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:

February 12, 2018

Kickstarter Update/Capaldi Entry List

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Since I did my usual “forgetting to queue Proverbs of Hell for a Monday,” I figured I should provide a Kickstarter update instead. At the time of writing, we’re at $8069. We hit the Algebra of Ice stretch goal over the weekend, which means we’re now approaching the $9000 stretch goal of The Unknown, which from Big Finish’s Diaries of River Song series. I haven’t listened to it yet, but it sounds fascinating. The hook is simple: River Song meets the Seventh Doctor. This is self-evidently a good idea. River’s entire M.O. is that she destabilizes the Doctor’s place in the narrative. She can do the things they do, and knows more than them. That’s especially true in stories before A Good Man Goes to War, which obviously this is. The Seventh Doctor, on the other hand, stands out even among the Doctors. He’s manipulative and has foreknowledge of events in ways they don’t. That’s a stereotype of his character in the same way “the loud obnoxious one” is of Six, but it’s also similarly true. So having River meet him is, in its own way, as much of a limit point for her character as meeting the Twelfth Doctor was. It’s a hook that does to River Song what she usually does to Doctor Who. Outside of pornographic fanfiction (where the answer is clearly the Third Doctor) the Seventh Doctor is straight-up the most interesting past Doctor for River to meet save arguably the First? Can Guy Adams rise to the occasion and hit his obviously laid out marks? Can Big Finish avoid screwing up a self-evidently good idea for once? I don’t know. I’m actually kind of nervous to find out because I am so often frustrated by Big Finish and I do so love this idea.

So if me tackling that sounds interesting and you haven’t backed the Kickstarter yet, now is a great time. If you have backed the Kickstarter and haven’t spread word on social media, now is a great time. If you’ve done all of those things, on the other hand, now could be a great time to do them again. But it could also be a good time for some self-care. Get a drink of water. Have a small and healthy snack. Look at some cute cat videos on YouTube. You’ve earned it.

I also wanted to give an update on the Patreon campaign for the Peter Capaldi era of TARDIS Eruditorum. Right now that’s at $345, a mere $5 away from The Full Eruditorum, complete with Pop Between Realities, You Were Expecting Someone Else, and Outside the Government entries. One way or another that will start on March 19th. But will it start with Deep Breath (currently readable by Kickstarter backers) or Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea (Captain America: Winter Soldier, The Lego Movie, It Follows)? While odds look good for the latter, it’d be good to get well over $350 so that’s nice and secure and we don’t suddenly drop down to going episode-only in the middle of the run.…

February 8, 2018

Kickstarter Week One Update

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Just wanted to use a dead day to give an update on how the TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7 Kickstarter is going and to highlight one of the reward tiers I’m offering for this Kickstarter that I know will be of interest to some of you. So, after the best first couple of days any of my Kickstarters have ever had (yay!) the Kickstarter has dried up pretty significantly (boo!), ticking up only $60 or so the last two days. At the moment we’re stuck pretty grimly in the low $7000s, which is fine and delightful, but a ways off from some pretty attractive stretch goals like the Kate Orman interview at $10,000 or me slogging through The Pit at $14,000. So if you haven’t backed yet, well, now’s a great time to. But more importantly, even if you don’t have the money to back, I want to beg you again to spread the word about the Kickstarter. Post to social media. Right now a dozen and change of you have posted to Twitter about the Kickstarter. That’s great, and thank you, but I know more than a dozen of you are reaeding this, so please. Post the Kickstarter link. Here it is again. Just say something like “hey, here’s a cool Doctor Who Kickstarter I’m really hoping will make some stretch goals.” Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, anywhere. I promise, your friends won’t hate you for it, and it really does make a difference. More than $2000 of the current Kickstarter total is from social media links.

