'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Sentences which could easily be misinterpreted: "I was mourning the end of a long-term relationship with a massive bender."

Grant Morrison has abandoned The Authority, putting most of the blame on the predominantly poor reviews the first issue received. What? Where would he be, where would we be, if he'd quit Animal Man or Doom Patrol or JLA over the reviews which missed the point? Even with his current Batman run, a lot of people were underwhelmed until he deployed the issue that pulled it all together. On top of which, this is a man who more than anyone else understands art's roots in magic. That first, brilliant set-up issue of The Authority began with our world, our poor hero-less world...and then threw in The Authority to save us. You can't leave a spell like that half-cast, man! And for pity's sake, it was only meant to be a four issue run anyway. If he'd been on schedule in the first place, it would all have been written before those bad reviews even appeared.
I'm still looking forward to his DC Universe stuff, obviously. But this has really dented my respect for him.

It's little more than a month since I first saw The Long Blondes live; this time I knew the new album and they played 'You Could Have Both', but I still have my reservations, and they come down to one thing: Kate Jackson's not the 'Kate Jackson' of the songs. I say this not as any criticism of her, you understand - only with the same sense of regret as accompanied my realisation that Viggo Mortensen is not actually Aragorn. I love the Blondes' music for its loneliness, the predatory gleam in its eye, its desperation. My kind host cappuccino_kid tells me that in the smaller shows in earlier days, more of that sort of stuff came across. But at a triumphant Forum show, with the crowd singing back every line...well, Kate's too busy having fun to get caught up in all that angst, and who can blame her? It suits some of the songs (from 'Guilt' onwards, the show really comes alive) but I am forced to conclude that, like St Etienne among others, for me The Long Blondes are a band where the live incarnation just isn't quite what I'm after.

Hushang Golshiri's The Prince seems to be accounted quite the classic of Persian literature - Golshiri was imprisoned by the Shah and no more popular under the ayatollahs, which always augurs well. Nor have I any criticism of James Buchan's translation, or his introduction (which one critic correctly classifies as "lucid"). The problem is...there's only so far a translation can go. The back cover told me of an ageing prince looking back on his life and his dynasty's extinction, which made me think of Lampedusa's The Leopard; the tone sounded somehow akin to that obscurely poisonous quality in Mishima. These are both writers I've enjoyed in translation, and yes, there are resemblances to both. But the hallucinatory shifts in identity, the portraits unconfined by their frames...these reminded me more of Polanski's Repulsion or Cronenberg's Spider*. Imagine trying to write those out as prose. Now, imagine trying to translate that prose. Oh, and all the characters are obliquely identified historical and political figures about whom your translation's readers are unlikely to know much, if anything. Imagine a Mongolian reading The Damned United, or a member of a remote tribe whose first encounter with Western literature is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, and you will have some handle on my frustration.
The LoEG comparison's an interesting one, because straight after finishing The Prince I read an earlier, simpler Alan Moore - the recoloured 'Killing Joke'**. A book Moore has damn near disowned, purportedly because he doesn't feel it means anything in the wider world - it's just about Batman and the Joker being very similar, and since they don't exist, so what? Well, I'm not so sure about that. It's not his finest hour, for sure - like most of his DCU work bar Swamp Thing it's maybe a little sketchy, a little hurried. But would it mean anything to someone who'd never encountered these characters before? I think maybe it would. A murderous madman says all it needs is "one bad day", and any one of us could end up like him; another madman tries to prove him wrong. That's universal, isn't it? At least as much so, I would contend, as Golshiri's last scion of a deposed dynasty, at once ashamed and envious of his royal ancestors' excesses. Batman and the Joker don't exist - but nowadays, do faded princelings? Only a handful in the gossip columns; for the rest of us, strictly by analogy.

*Yes, I know it was a book first. But still...
**Yes, the new colouring job is much smarter, much more evocative, and simply better. But perhaps not so much so that the book's worth buying again if you already own it. Handily, I didn't, and this was free.