Levitation, Leary, Popes and Potpourri

Selected excerpts from an interview published on LA Public Library. You can read the complete piece HERE.

[...] LAPL: What was your process for putting together this collection? How did you decide which of your stories would be included?
Alan Moore: My first step in assembling the collection was to gather my published short-form works together and then exclude the pieces that didn’t seem to fit or had been made widely available elsewhere. With this accomplished, I estimated that it would require four new stories to complete a reasonably-sized volume, and very soon thereafter decided on what those stories should be about. They were all completed in a rush of excited energy during the early months of 2021, and for my money, they represent my most accomplished short-story work to date, even if What We Can Know About Thunderman turned out to be a short story that was strenuously trying to turn itself into something else entirely.

You’ve done a lot of different types of work (graphic novels, novels, and short stories, to name a few). Is there a format that you prefer over the others?
[...] if pressed to name the medium I most admire, it would be unadorned prose or poetry, simply because writing is our first technology—the technology that makes all other technologies possible—and is still our most powerful, most elegant, and most efficient: with a mere couple of dozen characters and a peppering of punctuation, we can convincingly conjure absolutely anything in the conceivable universe. Also, writing is the form which forces the reader to do at least half of the work, in imagining the landscapes or conjuring the characters’ appearance and the sound of their voices, and I believe that the art we find most affecting is the art that we put this personal effort into engaging with, rather than art which washes over its viewer and makes them, sometimes, into mere passive recipients.

Is there something you haven’t done yet but are hoping to have the opportunity to try?
Perhaps levitation, but beyond that, I can’t really think of anything. [...]

What’s currently on your nightstand?
Since I don’t read in bed, what’s on my night table at the moment is an ashtray supported by two metal frogs that is currently full of loose pocket change; a bag of Rowntree’s fruit pastilles; a bulging and battered cardboard folder containing the original draft of the forthcoming Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic; a copy of Steve Moore’s work of classical scholarship Selene; a notebook that represents an abandoned attempt to write down my dreams; a couple of copies of Weird Tales with lovely Margaret Brundage covers; and paperback copies of Nik Cohn’s Arfur and Dee Brown’s The American West where I have no idea how they ended up there.

As for what’s in my pile of things to read at present, that would be the trove of Beat Generation items that I recently purchased from Beat Scene’s estimable editor and publisher, Kevin Ring. There’s a Ballantine paperback of Kerouac’s Dr. Sax, collections of the poetry of Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, a critical study of Richard Brautigan, Neal Cassady’s influential The Joan Anderson Letter, a collection of interviews called The Sullen Art that features an interview with the immaculate Gilbert Sorrentino, and a 1962 copy of Yugen magazine from LeRoi Jones and Hettie Cohen.

Can you name your top five favorite or most influential authors?
I always have trouble with questions like this, because I don’t tend to think in terms of lists or favourites, and don’t really organise things I enjoy into a top ten. So, for what it’s worth, at this particular moment in time, I’ll say William Burroughs, Angela Carter, Iain Sinclair, Samuel Delaney and Michael Moorcock, although ask me in ten minutes time and it could be a different list altogether. I’m probably influenced in one way or another by every book I’ve ever read, good and bad alike. [...]

Is there a book you've faked reading?
No. I have a morbid fear of being the person who maintains that their favourite part of Harper Lee’s book was when they finally killed that bloody irritating mockingbird. [...]

Is there a book that changed your life?
Thinking about it, if I hadn’t been quite so enthusiastic about the (retrospectively dubious) ideas in Timothy Leary’s Politics of Ecstasy—the Paladin paperback edition with the exquisite Martin Sharp cover—then I probably wouldn’t have been expelled from school for dealing LSD, wouldn’t have been forced back onto my own resources, and very possibly would never have ended up as a writer. Admittedly, it’s perhaps not the most heart-warming or inspiring way for a book to change one’s life, but looking back I’m very grateful that it did, even if many of Leary’s central tenets turned out, in my adult opinion, to be nonsense. [...]

What is your idea of THE perfect day (where you could go anywhere/meet with anyone)?
A day spent somewhere comfortable and out of the public eye—like, say, my home in Northampton—in the company of my wife, our daughters, our grandchildren, our family, and our incredible friends would, for me, be a perfect one. I get far too few of them. [...]

What are you working on now?
At the moment I’m largely involved with interviews and publicity work around the publication of Illuminations, but once that’s concluded I’m desperate to get back to work on the first of my Long London quintet of novels, which is titled The Great When, and I’m currently paused at the beginning of chapter four, which is called "Popes and Potpourri". It’s a lot of fun, or it will be when I can return to it, with as exotic a cast of characters—most of them real—as anything I’ve ever written.

The complete interview is available HERE.