Eruditorum Press

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Book Preview: They Might Be Giants’ Flood

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Today we’ve got the intro to They Might Be Giants’ Flood, the book I wrote with the brilliant S. Alexander Reed for Bloomsbury Academic’s 33 1/3 series. The book is out November 14th, and is available for pre-order at Amazon and Amazon UK. 
I’ll surely write about the book again closer to release, so I don’t want to do too much beyond just put the intro here and let it speak for itself. I will say that even if you’re not a huge They Might Be Giants fan, I think the book probably has plenty of cool stuff for you. It’s not just about They Might Be Giants, but about a particular historical moment. It’s not just a book about music, but about how 1990 was a turning point for geek culture, and about the nature of what geek culture is, in a way that goes beyond the conventional nerdy references. Indeed, one thing the book is very much about is how “geek” went from meaning twenty-sided dice and fluency in Klingon to meaning something much broader and more inclusive. I think most people who like my stuff will like it too.
But I will add a personal note. In the current publishing climate, the saying is that anything that sells a thousand copies is doing well. The TARDIS Eruditorum books do that. Handily. Unfortunately, they do it through channels that don’t show up when publishers do searches on authors’ past sales.
One of the explicitly stated reasons I didn’t get a traditional press contract for the Wonder Woman book (out towards the end of October, I believe) is exactly this – my sales figures look way smaller than they actually are. And by way smaller, I mean that when traditional publishers check my sales, I have sold two books. Ever.
All of which is an overly long way of saying that this book is kind of a big deal for me. If it does well then when I shop future projects to traditional publishers I look a lot more credible. It opens doors. So if you’re interested, please consider putting in a pre-order. Impressive pre-orders make the publisher put more time into supporting the book. The publisher supporting the book boosts sales. Strong pre-orders are, in current publishing, a huge deal.
But more broadly, and with the knowledge that my readers have been incredibly generous to me this year, and that I have a lot of material coming out in a short period of time, I just want to pause and say thank you to everyone who supports my work, however you support it, and whichever bits of it you support. It means a lot knowing that I do work that people enjoy enough to support. More than a few days have been genuinely brightened just by knowing you lot exist.
…

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Sensor Scan: The Transformed Man

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William Shatner is one of those personalities who is so ubiquitous that their reputation precedes and obfuscates their actual contributions to art and pop culture. Shatner is so famous as Captain Kirk and the the king of unironic and self-evidently ridiculous camp that his iconic public persona dwarfs and overshadows his entire creative body of work. One of the reasons why I focus so heavily on Shatner in my overview of this period of Star Trek history (if not the primary one) is that his status as an omnipresent and immediately recognisable part of pop culture has ironically made it difficult to discern any reasonable erudition about the kind of actor he is, the style of performance he delivers and what the positionality he draws it all from really is. That’s not to say Leonard Nimoy, James Doohan, DeForest Kelley, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig aren’t equally as iconic and memorable in their roles, they are, but everyone knows they’re brilliant and, more to the point, everyone largely knows why they’re brilliant. That’s not really the case with with William Shatner.

All of which is to say that in 1968 William Shatner released an album of spoken-word poetry.

This is, it should probably go without saying, manifestly not the sort of thing anybody expected of William Shatner at the time, two thirds of the way through the original run of Star Trek. It is also probably fairly safe to say it is still not the sort of thing people expect of William Shatner today, because despite his subsequent musical performances becoming part of his camp reputation, the sort of bemused detachment this part of his oeuvre attracts from would-be fans and critics is rather telling. But the existence of The Transformed Man is in fact a very revealing look at not only the approach to Soda Pop Art in the late-1960s but also Shatner’s own worldview and how his presence helped re-shape what Star Trek came to represent. So with that said, what the heck even *is* The Transformed Man?

It may actually be beneficial to begin with an overview of what The Transformed Man *isn’t*, as this is the source of the overwhelming majority of confusion and bafflement this record attracts. In this regard it’s worth comparing it, if for no other reason then the comparison is unavoidable, with Leonard Nimoy’s musical catalog. In 1967, just as Star Trek was starting to gain a significant following, Dot Records released an album called Mr. Spock’s Songs from Space, which was pretty much exactly what it sounds like: A collection of fluffy novelty songs Nimoy recorded in full-on Spock-the-logician mode to abjectly hilarious results. Literally the only reason this album exists is because Spock was the show’s breakout character, and in the 1960s releasing an album of novelty music to tie in to a popular TV show was just sort of the thing you did, no matter how nonsensical it might sound if you think too hard about it (see also “Snoopy’s Christmas” by The Royal Guardians).…

