End Break

The odd thing about break week is the way it ends.

It's not "Thank God It's Friday".

It's "Oh, hell, it's Friday."

Who's the Troll?

This is a horrifying story. The Miami New Times headlines it as "Sex offenders are ordered to sleep near a center for abused kids"; Michael Froomkin points out that "the government is requiring people — maybe people who are very not nice, but still people — to be homeless and to sleep under a bridge".

"There Is Nothing New Under the Sun..."

For a variety of unimportant reasons, I've pulled my copy of The Scarlet Letter off the shelves and begun rereading it. I'm not sure whether this is my second or third reading. I know that I read it, under coercion, in high school; I believe I reread it years later, to better effect, but I'm not certain of that. Anyway, here I go.

I mention this only because, reading the introductory essay, I was struck by the following passage. It has that usual 19th-century prolixity, but it amuses me to interpret it as advice for LJers and other bloggers.

The truth seems to be, however, that when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent, and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader's rights or his own.

N.B.: I'm not saying it's necessarily good advice...