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View from cheap seats. Neil Gaiman: The View from the Cheap Seats The View from the Cheap Seats fb2

The View From The Cheap Seats

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Ash, who is still very small now. When he grows up, he will read it.

And he will find out what his dad loved and what he talked about, what he cared about and what he believed in - once upon a time, a long time ago.

Preface

At one time, I moved away, or rather, crawled sideways, away from journalism, because I wanted to write whatever I wanted, without interference. I was bored of telling the truth and nothing but the truth; that is, I wanted to tell the truth, but in a way that I didn't have to constantly worry about the facts.

And now, as I type these lines, there is a huge pile of papers on the table in front of me, and they are all covered with my words. I wrote all these articles after I left journalism, and - what a surprise! – in each of them I tried my best to stick to the facts. Sometimes it didn't work out. For example, the Internet assures us that the illiteracy rate among ten- and eleven-year-olds is not used at all to estimate how many new prison cells the country will need in the near future - although I was at one event where the then head of the New York Department of Education from all over definitely stated the opposite. And just this morning the BBC news reported that only about half of UK prisoners learned to read at age eleven or earlier.

This book contains my speeches, essays and introductions to other books. I decided to include some of the prefaces simply because I like the authors or books to whom they preface, and I hope that my love will be conveyed to the reader. And some - because when working on them I tried very hard to explain some of my beliefs and express something that - who knows! – may even turn out to be important.

Many of the writers from whom I learned my craft over the years were evangelists of sorts. Peter S. Beagle wrote the essay “Tolkien's Magic Ring,” which I read as a child—and it gave me Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. A few years later, H. P. Lovecraft, in one long essay, and then Stephen King in one small book, told me about the writers and stories that shaped the horror genre and without whom my life would be much poorer. While reading Ursula Le Guin's essays, I looked for the books she referenced to illustrate her points. Harlan Ellison was a very prolific writer, and his essays and collections exposed me to many new names. It has always seemed completely natural to me that writers can read other people's books with pleasure, sometimes even falling under their influence, and recommend the books they like to others. Literature cannot live in a vacuum. It cannot develop as a monologue. Literature is a conversation in which you need to constantly involve new people, new readers. And I hope that among the creators and their creations that you read about in this collection, there will be something - perhaps a book, or a film, or a song - that will arouse your keen interest.

I am now typing these lines on my laptop, and there is a baby on my lap. He grumbles and squeaks in his sleep. He is my happiness, but looking at him, I begin to feel vulnerable: old, long-forgotten fears are again creeping into the light from dark corners.

Several years ago, one writer, who was then not much older than I am now, told me (without any bitterness or anger, completely casually) that it was very good that I was still so young: unlike him, I I don’t have to look into the darkness every day and realize that my best books have already been written. Around the same time, another, who was already over eighty, admitted that the only thing that kept him going was the thought that his best book was yet to come - the truly great book he would someday write.

I would like to follow in the footsteps of the second one. I console myself with the thought that one day I will be able to create something truly wonderful, although I am afraid that for the last thirty-odd years I have been doing nothing but repeating myself. With age, every new thing, every new book begins to remind you of something that already happened. Events rhyme. There is no first time for anything.

I have written a lot of prefaces to my own books - long prefaces in which I talk in detail about the circumstances under which certain episodes of the novel or stories in the collection were born. But this preface will be short, and most of the essays included in it will remain without explanation. “The View from the Cheap Seats” is not “the complete non-fiction work of Neil Gaiman.” This is just a motley collection of speeches and articles, essays and prefaces. Among them there are some serious, some frivolous, some very sincere, and some that I wrote in the hope that people will listen to me. You are under no obligation to read every single one of them, or to read them in any particular order. I arranged them in an order that seemed somewhat meaningful to me: at the beginning there are public speeches and the like, towards the end - more personal texts written from the heart, and in the middle - all sorts of things, that is, articles about literature and cinema, about comics and music, oh different cities, and about life in general.

In this book, I write, among other things, about things and people close to my heart. Some of them even entered my life. In general, I always try to write from within the situation in which I find myself, and because of this, perhaps there is too much of myself in my texts.

Anyway, I leave you with this book alone, but first I want to say a few words of gratitude.

Thanks to all the publishers who ordered these texts at one time.

A simple “thank you” cannot express how grateful I am to Kat Howard, who read through so many of my articles and introductions and decided which ones would be suitable for this book and which ones would sink into the darkness of oblivion, and then rearranged them ten or fifteen times in different ways. order, so that every time I could say: “But it seems to me that it’s better to do it this way...” Yes, I constantly put a spoke in her wheels! Every time it seemed to her that the composition of the collection had been finalized, I suddenly remembered: “And somewhere I had another essay on just this topic...” - and began to rummage through my hard drive or scour the dusty shelves in search of the next one. additions. Kat is a real saint (perhaps Joan of Arc has returned to us in her person).

