Overture

Just a quick post on Gaiman because it seems irresponsible not to.

The press is currently beating two dead horses: i.e. we're all dying of pleasure that The Ocean at the End of the Lane came out last week, delicious in all its deckle-edge glory; moreover, that news has moved from trickle to stream regarding Overture, the pre- Preludes and Nocturnes portion of what is often called the Sandman epic narrative. ETA is All Hallows' Eve's Eve, 2013; publication will be bi-monthly and will supposedly consist of six issues. McKean, of course, will be doing covers, and J.H. Williams III will be be doing the rest of the art.

Speaking of which:

This is Williams's cover image for Overture 1 from his blog.

The Dark Side of the Moon

Well, you never achieve everything you wanted to. It's the simple act of writing. You begin with a platonic ideal that is a shimmering tower carved out of pure diamond, that is this perfect thing that stands there unfouled by gravity and the weather. And, then, the thing that you build is this thing that you have to build out of whatever is at hand and you use empty sushi boxes and chairs and get friends to hold it up and try to make it look like it's standing. And at the end of it, people look at it and they say, "It's amazing." And you say, "Yes, but if only I could have done the thing that is in my head."

—Gaiman, when asked if he felt he'd achieved everything he wanted to with The Sandman. (Hanging out with the Dream King, p. 20)

I don't know many people who speak in perfect prose, but Neil's one of them.

—Dave McKean in an interview (Hanging out with the Dream King, p. 6-7)

What does that mean, to 'speak in perfect prose'? That it sounds, to the rest of us, like something worked out on the page and subsequently revised, I suppose. This is perhaps why interviews will Gaiman go so well: people read the author's person as they'd hoped to find him from his texts. 

Yesterday I read the Bouchard/Simon translation of Foucault's What Is an Author? Unsurprisingly, it's very, very good. My work has become ruled by the author-function as a point of obsession: applied to Gaiman, we call this celebrity; applied to Shakespeare, we call this scholarship.

The third point concerning this 'author-function' is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a 'realistic' dimension as we speak of an individual's 'profundity' or 'creative' power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspect of an individual, which we designate as an author... are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice.

When we read The Sandman for pleasure, we rely on our ability to address Gaiman's authorship as an entity in flux. Fans beg for backstory, annotated editions*, preliminary sketches. We interview him, over and over, we follow the blog and lose our knickers when the prequel is announced. Why? I like to think of it as a response to the world the text evokes, a kind of moving literary shadow. It's the reason we send up probes to take pictures of the dark side of the moon, the way we crouch down and peer into the backs of drawers when looking something, even though our hands have already come up empty. We want to confirm our suspicions, we want the intangible real. Realized.

But we can't have that with Will. Not until, as I have often fantasized, we dig up his grave and find The Long Lost Journals or recover Cardenio will we have 'new' academic flesh to sink our teeth into. What changes is the conversation--Shakespeare stays the same, but 'Shakespeare' evolves.

*A word on The Annotated Sandman v.1: yes, it is that good, except that The Sandman Chronology the editor uses is of variable quality.

we can't all be superheroes, I suppose

a gem by Charles Vess, which I found here.

Endless Nights, 147

(although the wish and the thing are so close in the realm of the Endless that you cannot get a thin-bladed knife between them)

Milo Manara's Desire

 originally published in Endless Nights, which I found here.

Do what thou wilt, buster!

Dave McKean's illustration The White Road from Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors, which in some way is the only appropriate way to begin this blog, as indeed the blog begins with it.

The beautiful advantage to writing a thesis concerning something you love (in my case, Sandman, Shakespeare, & Plautus) is what ends up falling under the purview of "research". In my sick and twisted rationale, every attempt must be made to uncover anything which could possibly contribute to the project at hand.

This, by the way, is impossible. And, as H.H. Furness avowed a hundred or so years ago, "were I told that my closest friend was lying at the point of death, and that his life could be saved by permitting him to divulge his theory of Hamlet, I would instantly say, ‘Let him die! Let him die! Let him die!"

Shakespeare, and his very corporeal body of work, is someone we simply cannot shut up about—as he himself could not keep his mouth shut nor quill clean of Titus Maccius Plautus (we write what we know, I suppose). Gaiman's well on his way, as this blog and every other of its kind will attest. So to begin a project obsessed with amassing said body of work is suicidal.

Which is exactly the fight I had had with myself yesterday, "researching" McKean's current work while re-reading Preludes & Nocturnes, trying desperately to justify the intensive google image search with my very own completist research philosophy. I looked at this damn picture and knew it would never be useful in my thesis. It's just gorgeous. And no, that's not enough: beauty for its own sake is not the province of an academic piece—or at least not this one. But I can't bring myself to trash these gems I find along the way. Nor the conversations they may inspire.

So, a blog.

Here, I hope to host a forum of indulgence. All the Gaiman/Sandman information I cannot part with, juicy tidbits here and there on Will and Plautus. Nerdy interludes. Fantastic musings. High-minded rubbish, occasionally. And you, my dear and prospective readers, are invited.