George Moore Interactive

Man of Wax

March 19th, 2023

“OUR LAST VICTORIAN“
A Fantastic Portrait in Wax, at the Grafton Galleries.

This amusing little effigy is one of Mr. Edmund Dulac’s exhibits at the National Portrait Society’s Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries. It is carried out in wax, is beautifully clad in an evening suit of the correct period, and stands under a glass case with a wreath suspended over its head, labelled “Our Last Victorian.” Readers will recognise it as being an amusing vision of Mr. George Moore. It stands in the entrance to the Long Gallery, as if to say “Salve” ‘to those who enter.
Reported in The Sketch (London), November 2, 1921
✽ ✽
This doll and other works were owned by Edmund Dulac’s biographer, the late Dr. Colin White of Leeds, when we corresponded in the 1980s. I’m now in touch with the University of Leeds Library about objects they inherited from Dr. White and also about contacting his estate to learn the present whereabouts of other objects.

Hi Reader! My updated and expanded iconography of George Moore lists more than 160 images of the peculiar man in various media: oil, watercolor, pastel, crayon, charcoal, ink, graphite, etching, bronze, doll, photogravure, photograph, lithograph, newsprint.

Have I left something out? Certainly, but you get the idea. There are lots of portraits, made in lots of different ways, by lots of artists. Which begs the question: Why?

George Moore was famous for much of his life, but he wasn’t a celebrity. Fans didn’t hang his picture on the wall or paste it into a scrapbook. (Ahem, full disclosure: four framed pictures of George Moore are hanging on my walls, and hundreds of snaps are cached in my archival scrapbooks. That’s an anomaly.)

Moore was not a show-biz celebrity, nor was he beautiful or handsome or even cute. Setting aside his literary legacy, it’s hard to see what attracted artists to him. The French impressionist Edouard Manet rendered Moore as a “drowned fish.” The Victorian sexologist Havelock Ellis said he closely resembled an Egyptian cat mummy in the British Museum. The cosmopolitan post-impressionist Walter Sickert figured him as an “intoxicated mummy.”

Ergo: artists did not put this strange-looking individual on a pedestal. And yet they did!

No art historian has explained why artists clung to Moore, and that’s too bad. When one of our great museums gets around to mounting an exhibition of George Moore portraits, a curator will perhaps tell us why there are so many.

If I remember correctly my hurried, naive monograph about George Moore and art (in the Irish Arts Review of 1985) took his images for granted. I merely cataloged them (overlooking much). I didn’t ask why there were a lot. I didn’t speculate about their meaning and value for people today (including myself). This was an oversight that I’ll now start to repair.

Why did artists depict George Moore with uncommon persistence? One answer was given by Max Beerbohm, the esteemed English man of letters and artist who drew Moore again and again, and yet again. Max wrote in The Atlantic Magazine (Boston) of December 1950:

When, where, did I first see my friend George Moore? It is odd that I do not remember my first sight of him. For I am sure there never was in heaven or on earth any one at all like him. It is conceivable that in the waters that are under the earth there may, vaguely luminous, be similar forms, and — stay, it isn’t odd, after all, this lapse of my memory. It is explained by that quality of luminous vagueness which Moore’s presence always had. There always was an illusory look about him the diaphanous, vaporous, wan look of an illusion conjured up for us, perhaps by means of mirrors and by a dishonourable spiritualist. There was something blurred about him: his outlines seemed to merge into the air around him. … Mentally, as well as physically, he was unique. He was always the same, and yet always new. … The outer and inner demeanour of almost every man is variable, changing with the circumstances he is in and the sort of people who are about him. Except Oscar Wilde, I never knew a man whose tone of mind and mode of expression, everywhere, and with every one, were so invariable as Moore’s.

Invariable and yet always new! Taking Max’s word as gospel truth (the right and proper thing to do), I would argue that the reason artists gravitated to George Moore is comparable to why the literary avant garde gravitated to William Butler Yeats. Each man was charismatic, evidently given to exuding a sort of spiritual and ethereal air that fascinated those who met them. Each was present in the human moment while navigating a cosmic arc.

And that basically is why there are lots of images of George Moore, made in lots of different ways, by lots of artists. In person he was unique, authentic, “fantastic,” and entirely the real deal.

Éirinn go Brách

Normally I devote this blog to George Moore, but want to make an exception to tout Fintan O’Toole’s “personal history of modern Ireland,” a weighty book named We Don’t Know Ourselves (2021).

