Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Jeremiah and I rented the Lost House some time in 2001 because we wanted a bigger place that would hold us and our friend, Matt. The place was too big, so we had to get a roommate. Eventually, Jeremiah's cousin moved into a room in our house that was not that bigger than a closet. Another guy  moved in upstairs with Mat, and maybe I will discuss him in more detail in a future post. Needless to say the guy was a mess and caused us more stress than you could ever imagine.  We decorated the house in Punk and Industrial Chic, taping flyers, newspaper clippings, and comic strips to the dirty walls. It soon resembled  a larger version of my bedroom in high school. Much to my mother's dismay, I covered the walls of my room with clippings and pictures from floor to ceiling, tacking up whatever took my fancy from punk ads to clippings from old books. My room was on the second floor of the house, which earlier had been converted from an attic, so the lower half of the wall had pa...

It is halfway through November, and the leaves are covering the ground, so it is probably time to read one of my Amphigorey  volumes by Edward Gorey. His taste for the absurd and the horrific have fascinated me since I first noticed his artwork on PBS's Mystery! opening title sequence. I never put two and two together that he was the same artist who did the Amphigorey collections until years later when I started seriously collecting cartoon collections and independent comics. As a kid, I was a big fan of John Bellairs's books with their gothic and creepy adventures in which boys like Lewis Barnevelt and Johnny Dixon faced sorceresses and wizards. The House with a Clock in its Walls and  The Mummy, The Will, and the Crypt were particular favorites. Gorey did the covers for these books and many horror collections that I have read since. I habitually buy any book that has Goreycover art and reread his works almost every year. Numerous Marvin Kaye edited collections, such as Ghost...

I moved in that summer, not prepared for a hot, festering several months in a strange, small house that had seen its share of drunken, college parties. I moved in with three other guys who I had known awhile: Dave, Joe, and Jeremiah. We were a motley crew: a punk rock English major, a brusque music major, a science major, and an opinionated psychology major. I was the progressive English major that flirted with anarchism, like a less obnoxious version of Rik from The Young Ones . In some ways, we resembled that troupe, except with far less humor.   Joe was a more conservative psychology major who liked to argue. We were both from the same hometown and had honed our friendship as outsiders. Dave majored in teaching music; he was the authoritarian taskmaster that wanted to keep us in line. Jeremiah, the science major, added a new flavor to our little group of outsiders. We met Jeremiah when he took a room in the house the previous January. He and I would move into another house, T...

" One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the  'impossible,' come true.”  -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up , 1945 I should be working on many different things, including applications, revisions, and grading student papers. Yet I find myself at a cross roads, torn between doing the things I love and trying to keep food on the table. I struggle at being an academic, a teacher, a citizen of this mess of a country, while working sixteen hour days. I feel disappointed and broken if I take time to watch a movie or listen to a record. The mounting stress and anxiety bleeds into my work, etching my writing and my scholarship indelibly until the two become inseparable, a misshapen hulk of a thing, trending between monster, art, and commerce. I know that this will someday end at the inquisition or the tenur...