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There Was A Sort Of Irony In The Fact That These [superhero] Characters - Many Of Whom In That Period, The Golden Age, Had Been Evolved To Fight The Nazis - Were Themselves Very Much In The Nazi Ideal. The Idea That You Can Solve Problems Through Physical Strength, By Being Stronger And More Dominant And More Powerful - That Is Fascism. I Mean, That's It, That's The Essence Of Fascism. I Don't Think The Creators Of The Superheroes Or The Kids Who Were Reading Them At The Time Were The Slightest Bit Aware Of It.

-Michael Chabon

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There Was A Sort

Michael Chabon

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There Was A Sort Of Irony In The Fact That These [superhero] Characters - Many Of Whom In That Period, The Golden Age, Had Been Evolved To Fight The Nazis - Were Themselves Very Much In The Nazi Ideal. The Idea That You Can Solve Problems Through Physical Strength, By Being Stronger And More Dominant And More Powerful - That Is Fascism. I Mean, That's It, That's The Essence Of Fascism. I Don't Think The Creators Of The Superheroes Or The Kids Who Were Reading Them At The Time Were The Slightest Bit Aware Of It.

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It's Always Been Hard For Me To Tell The Difference Between Denial And What Used To Be Known As Hope.

. . .i Really Ought To Have Recognized It For What It Was And, Perhaps, To Have Stopped Right There - For It Was Nostalgia, And What Inspires Nostalgia Has Been Dead A Long Time

[comics] Were Viewed As The Literary Equivalent Of Bubblegum Cards, Meant To Be Poked Into The Spokes Of A Young Mind Where They Would Produce A Satisfying But Entirely Bogus Rumble Of Pleasure.

Forget About What You Are Escaping From. Reserve Your Anxiety For What You Are Escaping To.

Some Things That Are Invisible And Untouchable Can Nevertheless Be Seen And Felt.

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He Comes To This Other World And He Has To Reinvent Himself. Again, It Felt Natural, Even Though I'd Been Working Really Hard Trying To Come Up With Something.

Procrastination Is Something You Do Yourself. You Know: "i Gotta Sharpen These Pencils Before I Start. I Got 20 Pencils, They're Looking Kinda Dull." Well, The Pencils Aren't Calling You And Alluring You And Inviting You And Offering You Anything. They're Just Sitting There. You're The One Who's Procrastinating.

Procrastination

As For Comics, One Has Only To Turn To The Characteristic Output Of Marvel Comics, For The Period From About 1961 To About 1975, To Find Not An Expression Of Base And Cynical Impulses But Of Good, Old-fashioned Liberal Humanism Of A Kind That May Strike Us Today, God Help Us, As Quaint, But Which Nevertheless Appealed, In Story After Story, To Ideals Such As Tolerance, Technological Optimism, And Self-sacrifice For The Benefit Of Others.

Not Only Would I Never Want To Belong To Any Club That Would Have Me For A Member--if Elected I Would Wear Street Shoes Onto The Squash Court And Set Fire To The Ballroom Curtains.

I’m A Man Who Falls In Love So Easily, And With Such Reckless Lack Of Consideration For The Consequences Of My Actions, That From The Very First Instant Of Entering Into A Marriage I Become, Almost By Definition, An Adulterer.

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That's Why School Was Invented - To Give Your Parents Some Peace And Quiet During The Day.

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The World Like Our Heads Was Meant To Be Escaped From, They Are Prisons World And Head Alike.

Were Meant To Be

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Black And White

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... But He Believed That Every Great Love Was In Some Measure A Terrible Mistake.

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I Was Surprised That My Wife Thought It Was A Good Idea, Then Again With My Agent, Another Woman, Then My Editor, Another Woman - In Spite Of The Fact That All Three Of Them Reacted Positively I Still Have This Fear.

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Every Time Another Review Comes Out I Let Out A Deep Breath.

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There Were So Many Pittsburgh Poets In My Hallway That If, At That Instant, A Meteorite Had Come Smashing Through My Roof, There Would Never Have Been Another Stanza Written About Rusting Fathers And Impotent Steelworkers And The Bessemer Convertor Of Love.

One Knew, Of Course, That It Was Not The Red Cape Any More Than It Was The Boots, The Tights, The Trunks, Or The Trademark "s" That Gave Superman The Ability To Fly. That Ability Derived From The Effects Of The Rays Of Our Yellow Sun On Superman's Alien Anatomy, Which Had Evolved Under The Red Sun Of Krypton. And Yet You Had Only To Tie A Towel Around Your Shoulders To Feel The Strange Vibratory Pulse Of Flight Stirring In The Red Sun Of Your Heart.

