About your idea for a “Damn” stamp, you’re not the first, of course! When Allen and I were teaching in the 1990s, we thought of a stamp to put in the margins of confounding papers that came in. The not-too-crushing one that we finally agreed on just said “Odd.”
Nice bit about virtue and the aversion we all have to apparent virtue that might not be true virtue. FWIW, this may be a particularly Christian perspective, as Jesus in the Gospels spends a lot of time attacking other Jews as "actors" (Gr. hypocriteis) for demonstrably following the Law of Moses. As someone with a very Christian upbringing, this caused no end of trouble for me, since I was measuring my virtue by my ability to be utterly consistent in what virtuous conduct I was capable of (not much, when I was younger).
In retrospect, this kind of thing seems pretty culty on Jesus' part, and not a particularly good way of evaluating someone's conduct. The older I get, the more it makes sense to me to evaluate people's conduct in independent spheres of life, and recognize that not everyone is good at everything. If you work hard, and are thrifty, and build up a successful business, that's a good thing, with its own reward. If you get mad that there are poor people who need help from charities or the state, then you're not a good person in that respect. Yes, there's a logical consistency in your choices and the vices you ascribe to others, but it's also a virtue to do things for people when they are suffering, and you're doing the opposite.
The Wills quote made me think of Diderot's book "Rameau's Nephew" which seems like something you might enjoy. If you follow John Ganz, I'm sure he has written about it, because Hegel draws on it in the Phenomenology. The book itself is very accessible, but it's written at this point where there's still a royal court, and people with sinecures and others living by earning a place at the tables of those with wealth. Rameau's nephew is one of those parasites (this is the original meaning of the word) and talks about the ups and downs of a life where being cancelled means no meals for the foreseeable future. The narrator takes the position that it's much more satisfying to rise early, work hard, and earn a living for yourself. The pleasure of the book arises from the fact that the narrator is so boring in comparison to Rameau's nephew, who sounds like a person today who hates their job. Every mode of living has its risks and rewards, Enlightenment liberalism was never going to fix everything, but (pace Wills) Catholicism certainly won't.
If you ever get a chance to write a capsule review of Moore and Cambell's "From Hell", I would love to read it. I feel like it's the comic book with the best claim to being a work of art for the ages. I have no idea how it reads to someone who's not a comic-book person, though. I read what you wrote a while back about feeling like the pictures get in the way of enjoying the writing - if that's still the case, you might try reading Bill Griffith's book on Ernie Bushmiller and "Nancy". Bushmiller's "Nancy" comic has the virtue of being the most efficient comic ever produced - Spiegelman once said that it takes more energy to avoid reading a "Nancy" strip than to read it - and Griffith reproduces a bunch of excellent examples, with explanations of how they work. It's a detailed explanation of how to read comics, using the comics that are the easiest to read, and that can only be read as comics.
From Hell is the work from Moore I like most because omg Eddie Campbell's pencil-and-ink art...be still my heart...and also because I have always somewhat disliked Moore's magical modernist sensibility and From Hell is the point at which he turns his scalpel on himself. I feel like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Watchmen (and Promethea, to my limited knowledge) all confirm rather glibly Moore's use of mysticism as a structuring device, his penchant for modernist time-violations/hauntings, his belief in the generative power of storytelling...Gull (as Dr Manhattan in Watchmen) is the focus of all of that here but the story unmistakably rebukes him and everything he represents as delusional. his ritual succeeds but he goes down to the grave like the rest of us, the old devil.
(our ostensible heroes Abberline and Lees, like Gull, are pompous blowhards who manipulate fraudulent and constitutively masculine ideologies for their own benefit and arrive at the right answer only by accident. it's no surprise that they fail to unmask him; they were trying to dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.)
I grew up reading comics in the shadow of the counter-culture (Jim Starlin's original Thanos story in "Captain Marvel" was my idea of a perfect comic book at age 12), so most of Moore's affectations read like virtues to me rather than vices. I mean, his magicians use an actual magical system rather than just saying words backwards! So there's a lot of stuff he's written that I have no idea how it plays to younger readers. "V for Vendetta" is basically the Patty Hearst kidnapping from the point of view of the SLA, which seems problematic, at the very least.
