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Nisus writer pro lost my page view collapse12/12/2022 ![]() ![]() In this respect, our culture is failing us.” I ask whether our culture fails us or we fail our culture-the arts he’s describing continue to be created even as their supposed deaths have been lamented for years if not decades. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. I’m struck by how a paragraph of Gioia’s resonates with what Charles wrote: “But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing–it puts a price on everything. That ties into Dana Gioia’s recently piece in the Wall Street Journal, The Impoverishment of American Culture, which argues that the arts-music, dance, painting, and, yes, literature-are worth experiencing and saving, the implication being that most people believe otherwise. The reader usually isn’t overtly manipulated toward a particular view, whether of products or politics, and in the novel I find the kind of expansiveness that comes from unfettered stories. One reason I still love the form is that it’s among the few means of entertainment in which one isn’t constantly being advertised at. The articles details the usual litany about illiteracy and slips in an important sentence that struck me: “Perhaps submerging the world in an orgy of marketing hysteria doesn’t encourage the kind of contemplation, independence and solitude that real engagement with books demands - and rewards.” If we no longer want contemplation or independence and indulge in marketing hysteria, perhaps novels are truly being marginalized. ![]() The first, Ron Charles’ Harry Potter and the Death of Reading, recites the now-familiar statistics about the relatively small number of people who read and how their ranks thin among the young. Two articles not directly related but nonetheless dealing with similar issues regarding American culture caught my eye. ![]()
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