Michael Chabon, asked if John McCain was smart or stupid picking Sarah Palin for vice president, said “the answer is probably both more pathetic and more chutzpadich than either [choice] would imply.”

In a humorous interview with Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, Chabon, who backs Barack Obama and whose Yiddish Policemen’s Union took place in Alaska, discussed his views of the state and the election. Alaska, he said, is “crazy beautiful” but also a “dark place, and not just because it was literally dark much of time.”

“Also, I found it (the place, not the people) hostile, and not just in the sense that wilderness is generally said to be hostile,” Chabon said. “I kept thinking of that bit from Twin Peaks, where the sheriff says, ‘There is something very, very strange in these old woods. Call it what you want, a darkness, a presence.’ Almost everything humans have built there is unbelievably ugly. That might have something to do with the air of resentment given off by the underlying terrain.”

Asked if Obama had placated elderly Jewish fears about his potential election, Chabon said he wasn’t sure.

Michael Chabon shed some more light on his next book, saying “a lot of the same concerns, themes, motifs, and even to some degree conventions, that I have been exploring in my recent work will find their way into this book.”

In an interview with science fiction magazine Locus, Chabon says the new book will take place in Oakley and Berkeley, a place he says he loves and “it turns out I actually know a lot about.” The novel appears to be the same untitled Bay Area novel that Chabon, which is set to come out around 2011.

“I want to write another novel for younger readers and I know what that’s going to be, but I just felt that it had been since Wonder Boys in the early ’90s that I had written a novel set in consensus reality — modern-day America — and I missed it,” Chabon said.

The full interview appears in the August issue of Locus.

Today is the last day for the Democratic National Convention, where Ayelet Waldman has been representing Berkeley as a delegate for Barack Obama.

The Berkeley Daily Planet profiled Waldman last week about becoming a delegate. “I was surprised I won,” Waldman said. “I wasn’t sure who would come. I ran on a slate with a friend, and we asked as many friends to come as possible; they would have to give up a beautiful Sunday. And when I arrived I saw this line, and I went up and down the line of people, campaigning.”

At the convention, an ABC affiliate interviewed Waldman about what it was like attending law school with Obama at Harvard. “He was someone you absolutely knew,” she said. “Everyone knew Barack at law school. It was very clear even then that he had some kind of special gift.”

Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won the Hugo Award on Saturday for best novel.

It’s the second science-fiction related prize that the novel has nabbed since it was published last summer. In April, Chabon won the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. He was nominated for an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, but lost to John Hart’s Down River.

GalleyCat notes that while Yiddish Policemen isn’t the first book to win both the Hugo and Nebula, “it is arguably the first time that either award has been given to a book that was not published as a science fiction or fantasy novel.”

The Los Angeles Times has a Q&A posted this week with Michael Chabon on the topic of genre and pulp fiction as Chabon continues to promote Maps and Legends.

“Every so often a writer hacks and crawls out of the brambles of genre,” Chabon says. “Somebody like Philip K. Dick clearly began in the pulps, writing mass commercial fiction. Almost by dint of the passion of his fans, and the intensity of his vision, and all of that stuff, eventually he ends up getting canonized in Library of America. But those are much more the exceptions.”

Chabon gives a list of authors who have inspired him over the years: Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Ross Thomas, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert, Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury, Jack Kirby, Steve Gerber, Alan Moore. “And there are a whole list of borderland writers — John Crowley, Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen Millhauser, Thomas Pynchon — writers who can dwell between worlds,” he adds.

The rest of the interview can be read here.