It's Fun to Think About How Wrong We Are

The premise of Chuck Klosterman's new book But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past is stated succinctly in the subtitle . . . the way a time period is perceived in the future is never the same as the time period is perceived while people are living in it, because of future discoveries and progress in art, science, ethics, and technology and the cultural shifts that accompany these . . . and Klosterman concedes that everyone will admit this in the abstract, but once you get specific-- once you tell people that Abraham Lincoln will be perceived differently, or Led Zeppelin, or the American system of government-- then they have trouble getting on board; from my perspective in the present, this is another excellent Klosterman book, and by excellent, I mean that Klosterman discusses things-- both eminent and obscure-- of which I have working knowledge: American football, Kurt Vonnegut, Kafka, George Saunders, Citizen Kane, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, Star Wars, The Constitution, Renata Adler's novel Speedboat, string theory, Ohio, Nick Bostrom's simulation argument, etcetera-- and he writes about these disparate things so lucidly and logically, that once I read his ideas, I immediately digest them and believe they are my own . . . now this could mean he's just a middle-of-the-road thinker and a really compelling and clear stylist, so that reading his books makes me (and anyone my age who likes literature, science, pop culture and sports) feel really smart, because we get the allusions and can put everything in context, but I like to think otherwise: I like to think that Klosterman takes the time to think extensively, precisely, and comprehensively about the things that people of my generation and proclivities only half-think about, because it's not our job to think full time about hair bands and conspiracy theories and why the hell people still love Ronald Reagan, and Klosterman takes a real critical eye to these things and makes you rethink your half-baked thoughts about them . . . so thanks Chuck, I don't know how people are going to view your books in the future-- probably as mindless drivel about obscure minutia-- but I love and look forward to them here in the present.

Two Books with White Covers (Both Containing Allusions)

I recently finished two new books with white covers: But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman and White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer and while both of these authors are generally regarded as critics . . . of popular culture, the arts, and-- in the case of Klosterman-- sports (and both write novels as well) and they both share a precise, crisp writing style that is almost mock-epic in laying bare the logic of thought (Pulitzer Prize winner Kathryn Schulz, in this review, described Dyer as "one of our greatest living critics, not of art, but of life itself, and one of our most original writers") but the big difference-- for me at least-- is that reading Klosterman is a smooth transference of thought, because Klosterman is around my age and he refers to things that I know a lot about (The Sex Pistols, Nick Bostrom, The Cosby Show, American football, Roseanne, Dan Carlin, the intelligence of octopi, the Higgs Boson, and Star Wars are a few that come to mind from his new book) while Geoff Dyer, a fifty year old Brit, will often refer to things just outside my purview . . . I think this is purposeful: Klosterman wants to appeal to a certain category of forty-something semi-literate, semi-intelligent, semi-athletic nerdy hipster (Dave is pegged) while Dyer, though easy enough to read, designs his references and allusions to take you beyond your normal thoughts and logic . . . in this new book, you will "experience the outside world" a world of art and culture and music that you know exists, but probably never investigated; anyway, here are some references and allusions from Geoff Dyer's new book, divided into two categories, the ones I knew and the ones I had to Google:

some of the references I got . . .

1) Robert Smithson's earthwork Spiral Jetty;

2) Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come;

3) the life and works of Matisse, Pissarro, and Gauguin;

4) Dick Diver in Tender is the Night;

5) Art Pepper . . . I learned about him in the Bosch mysteries;

6) full moon parties at Ko Pha Ngan

7) Don Delillo's novel Underworld;

8) David Mamet and Thomas Pynchon;

and here are some of the people, places, and things I was unfamiliar with . . .

1) the critical works of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer;

2) Walter de Maria's landwork The Lightning Field . . . this giant rectangular collection of tall metal poles is in New Mexico, if I had know about it we could have taken a detour on our cross-country trip and tried to see it . . . although it's difficult to access;

3) Chaiwat Subprasom's photo Koh Tao;

4) Taryn Simon's photo series The Innocents;

5) Simon Rodia and The Watts Towers;

6) jazz bassist Charlie Haden, who played with Ornette Coleman;

7) seminal jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders;

8) Don Cherry's funky fusion album Brown Rice, with Charlie Haden on bass . . . I really like this album and I would have never listened to it if I hadn't read the book . . .

and so thanks to Geoff Dyer for introducing me to some new things, and making me feel a bit dumb, and thanks to Chuck Klosterman for explicating things I already know about, and making me feel smart.

