Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
hmmm..... it appears i need to put the crackpipe down.
  

    
Some answers, and a question:

1. No.
2. No.
3. I was =taught= the Johnny Appleseed legend in third grade, and as best as
I can recall, was taught about it as if it were a real person rather than
folklore. A few years ago, it occurred to me that I knew none of the actual
facts of his life, but that what I knew was probably all wrong.
4. See #3.
5. An Indian chief in a Longfellow poem that I've never read.

Actually, two questions:

1. Has living in the United States let you stumble on surprising bits of
American folklore? Any examples come to mind?
2. Is it safe to assume Miracleman will never continue? If it had, what were
your plans for it?

I suppose those was were sneaky multipart questions, but so it goes.
  

    
My grandfather could recite the entire Hiawatha poem.  He grew up at a time
when portable entertainment had to be in your brain, not in a device.

I learned about Chapman by writing an environmetal studies paper about his
viability as a symbol.  In 1977 or so at Berkeley.  Theorized that it was a
metaphoric tale about caring for the future, good medicine for our time, 
but it's a tough sell unless a saturday morning cartoon or something
kicked it in the pants.  
  

    
Frank Browning's book about Apples talks about Chapman. Apparently, he was a
Swedenborgian missionary, who use his orchard plantings to gain access to
frontier communities. And he was probably the last orchardist in history to
do large-scale propagation by seed rather than grafting. Because apples are
not self-pollinating, they don't breed true  from seed (meaning the seedling
are not the same kind of apple as the parent tree).
  

    
John -- I think he was more of a farmer who also handed out
swedenborgian tracts than a swedenborgian missionary who planted
orchards, but that one may be a judgement call.

Laurel -- ah, but the most interesting thing about Hiawatha is that he
WASN'T the guy in the poem. Or rather, the gentleman that Longfellow
cribbed from got a real person (Hiawatha) and a culture hero confused
and gave the diplomat's name to the legendary warrior.

Thank you all... and any more responses are very welcome and
interesting.

Mike -- Tori was on Colour and Light? Are you sure you aren't thinking
of the wonderful holly Cole?

Lagoon -- there's not a lot of stumbling: you have to go and look a
lot.

Who knows, about Miracleman? After the Silver Age came the dark age.
That one was scary.

Off doing some movie pitches for a few days. What a strange world.
Also write intros for SUPERNATURAL LAW (Batton Lash) a Projekt ORPHEUS
album (I tried to write a thing about Kathy Acker in the style of Kathy
Acker without mentioning Kathy Acker) and am working on the novel in
the background.
  

    
Neil,

Of course I was thinking of the wonderful Holly Cole. Sorry about
that. I'm more of a Sondheim fan actually, although I appreciate both
Tori Amos and Holly Cole, which incidentally have very different
styles, which makes it the more embarrassing to have confused the two. 
But I guess I can blame the jitters at actually writing something that
Neil Gaiman would read, trying to say something more interesting than
"Sandman is great. You're great.", and making a fool of myself instead.

Let's try again. I'll ask a question, so I have little chance of
saying something stupid, and I can even be relevant to the theme of
this conference.

(cough) Another axis you have explored in Sandman is the western-style
to eastern-style story; dream hunters could be called an eastern-style
story. Now, it's obvious you're extremely well-read, and through
interviews and introductions and such I find we've learned a bit about
your western influences. Could you name a few of your eastern literary
influences?

Mike
  

    
Neil, I don't suppose you saw the show "Shockheaded Peter" when it was
working away across the country to San Francisco?  I saw it last night,
and--especially at a certain point when the musicians, the Tiger Lillies,
made me think I understood what it was like to be a small child at a Punch &
Judy show--I thought, Neil would certainly enjoy this.
  

    
Neil-- interesting re Hiawatha.  I did know there was more to it, but I'm
not sure I ever knew what (or if I did, I forgot ages ago).
 

Holly Cole and Tori Amos are both wonderful, but in different ways.  Sure,
they're quite different, but I can see mentioning one instead of the other
in a flustered moment.  
 
  

    
Mike, not to worry. I'm always doing that.

Eastern wise -- well, Arthur Waley is a huge influence. And books of
fairy tales read as a kid. And all those penguin classics with green
spines...

Martha -- I saw the ads for it, and thought I'd like it, but never
made it happen to go when I was in NY and it was on.

Reading the T H WHite bio by Sylvia Townsend Warner. WOnderful book --
really fine portrait of a fine writer. And a fairly miserable man.
  

