I must not think bad thoughts : drive-by essays on American dread, American dreams

✍ Scribed by Dery, Mark; Sterling, Bruce

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 337
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

From the preface by SF legend Bruce Sterling:

"Dery...brandishes a Diogenes lantern as the the smoke thickens on every side. ... Beset with Google erudition, [these essays] tackle a dizzying set of topics--even within the essays, within the very sentences, there are dizzying arrays of topics. ... He's very good at going into areas of culture you wouldn't care to visit yourself, and performing autopsies. He assesses each bone and organ in detail. Not in a crowd-pleasing way--he doesn't prettify it, culture-industrialize it and build a gift-shop at the door. Mark is like a Martian probe. He is high-tech. He is way out there, on his own. He came equipped with an onboard set of lenses and abrasion tools."

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 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 a generalist's guilty pleasure in an age of nanospecialization and niche marketing. From Menckenesque polemics on American society and deft deconstructions of pop culture to unflinching personal essays in which Dery turns his scalpel-sharp wit on himself, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is a head-spinning intellectual ride through American dreams and American nightmares.

✦ Table of Contents

Content: American magic, American dread --
Myths of the near future : making sense of the digital age --
Tripe soup for the soul : religion and all its works and ways --
Anatomy lesson : the grotesque, the gothic, and other dark matters.

✦ Subjects

Popular culture -- United States. United States -- Civilization -- 1970- POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Public Policy -- Cultural Policy. SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropology -- Cultural. SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Popular Culture. LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays Civilization. Popular culture. United States. Social Science. Fine Arts