Talking Magic and Fiction | The Invisibles and Providence | Christopher Knowles

Do you have a favorite? Not meant to. But mostly the unloved ones, the unvisited ones, the cases that get dusty and ignored, all the broken and shunned creatures. If someone's got to care for them, who shall it be if not us? Yes. [Music] Welcome to Runesop, a weekly podcast about magic, culture, and the very best new and old ideas for living in this world. Coming to you from 43 degrees south on a small farm in deepest Tasmania. My name is Gordon and I shall be your host. This week, and also counting for next week, in fact, we welcome back to the show The One and only Christopher Noll's of Secret Sun. As maybe some of you are aware, I made sure to have a few weeks in the can for late October and early November, because I'm travelling again. The upshot of that is very long days, getting a high volume of communications projects completed right on the Mercury Retrograde station. But this isn't a podcast about a girl named Lucky, and I'm certainly not complaining about being forced to have excellent conversations with excellent people before heading off on a long overgift. It's just that, you know, I need to let you know there were a couple of tech dramas for the first few minutes. My mic quality is a little poor thanks to Skype being Skype. We switched to Zoom and it cleared up. But on Chris's side, there is this super faint random beep, like a neighbor's smoke alarm, needing new batteries or something. To be honest, I'm kind of into it. It's a bit OG Star Trek, but it's nevertheless there. I'm just mentioning if you hear it, you aren't going crazy, because it's one of those sounds that's so faint, you're not sure where it's coming from, and letting you know it's in the recording. Anyway, in both cases, I've done my best to clean it up. None of it's particularly distracting for what is an otherwise amazing mega discussion around the macro subject of writing about magic, how writing is magic, and, you know, generally magic and quote unquote fiction. That said, it is a discussion through a particular, and I guess classic, Morrison and more lens, where we explore in great detail the presentation of magic and similar topics in the invisibles, obviously, and per-ovidance. You'll thought I was going to say something else. In the show notes, you will find links to where you can read both series online in their entirety. So, we sort of spoil and sort of don't spoil, but I'm just mentioning the show notes now, because if you get halfway through the episode and think, "No, I'm going to go and read them," and you can do that, you know, and come back and finish later. This mega episode is more than twice the length of a typical one, so it counts as two weeks worth of shows. So believe me, you've got the time if you want to go and click off and read the documents with, talking about, and then come back and finish the recording. Anyway, that's the show. Let's do it. Chris Knowles, welcome back. Always great to be here. Oh, I know. I know. And this is going to be a super fun chat or series of chats, because we are talking about how one writes about reality. Yes, we are. And we're picking two very good examples of such. Yes, I think so. And I have you to thank for this, because a couple of months ago, you were bugging me to read Providence. And when Chris Knowles bugs you to read something, you should probably read it. And so I did. And it turns out, turns out to, I fully get why. So we'll move on to it in a minute. But I think the impetus for the discussion, here we are, getting towards the end of 2019, writing about reality definitionally has to include writing about magic, because this is a weird way of describing it, magic is real. So we talk about realism in quote unquote fiction, as if it's some sort of gritty, hard and gum shoe on, you know, on the hunt for a criminal gang or that sort of procedural drama crap is realism. It's not. That's fantasy. Fantasy is materialism, right? And so if we want to talk about who's doing the best kind of writing about reality, one of the most important yardsticks we're biased, but it seems to me is who gets things like magic, the most accurate. Do you think that's a reasonable statement? Yeah, I do. And it's also important to point out that magic is really almost at the root of writing. That writing really evolved as a magical form. You know, the art of naming, the art of recording. These are all fundamentally magical arts at their core. So I think that, you know, to push that forward into the present day, you know, and also look at just how much writing, you know, journalism, and just every kind of writing is all trying to mold reality to your own wishes, which is fundamentally a magical imperative, I think. Yeah, completely, completely. And that's why I think we should, let me put it this way. From my perspective with bias, because it's like a chaos magic thing, right? The defining comic series for kind of getting magic right, for me personally, is/was the invisible. And when we're talking about the classic "Boldie Beauty" trade-off, which is of course for people who are new somehow, who are unaware of these cute pet names, we're talking about Alamore and Grant Morrison, right? It used to be that Promethea was the one, was the series, Alamore series that you would sort of hold up to the invisibles and say, "Well, who kind of did magic the best?" And I'll be honest, I think Grant wins that. Hands down on that account for sure. I think Promethea was weak tea, to be honest with you. Yeah, and Alamore comes providence. And for me, and this is thanks to you, and it's why you actually bullied me into reading this series, this is the series that we should be holding up to the invisibles for that kind of perennial, "Boldie Beauty" face-off. And I think we should probably start with you kind of, because most people I would assume, who have listened to this podcast for a while, are familiar with the invisibles, but they may not be familiar with providence. It's worth pointing out that links to both series are in the show notes for people who, after our discussion, want to go and explore for themselves, because they will kind of be spoilers, but I'm hoping we keep the discussion thematic, so that people can still enjoy these series, if they haven't got to them. But like it might be worth you sort of describing or situating providence in the context of Alamore's lovecraftian work, and then sort of giving us a brief rundown of what it even am. Yeah, well, Alamore famously had worked for DC in the 80s. He'd come over with what was called the British invasion of comics. And he was the first one to really make a mark as a writer with Swamp Thing. And Swamp Thing was a really kind of revolutionary book, and I think it showed that he was sort of a nascent magician in development. He always sort of protest that he just woke up one morning when he turned 40 and decided to be magician. And I think he was moving in that direction fairly evidently for quite some time. But he famously did the watchman, and he had a huge blowout with DC about it, because the deal was that the rights would revert to him when the book went out of print. And of course, the book is still very much in print, and is still a top-the-graphic novel, bestseller lists on a regular basis. So he felt ripped off by that, and he also felt he wasn't given a cut of merchandising. They were making a lot of T-shirts and buttons and bumper stickers and all these kind of charts, because that were capitalizing on the book. So he really dipped out of comics that a lot of indie work. And then he sort of got his toes back in the water in the early 90s working for a guy named Rob Liefeld, who was a Marvel artist who went on to form an independent company called Image. So he was sort of building back up to doing comics work again, and he was also very alienated from the sort of dark and gritty style of comics that was ostensibly taking off from the watchman. But he was also doing things like From Hell, which I think is a very deliberately and specifically magical tax, that I think that you can pair very nicely with Providence, even though I think Providence is a lot more interesting, personally. But then he did some superherititals in the late 90s for a company called Wildstorm, and then they saw that the DC and he sort of dipped out again. So he started working for a company, which is really sort of like a, I call them a horror porn company. This company called Avatar, that sort of made their name in like the horror boom. I guess maybe in the late 90s, early 2000s, you know, they have sort of a shady reputation. I don't know it's deserved, but they have published a lot of very questionable material, very explicit horror. or torture porn kind of material. And somehow he hooked up with them. And one of the first projects he did with them was some of these, his lovecraft stories which were adapted for comics. And one of them was a two issue book called The Courtyard. And this was based on a pro story that he had written for a lovecraft anthology. And it was adapted into a two issue book, Black and White. And it sort of started a ball rolling. It was very well received, even though it's a very short story. But it's sort of focused on the whole idea of, language is being a form of magic and language having almost like hallucinatory effect, having an effect of altering reality. And sort of transforming an FBI agent into a serial killer. And this was followed by a for issue mini series called Neonomicon. And the impetus behind this series is very interesting because it really was because he owed a lot of taxes to the government, to her majesty, and needed to raise some money very quickly. So he signed a deal, again with Avatar Perez to do this for issue mini series. And my very strong opinion is that the basis of this series was not only the obvious lovecraft, material and references that he weaves throughout, but I very get the very strong feeling that this was a rejected X-Files pitch that he had submitted. Because we had people like William Gibson and Stephen King got a couple of stories adapted for the X-Files. And I think he was kind of trying to hand it that because if you look at the characters in Neonomicon, they pretty much directly line up with the main characters X-Files. But it was a very controversial book because Alan Moore's got like a rape thing going on. It's a little disturbing. I'm not exactly sure what the impetus behind that is, but there's a lot of very brutal rape scenes in this Neonomicon. And it's sort of these in feebious characters. Remarkably similar to the shape of water, you're strangely enough. But there meant to be descendants of the old ones or offspring of the old ones. And this woman, this FBI agent named Merrill Brayers, is kidnapped by this cult and Salem mass chews that's operating out of one of these kind of witch stores that are all over the place in that town. And she's basically a sex slave to this reptilian monster. And it sounds very brutal and it sounds very pulpy and kind of classless, but it's actually much better than it sounds. Even though there is a lot of brutal violence and of course the rape scenes and so on and so forth. But that led to this 12 issue deluxe mini series called Providence. And before we start describing Providence, I do just what I jump in and I mean, you've just described this, right? But it is important for where we go with this conversation to really underline that Allen's Lovecraft food is strong. Like he has Lovecraft game. - Oh, he's obviously very, very deeply invested in the work. So my personal belief and I think, you know, events have kind of borne it out is that he intended Providence to be sort of his valid Dictory message to the comics world that you know, he's getting ready to deck out. I mean, I think he did. Afterwards, there was another league of extraordinary gentleman volume, but you know, it's pretty clear that his heart wasn't really in that project anymore. And I don't think has been for a while. So I, and you know, who knows when he even wrote it. So I think the Providence was really sort of his, his farewell and that, you know, what he wanted to leave the medium, having to say, you know, what kind of statement he wanted to make. And I think if you read Providence, it's very clear that, you know, there's so many strands and themes in his work that seem to be leading up to it in a very interesting way. So the story, the basic story itself is that a writer, a New York based writer goes to New England, goes to the wilds of New England. In the early part of the 20th century, I think, believe in the 1920s and travels around sort of searching for folk, folk magic that he's heard of, that he's heard rumors of, and that he believes lovecraft is kind of tapping into, that the stories that lovecraft is writing are actually based on real life events. And he wanders around, he goes from Salem, out to the Hampshire and around Western Massachusetts, which really at that point in time were pretty unsettled. I mean, that was pretty wild territory. It was the boondocks, it was the backwards, some ways it still is. And he basically goes through the canon, sort of the pantheon of star lovecraft characters, more changes their names, changes some of their stories, but has his character, has his protagonist, basically interacting with a bunch of, like Herbert West and Asnath Wade, and all these different characters from well-known, more lovecraft books, he interacts with and kind of, almost like, I would almost say like larps, the stories that the lovecraft had been writing, and eventually ends up in Providence, hence the title of the book, and interacts with lovecraft himself, and lovecraft is younger, and he's very eccentric, and he's, as we know, he's a blightly racist and show of anistic, and rather unpleasant, but also very ingratiating in many ways, and eccentric, and talks in our cake, English forms, sees himself as a 19th or 18th century gentleman, and the stories sort of proceeds in there, where we can get more into the D.A. each. - Yeah, yeah. I really love the inclusion of lovecraft. It's probably one of the first areas of comparison. I'll do a brief couple of sentence in Visibles, just so that we've sort of done the same thing, right? Which is essentially a group of magic using activists who are part of a much longer sort of legacy of groups fighting as the archons or tyranny, or whatever, engaging this sort of multi-continent battle with alien demon things, and it's all kind of metaphors for tyranny and power and so on. But one of the things that I think Alan does better in this, and it's a bit unfair because Grant was much younger when he wrote Invisibles, but both of them have done the comic equivalent of the play within the play, like Grant's sort of interested in how you weave the reality. And it's done, I mean, I don't like Gideon Stargrave, I think it's dull as a character, but he does that kind of, well, what is, what's a character in a comic and how do they exist in reality? You see the beginning of his interest in it in Invisibles? The better one is Flex Mentalo, still not that great, but the inclusion of the whole kind of thing about Providencies, the story is story in reality and where they interrelate. And it's really cute when it comes to Lovecraft because Alan has the opportunity to wink at the gross things about the personage of Lovecraft being homophobic and anti-Semitic and racist and whatever, and kind of has his lead character not really kind of realizing, well, it's a bit of a bum note. And I thought that was quite delightful, but I think the competence of how you handle these sort of very Western categories of fiction versus non-fiction and versus reality, it's definitely handled with more deafness in Providence. And part of that is an age difference. Like Grant was very young when Invisibles came out and it's decades later when Providence does, but by the same token, I think Alan kind of wins on the blending of fiction and reality. - Well, I think, you know, the Invisibles is a very 90s work, you know, it's very druggy and horny and pop mad and fashion conscious and hyperactive and, you know, ADD, short attention span jumping from one theme to the next. I mean, it's very much a product of its time. And by the same token, I think the Providence is very much, you know, a product of its time. It's a product of this sort of early 21st century malaise and exhaustion and just pessimism and fatalism, I think, you know, sort of the hallmarks of that. It's interesting in some ways because if you really wanted to go, you know, apples to apples, oranges to oranges, you can't really compare these two books. I think that the closest analog for Invisibles, I think would be Watchmen. I think that Watchmen would be the closest. - Yeah. - Mirror image as much as they can be with these two very different writers, there's the same, a lot of the same themes. There's a lot of jumping around the timeline. There's a lot of issues, like you said about lineage, about tradition, about received tradition, about secret packs and alligarchs with mad plans of dealing with interdimensional terrors. I mean, there are a lot of similarities and a lot of themes that you can kind of, do a bit of twining with the two works. Watchmen is a very 80s work. It just as much as the invisibles is a very 90s work. The