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WALDMAN REFLECTS ON CONTROVERSIAL ESSAY
The Contra Costa Times carried a thorough wrap-up of the recent flap over Ayelet Waldman's now-infamous essay where she says, "I love my husband more than I love my children."
Tuesday night, before Waldman took the stage at Walnut Creek's Regional Center for the Arts, some audience members wondered if she would address the elephant in the living room. And indeed she did, tackling the issue head on.
Based on the laughter in the theater, the audience was decidedly more forgiving than Oprah's.
But still, it was the suburban East Bay, a notoriously family-friendly community that prides itself on supporting the ideals of healthy child-rearing.
And if you listen to many of Waldman's critics, she's a woman determined to destroy those values.
"After the New York Times piece published, I had people calling and e-mailing to say they thought my children should be taken away," Waldman said Tuesday in her biting and humorous explanation to the nearly 800 audience members on her newfound infamy. INTERVIEW WITH MALISZEWSKI ONLINE
MobyLives published an interview with Paul Maliszewski yesterday, where they discuss the recent controversy involving him and Michael Chabon.
DLJ: If I read you correctly, you believe Chabon's presentation represents a failure of the imagination.
PM: It seemed to me that buried in the lecture is a story about Chabon's life, and that it got lost. It's a story about his growing up in Columbia, Maryland, about his parents' divorce and his father's embellishments and lies, and about Chabon's attempts to escape that world into alternative universes imagined by mystery, science–fiction, and fantasy writers. To me, that sounds like a great story. It's a quieter story, for sure, and harder to tell in some ways, more difficult to imagine as a writer, because, in some of its details, it might appear just plain or even average American, but still, I'd love to read it. But that story—that true story—is obscured when Chabon inserts his fictional brush with a fake Holocaust survivor. In fact, letting the Holocaust into the story of his life has the effect of dwarfing everything else.
DLJ: What about another of the charges leveled against you in the Times story: that you have faked a story in the past. This is something you wrote about yourself, for The Baffler, and in fact you mention these writings in the Bookforum Chabon piece.
PM: I never faked a story. That's a real misunderstanding of what I did. As a reporter, working at The Business Journal of central New York, I made up fictional characters and had them write satiric letters to the editor. Over time, I had other characters submit managerial advice columns and even a couple of news articles. And the editors decided to publish them. But as a journalist all that time, in my actual reporting, I turned in work that was sound and true and accurate. What I did was very different from Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass, who handed in work of their own that contained fiction. I was writing satires in order to comment on the Gold Rush that was the business world in the late 1990s. Most readers, thankfully, do get this distinction. But if people are interested, they can take a look at what I wrote for The Baffler. Their website has both essays, "I, Faker" and "Faker's Progress," as well as all the satiric articles.
DLJ: Matthew Brogan of Nextbook, the sponsor of the Chabon lectures, has also written a heated response to your article, one that Nextbook has been sending to numerous publications and bloggers in what seems a rather vigorous spin campaign. It will also be appearing in Bookforum as a letter to the editor. What do you think of Brogan's charge that you missed the fact that Chabon's lecture was a "tall tale"?
PM: Brogan argues that Chabon's lecture takes the form of a tall tale, but it remains an inconvenient fact, and one he avoids addressing, that except for him, everyone I spoke to thought that the section of the lecture about Joseph Adler and his fake Holocaust memoir was absolutely true. Even a member of Nextbook's fellows program, who introduced Chabon at both the lectures I attended and ran the Q&A sessions after, thought the story about the Holocaust memoir was real.
These were not simple–minded folk. They don't also believe that golems are real, or that unicorns exist. They detected the clearly fictional. Everyone did. But when it came to the part about the Holocaust, they all assumed they were once again in the realm of fact.
DLJ: Perhaps somewhat contradictory to that, Brogan also writes, "Maliszewski's point seems to be simply this: Michael Chabon promised us a memoir and instead gave us a yarn."
