Eruditorum Press

Less organic intellectuals than morbid symptoms

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

The Robot Revolution Review

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It’s strange, in many ways, to be back, or at least back under these circumstances, watching Doctor Who tick down to the first time since Time of the Doctor  that an episode will air when the next episode hasn’t been shot. And that was a two week period towards a commissioned episode—Deep Breath shot in January. Here we head towards the great unknown, perhaps even the wilderness. It’s faintly unsettling—I’ve not written about Doctor Who in a moment where it might not come back before.

What’s interesting, of course, is that this was all shot and prepared with no knowledge of that—this entire season was in the can before 73 Yards aired, and so is not in a position to respond to the anxieties about its own performance. As far as the show knows, Davies is still the triumphant returning hero. In the latter stretches they’ll know the 60th Anniversary stuff landed. This is, I suspect, to the series’ benefit—it’s in no position to second guess itself. It doesn’t know it’s going to be going out under cancellation fears as the global economy collapses and the United States succumbs to fascism. So it just comes out swinging.

The result has pleasing Cartmel vibes. “Planet of the incels” is the obvious line to point at, and Davies is plainly fishing for praise with it, but the point remains: Doctor Who is aiming at the right fascists here. It’s angry and has a head full of steam. This is good and as it should be. On top of that, it’s pretty well assembled, especially by the standards of the Gatwa era to date. Obviously it’s gorgeous, with a lushly camp 50s retro-future. The basic idea of a star registry certificate being a real and valid document is great. “Belindachandrabombs” has a delightful frisson of comedy and barbarity. There’s lots to love here.

It also doesn’t bottle the ending as badly as much of Series 1 seemed to. In some ways this is me in the odd position of praising the show for the fact that the Alan reveal and the use of the star certificates to defeat him were both extremely obvious, but in an era where the episode resolutions have so frequently been off it’s nice to have everything successfully telegraphed. To some extent this is accomplished by moving the duff bit of pacing to the midpoint instead—the beat where Belinda reactivates the polish droid so she gets captured doesn’t feel entirely earned. But the middle of the episode is a good place to bury your sketchy beat.

And yet there’s a sense of the episode as a bunch of parts in search of a whole. The moment I find telling comes at the beginning. Davies does a quick set of establishing beats for Belinda—stuff we’ve seen a thousand times, and that he does as well as ever. We get her harried at work, then straight to a flatshare situation, and with that we’ve efficiently sketched a skilled career woman in a world where that gets you fuck all.…

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Doctor Who Reviews Update

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Just wanted to give the note that the Patreon is currently slightly short—about $20—of the threshold where my Robot Revolution review will be posted publicly. I’m reasonably confident that gap will be bridged some time in the next five days, but it’s where we are.

In any case, reviews should go out Saturday mornings/afternoons at some point. With episodes dropping at 3am my time, I expect to watch them when I get up on Saturday. The exact shape of this is going to be a bit tricky, as Saturday is also the Ithaca Farmer’s Market, where I do my shopping, and also I have prior commitments for the first two weeks that were on my calendar before we had a launch date, but I’ll figure out the routine that works best, and getting reviews out as fast as possible remains a priority for me.

A final note that this is the last season whose “post publicly” threshold will be $2850. That number’s always been keyed to my rent, and that’s going up at the end of the summer, so by the time The War Between the Land and Sea airs, the public review threshold will have jumped to $2920.

In addition to helping reviews be public, of course, my Patrons already have access to the first chapter of Last War in Albion v4, early chapters of my Blake book, the magical zines Penn has been working on, and will be getting a pair of politics/AI/fascism essays in the near future.

Thanks for reading, and I’m sure I’ll see you all on Saturday.

And here’s that Patreon link again.…

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The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore wrote Watchmen, which, for complicated reasons involving William S. Burroughs and the weak nuclear force, ended the Cold War and replaced it with a magical one with Grant Morrison. That story continues in Book Three. This, meanwhile, is a new epilogue to Book Two, which I hope to have out in print later this year. 

