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I'm back in the UK, and, today, really starting to feel the jet-lag, which means that the long description of everything I did in Japan may have to wait, or to be one of those things I always mean to write and never do. But I had a really busy Saturday and was taken to many places -- the oddest of which was a blessedly short visit to the Maid Cafe. "The line between pop pulture and porno is sometimes blurred in Japan," said my guide as she took me there, which meant that whatever I was expecting it definitely wasn't the Japanese equivalent of being taken to a cafe where the waitresses were all completely asexual children's party hosts pretending to be six themselves, speaking in helium chipmonk voices and dressed like Alice in Wonderland, where I would feel as if I had tuned into a game show on a foreign television station that I did not understand. I kept trying to imagine how one could transpose something like that experience into the US or the UK, and failing.

I bought lots of brush-pens.

I came back to the UK.

And am now brain dead (which is okay as nobody is interviewing me today). Tomorrow I am a special guest chairperson at Susanna Clarke's event

EXCLUSIVE UK EVENT
Susanna Clarke with special guest chairperson Neil Gaiman, Tuesday 25 September, 7pm
UCL Bloomsbury Theatre, 15 Gordon Street, London, WC1H 0AH

Susanna is the international bestselling author of the wonderful Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and to celebrate the paperback publication of The Ladies of Grace Adieu she will be in conversation with legendary author, Neil Gaiman. This is a rare appearance by Susanna and the only UK event to celebrate publication so book early to avoid disappointment.

Click here for booking information and ticket prices.

Neil, As a fellow Midwesterner, I also watched and waited for the: "Storm of the year" to strike us this weekend. My concerns however were laid to rest after reading your journal, and the prediction you made that it would in fact, not happen.When my wife reminded me that I needed to refill the gas can for the snow-blower, I assured her that it would not be needed as "Neil says it won't happen." My wife not having any faith at all in the Power of Gaiman, rolled her eyes but said nothing else about it.I'm sure you can imagine my surprise when mother nature dumped a foot of snow on us just as the weather man had said.This morning, As I pulled on my heavy coat, and prepared to walk to the filling station to fill my can, my wife patted me on the back and said: "You need to tell Neil that he is full of shit." and so here I am doing just that. Eric

Mea culpa. I went and checked with the Oracular Divination Machine, and it said "Because even lousy miracles are still miracles". I think we all need to ponder that.

Back in England I used to puzzle over my (American) wife's tendency to believe in weather forecasts, and to act on whatever information she was given, because the weather in the British Isles does whatever it's going to do with no regard to or respect for weather forecasters, and mostly what they tell you you can also learn by looking out of the window. I don't think I'll ever get used to the American system of more or less functional weather forecasting (much of which seems to consist of seeing what the weather was doing yesterday to the West of you).

If it's any consolation, I also had to do a fair amount of snow-shovelling yesterday, most of it while being harassed by Fred the cat, who seemed to think it was my fault too.

Hello Neil,

Here a question from the Netherlands (i say this now because it is very important for my question). I noticed you have posted dates and locations for an European tour, and I was wondering, and many people with me i think, why you don't come to (continental) europe more often. Is it because your comics/books are selling less? or because of some 'logistical' problems involved with the multitude of translations of your work?
Well, i would understand if you won't visit the Netherlands...But maybe you'll come over to france/belgium/germany more often? cause maybe i have the chance to pop over the border then (which i sadly don't have when you are in Hamburg.. i already checked). (oh and by the way: you should visit Holland with, or without a tour as excuse... a great little country i dare say)
sincerely, Jaap

It's time. I've done, what, four or five big European tours and events since I've been doing this blog. And they take time -- in 2003 and 2004 I spent probably a total of three months signing and talking and doing events in continental Europe and Scandinavia -- and they also take an astonishing amount of organisation, mostly because if I'm going to cross the Atlantic it makes sense to do more than one country, and often it depends, as you've guessed, on what works for the publication schedules of the publishers in each country that wants me. Getting everyone to publish Coraline at roughly the same time in 2003 was hard...

Truth to tell, the Netherlands isn't very high on the "I have to get there and sign again" list only because I've done several events and signings in the Netherlands in the last ten years, whereas there are lots of countries that have asked me to visit that I've never been to at all. (Turkey, for example, and all the Eastern European countries except Croatia, where I signed in 2003. And I've never signed in Iceland. And then there's China and Hong Kong...)

We'll see what happens later in the year when the Stardust film comes out (August in the US, October in the rest of the world) -- I may find myself visiting a number of different countries for that. But they may well be interview visits and not signings. We'll see...

...

Finally, over at http://www.gramophone.co.uk/newsMainTemplate.asp?storyID=2765&newssectionID=1 Joyce Hatto's husband has confessed, and offered the most humane version of the story possible. I'm not sure that I believe it, but, as I said yesterday when I listed it as a possibility, it makes the best story. This'll be a movie within the next few years, I have no doubt, and Jim Broadbent will probably be playing Mr Barrington-Coupe... Read the rest of this post

The storm of the year dumped some snow on us, and made driving a little treacherous. We missed the ice and sleet here, though, and didn't get any hail. Still, there's a foot of snow outside my window that wasn't there before, and it now looks rather beautiful, and we're due for more today.

I tend not to run this blog as a debate, because if I do I win, because I get the last word. Still, I tend to feel that articulate opposing points of view need to be represented. Either way, this is the final post for now on librarians and what they do or don't do...

"surely saying "It won the Newbery Medal. We order the books that do that. It's been the most respected guide to quality children's literature since 1922," would fend off most threats to a school librarian's job... wouldn't it?"

