The Lost Generation of expats writing in Paris in the 20s created some of the most amazing literature of the modern era. Are there any places nowadays that combine inexpensive living with a stimulating environment and wildly creative, intelligent people?
During an interview we did, mk once referred to Hubski as like Paris in the 20s. It may have been the NPR Michigan radio interview. I'm not sure, but what I am sure of is that there are a lot of creative people collaborating, sharing and making interesting art on Hubski. That is by far my favorite aspect of the site. When strangers who have never met in person can collaborate and create something bigger than themselves, that's just amazing. We have poets, authors about to release novels, musicians of all genres, entrepreneurs and great conversationalist. We have a #hubskidrinkclub too. We just need the inexpensive living part…
I'd say it really is just the internet is general. We millenials have already been referred to as a lost generation for a few years now, and so say we feel disenfranchised and with little place in the current world is a massive understatement. Meanwhile, literally every idea and person and connection is well heard across the internet, and it's something that people outside our generation don't really have a grasp on. Sure, there are some, and others that use it, but not to the degree of our persona of an online entity and the fading delineation of meatspace and cyberspace. That's really visible on Hubski especially, because we actually have deeply personal relationships with each other. As for physical space, I think our generation (broader than millenials) of thinkers and brilliance veer more towards isolation. In the 1920's, it was obviously much more difficult to hear the thoughts of others. You already had your own thoughts and identity and creative tendencies, but accessing others was difficult. Nowadays we have everyone else's voice, but we have to get away from it all to find our own.
Hubki's collaborative feel (and that beautiful picture of the Croatian coast) is what got me on this train of thought. For the first time in a long time, I'm cautiously optimistic about participating in an online community. From what I've seen, the peeps participating are wicked smart and mostly respectful. It would be awesome to have that community in real life--to just take over an entire block in some out-of-the-way coastal town with a great library and fast internet. A man can dream...
I love the collaborative feel on this site as well. Unlike Reddit, which is designed as a bunch of mini-feifdoms in which one can isolate themselves, the Hubski design is better at getting people with various interests to talk to each other. Everything is on a single global feed, users can pick out parts of the feed they find interesting by following people, domains and topics, and content propagates through sharing rather than a battle for up votes.
I read something a while back, no idea what the source was or how to find it now. It discussed the effect that the Internet and other instant communication methods have had on the development of scenes. It focused specifically on music scenes but I think the concept can be applied to any sort of scene. The premise was, that prior to the internet, scenes reached a certain stage of development before being recognized or even noticed by the world at large. Nowadays, no such development is possible, as soon as there is anything at all worthy of attention, anything that can possibly be monetized, anything worthy of a few million hits on Youtube, that 'anything' is plastered across every aggregator on the net, obsessed over for 2 weeks and then forgotten. So perhaps the place you're looking for exists only in the past.
As flagamuffin mentioned below, Berlin certainly fits the bill of inexpensive living coupled with a disproportional creative and artistic population. It's own mayer coined the tagline "poor, but sexy" in the late 90s, and since then Berlin's allure as a city on the bleeding edge of art and culture has only grown.
Here's an Australian musician who moved with her band to Berlin describes her first few weeks in the city in the NYTimes:
Berlin's also known for it's club scene, which is often linked to it's art scene, so take that for what it's worth. Berlin's also probably more associated with music and the visual arts than writing, although I'm sure there are more than a modest amount of literary clicks in the city too. Aside from Berlin, Brooklyn in NYC is a tempting answer, but the rent is high and only getting higher. I've heard rumor's from a few people that Hanoi is becoming a destination for western migrants/expatriates, particularly writers, but I can't substantiate them at all so take them with a grain of salt. EDIT: I just saw that you said that cities aren't really your scene, sorry if my post is useless now :) Isn't the city aspect a big part of the "Paris of the 20s" though?In the first few weeks, we met fashion designers, photographers, illustrators, filmmakers, writers, other musicians and dozens of miscellaneous expat misfits who escaped to Berlin for a clean artistic slate. On encountering an El Salvador-born, Los Angeles-raised filmmaker named Nehemias at a park gathering, I was curious to know his personal motivations for moving to Berlin. He told me about the inexplicable energy he felt when he visited the previous year on vacation. Still in awe of the city myself, I asked if there were any drawbacks to living as a creative in Berlin. “In L.A., people actually get stuff done because you’ll go homeless if you don’t hustle. Here you can be super poor for years and still live comfortably.”
