Love his prose or find him a digressive, circular-reasoning gas bag, Chuck Klosterman is an unavoidable fixture on the hipster-lit scene -- and he's almost as polarizing as The Hold Steady (almost). The Phoenix picked up on this phenomenon and published an extensive profile of the guy. An excerpt (via Gawker):
?Oh my God!? gasps a Boston University student as he enters the room. ?I?m like a little schoolgirl!? In her excitement, she spits on my knee.
She is Amanda and she has not just seen Brad Pitt. Or David Ortiz. Or the Crocodile Hunter?s ghost. The 34-year-old bearded dude who just caused Amanda to expectorate is not bringing sexy back. Rather, he is a six-foot-two native North Dakotan who has been called everything from ?the voice of a generation? to ?the new Hunter S. Thompson? to a ?saggy ass-head.? He is wearing a jean jacket that could have been an iron-on canvas for Guns N? Roses back patches 20 years ago. He is Charles John ?Chuck? Klosterman: pop-culture critic, four-time author, celebrity profiler, Esquire columnist, ESPN Page 2 sportswriter, former Spin senior editor, unrepentant Billy Joel fan. And he makes girls spit.
If you?re familiar with Klosterman?s writing, this shouldn?t be surprising. If you?ve never heard of the guy, it might help to know that Seth Cohen read one of his books on an episode of The O.C. (Culturally speaking, this is the low-rent equivalent of Natalie Portman?s character name-checking the Shins in Garden State.)
Klosterman (pronounced Kloh-ster-man) became a prime-time-TV prop alongside Death Cab for Cutie and the Killers partly by publishing four books in five years that examined American life through the prism of pop culture...
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It?s also worth noting that people who expend mental energy thinking about Chuck Klosterman do so in three overlapping ways: a) being jealous of him, b) hating him, or c) loving him.
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In the past, people like this have been called disciples in the ?cult of Klosterman.? Looking around the Boston University Bookstore, where he?s giving the first of two readings today, I can confirm that this is not an opinion or a theory but a statement of fact. At one in the afternoon on a late-September Monday, about 130 college-age kids who should probably be in class are seated with Klosterman?s books laid flat on their laps, like Bibles in church. About 50 more are relegated to the standing-room section of the foyer, where they?ll remain listening for the entire 90 minutes.
We know the BU bookstore well, and the visual of bookish hipsters in congregation, replacing the usual flow of meatheads and Eurotrash, is both refreshing and alarming (are bookish hipsters the new meatheads? Or worse -- the new Eurotrash?!). But like Chuck, we digress.
Not that we want to turn this into a referendum on his relevance (who are we kidding), but you guys have thoughts on his work? Out of obligation (and, let's face it, with some enjoyment), Stereogum's made it through all of his books, save the Led Zep-referencing IV. Fargo Rock is much-maligned but can be witty (and did allow the Trixter fans in us to rest easy -- kidding), while Sex, Drugs, And Cocoa Puffs and Killing Yourself To Live are remarkably engaging and horribly self-important, respectively. But then, so is most indie rock.
