Eruditorum Press

Crash log of the Singularity

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:

There’s No Point in Growing Up (Amy’s Choice)

71

This happens more often than you’d think. Trust me, I know.
My wife’s a hospice nurse.
It’s May 15th, 2010. Roll Deep are at number one with “Good Times,” a song that sounds from the title very much like it is about sober and responsible behavior. Plan B, Aggro Santos, and Professor Green also chart. I’m going to go ahead and admit I’ve not heard of any of these. News I remember – BP continues to do a very bad job of stopping the Deepwater Horizon spill. Gordon Brown announces that he will resign as head of the Labour Party, which precedes David Cameron forming a coalition government with Nick Clegg. The Queen approves of this, apparently. Oh, and Eyjafjallajökull’s ash cloud started wandering by again. 
While on television, the midpoint of the season, Amy’s Choice. Let’s start with the end, since its implications are easy to overlook. In amidst the revelation that the Dream Lord was just a twisted reflection of the Doctor (which is to say, literally what he appeared to be all episode, as opposed to merely figuratively), it is easy to overlook the larger point, which is that Amy’s choice was always a false one. The episode spends most of its runtime positioning Amy to make a choice as to which of the two worlds is real, with this choice symbolically standing in for her choice between Rory and the Doctor. The final revelation is that this choice was illusory. 
This is not a small thing. The conventional wisdom, after all, would hold that Amy and Rory getting married would bring about the exact result it seems to in this story: they’d settle down in Leadworth and stop having adventures. Because growing up is antithetical to adventures. That’s the entire point of the Amy/Amelia dichotomy and the whole “run off with the Doctor the night before her wedding” idea. Instead of your Mickey-esque terrestrial partner you fall in love with a madman with a magical box. Of course for Amy, for whom sexual confidence is one of the first traits given, this was always going to be somewhat less chaste than the Rose Tyler era. Especially once she’s met River, and thus been tacitly invited to view the Doctor as a sexual being. 
And this logic is hardly unique to Doctor Who. Just over two years prior to this story Marvel Comics went to great lengths to undo the marriage between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson in the Spider-Man comics, saying that “When people get married, they tend to settle down — life slows down and you gain different responsibilities, grown-up responsibilities, boring responsibilities. You go out to dinner less, see fewer movies, your social life is curtailed and revolves, as it should, around your significant other. In short, life hands you a mini van. While marriage makes for an okay story, there is less drama in a (healthy) marriage than in a single relationship.” Just over two years after it, DC did a big reboot of its universe and, in the process, undid the Clark Kent/Lois Lane marriage before, eventually, clarifying that they were simply opposed to the idea of any superheroes being married, saying, “heroes shouldn’t have happy personal lives.”
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Saturday Waffling (April 12th, 2014)

26

Hello all. I’ve finally gotten around to those tax things, so the general “here’s where things were in 2013 for Eruditorum Press” post should be up this week.

But for now, gossip! Discussion! Games!

The following eight posts will have other stories subbed in for them in the manner of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead and Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone.

  • The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang
  • The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon
  • A Good Man Goes to War
  • Let’s Kill Hitler
  • The Wedding of River Song
  • Angels in Manhattan
  • The Name of the Doctor
  • The Time of the Doctor
The stories available to go into those slots are the first six as well as Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead and Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone.
I have already selected which ones are going to go where, and have in my head some sort of spurious justification and plan for why I picked the order I did.
What order do you think I’m going to tackle them in? 
Give cool justifications for your picks and you might even change my order from the one I’m planning.
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Closer to Glorifying Ecoterrorism than Neoliberalism: The Alex Reed Interview

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Alex Reed of the band Seeming (and various other projects you may have heard about) was kind enough to provide an interview. You can read my earlier review of Seeming’s deliciously good debut album Madness and Extinction here, stream the album here, and part with your hard-earned money for a copy here and at various other places where one would expect to buy music.