It's funny -- you can trace the "1920s Paris scene" through the century til sometime in the '90s, at which point major cultural centers stopped coalescing in that fashion. Many reasons for that. For instance post-1930 you've got Sartre's scene, Hemingway's Cuba, then later Beatnik San Fran and New York, Berkeley (the famous "high water mark"), briefly Aspen, Greenwich Village, the London New Romantics, maybe Seattle. Mostly revolving around music and a certain lifestyle, but definitely some literature. The arts in general. Now ... Brooklyn? Brooklyn's kinda gone off the rails and it's sure as hell not cheap. I think it's the closest you're going to get. Good question. (As far as primarily literary scenes ... the modern publishing industry destroyed literature.) Preemptive edit: it may seem like I largely dismissed the rest of the world -- but I think the 20th century, as far as cultural movements in the sense that you mean, was essentially western. It was in a lot ways the century of the West, and the one we're in right now is most assuredly not. Maybe the next great literary/musical/artistic scene springs up in Singapore or Hong Kong or Joburg.
What I actually wanted to hear was "There's this great beach town in Croatia..." I appreciate how you've traced out the various movements, and I agree with your assessment. I'd also agree that Seattle in the 90s was a hugely important cultural scene. I would like to say that my hometown of Nashville is experiencing a cultural renaissance, but the current surge of creativity feels plastic somehow. Maybe it's just that I'm on the outside looking in, or maybe it's that everything is geared to the Instagram/Pinterest aesthetic, but it seems like there's a certain spirit missing. The most surprising answer I received among my group of friends was Detroit. Apparently they're giving writers free houses? Anyway, Detroit is definitely cheap, and apparently there are a ton of creative and artistic types there. I'm not sure how inspiring the city is, but cities aren't really my scene anyway.
Let me preface this by saying I have no idea what Paris in the 20's was really like outside of what are almost certainly stale tropes in my mind (but possibly accurate ones). I will say this about Detroit though. It is currently undergoing a developmental revival that may or may not last, and this development is built on not just a cultural revival, but a creative, determined, DIY culture that was never not there in my lifetime, and did not need to be reintroduced. Sections of downtown are experiencing a renaissance. Other parts are crime ridden, cheap, terrible, unique, beautiful, and all sorts of other things. The creative class is definitely flowing into Detroit right now and has been for years. I travel to the East Coast and out West a couple times a year on buying trips for fashion & apparel. I've met more than one indie designer in the past few years that, when they hear we live in the Detroit area, say something along the lines of "No way...a got a bunch of friends back in Cali that were talking about just moving to Detroit and getting an old warehouse...just to you know, make art and clothing and stuff." In my lifetime I've witnessed Detroit about to "come back" about 3 times now. Something is different this time, though who knows how it will play out. That uncertainty is what the vanguard creative class is built on. There is a lot happening in Detroit creatively right now. Finally, I should note that a terribly large number of the population of Detroit is overwhelmingly impoverished, unemployed, under educated, and black. When you look at conversations like these, most of the residents would probably just shake their heads and wonder wtf. They don't need a cultural scene. They need schools that don't systematically fail their kids, neighborhoods that aren't havens for violence, a chance in hell of getting a job, and something in the way of city services in exchange for their taxes (for those that can afford to pay them). The creative revival in Detroit is stimulating, vibrant, frenetic, life-giving, lauded...and completely overrated with respect to the amount of progress it represents in local popular culture imho.
Didn't know that about Detroit ... at least a dozen hubskiers from Detroit so maybe they'll chime in. I should've mentioned Nashville in the iconic Opry days. I could've gone in-depth with musical venues -- because a lot of the great 20th century American movements were associated with venues -- but I'm really hungover and the France Switzerland is starting up. -- Don't count out Croatia! Eastern Europe, Berlin, Budapest, some of the Slavic states are all incredibly cheap and really underrated ... wouldn't be at all surprised if there's an actual US expat movement out there soon. Already starting to be one in Berlin.
