I just watched this last night. It’s wicked funny and you get a very fun performance from that nice Mr. Neil Gaiman as well…
(And you can watch it for free on Hulu. Because technology is awesome.)
The Book Job
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Tag Archives: Neil Gaiman
Almost thirty years ago…
…a fellow in a dream told me “He who dies…” but I woke up before he could finish what he had to say.
Tonight I finally heard the end of that phrase thanks to Boardwalk Empire.
So there’s that.
(Best show on television, by the way.)
A Cruel Season
Before the actual bloggery begins, I just wanted to give a shout out for my friends in New Zealand. You’re all in my thoughts and prayers.
And, to everyone everywhere else… you should all go make a donation to the NZ Red Cross right now.
Seriously. They need all the help they can get.
——-
Everything is slightly off-kilter these days. I’ve been finding it difficult to stay awake much past 10pm and, if I do manage it, all I seem capable of doing is staring at the television — whether it is switched on or not. In fact, a blank wall will do just as well.
As a result, my usually predictable writing schedule has been stuck in first gear, grinding and whining and producing inordinate amounts of psychological smoke to blanket my mind in thick, cloying fumes.
Mostly, I just want to sleep.
This is uncommon for me. All I can think is that, despite my deep and abiding love of winter, I’m somehow suffering from some mild seasonal affect disorder or a soul-crunching depression brought on by B-vitamin deficiency. This seems unlikely, as I have spent fifteen winters in the Midwest with no perceivable ill-effects. But perhaps it is cumulative.
Possibly I am only dying.
It was in this condition that I wrote a fairly long post that began I’ve been thinking about belief a lot lately… but after a week of poking these concept with the blunt stick that is my current mind, I gained enough lucidity to recognize it as the diseased offspring of a crippled animal and had it put down.
Why I was so fixated on this for a while escapes me. It had something to do with Scientology, though. And Science Fiction authors. And leaving people’s beliefs alone. I forget the rest.
Trust me, you have missed out on nothing.
I also wrote a long essay on the work of fanboy-favorite-who-will-one-day-be-exposed-for-the-charlatan-he-is Grant Morrison detailing why the rumor of him taking a crack at Captain Marvel fills me with nothing short of Jihadist-level rage.
That too was a post best left unpublished. Even mentioning it here is dodgy enough. Morrison fans can sometimes be a little aggressive in their preservation of the Emperor’s wardrobe.
And so, in the tradition of The Bloggess, I humbly offer the following Shit I Did When I When My Brain Wasn’t Here.
(It’s an homage, dammit. Be glad I didn’t use the picture of me in hair curlers.)
Meet Marshall
If you want to know what the by-product of my aforementioned mental condition looks like, check out the latest episode of The Gospel of Thomas. In addition to a thankfully brief audio version of my blog post on belief, you get a sneak preview from my forthcoming novel Pantheon. The episode was originally meant to be posted for the holidays late last year but, again, my brain betrayed me. It sat on my hard drive for a few weeks before I realized that it hadn’t actually been posted. By way of penance, I included a longer section from the book as well.
There’s plenty more where that came from, of course. So consider subscribing to the show via iTunes or RSS, won’t you?
“Dad? Are you famous yet?”
There’s been a fan page out on Facebook for a while now — which is really important and relevant these days, what with all that stuff in the media about those people revoluting and whatnot in the Mid East. Every time you click the “like” button, a dictator falls. At least, that’s what they keep saying on the news.
(My daughter asked me the question. Let’s not let the little lady down, folks…)
Neil Gaiman, Pirate
“You’re not losing sales by getting stuff out there. When I do a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people ask “What about the sales you are losing by having stuff floating out there?” I started asking the audience to raise their hands for one question — Do you have a favorite author? And they say yes and I say good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book put up your hand. Then anybody who discovered their favorite author by walking into a book story and buying a book. And it’s probably about 5-10%, if that, of the people who discovered their favorite author who is the person they buy everything of and they buy the hardbacks. And they treasure the fact they’ve got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it. That’s how they found their favorite author. And that’s really all this is; it’s people lending books.”
(Okay, not really. But I thought this interview was fascinating. More and more, these ideas — Free Economic Models, Independent Publishing, Crowdsourced Project Financing, etc. — are making their way into mainstream discussions. This is a good thing.)
Alan Moore, Hero
“I am very concerned about the kids today which might grow up without this access. I am very against taking literacy away from people. Education must not be a privilege for the well-off.”
Amen to that.
If only every endangered library had their very own magician to protect them, the world would be a better place.
(Yep. Definitely a hero.)
Reports of My Being Boring Were Greatly Exaggerated
I’ve been reading The Autobiography of Mark Twain — well, I’ve been listening to it — and I’m somewhat surprised to find that I’m enjoying it. After all of the faintly negative response on the publication last month, I was prepared for a real grind. But something told me that maybe, just maybe, all of the grumbling from critics had less to do with Twain and more to do with certain academic axes they had to grind.
