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As RuPaul has said, this is the Golden Age of Drag-and that's
chiefly the achievement of RuPaul's Drag Race, which in its
eleventh year is more popular than ever, and has now become fully
mainstream in its appeal. The show has an irresistible allure for
folks of all persuasions and proclivities. Yet serious or
philosophical discussion of its exponential success has been rare.
Now at last we have RuPaul's Drag Race and Philosophy, shining the
light on all dimensions of this amazing phenomenon: theories of
gender construction and identity, interpretations of RuPaul's
famous quotes and phrases, the paradoxes of reality shows, the
phenomenology of the drag queen, and how the fake becomes the truly
authentic. The book includes a Foreword by the original "Gender
Outlaw" Kate Bornstein. Among the thought-provoking issues examined
in this path-breaking and innovative volume: What Should a Queen
Do? Marta Sznajder looks at RuPaul's Drag Race from the perspective
of rationality. Where contestants have to eliminate each other, the
prisoner's dilemma and other well-known situations emerge. Reading
Is Fundamental! Lucy McAdams analyzes two different, important
speech acts that regularly appear on Drag Race-reading and throwing
shade. The Values of Drag Race. Guilel Treiber observes two
competing sets of values being presented in Drag Race. The more
openly advertised "charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent,"
advancing the skills of every single contender, are opposed by the
fading set of "acceptance, support, solidarity, and empowerment,"
which has historically been the cornerstone of the LGBTI+
community. The Importance of Being Fabulous. Holly Onclin
challenges the preconceived notion that drag queens are mainly
about female impersonation and instead proposes to understand drag
queens as impersonators of celebrity. RuPaul Is a Better Warhol.
Megan Volpert compares RuPaul and Andy Warhol in their shared
pursuit of realness. Is Reading Someone to Filth Allowed? Rutger
Birnie asks whether there are ethical restrictions on reading
someone, since reads are ultimately insults and could cause harm.
Serving Realness? Dawn Gilpin and Peter Nagy approach the concept
of realness in Drag Race, to discuss the differences between
realness, authenticity and the nature of being. Death Becomes Her.
Hendrik Kempt explores the topic of death both in philosophy and in
Drag Race, starting from the claim that "Philosophy is training for
death." We're All Born Naked. Oliver Norman follows up on Ru's
mantra, "We are all born naked and the rest is drag." Fire Werk
with Me. Carolina Are looks into the fan-subcultures of Drag Race
and Twin Peaks, which have come together to form a unique
sub-subculture, in which members of both fan-subcultures create
memes and idiosyncrasies. Towards a Healthier Subjectivity? Ben
Glaister looks at the way Drag Race contestants adopt their drag
personae almost as second selves, without finding themselves
violating their other self. RuPaul versus Zarathustra. Julie and
Alice van der Wielen ask the question, Who would win an
intellectual lip-sync battle-RuPaul or Nietzsche's Zarathustra?
Playing with Glitter? Fernando Pagnoni and pals explore the game
and play elements of Drag Race. The Origins of Self-Love. Anna
Fennell expounds upon RuPaul's question, "If you can't love
yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?" The
Sublime. Sandra Ryan thinks about Kant's concept of the sublime and
explores how we find its applications in Drag Race. You Want to Be
Anonymous? You Better Work! Alice Fox watches Drag Race through the
lens of criminal law and the problem of decreasing anonymity
through ubiquitous data surveillance. Drag Race can teach us how to
create misleading patterns of online behavior and public
presentation to render the blackbox persona useless. Drag and
Vulnerability. Anneliese Cooper contrasts Drag Race's demand for
vulnerability and perceived authenticity with the inherent
inauthenticity of creating a new persona.
"Seventeen curious, well-tuned writers (they're fans, too) turn
their philosophical attention to Tom Petty in this intellectually
rigorous and wildly fun 'little box set of big ideas'. In his hits,
deep cuts, and videos they find complexity, ideas, and plenty of
questions-plus some answers-about the human condition. I need to
know, Petty once sang. These writers are really listening." -JOE
BONOMO, author of Field Recordings from the Inside (2017) and
editor of Conversations with Greil Marcus (2012) "A great song has
worlds inside of it. And Tom Petty wrote a lot of them. But too
often we don't stop to explore, question, consider, knock on a few
of the doors that appear down a great song's corridors. In this
collection, some thoughtful writers have come together to show us
how they did it. It stands as a testament both to the strength of
Petty's songwriting and record-making and the possibilities that
remain as regards writing about music." -WARREN ZANES, author of
Petty: The Biography (2015) "Maybe because he simply made it all
look easy, Tom Petty never received the unanimous critical glory
bestowed upon more obvious geniuses. But now that his career is
complete, the world is gradually awakening to what his fans have
known all along: Tom was plugged directly into the original juice
of rock'n'roll, injecting that authenticity into everything he ever
touched. This collection of deeply thoughtful, dimensional chapters
goes a long way in setting the record straight. In each, the author
bears witness to the profound impact of Tom's music on our lives,
and also our thoughts." -PAUL ZOLLO, author of Conversations with
Tom Petty "Tom Petty would have hated this book. And that's why
it's necessary-to give new context to songs and an oeuvre that
defied his own explanation." -NEIL STRAUSS, contributing editor,
Rolling Stone "This is a fun appraisal of Tom Petty's masterful
musical works as viewed through the framework of both classical and
modern philosophical theory. Tom Petty and Philosophy is
recommended for both the fan and the student of rock." -NICK
THOMAS, author of Tom Petty: An American Rock and Roll Story (2014)
"Just as no single musical genre easily ensnares Petty's musical
catalogue, this book is-thankfully-not easily pigeonholed. It spans
a wide range of topics. From whether Tom Petty was a feminist to
whether the album Echo displays a situation of distress in
Nietzsche's sense, there's something here for all Petty fans to
ruminate and debate for years to come." -CLAY CALVERT, University
of Florida professor teaching "Tom Petty 101" For the first time,
serious thinkers explore the work of this towering genius of rock
music. For fans of Tom Petty, this volume is an eye-opener, with
fourteen music-savvy philosophers looking at different facets of
Petty's artistic contribution. They examine not only Tom Petty's
thoughts but also the thoughts we have while we listen. The
authors, all Petty fans, come from every philosophical viewpoint:
classical, analytic, postmodernist, phenomenological, and
Nietzschean. Tom Petty's body of work exists on a continuum between
Folk and Rock, between New Wave and Americana, between Southern
simplicity and West Coast chic. There is the legacy left to his
main backing band, the Heartbreakers, but also bookended by
Mudcrutch and his collaborations with his elders, such as Bob
Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash. Tom Petty's
songs hook and they captivate, but they are often profound in their
understatement, their stark minimalism. His insight into the human
condition conveys a powerful philosophical anthropology with a
metaphysics of tragedy, gravity, and levity. Tom Petty's ethics
focuses on dilemmas of the outcast, downtrodden, and heartbroken
with a view to the fallen and the sinful as our redeemable
antiheroes of the everyday. His political thinking is that of the
artist, enlivened by Southern hostilities and Californian
futilities, culminating in a personal ethic that puts duty to the
fans first. Petty's theory of knowledge is psychological and
interpersonal, both deeply meditative and delightfully skeptical.
The dialectic of love and hate, abuse and recovery, poverty and
power, triumph and loss provide the genuine objects of knowledge.
Above all, Petty's songs are the confessions of a poetic mind
interpreting a wounded soul. Petty lived his life the way he wrote
and the way he played. It was grit, drive, and just enough finesse,
to make things nice, where they need to be nice. On stage, he put
the schau in Anschauung. Petty stood up to corporate assholes in a
number of precedent-setting legal maneuvers and album concepts,
risking his career and fortune, but never backing down. He was the
center of a musical community that endured over four decades. His
ability to cultivate new generations of listeners while connecting
himself backward to the heroes of his own youth have made him
universally respected by the widest range of music fans.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books
about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Our sense of smell is
crucial to our survival. We can smell fear, disease, food.
Fragrance is also entertainment. We can smell an expensive bottle
of perfume at a high-end department store. Perhaps it reminds us of
our favorite aunt. A memory in a bottle is a powerful thing. Megan
Volpert's Perfume carefully balances the artistry with the science
of perfume. The science takes us into the neurology of scent
receptors, how taste is mostly smell, the biology of illnesses that
impact scent sense, and the chemistry of making and copying
perfume. The artistry of perfume involves the five scent families
and symbolism, subjectivity in perfume preference, perfume
marketing strategies, iconic scents and perfumers, why the industry
is so secretive, and Volpert's own experiments with making perfume.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in
The Atlantic.
Poetry. LGBT Studies. Speaking directly to the pop icon's ghost,
Megan Volpert dives into a completely charted yet utterly unknown
ocean that is Andy Warhol. The resulting collection of love letters
and hate mail audaciously perforates the scene of the usual
cultural suspects with icy shrapnel in a terrifying mirror game.
This is not a biography, but a book that reflects Andy--detects
him, the Andy who deflects. Working into territory that channels
the essay as its more radical practitioners imagine, Megan revives
the prose poem and rethinks herself. As the idea of a "real" Andy
begins to decay, the author learns to invent him and discovers
herself everywhere. Remaking this mythic man in the image of her
own baggage, Megan gives us her most personal writing to date and a
striking truth: everybody becomes Andy.
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Poetry. LGBT Studies. If Denis Johnson had written Tuesdays with
Morrie, it'd feel like Megan Volpert's book of prose poems. Clawing
its way out through this minimalist checklist of suburban malaise
is an emphatically optimistic approach to growing up. These tiny
essays carefully detail how to avoid becoming one's parents, how to
manage a body addled by disease, and how to keep having the best
possible time in life. After all: this is the only ride there is,
and we can only ride it. Volpert's is a story of Springsteenian
proportions, a gentleman's guide to rebellion complete with iron
horses and the church of rock & roll.
Poetry. LGBT Studies. "About 'it gets better, ' they were never
wrong, the path-forgers, the ground-breakers. How it gets better is
another question, for a new century has brought changing minds, but
also new hardships. That is why this extraordinary book matters.
Teaching is such a sacred office, and we who teach today know the
attentiveness that must be brought to the profession. These poems
track, record, memorialize, and meditate on that office. There are
poems of the student one lost, the student who reached out at last,
of the daily commitment that teaching who you are requires, of why
it matters. There is nothing like this thoughtful collection of
trenchant, witty, poignant, blunt, and luminous poems on the art of
teaching by LGBTIQ poets assembled with judicious vision by Megan
Volpert. THIS ASSIGNMENT IS SO GAY is a beautiful and necessary
book, not just for teaching, but for us all."--Cynthia Hogue
As Megan Volpert stood over train tracks preparing to surrender to
the psychedelic blindness of simple human misery, of all the
Heartbreakers tracks available to come through her headphones,
Straight Into Darkness is the one that did. In this highly
philosophical and deeply personal exploration of one obscure Tom
Petty song, Volpert's essays comb through the musical, historical,
rhetorical, and sociological implications of a forgotten gem in a
legendary catalog with satisfying results. Through this epic
celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Long After Dark
album, Petty and Volpert each emerge as modern mystics who argue
that in the face of powerlessness, we rebel anyway. Volpert judges
the forty years of Petty's career with one finger on the pulse of
Bob Dylan and an occasional whiff of Bruce Springsteen, looking at
the sometimes-violent mob scene of concerts as a type of
transcendent communion. Straight Into Darkness offers a compelling
vision of rock and roll fandom where the songwriter's hardworking
sense of humor is enough to save us from absurdity. All you need is
Albert Camus and a couple of chords.
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