He Took A Step Toward Her, Than Another, Tentatively, Gathering All His Strength, As Though About To Throw A Heavy Switch That Would, If His Calculations Were Correct, Bring Light To A Hundred Cities And Ten Thousand Darkened Rooms. He Was Going To Ask Her To Dance - That Was All.

... And Because It Was A Drunken Perception, It Was Perfect, Entire, And Lasted About Half A Second.

People Keep Saying, 'oh, You're Getting All These Great Reviews, That Must Make You Really Happy.' I Guess It Does, But Mostly It's Just A Relief.

It Was The Kind Of Promise A Father Makes Easily And Sincerely, Knowing At The Same Time That It Will Be Impossible To Keep. The Truth Of Some Promises Is Not As Important As Whether Or Not You Can Believe In Them, With All Your Heart. A Game Of Baseball Can't Really Make A Summer Day Last Forever. A Home Run Can't Really Heal All The Broken Places In Our World, Or In A Single Human Heart. And There Was No Way That Mr. Feld Could Keep His Promise Never To Leave Ethan Again. All Parents Leave Their Children One Day.

There's Nothing More Embarrassing Than To Have Earned The Disfavor Of A Perceptive Animal.

Bina, Thank You. Bina, Listen, This Guy. His Name Wasn't Lasker. This Guy-' She Puts A Hand To His Mouth. She Has Not Touched Him In Three Years. It Probably Would Be Too Much To Say That He Feels The Darkness Lift At The Touch Of Her Fingertips Against His Lips. But It Shivers, And Light Bleeds In Among The Cracks.

I Was Thinking, Too, Of Superman And His Fortress Of Solitude.

She Was A Natural Blonde, With Delicate Hands And Feet, And In Her Youthful Photographs One Saw A Girl With Mocking Eyes And A Tragic Smile, The Course Of Whose Life Would Conspire In Time To Transpose That Pair Of Adjectives.

We Have The Idea That Our Hearts, Once Broken, Scar Over With An Indestructible Tissue That Prevents Their Ever Breaking Again In Quite The Same Place.

I Said, “i Need To Hear Something That’s Going To Save My Life.” Re: Selecting Songs From A Jukebox.

I Can Imagine Anything Except Having No Imagination.

Undressing Her Was An Act Of Recklessness, A Kind Of Vandalism, Like Releasing A Zoo Full Of Animals, Or Blowing Up A Dam.

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I Have A Good Memory For Words, And When I Come Upon A Word I Don't Know, I Remember It, Or Try To - It's Almost Like A Tic.

The First Amendment Has The Same Role In My Life As A Citizen And A Writer As The Sun Has In Our Ecosystem.

No; He Could Be Ruined Again And Again By Hope, But He Would Never Be Capable Of Belief.

Again And Again

The Problems You Have As A Novelist Tend To Have To Do With Making A Living And Trying To Find Ways To Supplement The Income You Get From Writing Novels. For A Lot Of Writers, That Involves Teaching. In My Case, So Far, I've Been Able To Get By Working In Hollywood With This Tv Stuff I've Been Doing. And It's Very Important, Because My Wife Is A Writer, Too, And We Don't Have Health Insurance Through Any Employer.

...landsman Doesn't Buy That. Bina Never Stopped Wanting To Redeem The World. She Just Let The World She Was Trying To Redeem Get Smaller And Smaller Until At One Point, It Could Be Bounded In The Hat Of A Hopeless Policeman.

Art Is A Form Of Exploration, Of Sailing Off Into The Unknown Alone, Heading For Those Unmarked Places On The Map. If Children Are Not Permitted-not Taught-to Be Adventurers And Explorers As Children, What Will Become Of The World Of Adventure, Of Stories, Of Literature Itself?

That's A Big Trunk," James Said, As We Jammed In The Leathery Old Case That Looked So Much Like The Black Heart Of Some Leviathan. "it Fits A Tuba, Three Suitcases, A Dead Dog, And A Garment Bag Almost Perfectly." "that's Just What They Used To Say In The Ads," I Said.

Every Day Is Like A Kid's Drawing, Offered To You With A Strange Mix Of Ceremoniousness And Offhand Disregard, Yours For The Keeping. Some Of The Days Are Rich And Complicated, Others Inscrutable, Others Little More Than A Stray Gray Mark On A Ragged Page. Some You Manage To Hang On To, Though Your Reasons For Doing So Are Often Hard To Fathom. But Most Of Them You Just Ball Up And Throw Away.

He Had No Idea Of How Long His Life Would One Day Seem To Have Gone On; How Daily Present The Absence Of Love Would Come To Feel. “just Watch Me,” He Said.

