From the back cover:

“A love song in sixteen parts—an exhilarating ode to reading and writing—by Pulitzer prize-wining author Michael Chabon, ‘the premiere prose stylist…of his generation’ (TIME).”

You know me well enough by now: this suckered me in. It might as well have been an email—.exe attached—that promised nude photos of Anna Kournikova (kournicopious. adj. – Blonde. Buxom. Bountiful but belaboring. “Backlogging this bevy of baskets of beautiful Barbies is becoming kournicopious.”). The cover hit all of my criteria, so when I stumbled across Michael Chabon’s Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, I was really powerless to resist it.

I’ll pause a moment and say the following, though. I realize that I have skewed this ‘column’ very very strongly toward the critical-thinking/short-story or essay/pop-culturalist section of the book store. I haven’t even really been shy about focusing on the same authors time and time again. If you are interested in books, and you are interested in reading about books on the Bloglin, and you are really hating this trend, it is absolutely OK to say so in the comments thread. I mean, be gentle or something, but if you’d rather see more of something vs. another thing, that’s cool to say. I can’t really promise that I’m gonna get into much hard-boiled romance or freakonomics or anything like that, but, well, your feedback is welcome. I geek out on this sort of shit, and I figure you’d rather hear about this than WWII or Abraham Lincoln. Both of which are subjects I spend a lot of time reading about.

So yeah. Michael Chabon. I’ve recommended one of his books here before, and of course, this is not the first collection of short, breaking-the-fourth-wall essays I’ve talked about, and it won’t be the last.

All that aside, the main thing that attracted me about this book was it’s promise to be ABOUT reading and writing. Read this book that I wrote about reading and writing. Meta as fuck. It is, without fail, exactly what it says it is.

This book has several book reviews/essays of it’s own: Chabon gives us his thoughts on Chaykin’s American Flagg!, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (Now a Major Motion Picture!). He also spends some time—tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely without sympathy—looking at and dissecting the cult of Sherlockians who make a habit of love-hating the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

More than anything else, however, Chabon spends a ton of time waxing philosophical on the idea of golems—both literal and figurative—and making the connection between the relationship between a rabbi and his golem and a a writer and his writing. Or a liar and his lying. Or a religion and it’s gods. It’s really—really—fascinating stuff.

And it occurs to me why I’m so transfixed by this guy’s style: he has this innate ability to keep his cultural background at the forefront of whatever he’s writing. He’s not heavy-handed with it, and yet it is almost a given that Jews and Jewishness are a top-tier theme in any given piece (I’m sure there are exceptions, but I am spouting. Let me spout). And it both makes me happy and sad:

Happy because there are guys like him out there really trying to mix and remix and share and re-share how he feels about the really complicated, really painful, and really weird things he’s feeling. He is honest-to-goodness creating his own strain of the culture he knows and grew up with. And I think that’s totally awesome. This particular book focuses on books he’s read and writers he’s experienced to that end.

Sad because when I try to apply that same idea of critical thinking and thought experimentation to my own situation, I kind of come up with a big goose egg. What IS the modern American cultural experience? Really. Is it lolcats and dick jokes? Is it Yes We Can and Change Into a Truck? I’m at a loss to—without invoking God, Liberty, or Patriotism—to answer that question. I don’t even think I could do it without the condition.

In one of the essays—Imaginary Homelands—Chabon recounts a tale wherein he unwittingly enrages the users of an online community whose purpose is to protect and enrich the Yiddish-speaking aspects of Jewry. Obviously, there is much more to the story, but just the idea that folks were online somewhere, talking, messaging, and posting about the trials and travails of their cause—their culture—made me realize that this—The Bloglin—is the closest thing a guy like me has to that. They feel passionately about protecting a language that without them will go the way of sanskrit, and I feel passionately about madballs and Jack Burton.

Is it the same?

- Hateball