Eruditorum Press

No ideas but in Swamp Thing

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:

I Pilfer: The Newsletter of the Ithaca Psychogeographic Liberation Front

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Hey all – just a heads up that I’ve started a newsletter for the Ithaca Psychogeographic Liberation Front. It’ll mail out eight times a year. You can sign up for it here. The first installment of it is below if you want to get a sense of what it’ll be like.

Oh, and Jack’s on Fridays now, so do check back tomorrow.

—-

Hello. We are the Ithaca Psychogeographic Liberation Front. This is our cross-quarterly newsletter, coming out eight times a year to give you the latest news on the struggle to liberate Ithaca from a variety of nebulously defined forces. You’re subscribed to it either because you asked to be or because you downloaded Articles of Secession, our debut release. If occasionally being treated to our deranged musings was not something you meant to sign up for, there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom which you can use to depart our newly liberated Ithaca in favor of the frozen wastelands of reality. Careful though: there are wolves out there.

CONTENTS

Your Cross-Quarterly Manifesto
Articles of Secession Update
Introducing Ithaca
State of the City
What Would Be Next for the IPLF if We Were Bound by Linear Time
What’s Actually Next for the IPLF
Follow Us On Instagram
Other Projects
Closing Thoughts
 

YOUR CROSS-QUARTERLY MANIFESTO 

“Beneath the paving stones, the beach” graffitied the Situationists in 1968. But more than that, beneath the paving stones are a vast kingdom of histories and memories. This is the domain of psychogeography, which attempts to understand physical spaces primarily through human experiences of them. To psychogeography, a street corner is not primarily understood as the intersection of two stretches of pavement, but rather as the accumulated intersections of decades or centuries worth of individual journeys along those roads, all the shops and apartments to have been built up and torn down, and entire philosophies of urban design and trajectories of history that led the roads’ existence in the first place. The Ithaca Psychogeographic Liberation Front will not rest until the physical Ithaca has been entirely supplanted by this imaginative dimension.

 

ARTICLES OF SECESSION UPDATE

The IPLF’s inaugural release, Articles of Secession, has been a solid success, raising more than $300. We’re waiting for the last few Bandcamp payments to process and for the money to come in from selling the last zine edition on eBay, but we’ll be donating that money to Ithaca Welcomes Refugees in the next couple of weeks. Thanks to everybody who supported the release. If for some reason you missed either the video or the single, here are those links.

Single: ithacapsychogeographicliberationfront.bandcamp.com

Video: youtube.com/watch?v=8hzB6D1gBwU

 

INTRODUCING ITHACA

We know a lot of our followers aren’t actually from Ithaca, so we thought a super-quick overview of the city might be in order. First, the Finger Lakes – a set of ten oblong lakes cut in the middle of what’s now New York by glaciers. Ithaca sits at the southernmost tip of Cayuga Lake, one of the two biggest. As the famed slogan goes, “Ithaca is gorges,” which is to say that it’s a ridiculously hilly city defined by the gorges cut by three north-flowing creeks: Fall Creek, Cascadilla Creek, and Six Mile Creek, and by the frankly preposterous number of waterfalls in and around town.…

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An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy: Episode I – The Phantom Menace

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Fittingly, this project exists for three basic reasons. First, having subjected everybody to eight parts of Build High for Happiness, it felt like it was time for a nice populist project. Second, I was seized by a desire to watch all seven Star Wars movies and figured “why waste the research.” But third, I was struck by the fact that, as I put it on Twitter a while ago, the bulk of criticism of the Star Wars prequel trilogy is worse at being criticism than the prequels are at being movies. The most common type is of course the brutal and sneering takedown, an approach that usually ends up committing so totally to its brutality that it gives up on making actually interesting points in favor of preening snark. The second is the counter-tendency of contrarian apologias, which are generally better (I’m partial to Rian Johnson’s “the prequels are a 7 hour long kids movie about how fear of loss turns good people into fascists. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”) but still suffer from wanting to be in conversation with the Red Letter Media shit, and also from the fact that they’re taking a provocative position at the expense of actually being right, which is fine, but you should be able to do both. Particularly lacking, it struck me, are approaches that actually attempt to look at the whole of Star Wars as it presents itself: a story beginning with The Phantom Menace and continuing through to The Force Awakens and, eventually, beyond. A few exceptions exist – perhaps most notably Mike Klimo’s epic “Ring Theory” series, but for all its admirable attention to detail there’s a maddening sterility to the whole affair, reducing the series to an intellectual exercise.