O’Toole writes with refreshing candor, clarity, vigor, and without a trace of sentimentality that often colors recollections of Ireland. He being about my age (a wee bit younger), his book strikes me as a testament — as in eyewitness testimony — of the Ireland that I experienced starting as a student.

Not being Irish, nor having any Irish connections, Celtic proclivities aren’t baked into my DNA as they are for members of the tribe and diaspora. I went there for the first time in 1976, on a ferry from Holyhead in Wales, knowing a little about the Moores of Moore Hall but nothing about their country. Within hours of my arrival to conduct research, I was fairly confused by everything. The environment seemed superficially familiar and profoundly strange, weird, unbelievable.

My sensations of cognitive dissonance summed up to an answer I kept getting in response to questions I asked, even the simplest, most basic questions; an answer that epitomized my uniquely Irish experience:

“It is and it isn’t.”

Any closed-ended question you can think of, that in other places gets a yes or a no or a maybe, in Ireland got all three at the same time: “It is and it isn’t.”

Fintan O’Toole never utters that phrase in his awesome book, but he explains what it means and why it makes sense. He shows how Irish culture is rarely what it seems and is often what it tries to hide. He has written, far and away, the best book about Ireland I have read.

I hope We Don’t Know Ourselves inspires an American memoirist to write likewise about the United States. It’s dreadfully apparent these days that we too don’t know ourselves, for similar or analogous reasons.

By the way, I emailed Fintan O’Toole to ask his opinion of another great Irish memoirist, the author of Hail and Farewell. I’ll let you know if he answers.

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Worlds of Difference

February 28th, 2023

Medieval world map from La Mer des Histoires (1543) an example of naive worldbuilding in the Renaissance.

Hi Reader! The foundries of George Moore Interactive are called pillars. Each uniquely supports my overarching aim of kick-starting a literary legacy in the digital age.

I’m making six of the pillars from the facts of Moore’s life and work. Each of the pillars represents phenomena manifest in history. They summon tangible things that are neither theorized nor fantasized nor intuited, and they go on to make such things useful and expedient to readers today.

The factual pillars include:

1. Bibliography (his publications)

2. Aesthetics (his criticism)

3. Iconography (imagery of him)

4. Chronology (events he experienced)

5. Letters (his communications)

6. Collections (artifacts and souvenirs)

I straightforwardly named these pillars a while back; then struggled to identify the missing seventh. There must be a seventh pillar, I reasoned, because seven is a mystical number (seriously); moreover one of my favorite books is Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) by T.E. Lawrence (a modernist peer of George Moore) and I liked the echo; also because an important class of data was missing from the array, though I couldn’t name it.

Until I did:

7. Worlds (make-believe)

The Worlds pillar is not made out of objective facts like the others. It represents the creative content of George Moore’s worldbuilding as a novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist and memoirist. The figments of his imagination that he recorded on paper and that didn’t exist before he thought of them, and still persist only in the Anglo-Irish cultural ether.

Worldbuilding is usually associated with genres of science fiction and fantasy, neither of which George Moore wrote or wrote about. He was a materialist, also known as a realist, sometimes caricatured as a sensualist, with strong affinities for social science.

That said, he was an artist and not a scientist (though as a disciple of Émile Zola he appreciated the scientific method). Like the impressionist painters he fraternized with and promoted, he carefully observed conditions in which people lived, their appearance, behavior and organization, and he made from these observations an art that seemed grounded. But it was not grounded. It was a long and meandering serial flight of fancy.

Worldbuilding by George Moore didn’t involve bending or breaking laws of nature. His realistic fiction was never surreal. Nor was it journalistic. While he copied aspects of nature and society in order to flesh out his storytelling, readers didn’t — and shouldn’t — visit his canon to learn what life was really like between 1852 and 1933. Instead they can explore George Moore’s sometimes peculiar point of view and the “impressions” he turned into exquisite art.

One of my favorite examples of his worldbuilding is the story of Albert Nobbs, which first appeared in A Story-Teller’s Holiday (1918). Moore “copied” this story from nature and society, in a newspaper article he must have read, about an actual transgender man. From this elemental, tabloid raw material, he wove a tender love story that has no precedent in English fiction, as far as I know, and which at the same time feels like it has always been and belonged there, just waiting to be acknowledged. Like so much about gender and sexuality in the real world.

Albert Nobbs was eventually dramatized for the stage in France and England (where I saw it) and the United States, but never in Ireland as far as I know. Glenn Close made it into an Oscar-nominated feature film.

What Moore did with some person who modeled Albert Nobbs in a Victorian newspaper is the same that he did with Phidias, Héloïse d’Argenteuil, Pierre Abélard, Martin Luther, Jesus Christ, Joseph of Arimathea, Edouard Manet, William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Arnold Dolmetsch, Nellie Melba, and uncounted others including himself.

