posted by Neil
I'm now three stops into this tour, and it's been a delight so far. As I type this, I still have a beard.
Lev Grossman interviewed me at the 92nd St Y, and it was funny and glorious and he had amazingly shiny shoes and should have his own chat show.
The Big Gay Ice Cream Van was a huge success too.
Then I flew to Portsmouth New Hampshire, defying the rain gods, discovering that they have a submarine in a park that looks as if it is preparing to become a subterranean. Beautiful theatre, loverly people. The extra-loverly people at River Run bookstore should still have lots of signed books by me for sale and will ship them anywhere. I was interviewed on the Music Hall stage for NHPR's WORD OF MOUTH by the beautiful and funny Virginia Prescott, or as I will now always think of her, Crystal Ball-breaker.
Tonight it's WITS at the Fitzgerald Theatre. It'll be streaming and you should watch it. I guarantee strange things will happen.
Famed Periodical The Onion has started its campaign for a Pulitzer Prize. They asked if I'd make a video of me talking to the Pulitzer Committee for them, and I recorded this video.
I recommend watching the others - so far I'm a particular fan of the Ricky Gervais, the Mark Gatiss and the Ira Glass.
I'm in a hotel room in St Paul, along with two dogs, an assistant and a daughter, who all picked me up at the airport. It's odd being (sort of) home in the middle of a tour - normally I start here or finish here. This time I don't even get home to my house, so I am particularly glad that they all came out to see me.
I am not looking forward to getting Cabal into the lift (er, elevator) back down again. It went fine coming up, but he now knows what it is and will probably have remembered that he doesn't like elevators.
Neil Gaiman on WhoSay
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The biggest news stories of the day: Gene Colan passed away. He never drew anything I wrote, we never worked together, I never met him. But I loved his art. Here's Mark Evanier to tell you who he was and what made him special.
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And if you're thinking of going to Canada, or leaving Canada, then you should read this: http://cbldf.org/about-us/case-files/cbldf-case-files-canada-customs-case/. The latest Comic Book Legal Defense Fund case - they've agreed to help the Canadian Comic Legends Legal Defense Fund in defending a young man who had some Manga on his computer.
I'll write more about it soon.
In the meantime, if anyone tells you that mucky Manga shouldn't be defended, point them to http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speech.html
By: Neil Gaiman,
on 2/14/2010
Blog: Neil Gaiman (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: A little Valentine's Wish, Why I Support the CBLDF, Jack Benny and his Show, Now cut that out..., Add a tag
posted by Neil
Today is a very important day. Viz and to wit: Jack Benny's 116th Birthday. Which means that somewhere out there, he is still 39.(A quick Google found 12 episodes of the Jack Benny Radio Show that you can download at http://www.oldtimeradiofans.com/template.php?show_name=Jack%20Benny. Very much worth a listen: the show's dated less than you'd expect, because the humour of the Benny show tended to be based on people, rather than topical gags, and I'd say that from around 1942 to around 1951 it's pretty consistently funny, with its best material between about 1946 and 1950. I'm not a fan of the 1930s Benny shows -- the writing was patchy, and there are occasional racist tropes and gags that lurch between unfortunate and just plain horrible, and as the 50s went on Jack's attention is on his television show, and there are weird moments in many of the radio shows where Mary Livingstone, Jack's wife, was recording her lines in the bathroom so she didn't have to stand in front of a studio audience, and the timing is off, which is a hard thing for a show that's all about timing, while Bing Crosby's brother Bob was no substitute for Phil Harris.... But when it was good, it was wonderful. And we'll not even go into the sexuality of the show at this point, other to say that it's consistently interesting).
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Christopher Handley was sentenced to six months in jail yesterday. He pled guilty to owning obscene comics - seven comics, imported from Japan, out of a manga-anime collection of thousands. He's a computer programmer, who had moved back in with his mother when she had health issues, who had, as far as I know, no interests apart from obsessively collecting Manga and bible study.
I wish he'd fought the case. But I can also understand why his lawyer persuaded him to go the way he did: he was facing a $250,000 fine and a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
Mr. Handley's case began in May 2006 when he received an express mail package from Japan that contained seven Japanese comic books. That package was intercepted by the Postal Inspector, who applied for a search warrant after determining that the package contained cartoon images of objectionable content. Unaware that his materials were searched, Handley drove away from the post office and was followed by various law enforcement officers, who pulled him over and followed him to his home. Once there, agents from the Postal Inspector's office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, Special Agents from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, and officers from the Glenwood Police Department seized Handley's collection of over 1,200 manga books or p0 Comments on What Today Is... as of 1/1/1900Add a Comment
By: Neil Gaiman,
on 11/24/2008
Blog: Neil Gaiman (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Coraline movie, Why I Support the CBLDF, G1, many meanwhiles, make Gahan Wilson King of America, Add a tag
posted by Neil
Up until now the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has defended Artists, Writers, Publishers, and Retailers. We've never had to defend a reader before.I talk about it over at: http://splashpage.mtv.com/2008/11/24/neil-gaiman-on-the-obscenity-of-manga-collector-christopher-handleys-trial/
That's where the money the CBLDF raised from the eBay auction went (and thanks to everyone who contributed!). Katherine Keller writes an editorial about it at http://www.sequentialtart.com/article.php?id=1183. Then she puts her money where her mouth is at http://kadymae.livejournal.com/719901.html.