And so I thought, as someone who readily grants that the prequel trilogy’s pretty crap but is inclined not to think the rest of the series is anything too impressive, I feel like I can offer a take that’s not going to get hung up on the banalities of whether the movies are any good or on arguing for their secret and intricate genius. As far as I’m concerned, Star Wars is a deeply and systemically flawed work that’s nevertheless interesting in its pathologies. One thing I will be doing, if only to force the discussion further away from the banality of comparing the original trilogy to the prequels, is to, as I said, treat the work as presented: a seven part and counting story. This doesn’t mean willfully ignoring the fact that The Phantom Menace came out twenty-two years after A New Hope (or, for that matter that A New Hope wasn’t originally called that), or doing some sort of silly narrative game where we ignore future installments entirely, but it does mean accepting that The Phantom Menace is intended to function as a beginning despite the fact that in practice the entire audience knows that Jake Lloyd’s character grows up to become one of the most iconic villains in cinematic history.…

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Guest Post: A Sober Call for Madness

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A guest post from Sam Keeper, normally of Storming the Ivory Tower. Sam’s great and worth supporting, and I’m totally not just saying that because she pitched me a guest post that’s in part about my own work. Though speaking of Articles of Secession, the auction for the last physical zine copy ends today.

“We secede from all secession that does not secede from itself.”
 
The dadaists would be proud of this line, as would, famously, Groucho Marx. Of course, it shouldn’t come as much surprise that a movement that pronounced its own negation–DADA IS ANTI-DADA!–should find parallel in a comedian’s words. It is after all just another way of saying we don’t wish to belong to any club that would have us as members. (Whether or under what circumstances Groucho actually said that is pretty irrelevant–we’re in the realm of the mythic now.)
 
This is one angle one might take in tackling the Ithica Psychogeographic Liberation Front’s manifesto, a musical composition from Seeming with voiceover contributions from Meredith Collins and oh hey Phil Sandifer where have I heard that name before? It’s just one angle thought–the manifesto, like its cosigners, is “polymorphous, multitentacled, pandimensional, and incorporeal strobelights of blood and supernova,” particularly in video form where the barrage of dense, poetic text is accompanied by a large number of sometimes striking and unexpected images. The result is something that, among other things, it’s really hard to write about while listening to, at least for someone who struggles with multitasking as I do. 
 
So the question becomes, how do you do criticism to this piece? And the answer I think is, it’s too late for that, bucko, they’ve already seceded from criticism.
 
Not that we have a lot of great techniques for critically engaging with humor anyway, at least criticism oriented not towards questions like “is this joke problematic” but towards “how is this joke functioning semiotically and affectively.” And even less common is criticism engaging something like this, which presents, deadpan, lines like “We secede from pants. Seriously, fuck pants.”
 
This is an aesthetic of rupture, mutation, misdirection, and surprise, and I think it’s worth our time to start thinking seriously about how we address this aesthetic, simply because we’re seeing such a burst of it in just the last damn week. In the text accompanying my attempt at analyzing one of these pieces–Neil Cicierega’s new mashup album Mouth Moods–I laid out a number of guiding principles that I think might be used to whip up a kind of pathology of this aesthetic, a kind of diagnostic manual.
 
The qualities I’m really interested in here are the treatment of existing culture as something to be plundered for raw material freely, a complex affective experience that pairs delighted humor, disgust, and anger all at once, points of misdirection, unexpected juxtaposition, sudden stops and swerves, floods of information that are difficult to assess or even to hold in working memory long enough to fully understand, a reorganization of how we curate culture (the gutters of culture rise up and the texts consecrated by the culture and critical industry are brought down, all treated as worthy of pilfering), and techniques such as litany-like repetition and aesthetics that borrow from religion and the occult to create a sense of ominous spiritual portent.
…

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Build High for Happiness 8: Jerusalem (2016)

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such rich centers of possibilities and meanings

There is of course no other way this could end, which is fitting given that one of the (many) things Jerusalem is about is predestination. Moore’s vision of the world is closely related to the one we’ve been exhaustively exploring throughout this series. He does not actually use the word hypercube (and indeed envisions the structure in even higher dimensions), but it’s nevertheless clearly what’s going on. And though it would be wrong to describe it as a prison (he’s ultimately too optimistic for that), the multidimensional superstructure in which he places us is nevertheless utterly inescapable. As Moore imagines it, reality is a fixed solid existing in at least four dimensions, in which all events are fixed, and human consciousnesses simply experience their lives on endless repeat, passing through their allotted portion of the structure over and over again, experiencing the same unchanging lives each time.

This poses several problems, of which the loss of free will is only one, and a fairly minor one at that. Some are acknowledged by Moore, either within Jerusalem itself or in interviews, most notably the apparent loss of any moral perspective. Moore, being a monstrously intelligent man, anticipates these, emphasizing the sacredness of consciousness and the way that it imposes morality and aesthetics upon the world, and for the most part this works. Certainly there’s a flat truth to it: whatever the overall cosmological structure of reality (or even just history) may be, we are in the end pinned to linearly experienced consciousness, and in a way that means that our perception of morality is all-encompassing. Moore unfolds this with moving humanity, suggesting that we are ourselves harsher moral judges than any external force could ever be, but the point stands as a simple, stark description of how the world works: in the end, we are alone with our experience of it and left to make of that what we will.

