Get Back In Line
So I did in fact slip Chuck Klosterman my card, which I realized after the fact includes a link to a website featuring a blog where the very first entry one sees was titled "I Want To Have Approximately 8 Billion of Chuck Klosterman's Babies." And I want this guy to respect me as a literary presence enough to participate in my reading series? Smooth, Jess. Real smooth.
What's done is done, though, and my relentless worshipping-from-afar (and not so afar) of the inimitable Mr. Klosterman continued tonight as I made a complete giddy ass out of myself in front of him at his signing. Though I wouldn't put this up there with the time I ran into David Byrne in the Carnegie Hall elevator bank and proceeded to spend the next three minutes heaping mindless praise on him in one lengthy sentence that used the word "great" a lot of times, thereby almost causing him to stop the elevator and take the stairs, even though he had his bike with him, it was pretty close. What can I say? I get silly in the presence of greatness. Probably always will, even if I myself somehow managed to become great at some point.
The evening was awesome, though. He was sure to answer every single question people asked, even the totally inane ones that seemed to serve solely as a platform for the question-asker to display his/her talent for punditry and/or dispense useless trivia about themselves. (Yes, I may have some solipsistic tendencies, and yes, I may have wondered exactly where in Montana Chuck was when he had his revelation about his ex-girlfriends corresponding to past and present members of Kiss as described in Killing Yourself to Live, being that I myself grew up in Montana and would love to know if he stuck to the interstate or took Highway 2 across my old stomping grounds... but recognizing the global irrelevance of the question, I had the good sense to keep it to myself.)
Being that I have been a Chuck Klosterman fan for, oh, 72 hours now, I hadn't yet had the chance to pick up Killing Yourself to Live, and briefly pondered getting it at the signing. The managers herding us into the autograph line informed the crowd that they'd sold out of the book but would special-order copies if anybody else wanted one. Well, okay then, I thought. No book for me. That's cool, I have lots of books. I pulled my copy of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs out of my bag and headed through the row of seats toward the line. Then I tripped over something - a copy of Killing Yourself to Live that someone had stashed under a chair and abandoned. Clearly, this was a sign from the universe that I was meant to own this book. I devoured half of it on the subway ride home. Something about this man's writing makes me want to consume as much as I can as quickly as I can - I've been gorging myself on his words for the last three days. I can't seem to get enough.
And while the purchase of these two new books over the last four days is certainly feeding my brain and making me extremely happy, I can't ignore that it is feeding a larger problem, namely that the number of books I read in a given month is generally not as high as the number of books I acquire in a given month. Observe:
What you're looking at here is approximately half of all of the books in my apartment which I have been meaning to read but for some reason or another have not yet gotten to. Mostly they come from the dollar rack at the Strand and friends who work for book publishers, so it's not necessarily an issue of financial drain, but I still have no excuse to keep on buying new books when I clearly have a queue.
I used to date a guy who would read books not because he had lovingly chosen a particular title, but solely because he needed to get them off of his shelves and out of his apartment. At the time I did not have any friends who worked for book publishers, and I lacked both the funds and the upper-body strength to visit the dollar rack at the Strand the way I do now, and I used to be shocked at his cavalier reasoning for choosing a particular piece of recreational reading. While I hope I never take my books for granted, I'm starting to understand how he got to that point. I don't even remember why I have half of these, though I know I probably had good reasons at the time. It's no wonder I've Hoovered up the Klosterman books the second I got them rather than dipping into the reserves - I know why I wanted them (namely, my sudden and intense literary crush on Chuck Klosterman), and they're crying out to be read.
I'm sort of rambling now, I realize, so I'll just sum up: this is nothing more than a reminder to myself to stop buying new books and get through some of the backlog. Self, I don't care HOW awesome Chuck Klosterman is - you don't need to seek out the rest of his books until you've at least attempted to crack that Stephen Ambrose you bought last year. And who the hell knows? There's some great stuff in that pile - maybe I'll find myself similarly compelled to heap sycophantic praise on, like, Jay McInerney (though probably not, since my love for his fiction is almost completely negated by my lack of interest in his wine column in House & Garden, hence his novel has sat on my shelf unread for about 8 months).
