Miscellaneous: Footnote to History

Let’s take it as a given that we all Google ourselves, OK? Nothing wrong with that. It’s a natural, healthy, human impulse. Maybe we even run our own names through Technorati every once in a while, too. What the hell. No harm in that.

We’re edging into some odd territory when we admit that we search for ourselves on Amazon.com. Particularly when we haven’t had any books published books yet.

But the way I see it, I have to do that on occasion. I have multiple projects in the works and I need to know if some other Vince Keenan is out there stealing my thunder. That’s why I bought this domain name: to let pretenders know who’s the alpha Vince.

Whatever my reasons, I’m searching for myself in Amazon.com over the weekend. And discover, to my shock and amazement, that I am now represented there, too. In an academic publication, no less.

The book is Beautiful Things in Popular Culture. (Amazon lists the title as Beautiful Objects, for some reason.) It’s a collection of scholarly essays decreeing, for instance, that the Best Contemporary Mainstream Superhero Comics Writer is Brian Michael Bendis and the Best Pop Princess is Kylie Minogue.

Scholar/critic Sue Turnbull declares Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon to be the Best Serial Killer Novel. She buttresses her argument by citing posts made in the online mystery fiction forum DorothyL, including one by yours truly. I’m quoted twice – and those quotations are indented, my friends. One of them is marred by Ms. Turnbull’s erroneous suggestion that I’m conflating two scenes in Harris’ novel, when a check of the book shows that my summary of the material is correct. But I’ll take it.

I’m also in the footnotes. Not twice, but thrice. I’m an op. cit. My eleventh-grade English teacher Mrs. Whitehead would be so proud.

This makes it official. I am now a fully-accredited pop culture expert, with the academic citations to prove it. Your time here has not been wasted, dear readers, because those in the know know to turn to me.

And just think: my rampant egomania made it all possible.