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Searching for any gleanings with which to understand RFK Jr and the Whale

Look it’s nice prose and Wills has an absolute scalpel of an eye but 550 pages of eyewitness reporting and essays on Nixon and the crucible of the 1968 campaign is a lot.

This is the weirdest thing of his I’ve read

(Tbf have only read High Castle, DADoES, Time out of Joint)

"Try the radio again," Pete said, and pressed the on button. Music. Everything quite normal. Roaring Mortimer's crazy version of Summertime with the high-speed double talk like an old King Pleasure number.
"Summertime boys and girls and those intermediate and the killing is wheezy laze an' gemmun an' it's a GAS a GAS a KNOCK SEE JIM! Heddle-ah-boh!"

The king of idiom.

This character subsequently gets shot and the shock causes him to lose all English syntax. People do lose fluency their secondary languages in moments of stress but would you believe John Brunner’s execution of this phenomenon leaves a bit to be desired.

"That should put-if you forgive the remark—a little color in your cheeks," encouraged Major Obou. She forced a smile in reply, and wondered for the latest of many times what she should make of this handsome dark man who took such pains to salt his English with bookish idioms, right or wrong.”

The nerve of this man.

Not even ten percent of the way in and we’ve got Americans beginning sentences with “Mustn’t”. He’s a master.

It’s the holiday season so I am again subjecting myself to a John Brunner book

“For all its limitations thoughtful speculation is analytically and politically superior to all other options available: pretending everything is “normal”, embracing the false hopes peddled by techno-utopians, abandoning ourselves to nihilism […] or, worse still, validating the visions of the apocalyptic books and films that transmute our fears into spectacular, dystopian commodities.”

“That the luxurious life of the capitalist global North is desiccating West Africa and scorching South Asia is impossible to deny — but it is just as impossible to /price/. “

I assumed I’d be reading this while the conflict was still ongoing.

I dimly the remember the Bing Crosby-directed fake Sukarno blackmail porno from reading LEGACY OF ASHES but Bevins really hones in on how the pencilnecked Presbyterian poindexters at Langley couldn’t handle Bung Karno’s extreme horniness.

I am doing this of my own free will.

still reading these tales before bed and sleeping soundly

I love 19th century sci fi.

You have a flying machine.

Everyone exclaims "By god! It's a flying machine! Impossible".

Then characters accept the flying machine and get onboard but hours into their flight still feel the need to say "By god! We appear to be flying! Preposterous!"

Been meaning to check out this corny thing since Mark Mazower mentioned it in Governing The World

Rounding out my Anglophone Nazi History Bore credentials

I like Swanwick but this is not doing a lot for me 1/3rd of the way in.

This one is also really good, btw.

It opens in 1937 with George VI’s coronation and every subsequent chapter is a perfect compact summary of a major facet of pre-war British society, culture, politics or economics while always keeping the global imperial dimensions in mind.

Back on my bullshit (insofar as I seem unable to prevent myself from reading about the British Empire’s fateful collision with WW2)

wasn’t planning on rereading this but neither was I planning to get a virus just before new years

Just felt like reading this for no particular reason.

Not sure this is the bedside reading I was looking for...

alternatively interesting and deathly dull

This is hitting a lot of the "I get it man, War and Capitalism are Dumb and Bad, good job making that point with these cardboard cutout characters" notes that put Teenage Me off S-5, close to chucking it.

The romanticisation of the rant, the screed ready to dismiss anything contemporary as rubbish... shouldn’t be seen as a rejection of the 90s aesthetic. Jolly irreverence and cynicism are, from a certain perspective, formally indistinguishable. The idea that everything can be good is curiously isomorphic with the idea that everything is terrible.

The theme of the poem was the subjugation of English identity by “politicians” who refused to let English people be patriotic even though all the other nearby nations - “the Scottish”, “the Irish”... were permitted to. One couplet in particular stood out, and I can quote it from memory:

What about Shakespeare, Wilde and Shaw?
Nobody teaches them in school anymore.

The theme of the poem was the subjugation of English identity by “politicians” who refused to let English people be patriotic even though all the other nearby nations - “the Scottish”, “the Irish”... were permitted to. One couplet in particular stood out, and I can quote it from memory:

What about Shakespeare, Wilde and Shaw?
Nobody teaches them in school anymore.

Could this history of a decrepit political establishment unable to rein in rampant corruption and administrative decomposition at time of growing public dissatisfaction and worsening material conditions have any relevance to our world today?

I’m about to find out!