NO SAINTS IN L.A.

Chuck Klosterman has perspective to burn. I would bet a large sum of money on his being correct (or at least pursuasive) ninety-five percent of the time, whether or not I personally disagree with his thoughts, particularly as they relate to the age old question “What does it all mean?” Ostensibly, he makes a good point on the subject, on many subjects, and one in particularly is, what’s with Publishings’ state of affairs? We rank 18 out of 24 nations in terms of the relative effectiveness of our educational system, and routinely have low reading rates of adults across the nation. But that’s not all, Culture as a whole generally sucks, countries hate us for the shit we spew out. So, it seems significant to read a passage from Chuck Klosterman’s IV, a collection of essays from his days spent writing for Esquire and Spin magazine, who said this:

If disagreement with mainstream culture simply means that your ideas aren’t preferred, then consider the opposite, by Stephen King, who says, “There is a kind of unspoken (hence undefended and unexamined) belief in publishing circles that the most commercially successful stories and novels are fast-paced….the underlying thought is that people have so many things to do today, and are so easily distracted from the printed word, that you’ll lose them unless you become a kind of short-order cook, serving up sizzling burgers, fries, and eggs over easy just as fast as you can. Like so many unexamined beliefs in the publishing business, this idea is largely bullshit…which is why, when books like Umberto Eco’s The Name of The Rose or Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain suddenly break out of the pack and climb the best-seller lists, publishers and editors are astonished. I suspect that most of them ascribe these books’ unexpected success to unpredictable and deplorable lapses into good taste on the part of the reading public.”

I think, we all liked McDonalds hamburgers, and look where that got us. Fast food and bigger belts – can you consider these ostensibly unintended consequences the “not wrong” taste of Culture? Or is Chuck Klosterman’s assertion that culture’s not wrong or right just really saying that culture is the result of freedom of choice, and where we’re at is the result of freedom, not taste, because from what I can tell – we don’t have any.

Photo by Mauricio Quiroga – Miami’s Memorial Statue

Tags: Book Review, Chuck Klosterman, Writing

Photo by Chloe Scheffe

Chuck Klosterman uses words like abject, schism and ungulate. I sulkily admit I had to look up their meanings. Reading a half hour of Chuck Klosterman’s disquisitional essays in A Decade Of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas is mind-blowing on this level. I assume a well-thumbed thesaurus is always with him; but I have no proof beyond his particular, intellectual and varied, speech staccato peppering all his work. I’m in awe, but not in love.

I’m alone in my lovelessness – there are those who are head over heels: two friends of mine are crushing on Chuck because, as Lauren Salazar from Daily Intel put it, he’s got a ‘nerdy hotness’ about him that makes you sympathize with his wistful fictional characters (he says that “No one ever has sex in his books because he identifies more with people being rejected”) and quirky personal real-life stories. Just select a piece from Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, a running commentary on pop culture and its icons – an extension of his comprehensive work – and you’ll find a man colored by hilarious juvenile tales and a keen awareness of how to translate what happens around him into a contextualized concept.

When asked if he had a critical aesthetic, which sounds to me like a question about his particular brand of presentation, he says, “I don’t know that I have an aesthetic, really. If I do, it would be that I think there are people who want to think critically about the art that engages their life, and I think you can do that with any kind of art. There’s this belief that some things can be taken seriously in an intellectual way, while some things are only entertainment or only a commodity. Or there’s some kind of critical consensus that some things are “good,” and some things are garbage, throwaway culture. And I think the difference between them, in a lot of ways, is actually much less than people think. Especially when you get down to how they affect the audience. So when I write, I don’t think it necessarily matters what I’m writing about. I think it matters the way I think about it. The chord changes, and the lyrics on a record have value, but their real value is how they shape the way people look at their own lives.”

Although Chuck states that no one can really write an objective piece because it’s based on the author’s “subjective objectivity,” he nevertheless strikes a chord with partakers of pop culture; I think that chord is a collective sense of cynism. In his own words, “I think there’s an element of cynicism in my writing, but I’m an optimistic cynic.”

Photo by Ellen Choi

Tags: Book Review, Chuck Klosterman, Writing