There is nothing quite like reading the short stories of Poe on a Sunday morning while waiting on a coffee at the local coffeeshop.

I just left the Everglades Immigrant Interment Camp. No, I’m not using their ridiculous name. It was a very tough to witness humans in those cages. Every Floridian should be ashamed that our taxpayer money is being used for this.

“All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions, leave their foundations and dance before our eyes.”
- Emerson

We are in the midst of a culture change; the old is passing away.

May I always be Becoming, and never settle. Being in the midst of perpetual Becoming: this is life and positive evolution.

“Is not prayer also a study of truth—a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.”

- Emerson

“The true function of scholarship as of society is not to stake out claims on which others must not trespass, but to provide a community of knowledge in which others may share.”
- FO Matthiessen

It's not that literature is dead. It's that, soon enough, literature won't exist. Nor will history, culture, or meaningful politics. Just a smooth surface of accessibility. And when that happens, it will be because of AI.

#booksky #literaturesky

“Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.”
- Emerson, Circles

Perfect spot for reading: University of Georgia’s North Campus.

Excuse me while I settle down to some Hawthorne short stories.

Here is a statement of profound optimism:

“Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy.”

- Emerson

In the lead up to the American Civil War, slavery was known as “the National Crime” by abolitionist writers, such as John Greenleaf Whittier, among others.

And to that crime, and many other National Crimes, we’ve added “Funding Genocide.”

Will we ever live that down?

Read in the light of post-structuralism, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter has got to be one of the most terrifying and before-it’s-time texts. It’s the first American novel to achieve the status of “High Art,” and it’s a feminist text to boot.