Hello Alex!
Hello Phil!
Much as it’s a largely debased and meaningless term, at first glance Madness and Extinction appears to be something of a concept album. So, why madness, why extinction, and why together?
Right.  I think both madness and extinction are viable alternatives to a world overrun by people convinced of their own rightness, and of their own right to control others, kill living creatures, and poison the sky.  As options go, I’d even say they’re preferable, really.
One aspect of the juxtaposition between madness and extinction is that the album has a sort of apocalyptic confessionalism: of the ten songs you wrote for it, by my count, nine of them feature the first person, including “Convincing,” in which you break an unspoken pop taboo and invoke yourself by name. What’s the appeal of such personal engagement with the apocalypse?
Music is a way of connecting with people, but I’m not going to pretend that what we have to say on this record is a message that lots of other people relate to or would want to.  Oftentimes the most rewarding art is the stuff that feels dangerous or risky, and so I made the choice with this album to give up on dance songs, on love songs, or on cheesy motivational ideas.  I like making dance music and love songs and I’ve written some very honest and hopeful stuff, but if that’s what you’re looking for as a listener, there’s a whole world of music out there tailor-made for you, and I can’t compete with it.  What I can do, though—and what I think we did with this record—is paint a picture that stares you back in the face with more than a hint of wildness and cold distance.  The risk on this record is its uninterest in relating.  It’s kind of a martian portrait.  And I think that’s what makes it exhilarating for me, and I think that people are starting to get it.
Speaking of “getting it,” I saw an exchange on Facebook where someone suggested there’s a symbolic “side flip” to the album between “Goodnight London” and “Come Back”—a feature that you more or less confirmed.  Can you talk a bit about the album’s sequencing and this two-sidedness? Is there a dramatic arc that you see to the album? Do some songs respond to one another directly?
Well, you talked about a “concept album,” and I can tell you that we never planned this to be a concept record as such.  But once we had the songs assembled, certain patterns fell into place in the sequencing.  “The Eyes of Extinction” always sounded like an opener, though finding a closer was harder. 
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Kid-With-Knife Is Behind You With An AK-47 (The Last War in Albion Part 39: D.R. & Quinch)

, 7

Coming a day early due to the nature of this week’s extra post, this is the fifth of six parts of Chapter Six of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Skizz and D.R. & Quinch  for 2000 AD. An ebook omnibus of all six parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords  for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation. The Last War in Albion now also has an imageblog on Tumblr. 

The stories discussed in this chapter are available in the collections Skizz and The Complete D.R. & Quinch.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s D.R. & Quinch featured juvenile delinquency and massive amounts of destruction played for countercultural laughs.

“Kid-With-Knife is behind you with an AK-47.” -Kieron Gillen, Phonogram: The Singles Club

Figure 290: Northampton School for Boys, from which Moore
was expelled for dealing acid. Moore notes that he declined
to rat out his accomplice, who he says went on to become
a police officer.
Also important, of course, is the material itself. The anarchic glee that D.R. and Quinch builds its humor out of is an ideology that must surely have appealed to Alan Moore. The detail that the two lead characters have been kicked out of school makes this one of the earliest of relatively few instances in Moore’s career where one is compelled to read a story at least partially autobiographically. Moore, after all, was himself kicked out of school, and, if not under similar circumstances to those of D.R. and Quinch (he was only caught dealing acid, as opposed to harboring an extensive stash of high energy weapons), at least under a similar rhetoric. “The headmaster who had dealt with my expulsion had, I think, taken me rather personally,” Moore explains.  “He had written to all of the colleges and schools that I might have thought of applying to and told them that they should under no circumstances accept me as a pupil because it would be a corrupting influence upon the morals of the other students. I believe that he did at one point in the letter refer to me as sociopathic, which I think was rather harsh.” 
It is difficult not to find certain parallels between Moore’s wry interview humor in 2005 and the opening gag of “D.R. & Quinch Have Fun on Earth,” where Quinch explains that “my psychiatrist says I’m a psychotic deviant. But that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person, right?” Similarly, in another interview, Moore describes how “I was just convinced I must get my revenge upon society, no matter what” for being kicked out, making it clear that his animosity was for “the government, it was the structure of everything.” Although this is delivered with similar humor (Moore encourages the interview to “try to picture, if you will, a little 17-year-old Alan sitting there, kind of staring, hallucinating”), the similarity between it and D.R.
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Vanished Even To His Shadow (The Vampires of Venice)

