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Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands: This is a collection of essays, including defenses of “genre” writing and what Chabon calls fan fiction, though he is generalizing the term to include writing towards a desired style and sees it as part of an artist’s journey: “Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving—amateurs—we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers—should we be lucky enough to find any—some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss” (57).
I’m not thrilled with his desire to write about “problematic women and the men who make them that way,” as he describes The Great Gatsby and his own The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but his narrative of the creative process is still compelling. I particularly enjoyed his description of the good and the bad parts of writing—the way he tried to put into his first book “everything I had ever learned or felt, and to use every single word I knew,” an intensely fun process. By contrast, writing his second novel was awful: “Where Mysteries had been a kind of Drake’s voyage, a wild jaunt in a trim ship to make marvelous discoveries and conduct raucous pirate raids on the great ports of American literature, Fountain City [ultimately abandoned] was more like the journey of Lewis and Clark, a long, often dismal tramp through a vast terrain in pursuit of a grand but fundamentally mistaken prize.”
There are reviews of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass trilogy, as well as appreciations of M.R. James, Howard Chaykin, Sherlock Holmes, Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl, and Will Eisner. The single most interesting piece is the last one, a mix of reality and fantasy in which “Michael Chabon” narrates his experiences with golems. In an earlier piece, he argues that golems represent the fundamental power and danger of the creative impulse, the way that the creation detaches itself from the creator, both representing something about the creator and existing independently. The writer always risks being judged by his or her characters, and must live with the internal suspicion that such judgments aren't entirely false, even if they're not true either. Maybe all writers have their own foundational metaphors; I thought the golem worked well.
I’m not thrilled with his desire to write about “problematic women and the men who make them that way,” as he describes The Great Gatsby and his own The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but his narrative of the creative process is still compelling. I particularly enjoyed his description of the good and the bad parts of writing—the way he tried to put into his first book “everything I had ever learned or felt, and to use every single word I knew,” an intensely fun process. By contrast, writing his second novel was awful: “Where Mysteries had been a kind of Drake’s voyage, a wild jaunt in a trim ship to make marvelous discoveries and conduct raucous pirate raids on the great ports of American literature, Fountain City [ultimately abandoned] was more like the journey of Lewis and Clark, a long, often dismal tramp through a vast terrain in pursuit of a grand but fundamentally mistaken prize.”
There are reviews of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass trilogy, as well as appreciations of M.R. James, Howard Chaykin, Sherlock Holmes, Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl, and Will Eisner. The single most interesting piece is the last one, a mix of reality and fantasy in which “Michael Chabon” narrates his experiences with golems. In an earlier piece, he argues that golems represent the fundamental power and danger of the creative impulse, the way that the creation detaches itself from the creator, both representing something about the creator and existing independently. The writer always risks being judged by his or her characters, and must live with the internal suspicion that such judgments aren't entirely false, even if they're not true either. Maybe all writers have their own foundational metaphors; I thought the golem worked well.
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