Freckles & Doubt

There is an, on the whole, surprisingly small surge of posts on Tumblr about Neil Gaiman, who has been accused of less than savoury sexual activities with much younger women in positions of comparatively less power than he has. The initial article focused on one victim has brought half a dozen others out of the woodwork, so it's a pattern. There's what seems to be a fairly balanced reflection on the situation at https://politicsdancingxyz.substack.com/p/manufacturing-consent.

This has come completely out of left field: of all the potential items on my 2024 Bingo card "Neil Gaiman sex scandal" would absolutely never have been an option. I love his writing and his social media presence - Tumblr particularly, where he is sane, enlightened, snarky, and surprisingly in tune with Tumblr's propensity for idiosyncratic off-the-wall playfulness. He seemed, on all fronts, like one of the good ones, and a part of me was desperately hoping his accusers would be revealed as chancers, drama-seekers or severely disturbed, and the whole thing manufactured in bad faith. But his response has been to make noises that "it was consensual" in various articles, and then to disappear from sight since the whole thing blew up and hire marketing firms, so that's obviously wishful thinking on my part, and I am sternly suppressing it. It seems fairly clear that he was awful to women across the span of his life, and he clearly caused horrible pain and degredation to his victims, and they have my absolute sympathy, support and admiration for their strength in coming forward with this in the teeth of his reputation and status. But the fact that their pain is clearly the important thing here doesn't actually stop me - stop many of us - from feeling our own pain and loss at a destroyed relationship with a writer and creator who felt like one of our own.

I think, on the whole, the comparative silence on Tumblr is an echo of what I'm feeling myself - shock and grief, to an extent which makes it hard to process. He has been an icon in the sf/fantasy community for as long as I've been reading sf and fantasy. His work is warm and human and compelling, his treatment of female characters and queer identities and the like seemed to be enlightened and supportive, this simply doesn't fit. But I have to make it fit, and it's doing my head in - as it is, I think, for a large swathe of his readers.

It also stings paricularly because grief is partly anger, because what's been revealed about his personal proclivities for abusive sex with comparatively powerless women means that his public persona is a carefully crafted lie, designed to cover and enable his activities. I am angry because I feel stupid, as though I should have known. (I mean, I always hated his relationship with Amanda Palmer, who I intensely dislike for not particularly rational reasons beyond the age discrepancy and her brashness, but I blamed her for its dissonances, not him. He got me. Bastard.)

A lot of the discussions on social media from betrayed fans circle around the perennial problem of what the hell you do with your relationship with the art when the creator turns out to be a problematical dickhead. Sometimes this easy - I ditched Orson Scott Card and wossname, John C Wright (had to look him up) without a blink when I became aware of their respective frothing homophobias, their work never really mean that much to me. And the China Mieville jerking women around thing simply allowed me to admit how pretentiously intellectualised his work can be, despite its undoubted quality and originality. While I was fond of Harry Potter, I have always been aware of the books' flaws as literary works, and been frustrated by their conservative moral framework; JK's rampant TERFism was not a shock, and it has cost me absolutely nothing to boycott anything further from which she might profit, and retreat into HP fan fiction. Joss Wedon was a betrayal, but Buffy and Firefly were in the past, their loss is not as immediate. I have a harder time with Arcade Fire and Win Butler's sexual misconduct allegations, I love Arcade Fire, and I can't really listen to it any more without a sense of unease, so I listen to them a hell of a lot less than I used to. But I have bought and read, multiple times, pretty much everything Gaiman ever wrote, book-wise, and a fair chunk of his graphic novels. I have the giant Absolute Sandman tomes, for heaven's sake. I have Good Omens on DVD. I have written academic papers on him. Any way you slice it, that's a loss.

I don't know if it's possible to separate the art from the artist. I know it's far more likely, in our modern media age, that the relentless glare of the media spotlight will sooner or later discover horrible things about large numbers of our respected creators. No-one is perfect, and media - and humanity in general - love to dish the dirt, and the reality is that if the internet existed a hundred years ago we'd be cancelling cherished literary icons left, right and centre. And there may be an argument for trying to make that separation in order to still enjoy the work, but I can't. I cannot read or watch or listen without suspicion when I know the sordid details, and the suspicion, and consequent re-analysis of the work, spoils my enjoyment. TERFism is implicit in Harry Potter if you read it with the knowledge of JK's current frothings, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to find that Gaiman's female characters are rife with problems if I revisit them now, in the same way that Buffy is if you use the lens of Dickhead Joss. And that'll hurt.

