Went to an awards ceremony presented by the European Centre for Common Ground last night, largely out of respect for President Trajkovski of Macedonia, who was killied in a plane crash in February, and whose wife was collecting a posthumous award on his behalf. I got to talk to her afterwards, which was nice; we managed to stay off Macedonian politics, which was a relief since I’ve spent most of the last two weeks immersed in it.

The evening was mainly devoted to awards for Middle East journalism, one of which was presented by John Hume, of all people. He made a speech about how if we could get peace in the Middle East there would be no more war anywhere (sentiment good, logic less so). There was a Brussels-based Mediterranean band which finished off the evening with a chorus of “Bella Ciao”. Then just as we were about to go to the buffet reception, John Hume grabbed the microphone and treated us to an unaccompanied chorus of “Danny Boy”. He was surprisingly good.

Now on http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3638446.stm

“Rove, who cooks eggies, has masterminded Bush’s career”

Cooks eggies?

…to Democratic Senator Zell Miller, in the wake of the latter’s speech at the Republican convention:

You seem to have forgotten that loyal Democrats elected you as mayor and as state senator. Loyal Democrats, including members of my family and me, elected you as lieutenant governor and as governor. It was a loyal Democrat, Lester Maddox, who assigned you to high positions in the state government when you were out of office. It was a loyal Democrat, Roy Barnes, who appointed you as U.S. Senator when you were out of office. By your historically unprecedented disloyalty, you have betrayed our trust.

Great Georgia Democrats who served in the past, including Walter George, Richard Russell, Herman Talmadge, and Sam Nunn disagreed strongly with the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and me, but they remained loyal to the party in which they gained their public office. Other Democrats, because of philosophical differences or the race issue, like Bo Callaway and Strom Thurmond, at least had the decency to become Republicans.

Everyone knows that you were chosen to speak at the Republican Convention because of your being a “Democrat,” and it’s quite possible that your rabid and mean-spirited speech damaged our party and paid the Republicans some transient dividends.

Perhaps more troublesome of all is seeing you adopt an established and very effective Republican campaign technique of destroying the character of opponents by wild and false allegations. The Bush campaign’s personal attacks on the character of John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 was a vivid example. The claim that war hero Max Cleland was a disloyal American and an ally of Osama bin Laden should have given you pause, but you have joined in this ploy by your bizarre claims that another war hero, John Kerry, would not defend the security of our nation except with spitballs. (This is the same man whom you described previously as “one of this nation’s authentic heroes, one of this party’s best-known and greatest leaders — and a good friend.”)

I, myself, never claimed to have been a war hero, but I served in the navy from 1942 to 1953, and, as president, greatly strengthened our military forces and protected our nation and its interests in every way. I don’t believe this warrants your referring to me as a pacificist.

Zell, I have known you for forty-two years and have, in the past, respected you as a trustworthy political leader and a personal friend. But now, there are many of us loyal Democrats who feel uncomfortable in seeing that you have chosen the rich over the poor, unilateral preemptive war over a strong nation united with others for peace, lies and obfuscation over the truth, and the political technique of personal character assassination as a way to win elections or to garner a few moments of applause. These are not the characteristics of great Democrats whose legacy you and I have inherited.

Thanks to Talking Points Memo and others.

Welcome to livejournal, !

Also, my old friend David Feige has a blog.

Wow! Hundreds of hits by way of Crooked Timber, tens from Language Hat, a dozen from Des Von Bladet, and a few from Davos Newbies and The Couch. Well, I guess this is my fifteen minutes of fame in the blogosphere…

So, I got called to a business lunch at fifteen minutes’ notice. The Deputy Prime Minister of country X had been told to look me up while he was in Brussels so he invited me to lunch, somewhat to the annoyance of his hosts. He and I then huddled at one end of the table, muttering conspiratorially to each other in German (our best mutual language as it turned out) while his aides and bodyguards trapped our hosts (who actually were German) at the other end. But it was a very useful conversation.

Then a reception in the evening. the deputy head of one of the other embassies told me she’d been busy because of the arrical of her ambassador. “Oh!” I exclaimed in delight, “You have a new ambassador then?” No, she explained, it was just that the old one had been on holiday and had just come back. But, she whispered, he actually is going to be replaced – but he doesn’t know that yet! (The deputy head of mission and her foreign minister are from one political faction; the ambassador from another, thanks to the delicate power-sharing arrangement in their country. He is also not very good at his job.)