Thank you, Shield Bonnichsen: if not for you, one of the necessary essays would have been lost forever. Thank you, Christina Di Crocco and Kat Mihos: you found and retyped texts and generally helped me a lot and were simply wonderful.

And a huge thank you to my agent Merrilee Heifetz, my American publisher Jennifer Brel, my British publisher Jane Morpeth and - always and forever - Amanda Palmer, my wonderful wife.

Neil Gaiman

I. Something I believe in

“I believe that in the war between guns and ideas, ideas will win in the end.”

My creed

I believe that an idea is hard to kill because ideas are invisible, highly contagious and very agile.

I believe that you are free to contrast your own ideas with those you don't like. You have every right to prove, explain, interpret, argue, offend, insult, get angry, ridicule, glorify, exaggerate and deny.

I don't believe that in trying to stop the spread of ideas that you don't like, it makes sense to burn, shoot, and blow up people, smash people's heads with rocks (obviously to get the bad ideas out), drown dissenters, or even conquer their cities. None of this will help. Ideas are exactly like weeds: they sprout where you don’t expect them, and then you can’t get rid of them.

I believe that suppressing ideas only helps them spread.

I believe that people, books and newspapers are carriers of ideas, but burning people who have taken an idea into their heads is as pointless as bombing newspaper archives. Simply put, it's too late. It’s always like that with ideas: they are always one step ahead. They have already gotten into people's heads and are sitting there, waiting in the wings. They are passed on to each other in a whisper. They are written on the walls under the cover of darkness. They are embodied in drawings.

I believe that an idea doesn't have to be right to have a right to exist.

I believe that you have every right to believe with all your soul that the images of deity, prophet or man that you revere are sacred and immaculate - just as I myself have every right to believe in the sanctity of the word and the sanctity of the right to ridicule, remarks , disputes and expression of one's own opinions.

I believe that I have the right to make mistakes - both in words and in thoughts.

I believe that you can fight this by making your own arguments or simply not paying attention to me - and that I myself can fight in the same way the mistakes that I think you are making.

I believe that you have every right to hold opinions that I find offensive, stupid, ridiculous or unsafe, and that you are free to express, write and disseminate those opinions as much as you like. I, for my part, do not have the right to kill and maim you or take away your property and freedom just because your ideas seem dangerous, offensive or simply disgusting to me. Perhaps some of my ideas seem like absolute abomination to you.

I believe that in the war between guns and ideas, ideas will win in the end. Because ideas are invisible, and very tenacious, and sometimes even turn out to be correct.

Eppur si muove: and yet she spins!

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and the ability to dream: a lecture given at the Reading Agency in 2013

It's important to have people tell you which side they're on and why—and whether you can expect them to be biased. A kind of declaration of membership interests. So, I intend to talk to you about reading. And talk about how important libraries are. And even to assume that reading fiction, reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things that a person can do. Now I will wholeheartedly urge you to understand what libraries and librarians really are, and to save both.

And in this matter I am very biased - incredibly and obviously: I am a writer, and also an author of fiction. I write for children and adults. For about thirty years now I’ve been making my living with words—mostly by inventing things and then writing them down. It is in my direct interests that people read—and read fiction; so that libraries and librarians continue to live and help foster a love of reading and the places that are meant for reading.

So yes, I am biased as a writer.

But even more – and much more! – I am biased as a reader. And even more biased - as a British citizen.

And today I give this speech under the auspices of the Reading Agency, a charity whose mission is to give everyone a fair chance in life by helping them become confident and enthusiastic book readers. This organization supports educational programs, libraries and individuals, and openly and unabashedly encourages the act of reading. Because, as these people insist, when we read, everything around us changes.

And it is about these changes, about this act of reading, that I want to talk to you tonight. I want to talk about what reading does to us. And why is it even needed?

Once in New York, I listened to someone talk about the construction of private prisons - this industry is now experiencing a period of enormous growth in America. The prison industry must also plan for its future development: how many cells will it need in the next year? Well, they found that it was very easy to predict - using a simple algorithm based on statistics: what percentage of ten- and eleven-year-olds cannot read (and certainly do not know what reading for pleasure is).

This is not a one-to-one relationship: it cannot be said that in a completely literate society there is no crime. And yet the correlations are very real.

And I think some of them, the simplest ones, are based on something incredibly simple. Literate people read fiction, and fiction is needed for two things. Firstly, it is a starting drug that gets you hooked on reading. The desire to find out what will happen next, turn the page; the urge to continue, no matter how hard it is, because someone is in trouble, and now you simply have to find out how it all ends...

...actually this is a very serious craving. It forces people to learn new words, think new thoughts, and not give up. And discover that reading in itself already brings pleasure. Once you feel this, you will have only one path left - read everything. Reading itself is the key. A few years ago there was some noise (though not for long) that we were living in a post-literary era and that the ability to extract meaning from words written by someone would no longer be useful to us. Today this noise has already died down: it turned out that words have now become even more important for us than ever. With the help of words we navigate the world, and as the world steadily slides into the Internet, we have to follow it. That is, to understand What we read on the screen, and be able to convey this understanding to others.

People who do not understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and the possibilities of auto-translator programs are far from limitless.

The easiest way to raise literate, educated children is to teach them to read and show them that reading is a very enjoyable activity. In its simplest form, this means finding books that children enjoy, providing access to those books, and allowing them to be read.

This is nonsense. Moreover, this is snobbery and stupidity.

There are no bad children's writers - as long as children like them and children want to read them. Because all children are different. They themselves are able to find the stories they need, they themselves can decide whether to read them or not. A hackneyed, banal idea is not at all hackneyed and not banal for those who encountered it for the first time. Even if you think that a certain book is not suitable for a child, this is not a reason to ban it. A book you don’t like may well turn out to be the starting drug that will make your child want other books – including those that you yourself would be happy to give him. And then, don’t forget: everyone has different tastes.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy the love of reading in a child: it is enough not to let him read what he likes, or give him worthy, but boring books that he likes to you, is the modern equivalent of Victorian “correctional” literature. What you end up with is a generation that is absolutely convinced that reading is uncool and, worse, uninteresting.

We just have to put the child on the first step of the reading ladder - and then everything that he liked to read will move him, step by step, up to real education.

(Well, don’t repeat the mistakes of this writer who is now standing in front of you and who slipped his eleven-year-old daughter, who adored R.L. Stine, a copy of “Carrie” by Stephen King, with the words: “If you like that, obviously I’ll like this too!” From then until her mid-teens, Holly read exclusively peaceful tales of American pioneers on the prairie, and she still gives me glares whenever King is mentioned.)

The second thing fiction does is inspire empathy. When you watch TV or a movie, you see what is happening to some other people. And literary prose is something you construct yourself, from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. You yourself, single-handedly, create a whole world, and populate it with characters, and look at it through their eyes. You feel things and visit places and worlds that you would otherwise never know existed. You learn that everyone there is also “me”, also you. You become someone else, and then you return to your own world a little different.

Empathy is a tool that builds groups and communities out of individuals because it gives everyone the opportunity to be not just a self-indulgent individual, but something more.

And while reading, you will learn one thing that will then be vitally important for finding your own path in this world. Here's what:

HE, THE WORLD, DOES NOT HAVE TO BE EXACTLY LIKE THIS. EVERYTHING CAN BE CHANGED.

Fiction can show you another world. She will take you to places you have never been before. And having visited other worlds, you, like those who tasted fairy food, will never be completely satisfied with the old world in which you grew up and got used to living. Dissatisfaction is actually a great thing: it gives a person the opportunity to change and correct their world, leaving it behind better than they found it.

And since we're talking about this, let me say a few words about escapism. It is usually considered something bad. It seems like “escapist” literature is something like a cheap opiate for the needs of fools entangled in illusions, and the only literature suitable for both children and adults is “realistic” literature, imitative, demonstrating, as in a mirror, everything the worst thing that exists in the world where, by the will of fate, the reader found himself.

If you find yourself locked in an unbearable situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who wish you harm, and someone suddenly offers you salvation, albeit temporary, but still - why not take the chance? This is precisely the chance that escapist literature gives us: it opens the door to freedom, shows that the sun is shining outside, shows the way to places where you will again be in control and in the company of those you really want to be with (and books are the most not at all real places, let's not forget about it). And, more importantly, during such an escape, books help you better understand the world and the predicament you find yourself in; they give you weapons, they give you armor - real, real things that you can then take back to your prison. Knowledge, skills and tools that you can use to escape for real.

As C.S. Lewis said, the only people who always protest against escape are the jailers.

Another way to kill a child’s love of reading is, of course, to make sure there are no books around at all. Or, if there are books, there is nowhere to read them.

I was lucky: when I was growing up, we had an absolutely excellent library in our neighborhood. And my parents were from those who summer holidays maybe on the way to work just drop a child there... and the librarians had nothing against a little boy wandering around on his own every morning and, with his own strength, chewing his way through the subject catalog in search of books with ghosts, magic or rockets - or even better , if vampires, detectives, witches, miracles... And, having finished with the children's section, I would begin to read adult books.

These were very good librarians. They loved books and loved books to be read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries through interlibrary loan and never made fun of what I wanted to read. They just seemed to like the fact that there was this little kid with huge eyes who loved to read. They talked to me about books, found me the next volumes in the series, and generally helped in any way they could. They treated me as one of the readers - no more, but no less - which means they treated me with respect. At eight years old, I was somehow not used to being treated with respect.

