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Free flowing forms, soothing, melodic movement, gentle connections between affectionate souls, Charmagne Coe’s paintings will touch you like a gentle breeze upon the back of your neck on a warm summer day.

These are personal works of art that speak differently to each individual who views them. Somehow Charmagne manages to capture innocence and fear, frailty and strength, love and melancholy with unique figures in extraordinary surroundings.

Charmagne Coe creates her mixed media paintings in a studio in Northern Arizona. Her medium of choice is watercolor combined with pastel and various inks.

Charmagne holds a degree in Fine Art from Northern Arizona University. She describes her work as illuminating the connection between humanity, spirit, nature and time.

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I’ll be moderating Sue Coe’s lecture at the SI this Wednesday. As I’m sure EVERYONE knows here, she’s a brilliant mind in our field and I can’t wait to meet her in person and hear what she has to say.
Hope you can make it!

http://societyillustrators.org/upcoming/coe.cms

Fernanda

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Megan Branch, Intern

The only foods that I can think of as being as “American as apple pie” are recipes that have been lifted from other countries: pizza, sushi and, of course, Chinese food. College in New York has meant that I eat a lot of Chinese food. In his new book, Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, Andrew Coe chronicles Chinese food’s journey across the ocean and into the hearts of Americans everywhere. Below, I’ve excerpted a passage from Chop Suey in which Coe details the earliest written account of an American’s experience eating Chinese food for the first time almost 200 years ago.

Nevertheless, the first account we have of Americans eating Chinese food does not appear until 1819, thirty-five years after Shaw’s visit. It was written by Bryant Parrott Tilden, a young trader from Salem who acted as supercargo on a number of Asia voyages. In Guangzhou, he was befriended by Paunkeiqua, a leading merchant who cultivated good relations with many American firms. Just before Tilden’s ship was set to sail home, Paunkeiqua invited the American merchants to spend the day at this mansion on Honam island. Tilden’s account of that visit, which was capped by a magnificent feast, is not unlike the descriptions Shaw or even William Hickey wrote a half century earlier. First, he tours Paunkeiqua’s traditional Chinese garden and encounters some of the merchant’s children yelling “Fankwae! Fankwae!” (“Foreign devil! Foreign devil!”). Then Paunkeiqua shows him his library, including “some curious looking old Chinese maps of the world as these ‘celestials’ suppose it to be, with their Empire occupying three quarters of it, surrounded by ‘nameless islands & seas bounded only by the edges of the maps.” Finally, his host tells him: “Now my flinde, Tillen, you must go long my for catche chow chow tiffin.” In other words, dinner was served in a spacious dining hall, where the guests were seated at small tables.

“Soon after,” Tilden writes, “a train of servants came in bringing a most splendid service of fancy colored, painted and gilt large tureens & bowls, containing soups, among them the celebrated bird nest soup, as also a variety of stewed messes, and plenty of boiled rice, & same style of smaller bowls, but alas! No plates and knives and forks.” (By “messes,” Tilden probably meant prepared dishes, not unsavory jumbles.)

The Americans attempted to eat with chopsticks, with very poor results: “Monkies [sic] with knitting needles would not have looked more ludicrous than some of us did.” Finally, their host put an end to their discomfort by ordering western-style plates, knives, forks, and spoons. Then the main portion of the meal began:

Twenty separate courses were placed on the table during three hours in as many different services of elegant china ware, the messes consisting of soups, gelatinous food, a variety of stewed hashes, made up of all sorts of chopped meats, small birds cock’s-combs, a favorite dish, some fish & all sorts of vegetables, rice, and pickles, of which the Chinese are very fond. Ginger and pepper are used plentifully in most of their cookery. Not a joint of meat or a whole fowl or bird were placed on the table. Between the changing of the courses, we freely conversed and partook of Madeira & other European wines—and costly teas.”

After fruits, pastries, and more wine, the dinner finally came to an end. Tilden and his friends left glowing with happiness (and alcohol) at the honor Paunkeiqua had shown them with his lavish meal. Nowhere, however, does Tilden tell us whether the Americans actually enjoyed these “messes” and “hashes.”

