Eruditorum Press

The trap at the end of the clickbait

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:

Erudite Waffles 1/7/23

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A middle-aged trans woman with dyed red hair is wearing an olive green t-shirt, red and black flannel, brown denim pants, and red Doc Martens Chelesa boots. Her necklace is a copper apple pendant, and she is wearing a copper bracelet and earrings. Her other necklace is made of blue stone.

Well, I’m starting this on Thursday, which tells you how my week has gone. Travel back from Connecticut, and then just a lot of to-do upon returning to Ithaca means that this is the first proper workday I’ve had. And, of course, I’m spending it on this, not paying work. Which is a problem, so expect brevity this week so I can actually do some paying work.

What I’ve Been Up To

C.f. the first paragraph.  Sunday was family, Monday was driving, Tuesday was errands, Wednesday was mostly hanging out with Lexi (see “The Part Where She Leaves You With a Song”) before she leaves for Brooklyn for a few months, today is gym and then doing some prep/research work on Last War in Albion. Friday is currently scheduled through to about 3pm, at which point I’ll work / remember that I’m doing a complicated dinner that night. 

Yeesh. That’s grim when you put it all out there. That said, there’s a lot of my job that, you know, happens quietly in my brain. I’ve got seven more pages in Britain a Prophecy #7 to write a rough draft of, and I’m trying to figure out exactly how to use them. I’ve got bits of the section on The Doll’s House slowly filling in my brain. I’ve almost cracked the precise beats of the end of Act I of the novel, which I’ll hopefully get through the critical stuff fast enough to get to later this month. I’ve also been continuing to think about doing a heavily annotated 90s music playlist, probably titled “How to Be an Egg in the Age of Lilith Fair,” so that might happen, whether on Patreon or here idk. (Last minute addition: I’ve at least built the playlist.)

On Twitter And Its Horrors

I’ve had Kieron’s thoughts on largely leaving Twitter going through my mind a lot over the past week and change. They’re good thoughts, because of course they are, it’s Kieron, but here’s the bit that sticks in my head:

If twitter wasn’t there, anyone dumb and hungry enough want to do comics would have gathered somewhere else (or several somewhere elses) because anyone who really cares to get in knows how to google. Hell, artists especially can do it semi-passively by just showing their work – Instagram is a far better place for artists than twitter. Writers? I came in through the forums – which obviously were deeply imperfect in so many ways… but so is twitter. We would work out something else if there wasn’t twitter. You use twitter. If it wasn’t there, you would use something else, because you are brilliant and smart, and finding tactics to manouvere through an environment is what creatives do.

And yeah. That’s a lot of what I’m trying to do with this as a very different sort of way of maintaining presence. But I want to talk about another key way that Twitter has changed, and changed in a way that renders it untenable as a major platform for what I want to do right now.…

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Today I Stop Being Real (Book Three, Part 57: V for Vendetta at DC)

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British police on horses, both in riot gear, as described by Alan Moore in the quoted passage.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The entire Grant Morrison half of the book happened.

“Today I stop being real. No one’s going to listen to a boy genius. No one’s going to listen to a philosopher or a traveler. No one cares about an orphan, or a rich man, or some grown up grinder kid from Heavenside. All the things I’ve been: no one’s ever been interested. Weird little Johnny from the big house on Scartop; who ever really gave a shit? People like listening to characters. Characters are safe, because they’re not real.” – Warren Ellis, Doktor Sleepless

And what of their opponent, the self-exiled king? At first, a settling of accounts—the tying off of old obligations, so that the first phase of his career could be buried in full. Mostly this meant the completion of V for Vendetta for DC. This was not going back to the absolute start of his career, but it was close—the strip had begun serialization in the March 1982 debut issue of Warrior, at a time when Moore’s other work was The Stars My Degradation, occasional Future Shocks, and a couple Star Wars backups—before even Skizz or Captain Britain, so far back that it was able to influence the tail end of Morrison’s Captain Clyde run. The double header of Marvelman and V for Vendetta in Warrior were where Moore had revealed himself to be more than just the clever writer of things like the Abelard Snazz stories or “Tlotny Throws a Shape”—one capable of serious, penetrating work. It had been the first time Alan Moore’s public persona made an appearance—the first time he was not merely a name in the credits that, to a particularly attentive reader, might signify a basic level of quality that other writers lacked, but an auteur to be actively paid attention to—a creator of major projects who might plausibly serve as the sole reason someone picked up a comic. Warrior #1 began a coherent sense of a career that extended forward to the vast edifice of Watchmen. Now, in that project’s totemic wreckage, Moore returned to the beginning to draw the curtain down on the first phase of his career.

