Saturday, November 01, 2008

Macabre

Went to see the very splendid Neil Gaiman read at the LSE last night - my photos of the event are all a bit rubbish, but this was the best one...



We got a whole chapter of The Graveyard Book - Chapter 5, Danse macabre - which was an entirely appropriate chapter for Halloween. His reading and comic timing are great.

And the Q&A session afterwards was hilarious. He ran through a stack of questions on cards submitted by the audience, including on NaNoWriMo (strangely, he won't be doing it), Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand (idiots, but surely not worth this amount of coverage and outrage), McCain v. Obama (told an interesting story from a White House/Pentagon insider about the chaos in McCain's senatorial office), writing a musical with Mitch Benn and the quality of haircuts in China.

The audience was also quite exciting - many people dressed up as ghouls and so on - and also the entire cast of Dr Horrible... Evidently more people dressed up than he was expecting - he commented twice on this...

I originally intended to stand in line for as long as necessary to get a book signed, but then did some quick calculations of the number of people in the room/the general level of fanaticism/the speed he'd be able to sign at/the time of the last train home; and picked up one of the copies he'd thoughtfully pre-signed... I'd only have said something idiotic if I'd actually met him, anyway!

Edited to add: Mr G has blogged about the evening. It seems he felt he was grumpy. I didn't think either someone's mobile phone going off or someone taking huge numbers of noisy photos was grounds for grumpiness; I should probably have commended his restraint, frankly...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

But would he have known who you were? Just think of the opportunity you denied him ;-)

Liz said...

Mr G probably has so many more stalkers than the Harlot... he doesn't even *have* a comments section these days...