While I failed my attempt to blog my reading of The Use of Pleasure, I vow to do a better job with the book I am currently reading: Pervert in the Pulpit: Morality in the Works of David Lynch.

So far I am only about 30 pages into the book, but I can say already that it is absolutely fascinating. The premise of the book is that far from being a counterculture artist who challenges American values of nostalgia and innocence with irony, David Lynch (who is my all-time favorite director), yearns for a world of normalcy where people who do bad things (drugs, sex, pornography, etc.) are punished and lead fucked up and suffering lives.

It is also interesting to read this book because I would say that I have very very little experience in moral philosophy. Most everything I read is more metaphysical, so looking at something from that angle is new to me. The only other critical work I’ve read about David Lynch, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway by Slavoj Zizek is very psychoanalytic (mostly Lacan), and the author of Pervert in the Pulpit totally rejects such readings as Lynch because, he claims, they completely ignore or gloss-over any moral issues in Lynch’s movies and go directly toward readings that are metaphysical.

So because this book is so goddamn interesting, I promise that I will post my notes — so look forward to them. I can’t say whether I’m buying his argument (yet — as I said, I’m only 30 pages into the book), but it is compelling and I’m curious about what other people think.