Photographers:

A call for six (6) photos, to be reproduced in black and white, as illustrations in a forthcoming Brazilian (Portuguese-only) anthology of my work, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Essays on American Empire, Digital Culture, Posthuman Porn, and the Sexual Symbolism of Madonna's Big Toe (Editora Sulina). The book will be launched at the prestigious Pernambuco book fair, FLIPORTO, in Olinda, Brazil, November 12-15. (Details HERE.)

I'm inviting interested parties to send a link to their online galleries or portfolios to me at markdery at verizon dot net.

Unsurprisingly, there won't be any clink of coin, here. (Is there ever, these days?) But if I choose your image as one of the six B/W illustrations in the book, or six of your works to fill all six slots, you'll receive written credit in the book, including a link to your site, and as many complimentary copies of the book (which, again, is Portuguese-only) as I can pry from the publishers' white-knuckled grip. As well, English-language rights to the book may be picked up by an American publisher, in which case I'll lobby strenuously to include your images in the English-language version.

What am I looking for? Any images that resonate with the sensibility at play in my writing. If you're unfamiliar with my work, prowl around my site, Shovelware, or read the Wikipedia entry on me, or search sites like True/Slant and Boing Boing.

For the time-deprived, here's the back-cover promo copy for I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts. (Pardon the shamelessly self-aggrandizing tone. Flogging product is part of every hack's job description, these days.)

From the cultural critic Wired called "provocative and cuttingly humorous" comes a viciously funny, joltingly insightful new collection of drive-by critiques---of an America gone mad, and a world where chaos and catastrophe are the new normal.

Here are essays on Star Trek fans' pornographic fantasies about the Borg, a fascist hive mind of alien man-machines; Facebook as a Limbo of the Lost for the dead souls from your high-school yearbook; George W. Bush's fear of his Inner Queer; the SUV as a totem of Ugly Americanism; the morality of wearing camo-themed fashion during wartime; why golf is a battlefield in the war between the classes; the homoerotic subtext of the Superbowl; the theme-parking of the Holocaust; the Church of Euthanasia; the hidden agendas of IQ tests; Santa's secret kinship with Satan; the sadism of dentists; why HAL, the computer in the movie 2001, was gay; the severed head as signifier; the literary merits of suicide notes; and, of course, the sexual symbolism of Madonna's big toe.

From Menckenesque polemics on American society to deft deconstructions of pop culture to unflinching personal essays in which the author turns his scalpel-sharp wit on himself, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is a head-spinning intellectual thrill ride.

I'll seriously consider any stunning image that harmonizes with the style and subject matter suggested by that blurb.

DEADLINE: MONDAY AM, NYC TIME.

To get you in the mood, here's the unforgettable front-cover photo by the incomparable Adam Szrotek, guaranteed to leave big, puffy blisters all over your mind:

Photo: Adam Szrotek; copyright Adam Szrotek, all rights reserved.

READ IT NOW, BEFORE IT'S REDACTED: "Goodbye to All This: On Leaving True/Slant."

TEASER:

The unspoken goal, in too much American journalism, is not to tell people what they don't know, or never even imagined they might want to know, but to tell people what they already know, since it logically follows that anything they don't know is too weird to survive in what we Americans, in our inimitably irony-free way, like to call the Marketplace of Ideas. It's this failure of editorial nerve, driven by a cringing fear of scaring off advertisers, that has rendered largely extinct the sort of narrative nonfiction Lawrence Weschler describes as "pieces you might curl into, of an evening, having no prior notion that you could even become remotely interested in their subject, and through the sheer narrative energy of the writing, you'd find yourself becoming caught and then held, completely immersed, lost to the world for hours at a time..."

And one must tell people things they already know in language they already use---PowerPoint prose that is easily bullet-ized in the reader's mind. Like William F. Buckley, I never scrupled at sending my reader to the OED if a sesquipedalian word was the best word for the job. Nor did I feel any obligation to smilingly submit to the intellectual straitjacket that constrains too much American journalism, namely, the presumption that a writer's allusions and references should be bounded by the cultural literacy of Kim Kardashian.

HELP WANTED

NEEDED: A webdesigner with some coding skills (Movable Type, Perl) OR a coder with some design literacy.

