Mark Dery's guest appearances

Mark Dery

MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

The Virtual Memories Show

Events & Discussions

Plutopia News Network

Scott McCloud

Sarah Williams

Ashton Applewhite

Kevin Young

Kurt Andersen

Cameron Esposito

David Shields

Jane McGonigal

Bob Stein

Lynn Nottage

Toni Morrison

Eddy Portnoy

John Jennings

Andrew Parker

Gary Clark

OwlTail

For his first biography, Mark Dery picked a doozy of a subject: the great, creepy, droll, mysterious artist and writer Edward Gorey. We talk about Mark's brand-new book, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey (Little, Brown), his one in-person encounter with Gorey, how Gorey's sexuality did and didn't inform his work, and the challenge of writing the biography of an artist whose work always invited the reader to fill in the gaps. We get into how Gotham Book Mart made a cottage industry out of Gorey, the long-range impact of Gorey on America's pop culture, the queerness of children's literature beginning in the '50s, the influence of Asian art and philosophy on Gorey's work, his devotion to ballet and Balanchine, why the epic catalog makes for a great biographical tool, and a lot more, like Mark's lifelong one-sided relationship with Patti Smith! • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

<p>For his first biography, <a href="http://markdery.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Mark Dery</a> picked a doozy of a subject: the great, creepy, droll, mysterious artist and writer <a href="http://www.edwardgoreyhouse.org" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Edward Gorey</a>. We talk about Mark's brand-new book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Born-Be-Posthumous-Eccentric-Mysterious/dp/0316188549/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey</a> (Little, Brown), his one in-person encounter with Gorey, how Gorey's sexuality did and didn't inform his work, and the challenge of writing the biography of an artist whose work always invited the reader to fill in the gaps. We get into how Gotham Book Mart made a cottage industry out of Gorey, the long-range impact of Gorey on America's pop culture, the queerness of children's literature beginning in the '50s, the influence of Asian art and philosophy on Gorey's work, his devotion to ballet and Balanchine, why the epic catalog makes for a great biographical tool, and a lot more, like Mark's lifelong one-sided relationship with Patti Smith! • More info <a href="http://chimeraobscura.com/vm/episode-294-mark-dery" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">at our site</a> • Support The Virtual Memories Show via <a href="http://patreon.com/vmspod" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Patreon</a> or <a href="http://paypal.me/vmspod" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Paypal</a></p>

Episode 294 - Mark Dery

In the Age of Always Connect, are we witnessing a plague of oversharing? If so, are social networks its vectors of transmission? Does this much-discussed phenomenon mark the Death of Shame, perhaps even a return to pre-modern notions of public and private? What does it mean to live in a historical moment when the faces in our high-school yearbooks materialize, without warning, in our Facebook lives, Walking Dead eager to rekindle friendships we thought we’d buried long ago? In his illustrated lecture, “(Face)Book of the Dead,” cultural critic and media theorist Mark Dery, author of seminal essays on online subcultures, culture jamming, and Afrofuturism, will address these and other questions, from the posthuman psychology of disembodied friendship to our growing unwillingness to untether ourselves from our social networks or the media drip, even for an instant. What does it say about us, as a society, if we’re unable to be alone and unplugged without being bored or lonely? Is this, at root, a fear of the emptiness in our heads? Should we preserve some small space in our lives for solitude — a Walden of the mind, away from the Matrix?Mark Dery (www.markdery.com) is a cultural critic. He is best known for his writings on the politics of popular culture in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Cabinet, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, Elle, and Wired; on websites such as True/Slant and Thought Catalog; and in books such as The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. Dery’s latest book is an anthology of his recent writings, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Essays on American Empire, Digital Culture, Posthuman Porn, and Lady Gaga’s Lesbian Phallus, published in Brazil by Editora Sulina. Dery is widely associated with “culture jamming,” the guerrilla media criticism movement he popularized through his 1993 essay “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs,” and “Afrofuturism,” a term he coined in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future” (included in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, which he edited). He has been a professor of journalism at New York University, a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. He is at work on a biography of the artist Edward Gorey for Little, Brown.

In the Age of Always Connect, are we witnessing a plague of oversharing? If so, are social networks its vectors of transmission? Does this much-discussed phenomenon mark the Death of Shame, perhaps even a return to pre-modern notions of public and private? What does it mean to live in a historical moment when the faces in our high-school yearbooks materialize, without warning, in our Facebook lives, Walking Dead eager to rekindle friendships we thought we’d buried long ago? In his illustrated lecture, “(Face)Book of the Dead,” cultural critic and media theorist Mark Dery, author of seminal essays on online subcultures, culture jamming, and Afrofuturism, will address these and other questions, from the posthuman psychology of disembodied friendship to our growing unwillingness to untether ourselves from our social networks or the media drip, even for an instant. What does it say about us, as a society, if we’re unable to be alone and unplugged without being bored or lonely? Is this, at root, a fear of the emptiness in our heads? Should we preserve some small space in our lives for solitude — a Walden of the mind, away from the Matrix?<br><br>Mark Dery (<a href="http://www.markdery.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.markdery.com</a>) is a cultural critic. He is best known for his writings on the politics of popular culture in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Cabinet, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, Elle, and Wired; on websites such as True/Slant and Thought Catalog; and in books such as The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. Dery’s latest book is an anthology of his recent writings, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Essays on American Empire, Digital Culture, Posthuman Porn, and Lady Gaga’s Lesbian Phallus, published in Brazil by Editora Sulina. Dery is widely associated with “culture jamming,” the guerrilla media criticism movement he popularized through his 1993 essay “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs,” and “Afrofuturism,” a term he coined in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future” (included in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, which he edited). He has been a professor of journalism at New York University, a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. He is at work on a biography of the artist Edward Gorey for Little, Brown.

Mark Dery, "(Face)book of the Dead"

Mark Dery speaks of The Pathological Sublime