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David Domke is Professor of Communication and Head of Journalism at the University of Washington. Kevin Coe is a doctoral candidate in Speech Communication at the University of Illinois. They are authors of the The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. To learn more about the book check out their handy website here, to read more posts by them click here.  In the post below they bid farewell to Mike Huckabee.

On Tuesday, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee finally gave up on his bid to win the GOP presidential nomination. Let us be among the first to say good riddance. (more…)

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There's nothing like a day when you can sleep in, especially when you are in a hotel a long way from home and you don't have to take anyone to school or take anyone for a walk. It almost never happens -- normally if I'm in a hotel I have to set alarm clocks. And the whole sleeping in bit is made even better when the day before was long and exhausting, and made better than that by the fact the clocks have gone back an hour so I can really sleep as long as I want to plus an hour...

But the front desk phoned at seven a.m. to let me know I had a driver I didn't want or need or order waiting to take me nowhere at all. And that was that on sleeping in for the morning. So I shall write a slightly sleepy morning blogpost instead.

It's weird. They call these things junkets. It's a word that means either "a sweet dessert", "a party" or "a trip made for pleasure at someone else's expense". And the pleasure trip aspect is certainly there for the journalists, who get flown to somewhere nice by the film company, put up in hotels, see the film and then spend a day or a few hours talking to the people who made it. When I was a journalist, getting on a junket was always considered a good thing -- a small amount of work for a fair amount of pleasure and adventure.

Having done a few of them now on the other side of the press conference tableI think it's worth mentioning that they aren't really junkets for the people organising them or for the people being interviewed.

We assembled yesterday in a hotel back room. A lady did hair and make up for the cameras (which means, in my case, a bit of powder, and then her looking at my hair and asking "Is it meant to be like that?" and me saying, um, yes, sorry. Then into a back room to be led onto the stage for a press conference. Ray Winstone and Crispin Glover had just seen the film and loved it (Crispin: "And mostly I don't like films I'm in,"), John Malkovitch, Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie haven't yet seen it. Bob Zemeckis was there but decided some years ago not to do things like interviews and junkets and press conferences (very wise).

I like Angelina. She's nice, very professional, and has a slightly goofy sense of humour. Last time I met her was November 2005, when she was doing the acting bit of Beowulf. Even then, it had already been reported in the papers that she had closed down production on Beowulf by walking off the set after a fight with Ray Winstone -- two weeks before her first day on set. I realised that where she was concerned the press were happy to simply make up stuff that sounded credible. It didn't need have to have any basis at all in reality.

It was obvious during the press conference that a large contingent of the press just wanted to talk to her and talk about her private life, something she declined to do and handled with grace and aplomb. Overall, the press conference went well (I think my favourite bit was the way Ray Winstone, answering questions, refers to me and Roger Avary as "The Boys", as if we're a couple of writing hardcaseswho will come over to your house and beat you up with our typewriters.)

And then on to interviews. Round tables: a dozen journalists in each room, and Roger and I go in, talk for half an hour and are then moved to the next room, where another dozen journalists are waiting to ask the same questions, while Anthony Hopkins, always one room behind, is moved into the room we were in.

And then it was individual interviews, and telephone interviews with journalists in Kansas and suchlike places. And then, brain dead, we were done.

The reaction to the film from the journalists and interviewers, who had seen it the previous night, seemed overwhelmingly positive, which was a relief.

It's nice that people have started to see the film, and are now actually talking about the thing they've seen. (I got a bit tired of reading online "reviews" of the film, which were always mash-ups of what people thought they'd seen in the trailers with what they imagined we were doing to the story, along with complaints about visuals they hadn't properly seen yet, which then normally concluded with the loud and proud announcement that as they knew they wouldn't like it, they wouldn't be seeing it, and it certainly wouldn't be Beowulf. Several of them were written by people who should, I thought, know better. I've never minded getting bad reviews, but in the past they've always come from people who had at least read or seen the thing they were complaining about.)

Anyway, now we've started screening it, real reactions are coming in.

