#literature — Public Fediverse posts

Born this day: 10/01/1914 (d. 11/02/1990) Donald Allen Wollheim was an American SF editor, publisher & writer. (aka - David Grinnell, Martin Pearson, and Darrell G. Raynor). Wollheim's "Pogo Planet", was the cover story for the October 1941 issue of Future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_A._Wollheim

#Literature #SciFi #ScienceFiction #books #bookstodon #coverart #bookart #bookcovers
#DonaldAWollheim @books @scifi @Scifiart @sciencefiction

https://astralcomputing.com

illustrated by Hannes Bok

Born this day: 10/01/1914 (d. 11/02/1990) Donald Allen Wollheim was an American SF editor, publisher & writer. (aka - David Grinnell, Martin Pearson, and Darrell G. Raynor). Wollheim's "Pogo Planet", was the cover story for the October 1941 issue of Future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_A._Wollheim

#Literature #SciFi #ScienceFiction #books #bookstodon #coverart #bookart #bookcovers
#DonaldAWollheim @books @scifi @Scifiart @sciencefiction

https://astralcomputing.com

illustrated by Hannes Bok

Born this day: 10/01/1914 (d. 11/02/1990) Donald Allen Wollheim was an American SF editor, publisher & writer. (aka - David Grinnell, Martin Pearson, and Darrell G. Raynor). Wollheim's "Pogo Planet", was the cover story for the October 1941 issue of Future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_A._Wollheim

#Literature #SciFi #ScienceFiction #books #bookstodon #coverart #bookart #bookcovers
#DonaldAWollheim @books @scifi @Scifiart @sciencefiction

https://astralcomputing.com

illustrated by Hannes Bok

Variations on the Death of Trotsky by David Ives #books #literature #dedication

Variations on the Death of Trotsky by David Ives #books #literature #dedication

Variations on the Death of Trotsky by David Ives #books #literature #dedication

Variations on the Death of Trotsky by David Ives #books #literature #dedication

La cuarentena no terminó.
Ahora las calles las recorren ellos: los caminantes desquiciados.
Lentos, cabizbajos, tristes… hasta que te huelen.
Entonces corren. Y solo quieren carne...

https://fictograma.com/d/4191-proyecto-hbk-parte-1-los-caminantes-desquiciados

#books #literature #writing

La cuarentena no terminó.
Ahora las calles las recorren ellos: los caminantes desquiciados.
Lentos, cabizbajos, tristes… hasta que te huelen.
Entonces corren. Y solo quieren carne...

https://fictograma.com/d/4191-proyecto-hbk-parte-1-los-caminantes-desquiciados

#books #literature #writing

La cuarentena no terminó.
Ahora las calles las recorren ellos: los caminantes desquiciados.
Lentos, cabizbajos, tristes… hasta que te huelen.
Entonces corren. Y solo quieren carne...

https://fictograma.com/d/4191-proyecto-hbk-parte-1-los-caminantes-desquiciados

#books #literature #writing

Katska llega a Lorkof sin uniforme, sin nombre… solo un número blanco.
Cientos de prisioneros, duelos, canciones rotas y un silencio que no existe.
La cárcel imperial no necesita muros para destruirte.

https://fictograma.com/d/4190-dragones-eternos

#books #literature #writing

Katska llega a Lorkof sin uniforme, sin nombre… solo un número blanco.
Cientos de prisioneros, duelos, canciones rotas y un silencio que no existe.
La cárcel imperial no necesita muros para destruirte.

https://fictograma.com/d/4190-dragones-eternos

#books #literature #writing

Katska llega a Lorkof sin uniforme, sin nombre… solo un número blanco.
Cientos de prisioneros, duelos, canciones rotas y un silencio que no existe.
La cárcel imperial no necesita muros para destruirte.

https://fictograma.com/d/4190-dragones-eternos

#books #literature #writing

¡Nieve, culpas y una familia al borde! ❄️🎄
Capítulo 11 de *Nochebuena en Pie de Guerra*: cuando la tormenta llega a casa… y a la plaza.

https://fictograma.com/d/4189-nochebuena-en-pie-de-guerra

#books #literature #writing

¡Nieve, culpas y una familia al borde! ❄️🎄
Capítulo 11 de *Nochebuena en Pie de Guerra*: cuando la tormenta llega a casa… y a la plaza.

https://fictograma.com/d/4189-nochebuena-en-pie-de-guerra

#books #literature #writing

¡Nieve, culpas y una familia al borde! ❄️🎄
Capítulo 11 de *Nochebuena en Pie de Guerra*: cuando la tormenta llega a casa… y a la plaza.

https://fictograma.com/d/4189-nochebuena-en-pie-de-guerra

#books #literature #writing

Le di a Gra el cuento que escribí
sobre nuestra salida a comprar ropa.
Esperaba una sonrisa en “salvia”.
Nada.
En “visón”. Nada.
En el hombre del banquito. Nada.

Cuando terminó levantó la vista:
👉 https://fictograma.com/d/4187-yo-solo-se-lo-di-para-que-lo-leyera

#books #literature #writing

Le di a Gra el cuento que escribí
sobre nuestra salida a comprar ropa.
Esperaba una sonrisa en “salvia”.
Nada.
En “visón”. Nada.
En el hombre del banquito. Nada.

Cuando terminó levantó la vista:
👉 https://fictograma.com/d/4187-yo-solo-se-lo-di-para-que-lo-leyera

#books #literature #writing

Le di a Gra el cuento que escribí
sobre nuestra salida a comprar ropa.
Esperaba una sonrisa en “salvia”.
Nada.
En “visón”. Nada.
En el hombre del banquito. Nada.

Cuando terminó levantó la vista:
👉 https://fictograma.com/d/4187-yo-solo-se-lo-di-para-que-lo-leyera

#books #literature #writing

When we are happy,
we are always good...

Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray

Photo Morten Lasskogen

#Bookstodon #Literature #Photography

When we are happy,
we are always good...

Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray

Photo Morten Lasskogen

#Bookstodon #Literature #Photography

When we are happy,
we are always good...

Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray

Photo Morten Lasskogen

#Bookstodon #Literature #Photography

When we are happy,
we are always good...

Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray

Photo Morten Lasskogen

#Bookstodon #Literature #Photography

𝐓𝐁𝐑 𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐞: 𝐎𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐬 -

October, of course, is a great time for horror reads! And here are a few titles lurking about my chair as I prepare for both 13 Days of Halloween and the upcoming Literary Nomads season on "monsters"!

#books #literature #tbrpile #tbrlist #tommypico #naturepoem #julesverne #captainhatteras #kentarokiura #berserk #gemmafiles #ahmedsaadawi #kathekoja #johncarpenter #richardbachman #stephenking #freddaguiar #13daysofhalloween #horror

𝐓𝐁𝐑 𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐞: 𝐎𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐬 -

October, of course, is a great time for horror reads! And here are a few titles lurking about my chair as I prepare for both 13 Days of Halloween and the upcoming Literary Nomads season on "monsters"!

#books #literature #tbrpile #tbrlist #tommypico #naturepoem #julesverne #captainhatteras #kentarokiura #berserk #gemmafiles #ahmedsaadawi #kathekoja #johncarpenter #richardbachman #stephenking #freddaguiar #13daysofhalloween #horror

𝐓𝐁𝐑 𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐞: 𝐎𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐬 -

October, of course, is a great time for horror reads! And here are a few titles lurking about my chair as I prepare for both 13 Days of Halloween and the upcoming Literary Nomads season on "monsters"!

#books #literature #tbrpile #tbrlist #tommypico #naturepoem #julesverne #captainhatteras #kentarokiura #berserk #gemmafiles #ahmedsaadawi #kathekoja #johncarpenter #richardbachman #stephenking #freddaguiar #13daysofhalloween #horror

𝐓𝐁𝐑 𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐞: 𝐎𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐬 -

October, of course, is a great time for horror reads! And here are a few titles lurking about my chair as I prepare for both 13 Days of Halloween and the upcoming Literary Nomads season on "monsters"!

#books #literature #tbrpile #tbrlist #tommypico #naturepoem #julesverne #captainhatteras #kentarokiura #berserk #gemmafiles #ahmedsaadawi #kathekoja #johncarpenter #richardbachman #stephenking #freddaguiar #13daysofhalloween #horror

https://www.europesays.com/unitedstates/6059/ Russian Pro-War Writers Say State Has Failed Them #ArmedConflicts #Literature #StPetersburg #WarNews

“Now I will tell the captains of the ships, and all the ships together”*…

Ethan Mollick has created a new site that’s fascinating in two different ways. First and most overtly, it’s a beautiful (and thorough) visualization and explanation of the ships used by the protagonists of The Iliad.

But at the same time, it is a powerful demonstration of (at least one of) the ways that AI might be useful in scholarship and education: Mollick spun up the site last month, using Claude…

In the second book of the Iliad the poet pauses on the brink of the first battle, calls on the Muses, and counts the fleet: twenty-nine contingents, forty-six captains, some 178 place-names, 1,186 ships [and by Thucydides’ reckoning, around 100,000 men]. This site puts every entry on the map, rebuilds the ships from the archaeological evidence [pictured on this site], and lets you read the lines beside the ruins they describe…

“The Catalogue of Ships” from @emollick.bsky.social.

* Homer/The Poet, The Iliad, Book 2, lines 492-3

###

As we set sail, we might recall that it was on this date in 331 BCE (long, long ago– but hundreds of years after the action described in The Iliad) that Alexander the Great and the Army of Macedon defeated King Darius III and his Persian Army in the Battle of Gaugamela, effectively the final blow to the Achaemenid Empire, resulting in its complete conquest by Alexander.

“Now I will tell the captains of the ships, and all the ships together”*…

Ethan Mollick has created a new site that’s fascinating in two different ways. First and most overtly, it’s a beautiful (and thorough) visualization and explanation of the ships used by the protagonists of The Iliad.

But at the same time, it is a powerful demonstration of (at least one of) the ways that AI might be useful in scholarship and education: Mollick spun up the site last month, using Claude…

In the second book of the Iliad the poet pauses on the brink of the first battle, calls on the Muses, and counts the fleet: twenty-nine contingents, forty-six captains, some 178 place-names, 1,186 ships [and by Thucydides’ reckoning, around 100,000 men]. This site puts every entry on the map, rebuilds the ships from the archaeological evidence [pictured on this site], and lets you read the lines beside the ruins they describe…

“The Catalogue of Ships” from @emollick.bsky.social.

* Homer/The Poet, The Iliad, Book 2, lines 492-3

###

As we set sail, we might recall that it was on this date in 331 BCE (long, long ago– but hundreds of years after the action described in The Iliad) that Alexander the Great and the Army of Macedon defeated King Darius III and his Persian Army in the Battle of Gaugamela, effectively the final blow to the Achaemenid Empire, resulting in its complete conquest by Alexander.

“Now I will tell the captains of the ships, and all the ships together”*…

Ethan Mollick has created a new site that’s fascinating in two different ways. First and most overtly, it’s a beautiful (and thorough) visualization and explanation of the ships used by the protagonists of The Iliad.

But at the same time, it is a powerful demonstration of (at least one of) the ways that AI might be useful in scholarship and education: Mollick spun up the site last month, using Claude…

In the second book of the Iliad the poet pauses on the brink of the first battle, calls on the Muses, and counts the fleet: twenty-nine contingents, forty-six captains, some 178 place-names, 1,186 ships [and by Thucydides’ reckoning, around 100,000 men]. This site puts every entry on the map, rebuilds the ships from the archaeological evidence [pictured on this site], and lets you read the lines beside the ruins they describe…

“The Catalogue of Ships” from @emollick.bsky.social.

* Homer/The Poet, The Iliad, Book 2, lines 492-3

###

As we set sail, we might recall that it was on this date in 331 BCE (long, long ago– but hundreds of years after the action described in The Iliad) that Alexander the Great and the Army of Macedon defeated King Darius III and his Persian Army in the Battle of Gaugamela, effectively the final blow to the Achaemenid Empire, resulting in its complete conquest by Alexander.

“Now I will tell the captains of the ships, and all the ships together”*…

Ethan Mollick has created a new site that’s fascinating in two different ways. First and most overtly, it’s a beautiful (and thorough) visualization and explanation of the ships used by the protagonists of The Iliad.

But at the same time, it is a powerful demonstration of (at least one of) the ways that AI might be useful in scholarship and education: Mollick spun up the site last month, using Claude…

In the second book of the Iliad the poet pauses on the brink of the first battle, calls on the Muses, and counts the fleet: twenty-nine contingents, forty-six captains, some 178 place-names, 1,186 ships [and by Thucydides’ reckoning, around 100,000 men]. This site puts every entry on the map, rebuilds the ships from the archaeological evidence [pictured on this site], and lets you read the lines beside the ruins they describe…

“The Catalogue of Ships” from @emollick.bsky.social.

* Homer/The Poet, The Iliad, Book 2, lines 492-3

###

As we set sail, we might recall that it was on this date in 331 BCE (long, long ago– but hundreds of years after the action described in The Iliad) that Alexander the Great and the Army of Macedon defeated King Darius III and his Persian Army in the Battle of Gaugamela, effectively the final blow to the Achaemenid Empire, resulting in its complete conquest by Alexander.

PSA: You are not obligated to explain why you block someone on social media. Use that option if your gut says so. Yes, that applies to mastodon too. Take care ♥️

#socialmedia #mentalhealth #adhd #depression #quotes #reading #design #mastodon #literature #knitting #gardening #technology #hardware #programming

PSA: You are not obligated to explain why you block someone on social media. Use that option if your gut says so. Yes, that applies to mastodon too. Take care ♥️

#socialmedia #mentalhealth #adhd #depression #quotes #reading #design #mastodon #literature #knitting #gardening #technology #hardware #programming

PSA: You are not obligated to explain why you block someone on social media. Use that option if your gut says so. Yes, that applies to mastodon too. Take care ♥️

#socialmedia #mentalhealth #adhd #depression #quotes #reading #design #mastodon #literature #knitting #gardening #technology #hardware #programming

PSA: You are not obligated to explain why you block someone on social media. Use that option if your gut says so. Yes, that applies to mastodon too. Take care ♥️

#socialmedia #mentalhealth #adhd #depression #quotes #reading #design #mastodon #literature #knitting #gardening #technology #hardware #programming

Decolonize This: Keep Your Woke Politics Off My Bookshelves

“Decolonize your bookshelves.”

Every time I encounter this idiotic phrase, I feel compelled to buy more books by dead white European writers. Or I could simply revisit the ones already colonizing my shelves, those stubborn monuments to literary excellence that have somehow survived without diversity consultants. Apparently my humble home library has been problematic for years without bothering to inform me.

Not merely dead or white. Preferably male, and straight. Preferably from a civilization that built cathedrals, waged several inadvisable wars, pillaged colonies of naked savages, invented something magnificent, and left behind thousands of pages of difficult, glorious prose. Perhaps more limited editions of Shakespeare, Dante, Montaigne. Maybe I shall finally acquire that obscenely expensive hardcover edition of Virgil I have been eyeing. If I am feeling particularly colonial, I might add Heart of Darkness or Robinson Crusoe or Mein Kampf, which are all due for a good reread.