In "From Hell", the attitudes of the characters, the violence, and the magic all take their shape as an expression of the world that Moore is depicting. If you want to read the book as a critique of Victorian society, that's valid, but it's also easy to see that the characters are doing their best by their own lights, and to treat their various vicissitudes as tragedies that are real enough, given the world that they live in. When Gull ends up actually seeing the future, his view of a 1990s office is quite poignant - would anyone imagine cubicle-land as a world that people have saved and sacrificed to create? It's a very vivid illustration of the problem with working to create a better future - by definition, the future is a place where the people of the present won't belong.
Re: the cubicle vision, "Gull, ascending" obviously is one of the most brilliant things I've ever read. I think that particular aspect of it shows that he, like many visionaries, is a snob at heart: he's willing to pontificate about building a new society but unwilling to confront how ordinary people might experience his vision. He can sympathize only with "individualists" like himself. And I think his contempt for normalcy is what enables Mary Kelly (and Moore) to banish him back to hell; From Hell, after all, is "a melodrama in sixteen parts," and no one in a melodrama who has contempt for the little guy ever comes to a good end.
(The "god" page...I admittedly am not a comics gal but I personally believe that to be the most astonishing page of comics I have yet read)
I went to look at my current set of notes just now and lol'd a bit at this comment:
"I actually had a dream sometime later where I was complaining to somebody about all the historical cameos—specifically, Yeats—I was saying 'ooooh, look everybody, it’s Yeats! I just happened to run into Yeats!' and then somebody else said (in the dream) 'this is why I just can’t take Alan Moore seriously.'"
It is a historical novel about the occult in the late 19th c., so including Yeats didn't seem like a problem to me.
If you don't mind me asking, what's the view of Alan Moore as a writer of funny books these days? If you're going from Chris Claremont's X-Men to Watchmen, his virtues seem obvious. If you got into reading graphic novels by reading Alison Bechdel, I'm not sure what he would have to offer. His roots are entirely pulp fiction, and I understand the reason for a distinction between pulp and literary fiction. If you're a literary person, there are plenty of graphic novels that address the world in a way less reliant on familiarity with bad writing.
I understand that they teach Moore in high school and college classes, so maybe people feel a need to react against having him shoved down their throats as "good writing"?
yeah this will be discussed in My Eventual Post but there was a certain point early in From Hell (chapter four) where I felt like I was reading somebody's rant copy/pasted over some pictures, and I really hated it, and also hated myself for going with the less expensive Moore book over the one I actually wanted to start with for my project (Swamp Thing)… but directly after that it starts using the comic page way more inventively.
now in hindsight I think that the absolute tedium of chapter four is on purpose because it tells you something about Gull that his big introduction works against the form in this way. but I'm still thinking about this, and there are some things i want to read / reread before i actually write my post.
I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but just a warning for when you get to it, to be careful with Swamp Thing editions-- most of the current print editions are really, awfully (I would say sinfully) recolored editions that look nothing like the original. What DC does with recoloring is just vile.
Man, I loved Chapter 4 when I first read it. Mind you, I've read a lot of books on religion and the occult over the years, so the "rant" aspect of it wasn't particularly troubling. I've always been a big fan of the city hidden under the city that I'm walking through, and the illustrations of the old buildings with the occult "history" set out next to them is right up my alley. Campbell plays around a lot with how he renders each of the buildings as well, so it's hardly just a series of pictures.
Gull is such an amazing character - he pushes that 19th c. craziness to its limits, like Nietzsche or Crowley. Like Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness", his methods have become unsound, but he raises the question that the counter-culture always raises against the culture - given the lives sacrificed in building the disenchanted world, isn't it possible that the enchanted world might be less costly? He's completely implausible, but so are the murders, so the fact that they really happened pull us into his interpretation of reality. A disturbing but enjoyable ride.
Obsessed with the idea of how men act out dad scold liberalism, but specifically as Calvin's dad from Calvin and Hobbes ("I'm going to rip off every license plate cover in the neighborhood!")
In his new memoir, Daniel Handler mentions putting "DB" in margins as he edits for "Do Better." (He originally got this as the main, frequent annotation to a screenplay draft)
About your idea for a “Damn” stamp, you’re not the first, of course! When Allen and I were teaching in the 1990s, we thought of a stamp to put in the margins of confounding papers that came in. The not-too-crushing one that we finally agreed on just said “Odd.”