OK. That’s the begging done. Now for some fun bits. First, I want to highlight the high-roller reward tier, the $150 signed and numbered hardcover versin of the book. After doing the Sigil and Color editions of Neoreaction a Basilisk, I came to the conclusion that Kickstarter-exclusive special editions are a hella fun reward perk. And so I’ve decided to do something I’ve always wanted to do, but that didn’t really make financial sense before, namely have a hardcover edition of the book. I haven’t looked too closely into printing on it yet, but my plan is to have it be a nice, high-quality edition of the book. And if you’re worried it won’t match the rest of your books, I’ll make a deal with you. Right now there are 11 hardcovers sold. If that number gets to 20, I’ll figure out how to do hardcover editions of Volumes 1-6 for the truly ridiculous few. (And no, those won’t be $150 a pop. They won’t be cheap, but I’ll make sure catching up is as affordable as possible.)

Second, I want to talk about the next stretch goal, Lloyd Rose’s The Algebra of Ice. Or, rather, I want to edit and expan on Twitter thread from a few days ago about why this book would be super cool to cover:

I can’t hype this on the basis of Big Name Authors like I could Nightshade or Springhill, or even Master. This is by a woman named Lloyd Rose.…

February 6, 2018

The Proverbs of Hell 35/39: And The Woman Clothed With The Sun

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AND THE WOMAN CLOTHED WITH THE SUN: This is not the picture that Dolarhyde worships, which is “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun.” The distinction flummoxed Harris himself, who got the wrong one in Red Dragon, and the most satisfying explanation for this preceding the episode named after the story’s central painting is that Fuller is providing an homage to the error. In any case, this painting is essentially Dolarhyde’s from the opposite perspective. The result is that the woman is the central object of the painting, with the Dragon looming above her, mimicking our own act of looking at her. The picture Dolarhyde prefers is on the whole the far more interesting framing, which we’ll get to next week.

HANNIBAL: That’s the same atrocious aftershave you wore in court.

WILL GRAHAM: Hello, Dr. Lecter.

HANNIBAL: Hello, Will. Did you get my note?

WILL GRAHAM: I got it. Thank you.

HANNIBAL: Did you read it before you destroyed it? Or did you simply toss it into the nearest fire?

WILL GRAHAM: I read it. And then I burned it.

HANNIBAL: And you came anyway. I’m glad you came. My other callers are all professional. Banal psychiatrists and grasping second-raters. Pencil-lickers trying to protect their tenure with pieces in the journals.

WILL GRAHAM: I want you to help me, Dr. Lecter.

HANNIBAL: Yes, I thought so. Are we no longer on a first-name basis?

WILL GRAHAM: I’m more comfortable the less personal we are.

HANNIBAL: Your hands are rough. I smell dogs and pine and oil beneath that shaving lotion. It’s something a child would select, isn’t it? There a child in your life, Will?

WILL GRAHAM: I’m here about Chicago and Buffalo. You’ve read about it, I’m sure.

HANNIBAL: I’ve read the papers. I can’t clip them. They won’t let me have scissors, of course. You want to know how he’s choosing them.

WILL GRAHAM: Thought you would have some ideas.

HANNIBAL: You just came here to look at me. Came to get the old scent again. Why don’t you just smell yourself?

We may as well just do the entire exchange here. The sections in boldface are original to the show. The remainder is more or less from the book, with a few small adjustments. (It’s a card in the book, the “dogs and pine oil” is new, and the murders have been moved north from their original Atlanta and Birmingham locations.) This exchange, of course, is the most iconic in Red Dragon, and for obvious reason. Fuller to do anything other than let Mikkelsen and Dancy at it would have been criminal. Matthew Morettini has done a supercut of the three adaptations that’s interesting a much in its disjuncts as its unities. Within the context of Hannibal, however, what jumps out most aggressively is the degree to which the scene is stilted. Fuller’s version of these characters has become so much more than what is in Harris’s book, and while Mikkelsen and Dancy acquit themselves well upon the lines, it still feels momentarily odd to see them in this more stripped down iteration.…

February 3, 2018

$5000 in Two Days. Dang. (Also two new reward tiers)

