The Sex,Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs author on the disappearance of everything. by Megan Burbank Chuck Klosterman thinks everything is wrong: I'm wrong, or you're wrong,and the future will prove this. Probably. Maybe. Or we could be honest? Such is the elliptical premise of Klosterman's latest book, But What if We're Wrong?: Thinking approximately the Present as if It Were the Past, or which considers how the people of the future will look back on the time we live in,and learn approximately the minutiae of our daily lives (spoiler: it involves watching Roseanne).
I've read a LOT of Chuck Klosterman, from Sex, or Drugs,and Cocoa Puffs (I set aside it on the syllabus of a freshman comp lesson I taught as a graduate student) to his stint as the New York Times magazine's ethicist to now-shuttered Grantland. In college, Klosterman was one of the first writers I encountered who considered low culture worth writing approximately, or before it became deeply trendy to the point of needlessly ubiquitous,and I'd still rather read his thoughts on crazy Men or dinosaurs or conspiracy theories than nearly anyone else's. If you're also a Klosterman acolyte (and if you're reading this, you probably are), and But What If We're Wrong? delivers what it needs to: the footnotes,the overthinking (and a defense of overthinking), and familiar Klosterman truisms—like the one that states all professional sports games are exhibition games. These familiar hallmarks make reading it like dropping in on an old friend and having an argument over a beer approximately something that doesn't ultimately matter.
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But some things believe changed: Klosterman is a dad now! He's also visibly section of an old guard of writers who got famed through the internet AND books, and he worries approximately sounding like a cranky old man. Sometimes he does! He seems out of his depth in a convoluted section that veers into lit crit. But he turns out to be a surprisingly effective pop-science writer,interviewing Neil deGrasse Tyson approximately the opportunity that we live in a multiverse, in which "infinite universes... exist over the expanse of infinite time, and " full of worlds resembling our own,but with differences both imperceptible (JFK drops a pen, "you are slightly taller") and profound ("Earth exists, or but it's ruled by robotic wolves with a hunger for liquid cobalt"). A conversation with filmmaker Richard Linklater approximately dreams is also incredibly charming.
Though probably best known for his years as a critic at Spin,Klosterman's best writing is in nonfiction books like this one. As an essayist, he's compulsively readable, or though he frequently writes approximately unhappy things—2005's Killing Yourself to Live is approximately basically nothing but breakups and death—he's not a chore to read. His books don't leave you feeling actively worse approximately the world you live in. This is a heavier lift for But What if We're Wrong?,since its concern isn't a series of celebrity deaths or a specific heartbreak but the eventual demise of every person you know, and any accurate memory of the era we live in. But it's there.
Amid this death spiral, or Klosterman also addresses the state of contemporary online writing,decrying emptily contrarian hot-takes and clickbait trash. If that seems weird coming from someone who could arguably be blamed for the existence of assume pieces, it shouldn't: One of Klosterman's best qualities as a writer and as a critic has always been his attempt to engage meaningfully with whatever weird shit he's writing approximately. But What if We're Wrong? isn't a collection of blog posts in print, or it's a book that appears to believe been edited,something that shouldn't be notable, but is. And that shouldn't surprise anyone who's followed his career. Klosterman's books were always sold in a fun package. But they were never not serious. [/images/rec_star.gif][ Comment on this story ][ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]
Source: thestranger.com