I Wear The Black Hat by Chuck Klosterman

I Wear The Black Hat by Chuck Klosterman

Chuck Klosterman is likely one of the most fun people you could ever invite to a cocktail party. His ability to opine on almost anything makes him a national treasure, and when he gets rolling on a theme… Watch out!

I Wear the Black Hat is a meditation on villains, villainy, and why we lionize some and demonize others. Kobe Bryant, Bernie Goetz, Batman, George Bush, Charlie Manson, OJ Simpson, and a few hundred others get insightfully skewered in this collection of essays on why how we think the way we do about the bad guys.

Awesome brain-candy popcorn from a master of cultural criticism. Delightful collection of essays as usual.

Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman

Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman

Do you love rock and roll? Specifically, do you have opinions on the differences between Cinderella and Motley Crue? Thoughts on Def Leppard’s drummer? (Quick: How many arms does he have?) Which was the best song off Appetite for Destruction? Why was Lies such a letdown? Who would win in a cage match between REO Speedwagon and Cliff Burton? What if the fight happened in 1995?

If these sorts of questions bring a smile to your face, then you need to run, not walk, to pick up a copy of Fargo Rock City. It is Klosterman’s first major collection of essays, and it’s a wonderful collection of meditations on the question of why rock music (metal?) mattered so much to all us kids in the eighties.

Klosterman is brilliant, fun, funny, and (as many others have occasionally observed) a tad frustrating at times. But he’s just plan delightful to spend time with, and Fargo Rock City is like sitting around with your closest genius friends discussing the metal scene in the last two decades of the previous millennium.

Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman

Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman

Why are we so obsessed with dead rock stars? What makes them so much more interesting than living rock stars? Why is this such a reliably good career move? (Consider well, Miley…)

Klosterman flirts with these questions while taking a road trip around the US and visiting the site of a number of famous rock star deaths (from that famous plane crash forever remembered as The Day the Music Died, to the more recent tragic nightclub fire at a Great White concert.) Along the way he gives us good young Klosterman gonzo journalism, getting wasted and thinking about girls.

This is great stuff if you’re into pop culture, snarky thinking, rock n’ roll, Americana, or anything else in the usual Klosterman wheelhouse.

Chuck Klosterman IV by Chuck Klosterman
Styled somewhat in the style of Led Zeppelin’s final album, Chuck Closterman IV treads the same turf as his other works: fast-paced, clever pop culture analysis. The book is divided into three sections: Things That Are True, Things That May Be True, and Things That Are Not True.

Klosterman definitely improved as his career advanced and he matured; there is a pronounced delta between Klosterman IV and, say, Eating the Dinosaur, written some years later. Still though, Chuck Klosterman IV was entertaining, but by this point, I’d grown a little weary of the shtick, and the pop-culture references had started to feel more like an exhumation than a fresh look at (semi-) current events. So I elected to move on rather than read Klosterman’s earliest book, Fargo Rock City. However, I would like to make my esteem for Mr. Klosterman clear here: He writes a great essay.

Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs by Chuck Klosterman

More Klosterman from a few years earlier, Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs deals primarily with television, sports, and music. It’s all in a similar vein to Eating the Dinosaur, though without the clever mashup structure.

If overly clever, not-at-all-reverent essays on pop culture are your thing, and you don’t mind subject matter which is fast becoming dated, you’ll be delighted by Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs.

Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman

Turns out, Chuck Klosterman is smart, funny, and occasionally insightful. Eating the Dinosaur is a collection of essays on pop culture and interviews with the type of vapid celebrities that little the late-night talk-show pop culture landscape like worms on the sidewalk after a rain. Except the essays are brilliant, and they are woven together in twos, sections from each essay, which are seemingly unrelated, chopped and screwed under the banner of an interview. And the awesome magician’s trick that Klosterman pulls off is to have the disparate parts all combine by the end of each chapter to have some broader significance, relationship, or commentary.

I read Eating the Dinosaur in one sitting on an airplane from Texas to Seattle, and immediately visited a Half Price Books there in Redmond, where I picked up two more Klosterman books.

Highly recommended.

Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs

Mr. Burroughs is clever, if deeply unlikeable. He’s a snotty gay Manhattenite who embodies a slew of traits that represent the worst neurotic self-indulgences of his generation of Americans.

Possible Side Effects is a series of comedic essays on Burroughs awkwardness in social situations and times when he has been mildly inconvienced. A former advertising agent from a shitty childhood, Burroughs turned into a drunk, which gave him the type of lowbrow James Freyesque “life story” that sells books like Running With Scissors, his previous bestseller.

Now, all of this may make it sound like I don’t much like Mr. Burroughs, and that would be accurate. But his book was funny, diverting, and occasionally insightful and not badly written.

I read this one in Stillwater Minnesota during a weekend long wedding. Stillwater was a beautiful town on the St. Croix river. This book wasn’t the most memorable part of the weekend.

Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie
Rushdie’s essays are as good as his novels, if occasionally equally unfocused. In this collection, written between 1982-1992 we get some pre-Fatwah Rushdie. He is younger, perhaps a bit more arrogant in some ways, and just as outspoken and bright. These essays, about politics, literature, history, sports, and music ramble across themes, but always return to the notion of home as more than a location. There are a total of almost seventy-five essays here, which reveal a mind that is unable to rest with comfortable definitions or life unexamined.

This book seems to be out of print. I looked high and low for a second copy to give to LT, (whom I thought might find Rushdie’s comments on Borges interesting) but was unable to find it in any new bookstore. So if you find a copy somewhere at a used bookstore, grab it and run like hell!

Step Across This Line by Salman Rushdie

Oh sir, you have done it yet again. Read mostly in the Fairmont Waterfront on the Vancouver harbor in the first month of the year, this fine collection of essays landed in a suitcase and didn’t get finished until a different man read it months later in Puerto Vallerta. I suppose that’s fitting, since Rushdie himself wrote this as a lot of different men over a span of years from 1992 to 2002. And reader, let me tell you, you’re in for a treat. In 400 pages of dense, playful, angry, erudite and brilliant essays covering a wide range of topics, from The Wizard of Oz, to English footie, to his thoughts on the fatwa, Rushdie reminds us that he’s not just an important writer – he’s an important thinker. We get Christianity, judiasm, islam (of course), Pinochet, oral sex, infanticide, partition, Mercator projections, Bono, Bridget Jones, Ghandi, Babur, globalization, Nabakov, 9/11, Sammy Beckett, Kosovo, Elian Gonzales, Bush & Cheney, Yates & Faiz, tabloids, and a treasure trove of other topics.

This is a fantastic collection of essays, and as the title indicates, keeps coming back to a central theme that must have been very much on Rushdie’s mind at this time: lines, borders, their crossing; in short, the transgressive.

I’ll stop now, from fear that further expressing my admiration for Rushdie may begin to border on the sycophantine.

Sacagawea's Nickname by Larry McMurtry

Sacagawea's Nickname: Essays on the American West is the most recent book of essays published by McMurtry, released in 2001 by the New York Review of books. In it, LMM reminds the reader that he is absolutely still keen in his wit, still thirsty to delve, discuss and debate, and still focused on the high plains, swollen rivers, and the deep canyons of the American West.

Indeed, much of the spirit of Sacagawea's Nickname is derived from a sort of metatextual discussion in which McMurtry engages with the reader to determine where the real American West is. He concludes as have scholars before him, that the real West is that of the imagination, existing somewhere between the dusty frontier towns of Oklahoma, the problem of erosion, and the mythic high-adventure West of John Wayne, Tombstone, and Louis L'amour.

McMurtry starts this short and lively discussion by examining a recent version of The New Encyclopedia of the American West, which he finds to be a pandering, lacking attempt at broad coverage of the west. In addition to an entry for "chili" about which McMurtry quips: "In this increasingly secular age, what to put in chili-- or what to exclude-- provokes the nearest thing to religious argument to be heard in the modern West, while the great chili cookout held annually in Terlingua, Texas, is a loose equivalent of the Council of Nicea, in which many heresies are defined and many schismatics cast out." McMurtry believes that good writers and historians of the American West are given short shrift in the Encyclopedia. This belief gives the book its central purpose, as LMM sets out to discuss, berate, and honor a staggering number of historians who have treated his native land as their subjects.

Across these twelve essays, largely unrelated, save for their shared concern with the theme described above, LMM displays a breadth and depth of knowledge on the topic that would do any emeritus professor proud. He is, as already described in my coverage of Roads, a fearsome collector of anecdotes, names, places, and book titles. At least in these works, LMM comes across as the kind of self-taught scholar that should give us all cause to despair. How on earth can we work for a living, lead lives filled with romance, friends, children, and all the rest, and still master such a body of knowledge as he has demonstrated? I do not know the way, but will keep trying to get there.

Despite tipping the scales at only one hundred and seventy two pages, Sacagawea's Nickname is loaded with information, sly commentary, and LMM's usual dry humor for both comedy of situations and for wordplay.

I'd love to write more, but Mouse the Impatient is threatening to unplug me, and in any case, I've got a few thousand more books to read before I'll be a worthy judge of a book like this. Back to the stacks.

-tf

Roads by Larry McMurtry

Roads is a book that I will buy another copy of. While the first one will go onto my shelf, alongside all of McMurtry's other works, this second copy has a different fate in store. Roads is a book that I want to keep in my car. I want to paste a US roadmap to outside (like book covers in school) and annotate each highway and interstate segment with the page number on which he offers commentary on that artery. It would be great to always have this book with you while you were on a roadtrip.

