“Culture is dead.” These are the words printed on the stained, unlaminated paper sign stapled to the door of the dilapidated big house of the long ago dissolved¹ Fakename Plantation in Faketown, Mississippi. For some residents of the ramshackle manor—an artist collective of disaffected writers, homeless squatters, multiple personalities, artificial intelligences, and howling ghosts—this motto is a call to arms, for others a victory cry, for others still a statement of cold,² dispassionate fact. For all, it’s an organizing principle, a rationalization of their fruitless labor, a hustle. Together they run The Last Estate, a post-culture arts & culture “magazine”³ dedicated to exhuming and reanimating⁴ the corpse of artistic joy, if only to add spice to the autopsy.

1. The cotton fields have been replaced with tract housing, drive thru pharmacies, and Dollar Generals. The bumper crop: opioids.
2. Just as the universe will someday be entirely cold, devoid of heat and light.
3. Scare quotes because print is deader than culture.
4. And honoring. And defiling.