#I wrote a short story called THE GOLDFISH POOL AND OTHER STORIES about that time and that place

[neil-gaiman]

Hello!!

First of all, THANK YOU!!! The world has been feeling harder and more hopeless to me in recent years, and individuals like yourself help more than I will ever be able to express to bring light and hope back into my world. Loving and obsessing over gems like Good Omens, and American Gods (the novel at least, I must admit I never saw the show 🙈) have always given me motivation, sparked my creativity, and made me feel so much love for this, often unfortunately cruel, world. I can't express the solace it brings to me when the creators of the things I love are thoughtful and decent human beings. So, again, THANK YOU 🫀🫀🫀

I just finished my second viewing of Season 2 and have a question for you (my apologies if it has already been asked and/or answered and I missed it)!! 

How did you select the song "Everyday" by Buddy Holly? It is absolutely perfect on so many different levels, and for so many different threads and characters, all while still encompassing the perfect feelings of this show. I always include playlists with the stories I write, and often agonize over which song is the best choice for certain moments. You had to pick one song to encompass the entirety of it, and it truly blew me away! 

Thank you this Season and for everything you do; it really does mean the world to so many of us 🫀🫀🫀

In February of 1991 (I think) Terry Pratchett and I were staying in the Chateau Marmont hotel in LA. These days it is a very fancy hotel but back then it was pretty manky and run down. We were being put up by a film company and each morning we would fax over an outline for a new version of Good Omens the Movie and each afternoon we'd go to the studio for a meeting and we would realise that nobody had actually read what we had sent over that morning. Then we would go back to the hotel and work on trying to incorporate the studio notes on the outline they hadn't actually read into what we were doing.

We worked up in Terry's room because it had heating, and it was incredibly cold in LA that February, especially cold because I was in a chalet out in the grounds and there weren't heaters or extra blankets or anything in the chalet.

And at some point in there we were talking about music, and I suggested a few scary and ominous songs that might work to signal the end times. And Terry said "What about Buddy Holly's song Everyday? It sounds so upbeat and cheerful. But what if it was about the end of the world?" And I got all excited at the idea of Everyday being the Good Omens theme song.

So it's really just there to make Terry happy.

[brevityisthesoulofbitch]

Making a journey through Neil Gaiman’s short stories that I usually do every couple of years and my brain must of, in college, completely erased some tales details, but in the short story collection from the 90s (composed from a variety of work) called ‘Smoke & Mirrors’ I need to talk to Neil about the erotica-Neil, I just want to talk. It perked my lips. 

That being said there are some very under rated tales in this collection; ‘Murder Mysteries’ makes me cry and be angry, down to my teeth anger, every time I read it. And what a befitting a feeling that righteous anger in a tale about ‘justice’ and love. ‘The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories’ is always beautiful for no reason in particular it is always the story that sticks with me. That fish with the lipstick on its’ back, the timelessness of Hollywood that in way is everything it is hyped up to be and nothing like it at all. ‘The Price’ is also one that has stuck with me; Sweet and telling of the strength of simple character. ‘Virus’ resonated with me in a new way and had jolting lines that I wrote down to reference later. 

There are stories that make me want to sit with Neil and talk about his take on gender now, the occult, freedom, magic, and what has changed since then. If he still thinks about the cat here in America that may or may not have saved his family years and years ago. 

@neil-gaiman

[fanlan1]

I wonder if the character of TV!Gabriel drew inspiration from Movie!Crowley. Because Jesus Christ, the things he says are so abusive to someone who would consider you his only friend? He’s dismissive and rude and only cares for himself, plus the fact that Crowley called the guy “sunshine” I wonder if neil drew from negative experience to write the most Dickish boss he could

I feel like its a very good possibility?

Personally, I always felt like it was implied Gabriel was horrible to Aziraphale even in the book (I remember Aziraphale asking Crowley out of fear if Hell could protect him from the antichrist mess because he fears Gabriel specifically), like maybe others read it differently but I always read it as always being the intention that Gabriel was terrifying.