And my boss is back after three weeks travelling. Things will pick up around the office now…

Ow, my eyes hurt.

This kind of thing really annoys me:

Beqiri was given an official platform at the behest of ICG Balkans head honcho Nicholas Whyte, who invited him to speak on the very pressing need for all Albanians to live in one tidy state. While Whyte was careful to “express disagreements,” but promised to include the FBKSH platform as one of the three possible solutions to the Empire’s Balkan quagmire.

This tepid response was, of course, trumped by the fact that a criminal militant urging violent changes of international borders was invited to speak in the decorous and oh-so altruistic confines of the ICG anterooms. Hey, way to marginalize the extremists, guys!

As I noted in this journal at the time, I thought this was a confidential meeting rather than an “official platform” when I organised it. The conversation took place in a nearby cafe rather than in our anterooms (I don’t think we have any anterooms anyway). And my job is actually to talk to people who I often don’t like and usually disagree with, in order to find out what they really think.

It’s such a crappy piece anyway. I mean, the next paragraph:

German authorities did not provide any details on possible extradition to Albania, and the case seems to have vanished from the radar thereafter. However, it seems likely that Beqiri made it back to the fatherland.

– well, the author seems to have missed the news reports of the German extradition procedures in June.

Aaargh.

asks about my favourite sf authors. A proper answer will have to wait a few days. But authors I particularly enjoy include Brian Aldiss; Iain Banks; Ray Bradbury; Lois McMaster Bujold; Ted Chiang; Arthur C. Clarke; Philip K. Dick; Neil Gaiman; Ursula Le Guin; Madeleine L’Engle; H.P. Lovecraft; Ian McDonald; Ken MacLeod; Terry Pratchett; J.K. Rowling; Neal Stephenson; Sherri S Tepper; J.R.R. Tolkien; Connie Willis; last but by no means least Roger Zelazny. More information on my tastes can be found here and here. More, as they say, later. I’ll just say I’ve gone right off Asimov after a teenage fling.

Earlier today I was at a presentation of a report on Turkey’s prospects for EU membership. All pretty much as you would expect; and then someone asked one of the authors of the report, a former French Prime Minister, why he felt that Turkey was no threat to the European project. And he replied, more or less:

“I was born in 1930. I became a European federalist at the age of 17. I wanted to build a Carolingian European state, able to challenge the Americans as a real superpower. But this all changed once we let in the British, and the dream was killed off by the Maastricht Treaty. So, since Europe doesn’t have the will to be anything more than a rather well developed rules-based market economy, why not let Turkey in? It does them good and it doesn’t do us any further harm. And people who say that letting Turkey in is dangerous to the Euro-federalist project are lying. Turkey would indeed be dangerous to that project if it was still alive. But it is dead.”

Two extraordinary things about the spech. First of all, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone before publicly recant federalism in quite such graphic terms in public in front of a Brussels audience. And secondly, I imagine that even as recently as ten years ago a former French Prime Minister would have naturally made his remarks in French. (The report was published in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Turkish.)

The Finnish chairman of the report committee, and its Austrian rapporteur, shuffled their feet in some embarrassment. Both had played important roles in bringing their respective countries into the EU; and it’s easy to forget that that was less than ten years ago.

I just realised I am the same age as the protagonists of both Casablanca and Flowers for Algernon.

devours the brains of various people.

Well, no really bad story won, and only one category really disappointed me.

Best Novel: Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold. I’m a fervent Bujoldian, and really like this book; I just happened to think two other nominees were slightly better. Bujold’s third fantasy novel, and her second in the world of The Curse of Chalion, the action is set in a much smaller scale than the continent-spanning action of its predecessor; the characters are beautifully drawn, in a world where theology is an applied science; and it’s nice to have an adventure and romance story whose character is actually middle-aged.

Best Novella: The Cookie Monster by Vernor Vinge. I thought it would win, as Vinge tends to win Hugo awards these days. Seems at first to be a normal story a la Microserfs. But then it turns out to be much much closer to numerous classic sf stories, mentioning any one of which will give away the main point of the plot. I don’t normally go for Vinge but I thought this was pretty good (though Frederik Pohl did it better). I still preferred The Empress of Mars, by Kage Baker.

