The Book Lovers by Steve Aylett

Below, Alan Moore's words of appreciation for The Book Lovers, Steve Aylett's new book to be released this December. 

"In the whole of language there is nothing like Steve Aylett, and The Book Lovers is his most relentless assault yet on our prissy synapses. Every sentence is a nifty seizure that will slug his reader through the printed page into a better and less reasonable world, a fugue-state heaven of excruciating beauty that spends dazzling insight as though it were chocolate money. Utterly astonishing, and possibly some manner of police procedural. Read this now before it happens." ― Alan Moore, author of  Jerusalem 

For more info about the book, visit the author's site HERE.

All films are haunted

Below, a statement from Moore promoting Last Movies, Stanley Schtinter's new work.

The book seems a really interesting reading: "Last Movies remaps the century of cinema according to the final films watched by some of its cultural icons, giving an audience the opportunity to ‘see what those who see no more last saw’."

All films are haunted, both by the immortal light of the sooner-or-later dead that they curate, and by the filaments of meaning they extrude into unscripted human lives. Last Movies is an unexpectedly revealing catalogue of final interchanges between imminent ghosts and counterpart electric spectres on the screen’s far side.
Profound and riveting, Schtinter’s graveyard perspective offers up a rich and startlingly novel view of cinema, angled through cemetery gates before the closing credits.
A remarkable accomplishment.
--- Alan Moore

More info at the author's site. Buy a copy HERE.

The outrageous edifice of The Great When

Moore speaks about his new book in a short video shared by Bloomsbury on their FB page.

You can watch it HERE.

Alan Moore: For me, when writing The Great When and the subsequent books in The Long London series, the most enjoyable thing has been taking actual history and then managing to fill the cracks in that history with delirious fantasy. So that I hope that the reader will sometimes find it difficult to tell the difference between the two. 

Starting the series in 1949 seemed like a good move because at that time London was in pieces, shattered by the events of the previous five or six years by the hail of bombs and V bombs. After which I would imagine that the average Londoner’s sense of reality had been drastically overhauled psychologically and socially. The whole of the city, the whole of the country was in pieces, it was in fragments. It was trying to work out what was going on and what its identity was. It was very unstable. We had questions of whether we should adopt nuclear weapons were starting to arise. We had a rise in what we would today call serial murderers after the Second World War. 

All of these things gave the landscape a very uneasy and shifting uncertain feeling. And upon that landscape in 1949 I thought that that would make a wonderful setting on which to erect the outrageous edifice of The Great When.

Alan Moore and Harry Smith

In 2011 Moore paid homage to American countercultural giant Harry Smith.

Below, excerpts from a review of the event published on BFI site.

[...] The polymath spirit of American countercultural hero Harry Smith – filmmaker, artist, folk-song collector, psychonaut and magician – is hard to pin down, let alone summon in the sedate surroundings of the Barbican’s cinema. Yet writer Alan Moore and artist, critic and musician Edwin Pouncey pay their respects admirably tonight, in an event programmed as part of the Barbican’s Watch Me Move: The Animation Show exhibition, conjuring up a soundtrack of poetic biography and collaged noise to a screening of Smith’s No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic (1957).

 

[...] Moore’s skill as a comics writer fits him well for narrating the moving image. Seated in a conspicuously cosy leather chair (which throws a distracting shadow across the screen), he recounts a subjective version of Smith’s life story, from Portland, Oregon childhood to death at the Chelsea Hotel, in a rhythmic present-tense style. Moore’s eye for everyday, even trashy magic is keen and wry, evoking the occult power of New York City’s streets and peep shows, and journeying with abandon into Smith’s psychic and physical desires. [...]

Read the article HERE. Pics of the event HERE.

Harry Smith's movies: Heaven and Earth Magic - Early Abstractions

 

And... I'd love to read Moore's complete text on Harry Smith and/or watch the whole performance!

The last Beatnik artist

Alan Moore speaks about Savage Pencil to promote his Rated SavX book, released in 2020 by Strange Attractor.

From the most subterranean of underground cartoonists to full-blown daemonic visionary, here we see Savage Pencil’s horrid Lovecraftian metamorphosis in all its sublime and terrifying glory; all its ugly ecstasies. Hilarious, psychedelic, beautiful, deformed – give your nervous system a bracing dip into this lysergic acid-bath of a collection from the last Beatnik artist standing. Unmissable.
 -- Alan Moore

More info here, here, here (interview) and here (a book's review).

A picture from the 80ies (from left to right): Chris Long, SavX, Alan Moore

On dreams, punch-ups, occult artifacts and Steampunk

Below, excerpts from a really entertaining interview printed in 2013 on The Chap magazine, issue 70. If you can, get a copy of the magazine! Highly recommended!

 

The Chap is a British humorous men's lifestyle magazine published quarterly, founded in 1999 by Gustav Temple and Vic Darkwood. 

For more info, visit the magazine's official site (HERE) and check the Wikipedia entry (here)

The Chap: [...] What, if any, are your recurring dreams?
Alan Moore: I remember when I was about five, my mother had taken me to the cinema - this wasn't a dream, this was real - to see a film by the Dead End Kids. And this particular film had them meeting a man in a dark suit and a bowler hat, who introduced himself as Mr. Boob. When he took his bowler hat off, it revealed two horns sticking out his bald head. I assume his name was a pun on Beelzebub or something like that. I was screaming and under the seat. And for about a year, thereafter, I would have serial dreams in which I was haunted by this pair of horns in a bowler hat. [...]

When was the last time you engaged in a genuine punch-up?
Because I was an unusually tall kid, I used to attract a certain amount of bullying, but the pattern was that I would put up with it for a certain amount of time. And then I would completely lose all rational control and go berserk, and I nearly strangled two of my classmates. I was quite a strong child. And I also - this is a creepy admission - used to work out by squeezing a weighing scale until I could exert my body weight with my thumbs. So there is this young strangler in here just trying to get out. That would perhaps be a good title for an autobiography: Strangler in Paradise or something. [...]

Could you disclose to our readers some of your favourite and most interesting occult artifacts?
My most powerful, without a doubt, is the Random House Dictionary of the English language, unabridged. That is the best book anyone will ever read. To understand language is to understand what is hidden, which is to say, the occult. [...]

Have you ever experimented with any contemporary fashions? EG Steampunk, Young Fogey, GothLoli etc.
I've got nothing against any of that. Steampunks, sometimes at its more committed end, come up with some really useful ideas. I'm friends with people like Margaret Killjoy, who contributed to Dodgem Logic and also, I believe, actually invented and built a desalination unit (which turns seawater into fresh water). So that's useful. One of my favourite jokes is: "How many Steampunks does it take to change a light bulb? It takes two. One to change the light bulb and one to glue an unnecessary watch part to it." [...]

If you can, find a copy of the magazine. Highly recommended. 

I can hear the grass grow

Excerpt from an interesting analysis by Marc Sobel about I can hear the grass grow, Moore's forgotten strip (or is it a trip?) & adaptation of a song by British band The Move.

Read the complete article HERE. 

Hear the song and watch/read the strip HERE. 

 

The work has been originally published in 1988 in the third issue of  British music magazine, Heartbreak Hotel published by Willyprods. It was also reprinted in George Khoury's The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, published in 2003 by TwoMorrows.

Marc Sobel: "[...] Alan Moore’s ability to probe such deeply spiritual and intellectual concepts, while using the comics medium in a wholly original way, sets this short story apart. As an adaptation, this work of "graphic sound" offers a transcendent depiction of an acid trip, elevating a simple pop song into a pioneering work of imagination. As a comic strip, it shatters the traditional boundaries of print media while pushing the form to its limits. As a work of psychedelic art, it is a masterpiece on par with Huxley’s The Doors of Perception."

Read the complete article HERE. Hear/watch the song/strip HERE.
 

Dennis Knuckleyard in Dream!

An excerpt from an article posted on BleedingCool the 30th of April 2024. 

[...] the protagonist of The Great When was one Dennis Knuckleyard, and [...] Alan Moore came up with the name from a dream diary of his. "The only promising item that they've thrown up so far is an intriguing sounding name: Dennis Knuckleyard. I may find a place to use this in the future, or I may not." But it seems the name was also used as a pseudonym for Moore in a Northampton fanzine called Dream, with a story titled "My Protocol", listed – and then withdrawn – on eBay for £400, described as being "very rare, approx. 50 copies were made and sold mostly at local poetry reading events." Good luck hunting that!

You can read the complete piece HERE. And... let me know if you find a copy of Dream!