Posts tagged michael chabon

When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another’s skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness - and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.

Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood

A great essay by Michael Chabon from his new essay collection to be released this October, Manhood for Amateurs.

There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworkers and the Bessemer convertor of love.
Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)

I’m eager to see this adaptation of Michael Chabon’s 1988 novel by the same name, but I’ve been hearing mainly negative reviews.  However, with respect to the image of the city in the film, a review that I read either in the Post-Gazette or The Tribune remarked that the city “has never looked better.”

Pittsburgh has so often beeen used in film as a run down town that the protagonist wants to get away from (see Flashdance, & Deerhunter).  In Chabon’s book though, we get a version of Pittsburgh that is far more complex — one that breaks outside the reductive image of it as an old steel town, or the rust belt’s Bedford Falls.