Eruditorum Press

We’re all for praxis, just not for going outside

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 Side Jaunt of Internet Politics

6

I try to avoid side posts other than the meat and matter of the blog, but occasionally an issue comes up that seems to me worth remarking on, and in this case it is at least relevant to this blog.

You may have noticed that this blog has an overtly left-wing perspective that is actively sympathetic to, among other things, feminism. This perspective is in part the product of extensive reading. Some of that reading consists of academic tomes and philosophy. Other parts of that reading consist of blogs and casual conversations. And one of the single biggest sources for my viewpoints are a wealth of feminist bloggers. It is my genuine belief – and I say this as someone well familiar with academic popular culture studies – that the best work in the field is often done by feminist bloggers. They have quietly reinvented or helped to reinvent a wealth of new perspectives that have been jaw-droppingly lively and productive for understanding media.

Among the ones who have influenced me – and this list is not a list of the greats, but an idiosyncratic list – are places like DC Women Kicking Ass, A Random String of Bits, Game Girl Advance, and Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. These are, of course, just the ones I happen to remember – there are many more stray LiveJournals and the like I’ve read one or two posts by and not written down or remembered the name, but have been quietly influenced by and responding to for years now.

I say all of this because there is a well-documented problem of female bloggers getting viciously trolled and abused, with threats of rape and sexual violence against them and horribly derogatory personal attacks. The Guardian ran a chillingly good story on it this weekend, but it’s not the first thing I’ve seen on the topic. It’s a real problem.

I love the feminist blogosphere. They are among the giants whose shoulders I stand upon. And so I want to make this post. Partially because raising awareness of the issue matters. Partially because it’s important to stress that this is a human issue, not a women’s issue – anyone who is interested in having a world with more exciting, moving, and interesting comments and observations in it wants more women bloggers.

But mostly to say this:

I have very, very good commenters on this blog. But then, I’m a male, and apparently that helps me. I can’t imagine most of my readers are the sorts of people who send vicious abuse to female bloggers, mostly because I can’t imagine that what I write would be of interest to an asinine cave troll who would do things like that.

All the same, if there is any blogger, anywhere in the world, that you would e-mail to berate for their physical appearance, that you would threaten or joke about raping or hurting, or that you would advocate violence against, you had damn well better be willing to make those exact same threats to me.…

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How Easy it Is to Be a Magician (Masque of Mandragora)

38

Close your eyes, give me your hand, darling.

It’s September 4, 1976. ABBA are at number one with “Dancing Queen,” a fact that says more about the zeitgeist than anything else I can hope to say. But for the sake of completism, it stays at #1 for all four weeks of this story. Wings, Bryan Ferry, Rod Stewart, The Bee Gees, and Elton John and Kiki Dee also chart. And The Ramones release their first album, which is the sort of thing that means we can start talking about punk when the mood strikes us.

Since The Seeds of Doom, the most obvious thing to say happened is that Harold Wilson unexpectedly resigned as Prime Minister on March 16th, and the Labour Party voted James Callaghan in as his successor. This is, as it happens, not going to end well. In other news, Apple Computer was formed, the UK actually wins Eurovision, the Soweto riots begin in South Africa, Viking 1 lands on Mars, the Son of Sam killings begin, and Big Ben breaks down for nine months.

While during this story, Mao Zedong dies, which is a kind of definitive end to an era. A fatal air collision occurs in what is now Croatia between a British Airways flight and a Yugoslavian flight, killing 176. The 100 Club Punk Special, an iconic and formative punk concert that put The Damned, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, The Sex Pistols, and Siouxie and the Banshees all on one two-day long bill, takes place, which means we can really talk about punk just as soon as Doctor Who bothers to make that option relevant. In a less fortunate rejoinder, U2 forms.

While on television, we have the start of a new season of Doctor Who, and a return to the wide world of human history. Prior to my power/Internet exploding (and off and on since then), I found myself enjoying the great time-wasting distraction of the early 21st century, arguing with people on the Internet. Or, more specifically, I found myself arguing with people on the Internet over whether or not Doctor Who is best considered a science fiction show or a fantasy show. Mostly I find the distinction not particularly worth making, but there’s a flavor of the “Doctor Who is sci-fi” argument that I find sufficiently loathsome that I can be reliably dragged in on it, and that’s that Doctor Who in some way supports a rationalist/skeptical view of the universe.

