Blogging might be a bit patchy over the coming days (when isn't it, some might argue). Apart from noisome tasks associated with contract work, I'm doing some reading in my spare time (well, spare spare time, assuming that non-working hours should be spent being a good and patient father) for an interview I hope to do with one of Ireland's more interesting new writers, Sean O'Reilly.

All going well, the interview should appear on the main site within a fortnightish.

In the meantime, I leave you with a great profile by the Spanish writer Javier Marías of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the singular (in every sense of the word) author of The Leopard.

Crammed with insights, the short piece contains one of the better explanations of the motivation for writing a novel:

"According to Lampedusa, what finally made him decide to write was seeing one of his cousins, Lucio Piccolo, another late starter, win both a prize and the applause of Montale for a volume of poems he had written. "Being mathematically certain that I was no more foolish than Lucio, I sat down at my desk and wrote a novel," he said in a letter to a friend. He was convinced that The Leopard deserved to see the light of day, but he also had his doubts. "It is, I fear, rubbish," he remarked to Francesco Orlando, who claims that he said this in good faith."

(Link via Rake's Progress)

The New York Times has a profile of the reclusive author, S. E. Hinton, author of such teen classics as The Outsiders, and Rumblefish.

The enduring popularity of her work is staggering:

"Her most famous book, "The Outsiders," about teenage gangs and alienated youth in Tulsa during the 1960's, transformed young-adult fiction from a genre mostly about prom queens, football players and high school crushes to one that portrayed a darker, truer adolescent world. Since it was published in 1967, the novel has sold 14 million copies, 400,000 of them last year alone."

I wonder if Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Goblet of the Philospher's Stone or whatever it's called will be shifting 400,000 copies in 2043?

Last night's performance by the Irish soccer (I have to use that term instead of "football" to avoid growls from GAA supporters) team in the World Cup qualifying game might have disheartened many, but for those who hanker after submerging their individuality in the warm bath of patriotism can shake their fists with joy this evening. Two Irish authors have made it on to the Man Booker shortlist! Two--that's, oh, 1/3 of the entire list.

And Three Monkeys Online has done/is doing a sterling job in covering the authors in question. Here's an interview with John Banville about his nominated book (which I think is pretty interesting despite a friend mocking me for namedropping Cyril Connolly and using the word pronunciamento in a question. There 's a review of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which is far more interesting that is apparently sci-fi theme would suggest. Moreover, there's a good chance of snagging an interview with the other Irish nominee, Sebastian Barry.

The only black cloud is that, according to the bookies, there is as much a chance of an Irish winner of the Booker Prize as there is of seeing Brian Kerr's "lads" in Germany next year.

I've held off writing about the disaster until now for a number of reasons:

a) After the hours of saturation coverage (no pun intended), I thought what's there to add?

b) I felt guilty at not having paid sufficient attention to that equally awful but now almost forgotten contemporaneous calamity in Baghdad.

c) I didn't want to join the hordes of finger-wagging Europeans apparently aghast at American racism. As if white Europeans giving a flying f**k about their own ethnic minorities. (What's the toughest situation, for example? Being a black in Atlanta, an Algerian in Paris, or a Turk in Berlin--a difficult call.) In particular, as we in Ireland recently displayed during the recent shameful referendum on citizenship, we care about black people only so long as they don't turn up on our doorsteps.

d) Related to point c), I think the more outsiders criticize the relief efforts the more the invidious right-wing media will report on it, which will translate into rally-round-the-flag support for the Bush Administration. Not that I think that Matt Drudge reads my blog, but on the days following the disaster a lot was made of a leading German politician suggesting the disaster was a sign of global warming. (The Guardian's patronising Operation Clark County during the 2004 Presidential Election illustrated that Americans, like most people, don't warm to lectures from outsiders.

But I decided to mention something because I remember one story that circulated the web a few years back and has not apparently been raised in relation to recent events. It was pounced upon the right-wing punditocracy as proof of the supeiority of the American model of capitalism. Most focused on the facts as reported in the first paragraph of this report from The American Prospect:

"This just in from something called the Swedish Research Institute of Trade (HUI): Your typical Swede is less well-off than all but the poorest Americans. Measured by after-tax income and adjusted for purchasing power, the authors of this study argue, the Swedish people are just scraping by. Ranked by this measure, Sweden would come in lower than any of the 50 states -- even Mississippi. Viewed through this prism, the median income of Swedish households would amount to just 68 percent of the U.S. median -- two points lower than the median African-American household income, which comes to 70 percent of the U.S. average. "Black people, who have the lowest income in the United States, now have a higher standard of living than an ordinary Swedish household," the HUI economists assure us."