Give me Chaucer. Give me Proust. Give me Miguel de Cervantes. Give me more of Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, John Milton, Dostoevsky. Stack them obscenely high. Let the shelves groan beneath the accumulated weight of Western civilization until some diversity consultant arrives with a clipboard and suffers cardiac arrest.

Because what in the DEI fuckery is “decolonize your bookshelves” supposed to mean?

There is a peculiar comedy to contemporary progressivism. A movement that never tires of announcing its opposition to policing has developed an extraordinary appetite for becoming the police. The vocabulary police. The pronoun police. The representation police. The cultural-appropriation police. The sensitivity-reader constabulary. And now, apparently, the bookshelf police.

You’d expect the knock at the door any day now. “Good evening, citizen. We have received reports that your Russian literature section is disproportionately male.”

I confess. Take me away.

Somewhere along the way, reading, that most private and gloriously antisocial of activities, became yet another territory apparently requiring ideological supervision. It is no longer enough simply to read a book, enjoy it, hate it, argue with it, throw it across the room, underline half of it, scribble manic marginalia all over its pages, or abandon it after eighty pages because life is short and the prose is unbearable. No. Now you must apparently “interrogate” the racial composition of your shelves, audit the geographic provenance of your authors, examine whether your reading habits reproduce structures of imperial domination, and presumably submit your whole fucking collection for inspection by the Ministry of Virtuous Consumption.

GTFO. My bookshelves are not a parliamentary body. They do not require proportional representation.

I am Filipino. I live in the Philippines. I also am a transgendered individual, which, according to the increasingly ludicrous assumptions of contemporary political tribalism, ought to place me comfortably within the cultural Left. I should presumably be nodding obediently whenever someone says “decolonize,” “center marginalized voices,” “deconstruct,” or whatever other jargon has escaped from some Democrat-run university in the US and infected ordinary speech all around the world this week. Being Filipino and trans, according to the primitive identity astrology of identity politics, should determine approximately ninety percent of my opinions. They do not. And this bewilders people.

Filipino? Colonized subject. Trans? Progressive constituency. Woman? Feminist bloc. Minority? Presumed marginalized, disenfranchised, oppressed, and therefore should be Left-leaning. You need only feed the demographic information into the ideological machine and out comes the approved worldview, preassembled and ready for installation.

Unfortunately, I appear to have malfunctioned.

I transitioned my gender, not my capacity for independent thought and critical thinking.

Nothing about being trans requires me to pretend that Judith Butler is more important than Shakespeare. Nothing about being Filipino compels me to regard Europe and the USA as some vast cultural crime scene from which all intellectual contraband must be confiscated. Nothing about my personhood requires me to genuflect before every fashionable slogan containing the words “decolonize,” “problematize,” “center,” “decenter,” “interrogate,” or that most ominous verb in the activist lexicon, “unlearn.”

I have spent too much of my life trying to learn things to be impressed by people commanding me to unlearn them. Dear ideological census-takers: I am not a demographic marionette.

Being trans does not obligate me to subscribe to an entire political catechism. Neither does living in a formerly colonized country require me to regard Western civilization with suspicion, resentment, or theatrical guilt. I am perfectly capable of recognizing the brutality of colonialism without pretending that Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Montaigne, Milton, Goethe, Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, and the rest must now stand trial because history contains conquest.

History contains conquest everywhere.

If I had to purify my reading according to the bloodstained histories of civilizations, I would eventually be left reading the back of a cereal box. And even then some libtard wokester would undoubtedly inform me that breakfast cereal participates in capitalism.

The phrase “decolonize your bookshelves” does contain a legitimate observation buried beneath several geological layers of fashionable bullshit: the literary world is larger than Europe and North America. Of course it is. Asia existed before social media discovered it. Africa had civilizations before diversity officers began putting maps of it into PowerPoint presentations.

The Arabs wrote philosophy, mathematics, history, medicine, and poetry while large portions of Europe were busy stabbing one another with farming implements. India possesses literary and philosophical traditions older than many European nations. China produced philosophy, poetry, historiography, political thought, painting, and criticism on a scale that makes much contemporary book discourse look like the intellectual equivalent of finger painting. Japan gave the world The Tale of Genji while vast regions of the modern literary world had not yet conceived of anything resembling the novel.

Read all of it. Read Africans. Read Indians. Read Chinese and Japanese writers. Read Arabs and Persians. Read Latin Americans. Read Southeast Asians. Read ancient epics, modern novels, obscure poetry, sacred texts, dirty stories, philosophical treatises, revolutionary pamphlets.

But read them because they are good. That distinction matters. Read them because they disturb you, delight you, educate you, seduce you, offend you, enrage you, enlarge you. Read them because a passage makes you put the book down and stare at the wall. Read them because their characters follow you into sleep. Read them because something inside the work reaches across geography and across centuries and seizes you by the throat.

Do not read them because someone handed you a moral spreadsheet. There is an enormous difference between expanding the consciousness and balancing an ideological ledger. One is education. The other is Human Resources with footnotes.

The instant literature becomes demographic bookkeeping, art is degraded into sociology. The writer becomes a specimen. The reader becomes a census worker. A Nigerian novelist is no longer simply a novelist but “an African voice.” A Japanese writer becomes “Asian representation.” A gay author is processed through sexuality. A woman becomes feminist studies. A Filipino becomes postcolonial testimony. Everything individual, eccentric, monstrous, brilliant, contradictory, aesthetically strange, or gloriously cosmic gets flattened beneath the great bureaucratic steamroller of identity.

This is supposedly “respect.” It strikes me as condescension wearing expensive glasses.

This is where the whole enterprise becomes ridiculous. The moment literature is reduced to demographic bookkeeping, reading ceases to be an encounter with minds and becomes another diversity exercise. The author stops being an artist and becomes a representative specimen. The reader stops asking, “Is this beautiful? Is this good? Is this consciousness-expanding?” and begins asking whether the appropriate identity boxes have been ticked.

What an insult to literature. And, quite frankly, what an insult to non-Western writers.

Imagine being told that somebody selected your novel not primarily because of its prose, imagination, philosophical power, humor, psychological insight, or narrative brilliance, but because his or her reading list was suffering from an unacceptable melanin deficit. How flattering. Nothing says respect quite like turning writers into diversity decorations.

If I were a novelist, I would be insulted if somebody read me because I was trans. Read me because I wrote something worth reading. Despise me because I wrote something worth despising. Argue with me. Laugh at me. Underline me. Throw the book across the room. But spare me the indignity of being consumed like an ethically sourced vegetable because somebody’s reading list needed another minority. Tokenism did not become noble merely because some Left-leaning cultural Marxist English professors gave it better vocabulary.

I’d rather read a brilliant Nigerian novelist because the novelist is brilliant than because somebody told me my bookshelf contained too many white Europeans. I’d rather encounter Japanese literature through curiosity than obligation. I’d rather discover a transgender writer because something about the work seized me than because I was instructed that supporting “my own” literature constitutes some civic or ethnic duty. Books deserve better than this. Readers deserve better too.

Reducing creators to their demographic coordinates is profoundly anti-art. Great artists are not representatives of categories. Quite often they are traitors to categories. They embarrass their nations, insult their classes, betray the expectations of their sex, contradict their politics, scandalize their contemporaries, and occasionally make complete fools of their admirers. That is why they are interesting. Great art is unruly. It refuses to behave. It does not sit politely beneath a placard saying QUEER FILIPINO VOICES or POSTCOLONIAL WOMEN’S NARRATIVES like a museum artifact awaiting institutional approval. Great literature bites. It seduces. It blasphemes. It contradicts itself. It travels illegally across cultures and across centuries.

Homer belongs to me as much as he belongs to Greece. Dante belongs to a Japanese atheist. Confucius belongs to an Irish Catholic. Dostoevsky belongs to an African Muslim. James Joyce belongs to anyone who has the patience to read him. Civilization advances precisely because human beings steal intellectual fire from one another. That is culture. The alternative is cultural segregation with politically correct branding.

The Canon is not sacred scripture. Of course it can expand. It has expanded. It will continue expanding. That is what a living civilization does. Literary judgment is neither frozen nor infallible. But expansion is not demolition. And appreciation is not a zero-sum game.

Reading Toni Morrison does not require burning Faulkner. Reading Achebe does not necessitate apologizing for Conrad. Reading Murasaki does not oblige me to remove Austen from the shelf. I can read Nick Joaquin in the morning and Montaigne at night without suffering ideological contamination.

One of the supreme pleasures of serious reading is precisely this promiscuity of the mind. You, the reader, owe allegiance to nobody. The Western Canon has become particularly offensive to the bureaucratic imagination because it is stubbornly unequal. It is hierarchical. Some works really are better than others. Some writers really are greater than others. Some books contain depths that ten thousand respectable novels do not.

This is intolerable to a culture increasingly uncomfortable with hierarchy except when disguised as morality. They pretend that all judgments of greatness are merely exercises of power because admitting that greatness exists means confronting standards that cannot be democratized by administrative decree.

Shakespeare is not merely one “voice” among many. He is Shakespeare. The Shakespearean plays contain an almost terrifying range of human consciousness. Kings, drunks, fools, murderers, lovers, tyrants, cowards, soldiers, virgins, schemers, clowns, grieving fathers, ambitious wives, melancholy princes. Four centuries later, humanity is still rummaging through them looking for its soul. Dante is not important because medieval Italian men require representation. Homer is not assigned because ancient Greek masculinity deserves greater visibility. Austen is not valuable because Regency-era white women finally got a seat at the table. Dostoevsky does not survive because nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox neurotics constitute an underserved demographic. These formulations sound ridiculous because they are ridiculous. The works exceeded their authors’ demographics. That is precisely why they survived.

The Western Canon, for all the fashionable sneering directed at the very phrase, did not emerge because white men gathered secretly in a candlelit basement and conspired to ruin future diversity initiatives. Many canonical works survived because generation after generation found them inexhaustible. This is why I find the attack on the Western Canon so tedious. The Canon is not sacred scripture. It is not infallible. It is not finished. It has changed before and will change again. Forgotten writers are rediscovered. Neglected works are restored. New books, at rare times, enter the conversation. Most others quietly and unceremoniously descend into deserved oblivion.

Shakespeare persists because Shakespeare is fucking good. Dante persists because seven centuries later people are still descending into Hell with him. Homer persists because Achilles still rages. Dostoevsky persists because human beings continue to torment themselves with guilt, pride, faith, freedom, resentment, murder, and God. Austen persists because vanity and stupidity remain renewable resources.

These writers are not great because they are Western. They are great because their works have demonstrated an almost indecent capacity to survive interpretation, revolution, war, cultural transformation, political fashion, and academic assault. Fashion expires. Jargon goes stale. Homer remains. And perhaps that durability itself is offensive to people who imagine that history began five minutes after they learned the word “intersectional.” Great literature performs the miracle that identity politics, for all its rhetoric about empathy, continually risks undermining: it allows one consciousness to enter another without requiring demographic permission.

I have never been a Russian murderer tormented by metaphysics, yet Dostoevsky still speaks to me. I have never been an aging English butler embalmed in emotional repression, yet Ishiguro can still devastate me. I have never wandered through medieval Hell guided by Virgil. Yet Dante remains imaginable. I have never hunted a white whale, ruled Denmark, fought at Troy, attended a nineteenth-century English marriage market, or discovered that my father had been murdered by my uncle. Thank God literature does not require lived experience. Otherwise we would all be condemned to autobiographical narcissism.

Perhaps this is my deepest objection to the ideological colonization of reading: it shrinks literature while pretending to expand it. Find your identity. Find your representation. Find your community. See yourself. Center yourself. Your race. Your gender. Your sexuality. Your nation. Your trauma. Your marginalization. Your perspective. What suffocating provincialism.

The entire point of literature is that for several hundred pages I do not have to be myself. I am already myself all fucking day. Give me someone else. Give me a medieval monk, a Roman emperor, an adulterous Russian aristocrat, a Japanese court lady, a mad king, a murderer, a slave, an aristocrat, a saint, a nihilist, a peasant, a whaler, a prostitute, a philosopher. Give me people whose moral assumptions horrify me. Give me civilizations whose gods I do not worship. Give me writers who would have considered my existence incomprehensible. Especially them. Reading should not be ideological comfort food.

The dead are valuable partly because they do not know our commandments. Their alienness is the point. They arrive from moral universes that cannot be reconstructed according to contemporary sensitivities without destroying the very historical distance that makes them worth encountering. Their ignorance liberates them. They are also wonderfully difficult to cancel because they are already dead. This is one of the great advantages of the dead. They cannot issue apologies. No publicist can force Aristotle to post a Notes App statement. Dante will not be attending sensitivity training. Tolstoy cannot be summoned before the Diversity Committee. Homer has no social-media accounts to delete. Catullus will not be revising his language after feedback from the community. The dead remain gloriously unmanageable.

And what astonishing arrogance it takes for every generation of comfortable moderns to imagine itself morally superior to the entirety of the past. We sit surrounded by technologies we did not invent, institutions we inherited, languages shaped by the dead, artistic forms refined over millennia, and then announce ourselves enlightened because we have mastered the vocabulary of a diversity training seminar.

The fashionable historical narrative is equally childish: civilization divided neatly into oppressors and oppressed, with moral virtue attaching itself automatically to whichever population happened to lose the most recent war. Human history is not a morality play. It is a slaughterhouse with libraries.

Empires rose and fell on every inhabited continent. Peoples conquered and were conquered. Kingdoms enslaved, traded, massacred, assimilated, intermarried, converted, rebelled, and conquered again. Aztecs tore hearts from human chests. Mongol armies left pyramids of skulls. Imperial China expanded. Arab empires expanded. African kingdoms fought and enslaved their neighbors. Japan built an empire. Europeans eventually conquered on a planetary scale because technological, naval, military, and economic circumstances gave them the capacity to do so.

This is called history. It is horrible. It is magnificent. It is tragic. It is human. Every civilization has blood on its hands. Every civilization has beauty in its ruins. Frequently the same civilization produced both before lunch.

That does not excuse atrocity. It merely rescues history from the infantile fantasy that humanity consisted of innocent peoples living peacefully beneath mango trees until the British arrived with capitalism and problematic adjectives.

Colonialism should be studied honestly. So should the civilizations that colonial powers encountered. So should what preceded colonialism, what survived it, what resisted it, what collaborated with it, and what emerged afterward. But history becomes intellectually useless when converted into a system for awarding hereditary moral credit and debt. I did not conquer anybody. Shakespeare did not colonize the Philippines. My copy of The Divine Comedy has never oppressed a peasant. Books are not guilty by association.

The tendency to treat Western civilization itself as a kind of radioactive substance is particularly absurd because the intellectual weapons used to attack “the West” are so often Western inventions: historical criticism, liberal individualism, universal human rights, anti-slavery arguments, modern feminism, socialism, postcolonial theory itself.

