{"id":1687,"date":"2008-10-15T16:41:44","date_gmt":"2008-10-15T16:41:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/?p=1687"},"modified":"2008-10-15T16:41:44","modified_gmt":"2008-10-15T16:41:44","slug":"a-great-year-for-meeting-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/archives\/1687","title":{"rendered":"A great year for meeting people."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you had told me when I was sixteen that later in my life I would, in the course of approximately one year, spend some genuine facetime with Neil Gaiman, James Morrow, Mike Mignola, Kelly Link and Jonathan Carroll I would have said that you were nuts.  (Well, I would have also said &#8220;Who&#8217;s Kelly Link?&#8221; back then, but that&#8217;s beside the point.)<br \/>\nIf you&#8217;d told me that I would have gotten the chance to meet Rand Miller (the co-creator of <i>Myst<\/i>), Bill Willingham (who writes <i>Fables<\/i>), befriend Raph Koster and listen to a lecture by Guillermo del Toro in that same year, I&#8217;d&#8217;ve told you that you were also insane.<br \/>\nIf you&#8217;d told me that if you extended that window out to eighteen months it would also include getting to meet Jeff Smith and graduating from MIT, I&#8217;d&#8217;ve told you were <i>completely barking mad.<\/i><br \/>\nYet, that&#8217;s the eighteen months it&#8217;s been for me.  When I look back on 2007-2008 and think about all this economic disaster and political hoo-rah and all the rest of the bizarreness afoot in the world, that&#8217;s what I should remember &#150; that this year-and-some-change has been amazing, wonderful and incredibly stimulating.<br \/>\nAll of this is brought up by my attending back-to-back lectures by both Stephen Greenblatt (the noted New Historicist from Harvard) here at MIT and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jonathancarroll.com\">Jonathan Carroll<\/a> (one of my favorite novelists) at the Harvard Bookstore last night.  Consider my mind officially blown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you had told me when I was sixteen that later in my life I would, in the course of approximately one year, spend some genuine facetime with Neil Gaiman, James Morrow, Mike Mignola, Kelly Link and Jonathan Carroll I would have said that you were nuts. (Well, I would have also said &#8220;Who&#8217;s Kelly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-life"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4e5QR-rd","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}