Eruditorum Press

Incremental progress meets Zeno’s Paradox

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:

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Coffee (LOST)

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“Artists should not be trusted. If an artist is not deceitful
every so often in the cause of his art, then he is a poor artist.”
— Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev
LOST was quite possibly one of the biggest shows to hit television in the last decade. More remarkable was the fact that it was ostensibly “cult television” and yet it still hit it big in the mainstream. It was never the highest rated show on television, but it was in the American top-20 for most of its six-year run, it was the most recorded TV show at the time, and it was also an international sensation. It garnered 55 Emmy nominations (the American equivalent of BAFTAs) winning 11; many critics once called one of the greatest shows ever made.
As far as this blog is concerned, we shouldn’t be surprised. Like Doctor Who, LOST provided a means by which disparate genres could be smashed together. Doctor Who has the TARDIS; LOST had The Island. A place for people who were metaphorically lost in their lives, it allowed all kinds of different stories to play out. One week The Fugitive would be running about helping people and all the while trying to evade the law. Next week there might be a medical drama, followed by a comedy, a family drama, a love story, a con game, or a tragedy. This all got mixed in with the adventure of exploring a mysterious Island, populated by ghosts, time travel, an Island god, and a Smoke Monster for good measure. It hit the sweet spot of soap tropes and “genre” mythology.
Today its reputation is far different, and it’s impossible to go back and watch it again without keeping this in mind. The finale (as was the case for most of its final season) was largely panned, and it isn’t unusual to find it on a critic’s “10 worst” list of some sort or another. People expected answers that were never delivered; new but less compelling characters came to the forefront; the show veered into iconography better found in a greeting card penned by Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Which really begs the question: What the hell happened?
~~~ whooosh ~~~
KATE: We have to go back for him.
CHARLIE: Go back? There? Kate, there’s a certain
gargantuan quality about this thing.
(1×01: Pilot, Part 1)
~~~ whooosh ~~~
It’s August 15th, 2005. Oasis is poised to hit number one, with McFly, Babyshambles, Iron Maiden, and British Whale all charting. Americans are killing Iraqis, but Indonesia signs a peace treaty with the Free Aceh Movement, so there’s that. India celebrates its 60th Independence Day. Helios Airways Flight 522 crashes near Athens, killing 121.
While on Netflix, it’s Disc One of Season One of LOST. I inhale it quicker than Bill Clinton can suck down a cigar. Yes, I’m late, almost a year late to the LOST party (it premiered on September 22nd, the Fall Equinox of 2004) but it won’t take me long to go back and get caught up.
…

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Believing the Victim

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A week or two ago there was a bit of a to-do within American comics fandom when Brian Wood, a prominent writer often praised for his commitment to feminism and his well-written female characters, was accused of sexual harassment by Tess Fowler, an illustrator and artist. This has been the occasion for a lot of hand-wringing about the chronic problem of harassment at conventions, which mostly seems to consist of people making blog posts about how this is a serious issue. There’s very little sense of what can be done.

So here’s a suggestion: by default, we should believe the victims. On a basic, human, personal level, if someone makes an accusation of abuse, assault, or harassment, we should believe them.

Here’s what happens instead. Fowler’s account of what happened was, inevitably, picked over by large swaths of the male-dominated comics fandom who were eager to minimize the severity of what Wood did or to find a way to blame her for it. All of this is accompanied by lots of skepticism, usually with phrases like that Wood is “innocent until proven guilty” or that it’s “his word against hers.”

It’s not, of course. Fowler noted that she had several people who had e-mailed her with similar experiences. I’ve seen at least one person come forward with a similar allegation against Wood. There’s a pattern of behavior on Brian Wood’s part that’s disturbing, to say the least.

But never mind the specifics. Let’s look at some of the usual canards that get brought out around this point in the discussion, just in the abstract case. Because this isn’t really about Brian Wood. “Innocent until proven guilty,” for instance. Which is an important principle… in criminal law. It’s there because the standards by which the state can declare that someone ought be locked up in prison really should be high. If we are, as a society, going to sanction violence against people then we need to have serious safeguards. And one of them is that we wait until there’s proof in a court of law, beyond a reasonable doubt, of guilt.

But that’s not the standard that should apply to everyday interactions. If a guy at a comics convention offers to take you up to his room and you know that three people have reported that he’s sexually harassed them or assaulted them, you’re not unreasonable for deciding that you don’t want to go up there. Even if he’s never been “proven” guilty. And you’re not unreasonable for thinking that if someone knows that the guy chatting you up has a litany of accusations against him they should probably warn you about it.

