Eruditorum Press

Less organic intellectuals than morbid symptoms

Jane Campbell

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Sunday Eggs and Bangers

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In a very special pocast (albeit one recorded a month ago) Jane and James discuss Steve Thompson’s Doctor Who episodes. At length. Now, mind you, this was at midnight over here in the States, and I was well past my bedtime.  Whereas James was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 6am over in the UK.  So I would definitely go James’s version of the event, because my memory is hazy on the point.  I think I kept talking about death.  Yeah.  That seems likely. 

Grab the episode here.

And feel free to mock us to the high heavens in the comments.  🙂…

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The One Word Test

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Not sure how we failed to post this yesterday morning. Sorry. -Phil

The following is an essay that will appear in 101 Claras to See, a charity anthology edited by Caitlin Smith.  The book will feature essays, art, and fic, all celebrating the character of Clara Oswald from Doctor Who and the fandom that’s grown around her, including contributions from both Phil and Jill.  The proceeds will help the One to One Children’s Fund. 

It is a game of wits, of intelligence, of one’s ability to manipulate words. To play, to win, one must understand the nature not just of stories, but of conversation, of dialectic… of alchemy.  The One Word Test demonstrates just how much Clara understands the nature of storytelling, not to mention the nature of so many underlying principles.

The game is played in a greenhouse – a kind of Garden, complete with chirping birds (one of Clara’s symbols). This is an inversion – a warm place in the middle of winter, a place of life, while outside the world slumbers in its annual death. This is an important alchemical principal, the union of opposites, and the power of negative space (the reversal of polarity, so to speak).  Indeed, the entire scene is a study in contradiction. Even Strax’s lines that open the scene (“Do not attempt to escape, or you will obliterated. May I take your coat?”) revel in the juxtaposition of violence and etiquette. 

Vastra sits in the larger of two wicker chairs: she is in the dominant position, and acts as a gatekeeper to the Doctor. The chair is large enough to form a halo around her. Clara sits in the smaller chair, and is not haloed; she has yet to realize her full potential.  The wicker of her chair is simpler than that of Vastra’s chair, with diagonal cross-hatching that resembles Oswin’s actual room at the Dalek Asylum.

JENNY: Sit.
VASTRA: There are two refreshments in your world the color of red wine. This is not red wine.

It’s interesting how the Test begins – before Jenny explains the rules, we get this: Jenny delivering a single word in the imperative (not to mention a Buddhist meme), and Vastra invoking the principle of Negative Space within the context of a dualism – the heart of contradiction.  Vastra does not offer the truth of what she is drinking. She only offers what it is not.

JENNY: Madame Vastra will ask you questions. You will confine yourself to single-word responses. One word only. Do you understand?
CLARA: Why?
VASTRA: Truth is singular. Lies are words, words, words.

Already Clara demonstrates that she’s more than qualified to play this game. The first response she gives is a single word, but it isn’t an answer, it’s a question. She has already reversed the roles that have been established (now she is asking the question) while adhering to the rules at the same time. Vastra, we should note, speaks the truth and yet lies at the same time.…

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Time and The Island

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So I recently finished the last couple of Jonathan Blow video games, so curious was I about this developer’s work given the interest in it by people I respect. As Phil predicted, The Witness was a bit more up my alley than it was his. Phil is often right.

Not that I didn’t like Braid. Indeed, the basic mechanic itself in that game is both fascinating and relevant to the game’s overall points about regret and nostalgia, which are entwined with the impetus to “save the princess.” The actual puzzles I found very entertaining. Indeed, stripped down to just its mechanics, Braid has a wonderful, enchanting structure. Each section is basically an exploration of what happens when the mechanic of going back is contradicted or expanded in some novel way. Even more so, the way the various levels unfold remind me of certain musical compositions.

Take, for example, the rather well-known Canon in D Major, by Johann Pachelbel, or Ravel’s Bolero. Certain passages repeat, over and over, but with different tones and expressions as they are played by different instruments and with slight variations. This is the sense I get of Braid’s structure, from the repetition of The Pit as the first level in a new world (to explore a newly introduced mechanic) to Tim’s constant failure to find the princess at the end of each sequence.

Likewise, I found the art of Braid to be terribly enchanting. The palette of colors, the impressionistic brush strokes, coupled with the background music, it’s a game that’s pleasurable just to get immersed in. There is an element of pleasure for the sake of pleasure that I find very appealing, though obviously that’s not all that’s going on with Braid.