So I have actually found Brandon Taylor's article about Alice Munroe to be strangely consoling, because he talks about precisely this betrayal in terms which mirror my own. And two of his comments really stay with me: one, "Being a brilliant writer does not elevate one above the common smallness of being a person." And two, "For myself, I will never read Alice Munro the same way again." This encapsulates it: three equal but competing truths. Brilliant writer. Dickhead. Tainted work.

My so far favourite response to this whole debacle, and the writer/cherished work relationship, is this tweet:



Part of me is also angry because this is such a waste. Gaiman had it all: respected body of work, iconic status among the fandom, a guaranteed market for Good Omens and Sandman and Dead Boy Detectives, the high-budget cinematic adaptations which are in process at the moment, and which will unavoidably see less success than they could have because so many of us have a bad taste in our mouths. He was talking about working on a new book, which I will now not buy if he ever does publish it. He pissed all that away by being a dickhead and pretending he wasn't. He must have thought the structure of his achievements and his place in the fandom were unassailable. Now that it's all out in the open, they were - not precisely a lie, but an ill-built edifice threatening to totter, because we're looking at it harder, and bits of it are illusion over ugly gaps, and this is an ugly wind.

Good grief. Last night I dreamed I was staying in the guest house in Neil Gaiman's garden, but managed to somehow antagonise the pet tiger he had lounging around the place, so I spent a lot of the dream tiptoeing around avoiding it in a state of some trepidation. It was perfectly friendly to everyone else, but at one point it came and slept up against the guesthouse door in a marked manner. In retrospect, this might have had something to do with Hobbit sleeping on my feet, but why my subconscious should attribute tigers to Neil Gaiman is anyone's guess. Later there was the somewhat confused session in the hairdresser's that was also a delicatessen, but it wasn't really connected and I never actually had my hair cut.

I've had a lovely five days doing bugger-all, which I really needed. About the only things I actually achieved were chocolate chip cookies, another season of Smallville, and some progress in my current project, which is to scan old family photos my dad left. Black-and-white photos of one's parents in their twenties are a very oddly poignant experience. Oh, and a Microfiction (the theme was "Vainglory"). Not, I think, a very good piece of writing, I had an argument with Jo about last-minute free-flow creation versus careful and conscious shaping, which resulted in a mutual challenge to try the opposite technique, and it transpires I suck at the free-flow creation thing. Unless an idea has grabbed me to the point where it writes itself, which I'd say happens about one time in three, I'm all about the crafting, and the uncrafted first draft is generally horrible. I threw out about eight horrible first drafts this week, and the one I finally posted is a thin and obvious thing. The Romantic poets would hate me. I'm OK with that.

I have a four-day working week before me, three if you count working at home on Friday, and it's all cool and cloudy out there with a fine mist of rain. It's a good start.

Right, it's official: the Imaginet guys clearly have a stash of naughty photos of Telkom technicians in compromising positions, and aren't afraid to use them. I logged a call with Imaginet on Saturday morning, to complain that the ADSL has tended to fall over randomly at intervals since all the new internal phone wiring. I was phoned on Sunday morning by the Telkom people, asking if they could send a technician around there and then. He arrived within 20 minutes. He fossicked around a bit, worked out that the cabling was OK but there was weirdness on the line, beetled off saying he'd ask them to reset the technical whatevers, phoned back twenty minutes later to check if the modem had reconnected, discovered it hadn't, came back in his little van, worked out what was wrong and forced the etheric wossnames to reconnect by the simple expedient of unplugging the spanky new phone extension, which is apparently interfering with the ADSL and needs a splitter. I shall procure one this afternoon. If this actually sorts out the problem, I suspect I may be contractually obliged by my life membership of the Telkom Infernal Suckage Club to pass out, stage left, in sheer surprise.

In fact, I may have already done so. This bloody sinus thing won't leave me alone, and I spent two hours of Sunday afternoon passed out on my bed in a state of ineffable physical lowness, thereby missing a ladies' tea at the Mount Nelson, for which I apologise. Wretched Sid. Wretched headache. Wretched need to actually drag myself to work today, owing to two days in workshops last week and a concomitant piling up of Emergencies. I have cleared most of these, however, and if I wake up tomorrow feeling like I do now, I shall simply stay in bed.

On the upside, last night I dreamed I met Neil Gaiman at a weird signing in a giant underground Roman amphitheatre, and got press-ganged into following him around as an assistant. Assisting Neil Gaiman seems to be a recurring motif in my dreams. Clearly the fangirly bit of my subconscious has a deep need to feel useful.

There's still a significant portion of my psyche which seems to operate at about age 8, particularly when confronted with anything in the "oooh" category - the magical, the unreal, the not quite possible. Magicians elicit this response, as do fireworks and parkour, and now, apparently, so does 3D animation. I've never seen a 3D film before (bad film critic! no biscuit), and Coraline on Friday night was a truly amazing experience productive of a great deal of "oooh"ing, wriggling ecstatically in my seat and a sort of suspended wonder.

( Review cut at egadfly's request. )

Slipped, fell and ordered books over the internet again, good lord, my sense of financial balance is as ungainly as the real one - elbows, knees, credit card, all bent, bont and splugged. However! New Robin McKinley, new Neil Gaiman, there went last night. Tepper 0, Potter 0, Literary Self-Indulgence 10. I'm unrepentant.

Robin McKinley is in some ways a guilty pleasure for me: some of her fairy-tale rewrites I find professionally interesting, but my response to her books is always a bit patchy. I will, for example, re-read Beauty more or less annually, when tired or depressed, because it's lovely; Deerskin is quite a challenging revision of a fundamentally dodgy fairy tale; and my devotion to Sunshine is unending (intelligent vampire-dominated world-building! and a heroine who cooks). But The Blue Sword, while compelling, is unashamed Mills&Boon, and her later work, including Spindle's End and Rose Daughter is starting to feel repetitive, a bit shapeless and not entirely successful.

Chalice, the new one, has a fascinating setting, a medieval society in which a feudal structure overlays a profound, magical connection to the land which expresses itself both through the bloodline of the landowner and through the circle of land-linked functionaries who support him. Mirasol, the new Chalice to a troubled demesne, is an extremely sympathetic character, pitchforked into vital and unfamiliar duties through tragedy and need; again professionally, I'm a sucker for magical land-connection as a metaphor for power and control. She's also a bee-keeper, and I loved the bee-keeping detail and the resonance between its logic and that of the land itself. But the weird land-owner himself is a bit too much, too alien and distant to be empathised with, and the story's conclusion somehow too pat. Worst of all, though, I wish McKinley wouldn't descend into measured, formalised interchanges between her main characters, which lay out motivations and plot details in great, chunky, over-emotional paragraphs. I think she's going for a sort of archaic, heightened tone, but I really don't think it works.

The Graveyard Book, on the other hand, is unalloyed delight. Gaiman is a sneaky, sneaky man: here, as much as in Sandman, American Gods or Anansi Boys his mythologies sidle up to you nonchalantly, ramifying casually off the edges of the text in a way that feels naturalised and inevitable. This works because they're powerful, coherent and understated, offering a slow pleasure in gradually apprehending the system in which his characters, alive and dead, function. His theme is death, naturally enough, but it's handled with particular power in the relocation of death's intrinsic concerns away from the actual dead: in the end, death is revealed in its stark truth as being about loss, separation and, in a strange way, maturity - simply coming to terms with life and living.

A lot has been made of the book's debt to Kipling's Jungle Book, but I think it's an understated homage, mostly found in the idea of growing up as different and thus alone, however supportive the alien culture - animals, the dead - which sustains you. The book's episodic structure is effective, bound as it is by the solid integrity both of his mythology and of his narrative vision, and, as usual with Gaiman, is nicely balanced between the chilling, the amusing and the emotionally real. I love the mix of times and tones in the dead characters, and the apparently random and unexplained intrusions of mythological figures. Also, bonus points for a seriously threatening villain, etiquette details across about five centuries, and occasional nightgaunts. Every nice novel needs a nightgaunt. I've always thought they got unnecessarily bad press.

In other news, Vienna Teng. Apart from the lovely voice and groovy piano, her name's fun to say.

Not mine. Did those yesterday. Instead, as a welcome to 2006, Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett have put up Crowley and Aziraphale's resolutions here. Anything I could do would be anticlimactic.

I should add, for posterity, that the degree of shambles created by 26 people drinking cocktails, waving sparklers and popping party poppers is truly epic. The streamer debris was ankle-deep in the living room and kitchen, and extended tentacularly down the passage into the bathroom. I keep finding shiny bits of confetti in random places, like the cats' bowls and the potplants and my cleavage. The party had me buzzed enough that, when the final last-dogs had left at 2.30 am, I lay awake until 6, and only managed to sleep until 8.30. The two and a half hour's sleep was very weirdly full of strange dreams about frantically directing a large crew piloting a giant ship round a whole series of very tight underground corners, while I was simultaneously being madly chatted up by an unattractive and low-status Hollywood actor (no-one real, you know how dreams go). I consequently greet the new year as something of a shuffling zomboid thing.

I should also add that the three-hour clean-up this morning was absolutely worth it in every sense. Good party. Thanks, everyone who attended.

I blame bumpycat and wytchfynder, who pointed me here and thus sparked this tragically obvious rediscovery of my goth roots.



In other news: Anansi Boys. I went forth and bought it yesterday, recking not the damage to my long-suffering credit card since this is Work, dammit, Work! (I also, with enormous self-restraint, didn't buy the new Terry Pratchett, although if ever there was an excuse for self-indulgent frothy book buying, wisdom teeth removal is it). I'm very glad I did grab Anansi Boys, actually, it's an interesting document in the ever more folkloric progression that is Neil Gaiman. I really enjoyed it; basically, it's about being incredibly embarassed by karaoke, which is a sentiment I can heartily grok. It's also about the self-conscious battle for the control of narrative, which means I can spend several sentences being pretentious about it in this encyclopedia entry. Money for jam.

My worst fears are realised: this morning's preparation for a random SCA picnic suffered a temporary setback when I discovered that my first batch of pastry was liberally laced with pewter shavings, presumably from the Evil Landlord's casting efforts last night. So, not Chicken Pewter surprise, quite, but certainly Strawberry Tart Unexpected Crunch. Had to toss the lot. Am accepting tenders for bodily harm to said Evil Landlord. Dammit.

I'm also somewhat cross that the local movie networks have changed their minds on showing Serenity. It was supposed to be released by Ster Kinekor on 18th November. The buzz on the grapevine is that that has been moved to mid-January. Ritual suicide may be an option.

Random fun quotes for the day!

Off James & the Blue Cat, an amusingly self-deprecating British scriptwriter's blog, a glancing reference to the Terrifying Carnivorous Seagulls of St. Ives:
In D&D terms, a monster with a Challenge Rating of 4, Attacks: beak +6, flappy feet +3 and a ranged area effect weapon you really don't want to be on the wrong end of, even if it is supposed to be lucky. Also has skills: Sense Pasty and, Mob Tourist. Varient 5 hit dice Dire Seagull with Carry Off Small Child rumoured to exist, as yet only a rumour.

Time magazine interviewed Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman together, causing mass outbreaks of helpless fan squeeing and fainting. My favourite Gaiman quote, on the general all-round coolness of fandom at a con signing:
...we're ready to leave the stage. I look up and they have a bodyguard line of 30 Klingons. They're six-foot six and four-feet wide and they have the foreheads and they had linked arms. We were being lead off behind a human wall —a Klingon wall—of Klingon warriors. And I thought, how good does it get?.

And Joss on the Big Damn Movie: "This will be the greatest film since whatever film comes out right before it. And I'm not backing down from that."

Prophetic, given that it hasn't done as well at the box office as everyone hoped, although the reviews are generally good. Sigh. Cinema audiences. Like herding brain-dulled media zombies.

Excuse me, I have to go and discuss Terry Pratchett with a lively third-year class now. Academic life, such hell.