Similarly, the “his word against hers” line. Yes, it is. But once you have an accusation of assault or harassment, the person being accused has a pretty obvious reason to deny it regardless of what actually happened. Whereas the victim… doesn’t really. I mean, yes, false accusations happen occasionally. But they’re very, very rare – much rarer than the rate at which sexual assault and harassment take place.…

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The Size of the Mouth and the Size of the Brain (Partners in Crime)

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DEMIURGE! (This has to be the most obscure caption
I’ve done in ages.)

It’s April 5th, 2008. As you might imagine, very little has changed. We’ve just calmly plowed from the end of Torchwood Season Two into Doctor Who’s fourth season, specifically Partners in Crime.

Partners in Crime stands out as one of the most structural pieces Davies has ever done. Davies, on the commentary track, describes the story as in part a work of petulance on his part. Given that everyone expected he’d do a darker story to help change the perception of Donna from The Runaway Bride, he decided to turn towards comedy more thoroughly than he had in the past. And yet in all of this what jumps out is that Catherine Tate doesn’t do any comedy bits until her “mime at the Doctor” sequence when they finally meet. She’s in a comedy, yes, but she’s playing it straight the entire time.
This, more than anything, constitutes the reinvention of the character. Had Davies taken the obvious route of just throwing Donna into something dark and serious (i.e. either of the next two stories) he would have ended up with a functional character, but at the expense of having any reason to give the role to Catherine Tate. You don’t cast Catherine Tate for the latest iteration of generic companion. So Donna needs to retain the frisson of wrongness that animated The Runaway Bride. There the joke was that David Tennant was stuck with a character off of The Catherine Tate Show, and this was not a narrative he was well-suited to. 
But a comedy sketch character can barely be stretched over an hour (Davies, quite sensibly, gives her an emotional arc so that she grows at the end). To do it over a season would be suicide – a fact so self-evident that even Doctor Who fans realized it and panicked when Tate was announced as the new companion. And so Donna had to be moved away from being a sketch character while still finding a way to retain the fact that she was an unusual choice as a companion.
Hence the structure, where we get an overtly comedic episode in which Catherine Tate gets exactly two comedy bits, only one of which – the one at the very end of the episode – involves her playing a Catherine Tate Show character. This provides a sort of halfway house for Donna as a character – she retains the genre colliding aspects she was first created with, but doesn’t actually have to be that character full-time in the narrative. 
Instead, Donna is built up as a sorrowful character. The key sequence comes when she all but watches a woman die, then goes back to her mother’s where she’s berated and belittled for a scene (done gorgeously in time lapse, with Donna sitting wearily at a table, never moving as the scene cuts forward on her mother’s diatribe), and then goes to talk to her grandfather who is supportive but inescapably sad.
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Saturday Waffling (November 23rd, 2013)

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Let’s talk about Jack Graham, writer of Shabogan Grafitti, who has just wrapped up his 50 post countdown of Marxist readings of Doctor Who scenes across the years. Cheeky, passionate, insightful, and altogether wonderful, it has been, for my money, the best part of the 50th Anniversary so far.

Read them all, but if you must have highlights, 3, 4, 15, 17, 20, 23, 25, 26, 30, 32, 37, 47, and 49.

Seriously. I have not even been in the running for best Doctor Who blog this month, and it’s not just because I spent it stuck on sodding Torchwood. It’s because Jack has hit this one out of the park. Repeatedly. I’ve read each one with a hint of jealousy, wishing I’d written them. He’s just about the most vibrant voice in Doctor Who blogging these days, and this has been an absolute masterstroke by him. Unless there’s something on TV you really want to watch, there’s no better way to spend your time today than reading these.

Wait, is there something on TV today?

Edit: Oh, hey, yes, there was. Thoughts?…

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Guest Post: Moths Ate My Girls Aloud CD

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Abigail Brady will get the sole power to decide if you ever get to see me play Soldeed. She is also responsible for starting the entire Chelsea Manning feud on Wikipedia by moving the article to its correct title. Beyond that, she’s invaluable for checking random facts about London for various projects and is an Iron Man villain. She also happily stepped in for a guest post on short notice. She is, in short, one of the five greatest people never to be Verity Lambert.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: what’s the connection between Phonogram and Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf  other than on November 17th, 2013 I went straight from seeing a panel discussion containing the writer of the first to a performance of the second?  After all, one is a comic taking an adult perspective on the someone from the middle of nowhere in the West Midlands’ teenage obsession, whereas the other… is the exact same thing but in plural.

Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf is a one-man standup show by Toby Hadoke, C-list Doctor Who celebrity, actor, writer and comic. It debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006, and did a West End run in 2008.  If you never saw it live, you’re now officially out of luck, as that performance I saw was supposedly the last (I speak as someone who went to two of Pitchshifter’s last tours) – an audio CD version released in 2007 by the BBC is your best bet.  It’s a picture of the role that Doctor Who played in his life from his early childhood up to about 2005.  There’s nothing massively unexpected: he is obsessed with it as a youngun, and eventually starts to lose hope about a return, then the new series is announced, which is  quite good, and he bonds with his son over it.  It’s quite funny: he does angry very well, with a nice sideline in self-mockery.  The performance was double-billed with his new show My Stepson Stole My Sonic Screwdriver, not entirely to the latter’s benefit. The biggest laugh that Sonic Screwdriver got was in the opening, just after a 15-minute interval, when he kept to his usual script and said “you may have seen my other show, Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf”…  Well, yes.
Phonogram is a comic, as well, but the other kind.  This one is by Kieron Gillen (writing) and Jamie McKelvie (arting), and was published from 2006 to 2010 by Image Comics. Its topic is neatly summarised by the identity equation that Gillen scrawls when signing copies: “MUSIC = MAGIC”.  It has an almost Mooreish take on matters, with the magic of music simultaneously being wholly metaphoric and completely literal.  Thus far there are thirteen issues over two volumes.  In the first, Rue Britannia, protagonist David Kohl, one of the few practitioners of music-magic (phonomancers) still rooted in the British guitar music scene of the 1990s, is tempted by the goddess Britannia into accepting a revival of Britpop. 
…

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1/2.*/”£5/8£-&'(?)WEX*zz (The Last War in Albion Part 19: Abslom Daak, Pressbutton and Laser Eraser)

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This is the second of seven parts of Chapter Four of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work onDoctor Who and Star Wars from 1980-81. An ebook omnibus of all seven parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. The ebook contains a coupon code you can use to get my recent book A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman for $3 off on Smashwords (the code’s at the end of the introduction). It’s a deal so good you make a penny off of it. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help support it. 

“Oh, and by the way, Pedro Henry is really Steve – HEY!! Leave it out, you! This is my typewriter! My typ1/2.*/”£5/8£-&'(?)WEX*zz” – Warren Ellis, fan letter to Warrior, 1983


PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s closest friend over the course of the War is Steve Moore, to whom he is not related. Steve Moore is a long-time comics professional who started in 1968, and bounced around the British comics industry in both an editorial and creative capacity. By 1979 he’d settled in as the writer of backup features, and, later, the main feature in Marvel UK’s new Doctor Who Weekly, where he would create one of his more enduring creations…

Figure 144: Abslom Daak makes a solemn vow. (Steve Moore
and Steve Dillon in Doctor Who Weekly #20, 1980)

The most significant of Steve Moore’s backup strips were a pair of stories introducing the character Abslom Daak. Daak’s first appearance was in Doctor Who Weekly #17 in a strip illustrated by Steve Dillon and titled simply Abslom Daak… Dalek-Killer. It opens with Daak being convicted of “murder, pillage, piracy, massacre, and other crimes too horrible to bring to the public attention” and being sentenced to his choice of “death by vaporisation or exile D-K.” Daak’s response is that “vaporisation doesn’t hurt,” and so he is teleported to a planet occupied by Daleks to kill as many as he can before they inevitably kill him. Thus do Daak and his chain-sword plunge to the Dalek-occupied world of Mazam, where Daak meets Taiyin and rescues her from Daleks. The story consists of Daak repeatedly trying to engage in suicidal assaults against the Daleks, openly wanting to die, and Taiyin steadily falling in love with him and trying to save him from his self-destructive impulses. Daak remains an over the top hero throughout; he wise-cracking, violent, lightly misogynistic, and virtually unkillable. The story ends with one of the handful of Daleks Daak has not murdered killing
Taiyin just as she admits her love for Daak. With her dying breath she tells him to live his life, leading him to scream his promise to “kill every damned, stinking Dalek in the galaxy!”

Daak’s story picks up about two months later in Moore’s Star Tigers, the first installment of which speaks volumes about how pleased Marvel UK was with Daak’s first appearance.
…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 72 (Being Human)

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Well, look, the pilot was in 2008. So we’re only a little ahead of ourselves. And it’s worth exploring now simply because Being Human is a show that reveals a lot about what television became in the wake of Doctor Who. Because in many ways Being Human is the first significant post-Doctor Who show. It’s had its imitators, as we saw back when we looked at Primeval and Robin Hood, but those were just that: attempts to discern the underlying formula of Doctor Who and replicate it. With Being Human we have something else – a show that on the one hand clearly exists only because of Doctor Who and on the other is clearly not a Doctor Who clone by any measure.

