Eruditorum Press

Watery tarts distributing hammers and sickles

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:

Neoreaction a Basilisk: Excerpt Two

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The Kickstarter for Neoreaction a Basilisk will begin next week. For now, here’s another excerpt, this time after a section looking at the notion of “the red pill,” a concept Mencius Moldbug introduced to the alt-right, and claims that his blog offers readers.

No, what’s really striking is Moldbug’s repeated insistence on the “agony of ingestion.” While a fair description of his writing style, it’s rather hard to see what he actually intends it to refer to in terms of neoreaction. And this is clearly a definitional thing about the red pill. It doesn’t just offer the truth; it offers the searing and traumatic truth. That’s the entire point of Joe Pantoliano’s character in The Matrix, who, having taken the red pill, has decided that the Matrix was his preferred drug after all, a position that is not so much refuted as set aside when its sole proponent is impaled. And Moldbug is visibly desperate to believe he’s got it, despite the almost painful lack of agony.

But look, Moldbug isn’t insincere. If he says the red pill is agonizing to swallow, we can safely assume that he, at least, thinks there’s agony. So the question becomes: what, precisely, does Moldbug find agonizing in his own thought? This is closely related to the question of what his monstrous offspring looks like. What’s the moment in his reasoning that he doesn’t want to be there? He says that it’s Part 9a of the Gentle Introduction which begins, after several parts not mentioning anything like the red pill at all, “Today you begin your irreversible descent into black, unthinkable madness.” Oh boy! But let’s continue with our “Moldbug is sincere” principle and assume that, after his eight part buildup, he really is delivering what he imagines to be the goods. Certainly Part 9a marks a turning point, as he explains it, between the first eight parts that explain “what history really is, and what it really has to teach us,” and the finale that offers a program of action.

So what is the program of action? It’s not, to be clear, putting Steve Jobs in charge; that’s Moldbug’s wish, but he isn’t actually proposing it as a plan of action. Actually, Moldbug is being refreshingly realistic here, trying to come up with a program that can be enacted on an individual level. As he conceptualizes it, the idea is to be “political engineers” designing a backup system that will kick in when American democracy inevitably goes south. And the first step of this backup system is, as he puts it, becoming worthy, by which he means the embrace of a doctrine he calls passivism. He describes it thusly: “The steel rule of passivism is absolute renunciation of official power. We note instantly that any form of resistance to sovereignty, so long as it succeeds, is a share in power itself. Thus, absolute renunciation of power over USG implies absolute submission to the Structure.”

And suddenly the abyss gazes also. Moldbug has stared into the truth of history, seen that it is a massive pack of lies designed purely to justify the corrupt status quo, and the only thing he can think to do about it is to submit entirely to the status quo.…

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The Evil in All the Wood (X-Kaliber 2097)

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This wasn’t on the original list of games to be covered. Consider its inclusion something of a magickal mistake, honored as hidden intention. I cast my initial circle carelessly, and, through an accident of timing, ensconced a particular monster within the territory covered. This, then, is the consequence.

Like any story, it could begin anywhere. Let’s pick 1980, when a Chicago record shop called Wax Trax, owned by Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher, began releasing records itself, including both local acts like Ministry and European acts like Front 242. The resulting WaxTrax! label became one of those glorious scenester success stories, at the forefront of the American industrial music scene despite being a literal backroom operation with spectacularly lax bookkeeping.

WaxTrax! represented a key part of a slow and arcing transition for the industrial subgenre, which began in the late 1970s as an aggressively experimental anti-genre pioneered by UK acts like Throbbing Gristle, whose legendary founder Genesis P-Orridge coined the actual term. As with any such venture it gradually cleaned up its act (literally – Throbbing Gristle performances were famously the sorts of things that required phrases like “licked their own vomit off the stage” to describe) and became a quasi-mainstream style that visibly influenced actually popular bands like Depeche Mode.

In the US this culminated late in the decade when Cleveland-based musician Trent Reznor assembled a set of demos during spare time working as a technician/janitor at Bart Koster’s Right Track Studios. Reznor managed to spark a bidding war for the album, and through WaxTrax! was one of the labels to make him an offer, he ended up going with TVT, an oddball label that got its start releasing compilations of television theme songs, but that also handled things like the American distribution of Discordian legends the KLF, a band that famously literally had a million quid to burn, mostly on the basis that TVT was willing to pay for him to work with top tier industrial producers.

