Eruditorum Press

If you want an image of the future as we desire it, imagine a boot stamping on Jonathan Jones’ face… forever

Erudite Waffles (3/25/23)

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What I’m Up To

Well, mostly I’m trying to finish off the Eruditorum post on Resolution, so I want to get through this as fast as possible. A lot of my last week was eaten up by some exciting work for hire news that I can’t share yet. Spent a bunch of last week in Brooklyn working on a piece that I successfully sold, and then spent the early part of this week working on a pitch for another one that I hope to hear back on soon. So balancing that with Patreon work is currently… exciting, and I’m going to make this super brief and get back to it.

Still, we’re back Monday with the first of six parts of Last War in Albion v3 Chapter 9: Brought to Light. We’ll be talking about war comics, Harvey Pekar, the CIA, and Bill Sienkiewicz.

Halo 3: Head Like a Hole

As a single, a bit “this book taught me more about penguins than I care to know,” not only incorporating all the needless “Down In It” remixes off Halo 1 but offering five separate and once again mostly interchangeable remixes of the song, made all the worse by the fact that the Opal mix, which is actually interesting, isn’t on the most readily available version. All of which said, the Empathetic mix of “Terrible Lie” on this disc can get it. And I feel like you have to acknowledge the fact that “Head Like a Hole” itself is an absolute classic banger that literally never gets old. Put it this way: unlike Halo 1, this is actually offering quantity as an alternative to quality. 3/9 Inches

Tumblr Ask Theater of the Mind

As always, my ask box is open to anonymous asks if you’d like to lob a question my way.

Since the original run of Eruditorum ended, are there Who episodes that you didn’t love at the time but have since grown on you to become favorites?

Favorites? Not a ton, but I’ve largely grown bored of Tomb of the Cybermen is overrated discourse and come to find it a modest classic. Day of the Daleks I’m probably fonder than I used to be of.

Inverse question: What Dr Who episodes have you found yourself souring on since writing Tardis Eruditorum?

I really struggle to get excited about Genesis of the Daleks anymore. Not sure The Mutants will ever be as good as it was on the precise amount of cannabis I was experiencing right then. And man, Name of the Doctor was rough on the last rewatch.

Which other of the Wh- words would have made a more or as interesting show as Doctor Who?

Whalebone

What episodes of Flux would have been in Dalek Eruditorum?

Probably would have done it as a whole.

Is there a method to the madness with the ordering of the Sandman essays? Or rather, does the ordering make sense if you’ve read Sandman and know the content of the issues, or is it some private system you’re keeping secret?…

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Pop Could Never Save Us – 03R

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The new episode of POP COULD NEVER SAVE US is from the glittery world of 1973! Wizzard! Sweet! Suzi! Bowie! Lou Reed! Alice Cooper! Nonces! Ferdinand Marcos is deposed on live TV, and we are fascinated by a homegrown UK reggae playground shitslinger. …

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“Such terrible, terrible joy”: the anti-fascism of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

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Originally posted to my Patreon on December 17, 2022. Now that the movie has an Oscar, this seems like an appropriate time to post it. Please back my Patreon to support my work.

My nonna was born in Vicenza, about 40 miles west of Venice, in what seemed to be the dying days of Italian Fascism. She was one year old when the Allies bombed Vicenza, targeting strategic locations but killing around a thousand civilians. My nonna’s brother rescued her from the rubble of their bombed house. He was a toddler at the time.

In the early 1960s, my nonna, a woman of 20, left Italy with her two young sons. When she arrived in the United States, she spoke hardly a word of English, raising her boys alone while her husband (a Green Beret of the U.S. Army) slept with every woman under the son. The marriage didn’t last — Nonna married an Air Force officer some years later, trading in her family name Salvarese for Kelley.

As a third generation American, my connection to my Italian family history was mediated through family anecdotes and media. Disney’s Pinocchio was probably the first vaguely Italian movie I saw. The still abjectly frightening scene where the boys on Pleasure Island transform into donkeys might be my earliest life memory, a fact which probably explains a lot about me. While the 1940 movie largely glides around its source material’s basis in Italian culture (no small part, the donkey scene preserves a key part of Carlo Collodi’s tremendously disturbing book in which Pinocchio murders the Cricket who has lived in his house for 100 years. The Italian words for donkey — asino, somaro, ciuco — are polysemous, referring not merely to animals but to lazy students and — paradoxically — people who work themselves to death, with the underlying understanding that poverty sucks, but that hard work and school are ways to avoid it. 

