Eruditorum Press

The Coalition of Chaos

Unearthing Review

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Well, I’ve just had one of the most magical experiences of my life.

Some context – a film version of Alan Moore’s Unearthing is dropping later this morning. I was given a screener copy, and just finished watching it. It is absolutely amazing. If you have never experienced Unearthing, it is unquestionably the version to go for. If you have experienced it before, it offers a substantial upgrade to all previous versions and is very probably worth revisiting; certainly I found it a tremendously rewarding experience.

There are ways in which yours will not match mine. It will not, for instance, include you belatedly realizing that you got the idea of printing an edition of your book published on old-fashioned printer paper from the transcript included with the old box set of Unearthing as an audio performance. Nor the sequence where you are floored by a snake-based description of philosophical horror that repeatedly echoes and parallels your book’s major points, a beautiful and welcome reminder that your great work can probably be encapsulated in a clod of dirt in a Northampton back garden. Still, it won’t be hard to see how the work could affect someone like that. It’s that good, and that visibly powerful a piece of magic. Of course it’s going to resonate weirdly with the world. That’s the point.

Unearthing is the story of Steve Moore, as told by Alan Moore. A prehumous eulogy, in many ways deliberately, Moore relates the strange life of his best friend, who was born in the house on Shooter’s Hill in London where he died, who taught the greatest English-language writer ever to work primarily in the medium of comics how to write a script, whose own career spanned decades, its fingerprints all over the history of British comics, who was beyond that a noted I Ching scholar, and who conducted a lengthy sexual affair with the moon goddess Selene.

Moore does not bury the lead, although he does build to it. Still, Unearthing is about this last bit. And the other bits, and many besides, but mostly the last bit. It is handled with a deft literary irony – a claim vouched for entirely by the author, who is ostentatiously present, a hypnotic baritone and looming beard that repeatedly appears on screen while the tale’s subject appears only in flickered inserts, played by an actor. An author who announces his entrance to the narrative with relish and fanfare, positioning himself as arbiter of the great “is Steve Moore mad or is this really magic” debate to an audience who knows full well that there is only one possible answer that he would ever give. It’s a delightfully, deliberately ludicrous claim – a man who worships a glove puppet promising us all that his best friend’s girlfriend is a Greek goddess and blue.

You’ll believe every word.

Much of this is because the narrator’s appearances, though dramatic and coming at highly charged moments of the tale, are nevertheless cameos. For most of the piece, Moore stands at polite distance, affecting to tell his friend’s story as he would want it told.…

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Neoreaction a Basilisk: Color Edition Reveal

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As we roll on towards the one week mark on the Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter, it seemed a good time to give the Color Edition a preview in the vein of the previous Conspiracy Zine Edition preview. Indeed, the same three pages of the book as were previewed there, so you can get a sense for how the two editions differ. (Which is more than just “one has color” – the Conspiracy Zine is using multiple generation photocopies to give that authentically degraded look, whereas the Color Edition is trying to be as close to the original taped-together pages as possible – if you look closely the tape is visible on these scans.) There’s also some new pledge tiers, including all existing Eruditorum Press books (Neoreaction a Basilisk included) for just $35, so if you’ve been on the fence, there’s new reason to climb off it. Anyway, here’s three pages.

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A Feast Impending. Our Ruin to Come. It Becomes Symmetry (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Thirty-Four: In Pictopia!)

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Figure 969: Left: First two panels of “In Pictopia.” Right: Last two panels of “In Pictopia,” showing Moore’s characteristic elipticism. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Don Simpson and Eric Vincent, in Anything Goes #2, 1986)

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore wrote a short story called “In Pictopia” for a Fantagraphics charity anthology. We discussed a lot of implications of those last three words and never managed to get to the story itself.

