Bob Batchelor

Butler County is filled with a variety of people doing interesting things. This weekly feature offers snapshots of some of them by asking five questions. The latest installment appears below.It’s getting harder and harder to be the fan of that obscure band or midnight movie or unknown novelist. Or rather, its getting harder and harder for that band, writer or film to remain truly obscure.That’s the thinking behind author and editor Bob Batchelor’s three-volume anthology, “Cult Pop Culture: How The Fringe Became Mainstream.”Batchelor, a 1987 graduated of Slippery Rock High School, is currently an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Kent State University and academic coordinator of its online M.A. program in public relations in Kent, Ohio.He lives in Kent with his wife Kathy and 7-year-old daughter Kassie.He is the author or editor of 17 books including “Cult Pop Culture,” which was published in December 2011.“Cult Pop Culture” contains 60 articles written by 65 authors spread out over three books. It examines the cultural signifier of Patrick Swayze’s mullet haircut in the film “Roadhouse” to the Oprah Winfrey effect.“Each volume is broken into chunks that the reader can more easily grasp, A person could read the books going from one to the next to the next or just dive into the book wherever you want depending on what you are interested in,” he said. The volumes cover TV and film, literature and music and everyday culture.He assigned and edited the articles, wrote the index and even contributed a chapter.He’s readying another three-volume anthology due to come out in the fall. The essays will look at sports from the colonial times to the present day.He took a break to answer five questions.

QUESTION: How do you define “Cult Pop Culture?”ANSWER: Cult Pop Culture consists of topics that people love and get attracted to in a way that goes beyond simply liking TV, film and literature. It is this intense fascination or obsession with a topic.I think the point I’m trying to make in the book and in the introduction is that before technology became so pervasive cult topics were smaller and more obsessive.We still use the term cult but it is now mainstream and so broad. We call Mac users devoted to Mac products a cult. But how can something become a cult when millions are using it?It’s not like “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” in the past when you had to go to the theater with 50 or 100 other people. Now you can engage with “Rocky Horror” for hours every day if that is something you are into.

QUESTION: If fringe is now mainstream, aren’t we all fringy?ANSWER: Yeah, I think we are all pretty fringy now. Even people with mainstream interests have aspects that they are really fringy about. Somebody can be a Pearl Jam fan, that’s a pretty mainstream thing to be interested in. But in the millions of fans, there are those who spend hours on the band’s website or follow the band around like the old Grateful Dead fans.We’re more connected to the fringy things that we enjoy. Technology has increased the accessibility to the freaky things we all enjoy.

QUESTION: How long did it take you to complete this?ANSWER: It’s pretty hard core when you are dealing with 65 professors and graduate students. The simple answer is it took about two years from start to finish.That’s probably about normal with these projects. I read the manuscripts nine complete times through the process of editing, preparing for publication, preparing the index. The list goes on and on.

QUESTION: What sort of reader do you hope these books attract?ANSWER: This collection is designed primarily for libraries. The primary reader is smart people going to libraries and students going to the library for research. It is readable. It’s not overly academic, but it’s still solid research.

QUESTION: What new pop culture cults are popping up?ANSWER: I think every day certain kinds of quirky topics are being popularized by intense followers. You see it with Harry Potter, the Twilight books.It’s almost cyclical that some new film or TV show or novel is going to generate some sort of intense following.You are going to see cult topics ebb and flow, too. Harry Potter has staying power. You could argue Twilight may have lost its standing.I think the interesting thing is, whether its Beanie Babies or Cabbage Patch Kids, if a company thinks money can be made off these things, they will bring the cult back. It may not be as obsessive as it used to be but they are still around.It ties to nostalgia: Parents had Cabbage Patch Kids, and now they want their kids to have them. It’s like Tickle Me Elmo. It was a craze, then it went away and now it’s back.A lot of this cult phenomenon is driven by capitalism. It’s the economics of these cult things, that’s what drives them.