I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you are possibly more familiar with this author’s work than I am, this despite the fact that I own and have read several of his books. I make that assumption for two reasons: first, people I know are so much more well-read and whatever the musical equivalent of that is¹, mainly because I like to surround myself with people (and authors) who know more than I do about stuff, because that’s a great way to learn; and second, because – based on what Chuck says about himself in this book – he is someone who writes about music (and maybe literature) for a living. So, if you are reading this because you know me, chances are you’ve read Klosterman’s articles or books about music, celebrity, and whatever else he writes about, and will find my ignorance of his body of work naïve at best.

If you had pointed to this book on my shelf yesterday – or on my e-shelf, since I read this on my phone app – and asked if I had read it, I would have answered decisively, Yes. And if you had asked if I had enjoyed it, I would have again responded decisively, Yes.² If you then asked me what it was about, I would not have been able to tell you a single thing he said because I had read it so long ago. So, before writing this post, I re-read it.³

And I am glad that I re-read it, because I will respond again, Yes, I enjoyed it. It made me think, which I can’t say about all the books I read.⁴ At the same time, this book was published in 2016 and I wondered from the perspective of the post-Covid age, what happened to Klosterman during Covid. It is very possible, based on his age (GenX) and the slightly left-wing libertarian way that he describes himself in this book, that he like so many other GenX men of a slightly left-wing libertarian wing, took a hard right turn during Covid and disappeared down a rabbit hole. It’s also possible that his cynicism protected him against that risk, and he has continued doing what he was doing before all this.⁵

I will also say that, as I started reading this book for the second time, I had no memory of reading it the first time. Well, maybe an “oh yes, that’s what this book is about” sort of distant memory, but not with the familiarity of an old friend that so many of my p-books have.

And yet – and yet, as I read further, I realized that this book made a huge subconscious impression on me.⁶ The premise is, as the author himself puts it, “a question about the security of our informed imagination.” What if everything we assume about the world and the direction that things will progress is wrong? What if people in the future, will look back on us and shake their heads sadly at what we believed so firmly, the way that we shake our heads at the idea that health is ruled by humors, or that handwashing by doctors is unnecessary, or that things fall to the ground because they are attracted to the center of the universe⁷ ? What if the things that we label as great literature or great music or great TV are lost to history, replaced by creations that are perhaps only on or not even on the edge of our perception, one of those musical groups, for example, that I’ve never heard of that popped just enough to end up on SNL, which has to be the worst venue for a musical artist ever because even artists I like sound absolutely horrible when I watch them on SNL.⁸

It’s possible that the first time I read this, my thoughts about the first two chapters (books and music), were similar to my thoughts this time: they seemed academic to me, the late-night BS sessions that I listened to between my high-school, music-intelligent friends⁹ and the BS sessions I listened to between the literary people I knew when I was a bookseller¹⁰; and I didn’t really care, other than to vaguely wonder whether I should read or listen to any of the artists he mentioned.

Then he progressed to science and I had two thoughts, one of which I am sure I had the first time around and one which I could only have now. The one I am sure I had before was something along the lines of Gosh, Neil DeGrasse Tyson sounds like such an ass (for reasons I will come back to below). And the new thought being, I think he has this wrong. His premise for this chapter is that the thing we might have wrong about science is going to turn out to be something like our understanding of gravity. I posit here, however, that based on the last eight years, the thing the future-we might look back on and shake their head at past-our naiveté will be that we believed in science at all. When disbelief in the science underlying medicine and/or climate and/or women’s health becomes an article of faith and a loyalty test for a political movement that, if it were able to regain power, has made it a goal to eliminate funding for education and science, science itself is at risk. So I think he underestimated the magnitude of this one.

And when he reached the chapter on democracy, the book felt downright dated. If Democracy fails, he theorizes,¹¹ it will be because of the things that make it great: the emphasis on liberty and freedom. Does he mention – and he must have been writing this during the 2016 election cycle – that it will fail because a right-wing elderly senator from a southern state refused to allow a president from the other party to appoint replacements for Supreme Court Justices, just so that he could, when a president from his own party is elected, pack the court with justices that reflect the a belief introduced by a B-movie actor with cognitive decline, that government is the problem and should be disempowered as much as possible, with the exception of the regulations that prevent people who are not wealthy, white men from doing what wealthy, white, conservative men find threatening. So, yeah, think he got this one wrong, too.¹²

It is the last chapter, however, that made me realize how much this book had sunk into my subconscious. He wraps up by talking about the culture of “you’re doing it wrong” and how this has permeated American culture. This got significantly worse during Covid as we all escaped mentally from our homes by diving into social media (prime real estate for “you’re doing it wrong” attitude – I’m looking at you LinkedIn, I can’t even scroll anymore because it’s all outright ads and people telling me I’m doing it wrong).¹³ I hate that condescending, performative tone (here’s where I come back to Neil DeGrasse Tyson), that tone that says they know more than everyone who is listening, it’s like fingernails on a blackboard to me. And I think that I became aware of that culture when I read this book, perhaps it was already there, lurking below the surface, and this book brought that awareness to the surface of my consciousness, the same way that the last 8 years have brought my husband’s intolerance for meanness to the surface in such a crystalized way that he refuses to watch movies like Pixie¹⁴ where the main character is, when you boil down to it, cruel.

