Summer Brief 3

Quotes

"Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different."

-Guardian Talk

In the last few years, we’ve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. That’s about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

-Guardian Talk

“One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.
The tale is the map that is the territory.
You must remember this.”

-American Gods

“He had gone beyond the world of metaphor & simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.”     

-The Sandman

I want to be alive again," she said. "Not in this half-life. I want to be really alive. I want to feel my heart pumping in my chest again. I want to feel blood moving through me — hot, and salty, and real. It's weird, you don't think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you'll know."
-American Gods

Motifs

I struggled with this for a while trying to decide what how to define what a motif is, so I started with a dictionary definition and went from there.

"something (such as an important idea or subject) that is repeated throughout a book, story, etc."

-Self imprisonment

-Parents damaging their children

-The necessity of stories

-The cycle of birth, death and rebirth

-Dreams

Characters

-Dream/Morpheus

Dream's appearance often changes depending on who is looking at him at the time. he has appeared in a number of guises throughout the comic, including-

-A huge black cat

-A cat headed god

-A flaming Martian skull

-A Japanese man

-A fox

He usually appears as a tall, thin man with bone white skin, black hair and stars instead of eyes.

He sometimes wears a helm made from the skull and backbone of a beaten foe that resembles a World War 2 gas mask. He often wears a cape that sometimes has a flame motif. Over time his appearance has been based on various people but the original basis of the character was Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy.

-Delirium

Delirium is the youngest of the 'Endless' and her appearance changes depending on her mood. The only constant is the colour of her eyes, she has on emerald green eye and one blue with silver flecks. her sigil is a shapeless blob of colour. In the comic series Neil Gaiman changes the speech bubbles and text to be unique to each character and Delirium's speech is especially bold. her speech is all in caps, varies through unpredictable orientations and the background is a multi-coloured gradient.

Destiny-

Destiny id the oldest of the 'Endless' and appears as an old blind man dressed in grey or brown robes.

he carries a large book called the 'Cosmic Log' that contains the entire sum of existence, past, present and future. His garden that contains paths that souls walk along as they fulfil their lives.

Mr Wednesday-

Mr Wednesday id Odin, the leader of the old gods, the most dominant god of the Norse Pantheon. He is the god of wisdom. In America he works as a con artist.

he is described as having greyish hair and a stubbly beard. he has a glass eye that doesn't match the other. he is stocky, smaller that Shadow but seems to take up more room. He is described as having a

"craggy square face with pale grey eyes".

Shadow-

Shadow is a seemingly ordinary man from the Midwest. various characters throughout the novel question Shadows race. This ambiguity plays a part in an important twist in the story. Neil Gaiman has revealed that the characters mother was black. he is decribed as being "big enough and looked don't-fuck-with-me enough" to keep out of trouble while in prison. Shadow's eyes are described as grey in color.

Information about the author-

- He has created a varied body of work including prose, poetry, comics, journalism and song lyrics.

- Neil Gaiman delivered a lecture for The Reading Agency at the barbican in London. The Reading Agency started the lecture series in 2012 with the idea being to create a platform for writers to share ideas about reading.  Gaimans lecture was focussed on the importance of libraries and the reading habits of children. this is a good example of his wider influence.

- He clearly draws inspiration from a well researched and wide reaching catalogue of cultural references ranging from Shakespeare to mythology. He has even placed people who have influenced him into his work as characters.

- Neil Gaimans family has Polish-Jewish and other Eastern European-jewish origins, he was brought up surrounded by Jewish beliefs as well as scientology. This unconventional combination of beliefs could explain the ways he finds connections between subjects that most would never discover. It could also be in influence on the way he treat characters from a variety of cultural backgrounds as though they are part of the same overall narrative.

- " His mind is a dark fathomless ocean, and every time I sink into it, this world fades, replaced by one far more terrible and beautiful in which I will happily drown." Benjamin Percy

Locations-

-East Grinstead- Gaiman lived there for many years between 1965-1980 and then from 1984-1987

-Menomonie, Wisconsin, United States- This is where Gaiman currently lives and has done since 1992

-America- Moving to America was the inspiration for Giaman's book 'American Gods' he said that he knew wanted to write about America as soon as he got there

-Libraries- Gaiman has spoken and written on a number of occasions about the importance of libraries and the effect they had on him when he was young.

-The DC Universe. The sandman comic series is one of gaiman's best known works and by far the longest running. the characters he has spent a long time creating  and writing for exist within this fictional universe.