From the Editor
This week I bought eight new novels. I really have no businesses buying any more books, but here we are. And this morning I found myself jotting down three new books that I “need to get.”
This is not a unique problem (is it a problem though?) – many readers and bibliophiles are watching their TBR stack grow into behemoth stacks.
Hoarding? Impulsive shopping addiction? I rebuke these labels. This is cultural collecting. That’s what I tell myself anyway.
It doesn’t matter if I never read any of the new books joining my always growing home library. They are there waiting with the promise of stories that at some point intrigued or excited me.
Distraction is a concept in the arts that I’ve been laser focused on for a few weeks. A concept that affects artists, audiences, and the ecosystem of the media in ways that makes a digital detox sound less like a spa treatment and more like a necessity.
This is probably why I (and many others) collect books. They are a sanctuary from the all the distractions of the world, distractions that are becoming vigorously more difficult to control.
For this writer, a digital detox is very much waiting for me at home, going through the books on my shelves, whether I read them or not.
Enjoy,
Maan Jalal
This Week on The Culturelist
We Are at War: Will Distraction Kill Art?
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Hayden Panettiere’s Death, Princess Diana Book, Marc Jacobs Sale
From the tragic death of a talented actress to a new book about an iconic figure, and what happens to your name and legacy when you decide to move on? The biggest cultural stories from this week now on The Voice Note.
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Jeff Vandermeer is an incredible storytelling who has taken the sci-fi genre into new and fascinating areas combining the best of literary and commercial writing.
In Bourne, we are in a far-off dystopian future and our protagonist Rachel, a resourceful scavenger who lives with Wick her drug dealer partner in a city ravaged by war and where biotech experiments hide in the shadows.
One day Rachel comes across Bourne a creature both (or neither) a plant and animal. As their relationship grows, the balance of Rachel’s world shifts and nothing she thought she believed is what it seems.
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One List Thing…
This Week’s Quote
Slightly controversial when she started in the 1960s, Elaine Sturtevant is an artist whose perspective on art and originalist is one worth examining. The quote below from her 2012 retrospective, Sturtevant: Image Over Image, at the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm, feels timely as we continue to drown in the digital forays.
What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine – that's the way to go.
This Week’s Question
Given this week’s focus on art in the age of distraction, it only makes sense that I pose this question to you.
What was the last work of art (book, film, music, concert, painting, or exhibition etc) that made you forget about your phone?
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See you next week,
Maan Jalal