While Disney avoided explicitly referring to Italy in the Mussolini era, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio embraces its source material’s Italian heritage in the age of Giorgia Melloni. It’s an explicitly Italian film, with characters shouting “arrivederci” and having names like Spazzaturra (which means “trash”). It’s also unequivocally anti-fascist, as del Toro always is, trotting out Fascist nightmares as the death of family and wonder. Mussolini even gets a cameo, voiced by none other than Tom fucking Kenny.

Yet despite its independence from previous Pinocchios, the del Toro film is keenly aware of its debts to the Disney film. It’s a musical, its setting in Fascist Italy is a nod to when the original film was produced, and Ewan MacGregor’s Sebastian J. Cricket (a perfect boy for whom I will die) serves as a narrator like Jimmy Cricket. Del Toro looks at Disney’s template, plucks bits from it, and goes “OK, I’m going to plug my own anti-fascist weirdness into this.”

Del Toro’s anti-fascism is unique to this Pinocchio. Le avventure di Pinocchio predated Mussolini’s rise to power, while the original Disney film elided the issue altogether.…

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Erudite Waffling (3/11/23)

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The featured image for this post is the weather outside my office window yesterday afternoon as I got ready to queue this up, and is as good a statement of mood as any.

What I’m Up To

Well I suppose the biggest headline is the first new TARDIS Eruditorum in… months? Almost a year? Not even sure, but my coverage of Juno Dawson’s The Good Doctoris up on my Patreon. Things are quieter on the Britain a Prophecy Patreon, but we’ve got a scene out with Nechama for coloring, which means we should have some writer/artists notes soon, and there’s only two scenes left on issue 5. That Patreon has gotten a little lower than I’d like, so there may be some sort of fancy sale coming in soon where we offer catch-ups on our physical editions or a copy of our re-covered and reprinted #1 to all Patrons who have backed before issue 5 is done or something. We’ll see! Whatever it is, if you back now we’ll be sure you get it. I’ll probably get a LWIA out this weekend, and then it’s Brooklyn again. (So we’ll see if there’s one of these next week.)

If You Post Vacation Photos I Will Let Myself Shrink to Zero Points In A Typographical Hunger Strike

Do we need to get you some help, Centyjust? Like, your pathological aversion to vacation photos and repeated threats of self harm are actually slightly unsettling, and I genuinely worry for you.

No, No, I’m Fine, I’m Just Being Melodramatic and Should Probably Go Listen to Some Nice Angry and Depressive Music To Better Regulate My Own Emotions

Well, good news on that front.

Halo 2: Pretty Hate Machine.

Listening to it, especially if you put it right next to Ministry or Skinny Puppy, the thing that stands out most clearly is that Trent Reznor has obscenely good pop instincts, taking what those bands are doing and making it slap in an immediately catchy way. We can talk about the lead single next time, and “Something I Can Never Have”’s swirling maelstrom of despair is one of those “everyone already knows how good this is” songs, but damn if “Kinda I Want To,” “Terrible Lie,” and “Sanctified” don’t all slap. And “That’s What I Get” at least deserves credit for the most impressively bad lyrics of Reznor’s career. Notably better than I remember it being. 7/9 Inches

Tumblr Asks

As always, my asks remain open and I’m pretty reliable about answering them. (I think I’ve got one sitting that I need to go back to.)

What’s the best NiN version of I’m Afraid of Americans?

You really can’t beat the classic V1 Mix.

Do you think it was a good or a bad thing that the Post-2005 Who showrunners haven’t hired any classic-era writers? I know RTD only wanted Robert Holmes from that group (impossible for obvious reasons), and there are some out there who bemoan that Terrence Dicks never got the chance to write another episode before his death.

…

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Pops Could Never Save Us – 02R & 03

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Delighted to be able to share the latest episodes of the popcast! Get yourself caught up with your ol’ mates, on the most recent songs in the UK Charts.

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/holly-bo/episodes/03—UK-Top-40-Weeks-3rd-March—10th-March-2023—Tik-of-the-Toks-e206m1i

And! Take a groovy trip back in the Could Never Save Us Relative In Space ship. All the way back to swinging London in the 1960s.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/02r-uk-top-40-5th-11th-may-1966-bang-bang/id1665362470?i=1000601674804

Tell all your friends! No, not that one! But the rest! …

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Erudite Waffles (3/4/23)

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Hello after a week’s break. Let’s get down to it.

