Luke > Recent Status Updates

The only big business, it seemed, was culture.

[W]hat if there was a man in there threatening me to support me! I didn't know what this supporting business actually was, but I was sure it would hurt a lot and that it might kill you.

If you can't cope with the idea of having an 'abnormal' child, don't have children. You're obviously not mature enough.

I'd feel bad about reading this for the sake of the movie coming out soon, but considering the atrocities that the general populace refuses to shame itself about, I'm doing just fine.

When the people needed such criticism, I felt he ought to have done as we did—tell them about it at home rather than tell our enemies abroad.

Jesus christ this font size. And here I was picking it up cause I thought it was short.

I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free.

The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick.

Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.

I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both...[T]hose who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets.

'Jewish' can never become 'white', Coates. Try again.

It had to be made holy, by the wicked logic that renders the expensive sacred.

Someone responded to my required friend request question of what percentage of their books are by women of color with 'not a lot, but I mostly read literature in translation'. I hadn't realized postcolonialism and settler state reclamation movements and general realizations that Arabic/Chinese/Japanese etc exist hadn't happened yet.

"I love you, Carol."
"But do you see what it means?"
"Yes."

If the majority did not want Negro rule, or Negro participation in government, the majority was right, and they would not allow themselves to stop and ask how that majority was made.

It may be said, then, that the argument for giving the right to vote to the mass of the poor and ignorant still stands as defensible, without for a moment denying that there should not be such a class in a civilized community; but if the class is there, the fault is the fault of the community and the community must suffer and pay for it.

On the one hand, it's a shame one of the universities I'm applying to doesn't have a real emphasis on 19th c. English women's literature. On the other, I'd sacrifice my first born child to research the connections between Woolf and Larsen, so it has that going for it.

If the Northern fanatics are the means with which God wishes to confer upon us these rights, I will take the rights whether they or the devil brought them to us. I know that we have them.

It's depressing to realize last year's Nobel Prize for Lit events so spoiled the event for me that this one, coldly gratifying as it is, has arrived unheralded and will go by unrejoiced.

When citizens undertake to claim a right for themselves, they must claim it as a principle, and therefore speak in the name of all who are deprived of the same immunities. As long as they do not consider the question from a high standpoint, as long as they overlook the principle for a mere expediency, they will have no force whatever.

Take out the accusation of being black, which is still a crime in the United States, and there remains in such tirades as this only a protest against ignorance and poverty presuming to rule intelligence and wealth; and yet, under the circumstances, how else was the necessary economic and social revolution to be effected?

[F]or 250 years the Negroes had worked on this land, and by every analogy in history, when they were emancipated the land ought to have belonged in large part to the workers.

I accidentally postponed reading this for who knows how long cause my shelves were configured incorrectly. Time to revamp everything. Again.

Sf book sale today! 500,000 books, here I come.

It made little difference what laws were made so long as their interpretation by the courts and administration was dictated by capital.

'Our myths are ignorance, theirs are literature.'

White Magic

(For Leo St. Helene)

Here were grown, sensible men arguing about a written form of government adopted ninety years before, when men did not believe that slavery could outlive their generation in this country, or that civil war could possibly be its result; when no man foresaw the Industrial Revolution or the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; and yet now, with incantation and abracadabra, the leaders of the nation tried to peer back into the...

Seeing the remake of 'It' was a good experience for me despite how much the book/original movie fucked with me as a kid cause now I can get drunk off my balls post-watching. I could've drunk while I was watching, now that I think about it, but I feel that wouldn't've counted as a valid facing of fears. Still: fuck drains though. Fuck them all.

Might as well continue the NYRB Classic trend, although I have a different edition this time.

When people learned from Edward, as they did sooner or later for he saw no reason to conceal the fact, that he had not seen his family for eleven years but that he considered himself a married man, a responsible father, most were inclined to express some feeling of astonishment, as when an apparently harmless human being (for people will forever consider naïvely that a harmless human being exists) is found out in...