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Titolo: [LUNGHISSIMO] Intervista (in inglese) ad Alan Moore su Forbidden Planet

http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/?p=7895
http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/?p=7911
Ecco il copia ed incolla brutale del testo. Ovviamente per una migliore
leggibilita' si consiglia di andare a leggersela direttamente ai link
riportati sopra.
**** prima parte *******************************************************
We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Northampton -
Pádraig Ó Méalóid talks to Alan Moore
June 13th, 2008
Filed under: Interviews, Books, Graphic Novels, Comics and cartoons �
Joe @ 12:05 am
I’ve been friends with Pádraig Ó Méalóid years – he’s been heavily
involved with the comics and science fiction scene in Ireland (including
a fair bit of time organising the major P-Con event, which has been host
to many top SF and comics writers and artists) and he writes extensively
on both SF and the comics medium, at least when he can tear himself away
from watching Stephen Fry on QI. While he’s reviewed and promoted many
different comics and books over the years, I know that his particular,
personal favourite has always been the works of Britain’s Graphical
Wizard in Residence, Mr Alan Moore (he has a Moore-specific Live
Journal, Glycon, here). When the extreme good fortune to have someone
chat to Alan came up, I couldn’t think on anyone better suited..
Obviously I’m biased as I’ve been reading Alan’s work since I was a kid
sitting with 2000 AD’s Future Shocks and followed him as he’s practised
alchemy on the entire medium ever since, but I think Pádraig and Alan
have something fascinating for you here, talking about new works like
the third League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the Lost Girls, touching
on earlier material, as well as Alan’s prose work, performance art and
his experiences and opinions on dealing with publishers, large and
small.
Alan Moore at GOSH.jpg
(Alan at a signing at Gosh for the UK release of the Lost Girls,
borrowed from Joel Meadows’ blog)
This interview was conducted by phone by Pádraig and it’s quite a long
piece, so today we’re presenting the first part of it, with more to
follow. I’d like to thank Alan very much for giving up a good chunk of
his free time to chat to Pádraig; thanks also go to Top Shelf’s Chris
Staros, gentleman publisher, who was kind enough to set the whole thing
up for us all and, of course, to Pádraig for conducting the interview
and then taking the time to go through the entire long phone
conversation and transcribe it (a very time consuming process) so we
could share it with our readers. Without further ado, it’s over to
Pádraig and Alan:
P: Lost Girls has been out in the States since October 2006, and it’s
only recently out in the UK. Was there any surge of interest in it when
it was released in the UK, or did it just come out and that was that?
AM: Well there was a certain amount, we’re getting good reviews, it’s
apparently selling very well, and the only thing that was surprising was
that there was no trouble, either in the American release or the British
one, or any of the European ones that we’ve heard of so far. It’s that
there hasn’t been - we didn’t know what might happen, and we were
certainly prepared to have to defend Lost Girls, perhaps in a court of
law and we were confident that we could do that, but…
Melinda Gebbie Alan Moore Lost Girls.jpg
P: Do you mean on copyright reasons or on content?
AM: With the current moral climate, especially in America where we have,
for the first time in decades, the moral majority practically running
the country. So we didn’t know, and there’s certainly been far more
innocuous book than Lost Girls, I’m thinking of Alison Bechdel’s Fun
Home, and Craig Thompson’s Blankets…
P: Did that have problems? I didn’t think there was anything
particularly peculiar about that, shall we say?
AM: Well, Craig Thompson’s Blankets is one of the most innocuous, sweet,
- it’s practically too sweet for my tastes…
P: I know what you mean, it really is lovely, squeaky clean stuff.
AM: It is! And both of those books were seized in a raid in Atlanta, I
believe, and they were seized upon by some right-wing senators who
presumably wanted to make a big fuss in the papers, and there’s barely
any sexual content in them at all.
P: Yes, particularly Blankets, when the whole point is that he was
keeping himself pure all the way through.
AM: Well, it’s just a very sweet little story. I believe that there is
one scene where they are, a boy and a girl, under a blanket, and this
was apparently the brink of obscenity that the senator was trying to
stop America from plunging over. There was somebody that Melinda met
when she was over there, a proprietor of a store who’d had a terrible
situation where I believe somebody had bought a book that had a picture,
taken from a photograph, of a drawing of Pablo Picasso working at his
easel, naked. And this led to this store owner and his wife, they were
ostracised by their community, they had a really horrific couple of
years of it, with all these court appearances, and things like that, and
yet with Lost Girls, which is very upfront about being pornography, we
haven’t had any trouble at all, possibly because we are upfront about
it, I don’t know whether that’s wrong-footed people.
P: They can’t really come around and say “Oh my God!” when you’re
saying, “Yes, we actually knew this is what was in it. We put it in it!”
I’m living in Ireland, and we come from a very repressive regime with
the Catholic church, not terribly long ago, and it’s just odd to me that
I can go into a shop and I can buy it now, and there’s no problem, -
it’s on a high shelf, which means only tall people can read it - but we
have changed here, and I’m seeing America where you’d imagine they
should be more liberal, more outgoing, than we are, but no, not a bit of
it.”
The Lost Girls Top Shelf.jpg
(a spread of the Lost Girls, borrowed from the Top Shelf site)
AM: It’s very strange the way that Lost Girls just seems to be… over the
radar?
P: One of the things you were supposed to be trying to set out to do was
to, is it reclaim pornography, for want of a better word?
AM: To reclaim it, to rehabilitate it.
P: And do you think that’s worked? Do you think you’ve done anything?