What I’m Up To

Let’s see. In a continuing effort to get my word count back up and deal with LWIA v4’s refusal to play nicely with my ADHD I’ve actually tried poking some TARDIS Eruditorum. So look for that on the Patreon. Past that, I sent a pitch out this week, but have mostly been reading and researching and only just switched back into writing mode in the last two days, in part on account of spending a week in Brooklyn.

But frankly who needs me when Christine is dropping career best essays like this.

Oh God You’re Going To Do Vacation Photos Again

Cool your serifs, center-justified boldface text. It was a much lower photo vacation than the last one, and much higher on low key sitting around Lexi’s place watching Game Changer on Dropout and eating the frankly astonishing popcorn she makes. (I am utterly mortified that the food hippies are right and “nutritional yeast” is good. This is actively offensive to me.) Got to take Christine perfume shopping (she now wears Imaginary Authors’ Memoirs of a Trespasser; I’m rocking Nobile 1942’s La Danza delle Libellule, and Penn added Comme des Garçons’ Copper to his collection) and see Battery Park with her, which is where her biological family landed in the country when emigrating from what’s now the Czech Republic, spent some time in MoMA, and went to a leather dyke event, though. But you’re spared photos.

I’m a Sans Serif Font You Typographically Ignorant Cunt

I think that kind of language is a bit unnecessary, Centyjust. (I can call you Centyjust, right?)

Actually… Actually That’s Kind of Cute

Glad you like it. Anyway, the other thing I’ve done is write reviews of all the official Halo releases from Nine Inch Nails with the intention of serializing them here over the next thirty-four weeks. So without further ado…

Halo 1: Down In It

Something like the sixth best song on Pretty Hate Machine gets two additional remixes, neither distinctive enough to bother pulling this disc out over the album version or, more to the point, the other disc they’re both included on. Still, something’s gotta be the debut single, and this is inoffensive, even if you’re more annoyed than satisfied when it’s stuck in your head. 2/9 Inches

And Now… Tumblr Asks!

As always, feel free to send me asks. 

Which is the better name for them: Nine Inch Nails, NIN, or The Nine Inch Nails?

The Nine Inch Nails, obvs.

Do we ever see the cybermen convert anyone in the classic series? It seems like an obvious thing to do with the premise, but I can’t think of examples.

Attack of the Cybermen. (And Tomb, as someone pointed out in reply.)

Have you read any of Miracleman: The Silver Age yet? If so, was it worth the wait?

None of the new issues; figure I’ll read the arc when it’s all together. But no. Nothing is worth that kind of wait.…

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“A good way to hear God laugh” (David Milch, Deadwood, and Saint Paul)

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“I believe one way God says, “I too have a hand here” is in the rhythms and metrics of speech,” writes David Milch, the author of television’s most profane iambic pentameter, in Life’s Work: A Memoir. “[…] The metrics of speech are important and representative of our fellowship even in those of us who feel, mistakenly, that we are separate from each other as individuals.”

That paragraph could well be the perfect synopsis of Milch’s career; fitting enough, as Life’s Work is a self-knowing epilogue — also effectively a last will and testament — to Milch’s corpus. Milch and his family assembled the book through years of dictation by amanuensis as Milch’s Alzheimers has sent him into a decline. Considering that slow process, Life’s Work is stunningly cogent — possibly one of the best I’ve ever read — comparable only to something like Blackstar in its powerful finality. 

In essence, Life’s Work is a prayer — like all art is, particularly Milch’s. “Every day, before I write, I pray, and I ask to be willing, and then I see what happens. “I offer myself to Thee to build with me and do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will.” (This is a practice I have started to borrow from Milch — although for him it’s an AA method, whereas I have the curse of alcohol intolerance which prevents me from downing whiskey over a typewriter.) Writing starts with an act of contrition — with utter humility. Art comes from forgiveness.

One gets the impression Milch’s work is fundamentally based in dialogue, not only with God, but with other people (although frankly, that’s not a distinction which has any meaning). Certain truths percolate through the encephalic plaque that accompanies Alzheimers.

