Friday Night Links/P.J.'s Picks: Monday Edition

I finished Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands over the weekend. Not the most interesting book in the world. The first essay,"Trickster in a Suit of Light , starts the book on a high note as it explains Chabon's stance on so-called "genre fiction" and "literature." The premise of the essay was that entertainment has gotten a bad rap over the years because we have limited its definition. Entertainment has come to mean mindless action movies and formulaic sitcoms. That isn't all entertainment is and can be, that's just what we've let it become. Writing, Chabon contents, is also entertainment and that giving writing such a label isn't derogatory, but merely a description of its basic function. He says, "I'd like to believe that, because I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period."

He goes on to define entertainment in its broader sense and finds it quite apropos when applied to writing.

"The original sense of the word "entertainment" is a lovely one of mutual support through intertwining, like a pair of trees grown together, interwoven, each sustaining and bearing up the other. It suggests a kind of mid-air transfer of strenght, contact across a void...I can't think of a better approximation between reader and writer."

The above quote is more or less the thesis for the entire collection of essays, though I felt it wasn't always supported all that well. A couple of the essays were only five or six pages long including, "Landsman of the Lost" which was about American comic strip writer Ben Katchor. The essay gives a brief account of how and why Chabon is interested in the man and then talks about what he did for the essay's remaining four or five pages. This essay, like many in the collection, felt cursory, more recollections than analysis. Chabon often talks of his childhood and liking comics and having various religious and identity crises, but none of it felt all that personal. I never felt that I was getting to know him better as a writer. The essays felt like facts, I was getting a list of things Chabon likes without really understanding their relationship to him or his writing.

The most compelling essay, "Imaginary Homelands," deals with Chabon's Jewish identity as awriter, how that informs his writing, and how an essay he wrote about a Yiddish dictionary angered a lot of scholarly Jews. It was the first time I felt Chabon was intimately discussing something that was important to him and how personal aspects of his life affected his public output as a writer. Plus, it dealt with etymology and language, which is always a point of interest to me. I wouldn't say this essay alone is worth the cost of the book, but it does finally reveal something about the author, which I had been waiting 157 pages for. I have not given up on Chabon as a fiction author. I've read his short story collection A Model World and hope to pick up Wonder Boys sometime soon. In the meantime, I'll stick to other more convincing essayist fare.



LINKS:

Good Magazine has several good articles, one of which claiming that 2009 is one of the best years for the novel we've seen in a while. Pynchon's new novel, Inherent Vice, is proof enough. For a list of must-read novels from 2009, none of which I've read (for shame!), click here.

The lucky bastards in Belgium have not only a kick ass train system, but a new central terminal decigned by Santiago Calatrava.

A new study has found that Mother Earth has tapped out and it's all because we put her in a choke hold. Now we're all going to die. Good going, citizens of Earth.

826 National, in addition to offering outstanding free tutoring services to children around the country, also has an unbeatable line of products including antimatter, robot emotions, and existentialist wine. To celebrate the organization's amazing products and its design/development team, 826 has put out a book entitled, Essentially Odd. It can be purchased at the 826 National website.