I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts Drive by Essays on American Dread American Dreams From the cultural critic Wired called provocative and cuttingly humorous comes a viciously funny joltingly insightful collection of drive by critiques of contemporary America where chaos is the new n
From the cultural critic Wired called provocative and cuttingly humorous comes a viciously funny, joltingly insightful collection of drive by critiques of contemporary America where chaos is the new normal Exploring the darkest corners of the national psyche and the nethermost regions of the self the gothic, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque Mark Dery makes sense ofFrom the cultural critic Wired called provocative and cuttingly humorous comes a viciously funny, joltingly insightful collection of drive by critiques of contemporary America where chaos is the new normal Exploring the darkest corners of the national psyche and the nethermost regions of the self the gothic, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque Mark Dery makes sense of the cultural dynamics of the American madhouse early in the twenty first century.Here are essays on the pornographic fantasies of Star Trek fans, Facebook as Limbo of the Lost, George W Bush s fear of his inner queer, the theme parking of the Holocaust, the homoerotic subtext of the Super Bowl, the hidden agendas of IQ tests, Santa s secret kinship with Satan, the sadism of dentists, Hitler s afterlife on YouTube, the sexual identity of 2001 s HAL, the suicide note considered as a literary genre, the surrealist poetry of robot spam, the zombie apocalypse, Lady Gaga, the Church of Euthanasia, toy guns in the dream lives of American boys, and the polymorphous perversity of Madonna s big toe.Dery casts a critical eye on the accepted order of things, boldly crossing into the intellectual no fly zones demarcated by cultural warriors on both sides of America s ideological divide controversy phobic corporate media, blinkered academic elites, and middlebrow tastemakers Intellectually omnivorous and promiscuously interdisciplinary, Dery s writing is
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Mark Dery
From markdery page_id 130Mark Dery is a cultural critic He writes about American mythologies, American pathologies, the visual landscape, unpopular culture, masculinity, and dark matter of all sorts He is the author of The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium American Culture on the Brink 1999 and Escape Velocity Cyberculture at the End of the Century 1996 He edited Flame Wars The Discourse of Cyberculture 1994 , the anthology that inaugurated cyberstudies as an academic field and kick started the academic interest in techno feminism and black technoculture through Dery s trailblazing essay Black to the Future, in which he coined the term Afrofuturism His 1993 essay Culture Jamming Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs popularized the term culture jamming and helped launch the movement Widely republished on the Web, Culture Jamming remains the definitive theorization of this subcultural phenomenon Mark has taught in the Yale School of Art and the Department of Journalism at NYU and has been a Chancellor s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome Mark s latest book is the essay collection, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts Drive By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams University of Minnesota Press April 2012 Bruce Sterling wrote the introduction Boing Boing s advance praise calls it intellectual journey through our darkest desires and strangest inclinations Luc Sante says it s a trustworthy and entertaining analysis of the lunatic fringe, which constitutes an ever larger portion of the discourse in America today Mark is at work on a biography of the artist, writer, and legendary eccentric Edward Gorey for Little, Brown.