So the only Philip Roth book I ever read was in a college class on 20th century popular culture.

I think it was by a guy who was also dean of the summer-in-Washington program?

The lectures were good, one was about the development of soap operas and romance novels, one I think was about broadcasting and the consolidation of sports leagues (incl. wrestling), one was the basis for my “3 Foundational Authors of Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction” post

But he assigned crap books, like when we got to the ‘60s and the generation gap and the incorporation of the once-”unmeltable” white ethnics we read American Pastoral which

1. is boring as hell
2. was clearly Roth understanding and framing “The ‘60s” from afterwards as a phase between Back Then and The End of History. Understanding it in its complexity maybe but I didn’t really want 1997 Phillip Roth prechewing my analysis tbh so
3. why the fuck weren’t we reading Portnoy’s Complaint?

At the end we were reading Iron John and he was insisting that Robert Bly’s “men’s movement” was rillly important you guise and we just looked at each other and shrugged

I mean even then I coulda given you something off the top of my head on Promise Keepers, the Million Man March, purity balls, “lad magazines”, or Faludi’s Backlash, but my only real context for that shit was secondhand mockery on a Beavis and Butthead plot