Guest blog: Nerd-like author as matinee idol?

Minutes before interviewing author Michael Chabon for a Monitor podcast, I asked on Twitter whether there were any burning questions I would forget to bring up. "How about, 'What's your phone number?'  ‘Are you free Saturday night?' OR 'How do you feel about chunky blondes?' " came one friend’s reply.

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"Isn't he just dreamy?" said another.

The Stranger, an alternative weekly in Seattle, wrote the same week, with tongue no more in cheek than usual, how "women swoon over (Chabon’s) thoughtful, erudite prose (and dashing good looks)."

This was all somewhat startling, because, as much as I admire and enjoy the Pulitzer-winner’s writing, he is also quite married, settled, the father of four, old enough to have teenagers, and... well... an unabashed nerd. Even the first essay in his new book, "Manhood for Amateurs," is devoted to the failed comic book club of his youth.

Now, I love nerds myself, but that’s to be expected. I

a nerd, I am even a card-carrying (or Mylar bag carrying) comics nerd. I married a geek, which is a kissing cousin to a nerd. But since when did authors – let alone married fathers willing to admit their love for the 1972 first appearance of the character “Big Barda,” in Miracle Man #8 – turn into sex symbols?  Just thinking about it makes me toss my hair a little in the manner of the cool kid I never was.