Slicing Open the Eyeball. Live, now, on Thought Catalog: My interview with the visual-culture critic Rick Poynor. And I quote: “More than just the preeminent commentator on the social role and cultural politics of graphic design in contemporary culture, the English cultural critic Rick Poynor is our most reliable dashboard navigator through the visual landscape, […]
This just in: “NEWS bulletin from the spirit world: The specter of Edward Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, is haunting our collective unconscious.” My feature on Edward Gorey’s posthumous popularity and his mounting influence on pop culture, live, at The New York Times. Read it HERE. Teaser: Gorey was born […]
SOLD! From Publisher’s Lunch: “Mark Dery’s essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, a humorous, new collection of drive-by critiques of an America gone mad and a world where chaos and catastrophe are the new normal, to Jason Weidemann at University of Minnesota Press, by Andrew Stuart at The Stuart Agency.” A supreme act […]
An essay on the unsettling Lilliputian diorama photography of Nicholas Cobb, at 21.C, reprinted from Photofile magazine: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. PULLQUOTE: Like the yuppie apartment-tower dwellers in David Cronenberg’s Shivers, driven to acts of bacchanalian depravity by a sexually transmitted parasite, or the residents in J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, whose class war escalates into […]
An essay, at Thought Catalog: Gun Play: An American Tragedy, in Three Acts. PULLQUOTE: No one can truly understand the land that inspired Dorothy Parker’s mordant one-liner “American as a sawed-off shotgun” unless he has held—ideally, fired—a gun, felt the perverse sensuality of the way it fits your grip, thrilled to the queasy buzz of […]
From Publisher’s Weekly, the bible of the publishing industry, comes this announcement of a recent deal: “Cultural critic Mark Dery’s THE DOUBTFUL GUEST: The Mysterious Mind and Legendary Life of Edward Gorey, the first true biography of Gorey, one of the distinctive literary forces of the last half of the twentieth century, looking at his […]
WHAT: “The Vast Santanic Conspiracy: Is St. Nick the Tool of a Plot too Monstrous to Mention?,” an illustrated Dery lecture, brought to you by Morbid Anatomy at The Observatory in Brooklyn. Come share the Christmas jeer, followed by a Krampus/Solstice-themed party with music and unique cocktails. Fire the first flaming shot in your own […]
NEW POST AT THOUGHT CATALOG: A brain-pummeling 3,000-word (!) essay on the insistence, in socially networked Web culture, that we Favorite This! and Like that. READ IT HERE: Hate is All Around: The Politics of Enthusiasm (and its Discontents) In this one, I’m thinking about whether we’re defined by what we Like and what we […]
WHAT: My inaugural post for the blog portal Thought Catalog, a discursive meditation, refracted through the prism of personal recollection, on what I call “the fulsome ’80s” and, more specifically, the industrial aesthetic in music and subcultural thought, on the occasion of the death of the Throbbing Gristle keyboardist–tape-player, to be accurate–Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson. WHERE: […]
On November 15, 2010, in Brazil, I launched the (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) at the prestigious FLIPORTO book fair, in Olinda. Buy Não Devo Pensar Em Coisas Ruins (Portuguese only) […]