58

What do you mean Girls Aloud are “on hiatus”?
It’s May 8th, 2010. Roll Deep are at number one with “Good Times,” with Taio Cruz, Usher, Plan B, and Timbaland also charting. In news, the bombing in Mogadishu is widely blamed on Al Qaeda, protests begin in Greece against austerity measures, and the general election takes place, with results described in a Pop Between Realities post at the start of the Smith era, although the actual formation of a government does not take place this week.
Meanwhile, on television, Toby Whithouse’s The Vampires of Venice. The decision to bring back Toby Whithouse was, in many ways, obvious. He had experience with Doctor Who, but had by this point distinguished himself with Being Human and shown that he could more broadly handle genre-based character drama. But there’s a second and subtler reason at play here, which is that in many ways Whithouse has been brought back to write the same story he did last time. School Reunion was one of the better notes of the 2006 season, but one if its main purposes was to rehabilitate Mickey such that he would serve as a functioning companion instead of the buffoon he was initially portrayed as.
In many straightforward regards, The Vampires of Venice is visibly designed to serve the same purpose. It is the “reintroduce Rory” episode, and, more to the point, the one in which he becomes a regular companion. And Rory served many of the same purposes in The Eleventh Hour that Mickey did way back in Rose – he’s the good but slightly inadequate guy that the new companion leaves in favor of a life of adventure. In that story he’s nobody’s favorite character, and this is by design. His role is to be replaced by the Doctor. And so when he does come back in The Vampires of Venice, the audience’s reaction is necessarily one of slight hostility. He is, after all, a third wheel on our brand new TARDIS team that we’ve been set up to love over the past five episodes. 
Another way of putting this, then, is that the series has so far led us to, if not root for Amy to abandon her wedding and run off in the TARDIS, at least to fail to have any strong feelings that she should go back and marry Rory. It is, at this point in the narrative, more or less impossible to have those feelings: Rory isn’t developed enough as a character to motivate them. And since marrying Rory is explicitly set up as a threat to the fun adventures in time and space, the audience has been carefully positioned to be relatively hostile to the idea. This is not ironclad, of course – surely there exist people who sided with Rory from the start. But the series has been constructed so as to give the sense (without actually having said much of anything about it) that it is on Team Doctor, to borrow another text’s milieu.
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Here Standing In Front Of You (The Time of the Doctor)

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In this image, Clara is cleverly disguised as the number 2.

It’s December 25th, 2013. X-Factor winner Sam Bailey is at number one with “Skyscraper.” Eminem, One Direction, and Pharrell Williams also chart, as do Leona Lewis and AC/DC. In news, since Tom Baker last appeared as Doctor Who, the Syrian civil war rumbles uncomfortably on, and the official intermediate report on the Sandy Hook shooting was released. Paul Walker died, as did Nelson Mandella. Pope Francis gives his first Urbi et Orbi speech. Matt Smith regenerated into Peter Capaldi. 

So here we are at the last entry of TARDIS Eruditorum. Nothing flashy, I’m afraid. I can’t possibly go bigger than I did for Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, and the elaborate structural games of things like Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways or Ghost Light don’t quite seem appropriate. Just an ordinary entry, as befits an ending where, in truth, everything carries on perfectly fine without me.
Still, some cards on the table. Why here, first of all. After all, due to the twice-weekly schedule of the Smith era, these posts have carried on well past Series Eight. Why not blog it? Because Time of the Doctor is a good end, ultimately. And I needed one. You have to to end somewhere, and a regeneration story at the end of the program’s fiftieth year is a good place to do it. It gave me an end I could build to for a nice, long while, and gave me the same advantage with the Smith era that I had in every other era, which was knowing where I was going with it. And, as I discovered to my pleasure when it aired, it’s a good story. One of my favorites, in fact. 
Second, since this is the last of the posted-out-of-order entries, why have I been posting some stories out of order ever since I put The Name of the Doctor in place of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. Which perhaps gets at another nagging question I should answer before walking off the stage, which is why I do odd things like this in the first place. The answer, for better or for worse, is to explore the idea of non-linear storytelling in a more direct way. So much of the Moffat era takes place out of chronological order, with consequences preceding causes and explanations preceding the things they explain. And that seemed worth dealing with. The obvious vector was River Song, the character in the Moffat era most defined by her non-chronological nature, and so I decided to put the River Song posts out of order. I considered both along her own timeline and backwards, but neither seemed quite appropriate. River’s own timeline simply prioritizes a different story while retaining chronology, and backwards was always going to be a big risk if she appeared again. So I decided to do it genuinely out of order, picking stories for slots based on what thematic concerns they engaged and what would come of contrasting those with the points in the chronological narrative they fell.
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Saturday Waffling (April 5th, 2014)

53

Hello all. A lovely, if busy week, spent mostly writing Last War in Albion. The next chapter’s at 6,000 words and shaping up on the whole well. Still lots to fill in – it looks set to be a long one – but I like where I am on it for the amount of time I have to write it in.

