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And having a hell of a time keeping one eye on the skyline
Oh, right, and I read the trade paperback of Alan Moore's Neonomicon (2010), which did not impress me. It wasn't the rape scenes, although there is a substantial duration of them (the book opened to one when I picked it up). It was the fact that if I want Lovecraftian body horror—if I want sex with Deep Ones, unimaginable, mind-breaking violation, congress with things that are nothing so comprehensible as callous human predators and that leave their object waiting coolly for nothing more than the hastening obliteration of a world which allows these and so many other atrocities to occur—I can pick up any of a dozen issues of Sirenia Digest and get it done better. I'm not being shown anything I haven't thought of. Ditto the sex cult whose ultimate goal is the birth of the apocalypse, because I have seen horror films made in the '70's. If there was some kind of meta-commentary going on—an indictment of Lovecraft fandom, the reduction of women in horror to their sexual physiology—I missed it. Mostly I was left wanting to read some Caitlín R. Kiernan or Gemma Files. Or e-mail Paula Guran and ask her to edit, for real, that anthology of weird erotica that was batted around after the panel at Readercon 2012. The point here is not a-ha! I am too edgy for Alan Moore!; I don't have time for that kind of nail-buffing weirdo pride any more than I think I should get a British history pat on the back because I liked George VI before The King's Speech (2010). It was just the blank, slightly nonplussed feeling of picking up something acclaimed and putting it down in confirmed knowledge of the fact that there is better cosmicist fishsex in this world.
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Alan Moore is so overhyped that it's hard for me to see what's so great about him. "Watchmen" and "V for Vendetta" were good reads, mind you, and groundbreaking for their time I suppose, but you'd think they were the complete works of William Shakespeare, the way people discuss them.
Also I owe you an e-mail. I am sorry for dropping off the earth and will haul myself back in a day or so.
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There's an intersecting issue here that I have to think about how to articulate, because I don't want to end up saying something reductive at this hour of the night. (Even with the extra hour provided by Daylight Savings fleeing back to the land of light until the spring. Seriously, it's like Persephone of industrialized societies.) I like confrontational art. Art should shock, provoke, question, and redefine as much as it describes, evokes, or affirms. It doesn't need to be didactic, but I set a high value on narratives or juxtapositions that show me something I hadn't considered about a piece of the world, whether it's a pleasure to discover or not. (Oh, look, it's a comic about the Patriarchy. Ha ha ow.) I don't like art that assumes it knows my limits. This is not, again, some kind of intentional fallacy harder-than-thou. I have been shocked by art. I have been surprised by books, moved to argument by movies, turned on by things I didn't expect and profoundly upset by ditto. But I also know that what I get out of a given piece of art is not necessarily what its creator put into it, as in the exemplary case of Lovecraft himself. His Innsmouth is an object of horror; he intends it to repulse and alarm. I read about dissolving into ancestral sea-people and it doesn't matter that the narrative identifies the Deep Ones and Y'ha-nthlei as monstrous, unholy, and full of problematic assumptions about race and heredity, it catches me. I don't imagine Lovecraft envisioned that reaction. I am fairly certain it would have appalled him. Reading Neonomicon, I kept feeling that Moore was pushing me for emotional reactions I wasn't going to feel, with even less reason than Lovecraft to expect they would come off. Was it supposed to startle me that the Lovecraftian cultists of Moore's Innsmouth-Salem are all casually, venomously racist? Lovecraft was a horrible racist. Anyone with an affinity to the other aspects of his work has to square with that one and not turn into some kind of apologist for "The Horror at Red Hook." It's not some kind of horrifying illumination of his worldview to foreground this element in a present-day reworking any more than it's a shocking inversion of his aesthetics to introduce sex into a universe that is nearly sexless except for squeamish adjectives and the recurring specter of sexual relations between humanity and not. (Sex is pretty much the first way any writer thinks to transform a familiar story, in any case. Angela Carter was brilliant at it; Anne Rice should have had her typewriter revoked.)
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Tangentially: this is so very, very true. I can see it in other people when they have violent, deep attachments to works of literature that just don't seem to bear the weight of that attachment--it's because it isn't the work, it's the jigsaw puzzle interlocking of that work with that person at some particular time. And I have experienced it myself, too: things I've loved that not many people love in the same way, and it's not because I'm this amazing tremblingly sensitive appreciator of genius that others don't get, but just that the book and I fit together perfectly.
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So circling back to tentacles, if the mood Alan Moore wants to instill in the reader by the story's end is a devastating, dreadful nihilism, the utter insignificance and condemnation of the human race that deserves every aeon of devouring by great Cthulhu dreaming and unborn, a woman getting raped by some orgone-high cultists and their scaly-cocked pet Deep One is not going to do it for me. Especially when the sex is used as an illustration of the horror: that overturns nothing about Lovecraft's world, examines no new angle. If the entirety of the emotional effect is intended to rest in the fact that the comic went there, then there is going to have to be somewhere intrinsically as empty and incomprehensible as the careless stars of Lovecraft's cosmos. There in Neonomicon was where far too many women in horror fiction end up. And so we're back to me feeling that I have seen this story before and I've seen it better, when I think instead I was supposed to feel I'd been put through a wringer of what my favorite author really means. Here's all the racism you didn't notice, the sexuality that squirms out sideways in the horror of damp sea-caves and slime. Here is the ultimate end of his philosophy: a brutalized woman gladly birthing the end of all things. Okay, then. That's an interpretation. But it isn't much of a revelation. And this is Lovecraft, all right? "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Revelations that destroy are his stock-in-trade. You can't pull that off in your modernization, your meta-level has failed. And I have not been confronted by anything new.
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I always think of my introduction to Alan Moore as starting with Andrew Bonia at Yale telling me about Miracleman (Marvelman), but I keep forgetting that I read a lot of Moore's Swamp Thing in college because of Sandman: I wanted Matthew's backstory, so I sat in the aisles of The Million Year Picnic and Newbury Comics and read my way through as many volumes as they had.
I still need to read From Hell.
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Quoth Moore: "The greater part of any murder is the field of theory, fascination, and hysteria that it engenders."