This was fitting. What remained to write of V for Vendetta, after all, concerned the final fate both of the visionary terrorist V and of his schemes to bring down the fascist Norsefire regime. Moore was perhaps less a visionary terrorist at this stage than a visionary artist, or, perhaps, a visionary con man, but Moore was also not the sort to get hung up on the fine distinctions between these three classes. But Moore was someone who would, in some strange cousin to self-effacement, describe himself (or at least his female author-insert character Alma Warren) as “a super-villainess” who “sits in a swivel chair amongst the shifting screens and contemplates deranged agendas. These include affecting the development of culture by the subtle introduction of extreme ideas, which, if pursued, will almost certainly precipitate widespread apocalyptic psychological collapse,” and how he chose to resolve the story of V would have obvious parallels for his own story, especially in the still pulsatingly magical aftermath of Watchmen.…

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Erudite Waffles (12/31/22)

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Happy New Year’s. 2022 has been absolute dogshit for me. Which, I know everyone says about every year from 2016 on, but like, 2016 and 2020, the two canonical lowlights of that period, were actually quite nice for me personally. 2022, on the other hand—a year that was basically pleasant as far as the anthropocene extinction goes—was just absolute hell for a lot of people and things I love. Fucking hell.

Onwards to better things. 

What I’m Up To

Well, I just published literally my favorite thing I’ve ever written to my criticism Patreon, which is the fifth part of Ithaca a Sága, my take on an Alan Moore-style spoken word performance piece. I hope you’ll decide to chip a couple bucks a month my way and check it out. 

We also got a new set of colored pages back for Britain a Prophecy #5, which are up on the Britain a Prophecy Patreon for $10+ monthly Patrons. The first panel of this scene is pleasantly non-spoilerish, so enjoy Penn’s rendition of a 1980s British service station.

Past that, I’ve been trying to salvage some time for the novel, or any work at all. I said it’s been dogshit, right? Yeah. 

I’m signing off on this newsletter back on Thursday. Then I’ll go get Last War in Albion queued up for Monday, and pack up to spend the weekend back in Newtown with Penn and Christine for my family’s traditional Second Christmas, in which all the cousins you’d expect an Italian-American family to have get together and do a Secret Santa. Last time I was at one of these was close to a decade ago, and I honestly have no idea if we still fall over each other like ravenous dogs the moment the pigs in a blanket (distinct from “pigs in blankets,” according to Wikipedia) hit the table. 

I hope so. I fuckin’ love pigs in a blanket. 

Recycled Tumblr Ask Theater Of The Mind

Got a Tumblr ask about “The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe” and whether my opinions about it had changed, and so found myself rereading that essay and writing this:

Haven’t seen it since I wrote the essay. Rereading my essay on it, I’m struck by how little any of the discourse that was still buzzing around it when I wrote that essay feels like it matters. I mean, good lord, has anything from the Moffat era aged as pathetically as discourse about the trope of persistent courtship? Talk about the worst excesses of Tumblr discourse.

The trans stuff obviously stands out a little more given Moffat’s continual TERF adjacency, but also, he’s repeatedly come out as broadly pro trans rights, and I think my read on it at the time was correct: it’s cisnormative, not transphobic, and yeah, the trans community really could use to spend more time creating a nuanced discourse for talking about trans representation and less time building murder drones. Again, I look at it and mostly just go “oh god, do I really have to care about that?”…

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The Return of The Saturday Waffles

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The character Terrence from the comic Britain a prophecy as a sexy Santa

Hello everyone, and Merry Christmas Eve

With Twitter becoming an unfun hellsite instead of a fun one, I’ve decided to start running a weekly post here as a more general sort of communication—a home for the random flights of fancy that social media has in the past been an outlet for. Since all the other midlist creators on Twitter are decamping to Substack and stuff I figured I’d take the cool outre move and do a retro-chic return to old school blogging about, like, whatever. Past that, who knows what these posts will be like? We’ll find out together! There are no rules, beyond the fact that Graham Linehan is human garbage whose continual occupation of the planet is an affront to basic decency!

