Luke > Recent Status Updates

Have I read enough Virago Modern Classics this year? Hard to say.

Considering how impossible it is for the author to go ten pages without rhapsodizing on how sexy the protagonist is, I imagine this led to a queer awakening in many an unsuspecting youth (or elder) back in the day.

Ending of the main line, beginning of the jumps.

It's safe to say that, if this one dude weren't such an entitled fool, this work would be three-quarters shorter in page length.

The chronological ordering by publication date admittedly made the early section rather tedious, but the works of 1833, when Poe was 24, seem to mark a turning point for the better in terms of quality.

Goodreads/GRAmazon's behavior regarding the comment section on its previously headlined Anti-Racist booklist article makes the piece a perfect example of virtue signaling.

Resident edgelord conscientiously ignores a probably dead/dying infant cause taking care of it is what normies do. Right then.

I wouldn't have expected to see both 'Delusions of Gender' and 'Stone Butch Blues' on a 'radfem-friendly' shelf (well, maybe the first a little bit, but definitely not the second), but now that I have, they're unfortunately suspect.

I can't imagine home without an overflow of books.

All of this voter suppression occurred while Ohio governor John Kasich established himself as a fierce critic of Donald Trump. Yet the governor, while making symbolic gestures of defiance...did nothing to remove the barriers his administration had put in place to make it doubly difficult for blacks to vote [.]

And now for a highly unusual, though probably long overdue, change of pace.

The insistence on destroying Brown [v. Topeka Board of Education], and thus the viability of America's schools and the quality of education children receive regardless of where they live, has resulted in "the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession" for wide swaths of the American public.

There's at least one user I'm friends with whom the GRAmazon always shows in the app and never on the desktop, and considering how trashy and broken the app is, that's basically user censorship. Always good to be reminded how performative this site is.

This has been a long, long, long time coming. Might as well get through it while shelter in place still drags on.

This is the kind of spiel satirized by the likes of 'White Tears' and co.

Fines, anti-vagrancy laws, and homeowners' associations: the handbook for any good widdle white supremacist.

"The theory of the 'living wage,' of which more recent days have heard so much, was preached in other terms, but with equal vigour[.]"

Sound familiar? I should hope so. And, mind you, this is a work of 1894 referencing an even earlier period.

Mostly white boy references, flighty-dighty "rebellion", an obsession with jazz music, and badly written sex. So far, so expected.

Indeed, such was Mississippi's obstinacy that it delayed ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment until 2013.

Human helplessness, human agony—set against the careless joy of nature—there is no new way of feeling these things. But not to have felt them, and with the mad, impotent passion and outcry which filled Marcella's heart at this moment, is never to have risen to the full stature of our kind.

These last few paragraphs are so laughably nonsensical in so many ways in the grand scheme of the work that I'm going to have to come back to them once everything else is through.

'What is justice?' she cried; 'the system that wastes human lives in protecting your tame pheasants?'

It took the white male Anglo literary establishment twelve years to publish Mistral, first Latin American laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in English. Then there's the fact that her relationships, or "passionate friendships" as Wikipedia likes to gloss over, with both men and women gets parsed as either heterosexual or lesbian by the most vocal proponents. Give me a non-monosexual break.

Now the author insert is uncritically calling people subnormal degenerates. Fascinating.

Taking a break from my Twitter politicizings to bring you this absolutely ridiculous difference in word count per page between two books from the same publisher:

"If a man had a child and he was also a writer we should have heard a lot about it," [Bagnold] once commented. "I wanted The Squire to be exactly as objective as if a man had had a baby."

These days, of course, the situation she describes is far more commonly acknowledged as both credible and possible, but the literary sentiment she was getting at remains of note.

The irony of a public library being taken for granted in the midst of a socialist revolution.

This far in, I have to say, I'm liking this a whole lot better than I thought I would. The prose rolls along quite nicely, the heart of the politics is in the right place, the author isn't afraid of a healthy amount of digression, her characters are entertaining when they need to be and largely credible otherwise, and I am always a sucker for aesthetics both natural and architectural. I do hope it keeps up.

I'm going to wait and see whether this builds up to something worthwhile ,but for now, I could do without the 'Jewish people are the first Christians' gibberish.

I don't know what the writer of this introduction was on, but it certainly wasn't professionalism.