WORLDLIT.ORG 31 things that have been done to them and the way in which they have been made to live. Now, actually neither of these options are the way that working-class people think about themselves. We are all heroes in our own narrative. Of course we are. This is why the idea of supervillains in comics is innately so ridiculous. Nobody in the world is ever going to call themselves “Dr. Evil,” because we all are the heroes in our own stories. In trying to address that, there weren’t really that many difficulties. If I were trying to talk about a famous person—like, say, the various references throughout the book to Lady Diana Spencer—there, with that, I did my research. I read the books. I looked at Wikipedia entries. I did as much as I could to actually put together a picture of that woman and her family life. It was a lot easier actually to get the often inexact and fictionalized details of my family’s history and the neighborhood, just from conversations. It all doesn’t have to be upon Wikipedia. A lot of it is these days and that’s a good thing, but there is this other, much older method of transferring information from one generation to another, and that is oral tradition. Even in our techno-rich times, there is still an oral tradition. There are still people with a wealth of stories. Other than the various narratives that were told to me as part of family history, family legend, or tales about the neighborhood, there was one specific book that is probably a cornerstone of Jerusalem. This is a book called In Living Memory, and it was published by Northampton Arts Development in the 1980s. It was a series of interviews, just with the people of the neighborhood, asking what they remembered. It was quite an unusual thing to do, and if my friend Richard Foreman and his accomplices hadn’t done that, there would probably not be a Jerusalem, or at least not in its current form. Some of the most extraordinary things were things that I found in there. For example, I had known what my grandmother’s occupation was, my paternal grandmother . I had known that she was one of those mythical women who lived in the next street that if you’d got a pregnancy that was just about to turn into a delivery or you’d had somebody die, then, in a neighborhood without midwives or undertakers, there would be a woman in the next street or down the road who, for a shilling, would come and deliver the baby or would lay out the corpse. I’d known that my nan had worked in that profession. I hadn’t realized until I’d read the book Dressing the Tongue The Spoken-Word Albums of Alan Moore by Rob Vollmar In addition to his better-known work as a writer of comics and novels, Alan Moore has built a considerable body of spoken-word albums, most created in conjunction with a collective known as Moon and Serpent, which features musicians David J (of Bauhaus fame) on the first two albums and Tim Perkins on all but Brought to Light and Unearthing. The Birth Caul (Charrm, 1996) Subtitled“A Shamanism of Childhood,” The Birth Caul was originally performed on Moore’s forty-second birthday. The piece is structured around a meditation on his mother’s birth caul (fetal membrane), found upon the occasion of her death, as juxtaposed against a narrative that unravels a human life from middle age to the mystery from which we emerge into birth. The piece was later adapted for comics by Eddie Campbell (1999). The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels (Cleopatra, 1996) The first piece recorded by the collective but released after The Birth Caul, Moon and Serpent explores ideas of magic in practice as well as some of the psychogeographical material about London also featured in Moore’s graphic novel From Hell. Brought to Light (Codex Books, 1998) With a text adapted from Shadowplay, a comic written by Moore in collaboration with artist Bill Sienkiewicz (Eclipse...
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Jun 22, 2017
Elżbieta Dolata 
Open Access
