Culture Wars?

Kudos to Blog of a Bookslut -- AGAIN -- for providing this interview with the guys who have launched the new literary magazine Barrelhouse.

A lot of the discourse into why these fellows launched the magazine has to do with the state of art today. These guys contend that people now are more likely to merge high and low culture, as opposed to the way that the literary world usually operates, with one of the guys describing that attitude as, "We should all have Serious Thoughts about Serious Issues, reading only Serious Books and admiring Serious Art."

I've wondered about that myself. For example, Gargoyle magazine, as I described in a blog post recently, definitely publishes some work with a sense of humor, dark that it may be. So maybe these guys are onto something, onto the way our generation thinks and has been raised, with a blurring of the lines between entertainment and art -- and maybe the ability to not take everything, including ourselves, so dreadfully seriously.

I highly recommend the interview, it's interesting and thought-provoking (and touches on other interesting topics, like the proliferation of quality content on the Web as compared to traditional print journals), and recommend checking out Barrelhouse.

Thanks for reading,

LLB