Discarding Neil Gaiman

.

If you haven’t read the Vulture exposé on Neil Gaiman, here it is. It ain’t pretty.

I first heard about this in hints from William Morris; I did not immediately seek out more information. Perhaps for the same reason I take issue with this observation:

Don’t people deserve time to grapple with new information? to mourn?

William’s responding to a fellow who said that the only appropriate response to Gaiman’s actions would be life in prison. Which I find even more troubling.

I want to be clear: in no way am I defending Neil Gaiman. But we as Americans are already way too happy sending our fellow citizens to prison. This call for suffering to solve the problem of suffering is never great but in a time where we are battling authoritarianism within our own nation, that impulse could be used against us in a hurry.

But I never would have written this little essay were it not for something another friend posted on Bluesky:

This led to others (including people I like quite a lot) piling on, saying they’d always felt this about him and complimenting the term “cruelty mining” as being just the right critical lens through which to view his work. To the exclusion of all others, I suppose.

Again, I’m not here to defend Gaiman’s actions as described in Vulture. They’re abhorrent and sad. But we’ll get to them.

My first thing, the thing I felt I had to say something about, was this Calvinistic take of Meg’s and how I find it deeply troubling.

The fact that folks from many marginalized groups have found themselves in Gaiman’s work for decades should count for something. His longtime allyship with Tori Amos, including in her role as public rape victim, should count for something. That women in particular have felt seen and accepted through his work should count for something. Discovering his late sins does not retroactively turn him into a monster-since-birth.

Reminds me of a seven-year-old who knew the penny was heads all along—as soon as he sees it is heads (whether he had said heads previously or not).

Anyway.

Enough with knocking the rhetoric of my friends.

I’m on record (many, many times) as saying that Gaiman’s shorter work is better. His comics, short stories, and children’s novels tend toward the excellent. I haven’t read a single novel of his for adults that struck me as all that good.

(A list of reviews [likely incomplete] available over on Thutopia: The Sandman [comics]; “Metamorpho” [comics]; Fragile Things [short stories]; Best American Comics 2010 [as editor]; Chivalry [comics]; Fortunately, the Milk [children’s novel]; Norse Mythology [retellings;] Trigger Warning [short stories]; Black Orchid [comics]; The Graveyard Book [children’s novel]; Neverwhere [novel]. Among the other works I’ve read but are not listed here, probably because I read them before I started keeping track, are Coraline, Smoke and Mirrors, American Gods, Death: The High Cost of Living. Also, little books like picture books generally don’t get reviewed. Yet no matter how you count, I’ve read a good amount of his work.)

I’m struck now by a story that appeared in Smoke and Mirrors, “Tastings.” This is a super-graphic story that takes place entirely during a sex scene. The costly male prostitute is wonderfully successful at his job because his has psychic powers that let him know what women want, nibble by thrust, before they know it themselves. This preternatural skill, as you might imagine, makes him very popular. In the story, however, the woman he’s having sex with is some sort of succubus who sucks away all his psychic powers. And while he will remain skilled at the sex, something is gone that will never return.

It’s easy to see myriad ways this story might apply to the Vulture story, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

What I’m thinking about more than the story itself is the author’s note for that story. And just how embarrassed Gaiman was to have written it. He was as shocked as we were. Even through the words on the page you could see the red in his cheeks. He had fulfilled the assignment he was given but he wasn’t sure how to feel about it.

The first time I was disappointed in Gaiman as a person was 2007 when he divorced his wife of 22 years. This felt like a true celebrity divorce; behold! a man who had found fame and success and fans upon fans upon fans—then suddenly discovered he was too cool for the wife of his youth, for the mother of his children. That decision felt then (and now) portentous. While his art might survive the transition, it seemed probable that his soul was now a different man’s soul.

This, too, is judgmental, I admit. But I want to be clear that my judgment, while also faulty and preferably avoidable, is based on actions and not my “always was” reading of a person’s art. The reason I was saddened-but-not-surprised to hear of this once-good man’s fall is because he had already fallen—when he left his family. Not because I didn’t like American Gods.

The Vulture article reveals a man who has now had decades of experience justifying one thing and then another thing and then another thing until he became a monster.

Now, sure, we might find out next that he was a-raping people in 1992, and that will be a new conversation. But let’s not assume that.

What’s troubling me now, what I need to speak out against today, is how, upon uncovering a crime, voices insist this person was predetermined for hell. I don’t believe that. I won’t believe that. And painting an entire person’s life (and work) with a brush dipped in their current sins is, I think, wrong. We shouldn’t do it.

It is better to mourn than to have been right all along.

Maybe we should just pretend this set begins and ends with Wednesday Addams

.

