"Michael Moorcock, a living saint of English gutter fiction, once observed that Victorian middle-class morality had erected wrought-iron rails about the confines of what could be considered literature--essentially Jane Austen and the novel of manners. All other forms of writing, like genre fiction and the literature of the fantastic, were exiled to the wastelands out past the perimeters. Literature was a vanity mirror for the social strata that could afford to be literate, and only writing that reflected an absorption in the social intricacies of the book-buying classes would be allowed past the gate, past the critics, past the guard dogs. This still obtains. No admission for the too-flamboyantly attired, for the impassioned and overexcited, for the rowdy or intoxicated or possessed, who are relocated to where the surfaced roads peter out and the inbred web-toed monsters really start to kick in. With the gothic melodramas and pornographies and ranting pamphlets. This isn't a nice district. You're not likely to have a park named after you. On the other hand, there are advantages . . ."
--from an interview with Alan Moore, writer of the graphic novels Watchmen and From Hell.
also, noticed this piece on Southern.
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--from an interview with Alan Moore, writer of the graphic novels Watchmen and From Hell.
- tom moody 8-02-2001 8:28 am
also, noticed this piece on Southern.
- bill 8-02-2001 3:12 pm [add a comment]
Alan Moore was to the '80s what Terry Southern was to the '60s. (Note subtle attempt to get thread back on track.)
- tom moody 8-02-2001 7:38 pm [add a comment]
Didn't think much of the Ames article; maybe all the "ballsy" writers are doing comic books and sci-fi now. That seems to be Moore's take.
- alex 8-02-2001 8:22 pm [add a comment]
I just finished From Hell. It's a baedeker of London architecture, history lesson on paganism and freemasonry, and conspiracy thriller linking the Ripper murders to the British crown, held together with sinuous threads of fourth-dimensional speculation and Moore's trademark poetic disjunctions between image and text. Fantastic! Who needs "real" novels?
- tom moody 8-02-2001 9:11 pm [add a comment]