Alan Moore

[Adam Lou Stephanides]

Another message that got lost.

On Fri, 26 Apr 1996, Adam Lou Stephanides wrote:

> 
> 
> On Fri, 19 Apr 1996, marc issue robinson wrote:
> 
> > Quoth Adam Lou Stephanides:
> > 
> > > The prose works of Moore's that have been published since he declared
> > > himself to be a magician are even more Pynchonian in theme (I'll be
> > > happy to elaborate if anyone's interested).
> > 
> > Yes, please do - I knew about (or did I just assume?) Alan Moore's
> > involvement with magick from years back, but I'd rather lost track of his
> > work after Watchmen. When did he "declare himself", and how?
> 
> The recent prose works by Moore that I'm aware of are:
> 
> "The Courtyard," a short story appearing in _The Starry Wisdom: A
> Tribute to H P Lovecraft_, ed. D M Mitchell, published by Creation
> Books.  This is a horror story set in the near future, with a sort
> of cyberpunk atmosphere without the cyber-, if this makes any sense.
> While there is a Lovecraft connection to the story, you don't
> have to have read Lovecraft (I haven't) to appreciate it.
> 
> "The Demon Asmodeus," an extract from a piece of performance art,
> appearing in _Rapid Eye 3_, also published by Creation Books.  This
> is less than half a page long, but formally quite amazing: the second
> half contains the same words as the first half, but in reverse order.
> Nor does Moore do this the easy way, by writing sentences which are
> grammatical either forwards or backwards; the boundaries of phrases
> rarely coincide in the two halves.
> 
> Two extracts from _The Yuggoth Chronicles_, a book by Moore of inter-
> related texts concerning H. P. Lovecraft, which was supposed to have been
> published in 1995, but I've never seen it and inquiries at bookstores
> have drawn a blank.  The extracts themselves appeared in _Dust:
> A Creation Books Reader_.
> 
> Reading these pieces over, their Pynchonesque aspects are not as evi-
> dent as I'd remembered, though I think they're present.  There's a
> definite interest in discarded, "preterite" objects and ideas:
> in "The Courtyard" Moore speaks of "the negative conceptual space
> left surrounding a positive concept, the class of things larger than
> thought, being what thought excludes."  Aside from this, the resem-
> blance seems to me now to be largely one of tone: the combination of
> baroque, erudite prose with an underground sensibility.
> 
> In _Rapid Eye 3_ there is other stuff on Moore, including two inter-
> views, in one of which he discusses his declaring himself a magician.
> He explains his decision as follows: "Last November ('93) I reached
> my 40th birthday and was faced with the decision between having a 
> mid-life crisis or going _completely_ insane, and at the same time
> hopefully doing something a little bit more constructive.  So, I
> decided to declare myself a magician as that was the only system I
> could see which would include all of my other interests -- _sex_
> is magick, _art_ is magick, _history_ is magick, science, politics,
> life... are all magickal!"  Apparently the actual "declaration"
> involved nothing more than telling his friends he was a magician.
> 
> Incidentally, for comics fans, both _Rapid Eye 3_ and _The Starry
> Wisdom_ also contain pieces by Grant Morrison.  Come to think of
> it, Morrison has dabbled in Pynchonesque themes as well; e. g.
> the Flex Mentallo saga in _Doom Patrol_.
> 
> --Adam
>