I'm sorry, but are you being deliberately disingenuous? Do you understand that the competition for librarian positions (which are notoriously low-paying, and therefore done for the love of the work) is incredibly tight? Losing your job as a librarian doesn't mean you go work in the library next-town-over; it often means you have to move to another state to take a lower-paying job.

Do you seriously believe that waving the Newberry Award around is going to dissuade the uptight right-wing parent who will make waves at every PTA meeting and harass their school superintendent and congressman until something is done?

Librarians are working-class people who have to do, frankly, an incredible amount of work -- much more than the public ever sees -- for a pitiable amount of money. Maybe it's hard for you to remember, Neil, but sometimes people who don't have a lot of money make sacrifices to keep their jobs. Is it awful that they don't feel like standing up for this book or that book would achieve anything other than the loss of their jobs? Of course. But it's not a hypothetical. It's real life.

It's easy for you to take a stand. You're influential, you're well-off, you know there's another job available whenever you want. Sometimes people have to be practical. It sucks, but it's true.

- Jamie


Well, twenty years ago, when I was younger, quite poor, had two small children and a mortgage, I quit the best job I'd had to that point -- writing for a national UK paper -- because I didn't want to write a front page article that editorial had concocted that was obviously untrue. Which was the end of my career as a journalist, really, and which I mention not to claim any kind of moral high ground, or because I was perfectly willing to take a stand when I wasn't influential or rich, but because it wasn't considered, by me or by anyone I knew, anything particularly special. Just as it wasn't considered special when friends of mine who wrote or drew comics stopped working for a title or a publisher because of something they believed, often with severe financial consequences. In truth, most of the people I've run into over the years, people for the most part neither famous nor rich nor influential, were perfectly capable of taking a stand for the things they believed in, and they did and they do.

Truth to tell, on reading this email, my respect for the very few librarians who declined to have The Higher Power of Lucky in their libraries because they felt it was somehow inappropriate went up, not down. I'd rather spend time with them, with people who have an unpopular view that they believe in and who are willing to stand up for it, than with some hypothetical beleaguered souls who are too scared of being fired for offending someone to order books they truly felt they should have in their libraries, and are now too scared of being fired or the spectres of hypothetical congressmen to say anything about it.

Do I believe that "waving the Newberry Award around is going to dissuade the uptight right-wing parent who will make waves at every PTA meeting and harass their school superintendent and congressman until something is done?" Not at all. But I believe that winning the Newbery, the most respected children's literary award in America, probably in the world, puts the onus on the dissenting parent to prove his or her case, and that it would be a foolhardy school board who would try and fire a librarian for having ordered it. And I also believe that the ALA Code of Ethics is something that the majority of librarians actually mean and subscribe to.

It says, in the preamble, that In a political system grounded in an informed citizenry, we are members of a profession explicitly committed to intellectual freedom and the freedom of access to information. We have a special obligation to ensure the free flow of information and ideas to present and future generations.

When I say that my love for librarians is unconditional, it's because of statements like that. I'm not saying that librarians can't or shouldn't make decisions about what books they have or don't have on their shelves, or that the surrounding community, what it is and what it reads, shouldn't play a part in those decisions. Obviously they make those decisions all the time, and they should. Space is limited, and choices need to be made. But not out of fear.

...

I've been following the Joyce Hatto case with a certain fascination, and mention it here only because everyone I've said "Joyce Hatto case" to in the last few days has given me a blank look. So, for those of you who missed it...

Joyce Hatto was an English classical pianist who retired from public life in 1976, fighting cancer. She lived for another thirty years, and in the last decade of her life she would release over a hundred recordings on her husband's small CD label which made her a cult figure, and an inspirational one: she covered the work of an amazing range of composers with sensitivity and brilliance and remarkable technique. When she died she was praised by obituarists as "a national treasure".

And then she was busted by iTunes.

Several days ago, another Gramophone critic was contacted by a reader who had put a Hatto Liszt CD – the 12 Transcendental Studies – into his computer to listen to, and something awfully strange happened. His computer's player identified the disc as, yes, the Liszts, but not a Hatto recording. Instead, his display suggested that the disc was one on BIS Records, by the pianist Lászlo Simon. Mystified, our critic checked his Hatto disc against the actual Simon recording, and to his amazement they sounded exactly the same.

In then went a recording of Hatto playing two Rachmaninov Piano Concertos and, sure enough, his computer's CD player listed it as another – by Yefim Bronfman, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, on Sony. Again, the critic compared, and again he could hear no difference.

Gramophone then sent the Hatto and the Simon Liszt recordings to an audio expert, Pristine Audio’s Andrew Rose, who scientifically checked the soundwaves of each recording. They matched.

and the ripples of the story kept widening. Over at her Wikipedia page they've identified over twenty of her recordings, with more coming in. http://www.andrys.com/hatto.html is keeping track of the story, article by article. Hatto's husband asserts in this interview that his wife's recordings are genuine, but doesn't produce any hard evidence that she recorded them, or produce anything other than a feeling of unease. And I wonder most about the motive, which is why it's a story. Was Hatto complicit in the fraud? (Probably.) Were they doing it to create a reputation for her? (Probably.) Was her husband trying to spare her feelings about how good she actually was by releasing other people's recordings as hers, while she thought they were hers? (Probably not, but it's a nice story.) Would she have been busted in the pre-computer days (eventually, but I suspect it would have taken much longer, and it would have been a matter of debate rather than an easy open-and-shut case -- look at this visual representation of the work.)

And I am only certain that, as with anything with people in it, we'll never know the complete truth... Read the rest of this post