The next Eruditorum book has fallen into a slight limbo – the copyeditor I gave it to has been busy and is behind. I need to do some shifting around and probably give her Davison/Baker to work on instead and give Baker part 2 to someone else, but I’ve not gotten my act together to send those e-mails. Hopefully this week and I can get everything back on track, but realistically, it’s looking like late summer as a best case scenario for Baker 2, and probably more early autumn. I’ll try to have Davison/Baker sooner after that, however. Very sorry for that.

I recently found myself looking up Season Eight spoilers for an utterly idiosyncratic reason that I am absolutely confident nobody has ever looked up spoilers for before. But that got me thinking about the general question of spoilers and people’s views on them.

So, to what extent do you seek out spoilers, avoid spoilers, let yourself be spoiled, or go to great lengths to not be spoiled? Do you think spoilers actually diminish your enjoyment of a text? Are they a big deal at all? Should productions put effort into keeping a tight lid on things, or should people who like spoilers be allowed to enjoy them in peace?…

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Acid Bombs From Little Hatches (The Last War in Albion Part 38: D.R. & Quinch, O.C. & Stiggs, Juvenile Delinquency)

, 9

This is the fourth of six parts of Chapter Six of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Skizz and D.R. & Quinch  for 2000 AD. An ebook omnibus of all six parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords  for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation. The Last War in Albion now also has an imageblog on Tumblr. 

The stories discussed in this chapter are available in the collections Skizz and The Complete D.R. & Quinch.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s first recurring feature for 2000 AD, Skizz, was a mixed success, but his second, D.R. & Quinch, featuring an anarchic and psychotic pair of alien delinquents, was an altogether more popular endeavor.

“He dropped acid bombs from little hatches in the base of his testicles.” – Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan

Figure 284: Randall Schwab Jr. discovering the Uzi left
for a wedding present.
The second major influence is the National Lampoon’s recurring feature O.C. and Stiggs, an influence that D.R. & Quinch largely wears on its sleeve, or, at least, in its title. Like D.R. & Quinch, O.C. and Stiggs tells the story of two socially maladapted college students and their mayhem-causing adventures. For instance, at the start of their most iconic adventure, The Utterly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs, which took up the entire October 1982 issue of the National Lampoon, the narrator, O.C., describes “the small inconvenience of having to attend the wedding reception of Schwab’s sister, Lenora, a totally white-skinned harpist and ballet deviate with nostrils that look like old-fashioned key holes, who never appears anywhere without a ribbon on her somewhere, usually on her head, and usually four or five of them.” He goes on to explain that “because Lenora was so artistic and withdrawn and delicate, and totally unable to function anyplace where there were any people or any windows or anything else that might suck her into a connection with the world, me and Stiggs got her an Uzi submachine gun for a wedding present, with a twenty-round clip and a detachable stock.” This turns out to be a prime example of starting as one means to go on. 
Once again, the obvious difference is in the sort of technology, although if one is being honest the presence of submachine guns already puts O.C. and Stiggs in a class closer to D.R. & Quinch than Dennis the Menace. But on the whole, O.C. and Stiggs takes a markedly different approach than D.R. & Quinch. Where D.R. and Quinch revel fairly purely in the destruction they cause, largely seeing it as an end in itself, O.C. and Stiggs are visibly motivated by an outright hatred for the people they harass. When D.R. and Quinch take revenge on someone it is inevitably because that person has done something terrible to them like kick them out of school or say mean things about them at a legal hearing.
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I Don’t Like The Colour (Victory of the Daleks)

126

Perhaps the greatest mystery of Victory of the Daleks is why the Daleks have
an air conditioning vent on their spaceship. 

It’s April 17th, 2010. Scouting for Girls are still at number one with “This Ain’t a Love Song,” with Plan B, Tinie Tempah, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and Usher also charting, the latter working with will.i.am on “OMG.” In news, Poland reacts to the death of a large swath of its government in a plane crash that I forgot to mention last entry, an earthquake kills over 500 people in China, and the first-ever televised leaders debate takes place ahead of the general election, with the general consensus being that Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg came out the best.

