Tolkien, nostalgia, superheroes & material culture

In the past days, on the occasion of the paperback release of Illuminations, Screen Rant published a 2part in-depth interview with Alan Moore. 

You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here. It's a reading that I highly recommend!

Below, some selected excerpts.

From Part 1
Alan Moore: [...] My favorite fantasies are the ones that are unclassifiable. Things like David Lindsay’s The Voyage to Arcturus, or the late Brian Catling’s Vorrh trilogy, which was one of the most original fantasies that I’d ever read, where the authors are coming up with things that aren’t their fantasies. That are things that they have created when not restrained by the rules of naturalistic fiction, not something that Tolkien borrowed from Norse Mythology. Nothing against Tolkien, although he’s not an author that I particularly admire. [...]
I read The Hobbit and thought it was a great children’s book. I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the ‘60s because that was kind of mandatory in the ‘60s. You had to read The Lord of the Rings or you’d have been, I don’t know, thrown out of the counterculture or something like that. I read them and some of my friends, whom I very much admired, said that they had been completely captivated, but it didn’t really relate to me. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just to say that I didn’t particularly respond to it.

[...] The nostalgia is never for anything real. Even when we practice it ourselves, and yes, it’s something we all do. We say, ‘aw, wasn’t that nice, that particular television series or that particular brand of...’ There’s nothing wrong with it, to feel nostalgically affectionate for things like that, but it is technically an illness. The first people to be diagnosed with nostalgia – I believe it was somewhere in Germany – there were some people who’d arrived in a village and immediately fallen ill, and there was nothing that seemed to be done for them, until somebody said, ‘they are suffering from nostalgia. Take them back to the places where they came from, and they’ll get better immediately.’ And they did. He was talking about a physical homesickness, but I think nostalgia is a sickness, because those memories – they’re not actually real. We’ve elaborated them, we’ve gilded them, those memories of how wonderful those things are. When I’ve done pastiches of things from the past, which I’ve done quite a bit over my career, I’ve found out that you don’t have to make them as good as the things were originally. You have to make them as good as people remember those things being, which is to say you have to make them better than the original. Because we will burnish things in our memories, and that becomes dangerous when we’re burnishing fairly miserable times into some kind of trouble-free utopia, when in fact it was pretty much the exact opposite. The mythical past that has been taken from people, and that, if they just vote for this person or that person, they will somehow mystically have returned to them. [...]

[...] as I was attempting to say in Watchmen, if these creatures, these superheroes were ever manifested in anything like a real world, the results would be horrifying and grotesque. That was basically the message, at least one of the main messages of Watchmen: that they don’t work in reality! Even in the fake reality that I constructed for them to work in in Watchmen, they don’t work, they mess everything up. [...]

From Part 2

Alan Moore: [...] I am obsessed with rhythm, because it will create a rhythm in the reader’s head. And if that rhythm is smooth, then they will absorb the prose without little stumbles or things like that. It’ll be easier for them. I think that’s perhaps one of the things that – of course the use of language as well, but the rhythm I think is one of the things that gives the poetry some room to breathe.

[...] I’d like maybe a return to some of the older forms of culture, because, just because they have been apparently superseded, that doesn’t mean that they’re banished, or that there’s no point to them anymore. When the camera was invented, all of the painters in Europe didn’t immediately go out and burn their easels and brushes. There is still painting, even if we have a more high-tech way of producing images. And it’s the same with stories and with culture in general, that, yes, the whole world, we are told, is destined to be run completely online. I wasn’t consulted. An awful lot of the people that I know weren’t consulted, obviously, and that really doesn’t work for me. If it works for other people? Fine, although I’m not sure that it does. Given the immense amounts of political instability that have been occasioned by online interference, firms like Cambridge Analytica, and all of these other movers and shakers who have been targeting different voter groups and stuff like that. Who were responsible, it was found out by the electoral commission over here, for completely throwing the results of the EU Referendum in 2016, and who weren’t a million miles away from the people organizing Donald Trump’s campaign a few months later that same year. This online world has got a lot of problems with it, but one of those is that it’s made people think that other forms of expression are kind of old-fashioned.

I’d like to see a return to physical culture. I’d like to see a return to music papers and physical fanzines. I’d like to see – I mean, the hippy culture that I grew out of and the culture that Beat culture turned into was entirely – the actual texture of it, the fabric of it, was hundreds and hundreds of cheaply produced poetry fanzines. Little poetry magazines, which I spent quite a great deal of money on buying in the moment. Things that were originally 50 cents that had got brilliant poems in, by poets who went on to become really famous or really accomplished. These artifacts have got so much of that era in them, and offer so many possibilities. When I was producing things like my crappy school poetry magazine, Embryo, and the Arts Lab magazines, we were doing them all upon a big duplicator where you had to type them onto wax stencil, then put the stencil physically on the drum of the duplicator machine, turn a big handle that would propel single sheets of paper through the drum, which would come out printed on one side. So, it took quite a while to print and staple even 200 copies of a twenty-page poetry magazine, but that physical culture, it was important. And at that time, we would’ve killed to have the possibilities that desktop publishing offers. What kind of Arts Lab could we have made if we’d have had the technology that is around today? What kind of magazines could we have published? What would our music have been like if we’d got that facility for it?

And yet, now that that technology and that capability is within everybody’s grasp, when anybody could produce a magazine much, much better looking, much better presented than anything we did in the Arts Lab on their desktop computer, nobody’s doing it. There aren’t poetry magazines. There probably are, but nowhere near the number that there were. There aren’t fanzines. There aren’t any places where people can try out their work and get themselves published. So, I would say, that an ideal situation for me was, if we took, in some areas, a couple of steps back. Or at least, if part of the culture took a couple of steps back.

[...] So, yeah, a return to some sort of material culture, even if that’s augmented by the technology of present day and the future. I can’t help but feel that a physical culture would be something that I think would be a lot more sustainable. It would probably allow a lot more people the opportunity to see what they could do as an artist, as a writer, as a musician or whatever. I think it would probably be a bit more democratic, and perhaps a bit more enjoyable, but that may be just me.

You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here.