a journal of the plague year [long weekend reviews]

Read Thinblade, ordered by mistake as I confused the author David Wells for another more famous one! An absolute disaster, from the poor quality of the printed-on-order self-published amazon-made copy to the abyssal style of the author (or of his dog). The story has no depth and no originality [a teenager discovers he must save the World against an evil entity released from captivity and gathers a team of un.be.lie.va.ble followers], the characters are uni-dimensional, either unbelievably good or complete evil and a colour comes with them to tell the hero which is which. The style (or lack thereof!) is massively indigest, with numerous repetitions about the feelings and questionings of the central characters, plus an hilarious focus on food, all menus being included in the text!, same endless drones about the incredible beauty of the visited castles a few days of ride from the hero’s farm. The plot is, again, laughably simplistic, making the Shannara books I read a few months ago sounding like an elaborate literary construct, and completely predictable. I cannot imagine myself or anyone else’s dog reading further books in the series…

Watched The Old Guard after an exhausting day, including a (physical) trip to a dreaded DIY store!, after reading a somewhat lukewarm review in The New Yorker… I found out later that the film is based on a comics series with the same title. And it shows from the lack of real plot (need to get quickly to Afghanistan? just drop out from a freight train in the middle of Sudan…) to the predictability of the story (set-up heroes fight bad guys and at the end, guess what, …), to the massive amount of stale gun fights with the addition of archaic weapons (to make sure everyone understands the old guard is really old!). The funniest part is actually taking place in Goussainville, France, in the ghost section of this town located on the path of De Gaulle airport planes (and thus evacuated, but not demolished), and in its Roman church (listed, hence intact!). The lack of moral imperative or of higher being driving such immortal killers, who mostly seem tired of said immortality, and the absence of connection with the locals (as e.g. in the scenes taking place in Morocco) do not make this B movie any better. (And the French character definitely has an English accent!)

Had a chance lunch in a Michelin recommended restaurant, on the road to Chenonceau and a family vacation, as we were looking for an open restaurant. The haddock appetizer was fantastic (and enough!), while the trout was not so great, presumably frozen, even though the vegetables were original (incl. chayotte) and yummy.

Read Konungsbók (The King’s Book) by Arnaldur Indriðason, found on my mother’s bookshelves, which is a stand-alone book more of the “involuntary spy” type found in Eric Ambler‘s stories than the usual social theme detective story favoured by Indriðason. While the two involuntary spies in the story are indeed two archeolinguists blundering their way through implausible situations, against hidding Nazis and East German police, as Ambler’s The Dark Frontier, the appeal of the book is in the quest for the ultimate Icelandic saga that would close the nation’s history, The King’s Book, towards recovering other foundational and historical documents hoarded by Denmark. At some point, Halldór Guðjónsson Laxness gets the Nobel Prize in Literature, which first stuns the characters into stupefied pride and second helps them into making another unlikely escape. What I enjoyed in the novel is the feeling of ultimate importance attached to the sagas and their role in cementing Iceland as a genuine nation (again connecting with Laxness, whose books described the social desagregation produced by the American occupation).

whazzat?! [scam conferences inc.]

Earlier today, I received an invitation to give a plenary talk at a Probability and Statistics Conference in Marrakech, a nice location if any! As it came from a former graduate student from the University of Rouen (where I taught before Paris-Dauphine), and despite an already heavy travelling schedule for 2016!, I considered his offer. And looked for the conference webpage to find the dates as my correspondent had forgotten to include those. Instead of the genuine conference webpage, which had not yet been created, what I found was a fairly unpleasant scheme playing on the same conference name and location, but run by a predator conglomerate called WASET.  WASET stands for World Academy of Science, Engineering, and Technology. Their website lists thousands of conferences, all in nice, touristy, places, and all with an identical webpage. For instance, there is the ICMS 2015: 17th International Conference on Mathematics and Statistics next week. With a huge “conference committee” but no a single name I can identify. And no-one from France. Actually, the website kindly offers entry by city as well as topics, which helps in spotting that a large number of ICMS conferences all take place on the same dates and at the same hotel in Paris… The trick is indeed to attract speakers with the promise of publication in a special issue of a bogus journal and to have them pay 600€ for registration and publication fees, only to have all topics mixed together in a few conference rooms, according to many testimonies I later found on the web. And as clear from the posted conference program! In the “best” of cases since other testimonies mention lost fees and rejected registrations. Testimonies also mention this tendency to reproduce the acronym of a local conference. While it is not unheard of conferences amounting to academic tourism, even from the most established scientific societies!, I am quite amazed at the scale of this enterprise, even though I cannot completely understand how people can fall for it. Looking at the website, the fees, the unrelated scientific committee, and the lack of scientific program should be enough to put those victims off. Unless they truly want to partake to academic tourism, obviously.