Elsewhere on television, the Daleks are back. Here we come to one of the handful of Matt Smith stories with an unambiguously dire critical reception. Those hoping for an enthusiastic redemptive reading are, I fear, going to be disappointed. There’s very little to do with Victory of the Daleks besides either vicious snark or a calm dissection of its many problems. Given the choice, I’ll go with the latter, and wrap it up in one of those slightly heartbreaking structures where I spend a bunch of time talking about what a good story this could have been before hitting a brick wall with a paragraph beginning “Unfortunately…”
Because in its own strange way, Victory of the Daleks is a nearly perfect imitation of its ostensible source material, David Whitaker’s sublime Power of the Daleks. As designed, Power of the Daleks was a crutch. For the bold experiment of recasting the lead role, Innes Lloyd reasoned, the sensible thing to do was to bring the Daleks back to distract everybody. Terry Nation was unavailable, however, and so the script went instead to David Whitaker and Dennis Spooner, who took the premise of “once again, Daleks blow shit up” and turned it instead into a complex meditation on human frailty, the temptation of power, and the mechanics of politics. Victory of the Daleks is almost the exact same thing, only in reverse. 
Very deep within Victory of the Daleks is a profoundly interesting story based on the confluence of several intersecting themes. First is an exceedingly and straightforwardly mythic engagement with the Daleks. From the start the Daleks have served in part as analogies for the Nazis. Setting a Dalek Story in World War II, therefore, ups the stakes in a very particular and methodical way. Equally, however, it risks a profound awkwardness. The Daleks may have started as metaphors for Nazis, but they haven’t really been used that way in a while, not least because the Nazis, as ideas, have gone from being the terrifying face of a narrowly avoided nightmare and have started being a way to do war stories with unambiguous villains. The Daleks, meanwhile, have become metaphors less for the Nazis and more for a sort of complete and utter abyssal horror defined only by their desire to kill absolutely everything ever. 
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Jerusalem, Candle in the Wind, and Princess Diana: A Reply to Popular

8

So, this entire thing is a response to Tom Ewing’s fabulous post on his blog Popular on “Candle in the Wind ‘97,” which really is great, and probably worth having a look at. What follows is a rather lengthy reply that focuses on one specific aspect of his essay and runs with it for rather a lot of words. Enough words, in fact, that I thought it worth porting over here.

Specifically, I want to talk about the invocation of Blake’s “Jerusalem,” and use it to make a point that is only incidentally related to Elton John and Princess Diana, and really an excuse to highlight something that I’ve been meaning to find an excuse to talk about for years, which is that picking anything by William Blake as your de facto national anthem is the most amazingly and wonderfully fucked up thing ever.

For those playing along at home, in addition to writing the words to the hymn popularly known as “Jerusalem,” or, more accurately, to writing the poem that Hubert Parry set to music in 1916 and to writing that poem that misspelled “tiger” that you had to read in Intro to Poetry, William Blake was an outsider artist, printmaker, revolutionary, and poet who regularly had visions of angels that inspired his lengthy prophetic works in which he detailed his own personal mythology of gods and wondrous beasts battling for control of the very soul of the world.

In his reading of “Candle in the Wind ‘97,” Ewing makes the interesting note that the passing reference to “England’s greenest hills” in the lyrics in turn invokes “Jerusalem,” specifically its opening couplet “And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green.” Ewing reads this as a moment in which the vaguely messianic imagery surrounding the late Princess Diana almost coheres, gesturing towards “what England might have if we finally got rid of the Royal Family” due to the hymn-version of the poem’s status as an alternative national anthem to “God Save the Queen,” noting the spikiness of invoking this in the context of Diana’s fraught relationship with the Royal Family proper. Ewing labels this reading as “tenuous,” which is perhaps, fair, except the tenuousness fits perfectly into what “Jerusalem” actually is.

“Jerusalem” is in practice part of the preface to Blake’s second-longest completed prophecy Milton A Poem. Indeed, it is arguable whether this is even true – as with many of Blake’s works, Milton a Poem is a complex textual phenomenon. Four of the engraved and illuminated manuscripts that Blake himself prepared survive. Three of these, known as copies A, B, and C, were printed in 1811, while a fourth copy, D, was printed in 1818. Despite being printed along with Copies A and B, Blake tinkered with Copy C over the years, and it more closely resembles Copy D. As a result, five plates appear only in Copies C and D, and a sixth plate is unique to Copy D. A seventh plate, however, appears only in Copies A and B.…

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