Eruditorum Press

That is not dead which can eternally hit the snooze button

Jack Graham

About Jack Graham

Jack Graham writes and podcasts about culture and politics from a Gothic Marxist-Humanist perspective. He co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper. Support Jack on Patreon.

Posts by Jack Graham:

Yet More Audio (Mind Robber Commentaries)

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Strange, isn’t it?  Years go by without you hearing my voice… and now I won’t shut up!  But yes, there’s some more audio for you to enjoy with your ears.  This time it’s another Eruditorum/Shabgraff co-venture, with Phil Sandifer and I talking over the top of one of the greatest Doctor Who stories ever made.  Very much for people who think Doctor Who is best when you can’t hear the dialogue… but can hear two bloggers talking about it.  Hmm.

I’m only kidding.  These commentaries are actually all brilliant.  Especially my bits.  (Phil’s are quite good, but he does insist upon letting actual knowledge and erudition interfere with the flow of manic blithering… which is not a problem I have, let me tell you.) 

This time you can download all the episodes at once, which is a better way of doing it (I think).  Just click here, my poor innocent trusting fools. …

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Reviewing Doctor Who Episodes Without Having Watched Them: ‘Robots of Sherwood’

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I saw ‘Deep Breath’ and ‘Into the Dalek’.  Then I stopped watching Series 8.  Welcome to the first in a new series of posts in which I will be revewing the rest of Series 8 without having watched it.

Mark Gatiss, that arch-trickster of modern Doctor Who, has done it again.  In ‘Robots of Sherwood’ he has managed to dupe everyone into thinking he is doing nothing more than simply paying homage to the classic series, while actually flying something far more profound under the fan radar.  Yes, he has armies of robotic Merry Men stalking around Sherwood Forest, their eyes glowing red, holding out their hands and saying “Kill the humans” in calm voices, but that’s where the similarities to ‘Robots of Death’ end.  For a start, these robotic outlaws are the good guys, cleansing the greenwood of the forces of law and order.

The triumvirate of villains in this episode – the Sheriff of Nottingham, Sir Guy de Gisbourne and King John – represent the power of the Norman state, and Robin Hood is a symbol of Saxon resistance.  It’s fitting that they should use a CGI Patrick Troughton to play Robin, since the Second Doctor was always the most anarchic and rebellious, and there’s always been something of Robin in the character of the Doctor.  The CGI is a bit wobbly here and there, but generally it more than adequately captures the nuances of Troughton’s acting style.

The extended use of quotations from Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Labriola, Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, Victor Serge, Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Christopher Caudwell, Bakunin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Maxim Gorky, Adorno, Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and Brecht liven up the episode no end.  It’s quite remarkable that the BBC should choose to devote such a long stretch of an episode of their flagship family entertainment show to a scene in which various characters learnedly debate revolutionary theory.  But the brave decision pays dividends.  I particularly enjoyed Jenna Coleman’s readings from Minima Moralia.

Jenna is the star of the show here, especially in the scene where she verbally disembowls the Sheriff when he quotes from various sociobiologists, most notably E. O. Wilson.

However, at the end of the day, Gatiss is playing yet another trick on us – albeit a fascinating one – when he launches his extended mediatations on the hermeneutics of revolutionary theory and the radical Enlightenment.  What he’s really up to is a critique of the whole concept of metafiction.  By having his characters display a lumpenly obvious and clunky self-awareness of their own historico-mythic quasi-fictionality, he tackles head on the banality of the pop-postmodern obsession with texts which are reflexively self-referential.  (There’s also, I believe, an encoded critique of Steven Moffat here… I know he and Gatiss don’t get on.)  This ties in with the way in which the functional adequacy of the CGI Troughton implicitly lays bare the limitations of the original actor.

Gatiss’ ultimate project for Doctor Who becomes clear in the powerful mix that he creates for ‘Robots of Sherwood’: a subversive political radicalism joined to a total rejection of the strategy of the self-involved and the self-referential. …

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No Question

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I wrote this for somebody as a favour, to fill some space.  I thought I might as well post it here.  It isn’t really a Shabgraff piece, but it exists.

