posted by Neil
Good morning world.
If you want to watch selected highlights of the me-and-Amanda HousingWorks gig last week (which raised 10K for HousingWorks, hurrah), Spin has them up at
http://www.spin.com/articles/watch-amanda-palmer-neil-gaiman-live-nyc. (I read "Feminine Endings" aloud for the first time, and I think it works aloud, which makes me happy.)(Also one of my favourite "I Google You"s)
So the last two weeks of madness is over and I am starting to look around and hoping one day to catch up.
Chicago was fun, in a strange, sleepless sort of a way. I got in on an early in the morning plane, sleepily left my garment-bag behind on the plane (
my assistant and Maure Luke made this better), had planned to spend several hours working in my hotel room on the speech. But the hotel room, when I got there, was already occupied, and the morning got stranger from there, which meant that my acceptance speech was rather more impromptu than I had hoped, but people liked it.
It had been Decided that I wasn't doing a signing afterwards, something I thought was a bit disappointing when I learned about it. But I crashed shortly after, slept through both the Chip Kidd and Ivan Brunetti panel and the Chris Ware and Lynda Barry one that followed it, woke in time to have dinner with Jill Thompson and her husband, Brian Azzarello, at Katsu.
Breakfast with Chip Kidd, who got to look at the first copy of
Who Killed Amanda Palmer, and said nice things, and then to the airport and off to Toronto.
I dined with Mark Askwith, who I have known for 22 years. We met in Gotham City -- literally, on the set of the first Tim Burton Batman movie -- and I would like to say that we have not changed, but we're both mellower and more contented and less spiky than we were then. We were both journalist-explainer-connectory people who loved comics and wanted to write them, and although he would write some comics he went one way, into television production, and I went the other.
Next morning I went off to CBC to record The Hour. In the car on the way I was told that they'd decided the night before not to do an interview but instead to have me read off a list of 5 Crap Superheroes. I looked them over. They weren't funny. I asked the producer about it, when I got there, and wound up rewriting them, very fast, so they weren't quite as not-funny as they had been, but I'm not sure they ever made it all the way to funny. Then up from the deep basement to a radio studio where Sook-Yin Lee interviewed me for
Definitely Not The Opera about fathers and sons, and it wound up being one of the most real and personal interviews I've ever done.
The downside of being interviewed a lot is that people ask you the same questions a lot, and you wind up saying the same things over and over. Sook-Yin wanted to know things nobody had ever asked, and that I was happy to talk about. It goes out on the 20th of June.
The Luminato event was really fun and fine. Mark Askwith introduced me. (A quick google found
a review of the event here , another
with more photos here, and Mark Askwith's blog,
with his introduction, here.)My favourite event was the next morning: I went to
Nelson Mandela Park school. I read to the kids and answered their questions, then I was shown around the school and finally was taken to a room where thirteen small actors portrayed scenes from the first chapter of
The Graveyard Book. It was delightful.
In other news: Duncan Jones's film MOON opens tonight in LA and New York. I
saw a preview back in February and loved it. Really good SF movie of the kind nobody makes any longer.
I have been nagging Mitch Benn to set up an internetty sort of place to sell his songs directly for a year or so, and he now has it at
http://www.corporationrecords.com/store/index/104. Please buy music from him, so he does not feel it has been a waste of time.
The Graveyard Book -- and this Blog! -- have been nominated for British Fantasy Society Awards:
http://www.locusmag.com/News/2009/06/british-fantasy-award-finalists.htmlHere's a New York Times article about the CORALINE musical and the way it uses diferent kinds of pianos.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/theater/07Blan.htmlThis came in from Mike Berry:
Neil -- Congratulations on the "Coraline" musical. Thought you might be interested in this video of Schuyler Rummel-Hudson retelling the story of "Coraline." Schuyler has a brain malformation that inhibits her ability to speak, as recounted in her father Robert's excellent memoir, "Schuyler's Monster." Still, she's a remarkable storyteller in her own right.
Here's the link:
http://www.schuylersmonsterblog.com/2009/06/storyteller.html
posted by Neil
I've got something that's probably only a bad cold that caught up with me after five months on the road, so I was asleep last night by about nine... and awake this morning at six.
I finished typing the
Dying Earth story for Messrs Martin and Dozois, who were sitting on an otherwise completed book drumming their fingers against their tabletops in a worried manner and waiting for me to finish touring. It's an odd story but it made me happy, and, while I get to do some Jack Vance impressions (no-one but Vance can do Vance properly) I got to do me too.
Again, tabs to close and plenty of them.
Or in one case, tabs to keep open. I'm now hooked on
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org , reading my way through the ancient legal cases, loving the details and the names, occasionally marvelling at the difference in times and moral codes and modes of justice. (Like this:
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17140908-26&div=t17140908-26 which reminds us of the value of freedom of speech...)
A slightly odd Batman article in
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-11-17-batman-gaiman_N.htm -- I'm not exactly misquoted, but I'm not sure I'd entirely endorse any of their conclusions.
(I don't think I've ever had an Alex Ross cover on anything I've done, and it was lovely to see it...)
....and, now that it's been shown full size on the back of Previews, I don't think there's any harm in putting up Andy Kubert's cover, in its original uncoloured version. (which is the one I can find on my computer.) (If anyone grumbles I'll take it down.)