So do I recommend that you read this book? Absolutely. Not because I think it is a great book that hundreds of years from now will be held up as The Example of great 21st Century literature – to use Chuck’s own pretense – but because it will challenge you to think differently about assumptions you have about the world, about the linear nature of history¹⁵, about things you take for granted about the world.

And that’s a good thing.¹⁶

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1. Well-listened? ↩︎
2. Few books that I read and do not enjoy remain on my shelf, unless I feel like they are there to teach me a lesson of some sort. Or unless they are my grad school statistics book, which I threw in a sidewalk trashcan after leaving the New School building (the old one not the new one that replaced it) after the final class in that course. My husband, having found out that I had thrown out a book, a textbook, a statistics textbook, was very unhappy with me. Luckily a friend in the class bequeathed their copy to him because they didn’t want it in their collection either, and he shelved it right there, in the middle of the living room bookcase and, as far as I know, has never opened it, even once. ↩︎
3. Which it why, combined with the Olympic Opening Ceremony and a bottle of wine, I am posting much later than my usual 8am ET time. I need to get back in the habit of writing my posts several days in advance. ↩︎
4. Case in point, that Deadwood series which is super-fun to read but can’t be credited with making me think. ↩︎
5. After I post this, perhaps I’ll Google him and see if I can find out. Waiting because that could take some of the fun out of writing this, especially if he now espouses views about essential things that I disagree with. Okay, I’m back. Googled him lightly and can’t find him espousing any crazy views on his Wiki page or in the graduation speech he gave earlier this year, which makes me think that he survived Covid with his perception of reality as intact as it was before because the kind of people who I am talking about would have spouted crazy in their Wiki or in a graduation speech. Whew! ↩︎
6. For one thing, I suspect that it triggered my interest in Futures Thinking, a practice I recommend everyone take up as a hobby. ↩︎
7. The earth. ↩︎
8. Or, I guess, technically, “?” ↩︎
9. And resulted in one of them loaning me his record collection, 2-3 linear inches at a time. (If I hadn’t been so ignorant about music and so unsure of myself, I would have realized what this meant about how much he liked me in that way.) I put each album on my record player at home, sat quietly in my father’s chair next to the stereo (no one else was home; no one else was ever home), and listened thoughtfully to Sex Pistols, Throbbing Gristle, The Talking Heads, and maybe – I don’t even remember, so maybe it was the Velvet Underground. (I imagine him or maybe people who knew him pounding their fist against their foreheads on that guess, and saying in a high-pitched voice, Libby! The Velvet Underground! Really? The Velvet Underground…) The end result of all this intellectualizing of – er, Rock? (sorry) – being that I made it through his entire 3 linear feet of vinyl liking only one song. And he guessed what it was: Rebel Waltz, a song that even now I can put on repeat and listen to for hours (with headphones on or when no one is home). Because, he said, it’s a waltz. (He did not add, because you are a musical philistine, which was another sign of his feelings for me that I did not recognize.) My musical tastes since then have evolved and I realize now that if I had, instead of sitting and studying the music with my mind, played it loudly in the background while I did other things, I probably would have liked it a lot more. Perhaps even enough to, once it became a brain worm, then sit and listen to it with my mind, and learn to appreciate it on another level. ↩︎
10. The five saddest words. ↩︎
11. Paraphrasing here. ↩︎
12. Occurs to me, as I am just clicking the “Publish” button, that he also talks about the future of football, which someone at the NFL must have read because of the turn they have taken in the last few years to protect their future despite the growing awareness of concussion dangers. And it also ties in with this paragraph. ↩︎
13. If you look at my posts, you’ll see that I have fallen into that myself from time to time but I’ve gotten so irritated by it over the last few years that I have pulled back from trying to promote my expertise by telling people that they’re doing it wrong and should do it differently, perhaps even to an unhealthy level for my career. Because, as my friend Susanne keeps reminding me, I am an expert in several areas and I am not presenting myself that way. Susanne is a good person. ↩︎
14. Awesome Irish movie, highly recommend. Not for children. Or men who fear women’s power. ↩︎
15. What if, he asks, talking about how the internet has compressed time, what if time is not like a river flowing one way, but more like a shallow sea? This book is worth reading for this chapter alone. ↩︎
16. Have to say that I loved his footnotes. He is a footnoter after my own heart. But it was really annoying dealing with footnotes in my app. If they fall at the start or end of a line, and you tap them, the app sends you back or forward a page. If they fall in the center of the page and you tap them, the toolbars at the top and bottom of the screen appear. You have to tap with exactly the right amount of speed and force to get to the footnote. And then, to get back to where you were, you have to tap the footnote number, which is in the left margin and tapping takes you back a page again. It got to the point that I just skipped over the footnotes and read them all when I had finished the book, which kind of detracts from the fun. Nook, fix this. ↩︎