Southern Places

In a recent interviewer, the subject said that southerners have a stronger sense of place than most. I wonder if that's true. He happened to hail from Claremont in Lake County, Florida.

Another random thought: isn't the city in literature normally a corrupting, evil institution? From the mythical Babylon to Manhattan Transfer to even the Superman comic strip, the city represents not just knowledge but also a degradation of values.

I was thinking about how the Walk across Florida, seen through a literary criticism lens, is basically a romance. A man finds himself and his state in the backwoods, not in downtown Orlando.

I'm patching together a rural photo album of Virginia that I'll post soon with some brief comments.