In Confessions of a Young Man (1888), he performed the astonishing transmutation of himself as a living human being into a work of art, his own spontaneous performance as Pygmalion in reverse.

The Worlds pillar of George Moore Interactive represents many of these creative expressions, all of them showing how an artist of genius builds beautiful new worlds from the raw materials of lived experience.

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Thank You

My lecture Kick-Starting Literary Legacies in the Digital Age was given at the Oak Park Public Library on 25 February 2023. The text of the lecture and a video recording are posted here.

Thank you for attending in-person or online! The QA afterwards was terrific! We had rare fun talking about literature, fine art and advanced technology all at the same time.

My thanks also to Oak Park Library staff who created and managed the event so professionally: Kheir Fakhreldin, Kathleen Spale, Eric Alexander, Rafal Baranowicz, Jabez Patterson and J Soto. I have been on many sets before this one, but none were smoother or sweeter!
Who Am I?

February 13th, 2023

Logo art for George Moore Interactive using the national colors of Ireland and the Neue Kabel typeface, both dating to the early twentieth century.

Hi Reader. This post answers the question, Who Am I? — not nearly as well as Victor Hugo did in Les Misérables, and without music or costumes.

My answer takes the form of a lecture that I’m slated to give on 25 February 2023, at the Oak Park (Illinois) Public Library. You can choose to attend in person, or on Zoom, by tapping this link for the free registration page.

It’s often the case that lectures are given to people who don’t know what’s coming, or who want to think more about it after it came. Even more often, a lecture is missed by people for whom scheduling is inconvenient. And of course there are many who don’t care to sit still for a lecture that they’d rather scan as an article.

For all these people, I have posted the text of my lecture at this link. This is well before the scheduled date, so today’s readers of the “article” can decide if they want to become listeners and discussants at the end of this month. The article will stay up after that, making it easy for people to post their own ideas and questions that slowly come to mind.

Why bother with lecturing and posting? Is a discussion about George Moore so important that access must be as wide and easy as possible? No, that’s not the case. Nor is it the case that my lecture is about George Moore.

The lecture is actually about something larger, dare I say epic: leveraging advanced technology to increase engagement with literature and fine art of the past; what I call literary legacies. I know a little about Moore, and I know that most people care nothing for his legacy, so he makes an excellent use case.

The lecture — or article, if you prefer to read it — answers the question Who Am I for the simple reason that George Moore Interactive is me. I founded it, I’m the only one working on it. It’s not only a technical solution to a problem that folks like me have. It’s core to my raison d’être.

George Moore Interactive is me, yet it isn’t all of me. It’s the part that Ralph Waldo Emerson labeled Man Thinking.

Assigning a visual identity to this Man Thinking seemed appropriate, hence my new logo. Eventually the logo will brand technology created by George Moore Interactive and stand for something beyond myself.

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Words and Pictures

January 20th, 2023

From Homage to Manet (1909), an oil painting by the Irish artist William Orpen, now in the Manchester Art Gallery. Six friends are gathered in Hugh Lane’s London home. George Moore aet 57 reads (his art criticism?) aloud to painters Wilson Steer, D. S. MacColl, Walter Sickert, Henry Tonks, and art dealer Hugh Lane (Lady Gregory’s nephew). The sculpture of a Greek female form (Aprhrodite in Aulis?) looks over Moore’s shoulder. Edouard Manet’s portrait of impressionist painter Eva Gonzalès aet 22 (1870) hangs on the wall behind Steer. A year before this, Lane (with Moore’s support) founded the world’s first public gallery of modern art in Dublin. A few years later, Eva Gonzalès (with the rest of Lane’s collection) was bequeathed to the National Gallery in London and Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin. Exhibition of the Lane bequest rotates between the two cities.

Hi Reader! When I started George Moore Interactive, Iconography was the only pillar. First and foremost, I wanted to explore the symbiosis between words and pictures in Moore’s world. I intended to show how verbal and visual arts enhance and advance one another, as Moore himself often did.

Years ago with an incipient version of this idea in mind, I gave a public lecture about George Moore and art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Likewise I published two articles in the glossy Irish Arts Review. I admit, these were hurried, half-baked efforts, and they remained that way for a very long time, because afterwards I emigrated from academia and found other fish to fry.

Even so, I never lost my desire to do more with words and pictures. And now because technology is so much better, faster and cheaper, I actually can!

