Anyone contemplating a biography of James Joyce has a formidable mountain to climb in the shape of Richard Ellmann’s magisterial tome. But Gordon Bowker has risen to the challenge and his James Joyce: A Biography is in the shops in good time for Bloomsday. This morning on Radio 4’s Today programme he was interviewed by John Humphreys about his discovery that Joyce had decided to renew his British passport rather than opt for an Irish ‘Free State’ (or, as he called it, a ‘Free Fight’) one.

Many thanks to Peter Morgan for the Today link.

Interesting revelation by BusinessInsider (via The Daily Beast) about the NYT’s technology commentator.

Powerful New York Times tech reviewer David Pogue’s new romance with a key Silicon Valley PR executive has many buzzing about a possible conflict of interest.

David Pogue is an incredibly popular technology columnist and one of the most influential gadget gurus in the world. With a column in the New York Times, TV gigs on CNBC, CBS, and PBS, and 1.3 million Twitter followers, Pogue can drive sales of a new gizmo with a few exuberant words or crush a company’s dreams with a thumbs-down on a new product.

But Pogue in the past has landed in hot water for failing to disclose potential conflicts of interest. And he has recently attracted some notoriety after he and his wife, whom he’s divorcing, were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct following an alleged scuffle during a domestic dispute that some reports say involved him hitting his wife with an iPhone.

And now those two issues are converging: Pogue has been dating Nicki Dugan, a vice president at OutCast Agency, a San Francisco PR firm that represents top tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Cisco, Netflix, and Yahoo, since last year. (On April 24, things between them had grown serious enough that Dugan announced their relationship on her Facebook page.)

During the time they’ve been involved, Pogue has written articles about OutCast clients and their competitors without disclosing his personal connection to a senior staffer at the firm.

Hmmm… I enjoy David Pogue’s stuff and admire his video essays about new gadgets. The possiblity of conflicts of interest is, of course, worrying. But in a way what is more disturbing is the way Pogue has involved his soon-to-be-disrupted family in his work. His kids, for example, were sometimes co-opted as extras in his NYT videos, and I can think of at least one clip where his (ex?) wife also featured in a non-speaking role. I’ve always been suspicious of entertainers and authors who make a big deal of their uxoriousness and parade their happily-married status in public. (Think of Martin Amis, for example.) It makes one think that they doth protest too much, as Shakespeare would have put it. And all too often those niggling doubts have proved correct.

Today’s Irish Times feels strange: Garret Fitzgerald’s weekly column is missing. Noel Whelan has a nice tribute to him.

My favourite story, however, is one he used to tell against himself. It involved an occasion when he had to overnight in a Rosslare hotel either because he had just missed a ferry departure or because his ferry was delayed until the following morning. Unusually, he found himself in the hotel room with no reading material. Intellectually frustrated, he searched the bedside locker where, apart from the usual Gideon Bible, he could only find two telephone books. This was in the days when the entire Republic’s numbers were encompassed in two volumes.

Putting the Bible to one side, he sat and read one of the telephone books. However, there was an objective to his reading. He was anxious to prove to himself a theory he had that once people from the counties of Leinster gravitated to study or work in Dublin, very many stayed there. By cross-referencing his own detailed knowledge of the concentration of particular surnames in particular counties with a reading of the 01 phone book, he apparently confirmed his theory.

Garret’s addiction to statistics was legendary. When he worked for Aer Lingus, it was said that he knew the international airline timetable book by heart. At his funeral last Sunday, his son John addressed this remark to the staff of the Central Statistical Office:

For over half a century you have enthralled our father and provided much to stimulate him. He was your biggest fan and he probably drove you mad.

Here’s a depressing thought: two of the bloodiest current operators in the Middle East both had a good Western education. Saif Qadaffi went to the London School of Economics, and produced — or had produced for him — a respectable PhD dissertation (I’ve read some of it, and it looks academically respectable). And Bashar al-Assad, currently presiding over murder and torture in Syria, trained as a doctor in London (which means, among other things, that he subscribed to the Hippocratic Oath). So the belief that a good education civilises its recipient needs to be taken with a large helping of salt.

Aw, isn’t that nice. This email just popped into my mailbox from a PR firm which shall be nameless.

Hi John,

I’m getting in touch because I thought you’d be interested in hearing about a new celebrity mobile video service launching today. It’s called Sparkle.

Sparkle brings you video messages from the stars, direct and unedited. It is the only subscription-based mobile video service that guarantees regular authentic, never-before-seen footage of genuine stars. Sparkle connects you via video message directly from your favourite celebrities’ mobile phone to your own, at least three times a week.

Sparkle is launching to coincide with the Gumball 3000 Rally 2011. Celebrity Gumballers including Hollywood’s Christian Slater, the cast of Dirty Sanchez, hip-hop star Eve and Sparkle Ambassador Tamer Hassan will film and share their Rally experience in real time only on Sparkle.

We’d like to give you the chance to test Sparkle for free.

Note the cheery familiar tone, and the assumption that a tech blogger might be interested in news about celebs — which suggests a complete failure to do any background research on the intended recipient of such trash!

And the funny thing is that until this moment I thought that Sparkle was some kind of domestic cleaning product. It isn’t — but it’s a lot of other things besides.

