Polish Illuminations

Above, cover of Iluminacje, the Polish edition of Illuminations published by Echa in 2023.

On the upper side of the image, you can notice that they involved a lot of translators!

 

More info HERE. 

Moore Iluminace by Mikulas Podprocky

Art by Mikulas Podprocky

Above, a great portrait of our Writer from Northampton by Czech artist Mikulas Podprocky.

The image has been used as cover for the Czech edition of Illuminations (Iluminace) published by Argo even if the final printed image seems a bit different, as filtered to feel more "material". I confess I prefer the original one.

More info about the artist at Podprocky Artstation page, here.

Iluminace published by Argo

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.

The comics medium is sublime

Excerpts from an interview published on Newsarama. The complete piece is available HERE.

Moore is talking about his 'What We Can Know About Thunderman' story from Illuminations.
Alan Moore: [...] The comics medium is perfect. It is sublime. The comics industry is a dysfunctional hellhole. [...] The medium can do anything. Its potential is still almost completely untapped. So it was attempting to express my love of the medium, some of the wonderful people who worked in it, and to also express my horror at the fact that this this little offshoot, the superhero genre, has become a monoculture that's in danger of taking down at least a considerable part of the comics medium with it when superhero movies finally aren't interesting. When that happens, my worry is that a lot of the comic shops won't be able to continue and a lot of interesting independent comics would perhaps not have outlets.

Italian Illuminations

Italian publisher Fanucci Editore has announced the upcoming publication of Illuminations. The release date is set for the 27th of October 2023. The book is already available for pre-order. 

For more info check the publisher's site and Facebook page.

Optimism vs. pessimism, critics and healthy escapism

The Brazilian edition of Illuminations, published by Aleph in November 2022, includes an exclusive 15-question interview with Alan Moore by Ramon Vitral. You can order the book HERE. 

Below, you can read 3 questions/answers, in their original English form, with the permission of Vitral & the publisher. Mille grazie, Ramon! :)

Ramon Vitral is a journalist who writes mainly about comics; he is about to publish Vitralizado - HQs e o Mundo (“Vitralizado” is the name of Vitral’s blog and “HQs e o Mundo” can be translated as "Comics and the World"), a collection of interviews with comic book authors from Brazil and all over the world including international names such as Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, Emil Ferris, Rutu Modan, Charles Burns, Naoki Urasawa and many others. 

Ramon Vitral’s blog: HERE. You can order Vitralizado HERE.
 

smoky note: Illuminations has been published in Brazil in November 2022, so Vitral’s introduction reflects the political situation of that time. But can we really say things are going better now? 

Anyway, happy reading!

Ramon Vitral: We are living in very strange times all over the world, but Brazil is going through an extraordinarily catastrophic period. We have a far-right president, a man who has repeatedly expressed (and acted on) his authoritarian and anti-democratic views. It seems to me that the situation in the UK is not as catastrophic, but you are still living in the aftermath of Brexit and Boris Johnson's period as prime minister. I say this to express how the publication of your new book and the opportunity to talk to you are a breath of fresh air amidst all this obscurantism.

Here are my questions:
The word “Illuminations” sounds extremely pertinent in this dark period we are experiencing. Is there any light that allows you to feel some optimism about the future of humanity?
Alan Moore: Optimism, whether justified or not, is the only functional position, and pessimism, no matter how well-founded, is almost always useless; a surrender to circumstances that makes those circumstances all but inevitable. On nearly every front – the continuing destruction of our environment; the obvious intent of the world’s billionaires to hoover up everyone else’s money; the intrusion of surveillance culture into every human life on the planet; the destabilisation of consensus reality beneath a landslide of ludicrous bullshit; the rise of something that isn’t even fascism; the mass desire to escape into fantasy, or Second Life, or the Metaverse, as if that was existentially possible – our species’ situation appears hopelessly terminal. My own optimism, such as it is, is born of my perception that human development may be following the alchemical formula of solve et coagula, where solve is the process of analysis, of taking something apart to its smallest component in order to fully understand the whole, and coagula is the process of synthesis, of putting the components back together into an improved form. It is my hope that the fragmentation that we see almost everywhere in society is the last, necessary stage of solve, of the dismantling of the old world, in order for coagula to begin with its building of the new. It may be a fragile hope, but it is the one source of illumination that I can discern in this otherwise pestilential moral blackout.