Which brings me to what really didn’t work for me, which is the story. Some of this displeasure is undoubtedly rooted in having just played Undertale. In Undertale, the avatar for the player is decidedly ambiguous – a figure who could be any sex, and who could come from all kinds of different cultural backgrounds. Which makes it very easy to project one’s self into the story. But Undertale goes further, in that there’s an element of co-creation to the story, for indeed the point of Undertale is explore what sort of role you want to play in a game in the first place. You don’t have to kill monsters, you can make friends. Or you can be a terribly fearsome fighter. The outcome of the story is a reflection of your choices.

The actual mechanics of Undertale, in the meantime, are relatively trivial. You wander around various environments, solve some puzzles, and occasionally play mini-video games that are mostly about dodging or capturing certain sprites. But, as I said, the point of Undertale isn’t the mechanics, it’s the story, which unfolds through the exploration of the world and interacting with its characters. If anything, then, the central mechanic is choosing what you’re going to say next.…

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Lost Exegesis (The Moth) — Part 2

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You can find Part 1 of the essay here. Usually, the essay is spoiler-free until we get to the “Looking Glass” portion after an intertextual intermission. In this case our selected cultural artifacts are all much more interesting in how they function prophetically, so here’s your advance notice of spoilers from here on out.

Intermission

Saint Jack

SAWYER: Ah, damn. Didn’t I tell you? Word from the valley is Saint Jack got himself buried in a cave-in.

Let’s start with Saint Jack, a movie directed by Peter Bogdanovich based on the novel by Paul Theroux. Now, Paul Theroux, we should point out, isn’t just a novelist, he’s also justly known as a great travel writer, thanks to his travels to Africa, Singapore, and Japan. He’s earned the enmity of several governments, largely for bringing to light certain aspects of their countries which they’d preferred to keep covered up.

That said, I think the movie is much more celebrated than the book, so that’s what we’ll be attending to. It was shot in several months entirely on location in Singapore, under the pretense of being a standard rom-com (“Jack of Hearts”) as opposed to an adaptation of Saint Jack. After it was released, the movie was banned in Singapore for decades. So it’s got that, at least, in common with the book.

(What is it about “covering” things up? Come to think of it, Jack covers for Charlie at the end of The Moth, lying that Charlie has the flu to make his withdrawal more socially acceptable.)

The film is possibly some of the best work by Bogdanovich and lead actor Ben Gazzara, who plays the titular Jack Flowers. Jack Flowers is an American expat living in Singapore in the 70s. He makes his living by running a brothel, which also supports his drinking. Jack makes it work because he does not judge the people in his life. It’s not like he’s in a position to without being a hypocrite, but then we see all kinds of hypocrites in Jack’s line of work. He doesn’t use force or intimidation or privilege to navigate the world – no, he looks at everyone as deserving of his attention and respect and warmth, and even when he’s proven wrong he does little more than walk away. So Jack is a “saint” in this rather spiritual respect, in how he manages his relationships, not in terms of his “sins.” He’s a saint, but he’s no saint.

The movie meanders for quite a while, basically a series of vignettes featuring Jack interacting with his clients, workers, and other people, but it’s got a couple of pivotal moments. The first is when the local mob takes down Jack’s place of business, wrecking his establishment and dispersing his people, while marking his arms with tattoos comprised of various epithets and obscenities. This is actually about the halfway point of the movie. Jack goes to another tattooist to put down more tattoos that effectively integrate the Asian hieroglyphs into pictures of flowers.…

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Lost Exegesis (The Moth) — Part 1

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The moth is the obvious symbol of this story, so let’s start there. Both moths and butterflies are of the same family, Lepidoptera. The species, like many insects, goes through several developmental stages, resulting in complete metamorphosis. After an egg is laid, a larva or caterpillar emerges, which will shed its skin several times as it grows. Eventually it enters a pupa or chrysalis stage, cocooned and stewing in its own juices, and dissolving almost utterly. The imago or adult creature emerges, with wings and antennae, ready to reproduce and begin the cycle anew.

Locke is right: butterflies, not moths, get all the attention. Mythologically, for example, the butterfly is symbolic of Psyche (“psyche” is also a word that means “breath” and “soul”), a beautiful mortal woman who becomes a goddess. In this myth, Psyche is taken by Eros into Paradise, with only one rule to abide: She dare not see his face. Unable to resist, she lights a flame at their bedside one night, and is so taken by the beauty of her lover that she spills a drop of hot oil on him. He wakens, sadly, and asks why? She answers, “I had to know.” Psyche awakens and Paradise is gone.

