Eruditorum Press

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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:

The Vox Day Interview

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At long last, and with sincere thanks to Kevin and James over at Pex Lives for hosting, I am pleased to announce that my interview with Vox Day is live. You can find that right here. It’s a roughly two hour long discussion if John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them, one of the Sad/Rabid Puppy nominees for Best Novella this year, and Iain Banks’s debut novel The Wasp Factory, which I’ve previously covered here. Though don’t worry if you’ve not read them; the interview should be perfectly accessible to anyone who doesn’t mind some spoilers.

I’ve also recorded a conversation with Kevin, James, and Jack Graham that’s something of an afterparty, in which the four of us and Jack’s cat Quiz have a nice long chat about the interview, our thoughts on it, and what it revealed. It’s at times very silly and at times very interesting, and is available here. While the interview itself is obviously the more general interest item, I have to say, if you’re coming at this from the perspective of someone who likes my stuff, which, since you’re here, I assume you are, the afterparty is frankly essential listening.

I think both make for excellent and edifying radio, and hope you enjoy them.…

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The Dance of Dragons

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My interview with Vox Day should go up some time tomorrow over at Pex Lives, along with an accompanying Shabcast in which Jack, Kevin, James and I talk about the interview. There will be an announcement here when they go live.

State of Play

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

Lions of Meereen: Tyrion Lannister
Lions of Dorne: Jaime Lannister
Dragons of Meereen: Daenerys Targaryen
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
The Burning Hearts, Stannis Baratheon and Mellisandre
The Ship, Davos Seaworth
Snakes of Dorne: Elaria Sand
Direwolves of Braavos: Arya Stark
Chains of Dorne: Bronn
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Paws of the Wall: Tormund Giantsbane
Coins of Braavos: No one
Swords of Meereen: Daario Noharis
Butterflies of Meereen: Missandei
With the Bear of Meereen, Jorah Mormont

Winterfell and King’s Landing are abandoned.

The episode is in parts. The first is two minutes long and is set in Stannis Baratheon’s camp north of Winterfell. The opening image is an establishing shot of the camp in the snow.

The second is three minutes long and is set at the Wall. The transition is by dialogue, from Daavos talking about Castle Black to the northern gate to Castle Black.

The third is four minutes long and is set in Stannis Baratheon’s camp north of Winterfell. The transition is by hard cut, from Jon Snow to Stannis’s map, and by dialogue, with Stannis talking about Jon Snow and the Wall.

The fourth is six minutes long and is set in Dorne. The transition is by deeply idiosyncratic relationships between fathers and daughters, from Shireen to Myrcella.

The fifth is eight minutes long and is set in Braavos. The transition is by hard cut, from Bronn to an establishing shot of the docks.

The sixth is three minutes long and is set in Dorne. The transition is by dialogue, from the House of Black and White to Doran informing Ellaria that she has a choice ending with “or die.”

The seventh is six minutes long and is set in Stannis Baratheon’s camp. The transition is by dialogue, with both scenes talking about Targaryens. It features the death of Shireen Baratheon, burnt to death on her father’s orders.

The eighth is seventeen minutes long and is set in Meereen. The transition is by the theme of barbarism, from Shireen’s death to the fighting pits of Meereen. It features the death of lots and lots of people. The final image is of many people surprised at the unexpected departure of their queen and the means of her conveyance.

Review

In many ways this has the same structure as “Hardhome,” although Meereen is not as large a part of the episode as Hardhome was – this is an episode that deals with some smaller plots and then does a big endcap scene. Given this, there is a certain anticlimax, especially given the near-mythic power that “episode nine” at this point has within Game of Thrones. Put simply, this year the big set piece is not in the ninth slot; it was in the eighth, clearly.…

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Saturday Waffling (June 6th, 2015)

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If you missed it, yesterday’s Last War in Albion was something of a big post, culminating in the moment where I finally offer something of a thesis statement/summation of the sort of endlessly building history of Alan Moore that’s been going on, namely that he’s a con man. There’s still a brief chapter on The Ballad of Halo Jones to wrap up Book One (actually brief; it’s the shortest of the eleven chapters in Book One), and then on to Book Two. Excitement and fear abound.