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After what was not only the best launch day i’ve ever had for a Kickstarter but the best second day I’ve ever had as well, the TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7 Kickstarter has managed to break $5000 in just two days. I am stunned, humble, and unbelievably grateful. That’s not only enough to print the book, but enough to get bonus essays on Nightshade, Springhill (a mostly overlooked and forgott4en Russell T Davies supernatural soap opera worked on by Gareth Roberts, Paul Cornell, and Frank Cottrell-Boyce), and “Was He Half-Woven On His Father’s Side?”, my essay on Looms and whether they make any goddamn sense. The next couple stretch goals are on the Andrew Cartmel-overseen season of Casualty (I got my hands on it!), the Big Finish audio Master, and Lloyd Rose’s novel The Algebra of Ice. Plus we’re halfway to the Kate Orman interview!

Anyway, by popular request I’ve added two new reward tiers for people who want to catch up on the Eruditorum Press catalog, but don’t necessarily want all seven TARDIS Eruditorum Books. There’s a $10 ebook threepack, and a $60 print threepack. Either can include Volume 7 if you like, but can also include Volumes 1-6, The Last War in Albion, A Golden Thread, Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, or Neoreaction a Basilisk. (And the print one can include Recursive Occlusion too if you like.) These can be added to existing pledges, so if you’d like them but have already backed at another tier I am happy to separate you from more of your money. As the Daleks say in “Doctorin’ the TARDIS,” “DOSH DOSH DOSH LOADSAMONEY!”

Once again, the Kickstarter’s here. Thanks again. …

February 1, 2018

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7 Kickstarter

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Eruditorum Press is pleased to announce the launch of our latest Kickstarter, for TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7: Sylvester McCoy. You can check it out here. The goal is a modest $2000 which, given that it’s made it to $165 in the time it took me to log into the site and start this post, I expect we’re going to make, but there’s stretch goals every $1000 after that all the way up to $14,000, which will add up to thirteen bonus essays if we can make it through them all. The crown jewel is probably at $10,000, where I’ll do an interview on the Sylvester McCoy era with the legendary Kate Orman, but there’s good stuff throughout, from covering Mark Gatiss’s Doctor Who debut Nightshade all the way up to finally writing about The Pit. (And no, that’s not the actual cover; it’s just what James had time to design this month. Though I do kinda love it.)

You may be wondering why I’m doing a Kickstarter for Volume 7 given that I didn’t for the initial releases of any previous TARDIS Eruditorum. Two basic reasons. 1) Books I sell directly via Kickstarter net me a far higher royalty than books sold through Amazon, and so I’m moving to a Kickstarter-based model for all future releases. 2) I’m kinda broke. It’s nothing crushing and unmanageable; I’ve got a month-to-month income that’s roughly commensurate with expenses. But my saving account is currently at “ha ha ha no,” and that’s kinda stressful. Hence Kickstarter.

But that’s depressing, so let’s talk about cool stuff. Like the Kickstarter-exclusive hardcover edition that will be signed, numbered, and never for sale ever again after February 28th. Or the opportunity to catch up on the entire TARDIS Eruditorum series in print or digital at a nice and healthy discount. Or, if you really don’t have much but still want to support, at just $1 you can read a preview of the TARDIS Eruditorum entry for Deep Breath. (Which, btw, the Patreon is just $19 away from the full compliment of Capaldi-era Pop Between Realities, Outside the Government, and You Were Expecting Someone Else essays if you want to back that too.)

Whatever you can give is extremely welcome. And if the money isn’t going to work out for you to donate this month, you can at least spread the link far and wide. Word of mouth is effective marketing. Twenty seconds on Twitter or Facebook makes a real difference to me.

