Eruditorum Press

This machine mildly irritates fascists

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:

A Split in the Skin of the World (The End of Time, Part Two)

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The lengths people will go to in order to get License to Kill
written out of canon…
A bombed out husk of imagined Londons, all the dead and abandoned futures piled up alongside each other. All the things that could have been, united by their shared experience of a moment where it became obvious that they actually never could be. Futures that have run out, been spent, boiled away to ruins, our cultural memento moris, reminding us all of the looming and inevitable death that is nostalgia. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. I don’t want to go.”
It is tempting to end on a more positive note. It is not as though I don’t enjoy The End of Time, or the Davies era. I quite love both. Really, I do.
But the Davies era has long since ended. We have parted the ways, and faced doomsday. We have seen the journey end and long since seen the next Doctor. We’ve praised it, buried it, critiqued it, and disinterred it several times to do it all again. And now we have The End of Time, an ending so absolute that it does not so much cut off the Davies era as it cuts off the abstract possibility of anything. With the Davies era refusing so spectacularly to die, few other options seem to exist but cutting off the very possibility of time’s advancement. End everything and you might just manage to kill it off too. 
If, in fact, there’s even any time left to have. By this point the contours of the last Davies episode are self-evident. It is going too far to suggest that all of Davies’s season finales (and this clearly counts) are the same, but there is a structure to them: a whirling mass of conceptual quotes, flipping channels endlessly until it resolves by declaring the permanence of Doctor Who as a narrative fixture. A regeneration story is going to be no different. A shell game – where in the narrative is the trap that kills the Doctor? Inevitably, the point will not be what kills the Doctor but the fact of his ongoing narrative role: a story that never ends. The justification for this lack of resolution will, as always, be populism. Doctor Who is loved, so it is not cancelled.
Underneath all of this, very low in the mix, is a very different sort of story. In every season after the first, the most interesting moment in terms of Davies’s own scripts has been the inevitable spiky and difficult story – the one where Davies stops trying to be quite so populist and throws something a bit ugly and unnerving on the screen. (And the only reason this can’t be said of the first season is that practically every Davies episode that season does it.) Love and Monsters, Gridlock, and Midnight are all cases where one can see a very different sort of Davies: an angry one clearly considerably more skeptical and cynical about the world.
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Venison with Mushroom Jus, Oven Roasted Potatoes, and Salad with Walnuts, Pears, and Goat Cheese

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I can make a really good rabbit dish too, if you’re wondering.

Some people have been oddly requesting that bits of my food writing make it to the blog one of these days. So here you go – a totally out of left field post to satisfy the two or three people who have requested that.

Background – Jill did a lot of the work with packaging the Kickstarter rewards, and so as a reward after the last day of it, I promised her a wine dinner. “Wine dinner,” in this case, means a game we play sometimes whereby she picks a bottle of wine and I go to the grocery store and cobble together a meal to pair with it. In this case we were already out, so we didn’t grab anything from my existing wine cellar. Instead we went to a liquor store and asked for a weird bottle, and they helpfully provided a bottle of Southern Right 2010 Pinotage. (A sort of odd South African cousin of Pinot Noir.)

There are tricks to this sort of thing. I use a pair of books Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg called What To Drink With What You Eat and The Flavor Bible. I’ve got both on Kindle, and can pull them up for quick reference on my phone. Both do what they say on the tin. The former has an index of foods and an index of wine varietals and recommended pairings for each. The latter is an index of foods with complimentary flavors and ingredients.

Among the recommended items for Pinotage was “game meats,” with venison recommended in particular. The Woman had been requesting I make venison for a while anyway, so I decided now was the time.

The Flavor Bible recommended a bunch of things for venison, but a couple jumped out at me: mushrooms, apples, pears, stocks, rosemary, and juniper berries. I also knew that venison was typically recommended with a marinade. I figured I’d go for something fairly simple: this seemed the time for a basic meat and potatoes dish, probably with a salad.

