I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams download epub

by Mark Dery

Mark_Dery Essays_and_Correspondence English

Epub Book: 1205 kb. | Fb2 Book: 1139 kb.

Mark Dery never tries to empty his head or not think of anything. I find it impossible to discuss Mark Dery's I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts in anything other than the first person

Mark Dery never tries to empty his head or not think of anything. He knows that every Stay Puft planetary destroyer needs to be yanked from our hindbrain and gurneyed over to the dissection theater for a postmortem of what ails us. (Heck, even wang cancer gets a BoingBoing prose poem for its troubles. I find it impossible to discuss Mark Dery's I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts in anything other than the first person. The book speaks so eloquently of its time that, uncannily, I can't help but feel it speaks of me. So many of my own interests and obsessions rise from its pages - death, deviance, intellect.

American Dread, American Dreams. No critic delves into the dark recesses of American consciousness quite like Dery

American Dread, American Dreams. No critic delves into the dark recesses of American consciousness quite like Dery. And perhaps at no time in recent history has national disillusionment been so primed for such critique. With the publication of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, his first book in over a decade, Dery strays (somewhat) from his interest in technoculture, the interactions and politics of technology and culture. Dedicating only a quarter of the page count to the topic, he takes on a dizzying new array of cultural memes and altered realities.

Foreword by bruce sterling. Foreword: I Must Not Read Bad Thoughts. I have read every mark dery book ever written, including, of course, this one. I find them exceedingly practical, concrete, and useful works. Mark is always willing to venture to the fringes, the edges, the frontiers. He marinates himself in the sensibility of the locals. He never lies about what he finds.

Irreverent and shocking stand to Mark Dery’s I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts as sunny and beautiful do to the best .

Irreverent and shocking stand to Mark Dery’s I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts as sunny and beautiful do to the best summer day in Bora Bora – they’re both accurate and deadly boring descriptions of the matter at hand. The book’s value, I think, stands in the breadth of its interests, its dragging you from subject matter to (very different) subject matter and forcing you to inspired critical effort, its moving you to constructive skepticism.

Mark Dery’s restless and stylish essay is concerned with one thing only-what it means to be alive in America. Mark Dery is a cultural critic. Richard Rodriguez, author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America. He is best known for his writings on the politics of popular culture in books such as The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, Flame Wars, and Culture Jamming. He has been a professor of journalism at New York University, a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at the University of California, Irvine, and a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome.

118+ million publications. Recommended publications. Discover more publications, questions and projects in Dreams.

Mark Dery (born December 24, 1959) is an American author, lecturer . I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Mark Dery (born December 24, 1959) is an American author, lecturer and cultural critic. ISBN 978-0-8166-7773-3.

Will the last American band to get played on the radio Please bring the flag? . The cultural critic Mark Dery wrote a book named after the song in 2014: I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

I must not think bad thoughts I must not think bad thoughts I must not think bad thoughts. The cultural critic Mark Dery wrote a book named after the song in 2014: I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. This is how he describes it

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.

Publishers Weekly,In this new collection of essays, Cultural critic Dery (The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium) pokes fun at American popular culture and shines light on subjects often considered taboo. Exploring music, masculinity, and media, Dery takes on subjects as varied as the depth of Lady Gaga's intelligence (promising signs are there), jocks, Dubya, and Mark Twain's legacy. His trio of essays on Hitler and the Holocaust are particularly powerful, bringing a smart, fresh take on the commercialization of the Holocaust legacy; the power of Nazi branding and Hitler's use of media;.

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.

Comments: (7)

Vit

Mark Dery is a cultural mythographer for the 22nd Century. A modern philosopher, exploring the connections which bind our souls to art, music, film, commerce, and ultimately each other, Dery writes exuberant, eclectic essays which draw from the entire scope of human knowledge and experience. I unabashedly adore his work. By all means, read him.

MeGa_NunC

The cover of Bad Thoughts is delicious, as is the title. And the foreword by Bruce Sterling. The writing is like poetry -- worth reading for its own sake, regardless of the message. The message itself, about the shadow side of American culture, is important and not exactly over-covered by other authors. . Dery's is a dark vision spiced with gallows humor. It's more than gallows humor. Is it mordant? I haven't ever had the occasion to use that word before, but I believe it fits. I wouldn't choose it to read to my toddler, but in an ideal world it would be an alternative text in college American History or American Studies courses.

anneli

witty, very well written and insightful

Bloodray

A walk through the sideshow of American cultural and intellectual life in the first decade of the 21st century. Fun.

