"I... am... a writer."

Michael Chabon's WONDER BOYS is on sale for Kindle for $1.99 today in case you like academic satire, capers, Old Hollywood or stories about really long books.

Super-long sentences and fanboyism: Chabon and Smith at 92Y

Last night I went to see Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith read together at 92Y on the Upper East Side. I should just quit blogging and going to all reading events because it's never going to get any better than this! I'm not actually quitting but the sheer joy of seeing two of your favorite authors onstage and having them praise each other cannot be understated.

Chabon read first and Smith introduced him, praising his work for containing multitudes of voices and never losing the fan's spirit which animates his characters and is so often lost to adulthood. He read Part III of TELEGRAPH AVENUE, "A Bird of Wide Experience," a single sentence 11 pages long that follows one character's beloved parrot through Berkeley overlooking other characters in their daily routines. It was a show-stopper and judging by the laughter from the crowd, enough present had already read TELEGRAPH AVENUE to know what was in store and anticipate it appropriately.

As if planned that way, Chabon's introduction of Smith contained a list of things that bring him joy including a new Zadie Smith book (also the First Amendment, his son's Halloween costume and Wes Anderson movies). Smith read a short passage in which Natalie and her neighbors confront a teenage smoker on the playground, and a longer passage in which a character tries to break up with another, which she infused with a pathos beyond the page. She also switched seamlessly between different characters' voices and compared the London neighborhoods mentioned to places in New York (Bed-Stuy, the Upper East Side, the Bronx).

In Q&A both authors were asked if they mentally cast their own books while writing for possible future adaptation; Chabon said not usually, although he tried to put some of "The Wire"'s Wendell Pierce in TELEGRAPH AVENUE Archy Stallings (Pierce, call your agent); Smith suggested Jessica Chastain for Leah Hanwell of NW. Both authors cringed when asked to grade President Obama's performance in Wednesday's presidential debate until Chabon meekly offered, "You know when you're watching a sporting event and you're yelling at the TV, 'Hit him! Punch him'?" Describing dream projects they have yet to complete, Smith said she'd love to write a novel set in 1930s movie musicals; Chabon quipped that he'd like to rewrite MOBY DICK from the perspective of the whale.

Top 5 characters in TELEGRAPH AVENUE

5. Mr. Nostalgia
4. Valletta Moore
3. Nat Jaffe
2. Gwen Shanks
1. Cochise Jones

Reading on the Road: All I do is wine

Among other things that are out of my control, I am grateful for my ability to read in moving vehicles and almost never get sick. (Once or twice, tops.) Comes in handy this weekend as I am off to participate in a relay race between San Francisco and the Napa Valley I'm so excited for this as yet unseen area of the country to open up for me, although less so now that someone told me there are wolves out there.

I'm taking a random assortment of shelf paperbacks: John Jeremiah Sullivan's PULPHEAD, Rick Moody's THE ICE STORM and Stewart O'Nan's SONGS FOR THE MISSING. And TELEGRAPH AVENUE. Top priority.

Maybe it's Form Reversion Week: Michael Chabon tells Mother Jones his new novel TELEGRAPH AVENUE began life as a TV pilot for TNT:

"It never got past the script stage. I put it aside. But I think partly because I was living in the world of that story every day and because I really love the characters, I decided to go back to it. I mistakenly thought all I needed to do was novelize it. Well it turned out that was just idiotic. And I spent two years wrestling with that laziness. Because—it seems so obvious in hindsight—a TV pilot doesn't do anything that a novel does. A TV pilot is all about setting the table. It's opening doors and leaving them open, and they're the doors that you're gonna go through to tell stories in the course of the series. Oh, it was a horrible structure. You try to make a novel out of it! I spent two years trying to before finally deciding just to abandon the novel completely. My wife talked me out of it. She loved Archy; she loved Gwen especially. And she just said, 'You can't do that! I need you to write this book.' Anyway, I kept the same characters and settings but I just reconceived the whole thing." 