In terms of import, at least, the end of the Cold War and commencement of the Last War in Albion was by some margin Watchmen’s biggest consequence. It was not, however, its only significant one. Moore drew the magical theories that fueled Watchmen from William S. Burroughs, but Burroughs had drawn them from L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology, and there were debts to be paid.

And so it was that when Karen Berger and Dick Giordano traveled to London in February 1987 to scout talent there were in fact two writers who successfully pitched to them on the back of Alan Moore’s endorsement. The first, of course, was Grant Morrison. The other was a journalist named Neil Gaiman who had struck up a friendship with Moore after interviewing him a few years earlier. And while Morrison would find no shortage of commercial success across their battles with Moore, neither of the great magi would come anywhere close to Gaiman, who is straightforwardly the most commercially successful writer ever to emerge from comics.

Gaiman was born in November of 1960 in Hampshire, above his family’s grocery store. He was a third generation immigrant, his grandfather (who opened the grocery store) having been of Polish-Jewish descent. In 1965 his father David decided he wanted to go into business for himself, and moved to the town of East Grinstead in West Sussex, in part to open a vitamin shop, and in part to study at the Scientology Center in town. Both ventures would prove tremendously successful—the shop grew into a major vitamin manufacture company called G&G, while David Gaiman quickly rose through the ranks of Scientology, eventually becoming the the Church’s primary media spokesman in the UK.

In the official version of Gaiman’s biography—the one he offers to Hayley Campbell in her coffee table hagiography The Art of Neil Gaiman—he has what seems a largely happy childhood defined almost entirely in terms of his engagement with arts and language: dictating poetry to his mother before he even knew the alphabet, into Enid Blyton’s Noddy, British comics like Sooty and Pippin, watching the 1966 Adam West Batman series and Doctor Who at his grandparents, then reading Marvel reprints in Odham’s titles like Smash! and Pow!, getting The Penguin Charles Addams at age seven along with the Narnia books and Ray Bradbury, then Gilbert and Sullivan, proper American comics, Michael Moorcock, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Vonnegut, Burroughs, and then into proper literary fiction like Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and, as he finished school in the late 70s, finally into punk. It is a story that seeks, first and foremost, to explain how someone became a writer.…

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Joy to the World Review

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First off, I want to note that technically Penn’s and my Patreon is well short of where it should be for me to be doing this. I ain’t no grinch, and so I’m posting publicly anyway, but seriously, it’s a pretty sizeable shortfall in our monthly budgeting. I’m currently finishing up the epic Neil Gaiman section of Last War in Albion over on the Patreon, which you’ll see here in a few months, and I’ve also finally started work on my inevitable Blake book, so it’s an exciting time.  And besides. Next episode isn’t at Christmas and I can grinch it up as much as I want.

Right. On to the fun stuff, or at least this curious little thing we’re calling the Gatwa era, and may someday find out if we’ll be calling it that for more than another eight episodes. Let’s start with the obvious: this is loads of fun, in a big dumb Christmassy way. Yes, obviously this is not my favorite mode of Moffat because I’m a basic bitch who prefers dark and epic Doctor Who to comedy. But it’s still Moffat, with all his weird little idiosyncrasies, which at this point feel like pulling your favorite jacket off the rack and slipping it on. I in no way hope he takes over again after Davies (though I suspect I’d be hard-pressed to actually be unhappy if it happened), but this is always going to be the most straightforwardly “my Doctor Who” there is. The bit at the start where the Doctor realizes he’s seen something because he’s suiting up—nobody else writes that particular Doctor, and I just plain vibe.

This one even avoids Moffat’s standard tics more than Boom did. There’s a bootstrap paradox and a long way around, and there’s not a single other writer who would have done that Christmas farce cold open, but this isn’t a “play the hits” episode in the same way. In some ways it’s much closer to “play the misses”—I remember seeing the AV Club’s review drop a few days ago and being utterly bemused at its longing for the classic Moffat specials of yesteryear like The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe and The Return of Doctor Mysterio, which this was apparently not as good as, and feeling like I should quickly Google how The Berenstain Bears are spelled to make sure I was still in the correct reality. 

