Description
Book SynopsisFrom 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 selfthe gothic, the grotesque, and the carnivalesqueMark 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 live
Trade ReviewMark Dery’s cultural criticism is the stuff that nightmares are made of. He’s a witty and brilliant tour guide on an intellectual journey through our darkest desires and strangest inclinations. You can’t look away even if you want to.—Mark Frauenfelder and David Pescovitz, Boing Boing
Mark Dery is gifted with sanity, humor, learning, and a prose style as keen as a barber’s razor. He applies those qualities to a trustworthy and entertaining analysis of the lunatic fringe, which constitutes an ever-larger portion of the discourse in America today.—Luc Sante
Do not turn squeamish from the many considerations of death that lurk within—vampires, tombs, disease, corruption of many varieties. Mark Dery’s restless and stylish essay is concerned with one thing only—what it means to be alive in America.—Richard Rodriguez, author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America
The bebop rhythms of Mark Dery’s prose reflect an intellectual excitement that is rare among contemporary cultural essayists. Reading him is like ingesting a powerful jolt of espresso.—Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars
Table of ContentsContents
Foreword: I Must Not Read Bad ThoughtsBruce Sterling
Introduction
Part I. American Magic, American DreadDead Man Walking: What Do Zombies Mean?
Gun Play: An American Tragedy in Three Acts
Mysterious Stranger: Grandpa Twain’s Dark Side
Aladdin Sane Called. He Wants His Lightning Bolt Back: On Lady Gaga
Jocko Homo: How Gay Is the Super Bowl?
Wimps, Wussies, and W.: Masculinity, American Style
Stardust Memories: How David Bowie Killed the ’60s and Ushered in the ’70s and, for One Brief Shining Moment, Made the Mullet Hip
When Animals Attack! An Aesop’s Fable about Anthropomorphism
Toe Fou: How I Was Subliminally Seduced by Madonna’s Big Toe
Shoah Business
The Triumph of the Shill: Fascist Branding
Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall Parodies and the Inglorious Return of Der Führer
Part II. Myths of the Near Future: Making Sense of the Digital Age World Wide Wonder Closet: On Blogging
(Face)Book of the Dead
Straight, Gay, or Binary? HAL Comes out of the Cybernetic Closet
Word Salad Surgery: Spam, Deconstructed
Slashing the Borg: Resistance Is Fertile
Things to Come: Xtreme Kink and the Future of Porn
Part III. Tripe Soup for the Soul: Religion and All Its Works and WaysTripe Soup for the Soul: The Daily Affirmation
Pontification: On the Death of the Pope
The Prophet Margin: Jack Chick’s Comic-Book Apocalypse
2012: Carnival of Bunkum
The Vast Santanic Conspiracy
Part IV. Anatomy Lesson: The Grotesque, the Gothic, and Other Dark MattersOpen Wide: Dental Horror
Gray Matter: The Obscure Pleasures of Medical Libraries
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Severed Head
Been There, Pierced That: Apocalypse Culture and the Escalation of Subcultural Hostilities
Death to All Humans! The Church of Euthanasia’s Modest Proposal
Great Caesar’s Ghost: On the Crypt of the Capuchins
Aphrodites of the Operating Theater: On La Specola’s Anatomical Venuses
Goodbye, Cruel Words: On the Suicide Note as a Literary Genre
Cortex Envy: Bringing Up Baby Einstein
AcknowledgmentsNotesPublication History
