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Music gives us alternative imaginative geographies for the places we inhabit. I would argue that all music is world music, that is, music opens a world. At its best, music lets us imagine another world, a better world. It is here that music touches on politics, whether giving noisy Clash-like voice to anger, rage or injustice or directing the demand that things be otherwise through humour, irony or Morrissey-esque comic subersion: I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving/ England is mine and it owes me a living.
- Simon Critchley

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Do Something!
In her blog, Maud Newton has written a sad, all too true and extremely well thought out rant about the state of fiction in publishing: Self-fulfilling prophecy: is fiction really dead or are publishers killing it?
She starts out by saying The U.S. publishing industry pumps out a new work of fiction every 30 minutes – an unprecedented pace – but this summer a National Endowment for the Arts study revealed that Americans, particularly teenagers and college students, are far less likely to read literature than they were twenty years ago. Blame for disinterest in literary reading is often placed at Hollywood’s doorstep. Runner-up targets are television, the Internet, and video games.
• It’s as if our publishers are helping us commit professional suicide [Why are thy songs so short? a Czechovian bird was once asked. Is it because thou art so short of breath? Short Stories with Long History ]
• · The Education Department this summer destroyed more than 300,000 copies of a booklet designed for parents to help their children learn history after the office of Vice President Dick Cheney's wife complained that it mentioned the National Standards for History, which she has long opposed a booklet designed for parents to help their children learn history after the office of Vice President Dick Cheney's wife complained that it mentioned the National Standards for History, which she has long opposed.
• · · Suppose a drug could hand us total happiness. Pangs of conscience gone, the miseries of failure or grief reduced to mere pathologies But what then of personality... [The idea of being better than normal (Michael Jackson) may prove a bigger flop than the Edsel]
• · · · The question has been asked: Was Franz Kafka human? He seems to have had doubts himself. Many of his most persuasive and most affecting literary representatives are animals: a burrowing mole, or Jozefina the mouse singer, or poor Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to find he has been transformed into a cockroach: The creator of these changelings was himself an amorphous creature