Product Description

A Book of All-New Pop Culture Pieces by Chuck Klosterman

Chuck Klosterman has chronicled rock music, film, and sports for almost fifteen years. He's covered extreme metal, extreme nostalgia, disposable art, disposable heroes, life on the road, life through the television, urban uncertainty and small-town weirdness. Through a variety of mediums and with a multitude of motives, he's written about everything he can think of (and a lot that he's forgotten). The world keeps accelerating, but the pop ideas keep coming.

In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman is more entertaining and incisive than ever. Whether he's dissecting the boredom of voyeurism, the reason why music fan's 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.

Q: What is this book about?

A: Well, that's difficult to say. I haven't read it yet - I've just clicked on it and casually glanced at this webpage. There clearly isn't a plot. I've heard there's a lot of stuff about time travel in this book, and quite a bit about violence and Garth Brooks and why Germans don't laugh when they're inside grocery stores. Ralph Nader and Ralph Sampson play significant roles. I think there are several pages about Rear Window and football and Mad Men and why Rivers Cuomo prefers having sex with Asian women. Supposedly there's a chapter outlining all the things the Unabomber was right about, but perhaps I'm misinformed.

Q: Is there a larger theme?

A: Oh, something about reality. "What is reality," maybe? No, that's not it. Not exactly. I get the sense that most of the core questions dwell on the way media perception constructs a fake reality that ends up becoming more meaningful than whatever actually happened.

Q: Should I read this book?

A: Probably. Do you see a clear relationship between the Branch Davidian disaster and the recording of Nirvana's In Utero? Does Barack Obama make you want to drink Pepsi? Does ABBA remind you of AC/DC? If so, you probably don't need to read this book. You probably wrote this book. But I suspect everybody else will totally love it, except for the ones who absolutely hate it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #184 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781416544203
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Chuck Klosterman is the New York Times bestselling author of Downtown Owl; Chuck Klosterman IV; Killing Yourself to Live; Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs; and Fargo Rock City, winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. He is a Contributing Editor for Esquire, a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and has also written for Spin, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Believer, A.V. Club, and ESPN. Klosterman grew up on a farm near Wyndmere, North Dakota. After graduating from the University of North Dakota, he wrote for the Fargo Forum and the Akron Beacon Journal. Klosterman is published in eight territories and seven languages. Klosterman lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1 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.

"Why did you do it?" I would ask these strangers. It did not matter what it was. "What were you thinking while you did that? Did it satisfy you? What does it mean to be satisfied? Do you consider yourself to be famous? How does it feel to be famous? How did this experience change you? What elements didn't change? What will never change? What drives you? Are you lying to me right now? Why should I care about what you are saying? Is this all a construction? Are you constructed? Who constructed you? What was their purpose? Does God exist? Why or why not? Thank you very much. It was great meeting you in the lobby of this unnecessarily expensive hotel."

This has been a tremendous way to earn a living. Who wouldn't enjoy getting paid for being curious? Journalism allows almost anyone to direct questions they would never ask of their own friends at random people; since the ensuing dialogue exists for commercial purposes, both parties accept an acceleration of intimacy. People give emotional responses, but those emotions are projections. The result (when things go well) is a dynamic, adversarial, semi-real conversation. I am at ease with this. If given a choice between interviewing someone or talking to them "for real," I prefer the former; I don't like having the social limitations of tact imposed upon my day-to-day interactions and I don't enjoy talking to most people more than once or twice in my lifetime.

2 For the past five years, I've spent more time being interviewed than conducting interviews with other people. I am not complaining about this, nor am I proud of it -- it's just the way things worked out, mostly by chance. But the experience has been confusing. Though I always understand why people ask me the same collection of questions, I never know why I answer them. Frankly, I don't know why anyone answers anything. The obvious explanation is that the interviewee is hoping to promote a product or a concept (or the "concept of themselves," which is its own kind of product), but that's reductive and often untrue; once a media entity makes the decision to conduct and produce an interview with a particular somebody, the piece is going to exist regardless of how the subject responds to the queries. The interviewee can say anything, even if those sentiments contradict reality. They can deliver nothing but clichés, but the story will still run. On three occasions I've consciously (and blatantly) attempted to say boring things during an interview in the hope of killing the eventual article. It only worked once. But this type of behavior is rare. Most of the time, I pretend to be interesting. I try to frame my response in the context in which the question was asked, and I try to say things I haven't said before. But I have no clue as to why I do this (or why anyone else does, either).

