Luke > Recent Status Updates

I haven't felt my brain expanding like this in a while, and lord is it a lovely feeling.

The History of China has shown no development, so that we cannot concern ourselves with it any further...China and India as it were lie outside the course of world history.

-Hegel

If anyone's interested, I'm hosting a Reading Women Bingo for 2020. You can check (and perhaps start planning reads) here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

If this doesn't satisfy my current itch for poetry, nothing will.

I'm glad this work is rising above its borderline book report writing style, as I'd rather not make the first GR review for it a poor one.

In any case, I stopped believing that "theory" had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn't the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?

If you only care about mental health when mass shootings and serial killers start showing up in the news, you don't actually care about mental health. You just care about being inconvenienced.

JOE: Oh if people like you didn't have President Reagan to demonize where would you be?
LOUIS: If he didn't have people like me to demonize where would he be? Upper-right-hand square on The Hollywood Squares.

Time to see what all the fuss is about (as well as find out who actually reads poetry on this godforsaken Amazon market masquerading as a literature community).

There's the hype and all that, but a few pages in and I'm already thinking, aw, hell: this is going to break my heart, isn't it.

Two centuries ago there lived two women who chose to marry each other rather than any man. For more than forty years they shared a purse, common relations, and a bed, where when the spirit moved them they shared their bodies as well. When they died, they were buried under the same gravestone. And there you can find them still.

First the Nobel for Lit, now the Booker. Time to go back to digging underread queer peeps out of the book sales.

Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day!

All American whites are from the South.

The fact that Diana Mosley, fashionable fascist extraordinnaire, greatly enjoyed Simone de Beauvoir's third volume of autobiography, aka one of if not the most political/antifa of the bunch, is baffling to say the least.

"Handke turns out to be the most contemporary of winners: a man past his prime, enthralled by alternate facts, and selected by voters working with incomplete evidence." Theodora Danek in 'Was Peter Handke’s revisionism lost in translation?': http://littleatoms.com/was-peter-hand...

Is anyone else seeing this group page bullcrap?

I'm going to have to start weaning myself after the Nobel Prize for Lit after this. You give them an inch, they take a mile.

When American reviews are good they are better than any because unlike European reviewers they actually read the book.

—Nancy Mitford, 1961

Observing the Nuremberg trials, Winston Churchill commented to Lord Ismay, 'It shows that if you get into a war, it is supremely important to win it. You and I would be in a pretty pickle if we had lost.'

I've learned so much about people—what they choose to believe if it makes them feel better. How they have to interpret things to make their own being better, to fit their own image of themselves.

My secret hope was that they were from somewhere else that then of course you can create that distance: We don't grow children like that here. Well it's pretty clear that we do grow children like that here...

"Parce que c'était lui, parce que c'était mois," my father added, quoting Montaigne's all-encompassing explanation for his friendship with Etienne de la Boétie.
I was thinking, instead, of Emily Brontë's words: because "he's more myself than I am."

Anyone reading anything for Queer History Month this October?

Did I want to be him? Or did I just want to have him?

We were asked to stay with somebody called Himmler or something, tickets and everything paid for...I suppose he read my book & longed for a good giggle with the witty authoress. Actually he wanted to show us over a concentration camp, now why? So that I could write a funny book about them.

—Nancy Mitford, 1935

A last shudder of strangeness, a last flash of fear before longing pushes its blade into me, up to the hilt.

Send the tourists to the burned-out chorios. These are our historic sites now. Let the tourists visit modern ruins.

First we'll kill all the subversives. Then we'll kill the collaborators. Then the sympathizers. Then the undecided. And finally, we'll kill the indifferent.

—1976: Montevideo

Stubbornly, Trotsky continues to believe in socialism, fouled as it is by human mud; for when all is said, who can deny that Christianity is much more than the Inquisition?