SoFest #37

[On Substack]

What a glorious day at the Southern Festival of Books yesterday, the 37th rendition of an event that almost didn't happen due to the pernicious withdrawal of federal funds. But Parnassus and Vandy and lots of individual donors saved it.

The No Kings protesters paraded by, as if on cue, as I waited in line to get my Jimmy Carter book signed.

Attended several author talks, indoors at the state library and the museum, and out under the big tent. Bought many books. Spoke with many authors. Had the best (only) peanut butter bull's-eye shake I ever paid $12 for. Enjoyed communing with my people.

Had a full-circle moment when I showed Jonathan Eig the inscription he wrote for Older Daughter in Ottawa, Kansas back in 2017… just before he inscribed his award-winning MLK book for Younger Daughter, so many years on. (Counting on her not to see this, so I can set it aside 'til Christmas.)

 

A festival highlight: meeting the author who road-tripped in Florida with John in his classic '77 Coupe DeVille. He was still living and loving life, very near the end.

 

"Prine radiates a sense of well-being..."

 

The SoFest also radiates well-being. Thank goodness (and Vandy and Ann Patchett and so many anonymous local Book People) for its survival. 'Til next year...

SoFest + No Kings

Happening today, thanks to Parnassus Books, Vandy, and a legion of devotedly-"efficient" bibliophiles.: www.sofestofbooks.org

—And also happening, next-door at the state capital: No Kings! I'll be getting my steps in this morning.

https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3m3hpooyjyk2s

Saints everywhere

But we’d do it for free anyway

"What an awful trade that of professor is--paid to talk, talk, talk!
…
It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words."

https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3m3fauk4ids2r

The Scene’s Guide to the 37th Southern Festival of Books

In early April, executive director Tim Henderson of nonprofit Humanities Tennessee sent out a memo "with great urgency" saying that the organization's National Endowment for the Humanities grant, worth about $1.2 million annually, had been terminated.

One of the first consequences that many Nashvillians spoke of was the potential loss of the Southern Festival of Books, which has been among the most beloved literary events in Nashville since its inception in 1989. But community support and an expanded partnership with Vanderbilt University secured this year's festival. Now, on Oct. 18 and 19, the 37th annual Southern Festival of Books will visit the Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park and its neighboring Tennessee State Museum and Tennessee State Library & Archives. All seems right in the world — at least for a weekend...

https://www.nashvillescene.com/arts_culture/books/2025-southern-festival-of-books/article_6074a87b-1a41-499e-8cfd-04a08b1e2d3f.html

Protest gear

The No Kings protest will be happening next-door to the book festival Saturday, at the capital. I'll take my hardhat.

Hannah Arendt (& John Prine) on forgiveness

On Hannah Arendt's birthday, her timeless meditation on what forgiveness really means…

"The capacity for forgiveness and the enactment of that capacity in the willingness to forgive is what holds the sphere of human experience together — the private sphere as much as the public sphere, for forgiveness is as vital in our deepest personal bonds as it is in the collective experience of public life."

 https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/07/14/hannah-arendt-forgiveness

It means, among other things, that we finite and imperfect beings owe one another the benefit of the doubt. As John Prine sang in Fish & Whistle…

https://youtu.be/WNuuBfWFYvQ

Zero books. HALF of Americans.

…According to a recent report, adult literacy scores leveled off and began to decline across a majority of O.E.C.D. countries in the past decade, with some of the sharpest declines visible among the poorest. Kids also show declining literacy.

Writing in The Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch links this to the rise of a post-literate culture in which we consume most of our media through smartphones, eschewing dense text in favor of images and short-form video. 

Other research has associated smartphone use with A.D.H.D. symptoms in adolescents, and a quarter of surveyed American adults now suspect they may have the condition. School and college teachers assign fewer full books to their students, in part because they are unable to complete them. Nearly half of Americans read zero books in 2023...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/opinion/smartphones-literacy-inequality-democracy.html?smid=threads-nytopinion&smtyp=cur

Descending to a post-literate culture

Those who most need to grasp this message will find it too long. They won't read it.

