Chuck Klosterman
Chuck Klosterman
Charles John "Chuck" Klostermanis an American author and essayist who has written books and essays focused on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine. Klosterman is the author of eight books including two novels and the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth5 June 1972
CountryUnited States of America
Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.
Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless.
Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.
I think anyone who's not as good a writer as me is absolutely a hack, and I think anybody who's a slightly better writer than me is brilliant. So of course that makes me a horrible critic when it comes to books, because I can't distance my own experience from what I'm doing.
It's possible for me to imagine a generation of people maybe two generations removed from you who might decide that we have an adversarial relationship with technology.
But it goes without saying that Michael Jordan could never date Pamela Anderson. That would cause the apocalypse.
Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.
Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.
Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.
This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.
It's possible this whole "Why do Latinos love Morrisey?" question will haunt us forever. Fortunately, Canadian academics are on the case.
I think one possibility [in the future] might be chemotherapy. And I'm always hesitant to say that because it makes it sound like I'm against chemotherapy. Right now, chemotherapy is the best cancer treatment therapy we have. But let's say we find some way where we can almost genetically engineer the DNA of our being and fight cancer that way. Then, the idea that we used to pump poison into people to fight off cancer will almost seem like the use of leeches or something.
It is very easy for me to imagine in 200 years, people looking back at chemotherapy as proof that people of the 20th century were insane and just morons.
The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.