Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Hallucinogenic, even for me
I’ve been re-reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and enjoying it a good deal more on the second read. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because I read it soon after publication (2001), which was before I tried to reinvent myself as a writer. Ten years later, I’m sure I have a better appreciation for craftsmanship. Guess I’m saying I have greater respect for Gaiman nowadays.
One possible metric for a book is the degree to which it permeates my thoughts, waking and sleeping. Last night I wandered from one wild scene into another in a world bereft even of dream logic. It’s a characteristic of mad speech that the sane listener can’t remember or reproduce more than a fragment of the monologue; in a similar manner, my dreaming self had a devilish time remembering things from one vision to the next.
But I remember a statue of a mermaid, human from the waist down, fish from the waist up. Devotees suckled her genitalia and were rewarded with gushes of salt water. Yes, I probably watch too much internet porn.
At the western limit of a carnival are cabins, shuttered windows glowing under a starred sky. It’s the red light district. I knock on a door and am swept in by a small, dark woman, one of dozens of small, dark women, who together greet me as if I were Norm from Cheers. I’ve come home it seems, and I fall, really fall into the arms of the woman who opened the door for me. The night’s cold leaves me. She asks if I’ve brought ice cream and when I say no, but I can run out and get some, she says that’s all right, you just stay right here, baby; and I fall asleep in her arms.
When I wake up, I’m in a hotel room, and in the mirror I see that the women have painted my lips, rouged my cheeks, and waxed my hair (yeah, I have hair in this dream) into a pompadour. They’ve had their way with me in the sense of dressing me up like a Ken doll and chortling all night long over the results. And I can’t wait to get back for more.
D.
..have you read “Anansi Boys” yet?
Gaiman is part of my comfort food diet; “Neverwhere”, “The Graveyard Book”, the Sandman series; always thought-provoking, always leading you to making mythological/anthropological connections; BTW, have you any idea who the faceless god is? Most of them I could find (sources on those Slavic gods are pretty scarce) but that one still has me stumped.
Rereading Anansi Boys as we speak. I downloaded it to my Nook. I’m afraid I didn’t like Neverwhere, and I think I own only one Sandman (sorry!)
Nope, the faceless one has me stumped, too.
Only one thing bugs me about American Gods: Gaiman’s conspicuous neglect of Yahweh. As if he were trying to be very, very careful not to offend.
…yeah, I had that thought, too, about avoiding controversy; but, consider, all the how-you-say, historical gods in the book are members of pantheons, more or less aware of other gods and more or less able to cope with diversity, while old Nobodaddy insists on being unique and unrivalled; not a team player, even by the (jealous, treacherous) standard set by Wotan. Not a good fit; also, this is a conflict between fading gods and arrivistes; YHWH, notoriously, thrives. The one place in all of Gaiman’s oeuvre AFAIK that he represents any interaction between the Judeo/Christian mythos and other mythologies is in “A Season of Mists”, one of the Sandman series, in which Lucifer resigns, empties Hell and hands it over to Morpheus (Hell, and Lucifer, figure in a few more episodes of Morpheus’ saga, but this is the only instance of intervention by Jahweh in the context of other traditions; though in “The Book of Magic” The Silver City is one among many stops on a tour of the magical universe).
As he has on several occasions (notably the short story “Murder Mysteries”, in the collection “Angels and Visitations”) used the J/C mythos, i don’t think he worries much about offending the Taliban wing of any of the Abrahamic religions (and they all have theirs); it’s just a matter of context.
oh, and why Sorry? it just means you have something well worth reading yet awaiting you.