Within the novel, of course, this is a cheat, albeit a fairly well-earned one. The narrative perspective shifts among two dozen or so characters in the course of the telling, but they are all in the end Moore’s perspective upon Moore’s world, a fact all but explicitly acknowledged by Moore’s blatant avatar within the work, an artist working on an installation about the working class Northampton neighborhood she lives in that consists of thirty-five works corresponding precisely to the novel’s thirty-five chapters. And the larger cosmology of the novel tacitly acknowledges this cheat: in fact there is an afterlife that one can retire to when one is tired of repeating one’s life, consisting of existence in the higher realm of Mansoul in which the four-dimensional solid of reality can be observed from above, and where the immortal souls appear to have free will and the ability to die. And there are several points where it’s noted that there’s a level above Mansoul on which the pattern repeats, occupied by a singular architect that Moore has been perfectly willing to suggest is him all along, typically via a long and deadpan interview routine in which he discusses the idea of simulationism before noting that the designer would probably incarnate himself in the simulation, and that most portrayals of God are of an older man with a long beard before trailing off pointedly.…

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Saturday Waffling (January 21st, 2017)

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Two quick orders of business.

1) As part of the release of Articles of Secession (which, if you missed that yesterday, do check out), we made a 50-copy print run of the zine with the extended text of the piece. Forty-nine of these were distributed around Ithaca. The fiftieth is now on eBay, with proceeds going to charity. For the purposes of people who aren’t in Ithaca, this is basically a print edition of one, so go get yourself some bragging rights and some disenfranchised Ithacans some groceries.

2) Jack has opened a Patreon of his own. If you like Jack’s work here, and of course you do because Jack is fucking awesome, you should go support it. 

How’s everyone holding up?…

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The Comprehensive History of Injustice

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A guest post by Seth Aaron Hershman.

…the entire world might be poisoned. This, however, seemed unlikely, as the world, no matter how monstrously it may be threatened, has never been known to succumb entirely.

A Series of Unfortunate Events is a book series, and currently a Netflix show, about three orphans, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, who are chased from place to place by a man named Count Olaf who manipulates (and if necessary knocks off) anyone who might try to take them in so that he can have them–and their inheritance/trust fund–for himself.

Count Olaf is a rich man looking to get richer, who relies on transparent lies and cheap theatrics to get his way, casually uses and discards people, has a roughly third-grade literacy and vocabulary level, and works in entertainment.

It’d be easy to go that route, wouldn’t it?

The issue of timeliness is a difficult one for A Series of Unfortunate Events, a franchise which actively avoids setting itself in a specific era in a way that should be familiar to fans of, say, Archer or Batman: The Animated Series. Because the series goes out of its way not to take place in any particular time, it’s difficult to pin whether the obvious allegory is an act of authorial intent or merely a fortunate coincidence. (One could argue that the fact that these books were written a decade ago makes it a forgone conclusion, but it’s not like our president was anonymous in at the turn of the century.)

In fact, it’s difficult to pin anything. Which is perhaps part of the point–anchored to no time, the series is able to make a broader point about how all times and all eras are susceptible to the transparent lies and cheap theatrics of rich men looking to get richer.

The rich men themselves are not really the point of the series–after all, most of the series’ characters are comfortably well off, and our leads are victimized specifically because Olaf wants at their sizable inheritance. In fact money itself seems to be a little besides the point. The bigger problem is self-absorption, and the inherent flaws in systems built out of self-interest.

The reason Olaf’s schemes always succeed until the last moment is that self-possession is a character flaw on the part of all who take the Baudelaire orphans in. Their uncle Monty knows well enough to suspect “Stephano” but gets hung up on the idea that his new assistant is after his scientific discoveries rather than his newly aquired children. Their aunt Josephine is ruled by her intense phobias and too obsessed with her tragic past to suspect someone who’s obviously manufactured a similar one for the sake of sympathy. And Mr. Poe, the man in charge of the Baudelaire estate, is constantly talking about how important it is that he get back to his other business matters before he has the chance to do even the most basic checking-up on whatever circumstances he’s dumped the children in this time.…

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Build High for Happiness 7: The Witch (2015)

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wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public

Many roads lead here, but we are unmistakably off the map. Like High-Rise, Robert Eggers’s film is firmly rooted in both place and location: the edge of a New England forest during the Puritan era. This in turn situates it a mere step away from A Field in England. Other distant reflections will flicker through the trees as we progress. Make no mistake, however, Whatever this belongs to, it is not our comfortable hypercube, with its cool brutality. This is somewhere else. Somewhere the land is cursed. Where the crops wither, the hunts fail, and the beasts turn against their masters. Where the sky is as stark as the muddy, useless soil. And that’s outside of the forest. Within its canopies there are even more horrors to be had.