Oh, and that these go up on Saturdays.

A Section Break

Yeah! These posts happen in sections now! It’s a wild and untamed world in which I can just do things like that!

Shit, now there’s three rules. 

What I’m Up To (Professional Mix)

I’ve blocked off the rest of the year to work on the cyberpunk novel I’m writing. Currently I’m writing chapter seven, which is the penultimate chapter of Act I (in a three act structure). I’ve also got issue seven of Britain a Prophecy and a pitch document for a work for hire gig open. 

Speaking of Britain a Prophecy, Penn is currently drawing pages 8-11 of issue 5, which will roughly mark the halfway point of that issue. Also, because I’ve been absolutely terrible about using this site to promote that project, did you know that we have three whole issues out on Gumroad, all of them pay what you want? Did you know that our fourth issue is available to all $5+ patrons? You do now, so if you haven’t downloaded and read our first three issues CLEARLY THERE IS NO HELPING YOU.

As for books, Eruditorum v8 is with the copy editor. I had a great conversation with her last week about all the ways I’m a fucking idiot who can’t make consistent decisions on things like whether wilderness years should be capitalized. I expect to have first revisions back at the beginning of the year, at which point I’ll go through them and then do a second pass that’s just a pure “OK, really, this is done, right?” edit.

Come January I’ll be switching gears and doing some more writing about Sandman for the Eruditorum Press Patreon. Right now I’m serializing Ithaca a Sága, a work of longform magical poetry. Each installment goes out to exactly zero likes or reactions, just a complete grave silence from my shockingly indulgent patrons. And if that doesn’t make you want to subscribe to the Patreon and check it out, I don’t know what possibly would.

On Canon (A Tiny Essay)

Adapted from a post to my Tumblr. Yeah, Tumblr. I said we were being retro-chic.

I want to talk about a position that I’ve seen espoused among people upon whom I have a demonstrable influence, and that I have issues with, namely the declaration that within fictional shared universes writers ought not be bound by canon.…

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No Way Forward (Book Three, Part 56: Really and Truly)

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Grant Morrison, bald and in sunglasses, in front of a graffiti mural

Previously in Last War in Albion: Morrison did the worst work of his career with the recklessly offensive and bullying Big Dave.

A nervous breakdown. There is no way forward. We must set the action in reverse. -Alan Moore, The Birth Caul

Whatever its moral flaws, Big Dave, along with Maniac 5, were the two most popular strips of the Summer Offensive, and so like Maniac 5 it saw itself trotted out for return engagements. This began with the one-off “Young Dave,” a story of Big Dave’s childhood, which appeared in the 1994 annual, followed by two more four-part stories in 1994. These stories moved away from the sheer and over the top big concept premises of the original two strips, finding their humor instead in putting the title character in juxtaposition with iconic parts of British lad culture. The first, “Costa Del Chaos,” sees Big Dave holidaying in Tenerife, while the second, “Whole Lotta Balls,” sees him storming the World Cup to win it for England and defeat the Germans. Tonally both are similar festivals of cynical and calculated offense to the original, but there’s a creeping sense of desperation and trying too hard, as if Morrison and Millar were simply trying too hard for something that neither deserved it nor, truth be told, wanted it. Morrison validates this sense, admitting that  “Big Dave clearly had to die. Mark and I were goading each other on every day to break some new bad taste taboo, We both have pretty fucked-up notions about what’s funny and what isn’t. It got to the point where we wouldn’t be satisfied with a Big Dave pitch unless one of us was really badly shocked. We were barely aware that our audience didn’t necessarily want to go as far as we would have liked.”

Mercifully, 2000 A.D.’s editors eventually grew to blanche at their enfants terrible, and pulled the plug later that year. Morrison has suggested a variety of ideas that might have come out otherwise—“Planet of the Darkies,” which Morrison described as “Dave gets sick on a bad kebab and imagines returning from space to a world taken over by immigrants,” “Battleground Bulger,” which saw miniaturized Dave and Saddam Hussein fighting inside the body of a dead toddler, and a story for the 2000 AD Yearbook called “Cheryl-Anne’s Big Night Out,” which saw Big Dave trying to kill Salman Rushdie. This story, which apparently got as far as Steve Parkhouse drawing it, was the one that actually served as the breaking point, with Fleetway head Chris Powell rejecting the story, which largely coincided with both Morrison and Millar ceasing to work with the company, with Morrison going so far as to suggested that he was “blacklisted at 2000 A.D.”