My lecture and articles explored two poles of George Moore and art: one being pictures of the author, the other being the author writing about pictures. I slated both under the title “iconography,” but that was a force fit. Strictly speaking, iconography is just a cluster of pictures; the only words that belong there are ones that document the pictures.

That’s what you’ll find in the updated Iconography of George Moore Interactive: currently more than 150 pictures of him; plus dozens more of people, places and things that George Moore experienced and appreciated; plus documentation of all the pictures and where to view them in collections. I’ll talk more about the new Iconography in a future post.

The other pole of my original iconography — the force fitted stuff — is now housed in a second pillar named Aesthetics. This pillar is for George Moore’s writing about art and artists; his visual acuity trained on ancient, neoclassical, impressionist and post impressionist pictures (illustrated by William Orpen in Homage to Manet).

There’s a trove of Moore’s writing in Aesthetics, most of it uncollected and unedited for contemporary readers like you and me (until now). The pillar currently has about 220 essays of art criticism that Moore contributed to magazines and newspapers, from the mid 1880s until the early 1930s. This is Moore the aesthete, the philosopher, the polemicist, the tastemaker, the advocate and iconoclast.

Also in Aesthetics are about 40 quotidian articles that Moore revised for publication in books, as a more permanent and collectable testament of his beliefs. Because George Moore Interactive is unconstrained by the economics of print publication, all of these revised texts are served up with their predecessors, so that the curious among us can see for themselves how the author’s “impressions and opinons” evolved. Why take Douglas Cooper’s word for it?

Though Aesthetics is mainly textual, it is illustrated. Not with pictures of George Moore (those are in Iconography), but with pictures that Moore gazed at, thought and wrote about (e.g. Manet’s portrait of Eva Gonzalès). As an art critic, he frequently attended exhibitions in academies and galleries and evaluated what was for sale (including lots of pictures that he didn’t like and the few that he loved). When empty column inches and press deadlines demanded Moore’s immediate attention, and there was nothing new in Bond Street worth talking about, he would visit museums and review what he found there; occasionally he advised curators about what to acquire, what to shun and what to deaccession; he once even interviewed for a job as director of a museum of art (but wasn’t hired).

Aesthetics retrieves, edits, annotates and programs hundreds of essays that George Moore wrote about art and artists, and also shows the pictures he wrote about. Each of us gets to ponder and decide what to make of it.

This is a dynamic, self-directed approach to art history and it’s how many of us like to approach words and pictures when we’re allowed to roam the stalls and galleries without a tour guide or lecturer telling us what to think.

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You Are Invited

The Oak Park (Illinois) Public Library will host a virtual + in-person discussion of George Moore Interactive on Saturday, February 25, 2023 at 12:30 PM US Central Time (6:30 PM GMT). Click here to open the Library’s free online registration page. I’d love to see you there.
Making Time

January 2nd, 2023
Mr. George Moore — The Old and the Young Self (1924)
YOUNG SELF: “And have there been any painters since Manet?”
OLD SELF: “None.”
YOUNG SELF: “Have there been any composers since Wagner?”
OLD SELF: “None.”
YOUNG SELF: “Any novelists since Balzac?”
OLD SELF: ” One.”

This is number 15 of 19 Old and Young Self caricatures in the book Observations (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1925) by Max Beerbohm. Moore appears in a second time-warp in this book: Some Persons of “the Nineties” little imagining, despite their Proper Pride and Ornamental Aspect, how much they will interest Mr. Holbrook Jackson and Mr. Osbert Burdett.

Max drew at least 33 caricatures of his friend George Moore and published a touching memoir in the Atlantic Monthly (Boston, December 1950). The pencil and watercolour of this Old and Young Self is now in the London Library; it was published in color in The Sketch (London, May 20, 1925), in an issue that is now strangely missing from the British Newspaper Archive. When I obtain a color photograph of the original artwork, I will put it on this page.

Hi Reader! Art may be imbued with transcendent idealism, but life and work? Not so much. Understanding the thoughts, feelings, behavior and experience, even of a lofty man of letters like George Moore, often comes down to ascertaining precisely what happened, when, to whom, and to what effect. Evidence of that mundane sort is the remit of Chronology, one of the six pillars of George Moore Interactive.

Chronology is implicit in George Moore’s autobiographies, letters, articles, biographies, bibliographies, iconography and critical heritage. Readers can extrapolate what happened etc. but rarely with much depth or certainty.