In terms of the salad, another pairing for Pinotage was goat cheese, so I figured there I’d go with something classic: a lettuce, fruit, nut, and cheese salad with a vinaigrette. It’s a really basic salad, and works almost every time. Since pears had been recommended for venison, I went with those, the goat cheese, and walnuts, and a cider vinaigrette. Simple and straight forward. Which was the watchword here – this didn’t seem a dish that was going to call for anything fancy or overly heavy. My usual logic is that when you have an unusual ingredient you’re trying to spotlight, you provide a pretty simple, basic platform for it.

For potatoes I thought a straightforward oven-roasted recipe. I usually do those with just salt and pepper, but I decided some rosemary would work nicely this time. It’s a longstanding preparation for me – I sometimes do it on the grill, other times in the oven, but it’s one of my go-to sides for meat.…

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A Woman (The End of Time, Part One)

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Wilf reacts to the news that Claire Bloom is playing the Rani.
It’s December 25th, 2009. Rage Against the Machine are at number one with “Killing in the Name,” a feat of countercultural rebellion cooked up by people who got tired of the crown of the Christmas #1 being dominated year after year by The X Factor and who thus decided to try to send a different single to number one. Also in the charts are Lady Gaga, Robbie Williams, Rihanna, Journey, Cheryl Cole, the Black Eyed Peas, and X Factor winner Joe McElderry.
In news, since The Gift made its bow, the Treaty of Lisbon has come into force, Terry Wogan has presented his final breakfast show, and polling in advance of the 2010 general election has shown the Conservatives with various degrees of leads. Also, David Tennant has been all over every talk show imaginable doing a farewell tour as the Doctor, as Christmas marks the first episode of his two-part departure, The End of Time. After all the festivities have died down, long after the episode has aired, it is possible to go and download the podcast commentary from the BBC and to watch the episode again, immediately, with DVD-style commentary. You still can, though it’s harder to do these days. 
The commentary consists of Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner, at 8:30 in the morning on December 11th, 2009 doing a straight shot of recording commentary for this and The End of Time Part 2 while simultaneously answering phones and checking e-mails as part of their new normal workday in Los Angeles, where they were in effect sent by the BBC after finishing Doctor Who with the mandate “make us some high profile co-productions, starting with Torchwood.” 
As with most commentaries featuring Davies and Gardner, it is in many ways an extended pat on the back for itself. They are quick to highlight how “marvelous” things are. But equally, they’re not wrong. Their first example, Bernard Cribbins, really is marvelous. But there is a subtler dynamic beneath the surface: Gardner and Davies both praise Cribbins enthusiastically, but then Davies digresses to point out that the street he’s walking down is one they’ve used in every other Christmas special. Gardner sits quietly, and then calmly declares that she wants to go back to talking about Bernard Cribbins, obviously finding the obsessive detail spotting involved in Davies’s fannish observation (which is firmly in the same tradition as any number of other fannish practices – “spot the recycled location/set/prop” is a positively august fan tradition) rather spectacularly less than interesting. It’s not quite a prickly moment, but it’s only one step away from it. And then a moment later the two of them are geeking out ecstatically over the nature of Bernard Cribbins’s acting skill and precisely what it is that he’s so good at. 
In under a minute of commentary the entire sweep of the Gardner/Davies partnership becomes clear. And this is a significant thing.
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Saturday Waffling (March 15th, 2014)

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Absolutely scrambling at deadlines right now, although I just about sort of kind of maybe but not really have them under something resembling control. Sorry, thus, for a recklessly short Waffling – I’m just absolutely buried.

Let’s just do Q&A, shall we? Depending on the level of response I may or may not get to everything promptly, but I’ll at least answer what schedule permits.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 29 (The Tennant Doctor Who Magazine Comics)