And indeed, their future treatment at 2000 A.D. largely bears this out, at least in the short to medium term. Perhaps the most striking example comes with the strip Janus: Psi-Division, featuring the psychic judge they introduced in Inferno.…

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Nobody Cares About Anything Anymore (Book Three, Part 55: Big Dave)

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A still from South Park featuring the show's typical homophobic humor

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Having failed to jump immediately to the US market on the back of his early Trident and Crisis work, Mark Millar found himself writing Sonic the Hedgehog comics.

You just like offending people, don’t you? Nobody cares about anything anymore. – Grant Morrison, Multiversity: The Just

Millar’s Sonic the Hedgehog work consisted of eleven self-contained stories across eleven issues, mostly in 1993 but with one in 1994 and two—presumably inventory pieces—in 1996. None are extraordinary, and if they did not bear Millar’s name they would seem wholly unremarkable. They are not cynical and nihilistic in the way that Millar’s work for older readers is. And yet looking at them in the context of his career, some of Millar’s trademark obsessions do begin to emerge. Most obviously, Millar leans hard into the idea of Sonic as an egotistical jerk—admittedly a savvy move that acknowledges part of the character’s core marketing appeal. But there are subtler issues too—a running theme of sidekicks and secondary characters who are defined in part by their inadequacy compared to the hero, especially in his first strip, which features Tails, Sonic’s sidekick from Sonic the Hedgehog 2, captured by Doctor Robotnik and turned into an evil cyborg brimming with vocal resentment. This would be a trope Millar would return to, and one it’s hard not to read in light of his own status as a sidekick within the War. Also obviously notable is the comedy “A Day in the Life of Doctor Robotnik,” a strip whose ending, which reveals Robotnik as a fan of romance comics, is difficult not to read in light of Millar’s broader fondness for homophobic jokes.

Something closer to an unfiltered version of Millar appeared in his other strip for Sonic the Comic, Streets of Rage. Based in a beat ‘em up style game in which vigilante ex cops try to rid a decaying American city of crime, the strip was by some margin the most adult strip in the comic. The nature of its setting, with its failed institutions that can only be saved by vigilante violence, lent itself to Millar’s cynicism, but also showcased the kind of innately conservative aesthetics that would come to dominate Millar’s work. The comic was also simply a venue for an only mildly toned down version of the nastiness that pervaded Millar’s other work, however. His first arc culminated in the villain being dumped alive into a vat of molten steel, a barely sanitized version of the resolution of Purgatory, while his second features a scene in which a character researches on a computer while narrating about how “There’s always one jerk in every class who’s into computers. One specky wimp with rich parents who drive him to school. I should know—I’ve got one pinned under my skate shoe right now,” a bit of bullying nastiness that evokes Insiders. In both cases the work is tamer and less confrontationally offensive than Millar’s other work, but the underlying attitudes are viscerally clear.…

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Living Under a Bridge and Doing Drugs (Book Three, Part 54: Mark Millar’s Sonic the Hedgehog)

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The box art to the first Sonic the Hedgehog game, featuring Sonic looking cool af

Previously in Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison met a bad influence.

It’s clearly an entirely legitimate product from Sega, and in a Modern-Warfare-2 piece of relevancy, the eponymous spiked-creature is now homeless, living under a bridge and doing drugs. – Kieron Gillen, Rock Paper Shotgun 

On the one hand there’s nothing wrong with this. Moore deftly wielded provocation plenty of times in his rise, and Morrison’s enfant terrible persona was a well-crafted and effective attempt to do the same. What’s notable is not the extremity of what Morrison said, but simply the degree to which Millar brought this side of Morrison out, eliciting jokes about how “ I really would like to expire in some dramatic motoring accident.  There’s nothing like travelling at high speed without a seatbelt and no thrill like the possibility of hitting a wall at a hundred miles an hour.  Anyway, what I’d like is to be cremated and leave instructions for my ashes to be thrown in the face of some perfectly innocent passerby.  Someone I never knew or had any remote connection with.  It would be such a lovely gesture” and anecdotes about how “my classmates and I were responsible for the nervous breakdowns of two teachers.  One of them, a kindly and inoffensive old gentleman was subjected to a campaign of sustained psychological torture that would have brought Patrick McGoohan to his knees in no time.  After a spell in psychiatric care, this dear old character bravely returned to teaching and lasted only a few months before being driven completely round the bend..  He lives quite near me actually and I often see him wandering about with a walking stick and an air of tragic bewilderment.  You shouldn’t laugh really but sometimes it’s impossible not to.” This was a version of Morrison who was more instinctively disposed to stylized meanness and transgressive jokes. They were perfectly capable of this on their own, it’s true, and there’s no shortage of examples of them indulging in it, but the fact remained: when Millar was in the picture, Morrison could inevitably be found playing the most cartoonish version of their public persona. 