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Saturday Waffling (September 28th, 2013)

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I made the Last War in Albion deadline, obviously. I’ve also just about worked through the Wonder Woman copyedits – I just need to rewrite the last chapter to deal with the fact that it was written a year ago and is about the current run of Wonder Woman comics. Which shouldn’t be hard, as the last year of Wonder Woman comics was not particularly different from the year before it. And then it needs one more round of edits and some formatting, but I’m cautiously optimistic that I can get that out in October. Meanwhile, the Flood book comes out in November. That’s very fun – I just flipped through bits of it today, and found myself enjoying it. You can pre-order it on Amazon here. Hartnell Second Ed should be December, and I’m not really sure about Baker 1 – it’s still got a fair chunk of revisions to work through. But my goal is to have all four come out in 2013.

I’ve got an issue with Last War in Albion I’m not quite sure what to do with – the next post deals with R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson at length, and can’t really be done without including some NSFW images. How would people prefer I handle that when it happens (since it’ll be an issue more than just next week, i.e. when I get to Lost Girls or Neonomicon)? A warning at the top of the screen and no NSFW until at least a monitor’s length down? A “clean” version of the post on the front page and a link to an explicit one? NSFW images done as links instead of embedded in the text? Don’t worry about it because you all have workplaces in which massive tableaus of violent demon sex are perfectly acceptable?

Since that’s the most rubbish topic of discussion ever, and since we’re all geeks here… Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. What did we all think?…

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Sensor Scan Bonus: Mysteries Five and 1968

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Before I began Vaka Rangi, I was toying with the idea of doing projects of similar size and scope for other pop culture phenomena. I posted most of these “pilots” to this blog’s sister site Soda Pop Art, if anyone’s interested in some of the things I write about outside of Star Trek. One of the projects I’ve considered doing off and on for the past three or four years is a comprehensive critical history of the Scooby-Doo franchise, which, in my opinion, is one of the most frequently misread things in pop culture. And, when I was planning the between-season material for the gap between the end of the Original Series and the beginning of the Animated Series, there was one show from 1969 I knew was an absolute no-brainer for me to cover.

Unfortunately, I’d already written about it.

So yes, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is getting a Sensor Scan post sometime after “Turnabout Intruder”. But as it’s part of a larger project I’d still like to write someday and as its sociopolitical and ethical roots really date back to 1968, the production history of the show has its own post, which you can read below.

This essay then, as well as the planned one on the show-as-aired, is a revised, remixed, expanded and otherwise tweaked version of a piece I already posted to Soda Pop Art about a year ago. Because of that, I’m not comfortable making this an “official” Monday/Wednesday/Friday post (even though it’s certainly long enough to be one) and you’re free to skip ahead and go read up on Scooby-Doo over there if you like. Or if you’d prefer to wait to see the strangled way I try to connect this all back to Star Trek, you can certainly do that as well.

Mysteries Five

The year was 1968.

Hanna-Barbera, long having proven itself one of the major pillars of the children’s television animation genre they helped create, was under fire from Parental Rights and moral guardian activist groups who were complaining that their Saturday Morning Cartoon market, at the time dominated by sci-fi action serial inspired offerings such as Space Ghost and Jonny Quest, were too violent and scary for children and demanding their programming be changed to reflect more “suitable” content and topics. Despite being Exhibit A, Hanna-Barbera were far from the only studio targeted by this campaign, and one of the earliest, and most influential, responses was Filmation’s The Archie Show, which reconceptualized the Riverdale high kids from the popular evergreen comics as a teen pop band and centered around themes of teenage relationship and parent drama.

With the complaints by parental watchdogs echoing in their ears, Hanna-Barbera set to work trying to come up with a show that would both please the activists and serve as a tentpole series for their upcoming season. While all this was going on, Fred Silverman, then head of CBS’ children’s television department, contacted producers Joe Ruby and Ken Spears with an idea he had for a new show that combined elements from I Love A Mystery and Armchair Detectives, two popular radio serials from decades past.…

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Sensor Scan: Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In

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Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In

The question of exactly how radical and progressive a television show can get when it’s airing on major network television and supported by corporate advertising and ratings is an interesting one. On the surface the answer seems like a flat “not in the slightest”: Simply put, it’s a rather noticeable conflict of interest to have a work deeply invested in overturning the current social order dependent on the tools and infrastructure of the very hegemony it’s set itself in opposition to. On the other hand, one does sort of hope there’s at least a little-wiggle room for this kind of thing in pop culture mass media: If you’re a young person just starting to come to terms with your worldview and unaware of big underground counterculture movements, it’s really helpful to be able to turn on the TV and see you’re not completely alone, especially in a world without the Internet.