This is an unfortunate disease within science fiction fandom in general. I mean, I’m obviously a fairly pro-science kind of guy, and I salute the people who devote time to taking down “alternative medicine” cranks that, in a real and literal sense, kill people. But there’s a second flavor of skepticism that amounts to an effort to eradicate non-scientific thinking in favor of the belief that science is the only meaningful form of truth. This is the sort of skepticism favored by evangelical atheists, anti-postmodernists of the Alan Sokal school, and other groups of people I am less than fond of (though, to be fair, most adherents to either perspective can be fairly easily brought around by encountering theists who are not theocratic lunatics or postmodernists who can speak reality when called upon to do so – most of the hardline skepticism crowd, much as they irritate me, are good folks).…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 13 (System Shock, Virgin Books, 1995)

, 11

Reasonable people, by which I’m pretty sure I mean Stephen, one of my wise and decorated commenters, expected me to go for Stephen Marley’s Managra, a metafictional romp through the history of British culture in the far future that even features Aleister Crowley. (I say pretty sure because Connecticut got slammed by the worst snowstorm I have seen in my life last weekend. Nearly a foot of heavy, wet snow falling on trees that still had leaves on them. This turned out to exceed their intelligent design parameters. The result is that 99% of my town is without power. The good news is, this time I am the 1%. The bad news is, I didn’t dodge the Internet outage, so doing things like actually checking past comments is beyond me. But I’m optimistic that I can at least keep a posting schedule.)

There are many good reasons why I would pick that book, and I see why probably-Stephen assumed I would cover it. The thing is, I’ve said an awful lot about metafiction and British culture already in the Hinchcliffe era, and while I’m sure I’ll do Managra when I take another pass in the book version, clearly I skipped it. Equally clearly, at least to those who read titles and look at pictures, is that I’m doing Justin Richards’s System Shock instead, a book which probably-Stephen expressed some surprise as to why I would do.

The answer, probably-Stephen, is that I am a sucker for 90s techno-thrillers about computers, and that I am completely powerless to resist any book that is set, quite literally, “when the information superhighway comes online” in 1998. So crack open a bottle of Zima and put on some Jewel. Because it’s 1995, and people are about to make some very, very embarrassing predictions.

That is of course, terribly unfair of me. But it’s very difficult to read System Shock in 2011 without laughing at its naiveté. The most obvious example is the one we’ve already discussed – the charmingly dated phrase “information superhighway.” This phrase rightly serves as a sort of memetic tombstone for a particular historical moment in digital technology – what we might call the last moment in which you could get away with being stupid about digital technology in public. (It is not, obviously, the end of public stupidity about digital technology in public – merely the end of where you can get away with it. Consider the degree to which, ten years after the date Richards pegs for the information superhighway coming online, the degree to which the ostensibly similar “series of tubes” metaphor proves to be a massive PR disaster for Ted Stevens)

The phrase does not have a clear inventor, although its prominence is due largely to Al Gore. Gore, who had been closely following digital issues as a Senator for decades before becoming Vice President, used the term with reasonable frequency, and so upon becoming Vice President, his newfound profile catapulted the term into the mainstream. But, equally crucially, Al Gore was a politician who liked giving money to the geeks.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 6 (Doctor Who and the Pescatons)

, 15

There is a thread that we should follow up on from Friday. We established that The Seeds of Doom was quite entertaining. But there is a serious ethical critique to be raised against it. And you’d kind of hope that there would be more people who would prioritize the ethical critique over the entertainment defense. There’s something terribly unfortunate about the fact that a story that is at best wholly amoral and at worst outright ethically bankrupt can be genuinely believed by fans to be the 16th best Doctor Who story ever.

Which brings us to Doctor Who and the Pescatons, about which it is far more easy to find things to criticize than it is to find things to praise. This in and of itself is hardly an unusual position for Doctor Who to be in. Nobody gets to active Doctor Who fandom without going through a few paragraphs that begin “In spite of…” There’s even a complex if unofficial set of rules to this sort of thing. It makes sense – loving Doctor Who necessarily involves a fair amount of taking green bubble wrap seriously. But there are also pathological elements to it.

