Thursday, September 07, 2006
MORE ON LOST GIRLS
While I'd been taken aback by the gap between the lofty claims and ecstatic praise I had read and what I was actually seeing on Lost Girls' pages, I wasn't greatly concerned by it. But as I thought more about Moore's interviews and the critiques mentioned in my last post (which are entertaining as well as intelligent), I began to get genuinely annoyed. Moore boasts about how Lost Girls is more realistic than all other pornography because it shows sex having consequences. (It's not true, incidentally, that his is the first pornography to do so.) But the book is about three repressed Edwardian women who meet for the first time at a hotel and almost immediately (from what I gather) start bonking one another's brains out. To vaunt the "realism" of such a book smacks of hypocrisy.
If the concept of Lost Girls had been given to the old Alan Moore, the pre-From Hell and Big Numbers Moore, the Alan Moore who wrote unpretentions gems like "Mogo Doesn't Socialize" and the D.R. and Quinch stories, it might well have been fun -- cheeky, to borrow dolce far niente's word. But now that Moore is a Thinker, when he writes porn there has to be a Message, and a world-changing one at that (though in fact it's nothing new). And it has to be hundreds of pages long, to show that it's Art.
And, of course, there's "beast-peach hole." Has a worse phrase ever been penned by a supposedly major writer? And Moore used to be a good writer, though at times too purple. It's hard to understand how the Moore I used to read could have published such a phrase, let alone how someone could quote a passage containing it as an example of good writing.
[Edited to make my point a bit clearer.]
While I'd been taken aback by the gap between the lofty claims and ecstatic praise I had read and what I was actually seeing on Lost Girls' pages, I wasn't greatly concerned by it. But as I thought more about Moore's interviews and the critiques mentioned in my last post (which are entertaining as well as intelligent), I began to get genuinely annoyed. Moore boasts about how Lost Girls is more realistic than all other pornography because it shows sex having consequences. (It's not true, incidentally, that his is the first pornography to do so.) But the book is about three repressed Edwardian women who meet for the first time at a hotel and almost immediately (from what I gather) start bonking one another's brains out. To vaunt the "realism" of such a book smacks of hypocrisy.
If the concept of Lost Girls had been given to the old Alan Moore, the pre-From Hell and Big Numbers Moore, the Alan Moore who wrote unpretentions gems like "Mogo Doesn't Socialize" and the D.R. and Quinch stories, it might well have been fun -- cheeky, to borrow dolce far niente's word. But now that Moore is a Thinker, when he writes porn there has to be a Message, and a world-changing one at that (though in fact it's nothing new). And it has to be hundreds of pages long, to show that it's Art.
And, of course, there's "beast-peach hole." Has a worse phrase ever been penned by a supposedly major writer? And Moore used to be a good writer, though at times too purple. It's hard to understand how the Moore I used to read could have published such a phrase, let alone how someone could quote a passage containing it as an example of good writing.
[Edited to make my point a bit clearer.]
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