Katy > Recent Status Updates

“The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge.”

And so continues my New Orleans reading

“Among the venerable oaks and Spanish moss and the haze of the later afternoon, I was looking out at the tropic night from the slightly unintelligible elegance of the plantation style. I felt a loyalty to it, and to its refuge, its defeat.”

I’ll be honest. I’m tired of male authors thinking punctuation is optional.

Sigh. Sometimes I think we overdo it with the women written by men trope, and then I read something like this.

Samuel Hamilton reminds me so much of my grandpa, John Chase: Irish Catholic, raised in the hills in California, stubbornly kind, and resilient until beat down by the death of his daughter. One of the greatest fictional men I’ve ever read, and yet he appears as fallible as a paper cutout compared to my grandpa. Samual Hamilton’s death still cut me deep.

Chapter 13: “I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good.”

This story is timeless. It’s ahead of itself, and retrospective. The first book.

“Rocks and humans are not so different; we are also acted upon by time. My face is its own geologic map with creases, wrinkles, and eyelids pulled down by gravity, weathered by wind, marked by the sun, and rounded by time… Why do we smooth away our storylines etched into our faces to pretend we have not lived?”

“Let us not squander our time when the opportunity to transform ourselves is upon us. Let us know when to be still and when to stampede when false statements and lies are delivered as truths. Let us learn how to migrate in the dark and return home to where we belong for nourishment.”

Since JD Vance wants to pretend like his previous comments don’t exist on “absolute immunity for ICE” I think it’s about goddamn time I revisited this

“Submission was no protection.”

“‘A strong Christian America,’ he said, ‘Needs strong Christian American soldiers to reunite, rebuild, and defend it.’”

I say again…. Did Octavia Butler look into the future???

Did Octavia Butler have a time machine???

There are so many unreal one liners from this book. I keep thinking about her speech where she spoke about the power of capitalism and equated it to what was once thought of as the indomitable power of kings. I love Ursula K. Le Guin and I am learning so much from her

“You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing!”

I am having so much fun with this book and kicking myself for not getting into Ursula K. Le Guin sooner!!!

This book is gnawing at a hole in me that only opened during my 6 years living in the south. This is an alternate history depicting the south seceding in 1945 and decisively becoming a Christian Nation exercising total dominion and control over its population under the word of god. In the last 6 years living in Louisiana, I felt like we were only a sneeze away from this Taliban style complete control.

I love Ina Garten and how out of touch she is what a diva

“Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.”

😭😭😭

Utterly charming