I just finished Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends. It's a splendid compilation of his essays and suchlike, published by McSweeney's. The cover is fantastically elaborate and the contents are similarly exuberant. I dog-eared a lot but I'm just going to excerpt a few big bits, because they give you a sense of how superb it is. (I hope they're not too big for Mr Chabon and/or his lawyers.)
This is how it opens, it's from Trickster In A Suit Of Lights - Thoughts On The Modern Short Story.
"Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jagermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a Street Fighter machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade. Entertainment trades in cliche and product placement. It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation. It skirts the black heart of life and drowns life's lambency in a halogen glare. Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you - bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.
But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted - indeed, we have helped to articulate - such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment. The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth, and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.
I'd like to believe that, because, I for read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period. Oh, I could decoct a brew of other, more impressive motivations and explanations. I could uncork some about reader response theory, or the Lacanian parole. I could go on about the storytelling impulse and the need to make sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I could adduce Kafka's formula: "A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul." I could go down to the cafe at the local mega-bookstore and take some wise words of Abelard or Koestler about the power of literature off a mug. But in the end - here's my point - it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles."
Isn't that great? Sets out his agenda - both the point of view and the kind of writing you're going to be riding on. I love this willingness to throw words, metaphors and references around like we're all as smart as Sorkin characters.
This is from a piece called The Killer Hook - Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!
"In a popular medium that needs to label everyone a journeyman hack or a flaming genius god - like the world of comic-book art - Howard Chaykin is something else: a craftsman, an artisan of pop.
...What I'm talking about is a kind - the toughest kind - of balancing act. Taking pains, working hard, not flaunting his or her chops so much as relying on them, the pop artisan teeters on a fine fulcrum between the stern, sell-the-product morality of the workhorse and the artist's urge to discover a pattern in, or derive a meaning from, the random facts of the world. Like those other postwar East Coast Jewish boys, Barry Levinson and Paul Simon, Chaykin, a man as gifted with a quicksilver intelligence, as irrepressible a sense of verbal play, and reservoirs of rage and humour of apparently equal depth, has spent most of his career seeking and sometimes finding, that difficult equilibrium.
The pop artisan within the received formulas - gangster movie, radio-ready A-side, space opera - and then incorporates in the style, manner and mood of the work bits and pieces derived from all the aesthetic movements he or she has ever fallen in love with in other movies or songs or novels, whether hackwork or genius (without regard for and sometimes without consciousness of any difference between the two): the bridge in a song by the Moonglows, a James Wong camera angle, a Sabatini cannonade, a Stan Getz solo, the climax of The Demolished Man, a locomotive design by Raymond Loewy, a Shecky Greene routine. When it works, what you get is not a collection of references, quotes, allusions, and cribs but a whole, seamless thing, both familiar and new: a record of the consciousness that was busy falling in love with those moments in the first place. It's that filtering consciousness, coupled with the physical ability (or whatever it is) to flat-out play or sing or write or draw, that transforms the fragments and jetsam and familiar pieces into something fresh and unheard of. If that sounds a lot like what flaming genius gods are supposed to be up to, there here's a distinction: the pop artisan is always hoping that, in the end, the thing is going to fucking kill. He is haunted by the vision of pop perfection: heartbreaking beauty that moves units. The closest that Howard Chaykin has yet come to fulfilling that vision - though he has approached it many times - is probably still American Flagg!"
That gets so much right for me. So much of what I love most is balanced in that lagrange point between art and commerce, not plumping for one or the other but excelling at both. The best people I've ever worked with have never worried about the art or commerce thing, they're doing both: "heartbreaking beauty that moves units".
And good use of a list as well. Lists are like poems with all the form squeezed out, you're just left with the meaning and the metaphor. Plus, I like the idea of The Killer Hook as a thing beyond music - like Rudy Rucker's Power Chords.