Of course, this was very much the sort of thing Millar did. He was, after all, the writer of Insiders and Purgatory, for whom a nihilistic transgressiveness seemed the only aesthetic goal of any interest. In a comics scene increasingly defined by performative edginess, he offered the purest expression of it. And Morrison was open about this being the appeal, noting that “We both have a very ghoulish sense of humor.” This is clear in all of the joint interviews they did in the period, which positively brim with casual homophobia and puerile attempts to shock and offend. A 1992 interview saw Morrison complaining about how “We’re both sick of the way 2000 AD is full of poofs these days. Judge Dredd’s turned into a poof and so has everyone else. All the stories are about Buddhists, Feminism and Ecology – it’s a real drag” while Millar railed about how “I’m sick of listening to them bleating on about how bloody great they are.…

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Kiss It And Make It All Infected: A Review of Manhunt

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Listen up fives, a ten is speaking.

Let’s start with the context. Although the mainstreaming of trans culture is a thing that has happened and is continuing to happen, like any future’s arrival it has been unevenly distributed, not least in the way in which it’s paralleled efforts at our extermination. One facet of this—especially relevant in the realm of trans SF/F—is the prominence of a particular trans aesthetic. It’s the one Charlie Jane Anders gestured at in her self-proclaimed “Sweetweird Manifesto”—one that’s seen Hugo nominations for Ryka Aoki and, of course, for Anders herself. It’s largely the one the Wachowskis have settled on, much as they retain a lingering fondness for fetish aesthetics. It’s the one on display in the successes of Rebecca Sugar and Nate Stevenson have had in children’s media. 

I neither want to condemn this aesthetic—it’s produced a number of genuinely great works—nor, really, to analyze it unduly and try to delineate its borders or rigorously define it. Let’s offer a few arbitrary touchstones and move on: anime fandom, belief that the colors of the trans flag are something other than vomit-worthy, a fandom history going back to Tumblr, catgirls, strong attachment to children’s media… you get the picture. As trans aesthetics go, it’s done well for itself, not least because it’s compatible with existing trends in SFF—what I’ve previously called Torwave and others, more pejoratively and to my mind less coherently, have called squeecore. But, crucially, other trans aesthetics exist—ones that haven’t done as well in the mainstream.

One is what I like to call “angry goth trans,” in contrast to the dominant aesthetic of “cute anime trans.” (I was very proud of this joke as a baby trans.) Anyone decently steeped in trans culture knows the type: the trans woman with the noise band and a favorite Mark Fisher book, who goes for an outright punk aesthetic and has gloriously snooty taste in films, who thinks William S. Burroughs is still relevant and hated J.K. Rowling long before she became a TERF. These are the trans we don’t let out, in part because they’re fucking terrifying—slightly feral creatures whose social failure mode is not faintly endearing cringe but doom-laden prophecies and rage to chill the Erinyes’s blood. But also, if we’re being honest, because there’s something a lot less commercial about dungeon synth than there is about Steven Universe. And that’s just the way it is for angry goth trans. If you’re lucky, you also work in tech or are in a polycule with someone who works in tech so that your profoundly maladaptive ass can pay rent. You might make art, but you do it as a hobby because you are simply too fucking weird for any sort of success or existence outside of the queer fringes of culture.

And then there’s Gretchen Felker-Martin, whose debut novel, an explicitly trans splatterpunk zombie apocalypse thriller called Manhunt, has unexpectedly found itself to be one of the hottest books out of Tor this year.…

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America a Prophecy 2: The Devolution of the Funny Pages, 1895-2022

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CW: Racist imagery, not discussed by the larger essay

One complicating factor in our exegesis of the 9/11/11 Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip is that the strip exists in two different forms with two distinctly different resonances. Last year we discussed a five panel version of the strip, however another version exists and saw publication with an additional sixth panel at the beginning of the strip.

