Status Updates From The Life of Langston Hughes...

I think another big difference between St. John and Rochester is the origin of why they enjoy Jane's directness in speech -- I think Rochester is genuinely excited by it, he finds it stimulating in the original sense of the word, and he wants to take it further. For St. John, instead, it's not that it is good that it's there, so much as that it might as well be used if it is to be there at all.

"I soon forgot storm in music."

I guess I never really internalized the emotional reality of what it felt like to live through the Red Scare — it’s like what conservatives *say* they feel about “cancel culture” — but, like, actually real.

Oh no, the comeback tour is really tugging at my heartstrings - but I know that because it's happening in the fourth chapter, and not the twelfth, that it's all going to go wrong soon, and I don't think I can stand it again.

"Hughes always liked forceful women..."

AGAIN, WE. STAN. AN. INTERSECTIONAL. KING.

So things I didn't know: That Langston Hughes advocated against the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II -- which means that George Takei and Langston Hughes were once alive at the same time, which means that Langston Hughes is literally in living memory still, which is cool to think about -- and also that Hughes advocated for Indian Independence too.

We stan an intersectional king.

“Thus do the outlaws... of one generation... become the conservatives of the next.”

"... the janitor had allowed water from a broken pipe to drip on and ruin several programs and books (including... an autographed copy of James Weldon Johnson's 1927 masterpiece, God's Trombones)."

oh my god, an actual nightmare. I *will* dream about this and it absolutely will *ruin my night*. I am *STRESSED* just reading about it.

This little bit here about W.H. Auden and George Orwell having a tiff over a line in a poem by Auden is really fantastic flavortext, and just a fun bit of trivia.

“They loved life, and eating and drinking; but they were grave people when you came right down to it. What was extraordinary in Langston was that he was able to be both gregarious and remote, at one and the same time.”