How useful is your work?

I've spent the last couple of weeks writing an European Research Council grant application. It's taken a huge amount of time as collectively the forms come to c.15,000 words and, given the competitiveness of the process, they have to be 'good' words. One of the things that you have to do is work out the impact of your work to date by looking up the citation rates of publications (basically how many times other people's papers/books refer to your papers/books). It's a pretty disheartening process. The vast majority of academic work it seems makes practically no impact, being cited only a handful of times. I'm not too unhappy with my citation rate given how it compares to others, but it's still fairly sobering (and I'm well aware of the problems of judging academic worth using such a crude quantitative measure). I used a neat bit of free software - the aptly named Publish or Perish - to calculate the rates (it harvests the data from Google Scholar). Overall, my work has been cited in excess of 3,500 times, but the distribution of those cites is very skewed as the graph shows. I don't actually have 170+ publications - it's around 130 (some of the tail is double counts). Only 24 of my pieces are cited more than 30 times, 9 of those above 100. Those 24 pieces are 75% of the citations (the top ten pieces are 40% of the citations, and the top cited book - Mapping Cyberspace - is 13% all on its own!).

Review of People Who Walk in Darkness by Stuart Kaminsky (2008, Forge)

A Canadian diamond mining expert is found dead in a Siberian mine, dead after encountering a supposed ‘ghost child’. A young woman is discovered murdered on train after swapping a consignment of diamonds for a suitcase of cash. A Botswanan gang member is being held and tortured by a Moscow gangster. Inspector Rostnikov from the Office of Special Investigations is assigned to the first two cases, overseen by his ambitious and politically savvy boss, ‘The Yak’. A rival general would like to add the Office of Special Investigations to the Division of Murder, and without solving a high profile case in the next nine days, that's a distinct possibility. Rostnikov and his small team are in a race against time and several parties – including a super model, assassin, Olympic standard weight-lifter, a Russian billionaire, Botswanan gang and Russian mobsters – interested in recovering a fortune in diamonds and cash.

People Who Walk in Darkness has a fast paced plot involving many threads. The plot and characters hold much potential, but the narrative failed to deliver in many ways. The storytelling felt workman-like and rushed, with not enough attention to detail. My suspicion is it was written to a formula, by an old hand who has a track record of churning out a couple of books a year – others of which are much more finely honed. The result is flat prose, under-developed characters and scenes, and a lack of context and story scaffold. This was a real shame as the bones of a decent caper/police procedural novel are here. An interesting enough read, but not out of the top draw.

Lazy Sunday Service

I'm most of the way through Michael Lewis' The Big Short, possibly one of the most depressing books I've read in a while. The focus is the greed, stupidity and duplicity of Wall Street and their handling of the sub-prime market and the handful of people who saw the crash coming and rather than try and stop it, put billion dollar bets on it happening. Casino capitalism at work. There's a reason for financial regulation and oversight and this book spells out why.

My posts this week:
More for the pile
'I do bad things but I'm not a bad man'
Review of the Planning and Development (Amendment) Act 2010
Review of A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn
How to regress Irish universities and the smart economy
Review of The Main by Trevanian

Review of The Main by Trevanian (1976, edition Old Street Publishing)

The Main is Boulevard Saint Laurent, the heart of immigrant Montreal and an artery of the underworld and its vices. Police Lieutenant Claude LaPointe patrols the street and the neighbourhoods surrounding it as a patrician – a ruler who keeps peace and order, using his power, influence and street knowledge to marshal the drifters, cheats, thieves and other assorted lowlifes and people on the make. LaPointe is an old style cop that uses embarrassment, threats, intimidation and the odd bit of violence to stop the street descending into chaos. He’s an anachronism as policing changes; his old style methods out of place in a modern force. He is a rule unto himself, ignoring departmental procedure, paperwork and orders, and the senior management want him retired. The job though is his life. His wife died years before, with only her memory and the daughters that never were keeping him company. When a young man is found murdered in a side alley, LaPointe takes charge. A young, principled cop is assigned to work with him and despite their differences they work together to try and solve the puzzle, and in doing so come to see themselves in different ways.

