Alexx's Patreon Update: June 2021

[alexxkay]

Alexx's Patreon Update: June, 2021

Productivity streak continues!

· Spent a week immersed in ancestry.co.uk, researching the real-world equivalents of the Warren family in Jerusalem. In addition to an interactive family tree storing lots of raw data, I distilled some significant findings into their own page on the annotations site.

· Finished annotating chapter 2 of Jerusalem. Sadly, the most significant findings were all historic facts that Moore changed to fit his story better. Of the remainder, some highlights:

o "spiralling away in countless fainter and more distant repetitions" - Moore seems to be comparing the sound to a fractal such as The Mandelbrot Set (which was also the working title for Moore's unfinished project Big Numbers).

o “Pepper’s Ghost” is a kind of stage illusion using a large sheet of plate glass, named (somewhat unfairly) after an early popularizer of the effet in the 1860s. It is still used to this day.

o “Highbury Barn […] the shade of Hamlet’s father” – Highbury Barn was at this time a performance building in Highbury, a district of North London. In 1863, scenes from Hamlet were performed there using Pepper’s Ghost, to “great attraction“. Moore previously referenced this as part of his performance piece The Highbury Working in the track “Pepper’s Ghost“.

· Annotated chapter 3 of Jerusalem. Highlights:

o “in the 1960s when it was all whatsit, all Dickensian and that. It must have been like really nice.” – There are multiple levels of mistake/joke going on here. Firstly, Charles Dickens died in 1870, almost a century before the 1960s. Secondly, the word “Dickensian” is very often used to refer to Victorian conditions of poverty and injustice, but here Marla seems to think of it as a positive thing. But of course, while “Dickensian” generally connotes the Victorian period, the poverty and injustice that Dickens decried have hardly vanished, as Marla herself can attest. And, at least in some ways, things do seem to have been better for the poor of Northampton during the 1960s, so her nostalgia is in line with the overall nostalgia of Jerusalem.

o As a person, I try to be kind and cooperative. But as a fallible human being, I take a savage joy in discovering that some influential 50-year-old scholarship was wrong wrong wrongity-wrong wrong! An earlier version of the below note appeared when I was working on the Round the Bend chapter, but at that time said something like "I don't know why Michael Harrison makes this connection". I have since figured out why, and it comes down to extremely shoddy research on his part, which unfortunately has been taken at face value by scholars for 5 decades…

§ "all hail Kaphoozelum, the harlot of Jerusalem" - Although Moore suggests, both here and in the chapter Round the Bend, that J. K. Stephen wrote this line, in fact he seems not to have. The story of Kaphoozelum actually begins with "The Great Comic Songs of Ka-Foozle-Um", by S. Oxon (identified elsewhere as Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford) and Frederick Blume, published in New York in 1866 (when J.K.S. was seven years old). The song is silly and mildly romantic, if racist. However, the folk process quickly produced many pornographic variants. These varied in their wording (and spelling), but the line given multiple times in Jerusalem is a typical version of the first half of the chorus. The only links with J. K. Stephen seem to have emerged from some shockingly bad research on the part of Ripperologist Michael Harrison which subsequently spread to many other sources, eventually reaching Alan Moore. Per Wikipedia, Harrison claims that various mental stresses "provoked Stephen to act out his own poem "Air: Kaphoozelum", in which the protagonist kills 10 harlots.^[18]" There are multiple errors in these claims.

§ Firstly, Stephen did compose and publish a satirical song called "The Littlego". Beneath the title of "The Littlego" is the notation "(Air: Kaphoozelum)"; this is not a title, but rather an indication that "The Littlego" is meant to be sung to the tune of the already-well-known Kaphoozelum. (This is easily verified by examining other songs from the same book, many of which have the same "(Air: name of well-known song)" notation beneath their titles.) What "The Littlego" is actually about is obscure, but the only "death" in it seems to be that of an abstruse academic concept, not a prostitute.

§ The claim about "kills 10 harlots" can be traced to some variants of the Kaphoozelum song, but even that is a gross misrepresentation. The relevant stanza is:
For though he paid his women well,
This syphilitic spawn of hell,
Struck down each year and tolled the bell,
For ten harlots of Jerusalem.
The key word here is "syphilitic" - in the full context of the poem, it is abundantly clear that these deaths are from disease the fellow spreads, not Ripper-style murders. So even if Stephen had written (some version of) Kaphoozelum, it would hardly connect him to the Ripper.

· A bit of accidental virtual time travel! In my Jerusalem work, I have been relying heavily on Google Street View to show views of the various locations in Northampton. Of course, some of these views have changed significantly since the period when (most of) the book is set, May 2006. But this is interesting in itself, since how a city changes over time is one of the major themes of the book. One of the significant locations in the book is a particular house which sits by itself on a large patch of grass. Only, by the 2018 Google Street View survey it is no longer alone, as the area nearby has been built up. As I was moving around Google Street View to get another angle on this house, the surrounding newer houses suddenly vanished, and the house was alone on the grass! Further experimentation made it clear that GSV had photographed the area multiple times, and clicking around can somehow (I never did figure out exactly what triggered it) move one between the three surveys. In 2016, the street still looks as it is described in the book, in 2018 it has a new housing development on it – and there's even a 2017 set, where you can see the new development under construction!

· Integrating reader comments on various projects.

Projected for next time: Jerusalem, chapters 4 and 5, and perhaps a few extras. I seem to be running rather over a month lately, so it might come out in July, might slip to August.