Luke > Recent Status Updates

Dear God, these terrible alliances.

Young me: All these difficult words and they're just talking about food again, what is even the point.
Current me: Oh baby give me more of that well translated world building/ enthralling voice from history yesssss.

A priest in Kells, County Meath, estimated that one in twenty families would be out of potatoes by Christmas. And yet even as the crisis deepened, the priest noted, exports kept moving out of the country. He saw at least fifty dray carts full of grain on the road to Drogheda, "thence to feed the foreigner."

It is important to respect the need for context. It is an incredibly powerful need.

What sort of man would meet me at this delicious ebb and flow of union and solitude? For what sort of man would I risk this seduction of my own seclusion.

Look, I am in dire need of queer gothic self indulgence, ok?

The potato could fail and collapse a family's prospects; a pig could kill a child, maim an adult, destroy a home. The Irish poor depended on both from necessity.

—our era, which some people call the "Anthropocene," others the "Capitalocene," and others still the "Chthulucene."

Experiments in austere political economy that would not be tolerated in England could be tried in the colonial world—even if the "colony" was a part of the United Kingdom.

"In the Victorian era, a very small number of people owned the United Kingdom. Just under four thousand people owned nearly 80 percent of Irish land, under two thousand owned 93 percent of Scotland, about five thousand owned more than half of England, and seven hundred held 60 percent of Wales." (for comparison purposes, the population of Britain rose from 13.9 million in 1831 to 32.5 million in 1901)

I really shouldn't have to splice urls together on a text pad to see the only the status updates that contain text for only one edition, but here we are.

Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass murderer, and a war hero.

I see how happy you are with your short hair, and I think about how much cheaper a gender-fluid body is than a dementia-ridden body, and that we're both regarded as sick by this system, yet neither of us are accepted by the health insurance plans.

Lately it's the Troubles making the bestseller lists, but what I want to know is whether the century prior laid the scene with a genocide.

Can't remember the last time I had so much fun with a book.

And there's the Telemachus riff (in all honestly, I've smiled at least three times so far, so something's obviously going well despite the conjunction of the influencer and the influenced on my reading palate).

Unfortunately off to a slow start thanks to this introduction: 100 pages, and it stopped being inspiring after the 50th.

What has been, and still is, needed is for mainstream and privileged communities to go into the communities that raised them and taught them these perjorative views and to teach them differently.

...I live in this era when the specter of nationalisms is searching for—and finding—new sons.

As Charlotte Linde (in conversation) has observed, whether in national politics or in everyday interaction, people in power get to impose their metaphors.

Of course this is the one checkout that has a hold on it -_-

Can one put a price on peace? No, he thinks. Everyone would balk at the cost. No one would want it.

The fact that the CEO of Barnes & Noble, "[l]ike many in the industry", "believes there are too many books being published" tells me everything I need to know about the "industry."

Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground.

Sometimes GR slows my search for trans books to a crawl, and it's like, I didn't survive cancer to deal with this, you sanctimonious shitheel.

Where massive police force or state power was exercised, as in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, or Jackson, Mississippi, police violence was not a response to either the use of guns or the practice of nonviolence; rather, it was exercised for the sole purpose of crushing black protest and demands in any shape.

All these folks getting mad about ICE after condeming the pro-Palestine protests: bit late, no?

There's only one person he knows who can comprehend what has been done, who will want to wound.
"Send a coach to Morba," he says. "Bring my mother back here."

Samuel Bowers, the leader of the Klan group that had murdered CORE workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman in Philadelphia, Mississippi, was from a prominent Louisiana family and had studied engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans.

O, you ambiguous word, obscure. You mean so many things. Youneven have a cure hidden inside of you. Can you hide me inside you too?