 The resulting album was Nine Inch Nails’s 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine, and its fusion of the increasingly danceable industrial sound with more pop-friendly song structures and a brutally confessional lyrical style made Nine Inch Nails the premiere band for alienated American white boys of the 90s. Their second full-length album, The Downward Spiral, was released just a few weeks after X-Kaliber 2097, and featured the mega-hit “Closer,” whose leeringly stomping chorus of “I wanna fuck you like an animal” was the perfect way to offend millions of suburban American parents who had finally gotten over Mortal Kombat. This album, however, was released by Interscope, who had acquired Reznor from TVT in 1992 following his acrimonious falling out with boss Steve Gottileb.

Nine Inch Nails’s assault on the mainstream charts made industrial bands the hot new thing for major labels to acquire. The resulting feeding frenzy hit WaxTrax! hard. The label’s DIY ethos meant that it was being run largely on handshake deals that were spectacularly vulnerable to disruption, and the label quickly found itself under water.…

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The Red Woman

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State of Play

(They’re genuinely helpful in quantifying what the episode did.)

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Lions of Meereen: Tyrion Lannister

Lions of King’s Landing: Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister

The Dragon, Daenerys Targaryen

Ships of the Wall: Davos Seaworth

Burning Hearts of the Wall: Melisandre

Roses of King’s Landing: Margaery Tyrell

Snakes of Dorne: Elyria Sand

Direwolves of Winterfell: Sansa Stark

Direwolves of Braavos: Arya Stark

Spiders of Meereen: Varys

Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy

Shields of Winterfell: Brienne of Tarth

Stars of King’s Landing: The High Sparrow

The Sword, Daario Naharis

Flayed Men of Winterfell: Roose Bolton, Ramsey Bolton

With the Bear, Iain Glenn

The episode is in nine parts. The first runs eight minutes and is set at the Wall. The opening shot is of the Wall at sunrise, as the camera pans down into Castle Black.

The second runs ten minutes and is set in Winterfell. The first section is three minutes long The transition is by image, from Jon Snow’s dead body to Miranda’s. The second section is seven minutes long. The transition is by dialogue, from Ramsey and Roose talking about Sansa to Sansa.

The third part runs six minutes  and is set in King’s Landing. The first section is four minutes long. The transition is by hard cut, from Brienne’s anguished face to the sails of Jaime’s ship. The second section is two minutes long. The transition is by hard cut, from Jaime holding Cersei to Septa Unella’s book.

The fourth part runs two minutes and is set in Dorne. The transition is by hard cut, from Margaery in her cell to a garden in Sunspear.

The fifth runs one minute and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Doran to Trystane Martell.

The sixth runs four minutes and is set in Meereen. The transition is by hard cut, from Trystane’s corpse to an establishing shot of the city.

The seventh runs nine minutes and is set in the Dothraki Sea. The first section is three minutes long. The transition is by faction, from Varys and Tyrion to Jorah and Daaario. The second section is six minutes long. The transition is by dialogue, from Jorah and Daario concluding that the Dothraki have captured Daenerys to Daenerys among the Dothraki.

The eighth runs two minutes and is set in Braavos. The transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys to a street in Braavos.

The ninth runs five minutes and is set at the Wall. The transition is by family, from Arya Stark to Jon Snow. The final image is of Melisandre going to bed.

Review

For what is surely the most highly anticipated episode of Game of Thrones ever – the first 100% off-book episode (well, 90% – Arya’s still in A Dance With Dragons) – this is a shockingly thin and uninspiring thing. Given that… I’d say there’s a fine line between a languid start and just trolling the audience, but it’s not that fine a line, and the title is on the wrong side of it.…

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Saturday Waffling (April 23rd, 2016)

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First of all, we hit the Game of Thrones reviews threshold on Patreon, so I’ll be back tomorrow night for “The Red Woman.” 

I also just cut a podcast with David Gerard, who probably very few of you have any idea who is, but has been an online friend for literally over a decade, starting in the Wikipedia trenches and evolving to… the Tumblr trenches. He ended up being the beta tester for Neoreaction a Basilisk by dint of being mad enough to volunteer, and kept me confident that this fifty-thousand word piece of madness was actually working despite all common sense that this was a very bad way to write a book. Anyway, that’ll be out in a few weeks, along with some other people who’ve gotten preview copies of it.

Also finally wrapped the backmatter of the “Fearful Symmetry” chapter, and am about to make a tilt at not having to take a break before “The Abyss Gazes Also.” Which brings me to my question, which is really just “so who’s being obsessive enough to track my structural gimmicks there?” To be clear, literally no problem at all if you aren’t; if the chapter doesn’t work for non-obsessive readers the chapter fails. I, who complain regularly when I can’t follow monthly superhero comics, have no right to whine if I can’t make a Watchmen pastiche work. But those posts get low comments, which is totally understandable – they don’t lend themselves to comments. So I don’t really have a sense of how that aspect of it is landing at all. Or any questions people want to throw out about that project.

