Luke > Recent Status Updates

Israel does not have a Hamas problem; it has a Palestine problem.

By April 2014, it became increasingly clear that the tireless efforts of Secretary of State John Kerry would fail to produce a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. In a leaked recording of a closed-door meeting, Secretary Kerry warned that Israel risked becoming an "apartheid state" if the US-sponsored peace process failed to produce a two-state reality. (Beaumont, The Guardian, 4/28/14)

[...] Maugham and Virginia Woolf were walking [...] when [...] bombers came over. "[I] shouted at [Virginia] to take cover but in the noise she couldn't hear [...] She made no attempt to take cover but stood in the middle of the road and threw her arms into the air. She appeared to be worshipping the flashing sky. It was a most weird sight to watch her there, lit up now and then by the flashes from the guns."

Decades later, For Services Rendered was to be recognized as one of Maugham's finest dramas, but for the middle and upper classes of the 1930s such radical pessimism was unpalatable; at a time of political instability and acute economic depression, audiences were angry at what they saw as a lack of patriotism, and they were made uncomfortable by the author's dismal prediction for the future.

So GR is saying I have three books logged in the 'currently-reading' shelf when I obviously have four. Course, it's also said I have almost twice as many books logged as I actually do for a while now, but I've always chalked that up to it throwing a tantrum over my refusing to use the 'Want to Read' shelf/feed its privacy invading algorithm.

With Hamas's takeover, [Gaza Strip] came under absolute internal Palestinian control, as Hamas's government rejected any official engagement with the Israel state. Imposed curfews, home demolitions, and midnight raids by Israel's occupying forces, or by Palestinian security following Israeli orders, were no longer a daily occurence as they were in the West Bank.

Hamas's thinking was grounded in a revolutionary's mind-set, questioning why past policies enacted by the PLO had to persist in light of the most recent democratic election. Perhaps more importantly, leaders argued that the arguments were redundant given Israel's chronic failure to meet its own responsibility.

One bird floats in the circular sunlit hell of the cloudless blue sky.

I'm sorry, but if you have more than 100,000 followers, your "reviews" aren't allowed on my feed. Indeed, even 10,000 followers is pushing it.

Filling in the blanks, filling in the blanks 🎶 (though I am glad that the actual reading stops at the 250 mark, any longer is going to magnify the decompression period to an unsustainable degree).

Glad I read Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present and am planning to read Say Anarcha, among other things, else I'd be having some trouble.

I've graded many an essay written by 9-16 year-olds, so if anyone admits to using ChatGPT and co. in their work, my choice of which persona to assume in response is an easy one.

Surgeon called last night. For the first time since last November, I'm officially cancer free :)

As L. H. Stallings writes, "If transgender and transsexual history and culture depend on what has been published, visible, legible, and authorized enough to be archived, then we might query what has been omitted as the result of the conditions of illiteracy, criminalization, or poverty. (Funk the Erotic, 224.)

Not unenthused to get to this sooner rather than later, but the whole point of going after the less new and the less popular is so that I'm not harried by holds thank you very much.

I grew up in a tiny version of hell called the suburbs and experienced the Universe of the neatly clipped lawn. This is a place where anything and everything can and does take place—and events such as torture, starvation, humiliation, physical and psychic violence can take place uncontested by others, as long as it doesn't stray across the boundaries and borders as formed by the deed-holder inhabiting the house on...

Can the chucklefucks calling themselves 'librarians' on this site stop shoving TikTok tags into book titles? Thanks.

...nothingness and here we are, here I am, some fugitive soul having passed through the void of the cities, skimmed across the emptiness of landforms and roadways through holes in the mountains westward to this one point in the dead road where vehicles have stopped to rest in the boiling heat and the entire landscape is silent except for the dull flat whine of insects and the dry brush.

The devil knows as much as he does because he's old, not because he's the devil.

[Maugham] wrote to his literary agent, J.B. Pinker, to sever the association between them, explaining that he now had so many requests for plays he would no longer have time to write stories—a letter that Pinker sensibly chose to ignore.

I'm being buoyed by discrete pleasures, walking the familiar streets and river.

At any rate, married life is all about eating. The rest of the time is spent making money in order to eat. There really isn't much more to it.

Was I so petty as to uBlock GRAmazon's logo redesign? Yes, actually. I will be maintaining the good pre-Amazon memories of this place in peace, thank you.

My hair's grown back enough from chemo for me to feel it prickling all over my scalp for the first time since last year. That's certainly something.

There are a number of words that will cause me to simply stop reading a review the moment it whips one out, but 'gaslight' has to be one of the most obnoxiously tedious of the bunch.

Ganymede? St. Sebastian? Might as well drag Magic Mike into this 'study' and put on a show.

With the latest Libby news, I'm finishing this trilogy while I still can.

I never add books on the strength of back cover title drops, but the fact that I can accurately gauge both the worth and relevance of this edition's choices of Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters and Waters' The Night Watch is honestly a welcome reminder of how far I've come as a reader.

People who once dreamed of justice and equality, and dared to demand land to the tiller, have been reduced to asking for an apology from the police for being beaten and maimed. Is this progress?

The library I originally recommended this book to rejected my suggestion, so I went ahead and got it for my own workplace (collection relevancy and all that). Then the rejecting library decided that, actually, they were going to order the book. Last I checked, they had three holds waiting on a pending order, while I hold my workplace's copy right here in my hands. Funny how that works out.