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It’s strange, I’ve been writing about the Tennant era for nine months now, and yet reading the compiled Tenth Doctor comics from Doctor Who Magazine the thing that jumps out most immediately is the amount of time enveloped in them. It helps that there’s a change in editors and a late change of direction as a result, but even without that there’s a sense of size and history here that is perhaps lost when looking at the story-to-story changes of the Tennant years.
Actually, let’s start with that change in editors. The majority of the Tenth Doctor’s comics are edited by Clayton Hickman. No account of of Doctor Who is ever going to allege that Hickman is one of the great and most important figures in the history of the series, which is true in a sort of blandly factual sense, but obscures the fact that on the occasions where Clayton Hickman does enter the margins of the story he inevitably acquits himself marvelously. Whether as the talking head who obligingly filled in context so that some washed up 70s actress or another appears to actually make sense in Doctor Who Confidential, as Gareth Roberts’s funnier writing partner on audio, television, and ideally, a bizarre and inscrutable DVD extra for The Masque of Mandragora, as the cover designer for the classic series DVDs, as the terribly sweet seeming judge for Companion Academy, or just as that nice man on Twitter who keeps mistakenly saying good things about my blog, Clayton Hickman is very possibly the figure in Doctor Who it is least possible to say mean things about without feeling like a complete and utter bastard.
But one thing that becomes clear reading the commentary at the end Panini Press collections of Tenth Doctor comics is that there is nowhere in his contributions to Doctor Who that Hickman is more in his element than editing the comics for Doctor Who Magazine. None of this is meant as a knock against the last run of Tenth Doctor comics, edited by Tom Spilsbury. The final run, an ongoing story with a comics-exclusive companion, is a satisfying homage to the way comics were before the arrival of Doctor Who as a global megabrand, and the final Donna story, “The Time of My Life,” is both clever and terribly moving. But nowhere in the Panini books does one get the sense of Tom Spilsbury as an editor who lived and breathed the details of the comic. (Although it’s certainly possible he’s actually just less prone to talking about himself.) 
(It’s also worth briefly acknowledging the second line of comics in Doctor Who Adventures – over five hundred pages of short done-in-ones that tended to pick up with the Doctor and Rose already in some sort of danger, and to romp madly through absurd premises. Good fun, but not something I’m going to cover in detail.)
Hickman, on the other hand, is clearly the sort of nightmarish editor a good writer dreams of: one who is going to challenge detail after detail, who has no tolerance whatsoever for crap, and who is going to make damn sure anything that goes out under his editorial name is going to be brilliant.
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Fantasies in the Here and Now (The Last War in Albion Part 35: Skizz and E.T.)

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This is the first 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 wrote numerous short stories for 2000 A.D., but the holy grail of comics assignments in early 80s Britain was an ongoing series. In March of 1983, he finally got a crack at one…

“Best bet is to set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.” – Neil Gaiman


Moore finished his time doing shorts for IPC the way he began it – by trying to learn new storytelling techniques. In this regard his comments about “doing an apprenticeship in public” and using short stories to learn “to do all the things that you will have to do in a bigger work but in a much more constrained space” are very much on target through and through. He used his time at IPC to learn his trade and craft. That not all of his experiments came off is, in many ways, proof of this fact. But notably, many of the experiments that did come off demonstrate techniques he would later make considerable use of, up to and including his confidence in purely visual storytelling that he was clearly trying to build in his last few strips. The effect is not entirely unlike the old story about Michelangelo creating the David by taking a block of marble and removing everything that wasn’t the David. The figure that is Alan Moore visibly emerges into the narrative, and comes ever more into focus over the course of these dozens of short stories.
Figure 261: 2000 AD‘s humorous conceit that its
comics were produced by robots under the command
of the alien Tharg the Mighty did not always result
in the most dignified of public portrayals of its
employees. (From 2000 AD #322)
Indeed, it’s clear that by the time he was done with his Future Shocks that he had, in practice, emerged. He visibly stopped doing Future Shocks in order to focus on his new and much higher-paying gig doing Swamp Thing at DC Comics. There is no serious way to describe Alan Moore in the autumn of 1983 as a tentative journeyman. Indeed, as we noted, even within the period working on Future Shocks for 2000 AD there is a clear dividing line in March of 1983, when Moore began writing his first ongoing for 2000 AD, Skizz.
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You Were Expecting Someone Else 28: The Forgotten

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A commissioned essay for ?ukasz Bury.