Disconsolate, Psyche makes for a great river to end her misery, but she hears Pan playing his flute, and takes his counsel. She makes for the temple of Venus and dedicates herself to the Goddess, for her only hope of ever seeing Eros again is to become a goddess herself. She is set to impossible tasks, which she impossibly completes – sorting seeds from pebbles, procuring golden fleece, and retrieving water from the source of the River Styx. Her final task is to acquire the beauty cream of the goddess of the Underworld, Persephone. She returns with the beauty cream, but keeps it for herself rather than turning it over to Venus. Psyche opens the cream, and one deadly vapor emerges, ending Psyche’s life. The gods decree that she has succeeded by claiming her own power, and Psyche becomes a goddess and weds Eros.

The journey here is one of ego-death. The divine pours through when the ego dies, when it has finally let go. As such, the family Lepidoptera makes for wonderfully apt symbolism. Of course, Charlie isn’t a butterfly, he’s a moth, so he’s not as pretty, but the journey is nonetheless the same.

 

Charlie’s Heroic Journey: The Call to Adventure

The Heroic Journey follows a basic structure – hearing the Call to Adventure, the Hero ventures off to the Special Place to secure a Boon for the Ordinary World, a return that requires the development of a kind of Mastery through which the Freedom to Live is earned. As much as is made of the structure, however, this is largely beside the point. The structure simply allows the myriad of each journey’s particular details to be read metaphorically as a spiritual process of ego-death – and, subsequently, to position the spiritual process of ego-death in the material conditions of our ordinary lives.…

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Lost Exegesis (House of the Rising Sun) — Part 2

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Part 1 of the essay can be found here. Unlike that part, this one will have spoilers of future episodes.

Watership Down

I have to admit, I was wrong. In the White Rabbit entry I claimed that Watership Down was in four straight episodes. It is not. But have no fear, it will appear again. Nonetheless, we might consider that the book has been “invoked” by virtue of the rabbit on the bus outside the airport terminal where Sun decides to stay with Jin. As such, we will continue to explore this rather delightful tale.

In terms of plot, Part 2 of Watership Down doesn’t have much to do with House of the Rising Sun, but there are a couple of interesting resonances. For example, the rabbits, led by Hazel, form a new warren which they dig out underneath the roots of a massive tree. They call their new home The Honeycombe. So we have a convergence of bee symbolism, the World Tree, and “caves,” just like this episode.

The rabbits make friends with a large bird, Kehaar, who speaks with a thick accent and performs reconnaissance for them. They use this to their advantage when they realize they have no females amongst them (they are all “bucks”) and decide to go raiding other locations to find “does” – to basically steal females from other warrens. Well, one warren is run under martial law, while the other is just a girl’s rabbit hutch on a farm. Two “away teams” split off (hmm). One returns empty-handed, lucky to be alive, thanks to the timely intervention of a train (which is actually kind of how the Island’s “monster” sounds). The other leads to the wounding of their leader, Hazel, who nearly dies before he’s rescued by his brother. After this encounter, he decides he’s going to lead his rabbits to raid the militarized “other” warren and steal their “mothers,” effectively splitting his own “hive” as not everyone agrees with him.

There’s a couple of interesting broader-scale themes that emerge in this part of the book that are relevant to LOST. First, the question is raised on what it’s like to live “naturally,” with the farm-hutch rabbits and the militarized “other” warren used for contrast. And this of course applies to how the Losties are organizing themselves in a “state of nature,” as it were,. What kind of political system are they setting up? Leadership by the most dynamic individuals, for the most part, just like Watership Down’s rabbits, but with everyone pretty much free to do as they please. It’s a question and answer that’s actually brought up by the historical John Locke, so this fits nicely into the larger pattern of philosophical thoughtfulness that LOST has already staked out.

Secondly, there’s the matter of rabbit mythology. After Hazel’s near-death experience, his brother Fiver (the mystic) ruminates on the possibility of “another world”:

“Hrairoo,” said Hazel one evening, “what would we have done without you? We’d none of us be here, would we?”
…

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Lost Exegesis (House of the Rising Sun) — Part 1

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It’s been a while since we had one of these LOST Exegesis posts! So sorry for the delay. It couldn’t be helped. And not just the nearly two months since the last one of these — I had trouble accessing Eruditorum Press last night.  Anwyays, enough excuses.  It’s been a while.  As such, please remember that Part 1 of the essay is spoiler-free. For those who’ve seen the entire series, the second part of the essay, titled “Through the Looking Glass” (and appearing next week in the second part of this massive post), applies foreknowledge to the episode at hand.