"…For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.
The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold's famous phrase, "the best that has been thought and said".

The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading non-fiction — science, history, philosophy, travel writing — we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations.

The epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposelessness afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.

It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative…"

https://open.substack.com/pub/jmarriott/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Pilgrimage

[On Substack...] Since Jacob's and Avery's reports yesterday in Philosophy of Happiness on Wanderlust, and Gary's mention of his recent trip to his old alma mater, I've been thinking of my own periodic "pilgrimages" to Columbia MO where I was an undergrad in the '70s...

That's the first house I lived in, on Westmount (210 then, 504 now), partly constructed of materials salvaged from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

On the Mizzou campus:

You can go home again, Thomas Wolfe. Happily.

Also thinking about the long journey from our earliest steps to another world. We're still taking baby steps, who knows how far we can go?

"We humans have set foot on another world in a place called the Sea of Tranquility, an astonishing achievement for creatures such as we, whose earliest footsteps three and one-half million years old are preserved in the volcanic ash of east Africa. We have walked far." Carl Sagan, Cosmos

And the further we walk, the more we feel at home.

Also: the guy I mentioned who recently finished his walk across America for men's mental health: Tim Perreira.

And: MTSU's convocation speaker a few years ago did his own walk across America and wrote about it in Walking to Listen, Andrew Forsthoefel.

==
Is this also "pilgrimage"?:

The Simple Pleasure of a Long Walk and a Fun Meal

Charlotte Ward just wanted to share photos with family and friends, but she has built a community of people documenting their journeys, and the food they eat afterward.

The concept behind Charlotte Ward’s X account is simple. Every day, Ms. Ward, 22, goes for a long walk, usually through the lush woods near her home in Yorkshire, England, before she sits down for dinner. And every night she posts three photos of the scenery from her walk along with a photo of what she ate.

Sometimes she heads to the Yorkshire Dales to hike the highlands, other days she traverses the streets of London, but the result is always the same: three photos of the walk, and one of what she ate. It has been a perfect recipe for her growing audience.

Since starting her @hikingshawty account in April 2024, Ms. Ward has amassed more than 170,000 followers and has built an audience of nearly 200,000 in an X community she created called “today i walked…” Many of the people who come across her posts express their desire to live a quieter life like hers, spending time in nature and baking cakes from scratch.

For Ms. Ward, who originally started her account to share photos of her hikes with friends, the attention has been surprising... (continues)

How to Save a Book Festival

The Southern Festival of Books in Nashville has been one of the highlights of October for me for decades. Trump's & Elon's DOGE tried to kill it. The owner of my favorite bookstore helped save it. It'll be back weekend after next. Thank goodness!

"… a festival where tens of thousands of people come together to celebrate books — books of all kinds, for all ages — tells us something about the power of storytelling. Especially in a time of terrible fear and sorrow and vitriol, stories remind us of who we are and of how we belong to one another.

It's too soon to say how long the public arts and humanities, among so many other facets of the public good that are now in profound peril, will survive. Will people part with enough $20 bills to save them forever? Will philanthropic organizations support endangered cultural assets indefinitely? Will a lawsuit by the Federation of State Humanities Councils restore funding until the federal budgeting process returns to normal?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions. What I do know is that we need the humanities now, perhaps more than we have ever needed them, because we live in a time when so many of us have forgotten this crucial truth: We are a fangless, clawless, furless species, and we survive only in community."
— Margaret Renkl

The 37th annual Southern Festival of Books will be held in Nashville Oct. 18-19. As always, it is free and open to the public.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/opinion/how-to-save-a-book-festival.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Last year at the festival: the author and her brother , seated on stage...

This morning

Another dawn. 

All the same, all different. All awake with possibility.

Bernie & AOC on the shutdown

https://www.threads.com/@mike_nellis/post/DPSVPLtiO0t?xmt=AQF0lRwCDr0ifFR5sG3k6V-ulNzss4EQHnVlFjDhfC8X2w&slof=1