Luke > Recent Status Updates

Governments who manipulate population growth have two choices: making maternity pleasant, or making it inescapable.

Archipelago Books is releasing 30 of their eBooks for free starting today. Includes Our Lady of the Nile, Gate of the Sun, and more: https://archipelagobooks.org/2020/03/...

Oh how I wish I had read this when I was young! However, it's still delightful now.

...[T]here had never been an ideal, however humane and peaceful, which in its time had been considered "within the law."

End of Volume Three.

I'm getting quite a lot out of this, but my lord is it tedious to get through Millett's opinions on sex work, which are hilarious at best and violently dehumanizing otherwise.

Goldman has some weird Psycho/Friday the 13th/son-obsessed-with-mother horror story ideas about gender essentialist relations, to put it lightly.

No tyranny exerts its possibilities without mitigation[.]

So, my entire county is now on almost complete lockdown. Time to get some reading done, I suppose.

It's fascinating how much the narrative has shifted from feudal wars to full blown imperial colonization, complete with sensational descriptions of the indigenous people and their native lands. The latter, ridiculous and depressing as they are, make it much easier to ground oneself in the environment.

Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork: even when someone is not ill, when there has been no telegram, they run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by sone mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.

Desire of what she gave seemed to be desire of her.

I wouldn't have expected one of the three brothers to die so early on, but so it goes.

One can tell that this translation is fairly modern by its legitimizing the usage of the word "punk" as an acceptable word.

An especially queer lord/vassal scene we're having here.

Happy International Women's Day!

Beginning of Volume III.

No doubt that is the reason why you all feel so sympathetic to the dead. You know you'll never be called upon to make good your protestations.

I should say that organ-music fills to an ecstasy the act of feeling.

No telling what a man might do if he were given a chance to stand and think.

[N]ot being puritanical does not always mean being free.

Well, the writer of this introduction is a pompous fool, but now that I'm past it, I trust that Keller can write for herself.

I thought I could check out a good number of my favorite YA novels from the library without getting the intense urge to reread any of them. Boy I was wrong about that.

While Goldman does mention Lucy Parsons, bringing her up again a few pages later only as the "young mulatto" that her famous white anarchist former Confederate soldier husband married is rather off-putting.

We are forced to realize that insulation by class destroys the power of imaginative sympathy in everyone. (Q. D. Leavis, 'Introduction')

[B]etter people die on the gallows than in palaces.

End of Volume Two; halfway done.

As a head's up, JSTOR is making its 'Lives of Literature' materials free through till the end of February: https://about.jstor.org/l/free-lives-...

Intimations of a typical (or is it prototypical?) 'Walking Dead' plotline here.

What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject the merest accident. Day by day we are forced to believe this. He whom a scratch has disorganized, he who disappears from apparent life under the influence of the hostile agency at work around us, had the same powers as I—I am also subject to the...