Return of the Sandman Meditations

Boomtron just published my latest Sandman Meditation, this one on Chapter Two of The Wake.

"Sandman Meditation?" you say. "That sounds ... vaguely familiar..."

In July 2010, I started writing a series of short pieces called Sandman Meditations in which I proceeded through each issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic and offered whatever thoughts happened to come to mind. The idea was Jay Tomio's, and at first the Meditations were published on his Gestalt Mash site, then later Boomtron. The basic concept was that we'd see what happened when somebody without much background in comics, who'd never read Sandman before, spent time reading through it all.

I wrote 71 Meditations between July 2010 and June 2012, getting all the way up through the first installment of the last story in the regular series, The Wake. 75,000 words.

And then stopped. I read Chapter 2 of The Wake and had nothing to say. I tried writing through the lack of words, but the more I tried to write the more what I wrote nauseated me. I couldn't go on.

A Decade of Archives 9: 2004

This is the ninth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here.

2004 was the first full year of The Mumpsimus. It was also the year with the largest number of posts: 319. (These days, I'm able to get out about 100 or so in a year.) And it was the year when a relatively large number of people began to notice what was going on here. That initial attention is what made me think this was not, perhaps, just a useless lark. A lark, yes, and largely useless, yes, but maybe not completely so...

The year began with a post about returning: I hadn't paid a lot of attention to the site at the end of 2003, having written one post in December and none in November. The first paragraph of that post indicates that I was still thinking of this as a site about, primarily if not exclusively, science fiction. The reason for my absence, I said, was, "my life has been busy and I haven't been reading nearly as much SF as I would like."

I made up for the absence quickly, with numerous posts, some of them with real substance. The first was a comparison of Sergei Bondarchuk's film of War and Peace with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. The rest of January 2004 covers most of the major topics that the site would continue to explore for the next 9 years: a review of a novel by a writer not known as a genre writer (Genesis by Jim Crace); a plea for a writer who deserves more attention (Judith Merril); a naive but (surprisingly!) not entirely embarrassing post on sexism and reading; somewhat literary theory-ish posts on characterization and narrative (which, despite their naivety — my education in lit theory was entirely autodidactic [read: haphazard, shallow] at that point — are still recognizably in the direction of ideas I now hold); a review of Lucius Shepard's extraordinary 9/11 story "Only Partly Here"; a look at Tim Burton's movie Big Fish; a mention of one of my favorite writers, David Markson; and, finally, a post that mentions Samuel Delany's Dhalgren in the context of a discussion of the baleful influence of the 3-act structure for screenplays. Clearly, it was winter in New Hampshire and I needed something to keep my mind occupied other than just teaching high school!

The rest of the year goes on in a similar manner. I hadn't look back on it all until now, and was a bit scared to — I haven't been thrilled with a few of the later years on the whole, so had no reason to assume the earliest years were of any value whatsoever. There's drivel, certainly, but also good stuff, at least in comparison to a lot of what came later.

Sandman Meditations: Finishing Up A Game of You

I had to skip a week of Sandman meditating because of a billion other commitments (you might have noticed this here blog has been quiet...), but the column is back this week with some thoughts on the final chapter of A Game of You.

I try to avoid looking at any response to the columns, including the comments sections, because I discovered early on that if I pay much attention to what folks are saying about the columns, I then start tailoring what I write to those responses. And for various reasons, with this particular project I don't want to do that.

I have to admit, though, I loved this tweet from Neil Gaiman:

I promise that whenever I come to an end with The Sandman, I'll write a column that looks back over this whole strange endeavor, because I've really pushed myself to write these pieces quickly and as a kind of first response, without a whole lot of reflection, which means, I'm sure, some of the columns are just barmy. My perception of individual Sandman issues has changed as I've read others, and my perception of the whole series has changed again and again. There are days when I think the real way to do this experiment is to go through it all once, then start over from the beginning, but I probably don't have the stamina for that. (Heck, when I agreed to do this, I was thinking I'd write one column about each story arc, not each issue! Then Jay told me what he'd really been thinking. And I, being somewhat susceptible to crazy challenges, said I'd give it a try. And as they say, I'm not dead yet...)

Catching Up with the Dream King

I'm doing a terrible job of posting links here to my Sandman Meditations column every week (following Gestalt Mash on Twitter is the easiest way to be updated).  We've finished with Preludes & Nocturnes and have now moved on to The Doll's House with "Tales in the Sand" and "The Doll's House".

I also wanted to mention that Tor.com recently reprinted one of my favorite Gaiman stories, "Bitter Grounds", a story I've admired since its first publication, and one I'm thrilled to see available online.

Sandman Meditations: "The Sound of Her Wings"

My latest "Sandman Meditations" column has been posted at Gestalt Mash, this one about the eighth issue, "The Sound of Her Wings", which is the concluding story in the first collection, Preludes & Nocturnes.

With the eighth issue, the Sandman is free for the first time of all the concerns that occupied him previously, and so “The Sound of Her Wings” is a kind of coda to the tale up to this point. It’s a particularly interesting issue in that it has no overt conflict; what conflict there is exists within Dream himself.

Read more...

Sandman Meditations: "Dream a Little Dream of Me"

My latest "Sandman Meditations" column has now been posted at Gestalt Mash.  This particular column seems transitional to me, bringing myself as a reader to the foreground, because sometimes that feels necessary; the next installment goes in the opposite direction to some extent, and I expect as the experiment continues I'll be trying out different modes of narration, simply because doing all 75 or so of them in the same way would get rather tedious for all of us...

Here's an excerpt:

The third Sandman poses some problems for me, someone who has read almost no DC comics and has only the vaguest sense of their characters and history. The vagueness and sense share a source: popular culture in general. You’d have to live in some remote part of the world, away from billboards and newspapers and televisions and radios, to avoid all references to DC characters, given how many of them have metamorphosed into stars of movies and TV shows. I was going to write a sentence in which I listed them, but then I realized I don’t know how many of the characters I’m thinking of are DC characters.  Many, I’m sure, are Marvel characters. In fact, I probably have a greater sense of Marvel characters than DC characters, because the only comic I read as a kid was G.I. Joe, and that was a Marvel comic, so there were ads in it for other Marvel comics. At least, I think it was a Marvel comic.  

continue reading...

Sandman Meditations: "Imperfect Hosts"

My second Sandman Meditations column is now live at Gestalt Mash, this one looking at the second story, "Imperfect Hosts", and considering, among other things, the place of speech and thought balloons.

Sandman Meditations

Jay Tomio has started a new website, mostly (but not only) devoted to comics, called Gestalt Mash, and he very kindly asked me to be a regular contributor. When he first asked, I thought he must have me confused with somebody else, because though I have some good friends who are comics experts, I'm only an occasional reader of them myself. The only comic I read regularly as a kid was G.I. Joe, and I didn't read my first graphic novel until I was well into my 20's. Jay asked if I'd write about Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, writing a short essay for every issue. I told him, with a bit of embarrassment, that I've never read Sandman; indeed, I only know Neil Gaiman's work in prose (and like some of it quite a bit). Jay said that would be the fun -- plenty of comics afficionados have written about Sandman ... but what happens when somebody who doesn't know much about comics does?

Well, the first of my "Sandman Meditations" has now been posted, and you can see for yourself. This is just the beginning of a journey, and who knows what it will all look like in the end. It's intimidating to write from a position of naivety about a work of art that is so beloved by so many people, but it's also a challenge that offers some interesting opportunities, and I hope to explore different ways of writing about the series as I go along.

We're planning on posting a new piece every 7-10 days, which means this endeavor will take at least a year and a half to complete. Let the journey begin...