The Forgotten is a different sort of Doctor Who comic to any we’ve discussed before. For one thing, it’s American – so American, in fact, that it didn’t even get a UK release. This was a peculiarity of IDW’s deal to acquire the license: because Panini has the UK license already, none of IDW’s Doctor Who comics could be distributed in the UK (which is why their Star Trek/Doctor Who crossover led with Star Trek – because that made it technically a Star Trek comic that could thus get UK distribution. No, really, the licensing rules are that dumb). 
IDW, upon acquiring the license, commenced with a two-pronged approach. First was a six issue run of Tenth Doctor/Martha Jones comics by Gary Russell, with art by Nick Roche, which was published alongside reprints of 70s/80s Doctor Who Magazine material starting with Doctor Who and the Iron Legion, all with quite slick colouring. (These books are presumably out of print or on their way out of print now that IDW has lost the license, and I actually highly recommend them if you can track them down. Voyager has never looked so good.) The initial Ten/Martha series was followed by Doctor Who: The Forgotten, intended to be by Tony Lee and Pia Guerra, the latter fresh off the esteemed Y: The Last Man series with Brian K. Vaughan, and the former a writer with some Doctor Who pedigree, having written a few Tenth Doctor strips for Doctor Who Magazine (which we’ll speak more of on Wednesday). Technically this is a bit old – it’s properly set right after Journey’s End. But I like doing comics stuff at the end of a Doctor – it’s become quasi-traditional. So. 
The major hook for The Forgotten was that it was the first “all the Doctors ever” story of the new series. That this would be at all novel already feels like an odd historical moment – even if we’ve not had a televised The Thirteen Doctors due to some actors being inconsiderately dead, we get compilations and sets of the entire line of Doctors fairly regularly at this point. And given that this was pointedly not “all the Doctors meet” but rather a story about the Tenth Doctor regaining his memories by exploring a museum of his past selves. Still, this was by far the most substantive crossover between the new series and the classic series that existed to date – especially given that the first issue predated The Next Doctor, and thus predated our first on-screen montage of the classic series.
On the one hand, then, this is a fairly slick production. Tony Lee knows his stuff pretty well, and has researched the rest. There are bits where his characterizations are a bit inept – his Hartnell never feels right, and his Romana is miles off base – but it’s not as though plenty of longstanding Doctor Who writers haven’t fluffed characterizations in their day.
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Seeming: Madness and Extinction

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The disclaimer I offered back when I reviewed Assimilate, Alex Reed’s sweeping analysis of industrial music, does not even begin to apply here. I’ve been hearing bits of these songs since 2007. For several of these songs the version on the album is the sixth or seventh version I’ve heard, and that’s discounting times he just pulled out a guitar and played something for me. So on top of being an album by one of my best friends (as well as Aaron Fuleki, a more casual college friend and the other half of Seeming) this is an album I can’t even begin to come to fresh or without preconception.

So let’s not pretend that this is an impartial review. It’s not. It’s just a commitedly partisan case for why this is an incredibly good album that deserves to be recognized as a major album. In a just world, in ten year’s time some arrogant blogger and his music professor friend will write a 33 1/3 book about this album. In a just world, it will be on “greatest something or others of the sometime or others” lists in music magazines. It is phenomenal and brilliant and you should buy it, whether on iTunes, Amazon, Amazon UK, or from the label itself. If you want a preview, the album is available for streaming here.

Really. You should go buy it. I mean, feel free to finish the blogpost and listen to the embedded songs and all that, but please, really, if you like it, buy it. First week sales matter absolutely massively for things like this. This is a new band and a first album, and if it turns good first week numbers then that translates to a successful band that gets to do more albums. If you like what you hear and read here and think you might buy it, please, please, do it this week.

That out of the way, let’s get to the fun bit, where I talk about why this is so good.

Seeming is not Alex’s first band. As ThouShaltNot he put out four albums packed with satisfyingly and seductively catchy goth/darkwave grooves. His knack for an earworm is impeccable. And every song on Madness and Extinction demonstrates that skill. But they do it without being anything like a straightforward or approachable pop song.