PM: My point was never that simple. I was less interested in the fact of the trick Chabon played on the audiences than its content, namely the way the trick relies on the Holocaust to beef up the seriousness of his lecture and supplement his identity as a Jewish writer. The essay is not about an author committing a bad act, but rather an author creating what I consider bad art. NEW AYELET SALON COLUMN
Ayelet Waldman's newest Salon column hit the net yesterday, this time discussing "society's bigotry -- and our inability to think straight about teenage sexuality."
Kansas' statutory rape law prohibits "criminal sodomy" (including oral sex) with teenagers younger than 16. If the object of Matthew's affection had been female, however, Kansas would have afforded him the benefit of its romantically named "Romeo and Juliet" statute, designed precisely for kids like him, kids who have consensual sex with other kids. In Kansas, and in many other states, when two teenagers have heterosexual sex, even the dreaded sodomy, the penalties are relatively mild. If Matthew had had consensual sex with a girl, and the state had prosecuted him at all, the longest sentence they could have given him was 15 months. Instead, because Matthew had sex with another boy, and only because he had sex with another boy, he has spent the past five years in Ellsworth Correctional Facility in central Kansas. BOND SIGNS FOR VAUGHAN STORYLINE
Philip Bond (Kill Your Boyfriend) has signed on as the artist for Brian K. Vaughan's up-coming storyarc starting with The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #8, Michael Chabon announced Friday.
Chabon, announcing the hiring on his website, said Bond's past work suggests he "is also well-suited to tackling the remarkable use that Vaughan's Escapist script makes of the urban landscape and landmarks of Cleveland, OH."
To visit Bond's official website, click here.
A DIFFERENT VIEW
Scott McLemee has written a very calm and scholarly analysis of the Chabon-Maliszewski controvery that we should all read.
If you take the time to read the essay, though, you find a nuanced and searching analysis of the relationships between author and audience, between memory and fantasy, between story-telling and truth-telling. Maliszewski’s point is less that Chabon intends to trick his audience than that (for a variety of reasons) his listeners want the story to be true. To read the entire piece, click here.
VAUGHAN ON GETTING ESCAPIST GIG
Over at his blog, Brian K. Vaughan posted an entry yesterday detailing some of his plans for his new storyarc in The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, along with how he got the job.
One conversation later, and I had signed up with Dark Horse to be the writer of an all-new ongoing story that will soon begin appearing in each installment of the quarterly Amazing Adventures of the Escapist (which will continue to feature anthology-style stories from today's best writers and artists in the back of every issue).
I don't want to say too much just yet, but taking a page from Chabon's Kavalier & Clay, our story will balance the fictional adventures of the Escapist with the "real world" drama of the new creators behind the character's modern-day return. I'm very proud to announce that my collaborator for this endeavor will be artist extraordinaire Philip Bond, the genius behind Kill Your Boyfriend, The Invisibles, and most recently with Grant Morrison, Vimanarama. YANKEE POT ROAST SPOOFS CHABON DEBACLE
What a relief to read something with a sense of humor about this whole Chabon-Maliszewski controversy. Click here.
AYELET MEETS OPRAH!
Oprah: I think a lot of people interpreted it, or misinterpreted, that article that you wrote…when you say I love my husband more, I think a lot of women heard you don't love your children.
Mothers in the discussion: Why can't you say to them I love your daddy different? Why is there such an obsession of putting somebody before the other?
Ayelet: [In the article] I was responding to what I have seen as a replacement. And what I say is I'm in love with my husband but I love my children. I mean the truth is, yes, of course you love people differently. But what I'm saying is I don't think what we're seeing nowadays is people loving differently. I think we're seeing people loving more. MALISZEWSKI'S LIES
As web editor for McSweeney's Quarterly, Paul Maliszewski sent anonymous e-mail newsletters with fake gossip about writers, according to The New York Times and Edward Champion's blog.
"Hundreds of people around New York were getting some incredibly blasphemous e-mail full of incredible fabrications," Dave Eggers, McSweeney's editor, told the Times. "His contention was that people knew it was a joke. Nobody but him thought it was a joke."