Libraries are Freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom to communicate. Libraries are education (which does not end the day the school or university doors close behind us), they are entertainment, they are safe havens and unlimited access to information.

It worries me very much that here in the twenty-first century people misunderstand what libraries are and why they are needed. If you think of a library as just a shelf of books, it may seem old-fashioned or even outdated in an age when most (though not all) printed books also exist in digital format. But those who think this way are missing the most important thing.

I think it really comes down to the nature of the information.

Information has value, and the value of truthful information is immeasurable. Throughout the history of the human race, we have lived in conditions of information deficiency. Having the right information has always been important and always worth something: when to plant grain, where to find geographical maps, how to discover new stories, real or fictional, that will come to the table and to the company. Information was important, and those who owned it or could obtain it could set a price for it.

Over the past few years, we have moved from an information deficit to an economy driven by information overload. Eric Schmidt of Google claims that humanity now produces as much information every two days as it did from the dawn of civilization until 2003. That's about five exabytes of data per day, if you're interested in numbers. And now our problem is to find not a lonely blade of grass in the vast desert, but some definite plant in an impenetrable thicket of the jungle. And in this information sea you can’t do without a pilot.

Libraries are places where people go for information. And books are just the tip of the information iceberg: yes, they exist, they exist, and libraries are designed to supply you with them freely and legally. Now more children than ever are checking out books from libraries—all kinds of books, paper, digital, audio. But libraries are also a place where people who, for example, do not have a computer or the Internet, can go online completely free of charge, and this is very important now when searching for work, filing all kinds of applications and social payments are steadily migrating online. sphere. And librarians help such people navigate the world.

I don’t think that all books should necessarily migrate to the screen or that all of them will ever do so. As Douglas Adams once told me (about twenty years ago, when there was no Kindle yet), a paper book is like a shark. Sharks are very old: they swam the oceans before dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around us is quite simple: they have learned to be sharks better than anyone else. Physical books are tough, indestructible, generally waterproof, powered by solar energy, and fit well in the hand: they have perfected the art of being books, and there is always a niche for them in the world. They live in libraries, and libraries have already firmly and firmly become the places where people can get access to e-books, audiobooks, DVDs and web content.

A library is a place where information is stored and equal access to it is provided to all citizens. Including health information. And about mental health too. This is such a special common space. A safe space, a refuge from the whole world - and in this special space there are librarians. Now is the time to try to imagine what the libraries of the future will look like.

Education is more important today than ever - in a world of text messages and email, in a world of written information. We need to be able to read and write, we need global citizens who can read with pleasure, understand what they read, grasp nuances and make other people understand them too.

Libraries are the real gateway to the future. And that’s why it’s especially sad when, all over the world, local authorities close libraries in order to somehow save money - not realizing that they are literally stealing from the future in order to pay for the present. They themselves, with their own hands, close the gates, which must remain open at all costs.

According to recent research by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, England was “the only country where, after controlling for additional factors such as gender, socio-economic environment and occupation, the oldest age group scored higher in literacy and mathematics literacy than the youngest.”

In other words, our children and grandchildren read and count worse than we do. They are less able to navigate the world, understand it, and solve its problems. They are easier to deceive and mislead, they will have less chance of changing the world in which they find themselves, they are less able to work - all this at once, together. And as a country, England will soon trail behind other developed nations because it will have a shortage of skilled labor. And while politicians blame their opponents for this, we must realize: the truth is that we must teach children to read and love reading.

We need libraries, we need books, we need literate and educated citizens.

I think it doesn't matter at all whether these books are paper or digital, and whether you read by unrolling a parchment scroll or scrolling text on a screen. Content is important.

But the book itself is content, and this is also important.

The dead communicate with us through books. This is how we learn the lessons of those who are no longer with us, this is how humanity builds itself on its own bones, develops, gradually accumulating knowledge, instead of mastering it from scratch again and again. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlived their cultures and the buildings under whose roof they were once first told.

I think we have a responsibility to the future. Responsibility and obligation to children and the adults these children will one day become, to the world they will inhabit. We are all readers, writers, citizens: we all have responsibilities. I think I'll even try to outline some of those commitments here.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure - in private and public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading a book, then we are learning, we are exercising our imagination. We show others that reading is great.

We have a commitment to supporting libraries. Use them and encourage others to do so, protest against the closure of libraries. If you don't value libraries, then you don't value information, or culture, or human wisdom in general. You are silencing the voices of the past and damaging the future.

We have a commitment to read aloud to children. Read to them what they love. Read stories that we ourselves have long been tired of. Read in a way that is interesting to them, in different voices, and don’t stop reading to them just because they have already learned to read themselves. We have an obligation to use this very reading aloud as a time to strengthen family bonds, when no one is checking any phones, when all other activities are forgotten for the time being.

