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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

5 Comments

  1. David Anderson
    February 6, 2018 @ 5:09 pm

    Blake’s compositions are often dictated by the need to have the characters that are – not ‘good’ (a difficult word for Blake) but embody whatever set of values he approves of at the moment – facing upwards and the characters of whom he disapproves facing down. That works when he has a single figure but when he tries to depict two figures interacting it leads to awkwardnesses. (The disapproved figures have to be higher in the composition for one thing.)
    There aren’t a lot of genuine interactions between figures in his poetry either though. Interactions aren’t really Blake’s area of expertise.

    Reply

  2. Przemek
    February 7, 2018 @ 12:26 pm

    A great essay, as always.

    This show’s strange reluctance to deal with origin stories seems to me to follow naturally from the decision to make Hannibal a demiurgic figure. His ability to bend reality around him, to pull other characters into his nightmarish dreamscape, enables him to almost erase his own point of origin. To have no beginning is to have no end. Without clearly defined roots he’s untethered, timeless, undying. The same goes for Dolarhyde – his origins don’t matter because his real point of origin is Hannibal himself. Without the connection to his creator, his demiurge he couldn’t exist.

    On an unrelated note, can anybody point me towards a source where I could learn more about the “hauntological vs weird” dichotomy? It keeps cropping up in these essays and I’m not sure I fully understand either of those terms.

    Reply

    • Przemek
      February 8, 2018 @ 9:34 am

      Nevermind, mx_mond already provided me with a link to the wonderful Miéville essay. Marvelous.

      Reply

  3. jean allen
    February 11, 2018 @ 5:24 am

    Honestly I feel like the decision to de-center origin stories is refreshing. You take the Harris novels out of the campy psychoanalysis of their time and there’s nothing that you can say about someone who’s decided to murder people in order to become a Blake painting that will make that pathology make sense. Same thing with Hannibal. The movies try to have it both ways by both turning him into a comicbook villain while humanizing him which leads to his character being both fucking ridiculously horrible and a far more sympathetic character than anyone else in the movies.

    2010s Hannibal has a lot more awareness of why this kind of path leads you to a dark place. Hannibal is interesting yes, but there’s nothing that can be done to humanize him, and frankly Hannibal would be angered at the very concept of humanization. Same with Dolarhyde

    Reply

  4. Rrr
    August 13, 2020 @ 12:42 pm

    “Moral dignity pants” comes straight from The Silence of the Lambs book, to me it does not seem uncharacteristic at all.

    Reply

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