Michael Chabon: Entertainment has a bad name

Writer Michael Chabon comments on the value of not defining creative work – and ourselves as creators – too narrowly:

Entertainment has come to mean junk. But its definition also should include everything pleasurable that arises from an encounter with literature.

Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a “Street Fighter” machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade.

Continued on The Inner Writer.