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Across these essays Gary Indiana ranges freely, commenting on films and books as well as the state of the (US) nation.
At times it is a little depressing when you realise some of the commentary of the ills of a society that oppresses its people is decades old and yet could have been written yesterday – where do we go for hope when it feels that conflict and division are the only points of continuity left?
Many of the works review were unfamiliar to me but for the most part the richness of the essays made them engaging even without the knowledge of the specific reference point.
In an age of social media and sound bites who is writing essays, who are reading essays, today – the space to develop a thought, to offer context, connections, nuance are all sadly missed.
I put one tag in (a 1993 essay on Daniel Schmid’s La Paloma) “I like Daniel Schmid’s idea that we are all private radio stations transmitting on our own frequencies, sometimes audible to each other, sometimes not. Personally, few blue-ribbon cultural products occupy my consciousness with anything like the force of my own imagination or experience, and those that do… seldom belong to the upper reaches of any established cannon… there exists [no] legitimate authority to declare one thing ‘major’ and another ‘minor’. In the end we have only our experiences and we feel them with the particularity of monadic creatures.” (p310)
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