| Title | : | Eating the Dinosaur |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1416544208 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781416544203 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 245 |
| Publication | : | First published October 20, 2009 |
In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman is more entertaining and incisive than ever. Whether he's dissecting the boredom of voyeurism, the reason why music fans inevitably hate their favorite band's latest album, or why we love watching can't-miss superstars fail spectacularly, Klosterman remains obsessed with the relationship between expectation, reality, and living history. It's amateur anthropology for the present tense, and sometimes it's incredibly funny.
Eating the Dinosaur Reviews
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Ok, I’ve read every book Klosterman has written and I’m going to outline what I think was running through his mind when he wrote the excellent Eating The Dinosaur:
1. You know, if one more person asks me if I still watch The Real World or know that Screech was in a porno, I’m going to scream. No, I probably won’t scream. I’m from North Dakota, a courteous locale, so I will not scream. I will feel embarrassed for the questioner and remove myself from the interaction as quickly as possible.
2. I’m glad I don’t have a real job. Some of my former basketball teammates back near Grand Forks are stuck in factories or the family farms, and we know how those industries are doing (although North Dakota has weathered the economic hard times better than people might expect). Still, it’s not like I sit around on my ass and watch syndicated television until inspiration hits. I need drugs, too. No, no, kidding. If everybody thinks writing like me is so easy, why doesn’t everyone write like me and get famous? I’m not afraid of any of the bloggers or goodreads reviewers. I did my time and honed my craft. But I write a lot, under deadline, interviewing people about whom I don’t care much, anything to get another article in Spin or Esquire.
3. Ok, that’s not true anymore. I used to whore myself out to magazines indiscriminately but after Downtown Owl and all the speaker fees I’m doing ok financially and don’t have to write another profile of the semiotics of old television shows if I don’t want to do so. Still, I probably should. This gravy train might not run forever.
4. I know I shouldn’t care that people think my job is easy but sometimes those people bug me. However, once I’m bugged, I can own the fact I’m bugged, shrug off the jealousy, go for a run, and stay humble. I know I’m crazy lucky to do what I do. I mean, I work hard but I know I’m lucky.
5. I’m married now. I should start acting like a grown-up. The hipster kids have already disowned me and re-owned me about seventeen times. I’m too old for this shit.
6. I write better than people expect, mostly from practice, and I’ve got good editors.
7. In turn, I’m going to write an excellent book (according to at least one GR reviewer) with thoughtful, top-notch essays about subjects like how Pepsi and Obama are linked and the similarities between Kurt Cobain and David Koresh. I will also write about football and Abba. These essays will be better researched than some of my previous work but retain the dizzying logic and “you thought X was this but we know it’s really Y and if we’re honest with ourselves we’ll acknowledge X is Y and we probably do acknowledge X is Y covertly so everyone knows but we pretend X is Y but says X is X” rhetoric. I’m not stupid. I know what works. But I don’t want to sound like I’m arguing in a bar at 4 in the morning anymore. I’m, like, your cousin’s husband at your sister’s graduation now. I’m kind of interesting, I guess, and I’m a decent listener, but the kids don’t take me seriously.
8. The final essay, on the Unabomber, will be the best essay I’ve ever written.
Maybe Klosterman didn’t think any of that. I don’t know. Maybe he plays the stock market and smokes cigars between donations to the NRA. Maybe he campaigned for Al Franken and has a secret crush on Rachel Maddow. I don’t care. Eating the Dinosaur is the work of a smart, perceptive man with an loyal audience, a generally optimistic disposition, and years of experience at the keyboard. I know he makes it look easy but I doubt writing like Klosterman is as easy as one might think. If you’re a Klosterman fan you’ll love Eating the Dinosaur. If you don’t like Klosterman you still might at least, upon reading these essays, fail to hate them. I’m glad Klosterman exists and I’m uncool enough to dig his work. And that makes me cool. X equals Y. Everybody knows it. -
Here's a confession: I did not read Chuck Klosterman's entire book "Eating the Dinosaur." This slighting came with his permission, nay, his insistence. Klosterman busts through the fourth wall in his essay about football to suggest that if you aren't into football, you can jump this chapter. " ... I will understand if you skip to the next essay, which is about ABBA." And if a reader hangs around a bit longer, thinking, perhaps, "Meh. Who cares. He'll probably say something about Britny Spears in here somewhere," he stops the bus and holds open the door once again:
"If you'd still rather get to the shit about ABBA, you should go there now."