In the past, we’ve looked at this issue on the context of Star Trek: Supposedly the most forward-thinking and youth-embracing show on television in the late 1960s, the Original Series has in truth proven to be somewhat changeable on the ethics front. There have been moments that seem to support this claim, most noticeably in the last third of the second season, but there have also been just as many, if not more, that would seem to give the indication Star Trek was anything but, and in truth pretty regularly and reliably (and disturbingly) reactionary. But that’s Star Trek, and in spite of the numerous overtures it can and has made towards a more socially-conscious approach, it’s still burdened by some pretty major liabilities (in particular the one named Gene Roddenberry) and its potential to make a positive impact is frustratingly not always as clear as it should be. The question remains though: Can you have a truly countercultural television show? We can, in fact, take an even broader scope: Can you have countercultural Soda Pop Art at all?

In my opinion, the only real satisfactory answer is “yes and no”, and for a good example let’s take a look at the other iconic NBC show of 1968, and the show that kicked Star Trek out of its primetime slot: Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Conceived by Dan Rowan and Dick Martin as an evolution of the “straight man/dumb guy” act they had honed in nightclubs, Laugh-In was a weekly sketch comedy show most famous for its innovative style marked by rapid-fire editing that cut between various discrete images and scenarios. The jokes and sketches on Laugh-In were frequently only seconds in length, just there long enough to deliver a punchline before cutting away to something completely different. The show lasted an impressively long time, from 1968 until 1973, and helped launch the careers of future luminaries like Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin, not to mention Lorne Michaels, a staff writer on Laugh-In who would go on to produce Saturday Night Live.

The most obvious thing that set Laugh-In apart from its predecessors in television and stage comedy, and what it’s most remembered for, is its overt courting of the 1960s counterculture, and in particular the Mods and the Hippies.…

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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: Bjo Trimble and “Save Star Trek!”

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Yes, Star Trek did in fact come back for a third season. Barely.

Critically however, this wasn’t a renewal in the traditional sense either. What happened in March of 1968 was something the likes of which had really never been seen before in US television, and about which there is a considerable amount of myth and contradictory lore, most of which seems to have been deliberate. Central to these events is a woman name Betty JoAnne Trimble, better known as Bjo. So, in the first entry of the “Ship’s Log, Supplemental” series, which looks at miscellaneous aspects of the Star Trek pop culture phenomenon, in particular the history and historiography of its fandom, I’m going to try and piece together as best I can the extent of her influence and connection to the franchise and the series of events leading up to Star Trek‘s unexpected renewal…And inevitable, if postponed, cancellation.

Although Star Trek never commanded acceptable, let alone impressive, ratings in its original run, what fans it did have were notoriously passionate and vocal. Throughout the duration of the first season, NBC got close to 29,000 letters from fans gushing about the show, which was the most amount of mail they got for any of their shows save The Monkees. Although a comprehensive cross-section of Star Trek fandom in the 1960s is difficult to establish, it is clear a great many of these early fans were women. Numerous producers, executives and other creative figures associated with the franchise for decades have pointed this out, despite their tendency to make spectacularly unfounded inferences from this fact, mostly in regards to how all those women were apparently just lusting after Spock (Ron Moore is particularly egregious in this regard, having made a somewhat thoughtless comment in the context of one of his early Star Trek: The Next Generation scripts but we’ll get to that). Although there were most certainly more then a few women who fixated on Spock and who turned him into a sex symbol for one reason or another, the sexism implicit in assuming the *only* reason women watched Star Trek was because of this should be self-evident. In truth there is a long tradition of a feminist Star Trek fandom which goes all-but-ignored thanks to the unbelievably patriarchal nature of science fiction culture, and which will start to become more of a theme once we reach the 1970s. This outpouring of fan mail is the first manifestation of it.

It’s not terribly difficult to see why women would feel inspired and empowered by Star Trek in 1968. Gene Roddenberry may have had a tendency to act like a misogynistic bastard, but in the two years since the series has been on the air people who aren’t him have used the show to make considerable strides for more egalitarian representation: We’ve had characters like Ann Mulhall and Charlene Masters being depicted as colleagues in equal standing with their male shipmates, not to mention Uhura, who’s become a strong and capable character in her own right over the course of the last season.…

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Bat Anti-Review Blog

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Credit to Anton B for the title. Only the ones I’ve read in recent memory here, which is to say, ones I covered on the blog. And thus a self-selecting set that avoided the canonically crap ones.

