Eruditorum Press

An entryist coup for your subconscious

chapter two

MacGowan Songs: 01 – The Old Main Drag

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The Old Main Drag

The song starts with the sustained drone of an accordian note. It sounds like a horn ringing out across the docks, telling the roustabouts they have to get to work. A winding, driving banjo figure begins a semi-reel which leads into light, fairy-winged acoustic guitar strumming. Then comes Shane’s voice, matter of fact, mobile, and comparatively young sounding.

When I first came to London I was only sixteen
With a fiver in my pocket and my old dancing bag
I went down to the Dilly to check out the scene
And I soon ended up on the old main drag

“The Dilly” is Picadilly Circus, a main thoroughfare in Central London and the heart of the tube network. At the time of the song’s writing, it was the British equivalent to Times Square in New York, dangerous, dirty, and filled with rats. Today, with gentrification, it’s the equivalent to 21st century Times Square. It’s clean, Disneyfied, and a great place to buy Royal Wedding merchandise.

The song details a nihilistic descent into homelessness, drug addiction, and sex work. From the 1970s onwards, the London that MacGowan begrudgingly called home saw homelessness rise exponentially as neoliberal policies were implemented first, with sad eyes and apologetic shrugs by a dying Labour government at the behest of the International Monetary Fund as security on a multi-billion pound loan, and then with gleeful abandon by Margaret Thatcher’s government, stripping the needy of the services that the public had funded through taxation and funnelled up to the wealthiest. The people at the bottom, on the ground, suffered. Almost nothing, as has been proven again and again, trickles down.

When fame and riches came his way, Shane MacGowan, skinny and underdressed for the bitter winter nights, could be found on the streets of London, desperately pulling bundles of twenty pound notes from his pockets and pushing them into the hands of those on the streets. His attitude was, considering his own alcoholism and drug abuse, “there but for the Grace of God go I.” Through imagination and observation, he sends the listener this missive from the bottom rung. Unlike the joyless sanctimony of Ralph McTell’s Streets of London, which rings with paternalistic pity, Shane knows enough to be able to hint at the escape that the early days of a dead end lifestyle can offer and even some of the pleasure that can be found at the bottom of the heap before forces out of your control overwhelm you. Shane has described himself, in an effort to contextualise his songwriting, as a journalist and this song is one of his best claims on that title.

There the he-males and the she-males paraded in style
And the old man with the money would flash you a smile

Reportedly, The Old Main Drag was one of the first songs written for the band (hence its position at the opening of this project) so this is one of Shane’s earliest references to the LGBT experience. True to form, he uses politically incorrect language mixed with a prurient interest in what he perceives to be the interestingly subversive sexual activities of gay men topped off with compassion with their shared humanity.…

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I Don’t Speak German, Episode 25 – Deconstructing the CV/Striker Debate (with CV Vitolo-Haddad)

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In a fun episode, Daniel chats with CV Vitolo-Haddad about CV’s recent debate with Eric Striker.

Content warnings.

Direct Download / Permalink

The Striker/CV debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAm3qijUWUk&t=5073s

Eric Striker dox from the SPLC: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/05/01/prolific-alt-right-propagandists-identity-confirmed

Eric Striker (@AarickStriger) complains about snitches. Which are really just people Striker is frightened of. https://twitter.com/AarickStriger/status/1153503065649176576

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Faeces on Trump 3

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Or ‘These Theses on Faeces and Fasces’

 

First some very important business.  There’s a new podcast in town, Wrong With Authority, created and starring myself and my friends, familiar to you all, Daniel Harper, James Murphy, and Kit Power.  It’s yet another movie podcast… but it’s also about History.  So that’s exciting then.  Specifically, it’s about movies about historical events, and how full of shit they are.  Our first episode is just out and it covers the movies Murder by Decree and From Hell (adapted from a graphic novel some of you may have heard of) and their relationship to the historical ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders.  Download our first episode here.  And please feel free to recommend and share.  We won’t mind, I promise.

 

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As you probably noticed, the word ‘fascism’ is being thrown around a lot in response to Trump and his election.  I don’t happen to think terminological issues are unimportant.  I think this issue is worth investigating.