History has a sense of humor, sometimes an exceptionally cruel one. It is also worth noticing how closely the new moral bureaucracy resembles the old religious structures it imagines itself to have transcended. It has original sin: privilege. It has confession: “I acknowledge my positionality.” It has penance: performative allyship. It has saints and martyrs. It has heresy. It has excommunication. It has ritual language that identifies the faithful. It even has indulgences, although these are now processed through nonprofit organizations. And like every religion entering its decadent bureaucratic phase, it eventually comes for the books. That is where my political patience evaporates.

I grew up thinking liberalism meant intellectual freedom: speak, read, debate, offend, inquire, contradict, doubt. Increasingly, parts of the cultural Left appear to mean something rather different: speak, provided the approved vocabulary is used; read, provided representation is balanced; debate, provided foundational assumptions remain untouched; offend, provided the correct people are offended; doubt, provided the doubt travels in the permitted direction. That is not liberalism. That is etiquette enforced by ideology. And yes, bullshit like this pushes me further away from the contemporary Left and toward the Right. Not because I have acquired mystical reverence for every Conservative politician. God forbid. The Right has its own censorious idiots, book banners, fundamentalists, moral panics, philistines, and provincial busybodies who would happily empty half a library because a teenager encountered an uncomfortable sentence. Fuck them too. I have no interest in replacing the commissar with the church lady. The principle remains the same: Keep your politics off my books.

But the peculiar betrayal of contemporary progressivism is that the Left once claimed intellectual liberation as part of its inheritance. It opposed censorship. It mocked bourgeois prudery. It defended transgression, obscenity, experimental art, sexual freedom, dangerous ideas. Now portions of it behave like Victorian matrons armed with sociology degrees. One wrong word and everyone reaches for the smelling salts. The new puritanism has rainbow stationery. The new church ladies have pronouns in their bios. The new censors call censorship “harm reduction.” What a fucking joke.

Art cannot flourish permanently beneath moral supervision. Neither can thought. A civilization frightened of offensive books will eventually become incapable of producing interesting ones.

The great canonical writers were rarely well-behaved. They were obsessive, cruel, lustful, arrogant, neurotic, reactionary, radical, intoxicated, devout, atheist, misanthropic, contradictory. Some held views so grotesquely incompatible with contemporary sensibilities that a modern publishing house would require three sensitivity readers, two publicists, a crisis-management team, and probably an exorcist. Good. I do not read literature in search of human-resource compliance. I want genius, not good citizenship. And I especially reject the suggestion that my being trans somehow imposes an ideological debt upon me.

This expectation is itself a form of prejudice, although an unfashionable one to acknowledge. It assumes that people who share an identity must share politics. It treats minorities not as individuals but as electoral property. Depart from the approved position and confusion follows.

“How can you be trans and think that?” Very easily.

If living outside conventional expectations has taught me anything, it is that one should be suspicious of anybody demanding conformity while promising liberation. I did not go through the trouble of becoming myself merely to become somebody else’s demographic mascot. My identity is not a political subscription service. My existence does not come bundled with mandatory opinions. And my bookshelf certainly does not.

This is one reason contemporary progressivism increasingly repels me despite the identity category into which strangers might automatically place me. I am tired of politics that assumes demographic identity determines intellectual obligation. I am tired of the insinuation that because I am trans I must think certain things, use certain terminology, admire certain causes, despise certain people, and subscribe wholesale to an ideological package assembled by activists I do not have the slightest ounce of respect.

Literature is supposed to expose you to dangerous minds. Wicked minds. Brilliant minds. Wrong minds. Alien minds. People separated from you by oceans, centuries, religions, languages, classes, civilizations, and moral universes.

I do not need any author to resemble me. If literature existed merely to provide mirrors, reading would become unbearably narcissistic. Sure, sometimes I want a mirror. Sometimes I want a window. Sometimes I want someone to drag me by the hair into a world whose assumptions I despise. That friction is part of the education.

The increasing moralization of reading therefore bothers me not merely because it is silly but because it attacks something fundamental: the sovereignty of private judgment: “You should read this instead of that. You need to interrogate this. Decenter these voices. Center those voices. Do the work.”

Must I? I thought I was reading books, not accepting party instructions.

First came the endless quarrels over permitted vocabulary, mandatory terminology, approved labels, forbidden phrases, prescribed gender-neutral nouns, and the politics supposedly concealed within ordinary speech. Now even the quiet act of sitting in a chair with a novel attracts ideological scrutiny.

There is something glaringly totalitarian in the impulse, even when the people exercising it believe themselves benevolent: the conviction that no private corner of human life should remain politically innocent. Everything must signify. Everything must declare allegiance. Everything must be interpreted through power. Everything must be corrected. No, thank you. And fuck off. Sometimes a bookshelf is simply a bookshelf. Mine, incidentally, contains plenty of dead white men. I hope it will eventually contain even more. It also contains writers from everywhere else. But the organizing principle will remain stubbornly reactionary: great books I want to read. What a scandalous concept. The bookshelf is not a model United Nations. No author, black or white, dead or alive, has a human right to fifteen centimeters of shelf space.

A personal library is an autobiography of appetite. It records curiosity, prejudice, discovery, admiration, boredom, obsession, intellectual humiliation, bad purchases, magnificent accidents. Here is the book I adored. Here is the bastard that took me three weeks. Here is the novel everybody praised that bored me senseless. Here is a writer I expected to hate, but ended up liking. Here is a philosopher who changed my way of thinking. Here is an author whose politics disgust me and whose prose I would crawl across broken glass to endure. That chaos is intellectual life. A library should reveal the shape of a mind, not the composition of a census district.

I will read Filipino writers when I want to read Filipino writers. I will read Africans, Japanese, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Latin Americans, Russians, Americans, Europeans. Women, men, gays, lesbians, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, conservatives, monarchists, libertines, revolutionaries, reactionaries, lunatics, saints, sinners. And I will read dead white men until the shelves collapse. Not because they are dead white men who are deemed canonical. Because some of them were fucking magnificent. No slogan changes that. No curriculum committee repeals it. No diversity initiative can make Shakespeare mediocre by decree. No fashionable theory can render Homer obsolete.

The Western Canon may be questioned, revised, enlarged, argued with, mocked, supplemented, rediscovered. Excellent. Argument is civilization. But I will not participate in the ludicrous ritual of treating Western civilization as cultural toxic waste. The West produced empire, slavery, fanaticism, war, exploitation, hypocrisy, and oceans of blood. It also produced Socrates, Plato, the Parthenon, Roman law, Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance paintings, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the Enlightenment, modern science, constitutional government, capitalism, liberalism, the modern novel, and intellectual traditions that made it possible to criticize Western civilization with extraordinary freedom. Civilizations are amoral. They are vast accumulations of achievement and horror.

Maturity consists partly in being able to hold both facts in one’s head without requiring one to cancel the other. I refuse to hate beauty because its creators were imperfect. I refuse to abandon genius because history was brutal. I refuse to pretend that civilization can be purified retroactively according to the moral fashions of 2026. And I certainly refuse to allow activists, academics, ideologues, politicians, clerics, progressives, or any other species of cultural Marxism to tell me what moral meaning attaches to the books sitting in my house.

The Western Canon will survive “decolonization” campaigns for the simple reason that genuinely great literature is exceptionally difficult to kill. Academic fashions come and go with almost comic regularity. Yesterday’s indispensable theoretical apparatus becomes tomorrow’s intellectual embarrassment. Jargon ages faster than milk. Homer remains. Shakespeare remains. Dante remains. Perhaps that durability itself irritates people. The dead are inconveniently difficult to cancel.

So decolonize your bookshelf if you wish. Colonize it. Recolonize it. Arrange it alphabetically, chronologically. Arrange it by genre. Arrange it by the authors’ skin color like some aesthetically deranged Instagrammer. Read nothing but black lesbian women for a year. Read nothing but queer literature. Spend six months with the deconstructionists and post-structuralists. Become temporarily obsessed with African-American literature. Read the Bible beside Nietzsche, Marx beside Hayek, Freud beside the people who dismantled Freud, Foucault beside anybody capable of writing a clear sentence. Hunt for every lesser-known Penguin Modern Classic you can afford until your floorboards begin making ominous sounds. But choose for yourself. That is the principle worth defending.

My personal library is not an ideological display cabinet. It is a record of curiosity, preference, prejudice, discovery, admiration, boredom, obsession, bad purchases, magnificent accidents, and the long education of one autonomous, autodidact mind. Nobody gets to decolonize that for me.

My bookshelves will remain gloriously colonized by everybody: Greek poets, Russian lunatics, English spinsters, French libertines, Japanese aesthetes, Filipino revolutionaries, German pessimists, American drunks, Indian epic poets, dead aristocrats, living misfits. No quotas. No purity tests. No diversity clipboard. No moral accounting department. Only the oldest and most dangerous criterion in literature: Is it any fucking good? If yes, put it on the shelf.

And if somebody objects because the author possesses the wrong skin color, nationality, sex, politics, century, civilization, or position within the fashionable hierarchy of oppression, there remains a perfectly concise piece of literary criticism suitable for the occasion:

Fuck off. I’m reading.

Now excuse me. I have more Great White Authors to read and reread.

Decolonize This: Keep Your Woke Politics Off My Bookshelves

“Decolonize your bookshelves.”

Every time I encounter this idiotic phrase, I feel compelled to buy more books by dead white European writers. Or I could simply revisit the ones already colonizing my shelves, those stubborn monuments to literary excellence that have somehow survived without diversity consultants. Apparently my humble home library has been problematic for years without bothering to inform me.

Not merely dead or white. Preferably male, and straight. Preferably from a civilization that built cathedrals, waged several inadvisable wars, pillaged colonies of naked savages, invented something magnificent, and left behind thousands of pages of difficult, glorious prose. Perhaps more limited editions of Shakespeare, Dante, Montaigne. Maybe I shall finally acquire that obscenely expensive hardcover edition of Virgil I have been eyeing. If I am feeling particularly colonial, I might add Heart of Darkness or Robinson Crusoe or Mein Kampf, which are all due for a good reread.

Give me Chaucer. Give me Proust. Give me Miguel de Cervantes. Give me more of Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, John Milton, Dostoevsky. Stack them obscenely high. Let the shelves groan beneath the accumulated weight of Western civilization until some diversity consultant arrives with a clipboard and suffers cardiac arrest.

Because what in the DEI fuckery is “decolonize your bookshelves” supposed to mean?

There is a peculiar comedy to contemporary progressivism. A movement that never tires of announcing its opposition to policing has developed an extraordinary appetite for becoming the police. The vocabulary police. The pronoun police. The representation police. The cultural-appropriation police. The sensitivity-reader constabulary. And now, apparently, the bookshelf police.

You’d expect the knock at the door any day now. “Good evening, citizen. We have received reports that your Russian literature section is disproportionately male.”

I confess. Take me away.

Somewhere along the way, reading, that most private and gloriously antisocial of activities, became yet another territory apparently requiring ideological supervision. It is no longer enough simply to read a book, enjoy it, hate it, argue with it, throw it across the room, underline half of it, scribble manic marginalia all over its pages, or abandon it after eighty pages because life is short and the prose is unbearable. No. Now you must apparently “interrogate” the racial composition of your shelves, audit the geographic provenance of your authors, examine whether your reading habits reproduce structures of imperial domination, and presumably submit your whole fucking collection for inspection by the Ministry of Virtuous Consumption.

GTFO. My bookshelves are not a parliamentary body. They do not require proportional representation.

I am Filipino. I live in the Philippines. I also am a transgendered individual, which, according to the increasingly ludicrous assumptions of contemporary political tribalism, ought to place me comfortably within the cultural Left. I should presumably be nodding obediently whenever someone says “decolonize,” “center marginalized voices,” “deconstruct,” or whatever other jargon has escaped from some Democrat-run university in the US and infected ordinary speech all around the world this week. Being Filipino and trans, according to the primitive identity astrology of identity politics, should determine approximately ninety percent of my opinions. They do not. And this bewilders people.

Filipino? Colonized subject. Trans? Progressive constituency. Woman? Feminist bloc. Minority? Presumed marginalized, disenfranchised, oppressed, and therefore should be Left-leaning. You need only feed the demographic information into the ideological machine and out comes the approved worldview, preassembled and ready for installation.

Unfortunately, I appear to have malfunctioned.

I transitioned my gender, not my capacity for independent thought and critical thinking.

Nothing about being trans requires me to pretend that Judith Butler is more important than Shakespeare. Nothing about being Filipino compels me to regard Europe and the USA as some vast cultural crime scene from which all intellectual contraband must be confiscated. Nothing about my personhood requires me to genuflect before every fashionable slogan containing the words “decolonize,” “problematize,” “center,” “decenter,” “interrogate,” or that most ominous verb in the activist lexicon, “unlearn.”

I have spent too much of my life trying to learn things to be impressed by people commanding me to unlearn them. Dear ideological census-takers: I am not a demographic marionette.

Being trans does not obligate me to subscribe to an entire political catechism. Neither does living in a formerly colonized country require me to regard Western civilization with suspicion, resentment, or theatrical guilt. I am perfectly capable of recognizing the brutality of colonialism without pretending that Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Montaigne, Milton, Goethe, Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, and the rest must now stand trial because history contains conquest.

History contains conquest everywhere.

If I had to purify my reading according to the bloodstained histories of civilizations, I would eventually be left reading the back of a cereal box. And even then some libtard wokester would undoubtedly inform me that breakfast cereal participates in capitalism.

The phrase “decolonize your bookshelves” does contain a legitimate observation buried beneath several geological layers of fashionable bullshit: the literary world is larger than Europe and North America. Of course it is. Asia existed before social media discovered it. Africa had civilizations before diversity officers began putting maps of it into PowerPoint presentations.

The Arabs wrote philosophy, mathematics, history, medicine, and poetry while large portions of Europe were busy stabbing one another with farming implements. India possesses literary and philosophical traditions older than many European nations. China produced philosophy, poetry, historiography, political thought, painting, and criticism on a scale that makes much contemporary book discourse look like the intellectual equivalent of finger painting. Japan gave the world The Tale of Genji while vast regions of the modern literary world had not yet conceived of anything resembling the novel.

Read all of it. Read Africans. Read Indians. Read Chinese and Japanese writers. Read Arabs and Persians. Read Latin Americans. Read Southeast Asians. Read ancient epics, modern novels, obscure poetry, sacred texts, dirty stories, philosophical treatises, revolutionary pamphlets.

But read them because they are good. That distinction matters. Read them because they disturb you, delight you, educate you, seduce you, offend you, enrage you, enlarge you. Read them because a passage makes you put the book down and stare at the wall. Read them because their characters follow you into sleep. Read them because something inside the work reaches across geography and across centuries and seizes you by the throat.

Do not read them because someone handed you a moral spreadsheet. There is an enormous difference between expanding the consciousness and balancing an ideological ledger. One is education. The other is Human Resources with footnotes.

