Oh, Internet

You make it so easy to stalk people. I was Googling something else the other day and Google tapped into my friends network and found a related picture from one of my friends. It reminded me of this song from Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman. All I need to do is add the word "inadvertently."

EEEEEEEEEEE!!!

Okay, so fan girl squealing aside, I had a great time seeing Neil Gaiman at UCSB. Thanks again to Tim and Mag for letting us stay with them. The one sad thing is I lost the hat pictured here. It was my Denison hat so I was rather fond of it and it's a bit tricky to replace. But if I had to lose a hat to see Neil Gaiman, that's more than worth it (plus, I didn't really lose it while seeing Neil, but a few days later).

Highlights From Neil's Lecture:

He read 2 excellent unpublished stories: one about being murdered at sea and the other was called Cassandra and was a creepy story about about imaginary friends.

He answered MY question! I was thinking that it would be really unlikely because we wrote our questions on index cards and he had a huge stack and kept tossing half them aside without reading them. But he still did mine! I got so excited I started jiggling in my chair. My question was: "Did you base the graveyard in The Graveyard Book on any specific graveyard?" His answer was: Stoke-Newington, Glasgow Necropolis, and Highgate Cemetary.

He answered my sister's question which was "How many drafts do you usually write?" The answer was: as few as 1, and average of 2-3, and as many as 11.

Someone asked if he ever felt like his characters wrote themselves. He said no, but that would be awesome. He would just sit there and drink tea. Then he pointed and was like "You, write yourself faster!"

Someone said they were getting a PhD in super-herology. He didn't answer their question but said he "loved living in a world where you could get a PhD in super-herology."

When we got our books signed I thanked him for answering my question and when I told him which one it was, he said it was a good question and no one had ever asked him that before. Yay! Watching and reading every Neil Gaiman interview I can get my hands on has finally paid off! I know every question he's ever answered!

My sister mention she liked "Crowley's green-thumb" in Good Omens and he said he thinks he wrote that bit. I said how much I've always loved how Crowley "didn't so much as fall as vaguely saunter downwards." Neil says he think Terry wrote that bit.

All in all he was very nice and very gracious. Pretty much everything I had hoped for (aside from, unreasonable hopes like having his awesome radiate onto all of us making us into super-writers.) But everything else was great!

Here you see me groveling before the master as he draws an excellent mouse in the copy of Coraline I bought that night to be signed. I was a little sad he didn't look up in any of our pictures. I'm sure he probably would have since he was so nice, but I was too shy to ask him to. Some people went right up to him and put their arm around him, but I was too shy for that too. Still, he'd been looking into a lot of camera flashes, so I'm glad we could give him a break from that and not make him completely blind.

This is the signature in my book. Mouse drawn by Neil.

This is the signature in Chrissy's book. Excellent quote by Neil that summarizes Good Omens.

American Gods: Book Review

This was a difficult book to read, took me a long time, and I don't properly remember all of it, so this may influence my overall opinion.

Oh, how to summarize American Gods... Well, on the surface, it's the story of a man named Shadow who, after being released from prison, finds that his wife is dead, and a strange man named Wednesday draws him into an ancient conflict. Stranded in America by the original immigrants, the gods of the old lands are painfully fading. Scraping by on whatever worship or sacrifice they can capture through art or trickery. They are beset by the new gods of technology and consumerism. In one last effort at survival, Wednesday, with Shadow's often reluctant help, works to convince the gods band together to fight one last battle for survival.

But there's so much more to it than that. Much like Gaiman's sprawling Sandman series, this novel is made up of thousands of different threads. It's like a tapestry where a single thread might be beautiful, plain, or even ugly. But you must step back to see the whole picture.

When stories are told like this, I can never quite say that I personally loved or hated the whole. Part of the story will stick with me while other parts seem wholly unsatisfactory. However, it is more in the way that I find certain aspects of life that the book addresses to be unsatisfactory. So the portrayal is not necessarily incorrect. I can never say that any of it doesn't fit. All I can definitely say is that the novel is well written, expertly planned, and powerfully poignant. The complex and varied nature of the narrative fit the subject of gods well.

Still, it's a long, dark journey.

* * * * *

Now I'll address specific parts of the story for all those who have read it. If you haven't and don't want to know specific plot points, I would recommend you stop reading now.

So, the ending is freshest in my mind. I have to say it didn't have the resolution I generally crave in a story, so personally, especially after so long a book, it did not sit well with me. But, then again, that is life. I can't quarrel with the truth of it. And after reading it again and thinking about it I cannot say it is simple or without meaning. The coin in the air, for me, represented the fleeting nature of life. Not waiting to see it fall seemed to me a rejection of any predestination, not wanting to see the outcome life. Plus, I thought the gold of the coin could represent the sun, just as the silver coin was the moon. Since the moon guided Shadow in death, it makes sense that the sun would guide him in life. This is supported by his last location being Iceland during the time of the year when the sun practically never sets. Still, even in Iceland, someone wishes him a happy fourth of July. Even when he's not in America, some of it has come with him-importantly, the independence aspect.

I could go on, but I won't. It is well written in the sense that I could probably write an entire thesis on the last chapter alone. Now that I examine it, I think it may have been the independence part that bothered me. On one hand, it ties in nicely with one of my favorite lines toward the end:

"I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don't need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It's what we do."

So from the perspective of the novel, humans are independent of worship. At least, of a need to be worshipped. Though many would like to be worshiped. Still, for reasons I won't get into in this blog, I often don't feel Americans in general are nearly as independent as Shadow is represented at the end of this book. I don't mind that Gaiman is British. Oftentimes I think it takes an informed outside perspective to truly see a country. But I suppose I've also lived too long in America. I can't be happy with the entire tapestry anymore than I can all aspects of America.

American Gods: The Epic Journey

This is not yet a book review because it's a journey I haven't finished. I think I started American Gods back in 2007. I generally read it on planes since I bought it off another grad student in a yard sale for about a dollar. Great investment, considering how slowly I've read it. It's not so much the length. At 588 pages it's a lightweight in comparison to many of the sprawling fantasy epics I read. But it's a difficult book. It's not necessarily a difficulty of comprehension. It's more along the lines of not wanting to comprehend. After a time life got difficult enough for me and I didn't need literature adding to it. But I've finally picked up the book again. I left off very near the end around Chapter 16 and I'm once again finding my way through the darkness of the next five chapters.

Still, these lines struck me most while reading again (though the first doesn't have the same impact without the context of the story):

"It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you."

and this one just made me smile.

"Are you scared?" asked Mr. Ibis.
"Not really."
"Well, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror as we walk."

Now, perhaps I'll finally see what the end will bring.