Chuck Klosterman is awesome. Not in the awe-inspiring way a hero might be awesome, but in the happy-accident way that a very seemingly regular guy with great writing talent became a best-selling author through some of the oddest series of circumstances is awesome.
He spoke on Tuesday to a crowded room of people, many of which had books in hand (I had Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs), nodding and laughing at Chuck's sense of humor. He's certainly odd, but oddly fascinating in that he reminds me of one of my good friends in manner and speech, yet he seems so different from anybody I know. I think that reading his book caused me to imprint an unreal image on him (as would reading any book by any author that you had never met previously), but now I can at least say that he's a pretty good speaker.
He read a selection from the section of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs in which he lists 23 questions that he would ask someone and, depending on their answers, decide if he could love them or not. He played this game with the audience, and it was a lot of fun (if long). I don't know that we gave enough good answers that he fell in love with us, but there was plenty of endearment for him on our parts.
After the talk, I thought long and hard about a question I wanted to ask him today (Wednesday), as I was going to participate in a roundtable with him. He was great, again, but I fumbled over all the questions I wanted to ask, remembered vaguely what it related to, and simply said, "Your essay on porn was one of my favorites," referring to such an essay in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. He nodded and seemed unsure of what to say to that, not because of the subject, but because there was actually no question. No point of discussion. When he was prompted again later by someone else, it became a commentary on the usability of the internet, which is interesting but not what I so feebly tried to dig out of my poor exhausted brain.
So, to make myself feel better, I am going to provide a list of five questions that, if I had the whole day to do over again, I would pick one (or two) questions to ask Mr. Klosterman. Without further ado:
FIVE THINGS I COULD AND/OR WOULD HAVE ASKED CHUCK KLOSTERMAN IF THERE WASN'T A GAP BETWEEN MY BRAIN AND SPINAL CORD
"You seem to be a pretty popular writer just from what I've seen and from your talk last night. By a pretty fair definition, you have become a part of pop culture. I think you're a great writer, but I am curious: do you think you're a good writer? Or do you think that you owe a large part of your success to your positioning of your writing in the spectrum of what is "cool" and what is "pop culture?"
"Concept albums in music are often either grandiose or completely underwhelming -however, they give the bands another way to actually own their music. In your experience with interviewing quite a few musicians and encountering their egos, do you believe that the concept album is more a tribute to the self (musician) or social group (band), posturing for a place in music history, a service to the fans, or to simply intellectualize the music?"
"Last night, you referred to the bleak outlook for the print media because of the technological age (which I feel was a very valid assessment of where things are going), but I was curious on how you think the Web 2.0 movement will affect other media, with the advent of sites like YouTube and Wikipedia and other advances like downloadable TV shows, media critique blogs, photo hosting, and news aggregators (like Digg)? We know our culture will never be the same, but in what way do you believe these things have affected the trajectory of our culture?"
"What one cultural idea, statement, fashion, political ideology, fiction, meme, etc., have Americans adopted as part of their American identity and internalized, perhaps without realizing it? If it makes the question easier, you can look specifically at a generation."
"Judging from your comments last night, you're not a huge fan of Family Guy. I'm just curious as to why it doesn't appeal to you, and whether or not you believe the show has actually raised awareness and perhaps saved some cultural bits and pieces from completely disappearing from memory?"
*sigh* If only. C'est la vie.
Feel free to answer some of the questions! At least someone will have put them to good use.
So many things have happened in the last few weeks that it's hard to recount them all, so I won't. However, there are a few major things.
The GRE and my inability to speak of it without great acrimony(thanks, GRE guide makers, for giving me over 490 of the most often recurring words on the GRE and it being completely useless in application): Without disclosing too much, the GRE is hard. Though I only studied for a day, I came out ahead of where I could have been, but I can't help feeling that $140 I spent wasn't worth the plastic I put it on. We'll see once I start hearing back from grad schools. There's always window-washing if things don't work out, I s'pose.
Two all-nighters later, and I have somewhere around half of my thesis done: You may think that I've done well from that alone, but keep in mind that the rough draft was due last Monday. God, someone shoot me. I just want it to write itself already. It almost literally does except for pesky things like "continuity" and "chronology."
The "Oh-my-God-how-does-someone-forget-a-midterm-*headdesk*" moment: I'm varying back and forth between being disgusted and being apathetic about this, but I let a Monday-after-Fall-Break midterm sneak up on me and bite me pretty hard. From the looks of the study guide, I could wing it and make a passable grade (the first identification term is "Hernando de Soto" - hellooooo, sixth grade!), but why on earth do I need to take that chance. I'm filling out the study guide and studying before class tomorrow, but I am not happy that I forgot.
I've had an otherwise eventful weekend, but it's been one of those survive-now-and-live-to-tell-the-tale type weekends. I will say that it's been one of my most interesting as well as one of my most (negatively) enlightening weekends of my life, and that's excluding the GRE.