Here's a letter Jeff Wells that he put up at his blog in advance of his review appearing, which he's posted I think partly because he was embarrassed by having said nasty things about Beowulf last week before seeing it http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/archives/2007/11/beowulf_2.php
Here's someone who saw a preview screening at UCLA - http://strstruckdreamr9.blogspot.com/2007/11/beowulf.html
and another early screening blog http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=43263288&blogID=325323587
Moriarty review it over at aintitcool -- http://www.aintitcool.com/node/34678 -- and I'm sure that lots of other reviews are going to start surfacing now that people are seeing it. (It's not that we were playing the completed film close to our chest. It's just that it wasn't completed -- the film, in its final form, was only emitted from the computers this week. And the Imax 3D print people started seeing on Friday afternoon was only completed on Friday morning.)

...

Dear Neil,

About two or three months ago I was found a book in the New Release section by you and Micheal Reaves. Being a fan of yours, I bought the book, presuming it would be good. It was good.

However, it didn't seem to be your style exactly so I checked the release date: 2007.

I was surprised that I hadn't heard anything about this book on your blog since I have been reading it for about a year, maybe more.

I thought that maybe, albeit doubtfully, there was someone else in the world named Neil Gaiman.

Nope. Under OTHER NOVELS FOR YOUNG READERS BY NEIL GAIMAN, was Coraline.

The book is called Interworld.

Just asking why you havent mentioned it at all on your blog.

-Camille

I'm posting this to remind people that there is a SEARCH function on the www.neilgaiman.com pages. They take you to http://www.neilgaiman.com/search_form/. If you typed in Interworld it would give you about 15 hits from the website, first among them http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/labels/Interworld.html which is all the times I've labelled a blog entry Interworld since I've been doing labelling on this blog (basically this year). And which would answer all your questions...

Hello, Neil!

Sorry if this is old news, but your journal has been nominated for Best Literature Blog on the 2007 Weblog Awards.

http://2007.weblogawards.org/polls/best-literature-blog-1.php

The voting closes November 8 and you're currently in the lead!

Best of luck,

Leanne

Thank you! What fun. (Which left me suddenly wondering what happened to the "Bloggers Choice" awards -- looks like they get handed out next week in Las Vegas.)


...

Lots of people asking what's happening in the Philippines in a couple of weeks. I'm talking to an ad congress -- I don't think the event is open to the public -- and doing something with Fully Booked (I googled but only found http://www.fullybookedonline.com/adsdetail.php?id=53).

Anyway. Maddy is here -- I've told her she has to blog the Premiere please -- and I am going off to be a dad now. (In the interests of fairness, I should add that an apologetic fruit basket has just arrived from the people who sent the 7.00 am car and driver, putting me in mind of the Elvis Costello bit on the old Larry Sanders Show. And that Maddy has been eating the gummi bears out of it.)

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I'm doing a sort of one man press junket right now (although Michelle Pfeiffer will be doing it as well tomorrow). Lots of interviews (MTV Movies, Time Out NY, NY Daily News, Time Magazine and the LA Times today, along with a "round table" interview with about ten journalists and a photo shoot (thank heavens they had a make-up lady for the shoot, who made me look less like a giant panda around the eyes than I really do right now). Tomorrow is the NY Times syndicate and the NY Times, and the NY Post. Then I get on a plane and do it some more.

I'm brain dead, partly from being interviewed out and partly because travel to NY yesterday afternoon proved really problematic -- my flight was cancelled, and I didn't get in until after midnight, on a different airline, on a delayed flight flying via Milwaukee (and at that, I did better than most of the other people on the flight, who had to stay overnight in Minneapolis).

I also decided that the thing you most don't want to hear from a check-in person is what the lady at Midwest Airlines said to me when I showed her the Northwest slip saying they'd put me on MidWest, after I'd made a mad taxi ride from one airport to another. She looked down at it and said "You have got to be kidding!" The flight they'd put me on was oversold and had standby passengers.

But they got me on it somehow, and all was well. I just wish I wasn't so tired.

Regarding raccoons getting through catflaps: a few years back someone set up a computer with image-recognition software to stop their cat bringing in small animals (and incidentally test their image-recognition software). It also stopped a skunk getting in; it should work on raccoons too:

http://www.quantumpicture.com/Flo_Control/flo_control.htm

I don't think it would do any good, seeing that it's all based around the same magnetic cat-door that our raccoons have already figured out how to jimmy. It's very clever, though.

...
And over here -- http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=news&id=11038 -- is a little of the Beowulf score.

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