Illuminations: Stories

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There’s a lot of local history brought in through the annotations, and it’s clear that Moore likes that part, but your enjoyment of the rest will hinge on your tolerance for beat poems. I especially wasn’t prepared for a 200+ page “novella” (‘What We Can Know About Thunderman’) to be included herein; that’s like reading a whole book by itself! And at the Last Just to Be Done With Silence: Alan Moore's Waiting For Godot complete with macabre twist, tiresome. Gaiman describes it as "a scabrous, monstrous, often hilarious unmasking and reinvention of the people who made the comics, and the lives destroyed by the four-color funnies.

Almost none of the stories interested me with the exceptions being The Improbably Complex High-Energy State which was a fun and silly romp, Location Location Location which was more or less an interesting idea and executed fairly well, and What We Can Know About Thunderman, which was a very tiresome deluge of Alan Moore's vitriol and like most of the book was tiresome. What We Can Know About Thunderman" es una pieza que debió de haber sido muy catártica para Moore de escribir y aunque es entretenida y ciertas piezas son excelentes sufre de que considero que debió de haber sido como como una novela para acabar con las ideas que son presentadas. Location, Location, Location sees the Biblical apocalypse through the eyes of a Bedford estate agent, after it turns out that Joanna Southcott and the Panacea Society were right all along. More vexing than the label, though, is the theme: an extended hatchet job on the US comics industry.Some plots are sardonic dissections of pretense, exposés of the subterfuge hiding behind the social contract. Although many elements are exuberantly fictionalised – I doubt that any female executives at DC Comics were married to a painting of Augusto Pinochet – part of the story’s pleasure lies in Moore’s insider knowledge of the industry: there is a sense that there’s a kernel of sordid truth within each satirical fictionalisation, as though Moore is airing everyone’s dirty laundry for the world to see. It’s dragged down by the inclusion of what amounts to a full novel that’s by far the worst thing in the volume, and takes up more than half of it. The method is to some extent the same one comics have been using for decades, where if you want to use characters whose rights are elsewhere, you change the name and a couple of details, and then go wild; Moore did it himself with Watchmen and Supreme.

I have a very hard time getting up the stairs as a twenty-some year old without resorting to all fours--and I have better balance than An American Light . The best way to describe this one is the evolution of a being, starting from nothing and eventually falling into the normal pitfalls of arrogance, judgment, and yearning for omnipotence. In the course of pursuing an only superficial anti-fascist polemic, Moore's superheroes are more fascist than anything you'd have found in the same period in the average Marvel or DC Comic. I loved this one the most given it was quick, it was cerebral, and it brought that beautiful sexual undertone that Moore has to the surface, complete with a cinnamon-roll Jez.I would read more of this though, as I feel it has potential (uuugggghhhhh and now I just feel pretentious saying that about Alan Fucking Moore! Billed as a collection of "stories," Illuminations is, rather, as Neil Gaiman concedes on his back cover blurb, "a sort of camouflage, or frame" for What We Can Know About Thunderman—which, at 240 pages of a 450-page book, is not a story or even a novella but a full-length novel. There is a narrative that reveals itself in these footnotes, but it’s entirely too insubstantial to justify itself. The only thing that makes it recognizably Alan Moore-y is the scaffolding of local history, which is by far the most interesting part of the story. It took me a few pages to get into it, but it winds up having a nice rhythm, and building to a clever ending.

The dinner is interrupted by the belated revelation that American’s editor-in-chief, Brandon Chuff, has been dead for the entire conversation, despite his smiling presence at the table (somewhat like the real-world comics industry, Moore implies). In the first femtosecond of time at the beginning of the universe, a spontaneously generated consciousness emerges, followed by another, then by a whole passel of them. Executives exploit working-class creators – such as Superman’s creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, as well as Moore himself – for the benefit of shareholders and corporate oligarchs. ILLUMINATIONS (five stars) A recently divorced man decides to visit a beach resort where he remembered being happy as a child, and in so doing, discovers that nostalgia engenders disappointment, boredom, and finally, horror. this has some good short stories and some other undefinable stuff for which even the structure can't be described (the long story one about the first femtosecond of the creation of the world, for instance).

If Moore just wanted to give us an education on the Beat scene in San Francisco, it’s a halfway clever, if a bit didactic, way of doing it. NOT EVEN LEGEND (four stars) A society for the investigation of the paranormal routinely investigates urban legends. The difference here is that as well as characters getting aliases – so Thunderman is Superman, the National Guard is Captain America, and so forth – so do publishers, and creators, and editors, and the gangsters who financed the companies.

The best description I have of the stories is that they are like Ishiguro books, however Ishiguro definitely has perfected this style of writing. There is even an absolutely perfect parody of self-important literature, especially outlandishly bad poetry, a thing to treasure and behold in its impenetrable glory. If the comics industry is “a metaphorical microcosm for the whole of society”, then comics fans and Maga reactionaries both similarly reveal “how blurred the line separating fact from fiction is for many people”. Alan Moore's intellect is staggering and on full near constant display in this book and it gets real tiresome, with each new style or variation appearing to be yet another "look what I can do" moment for the author to show off. But Moore, from the depths of the English working class, has always aimed his ambition at the attainment of high culture.His punishment for this desire, should he achieve it, will be to leave behind, down in the Marvel Bullpen, the merely conflicted liberalisms of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for the much more exalted slopes of Parnassus, where figures as troubling (and as obsessed with heroism) as Blake, Nietzsche, and Yeats will tell him what Walter Benjamin long ago told us all: "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.