Instead the pop hooks keep withering in front of you, or slithering just out of view, hiding and teasing from deep beneath the intricate soundscapes that he’s built up. I mentioned above that the album has been in the works since 2007. And that shows. Not just because it has the benefit of cherry picking the best of Alex’s songwriting over the last seven years, but because it means that every song is a rich and dense object full of beautiful noise and splendor.

The result are songs that get caught in your head, but that, marvelously, don’t grow tired and cliche as you listen to them.…

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Outside the Government 16: Dreamland

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The first question with one of these, and by “one of these” I mean bits of Doctor Who made post-2005 that are not television episodes, is why it exists. This is not pejorative in the least – it’s just that with all the brand management that goes into Doctor Who post-2005, causing an officially licensed story featuring David Tennant’s Doctor as the lead character to exist is non-trivial. There are meetings, and budgets, and all sorts of non-trivial processes and hoops to jump through. Which means that a project like Dreamland only exists because of a complex network of politicized corporate decisions.
In the context of 2009, at least, it’s easy to understand. Doctor Who was being very naughty, after all. Coming off of its hottest year ever, a program that was pulling in a fantastic amount of money for the BBC decided to kick up its feet and take a year off prior to returning in a new and altogether more uncertain form. It was a massively high risk strategy, and the fact that Davies (and Moffat) could get away with it speaks volumes about how successful Doctor Who was and how unassailable Davies’s position was at that time. Nevertheless, there were, so to speak, bills to pay and favors due all around. The absence of Doctor Who proper meant an unusual amount of what we might call Doctor Who improper; things like The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith. 
Which is to say that a fair part of why the BBC whipped up a roughly episode-length string of six animated episodes to throw onto the recently renamed BBC Red Button service was because Doctor Who owed the BBC a promotional favor, much as the outsized presence of Tennant and Piper in the 2005 Children in Need broadcast existed as a counterweight to the unusual decision to make “Pudsey Cutaway” a straight bit of Doctor Who instead of something that gave way to a comedic conceit at some point. The major purpose of Dreamland was to give the BBC Red Button service something a-list to air. 
At least, that’s the one hand. On the other hand, Dreamland is a rather obviously cheaply made bit of fluff that got farmed out to a de facto Big Finish team with Gary Russell directing and Big Finish stalwarts David Warner and Lisa Bowerman popping up to act. Large swaths of the cast, most blatantly Tim Howar, have clearly not looked at the script prior to recording lines for it. Tennant, as with The Infinite Quest, is on autopilot that’s tempered only by his underlying skill. And the animation style is, to be charitable, complete shit.
This is, to say the least, a problem. There’s a general assumption that animation is somehow easy or trivial – within Doctor Who it’s seen most clearly in the reflexive belief that animating any missing stories that Phil Morris doesn’t happen to be sitting on is just a straightforward and unambiguously sane thing to do, not, apparently, realizing that animation is phenomenally difficult and complex unless you’re actively going for something that supports what might be called a low-fi aesthetic (South Park, for instance, where the fact that the characters all look like paper cutouts is part of the show’s point and conceit).
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Saturday Waffling (March 8th, 2014)

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Right. So, all these packages should go out Monday or Tuesday, at which point I’ll have to figure out what to do with my spare time besides huddle in a basement signing books and shoving them in envelopes. Perhaps I’ll take up writing.

Meanwhile, plans continue to slowly solidify for Kickstarter Round Two. This Kickstarter will in effect cover what I’m thinking of as Phase Two of Philip Sandifer: Writer – the run of Last War in Albion that will take us to the start of Watchmen and the finale of TARDIS Eruditorum, which is big enough that I’ve already started writing it.

Since there’s usually one or two quite good ideas when I throw the doors open, any ideas for rewards? The usual stuff can be assumed – ebooks, print books, and signed books. Signed books are going to be priced better – I’m thinking $50 for a book, with no increase for international shipping. Yes, that’s more expensive, but after four days in a basement and realizing just how much physical merchandise can make cost calculations on a Kickstarter go wobbly I’m actively trying to minimize physical merchandise for this Kickstarter. That’s not to say there won’t be any, but I want to focus more on things like custom essays, ebooks, et cetera and less on things that make the budget go wibbly.

So, ideas? What would people like me to offer?…

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