The Main is principally a character driven novel in two senses. First, it is a detailed exploration of a neighbourhood, its geography, people, dynamics and relationships. Second, it is an in-depth portrait of a man and his lifeworld, outlook and philosophy, and how he relates to those people who populate his life. Trevanian really excels at both using well constructed prose. There is real insight, understanding and perceptive psychological and philosophical observation in his writing. He’s particularly good at teasing out the ambivalent, shifting, complex and sometimes paradoxical relationships between people and the places they inhabit. The murder and the investigation is almost incidental; a foil through which to explore the Main and LaPointe. Which is the one slight weakness of the novel. The mystery wasn’t particularly compelling and the resolution seemed somewhat weak and contrived. But this really isn’t a police procedural in the conventional sense. It is much more than that. If the murder element of the plot had received the same kind of attention that the character portrayal and sense of place then it would have been exceptional. As it was, it’s damn fine piece of writing and well worth a read.

Review of A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn (Picador, 2009)

September 1952 and the body of Willem Pretorius, an Afrikan Captain of the local police force, is found dead, lying face down in waters of a river he’d been fishing in rural South Africa. Due to a miscommunication, rather than a full investigative team arriving on the scene, Sergeant Cooper, an ‘English’ South African has been dispatched on his own, much to the chagrin of the dead man’s powerful family. Not long after Cooper starts his investigation, the case is taken over by the army’s security branch who are keen to prove that the captain’s death was the work of black communists. Convinced that the security branch are using the murder for their own ends and that Pretorius had been leading a double life, Cooper is ordered by his boss to stay in place and run a parallel investigation, much to the annoyance of the family and the army. Running against the grain, he slowly starts to unpick Pretorius’ dark secrets, aware that in pursuing them he is in danger of revealing his own – secrets that would threaten his position.

A Beautiful Place to Die has all the ingredients of a good crime novel – social tension between individuals and groups, interesting historical context, excellent characterization, strong sense of place, good pacing and a well constructed plot. The novel is set not long after the National Party came to power in 1948 and started to push a strong apartheid agenda and Nunn uses this context to good effect, especially the simmering tensions between Dutch Afrikaners, English White, Blacks and Coloureds, and even Jewish refugees from Germany, and exploring the blurred lines between these groups. The characters are well penned and memorable, and the dialogue and scenes were well judged. The sense of place is particularly strong, capturing both the landscape of rural South Africa and the geography of apartheid in terms of how space was carved up and traversed. The plot builds nicely, with a number of blinds and twists, though ultimately in striving for increasing tension the end wobbles a little by stretching plausibility to the limit and becoming a little too over-melodramatic. This was a shame as the book really was excellent up until this point. Regardless, there is much to like about A Beautiful Place to Die, and Nunn has the foundation for an enjoyable series.

"I do bad things but I'm not a bad man"

I was walking across campus this evening, trailing behind two young students flirting with each other. The man was wearing low rider jeans with no belt that kept slipping down to reveal multi-coloured underpants. The woman was wearing a short skirt over black tights. The skirt kept riding up her hips to reveal her tight-clad knickers. Every few yards he pulled up his trousers and she tugged down her skirt. It was one of those scenes where you feel you've entered a comedy sketch. What they needed to do was walk with their arms around each other, her hand holding his trousers up, his hand holding her skirt down. As I caught up and passed them, I heard one line of their conversation, said by him: "I do bad things, but I'm not a bad man". There's probably the hook of a short story there. Maybe I'll get round to using it sometime.

More for the pile

Four more books turned up today in the post, two of them for my Seattle trip next month. I've been on a bit of book buying binge since the start of the year and I've now got just over 40 books on the TBR, about half a year's supply at my present rate of reading. I usually try and keep it about around ten to fifteen, so I'm finding this pile a bit overwhelming. What it does mean is that I have great choice as I near the end of whatever book I'm presently reading. Looking forward to these ones in due course.