A new(ish) Alan Moore reading list.
One of things I’ve always liked about Affable Al is his willingness to share what he’s been reading. This one comes from the link in u/Successful-Tie5386 ’s excellent post about Moore’s interview in the Northampton Poetry Journal (link to the journal is in the last link there - well worth downloading, it’s got a very good interview about poetry with Robin Ince in it as well.)
Nice that he gives a Mariana Enriquez’s excellent novel a namecheck as well seeing as she's often spoken of how Alan Moore is one of her big influences. And, of course, Viz... my secret hope is one day Alan contributes something to it which might stand alongside Roger Mellie or Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles.
>17. Do you think poetry still has the power to transform culture or perhaps at least assist in an effective counter culture?
>One of my big delights these days is buying old poetry books and, especially, small press magazines from Kevin Ring at Beat Scene or Will Shutes at Test Centre. I think that one of the things contemporary society is in most urgent need of is a counterculture, and looking through these stab-stapled wonders makes me realise that any counterculture worth its salthas always had poetry at its very core, whether that be the Beat eruption of the American 50s, Jeff Nuttall and company in the English 60s, or John Cooper Clark in safety-pinned 70s.
>Looked at objectively, it almost seems to me as if a healthy network of small press publications and fanzines is possibly a necessary precursor to any serious counterculture. But I think, perhaps superstitiously, that this has to be a material phenomenon, rather than online or otherwise virtual. I think there has to be a physical scrap of paper as a nucleus or kernel before a counterculture can coagulate about it, which is probably why we haven’t seen one since the early 1990s.
>18. What are you reading at the moment?
>At the moment, it’s mostly reference for my Long London novels – Prince Monolulu’s autobiography I Gotta Horse, James Morton’s Gangland Bosses, David Gascoyne’s Man Is This Meat, Nairn’s London, The Surrender of Silence by by Iain Sinclair, tons of Arthur Machen, and a surprising number of books from the estimable Phil Baker, including his excellent Austin Spare biography and his more recent City of the Beast.
>Other than that, I just finished Steve Paxton’s highly convincing How Capitalism Ends, and before that I very much enjoyed Mariana Enriquez’s supernatural horror/political metaphor, Our Share of Night, and Jessica Gregson’s remarkable After Silence. Coming up next is an unfinished novel by the great Brian Catling, and then the latest illuminating mental walkabout from my mate Robin Ince. Other than Viz, Private Eye, Faunus (the quarterly journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen), New Scientist, and the aforementioned Beat Scene, that’s about it.