Chuck Klosterman Makes People Spit, Emit Other Bodily Fluids
"Oh my God!" gasps a Boston University student as he enters the room. "I'm like a little schoolgirl!" In her excitement, she spits on my knee.
She is Amanda and she has not just seen Brad Pitt. Or David Ortiz. Or the Crocodile Hunter's ghost. The 34-year-old bearded dude who just caused Amanda to expectorate is not bringing sexy back. Rather, he is a six-foot-two native North Dakotan who has been called everything from "the voice of a generation" to "the new Hunter S. Thompson" to a "saggy ass-head." He is wearing a jean jacket that could have been an iron-on canvas for Guns N' Roses back patches 20 years ago. He is Charles John "Chuck" Klosterman: pop-culture critic, four-time author, celebrity profiler, Esquire columnist, ESPN Page 2 sportswriter, former Spin senior editor, unrepentant Billy Joel fan. And he makes girls spit.
If you find any of this palatable, by all means read on. It's an incredibly lengthy profile/interview/assessment of our good friend Chuck Klosterman. The author seems to have mixed feelings about him, as do so many people who aren't busy hating him out of jealousy. Chuck himself suffers from this same problem: "I'm incredibly self-aware, but I don't have a great sense of self. Your sense of me is so much more accurate than mine. Totally is. Anybody who's not me, I think, has a better sense of me than I do."
We're not Chuck either, but, yeah, we think we have a pretty good sense of him. Finally, something about which we agree!
Hunting the wild Klosterman [Boston Phoenix]
Earlier: Asshole Whose Entire Career Based On Appreciating The Lowbrow Wants To Pull Up The Ladder