Download I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American by Mark Dery PDF
By Mark Dery
Cadillacs, Coca-Cola, and cocaine, presidents and psycho-
paths, Norman Rockwell and the mafia . . . the dream of
America eternally unravels its codes, just like the helix of a few
ideological DNA.
J. G. Ballard, creation to Hello America
From the preface by way of SF legend Bruce Sterling:
"Dery...brandishes a Diogenes lantern because the the smoke thickens on each part. ... Beset with Google erudition, [these essays] take on a dizzying set of topics--even in the essays, in the very sentences, there are dizzying arrays of subject matters. ... He's first-class at going into components of tradition you wouldn't care to go to your self, and acting autopsies. He assesses each one bone and organ intimately. no longer in a crowd-pleasing way--he doesn't prettify it, culture-industrialize it and construct a gift-shop on the door. Mark is sort of a Martian probe. he's high-tech. he's approach in the market, on his personal. He got here built with an onboard set of lenses and abrasion tools."
From the cultural critic Wired known as "provocative and cuttingly humorous" comes a viciously humorous, joltingly insightful choice of drive-by evaluations of latest the US the place chaos is the recent general. Exploring the darkest corners of the nationwide psyche and the nethermost areas of the self--the gothic, the gruesome, and the carnivalesque--Mark Dery is smart of the cultural dynamics of the yank madhouse early within the twenty-first century.
Here are essays at the pornographic fantasies of Star Trek fanatics, fb as Limbo of the misplaced, George W. Bush's worry of his internal queer, the theme-parking of the Holocaust, the homoerotic subtext of the tremendous Bowl, the hidden agendas of IQ exams, Santa's mystery kinship with devil, the sadism of dentists, Hitler's afterlife on YouTube, the sexual identification of 2001's HAL, the suicide word regarded as a literary style, the surrealist poetry of robotic junk mail, the zombie apocalypse, girl Gaga, the Church of Euthanasia, toy weapons within the dream lives of yankee boys, and the polymorphous perversity of Madonna's tremendous toe.
Dery casts a severe eye at the accredited order of items, boldly crossing into the highbrow no-fly zones demarcated through cultural warriors on either side of America's ideological divide: controversy-phobic company media, blinkered educational elites, and middlebrow tastemakers. Intellectually omnivorous and promiscuously interdisciplinary, Dery's writing is a generalist's to blame excitement in an age of nanospecialization and area of interest advertising and marketing. From Menckenesque polemics on American society and deft deconstructions of popular culture to unflinching own essays during which Dery turns his scalpel-sharp wit on himself, I must never imagine undesirable Thoughts is a head-spinning highbrow journey via American goals and American nightmares.
Note: retail caliber PDF; bookmarked, contains TOC.
Read or Download I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams PDF
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Extra resources for I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams
Sample text
How many American icons began by reinventing themselves at Ellis Island, their dreams still reverberating with the howl of the mob at their heels? How many American millionaires made their fortunes peddling promises—the dream of home ownership, say, with no money down and no background check? C. Fields and William S. Burroughs and Tom Waits, Twain’s voice echoes with the cadences and jargon of that archetypal American, the confidence man. A felon with a thousand faces, we see him everywhere in our nation’s family photo album: carny barker, riverboat gambler, revival-meeting preacher, traveling salesman, soapbox 33 MYSTERIOUS STRANGER orator, politician.
When I was 14, sex suddenly became all-important to me. It didn’t really matter who or what it was with, as long as it was a sexual experience. So it was some very pretty boy in class in some 43 ALADDIN SANE CALLED. school or other that I took home and neatly fucked on my bed upstairs. And that was it. ”25 For a performer who exults in the fabricated self, Gaga seemed caught in the headlights of fame by Walters’s question, as if her inner Stefani Germanotta, the prep-school striver from the Upper West Side, was squirming inside her determinedly scandalous Gaga suit.
Bang, he says. Bang bang. You’re dead. (2011) 26 Grandpa Twain’s Dark Side Mysterious Stranger r e p o r t s o f m a r k t wa i n ’ s r e s u r r e c t i o n a r e g r e a t l y exaggerated. Still, with luck, the publication of the three-volume, 500,000word, unexpurgated edition of Twain’s autobiography will revise the Twain enshrined in the popular imagination—the twinkly-eyed rapscallion with a gently pricking wit—along more accurate, which is to say more mordant, lines: Grandpa Walton as Gawker blogger.