AM: It seems, at least in the case of Lost Girls, there is now an
existing piece of erotica or pornography which people, in the debate
upon obscenity or pornography, can now point to and say, “What about
Lost Girls?” Now if that is all that it’s done - and I don’t think
there’s going to be a huge rush of publications like Lost Girls in the
very near future because both me and Melinda are very good at what we
do, and it took us sixteen-eighteen years, so I doubt there’ll be very
many people queuing up to do anything quite like Lost Girls - but, at
the same time, Lost Girls exists. It’s a kind of benchmark. I’m not
expecting, I don’t know, all of Richard Desmond’s vast array of smutty
periodicals to suddenly clean up their act overnight and become
aesthetic and intellectual works of art, but, Lost Girls exists.
It’s like when you’ve got people like Angela Carter who, in her book The
Sadeian Women, she admitted that there was the possibility she could
imagine a form of pornography that was benign, that was imaginative, was
beautiful, and which didn’t have the problems that she saw in a lot of
other pornography. I think even Andrea Dworkin said the same thing. She
said it a bit more grudgingly, but she said that conceivably there was,
there could be, a benign form of pornography but she didn’t personally
believe that it would ever happen. So that’s what we’ve tried to do.
We’ve tried to say, yes, good pornography can exist, and I think that
possibly the fact that we called it pornography wrong-footed a lot of
the people who, if we’d have come out and said, “well, this is a work of
art,” they would have probably all said, “no it’s not, it’s
pornography.” So because we’re saying, “this is pornography,” they’re
saying, “no it’s not, it’s art,” and people don’t realise quite what
they’ve said.
P: Have sales been good? It’s a big expensive three-volume box thing.
AM: It’s very, very reasonable considering the quality of the
merchandise. But it still seems to be selling well as far as everything
we hear about it. The tiny little local comic shop, Phoenix Comics, has
sold thirty copies which, for a book that size, you’d have to sell a lot
of Marvel and DC comics…
P: Another thing is that for fiction publishers, hardback fiction is
kind of just dropping out of the water. Some of them are not publishing
in hardback any more, but there seems to be a big hardback boom in
comics.
AM: Well I think this is something to do with the internet. I think that
as culture becomes more and more virtual, as more and more things are
available online, then I think that in some inverse way the beautiful
artefact becomes much more valuable and that was partly why, largely at
Melinda [Gebbie]’s insistence, that we made Lost Girls as beautiful an
artefact as we were capable of doing. Chris [Staros] asked Melinda what
her perfect vision of the book would be, and Melinda was entirely the
wrong person to ask that question because she’s got a really vivid idea
of all the things she wanted to do with the book, and Chris listened to
it all, he took a deep breath, and he said that he’d do his best to
actually fulfil that, and he more than fulfilled it.
P: Yes, it’s beautiful.
Lost Girls shadow sex.jpg
(two parallel scenes for the price of one; exploring the shadow world of
sex and sensuality in the Lost Girls by Alan Moore, art by Melinda
Gebbie)
AM: It’s a beautiful piece of work. I think that apparently the hardback
collections are about the only thing where you’ve got signs of an
increase in sales. The pamphlets are falling by the wayside and you’ve
got to suspect that this is probably the future. I would like to see a
world in which - it’s a pity that you couldn’t always have had comics
that were just for kids, and it’s a pity that they had to change into
something that they probably weren’t designed to ever be, but I think
that what is likely to happen over the next ten or twenty years is that
you’ll have more and more of the traditional comic companies, even the
big ones, starting to lose ground against mainstream publishers who have
suddenly realised that there is quite a bit of money to be made in
hardback graphic novels or whatever you prefer to call them.
P: They’re also giving very good deals to people, I think Bryan Talbot
with Alice in Sunderland is very happy with Jonathan Cape.
AM: They seem to be going out of their way to engage a lot of comics
talent and you can only suspect that this trend will continue and it’s
good. What I would like to see in an ideal world is for the large comic
companies to be taken down a peg or six. It might be nice if they got
back to producing cheap genuinely entertaining stories for children. I
don’t think that’ll happen, I don’t think they’ve got a way back there.
P: I think that with the big comic companies, the ways they did things -
which I think I saw you describing as from their gangster beginnings -
when they just said, “we want all the rights to everything and that’s it
in perpetuity.” Now recently a little chink in that some of the rights
to early Superman were given back to Jerry Siegel’s family. Did you hear
about that?
AM: I heard something - there’s several different cases, including the
rights to Superboy.
P: Superboy is a separate issue, I think, but apparently will be seen as
arising out of this. I think it’s just a tiny thing, where they have
said, “for this particular point, this particular thing, we say that you
have the rights,” because apparently an act of Congress recently said
that anything that people sold the rights to before 1978 they’re now
allowed to go back and renegotiate or have another think about what they
did, and on the basis of that Jerry Siegel’s family have been awarded
back some rights to Superman.
AM: Well that’s good. It’s still probably nowhere near enough, but it’s
a chink in the armour, like you say.
P: It’s a start.
AM: Things have changed for comics over this past twenty five years or
so. They’ve had a spotlight thrown upon them, and they can’t really get
away with the subterranean practices that they’d been happily engaging
in since the late thirties, you know what I mean? It was good for them
in a certain sense, in that they made lots of money, when they were
getting all of those articles saying “Bam! Sock! Pow! Comics aren’t just
for kids anymore.”
I think that some of the uneasiness that I felt around the upper
echelons of DC and Marvel back then was probably caused by the fact that
the attention that the comics boom of the mid-eighties brought to those
companies was a bit of a two-edged sword, because all of a sudden there
was the possibility of creators outgrowing the actual comic industry and
having somewhere else to go, which has not really existed before.
There were great creators in the past but they felt trapped, in some
senses quite rightly, because none of them were very well know outside
the relatively tiny field of comics, but that’s changed, it’s different
now, and there are certain creators around who actually don’t need the
comic industry as it stands.
P: I think it needs them more than they need it.
