Luke > Recent Status Updates

Smallpox ravaged us quick, tuberculosis killed us slow, liquor made us stupid, religion meddled with our souls, but the bureaucrats did the worst and finally bored us to death.

'Thirteen Reasons Why', or 'The Neurotypicals Are At It Again'. You'd think 'Split' would've gotten them off enough on mental illness porn, but apparently not.

[W]hat was most clearly impressed in my mind was how she had recognized in the filthiness of my story her own experience of filthiness. It was a new fact, I didn't know how to evaluate it.

It's precisely because everyone wants democracy that the government will crack down on us[.]

Anyone watching American Gods? Cause holy shizznizzle, good shit all around.

This series will be my 'for fun' until further notice.

Lessing's argument about the Trans Saharan slave trade would be much more effective if she acknowledged that, before the Trans Atlantic slave trade came along and invented an entire pseudoscience to work against Protestant doctrine and Enlightenment ideals of individual rights, "race" and "black people" didn't exist. If you want to rehash that much history in your science fiction, you better make damn sure you're...

For those of you as sick as I am of the constant forcefeeding of "new books published today!!!" via the front page feed, Shakespeare's sonnets were also first published today, so you can go read those instead.

Over and over again, people who have been kept on the move mentally, always having to defend and sharpen and refine their perceptions of events, will suddenly find themselves in a spotlight focussed on them by the many publicity machines, will be made national figures, will be frozen, in fact, in public attitudes. Again and again, valuable people become neutralised, made into—often—figures of fun, at the least...

I've found myself at one of those rare impasses where I feel the need to read something "for fun". Do I even own any books that are "for fun"? I guess I'll find out.

No one can articulate a syllable which is not full of tenderness and fear, and which is not, in one of those languages, the powerful name of some god. To speak is to fall into tautologies. This useless and wordy epistle itself already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves in one of the uncountable hexagons—and so does its refutation...You who read me, are you sure you understand my language?

A REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT SHOULD LISTEN TO THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE. NOTHING SHOULD FRIGHTEN IT MORE THAN SILENCE.

He was in the library, reading up on the American Constitution.
'It's a bit late for that now, isn't it?'

I like how, despite having conscientiously tended towards longer works after being overwhelmed by too rapid pace of reviewing, I'm now settling into reading nearly half of this in one fell swoop. I blame it on this being Borges.

Well, this latest business with Russia and Trump sure looks promising.

"...we knew that he would not be in exactly the right place to take up the defence of the white races at the moment when they were to be threatened with extermination". Wait wut.

A few days later, the People's Literature magazine published Stick Out Your Tongue, an avant-garde novella by a writer called Ma Jian. The Central Propaganda Department denounced it as nihilistic and decadent, and ordered all copies to be destroyed, then proceded to launch a national campaign against bourgeois liberalism.

I haven't been this pleased with the result of a book sale in a long time.

Its proportions frightening, once it no longer lived.

Mou Sen had told me that if you didn't read Kafka, you'd never grasp the underlying principles of biology.

I could do without the pipe dream of colonialism rescuing Europe from fascism. "[A] new, broader earth not yet fertilized with blood, not yet poisoned by hate...still wait[ing] for man," my ass.

No one of us is so whole that [they] can see the future.

A city with nothing, with everything.

....the regime wasn't being sustained by hope or conformity or even by terror, but by the pure inertia of an ancient and irreparable disillusion...

...Saenz de la Barra explained to him impassively that you aren't the government, general, you are the power...

There were some things that took life and broke it, not merely into meaninglessness, but with active malice flung the pieces farther, into hell.

I finally got the 500 GBBW bookshelf squared away so that every included work's main page has a link to its respective discussion in the group. Now I just need to not think of all the connections I missed because I didn't get it done sooner.

She had decided to live. If she could not think of certain things, she would not think of them. There were other things to think of, immediate things.

98% on the English GRE Subject Test. Least I know where I belong.

[I]t was unthinkable to Germans that a man who had not even finished high school, to say nothing of college...should even make a pass toward a position once held by a Bismarck, a Baron vom Stein, a Prince Bülow. Nothing misled the German intellectuals as much as this education-vainglory into believing that Hitler was still only the beer-hall agitator who never could become a real danger[.]