Best Novelette: Legions of Time, by Michael Swanwick. I find Swanwick’s sense of humour sometimes a bit wearing, but this one worked for me. Woman in 1930s New York has a job where she Must Not Open The Door. She opens the door. Time-travelling and saving the world ensue. Good fun, but I put it fifth out of six.

Best Short Story: A Study in Emerald, by Neil Gaiman. This is by far the best story from a collection of stories melding the worlds of Sherlock Holmes and H.P. Lovecraft; the narrator takes us through his unspeakable experiences in Afghanistan, his eccentric Baker Street flatmate, and encounters with a royal family whose habits are rather unlike the home life of our own dear queen, and a final confrontation with his version of England’s subversive mastermind. I think Gaiman’s writing is a bit more uneven than most people like to admit, but he’s caught the voice of Conan Doyle perfectly here, and interspersed the narrative with slyly allusive small ads from the alternative London he has envisaged.

Bujold now has twice as many Best Novel Hugos as any other living author (Heinlein ahead of her on five, but only if you count the retro-Hugo he was awarded on Friday, and Brin, Card, Cherryh, Clarke, Haldeman, Le Guin, Vinge, Willis, and the late Asimov and Zelazny on two each). Swanwick has now won five Hugos in the last six years, a unique winning streak. Gaiman has won three Hugos in different categories in consecutive years, a feat only previously managed by Ursula Le Guin in 1973-75.

3) The Sandman: Endless Nights, by Neil Gaiman. a recent coda to the Sandman series, with one short story for each of the seven Endless siblings. A couple of them – Despair and Destiny – really seemed pretty pointless, and I didn’t think much of the Dream story either. I enjoyed all the others though; a marvellously sultry tale of Desire, and the Destruction, Delirium and Death stories all left me wishing they had been longer.

2) Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, by Marjane Satrapi. I bought this today to continue my comics education, from Het Besloten Land, the shop on Parijsstraat in Leuven which seems to have a sense of combining the bandes dessinées tradition and Anglophone graphic novels. Persepolis fits both. Its original language of publication was French, but its story of a young girl’s life through the rise of a repressive regime, and her eventual escape, is of course reminiscent of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. I learnt a lot from it. OK, it’s not an average story – Satrapi’s great-grandfather was the emperor overthrown by the last Shah’s father in 1925, and she uses this for certain historical insights – but it’s a gripping and human tale. One forgets just how much happened in Iran, in terms of total social dislocation, between the start of the narrative in 1979 and the end in 1984. Apparently the sequel will be out in English Real Soon Now. I can’t wait.

The news from North Ossetia gets worse and worse. This morning’s Guardian had 150 dead. This morning’s BBC news had 250. And this evening the BBC reports 350. Ruthless and also it seems incompetent terrorists, combined with incompetent and trigger-happy state seciurity forces. Dreadful.

And, though it’s not on the same scale of horror, the electoral college predictor has Bush ahead for the first time since June. Rasmussen think it’s too close to call. Pennsylvania is the key state, I reckon.

Apparently the “normality index” is “based upon some standard statistical measures of the the top interests list. If the top 20 interests of a users friend are the same as the top 20 overall the normality score will be 101%.” Why 101% rather than 100% I don’t know…

Cheryl Morgan has a nice line in the latest Emerald City, that “most American claims to admire Celtic culture are on a similar level to telling someone from India that you really love that wonderfully authentic Indian writer, Mr. Kipling.”

Good line, but not necessarily so, as my wife pointed out to me. Compare the twee Celtic fiction written by the sort of person who takes The Mists of Avalon as a religious text with Kipling’s stories: can no doubt put me right on this (as she has done to others) but I think Kipling wins hands down; he was after all writing about a real, recent or even contemporary India, which he had experienced at first hand (if more briefly than most of his readers realised), rather than inventing a non-existent past of social and sexual harmony and haunting pipe music, with everyone worshipping the Mother Goddess in an archipelago unsullied by the Saxons or Christianity. Actually one of my favourite drawings by the Irish political cartoonist Martyn Turner has a crowd of ancient Celtic warrriors cowering behind the ramparts of their fort as missiles are hurled at them from below. One of them is saying to the others, “I can’t wait until we get Christianity in here and get rid of all this tribalism.”