I'm planning on starting either a new blog or posting a new page with .pdfs of some of my work (papers and such) so that grad schools have URLs to access my presented-but-unpublished papers and articles. What do you all think? .PDFs and a new blog, or .PDFs on this blog? My only worry about this blog is the possibility that it's inappropriate. I don't think it is too much so, but it is certainly not professional. Let me know what you think soon so I can take your thoughts into account when I decide this week.
Oh, and the top five list changed.
1. UT at Austin 2. Vanderbilt 3. OU at Norman 4. Ole Miss 5. Duke
Now to contact professors in each history department! Hurray for the most time-consuming high-risk activity I've done thus far in my academic life.
Edit: Also, a review of the Fall movie Blindness is up at VDCC.
Barack Obama suggests we need to consider moral issues in intervening with combat forces. He mentions intervening in the Holocaust and how we should have done that.
Um Senator, we did intervene in the Holocaust. It was called World War II.
As one of the comments on the above post states, the Holocaust was not, I repeat, not the U.S. casus belli for entering the war. That was called Pearl Harbor.
Yes, you can argue the entire f*cking live long day that the U.S. could not have stopped the Holocaust if it had not entered the war, but that would assume that the U.S. was solely responsible, as well as that the U.S. had been itching to get in the war to help. In fact, it tried to remain isolationist, and only fought when provoked. By that logic, it was the Germans who wanted the U.S. to liberate the concentration camps and decided to give them a reason to get involved. It also ignores that the Holocaust was going on eight years before the U.S. even joined the war.
Were there humanitarian concerns? Of course there were, but they were most certainly a secondary objective. To claim that the U.S. interevened makes it sound as if the U.S. intervened in the nick of time, which makes the 6 million Jews and four million Gypsies, Christians, Slavs, and other ethnic and religious groups into what, exactly? Unworthy of liberation? The necessary prelude to provoke action? How ridiculous and demeaning.
To Red State and Erick Erickson: When you go out of your way to make someone you don't like look like an idiot, make sure you don't trip all over yourself.
I went to a dinner in Little Rock yesterday as a brief reunion with friends from school. On the way home, I did not drive above 70 miles per hour. Gas was $3.78 yesterday, and that was down from what it was. I was trying to make it home on what I had. I wasn't on a deadline. I didn't have a curfew. I wasn't in a hurry to go home.
I was passing a truck that was traveling around 65 when a car came up on my bumper and stayed there. All I could see was headlights. As soon as I passed the truck, I got into the right lane. The car was actually an SUV, and it passed me going at least 90 mph.
This got me thinking about the energy problem facing the United States, and who and what people believe the problem is.
Obviously, it's not us.
The house recently passed a bill allowing the U.S. to sue OPEC. Oil executives were "grilled on fuel prices." I'm sure you've heard about the gas tax holiday that McCain proposed and Clinton backed - despite the fact that economists all agree it would be a horrible idea. Oil speculators are making their money, too.
So who's the blame, according to our actions? OPEC, the oil companies, taxes, and speculators. While these all play their parts, there's still the one cog that no one is blaming too loudly, lest they lose their congressional seat: the consumer.
I understand what people are saying. They don't really have a choice when it comes to driving those long distances. My mother is one of them, as she drives an hour to work each way (and that's with good traffic). My college is an hour and a half away from my home. My grandmother works two jobs and drives to both. I get it. The people who need to drive are the ones getting hurt.
But not everyone is in this situation. Many people live in cities, where there is public transportation, but they refuse to take public transportation because they can still afford to drive their Hummers and their SUVs. But that's hardly the only problem. Remember the person in the SUV who was going 90? That person was willingly spending as much as $1.20 for gas, and wasting what he or she was paying more for.
Does anyone live in a vacuum? Why do people think, "Well, I can afford the gas today, so I'll go ahead and drive fast" only affects one wallet? It's disheartening to see people still use these attitudes. They believe in the power of their own money rather than the power of common sense.
I don't understand how people can still use this reasoning - that they're not the problem. Is the person who can only nickel and dime his gas tank the problem? Because I'm pretty sure they are lowering demand, not increasing it. Are the coworkers who carpool the problem? Because I'm also pretty sure that they're using as much as half of the gas they were before.
Every time you step on the gas, you're taking money out of your wallet and someone else's. I know, this kind of "help your brother" attitude is not very American, but our attitudes aren't the only thing that has to change if we're going to survive these tough times.
I hope people think about that as they lounge on their boats this Memorial Day weekend, commemorating what others sacrificed for them. Maybe they - we - will realize that it's our turn.
How big of a budget? $3.1 trillion? A little under a fourth of the U.S. total GDP? And you want to cut popular programs for children, impoverished, and education? Sure thing!
I might blog on these two things later, but I'm sure they speak for themselves.
