Had a good wander around the Trastevere district last night. I went to Mass in Santa Maria in Trastevere, which is also the base of the Sant’Egidio community who are of course of professional interest. Then I managed to locate the church of San Pietro in Montorio, way up on a hill behind the trendy streets nearer the river, where the tombs of the Earls are located. The church appears to be part of the Spanish Embassy complex of buildings, and by the time I got there it was closed (and I didn’t think it was appropriate to disturb the couple in the car parked outside the door) but at least I know where to go next time I’m in Rome and have time. Nice dinner in one of the many restaurants on Via della Lungaretta, reading England Swings SF. And so to bed, as the man says.

Then I had to get up early at *mumble* o’clock to get the 0720 flight, but the advantage is that I’ve got the whole weekend at home with the family, including my mother who is visiting. More later.

Have spent all day in Rome at a conference; there were only eleven of us, all males, and the food was not very impressive though the debate was good. Everyone else has other plans this evening so I am enjoying a walk around in the mild January twilight. And of course some updating of livejournal.

Last year I was a speaker at a conference with these people:

Left to right:
Mladen Ivanic, Bosnian Foreign Minister
Fraser Cameron of the European Policy Centre, chairing the meeting
Miomir Zuzul, Croatian Foreign Minister
Me.

Well, Ivanic resigned last month and Zuzul resigned this week. Fraser and I are still in our jobs though.

The Onion article I linked to has been archived. Here’s the text:

Fighting Insomnia

Insomnia—the chronic inability to fall and remain asleep—affects roughly 20 percent of American adults. Here are some tips to get a better night’s sleep:

Fighting Insomnia

• Although it’s tempting to use liquor as a cure for chronic sleeplessness, be warned: Liquor is quite expensive.
• Getting more exercise can help combat insomnia. If you suffer from sleeplessness, try shuffling from the bed to the kitchen, opening and shutting the refrigerator door, and shuffling back to bed.
• According to researchers at the National Sleep Foundation, there is an actual National Sleep Foundation. Yes, for real.
• If you are going to take pills to help you sleep, be sure you take enough to knock yourself out. Watching Good Morning America while sleep-deprived and tranquilized is a hellish experience.
• Use your bed for sleeping only. Conduct all reading, eating, phone calls, and sexual relations on the kitchen table.
• Try counting sheep, rather than the number of times you’ve failed as a wife and mother.
• If you got less than three hours of sleep the previous night, it’s important to inform everyone you meet of that fact all day long.
• If you’re having night after night of hours-long jungle sex when all you really want is a decent night’s rest, go cry on someone else’s shoulder.
• Minimize noise, light, excessive temperature—all factors that could potentially disrupt rest—by sleeping indoors.
• Sleeping pills can and do become addictive. Before you know it, you’ll be giving back-alley blow jobs for hits of Ambien.
• Remember: Insomnia is only a problem if you are employed or have a reason to live.

January: Gateway by Fredrrik Pohl. As good as I remembered it as being.

February: The five questions meme: I’ve seen this floating around, but part of the problem is catching it at the right moment and also finding someone whose questions you think you would like to answer!

March: [three book reviews:] A train to Paris, followed by a trans-Atlantic flight, is a good way to make further inroads into the books bought the other week in London.

April: Just discovered that is one of my colleagues at work. Привет, Игорь!

May: No long weekend in Belgium, but I’ll make the most of what I’ve got.

June: Two of my colleagues have been expelled from Indonesia.

July: This evening: train to Paris, for conference tomorrow.

August: The Year of Our War, by Steph Swainston: Well, this is depressing. A Cambridge graduate, like me, who has dabbled in archaeology, like me, and now works in vaguely international relations stuff, like me, but is about six years younger and has produced a stormingly good first novel.

September: I’d been thinking of doing a post about the tenth anniversary of the IRA ceasefire, pushed a little bit by ‘ reminiscences about the Bad Old Days, by ‘s latest post about terrorism, and by the fact that I participated in a live panel discussion with John Hume and Albert Reynolds about it on RTÉ radio yesterday (don’t worry, Dublin-based readers – you didn’t miss much).

October: Back from Portugal. Got to swim in the sea on Wednesday and Saturday; had lots of time today to look around Lisbon; stayed in a beautiful monastic retreat house (now owned by a Portuguese foundation).

November: Atonement: A very good book, this, which had been sitting on my “to-read” pile for far too long.

December: The scourge of insomnia.

Lots of books, lots of travel, a little politics. Am off to Rome for 24 hours later today.

2) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

I’ve got into the habit of buying and reading a self-help book every year or so – especially since I became a manager, an important role for which I have had no formal training. I must say I’ve found this to be one of the more useful ones I’ve tried; it goes far beyond the simple questions of running an effective office and concentrates on how to lead a more rewarding life.

The 7 habits are:
1. Be proactive
2. Begin with the end in mind
3. Put first things first
4. Think win/win
5. Seek first to understand, rather than to be understood
6. Synergise
7. Sharpen the saw

My own biggest difficulty has always been #3, the art of prioritising, but I found the reflections on the other points reinforced a lot of my own approach to personal development and offered some helpful further thoughts. The book is not too loaded with timeconsuming exercises – basically one short one at the start of each chapter. It is, however, a little repetitive.

Anyhow, I’ve found the author’s website and am downloading the planning software for a free trial – will report back on whether it works for me or not.

Sorry to hear it, so soon after I read A Contract With God.

Well, we’ve been watching them at the rate of one a night for the last week (last night we took a break so that Anne and I could go out). And my conclusions are as follows:

The Fellowship of the Ring: Lots more extended scenes and fewer completely new ones, compared to the film. The extra material was generally very good, though oddly enough two of the new scenes (the Elves passing through the Shire, and Aragorn’s mother’s tomb) seemed rather bolted on.

Unlike the other films we’ve seen most of the extra two DVDs here as well, and of course it’s all absolutely fascinating. The introduction to the special effects if anything deepens your appreciation of scenes like Hobbiton, Moria, Rivendell, and so on. It’s a bit sad that despite the mini-feature ostensibly on Tolkien, we don’t actually get more than still photos of the author himself – not even quotes from letters if I remember rightly. But we do get lots of good quotes from Tom Shippey and Brian Sibley. (And is that Patrick Curry the same one whose writings on astrology I used for my M Phil?)

The Two Towers: This was the one film we hadn’t seen in the cinema, partly because it came out just at the time that U was born but also I’d read in the review in Interzone that it took a lot of liberties with the plot. Well, indeed it does: Aragorn falls over a cliff; Faramir takes Frodo, Sam and Gollum as far west as Osgiliath; Pippin tricks Treebeard into going to war against Saruman; and the Elves save the day at Helm’s Deep. It all seemed worthwhile to me, except perhaps for the Aragorn bit (and another bot where he tells Eowyn his true age) which felt a bit bolted on. (Also we never find out what happens to the Elves who tuned up at Helm’s Deep.) I was sorry, however, to lose Gimli’s reaction to the glittering caves. More on this later.

Great bits: Gollum is the real star here. Not just the special effects but the story of potential redemption of someone whose life has been poisoned by the Ring. Treebeard and the Ents are not bad either, though I wished they had looked a bit more solid. And of course, the flooding of Isengard takes your breath away – especially when you consider certain recent awful events in the real world.

The Return of the King: We start with a huge deviation from the book – interestingly not in the film either – as Saruman and Wormtongue both get killed at Orthanc. So on the one hand we who have read the book know that the Scouring of the Shire is not going to happen; but on the other hand, added to the variations from the text in the previous film, there’s a real sense of suspense now about whether the ending will actually go as planned. The film becomes also a bit of a Bildungsroman for Merry and Pippin. The parallels between the grievously wounded Frodo and Faramir were a point I had missed in the cinema.

And when Sam does return, and the little Gamgees (played by the little Astins) leap into his arms, and he says, “Well, I’m back”, well, anyone whose eyes do not moisten has no soul.

The set piece that made the biggest impression on me in the cinema, the lighting of the beacons, was much less impressive here; small screen vs big, I suppose. On the other hand, Shelob, the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, and the climax at Mount Doom are still fantastic. And the extra length actually makes the hail-and-farewell scenes at the end, which seemed excessive in the film, seem better paced to the work as a whole. Finally, let’s hear it for the Mouth of Sauron, gloriously horrible in the DVD though knifed from the film.

Overall: C’mon, folks, Liv Tyler is pretty good actually. And while it jars at first for the young hobbits to have such different accents, and Gimli to be cast as comic relief (so we lose the Glittering Caves bit), it actually makes him a more rounded character than in the book. Also the relationship between Frodo and Sam (and by extension Gollum) in my view acquires much greater depth in the Jackson treatment, simply by allowing Frodo to be more visibly flawed (and perhaps Gollum to be a little smarter). In sum: I liked it.