Nice bit about virtue and the aversion we all have to apparent virtue that might not be true virtue. FWIW, this may be a particularly Christian perspective, as Jesus in the Gospels spends a lot of time attacking other Jews as "actors" (Gr. hypocriteis) for demonstrably following the Law of Moses. As someone with a very Christian upbringing, this caused no end of trouble for me, since I was measuring my virtue by my ability to be utterly consistent in what virtuous conduct I was capable of (not much, when I was younger).
In retrospect, this kind of thing seems pretty culty on Jesus' part, and not a particularly good way of evaluating someone's conduct. The older I get, the more it makes sense to me to evaluate people's conduct in independent spheres of life, and recognize that not everyone is good at everything. If you work hard, and are thrifty, and build up a successful business, that's a good thing, with its own reward. If you get mad that there are poor people who need help from charities or the state, then you're not a good person in that respect. Yes, there's a logical consistency in your choices and the vices you ascribe to others, but it's also a virtue to do things for people when they are suffering, and you're doing the opposite.
The Wills quote made me think of Diderot's book "Rameau's Nephew" which seems like something you might enjoy. If you follow John Ganz, I'm sure he has written about it, because Hegel draws on it in the Phenomenology. The book itself is very accessible, but it's written at this point where there's still a royal court, and people with sinecures and others living by earning a place at the tables of those with wealth. Rameau's nephew is one of those parasites (this is the original meaning of the word) and talks about the ups and downs of a life where being cancelled means no meals for the foreseeable future. The narrator takes the position that it's much more satisfying to rise early, work hard, and earn a living for yourself. The pleasure of the book arises from the fact that the narrator is so boring in comparison to Rameau's nephew, who sounds like a person today who hates their job. Every mode of living has its risks and rewards, Enlightenment liberalism was never going to fix everything, but (pace Wills) Catholicism certainly won't.
If you ever get a chance to write a capsule review of Moore and Cambell's "From Hell", I would love to read it. I feel like it's the comic book with the best claim to being a work of art for the ages. I have no idea how it reads to someone who's not a comic-book person, though. I read what you wrote a while back about feeling like the pictures get in the way of enjoying the writing - if that's still the case, you might try reading Bill Griffith's book on Ernie Bushmiller and "Nancy". Bushmiller's "Nancy" comic has the virtue of being the most efficient comic ever produced - Spiegelman once said that it takes more energy to avoid reading a "Nancy" strip than to read it - and Griffith reproduces a bunch of excellent examples, with explanations of how they work. It's a detailed explanation of how to read comics, using the comics that are the easiest to read, and that can only be read as comics.
From Hell is the work from Moore I like most because omg Eddie Campbell's pencil-and-ink art...be still my heart...and also because I have always somewhat disliked Moore's magical modernist sensibility and From Hell is the point at which he turns his scalpel on himself. I feel like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Watchmen (and Promethea, to my limited knowledge) all confirm rather glibly Moore's use of mysticism as a structuring device, his penchant for modernist time-violations/hauntings, his belief in the generative power of storytelling...Gull (as Dr Manhattan in Watchmen) is the focus of all of that here but the story unmistakably rebukes him and everything he represents as delusional. his ritual succeeds but he goes down to the grave like the rest of us, the old devil.
(our ostensible heroes Abberline and Lees, like Gull, are pompous blowhards who manipulate fraudulent and constitutively masculine ideologies for their own benefit and arrive at the right answer only by accident. it's no surprise that they fail to unmask him; they were trying to dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.)
I grew up reading comics in the shadow of the counter-culture (Jim Starlin's original Thanos story in "Captain Marvel" was my idea of a perfect comic book at age 12), so most of Moore's affectations read like virtues to me rather than vices. I mean, his magicians use an actual magical system rather than just saying words backwards! So there's a lot of stuff he's written that I have no idea how it plays to younger readers. "V for Vendetta" is basically the Patty Hearst kidnapping from the point of view of the SLA, which seems problematic, at the very least.
