Jacket Copy is our more-adult sister blog about books (and by "more-adult" I don't mean porn; I mean that it has fewer posts about, you know, zombie comedies and super-villains) and our newsroom pal Carolyn Kellogg has a new Q&A there with Michael Chabon, who is the F. Scott Fitzgerald of fanboys. Or is he more like the Saul Bellow of super-geeks? Hmm. The Martin Amis of comics nerds? Anyway, as the father of an 8-year-old who is obsessed with "Star Wars" Legos, I had to smile at Chabon's knotty musings about that most structured of playthings.

JC: In a couple of the early pieces in [the new nonfiction collection "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son"], you express a concern for the lack of mystery in the lives of children.

MC: I'm not sure it's so much a lack of mystery. I think there's still plenty of mystery. It's a lack of freedom, it's a lack of unsupervised play.

JC: Both physically, and through the proscriptive, highly specialized Legos …

MC: The thing with Legos -- I hope it's an example of how I recognize the possibility that I might be overstating my objections.

Not everything that at first glance seems to be a further illustration of the kind of cultural imperialism I see at work in the adult world over the world of childhood -- not everything is necessarily an example of that. Certainly kids retain their love of subversion, and I think it's just innate to a child's mind to want to subvert authority. I think it's unfortunate that the adult world figured out a way to take over that impulse and package it and retail it and sell it back to children, and to their parents.

In the world of Legos, what I did discover is that my kids were taking these beautiful, gorgeous, incredibly restrictive predetermined Legos Star Wars play sets -- and yeah, they really wanted it to be put together just the way the box showed it. I don't think it occurred to them you'd want to do anything else with it. But inevitably, over time, the things kind of crumble and get destroyed and fall apart and then, once they do, the kids take all those pieces, and they create these bizarre, freak hybrids -- of pirates and Indians and Star Wars and Spider-Man. Lego-things all getting mashed up together into this post-modern Lego stew. They figure out a way, despite the best efforts of corporate retail marketing.

It's a smartly done Q&A and, again, you can read it in its entirety right here.

-- Geoff Boucher

RECENT AND RELATED

LAT REVIEW: Chabon's essays -- "erudite, occasionally profane and ultimately wise"

Michael Chabon on writers who "dwell between worlds"

Fanboy confession: I want a $400 Lego for my 40th birthday

Bradbury brings "Dark Carnival" to Santa Monica on Oct. 23

"Fahrenheit 451" and the credibility of comics

Priest's "Inverted World," reissued and reconsidered

Eoin Colfer takes "Hitchhiker's Guide" on a new ride

"Trek" screenwriters pick their favorite Starfleet novels

Ron Howard has a Hollywood plan for H.P. Lovecraft

Top photo of Chabon by Randi Lynn Beach / For The Times. Bottom photo of Chabon by Marcio Jose Sanchez / Associated Press. Credit for toy images: Lego and Lucasfilm.

Scott Timberg is a good friend of the Hero Complex who writes insightfully about authors and literature for the Los Angeles Times. He recently interviewed Michael Chabon for a Q&A that appeared in the Sunday paper recently, but due to space considerations, it was edited down. Here is the full, "director's cut" version.

Michael Chabon is well known as the author of novels such as the coming-of-age tale "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," the exuberant, Pulitzer-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" and "The Yiddish Policeman’s Union," an alternate-universe story that just came out in paperback and recently won the Nebula Award.

But Chabon has long harbored a related passion, which has run alongside and sometimes overlapped with his novels: to make the literary world safe for genre fiction and to expand the notion of what a serious work of fiction can be. "Entertainment has a bad name," begins the book’s opening essay, "Trickster in a Suit of Lights." "Serious people learn to mistrust and even revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights."

The pieces in "Maps and Legends" range far and wide, including one on Chabon’s hometown of Columbia, Md. (a planned community that reflects some of the writer’s concerns), and memoirish pieces that give the background to his novels.

The heart of the book, though, concerns his crusade to save comics, science fiction, fantasy, horror and detective fiction from condescension.

He wants to move past the ambivalence of the Moderns — whether novelists, poets or surrealist artists — who played with pop elements such as popular songs or comics but did so behind what Chabon calls "the line of irony."

I spoke to Chabon from his home in Berkeley about a process by which sophisticated writers are kept in the genre ghetto and readers are scared away from novels and stories they might otherwise love.

Timberg: Let’s start with some of the pulp or genre writers who have spoken to you over the years and perhaps inspired your own books.

Chabon: There are so many. Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, Ross Thomas, Ursula K. LeGuin, Frank Herbert, Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury, Jack Kirby, Steve Gerber, Alan Moore. And there is a whole list of borderland writers — John Crowley, Jorge Luis Borges, Steven Millhauser, Thomas Pynchon — writers who can dwell between worlds.