[My awesome wife Vaughn Joy’s book Selling Out Santa: Hollywood Christmas Films in the Age of McCarthy has been out for about four months, which means Vaughn has had the chance to share it through a ton of book talks, podcast episodes, writing, and more. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of such occasions, leading up to a special post featuring my own thoughts on this must-read book!]
On why you should complement your reading of Selling Out Santa with these three excellent short-form pieces.
- Clio & the Contemporary: As is usually the case with these subjects we’ve been thinking about for so long, Vaughn had plenty to say about both her book’s specific historical topics and their evolving legacies even before Selling Out Santa came out—and of course such early pieces offer fascinating foreshadowings of the upcoming release. So it was really cool that the folks at Clio & the Contemporary invited her to write an op ed in September (hyperlinked above) on Trump’s attacks on Tom Hanks (and other cultural figures and institutions) as examples of modern McCarthyism in American culture and society. I love everything about that piece, but well-established and lifelong believer in critical optimism that I am, I was particularly struck by Vaughn’s banger of a final sentence: “Modern McCarthyism may be escalating, but resistance to it is rising every day.”
- De Gruyter Conversations: In recent years I’ve become a big fan of the blogs that many presses publish, as they offer a fascinating opportunity to learn about new or forthcoming books, and more exactly to get some inside baseball from the authors on both the ideas and the processes that have contributed to those books. When Vaughn had the chance to share a piece for the blog of her publisher, De Gruyter (who are now De Gruyter Brill, having completed a merger that is helping them move more fully into the U.S. market), her piece featured precisely that compelling combination—some details about the book’s main ideas and arguments, but also a fascinating case for why taking seemingly frivolous or escapist entertainments like Christmas/holiday films seriously is vital both for engaging with their political layers and for practicing cultural and media literary more broadly.
- Pittsburgh Review of Books: First, I have to shout out this wonderful new magazine, which is the brainchild of one of my longtime public scholarly friends, the awesome Ed Simon. I had the chance to share my own essay in PRoB this fall, and recommend it as a venue for anybody looking to share their writing and work. Vaughn was able to publish an excerpt from her book in the magazine, and it’s not just any excerpt—it’s the hugely fascinating story of Frank Capra’s unpublished and not-complete screenplay for the final film he was never able to make, and what that can help us see about where and why his career ended (as well as a bit on how Vaughn found and read it in his archives at Wesleyan University). I’m so glad she was able to share this bit of her book, and hope you’ll check it out along with these other great pieces!
Last book convo tomorrow,
Ben
PS. If you’ve had a chance to check out the book, and/or have ideas for places or ways Vaughn can talk about it, feel free to reach out!
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