In "From Hell", the attitudes of the characters, the violence, and the magic all take their shape as an expression of the world that Moore is depicting. If you want to read the book as a critique of Victorian society, that's valid, but it's also easy to see that the characters are doing their best by their own lights, and to treat their various vicissitudes as tragedies that are real enough, given the world that they live in. When Gull ends up actually seeing the future, his view of a 1990s office is quite poignant - would anyone imagine cubicle-land as a world that people have saved and sacrificed to create? It's a very vivid illustration of the problem with working to create a better future - by definition, the future is a place where the people of the present won't belong.
Re: the cubicle vision, "Gull, ascending" obviously is one of the most brilliant things I've ever read. I think that particular aspect of it shows that he, like many visionaries, is a snob at heart: he's willing to pontificate about building a new society but unwilling to confront how ordinary people might experience his vision. He can sympathize only with "individualists" like himself. And I think his contempt for normalcy is what enables Mary Kelly (and Moore) to banish him back to hell; From Hell, after all, is "a melodrama in sixteen parts," and no one in a melodrama who has contempt for the little guy ever comes to a good end.
(The "god" page...I admittedly am not a comics gal but I personally believe that to be the most astonishing page of comics I have yet read)
I went to look at my current set of notes just now and lol'd a bit at this comment:
"I actually had a dream sometime later where I was complaining to somebody about all the historical cameos—specifically, Yeats—I was saying 'ooooh, look everybody, it’s Yeats! I just happened to run into Yeats!' and then somebody else said (in the dream) 'this is why I just can’t take Alan Moore seriously.'"
i agree with your dream-interlocutor
It is a historical novel about the occult in the late 19th c., so including Yeats didn't seem like a problem to me.
If you don't mind me asking, what's the view of Alan Moore as a writer of funny books these days? If you're going from Chris Claremont's X-Men to Watchmen, his virtues seem obvious. If you got into reading graphic novels by reading Alison Bechdel, I'm not sure what he would have to offer. His roots are entirely pulp fiction, and I understand the reason for a distinction between pulp and literary fiction. If you're a literary person, there are plenty of graphic novels that address the world in a way less reliant on familiarity with bad writing.
I understand that they teach Moore in high school and college classes, so maybe people feel a need to react against having him shoved down their throats as "good writing"?
yeah this will be discussed in My Eventual Post but there was a certain point early in From Hell (chapter four) where I felt like I was reading somebody's rant copy/pasted over some pictures, and I really hated it, and also hated myself for going with the less expensive Moore book over the one I actually wanted to start with for my project (Swamp Thing)… but directly after that it starts using the comic page way more inventively.
now in hindsight I think that the absolute tedium of chapter four is on purpose because it tells you something about Gull that his big introduction works against the form in this way. but I'm still thinking about this, and there are some things i want to read / reread before i actually write my post.
I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but just a warning for when you get to it, to be careful with Swamp Thing editions-- most of the current print editions are really, awfully (I would say sinfully) recolored editions that look nothing like the original. What DC does with recoloring is just vile.
Man, I loved Chapter 4 when I first read it. Mind you, I've read a lot of books on religion and the occult over the years, so the "rant" aspect of it wasn't particularly troubling. I've always been a big fan of the city hidden under the city that I'm walking through, and the illustrations of the old buildings with the occult "history" set out next to them is right up my alley. Campbell plays around a lot with how he renders each of the buildings as well, so it's hardly just a series of pictures.
Gull is such an amazing character - he pushes that 19th c. craziness to its limits, like Nietzsche or Crowley. Like Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness", his methods have become unsound, but he raises the question that the counter-culture always raises against the culture - given the lives sacrificed in building the disenchanted world, isn't it possible that the enchanted world might be less costly? He's completely implausible, but so are the murders, so the fact that they really happened pull us into his interpretation of reality. A disturbing but enjoyable ride.
there will be a post about from hell in the future! it is in fact partly written. not sure when it will be done, though.
Obsessed with the idea of how men act out dad scold liberalism, but specifically as Calvin's dad from Calvin and Hobbes ("I'm going to rip off every license plate cover in the neighborhood!")
In his new memoir, Daniel Handler mentions putting "DB" in margins as he edits for "Do Better." (He originally got this as the main, frequent annotation to a screenplay draft)