AM: Which makes their behaviour ever more perverse, because they have
alienated everybody who could have possibly saved them…
P: And yourself. If you’d been treated well you would presumably still
be working for them, or for someone…
AM: Of course. If they hadn’t tried to steal pocket change from us at
the beginning, ‘cause that was when it was, that was the thing that
started to queer the pitch, was when we realised that they were trying
to pretend that Watchmen merchandise was self-financing promotional
material, and me and Dave, not being completely stupid, said, “Yeah, but
if you make profits from this self-promoting, self-financing promotional
material, then it’s merchandise, isn’t it? And we have to get some of
that, don’t we?”
And it was, again, it was a few thousand dollars. If they had not tried
to pick our pockets then we would have continued – we were enjoying
doing the work – who knows what the comic industry might be like now,
but I suspect that it would be a lot better place than the place that it
has become. From everything that I hear from the few contacts that I
still have in the industry it seems like DC and, well - at least DC -
are trying harder than ever to crack down upon the talent. Everybody has
to have an exclusive contract, they are free to actually alter your work
on computer without consulting you, and they do this if they feel that
it’s justified.
It was starting to look promising at some point in the eighties. There
were a lot of those things that they were starting to tentatively
introduce, I think they’ve rolled them back. They don’t think that the
liberal experiment of the eighties worked. I think that they thought it
brought them more trouble than it solved.
P: I see. OK, the next thing you have coming out is League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century, volume three of the League?
AM: The first part should be out later this year.
League Extraordinary Gentlemen 3 - Century Alan Moore Kevin ONeill.jpg
(artwork for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century, borrowed
from the Top Shelf site and (C) Kevin O’Neill and Alan Moore)
P: Should it? OK, good.
AM: Century - that’s the overall title of volume three - is going to be
in three books. Now we figured that we wanted to do three seventy-two
page issues rather than, say, six twenty-four page comics, because we
wanted to be able to tell a complete story in each issue, and they do
build up into a narrative arc that spans the century of the title, but
they’re each complete and satisfying in themselves. They’re set in three
different time periods, so there won’t be a long nail-biting wait
because, quite frankly, Kevin [O’Neill]’s going to take as long as
Kevin’s going to take, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
When people see the work that he’s doing - the Black Dossier itself was
absolutely marvellous, he’s excelling himself, and it’s a very different
feel to the other League books. For one thing we’re liberated from
working for a mainstream comic company, and that has made some
difference. It wasn’t even a conscious decision, it was just that
working for Top Shelf is a much more pleasant and inviting experience
and so we felt that, at least in this first issue, there’s not so much
action as there was in the first couple of volumes and in the Black
Dossier. It’s as if we feel freed from the conventions of boys’
adventure comics, and so it’s a lot more atmospheric, it builds to a
tremendously bloody climax, it’s a slow build. We’re thrilled with it.
It’s got some songs in it, it’s a musical.
LOEG Black Dossier.jpg
(detail from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: the Black Dossier,
by Alan Moore and Kev O’Neill)
P: I’m looking forward to seeing it.
AM: That’s coming along well, then I’ve got the second one written which
Kevin can start as soon as he’s finished this first one, and then I’m
going to be probably starting writing the third one, which is set in the
present day. That might be… that’ll probably be 2009. So…
P: So we should see the lot of them maybe by the end of 2009?
AM: It’s possible. It’s possible, that sounds about feasible though I
wouldn’t want to promise anything, and it would depend upon how long it
takes Kevin to draw them because there’s not many people who actually
work in the way that Kevin does anymore. It’s very seldom that you’re
going to see just that amount of art - it’s just like with Melinda on
Lost Girls.
These are handmade things and Kevin doesn’t work on a computer. There
are actually pages of Kevin O’Neill original art are around, just like
there are pages of Melinda Gebbie art around.
P: Earlier on I was watching the extras from The Mindscape of Alan
Moore, and there’s the interview with Kevin and he has these huge pages
of black and white, beautiful artwork from the earlier volumes of
League. They’re just absolutely gorgeous!
AM: It is, absolutely. Everybody works in the way that they want to,
but, there hasn’t been a page of Brian Bolland artwork in the past
twenty years.
P: Speaking of Brian Bolland, did you see he redid the colouring on
Killing Joke?
AM: I didn’t because I had told DC never to send me anything again that
wasn’t money, and I didn’t even know that there’d been a new version of
The Killing Joke, and, after the way that I was treated, and continue to
a certain extent to be treated…
P: I was just wondering if, I think he’d always said he was unhappy with
the colouring work on it and he’d completely redone it. DC are still
milking your back catalogue, and they were bringing out a hardback
version…
AM: They just don’t send me them any more, and that’s fine by me. To a
certain degree I’ve detached myself from all that stuff. I would be
quite happy if I never heard the names of those books ever again.
P: I’m very sorry for bringing it up.
AM: I’m not saying anything about you, its because obviously I did write
them, it’s just that they’re all owned by DC Comics, and DC stole them
from me, much the same as they stole everything else that they own, so
all of these toys with Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Killing Joke
commemorative, which I’d only seen when I go into a shop; if they’d
asked me I wouldn’t have had my name on those.
I’m quite happy with the work that I actually own, which means that
ninety per cent of my work I have effectively disowned, which of course
was painful, but it’s a small price to pay if it means that I have to
have nothing to do with those people ever again. I think I might have
signed a couple of the books when I down at the local Waterstone’s
earlier on, but I didn’t even look at them then, I was doing a favour
for the manager.
P: That’s fair enough, it was good of you to do so. I’ll tell you what I
am looking forward to seeing is the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of
Magic.
AM: That’s proceeding apace. Me and Steve [Moore] are writing it all and
it’s turning into quite a wonderful thing, There’s so many different
sections that are scattered through it. We have been working upon – one
of the strands is this Old Moore’s Lives of the Great Enchanters where I
think it’s fifty-two full pages that are laid out a bit like the old
Ripley’s Believe it or Not, where you’ve got five panels with captions,
and we’re starting out with the Dancing Sorcerer from the Trois Freres
cave in France, the picture of the guy with antlers prancing around –
it’s the first representation of a magician.
Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic Alan Moore Steve Moore.jpg
(cover art for the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore
and Steve Moore)
P: Yes, I know the one you mean.
AM: Then we move up through the Persian Magi and Zarathustra, because,
after the Stone Age shamanic period, that is the first record of actual
magic, and then we move up through real, fictitious, and semi-real
figures like King Solomon, Circe, Medea, until we get to Apollonius of
Tyana. We’ve got Merlin in there –he never existed, but that’s not
really important. He was the first Christian-approved magician. Because
prior to that you’d got Simon Magus, who was actually a conflation of
two figures. There was Simon the Magician, who was a travelling
magician, and there was Simon the head of the Gnostics, which was of
course the largest rival to Christianity, so by squeezing them both into
one figure, and making this tale of the vain magician who has a duel
with Saint Peter in Rome and flies through the air but is brought down
by the power of God - it was all a propaganda story. It made Simon the
first black magician, and then later the story of Merlin - he’s supposed
to be the son of the Devil, he did help out King Arthur with all that
Holy Grail business, so it’s alright - he’s the magician it’s alright
for Christians to like, so he’s the first white magician.
And then we move on to ones that almost certainly existed, like Roger
Bacon and people like that, and we carry on right up to the present day,
and the modern magi, such as they are. And there are pages of
theoretical essays upon what magic is and how it works. There’re
practical articles on how to actually do the different things that magic
can do. There’s this bestiary of demons and gods and other things that
you might be lucky or unfortunate enough to bump into.
I think it’s fairly rational, and it’s going to be very beautiful. We’ve
got all these lovely artists, Melinda’s doing a pop-up temple, right,
for the modern magus on the move, and Kevin’s doing this seven or
eight-page life of Alexander, which will be done in a Radio Fun style of
thing, which will detail the life of Alexander of Abonuteichos who was
the creator of Glycon, my patron deity.
P: I’m familiar with Glycon, yes.
AM: So there’s a Kaballah board game which we’re struggling with at the
moment. It’s do-able but we’re just got to work out some layout
problems. There’s the Tarot deck that I shall be commencing with José
Villarubia…
P: Is that a separate Tarot deck, or is it just going to be…
AM: It’ll be a Tarot deck that will be included in the Bumper Book with
cut-out cards, but we probably will be bringing it out in a separate
deck as well for people who don’t want to cut up the Bumper Book.
P: That’s a very good idea!
AM: So, we have a lot of this stuff, it’s still in the planning stages.
I think that me and Steve have written about a quarter of the book so
far, but Steve’s got a lot of pressure on at the moment and we are
having to work more or less around what is possible for him, but that’s
coming on nicely.
P: That’s something I’m really looking forward to it.
AM: We just wanted to get rid of a lot of the pretentious, shadowy,
gothy atmosphere which people seem to try to contrive to cloak magic in.
In our experience, we find magic to be something which is profound,
human, beautiful, occasionally very, very funny, and we want to do a
book that reflects that, which has got all of the excitement and all of
the pulp fiction side of it, that has got all the rest of magic as well.
Neither me nor Steve are huge fans of modern, say, chaos magic, and this
is our proposed antidote, something that is a lot less self-conscious
and hopefully a lot closer to the spirit of what, in our opinion,
genuine magic is about.
Still to come - Alan chats to Pádraig about his prose work, performance
art, Melinda’s work, his daughter Leah and her husband John’s (both good
friends of the blog) burgeoning creative career, psychogeography and the
influence the environment has on the creative influence and the
re-appearance of early, ‘lost’ Alan Moore works which have been rescued,
scanned and restored to readers through the magic of the web (quite a
few of which were done by Pádraig himself, I might add!) and more.
**** seconda parte *****************************************************
You want Moore? You got it!
June 19th, 2008
Filed under: Interviews, Graphic Novels, Comics and cartoons � Joe @
12:02 am
Last week we posted the first part of a fascinating interview of Alan
Moore by Irish comics and SF expert Pádraig Ó Méalóid, in which they
discussed Alan’s earlier body of comics work and his contemporary titles
such as The Lost Girls and the next installments in the League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen, as well as his opinions on and experiences with
different publishers. We’re delighted to offer you the second part of
this chat, which ranges from, knighthoods to prose work and performance
art, work by his wife Melinda Gebbie and his daughter and son in law
Leah Moore and John Reppion and the importance of the fanzines and small
press scene. Once again FPI would like to thank Alan very much for
giving his time for this interview and to Pádraig for conducting it and
taking the time to transcribe it all for us to enjoy; special thanks
also to Chris Staros of Top Shelf for setting it up.
P: I wanted to ask you about Jerusalem, but before I get to that - Did
you hear about this petition that apparently exists on the 10 Downing
Street website to give you a knighthood?
AM: What??
P: Have you not heard about that?
AM: No, I think it is something that has escaped me… So what’s this
knighthood nonsense?
P: Apparently you can put a petition on the website for number 10
Downing Street, and your name is up there - somebody suggested that you
should become Sir Alan Moore, Sir Alan of Northampton.
AM: Well it’ll be nice to get the opportunity to turn it down. I’m sure
there’s a lot of other names on there, they’ve got Jim Davidson…
P: Yes, yes, they do…
P: OK. Jerusalem. One of the questions I wanted to ask you about
Jerusalem, is there going to be one of these intractable, impenetrable
first chapters like with Voice of the Fire?
AM: Now, I did deliberately put the Hob’s Hog chapter in Voice of the
Fire. I have been asked since why I did that. The only thing I could
think of was, to keep out scum. But with Jerusalem – it’s very, very
readable. It’s some of the most readable stuff that I’ve probably ever
written. I’ve just finished the second third of it, and the first third
is similar to Voice of the Fire in that it jumps around a bit from
narrator to narrator and from time to time, and it’s all set in
Northampton, but it’s got a different tone, it’s much more approachable.