“When I look at my grandchildren or I hold them, I can feel that it’s only my individual strength that is subsiding. The strength in the family, in the species, and in the whole beating heart of the universe hasn’t subsided at all.”

Milch’s dedication to the idea of humanity as one contiguous organism comes through even as he gives the impression of being a single-minded solipsist whose drug-and-booze-addled decision-making leads him to do things like sign off part of his ownership in a network TV show to his Vicodin dealer. Or when Milch, as a Yale student, tripping balls on acid, blows out street lights and a police car siren with a shotgun (he then told the cops “I’ll confess when your badge stops melting”). Milch’s account of his addictions, including a gambling penchant which cost his family their financial security, evince a clear sign of an urgent need to fulfill his own desires. His devotion to universalist community is genuine, but it’s clearly tied to his need for gratification.

To call Milch a monomaniac would be problematic given his diagnosed OCD (and learn harder into diagnosis than I’m remotely interested in doing) and yet it’s not exactly wrong.…

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Erudite Waffles (2/18/23)

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Hello eyeballs. Would you like some glyphs to massage against your optic nerves? Well I’ve got 8356 of them for you.

What I’m Up To

The general malaise in which multiple people I love are having tough times continues. But I got a Last War in Albion v4 post on Miracleman out to Patrons, I’ll have another on Johnny the Homicidal Maniac this weekend. And, of course, “How to Be an Egg in the Age of Lilith Fair” posted, which I guarantee will be oine of my favorite things I write this year. Monday we’ve got the last V for Vendetta post, as well as me being off to Brooklyn to see Lexi again.

Right. Only one main section this week, because I got

An Absolutely Ridiculous Number of Tumblr Asks

Good ridiculous though! Keep ‘em coming. 

Do you have plans as comics creator beyond Britain a Prophecy ?

Plans evince a certain arrogance that’s unearned at this stage in my career, though Penn and I have a ton of stuff we want to do. More broadly, I’m certainly pursuing options in comics, just like I’m working on a novel. I’d like fiction work to be a majority of my work within the next few years.

Which TARDIS Eruditorum book/era stands best on its own? For me it’s the Hartnell one but curious to hear your take also regarding best run of essays maybe

Quite proud of Volume 4. Really, 1-4 form a nice kind of Eruditorum Golden Age. Literally was just talking to Lexi about the way in which I was using the blog at that time to grind a lot of axes about narratology and long-form serialized narrative, and there’s a really satisfying, let’s go ahead and call it alchemy between my still present academic instincts and my more esoteric tendencies. All of those are quite strong eras. But Volume 4 feels like a real personal peak—as good as I got at the particular thing I was doing at that time.

Starting with Williams the show became a very different thing and I got sucked further into Fandom Debates, and while the highs there—Logopolis, Trial of a Time Lord, the TV Movie, and honestly most of the televised McCoy stuff—are probably my individual favorite essays, there starts to be a lot more filler-feeling stuff in between those high points. Call it the Silver Age.

New series marks a sort of Bronze aAge, and becomes a “covering all those spinoffs before you had a Patreon to monetize the extra entries was not a sound career decision” sort of situation, especially with so many more stories per era compared to the classic. (One season of Tennant is around as many stories as the Baker or McCoy eras.) Add the difficulties of effective hindsight and I’d be lying if I said Tennant and Smith in particular were favorites. But god, that Eccleston run of entries is as good as anything I’ve ever written.

And the Capaldi era, my late career return, is rock solid, wall to wall some of my favorite material on the blog.…

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How to Be an Egg in the Age of Lilith Fair

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Christine:

Since listening to some of these songs in the car with you on the way to grandma’s for Christmas and realizing you were less familiar with the 90s female singer songwriter boom than I’d assumed, I’ve had it in my head to try to communicate what it was like to be a trans teenager at that precise moment. So, because I’m me, I wrote you an 8000 word essay/annotated playlist and am posting it on your birthday. So happy birthday. There aren’t a ton of rules for this; it’s all female vocals, mostly from the 90s, though anything that came out during my life but before I graduated high school was eligible, so there’s two 80s tracks. I centered the playlist on the Lilith Fair; a touring festival of female musicians that took place from 1997-99 and that always felt to me like the nexus of the musical era I’m trying to sketch for you, although songs by non-Lilith Fair artists are included. Likewise, the songs are not always my favorites, whether from the period or now—they are chosen instead because they collectively capture a fragile strand of libidinous glamor that I hung onto for dear life as a kid.