Sorry Chuck, The Inevitable is Coming

Chuck Klosterman concludes his book But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past with this thought: "I'm ready for a new tomorrow, but only if it's pretty much like yesterday" and while this is a pleasant thought, there's very little chance of it happening; before he gets to this romantic notion, he speculates on just how much the future will be different from the now, and how that will change the lens through which those future people view our time . . . and he also recognizes that not much will survive the test of time and that we have little to no chance of predicting what those things will be:

1) it's very difficult to predict what band will become the John Philip Sousa of rock'n'roll . . . no one can name another march music composer (and Klosterman points out that in one hundred years Bob Marley and reggae will be synonymous) so you can speculate: Chuck Berry? Led Zeppelin? The Beatles? The Rolling Stones? Def Leppard? who knows?

2) once a genre becomes insular and arcane, it's the "weirdos" who get to curate the art form, and select what is great;

3) American football now seems to be on the outs, as everyone educated knows that the sport is too dangerous because of the head injuries-- but Klosterman points out that this is because football is trying to become the sport for everyone . . . everyone watches a game or two, and almost everyone belongs to some kind of fantasy league or pool and everyone watches the Super Bowl . . . so this is too much exposure for something so dangerous, but there are plenty of sports that are more dangerous-- auto racing, UFC, base-jumping-- but they don't command such a large audience, so football may become less popular, and that may save it-- it may have a core group of diehard fans and  to them, the sport will represent valor and fortitude and toughness and all kinds of conservative values, and the rest of society will look upon it like auto-racing . . . or it may be deemed too dangerous and expensive it may die at the youth levels and go the way of boxing and the dodo . . . we won't know until the future;

4) folks in the future may look at The Matrix as a seminal film not because of the groundbreaking "bullet time" effects, but because the Wachowski Brothers transitioned and became the Wachowski Sisters, and so the world-within-a-world theme takes on an entirely new (and possibly more compelling) spin for future generations;

5) Klosterman concedes that important art from our time should reflect the most important elements of our time and he gives a list of these possibilities, while admitting that we see these through the cloudy and low vantage point of the present, but here are a few . . . and while I don't use quotes, I am usually using his exact words, just truncated: the psychological impact of the internet, the prevailing acceptance of nontraditional sexual identities, the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers, an unclear definition of privacy, a hatred of the wealthiest one percent, the artistic elevation of television, the recession of rock'n'roll and the ascension of hip-hop, a distrust of objective storytelling, the prolonging of adolescence;

BUT, while I love Klosterman and had a great time navigating his ambiguous, philosophical arguments about how we can't predict the future, or how the future will view our present, Kevin Kelly does present a convincing counter-argument in his new book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future . . . I'll save the summary of his most interesting predictions for another sentence, but, Chuck Klosterman, I'm warning you: tomorrow is going to be nothing like today, and the day after that is going to be exponentially even more wild . . . we've leapt over the edge and into the realm of the zillions . . . zillions of bits of interconnected information, zillions of smart objects, zillions of interconnected screens, zillions of hyperlinked pages, zillions of sprawling dendritic tendrils, stretching across the earth, in an ever-expanding, self-revising smart tangle of digitally connected humanity, so strap yourself in and get ready for a wild ride: we'll be in the future before you know it.

The Strangest Thing About Stranger Things is That My Son Looks Like the Girl in Stranger Things