The second section reads like, well, I’ve described it as reading like a
savage hallucinating Enid Blyton. It’s because there’s a gang of ghost
children that are the main characters, and even though there are very
adult things happening all around them, there’s something about having a
group of children that makes it into an Enid Blyton story, even though
the background of the story and everything that’s happening is
completely mental.
I’ve just started the third book which looks to be a bit more poetic, a
bit more experimental, but, as a whole, I think that the difficulty with
this book, it won’t be getting through the first chapter, it’ll just be
picking it up! It goes beyond criticism because nobody’s going to be
able to actually lift it. I just did the word-count the other day, I’ve
got to the two thirds mark and the word count is just over four hundred
thousand words, so that means, probably not quite three quarters of a
million, but more than half. It’s coming together very nicely.
Alan Moore Voice of the Fire.jpg
(Voice of the Fire, dust jacket designed by Chip Kidd, published Top
Shelf and (c) Alan Moore)
I’ve just read it all through a couple of weeks ago, I read the whole
thing from the start to where I’ve got to, and it’s actually quite good!
I’d forgotten a lot of the opening stuff because I’ve been doing it for
a couple of years now, but, very readable, and there’s some great
exciting stuff – and the fantasy in it is demented, it’s really
thrilling to write. With Voice of the Fire I really didn’t want to do a
book that was going to look like what it was, I didn’t want to do a book
that was going to look like a comic writer who was doing a novel, so I
didn’t want to make it any genre, I didn’t want to do a fantasy novel,
or a horror novel, or a science fiction novel, because that’s generally
what comic writers do. And, nothing against doing that, but I just
wanted to do something that was outside genre.
Now with Jerusalem, which is all based upon the area in which I live,
well, the area in which I grew up, I’ve got a hankering to call it
scientific fiction, just because I think I can argue the case for that
from a purist point of view, in that the central part of the novel
extrapolates upon known facts of science the central theme of the whole
book extrapolates upon known facts of science. I’ve got a couple of
quotes from Hawking, and a quote from Wittgenstein, and some things that
back up my general hypothesis so, yeah, I might call it scientific
fiction, just out of perversity, as much as anything else. Just to
confuse the people stocking the shelves at WH Smith.
P: Any idea when we would be looking forward to seeing that?
AM: Well, since I’ve started doing it, when people have said, “Any idea
how long it’ll be before we can look forward to seeing that?” I’ve said,
“It’ll be about two years.” I’ve been saying this for the past two years
I just realised the other day, so, realistically, if it takes me another
year to finish writing it, then it should take me less than a year to do
the cover, which I’m going to do – I’ve already got it started, and I
just felt like doing the cover - and to revise it, ‘cause I’ve been
having as go through, and there’s bits there where I’ve repeated myself,
given the same chunk of information in a couple of chapters because I’d
forgotten that I’d done it already.
There’s going to be bits of editing that I’m going to have to do, bits
of revision – I’ve got Steve Moore helping me, because he is the world’s
best editor, and he’s going through and sorting out a lot of the really
stupid mistakes that I’ve made, grammatical and spelling errors. He’s
great for that, he doesn’t touch any of the actual book, he doesn’t say
“I think we should lose half this chapter because it’s too broad,” he’s
just doing what an editor should do. So he’ll edit it and then I’ll
revise it, and when it’s as perfect as I can make it then, I guess a
couple of years, then it’ll be coming out.
And as for a publisher, at the moment I’m thinking it’ll probably be Top
Shelf. I don’t see any point, at the moment, in going with a big
publisher, because I’ve got a following independent of note who
publishes me, so the only thing the big publishers can offer you is more
exposure, and they don’t very often deliver with that, because they’ve
got so many people that they’re promoting that the chances of you
getting to the top of the list are slim, so it makes more sense for me
to work with a small, honest, scrupulous publisher like Chris Staros, so
it’ll probably be coming out from Top Shelf.
P: There was to be another novel, wasn’t there? A Grammar?
AM: Now that fell by the wayside because, it was after I had finished
Voice of the Fire. The only reason I did Voice of the Fire with Gollancz
was because I liked Faith Brooker. She was a great editor, she was
really nice, she looked after all the people who were working for her,
and she was treated abominably, and so when Gollancz asked me if I
wanted to carry on writing A Grammar I said, “Well actually I was really
only doing it for Faith, and she’s not working for you any more, so,
nah…” and to tell the truth, I hadn’t really got very far with the
concept. It was because Faith wanted another book quickly, I think it
would have helped her situation, that I’d come up with it at all, and
once Faith was out of the picture I really didn’t feel like making that
kind of investment.
Actually, this is going to be a better book, I think. Because, I was
going to be writing this story about the sheep track between – that was
what A Grammar was going to be – the sheep track between Wales and
Northampton, and that would have given me a lot of stuff, but it
wouldn’t have given me anywhere near the amount of stuff that I’ve
managed to come up with for Jerusalem. I’m not really repeating any of
the same territory that I used in Voice of the Fire.
It’s mostly all new stuff, well not new stuff, because most of it’s
historic, but I’m just finding out new material all the time. I found
out the other day that Hitler’s invasion plan for England ended with
Northampton, and there was also the eighth century monk who was directed
by angels to place a stone cross here because it was the centre of the
land. So the way I see it, that if people want to argue with me about
the importance of Northampton, then they’re not only arguing with me,
they’re arguing with God, and they’re arguing with Hitler. And that, I
think me, God, and Hitler, that’s the dream team!
P: The two books, Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, are set very solidly
in Northampton. If you had been born somewhere else, do you think you’d
be able to have done the same sort of thing?