Actually, since the Neoreaction a Basilisk excerpts aren’t necessarily comment friendly either, I should explicitly solicit Eruditorum Press reader questions on that book as well. 

Obvious answers to questions on both topics, then. 

1. Last War in Albion Volume 1 will be out in late summer.

2. The Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter will start in May.

3. I don’t know for sure whether the specific work you’re wondering about will be covered in Last War in Albion, as I’m only just starting to have my first serious “actually write things down” thoughts about the structure of Book Three in the last few weeks, but broadly speaking it’s probably got a pretty good chance of at least coming up.

4. Monday’s Super Nintendo Project post is a hoot.

That last one’s not really an answer to a question. It’s just true. …

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The Recapture, Consciousness Let Live Moments Longer, Which, in Truth, Only Offers Turmoil (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Thirty-Two: Eschatology and Rebellion)

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Figure 957: The frontispiece to The Book of Ahania, showing Urizen’s murder of Ahania. (By William Blake, 1795)

Previously in The Last War in Albion: William Blake, who contains within himself at least one entire past War in Albion, wrote compellingly of the importance of opposition in forward progress.

But as mentioned, by this standard Blake had no true friends; only those who, like Catherine, respected and pitied him. He wrote in mindful opposition to writers like Swedenborg and Milton, but both were dead by the time he addressed them, their replies to him limited to his own dreams and visions. He existed singularly within his time; and perhaps within any other. Given this, it is perhaps no surprise that he turned his vision inward, making a rival of himself to serve in place of the one the world would and could not provide. Within himself, however, Blake found far more than mere Contraries, a notion Blake was quick to move beyond, if indeed the simplistic alchemic model of unifying opposites was ever anything but an element of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’s satire. Certainly by the time of The Book of Urizen he had come to be more skeptical of the idea, hence the opposition of Los and Urizen being not a means by which Urizen is redeemed but a crucial step in creation’s fall into base materialism and the ensnarement of the world in the horrid net of religion. And much of Blake’s prophetic work in the period displays the same themes. From 1793-95 Blake produced two three-book myth cycles – the Continental Prophecies (America a Prophecy, Europe a Prophecy, and The Song of Los, which consists of two poems, “Africa” and “Asia,” that bookend the first two prophecies) and The Book of Urizen along with its two revisions/sequels The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los, across which he developed the early fundamentals of his mythology. And these are shot through with failed and frustrated oppositions: Orc’s faltering revolution in America, Enitharmon’s corrupted ascension in Europe, and both the failed revolt of Urizen’s son Fuzon and the destruction of his Emanation Ahania in The Book of Ahania.

Blake’s sense of doom and futility in this period is impossible to escape. He fashioned himself a prophet, yes, but his prophecies augured nothing good. Urizen’s tyranny seems inescapable, with every avenue of resistance doomed to sputter out or turn against itself. Even the grim eschatology of an unrelenting march towards doomsday would seem in some ways more optimistic than the utter despair of The Book of Urizen, which ends with a description of how “Beneath the Net of Urizen; / Perswasion was in vain; / For the ears of the inhabitants, / Were wither’d, & deafen’d, & cold; / And their eyes could not discern, / Their brethren of other cities.” The end, after all, is at least a form of escape and change. Blake, however, saw no escape or hope within his visions, writing in one of his notebooks in 1793 that “I say I shant live five years And if I live one it will be a Wonder.”…

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Comics Reviews (April 20th, 2016)

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James Bond: Vargr #6

This really fell apart for me in the denouement. It’s hard to be surprised by how many times Ellis did “and now for a long action sequence” in this book; it’s one of his preferred tricks, and the subject is suited to it. But as a conclusion to a six-issue arc an action-heavy ramp-up to a mournfully ambivalent conclusion is, to say the least, unsatisfying. Always a pleasure to watch Ellis at work, and he’s right to say that Jason Masters is visibly improving over the course of the series, but this is unquestionably a minor work.

Cry Havoc #4

Starting to have some trouble keeping everything straight here, though it’s firmly in “reread the first arc when it’s done” territory and not “annoyed at this” territory. Or perhaps just to obey the still-brilliant “for more information reread comic” edict and better parse out exactly what happens in Afghanistan this issue, as it all gets a bit odd and dependent on a firmer knowledge of how the supernatural is meant to work in this story than I have. Interesting, but definitely a comic in a lull for me.

