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.
I asked AM for an interview for a masters' thesis (a complicated process including handwritten letters to secret addresses, aided by the much missed Si Spencer) Alan gave me 6 hours of his time on the phone. What an extraordinarily generous and brilliant man he is.
He's incredibly generous with his time, after employing a few tactics to see that the person is coming from a sincere place. You must have passed his test with flying colors!
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.
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.
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 as floored by his productivity and inventiveness too. And I’m with you, for the most part, about Jerusalem: it’s a masterpiece, it sometimes asks more from the reader than it gives back, and it could easily lose 200 pages. I understand there are arguments to the effect that shaving any details would compromise its patterns and ideas — but it would also make the thing more readable and friendly.
But yes, overwhelmingly, the attitude is awe for the work, and appreciation for Moore as an complex, generous, conflicted person.
I interviewed Alan back in 1989 at forbidden planet in London on the occasion of AARGH. He was very kind to me. He features in my PhD dissertation. One of my first published articles is on his Blake poems. When I visited a Blake exhibit I sent him some postcards. All of this is to say his work is very important to me, and I have followed him my entire adult life.
But I learned so much from your work. You brought his voice back to me across almost 40 years. Thank you very much. You have every right to be proud.
Oh you have the key to his heart if you start talking to him about Blake. It’s one of the most compelling things about Moore, I think, that he’ll admit, gently, if he’s moved past some of his early influences — but he stays fiercely loyal to them. Blake’s one of the handful of topics that you can see him just igniting about, from the inside.
Sounds like a wonderful formative encounter, I’m really happy to hear that you enjoyed the piece, and that it took you back there.
Impressed by how this article flows effortlessly between eras, the books, controversies, disputes and mannerisms of one man. I'd never really thought about what it would take to write comics, now that I have, I find myself with the growing urge to read V for Vendetta and Watchmen and see what the hype is all about.
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!
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.
I asked AM for an interview for a masters' thesis (a complicated process including handwritten letters to secret addresses, aided by the much missed Si Spencer) Alan gave me 6 hours of his time on the phone. What an extraordinarily generous and brilliant man he is.
He's incredibly generous with his time, after employing a few tactics to see that the person is coming from a sincere place. You must have passed his test with flying colors!
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!
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.
Meanwhile, I'm pondering if I shall have yogurt or eggs for breakfast while wearing a robe I bought at Sears twenty years ago.
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.
Brilliant Writing.
Really captures Alan Moore.
Im not the writer so many on here are but ive come along all the way with Alans work & adore insights into Alan.
I loved Jerusalem however appreciate its probably the densest book ive ever read & it was a tough but fulfilling read.
Ive read every comic & im still astounded that Alan has ideas that work as mainstream comics, that work as outlier pieces & everything inbetween.
Alans work is always entertaining but the thing that works for me is that every book is interesting too.
Im sure im not doing him justice but thanks for this piece.
Im sure I will come back to read it again.
I’m as floored by his productivity and inventiveness too. And I’m with you, for the most part, about Jerusalem: it’s a masterpiece, it sometimes asks more from the reader than it gives back, and it could easily lose 200 pages. I understand there are arguments to the effect that shaving any details would compromise its patterns and ideas — but it would also make the thing more readable and friendly.
But yes, overwhelmingly, the attitude is awe for the work, and appreciation for Moore as an complex, generous, conflicted person.
Nice piece. Reads like a premature obituary … which I’m not sure Moore will 100% appreciate, but what the hell.
I interviewed Alan back in 1989 at forbidden planet in London on the occasion of AARGH. He was very kind to me. He features in my PhD dissertation. One of my first published articles is on his Blake poems. When I visited a Blake exhibit I sent him some postcards. All of this is to say his work is very important to me, and I have followed him my entire adult life.
But I learned so much from your work. You brought his voice back to me across almost 40 years. Thank you very much. You have every right to be proud.
Oh you have the key to his heart if you start talking to him about Blake. It’s one of the most compelling things about Moore, I think, that he’ll admit, gently, if he’s moved past some of his early influences — but he stays fiercely loyal to them. Blake’s one of the handful of topics that you can see him just igniting about, from the inside.
Sounds like a wonderful formative encounter, I’m really happy to hear that you enjoyed the piece, and that it took you back there.
Impressed by how this article flows effortlessly between eras, the books, controversies, disputes and mannerisms of one man. I'd never really thought about what it would take to write comics, now that I have, I find myself with the growing urge to read V for Vendetta and Watchmen and see what the hype is all about.
this is wonderful
SO GOOD!!! Thank you Alexander, excellent work
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!
Will do, Alex
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.
I’m excited to print this out and enjoy it Sunday morning. Congrats!
I couldn’t wait till Sunday. Great work, @Alexander Sorondo. Like all your profiles, I would have gladly read ten thousand more words of this.
And on the day of thanks, no less — I appreciate you diving right in and I’m really thrilled you enjoyed it!