JOB DESCRIPTION:

1. Migrate the contents of my extensively built-out website (www.markdery.com) to a new, user-friendly, free-hosting platform such as WordPress, Blogger, MT, or Tumblr. (Your informed opinion on which platform is best will help determine which platform I choose.) Once you've designed the site architecture and flowed legacy content into it, I'll choose from among the available, off-the-shelf templates offered by the new host, but will likely need your help in customizing the generic design to suit specific layout and functionality concerns.

2. Move my domain name to same.

3. Optimize for search engines; notify all major engines of new site location.

PAY: To be negotiated. My budget for this is limited, but I'll seriously consider all reasonable estimates. This project would offer marvelous experience for a newly minted design or programming grad, not to mention an impressive addition to his/her portfolio.

CONTACT: Send a resume, cost estimate (broken down by task/expense), and projected time frame for completion of project to:

markdery at verizon dot net

NOTE: I'll be out of the office July 23-31, so if you send your resume and estimate between this Friday and July 31, please be aware that I'm off the grid.

WEEKEND UPDATE: Apparently, some Bronze-Age bible troll reported my Facebook link to this essay as "abusive," presumably because Twain was an atheist and Huckleberry Finn, one of the most banned books in a nation that stinks to heaven of god-bothering, is the devil's handiwork. Now, due to Facebook's guilty-until-proven-innocent logic---a rule of thumb that wins the Idi Amin Dada Award for enlightened online governance---I'm unable to repost. Anything. Whether you like Twain or my work or not, I hope you'll consider reposting a link to this page on your Facebook page as a way of saying you support free speech. If that sounds like product placement, mea culpa maxima.

((YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Facebook appears to have repealed its ban on my links, at least for the moment, restoring the link to my article. Heartfelt thanks to all who stood with me in free-speech solidarity by reposting a link to this essay on their FB pages. Twain would be proud of you!

But I will be keeping a close eye on FB's thoughtcrime police, in the future, and will devote a post to the subject if merited. As I note in the TRUESLANT comment thread, it's a strange philosophy of community governance that accepts on faith the baseless accusations of self-appointed public morals czars, by which I mean: community members who, under cover of anonymity, bang the "ABUSE" button whenever they hear speech they don't like. Shouldn't the burden of proof be on them, not the other way 'round? I applaud FB's prompt repeal of their ill-advised gag order, but worry about a privatized commons where the worst among us, who seem to have all the passionate intensity (if not the facts) these days, are able to muzzle freethinkers with the click of a button.))

Grandpa Goth: the new unexpurgated autobiography reminds us how dark Twain could be. A new essay, at True/Slant; read it HERE.

Mark Twain, found on the Web. All rights reserved.

Teaser:

That Twain the Sage of Pepperidge Farm is a sentimental caricature has been obvious since at least 1917, when Mencken published his thoughts on the subject in the New York Evening Mail. Twain had been in the ground only seven years, but already Mencken felt the need to set the record straight, inspired by the posthumous publication of books Twain had suppressed during his lifetime on the assumption that they would demolish, in one blow, his reputation as a lovable curmudgeon. Twain's misgivings were well-founded: The Mysterious Stranger and What Is Man? are sardonic meditations, respectively, on the hypocrisies and fatuities of religion and the moral depravity and brutish self-interest of the species. "Mark Twain dead is beginning to show far different and more brilliant colors than those he seemed to wear during life," writes Mencken, "and the one thing no sane critic would say of him today is that he was the harmless fireside jester, the mellow chautauquan, the amiable old grandpa of letters that he was once so widely thought to be."

The Twain rising from the grave on the centennial of his death lives up to Mencken's press---and just in time for our age of Tea Party know-nothings and bible-thumping flatheads, not to mention CEOs like Lloyd Blankenfeld of Goldman Sachs and Tony Hayward of BP, poster boys for unchecked corporate arrogance and greed.

But seriously: the debate about publicness is too important to be left to prophets of a great big beautiful tomorrow. Join the bloodsport, HERE.

PULLQUOTE:

Is the pervasive resistance to untethering ourselves from our social worlds or disconnecting ourselves from the media drip, even for an instant, at root a fear of the emptiness in our heads? What does it say about us, as a society, if we're unable to be alone and unplugged without being bored or lonely? Is the girl in Deresiewicz's anecdote who wonders why anyone would want to be alone an outlier or a poster child for our times? If Deresiewicz is right, should we preserve some small space in our lives for solitude---a Walden of the mind, away from the Matrix?