McSweeney's editor, Dave Eggers, told the Times that Maliszewski's job ended when the magazine found out. As previously reported, Maliszewski published an article in Bookforum describing how Michael Chabon may have lied to his audience during a lecture about golums and the Holocaust.
Asked for comment by Edward Champion, Maliszewski said he had no specific comment on Egger's remarks, refering readers instead to his Bookforum article. But he added that his article was "a serious investigation and a fair piece of journalism and is based on my extensive interviews with Chabon, two people at Nextbook, and several members of the audience. It would have been nice to let all that work do the talking, but that doesn't seem to be possible."
An anonymous source reported to Champion that Maliszewski's newsletter, called "The Pearl Report" (though later sources indicate it was also called "Pearl Files") and signed by "Allen Pearl," reported "various gossipy tidbits, mostly about Tom Beller and the three Jonathans - Ames, Franzen, Lethem. (Though I think Chabon and maybe even Eggers figured in a few items.)"
For example, according to the source one e-mail alleged that Jonathan Lethem had hired someone to sign autographs for him for limited editions of his books in the late 1990s.
The source, who hinted at being a McSweeney's employee, said an ex-girlfriend of Maliszewski "spilled the beans" to editors at the magazine in spring 2002.
"At which point Dave did the stuff that makes him so eminently qualified to replace the 'zinger-man at the Holy Office, now that the dude's moved on up," the source said.
Maliszewski edited McSweeney's 7 in 2001, which featured Chabon's "The Return of the Amazing Cavalieri: From Untold Tales of Kavalier & Clay."
In a 1998 article for The Baffler, Maliszewski admits to writing several fake letters-to-the-editor to The Business Journal in Central New York since August 1997, using various pseudonyms and free e-mail accounds. Maliszewski confirmed the account with The New York Times, though who knows if he is really telling the truth.
"How many fake writers did I invent?" he writes. "About as many as the months I spent working at The Business Journal full-time."
He continues: "In my spare time I manufactured whole companies. They emerged from my head wildly profitable and fully staffed with ambitious assistants obeying the bidding of sage bosses. If my fictional characters filed tax returns, I probably would have been personally responsible for creating more new jobs in central New York than any non-fictional company."
"I littered my fictions with bogus references and bastardized quotations from literature, less to show off my fine education than to underline how utterly irrelevant it now seemed. I quoted Donald Barthelme but made the words pass through the dead lips of Adam Smith. In another counterfeit, I drew names of characters from a New York Review of Books essay about Vincent Van Gogh forgers and the businessmen who knowingly peddled the knock-offs."
When he heard about Stephen Glass, the former The New Republic reporter who had fictionalized dozens of articles, he said he initially "thought I had found a co-conspirator."
"Here, maybe, was someone else who understood the restrictions of journalism and bristled against them."
Later, he decided Glass's "writing was not so much satiric as sarcastic."
"Not a single article tweaked readers' expectations or questioned received opinion," Maliszewski wrote. "He only made the conventionally wise seem that much wiser."
More news as it comes...
UPDATE: One of the Pearl reports has surfaced over at Radosh.Net. The newsletter, titled "Pearl Files," was, as previously reported, written under a pseudonym, "Allen Pearl," and sent out using a Hotmail account. To read it, click here.
RUDIN TO LEAVE PARAMOUNT WITH KAVALIER IN HAND
Producer Scott Rudin (The Hours, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events) will likely sign an exclusive five-year deal with Walt Disney, Co., leaving Paramount Pictures, his home for the past 15 years, and possibly taking The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay with him.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Rudin will likely work to reinvent Miramax Picures, which co-founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein left last month.
Rudin is expected to exercise a "unique provision" in his Paramount contract if he can leave before Sept. 2006, where he could take all of his approximately 40 development projects, including the adaptation of Kavalier & Clay, to Disney.
Check out the Los Angeles Times for the full-story.
CHABON COMMENTS ON CONTROVERSY
Michael Chabon posted a little tid-bit on the recent controversy related to his Golem speeches.
Now available for degustation at Nextbook's excellent website, along with a letter to Bookforum from Matthew Brogan, the program director of Nextbook.
