If your life has a certain soundtrack and you read American literary fiction, you may have already encountered the novels of Michael Chabon.  Click the image above for a snapshot interview with him.  When he announced at the beginning of this year that he was working on a new novel, it was seen by many in a blog post split over two days.  A turn of phrase in the middle of the second post resonates with the small group of people who form Raxa Collective:

…thanks to Wax Poetics, one unexpected but maybe not unforeseeable result of the decision to have some characters own a shop together selling battered old things that are beautiful and valuable only to a small number of randomly assorted Geeko-Americans has been the joyful return to my life of hip-hop…

Things that are beautiful and valuable only to a small number: those are the things we are focused on here.  See all of Salim’s recent posts for examples.  Milo’s too.  Chabon’s new novel may focus on the culture of hip-hop, which you will not likely encounter on our pages, but the underlying idea has both profound and light-hearted implications. Just a day prior he had another keeper of a phrase that resonates here:

Maybe your hometown is always an imaginary place: the home of your imagination. If so, then mine–at its best, at its most vivid–whether the vanishing rainbow of Columbia, or the shifting restless polycultural territory manifesting in the joint between Oakland and Berkeley, is a place a lot like this place right here, a place to which people come most of all, I think, because they want to live around people who are not like them, because that is the very thing they have most in common, because they are dedicated to the self-evident truth articulated in one of the founding documents of my hometown, that it ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.