...
I've been pondering the word
prevaricate on and off for a number of years. I'd used it once in
Sandman to mean someone not making up their minds, and Emma Bull, reading it, said "You mean
procrastinate.
Prevaricate means
to lie." And I changed it before it saw print, realising that if she thought it was being misused, so would many other readers. Then, eighteen years later, I read an article on
how to hang Rothkos which contained the sentence
"Rothko was always prevaricating over how his art should be shown," said Waldemar Januszczak, art critic for the Sunday Times, and decided to research.
I think it's a word with shades of meaning, and while in the US it tends to get used simply as "to lie" (as in "All politicians prevaricate"), in the UK it's more often used as a synonym for
Equivocate -- i.e. to avoid giving a straight answer... even to
tergiversarate. And it's the equivocation, with its implications of putting off a decision that then shades over into meanings that aren't simply "to lie".
And after writing that I just found
some people arguing with each other about that on a French/English board, as if it's a new meaning that's just come along. The Big Oxford English Dictionary that I need a magnifying glass to read lists as
Prevaricate definition #2
"To deviate from straightforwardness; to act or speak evasively; to quibble, shuffle, equivocate." And it gives examples going back to 1651. (Squints. Checks with magnifying glass. Nope, 1631.)
...
Joe Gordon asked if I could mention
this excellent Vertigo Encyclopedia interview up at the FPI blog, which I do, partly because I still feel guilty for not ever reading Alex's book
A Scattering of Jades, copies of which were pressed on me in proof by friends, and which, like so many books people give me, never made it off the to-be-read pile.Berkeley Breathed's favourite strips are up at
http://www.berkeleybreathed.com/pages/favorite_strips.asp.
A few people have sent me links in to the Io9 article on
How Sandman Changed the World. It's over at
http://io9.com/5086663/5-ways-that-sandman-changed-the-world if you want to read it. I guess I have the same problem with it I do with a lot of Io9 stuff -- it's an article that reads like someone was assigned it, and sort of blogged it out in a bit of a hurry without any research or real thought. I don't think that
Sandman actually did any of the five things he lists it as having done, and a lot of the things presented on the page as if they're facts are opinions, and dodgy ones at that. (Which sounds remarkably ungracious, considering it's a blog entry that says nice things about
Sandman. If so, blame it on the author being in bed with a cold.) (And, before people write in asking about the "lost Sandman role playing supplement", and before it makes it into Wikipedia, the Mayfair Games
Sandman someone talks about in the comments is more or less entirely fictional. I think I had a chat about a potential Sandman game with Dan Greenberg, who wrote the DC
Magic supplement, but it went no further and Mayfair went down soon after -- I've never before encountered the idea that the two things were linked, and no
Sandman game was ever written, made, solicited or cancelled.)
On the other hand someone sent me a link to this article on children's literature at
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6403. It's a fascinating essay which I agree with parts of, disagree with parts of (I really rate A.A.Milne as a humourist, children's writer and playwright, and my five-year-old love for the Winnie The Pooh books is all-consuming), but love his journey from premise to conclusion. If we are in a golden age of children's literature, it's probably mostly because of Sturgeon's Law. There are a lot of books being written right now, after all.
Also ran into
this article by Roseanne Cash on songwriting (which I suspect applies equally to writing of all kinds) which I really enjoyed: so much of the magic is made by turning up and crafting something, simply by doing the work, and it's so hard to convince people of that, and it doesn't make the magic any less for it.
The Independent has its 50 best books for Winter up as a slideshow at
http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/arts-books/the-50-best-winter-reads-1017075.html (click on the picture of the Ali Smith book to start it).
The Graveyard Book is one of the books, I'm happy to say, and it's also on
Amazon.co.uk's Years Best SF and Fantasy list.
And Meg Cabot
says nice things about The Graveyard Book, and dispels rumours on her lovely chatty blog.
...
About seventeen years ago the phone rang. "You're nominated for a World Fantasy Award for best short story," I was told.
"You should make sure that Charles Vess is nominated too," I said. "He drew it. And as a comic, it's not just the writer. It's both of us."
There were a couple of phone calls, and when the nominations were announced, Charles had been added to the list.
Which was something I found myself remembering when I read,
The Canada Council for the Arts won't add Canadian illustrator Jillian Tamaki's name to the official list of nominees in the text category for this year's Governor-General's Award for children's literature.
"We're a little bit late in the game" to either discuss the issue or make the addition, Melanie Rutledge, head of writing and publishing for the Canada Council, said Wednesday evening. But "we'll take it under consideration going forward. ... We're always wanting feedback like this."
It's for
Skim,
a graphic novel [Jillian] created with her cousin, author Mariko Tamaki. The book, published by Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press, is one of five titles short-listed for the $25,000 G-G prize in children's literature (text), with Mariko Tamaki cited as the sole creator. If you give a writing award to a comic and ignore the art, you're being foolish, short-sighted and fundamentally failing to understand what comics are or what comics writing means.
And it's never too late to fix things.
Now, before I head off on some barking mad Jeremiad against short-sighted Canadians, I shall drink some chicken soup and go to sleep.
