Luke > Recent Status Updates

"Broken limbs, broken heads, the mangling of bodies, all prove that it was a contest between enraged men: on the one side from hatred to a race; and on the other, desire for self-preservation, revenge for past grievances and the inhuman murder of their comrades."

Nearly three-hundred pages in and I've yet to start caring about the main character. Oh well. Once I'm done, I'll never have to read this again.

Carlyle sneered at people "cutting each other's throats because one-half of them prefer hiring their servants for life, and the other by the hour."

Why? why didn't I want to become as unclean as the roach? what ideal was fastening me to the sentiment of an idea? why shouldn't I become unclean, exactly as I was discovering my whole self to be? What was I afraid of? becoming unclean with what?

https://tetheredfeather.tumblr.com/po...
Excerpt: "White complacency - that is to say, white people who shake their heads at photos of the Charlottesville rally but don’t involve themselves in the “politics” of racism because they want to live safe, quiet, white lives - is what made a KKK/nazi rally of this size possible in 2017."

All observers spoke of the fact that the slaves were slow and churlish; that they wasted material and malingered at their work. Of course, they did. This was not racial but economic. It was the answer of any group of laborers forced down to the last ditch. They might be made to work continuously but no power could make them work well.

When oh when will GR take the block button seriously and get this dog whistling horseshit off my dash.

In fine, I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience.

-W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Atlanta, December, 1934

Life, are you here?...Doctor, excuse me please, sorry to bother you, but just one question: tell me, is Life there?

Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish.

A promise is a promise, Brian.

Burning is not answering.

For now the first timid pleasure I am having is realizing I lost my fear of ugliness. And that loss is such goodness. It is a sweetness.

This is not an ethical position. It is an excuse.

What if we decide to simply dispose of that word — and I don't know if there is an English word I dislike more than this — emasculation.

"They kill dictators," Danton said. "In the end."
"But if, before that happens, you have saved your country? 'It is expedient that one man should die for the people.' "
"Forget it. I've no desire to be a martyr. Have you?"
"It's all hypothetical anyway. But you and I, Danton...You and I," [Robespierre] said thoughtfully, "are not alike."

I don't care about changing the opinions of bigots. They had their chance. What I'm going to do is limit their power, because that's what makes their murderous ways legal.

I wanted to get back to Adichie as well as counterbalance all my 400+ pagers with something short, so the fact that I found this three days ago at my last book sale is a godsend.

No one asked what 'agreement' could even mean in a situation of such deep imbalance.

Nothing offends a man so much as being ignored.

Officially reminded my former professors that I'm still alive and still need rec letters, as well as began my Excel spreadsheet of school names/deadlines/adviser possibilities/etc/etc. Let the games begin.

You can't claim to like my reviews while railing against "insanity", despite the number of shit tits who've tried.

England, check. Weed, check. Extraordinarily famous rich person, check. If it weren't for the zombies and the publication date, I'd say that this short story author had been reading 'Swing Time'. Or perhaps it's the other way around.

If anyone's wondering how this book works into my current reading scheme, for one, Bellow's Jewish, and two, the book is reputed to be a deconstruction, albeit neurotypical, of the dehumanization society makes the famous undergo should they take their own life, which is something I could use right now. If Bellow fucks the latter up, well, I'll still have the prose and the lit cred.

He was from Harlem, originally — 'where we got a grid' — and the inability of Londoners to likewise number their streets was something he couldn't forgive, he'd written off the whole city on account of it.

Camille Desmoulins:
"The King has aimed a pistol at the nation's head; he has misfired, and it is the nation's turn now."

Lucile Desmoulins:
"We want to be free; but oh God, the cost of it."

To the pragmatists who like to point out—quite untruthfully by the way, but let that pass—that in spite of all General Gowon did win the war there is only one answer and it contains a warning: so did General Franco.

The ideas that were considered dangerous twenty years ago are now commonplaces of establishment discourse—yet people still die on the streets every winter, they still starve.

[']What of all these intellectuals we hear so much about with all their pseudo-socialist jargon? We used to laugh at those phonies when I was with Nkrumah. So what happens when something anti-social happens and threatens to break up the nation. Why do we never hear them at the time of the event?'
'You won't ever hear them,' I said. 'They are enjoying the anguish of having to decide between two evils.'

Time to check on how my inner child's doing.