The Klosterman Files : Eating the Dinosaur (2009)

My parents are the only people I know who are completely devoid of irony. They can recognize it in a conversation, but cannot physically formulate it unless it is what the context requires (telling a joke, talking shit about somebody, etc.) To them, life is serious and it always fucking is. When I say something to them, I cannot be anything but 100% earnest. I said in a Facebook conversation about the idiom “punk rock saved my life” that Satan saved mine, the other day.

I’m sure you can imagine how it went. The worst part is that I was only half-joking.

That made me realize I’ve grown up in a loving household that was completely devoid of symbolic meaning. My folks believe symbolism is for artsy movies and children books. Grown ups go to school, find work, raise a family and then die. Of course, I’ve grown up famished for meaning and became a semi-professional critic as a direct byproduct of this slightly unconventional quirk in my upbringing. For the longest time, I felt fucking weird about that.

You know what I also felt fucking weird about? Obsessing over the work of Chuck Klosterman to a point of reading all his cultural criticism (and novels) again. There’s no real intimate factor to his writing outside of his personable tone, so why do I feel this overbearing connection when I read him? Feeling weird about stuff I should or shouldn’t feel weird about is a theme with me. But I finally got somewhat of an answer from his sixth book Eating the Dinosaur.

I would say this is the first book of advanced Klosterman era, where he shifts focus from pop culture to the nature of reality. But he does it very subtly. Perhaps even unwittingly to a certain extent. There are thirteen essays in Eating the Dinosaaur, but the most important (and probably the most famous) is his critique of Industrial Society and its future, otherwise known as the Unabomber Manifesto. I shit you not. The very last essay in the collection.

This is a theme with Klosterman. Placing the most important essay (the one that best makes his point) at the end.

FAIL

He was a bad person, but sometimes he was right.

That’s how Chuck Klosterman describes Ted Kaczynski on the third page of his essay Fail, where he takes all sorts of winding roads to say there are important ideas in his 35 000 words manifesto. Mostly that we have lost control of our relationship to technology a long time ago. Kaczynski’s paper was written long before Facebook complicated democracy and internet unleashed torrents of unnecessary information on unprepared brains.

The point Kaczynski makes is that you have to adhere to norms that you haven’t decided and that you might not agree with if you want to enjoy the most basic technology, such as electricity. That it shapes you into a human being you might’ve not been otherwise. It is so pervasive that it deprives you of a freedom you never knew you could have. This idea is a prism to understand Eating the Dinosaur and most of Chuck Klosterman’s intellectual process through.

I come from a household where television (and later the internet) is supremely important. It would bridge the gap from dinner to bedtime every night of the week. In a small, isolated town where no important cultural event ever happen, watching television is crucial to how you understand the world and how you understand yourself. It’s your only way to understand what it means to exist in the world at large. That’s why pop culture is so important.

It is a common language through which we construct our identity.

Cobain & Cuomo

Two other essays I thought were important in Eating The Dinosaur are those analyzing the respective cultural fates of Kurt Cobain and Rivers Cuomo. Both struggled in their own way against the image we had of them. The former wanted to subvert mainstream culture and redefine rock n’ roll, but whatever he did weirdly became exactly what people wanted. He would control mainstream culture without changing anything about it. It drove him insane.

The latter is a historically less tragic figure, but had a complicated relationship to his own legacy nonetheless. Weezer is the strangest band because people always cite them in their most important influences and yet always manage to disappoint everyone. Klosterman argues that it’s because River Cuomo’s earnest songwriting clashes with his ironic demeanor. That the character Cuomo cultivated out of anxiety also cultivated unhealthy expectations.

Cobain and Cuomo were two necessary steps on the way to creating Taylor Swift, a musician that has absolute fucking command of her public persona and that weaponizes it in order to leverage her personality. Culture dictates who you are and the more important you become within the parameters, the more difficult it will become to redefine yourself. Cobain and Cuomo both became prisoners of their own earnest desires and their cultural interpretation.

Klosterman 101

Once again, I said almost nothing. I barely grazed the surface of a treasure chest of cultural criticism. But here’s an important message that should prompt you to read Eating the Dinosaur: your perception and understanding of reality is defined by cultural parameters. You might not agree. You might not understand it yet. But it doesn’t make it any less true. You can only become what culture wants you to become. Because it encompasses what exists.

If you want one book to read to try and understand Klosterman, make it this one.