I’ll be noisy throughout the month with Kickstarter promotion, including, in the very near future, the running order for the Capaldi era. Thanks for your support, and for reading. And one more time, here’s the Kickstarter link.…

January 30, 2018

The Proverbs of Hell 34/39: The Great Red Dragon

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THE GREAT RED DRAGON: After thirty-three episodes named after food, we change gears abruptly to episodes named after works of art by William Blake. This episode does not designate a specific work but rather a series of four paintings in a larger series of water colors illustrating the Bible completed between 1800 and 1806 four of which have titles beginning “The Great Red Dragon.” Thankfully we still have food to illustrate this episode as part of the delightfully barmy decision to let Hannibal still cook in prison, and we can get on to the Blake works starting next episode.

Although Time has on a few occasions in its history had articles on Blake exhibitions, he is not generally considered cover material, and if he were it seems unlikely The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun would be the image gone for. But for all its mild silliness, there’s a certain logic to having Dolarhyde encounter the Great Red Dragon in a print magazine, given that Dolarhyde exists in a constant tension with modernity, as we’ll get to.

The first thing to be emphasized about Dolarhyde is his intense physicality—he is, as they say, a beast. This is something of a novelty in Hannibal—there’ve been a handful of killers whose physicality has mattered in some sense (Randall Tier and Georgia Madden spring to mind), but none where the basic threat and danger of them is so rooted in raw puissance.

Finally the influence runs in the opposite direction as Hannibal shamelessly rips off Sherlock.

One step away from the outright defining image of Hannibal. It is notable, compared to other depictions of Hannibal in a cell, for its relative lushness—Hannibal’s cell is large and decorated with an ornateness that contrasts utterly with the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane as depicted in Seasons One and Two, and he’s afforded a myriad of luxuries unlike the sparse hells usually associated with his incarceration. There are a number of reasons for the change. First, Hannibal here is a character we’ve spent thirty-three episodes with already, and does not need to be a beast at the heart of a terrible dungeon in order to be scary. Second, and somewhat contradictorily, Hannibal here is not monstrous in the same way as in previous versions. Hannibal has made much more peace with the inherent tension of revulsion and adoration the monster in a horror movie elicits. A grand room from which Hannibal grants audiences to lesser creatures is fully in line with what this version of the character is.

ALANA BLOOM: Congratulations, Hannibal. You’re officially insane.

HANNIBAL: There’s no consensus in the psychiatric community what I should be termed.

ALANA BLOOM: You’ve long been regarded by your peers in psychiatry as something entirely Other. For convenience, they term you a monster.

HANNIBAL: What do you term me?

ALANA BLOOM: I don’t. You defy categorization.

The previous episode asked whether Alana could ever have understood Hannibal. Certainly her attempted distinction between defiance of categorization and monstrosity points towards “no,” although the fault is just as plausibly Fuller and Lightfoot’s.…

January 27, 2018

Saturday Waffling (January 27th, 2018)

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Morning all. The Kickstarter for TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7: Sylvester McCoy will, unless something goes weirdly wrong, start on Thursday. I’m finalizing the list of stretch goals, which will be the added essays for the bolume, and I wanted to solicit input on McCoy-era stuff I’ve not covered that you’re hoping for in the book version. It can be Virgin or BBC Books novels, Big Finish stories, other media, Pop Between Realities stuff, or larger questions you’d like me to wrestle with.

Nightshade is already on the list, and will be the lowest stretch goal, so you’re almost certain to get that. The final stretch goal will be “force Phil to read The Pit.” There are others I’m pretty sure to have on there, but I’ll leave it vague for now and let you suggest what you will.

Also, due to the existing number of McCoy entries and the fact that there’s some definite chaff in there (both Pop Between Realities stuff that only exists because I couldn’t keep a pace of three novels a week and novels that just didn’t work out as essays), there’s a very high chance some blog material will not make the book. If you have any beloved entries from the McCoy era that you’d be gutted to see fail to make the book, now’s a good time to tell me that.…

January 22, 2018

An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi

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The obvious starting point is the dualism that creatively defines the sequel trilogy, with J.J. Abrams’s faithful recitations of iconography on either end of Johnson’s far weirder and more difficult approach to doing a Star Wars. Neither director needed to do Star Wars, but for very different reasons. Abrams had already defined himself as a classically minded reinventer of classic genre tropes, and the franchise was merely a bigger version of what he’d already done with Star Trek. Johnson, meanwhile, was a rising indie visionary with ideas of his own and while jumping over and doing a big genre film would no doubt open new options for his own work, he was doing perfectly fine.