William Shakespeare wrote the plays of William Shakespeare.  It wasn’t the Earl of Oxford, or Francis Bacon, or Christopher Marlowe, or any of the other candidates sometimes suggested.  But how can we be so sure?

We have the accounts of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.  His rivals, detractors, friends and colleagues had no doubt.  Ben Jonson wrote in his published diaries about his criticisms of the plays – right alongside his love and admiration for his friend Shakespeare, their author.  Nobody questioned Shakespeare’s authorship of his own work for centuries.  It wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that a brilliant but eccentric woman called Delia Bacon wrote a book in which she heavily hinted that the true author was Sir Francis Bacon.  She convinced a few people – including Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud (who never believed anything silly, of course).  The early-to-mid 19th century was an age still influenced by the Romantics, who had invented the idea of the Artist as a lone creator, driven by the spirit, scribbling away in a garret, listening to the Muse whispering in his ear and writing for the sake of Art itself.  William Shakespeare – a professional actor, jobbing hack, and sharer in the going concern that was the Globe Theatre – didn’t fit this Romantic ideal.  Delia Bacon preferred her more upper-class, better-educated, self-consciously intellectual namesake.  Trouble is, aside from the total lack of any evidence at all connecting Bacon to any of the plays or poems, we also know Sir Francis Bacon’s writing style, his range, his concerns, and his opinions.  They don’t fit the plays.  At all.  The same is true of the current most-favoured candidate, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, the shy bard depicted in the recent (and very silly) movie Anonymous.  We have extant examples of de Vere’s poetry.  It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t compare to the style and quality of even Shakespeare’s earliest and worst sonnets.  The Earl also wrote a few comedy plays.  None of them survive, but they are mentioned by a contemporary critic, Francis Meres.  Meres also mentions Shakespeare.  The context makes it perfectly clear that Meres thinks of them as different people.  (This also rubbishes the notion that deVere would be precluded from writing plays by his social position – the excuse often used to explain the Earl’s theorised decision to use an actor as a front man.)

It’s often said by ‘Anti-Statfordians’ that Shakespeare lacked the education he would have needed to write the plays.  But Shakespeare, as the son of a local alderman, would have been entitled to attend Stratford’s King Edward VI grammar school.  Shakespeare’s plays are recognisably the work of someone with an Elizabethan grammar school education – a grounding that would look more like a Classics degree from Oxbridge today.  Anti-Stratfordians often point out that, unlike other playwrights (Christopher Marlow, for instance) Shakespeare didn’t attend University.…

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Shabcast 2

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Yes, Shabcast 2 is here.  This month, you get the first part of my immensely long (and ongoing) discussion with the wonderful Josh Marsfelder, writer of the Star Trek blog that makes all other Star Trek blogs look like nothing more than Star Trek blogs, Vaka Rangi.

There will be more of the discussion up next month in Shabcast 3.

Meanwhile, Shabcast 1 – with me and Phil Sandifer – is still available here.

And, once again, thanks to the lovely lads at the Pex Lives Podcast for providing me with the bandwidth to make this project possible.  Pex Lives’ latest edition is just out, and is about ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’, and is very funny and opinionated (I think they’re a bit hard on Colin Baker to be honest, and far too kind to The Verve).  Download or listen here.…

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The Goodies

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Ah, thank heavens for NATO, those white guardians of light and order.  And boo hiss to those nasty old Russians.  It’s a good job ‘we’ don’t behave like ‘them’.  NATO is proof of ‘our’ sanity (in both senses: rationality and cleanliness), isn’t it?

Human Rights Watch has conducted a thorough investigation of civilian deaths as a result of NATO action. On the basis of this investigation, Human Rights Watch has found that there were ninety separate incidents involving civilian deaths during the seventy-eight day bombing campaign. Some 500 Yugoslav civilians are known to have died in these incidents.

