Luke > Recent Status Updates

'Trump and Musk Hurl Insults as Policy Bill Spat Devolves' BITE EACH OTHER'S DICKS OFF.

[A]s human material the Orient is less important than as an element in a Romantic redemptive project.

Not only are Oriental literary productions essentially alien [...]; they also do not contain a sustained enough interest, nor are they written with enough "taste and critical spirit" to merit publication except as abstracts [...] Objective structure (designation of Orient) and subjective restructure (representation of Orient by Orientalist) become interchangeable.

Sure hope Paul's view of gender doesn't stay so boring.

Public library's making it easy for me to go hard for Pride Month.

I suggest queer folks stop believing that anyone who works at this site actually cares about them.

Rhetorically speaking, Orientalism is absolutely anatomical and enumerative; to use its vocabulary is to engage in the paticularizing and dividing of things Oriental into manageable parts. Psychologically, Orientalism is a form of paranoia, knowledge of another kind, say, from ordinary historical knowledge.

Long time coming.

Well, I didn't knowingly harbor an illegal, that's the point. So that's why I decided if the sons-of-bitches were going to bring charges against me for unknowingly harboring an undocumented worker, I'd start knowingly harboring them, or at least using my talents to create free papers for them. That's what you call real art.

In the US, a federal appeals court for the Fifth Circuit just ruled that a public library collection is government speech, and that a public librarian's decision to pull certain books can't be challenged under the First Amendment.

I suggest folks start paying attention, cause Amazon's certainly not going to save you.

It's rare that a narrative this old is so explicitly retributive in regards to racism, however unintentional.

I hold the book right here in my hands and can still only hope that this edition is unabridged, so grant me some grace if the reality's otherwise.

You have a plan, I said.
Everyone should have a plan.

These people who think it's not a war, and that America's not a war zone, just don't know who they're dealing with...

Free man, rediscover the prisoner! Resurrected man, remember the corpse!

Thank goodness Dumas is is in charge of the plot, else half his good characters would be under arrest for blabbing so much about the exact mechaniations of the murder and mayem around them to the persons most capable of bringing the law down on their heads.

The rise of "normality discourse'," [Julian B.] Carter writes, "drew on and extended several earlier conceptual vocabularies, especially those of civilization and evolution, in a way which made it possible to talk about whiteness indirectly, in terms of the affectionate, reproductive heterosexuality of 'normal' married couples." [..L]ove discourse was veiled white supremacist discourse[.]

Much as I love the anime, it did Mercédès dirty.

Not a literal 'uwu softie' treatment of the malignantly misogynistic 'wandering womb' trope/crackpot theory jesus fucking christ.

Pain is a warning.

'100 Years of Beloved Books' Amazon wouldn't know a beloved book if it shook it upside down for its lunch money.

Would that you were born twenty two or twenty four years ago and so never had to know the world that birthed this one, and would that you have lived your life in safety in one of the cities of the east, and have never committed any acts you have lived to regret, such that regret finally stands up on two legs, walks down across the Yellowstone and tells you oblique tales that cause your hand to quake, your chest to...

I found out later that a four-meter, tentacled eel of a person had paid the balance of my fare without telling me, because, she had told the captain, I didn't belong there and would be healthier elsewhere. Odd people, as I said, and I owe them a great deal, though they would be offended and distressed to think anyone owed them anything.

Scratching across its black eyes, I knew, were the stars that fell across the smoke-hole of my mother's birthing lodge, and I cried again, tilting my head back to open my throat wider to the night, to let it all in, and I told Feather Woman that that magic turnip she was looking for to get back to her world, here was its top, right in my throat, she could just grab on and oull and pull, unwind me into the stars.

"Either way, the time for scalping is well behind us," I said. "This is a new day, is it not?" [...]
"Or it's a single, long night."

["]I can bring you back. I'm sure I can."
"You can kill me, you mean. You can destroy my sense of self and replace it with one you approve of."

No one in the temple at that moment was young enough to be surprised at what had happened, though perhaps the several years since I'd executed anyone had lent the memories some distance, maybe even engendered some confidence that citizenship meant an end to such things.

Several years back, I accidentally bought the sequel to this rather than the work itself. Now I've found a couple of days late that I did the same when I finally started reading it. I suppose I should be glad I was still able to orient nyself, although I imagine I'm thoroughly spoiled on most major plot points. Hopefully the rest of it that's been so lauded is still worth the effort.

It is impossible to become a vegetable gardener without at the same time coming into contact with the wonderful strangeness of human nature.

This was certainly one of Dumas' less inspired weeks.