I’m often amused by the ‘Books of the Year’ lists that are a feature of literary pages at this time of year. They are delicious show-cases of judicious back-scratching by celebrity reviewers and authors. Yesterday’s literary supplements provided some interesting examples of how participants tailor their lists to different publications.

Here, for example, is Colm Tóibín writing in the Guardian.

Mary-Kay Wilmers’s The Eitingons (Faber) is a secret history of the 20th century in which members of her family played a crucial role – one in the fur trade after the Russian revolution; another as an early disciple of Freud’s; and a third, an agent of Stalin’s, who set up the assassination of Trotsky. The fact that this last one was the most fun, or at least the most fascinating, is an aspect of the book’s originality. I found the book a riveting piece of story-telling.

The best novel I read this year was Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (Hamish Hamilton), which tells the story of an ungrateful immigrant, filled with angst and attitude, in a Montreal which could be Kafka’s Prague. It is a dark book, narrated with verve and brilliance. It made me jump for joy.

Paul Durcan’s Life is a Dream (Harvill Secker) is a generous selection of his poetry over the past 40 years, and displays his skill, his importance and his bravery, his willingness to tackle difficult public matters but also to explore with eloquence and fierce honesty the most private areas of the self.

And here is the same Colm Tóibín giving his list in the Irish Times.

Diarmaid Ferriter’s Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (Profile) is a brilliant re-examination of the gnarled intersection between public life and private life in Ireland since the foundation of the state. His use of the Irish Queer Archive in the National Library is particularly valuable.

Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (Faber) offers an account of what was done to the Irish economy over the past 20 years which is lucid and convincing. It is an essential book for anyone who wants the facts and the background to refute the idea that what happened to the Irish economy was a sad accident.

Paula Meehan’s Painting Rain (Carcanet) displays one of our best poets at her most eloquent. These are poems which both confront and celebrate the world we inhabit, but they also manage in their rhythms to transcend that world. Eibhear Walsh’s Cissie’s Abattoir (Collins Press) is a wonderful memoir of growing up gay in Waterford city, and growing up in a funny and loving and often hilarious family.

Note that there’s no overlap between the two lists. Note also the fulsome reference to Fintan ‘the Curate’ O’Toole. Interestingly, his ‘books of the year’ include this puff for — you guessed it — Colm Tóibín:

Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (Penguin) is a small masterpiece of resonant understatement. While maintaining complete fidelity to a simple, beautifully detailed story, it becomes a luminous exploration of the central human experience of exile. It tells us what it is like to live in two worlds at the same time.

Aw, shucks!

Anthony Beevor is another literary celeb who figures in both the Guardian and the Irish Times. Here he is writing in the Guardian:

My book of the year is Javier Marías’s conclusion to his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy. Although an unashamed novel of ideas, Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Chatto & Windus) possesses an astonishing tension which makes it hard to put down. Marías’s observation in exquisite detail has prompted many comparisons to Proust, but his themes, including human corruption through state secrecy and power, could hardly be more contemporary. It is probably the most powerful and important novel to appear in European literature for some time.

His dispatch in the Irish Times is fuller:

This year has seen the publication of two very important European novels; Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (Chatto) is the defiant confession of an SS officer involved in the Holocaust. It is a masterpiece, however flawed and controversial because of a sexual-scatalogical element. American reviewers hated it, perhaps because the French had lauded it so much with the Prix Goncourt and Prix de l’Académie Française.

Javier Marias’s final volume in his trilogy Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Chatto), is a novel of ideas focusing on secrecy, betrayal and the threat of violence, both state and private. Twisting like the double-helix of human DNA, shame and guilt, power and impotence, treachery and loyalty, domination and humiliation, love and hate, the past and the present, all are revolved in this extraordinary and unashamed novel of ideas.

Interesting, ne c’est pas?

Hmmm… Just read this Statement from Tiger Woods.

As you all know, I had a single-car accident earlier this week, and sustained some injuries. I have some cuts, bruising and right now I’m pretty sore.