I believe my response to this is best delivered in a YouTube video.

(P.S. I linked to this interview on Twitter, noting that the interviewer asked Chabon how he and author wife Ayelet Waldman manage their work and kids, which I thought was a positive step because it's a question most often asked of female authors. I thought I might get backlash for pointing this out -- is it reverse sexism to say that male authors should be asked that question? I don't know, okay? -- but I only had 1 unfollower and no angry responses. It's like the medium is growing up or something!)

Spotted on the subway

Last night I was reading the covers in other people's hands and I saw someone doing the same thing. He got on at the stop after mine, wearing a light blue buttondown and a Richard Bransonian haircut. He sat across from me on the bench seat and rubbed his bangs out of his eyes.

Maybe he was getting tired and found scanning faces more absorbing than reading. Maybe he was drunk. After a while he put in his headphones. I would have told him this was a great choice, but by then it was too late.

Work that pays the bills (or: Why do successful authors go to Hollywood?)

Buried in this examination of Michael Chabon's film work (including the forthcoming "John Carter" remake, for which he wrote the script) is an interesting contention about why, despite frustrations and failures, Chabon would have taken something like the pulpy-scifi-looking "John Carter":

It’s likely that Chabon received a hefty paycheck for most of these projects—in addition to having sold the film options for many of his books—and screenwriters can spend years before breaking through with a big movie. Perhaps in no other industry can you toil for so long, be stymied so regularly, and still earn millions, while also being considered a relative success. (Chabon has also mentioned that his screenwriting work has helped to provide health-insurance coverage for his family, which includes four children and his wife Ayelet Waldman, herself a successful novelist.)

What looks like a partial indictment or at least a you're-on-notice for the author who first became known as a novelist, and whose next novel TELEGRAPH AVENUE will be out this fall, resolves into kind of a brash truth. Screenwriters get paid for work that sells but is never made, but if your novel never goes into print, you're not going to get your full advance (and depending on your contract, may have to return all of it). And in the meantime, you're living on your day-job earnings, or your royalties from the last book, or dreams and wishes and unicorn rides, or whatnot.

Jacob Silverman's piece is hardly the first to point out that full-time writing is not a lucrative occupation, and I don't carry his concern that those projects will negatively affect his writing. But it's startling to see as successful an author as Chabon pointing out that, in this case, it actually saves him money to step away from his fiction. Here are a few interviews in which Chabon mentions the health-insurance angle, and without getting too deeply into that flawed American system, well, it's not as if he can draw on COBRA from his previous office job since that was probably 15 years ago. (And if you've never been on COBRA, what gets you is not the high cost to begin with -- it's the irregular, steep price increases designed to make you quit.)

It's easy to make light of (as I have) authors who verge into more lucrative media, who sign HBO deals that may never see the light of day or become the fifth writers on flawed screenplays (like Chabon and "Spider-Man 2"). Maybe they're irresponsible with money and possessed of delusions of grandeur, like latter-day F. Scott Fitzgeralds! (Sorry, Francis.) Or maybe they're just trying to get by, and if a two-author household like the Chabon-Waldman complex finds the most thrifty solution is to take side work -- that is still about creating things, mind -- then maybe the more relevant question is "How did we get to the point where we can't afford to keep our literary writers in business?"

Via Ed Champion on Twitter: In the next McSweeney's Michael Chabon will publish the first four chapters of FOUNTAIN CITY, the legendary [only to me?] 1500-page novel he abandoned to write WONDER BOYS and the probable inspiration for Professor Grady Tripp's baggy unfinished masterpiece. Probable buy.

This woman has dragged, nudged, coaxed, led, stirred, embroiled, mocked, seduced, finagled, or carried me into every last instance of delight or sorrow, every debacle, every success, every brilliant call, and every terrible mistake, that I have known or made. I'm grateful for that, because if it were not for her, I would never go anywhere, never see anything, never meet anyone. It's too much bother. It's dangerous, hard work, or expensive. I lost my ticket. I kind of have a headache. They don't speak English there, it's too far away, they're closed for the day, they're full, they said we can't, it's too much bother with children along.