Of course, I don’t want to give the impression that Kipling’s India is better than that of a writer who is actually Indian. But I do think his India is better as India than the Ireland of a writer who has never lived in Ireland. It’s interesting to note that Kipling’s Kim is actually an Irish boy, Kimball O’Hara; and that the only novel I’ve read about India recently is River of Gods, by Irish writer Ian McDonald. As Niall Ferguson points out, there are a lot of connections between India and Ireland.

I’m thinking about all this largely because it interests me anyway, but also because I’ve proposed to Farah Mendlesohn that I might give a paper at next year’s WorldCon in her track on the Matter of Britain. I must say my initial approach was going to be to take the hig road of slagging off the diaspora for trying to tell me what kind of country I grew up in. But I’m now beginning to reflect -as I found ten years ago for my Ph D thesis – that there may be something to be learned from the comparative experience of other countries as well. Hmm.

Dave Barry in New York has “witnessed a dramatic confrontation: A lone, courageous police officer faced an entire sidewalk full of commuters and told them he could not let them through to their subway station. Now if this had happened in, say, Des Moines, the crowd would have peacefully dispersed, because (a) Iowans are low-key, and (b) Des Moines has no subway.”

And there’s more:

“Karl Rove… depending on your political perspective, is either the (a) chief political advisor to President Bush, or (b) the Antichrist. Some people claim he’s the brains behind the president, who, let’s face it, does not always appear to be 100 percent aware of what he is thinking.

“This was demonstrated Monday when the president said we could not win the war on terror, and his aides had to clarify this by explaining that what the president meant was that we COULD win the war on terror. (John Kerry immediately released a statement stating that he strongly disagreed with both of the president’s positions.)”

and more:

“the protesters began chanting a chant that I cannot repeat in the newspaper except to say that it utilized wordplay involving the president’s last name.”

…or early morning media, if you’re in Australia. Just did five minutes on ABC’s morning radio news programme talking about Kosovo. Had to keep kicking myself to not refer to spring, summer etc, as if these were terms with world-wide application. Started the interview a bit weakly but I had got it togther by the end I think. Now in Belgium, it’s time for bed.

It’s a cliche, I know, but Hannah Arendt’s phrase about Eichmann was the first thing that crossed my mind when I heard that Radoslav Brdjanin had been sentenced to a 32 year jail sentence by the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. I knew him very slightly in my Banja Luka days. In early 1997, at the start of my mission to make contact with and strengthen opposition political forces, his political party was more or less the last on my list to meet; I found them in a basement room under the municipal art gallery (once the terminus of Bosnia’s first railway line). Brdjanin explained to me how he had once been a high-ranking politician but had been expelled by Radovan Karadzic from the ruling party when he protested against corruption. His colleagues had chosen him as leader of their new dissident party “because I was the shortest”, and they had lots of support. However the wicked manipulation of the elections which the international community had allowed meant that they had got fewer votes than they had members. His colleague Milan Trbojevic noticed my sceptical wince at this last point, but Brdjanin was too full of himself to stop; by the end of the conversation I was regretting my investment of time – I did go back to the basement a couple of times, but basically to use the rather decent restaurant next door.

I also began to hear rumours of precisely what Brdjanin had been up to before he fell out with Karadzic over the division of the spoils. Even among the remaining population of Banja Luka, he was pretty unpopular; people remembered how the electricty had mysteriously stayed on in his house even during the power cuts and the NATO air strikes. But most visible of all was the devastated landscape of Kozarac, just before you get to Prijedor driving from Banja Luka, where for ten kilometers along the road the landscape was nothing but bombed out houses of what had once been a prosperous town. The famous camps so memorably filmed by ITN in 1992 were here. Brdjanin had been the head of the Crisis Committee of the Krajina, responsible for setting the whole thing up.