That’s because authors and critics who write what we study tend to filter what-when-who-where data to suit themselves, typically producing partial and inconsistent records of activities and outcomes; also because the structure and language of research literature is often bewildering (if not mind-numbing), impeding rather than facilitating an ordinary reader’s curiosity; also because PRINT — de facto medium of scholarly publication — is not interactive, so gaps and errors that find their way into text are not self correcting. Authors depend on editors, critics depend on peers, students depend on teachers to correct their mistakes. The system is not fail-safe.

Would it be more efficient (and fun) for readers to depend on the evidence itself for understanding, rather than on people who may have a literary or academic ax to grind with the primary sources? Would it be empowering for ordinary readers to interrogate accessible texts and images, nudging objects to reveal much of what one wants to know? That way readers themselves could spot gaps and errors in their understanding, and replace them with insight about what happened, when, to whom, and to what effect. Chronology enables that kind of empowerment.

I am modeling the Chronology of George Moore Interactive on The New York Public Library Book of Chronologies (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990) by Bruce Wetterau. This magnum opus is divided into 14 chapters of broad subject matter. Each chapter contains core chronologies of narrower topics that fit under the overarching title. Core chronologies are interspersed with mini chronologies of outstanding subtopics.

A total of 250 core chronologies fill the book. Readers open a chapter on a subject of interest; then they find the pertinent chronologies; then they read entries listed in chronological order. Each entry contains:
- YYYY Year
- Pea-sized description of a behavior, event, person, thing etc.
- MM/DD dates (if known) of key particulars in the description
These entries reveal both granular specificity and thematic patterns. It’s remarkably cool (though it may sound convoluted in my telling).

Another way to navigate entries in the Book of Chronologies is with a comprehensive name index. For example, the name George Moore in the index references:
- Chapter: The Arts
- Core Chronology: Novelists, Poets, and Essayists
- Citation: George Moore on page 249
- Entry: 1852-1933 George Moore… (description of life and work)
This diagram shows the basic structure of the data. All of the content is in the entries; the other boxes are mere containers.

Like George Moore Interactive, The New York Public Library Book of Chronologies is for general readers: people who are there to be amused and edified (not pay the rent). That makes it a worthy model for my project.

Following the model, I defined the broad subjects (i.e. “chapters”) of the George Moore Chronology as follows:
1. Moore Hall: The ancestral home and lineage it represents.
2. Life: Notable experiences of George Moore (1852-1933).
3. Friends & Family: Notable experiences of people Moore knew.
4. Work: George Moore’s publications and events.
Each of these broad subjects is supported with a few core chronologies. Within each core there are mini chronologies. For example, within the broad subject of Work, there is a core chronology named Bibliography. Within Bibliography there are mini chronologies named Books and Pamphlets, Contributions, Periodical Appearances, and Translations — dovetailing with Edwin Gilcher’s organization of the same data.

Now you might wonder about this example: why bother? Doesn’t the Bibliography pillar of George Moore Interactive give dates of publications? Yes it does! The difference is that Bibliography groups most things by title and Chronology groups them by date. When you consider how large and convoluted Moore’s publishing (and other work) history is, you see how Chronology does what Bibliography can’t. It supports a coherent timeline.

The same kinds of benefits enhance biographies, collected letters, and the critical heritage. The Chronology of George Moore Interactive enhances all of these data sets for the benefit of naive readers trying to figure things out on their own. They are the people I care most about.

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You Are Invited

The Oak Park Public Library is going to host a brief discussion of George Moore Interactive a few days after George Moore’s birthday on Saturday, February 25, 2023 at 12:30 PM Central Time (6:30 PM GMT). You may remotely attend on Zoom or in person. Here is an announcement that will soon appear on the Library’s free registration page.

The brilliant iconoclast George Moore (1852-1933) helped put modernism in the vanguard of Western literature and art; afterwards he was eclipsed by friends such as Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce. What is the value of Moore’s legacy today? Dr. Becker is proposing an answer in the form of George Moore Interactive, a project that makes it easier for people to access, enjoy, understand, and use the art and literature they experience. The technology can be applied to other modernist creatives including Ernest Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Oak Park is where Ernest Hemingway (fan of Moore) was born and raised; where Frank Lloyd Wright founded and grew his architecture practice; and where I live and work in my own home studio. The Oak Park Public Library is a pillar of the community; Special Collections librarians Kathleen Spale and Kheir Fakhreldin make projects like mine not just doable, but joyful.
Ideas in Things

December 20th, 2022

Montage of my copy of Pagan Poems (London: Newman, 1881) initialed by George Moore aet 29 and anticipating his signed editions later in life. Edwin Gilcher told me that Pagan Poems is the rarest of all books by George Moore. I purchased this copy from Maggs Bros. in London, one of the great British booksellers.

