From the Editor’s Desk
This issue of PCR takes you through time and around the world without
the bother of coping with airline security. We begin with H. Peter Steeves’s
brilliant “The Monster at the End of This Essay,” a written version of his
luncheon speech presentation that brought down the house at this year’s meeting
of FWPCA/ACA. Calling The Monster at the End of This Book “strange, joyfiil,
and cerebral,” as well as “one of the finest psychoanalytic, existential,
postmodern texts ever written,” he goes on in this delightfully “strange, joyful,
and cerebral” essay to show how the book stands beside “Joyce and Kafka,
Beckett and Sartre, Freud and Derrida.” We follow with Dennis Rohatyn’s
“Thinking Things Through: A Meditation on H. Peter Steeves’s The Things
Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return to the Everyday, "v itself a lively
popular culture filled excursion into Peter’s world, our world.
Amy Green explores the ways in which Cartoon Network’s Foster's
Home for Imaginaiy Friends (Foster's Home) “celebrates both the imaginative
powers and unique qualities of each child who creates an imaginary friend”
while containing elements of social commentary and satire mercifully appealing
to the adults who often share television watching with children. In “Pleasing the
Queen but Preserving O ur Past,” James Forse examines popular culture aspects
of religious cycle plays and difficulties faced by the producers in their attempts
to both continue production and satisfy Queen Bess’s injunctions.
In “Perpetuating ‘The Big Lie’: Subversive Feminism in Stephen
Sommers’s Horror/Action films,” John R. Craig takes the position that while the
heroines in these films appear strong, the films send mixed messages about their
dependencies. In “Whafs Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander:
Interpreting Marge Piercy’s He, She and It, Brook Brayman does a masterful job
of analysis as well as pointing out that women science fiction writers are not rare
and have been around since the beginning of the genre.
Shaorong Huang shows how the Chinese use television soap operas as
a way to inculcate values in the primarily female audience in “Telling Stories,
Saving Families: Media’s Concern with Modernization as a Challenge to
Traditional Chinese Family Values.”
Other values are explored in frequent contributor Ron Briley’s “‘I
Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night’: The IWW’s Lost Legacy in American
Popular Culture,” an article that takes us back a century to the spirit of the
Wobblies and their role in the labor movement. Kris Kamberbeek also turns
back the clock in “Parks and Wreck: Amusement and Anxiety at Turn-of-theCentury Coney Island,” when amusement parks were first seen as therapeutic.
Joey Skidmore adds sounds effect in his fascinating essay on the theremin, that
weird instalment which the provided the sound of the Green Hornefs buzz on
1930s radio. Also don’t miss the book review section, which is finally beginning