Over the next few months the political situation in Banja Luka turned upside down as the local leader, Biljana Plavsic, broke definitively with Karadzic and assembled a grand coalition of all the opposition forces to take power. Brdjanin got back into the parliament but didn’t get an executive position. His friend Trbojevic became minister of justice. A few months after I moved to Brussels in 1999, Brdjanin was arrested by NATO soldiers while walking down the street in Banja Luka on the war crimes charges. Trbojevic’s reaction was, I thought, rather nuanced, as if he didn’t really mind his friend being arrested and facing a long prison term.

Well, if you have the stomach for it, you can read the summary press release, or you can read the full judgement, or you can just take my word for it; in a curiously precise formulation, Brdjanin is found responsible for the murders of “at least 1669” civilians, and of organising a general campaign of terror and deportation against non-Serbs around Banja Luka, who he wanted to see reduced to less than 3% of the population. He does at least get cleared of genocide, mainly because so many people were forcibly displaced from their homes but not killed.

Brdjanin’s co-accused, Momir Talic, won’t be punished by the international court; he died last year, and has I hope been dealt with by a different tribunal.

1) The Warrior’s Bond, by Juliet E. McKenna

Funny to think that a year ago I’d never heard of Juliet McKenna; but we met and got on well at P-Con last September, and as a result I’ve been buying, reading and enjoying her books. I don’t read a lot of fantasy as a rule but have a loyalty to certain authors, and I can continue my path through Juliet’s novels while waiting for the next George R.R. Martin volume to come out.

This is a bit different from its three predecessors in the Einarinn series, with battles on the high seas against strangely magical opponents replaced by a political drama, set in the capital city and watching the machinations of the great houses against each other. One of McKenna’s successes is that her world possesses a certain depth; every character has an almost tangible hinterland of family and friends. The Empire she portrays is a breathing, developing and somewhat fragile polity. (She’s less convincing on the languages but nobody except Tolkien has ever done well on that score.) The book reminded me a bit of Feist’s Rise of a Merchant Prince (one of only two by him that I’ve read) but is much better – characters less wooden and generally more sympathetic. You wouldn’t want to start reading McKenna with The Warrior’s Bond but it’s certainly enough to get me to buy the fifth and final one in the series.

The Bush daughters’ speech is not very funny. Maybe you had to be there.

The school siege in North Ossetia naturally attracts the sympathy of anyone who, like me, saw off their kids to the start of a new year yesterday morning. Nothing is more awful than pulling children into a conflict for which they cannot be responsible and of which they know nothing. Obviously the local resonance for me is the affair of the Holy Cross school in North Belfast from a few years back – deeply unpleasant for the kids and parents concerned, though obviously not as bad as what’s happening in North Ossetia now.

But I’ve been following a similar, if less dramatic, incident over the last few weeks which seems to have had zero coverage in the Western press. On 26 July, the security forces in the separatist region of Transdniestria seized control of an orphanage in the town of Bendery (also called Tighina), while the orphans were out on a trip, because the staff teach the children using the Latin alphabet rather than the Cyrillic alphabet (this is, believe it or not, one of the main issues in the little-known Transdniestrian conflict). They also closed down three schools in Transdniestria at the same time. The orphans, whose ages range from 8 to 15, managed to sneak past the militia the next day and broke into their own home. Since then they have been surviving on food and water supplies brought in by international officials from the OSCE (two of whom have worked for me in the past) and UNICEF.

This isn’t an action by unaccountable and anonymous terrorists from forgotten parts of the Caucasus, it’s harassment of children – who have already lost their parents – by a Russian-backed government that claims to want recognition as an independent state. Last week the EU and US imposed visa bans on the Transdniestrian officials who are believed to be responsible, but since none of them was likely to be travelling to the West any time soon anyway, I don’t see it having much effect. I find it utterly extraordinary that no Western journalist has given this affair any column inches at all in the last five weeks. See news coverage (from a Moldovan newsagency) here.

Added later: Also IWPR article about it here.

Lunch today with a French Green MEP. My French is not good. Her English is worse. Luckily her Italian adviser speaks both fluently. I reflected that I would like to blame my French teacher when I was in third form, who was too much of a political activist to really take to teaching, but unfortunately the record shows that I learnt French for another two years after she left the school.

Coming out of the restaurant I bumped into her, as she was elected to the European Parliament herself last June. She didn’t remember me but I gave her my card. Bygones should be bygones.

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).

