https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/198 ... rst-humans

Enjoyed this.

kokorodoko wrote: Fri Jun 21, 2024 6:33 am The library also had the recent autobiography of Britney Spears on display, so what the hell.

In what looks like an amazingly corrupt arrangement, her dad worked together with some businessman whom he was heavily indebted to, who then became co-manager of the conservatorship, earning a percentage of Britney's income. During this time her dad controlled where she went, who she met, what she wore and what she ate. I can't grasp quite how it was possible for things to be set up in this way, it seems her dad managed to convince the court that she suffered from substance abuse and was unstable in other ways, which according to her stemmed from a couple of overblown media stories. But it really looks like an ambush, the way she describes the trial it's like she didn't fully know what was happening - she had been told she wasn't allowed to select her own defense, which turned out to be a lie, and so on.

I'd have wished she'd went into some more depth on the kinds of questions and comments she got from reporters early on, weird stuff about her sexuality and her body. I remember one thing I catched on TV where a reporter asked her "Are you still a virgin?", to which she laughed and answered "Yes" - a troll response, it turns out. The innocent, virginal image was in fact a complete fabrication. She says she felt relieved when Justin Timberlake supposedly outed her as a sexual being, because then she didn't have to pretend anymore.

Justin doesn't look good otherwise. They were basically on the verge of breaking up, he had been cheating, she was advised that she should be the one to break it up so as to not lose face. So she did, but that made her the villain in the eyes of the media and the public. He went on to make mope-songs about how she had been cheating on him. Similar bad advice was presented to her in her later marriage with K-Fed, with similar consequences. Her ex-husband then kept her from seeing her children, which may have precipitated some of her 'scandalous' behaviour.

One of the most wretched parts of celebrity culture is how famous people are on the one hand accorded a kind of moral freedom granted no one else, while at the same time having insane demands of propriety and presentability placed upon them. They are then made into someone whom ordinary people have permission to throw trash at whenever they feel like it, since there is this notion that once you become well-known you automatically sign some contract that makes any expectations of decency and respect not apply. A line of vultures by the roadside, waiting to lunge and hack somebody apart at the sound of a whistle. Although the behaviour is not unique to this sphere, it receives a special kind of sanctification here.

Surprising is how Britney mostly doesn't have anything bad to say about the people she works with. There are a few occasions where she is pressured into doing a show she doesn't want to and such, but there is nothing suggesting that she felt artistically compromised at any point. I read something about how her trademark singing voice was something foisted on her - it's very different from her child voice - but it appears nothing like that happened. She says she thinks her new voice sounded sexy. I think it sounded stupid. But nevermind. At least one point of light in this story.

kokorodoko wrote: Mon Jul 08, 2024 8:27 am War of the Worlds

Zoomed through it. Structured like a movie. Very good.

Other stuff:
Neuromancer - Re-read in translation. A little bit awkard at first, since the opening passages are so iconic and rendered in an extremely American cadence. The translator appears as someone trying to wrestle themselves into a place where they don't belong and aren't at home. Pretty soon I stopped thinking about it though. In fact it may have helped to strip the text of a certain superficial coolness aura, in a way that does it service. The Sprawl feels like a real place now, not just random pictures from random movies.

Although this future vision is strongly non-utopian, I hesitate to call this a dystopia, since that term to me has something of the fantastic about it. This world by contrast appears mundane and realistic - and is for that reason more depressing, in some ways.

Darkness at Noon - REALLY good.

A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula Le Guin) - Gripping right from the start.

I'm in the middle of a cracking kid's book with the 7-year-old, just in case someone's looking for a great book to read to their kids, ages precocious 7 to maybe 11 or 12:

The Summer I Robbed a Bank.


Divorce, death, anxiety, adventure, ambiguous morality, and funny as hell. Highly recommended!

Just finished William Gay’s Provinces of Night, and now I’m reading Fay by Larry Brown. Eagerly awaiting the new ones from Willy Vlauten and James Wade.

kokorodoko wrote: Fri Jul 12, 2024 5:36 am Neuromancer

Some parts read like a computer game, others like an action movie, and the part where the two first enter cyberspace together played out like the animation of Ghost in the Shell - something in the sequence of frames.

Very entertaining, and learned about the band The Blackouts, who were quite good.

In 2004 I came to Sussex, UK, as an aspiring interpreter, willing to work in the sphere of politics to assist understanding between the leaders of the world, obviously full of naiveté and boundless ambition. It seemed to me then that I could use my love of languages as contribution to address the unfairness and injustice in the world, and there was no shortage of those.

I was politically apathetic, defeated, in a state of self-imposed intellectual coma that I felt was necessary to survive the lawlessness and civic impotence I’d experienced growing up in Kuchma’s Ukraine. I saw miners on hunger strike in tents in central Kyiv being fenced off so a Christmas tree could be put up and their discomforting sight would not bring down the spirit of the festive crowd. I heard a university lecturer reply to my complaining about this with her approval of the city administration’s actions.

My uni friends and I were taken out of classes on a few occasions to take part in pro-president demonstrations by orders ‘from above’, our lecturers being asked to oversee us go. We didn’t go, we ‘got lost’ en route to the demos, then we got into trouble with our department and that was also later reflected in our grades. All state institutions were subject to such pressure and demands to show ‘loyalty’ or else . . .

Don't even know what the book is about yet but you have my attention!

(Ukraine and the Empire of Capital, Yuliya Yurchenko, 2018)

^ or at least, would like a continuation that story. the book has a different focus.

The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. In English translation, the version in Project Gutenberg.

I may have bitten off more than I can chew with this one. I don't know if the dense prose is the translator's affectation or is somehow weirdly faithful to the source material, but the "Proem" that starts it all off is a 1,000-word single paragraph.