The premise of the show is simple and cheeky: a vampire (Mitchell), a werewolf (George), and a ghost (Annie) attempt to live together and maintain a semblance of a normal life. They routinely fail spectacularly, getting embroiled in supernatural goings-on – vampires trying to take over the world in the first and third seasons, and human supernatural hunters in the second. It’s good – it started, as mentioned, with a 2008 pilot, and then kicked off properly in 2009 and ran for five seasons. But we’ll cover it here, because it’s not really a show that had an influence on Doctor Who going forward: it’s one that, by its existence, demonstrates the influence Doctor Who was having.

And yet if you are to look for obvious influences on Being Human you’d end up in the 90s looking at the wave of goth-inspired vampire stories in the wake of the Interview with a Vampire movie. The ur-text here is probably White Wolf Entertainment’s World of Darkness line of role-playing games, the flagship of which was Vampire: The Masquerade. This game was an important moment of cultural history in terms of the steady merger of the goth scene and geek culture (see also the Sylvester McCoy era), synthesizing as much classic vampire fiction as possible into a game set in a gothed up and sexy version of the then-present day. Indeed, there are many points where Being Human feels like someone dusting off their old World of Darkness campaign notes and turning them into a television series.

Its self-descriptor – gothic-punk – is an interesting phrase, both because of the strange ahistorical nature of it (goth is, after all, an aesthetic that derived from punk) and because it situated Vampire: The Masquerade in its more relevant tradition, namely the “____punk” tradition kicked off by cyberpunk. That is to say, grim stories with tortured and fairly violent antiheroes wearing mirror shades at night. Matching traditional horror fiction tropes up with it is one of those ideas that’s both reasonably clever and so dead obvious it hurts. And so despite being trapped in one of the grimiest corners of nerd culture, White Wolf ended up accurately calling how vampires were going to work from now on.

(Yes, huge swaths do go back to Anne Rice, but Rice is ultimately writing romantic vampires.…

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Flood Extras

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Another cheery reminder that S. Alexander Reed and I have just had our book on They Might Be Giants’ Flood released by Bloomsbury Academic. You should buy it! On top of that, you should review it. No, really. The 33 1/3 series has a bit of a chronic problem in reviews, which is that people buy them expecting them to be extended Rolling Stone articles and then get cranky when they’re pop scholarship. So having people who understand what the book is trying to do put reviews in would really help. (Likewise, A Golden Thread is sad and unreviewed. Can you spare a few minutes for that?)

Right. So, you may recall Alex and I guest-editing 33 1/3’s blog last week. But we had some stuff on the cutting room floor, so I figured I’d use it here. First off, we have an entry that I am truly at a loss for why 33 1/3 decided not to run, preferring as they did our promo video…

Fifteen Cat GIFs Captioned With They Might Be Giants Lyrics

What’s that blue thing doing here?

A snowman with protective rubber skin.

Glass of milk standing in between extinction in the cold and explosive radiating growth

I took my boat for a car

She looked at me, I looked at something written across her scalp

The hip hop and the white funk just blew away my puppy’s mind

The water running down that pipe looks like a snake to me

Someone keeps moving my chair
By rocket to the moon, by airplane to the rocket, by taxi to the airport

The TV’s in Esperanto; you know that that’s a bitch

A jailer trapped in his cell

Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads

Where your eyes don’t go a part of you is hovering. It’s a nightmare that you’ll never be discovering.

What’s a guy like me supposed to do with all this extra savoir faire

And the person inside says nobody’s home, so your own worst enemy peeks inside
Secondly, I’ve got an extended version of my essay “How to Be Fifteen,” about adolescence, music, and mid-90s America.
How To Be Fifteen (and a Half)

The primal conflict underlying an American highschooler’s life is the fact that you are old enough to be into rock music and too young to actually go to any concerts. Not only is fifteen too young to drive, but even if you got to a show you’d run into the fairly fundamental problem that most of them have age restrictions. 
Instead the fifteen year old’s musical life is constrained by odd tendencies. Tracking down individual songs one wants is a months-long production in the pre-Napster days. The most reliable tactic is to call in requests to your local college radio station and to tape songs you want off the air, but this has mixed results at best. An attempt to get a copy of “Son of a Preacher Man” is met with a DJ apologetically being unable to find it and playing Cypress Hill’s “Hits From the Bong” instead.
…

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Outside the Government: Exit Wounds

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You did notice the giveaway of two free copies of my new book on Flood that I started on Saturday, yes? You should go take guesses and win my books.