Sometimes the pathology is harmless and, if you look at it the right way, even kind of endearing. There are people who factionalize hilariously within fandom, and come to love or hate a particular era with a verve that pushes them to absurdly indefensible positions. To use an example I mentioned in an earlier entry, say what one likes about “The Wedding of River Song,” but to complain that it’s a letdown in terms of how it resolves its plotlines while praising Pyramids of Mars as a classic when it pulls up lame as badly as it does in the fourth episode is to demonstrate a complete and utter disconnection from reality. 

But there are cases that go further than this. Fans want desperately to love Doctor Who, and sometimes are far too willing to excuse real problems in order to do so. This is not unique to Doctor Who fandom. Indeed, it’s not really unique to fans. People are defensive of the things they love. A normal person would look at The Celestial Toymaker and say “well that’s racist crap.” But a Doctor Who fan, if they can bring themselves to admit that it is racist, is going to be actively depressed by that fact. And so many opt not to admit it, pretending that it or Tomb of the Cybermen are just fine. And this is a more pathological and upsetting aspect of fandom, and one we see pretty clearly with The Seeds of Doom.

But this brings us back to The Pescatons. Because while fans are willing to blind themselves to the faults of television episodes, it’s rare to see them so willing to protect spin-off material. Few people are moved to defend the New Adventures or Big Finish Audios with the same passionate fervor as people will line up to explain why, despite the overwhelming pile of evidence, to explain why The Celestial Toymaker isn’t racist.…

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An Unintelligent Enemy (The Seeds of Doom)

24

I was going to just caption this “It’s…”, but then I chickened
out because it seemed too obscure and decided on an
awkward meta-commentary instead. 

It’s January 31, 1976. Queen is dead, but it’s not particularly lonely on the living because ABBA are at number one with “Mamma Mia,” a song that performs that classic pop trick of setting itself a low bar to clear and sailing miles over it. It lasts for two weeks, and is unseated by Silk’s “Forever and Ever,” which lasts one week before falling to The Four Season’s “December ’63,” better known by its not-actual-title of “Oh What a Night.” a song that is frankly alarmingly easy to argue is about someone watching Barbara Wright be menaced by a Dalek so long as one ignores the detail that it’s an American song. It lasts two weeks before Tina Charles takes over with “I Love to Love.” Donna Summer, ELO, Manuel and the Music of the Montains, and The Who also chart.

While in real news, Cuba adopts its present constitution, an earthquake in Guatemala and Honduras kills over 22,000, and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, the disputed government of Western Sahara, is formed. For our purposes, however, most interesting is the revocation of Special Category Status for people arrested as part of the Troubles. (Special Category Status was a system whereby IRA members who were arrested for bombings and other crimes were treated as political prisoners and given certain privileges, most famously not having to wear a uniform. Its revocation was unpopular among IRA members, and many when arrested refused a uniform, engaging in protest by wrapping themselves only in their prison blankets. This became a powerful symbol for the Irish republican movement.)

Speaking of blowing things up, then, we have The Seeds of Doom. Which is apparently the 16th greatest Doctor Who story ever, at least if Doctor Who Magazine is to be believed. Which, given that it thinks that The Brain of Morbius is only 40th, it probably isn’t. But the fact that Tat Wood flags it in About Time as his least favorite story of the first six years of the Tom Baker era does mean that we have now identified Tat Wood’s most contrarian view about Doctor Who. And that’s interesting, because while I disagree with Wood on some big points, I’m pretty much of the view that he’s the most consistently intelligent commenter on Doctor Who to date. And on the comments, there’s been a larger debate brewing over whether the Hinchcliffe era is, in general, overrated. So here we have a story that, look, let’s just say up front is nowhere near as good as the 16th best Doctor Who story of all time that is flat-out loathed by Doctor Who’s best critic. If we’re going to talk about the overrated aspects of the Hinchcliffe era, here is, I suppose, where we must make our stand.

