Corridor Buzz - The Premier Source of Arts & Entertainment News and Information for the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City Corridor

Chuck Klosterman to deliver UI welcome lecture

By Loren Keller

As the popular English rock band Oasis has fashioned a lucrative career based on the musical stylings of the Beatles, writer Chuck Klosterman clearly has influences of his own: Lester Bangs and Hunter S. Thompson, to name a couple.

He’s just loath to admit them.

“If I answer that question people are then going to perceive my writing through the context of what they know about that other individual,” Klosterman says.

“It’s a disadvantage to have clear influences in anything, whether you’re a writer or a songwriter or a director. If people are able to deduce who influences you through your writing, in a sense you’ve failed even if you do a great job. I mean, I love the band Oasis, but the fact they’re so derivative of the Beatles, to a degree it’s detrimental to my perception of that, because you can never be as good as the thing that influences you. If you’re as good as the thing that influences that would mean you’re a plagiarist.”

With four collections of journalism under his belt drawn from the work he has published in magazines including Spin, Esquire and GQ—and his first novel, Downtown Owl, due out next month—Klosterman can hardly be labeled a failed writer or plagiarist. The author’s best-known work is perhaps the 2003 New York Times bestseller Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, which the Onion called “one of the brightest pieces of pop analysis to appear this century.”

And he’s plainly a writer of influence himself: Klosterman will be the featured speaker for the inaugural Cassandra S. Foens M.D. Lecture scheduled for 8:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Englert Theatre in downtown Iowa City as part of the University of Iowa’s annual Welcome Week.

Speaking on a conference call from his apartment in New York City, Klosterman, 36, acknowledges that much of the college-level cultural and social landscape has shifted since he graduated from the University of North Dakota in 1994.

“You used to have a few close friends that you’d speak to every day and another tier of friends you would talk to occasionally by telephone. You had a larger group of friends you might only see in social situations, and a very large scope of people who you just sort of knew because you’d seen them before or had class with them.

“Now it’s kind of reverse, in the sense that people can sort of almost exist like media entities. They can kind of broadcast through Twitter or Facebook basically whatever they’re doing at any given moment. And it sort of inverts the relationship they have with people. Now the only people you wouldn’t necessarily need Facebook for are that rare group of people who are your closest friends.”

Not that it’s exactly breaking news, but technology has also changed the way college students consume music. In downtown Iowa City, for example, there were as many as a half-dozen places to buy CDs, tapes and records as recently as a decade ago. Today, there are just two.

The music industry has been slow to figure out that most listeners don’t care about owning CDs, Klosterman says.

“As it turns out, not only do people not care about them, they prefer not to have them—even though the sound quality is greater on a CD than listening to it on your iPod or through a computer,” he says. “Moreover, young people particularly think music is supposed to be free. That’s just part of the equation now. There really is no future to the selling of music as physical objects.”

At the same time, Klosterman says, it’s much easier for music fans to find what they want.

“You just go online and basically become virtually an expert on popular music in two days,” he says. “For the average student, it just makes things easier and cheaper.”

And perhaps a little less meaningful.

“People move on to things quicker,” Klosterman says. “Technology is part of the overall acceleration of culture. That culture is accelerated now due to the fact that people area able to consume more information in a shorter amount of time on a more consistent basis.

“But whenever you have a lot of anything, its value goes down. It’s just like any kind of economy. If it was 1986 and it was really hard to get metal records, and you could only get ten of them, then those ten metal records would be incredibly valuable to you, you’d play them all the time.”

Klosterman says writing his first novel was a welcome challenge, though he’s now working on another collection of journalism and essays.

“It’s not like I’m going to become a novelist now. To a degree what happens with this novel will have an impact on that. Obviously if this novel does extremely well or people really seem to like it… that will give m a great motive to do another one. I don’t think that far ahead. It blows my mind when I meet a writer and they have these ideas about how many books they want to write in their career. I have no f---ing idea. I know I’m going to write one more after this one.”