A basic CBLDF membership is $25. http://www.cbldf.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=44 and there are people who really would like them as gifts. Honest. You get a membership card and everything.
And seeing I'm now recommending gifts -- Todd Klein documents the end of the story of his Alex Ross print at http://kleinletters.com/Blog/?p=2295 (and it's fascinating watching how something goes from not quite right to really very right), and then tells you how to order it -- or the third printing of Alan Moore's print or the second printing of my print (all signed in dark green ink) at http://kleinletters.com/Blog/?p=2385.
You can find out about the talk I gave the Open Rights group at http://entangled.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/neil-gaiman-talked-about-publishing-in-digital-age/, with links to a recording of the talk and some transcribed bits of it.
And more Coraline boxes are showing up on the web... http://www.slashfilm.com/2008/11/23/a-magic-box-from-the-makers-of-coraline/ has one, with a video of its opening, while another, very different, is up at http://fashion-piranha.livejournal.com/40454.html. I'm almost envious...
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Meanwhile, an animated short film based on a short comic by Gahan Wilson and me (one of the two "five finger exercises", along with "October in the Chair", that I did before starting The Graveyard Book). You can read about it at the Playboy blog. It was made as part of the Born Dead: Still Weird documentary on Gahan Wilson (here's an article about it, by director Steven-Charles Jaffe, also at Playboy.com), and you can find a selection of Gahan's cartoons up at http://www.playboy.com/arts-entertainment/features/gahan-wilson/index.html (and a note saying that in 2009 Fantagraphics and Playboy are going to be publishing "a deluxe hardcover edition with three slipcased volumes that contain every one of Gahan’s Playboy cartoons" This is a really good thing).
Well, it is if you love the macabrely funny, or the funnily macabre......
Meanwhile in another part of the forest, I'm simultaneously more impressed, and sometimes more frustrated with the G1.
No blogger app, yet? Not a problem. According to blogger you just send a text -- no content specified -- to [email protected] and it'll send you a code to allow you to claim your blog... so that should be simple. Except that if you send a text message from the G1 to blogger you get a message back telling you that you haven't registered and to send a text message containing the text REGISTER to [email protected]. And if you send a text message containing the word REGISTER you get another message back telling you to send a message containing the word REGISTER... You do this a few more time, with no change.
So you give up and log in to Blogger using the G1's browser, and discover that the ability to upload photographs to Blogger has been disabled, and then you give up.
The voice recognition software doesn't always recognise that I've even said anything, and its choices, when it does think I've spoken, aren't just mishearings, they're positively perverse:
Me: Call Mike Gaiman.
Phone: (offers me a choice between)
Dial 508 0972
Dial 508 9721
Dial 508 9720
Me: Call Dad Cell
Phone: (offers a choice between)
Call Hilary Bevan Jones at Work
Call Hilary Bevan Jones at Home
...it's not even like there's a match up between the vowels, the consonants, or the number of syllables. Mysterious.
But the things that work work so well. I'm now using it as my bedside clock-alarm and GPS. It's a great phone. I cannot wait for a Slingbox app, or a RealPlayer app so I can use it to stream BBC Radio...
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And finally, LEEDS UNITED: A musical video by Miss Amanda Palmer.
Labels: Coraline movie, many meanwhiles, make Gahan Wilson King of America, Why I Support the CBLDF, G1
0 Comments on ...is Nothing sacred? as of 11/25/2008 12:13:00 AM
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By: Neil Gaiman,
on 7/31/2008
Blog: Neil Gaiman (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: tee shirts, batman, Why I Support the CBLDF, who actually did kill Amanda Palmer?, first amendment stuff, Add a tag
I'll be working with Amanda Palmer on the WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER Book for the next couple of days. It's a book of photos of her with occasional words by me, which are currently being written. Some photos were taken over a decade ago, most are more recent and most of them are by photographer Kyle Cassidy, who in between taking proper important shots of Amanda doing book things on the roof this evening, took this photo of Amanda and me. I am wearing socks because I have incredibly painful blisters on my feet because I can be an idiot sometimes. Possibly more information than you wanted to know, but there you go.