There is virtually no way of describing the two where Johnson does not come across as the more interesting filmmaker. He is, frankly, a bizarre and unprecedentedly brave choice for the franchise—to put it with maximal uncharitableness, the first time a Star Wars film has ever been helmed by a real director. And it’s no surprise that the result is fundamentally unlike other Star Wars movies. We might start with the end, noting that the final shot, in which Star Wars merchandise becomes the next Guy Fawkes mask in a scene with none of the main characters, utterly removed from the main action, is simply not something that any previous film would ever have considered. It’s amazing, and we’ll return to what it’s doing, but the real jaw-dropping moment that requires us to stop and reevaluate the basic question of what a Star Wars movie is comes a few minutes earlier, in the fight between Luke and Kylo Ren. Ren directs the full force of the First Order’s weapons against one man, standing out in the salt plain, hitting him with a bunch of AT-ATs. The attack stretches on preposterously long, an act of blatant, childish overkill. And then, as the smoke clears, an unharmed Luke walks out and moves his hand along his shoulder in an imitation of a Jay-Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” a song from a distant galaxy in the far future.

Never mind that no previous Star Wars movie do this – had Johnson done it two-and-a-half hours earlier it would have come off as a complete misunderstanding of how to Star Wars. Doing stuff like this seems to be part of why Chris Miller and Phil Lord got themselves sacked from Solo. It’s the most mind-wrenching and genuinely astonishing shot in all of Star Wars, simply because it passes off something that should be entirely outside the grammar without so much as a fuss. What on Earth had he been doing for two-and-a-half hours that made that work?

Inevitably, there’s no one answer. Indeed, the crux of Johnson’s approach is to repeatedly do small and unexpected things, none of which feel like ruptures of what Star Wars means, but all of which demonstrate a willingness to ask not only what Star Wars can do that’s new, but to ask what it has thus far lacked.…

January 16, 2018

The Proverbs of Hell 33/39: Digestivo

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DIGESTIVO: An after-dinner (and after-coffee) drink such as grappa or limoncello. As we’ve completed the actual Italian portion of our adaptation of Hannibal in order to return to the US, this is on the whole sensible.

JACK CRAWFORD: Hannibal Lecter, il Mostro di Firenze, narrowly escapes the Questura. That how the story goes?

INSPECTOR BENETTI: Missed him by that much. The good Dottor Lecter is once more in the wind. But he left one last victim. Open him the way Lecter opened the other one. Open him all the way.

Something of a rarity in Hannibal, Benetti is an utter shithead who gets to display this act of staggering and monstrous corruption without any consequences. He disappears from the narrative entirely, having nothing to contribute past this point. Indeed, this is the last scene to be set in Italy, and there is essentially no unfinished business there, this dickbag excepted.

CHIYOH: You’re sitting at Hannibal’s table. You know him. You know Will.

JACK CRAWFORD: I know them. They are identically different, Hannibal and Will.

This is a deeply odd time for Jack to lapse into gnomic hedging, even if it is generally his default state. “Identically different” is a particularly sub-par contribution to the genre, saying little (and nothing Chiyoh doesn’t already know) and doing so in a way that is downright ostentatious in its capacity to frustrate. He is admittedly heavily drugged, but “identically different” manages the impressive feat of not actually describing Will and Hannibal’s mirrored quality in any particularly accurate way.

MASON VERGER: There’s a hush over Muskrat Farm, Cordell, like the quiet of the old Sabbath. Smells like salvation.

