Alexx's Patreon Update: July, 2021

[alexxkay]

Productivity streak continues! Missed a few days, but still managed to get through two whole chapters. Given how late in the month this is, I'll be surprised if I manage to get another post in August, but I've been pleasantly surprised before.

• Annotated chapter 4 of Jerusalem, Rough Sleepers. This chapter contains many characters based on actual residents of Northampton in the mid-20^th century, as detailed in a small book In Living Memory: Life in 'The Boroughs'. Joe Linton got me a copy of this book (thanks, Joe!), so I was able to quote some of what inspired Moore in the annotations. Highlights:
  • "an accent Freddy couldn’t place. It sounded a bit backwards" - It's more than a bit backwards, as Brother Peter is in the year 810 AD, over 1100 years before Freddy's lifetime!
  • "nicking all the loaves and pints of milk" - In In Living Memory, a former policeman, George Harding, says of Freddy: "He was another likeable villain, petty thief. Would pinch milk off the doorsteps, pinch the loaves of bread off the bread van and that's how he existed and lived for many years."
  • “we all thought as [climate change disaster] would be further off” – A reasonable characterization of the mainstream scientific consensus in 2006. Moore, cynically but accurately, predicted that things were getting worse faster than that consensus.
  • “Puck’s Hat” – First mention of these enigmatic fungi. They do not actually exist, despite the large amount of apparent folklore surrounding them that Moore has invented. “Puck” is presumably the folkloric fairy figure most famous for his appearance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
    • Moore described Puck’s Hats in detail in The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities.
    • Various covers of Jerusalem‘s first edition have featured images of Puck’s Hats. The cover as a whole is credited to Moore, though the Puck’s Hat images look to me like they might be the work of Melinda Gebbie. A Puck’s Hat image was also featured on a signed and numbered bookplate for a limited edition. All these images are largely as described in the text, with the exception of the fairies’ arms
  • “Rose Bay Willow Herb” – A tall, fast-growing herb with small violet flowers. Per Wikipedia: “In the United Kingdom it is also known as bombweed, as a result of its rapid appearance on city bomb sites during the Blitz of World War II”. Presumably Georgie thinks the bombweed will similarly take over after Northampt on is wiped out by one disaster or another.
• Annotated chapter 5 of Jerusalem, X Marks the Spot, which takes a detour through time to the year 810 AD. Highlights:
  • “I em not minded ef et be the left leg o’ John Baptist for so long uz et’s not put about the smashen o’ men’s eds, nor that ets ragged end be lit un made a torch fer burnen. Not last month were one like thee uz ad the skull-bone of the Lord, un when I asked em ow et were so small, e sed et were the skull o’ Christ from when e were a babe. I erd uz the good folk as dwell beside Saint Peter’s Church ad depped ez cods en tar un sent em cryen ome.” -
    "I don't care if it's the left leg of John the Baptist as long as it isn't used to smash men's heads, or that it's ragged end be lit as a torch for burning. Not last month there was someone like you who had the skull of the Lord, and when I asked him how it was so small, he said it was the skull of Christ from when he was a baby. I heard that the good folk that dwell beside Saint Peter's Church dipped his testicles in tar and sent him crying home."
    • There are many recorded instances (some probably just jokes) of various small skulls being passed off as the skull of an important saint "as a child".
  • "a crossroads or its like might suit the crucial item" - A double pun. The item is, itself, a cross, hence suitable to crossroads. But "crucial", in addition to its meaning of "important" can also mean "cruciform", cross-shaped.
  • This consideration of two different worlds, the real and the imagined, is a frequent theme for Moore. To quote an interview from 2000:
    This leads to a consideration of the relationship between fiction and reality. I started to come to the conclusion that fiction has an immaterial reality that is exactly equivalent to material reality. It is no less or more real, it is simply different. For example, we have a three dimensional solid material chair such as the one that I'm sitting in. This is real in material terms. Then we have the idea of a chair. The idea of a chair is perhaps more important than any single individual chair, and yet the idea of a chair exists nowhere in the physical universe.
• Discovered that Google Street View lets one easily look at older sets of images – and that they did a fairly comprehensive survey of Northampton in April 2009, just under three years after the main action of Jerusalem! This let me get illustrations that are significantly closer to the scenes described in the book. I went back and re-did a number of the illustrations for chapter 1. Here, for instance, is the oft-visited location of the house on the corner of Scarletwell Street, back before the area got built up again.
• Also discovered how to make my own overlays for Google Maps, making my map illustrations of much higher quality. (I haven't yet gone back and re-done all the old ones.) Sample at right.
• Integrating reader comments on various projects.

Projected for next time: Jerusalem, chapters 6 and 7.