(A much fuller description of the late evening and more photos from Kyle at http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/)
Neil,
Went to CBLDF booth. Got T-shirt. It smells like your basement. Can I wash this thing without your signature coming off?
Also, my Fiance got the New wave hookers shirt. Seriously Neil? A porno? There's gotta be a good story there.
You rule,
Noelle
You should certainly be able to wash it -- the thick fabric paint I used to sign it says it's washable, anyway. If it's any consolation, that smell is attic, not basement. And more than half of the tee shirts were originally gifts, and many of them were mysteries swallowed by time or never explained even to me: where I got the "New Wave Hookers" tee shirt is anybody's guess. But I wore it happily anyway.
I hope this reaches neil himself. Never have i ever known of anyone as full of himself as well as shit, than you. Now another milestone in your over-hyped career, Writing Batman. Not only are you under the impression you can write, but write batman? Fuck You. You Tried before and it sucked. It was just gaiman... With Batman in it. Fuck You.
If I'd known that Secret Origins of Batman Villains #1 had made that much of an impression on people, I would have... actually, probably not done anything different, really. I was rather fond of it.
If you think you won't like the Batman comic I'll write, probably you'd be best off not reading it. It'll just be a two part Batman comic, you can save your money. Although if you'd bother to write me a letter like that you might buy it just to prove to yourself that you hate it as much as you know you're going to...
Dear Neil,
I just wanted to drop a line to pass on this article on the relevance of comics in academia, which you might find of some interest, despite the fact that the author places a line break between every sentence. Some of the facts are old news, but there are some interesting tidbits to be gleaned. Here's the link: http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0729/p01s06-ussc.html
Sharyn
That took me back. I thought that newspapers had finally given up on variants of WHAM SMASH POW! COMICS HAVE GROWN UP! in headlines...
Hi Neil.
When you talk about "places where you can be arrested for drawing cartoons", surely you don't mean to imply that in the USA you can't be arrested for drawing a cartoon? You can, just as you can for any other art form.
The First Amendment doesn't provide protection for (among other things) incitement to commit a crime, threats, or so-called "fighting words" intended to provoke violence. Any of these things is possible in a cartoon, and could constitute a criminal offence depending on the details and applicable State law.
I'd suggest that cartoons which are indiscriminately hostile to members of a particular race or religion could, depending again on the exact content, constitute any of those three things, and that the police were probably right to at least investigate once a complaint was made.
Whether Nekschot actually did any of them, whether his cartoons would be criminal in the US, and whether they are in the Netherlands, I'm not equipped to say.
Obviously I'm not suggesting that you can't be arrested in the USA for drawing a cartoon, and not for the reasons you suggest: Mike Diana was convicted of obscenity, for example. Take a look at this blog post where I talk about the Mike Diana case and the time I came close to sending a publisher in Sweden down for a long jail term for depicting acts of violence against women by retelling a bible story. That's why I'm a member of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund -- because there are always worms nibbling away at the First Amendment, and because comics are particularly vulnerable.
Here's a summary of the "fighting words" history: http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=13718. I don't believe you could create a cartoon that would, however robust, actually fall into the category of "fighting words" unless it was "addressed to a particular individual" and presented "an actual threat of immediate violence, not merely offensive content".
Argh. Up too late. To bed, to bed.
Went to CBLDF booth. Got T-shirt. It smells like your basement. Can I wash this thing without your signature coming off?
Also, my Fiance got the New wave hookers shirt. Seriously Neil? A porno? There's gotta be a good story there.
You rule,
Noelle
You should certainly be able to wash it -- the thick fabric paint I used to sign it says it's washable, anyway. If it's any consolation, that smell is attic, not basement. And more than half of the tee shirts were originally gifts, and many of them were mysteries swallowed by time or never explained even to me: where I got the "New Wave Hookers" tee shirt is anybody's guess. But I wore it happily anyway.
I hope this reaches neil himself. Never have i ever known of anyone as full of himself as well as shit, than you. Now another milestone in your over-hyped career, Writing Batman. Not only are you under the impression you can write, but write batman? Fuck You. You Tried before and it sucked. It was just gaiman... With Batman in it. Fuck You.
If I'd known that Secret Origins of Batman Villains #1 had made that much of an impression on people, I would have... actually, probably not done anything different, really. I was rather fond of it.
If you think you won't like the Batman comic I'll write, probably you'd be best off not reading it. It'll just be a two part Batman comic, you can save your money. Although if you'd bother to write me a letter like that you might buy it just to prove to yourself that you hate it as much as you know you're going to...