Ramon Vitral: Literature, science fiction, comics and other art forms are often spoken of as part of the “entertainment industry.” What is your opinion of this co-option of artists and their works by an industry?
Alan Moore: If art is not on some level entertaining then it will have great difficulty in conveying its message to all but a tiny audience. On the other hand, if it is only empty entertainment then it loses all its power and meaning as art, making the enterprise pointless save for commercial purposes. What I propose is art powerful enough to shake the city walls, and popular enough to engage with a multitude. I hope that my work is sufficiently entertaining for the reader to absorb its content, but I have never seen myself as an entertainer. Fortunately, my critics assure me that I need have no worries on that score.

Ramon Vitral: You have already classified superhero comics as “unhealthy escapism.” Why do you consider them “unhealthy escapism”? And what do you consider to be “healthy escapism”?
Alan Moore: I think that in the 1980s people were declaring that comics had grown up, when actually they’d just met the emotional age of the audience coming in the opposite direction. At their very outset, with Siegel and Schuster’s Superman, superheroes were much-needed Depression-era fantasies of working-class empowerment, by working-class creators in what was then a working-class medium intended for working-class readers. Now, comics are priced and packaged pretty much exclusively by and for middle-aged and middle-class hobbyists, and therefore serve as empowerment fantasies for the already-empowered. I think that their protracted existence into the present day is part of a panicked reaction against the world’s mounting complexity: people become scared and anxious, understandably, when faced with a world too complicated to be understood or controlled. When the narrative of modern life becomes too complex to be endured, perhaps many people feel the compulsion to retreat to a simpler narrative which, though it may be delusional nonsense, they can at least understand. The conspiracy-theory jamboree of the Trump years provides a perfect example. The QAnon concept of subterranean Democrat paedophile demons feasting on the adrenal glands of children poses a ridiculous, simplistic and non-existent comic-book threat, which can only be averted by an equally ridiculous, simplistic and non-existent comic-book hero, namely ‘The Donald’. Superheroes in their current incarnation, children’s stories that are seemingly the only narratives that today’s reluctant adults are prepared to engage with, have played a major role in the infantilization of western culture during this last decade, which I would argue has contributed greatly to the rise of populist fascism during the same period. Since-disowned works such as Marvelman and Watchmen weren’t intended as a revitalisation of this flagging genre so much as a satire and a criticism of it. The superhero today can only be an invulnerable compensatory figure for a nation afraid to sleep without a handgun on the night-table, or a proudly-brandished embodiment of American exceptionalism. I presume they will only finally die or fall out of favour when the psychological need for them dies, which, given the current state of culture and society, may be some time. 

You can order Vitralizado HERE

International Illuminations

Above, cover for Iluminações, the Brazilian edition of Illuminations, published by Editora Aleph in November 2022. Editor: Tiago Lyra; translator to Portuguese: Adriano Scandolara; cover artist: Pedro Inoue. More info at the publisher's site: HERE.

Below, cover for Iluminaciones, the Spanish edition of Illuminations, to be published by Nocturna Ediciones in April. Translator to Spanish: Juan Trejo.

More info at the publisher's site: HERE.

Thunderman: Paul Hostetler did it!

Art by Paul Hostetler

American artist Paul Hostetler did it! He created a 1-page comics by using Moore's script included in "What we can know about Thunderman", a short (well not so short...) story from his Illuminations book.

 

All the details are HERE, at Hostetler's site.

And if you happen to be Mr. Alan Moore, reading this, and thinking, "My career in comics cannot end on such a note," we would be happy to have you and your verbose, asiatic, quaquaversal scripts back in the medium. - Hostetler

For more info about the artist: his official website - Instagram - Twitter

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.

The Queen, Thunderman and Long London

Excerpt from a great interview by Séamas O'Reilly published on his site few days ago.

You can read the complete piece HERE.

[...] This interview took place on 14th September. As it was six days after the Queen’s death, I began by offering what little consolation I could to one of Her Majesty’s most doting subjects.

As we speak, we’re all in mourning here in Walthamstow. How are you finding yourself in these sad times?

