A few nights ago, I spent an evening inside Powell's WORLD FAMOUS City of Books. There were other people there, of course. Far too many others, in fact, to fit inside the Pearl Room. Most of them were somewhere between 16 and 40, dressed in their finest vintage concert t-shirts. The large majority were attractive, or at least not unattractive - no rolls of underarm fat undulating as people moved. There was a bit of very quiet, almost sotto voce chatter that never rose above a kind of verbal Spackling, as people had little conversations into their own chests about how great their opinions were.
One man was talking to himself in this manner, with a microphone in front of him so the entire group could be privy to his thoughts, and he was the guest speaker of the evening, the author of Fargo Rock City, Killing Yourself to Live, Eating the Dinosaur, and the Visible Man, among other things.
Chuck Klosterman was by some measure the most notable person there. Hie was advertised on the marquee outside, after all. If there were any other comparable writers at the lecture, they did not make themselves known. Tom Bissell could have been hanging around for all I know. At one point, Klosterman paused, flabbergasted to recognize a few people he knew from his North Dakota youth standing in the corner. The people he recognized were equally perplexed, because they had never been to North Dakota in their lives and were certain they hadn't attended school with Mr. Klosterman. The show went on.
Not to say this reading and Q&A session were anything but excellent. Klosterman's oeuvre of intriguing, slippery essays are both very good, and very likely to grab many people who love self identifying themselves as "Portlanders," as though that were a fucking excuse or explanation for anything. His self-reflectionate profiles of pop stars and his magazine essays are anathema to what usually passes as punditry and criticism in 2011. Instead of sermonizing and condemning all of popular culture (cf "The Closing of the American Mind") or championing it as somehow vital to our evolution (cf "Everyingthing Bad is Good for You"), Klosterman writes deliberately contemplative stuff that finds oblique pathways to contextualize the not-exactly-empheral, not-exactly-important stuff he (and a lot of other people, myself included) spend too much of our lives grappling with. He has a contrarian streak, but not a pedantic or bullying way of expressing it, as is the contrarian's wont. His essays about popular culture and the very complex relationship our post-modern, post-structuralist society has between this hyper-fractured consumerist society and the phenomenological ramifications of how we live is the most overblown bullshit way I can state that I do love Klosterman the essayist. It's "first rate second rate" writing.
Anyway, most likely you know what Klosterman is, and if you like him qutie a bit or find his refusal to take a stand on any idea he brings up annoying as hell, well, that's how it goes. What you might not know (what I sure didn't know) before the reading is that - hey, he can write fiction! The excerpt from his new novel "The Visible Man," which I had no intention of ever reading before this visit - just as I never had any intention of reading Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilson's novels - was not some radical departure from the expected tone of Klosterman, but the story sounded pretty interesting and just as vital a path towards knowledge
So why have I always shied away from critics, essayists, and "public intellectuals" 1 fictional output? What a weird bias to have! I will gobble up Virginia Woolf, Orwell - hell, I even like reading Steven King in Entertainment Weekly. It's a weird and stupid oversight on my part.
So the first thing I'm going to do after I get off this weird mid 20th century history kick is find a copy of Memoirs of Hecate County. The second thing I'm going to do is finish Castlevania Symphony of the Night again. And then I'll read it.
1 - Klosterman most likely doesn't qualify as a 'public intellectual', although I'd sure rather read his essays than, say, late period Gore Vidal. I certainly never shy away from Flann O'Brien's newspaper criticism, or Orwell's vast body of brilliant essays. Actually, Orwell was a much better essayist than he ever was a novelist - and since his fiction is infinity times better than, say, Snooki's debut novel or Norman Mailer's "Tough Guys Don't Wear Plaid," that puts him in some esteemed company
One man was talking to himself in this manner, with a microphone in front of him so the entire group could be privy to his thoughts, and he was the guest speaker of the evening, the author of Fargo Rock City, Killing Yourself to Live, Eating the Dinosaur, and the Visible Man, among other things.
Chuck Klosterman was by some measure the most notable person there. Hie was advertised on the marquee outside, after all. If there were any other comparable writers at the lecture, they did not make themselves known. Tom Bissell could have been hanging around for all I know. At one point, Klosterman paused, flabbergasted to recognize a few people he knew from his North Dakota youth standing in the corner. The people he recognized were equally perplexed, because they had never been to North Dakota in their lives and were certain they hadn't attended school with Mr. Klosterman. The show went on.
Not to say this reading and Q&A session were anything but excellent. Klosterman's oeuvre of intriguing, slippery essays are both very good, and very likely to grab many people who love self identifying themselves as "Portlanders," as though that were a fucking excuse or explanation for anything. His self-reflectionate profiles of pop stars and his magazine essays are anathema to what usually passes as punditry and criticism in 2011. Instead of sermonizing and condemning all of popular culture (cf "The Closing of the American Mind") or championing it as somehow vital to our evolution (cf "Everyingthing Bad is Good for You"), Klosterman writes deliberately contemplative stuff that finds oblique pathways to contextualize the not-exactly-empheral, not-exactly-important stuff he (and a lot of other people, myself included) spend too much of our lives grappling with. He has a contrarian streak, but not a pedantic or bullying way of expressing it, as is the contrarian's wont. His essays about popular culture and the very complex relationship our post-modern, post-structuralist society has between this hyper-fractured consumerist society and the phenomenological ramifications of how we live is the most overblown bullshit way I can state that I do love Klosterman the essayist. It's "first rate second rate" writing.
Anyway, most likely you know what Klosterman is, and if you like him qutie a bit or find his refusal to take a stand on any idea he brings up annoying as hell, well, that's how it goes. What you might not know (what I sure didn't know) before the reading is that - hey, he can write fiction! The excerpt from his new novel "The Visible Man," which I had no intention of ever reading before this visit - just as I never had any intention of reading Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilson's novels - was not some radical departure from the expected tone of Klosterman, but the story sounded pretty interesting and just as vital a path towards knowledge
So why have I always shied away from critics, essayists, and "public intellectuals" 1 fictional output? What a weird bias to have! I will gobble up Virginia Woolf, Orwell - hell, I even like reading Steven King in Entertainment Weekly. It's a weird and stupid oversight on my part.
So the first thing I'm going to do after I get off this weird mid 20th century history kick is find a copy of Memoirs of Hecate County. The second thing I'm going to do is finish Castlevania Symphony of the Night again. And then I'll read it.
1 - Klosterman most likely doesn't qualify as a 'public intellectual', although I'd sure rather read his essays than, say, late period Gore Vidal. I certainly never shy away from Flann O'Brien's newspaper criticism, or Orwell's vast body of brilliant essays. Actually, Orwell was a much better essayist than he ever was a novelist - and since his fiction is infinity times better than, say, Snooki's debut novel or Norman Mailer's "Tough Guys Don't Wear Plaid," that puts him in some esteemed company
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