New Books in Popular Culture

The Americans by Car is Karl Baden’s latest book. An homage to Robert Frank’s The Americans and Lee Friedlander’s America by Car, Baden’s book “is a personal, more specific answer to the vague question of ‘how are we influenced,'” according to the artist. The photographs in the book were taken by Baden from his car and offer a snapshot of American life. Karl Baden, a New York City native, he received his B.A. in Fine Arts at Syracuse University in 1974 and an M.F.A. in photography at University of Illinois at Chicago in 1979. Baden has taught at Boston College, Harvard, Clark University, and Rhode Island School of Design. He was Director of Photography at the Project Art Center, Cambridge, in the early 1980s, and served on the board and programming committee for the Photographic Resource Center, Boston. Baden has had numerous one person and group exhibitions and has received noteworthy fellowships. Baden’s probably best known work is called “Every Day” which, this past February, marked thirty years since its start. In “Every Day,” Baden has taken a single photograph of his face every day. According to a recent interview, he’s only missed one day in the entire 30 years, 15 October 1991, It was a dumb moment of forgetfulness,” he said. Karl currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is an Associate Professor of the Practice in the Morrissey College of Art and Science at Boston College. The Americans by Car is available through the photographer: badenk@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels is interested precisely in these vicissitudes of the primal shower scene–what he calls the “Psycho Effect”–as it is taken up and therapeutically transformed by subsequent slasher and splatter films. It is not an accident that Hitchcock chose the shower stall as the site for his most famous moment of Schauer, the German cognate meaning “horror.” Traumatized American soldiers returning from World War II, dubbed “psychos,” were transposed into filmic psycho murderers straddling psychosis and psychopathy. Norman was perhaps the first such hero of variegated diagnosis. In the 1970s and 1980s we encountered less exalted figures, like the cannibal Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Still less sophisticated mass murderers followed: the zombies revived post-9/11 and, eventually, motive-less serial killers captured with the aid of “objective” forensics. All these characters address the difficulty of separation and mourning, the pull toward fusion with Mother, the trauma of the cut, survival, and industrial killing–the intimate violence of Nazi doctors and the impersonal push-button battles of the Gulf War. Many slasher and splatter films also tell the story of a newly emergent social category, subgenre, and audience member–the teen. Rickels devotes parts of the book to the postwar invention of adolescence, reading closely D. W. Winnicott’s papers on antisocial teenagers and juvenile delinquency. We all experience adolescence as a brush with psychopathy, Rickels tells us; for many it is the path not taken. Perhaps this explains the appeal of the psycho, our “near-miss double.” In psychoanalytic terms, “there but for the grace of the good object go I.” [5] Other topics covered in our interview and in The Psycho Records include vampirism, the couple and the crowd, scream memories, laughter, and substitution. As those familiar with Rickels’ books might expect, we often touch on one of the great themes of his oeuvre: mourning. Listen in! Laurence A. Rickels, PhD is a psychotherapist and scholar of literature, film, and psychoanalysis. He is Sigmund Freud Professor of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School (EGS) and most recently was professor of art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

There’s a common myth about the history of comic books and strips. It’s the idea that the medium languished for decades as a sort of time-wasting hobby for children, but now has redeemed itself and can be appreciated even by the literary. University of Georgia professor and comics scholar Christopher Pizzino argues that this history is as false as Clark Kent’s eyeglass prescription. Comics, he says, are still burdened by their early stigma, their status in modern culture tenuous at best. In Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature (University of Texas Press, 2016), Pizzino offers up an educated and entertaining history of the comics medium, then devotes a chapter to each of four groundbreaking comic artists. In one, he looks at the film noir and manga-influenced work of Frank Miller, creator of The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City. Another chapter examines the work of Alison Bechdel, whose famed lesbian-centered comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, led to pop culture’s Bechdel Test, and whose autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home is now a hit musical. Charles Burns, whose Black Hole tells a haunting story of a teenage plague, is highlighted as an artist unable to sugarcoat his work even when he was trying to have his art published in Playboy magazine. And Gilbert Hernandez, best known for his innovative Love and Rockets series, created with his brother Jaime, shows himself to be nigh-fearless when it comes to his work, blending everything from erotica to violence to a biography of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Join Pizzino and pop-culture junkie and author Gael Fashingbauer Cooper (no relation to Archie Comics’ Betty Cooper) for a lively look at comics and their evolution, and why the very idea that the medium has safely come of age may be working against it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945-1970 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) offers