Luke > Recent Status Updates

[W]hen intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or the simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.

[']Till your arrival we had no serious problems in this kingdom. You failed to win them over by force of argument and now you wish to resort to the methods of the inquisition.'
'Practical methods, Excellency. Tried and tested.'
'Yes, tried and tested on Catholics whose property you wanted to possess and on Jews who have never ruled over a kingdom and who bought their freedom by paying out gold ducats and...

Rest in peace, Toni Morrison.

["O]ver 97 percent of the detained immigrants are people of color"—even though 5 of the top 20 countries for illegal immigrants are [white].

Housing INS [Immigration & Naturalization Service] detainees is such good business for York [County Prison] that there were plans to expand the prison so it could hold five hundred detainees...All that money. And the prison didn't treat refugees any better than it treated convicts. If anything, it treated us worse.

In times such as these, what is the most important consideration? To survive here as best we can, or to rethink the last five hundred years of our existence and plan our future accordingly?

We found it both interesting and disturbing that people's attitudes towards women and their bodies had changed so little since the days of Nebuchadnezzar II.

I can't remember the last book I read that dragged in autism as denigrating metaphor, but we'll see if this instance of it ruins this work as well.

I'm not sure how the public interest was served by my incarceration.

This is a nifty list packed full of translated classics, modern and otherwise: https://www.listchallenges.com/the-10...

Thoughts? Feelings? Suggestions? Corrections? I'm at 28 read and 16 on the TBR, but I'd definitely swap out some works for others.

But here the victims are people of means, not the already downtrodden, so the notion that they're being either cosmically punished or held up as "a warning to us all?" (Vancouver Sun editorial, October 16, 2006) is debated in the mainstream media by pundits with straight faces.

Such a quick thoughtless destruction of the past must always be a matter of regret whatever the subsequent advantages.

A book like this just can't be written anymore without taking misogyny and toxic heteronormativity for granted, unless, of course, it's satire. Guess I'll have to see. It's a shame, though. I miss the emphasis on sea scenery and descriptions of meal creation it used to have.

"There is no place for anger in a good wife."
"Then indeed, there is no place for honor or virtue, it seems to me.["]

There are a lot of annoying things in this world, but having three reviews waiting to be typed up has to be one of the more aggravating ones.

[T]he British might boast that they had the first empire in history on which the sun never set; to which an Indian would reply: Yes, because God cannot trust an Englishman in the dark!

I will merely say that a tradition does not begin and thrive, as the tradition of British writing about Africa did, unless it serves a certain need.

Let's see what's changed since the required reading days of freshman year in high school.

If you didn't like Clancy's white people, you could go out and read about some others.

We can no longer hope for a revolution in Germany which would put an end to the war. (September, 1939)

Unfailingly find the fault line, the tiny place where meaning calls for some daring moves. Such was the price of beauty, like a longed-for light.

Men think they live and die for ideas. What a divine joke. They live and die for emotional, personal errors, just as women do.

In the wake of Pride Month, I have acquired the classic Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg for free here, as zie intended: https://www.lesliefeinberg.net/

"Our ancestors were held in camps too. Let these people go."

You can download 'Stone Butch Blues' by Leslie Feinberg for free here, as zie intended: https://www.lesliefeinberg.net/

But I could exist without comparison.

When Henry [Miller] wrote a fan letter to Kay Boyle she thought it was a letter from a very young writer, who, while admiring and praising her, could not help imitating her own style.

We are offered some false gains to keep us from making that choice to stand with women different from ourselves.

To acknowledge the complexity of another's existence is not to deny my own.

I may make a yearly ritual out of reading each succeeding volume of this. It would give me time to serendipitously stumble across the final entr(y/ies), if nothing else.