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
The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad.
Do you know people who insist they like 'all kinds of music'? That actually means they like no kinds of music.
Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me.
I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and trying to rewrite it.
I am of the opinion, and have been for a long time, that any kind of big technological move is almost always positive in the short term but inevitably somewhat negative in the long term. And I think there are many examples of this in every possible context.
I want fake love. But that's all I want, and that's why I can't have it.
Soccer is like punk rock: The product is not necessarily terrible. The problem is the fan base.
[On political correctness:] Any intended message mattered less than the received message, and every received message could be interpreted in whatever way the receiver wanted.
Technology evolves faster than people do, faster than biology does.
People who are wrong during particularly important moments inevitably spend the rest of their lives trying to explain how their wrongness was paradoxically correct, or-at the very least-why their wrongness "felt right at the time," which is very, very different from being authentically correct.
The message of "The Winner Takes It All" is straightforward: It argues that the concept of relationships ending on mutual terms is an emotional fallacy. One person is inevitably okay and the other is inevitably devastated.
Instead, we were given a publication called the Weekly Reader, which was like a newspaper for four-foot illiterates.
As more and more people recognize the level of violence involved and the consequences of CTE [chronic traumatic encephelopathy, a degenerative brain disorder], they're obviously going to say "We don't want this to be a part of culture." And they overlook the fact that there's a huge swath of the populace where physicality is still a real common thing.
A homeless man once told me that dancing to rap music is the cultural equivalent of masturbating, and I'd sort of fell the same way about playing John Madden Football immediately after filing my income tax: It's fun, but - somehow - vaguely pathetic.