Basically, we who have loved the book for decades are incredibly lucky. (Anyone out there remember the 1978 Ralph Bakshi version, which ended with Frodo and Sam adrift in the river, Merry and Pippin in Treebeard’s clutches, and the others besieged in Helm’s Deep?) This is not just a full-length treatment but a quintuple full-length treatment, made by fans for fans. And its success bears witness to the success of Tolkien’s own project to write an epic “linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama”. We won’t see the like of this again; it’s exceptionally rare for a such a popular film to capture the spirit of such a popular book in this way. (I don’t know but I suspect the last, perhaps the only other, example may have been Gone With The Wind, in 1939.) And I’ve still got the extra material on the other four and a half DVD’s to get through. Further enjoyment awaits.

1) Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky/ Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский

Father Ted said something along the lines of, “I liked the crime bit but I found the punishment a bit of a drag” (of course now I actually need the exact quote I can’t find my copy of the scripts), and that was pretty much my feeling for several weeks, to the extent that I read a number of other books in the meantime. Finally, encouraged by , I gave it a concentrated push over the last few days, and was duly rewarded.

The book has three stars – Raskolnikov himself, the actual criminal; Porfiry, the detective (whose surname I don’t think we ever learn); and the city of St Petersburg, whose geography is a key part of the novel. The edition I have has a helpful map at the front which I’ll now go back to. It’s not geography bound to the same extent as Ulysses – but then, what other novel is? – yet I feel a certain confidence in the rest of the story once it’s clear that the author has thoguht out the setting properly, even if (as in this case) it was a setting he knew well because he was living there at the time.

Anyway, I think I’ll come back to this one. A decent literary start to the new year. And who knows, if I succeed in my ambition of improving my Russian I may be able to try it in the original:

В начале июля, в чрезвычайно жаркое время, под вечер, один молодой человек вышел из своей каморки, которую нанимал от жильцов в С—м переулке, на улицу и медленно, как бы в нерешимости, отправился к К—ну мосту.

Early in July, in exceptionally hot weather, towards evening, a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and slowly, as though in hesitation, walked towards K. bridge.

This has been very amusing.

Despise Nerds:
2. Allegedly.
7

Not Nerds:
10
11
also 11
14

Nerd Wannabe:
20
24
31

Lightly Nerdy:
, from whom I got it in the first place, 40
also 40
47

Low-Rank Nerds:
51
56
62
Me 65

Mid-Rank Nerds:
70
72
74
also 74
79

High-Nerds:
86
also 86
just beaten by ‘s 87

and finally in the Nerd King God category:
97
also 97, but beaten by
with a score of 98.

Edit Now updated with lots more scores!
Later edit See here for and his friends.
Final edit, almost a year later All hail with his score of 99!!!

My friends

My interests

See here for your own.

Happy birthday, and !

Over at LanguageHat, they’re having trouble with Gogol’s phrase, “Ах ты, Оподелдок Иванович!”

…word for word, it means “Oh you, Opodeldok Ivanovich!” Opodeldok was clearly not an actual Russian name, so I looked it up in my trusty Oxford dictionary (where it is listed under the more usual spelling оподельдок), and there it was—helpfully defined as “opodeldoc.” I let out a bellow of rage at the perfidy of the lexicographers who had taken the easy way out, refusing to give the user the slightest actual help, requiring an additional trip to the OED.

Fortunately the Oxford English Dictionary was able to help, so there is a happy ending.

A good set. (via )

My own New Year Resolution is to have another crack at learning Russian.

9) The Radiant Seas, by Catherine Asaro

A couple of months back I reported here that award-winning author Catherine Asaro, pained at my dissing her works on my website, had sent me three of her novels to try and make me change my mind; and that indeed I very much enjoyed her first, Primary Inversion. It was therefore with a certain amount of eager anticipation that I turned to The Radiant Seas which picks up the story from where we left it at the end of the first book.

Oh dear. A real disappointment. Lots of infodumping, tedious handwaving technicalese – the nadir, close to the end, is this sentence:

With a rest mass of 1.9 eV and a charge of 5.95×10^-25 C, abitons only needed an accelerator with a 50 cm radius and 0.0001 Telsa [sic] magnet.

Which I wouldn’t mind if it actually helped the book make sense; but it doesn’t. Anyway thanks to the helpfully provided diagram I spent much time wondering how you could possibly keep anything, let alone tons of antimatter, in a Klein bottle (whose inside is the same as its outside).

I was quite unable to suspend my disbelief to take seriously the family and interplanetary politics as I could for the first book. The good guys always escape certain doom in the nick of time, unlike the bad guys. And worst of all, my particular bête noire, there is a chatty artificial intelligence which tries to get its owner to call it by a proper name. Aargh.

Out of a (possibly misplaced) sense of honour, I will read the third book she sent me, but I don’t feel any sense of urgency about it.

