Luke > Recent Status Updates

The alternative Nobel for Lit:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...

Thoughts?

It'd be easier to read this through the penciled in scribbles if the annotations weren't so obtuse.

My father says that in our part of the world this idea of jihad was very much encouraged by the CIA. Children in the refugee camps were even given school textbooks produced by an American university which taught basic arithmetic through fighting. They had examples like "If out of 10 Russian infidels, 5 are killed by one Muslim, 5 would be left" or "15 bullets — 10 bullets = 5 bullets."

You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals.

Once again, a book is around 100 pages longer than I was led to believe by the online database. Oh well. At least I'm enjoying myself.

"What do you think of the attack on Pearl Harbor?"
"I am sad for both countries. It is the kind of thing that always happens whem military men are in control."

PSA: There is currently a bug being reported by Goodreads users in which:

if you send someone a friend request, that request may show your email to the person you are asking, even if your profile setting for emails is "Share my email address with no one."

Epistemological choices about who to trust, what to believe, and why something is true are not benign academic issues.

Evidently, to be a good trial lawyer you have to be a good hater.

Invoking comparisons to Clytemnestra was a poor choice on Malcolm's part, as all it accomplishes is mental comparisons to Wolf's own thoughts on the subject, and it's Wolf who comes out ahead.

It was not religion he preached, but a narrow code of ethics, imposed from above upon the lower orders, which, even in those days, was out of date.

I hate everyone who could go on living, go on working after this announcement, and at the same time I know that those in power urgently need this very self-hatred.

'While some may prefer to keep the body of the author and the work of the author in different files, claiming that good art does not distinguish between genders or classes or races, I am reminded that this is an operation as cruel as it is, frankly, impossible.'

-Cristina Rivera Garza, The unusual: a manifesto (https://pentransmissions.com/2018/05/...)

We prepared for war in all innocence and with an easy conscience. The first sign of war: We were letting the enemy govern our behavior.

Oh yes, let's add "humiliation, with cutting personal attacks and sexual remarks" as a valid directotial technique to the already horrendously classist, racist, and physically abusive world of ballet. What the fuck was this author on? What the fuck were the reviewers on when they called this work "The only truly definitive history of...ballet"? It explains so much of what's wrong with today, that's for sure.

Knowing the ending "twist" as I do, I'm not expecting to like this book very much, if at all. I'm reading it still because of how much Oyeyemi has personally thrilled me and how important black woman experimental writers are to the literary landscape, as well as as a reminder of how much harder the already marginalized literary landscape needs to try. After reading this, I want to see better from Oyeyemi, and I...

It's pathetic when people such as Homans uphold the fairytale that communism brutalizes art any more than capitalism does. The rich are the rich cause they're rich, not because they're the only ones able to generate "freely expressed artistic vision[s]". Enough with the propaganda. I came here for art, not politics.

No Nobel Prize for Lit this year. It's for the best, as this is a prime example of what happens when ordinary people choose to sit down and do nothing in the face of extraordinary circumstances for a protracted period of time.

"Pepita knew that his studied ignorance was also a mark of prestige..." Only the powerful can get away with something like that.

Originally, this was a history. Increasingly, it is a self satisfied and longwinded rant. Bias is necessary for creating a credible base for academic expertise, but spare me Homans shitting all over what she doesn't consider to be 'true' ballet.

There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, "Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children."

I dislike seeing the children of Jason whose throats have been cut in the course of a dance by their dancing mother, die in time to music under her rhythmical blows.

The great bargains are made in the dark.

Well, the introduction for this edition is absolute crap. Fortunately, Mishima will never be affected by such drivel.

[W]hat are people if not the consequence of a way of understanding and loving that belongs to someone already lost in time?

‘Oh, it’s not hostility,’ said Amalia, getting up from the bench and
dropping the rug behind her, ‘it’s nothing that looms as large as that,
it’s just a case of going along with public opinion.['] (I forgot to bring a book with me, so I'm reading a free epub of a noncopywrighted edition of this, in case anyone's wondering why this quote isn't where I'm specifying in the actual edition.)

Growth is full of tricks and self-derision and fraud; only a few people have the requisite dishonesty not to become nauseated.

If a marriage is a happy one, no outsider could ever destroy it.

Could GR make its ads any bigger? Jesus fuck.

If anyone needs any ideas as to what to read next, April is both Arab American Heritage and National Poetry (Writing) Month.