Death of a Selfish Altruist: Tales & Poems from a Minor League Culture Worker

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Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books. Death of a Selfish Altruist is a memoir in which the personal gets tangled in the political, and cultural transformations of American in the last 3rd of the 20th century into the first decade of the 21st. It is also a memoir that distrusts the conventions of memoir . Though it traces Stroffolino’s various social activities as a “minor league culture worker,”—especially as a poet, teacher, and musician, and is clearly a working out of trauma caused by such “purely personal” experiences as becoming disabled, unemployed, and subsequently homeless, strains to connect them—by synthesizing various history myths of progress, and decay-- to the larger cultural phenomena investigative reporter Scott Timberg referred to as the 21st century “Culture Crash.” With a degree of gallows humor, Stroffolino proposes some off-beat solutions to some of today’s cultural issues in hopes of re-establishing a sense of the commons in an attempt to survive dominant cultural trends of privatization, gentrification, the 21st technocracy, as well as more perennial issues such as he way the same old mind-body dualism that has been used to further racism, classism, and sexism is employed by 21st century Culture Tzars to keep us divided. It is also an attempt to further a cultural discussion.