klosterman on teaching

In his smart and smarmy new book A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas, Chuck Klosterman describes his meeting with Britney Spears. Klosterman, who writes for Spin, Esquire, and other magazines, attempts to convince Spears to discuss her own iconography, to analyze her own appeal, to reflect on her cultural significance. Spears won't bite. Perhaps she has no interest in such things, maybe she's intellectually incapable of meta...it isn't clear. But the point is, Klosterman wants analysis and Spears wants surface. Even regarding the easiest of Spears' cultural moments, they differ on how to talk. For Spears, "I'm a Slave 4U" is a ditty about how she gets lost in music. Her Catholic schoolgirl costume is an outfit. Klosterman wants to riff on how soft-porn Esquire covers impact careers of young women in the entertainment industry. Spears: "...it's the freaking cover of Esquire magazine! Why not? You get to look beautiful. It's not that deep."

And there it is. The moment of teacher-student conflict. "Analyze. Think critically. Deconstruct. Expand." "Why? It's not that deep."

Chuck Klosterman, one of my favorite writers, is always aware of the absurdity of his own subject matter, the absurdity of his own positioning as commentator. Yet he never hesitates to elevate the absurd--and the popular, the everyday, the cliche--to the highest of heights. He's a skilled rhetorical analyst, always searching for a funny but somehow useful shorthand for, say, outlining why Billy Joel is great but not cool, or coming up with a taxonomy for types of Lakers and Celtics fan, or listing what 20th century icons are "advanced" (Val Kilmer and Raymond Carver, for example). Rhetorical analysis as three-hour drunken dorm conversation.

I must confess that I want students to write like Chuck Klosterman, which is probably a by-product of obsessing over pop culture from the time I could talk, coming up through a graduate and TA-training program foregrounding neo-aristotelian rhetorical analysis, and using for years cultural studies readers in first-year comp courses (talk about cultural myths and you'll become a better writer--which itself has become a cultural myth!). A preferable objective would probably be wanting students to write themselves...only more effectively, with a larger arsenal of writerly choices, blah, blah, blah. But I know I'm not alone in having this kind of model writer in my head as I plan syllabi, comment on student papers, and lead discussion in class. Some teachers want their students to write like Noam Chomsky or Natalie Goldberg or a columnist at Wired or Anna Quindlen; for me, it's Klosterman.

I've heard that Britney Spears response over the years: "It's not that deep." In the Klosterman piece, Spears seems lost in soundbites, lost in her handlers, unaware of what she even thinks, as she subsistutes the p.r. answer for the honest answer. I'm not saying this mentality is the mentality of students. I wouldn't be so cavalier as to position teachers as somehow above this kind of mythic thinking (see again the aforementioned instance of teacher mythology; see also a thousand other examples of said thinking), but I would suggest that one useful thing we can do for students is to help them locate writers whose thinking resonates for them, whose thinking opens up new possibilities for them. Might not be Chomsky or Klosterman or whoever else we valorize, but there's a wonderful and productive process (discovery, reflection, critique, expression) that we've got the opportunity to model. Good way to earn a buck. Meantime, check out Klosterman's book.