Dear Neil,
I just wanted to drop a line to pass on this article on the relevance of comics in academia, which you might find of some interest, despite the fact that the author places a line break between every sentence. Some of the facts are old news, but there are some interesting tidbits to be gleaned. Here's the link: http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0729/p01s06-ussc.html
Sharyn
That took me back. I thought that newspapers had finally given up on variants of WHAM SMASH POW! COMICS HAVE GROWN UP! in headlines...
Hi Neil.
When you talk about "places where you can be arrested for drawing cartoons", surely you don't mean to imply that in the USA you can't be arrested for drawing a cartoon? You can, just as you can for any other art form.
The First Amendment doesn't provide protection for (among other things) incitement to commit a crime, threats, or so-called "fighting words" intended to provoke violence. Any of these things is possible in a cartoon, and could constitute a criminal offence depending on the details and applicable State law.
I'd suggest that cartoons which are indiscriminately hostile to members of a particular race or religion could, depending again on the exact content, constitute any of those three things, and that the police were probably right to at least investigate once a complaint was made.
Whether Nekschot actually did any of them, whether his cartoons would be criminal in the US, and whether they are in the Netherlands, I'm not equipped to say.
Obviously I'm not suggesting that you can't be arrested in the USA for drawing a cartoon, and not for the reasons you suggest: Mike Diana was convicted of obscenity, for example. Take a look at this blog post where I talk about the Mike Diana case and the time I came close to sending a publisher in Sweden down for a long jail term for depicting acts of violence against women by retelling a bible story. That's why I'm a member of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund -- because there are always worms nibbling away at the First Amendment, and because comics are particularly vulnerable.
Here's a summary of the "fighting words" history: http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=13718. I don't believe you could create a cartoon that would, however robust, actually fall into the category of "fighting words" unless it was "addressed to a particular individual" and presented "an actual threat of immediate violence, not merely offensive content".
Argh. Up too late. To bed, to bed.
0 Comments on The roof of all evil as of 7/31/2008 4:37:00 AM
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By: Jessamyn West,
on 11/13/2007
Blog: librarian.net (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: l3@d, unt, webjunction, learning, 'puters, elearning, Add a tag
Upgrades don’t wipe out all your coursework if you use a textbook and a notebook instead of WebCT. This is embarassing, honestly. Switch to a new “learning management system” lose all your old work.
9 Comments on why e-learning and learning are different, last added: 12/4/2007
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I’ve yet to see a really good one. (FSU uses Blackboard, and it’s a usability train wreck.)
Shame on people who don’t archive their stuff outside “the system,” though.
[…] why e-learning and learning are different » This Summary is from an article posted at librarian.net on Tuesday, November 13, 2007 why […]
My school uses WebCT. I hate it. I could set up a better online learning environment with a Yahoo! Group.
Man, I took a few classes through WebCT at UNT, and let me tell you: losing your work is a minor problem there. More important is the fact that, WebCT is so clunky and user-unfriendly that it makes it very difficult to actually exchange ideas with people. When the courses use the ol’ memorize-and-regurgitate method of “learning,” you start to wonder if you’re getting your money’s worth out of that school, even if it’s close to free…
I’ve done WebCT through Marshall (hated it, clunky, CONSTANTLY crashed) and Blackboard through Mansfield (a little better, IMHO). It stinks that they’re moving to a new system, but apparently either can’t figure out or can’t be bothered with finding a better solution.
Heather, the two companies merged recently, or one bought the other, I don’t know the details. So it has even less incentive to improve. Unless we keep reminding it about Moodle, Sakai, and other open source courseware applications. I was told that one of the features that recommended WebCT was its integration with the Registrar’s database. But when people withdrew from my Reference class, the instructor didn’t know about it, so I don’t think it was really all that well integrated.
Sharon,
Thanks for the heads-up re: the merger. I’ve heard good stuff about Moodle, and I don’t know why more schools don’t use it. I know some high schools have used it for their distance education purposes with pretty good results. I’ve never heard of Sakai, but now I’ve got something to look for, just to satisfy my own curiosity!
I too have taken many WebCT courses at UNT. Contrary to Doug’s experience, mine has been alright. I believe WebCT facilitates the exchange of ideas far better than a face-to-face class. The system is sluggish at peak hours, and yes, you MUST save your work outside the system or risk losing it. But I can’t imagine anyone not doing that anyway. WebCT, and any other web-based instructional system I suppose, forces participation. Students cannot fake it the way they can in most conventional classes.
Tsk,tsk, WebCT, I cannot yet grasp why on the world with free and open source systems available out there like moodle (www.moodle.org) or claroline (www.claroline.net), educational institutions keep insisting in wasting their money and time with WebCT!!!