I look over this collection of recently read and . . . I mean the beloved cartoonists and the Novel Prize–winner come close, but I think maybe the best thing here is the pornography? Can that be right?

Egad. I need to read better books.

.


007) Chas. Addams Half-Baked Cookbook, finished January 29

It's a lovely little collection off Addams's culinary cartoons, interspersed with peculiar recipes you'd assume he made up but which come from various cookbooks over the last couple centuries.

between bouts of arguing teenagers

008) Monica by Daniel Clowes, finished February 3

I don't really love Clowes, though I appreciate him and wish I liked him more. I often tell myself that I'll read his new thing but, if my brief search is accurate, I haven't, not since 2011.

So when I say I liked this one perhaps the most of all his work, I don't know what I'm talking about. (My favorite thing of his remains the Ghost World movie.)

I like how this one is broken up by time and narrative and takes a moment to settle on Monica as our point-of-view characters. How some of Monica's fiction filters in. I like how he slides through her story, focusing on different parts in different orders. This aspect is similar to My Favorite Thing Is Monsters but it arguably works better and more naturally with an older narrator.

I'm undecided, if I think the final two panels are a copout, simply bad, or appropriate. I'm leaning copout at the moment. It kinda felt like it was just a way to finish this project. Did he have a deadline to meet or something?

But perhaps I am wrong.

three days

 

009) The Unexpurgated French Edition of Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland, finished February 19

This edition is introduced by Louis Untermeyer who edited one of the most influential books from my childhood. His intro is largely about the history of banning and charges of obscenity and such the book's been subject to over the years and the inevitability of its ultimate redemption leading to this edition. It's not clear to me is that's because we're finally wise enough to see that Fanny's not obscene or simply that, in comparison to what Billy Joel called "British politician sex," the news these days has got nothing on her.

The book took a long time to read because it has minimal plot and minimal characterization. Fanny's really the only character worth noting and she ain't got many notes herself. She comes to the city at fifteen, gets taken in by a madam, and spends the next four years living in a fantasy. If only a life of prostitution was always so cheerful! She really only meets one bad customer in her time (and the more experienced girls teach her how to fool him into receiving nothing at all) and the only truly horrifying thing she witnesses is too dudes in a barn. Sadly she slips and hits her head so they can get away before she turns them in which means that the books can keep its general ethos of consequence-free sex without seeming like it's approving of homosexuality with the same vigor in which it approves of straight sex.

Essentially, it's 250 pages of nonstop Bad Sex in Fiction Award–winners. Although worse in the sense that Cleland clearly has some level of expertise in fifteen-year-old breasts he's eager to share with us and he really, really wants to talk about pensises but he only has so many descriptors available to him.

The gay guys show up when Cleland was getting board as well. That scene is immediately proceeded by Fanny volunteering for a whipping (which she finds interesting but not enough to ever do again) and followed by her friend seducing the local idiot (Fanny herself being to moral than to do more than strip him in order to see if it's true what they say about simpletons).

And then Cleland pretty much stops writing about Fanny's exploits because he's ready to rush through some plot in order to reunite her with her true love.

So is Untermeyer right? Are Fanny Hill's adventure's no longer that dirty in the modern world?

Well, I tried out a lot of definitions for pornography in LDS EROS. Let's consider a couple.

D.H. Lawrence: "Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it."

I mean . . . no. Cleland clearly thinks he's exposing sex and beautiful and wondrous and something everyone can get into without moral qualm. Fanny even gives a little (confusing) speech about virtue and vice in the final pages. And it's not entirely clear what her point is but certainly she thinks she has demonstrated the cleanliness of a good romp. That said, her Memoirs are clearly a big fat lie. Teenagers sucked into the oldest trade in 1700s London didn't all live in the kind of carefree luxury, bouncing from one fine appointment to the next, as does Fanny. And if lying isn't doing dirt, I don't know what is. My guess is that Cleland was the sort of well-appointed john who either never saw the awful other side or was skilled enough at lying to hide it even from himself. Or he just had fun writing fantasies about nubile women whilst languishing in prison.

Levi Peterson: "It is gross disproportion that creates pornography. . . . [When things are] amassed, concentrated, enormously emphasized --- if they become the single end and purpose of the writing --- they are pornographic."

Oh, ho! Levi's nailed it here. This is Fanny to a T.

Bruce Jorgensen: "[A pornographic event requires] three elements: a porn author, a porn text, and a porn reader. In fact, it seems to me that the porn event seldom requires all three, though it always requires one: just a porn reader. Porn author and porn text make the event more likely but do not inevitably guarantee it."

