Luke > Recent Status Updates

Look, I don't care who the fuck you are, one person finding out that another person's being carrying around a chunk of the first person's pubic hair in their wallet is not the catalyst of any kind of romance.

I had such good fortune with my last revisiting of a woman with a Nobel Prize for Lit to her name, I couldn't resist making a second attempt.

It was a Western movie, from which Homer could only conclude that crossing the country in a wagon train was an exercise in lunacy and sorrow; at the very least, he thought, one should make some arrangements with the Indians before starting out.

We are an Empire of 435,000,000, and 350,000,000 are coloured.

I'm certainly learning a lot, but I could do without the tedious intimations that non-status quo sexual habits have any sort of causation relationship with virulent anti-Blackness. If part of your argument arsenal involves fear mongering about certain racist white men being 'degenerates', all you're going to get in your audience is nazis of color.

Some mothers are fishhooks—they're shaped to raise you, raise you out of the water for slaughter.

Ordering all the queer books that my teen librarian coworker is requesting gives me life.

I understand this work specializes in taking extensive creative liberties, but when it comes to strap-ons, you really don't want anything that's in any way porous.

If pride was a sin, thought Dr. Larch, the greatest sin was moral pride.

[F]or a few years it was possible to publicly and legally purchase slaves in Washington DC but not in [Istanbul,] the Ottoman capital.

Not saying I approve every patron's request when they suggest that we add a book to the library that I myself want to read, but it certainly makes the job easier.

[T]he most deadly slave rebellion in Jamaican history began as a sit-down strike in the cane fields [....] The planters [...] met the appeals of the strikers with bullets and bayonets.

This is your chance to see what I see, she said, and I remembered that first time we were in bed, when she'd explained all the preparations necessary to get close to death and deny it. I wanted to tell her that some people don't need to get closer to death. They are born inside of it and will never leave.

There's a chance I may have thought this even if I weren't reading Black and British alongside of this, but it's amazing how many endnotes this has and how few of them really mean anything in the long run.

Fear of losing enslaved property and livelihoods built on the foundations of forced labour motivated some [British] loyalists to turn [US] patriot.

The previous section on neoliberal WASP feminism was fantastic, but if the author's declaration that radical feminists had all but disappeared in 1997 were true, my queer community would be in such a better place right now.

Now that I librarian in an area that calls itself "liberal" and has almost no locals who aren't white, I'm a lot more aware of how, simply by checking them out, I'm likely singlehandedly saving a bunch of books by women of color from being weeded a year or two after the library acquired them. Every little bit helps.

Securo-feminism, coined by [...] Lila Abu-Lughod, stands for the collusion between countering violent extremism (CVE) initiatives and global gender rights advocacy [...] Just as imperial feminists during the British colonial era had convinced themselves of their own benevolence in improving the lives of native women, so to did securo-feminists believe that they were "saving" Afghanis and Iraqis from themselves.

Good way to start off Black History Month (US), no?

Lol, I had been wondering when the Orientalism was going to undeniably assert itself.

Folks who are ok with reading books where us queers are murdered but not with reading books where us queers have sex (in a non-cishet voyeuristic sense): your fascism is showing.

Amazing how these types always treat Planned Parenthood like the antichrist. And by amazing I mean tedious.

Well, now that Amazon has shoved its walking ad excuse of a book page down everyone's throats, all I can say is that I'm glad an actual librarian now and won't be tempted to perform free labor for proto-Skynet anymore.

There was one thing which stood to Gos's credit, and that was his genuine love of music. He sat there absolutely entranced, giving the strange box his full attention and watching me as I fiddled with the knobs. It was a beautifully-mannered visit, the eagle sitting courteously in the cottager's ben and sharing his humble entertainment.

Of course I had to wait to start a book that talks about folks losing their jobs to AI until such an idea becomes nauseatingly relevant.

If we are to believe this author, there are no real differences between anarchism, socialism, and democratic republicanism. Once again, it would have been better for the author to stick to the facts and leave the conclusions to writers less uneasily fascinated by their subjects.

This would be a far better read if the author were more interested in the facts rather than in assuring the reader (and herself, I imagine) that there is no way that they could ever behave like Sade, with various nonsensical paradigms of neurotypicality and puritanism serving as argument.

I write this while experiencing a strain of psychosis known as Cotard's delusion, in which the patient believes that they are dead. What the writer's confused state means is not besides the point, because it is the point. I am in here, somewhere: cogito ergo sum.

Virginia Woolf’s 'To the Lighthouse' enters the public domain this year. Can't wait for the fanfiction, and I mean that in the most enthusiastically serious sense.

Sweet race, daughter of the sierras,
lineage of tower and turquoise,
close my eyes now
before we return to the sea,
whence our sorrows come.