From “A Home in the Neon,” an essay about living in Las Vegas by Dave Hickey, in his collection Air Guitar:

Most of all, I suspect that my unhappy colleagues are appalled by the fact that Vegas presents them with a flat-line social hierarchy . . . Membership in the University Club will not get you comped at Caesars, unless you play baccarat. Thus, in the absence of vertical options, one is pretty much thrown back onto one’s own cultural resources, and, for me, this has not been the worst place to be thrown. At least I have begun to wonder if the privilege of living in a community with a culture does not outweigh the absence of a “cultural community” and, to a certain extent, explain its absence. (Actually, it’s not so bad. My [Times Literary Supplement] and [London Review of Books] come in the mail every week, regular as clockwork, and just the other day, I took down my grandfather’s Cicero and read for nearly an hour without anyone breaking down my door and forcing me to listen to Wayne Newton.)