Hi Reader! When I worked in educational technology, a business executive told me that new car salesmen don’t learn from, or even like, lofty ideas. They’re excited by physical things, he said: the glass, steel and fabric, the smell and sound, the power and handling of a luxury automobile. He made up a verb to nail this cognitive principle: “tangibilitate” — for making abstract concepts tangible. Dictum: tangibilitate the sales training! In other words, design pedagogy that is experiential rather than overtly instructive.

The modernist American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) never uttered the word tangibilitate, but he conveyed much the same meaning in his epic Patterson (1946-1958) where he declared “No ideas but in things.” * Not just declared, but walked the talk. Modernists like Williams (and of course George Moore) engaged readers with sensory impressions rather than philosophy. Some people today call this world building. I also call it book collecting. Books are the ultimate tokens of ideas in things.

In the Collections pillar of George Moore Interactive, I identify public and private repositories that include George Moore materials; where his books, pamphlets, periodicals, manuscripts, and pictures are stored. These are tangible things that contain the entirety of an author’s oeuvre. In future, Collections will also have to include virtual assets (e.g. emails and NFTs). George Moore Interactive anticipates that evolution by digitizing the Moore legacy now.

The Collections pillar covers printed and handwritten, painted and drawn artifacts. People who collect such things may be scholars but often are not. Scholars rarely choose to spend the money.

My friend Rupert-Hart Davis had over 15,000 printed materials and innumerable handwritten and painted objects in his Yorkshire home when I visited, plus a table in his study stacked with new arrivals. His collection is now in the University of Tulsa Library where scholars can pore over it. Rupert had superb literary acumen but no PhD.

My friend Edwin Gilcher collected more than 600 printed materials of George Moore before I met him, and other things of course. (His copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz is on my shelves.) His Moore collection is now in the Arizona State University Library. Edwin too was blessed with literary acumen, but no PhD.

These outstanding men of letters were not academic, but were beacons of ideas in the things they collected. Things they put on their shelves animated their thinking.

I too collect books, on a smaller scale, and some of what I have is by George Moore. I had only a vague idea of what was on the 21 linear feet of shelves devoted to Moore, so with the encouragement of local librarians and friends, I used the Libib application to catalog it. From August 2022 until just last week, I spent over 100 hours entering my Moore collection into Libib. So far there are 450 entries. As on the table in Rupert’s study, the number keeps growing (number 451 arrived today). Now that I know what I have, I begin to know what I want!

I hope to post many Moore catalogs in the Collections pillar of George Moore Interactive. Starting with mine and including those of other people who are willing to open their kimonos. I will likewise identify institutions that have significant Moore assets. Doing this will help Moore’s readers skirt the hundreds of hours it takes to find the things they want to see. It will introduce collectors to brethren who share their passion and ideas.

Collections is vital to George Moore Interactive because every manuscript and artwork is unique of course, but many printed materials are also uniquely telling. For example, loosely inserted into my copy of George Moore’s Letters to Lady Cunard (London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1957) is an important manuscript letter by Moore to Lady Cunard that is not printed in the book, along with a letter from Lady Cunard to Shane Leslie. Hot damn!

Ideas are indeed in things, and every single thing that is collected potentially imparts ideas worth having and sharing.

* Patterson was also a popular automobile when William Carlos Williams was writing.

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You Are Invited

The Oak Park Public Library is going to host a brief discussion of George Moore Interactive a few days after George Moore’s birthday on Saturday, February 25, 2023 at 12:30 PM Central Time (6:30 PM GMT). You may remotely attend on Zoom or in person. Here is an announcement that will soon appear on the Library’s free registration page.

The brilliant iconoclast George Moore (1852-1933) helped put modernism in the vanguard of Western literature and art; afterwards he was eclipsed by friends such as Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce. What is the value of Moore’s legacy today? Dr. Becker is proposing an answer in the form of George Moore Interactive, a project that makes it easier for people to access, enjoy, understand, and use the art and literature they experience. The technology can be applied to other modernist creatives including Ernest Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Oak Park is where Ernest Hemingway was born and raised; where Frank Lloyd Wright founded and grew his architecture practice; and where I live and work in my own home studio. The Oak Park Public Library is a pillar of the community; Special Collections librarians Kathleen Spale and Kheir Fakhreldin make projects like mine not just doable, but joyful.
Collecting Letters

December 1st, 2022
Letter of George Moore aet 71 to Sir Rennell Rodd, a friend of Oscar Wilde, later a well-traveled diplomat and MP. The manuscript is loosely inserted in my copy of Aphrodite in Aulis (1930), by George Moore.