Oh, and everybody else: Yep, it’s our very own Christine Kelley’s birthday. Don’t forget to support her work on Patreon.

Apple Music Version

1. Ani DiFranco, Untouchable Face (1996; Never Played Lilith Fair)

The central moment to remember, years later, with a vivid clarity so intense you can practically feel the upholstery, will be sitting in the passenger seat of your mother’s car outside the Borders in Farmington. By this point you are already into this sort of thing—a clear and developed fondness for the female singer-songwriter boom. You have heard of Ani DiFranco somewhere on the Internet, recognizing her as a next door neighbor to stuff you already like, and so on your next shopping trip you spend your allowance on Dilate. You head out to the car with your mother, pop it into your Discman™, and give it a listen.

At first it seems familiar—a lilting guitar, a slightly melancholy vocal, wistfully nursing a breakup with a seemingly amused distance. You will understand this through the first verse. You will think you have a handle on this. And then Ani DiFranco will calmly, even sweetly, intone the first “fuck you” of the chorus.

In truth this is cringe. DiFranco is already exiting her imperial phase—you will later rehearse an argument that the precise moment her career goes off the rails is the horn part on the first track of her next album. In years to come she will play a plantation, rewrite the barnstorming pro-union “Which Side Are You On” into a piece of bland pro-Obama glurge, and generally become a middle-class parody of the DIY folk-punk icon she momentarily appeared to be. She will be a taste you embarrassedly defend to Lexi, until she grudgingly admits that Amanda Palmer played a similar role for her. 

In the moment, however, none of this matters.…

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The Trump Trap

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The GOP, MAGA, the past, and the future…

Trump might leave the US as a three party system.  America would have three parties - a centrist liberal party, a far-right party, and a fascist party. 

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The classic pattern of a fascist takeover of government goes something like this…

The fascist party grows to the point where it is big enough to be a kind of kingmaker in a deadlocked representative democratic system, and the conservative elites of that system, threatened by chaos and/or growing left political feeling and workers’ struggle, adopt the fascists as the (to them) lesser evil, and help them into power.  The conservative elites expect to be able to control the fascists and use them as a bulwark, discarding them when they have outlived their usefulness, only to find that the fascist party out-manoeuvres them and assimilates or ejects them.  This has not yet happened in the United States, but it seems to have happened – on a micro level, as it were – within the Republican Party.  

The MAGA conquest of the Republican Party may not be absolutely complete, however.  MAGA might still split away.  

A lot depends on whether Trump once again secures the Republican nomination.

Front-runners don’t necessarily get nominations.  Many people now considered political jokes have, at one time or another, been front-runners.  Donald Trump isn’t even always the front-runner in the polls these days.  Even so, the likelihood is that, all else being equal, he will get the Republican nomination again.  

The movers-and-shakers within the GOP want rid of him.  So do most of the mid-level people.  They talk openly about how he was great but it’s not 2016 anymore, we need someone new, etc.  They are hoping to nudge the feeling in the party.  But the feeling in the party stays with Trump.  The insiders are reduced, as some of them have recently confessed, to waiting for Trump to die.

We all know the paradox.  We saw it played out in instance after instance in the midterms.  Republican hopefuls can’t be candidates without Trump’s approval; Republican candidates can’t get elected by the public with Trump’s approval.  This paradox runs right the way through the Republican Party, from top to bottom.  It is soon to be enacted on the national stage in the 2024 presidential election.

This is the trap the present-day Republican Party is in.  A trap entirely of its own creation and long in the making. 

I’ll have to go back a bit.

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Neoliberalism, ‘Creeping Fascism’, and The Cosby Show

In the late twentieth century, the post-war ‘long boom’ crumbled as a result of the secular tendency towards decline in the profit rate, which is – as Marx showed – innate to capitalism.  By the 1970s, even the vast and ongoing government stimulus of Cold War arms spending was failing to pump up the burst tyre.  The neoliberal strategy was an attempt by capitalism – unsuccessful in overall, real terms – to restore the profit rate, and the GOP was at the forefront of it with Reaganism, as were the British Tories with Thatcherism.  

The neoliberal revolution was not just economic.  It was also – in an almost too on-the-nose demonstration of Marx’s ‘base and superstructure’ model – political and cultural. …

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