I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dream [Hardcover]

If you're one of those pain-in-the-neck smart people who see the idiocy on both sides of pretty much every dichotomy, from Democrat-v-Republican to jock-v-head, you'll like this guy. I've dug Dery's stuff for a few years now, having happened upon his work on the (very sadly) defunct True/Slant blog, which, looking back, was a super-rare Topps Rookie Stars bubble-gum-card collection of our greatest new journalists, such as Goldman Sachs-killer Matt Taibbi and porn-fascinated snark-dispenser Susannah Breslin.

Dery is hideously progressive, open-minded and New York avant-art-mongering, so be ready for that. If you're a news and/or culture junkie of a liberal/urban stripe, Dery's books will, I promise, wind up living on the same shelf as your Taibbi, Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson, not because of the implicit liberal slant but because you'll A) learn a bunch of cool stuff you never thought you wanted to know, and B) help your brain put out some psychic fires vis-à-vis our teetering American culture. This guy should be the content manager of google.com.

For instance, go reality-check his essay on Lady Gaga, which I've mentioned in a few of my own incoherent ravings on Big Corporate Music. After months of exposure to Gaga-this and Gaga-that vomited from the great media Matrix that keeps us all in line (you remember all that Gaga overexposure, right, before Katy Perry took it to a whole `nother level?), Dery - and I would have personally warned him not to do this if we were better acquainted - accidentally read a Sasha Frere-Jones article on Gaga. Frere-Jones's M.O. has always been an especially bovine blend of milquetoast-flavored suckup-ism toward and reverence for Corporate Rock. It's horrible, like reading Tom Friedman trying sneakily to justify the latest military "accidental" massacre of Middle Eastern civilians by hand-holding us through the big-picture importance of Kellie Pickler, but with fewer mixed metaphors.

Anyway, upon reading Frere-Jones's nonsense about Gaga, Dery's head finally exploded, and he went on an epic, Bowie-loving, can't-miss rant that should be required reading in every American high school. That one's here in this book.

Here's one I hadn't even thought about: non-jocks, especially guys who were bullied in school, thoroughly dreading and hating Super Bowl weekend (and don't we all, really, deep down? It's like a culture-somnabulist's Thanksgiving with Doritos instead of turkey, if you ask me). That piece, "Wimps, Wussies and W.," also covers how our modern conception of masculinity has been hijacked to mean blind obedience to authority rather than courageous, outside-the-box thinking.

In the wake of the Crocodile Hunter's death, Dery wrote a piece (that's here also) about animal attacks both wild and domestic. Delightfully gross stuff in there about killer whales, lions, "domesticated" chimps - did you know a grizzly bear can fit an entire human head in its mouth?

That last bit is what Dery's really all about. You know your buddy who likes watching bootleg videos of real deaths and stuff? Well, imagine that guy, but with intense insight into the hows and whys of each individual dismemberment, etc. and armed with one of the most fearsome vocabularies on the planet. That's Dery. He sees the information zeitgeist for what it is: a gigantic kerfluffle that's only in its gothic adolescence.

Not that he ever says so outright. That'd be too hick. A while back, I whined in some review someplace about his detachment: give those mean old dumb Republicans a nice beatdown, willya, was my intent there. But in this collection Dery solidifies his brand, not just by examining the nonsensical psychic sewage in which we all soak but by asking the right questions. And when he talks about himself ("Cortex Envy"), he's literally the greatest thing since sliced bread, at one point generally comparing his passive-aggressive, comics-fueled battles with his stepdad to a Greek tragedy starring Kevin Sorbo.

I was going to slap an A+ grade on this thing, but it's a collection of previously released items stockpiled over the last few years now, and some of it's actually still on the web, which I wasn't even going to tell you, but full disclosure and all that. But whatever, he deserves it, so I've changed my mind.

I'll warn you that you may or may not need thesaurus.com handy while you read this stuff, as he's not just a (former?) New Yawk lit professor but a good one. The thing about that, though, in this instance, is that the rewards are priceless, as are these deep, deep (bad) thoughts.

- Eric W. Saeger

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. I recognize my iTunes library in Dery's tours de force on David Bowie and Lady Gaga. I recognize my bookshelf in Dery's essay on Amok Books, whose productions were once textbooks in the éducation sentimentale of the counterculture. I recognize my own rhetorical strategies in the move Dery makes in "Toe Fou," updating George Bataille's meditation on the big toe by riffing on a picture of Madonna's bare feet. Weirdest of all, I recognize what I thought was my own obscure fondness for "invisible literature" in Dery's essay on the New York Academy of Medicine Library -- a place I too have plundered in quiet hours of mad and horrible research. Was I sitting across the table from you, Mark? I feel as though you, like Baudelaire, have addressed your book to "mon semblable, mon frère."

How is it that Dery is able to produce this uncanny feeling of identification? You get the sense that, while the rest of us were living the zeitgeist, Dery was holding a stethoscope to its heart. His essays are EKGs showing that our pulse goes haywire in the presence of extremes -- perversion, violence, satanism. In an introduction, Dery declares that it is "the writer's job" to "think bad thoughts": "to wander footloose through the mind's labyrinth, following the thread of any idea that reels you in, no matter how arcane or depraved, obscene or blasphemous, untouchably controversial, irreducibly complex, or preposterous on its face." All of us take in these abominations as they play across our flatscreens and iPhones, but Dery's distinction is to really think about them -- reflect on them, contextualize them, pursue their logic to sometimes unpalatable consequences. "The writer's job," he means to say, "is to transform 'bad thoughts' into good ones -- insights and observations -- through a process of examination." Will this thankless job now compel Dery to go in search of even worse thoughts? Perhaps the worst of all lies in the realization that there are so many bad thoughts, an inexhaustible supply, yet to be confronted.

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.