But I just heard another interesting factoid: that today is the tenth anniversary of the opening of (supposedly) the first internet cafe, Cyberia in London. Internet cafes per se have made a huge difference to the way we work. I’ve posted entries to this livejournal from internet cafes in Kosovo and Azerbaijan. Touring Macedonia during the 2001 conflict, every small town, whatever its local ethnic majority, had one. Of course it also means that when travelling on business, you have less time to relax because the possibilities of doing routine office work are that much greater…

And mention of the 2001 conflict in Macedonia (which I wrote a lot about at the time, eg here and here) brings me back to the IRA and terrorism. In other countries – in both Macedonia, with regard to the Albanian insurgents, and Ireland, with respect to the IRA – the US is prepared to recognise that terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy; and that a security response to terrorism can never be the whole story. George Mitchell in Ireland and Robert Frowick in Macedonia were both sent in as US envoys to help push the men of violence onto a purely political path. Both succeeded (Frowick got his timing slightly wrong in the process and had to be replaced by James Pardew). But a key element to their success in both cases was that a political path was possible; that a peaceful and democratic strategy was a credible alternative; and also that any serious effort at a purely military solution would have meant misery for hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Apart from the 9-11 Commission in their excellent report, I don’t see anyone saying this in America with respect to the Middle East. I don’t know enough about it, but it seems to me that for any unemployed young man in the Arab world, political paths are blocked; peaceful and democratic ways of changing the world for the better are not obviously going to work; and US policy isn’t doing a lot about that. The fact that the most rapidly democratising regime in the region (not actually Arab, of course, and the reformists are currently on the back foot) is Iran, which has been ostracised by the United States since the 1979 hostage crisis (which took place before 60% of today’s Iranians were born), demonstrates that US policy has some way to go before it is seen as synonymous with democracy and freedom.

There have been some faltering steps in that direction. I had an email yesterday from a former colleague, wondering if I knew any European politicians who might be interested in a trip to Baghdad to help in a training course for members of the new Iraqi assembly. The fact that there is such a programme is of course a good thing. The fact that none of my politician friends, all of whom opposed the war, would be seen dead near a US-sponsored training program for what is seen by a lot of Europeans as a puppet assembly, is a bad thing. (I referred my friend to one of my former political enemies, who is pro-war.) But even if by some miracle this process does lead to a new democratic and peaceful Iraq, how is the US going to repeat the trick for other repressive Arab regimes which happen to already be American clients? Unless there is an answer to this question, the “war on terrorism” will end in defeat.

I’m giving a lecture at the Kennedy Center in October. Not, I’m sorry to say, the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC; nor (even more exciting) the John F Kennedy Space Center in Florida; nor, alas, the John F Kennedy School of Government in Harvard; nor even the Robert F Kennedy Center for Human Rights in Washington DC; but in fact the David M Kennedy Center for Intrernational Studies, part of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. David M Kennedy (no relation to the others) was Nixon’s first treasury secretary, and also a Mormon bishop; no Mormon has ever held a higher position in the US government. In 1971 Nixon sacked him and replaced him with John Connally, the guy who was in the same car when President Kennedy was assassinated. It will be an interesting trip.

Prompted by :

I first read Scoop as a schoolboy in the mid-1980s and thought it was hilarious and surreal. I reread it again while working in the post-war Balkans in 1998 and realised that all the bits I had thought wildly exaggerated were perfectly true. In particular, he vividly describes the herd mentality of the journalists who go chasing up-country for the story while the real stuff is happening in the capital, their peculiar relationship with the local expatriate community, and the odd banality of events that actually have a dramatic political significance. It should be required reading for any international relations student, as well as (of course) for budding journalists.

Via :

The Books Are My Friends Test

The Literati
And the Survey Says: 90%

        You are one of a select group of intellectuals. You appreciate good literature and you nurture an affinity for elegance. You probably have a library of books waiting on your shelf, so put away the computer and start reading.

        Recommendations:
        Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged
        Daniel Keyes – Flowers for Algernon

Well, my essay on Flowers for Algernon is one of the most visited pages of my website. I haven’t read Ayn Rand, but perhaps I should, if only for amusement’s sake. Of course, it’s perfectly true that I have a library of books waiting on my shelf.