November 15, 2010
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Chuck Klosterman IV Notes.
So... before I send my Chuck Klosterman IV back to the library, I'd better plop down some of my favorite lines.
-"[...] Where's the conflict? What is the problem? I mean, you said it yourself: technically, you are the hero of the story." "Yes," he said in response. "Technically, I am. But isn't that always the problem?" (8)
-"[...] There is this cliche that artists are pure and businesspeople can't be trusted. Well, in my life I've met a lot of artists who were real assholes, and I've met a lot of businessmen who walk their dogs. So these things aren't true. We need new thinking." Bono, page 26.
-"We are all lead by instinct, and our intellect catches up later." Bono, page 28.
-Listen to the song "There is a Light that Never Goes Out"?
-Use Morrisey's songs as teaching tools? "Reader Meets Author" is a good song to use?
-"But if you give of yourself, you do get things back. Sometimes that's tangible, and sometimes that's intangible. It's more like gambling: when you gamble, you try to give yourself the best possible odds of success." (70)
-Read "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," but David Foster Wallace?
-"Being a fan of Metallica in the '80s was not supposed to be fun. Loving Metallica was like being Catholic: if you truly believed, it was supposed to inform every aspect of your life. I could not relate to this." (101)
-"[...] and the possibility that just about everyone is a little damaged." (104)
-"But sometimes the difference between self-actualization and self-amusement is less than you think." (112)
-"[...] it wasn't that goth kids weren't considered violent; prior to that tragedy, goth kids weren't even considered scary. They were just the kids who listened during English class." (121)
-"It's impossible to understand the present if you cannot see the future." (156)
-"What's weirder: admitting that you're crazy, or always pretending that you're not? I do not know." (181)
-"[...] but he thinks too many Americans exist in a 'culture of intellectual laziness.'" Word. Dude, that is so true. Said by Mike Skinner, a white rapper. (204)
-"The things that matter to normal people are not supposed to matter to smart people." (209)
-"Choice makes us depressed. We just don't realize it." = "Barry Schwartz suggests [...] 'the culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction.'" (216) = "In the present tense, we always want the maximum number of alternatives; in the short term, choice improves our lives, and we're completely aware of that. The problematic rub is that - over time - choice isolates us. We have fewer shared experiences, and that makes us feel alone." (218)
-"If you ask any single man if he'd prefer to (a) have sex with a thousand different women or (b) have sex with one woman a thousand times, he will always take option 'a,' even though he knows this decision is virtually guaranteed to make him feel awkward and alone. In the present tense, we always want as much individual choice as possible; once that present has passed, we're happier if we've experienced the same limited options as everyone else." (219) This connects to many things... Chuck's example brings up how if you're at a pub and a guy says he likes Beck (and you do too!); then you run into someone who just watched Glee (and you did too!). These shared experiences bring people together. Johnny Carson was the last guy to do that (which is the point of this essay).
-QUESTION: Think about your life. Think about the greatest thing you have ever done, and think about the worst thing you have ever done. Try to remember what motivated you to do the former, and try to remember what motivated you to do the latter. How similar are these two motives?
-Women are more likely to hate people and men are more likely to hate things that can't hate them back. (245)
-"Every so often, I look at the condition of the world and I suspect that the most widespread problem we have is the growing sentiment of anti-intellectualism that seems to infiltrate everything, particularly politics (where intelligent candidates are attacked for being intelligent) and advertising (where everything is designed to convince smart people they'll be happier once they agree to become dumb)." (277)
-"It never matter what you like; what matters is why you like it." (280)
-"Voltaire once argued that every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do, and I suppose he had a point: if I spent as much time analyzing al Qaeda as I've spent deconstructing Toby Keith's video for 'Whiskey Girl,' we probably would have won the war on terrorism last April." (281)
-"They [Americans?] don't merely want to hold their values; they want their values to win." (285) = "You're not wrong, and neither is the rest of the world. But you need to accept that those two things aren't really connected." (287)
-"It is very easy to be underrated, because all you need to do is nothing. Everyone wants to be underrated. It's harder to become overrated, because that means someone had to think you were awesome before they thought you sucked. Nobody wants to be overrated, except for people who live in big houses." (296)
-"We seem to have no qualms about making postbirth improvements to our feeble selves. Why are we so uncomfortable with prebirth improvement? What's the difference? Just because something isn't natural doesn't mean it isn't good." (316)Lastly, I really didn't know what to expect once Chuck attempted FICTION. I had heard, from KB, that he "didn't want to write nonfiction anymore because he didn't want to talk about himself so much, but then he's obviously a character in his fiction." Well, it's true, but it's a "good" truth. I feel him in each of the three characters, and I'm okay with it. It's almost how I'd do fiction. IF I ever did. Yeah. I don't think Downtown Owl will surpass how I feel about Killing Yourself to Live, but it's close. I couldn't put it down last night, and when I did, I dreamt about it. Or dreamt about meeting him, and we got along super well. Then suddenly, I was watching my youthful self with bushy eyebrows wishing I could play football (powder puff)? Then there was a contraption at St. John's that they were building; then we had a house that was odd, and lastly, I thought two of my front teeth were going to wiggle themselves out of my head. I had about 5 million dreams. That's a rough estimate.