During the summer of 2008, I was interviewed by a Norwegian magazine writer named Erik Moller Solheim. He was good at his job. He knew a lot of trivia about Finland's military history. We ate fried pork knees and drank Ur-Krostitzer beer. But in the middle of our playful conversation, I was suddenly paralyzed by an unspoken riddle I could not answer: Why was I responding to this man's questions? My books are not translated into Norwegian. If the journalist sent me a copy of his finished article, I could not read a word of it. I don't even know what the publication's name (Dagens Naeringsliv) is supposed to mean. I will likely never go to Norway, and even if I did, the fact that I was interviewed for this publication would have no impact on my time there. No one would care. The fjords would be underwhelmed.

As such, I considered the possible motives for my actions:

1. I felt I had something important to say. Except I did not. No element of our interaction felt important to me. If anything, I felt unqualified to talk about the things the reporter was asking me. I don't have that much of an opinion about why certain Black Metal bands burn down churches.

2. It's my job. Except that it wasn't. I wasn't promoting anything. In fact, the interaction could have been detrimental to my career, were I to have inadvertently said something insulting about the king of Norway. Technically, there was more downside than upside.

3. I have an unconscious, unresolved craving for attention. Except that this feels inaccurate. It was probably true twenty years ago, but those desires have waned. Besides, who gives a fuck about being famous in a country I'll never visit? Why would that feel good to anyone? How would I even know it was happening?

4. I had nothing better to do. This is accurate, but not satisfactory.

5. I'm a nice person. Unlikely.

6. When asked a direct question, it's human nature to respond. This, I suppose, is the most likely explanation. It's the crux of Frost/Nixon. But if this is true, why is it true? What is the psychological directive that makes an unanswered question discomfiting?

Why do people talk?

3 Why do people talk? Why do people answer the questions you ask them? Is there a unifying force that prompts people to respond?

Errol Morris: Probably not, except possibly that people feel this need to give an account of themselves. And not just to other people, but to themselves. Just yesterday, I was being interviewed by a reporter from the New York Observer, and we were talking about whether or not people have privileged access to their own minds.

Privileged access?

EM: My mind resides somewhere inside of myself. That being the case, one would assume I have privileged access to it. In theory, I should be able to ask myself questions and get different answers than I would from other people, such as you. But I'm not sure we truly have privileged access to our own minds. I don't think we have any idea who we are. I think we're engaged in a constant battle to figure out who we are. I sometimes think of interviews as some oddball human relationship that's taking place in a laboratory setting. I often feel like a primatologist.

Do you feel like you know the people that you interview? Because I feel as though I never do. It seems like a totally fake relationship.

EM: I don't feel like I know myself, let alone the people I interview. I might actually know the people I interview better than I know myself. A friend of mine once said that you can never trust a person who doesn't talk much, because how else do you know what they're thinking? Just by the act of being willing to talk about oneself, the person is revealing something about who they are.

But what is the talker's motive? Why did you decide to talk to the New York Observer? Why are you talking to me right now?

EM: Well, okay. Let's use the example of Robert McNamara. Why does McNamara feel the need to talk to me -- or to anyone -- at this point in his life? Because there's a very strong human desire to do so. It might be to get approval from someone, even if that person is just me. It might even be to get a sense of condemnation from people. Maybe it's just programmed into us as people. McNamara also had this weird "approach-avoidance" thing: He agreed to do the interview because he assumed I was part of the promotion of his [then new] book. I called him around the same time his book was coming out, and he thought it was just part of that whole deal. When he realized it was not, he became apprehensive and said he didn't think he was going to do it. But then he did, and it went on for well over a year. In fact, I continued to interview him for a long time after that movie was finished, just because I found it very interesting.