As we prepare to say goodbye to Mason Verger, let’s pause to savor him dramatically unfurling Harris’s scene description as an aside to Cordell in an attempt to amp up the moment. Although his scenery-chewing “smells like salvation” is a step down from Harris’s almost Trumpian folow-up that “Privately, [Mason] compared his accomplishment to the discovery of radium.”

ALANA BLOOM: I appreciate wanting to kill Hannibal Lecter. I am not without benefit from that.

MASON VERGER: Can’t make good on his promise to murder you if he’s dead.

ALANA BLOOM: But he’s not dead. Play with your food, Mason, and you’ll give it the opportunity to bite back.

MASON VERGER: Oh, I’m not playing, Dr. Bloom.

ALANA BLOOM: Hannibal is. He’s always playing.

Alana speaks damning prophecy here while navigating a tricky set of competing concerns; she’s previously expressed a desire to sell Mason out and get Hannibal into FBI custody. That seems frustrated at the moment, but pushing for Hannibal’s fast death undermines her stalling for time to save Will.

MASON VERGER: You boys remind me of that German cannibal who advertised for a friend, then ate the friend’s penis with him before he died. Tragedy being, the penis was overcooked. Go to all that trouble to eat a friend, and you overcook his penis. They ate it anyway. They had to, they committed. But they didn’t enjoy it.

…

January 9, 2018

The Proverbs of Hell 32/39: Dolce

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DOLCE: Dessert. Nobody particularly gets their just ones here, so let’s call this a case of running out of both course names and titles in this phase of the series.

The bath has been a fragile refuge for Bedelia over the first half of this season. Here she sacrifices this safe position, turning it over to Hannibal as she cleans his wounds after his fight with Jack. This, however, contains its own form of power, as we will shortly see.

WILL GRAHAM: Jack .

There is an odd understatement and contrivance to this reunion – Will pops up in Florence with improbable speed and simply arrives by Jack’s side, with their reunion almost entirely underplayed. But for all that this violates scads of normative rules about how narrative functions, it’s tremendously effective. The reunion between them that mattered was in “Apertivo.” The significance of this is simply that it allows the plot to move forward, and so it does.

JACK CRAWFORD: And Hannibal would slip away. Would you slip away with him?

WILL GRAHAM: Part of me will always want to.

JACK CRAWFORD: You have to cut that part out.

A simple and moving confession on Will’s part. Jack’s response is fundamentally inadequate, asking something of Will that he cannot possibly give – the “have you tried not being gay” of addictions to cannibalistic serial killing,

HANNIBAL: I want to be able to draw these streets from memory. I want to be able to draw the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: You won’t be coming back here for a very long time.

HANNIBAL: Memories of Florence will be all I have. Florence is where I became a man. I see my end in my beginning.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: All of our endings can be found in our beginnings. History repeats itself and we can’t escape it.

Bedelia’s fatalism is essentially a restatement of Aristotelean plot structure, and thus an overwhelmingly safe bet for someone currently inside a serialized television show. Her real concerns, however, are not so much Hannibal as herself and her end, as evinced by her use of the first person plural and by the next exchange,.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: I knew you were intending to eat me and I knew you had no intention of doing it hastily.

HANNIBAL: Would be a shame not to savor you.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: I haven’t quite marinated long enough for your tastes.

And here we see the exquisite and frankly mad brinkmanship of Bedelia’s position – her compulsion to study and observe Hannibal wedged right up against her knowledge of how that will inevitably play out. And yet in this moment at least, she navigates an escape, getting Hannibal to, at least temporarily, leave her undigested.

CORDELL: A Buddhist singing bowl. The gong represents the start of a new day.

MASON VERGER: Buddhists don’t eat meat.

CORDELL: This isn’t meat. This is man.

Mason’s planned consumption of Hannibal is a vulgar inversion of Hannibal’s tastes. Where Hannibal eats people to show that he is more than human, Mason eats them precisely because they are human, viewing the act of consumption as elevating himself.…

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