Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century by W. David Marx
Critic and historian W. David Marx has taken the pulse of mass culture and declared it moribund—not quite dead, but nearly so, its complexion bluing as torpor thins the rhythm of its wilted heart. In Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, Marx sifts through a quarter-century of popular music, fashion, movies and memes, as well as those half-breeds unleashed from the irrepressibly fecund hatcheries of Content Creation, searching out the bottom of what he sees as culture’s steady decline into a NeverEnding-Story-style Swamp of Sadness, in which Instagram-faced influencers strike spiritless poses amidst the slimy reeds of a thousand reality TV spinoffs. Culture, he laments, has beached itself on the shores of a terminal banality, where it festers spewing from all its pores a relentless spillage of Marvel Universe metastases and retro-chic reboots, impenetrable brainrot dreck, TikTok trends and rebranded reheated remixes and the treacle strains of Taylor Swift echoing to the sunken horizon.
Although I’m not as close as Marx seems to be to donning my widow’s weeds for processing behind culture’s hearse, having witnessed faint stirrings of life at the margins, I have also seen the slackening of a tween’s jaw as she was looping for the zillionth time through some jittery video of a cartoon fork gyrating to the B-52’s “Rock Lobster” and hummed a mute, internal dirge. Of course, declaring culture a cadaverous husk is a straight shot to an Insufferable Snob of the Year nomination, but Marx takes the risk, in the hope that sounding the alarm might kindle resistance, even revival. Marx, for one, is not yet ready to slouch into the oubliette of stuporous eternal return eroded into our century by what he identifies as a confluence of forces philosophical, political, and economic: the Panglossian “poptimism” that ranks popularity over originality or substance as the ruling measure of excellence; risk-averse funders’ distaste for any but the most market-tested hot commodities; the apparently unshakeable postmodern infatuation with pastiche; algorithmic tyranny and, most recently, the AI art-pocalypse. If we are to exhume ourselves from the sludge of cultural stagnation, Marx writes, it will require a tipping of collective creative vision to some north star slightly upward of the bottom-line.
For fans of cultural criticism and long-form polemic, as well as recusant non-Swifties, creative malcontents, and everyone gagging at the idea of another Superman remake.
Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First Century Life by Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita
Escapist nostalgia tops the list for most obvious of all possible reactions to an underwhelming present and the vertigo induced by a future that looks, from where one reels queasily on the precipice, less promising with each new and inhospitable day. I am as guilty of this very unimaginative retreat from hard reality as anyone, though for years I could pretend otherwise, absolving myself on the grounds that my own old-timey psychic haven of choice was no red-and-white gingham midcentury American Heartland kitchenscape nor PBS romance Edwardian manor, but an age usually diligently avoided by the daydream set, smirched as it is by the stigma of bubo-ridden mass death. Yes, my nostalgia time-warps me right back to the Middle Ages, though I’ll make do with the Baroque period if pressed. To be more specific: the cloister beckons. It has nothing to do with religious vocation, I confess; what attracts me is the quietude, the slow candlelit cycling of a contemplative life, equally appealing whether spent in devotional solitude or enveloped in the company of self-sufficient women. (This is pure fantasy and I know it, so feel no need to shatter my illusions. I would make a terrible anchoress and a truly disastrous Mother Superior, were I among the blessed who survived past toddlerhood.)
Whereas I’ve long had the place to myself, my own fringe borderland of nostalgic reverie, now, apparently, I’ll have to make room in the stone-walled cell, since, as the authors of Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First Century Life point out, the nunnery has become an It destination in armchair time travel. Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita met while PhD students at Brown University, where both were researching the Spanish Carmelite nun St. Teresa of Avila, of Interior Castle fame. By some miracle the pair triumphed over academic competitiveness to become best friends, and the book they’ve co-authored is a paean to Renaissance-era nuns that cheekily masquerades itself as a self-help manual. Whether it’s friendship friction, body image woes, despotic bosses, financial turmoil, or the pangs of unreciprocated sapphic love that plague you – alas, no counsel is offered for those plagued by actual plague – as Garriga and Urbita write, “Anything you may be going through now already happened to a nun.” And so too did any number of things weirder than you might expect. For example: have you ever had demons frame you for stealing from the communal pantry, when in fact you were subsisting entirely on spiderwebs and thorns? Have you levitated to the rafters of your local chapel? Or been graced with visions depicting the universe in shapes and hues that would make Georgia O’Keefe blush? All these and more abbey antics feature in Convent Wisdom, making it a high-spirited primer for those whose retrograde glances have initiated them into the new Cult of the Nun. Welcome, Sister.
For fans of St. Teresa of Avila, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the Beguines, Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, and vows of silence.