My reply was definitely more pertaining to music and some digital art or film that I know about in a modern context, though I read plenty, it's mostly "historical" stuff. Like, the newest literature I've read is DFW and a sparse few others, I'm a big pomo fan, but that's anywhere from Burroughs to Pynchon to Delillo. I don't get the sense of a "movement" anywhere, mostly likely because I just haven't encountered it or have pursued it as much. I know you're pretty well-read, and it seems like you would have a better bearing for whatever is going on now, is there like, a case study you know of about your publishing industry remark? Or do you think literature is getting squashed from the outset? Anything you've encountered online you think has potential?
I think the best (fictional) literature in the 21st century will be published online on personal websites. It may be that no one will read it. Or maybe I'm completely wrong. But the publishing industry now is either a) unsustainable or b) has completely different goals that it used to. There was a hubski thread a year or so ago where we tried to name the greatest living American author. It's not like we drew a blank -- McCarthy, Pynchon, Salinger was still alive at that point, etc -- but there wasn't a clear answer carrying the torch. Steinbeck books were events. Consensus literature is no longer also (necessarily) the best literature, which makes it very very difficult to gauge the state of the art. The "problem" with the publishing industry that it's a profit-driven machine and while the books that get published are often quite bad they make money so there is no incentive for publishers to try harder. Remember Rowling's experiment. Talent will not out. And since that's the case people like you and me have to go the extra mile to find our reading material elsewhere. Hence (hopefully) the rise of self-publishing online, serialization on blogs (this and this are two of the best things I'm reading right now), etc. I feel like I read an Atlantic/New Yorker piece about this in the last year but... And we've discussed this on hubski before (since we've got several published/self-published/aspiring authors). I'll keep an eye out.a case study you know of about your publishing industry remark?
I'm not too terribly knowledgeable about that particular scene, just about several of the artists that were present, but was it well known while it was happening or was the veneration kind of in hindsight? I think there have been places similar, especially in what I've heard about urban areas in the US from the 70s-90s: cheap areas with lots of young, gifted and poor artists trying to make sense or relay experiences. There are still places like that nowadays, like some parts of brooklyn, but tastes/scope/aesthetics have changed drastically, plus there legitimately IS tons of cross-pollination outside of geographical areas because of the internet. A lot of digital art/music provide examples of this, they have this hella fast adoption of aesthetic memes that blow through the landscape really quickly and then disappear. Granted, there's always changing/evolving tastes and whatnot, but it seems like it is much more rapid than previous times. We have a completely different world we are trying to address that isn't the awe-struck aplomb of a bombed-out post-World War era, which was limited to locale and stimulated by direct experience, but now a lot of those experiences are much more universal. and ubiquitous and not limited to a particular locale. Not to say there aren't influences that stem from particular social-spheres (sissy bounce rap from NOLA, gender-fucked performance art from SF, vaporwave-esque-gif-90s-tumblr art in brooklyn) but it doesn't really stay contained nor do these scenes have a focus on just a handful of innovative individuals doing their own thing, but rather copies on copies on copies, post-post modernism or whatever? Hyperreal shit? Fuck if I know, but I don't think our generation is gonna have heros and physical locales like there used to be. As for literature, I'm not too terribly up-to-date, but I've heard good things about HTML Giant.
In New York, I know the West Village and Chelsea are the most tremendous artistic hubs I've ever experienced. Truly the frontier of cultural progress, beauty and creativity. They're also some of the most affluent neighborhoods on the planet, so I don't know if that fits your quote. I think the modern day 20's Paris would really be something like Hollywood, in terms of the grasp on popular culture and its total influence. But the world is so much more globalized I think the internet kind of voids any isolated niches of genius or creativity, unless it's intentionally hidden like an indie cafe in Brooklyn (not that they're genius).
Bristol has an extremely iconic and influential music scene in the UK. I believe it's also one of the easiest places to cover the cost of living as a student in the Britain. I'm not sure it quite has the same international rayonnement as that of France during the 1900th and early 20th centuries, but it seems promising. Can you give me some examples of expat literature from Paris? I'd love to hear some recommendations.
The former was about Gertrude Stein, who in many ways embodies the Lost Generation. And I would be remiss in failing to mention Fitzgerald, who in my opinion was the finest author of that circle. He wrote one of my favorite books, This Side of Paradise (and though it was neither written in France nor is it about France, it deserves wholeheartedly the Lost Generation tag). He also wrote, of course, Tender is the Night, a quintessentially depressing novel set on the Riviera about the sorts of American expats who populated it.