Neil Gaiman sings The Problem With The Saints

8in8 is a music band that Neil Gaiman is part of. Ok I don't think taking up music would be a strategic career move for him but I did enjoy listening to his debut. I got the 8in8 album off the Amanda Palmer website for a dollar in case you're interested. I think its well worth it because its got some good vocals from the other band members, e.g Ben folds singing Twelve Line Song is good. The story that explains how this music group came about on the 25th of April I think it was, can be found HERE.

.

I is for Imagination

I is for Imagination. This is something I wrote  awhile back (give or take a few word changes)and I wanted to share it with those who haven't see it. That was before this morning's wave of inspiration hit as can be seen in the next post.

An awesome imagination
I think a fantastic, awe-inspiring imagination is one with a proclivity for creating worlds, other worlds, unhampered by endings or limited to the temporal. It is an infinite spiral of thought only subject to the cicerone, in this case the thinker . Where sense and logic are whatchamacallits that hold strands of thought together but are never fetters or  the steer.

Where myth and legend is as absolute as the flesh and blood that summons them. Where the self is so lost that the magician that is him, is found.

An extraordinary imagination is where our banal reality looses substance and your world is......reality.

Quoting Neil Gaiman:

"THERE ARE MYTH-PLACES. They exist, each in their own way, some of them are overlaid on the world, others exist beneath the world as it is, like an underpainting.

My angels was stolen from Ken Paton's Library

 There are moumtains. They are the rocky places you will reach before you come to the cliffs that border the end off the world, and there are caves in those mountains, deep caves that were inhabited long before the first men walked the earth. 

They are inhabited still"...... Anansie boys

                                                                 

Neil Gaiman Lost a Friend _ A sad tale

I got this from Neil Gaiman's blog and it is so beautifully written I was mush by the time i finished:

Being Alive. Mostly about Diana.

I'm in the UK right now, in the middle of nowhere, working on Monkey, about to go offline for a few days.

She's been my friend since about 1985, but I was a fan of hers since I read Charmed Life in about 1978, aged 18. I've loved being her friend, and I'm pretty sure she loved being my friend. She was the funniest, wisest, fiercest, sharpest person I've known, a witchy and wonderful woman, intensely practical, filled with opinions, who wrote the best books about magic, who wrote the finest and most perceptive letters, who hated the telephone but would still talk to me on it if I called, albeit, always, nervously, as if she expected the phone she was holding to explode.


I came over to do three things: to give the BBC a day to promote Episode Four of the next season of Doctor Who, which I have written; to see Hilary Bevan Jones, a wonderful producer with whom I've been working for years, about a couple of things; and to see Diana Wynne Jones.

Thursday I was interviewed about Doctor Who all day. Mostly the interviews would go like this:

Them: "So, can you tell us the title of the episode?" Me: "No."

It was a fun but sometimes frustrating day.

She adopted me when I was a 24 year old writer for magazines of dubious respectability, and spent the next 25 years being proud of me as I made art that she liked (and, sometimes, I didn't. She'd tell me what she thought, and her opinions and criticism were brilliant and precise and honest, and if she said "Yee-ees. I thought you made a bit of a mess of that one," then I probably had, so when she really liked something it meant the world to me).

For more: More on this story

I LOVE Neil Gaiman

I truly do.....

Everytime I open one of his books I feel my long dampered passions for theology and mythology rekindled, reignited in the most unexpected ways. He takes away the burdens of the -----------(secret guilt)-------- often encumbered on one because of the innate conflicts of spiritual credence and fascination with mythology.
I mean look at this extract from a book called the Anansie Boys. this is the very first paragraph in this novel:

It begins, as most things, with a song.

In the beginning after all were the words, and they came with a tune. That was how the world was made, how the void was divided, how the lands and the stars and the dreams and the little gods and the animals, how all of them came into the world.
They were sung into existence.

The great beasts were sung into existence, after the Singer had done with the planets and the hills and the trees and the oceans and the lessor beasts. The cliffs that bound existence were sung and the hunting grounds and the dark.
Songs remain. They last. The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties. A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams are gone. That's the power of songs.

I think one of the most accurate descriptions of Gaiman comes from the National Post (Canada):

Neil Gaiman is a storyteller whose tales resonate with secrets and deep truths...

His mastery of language creates a momentum which keeps you at the edge of your seat from take off right up to the inevitable climax camouflaged as a conclusion. Having read the two books (American Gods and now Anansie boys), when I think of him my mind conjures up what must be a philosopher, a comedian, a spiritual soul with a horrifically dark imagination, a prolific composer of written works. He manages to comfortably juxtapose unfriendly philosophical facets to create a homogeneous and more than palatable tale, while still making room for moral discussion and persuasion.

I'm convinced that in the not so ancient Greek mythology he would have been someone illustrious such as King Midas (the Composer) and in medieval philosophy The Alchemist (bringer of life to the written word).

Just my opinion of course.....
For more visit:
Neil Gaiman, his complete works. , www.telegraph.co.uk