Speaking of excitement and fear, with no shortage of deep ambivalence, I’m interviewing Theodore Beale today. What are you doing?…

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The Storm I’ve Unleashed (The Last War in Albion Part 99: Notes on the Fundamental Nature of Alan Moore)

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This is the eleventh of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore grew up in the Spring Boroughs area of Northampton, a desperately poor part of England near Green Street, famously described by Jeremy Seabrook in his book The Unprivileged.

“It flows out of me, and I don’t understand it and I don’t know where it’s from, but it’s there and undeniable and mine and I get to share it. I get to share it with everyone. This? This is as good as it gets. I feel small and holy, and the part of me that hasn’t disappeared in the storm I’ve unleashed is whispering… ‘This is worth it.'” – Kieron Gillen, The Wicked and the Divine
Seabrook returns constantly to the closed-mindedness of the area’s inhabitants, describing their hatred of abstract art as “the anger of anyone brought abruptly face to face with ideas which he has no use for, but which he finds form the very basis of someone else’s philosophy. They did not admit it willingly that anything exceeded their ability to understand, and in consequence violence had to be done to everything they encountered in order to accommodate it.” This resulted in attitudes characterized on the one hand by intense suspicion towards “other people [who] were sure to abuse your hospitality, take advantage of your kindness and exploit your generous nature,” and on the other by an intense desire “not to be beholden to anybody.” He describes one group of relations simply as “mean. Of them it was said that ‘they’d bottle a fart and use it again if they could’. Tom’s mother was extremely reluctant to throw away anything she had used personally, and even left the water she had washed in cooling greyly for hours in the enamel bowl in the sink. Once they found some mice-droppings in a sack of flour, and they spent the whole night extracting the tiny black grains from the bag before offering the tainted powder for sale the following morning.” The sense of anti-intellectualism and insularity is profound, and the theme that Seabrook circles back to again and again, concluding that “the life of the streets had a devitalizing effect, and did not allow of any departure from a rigidly fixed pattern of behaviour and relationships.” But for all of this, he speaks movingly of the plight of his family and neighbors, explaining in the book’s final passage how, when the terraces were finally bulldozed in favor of some new vision of social engineering, the now displaced residents were “shown the error and irrelevance of their faith by those who have access to greater truths, and who tear the veils from the eyes of others, veils that prove to be not veils at all, but living membranes, the removal of which leaves nothing but empty and bleeding sockets.”
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Comics Reviews (June 3rd, 2015)

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Years of Future Past #1

A very capable homage to a classic motif in X-Men stories, rejigged in terms of Secret Wars. That said, I’m not even reading a ton of these alternate realities Secret Wars books and they’re starting to all feel a bit alike to me; I can’t imagine how they’re reading to people with larger pulls than me.

Secret Wars #3

The settling into something more standard issue is probably inevitable, and the collection of saved heroes is a novel one. I expect this will remain satisfying, but there’s very much a return to ground here after the giddy highs of the kickoff, and the news that #4 has been pushed back to July is worrisome; part of why this is working, frankly, is the high pace of release. I’m not sure I’m still going to give a shit come November, especially with all these auxiliary books.

Crossed: Badlands #78

Zombies vs. Megafauna. Possibly not a comedy. It’s sometimes hard to tell with Gillen. We’re in the mid-story lull here, with neither plot having much conceptual oomph, but it’s capable zombies, prehistoric and otherwise.