--Michael Chabon, MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS

Wrapped Up in Books Meets Michael Chabon

I said I wasn't going to nag any more -- but I'm sure you will understand if I do it one more time.

This week at the A.V. Club we're discussing Michael Chabon's THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH, which is MY pick. Come over and let me tell you why you should read this book if you haven't already! If you have, even if you hated it, please comment freely.

If I have already pestered you about it somewhere else, sorry for the rerun. I'll go e-mail my mom instead.

Warning: your mileage may vary if you are not Jon Hamm

Dear Jon Hamm,

Okay, okay, enough. We already loved you for all the usual reasons, but then you had to give an interview to Oprah.com on "books that meant the most to you" and name WONDER BOYS. We love WONDER BOYS. (Not bad on the others either!)

But all the swooning is starting to interfere with our work, so could you quick do something that will tarnish your sterling image? We've thought of some options (in no particular order):

• Appear in an ad for Microsoft's new search engine Bing
• Leave your longtime girlfriend for some 19-year-old hot mess on "The Real World"... or Megan Fox
  
• Make a splashy public donation to an anti-gay-marriage association because Don Draper is such a great spokesperson for "opposite marriage"
• Get caught by TMZ kicking a puppy
• Retract the above article and announce that your real favorite book is Neil Strauss' THE GAME 'cause, like, it totally works on chicks
  

Can't take a book into a cold shower,
The Management

(Via Uptown Literati.)

Post-Its: Better than direct mail from John Grisham

I received a charity letter "from" John Grisham on behalf of the Southern Poverty Law Center in the mail while I was gone. Putting "Author" as part of your return address is a great way to get me to open your unsolicited mail; thank goodness spammers haven't caught on. (J.M. Coetzee wants to help me with the ladies? Sweet.)

• Because a lot of people are winding up here looking for it, my Frank McCourt note from a few weeks ago has been updated with public memorial information, as current as I could find. Not afraid to be servicey!
  


• My copy of LOLITA which I admitted to re-purchasing several months ago has still not turned up. I think it either has been lent out for a long time or got mixed in with another family member's books. I may even have been the forgetful lender; that's where my copy of THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY was all this time, on the nightstand of the West Coast bureau (who has since finished it). Meanwhile, another book has pulled a disappearing act when I most wanted it, which is why you're not currently getting "Incomprehensible Notes From My Adolescent Copy of LEAVES OF GRASS."



• This Times article on how serendipity is becoming extinct has so many techspletives in it it's practically unreadable. But I'm posting it because "serendipity" is one of my favorite words, and I see no reason that we have to let the concept or the term go. Now get off my lawn.


• "If Nora Ephron had been born buxom, what else besides that article might she not have written?" I'm just catching up to Ariel Levy's profile of Nora Ephron in the New Yorker from a few weeks ago, whose second paragraph can only be described as an equal-opportunity offender for the ladies, but if you can make it past that there are some nifty tidbits about her life as a writer. Related: Tina Fey's forthcoming book (!!!) was described at deal time as being "in the style of Nora Ephron."
  


• INFINITE JEST corner: What the hell do you say when people unfamiliar with the book ask what it's about? This has happened to me several times and my latest answer was the best, but I feel as if I owe people more than a shrug and a smile. (Let us not speak of the back-cover copy, which is atrocious.) My latest answer incorporated the current situations of the various Incandenzas and, since I passed Interdependence Day a while back, a smidge of the alternate-reality politics going on behind them. The last thing I want to do is deter anyone from reading it, which a vague answer or an "It's extremely complicated" might.


• Finally, shamelessly, self-promotionally: The AV Club's latest Wrapped Up in Books round begins Aug. 17 on John Crowley's LITTLE, BIG. That's two weeks from now. It is possible that you have not started the book yet, and I am not judging you, promise. But now would be a good time to start it!