I Want to Have Approximately 8 Billion of Chuck Klosterman's Babies
I realize it's been a few days since I've updated ye olde litblog(e), and even longer since I've actually written something about, well, lit...this is not to say I haven't been pondering it, since it's pretty much all I ever think about, but I just haven't had the opportunity to sit down and compose all of my various ponderings into something coherent. Not that I really do now, understand. But I couldn't bear to think about my readership gradually losing interest and then falling away, after such a promising start to the bittysoda enterprise.
Someday when I'm a real writer with real fans, never let it be said I don't care about the fans. Or anybody who shows more than a passing interest in what I have to say, really.
That said, here's today's piece of literary sycophantism: the nicemodernism movement has found its writerly patron saint, and that man is Chuck Klosterman. Oddly enough, I had not heard much about this guy until this past week. The only thing I knew about him was that he had written for a few of the magazines that my company puts out, and that he was the subject of the most scathing review I have ever read about anything, which honestly should have made me more interested in reading him, but I think at the time this ran I could barely muster enthusiasm for books people were telling me I would enjoy, so I promptly forgot about it until this week, when three different people who do not know each other suddenly told me I needed to check him out.
And of course, now that I have, I wish I'd done it a long time ago. I finished Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Klosterman's recent collection of pop-culture essays, within 24 hours of opening the book (and it bears pointing out that I was actually on a date for most of this 24-hour interval). Ladies and gentlemen, this man is nicemodernism personified. He was nicemodernist before we coined the term. Despite being fairly unfamiliar with his oevure prior to this weekend, I get the painful feeling that I've been somehow subconsciously ripping him off these past few weeks whenever I wax rhapsodic about baking cookies and Journey and other things that demonstrate a conscious effort on my part to utterly transcend the cool-uncool continuum. Chuck Klosterman has been doing exactly this for years, and he knows better than I do what I'm trying to do in this blog. Reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I had the same weird feeling I did when I read Prep, where I had to pause for a second to wonder if I'd actually met the author at some point, because what was being said was so like something I myself have long wanted to express.
(I guess this all means I'd better get to writing the book I'm trying to write now before someone else beats me to it.)
Anyway, the Klosterman of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs seems very much like the sort of person I would be if I were a 33-year-old man. We both grew up in the same part of the country, and I can detect this very down-to-earth, westmidwestern sensibility beneath the hyperintellectual veneer. It's what makes his utter unpretentiousness so convincing to me, actually. Those of us who grew up intellectually-inclined in the pre-ironic lands where cool and uncool generally run parallel to lowbrow and highbrow got a much clearer picture of how meaningless any of these designations are. Culture is culture. If it's being consumed on a mass level, it's influencing you. (Now, granted, Klosterman's enthusiasm for some things that are objectively uncool coupled with his genuine and profound lack of pretense made the Mark Ames review of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs veritably brilliant in that it pushed all the right buttons. Sort of the same way I'm vaguely awed when someone makes a brilliant back-handed comment that hurts my feelings to the core. Sure, I'm insulted and injured, but I have to give props to them for knowing where to strike.)
If you're an aspiring nicemodernist, you need to read this book. Klosterman describes perfectly so many of the concepts I hadn't quite formed in my own head. He shows you that it's okay to dislike things, and be angry, and rant, and even be a little bit cynical, so long as you recognize that liking the things you like (or disliking the things you don't like) doesn't make you hip, square, ironic, or anything else, it just makes you a Person Who Likes Stuff, and really, that's not a bad thing at all. The designations of "cool" and "uncool" have nothing to do with "great" and "not great", which really should be self-evident but isn't.
This evening, I intend to be at the Borders in the Time Warner Center, where Klosterman will be reading and signing. It's been a few weeks since I've been to a really great reading/signing, so I'm pretty stoked. I intend to slip him my card in the hope that he'll be interested in reading at Barbes, because the pioneer of nicemodernism before nicemodernism was nicemodernism clearly needs to read at the nicemodernist reading series before all can be right in the universe.
Someday when I'm a real writer with real fans, never let it be said I don't care about the fans. Or anybody who shows more than a passing interest in what I have to say, really.
That said, here's today's piece of literary sycophantism: the nicemodernism movement has found its writerly patron saint, and that man is Chuck Klosterman. Oddly enough, I had not heard much about this guy until this past week. The only thing I knew about him was that he had written for a few of the magazines that my company puts out, and that he was the subject of the most scathing review I have ever read about anything, which honestly should have made me more interested in reading him, but I think at the time this ran I could barely muster enthusiasm for books people were telling me I would enjoy, so I promptly forgot about it until this week, when three different people who do not know each other suddenly told me I needed to check him out.
And of course, now that I have, I wish I'd done it a long time ago. I finished Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Klosterman's recent collection of pop-culture essays, within 24 hours of opening the book (and it bears pointing out that I was actually on a date for most of this 24-hour interval). Ladies and gentlemen, this man is nicemodernism personified. He was nicemodernist before we coined the term. Despite being fairly unfamiliar with his oevure prior to this weekend, I get the painful feeling that I've been somehow subconsciously ripping him off these past few weeks whenever I wax rhapsodic about baking cookies and Journey and other things that demonstrate a conscious effort on my part to utterly transcend the cool-uncool continuum. Chuck Klosterman has been doing exactly this for years, and he knows better than I do what I'm trying to do in this blog. Reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I had the same weird feeling I did when I read Prep, where I had to pause for a second to wonder if I'd actually met the author at some point, because what was being said was so like something I myself have long wanted to express.
(I guess this all means I'd better get to writing the book I'm trying to write now before someone else beats me to it.)
Anyway, the Klosterman of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs seems very much like the sort of person I would be if I were a 33-year-old man. We both grew up in the same part of the country, and I can detect this very down-to-earth, westmidwestern sensibility beneath the hyperintellectual veneer. It's what makes his utter unpretentiousness so convincing to me, actually. Those of us who grew up intellectually-inclined in the pre-ironic lands where cool and uncool generally run parallel to lowbrow and highbrow got a much clearer picture of how meaningless any of these designations are. Culture is culture. If it's being consumed on a mass level, it's influencing you. (Now, granted, Klosterman's enthusiasm for some things that are objectively uncool coupled with his genuine and profound lack of pretense made the Mark Ames review of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs veritably brilliant in that it pushed all the right buttons. Sort of the same way I'm vaguely awed when someone makes a brilliant back-handed comment that hurts my feelings to the core. Sure, I'm insulted and injured, but I have to give props to them for knowing where to strike.)
If you're an aspiring nicemodernist, you need to read this book. Klosterman describes perfectly so many of the concepts I hadn't quite formed in my own head. He shows you that it's okay to dislike things, and be angry, and rant, and even be a little bit cynical, so long as you recognize that liking the things you like (or disliking the things you don't like) doesn't make you hip, square, ironic, or anything else, it just makes you a Person Who Likes Stuff, and really, that's not a bad thing at all. The designations of "cool" and "uncool" have nothing to do with "great" and "not great", which really should be self-evident but isn't.
This evening, I intend to be at the Borders in the Time Warner Center, where Klosterman will be reading and signing. It's been a few weeks since I've been to a really great reading/signing, so I'm pretty stoked. I intend to slip him my card in the hope that he'll be interested in reading at Barbes, because the pioneer of nicemodernism before nicemodernism was nicemodernism clearly needs to read at the nicemodernist reading series before all can be right in the universe.
1 Comments:
I read this on vacation last year (after borrowing it from a friend whom I actually bought it for for Christmas). Pretty awseome, though I had some issues with the Billy Joel thing...
~Teany
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