AM: That’s an interesting question, and, back when I started to get into
this psychogeography business, it was mainly because of the input of
Iain Sinclair, and just by circumstance the first works that I did were
largely set in London; From Hell, because that’s where the Jack the
Ripper murders happened, and a lot of the performance pieces that I did,
I’d been asked to appear at London venues, so with Voice of the Fire I
thought, “OK, well let’s see if I can do the same thing for Northampton
as Iain and Peter Ackroyd and people have done for London,” and, yes, it
was a great experience, and I think that the theory that I was working
on then was that this must be true of everywhere.
P: Yeah. Well, I feel that it’s certainly true of Dublin.
AM: Absolutely, it would certainly be true of Dublin, and I think that
this is part of the problem, because if you were to try and do the
psychogeography of Dublin you would find that there is a mass of
wonderful material. Iain does it about London, I do it about
Northampton. We find these things, and that tends to make us think that
every square yard on the surface of the British Isles must be of
enormous psychogeographical significance.
That was the theory I was working on, and then, when Iain was working on
his last book, Edge of the Orison, where he was following trails
relating to John Clare, and he was visiting places like Peterborough and
Kettering, and he came over to Northampton because Clare spent a lot of
his time in the asylum, and Iain was saying that the book really only
came to life when he came to Northampton. He was saying, “Your
Northampton, it’s a fantastic place,” and I said, “Well yeah, obviously
I think so,” I said, “but you could probably say that about everywhere,
couldn’t you?” and he said, “No, I’m not so sure.” He said Kettering is
completely dead. He said Peterborough is completely dead. He said he
couldn’t pick up the least tremor of resonance, that there was nothing -
and Iain’s very good at picking tremors of resonance. If there’s
anything there his antennae are very finely tuned.
So I suppose the vote’s still out on that one. I would have said, “If
I’dve been born anywhere I could have done The Voice of the Fire or
Jerusalem,” but the more I get into Jerusalem, the more I feel that, no,
I couldn’t have written this novel about anywhere, I certainly couldn’t.
Alan Moore by JosÃ© Villarrubia Voice of the Fire.jpg
(Alan in urban shamanic mode in Voice of the Fire, art by José
Villarrubia, published Top Shelf)
P: No, you could only write the novel you could write about somewhere!
AM: Well that’s it. But it’s also that I’m becoming more aware of just
how extraordinary Northampton is.
P: I’m looking forward to actually going over, to seeing the place. I
have a certain curiosity…
AM: Well, you’ll be able to come and check out those opening scenes of
Big Numbers, and things like that. We’re the Mecca of the Midlands.
P: Speaking of Big Numbers, is anything ever going to happen with Big
Numbers?
AM: No. I tried, and I tried, and I tried. The initial comic collapsed,
then we tried to get a replacement artist in, and he fled screaming into
the night, and then I was working with a guy who was suggesting it as a
television programme of twelve hour long episodes, something like Our
Friends in the North, maybe, but with more fractal mathematics. There
were some people working on a screenplay for that, a teleplay or
whatever they call it, but that didn’t really happen, so that time it
was three strikes and you’re out.
I really wouldn’t be able to summon the energy to finish Big Numbers,
although in some ways, a lot of the stuff that I was thinking about with
Big Numbers is going to be completely applicable to Jerusalem. Not in
the same sense, not the same characters, not the same story, but some of
the same spirit. So, I think that Big Numbers is probably going to be
Edwin Drood, but everyone should probably have at least one.
P: You mentioned the performance pieces. Are there any more?
AM: I haven’t seen Tim Perkins – we’ve spoken – but I haven’t seen him
for a couple of years now because he went against all my best advice and
he reproduced. He’s got a wife and two children, and he’s living over in
Oxford, and he’s apparently doing well with his composing and he’s
taking his BA, I believe – or is it a PhD? – in musicology, I’m not
sure, but he’s doing famously, but we were talking the other day and he
was saying about coming over to visit sometime soon, and so that we can
start work upon another album. We’re not sure what, but one of the
things that Chris has always said is that if me and Tim get another
album done, that would give him an excuse for bringing out the previous
– five…?
P: Yeah, something like that, five or six. It depends on which ones
you’re counting…
AM: And do a nice little retrospective package, and include this one as
well.
P: That would be nice, because somebody was mentioning to me that
they’re all currently unavailable.
AM: So me and Tim are thinking of - we’re not sure what yet, there’s
different possibilities, it might be another performance piece. It might
be a performance piece in Northampton, which I’ve never actually done
yet, so that could be fun, but we will have to see.
P: A few of those have been adapted for comics. I know Eddie Campbell
did two of them. Am I right in hearing that Melinda is going to do Angel
Passage?
AM: That is the plan, although there are other things, other projects
that she’s got involved in - she’s working on a beautiful series of
paintings at the moment and she’s working on a book about her
experiences in the San Francisco underground scene, and life experiences
in general, because she’s had quite an astonishing life.
P: I imagine so, yes.
AM: She’s danced with James Brown, and there’s not many people who can
say that…
P: And she ended up in Northampton!
AM: But, eh, the Blake thing is still, she’s hoping that she can get
around to it. She’s done a couple of pictures, but the other things have
taken precedence, so, it might happen.
P: I actually have a lot of odd bits and pieces of your output, and I
scan some of them and I put them on the internet because – particularly
the stuff that’s out of print – which I hope you don’t mind?
AM: Not at all mate. Someone told me that most of The Stars My
Degradation is on the internet.
P: A lot of that I started off - I bought a few of them on eBay – eBay
is absolutely great for stuff like that – I bought a bunch of them, and
I got in touch with this guy who has a site called 4 Color Heroes, and I
said, “If I scan them, do you want put them up?” because he already had
a thing called Moore for Free, and I sent him off forty of them, and
then various other people sent them in, and I think virtually all of it
is up there.
AM: Well that’s great, Pádraig, I’ve got, because people have said,
“Hey, can we bring out a book of it,” and I’ve said, “well, no, because
I don’t want to make any money out of it because I don’t think it’s good
enough.”