Speaking of books I bought instead of reading the ones I already have, stay tuned: tomorrow I talk about John Irving. Finally. Girl scout's honor.
What's done is done, though, and my relentless worshipping-from-afar (and not so afar) of the inimitable Mr. Klosterman continued tonight as I made a complete giddy ass out of myself in front of him at his signing. Though I wouldn't put this up there with the time I ran into David Byrne in the Carnegie Hall elevator bank and proceeded to spend the next three minutes heaping mindless praise on him in one lengthy sentence that used the word "great" a lot of times, thereby almost causing him to stop the elevator and take the stairs, even though he had his bike with him, it was pretty close. What can I say? I get silly in the presence of greatness. Probably always will, even if I myself somehow managed to become great at some point.
The evening was awesome, though. He was sure to answer every single question people asked, even the totally inane ones that seemed to serve solely as a platform for the question-asker to display his/her talent for punditry and/or dispense useless trivia about themselves. (Yes, I may have some solipsistic tendencies, and yes, I may have wondered exactly where in Montana Chuck was when he had his revelation about his ex-girlfriends corresponding to past and present members of Kiss as described in Killing Yourself to Live, being that I myself grew up in Montana and would love to know if he stuck to the interstate or took Highway 2 across my old stomping grounds... but recognizing the global irrelevance of the question, I had the good sense to keep it to myself.)
Being that I have been a Chuck Klosterman fan for, oh, 72 hours now, I hadn't yet had the chance to pick up Killing Yourself to Live, and briefly pondered getting it at the signing. The managers herding us into the autograph line informed the crowd that they'd sold out of the book but would special-order copies if anybody else wanted one. Well, okay then, I thought. No book for me. That's cool, I have lots of books. I pulled my copy of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs out of my bag and headed through the row of seats toward the line. Then I tripped over something - a copy of Killing Yourself to Live that someone had stashed under a chair and abandoned. Clearly, this was a sign from the universe that I was meant to own this book. I devoured half of it on the subway ride home. Something about this man's writing makes me want to consume as much as I can as quickly as I can - I've been gorging myself on his words for the last three days. I can't seem to get enough.
And while the purchase of these two new books over the last four days is certainly feeding my brain and making me extremely happy, I can't ignore that it is feeding a larger problem, namely that the number of books I read in a given month is generally not as high as the number of books I acquire in a given month. Observe:
What you're looking at here is approximately half of all of the books in my apartment which I have been meaning to read but for some reason or another have not yet gotten to. Mostly they come from the dollar rack at the Strand and friends who work for book publishers, so it's not necessarily an issue of financial drain, but I still have no excuse to keep on buying new books when I clearly have a queue.
I used to date a guy who would read books not because he had lovingly chosen a particular title, but solely because he needed to get them off of his shelves and out of his apartment. At the time I did not have any friends who worked for book publishers, and I lacked both the funds and the upper-body strength to visit the dollar rack at the Strand the way I do now, and I used to be shocked at his cavalier reasoning for choosing a particular piece of recreational reading. While I hope I never take my books for granted, I'm starting to understand how he got to that point. I don't even remember why I have half of these, though I know I probably had good reasons at the time. It's no wonder I've Hoovered up the Klosterman books the second I got them rather than dipping into the reserves - I know why I wanted them (namely, my sudden and intense literary crush on Chuck Klosterman), and they're crying out to be read.
I'm sort of rambling now, I realize, so I'll just sum up: this is nothing more than a reminder to myself to stop buying new books and get through some of the backlog. Self, I don't care HOW awesome Chuck Klosterman is - you don't need to seek out the rest of his books until you've at least attempted to crack that Stephen Ambrose you bought last year. And who the hell knows? There's some great stuff in that pile - maybe I'll find myself similarly compelled to heap sycophantic praise on, like, Jay McInerney (though probably not, since my love for his fiction is almost completely negated by my lack of interest in his wine column in House & Garden, hence his novel has sat on my shelf unread for about 8 months).
Speaking of books I bought instead of reading the ones I already have, stay tuned: tomorrow I talk about John Irving. Finally. Girl scout's honor.
1 Comments:
I don't think Klosterman will mind your actions, since he always has girls hittin' on him. Don't you love his hair?
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