Bawdry
IN AMERICA, in this time, which is the early 21st century, we have inherited the clap of our fathers, i.e., applause sought and received for culture which is clotted, being either an anthropological definition of culture as the way a group acts, in which case culture is susceptible to legislation (right: a society that legalized abortion/permits homosexual marriage is an immoral culture; left: a society that proscribes abortion/denies homosexual marriage is an immoral culture), or, on the other hand, a historical definition of culture as the manifestation of the demos, in which case culture is susceptible to evisceration by those academics/artists who believe true culture is mass culture, who promulgate bad art and worse history in mock protest of what they claim are/were unnecessarily difficult aesthetic standards (t’wit: the value of art, in neat elliptical fashion, is derived, like the value of everything else, from popular opinion as proved by habits of consumption), or, on the third hand, culture which is purely fiscal, evidenced in the literary world by very large corporations which craft niche markets and call them literary, or smallish corporations which have no particular aesthetic principle but an excellent attitude, rivers of thin and thick in which art floats no boat.
Les Figues Press is an extremely small, extremely independent press, hell-bent on preserving and promulgating art like glass jars of Devonshire cream and batches of fresh yogurt.