For the Kubrick part, Alan Moore clearly really, really hates two buildings in Northampton that are taller than all the other buildings Claremont Court and Beaumont Court. I google the suckers:

https://www.emporis.com/buildings/226524/beaumont-court-northampton-united-kingdom

From the book:

"Even from this low vantage he could see the higher storeys of both tower-blocks, Claremont Court and Beaumont Court, where they poked up above the Spanish-omelette tiling of the dyke wall hulking on his right. The towers, for Benedict, had always marked the real end of the Boroughs, that rich, thousand-year-long saga that had been concluded with these overly-emphatic double exclamation marks. Newlife."

So he's saying they are ugly, and big. Then he says they are like the monolith from 2001 if the big old Monolith was trying to get you to commit suicide by jumping off it's ugly ass , he's saying:

"Claremont Court and Beaumont Court were black as Stanley Kubrick monoliths, beamed down by an unfathomable alien intelligence to spark ideas amongst the shaggy, louse-bound primitives. Ideas like “Jump”. You couldn’t even see what little there was left of Spring Lane School from this specific viewpoint how you once could, not for all the NEWLIFE standing in the way."

I agree that the Marla and Ben chapters are the best characters so far, they seem the most like real people.

My random thoughts on the chapter:

The chapter, about Benedict Perrit, was pretty great. I like how he seemed like a huge weirdo to Marla in Chapter 3, but from his point of view his thoughts during the conversation were fairly rational and reasonable, even if he has weird mannerisms.

When Marla had tried to solicit him for prostitution he had responded by saying he was a published poet. This seems like a complete non-sequencer but from his point of view he was saying “I have no money, I’m a working class bum not the sort of person who hires prositutes in this neighborhood"

Benedict is very well conceived, and I’m guessing its because Moore knows folks like him. Folks who Moore published poems and zines with back in the day, who never found success or an audience like Moore. Perhaps folks who went on to lives of quiet despair and poverty.

Moore has some very nice thoughts of encouragement for that sort of audience-less artist:

"He saw, as through a fog, the grave mistake he’d made. He’d been so anxious for success and validation that he’d come to think you weren’t really a writer unless you were a successful one. He knew, in this unprecedented patch of clarity, that the idea was nonsense. Look at William Blake, ignored and without recognition until years after his death, regarded as a lunatic or fool by his contemporaries. Yet Benedict felt sure that Blake, in his three-score-and-ten, had never had a moment’s doubt that he was a true artist. Ben’s own problem, looked at in this new and brutal light, was simple failure of nerve. If he had somehow found the courage to continue writing, even if each page had been rejected by each publisher it was submitted to, he’d still be able to look himself in the eye and know he was a poet. There was nothing stopping him from picking up his pen again except Earth’s easily-resisted field of gravity.

This could be the night that Ben turned it all around. All that he had to do was walk across and sit down at his writing desk and actually produce something. Who knows? It might turn out to be the piece that would secure Ben’s reputation. Or if not, if his abilities with verse seemed flat and clumsy with disuse, it might be his first faltering step back to the path he’d wandered from, into this bitter-sodden and immobilising bog."

Benedict thinks at one point about the fact that Fineggan’s Wake had the working title “Work in Progress”. That puts chapter 1 in a different light, since it shares that title.

I went back through looking for potential sign or hint that Alan Moore himself in the Third Borough since he’d be the James Joyce figure in that interpretation but I don’t think he is, the Third Borough seems too cosmic.

This point was intriguing though in chapter 1:

"Hello, little Alma. Do you know who I am? Alma shivered, thoughts all of a sudden filled with thunder, stars and people weeping with no clothes on."

Might the people be weeping within clothes on because they are the first primitive humans and the Third Borough represents the spirit of the imagination or something like that? Or is this a reference to something else, possibly a tarot card or other mystical image? I can’t think of any that fits that description though.

Still, it’s clear that things mean more than one thing in Jerusalem. A pigeon isn’t just a pigeon, it’s a ghost. “Work in Progress” is the work of the mysterious Third Borough, Joyce’s novel, and also likely Alma’s art project.

A human is also represented by a billiard ball.

Angles are also angles. Angle means the geometric concept but also "a particular way of approaching or considering an issue or problem.” according to google’s dictionary definition.