watchmen is very much a product of, sort of the tail end of baby boomer, optimism, baby boomer, change the world aquarium mentality, sort of collapsing in on itself and admitting defeat, which was very much a very current theme at that time. It was very much the hippies become the yuppies and put on three pea suits and join the system. And I think that since, you know, grants several years younger, comes from a different mindset, comes from a different subculture because subcultures will move them so rapidly. They're cycling in and out at such a pace back in Britain in the 70s and the 80s. I mean, the difference might as well be just multi-generational. So I think that the grants approach is much different and it's much more autobiographical and fantasy fulfillment. You know, so much of the invisibles to me is a really horny, really enthusiastic, hyperactive guy kind of, shoving his dick into the world, you know what I'm saying? It's like he's just really, you can just feel the sexual energy and the, and fetamines and the adrenaline in that book. It's a much different field and then I don't think Alan Moore has ever done anything quite like that. And Moore's work, you know, to be, you know, perfectly frank until he sort of had this magical reawakening and did a lot of, you know, very fun and joyous work in the late 90s. I mean, his work was, you know, it was always very pessimistic. It was always very dull or it was always very earnest, you know, even in his approach to the supernatural, even in his approach to magic, it was, it was not something you read for fun, you know, you, there was enjoyment in the reading, but it wasn't necessarily fun to read. And I'm not exactly sure that the provenance is fun to read, you know, as these invisible is fun to read. You know, I would just go out and say, no, and a big part of that, and I get why this is, because Alan's like, he would criticize himself at the beginning that watchman is overstructured, but he is really good at structure. Like this one, this one is structured in a, in a deft way, but holy shit, the, the actual commonplace book, components to it. So for people, structurally, it's a graphic novel for people who haven't read it yet again, it's in the show notes. But they're a big chunks of it because it is exploring the whole kind of archetypal shape of a lovecraft story, a diary entries. And oh my god. (laughing) Yeah. Yeah. We both skim them. Well, I mean, you have to read them, but like, this is a comfort to your point that there is pleasure in the reading, but it's not, it's not this bright, zippy action pact, MTV, invisible kind of pace. That it is, it's early 20th century, yeah, northeast, complete with, I'll call it, say, it's like a self-obsessed writer's fucking diary. (laughing) Yeah, and he nails that quite well to your kind of detriment's the wrong word. He nails that despite the fact that it is impacting your reading pleasure. And I mean, that's a side of a confident creator, but yeah, it's definitely not as much, quote unquote, fun to read as the invisible. Well, I'll tell you the fun in Providence for me is that, and again, it's not sort of like a party kind of fun, but the pleasure more than the fun and the satisfaction you get from reading Providence is you are getting a much closer mirror of magical reality, as it exists in meat space and consensus reality, then obviously sort of the hallucinatory, very, very, very comic book adventures of the invisibles. And you know, it's funny because the invisibles was not all that much of a departure from a lot of the comics that you saw in the 70s, because a lot of the comics that you saw in the 70s were written by guys who were like serious acid heads. The whole idea of cosmic dimensions and traveling between timelines, all these kind of things. I mean, you had a lot of writers like Steve Engelhart and Jim Starrlin and people like that, David Anthony Kraft, who were very much of that same ilk, that same mentality. And I think that Morrison adds a very British, a more transgressive, a little bit more of a generation, X-Flavor to the storytelling, but it's not all that much different than a lot of things that you would read in the 70s. And people like Steve Engelhart were practicing magicians. And a lot of people, I was interviewing somebody, might have been Jim Starrlin, by telling me how, a lot of these young guys who started working for Marvel came in from the hippie generation. Basically what they would do is that they would just like drop mega doses of acid and they would just like wander around New York City at night, which like in the 70s seems like, not the best tripping atmosphere that you could, you know, there's a whole thing of, you know, sat in setting. And I don't think that that was a very conducive setting to good trips, but I think that sort of, you know, they were trying to blow their minds open. And that's probably a good way to do it. So I think that Morrison was very much following in a lineage that had been established. You know, again, people like Doug Mench as well. I mean, Doug Mench is somebody who I met out at Esselin and he was doing a lot of this kind of stuff. You know, he was a real dyed in the world to Troy hippie, you know, sort of the ass kicking hippie lineage. So Morrison was much more detail oriented. And again, he had that fashion sense. He had the pop sense, you know, he had sort of that swing London mentality, ironically for a Scott. But it was very much a lineage. And also, I mean, more too as well. I mean, one of the things that the troubles me and maybe it works me is that people sort of assume that, you know, nobody who's doing stories about magic or the occult in comics, you know, Joe, I'm sorry, Jerry Siegel, who invented Superman was very interested in the occult and did a number of stories. I mean, he didn't, you know, the specter, who some people might have heard of is a character that he invented in the early 40s that was, you know, very occult oriented and he clearly knew his stuff. If you read a lot of Jerry Siegel's stories, he knows what he's talking about. He's well read. So this is a lineage that I think is baked into the medium. And I think what more and Morrison did so well is that they drew attention to it, you know. They packaged it more effectively than I think it had been before. And by doing so, they were able to sort of shift that consciousness. You know, they were moving the needle so that, you know, they were moving the needle along and changing people's consciousness and making people more aware of the process of magic and writing. You know, it's funny when I was refreshing myself on the invisibles and the lead up to this chat. It kind of occurred to me, because we're going to lead up to who describes, I guess, magic better once we sort of talk about things like name, place and so on. There is something about the invisibles, like both of them packaged it correctly, but in the case of the invisibles, and I know I like it, and it's sort of been a companion of mine for some time now, I think, Al, I think Grant had to describe this. I think he set out to write a comic that was smaller than the one he ended up with. And it's almost like a weird channeling situation, like catching the end of the millennium current, because there are moments where you see, and it frankly, it ends with a really shitty philosophy, like a really limited or a human philosophy, like Grant's like, well, maybe we invented the gods as our prisoners and like our job is to, like a true free person gets past that. And you go, really, what are you 16? Like how do you end the invisibles, which has got aliens and underground bases and ancient Aztec gods and all this stuff, and then you end with like, Maybe the good guys and the bad guys are the same and we just invent our own gods and prisoners and we should move past it. Like it's weird. It's almost like there's the human ending this moment, but he essentially channeled something bigger than he actually could describe as a person with that age 'cause there are moments where the set of bum notes feel human, but then the rest of it, just crazy. Like, I mean, we'll get to it in a minute, but reading back through it, I'm like, oh, look, he basically in the 90s has a very crisp knolls understanding of what happened at Rosewell. You think, hang on a minute. That's not bad. And then he ends up like, maybe we made all this stuff up and we should be free. And you think, hang on, no, there's something, there's a jarring there where he's done that by virtue of performance and just the creative act. He has caught a current that is bigger than his own kind of philosophy could compose, I guess. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense? - Yeah, it does make sense, but I think we should go back to the beginning of this series and kind of look at where it starts and then sort of takes off on this rocket ride because it does start small. It does start is almost a conventional, almost like an authoritarian story, 'cause you have this like Arthur archetype who meets his Merlin and they sort of wind around and Merlin shows him the ropes. And it is a very small and it's a very conventional narrative. - It's ultra, it's almost like he glimpsed at here with a thousand faces or something because even before we're talking about when Dane Meetzel Tom and London, in the first episode, but at the very beginning of it, he encounters either the ghosts of a couple of the Beatles in Liverpool or he has a kind of slipping through time moment where he's a few decades back in Liverpool and they're in their Hamburg phase. And so it opens with this high-strange encounter and then in Arcon. So it's literally as quintessentially here with a thousand faces as you could possibly want to the point of being boring or authoritarian, as you say, it's like here's a cure to is touched by destiny as a child and then gets given a Merlin. It actually does start as conventional as it could be. - And what it reminds me of in the early issues and I hate to say this because first of all, I don't want to offend anyone of this particular writer's fans, but also I don't want to offend Grant Morrison fans. But it reminds me of Neil Gaiman did a BBC series that became a graphic novel called "You Never Wear." And it was, I remember I bought the entire series when it was published and I think I enjoyed it. It might have been because the art was very good, but it's just a very standard kind of, oh, you don't realize it, but there's this whole secret world in your midst and somehow you sort of fall into it and it changes your life and, you know, which is fine, but it's not exactly the most compelling narrative that you can pull out of the ether. I think that Invisible's very much starts in that vein and gets a lot more interesting as it goes along. - Yeah, and this would map to my sort of contention that which happens with all good creative stuff, right? Like that it should get away from you in some way. I guess that's a difference. Like, Alan's clearly thought, and this comes through in Providence. I don't think Providence gets away from him. I think he says exactly what he wants to say in that, but what he wants to say in that is that the creative and the imaginal can get away from you. So it's weird, like it's almost like the Invisible's is an example of it and I could make the case in Providence that that's actually what Alan's saying, which is that the active creation and the ontology of the imaginal is undeniable and can change or destroy the world. - Well, on a functional level, that's a difference between the two writers. I mean, Alan Moore is famous for writing like three pages to describe a match book in a gutter. He plans everything up meticulously and he makes sure that everything is where it should be well ahead of time before the pencil or even hits the page. I get the feeling very much withinvisible that it was very spontaneous. And it was very seed of the pants. And he might have had an idea of what he wanted to incorporate, but I think he, it was an adventure. It was just sort of like, well, let me just let myself go and see where this ends up. And that end that you talk about, again, if you put it in the context, I mean, one of the problems with the Invisible's is that it really never found a large audience. You know, it never really, as far as I remember, it always seemed to be selling in like the 20K range, which would be a hit these days, but at that point in time, it didn't really sustain itself to grant Morse and sales levels. I mean, he was doing justice league at the same time and I believe it was selling like 100,000, 150,000 somewhere in that range. I'm sure that DC editors weren't really that crazy about him spending his time on this book that a lot of people didn't really understand too well because it is so ascetic and it is so detailed. So I think that ending where it sort of potted to the stop, sort of speaks to his mindset that I think that he was frustrated in a lot of ways that people weren't willing to come on this rocket ride with him. - Okay, all right. I like that. - I'm gonna mean that, and he was trying to like create this valedictory message, this bad addiction because not long after he finished the Invisible, he went over to Marvel and started just writing a lot of superhero titles. So, and that's what he did for the next several years. So I believe that there might have been a lot of frustration with this book because don't forget that it was canceled twice. You know, it was the first run and then it was canceled and then it was rebooted. So it started in 1994 and then was rebooted in 1997 and then rebooted again in 1999. - All my favorite things are canceled twice. Futurama was canceled twice. It's a, it does, the story's uneven because of it and I like that. I like that the sort of last volume, they're all older and like that Invisible Kingdom stuff is, you know, that's yeah, the Invisible Kingdoms are last one. That's fine. It's just the ending. Now, I'm gonna have to think about what you said about the ending. You're probably right there, which is a, yeah, I like it. It's cool. Sorry, carry on. - But I think before we get too much farther into the book, we should sort of just cover like what basically the book is about. I don't think we covered that yet. So it's basically a very esoteric superhero team and superhero team that aren't necessarily super powered, but it's a team of, you know, what I basically think are, you know, Grant Morrison's personal fantasies assembled, you know, to fight this conspiracy of aristocrats who are in league with, what are basically time demons. I think would probably be the best term. Do you like that time? - I do. I think his understanding of time and exploration of it is the best thing about the invisible. And I do believe that's a side effect of, you know, whatever happened to him in Nepal with those drugs and whatever. I think there's one of my favorite lines in it is that lady Edith line towards the end, where she's like, time can be tricky, one false move and then suddenly you're a hundred. It's just time in the invisible is the thing and he does it so well. - Well, there's always, when they see aliens or UFOs or whatever, you know, someone will say, oh, you know, those are from space and they'll always be corrected and know they're from time. You know, they're out of time, they're not out of space. I think there, somebody said spacebuggers and then he's corrected and said, no, they're timebuggers. So I think that, you know, that's a very important aspect of the story that, you know, is probably overlooked. But some, you know, certainly not by yourself. But so we have a sort of, you know, the character that we talked about who's sort of the king Arthur character who's, I guess, supposed to be the next Buddha who is this liver puddleian scouse, I guess you would say, sort of street punk, you know, very much of the 90s with the anorac and the, you know, the bull cut part. - And the bull cut part is. - Yeah, and the bull cut part in the middle. And, you know, I think, so if I look at these characters archetypely and what they mean to Grant Morris and, you know, my definition and my explanation, you know, might be different than yours. But so I see Jack Frost who is this scouse boy as, you know, Grant's fantasy of himself as a teen. You know, maybe fantasy that he had of himself as a teen is being sort of this man of, you know, future man of destiny. And then King Mob is an interesting character because King Mob really looks like Grant. and Mars and he just says more piercings. So he's a professional assassin who assembles this team to be invisible, which is really a secret society that dates back in time. And this is the latest iteration of them. And King Mob is the leader. And it's really interesting to see how, throughout the course of this series, how King Mob and Grant Morrison, or King Mob the character, and Grant Morrison, the fictional character that existed in real time, really fed into each other and fed in and out of each other. I remember seeing Grant Morrison at a San Diego convention and he walks in and he's wearing, he's got the shaved head and he's wearing this full length, black leather trench coat. And he's got this very rather extravagant looking woman who is extraordinarily busty and is wearing huge black dress and has this died scarlet hair. I mean, they really