Literature, Like Magic, Has Always Been About The Handling Of Secrets, About The Pain, The Destruction, And The Marvelous Liberation That Can Result When They Are Revealed. If A Writer Doesn't Give Away Secrets, His Own Or Those Of The People He Loves, If He Doesn't Court Disapproval, Reproach And General Wrath, Whether Of Friends, Family Or Party Apparatchiks... The Result Is Pallid, Inanimate, A Lump Of Earth.

The Magician Seemed To Promise That Something Torn To Bits Might Be Mended Without A Seam, That What Had Vanished Might Reappear, That A Scattered Handful Of Doves Or Dust Might Be Reunited By A Word, That A Paper Rose Consumed By Fire Could Be Made To Bloom From A Pile Of Ash. But Everyone Knew That It Was Only An Illusion. The True Magic Of This Broken World Lay In The Ability Of Things It Contained To Vanish, To Become So Thoroughly Lost, That They Might Never Have Existed In The First Place.

I Found One Remaining Box Of Comics Which I Had Saved. When I Opened It Up And That Smell Came Pouring Out, That Old Paper Smell, I Was Struck By A Rush Of Memories, A Sense Of My Childhood Self That Seemed To Be Contained In There.

I Do Have A Collection Of Mid-century, Small-press Science Fiction And Fantasy Hardcovers That Is My Most Focused And Dedicated Collection. Everything Else I Tend More To Acquire Or Amass Than Collect. I Have Vinyl Records I Listen To All The Time When I Work. But I Don’t Collect Records. I Just Buy Records Where The Price Seems Right And It’s Music I Actually Listen To.

It Took Marvel Comics Years To Begin To Put Together Any Worthwhile Superheroines. The First Crop Was, To A Gal, Embarrassingly Disappointing. They Had All The Measly Powers That Fifties And Sixties Male Chauvinism Could Contrive To Bestow On A Superwoman.

All Male Friendships Are Essentially Quixotic: They Last Only So Long As Each Man Is Willing To Polish The Shaving-bowl Helmet, Climb On His Donkey, And Ride Off After The Other In Pursuit Of Illusive Glory And Questionable Adventure.

To Me, Clark Kent In A Phone Booth And Houdini In A Packing Crate, They Were One And The Same Thing," He Would Learnedly Expound At Wondercon Or Angoulême Or To The Editor Of The Comics Journal . "you Weren't The Same Person When You Came Out As When You Went In.

See You In The Funny Papers," He Said. Jaunty, He Reminded Himself; Always Jaunty. In My Panache Is Their Hope For Salvation.

The Whole House Seemed To Exhale A Melancholy Breath Of Emptiness

The Handy Thing About Being A Father Is That The Historic Standard Is So Pitifully Low.

When I'm Writing Solitude Feels Very Good. But When I'm Not Writing It Feels Lonely... Having A Big Family Solves That Problem.

I Feel That In The Past, My Style Has Shown Itself To Be Capable Of Handling Dark And Light In The Same Paragraph, Or Even In The Same Sentence. That's Something I Almost Take For Granted. I Think It Was More A Concern To Get The Details Right And Persuasively Recreate The World I Was Trying To Write About.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday Night Is Like A Microwave Burrito. Very Tough To Ruin Something That Starts Out So Bad To Begin With.

That Evening I Rode Downtown On An Unaccountably Empty Bus, Sitting In The Last Row. At The Front I Saw A Thin Cloud Of Smoke Rising Around The Driver’s Head. ‘hey, Bus Driver,’ I Said. ‘can I Smoke?’ ‘may I,’ Said The Bus Driver. ‘i Love You,’ I Said.

Mr. Feld Was Right; Life Was Like Baseball, Filled With Loss And Error, With Bad Hops And Wild Pitches, A Game In Which Even Champions Lost Almost As Often As They Won, And Even The Best Hitters Were Put Out Seventy Percent Of The Time.

But The First Lie In The Series Is The One You Make With The Greatest Trepidation And The Heaviest Heart.

I Knew That I Shouldn’t Have, But I Did It All The Same; And There You Have My Epitaph, Or One Of Them, Because My Grave Is Going To Require A Monument Inscribed On All Four Sides With Rueful Mottoes, In Small Characters, Set Close Together.

I Have A Deadline. I'm Glad. I Think That Will Help Me Get It Done.