The instant literature becomes demographic bookkeeping, art is degraded into sociology. The writer becomes a specimen. The reader becomes a census worker. A Nigerian novelist is no longer simply a novelist but “an African voice.” A Japanese writer becomes “Asian representation.” A gay author is processed through sexuality. A woman becomes feminist studies. A Filipino becomes postcolonial testimony. Everything individual, eccentric, monstrous, brilliant, contradictory, aesthetically strange, or gloriously cosmic gets flattened beneath the great bureaucratic steamroller of identity.

This is supposedly “respect.” It strikes me as condescension wearing expensive glasses.

This is where the whole enterprise becomes ridiculous. The moment literature is reduced to demographic bookkeeping, reading ceases to be an encounter with minds and becomes another diversity exercise. The author stops being an artist and becomes a representative specimen. The reader stops asking, “Is this beautiful? Is this good? Is this consciousness-expanding?” and begins asking whether the appropriate identity boxes have been ticked.

What an insult to literature. And, quite frankly, what an insult to non-Western writers.

Imagine being told that somebody selected your novel not primarily because of its prose, imagination, philosophical power, humor, psychological insight, or narrative brilliance, but because his or her reading list was suffering from an unacceptable melanin deficit. How flattering. Nothing says respect quite like turning writers into diversity decorations.

If I were a novelist, I would be insulted if somebody read me because I was trans. Read me because I wrote something worth reading. Despise me because I wrote something worth despising. Argue with me. Laugh at me. Underline me. Throw the book across the room. But spare me the indignity of being consumed like an ethically sourced vegetable because somebody’s reading list needed another minority. Tokenism did not become noble merely because some Left-leaning cultural Marxist English professors gave it better vocabulary.

I’d rather read a brilliant Nigerian novelist because the novelist is brilliant than because somebody told me my bookshelf contained too many white Europeans. I’d rather encounter Japanese literature through curiosity than obligation. I’d rather discover a transgender writer because something about the work seized me than because I was instructed that supporting “my own” literature constitutes some civic or ethnic duty. Books deserve better than this. Readers deserve better too.

Reducing creators to their demographic coordinates is profoundly anti-art. Great artists are not representatives of categories. Quite often they are traitors to categories. They embarrass their nations, insult their classes, betray the expectations of their sex, contradict their politics, scandalize their contemporaries, and occasionally make complete fools of their admirers. That is why they are interesting. Great art is unruly. It refuses to behave. It does not sit politely beneath a placard saying QUEER FILIPINO VOICES or POSTCOLONIAL WOMEN’S NARRATIVES like a museum artifact awaiting institutional approval. Great literature bites. It seduces. It blasphemes. It contradicts itself. It travels illegally across cultures and across centuries.

Homer belongs to me as much as he belongs to Greece. Dante belongs to a Japanese atheist. Confucius belongs to an Irish Catholic. Dostoevsky belongs to an African Muslim. James Joyce belongs to anyone who has the patience to read him. Civilization advances precisely because human beings steal intellectual fire from one another. That is culture. The alternative is cultural segregation with politically correct branding.

The Canon is not sacred scripture. Of course it can expand. It has expanded. It will continue expanding. That is what a living civilization does. Literary judgment is neither frozen nor infallible. But expansion is not demolition. And appreciation is not a zero-sum game.

Reading Toni Morrison does not require burning Faulkner. Reading Achebe does not necessitate apologizing for Conrad. Reading Murasaki does not oblige me to remove Austen from the shelf. I can read Nick Joaquin in the morning and Montaigne at night without suffering ideological contamination.

One of the supreme pleasures of serious reading is precisely this promiscuity of the mind. You, the reader, owe allegiance to nobody. The Western Canon has become particularly offensive to the bureaucratic imagination because it is stubbornly unequal. It is hierarchical. Some works really are better than others. Some writers really are greater than others. Some books contain depths that ten thousand respectable novels do not.

This is intolerable to a culture increasingly uncomfortable with hierarchy except when disguised as morality. They pretend that all judgments of greatness are merely exercises of power because admitting that greatness exists means confronting standards that cannot be democratized by administrative decree.

Shakespeare is not merely one “voice” among many. He is Shakespeare. The Shakespearean plays contain an almost terrifying range of human consciousness. Kings, drunks, fools, murderers, lovers, tyrants, cowards, soldiers, virgins, schemers, clowns, grieving fathers, ambitious wives, melancholy princes. Four centuries later, humanity is still rummaging through them looking for its soul. Dante is not important because medieval Italian men require representation. Homer is not assigned because ancient Greek masculinity deserves greater visibility. Austen is not valuable because Regency-era white women finally got a seat at the table. Dostoevsky does not survive because nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox neurotics constitute an underserved demographic. These formulations sound ridiculous because they are ridiculous. The works exceeded their authors’ demographics. That is precisely why they survived.

The Western Canon, for all the fashionable sneering directed at the very phrase, did not emerge because white men gathered secretly in a candlelit basement and conspired to ruin future diversity initiatives. Many canonical works survived because generation after generation found them inexhaustible. This is why I find the attack on the Western Canon so tedious. The Canon is not sacred scripture. It is not infallible. It is not finished. It has changed before and will change again. Forgotten writers are rediscovered. Neglected works are restored. New books, at rare times, enter the conversation. Most others quietly and unceremoniously descend into deserved oblivion.

Shakespeare persists because Shakespeare is fucking good. Dante persists because seven centuries later people are still descending into Hell with him. Homer persists because Achilles still rages. Dostoevsky persists because human beings continue to torment themselves with guilt, pride, faith, freedom, resentment, murder, and God. Austen persists because vanity and stupidity remain renewable resources.

These writers are not great because they are Western. They are great because their works have demonstrated an almost indecent capacity to survive interpretation, revolution, war, cultural transformation, political fashion, and academic assault. Fashion expires. Jargon goes stale. Homer remains. And perhaps that durability itself is offensive to people who imagine that history began five minutes after they learned the word “intersectional.” Great literature performs the miracle that identity politics, for all its rhetoric about empathy, continually risks undermining: it allows one consciousness to enter another without requiring demographic permission.

I have never been a Russian murderer tormented by metaphysics, yet Dostoevsky still speaks to me. I have never been an aging English butler embalmed in emotional repression, yet Ishiguro can still devastate me. I have never wandered through medieval Hell guided by Virgil. Yet Dante remains imaginable. I have never hunted a white whale, ruled Denmark, fought at Troy, attended a nineteenth-century English marriage market, or discovered that my father had been murdered by my uncle. Thank God literature does not require lived experience. Otherwise we would all be condemned to autobiographical narcissism.

Perhaps this is my deepest objection to the ideological colonization of reading: it shrinks literature while pretending to expand it. Find your identity. Find your representation. Find your community. See yourself. Center yourself. Your race. Your gender. Your sexuality. Your nation. Your trauma. Your marginalization. Your perspective. What suffocating provincialism.

The entire point of literature is that for several hundred pages I do not have to be myself. I am already myself all fucking day. Give me someone else. Give me a medieval monk, a Roman emperor, an adulterous Russian aristocrat, a Japanese court lady, a mad king, a murderer, a slave, an aristocrat, a saint, a nihilist, a peasant, a whaler, a prostitute, a philosopher. Give me people whose moral assumptions horrify me. Give me civilizations whose gods I do not worship. Give me writers who would have considered my existence incomprehensible. Especially them. Reading should not be ideological comfort food.

The dead are valuable partly because they do not know our commandments. Their alienness is the point. They arrive from moral universes that cannot be reconstructed according to contemporary sensitivities without destroying the very historical distance that makes them worth encountering. Their ignorance liberates them. They are also wonderfully difficult to cancel because they are already dead. This is one of the great advantages of the dead. They cannot issue apologies. No publicist can force Aristotle to post a Notes App statement. Dante will not be attending sensitivity training. Tolstoy cannot be summoned before the Diversity Committee. Homer has no social-media accounts to delete. Catullus will not be revising his language after feedback from the community. The dead remain gloriously unmanageable.

And what astonishing arrogance it takes for every generation of comfortable moderns to imagine itself morally superior to the entirety of the past. We sit surrounded by technologies we did not invent, institutions we inherited, languages shaped by the dead, artistic forms refined over millennia, and then announce ourselves enlightened because we have mastered the vocabulary of a diversity training seminar.

The fashionable historical narrative is equally childish: civilization divided neatly into oppressors and oppressed, with moral virtue attaching itself automatically to whichever population happened to lose the most recent war. Human history is not a morality play. It is a slaughterhouse with libraries.

Empires rose and fell on every inhabited continent. Peoples conquered and were conquered. Kingdoms enslaved, traded, massacred, assimilated, intermarried, converted, rebelled, and conquered again. Aztecs tore hearts from human chests. Mongol armies left pyramids of skulls. Imperial China expanded. Arab empires expanded. African kingdoms fought and enslaved their neighbors. Japan built an empire. Europeans eventually conquered on a planetary scale because technological, naval, military, and economic circumstances gave them the capacity to do so.

This is called history. It is horrible. It is magnificent. It is tragic. It is human. Every civilization has blood on its hands. Every civilization has beauty in its ruins. Frequently the same civilization produced both before lunch.

That does not excuse atrocity. It merely rescues history from the infantile fantasy that humanity consisted of innocent peoples living peacefully beneath mango trees until the British arrived with capitalism and problematic adjectives.

Colonialism should be studied honestly. So should the civilizations that colonial powers encountered. So should what preceded colonialism, what survived it, what resisted it, what collaborated with it, and what emerged afterward. But history becomes intellectually useless when converted into a system for awarding hereditary moral credit and debt. I did not conquer anybody. Shakespeare did not colonize the Philippines. My copy of The Divine Comedy has never oppressed a peasant. Books are not guilty by association.

The tendency to treat Western civilization itself as a kind of radioactive substance is particularly absurd because the intellectual weapons used to attack “the West” are so often Western inventions: historical criticism, liberal individualism, universal human rights, anti-slavery arguments, modern feminism, socialism, postcolonial theory itself.

History has a sense of humor, sometimes an exceptionally cruel one. It is also worth noticing how closely the new moral bureaucracy resembles the old religious structures it imagines itself to have transcended. It has original sin: privilege. It has confession: “I acknowledge my positionality.” It has penance: performative allyship. It has saints and martyrs. It has heresy. It has excommunication. It has ritual language that identifies the faithful. It even has indulgences, although these are now processed through nonprofit organizations. And like every religion entering its decadent bureaucratic phase, it eventually comes for the books. That is where my political patience evaporates.

I grew up thinking liberalism meant intellectual freedom: speak, read, debate, offend, inquire, contradict, doubt. Increasingly, parts of the cultural Left appear to mean something rather different: speak, provided the approved vocabulary is used; read, provided representation is balanced; debate, provided foundational assumptions remain untouched; offend, provided the correct people are offended; doubt, provided the doubt travels in the permitted direction. That is not liberalism. That is etiquette enforced by ideology. And yes, bullshit like this pushes me further away from the contemporary Left and toward the Right. Not because I have acquired mystical reverence for every Conservative politician. God forbid. The Right has its own censorious idiots, book banners, fundamentalists, moral panics, philistines, and provincial busybodies who would happily empty half a library because a teenager encountered an uncomfortable sentence. Fuck them too. I have no interest in replacing the commissar with the church lady. The principle remains the same: Keep your politics off my books.

But the peculiar betrayal of contemporary progressivism is that the Left once claimed intellectual liberation as part of its inheritance. It opposed censorship. It mocked bourgeois prudery. It defended transgression, obscenity, experimental art, sexual freedom, dangerous ideas. Now portions of it behave like Victorian matrons armed with sociology degrees. One wrong word and everyone reaches for the smelling salts. The new puritanism has rainbow stationery. The new church ladies have pronouns in their bios. The new censors call censorship “harm reduction.” What a fucking joke.

Art cannot flourish permanently beneath moral supervision. Neither can thought. A civilization frightened of offensive books will eventually become incapable of producing interesting ones.

The great canonical writers were rarely well-behaved. They were obsessive, cruel, lustful, arrogant, neurotic, reactionary, radical, intoxicated, devout, atheist, misanthropic, contradictory. Some held views so grotesquely incompatible with contemporary sensibilities that a modern publishing house would require three sensitivity readers, two publicists, a crisis-management team, and probably an exorcist. Good. I do not read literature in search of human-resource compliance. I want genius, not good citizenship. And I especially reject the suggestion that my being trans somehow imposes an ideological debt upon me.

This expectation is itself a form of prejudice, although an unfashionable one to acknowledge. It assumes that people who share an identity must share politics. It treats minorities not as individuals but as electoral property. Depart from the approved position and confusion follows.

“How can you be trans and think that?” Very easily.

If living outside conventional expectations has taught me anything, it is that one should be suspicious of anybody demanding conformity while promising liberation. I did not go through the trouble of becoming myself merely to become somebody else’s demographic mascot. My identity is not a political subscription service. My existence does not come bundled with mandatory opinions. And my bookshelf certainly does not.

This is one reason contemporary progressivism increasingly repels me despite the identity category into which strangers might automatically place me. I am tired of politics that assumes demographic identity determines intellectual obligation. I am tired of the insinuation that because I am trans I must think certain things, use certain terminology, admire certain causes, despise certain people, and subscribe wholesale to an ideological package assembled by activists I do not have the slightest ounce of respect.

Literature is supposed to expose you to dangerous minds. Wicked minds. Brilliant minds. Wrong minds. Alien minds. People separated from you by oceans, centuries, religions, languages, classes, civilizations, and moral universes.

I do not need any author to resemble me. If literature existed merely to provide mirrors, reading would become unbearably narcissistic. Sure, sometimes I want a mirror. Sometimes I want a window. Sometimes I want someone to drag me by the hair into a world whose assumptions I despise. That friction is part of the education.

The increasing moralization of reading therefore bothers me not merely because it is silly but because it attacks something fundamental: the sovereignty of private judgment: “You should read this instead of that. You need to interrogate this. Decenter these voices. Center those voices. Do the work.”

Must I? I thought I was reading books, not accepting party instructions.

First came the endless quarrels over permitted vocabulary, mandatory terminology, approved labels, forbidden phrases, prescribed gender-neutral nouns, and the politics supposedly concealed within ordinary speech. Now even the quiet act of sitting in a chair with a novel attracts ideological scrutiny.

There is something glaringly totalitarian in the impulse, even when the people exercising it believe themselves benevolent: the conviction that no private corner of human life should remain politically innocent. Everything must signify. Everything must declare allegiance. Everything must be interpreted through power. Everything must be corrected. No, thank you. And fuck off. Sometimes a bookshelf is simply a bookshelf. Mine, incidentally, contains plenty of dead white men. I hope it will eventually contain even more. It also contains writers from everywhere else. But the organizing principle will remain stubbornly reactionary: great books I want to read. What a scandalous concept. The bookshelf is not a model United Nations. No author, black or white, dead or alive, has a human right to fifteen centimeters of shelf space.