Friends, I went to the ABBA.
Klosterman's most-recent compilation of essays includes comparisons between David Koresh and Kurt Cobain, the mislaid career of a once-great athlete, and why observing his longtime neighbor through her window was never really interesting. He talks about why Weezer fans never appreciate Weezer albums, Twitter, and the Unibomber.
It is all done with Klosterman's patented template. He seems to randomly draws two topics out of a hat, finds a way to weave them together, then throws in an opinion on why an intelligent, shape-shifting metal is more believable in "Terminator" than time travel.
This book is fine. There is not a lot that differs from any of his other books -- post "Fargo Rock City" -- including the ones that are fiction or first cousins of fiction. Sometimes this is fine. It's like always ordering the wild rice burger and beer battered fries from the Brewhouse. It tastes good, but it doesn't come with a hell of a lot of suprises. Sometimes it feels like Klosterman could be more something. "Funny" is one word that comes to mind. "Spontaneous" is another.
This is what it is like to read one of Chuck Klosterman's compilations of nonfiction essays: It is like being on vacation in a small town in a weird state and seeing some guy wearing a T'shirt with the name of your favorite dive bar printed on the front. It's like "Oh! You've been to Dick's Crab Shack! We go there all the time!" Except in this metaphor, the T'shirt is Klosterman's pop culture references. There you are in a mess of words that may or may not interest you and he mentions something you like or remember liking. "Saved by the Bell," or "WKRP in Cincinnati." So you nod and keep reading.
At one point while I was reading this book, Klosterman mentioned Matt Dillon and the band Was Not Was (although this has noting to do with the title) within a few pages of each other. Both of these topics had come up in a conversation I'd had with my boyfriend earlier in the day.
I can't tell if this means we are all psychically linked, or if it just means that Klosterman talks about everything in the world at least once. -
Meh. I hoped that Eating the Dinosaur would be a return to form for Klosterman, after the unreadable novel Downtown Owl. In retrospect, it occurs to me that Klosterman's books have gotten steadily less entertaining with each one that is published. Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs had me laughing out loud, and I found Killing Yourself to Live pretty insightful and entertaining, but since then the returns have been diminishing. I'll pay Klosterman a sort of compliment here: Eating the Dinosaur reminds me of what I've read about the last few years of Lenny Bruce's life. Razor sharp wit degenerated into whiny self-absorption and self-reference. While the occasional glimpse of genius was still visible, the overall impression of his rants was that they were just plain boring and sad. While Klosterman is still pretty upbeat, he still writes too much about the phenomenon of Chuck Klosterman and What Chuck Klosterman Means and Why That Is Important. He doesn't take anything else seriously, which is what used to make him fun to read - if he could stop taking himself so seriously, I'd enjoy his writing a lot more.
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I have had a longstanding love/like relationship with Chuck Klosterman. Most of the time I like what he writes, and occasionally I love certain pieces, or even parts of pieces.
But Eating the Dinosaur has, somehow, taken large parts of my brain--and by this I mean not only or simply objects and topics that inhabit my brain, but THE WAYS I THINK ABOUT THEM--and made them plain, in language that not only replicates my own cadences and ramblings, but refines them to the point where I somehow recognize, to my chagrin, that I could never actually say what I mean in quite the way that Chuck Klosterman can. (And I incidentally refer to him by his entire name, "Chuck Klosterman," because I cannot imagine the alternatives--or rather, I can, but I am uncomfortable with them.)
The weirdest part of this was reading it earlier this week (Sunday, the 12th of September), and stopping before reaching the end, and then having dinner with friends, one of whom (my very best friend) heard an NPR report on the way to picking up dinner about how the Unabomber was deeply affected by some weird Cold War experiment at Harvard, and then going back to Chuck Klosterman's book, where the final essay was about . . . the Unabomber.
I think my Facebook update about this said something to the effect that not since Don DeLillo's White Noise has a book reflected nearly exactly who I was and what I was thinking at a specific moment in history. I've since thought about maybe a half-dozen other books that did the same thing (most recently Roberto Bolano's 2666), but Klosterman's ease of access and rough-hewn prose, which is actually quite difficult to parse out to read to friends and loved ones (so you end up reading nearly the whole thing out loud, to the consternation of the aforementioned), harkens back to DeLillo's effortless xeroxing of my brain back in the eighties.
