Harlequin Valentine | Neil Gaiman
from Telling Tales
…I pin my heart to Missy’s front door.
The heart is a deep, dark red that is almost brown, the color of liver.
Then I knock on the door sharply, rat-a-tat-tat!,
and I grasp my wand, my stick,
my oh-so-thrustable and beribboned lance
and I vanish like cooling steam into the chilly air.
“When my heart was broken and I was fifteen, I listened to Lou Reed’s Berlin over and over and walked around a lot in the rain, while my friends followed me looking worried and imploring me not to do anything stupid. Well, stupider than walking in the rain, anyway.”
- Neil Gaiman
__
“The boy I loved didn’t know I existed. Then again, he was obsessed with Camus, so he didn’t know if any of us existed.”
-David Levithan
__
“When Patti Fox broke up with me, I typed her name over a thousand times on my manual Olivetti until the entire page was beaten into a stiff sheet of black ink.”
-Jack Gantos
__
“The first boy I fell in love with didn’t know I loved him, but he managed to break my heart anyway.”
-Holly Black
__
“Of course I had my heart broken as a teen. I was desperately in love with myself. Then I found out that I was completely shallow. I haven’t spoken to myself since.”
-M.T. Anderson
__
“I was heartbroken when my boyfriend announced he was moving to Chicago without me. But, oh yeah, I could keep his guitar amp. Thanks.”
-Sarah Shepard
__
“My heart was broken the spring of my senior year in high school. We broke up in a park outside of town, and as I drove him home, he read me what he’d written in my yearbook. The line that really made me sob? ‘You will always be my Princess Bride.’ Sniff.”
-Carolyn Mackler
__
“We broke up because I was not a boy.”
-Lisa Brown
__
“I thought dating her was just fine. Pleasant. You know what I mean? When she said she didn’t want to go out with me anymore my friends gathered around me. They shook their heads and frowned. They patted my back. ‘To bad,’ they said and ‘you’ll be okay.’ I wasn’t sure how they wanted me to act so I tried stomping around and punching walls. I tried to feel bad. I really did. But it didn’t really make any sense to keep up the act. Then I found the meaning of relationships when you’re a teen. It’s a wonderful country music tune called: I Don’t Know Whether To Kill Myself Or Go Bowling.”
-Kevin O’Malley
__
“After my first lesbian break up, my ex left a series of ‘I hate you’ parting gifts on my porch. Including a cassette tape of the Radiohead song ‘Creep.’ Looped. Back to back. Side A and B. Best. Mix tape. Ever.”
-Mariko Tamaki
__
“We broke up because I kept forgetting that I had a fake British accent.”
-Adele Griffin
__
“I got dumped on my nineteenth birthday. The next day a car hit me. The impact threw me ten feet. My jeans were shredded so badly that my college roommate hung them on our dorm room wall as a conversation piece. I spent the next week recovering in bed, listening to The Smiths and feeling sorry for myself. It took about a decade, but eventually I understood that young love is always a comedy.”
-Matthew Quick
SKELLY ISN’T PRETTY
OFF-TOPIC! I think most Tumblr girls need to see this photoset. Cross-posted from my blogspot.
One of my favorite questions for anyone in the fashion industry is this: “Many models say that confidence is sexy, but a lot of girls don’t seem to truly grasp its meaning; they still think they have to be really thin in order to be considered beautiful. What advice can you give them?”
(FACT: Whenever I get a chance to interview a model for our bi-monthly fashion magazine, I always ask them this.)
Let’s face it—the clichéd “what truly matters is that you’re beautiful on the inside” won’t do anymore. Up to now, I still haven’t heard an answer that girls would immediately heed, what with their perspective of beauty tampered with and distorted by our society today. If you aren’t stick-thin and post-tall, if you can’t stuff yourself in branded teeny-weeny tees and micro-mini skirts, then most likely you’re out. The fashion industry’s obsession with size zero models with mile-long legs and filament-like arms has always unnerved me, but what can we do? That’s how the world as we know it rolls.
When I chanced upon Gavin Bond’s old in-your-face photography set that ridicules this situation, I know I should give it a space on my blog. It’s playful but definitely thought-provoking. The set features a skeletal girl doing things the typical rich girls most people revere do on the beach.
The photos sort of reminded me of the Apocalyptic horseman Famine from the Gaiman-Pratchett collab, Good Omens. Famine loves skinny models. They’re the living proof of his success. He creates diet fads and new foods that are indistinguishable from any other food except for the nutritional content…which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. It didn’t matter how much you ate, you lost weight. And hair. And skin tone. And, if you ate enough of it long enough, vital signs. :p
Don’t let yourselves become walking skeletons, girls! Health is important, and you can be beautiful without your body image having to mimic the stick-and-paper build of a kite. ;)
“I draw sketches of imaginary covers on little minicomics I use as reference as I write. Nobody ever sees them but me. This (pulled from a dusty filing cabinet) was my sketch for the cover of SANDMAN#8, and was thus, I suppose, the second drawing of Death.”
-Neil Gaiman
2011 Book-related Art: The Book Thief, Thirteen Reasons Why, Paper Towns, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Sputnik Sweetheart. More here.
Looking forward to another year of books and doodles! :)
Neil Gaiman’s “The Price” (CG animation by Christopher Salmon). Originally published in the anthology Smoke and Mirrors, this short story is about a black cat that acts as a guardian angel of some sort for a middle aged writer. You can listen to the story here and you can watch the short film’s trailer here.
A Writer’s Prayer | Neil Gaiman
Telling Tales
—
Oh Lord, let me not be one of those who writes too much;
who spreads himself too thinly with his words,
diluting all the things he has to say,
like butter spread too thinly over toast,
or watered milk in some worn-out hotel;
but let me write the things I have to say,
and then be silent, ’til I need to speak.
Oh Lord, let me not be one of those who writes too little;
a decade-man between each tale, or more,
where every word accrues significance
and dread replaces joy upon the page.
Perfectionists like chasing the horizon;
You kept perfection, gave the rest to us,
so let me earn the wisdom to move on.
But over and above those two mad spectres of parsimony and profligacy,
Lord, let me be brave, and let me, while I craft my tales, be wise:
let me say true things in a voice that is true,
and, with the truth in mind, let me write lies.
Amen.