We determined the intended target in sixty-two of the ninety incidents. Military installations account for the greatest number, but nine incidents were a result of attacks on non-military targets that Human Rights Watch believes were illegitimate. (Human Rights Watch is currently preparing a separate report with a full analysis of our legal objections to the choice of certain targets.) These include the headquarters of Serb Radio and Television in Belgrade, the New Belgrade heating plant, and seven bridges that were neither on major transportation routes nor had other military functions.

Thirty-three incidents occurred as a result of attacks on targets in densely populated urban areas (including six in Belgrade). Despite the exclusive use of precision-guided weapons in attacks on the capital, Belgrade experienced as many incidents involving civilian deaths as any other city. In Nis, the use of cluster bombs was a decisive factor in civilian deaths in at least three incidents. Overall, cluster bomb use by the United States and Britain can be confirmed in seven incidents throughout Yugoslavia (another five are possible but unconfirmed); some ninety to 150 civilians died from the use of these weapons.

Thirty-two of the ninety incidents occurred in Kosovo, the majority on mobile targets or military forces in the field. Attacks in Kosovo overall were more deadly-a third of the incidents account for more than half of the deaths. Seven troubling incidents were as a result of attacks on convoys or transportation links. Because pilots’ ability to properly identify these mobile targets was so important to avoid civilian casualties, these civilian deaths raise the question whether the fact that pilots were flying at high altitudes may have contributed to these civilian deaths by precluding proper target identification. But insufficient evidence exists to answer that question conclusively at this point.

From the Human Rights Watch report ‘Civilian Deaths in the NATO Air Campaign‘, 2000.

“I just need an answer from NATO: Why did you destroy my home and kill my family?”

That quote, attributed to Faiz Fathi Jfara from the town of Bani Walid, appears in a Human Rights Watch report released this week titled “Unacknowledged Deaths.” The report details eight specific incidents where at least 72 Libyan civilians died as the result of NATO’s bombing campaign. A third of the victims were children under the age of 18. HRW researchers found the remnants of a laser-guided missile in the ruins of the Jfara family compound, where five members of the family, including a nine-year-old girl, were killed when bombs fell on Aug.

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More Audio News

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Phil Sandifer and I have started to record commentaries for Doctor Who episodes.  So far we’ve only done ‘The Rescue’, but the plan is to do some more.  We’re both quite happy with the ones we’ve done, and I think they’re a lot of fun. 

‘The Rescue’ Episode 1 can be downloaded or heard here.

‘The Rescue’ Episode 2 can be downloaded or heard here.

I’m so pleased with the result that I may use the ‘natter while watching’ format for future Shabcasts.

Shabcast 1 was a roaring success, by the way… at least in terms of numbers of listens/downloads.  Many thanks to Phil (again), and the Pex Lives boys (again) and to all the people who listened or downloaded.  If you did so because you’re a reader of mine rather than a regular Pex Lives listener, then

a) thanks, and

b) you should listen to Pex Lives, because it’s great.

The next Shabcast is being planned as we speak, and looks set to be just as good as the first one.  Look for it some time next month.…

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Knock Knock

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Spoilers.

So, my pre-ordered copy of the much-critically-fawned-upon ‘horror’ film The Babadook arrived this morning.  And I’ve just watched it.

What a load of crap.

Look, I get what was being attempted here.  And it was attempted with a lot of sincerity, and some excellent acting.  But, really, what was the point?  Depression is a terrible thing.  Yes, we know.  We all bloody know.  Even those of us lucky enough to have escaped direct experience of depression know that we have escaped something terrible.  Grief is a terrible thing too.  Likewise.  It’s better to connect with and love your kids than to not.  Yes.  I don’t have kids and I know that.  These are trite morals.

Of course, there’s no reason why you couldn’t make a film carefully exploring these issues, delineating the experience of suffering from grief and depression so bad that it paralyses even your ability to love your own child.  But if that’s what you want to talk about, do so.  Make a film about depression.  Make a film about mental illness.  Make a film about a nervous breakdown.  Make it with sensitivity, and with the space and attention these issues deserve.  The Babadook isn’t that film, though it seems to be under the impression that it kind-of might be.