Wood’s critique stems from one – and actually, as we’ll see, in a way from all three – of the things everybody (By everybody, of course, I mean pathetic fans like me.…

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Sheer Poetry (The Brain of Morbius)

33

Marco… 

It’s January 3, 1976. Despite the fact that we have jumped three weeks into the future, Queen remain undisturbed at #1. It doesn’t move from number one during the next four weeks. Also charting are David Bowie, ABBA, Michael Oldfield, Barry White, and Greg Lake, the latter with “I Believe in Father Christmas,” which I would like to point out is easily one of the five best Christmas songs written by popular musicians in the latter half of the 20th century. Seriously not a bad four weeks for music there.

During the few weeks in which Steven Moffat’s Philip Hinchcliffe’s bold new idea of a midseason break for Doctor Who have played out, also known as Christmas, Carlos the Jackal and others kidnapped delegates at an OPEC meeting in Vienna, and a bomb at LaGuardia Airport in New York kills eleven and does not lead to a decade of pointless war for the United States. While during this story’s transmission, the trial of members of the Red Army Faction begins in Germany, the first commercial Concorde flight takes off, and the Scottish Labour Party is formed.

While on television, we get a classic. I mean, a bona fide, proper one – another one of the stories that people rave about as one of the best Doctor Who stories. The Hinchcliffe era has a lot of these. But here, I’ve got to admit, I was definitely under the spell. I had the irritating cut down hourlong version of this that came out on VHS, and on the one hand could tell it was great, but on the other could tell that something was missing. And I remember being absolutely thrilled when the full version came out, and devouring it. I must have watched this one a good half dozen times over the course of two years between the two edits. This would have been… ooh, 1993-94. So this is another one that’s a tentpole of both Doctor Who and my childhood.

In many ways, this story is where the Hinchcliffe era to date comes together – in a story with as much density and power as Genesis of the Daleks, only better written and not reliant on nostalgia for its evocative power. It is another story that raises the bar for what the show is capable of. It is utterly and completely fantastic. So let’s just talk about why. And then maybe towards the end we’ll try something ambitious like declaring what the entire point of Doctor Who is.

First of all, there is the writing. This story benefits from extraordinary fortune in the scriptwriting stage. Terrance Dicks pitched a script based on the idea of doing a reverse Frankenstein story in which the scientist was a hideous monster who creates a perfectly normal-looking human. Then, after delivering the scripts, he went on vacation. Looking at them, Robert Holmes observed the same problem any script editor worth his salt (Dicks, no doubt, included) would have noticed: a story in which the impressive monster appears at the start and the big reveal is an ordinary person has some serious structure problems.

…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 18 (Space: 1999, I Clavdivs)

, 23

Yes, I really am tackling Space: 1999 and I, Claudius (or, as I insist on referring to it for no other reason than “it makes me happy,” I Clavdivs.) in one entry. It even makes sense to do so. Because one thing that we’re going to have to deal with over the remainder of the series is the fact that the nature of television is shifting rapidly. And the beginnings of that shift are starting to happen around what we’re watching now. One of the easiest lenses to look at that through, at least for our purposes, is the way in which British television is made for the export market. In other words, shows designed to make money by being sold to other countries.

The BBC, of course, had done this to some extent for years. In terms of Doctor Who, this has been tracked extensively by the folks at BroaDWcast. But notably, these sales were mostly to Commonwealth countries, with Hartnell and Troughton stories often airing well into the 1970s. Despite Innes Lloyd eying the possibility in the 1960s (hence the conscious reintroduction to the premise of the show at the start of Tomb of the Cybermen), no successful effort to show Doctor Who in the US happens until 1972, when Time Life, who bought the distribution rights, sells a package of Pertwee episodes to a PBS station in Philadelphia. (In a moment of explaining things to a different side of the Atlantic than usual, PBS is basically what the BBC would be if Rupert Murdoch got his way – an underfunded and stitched together coalition of local stations with an extreme lack of money for producing new content outside the children’s market. They market to the sorts of people who in the UK watch a lot of BBC4 and read The Guardian. But more on them in a few paragraphs.) But it’s not really until the late 70s/early 80s when Doctor Who manages to take off in a meaningful sense in the US, so we’ll mostly drop that strand until… oh, The Five Doctors sounds like a pretty good place to pick it up next, no?

