The Milli Vanilli Condition : essays on culture in the new millennium / Eduardo Espina ; English translation by Travis Sorenson.

"Few times in history has the art of pretending enjoyed so much continuity and led to so few consequences as during the hinge-like period between the twentieth century and the beginning of the next," Eduardo Espina asserts in this collection of thirteen essays. He laments the serial falsification of events, as when the German pop duo Milli Vanilli won a Grammy for songs that they in fact did not sing. Even they were seduced by their own deceit, initially denying the accusations. Ultimately, though, the group was stripped of its award. Uruguayan-born poet Espina ponders the paradoxes of modern-day life in these essays on a wide variety of subjects, including the proliferation of flags in his small Texas town after 9/11, serial killers, nostalgia and even the Olympics. In The Xerox Syndrome, Espina examines the history of plagiarism, from a statement by King Solomon in Ecclesiastes 1:9 to contemporary times. Do people plagiarize, he wonders, because they love a text so much that they can't leave it once they've finished reading it?These pieces are always thoughtful and frequently humorous. In Lives in the Supermarket, he writes tongue-in-cheek that some supermarkets are better than museums. He would rather visit a Kroger than the MOMA, where at least there's a bigger collection and no admission fee! Espina remembers the very first supermarket in Montevideo, Uruguay, where his grandfather worked and another one in Paris, where he spent five hours as "a tourist among cereals and sausages."Translated from the Spanish by Travis Sorenson, this serious but entertaining collection is a must-read for anyone interested in recent history, pop culture, language and everything in between.

Translated from the Spanish.

Vendor-supplied metadata.

Includes bibliographical references.

Title Page; Copyright Page; Dedication; Table of Contents; Prologue: A Century in the Next Century; The Day After the Flag; The Future of the Past: The World Capital of Nostalgia; Please, Mr. Post(mortem); The Fall as Something Indigenous: Icarus, Museums, the World Trade Center; Inclusion in Vogue; The Xerox Syndrome; Epically Olympic; Disasters with an Oceanfront View; The Music of Collecting; Panic in the Panoptic Scenes; Lives in the Supermarket; Footnotes; The Future of the Past: The World Capital of Nostalgia; Please, Mr. Post(mortem); Inclusion in Vogue; The Xerox Syndrome.

Disasters with an Oceanfront ViewThe Music of Collecting; Panic in the Panoptic Scenes.

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