My Observer colleague Peter Preston had terrific piece about the lawyers-vs-Twitter controversy in yesterday’s paper in which he highlighted an aspect of all this that has not received the attention it deserves. This is the fact that the motive force behind the growth in privacy injunctions is not just the intrusiveness of the British tabloid media, but the enterprising greed of London’s leading law firms. As he puts it,

The other defining change of the last 12 years has gradually seen the essential big earner for England’s small but richly endowed libel bar sliding away. English libel law, offering heavy damages, huge fees and real advantages to a prospective litigant, has slowly become another victim of the digital revolution. Our courts have traditionally welcomed cases from all over the globe, however vestigial publication to a UK audience may have been. In that sense, the internet seemed to offer still plumper pickings. But American administrations, first at a state then a national level, became disgusted by the justice they saw meted out to their citizens by the Strand. They have decided that no English ruling that infringes the right to free speech can be enforced across the Atlantic. Our own politicians, spurred into action, are seeking to reform the gross imbalances of English libel.

And this decline in libel rewards is fundamentally connected to the rise in privacy speculation since 1998. Max Mosley could have chosen libel, but opted for privacy. Lawyers, naturally, have moved into this fresh, potentially lush area of litigation. Sweeping injunctions – nobody has quite counted them yet – have become the weapon of first resort. Sometimes (as with Trafigura’s attempt to gag the Guardian) the case has been too outrageous to endure. More typically, though, the queue of celebrities at the court door has succeeded in buying expensive secrecy for marital misdeeds – even if some, such as Andrew Marr, eventually repented of going to court.

(Emphasis added).

What’s going on, I suspect, is that law firms are encouraging clients to splash out on what they (the lawyers, that is) must know is futile expenditure. In the case of footballers earning anything up to £200k a week, the fees probably look like small beer, so there’s clearly room for business expansion here — for lawyers.

In the interests of helping innocent footballers I’ve built a simple DIY calculator which will enable the average footballer to work out how much it will cost him to fail to get a US court to force Twitter to reveal the identify of Twitterers. It assumes that a US law firm will also be needed to do the business on the American side. On the assumptions I started with, it looks like the minimum cost would be about two days’ wages.

The problem, for those who read recipes on their iPads, is how to keep the precious device safe from the various fluids and other hazards likely to be found in kitchens. The solution (apparently) comes from Chef Sleeve. The triangular box in which the disposable bags come doubles as a stand.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Interesting piece in The Atlantic.

There are politicians who don’t cheat on their wives, movie stars whose marriages don’t end in divorce, and professional athletes who aren’t womanizers, but a pro bodybuilder turned Hollywood star turned governor?

Arnold Schwarzenegger never had a chance.

His impending divorce has been the talk of Southern California drive time radio for at least the last week, and I’ve yet to encounter anyone surprised by the news. It’s because we remember. Eight years ago, on the eve of the special election that won him the statehouse, the Los Angeles Times published a scathing story about his groping problem. “The initial Times report told the story of six women who said that the star had touched them in a suggestive or aggressive manner without their consent,” James Rainey recalled this week. “Eventually, a total of 16 women, 11 of them giving their names, described physical humiliations suffered at the hands of the man who was running to replace Gray Davis as governor in the recall election.” 

Today the newspaper has finished what it started.

“Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, separated after she learned he had fathered a child more than a decade ago — before his first run for office — with a longtime member of their household staff,” says the front page story. “The staff member worked for the family for 20 years, retiring in January.”

I never look at photographs of Schwarzenegger without thinking of Clive James’s wonderful description of him looking like “a condom stuffed with walnuts”.

It’s not often that one feels genuine sadness when a politician dies, but I felt it this morning when the news came through that Garret Fitzgerald died last night. He was one of the very few Irish politicians who was a genuine intellectual — a fact often illustrated by the (possibly apocryphal) story of him emerging from an exhausting all-night EU negotiation session and expressing the view that while the resulting deal might be ok in practice “the question is whether it works in theory”.

He was for many years an academic at University College, Dublin and benefited from an unusual clause in the terms of employment of lecturers in the National University of Ireland (of which UCD was a constituent college) which gave staff unpaid leave of absence to hold public office while keeping their academic posts open. So even when he was Foreign Minister or Taoiseach he always had the possibility of returning to academic life. Perhaps that’s what gave him such a sublimely distracted look.

He was a mass of contradictions: the son of two heartland Irish nationalists, he ought to have been a visceral anti-Brit. But he was exactly the opposite — which perhaps helps to explain why he was able to overcome the damage done to Anglo-Irish relations by the antagonism between Charlie Haughey and Margaret Thatcher. In that sense — as former President Mary Robinson pointed out on Radio 4 this morning — there was a strange resonance in the fact that he passed away on the night when the British monarch was making a speech down the road in Dublin Castle, at a banquet to which he had been invited.

Searching for images of him this morning, I was struck by this one (from Wikipedia), in which he looks eerily like my maternal grandfather — who was a devout Fianna Fail supporter and probably disapproved of Garret (who led the opposing political tribe, Fine Gael). The nicest personal memory I have of him comes from a day when I was heading for Davey Byrne’s pub off Grafton Street in Dublin. I suddenly saw Garret walking towards me, accompanied by one of his grandchildren, a young girl who was holding his hand and talking animatedly to him. What was striking was the fact that he was entirely engrossed in what she was saying, and paying no attention whatsoever to what was happening on the street. It was a lovely encapsulation of the fact that while he may have been a statesman and a world figure, at that moment he was, purely and simply, a loved and loving grandfather. May he rest in peace.

LATER: Nice round-up of tributes on Politico. And the LRB has put up a list of the articles he wrote for the magazine.