A Conversation With Neil Gaiman
Terry Huang:
You mention on your webjournal[1] that you like sushi so much, that whenever you travel you go looking for it, and that sometimes you are tempted by airport sushi…
Neil Gaiman:
There is only one decent airport sushi I’ve found so far, which is Amsterdam. Amsterdam Schiphol actually has decent sushi. Not a great variety, but it’s decent.
TH:
We were wondering, if you were to make up your own sushi dish, what sorts of things would you put in it, and how would food critics describe it?
NG:
Ah… Let me babble while I think, ’cos that’s a really fun sort of question. I found at least one of my two or three favorite sushi restaurants, Sasabune in Los Angeles, which has that lovely quality of… That really good restaurants have this “trust me.” You go in there and you sit down and they feed you. If I were to do my own sushi, metaphorical or literal, I would want it to be about trusting me. And the literal sushi, it would probably be lots of strange old flavors, favorites like yellowtails and kanpachi. Really, really good salmon, but not crap salmon. Crap salmon is one of the saddest little fishes in the world. A really nice bonito and toro. And metaphorical sushi, I would just want to surprise you. One of the things I love about sushi is that the way it works is sort of flavored combinations. You put something in your mouth and all of a sudden you’re happy and it shouldn’t have worked as well as it did, but it did. That’s probably one of the things that attracts me to it, and also the simplicity. You’re looking at something which if it’s being done with sort of the same set of ingredients, it can go all the way down to bad airport sushi, or bad supermarket sushi which tastes like sad strips of fishy rubber placed on top of cold rice pudding, and then go all the way up to… oh, what’s that lovely place in Chicago?
TH:
I don’t know.
Lee Wang:
I haven’t even seen Chicago.
NG:
I’m kicking myself because there is one really nice place in Chicago… Ah well.
It’s really fun, going out just sort of finding places and trusting people, and having strange meals in unlikely places. Once I was in, of all places, Salt Lake City doing a signing. The only time I was going to get to eat was lunch, because the plane was leaving as well. The store owner knew that the sushi restaurant around the block was where he sold them manga. So all of a sudden, it’s just me having lunch with… you know, the store was closed, but it was the family was being fed, and me. And that kind of thing wouldn’t turn up if I decided to go to McDonald’s.
LW:
I noticed that bizarre and fantastical elements recur frequently in a lot of your works, like Coraline, American Gods, Sandman, MirrorMask and so on. Does the regular presence of such elements suggest that the worlds of these works occupy different parts of the same weird universe, even if it’s not a conscious decision to make it that way? Or is everything self-contained in its discrete world?
Heidi Coleman [bringing Gaiman chips and a soda]: They’re the most normal chips we could find.
NG:
Oh, that’s perfect. And they’ll be really really crunch and it’ll be like static, it’ll destroy the interview. You guys’ll be trying to figure out what I was saying, and I would’ve been crunching chips.
[opens soda] I’m not sure, I think some things definitely occupy the same world. Some things don’t just because the internal voice is so different. And then there are things that intersect. My new novel, Anansi Boys, is sort of set in the same world as American Gods, but it has a completely different tone of voice. American Gods is a very serious and a very bleak place, and the world of Anansi Boys is fundamentally a world of comedy. There’s a fundamental agreement in a comedy that the world will look out for you, and then everybody will get what they deserve. As opposed to horror, where everybody gets what’s coming to them, which is a different kind of thing. I don’t think that the world of something like Coraline is in the same world as Sandman or American Gods. And they feel so very different. But on the other hand, all of them occur in my head, which is a little world on its own and it seems to contain and has room for all of them.
TH:
Do these worlds ever show up in your dreams? Do your dreams reflect or influence your works?