A personal library is an autobiography of appetite. It records curiosity, prejudice, discovery, admiration, boredom, obsession, intellectual humiliation, bad purchases, magnificent accidents. Here is the book I adored. Here is the bastard that took me three weeks. Here is the novel everybody praised that bored me senseless. Here is a writer I expected to hate, but ended up liking. Here is a philosopher who changed my way of thinking. Here is an author whose politics disgust me and whose prose I would crawl across broken glass to endure. That chaos is intellectual life. A library should reveal the shape of a mind, not the composition of a census district.

I will read Filipino writers when I want to read Filipino writers. I will read Africans, Japanese, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Latin Americans, Russians, Americans, Europeans. Women, men, gays, lesbians, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, conservatives, monarchists, libertines, revolutionaries, reactionaries, lunatics, saints, sinners. And I will read dead white men until the shelves collapse. Not because they are dead white men who are deemed canonical. Because some of them were fucking magnificent. No slogan changes that. No curriculum committee repeals it. No diversity initiative can make Shakespeare mediocre by decree. No fashionable theory can render Homer obsolete.

The Western Canon may be questioned, revised, enlarged, argued with, mocked, supplemented, rediscovered. Excellent. Argument is civilization. But I will not participate in the ludicrous ritual of treating Western civilization as cultural toxic waste. The West produced empire, slavery, fanaticism, war, exploitation, hypocrisy, and oceans of blood. It also produced Socrates, Plato, the Parthenon, Roman law, Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance paintings, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the Enlightenment, modern science, constitutional government, capitalism, liberalism, the modern novel, and intellectual traditions that made it possible to criticize Western civilization with extraordinary freedom. Civilizations are amoral. They are vast accumulations of achievement and horror.

Maturity consists partly in being able to hold both facts in one’s head without requiring one to cancel the other. I refuse to hate beauty because its creators were imperfect. I refuse to abandon genius because history was brutal. I refuse to pretend that civilization can be purified retroactively according to the moral fashions of 2026. And I certainly refuse to allow activists, academics, ideologues, politicians, clerics, progressives, or any other species of cultural Marxism to tell me what moral meaning attaches to the books sitting in my house.

The Western Canon will survive “decolonization” campaigns for the simple reason that genuinely great literature is exceptionally difficult to kill. Academic fashions come and go with almost comic regularity. Yesterday’s indispensable theoretical apparatus becomes tomorrow’s intellectual embarrassment. Jargon ages faster than milk. Homer remains. Shakespeare remains. Dante remains. Perhaps that durability itself irritates people. The dead are inconveniently difficult to cancel.

So decolonize your bookshelf if you wish. Colonize it. Recolonize it. Arrange it alphabetically, chronologically. Arrange it by genre. Arrange it by the authors’ skin color like some aesthetically deranged Instagrammer. Read nothing but black lesbian women for a year. Read nothing but queer literature. Spend six months with the deconstructionists and post-structuralists. Become temporarily obsessed with African-American literature. Read the Bible beside Nietzsche, Marx beside Hayek, Freud beside the people who dismantled Freud, Foucault beside anybody capable of writing a clear sentence. Hunt for every lesser-known Penguin Modern Classic you can afford until your floorboards begin making ominous sounds. But choose for yourself. That is the principle worth defending.

My personal library is not an ideological display cabinet. It is a record of curiosity, preference, prejudice, discovery, admiration, boredom, obsession, bad purchases, magnificent accidents, and the long education of one autonomous, autodidact mind. Nobody gets to decolonize that for me.

My bookshelves will remain gloriously colonized by everybody: Greek poets, Russian lunatics, English spinsters, French libertines, Japanese aesthetes, Filipino revolutionaries, German pessimists, American drunks, Indian epic poets, dead aristocrats, living misfits. No quotas. No purity tests. No diversity clipboard. No moral accounting department. Only the oldest and most dangerous criterion in literature: Is it any fucking good? If yes, put it on the shelf.

And if somebody objects because the author possesses the wrong skin color, nationality, sex, politics, century, civilization, or position within the fashionable hierarchy of oppression, there remains a perfectly concise piece of literary criticism suitable for the occasion:

Fuck off. I’m reading.

Now excuse me. I have more Great White Authors to read and reread.

Decolonize This: Keep Your Woke Politics Off My Bookshelves

“Decolonize your bookshelves.”

Every time I encounter this idiotic phrase, I feel compelled to buy more books by dead white European writers. Or I could simply revisit the ones already colonizing my shelves, those stubborn monuments to literary excellence that have somehow survived without diversity consultants. Apparently my humble home library has been problematic for years without bothering to inform me.

Not merely dead or white. Preferably male, and straight. Preferably from a civilization that built cathedrals, waged several inadvisable wars, pillaged colonies of naked savages, invented something magnificent, and left behind thousands of pages of difficult, glorious prose. Perhaps more limited editions of Shakespeare, Dante, Montaigne. Maybe I shall finally acquire that obscenely expensive hardcover edition of Virgil I have been eyeing. If I am feeling particularly colonial, I might add Heart of Darkness or Robinson Crusoe or Mein Kampf, which are all due for a good reread.

Give me Chaucer. Give me Proust. Give me Miguel de Cervantes. Give me more of Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, John Milton, Dostoevsky. Stack them obscenely high. Let the shelves groan beneath the accumulated weight of Western civilization until some diversity consultant arrives with a clipboard and suffers cardiac arrest.

Because what in the DEI fuckery is “decolonize your bookshelves” supposed to mean?

There is a peculiar comedy to contemporary progressivism. A movement that never tires of announcing its opposition to policing has developed an extraordinary appetite for becoming the police. The vocabulary police. The pronoun police. The representation police. The cultural-appropriation police. The sensitivity-reader constabulary. And now, apparently, the bookshelf police.

You’d expect the knock at the door any day now. “Good evening, citizen. We have received reports that your Russian literature section is disproportionately male.”

I confess. Take me away.

Somewhere along the way, reading, that most private and gloriously antisocial of activities, became yet another territory apparently requiring ideological supervision. It is no longer enough simply to read a book, enjoy it, hate it, argue with it, throw it across the room, underline half of it, scribble manic marginalia all over its pages, or abandon it after eighty pages because life is short and the prose is unbearable. No. Now you must apparently “interrogate” the racial composition of your shelves, audit the geographic provenance of your authors, examine whether your reading habits reproduce structures of imperial domination, and presumably submit your whole fucking collection for inspection by the Ministry of Virtuous Consumption.

GTFO. My bookshelves are not a parliamentary body. They do not require proportional representation.

I am Filipino. I live in the Philippines. I also am a transgendered individual, which, according to the increasingly ludicrous assumptions of contemporary political tribalism, ought to place me comfortably within the cultural Left. I should presumably be nodding obediently whenever someone says “decolonize,” “center marginalized voices,” “deconstruct,” or whatever other jargon has escaped from some Democrat-run university in the US and infected ordinary speech all around the world this week. Being Filipino and trans, according to the primitive identity astrology of identity politics, should determine approximately ninety percent of my opinions. They do not. And this bewilders people.

Filipino? Colonized subject. Trans? Progressive constituency. Woman? Feminist bloc. Minority? Presumed marginalized, disenfranchised, oppressed, and therefore should be Left-leaning. You need only feed the demographic information into the ideological machine and out comes the approved worldview, preassembled and ready for installation.

Unfortunately, I appear to have malfunctioned.

I transitioned my gender, not my capacity for independent thought and critical thinking.

Nothing about being trans requires me to pretend that Judith Butler is more important than Shakespeare. Nothing about being Filipino compels me to regard Europe and the USA as some vast cultural crime scene from which all intellectual contraband must be confiscated. Nothing about my personhood requires me to genuflect before every fashionable slogan containing the words “decolonize,” “problematize,” “center,” “decenter,” “interrogate,” or that most ominous verb in the activist lexicon, “unlearn.”

I have spent too much of my life trying to learn things to be impressed by people commanding me to unlearn them. Dear ideological census-takers: I am not a demographic marionette.

Being trans does not obligate me to subscribe to an entire political catechism. Neither does living in a formerly colonized country require me to regard Western civilization with suspicion, resentment, or theatrical guilt. I am perfectly capable of recognizing the brutality of colonialism without pretending that Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Montaigne, Milton, Goethe, Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, and the rest must now stand trial because history contains conquest.

History contains conquest everywhere.

If I had to purify my reading according to the bloodstained histories of civilizations, I would eventually be left reading the back of a cereal box. And even then some libtard wokester would undoubtedly inform me that breakfast cereal participates in capitalism.

The phrase “decolonize your bookshelves” does contain a legitimate observation buried beneath several geological layers of fashionable bullshit: the literary world is larger than Europe and North America. Of course it is. Asia existed before social media discovered it. Africa had civilizations before diversity officers began putting maps of it into PowerPoint presentations.

The Arabs wrote philosophy, mathematics, history, medicine, and poetry while large portions of Europe were busy stabbing one another with farming implements. India possesses literary and philosophical traditions older than many European nations. China produced philosophy, poetry, historiography, political thought, painting, and criticism on a scale that makes much contemporary book discourse look like the intellectual equivalent of finger painting. Japan gave the world The Tale of Genji while vast regions of the modern literary world had not yet conceived of anything resembling the novel.

Read all of it. Read Africans. Read Indians. Read Chinese and Japanese writers. Read Arabs and Persians. Read Latin Americans. Read Southeast Asians. Read ancient epics, modern novels, obscure poetry, sacred texts, dirty stories, philosophical treatises, revolutionary pamphlets.

But read them because they are good. That distinction matters. Read them because they disturb you, delight you, educate you, seduce you, offend you, enrage you, enlarge you. Read them because a passage makes you put the book down and stare at the wall. Read them because their characters follow you into sleep. Read them because something inside the work reaches across geography and across centuries and seizes you by the throat.

Do not read them because someone handed you a moral spreadsheet. There is an enormous difference between expanding the consciousness and balancing an ideological ledger. One is education. The other is Human Resources with footnotes.

The instant literature becomes demographic bookkeeping, art is degraded into sociology. The writer becomes a specimen. The reader becomes a census worker. A Nigerian novelist is no longer simply a novelist but “an African voice.” A Japanese writer becomes “Asian representation.” A gay author is processed through sexuality. A woman becomes feminist studies. A Filipino becomes postcolonial testimony. Everything individual, eccentric, monstrous, brilliant, contradictory, aesthetically strange, or gloriously cosmic gets flattened beneath the great bureaucratic steamroller of identity.

This is supposedly “respect.” It strikes me as condescension wearing expensive glasses.

This is where the whole enterprise becomes ridiculous. The moment literature is reduced to demographic bookkeeping, reading ceases to be an encounter with minds and becomes another diversity exercise. The author stops being an artist and becomes a representative specimen. The reader stops asking, “Is this beautiful? Is this good? Is this consciousness-expanding?” and begins asking whether the appropriate identity boxes have been ticked.

What an insult to literature. And, quite frankly, what an insult to non-Western writers.

Imagine being told that somebody selected your novel not primarily because of its prose, imagination, philosophical power, humor, psychological insight, or narrative brilliance, but because his or her reading list was suffering from an unacceptable melanin deficit. How flattering. Nothing says respect quite like turning writers into diversity decorations.

If I were a novelist, I would be insulted if somebody read me because I was trans. Read me because I wrote something worth reading. Despise me because I wrote something worth despising. Argue with me. Laugh at me. Underline me. Throw the book across the room. But spare me the indignity of being consumed like an ethically sourced vegetable because somebody’s reading list needed another minority. Tokenism did not become noble merely because some Left-leaning cultural Marxist English professors gave it better vocabulary.

I’d rather read a brilliant Nigerian novelist because the novelist is brilliant than because somebody told me my bookshelf contained too many white Europeans. I’d rather encounter Japanese literature through curiosity than obligation. I’d rather discover a transgender writer because something about the work seized me than because I was instructed that supporting “my own” literature constitutes some civic or ethnic duty. Books deserve better than this. Readers deserve better too.

Reducing creators to their demographic coordinates is profoundly anti-art. Great artists are not representatives of categories. Quite often they are traitors to categories. They embarrass their nations, insult their classes, betray the expectations of their sex, contradict their politics, scandalize their contemporaries, and occasionally make complete fools of their admirers. That is why they are interesting. Great art is unruly. It refuses to behave. It does not sit politely beneath a placard saying QUEER FILIPINO VOICES or POSTCOLONIAL WOMEN’S NARRATIVES like a museum artifact awaiting institutional approval. Great literature bites. It seduces. It blasphemes. It contradicts itself. It travels illegally across cultures and across centuries.

Homer belongs to me as much as he belongs to Greece. Dante belongs to a Japanese atheist. Confucius belongs to an Irish Catholic. Dostoevsky belongs to an African Muslim. James Joyce belongs to anyone who has the patience to read him. Civilization advances precisely because human beings steal intellectual fire from one another. That is culture. The alternative is cultural segregation with politically correct branding.

The Canon is not sacred scripture. Of course it can expand. It has expanded. It will continue expanding. That is what a living civilization does. Literary judgment is neither frozen nor infallible. But expansion is not demolition. And appreciation is not a zero-sum game.

Reading Toni Morrison does not require burning Faulkner. Reading Achebe does not necessitate apologizing for Conrad. Reading Murasaki does not oblige me to remove Austen from the shelf. I can read Nick Joaquin in the morning and Montaigne at night without suffering ideological contamination.

One of the supreme pleasures of serious reading is precisely this promiscuity of the mind. You, the reader, owe allegiance to nobody. The Western Canon has become particularly offensive to the bureaucratic imagination because it is stubbornly unequal. It is hierarchical. Some works really are better than others. Some writers really are greater than others. Some books contain depths that ten thousand respectable novels do not.

This is intolerable to a culture increasingly uncomfortable with hierarchy except when disguised as morality. They pretend that all judgments of greatness are merely exercises of power because admitting that greatness exists means confronting standards that cannot be democratized by administrative decree.

Shakespeare is not merely one “voice” among many. He is Shakespeare. The Shakespearean plays contain an almost terrifying range of human consciousness. Kings, drunks, fools, murderers, lovers, tyrants, cowards, soldiers, virgins, schemers, clowns, grieving fathers, ambitious wives, melancholy princes. Four centuries later, humanity is still rummaging through them looking for its soul. Dante is not important because medieval Italian men require representation. Homer is not assigned because ancient Greek masculinity deserves greater visibility. Austen is not valuable because Regency-era white women finally got a seat at the table. Dostoevsky does not survive because nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox neurotics constitute an underserved demographic. These formulations sound ridiculous because they are ridiculous. The works exceeded their authors’ demographics. That is precisely why they survived.

The Western Canon, for all the fashionable sneering directed at the very phrase, did not emerge because white men gathered secretly in a candlelit basement and conspired to ruin future diversity initiatives. Many canonical works survived because generation after generation found them inexhaustible. This is why I find the attack on the Western Canon so tedious. The Canon is not sacred scripture. It is not infallible. It is not finished. It has changed before and will change again. Forgotten writers are rediscovered. Neglected works are restored. New books, at rare times, enter the conversation. Most others quietly and unceremoniously descend into deserved oblivion.

