I like reading Chuck Klosterman's writing, books included. His last novel, Dowtown Owl, was his first stab at a novel, and I liked it well enough. Klosterman's latest book The Visible Man came out recently. Here are two excerpts.

Preface

Part 1

I'm looking forward to reading the book.

Like much of the east coast, Chuck Klosterman's travel plans appear to have been impacted by yesterday's weather. He documented his path through the several stages of traveler grief on Twitter, and then he stopped. Either his flight left, he ran out of batteries, or something more nefarious happened. In any case, enjoy.

-If I am allowed on this flight, I will become a better person. I will change. I will do whatever it takes. 6 hours ago
-Nothing is off the table. 6 hours ago
-I feel like I have entered a new level of desire. Things are clear now. I will give up everything for one thing. 4 hours ago
-If you (a.) need a kidney and (b.) control runway traffic at JFK, I'm ready to negotiate. #NotAHighQualityKidneyToBeHonest 3 hours ago
-How many people in this airport would kill a stranger with a hammer in exchange for air travel? #EveryoneExceptMaybeMyWife 3 hours ago
-A woman in the terminal is trying to stretch her legs by goose-stepping. The guy next to me is talking about Douglas Adams like he's alive. 3 hours ago
-"My mother is optimistic about this flight," says the goose-stepper. "That's better than nothing." #ActuallyIt'sTheSame 3 hours ago
-Maybe I should start wearing a sweater around my shoulders. I've probably been living wrong. This is my fault. 2 hours ago
-None of these people with sweaters around their shoulders seem upset. It's like they understand the big picture, you know? They get it. 2 hours ago
-FYI: They don't sell SARS masks in Huson News. 2 hours ago
-Whatever happened to SARS? That used to be so hot. 2 hours ago
-"My brother went to Simon's Rock," says the redhead sitting across from me. "He said, 'Never go there. It's a fishbowl.' That was his take." 2 hours ago
-Oh my God. The guy at the gate just got a phone call. Oh my God. What does this mean? What does this mean? Why isn't he reacting? 2 hours ago
-WHY IS HE NOT REACTING? This dude is the Robert Parrish of Delta employees. React! React! YOU ARE ALIVE, MAN. 1 hour ago

This seems like as good a place as any to continue the Chuck Klosterman blog project Chuck Klosterman Chuck Klosterman Blog Project.
-Klosterman recently started selling his essays for $0.99 a pop. People keep predicting this is the future of essay writing/magazine articles, but I think it's going to take a second to catch on. If there's a good delivery system, though, all bets are off.

-Back in September, he had 5 ideas to make the NFL better. I agree with all of them.

Lastly, How Modern Life Is Like a Zombie Onslaught, which makes some good points about the Twilight series.

In continuing my near breathless documentation of Chuck Klosterman's online presence, here he is interviewing Stephen Malkmus from Pavement in GQ. Pavement is reuniting this year, which Zach Baron in Slate says marks "the end of baby boomer cultural hegemony". This might not mark the end, and it might not even mark the middle of the end, but it might, perhaps, mark the beginning of the end, which I'm all for. Back to Klosterman on Malkmus:

In fact, he looks like someone playing Stephen Malkmus in an ill-conceived Cameron Crowe movie: He's unshaven, he's wearing Pony high-tops that no longer exist on the open market, and his baseball cap promotes the Silver Jews. His T-shirt features the logo of the Joggers, a Portland band whose greatest claim to fame is being mentioned in a GQ story about Stephen Malkmus eating at a Thai-sandwich shop.

It occurs to me that Klosterman is the best rock writer going right now, by which I mean he's my favorite and I don't read any others. Are there any others I should look in to? In any case, enjoy.

Hearing how Chuck Klosterman's voice sounds on Bill Simmons' podcasts makes it a little more awesome to read this book. I thought the premise tying this book together was unnecessary, as Spin could have just sent Klosterman on a road trip. It's worth reading even if I don't know whether to pronounce Klosterman as Close-terman or Claws-terman.

Chuck Klosterman has a new book coming out today, Eating the Dinosaur. Here are a couple interviews, from the Wall St Journal and the Washington Post. As a bonus, here's a review he did about a baseball book.

This may be the best music review I've ever read. A sample:

1967 proved to be a turning point for the Beatles—the overwhelming lack of public interest made touring a fiscal impossibility, subsequently forcing them to focus exclusively on studio recordings. Spearheaded by the increasingly mustachioed Fake Paul, the four Beatles donned comedic Technicolor dreamcoats, consumed 700 sheets of mediocre acid on the roof of the studio, and proceeded to make Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a groundbreaking album no one actually likes. A concept album about finding a halfway decent song for Ringo, Sgt. Pepper has a few satisfactory moments (“Lovely Rita” totally nails the experience of almost having sex with a city employee), but this is only B+ work.