I’ve got no problem at all with it being on the ‘net, in fact I’m quite
pleased that it’s on the ‘net. Steve Moore was telling me the other day,
‘cause he’s just sold the rights to the Pressbutton computer game, which
is fantastic. It’s some much needed income for Steve and and I’ve said
that it’s perfectly alright by me if he wants to use the Three Eyes
McGurk material from Dark Star or any of the stuff that I came up with
in The Stars My Degradation, so, it’s funny how these things raise their
heads from time to time.
Alan Moore Bride Pressbutton Stars my Degradation.jpg
(a panel from the Star my Degradation tale Bride of Pressbutton, written
and illustrated by Alan Moore, borrowed from Glycon; you can find more
‘lost’ work on Moore for Free)
P: The Sounds thing, somebody was saying that it’s the longest
unpublished piece of work which you’ve done…
AM: That’s probably true. Yes, and it will probably remain unpublished.
I’m glad, it’s nice that it’s out there on the ‘net. The thing is, I was
doing me best at the time, even if I didn’t. You can understand, I just
didn’t feel that, to put it out as a piece of work by Alan Moore, it
would be crap, because it wouldn’t be the Alan Moore that people are
expecting, it would be back when I was just cutting me teeth, and, eh…
So I’m really glad that it’s out there, so people can see, but I’m glad
that…
P: It being on the internet relieves you of the burden of having to…
AM: I don’t even have to look at it! It’s fantastic! (Laughs) No, it’s
brilliant, I have no problems with that at all, no.
P: Great, fantastic. And, actually, speaking of your early work, Avatar
published a lot of your bits and pieces from early on…
AM: They were just asking if there was anything I’d got, or they’d find
out about things and ask, “Can we do this as a comic,” and I’d say,
“Yeah, I guess so,” and some of them looked all right - I’m not sure
about – the artwork was great…
P: Well, the artwork was interesting…
AM: That was little bits and pieces the world could have probably lived
without, but…
P: There are some of us who like to see all this stuff, warts and all,
Alan.
AM: Oh, that’s nice, that’s appreciated.
P: Is Jacen Burrows doing something else of yours for Avatar?
AM: Well there was a think that I wrote, basically, because – it was a
couple of years ago, two or three years ago – I wrote a thing because I
needed some money to pay off tax, because DC were getting creative with
our payments again, and I wrote a thing which – I don’t know how good it
is –I was trying my best, but it was at a time when I was poisonously
angry, and that may have coloured the work. It was a HP Lovecraft – my
basic thinking was – all right, they asked me to do something that was
in a a horror vein, they asked me, and I said, well, I had some vague
ideas about a continuation of that Courtyard story that I originally
wrote for a HP Lovecraft prose anthology…
P: I know the one.
AM: And I said I’d thought of a vague continuation of that, and they
said, “Great, why don’t you do that, do it with Jacen Burrows,” who’s a
great artist, so I wrote this four-part story, which is really horrible.
It’s a modern Lovecraft story, but I was thinking, well, let’s put the
racism in, and let’s put the, misogyny in, and let’s put the – where in
the past we talked about Nameless Rites, let’s name them, and let’s see
what happens.
And so it’s a very unpleasant story, it’s very weird, I’ve not looked at
it since, and I’ve not, I don’t know if they’re even, if Avatar is still
doing it, I’m not really in touch with them. Your guess is as good as
mine, and even whether it’d be that good when it comes, I don’t know.
I’m sure Jacen will have done a great job, I’m just not sure I did the
writing well. And it might have been a bit dark, you know. I might have
been going through a bit if a dark spell, which, sometimes it colours
the writing and whether it’ll ever come out I really don’t know, but
that’s be something to - it was called, what was it called? I can’t even
remember the title! I know it’d got four parts, and it was, no, it
completely fails me. I have no idea.
P: What do you think about Leah trying to make a career for herself in
comics?
AM: Ah, it’s great, and they’re doing terrific, The thing was, when I
first suggested to both Leah and Amber that if they ever wanted, for
some unknown reason, to have a bash at working in comics, then I’d
gladly do what I could to help them, and Amber had got other plans, but
Leah was interested in it, and I remember that first Tom Strong story, I
sent it off, I spoke to Scott Dunbier at Wildstorm and said, “Look, I’ve
got somebody that I know who’s got a Tom Strong story that they’ve
written. Actually I thought it was OK, but I thought I’d send it in and
see,” and I’d done that with other people, and I didn’t mention that it
was Leah, and I waited until he said, “This guy is really good!” and I
said, “Well actually it’s a girl and it’s me daughter, and I’m glad you
liked it.”
Alan and Leah Moore Tom Strong.jpg
(cover to Tom Strong Book Three which saw Alan and daughter Leah working
together, published DC)
And, since then, Leah and John have developed completely on their own, I
don’t think that their writing style is anything like mine, and
consciously so, I think they’ve made different choices, they’re going in
a different direction, I think that - I fear for anybody that’s working
in the comics industry, but I think it’s great the way that they are
doing exactly what I would have done if I’d have been their age still.
They’re doing fanzines, and they’re doing work for their friends, which
is what I used to do, and…
P: Leah did a cover for me for a fanzine I produced.
AM: I think I’ve got a copy of that. Is that the space thing…?
P: Puny Earthling, that’s the one.
AM: Yeah, I’ve got that, I’ve got it downstairs at the moment.
P: Fantastic!
Puny Eartling cover by Leah Moore.jpg
(cover to Puny Earthling #1, edited by Pádraig Ó Méalóid and featuring
cover art from Leah Moore)
AM: I think that the fanzine scene is the brightest part of the modern
comic landscape.
P: Do you keep an eye on the UK small press stuff at all?