Mostly, though, this feels like its own thing. Boom came early enough in the Gatwa era that everything was up in the air, such that it felt like Gatwa doing a Moffat episode as part of the work of establishing himself and figuring out what this show is. This, on the other hand, feels like Moffat doing a Gatwa episode, which is to say that it feels like Gatwa-era Doctor Who is a defined enough thing to riff upon. The death of the hotel manager is a good example—Gatwa’s Doctor simply handles that emotional beat differently than Smith or Capaldi would have, and Moffat writes it accordingly. …

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11:27 in Sokvabekkr

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Stop playing with me ‘fore I turn you to a song. – Kendrick Lamar

Ever since Monday there’s been this Draugr following me around. Weirdest thing. 

OK, look, let’s say up front, this is a petty footnote. “Exiting the Draugr Castle” is a major work on my part—a big swing essay tackling important topics. This is some bullshit—an update to enliven the holiday weekends of the sort of people who check Eruditorum Press on a holiday weekend. 

The essay went over about how I expected. Good number of people who are still cool with me, more who aren’t. Landing slightly more punitive than I’d hoped—caught some Facebook blocks from people I’d honestly expected more empathy from. But like I said, you don’t write an essay like that unless you’re ready to lose friends over it. The good news is that nobody’s played “collective guilt” and taken it out on Penn or something. 

Except, like I said, this one fuckin’ Draugr. And the funny thing is, he’s the one I hemmed and hawed on including, cause I was less sure I thought he deserved it than some. Needn’t have worried, turns out. Cause the Quisling went on an absolute unfriending spree, dropping not only Penn but a swath of other friends of mine, and also managing to blow up his local community in the process. Must have been something I said.

Thing is, some of those blocks I caught seem to have been in response to him accusing me of “all but doxing” him. And as that’s lie worthy of Tyr himself, I think it’s time for one last ray of disinfecting sunlight. 

So, here’s the thing he’s pissed at me for—a Bluesky post I made where I included these two screenshots.

Now, as you can see I went through and blacked out everyone’s names there except, of course, David Carron’s. I labeled the two people who had been characters in Draugr Castle, and left their Facebook icons, which I suppose means that if you really wanted to go scavenging around Facebook you could probably find them, but come on. That’s not fucking doxxing. For one thing, I’d already identified the Quisling as Associate President of the Troth. In what is probably not a surprise to you, the Troth’s website will readily inform you who its current Associate President is. Anyone who was terribly interested who the Quisling was could have figured it out from the original essay, which has been read by 2500 people at this point, and had a far easier time than they would reverse engineering his Facebook icon from a screenshot.

And I knew that when I posted the essay. I, in fact, put a lot of thought into exactly how identifiable people were. I wrote it so that anyone in the community could trivially solve the roman a clef for most of the main figures, but so that readers from outside the community would not. The only two exceptions were David Carron, because fuck him, and the Quisling, because it was impossible.…

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Exiting the Draugr Castle (A Tragicomedy in Twenty-Four Acts)

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Screenshot of a dictionary definition of "flyting" resembling the album art for Kendrick Lamar's "euphoria" single. David Carron

Think I won’t drop the location? I still got PTSD. – Kendrick Lamar

ᚠ. Establishing Shot of a Cow Licking the World into Being

Funny story: I just spent five years being a heathen.

It ended poorly. There was a dispute, I set a red line, and it got crossed. And since one’s honor is the only thing in this world that one truly owns, I’m not a heathen anymore. But since one of the fundamental privileges of being a professional essay writer is that absolutely any terrible experience you have can be refined into material, I figured I’d write about the five years where I was.

ᚢ. What’s a Transsexual Menace Like You Doing in a Religion Like This?

