Primate Typings

More Neil Gaiman. This time he’s reading one of his short stories, “The Day the Saucers Came.”

(via I seem to have lost the link but it was a Wits broadcast anyway)

The Internet is a giant slush pile, and I’m the unpaid intern wading through it. Here’s a bit of pretty dredged from the dreck.

Neil Gaiman adds his NSFW support to the Onion’s campaign for a Pulitzer Prize.

(via Comic Alliance)

The Internet is a giant slush pile, and I’m the unpaid intern wading through it. Here’s a bit of pretty dredged from the dreck.

Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Ben Folds, and Damian Kulash started a band called 8in8 at 4 pm on Monday. They immediately recorded an album and posted it here.

The future is a weird place.

The Internet is a giant slush pile, and I’m the unpaid intern wading through it. Here’s a bit of pretty dredged from the dreck.

I often give Neil Gaiman’s works as presents. Fantasy and horror and superheroes make his stories tango and polka and twist. In fact, I have one of his books being delivered from Amazon via UPS that I will give as a gift later this year.

 “Who Killed Amanda Palmer” is not that book. I got it today from JSR Merchandising, and it came by FedEx. Amanda Palmer was a singer and musician. She was one half of the Dresden Dolls. The Dolls have a song that turns up on our local college radio every now and then called “Coin Operated Doll”. I bought the song and put it on my iPod. John Scalzi claims the song works better as a video. John Scalzi is wrong. The visuals of the song without the video are so much more magical.

 Download the video below. Please do not watch it.

High Quality here. Low quality here.

Shut your eyes tightly and enjoy.

 The book “Who Killed Amanda Palmer” is magic of the blackest sort. Apparently, Palmer has made a habit of being dead in photographs for a while. While working on her lastest solo project, she decided being dead for it would be great. So she had even more photographs of her corpse taken. She also ran into Neil Gaiman and asked him if he wanted to write short stories to go with the pictures. Eventually that became a book of photographs taken by Kyle Cassidy, Beth Hommel, and others, with lyrics by Palmer and stories by Gaiman to go along with the album by Palmer. Somewhere during that time, Amanda and Neil started dating. I’m unclear on whether or not she was alive during the first date, but it’s impolite to pry, so we’ll just have to make due with whispers and innuendo.

That can’t be good for the furniture.

 The resulting book is beautiful, dark, and unpleasant. Page after page of pictures of dead women, clearly killed in unpleasant ways, both mundane and magical, makes for a work that I hope no visitors to my house randomly pick up. Palmer’s lyrics and Gaiman’s stories make a great accompaniment for the images. Noteworthy are a couple of Gaiman’s stories where he has to explain why Amanda is dead right there and then standing a couple feet away in the same photo, sometimes as a bystander, sometimes as the murderer.

It is an unsettling book that destroyed my initial excitement of getting a new Gaiman-based gift for friends. Instead, I’ll tuck it on the shelf between some of his other works, where it will hopefully sit unnoticed by visitors to my small private library. No one should be exposed to such materials, unaware of their existence. Unless they’re already Gaiman fans and heard of Amanda Palmer’s death, and thus forewarned, pull it of the shelf….

The musical accompaniment.

Originally posted in the comments to this article over at Tor.

Well, first off, I can guarantee that you won’t enjoy all of Neil Gaiman’s work equally. He isn’t an author who tells the same story in the same way again and again. I can say as someone who spent years on his site’s forum that there are plenty of disagreement of which of his works are the best. Really, you can even name distinct factions among his fandom. Sandman, Death, Good Omens, and American Gods seem to be the major poles, although others may have emerged in the years since I was a regular there.

For me anymore, that variety is a deal breaker. I burnt out on fantasy in the middle of college. I’d read more than enough of the field to know every cliché and every trick, and I started hating everything I was picking up because I’d already seen it. It made me sad, because the itch that drove me to read fantasy in the first place didn’t go away. So, for a few years I mostly reread old favorites and bad science fiction (plus, totally broke in college, so that saved me money).

When I got a real job and some money, I didn’t return to fantasy. No, I went with comic books, which were just starting to regularly put out trade paperbacks and graphic novels. The Dark Knight Returns had been on my bookshelf since college and the first half of Maus I bought for a college course. The Crow, Watchmen, and the JLA all followed. Then I picked up the first volume of Sandman.

I love series. I always have. Part of the problem I was having with fantasy novels were single novels that I enjoyed were often part of a series in which the same story is told again and again, although most authors at least have the decency to change the main characters every few books. There’s nothing wrong with it, since that was what many readers want. Heck, some of those old favorites I mentioned are just those sorts of books, which I happened to run into before I got burnt out.

The Sandman is a series, but it’s not the same story again and again. Instead it changes characters and story types, moving from boy stories to girl stories, from minor characters to guest stars, from pop culture to Shakespeare, from mythology to harsh reality. And yet it builds a world and single story out of 76 issues (10 volumes) (4 Absolutes) that ends up being more than the sum of its parts. It is a staggering piece of literature.

The variety did not stop when Neil moved on to other works. The comedy of Good Omens, the fairy tale of Stardust, the mythological weight of American Gods, and the many deaths of Batman – these are all different kinds of stories with different needs and different audiences. Neil does a good job of entertaining each of those audiences, but it should not be a surprise that some fans of his puppet show are not enthralled by his children production about two small fish and a parental figure.

Neil Gaiman is big deal author not because of he has a big following, but because he has many different big followings. He even has fantasy snobs like me, who appreciate good authors who don’t sell me the same thing I loved before again and again.