Timewyrm: Genesys: Everybody involved should be ashamed for putting out a book in which the Doctor, in all seriousness, tells Ace not to be so upset over being sexually assaulted. (I am in no way exaggerating this scene for dramatic effect, to be clear. This actually happened.) If this were a bizarre and dissonant note in an otherwise well-written book, it would still be enough to virtually disqualify the book from praise. But on top of that, the book sucks too. 1/10

Timewyrm: Exodus: Those who say this is the greatest New Adventure are simply wrong, and very probably lack souls. However, it is a stunning novel in which Dicks applies his ruthlessly and gloriously functional prose style to a truly disturbing story that captures the horror of the Nazis. Not of what the Nazis did, but of the Nazis themselves. It’s a strange artifact from the point before Paul Cornell showed the Virgin books what they wanted to be. But it’s a marvelous one. 10/10

Timewyrm: Apocalypse: I will never understand the sheer loathing for this book, which runs through perfectly traditional Doctor Who, only with one or two genuinely novel and laudatory conceptual leaps towards adulthood. It’s nothing amazing, but it’s nothing particularly grating either. 5/10

Timewyrm: Revelation: There are a handful of stories that changed Doctor Who – stories that single-handedly draw a line where you can say “everything before this was one way, and everything after was another.” And more to the point, that did so just by being so brilliant that nobody did things the old way again. Power of the Daleks, The Ark in Space, Remembrance of the Daleks… and this. The story that created emotional, character-based Doctor Who. So many great moments and lines and images in this, both Ace and the Doctor are portrayed better than they ever have been. If you’ve never read this, you don’t understand the history of Doctor Who. Astonishing. 10/10

Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible: It’s understandable why everyone fell into the trap of thinking people would care about dark secrets in Gallifrey’s ancient past on their own merits. Equally, however, it was a trap. Several iterations of Gallifrey past, where these secrets are just revelations about a particular version of Gallifrey that was popular in the early 90s, it’s tough to care, and the book lacks enough oomph elsewhere to justify the fuss. On the other hand, you can still see how and why people convinced themselves that this was a good idea, and you can just about get swept up in the mystery and strangeness. If you really, really try. 4/10

Cat’s Cradle: Warhead: There is a line of thought that Cartmel didn’t want to be writing Doctor Who, and so just wrote generic cyberpunk novels featuring cameos by the Doctor.…

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“Creators of history”: Assignment: Earth

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“Assignment: Earth” aired on March 29, 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4. Synchromysticism is the study of “happenings” and reoccurring patterns and synchronicity in human behaviour and world events, and the end of April is regarded in synchromystic circles as a “red zone” with a high concentration of violent activity. Sixty-nine days after King’s death, Robert F. Kennedy was also assassinated. June 5, the date of Kennedy’s death, also has synchromystic connections, being the date of the Six-Day War between Israel and its neighbouring countries. June is a major month on the whole with Midsummer (around the 24th) being a particularly important date. The flying saucer era began on June 24, 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing unidentified flying objects flying in formation at supersonic speed over Mount Rainier in Washington. The date has also marked several occasions when mysterious objects fell from the sky.

Looking back on the pilot of any long-running television series can be a strange experience. The reoccurring motifs we’re accustomed to aren’t there, or are at least present in forms different to the ones we’re accustomed to. A pilot is by definition a first draft, and the one for Assignment: Earth is no different in this regard. What’s especially strange about this pilot though (simply and uninspiringly titled “Assignment: Earth”, though I suppose it gets the point across), at least for someone used to what the show eventually becomes, is that it opens up not with Supervisor 194 Gary Seven in his swanky apartment, but with an oddly-shaped spaceship in orbit around Earth. The ship’s captain, played by Canadian Royal Shakespearean actor William Shatner, exposits that he and his crew come from the far future and have travelled back in time to 1968 for historical research. Gary then transports aboard the ship, looks around in confusion and we cut to the intro credits…of an entirely different show.

Knowing a little background about how United States TV worked in the late-1960s would probably be beneficial. Back then it was customary for new pilots to be not-so-subtly disguised as regular episodes in currently-airing shows, so that the new show could piggyback off of the existing one, hopefully inheriting its audience. This still happens on occasion today, but not with the same kind of regularity as it used to. In this case, Assignment: Earth actually began life as a spin-off of an earlier, lesser-known series of Gene Roddenberry’s called Star Trek, which followed the adventures of Captain Kirk (Shatner’s character) and the crew of the USS Enterprise, which patrolled and explored the galaxy in the far future as part of an interstellar conglomerate called the United Federation of Planets. Star Trek was indebted to the Pulp and Golden Age science fiction genres of the 1950s and early 1960s, in much the same way as Assignment: Earth was to the “spy-fi” fad of the late-1960s and 1970s, at least at first.

Part of the reason Star Trek isn’t as well remembered as its successor is today is that it never scored particularly good ratings, partially due to the fact that it largely wasn’t any good, and it ultimately burnt itself out after two seasons.…

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Saturday Waffling (September 21st, 2013)

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Chapter 3 of Last War in Albion is 9824 words long. This is not a bad length – the first two chapters are  11,577 and 12,54. So it’s in range.
Which would be comforting if I weren’t aware of how much there was to finish. Thankfully the first 2000 words are solid, so I can slice a post off the top and make Thursday’s deadline, but having the ebook together… ooh, that’s dicier. 
Once I stagger past the finish line on that, it’s time for some focus on Wonder Woman for a bit.
Meanwhile, there’s been a lot of stuff about academia whizzing about the blogonet this week. Some of you have surely seen this story, but I figured I’d repost it for those who haven’t. Death of an Adjunct
tl;dr – a part-time professor at Duquesne University, a Catholic university in Pittsburgh, died in crushing poverty after twenty-five years of service to the University. Which is citing a religious objection to unionizing its adjuncts (curious, given the historical links between the Catholic church and the American labor movement). The university asserts that it gave the late Margaret Mary Vojtko a dorm room to stay in when she could not afford to heat her house, and that priests visited with her frequently as she battled cancer (which bankrupted her). Because nothing says supporting someone who’s worked for you for a quarter-century like a dorm room and a pat on the shoulder as they’re dying.
No active question for discussion this Waffling. Just a shuddering anger at the ruins of a once proud profession.
…

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“When the wayfarer whistles in the dark…”: The Omega Glory

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“I’ll see you…in two and two.”

It’s bad.

What more do you want me to say? It’s terrible. Everyone knows it’s terrible. You don’t need me to tell you that. The plot is literally nothing more then capture and escape sequence after capture and escape sequence liberally peppered with intolerably drawn out and boring fight scenes in between. It is so chest-thumpingly, simperingly jingoistic it practically loops back around to parody (at least William Shatner is playing it that way). It is racist on some kind of transcendental level, depicting the Yangs as noble savages while portraying the supposedly technologically-advanced Cohms as identical, mute, smiling Chinese stereotypes and it even has Kirk literally call them yellow. It is the picture-perfect case study of the ugly racism, sexism and unreconstructed United States neo-imperialism that always lurks just below the surface of Star Trek, threatening to eclipse everything that makes the franchise actually worthwhile. It was also one of the leading contenders, along with “Mudd’s Women”, to be the second pilot. Bob Justman was so appalled by the script Gene Roddenberry turned in, he drafted a multi-page memo savaging it; railing into it from every possible angle before throwing it away at the last second and delivering a few comments in person because he thought he was being too brutal. A shame he didn’t save it: I’dve loved to reprint it. Not that this phased Roddenberry in the slightest: He was was so proud of his work on this one he personally submitted it to be considered for an Emmy Award.

I’m not going to go into a lengthy critique of “The Omega Glory” to point out what’s wrong with it. It’s far easier (and more accurate) to just say “everything” and that it commits an unforgivable sin simply by existing. No-I’m much more interested in the question of “why now?” and looking at how Star Trek, which had been on such a terrific streak since “The Immunity Syndrome”, suddenly turned out a story so irredeemably awful even Trekkers can’t defend it, and this is a group of fans so loyal and dedicated they’ll make apologies for “The Enemy Within” and “Who Mourns for Adonais?”. Tell someone unfamiliar with Star Trek that this episode and “Patterns of Force” are from the same season, let alone the same series, and they’ll laugh in your face. That this was produced directly after “The Ultimate Computer” is unthinkable. But there are, sadly, easily discernible reasons that explain “The Omega Glory”, and it’s also depressingly telling that this episode, along with “Spock’s Brain”, are the ones that stick out to fans as the bad ones amongst five years of television that are about half excellent and half intolerant, bigoted garbage if we’re being charitable. There’s also the matter of Gene Roddenberry: For all intents and purposes this is his final significant contribution to the Original Series. He’s behind “Assignment: Earth” next week of course, but there’s a lot going on there that’s not to do with him.…

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