Experts have been unable to determine why this feature is accompanied by a photograph of Mrs. Colodny, a Hebrew school teacher active in Columbia, Maryland during the early nineteen seventies. NEXTBOOK RESPONDS TO MALISZEWSKI'S CHABON CRITICISM
As reported earlier today, the April-May issue of Bookforum features an article by Paul Maliszewski describing how Michael Chabon may have lied to his audience during a lecture about golums and the Holocaust.
Chabon declined to comment for The New York Times. But Nextbook, the sponsor of at least one of the lectures, now has a response by Matthew Brogan, Nextbook's program director, defending Chabon.
MICHAEL CHABON'S HOLOCAUST HOAX?
The New York Times reports that the April-May issue of Bookforum includes a cover-story by Paul Maliszewski describing how Michael Chabon may have "exceeded the bounds of poetic license in a lecture that he has given perhaps half a dozen times since 2003."
Mr. Maliszewski pointed out that the Nazi character was entirely fictional, and contended that Mr. Chabon had misled his listeners into believing it was real. He suggested that Mr. Chabon had "fashioned a Jewish identity for himself that incorporates - through an utter fiction - the Holocaust."
The lecture's organizers have said the lecture was clearly advertised as a series of yarns. In a letter that will be printed in the next issue of Bookforum, Matthew Brogan, program director for the Jewish literary nonprofit organization Nextbook, which sponsored some of the performances, wrote that Mr. Chabon had "signaled to the audience at every turn that the narrator is not to be completely trusted." Mr. Maliszewski, he added, had "deliberately misread these signs in the hope of stirring up a scandal." ESCAPIST, VAUGHAN NOMINATED FOR 2005 EISNERS
Nominees for the 2005 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards were announced today, with Michael Chabon Presents The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist receiving a nomination for "Best Anthology" and new Escapist writer Brian K. Vaughan topping the list with seven nominations.
The Escapist will compete against Top Cow's Common Grounds, Dark Horse's The Dark Hourse Book of Witchcraft, Burlyman's The Matrix Comics (vol. 2), and McSweeney's Quarterly #13, edited by Chris Ware.
Along with being the creative mind behind The Escapist, Chabon also contributed an essay to McSweeney's Quarterly #13.
Vaughan, who Chabon announced Tuesday will now be tackling an on-going Escapist tale, received seven nominations. Five are for his WildStorm series Ex Machina, which tells the tall of a former superhero who becomes mayor (Best New Series, Continuing Series, Single Issue, Serialized Story).
Two other nominations are for Vertigo's Y: The Last Man (Continuing Series, Serialized Story).
Most importantly, Vaughan is nominated for Best Writer.
For a complete list of the nominees, click here.
Winners will be announced July 18 at the San Diego Comic Convention.
FAME COMPOSERS WROTE KAVALIER SONG?
Is it possible a song based on Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, written by a former collaberator with Bob Dylan, exists somewhere in this world?
ACM Records, a music production company in New Jersey, claims to have a song written by Jacques Levy, who, amongst other career achievements, wrote lyrics for Dylan's album "Desire" and co-wrote Fame: The Musical. Levy died Sept. 30, 2004 at the age 69, but according to ACM, Levy had just completed a song he was trying to pitch for Paramount Pictures' adaptation of Kavalier & Clay.
Written by Levy and Steve Margoshes (who co-wrote Fame with Levy), the song, titled "Friends," was "to be
sung by two guys representing the characters Kavalier & Clay," according to ACM. The record company believes the song may have been Levy's final work and claims Levy
had been trying to reach the film's director but became ill before he could.
The song is intended for the final credits, according to ACM.
Stephen Daldry (The Hours) is set to direct, with Scott Rudin producing.
More news, and hopefully verification, as it comes.
SHAKE-UP AT ESCAPIST, VAUGHAN MOVES IN
Michael Chabon announced Tuesday that Brian K. Vaughan will write a continuous story arc for The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist.
The announcement was a major departure from the series’ usual structure of many one-shot stories crammed into a single issue. Vaughan’s story line will fill the first half of the book, Chabon said on his website, with other stories in the back of each issue.
