Luke > Recent Status Updates

Of course, one shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but if the baby wants to throw itself out, my office will make all the arrangements.

Sometimes, when a list of non-Anglo literature comes your way, you have to look up every single woman writer mentioned, cause assuming that your instinctive recognition/evaluation skills are going to make you interested in what you should be interested in without any additional effort on your part is, more often than not, pride coming before the fall.

The waiters at the Select comported themselves with that slightly theatrical mixture of charm, complicity and contempt that one would expect from servants in Hell.

Less than 50 pages in and I'm already coming across bisexual indigenous deities. This is the good shit.

I declare this collection's 'The Bookmark' to be one of the best short stories of all time.

And nothing, from the hungry jungle cat to the African ferryboat, is more dangerous than a white person on what they think is familiar ground.

God has punished the knave, and the devil has drowned the rest.

'You rate men lower than woman in power to endure pain.'
'They get more practice.'

He went on to cite statistics that, even if true, were completely meaningless when you consider the simple fact that slaves were slaves.

Charisma flung back her long straight black hair from her face and took a hit that illuminated the mysteries of the Internet, Ulysses, Jean Toomer's Cane, and the American fascination with cooking shows.

If one was dying, it had to be done in style if the dying took place in whitefolks' part of town.

Some utility and some appeal in this so far, but ultimately, it reads like a white man's guide to customer service.

Of course Miriam/Dorothy would appreciate the writing of Mary Augusta Ward, aka Mrs. Humphry Ward. Of course. And since I appreciate them as well, I appreciate both of them the more.

Don't you see that the Americans need the anti-American? While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored.

Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen.

Sending me a friend request based on my review of 'Les Misérables' is like buying a car solely because you like the color of its paint job.

I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it.

Can you imagine if every single self-assigned reader of highfalutin works were as honest about their experiences with them as they know they are permitted to be with this one? Both the prose and the ideas are a tad prolix, but they are frank, complex, and rigorous in ways oft praised in more puritan styles. Misogyny? Let me hear that accusation truly said in more lauded halls than these, and I'll believe you care.

So this is the infamous squid scene. Given the actual magnitude of the incident, I would have expected to hear about the scene near the very beginning of 'East of Eden', wherein the first patriarch stalked a black girl in the effort to 'cut off her ears and her nose with his pocketknife', as often as I did this one. What could be the difference, I wonder.

He had hung an elaborate Oriental rug on his wall, in lieu, I suppose, of an actual Oriental.

Translation of the original edition I added sucks, so switching to the collected edition with its better take + supplemental material. Not reading anything more than the introductions + chronology + Justine, so picked this edition for format, language, and page count. It'll mess up my reading rate a tad, but one's first experience with Sade should be as carefully considered as possible, no?

Even if they found themselves in Heaven, our countrymen would find occasion to remark that it was not as warm as Hell.

And now, time for something that's a bit more honest about its inclinations.

And now for a classic in the more contemporary sense of the word.

At first I thought a couple of my favorite authors had been hacked, but I guess this shelter in place nonsense has gone on for so long that they're checking this place out out of sheer boredom as well.

I sometimes read books which I still can't believe that I was able to track down a copy of in the haphazard way that I do. This is one of them. Looking back, I can tell by the date when this was marked as owned that it was found at the absolute best book sale that's held in my area. Here's hoping that it can come back in 2021, and that I'm still close enough to take advantage of it.

"He's sent down this rain to wash off their makeup and reveal their true looks, so we literary men can rank them properly. We can't disobey the Will of Heaven now, can we?" I see that dudebros have been at it for centuries.

And now the ultimate villain is disabled. How novel.

One would assume that works hailing from the mid 17th c. wouldn't have a healthier view of human sexuality than those published within the last seventy years, but alas...

That was feminine worldliness, pretending to be interested so that pleasant things might go on. Masculine worldliness was refusing to be interested so that it might go on doing things. Feminine worldliness then meant perpetual hard work and cheating and pretence at the door of a hidden garden, a lovely hidden garden. Masculine worldliness meant never really being there; always talking about things that had happened..