    
Well, you would have liked it, I'm sure; and you'd like the album for it.

Have you been having fun?
  

    
Neil,

Do you mean the works that Waley translated to English or something he
wrote himself (I've never seen anything he wrote, but I guess he might
have written some non-fiction books, histories and such...)?

I went halfway through his translation of the Tale of Genji about ten
years ago. Strangely, I chose that one over the new translation by
Seidensticker (of which I know nothing about except that it exists). He
did both Chinese and Japanese, didn't he? I vaguely remember poem
collections from each.

I saw the Disney version of the Sword in the Stone before reading the
Once and Future King, and I was convinced most of the anachronisms had
been added by Disney (à la Hercules). I was shocked to read such
phrases as "blow me to Bermuda" right there in the T H White version. I
read somewhere that T H White visited the Merlyn shop in Disneyland
and was disappointed to find that he couldn't pull the sword from the
stone because the apparatus was broken.

Is there a place in the dreaming for all the dream versions of the
Arthurian legends, like the books in Lucien's library? Maybe they'd be
in some type of container, like the dream Baghdad in the bottle...
Anyway, they are a really important example of artistic distortions
applied to real events making them much more interesting than the
factual history. Last I heard, King Arthur was a Roman...
  

    
Hey Neil, when is the next time you will be in Texas?
  

    
Mike -- stuff that Waley translated. I used to have a huge and
wonderful volume of his oriental poems which I must have lent to
someone and not got back. But there are many books of his on my
shelves. There's a cleanness to his translations I enjoy.

My second favorite Oriental author is... argh. The SMEARING THE
GHOST'S FACE WITH INK writer (my office is filled with kids watching
Eddie Izzard videos and I'm much intimidated to go and look at the
shelves).

And my favorite pseudo-Chinese author is Ernest Bramah, author of the
Kai Lung books. I pinteds out to someone the other day that there was
no problem that couldn't be solved with an appropriately placed bag of
gold or by pushing a hated enemy over a cliff at midnight, and then had
to explain that it was a literary allusion.

I just discovered that the second volume of Once and Future King, The
Queen of Air and Darkness, started life as a book called The Witch in
the Wood and was substantially different. I knew that there were
various changes in the Sword in the Stone of course....

There is no historical arthur, in my opinion. Just a hundred imaginary
arthurs.  All of whom were quite real and contradictory and who really
existed and did all the things that were reported of them -- including
making war on Rome and winning.

I once worked out a serviceable theory of how this could be completely
true. it was called The Oxbow Lake Theory of Time. I'll stick it in a
book one day.

....

Joram: probably on the American Gods signing tour, whenever that is.
Next summer maybe?

My various editors seem resigned to American Gods being published
about a year later than everyone planned, and they also seem resigned
to it being a much fatter book than it was meant to be.

The people who aren't resigned to it are all the people who were meant
to get their script/story/whatever as soon as I finished the novel...
  

    
Neil, as this topic scrolls by, "69 Love Songs" is playing.
  

    
(Neil, for some reason the image of you quailing at the prospect of entering
the office-full of kids and video has given me the rueful giggles. Also,
thanks for the mention of the Bramah books -- I bought KAI LUNG a while
back, and then promptly put it down and couldn't find it to begin reading.
Time for another search.

If you see a big blue secondhand Oldsmobile go past tomorrow or Saturday
with a familiar figure waving, it's probably me and Juan en route to and
from a funeral back in my hometown.

I'm in parentheses because I'm too tired to type at a normal volume.

Your Chapman/Appleseed questions are interesting. My answers would be: no,
but he sounds familiar; oh, *that's* why he sounded familiar; well, yeah, I
believed it, but then I was taught to believe everything I heard; really?
huh. well, ain't that a kick in the head. quelle disillusionment and alla
that; I blush to say that other than recognizing his name and recalling
dimly the poetry connection, my major association with Hiawatha is in terms
of railroad stuff.)
  

    
Martha -- hurrah!

Elise -- well, there are places where I have no real sense of what is
American white knowledge -- the stuff they sort of taught you in school
or you overheard and so on. Genuinely surprised to find that people
don't read Hiawatha for example (my mother bought me "the children's
Hiawatha" when I was a small boy, along with "the Pied Piper of
Hamelyn" so I knew he was a culture hero. I didn't know he was a real
life diplomat whose name was given to a culture hero).