cut quite a couple of figures walking through this mass of Ben Boy, Ben Boy, protoplasm, I'm saying, they really stood out. And I think he was very canny at marketing himself and marketing the Grant Morrison character. A lot of people would be familiar that he was associated with Richard Mascar when he was running disinformation and disinformation was kind of like this clearing house for pop-a-cultism and conspiracy theory and all these kinds of things that they put out a number of books. And later they became a website that was running to the ground. (laughs) To God knows who. So anyway, so then there's a Brazilian transgender woman named Fanny and I believe this is probably based on Grant Morrison's favorite porn genre because this is popped up in the film as well, the quasi sequel to The Invisible's. - It's also simply he briefly experimented with not trans, not being trans, but like cross-dressing and so on when he was in Soho. Not that often, but he had a couple of months there of hitting up the gay bars in drag, which he talks about himself. It's funny, I wanna jump in there because one of the things that's aged it is Alan's name game as we were talking before, he had recorded so much better. But like Lord Fanny, you wouldn't name it. In the 90s, because no one was writing comics about trans people or whatever, he's hearts in the right place, but it's funny that it's conkey to the point of insensitive and in the same way the sort of voodoo character named Jim Crow, like a white Scottish man, a heterosexual white Scottish man probably wouldn't make those creative choices in 2019. And it's interesting to see that it had difference to say lovecraft where it's aged horribly. It's tarnished a bit, but you can kind of give grant the benefit of the doubt, like, well, your heart was in the right place. You were trying to explore actual things that were important and not spoken of. But you mentioned Lord Fanny there and I'm like, we should jump in and go, it's really interesting reading through it now and going, this isn't exactly the cutting edge of progressiveism in 2019, I guess. - Well, yeah, but it was sort of daring. - Oh, absolutely. - You know, they didn't have the time. But you know, it's funny because like, it reminds me of when the X-Files would always try to do like different cultures. They always just, it was always so clubfooted and earnest to the point of being very cringey. And it was, yeah, inadvertently insulting, you know. - When I was in film school, which was like the end of the 90s, beginning of the 90s, I remember distinctly an article that we were given in class, which is why there are so many magical black characters in Hollywood films. And it's essentially that. It's essentially that they're written by white people who don't have the experience of black culture and the easiest thing to do when you want to include other cultures is to make them magical so that you don't actually have to like engage with them. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's this whole thing about why they're so many magical black characters, particularly in the last 20 years of the 20th century, green mile type stuff. There's all these magical black characters and films written by white people. And I would say, I would actually say that Jim Crow and Lord Fanny are much better versions of that. But they are nevertheless like kind of a thing that happened at the time, hard in the right place. We would do it differently now. - Yeah, they weren't meant to be offensive or degrading or demeaning. - Yeah. - And then there's a boy who's the androgynous black female former cop. She's not given a tremendously compelling story. I think her backstory is interesting. If you asked me to name the most memorable story in this series for me, it would be volume one, number 20, which is a story called Howard became invisible. And it's basically her origin story. And a very chilling story and really fascinating and very different, not of the same piece as the rest of the series. But it's almost like a standalone that I think is really effective. But he sort of gave this very contrived romance between the young Scouse Boy and this older, as much older female black cop from New York that I don't know if they'd even be able to speak to each other in real life. Like, I just don't think there would be any points of reference between these two characters at all in the real world. Of course, it's isn't the real world. But then there's also King Mob, who is the grand character, has a girlfriend called the ragged Robin. And he had claimed that it was based on ragged Andy, but if you look at the way she's drawn, there's an artist who actually drew a few issues of this series called Jill Thompson, who seemed to be sort of the muse for a lot of these 90s edgy boy comic artists. She seemed to be, you know, I knew Jill Thompson, actually spent a very interesting night, San Diego on a pub crawl with her and her husband, a guy named Brian Osarello, who writes a lot of the B.C. But she seemed to be sort of a muse for a lot of people like Grant. So it's very clear that maybe he had a crush on her at some point, so he made his girlfriend, you know, his alter ego's girlfriend in this book. And then there's, so that's the core of the team. And the sort of characters that flowed in out of it, you know, very supporting characters. You know, the two most important ones, I guess would be Mason Lang. Well, I guess would be sort of almost like a Bruce Wayne character. And he's like the impossibly rich character who's, you know, is impossibly generous with his money and is willing to bankroll whatever these occult superheroes need. You know, it's very much a fantasy. You know, every occultist wish he had a patron, that would just write all his checks for him. And then the primary villain. So that's the team. He's sort of the, you know, that's, that's a very kind of well-known archetype, you know, the patron, the money man, the sugar diardi. And it's funny, right? Like this is an example of I think Grant accidentally writing reality correctly, because Mason Lang and the investments he makes in the Japanese scientist Akashi and time travel, he's accidentally describing Silicon Valley before it was, I mean, it existed. And it's been around since the '70s. It's a place of technological innovation, but not the Silicon Valley we know today, right? Yeah, it's like Elon Musk, isn't it? Yeah, because it looks like it's a billionaire. It's like a benign Elon Musk or a sort of good guy. Investing is money and the kind of stuff that the edges of Silicon Valley invested now. And arguably, if we read Jacques Bale's fiction the way I think we should, probably has gone on like quite literally things like trans-temporal technology stuff. And that's funny. Like he didn't, it's an example of him getting things like with the underground bases and all of that kind of stuff that Grant just sort of swinging for the fences kind of got right. Well, ironically another person who's a real life analyte to Mason Lang would be Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah, that's true. It's very interesting since Epstein got arrested and got dead, let's just say. I've noticed that a lot of the real kind of crazy science stories that you're reading, you know, like a lot of these transhumanists and CRISPR and just the real sci-fi comic book stuff that was really hitting the science websites very hard. Science headlines were getting really, really kind of crazy. For a couple years there. And then when you read the same websites now, it's deadly dull. So I really wonder how much of Epstein's money was just driving a lot of this, just like crazy off the wall comic book pseudo science, really, you know, I think in the long run. I mean, I know people have been always very real scientists have been skeptical of transhumanism for, you know, since the beginning. But I'm sure. Communism is over and that's either good news or bad news in the sense that it's in a very invisible sense. It's a game board that's being packed up because they've got what they wanted or more likely what it looks like at the very top doesn't look like the Epstein level of these people are stupid enough to believe that they can like we were talking about this the other day like apparently he wanted to have his head and his penis preserved like you are a child you actually your cosmology is this stupid I'm glad you're dead. Like do you and he was funding science so there are scientists out there who are going to know it long seriously to like you can live forever oh we need his your head and you dick. What the fuck. Yeah he was a very sick man but I think he's emblematic of his entire social milieu I think they're all sick in the head I think they all have bizarre fantasies they have too much money that they they haven't really earned and they don't know what to do with and I think that's basically the story of late capitalism as we know it. But you know as far as grants sort of make it up as you go along see to the pants energy at some point in the second series there are these three characters called division X who you know are clearly modeled on the old British spy thriller TV show department S you know visually modeled on them you know quite clearly and with the star of which was Peter Windgard who if anybody ever gets the chance if you really want to see a great magical narrative in cinema there's a book a film sorry called Burn which burn aka 90 the eagle the Peter Windgard stars in and it is a phenomenal movie that everyone if you haven't seen it and you're interested in magic you're interested in magic in popular culture just drop everything like stop listening to this podcast and go watch it and then come back because it's just it's that to me it's that foundational it's just it's a must see it's a phenomenal movie and it's really very it's remarkably relevant today it's remarkably current because it's about the whole you know the dialectic between science and magic and how science is much more reliant on magic than it would ever want to ever believe it is it's just oh I can't say enough about this movie it's just phenomenal but Peter Windgard was actually he was romantically linked to Alan Bates of the you know who's been in a million things but was also the John Kielt character in Mothman prophecies which I think has a lot of a lot of thematic overlaps with the Invisible's I think that the two sit nicely together on your your shelf of geek the Mothman prophecies if you haven't seen the movie that's another it's just vastly underrated and one of the things I'll jump in there that I would suggest people do is by the DVD second hand of Amazon if you still have a device that can play DVDs because it had a whole bunch of really good 40 and extras that that came along with it the film itself is great and obviously the book is but well the book that it's based on or the work that it's based on but the actual DVD when it came out had like all these extra features that are for people listen to this kind of show worth worth the one cent or whatever a second hand DVDs on Amazon now. Yeah I I concur and it's this if you do a little research do a little searching on the net there were some very tragic after effects of that film you know which is I believe you know it is a work of magic in and of itself and unfortunately had some unpleasant blowback for a lot of people who worked on it but I think that just speaks to you know the power of the the basic narrative and also the the veracity of the basic narrative I you know there's always been a lot of debate going back and forth about the book and how keel was just blown smoke and here's just you know a sensationalist and I think if you really look into his history I don't think that he was a sensationalist but that doesn't mean it was a lie you know it's it's the difference that he wrote in a certain and very distinct way which I find quite enjoyable but it's it's different to saying he made it up and and it's weird because of the the documents under discussion for this show we can make the sort of retroactive case that the incidents that occurred surrounding the film are evidence that there was an actual phenomenon that he was documenting in his book because look at these effects and you kind of move into that world of of of of retroactive spirit evidence based like if if he made it up then they wouldn't have been close to anything that could have the impacts that it did yeah I agree but you know another thing that it has in common with the invisibles as well is just the the whole idea of your temporality you know the time space is not fixed that or it's simultaneous like I think when I was putting this stuff together in my head for the show and one of my favorite films that I know a lot of people don't like it but I think it's really good for this reason it's car atlas because that sort of our lives are not our own from room to to two move on to others with each crime every act of kindness we both have future. Caratless essentially says the same thing about time that the invisibles does which is you have essentially the opportunity the at each moment you have the opportunity to do good or to be free and your decision and behavior to do that impacts time backwards and forwards and so the invisibles are part of an invisible college and I think Grant does this really well where any you know he quotes the start at the beginning there is only ever one revolution and I think you see Grant processing his entage and experience is there because he's so good at time and and that's why lady Edith is my favorite character like the sort of hundred year old quote unquote former member of this this kind of group understanding the difference of time and how it was sort of the same when she was younger and and and Kimob was there and because it is the one thing it is the one revolution and I think he gets that I think he gets that so right I think that's the perennial draw for me back to the invisibles is that you are always participating in that birthing of our future with every act of kindness. Yeah and it's very poignant too I this is the kind of poignant emotional content to her story that I don't think you see in some of the you know where it's all just like flashbang you know. I think she's the best yeah like from a writing perspective she's the most compelling character for me and she has the most reality and and it is it's a testament because he was young it's a testament that I believe every word about her understanding of age and the passing of time in in Grant's mouth essentially. So let's let's get into the whole sigil thing too because you know the the series itself we sort of imagined as sort of a sigil working you know we can get to the the other sigil working the most specifics such working at a moment but you know he was really trying to construct this entire series you know all or all three separate series and the you know the franchise or the you know the the idea itself as a form of silge or magic and you know this is something I think you could speak to a lot more eloquent let me then myself because I'm not really familiar with the mechanics of this magic but you know that there was a very conscious and deliberate attempt to make this comic book series a sigil and you know it's interesting to me too because you know we talked about how magic informs writing and really the root you know the basis of of magic and writing are sort of have the shared lineage you know or the shared nativity almost and I think in the case of the invisibles you know you have something which is basically you know higher glyphs for want of a better term I mean you know that their Egyptians contrary to a lot of people think did have a form of actual writing you know something that we would recognize more as standardized handwriting and that the higher glyphs were really a form of sacred writing and it's fascinating to me that you know the higher glyphs were basically pictograms and you know it's a tortured analogy but I think to construct you know if you're going to do a work intended as a sigil working that you you know you have so many shapes and lines and forms and color and and all these kind of things you know never mind all the letters you know you have so much at play that you know it's it's almost like your fractal sigil or you know, quantum sigil. I'm not exactly sure, you know, again, I don't really understand the mechanics of that form. But. - Well, he described it as a hypersigil, which has always been an underdeveloped idea. Like, sigils were kind of like a thing at the time. But it is, it's almost like you have to drop down to well, how do you think sigils work? And then, and from that level, move across to being adjacent to sigils and then move back up. And that's where you'll find something like the invisible. Because you're right. Like, it is, it's hieroglyphic in the sense that how do I, how does performance and depiction map to, or are they identical to the thing that it is depicting or performing? And that's why sigils work, right? And, and you see him playing with that idea in him dressing like King Marble and having the same kind of hospitalization incidents that happened to his character. Like, he's sort of dealing with, and living through the, and it, so it's different magical writing to Providence in that sense, because it's, it is a performed spell