Alexx's Patreon Update: October 2019

[alexxkay]

I’ve had a good couple of months.

• Did a proofreading pass on my fellow-annotator Joe Linton’s forthcoming book about Alan Moore’s Crossed +100 (and its spinoffs). Post-apocalyptic cannibal rape-zombies are not really my thing, but I’m generally willing to help a fellow Moore scholar out :-)
• Finished “Round the Bend” section 12, with Dusty Springfield (plus special guests Charlie Chaplin and Patrick “The Prisoner” McGoohan). Some highlights:
  • "The House that Jack Built" describes a series of odd, possibly insane people, and may have been an influence on Moore's The Bojeffries Saga. Within the song, "the house that Jack built" might be a madhouse, an allusion to the Tower of Babel, or perhaps even a metaphor for the world.
  • While the literal meaning of "heave a brick" certainly applies here, this is likely also a reference to Krazy Kat, in which a complex (and arguably genderqueer) set of romantic relationships are mediated by repeated acts of brick heaving.
  • "amoratic" - "Aromatic", "romantic", "amor" (Latin "love") "Attic" (Ancient Greek).
    • "amor Attic" may be read as "Greek love", which is itself a euphemism for homosexual activity.
  • This sentence calls back to Section 3, especially paragraph 50. It similarly surveys the historical development of English as a visionary language, but now extends that history to mainstream pop culture in the 1960s.
  • Bringing up these two prominent political Cold War figures in contrast with The Beatles subtly brings in the primary theme from Moore's pornographic opus Lost Girls: the opposition of war and creativity.
  • "surrealisation" - "The realization", "surreal -ization" (as will soon become explicit, this section is about the way surrealism bled into mainstream culture in the 1960s).
  • Described here is the Village's ultimate means of pursuing and retrieving prisoners who attempt escape: a mysterious white blob called Rover. It's a very simple creation, which sounds silly when described, but is (at least to most viewers) uncannily frightening in practice.
• The usual keeping up with integrating reader comments on the various projects.

Projected for next time and beyond: Finishing up the final section of “Round the Bend” – first pass. Then, right into revision work on the whole chapter, as I’ve developed better ways of handling the task of annotating this specific chapter in the (checks…) roughly 2.5 years that I’ve been working on it, on and off. Once I’m happy with the state of this chapter, I will probably do one or two small, palate-cleaner projects before diving into work on the rest of Jerusalem.