Make Good Art

Neil Gaiman delivered some excellent advice in his commencement address to the graduates of Philadelphia's University of the Arts, including some useful Freelancer Secret Knowledge:

You get work however you get work.

People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you.

Amanda Palmer - Science Fiction/Double Feature

with Moby, Stephin Merritt and Neil Gaiman on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

Neil Gaiman Sings about Joan of Arc

Neil Gaiman in the New Yorker

A sort of strange profile of N. Gaiman in this week's New Yorker occasionally gives me the impression that the writer interviewed a Neil Gaiman impersonator (perhaps a version with a goatee), rather than the man himself. Somehow, many of the quotes come out sounding like someone else said them. Although it does include the great line, "At the age of four, I was bit by a radioactive awesome."

Also, there's the bit about NG's alternative career as a bespoke religion designer.

Library Porn: Neil Gaiman's Book Collection

So this is what it feels like to experience covetousness.

Shelfari has a biiiiig photospread in hi-def of Neil Gaiman's home library. Rooms and rooms of gorgeous books and paraphenalia.

The Internet May Explode

Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman are dating! That's, like, too much coolness to exist in one universe.

Blueberry Girl

Neil Gaiman reads a poem for his god-daughter, illustrated by Charles Vess.

Dave McKean Interview

7 impossible things interviews Dave McKean. Lots of excellent samples of his work, and some interesting insights into his work.

(via Neil)

James Kennedy

"What an eccentric performance."

The Coraline Boxes

Fifty bloggers have received mysterious boxes from the Coraline film company. So far, 26 have revealed the contents: photos, movie props, letters and keys. Neil Gaiman has more.

I am positively agog with envy at such wonderful craftsmanship. And what a great way to publicize an indie movie.

Neil Gaiman's Hanukkah Christmas

I know any number of Jewish people who keep kosher, but will make an exception for bacon, because it is such a great food that, well, how could ha-Shem object? Likewise, Christmas trees are another case for a special exemption, as Neil Gaiman has known from a very young age:

It was trees all the way, properly decorated ones, with tinsel and glass balls and a star on the top. We lobbied and we lobbied hard, and we would not give up. My parents would not countenance it. They had not had Christmas trees when they were children; instead, they had parents who disapproved of Christmas trees. You couldn't, my mother told us, be Jewish and have a Christmas tree.

I was a precocious child, and I had read widely, and I struck. "But it's not Christian," I said.

"I think you'll find it is, dear," said my mother. "That's why they call them Christmas trees, after all."

"They are actually," I told her, proudly, and precociously, "a pagan relic. The trees. The thing of people bringing trees into houses at the winter solstice and decorating them has nothing at all to do with Christianity. It's from pagan times."

I'm not sure why it was better to be a pagan relic, but I hoped it was, and it seemed to shake my mother's certainty. Like my teacher, she knew better than to argue
theology with an eight-year-old.

Whether it was, as I thought at the time, my precocious argument or (more probably in retrospect), my sisters' huge, pleading eyes and trembling lower lips, I do not know, but my father went to the local market and picked out a Christmas tree for us and brought it home. We decorated 'it, and were content. Having won the Christmas tree battle, we had, somehow, won the Christmas war.

Two Short Neil Gaiman Links

Things I originally forgot to post about when they first appeared:

1. In which one can see Mr. Gaiman's house, writing cottage, pumpkin patch and blackberry bramble. It is an absolutely satisfying environment for a writer of strange fiction, as if fed by the compost of imagination and old stories.


2. In which he discusses the impact of the strange onto everyday life:

GR: So many of your books walk the boundary between the real and the supernatural. Have you ever had a supernatural experience?

NG: You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd. Like everybody in the world, I've had moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd. I actually wrote about one of them in my latest book, Fragile Things. There's a true-life ghost story about running into a gypsy woman dressed as if she was from a previous century outside my front door. And maybe she was. There's a wonderful author named Robert Aickman who wrote what he described as "strange stories." They were more or less ghost stories, but they always lacked explanation.