Hi Reader! My study of George Moore sprouted in New York City when I was just a big kid. After graduating at New York University and taking a grand tour of faraway places, in January 1975 I hunkered down in the reading room of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, at the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. I was neither a student, nor a professor, nor a gainfully employed commoner; I wasn’t even self-aware. I behaved like an itinerant explorer seeking truth about the life and work of an obscure and fascinating man of letters. Without any prerequisites, training, encouragement or supervision, I launched a Nowhere Man project called The Collected Letters of George Moore. That project is now a pillar of George Moore Interactive.

This Correspondence pillar includes at least 6000 letters written by George Moore, located in places that I will identify in another pillar of George Moore Interactive named Collections. “At least 6000” because I’m sure I haven’t found all of Moore’s extant letters — and doubt I ever will. Instead I am building a digital lounge where I can share the material I’ve got, and more that will eventually surface. This dynamic Collected Letters has neither beginning, middle nor end. It has only a center that holds together the disparate parts and expands over time.

The “parts” are source materials: handwritten letters, typed letters, printed letters. By letter I mean any instance of George Moore writing what’s on his mind on a blank sheet, or letterhead, or card stock, or newsprint, and addressed to a particular individual or group. Literary letters are basically a person communicating to his friends. Moore’s last book, published just after he died, is A Communication to My Friends (1933) — and yes, according to my definition, that book is a letter and included. For similar reasons, my friend and mentor Rupert Hart-Davis included De Profundis in his Letters of Oscar Wilde (1963).

There are two ways to experience a letter. One way is to view and handle the original, tangible object (as I did at the Berg Collection and many other places). The other way is to read a printed or typed transcription. Transcribing any manuscript is a transformative process that not only makes the original writing more legible, coherent, and nowadays machine readable; it also changes the intrinsic quality of a text. Scholars and editors have argued endlessly about the give and take between these experiences: of the thing versus a representation of the thing.* For me the debate ends here and now, because George Moore Interactive presents BOTH a photographic image of each manuscript with its provenance AND a transcription in typography that is optimized for screens. Isn’t it amazing, what’s feasible when paper and ink are excluded from the publishing process!

The text of a transcription cannot stand alone. It has to be annotated, as you would expect; otherwise the meaning of words written in haste a hundred years ago would be elusive, to say the least. But “text” in my transcriptions does not manifest in ink. It’s hypertext that manifests in light, making each item of correspondence a container for keywords that are pregnant with context, inferences, implications, and capable of generating fresh meaning. Hypertext itself is “responsive to inquiry” as no printed page or author or editor ever was or can be. It turns Moore’s letters into an interactive system, rather than a cabinet of curiosities or the hobbyhorse of experts.

Ergo: The whole of Correspondence is greater than the sum of its parts!

Here on the threshold of engineering the dynamic system, my immediate next steps are clear:
- Scan my three-decker PhD dissertation with nearly 1000 transcribed letters. The dissertation was typed in 1979. No digital copy exists, to my knowledge. I’ll make one.
- Scan thousands more transcribed letters written after the cutoff date of my dissertation. I typed these in the 1980s from images I made of the manuscripts. Microfilm. Microfiche. Photocopy.
- Key in some number of manuscripts (hundreds? thousands?) that I imaged way back when but never got around to transcribing. Every one is documented on a handwritten notecard. The old fashioned way.
These steps will make letters of George Moore machine readable, intelligible and ready for 21st Century editorial treatment (the topic of a different post). Altogether this is an incredibly exciting prospect that’s been a very long time coming into view.

* For a peek at this debate, see my paper on “Challenges in Editing Modern Literary Correspondence” in TEXT: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship (New York: AMS Press, 1981), pp. 257-270.

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Scanning the Bibliography

November 21st, 2022

From a pencil sketch by Francis Dodd of George Moore aet 80, a year before he died. Edwin Gilcher chose this portrait for the dust jacket of A Bibliography of George Moore. The artwork is in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Another portrait of Moore by Henry Harris Brown, oil on canvas at arround the same time, is in my collection.

Hi Reader! A few months ago I began to wonder: “Can I somehow work a bibliography into George Moore Interactive?” Probably not, I thought, but then I took a closer look. Turns out the answer is yes, it is possible and now it’s happening.

Edwin Gilcher, Moore’s tireless bibliographer, was my friend for 30 years, beginning soon after the publication of A Bibliography of George Moore (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1970). That magisterial volume got me knocking on Edwin’s door, not far from Albany, New York, while I was a student at New York University.

