Luke > Recent Status Updates

A woman with a proud face is one thing, but a white woman with a proud face is another.

Capital used Chinese laborers as a transnational industrial reserve army to weigh down white workers during periods of economic expansion and to hold white labor in check during periods of overproduction. Labor was a major cost of production, and employers saw how the importation of Chinese workers could boost the supply of labor and drive down the wages of both Chinese and white workers. The resulting racial...

The paranoia their parents had been inculcating for years had suddenly paid off. Here was persecution!

Becoming increasingly worried this work would've gone over better post-college rather than post-cancer.

They would take it as an insult and trample you underfoot for insubordination, because you have presented them with a much higher opinion of their profession than they could ever have themselves.

[H]e gave up a kingdom, and his men became monks in his memory.

Summerween time.

I carefully read the tracts he gave me, then urged him to show me something not based on the fear of death.

Then they were both quiet, and they walked on, their faces set towards the sunrise, night their sanctuary: in this fragile darkness, delivered of the malignant judgements of reason, the past and present are the same, and the future is lit by the radiant light of hope, and the spirits of your ancestors walk beside you; in the trembling of the earth underneath and the movements of indistinct animals is all the pain...

Was it the faces of men going to meet a powerful enemy or was it the spindly-legged little boy with the gasoline tin that so deeply affected me? The gasoline tin was the only contribution from my country to China which I saw on the north-western front. But the enemy planes above us were American and their bombs were made of scrap iron and chemicals from America.

They preferred a different shape of lamp, but did they therefore manifest less inclincation toward violence?

O come my lovely, come my heart, old friend, we are for the cliff, the precipice, come my beautiful, turn again, quick quick quickly, and now nothing impedes us, the summer has expended its dry poisonous malice, the monsoon rumbles again in the clouds, now the sky waits for us.

When we told him that we are Americans, he recalled that some of our countrymen had lectured at his farm. From them he had learned that there were twelve million unemployed in America. It had seemed unbelievable, he said—as many people as in the entire Caucasus—perhaps more. It was like a whole country having no way of earning a living. Looking compassionately at us with his very blue eyes, he remarked that it...

"Her face had the same wide-eyed expression that children put on when someone reading a fairy tale to them is tactless enough to insert some general remarks on morals and duty—a mixture of embarrassment and impatience, piety and boredom."

(Yes, I switched to the library copy, but there's only so many times one is able to face with equanimity one's copy splitting in half during the course of reading.)

Very interesting so far unsurprisingly, but the tiny ass font is killing me.

Love having to reload every page on this site 2-3 times cause Amazon has to track everything just in case it can get off on selling my data to ICE so that Bezos can rent out the entire city of Paris for his next marriage.

Copy's falling apart as I read it, but that's what you get with a borderline mass market paperback that came out three years before the author passed.

In another image, a finger caresses a bumblebee nestled in the palm of her hand. I think it must be dead. Bumblebees don't usually like being caressed that way.

Now who could've seen this coming (even checking out the local library edition in addition to my home copy for some good ol' translation hedonism).

I'm glad I read Charity and Sylvia years earlier in my own sweet time, that pratfall of a graphic novel is a painful reminder of the devastation that undermining queer scholarship in the name of marketing hype ultimately achieves.

I've never heard a story about a talented actress who fucked her way to the top.

Miéville you motherfucker, 1260 pages and my brain's still going 👀

In this roundabout and fallible way, they learned about nuclear missiles, the problem of evil, the logic of deterrence, the nature of the northern lights, the origin of children—which Junior said he already knew—and the care and keeping of ghosts.

Do you believe in ghosts? Luke asked suddenly, turning to look at his father-in-law, dazzling the old man with his headlight.
Saul raised a hand and pushed Luke's headlight away, redirecting his gaze in the process. I have always known ghosts.
Well, said Luke after a moment, forcing a light chuckle into his words, I haven't had the pleasure yet.

Just trying to watch a promising looking tv show except someone in the production line apparently was all, you know what this needs? A cancer plot! And I'm like, no, you jackass, it certainly does not.

Two SS men with white rags limped forward to request a fifteen-minute truce to collect their wounded. The [Warsaw ghetto] fighters answered them with bullets. Criminals, [obergruppenführer Jurgen] Stroop sniffed. This was against the rules.

Yes, she was indeed a barmaid, and I trust that, since we are in exile now, we have not brought with us the snobbery that so maimed our lives when we lived in Munich.

Outside, the wind sculpted ice and snow into the unrecognized profiles of long-dead emperors.

"Agnes Meyer is the sort of person who emerges when there is a war or threat of a war," Katia said. "But they usually work as matrons or snipers."

Erlich was so stupefied by boredom he snuck out just to wait on breadlines.