Darth Vader #6

At the book’s heart is a scene Gillen basically promised in the initial interviews about the book. Gillen’s take on it is very strong, and it successfully sets up a new status quo for the book. Good, solid fun.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #6

Some solid but not particularly noteworthy jokes about hippos give way to a Welcome to Night Vale-esque separation of narrator and story, followed by smashed cars. Yes, that is a summary. Yes, it also counts as a review.

Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #1

Perhaps just because its concept is an active turn away from the past few years of Spider-Man, but this worked in a way that not all of the Secret Wars minis have. The flash-forward is very well done, setting a new status quo that is at once unlike anything we’ve seen before and an archetypal Spider-Man setup. This is very promising.

The Wicked & The Divine #11

There’s plenty of world in which to enthuse and speculate over the consequences and implications of this issue, including comments here. I have numerous theories and guesses. Those, however, are not the point of a review.

As a comic, as a piece of art and an engagement with culture, as an installment in the serial The Wicked and the Divine, this is superlative. It is one of the best comics of the year, guaranteed. I’ve praised this comic plenty of times as one to watch. The thrill those of us who have been following it got this week, opening our issue, more than justifies that recommendation. Simply, utterly, perfectly brilliant. Indeed, so good it deserves a reaction image.

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.02: The Night Lands

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State of Play
The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister
Dragons of the Dothraki Sea: Daenerys Targaryen
Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish
Bears of the Dothraki Sea: Jorah Mormont
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Ships of Dragonstone: Davos Seaworth
Kraken of Pyke: Theon Greyjoy
The Direwolf, Arya Stark
Burning Hearts of Dragonstone: Stannis Baratheon, Melisandre
Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn
Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae
Winterfell lies empty.
The episode is in twelve parts. The first part runs four minutes and is set on the Kingsroad north of King’s Landing. The opening image is of Arya pissing by a stream. 
The second runs six minutes and is set in King’s Landing; the transition is by hard cut, from Arya and Gendry looking nervous to Tyrion whistling “The Rains of Castamere.”
The third runs four minutes and is set at Craster’s Keep north of the Wall; the transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion talking about the Night’s Watch to the Night’s Watch.
The fourth runs three minutes and is set in the Red Waste east of the Dothraki Sea; the transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Daenerys Targaryen. 
The fifth runs two minutes and is set in Pyke; the transition is by hard cut, from a wide shot of the Red Waste to Theon Greyjoy’s ship.
The sixth runs eight minutes and is in sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is four minutes long; the transition is by image, from Theon having sex to prostitutes having sex. The other is four minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Ros to Podrick’s hand pouring wine for Tyrion. 
The seventh runs four minutes and is set on the Kingsroad north of King’s Landing. The transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion and Bronn talking about killing Robert’s bastards to Gendry.
The eighth runs seven minuets and is set in Pyke. The transition is from hard cut, from Gendry lying on the ground to Theon arriving in Pyke.
The ninth runs four minutes and is set in Dragonstone. The transition is by dialogue, from the Greyjoys talking about ships to Davos on the shore.
The tenth runs three minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Davos riding off to Tyrion and Cersei. 
The eleventh runs four minutes and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion and Cersei discussing Stannis, among other things, to Stannis.
The last runs two minutes and is set at Craster’s Keep north of the Wall. The transition is by theme, from Melisandre working her magic with Stannis to Craster working his with his son. The final image is of Craster clubbing Jon Snow for sneaking about the camp looking for the answer to a riddle whose answer is chess. 
Analysis
It is not by any means the first time that the title of an episode has come from a relatively small portion of the episode.
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Hardhome

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State of Play

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

Lions of Mereen: Tyrion Lannister
Lions of King’s Landing: Cersei Lannister
Dragons of Mereen: Daenerys Targaryen
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Direwolves of Winterfell: Sansa Stark
Direwolves of Braavos: Arya Stark
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Flowers of the Wall: Gilly
Paws of the Wall: Tormund Giantsbane
Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy
Butterflies of Mereen: Missandei
Coins of Braavos: No one
Flayed Men of Winterfell: Roose Bolton, Ramsey Bolton
With the Bear of Mereen, Jorah Mormont

Dorne is abandoned.