At the heart of this malaise is the eponymous witch, a fact that led to an easily dismissed but frustratingly widespread reading of the film as somehow concerned with validating Puritan anxieties. It is tempting to dismiss this by asking whether this logic applies to all horror movies, or to point out that for all the film commits completely to the presence of an actual witch straight out of New England folklore it also repeatedly undermines Puritan ideology at large. But the more important angle to take on this is simply that this fundamentally mistakes the film for being about the family at large, as opposed to what is clearly demonstrated by the opening shot, in which William being exiled from the plantation is depicted not in terms of his philosophical and religious defiance, but in terms of how it is experienced by Thomasin, his eldest daughter. This may be a story in which a bunch of Puritans confront their biggest cultural nightmare, but what the story’s about is female sexuality and agency.

In this regard its ending, in which Thomasin becomes a witch, levitating into the sky at a Sabbat cackling with ecstatic joy, is a surprisingly vivid match for High-Rise, which similarly resolves into a murderously utopian vision of matriarchy. This is derived from Ballard’s novel, but Jump expanded on it considerably in scripting the film as part of a larger and welcome revision away from Ballard’s fairly banal overuse of rape, making the ultimate dominion of the building by its female residents into a point in its own right instead of a glib culmination of Wilder and Laing’s psychosexual architecture. But it is here, fully liberated from the tower’s phallic shadow, that the idea finds its fully developed form.

Central to the film is the way in which Thomasin is trapped and essentially powerless. This is a subtle thing in a horror movie, in that everybody is trapped and essentially powerless. What’s only gradually made clear over the course of the film, however, is that unlike all the other characters, it’s not the witch and her blight that imprisons Thomasin: it’s all the other characters. Her mother is vindictive and suspicious, her father is a mediocrity willing to lie and let her take the blame, her younger brother is more powerful than her in terms of the family dynamic but still looks to her for physical comfort and, increasingly, with lust, and the twins don’t obey her (and are worshipping Satan in the form of a goat).…

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The Final Problem Review

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I know, I said this wouldn’t be up for Monday. But then my weekend plans got spoiled by a stomach bug and I ended up home and watching Sherlock anyway. So it’s entirely possible that I’ve got a sour mood to match my stomach. Nevertheless, what a complete and utter disappointment this season of Sherlock has been.

The crux of the problem is one that plenty of franchises have fallen afoul of, which is thinking that you can introduce a character like Eurus and have her matter to the audience purely on the mythic weight of who she is instead of having to develop her. But it doesn’t work. She’s a distressingly one-note character whose characterization consists entirely of Mycroft asserting things about her. More to the point, her supposed powers are all bizarrely undersold: we’re told that she can effectively enslave someone by talking to them, but nothing about her comes off as particularly persuasive or charismatic. Mostly she sits around talking like a Markov bot fed on mediocre nihilist philosophy. And this is a real problem – the episode depends on her being the unholy fusion of Sherlock and Hannibal, but instead she’s just a generic megalomaniac. Which makes the resolution of her just needing a hug painfully unearned.

Making this worse is the way in which the episode is haunted by Moriarty. It’s not that it would have been better to actually bring him back, but having him popping up on video screens for dramatic effect and to have been the secret co-architect of all of this only serves to highlight how much weaker Eurus is as a villain. I’m not sure even Magnussen could have been effective with Andrew Scott popping up all over his episode, but Eurus doesn’t stand a chance, and the overall effect is to constantly remind the audience of a time when the show hadn’t used up its best ideas yet.

It’s not that there aren’t good bits. The relatively bottle-episode nature of it such that the majority of it is just Sherlock, John, and Mycroft is good, and all of them get some lovely character moments throughout. Mycroft, in particular, shines, getting a wealth of small emotional moments of the sort that he hadn’t really had before in the series. But John’s incredibly well-used as well, even if I don’t entirely buy him backing down from shooting the warden. And of course Molly’s scene was incredible.

But none of that masks the fact that this is just The Great Game done over with the melodrama pushed past the breaking point. The reveals just don’t work. The big one – that Redbeard was actually a person that we’ve never met before and aren’t particularly invested in – is a complete flop. We’ve already seen five people get murdered this episode. Finding out some kid from Sherlock’s past got killed instead of his dog doesn’t carry any particular weight. If anything, it was easier to be upset when it was a dog, which at least felt like a fairly fleshed out dog.…

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