Finished reading the T.H. White biography. A really dark life with
some moments of light in it -- he was really hurt by his sexual side
(mostly non-practising S&M paedophile) and his alcoholism.

It was strange to realise how much he was Merlyn and the young Wart
is, not a self-portrait, but The Love Object, much as the oddness of
realising that the bitten-nailed magic kids in Delany were not self
portraits but love objects...
  

    
        Mr. Gaiman, I note that a number of British comic book writers seem
to have ideas regarding the reality of the imaginary which are similar to
those you expressed re: King Arthur above.  Moore's Promethea and Ellis's
Planetary are two that spring to mind right away.  Why do you suppose that
is?  Is it a British thing?  Is it a British writer thing?  Is it a British
comic book writer thing?  Is it a silly coincidence?
  

    
They're good love songs.  You can keep all three hours of them on without
getting tired of them.
  

    
Streak -- well, we three certainly aren't the first authors to have
ideas regarding the reality of the imaginary -- there are an awful lot
of writers, from all over the world who have used similar themes in
their work. Robert Heinlein wrote a whole novel -- one of his worst, if
you ask me - about the realness or otherwise of imaginary places and
people.

Oddly enough, though, the Oxbow lake Theory doesn't really work that
way. It's not about the reality of fiction, but about the elasticity of
reality.

Reading MONKEY currently -- and just wishing that Waley had translated
the entire thing.

Got sent the ALEX award for STARDUST as being one of the ten best
adult books published that young adults like. It's a huge coin, on a
stand. I put it on the mantlepiece.
  

    

Congratulations!  What's the coin made out of?
  

    
Cool! STARDUST is a lovely book.
  

    
Linda -- er, metal. Bronze at a guess. It's nice, and heavy. Too big
for coin tricks.

So it's time for a pumpkin update: the Atlantic Giant pumpkin plants
are suddenly starting to go huge. I'm burying occasional creepers, so
make them put out more roots, but am basically watching these things
and going "they will own the whole garden soon. My wife will return
from taking son Mike to Adobe and the garden will be nothing but
pumpkin leaves." Of course, from my perspective this is a good thing.
  

    

Gaiman and the Pumpkin Patch!
  

    
There. Well, I have a sore throat and am spending a quiet day
listening to the rain (and a Thea Gilmore album, LIPSTICK CONSPIRACIES
-- she's a really fine songwriter), and thought I would mention a
couple of things.

First, Joe Mayhew died on the tenth of June. He was one of those
people I never saw much but really liked -- we'd chat at conventions,
and I'd always look forward to going out to Washington DC for signings
and interviews as I'd run into Joe. He twinkled, and was very wise when
it came to books. We'd always talk about Gene Wolfe.

Second -- and on a lighter note -- last week Maddy woke me up early in
the morning. 

"Daddy," she said, "There's a bat on the kitchen window."

"Grumphle," I said and went back to sleep.

Soon, she woke me up again. "I did a drawing of the bat on the kitchen
window," she said, and showed me her drawing. For a five year old
she's a very good artist. It was a schematic of the kitchen windows,
showing a bat on one of the windows.

"Very nice dear," I said. Then I went back to sleep.

When I went downstairs...

We have, instead of dangling fly papers, transparent strips of gluey
clear plastic, about six inches long and an inch high, stuck to the
windows on the ground floor. When they accumulate enough flies, you
peel them off hte window and throw them away.

There was a bat stuck to one. He was facing out into the room. "I
think he's dead," said my assistant Lorraine.

I peeled the plastic off the window. The bat hissed at me.

"Nope," I said. "He's fine. Just stuck."

The question then became, how does one get a bat (skin and fur) off a
fly-strip. Luckily, I bethought me of the Bram Stoker award. After the
door had fallen off (see earler in this topic) I had bought some citrus
solvent to take the old glue to reglue the door on.

So I dripped citrus solvent onto the grumpy bat, edging him off the
plastic with a twig, until a lemen-scented sticky bat crawled onto a
newspaper. Which I put on the top of a high woodpile, and watched the
bat crawl into the logs. With any luck he was as right as rain the
following night...

...

There. and back to the novel now. I've decided to steal a buddhist
story I'd learned from Lafcadio Hearn for one of Shadow's dreams, which
is really the first time in the novel it seemed appropriate to nick
anything that hadn't really happened to someone or other. It's the one
about climbing the tower of skulls..
  

    
But did he like to smell all citrusy fresh?

I hope your throat feels better.