A mini-festo for the digressive essay: “But I Digress: On The Point Of Not Getting To The Point,” new, now, at Thought Catalog. The Shining, Stanley Kubrick. Copyright Stanley Kubrick; all rights reserved. Teaser: “The digression must wander off the point only to fulfill it,” Lopate insists; in contradistinction, the digressive essay makes a point […]
LIVE, NOW: ALL THE YOUNG DUDES: WHY GLAM ROCK MATTERS [KINDLE SINGLE]. BOING BOING‘s inaugural Kindle title, and my latest. Currently out of print. Design/illustration: Mark Frauenfelder. © Mark Frauenfelder; all rights reserved. From the Amazon blurb: “All the Young Dudes,” glam rock’s rallying cry, turned 40 last year. David Bowie wrote it, but Mott […]
“Thank God I’m an Atheist: Bunuel’s Last Laugh,” the second installment in my “Self-Help for Surrealists” series is live, on Thought Catalog, HERE. Nut graf: Buñuel is a philosopher – a moral philosopher, to be exact, albeit one who makes his case with gleeful, Surrealist savagery, using images dredged from the depths of the unconscious. […]
DOWNLOADABLE* NOW, at http://amzn.to/ZxSYPE, MY FIRST E-SINGLE, a longform essay called “England My England: Anglophilia Explained.” (It’s available at iBookstore, too, I’m told, and coming soon to B&N.) What do you get for your $2.99? Nearly 8,000 (!) words of brow-furrowing about why some native-born residents of our Shining City Upon a Hill, where All […]
IT WAS WEARING ONE OF THOSE UHURU-ESQUE HEADSETS, TELLING A CROWD OF WHITE PEOPLE CLONED FROM ONE OF CHRIS ANDERSON’S STEM CELLS A WARM, WISE, AND WITTY PARABLE OF SUFFICIENTLY GLADWELLIAN COUNTERINTUITIVENESS. This just in: a flaming brick, neatly wrapped and tied with a pretty pink bow, just in time for International Women’s Day. When […]
“Are Anglophiles born or made? Or cultured in a medium of suet and sentimentality, romanticism and Marmite?” My first longform essay for e-reader, out from Thought Catalog publications this Monday, March 11; available from Amazon (Kindle) and iBookstore; Barnes & Noble (Nook) to follow. Teaser: Downton Abbey has brought out the Anglophile in American fans […]
Now, on BOING BOING: My essay on the mad poet Gerard de Nerval’s famous “lobster walk.” (The first in a series of ha-ha-only serious attempts at “Self-Help for Surrealists.”) Teaser: “Before Rimbaud, before the Surrealists, there was Nerval (1808 – 1855), living his life as if it were a lucid dream. Of course, it didn’t […]
At Boing Boing, “The Kraken Wakes,” my belle-lettristic (yet exhaustively reported) science feature on the first-ever footage of Architeuthis, the giant squid, in its deep-sea element. Chromatophores flashing from iridescent silver-gold to gunmetal blue, the animal danced in the dark, an emissary from a sunless, starless void. … “The color was utterly different than any […]
From the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography’s “Year in Books 2012: Worth a Second Look“: “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, by Mark Dery. After a fully established career that has seen this cultishly loved essayist slowly building a following, 2012 seemed to finally be the big breakout year for Mark Dery, with this […]
WHAT: REVEALER READING SERIES AT NYU: “MARK DERY reads from, and riffs on, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams, his new book exploring the edges of popular culture. Respondent: STEPHEN DUNCOMBE (Gallatin, NYU).” WHEN: Wednesday, October 24, 5:30 P.M. until 7:00 P.M. WHERE: NYU Bookstore 726 Broadway, New […]