Alexx's Patreon Update: November, 2021

[alexxkay]

Decent productivity this month. I only got one chapter done instead of two, but that's because chapter 8 was not only longer than either of the last two chapters, but denser in allusion as well. The word count on the annotation page is almost exactly the same as that of the last two pages combined!

• Had some exciting correspondence with the Archivist of St. Paul's Cathedral. Sadly, this made me convinced that Moore invented the "elevator" mechanism from chapter 2. But I did get tons of information about the actual scaffolding, which I found super interesting.
• Annotated chapter 8 of Jerusalem, Atlantis. Highlights:
  
  
  
  • General: This chapter is from the point of view of Benedict Perrit, an aging poet, on May 28, 2006. It intersects with several other chapters set on that date. Perrit is closely based on a friend of Alan Moore's, Dominic Allard. Like Moore/Warren, Allard was born in 1953.
  • "four-by-fours and Chavercrafts" - A "four-by-four" is a vehicle with four wheel drive. Such a vehicle is almost by definition a statement of masculinity, as such power is certainly not necessary in Northampton's gentle terrain and climate. "Chavercraft" is an original portmanteau of "chav" (a working-class young man with poor taste) and "hovercraft".
  • "yellow-covered 1960s pornographic classics" - Possibly referring to the Orpheus Original imprint of Bee-Line books. At least during the early 1970s, their books all had yellow covers; see image. But see next note for other possibilities.
  • "Jaundiced Aubrey Beardsley nudes" - "Jaundiced" is a here a decadent way of saying "yellow". Aubrey Beardsley was an important 19th century artist, whose work was often erotic. He was an editor of the magazine The Yellow Book. Per Wikipedia, "The Yellow Book's brilliant colour immediately associated the periodical with illicit French novels".
  • "Dennis Wheatley" - 20th century English horror writer. Moore used his name in Providence, most significantly in issue 4. Moore had a "spate" of reading Wheatley around age 12; by 2011 he tended to denigrate Wheatley, but was still interested enough to read (and blurb) a biography of him.
  • "murder of hoodies" - Perrit is applying the collective noun for crows to the black-clad youths. In 2006, hoodies were the subject of much controversy, often associated with crime.
  • "she’d just fallen to the communists" - The late 60s was the height of the Cold War, when concern about countries "falling to the communists" was common. Moore is on the far left politically, and has been accused of being a communist. A 1987 picture of Moore shows him wearing a hammer-and-sickle T-shirt.
  • "Cyberman" - Punning on "cyber café". The Cybermen are popular nemeses of Doctor Who. They would have been much in the public consciousness as they had been brought back for the revived series just 15 days prior to this chapter.
  • "Androgyne" - In a 2007 interview, Moore stated:
    

    Myself and a couple of other kids of my age, some from the grammar school that I attended, some from the girls’ schools, we decided spontaneously to put together a magazine of bad poetry basically. It was called Embryo, it was originally going to be called Androgyne, but I found that I couldn’t fit that lettering onto the cover so I shortened it. It was very ramshackle.

  • "gravel-throated trailer" - Now a cliche, the original extremely deep "movie trailer voice" was Don LaFontaine, a staple of move trailer voiceovers throughout the 1990s until his death in 2008.
  • "relegated from a snooty grammar to a red-eared comprehensive in the middle 1970s" - In the English Tripartite System of secondary education (1945-1970s), a Grammar School was the most elite type of school, for only the highest-scoring students. From the 1960s through the mid-70s, this system was gradually placed by Comprehensive Schools, which did not discriminate based on test scores or class. "red-eared" probably indicates "embarrassed".
  • "broad imperial steps [...] soaring crystal palace [...] Dan Dare cathedral" - Seriously exaggerated description of the Guildhall, see picture below. Dan Dare was a British science fiction comic strip which originally ran from 1950-1967.
  • "countless civic weddings" - Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie were married at the Guildhall on May 12, 2007.
  • "like chess knights with concussion, waltzing mice with Tourette’s" - A rapid-fire set of images, all meant to evoke a drunken stagger. Chess knights move two spaces in one direction, then one space at 90 degrees to that direction. A waltz is a dance in which the basic step is forward, to one side, back, though the couple normally progresses in a spinning motion across the dance-floor. Waltzing mice are a type of Japanese mouse with a birth defect that causes it to move around in an apparently drunken manner. Tourette's Syndrome, while commonly associated with verbal tics, also commonly includes physical twitching.
  • "Coals to Newcastle, wolfbane to Transylvania" - Newcastle was a well-known coal-producing area. Hence "coals to Newcastle" became proverbial for adding something uselessly to an already abundant supply. "Wolfbane to Transylvania" extends the idea to classic horror movie tropes. Transylvania is infamously a haunt of vampires and werewolves. While wolfbane (or wolfsbane) is a real plant, in this context it can be taken to refer to the faux-folk usage of it in the early Universal horror movies Dracula and The Wolf Man. For more discussion of how Northampton is connected to goth subculture, see the chapter The Rood in the Wall, P1121p2ff.
  • "piss-yellow sodium light" - From the mid-20th century to the early-21st, sodium-based yellow street lights illuminated most streets at night. By 2006 some areas had already begun replacing these with white LED-based lights, but this obviously had not yet happened in Northampton.
  • "car engines vented jungle snarls across the darkening cement savannah" - Comparing cities to jungles is a well-worn image. Moore used similar imagery in his song "Leopardman at C & A": "zebra cars at dusk drink from a gasoline oasis".
    
  • "bear-baiting" - A blood sport involving forcing a chained bear to fight, popular in England from the 12th through 19th centuries. While Perrit obviously isn't literally hearing sounds of bear-baiting, his house is located quite close to where Bearward Street once was. While I haven't found any documentation that bear-baiting was done on Bearward Street, it's not an unreasonable guess. Moore further supports this idea with a brief mention of a "phantom bear from Bearward Street" in the chapter Malignant, Refractory Spirits.
• Integrating reader comments on various projects.

Projected for next time: Jerusalem, chapters 9 and 10.

Comments

[cvirtue]

I see the sodium light as much more orange -- although maybe I'm mis-identifying the gas involved. If one's urine is the color of the lights I'm thinking of, a doctor is needed.

Neat that you had a good conversation with the Archivist!
I've been to St. Paul's, and summoned my courage to go to the walkway around the inside of the dome. There's a nuWho fight that happens there, which hadn't happened yet at the time I was there.

[alexxkay]

Well, the viewpoint character of this chapter drinks a LOT of beer, which may well influence the color.

Apropos of English color, I just recently learned that English Robins are *orange*-breasted. They are named "redbreast" because that name predates the introduction of the word "orange"!

[cvirtue]

Robi s: right. Ditto “redheads.”

Beer: I don’t think it works that way. Maybe deeper yellow if dehydrated but to really a color change.