Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century

by Chuck Klosterman

There are stories in this collection about literature and zombies and postmodern television and the essentialism of Charlie Brown and the capricious nature of our illusionary universe.

I suppose it’s possible my hometown was just too small to have stereotypical cliques.

googling the game’s particulars is like searching for a glossy photograph of Genghis Khan.

United Tribes Technical College was somewhere between two hundred and three hundred students.2 The school was founded in 1969 by the five tribes of North Dakota, but its brick campus buildings were built at the turn of the twentieth century, intended as a military base. During World War II, the base was used as an alien internment camp. Attending school at UT is the polar opposite of idyllic. But that’s how college life was (and still is) for so many Native American students—it’s just that nobody pays attention. No American minority is less represented in the national consciousness.3

The central reason smart people (and certainly most critics) disparage nostalgia is utilitarian: It’s an uncritical form of artistic appreciation. If you unconditionally love something from your past, it might just mean you love that period of your own life. In other words, you’re not really hearing “You Oughta Know.” What you’re hearing is a song that reminds you of a time when you were happy, and you’ve conflated that positive memory with any music vaguely connected to the recollection. You can’t separate the merit of a song from the time you originally experienced it.

Charlie Brown effortlessly embodies what Peanuts truly is: an introduction to adult problems, explained by children.

“No matter what I do or what I try, I’m always going to be myself.”

This doesn't have to read as depressing

“The film is what it is,” which is the critical equivalent of saying “I concede that the film exists.”

Page is either the second- or third-greatest rock guitarist of all time, depending on how seriously you take Eric Clapton.

Yeah. I can be quite nostalgic. Although not to the point of melancholia.

There is music, and there is everything else.

Nobody looks back at Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and says, “I guess this music is okay, but it doesn’t really count. Those guys were obviously high in the studio.”