In other words: I cannot recommend this book highly enough. -
For one take on Eating the Dinosaur, check out
Anthony Shafer's review, which kicks ass in it's own way.
Chuck Klosterman's previous series of essays, Chuck Klosterman IV read more like a collection of rarities and half-formed ideas that left me wondering if Klosterman might be more enthralled with his celebrity as perhaps the pre-eminent pop culture essayist alive than being the pre-eminent pop culture essayist.
All those fears were put to rest after reading Eating the Dinosaur. Simply put, Eating the Dinosaur is the finest collection of essays Chuck Klosterman has ever penned. He even addresses those "sell out" fears in the first essay, attempting to reconcile his craft with his celebrity. It doesn't always work, Chuck writes, but there really is no other way.
The essays get better, stronger after that. His essay on the cult of personality surround Kurt Cobain takes a chilling and deadly accurate turn when he makes the link between Cobain and David Koresh, the apocalypse-spewing leader of the Branch Davidians. Not to say that Cobain was gunning for a Waco-style end of days, but both Cobain and Koresh attracted a cult of personality; one completely rejected it, when he should have embraced it, the other embraced it, when he should have rejected it. This essay alone is worth the price of the book.
Yet Klosterman saves his best essay for last; his rumination on the mad ramblings of Ted Kaczinski, aka the Unabomber, may be one of the best essays you'll read in a long time. Klosterman proves here he's not just the best pop-culture essayist alive, but one of the best essayists alive, period.
I felt as if Chuck wrote this book for me. Seriously. I've had conversations like the essays he's penned in this collection.
I'm sorry I doubted you, Chuck. -
So I've never read a book by Chuck Klosterman and after reading Eating The Dinosaur, I'm honestly started to wonder what I've done with my life. Eating the Dinosaur is a simple collection of essays that will slightly twist your mind but present a pleasant read.
In reading the 'Easting the Dinosaur' you could say this is just a cheap collection of essays by a guy whose editors told him; "hey it's been a while since you released a book" throw something together quick. I honestly wouldn't disagree with that assertion one bit yet it's to the credit of the writing style and prose of Klosterman that he can turn that into a excellent read.
Like Sports, this book has a section for you. Love Music, well it's Klosterman, of course there is a section for you. Even some totally random and inverted comparisons of within make it worth my time. It is a literary classic, no but it's a great lazy read to cruel up with on lazy evening night and digest some good writing. -
Not a book review. Talking to myself in descending order of relevance to book/you.
1. Klosterman and David Foster Wallace are right: irony tyrannizes us. But part of the reason that it tyrannizes us is because people will not shut up about it. It's exhausting trying to out-smart and pre-empt every clever person who's ever had a theory on pop culture and society. We all speak in the ridiculous voice of Wallace Shawn: "Perhaps you know that I know that you know that I know." I long for the day that we all breathe a collective sigh and let it go. Most sensible people have stopped talking altogether. I think Foster Wallace finally realized this.
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1B. But this is how we think, dammit, and it deserves props for being a lucid representation of that thinking.
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2. Amazingly, the sports essays were not my least favorite. More than that, I actually liked them!
The football essay particularly surprised me. I've been warming up to football over the years, but I've never stopped to consider why, exactly. I've had suspicions, but I think it might have come to me in reading Klosterman's essay.
I like football because I like Star Trek.
What?
You heard me, ensign. I want you to ram the Enterprise into the enemy flag ship in a little stratagem I like to call The Kobayashi Mmmmmmutha-fucka-didn't-see-that-comin!
This is the equivalent of the QB running the ball and hoping his precious legs aren't snapped like twigs in the process.
But it's not just the sucker punch element I enjoy. It's the outsmarting aspect. The tactical aspect where you're just trying to figure out what they think you think their weak spot is and adjusting the plan accordingly. How can we sneak the Defiant through this mass of Dominion ships to the Bajoran Wormhole? We run a distraction play using the Valiant as a decoy.
There's also the weird parallel of fantasy football and text-based rpgs. Fans of football and nerd-related things love this extra wasted time*. I really have no idea how either one works, but I get that it's the same concept. They love to sit around and discuss alternate realities (which might help to explain why I've been loving this strip lately).
I don't like sports and I don't like the military. I enjoy football only a little more than chess (by which I mean that I appreciate the concepts more the the actual gameplay), and I can get behind Trek because it's fictionalized military in an altruistic future.
*Klosterman makes an objectionable comment about excellence in billiards equaling a wasted life. I guess we all feel that way about interests we don't share.
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2B. Wallace Shawn for Captain!
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1C. A few years ago, I picked up my new (much younger) girlfriend in NY to drive her back to Boston for her new semester. She asked to drive my car because it was a Mustang and, as she drove, I looked in the backseat and found a wrinkled photocopy I had made of an especially powerful Cesar Vallejo poem. I pulled it out and read it to her. She looked over at me and said, "Who are you?" I was feeling pretty good at that point. Here I was with this college girl, in the first car I'd ever been happy owning, and for the first time in memory able to read a poem to another person without pausing over all the wrong bits. But the relationship didn't work out and I've slowly come around to why it couldn't have. It was all in her emphasis of "are." She also once referred to me as a cartoon and this really underscores her inability to see things unironically. The relationship failed (in part) not because of the age gap, but because we interacted with the world in a fundamentally different way (ok, maybe that's an age gap). There was always a layer of irony in her world and she couldn't conceive that I wasn't also living that way. Of course, none of this was helped by the fact that I met her through a craigslist missed connection, using her ironic t-shirt as an identifier.
The age gap wasn't so great that I didn't get the concept. I can think of dozens of situations where I deliberately acted ironically. But I feel like it's gotten to a point (the point of flarf) where people don't even know what their social circle is talking about, but they keep gibbering on, pretending that it's fine. In fact, "It's fine" was a sort of catch-phrase of hers.
More recently, I again sat in a car with a girl (this time a peer), discussing poetry, which had been the basis of our friendship. I recounted the Vallejo story and said that I was worried not just that we were getting older, but that people, "the kids", really were losing their aptitude for genuine discourse. "Do you know what I mean?" I asked. She looked down and said, "Yes."
If I had asked the first girl this same question, she would have said "Yes,' but she wouldn't have known what she was answering or if her answer was correct. Irony tyrannizes us all and yet I keep talking.
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1D. Klosterman is 90% wrong about Rivers Cuomo, which is why Cuomo really is a bad artist, and 100% right about Ralph Nader, which is why Nader would have been an awful president.
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3 At one point Klosterman refers to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as "a couple of disposable teens." This struck me as part of the new trend of not naming a killer (even though no one is ever consistent about this *ahem-Anderson Cooper*) because that's a form of honoring them. While I appreciate the sentiment, it's pretty misguided. First of all, you would never say, "let's never speak Stalin's name again." But more importantly, it's a level a hatred that simply cannot be healthy for anyone. Contrary to popular opinion, killing is not advertising; if you ignore killers, they're not simply going to go away. But if you ignore humanity, that will disappear. I feel like Klosterman could write a decent essay on this topic.
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4. Oddly enough, for much of my elementary school life, Kurt Cobain and David Koresh were interchangeable in my mind. -
Eating the Dinosaur is a series of essays on pop culture—social media, time travel, celebrity, music, television...and more. Some I enjoyed, but some missed the mark for me. Some gave me food for thought. In fact, the most interesting chapters made connections that I'm still thinking about, so overall, I enjoyed this intellectual romp through the deeds and misdeeds of our society.
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An interesting, fun, and sometimes laugh out loud funny read. This is the first book I've read by him and I wanted to get it finished before seeing him at the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend.
As is often the case I've been sitting on his first novel,
Downtown Owl for a couple of years but have never gotten around to reading it. Looks like I will have to remedy that and pick up a few more of his essay collections in the near future. -
Klosterman is hit or miss with me, but once I just sort of skipped the essays about sports, this was a very good collection. Though the essay comparing David Koresh and Kurt Cobain is the most notorious, the best essay for me was "T is For True," a discussion of irony and its application, or rather lack thereof, in the careers of Weezer, Werner Herzog, and Ralph Nader.
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This was a good Chuck Klosterman book. (But even a bad Chuck Klosterman book is better than 95% of books that are generally considered to be good.)