This situation is my fault, and it’s obviously embarrassing to my family and me. I’m human and I’m not perfect. I will certainly make sure this doesn’t happen again.

This is a private matter and I want to keep it that way. Although I understand there is curiosity, the many false, unfounded and malicious rumors that are currently circulating about my family and me are irresponsible.

The only person responsible for the accident is me. My wife, Elin, acted courageously when she saw I was hurt and in trouble. She was the first person to help me. Any other assertion is absolutely false.

Methinks he doth protest too much. I mean, anyone can drive into a fire hydrant.. Besides, it’s good to know that he isn’t perfect, despite the evidence of his teeth.

LATER: What “false, unfounded and malicious rumors” would those be? These, perhaps?

Well, well. It seems that talks between Microsoft and the BBC about putting the iPlayer on the Xbox have broken down.

Could this have anything to do with the fact that Rupert Murdoch and Microsoft are in, er, talks, about Redmond paying the Digger to let Bing have exclusive ‘indexing rights’ to News Corp content?

Fact: the Digger (and his various offspring) detests the BBC and would like to shut it down.

Wired writer Evan Ratcliff decided to see how difficult it would be to disappear in a networked world. His account of his month on the run is absolutely riveting.

Many thanks to Andrew Ingram for spotting it.

A few days ago I sat next to a fundamentalist Christian at dinner. She asked me at one point what my religion was. I replied that, having been brought up in Ireland, I had been thoroughly inoculated against that kind of nonsense.

Yesterday, the report of the Murphy Commission into child sex abuse by priests in the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin was published. The report shows, in graphic detail, that what lies at the heart of the Catholic Church in Ireland is a profound and widespread corruption, perpetrated by liars, child sex abusers and those senior clerics at the very top — including at least one cardinal — who covered up their crimes. The full text of the report is on the Web, and I’ve only read Part One (and I’m not sure I have the stomach to tackle Part Two), but for a quick and insightful commentary you could do worse than read Mary Raftery’s column in today’s Irish Times. This is how it begins:

THERE IS one searing, indelible image to be found in the pages of the Dublin diocesan report on clerical child abuse. It is of Fr Noel Reynolds, who admitted sexually abusing dozens of children, towering over a small girl as he brutally inserts an object into her vagina and then her back passage.

That object is his crucifix.

Nobody who grew up in 1950s Ireland will be surprised by the Murphy report — or by the earlier Ryan Report into abuse of children by Catholic religious orders throughout Ireland. To say that the Ireland of my youth was a priest-ridden society is the grossest of understatements. The deference shown by the State to the Catholic church was total. But the interesting thing about the new report is that it has been investigating a much more recent period in Irish history from the 1970s onwards — when the country was supposedly beginning its long march towards Celtic tigerhood. Now we find that the power of the church to protect its interests and to ignore its duty of care to the children of its credulous flock was as untramelled in that period as it had been in the 1950s.

What’s becoming clear is that the entire history of post-independence Ireland needs to be rewritten. The child abuse inquiries have revealed how corrupt was the religious institution that purported to provide moral guidance to the citizens of the fledgling state. And the various tribunals that have inquired into political corruption, together with what the banking meltdown has revealed about the pervasive corruption and criminality in Irish government, banking and construction, suggest that all the propaganda about a modern European democracy was just so much hooey. In truth, post-Imperial Ireland was more like Sicily with heavy rainfall than a modern secular state.