Waxy pointed to a question on Metafilter asking What books do people proselytize about and said, "Someone needs to compile this into a list, ordered by mentions." How could I not?

I took every book and author mentioned and compiled a list for both. If a book was listed with an author, this was counted as an entry for the book only. The Metafilter question asked for fiction books only, but this rule wasn't really followed so I counted everything. I did this fast and any errors can be blamed on speed, Drew's Cancer, or both. Finally, it becomes obvious quite quickly, that this list is more about books people don't like, as opposed to books with fanatical fans. This is summed up best by commenter OhHenryPacey, "If this list proves anything it's that assholes are assholes and will be assholes about just about anything or book you'd care to mention." You can't argue with logic like that.

Interesting findings:
-Ayn Rand blew away the competition in the author Category with 11 mentions, while The Celestine Prophecy edged out Harry Potter 8-6 in the Books category.
-There are 124 titles on the Books list and 56 Authors.
-People mentioned Jonathan Livingston Seagull 3 times, spelling the name 3 different ways.
-Twilight had 4 mentions, though I expect this to grow over time.
-Kottke will be happy to note that while Infinite Jest is on the Books list 4 times, David Foster Wallace is not mentioned on the Authors list.
-Looking quickly, Ayn Rand inspires the most assholish proselytizing with a combined score of 16. But what do you expect with a name like Ayn.
-Seriously? The Wizard of Oz? You must not like anything.

Full list below: Read the rest of this entry »

What is it, Malcolm Gladwell Week on Unlikely Words? Bill Simmons just put up a 3 part email discussion (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), check it out if you want to say goodbye to your morning. Not sure if this is a resurrection of the Curious Guy feature Simmons used to do a couple years ago, but if you want to say goodbye to tomorrow as well, here are the other Curious Guy discussions.

NBA Commissioner David Stern and Bill Simmons

Bill Simmons and Dallas Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban

Curt Schilling and Bill Simmons

Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman Part 1 and Part 2

Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Simmons Part 1 and Part 2

Bill Simmons and the Screenwriters of 'Rounders, Brian Koppelman and David Levien and Part 2

The OC Creator Josh Schwartz and Bill Simmons

Continuing the series of maintaining blogs for some of the authors I enjoy (Michael Lewis and Part 1 of Chuck Klosterman) because they won't maintain them themselves, here's another round of Chuck Klosterman on the internet.

Chuck Klosterman's favorable and effusive review of Benji Hughes' A Love Extreme:

Even after nearly three decades of MTV, we still tend to see musicians with our ears, which (I can only assume) is what the musicians would want.

Last week, Klosterman was on The BS Report with Bill Simmons (who calls Klosterman 'Close-terman' can we figure out if that's how it's supposed to be pronounced?) for 2 sessions. In the first they discussed the merits of pro sports (Simmons) vs college sports (Klosterman) and the second where they discussed newspapers, popularity and tenure.

Klosterman echoed David Carr's thoughts that newspapers should have been charging on the web since the beginning and colluding to do so now is one way to save them. He also pointed out Simmons' hypocrisy in criticizing sports columnists who have been where they are for ages. Simmons suggested that a lot of the best younger writers were leaving newspapers to go to the tubes, while Klosterman suggested that these guys might not be the best because internet is a popularity contest, judged by how much attention you can draw to yourself as opposed to how good you are.

Most interesting to me was a point Klosterman made a couple times that popularity begets popularity and the bigger websites are only going to keep getting bigger (though, wee Unlikely Words will soldier on!).

Lastly, spoke at the Highline Ballroom last night with all-girl Mötley Crüe cover band, Girls Girls Girls. I'll assume the evening went well and post a review if I see one.

Since my favorite authors refuse to have blogs of their own, I will do it for them. Here's an article by Chuck Klosterman about Obama's brother-in-law Craig Robinson a college basketball coach in Oregon. The famous campaign story of Michele making (NBA alumni) Craig let Obama play basketball with him and his friends is retold and analyzed from a different light.

Here's Klosterman on The B.S. Report podcast. Haven't listened yet, but I imagine it will be good.

And you know what else? Someone needs to come up with an Alltop channel that features all the articles by all the good authors who refuse to have blogs. I'm thinking Michael Lewis, Michael Pollan, Klosterman, maybe Susan Orlean if it's about origami or orchids, maybe Krakauer, Gladwell because he never updates his site. There's others. Who am I missing?