Shakespeare persists because Shakespeare is fucking good. Dante persists because seven centuries later people are still descending into Hell with him. Homer persists because Achilles still rages. Dostoevsky persists because human beings continue to torment themselves with guilt, pride, faith, freedom, resentment, murder, and God. Austen persists because vanity and stupidity remain renewable resources.

These writers are not great because they are Western. They are great because their works have demonstrated an almost indecent capacity to survive interpretation, revolution, war, cultural transformation, political fashion, and academic assault. Fashion expires. Jargon goes stale. Homer remains. And perhaps that durability itself is offensive to people who imagine that history began five minutes after they learned the word “intersectional.” Great literature performs the miracle that identity politics, for all its rhetoric about empathy, continually risks undermining: it allows one consciousness to enter another without requiring demographic permission.

I have never been a Russian murderer tormented by metaphysics, yet Dostoevsky still speaks to me. I have never been an aging English butler embalmed in emotional repression, yet Ishiguro can still devastate me. I have never wandered through medieval Hell guided by Virgil. Yet Dante remains imaginable. I have never hunted a white whale, ruled Denmark, fought at Troy, attended a nineteenth-century English marriage market, or discovered that my father had been murdered by my uncle. Thank God literature does not require lived experience. Otherwise we would all be condemned to autobiographical narcissism.

Perhaps this is my deepest objection to the ideological colonization of reading: it shrinks literature while pretending to expand it. Find your identity. Find your representation. Find your community. See yourself. Center yourself. Your race. Your gender. Your sexuality. Your nation. Your trauma. Your marginalization. Your perspective. What suffocating provincialism.

The entire point of literature is that for several hundred pages I do not have to be myself. I am already myself all fucking day. Give me someone else. Give me a medieval monk, a Roman emperor, an adulterous Russian aristocrat, a Japanese court lady, a mad king, a murderer, a slave, an aristocrat, a saint, a nihilist, a peasant, a whaler, a prostitute, a philosopher. Give me people whose moral assumptions horrify me. Give me civilizations whose gods I do not worship. Give me writers who would have considered my existence incomprehensible. Especially them. Reading should not be ideological comfort food.

The dead are valuable partly because they do not know our commandments. Their alienness is the point. They arrive from moral universes that cannot be reconstructed according to contemporary sensitivities without destroying the very historical distance that makes them worth encountering. Their ignorance liberates them. They are also wonderfully difficult to cancel because they are already dead. This is one of the great advantages of the dead. They cannot issue apologies. No publicist can force Aristotle to post a Notes App statement. Dante will not be attending sensitivity training. Tolstoy cannot be summoned before the Diversity Committee. Homer has no social-media accounts to delete. Catullus will not be revising his language after feedback from the community. The dead remain gloriously unmanageable.

And what astonishing arrogance it takes for every generation of comfortable moderns to imagine itself morally superior to the entirety of the past. We sit surrounded by technologies we did not invent, institutions we inherited, languages shaped by the dead, artistic forms refined over millennia, and then announce ourselves enlightened because we have mastered the vocabulary of a diversity training seminar.

The fashionable historical narrative is equally childish: civilization divided neatly into oppressors and oppressed, with moral virtue attaching itself automatically to whichever population happened to lose the most recent war. Human history is not a morality play. It is a slaughterhouse with libraries.

Empires rose and fell on every inhabited continent. Peoples conquered and were conquered. Kingdoms enslaved, traded, massacred, assimilated, intermarried, converted, rebelled, and conquered again. Aztecs tore hearts from human chests. Mongol armies left pyramids of skulls. Imperial China expanded. Arab empires expanded. African kingdoms fought and enslaved their neighbors. Japan built an empire. Europeans eventually conquered on a planetary scale because technological, naval, military, and economic circumstances gave them the capacity to do so.

This is called history. It is horrible. It is magnificent. It is tragic. It is human. Every civilization has blood on its hands. Every civilization has beauty in its ruins. Frequently the same civilization produced both before lunch.

That does not excuse atrocity. It merely rescues history from the infantile fantasy that humanity consisted of innocent peoples living peacefully beneath mango trees until the British arrived with capitalism and problematic adjectives.

Colonialism should be studied honestly. So should the civilizations that colonial powers encountered. So should what preceded colonialism, what survived it, what resisted it, what collaborated with it, and what emerged afterward. But history becomes intellectually useless when converted into a system for awarding hereditary moral credit and debt. I did not conquer anybody. Shakespeare did not colonize the Philippines. My copy of The Divine Comedy has never oppressed a peasant. Books are not guilty by association.

The tendency to treat Western civilization itself as a kind of radioactive substance is particularly absurd because the intellectual weapons used to attack “the West” are so often Western inventions: historical criticism, liberal individualism, universal human rights, anti-slavery arguments, modern feminism, socialism, postcolonial theory itself.

History has a sense of humor, sometimes an exceptionally cruel one. It is also worth noticing how closely the new moral bureaucracy resembles the old religious structures it imagines itself to have transcended. It has original sin: privilege. It has confession: “I acknowledge my positionality.” It has penance: performative allyship. It has saints and martyrs. It has heresy. It has excommunication. It has ritual language that identifies the faithful. It even has indulgences, although these are now processed through nonprofit organizations. And like every religion entering its decadent bureaucratic phase, it eventually comes for the books. That is where my political patience evaporates.

I grew up thinking liberalism meant intellectual freedom: speak, read, debate, offend, inquire, contradict, doubt. Increasingly, parts of the cultural Left appear to mean something rather different: speak, provided the approved vocabulary is used; read, provided representation is balanced; debate, provided foundational assumptions remain untouched; offend, provided the correct people are offended; doubt, provided the doubt travels in the permitted direction. That is not liberalism. That is etiquette enforced by ideology. And yes, bullshit like this pushes me further away from the contemporary Left and toward the Right. Not because I have acquired mystical reverence for every Conservative politician. God forbid. The Right has its own censorious idiots, book banners, fundamentalists, moral panics, philistines, and provincial busybodies who would happily empty half a library because a teenager encountered an uncomfortable sentence. Fuck them too. I have no interest in replacing the commissar with the church lady. The principle remains the same: Keep your politics off my books.

But the peculiar betrayal of contemporary progressivism is that the Left once claimed intellectual liberation as part of its inheritance. It opposed censorship. It mocked bourgeois prudery. It defended transgression, obscenity, experimental art, sexual freedom, dangerous ideas. Now portions of it behave like Victorian matrons armed with sociology degrees. One wrong word and everyone reaches for the smelling salts. The new puritanism has rainbow stationery. The new church ladies have pronouns in their bios. The new censors call censorship “harm reduction.” What a fucking joke.

Art cannot flourish permanently beneath moral supervision. Neither can thought. A civilization frightened of offensive books will eventually become incapable of producing interesting ones.

The great canonical writers were rarely well-behaved. They were obsessive, cruel, lustful, arrogant, neurotic, reactionary, radical, intoxicated, devout, atheist, misanthropic, contradictory. Some held views so grotesquely incompatible with contemporary sensibilities that a modern publishing house would require three sensitivity readers, two publicists, a crisis-management team, and probably an exorcist. Good. I do not read literature in search of human-resource compliance. I want genius, not good citizenship. And I especially reject the suggestion that my being trans somehow imposes an ideological debt upon me.

This expectation is itself a form of prejudice, although an unfashionable one to acknowledge. It assumes that people who share an identity must share politics. It treats minorities not as individuals but as electoral property. Depart from the approved position and confusion follows.

“How can you be trans and think that?” Very easily.

If living outside conventional expectations has taught me anything, it is that one should be suspicious of anybody demanding conformity while promising liberation. I did not go through the trouble of becoming myself merely to become somebody else’s demographic mascot. My identity is not a political subscription service. My existence does not come bundled with mandatory opinions. And my bookshelf certainly does not.

This is one reason contemporary progressivism increasingly repels me despite the identity category into which strangers might automatically place me. I am tired of politics that assumes demographic identity determines intellectual obligation. I am tired of the insinuation that because I am trans I must think certain things, use certain terminology, admire certain causes, despise certain people, and subscribe wholesale to an ideological package assembled by activists I do not have the slightest ounce of respect.

Literature is supposed to expose you to dangerous minds. Wicked minds. Brilliant minds. Wrong minds. Alien minds. People separated from you by oceans, centuries, religions, languages, classes, civilizations, and moral universes.

I do not need any author to resemble me. If literature existed merely to provide mirrors, reading would become unbearably narcissistic. Sure, sometimes I want a mirror. Sometimes I want a window. Sometimes I want someone to drag me by the hair into a world whose assumptions I despise. That friction is part of the education.

The increasing moralization of reading therefore bothers me not merely because it is silly but because it attacks something fundamental: the sovereignty of private judgment: “You should read this instead of that. You need to interrogate this. Decenter these voices. Center those voices. Do the work.”

Must I? I thought I was reading books, not accepting party instructions.

First came the endless quarrels over permitted vocabulary, mandatory terminology, approved labels, forbidden phrases, prescribed gender-neutral nouns, and the politics supposedly concealed within ordinary speech. Now even the quiet act of sitting in a chair with a novel attracts ideological scrutiny.

There is something glaringly totalitarian in the impulse, even when the people exercising it believe themselves benevolent: the conviction that no private corner of human life should remain politically innocent. Everything must signify. Everything must declare allegiance. Everything must be interpreted through power. Everything must be corrected. No, thank you. And fuck off. Sometimes a bookshelf is simply a bookshelf. Mine, incidentally, contains plenty of dead white men. I hope it will eventually contain even more. It also contains writers from everywhere else. But the organizing principle will remain stubbornly reactionary: great books I want to read. What a scandalous concept. The bookshelf is not a model United Nations. No author, black or white, dead or alive, has a human right to fifteen centimeters of shelf space.

A personal library is an autobiography of appetite. It records curiosity, prejudice, discovery, admiration, boredom, obsession, intellectual humiliation, bad purchases, magnificent accidents. Here is the book I adored. Here is the bastard that took me three weeks. Here is the novel everybody praised that bored me senseless. Here is a writer I expected to hate, but ended up liking. Here is a philosopher who changed my way of thinking. Here is an author whose politics disgust me and whose prose I would crawl across broken glass to endure. That chaos is intellectual life. A library should reveal the shape of a mind, not the composition of a census district.

I will read Filipino writers when I want to read Filipino writers. I will read Africans, Japanese, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Latin Americans, Russians, Americans, Europeans. Women, men, gays, lesbians, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, conservatives, monarchists, libertines, revolutionaries, reactionaries, lunatics, saints, sinners. And I will read dead white men until the shelves collapse. Not because they are dead white men who are deemed canonical. Because some of them were fucking magnificent. No slogan changes that. No curriculum committee repeals it. No diversity initiative can make Shakespeare mediocre by decree. No fashionable theory can render Homer obsolete.

The Western Canon may be questioned, revised, enlarged, argued with, mocked, supplemented, rediscovered. Excellent. Argument is civilization. But I will not participate in the ludicrous ritual of treating Western civilization as cultural toxic waste. The West produced empire, slavery, fanaticism, war, exploitation, hypocrisy, and oceans of blood. It also produced Socrates, Plato, the Parthenon, Roman law, Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance paintings, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the Enlightenment, modern science, constitutional government, capitalism, liberalism, the modern novel, and intellectual traditions that made it possible to criticize Western civilization with extraordinary freedom. Civilizations are amoral. They are vast accumulations of achievement and horror.

Maturity consists partly in being able to hold both facts in one’s head without requiring one to cancel the other. I refuse to hate beauty because its creators were imperfect. I refuse to abandon genius because history was brutal. I refuse to pretend that civilization can be purified retroactively according to the moral fashions of 2026. And I certainly refuse to allow activists, academics, ideologues, politicians, clerics, progressives, or any other species of cultural Marxism to tell me what moral meaning attaches to the books sitting in my house.

The Western Canon will survive “decolonization” campaigns for the simple reason that genuinely great literature is exceptionally difficult to kill. Academic fashions come and go with almost comic regularity. Yesterday’s indispensable theoretical apparatus becomes tomorrow’s intellectual embarrassment. Jargon ages faster than milk. Homer remains. Shakespeare remains. Dante remains. Perhaps that durability itself irritates people. The dead are inconveniently difficult to cancel.

So decolonize your bookshelf if you wish. Colonize it. Recolonize it. Arrange it alphabetically, chronologically. Arrange it by genre. Arrange it by the authors’ skin color like some aesthetically deranged Instagrammer. Read nothing but black lesbian women for a year. Read nothing but queer literature. Spend six months with the deconstructionists and post-structuralists. Become temporarily obsessed with African-American literature. Read the Bible beside Nietzsche, Marx beside Hayek, Freud beside the people who dismantled Freud, Foucault beside anybody capable of writing a clear sentence. Hunt for every lesser-known Penguin Modern Classic you can afford until your floorboards begin making ominous sounds. But choose for yourself. That is the principle worth defending.

My personal library is not an ideological display cabinet. It is a record of curiosity, preference, prejudice, discovery, admiration, boredom, obsession, bad purchases, magnificent accidents, and the long education of one autonomous, autodidact mind. Nobody gets to decolonize that for me.

My bookshelves will remain gloriously colonized by everybody: Greek poets, Russian lunatics, English spinsters, French libertines, Japanese aesthetes, Filipino revolutionaries, German pessimists, American drunks, Indian epic poets, dead aristocrats, living misfits. No quotas. No purity tests. No diversity clipboard. No moral accounting department. Only the oldest and most dangerous criterion in literature: Is it any fucking good? If yes, put it on the shelf.

And if somebody objects because the author possesses the wrong skin color, nationality, sex, politics, century, civilization, or position within the fashionable hierarchy of oppression, there remains a perfectly concise piece of literary criticism suitable for the occasion:

Fuck off. I’m reading.

Now excuse me. I have more Great White Authors to read and reread.

Decolonize This: Keep Your Woke Politics Off My Bookshelves

“Decolonize your bookshelves.”

Every time I encounter this idiotic phrase, I feel compelled to buy more books by dead white European writers. Or I could simply revisit the ones already colonizing my shelves, those stubborn monuments to literary excellence that have somehow survived without diversity consultants. Apparently my humble home library has been problematic for years without bothering to inform me.

Not merely dead or white. Preferably male, and straight. Preferably from a civilization that built cathedrals, waged several inadvisable wars, pillaged colonies of naked savages, invented something magnificent, and left behind thousands of pages of difficult, glorious prose. Perhaps more limited editions of Shakespeare, Dante, Montaigne. Maybe I shall finally acquire that obscenely expensive hardcover edition of Virgil I have been eyeing. If I am feeling particularly colonial, I might add Heart of Darkness or Robinson Crusoe or Mein Kampf, which are all due for a good reread.

