Luke > Recent Status Updates

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.

Some of these parchments are older than the children of the gods. Word is divine wish, they say. Word is invisible to all but the gods. So when woman or man write words, they dare to look at the divine. Oh, what power.

The heavens of his youth in the old country were here as well, indeed were everywhere, would be everywhere for all time, and yet here in this moment he was older than he ever could have imagined.

These activities won the Bund so much love that when a group of communists tried to jump Bernard [Goldstein] on Smocza Street, nearby housewives threw themselves on top of the attackers, using their brooms as bludgeons, and would have murdered them if the communists hadn't managed to escape.

When the reporter asked them what relationship Isherwood had with the family, Erika replied under her breath that he was their pimp.

For the Bolsheviks, stopping pogroms was a matter of self-interest as well as ethics. They had long known that the conflation of Jew and revolutionary would redound against them, and Trotsky's role as leader of the Red Army brought these slanders to a fever pitch. [...] Levin himself made a gramophone recording to convince soldiers that antisemitism was a tool of the bourgeoisie.

With the Bintuin I was neither man nor woman, for that is only two, and among the Bintuin there is many. Which is to say that I pass as one of them without the help of magic.

Just like lynchings in the American South, pogroms were family affairs. Blood-smeared Russian mothers loaded their pushcarts with the spoils from looted Jewish houses, then had their kids torch the homes behind them as they left.

I want a new god just to curse her for not telling me that you need a midwife for death too.

Did not at all expect the county library of all places to source this, so of course I had to immediately check it out in order to encourage them to buy more in the same vein.

"Do you think I should withhold it?"
"I don't think you wrote it to withhold it."

Once again seeing a lot of conflation of Pride with sexuality only, so shoutout to straight trans/intersex/gendernonconforming/etc types like me, there's a lot more to queer than same-sex.

Rest in peace, Marjane Satrapi.

Meanwhile rage turning into a friend that come at night and sit with me.

Maybe it is not a gift from the gods but a god for true, doing what they do mostly, which is to fuck with people.

'Escapist Reads' Oh, escape from the fact that this site continues to be burnt to the ground by oligarchical greed after more than a decade? What, exactly, kind of read is going to ever make me forget that?

"Now is not the season for witches," the King Sister say.
"I not a witch," Sogolon say.
"You are something, for certain. Maybe you should join the Sangomin."
"I would rather go back to Mitu."
"What is in Mitu?"
"Death."

Nice to start this on the eve of Pride.

This escort look like his clothes commit wickedness by hiding him.

This would be going better had I not recently read Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine and thus want to punt every cutesified 'and then this cause had this effect' segue and their associated characters into the motherfucking sun.

Nuremberg, where work had been going on throughout the war on the great auditorium and stadiums which were to mark the ancient town as the capital of the Nazi Party, was besieged and part of the U.S. Seventh Army was sweeping past it toward Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi movement.

And if I remember everything now in the form of lists it is that these notions come to me along a floating string of memory, a long and lyric processional that leads me out from the city in which I live, to return me here, back to this place of our ghosts.