John Barrow, the Cambridge mathematician (and one of my fellow patrons of the Cambridge Science Festival) has a lovely paper in arXiv. It solves a problem that has always bedevilled competitive rowing — the fact that in an apparently perfectly-balanced coxless boat one still gets a ‘wiggle’ which reduces the efficiency of the team. The Abstract reads:

We consider the optimal positioning of an even number of crew members in a coxless racing boat in order to avoid the presence of a sideways wiggle as the boat is propelled forwards through the water. We show that the traditional (alternate port and starboard) rig of racing boats always possesses an oscillating non-zero transverse moment and associated wiggling motion. We show that the problem of finding the zero-moment rigs is related to a special case of the Subset Sum problem. We find the one (known) zero-moment rig for a racing Four and show there are four possible such rigs for a racing Eight, of which only two (the so called ‘Italian’ and ‘German’ rigs) appear to be already known. We also give the 29 zero-moment solutions for racing Twelves but refrain from explicitly listing the 263 Sixteens and 2724 Twenties which have zero transverse moments. We show that only balanced boats with crew numbers that are divisible by four can have the zero-moment property. We also discuss some aspects of unbalanced boats, in which the number of port and starboard oars are unequal.

Isn’t mathematics wonderful? When I was a graduate student, one of my mathematician friends spent three days figuring out the fluid dynamics behind the swirl patterns in his morning coffee. I’m reminded of G.H. Hardy’s lovely book, A Mathematician’s Apology and his famous observation that he had “never done anything ‘useful’. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.”

As you might expect, he was wrong; according to Wikipedia, some of his mathematical work found its way into ‘useful’ applications — e.g. in physics to find quantum partition functions of atomic nuclei (first used by Niels Bohr) and to derive thermodynamic functions of non-interacting Bose-Einstein systems.

Well, blow me down! No sooner do I publish a column about suspicions that Facebook was de-linking incoming tweets before converting them into status updates than I find this post by Dave Winer.

I have several accounts that I use for testing Twitter apps. One of them, bullmancuso, was shut down last October. A few weeks ago I petitioned to have the account restored.

This evening I got an email from the Twitter support person BFF, who explained:

“Your account was suspended because our specialists found that your tweets were primarily links to other sites and not personal updates, a violation of Twitter Rules.”

http://help.twitter.com/forums/26257/entries/18311

It’s true of that account but it’s also true of the NYTimes and many other news oriented Twitter sites.

I suggest they take another look at this.

And it’s a reminder once again that we’re playing in someone else’s ballpark here, and they make the rules. This is not in any way like the Internet.

Yep. Most of the people I follow on Twitter use the service in much the same way. A proportion of their tweets are, of course, ‘personal’ updates. But an awful lot of them are pointers to interesting stuff. For us, Twitter has become a kind of selective RSS feed — and that’s its main attraction. If Twitter declares that use illegal, then we’ll just move on.

Also, Dave is right to point out that this kind of behaviour runs directly counter to the spirit of the Internet — which is a technology that is entirely agnostic about the uses to which it is put. That’s a feature of the system, not a bug: it’s what was designed into the architecture of the network. It’s part of its DNA. If the guys who run Twitter want it to enjoy the same kind of organic growth as the Net and the Web had, then they had better learn the same kind of agnosticism. Otherwise they’re screwed.

There’s another interesting aspect to this also. At the Society of Editors Conference last weekend it was noticeable that almost every ‘innovative’ use of online media by existing newspaper groups is now either built around Twitter or assumes that the service will continue more or less as it is now. If anyone’s betting the ranch on that, then they should think again.

… in 1963, JFK was assassinated,

One of the interesting side-effects of Twitter is that it liberates bloggers from one of their original duties — that of providing a set of links to interesting stuff elsewhere on the Web. That, after all, is where the genre originated — as weblogs which were just that, a list of links to other sites. In that sense, the first blogger was Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s inventor, because one of the first pages he published on CERN’s server (info.cern.ch) was a daily-updated list of other web servers.

As the web grew, and pioneers like Dave Winer began to explore what could be done with this new publishing medium, a consensus emerged that a weblog should be more than just a set of links — that there should be at least some kind of annotation or comment accompanying the links. And so Blogging was born and rapidly morphed into a literary form which uneasily mixed link-logs with heavily hyperlinked prose pieces of varying length, profundity and authority.

