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Chuck Klosterman on Media and Culture: A Collection of Previously Published Essays
From Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs; Chuck Klosterman IV; and Eating the Dinosaur, these essays are now available in this ebook collection for fans of Klosterman’s writing on media and culture.
169 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 14, 2010
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547 people want to read
About the author
Chuck Klosterman
112 books5,134 followersCharles John Klosterman is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine. Klosterman is the author of twelve books, including two novels and the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. He was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor award for music criticism in 2002.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 5, 2018
Exciting raids on petty tyrannies. Of: contemporary sexuality, cereal adverts, the implications of the 00s pirate craze, questions in general, the Unabomber’s good point. Klosterman’s not going to get away without comparison to DFW – but he’s really good in his own way too. He’s a more relaxed, atheoretical Wallace, with pop music (rather than Art writing) at his core, and technology (rather than general Irony) as the source of his worries about us all.
This slices through the reflexivity that causes modern confusions, while being mischievously reflexive himself (at one point he tells us that he once lied to an interviewer who had correctly identified Klosterman’s mouthpiece in one of his novels; Klosterman denied that he shared the character’s view in order to preserve a cheap narrative uncertainty for readers of the interview – but, of course, admitting that here undoes that cheap save for we third-order readers).
Applied instance:
Two quibbles: there is (what I take to be) a lack of ideological care you’d expect of pieces written for Esquire magazine. He doesn’t resolve (as I think DFW mostly does) the tension between a) affirming low culture’s power and unique charms against bullshit classist disparagement, and b) despising its crudest, most conservative common denominators.
Went through it in an hour.
This slices through the reflexivity that causes modern confusions, while being mischievously reflexive himself (at one point he tells us that he once lied to an interviewer who had correctly identified Klosterman’s mouthpiece in one of his novels; Klosterman denied that he shared the character’s view in order to preserve a cheap narrative uncertainty for readers of the interview – but, of course, admitting that here undoes that cheap save for we third-order readers).
Applied instance:
“We assume that commercials are not just informing us about purchasable products, because that would be crude and ineffective. We’re smarter than that. But that understanding makes us more vulnerable. We’ve become the ideal audience for advertising—consumers who intellectually magnify commercials in order to make them more trenchant and clever than they actually are. Our fluency with the language and motives of the advertiser induces us to create new, better meanings for whatever they show us. We do most of the work for them.”
Two quibbles: there is (what I take to be) a lack of ideological care you’d expect of pieces written for Esquire magazine. He doesn’t resolve (as I think DFW mostly does) the tension between a) affirming low culture’s power and unique charms against bullshit classist disparagement, and b) despising its crudest, most conservative common denominators.
Went through it in an hour.
Want to read
July 19, 2020elibrary
July 31, 2011
Klosterman's collection of essays are a great read that I would recommend to anyone and everyone. As a bit of a warning: There are one or two "adult themes" in his essays; however, because these are not personal narratives, details never get raunchy. Instead, the author uses observation and humor to meet his real goal--discussing American media and culture through a variety of different scenarios.
November 27, 2011
More repeats. I hope no one was fooled by repackaging these articles for ebook publication.
September 23, 2013
The worst of Kosterman's "On..." books. Still good, just not great.
June 13, 2015
Have read these essays before - but great to revisit them, works well in a more bite-sized arrangement.
June 15, 2011
Good essays if you like Klostermans stuff.
August 22, 2016
604 - 2016
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews