Journal

Friday, March 27, 2009

PEN and such miscellanea

Now people are asking for punk-time age 16 photos. The only photo out there that I know of is the one in the back of The Kindly Ones, although my friend Geoff Notkin, who was the drummer in the band, assures me that somewhere in a storage facility far from where he lives he has all the photos taken that day, and I think I will remind him of this. (Here is his website: http://notkin.net/. Go and buy meteorites from him so that he will feel well-disposed-enough towards the world to go to another city and and rummage.)

...

At the end of April it's the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. I'm honored to be taking part.

You can find me at http://www.pen.org/author.php/prmAID/36/prmID/1832 which tells you what panels I am doing in New York (and one at Washington College, Chestertown Maryland). If you are going to be in the area, there's an amazing list of participants, from Adrian Tomine to Lou Reed, Salman Rushdie to Paul Krugman. 


I was there a couple of years ago and loved it. Am sure I'll love it this time.

...

Jane Curtin (yes, that Jane Curtin) can be heard reading my story "Chivalry" as part of the PRI "Selected Shorts" series.
(For the curious, you can hear me reading it at http://www.last.fm/music/Neil+Gaiman/_/Chivalry and if I could find it online I'd link to the Christina Pickles reading of it too -- although it's in the Selected Shorts: Lots of Laughs audiobook.) It's funny, hearing other people read that story, because it's the story I've read aloud the most: I know what each word does for a live audience, and so keep wishing I could direct the reader  ("Use the word 'nice' like a weapon wherever it turns up. It means something different every time anyone uses it. Play Galaad utterly straight.  Domestic details always trump Arthurian details...")

...

There's a wonderfully (unintentionally) funny (if dim) bad review of Coraline at http://christiananswers.net/spotlight/movies/2009/coraline2009.html. It's the kind of review that makes you suspect the reviewer is reviewing the inside of his own head, and not the film at all.  When I linked to it on twitter several people wrote in to reassure me that this was not typical of all Christians, something I already knew: I've linked to a bunch of astonishingly sensible Christian reviews of Coraline earlier on this blog (and here's another sane one, as a makeweight: http://www.gospelandculture.org/2009/03/coraline/).
...

Daniel Pinkwater is one of my favourite authors. His new book, The Yggyssey, is up online, and you can read it at  http://www.theyggyssey.com/ .

And here's a marvellous interview with Lynda Barry.

Right. Off to talk to an English Honor Society.

Labels: , , ,