But why did McNamara keep talking?

EM: He said he enjoyed talking to me. That was his explanation.

2A While working for newspapers during the 1990s, I imagined that being interviewed by other reporters would be fun. I assumed answering questions would be easier than asking them. This proved completely untrue. The process of being interviewed is much more stressful than the process of interrogating someone. If you make a mistake while you're interviewing someone else, there is no penalty (beyond the fact that it will be harder to write a complete story). But if you make a mistake while being interviewed -- if you admit something you'd prefer to keep secret, or if you flippantly answer a legitimately serious question, or if you thoughtlessly disparage a peer you barely know, or if you answer the phone while on drugs -- that mistake will inevitably become the focus of whatever is written. As a reporter, you live for those anecdotal mistakes. Mistakes are where you find hidden truths. But as a person, anecdotal mistakes define the experience of being misunderstood; anecdotal mistakes are used to make metaphors that explain the motives of a person who is sort of like you, but not really.

4 "The people who come on This American Life have often never heard of our show, or have never even heard of NPR, so they have no idea what the conversation is going to be. It's very abstract. And we're on the frontier of doing journalism that's so personal, no normal journalist would even consider it. That's part of it. It's hard to resist whenever someone really wants to listen to you. That's a very rare thing in most of our lives. I'm a pretty talky person who deals with lots of sensitive people every single day, but if someone really listens to me and cares about what I say for ten minutes in the course of a day -- that's a lot. Some days that doesn't happen at all."

[These are the words of Ira Glass, host of This American Life, the tent-pole program for most National Public Radio stations. It was later turned into a television show for Showtime. Glass has an immediately recognizable interviewing style: amicable, intellectual, nerdy, and sincere.]

"Some...

Customer Reviews

Satisfying Meal
Klosterman does not go for the easy joke here; although he is consistently and absurdly amusing. Neither is Eating the Dinosaur a mere collection of pop culture references; although Mad Men, Nirvana, ABBA, The Fog of War and other mentions abound. What raises this book to a 5 star rating is the author's ability to weave humor and pop culture into genuinely insightful analyses of issues both important and sublime.

He starts with a very funny and equally revealing essay about why people answer questions during interviews. Just as the reader recognizes that this is not nearly as obvious a matter as it seems on first blush, Klosterman enters into a discussion of the nature of truth and of selfhood. Errol Morris contributes this gem: "I think we're always trying to create a consistent narrative for ourselves. I think truth always takes a backseat to narrative." (This would explain why each of my satellite radio news channels tells me about events in seemingly different worlds.)

Klosterman is less serious but just as interesting in exploring the challenges inherent in time travel. Even it were possible, he argues, the only reason to do so would be to eat a dinosaur.

His dissection of advertising through the medium of Mad Men and Pepsi is subtle and persuasive. He tries to convince us that we understand we are being conned by the ad. However, we reward the message that does the best job of setting the hook because we want to be a part of the process.

His best piece finishes the book and rather courageously tries to resurrect the Unabomber's arguments in Industrial Society for the Future without creating any sympathy for Ted Kaczynski. Klosterman shows how 130,000 years of psychological evolution, in which men observed actual images, have been replaced in one century by mediated experience. The media that the author has made a living writing about has created a new and false reality. "We are latently enslaved by our own ingenuity, and we have unknowingly constructed a simulated world, " concludes the author. "As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now."

Eating the Dinosaur is a lot to swallow. Whether the reader accepts its conclusions or not, however, consumption is both fun and enlightening.

Pop Culture Philosphy
On its face, just like the best of his other books, Eating the Dinosaur appears to be a book about the mundane and the fleeting. However, underneath that glossy surface, there are insights into our cultural ethos that are unmatched by other modern works. The essays include:

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Something Instead of Nothing: Why do people answer questions? For who's sake? What does that say about us? This is far more interesting than it sounds at first and, I think, provides insight into the current human condition. Interviews and answering questions are odder than you would think.

