Table of Contents

Contents

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

About the Author

Mark Dery is a cultural critic. 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. www.markdery.com.

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

Reviews

Mark 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