So I was in a sex club in North Carolina, and I saw this cute girl wearing a Mjolnir pendant. And what struck me about it was that it was a dainty Mjolnir pendant, which wasn’t something I’d ever seen before, so I chatted her up. One thing followed another, including the cute girl turning out to be a hot boy, me turning out to be a cute girl, and the two of us getting married, until in August of 2019 I found myself pulling up the trail to a campground in Pennsylvania to spend five days in the woods with a bunch of heathens at East Coast Thing, the second largest heathen event in the country.

This was to any extent uncomfortable for me. I wasn’t not heathen. I’d long described myself as having the protection of Loki. Way back in college a friend of mine—who ended up becoming a minister for like a decade—knocked on my dorm room door and told me that she’d found a sort of weird spirit around, and it seemed to be mine, and suggested it might be Loki. And after my life really just started to bounce from improbability to improbability, with weird careening plot twists like crashing out of academia after spending a decade in higher education and then making it as a professional Doctor Who blogger, “the protection of Loki” ended up being a pretty good shorthand for the question of “how the fuck do you manage to live this sort of charmed existence, you absolute weirdo?”

But I didn’t work with the larger Norse/Germanic pantheon. Heck, I didn’t even really work with Loki—I just graciously accepted his protection. Mostly I worked with Ahania, a minor figure in William Blake’s personal mythology, in a self-conscious homage to Alan Moore’s famous decision to worship a glove puppet. That had started to change with my marriage to Penn as we entwined our magical practices, but we’d only been married a couple of months and that was still in its early stages.

But the real reason I was nervous was the same basic reason the daintiness of Penn’s Mjolnir surprised me, which was just… the fucking viking of it all. The faith attracts a type, and it’s one where you’re not exactly surprised there’s a nazi problem.…

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Ithaca a Saga

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The Ithaca Psychogeographic Liberation Front has sought the council of Sága in the form of a rune reading. We received the following prophecy in reply.

ᚨ (Ansuz)

Screaming, I take up the runes.
A river of language pours from my open mouth–
Alive, the words carve meaning into a frozen world.
A comfort to the wise, and a charge.
Speak;
Your story begins.

In the beginning, then, the word
That sparking leap of conjuration,
Meaning brought forth from dead earth.
The way we speak of kings, in tales of debt and thunder.
The myths and lore. The cunning men who tell it.

This much is known:
I drink with Odin in a sunken place where water flows.

Odin, who screamed forth the runes from which you read,
And learned a woman’s magic.
This is an old tale,
Old as glaciers, a saga written on the earth itself.

He died. He hung nine days upon a tree and died.
Whatever war he fought was lost,
Gungnir’s bite upon his side,
He hung, alone, and died. 

This much is known.

This is the magic of the word.
The way the very speaking of a thing creates it.
I say “the crossroads where he hangs”
And you can feel the chill,
Smell the rot and shit from off his body,
Hear the wind trace a lazy finger
Across his freezing chest, which draws an agonal breath
The likes of which there’s what, a handful left?

This much is known.
This is how the story ends.

Imagine it. The flaming eye sputtering out,
The last thing the gallows’ burden sees
My runes, just eight and three.
Among the spots of light that strobe across his dying eye,
He learns their secrets.

And then he screams.

Imagination fails here.
This is a pain beyond words.
A god is dying.
And then he isn’t.
A scream that grinds like ice,
And then escapes.

The rest is lost,
Is just a whisper passed between a gallows pair
Who drink beneath the earth.
Even my name’s an ambiguity,
Derived perhaps from sight, perhaps from speech,
This gap the spring from which my magic flows.

The thing unsaid, or said in lies,
Made up, and then come true.
The text below the text, the hidden word,
The secret cloaked in paradox and metaphor.
This is the magic I taught him
There upon the gallows tree.

The raven tester paid me well.
Gave me a hall,
A sunken place where waters flow,
So radiant a glacier stopped
To drank it in, an ice age nib
That carved a rune into the earth,
A watery digit pointing to this spot.