Roads contains a dozen essays, each one of which is just a chronological ramble on LMM's drives from one place to another. His usual sardonic wit and attention to social structure and mannerisms is present on every page. He is rarely positive about any place he drives through. In addition, his fearsome arsenal of literary memories is brought to bear every few pages as he quotes, quips, and quibbles with and about the various author's whose hometowns he visits. He indicts Hemmingway's third wife for her tacky taste in furniture, praises Willa Cather's Arizona & Nebraska. In almost every county he explores, LMM is able to talk fluently about the works of those author's whose writings mention a particular landmark. I'd love to hear a conversation between he and Mrs. Anne Fadiman.

This book is also likely to be of interest to any other McMurtry scholars out there because of it's deep biographical component. He doesn't hesitate to remnisce (seldom elegaic, usually half-way bitterly) about those places which have touched his life when he passes through them. As a companion piece to In A Narrow Grave, this book serves to, in a sense, chronicle the last 20 years of LMM's mental progress (why do I want to use the word decay there?), literary adventures, and geographical wandering. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Travels with Charley by my beloved Steinbeck, and Lars Somebody's Travels with Lizbeth, written much later. Like those, this book is a travelogue, describing one man's undirected journeys across America; both the geographical patchwork of highways, roads, and interstates, and the far more interesting network of books, loves, and memories.

-tf

I just finished In A Narrow Grave. Review.


In A Narrow Grave by Larry McMurtry

Written in 1968 and now out of print, I was surpised to even hear of McMurtry's fourth book, titled 'In A Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas'. I thought that I'd read almost all of LMM's novels, and was going through a recent collection of Essays he wrote entitled 'Roads' in which we mentions that anyone who wants to know his opinion on Austin should read In A Narrow Grave. Luckily, my kind mother found the book for me in some used bookstore (of which LMM himself is said to own the largest in the state, somewhere up near Archer City) and gave it to me for Christmas.

In A Narrow Grave is a collection of 10 essays written in an elegaic tone. They deal with the character of several Texas cities, a farewell to the departed cowboy god of Texas, embodied (to LMM) by Frank Dobie's portrait of rancher Charles Goodnight and characters like Woodrow Call from Lonesome Dove, or the grandfather from Horseman Pass By. Indeed, LMM is clearly obsessed by the dissapearing myth of the cowboy. His entire tone is one of a wistful lament. Texas is a vast, empty space for LMM, now dead without his mythical heroes and indians. Reading In A Narrow Grave is like looking at a template for every LMM novel to date. His use of language is precise, folksy and possessed of a sort of tounge-in-cheek colloquial character. McMurtry repeats himself regularly, like the characters he describes, his thoughts keep coming back to the relationship between West Texas men and women, the status-obsessed provincialism of his hometown of Archer County (where he claims bestiality was rampant). It is his (and the earlier McMurtrys') love / hate relationship with his home soil to which he returns most frequently in this collection. While the focus is ostensibly on Texas as a whole, McMurtry seems to never be able to tear his gaze far from Archer County and his mythical town of Thalia. Like an old cowboy endlessly repeating himself around the campfire to any new bucks who will stop and listen, McMurtry seems stuck. In his essays he cannot leave Archer City behind, and as a man he can't seem to escape either. He is trapped by his books and his native land; stuck watching the plains suburbanize, selling used novels in a drafty warehouse, and hoping to catch a last glimpse of his cowboy god; a god who has already passed forever beyond his reach.

It has been a few days.

I've been taking it pretty easy, reading a lot and preparing for the coming storm that will be Garner X. My wonderful fiancee is still gone, so with the exception of some gaming sessions with the boys, I've been pretty sedate.


Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman
I just finished Anne Fadiman's 'Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader' which my Aunt Terry gave me for Christmas. Overall it was an excellent collection of essays which belongs in the 'books on books' section. Think of it as subtly meta, but not very concerned with it's own meta-ness. It contained about 12 essays on the role of books and reading in the author's life. Fadiman has a peaceful, relaxed but elegant style. She is a self-avowed compulsive editor, and is clearly a voracious reader. Also a New York literary snob of sorts, but in a good natured way. She has a great ear for language, and an encyclopedic knowledge of quotations and the lives of many authors, mostly nineteenth century. She uses great phrases, like "ossified scintillia" which are just dripping with attention to the way letters and words work together. The first essay is one that describes the occasion in which, some years after her marriage and the birth of her second child, she and her husband finally agreed to let their two libraries co-mingle. This essay struck a particular chord with me in light of my upocoming change in marital status. Another essay compared reading to eating, pointing out the metaphorical comparisons we use when descrbing books ("devoured", etc.) Another dealt with her compulsive need to add marginalia. Another with famous inscriptions on fly-leaves. Etc. Great one on the English artic explorers, etc. This is not a book for everyone, but for the dedicated reader, it is a real treat.

...

I'm only a few pages from the end of 'In A Narrow Grave', so expect a post on that next. For now though, Cog & I have to put together a cheap entertainment-center I just bought for the downstairs TV.

-tf