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“And the greatest good is little enough”: Relics

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I’ll bet you all already know how I feel about “Relics”. There’s really no point in going on. You can all fill in the blanks yourselves. You’ve all heard this story before.

Do I remember it? Yeah, of course I do. It’s one of those episodes that comes right out screaming “I am iconic!” and practically *demands* to be remembered. The viewing I most vividly recall was not one at my parents’ house, which is the way most of my memories of Star Trek are, but at my grandparents’. I guess we had just driven in for a visit one night or something, they happened to be watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and this was the episode on that night. I can’t remember if this was the first time I’d seen it, but it was definitely the one I remember most clearly, because everyone in that house made a *really big huge deal* about how Scotty was in this one and that this was the episode where the two Generations came together. Which was weird considering “Unification” had already come out the year prior, as did Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Maybe my family hadn’t seen those episodes and movie, but considering it was the media event of the year, I find that hard to believe. I mean even *I* had seen them, and I was years and years behind everyone else in everything.

I remember someone excitedly telling me how in this one shot the “new” Enterprise was flying alongside the “old” Enterprise. By this, they of course meant the part where the crew rescues the Jenolan. Which looks nothing whatsoever like the Original Series Enterprise in any way, shape or form. I hadn’t even seen the Original Series yet (except, again, for maybe “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “By Any Other Name” like a year or two prior) and even I knew that was utter bollocks. When I pointed out the ship in question didn’t seem to look a whole lot like Constitution-class as I understood it, I was told that was because it was upside-down, at which point I proceeded to drop the subject. Who knows, maybe it was and I just couldn’t tell because of how far away I was from the giant CRT TV in the hutch. I didn’t care enough to press the issue.

My relatives on this side of the family, my mother’s, had a bit of an inelegant relationship with my Star Trek fandom. While they were utterly supportive, incredibly generous and terribly well-meaning, they never quite seemed to grasp that I wasn’t a “Star Trek Fan” as much as I was a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan, inasmuch as that was the show that was on the air and that I watched every Wednesday or Friday or whatever: I watched TV casually at nights like ordinary people used to do back then, and while this was my favourite of the shows I watched at this age (at least of the big primetime dramas: Miami Vice has hung like a neon haze over my life and perspective forever, although I wouldn’t fully realise my love for it until later), it was, ultimately, still just another show.…

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Capitalist Pig

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Roasted pig’s head with barbeque sauce, raw vegetable salad, brioche bun, lime, and lettuce cup from the Greenhouse Tavern in Cleveland. ($52)

“All the pigs are all lined up. I give you all that you want. Take the skin and peel it back. Now doesn’t that make you feel better?” -Nine Inch Nails, “March of the Pigs”

There is something more than faintly reasonable about the droves of Tories attempting to spin the news that David Cameron fucked a pig with variations of “well who hasn’t?” After all, that’s basically why the story was so viscerally enticing – the fact that nearly everybody’s reaction to the news is complete credulity. Simply put, fucking a dead pig is the sort of thing you expect someone like David Cameron to do.

There are many reasons for this. Plenty of people have written intelligently about the psychological basis for initiation rituals among posh male societies and the way in which the resultant mutual possession of blackmail material ensures loyalty. More broadly, the idea that posh people are in reality depraved dunces is more or less a standard assumption of British comedy. “They all secretly fuck pigs” is perhaps not something that had been widely uttered before the Daily Mail started serializing Ashcroft’s book, but the basic sentiment bordered on the universal.

Less discussed, however, is this: why a pig? Because the pig clearly matters. It would be an entirely different scandal – and one Cameron probably could not politically survive – if he’d fucked a dog or Boris Johnson. Even a sheep wouldn’t quite work – sheepfucking is firmly a poor person’s bestiality. No, it was clearly a pig or nothing.

It’s not that pigs are specifically a rich man’s animal. One can just as easily imagine a rural yokel fucking a pig as David Cameron; the only difference is that when a poor person fucks a pig it’s because they want to, whereas the rich only fuck pigs when they have to. But the fact that pigs traverse the class divide is much, though not all, of why David Cameron had to fuck one.