The logic behind this is fairly straightforward: there are a whole lot of English speakers in the US, so it’s a really obvious market to sell in. But right around now there’s an odd transition going on in the nature of what a typical UK to US export looks like. In the 1960s, had we done a piece on exports, we’d have talked mostly about ITC – Lew Grade’s production company that made, of the things we’ve talked about so far, The Prisoner. In the UK, Grade’s shows went to ITV, whereas in the US they usually ended up in CBS.

Several things characterize the ITC approach. First of all, they were generally budgeted with the export market in mind. This gave them the budgets to do glitzy action set pieces that BBC productions couldn’t touch. Second, they were generally put together so that episode order didn’t matter that much.…

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A Bit Dodgy, This Process (The Android Invasion)

30

Frankly, this image is just here so that my heart doesn’t
sink whenever I scroll past this entry and remember the
story.

It’s November 22, 1975. Billy Connoly is at number one with “DIVORCE,” a novelty parody about dogs and, well, divorce. The remaining three weeks of this story, on the other hand, belong to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” one of the most epically successful singles ever. It is worth pausing and discussing what “Bohemian Rhapsody” does that is so significant. First, it’s a high profile case of a band performing a successful end-run around their label. EMI had no faith in the single for its length and lack of traditional song structure, and it was instead deliberately leaked via DJs. Second, it’s aggressively not poppy. It’s telling that there’s a lengthy period here where the number one song goes from a six year old piece of protoglam to a novelty record to this that provides a useful context for why postmodernist horror was proving to be adequate teatime entertainment. Third, it marks some of the initial stirrings of New Romanticism, which will eventually be one of the dominant aesthetics of the series. Also charting are Bowie, The Bay City Rollers, Rod Stewart, and Steeleye Span. 

Whereas in real news, there are no major English serial killings with which I can make a point about media sensationalism that somehow gets misread as a swipe at the people of Yorkshire. But there are Juan Carlos formally becoming King of Spain with the death of Franco, the official outlawing of the IRA, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show being released. New York City received a massive bailout to handle its massive cash-flow problems.

While on television, we run into one of the fundamental weaknesses of the Hinchcliffe era, especially compared to the Letts era. I’ve discussed the idea that there are two approaches to take when trying to improve a television show: increasing quality and reducing badness. This may sound like an obvious point, but it’s significant, in part because it gets to the heart of an art/entertainment debate. Barry Letts improved Doctor Who by targeting weak episodes and trying to eliminate them. Hinchcliffe did it by targeting strong episodes and trying to make them masterpieces. And just as the Letts era was never so frustrating as in its Sloman/Letts Curate’s Egg scripts that could have been great and weren’t, the Hinchcliffe era is never more frustrating than it is when it’s obvious that Hinchcliffe and Holmes have decided that this just isn’t one of the stories they’re going to put much effort into.

So, for instance, when they decide to just hire a writer with a massive list of television credits and pair him with the previous producer as director, it’s pretty clear that the plan here is that they’re going to go pay attention to other stories and let this story play out however it plays out. And it plays out terribly. It’s boring, unambitious, and terribly plotted. It brings back UNIT characters for another round without having anything resembling a reason for them.

…

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I Don’t Exist in Your World (Pyramids of Mars)

49

No! Not the Mind Nightlight!

It’s October 25, 1975. So… next Tuesday, basically. Art Garfunkel, who only has eyes for you, is at number one. It lasts for two weeks at number one, and is improbably overtaken by David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” rereleased six years after its original release and providing Bowie with his first number one single in the UK. “Space Oddity” plays out the story. ABBA, The Four Seasons, Roxy Music, and John Lennon also chart, the latter with “Imagine.”

