Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Neil, you've been watching way too much  _Little Bear_.
  

    
Or  _Star Wars_. Either way.
  

    
The EW thing in the blogger is a warning that you may not know
yourself as well as you think you do.
  

    
I dunno.. the idea of Neil and Star Wars references makes me go all
kersplooie. 

*grin*

Neil, I'll discuss this more in the other conference.. but I hope that
I do you right... our producer says that everything looks happy with
the rights people, and I'll be directing a staged version of We Can Get
Them For You Wholesale for this October's show. I'll do my best to
make sure that nobody gets bored (and therefore inspired. There will be
not inspiriation going on when I'm directing!! Um.. or something like
that.)
  

    
Hi Neil,

Just finished AG minutes ago and thought I'd stop by here to
see if you're still in.

It's a damn entertaining read, that's for sure. I didn't really
get the noir feel that a lot of reviewers seem to get, but it's
quite an absorbing mystery, trying to figure out who the heck
Shadow really is that the (once) mighty gods should take such
an avid interest in him.

What I'm most curious about after reading the book is the
degree of conscious social criticism in it. It's a time-honored
method in continental Europe to use America as the apogee of
modernity, and there is certainly stuff enough in AG that
appear as good starting points for criticism of modernity.
E.g. the new gods - Media, the Market (the Intangibles), the
Technical Boy, the Spookshow - replacing the old gods who were
embodiments of more real and substantial things such as love,
death, the sun, the land, etc. The fascination with the tacky
and the roadside attractions persistently reminded me of
Umberto Eco's "Faith in Fakes" (read it?), and of course
there's that Borges paraphrase in Ibis's book, about the map
and the territory.

During the first part of the book I sort of expected this to
become more of a focal point as the book went on, but it
remained subordinate to the adventure, leaving something extra
to think about for the so inclined while not cluttering the
narrative. So I came to wonder to what extent you yourself
found this dimension an integral part of the book, and if you
had something particular that you wanted to say about these
issues.

Lastly, thanks for the book. My hours soaking up the precious
few rays of semi-hot Swedish sun wouldn't have been nearly as
enjoyable without it. Missing it already. Especially Lakeside.
  

    
Hi, Stray - I'm going to have to check out this Umberto Eco book; love
his stuff anyway.
Modernity? It is a big misconception about America, that really
doesn't apply to small towns, especially around here (Southern
Appalachia). You might be amazed at the pockets of pioneer ways of life
floating around... but I've already talked Neil's ear off on this
subject...
  

    
Well, yes, I think one mistake there is treating America as a
homogenous country. And there is this questionable sense from
over here of an America that is (at least) as fictional as it
is "genuine", and many a postmodern, continental theorist has
devoted many a page to such things as "an ideological analysis
of Disneyland."

As I now flip through Baudrillard's tres pomo "Simulacra and
Simulation" I came upon this sentence (among many like it):

"Disneyland is presented to us as imaginary in order to make
us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles
and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but
belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation."

I like these guys, they have lots of cute ideas that make me
smile, but the rhethoric is a wee bit exaggerated sometimes.

Neil, being based in the US, is of course a much more subtle
and nuanced fellow. To the point of compelling me to ask him
how consciously he was actually thinking about these things
while writing American Gods.
  

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Of course there is. It's just the die-hard French pomo theorists
who sometimes forget that the US is populated by real, live,
flesh-and-blood humans and not exclusively by Disney figures and
TV celebrities ;)
  

    
Neil -- read your blogger and then I went to go check my Entertainment
Weekly. I must admit, the picture in the magazine doesn't look exactly
like your pictures we've seen before -- but is quite cute regardless. 
  

    
Wahoo!  Finally got to tape Neil's Book Revue reading on Long Island
off of the MetroLearning channel.  The man is, of course, in fine form,
if a trifle shaggy-- but we know about his lack of a razor from
Blogger entries.  In the show/on the video he reads from Sam & Shadow's
discussion about Herodotus to Shadow's talk with Lucy.  I'm kinda
bumming cause the editors cut out my question at the end (Neil actually
says my name, if only to make fun of my tentitive hand-raising,) but
the reading is really great, and there's a steady stream of "fun facts"
about Neil at the bottom of the screen  ("Neil Gaiman is English,"
etc.)  If anybody would like a copy of the tape, let me know.

