Jacob Christensen

Via The Quick and the Ed and Matthew Yglesias: The book meme.

Well, let’s see…

1. One book that’s changed your life

In a strictly material sense – Giovanni Sartori: Parties and Party Systems, vol. 1. I decided to write my masters thesis as a test of Sartori’s theory about party system mechanics on the Danish case. The rest, as they say, is history.

In a spiritual sense – I’m afraid that I can’t point to any single volume with that effect. But I’m pretty sure that having access to the local library in Gladsaxe has had quite an impact.

2. One book that you have read more than once

James Joyce: Ulysses. Three times, actually.

The trick is: Don’t try to analyse it. Go with the flow and enjoy Joyce’s writing while you’re doing it.

3. One book you would want on a desert island.

I haven’t read Ulysses for some time. Maybe I should head for a desert island armed with Joyce? Or perhaps some kind of survival guide will be more appropriate. The Junior Woodchucks Guidebook?

4. One book that made you cry.

Not cry in the narrow sense but – Primo Levi: Hvis dette er et menneske (If this is a man). As a matter of fact, anything by Primo Levi will do the trick.

Note to aspiring authors, screen-play writers and the like: When you are dealing whith human tragedy, less is more if you are looking for emotional impact. Levi knew that. Unfortunately it didn’t save his life.

5. One book that made you laugh.

Thomas Bernhard: Alte Meister (Old Masters). Life is misery and pain. And misery and pain can be outrageously funny when it is decribed by an Austrian author. What is the deal with those Austrians?

6. One book you wish had been written.

I think that a serious scholarly book analysing the causes behind the effective breakdown of the U.S. Constitution is overdue. We desperately need to update our knowledge in this field.

7. One book you wish had never been written.

Dan Brown: The Da Vinci Code. Not because of the silly conspiracy theories but because I read the first chapter and decided that the writing was so bad that continuing would be a complete waste of time, considering that the book is an entertainment. I’m sure there are a number of websites out there that can provide you with better examples of sado-masochistic porn involving albinos. Try Google.

Lenin’s What Is to Be Done, Hitler’s Mein Kampf and The Collected Poems of Mao Zedong are strong contenders but really belong in a separate category.

8. One book you are currently reading.

For fun – Paul Auster: The Brooklyn Follies. So pretentiously liberal-intellectual. I know.

For work – Fanie Cloete et al: Improving Public Policy.

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read.

Sigh. Do we have to mention this?

If you insist – Franz Kafka: The Castle. I have read The Process and Amerika and a number of his short stories, though.

This time it’s the chairman of the Danish Conservative Party, Bendt Bendtsen at the Conservative Party conference:

• Full text of Bendtsen’s speech

Ah, the joys of e-government. According to reports in Danish media (here is Danmarks Radio’s report), the homepage of the Danish Inland Revenue Service was down earlier today.

The reason? Either the Danish IRS forgot to pay the fee for the annual renewal of the domain skat.dk or the data systems of Hostmaster.dk which administer .dk domains screwed up.

All of which reminds me that I should get in touch with the Danish IRS because I am paying taxes of a Danish income that I don’t have. Sometimes being an ex-pat is frustrating.

It’s the party conference season (at least for the Social Democrats, the Danish People’s Party and the Social Liberal Party) and the party leaders speak:

• Marianne Jelved – at the Social Liberals’ party conference.
• Pia Kjærsgaard – at the Danish People’s Party’s conference; available as Ugebrev 2006-09-18.
• Helle Thorning-Schmidt – at the Social Democrats’ party conference.

If you read German, I would recommend Ulrich Speck’s latest post in Die Zeit’s Kosmoblog where he discusses the dangers emanating from islamist terrorists.It has become popular to compare islamism with fascism and nazism – giving us the concept islamofascism – and alarmist writers such as the Danish twosome Karen Jespersen and Ralf Pittelkow have adopted the perspective.Linking islamism and fascism of cause also has an added attraction: It gives authors and politicians the opportunity to paint everyone who do not readily accept the draconian anti-terrorism (and sometimes anti-Muslim) measures as Chamberlain-like appeasers.In any event – Speck is skeptical and points to some relatively obvious facts:

We are dealing with a terrorist threat, not a threat from a movement which has the control over real resources and which promises an alternative modernity that would be able to question the secular Liberal order in any fundamental way.

Without the support of Saudi Arabia, militant Islamism would be much weaker than it is at the moment and the comparison with Fascism is faulty because European Fascism in many ways embraced modernity.Update: See also Speck’s discussion of Justin Vaisse and Jonathan Laurence’s: Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France. Available at Amazon.

If you have an e-mail address, you know by now that an effective spam filter is an absolute must – let me recommend the open source mail client Thunderbird – if you don’t want to be flooded by “offers” of different kinds of medication, questionable investment advice and so on.

Less well known is the fact that the comment functions in weblog software are also open to abuse by spammers. But that’s the way it is and if you have a blog you should 1) turn on moderation to catch spam comments and 2) install some kind of spam filter.

Fortunately, WordPress includes a service known as Akismet which is a very effective spam killer and which lets me delete comment spam by the click on a button – or by simply forgetting about it and letting it disappear without trace.

I just wanted to let you guys in Thailand know about that.

Oh, and while we’re at it: Spam is not just a nuisance. We also know that spammers are usually criminals and rather nasty characters. They and their “messages” belong in the trash bin.

While we are at it: I would prefer 6 days since the election to -6 days to the election. Expecting a fixed date for the presentation of the new government would probably be to expect too much.

Just out of curiosity I tried to see how many of the major Danish and Swedish parties use rss (also known as web feeds) on their homepages.

My little test showed that among Danish parties only the Liberal Party, the Socialist Party and the Unity List had adopted rss to alert users to updates.

In Sweden, only the homepage of the Centre-Right Alliance provided an rss-feed. And maybe Jan Björklund should be put to work here because the feed is named “Allians för Sverge”.

According to an article in Politiken, the Danish Employment Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen has declared that the Danish People’s Party and the Liberal Party share core values.

No comments from the Conservative Party. Yet.

Politiken: Beskæftigelsesminister Claus Hjort Frederiksen siger, at Dansk Folkeparti og Venstre deler centrale værdier.

The replacement for the faulty laptop battery has finally arrived.