Awesome Like A Hotdog

I have long been a fan of Eddie Izzard’s call to action regarding the re-appropriation of the word Awesome. If you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, see below. See below and then, ideally, finish reading this blog post before feverishly getting your mitts and any and all material produced by comedy’s leading executive transvestite.

Watched it? Good. Continue. Now, if I use that adjective throughout this post, you know that I don’t mean awesome like the two-for-one pizza deal at the local supermarket (“Although,” she says with her mouth full, “that is pretty great”). I don’t even mean awesome like a hundred-billion hot-dogs. 

It may seem petty to split semantic hairs in this way, but I feel that the preamble is necessary. I overuse the term in daily life as much as the next person; - "You're paying in exact change and brought your own bag? AWESOME!" - but in order to describe the book around which this post will be based, we need the term and its original jaw-dropping definition.

She's just stared into the eyes of the Lord...

American Gods by Neil Gaiman is not a small book, either in size or scope. Taking Gods and deities from every culture, religion and cult, Gaiman places them as physical entities in the here and now; struggling to remain relevant in a culture which sees them as historical remnants rather than all-powerful rulers to be worshiped and feared. Their enemies are complacency, modernity and technology - represented in the real world as a new 'breed' of God like figures, Technology and Media.

The disparity between human worship of tradition, religion and myth versus our current fetishisation of modern living would make for a pretty interesting academic paper.  It probably has been done, and yet I don’t move in the circles where academic papers land on my doormat day to day. More’s the pity. Or not -  I’ve never been good at reading long pieces of discourse on the human condition without wanting to pick up my Editor’s pen and reduce the word-count by a few thousand. It’s the frustrated teacher in me, I’m sure.

Sometimes, however, Fiction can take the place of traditional Academia. If the aim is to encourage the reader  to consider how our values have shifted across the centuries, this entirely fantastical story holds its own. As previously mentioned, we are invited to consider whether it is our worship of 'new gods' which has pushed traditional religion aside. I certainly think this may have played a part - the small but intensely irritating group of Hare Krishnas that patrol Oxford Street nine times a day are certainly dedicated (Good GOD who gave them microphones?!), but no more so than the regular queues that appear outside the Apple store whenever a tiny upgrade has been introduced to the operating system. 

Et Tu, Matt Lucas?

We are also asked to think about whether increased migration and the multi-cultural societies that this creates has played its part in the decline of traditional religion. On this, I'm not so sure. Emigration to America did very little to reduce the religious fervour of the Pilgrims. The mass-migration of Jews to the Middle-East has not affected the religious beliefs in the area (if anything, heightening religious identity on both sides). On the other hand, perhaps it is true that in the days where most dwellings were slums and the local church would have been by far the most impressive building in the area, the static nature of society would have played some part in religious feeling.

But back to the book. Along with all these questions of faith, Gaiman has introduced a compellingly human narrative in the form of Shadow, a mortal ex-con dragged kicking and screaming into the politics of Gods as well as a very creepy 'whodunit'. The Gods in American Gods are rather more pliable than in real religion. In the novel they can either serve as conduits for questions of faith such as those mentioned above, or else they can be simply characters - as removed from Academia and philosophical pondering as Spot the Dog or any of the characters from Twilight.

DEEP.

Plus he gives them names and makes them have sex with each other. So... there’s that. Far too little sex in 99% of academic papers. Unless they’re about Foucault. (Bloody Foucault – managed to inflict sexual politics on buildings. Unless we’re talking about the Gherkin I ain’t buying it). 

What is that erection in the distance?