nemonemini posted: "The world still stands "on the brink of climate catastrophe" after the deal reached at the Cop27 UN climate summit on Sunday, and the biggest economies must make fresh commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions, climate experts and campaigners " 1848+: The End(s) of History
The world still stands "on the brink of climate catastrophe" after the deal reached at the Cop27 UN climate summit on Sunday, and the biggest economies must make fresh commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions, climate experts and campaigners have warned. Source: World Still 'On Brink of Climate Catastrophe' After Cop27 Deal | Portside
nemonemini posted: "Taylor Swift fans had their time wasted and pockets emptied by Ticketmaster. Now they're calling to break up the company's live events monopoly—and joining the movement to crack down on monopolies, period. Source: Opinion | Swifties Are Joining the Anti-" 1848+: The End(s) of History
Taylor Swift fans had their time wasted and pockets emptied by Ticketmaster. Now they're calling to break up the company's live events monopoly—and joining the movement to crack down on monopolies, period. Source: Opinion | Swifties Are Joining the Anti-Monopoly Movement | Bella DeVaan
Bored to Death book club posted: " Our August book club will be the last book club for a while. I'm taking a long break until the end of the year and hope to be back again in January. I picked two novels that are weird and kind of unknown which is what this book club was all about at the " Bored to Death book club
Our August book club will be the last book club for a while. I'm taking a long break until the end of the year and hope to be back again in January. I picked two novels that are weird and kind of unknown which is what this book club was all about at the start. So I'm hoping for peak Bored to Death book club conversations where half of the book club is thinking wtf did I just read while the other half loves it. Take a look at the picks and vote for the weirdest one!
In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm. But when the charismatic Irimias – long-thought dead – returns to the commune, the villagers fall under his spell. The Devil has arrived in their midst.
Irimias will divide and rule: his arrival heralds the beginning of a period of violence and greed for the villagers as he sets about swindling them out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. He soon attains a messianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold.
Satantango follows the villagers as they are exploited and taken in by Irimias; as they drink and stumble their way toward the gradual realization of their mistake and ultimate demise. In its measured prose and long, Tolstoyan sentences, Satantango is nothing short of a literary masterpiece; a formal meditation on death and avarice, human fallibility and faith.
The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe," he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him.
The last of O'Brien's novels to be published, The Third Policeman joins O'Brien's other fiction (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Best of Myles, The Dalkey Archive) to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland's great comic geniuses.