I had to put a pause on my read through of the script because 1) I had other things to do and 2) it really was distressful at times seeing Crowley, CROWLEY, this just horrible. I know the fandom doesn’t always agree on how he’s portrayed but I think we can all agree he would never, ever, EVER treat Aziraphale like this.

Ever scene they have together, even just the checkers scene, Crowley is mean to Aziraphale. I genuinely don’t know why they hang out...

Neil Gaiman was pretty upset (shocking, I know) by this script and it inspired the short story The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories (you can read it in Smoke and Mirrors along with a story in the American Gods universe if you like that book as much as me).

I haven’t read it all the way through at the time but I was reading a little of it before I stopped to answer this question. It starts with an abrasive, ignorant American making assumptions about England and you can already tell its about the screen play seeing all the blatantly stupid things written about English culture (I’m no expert but come on, some of this stuff is like you could have just read Good Omens to get an understanding about the setting or just set it in America at this point...)

So to answer your question, its possible Gaiman kept this bitterness in mind when he wrote Gabriel. The Sunshine thing? That’s a big indicator but also the fact that Gabriel is blatantly American, just like every character in this stupid screen play pretending to be British. 

(Also I feel like I need to point out the best part of the screen play is Crowley just putting the antichrist outside and that’s how he loses him?? Don’t tell that’s not something Gabriel would do if tasked with taking care of a baby...)

[recklesstreacherous]

Oh my gosh, Rebekah Harkness had such a messy and sad life www(.)nytimes(.)com/1988/05/22/books/is-there-a-chic-way-to-go(.)html?pagewanted=all

Thanks for linking this article! I love reading about her… and yes, she did have a very unique and tragic life. I’d love to watch a documentary about her.

_______________________________________________________________________‘IS THERE A CHIC WAY TO GO?’A week after her death on June 17, 1982, the mortal remains of Rebekah Harkness were toted home by her older daughter Terry in a Gristede’s shopping bag. The ashes were placed in a $250,000 jeweled urn made by Salvador Dali. They didn’t fit: “Just a leg is in there, or maybe half of her head, and an arm,” said one of Rebekah’s friends. Several hours later, the top of the urn - called the Chalice of Life - was somehow, by unknown agencies, uncovered. “Oh, my God,” said a witness. “She’s escaped.”        

This post-mortem mischief was going on at Harkness House, the East 75th Street town house headquarters of the Harkness Ballet Foundation, which Mrs. Harkness had modeled on the St. Petersburg Ballet School. The building, according to Craig Unger, the author of this rich-man/eye-of-the-needle biography, was in a state of putrefaction, “crumbling like Tara after the Civil War.” Meanwhile, in her apartment at the Carlyle Hotel, people who called themselves Rebekah Harkness’s friends were pillaging, “grabbing things right and left.”        

Rebekah’s younger daughter Edith, a failed suicide who had spent many years in mental institutions, took only her mother’s pills: Seconal, Nembutal, Valium, Haldol, Librium and various painkillers - 40 vials in all. Allen Pierce, Rebekah’s son by the first of her four husbands, was unable to be present. Convicted of murder in the second degree, he was behind the bars of a Florida jail. Bobby Scevers, Rebekah’s lover, 25 years younger than she and a self-declared homosexual, pronounced her children “the most worthless, selfish, useless creatures I’ve ever seen.” (Mr. Scevers has a stunning way of placing himself squarely in the center of every sentence he utters; he appears to believe that Rebekah Harkness’s death happened more to him than to her.) If I report on the demise of the multimillionaire patron of the dance dry-eyed, it is because I am confident in the belief that nothing we say about the dead can prejudice the Defense or tip the Scales of Judgment. I myself wouldn’t give the time of day to anyone who cleaned her pool out with Dom Perignon, put mineral oil in the punch at her sister’s debutante ball and (all in the middle of the Great Depression) got tossed off an ocean liner for shouting obscenities, throwing dinner plates at an orchestra of Filipinos gamely playing the American national anthem, and offending the sensibilities of her fellow passengers by swimming nude - for which actions she counted herself witty. (I do admit, however, that I’d go a long way to read a sentence like this, spoken by Bertrand Castelli, the co-producer of “Hair,” about the time he made love to Rebekah Harkness in her office: “It was as if we were two camels in the desert who suddenly know that the only way to make an oasis is to really talk sense.” After his brief interlude in the oasis, Mr. Castelli was made the artistic director of the Harkness Ballet. “Kiss me,” she commanded. “The others, they just know how to bite.”) Craig Unger, a former editor at New York magazine, appears to be dazzled by all this, although it is sometimes hard to tell whether his breathlessness arises from approval, disapproval, sadness, awe or simple bewilderment. Mr. Unger, who records interviews uncritically and unreflectively, does not permit us to know exactly how he feels about his subject.        