that is also working on him. And that says something about the creative process and reality that I don't, that he tried to articulate as a hyper-sigial, but that idea, it's because essentially the time to think he knew with sigils, right? Like, there, there are better words. There's better language now. I would argue to explore the implications of somehow, somehow you can write reality and you can write yourself into it. And that is, he is, that is a sigil magic, right? Or a hyper-sigil. And it's fine as a, as a kind of placeholder term, but it's so much deeper than, it's so much deeper than mere sigil magic, I think. - Well, you know, when you talk about, you know, the invisibles, you know, and again, we are looking at a very 90s work that couldn't have existed in any other decade and wouldn't have existed in any other decade. But to me, you know, if we're comparing in the invisibles and providence, but you know, they're an entirely separate approaches because I think, you know, for you, and people who are interested in chaos magic, it's almost definitive, you know, chaos magic in collected form, you know? It's almost like, it's almost, it almost defines chaos magic in this grand way. - Pete Carroll and the invisibles, the Kennen. - Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I think that's very true. And I think that it was constructed, you know, very intentionally to do that. And I think the great thing about, you know, Grant Morrison being such a, you know, a character, you know, his own character, his own fictional character. And being, you know, a very hard working person who could do this and just as league, simultaneously and, you know, as well as other projects, is that, you know, if he, if it wasn't Grant Morrison, if it didn't have the kind of juice and the clout that he had in the 90s, at that point in time, you know, this book would have just vanished probably after, you know, it doesn't, doesn't have so issues of the first series run. So, you know, you have a series of, I guess would probably be very chaotic, happy accidents, you know? - That's why I think it shows him, because you're completely correct. Like if it wasn't him and also, if it wasn't him then, because he was young. And so he had the youth to be able to travel the world, taking drugs and writing this comic book series and to be enriched by that rather than fatigued by it, in that kind of like post 40 watershed. Everything about it shows him, even, and I think that's what I mean by the hypersage of thing. It's like he's, he was trying to find terms to articulate that this ended up being bigger than him. And, and yeah, it's, it's a channel, it's a only semi deliberately channeled cosmology. Well, there's another thing that I wanted to bring up as well, in that regard is that so it had to be him. You know, it had to be him that did this. You know, it couldn't have been anybody else, you know, like you said. But, you know, it had to be like that publisher as well. I mean, Vertical Comics was shepherded by, you know, Karen Berger, who was a very protective editor, you know, really looked after her, her writers and her artists, you know, took very good, you know, close care of them and sheltered them from the realities of the business. You know, sheltered them from the, the requirements of, you know, sales, you know, certain sales targets and all these kind of things. I mean, she was, she had a lot of cloud because Sandman was a huge seller and preacher, you know, was a huge seller and preacher one on to be a series on AMC. And, you know, there were a few other like, you know, star earners that she was shepherding. So, she was, you know, under her ages that this project was able to survive that, you know, again, would not have survived, you know, under different circumstances. You know, it only reminds me of where you hear evolutionary scientists, you know, say, well, you know, the campy life anywhere else in the universe because you've got to have just like the specific mixture of elements and, you know, sunlight and all these kind of things. I mean, you know, which I don't believe at all. I mean, I'm very skeptical about that entire field. But, you know, it's almost like that kind of argument playing out in real life. It's, you know, it's also to be able to that. You know, it is, it is almost like that model that, you know, that the primordial soup, the primordial soup of the comics industry, the direct market, the counter culture, the drug culture, all these kind of things, you know, that this would sort of emerge. You know, this is sort of like that classic fish that grows legs and crawls onto land, you know, like that whole model. So, I have a different one which brings respect to Providence. Years ago on the blog, I described the Necronomicon and the Thurumethos as essentially a flying saucer crashing into our dimension and spreading the wreckage of it over about 110 years. So that it kind of, that's why every individual piece kind of looks fake or not, you know, built or not of the same thing because it's actually crashing through time into our dimension. And that's kind of more in the 90s, what I see happening with this sort of very chaos magic aesthetic, it's kind of like what you're saying, but I want to pull it back to Providence and go like, I think it crashed in pieces and it looks like it could only have happened through this miraculous, happy circumstance of having the right editor in the right place and all that kind of stuff. But those are the conditions that allow the portal to work, which is a very lovecraftian thing. And when I got to the end of Providence, I'm like, holy shit. Alan thinks the same thing I do about what the Kathulu mythos actually is, which is that. It's built itself. The last component of the book for people who are unaware, like the majority of the story is set in the early 20th century. But the final bit is almost like the end of Battlestar Galactica, just kind of moving through the decades of the 20th century, showing the build out of Kathulu and the Necronomicon and all the kind of elements of the mythos that to us look individual, but that's because they're looking at it in this dimension rather than it is more or less being tendrils of the one organism in another dimension. Okay, so I just want to clarify for the listeners that in this instance, we're talking about Providence because we're sort of jumping back and forth between the two. Let me, and I just want to interject here. I want to get on a little bit of a soapbox because I mean, this is something that I've covered on the blog and I still feel really, really strongly about. So there's this whole sense that lovecraft and the mythos, the Kathulu misos and the deep ones and all this kind of thing just sort of popped out of the imagination one day. You know, he's just sitting around and just put pen to paper and this all just flowed out of him. Providence was probably one of the most derivative and near plagiaristic pop culture writers we have in the canon and was, you know, rather shameless, not even shamelessly. He wasn't ashamed of it. He would tell you, put his harness sleeve and tell you, you know, Poe and Duncini and all these other people and that's what he was, he was almost like running fanfic in some ways. You know, I mean, he was really, and they put this in the, and Elmo puts this in the series, which I think is, you know, very cany and very apt where we see Lord Duncini giving a talk that the protagonist of Providence attends with lovecraft. You know, I think that's, you know, very cany on Moore's part. But one thing that I've written about on the secret son and, you know, I'll fight you about this, I really will. I was like, I really believe that so much of the Kathulomithos was lifted. not quite verbatim. I mean, he did sort of change things around, but lifted straight out of Alice Bailey and curl her whole uvra, which let's, you know, let's just accept the fact that she claimed the stuff was all being channeled by one of the ascended masters. He had cool in his name somewhere. So I, you know, I like something like that. Yeah, I mean, I'd have to look it up, you know, I don't, I don't do well with made up names. But if you look at books like Initiation, Human and Solar and you know, just all her early books that were being published in New York at the same time that Lovecraft was in New York and you know, sort of circulating among that kind of literati, pulpy, you know, that sort of set, you know, what we would sort of see almost as bohemians today, you know, that that that work was circulating in those circles. And I just think, you know, a lot of people have criticized me for this and, you know, sort of taken me to the woodshed over this. But, you know, I'm not, I'm not going to budge. I think that Lovecraft was wandering around lower Manhattan one day and somebody was on the street selling her books and he picked it up and he's like, oh, this is perfect. You know what I'm saying? I mean, if it happened, like, I think where people need to put some nuance into their reaction is buying it and reading it doesn't mean he approved of it. Like it wasn't a seek, seek, seek with the author's first. I do actually believe that he was for nightmarish reasons. The materialist that he said he was. Oh, I do too. Yeah. He would have read this stuff and gone, this is trash, but I'm going to use it. Yeah. Well, let's know what I mean. Like, ha ha, this proposter, like this is, this is the stuff I'm looking for. And I don't think, and I reckon Alan gets this nails, a vision of Lovecraft that I find resonant in the sense that he and the inclusion of Lord Dunstony, who we should probably describe in a minute is a good example where I think Lovecraft is almost like Grant in a way, but not a vector or a node for these vectors to become the thing that they've become and he was sort of unwitting about that because there's a couple of bits that I thought was super interesting, which I'm about to ask you about because we need to play the name game because I know we're going to have some fun with this one. So in the series in Providence, when Lovecraft and the protagonist go to visit his mother in hospital, she's there's a kind of component of like they live where for people who don't like don't know there's some glasses that one of the guys in the secret society creates and it allows you to see the exordimensional entities floating around and Lovecraft and Mother can do this in her unwelstate spontaneously. And the other thing that it was interesting, which I'm going to ask you about now is if the secret society in it, the Stelice Epiante or Wisdom of the Stars, is a couple of things. It's an esoteric order, but it is also a gloss for Masonic networks in the Northeast, right? And so Lovecraft's father and grandfather were in this esoteric Masonic group and that's sort of interesting for some of the other things that I know you have explored in terms of some of the bits that maybe don't add up in the story of Lovecraft and it's just kind of funny that there it is in Providence that he's the son and grandson of what is effectively a fictional version of esoteric Mason? Well, it was all over the place back then. I mean people really have no concept of how popular it was. I mean, you know, this is pre-TV in some cases pre-radio, pre-motion pictures. There really wasn't a lot to do. So you went into these lodges and you hang out when you drank and did these weird rituals and some other maybe less savory kind of activities. I would venture to guess. Certainly if you look at the history of that, particularly esoteric forms of Masonry in the Old West, they were basically how criminal gangs organized themselves. They organized themselves the lodges. I mean, a great example of this, you know, Billy the Kid. Billy the Kid, that whole story, Pat Garrett, and there was something called the Lincoln County War in New Mexico and it was basically, you know, the whole thing that you've heard about Billy the Kid and the regulators and all these kind of things. It was basically two different irregular Masonic lodges, you know, fighting for territory. I mean, they were basically just gangs, but they organized themselves through these irregular, more esoteric kind of Masonic lodges. So I think that that feels very real. That has real texture there. There's real meat on the bone and especially setting it in New England, which is very much kind of the birthplace of this. So, again, you know, Athol, you know, Athol Massachusetts, which is still pretty isolated. And a lot of the cities and towns that the character and Providence, you know, Alan Moore's comics series Providence is kind of wandering through. You know, in some cases are still very rural, you know, but in those days, I mean, forget it. And basically what you had, and you know, this is something that Lovecraft, you know, people who are familiar with his work, you know, are familiar with this because, I mean, Lovecraft, you know, did the same travels, you know, he sort of traveled the same circuit that the protagonist in Providence does. You know, he went around to all these places, you know, these backwards towns in upstate New York and Vermont and Western Massachusetts. Your basically what you had is that you're particularly following the Civil War, you would have veterans, you know, taking their their pension or some sort of, you know, whatever nest they were able to collect. And they'd move out of the cities, you know, move out of Boston, which, you know, was becoming very crowded, you know, especially with a lot of European immigration. So they'd move out to places like, like Athol, and wait for everyone else to show up. Like they thought they were sort of settling these towns, and we're going to, you know, make their fortunes when everyone else, you know, followed them there. And as it happened, people did not follow them there. And they sort of, you know, things all sort of fell apart. And this is something, you know, this is sort of the poetry of a lot of lovecraft's work, you know, that people who sort of took off into the hinterlands and became very isolated and sort of just fell apart and then almost became, you know, devolved in some ways. You know, this is something that the lovecraft reader is going to be very familiar with. And I think something that informs this story. But, you know, where more takes it, you know, is that these esoteric orders and collections, they're not just, you know, doing, drinking the beer and doing the whole hiring of bifthing, you know, they're sort of involved in, you know, there's the cannibals and the in-sash, you know, there's a lot of like unsavory things that are given sort of a magical or esoteric gloss by these groups. Absolutely. And I know for people who might be, if they're out there in their matesons and grumble about hearing this kind of stuff, there are two ways you can pass it, right, which is there are in fact esoteric components to or esoteric subgroups within masonry. But the other thing is historically you have, particularly in the US, although Britain as well, but much more in the US, a high degree overlap between high degree mason's and a elite power structure. So the ritual can, the inclination towards ritual can be there through either sense. And what I got, and it's funny, like just the wink at Lovecraft's potential involvement with masonry in Providence just made me realize how much Alan has just thought about the depth of his thinking about Lovecraft and the Love Craft mythos was there. So the first thing that made me realize this was in the, it must be actually the first issue where if there was, this is a weird way of saying it, I have to just describing the Necronomican as a crashed spaceship. If there was a quote-unquote real Necronomican in our reality, it would be the picketrix. And in the yellow signs are in the first issue of Providence, what Alan does is essentially blends the Necronomican with the story of the picketrix, not just from a name perspective, but actually it's kind of like a scary aversion of how the picketrix has ended up in the West. And it's not exactly wrong. This is why, and I'm sure he's thought the same thing because this is how I landed on it. It's not exactly wrong because the picketrix in aggregate is how you bring stellar influences down to earth. And so if there's a real Necronomican, it's the picketrix, and it's coming back to the masonry thing, you were in such good hands with Alan Moore in Providence when it comes to what the fuck is even going on with with Lovecraft and the Mythos. because right there he's like, "Well, in some sense it's true." And in some sense it's true. Yeah, well that's why the story is, again, it's not fun, but it's very satisfying. And it's like a good meal that isn't maybe filled with a lot of salt and sugar in preserved. So all those kind of chemicals that get those endorphins flowing. It's a good solid organic meal and it's because of things like that. I mean more, I'm sure more has, I could write a book on the Picatrix. I mean he could probably write a really good book on it. He could probably write a good book on a lot of things that he does not choose to do so. I think that he's an extraordinarily intelligent man. I would probably put his IQ somewhere bending the needle towards the 200 mark. He's very, very hardworking. He's got a phenomenal memory. And you need to be