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Alan Moore is the most celebrated comics writer living but doesn't write comics anymore. For the past decade, he's been working instead on his second novel, Jerusalem, a sprawling epic covering a span of time stretching to the heat death of the universe but contained geographically within half a square mile in Moores hometown of Northampton, UK, in an area known as the Boroughs. Using the rapidly eroding map of his own working-class neighborhood as a canvas, Moore spins a tale of life and afterlife, using narrative tools that include stream of consciousness, verse, playwriting, and Joycean glossolalia to boot. It is both the culmination of his life's work as a writer and a radical departure for an artist known for them. So it was with great excitement that I sat down to talk with Moore about this crowning achievement of his career.
Rob Vollmar: Jerusalem builds on themes and techniques that began in your work as early as From Hell but figured heavily in your first novel, Voice of the Fire, and, more recently, in your homage to your friend and mentor Steve Moore, Unearthing. Could you talk about psychogeography and how it came to play such an important role in your work?
Alan Moore: Psychogeography would be the understanding that in our experience of any place, it is the associations, the dreams, the imaginings, the history-it is all the information that is relevant to that place which is what we experience when we talk about a place. That is what we're talking about. We're not actually talking about the hard bricks and mortar.
Yes, that is all that we can measure in the material world, but that is not the essence of what we feel when we talk about a particular place that means something to us. It is always that psychological effect the place has on us that is going to be paramount, and that is psychogeography-a way of considering the landscape around us as more than its physical components, acknowledging that there is much more to all of this than the material world. The bigger part of our experience is spent in this vague, drifting, entirely immaterial world of associations.
I suppose that the first time I ever heard that term,...