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In a scant 245 pages Chuck Klosterman will find a way to annoy you. As far as I can tell he's built an entire literary career around being willfully obtuse. He proudly puts forth his failures of the imagination and practiced ignorance as if they were the highest virtues a cultural critic could aspire to. This is a pretty vague criticism, let me highlight two examples:
In "Oh the Guilt," Klosterman puts forth the idea that Nirvana really doesn't have much to say, because in lyrics such as "I tried hard to have a father/but instead I had a dad." you could swap the predicates without changing the meaning of the sentence. He also cites the quote, "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing," as an example of this. As a scholar of language, I'm utterly confused as to how Klosterman came to the conclusion that symmetrical predicates were some kind of measure of a statements philosophical value. The meaning, at least in the Nirvana lyric, is derived from the fact that they are two different words, not two different ideas necessarily. We all immediately understand the idea of trying to have one thing, but getting something inarticulately different. We understand this intuitively unless we're approaching the thing in a purposeful attempt to get it wrong.
In "Tomorrow Rarely Knows," Klosterman states that Time Travel is impossible, acknowledges the existence of Einstein and his theory of special relativity and immediately dismisses it. I assure you, Mr. Klosterman, it's a whole big thing. At the same time, he'll take daredevil leaps of logic that make Einstein look intuitive. I find it hard to read past statements like "(paraphrasing) This scenario is purely fictional, therefore no one has a reason to lie when talking about it." As a professional interviewer I expect Klosterman to know that people will find reasons to lie in the most surprising of places. There are some truly faulty Q.E.D.'s that will leap up at you in this book which have the net effect of making you feel as though you're reading a series of blog entries that someone saw fit to bind.
It's maddening to take in his writing on topics he knows little about, because he takes such pride in flaunting this ignorance but when he's writing about things I know nothing about, it's a pretty pleasant ride. I found the second half of the book to be much more enjoyable, and he won me over enough that I'd consider reading his future efforts. -
Scattershot, incoherent (apparently by design), and occasionally just flatly wrong...
Chuck Klosterman's essay collection
Eating the Dinosaur is still perversely interesting. And he's right a lot more often than he's wrong.
I really hope the method by which Klosterman constructs several of his essays doesn't catch on, though, the one where he just writes sections in the order that occurs to him and then labels them haphazardly so their linear order could conceivably be reconstructed. For example, the parts of the first essay, "Something Instead of Nothing," are labeled 1, 2, 3, 2A, 4, 4A, 3A, 4B, 5, 4C, 3B, 6.
Imagine reading sentences written that way!
1) It'd be like
3) to navigate
4) with every sentence.
3A) a maze
2) having
Doable, perhaps, but not especially enjoyable.
Fortunately, not all of Klosterman's essays are like that, and his wide-eyed interest in whatever he's writing about tends to carry the reader along anyway.
Klosterman's best move—and he uses this a lot—is his ability to juxtapose disparate elements of popular culture and write meaningfully about the connections he sees between them—Kurt Cobain and David Koresh, say, or as in the tour de force "T Is for True" later in this volume, Weezer, Werner Herzog and Ralph Nader. His sights rarely rise above middlebrow targets, but that's a strength, really; that makes it easier for him to carry the reader along with him as he makes these seemingly off-the-wall connections. Klosterman even managed to make American-rules football into an interesting topic for me, something I would've bet against if someone had just told me so in a bar.
I especially liked his take on the television show Mad Men, connecting it with Pepsi, Barack Obama and advertising then and now, in "It Will Shock You How Much It Never Happened." That's the one where he misuses the word "normative" (the way things ought to be) where he means "descriptive," but makes a valid larger point about how our perception of advertising has changed—has been changed—from being about the product to being about the packaging of the product, whether the product in question is a refreshing beverage, the leader of the Free World, or advertising itself. He even name-checks (although, hmm, it's actually not in this essay but rather in "Fail," where Klosterman writes unusually straightforwardly about the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski),
Jerry Mander's
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, that brilliant, often prescient, and ultimately doomed call for a little media literacy.