If one were to take a position of culinary technological determinism, the pig would have an almost causal relationship with European rural poverty. It reproduces quickly and grows to slaughtering weight equally quickly, making them an economical choice of animal. Unlike the Near East, where urban pigs served essentially as a sewage system, thus marking them as fundamentally unclean (and an entirely different vulgar metaphor), European pigs, due to the comparative excess of water and forestation, were historically well-raised while still being fairly cheap animals to keep. The pig is also a historically flexible animal, hence the French saying that you can use every part of the animal but the oink. But more important is why the entire pig is usable: pork is perfect for salting and smoking, and thus lends itself to preservation techniques for the winter.

But it’s here the class divide becomes important. Living high on the hog means more than just fucking one while coked up.…

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Weird Kitties Reviews, Batch Four (The Buried Giant, Woman at Exhibition, Empowered Volume 9)

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The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Reviewed by Jack Graham
 
Eligible for Best Novel and available for purchase here.
 

Nobody expected Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in ten years to be a fantasy novel, but it is – complete with dragons, ogres, pixies, and spells. The novel is set in a mythic version of the British past, during an uneasy truce between Britons and Saxons, a few decades after the death of King Arthur. The setting and style both rely as much uponThe Sword in the Stone as on Chaucer or Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Ishiguro (probably still best known for The Remains of the Day) is one of those literary authors who experiments with genre fiction. His last novel, Never Let Me Go, was written like a conventional ‘realist’ literary novel, but the backdrop and plot of the story depended upon both the SF trope of cloning and the SF technique of discursive worldbuilding. Unlike most critics I found Never Let Me Go disappointing, at least as SF. The SF elements didn’t do much except introduce a rumination on cloning that struck me as something of a moralistic strawman, and a metaphor about the fleeting nature of human life – not to give too much away: the novel is about people who die young – which left you wondering why he didn’t just write about how old people feel like time has gone by too fast. Literary novelists often do this sort of thing when they adopt SF inflections (c.f. Margaret Atwood). They grab the power of the fantastic to provide metaphors, but in so doing they disrespect the categories of the fantastic by using them to say things they could just as easily say literally. The great power of the fantastic is not only that it comes loaded with meaning, but also that it allows for polysemy, for multiplicity and instability of interpretation.
 
The Buried Giant, unlike Never Let Me Go, has met a mixed reception from critics, but is far less guilty of this sort of thing. Generally, Ishiguro is happy to present the literal fantastic as meaning what is says it means, even if it isn’t spelled out. For instance, boatmen who take elderly couples across the water to magic islands are literally taking the dead to the next world. They’re not a redundant metaphor for death, they are just a description of death. The description of death is couched in mythical terms because the story occurs in a mythical version of history. Paradoxically, this literalism (i.e. the dragon is pretty much just a dragon) means that the book refuses to foreclose upon easy, straightforward meanings. Clearly the dragon means something, but we are not being instructed by the author in what this is. Apparently intelligent people have complained about this. I relished it.
 
The book is clearly about all sorts of things, some of them perennial Ishiguro obsessions. Old age, memory, failure of communication, wasted opportunity, and self-delusion, for example. At the heart of the novel is the question of memory, both personal and historical.
…

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The Witch’s Familiar Review

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That didn’t quite work for me, at least on a first viewing, although watching it again as I write this it improves. Much of that is, I think, being free from the weird vertigo of the fake cliffhanger. I have mixed views about deliberate misdirection via out-of-context flash forwards as a technique. Actually, that’s generous; I tend to think they’re a cheap trick (and am still known to grouse about the utterly shameless and unnecessary one in American Beauty). So in that regard I found the episode jarring.

It wasn’t even that I was particularly excited about the trolly problem the cliffhanger set up. That was only ever going to be interesting as a platform upon which to do something interesting. In that regard, if anything the opening, with Missy having Clara tied up and explaining a seemingly irrelevant plot point from a story we weren’t watching, is the best part. Certainly it never quite matches that giddy thrill again. And similarly, the Doctor rolling out in Davros’s chair to argue with the Daleks is great. But it’s also where the episode loses its tension.