Joni_Dep

Mark Dery is a forward-thinking-and-looking writer who puts many of the more insane aspects of contemporary life under a magnifying glass and dissects them with fearsome insight and intellect. As befits a modern splintered age of no common morality or life-threads or belief systems, he approaches his subjects with a pathology-anthropologist's eye and holds up some of the darker areas of life to wriggle complaining under the concise blinding light of his deep-dish musings and extrapolations about their (im)possible meanings and potential future directions. As noted science fiction writer Bruce Sterling sagely notes in his introduction, Dery "brandishes a Diogenes lantern as the smoke thickens on every side" and these "Google erudition" pieces that comprise the book (ranging from 1996-2011) read "like the contents of bottles pitched into the sea."

And what of the contents of these electronic-disinformation-sea-bobbing vessels? Well, if bemused and fascinating musings on subjects as diverse as the homoeroticism of George W. Bush, how Lady Gaga stands up in comparison to previous gender-and-agenda-bender bi-curious rockers, current zombie apocalypse obsession, Dadaist spam poetry, the homosexuality quotient of the tiresome Super Bowl (Dery does not shy away from any sexual matter, straight or not), Mayan apocalypse cultists, fundamentalist religion pamphleteers, the suicide note as a literary subgenre, the fascist-identifying proclivities of Prince Harry, and on and on (you get the general hyper-eclectic-discussions gist) interest you, then you will absolutely love this book. With a spunky, funky sensibility informed in parts by the late 70s American punk of his youth, alternative literature and an endlessly inquiring mind, Dery gleefully picks up a great many taboo-subject rocks, shows us what's squirming sightless unseen underneath them, then crushes the stupidity of the more deserving targets to death with the selfsame stone.

On a technical level, Dery is an excellent writer, approaching his subject matter with a wry, sometimes uproarious spiketop sense of humor which helps to leaven some of his more serious discussions. Dery does tend to dwell a lot on the darker side of life, which can make for uncomfortable and somewhat frightening, if enlightening, reading. It strikes me there's a slightly schoolboy prurience (back to punk and nihilism again) to the glee-degree with which he jumps into some of humanity's bleakest corners, but his reports back on the long dark night of our ever-evaporating soul are always done with a judicious amount of redeeming humanity, a lack of identification with the insane, and a sense of genuine human curiosity and inquiry. He does not fetishise stuff like the sickest corners of the net's sexual representation, he just says here's what I found and saw during examining this crash on the information superhighway, here's what I made of it, nothing hugely interesting to see here, move along, move along.

Rleillin

I am an adjunct professor of writing at a small, public, NJ liberal arts college. I teach, mostly, argumentative writing (argument & persuasion the class is called) and we have liberties and I like challenging students to write about difficult art and artists for their assignments. I also enjoy assigning them provocative, contemporary, and smart essays in order to provide some examples of what I think good cultural analysis and essay-writing look like. So never mind the poets and short stories or films or musicians they are exposed to (it focuses on arts and humanities), but they have had to read essays/criticism from folks like Nick Tosches, David Foster Wallace, Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, Luc Sante, Greil Marcus, A.B. Spellman, Charles Bernstein, Simon Reynolds, Ron Silliman, Charles Olson, and yes, Mark Dery. He's a regular on my syllabus.

I have assigned this book for every class I've ever taught as an adjunct, or at least 3-4 essays from it. They have invaluable perspective, a wit which endemic to late 19th century and early 20th century essayists (Chesterton, Wilson, Wilde, Mencken), an occasionally melancholy lyricism, and a thoroughly modern and unquestionably necessary approach to things which we all-too-often overlook in our culture—or should I say, ignore. This book pokes around in our culture's abandoned houses, as it were, and surprises us with the discomfiting realization that they have not been "abandoned" at all, but rather that we are still living within them, as if it were a mirror capable of showing us that we are in fact ghosts, haunting ourselves.

I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams download epub

Essays & Correspondence

Author: Mark Dery
ISBN: 0816677735
Category: Literature & Fiction
Subcategory: Essays & Correspondence
Language: English
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (April 6, 2012)
Pages: 304 pages

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