“If culture is purely entertainment, nothing is of importance. If it’s a matter of amusement, an impostor can undoubtedly amuse me more than a profoundly authentic person. But if culture signifies more than this, then it’s worrying.” Sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky interviews the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa about the contemporary collapse between “high” and “low” cultures.
Civilization of the Spectacle
Kiley Reid on the Babysitter’s Dilemma
In Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid used her own experience as a babysitter to explore the transactional relationship that exists when caring for someone's child.
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Tough Broads
“The rest of the morning went like that. We did synchronized clapping. We did active listening. We did a role-play exercise in which I was a girl waiting for a bus and Karloff was a masher, but when I started flirting back, she didn’t like it. I got four more cups of coffee and felt brokenhearted when my bottle gave up its last drop.” Philip Marlowe attends a court-mandated women’s studies workshop.
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Flowers of Evil
“Life is worth less than a line of Baudelaire’s poetry.” These two lyric essays by Chen Li over at Asymptote Journal are economical and well-worth the read. Though Chen Li is from Taiwan, he writes in Chinese; this syllabus of Chinese writing and the “New China” from Casey Walker at The Millions pairs quite nicely.
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Full of Carp
Midwestern investors hope the production of domestically-farmed Asian carp can give rise to “the future Zappos of fish processing,” but such optimists would be wise to safeguard their aquatic livestock against would-be carp thieves.
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An Interview in the Worst Way
We Are Champion, a handsome new online literary magazine promulgating “what Donald Barthelme called “back-broke” sentences,” features an interview with the great Gary Lutz.
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