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Shut Up Gaiman [PICS]

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22:14 / 20.08.06

"A unique collaboration between a collection of talented musicians and a best-selling author. Seventeen top international acts offer 17 exclusive songs inspired by the diverse work of Neil Gaiman. Includes a lavish 20 page booklet with extensive liner notes from Neil Gaiman about the project and each of the songs and an assortment of all new artwork from Dave McKean, as well as a foreword by Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance."

What´s so top international act about Schandmaul? Did they ever tour outside Germany? Some of those people, I´ve never heard of. Still, it´s also got Thea Gilmore and Tori Amos.

Is chemical romance an emo band? Does Gaiman now try to tap the emo vein?

All Acting Regiment

13:30 / 21.08.06

I feel horrible, horrible, horibubble. Promised to read a Gaiman Fan's work and give advice. Yuck. Sorry, Gaiman Fan.

Er, don't read Barbelith for a bit.

Er.

SHUT UP GAIMAN

14:11 / 21.08.06

"I’ve always been fascinated by the places where music and literature come together. I know I wasn’t the only boy in the world to take George Orwell’s 1984 out of the school library in hopes of gaining some kind of insight into David Bowie’s DIAMOND DOGS; I wasn’t even the only boy in my class. I was the kind of kid who wrote essays on Bowie and Lou Reed lyrics when I was meant to be writing about poetry, and the teachers let me get away with it, mostly."

I've got about £30 to spare at the spare at the moment. If ten other 'Lithers feel the same, it would be perfectly possible to arrange a set of circumstances whereby all one's old copies of 'Sandman' would jump up in value, on the basis that Neil, subsequent to a certain, specified date, would not be adding to the mythos. Or doing any more interviews. Or much of anything else.

14:20 / 21.08.06

Sorry;

GAIMAN! GO AND SMOKE CIGS IN A GRAVEYARD IN A FASHIONABLE LEATHER BLOUSON WHILE PONDERING THAT MAGICKAL EVENING WITH AMOS SOMEWHERE ELSE! YOUR SORT IS NOT WANTED AROUND HERE!

miss wonderstarr

16:03 / 21.08.06

I know I wasn’t the only boy in the world to take George Orwell’s 1984 out of the school library in hopes of gaining some kind of insight into David Bowie’s DIAMOND DOGS

Is it just me or was this a really weird, misguided and stupid thing to do, and an even stupidier thing to disingenuously boast about years later?

Nineteen Eighty-Four [PROPER TITLE] is not going to give you any insight at all into Diamond Dogs.

paranoidwriter waves hello

16:15 / 21.08.06

Can Diamond Dogs give one insight into Nineteen Eighty-Four? Were Bowie and Orwell ever seen together in teh same room at teh same time? Eh? Eh?

And is it OK for me not to take the piss out of Neil Gaiman? He helped me understand The Pixies.

miss wonderstarr

16:38 / 21.08.06

I just really don't get it. If I'd taken Brave New World out of the library in the hope of better understanding Space Oddity, I'd be trying to bury that memory, not boast about it. What's he trying to say?

16:42 / 21.08.06

The Pixies are neither here nor there, PW - what insights has Gaiman's (alleged, artistic) relationship with Amos given you into their respective bodies of work? Or play? What do you think about how it's affected their writing?

Personally, I went off Neil a bit after I heard about that. I always thought (hoped, perhaps even dreamed) that he would be the dark lord of my nights, but it wasn't to be. There was all this terrible stuff to do with the restraining order, and so on.

Now, I just listlessly sail my boat onto the shores of unconsciousness with a picture of Carl from the Libertines at the helm, becuase that's who Neil used to look a bit like, when he was younger.

paranoidwriter waves hello

16:42 / 21.08.06

That he's not unique amongst his peers?

Maybe he's joking and reaching out?

But then maybe he shouldn't?

paranoidwriter waves hello

16:48 / 21.08.06

...should, shouldn't,... should...

So what do you really think? Should he stay or should he go?... I feel a song coming on.

16:57 / 21.08.06

He helped you to understand The Pixies?
Or he helped you to understand The Pixies?

paranoidwriter waves hello

18:06 / 21.08.06

Pssst...Yeah, and you know Kim Deal, yeah? Ever wondered why she's so beautiful, clever, and talented? Noticed how you never see the third crus of her two Helixes?...Eh?... And Black Francis? Aka Frank Black? Aka... Oh, you know about him already?...

ONLY NICE THINGS

19:35 / 21.08.06

Be fair - maybe he's admitting to having done something crushingly embarrassing, and also admitting that he went to posh school.

paranoidwriter waves hello

19:41 / 21.08.06

Yeah, you're right, and we all get embarrassed. I don't think he should have to pay for admitting childhood membership of a posh school. I imagine he may have already paid the price of admission many, many years ago, in some way or another. It can be very costly and unfortunate, or so I hear, anyway.

All Acting Regiment

12:54 / 22.08.06

I beleive the Nineteen-eighty-four/Diamond Dogs thing is an attempt to say: "Look, I read George Orwell, and I listen to David Bowie. Rather than enjoying these, I boast about them to get status. I am a white middle class man."

Possibly.

SHUT UP WHITEMIDDLECLASSMAN!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

12:58 / 22.08.06

Much as I love Diamond Dogs, the track 1984 did always make me think Mr Bowie had read a far funkier version of the novel than me.

This is all getting dangerous, though... it's been a while since anyone actually said SHUT UP GAIMAN! and I fear he may take this as encouragement.