For instance, I agree with Phil that the term ‘alt-Right’ cannot and should not be reduced to ‘neo-Nazi’.  Just to be clear (as if I haven’t made it clear where I stand): this is not in any way to defend the alt-Right, who I think are just about the most contemptible rabblement of toxic shitbags on the planet.  But they’re their own distinct flavour of toxicity, and the emergence of this flavour helps us know where we are now, and why.  Terminology is important precisely because it enables us to get a grip on complexities like this.  The intentions of many who are saying that “alt-Right = Neo-Nazi” are, no doubt, honourable, in that they are trying to expose a dirty truth that is being concealed.  And the claimed equivalence has more than a germ of truth in it.  However, the conflation is potentially damaging.  The alt-Right do, no doubt, share much that is crucial in common with Nazis, whether we use that term specifically or colloquially.  And I’ve referred to both Milo Yiannopoulos and Davis Aurini as Nazis in the past, with justification I think.  However, the alt-Right are a distinct phenomenon. 

This terminological issue is why I took a post to (roughly) define fascism in what I think are the correct objective terms.  There is a risk when you take this approach of falling into pedantry for its own sake, which won’t help anyone.  But I hope I have more to offer than just doing the equivalent of quoting the dictionary during a debate.  I’m going to try to test Trumpism against my definition.  Not in an attempt to decide whether Trumpism ‘is’ or ‘isn’t’ fascism in some simplistic way.  As I said at the head of my last post, fascism shouldn’t be reified and essentialized into an alien thing squatting outside the real world, a distinct and discrete entity that can be identified in the same way as a specific variety of phage or bacterium.  Political realities may have lineages and heredities and families but they don’t have DNA fingerprints.…

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The Real Problem With Stories (The Last War in Albion Part 10: Starblazer, Aristotle)

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This is the final installment of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. You can still grab the ebook single of Chapters One and Two at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. Barring a deadline catastrophe, Chapter Three will begin next week.
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Grant Morrison’s action-packed work for Starblazer evoked both the legacy of pulp magazines and the steady rise in popularity of the “fantastic” genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, including superheroes. This, in turn, raised the question of genre fusion, and what genre means in the first place…
“She’s realized the real problem with stories – if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.” – Neil Gaiman, Sandman #6
So in the late 1970s, as this tide began in film with things like Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Alien, major filmmakers in the genre like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Ridley Scott were inspired by the pulp fiction of their childhoods – 1950s America for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and late 40s/early 50s Britain for Ridley Scott. All of this took place in the context of other historical shifts, of course, but it was the trend that Moore and Morrison were swept up in, and, eventually, came to find themselves appearing to steer. Film and serialized print, after all, had always been bedfellows. Film adapted popular serialized print stories and genres – the films that were popular in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s were still action-adventure stories derived from the pulps, but they were war stories and westerns that lacked sci-fi/fantasy elements.
Figure 77: The more or less realist Luck of the Legion shared space in
Eagle with the sci-fi adventures of Dan Dare.
But the lines between these pulp genres often blur, much as the line between superheroes and the pulps blurs. Starblazer was the sci-fi/fantasy sister title to the straight war digest Commando, also published by DC Thomson. The American comics industry of the 40s-60s had superheroes, but also had westerns, crime comics, horror, and other genres. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote sci-fi when he did the Barsoom stories, but more straight adventure when he did Tarzan. Grant Morrison can feature a noirish private eye in what is essentially a Flash Gordon story. Eagle ran Dan Dare alongside stories of the French Foreign Legion. Adventure stories taken from the pulps have always been a subset of film, and sci-fi/fantasy has always been a subset of adventure stories. It is both crucial and obvious to point out that the pulps and film are, however, very different media. Further, it is important to point out that they have very different narrative forms. 
Figure 78: Ancient Greece has numerous subtle treatments
in comics, the bulk of which are impeccably researched.
This is best explained in terms of ancient Greece.
Virtually all thought about narrative structure is a reaction to Aristotle’s Poetics, and, to a lesser extent, his Rhetoric.
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Wiping Moscow From The Face of the Earth Would Be Fine (The Last War in Albion Part 9: Starblazer, the Pulps, Russian Structuralism)

