Grumpy Old Man

Comic Book Grrrl‘s Laura Sneddon did a 1,000 word article for The Independent a week and a half ago recapping an interview with Alan Moore, which is an astounding feat to me considering I can’t get angry about a 20-page Flash comic in less than 1,300 words.

But apparently her interview with Moore went on for about an hour, and she has posted an uncut transcript of the entire interview on her Website. Let’s take a look… and while we’re doing it, let’s try to forget that “Uncut Alan Moore” would be an excellent title for an Axel Braun Watchmen porno, shall we?

So I think that might end up being one of the subtexts of Century as a whole, that it will be just this slow degradation of culture, you know sort of in the space of a hundred years. I mean that’s one of the things that’s most extraordinary about reading and writing Century as a volume, is that yeah one hundred years, that’s living memory. And yet we’ve somehow gone from the waterfronts that Brecht was writing about in 1910 all the way to the present day, and everything that that means…

I think we kind of, we risk simply losing genuinely valuable parts of society and culture because of our fascination with lights and bells and whistles. I blame a lot of culture, I found myself half way through one of my unfathomable rants the other night, you know where I suddenly sort of think, what am I actually saying? And it turned out what I was saying was that I blame most of Western culture upon the manufacturers of children’s cot mobiles. Simply because I think that they have programmed a couple of generations to be entertained by something if it’s moving and if it’s making a noise.

Sorry, Alan; could you repeat that? I was distracted by something moving and making a noise. Her name’s Sasha. Welcome to the Internet, where you are competing with her.

And at the same time as this I’ve been working upon my novel Jerusalem which is at the moment on a pretty spectacular chapter where I’ve got a massive four dimensional hallway up above the world that is only above one area of the world geographically but it is above it in every particular moment of time. So it’s this immense hallway, two miles wide, a mile high, and running down it is a naked old man with a naked 18 month old baby girl riding on his shoulders…

Okay, slow down! Now say it in a sexy voice or I can’t come!

…and they’re running down the length of time and they are seeing the big freeze when the Greenland ice shelf melts and the Gulf Stream stops, and then a bit further on there’s a sort of a more jungly area, where presumably the warming of the planet has kind of counteracted the cooling down that would happen in these latitudes if the Gulf Stream were to stop, and you’ve got post-humans, genetically engineered to survive in a world with less food, and then after a few more thousand years of pounding down this corridor there’s no more people any more.

Dammit. So long, boner.

And then you start to get mega-fauna that have come up from the drying oceans, giant squids that are using their bodies as basically digital televisions, using the pigment cells in their skin to mimic their surroundings…

Hey! Welcome back, buddy!

…and land whales that look as if they’re part goat!

Yeah, I dated her.

And then after that you’ve got super anthills…

Dated her too.

…and then there’s no biological life at all, and I rang up Robin Ince today to find out about the date, whether it’s two million years when the Andromeda galaxy, might be two billion years, when the Andromeda galaxy crashes into our own, which will happen and I thought that should be quite spectacular!

You’ve got to admit that one thing in the past 100 years that’s gotten better, Alan: hallucinogens.

(Alan Moore is easy to make fun of, but if you’re a fan of his comics – particularly League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.)