Alan Moore: I’m taking each day as it comes. Being familiar with this country for nearly 69 years now, I have been avoiding any contact with the media or the world since we got the sad news. I figure that give it another a month and it might have died down to a manageable level.

There seems to be a fear within the media that they’re going to get leapt on by a public clamour which does not really appear to exist

I notice that most of my comedian friends are apparently only commenting within a fairly exclusive site where they can avoid getting piled upon by, what have been referred to as, flag-shaggers. I’ve seen there’s been a couple of nice comments. My friend Barney Farmer had noticed that a lot of food banks had been closed for the queen’s funeral, which is of course what she would have wanted. Barney posted a picture of the Swedish Chef from the Muppets giving one of his signature kisses. These are certainly eventful times. [...]

might the passing of the Queen mark a psychic shift in how people relate to that institution? That her being replaced by a King who enjoys a slightly less worshipful reverence, might make some of the arguments against the wider institution break through?

That had occurred to me. That this might be the beginning of the end of the Royal Family, which perhaps wouldn’t be before time. It’s about how relevant the Royal Family are to our current state of affairs. I tend to consider that, with or without a monarchy, this country will probably carry on as the conservative/fascist utopia that it has been for a long while.

I’m not sure how much, at least in the 21st century, that was dependent on the Royal Family. It would be a step in the right direction though, if only that. 

[...]

So maybe you can assuage my embarrassment and talk a little about how you assembled such a big, complete world for [What We Can Know About Thunderman]?

Well, it came from a strange place, it came from something I think I have one of the characters in there expressing, which is that leaving comics is one thing — and I’d done that, which seemed like a massive relief — but stopping thinking about comics is another. Especially when you’ve been working at them for forty years, which is a fairly long career by anyone’s standards. So, I tend to find these annoying, often negative, thoughts about comics swirling up in my mind when I didn’t want them there.

And there was also an image that came with them, it was something to do with, I dunno, old copies of Superboy or something like that. Some kind of Curt Swan scene with someone walking across one of those generic midwestern landscapes that used to appear in Superboy and adventure comics. And, coming the other way, there was somebody who was one of the original Legion of Superheroes in their original, twelve-year-old-kid incarnations. And I’d got no idea what this meant but there was a sort of obsessive quality about it.

So, when I was putting together the proposal for Illuminations I thought this would be a good place to actually exorcise some of that stuff as some form of art rather than some angry mutterings in the bath.

[...]

Will there be more of these short stories, is there a drawer full of these or you can return to the unwieldy space operas?

I’m probably not going to return to the space operas anytime soon but, for the time being, what I am committed to is a quintet of books I promised, which is the Long London series. I’m about halfway through the first one, which is entitled, at least at the moment, The Great When. I’m having enormous fun with them, when I get the chance to write them, which is one of the reasons why I’m finding the publicity circuit a bit of a pressure, because I’m just aching to get back to where I left Long London.

The first book is all set in 1949 with London pretty much destroyed, in pieces, and the national psychology in a similar state. Everybody important in magic has just died. Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Arthur Machen, Harry Price, Uncle Tom Cobbley, so there’s a gaping hole in English magic and English psychology.

It’s nice to get back into London again, it’s a city that have always enjoyed fictionally. I haven’t been down there for years but to get back into that fictional territory where there are all these figures from the different periods that I’ll be setting the various books in. I suppose those figures are the reason why I wanted to write the book. There’s something in those kinds of liminal characters and their histories and how they all interwove.

I’m talking about people like Prince Monolulu, the imaginary African, who was probably the most famous black man in Britain in his time. He was a racing tipster and he was acting the exotic very skillfully to work his audience.

People like Iron Foot Jack, the King of the Bohemians, with his huge built-up shoe. Austin Osman Spare figures quite prominently, and odd figures like John Gawsworth who was Arthur Machen’s biographer and publisher. Arthur Machen’s a big off stage presence, having died a couple of years before. It’s taking off from some ideas of Arthur Machen’s, along with the way that they overlapped with other bits of London lore and legendary London figures.  

 The complete interview is available HERE.

Chameleon Boy, tv series, theism

Photo by Josh Hight

Excerpts from a fantastic interview published on GQ few days ago. By M.H. Miller with amazing photos by Josh Hight. The complete interview is available HERE.

Alan Moore: [...] I suppose the comics were a very big thing in my life until the age of about 14, 15. I had absorbed an awful lot of completely pointless and unnecessary lore about superheroes, all of these excessive, insane, meaningless details of continuity. I have a very sticky memory. Not so much these days, but back in my pomp, I remembered everything. It was very embarrassing when, at a comics convention that I attended after becoming a professional, they had a trivia quiz that they persuaded me to take part in. And, horrifyingly, I knew the secret identity of Chameleon Boy [a minor member of DC’s Legion of Superheroes]. That was when I realized that, no, you gotta back away from this. It’s sort of an illness.

[...] I would be the last person to want to sit through any adaptations of my work. From what I’ve heard of them, it would be enormously punishing. It would be torturous, and for no very good reason. There was an incident—probably a concluding incident, for me. I received a bulky parcel, through Federal Express, that arrived here in my sedate little living room. It turned out to contain a powder blue barbecue apron with a hydrogen symbol on the front.
And a frank letter from the showrunner of the Watchmen television adaptation, which I hadn’t heard was a thing at that point. But the letter, I think it opened with, “Dear Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen.” That wasn’t the best opener. It went on through a lot of, what seemed to me to be, neurotic rambling. “Can you at least tell us how to pronounce ‘Ozymandias’?” [Another of the vigilante characters in Watchmen.] I got back with a very abrupt and probably hostile reply telling him that I’d thought that Warner Brothers were aware that they, nor any of their employees, shouldn’t contact me again for any reason. I explained that I had disowned the work in question, and partly that was because the film industry and the comics industry seemed to have created things that had nothing to do with my work, but which would be associated with it in the public mind. I said, “Look, this is embarrassing to me. I don’t want anything to do with you or your show. Please don’t bother me again.”

[...] I’m an atheist. No, there wasn’t some guy in the clouds who created everything. However, the pagan idea of gods, and the way they were regarded in the classical world, that interests me. The idea that these gods were essences of whatever their particular field of endeavor was, that Hermes is the essence of language and intelligence and also theft. I can accept gods on that level, that they are pure ideas that may have become, through their complexity, self-aware, or which have become so complex that we perceive them as being self-aware, whether they are or not. So it’s perhaps a heavily qualified theism, not quite atheism. [...]

Read the interview HERE

Moore The Merrier

Excerpt from a 2-page interview (titled "Moore The Merrier") contained in Big Issue North n.1454, 17-23 OCTOBER 2022. Interview conducted by Dan Whitehead.

Buy a copy HERE!

[...] “I started out doing comedy stuff,” he explains in his unmistakable Midlands baritone rumble. Indeed, his first published work was as a cartoonist in the 1970s for music magazine

Sounds, for which he supplied the anarchic comic strip Roscoe Moscow under the wonderfully punk nom de plume Curt Vile.

“After the early stages of my career in America, I think that people tended to see me as that guy who does the dark gritty dystopian material and that I was some kind of grim, dark gritty guy. Even in the most horrific things that I’ve done, there’s generally a joke or two in there somewhere. I like humour. Nobody wants to be a dark British dystopian guy forever, you know? it’s not a good look.”

His playfully dry humour is definitely to the fore in several of the stories in Illuminations. [...]

Order your copy HERE!

The Quietus Moore: on fantasy, capitalism and VR

Excerpts from a really informative interview published on The Quietus few days ago.

The complete interview is available HERE. 

Alan Moore:[ ...] I have to admit, I was never a fan of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, I never watched Game of Thrones. I think a lot of fantasy is kind of – perhaps lazy is too strong a word but something in that region. It falls back on standard tropes. Whereas fantasy should always be unique and new. For me, a wonderful fantasy would be Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, which hasn’t got a dragon or a wizard or a dwarf. It’s just about this crumbling castle and its ritual-bound inhabitants. Or Brian Catling’s Vorrh trilogy. Which is a completely original idea: this neglected garden of Eden that has overgrown space and time. The problem with fantasy at the moment is that most of it is purely escapist. It isn’t fantasy that’s going to tell you about the real world. It’s not using its symbols to illuminate, but give you access to another world that doesn’t have the problems and responsibilities of this one. I mean, take the Metaverse, which is a massive data harvesting project, apparently. I think people are trying to bail out of this universe into – I dunno – the Marvel Cinematic Universe...

[...]

We need to move beyond capitalism. We need to move urgently beyond growth and our obsession with growth, because that is a fantasy and it always has been. We do not live in a world of infinite resources, so infinite growth is clearly not possible. It’s becoming very urgent. We don't have to be ruled by GDP. There are other ways that progress can be measured: the wellbeing of a country, for example.

A lot of this would entail the introduction of a universal basic income scheme. Which again is very possible. There are places where they’ve tried it out. It seems to be a very workable thing. And we know that the money’s there. The thing is that amongst conservative thinkers, it is unthinkable that people should get something for nothing, even though that is what their entire careers are often based upon.

We need something drastic very soon. A lot of this stuff, it’s not going to work unless there’s some top-down adjustments. Big initiatives like the Green New Deal, which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was pushing in America. I don’t think the Green New Deal actually dares to talk about the possibility of a life after capitalism. But at least it sounded like people started to address the issues. We need to show people what a world beyond growth might look like.

[...]

The idea of a VR future is, at the moment, quite a frightening and disturbing one. And we’re going to be in the hands of big tech companies who simply want all of your data so that they can sell it. But that is not to say that there won’t be possibilities in the idea of virtual reality. Technology is pretty much neutral, it depends on how we use it.

I experienced a little bit of VR and it is a very compelling experience where your body is not obeying your instructions. I have tried to step off a VR cliff, knowing that there was solid floor there, and I’ve been unable to do it. I’ve tried doing it with my eyes closed. Now, that didn’t work either, because my brain was telling me, ‘no, we don’t step off a cliff, even with eyes closed’. That's worrying, but it does indicate the depth of effect of this technology. And it occurred to me that you could recreate a transcendent experience which is very rarely visited upon people by making that available through something like virtual reality.

The first time I heard about virtual reality, I said somewhat cynically, ‘Oh, yeah, like there’s another kind…’ because we already have a virtual reality, it’s just that our headset is our head. We don’t experience reality directly, it’s compiled somewhere on the loom of our consciousness from the sensory expressions that we receive. And we do that moment by moment. So it’s not that big a leap between reality as we experience it and virtual reality. Would it be possible to recreate a mystical experience using VR? It would take a great deal of artistry. [...]

Complete interview HERE. 

Guardian Live online event: Stewart Lee interview

The 3rd of October Stewart Lee interviewed Moore, in a the Guardian Live online event, on his upcoming Illuminations book. Now the whole video is available on YouTube, HERE.

In their email to the event subscribers the Guardian Live staff writes:

We have also included below a reading list of writers and works mentioned by Alan and Stewart during the discussion. [...] 

Reading List

Alan and Stewart talked about several different writers who had influenced Alan's work - and a few of you have asked for a reading list. Here are some of the authors and books they discussed...

• When talking about the story "Illuminations," Stewart referenced Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury - a story about lost childhood. The character in Moore's story finds a copy of The Silver Locusts by Bradbury in a junk shop. 
• When they spoke about Moore's story "The Improbably Conscious High-Energy State", Stewart compared Moore's experimental writing to Italo Calvino.
• When talking about the story "American Light: An Appreciation" Stewart said it read like an affectionate parody of 50s-60s beat poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Alan Ginsberg. Alan is a subscriber to Kevin Ring's Beat Scene magazine. 
• When talking about the first story, "Hypothetical Lizard", Stewart said he was reminded of the grotesque fantasy world of Clark Ashton Smith's novels. He also referenced the illustrations of Barry Windsor-Smith - particularly for Conan: Red Nails. 
• When talking about Northampton in Alan's work, Stewart referred to A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre. They both talked about Steve Aylett, in particular LINT, which contains what Stewart called a similar "collision of words that ought not to go together" - and Stewart recommended another title by Aylett, Hyperthick.
• Alan said the first of his new Long London series, The Great When - is influenced by Arthur Machen's writing, set in London - particularly his novel The Green Round and the short story, "N".  
• Alan talked about writing about specific places - in his case Northampton and London - and referred to William Hope Hodgson's novel The House on the Borderland, which was inspired by Hodgson seeing a house balanced precariously at the top of a clifftop chasm in Galway. In the 60s Iris Murdoch wrote The Unicorn after visiting the same place - both novels were similarly about a recluse threatened by supernatural visitations from below. 
• When asked what he'd recommend for a 10 year old boy to read, Alan recommended Alan Garner - in particular his latest book, Treacle Walker. He also read Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost at the age of 10.
• When asked his favourite ghost story, Alan picked Lost Hearts by MR James. He also praised the ghost stories of Robert Aickman. 

You can watch the whole video HERE.

More HERE at Bleedingcool too. 

Gormenghast, Internet and enlightening people

Excerpts from a Guardian interview published today. The complete article is available here. 

Alan Moore: "[The Gormenghast novels] were probably the first books where I began to understand just what you could do with writing: how he could conjure this entire complex environment and these almost fluorescent characters that stayed in your mind for ever”.

[...] "When the internet first became a thing," he says, "I made the decision that this doesn’t sound like anything that I need. I had a feeling that there might be another shoe to drop – and regarding this technology, as it turned out, there was an Imelda Marcos wardrobe full of shoes to drop. I felt that if society was going to morph into a massive social experiment, then it might be a good idea if there was somebody outside the petri dish." He makes do, instead, with an internet-savvy assistant: "He can bring me pornography, cute pictures of cats and abusive messages from people."

[...] "I’m probably a pretty much unreconstructed member of the psychedelic left from 1970, where the agenda was just: let’s drop LSD in the reservoirs and thus enlighten everybody. Luckily, before I could implement that, I did grow the fuck up and realise [it] would be a terrible idea. But nevertheless the idea of enlightening people as a way of changing society probably remained my strongest directive."

You can read the complete article here.

Alan Moore presents... Illuminations

A few minutes ago Waterstones published a short Alan Moore video presenting his upcoming Illuminations book. The complete video is available HERE.

Alan Moore: With prose fiction, you are able to create the finished work right there and then. [...] The words that you type up on the page, that is the finished work.

It's incredibly liberating to just be me and a keyboard, to not have to consider anything else.

[...] there is an awful lot to be said for just having it as one person and their mind and an empty sheet of paper.

That is probably the ultimate thrill of writing. [...]

Watch the whole video HERE.

Neil Gaiman on Illuminations

Illuminations is a wonderful collection, brilliant and often moving. A few are stories I've loved for years (in one case, for decades), some were new to me, often managing to be both mind-expanding and cosmic while utterly rooted in our urban reality, written in language that coruscates, concatenates and glitters. But the short stories in this book also turn out to be a sort of camouflage, or a frame, for 'What We Can Know About Thunderman,' a short novel that's a scabrous, monstrous, often hilarious, unmasking and reinvention of the people who made the comics, and the lives destroyed by the four colour funnies. It's Alan Moore's Guernica, a time-hopping ontological Imaginary Story that refuses to leave your head after you've read it. - Neil Gaiman

Regular edition - Limited edition

Illuminations: Moore in conversation with Stewart Lee

Guardian Live Event

Monday 3 October 2022, 8pm–9pm BST

Legendary comic book writer Alan Moore will talk to comedian Stewart Lee about his first ever short story collection, Illuminations.

Ticket will give access to the livestream event and the on-demand recording.

Details HERE.

On Edgar Allan Poe

 

I would like to thank Edgar Allan Poe for taking time off from the torment of his life to invent the short story—still the best form for a young writer to learn their craft, & still the most versatile vehicle when they're elderly and bent beneath the weight of all those words.
Alan Moore, from the Acknowledgements section of Illuminations

Source: The Hudson Review

Illuminations, published by Bloomsbury, will be available in hardback, eBook and audiobook on 11 October 2022. 

Illuminations contents

Above and below, pictures from a proof copy shared on Instagram by Kenny Chan, here.

The contents list reveals the title of the 9 short stories included in:

• Hypotethical Lizard
• Not Even Legend
• Location, Location, Location
• Cold Reading
• The Improbably Complex High-Energy State
• Illuminations
• What We Can Know About Thunderman
• American Light: An Appreciation
• And, at the Last, Just to Be Done with Silence 

The book, published by Bloomsbury, will be available in hardback, eBook and audiobook on 11 October 2022. 

You can get some hints about the stories HERE and HERE.