The Devolution Of American Culture Takes Another Great Step Forward

We Are Accustomed To Repeating The Cliché, And To Believing, That 'our Most Precious Resource Is Our Children.' But We Have Plenty Of Children To Go Around, God Knows, And As With Doritos, We Can Always Make More. The True Scarcity We Face Is Practicing Adults, Of People Who Know How Marginal, How Fragile, How Finite Their Lives And Their Stories And Their Ambitions Really Are But Who Find Value In This Knowledge, Even A Sense Of Strange Comfort, Because They Know Their Condition Is Universal, Is Shared.

With Patience And Calm, Persistence And Stoicism, Good Handwriting And Careful Labeling, They Would Meet Persecution, Indignity, And Hardship Head-on.

I Don't Have A Problem With Many Uses Of The Word Genre, Just Certain Ones. I Have The Most Trouble When These Labels Are Used To Prevent Discussion, To Prevent A Work From Being Taken Seriously As Literature. When We Say "genre," We Generally Mean "something Crappy," Something That Would Be Sold In An Airport.

The Little Boy Had Wandered Away From His Mother, Tacking Across The Grass Toward The Play Structure. His Mother Watched Him Go, Proud, Tickled, Unaware That Every Time They Toddled Away From You, They Came Back A Little Different, Ten Seconds Older And Nearer To The Day When They Left You For Good. Pearl Divers In Training, Staying Under A Few Seconds Longer Every Time.

He Was A Fugitive, Lurking Soul, James Leer. He Didn't Belong Anywhere, But Things Went Much Better For Him In Places Where Nobody Belonged.

Most Science Fiction Seemed To Be Written For People Who Already Liked Science Fiction; I Wanted To Write Stories For Anyone, Anywhere, Living At Any Time In The History Of The World.

The Things I Keep Going Back To, Rereading, Maybe They Say More About Me As A Reader Than About The Books. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Pale Fire.

What Smells Strongly Of Crap To One Generation - Victorian Penny Dreadfuls, The Music Of The Archies, The Lone Ranger Radio Show, Blaxploitation Films Of The Seventies - So Often Becomes A Fruitful Source Of Inspiration, Veneration, And Study For Those To Come, While Certified Great And Worthy Art Molders And Fades On Its Storage Rack, Giving Off An Increasingly Powerful Whiff Of Naphthalene.

Childhood Is A Branch Of Cartography.

It Is Always So Simple, And So Complicating, To Accept An Apology.

Do What You Gotta Do And Stay Fly

I Suppose There Is Something Appealing About A Word That Everyone Uses With Absolute Confidence But On Whose Exact Meaning No Two People Can Agree. The Word That I'm Thinking Of Right Now Is Genre, One Of Those French Words, Like Crêpe, That No One Can Pronounce Both Correctly And Without Sounding Pretentious.

I Smoked And Looked Down At The Bottom Of Pittsburgh For A Little While, Watching The Kids Playing Tiny Baseball, The Distant Figures Of Dogs Snatching At A Little Passing Car, A Miniature Housewife On Her Back Porch Shaking Out A Snippet Of Red Rug, And I Made A Sudden, Frightened Vow Never To Become That Small, And To Devote Myself To Getting Bigger And Bigger And Bigger.

I Don't Do A Lot Of Foisting, Because When It Comes To Books I Don't Really Like To Be Foisted Upon.

The Truth Of Some Promises Is Not As Important As Whether Or Not You Can Believe In Them, With All Your Heart.

For Me, Nostalgia Is An Involuntary Emotion. ... I Think It's Just A Natural Human Response To Loss.

Anything Good That I Have Written Has, At Some Point During Its Composition, Left Me Feeling Uneasy And Afraid. It Has Seemed, For A Moment At Least, To Put Me At Risk.

The Instructor, Ms. Pease, Also Taught In The Church's Religious School, And She Had A Sunday School Manner At Once Saccharine And Condemnatory.

It Never Takes Longer Than A Few Minutes, When They Get Together, For Everyone To Revert To The State Of Nature, Like A Party Marooned By A Shipwreck. That's What A Family Is. Also The Storm At Sea, The Ship, And The Unknown Shore. And The Hats And The Whiskey Stills That You Make Out Of Bamboo And Coconuts. And The Fire That You Light To Keep Away The Beasts.

A True Storyteller Is Really Good At Writing Himself Into A Corner And Then Finding A Way Out Of That Corner

He Looked So Profoundly Disappointed In Me That I Wondered For A Moment If He Was Someone I Knew.

And Then The Man Reminded Max, With A Serious But Suave And Practiced Air, That Freedom Was A Debt That Could Be Repaid Only By Purchasing The Freedom Of Others.

Only Love Could Pick A Nested Pair Of Steel Bramah Locks.

Poor Little Librarians Of The World, Those Girls, Secretly Lovely, Their Looks Marred Forever By The Cruelty Of A Pair Of Big Dark Eyeglasses!

