Luke > Recent Status Updates

[V]ice itself is a rescue from the misery of guilt, and there are deeper pits into which it is a relief to fall.

If this isn't a Chekov's gun (or Chekov's riptide more like) situation, I'll eat my hat.

You ever read a popular review and know that the reviewer doesn't deserve to read the books that they're supposedly evaluating? Yeah...

He felt as if he were being used, as if Willy were using him as a hard neutral surface against which to crush, like insects, the thoughts which haunted him.

Well, Murdoch, we meet again. Third time's the charm?

So the top of my feed has a status update from a person I've blocked, all the while I've never even seen a single update from some of my more recent friends. Classic Amazon. Why respect users when you can harass in the name of marketing.

Tennyson was rebuked for his Maud in 1855 by a critic who wrote, "If an author pipe of adultery, fornication, murder and suicide, set him down as the practiser of those crimes." To which he replied, "Adulterer I may be, fornicator I may be, suicide I am not yet."

Apparently resisting neoliberal disaster capitalism before it arrives on your doorstep equates to dictatorship. Writers of history get so offended sometimes when a country refuses to quietly sell itself to the devil and the deep blue sea.

Nearly a fifth of the way through and the whole text is still sloughing off of me like water off a duck's back. We'll see if the work allows me to use my brain between now and the end.

Brodie could afford to be a tad less self serving in her historical commentary; no one is going to thank her for looking out for the poor widdle white race and their rank atrocities.

The innocence of childhood is as innocence does, but all it takes is a nation aiming its immigrants' newly inculcated nationalism towards the nation's most lately manufactured "other" to transform loyal devotion into burgeoning fascism. I don't wonder at Antin's cynicism post-WWI, and can only imagine what the years after WWII were like for this poor, brilliant soul.

He was in a position to lead a very pleasant life; but he had the unfortunate habit of writing and publishing poetry.

No wonder so many folks are obsessed with Burton. He's a peacocking, vindictive little shit, and yet somehow resists being myopically sanctimonious. If more of the British had been like him back in the day, we'd be that much closer to world peace today.

No idea why I added this way back in 2011. Here's hoping I find out.

Čapek does not pull his satirical punches.

Time to give my personal NSA agent and whatever Amazon liaison they're currently in bed with a field day by not only reading, but also enjoying, works of Russian origin on this here 7/4 day of all days.

She is slender and enigmatic—just the two traits men want.

You can tell a lot from an introduction that discusses "The Blackamoor of Peter the Great" without once mentioning the author's Black great-grandfather, the original inspiration for the piece.

Full time librarianing sure does cut into one's schedule, but it makes the reading on one's days off even more pleasurable.

Done with the play, onto the bio. Hoping it'll be a much less brutally annotated reading experience.

Classic white in a non-white country: cares more about dogs than about members of his own species.

Beginning Sept 1 2022, Amazon is getting rid of Creative Writing, Favorite Authors, the Recommend Feature of Review Writing, Owned Books, and likely other things, as I only received info about what I myself have used. You also won't be able to download your data for this after that date. Eager to see what else they do to gut the community for the sake of profit.

Switching between this and Twain certainly is a trip.

The play itself only takes up 84 pages of this edition, which otherwise includes various introductions, excerpts from relevant contextual material and a biography of the playwright penned by one of her daughters. If all else fails, I'll have plenty of extenuating material for explanation purposes, whether I like it or not.

Fuck me this is good.

Ahhh, Twain. You're the most audaciously racist twat that ever walked the earth at times, but your remarks on Abelard and Heloise entertain, and likely aren't that far off the mark.

She was right to make fun of herself. But there was passion in this sparring, grieving, angry comic that had to find an acceptable disguise somewhere between sentimentality and brutality so that the world could decorously and sympathetically respond. She was just too truthful to make a success of it.

All this mewling and puking about unions as if the author would have lasted a second without the working women who fought and died for their right to exist while earning pay. How soon the oligarchs forget their origins.

Lord do I loathe it when a word-dense edition decides to deal with text inserts by making the font size even smaller.

I've never been interested in reading The French Lieutenant's Woman, but now I wonder if it would be worth it simply to see how much of Fowles' "woman who had been unfairly exiled from society" reflects an "African figure" that, previous to penning his own work, he had encountered here.