to himself very well. Yeah, you need to be to be that depth with, and I don't mean this disparagingly, with your out of his or your construction because it's so perfectly put together. I mean we got to do the name game now because one, there's a character in it called Elspeth and another character in it called Garland. I don't know either of them are familiar to you. But like let's, he plays, he's definitely playing, so shall we say a Crowley in name game with this series, isn't he? Yeah, well it kind of reminds me a lot of things that, what's that guy? Jim Branden wrote in the Return of Pan with the name game and place names and things like that. I'm sure I'm sure there's a copy of Return of Pan and Alan Moore's personal library. I would be very shocked if there was not. But it seems to be, for people who aren't really familiar with the series again, what Moore is doing is that he's having his main character sort of walk the stations of the Lovecraft, so to speak. He's going through the greatest hits and he's meeting all the the Star players of No Pun intended, of the Lovecraft mythos. And even a contemporary one, so the thing that interested me in the second issue, the hook, was the ecclesiastical organization under the church, I think is a reference to Peter Levendas Teenage Encounters with that fake church in the Bronx that was a cover for the intelligence agency, so that kind of was probably the beginning of his experience in the intelligence community, right? But like that just seemed to the first thing that happened is this year essentially meeting fake ecclesiastic types. And you go that literally happened as part of this story of the Lovecraft mythos. But I'll tell you something, I'm sure if we went back and did a little digging, I'm sure that that's based on something that actually went down in that area, you know, not just in the Bronx, but actually in Red Hook Brooklyn itself. So, I know a lot of people sort of group Brooklyn and the Bronx together, you know, for social or landscaperies, but they're actually, the much separate parts geographically. Brooklyn is sort of on the tail of Long Island, and the Bronx is at the north of Manhattan Island. So, you know, they are very different locations. So, I would not be surprised, you know, given Moore's hyper obsessive personality that he would be doing research into that. But, you know, the one thing that I wanted to mention here, you know, because getting back to my thesis about Lovecraft, you're not buying into Alice Bailey. I'm sure that he would just pick up an Alice Bailey, but I can think, you know, this woman is completely insane, which I think most people do. But, you know, it's the impetus that so much of Moore's work is building off the archetypes created by other writers. You know, for instance, I mean, a great example of this is a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which takes a bunch of, you know, dime novel and, you know, boy's own story kind of heroes and collects them into a team. Prometheus is very clearly a Wonder Woman analog. Tom Strang is very clearly Doc Savage, you know, and you can kind of, and for that matter, the Watchman, the origin of the Watchman is that DC had bought the rights to this defunct company called Charlton, and they had a number of heroes like the Blue Beetle and so on and peacemaker. And Moore wanted to use them for the Watchman, and they said, no, you can't use that because we've got plans for these characters. And so he created analogs of characters that, you know, were really kind of cheesy rip-offs of mainstream superheroes to begin with. So, Moore is always, you know, you can say that there's a high degree of unoriginality because he's not creating a lot of his own archetypes. He's working off the archetypes of other writers, but, you know, to me, that's, you know, that's part of the appeal of his work. Yeah, it's playing with the creativity is in the playing with the archetypes. And if he hadn't done that, he wouldn't have, like, the overall message, it's kind of overdetermined, but the overall message in Watchman would have come through if he didn't do that. And the same thing here, which is why I'm so interested in the name game from a Crowley perspective. So the names are used archetypally and deliberately. To the point of almost being clunky. And that is, I mean, yeah, there's one of them. So, Ronald Underwood Pitman, right, as a name, the first, well, the first person to intentionally show the main character, how to get into the underworld is called Underwood Pitman. It's literally someone who goes into the Underwood Pit. And that is what that shows you is that there's a deliberate use and construction of names. Yeah, I think I sort of string to offer examples of that, you know, in an earlier work to his, but I think that that's something that he's picked up on in the past, but in this case, it is. It's funny because I mean, I read all of Lovecraft a long time ago, and not even that long time ago, like 20 years ago. And it took me a while to sort of, oh, okay, that's this character, because he puts them in much different contexts. He's not putting him in the same context necessarily as Lovecraft would put him in his stories. He's, you know, he's using them to tell his own narrative. But I think, you know, those name games, you know, important to him because it's sort of that eighth dimensional chest that he's playing. Yeah. And it's part of the semi-conscious spell that's involved by incorporating real people like Lord Dunciny and Lovecraft and kind of like clunky siphoname. So Garland Wheatley, we can talk about the Garland bit in a minute, but it's Dennis Wheatley to start with. And one of the other characters, so the gay couple that essentially try to kill the protagonist, the other ones like James Montague, like Montague Summers. So there's all these names of characters from kind of like a classic British understanding of witchcraft and deabolism that are sort of structurally put in there. But the Garland thing is interesting because the sort of reverse rape character is called Elsmith, which is quite literally the Scottish version of Elizabeth. And I don't know if you have any opinion on the name of Elizabeth Chris, I'm uncertain. But it just seems like. Yeah. Something in the back of my head. The rings about somewhere. Yeah. That character is fascinating to me. It's fascinating to me that he made her 13 when the character that he's basing that version on. I think it's from the thing in the door, right? Is an adult woman. It's interesting to me, a little disturbing to me. There is a motif that we should probably touch on that seems to occur in a lot of Alan Moore work and that's sort of this disembodied rape motif that really started in Swamping. There was a storyline, story arc in Swamping that got the comics code authority to revoke its approval seal, which meant it couldn't be sold on new stands back in the day. And it was a storyline where if you're familiar with Swamping, but there's a female protagonist named Abigail Arcane. She's married to an intelligence agent called Matt Cable. Her uncle is sort of the demon, demonic, wizard, mad scientist character and his name is Anton Arcane. In the storyline, her husband dies in a car crash and And he is physically possessed by the spirit of Anton Arcan who is Abigail Arcan's uncle. So there's a kind of incestuous quasi pedophilic, not necessarily because they're both adult characters. But there's just that kind of inference. And this is something that we see repeated in Promethea in a storyline where a woman, I'm sorry, a wizard wants to enjoy sexual congress with Promethea, but he's actually doing it through the body of a teenage girl. And then again, in Providence, with the Elspeth Wade character who is 13. So that is something that, Moore's work, there was a series called Lost Girls that again kind of touches on this stuff. You can play it either way. I'm not exactly sure how people personally will think about it. I find it a bit just tasteful. You could make the argument there. There are artistic and philosophical or even magical, I'm depending on this. I find those arguments a bit strained. But in this case, in this particular case, in the story, it does speak to the nature of the character. It does speak to the nature of the characters involved. The family that this woman is from, that she's from a family involved in the nether regions of the secret society, I think that basically bad guys involved in ritual magic and spirit possession and so on. So yeah. And about two years ago, he wrote a big, he made some good points in his defense when there was some stuff about Lost Girls in particular. I seem to recall him going, it's to sort of boil it down. It's like, I write the most graphically violent stuff and no one bat tonight. And if there's sex things, everyone falls over themselves and go, there is a point to it. I know what you mean. It's not my favorite part of the book. And it's just, it's a thing that happens in Alan's work, I guess. Yeah, well, listen, I mean, everybody has their shortcomings in there. They're foibles. So in this particular case, it does not feel, I mean, it's very, very graphic, but it does not feel gratuitous, gratuitous or aggrievedous. It feels that it's serving-- It definitely belongs to you. It definitely belongs. Yeah, if you've ever read the thing on the door story or the character, Anson F. Wait, you know, is basically a witch, but she's also, she's from Insmall, so she's got that old one lineage. So I mean, there are justifications within the story. It probably could have been depicted less graphically, but there are some things that you just accept are part of the story tellers imperative, I guess. It's not the only kind of like, although it's the same adult character, but it's at the only teenage sex act. Oh, yes. And so there's a-- because the lead character's gay and there is a twink sex scene towards the end with another character called Howard Charles. Now, question for you is Howard Charles Robert Ballot? That's an excellent question. See, okay, so Lovecraft is depicted as homophobic in his dealings with what I call the Gordon character. I want to explain why, because I think this is hilarious. Yeah, when I read this book, you know, just the fact that he's, you know, he's a writer based in a large metropolitan media outlet who originally lived in sort of the provinces. I guess he's from Wisconsin in the series. And then leaves his comfortable New York media job to travel the highways and byways is of rural New England in search of authentic folk magic. And I, yeah, I don't know about you, but I think maybe some ruined super listeners and readers might find that. And what's the main character's name? The English family. Black. Right. So it's Robert Black. And we were-- because this is where you began saying you got to read this. Like, you're in it. And I'm like, okay. I'm still there to hear. I'm a joke that I was archetypal or iconic. But, you know, he's playing a-- who knows? If not, it's the character. Anyway, that's the main character. He's a gay journalist who, yeah, wonders the boondocks looking for magic and folklore. And there are some departures with my biography. Bangs a few. Bangs a few teenage girls. But I just think, again, it comes back to you. Get the sense of how much Alan Moore has sat and thought about Lovecraft. Because, again, it sort of belongs to-- in a funny way, the Howard Charles sex scene is almost more jarring than the Elspeth one in terms of it being like, no, I didn't quite expect that. And I'm just wondering if is it a wink at Robert Barlow? Oh, I was expecting it to get the minute that character showed up. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, I mean, I-- you know, let's not pussy foot around this. I mean, I definitely believe that Lovecraft was gay and had a sweet tooth, so to speak. I don't believe that-- so here's a thing. In a real world context, outside of the world of letters, when he's writing to people that he doesn't necessarily know, and the people who might circulate his letters, and he's would kind of make, you know, oh, golly gosh, I don't know about this, you know, this sort of me business, something like that. You know, if-- say a character like Robert Black showed up in Lovecraft's apartment, you know, I think that Lovecraft would probably have a pretty keenly developed sense of gay art and would not make those kind of comments. And, you know, there would probably be some, you know, this is what I think the long-- I'm going on there. That's what I think the lower Manhattan late night walks were about. I think he was cruising. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. There's no question about it. And, you know, his marriage just seems like, you know, sort of classic co-bearding in my estimation, at least. You know, a Jewish woman who runs a hat shop, you know, and they didn't spend a lot of time together. It just-- it-- it smacks pretty strongly at bearding. And the fact that he ended up in Redhawk, a place that he hated and was away from his beloved provenance, I think he's-- again, Lovecraft fans, I know, can get really fanatic about this thing. But I get the sense that there might have been like maybe some-- what they call, quote unquote, moral offenses. I think he was running out of town. I think-- Yeah. He may be-- I don't think that it was more like-- It wouldn't surprise me if the reason that he ended up in exile was because he maybe made a pass at the wrong high school boy. Yeah. Just the fact, you know, the fact that he would engage in, you know, this relationship with Barlow, that doesn't seem like-- you know, just sort of like fall into that. It's like, you know, he wakes up one morning. He's like, you know, I'm kind of sick of my wife. I think I'm going to like really get into this whole teenage boy business down in Florida, you know what I'm saying? It just-- it doesn't make any sense to me. It's not rational. You know, you had the reality of the closet back then. I mean, you could be arrested, you know, if certain activities are even just on suspicion of such. So I think that that I think is maybe where more drops the ball a little bit. Maybe he's playing too much to the public archetype of Lovecraft and not necessarily-- He's obviously thought about it. Like, because I think-- because the other thing about Barlow is-- this is-- again, we're talking about problematic stuff. Thanks a lot, Alan. And I don't want people to misread what we're talking about as in, you know, the minor asked for it since. But in the case of Barlow initiated the letter correspondence, right? Because he was a extensively fan. And they did hang out together. And so it-- again, different time, different legality. He's don't-- anyone listening think I'm saying like the teenage boy was asking for the adult man to become his lover. Probably was though. And that's what I-- that's why I think Howard Charles-- that's why I think Howard Charles is Alan Moore's Robert Barlow. Because if you read the book, that is a surprising yet very consensual sex act. Well the other thing too in that regard is that it always seems to me that Robert Black is not only, you know, Gordon White, but he's also-- you know, and that sort of dream logic type of storytelling that he's also-- So a mere image of Lovecraft himself, you know, he's Lovecraft kind of meeting an aspect of himself or projection of himself that black is in part is like a love, I don't want to necessarily say like an alter ego, maybe even like a talpa or something. He's like a talpa of Lovecraft going in search of Lovecraft, you know, going in search of his authentic self and you know, I don't know if Alan Moore thought of it in these terms. But it comes across as that because if Lovecraft had been less fucked up, he could have been a journalist at a at a major metro. Like if he wasn't so goddamn broken and weird, he and probably would have been just like a closet gay manhurt and newspaper journalist. Yeah, yeah, I maybe he had a desire to do so when he moved to New York in the first place. I mean, you know, he did sort of get involved with Poudini, you know, and maybe he saw that it. So he did a he ghost wrote a book for the Houdini, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Some of the plague of superstition or some of that. Speaking of intelligence connections, anyway. Yeah, well, see that's the other thing too. So again, this is something that I was very treated very gingerly when I when I broached the subject on my blog, but I have a very strong feeling that Lovecraft wasn't just traveling around to random cities in the middle of America on a lock, you know, particularly since he said he never had any money. Yeah, you know, my strong sense and you and I have discussed this in the past is that he was working as a carrier and he was probably working as a carrier for, you know, some sort of intelligence. Yeah, Masonic networks or intelligence networks inside their identical, their identical now, but they're identical that I don't mean that the CIA is Masonic. I mean, that definitionally, Masonic networks are an intelligence network, but we are talking pre creation of the national security status we understand, but we're certainly not talking pre intelligence, right? And that's it's funny because it's if if Alan Moore had has read any rune soup, he's also read some secret