Offering multiple perspectives from many fields of human inquiry that may move all of us toward a more integrated understanding of who we are as conscious beings.
I make things up and write them down. Which takes us from comics (like SANDMAN) to novels (like ANANSI BOYS and AMERICAN GODS) to short stories (some are collected in SMOKE AND MIRRORS) and to occasionally movies (like Dave McKean's MIRRORMASK or the NEVERWHERE TV series, or my own short film A SHORT FILM ABOUT JOHN BOLTON).
In my spare time I read and sleep and eat and try to keep the blog at www.neilgaiman.com more or less up to date.
An Evening with Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman is one of the world's greatest storytellers. He is a multi-award winning novelist who writes across genres and has been credited as one of the creators of modern comics. At this Sydney event, Neil talks and reads from his next novel for adults, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Presented by Top Shelf in association with Sydney Writers' Festival, City Recital Hall, Jan 2013.
This is very cool - and of course it comes from Open Culture, the curators of cool on the web. Some of the writers featured include Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Iain Banks, Roddy Doyle, and no collection would be complete without Christopher Hitchens.
Enjoy - this is frequently fascinating.
As an added bonus, in the summary below, there are links to a two part video of 100 academics, mostly scientists, talking about their perspectives on God and reason.
This past summer, Jonathan Pararajasingham, a neurosurgeon in London, created a montage of 100 renowned academics, mostly all scientists, talking about their thoughts on the existence of God. (Find it in two parts here and here.) Now’s he back with a new video, 30 Renowned Writers Speaking About God. It runs 25 minutes, and it offers as much a critique of orthodox religious belief as it does a literary tribute to humanism and rationalism. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Salman Rushdie (who kindly tweeted us this weekend), Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth — they all make an appearance. The full list of writers appears below the jump.
And, before we close, let me say this. Whenever we post videos like these, we get the question. Why the occasional focus on atheism/rationalism/humanism? And the simple answer comes down to this: If you cover writers, academics and scientists, the thinking skews in that direction. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are in shorter supply. But if someone pulls them together and makes a montage, we’ll likely feature it too. H/T RichardDawkins.net
Note: As you may have noticed, we have been experiencing intermittent outages over the past couple of days. Our host, Dreamhost, has been stumbling more than we’d like. So we’re figuring out alternatives and hopefully making a move soon. Our apologies for the inconvenience!