If, on the other hand, you want to make a ghost story, then make a ghost story.  But don’t make a film which uses the aesthetics of the ghost story as obvious and simplistic metaphors for depression and mental illness, especially if you’re going to spend the entire runtime of the film essentially screaming “THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR DEPRESSION!!!!” at the audience, as if you blatantly don’t trust them to twig.

It’s possible that someone who has actually suffered from depression may disagree with me here, and I shall respect that disagreement from my lucky positionality, but it seems to me that all we get in The Babadook are trite morals dressed up in dark cloaks.  ‘DON’T LET HIM IN’ says the book about the monster that will creep into your life through looks and words, attack you in bed, and get under your skin.  Well thanks.  I’m sure people suffering from debilitating depression never thought of that.  The story seems to also imply that, once in, depression is almost certain to lead to murder-suicide if left unchecked… which seems a dubious message to be sending out about the plight of millions of perfectly normal, innocent, non-dangerous people who are suffering from a disease.  Also, depression would appear to be a monster that attacks without much in the way of a social origin.  The monster sneaks into your life because of loss and boredom and family difficulties, not because of wider social problems.  Moreover, the monster must be slain by the lone individual deciding to belt up.  Apparently, according to this film, all you have to do to defeat the monster of depression is to pull yourself together.  Even at the point where you are a slavering, knife-wielding homicidal maniac who is breaking the necks of pets (a cheap, obvious and predictable shot that one, by the way) and attempting to strangle your own kid, all you have to do is summon up the will-power to shout down your inner demons. …

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Do You Ever Just Feel Tired?

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In the wake of the Chapel Hill murders, people of Left-wing persuasion have been doing a lot of talking about the double standards which are applied to murder when it’s Muslims being murdered by non-Muslims rather than the other way round.  All very true.  If a Muslim had been the murderer in Chapel Hill, and his victims had been non-Muslim, we’d now be hearing the mainstream media (let alone the conservative media) talking about ‘terrorism’, the pundits would be giving us their standard reheated ‘clash of civilisations’ rhetoric, pontificating about the inherently violent nature of Islam, asking Muslim ‘community leaders’ to address the cancer of extremism in their midst, etc etc etc, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.  Hell, Charles Windsor might even open his empty head again to release some more racist platitudes about the need for Muslims to ‘conform’ to ‘our values’ (there is no ‘us’ or ‘we’ or ‘our’, Mr Windsor.  Please fuck off).  There certainly wouldn’t be anybody desperately trying to spin the murders as nothing more than a dispute over a parking space, or the product of the singular demons of a lone nut.

But we don’t actually need to theorise what might have happened if the skin colours and/or religions of the victims and killer in Chapel Hill were transposed.  We’ve seen it demonstrated for us in the real world, time and time again.  You’ll have heard of Lee Rigby, the young British soldier horribly murdered by two Muslim men in May 2013.  If you were living in the UK at the time, you will hardly have been able to miss it.  I think people were actually obliged by law to mention it on TV at least once every half hour.  You may not have heard of Mohammed Saleem however, an 82 year old Muslim man who was stabbed to death by a Ukrainian student in Birmingham (I didn’t know non-Muslims were even allowed in Birmingham!).  It happened the month before Lee Rigby was killed.  To put it mildly… it wasn’t quite the media sensation that the Rigby murder became, despite the fact that Saleem’s killer was later convicted of planting bombs in three Mosques in the Midlands (so it probably wasn’t about a parking space).  The Rigby murder (which was utterly horrible and senseless, let’s be in no doubt about that) unleashed an upsurge of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the UK, despite being roundly and publicly condemned by just about every prominent Muslim, and every major Muslim organisation, in Britain.  Needless to say, the wave of violent, anti-Muslim bigotry was not covered in depth by the media.

But I mustn’t talk about this stuff.  Jonathan Freedland will accuse me of starting a who’s-the-most-picked-on ‘arms race‘.  I mean, surely there are higher priorities than the frequent violent Islamophobia in Britain.