What you’ve heard is true. Yes, the non-Twain introduction and textual explanations are fairly tedious. Yes, it’s a haphazard bundle of rough notes, dictation, and digressions that, in many cases, even Twain didn’t necessarily intend to publish. Yes, fine.
It’s also great.
The actual writing is, for the most part, electrifying. Even when mired in the mundane, Twain’s prose is startlingly good.* And he’s often laugh-out-loud funny. His ability to turn a compliment into an insult, like a trapeze artist effortlessly performing a mid-air flip, is amazing. I imagine that anyone on the receiving end of one of these would sit there with his mouth open and feel fortunate that the Great One took the time to even notice his existence.
I’m only about halfway through right now. The best part so far has been Twain’s response to a friend who did some edits to an essay without asking first. Twain spends a fair amount of time thanking him for his efforts and, with increasing venom, lambasting his audacity and ignorance.
It’s been a while since I mentioned it but…
…today is the Twenty-third of February.
Omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis, y’all.
And finally…
…I wasn’t kidding around. Go make a donation to the New Zealand Red Cross.
——-
* Opinions may vary. But I’m totally right about Grant Morrison.
The Trouble with Reading
A few days ago my daughter finally got around to reading the copy of Matt Phelan’s “The Storm in the Barn “ that she got for her birthday. It’s a great story and she really enjoyed it, which made me happy. I went down into my office to find something else for her to read, brought back Neil Gaiman’s “Death: The High Cost of Living”. She looked it over for a moment and then said “This doesn’t really fit on my list. I’d have to put it under my ‘Extra Choice’ ones and I already have too many of those.”
See, she’s got reading assignments for school. They’re given a list of categories/genres from which they are required to read a set number of books. And the teacher approves the books before they can get credit for that category. Apparently comics fit under the extracurricular category (since they’re not “real” literature, I assume). In my daughter’s mind, the Gaiman book didn’t qualify — she already had Fantasy and Extra Choice covered, after all — so she automatically dismissed it as something to read.
This was (and still is) intensely irritating for me. My daughter’s a big reader, always has been. She loves books. But somehow, school has shifted something in her head to think of a new book in terms of an assignment. She couldn’t look at something new and think “Oh, this looks interesting…” without also evaluating as to whether or not it “fits” into the terms set by her teacher. And, in the end, the assignment eclipsed the interest — which, to my mind, is exactly the opposite of what should happen.
Despite my grinding teeth, I tried to explain to my daughter (as best I could) that reading was something done for its own enjoyment and not just as an assignment. This is something she already knows, of course. But I thought it was important to mention that she could survive reading something even if it didn’t line up with any assigned (I did not at any point use the word “bullshit” though I was tempted) school categories.
Did she get it? I honestly don’t know. I’ve got enough confidence in my daughter to know that she’s going to be a reader no matter what’s been assigned.
But I can’t help feeling that it’s a damn shame, somehow.
Each Monday we do a morning production meeting at work. It’s partially a check-in for all of our active projects, but there’s also a fair amount of socializing about our weekends. This past week, one of my coworkers mentioned that she’d gone to see the latest Twilight movie. When she said how much she loved the books, three or four people offered a plain-faced, almost dismissive declaration along the lines of “Oh, I don’t read.”
There’s something wrong with that, somehow. Not just the fact that, for whatever reason, it would never occur to people to pick up a book . . . but also that there’s no sense that, on some level, anyone sees this as a problem.
And, of course, they do read. They read magazines and websites and street signs. But what they’re saying is much more specific. It’s not “I don’t read” but rather “I don’t read books.”
That’s utterly foreign to me, growing up as I did in a house full of books and people who read them. I’d be more judgmental on this point, perhaps, but I’ve been around long enough to recognize that my experiences aren’t always common. The only thing I can compare it to is that small subset of people who say “Oh, I don’t watch television” or “I don’t go to movies” — the sort of position that typically stems from a choice based on some kind of underlying moral or social or religious belief.
But “I don’t read” doesn’t seem to be a position so much as a preference. A matter of taste, along the lines of “I don’t like olives.”
But, of course, it isn’t a matter of taste — or, rather, it shouldn’t be. Your choice of books is defined by your taste — you might hate Twilight but enjoy John Grisham — but an outright dismissal of every book out there is . . . something else entirely.
And don’t try to tell me it’s all the fault of television or computers or video games or the internet. I grew up with most of those things and I’m more or less perpetually jacked in now, yet none of it has dulled my enthusiasm for the printed word. And since I’ve heard this from people of all ages, I don’t believe it’s a generational thing. I realize it might also not be such a new thing either . . . but it does seem that when I hear “I don’t read” these days, there’s no sense of “I know, I know…” behind it. I think, way back when, that used to be there.
All I hear these days is defiance. Of what, I have no idea. Perhaps of my own elitism for assuming that anyone who doesn’t read is, somehow, missing out.
The holidays are, more or less, here. With that in mind, I thought I’d put together a quick list of “Books for People Who Don’t Read” but it seemed more interesting to open it up to everyone in the comments. I’ll start us off with a few of my ideas but throw yours into the mix as well.