I don’t think the avant-garde applies in this country, anyhow. I think it’s a whole different kind of thing that goes on here. Because the continental avant-garde was, first of all, elitist. It depended on the existence of a literary class, which we don’t have here, not in the same sense as you have there. It implies a militant approach, it implies leaders and followers. What we have here is much more diffuse throughout the country at large.
“All the glasses break, one by one. The delicate champagne, short-stemmed and shallow bowled, glowing pink even on their own. The same expensive cheese from up the street, unwrapped onto half-washed, wooden boards. Plates of olives, and bowls of bread. Three bedroom doors hung open. Myriad ashtrays or objects ashed in. And the tree in the garden below that swung in full bloom at the height of spring, uncrushable, filling the windows, reminding me of itself as I lay on any of the couches. Catalogue of what.”
Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein | Nympholepsy