Some people still criticise Israel, for instance.

By the way, I do just want to make one observation about the Left reaction to Chapel Hill.  If you’re on the Left, or a liberal, and you’re condemning the Chapel Hill murders, and decrying the double standards of the media, and you’re not also at least occasionally speaking out against the wholesale slaughter of Muslims and Arabs by Western governments (chiefly but by no means only the USA), and the support given by Western governments to regimes that violently oppress Muslims (i.e.…

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Shabcast 1

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The long-threatened Shabogan Graffiti podcast – or Shabcast – is finally here.  Nobody asked for this, but you’re getting it anyway.

Episode One is available to download here, bandwidth kindly provided by the very nice Pex Lives podcast fellas.  In a classic example of arrogant Trot entryism, I’ve infiltrated Pex Lives with two guest appearances on their podcast and am now barging to the front and taking over their bandwidth.

This first episode is basically a gargantuan, rambling chat between me and Phil Sandifer of TARDIS Eruditorum (which apparently I’ve been saying wrong as well as periodically spelling wrong) and other insanely long projects, with all the boring bits edited out (mostly the bits when I talk, or a couple of rubbish questions that didn’t lead anywhere… this being the first ‘interview’ I’ve conducted since I was a journalism student about 712 years ago).

If you want, for some perverse and unfathomable reason, to listen to two men you don’t know talking about television for pushing three hours, then today is your lucky day my friend.…

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Lost Post

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“Twenty-eight minutes past,” said Felix, looking at his watch.  “Nothing.”

The Doctor consulted the black plastic Casio with a broken strap that she kept in her pocket.

“I make it 3.26,” she said.  “Any moment now.”

They were standing behind some empty flower tubs at the centre of a roundabout.  Every now and then a car would swoop past, but essentially they were alone.  A spray of chilly drizzle floated all around them.  It was almost frozen, and felt curiously oily.  Each droplet turned as bright gold as a cinder as it flew under the beams of the street lamps.

They’d left the TARDIS stuck half-way out of an Off Licence several streets away.

“How do you know there’s a roundabout around here?” Felix had asked.

“If we walk far enough in any direction,” the Doctor had replied, “we’re bound to come across one.  Roads need to diverge, you know.”

And, sure enough, a roundabout had eventually presented itself.  It was deserted, so they had strolled across the broad ring of tarmac to the little grassy hill at its centre.

And there they stood, side by side, like strangers waiting for a bus.  They did not speak for quite some time.

“Are you sure you’ve got this right, Doctor?” asked Felix at last, who was feeling wet and sick and cold, and increasingly sure that the Doctor was playing some kind of game, the aim of which was to fob him off.

“The instructions were quite clear,” she replied tersely.

“But I thought one had to wait at a crossroads at midnight,” said Felix.

“That’s if you’re waiting for the Devil.  We’re not.”

“I don’t think we’re waiting for anyone,” said Felix sulkily.  “I think you have been misleading me.  Again.”

It was a little while after this that they checked the time.  As they did so, a figure appeared on the other side of the roundabout, riding a bicycle.  The bicycle and its rider emerged from a patch of darkness between street lamps, without having entered it first.  The pedaling figure seemed simply to have formed itself from the darkness.  It began rolling slowly around the roundabout in what looked like a cloud of mist.  It had swerved into view and trundled up onto the centre of the roundabout almost before Felix and the Doctor had realised what was happening.

The Doctor consulted her Casio again.

“Twenty-seven minutes past three in the morning,” she announced, waggling her Casio in Felix’s face, and sounding more smug than Felix had ever imagined possible.

Felix did not respond.  His attention was fixed on the thing that had just appeared in front of them.

One cloven hoof remained upon a still pedal.  The other rested on the ground.  It made the wet grass sizzle and steam and char.

“Shall we finish the argument later?” asked Felix in a hoarse whisper.

“Just because you’re losing…” muttered the Doctor.

The creature stepped off its bike and leaned it against a flower tub.  It was short – though still taller than Felix – and stocky.…

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