13:17 / 22.08.06

Well he does say, in masterful Pratchett-ese, that he 'wasn't even the only boy in his class.' Given his age (mid forties?) it seems unlikely that he went to a posh (ie. boarding) school as a younger king of dreams, if only because not too many of them were co-ed in the late Sixties/early Seventies. Apart from Summerhill.

He seems to be trying to point out that he understood that Lou Reed and David Bowie were poets when he was at skool, even if the beaks didn't, chizz, chizz - any fule kno that these days, of course, but Neil, he'd have us realise, was ahead of his time.

It must get to the point, after you've been interviewed a lot, where the temptation to just give in and say whatever's on your mind without much consideration of how it's going to look in print becomes too much, but still ...

SHUT UP GAIMAN

17:54 / 23.08.06

I've got about £30 to spare at the spare at the moment. If ten other 'Lithers feel the same, it would be perfectly possible to arrange a set of circumstances whereby all one's old copies of 'Sandman' would jump up in value,...

Me me me! I´m the proud owner of the first 75 Sandman issues and would love to sell them for lots of €€€!

21:04 / 24.06.07

Neil Gaiman's talent is so vast that any exploration of his work can only be described as a beginning.

SHUT UP GAIMAN CRITIC!

21:14 / 24.06.07

Vast... Vaster than the anus of Despair...

Vast... As vast as the stars within the Sandman's cloak, each one a dream, a story...

21:21 / 24.06.07

Once more, my plans having been foiled, I have been unmasked as a killer of threads.

Regrettable Juvenilia

07:46 / 25.06.07

"Neil Gaiman's talent is so vast that any exploration of his work can only be described as a beginning. For all stories must begin at the beginning. And this, gentle reader, is a story. A fiction. A piece of make-believe. A dr-"

ONLY NICE THINGS

08:46 / 25.06.07

And, like all stories, this story has a beginning, a middle, and, like all stories, like all dreams, no matter how beautiful the dream or how finely crafted by a master of modern speculative fiction and adult fantasy the story, it must have an...

(NOTE TO EDITOR: Hi there, Neil here. Usually, when I was doing comics, this would be followed by a panel of dark, blank space - if we were really keen to make the point, a whole page of the stuff. Money in the bank for the artist, really.

Now that I'm a serious man of letters, I'm not sure exactly how to achieve the same effect. I was thinking, maybe, that we cut it off there, and then on the next leaf just have END. If that doesn't leapfrog me over that hack Pratchett in the IT Professional Monthly most important writers list, I'll eat my blouson-style leather jacket.)

Regrettable Juvenilia

08:52 / 25.06.07

Unless it was a book about a fish, or other sea creature - perhaps, say, a dark, adult, modern update of The Little Mermaid, in which metaphors for a young girl's sexual awakening are handled with all the deftness of Hephaestus in his forge - in which case the last page will say simply that this tale needs a

FIN.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

11:34 / 25.06.07

"It's what I always use when the recipe says basil this or oregano that. I can't be doin' with it. You ask me, it's all mixed herbs."

SHUT UP GAIMAN.

Regrettable Juvenilia

12:11 / 25.06.07

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:23 / 25.06.07

SHUT UP GAIMANS!

12:40 / 25.06.07

What happened to his face? He looks like the sheriff of Nottingham!

13:02 / 25.06.07

A multi-faceted sheriff of Nottingham, please.

Regrettable Juvenilia

13:05 / 25.06.07

I think he looks like an illusionist.

Which, if you think about it, he sort of is, because what are stories, after all, if not pleasing illusions? And, at the end of the story, like wide-eyed children, do we not wonder "how did he do it?", when really, we do not wish to know?

13:40 / 25.06.07

"The Neil Gaiman Reader"... Yup, that pretty much sums up why my vague 'meh' towards Gaiman turned into "gaahk! Go find me croz agginz dah self-proocleemd shedow vampyrz gofs!"

"Before I found a comic bo--err serious!, LITERARY! graphic novel called Sandman (it references Shakespeare! Right here, see?!), I could nothing but wait. I was in my blooming years, under a far too strong shade for far too long with very little occasional sunlight to bright my cold well... a Neil Gaiman. My castrating saturnian dyslexic father was reading this intro (that I wrote in my teen years) and somehow he thought I was coming out. I said I was, but not in the way he thought, only as a blooming dream-flower out of the dark depths of starved dead poets' hearts like a pixie flapping it's wings straight to Uranus, Mars, the moon and Venus with her black tears. He then tried to throw his WWII vhs box-set at my nose. I told him that(...)etc";

Shut up, Gaimooreson! Shut up McKean mimickers! Shut up, Mckean! And most of all shut the fuck up, Teh Neil Gaiman Reedah!

ONLY NICE THINGS

13:48 / 25.06.07

Here is one such beginning, an examination of the creative genius being The Sandman, American Gods, Coraline and so much more.

SPEAK UP PROOFREADER!

09:49 / 26.06.07

They cannot, for to proof Gaiman would be to deny the possibility of faith, and without faith he is nothing.

10:22 / 26.06.07

Listen, now. Read this carefully, because I am going to tell you something important. More than that: I am about to tell you one of the secrets of the trade. I mean it. This is the magic trick upon which all good fiction depends: it's the angled mirror in the box behind which the doves are hidden, the hidden compartment beneath the table.
It's this:

There is room for things to mean
more than they literally mean

That was it.
Doesn't seem that important to you? Not impressed? Convinced you could get deeper, sager advice from writing from a fortune cookie? Trust me. I just told you something important. We'll come back to it.

The Prince of Stories "removes the S" as it were in his introduction to volume 3 of 'Astro City'.

SHUT UP, PRINCE OF STORIES.

15:30 / 10.07.07

Gaimooreson, shut -- awwwwww!!!

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