Karnak #3

Ellis in full-out “my reading list, let me share it with you” mode, the basic perversity of Ellis being that this is generally preferable to Ellis writing action sequences. This time we have an issue based heavily on the work of Eugene Thacker (a significant figure in Neoreaction a Basilisk) and also on Karnak literally screaming at people until their heads explode. This is a ridiculous comic in all the best ways, and the new artist is a strong choice as well. …

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Neoreaction a Basilisk: Excerpt One

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In preparation for the May launch of our Kickstarter for it, we’re running excerpts of Neoreaction a Basilisk. This is from quite early in the book while I’m introducing my three main characters of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land.

And yet at every turn in Moldbug’s argument, Marxism seems to lurk, indeed, haunt the text. Every argument he makes about the Cathedral’s insidious suppression of the obviously preferable alternative has, to an even vaguely Marxist-familiar reader, an immediate counterpart pointing inexorably to the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is tempting to suggest that Moldbug is a failed Marxist in the sense that Jupiter is a failed star, its mass falling tantalizingly short of the tipping point whereby nuclear fusion begins. Over and over again, Moldbug asks questions much like those that Marx asked, and his answers begin with many of the same initial observations. But inevitably, a few steps in, he makes some ridiculously broad generalization or fails to consider some obvious alternative possibility, and the train of thought fizzles into characteristic idiocy.

The most obvious symptom of this is how rarely Moldbug actually takes a swing at Marx himself, despite the fact that he’s self-evidently the biggest single villain of his philosophical system. It’s not a pattern that’s quite noticeable on the paragraph-to-paragraph level; it’s just that when you do searches on his blog you discover that in the more than one million words he published as Mencius Moldbug he’s mentioned Marx a mere hundred-and-thirteen, and that’s including his uses of “Marxism” as a generic term of derision. And none of them constitute anything like an extended engagement with Marx’s thought. Sure, you can argue that this isn’t so much an oversight as a demonstration of contempt, but the fact remains – there’s a confrontation that’s obviously waiting to happen that Moldbug endlessly deferred. (Hitler, by comparison, makes four hundred and sixty-nine appearances.)

Indeed, at one point late in his blogging career he proclaimed (not for the first time) that he was finally going to offer the red pill in a compact form before dramatically unfurling the statement “America is a communist country.” He even reduces it to an acronym. “AIACC can be interpreted in countless ways,” he proclaims. “All of these interpretations – unless concocted as an intentional, obviously idiotic strawman – are absolutely true. Sometimes they are obviously true, sometimes surprisingly true. They are always true. Because America is a communist country.” And then, as you’d expect, he begins to go through various interpretations to show how they are either obviously idiotic or true. And yet there is one interpretation that, astonishingly, never seems to occur to him: “America is in some meaningful fashion run according to the philosophical principles of Karl Marx.” In fact, literally none of the hundred-and-thirteen uses of the word Marx appear in the essay in question, “Technology, communism, and the Brown Scare.”

Moldbug posted five more times on Unqualified Reservations after that essay, and then retired the pen name.…

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Silhouettes and Shadows Watch the Revolution (Mega Man X)

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Yes, that’s really how it ends; the most secret of histories is always is the real one. That gnostic gap between what we know happened and what happened. The facts are these: Mega Man X, released in the US just past Christmas at the start of 1994, is the beginning of Capcom’s second line of Mega Man games. There are scads of these now, the franchise famously diluted past all sanity. But at the time, this was the only one. It wasn’t even a “line” at the time; just one game, a grimdark future timeline of the proper series (which was about to put out the baleful Mega Man 6 for the NES, 1994 being the last year of new releases for that console, by now redesigned as a slimline top-loader to resemble its successor, with a key bit of circuitry accidentally removed so that there’s a constant vertical striping effect on games).

The existence of such a game is in hindsight inevitable. Indeed, by 1994 it was in foresight inevitable – franchises in multiple media were doing self-consciously serious installments. In fact, it’s in some ways surprising that Mega Man is the first major video game series we’ve seen pull this trick. But the surprise is only that it got there first, not that it got there. The original NES series was clearly on the road to diminishing returns; a simple SNES iteration of its cartoon robot mayhem would visibly be out of step with the trends. With tastes veering towards Nemesis, the way to update the franchise would have seemed self-evident to literally anyone.  