It’s April 4th, 2008. My long nightmare of being too lazy to check whether Duffy is a single person or a band is over, as now Estelle is at number one with “American Boy.” Madonna, Sam Sparro, and domestic abuser Chris Brown also chart. In news, the Justice Department approves the merger of the US’s two satellite radio companies, reflecting the steady decline of that spectacularly wrong technological bet. Harriet Harman becomes the first female Labour Party MP to answer at Prime Minister’s Questions. And researchers at Newcastle University create a human-cow embryo that survives for three days.

While on television, back to debuting first on BBC Two we have Exit Wounds, the second season finale of Torchwood, in which a large swath of the original cast is killed off. The story itself is, of course, a hot mess. To suggest that Gray does not quite hold up as a villain is the height of understatement. The structure, as ever, is lovingly ripped off from Joss Whedon, with the “little bad” being supplanted in the end of the narrative by the “big bad.” But there’s a fundamental error here, which is that you cannot supplant James Marsters with Lachlan Nieboer playing a man who has vowed revenge on a seven year old for letting go of his hand. The idea of a figure from Jack’s past coming back to haunt him works, as does the idea of having one who’s a bigger deal than Captain John, but Gray is so transparently created for the purpose of being the shock villain for the season finale that there’s no substance to it. He’s not a part of Jack’s past – he’s a series finale “big bad” who’s been casually grafted into Jack’s past, at a point so early on that it’s not even particularly interesting.

But by now the show seems to be staring into the mirror and realizing that it’s not working. Gray doesn’t work, but the episode seems to know this, recognizing that he’s not the point of the narrative. Jack chloroforms him out of the plot at the 2/3 mark, and he doesn’t even enter it until the 1/3 mark, making him a strictly Act II concern. He’s in the story for all of fifteen minutes. The story is really about… Ah, but here’s the rub. It’s not about anything. The first act is another “oh no, total devastation to the city.” The second act is ostensibly about Gray, but turns out to have been about meticulously moving Tosh and Owen into position for their death conversation. And by the third act we’re on to a story that was really about killing off Tosh and Owen. The structure holds together as a piece of steadily moving action television – the Doctor Who team has long been solid at doing stories that change shape and focus midway through.…

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A Giant Book Launch

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Right, lots to cover here. First of all, the final part of Alex and my guest-editing 33 1/3’s blog is up, with me running over some videos of and about They Might Be Giants.

As this suggests, our book for the 33 1/3 series on They Might Be Giants’ 1990 landmark Flood is now available for purchase. The Kindle edition looks to be, for some reason, held back until November 28th. Nobody tells me anything about these things or why. Further frustrating is that in the UK, print isn’t available until January, although, oddly, you seem to be getting the Kindle edition in two weeks. There are no doubt sound reasons for this as well.

But enough about the details. Let’s talk about this book. And then after I talk about it, I’ll give two copies away.

Flood is, without being particularly autobiographical at all and with half of it written by someone else, probably the most personal book I’ve ever written. They Might Be Giants formed an absolutely massive part of my childhood cultural landscape, effectively plugging the gap between my flaming out of interest in Doctor Who come 1996 and the early stages of adulthood represented by college. They were the soundtrack to my middle and high school years.

Much of this had to do with their peculiar status as the quasi-official band of a summer camp for “gifted and talented” students that I went to. The camp, called CTY, was a three-week session in which you took a condensed eight-hour-a-day course, punctuated by a smattering of mandatory fun including a trio of weekly dances. Within these dances there was a canon of songs that absolutely had to be played somewhere in the event, culminating in the final song for every dance, Don McLean’s “American Pie,” a fact about which there is a ten thousand word essay just begging to be written.

CTY is an impossibly large experience for me. It marked the first time in which I was in any sort of social setting in which I was normal. Frighteningly so, at times. This necessitated a rather massive paradigm shift. And my experience was hardly unusual – indeed, Alex attended a few years before I did. The camp was also deeply leftist in terms of the leanings of its student population – there was a widespread protest against an administrative decision to forbid cross-dressing in 1997 – and an aggressively horizon-expanding experience. It is a carnivalesque experience for anyone whose usual social interactions are defined by the ever-present threat of bullying. That the age range in which one attends – 12-16 – coincides with puberty and interest in sex further adds to the strange and heady mix.

Returning to the dances, then, it is notable that They Might Be Giants had two songs in the canon: “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” No other band had two slots like that. No other band ever could. So let’s freeze the image there. In a context in which hundreds of nerds encounter widespread social acceptance for the first time, overlapping with sexual awakening, come weekly dances – a particularly fast pace of them.…

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