Pamela-- with Chris and me, words usually come first-- but only 'cause
I write faster than he does.  And it's weird what triggers creativity.
 I once tried to get my wife to teach me how to crochet, thinking that
the repetitive activity would trigger my gamma waves (or whatever) but
I found it so hard to do well that I wound up with a foot of lousy
afghan and no writing. So I gave up my crocheting career.

Stray-- it seems to me that, as you say, lots of the cute pomo stuff
about simulacra and reality is generally refuted by taking a walk
outside and looking around.

Neil-- re: blogger entry on the Sound of Music.  I feel for you-- The
Sound o'Music is brain-twistingly awful... Nuns, kids and Nazis...ugh. 
However, my wife loves that show, and my someday-child will no doubt
love it too... my only hope is to get the kid hooked on Sweeney as soon
as possible... and to keep a ready supply of Werewolf Club books on
hand.
  

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But I wasn't the parent. I was just a(nother) sick kid...

Besides, I'm guessing most parents would rather have their kids
watching Sound of Music three times over than, uhm, _insert something
really awful here_ ...

Kids get like that, from what I remember and have experianced. They
just get into repetitive grooves, and there's probably a 'real' reason
for it, too.

It's why so many parents know Goodnight, Moon by heart... ;-)

-Kelly

(wow! really off topic!)
  

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jaNell -- 303 could be. More likely, as Rani suggests, it's that it
doesn't look a lot like me.

Dan -- oh good. Glad all's sorted on the rights -- who exactly have
they been talking to, as no-one seems to have run it by me yet (unless
they did it while I was on tour and in went in one eye and out the
other).

Stray -- is Faith in Fakes the one with the Eco essay on America as a
Fortress of Solitude in it?  

I think all of that stuff has to be part of the fabric of a story, but
subordinate to the story.  I'm with Wednesday, for example, on the
idea that America is not one place or even one country, but I do think
the American attitude to the future is very different to the European
one.

Ambrose Bierce was an American (although not a very american one) and
he defined it as

FUTURE, n. 
That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true
and our happiness is assured.

the nice thing about a novel is it's big enough to be about more than
one thing.

Len -- exactly.

JaNell --  of course I could turn it off, just as my parents could
have stopped me reading or watching all the stuff they didn't like. But
I'm grateful they didn't.  I've always found it makes much more sense
to find the stuff they love and encourage that rather than to stomp on
it.

As it is, Maddy gets an hour of TV a day, and if she wants to invest
it in The Sound of Music rather than Zaboomafoo or Scooby Doo or
Between the Lions, it's her call.

But as for how Len handles his wife's fondness for The Sound of Music,
that's up to him....
  

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But I can see from 316 that you do believe in spanking...
May I be excused to go to my room?
  

    
hmn... spanking...
  

    

I'm extremely fond of The Sound of Music for any number of reasons, one of
them being that it was filmed when I was in seventh grade, and one of my
classmates, who played Kurt (the kid who hits the really high note in the
Good Night song) was in it, and was gone nearly the entire year filming
it.  We were all quite excited, and that feeling has stuck with me all
through the years.  
  

    
E-mail from The Other Glen:

My sister-in-law, who has 2 parents with PHDs in education, claims
that children watch things until they've made sense of it all.  If
anything is puzzling or unclear, they watch it again and again. 
Given some kids attention span, it might take many viewings to get it
all.

When she bought my nephew "The Lion King", it wasn't until the third
viewing that he sat up and asked if the old King had died.  The
off-camera death wasn't enough for him the first few times.  

But what do I know?

- The Other Glen
  

    
You could all be right. It's just that so many parents let their kids
run them.

And the below part is not for everyone. 
  

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Sorry, way too personal, had to scribble.