So, here's a complaint that really calls my life choices into question, but maybe someone will at least find it funny.
After having gotten through those four Michael Moorcock novels about Jerry Cornelius last month, I felt like I didn't need to read any more Moorcock for a while. However—and now I can't find the source for this, so maybe I imagined it—I remembered having seen that Moorcock had a more specific complaint about Grant Morrison straight-up plagiarizing some prose from a different book, which (as I remembered it) was The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.
The Great Rock and Roll Swindle was a weird project that was supposed to be a loose novelization of or companion piece to the movie of the same name that's about the Sex Pistols—except Moorcock was very up-front about not giving a shit about the Sex Pistols or the movie, so he just wrote (in about two weeks) some plotless vignettes about the supporting characters from his Cornelius stuff, and threw in a few references to Malcolm McLaren and some scenes with Steve Jones. It's pretty obscure so if there was something in there, it was plausible that no one had bothered to find it.
But I had run across a copy of that book, and I thought what the hell—if all I want is to check on this alleged plagiarism, it's not as if I have to actually read it. That is: I have a weird relationship with printed text which I'm not sure if it qualifies as some kind of hyperlexia or not, but basically while I can't read all that fast for understanding, I can speed-read at a ridiculous rate if I just want to find a particular kind of thing. What I mainly did with that as a kid was to blast through horror/thriller paperbacks, while standing around for a few minutes in a bookstore, to find all the gruesome and/or dirty parts. It's kind of exhausting and unpleasant to do, but fairly reliable, and having read through The Invisibles a fair number of times I was pretty sure that if any not-totally-generic text that I had seen in The Invisibles was in this book, it would jump out at me.
So... the punchline is of course that after cramming all of this medium-short novel-ish thing into my eyes at ludicrous speed—and catching just enough of the prose on a conscious level to recognize that it was very much like my least favorite aspects of the Cornelius books, and that I didn't enjoy it at all—I did not notice a single thing that I'd ever seen in The Invisibles. Either Moorcock was wrong, or my mutant power failed me (not impossible), or I had just misremembered what book he was talking about (even less impossible, although I can't think how I even knew about this book otherwise).
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
2020-08-17 03:20 (UTC)After having gotten through those four Michael Moorcock novels about Jerry Cornelius last month, I felt like I didn't need to read any more Moorcock for a while. However—and now I can't find the source for this, so maybe I imagined it—I remembered having seen that Moorcock had a more specific complaint about Grant Morrison straight-up plagiarizing some prose from a different book, which (as I remembered it) was The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.
The Great Rock and Roll Swindle was a weird project that was supposed to be a loose novelization of or companion piece to the movie of the same name that's about the Sex Pistols—except Moorcock was very up-front about not giving a shit about the Sex Pistols or the movie, so he just wrote (in about two weeks) some plotless vignettes about the supporting characters from his Cornelius stuff, and threw in a few references to Malcolm McLaren and some scenes with Steve Jones. It's pretty obscure so if there was something in there, it was plausible that no one had bothered to find it.
But I had run across a copy of that book, and I thought what the hell—if all I want is to check on this alleged plagiarism, it's not as if I have to actually read it. That is: I have a weird relationship with printed text which I'm not sure if it qualifies as some kind of hyperlexia or not, but basically while I can't read all that fast for understanding, I can speed-read at a ridiculous rate if I just want to find a particular kind of thing. What I mainly did with that as a kid was to blast through horror/thriller paperbacks, while standing around for a few minutes in a bookstore, to find all the gruesome and/or dirty parts. It's kind of exhausting and unpleasant to do, but fairly reliable, and having read through The Invisibles a fair number of times I was pretty sure that if any not-totally-generic text that I had seen in The Invisibles was in this book, it would jump out at me.
So... the punchline is of course that after cramming all of this medium-short novel-ish thing into my eyes at ludicrous speed—and catching just enough of the prose on a conscious level to recognize that it was very much like my least favorite aspects of the Cornelius books, and that I didn't enjoy it at all—I did not notice a single thing that I'd ever seen in The Invisibles. Either Moorcock was wrong, or my mutant power failed me (not impossible), or I had just misremembered what book he was talking about (even less impossible, although I can't think how I even knew about this book otherwise).
Good thing I'm not getting paid for this!