Publisher Description

Since he burst on the world with his heavy-metal memoir Fargo Rock City in 2001, Chuck Klosterman has been one of the most successful novelists and essayists in America. His collections of essays Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas have established Klosterman not only as a credible spokesman for intelligent purveyors of popular culture. His writings and regular columns (in Spin, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine and other venues) about music, sports, and modern culture have sometimes become themselves touchstones in popular culture. The success of his card-based game Hypertheticals: 50 Questions for Insane Conversations has demonstrated that Klosterman can connect with his fans and readers even off the printed page.

As he writes in his contribution to this book, Klosterman "enjoys writing about big, unwieldy ideas" as they circulate in culture, in people, in music, and in sports. The twenty-two other philosophers writing alongside Klosterman couldn't agree more. They offer their own take on the concepts and puzzles that fascinate him and take up many of Chuck's various challenges to answer brain-twisting "hypertheticals" or classic ethical quandaries that would arise if, say, Aristotle wandered backstage at a Kiss concert.

Author Biography

Seth Vannatta is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore. He teaches philosophy of law, political philosophy, ethics, logic, and American philosophy. He is a former varsity volleyball coach and soccer coach and has written on the philosophy of sport.

Excerpt from Book

Introduction: Chuck at the Crossroads of High and Low Culture Seth Vannatta We all have guilty pleasures, don''t we? During the summer of 1993, my guilty pleasure was watching Saved by the Bell reruns. That summer I bussed tables in Vail, Colorado. After the lunch shift I would swing by the video store, pick up a classic movie, a Hitchcock or an Academy award winner from long ago, get in a quick jog, and then veg on the couch for an hour and a half watching four episodes featuring Samuel Powers and Zack Morris. (The middle thirty minutes covered two episodes on different channels). Somewhere in North Dakota, Chuck Klosterman was doing the same thing. But for Chuck, this was no guilty pleasure. Nothing more lofty or academic or altruistic was being postponed by this 90 minute routine. He was not even postponing his consumption of high art, watching Citizen Kane , for instance. I know this because Klosterman wants to rid the phrase, "guilty pleasure" from English diction. He thinks it''s a phony category of entertainment. The contributors to this book do not agree as to whether Chuck is right that "guilty pleasure" is an empty phrase. But I don''t think they view reading Klosterman as a guilty pleasure, even if we think that concept is one worth keeping--or even if we think Chuck is lying to himself about the status of guilty pleasures. Chuck''s distaste for the phrase guilty pleasure is really just a suspicion that distinction between the street paved for serious academic work and the one for spontaneous riffing on pop culture is either bogus, or the paint used to mark the direction of traffic has so faded as to be indiscernible. Some serious minded people have tried to issue academic traffic tickets to Klosterman. He''s been accused of misinterpreting Jacques Derrida, of all violations! In the face of the accusation, Chuck pled guilty, telling his self-proclaimed academic copper that he had never read Derrida. When Klosterman did peruse the French philosopher''s work, he was doubtful that his accuser had ever read Derrida either. Klosterman wanders the streets without paying any attention to the rules commanded by academic sovereigns. He follows his interests and inspirations, come what may. Chuck serves no academic camp in the war of ideas. In fact, he brings no philosophical weapons to the battle. How could he, when Chuck tells us that he secretly hates reading? The contributors to this volume do not hate reading. In fact, they have probably read Derrida and quite a few other famous folks usually confined to college syllabi. We also read Klosterman. In doing so we find ourselves at a strange intersection where high meets low--Kierkegaard meets KISS or Baudrillard meets Britney Spears. Confronting the work of Chuck Klosterman at this eclectic, entertaining intersection forces us to ask whether the roads that constitute two forms of culture, the high and the low, are real or imaginary. If these one-way thoroughfares are real, then they only intersect once if at all, and their crossing each other is potentially dangerous. Violent accidents await, and we need some traffic rules to prevent disaster. But if these roads are fake, then the intersection is really infinitely inflated, allowing a continuous flow of traffic, spontaneously producing new travel patterns and rules of engagement. The contributors to this book bring some philosophical lens to Klosterman''s project, as if to highlight what is already there, or to reflect on the same subject matter as Klosterman in a more consciously philosophical manner. This book is a celebration of the idea of engaging in culture in a thoughtful, reflective way. We are amenable to violating the supposed traffic rules maintaining the one-way streets of high and low culture. We are hopeful that such violations will produce new ideas about the meaning of pop culture and more. The intersection of pop culture and philosophy is fortunate to have Klosterman as one of its libertarian traffic cops. But Chuck''s a traveler too, and in reading his reflections on the meaning of music, movies, celebrity status, TV, and video games, we ask a lot of questions. How are our relationships affected by our inundation in pop culture and the multiplication of media? What do pop culture trends say about our values? How do we create a cardinality of pleasures, goods, and interests if we are willing to break down the distinctions between high and low art? What is good, what is beautiful, and what is true? Most importantly, how is our access to the good, the beautiful, and the true a refraction of our relationship to pop culture? If we cannot glimpse behind the veils of irony, appearance, persona, and inauthenticity, what are we left with? Are we left only with phoniness, cynicism, and disenchantment, or can we recover a modicum of earnestness, reality, self-understanding, and authenticity in and through our favorite bands, sports teams, video games, movies, and TV programs? The authors in the volume are both fans and critics. Some worship at the altar of a Chuck-inspired religion, while others think Klosterman''s Kool-Aid is, if not poisoned, not mixed quite right. One author imagines Chuck as the leader of a new, hip religion of blasphemy, built on a new ten commandments, including imperatives such as thou shall rock, cuss, and footnote frequently. Another author criticizes Chuck''s thin reading of texts--such as soccer--that constitute culture, and provide alternative speculations on the meaning of culture, the culture of football and f

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