NG:
Yeah, but not always one-to-one. Especially when I was writing Sandman, people would say, “Well, take your dreams and put them in stories.” Then you’d have to say, “No, ’cos dreams don’t work like that.” Dream-logic isn’t story-logic. You’ll be explaining it to somebody, “You’re walking down a corridor and you know that you’re being followed by something but you don’t know what it is, but it’s really really troubling you and then you go into the kitchen, and you’re just trying to figure out what that thing was when you notice that there’s a swimming pool in the kitchen that nobody every told you about,” and you’re trying to explain this to them and that’s not really story logic. On the other hand, there are definitely ingredients of things that have crept in from dreams. In American Gods, the character of Laura, [Shadow’s] dead wife, who carries on hanging around on the fringes of the whole book despite being dead, really was just a dream I had. I had this strange dream when I was putting the book together in my head, in which I was married to a dead woman who was around all the time. I think she was a vampire as well. We’d have these conversations, and she’d say things like, “I think we really need to work on our marriage,” and I’d say, “But you’re dead.” And then she'd say, “Well that’s obviously one of the things we have to work on.” And I woke up and I think that’s part of American Gods. I knew that his wife was dead, and I just thought, “What if she doesn’t lie down? What if she’s just wandering around out in the pages of the rest of the book?” So yeah, you find things like that.
LW:
So if you could be a deity for one day, or for the first day of eternity or whatever, which one would you pick and why?
NG:
Any god at all?
LW:
Yeah.
NG:
What a lovely question… It might be fun to be a Hindu god. Just because I really like the fact that they live in this multiplicity. I feel with the Hindus, they live in this world in which everything is true, and that all the other gods are out there. So the problem with being… if you sort of elect to be Jesus or whatever, then you don’t actually get to meet anybody. Well, I guess probably cherubs, and saints and your mum and stuff. But I like things with big pantheons, ’cos then you get to socialize. Sort of the ones that I’ve always really been fond of but never made it into things, would’ve been… the goofier, sort of the minor deities. Not the real minor ones, but more like Kubera, or Yama. They would be fun. Also, I’d love to be one of the Indian things that get to create worlds. Coyote! I’d love to be Coyote, for example, just ’cos he fucks things up as often as not, and then just carries on and does other stuff, and it’s really cool and just keeps going. [opens bag of chips]
LW:
Since socializing is such an important part of your decision, if you were going to throw a party, who would you invite?
NG:
What, this is one of those parties where you can invite anybody in the whole world?
LW:
Deities or mortals or otherwise.
NG:
Absolutely anything? Uh, would you like a crisp?
LW:
That’s ok.
NG:
You sure? An entire thing of potato chips, and they will be incredibly crunchy and they will show up on the soundtrack, so… I think I mentioned during that thing out there [faculty and student session] that I know an awful lot about John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. I’d love to have him along with something. He’d be entertaining. [eating chips] He’d probably sexually accost at least one other guest and throw up onto somebody else, and then recite some poetry that would get him banned from ever coming back, but it would be great. My friend, Kathy Acker, the writer, who is dead, because I miss her. It would be fun to have her back. I think it’d be lovely to get a whole gaggle of fictional characters. All of the fictional characters that I hung around with as a kid. I’d love to get some of them out and around. And possibly a bunch of big authors who seemed larger than life. I love Kipling’s writing, but I really have no desire to have Kipling at dinner. He would’ve been small and sort of stuffy and so forth, whereas somebody like Chesterton[2] who would’ve been fat and dropped things and knocked over his wine and would be an enormous delight.
TH:
Would you invite any of your characters, or would that be awkward?
NG:
God, they’d just give me shit. I mean, can you imagine, they’d turn up, and they’d arrive at your door and they’d be saying things like, “Why did you do this terrible thing to me? Why was I created to suffer and die?” Sorry, it was a really good story. [laughs] And that’s a flip answer, but it’s kind of true. A flip answer that’s just as true is that I know them all. I got to spend years with Death and Delirium and these guys hanging around in my head and I got to write them and I got to live with them, and I probably spent more time with Morpheus than I spent with my family during the years that I was writing Sandman. I know how they talk, I know how they sound, I know what they smell like. So there isn’t a huge urge there to go and have a party and I get to meet Death, because she lives in my head.
LW:
If there’s a project that you could do where readers who are already familiar with your corpus, and you wanted them to go, “Neil Gaiman wrote that?”, what kind of a project would it be?
NG:
How do you mean?
LW:
There’s sort of a NG style where someone reads something and readily identifies it as something you wrote, and if you wanted to shock your readers into sort of slapping their forehead or something, realizing that it was you, what kind of a project would you do?
