The Null Device

Neil Gaiman (who's sort of the Goth Terry Pratchett) writes about the evolution of vampires in popular literature:

I think mostly what it has to do with is what vampires get to represent. Dracula was a great novel of sexual seduction, full of repeated sexual seduction and rape and sex. So it makes complete sense that your solid Victorian vampires were fundamentally evil. And you can have that nice big stake hammered through them as a way of putting them to rest. After that, I think the next big, huge, cultural, “somebody’s just written a vampire story” is probably Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. Steve basically wanted to do Dracula again, only in a small town in Maine. At that point you got vampires still sort of representing the “other.” Then Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire, which as a teenager I thought was a rather drippy book. I have to say as a teenager who loved vampire fiction and wanted vampire fiction, I thought they all sort of sat around being miserable.

But I think then the thing that changed everything and that gave vampire fiction a new lease on life and death was AIDS, because you hit the early ‘80s, and suddenly you have something in the blood that is an exchange of blood that kills and is altogether fundamentally about sex. And vampirism essentially came out of the closet as a metaphor for the act of love that kills. Stephen King once said, using the Erica Jung quote, that vampirism is the ultimate zipless f—. And then a sort of continuous transmutation, you had Lost Boys, which is essentially vampirism as wish fulfillment. Finally, of course there’s Sesame Street, which I think may well have created the sympathetic vampire for the world in Count.

(via MeFi) ¶ culture goth horror neil gaiman vampires 0

There's a Neil Gaiman tribute CD coming out soon. It appears to consist of various goth/gothic-interest artists (natch), plus the obligatory Tori Amos track, and a contribution from Stephin Merritt. The foreword is written by a member of emo band My Chemical Romance, presumably to bring in the Hot Topic kids.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ emo goth hot topic neil gaiman stephin merritt tori amos 0

Time Magazine has an interview with Neil Gaiman (who has a movie, made with Dave McKean, coming out) and Joss Whedon (who did some rinky-dink TV show about valley ghouls in California or something):

JW: I find that when you read a script, or rewrite something, or look at something that's been gone over, you can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long it's been in development.

NG: Yes. It really is this thing of executives loving the smell of their own urine and urinating on things. And then more execs come in, and they urinate. And then the next round. By the end, they have this thing which just smells like pee, and nobody likes it.

(via /.) ¶ commercialisation hollywood neil gaiman 0

According to Neil Gaiman, prison companies in the US use juvenile illiteracy levels to predict how many prison cells to build:

At the Publishers' Lunch I attended last week, Joel Klein mentioned that the people who build private prisons in the US use third grade (that's about age eight for the non-Americans) illiteracy levels as their key to how many people are going to be in prison in ten, fifteen years, and how many prison cells they're going to need to build.

Thanks to Loki for digging that fact up.

¶ crime education freakonomics literacy neil gaiman usa 1

Neil Gaiman's somewhat camp Lovecraft pastiche I, Cthulhu (1986). (via Found)

¶ cthulhu fiction lovecraft neil gaiman 0

William Gibson (best known for writing Neuromancer on a 1927 typewriter after watching kids in a video arcade) now has a blog. Which looks much the same sort of deal as Neil Gaiman's blog used to be before he started linking to stuff. (via bOING bOING)

¶ blogs neil gaiman william gibson 0

There's a review on Slashdot of Neil Gaiman's upcoming book American Gods, which does sound rather Gaimanesque. And whilst we're on Slashdot, their next interview is not with a Linux developer, nor a sci-fi legend, but with visionary philanthropist Alex Chiu. That's right, Alex "Eternal Life Foot Braces" Chiu.

¶ alex chiu books neil gaiman psychoceramics 0

OK, two more things about Douglas Adams: firstly, Neil Gaiman has posted a short piece about him to his online journal; and then there's this piece he wrote about the Internet. He was a very canny fellow, and we'll miss him. (links via Graham and Jim)

¶ douglas adams internet neil gaiman 0