It's nearly Shabbat, but there's just time for a quick blog.
I'm interviewing my literary hero, Neil Gaiman at a JCC/Jewish Book Week event on Sunday night. I never realised I had literary heros, at least not in the sense that some people seem to have heros: people they worship and model themselves on. You can't really model yourself, as a writer, on other writers. You have to write what's in front of you to write, however weird or ridiculous it seems, and however much it subsequently causes people to come and ask you to speak at the PTA meeting of the Jewish primary school their child attends.
Neil Gaiman's a different sort of hero. I love what his work has to say about the doing of creative work. In his character Dream as well as in many other places, he investigates what drives creativity, what mad places it comes from, how mysterious and terrifying it can be, how much we long for it. He's the only writer I know whose work doesn't just make me want to read on, it makes me want to pick up a pen and write.
We'll be focussing some of our discussion on another Jewish comic book genius: Will Eisner. If you haven't read any of Eisner's work, go and pick yourself up a copy of A Contract With God. It's a sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-tragic, always engrossing depiction of Jewish life in New York in the 1930s. With all the financial turmoil at the moment, stories of The Great Depression seem particularly apposite.
Anyway, it was my birthday yesterday, so I'm hoping that some kind of universal karma and Special Birthday Magic will mean that I manage to ask Neil some useful questions without coming off like a babbling fool. What can I say? Come along and see for yourself; either way it should be entertaining.
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