Rebekah Harkness was born in 1915 to a rich, emotionally frigid St. Louis family. She was brought up by a nanny who was chosen because she had worked in an insane asylum. She went to Fermata, a South Carolina finishing school that had sheltered Roosevelts, Biddles and Auchinclosses. There she delighted, as she wrote in her scrapbook, in setting out to “do everything bad.’'  After her divorce from W. Dickson Pierce, an upper-class advertising photographer, she chose for her second husband the Standard Oil heir William Hale Harkness, who enjoyed a lofty social status, as her own family did not. He appears to have been an embarrassing sort of man; he wrote and privately published a book called ’'Totem and Topees,” which he described as a “conglomeration of uninteresting misinformation,” and followed that with a book called “Ho hum, the Fisherman,” which, he said, did not “have the excuse even of literary merit.” We are told by Mr. Unger - who is an uncomfortable stranger in the world of the rich, unused to deciphering nuances of caste - that the Harknesses’ seven-year marriage was a happy one. Little evidence is given in support of this thesis except that the two wrote a song together called “Giggling With My Feet.”        

After she was widowed, Mrs. Harkness renovated her Rhode Island house; she installed 8 kitchens and 21 baths. This arrangement effectively kept her from having to see her three children on anything like a regular basis. She had a salon of sorts. She traveled a lot.        

She fancied herself a composer.        

She acquired a guru, also a yogi.        

She married again. And again.        

She was surrounded by a group her son Allen described as “all the fairies flying off the floor, the blackmailing lawyers, the weirdos, the people in the trances.” “We were the favorites,” says a dancer. “We were the loved ones.” In 1961, Rebekah Harkness became the sponsor of the late Robert Joffrey’s small ballet troupe. She did this in grand - if occasionally Marie Antoinette-ish -style. Generous, wasteful, willful, demanding and delusional, she broke with Joffrey to form the Harkness Ballet when he refused to perform the compositions she insisted on writing. In the eyes of many, she had betrayed him. “Costumes, sets, musical scores,” Mr. Unger writes, “many of the best dancers, the entire repertory - even the works choreographed by Joffrey himself - were owned by her foundation.”        

“You see,” she said. “Money can buy anything.” It bought her the services of George Skibine, Marjorie Tallchief, Alvin Ailey, Erik Bruhn and Andy Warhol, but it did not guarantee her success. Mr. Unger tells us that under the direction of the dancer-choreographer Larry Rhodes the company began to garner critical raves - whereupon Mrs. Harkness fired him. Soon Clive Barnes was writing that the Harkness Ballet had “descended beyond the necessity of serious consideration,” and in 1975 it folded. She had spent the 1987 equivalent of $38 million on a failed enterprise.        She rang J. D. Salinger’s bell dressed as a cleaning lady, having conceived the harebrained scheme that the reclusive writer’s short stories be put to music.        

She dyed chocolate mousse blue. She dyed a cat green.        

She moved hundreds of thousands of dollars from one bank to another for the pleasure of confusing her accountants. She believed in reincarnation. She filled her fish tank with goldfish and Scotch.        

Her daughter Terry gave birth to a severely retarded and disabled child. For a time, Rebekah Harkness appeared to be enamored of the passive child, called Angel. Her passion, such as it was, burned itself out quickly, coincidentally with the baby’s pulling a ribbon out of her hair. Bobby Scevers, Mr. Unger writes, “had no sympathy” for the child. “So absurd,” Mr. Scevers pronounced. “When they started talking about putting the nursery over my room … I just hit the ceiling. I don’t want this screaming baby over my room! … Let the little creature die!” When she was 10 years old, she did.        

