Matthew Phillips – författare

Thailand’s position during the Cold War was ambiguous: the country’s political leadership was very keen to maintain the country’s independence on the world stage, yet at the same time was anxious to establish the country’s credentials as staunchly anti-communist. However, as this book argues, Thailand, though never formally a client state of the United States, was very closely embedded in the Western camp through the commitment of Thailand’s cosmopolitan urban communities to developing a modern, consumerist lifestyle. Considering popular culture, including film, literature, fashion, tourism and attitudes towards Buddhism, the book shows how an ideology of consumerism and integration into a "free world" culture centred in the United States gradually took hold and became firmly established, and how this popular culture and ideology was fundamental in determining Thailand’s international political alignment.

Thailand’s position during the Cold War was ambiguous: the country’s political leadership was very keen to maintain the country’s independence on the world stage, yet at the same time was anxious to establish the country’s credentials as staunchly anti-communist. However, as this book argues, Thailand, though never formally a client state of the United States, was very closely embedded in the Western camp through the commitment of Thailand’s cosmopolitan urban communities to developing a modern, consumerist lifestyle. Considering popular culture, including film, literature, fashion, tourism and attitudes towards Buddhism, the book shows how an ideology of consumerism and integration into a "free world" culture centred in the United States gradually took hold and became firmly established, and how this popular culture and ideology was fundamental in determining Thailand’s international political alignment.

There is nothing a twenty-one-year-old man at his first job in New York City needs more than a good mentor, although few of them find one. But author Matthew Phillips found the wild, impetuous, and knowledgeable Marylou Stern. The years Matt spent with Marylou were filled with parties, sex, excess, frivolity, live cows, kidnapped Jewish jewelers, and games that stretch the imagination.

In this memoir, Phillips shares his story of how Marylou, a former model, dancer, and actress, transformed him from an eager, fresh-faced college grad into a sidelines player in chic New York society. Over the course of three years, Marylou taught Matt about New York City, high society, the difference between class and low class, how to make a genuine egg cream, how to milk a cow, why wanton sex is good for your health, why listening is more important than talking, that Sara Lee Vanilla Layer Cakes are the best reward, and that you must never put up with thieves.

In Everything but Snakes, Phillips narrates how Marylous undying sense of celebration kept him going and gave him a floor beneath his feet and, along the way, an upside-down roller-coaster ride.

Modernist literature is defined by entropic characteristics. Its common themes include fragmentation, uncertainty, distrust, and misunderstanding. Alongside these themes, however, exists a desire to rebuild, to distill elements of past constructs into something that can provide stability in the chaotic present. Historically, modernist studies has focused on the former, without ample attention given to how entropic circumstances alter human emotion and affect. This book offers a new way of conceptualizing the modernist experience of alienation, disorder, and system deterioration as not merely negative, but productive in facilitating new structures of feeling and social adhesion. It pushes extant literary evaluations of entropy into a new realm by interrogating the human cost of entropic circumstances, and shows that we can use the process of entropy as a metaphorical lens through which to further understand the human connections and shared experiences reflected in modernist literature.