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
In baseball and sex, cliches are usually true: pitching beats hitting, and people always want to be loved by anyone who doesn't seem to care.
I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.
When Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the 'presidential greatness poll' in 1948, the top five were Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jefferson. Only Wilson appears to be seriously fading, probably because his support for the World War I-era Sedition Act now seems outrageous; in this analogy, Woodrow is like the Doors and the Sedition Act is Oliver Stone.
The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to need something deeper than what we want. This is why Woody Allen has made nebbish guys cool; he makes people assume there is something profound about having a relationship based on witty conversation and intellectual discourse. There isn't. It's just another gimmick, and it's no different than wanting to be with someone because they're thin or rich or the former lead singer of Whiskeytown.
What's kind of happening is the conflict over football might be a class conflict where there is a percentage of people who have no relationship to physicality and a percentage of the populace who still does.
If someone breaks your heart, just punch them in the face. Oh sure, it seems obvious now, but you'd be amazed at how many people don't think of it when it's relevant. Seriously, punch them in the face and go get some ice cream.
In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever in and of itself.
Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable. Unfortunately, the average man is less adroit at fostering such rivalries, which is why most men remain average; males are better at hating things that can't hate them back (e.g., lawnmowers, cats, the Denver Broncos, et cetera). They don't see the big picture.
Prior to the early 20th century, for the totality of humankind's existence if they saw something moving, it meant it was there. If they saw a tiger walking, that meant they were near a live tiger. This was entrenched in our subconscious and our unconscious.Then that drastically changed with film and television.
Internet porn makes everything more reasonable -- once you've realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it's erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy.
Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn't get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available.
Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus - as a writer myself - I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite.
People hate the feeling that technology is dragging them into the future, that they're not really following what's happening, but being forced to be involved. Even if it makes their life better, it still feels like it's happening against their will.
Perhaps we humans are still in command, and perhaps there really will be a conventional robot war in the not-so-distant future. If so, let's roll.