Give me Chaucer. Give me Proust. Give me Miguel de Cervantes. Give me more of Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, John Milton, Dostoevsky. Stack them obscenely high. Let the shelves groan beneath the accumulated weight of Western civilization until some diversity consultant arrives with a clipboard and suffers cardiac arrest.

Because what in the DEI fuckery is “decolonize your bookshelves” supposed to mean?

There is a peculiar comedy to contemporary progressivism. A movement that never tires of announcing its opposition to policing has developed an extraordinary appetite for becoming the police. The vocabulary police. The pronoun police. The representation police. The cultural-appropriation police. The sensitivity-reader constabulary. And now, apparently, the bookshelf police.

You’d expect the knock at the door any day now. “Good evening, citizen. We have received reports that your Russian literature section is disproportionately male.”

I confess. Take me away.

Somewhere along the way, reading, that most private and gloriously antisocial of activities, became yet another territory apparently requiring ideological supervision. It is no longer enough simply to read a book, enjoy it, hate it, argue with it, throw it across the room, underline half of it, scribble manic marginalia all over its pages, or abandon it after eighty pages because life is short and the prose is unbearable. No. Now you must apparently “interrogate” the racial composition of your shelves, audit the geographic provenance of your authors, examine whether your reading habits reproduce structures of imperial domination, and presumably submit your whole fucking collection for inspection by the Ministry of Virtuous Consumption.

GTFO. My bookshelves are not a parliamentary body. They do not require proportional representation.

I am Filipino. I live in the Philippines. I also am a transgendered individual, which, according to the increasingly ludicrous assumptions of contemporary political tribalism, ought to place me comfortably within the cultural Left. I should presumably be nodding obediently whenever someone says “decolonize,” “center marginalized voices,” “deconstruct,” or whatever other jargon has escaped from some Democrat-run university in the US and infected ordinary speech all around the world this week. Being Filipino and trans, according to the primitive identity astrology of identity politics, should determine approximately ninety percent of my opinions. They do not. And this bewilders people.

Filipino? Colonized subject. Trans? Progressive constituency. Woman? Feminist bloc. Minority? Presumed marginalized, disenfranchised, oppressed, and therefore should be Left-leaning. You need only feed the demographic information into the ideological machine and out comes the approved worldview, preassembled and ready for installation.

Unfortunately, I appear to have malfunctioned.

I transitioned my gender, not my capacity for independent thought and critical thinking.

Nothing about being trans requires me to pretend that Judith Butler is more important than Shakespeare. Nothing about being Filipino compels me to regard Europe and the USA as some vast cultural crime scene from which all intellectual contraband must be confiscated. Nothing about my personhood requires me to genuflect before every fashionable slogan containing the words “decolonize,” “problematize,” “center,” “decenter,” “interrogate,” or that most ominous verb in the activist lexicon, “unlearn.”

I have spent too much of my life trying to learn things to be impressed by people commanding me to unlearn them. Dear ideological census-takers: I am not a demographic marionette.

Being trans does not obligate me to subscribe to an entire political catechism. Neither does living in a formerly colonized country require me to regard Western civilization with suspicion, resentment, or theatrical guilt. I am perfectly capable of recognizing the brutality of colonialism without pretending that Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Montaigne, Milton, Goethe, Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, and the rest must now stand trial because history contains conquest.

History contains conquest everywhere.

If I had to purify my reading according to the bloodstained histories of civilizations, I would eventually be left reading the back of a cereal box. And even then some libtard wokester would undoubtedly inform me that breakfast cereal participates in capitalism.

The phrase “decolonize your bookshelves” does contain a legitimate observation buried beneath several geological layers of fashionable bullshit: the literary world is larger than Europe and North America. Of course it is. Asia existed before social media discovered it. Africa had civilizations before diversity officers began putting maps of it into PowerPoint presentations.

The Arabs wrote philosophy, mathematics, history, medicine, and poetry while large portions of Europe were busy stabbing one another with farming implements. India possesses literary and philosophical traditions older than many European nations. China produced philosophy, poetry, historiography, political thought, painting, and criticism on a scale that makes much contemporary book discourse look like the intellectual equivalent of finger painting. Japan gave the world The Tale of Genji while vast regions of the modern literary world had not yet conceived of anything resembling the novel.

Read all of it. Read Africans. Read Indians. Read Chinese and Japanese writers. Read Arabs and Persians. Read Latin Americans. Read Southeast Asians. Read ancient epics, modern novels, obscure poetry, sacred texts, dirty stories, philosophical treatises, revolutionary pamphlets.

But read them because they are good. That distinction matters. Read them because they disturb you, delight you, educate you, seduce you, offend you, enrage you, enlarge you. Read them because a passage makes you put the book down and stare at the wall. Read them because their characters follow you into sleep. Read them because something inside the work reaches across geography and across centuries and seizes you by the throat.

Do not read them because someone handed you a moral spreadsheet. There is an enormous difference between expanding the consciousness and balancing an ideological ledger. One is education. The other is Human Resources with footnotes.

The instant literature becomes demographic bookkeeping, art is degraded into sociology. The writer becomes a specimen. The reader becomes a census worker. A Nigerian novelist is no longer simply a novelist but “an African voice.” A Japanese writer becomes “Asian representation.” A gay author is processed through sexuality. A woman becomes feminist studies. A Filipino becomes postcolonial testimony. Everything individual, eccentric, monstrous, brilliant, contradictory, aesthetically strange, or gloriously cosmic gets flattened beneath the great bureaucratic steamroller of identity.

This is supposedly “respect.” It strikes me as condescension wearing expensive glasses.

This is where the whole enterprise becomes ridiculous. The moment literature is reduced to demographic bookkeeping, reading ceases to be an encounter with minds and becomes another diversity exercise. The author stops being an artist and becomes a representative specimen. The reader stops asking, “Is this beautiful? Is this good? Is this consciousness-expanding?” and begins asking whether the appropriate identity boxes have been ticked.

What an insult to literature. And, quite frankly, what an insult to non-Western writers.

Imagine being told that somebody selected your novel not primarily because of its prose, imagination, philosophical power, humor, psychological insight, or narrative brilliance, but because his or her reading list was suffering from an unacceptable melanin deficit. How flattering. Nothing says respect quite like turning writers into diversity decorations.

If I were a novelist, I would be insulted if somebody read me because I was trans. Read me because I wrote something worth reading. Despise me because I wrote something worth despising. Argue with me. Laugh at me. Underline me. Throw the book across the room. But spare me the indignity of being consumed like an ethically sourced vegetable because somebody’s reading list needed another minority. Tokenism did not become noble merely because some Left-leaning cultural Marxist English professors gave it better vocabulary.

I’d rather read a brilliant Nigerian novelist because the novelist is brilliant than because somebody told me my bookshelf contained too many white Europeans. I’d rather encounter Japanese literature through curiosity than obligation. I’d rather discover a transgender writer because something about the work seized me than because I was instructed that supporting “my own” literature constitutes some civic or ethnic duty. Books deserve better than this. Readers deserve better too.

Reducing creators to their demographic coordinates is profoundly anti-art. Great artists are not representatives of categories. Quite often they are traitors to categories. They embarrass their nations, insult their classes, betray the expectations of their sex, contradict their politics, scandalize their contemporaries, and occasionally make complete fools of their admirers. That is why they are interesting. Great art is unruly. It refuses to behave. It does not sit politely beneath a placard saying QUEER FILIPINO VOICES or POSTCOLONIAL WOMEN’S NARRATIVES like a museum artifact awaiting institutional approval. Great literature bites. It seduces. It blasphemes. It contradicts itself. It travels illegally across cultures and across centuries.

Homer belongs to me as much as he belongs to Greece. Dante belongs to a Japanese atheist. Confucius belongs to an Irish Catholic. Dostoevsky belongs to an African Muslim. James Joyce belongs to anyone who has the patience to read him. Civilization advances precisely because human beings steal intellectual fire from one another. That is culture. The alternative is cultural segregation with politically correct branding.

The Canon is not sacred scripture. Of course it can expand. It has expanded. It will continue expanding. That is what a living civilization does. Literary judgment is neither frozen nor infallible. But expansion is not demolition. And appreciation is not a zero-sum game.

Reading Toni Morrison does not require burning Faulkner. Reading Achebe does not necessitate apologizing for Conrad. Reading Murasaki does not oblige me to remove Austen from the shelf. I can read Nick Joaquin in the morning and Montaigne at night without suffering ideological contamination.

One of the supreme pleasures of serious reading is precisely this promiscuity of the mind. You, the reader, owe allegiance to nobody. The Western Canon has become particularly offensive to the bureaucratic imagination because it is stubbornly unequal. It is hierarchical. Some works really are better than others. Some writers really are greater than others. Some books contain depths that ten thousand respectable novels do not.

This is intolerable to a culture increasingly uncomfortable with hierarchy except when disguised as morality. They pretend that all judgments of greatness are merely exercises of power because admitting that greatness exists means confronting standards that cannot be democratized by administrative decree.

Shakespeare is not merely one “voice” among many. He is Shakespeare. The Shakespearean plays contain an almost terrifying range of human consciousness. Kings, drunks, fools, murderers, lovers, tyrants, cowards, soldiers, virgins, schemers, clowns, grieving fathers, ambitious wives, melancholy princes. Four centuries later, humanity is still rummaging through them looking for its soul. Dante is not important because medieval Italian men require representation. Homer is not assigned because ancient Greek masculinity deserves greater visibility. Austen is not valuable because Regency-era white women finally got a seat at the table. Dostoevsky does not survive because nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox neurotics constitute an underserved demographic. These formulations sound ridiculous because they are ridiculous. The works exceeded their authors’ demographics. That is precisely why they survived.

The Western Canon, for all the fashionable sneering directed at the very phrase, did not emerge because white men gathered secretly in a candlelit basement and conspired to ruin future diversity initiatives. Many canonical works survived because generation after generation found them inexhaustible. This is why I find the attack on the Western Canon so tedious. The Canon is not sacred scripture. It is not infallible. It is not finished. It has changed before and will change again. Forgotten writers are rediscovered. Neglected works are restored. New books, at rare times, enter the conversation. Most others quietly and unceremoniously descend into deserved oblivion.

Shakespeare persists because Shakespeare is fucking good. Dante persists because seven centuries later people are still descending into Hell with him. Homer persists because Achilles still rages. Dostoevsky persists because human beings continue to torment themselves with guilt, pride, faith, freedom, resentment, murder, and God. Austen persists because vanity and stupidity remain renewable resources.

These writers are not great because they are Western. They are great because their works have demonstrated an almost indecent capacity to survive interpretation, revolution, war, cultural transformation, political fashion, and academic assault. Fashion expires. Jargon goes stale. Homer remains. And perhaps that durability itself is offensive to people who imagine that history began five minutes after they learned the word “intersectional.” Great literature performs the miracle that identity politics, for all its rhetoric about empathy, continually risks undermining: it allows one consciousness to enter another without requiring demographic permission.

I have never been a Russian murderer tormented by metaphysics, yet Dostoevsky still speaks to me. I have never been an aging English butler embalmed in emotional repression, yet Ishiguro can still devastate me. I have never wandered through medieval Hell guided by Virgil. Yet Dante remains imaginable. I have never hunted a white whale, ruled Denmark, fought at Troy, attended a nineteenth-century English marriage market, or discovered that my father had been murdered by my uncle. Thank God literature does not require lived experience. Otherwise we would all be condemned to autobiographical narcissism.

Perhaps this is my deepest objection to the ideological colonization of reading: it shrinks literature while pretending to expand it. Find your identity. Find your representation. Find your community. See yourself. Center yourself. Your race. Your gender. Your sexuality. Your nation. Your trauma. Your marginalization. Your perspective. What suffocating provincialism.

The entire point of literature is that for several hundred pages I do not have to be myself. I am already myself all fucking day. Give me someone else. Give me a medieval monk, a Roman emperor, an adulterous Russian aristocrat, a Japanese court lady, a mad king, a murderer, a slave, an aristocrat, a saint, a nihilist, a peasant, a whaler, a prostitute, a philosopher. Give me people whose moral assumptions horrify me. Give me civilizations whose gods I do not worship. Give me writers who would have considered my existence incomprehensible. Especially them. Reading should not be ideological comfort food.

The dead are valuable partly because they do not know our commandments. Their alienness is the point. They arrive from moral universes that cannot be reconstructed according to contemporary sensitivities without destroying the very historical distance that makes them worth encountering. Their ignorance liberates them. They are also wonderfully difficult to cancel because they are already dead. This is one of the great advantages of the dead. They cannot issue apologies. No publicist can force Aristotle to post a Notes App statement. Dante will not be attending sensitivity training. Tolstoy cannot be summoned before the Diversity Committee. Homer has no social-media accounts to delete. Catullus will not be revising his language after feedback from the community. The dead remain gloriously unmanageable.

And what astonishing arrogance it takes for every generation of comfortable moderns to imagine itself morally superior to the entirety of the past. We sit surrounded by technologies we did not invent, institutions we inherited, languages shaped by the dead, artistic forms refined over millennia, and then announce ourselves enlightened because we have mastered the vocabulary of a diversity training seminar.

The fashionable historical narrative is equally childish: civilization divided neatly into oppressors and oppressed, with moral virtue attaching itself automatically to whichever population happened to lose the most recent war. Human history is not a morality play. It is a slaughterhouse with libraries.

Empires rose and fell on every inhabited continent. Peoples conquered and were conquered. Kingdoms enslaved, traded, massacred, assimilated, intermarried, converted, rebelled, and conquered again. Aztecs tore hearts from human chests. Mongol armies left pyramids of skulls. Imperial China expanded. Arab empires expanded. African kingdoms fought and enslaved their neighbors. Japan built an empire. Europeans eventually conquered on a planetary scale because technological, naval, military, and economic circumstances gave them the capacity to do so.

This is called history. It is horrible. It is magnificent. It is tragic. It is human. Every civilization has blood on its hands. Every civilization has beauty in its ruins. Frequently the same civilization produced both before lunch.

That does not excuse atrocity. It merely rescues history from the infantile fantasy that humanity consisted of innocent peoples living peacefully beneath mango trees until the British arrived with capitalism and problematic adjectives.

Colonialism should be studied honestly. So should the civilizations that colonial powers encountered. So should what preceded colonialism, what survived it, what resisted it, what collaborated with it, and what emerged afterward. But history becomes intellectually useless when converted into a system for awarding hereditary moral credit and debt. I did not conquer anybody. Shakespeare did not colonize the Philippines. My copy of The Divine Comedy has never oppressed a peasant. Books are not guilty by association.

The tendency to treat Western civilization itself as a kind of radioactive substance is particularly absurd because the intellectual weapons used to attack “the West” are so often Western inventions: historical criticism, liberal individualism, universal human rights, anti-slavery arguments, modern feminism, socialism, postcolonial theory itself.