son because there aren't too many other people that have kind of looked at it and gone, look, let me table this hypothesis. His family being his absent father and the grandfather and so on being sort of solid northeast middle class probably Mason's and then he is my explanation for how he managed to afford and why he went on these travels given that he was such a misanthro like it's not like he liked the world. So like, oh, let me, let me seek a big wide world. You didn't care for it. Well, I also feel like I also get the sense that he might have been sort of strong armed into it. So, you know, again, we're looking at the days of the closet and, you know, if you were found out to be gay in those days, you know, particularly by the cops or people in intelligence agencies and so on and so forth, you know, a lot of times you'd end up on the hook with them, you know what I'm saying? And this is pretty well known. I mean, as informants, you know, for honey traps, I mean, all sorts of things that would go on like that. So, you know, this is supposition. I mean, I do want to just say that it's supposition, but you know, it's just sort of filling in the blanks because a lot of lovecraft story as it's told by official biographers doesn't make any sense. No, there are bits that you can't, you can actually just look up how much a train ticket costs from like, in station to nowhere real Florida and go, well, he was eating half a can of beans a day. Like, how is that happening? And so you're right, like it's, it isn't effectively evidence-free hypothesis and it will be permanently evidence-free, but it's not a bad one. Like that's what it is. And people, I think, and it's a misunderstanding of how the world worked at the time. When you say he was a courier, that's literally a courier. Like it doesn't mean he was off doing some sort of James Bond daring do. There are some things if you are, if you are masonically affiliated businesses, there are some things that you probably shouldn't, like private correspondence that you shouldn't put through the mail because if you're in competition with other people, you don't do that because they have operands working at the post office as well. This has always been the game. This has been the game since the medieval guilds. That's actually how medieval guilds would have couriers for the same reason, which is this message must get to someone else un-malested. It's not he's off down there doing it, like, you know, killing Nazis or whatever. It is banal and probably is resentful and activity as you need to take this letter or this bag which you cannot open to this person in wherever. Well, it would be a bike messenger today. I mean, it's just, it's great work, you know? And again, like when you start, Hollywood just sort of distorts everything and gives people a distorted image of the things that you're trying to convey. But it's actually just like you said, it's entirely banal. It's entirely ordinary. It's entirely mundane. And if you look at his history, there's absolutely no reason for him to be going to, I don't know, little rock or something. I mean, wherever he would end up Charleston, Rochester, places that aren't really tourist traps, you know, saying that there's not a lot to do there. And if you're taking a bus or train, I mean, it was certainly a lot cheaper back then. But, you know, like you said, I mean, he's, you know, living on a chunk of cheese and a can of beans for a week, you just, you can't, you can't do that. It's just absurd. I think this is a lot of mythology. I, he might have even, you know, it might be the fact that he had family money that he didn't want to mention. Maybe he's crying poverty to sort of romanticize himself, make himself look like a hero, you know, a martyr. I mean, who knows, but if you just look and, you know, I don't want to put down the biographers because a lot of them are like excellent, excellent work. It's great. It's great. Josie, SD Josie appears in the flesh in this series as a character. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. And, you know, he's done phenomenal work. I mean, you know, his work has been excellent. But, you know, I just wonder that because they're also fans that they might not want to ask questions that might be seen, you know, it's casting, you know, also, then any more of a negative light that he has been already, you know. And I say it with love. It takes a nosy in mind to see patterns like that. And, and if you're trying to do a, an already challenging job, which is to perform a biography on someone you like who is also kind of an asshole. You kind of get your heads full. But I think that's, I think Alan, whether or not he's at least thought through these ideas himself because he gives lovecraft essentially an esoteric, misonic lineage in the context of the province. So it's one of the things that as I'm reading through it going, holy shit, like Alan, I mean, we shouldn't be surprised because as you say, probably 200 IQ brilliance blah, blah, blah. But also like he has spent a lot of time sitting quietly in Northampton, stone thinking about lovecraft. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And it really is, I mean, it is fan fiction, you know what I mean? And it's almost like, it's almost like a quasi-hagiography that he wanted to, you know, when we talk about this dream logic where you have the sort of top of lovecraft, you know, he understands that lovecraft is this very imperfect and problematic character. So he sort of creates a pure version of him, you know, in search of his authentic self to sort of, you know, so you can focus on the lovecraft mythos. You can focus on the lovecraft story without necessarily focusing on lovecraft himself. You can sort of focus on this idealized projection of lovecraft that, you know, it's far less problematic, it's much more sympathetic, you know, it's much more pleasant, you know, much more of a, like a kind of decent, salty earth character. And that to me is what somebody with more storytelling chops does when you want to write, you know, this glowing semi-hagiographic fanfic about this guy. The other thing, and this is where you, the strong twist at the greatest, when you said, you need to read Providence, was you said, this is actually Alan Moore's, this is what Alan Moore actually thinks about magic. It's not in Promethea. And it is the, which I've always hoped was there, but you do have to, I guess, the political problem if you don't want to, you don't want to scare the nerds where there's a sort of classic Alan Moore cosmology of the one place, you know, the gods can be said to and arguably exist as in the human imagination where they are something great and terrible about that, right? And that just sounds like almost, almost Dawkins level jibberjabber. But I knew it wasn't that like he has a decent understanding of the imaginal. And I would actually say a hypercompetent understanding of the imaginal after reading Providence because I believe that's what you were getting at. That here is you actually have Alan laying out for us. This is what I fucking mean about the imaginal. in the spirit world, you idiots. And I read through it going, I don't, like, where is the lie? I think he absolutely nails the imaginal in the spirit world in this. What do you think? I mean, talk us to how he describes it and your opinion of it. Well, that's a big job because a lot of what he presents is magic. He does the very clever move of offering you a rational counter-argument. So in other words, you heal depict a magical event. And one of the events I'm thinking of, you know, sort of the classic example of that is when he goes, you know, they tell him, don't go down in the basement. He goes down in the basement. And then you just sort of discovers this upper rung of hell that he sort of wanders through and he's chased by a demon and so on and so forth. And then, you know, he wakes up on the floor because there's a gas leak and everything like that. And you kind of get the sense that maybe the gas leak is real, but that's not-- you know, the doc in's mentality can go, oh, well, he just was hallucinating because he had inhaled this gas that was leaking from this furnace. But if you have a magical mindset, you're going to look at it and say, well, that's half of the story. Because what he-- you know, the gas and whatever effect it had on it, what it actually did was open this portal to the other reality that is as real and is internally consistent as the reality that we live in ourselves, but you can't access it through conventional means. You know, you can't access it through normal, ordinary consciousness. I know that Jeff Kriple has talked a lot about this. You have to be crazy. And because it is a lovecraft story, the main character gets progressively more insane as it goes on and ultimately goes, "Bullfuckin' nuts crazy." And-- You know, lovecraft stories. And I'm not ruined anything but to say that he dies, right? But it's each contact event. So that's the first one. That's in Red Hook, where he wonders down a basement. Yeah, and kind of is like an upper realm of hell. And then the guy who runs the place, like, oh, sorry, we had a gasoline. Then the next time is with the photographer and embossed it, well, the next-- The next time is when he's up in New Hampshire, and he's experiencing all the time slips. Sure, sure. Car going by. And you know, I want to talk about-- I want to come back to the time thing, because I think that's where Grant has in beat. But in terms of the sort of entrances into the underworld, then it's with the photographer who says, well, I'll show you. And he takes him down to the basement, which is a sort of metaphor for-- it is a basement, but the use of steps to kind of get into your unconscious. And then it's like, wow, your use of hypnosis is so good I could almost feel that thing next to me. And then when he meets the-- Oh, who do you think that character is, by the way? Who do you think-- is it Randall Carver? The sort of writer, friend. Yeah. Yeah. Randolph Carter. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Randolph Carter, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he gets taught how to do it. But it's funny. Like, you get the progressive-- you have a sort of lovecraft inflection or flavor to Alan Moore's depiction of the imaginal, which is like, you need drugs can accidentally get you there. But repeated contact will send you crazy, but also you need to be crazy to get there. And it's that kind of like that aspect of the Dreamlands, which is what it calls it. That sort of lovecraft in corner of the Dreamlands will send you insane, but you also have to be crazy to get there. And it's just so deft in that really morient sense of how he nests the contact experiences with the progressive descent into insanity of the main character. Well, I think simultaneously giving you particularly towards the end and the kind of climax, where he's essentially describing the collective unconscious as identical to the spirit world. And it's almost like the guys who are working for the old ones, almost like a dodgy version of the union notion of making the unconscious conscious. And in particular, these aspects that are associated with lovecraftian beings and the stars. And I just don't know where the lie is. I just think he nailed it. Well, I want to expand on that, because more clearly, building a lovecraft. But I guess when I was-- I don't know if we were talking about this, but I was doing some reading into lovecraft. And I was doing some reading into the basis of the stories. And more often than you would expect, a lot of these stories are based on things that were in the news, things that happened. And what is most commonly called lovecraft country, and lovecraft country is this sort of crescent that exists in the Northeast, in the Northeastern corner of New England. And I just want to sort of go into this, because you know that I've got a lot of personal experience in that area, particularly that in-small area, that became so well-known in the novels and so on. So I think-- so the cornerstone of this for lovecraft is that I think a lot of his curiosity about these areas, like I said, how to do with new stories that he would read, but also his travels when these areas-- I mean, if you go to Gloucester now, Gloucester, Massachusetts, it's like Yupi Hell and like houses are all parked up. But to not-- you know what I'm saying? I mean, they're right on top of each other. But back in lovecraft's time, this was a dangerous backwater. It really was. And the whole area of Cape Ann, where you have rock port and Gloucester and Raleigh and going down towards Beverly and Salem, this is that whole corner of Northeastern New England. So I think what the milieu that lovecraft was exploring, and I think that more is expanding on, is it's a blend of Scott's Irish folk magic, because some of these areas are a lot more hillbilly than you think they are. I mean, the western end of New England is on the Appalachian Trail. So there is that influence. And even when I was young, if you went to certain parts in a hamster of a launch in Massachusetts, it was as redneck as you get. People were driving around with Confederate flags on their trucks and listening to country music and the whole nine yards. And there's still parts of Pennsylvania they call Pennsylvania, the heartland of Pennsylvania is when you get outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and so on. It's pretty backwards. So it's the Scott's Irish folk magic. Combining-- again, we talked about irregular pre-Mason reframation, the rosacrucianism, maybe even some strains of OTO. Crowley-- I mean, Crowley was up in a hamster, right? Some reason Crowley himself-- Alice Crowley himself ended up in a Lovecraft country. You see what I'm saying? So it's just like-- I think there's some sort of pull, some sort of center of gravity in that area that is unique. And may have mainly dissipated now because of gentrification and so on. But I think there are still vestiges of it. But it's this mix of-- so again, it's a Scott's magic, maybe in some forms of-- I don't know, cornish or Welsh, just the sort of Celtic fringe brands of folk magic. Combining with more English, more urban, free Masonry, secret societies, and so on, we sort of see these backwards people in Masonic, Wrigalia, and the series. But also indigenous traditions. Because as soon as the Puritans got to Massachusetts, they started sending up Indian schools, what they called Indian schools, where basically they were raising Indian children and orphans to be Christian, English-speaking, so on and so forth. And there's just tremendous amount of intermarriage, something that people don't really understand about New England, is that even from the very early days that settlers weren't marrying with Indians, Native Americans, pretty early on. And so it's not uncommon. And then we sort of see it with Salem, right? Because Salem really starts-- the whole witch-crazy starts with the stories that I wish you'd make in, or Trinidadian. There's some slave in one of these households who's from the Caribbean. Trinidadian. I know you mean, Tituba. Yeah. So we had this very, I think, extraordinarily potent and unique blend of-- You know for lack of a better term magic in this corner you're particularly in the sort of the fringes And the outskirts of the corner because you know I gotta tell you I mean like the first real honest to God UFO sighting I had Was in 2015 you know not the long go and it was as we were entering your Hampshire because that area you know around sale I'm around American Stonehenge It's pretty notorious and and we're talking like orbs and I saw them and you know saw them for a good chunk of time Like almost a minute and I'm like those you know that's not drones. That's Something like kind of sickly in disturbing, you know what I mean? So there's a lot of that around there and There always has been I mean a lot of the you know the most well-known UFO abduction cases and you've got the hills from portsmith, you know, that's that you know right smack dab in the center of Of Lovecraft country You have Betty and Reyes in you're getting towards the southern end of the crescent Little out west, you know, you had a very famous You know abduction case So I mean there's a lot of this kind of stuff going on and You know, I'm not saying it's you know physical aliens and metal spaceships, but you know It's some sort of spirit contact that that I think is a lot older than than people get a credit for and Like I said, I mean I saw those UFOs myself and you know readers of the blog will know that I had a You know a lupurcon encounter with young and very sick. So it's baked into the stone. It really is and I think that Lovecraft wasn't just pulling these things out of the air. I think that he was just basing it on His observations, but also basing on new stories because I think there's a lot of the stuff going on You know, this is before television a lot of times it's before electricity You know, I think interaction with the spirit world was a lot more common back in those days I really do. I mean, I feel that very strongly and it it the manifestations Sort of arose in this milieu like I said of this blend of you know this different traditions that sort of created something new entirely, you know It's a place is one of the areas because