I think, from the above, you can start to get a feel for the way Klosterman jumps around, and for the wide range of his interests. These are both good things, on balance. I did not like this as much as I did my introduction to Klosterman's work,
Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, either—but I liked this more as the book went on. -
"Most people are not articulate about everything in their life, but they are articulate about the things they're still figuring out." (8)
"So the deeper question is, what's more important, narrative consistency or truth? I think we're always trying to create a consistent narrative for ourselves. I think truth always takes a backseat to narrative. Truth has to sit at the back of the bus." (13)
"People answer questions because it feels stranger to do the opposite." (20)
"Any time you try to tell people what your work isn't supposed to mean, you only make things worse." (45)
"If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word coincidence exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists." (47)
"There is no linear continuation: The past disappears, the future is unimagined, and the present is ephemeral. It cannot be traversed." (54)
"It doesn't matter what you can do if you don't know why you're doing it." (58)
"If you exist in two places, you don't exist at all." (66)
"It seems to exemplify the saddest thing about sports and culture, which means it's pretty much the saddest thing about life that doesn't involve death or secrets." (72)
"When you have unlimited potential and an unwillingness to pursue that potential, greatness doesn't need to be achieved; as fans, we only require glimpses of a theoretical reality that's more interesting than the one we're in." (78)
"So this, I suppose, is the first thing we can quantify: Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know, the less we are able to feel." (93)
"The upside to knowledge is that it enriches every experience, but the downside is that it limits every experience. This is why I preferred watching the stranger across the way, even though she never did anything: There was always the possibility she might do everything." (96)
"I would simply be seeing something I could not control and would never understand, and I'd be cognizant of a reality we all consciously realize but rarely accept—that almost all of the world happens without us." (101)
"Truly irrelevant art wouldn't even be part of the conversation." (172)
"The mere recognition of an extrinsic reality damages the intrinsic merit's of one's own reality. In other words, it's a mistake to (consciously) do what everyone else is doing, just as it's a mistake to (consciously) do the opposite." (173)
"There aren't many situations where life experience is assumed to make you dumber. The ability to understand technology is one notable exception." (215)
"Facts create norms, but they do not create illumination." (231)
"The only people who think the Internet is a calamity are the people whose lives have been hurt by it; the only people who insist the Internet is wonderful are those who need it to give their life meaning." (258) -
The first time I read Chuck Klosterman's Eating the Dinosaur, I wanted engaging material to get through a reading slump. This time, I read it as a GenX artifact.
These GenX kids (who are older than I am) worry about the authenticity of their lives at one pinnacle of American power and wealth. They have tons of money, relatively speaking, but worry that spending it on a Lexus is inauthentic or else that earning it at a desk job is in some way--probably in some existential way--wrong.
How does one deal with the realization that one is wealthy? Some become cynically ironic, buying the Lexus and flipping off everyone else in a Patrick Bateman kind of way. Others embrace irony to communicate their insecurity that they don't deserve the wealth they enjoy, a rationalization. Gen Xers who try to escape the authenticity trap without irony ultimately discover that there's no escape for them.
I note with as little snark as possible that William MacAskill, not a Gen Xer, worked to popularize Effective Altruism.
When reading existential texts or guides to philosophies (such as How to Choose a Life Philosophy, the Effective Altruists stand out for their willingness to see existential angst as a dead end if one makes too much of it. They also seem to worry very little about positioning themselves as cool. We can all learn something from their example. -
Reading this book is like being cornered at a party by Malcolm Gladwell, just after he's suffered severe head trauma and is mildly brain-damaged. Imagine Malcolm Gladwell, eyes unfocused, insisting on telling you which records were in high rotation on his CD player during the whole of the 90s. Making claims about lead guitarists in bands you've never heard of and then bursting into tears about the tragic waste that was Kurt Cobain's suicide. Then imagine Mr Gladwell, still refusing to let you get away, giving you a commentary on what he can see outside of the window and then recalling a football match he once saw on television.
It may sound like I am exaggerating the kind of things this book talks about, but I am not. If these subject-matters seem of interest, then maybe this book will appeal to you. If you are wondering what the Unabomber’s manifesto was all about and how it related to network television, rush out and buy this book. If the profound meaning of Abba lyrics (I kid you not) do not hold much fascination for you, move along. -
More epic Cali(fornication) road-trip fun, and more amusing short stories amusingly read aloud while we traded Southern Oregon coasts for Northern California Redwoods.
[Four stars for a hilarious essay on Val Kilmer, and for consistently making me laugh without a laugh track.] -
"For the first twelve years of my adult life, I sustained a professional existence by asking questions to strangers and writing about what they said."
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I was going to give it 4 stars, but I had to bump it down for the inclusion of 2 boring chapters on sports.
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Randomly picked up the book thanks to the intriguing title and a free afternoon spent in the library. Read it in one setting, but it must be noted that I didn't read all the essays as some of them were about things that didn't spark my interest (football, rock music). Overall, I loved the voice of the author and the questions he possess about the world. I will excerpt my favorite passages below.