“After bringing to bear on the problem his formidable knowledge of the world of comics, from the mists of the Golden Age to the Xeroxed and stapled world of the self-published zine, his sensitive grasp of character, his muscular story-telling gift, his fine ear for dialog, and a careful re-reading of the source novel, he turned in a script that caused grown men, or at least one grown man, to weep for joy,” Chabon said at his site.
Chabon said Vaughan’s first script “well meets, and perhaps even exceeds, the expectations raised by the shadow of the parent novel,” The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
“It is absolutely faithful both to the spirit of Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay and Rosa Saks, and to that of the Escapist himself,” Chabon said. “And yet it is, thrillingly, unmistakably the work of Mr. Vaughan.”
Dark Horse has not chosen an artist for Vaughan’s storyline yet, Chabon said. The Escapist comic, he said, “is about to turn, no thanks to its creator, into something very wonderful indeed.”
Vaughan’s previous works include the critically acclaimed Y: The Last Man, Runaways, and Ex Machina.
Chabon attributed the change to editor Diana Schultz, who joined the series with issue #3. Schutz proposed the change, Chabon said, with DC 100-Page Super-Spectaculars in mind.
Chabon said, “It has sometimes been hard to know how to feel about this quarterly. The series has featured creators “whose work has been featured have ranged across the spectra from trusted stalwarts to unknowns, experimentalists to gods of the long-underwear pantheon,” he said.
And yet, Chabon said, “there has been a sense of something lacking.” Kavalier & Clay created an expectation for a “sustained immersion in a single, coherent world of realistic characters,” he said, but any anthropology would be “hard-pressed to provide that sense of immersion, in a reader, in the world of the story.”
The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #6, featuring Will Eisener’s final story, hits stores tomorrow.
AYELET DEBATES HAVING FIFTH CHILD
Ayelet Waldman's column over at Salon this week discusses the possibilities of having a fifth child. To read the entire article, and its absolutley delicious tale of a daughter who knows how to work the Tooth Fairy myth for $13, click here.
CHABON SPILLS MORE ON BEST AMERICAN STORIES
Over at his site, Michael Chabon announced that, of the twenty stories selected, at least four are "genre stories," not three as previously mentioned.
The stories include Tom Bissell's "Death Defier," Kelly Link's "Stone Animals," Tim Pratt's "Hart & Boot," and a noire story by Dennis Lehane.
"That is the great thing about genre," Chabon said on his site. "It's as much about structures created in the mind of the reader as in the structure or pattern of the text itself. Genre isn't just a box to be stuck in; it's also a window to look through."
CHABON AND LETHEM... SUPER HEROES?
"Oh my God!! Someone please help us!!!"
Above the street, two solitary figures observe the scene below. There names? Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem.
"Looks like we got here in the nick of time!" exclaims Chabon.
The incidident, and it's related misadventures, are part of an absolutely hillarious spoof on the current trend
of using comic books as a literary device. Created by Patricia Storms, "The Amazing Adventures of Lethem and Chabon," pokes fun at the two authors and their compulsion for comic books.
"We see that your man is in distress!" Chabon says in the story. "But have no fear! We've got the kind of fiction that will give your tepid testosteone that proverbial kick in the balls!"
To read the entire comic (which I highly recommend), click here!
MR. MACHINE GUN! FIRST LOOK!
Here's what we've got to look forward to:
MICHAEL CHABON PRESENTS THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF THE ESCAPIST #7
Written by Michael Chabon, art by Eduardo Barreto, colored by Paul Hornschemeier, cover by Brian Bolland.
This very special seventh issue of The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist features...no Escapist whatsoever! Instead, Pulitzer-winning author Michael Chabon takes over the entire issue with a story introducing the mysterious Mr. Machine Gun, a character torn straight from the pages of Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
Legendary duo Kavalier and Clay created scads of fascinating characters, and Mr. Machine Gun was one of the best. A former guinea pig of Nazi bioexperimentation, the WWII hero turned to a postwar career in politics. Now, dealing with an intensely personal tragedy, Senator Ben Vanderslice struggles to once more gain control over his murderous right hand!
With Chabon aided by artist Eduardo Barreto, you'll swear that you're reading the original Sunshine Comics edition now an impossible find! Who is this classic character that inspired a runaway issue-length tale from a Pulitzer winner? Find out in this snub-nosed and smoking seventh installment of the popular quarterly anthology!
80 pages, $8.95, in stores on July 13.
SPIRIT: THE MOVIE!!!
Jeph Loeb has signed on to adapt Will Eisner's The Spirit for the big screen!
Odd Lot Entertainment and Batfilm Productions will produce.
MICHAELCHABON.COM, v2.0
Oh wow, no more "Bumps on My Head!"
Michael Chabon has totally revamped his website. The site, which previously consisted of a simple image map of a brain on a white background, now has a greyish-blue background, tables, sidebars, and more pictures. What's more, the site is more navigable. What joy!
Chabon says the site "should be a lot easier for me to update and maintain, now."
Chabon added a "In the Works" section, detailing his up-coming publications.
Chabon says in the section that he has written a new afterward for a reissuing of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (also to be published in The New York Review of Books). The paperback have new cover art, and A Model World and Other Stories will see "a similar revision," Chabon says..
Chabon also explains what the deal is with The Yiddish Policemen's Union.
"February 1, 2005 marked the start of year three on this novel," Chabon says. "Like its author, the book is changing. Novels are like Borges's Chinese map; the longer you write them, the closer they grow in scale to the contours of your own lived life. They have good days and bad days. They suffer calamities, they get lucky."
Amongst various other additions to the site:
Chabon employed an Apple Macintosh PowerBook G4, Movable Type 3.15, Adobe Photoshop Elements 3, and Mozilla Firefox 5.0 to construct the site.
HOLOCAUST AND THE FINAL SOLUTION
New Zealand's Stuff published a new interview with Chabon today. While the article presents no news, per se, it does have some interesting insights into Chabon's last novel, The Final Solution.
To read the entire article, click here.
Got news? E-mail me!
Friday, April 29, 2005, 1:20 PM ET
Source: Contra Costa Times
The controversy erupted into an Internet firestorm of public derision, support and parody -- and an invitation to Waldman by Oprah Winfrey last week, where she thought she'd be discussing her books but ended up defending her comments before millions of viewers.
To read the rest of the article, click here.
Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 9:00 AM ET
Source: MobyLives
To read the rest of the (lengthy) interview, click here.
Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 9:00 AM ET
Source: Salon
Matthew Limon gave his boyfriend a blow job and got himself a 17-year prison sentence. The boys were residents at the Lakemary Center, a school for developmentally delayed youngsters in Paola, Kan. It's generous, perhaps, to call them boyfriends. What they did was more akin to sexual experimentation, two boys in a dormitory at night, messing around. Matthew had just turned 18 the week before, and his partner was just shy of his 15th birthday. The younger boy, identified only as M.A.R., consented to the sex, but changed his mind. As soon as he asked Matthew to stop, Matthew did, and M.A.R. has always been steadfast in his statement that what happened was consensual. How the police were brought in, why they were called, isn't clear. Someone from the center complained and the trial was based on stipulated facts -- one paragraph stating that on that night in February, the boys engaged in consensual oral sex. That single paragraph was the basis for the 17-year sentence.
To read the rest of the column, click here.
Friday, April 22, 2005, 10:45 PM ET
Source: MichaelChabon.Com
Thursday, April 21, 2005, 11:45 PM ET
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Maliszewski’s essay in Bookforum is alive to such problems — which is what makes it particularly disgraceful that so few people have bothered to weight its actual argument before denouncing its author. From the commentary, you might suppose that Maliszewski’s purpose is to trash Michael Chabon — to call him out as a fraud, at best, or perhaps someone with the mental problems implied by Binjamin Wilkomirski’s fantasies of a childhood in hell.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 11:45 PM ET
Source: BKV.tv
Michael Chabon is easily my favorite living novelist, so imagine my shock when I came home to a message on my machine from him, which said, "Brian, I'm calling with urgent League of the Golden Key business."
To see the original entry, click here.
Thursday, April 21, 2005, 2:00 AM ET
Source: Yankee Pot Roast
Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 11:45 PM ET
Source: Oprah
Ayelet Waldman was a guest today on Oprah! And they discussed that essay of hers (you know the one)!
Ayelet: I have made so many mistakes as a mother. But the one thing that I know I do is I make sure my children know how much I love them and they are absolutely secure in that.
To see a promo and some photos, click here.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005, 9:30 AM ET
Source: Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant, The New York Times
Tuesday, April 19, 2005, 9:00 AM ET
Source: Los Angeles Times
Monday, April 18, 2005, 11:30 PM ET
Source: MichaelChabon.Com
The audio from the November 12, 2003 performance, in Seattle, of this talk, recently the subject of a tender little mash note from the editors of Bookforum.
Chabon earlier declined comment on the topic, telling The New York Times that he prefers that his work speaks for itself.
Monday, April 18, 2005, 7:10 PM ET
Source: The New York Times, Bookforum.
Maliszewski prefers to ignore, minimize, or deliberately misread these signs in the hope of stirring up a scandal. He tells us that "Chabon promised a real account," that "Chabon does make broad claims about truth," that Chabon "was presenting ideas as facts," and that he presented his talk as "an authentic portrait of the artist." He even quotes Chabon's promise "to come forward now and come out with the truth" about the existence of golems to support his argument. This is like invoking Spinal Tap to indict the music industry. Similarly, he dismisses Chabon's repeated references to lying as "the fine print at the bottom of a contract." The truth is just the opposite. If anything, Chabon might be criticized for being too obvious in his winks and nods to the audience, but it is clear that he wanted them to share in the fun.
To read the entire response, click here
Monday, April 18, 2005, 9:15 AM ET
Source: The New York Times, Bookforum.
In the lecture, titled "Golems I Have Known, or, Why My Eldest Son's Name Is Napoleon," Mr. Chabon recounts a version of his childhood, laced with some tall tales (saying, for instance, that he has encountered several golems, the clay monsters of Jewish lore), and tells the story of a counterfeit Holocaust survivor he'd once met who turns out to be an ex-Nazi in hiding.
The full article can be read here. Maliszewski's Bookforum article can be read here.
Thursday, April 14, 2005, 8:25 PM ET
Source: Comic Book Resources
Wednesday, April 13, 2005, 7:15 PM ET
Source: Exclusive
Tuesday, April 12, 2005, 8:30 PM ET
Source: MichaelChabon.Com
Tuesday, April 12, 2005, 8:30 PM ET
Source: Salon
Tuesday, April 12, 2005, 8:30 PM ET
Source: MichaelChabon.Com
Friday, April 8, 2005, 2:00 AM ET
Source: The Amazing Adventures of Lethem and Chabon
A woman's husband faints.
Friday, April 8, 2005, 2:00 AM ET
Source: Comics Continuum
Dark Horse released its July 2005 comic solicitations this week. Amongst them... *drum roll* Michael Chabon's hand-crafted 80-page Mr. Machine Gun tale!
Friday, April 8, 2005, 2:00 AM ET
Source: Hollywood News
Friday, April 1, 2005, 7:00 PM ET
Source: MichaelChabon.Com
Friday, April 1, 2005, 7:030 PM ET
Source: Stuff (New Zealand)
"Inevitably, the reason I like mystery," he says, "is because of the possibility for producing the sense of mystery with a capital 'M'. This allows us to talk about things that cannot be explained. In that sense, one of the great insoluble Mysteries of the human race is the Holocaust." This, perhaps, is why Chabon's haunting title, which the Nazis used for their plans to exterminate the Jews, looms over the narrative, untapped. "For there to be that sense of mystery with a capital 'M', I wanted to keep [the phrase] in the background, to leave it literally unspoken," Chabon says. "In a way, the parrot that can talk and the boy who cannot talk and the idea of speaking and not speaking plays in to the impossibility of finally explaining or understanding the Holocaust."