18 years later, Edwin’s ongoing sleuthing led to the publication of his Supplement to A Bibliography of George Moore (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), which graciously mentions me on the title page. I and others having joined Edwin on his quest to anatomize the “man of wax.”

The Bibliography is long out of print though available from secondhand booksellers. Meantime, Colin Smythe still has a few copies of the Supplement (one of which he donated to this project). If you collect Moore, you can buy a copy before they’re all gone.

According to family members, Edwin didn’t stop questing in 1988. His papers at Arizona State University Library include unpublished notes. If you go there to study them, and if you lay your hands on his publications, your understanding and appreciation of Moore’s life and work will rest on a very solid foundation.

But what if you don’t want to or can’t? What if you prefer to do everything on your desktop or mobile device, quickly, easily, freely?

I began my answer to that question by investigating Edwin’s copyright. The copyright holder in 1970 no longer has it. The copyright holder in 1988 is deceased and nobody has inherited it. Get the picture?

I found myself unable to request permission to update and e-publish Edwin’s invaluable work online. So I asked stakeholders in his legacy for their input. They said go for it. Thus the 20th century Bibliography of George Moore is about to have a second life in the 21st century cloud.

My next step, after clearing the copyright hurdle, was to scan Edwin’s books. The books haven’t been digitized for the public, so I had to do it myself. I identified several vendors who scan books professionally and qualified Blue Leaf Book Scanning in Missouri. They are reputable, economical and they produce high quality.

I know their quality is fine because today I inspected their fresh scans of the Bibliography and Supplement. Blue Leaf used a “destructive” technique in which they destroyed the printed books I provided in order to generate the best digital content. I got four texts of each book: high and low resolution Adobe PDF, formatted and unformatted Microsoft Word. All are machine readable, high fidelity and editable.

Examining the files, it’s as though I manually keyed in the content of Edwin’s books (well over 300 technical pages) on my Mac. In reality I keyed nothing. The efficiency of state-of-the-art scanning is astounding to somebody like me, who painfully remembers what it’s like to type and proof a large manuscript on a Smith Corona. How dreadfully time consuming, costly and headache-inducing that was!

So Edwin’s books are now digital! My next step is to break the digital texts into tidy pieces, one for each “A” title (Books and Pamphlets); then build intelligent super pieces forming The Bibliography of George Moore by Edwin Gilcher, edited by me. The super pieces will include Contributions, Periodical Appearances and Translations. The whole enchilada.

I’m going to make Edwin’s bibliography (and Moore’s writing) dynamic, interactive, discoverable and relatable for the next generation of readers, scholars, connoisseurs and collectors. Fingers crossed. I’ll keep you posted.

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Digitizing George Moore

November 9th, 2022

Illustration by Beatrice Moss Elvery on the cover of Aids to the Immortality of Certain Persons in Ireland (Dublin: New Nation Press, 1908), by Susan L. Mitchell. George Moore, hands in his pockets and a halo above his head, is caricatured with Douglas Hyde, Sir Hugh Lane, Lord MacDonnell of Swinford, Edward Martyn, Sir William Orpen, Sir Horace Plunkett, George Russell (AE), Captain Frank Shawe-Taylor, and William Butler Yeats.

Hi Reader! I recently formed a new cultural nonprofit: “George Moore Interactive.” My aim is to digitize a fascinating Irish author who is largely neglected or forgotten these days: George Moore (1852-1933). Digitizing Moore may launch him anew in the 21st Century.

Post by post, I’ll describe steps that culminate in a launch. The project is a huge undertaking on a wee budget. Risky and unprecedented I guess, yet doable and worth doing. A kind of intellectual moonshot.

But I’m not leaving home without you! I invite you to subscribe so you’ll be notified when I post. There’s a box for that at the bottom of this page. When you read news that prompts a question or suggestion, give me a shout on the Contact page.

Bit of background: I started reading and collecting George Moore in the early 1970s. Full-time primary research on his life and work continued until the mid 1980s. That’s when I rappelled down the Ivory Tower for a career in educational technology and entrepreneurial business.

Ever since I have collected (though not researched) Moore. I now have about 500 publications, manuscripts and artworks, and my Moore collection is still growing. I catalog everything in Libib.

For years I wondered: would I someday, somehow resume the research? I was originally motivated by a personal vision for literature, art and history long before the ways to pursue it even existed. Today those technical ways not only exist; they’re well lit and paved, signposted and accessible to a degree that continually amazes me.

The posts on this blog will explain what all this means. I’d like you to keep tabs on me and share your thoughts from time to time.

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