Michael Chabon

You are currently browsing articles tagged Michael Chabon.

“The Wisdom Of Dreams Is A Fortune On Paper That You Can’t Cash Out”

June 15, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

I love dreams, but the great Michael Chabon hates them. The opening of his new essay in the New York Review of Books about unconscious narratives:

“I hate dreams. Dreams are the Sea Monkeys of consciousness: in the back pages of sleep they promise us teeming submarine palaces but leave us, on waking, with a hermetic residue of freeze-dried dust. The wisdom of dreams is a fortune on paper that you can’t cash out, an oasis of shimmering water that turns, when you wake up, to a mouthful of sand. I hate them for their absurdities and deferrals, their endlessly broken promise to amount to something, by and by. I hate them for the way they ransack memory, jumbling treasure and trash. I hate them for their tedium, how they drag on, peter out, wander off.

Pretty much the only thing I hate more than my own dreams are yours. ‘I was flying over Lake Michigan in a pink Cessna,’ you begin, ‘only it wasn’t really Lake Michigan…,’ and I sink, cobwebbed, beneath a drifting dust of boredom.

Dreams are effluvia, bodily information, to be shared only with intimates and doctors.”

Tags:

“The Sex Pistols, Strictly Speaking, Were Right: There Is No Future”

December 2, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From “The Omega Glory,” Michael Chabon’s essay about that amorphous thing known as The Future, at The Long Now:

“The Sex Pistols, strictly speaking, were right: there is no future, for you or for me. The future, by definition, does not exist. ‘The Future,’ whether you capitalize it or not, is always just an idea, a proposal, a scenario, a sketch for a mad contraption that may or may not work. ‘The Future’ is a story we tell, a narrative of hope, dread or wonder. And it’s a story that, for a while now, we’ve been pretty much living without.

Ten thousand years from now: can you imagine that day? Okay, but do you? Do you believe ‘the Future’ is going to happen? If the Clock works the way that it’s supposed to do—if it lasts—do you believe there will be a human being around to witness, let alone mourn its passing, to appreciate its accomplishment, its faithfulness, its immense antiquity? What about five thousand years from now, or even five hundred? Can you extend the horizon of your expectations for our world, for our complex of civilizations and cultures, beyond the lifetime of your own children, of the next two or three generations? Can you even imagine the survival of the world beyond the present presidential administration?” (Thanks TETW.)

•••••••••

Punks and rotters, the lot of them, 1976:

Tags: , ,