We have an obligation to use our mother tongue. Don't be complacent, learn what different words mean and how to use them correctly, how to communicate clearly, how to say exactly what we mean. We must not try to freeze language into immutability or pretend that it is a dead thing to be given divine honors - on the contrary, we must accept it as something living that flows, changes, borrows words and allows meanings and pronunciations to change over time.

We writers—especially those who write for children, but generally all, regardless of genre—also have a responsibility to our readers: a responsibility to write the truth. This is especially important when we create stories about people who don't exist and places we've never been; we must understand that the truth is not what happens to someone, but what those events tell us about who we are. After all, fiction is a lie that tells us the truth. We have a commitment not to bore readers, but rather to keep them turning the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader is a story he can't put down. And although we must tell our readers the truth, provide them with weapons and armor and impart to them all the wisdom that we have been able to gain during our short stay in this green world, we have another obligation: not to lecture them, not to preach, not to shove ready-made morality down their throats, do not be like adult birds who feed their chicks half-digested worms. And we also have a commitment to never, ever, under any circumstances, write anything for children that we wouldn’t want to read ourselves.

We have an obligation to understand and acknowledge the important work we do as children's book authors, because if we screw things up and turn children away from reading with our books, we will irreparably impoverish both our future and theirs.

We all—adults, children, writers, and readers—have an obligation to dream. Commitment to imagine. It's easy to pretend that no one can really change anything, that we live in a world where society is everything and the individual is less than nothing: an atom of cement in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. The truth, however, is that individuals change their world again and again, individuals create the future - and they do it precisely imagining that things could work differently.

Take a look around. No, I'm really asking you to look around. A small pause, for a second. Look at this room we are sitting in now. I want to show you something so obvious that it is usually completely forgotten. Here it is: everything you see, including the walls themselves, was once represented by someone. Someone decided that it would be more comfortable to sit on a chair than on the ground - and invented the chair. Someone had to figure out a way so that now, here in London, I could talk to you without the rain dripping on our heads. This room and everything in it, and in general everything in this building, in this city, exists only because people imagined different things - again, and again, and again. They dreamed, they thought, they did what didn't work; they talked about something that did not yet exist to those who laughed at them for it.

Here is a fascinating collection of essays and articles on topics ranging from art and its creators to dreams, myths and memories from Neil Gaiman, the author of numerous books topping the New York Times bestseller list. Gaiman combines lightness of style with sincerity and depth. His style is recognizable - and distinguishes not only his artistic works, but also his journalism. An inquisitive observer, a thoughtful commentator, a diligent worker and a master of his craft, Neil Gaiman has been known in the world of literature for decades as an intellectual writer gifted with a vivid imagination, and his best fiction books are marked by all these virtues. But finally, readers had the opportunity to get acquainted with his best journalistic works, collected for the first time under one cover in the book “The View from the Cheap Seats.” Insightful and witty, wise and always insightful, these articles and notes address topics and issues that Neil Gaiman considers especially important. The View from the Cheap Seats is a chance to peer into the mind and heart of one of the most famous, acclaimed and influential writers of our time.

From the series: The Worlds of Neil Gaiman

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The given introductory fragment of the book The View from the Cheap Seats (collection) (Neil Gaiman) provided by our book partner - the company liters.

The View From The Cheap Seats

Ash, who is still very small now. When he grows up, he will read it.

And he will find out what his dad loved and what he talked about, what he cared about and what he believed in - once upon a time, a long time ago.

Preface

Anyway, I leave you with this book alone, but first I want to say a few words of gratitude.

Thanks to all the publishers who ordered these texts at one time.

And a huge thank you to my agent Merrilee Heifetz, my American publisher Jennifer Brel, my British publisher Jane Morpeth and - always and forever - Amanda Palmer, my wonderful wife.

An inquisitive observer, a thoughtful commentator, a hard worker and a master of his craft, Neil Gaiman has been known in the world of literature for decades as an intellectual writer gifted with a vivid imagination, and his best fiction books are marked by all these virtues. But now, finally, readers have the opportunity to get acquainted with his best journalistic works, collected for the first time under one cover in the book " View from cheap seats"Before you are more than sixty essays, forewords and speeches by Neil Gaiman - serious and at the same time humorous, displaying rich erudition, written in an accessible and...