a compelling investigation of Soviet leisure culture. Gleb Tsipursky undertakes an unexpected approach to illuminate some aspects of the USSR history, which have been previously disregarded. Describing leisure activities that were popular in the Soviet Union, Tsipursky contributes to the discussion concerning the shaping of Soviet mentality and consciousness. Briefly describing traditions that the Soviet Union was referring to when devising cultural programs, Socialist Fun focuses on the post-War period and offers a detailed analysis of leisure time activities during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Considering the developments of cultural programs devised and maintained by Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, Tsipursky outlines his theory regarding the development of the Soviet society. Sponsored by the state, the cultural sphere in the USSR appears a part of gardening policies: through a variety of entertainment activities, the state was implementing strategies to shape and direct Soviet peoples thinking. In this regard, leisure culture was one of the areas that invited discreet methods of the states control. Tsipursky also puts his discussion of Soviet culture into broader historical, sociological, and ideological contexts. The Soviet Union is viewed as an alternative modernity project. As Tsipursky illustrates, this project was gradually evolving, receiving the utmost support during the Khrushchev era. The detailed analysis of cultural programs that Tsipursky provides also expands the understanding of the concept of New Soviet Men and Women. As Socialist Fun demonstrates, this concept was subject to modifications: over the decades, emphases on isolationist and militant aspects, supported by Stalin, shifted to more open and cosmopolitan nuances, maintained by Khrushchev. Socialist Fun is based on a substantial analysis of archival materials; it also includes a vast amount of interviews that offer a glimpse into the life of Soviet people. The research offers a captivating narrative of how Soviet people organized their leisure time. Socialist Fun includes extensive information on club activities, dancing, music, theatre, literature, etc. In addition, a comprehensive survey highlights the history of jazz in the Soviet Union. This research is also supplemented with exclusive photos and stories shared by people who were creating and engaging in socialist fun. Gleb Tsipursky is assistant professor of history at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

How can we challenge the way film and television represents the world around us? In Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism (Rutgers University Press, 2017) Nancy Wan Yuen, and Associate Professor of Sociology at Biola University, offers a comprehensive guide to the problem of racism in Hollywood, along with possible solutions for organisations, governments and audiences. The book draws on a wealth of interview data, along with almost 10 years of fieldwork in the Hollywood system, interviewing on- and off-screen talent, agents, and decision makers. The book shows the high levels of exclusion of people of colour from Hollywood, along with the malign impacts of this on contemporary culture. Moreover, the book shows how actors of colour face a ‘double bind’ in trying to get work and negotiate the expectations and biases of a white system. By exposing the problem, and offering practical guidance for change, the book represents an important intervention. The engaging style and clear, academically rigorous, prose should be read by anyone interested in Hollywood, and thus more global, culture. The book also has a twitter feed and website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Mark Braude’s Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle (Simon and Schuster, 2016) tells the captivating story of the rise of Monte Carlo as Europe’s most famous casino-resort from the second half of the nineteenth century to the end of the 1920s. In a series of fascinating chapters, Braude takes readers through the history of this modern, luxury playground, from the legalization of gambling in Monaco in 1855, through a rise of the site in the decades that followed, a period of decline after the First World War, and a revival during the Jazz Age of the interwar years. Throughout, Making Monte Carlo follows the lives of individuals, families, companies, and a larger network of player-consumers, workers, and witnesses. Center-stage are the members of the Blanc family who first opened Le Grand Casino de Monte Carlo in 1858 and controlled the Societe des bains de mers (SBM). The SBM is Braude’s main archival source for the inside story of casino plans, management, and operations. The book also engages the lives and interests of the Grimaldis, the dynasty that presided over the tiny principality that became a haven for gaming and entertainments, a center of risk and adventure, of fantasy and speed. And then there are those who came to game, to work, to be entertained, and to watch. A number of participants would tell their stories, contributing to a mythologizing that made of Monte Carlo a destination whose imaginative dimensions exceeded by far its physical area. Making Monte Carlo is at once a history of commercial and business interests and of the rapid and remarkable changes in modern culture that took place in the period covered by Braude’s chapters. This was an era of the proliferation of mass spectacle, of advertising and marketing, of innovations in the technologies of leisure, recreation, transport, and tourism. It was an age that saw the emergence of new forms of capitalist exploitation and imagination, of transformations in the idea of selling and in the selling of ideas. Considering the impact of Monte Carlo’s development on tourists rich and less-so, on the workers who made the casinos, hotels, and clubs run, and on all those (in Monaco and beyond its small territory) who witnessed the spectacle as it unfolded, the book will be a compelling read to anyone interested in the place itself, as well as all those cultural dreams it has sought to encourage and represent since its inauguration as a high-end, high-stakes capital. