Luke > Recent Status Updates

I still can't tell whether I actually like close reading or like how its plodding linearity lets me be super lazy. It seems like cheating to just meander along and go "LET ME TELL YOU A THING ABOUT THIS THING" for five pages of critical analysis, but what the prof wants is what the prof gets. Least my decade(s) of learning French is finally pulling its weight.

Any Cortázar aficionados out there?

There may be sophistry in this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible.

That feeling when work's the highlight of your life cause it has the most books and the least drama.

Reading for class.

Render voices to meet the weight of stone with weight of voices.

There are some folks out there who are fans of the Prix Goncourt, yes? Well, here's a writer who won one. You should get on that (the award winning one, this one, another one, some that that is in this author's general direction).

...it often happened that the taking of preventive measures more or less brought on the prophesied disaster, indeed, it evidently never could have happened without such measures, making both the warning and fate itself the sport of demons.

I handled a book that's more than two-hundred years old today.

*faints*

It's hilarious that Mann has Jacob refer to Ishtar and Gilgamesh when trying to reassure Rachel of their married and prosperous future, considering how Ishtar failed to woo Gilgamesh cause he knows all her lovers end up dead or cursed or both.

Reading for class.

Apparently I learned how to cook since my last university stint. I simply stand in the kitchen while reading a tome for a time and voila. That and the lunches that keep appearing in my backpack alongside my personal reading says more about my aging self than anything else.

Under the right circumstances, I can request that my university library system buy books for me. In light of how quick they were in getting me Calcutta: Two Years in the City, On the Abolition of All Political Parties, and High Tide, I shall be abusing this mechanism as much as possible.

...devouring time, who eats his children so that they may not set themselves over him, but must also regurgitate them so that they may live again as the same children in the old and same stories. (For as he fingers them the giant does not notice that their clever mother has given him something like a stone, wrapped in skins, and not a child.)

"Let the boys be boys, the longer the better" is certainly the fastest way to make a hell out of earth.

...is the human ego something closed sturdily in on itself, sealed tightly within its own temporal and flesh limits? Do not many of the elements out of which it is built belong to the world outside and before it?

I don't think the question is whether or not I want to see 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' anymore. The new and improved one is, do I want to see all the '_____________ and Zombies' the world can give me.

Should I head straight to the beginning of my third and final chain of class reading, or try to fit in one last personal read. Decisions, decisions.

"However, betrayed by procrastination, apart from this [brief account], I have not found more to write about him." :)

From A Far
What nationality
or what kindred and relation
what blood relation
what blood ties of blood
what ancestry
what race generation
what house clan tribe stock strain
what lineage extraction
what breed sect gender denomination caste
what stray ejection misplaced
Tertium Quid neither one thing nor the other
Tombe des nues de naturalized
what transplant to dispel upon

Thus far, Mann's been talking about how hot Joseph is. There's been some other things, but that's the main gist of it. I'm imagining the character to look somewhat akin to Hugh Dancy, so I don't mind a bit.

Amoral literature! Oh noes!

FUCK YEAH ALEXIEVICH.

"There are many accounts like this. I don't know whether or not you want to listen to them. It would be quite difficult to ask you to do so, so I shall stop here." Don't get me wrong, Chöphel, I ended up learning a lot, but the fact that you didn't do this in the earlier history sections was rather a faux pas on your part.

Even then, it is said that he did all this purely for the sake of his religion, and not even the smallest deed has done out of the slightest attachment or hatred.

"They saw a great many texts there, but because all the people had been killed, there was no one who could read them." And the only proper course of action after that is to burn it all, of course.

"Oh, do somebody go down quick; John Brooke is acting dreadfully, and Meg likes it!"

I've got a bug bite on my face, skinned-bloody ankles from not-yet-broken-in shoes, two pairs of headphones that burnt out in the last week, and one laptop charger that burnt out today. Cost: I don't even want to think about it.

I also have a Toni Morrison Nobel Lecture reading assigned for homework. Cost: priceless.


(Nobel committee, you could pick another white boy. Or, perhaps, you could try.)

Well, my venture into the realm of pumpkin ale wasn't too successful, but this is swimming along just fine.

Stick to your mincing experimentation, Hejinian. Your attempts at profundity with "the mad" implies you're not in any way some flavor of insane; if that's the case, you don't know shit.