Here is a fascinating collection of essays and articles on a variety of topics - from art and its creators to dreams, myths and memories - from Neil Gaiman, the author of many books topping the New York Times bestseller list. Gaiman combines lightness of style with sincerity and depth. His style is recognizable - and distinguishes not only his artistic works, but also his journalism.
An inquisitive observer, a thoughtful commentator, a hard worker and a master of his craft, Neil Gaiman has been known in the world of literature for decades as an intellectual writer gifted with a vivid imagination, and his best fiction books are marked by all these virtues. But finally, readers have the opportunity to get acquainted with his best journalistic works, collected for the first time under one cover in the book “The View from the Cheap Seats.” Here are more than sixty essays, forewords and speeches by Neil Gaiman - serious and at the same time humorous, revealing a wealth of erudition, written in an accessible and simple way. The range of interests and issues addressed in this collection is unusually wide: among other things, Gaiman talks about his contemporaries and predecessors in the field of literature, about music, about the art of writing books, about comics and bookstores, about travel and fairy tales, about America, about inspiration, libraries and ghosts, and in the essay that gives the title to the entire collection, he touchingly and sometimes self-critically shares his memories of the Oscar ceremony in 2010.
Insightful and witty, wise and always insightful, these articles and notes address topics and issues that Neil Gaiman considers especially important. The View from the Cheap Seats is a glimpse into the mind and heart of one of the most famous, acclaimed and influential writers of our time.

In his journalism, Gaiman is relaxed and calm, as if at dinner with his best friend, but never for a moment loses sight of the big picture...
We strongly recommend it to fans of Gaiman in particular and the genres of science fiction and fantasy in general, as well as to anyone interested in cultural journalism and the secrets of literary craftsmanship (Lybrary Journal).

This book, full of passion and shining with erudition, is also a magnificent declaration of love: the love of reading and writing books, the love of dreams and the love of an entire literary genre (Junot Díaz, an American writer who received the Pulitzer Prize for the book “A Short wonderful life Oscar Wao").

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The View From The Cheap Seats

* * *

Ash, who is still very small now. When he grows up, he will read it.

And he will find out what his dad loved and what he talked about, what he cared about and what he believed in - once upon a time, a long time ago.

Preface

Literature is a conversation in which you need to constantly involve new people, new readers. And I hope that among the creators and their creations that you read about in this collection, there will be something - perhaps a book, or a film, or a song - that will arouse your keen interest.

Anyway, I leave you with this book alone, but first I want to say a few words of gratitude.

Thanks to all the publishers who ordered these texts at one time.

And a huge thank you to my agent Merrilee Heifetz, my American publisher Jennifer Brel, my British publisher Jane Morpeth and - always and forever - Amanda Palmer, my wonderful wife.

Neil Gaiman

I. Something I believe in

“I believe that in the war between guns and ideas, ideas will win in the end.”

My creed

I believe that an idea is hard to kill because ideas are invisible, highly contagious and very agile.

I believe that suppressing ideas only helps them spread.

I believe that an idea doesn't have to be right to have a right to exist.

I believe that I have the right to make mistakes - both in words and in thoughts.

I believe that you can fight this by making your own arguments or simply not paying attention to me - and that I myself can fight in the same way the mistakes that I think you are making.

I believe that in the war between guns and ideas, ideas will win in the end. Because ideas are invisible, and very tenacious, and sometimes even turn out to be correct.

Eppur si muove: and yet she spins!

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and the ability to dream: a lecture given at the Reading Agency 1
An independent UK charity that encourages reading. – Hereinafter, translators' notes, unless otherwise indicated. in 2013

So yes, I am biased as a writer.

But even more – and much more! – I am biased as a reader. And even more biased - as a British citizen.

And it is about these changes, about this act of reading, that I want to talk to you tonight. I want to talk about what reading does to us. And why is it even needed?

Once in New York, I listened to someone talk about the construction of private prisons - this industry is now experiencing a period of enormous growth in America. The prison industry must also plan for its future development: how many cells will it need in the next year? Well, they found that it was very easy to predict this - using a simple algorithm based on statistics: what percentage of ten and eleven year olds cannot read (and certainly do not know what reading for pleasure is).

This is not a one-to-one relationship: it cannot be said that in a completely literate society there is no crime. And yet the correlations are very real.

People who do not understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and the possibilities of auto-translator programs are far from limitless.

I don't think there is such a thing as a bad children's book. Every now and then a fashion arises among adults to take some genre of children's literature or, say, an author and declare that these are bad books and should not be given to children to read. I have seen this more than once: Enid Blyton was called a bad writer, and R.L. Stine, and dozens of others 2
Enid Blyton (1897–1968) was a British author of best-selling children's books that have sold more than six hundred million copies worldwide. Robert Lawrence Stein (b. 1943) is an American writer dubbed the “Stephen King” of children's literature.

By the way, it was believed that comics contributed to illiteracy.

This is nonsense. Moreover, this is snobbery and stupidity.

We just have to put the child on the first step of the reading ladder - and then everything that he liked to read will move him, step by step, up to real education.

Empathy is a tool that builds groups and communities out of individuals because it gives everyone the opportunity to be not just a self-indulgent individual, but something more.

