bring up the bodies

Good lord, can Hilary Mantel write. I think I'm just most blown away by the richness of her imagination. Such an easy book to get lost in. Zippier than Wolf Hall, which is good and bad. The characters aren't developed quite as beautifully here as in Wolf Hall, but then again they don't need to be. By rights the two should really be one book, or at least no one should read Bring Up the Bodies without reading the earlier book first.

the age of wonder

Centers around three titans of Romantic-era science: Joseph Banks, William Herschel, and the wonderfully-named Humphry Davy. The only one whose name really rang a bell was Davy, although some of the more minor characters were of course very recognizable: Faraday, Darwin (and, more importantly for this book, Erasmus Darwin, i.e., Darwin's grandfather), Ben Franklin, the Montgolfiers, James Cook, and also Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, Keats, and Byron. The latter group were, surprisingly to me, quite intimately tied up in the science of the time -- Keats was a medical student, in fact, and Coleridge was a lifelong friend and co-experimenter of Davy. And that's part of Holmes's point: Science is best when tied up with creative expression. To quote, "In the broadest sense [the book] aims to present scientific passion, so much of which is summed up in that child-like, but infinitely complex word, wonder. ... Wonder...goes through various stages, evolving both with age and with knowledge, but retaining and irreducible fire and spontaneity." (Emphasis his.) And then he quotes Wordsworth.

A few too many things were "characteristic" or "uncharacteristic" of someone, or else they were "haunting." But quibbles aside I really liked this book.

boom

Today was frustrating. We went to AID with the intent to hash out the MOU as much as possible and it was basically a massive waste of time. I'm going to stop myself there because holy shit I wanted to scream.

The rest of the day was nice enough. MJ left and RK, Lydia, Basharat, and I spent a couple of hours trying to finalize the budget. Ended up passing it on to BH and hopefully he'll get us a final version by tomorrow. RK and I will be on our way out anyway but with any luck we'll be able to keep things on track for the Friday deadline for re-submission of the application. Looking like probably not, though.

Dinner with the aforementioned people plus Akhtar was really nice. We went to Taverna and who should be there but Tameeza! She was meeting up with what seemed to grow into a ladies' group of some kind.

Also there was a suicide attack on the National Directorate of Security right as we were arriving to the US embassy around noon today. NDS is a bit less than a mile from where we were. The boom was loud but we were unaffected except that we had to stay inside for a while (which we were going to do anyway) and one of our interlocutors excused himself for a few minutes to make sure his team was all safe. They were, of course, no one leaves the compound. On the way home from dinner we drove past the site and you could see the hole around the gate they'd targeted. Not sure whether anyone was killed apart from the attackers but lots of people were hurt by flying glass and stuff. We couldn't get back to the hotel after the attack because they closed off all the streets for a while, but everything is back to normal now.

Tomorrow will be a bit more fun, we have meetings with some of the agencies I don't know nearly as well, and then Focus in the afternoon, and then it's off the airport and home! Can't believe we've only been here 4.5 days.

pell mell

All timelines are accelerated. These past couple of days of meetings have covered all kinds of ground and now we're on track to get an MOU by the end of the month and a full cooperative agreement by the end of March. What that means is that now RK and I are about to sit down and rewrite the technical proposal right now, and send it back to AID by tonight. With all that I haven't had time for much else; I was hoping to grab drinks or dinner with some friends but we've just been going too late. That's alright; we're here to work after all and truth be told the past couple of days have been pretty exhilarating. We're actually going to pull this thing off. It's incredible.

day

Worked 8:30-8:30, no break. Going to sleep now.

spectral kbl

We landed in Kabul around 7 PM, four hours later than scheduled because the plane didn't leave Kabul on time for Dubai. Never having landed in Kabul at night before, I was unprepared for how its ramshackle shabbiness would be transformed at night into something gloomier. The runways aren't lit at night, in fact, not much of anything is lit. Empty planes are scattered haphazardly like abandoned houses, the warehouses and shipping containers look like ruins.

The trip was uneventful other than the longer-than-expected layover in DXB. I had a middle seat in the rearmost row -- the damn travel agent -- but it wasn't so bad. Emirates is pretty generous with leg room and elbow room and at least I only had one person to disturb to get to the aisle. I've decided that the worst seat on the plane for a long-haul flight is any one with two seats between you and the aisle.

I'm safely ensconced at the hotel now. My companions have gone off to bed. I went down to the gym for 15 minutes, just to break a light sweat and stretch some. I'm not hungry but I might order something small from room service anyway, then pop a couple of Benadryl and call it a night. More tomorrow.

books read 2013

Well, I finished 28 books last year. Some were short and barely count, to be honest. Still books. Let's go for 30 this year.

1. Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
2. The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
3. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes
4. Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel
5. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter
6. Some Hope: A Trilogy, by Edwin St. Aubyn
7. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
8. The Spider's House, by Paul Bowles
9. Cuba Libre, by Elmore Leonard
10. The Human Factor, by Graham Greene
11. Liar's Poker, by Michael Lewis
12. The Places in Between, by Rory Stewart
13. The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkein (maybe third or fourth time but first in years)
14. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John Le Carre
15. Becoming a Supple Leopard, by Kelly Starrett
16. Smiley's People, by John LeCarre
17. The Sound of Things Falling, by Juan Gabriel Vasquez
18. Through the Eye of a Needle, by Peter Brown
19. Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault
20. The Honourable Schoolboy, by John Le Carre
21. Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood
22. Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin