Today Salon ran an excerpt from my Pretty Hate Machine 33 1/3 book, “Nine Inch Nails: a human scream in Reagan’s postindustrial America.”
More info about the PHM book is here on my site.
In honor of the Salon piece, I’ve put up a few of the final remaining limited edition NINPHM books here at Etsy. They’re hardbound, foil stamped, and handmade by Woodside Press bookbinder genius Davin Kuntze.
ABOUT THE EXCERPT
The editor and I went back and forth about which excerpt to pick, this one or the first 4-5 pages of the book. The one we went with gives some back history to how Nine Inch Nails’ fandom has been symptomatic of the discontent and depression brought on by post-industrialism in the Midwest. This is something that’s obviously been on the minds of many since the Trump campaign rendered visible these historical and contemporary feelings and found ways to weaponize them into a different, and much less pretty, hate machine.
The other excerpt was from the intro, which focused on now Nine Inch Nails and their fans became folk devils in the wake of Columbine. I think the section does a lot of good work to trace the social history of that time period and place it in context of larger American anti-hero archetypes. If I were writing the book again, I would more critically situate the mediatized shock of Columbine as a product of white privilege and late capitalism. Why are some childrens’ deaths more important than others? Why is gun violence more newsworthy than “slow violence” like poisoned environments that lead to chronic health conditions?
I was not sufficiently intersectional in my approach when I hit that storyline, but for me all writing is a process and the print version is just the one I surrendered to an editor at some point. Still learning.