Luke > Recent Status Updates

By then the papers had found other subjects, Palestine not enjoying the capacity to increase sales, and things went on as before, except in the destroyed homes.

Authors excerpted thus far:

Rasheed Jahan - Woh (That One); Urdu
Indira Sant - Selected Poetry; Marathi
Ismat Chughtai - The Quilt & Other Stories; Urdu
M.K. Indira - Phaniyamma; Kannada
Razia Sajjad Zaheer - Neech (Lowborn); Urdu

In 1910, [...] Koreans, hired to pick oranges, camped on Mary Steward's farm in Upland, California. Suddenly, one night, they were attacked by white farm workers [.] Steward armed the Korean workers and instructed them to defend themselves against the white rioters. "The minority Korean people in this great country of America," Steward declared, "have a right to live and work just as the other nationalities.["]

Talk of free speech and the iniquity of secret police is a fairly recent phenomenon in the West; generally it follows by a few years the end of their last dominions or other "possessions" and the consequent uselessness to them of such methods.

'...contain what was described as the growing threat from an Islam that demanded transnational loyalty." Oh, the worlds to be unpacked from that, especially the last quarter century of my home country.

You will pay for her foolishness as well as her own. That is the burden of friendship.

I will not speak of love when I level the immigration station!

-Lai, Lim, Yung (eds.), Island

...even as the feminist act of recovery establishes a historical legitimacy for women's writing, it consolidates the hold of a (liberal) humanism and with it the political imperatives that underwrote the setting up of literary studies as a major agent of that ideology.

Why does every self-proclaimed leftist feel the need to screech about psychopaths and otherwise eugenicist-code themselves. No wonder they think electoral politics is going to save them, take away their ability to put people in behavior boxes and there goes their spine.

The horror of Sindbad's tale is that the woman never turns up and he has to do the work himself, that's what has made him a legend.

...by talking about insects and smoke, each man was indicating to the other I won't hurt you.

It was the first time I saw how art allowed you to be not just a freak but a freak with power.

"The Chinese Exclusion Act was in actuality symptomatic of a larger conflict between white labor and white capital: removal of the Chinese was designed not only to defuse an issue agitating white workers but also to alleviate class tensions within white society." Now why does this all sound so familiar.

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.