Order EATING THE DINOSAUR here
(in chronological order)
Order FARGO ROCK CITY here
Order SEX, DRUGS AND COCOA PUFFS here
Order KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE here
Order IV here
Order DOWNTOWN OWL here
We have been trained to connect conversation with soft, interstitial laughter. It's our way of showing the other person that we understand the context of the interaction, even when we don't.
This is not the only reason Germans think Americans are retarded, but it's definitely one of them.
Most people in the era of social media know who Neil deGrasse Tyson is. He is that soft, friendly-looking man who says deep, smart things on YouTube videos and Facebook postcard thingies *. Chuck Klosterman is considerably less popular, despite having a purpose eerily similar to NDGT's. This might be explainable by the fact deGrasse's fields of interest are science and Greater Truths (religion and all that jazz) and therefore his simple, well-structured arguments make people feel better about themselves for understanding the functioning of the world. Klosterman's aim being pop culture, it sometimes frustrates readers that they didn't notice the meaning of a certain Nirvana album or of a Pepsi advertisement campaign, so they get defensive, argue that it doesn't have meaning at all and dismiss Klosterman as a pedantic weirdo. I'm one of these people who believe my everyday life is loaded with meaning, so I quite enjoy Klosterman's straightforward and democratic approach to picking apart pop culture. EATING THE DINOSAUR was uplifting in that regards, although I'll admit it's his most abstract and theoretical work so far, so it's not an ideal introduction to the author.
EATING THE DINOSAUR contains what might be the most beautiful and intimate thing Klosterman has written, so far. His essay FAIL (at the very end of the collection) discusses INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE, by Theodore Kaczynski, otherwise known as Unabomber. Klosterman finds himself agreeing with some points and mostly distraught by how well Kaczynski identified what kind of person he is. Before being a domestic terrorist, Kaczynski was a child prodigy turned college mathematics teacher, so despite being a horrible, demented person, he can make a point. His argument was that technology is evolving too fast for mankind and that it's actually making us stupider and emptier **. In his essay, Klosterman recognizes he is exactly the type of person who Kaczynski hates: people that understand the situation and do nothing about it. He admits his powerlessness to change his troublesome relationship to technology and even admits he hates himself, which is a pretty loaded thing to say. That can happen when you cross paths with a more powerful mind than you, vehemently disagree with everything it stands for and find out that mind/person is right ***.
But this essay is rather different than the rest of the collection. If I earlier said that EATING THE DINOSAUR was abstract and theoretical, it's because it questions something theoretical: reality. The fist essay, SOMETHING INSTEAD OF NOTHING is half-built with interview bits with documentary director Errol Morris and questions the reality of the interview process. How real is an interview? How much does it differ from a casual conversation. My second favorite essay in EATING THE DINOSAUR is T IS FOR TRUE, which examines our relationship to irony. It's a subject that has already been debated, notably by David Foster Wallace, but Klosterman takes a different angle and examines society's relationship to public figures who don't do irony very well, such as Weezer's frontman Rivers Cuomo, director Werner Herzog and political underdog Ralph Nader. The essay highlights that we have established a language of irony and that we're losing touch with people who don't speak it.
I do not know how much money Britney Spears earned last year. However, I do know that it's not enough for me to want her life, were I given the option to have it. Every day, random people use Britney's existence as currency; they talk about her public failures and her lack of talent as a way to fill the emptiness of their own normalcy. She - along with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and all those androids from The Hills - are the unifying entities within this meta era. In a splintered society, they are the means through which people devoid of creativity communicate with each other. They allow Americans to understand who they are and who they are not; they allow Americans to unilaterally agree on something they never needed to consciously consider. A person like Britney Spears surrenders her privacy and her integrity andf the rights to her own persona, and in exchange we give her huge sums of money.
Not every essay is successful. Part of what makes Klosterman as fascinating is that he always dresses a clear portrait of what he's talking about. He tried very hard to do that in his essay FOOTBALL, but since the very subject addresses a technicality of a sport I know nothing about, I ended up skimming. I can understand the enthusiasm, would've totally understood if it was about hockey, boxing or basketball, but football is way above my head. His essay on time travel also fell flat, but for slightly different reasons. It's a subject that's been debated to death before and despite that Klosterman's aim is to examine its representations in pop culture, there is hardly any fresh material to what he's saying. My dislike of his essay about road movies is 100% personal. It's probably very interesting, I just really dislike road movies. They often are a profound exercise in intellectual masturbation. Ironically, I really liked his road adventure KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE, but there is always the possibility that I would hate the movie version ****.
That's it. I just disliked three essays out of fifteen, which makes it really unfair that I dedicate a complete paragraph to them, but my main preoccupation is being truthful and fair to my readers, first and foremost. EATING THE DINOSAUR is another great essay book and long-time Klosterman readers will find it a natural evolution, where his purpose is more precise while his subjects are as varied as ever. His essays about Ralph Sampson, Garth Brooks' strange alter ego, the strange paradigm ABBA created for themselves, rock n' roll and Pepsi's cynical advertisement are all worth the money and time investment. I feel like I failed to transmit what it truly is to read this book, but it's not uncommon when I review Klosterman or when I review something I really like. This feeling that I understand exactly what another consciousness is preoccupied about only poorly translate in words. I have tried to find other essayists that feel as uplifting as Klosterman, but so far, he is ahead of his competition. The sexy thing to say would be that I like David Foster Wallace better, but in all truth, Wallace often loses me with his long, labyrinthic arguments and Klosterman does not *****.
FOUR STARS
* Some of you might not know, but he was a killing machine in his youth.
** It's probably more complex than that, but I haven't read the thing.
*** I'm not saying Kaczynski was right to send bombs. Obviously, he wasn't. But the old geezer saw the Twitter generation arrive WAY before its time.
**** This is doubtful. At least in my mind, it's a great fuckin' film.
***** Maybe it's Wallace's merit to require multiple readings, because I do understand him better a second and third time around. Klosterman might not require more than two or three, but I do think it's something Wallace was aiming at. Reading Klosterman feels like he's talking to you as reading Wallace feels like he's talking to himself, except maybe for THIS IS WATER.