"I fear that most contemporary people are answering questions not because they're flattered by the attention; they're answering questions because they feel as though they deserve to be asked. About everything. Their opinions are special, so they are entitled to a public forum. Their voice is supposed to be heard, lest their life become empty... This explains the rise of New Media."
"Real world problems are invariable too unique and too situational; people will always see any real-world problem through the prism of their own personal experience. The only massive ideas everyone can discuss rationally are big ideas that don't specifically apply to anyone, which is why a debate over the ethics of time travel is worthwhile: No one has any personal investment whatsoever. It's only theoretical. which means no one has any reason to lie."
"The mystery of life is not a question to be answered but a reality to be experienced."
"People who want to travel through time are both (a) unhappy and (b) unwilling to compromise anything about who they are. They would rather change every element of society except themselves... This is also why my long-standing desire to build a time machine is not just hopeless but devoid of merit. It has nothing to do with time. I don't think it ever does. It takes flexible mind to imagine how time travel might work, but only an inflexible spirit would actually want to do it. It's the desire of the depressed and lazy."
"Every day, random people use Britney Spear's existence as currency; they talk about her public failures and her lack of talent as a way to fill the emptiness of their own normalcy... In a splintered society, they are the means through which people devoid of creativity communicate with each other. They allow Americans to understand who they are and who they are not; they allow Americans to unilaterally agree on something they never needed to consciously consider."
"The theory that I am proposing, I suppose, is this: The reason voyeurism feels pleasurable is more physical than psychological... There is something unexplainable about spying on strangers that doesn't seem connected to what we actually see. On the surface, it seems like this should be similar to the human affinity for gossip, but it's not; we're never interested in gossip about people we've never heard of, and we're rarely interested in average gossip about average people.... {looking at a stranger} I would simply be seeing something I could not control and would never understand, and I'd be cognizant of a reality we all consciously realize but rarely accept - that almost all of the world happens without us. To look through the window of a meaningless stranger proves that we are likewise meaningless; the roles could just as easily be reversed with the same net effect...... The one thing all people are supposed to inherently deserve - a daily subsistence that's both meaningful and unpredictable - tends to be an incredibly rare commodity. If it's not already there, we cannot manufacture it. But looking through another man's window helps. It diminishes our feelings of insignificance, because spying illustrates how all lives are equal. It also feeds the hunger for spontaneity, because there is no sense of control or consistency."
"But there's one kid of writing that's always easy: Picking something obviously stupid and reiterating how stupid it obviously is. This is the lowest form of criticism, easily accomplished by anyone. And for most of my life. I have to avoid this."
Americans laugh at everything and anything to seem as if they are in on the joke, and smart enough to comprehend dry humor.
TV takes away our freedom to have whatever thoughts we want. So do photographs, movies and the Internet. They provide us with more intellectual stimuli, but they construct a lower, harder intellectual ceiling. The first time someone tries to convince you to take mushrooms, they often argue that mushrooms allow you to think whatever thoughts you want. This sentiment makes no sense to anyone who has not taken psychedelic drugs, because everyone likes to assume we already have the freedom to think whatever we please. But this is not true."
"My existence is constructed, and it's constructed through the surrogate activity of mainstream popular culture. I understand this.. I could go Christopher McCandless route and shoot a mouse for food and self-actualization. But I choose the opposite. Instead of confronting reality and embracing the Experience of Being Alive, I will sit here and read about Animal Collective over the Internet." -
Reviewing a Klosterman book is almost as difficult as reading one. The material is so specifically esoteric (yes, I mean that contradiction in terms) that it can vary wildly in reader enjoyment. While some parts of “Eating the Dinosaur” were fascinating to me, for the most part I was underwhelmed.
What I have found is that Klosterman tomes seem to maybe hang together a little better when they are able to relate back to some sort of underlying theme (even a vague one). For example, I loved “The Nineties” because even though all the essays within seem random, at they end they all tie back to his views on society in that decade. The same goes for “Sex, Drugs, & Cocoa Puffs”, just for pop culture in general.
In “Eating the Dinosaur”, though, the essays within truly seem completely and utterly random—not tethered to any over-arching concept or idea. As such, they can be hit or miss. I really didn’t need more content on Nirvana (that seems to present itself in every Klosterman effort), but his thoughts on Chris Gaines, advertising, fake-laughing (specifically in TV laugh tracks), and Weezer--or literalism—were highly entertaining.
