{"id":57307,"date":"2025-04-28T11:22:09","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T11:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/57307\/"},"modified":"2025-04-28T11:22:09","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T11:22:09","slug":"with-southern-festival-of-book-imperiled-read-with-jenna-comes-to-town-pith-in-the-wind-nashville-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/57307\/","title":{"rendered":"With Southern Festival of Book Imperiled, ‘Read With Jenna’ Comes to Town | Pith in the Wind | Nashville News"},"content":{"rendered":"

You all remember how the humanities infrastructure in this country is failing due to Trump cuts<\/a>? And how that threatens the very existence of Tennessee\u2019s beloved Southern Festival of Books, which takes place in Nashville every October? Perhaps you read about this in such prestigious publications as the Nashville Scene<\/a> or, oh, you know, The New York Times<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n


\n \"The
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Trump’s cuts could kill off the ecosystem of writers, historians, museums and libraries that sustains us<\/p>\n

Humanities Tennessee is out here begging for money in order to try to ensure that a festival even happens this year, let alone in the future.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Jenna Bush Hager (a rich person), employed by the Today show (a well-funded show on a rich network), with the support of the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp (money), is hosting Read With Jenna, a book festival here in Nashville next month. I hope you also have money if you want to go, because general admission is $399 and VIP tickets are $699. That\u2019s on top of lodging and transportation to the event, which the festival website<\/a> and news coverage stress<\/a>\u00a0are not part of the ticket. I assume someone somewhere in all this understands that $400 seems like it should at least get you a hotel room, and some people might assume that it does.<\/p>\n

It’s ghoulish to me, to come parading through the streets of Nashville, throwing that kind of money around, holding your own little exclusive book festival while our free and open festival is critically endangered for lack of money.<\/p>\n

I get accused all the time of being some crazed leftist, but this is it. This is my radical-leftist origin point … watching rich people throw money at each other so they can flaunt access to authors as regular people are in the process of losing that kind of experience, and reading stories about it with headlines like this gem from\u00a0The Tennessean<\/a>: \u201cCalling all book lovers! Read with Jenna book festival hits Nashville. Here’s what to know.\u201d Calling all book lovers?\u00a0<\/p>\n

So if you don\u2019t have $400, you don\u2019t love books? Is that the idea here?<\/p>\n

Jesus. How is a regular person supposed to experience this as anything other than contempt for us? Why in the world are we throwing money at rich people so that other rich people can also throw money at them? Throw money at the Southern Festival of Books.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n


\n \"Trump
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Humanities Tennessee’s National Endowment for the Humanities grant, worth about $1.2 million annually, has been terminated<\/p>\n

Hell, if\u00a0you as an individual have $400 to throw at a \u201cfestival experience,\u201d throw it at Humanities Tennessee to help preserve the festival experience that is open to everyone. Or throw it at a local bookstore. Do you know what a difference it would make to the bookshop in your neighborhood if you spent $400 there in May?<\/p>\n

There is this term in academia \u2014 and let me be honest that I loathe most academic terms, since they seem specifically designed to make it seem like you are saying something profound when you actually don\u2019t have anything useful to say \u2014 but this is one exception: extractivism. It\u2019s a clunky word and not likely to catch on widely, but what it\u2019s trying to get at is bullshit like this, wherein people and institutions with power aren\u2019t interested in the wellbeing of a community, but instead just want to hoover up whatever is valuable in that community and then jaunt off to the next resource-rich environment, without having to care about the messes they leave behind.<\/p>\n

These rich people are all flying in to Nashville to benefit from being in Nashville \u2014 not to actually contribute anything to our wellbeing. But they could, you know. That\u2019s the thing that breaks my heart and pisses me off. You think Jenna Bush Hager and her friends couldn\u2019t fund the Southern Festival of Books? Hell, they could fund the event and still have their own paid-for VIP track that runs parallel, if keeping separate from the unwashed book-buying masses is so important.<\/p>\n

They have the money to save the day, but instead are just showing off that they don\u2019t have to give a shit about the cultural forces that are devastating the rest of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You all remember how the humanities infrastructure in this country is failing due to Trump cuts? And how…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57308,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[11246,3444,77,30127,30126,391,30128,30125,1166,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-57307","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-analysis","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-humanities-tennessee","12":"tag-jenna-bush-hager","13":"tag-opinion","14":"tag-read-with-jenna","15":"tag-southern-festival-of-books","16":"tag-trump-administration","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}