IMPORTANT: Tickets and shows and life and death...

The photos above are of Amanda and her friend -- and then, pretty soon,  our friend -- Becca Rosenthal. (It was Becca who told Amanda that she ought to marry me, the night before I proposed and we got engaged.) Becca was smart and funny, an excellent writer, and had amazing taste in music and art. She acted in my film STATUESQUE (that's the costume fitting she's getting, in the bottom photo).

She wanted to be a librarian.

She was overjoyed when she got hired by her local library. One of her last emails to me said when can i hope to see you around boston again? i would like very much to give you a great big hug. and it will hopefully be the hug of a Real Librarian.

I never got the hug. She died, suddenly, shortly before I moved to Cambridge. 

And now, with the blessing of her parents, we're raising money for a fund, in Becca's name, at Smith College.

To honor Becca’s memory, and to redirect extreme grief into something positive and productive, Amanda, Neil and other friends of Becca’s are spearheading this benefit for this fund in Becca’s name. It is for the benefit of students working in the Archives or the Rare Book Room, where Becca spent so much of her time being the hipster librarian they all knew she would one day actually become (and get paid to do). Annual income from this fund shall be used to provide internships for students enrolled in library special collections concentrations (including but not exclusive to the Archives and Book Studies concentrations) and/or to provide general internship and research funds for student work in special collections.

And by we, I mean, Amanda, me, Brian Viglione, Jason Webley, Emilyn Brodsky, and more of us. Becca's friends.  We're doing an evening of stuff. I'll read stories, show Statuesque, Amanda and Brian will make music, all sorts of wonderful  things will happen.  It's a one night only show, inspired by a librarian who isn't with us any more.

“A Tribute to Rebecca Rosenthal: A Night of Music, Art & Remembering, presented by Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman, Brian Viglione and other friends of Becca’s” will take place at the Somerville Theatre, 55 Davis Square, for one show only on Monday evening, October 7th at 7:00PM. Reserved seat tickets are $25.00 (plus $1.00 facility fee) with a limited number of Gold Circle seats available at $100.00 (plus $1.00 facility fee) that include an after-show meet and greet plus an original, limited edition art poster signed by the participating performers. All proceeds are to benefit the Rebecca Samay Rosenthal ’07 Memorial Special Collections Fund at Smith College.

If you are going to be in the Boston area on October the 7th, you should come. The details are at http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=bc31868377c214862493bdd83&id=6cfd53754b. The tickets go onsale at https://www.vendini.com/ticket-software.html?t=tix&e=a4e51df651ed159d57c8ee040f26e44d at 10:00 am Eastern US time this Saturday.

(If you cannot be there, but you would like to donate to the Becca fund, you can find all the information you need here: https://sites.google.com/site/beccascholarship2/home/how-to-donate)


...

This blog feels like it's about tickets and shows. So...

My friends Michael McQuilken and Adina Verson are in their excellently reviewed show at the Amsterdam Fringe, Machine Makes Man. If you're in Amsterdam, go and see it. Here's the link: http://www.amsterdamfringefestival.nl/fringe/programma-2013/fringe-2013/best-of-fringe/machine-makes-man.aspx

Jethro Compton brings the Bunker Trilogy: Morgana and Agamemnon from Edinburgh to London for a month. It was the only drama I was gutted about missing when I was in Edinburgh. It's now in London, and I'm going to do my best to see it before I return to the US. If you are London you should do likewise. Southwark Playhouse: http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/the-little/the-bunker-morgana-and-agamemnon/ for info.

Saturday the 14th of September, if you are in the London area, you should come and see me as the Voice of the Book, along with the all star amazing original radio cast (AND MITCH BENN AS ZAPHOD BEEBLEBROX) and extra special guest star Miss Polly Adams as the Dish of the Day. It's the opening night of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Live tour, and we would love to see you there. (The tour will have lots of other Voice of the Books, but none of them will be me.) Stalls and dress circle and most of the upper circle are already sold out. https://uk.patronbase.com/_Hackney/Sections/Choose?prod_id=HHG&perf_id=1

October 7th it's the Becca Event above, in Boston.

October 15th, it's the FORTUNATELY, THE MILK live reading at Westminster Central Hall. It sold out 2,000 tickets in a couple of days.  They just released a final 100 tickets -- hurry if you want them:  http://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/neil-gaiman-and-special-guests-fortunately-the-milk

November 23rd in the Town Hall, NYC, it's the first NYC Evening with Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, to celebrate the release of the CD and LP of the original Evening With Neil and Amanda West Coast tour. Tickets are almost gone.  It's the 50th Anniversary of Dr Who too, and I'm sorry about that. It will be alluded to. Without spoilers.

There.

The sun finally came out here yesterday, after 5 days of mist. This is from the last day of the mist:

Labels: absent friends, An Evening With Neil And Amanda., Becca Darling, Mist, Shows, tickets

Remembering Frederick Pohl, and a walk in the mist.

I just heard that Fred Pohl has died.