NG:
I don’t know. The problem is that every time I set out to do the next thing, I always plan to make it completely different from whatever the last thing is. I always want it to be 180 degrees away. I always figure, “OK, I want to do something I've never done before. It’s why, even though I ought to, I never do sequels. People would love a sequel to Neverwhere. I’d love to write a sequel to Neverwhere. Except there’s things I haven’t written yet, so a sequel to Neverwhere never quite gets written, and other things do. The trouble is, that in my head, they’re all so completely different. And then I write one, and then when it’s done, normally, looking back, you sort of see exactly how it fits in to the corpus, which is part of the problem of having been a working writer for twenty whatever years now, and having a large enough body of work that covers… you know, it goes from… it’s not that it’s all fantastic, or fantastical… I’ve probably written something in pretty much every genre except perhaps for Western fiction. But you could always see afterwards how they fit in. What have I not… I haven’t done a cookbook yet. Maybe a Western cookbook, or a pornographic cookbook. But most other genres I’ve actually played with at some point or another. I keep thinking it might be good to do some science fiction, actually proper, clean hard SF, just because I’ve never done that. That’s mostly ’cos that was what I wanted to be when I grew up. When I was 12 or 13, I thought, “I’ll be a science fiction writer.” And then, I wasn’t. Winning Hugos and things is all very well, but I haven’t actually won anything for hard science fiction.
LW:
Then it doesn’t quite count.
NG:
Nope.
TH:
Our last question sort of ties in with the cookbook idea. Coraline, with a child’s taste in food, doesn’t like exotic food, and she has a negative reaction to the pineapple pizza that her father offers her. You mentioned in a previous interview with foodporn.com that the idea for the pineapple pizza was actually inspired by apricot pizza that a friend served you once…
NG:
That was Dave McKean.
TH:
…and that you—oh!… You refrained from saying his name on that website, but now that’s going up!
NG:
[laughs] It was the first time I ever went to dinner at Dave’s house and he served this apricot pizza and it was like… “How do I eat this?” I did, it was good. I ate it. Only once.
TH:
At one of our Otium meetings, we were making pizza from scratch, and we actually experimented and came up with a banana pizza.
NG:
Tinned apricot pizza, though, still has to be weirder than banana.
TH:
Have you had any wilder or sillier food experiments of your own that have turned out okay?
NG:
Yeah. I love kitchen disasters, because they’re always fun and odd, and we learn to be responsible. At that point when we do things like… like discover the joys of making your own sourdough bread. You wind up with your own sourdough mix which eventually of course will bubble over and explode, taking over the world. Mine never actually took over the world, but it definitely bubbled over and exploded. I love cooking. Particularly when I go off to write, and particularly when I go off to write at my friend Tori’s house in Ireland. She has this big house near the town of Kinsale. And every now and then I wind up down there writing. And it’s huge, strange, old, incredibly sort of… it would be wrong to describe it as haunted because that gives you the wrong kind of idea. Because haunted house implies that it’s sort of somehow unwelcome or weird. What it is, it’s an incredibly noisy house. You can be sitting downstairs, working very, very quietly, and then you hear people stomping around upstairs. And it sounds like they’re moving wardrobes, and then you go and check, and you are of course completely alone in the house. And quite how it manages to be so astonishingly noisy, I honestly don’t know. But whenever I’m there, I get to cook. And I get to cook for just me. And then I start trying to combine things. And she has a herb garden. I’ll go out while I’m cutting the equivalent of a large of bush of rosemary, and then try to figure out what to do with it. Then slowly I start cooking everything, because she has an AGA[3] there, it’s a kind of oven that never goes off. It’s providing hot water and stuff in the house so it’s always on, and you always have an oven, and if you always have an oven, you start going, “Well. I have leftover fruit here. I will cut all this fruit up, and then I will drizzle… what else have I got here. Oh, I have half a cup of leftover red wine from two nights ago, I will drizzle that over it… and I’ll put a little honey and balsamic vinegar, and then I’m going to put it in the oven and see what happens.” And on the whole actually what happened was really nice, except when I completely forgot when I put something in the oven, at which point we get these strange, black things that have somehow become part of the pie dishes. Take me several days to get them off.
TH:
Okay, thank you very much.
NG:
You are very welcome. They were fun questions, and they were very different questions, which made them fun.
- [1] http://www.neilgaiman.com/.
- [2] Writer G.K. Chesterton, on whom the character Fiddler’s Green in Sandman is based.
- [3] AGA Cooker, designed in 1922.
Otium