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This is the fourth of five installments of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. You can still grab the ebook single of chapters one and two at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Grant Morrison’s contributions to Starblazer consisted of action-packed adventure stories that always came back with the editorial note “more space combat.” This style of writing owes much to the cheap populist fiction of the American pulps and British penny dreadfuls, which favored a dynamic and breathless prose style… 
“Wiping Moscow from the face of the earth would be fine.” – Warren Ellis recounting editorial guidance from Hasbro, 2008
Indeed, the absence of this hypnotic prose in favor of banal action set pieces provides at least part of the explanation for why the John Carter film was so singularly unable to replicate the narrative magic of its source text. Their text was a sort of verbal spectacle, doing the same thing to language that Siegel and Shuster did for the comics page. 
Figure 68: “The thing was about the size of a Shetland pony,
but its head bore a slight resemblance to that of a frog, except
that the jaws were equipped with three rows of long, sharp
tusks.” – Edgar Rice Burroughs, describing a calot in A
Princess of Mars (image from John Carter, 2012)
But the chief engine of the narrative was the cliffhanger. A story’s job was to be exciting for a certain number of words, then to end on a big cliffhanger so the reader would want to see what happens next week. Their cryptic introductions serve as replacements for the lead-ins from previous installments, and the stories quickly get into their own distinctive rhythms. Chapter Four of A Princess of Mars ends with the revelation of a creature described as “about the size of a Shetland pony, but its head bore a slight resemblance to that of a frog, except that the jaws were equipped with three rows of long, sharp tusks.” The chapter then leaves off, more questions than answers.
Figure 69: Cover of the tenth issue of Eagle,
featuring a page of Dan Dare: Pilot of the
Future (Frank Hampson, 1950)
This structure survived the pulps’ gradual evolution into comics. In the UK the successors were things like The Beano and The Dandy, but also titles like Eagle, Marcus Morris’s 1950 comics magazine headlined by two brightly coloured pages of Frank Hampson and his studio’s Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. Dan Dare is one of the most iconic figures in British comics, and will appear several times in the course of the War. A square-jawed pilot meant to evoke the heroism of the RAF in the still-vividly remembered Battle of Britain, Dan Dare fought the villainous Treens, coded blatantly as space Nazis and led by the fiendish Mekon. Dare was in the tradition of action heroes like Flash Gordon, Alex Raymond’s 1930s newspaper comic.
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Believe in the Stars (The Last War in Albion Part 8: Starblazer, the Pulps)

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This is the third of five installments of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. The entirety of chapters one and two are available as an ebook single at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. 

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Grant Morrison’s superhero strip Captain Clyde came to an ignoble end in 1981, but in many ways what was most unusual was that it existed at all, given that superheroes were not particularly popular within British comics, where you were likely to find a wider variety of comics… 

“Believe in the stars.” – Alan Moore, Dodgem Logic #4, 2010
The superhero is thus best used to describe a type of pulp hero story that emerged out of 1930s American comic books. Not all superheroes have their origins in comic books, but enough do that it is a reasonably entertaining game to identify ones who first appeared in another medium, particularly ones that have any degree of popularity today. They are defined primarily by a visual intensity and a sense of heritage tracing back to Action Comics #1. And they are worth fighting over because pulp heroes of that sort are a large part of contemporary culture, and have come to almost completely dominate the American comic book industry, in which large swaths of the War are fought. 
Figure 58: Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future traded on
the fantastic and brightly colored art of Frank
Hampson (From Eagle v3 #12, 1952)
But the War starts in Britain and remains, in the end, fought in Albion. And in British comics culture superheroes never gained the absolute dominance over the comics industry that they did in America. In British comics the first massively popular instance of highly visual pulp storytelling was Eagle, an anthology comic featuring stories in several genres headlined by the colourful adventures of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, and, crucially, dating to 1950, not 1938. And 1950 was squarely in the dead period of superhero comics between their World War II popularity and their Silver Age revivals. This meant that the British comics industry had several years in which to develop its own styles of highly visual pulp storytelling without any influence from American superheroes. 
Figure 59: All-Star Superman #1 cropped
to digest size.

Which meant, in turn, that in 1979 Grant Morrison could submit a story to Starblazer, a comic that simply would not have ever existed in the late 70s American comic book industry. Starblazer debuted in April of 1979, and became a twice-monthly title in July of the same year. Its concept is simple – single issue sci-fi stories (later broadened to include fantasy as well) sold in what’s known as “digest” format. Measuring at 13.5 x 17.5 centimeters (or roughly 5 x 7 inches), digests were about the height of a mass market paperback, but slightly wider at the base – similar to the formats used for science fiction magazines like Galaxy and New Worlds, as well as to American “digest” comics, the most famous of which were Gold Key’s efforts.

