Luke > Recent Status Updates

Part One: 1911 - 1949. It is worth mentioning that the two works that Huang was unable to include in this anthology due, in part, to "unreasonable fees by some English-language publishers", fall within this time period: Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang (1943), and Fortress Besieged by Qian Zhongshu (1947). With NYRB Classics for the first and New Directions for the second, I have to wonder.

I've been borderline lusting after this work ever since its publication, and it's great to finally get to it as a segue into this year's Women in Translation Month, which, by the way, will be upon us in a mere week for anyone interested in that sort of endeavor.

This is engaging enough in its own right, but my lord, the way in which cishet white men are allowed to waste their way around with money certainly says a lot about the state of both today and way back when.

Fool, to think that good and evil are a matter of geography!

This is the third work concerned with the 1840s that I've taken on within the last few weeks. Certainly does make a difference to the overall feel which area of the world the piece is looking at.

Taking an aggressively defiant stance on qualities in myself that others might judge to be weaknesses became one of my most distinctive character traits. Still is, I suppose.

In my opposition there is nothing heroic—let me not for an instant forget that.

Second time this week that I started something that I forgot was in storage and got a copy out of my library out of sheer stubborn refusal to switch to another work. At least I became aware of the reopened book donation facilities and cleared out my trunk some as consequence.

I will change the system from the inside, said the cricket in the chicken's stomach.

It says a lot about a piece when even a suicide attempt can't shake off the overall "Mary Sue" feel of the writing, but so it goes.

Why are people so fucking weird about blonde hair.

Cooper does get a little carried away sometimes in arguing as if she's the only one paying attention to most of the issues related to this event, but honestly, I can't blame her.

Much as I appreciate a return to the roots of the term 'antifa' that cuts out today's obsequious/bad faith bootlicking, it's amazing how much classifying of humans nonsense is allowed to get in the way of the writing.

It is possible to complete a graduate degree in Canadian studies and not know that slavery existed in Canada.

This is a work I scrunged around in the falling-apart-out-of-print-works section for and zeroed in on for a feminine sounding author name and a promising publication date, but the description sounds interesting enough in its own right that I'm hoping reading it isn't so much an effort of pure pragmatism.

But your book is wrong, Mrs Strunk, says George, when it tells you that Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife. Jim wasn't a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim, if you'll forgive my saying so, anywhere.

There's the 1619 project, and then there's the year 1444, when the Atlantic slave trade is reported to have begun in earnest. Something to think about.

FYI, have seen at least one porn bot bypass the the new profile change requirements by commenting on their own profile in order to present said porno link in a seemingly innocuous manner. In other words, this site continues to barely be fit for an 18+ demographic, let alone a 13+ one.

Annoying as is Mitford's bad habit of not translating much of the French she includes, it got my brain working enough to observe her hilarious decision to include a rather indelicate line of Voltaire's in the original French alongside a poorly censored rendering of the line in English. Sorry, but 'J'embrasse votre gentil cul' is not in anyway PG-13.

The great scholars and functionaries took little interest in the world beyond until suddenly one day it rose up and devoured them.

Boccaccio derides the belief from the get go, but I do have to wonder how pervasive the superstition was that a woman topping the man during sex would make the man pregnant.

Voltaire observed that the State never minds how much it spends on keeping authors in prison, but if the question arises of some tiny pension for an author, that can never be afforded.

Running the numbers to find out exactly how many works one's likely been passing over due to their being on the longer side can be somewhat painful, but it's work that needs doing.

Or perhaps sisterhood is, plainly, a version of time travel.

Much as I would prefer it to be otherwise, this deep, bad faith Islamophobia of Paz's is costing this work its fifth star.

[O]n the following morning when the young man was returned to the square, he found himself not quite sure about which one he had been with more that night, the husband or the wife.

For Lévi-Strauss there is an essential difference between poetry and myth: myth can be translated and poetry is untranslatable. I believe the opposite: I believe that myth and poetry are translatable, though translation implies transmutation or resurrection. A poem by Baudelaire, translated into Spanish, is another poem and it is the same poem.

Madame is a snob but not a prude. She did not care about the relations of two men, just as long as they were of the same social standing and, of course, race.

I've read pure erotica that, even at their respective zeniths of stimulation, were incapable of reaching the heights of sensual drive that this work attains at times. Unexpected, but I'm not complaining.

Progress has peopled history with the marvels and monsters of technology but it has depopulated the life of man. It has given us more things but not more being.