Poker, pop culture, and procrastination

One of the most-anticipated events in poker media this summer was the June release of Martin Harris' Poker & Pop Culture: Telling the Story of America's Favorite Card Game. Clocking in at a little under 300 pages, Poker & Pop Culture does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: It tells the history of poker by examining its representation in American pop culture, including songs, literature, movies, television, and even radio. 

 

While a history of poker's influences on pop culture isn't quite the same thing as a straightforward history of poker itself, the two subjects are obviously closely related. Harris doesn't assume the reader already knows much about poker history, so we do get a good bit of both at the same time: Here's what happened, and here's how it was reflected in the art and cultural ephemera of the time. 

 

The book starts before poker does, with a brief discussion of poker's ancestor games and depictions of gambling and card-playing in the historical record of cultures around the world. When we do get to the development of the game recognizable as poker, Harris grounds it firmly in a context of American culture and, specifically, in the mythmaking of capitalist ideology. And that really is what the "pop culture" part of Poker & Pop Culture really is about: How the game fits into our beliefs and narratives about ourselves and the country we live in. (Given the current distributions of where poker is legal and popular and where it isn't, it's worth pointing out that this is an explicitly U.S.-centric book — if you hadn't already gathered that from the neon American flag on the cover.)

 

From then on it gets a bit... encyclopedic, to be honest. Like, it's very informative, and some of it is quite entertaining and illuminating, but others bits of it just read like what they are, which is cataloging every time poker has been mentioned in the media for the entirety of American history.

 

And yet, I still think the book is really good, because even an encyclopedic reading of poker history pulls up all sorts of weird cultural artifacts that have been long forgotten, including all sorts of batty radio dramas and midcentury sitcoms (most of which are kinda sexist, but still interesting to read about). The later parts of the book, where it gets more modern, were a little less fascinating because I already knew about most of that stuff (especially anything that's happened in the past four years, which admittedly media-wise is pretty much just the release of Molly's Game).

 

I actually did read this in June, when it first came out; I just haven't gotten around to writing a review for ages because I was supposed to write the review for Casino City but I haven't been able to bring myself to actually write anything all year (a clear sign that it's time for a new gig). As a result, I've forgotten many of my original thoughts. But it's a pretty thorough, solid read if you're interested in the subject matter.