Chuck Klosterman: belief

Transcript context

…What’s our biggest misconception about the ’90s? I would say that one of the things that I found interesting was, I am not certain it is a misremembered period. I think that there’s a caricature and an idea of the ’90s — I think in this book I described it as a low-stakes grunge cartoon, kind of. And that’s not perfect, but it’s not radically incorrect. The ’90s are still close enough that a lot of the things that we project upon that period aren’t so far from the truth. When you look at David Halberstam’s The Fifties, or books written about the ’60s, or books written about the ’70s, typically, the author is pushed or maybe feels obligated to contradict the widespread perception of the period. “We thought the ’70s were boring. Actually, there was all this tumult going on.” It’s always “We thought this, and we were wrong.” Someone could do that with a book about the ’90s, but I felt that that would be a misshapen view of how it was. My goal in this was to write a book that was not looking at the ’90s the way we think about the culture now, and jamming that retrospective view into a modern ideology, but to go back and try to capture what it actually felt like to experience that time. In some ways, it’s easy to seem smart by looking back and finding little signposts that signal a future, but it’s also not difficult to do that. What’s much harder is to describe what it felt like to hang around that signpost with no understanding that it had any future symbolic value. Now, the 1960s — you have the Professor on Gilligan’s Island, you have Spock on Star Trek. How does the popular culture of the ’90s portray science?…

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