Actually, between you and me, I suspect Moffat had trouble with the script. You can almost perfectly imagine him on some eventual DVD commentary during the “Doctor in Davros’s chair” bit admitting that he only wrote the scene because he realized he had written an episode that just dumped Peter Capaldi in a basement for forty-five minutes, and making fun of himself for the fact that it contributes absolutely nothing to the plot. Or at least I can, though maybe what this really reveals is that I’m the sort of person who writes imaginary Moffat commentary tracks in my head.

But the problem this script has isn’t the Doctor/Davros scenes, or at least, mostly isn’t. Indeed, on the rewatch those are what really sing. The detail of Davros being beside himself with joy at the news that the Doctor saved the Time Lords jumped out on the first pass, but only as part of a fairly tiresome “Davros pretends to be good” scene. On the second pass, it struck me as incredibly clever and interesting; a moment of genuine empathy from Davros, but one that’s carefully framed in terms of the nationalist and racist ideologies he espouses and represents. I buy that much more than the bullshit “the Doctor teaches child Davros about mercy and thus achieves some small ineffable victory in the form of incremental progress towards a less genocidal Dalek” note on which the episode ends, certainly.

No, the problem is ultimately that there’s not ninety minutes of story here, and the effort made joining the two halves up and structuring this as a season premiere detracts from the actually interesting bit. Or, rather, if there are ninety minutes of story the cliffhanger is in no way the halfway point of them. Certainly that’s what’s suggested by the weirdly rushed denouement, in which the Doctor, for no discernible reason beyond the fact that the episode is about fifteen minutes from the end, decides that instead of letting Davros die naturally he’ll walk into his trap.…

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Weird Kitties: Best Professional Artist Open Thread

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So I admit, this is a category I know basically nothing about. I mean, I assume it doesn’t generally go to comic artists, and so my instinct to nominate J.H. Williams III and Jamie McKelvie, though not unreasonable from any aesthetic perspective, is still out of keeping with social norms. Still, here’s the second most mindblowing moment of one of the best comics of the year, and a fantastic costume design to boot, and people can tell me what’s normal to nominate here. 

Looking at the people listed in the 2016 Hugo Wikia, I see Stephanie Hans, who’s doing the next issue of WicDiv, is there, so I can’t be too wrong-headed. Stephan Martinière’s work on the Three-Body Problem trilogy is pretty impressive too. Scanning quickly through the others, though, I’m finding this is a hard category for me. So yes, please someone have useful opinions.

Speaking of useful opinions, we could still use one or two more reviews for tomorrow. snowspinner at gmail. …

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Pex Lives 25: Carnival of Monsters/Nightmare of Eden

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Eruditorum Press is pleased to announce the release of Pex Lives #25, featuring our very own Jane Campbell alongside Kevin and James. This month’s installment opens with a discussion of The Magician’s Apprentice(which James seems to like more than anyone) before heading into a combined fairground twister on Carnival of Monsters and Nightmare of Eden. 

It’s available for download here. …

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“The picture you see”: Man of the People

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Oh good, Deanna Troi again. Well, at least we know what we’re in for.

But let’s be fair here. Deanna Troi is a fine character (regardless of what the creative team thinks) and Marina Sirtis is a fine actor, it’s just the combination of the two that seems to cause problems. In fact, this is probably the episode that proves this unequivocally beyond the shadow of a doubt. More to the point, this is an episode that probably shouldn’t exist, not because it’s particularly ethically reprehensible (well, it kinda is that a bit too) but because it’s plainly a stopgap story: “Relics” was supposed to go in this filming block, but James Doohan’s unavailability forced the team to push that episode to the following week. This necessitated a brand new script *right goddamn now*, with the brief given to incoming supervising producer Frank Abatemarco. It’s also another “Let’s Do” story, this time for The Picture of Dorian Grey.

