Ragtag Giggagon

Ireland's Census Day is April 24. To mark the occasion, here are some lyrics I wrote (to the melody of Annie's Song by John Denver) The CENSUS TAKER’S LAMENT You fill up my census with your four-person household, And the baby you gave up, to the nuns out of shame. Because rents are so high now, the kids watch you grow older, From the sofa beside you as you all watch the game Come on and tell us, about your hip operation: When you fell in October, were you in any pain? Did that wait on the trolley in your housecoat feel colder than the pain in your femur as you walk in the rain? After selling the Yaris, can you limp to the station? Are you getting up early, to catch the dawn train? Like the crippling interest on your defaulting mortgage, You fill up my census, with the thoughts of your pain!

Guest Post by Yusuf Toropov . Just as they do in in Syria, catastrophic ecological shifts underpin the long-running political trauma in Somalia. Westerners may be used to filing news from Somalia under such headings as "failed state" and "religious conflict," but these simplistic tags don't come close to telling the whole story, and they certainly don't give us the information that is most relevant to Somalis at the moment: The country is on the brink of yet another major famine. The last one, in 2011, took the lives of a quarter of a million people. Facing a surrealistic combination of severe drought in the north and relentless rains in the Middle Shabelle Region that brought flooding and crop failures, Somalia is in trouble again. The country faces a daunting humanitarian crisis, barely four years after the establishment of its first convincing attempt at a centralized government since the early Nineties. Those of us who live (and eat) far away from place

Jihadi, the debut novel by Yusuf Toropov, has been getting lots and lots of great reviews. For the blogging AtoZChallenge , I share some of them here, because Jihadi: A Love Story is a thoroughly engaging book: On Goodreads: Victoria Goldman says: Jihadi is intriguing, addictive, brutal, gripping, tragic and brilliant, with several strands that come together seamlessly by the end of the book. It's written in an almost-rhythmic way that enabled me to get inside the characters' heads. KE Coles says: Wonderful. The most fascinating book I've read for many, many years and probably the most original I've ever read. It's heartbreaking, horrifying, and yet beautiful too. I think I went through almost every emotion while reading it.     The great reviews this book is picking up indicate how very good it is. My advice is to just read on through. Read it like a straight thriller, with footnotes from an editor who is contradicting the narrator at every opportunity. R

The Quantum Eavesdropper is the name of my work-in-progress. I say work-in-progress; I've been sporadically shopping it around agents for the last year or more, adding to and editing it as I go. For instance, it has a little time-travel, but I have made the narrative more linear and less jumpy. It was a 170,000 word novel, since split in two, the most recent change to the ending of the first part, to give it more resolution. I've considered a sequel. There's space. I can see the title character moving aside for this next book. I've one specific scene in mind for that sequel already.  Although a far cry from the late lamented Douglas Adams, Eavesdropper 's somewhat parodic when it comes to sci-fi and pop culture. So I also have a gag about ret-conning for the sequel too. Beyond that, I have not plotted it out. I have submitted the manuscript to fewer than twenty agents so far. I've occasionally mentioned the novel on this blog since mid-2014. Feedback from rejec

Part of the AtoZ Challenge: P is for Privacy Government and corporate abuse of data storage I'd like to just spend an entry here defending some of my musings from yesterday's post .  A decade ago, Yahoo controversially cooperated with Chinese authorities , providing details of dissident journalists’ activities from their email accounts, on foot of requests related to log-in times, IP addresses, and other details. The dissidents faced charges directly related to their email activity, such as the sharing of material critical of the Chinese government with correspondents overseas, and these same dissidents were subsequently imprisoned. The UK and Ireland’s National Union of Journalists was among the groups advocating a boycott on the use of Yahoo services. One of Yahoo’s rationales for their behavior was that they cooperate with the law in whichever jurisdiction they operate. Recently, studies undertaken by credit ratings agencies have suggested that the preva

O is for Orwell? You can look up stuff related to Orwell on the Interweb yourself. I was having a chat with Yusuf Toropov who suggested I do a post on Orwell for the AtoZ Challenge. I don't know much about the chap, but here's a pic I found of him: Keith Chegwin (R) and Orwell Seriously, though: Let's look at Arthur Miller's The Crucible and George Orwell's 1984. John Proctor of The Crucible is a man with only his name left, and he will either hang, or relinquish his title - a thing by which he is ascribed identity by the members of the community - by signing a false confession. Orwell's Winston has perhaps more to protect, his uncertainty under interrogation more psychologically pernicious to him. Proctor's choice is stark, Winston's less so, although both situations equally harrowing. Principles in themselves may not be worth dying for. But the fact that The Crucible is an allegory for the HUAC and McCarthyism takes things further than Proc

Ireland marks the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising this year. Parnell There have been commemorations about the event that changed the lives of Irish people - perhaps for worse, perhaps for better – over the Easter period. Gladstone Briefly, Irish politicians in London’s House of Commons (led for a period of the late nineteenth century by Charles Stewart Parnell) had been trying to establish Home Rule – a form of devolved and limited parliament of their own, in Dublin – through coalitions with William Gladstone’s Liberal Party in London's House of Commons and broader pleas for devolution, since the 1860s. The House of Lords kept voting the legislation down. Lords being lords, they were quite conservative, and they wanted to hold onto Ireland and rule directly from London. There were three attempts to pass Home Rule Bills into law. The faces changed but the struggle remained. Redmond replaced Parnell, and Liberal leader Asquith took Gladstone's role in post-Victorian London. I