Luke > Recent Status Updates

Gonna hold off on 'Through Black Spruce' until this Boyden business is settled.

[I]n rebellion, certain emotions become amplified at the exact moments when you are expected not to feel them at all.

Rest in peace, Carrie Fisher. Your fellow neuroatypical women salute you and all that you accomplished.

In honor of one of the most visible characters in one of my favorite video games being confirmed as canonically lesbian.

I'd missed carting around a book that could easily crush one's skull.

"Cancer, cancer, cancer," he repeated as if in warning. "In the past doctors attributed illnesses to the conjunction of the stars, but only cancer has kept its astrological name, in all languages. The fear is still there."

I haven't read any Woolf all year. Time to get some of her in my life before 2016 is out.

It had occurred to me that perhaps mine was a perfectly normal condition, and that every boy wished to become a girl. It seemed a logical enough aspiration, if Woman was so elevated and admirable a being as history, religion, and good manners combined to assure us.

The sun struck, on steel, on bronze, on stone, on glass, on the gray water far beneath them, on the turret tops and the flashing windshields of crawling cars, on the incredible highways, stretching and snarling and turning for mile upon mile upon mile, on the houses, square and high, low and gabled, and on their howling antennae, on the sparse, weak trees, and on those towers, in the distance, of the city of New

Anyone else watch Westworld? Cause that's some damn fine television right there.

1897: Rio de Janeiro

Machado de Assís

He is the great Latin American novelist of this century. His books lovingly and humorously unmask the high society of drones that he, son of a mulatto father, has conquered and knows better than anyone. [He] tears off the fancy wrapping, false frames of false windows with a European view, and winks at the reader as he strips the mud wall.

Let me amend what I have always thought. I love not things that are certain, but simply things in themselves.

I didn't feel rebellious. I felt honest.

-Susan Power, Yanktonnai Sioux

It was a city without oases, run entirely, insofar, at least, as human perception could tell, for money; and its citizens seemed to have lost entirely any sense of their right to renew themselves.

A moment of happiness: integrating an excerpt of a 500 GBBW into a lesson plan for work.

1855
The Far West

Space exists for time to defeat, and time for progress to sacrifice on its altars.

All of the people in Ellis' world approached each other under cover of a manner designed to hide whatever they might really be feeling, about each other or about themselves. When confronted with Ida, who was so visibly rejected from the only world they knew, this manner was forced to become relatively personal, self-conscious, and tense. It became entangled with an effort to avoid being called into judgment; with...

You're never too young to mourn the death of a friend from high school.

"I'd like to prove to her—one day," he said; and paused. He looked out of the window. "I'd like to make her know that the world's not as black as she thinks it is."
"Or," she said, dryly, after a moment, "as white."

Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any farther. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

In the name of perfecting Cartography, Geography, Astronomy, Geometry and the Art of Navigation, scientist [George] Anson has hunted down various Spanish ships with his guns and set fire to several towns, taking everything, down to wigs and embroidered underwear.

-1742: Juan Fernández Islands

In every part of the world, wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of [humanity], and equality among people, you move toward the concentration camp system, and it is a road on which it is difficult to halt.

He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.

I was amazed, but they laughed at my amazement: 'Hitler's dead, isn't he?'

'White men put flesh on dinosaur bones to reconstruct the entire animal, to show they are smarter than the animal they construct out of their own egos. They do the same thing with us by rewriting our history. They do not have to be right, they only have to do the act itself.'

-Scott Kayla Morrison ("Kela Humma" (Red Hawk)), Choctaw, 'An Apokni by Any Other Name Is Still a Kakoo'

It was a naïve hope, like all those that rest on too sharp a division between good and evil, between past and future, but it was on this that we were living.

Since my country is simultaneously celebrating Native American Heritage Month, Thanksgiving, and shooting off the arms of NoDAPL water protectors tomorrow, I might as well draw attention to the genocidal hypocrisy of it all.

Short-term objectives — such as mass demonstrations, the formation of political parties and elections — are worthless if human rights are not consistently observed.