Alan Moore

I've been reading Alan Moore's novel "The Voice of the Fire." It's amazing, an exploration of history and transformation, and I'm pretty amazed that more attention hasn't been payed to it. It has 12 sections that span over 6,000 years, each set near Moore's hometown. The last chapter is about Moore himself, where he writes: "The last words of the previous chapter, written in grey light, stand there upon the monitor's dark stage, beneath the Help menu that's lettered up on the procenium arch. The cursor winks, a visible slow handclap in the black, deserted auditorium. [...] The hollow ashtray fashioned like a yawning frog, a gross cascade of cigarette end and sour pumice spilling from its china throat. THe index finger of the right hand, poised above the keys. The author types the words 'the author types the words'."

Here's some more stuff--

"Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world. All of the subtle energies pass through here on their journey into form. If properly dictated, they'll provide the closures that the narrative demands: the terrible black dogs shall come. There shall be fires, and severed heads, and angel language."

"Here, unmasked, a process that distinguishes this palce as incranated in industrial times. The only constant features in the local-interest photograph collections are the mounds of bricks; the cranes against the sky. A peckish Saturn fresh run out of young, the town devours itself. Everything grand we had, we tore to bits. Our castles, our emporiums, our witches and our glorious poets. Smash it up, set fire to it and stick it in the fucking madhouse. Jesus Christ."

"She is now say of stick-head men, and of they saying-path. [...] Say she, for make this saying-path they stick-head men is want of a strongness and a queer glean that is not hind-whiles in of they. A strongness that come from other world, in neath of dirt, where is they spirit walk."

"Beneath the base of every flame there is a still, clear absence; a mysterious gap between the death of substance and the birth of light, with time itself suspended in this void of transformation, this pause between two elements. I understand it now, that there has only ever been one fire, that blazed before the world began and shall not be put out until the world is done. I see my fellows in the flame, the unborn and the dead."