Luke > Recent Status Updates

I miscalculated how many paragraphs I would need for this essay. It seems I aimed for sentences and my feels for Beowulf and King Lear and Paradise Lost's Satan required pages.

Overheard someone debating whether they should buy 'Suttree'. They didn't, I did. Almost makes up for someone snatching 'House of Leaves' right in front of me. Almost.

I realized I could buy America, and it lost its shine.

This may not have been the best reading choice for me right now. Waiting for something to get better at page 101 out of 221 is never a good sign.

I bought this because Eileen Chang translated it. That should tell you something of my estimation of her as a writer, if nothing else.

I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.

...and so articles were written and read, simply and stridently, as though the writers lived in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of black and brown people from countries created by Britain.

Four of my eleven newly acquired treasures are library discards. Fools.

Careful with your bookish jaywalking, everyone, else some self-appointed gentrification enforcer will stalk you in their car and tell you you're in the wrong area and totally fuck with your mental review writing flow.

Anyone sensitive to language, living in this mess/miasma, must applaud it.

GONERIL

Milk-livered man
That bear'st a cheek for blows, a head for wrongs—
Who hast not in thy brows an eye discerning
Thine honor from thy suffering; that not know'st
Fools do those villains pity who are punished
Ere they have done their mischief.

The fact that Byron loathed Wordsworth pleases me.

What I have fallen from, perfected by memory into something only possible, I do not want to falsify any more than that.

Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.

444 followers right now. Going to wait till I have 666 and then set off the end of days. Or review Fifty Shades of Grey. Something fun.

Reading for class (yay).

She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.

I'm trying to engage with this properly, I really am, but the thought of the forthcoming King Lear has me slavering most obscenely.

The only good thing about the ads on this site is mentally waving 'hi!' at those targeted by ads that aren't in English.

In his first e-mail to her—a cybercafé had just opened in Nsukka—he gave her a list of books. The Fire Next Time was the first. She stood by the library shelf and skimmed the opening chapter, braced for boredom, but slowly she moved to a couch and sat down and kept reading until three-quarters of the book was gone, then she stopped and took down every James Baldwin title on the shelf.

Science fiction was created for works like this.

"Then we find George, tell him there's a bunch of white people up in the balcony, two of them with guns, who probably ain't gonna do anything."

Today my prof asked if anyone had read 'A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man', and when no one raised their hand proceeded to talk about Joyce and mention Proust. I could've engaged with the conversation by saying I had read Ulysses and ISoLT, but I didn't want to scare him.

When what terrifies is neither noisy, nor moves quickly, and lasts hours, then we become very different.

"She here fifteen years, Halima," Aisha said as if the length of years in America explained Ifemelu's eating of a granola bar.

Reading for class.

He hadn't geared up in months, "But it's like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell."

The white academic feminist who tells me she is so glad This Bridge Called My Back exists, because now it gives her a chance to deal with racism without having to face the harshness of Black undiluted by other colors. What she means is she does not have to examine her own specific terror and loathing of Blackness, nor deal with the angers of Black women.

Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us that.

I still have yet to find the megalodon literature classic that upon reading turns me into an elitist twit. Of course, I could already be one and not be aware of the fact. If this is not the case, though, it does make one wonder.