Oh, the Guilt: What do David Koresh and Kurt Cobaine have in common? Really interesting look at what makes self-made cultic leaders and culturally-created messianic figures different. Great examination of the Waco disaster as well - definitely want to read more about it after reading the little bit included here.

Tomorrow Rarely Knows: An essay about why time travel is impossible. Good, but the information is not very original. I had heard most of this before, but interesting none the less.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Ralph Sampson: Society's Reactions to Public Failures. As a lifelong Houston Rockets fan, I was excited to see this essay. Though the premise and the conclusions are valid, this essay on failure and how it is viewed by society ultimately comes up short. The circuitous route that Klosterman takes to get to his point has a few too many curves.

Through a Glass, Blindly: Voyeurism. The most interesting part of this essay were the discussions of the Hitchcock movies Vertigo and Rear Window. An understanding look at why we watch other's lives. The conclusion that Klosterman comes up with here is right on. This, along with the first essay in the book, deftly describes an individual's desire to be recognized and validated.

The Passion of the Garth: Fictional Reality. I am not a big country music fan and barely remember Garth Brooks' attempt to break into the rock world as Chris Gaines. After three slower essays, this one is great fun. The underlying discussion of created personas and how fiction can be truer than reality takes a back seat to the sheer entertainment value of the piece.

The Best Response. This one is just filler really. The one area that fell very short of Klosterman's best work (Sex, Drugs, And Cocoa Puffs, IV) are the filler questions. There really was not anything worthwhile in between the chapters, and though this grouping of questions is a little better then the filler in the rest of the book, its not by much.

Football: Liberal or Conservative? Great. As an avid football fan, one of my favorites in the book. Not much to say about it besides the fact that if you are a football fan, this one is a must read and almost worth the price of the book. This, along with the soccer essay (S,D, & CP, I think) is the best of his sports essays.

ABBA 1, World 0. Not great. Unclear about the point of this one, and I don't particularly care for ABBA's music.

"Ha, Ha," he said. "Ha, Ha." Canned Laughter. Very good. I always hated canned laughter, but now I know why. Your perception of canned laughter, both on television and in everyday conversations, will change after reading this.

It Will Shock You How Much It Never Happened. Advertising. As a Mad Men fan, this one was good. Though confused about the direction he was headed at times, the conclusion results in a great question about the nature of advertising in today's society.

T is For True: Irony and Its Pervasiveness. A look at the lack of literalism in today's society and what that means for us in the future. This one is a must read and will change the way you think about irony and its effects. One of the best in the book.

FAIL: Technology, Good or Bad. Worth reading for a couple of good points, but one of the weakest chapters in the book. Hard to take even one philosophical insight from the Unabomber and point out its value, but Klosterman succeeds (barely.)
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Chuck Klosterman has a unique talent to turn discussions about Nirvana, David Koresh, and Mad Men into philosophical treatises worth reading. Even if you disagree with many, or even all, of his conclusions you cannot ignore Klosterman's insight into pop culture and society. He is the best writer of the "educational & entertaining non-fiction" genre, and Eating the Dinosaur is one of his best.

A more self aware Klosterman
Chuck seems more aware of his own celebrity and status as a writer in this book than his previous ones. This comes, alongside the welcome addition of an index, making it all the easier to look up his culturally mundane references for a second time, if need be. The following is a sampling of the first 10 things referenced in the index (in alphabetical order, of course): Abba (pgs. 147-158), ABC, Abdul (Paula), AC/DC, Ace of Base, Across the Sea (Weezer), advertising, A-11 offense, Aerosmith, Aero-Zepplin, Against the Machine, and the Akron Beacon Journal.

If you're a fan of his previous works, and particularly Sex Drugs Cocoa Puffs, you should check this out. But if you're reading this, you probably already knew that.

*P.S. the page count here says 255 pages, but in actuality, it is 229 pages, plus the index from p. 233 to p.245... so it's shorter than has been listed. I ripped through it yesterday afternoon, and will probably read it a second time come Holiday break.