I started blogging in the mid-1990s because I needed a way of creating a hyperlinked notebook to keep track of my online reading and to support my academic and journalistic work. I had discovered that if one spent any amount of time on the Web then simple, browser-based bookmarking rapidly became dysfunctional. I first used a tool called AOLPress which was free and lightweight (and which, I learned much later from TB-L’s memoir, had very respectable antecedents). For the first few years, my blog was effectively private — it was hosted on my own computers and not available on the Web. This made sense at the time because it really was more like a lab notebook than a literary product: it was a way of enabling me to escape the consequences of a poor memory, especially once I’d put a search engine onto it. I knew from then on that if I’d written about it on my blog then I would always be able to retrieve it later.

Memex went public towards the end of the 1990s after I’d started to use Dave Winer’s Userland software. But going public involved an uneasy compromise. The terseness of the private blog had to be softened, somehow, by some degree of elaboration, explanation or exposition. Otherwise, readers might have no idea of what lay behind a particular link or observation. So from the moment Memex went public it’s oscillated between weblog and blog, with a strong bias towards the former. Every so often, I would post extended pieces which were more or less polished (usually the latter), but for most of the time Memex has been mainly a rushed, idiosyncratic guide to things I have found interesting, instructive or significant. In that sense it sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from blogs whose posts are well-formed, carefully-crafted mini-essays: like, say, those written by the venerable Chicago firm of Becker & Posner, or by Paul Graham, Ed Felten, Clay Shirky, Diane Coyle, Martin Weller, Bill Thompson, or Sean French & Nicci Gerrard — to pick just a few names at random from my blogroll.

The great thing about social bookmarking services like del.icio.us and Twitter is that they could liberate bloggers from the weblogging side of their lives and allow them to concentrate on, well, online essays. Which of course raises the question of what is an ‘essay’. As chance would have it, this is a subject discussed by Zadie Smith in the introduction to her splendid new collection of the things, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays.

As a noun, Smith observes, the word ‘essay’ has had “an unstable history, shape-shifting over the centuries in its little corner of the OED”.

For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: “A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition.” And if this looks to us like one of Johnson’s lexical eccentricities, we’re chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement (“The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays”) and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft. Not until the mid 19th century does it take on its familiar, neutral ring: “a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.”

Johnson’s definition seems to me to fit many of the longer posts one finds on the best blogs. They’re full of ideas, but not quite polished or honed: work in progress rather than finished products. As someone who has written a weekly mini-essay for (print) publication in a national magazine or newspaper for 50 weeks a year since 1982, I’m often struck by the differences between my Observer column and what I post here. In part, this is a response to the constraints laid upon one by a print publication; although my column is published (and widely read) online, its most important parameter — length — is set by the requirements of the page on which it sits in the print edition of the newspaper. So when I sit down to write a column, I know that whatever I have to say has to be fitted into 800 words.

Such a limitation makes no sense on the Web, where space is, in theory, infinite. But in fact the discipline imposed by the 800-word limit seems to me to be a beneficial thing. For one thing, it discourages prolixity and encourages brevity. As someone who agrees with Wittgenstein’s dictum that “if a thing can be said then it can be said simply clearly”* I rather like that.

An 800-word limit has other benefits too. It reminds one, for example, that readers’ time is precious and that one shouldn’t waste it. Space may be abundant on the Web, but attention is an increasingly scarce resource in this networked world. As Herbert Simon put it:

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes, What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Simon wrote that in 1971, long before the Web was created and just when the Arpanet was getting into its stride, but it seems spot-on for today’s circumstances.

The other difference between writing for print and writing for one’s blog is that there comes a moment with the print essay when it has to be ‘finished’ and dispatched to the sub-editors: there’s an ‘end-point’, in other words. But, in a sense, a blog post is never ‘finished’; there’s always the possible of ongoing revision in the light of comments, or second thoughts, or sheer, unreasoning loss of nerve. You could say, therefore, that writing for print is like sculpting in stone, whereas writing for a blog is like sculpting in jelly that hasn’t quite set.

So kindly stand aside while I pour…

*FOOTNOTE: Shortly after this was posted, my learned colleague, Doug Clow, corrected the Wittgenstein quote.