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Superhuman Effort to Keep Things The Way They Are (The Last War in Albion Part 7: Captain Clyde, Superheroes)

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This is the second of five installments of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. The entirety of chapters one and two are available as an ebook single at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: In 1979, Grant Morrison began writing and drawing Captain Clyde for The Govan Press, a small local paper of a district in Glasgow. The comic attempted to depict a quasi-realistic local superhero, named after the River Clyde upon which Glasgow sits, who, like Morrison, was just an unemployed Glaswegian trying to get by. Installments of Captain Clyde are extremely difficult to locate, but several strips are publicly available…
“A society where nothing can change because it takes superhuman effort to keep things the way they are.” – Warren Ellis, 1999

Figure 48: The goddess Elen offers Chris Melville superpowers
in an early installment of Captain Clyde (c. 1979)
The first strip appears to be from the earliest days of the strip – a plot that O’Donnell describes summarises as Melville being “offered the powers of Earth and Fire by the earth goddess Elen – If he could defeat her champion, Magna.” This, Morrison explains in response, is because of “an interest in ley lines and earth magic and all that pseudo mystical, hippy shit,” marking the first documented instance of Morrison’s fascination with magic and the occult. Morrison reiterates this in Supergods, using the story of his uncle giving him the Aleister Crowley/Frieda Harris Thoth Tarot for his nineteenth birthday, which got him into magic as a bridge between his discussion of Chris Claremont’s run on the X-Men and his own Captain Clyde work. The anecdote culminates with him performing what he describes as “a traditional ritual” resulting in “a blazing, angelic lion 
Figure 49: Lady Frieda Harris’s design
for The Magus (aka The Magician) in
Crowley’s Thoth Tarot
head… growling out the words “I am neither North nor South.” The second strip at least somewhat continues on that theme, showing Captain Clyde collapsed at the center of a stone circle before being renewed by some mystical power. This strip does not seem to immediately follow from the first, as Melville is identified by the caption box as Captain Clyde, suggesting it is not the origin story. Instead it appears to illustrate a feature of Captain Clyde, who, as Morrison puts it, “periodically has to recharge his powers by drawing earth energy from standing stones and other sacred sites.” The interest in Scotland’s otherness and pagan roots reinforces the initial sense of Captain Clyde as a sort of dissident superhero strip – an attempt to recreate the concept from the outsider perspective of an unemployed Glaswegian. 
The other two strips are consecutive, and feature a battle between Captain Clyde and a villain named Quasar, who is described in Supergods as “a tweed-jacketed headmasterly villain” who turns into a “star-powered monster.” The chronology given in Supergods suggests this too is from the earlier portion of the strip, before its turn towards excess.
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Warriors in the Vale of Entuthon-Benython (The Last War in Albion Part 6: Captain Clyde and Scotland)

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Greetings, faithful readers! As part of an effort to figure out how to make The Last War in Albion something I can fit in as part of a professional career, I’m trying an experiment. This is the first post of Chapter Two, focusing on Grant Morrison’s superhero strip Captain Clyde and his work in Starblazer. Chapter Two will be running weekly until September 19th. But the entirety of Chapter Two – all five posts – is already for sale as a digital single (albeit without its images, for a variety of reasons). It’s $2.99 on Amazon (and comparably priced for the UK) and $1.99 on Smashwords. The lower price is due to Amazon having quirks about royalties and my wanting all sales channels to be equal amounts of money for me – I discovered these quirks too late to do anything about it this time, but in the future will try to find some little bit of bonus content for the Amazon version to provide some vague sense of moral balance in the world. The digital single for Chapter Two also includes Chapter One as a bonus. So this time the price gets you about 20,000 words of content, though future editions will probably be about half that at the same price.


This is one of several ideas I have for how to make a profit off of The Last War in Albion, and so this is not some “pay money or I’ll terminate the project” thing. But equally, if none of the ideas to get this to be a source of income work out it’s ultimately not a project I’ll be able to devote much time to. So, you know, buying the digital single of this and future chapters is an effective way of helping make sure this project remains viable.

Right now this is an experiment, and the cover art is thus rudimentary. If it goes even remotely well I’ll get some proper cover art and probably make some other bits of fine-tuning for future chapters, and this will be a thing that happens every five or six entries. If it only sells two copies then we’ll sigh and never speak of this again. But for now, if you’re enjoying the project, please pick up the digital single of Chapters One and Two, and keep buying future singles as they come out. It is, I hope, a small and reasonable price to pay to help give work like this the support it needs to happen.

Either way, as ever, thanks for reading. – Philosophizin’ Phil Sandifer

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: The time is 1979. Grant Morrison, a 17-year-old Scotsman, has begun to write and draw comics for the short-lived but well-meaning attempt at an adult comics magazine Near Myths. These comics, like Near Myths itself, are heavily indebted to the literary new wave movement in science fiction and fantasy, a movement that was spearheaded, in the UK, by writers like J.G.…

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