The episode is in eight parts. The first is five minutes long and is set in Mereen. The opening image is an overhead shot of Daenerys’s throne room.

The second is one minute long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Tyrion to Cersei Lannister.

The third is five minutes long and is set in Braavos. The transition is by very hard cut, from Cersei screaming to Arya’s impassive face, accented by a sharply dissonant chord.

The fourth is three minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from the unnamed girl in the House of Black and White to Cersei’s cell door.

The fifth is four minutes long and is in two sections; it is set in Winterfell. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by theme, from Cersei to Sansa, both prisoners. The second is one minute long; the transition is by dialogue, from Theon talking about Ramsey to Ramsey.

The sixth part is six minutes long and is in two sections; it is set in Mereen. The first section is five minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Ramsey to Theon and Daenerys sitting and drinking. The other is one minute long; the transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys to a rack of weapons.

The seventh part is one minute long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Jorah to a spoon.

The last is thirty-one minutes long is in two sections; it is set at and north of the Wall. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by image, from Cersei licking water from a small puddle on the floor to a bowl. The other is twenty-eight minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Sam saying that Jon always comes back to Jon. The final image is an establishing shot of Hardhome fallen to the dead.

Review

The telling moment actually comes in the little “Inside Game of Thrones” thing they do at the end of the episode, where Benioff and Weiss pat themselves on the back for how Hardhome isn’t in the books. That’s true, and the episode is built to milk it, with the looming realization that there’s a big action sequence coming played as an almost decadently long moment of dread.

There’s a real structural cleverness to this. It’s the first “big moment” episode we’ve had; a half-episode one, in the tradition of “The Lion and the Rose” or “The Laws of Gods and Men,” as opposed to a “Blackwater” or a “The Watchers on the Wall,” but nevertheless an episode that is primarily about one thing.…

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Saturday Waffling (May 30th, 2015)

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First of all, the Perdido Street Station post is going to be in June. I foolishly didn’t look at the length of the book before planning my reading for the month, and am only halfway through. Will go back to reading after I schedule this though.

Hoping to clear time to look at the Hugo Packet a bit, if only to get a broader sense of the Puppies. My interview with Day/Beale isn’t quite nailed down yet, but it’s getting close. (He’s still rereading Wasp Factory, which is the main delay. I, in what was in hindsight the wrong call, reread it prior to Seveneves, putting Perdido Street Station after that.)

But for those who have read the Hugo packet, how are things in it? What are your ballots, if you’re not voting No Award in all categories (or if you’re ranking things below No Award, as I am planning to do with the non-Puppy choices, after perusing the Puppy choices to see if there are any surprises there.

Other than that, I’ve wrapped up the Davison revisions and started in on Colin Baker. Friday’s Last War in Albion is a big one. And there’s my first stab at original fiction in years up for people backing the Patreon at $5 or more. See you tomorrow night for Hardhome.…

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The City’s Burdened, Swollen Heart (The Last War in Albion Part 98: The Unprivileged)

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This is the tenth of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Several thousand words were spilled upon the subject of Alan Moore’s minor works, culminating with remarks on his two contributions to Fantagraphics’ anthology Honk. The first of these was a piece entitled “Globetrotting for Agoraphobics,” with illustrations from Eddie Campbell.

“Outside the horses walk on cobbles, ringing in the city’s burdened, swollen heart. Cars follow and then more cars; cyclone flow of noise and fume and coloured steel. The factories are born, thrive briefly, turn to husks as the hand lettered signs above the shops give way to corporate logo.” – Alan Moore, The Birth Caul
Figure 783: Moore’s family as depicted by Peter Bagge.
Moore’s other contribution to Honk is a reprint of a piece earlier published by Knockabout Comics, originally with illustrations by Savage Pencil, although the Honk version was illustrated by Peter Bagge. Entitled “Brasso with Rosie,” the piece is one of the few, and by some margin the earliest openly autobiographical piece that Moore has written. It is, to be sure, an exaggerated and at least partially fictionalized piece – Moore’s claim that an elderly relative of his was once “totally immobilized when a thoughtless spouse decided to hang mirrors upon either side of the tiny, damp-scented room in which he customarily sat, presenting the luckless dotard with an infinite succession of doppelgangers arrayed to either side of him,” leading him to believe that he had “been granted some form of X-ray vision, enabling him to see through the peeling walls and into the identical living rooms of his neighbors,” and that “he remained like this for twenty years” is, for example, surely overstating the case by at least half a decade. But underneath the comedic exaggeration is a sardonic and vivid account of the texture of Moore’s childhood, featuring no shortage of details that Moore would go on to revisit in later works, such as his claim that “while it was true that before I was ten years old I had been hung from a tree by my wrists, whipped with barbed wire and buried alive by my schoolchums, there were also moving and poignant memories that I shall carry with me forever,” an account he would eventually revisit in his magical working The Birth Caul. Indeed, “Brasso with Rosie” discusses birth cauls in the context of his grandmother’s “elaborate and obsessive system of Juju and Counter-Juju,” claiming here that she in fact had an “extensive collection” of them that was discovered after her death, as opposed to, in his later account, simply having his mother’s caul.
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You Were Expecting Someone Else: Marcelo Camargo

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This post exists because my Patreon crossed the $310 mark. It’s currently at $318.50, exactly $6.50 away from another bonus post like this on “Night of the Doctor,” which will otherwise wait until the McGann/Eccleston book to be written. You can pledge to help make that happen here.

To recap, in early July 2014 it emerged that a server at a BBC Worldwide had been improperly secured, and that scripts for the first five episodes of Season Eight had leaked. A few days later it became clear that the leak was worse than it had initially appeared as a workprint of Deep Breath also appeared on torrent sites, followed, over the course of the next month and a half, by workprints of Into the Dalek, Robot of Sherwood, Listen, and Time Heist. The files had been prepared for a Brazil-based subtitling company called Drei Marc, and specifically for a gentleman named Marcelo Camargo who, despite having absolutely nothing to do with the leak itself, became the name most associated with it.
 
The first thing to say is both obvious and controversial: it was fine. For all the talk of the leak being “embarrassing” for both Doctor Who and the BBC, there were no meaningful negative consequences. All five leaked episodes performed just fine, both critically and in the ratings. Just like the leak of Rose didn’t hurt anything (and indeed probably helped the series, as the diehard fans hashed out all their arguments over it in advance). Indeed, the truth is that it’s tough to think of any instance where a pre-release leak to torrent sites actually caused any damage. It’s to the point where it’s widely believed that the recent leak of the Supergirl pilot was deliberate on CBS’s part. 
 
No, that’s not the same as saying that leaks can’t hurt shows. Certainly it helps that the five leaked episodes were actually good. It’s hard to hurt good material by letting people see it. Had Capaldi completely bombed in the part such that the buzz around the screener copies was negative it would have been a very different situation. But these were five episodes of television that ranged from the quite good to the excellent, and even with unfinished effects and dodgy musical cues their basic quality was evident.
 
And yes, I suppose at this point I may as well admit that I watched them at the time, especially as Moffat has admitted that he would have watched them. I don’t mean this revelation to indicate some larger ethical principle, to be clear. I just couldn’t resist. My wife and I were nearly a year into a running joke of saying “guess what” with the answer being a very emphatic and happy “Peter Capaldi,” with every syllable emphasized. I was dying to see the new Doctor. So I caved. Lasted a solid week or two after Deep Breath leaked, and avoided the scripts entirely, as what I was interested in was the performance, not the plot, but I caved eventually.
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