Luke > Recent Status Updates

"Willy had shrewdly judged that the serious money wasn't in publishing at all, but in the symbiotic relationship between best-sellers and the theater." 1902 France, decriers of today's written-for-the-big-screen-sellers. Eat your heart out.

Rereading for class.

This author truly wants to play. Not the best fit for those "objective" types, but I'm enjoying myself well enough.

But it is a curious realism that sticks to the empty shell of the past and ignores or refuses to understand the hard facts of the present, which are not only political and economic but also include the feelings and urges of vast numbers of people. Such realism is more imaginative and divorced from to-day's and to-morrow's problems than much of the so-called idealism of many people.

But this freedom he talks about, this freedom to kill, is a choice I no longer want.

Reading for class.

One gives oneself away without meaning to.

Current mood: Having to delay my reviewing of The Discovery of India due to school mandated readings of The Importance of Being Earnest and Heart of Darkness boils my turnips, it does.

Repeatedly we pointed out the inconsistency of condemning fascism and nazism and maintaining imperialist domination. It was true that the former were indulging in horrid crimes whilst imperialism in India and elsewhere had stabilized itself. The difference was one of degree and of time, not of kind.

He realized that the war was not yet over in this place.

But you two were on the same side, weren't you?
Hey, hey, enough of that. We're not on any side.

Still don't know about this one.

The future historians of England will have to consider how far England's decline from her proud eminence was due to her imperialism and racialism, which corrupted her public life and made her forget the lessons of her own history and literature.

Catching up for class + recovering from illness + increasingly raging need to reread 'Of Human Bondage' = 'Pip did what now? Oh. Can I integrate that well enough for discussion purposes? Yes? Cool.' *toddles off to doze*

Reading for class.

You know a book's good when your brain registers you nearing the halfway point and goes "TOO SOON."

Until the literati get their heads out of their collective asses and start giving love stories their due, I shall have to reread this many times over.

I have no doubt at all that among the causes of India's decay in recent centuries, purdah, or the seclusion of women, holds an important place. I am even more convinced that the complete ending of this barbarous custom is essential before India can have a progressive social life.

As a reward for waking her up in time for work after she slept through all of her alarms, my sister permitted me to drag her along to browse in a bookstore for twenty minutes. She knows me so well.

We cling still to the ways of dogmatic religion, adhere to outworn practices and beliefs, and yet talk and presume to live in terms of the scientific method.

It is unfortunate that, despite delving into the figures of Cyrus and Darius the Great(s), my current Art History class does not mention at all the civilization of the Indus Valley.

...boundless pity as for a charming animal that was about to be led to the slaughter, and fixed hatred at the thought that eventually this innocent girl might turn into a devil...

Turns out my sale grab's a first edition. Cool.

Education about how to keep from getting AIDS does imply an acknowledgement of, therefore tolerance of, the ineradicable variousness of expression of sexual feeling.

The use of the word 'Orientalist' in a vaguely positive fashion requires a grain of salt in this otherwise wonderful work.

The relatively appropriate, unmetaphorical reaction to polio owes much to the privileged status of the face, so determining of our evaluation of physical beauty and of physical ruin.

And here we see the older generation's fetish for absolute control of communication that occurs entirely within the younger. How droll. Some envy never changes.

I suppose just men would be much less just if their justice pandered less to their love of cruelty.

"Blight" (a virtual synonym for slum) is seen as a cancer that spreads insidiously, and the use of the term "invasion" to describe when the non-white and poor move into a middle-class neighborhood is as much a metaphor borrowed from cancer as from the military: the two discourses overlap.

Health becomes banal, even vulgar.