At first glance this version of the strip seems to collapse some of our discussions, particularly around whether Snuffy’s final line constitutes a punchline or not. The addition of Snuffy reading a newspaper marking the anniversary of 9/11 and weeping while Jughaid looks in from the window and weeps alongside him removes the element of bathetic surprise that the five panel version of the strip traded on. More to the point, it renders the strip strangely incoherent—if Jughaid has just been weeping at the cover of the newspaper, his confusion as to what the strange perambulatory ritual that Snuffy is engaged in might be about becomes harder to reconcile. 

Broadly speaking, and inasmuch as discussions of craft can be applied to the strip, the addition of the new opening panel unquestionably harms the strip, muddying its intentions and rendering it incoherent in places where its coherence had been, if not strictly speaking a positive, at least broadly interesting. But while the panel muddies interpretation of the strip, it is clarifying in a different sense. The key question to ask is simple: why are there two different versions of the 9/11/11 Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip in the first place?

The answer is tied to the medium of newspaper comics themselves. By 2011 (or indeed decades earlier) newspaper comics sections had become extremely compressed things that attempted to fit as many comics into as small a space as possible. To accommodate this, the syndicates that distribute the comics sought to ensure the comics were rearrangeable. Part of this meant that the initial panels of a Sunday strip had to be disposable—the comic had to work with or without them. An ordinary example can be found in this 1991 Calvin and Hobbes strip, in which the first two panels are a standalone gag that the remaining panels do not depend on.

In fact the rearranging goes far further, however. Note in the Calvin and Hobbes strip that the second two rows divide into four equally sized quadrants. This means that if a newspaper wants they can shrink the art down, move the first panel of the second row to the first row, and run the remaining panels as a second row, taking up even less space (while also using the full version of the comic). A similar thing is possible with the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip—in its five panel version, panels two and three are equally sized so that it can be run in two rows instead of three, which is the format we discussed it in last year. Other strips are even further compressible—it’s entirely normal for a strip to be comprised of entirely equally sized panels so that it can be rearranged in any sort of grid or even in a single column that can be shoved down the side of a page.…

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Understand and Appreciate

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My father, Edward Sandifer, passed away on Wednesday after a long illness. He was a neuroatypical wonder of midwestern farmfolk the start conditions of which simply do not exist in the world anymore. He is also, in many ways, why I am the sort of person I am, and why this site is what it is.

This is the eulogy I read this morning at his burial.

You used to, whenever the family would come over, find a way to sneak off with some tea and read. It wasn’t that you were rude to people. Quite the opposite; you were always charming, interested in what people had to say, enthusiastic, and warm. You loved your friends and your family. It’s just that after enough time being extroverted, you’d get overwhelmed and find it necessary to retreat. I was always much the same way, which suited us both, not least because we often didn’t seem to count towards the other’s sense of being overwhelmed by company. So even when we were visiting someone else, we could find a corner of a room, sit, and talk about whatever interested us that day. I loved talking to you, loved engaging with the way your mind worked: the long, fascinating arcs of your reasoning and knowledge, and the swerving paths of connections you could draw from one thing to another. And so my audience will, I hope, forgive me if I do it one last time. I’m supposed to talk to all of them here, but I can’t. I’m overwhelmed. I need to sit down with some tea and talk to you.

My favorite time we ever talked was when we were on a Metro North train back from New York City, and I asked you a question that, perhaps eighteen years into my life, I realized I still did not have an answer to. I was attempting a reconciliation with Christianity that proved theoretically possible but practically unsatisfying, and I finally got around to asking you about religion. Mom and Grandma always made me go to church, but you never had to go and never spoke of it, agreeing the proscription existed but having no visible investment in the principle behind it. Twenty years of hindsight and I can see the parental faultline negotiated clear as day, the conversations that must have taken place away from your child’s ears. At the time, it was just a mystery. You looked thoughtful, as if I’d asked a good question, which was always a good feeling. Our discourse was Socratic—you answered with a question, and I replied, until my query had narrowed to something about the divine. I wanted to know your take on the noumenal. What did your spiritual life consist of? Or, as I finally ended up framing it, how did you worship? Mom worshiped, and I was expected to worship, through church, prayer, Christianity, but what did you do? And you thought for a minute, and said “the only way I know how to worship is to understand and appreciate.”…

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