History has a sense of humor, sometimes an exceptionally cruel one. It is also worth noticing how closely the new moral bureaucracy resembles the old religious structures it imagines itself to have transcended. It has original sin: privilege. It has confession: “I acknowledge my positionality.” It has penance: performative allyship. It has saints and martyrs. It has heresy. It has excommunication. It has ritual language that identifies the faithful. It even has indulgences, although these are now processed through nonprofit organizations. And like every religion entering its decadent bureaucratic phase, it eventually comes for the books. That is where my political patience evaporates.

I grew up thinking liberalism meant intellectual freedom: speak, read, debate, offend, inquire, contradict, doubt. Increasingly, parts of the cultural Left appear to mean something rather different: speak, provided the approved vocabulary is used; read, provided representation is balanced; debate, provided foundational assumptions remain untouched; offend, provided the correct people are offended; doubt, provided the doubt travels in the permitted direction. That is not liberalism. That is etiquette enforced by ideology. And yes, bullshit like this pushes me further away from the contemporary Left and toward the Right. Not because I have acquired mystical reverence for every Conservative politician. God forbid. The Right has its own censorious idiots, book banners, fundamentalists, moral panics, philistines, and provincial busybodies who would happily empty half a library because a teenager encountered an uncomfortable sentence. Fuck them too. I have no interest in replacing the commissar with the church lady. The principle remains the same: Keep your politics off my books.

But the peculiar betrayal of contemporary progressivism is that the Left once claimed intellectual liberation as part of its inheritance. It opposed censorship. It mocked bourgeois prudery. It defended transgression, obscenity, experimental art, sexual freedom, dangerous ideas. Now portions of it behave like Victorian matrons armed with sociology degrees. One wrong word and everyone reaches for the smelling salts. The new puritanism has rainbow stationery. The new church ladies have pronouns in their bios. The new censors call censorship “harm reduction.” What a fucking joke.

Art cannot flourish permanently beneath moral supervision. Neither can thought. A civilization frightened of offensive books will eventually become incapable of producing interesting ones.

The great canonical writers were rarely well-behaved. They were obsessive, cruel, lustful, arrogant, neurotic, reactionary, radical, intoxicated, devout, atheist, misanthropic, contradictory. Some held views so grotesquely incompatible with contemporary sensibilities that a modern publishing house would require three sensitivity readers, two publicists, a crisis-management team, and probably an exorcist. Good. I do not read literature in search of human-resource compliance. I want genius, not good citizenship. And I especially reject the suggestion that my being trans somehow imposes an ideological debt upon me.

This expectation is itself a form of prejudice, although an unfashionable one to acknowledge. It assumes that people who share an identity must share politics. It treats minorities not as individuals but as electoral property. Depart from the approved position and confusion follows.

“How can you be trans and think that?” Very easily.

If living outside conventional expectations has taught me anything, it is that one should be suspicious of anybody demanding conformity while promising liberation. I did not go through the trouble of becoming myself merely to become somebody else’s demographic mascot. My identity is not a political subscription service. My existence does not come bundled with mandatory opinions. And my bookshelf certainly does not.

This is one reason contemporary progressivism increasingly repels me despite the identity category into which strangers might automatically place me. I am tired of politics that assumes demographic identity determines intellectual obligation. I am tired of the insinuation that because I am trans I must think certain things, use certain terminology, admire certain causes, despise certain people, and subscribe wholesale to an ideological package assembled by activists I do not have the slightest ounce of respect.

Literature is supposed to expose you to dangerous minds. Wicked minds. Brilliant minds. Wrong minds. Alien minds. People separated from you by oceans, centuries, religions, languages, classes, civilizations, and moral universes.

I do not need any author to resemble me. If literature existed merely to provide mirrors, reading would become unbearably narcissistic. Sure, sometimes I want a mirror. Sometimes I want a window. Sometimes I want someone to drag me by the hair into a world whose assumptions I despise. That friction is part of the education.

The increasing moralization of reading therefore bothers me not merely because it is silly but because it attacks something fundamental: the sovereignty of private judgment: “You should read this instead of that. You need to interrogate this. Decenter these voices. Center those voices. Do the work.”

Must I? I thought I was reading books, not accepting party instructions.

First came the endless quarrels over permitted vocabulary, mandatory terminology, approved labels, forbidden phrases, prescribed gender-neutral nouns, and the politics supposedly concealed within ordinary speech. Now even the quiet act of sitting in a chair with a novel attracts ideological scrutiny.

There is something glaringly totalitarian in the impulse, even when the people exercising it believe themselves benevolent: the conviction that no private corner of human life should remain politically innocent. Everything must signify. Everything must declare allegiance. Everything must be interpreted through power. Everything must be corrected. No, thank you. And fuck off. Sometimes a bookshelf is simply a bookshelf. Mine, incidentally, contains plenty of dead white men. I hope it will eventually contain even more. It also contains writers from everywhere else. But the organizing principle will remain stubbornly reactionary: great books I want to read. What a scandalous concept. The bookshelf is not a model United Nations. No author, black or white, dead or alive, has a human right to fifteen centimeters of shelf space.

A personal library is an autobiography of appetite. It records curiosity, prejudice, discovery, admiration, boredom, obsession, intellectual humiliation, bad purchases, magnificent accidents. Here is the book I adored. Here is the bastard that took me three weeks. Here is the novel everybody praised that bored me senseless. Here is a writer I expected to hate, but ended up liking. Here is a philosopher who changed my way of thinking. Here is an author whose politics disgust me and whose prose I would crawl across broken glass to endure. That chaos is intellectual life. A library should reveal the shape of a mind, not the composition of a census district.

I will read Filipino writers when I want to read Filipino writers. I will read Africans, Japanese, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Latin Americans, Russians, Americans, Europeans. Women, men, gays, lesbians, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, conservatives, monarchists, libertines, revolutionaries, reactionaries, lunatics, saints, sinners. And I will read dead white men until the shelves collapse. Not because they are dead white men who are deemed canonical. Because some of them were fucking magnificent. No slogan changes that. No curriculum committee repeals it. No diversity initiative can make Shakespeare mediocre by decree. No fashionable theory can render Homer obsolete.

The Western Canon may be questioned, revised, enlarged, argued with, mocked, supplemented, rediscovered. Excellent. Argument is civilization. But I will not participate in the ludicrous ritual of treating Western civilization as cultural toxic waste. The West produced empire, slavery, fanaticism, war, exploitation, hypocrisy, and oceans of blood. It also produced Socrates, Plato, the Parthenon, Roman law, Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance paintings, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the Enlightenment, modern science, constitutional government, capitalism, liberalism, the modern novel, and intellectual traditions that made it possible to criticize Western civilization with extraordinary freedom. Civilizations are amoral. They are vast accumulations of achievement and horror.

Maturity consists partly in being able to hold both facts in one’s head without requiring one to cancel the other. I refuse to hate beauty because its creators were imperfect. I refuse to abandon genius because history was brutal. I refuse to pretend that civilization can be purified retroactively according to the moral fashions of 2026. And I certainly refuse to allow activists, academics, ideologues, politicians, clerics, progressives, or any other species of cultural Marxism to tell me what moral meaning attaches to the books sitting in my house.

The Western Canon will survive “decolonization” campaigns for the simple reason that genuinely great literature is exceptionally difficult to kill. Academic fashions come and go with almost comic regularity. Yesterday’s indispensable theoretical apparatus becomes tomorrow’s intellectual embarrassment. Jargon ages faster than milk. Homer remains. Shakespeare remains. Dante remains. Perhaps that durability itself irritates people. The dead are inconveniently difficult to cancel.

So decolonize your bookshelf if you wish. Colonize it. Recolonize it. Arrange it alphabetically, chronologically. Arrange it by genre. Arrange it by the authors’ skin color like some aesthetically deranged Instagrammer. Read nothing but black lesbian women for a year. Read nothing but queer literature. Spend six months with the deconstructionists and post-structuralists. Become temporarily obsessed with African-American literature. Read the Bible beside Nietzsche, Marx beside Hayek, Freud beside the people who dismantled Freud, Foucault beside anybody capable of writing a clear sentence. Hunt for every lesser-known Penguin Modern Classic you can afford until your floorboards begin making ominous sounds. But choose for yourself. That is the principle worth defending.

My personal library is not an ideological display cabinet. It is a record of curiosity, preference, prejudice, discovery, admiration, boredom, obsession, bad purchases, magnificent accidents, and the long education of one autonomous, autodidact mind. Nobody gets to decolonize that for me.

My bookshelves will remain gloriously colonized by everybody: Greek poets, Russian lunatics, English spinsters, French libertines, Japanese aesthetes, Filipino revolutionaries, German pessimists, American drunks, Indian epic poets, dead aristocrats, living misfits. No quotas. No purity tests. No diversity clipboard. No moral accounting department. Only the oldest and most dangerous criterion in literature: Is it any fucking good? If yes, put it on the shelf.

And if somebody objects because the author possesses the wrong skin color, nationality, sex, politics, century, civilization, or position within the fashionable hierarchy of oppression, there remains a perfectly concise piece of literary criticism suitable for the occasion:

Fuck off. I’m reading.

Now excuse me. I have more Great White Authors to read and reread.

« En compagnie de Senghor : quand la Culture rencontre la Diplomatie »

Suivez les traces du Pape Jean-Paul II, découvrant l’œuvre Chants d’Ombre (1976) du président Léopold Sédar Senghor, illustrée par André Masson grâce à du sable de Joal…

⏳ Notre exposition s’installe cette fois à la Bibliothèque des Batignolles, à partir du 1er octobre 2026 ! Si vous étiez passés à côté, c’est l’occasion de redécouvrir l’ancien président-poète sénégalais sous un nouveau regard : sa diplomatie culturelle.

Et dans quelques semaines, la chercheuse Claire Riffard (CNRS/ENS) y donnera une conférence à l’occasion de la parution de son nouveau livre « Dans l’atelier de Léopold Sédar Senghor ».

🗓️ Jeudi 5 novembre 2026, de 18h30 à 19h45
📍 Bibliothèque des Batignolles - 18, rue des Batignolles, Paris 17e

@cnrs @cnrsshs @mate_shs_cnrs @TheConversationAfrica @the_conversation_fr @academia @ferrandnathali1 @musitelli @estruppi @ucad_senegal

#research #socialsciences #ITEM #CNRS #ENS #livre #literature #Senegal #pape #Masson #culture #art #diplomacy

« En compagnie de Senghor : quand la Culture rencontre la Diplomatie »

Suivez les traces du Pape Jean-Paul II, découvrant l’œuvre Chants d’Ombre (1976) du président Léopold Sédar Senghor, illustrée par André Masson grâce à du sable de Joal…

⏳ Notre exposition s’installe cette fois à la Bibliothèque des Batignolles, à partir du 1er octobre 2026 ! Si vous étiez passés à côté, c’est l’occasion de redécouvrir l’ancien président-poète sénégalais sous un nouveau regard : sa diplomatie culturelle.

Et dans quelques semaines, la chercheuse Claire Riffard (CNRS/ENS) y donnera une conférence à l’occasion de la parution de son nouveau livre « Dans l’atelier de Léopold Sédar Senghor ».

🗓️ Jeudi 5 novembre 2026, de 18h30 à 19h45
📍 Bibliothèque des Batignolles - 18, rue des Batignolles, Paris 17e

@cnrs @cnrsshs @mate_shs_cnrs @TheConversationAfrica @the_conversation_fr @academia @ferrandnathali1 @musitelli @estruppi @ucad_senegal

#research #socialsciences #ITEM #CNRS #ENS #livre #literature #Senegal #pape #Masson #culture #art #diplomacy

« En compagnie de Senghor : quand la Culture rencontre la Diplomatie »

Suivez les traces du Pape Jean-Paul II, découvrant l’œuvre Chants d’Ombre (1976) du président Léopold Sédar Senghor, illustrée par André Masson grâce à du sable de Joal…

⏳ Notre exposition s’installe cette fois à la Bibliothèque des Batignolles, à partir du 1er octobre 2026 ! Si vous étiez passés à côté, c’est l’occasion de redécouvrir l’ancien président-poète sénégalais sous un nouveau regard : sa diplomatie culturelle.

Et dans quelques semaines, la chercheuse Claire Riffard (CNRS/ENS) y donnera une conférence à l’occasion de la parution de son nouveau livre « Dans l’atelier de Léopold Sédar Senghor ».

🗓️ Jeudi 5 novembre 2026, de 18h30 à 19h45
📍 Bibliothèque des Batignolles - 18, rue des Batignolles, Paris 17e

@cnrs @cnrsshs @mate_shs_cnrs @TheConversationAfrica @the_conversation_fr @academia @ferrandnathali1 @musitelli @estruppi @ucad_senegal

#research #socialsciences #ITEM #CNRS #ENS #livre #literature #Senegal #pape #Masson #culture #art #diplomacy

« En compagnie de Senghor : quand la Culture rencontre la Diplomatie »

Suivez les traces du Pape Jean-Paul II, découvrant l’œuvre Chants d’Ombre (1976) du président Léopold Sédar Senghor, illustrée par André Masson grâce à du sable de Joal…

⏳ Notre exposition s’installe cette fois à la Bibliothèque des Batignolles, à partir du 1er octobre 2026 ! Si vous étiez passés à côté, c’est l’occasion de redécouvrir l’ancien président-poète sénégalais sous un nouveau regard : sa diplomatie culturelle.

Et dans quelques semaines, la chercheuse Claire Riffard (CNRS/ENS) y donnera une conférence à l’occasion de la parution de son nouveau livre « Dans l’atelier de Léopold Sédar Senghor ».

🗓️ Jeudi 5 novembre 2026, de 18h30 à 19h45
📍 Bibliothèque des Batignolles - 18, rue des Batignolles, Paris 17e

@cnrs @cnrsshs @mate_shs_cnrs @TheConversationAfrica @the_conversation_fr @academia @ferrandnathali1 @musitelli @estruppi @ucad_senegal

#research #socialsciences #ITEM #CNRS #ENS #livre #literature #Senegal #pape #Masson #culture #art #diplomacy

‘The Wind’ by Gwendolen Haste

#poem #poetry #english #literature #wind

https://www.deadpoetsdaily.com/p/gwendolen-haste-poem-the-wind

‘The Wind’ by Gwendolen Haste

#poem #poetry #english #literature #wind

https://www.deadpoetsdaily.com/p/gwendolen-haste-poem-the-wind

‘The Wind’ by Gwendolen Haste

#poem #poetry #english #literature #wind

https://www.deadpoetsdaily.com/p/gwendolen-haste-poem-the-wind

HECTOR. bully, a swaggering coward. To hector; to bully, probably from such persons affecting the valour of Hector, the Trojan hero.

A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)

--
#books #literature #dictionaries #history #society #language #slang @histodons

HECTOR. bully, a swaggering coward. To hector; to bully, probably from such persons affecting the valour of Hector, the Trojan hero.

A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)

--
#books #literature #dictionaries #history #society #language #slang @histodons

HECTOR. bully, a swaggering coward. To hector; to bully, probably from such persons affecting the valour of Hector, the Trojan hero.

A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)

--
#books #literature #dictionaries #history #society #language #slang @histodons