What? You thought these were just streets you walked,
And not the corridors of thought?
That Ithaca was just a town above Cayuga’s waters
When so much treasure lays beneath its ground?
You ask for omens?
Why look, there’s Alex Haley’s roots,
And there a buried map of Sagan’s cosmos.
There’s Feynman stood beneath the shadow of the mushroom cloud
And Courtney Love beneath her grief.…

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Like an Old Ruin (The Power of the Doctor)

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And so, at last, we come to the end of the Whittaker era of TARDIS Eruditorum. In the wake of recent events, I’d like to stop and offer a special and deep thanks to my Patreon backers, who allow me the security and flexibility to keep doing what I do in spite of everything. This is all absolutely terrifying and dismaying, but it would be infinitely more so without them. I’ve got a few things that’ll go up on the site over the next few weeks, and obviously Joy to the World at Christmas, but I’ll mostly be over there until Last War in Albion returns in 2025.

It’s October 23rd, 2022. Sam Smith and Kim Petras are at number one with “Unholy.” Beyonce, Lewis Capaldi, Stormzy, and Nicki Minaj also chart. In news… fuck, man, there’s been a lot. We’re two days out from the end of the Liz Truss vs Lettuce race. Let’s just leave it there and move on to the entry.

Two months after Legend of the Sea Devils, while Penn and I are at a comics convention in North Carolina, I get the call that my father has had another stroke. The news meanders back and forth between bad and worse over six weeks until, at the end of August, he finally passes. I never go and see him, deciding that my week taking care of him in the spring is a better last memory than him stuck full of tubes, no longer even there enough to straightforwardly recognize the people around him. My mother doesn’t begrudge me this decision, recognizing, I think, that her and my sister’s need for hope is not compatible with my need to accept the inevitable and start processing it. A week later the Queen dies, and I turn forty.

Unsurprisingly, I crash into one of the worst and longest burnouts of my life and career. The handful of things I do write are stuff I’m proud of—a sprawling mystical poem called Ithaca a Saga (which I’m actually posting next week) and a blistering (affectionate) review of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, which, perversely, Penn and I listen to in the car on the way down to bury my father. But everything else just craters. The novel I’m writing dies on the page. The fourth volume of Last War in Albion stalls out completely (a lucky break in hindsight, but agonizing and humiliating at the time). Leaning into the midlife crisis vibe, I indulge in a complete wardrobe refresh, ditching nearly everything I own in favor of a futch-leaning aesthetic based primarily around jackets.

By the time the Chibnall era limps over the finish line I’m in New York to give a talk at NYU about Neoreaction a Basilisk. I get in shortly after this finishes airing, pulling out my phone as we check into the hotel to see if it’s Gatwa or Tennant. I don’t actually get around to watching until late that night, after we get back from a nice dinner with Christine.…

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The Myrka Takes Quite a Lot To Impress (Legend of the Sea Devils)

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It’s April 17th, 2022. Harry Styles is at number one with “As It Was.” Jack Harlow, Dave, and Cat Burns also chart. The biggest news since Eve of the Daleks is Russia invading Ukraine. The Gray report on Boris Johnson’s COVID parties emerges, and Boris Johnson is subsequently fined for his breaking of the law. Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her Platinum Jubilee, Microsoft buys Activision, and the state of Florida outlaws telling children gay people exist.

Somewhere in there I download and watch this. I don’t really remember that, though. What I remember is a few weeks earlier, on April 2nd, when the trailer drops. I’m in Connecticut again, called in to take care of my father while my mother and sister go to a family wedding. It was over a decade on from his stroke now, and he was just frail and couldn’t safely be alone that long. Penn and I loaded our computers into the back of the cars—Wacom tablet and all for Penn—and we unpacked in the old office where I used to log onto rec.arts.doctorwho via the VAX and spent a few days just working there and taking care of him. I wrote a bunch of the Big Numbers chapter of Last War in Albion, and Penn drew issue 3 of Britain a Prophecy—the scene with Queen Elizabeth.