It's interesting to not that Cleland claimed he wrote the novel to prove it was possible to write about prostitution without vulgarity. It's not clear to me what he means. The current definition of vulgarity seems quite well met by Fanny Hill, although it's probable Cleland meant "vulgarity" in the sense of "common" or "lower-class." In which . . . I guess so? But I don't really know which me meant. But I do suspect he was certainly a porn author writing a porn text. And even though it took me an insanely long period of time (not sure if I'm counting Octobers accurately), I'm embarrassed I finished it. Even though I do think Untermeyer was correct, at least in that there is something to be said about spending time with our narrator who is cheerful and interesting and good company and, good for her, getting a Dickensian happy ending filled with wealth and happy coincidence.

And if that's not pornography, I don't know what is.

either sixteen or twenty-eight months

 

010) Peach and the Isle of Monsters by Franco Aureliani and Agnes Garbowska, finished February 20

This is...not that good. Franco's trying something new (which is great) but it doesn't work. Instead of characters developing, they just pass through certain cliched story beats with the assumption that'll work for us. Well, it didn't work for me.

lunch

 

011) Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, finished February 28

This book appeared on semester on the dystopian-options list I provide students. It was selected by a group and they loved the book but they said it certainly was not dystopian (possibly even utopian), just the near future and world not that much different from ours. So I removed it from the list.

And I'll leave it off the list but not because I agree with them. In fact, I think Klara and the Sun is deeply dystopian—but in subtle ways that might be difficult for teenagers reading on their own to discover. Largely because this novel takes place as a dystopia is being formed. It's not quite obvious yet. And it's certainly not obvious to Klara who narrates the book.

Klara is a robot—an AF, a term never defined but which to me instantly suggested artificial friend. The first half of the book is dull dull dull. Klara's in the store. Klara's looking out the window. Klara's waiting for something to take her home. It's like if Corduroy never went on his adventure and yet his time in the store was hundreds of pages long. Then she is picked up by a family and nothing continues happening.

But all that stuff is important later on as we come to understand Klara better. She has an alien but rich inner life. She worships the sun, for instance. She's a careful observer. She has a sunny understanding of humanity, even when perhaps she should not.

I don't want to get too deeply into spoilers here although I would love to really dig in and analyze this book and the fascinating decisions it makes. It gets into plenty of fun and sticky topics from the ancient (family, love, growing up) to the contemporary (a.i., climate responsibility, genetic engineering). Ishiguro weaves these together in provocative ways. All through Klara who is about the least provocative character you can imagine. And all the human characters appreciate her purity while never seeing her as a thing particularly human. Which turns into a deep irony when the book's most shocking reveal presents itself.

In the end, as Klara fades away, I'm happy for her. She's lived a good live. She's fulfilled her purpose. She is happy. She has entered into the rest of the Sun.

Yet the world around her, though she cannot see it, is awful and getting worse all the time.

And the people have too many mundane tasks to genuinely appreciate their decent.

Pretty prescient stuff.

perhaps a month

 

012) Comic Poems edited by Peter Washington, finished March 7

Nothing like reading a collection of humor to see how similar you are to a person. I mentioned Louis Untermeyer's collection above. Most of that I liked, some I loved, some I simply did not find funny. Overall, that collection's a win.

I laughed a few times in this one but I was much more often utterly mystified as to why anyone would label this thing "comic." I recommend finding another collection of comic poems, if you're in the market but—and this is important—you are not me.

ten months

.
.
.

INCIDENTALLY, starting with #12, I think I'm no longer linking to Amazon. I never make that much money off affiliate links anyway and Bezos's final abandonment of seeming principledness with the Washington Post is leading to me stepping away. I'll start here, but as soon as I bite down and drop Prime (will that kill Alexa??) I'll also drop my (once beloved) Washington Post subscription.

(But Bezos is wealthy because his fingers touch even-invisible aspects of our life. I'll never be free of him so long as billionaires are allowed to exist.)

I've already been linking to Bookshop whenever possible. When that's not possibly, I'll now use Alibris as my backup, it being a collective of independent bookstores that sell used. That should work as well as anything can.

.
.
.

PREVIOUSLY THIS YEAR IN BOOKS

Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!

001) Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley, finished January 1
002) Cthulhu Is Hard to Spell: Volume Three, finished January 1
003) Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (translated by Megan McDowell), finished January 8
004) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, finished January 11
005) You're a Good Sport, Charlie Brown, finished January 12
005) Into the Headwinds: Why Belief Has Always Been Hard—and Still Is by Terryl Givens and Nathaniel Givens, finished January 24
006) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book Two by Emil Ferris, finished January 25

 

PREVIOUS OTHER YEARS IN BOOKS

2007 = 2008 = 2009 = 2010 = 2011 = 2012 = 2013 = 2014 = 2015
2016 = 2017 = 2018 = 2019 = 2020 = 2021 = 2022 = 2023 = 2024