AM: I mainly see it through Leah, because I’ve got straight out of touch
with everything, but Leah and John keep me updated upon things that
they’ve seen, and I think it’s great, I think there’s a load of energy
out there, and that’s where any new stuff is going to come from. It’s
not going to come from the big companies or from the centre ring acts,
it’s not going to come from Frank Miller or Art Spiegelman. It’s going
to come from some scruffy-haired little Herbert in a back room
somewhere, and he’s going to be the next Eddie Campbell or whoever, and
that’s where it always comes from. The real energy in comics always
comes up from below.
P: Well, the thing about comics is that anyone with a piece of paper and
a pen is off.
AM: Absolutely. That’s why it is a far superior medium to, say, movies,
or anything like that, because you don’t need all that money and backers
and technology; a paper, a pen. And that means that even, I’m completely
happy and confident about the comics medium because even if, as I hope,
the comics industry collapses tomorrow, then there’ll still be people
who have access to a Woolworth’s jotter and a cheap Biro - that was all
I used when I was doing my first groundbreaking series of comics when I
was eleven. The Crimebusters, I believe, which was a really shit
knockoff of The Avengers and we used to staple them at one corner and
then lend them out for a penny each, and that’s how nearly everybody I
know started.
Dave Gibbons started off doing comic strips in Woolworth’s jotters, we
all did, and I presume that the comics creators of the future - I
remember, one of the biggest things for me was when I was about thirteen
or fourteen, and I was starting to get into comics fandom, and to my
delight at the local library I found that there was a copy of Jules
Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes, which had got all this great
Plastic Man and Spirit stuff that I hadn’t seen, and it’d also got a
reproduction of a comic which Jules Feiffer had done when he was eleven
or twelve or something, and it was every bit as dreadful as the things
that I’d done, and that was inspiring, inspiring in the way that the Sex
Pistols must have been inspiring at the Hundred Club, that people
thought, “Shit, I could do that!”, and that’s the beauty of comics,
that’s why I’ve got no fears about the medium at all, not while there’s
a thriving small press scene, and the fact that it’s a press, the fact
that this is not internet magazines. I mean, I’m a real print boy. I
found some fanzines - I’ve thrown away almost all of my comics
collection over the last few weeks, I’ve given it to the local shop, and
things that I thought I’d never bet rid of but I’m just so bored with
them - I’ve kept some things.
I’ve kept my nearly complete set of Herbie, which is one comic that I
shall always worship, and, and I’ve kept the odd fanzine.
I’ve got a couple of Eddie’s early fanzines that I’ve kept, but it was
the fanzines from when I myself was a comics fan in the early seventies,
late sixties, and I found, I found a copy of Eureka!, which was Dez
Skinn’s comic fanzine, and there was a letter in it from my still great
mate Haydn Paul, there was a letter in it from Jim Baikie, there was all
these names that have since gone on to other things, so, even though Dez
Skinn had something to do with it, I kept that, just purely for interest
because fanzines, they do reveal a strata of what was going on which you
don’t get from looking at the comics of the period.
P: I was going through some old copies of Warrior, and there’s an
extremely enthusiastic fan letter in it from what was obviously a very
young Warren Ellis.
AM: Really?
P: Yes!
Warren Ellis Warrior Letter.jpg
(part of a fan letter to Warrior by a young Warren Ellis, borrowed from
Glycon)
AM: I’ll have to go back and check on that! I know that we had, was it
Pat Kane from Hue and Cry, he sent us some letters…
P: I think if you had the time to go through all these old comics, and
look at all of the people who sent in letters, you would probably find
some stuff they probably would sooner was forgotten at this stage.
AM: I know that my mate Steve Aylett with, when he did his Caterer, when
he was talking about his imaginary author Jeff Lint, and he was talking
about how, in the Caterer comic book, the letters’ page was called Your
Yell, and there was a letter saying, “How can I be like the Caterer? I
want to have your power of stillness,” it said, and this letter turned
out to be from a young Martin Amis, it says, “what was even more
inexplicable is that he was twenty seven at the time.” I can remember
hating Paul Gambaccini, I told him this when I met him, and I said, “you
know, when I was seven, Paul, I used to hate you,” I said, “it was just
that you always used to get letters in the Justice League letters page,
and I thought you were really opinionated.” i.e. he had different
opinions to mine, so, yeah, there was all sorts of interesting names
cropping up in those letters pages.
P: OK, I think that’s everything I wanted to ask you. Thank you very
much, Alan!
AM: Hey, my pleasure, mate, you take care of yourself and I’ll talk to
you again sometime soon.
P: Talk to you soon, Alan, Take care. Thank you very much indeed.
-- 
	Andy Roid

Ecco il copia ed incolla brutale del testo. 
Me lo stampo e me lo leggo quest'estate sotto l'ombrellone. Giuro...
:)
 
-- 
Ciao, | R: Perche' incasina l'ordine con cui si legge un messaggio
Speck | D: Perche' quotare sotto da' cosi' fastidio?
      | R: Quotare sotto.
      | D: Qual e' la cosa piu' seccante su usenet e in e-mail?

they’ve said.
Pezzo molto divertente e anche molto acuto.
Certo, fa anche un po' di piacere sapere che c'e' qualcosa capace di
spiazzare la gente in questo modo...
E fa anche riflettere sulla difficolta' che, molto spesso, abbiamo nel
chiamare le cose per nome.
-- 
Buon cammino!
il_pellegrino
"Leggo per legittima difesa." - Woody Allen

 chiamare le cose per nome.
rileggiti il mio articolo su proglo in merito ;P


dove bazzica anche l'intervistatore, Pádraig Ó Méalóid
E se vi interessa un po' la musica c'è Moore che intervista Eno (nel
2005):
<
http://www.readyourselfraw.com/profiles/alan_moore/moore_vs_eno/chainre
action_eno.htm>
-- 
Nicola D'Agostino
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