I watched The Sea Devils itself in that house, on tapes he made off PBS. I can’t remember how that tape worked. I think The Sea Devils was the thing labeled on it, and then there were probably two or three unlabeled bonus features—something like the poorly tracked version of The Time Warrior, or one of the Peter Cushing movies, or part four and only part four of The Caves of Androzani. But it could have been the other way around. I don’t know. The room where I watched them has long since been gut renovated, turned into the apartment where I spent some time living with my wife while writing the chunk of the blog from late Tom Baker into the Wilderness Years. It was where I lived when the shooting happened. Penn stayed in that apartment once too, dogsitting for me with the abusive ex-boyfriend he these days describes as the transmasc equivalent of joining the army to get the girl beaten out of you.

It’s wonderful to spend time with my dad. I cook for him—I remember chicken parmesan and steak au poivre. We watch a movie every night—CODA, But I’m a Cheerleader, Knives Out, and Annihilation, in his ranking. We leave and vow that we should just do it again some time, to give my mother a break from the constant caregiving, because it’s just so nice to see him.

It turns out to be the last time I do.

Legend of the Sea Devils, meanwhile, turns out to be another iteration of the Chibnall era’s paranoid recreation of the Nathan-Turner era—an episode of television that can, rather astonishingly, be described as Warriors of the Deep done wrong.…

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Because He’s Got Freckles (Eve of the Daleks)

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It’s January 1st, 2022. Ed Sheeran and Elton John are at number one with “Merry Christmas.” Wham, Mariah Carey, the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, and a variety of other Christmas classics also chart. (The one mercy of the Chibnall era’s abandonment of the Christmas Special turns out to be that at no point have I had to talk about Ladbaby.)  In news, large amounts of stuff in the UK has shut down again because of the massive spike in COVID due to the Omicron variant. The Guardian publishes a photo of Boris Johnson having a wine party during lockdown. Big Ben is reopened, the James Webb space telescope launches, and the first Starbucks in the US is unionized in Buffalo, New York.

I’m at home, Christmas plans having gone the way of Thanksgiving in the face of Omicron. We have Alex and Meredith over for a Boxing Day dinner to use all the food we bought for a more elaborate option. Somewhere in this general space we also switch to a days schedule for the first time in ages as my wife gets a major promotion at work. And then, to ring in the new year, this.

Which as fine, really. The thing about Eve of the Daleks is that it’s not actually that bad. Indeed, it’s pretty comfortably the best Chibnall-penned story of his era. This success arises in part out. of circumstances that have proven to be reliably good for Doctor Who in the past, namely having to bang something together quickly and with neither time nor money. The story goes that this was written in two weeks after some previous script fell through. It was shot something like six months ahead of broadcast, leaving little time for VFX. They blatantly have nothing save for a warehouse, two Daleks, and five actors. And they’re still shooting under COVID restrictions. All of which helpfully forces Chibnall to abandon his doomed epic instincts and do a small scale story without grander stakes beyond having Daleks in it. Add in a premise that forces structure onto the episode and you have…

Well, there’s the problem. See, when I sat down to watch this, a few minutes in I found myself grabbing my laptop and banging out a quick paragraph, because I had an idea I didn’t want to forget:

Aisling Bea manages the remarkable feat of making scenes funny despite a complete lack of actual funny bits. It’s quietly one of the most impressive feats of comedy I’ve ever seen. Like, any comedian can make a good joke funny. I’ve seen plenty who can make bad jokes funny. But there is perhaps no purer demonstration of the art of comedic acting than making the complete absence of jokes funny. Not even Stewart Lee goes that far.

It wasn’t until I opened the computer back up the next day to start writing the essay proper that I realized that this was supposed to be the “Chibnall gets one right” essay, and that it really had no real use for a paragraph written in what an editor recently and charmingly called my “usual acerbic” style.…

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