My family just binge-watched Stranger Things, a deft and super-compelling derivative mash-up that perfectly channels so many great shows and films:  E.T. and The Goonies and Freaks and Geeks and Poltergeist and eXistenZ and The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Stand by Me and Super 8 . . . and while this is a good thing, to see our family-favorites blended together in one eight episode mini-series, it also makes me think that we've come to the end of some of sort of artistic road-- and I'm having these kinds of deep thoughts about things I shouldn't think so deeply about because I just finished Chuck Klosterman's new book, But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past, which proposes exactly what the subtitle suggests: that we look at the present as if it were the past, and so from a future perspective, only a few movies and TV shows will be remembered,and--sadly-- Stranger Things probably won't be one of them (in my opinion) because it's so derivative, and the original works will take precedence . . . but I could be wrong, perhaps Stranger Things will be the perfect vehicle to remember all the tropes of the realistic/spooky/horror/teen/noir/government conspiracy/alternate universe/sci-fi/kids-band-together-and-take-on-the-supernatural-and-corrupt-world-of-adults genre . . . but I also found it interesting that I received multiple texts, from friends and colleagues and my brother, all advising me to watch this show with my kids . . . and most of these texts were from people who did not have children of their own . . . which is spooky in itself, but this also probably stems from nostalgia for the days when we had shared TV experiences, Seinfeld or Dallas or whatever . . . and people were saying that this show would be a perfect one to enjoy that shared experience, not only with the general public but also with your family, and they were right (if you can endure your kids having a few nightmares) but nostalgia for that "normal" time might not be so normal either . . . that was just a small window when people were on the same page, watching three networks, in the pre-internet, pre-DVR, pre-streaming, pre-Youtube, pre-plethora of shows age, but before that, way before that, everybody was doing their own thing-- just like now-- in pre-literate society, when everyone was around their own fire, telling their own version of the Ur-story about saber-tooth tigers and cave bears . . . I suppose there were a few classics, Homer and Beowulf and Gilgamesh, but most of the programming must have been very unstructured and primitive and unique, stick puppets, Dunt and Thok doing their schtick, song parodies very specific to a particular clan of people . . . anyway, that's how it feels now-- everyone is watching their own private pantheon of entertainment, and it rarely coincides with anyone else, but I should get off my high-horse and just recommend this show, because it will remind older folks of a by-gone era of TV and film, and it will scare the shit out of younger viewers, while also immersing them in a world before the internet, of microfiche and rotary phones, a world where there might be vast conspiracies and things beyond our understanding, unlike the world we have now, where if you've got a hunch about something like that, you just Google it, and voila, you were right: there is a vast conspiracy and there are things far beyond our understanding and aliens have come to earth and they live among us and of course our government planned 9/11 and dinosaurs live right beside us and they're chickens . . . Stranger Things delivers what it promises, that even in the suburbs, if you're brave and adventurous and loyal and have an imagination and a bike, then there is adventure right out your door . . . the series begins with D&D, and it ends with the mention of an Atari . . . perhaps Atari is the harbinger of the end of an era, the end of kids out in the world, depending on themselves, alone, unstructured, off the grid, fighting epic forces; anyway, my wife and I loved it and my kids claim it's the "best show ever" and there's one more creepy thing, just for folks who know us: Eleven is the female version of my son Ian, they look nearly identical and also make the same expressions and have the same eyes, it took someone else to point this out, and once she did, it made me look at my son in a totally different light (as in, I think he might be able to move things with his mind and squish bad people's brains).

2016 Book List

Here's what I read in 2016 (and despite reading nearly a book a week, I feel dumber than ever) and if you head over to Gheorghe: The Blog, you can see my eleven favorites . . . and if you're really feeling crazy and literary, you can check out my previous lists, but if you're going to read one book on this list, I would suggest Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather . . . I've read it twice, and I'll bet I'll read it again someday . . . anyway, here they are-- it's a little scary for me when I peruse this list, because I can't remember all that much about some of the titles, but I guess that's what happens when you read too much;

1) Trunk Music (Michael Connelly)

2) Hide & Seek (Ian Rankin)

3) Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis Robert D. Putnam

4) One Plus One Jojo Moyes

5) Andrea Wulf The Invention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt's New World

6) Death Comes to the Archbishop (Willa Cather)

7) The Milagro Beanfield War (John Nichols)

8) Agent to the Stars (John Scalzi)

9) The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run-- or Ruin-- an Economy (Tim Harford)

10) Tim Harford The Undercover Economist

11) The Expatriates (Janice Y. K. Lee)

12) Tim Harford The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

13) Dale Russakoff  The Prize: Who's In Charge of America's Schools?

14) Charlie Jane Anders All the Birds in the Sky

15) Mohamed A. El-Erian  The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse

16) Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Evelyn Waugh)

17) The Power of Habit:Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

18) Angels Flight (Michael Connelly)

19) Robert J. Gordon  The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

20) Tony Hillerman A Thief of Time

21) Peter Frankopan Silk Roads: A New History of the World

22) Tony Hillerman Hunting Badger

23) Tony Hillerman Listening Woman

24) Tony Hillerman The Wailing Wind

25) The Lost World of the Old Ones:Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest David Roberts

26) Roadside Picnic (The Strugatsky Brothers)

27) Chuck Klosterman But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past

28) White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer

29) The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 technological forces that will Shape our future by Kevin Kelly

30) Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

31) Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) Jerome K. Jerome

32) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

33) Truly Madly Guilty Liane Moriarty

34) Seinfeldia by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

35) Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

36) Ghosts by Reina Telgemeier

37) The Walking Dead 23-26

38) The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark For the Ivy Leagues by Jeff Hobbs

39) The Nix by Nathan Hill

40) Bill Bryson The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain

41) Tim Wu The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

42) Colson Whitehead The Underground Railroad

43) Nicholson Baker Substitute

44) The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea by Callum Roberts

45) Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance.