prescription cure for graphophobia

Quote

"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 a beloved book the most mysterious – the most phantasmal – is the way they always seem to come our way precisely when we need them."

— Michael Chabon, Afterward to The Phantom Tollbooth

(Source: michaelchabon.com)

January 09, 2013

9 notes

Quote

"

The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write:

too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming,

too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within,

too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again,

too many divorces to grant,

heirs to disinherit,

trysts to arrange,

letters to misdirect into evil hands,

innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever,

women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless,

men to drive to adultery and theft,

fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses.

"

— Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

Tags: michael chabon quotes wonder boys writing world building

August 29, 2012

9 notes

Photoset

captainamericass:

you’re so precious omg

Guys seriously if you want to really and truly love Stan Lee from the bottom of your guts, why haven’t you read Kavalier & Clay yet.

(Source: quellary, via solaceandsolitude)

Tags: kavalier clay michael chabon stan lee golden age

July 12, 2012

42,468 notes

Quote

"The writing of every novel, and not just some polyglot punster’s babbling Book of Kells, requires this act of invention, the creation of a personal Volapük. For each book you must devise an idiolect, a working creole you compound by embedding the fine-grained matrix of your mother tongue with the coarse aggregate of the world—a Yiddish-speaking Alaskan Jerusalem, a four-color Nazi-haunted Metropolis, a nighttown Pittsburgh of gangsters and gay boys—that you have dreamed, with its argots and geographies, ethnologies and etiquettes. The limits of language are not the stopping point, says the Wake; they are the point at which we must begin to tell the tale."

— What to Make of Finnegans Wake, by Michael Chabon

Tags: finnegans wake ireland james joyce michael chabon language writing quotes

July 02, 2012

4 notes

Quote

"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."

— Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys (via boyssmelllikeoranges)

(via boyssmelllikeoranges)

Tags: michael chabon wonder boys epitaph regrets quotes

June 26, 2012

7 notes

Quote

"‘Pay no attention to the spaceships and post-holocaust scenery, or the mutants,’ you say. ‘My novel is not sci-fi; it is literature.’ But these days all such fancy dances begin to look quaint. I’m grateful to people such as Michael Chabon, who came crashing like a golem out of Berkeley across the genre walls and through the gated communities and left them in rubble."

—

from The Golden Age, by Ursula K. Le Guin

The New Yorker: The Science Fiction Issue, June 4 & 11, 2012

OH LOOK, all of my Michael Chabon feels conveniently wrapped into one perfect sentence.

Tags: ursula k le guin michael chabon the golden age genre science fiction the new yorker

June 19, 2012

2 notes

Text

Michael Chabon read “the dreaded excerpt from a work in progress.” The chapter—he thinks it’s Chapter Six—describes a home birth in gory detail: a “smear of fluid and hair”; “ripple of liquid and skin; “hot smell between sex and butchery”; the womb “condensing like a lump of coal in Superman’s fist to a hard, bright, healthy diamond.”

Afterward, a woman from the audience commended Chabon’s mastery of the birthing process (“I’m a little sheepish to ask you about your research”), and asked if there’s a comparable defining physical experience for males.

“Whaling,” he replied.

Source.

Tags: michael chabon quotes new yorker birth labor whaling literature tongue in cheek bastard

February 15, 2012

1 note

Photoset

themegs:

trekwho:

i really need this to be real

So many sads that this movie doesn’t exist.

This has been ALL OVER my dash lately, so I just feel the need to remind everyone of the existence of the film Wonder Boys, which:

1. Has All The Gay between RDJ and Tobey, I mean I’m talking they’re actually having…non-subtexty sexual intercourse together, though keep in mind this is a comedy so it’s not exactly explicit…

2. Is the entire reason that this clip EXISTS. They called in Tobey as a “personal favor” because of having worked together in Wonder Boys, which makes it probably the best In Joke In A Blockbuster Referencing A Film No One Saw…

3. Is a GREAT commentary on writing, the creative process, and being a student, which probably 99% of Tumblr has been, is, or will be - in conclulsion, why have you not seen this movie.

(Source: formerlybickle)

Tags: wonder boys michael chabon rdj movies tropic thunder

January 11, 2012

3,342 notes

Text