So, on to the episode at hand. House of the Rising Sun is complex. Not to say that it’s difficult to understand; on the contrary, it’s rather straightforward, at first glance. It’s here we discover that whatever preconceptions we had about Sun and Jin, they were a bit wrong – these characters are not crass stereotypes – she’s the spoiled rich girl, he’s the poor nice boy corrupted by her father, who would have guessed that? It may have been Walkabout when I fell in love with the show, but it’s House of the Rising Sun that first earned my respect.

As we’d correctly surmise from the Opening Eye of the episode, this episode is Sun-centric. But there’s a lot more this episode’s plate. While Sun’s Flashbacks and her husband’s current predicament on the Island form the primary threads of the episode, there’s also the trip to the Caves, which also ends up split in two, with Jack and Kate’s early friendship tested by differing philosophies regarding the camp’s next big decision, while Locke takes an interest in Charlie. There’s even a thread breaded in that’s devoted to Michael. So there’s a balance of five stories, and even more characters to juggle, all in forty-five minutes on a network budget. On top of that, we get another piece of mythology with the skeletons found at the Caves, some new takes on previously invoked symbols, continued thematic concerns, and several more cultural references to untangle.

It’s three episodes in a row now where we’ve started with an Opening Eye. This time it’s Sun’s. And this time it’s a Left Eye, as opposed to the Right Eyes of Jack and Locke. So from the outset, we’d anticipate an episode that’s Sun-centric, and we’d be correct; at the same time, however, the switch from right to left should harken something different, symbolically, than what we’ve seen before, given the dichotomy. And this is definitely an episode about dichotomy.

Previously we’ve identified the Opening Eye with some kind of enlightenment, and I’m happy to continue doing so. But let’s also consider that the Eye itself is often used as a way of describing certain celestial bodies. In Egyptian mythology, for example, the Right Eye represents the Sun, and the Left Eye represents the Moon. The sun shines during the day, making everything visible; the Moon shines at night, and still leaves much in darkness. And then there’s the matter of these two bodies being gendered – the Sun is typically male, the Moon typically female (though not always, obviously).…

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Let’s Kill Hitler Again

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Hi all, sorry about the extended time away. Think of it as a winter hiatus, a polar opposite to, say, the summer hiatus preceding Let’s Kill Hitler. Anyways, I’m back!  And I’ve six thousand words to share.

I just happened to rewatch Series 6 recently with very good friends, so it’s on my mind, esepcially Let’s Kill Hitler. It’s one of those episodes that, for me, gets better every time I watch it – it’s very amenable to esoteric exploration, and being so familiar with all its beats, I no longer notice the tonal whiplash and the jarring pace. “Plus, she’s a woman” still sticks out like a sore thumb, but still, that’s a relatively minor complaint compared to all the wonderful stuff going on in this story, and even more so in the context of its production.

For those unfamiliar with the production schedule for Series 6, many of the stories were shot or placed out of order. Black Spot, for example, was repositioned to the first half of the series, switching places with Night Terrors. Let’s Kill Hitler, on the other hand, started production after they’d already filmed The Girl Who Waited, The God Complex, and Closing Time, even though it was meant to precede those stories in the broadcast schedule. So there’s a sort of foreknowledge to the production of this story – as if it were traveling backwards in time and inserting itself into a flow of events that had, in effect, already happened.

And I think this is important to understand when decoding LKH, because the show itself seemed to fully realize its aesthetics with Nick Hurran’s direction of The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex, where the visual elemt to the storytelling is every bit as (if not more) compelling as the stories themselves. Which is not to say that Moffat’s tenure was never about visual storytelling prior to Hurran, only that Hurran really took it to a stratospheric level. And surely Moffat and his production team realized this as Hurran’s work was already done by the time they got around to making Let’s Kill Hitler. As such, I’m inclined to consider LKH primarily in terms of its visuals and aesthetics, because that’s where a huge part of the storytelling occurs, though there are many thematic layers worth exploring as well. Which we will.

 

The Wheatfield

The very first scene of this episode was actually the very last one shot for the entire series – after The Wedding, in fact, because the production team needed to let the wheat grow. So I’m not surprised that the visuals and aesthetics and thematics of this scene are impeccable, helping it to function as a microcosm of the episode as a whole. Consider the fact it’s filmed out of order, and travels back to be inserted at a particular time and place, which is true for LKH, but is also true for the conceit of Melody “inserting” herself into her parents’ history, not to mention how the character of Mels is inserted into the show’s mythology itself.…

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The Other Side of American Ritual

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So, a short while back I discussed the mainstream American ritual cycle, and it was so much fun I thought I’d do it again, but from the other side of the looking glass. Because there are many other rituals available to us that are not a part of the mainstream, and which are frankly much more interesting than the ritual most people are talking about this year, namely New Year’s Resolutions.