Most pundits ignored the caveats mentioned in the next paragraphs:

"But even the authors of this study admit to a methodological flaw: They have declined to factor in the value of the social goods provided to Swedes by the world's most comprehensive welfare state. That includes free health care and education, comprehensive early education, fully subsidized senior care, paid leave for the parents of newborns -- you get the picture. These aren't exactly trivial household expenses in the United States; many American families can't afford them at all. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the HUI is a retail trade lobby -- an organization that looks longingly at all the money lavished on immunization programs and wonders why those funds aren't freed up so that the Swedes can buy more Nokias."

Yet the shibboleth that black Americans (even black Americans in Louisiana and Mississippi) are richer than Swedes quickly did the rounds and became established as a fact.

What do you think of that proposition now?

From Saturday's Irish Times article headlined "Two homeless found dead in 12-hour period":

When contacted for comment, Alice Leahy, director of the homeless charity Trust, said homeless people dying on the streets of Dublin is now "almost a weekly occurrence".

Saturday's Irish Times featured an entertaining review by Booker-shortlisted author John Banville of Neil Steinberg's Hatless Jack: the President, the Fedora and the Death of the Hat.

This exhaustive compendium of headgear-related facts attempts to correct the myth, of which I was blissfully unaware until yesterday, that Kennedy's aversion to hats doomed the industry. Steinberg points out, however, that "the peak year for the manufacture of men's hats in the United States was 1903, and by the middle 1920s hatlessness was a major problem for the industry..."

An anecdote from the book that struck me dates from much further back--and comes from an account from Samuel Pepys's diary of a dinner he had in the 1660s with a member of the nobility where they discussed the Duke of York's recent hasty marriage to his pregnant mistress:

'"My Lord told me," Pepys recorded, "that among his father's many old sayings that he had writ in a book of his, this is one: "That he that doth get a wench with child and marries her afterwards is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap upon his head.""'

By the way, near the end of the review, Banville writes "As Steinberg goes on laconically to observe, "The risk of being beaten by a mob, however remote, should not be underestimated as a force in fashion."

Now to correct the word usage of a writer such as Banville might seem like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, but a sentence that features a subclause and litotes is hardly laconic. Perhaps it's becoming one of those words, like "literally", for which the popular meaning is now the exact opposite of its dictionary one.

The most recent issue of The Economist features an article describing the finding of the Chernobyl Forum, "a group of several hundred scientists, economists and health experts supported by the three governments involved—those of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus."

Broadly speaking, these experts conclude that the long-term effects of the disaster are significantly less severe than was initially feared:

"...although tens of thousands of deaths have not materialised, it does predict that 4,000 people will eventually die from cancer attributable to exposure from radiation leaked from the plant. But while that sounds a lot, it would represent an increase of only about 3% in the number of cancer-related deaths among the 600,000 emergency workers, evacuees and residents of contaminated areas originally identified as being at risk. That is because about a quarter of these people would be expected to die from cancer even had they not been exposed to Chernobyl's radiation."

In fact, the real damage to health is apparently more psychological than physical:

"Perhaps the true tragedy of Chernobyl is that the biggest observable health impact so far has been on the mental health of the millions who have been told they are at risk. Many of these people received radiation doses no larger than they would get on a holiday in a place such as Denver, where the altitude increases exposure to cosmic rays, yet they have spent their lives anticipating illness and incapacity, and this has translated into such undesirable behaviours as drug abuse and long-term dependency on the state."

I wonder whether it's entirely fortuitous that a report telling us that Chernobyl was not as bad as we thought it would be is being given prominence just now. After all, the accident in 1986 virtually killed off the nuclear industry in the West--for example, part of the platform for the German Greens, who joined government in the late 90s, was to end the use of nuclear energy as a power source.

Now, with the gloomy prophecies of "peak oil" pundits entering the mainstream media thanks to crude oil prices hovering in the $60-70 region, people are once again mentioning the once-taboo "N" word in polite conversation.

This time things will be different is the promise. One of the great hopes for the nuclear industry--aside from the holy grail of achieving waste-free nuclear fusion--lies in the adoption of the here-and-now technology of pebble-bed reactors. This time last year, Wired magazine ran a very good (if typically starry-eyed) piece on how China is embracing this supposedly meltdown-proof reactor technology. (What's the Chinese ideogram for hubris?)

But the twin prongs of high prices and climate change are even driving talk of a nuclear renaissance in Europe. For example, Finland has just commissioned the first nuclear reactor in the western world since the disaster. (According to this Australian site, "At 1,600 megawatts, it will have the biggest electrical output of any reactor – enough to power Tasmania.")

