Adam Curtis Cancels the Future
Curtis’s new BBC series,
Can’t Get You Out of My Head, depicts the repetitive bleakness of individualism, but how can we collectively envision an alternative?
The primary thesis in Adam Curtis’s latest six-part BBC series,
Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021), seems to be that individualism has become an undemocratic force. Across eight hours, Curtis focuses on different revolutionary figures and those proximate to power, including Mao Zedong’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, and Black Panther Party activist, Afeni Shakur. He explores psychology theory and the psyche of isolation that festers in the suburbs to create a dizzying picture of how we have arrived at such a narcissistic moment in time.
This March weâre featuring Big Read Read-A-Likes at the library. The Big Read book for this year is âCirceâ by Madeline Miller, which focuses on the witch Circe of Greek mythology. If you enjoyed this mythology book, youâre sure to enjoy these other looks at myth as well:
âA Thousand Shipsâ
by Natalie Haynes
This newly-released book tells the story of the women involved in the Trojan War and how the war affected them from their perspective. Whether sheâs a mortal woman, a goddess, or a nymph, her story is told in this powerful novel.
âLaviniaâ
by Ursula K. Le Guin
February was another locked down month with a curfew in Quebec, and I was at home going nowhere. It snowed a lot. I saw a total of three other human beings in the whole month. The prevailing mood of this pandemic for many of us is “other people have it worse, but this sure sucks.” I read a perfectly reasonable seventeen books, and many of them were really excellent, which is always cheering.
This is the story of a young man with enough money to live on in London for a year and try to write, who entirely fails to achieve anything. It’s a comedy, though it is very sad, and you can see here the beginnings of the class consciousness which will make so much of Sharp’s later work so excellent. I enjoyed reading it, though I wouldn’t call it good, exactly. It also surprised me that it was 1932; it’s much more a book of the 1920s in feel. For Sharp completists, I suppose. Don’t start here. But I am excited to have so much new to me Sharp available as ebooks.
For as long as I can remember, my family has loved books. Oh, how I would look forward to curling up with a fantasy tale that transported me through kingdoms and across vast oceans, or a striking World War II novel that caused my stomach to twist into knots. How euphoric it felt to walk out of Barnes and Noble with seven, eight, nine new books stuffed with mystery, emotion, suspense, humor and wisdom.
Only after reconnecting with my longtime love for fiction over the February break did I make a harrowing realization. I had almost completely stopped reading. As I adjusted to high school during my freshman year, I made the excuse that I was far too busy with other aspects of my life to devote time to the hobby I had once treasured. Even still, I was confounded when a number of my friends admitted that they had watched iconic films like “Harry Potter” and “Percy Jackson,” but had never bothered to open the books.
The board of stockbroking firm
Davy is expected to examine whether other cases of wrongdoing occurred at the brokerage, as it starts a review of Central Bank findings that it had breached market rules on conflicts of interest. Joe Brennan reports that Davy has also promised it will take âappropriate actionâ at the end of the review.
Along with Jack Horgan-Jones, Joe also reports that the review will be led by
Davyâs four non-executive directors, while the Oireachtas finance committee is separately to ask Davy for an explanation of the events that led to it being hit with the â¬4.1 million fine.