jducoeur | Neilification

Our rather over-scheduled Memorial Day Weekend started last night with the first annual Julius Schwartz Lecture at MIT. This was an absolute delight -- thanks to

yakshaver for the tickets! (It was an Alex-rich night -- we wound up sitting with

yakshaver and

alexx_kay, and schmoozing with

learnedax.)

Anyway, the guest this year was Neil Gaiman, and it confirmed our belief that it's worth going to listen to Neil talk about anything. He confessed that he had still been scribbling notes at four o'clock that afternoon (and was clearly having to pause and decipher those notes occasionally), and it was *still* both a remarkably funny and insightful speech on the subject of genre fiction. Following the speech, he spent a while taking questions from his host,

henry_jenkins, in a rather Actor's Studio format, and finished off with a few questions from the audience.

They are apparently putting together a DVD of the talk, and that's recommended. Neil's speech was a real delight -- the extended analogy of pornographic movies to musicals is well worth the price of admission all on its own...