we should probably go back to We're kind of comparison to because I want to build these these Topic areas up to make a definitive statement towards the end, but like place is treated much better in provenance Which is surprising because it's my understanding that Alan more hasn't been to Lovecraft country. Is that correct? I don't even know the last time he's left like Between Northampton and London He's very famous as a hermit. I get to tell you though. I mean I'm from that area and You know, I'm sort of old enough to remember when there was still sort of messages of that old rural I mean not as old as you know as a Lovecraft, but you know Oh, no, no, I mean like it's you can tell it's it comes back to this Image I have a violin and in Northampton Just thinking so much about this and quite literally pouring over maps because maps of these different towns are a visual motif in the series, right? And so what I'm saying is that I it feels like very well realized to me. Oh, that's what I'm getting to like he's he's thought a lot about it And the point I'm building to is like where does he think Arkham? What is he gives the quote unquote real Arkham if we're like this a subitus like thought about Lovecraft country all the different towns of his life And and the different areas and things that have happened in different stories and and the maps are there in the graphic novel series And so the idea of place and and and the interactivity and connections between them is is Really really potent and and well Delivered in in Providence, but Arkham famously Isn't real but it's a fictional town, but where is it actually? According to Ellen. Well, you know, it's interesting because I actually used to know when I was young a Lovecraft scholar named Will Murray and Will Murray is has the benefit of being from you know, he's from Quincy So he's very familiar with The region that that Lovecraft was was referencing in his stories. I believe that Will Murray thought that Arkham was Salem That ends mouth was Gloucester I think you know, it's it's confusing though because he sort of you know, he'll mention Arkham and then he'll mention Salem But you know, he you know the geography that he alludes to Will be describing Salem will be describing a Gloucester. Oh You know, one of the stories that I wanted to bring up because I mean, this is something I sort of have An unhappy connection to is um, so you know, the whole of the spirit world in in you know particularly in colonial times and in rural areas You know, the kind of stories that that Moore is is channeling and and I think that inspired uh Lovecraft to begin with there was a very famous case called the you know the ghost Indian invasion And what it was is that in in Gloucester, Massachusetts um Somewhere between what's what's now called dog town and and what was then called Babson's farm There were all these salt marshes and a farmer in the late 1600s had been sort of aroused because there was an invasion of You know, what we're called ghost Indians which were uh Like knit apparitions or specters of um of Native Americans and I believe some French soldiers and or maybe Native Americans and French Military dress But this was such a big deal. I mean it roused the entire town and a lot of people were witness to this that it um even know cotton mather Uh got involved in it and you know cotton mather was down in Boston and sort of running about the show for the uh the corporate Jones town that was uh eastern mass chooses at the time um You know that this was a you know a very very big deal at the time and there was an investigation of it and you know church Figures got involved in it and And you know this to me has the kind of um You know the folklore that that I think really informs Lovecraft, but you know I We spoke in the past that you know a ghosts and and all these sort of Manifestations, you know, we're still very much part of the culture when I was growing up. I mean, it's probably a lot less so now but you know uh Trading ghost stories was it was a favorite pastime for for pretty much everyone at that point in time So the you know the the the reality of the spirit world was something that was very um present In the mind, you know certainly in lovecrafts time so What I'm trying to say you know to boil this all down is I don't think more is just like picking up on like sort of the imaginings of this weird you know probably closeted racist anti-summit Yeah, yeah, whatever you know in in in in a sort of decaying mansion in You know a downscale Providence neighborhood You know what what feeds into this and what I think feeds into it so powerfully Is you know like sort of the real experience and the real observations and the real events You know that it passed down to us You know it's folklore but you know have had basis in real experience and and that's To me is the um the resonance of that, you know, I mean even with the old ones so okay, so the old ones you know, I strongly believe I've taken in large part from Blavatsky but also Blavatsky by way of of Alice Bailey You know, but they weren't just Making the stuff out but a whole cloth. I mean this is based on You know really potent ancient religions that people you know people by the hundreds of thousands would kill and die for You know what I'm saying. I mean this is for and even the notion of the difference between Elder god like the successions of gods is an erasian motif. So it's like 45 that 25 to 50,000 years old according to dr. Whitsle But you have like a simple example of the difference between the gods of Olympus and the Titans right? So that we've always had the notion in the back of our nightmares That there are there are the gods and there are other things Well the whole idea of the abyss too. I mean the abyss is always sort of seen as like you know the pits of hell But the abyss is the adepts of the ocean You know, I mean that the word itself Comes What is it? Apsu or the Samirian God of the deep or God of the deep so I mean these traditions Yeah, these are these are baked into our culture, you know, I mean these stories have been passed down for You know like you said like the lyration period tens of thousands of years I mean they've gone through all these different iterations. I mean they these traditions animated people's lives. They certainly animated our culture And and not just western culture what culture around the world. I mean, you know, mermaids and, you know, human presonages in the ocean. I mean, these, these myths are universal. So, uh, uh, possible reason. Yeah. All possible for a reason. You know, like I keep trying to remind people, I mean, you know, they take it for granted. But, you know, the siren is one of the most ubiquitous symbols in the world today, you know, probably more so than the cross even at this point in time. I mean, you can't go into any store in America, you know, any grocery store or convenient store or supermarket without seeing that symbol, you know, certainly all over the beverage aisle. And, and, you know, they're, they're Starbucks and every street corner of every major city and the West and hemisphere. So, uh, people just, they don't look at it, you know, they just, they don't understand it. They take it for granted. It's, it's hiding in plain sight. They don't understand this is extraordinarily potent. I mean, there is the old one right there. You know, when you talk about the old one's returning. Yeah. 100% 100% I think that's what, um, what I find in it's where when people do it to read it as well from a magical perspective, it feels like Alan Moore put his personal magic cosmology in, like, here's what I think about magic described almost like through lovecraft, right? And, and, and by doing that, he gets the reality of the spirit world in a way that I'm essentially in 95% agreement with how he depicts the spirit world and its impact on the waking world in providence. And as you say, like, if you do that and if you spend enough time thinking on it and are aware that there is a, um, an actual reality to the imaginal, then even if you haven't visited lovecraft country, just bringing about to place, you get place right. You, you, you can deliver the sense of it because you've actually found its taste. But I mean, the thing about Salem versus Arkham, right? As you say, they mentioned differently, but you also need the university. You also need Niskatoy. And, and, I mean, where do you think he lands Arkham in, in providence? Where do you, like Alan in particular? We don't know if, if lovecraft based it on one individual town or if it is, as you kind of mentioned, it probably is this, let's be honest, like a composite of eerie things about lovecraft country, which he wouldn't have, he should have called it that, but he didn't, I mean, it is realistically a composite, but it is a majority one town more than another in the area, you think? Yeah, I think it's a composite, but I think the whole Niskatonic thing, it's, it's sort of pigeon, I'm not exactly sure what, what tribe, you know, a lot of, you know, massive soya, let's just say, you know, the massive soya, it's, but I think that more, you know, more, okay, so Arkham was probably Salem. You know, Salem is a small city. I don't, I'm not exactly sure, there is a fairly well-known college in Salem whose name escapes me at the moment, but I think that that, that was the reality to lovecraft. More, it's more the idea of Arkham, you know, that Arkham is, it's imaginal, but it's been so ingrained in the culture by now, you know, and through inference with Arkham Asylum and the whole Batman myth, that it has its own reality. You know, Arkham's the fictional city is probably, you know, more real to most people than, you know, most cities in Massachusetts itself. I mean, you know, even like a fairly large city, like, you know, Springfield or Worcester, you're even Boston itself. I mean, you know, Arkham, it's an archetype. It's, it's been burned into the culture, you know, it's been carved into the stone of our, you know, of our collective imagination. So I think, and I want to take it back to almost like the siren thing, because I prefer the sort of Yulni and idea of these things coming up from the deep, and I do think that's what the abyss and the ocean, that's why it's, it's both true and insufficiently true that when, you know, earlier cultures are, you can map the idea of the stars and the ocean as the same thing, right? Like Cosmic Sea, it's fine. But by the same token, it's also this imaginal idea. And, and I think Arkham is a thing that has emerged from the gloom itself. It's, it's a city that these entities need. And it's a good one as an example of how it, it's kind of crashed over 120 years like a spaceship as well, because I think of playing Arkham horror, when it came out as a sort of, you know, um, that would have been early college or something. Uh, and, and how Arkham grew in reputation over the 20th century as the other, uh, you sort of post-lovecraft authors in his orbit started using that idea and then the misalist informing games and so on. So you're right. Like Arkham is kind of like more real than most Massachusetts towns, because it's, it's lifted itself up from the gloom into into the sort of like close to waking dream stick. Well, when you're to, it's funny too, because when you talk about, like, name magic, there's something very potent just about those letters and those sounds, you know, you know, at that hard arc, you know, but Ark also is like Noah's Ark and, you know, the destruction, the, the inundation, you know, uh, the whole thing was, uh, the watchers, um, you know, this, all this, uh, biblical and an extra biblical mythology that, that, you know, Noah's Ark, you know, and there was the recent, uh, Aaronowski film, you know, where the watches are these giant rock giants, this, uh, you know, uh, angels. So I think that the whole, you know, even the word, see, yeah, it's a lot of mischotonic. I mean, you know, mischotonic could be anywhere in New England. I mean, it could just be like, you know, it could just be like any post-it stamp town in the middle of, you know, the mass pike, but the way these words are chosen, you know, when you, when you see these words for the first time, and I know I had this experience when I did when I was young, there's this some, the some inherent power in these names that he, he created. Um, and don't have found my good, but I agree. Like Arkham has an arc component to it, also arcane, and it just feels because it is, it's a summoning because it, you kind of build up to that K crescendo and you have the soft come down of their H-A-M, like, and Ham is, um, Anglo-Saxon for farm. So it's, it's almost a kind of creepy Samaritan idea of a, um, a human farm. But yeah, yeah, I know what you mean, like the word, and mischotonic has, has tonic at the end of it, and it's almost like a false potion. And, and there's something about the words that has a, has a hyper reality. Like it, you couldn't find it on a map because maps can't contain it. It's a really lovecraftian idea. It's a, it's a different category of real. See, I think my personal take on, on, on lovecraft, you know, even though he fancied himself a, um, a rationalist and, you know, a Darwinian and so on and so forth, um, I think that he spent most of his life in, in a very powerful, liminal state. Um, I would not, you know, we know about the night cons and things like that. I would not be surprised if he, you know, he had problems with his, like, sleep paralysis. Um, this kid had nightmares and night terrors. No question. And, and if you look at his relationship to the dark, it, it involves us, we presume cruising and, and the danger involved in that and like he was in a permanent state of exorcism and, and paranoia, he had to have been, if, like, I, and I think he would, he held the candle of his rationalism and atheism as this tiny little light in the wind against the darkness. And I don't think he believed it with the same level of confidence that, um, you can kind of see in his writing. Well, it's almost like, you know, like, um, you know, a vamp, somebody being attacked by vampire, holding up a cross and then discovering that, you know, the vampire actually isn't, you know, inhibited by the cross in any way. I think that it was, I think a lot of what he, uh, took on was a pose. I think that he was, um, a deeply, I think he suffered from deep anxieties. I mean, just, you know, how he died and what he died of, you know, anxiety and depression and all the sort of elements always manifest themselves in the gut, right? You know, that's, that's pretty well known that, um, a lot of these kind of, uh, negative stressors will impact, you know, the, the, the, the digestive system. So I, you know, I think, you know, when you see like, when people say, oh, he's racist and he's this and that, he, you know, all right, that's true. A lot of people were back then. It was, it was pretty common. It was pretty common when I was young. It's pretty common. A lot of places now. Uh, I, I think what, with lovecrafts, you know, I think he basically was living his life in a state of heightened anxiety and, um, you know, hyper alertness, hyper vigilance. I think that he was deeply afraid, um, of every thing and it manifested himself, uh, in these races and so on, you know, is, He was deeply phobic, he's deeply phobic of the other because everything seemed to be threatening to him. But I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that he was raised by two lunatics and it's all the diet of syphilis dimension and all this kind of stuff. It was a different world back then and you didn't have the support systems. You didn't have pop psychology and all these kind of things to draw on, to lean on. So yeah, I mean, he was an unpleasant man but I think he was an unpleasant man because his life experience was deeply unpleasant. Yeah. If that makes sense. No, it does. It wouldn't surprise me because usually when, if people, it's almost like a binary that needs to be get past, we need to get past, which is that if you dare make the statement that he's anything other than, or he was anything other than an atheist rationalist, he'll jump down your throat expecting that you're going to say, he literally believed in the older gods and the older ones at the time. He was secretly practicing this thing that he was writing about. No, that's crap. That's a false binary, right? Yeah, exactly. And it might be worth for people listening to think of it more and he was a fire in the sky kind of person. He would have had some kind of contact event or ongoing ones. In sleep paralysis, hagg attack, whatever. Like, stuff that we maybe would categorize, we have no evidence for this other than the fact that he was clearly processing nightmares as a human with his career. That's enough. Yeah, that's enough. Like, okay, well, we now wider understanding of what a classic alien abduction or contact event looks and feels like. Maybe consider him more like a fire in the sky type that he's had this thing that he's now that has had flow and effects through the rest of his life. And it's not the one thing that happened to him, but as you say, he's persistently phobic and essentially died of anxiety and phobia. So there was something with hunting him his whole life, you know? Yeah, and it's interesting to me because so a number of years ago in the blog, I wrote