Chuck Klosterman
Describe
your latest project.
 The
book I'm touring in support of is Sex,
Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which is a collection of eighteen
essays about low culture; this is stuff like MTV's The
Real World, serial killers, a Guns N' Roses tribute band,
the Lakers-Celtics rivalry from the 1980s, the Left Behind
book series, Pamela Anderson, John Cusack, and Saved by
the Bell. These eighteen essays are connected by seventeen
mini-essays, most of which are just weird.
Currently, I'm working on another book called Killing Yourself to Live:
85 Percent of a True Story. This is narrative about love, death, and
(to a lesser degree) Rod Stewart, Radiohead, and KISS.
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"The funniest thing I've read in an ice age....Chuck Klosterman is a Gulliver among the cult-crit Lilliputians. America should wrap her freckled arms around Klosterman's scrawny neck and press him to her bosom. He may be the last true patriot among us." Gary Shteyngart
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"I can't think of a more sheerly likable writer than Chuck Klosterman and his old-fashioned, all-American voice: big-hearted and direct, bright and unironic, optimistic and amiable, self-deprecating and reassuring ? with a captivating lack of fuss or pretension. He's also genuinely funny and I pretty much agree with everything he says." Bret Easton Ellis
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"Writing about American pop culture doesn't get any better than this, or any funnier, or any more readable." Stephen King
If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
I would leave that up to the discretion of my biographer. However, if I were
to write an autobiography, I'd probably go with: My Way or the Highway...
or Possibly Your Way
What fictional character would you like to date, and why?
I would love to say Dagny Taggart from Atlas Shrugged, but I fear she might be a little bossy. She probably wouldn't let me smoke pot, either. I suppose I'd ultimately have to go with either Patricia Neal's character from the 1963 movie Hud or the girl Prince sang about in "Darling Nikki."
Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good place to start.
Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. It will change the way you think about everything.
Writers are better liars than other people: true or false? Why, or not?
This is a trick question. Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is
not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they're honest
about everything. Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at
lying. Thus — as a writer myself — I cannot comment on whether or
not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually
mean its complete opposite.
In a semi-related note, the New York-based rock band The Liars
are fucking terrible.
Offer a favorite sentence or passage
from another writer.
"That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon,
she tries to jump out the window. I go, 'Holly, this can't continue.'"
(Raymond Carver, Gazebo)
Fahrenheit, Celsius, or Kelvin?
Since I like to keep my popsicles at absolute zero, I employ Kelvin more than
most Americans. I find that desserts aren't delicious unless they exhibit
no molecular movement whatsoever.
What do you fear?
The Minotaur.
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