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# links    03'03'21 08:40

Yesterday and today, I listened to the news in the morning for three minutes, and the I quit the war for the day. The media, no matter what their stance, have invested heavily in this war, so after spending all that money, you've got to squeeze some airtime out of that, right? Right. And whip it up with some tense- sounding jingles.
Misc. links:
Jason Kottke makes sense (though I disagree with his theory on hypocrisy);
Dear Raed blog Whether truly blogging from Bagdad or not (speculation here) he represents a different voice;
Kevin Sites' "first-person account of a solo journalist's life on the front lines of war"; [Update: cancelled]
Bush: 'Our long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is finally Over' comic relief from the Onion.
"Don't idealise the soldiers fighting this unjust war"
Let us hope that Saddam is gone by the end of next month - and George W. Bush by the end of next year (from The Times, of all papers!)
"The United States of America has gone mad": John Le Carré in, again, The Times, which seems to shed off a little of the conservatism it gained the last two decades.
And me? I still stand by what I wrote a month ago.

# Frisch und Fröhlich    03'03'19 23:38

V. sad. We can only hope for the best now.
These words keep ringing in my head: 'Ein frischen, fröhlichen Krieg' - that was the mood in 1914. A short war that'd be over soon.

I'll be glad to see Saddam go. Well, who wouldn't? The worldwide disgust against this coming war has more to do with Bush playing bully than with the actual horrors of war.
The facade of the disarmament has been dropped now by the US/UK alliance, it seems, and I wish they'd done it earlier. I can maybe swallow a true liberation war against a true tyrant, especially if it seems supported by a considerable part of the Iraqi refugee communities. Though I am utterly disgusted at Bush ignoring the international community.
So it may work. Who can tell now. But it is such a gamble (*). My god. Let us pray for the best, for that frischen, fröhlichen Krieg, instead of Saddam pulling a Samson.


I'm Reading 'The feast of the goat' by Mario Vargas Llosa right now. You can't tell what goes on in the mind of a dictator, but this book has eerie thoughts spread liberally on its pages.

Two hours to go. Tension as I'm typing this, Newsnight in the background. What a silly, silly world we make this. This earth, our own tragedy.


(*) Speaking of gambling: that's one more thing you're not allowed in Texas. Funny. Someone I know - 'The names have been changed, to protect the innocent' - who grew up in Texas told me that her father, a compulsive gambler, played poker with the governor.
After retiring, her father moved to Las Vegas. I kid you not.
It must've been at least fifteen years ago, and probably more in the direction of thirty, so the governor in question never made it to the whitehouse.

# Review: Titan - Stephen Baxter    03'03'09 22:15

Wow. It has been a while since I was so enthralled by a book.
When visiting the library, to avoid only reading titles I've heard about in some way, I like to grab a random book off the shelf. That's the way I took Stephen Baxter's Titan home. Never heard of the book, or even its author. Serendipity at work.
This book can be categorized as hard, near-future science fiction, and all the reviews I've found treat it as such. And they're all missing the point, I think. It touched me in a deep way, as few SF does.
Eerily enough, the book starts with the shuttle Columbia crashing, during landing, in 2003 (the book came out in 1997), spelling the end of most of the NASA space program. To combat this, a small group puts together a maverick, one-way mission to Titan, using the remaining shuttles and various bits and bobs from NASA's inventory.

CAUTION: (MINOR) SPOILER ALERT!
After the launch, the book alternates between the story of this mission on the six years journey to Saturn, and the story of earth during that time. Both are depressing. The crew sets out, hoping that their mission will inspire a new space program to eventually follow them, but as earth becomes more and more plagued by xenophobic politics and a cold war between the US and China, which eventually turns hot, interest for the mission dwindles. In space, the crew members die one by one, some in space, some on the surface of Titan. And on earth, warfare sets mankind back to the stone age.

Baxter is a good writer, knows his physics and the workings of NASA and uses them to good effect. But there is more to this book. In the SF genre, especially in the "hard" variety, the main characters tend to be the ideas, not the people. Characterisation is often weak.
Now, in this novel, none of the main characters are really likeable. During the long, long flight the crew members cut off communication as their means of social survival in their tiny living quarters. They basically bicker a lot, resent eachother, and retreat in their own routine as much as possible. It is a way of not going crazy, with a varying success rate, and at a huge cost. There are rare moments of insight, but mostly it is very dire. Not a pretty picture of humanity, and the characters on earth don't do much better. They are less locked up in their own life, but instead society gets them in the end, with an utter lack of compassion.

This book really touched me - once it got me hooked, it robbed me of a lot of sleep, as I had to go on. On the one hand, here is a possible future for humanity that is bleak, grim, and awkwardly realistic. It could very well happen: the industrial-military complex is bigger than ever, and populist politics abound.
But on the smaller scale it goes further: here we see the total breakdown of human communication, which lies at the root of our problems. In the end, we are alone, on a Titan colony or in a gated community in Seattle. And by not communicating to eachother, retreating in our own shell, for comfort - though we might mislabel comfort as survival - we create our own destruction. The complacency that the author rallies against is deep-rooted in all of us, and if we're going to make it depends on our growing awareness.
I've wondered whether Baxter put the human communication breakdown in on purpose - after all, I've read a lot of SF where the characters never become more than storytelling props. It could be just a side-effect of this writing style. But to me, it was what did it in the end. In this novel it works, and it works very well.

Oh, I haven't mentioned the ending. I'm not going to spoil it, but suffice to say that the last thirty pages are very different, even hopeful. If not for humanity, at least for life in general. It works for me.

# small town    03'03'09 14:38    link


Small town. Or is it?
Shot on Agfa APX100, nice film.
Impossible to do justice to the print with my cheap scanner: the dark areas blend to homogenous black, where the print shows all the fine details. In the end, I lightened the bottom and right side quite a bit, but it spoils the mood, and takes the sharpness out. Bugger.

# waiting    03'03'05 18:38    link


Finally some new photographs. This is the first.

# hear, hear    03'03'03 14:10    link

Hear, head!