8) Berlin: City of Stones, Jason Lutes

This is another from the Time list of 25 must-read graphic novels. Once again, fantastic. Very much in the Will Eisner tradition, following a set of characters through a richly imagined historical background; for instance the Potsdamerplatz, in the early episodes, seems to almost have a life of its own. But unlike Will Eisner, we know that there is a historical catastrophe coming; each episode takes place in one of the months from September 1928 to May Day 1929, with different characters experiencing different aspects of the gathering storm. Berlin has always fascinated me, and this book has further whetted my appetite. The most disappointing thing about it is that it’s only the first part of a trilogy and the next two bits aren’t out yet.

Discovered that I had done this meme a year ago

1. What did you last read?
   Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke.

2. What are you reading now?
   Berlin, City of Stones, by Jason Lutes; Crime and Punishment, by Dostoyevsky; Radiant Seas, by Catherine Asaro; England Swings SF, ed. Judith Merril.

3. What do you plan to read next?
   My answer this time last year was The English by Jeremy Paxman, and I still haven’t read it. As noted in earlier entries, on my immediate list are Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, and The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge. And I suppose The English by Jeremy Paxman!

4. What would you like to read, but haven’t? See previous entries! Last year I answered “Crime and PunishmentMaus.” Well, this year I’ve read Maus and am halfway through Crime and Punishment.
5. What (that you read in 2004) would you recommend for others to read?
   Overall best book is almost the first one I read this year, Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, a brilliant insight into the 17th century. Best sf book (and perhaps the most accessible for non-sf readers) was The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Charles N. Brown and Jonathan Strahan. Best other book was Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry.

6. What book last made you laugh? The Uncyclopedia, by Gideon Haigh.
7. What book last made you weep?
   Making Sense of the Troubles, by David McKittrick and David McVea, certainly brought tears to the eye.

8. What book last made you angry?
   Certainly The 9/11 Commission report – not just that one feels for those like the FBI agent who “said he was ‘trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.’ The headquarters agent replied that this was not going to happen” – but also that despite doing all that fantastic research and narrative writing they then come up with completely the wrong recommendations.

9. What book did you try to read, perhaps several times, and never managed to finish?
   Easy answer: The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson.

52 books have won the Hugo award for Best Novel. I’ve read 49 of them; that just leaves Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov, The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge, and The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber. I already have the Vinge; the other two should not be too difficult to track down in the course of 2005, though I’d like to buy and reread the Foundation trilogy as a whole before tackling Foundation’s Edge.

Peter Sykes keeps a list of the Top 100 SF books, aggregating from various sources as I did in my previous post about novel in general. The 14 books (not counting annual or award anthology series) I haven’t read from this list are: Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison; A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess; The Space Merchants, Pohl & Kornbluth; A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs; City, Clifford Simak; Babel-17, Samuel R Delany; Tau Zero, Poul Anderson; Grey Lensman, E E ‘Doc’ Smith; Again, Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison; The Female Man, Joanna Russ; The Snow Queen, Joan D Vinge; Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon; Deathbird, Harlan Ellison; and Dhalgren, by Samuel R Delany. The Vinge is already on my list; so is the first Dangerous Visions because it includes the next story in my grand project of writing up all Hugo and Nebula winners. I shall aim to read at least five of the others in the course of 2005. (Sykes also has a Next 100 best sf books list so this will keep me going for a good while.)

I’ll also be reading the Hugo nominees once they are announced, and will look out for likely prospects from the BSFA and Clarke awards shortlists (which usually have a certain degree of overlap). I tried using the SF Site’s Best of 2003 lists last year; so far I read and enjoyed Venniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer; read and didn’t quite so much enjoy Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde, Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases ed Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts; and bought but haven’t yet read The Light Ages by Ian MacLeod and The Golden Transcendence by John C. Wright. That’s a strike rate of only one in four which is not so good.

As for graphic novels, I’ve found the list of 25 must-reads posted on Bookslut in July really good, and will keep up my current plan of reading one of those every couple of months, plus keeping an eye out for Bookslut’s recommendations.

Mainly for my Belgian readers: I recommend having a look at Oxfam Solidarity, specifically their special South-East Asian tsunami fund. Because of the ludicrous Belgian tax system, every euro you give to charity here is multiplied up five or six times in its effect as long as you do the paperwork right.

I’m particularly keen on Oxfam because I see them combining the on-the-ground humanitarian stuff with political analysis. It may be an unfair impression, but I seem to see more of them doing the necessary politics in Brussels than any of the others. While some people complain when a charity does politics as well as good works, I think the former is an essential part of the latter.

Oxfam is also running special appeals in Ireland (inc NI), Great Britain, the USA and elsewhere. (The fact that my ex-sister-in-law runs one of their bookshops is irrelevant!)