In terms of master narratives, of course, this fits perfectly into the unpleasant and ugly turn that we’ve been tracking all project. The NES Mega Mans were charming family games. Mega Man X is unmistakably for boys. Less exclusionary than, say, Mortal Kombat, yes, but it’s still clearly got distinct opinions about who’s going to be playing, and its status as a revision of something that previously had a wider audience in mind makes it hard not to wince a bit at that.

But from my perspective there’s more to it – Mega Man X is the first game to exist on the wrong side of my Super Nintendo days.Simply put, there’s basically nothing from 1994 on that I actually played when it came out. A couple of games flitted at the edge of my awareness – both Mega Man X and Donkey Kong Country were definitely things I played other people’s copies of, along with, no doubt, a few others. And I was certainly aware that things like Super Metroid existed. But so far as I can tell I basically didn’t buy any Super Nintendo games after 1993, and indeed sold at least some of them off at recess for $15 a pop in the fall of that year.

But what replaced them? Again, I’m forced to reconstruct here, or rather, fail to. I had a PC gaming period in the late 90s, but there’s at least a year’s gap here.…

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Saturday Waffling (April 16th, 2016)

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The Super Nintendo Project is back on Monday! I’m excited at least. The first two entries are really fun, and I’ve high hopes for the rest of the run. It’ll be going through the 1994 games, which I think there are five of total (the list’s on the other computer), then probably doing another Cultural Marxism or two, then back to Brief Treatise. 

Anyway, the first two entries are posted to Patreon. Which is about $2 a week away from me reviewing “The Red Woman” next weekend, incidentally. So, you know, never a better time to start backing and all.

Also this week we’ll have the first of five excerpts from Neoreaction a Basilisk that we’ll be running to promote its upcoming Kickstarter. You can seem, um, some of the response it’s been getting over at Nick Land’s blog. (The Tweets aren’t his, to be clear.) And I pop into the comments on that one too. And soon I’ll be recording the first of a couple of podcasts I’ll be doing on the book, talking with a couple people who have gotten to review the manuscript. 

Now I just need to finish the backmatter essay for this Last War in Albion chapter and see if I can get Chapter Six to actually follow the week after Chapter Five ends.

So, what’re your bets on how the Hugos will turn out?…

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Mind That Until Now Thought of Continuity, Our Torch, Then Saw It Flicker (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Thirty-One: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The War was revealed to have certain similarities to the life and work of William Blake, whose mythology was built around the dualism of the creator Los and the tyrannical geometer Urizen.

Figure 954: Los recoils in horror from his work as Urizen’s body assembles itself. (By William Blake, from The Book of Urizen Copy G, written 1794, printed 1818)

As Blake’s dualism suggests, his instinctive mode of resistance to Urizen, both within himself and without, was creation. Specifically, in Blake’s case, the creation of art. As The Book of Urizen itself makes clear by depicting Los’s failure, the point is not that this resistance will “stop” or “defeat” Urizen, or indeed any other figure one wishes to inveigh against. Indeed, the point is often simply a matter of need or compulsion. Much like Watchmen is simply not a thing one writes if one is capable of avoiding doing so, the ornately realized illuminated prophecies that Blake creates – especially the late career ones such as the fifty page Milton a Poem and the hundred page Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion – are not works that people create incidentally. In many ways, this is far more true for Blake than for Moore. Moore, after all, may not have been capable of stopping himself from writing Watchmen, but equally, he wouldn’t have written it were it not for the existence of a major comics company that wanted him to do a prestige project. It was a lucrative gig and, for all Moore’s eventual misgivings about it, a savvily chosen project. Blake’s work, on the other hand, was ostentatiously non-commercial. The illuminated prophecies used printing techniques of his own devising, not fitting into any existing market or practice. After an early flirtation with the relatively sellable notion of a children’s book of poetry in the form of Songs of Innocence, his illuminated work moved quickly and decisively towards the obscure and difficult. His insistence that each copy must be unique and of his hand severely limited sales. In short, Blake’s illuminated prophecies eschewed essentially every form of commercial sense known to man.

This is not to say that Blake lacked all business sense. He supplemented his work as a prophet with more conventional commercial illustration, thus generally managing to make ends meet, although it was at times a bitterly narrow thing. But Blake often resented this work, and the degree to which he was constantly haunted by paranoia about his friends and associates made things harder for him. As a result, he could turn on his employers, as he did with his patron at the start of the 19th century, William Hayley, who gave him lodging in a cottage at Felpham and a series of portrait commissions that kept him busy and well paid. He found the work deadening, however, eventually coming to describe Hayley as “an enemy of my spiritual life” and moving back to London, where he quickly started work on Milton and Jerusalem.…

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