But since we’re here, let’s use that as a template for unpacking some of the more interesting implications of “ritual” in of itself. In the last essay I quoted my favorite academic definition for ritual, “the more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances mostly not encoded by the performers.” And I certainly think a New Year’s Resolution fits into that. The timing of the Resolution is pretty invariant, coming on the coattails of a the latest Gregorian calendar. The Resolution itself is a formal utterance, that of a pledge. The curious part is the “not encoded by the performers” bit, because at first glance it seems the Resolution is entirely encoded by one’s choice for what to put into that particular box.

Which is where the “mostly” comes from. I, for example, have resolved to exercise regularly, one of the most common resolutions. But even if I’d come up with something less banal, say, to start a graffiti campaign against the local Chamber of Commerce, or to kill the next billionaire I meet, there are still “codes” around the New Year’s Resolution in particular that do not apply to ordinary “resolutions” made in the middle of summer. For one thing, we usually don’t go around asking people if they’ve recently made any resolutions; no, the timing of the ritual allows it to be social, catching people up in it even if they’re not making a resolution. Secondly, there’s an expectation that New Year’s Resolutions will largely fail.

And this is actually a rather strange entailment to a ritual, an expectation of failure. We don’t usually see that in ritual activity. Usually ritual participants expect some kind of success, which is why they even bother to ritualize in the first place. But I would argue that New Year’s Resolutions aren’t meant as resolutions per se. Sure, sometimes they work. And yet we really don’t expect people to keep these “promises.” That’s because, in my view, a New Year’s Resolution isn’t a promise… it’s a confession. It’s an admission of failure, either in one’s self, or the world around us. And that, I think, is the encoding inherent to the New Year’s Resolution that the performers really can’t change, no matter what resolution is offered.

 

Dr. Martin Luther King Day

So, one of the first “holidays” in the American calendar is Martin Luther King Day. This is relatively new, coming into being just 30 years ago as a federal holiday, which means a day off work for certain federal employees. As of today, only about a third of Americans now get the day off.…

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The Feast of Steven

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For you holiday pleasure, I gift to you this little lovely essay on The Feast of Steven. Which is neither a reference to the current showrunner, nor to the marvelous Steven Universe, despite their similarities. No, this is the seventh episode in the epic The Daleks’ Masterplan, and quite possibly one of the best therein. See, at this point in the show, as Phil so eloquently inscribed back in the early days of TARDIS Eruditorum, Doctor Who had swung away from its counterculture ethics and aesthetics, and Masterplan was certainly a part of that swerve, an insistent undermining of the Doctor’s efficacy and the show’s overall optimism. But for one shining moment on Christmas Day, 1965 (despite a singular dark splotch within that moment) this was most certainly not the case.

The Feast of Steven is perhaps most memorably known as the most blatant case of the show breaking the 4th Wall, when at the end the Doctor turns to the camera and wishes everyone in the audience a Merry Christmas. In some dreary netherparts of our fandom, this is considered a mistake. Apparently the showrunners at the time, producer John Wiles and script editor Donald Tosh, weren’t too fond of it either, suggesting it was an ad-lib by Hartnell, a literal mistake. Of course it’s not a mistake. Everything in the episode was always leading up to this.

Not that this is an easy episode to analyze. The Feast of Steven was the first episode of Doctor Who to ever be junked – because everyone knew this was going to be the Christmas episode, and that people might not be watching on Christmas (how times have changed), they decided it would be something completely unnecessary to the larger serial around it; ergo, it wasn’t ever copied and shipped to other TV stations around the world with the other 11 parts of Masterplan.

So all we have is an audio recording, from which two main reconstructions have been reconstructed. On the one hand we have the version from stalwart recon studio Loose Cannon, which uses a variety of telesnaps (there were only 20, so even here there’s a dearth of material) in many creative ways to form the vague semblance of a visual narrative. The other is a crude animation, which is in some ways superior to the somewhat incoherent mélange of motionless stills of the former recon, but which elides any semblance of “performance” – gone are any of the actors’ expressions, the actual sets, and perhaps less obviously, the direction of the piece. Not that the Loose Cannon recon saved much in the way of direction, but its very lack of direction is ironically more honest. All that said, the animated version is certainly more watchable. Both are available at the usual places you might find such stuff.

The story basically consists of two parts, with some connective tissue inside the TARDIS – the story actually begins there, ends there, and that is the place that bridges the two main setpieces.…

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