Her daughter Edith jumped off roofs, swallowed pills and managed not to kill herself. “How should she do it?” Rebekah Harkness asked. “Is there a chic way to go?”        

She lived on champagne and injections - Vitamin B, testosterone, painkillers - as a result of which her bathrooms were splattered with blood and her muscles calcified. (“She walked,” an acquaintance said, “like Frankenstein.”) One could almost feel sorry for her.        

At the very end, according to Bobby Scevers, as she lay dying of cancer, “It was complete chaos… . It was so wonderful - everybody running around signing wills and trying on different wigs.”      

Her daughter Terry hired Roy Cohn in a (failed) attempt to have her will invalidated.        

Her daughter Edith killed herself. (“I’m glad Edith is gone,” said the unquenchable Bobby Scevers.        

“I can’t believe it took her this long to succeed.”) Her son Allen says the years he spent in prison were the happiest of his life. He likes to talk about blowing people away.       Knowing all this (and much, much more; Mr. Unger withholds no ugly or racy detail), what is it exactly that we have learned?        That money can’t buy happiness? That even the rich must die? These are facts of which we have already been apprised.      

One sometimes wonders if the point of all these poor-little-rich-girl/boy biographies is to lull the rest of us into a false sense of security: She is so unlike us that we are not encouraged to reflect upon our own mortality, the contemplation of which is a healthy and necessary exercise. We are meant to take comfort and a measure of relief from our difference - though, as we know but do not frequently wish to remember, the grave awaits us all.        

It would be interesting to see what a social historian, someone familiar with the hierarchies of caste and class in America - or, better yet, a novelist with a theological bent - would make of the raw material Mr. Unger has gathered. I am beginning to think that biography, especially the biography of such a chaotic personality as Rebekah Harkness, needs to be molded and informed by a novelist’s ordering imagination. It might also have been interesting to see how a feminist writer would have assimilated the facts of Rebekah Harkness’s sorry life. Might Mrs. Harkness be seen as a casualty of her own doomed and defiled expectations? Unfit for mothering, unfit for ordinary love, unfit - untrained - to be the caretaker of a great fortune, was she altogether silly or altogether bad? Was she power or pawn? And how in the world did she get that way?        

It is possible to write an edifying biography about an unedifying life. Jean Stein and George Plimpton did that brilliantly in “Edie,” the biography of poor Edie Sedgwick. “Blue Blood” is edifying only insofar as it raises questions about what a biography should be. A terrible story is told here. It makes no sense - and no sense is made of it.        

[titleofaking]

October 12th, 2016

I read Liz’s account of meeting family, and i sobbed. This is my attempt at a response. My sister writes. She's writing a book as the friends on Facebook know, she has gotten very far. And she writes like i think, so when scrolling through Facebook and i stop at this, i get to experience a part of a trip i never got to have, seeing my first house and the house that will always be across the street in my head, my Grandmas. I got to be right next to where all this was happening, and i have been doing some of my own remembering this night, funny enough. There was a slowly pressing weight on my chest while i was reading this, starting out slowly and gaining mass so it feel like while im sitting here replying to this outstanding memory it feels like ive got the weight of a person on my chest. About the weight of the narrator. And it feels cheap to just share, so i add what is left out, at least on my end. I wonder about what happened to Erica and Victoria too. I remember when Dad still lived in the Salem House and the kittens were just born from Wendy and (Max? i know her name is Wendy. There was also a kitten named Lily). But when i try to remember things with Dad in them, they dont get sorted out like that. I remember the Salem house, thats where all this ties back to for me. I can explore it in my head still, even though its been a decade (or very close to it) since ive been in there. Upstairs throught the screen door. Someones police radio sat over there, i assume it was Dad since he towed cars for a living. the kitchen on the right when you walk in through another door, living room on the left where one time we stacked all of the VHS tapes we had into a tower, of course it fell. I remember one Christmas after the divorce where i was a brat and wasnt happy with anything, and Liz was. I remember a pinball machine i broke the glass on, and did not fess up to, and then pushed peanut M and Ms through because it made sense. Continue straight and you get a hallway to the bedrooms, and ours is the first on the right. Liz and Mom and i shared a bed in the earlier years, and then it became just Liz and mine. We watched Roseanne and the Simpsons when we were supposed to be sleeping, and there was a mirrored closest that i was afraid of. Next room is the bathroom on the left, where if you opened the door, it sounded like you tugged on a balloon string with the balloon still attacked, (*doink.... doink doink doink) i can still hear it in my head, even though it doesnt make sense to why i can remember that instead of more important things. I remember Ray being little and upset and Mom saying "someone call the waaaaaaaambulance" and now i think thats just a way to relieve your stress of a kid crying, just make fun of them, but in a funny way so they dont catch on. And the pressed leaves in the frame that we still have, i can go and touch them if i want. on opposite sides, Ray and Justins and Jess and Sarahs rooms. I dont have good memories for the room on the left (Rays and Justins) besides looking for a specific shirt and the forever useful Lego table. The room on the right, i remember fuzzy animal stickers and a candle holder that looked like a couch and hiding behind the curtain on the loft bed because i could. Liz has a story about hiding pants behind a door, but i dont remember that. If you backtrack to the begining of the hallway, theres a set of stairs on the left. the first set is red, leads to a landing with a front door that no one ever used (I have fallen backwards down these stairs) to a set of stairs that leads to the downstairs that were green. on the right is Mom and Nans/Dads bedroom, leading through a door is the laundry room. if you turn around, theres a door that leads to the playroom/Barbaras bedroom. On the inside of the door, theres a branch that was soaked in water and was twisted into a great circle. Through the door is where we played as little kids, where Justin got his head stuck in the banister. We had a playplace in there at one point, a red roof thing made of plastic that was just a blast to have, even more on the inside. I have eaten the entire bottom excess salt of Pretzel Goldfish there, and have met kittens and watched National Treasure. Theres a bathroom in that room, and that is by far the best bathroom ive ever been in. It was small, but the wallpaper was like reading the comics, without having to grab a newspaper each time. Its hard to describe, but id love to see that bathroom and take pictures so i can show people what i mean. I remember washing my blue feet off from when we were painting the table. Sarah and Jess let us put our footprints on the bottom, and when that table got watterloggend and thrown away after the move to Tennessee, i cried. Theres a backdoor, right next to the fireplace. you go out there and your in the yard, massive to me. Theres a Tuggy the Tugboat in the far right corner, next to an old wooden play place that was fun to climb up to the top but absolutely infested with bees. In my head the gocart is still parked next to it, and i have no idea what happend to it. If you walk up the wooden steps, youre in the back yard were the pool is, where Justin got beaned by a plastic diving shark and was bleeding from it. I think we had grapes around the fence. I took a faceful of gravel from standing on one end of a see saw and asking someone to jump on the other end. Theres Lilac, absolutely giant privacy bushes of it between our house and our cousins. This backyard is massive too. Theres a picture in a scrapbook of Justin laying out excess bricks in the grass so it looked like a person was climing out. Its as cool as i remember it was when i was there in person. The boulder is out front in my head still, even though i know it was turned into gravel by the new owners. Mr. Kashi still lives across the road, and two kids down the street still owe us an XBox. Going back inside from the other porch door (man there were a ton of doors in this house) brings up different memories, years later when we had moved out and my Dad had stayed. This wasnt really about my Dad, but what i could remember from that part of my life. I remember weekends with my Dad, and one year when we were at The Hotel there was Christmas in a whole seperate room, and i got a Unicorn horse head on a stick, or maybe i got the regular horse one. I dont remember Dad at our house, but i remember him at The Hotel. Christmases i dont remember Mom giving us (besides one where i got Dragon Heart on VHS and one in Maine) and Jesses friends over and breaking the glass in a picture and putting it into a pillowcase to toss in the trash. Hawaiian shorts and little oranges i ate far too many of. Liz writes how i think, but i havent mastered that yet. This note she wrote, named after a Henry Paul Band song our Dad wanted us to sing, deserved more than a share.