And while reading, you will learn one thing that will then be vitally important for finding your own path in this world. Here's what:

HE, THE WORLD, DOES NOT HAVE TO BE EXACTLY LIKE THIS. EVERYTHING CAN BE CHANGED.

If you find yourself locked in an unbearable situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who wish you harm, and someone suddenly offers you salvation, albeit temporary, but still - why not take the chance? This is precisely the chance that escapist literature gives us: it opens the door to freedom, shows that the sun is shining outside, shows the way to places where you will again be in control and in the company of those you really want to be with (and books are the most there are no real places, let's not forget about it). And, more importantly, during such an escape, books help you better understand the world and the predicament you find yourself in; they give you weapons, they give you armor - real, real things that you can then take back to your prison. Knowledge, skills and tools that you can use to escape for real.

As C.S. Lewis said, the only people who always protest against escape are the jailers.

Another way to kill a child’s love of reading is, of course, to make sure there are no books around at all. Or, if there are books, there is nowhere to read them.

I was lucky: when I was growing up, we had an absolutely excellent library in our neighborhood. And my parents were the kind of people who, during the summer holidays, could simply drop a child there on the way to work... and the librarians had nothing against the little boy wandering around to them every morning on his own and gnawing his way through the subject catalog in search of books on his own. where there would be ghosts, magic or rockets - and even better, if there were vampires, detectives, witches, miracles... And, having finished with the children's section, I would begin to read adult books.

I think it really comes down to the nature of the information.

Information has value, and the value of truthful information is immeasurable. Throughout the history of the human race, we have lived in conditions of information deficiency. Having the right information has always been important and always worth something: when to plant seeds, where to find geographic maps, how to learn new stories, real or fictional, that will come to the table and to the company. Information was important, and those who owned it or could obtain it could set a price for it.

From the publisher
Here is a fascinating collection of essays and articles on a variety of topics - from art and its creators to dreams, myths and memories - from Neil Gaiman, the author of numerous books topping the New York Times bestseller list. Gaiman combines lightness of style with sincerity and depth. His style is recognizable - and distinguishes not only his artistic works, but also his journalism.
An inquisitive observer, a thoughtful commentator, a hard worker and a master of his craft, Neil Gaiman has been known in the world of literature for decades as an intellectual writer gifted with a vivid imagination, and his best fiction books are marked by all these virtues. But finally, readers have the opportunity to get acquainted with his best journalistic works, collected for the first time under one cover in the book “The View from the Cheap Seats.”
Here are more than sixty essays, forewords and speeches by Neil Gaiman - serious and at the same time humorous, revealing rich erudition, written in an accessible and simple way. The range of interests and issues raised in this collection is unusually wide: among other things, Gaiman talks about his contemporaries and predecessors in the field of literature, about music, about the art of writing books, about comics and bookstores, about travel and fairy tales, about America, about inspiration, libraries and ghosts, and in the essay that gives the collection its title, he touchingly and at times self-critically shares his memories of the 2010 Oscar ceremony.
Insightful and witty, wise and always insightful, these articles and notes address topics and issues that Neil Gaiman considers especially important. The View from the Cheap Seats is a glimpse into the mind and heart of one of the most famous, acclaimed and influential writers of our time.

The Nature of Contagion: Some Thoughts on Doctor Who
I wrote this several years before the brilliant Russell T. Davies and his minions brought the Doctor back to our screens and to life.

Years go by, and the debate about whether the perception of a work of art has any influence on the viewer or reader does not end and does not end. Does a violent novel make the reader cruel? And what about a scary film - does it create a frightened viewer or a viewer invulnerable to fear?

And the answer here will not be simply “yes” or “no”. He will say “yes, but.”

When I was little, adults were always complaining that Doctor Who was too scary. Because of this, I think they missed its much more dangerous effect - that Doctor Who is contagious.

No, of course he was scary. Well, more or less. I watched large chunks of it entirely from behind the couch, and the cliffhangers in the final moments of the episode invariably made me angry, scared, and made me feel cheated. But, as far as I can tell, all this did not affect me at all - at least when it comes to fear. What adults should really complain about—and even be afraid of—is what “The Doctor” did to my head, how he colored my inner landscape. When, at age three, I made Daleks out of milk bottles with all the other kids at Mrs. Pepper's kindergarten, I was already lost, although I had no idea about it. The virus has already settled in me and has begun to act.

Of course, I was afraid of the Daleks, Zarbi and others. Beyond that, however, I learned other, stranger and more important lessons from the Saturday afternoon series.

To begin with, I was infected by the idea that there were countless worlds just beyond the threshold. The other part of the meme was this: Some things are bigger on the inside than they appear on the outside. Perhaps some people are also bigger on the inside than on the outside.

