I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts – Table of Contents

Part I: American Magic, American Dread

  1. “Dead Man Walking: What Do Zombies Mean?”
  2. “Gun Play: An American Tragedy, in Three Acts”
  3. “Mysterious Stranger: Grandpa Twain’s Dark Side”
  4. “Aladdin Sane Called. He Wants His Lightning Bolt Back: On Lady Gaga”
  5. “Jocko Homo: How Gay is the Super Bowl?”
  6. “Wimps, Wussies, and W.: Masculinity, American Style”
  7. “Stardust Memories: How David Bowie Killed the ‘60s and Ushered in the ‘70s, and, for One Brief, Shining Moment, Made the Mullet Hip”
  8. “When Animals Attack!: An Aesop’s Fable About Anthropomorphism”
  9. “Toe Fou: How I Was Subliminally Seduced by Madonna’s Big Toe”
  10. “Shoah Business”
  11. “The Triumph of the Shill: Fascist Branding”
  12. “Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall Parodies and the Inglourious Return of Der Fuhrer”

Part II: Myths of the Near Future: Making Sense of the Digital Age

  1. “World Wide Wonder Closet: On Blogging”
  2. “(Face)Book of the Dead”
  3. “Straight, Gay, or Binary?: HAL Comes Out of the Cybernetic Closet”
  4. “Word Salad Surgery: Spam, Deconstructed”
  5. “Slashing the Borg: Resistance is Fertile”
  6. “Things to Come: Xtreme Kink and the Future of Porn”

Part III: Tripe Soup for the Soul: Religion, and All Its Works and Ways

  1. “Tripe Soup for the Soul: The Daily Affirmation”
  2. “Pontification: On the Death of the Pope”
  3. “The Prophet Margin: Jack Chick’s Comic-Book Apocalypse”
  4. “2012: Carnival of Bunkum”
  5. “The Vast Santanic Conspiracy”

Part IV:Anatomy Lesson: The Grotesque, the Gothic, and Other Dark Matters

  1. “Open Wide: Dental Horror”
  2. “Gray Matter: The Obscure Pleasures of Medical Libraries”
  3. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Severed Head”
  4. “Been There, Pierced That: Apocalypse Culture and the Escalation of Subcultural Hostilities”
  5. “Death To All Humans! The Church of Euthanasia’s Modest Proposal”
  6. “Great Caesar’s Ghost: On the Crypt of the Capuchins”
  7. “Aphrodites of the Operating Theater: On La Specola’s Anatomical Venuses”
  8. “Goodbye, Cruel Words: On the Suicide Note as a Literary Genre”
  9. “Cortex Envy: Bringing Up Baby Einstein”