There's even been some speculation that Ireland will eventually have to consider taking the nuclear option. David McWilliams in his column in last Sunday's Sunday Business Post argues that "In 2020, there is every possibility that we will be a nuclear state and, if not, we will definitely be importing nuclear energy from elsewhere."

I have to say that McWilliams seems very optimistic with his time scale. Given that it has taken over 30 years to finish a pretty crappy ring road around the capital, the planning quagmire that a proposed nuke reactor would prompt would probably drag on for at least a decade.

More painfully, in a country where a light-rail system, the LUAS, which is marginally longer than the monorail in Disneyworld, comes in at $1 billion, can you imagine the hideous economics of going nuclear?

Review of Kevin Stevens's latest novel, Song for Katya reviewed here.

That, I can imagine, would be the response if you invited the "cool kid" from school over to your house to play this touchingly ill-begotten attempt to help children "discover fundamentals of computer programming by playing a board game!"

(As reported by Wired news.)

Those who have earned a crust writing courseware for that nebulous industry, e-Learning, often cringed at the "scenarios" they had to create that illustrated some recommended workplace behavior. These scenarios are usually populated by saintly figures of decorum and tact (illuminating the "right" approach) and oblivious boors who make sexist comments and say the worst thing at the worst time (i.e. the "wrong" behaviour). As you might guess, the dialog in these situations can come off as a little forced. However, for anyone who has written a scenario or role-play, this sample of training material provided by Merck & Co., Inc. to its salespeople might encourage you to see your previous efforts in a far kinder light:

You want to avoid the impression of making a “hard sell.” But remember: even if a physician initiates a non-business-related discussion, later on s/he may remember you as someone who wasted his/her time with small talk. Many of you do a great job transitioning between products. Let’s test your skills in transitioning in a HEL [Health Education Learning] situation:

Scenario 1

Physician says: “What a nice restaurant! I hear that the food is wonderful.”

Possible rep response: “You’re right, it is. I’d only arrange the best for you. I’m sure you feel the same way about your patients. When you decide to prescribe an antihypertensive, what characteristics make one product stand out from another?”

Scenario 2

Physician says: “I love coming to this restaurant. It has a great menu.”

Possible rep response: “That’s one of the reasons I chose this place. You can get boiled lobster or a venison steak. Speaking of a great menu, what concerns you about the HMOs you’re dealing with, limiting your choices when choosing a specific drug therapy for a patient?”

Scenario 3

Physician says: “What a great football game yesterday. Did you see how effective Drew Bledsoe was in the fourth quarter? That guy is amazing.”

Possible rep response: “Bledsoe is effective on so many levels. He’s a leader, you feel safe with him carrying the ball, and he’s a proven winner. You know who else that sounds like? Zocor, a market leader with an eight-year safety record, proven to save the lives of your patients. Physician, what concerns do you have about Zocor leading your team in the fight against congenital heart disease?”

Scenario 4

Physician says: “So, what plans do you have for the holidays?”

Possible rep response: “Well, my wife and I are going to visit my grandmother. It should be a lot of fun, though I feel so bad for her. She really has advanced osteoporosis and can’t travel at all. She wasn’t on any treatment plan for the longest time. Physician, what do you think the reasons are that some physicians don’t do much about osteoporosis until it’s in its advanced stages and nearly too late?”

Extract from Harper's Magazine .

From the surprisingly dependable National Enquirer:

"Bush, who said he quit drinking the morning after his 40th birthday, has started boozing amid the Katrina catastrophe.

"When the levees broke in New Orleans, it apparently made him reach for a shot," said one insider. "He poured himself a Texas-sized shot of straight whiskey and tossed it back. The First Lady was shocked and shouted: "Stop George!"

"A Washington source said: "The sad fact is that he has been sneaking drinks for weeks now. Laura may have only just caught him — but the word is his drinking has been going on for a while in the capital. He's been in a pressure cooker for months."

If this is true, George will be jimmying open the drinks cabinet just as Rita makes landfall.

The BBC features an article on The Meaning Of Tingo, a book by euphoniously named Adam Jacot de Boinod that collects some words or phrases that deserve to be borrowed by English.

For example, the Japanese phrase "bakku-shan" describes a girl who appears pretty from behind but not from the front (a phrase that is quite illuminating of the Japanese male's mindset). Those wacky Dutch have "uitwaaien", which means walking in windy weather for fun. And what could be more typically German than "Kummerspeck", which "literally means grief bacon: it is the word that describes the excess weight gained from emotion-related overeating?"

A measure of how dysfunctional Russian society has become might be gleaned from "koshatnik"-- a dealer in stolen cats.

My favourite? "Backpfeifengesicht"--a German compound word that describes a face that cries out for a fist in it.