And this was just the beginning. Books only contributed to the growth of the infection - "The World of the Daleks", of course, and with it various annual publications on the "Doctor" in hard cover. Actually, they contained the first science-fiction plots that I encountered in my life, and they made me wonder if there was anything else like it in the world...

But the biggest damage lay in the future.

Here it is: my reality - the way I perceive the world - exists in this form only because of Doctor Who. And especially thanks to 1969's War Games, a composite series that was Patrick Troughton's swan song.

This is what remains in my memory now, more than thirty years after I first saw War Games. The doctor and his comrades find themselves in a place where there is a war - on the battlefield of the never-ending First World War, where the armies of all times have been transferred. They were stolen from their own space-time locations and forced to fight each other. Troops and time zones are separated by strange fogs. Movement between zones is possible using a structure the size and shape of a small elevator or, to put it more prosaically, a public toilet booth: you enter it in 1970, and exit in Troy, or Mons, or Waterloo. Well, not in the real-life Waterloo, because you are actually not in time, but in eternity, and somewhere behind all this - or outside of all this - there is some evil genius who has removed the armies from their realities, placed them here and with the help of boxes moving soldiers and agents from place to place through the mists of time.

The boxes were called SIDRATS. Even at eight, I understood what this meant.

Ultimately, with no other options and unable to solve the mystery in any other way, the Doctor - who we now know was a fugitive - calls upon his people, the Time Lords, to deal with the situation. And he himself turns out to be captured and punished.

It was truly a great finale for the eight-year-old. I especially relished his irony. I'm sure I don't need to go back there and try to rewatch War Games right now. That would be bad. And it’s too late: the damage had already been done anyway, having rewritten my reality. The virus has firmly entered the body.

Today I am an elderly and respected writer, but I am still overwhelmed by the feeling of some not entirely clear, but limitless possibilities every time I enter an elevator, especially if it is small and with bare walls. And to this day, the fact that its doors open in the same world and time, not to mention the fact that in the same building where they closed, seems to me to be a pure coincidence, indicating only a lack of imagination on the part of the rest of the universe.

I in no way confuse what did not happen with what could not happen, and in the depths of my soul I believe that Time and Space are infinitely malleable, permeable, fragile.

Let me make a couple more assumptions.

In my head the Doctor was William Hartnell, and so was Patrick Troughton. All the other Doctors were just actors, although Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker were the actors who played the real Doctor. The rest, including Peter Cushing, were just pretending.

In my head, the Time Lords safely exist and are completely unknowable: these are the original forces of the universe that cannot be named, only described: all these Master, Doctor and others like them. All descriptions of the Time Lords' habitat are completely non-canonical for me. The place in which they exist is generally impossible to depict in any way, because it is beyond the limits of imagination: it is simply cold there and everything is either black or white.

It's probably good that I didn't manage to lay my paw on the Doctor - that would have erased too much from the category of what happened.

The last reminiscence of the Doctor (and again from the baggy Troughton era, when some things were more than real to me) happened retrospectively in my BBC television series Unreality.

Not in the self-evident things - for example, in the BBC's decision that Unbelievable should be filmed in half-hour episodes. Not in the person of the same Marquis de Carabas, whom I did (and Patterson Joseph played), as if copying the Doctor from a pencil sketch, and really wanted to show him as mysterious, unreliable and quirky as the incarnation of William Hartnell. No, there was something in the very idea that beneath this world there were other worlds and that London could also be magical and dangerous, and that the subway tunnels were no less mysterious, inaccessible and fraught with the possibility of meeting some yeti than the ridges of the Himalayas. , may have borrowed from The Web of Fear, a Troughton-era plot. At least that’s what writer and critic Kim Newman told me at a screening of Unreality. And as soon as Kim said this, I immediately realized that he had hit the nail on the head, and I remembered the people in the dungeon, with torches, and the light piercing the darkness. The knowledge of the worlds that exist below - oh yes, that’s where I got it from, it’s true. And I realized with horror that, having caught the virus myself at one time, I was now infecting others with it.

This is perhaps one of the wonders of Doctor Who. He doesn't die no matter what. He's still serious and still dangerous. The virus is still out there somewhere, lurking, buried, buried like a pestilence pit.

You don't have to believe me. At least not now. But I'll tell you what. Next time you step into an elevator wearing some shabby office building, and he, twitching, will travel a couple of floors, at the very last moment before the doors begin to open, you involuntarily wonder - even if for a split second - whether you will now see a Jurassic forest behind them, or some moon of Pluto , or a full-service resort hotel somewhere in the center of the Galaxy...

That's when you realize that you too have become infected. And then the doors will open with a wild grinding sound, as if the universe itself is in pain, and you squint at the light of the distant suns - and yes, then you will understand...

From the introduction to Paul MacAuley's Eye of the Tiger (2003) - at a time when fiction was the only way to stay connected to the Doctor Who universe.

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