Alexx's Journal

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.

LOTS of productivity over the last two months!

• Major secondary passes on issues 1-4 of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Tempest. I was particularly happy to discover that Moore’s casting Prospero as the original agent 007 of Britain’s spies was actually founded in reality!
• Significant contributions to the recently-released penultimate issue of Tempest, #5. Possibly the most fun part of this was identifying all the various “Werewolves of London”, though it was also satisfying to track down a relevant Moore interview:<cut>
  • “Do I believe in fairies? Well, I believe in absolutely every creature that the human imagination has ever thrown up, in an ontological sense, in that the idea of fairies exists, and I believe that fairies are the idea of fairies, just as I believe that gods are the idea of gods, that these things exist in a world of ideas in which they are completely real, and you only have to look at the Victorian fairy painters, and how many of them ended up mad, you only have to look at Richard Dadd’s Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke to see that little figure of the old man with Richard Dadd’s face sitting there, looking really anxious, staring out of the picture at you, sitting there on his log, and I look at that, and I don’t think, “Oh, that’s Richard Dadd painting himself into his own, you know, miniature masterpiece,” I think, “That is Richard Dadd trapped in a painting. The fairies got him.” He was away with the fairies.”

  Also of note, that interview was by our own annotation team's Pádraig Ó Méalóid, and may be found in full in his collection of Moore interviews, Mud and Starlight.

• Minor contributions to Cinema Purgatorio #17. (Joe did the heavy lifting on this, as I was deep into LoEG annotating when it came out.)
• Moderate contributions to Cinema Purgatorio #18 – the final issue! -- including noting lots of past hints now made clear and a time-loops which has closed. I’m particularly proud of a closing note to Kieron Gillen’s Modded:
  • Gillen has chosen to put this message -- that gaming can be whatever you want it to be -- in the mouth of a young black female. While it was not part of the text of Modded, Gillen is certainly aware of the degree of racism and sexism that infect the "Old Men" of videogaming in our world. He seems to be suggesting that being welcoming to new types of audiences is the only way to break the dominant paradigm which seems to view "Guns AND conversation!" as some sort of innovation.
• Annotations for the cover art to the forthcoming Tempest hardcover.
• I finally got back to “Round the Bend”, and finished up the long-interrupted section dealing with the author’s cousin Audrey Vernall! This section also featured a surprise guest appearance by Bill Drummond of K Foundation Burn a Million Quid fame. A few favored entries:
  • “subloomly” – “Sublimely”, “sub loom lie” (referring to the weaving of the Fates).
  • “cantlostimes” – “Countless times”, “can’t lose times” (the fundamental message of Eternalism).
  • “containiwum” – “Continuum”, “contain I one” (I, alone, contain everything).
• Answering a Dragaeran continuity question from Steven Brust.
• The usual integration of cogent comments on the various annotation sites.

Prognosis for next time is more progress on “Round the Bend”. Only two sections remain! Though the next section is the longest one, so I may not get through it. And, of course, the final issue of Tempest might arrive, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it was late.

Man, it has been a long time since I’ve updated. It was a bad winter for me, in terms of both physical and mental health. But I have started producing again.

As predicted last time, I did, by mid-December, complete:

• section 3 of “Round the Bend”, in which Lucia Joyce meets John Clare for some hot and filthy literary sex.
• Updating the Dragaera Timeline with information on Vallista. I do feel the need to say “Fuck time travel!” Still, I did manage to arrive at a set of interpretations that only accuse the author of one out-and-out error, so I feel well-accomplished.

New things completed:

• Helped annotate Cinema Purgatorio #13, with looks at English comedian Arthur Lucan and his delightful character Old Mother Riley (though Joe Linton did most of the heavy lifting on this one).
• Completed section 4 of “Round the Bend”, Chaplin films and dark days, which is an interlude in which Lucia considers how the nature of time is like a Charlie Chaplin film, and the vicissitudes of her own life during the 1920s and 1930s. Since last time, I have acquired and read Carol Loeb Shloss’ biography of Lucia Joyce (which I believe was Moore’s major source as well), so I have been able to make much more informed commentary about the biographical details versus Moore’s inventions. I’ve also started a new formatting convention, where I am putting the “most significant” annotations in boldface for those who want to just browse the highlights.