Every Messiah Fails, The Moment He Tries To Redeem Himself.

It Drains The Bars And Cafes After Hours, Concentrates The Wicked And The Guilty Along Its Chipped Formica Counter, And Thrums With The Gossip Of Criminals, Policemen, Shtarkers,and Schlemiels, Whores And Night Owls ... Three Or Four Floaters, Solitaries, And Drunks Between Benders Lean Against The Sparkly Resin Counter, Sucking The Tea From Their Shtekelehs And Working The Calulations Of Their Next Big Mistake.

Fathering Imposed An Obligation That Was More Than Your Money, Your Body, Or Your Time, A Presence Neither Physical Nor Measurable By Clocks: Open-ended, Eternal, And Invisible, Like The Commitment Of Gravity To The Stars.

As Long As She Was Falling In Love With Me, I Might As Well Start Making Her Promises I Didn't Intend To Keep.

Falling In Love

Bina Rolls Her Eyes, Hands On Her Hips, Glances At The Door. Then She Comes Over And Drops Her Bag And Plops Down Beside Him. How Many Times, He Wonders, Can She Have Enough Of Him, Already, And Still Have Not Quite Enough?

Maybe All Wondrous Books Appear In Our Lives The Way Milo’s Tollbooth Appears, An Inexplicable Gift, Cast Up By Some Curious Chance That Comes To Feel, After We Have Finished And Fallen In Love With The Book, Like The Workings Of A Secret Purpose. Of All The Enchantments Of Beloved Books The Most Mysterious-the Most Phantasmal-is The Way They Always Seem To Come Our Way Precisely When We Need Them.

His Dreams Had Always Been Houdiniesque: They Were The Dreams Of A Pupa Struggling In Its Blind Cocoon, Mad For A Taste Of Light And Air.

In The Immemorial Style Of Young Men Under Pressure, They Decided To Lie Down For A While And Waste Time.

When Some Drunken Fool Asked If She Was A Lesbian, She Would Say, 'in Everything But Sexual Preference.

I Have Confused Ideas Of Deity, Heavily Influenced By Mind-altering Years Of Reading Science Fiction, That Do Not Often Trouble Me, But One Thing I Know For Certain, And Have Known Since The Age Of Five Or Six, Is That I Really Can't Stand The God Of Abraham. In Fact, I Consider Him To Constitute The Pattern To Which Every True Asshole I Have Ever Known In My Life Has Pretty Well Conformed.

There Was A Sort Of Irony In The Fact That These [superhero] Characters - Many Of Whom In That Period, The Golden Age, Had Been Evolved To Fight The Nazis - Were Themselves Very Much In The Nazi Ideal. The Idea That You Can Solve Problems Through Physical Strength, By Being Stronger And More Dominant And More Powerful - That Is Fascism. I Mean, That's It, That's The Essence Of Fascism. I Don't Think The Creators Of The Superheroes Or The Kids Who Were Reading Them At The Time Were The Slightest Bit Aware Of It.

I Don't Think You Could Teach Someone To Be A Genius, But You Can Certainly Teach Them To Not Make Rookie Mistakes And To Look At Writing The Way A Writer Looks At Writing, And Not Just The Way A Reader Looks At Writing. There Are A Lot Of Techniques And Skills That Can Be Taught That Will Be Helpful To Anybody, No Matter How Gifted They Are, And I Think Writing Programs Can Be Very Good For People.

[while Writing], I'll Go Anywhere I Find That Is Quiet, Has No Internet. I Have A Big Internet Problem.

It Was Nice Standing Out In The Darkness, In The Damp Grass, With Spring Coming On And A Feeling In My Heart Of Imminent Disaster.

Horror Grows Impatient, Rhetorically, With The Stoic Fatalism Of Ecclesiastes. That We Are All Going To Die, That Death Mocks And Cancels Every One Of Our Acts And Attainments And Every Moment Of Our Life Histories, This Knowledge Is To Storytelling What Rust Is To Oxidation; The Writer Of Horror Holds With Those Who Favor Fire. The Horror Writer Is Not Content To Report On Death As The Universal System Of Human Weather; He Or She Chases Tornadoes. Horror Is Stoicism With A Taste For Spectacle.

Love Is Like Falconry," He Said. "don't You Think That's True, Cleveland?" "never Say Love Is Like Anything." Said Cleveland. "it Isn't.

What's Going To Be Hard For Me Is To Try To Divorce Myself As Much As Possible From What I Wrote. I'll Have To Approach It Simply As Raw Material And Try To Craft A Film Script Out Of It.

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