about this, there was this group, I actually still around this group called StereoLab. Like a lot of the early music, there are certain groups and songs that sort of hit me. It's like, okay, I've heard the song a million years ago. I've known the song on my life, but I've known it in like another reality. And when I listen to this song, I can sort of inhabit that reality. It's very difficult to explain. But you know, why would certain people describe things as, you know, dream like or, you know, I feel like I'm in a dream, well, you know, do we have the same dreams? You know, how is it triggering this dream reaction when, you know, none of the sort of particulars or the external markers of a dream would be present? But I think that, you know, there's a shared, you know, for lack of a better term because I really hate this term, collective unconsciousness, that we sort of travel in different corners of and we travel in and out of different corners of. But I think the reason why Lovecraft still resonates, you know, despite, you know, his terrible writing and despite his, you know, his terrible biography and so on and so forth, is because he hit the sweet spot that everybody seems to respond, not everybody, but certain people seem to respond to very powerfully. It's like, oh, okay, I inhabited that world. Maybe not those particulars. Maybe you have the particular things that going on. But what he's describing, even though he's using all this archaic language and all this purple prose, okay, I've been there. I know what that world is like. I didn't see that particular character or that particular monster there, but it's the same. I reckon. Yeah, I reckon that landscape. So we're going to give spoilers here. We're going to go for the way. It's by the way, because we should actually go for it. Keep going. Okay. So what, so the story takes place predominantly in the, you know, the early 20th century and then it's Gordon alluded to you have the sort of montage of how Lovecraft mythosis is absorbed into the culture, you know, morning of the jissons and the hippies and so on and so forth. And then you kind of end up in, you know, the final issue being sort of thrown into this, you know, this apocalyptic nightmare. And it's an apocalyptic nightmare where the barriers, you know, the sort of the membranes between dream and nightmare and what we consider waking consensus physical reality are destroyed for good and that, you know, our reality, what we recognize is reality. Our landscape is invaded by, you know, all these things that Lovecraft was kind of writing about and more sort of inserts plenty of his own and, you know, it sort of takes off on that whole thing. So basically what you're looking at is that, you know, Lovecraft is kind of like an anti-Christ in that he liberates and, you know, through his writings, through his works and how they're absorbed and processed by the culture, you know, he liberates the prisoners of, you know, our world. But the prisoners of our world are not, you know, the pouring down trod masses, the prisoners of our world. These nightmares, these nightmares creatures and just like essentially dream reality itself, the dream reality has sort of been kicking at the door, you know, through the surrealists and this, like, a deal, you know, and all, you know, back and forth in time and history, you know, Bosch, people like that. But it finally, you know, the world becomes like a Bosch painting, you know. And it's kind of like where is the lie and maybe this is cyclical because all things are. But there's a way you can kind of look at scant at some of the stuff, say Gary Lackman's been doing in the last few books about taking seriously the collective unconscious equals the spirit world idea and thus all these, these horrifying notions being unleashed from, from, you know, minds and out into the waking world once again on earth. And so there's the delightful, glorious psychedelic, as you say, kind of like Bosch surrealist, even lovecraft, some of them motifs are kind of really cool. There's like the good side of that, but there's also if that's happening, if you kind of, if you open those floodgates, it all comes out and you see the kind of terrifying revivification of fascistic ideas and other things that are happening and you think, all right. And again, Alan, where is the lie? I think this is a very good model for the spirit world's relationship to the waking world. Well, it's actually going to get back to the invisible. So the invisible is, you know, it's a, it's a phantasia. It's a phantasmagoria. It's clearly over the top in every possible way. But by doing so, you know, it does offer a pretty solid allegorical model of our reality. It's a good, particularly today, right? So what more is done at the end of Providence? So I'm not exactly sure that things would ever sort of pan out the way they do in that story. But I mean, just look at what's going on right now. I mean, all the certainties of being demolished, I mean, all the institutions, all the cosmologies, you know, our, you know, our faith systems or philosophies. You know, people are just constantly kicking at the barriers and breaking the chains that maybe in some ways became calcified, some ways became oppressive. But you know, we'll put there in the first place to keep the excesses of human impulse in check, right? So we're experiencing this. We're not in the way that it's depicted in this comic book, but we are seeing this. We are seeing absolutely. You know, that, you know, the certainties, you know, and there's also kind of a contrarianism, you know, if something we're seeing is moral, now it's seen as immoral. So that I think he's like, because it's implied at the end of the book, at the end of Providence, that the previous world is about to become the concealed or spirit world and the sort of concealed or spirit world, the entities of the lovecraftian thing, like that's going to become reality. So it's almost like they've won. It's an invasion, right? And it's interesting, as you say, like, for me, that maps to Charles Fultz idea that we're renting that dominant of wider inclusions, where it's not, it's not a coony in model where we learn more and we expand our sort of like flood light of understanding, just wider and wider and wider, out into a dark universe. In a 40-in-sense, the rules of reality literally change in a new dominant. And again, where is the light? I think that's kind of what Alan is going with. Again, he's, I think he's describing, he's understanding, and I got this from you. I may be mischaracterizing your words, but you can correct me. I think Alan is describing his understanding of magic by using this multilayered, and it's a spell. This multilayered lovecraft story. And it's a spell because it is embedding it. It has portal points into reality and history by using real people and using names that reference other people in reality and whatever. It's this, it's like, and here's where, because I have to do this thing that I do with Ursula the Gwynne and Tolkien, which is, I need to make them both my favorite. And in terms of graphing over the pictures of magic, how I've done that with Providence versus the Invisible is that Providence is a absolutely deliberate, like, you can always picture him sitting down to a table with like a mug of coffee and putting the glasses on and going, and this is exactly what I think, or how I think magic works. And that's Providence. Whereas, the Invisible is accidental because it's performative, but where I think it has the upper hand is, you know, what you can make the case that they're sort of describing the same world, which is that our power structures and tyranny extend way deeper than you think into the Imaginal or Spirit world and get really fucking awful at the end point. You can kind of say that it's explicit in the Invisible, not necessarily in Providence, but you kind of make that case, but maybe just bending it a little, right? But what you get with the Invisible is like, what you do about it. Because that sort of revolution and pivot towards freedom and good is individualized in eternal in the context of this wider, crazy psychedelic sort of spirit world thing. But that's, I don't know. Let me know what you think about that because that's how I've landed. Which one of these is better at magic? Because Invisible is better than Prometheus. And I can't say the same. I can't say that Invisible is better than Providence is a description of magic. Well, I just want to bring it back because there's something that's been a bit of a hobby horse for me. But it obviously comes from Lovecraft. So one of my favorite Lovecraft stories is the Colorado Space, which is now a movie. It looks like it could be good, quietly confident. Yeah, I actually am too. But of course, the more famous Lovecraft adaption was annihilation. Yeah, true, fair enough. And there's another girl in there. But I think that what more is depicting in Providence is really not that much different than what we see inside the shimmer with annihilation. So what if people haven't seen annihilation? And I really recommend you do. So the alien, I don't even know, were like a virus or some sort of organism, some sort of vector crash lands off the coast of Florida and begins like a computer virus, rewriting the code. It's rewriting the code of DNA. And it's rewriting the code of DNA to suit its own imperative, and particularly that to survive. But it takes the stuff. It takes the basic structure of Earth life. And just rewrites it to suit, again, to suit its own imperative to more accurately become adaptive to the environment that it's trying to create. So this is an alien invasion. Perfound and disturbing implications for all life on Earth. Because what it is doing instead of landing in spaceships with ray guns is that it's just basically invading at the cellular level. It's an invasion that targets the building blocks of life rather than building blocks of buildings. So I think that this is, so maybe less of a magical model, but it feels to me that if this kind of invasion that more is depicting, taking off from lovecraft stories in this filmic version, which is taking very clearly off the color out of space, it would probably more in real life would be more similar to what we see in the film rather than this comic book. But again, I think the two are just offering, you know, like just slightly different lenses of the same reality. And it is, you know, it really is something that we're seeing, maybe not as explicitly and not as extravagantly, but we are seeing forces basically rewriting code, right? You know, things like CRISPR and so on and so forth. But we also have, you know, just the reality of algorithms and the reality of binary code. And if I was going to invade a planet, maybe I would just send them binary code, right? It might take a little longer, you know, but, you know, if you're patient, it would have basically the same effect. I mean, you know, what's happening in our world today and particularly when I go into New York City or, you know, after, you know, a particular couple years ago, after not being there for a while, just seeing just how unfamiliar everything, you know, the landscape has been, you know, rewritten. It's been re-drawn, you know, the, you know, it's constantly morphing and shifting. And now you have like all these electronic billboards where, you know, you can't even rely on like that static image because you're hit with a series of images, you know, like television, everywhere you look, it reminds me of the Blabron movie. So you know, we are seeing the same process take place all around us where, yeah, reality is being rewritten around us. And maybe the microchip and the binary code is some sort of otherworldly or other reality vector. But either way, it's having the same effect. Yeah. You know, you agree with that. No, for sure, absolutely. And, all right. So, we've given people. So this is what I just want to say, like, so that's a much more pessimistic sort of day-new month than what is presented in the invisibles or even Prometheus for that, you know, for that matter. But I think that it's probably a bit closer to what we're looking down the barrel at, you know. So like, I think, yes. And this is probably maybe points for a providence rather than invisibles in this sense. But I think it gets the eiriness. Well, enough. I think encountering the alien is better in invisibles. But I think the general eiriness that sometimes goes with often, if not every time, goes along with that. There's things getting closer to the surface is better explored in providence. But is there anything else? Because we've given people a bunch to think with for both of these documents. Is there anything else we want to say about that? Either of them, kind of like in passing or in closing, I guess? Well, I know a lot of you're listening as probably not comics fans. So the one thing that I would just say is that I think that providence would be an easier read, you know, despite those blocks of favorite texts, you know, book, book, book ending of the stories. The way it's laid out is much more cinematic. Invisibles can be varied, you know, even for somebody like me who's been reading comics for forever, 50 years. It can be hard to follow, you know, the page layouts and the balloon layouts and the narrative can get a little hectic and might be very difficult for a lot of people to read. If you don't read comics, if you don't really care about comics, but you know, are interested in sort of immersing yourself in this magic reality and how to pick one, I would go personally with providence. Invisibles is much more a very prone to artifact of its time, but it remains an artifact of its time. Yes, more people than chaos musicians listen to the show. So that's very really, that's a fair statement. They both, um, online versions of them are both linked up in the show notes. So if you cut the time, you can definitely do both. But particularly if you are reading it on the screen, you're correct that if you're unfamiliar with comics, definitely start with providence. Yeah, reading comics can be an art form, you know, particularly the way they used to be done. I mean, now today they're much more laid out like storyboards, but, you know, again, invisible is a challenge because it's not only the way it's the story is told, but, you know, the story itself, it's a rocket ride. You know, it is, it's like, you know, a rocket fueled roller coaster because grants got a lot of ground to cover. And he throws it all in. Boy, I mean, everything is name checked. I mean, you, you just take, you know, take Eric Davis is a new book called High Weirdness, right? So I'm sure if you just took the, the index of that book and cross referenced it with the invisible, you'd find every single solitary term referenced. in the invisibles because you know, grandson of mission. Yeah, absolutely. Well, is there anything else we want to say? Any announcements? Anything we want to talk about before we wind it up and point people in your direction and you'll be able to include your Twitter handle because you use Twitter more and more. Which delight me. Yeah, thank you. Oh yeah, it's the secrets on speaks. And I'm not sure when this is airing, but I do have a book that I'm being that's being ready for publication that I'm extremely excited about and hope to. What's the title? Hi, we're going. Yes, yes, yes. The book is entitled, "He Will Live Up in the Sky." It's my first book in several years. It took five years to write and I'm extremely excited about it and it's very, very much influenced and inspired by people like Grant Morrison and Alan Morph. Sure. I haven't finished it yet. I've been reading it for people listening and read it. Unless it somehow gets really crap. That would surprise me. Whatever I've read so far, it's, you're right. It is very much inspired by Grant and Alan and so on. It is a fucking romp and one that you want to kind of like shatter along an agreement with. So well done. I'm looking forward to that getting in people's hands as well. That's standing. Nice one. Well, once again, always a pleasure and I knew because by the time people are listening to this, if I haven't mentioned it in the opening, I will be away from the internet on a tiny island of another tiny island. And so I'm like, well, what can I do? What kind of value can I demonstrate to allow me to be away for a couple of weeks? I'm like, I know. We'll do a marathon Christmas show. So thank you for being so accommodating. It was a lot of fun. All right. Well, these are two very important works and you know, a lot of fun to talk about and think about. All right. Well, we'll do this again soon. Very good. There you go. I guess my main goal for the episode was to have a comparison of I guess magic depictions between these two series. And I feel Chris and I achieved that. But as is often the case with Mr. Knowles, you also got way, way, way more. In this case, we got a deep dive into the probably permanently unsolvable. See of creators and their creations and the impact of said creations on wider reality. Hopefully, that's big enough and sufficient enough to tidy over for an additional week as this episode is also next week's episode, meaning we'll be back on our weekly schedule for the last two weeks of November and right on through till Christmas. Until next time. [Music]