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In his new book The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing (Crown, 2017), Damion Searls presents the first biography of Hermann Rorschach and the history of the Rorschach Test. A story that is largely untold, Searls starts with the childhood of Rorschach and brings readers through his growth as a psychiatrist as he created an experiment to probe the mind using a set of ten inkblots. As a visual artist, Rorschach incorporated his ability to think about visuals and his belief that what is seen is more important than what we say. After his early death, Rorschach’s Test found its way to America being used by the military, to test job applicants, to evaluate defendants and parents in custody battles and people suffering from mental illness. In addition, it has been used throughout advertising and incorporated in Hollywood and popular culture. A tragic figure, and one of the most influential psychiatrists in the twentieth century, The Inkblots allows readers to better understand how Rorschach and his test impacted psychiatry and psychological testing. Searls’ work is eloquently written and detailed, pulling in unpublished letters, diaries and interviews with family, friends and colleagues. Searls’ well researched text presents insight into the ways that art and science have impacted modern psychology and popular culture. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Have you ever watched a futuristic movie and wondered if there will actually be any black people in the future? Have you ever been surprised, disappointed, or concerned with the lack of diversity demonstrated in many science fiction stories? In Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) the author analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan culture to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination. Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science reveals new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture and interrogates the meanings of race and genre through studies of science fiction, fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts. Author and professor Andre Carrington earned his bachelors degree in African American Studies from Macalester College and a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University. He is now an assistant professor of English at Drexel University, where he teaches courses on African American Literature, Comics & Graphic Novels, LGBT Literature and Culture, Global Black Literature and Literary Theory. His research focuses on the cultural politics of race, gender, and genre in 20th century Black and American literature and the arts. Carrington has devoted particular attention to considerations of cultural production and identity, especially those articulated in feminist criticism, critical race theory, performance studies and Marxism. In addition to his book Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, Dr. Carringtons writings have appeared in the journals Present Tense, Sounding Out!, Callaloo, and African & Black Diaspora. In 2015, he organized the first international Queers & Comics conference through CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies in New York. His current research project, “Audiofuturism,” explores literary adaptation and sound studies through the analysis of science fiction radio plays based on the work of black authors. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Stanley Kubrick is justly considered one of the greatest filmmakers, even with his limited output over his career. The first film he both produced and directed was Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, released in 1964. Mick Broderick has written an extensive overview of the film in his book Reconstructing Strangelove: Inside Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Nightmare Comedy’ (Wallflower Press, 2016). In addition to reviewing the creative, scientific, and political background of the screenplay, he also presents other interesting details, many of them based on his review of Stanley Kubrick’s private archives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In Ponyville Confidential: The History and Culture of My Little Pony, 1981-2016 (McFarland, 2017), Sherilyn Connelly examines the long and complex history of Hasbro’s My Little Pony franchise. Since it debuted in the early 1980s, controversy has surrounded My Little Pony. Dismissed as solely toy advertisements and not serious enough, the series has been critiqued since its inception. In her new book, Connelly explores the history of the franchise through four generations of ponies, comparing it to cartoons geared towards boys such as Transformers which, despite their similarity, were largely spared the criticism the ponies generated. The book is a comprehensive examination of the series through Season 5 -Friendship is Magic as well as first three Equestria Girls films. Connelly uses archival research into popular media’s response to the series as well as fan response through listservs, petitions, and fan pages to present a wide-range of information examining the My Little Pony phenomena. In addition to its discussion of My Little Pony, Connelly’s book serves as an examination into how children’s television is mediated, discussed and gendered. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture