Of all the pieces I've read on Alan Moore, this is the one that best captures his possibly unique mixture of pretension and self-deprecation, handling both aspects with appropriate seriousness (not buying too much into the hocus pocus, and not over-emphasising the bathos).
I didn't know he read DFW so late. His affection for Thomas Pynchon goes back decades (V reads 'V.' in the comic) and TP doubtless influenced the density of much of his work. I would have assumed he had kept tabs on Pynchon's descendents, but it seems as though his taste is shaped more by personal recommendations than, say, literary journals (or, God forbid, the internet).
Good observation (especially about “V.” in “VfV”). In the early ‘90s, after leaving DC, he seemed at pains to mention authors like Pynchon, and the fact that he normally reads very quickly but indulged himself by reading Gravity’s Rainbow slowly, over a couple months, to savor it.
Another factor in that pretension vs. self-deprecation dynamic is the fact that he doesn’t even have a high school education. When an interviewer asked if it’s true he’s an autodidact he said, “I even taught myself the word ‘autodidact.’”
Moore speaks often of his own class-consciousness, and how his social status has informed so much of his identity and worldview, but for a man of his generation I think it’s basically a euphemism for education-consciousness, diploma-consciousness; the fact that, right away, he had to work for a living. (In no time at all, he was a parent.)
Dude it’s such a wormhole: the two directions in which this essay really went into the weeds were (1) his mid-life crisis (of which his zealous turn into magic was actually the tail-end), and (2) his own troubled relation with his intelligence.
The education point is exactly right. Auto-didacticism tends to lead to distrust of institutions, conventions, the 'done thing' – and also a kind of anxiety about where you are in the social hierarchy (smarter than most professors but with no credentials to 'prove' it). I'm trying to write something about David Mamet, who couldn't be more different in his writing and politics, but there's a similar defiance there, an almost self-harming stubbornness, which I think comes in part from his bad early experiences in school and his subsequent rejection of traditional education.
A well crafted and reasonable piece on one of my biggest literary influences and one of the greatest living authors. This paints a very fair portrait of the man as someone a little garrulous and perhaps abrasive but nevertheless someone of endless merit and integrity, both as an individual and as an artist. I thought the postmodern structural play with the timelines and jumping back and forth was cute, if a little too cheeky at times for my liking (a complaint I have with moore’s own work at times). And I simply can’t countenance his ridiculous love for David Foster Wallace--the man was a hack, Infinite Jest is absolutely terrible, Moore should really know better--but even a GOAT should be afforded a few mistakes
i knew abt most of this already, but this was written with enough style and passion that i couldn't help but smile. excellent stuff!
Thanks for the praise, and cheers to reading so quickly!
I see where you're coming from with respect to Wallace: there were three pages of the essay that got nixed, early on, suggesting that you can see him change after Wallace's influence, but it's hidden (kinda) within his story collection ILLUMINATIONS. Whereas, in his earlier fiction, Moore needed a polyphony of voices (though you could see the style slowly cohering in JERUSALEM) what I think he discovered in Wallace -- especially the short story collections -- was a polyphony of literary *styles* instead of voices (e.g., the office memo, the one-sided therapy session, the senate hearing transcript, etc). The 200-page novel tucked into the center of that book, "What We Can Know About Thunderman," reads a bit like Moore's...literary Rumspringa. He employed all of Wallace's hijinks (plus a few more), got that out of his system, and then we get LONG LONDON.
*How did you like GREAT WHEN*, by the way? I'm really interested by how longtime readers embraced his transition -- especially since he kinda commenced that transition with a 1,200-page, coal-black, $30 hardcover with deliberately small type.
The structure of this piece is like a five hour labyrinthine conversation with Moore himself. And Moore sounds like a piece of work, too. I'll be thinking about this essay for a while. Great reading.
If I were to wheel out a single word, jigsaw of the entire universe on its lap, it would be “superb”, Alex. Never met Alan, but have seen quite a bit of Iain Sinclair and Brian Catling over the years. You conjure a world at once familiar and fantastically strange with great aplomb. Kudos.
Feels like a special commendation to get that sorta praise from someone who wasn’t already familiar with the subject. I’m really glad you liked it, and I’ll take those kudos to heart.
Ah, no, I haven’t MET Alan, but Iain and Brian are his comrades of old. I’ve READ Alan almost to death – his and mine. In fact, it’s fair, if a little mad, to say that Swamp Thing is one of the reasons I ended up living in Louisiana (which will be the subject of a newsletter in a few weeks). Cheers again.
Ah, my mistake — I only discovered Moorcock and Sinclair because of the research for this profile, only reading some of their essays along the way but Sinclair, himself, is one of the few writers who’s just as charming on camera as he is on the page.
This is a piece to be proud of, Alexander. I can tell you put a lot of work into it. I don't know much about Alan Moore, so I appreciate the opportunity to learn more about him through your piece. Good on TMR for publishing long-form features like this. Thanks!
Excellent work, as always. Reading this feels a bit like looking at the dead men in the daguerreotypes who don't know they're dead. All the decades and experiences intermingle, fade away, and come back to themselves. All of this has already happened, but in reading this profile, it's all happening again.
Also, all this talk of magic and the fourth dimension and non-linear time made me think of this BBC series called The Living and the Dead, starring Colin Morgan. It's more traditionally gothic than Alan Moore's occult stuff, but I couldn't get it out of my head while reading this. Might have to do a rewatch now.
Oh that sounds good! I’ve consumed so much British entertainment on YouTube because of this piece — I’m even reading Dickens now for the first time ever. Wondering if this is a phase or a whole new horizon I’ll be exploring for a while.
And thank you for giving your time and attention to the piece! I’m glad it left that semi-goth impression.
Yeah, yeah—Frank Sinatra had a cold, but did he SUMMON A DEMON?
Of all the pieces I've read on Alan Moore, this is the one that best captures his possibly unique mixture of pretension and self-deprecation, handling both aspects with appropriate seriousness (not buying too much into the hocus pocus, and not over-emphasising the bathos).
I didn't know he read DFW so late. His affection for Thomas Pynchon goes back decades (V reads 'V.' in the comic) and TP doubtless influenced the density of much of his work. I would have assumed he had kept tabs on Pynchon's descendents, but it seems as though his taste is shaped more by personal recommendations than, say, literary journals (or, God forbid, the internet).
Good observation (especially about “V.” in “VfV”). In the early ‘90s, after leaving DC, he seemed at pains to mention authors like Pynchon, and the fact that he normally reads very quickly but indulged himself by reading Gravity’s Rainbow slowly, over a couple months, to savor it.
Another factor in that pretension vs. self-deprecation dynamic is the fact that he doesn’t even have a high school education. When an interviewer asked if it’s true he’s an autodidact he said, “I even taught myself the word ‘autodidact.’”
Moore speaks often of his own class-consciousness, and how his social status has informed so much of his identity and worldview, but for a man of his generation I think it’s basically a euphemism for education-consciousness, diploma-consciousness; the fact that, right away, he had to work for a living. (In no time at all, he was a parent.)
Dude it’s such a wormhole: the two directions in which this essay really went into the weeds were (1) his mid-life crisis (of which his zealous turn into magic was actually the tail-end), and (2) his own troubled relation with his intelligence.
The education point is exactly right. Auto-didacticism tends to lead to distrust of institutions, conventions, the 'done thing' – and also a kind of anxiety about where you are in the social hierarchy (smarter than most professors but with no credentials to 'prove' it). I'm trying to write something about David Mamet, who couldn't be more different in his writing and politics, but there's a similar defiance there, an almost self-harming stubbornness, which I think comes in part from his bad early experiences in school and his subsequent rejection of traditional education.
A well crafted and reasonable piece on one of my biggest literary influences and one of the greatest living authors. This paints a very fair portrait of the man as someone a little garrulous and perhaps abrasive but nevertheless someone of endless merit and integrity, both as an individual and as an artist. I thought the postmodern structural play with the timelines and jumping back and forth was cute, if a little too cheeky at times for my liking (a complaint I have with moore’s own work at times). And I simply can’t countenance his ridiculous love for David Foster Wallace--the man was a hack, Infinite Jest is absolutely terrible, Moore should really know better--but even a GOAT should be afforded a few mistakes
i knew abt most of this already, but this was written with enough style and passion that i couldn't help but smile. excellent stuff!
Thanks for the praise, and cheers to reading so quickly!
I see where you're coming from with respect to Wallace: there were three pages of the essay that got nixed, early on, suggesting that you can see him change after Wallace's influence, but it's hidden (kinda) within his story collection ILLUMINATIONS. Whereas, in his earlier fiction, Moore needed a polyphony of voices (though you could see the style slowly cohering in JERUSALEM) what I think he discovered in Wallace -- especially the short story collections -- was a polyphony of literary *styles* instead of voices (e.g., the office memo, the one-sided therapy session, the senate hearing transcript, etc). The 200-page novel tucked into the center of that book, "What We Can Know About Thunderman," reads a bit like Moore's...literary Rumspringa. He employed all of Wallace's hijinks (plus a few more), got that out of his system, and then we get LONG LONDON.
*How did you like GREAT WHEN*, by the way? I'm really interested by how longtime readers embraced his transition -- especially since he kinda commenced that transition with a 1,200-page, coal-black, $30 hardcover with deliberately small type.
The structure of this piece is like a five hour labyrinthine conversation with Moore himself. And Moore sounds like a piece of work, too. I'll be thinking about this essay for a while. Great reading.
I’m really happy to hear that — thank you for giving it the time and attention, and leaving a nice word!
If I were to wheel out a single word, jigsaw of the entire universe on its lap, it would be “superb”, Alex. Never met Alan, but have seen quite a bit of Iain Sinclair and Brian Catling over the years. You conjure a world at once familiar and fantastically strange with great aplomb. Kudos.
Feels like a special commendation to get that sorta praise from someone who wasn’t already familiar with the subject. I’m really glad you liked it, and I’ll take those kudos to heart.
Ah, no, I haven’t MET Alan, but Iain and Brian are his comrades of old. I’ve READ Alan almost to death – his and mine. In fact, it’s fair, if a little mad, to say that Swamp Thing is one of the reasons I ended up living in Louisiana (which will be the subject of a newsletter in a few weeks). Cheers again.
Ah, my mistake — I only discovered Moorcock and Sinclair because of the research for this profile, only reading some of their essays along the way but Sinclair, himself, is one of the few writers who’s just as charming on camera as he is on the page.
Please tag me in that post or send it over to me!
This is a piece to be proud of, Alexander. I can tell you put a lot of work into it. I don't know much about Alan Moore, so I appreciate the opportunity to learn more about him through your piece. Good on TMR for publishing long-form features like this. Thanks!
Thank you for saying so — and you’re right: it took forever, and good on TMR for letting me park my trailer in their living room.
Excellent work, as always. Reading this feels a bit like looking at the dead men in the daguerreotypes who don't know they're dead. All the decades and experiences intermingle, fade away, and come back to themselves. All of this has already happened, but in reading this profile, it's all happening again.
Also, all this talk of magic and the fourth dimension and non-linear time made me think of this BBC series called The Living and the Dead, starring Colin Morgan. It's more traditionally gothic than Alan Moore's occult stuff, but I couldn't get it out of my head while reading this. Might have to do a rewatch now.
Oh that sounds good! I’ve consumed so much British entertainment on YouTube because of this piece — I’m even reading Dickens now for the first time ever. Wondering if this is a phase or a whole new horizon I’ll be exploring for a while.
And thank you for giving your time and attention to the piece! I’m glad it left that semi-goth impression.
I’m excited to print this out and enjoy it Sunday morning. Congrats!
Very dope stuff