Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/220855

Title

The lament of the disconsolate chimera

Author(s)

Tofts, Darren

Abstract

Essayist, author, cultural critic, blogger (though he despises the term), public intellectual, enfant terrible. Just some of the monikers that have been or could be applied to Mark Dery. Dery has made an art form of the short, punchy and polemical screed. It was through such writing that he single-handedly put epoch-defining terms such as cyberspace and culture jamming into permanent circulation in the 1990s.With the eviscerating Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. American Culture on the Brink (1999) he carved out a new identity for himself as the psychopathologist of the American unconscious. Following all too slowly on its heels I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts (2012) takes us beyond the brink into the maw of something distastefully uncanny, something so horribly real that it can't possibly exist. CGI cinema certainly has a lot to answer for. What is most appealing about both texts is their composition, by and large, of previously published essays. But this is no cynical commerce. On the contrary, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts reveals just how ferociously productive Dery has been during the past decade, especially when the final selection is only a snap, or rather sniper shot of the scribbling that the guy churns out. The book brings together essays published in diverse and at times obscure or at least specialized contexts that speak to different demographics and readerships. Collecting them into a single volume concentrates the intensity of the trip we are about to take, rather like pumping up the juice on the electric chair, or getting medieval on the plunger of a lethal injection. In the Pyrotechnic Insanitarium the conjoined metaphor of the theme park and the lunatic asylum gives a thumb nail sketch of the millennial American midway as a freakshow disporting pregnant men, homicidal clowns, cloned sheep and mordant space cults. In Bad Thoughts we are once again privy to a front seat view of the execution chamber where the spectres of American bad faith are gurneyed in for swift despatch at Dery's merciless hands.

Publication type

Journal article

Source

21.C Magazine, (2012)

Publication year

2012

Keyword(s)

Book review;  Dery, Mark (1959-);  Essays

Publisher

G & B Arts International

ISSN

1035-6754

Publisher URL

http://www.21cmagazine.com/The-Lament-of-the-Disconsolate-Chimera

Copyright

Copyright © 2012.