Essentially, that proved to be my entire experience with “Dinosaur”: since the snippets were unrelated to each other, so was my enjoyment of them. There were more “hits” than “misses” towards the end of the book, so maybe an exact rating would be 2.5 stars. But I’m certainly rounding down as opposed to up, as many pontifications just fell flat for me. -
This is (by far) the most interesting and most challenging book to discuss of this year-long Klosterman retrospective project. But no way it wasn't getting 5 stars.
Quite simply, this book is about how we process information to create reality. It's also very much about how Chuck Klosterman processes information to create reality, which is not all that different. The two best examples (I believe) are the exploration of the individual relationships to fame of nineties rockers Kurt Cobain and Rivers Cuomo. One will be forever revered for all the things he hated and the other is constantly disappointing people for basically being himself. Their media selves are more important than their real selves or whatever they desire... and to a certain extent control(led) what they desire(d). How we understood Kurt Cobain and Rivers Cuomo made them become that image.
Also loved the deconstruction of advertisement for the post-ironic age we're in, the exploration of Garth Brooks' weird alter ego Chris Gaines, the perception of athletic supremacy through the failure of Ralph Sampson essay and his immortal exegesis of the Unabomber Manifesto.
Klosterman said in KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE that it was difficult for him to understand himself without pop culture and he's giving a strong example of why here. We have collectively lost control of what we want and who we are. This is going to be my new Klosterman 101 book. -
This is the second Chuck Klosterman book I've read, and my experience was similar. It goes like this. I find his writing to be utterly fascinating. His affinity for sports, pop culture, and big ideas aligns with mine. I genuinely look forward to cracking open the book. I read his writing quickly. But I don't know why. Much of the time, I have no idea what he is saying. Honestly, I often doubt that he knows what he is saying. It feels to me like I'm reading the late-night ramblings of an intelligent, articulate, half-drunk, cocky loud-mouth in the midst of some stream-of-consciousness rant fest. Is it semi-interesting? Yes. Does it mean anything at all? Maybe not. I finished "Eating the Dinosaur" two weeks ago, and I honestly can't remember a single thing that I read. Not one thing. I don't know how to process that. I think that maybe this emperor has no clothes. But if another Klosterman book appears at the local used book sale on bag day, I might just snag it and read it anyway, against my better judgment.
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I enjoyed this book. It’s better than three stars but maybe not worthy of four. There is a chapter dedicated to truth that argues Weezer’s connection to its audience is through the authenticity of its lyrics and their meaning. Viewing Rivers through the lens of the authors toolkit can be extremely limiting and it made me wonder if the depths of these “thought experiments” are limited by their conversational approach. The chapter on technology and its impact on humanity feels shallow in depth when compared to a the short stories of Ted Chiang in “Exhalation”.
I enjoyed every chapter, even the one on football which did feel like the low point of the book, but I couldn’t escape the idea that something important was missing from almost every argument that was made. Michael Lewis has a similar writing style but even on his podcast he tends to flesh out the entirety of an idea in a way that isn’t happening here.
Despite its negatives I enjoyed it enough that I will seek out more from Klosterman and I would recommend the book to anyone. 3.8 stars. -
I always enjoy Klosterman’s essays. I have enjoyed watching the more mature Klosterman move beyond pop culture and music, though of course these things are still embedded within his work. I like the subjects he tries to wrestle with as he gets older. I always enjoy his ability to find value by following a contrarian viewpoint. If you’re a fan of Klosterman’s work too, this volume will not disappoint. I am frankly shocked by the number of his books that I possess, but he keeps bringing me back.
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Super great. First essay is one of the best, especially if you're interested in podcasting, interviewing, and what the truth is. Guest-starring Ira Glass, so you can't go wrong.
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His essays on sports and pop culture are like junk food for my brain. Hidden in all that junk there are two real brain worm essays on the Unabomber and the tyranny of irony.
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I can’t say this was any worse than other books of his that I really enjoyed. Maybe I have just had enough of his musings. Some entertaining items but most of it fell flat.
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Engaging, funny and thought provoking. Written in an easily accessible way. I especially enjoyed the parts about the Unabomber, gridiron, Garth Brooks and Nirvana. My favourite quote was "this is not the only reason Germans think Americans are retarded, but it's definitely one of them."