He was, for me, the last of the Golden Age greats, the first generation of Science Fiction Writers who created the genre. His collaborations with Cyril Kornbluth, his later solo work, were wonderful things: always witty, smart, interested in how people worked and how the stuff of the future would change the people who inhabited it. (I started with The Space Merchants, a book about advertising in a 1950s future. It's still my favourite.)

He was a literary agent too, and a whip-sharp editor of magazines and books. He stayed smart and he stayed relevant. Samuel R. Delany's groundbreaking Dhalgren was published as a Fred Pohl selection, and became a bestseller. And Fred kept on writing, and even blogging, giving us his memories of his past in science fiction. (Here's his blog entry on Dhalgren.)

I met him briefly at conventions, but never really knew him (I know his wife, Betty, Elizabeth Anne Hull, much better -- we spent time together in China, for a start). I told him how much I owed him, and how much the world of Science Fiction owed him, and I'm glad I did. I told him I saw him interviewed, when I was a boy, in a BBC documentary on SF writers, and it helped make it real that the things I loved were actually being made by real human beings.

The world is emptier without him, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction really has passed away.

...

This is a poem I wrote for Gateways, an anthology tribute to Fred, published a few years ago, about the futures that he and his Golden Age friends had promised us or threatened us with, about the future we seemed to have received instead:

The  [Backspace] Merchants

The [backspace] merchants sell deletions and removals,

masters of the world (or so they claim)

they go by many hundred different names 

and live inside a giant block of Spam.

It quivers, as if alive, is fed 

by tubes and tendrils, and is inhabited.

Portions are cut from it continually to feed the people.

Insidious, invidious, 

(occasionally in videos),

the [backspace] merchants seek to sell you:

V1agRa and all its magical cousins

(If you had a larger thing in your pants your life would have been better!!)

(MAGIC PENIS ENLARGEMENT PILLS)

(She'll love the new growth!)

(Make nights turbulent.)

Also, designer watches, diplomas, 

diplomats who will entrust you with their missing millions.

There are girls in your town who want to 

meet you.

The [backspace] merchants want so to delete you.

The [backspace] merchants click and they erase

our faces, so we keep on losing face.

The [backspace] merchants

offer relief from their own excesses:

The products will not work as advertised

The Spam is vast and must be satisfied.

In the old days of the future

our freedom fighters lived deep inside the chicken meat

Their coffee was the coffiest, their dreams the dreamiest.

The rest of us craved and grazed our lives away

and wondered if we should emigrate to Venus.

These are the poles we navigate between:

Yesterday's futures now reshape our days

into futures past, somewhere between last week and day million

as ancient as a black and white TV show, watched so late

and all the names we conjured with appeared to us in monochrome

with their faces, such young faces, 

to those of us who would learn to be plugged in at all times,

they told us of the future, that it was what they saw

a Game of If when they opened wide their eyes.

So we avoided all their awful warnings,

ignored the minefields as the klaxons sounded

played “Cheat the Prophet” just as Gilbert said,

we sidestepped cacotopias unbounded

and built ourselves this gorgeous mess instead

I wish we could still emigrate to Venus.

Sometimes I wonder what the Spam makes of us:

does it define us by our base desires,

or hope we can transcend them? Like small gods,

the [backspace] merchants offer us all choices

and each day

we can be tempted 

or  delete.

They lay their traps ineptly at our feet.

The present moves so quick we can't describe it,

so Science Fiction limns the recent past.

We future folk are just another tribe who 

hyperlinked our colours to the mast,

When now is always then and never soon

Our freak flags will not fly upon the moon.

Our prophets opened gateways, showed us pitfalls

gave us worlds of if and galaxies uncountable.

They made us think then take the other road.

But future yesterdays are growing cold.

The [backspace] merchants huddle in their meat

while we demand a finer, nobler future:

It waits for us beyond the blue horizon.

Our future will be glorious and gold.

If it lasts more than four hours

consult your physician.

For Fred Pohl, with infinite admiration.

.....................................................................................................

I'm still hiding out, still recovering from the three months on tour, still writing. Today I mostly went for a walk in the mist, cooked in the Aga, and wrote.

The world looked like this on the walk. (There are predictions that the sun will come out on Thursday, but I'm in no hurry. I'm good with the mist and the drizzle.)

(I can email photos like this over to WhoSay, which autoposts them to Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. Expect more of them.)

And I found myself on the TV News today (people phoned and told me). I talked about the role of libraries in the world in a piece on the opening of the new Birmingham Library - the largest lending library in Europe. You may (or may not, depending on where you live) be able to watch it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23869169 and http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b039109j/BBC_News_at_Six_02_09_2013/?t=25m35s.

Okay. I should go to sleep.

(Oh. I nearly forgot. A wonderful diary piece by Philip Pullman in the Financial Times about many things, including our time on stage. Yes, buy his wonderful Grimm Tales, out now in paperback.)

(And if you've ever wanted to hear Stephen Colbert read a chilling Ray Bradbury story and Leonard Nimoy read my favourite hilarious James Thurber short story, go to Selected Shorts http://www.selectedshorts.org/2013/08/dreams-and-schemes/: I host this episode.) 

Labels: Frederick Pohl, Mist, The Space Merchants