Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

Countless writers and artists have spoken for a generation, but no one has done it quite like Chuck Klosterman. With an exhaustive knowledge of popular culture and an almost effortless ability to spin brilliant prose out of unlikely subject matter, Klosterman attacks the entire spectrum of postmodern America: reality TV, Internet porn, Pamela Anderson, literary Jesus freaks, and the real difference between apples and oranges (of which there is none). And don't even get him started on his love life and the whole Harry-Met-Sally situation.

Whether deconstructing Saved by the Bell episodes or the artistic legacy of Billy Joel, the symbolic importance of The Empire Strikes Back or the Celtics/Lakers rivalry, Chuck will make you think, he'll make you laugh, and he'll drive you insane -- usually all at once. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is ostensibly about art, entertainment, infotainment, sports, politics, and kittens, but -- really -- it's about us. All of us. As Klosterman realizes late at night, in the moment before he falls asleep, "In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever 'in and of itself.'" Read to believe.

The answer to these questions he implicitly poses is very much "yes"--that is, *if* you happen to be Henry James, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, or Roland Barthes. Koestenbaum is not in their league, and where he aims for charm and brilliance he comes off instead sounding both dippy and drippy. It's a pretty pointless read, and his self-indulgence comes off as infuriating rather than irresistible.

2001 CCCC Outstanding Book Award

The vast majority of academic books are written from the scholar’s position, even those that primarily concern teaching. Writing/Teaching, on the other hand, is a book about teaching written from the position of the teacher. As the title suggests, Kameen’s book is split into two halvesâyet both, in different ways and through different discourses, are derived from his work in the classroom, and his own struggle with issues and problems all teachers of writing must face.

The first half is a series of essays originating from a graduate seminar Kameen team-taught with professor and poet Toi Derricotte in 1994. Included are essays Kameen wrote, a selection of pieces written by other members of the group, and a reflective âpostscript.â These essays combine personal narrative, reflective meditation, and critical inquiryâall used as discourse to depict and examine the process of teaching.

The second half of the book contains essays on Plato’s dialoguesâprimarily Phaedrus and Protagorasâas a means to interrogate the position of teacher through the lens of the most famous of Western pedagoguesâSocrates. Here, Socrates is used as a tool to examine and critique both Kameen’s own teacherly identity and, in a wider sense, the set of cultural forces that pre-figure the available positions for both âteacherâ and âstudentâ in contemporary education.

What unites both halves is the way Kameen approaches eachâthe âpersonalâ and the âscholarlyââfrom his position as teacher. The texts presented provide the occasion for a complex and nuanced meditation on the classroom as a legitimate arena for the production of knowledge and research. Sure to be timely and controversial, Writing/Teaching will enter into the debate on whether to reconfigure the relationship between research and teaching currently taking place among teachers of composition, cultural studies, and rhetoric. Compelling reading for teachers or those contemplating a career in the profession.