(By this point in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Jeri Taylor is effectively the sole showrunner, with Michael Piller temporarily stepping back a bit to spend more time on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to help it get off the ground and oversee the franchise more broadly. Abatemarco steps in here to ease some of Piller’s burden until things stabilize by mid season.)

So this is an episode quite frankly nobody has or should have any expectations for. It’s a “Let’s Do” story, stars a character nobody seems to have a good handle on, was thrown together at the last minute and given to a guy who was brand new to the show, effectively throwing him right into the deep end. Brannon Braga sums up the situation pretty well:

“I would have done it differently. I would have made it darker and much more a story about Troi’s dark descent from the psychological point of view. A scene we all wanted to see was Troi giving therapy to a young ensign – but make it twice as long and twice as dark as the one that was filmed, and make it much more of a Hannibal Lecter thing. This was a case where Frank Abatemarco saw a different show. He was focusing in on the show as a Prime Directive issue and looking at the character of the guy who was using Troi as a receptacle. To me, that was the utterly incorrect instinct. After six years, who cares about Prime Directive issues? It’s a Star Trek cliché. It should have been all about Troi and he would have been the catalyst in two brief scenes. The first three acts were still fun. It was enjoyable to see Troi acting strange and dressing in skimpy outfits. There was some argument in the structuring sessions. Ultimately, Frank was the writer and he was given the opportunity to do it the way he wanted to do it, and it suffered because he was new to the show.”
…

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Meat is Murder: Hannibal, True Detective, and the Anthropocene Extinction

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The anthropocene extinction, which Jack quite reasonably argues should be called the capitalocene extinction, is by some margin the most urgent philosophical issue facing humanity today. So let’s talk about a pretentiously well-directed television show that purports to be a crime drama, but is really just a vehicle for two men to urgently discuss the nature of the universe.

Let us suppose for the moment that I am talking about True Detective. Certainly I am not mischaracterizing it, although in its second season it made a substantial effort to engage with the question of what role women have in a universe that exists primarily for men to urgently discuss the nature of. (And indeed, of white men; were I to make one and only one suggestion for a third season, it would be for a main character of color who might prove capable of deflating the pretensions of the other detectives in the way Ani did this season.) Indeed, in many ways it is this second season that is easiest to start with; the most straightforward way to understand what sort of show that it is, thus understanding why its failure to quite be that in its first season was so electrifying.

On its most basic level, True Detective is a piece of noir. The plot of the second season – criticized by unimaginative reviewers as a convoluted mess – is in reality no worse than the legendarily incoherent classic The Big Sleep. And Chandler is certainly a major touchstone for the specifically Califronian subgenre of noir that True Detective works in this season – it’s all very “down these mean streets a man must go.” (In contrast with its first, southern gothic-inflected take on noir.)  

Within noir, at least in the Chandler model, the story is not so much a mystery as it is a test of the detective’s soul. The investigation of a crime is merely a vehicle for this trial and tribulation. And that’s very obvious in Season Two of True Detective, where the overall structure is primarily that of a classical tragedy – the falls of Ray and Frank, presented in parallel at the story’s climax. But crucially, their downfalls are then subsumed by the third strand of narrative, Ani’s successful escape and eventual telling of the story. True Detective becomes, in other words, not a story about the tragic downfall of the male heroes, but about the act of surviving a Greek tragedy, Ani being, herself, named after a character who failed to do just that.

(This is one of the most basic themes of True Detective: the failures of masculinity. All of the leads of the show, Ani included, attempt to perform masculinity and, in crucial ways, fail and are shown to be inadequate: Frank’s blue balls in his heart, Ray’s pathetic threats to the father of his son’s bully, Ani’s self-destructive determination to fuck like one of the guys, Paul’s entire plot and conflict in a thuddingly literal way, and, for that matter, Rust and Marty in a variety of ways.…

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Tricky Dicky, Part 1: Maximum Stay 530 Years

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This year, the English have been making fools over themselves over a posh dead guy. Wow, there’s something you don’t see every day. Sorry, did I say that’s something you don’t see every day? Silly me, what was I thinking? I meant, of course, that that’s something you do see every day. Literally, every fucking day. It’s practically our national pastime; worshipping posh dead guys. When we’re not worshipping posh live guys, that is. Everywhere in England, this is our thing. And Britain generally, if we’re honest… though the rest of the United Kingdom has the excuse that the dead guys (generally posh within their own context) they fawn over tend to at least be people who in some way stood up to English imperialism.

What a strange relationship we have in my country! (As an Englishman, I have the luxury of being able to blithely think of other people’s adjacent countries as being bits of mine… though there is some progress to be seen in the fact that, these days, that generally only works with adjacent countries.) In my country you can travel, in a relatively brief time, from a place where there are statues of English guys who became statue-material because they killed lots of Scottish people, to a place where there are statues of Scottish guys who became statue-material because they tried to stop the English guys killing those very same Scottish people. Okay, you can do something like that in America too. But at least in that case the people weren’t really different nationalities; the ones in the South were just pretending to be because a minority of them wanted to keep using black people as farm machinery, as Vonnegut put it. Also, in America, it has the decency to take longer. Even so, the pattern reoccurs across time with depressing regularity; the hyper-speed of modernity accelerates the process and telescopes it in space. And like so many political phenomena, it reoccurs dialectically at different distinct historical levels and loci. For instance, you can travel from bits of London alone where there are statues of guys who became statue-material for massacring lots of Indians to other bits of London where most of the inhabitants are descended from the survivors of the same massacres. But again, something similar is often possible Stateside too… though you have to redefine ‘Indians’ to make it work.

Speaking of America, and passing over the mounds of corpses of massacred indigenous peoples, we in Britain have had our civil wars too. Parenthetically, it often puzzles me that we talk as if we only ever had the one civil war… but I suspect the intensity with which we insist upon 1642-1651 being the ‘English Civil War’ is less to do with denying the others and more to do with effacing the fact that it was more fundamentally a revolution.

But this series of posts isn’t about that English Civil War. It’s about (albeit tangentially) one of the other ones. The one we charmingly call ‘the Wars of the Roses’.…

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Comics Reviews (September 23rd, 2015)

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Speaking of reviews, I could use Weird Kitties reviews for Sunday. snowspinner at gmail. Doesn’t have to be long at all; just a recommendation for something Hugo-worthy. (Next up on my reading list, The Dark Forest, but I don’t imagine it’ll be ready for Sunday.)

From worst to best of what I bought, which was surprisingly little this week. And next week will probably be even more ridiculously small. Ah, the direct market.

Doctor Who: Four Doctors #5 There are some nice moments here – I quite like the Twelfth Doctor’s inversion of Hartnell’s “what’s a breach for” into “what’s a bridge for? Burning.” It’s a pity Neil Edwards is drawing him to look like Peter Cushing in the scene in question. More than a bit uncertain about the Ninth Doctor cameo as well – it seems like a pointless side trip, and the claim that no timeline exists in which he’s not “fantastic” is frankly ridiculous. All in all, a nice bit of fluff, but ultimately marred by being a five week summer event that had three weeks pass between its last two issues and concluded after the series came back and when better-than-average Doctor Who methadone like this was no longer nearly as needed. Fun, but it feels like it should have been so much more.

Nameless #5

Speaking of series hurt by their delays, here’s Grant Morrison’s engagement with nihilism. Somewhat puzzled by his pastiche of the famous seance-gone-wrong sequence in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing; is he trying to suggest that Moore is a nihilist? Dense and chewy Grant Morrison is always a pleasure, but his heart just doesn’t feel like it’s in this.

Batgirl #44

It’s interesting, there is, by any normal standard, too large a cast here. But the storytelling is clear and does a good job of reintroducing characters as it uses them, and the book is terribly fun. Particular kudos this month to Bengal, who steps in for Babs Tarr and maintains much of the book’s signature high panel-count style (no wonder Tarr needed a break) while bringing her own style to things. This really is one of the best superhero books of its day.…

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