In real news, Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, commits his first murder, killing Wilma McCann in Leeds. It is worth pausing here and commenting on the fundamental absurdity of the phrase “Yorkshire Ripper,” combining as it does the macabre celebrity killer glory of Jack the Ripper with Yorkshire, a thoroughly working class region generally lacking in glitz and generally associated with the imagery of its mining regions, or with a more idyllic, pastoral imagery of agriculture, or, more broadly, with a wide variety of non-London cultural touchstones. Yorkshire, in other words, is conceptually miles from the seedy glamor of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper. “Yorkshire Ripper” is, in other words, a phrase that trades on the shocking contrast between the images evoked by each of its words. This is not to detract from the utter horror of Sutcliffe’s crimes – he’s one of the most brutal serial killers around – but rather to remark upon the sheer and callous skill with which he was transmuted into a media event, complete with a catchily incongruous brand-name that could be splashed across the red tops. (Just as a note for anyone who wades through the comment section, this paragraph has seen a good three revisions due to infelicities of phrasing)

Franco steps down in Spain, beginning to bring that dictatorship to an end shockingly long after everyone assumes a country like Spain was democratic. (By “everyone” I mean “Americans” here and not “people who read this blog.”) The first petroleum pipeline opens in Scotland, the Green March takes place in Morocco – a mass coordinated demonstration to try to take over Western Sahara, and, for fans of truly great bad music, it’s the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. (For proper effect, read that sentence with a Gordon Lightfoot-esque inflection so that “rald” is said about twice as loud and a solid octave higher than the prior syllable)

While on television, we have a story that is, from a critical perspective, somewhat weirder than normal. Two of the sort of standard issue angles to take on Doctor Who stories are, roughly speaking, “it’s got some problems but it does some really extraordinary things” and “it’s terribly unambitious, but executes a standard type of story very well.”It seems like these two things should be exact opposites, but somewhat incredibly, Pyramids of Mars manages to be a story that simultaneously does both.

In one very real sense, this is where the Hinchcliffe era comes together. It is not the best story to date, although it is very, very good.…

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Civilizations of Pure Thought (Planet of Evil)

10

RARRRRR! I’m EEEEEVIL!

It’s September 27, 1975. Rod Stewart sails on at number one. He sinks, and David Essex arrives to demand, “Hold Me Close.” Pop music may be a fickle mistress, but the people of the United Kingdom obey and keep him at number one for the next three weeks. Art Garfunkel, Showaddywaddy, Leo Sayer, The Four Seasons, and ABBA all also chart.

In real news, The Spaghetti House siege, in which Marxist black nationalists hold up an Italian restaurant and end up staying for six days, takes place in London, an event that is mostly just a sensationalist news story to fill the space between episode one and two of Planet of Evil, but at least has an entertaining name and no fatalities. The Thrilla in Manilla happens, as does a bombing outside Green Park Tube Station, and the first episode of Saturday Night Live.

On television, for the first time since The Faceless Ones, the Doctor Who we’re talking about is actually intersecting with the point in the calendar I’m writing from. With The Faceless Ones, that was dead on – the final episode of that story aired on May 13th, which is also the day that entry posted on. Here it’s off by a day – the final episode aired on October 18th. Personally, since this is the last entry written in a six day stretch starting with The Sontaran Experiment, I’m writing from an unseasonably warm Sunday, October 9, 2011 in suburban Connecticut, having watched the final two episodes of this last night.

In the Pertwee era, Doctor Who intruded into its audience’s lives by using the familiar as its setting – unfolding dramas in real places, and creating allegories for current events. But the central turn of the Hinchcliffe era, as we’ve said, is that the Doctor fights ideas now. To use a word rendered meaningless by vague use in something approaching its literal sense, Doctor Who has taken a very cerebral turn. It’s not telling stories about the world around the viewer anymore. Instead it’s telling stories about the world inside the viewer.

And so instead of allegories and allusions to the real world, it embeds itself in the viewer’s world according to an altogether subtler logic. The move to an autumn/winter schedule for Doctor Who moves it into darker and colder evenings. Planet of Evil went out just as the sun was setting in most of England, and later in the season stories will start going out firmly after dark. But the change involved here is about far more than light levels.

Living in New England, the last week or two has been marked by that sensation  of cold the moment you set outside. Not the frigid and despairing cold of winter, although that is worth discussing in its own right, but an altogether more pleasant cold. It is a cold that causes the body to draw inward, to huddle inside of itself slightly. One becomes more aware of one’s self, of the crunching of leaves underfoot and the swirl of scents and spices that seem to waft continuously through the air.…

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