Mass Culture . . . .

 . . . which,  I suppose, The Inn might be if anyone other than I ever read it.  I mean, hardly "mass" culture when it's so local as to show up nowhere other than this very pc.  And now that I think about it, "culture" may be assuming facts not in evidence.

In any event, I've been attempting a clear-out of the files shelves desk entire office.  It is now clear that all those things I have been meaning to read later, maybe tomorrow . . . . well, it isn't going to happen.  I won't live long enough.  No terminal illness.  It's just that, as the psalmist says,  the days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, * yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon passeth it away, and we are gone.  And in the meantime the office is assuming hazardous proportions.  The fire department would not approve.

So I've been reading rather more than is helpful in clearing-out.  Well, you do, don't you.  The March/April 2023 number of Touchstone, for instance.  So much good stuff.   F'rinstance:

I recall Gene Roddenberry stating, "Television exists for just one reason -- to sell you things."  Mass consumer culture is more than a vendor.  The range of its dynamics is greater than simply facilitating the transfer of wealth from consumer to merchant.  Mass culture is a principal venue for propaganda, seduction, illusion, and additions.

That, from Robert McTeigue's essay Resistance Writer.  And an even more powerful paragraph in the context of the essay than that excerpt shows.  And it's that sort of thing that makes clearing-out in the office so much more time consuming than clearing-out, say cans of soup past their sell-by date in the kitchen.

Back to work.

After thought:  Clear-out and clearing-out:  should they be hyphenated?  I can't make up my mind.  I  put them in and they look right.  But I can't find a rule on line and I don't know what I've done with my Fowler's.