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

Dery, Mark

3.82

248 ratings by Goodreads

9780816677733: I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0816677735 ISBN 13: 9780816677733

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2012

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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.

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About the Author:

Mark Dery is a cultural critic and journalist whose writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, Cabinet, Bookforum, and Boing Boing, among other publications. His books include Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture; The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink; and the widely republished pamphlet Culture Jamming. He is writing a biography of Edward Gorey.

Bruce Sterling is a science fiction author whose novels include Distraction, Zeitgeist, Holy Fire, and The Caryatids.

Review:

"More relevant than Mythologies, funnier than Travels in Hyperreality, more readable than Simulacra, less gloomy than Living in the End Times, smarter than Hitchens and without the pomposity, Dery's dazzling collection will, I unhesitatingly predict, become a classic of cultural criticism." - Jim Lawrence, Words, Noises and Other Stuff

"Whether writing about a severed head, toy gun lust, Lady Gaga, the Pope, Facebook, or Madonna's big toe, Dery indefatigably explores those dark corners of our collective, subconscious thoughts. [...] [A] masterful mash-up of personal history, literary study, and philosophical rumination..." - Kate Walker, Notes for Headstones

"Dery wants to turn society over and shine some light on the dark, crawly things growing underneath it---and us."

[T]hese short, sharp, well-turned pieces...will make you look at the world in a whole new and rewardingly disturbing way."

- Deborah Sussman, Phoenix New Times

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