In many ways, the story of “In Pictopia” is one of the strip constantly overperforming. Moore’s original commitment to Groth was two four-page strips, but he found the idea of “In Pictopia” too big to fit into such a small container, and ended up doing one eight-page script, although given that Simpson then expanded the script to thirteen pages, in terms of Moore’s short work it’s perhaps easiest to frame it as a forty-panel script, compared to his Future Shocks, which tended to have panel counts in the high twenties. And thinking of “In Pictopia” as a super-sized Future Shock is helpful, as Moore is using techniques he honed at IPC. The overall structure is typically elliptical – both the first and last panels feature captions over blackness, while the second and penultimate panels feature POV shots of the main character’s hands. And the overall story structure is what Moore describes as a “list” story, in which the plot mostly consists of taking a big concept and running through its most interesting implications in rapid succession – a style used for such 2000 AD classics as “They Sweep the Spaceways,” “Sunburn,” and “The Big Clock!”

Figure 970: The comic strip skyline of Pictopia. (In Anything Goes #2, 1986)

But between Moore’s maturity as a storyteller and the space afforded by the increased panel count, “In Pictopia” goes to stranger and more unsettling places. Its conceit is the city of Pictopia, depicted on the title page as a collection of skyscrapers seemingly made up of comic panels, in which various comic strip characters live. The broad premise has antecedents – most obviously Gary K. Wolf’s 1981 novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? – but as usual Moore’s angle on the material is unique. Wolf’s novel proposes that comic strips are actually photographs of the “toons,” while in Moore’s story, although the comic strips clearly exist (one character is introduced in terms of hers, and tenements are named after comic syndicates), there’s no clear sense of how the strips relate to characters’ day-to-day lives. Instead the sense is more that Pictopia is an early version of Ideaspace – a conceptual realm in which comic strip characters live, but that is ultimately created as a consequence of the real-world comics industry, its geography shaped and reshaped by industry trends – most notably when the Funnytown neighborhood (occupied by funny animals) is bulldozed because “this city’s changing, and some things just don’t fit the continuity no more.”

Figure 971: Funnytown! (Written by Alan Moore, art by Don SImpson and Mike Kazaleh, from “In Pictopia” in Anything Goes #2, 1986)

As this suggests, there’s an elegaic tone to “In Pictopia” in which Moore mourns the traditions and styles of comics that have waned and been neglected, and specifically that have been neglected in favor of superheroes, the only sorts of comics characters who can “afford to live in color,” as the narration puts it.…

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Neoreaction, Rationalism, and Eliezer Yudkowsky

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Last War in Albion this afternoon. 

So, there’s been a line of complaint about Neoreaction a Basilisk (my new book, currently funding on Kickstarter) that accuses it of being an attempt to slander “rationalism,” and specifically Eliezer Yudkowsky, by linking them to neoreaction. And of being part of a communist propaganda campaign to this end. It’s not. 

This weird theory mostly been pushed by a guy who blogs under the name nydwracu who’s active in both circles, which highlights the irony of the complaint(though he’s been pushing it on social media, not that blog)  I’ve sent him a preview copy, so he can at least trash talk it honestly now. Of course, he’s a white nationalist, and we know how good they are at intellectual honesty. 

All the same, it’s a serious enough concern that I want to address it, if only because it’s a concern Yudkowsky himself raised while news of the book was first flitting about the aether, and while there are some significant ways in which I do not respect Eliezer Yudkowsky, he seems a nice bloke, and I genuinely don’t want to cause him any distress. So allow me to say with absolute explicitness: Eliezer Yudkowsky is not a neoreactionary. He repudiates the philosophy in explicit terms. He has shown no sympathy for and ative hostility to its most noxious beliefs. If I have ever suggested otherwise, I apologize profusely for the infelicity of writing, and if it is possible to edit the text in question I will do so.

That said, this has also been read as an attempt to smear “rationalism,” and that’s a subtler thing worth unpicking. First of all, I want to be clear that the book’s topic is complex, and is not an equation of all of the elements within it. To nick an analogy someone made when defending the book on Tumblr, it’s a book that has Eliezer Yudkowksy and neoreaction in it; it’s also a book that has Frantz Fanon and China Miéville in it. It no more implies that Yudkowsky is a neoreactionary than it implies that Moldbug is a socialist or Nick Land is black. This is a pretty self-evident principle, and I’m not going to harp on it, but come on guys, be serious.

Still, the book’s title binds together two things – Neoreaction and the word “Basilisk,” which comes from Roko’s Basilisk, a bit of Internet infamy involving Yudkowsky and his website LessWrong. Obviously I’m insinuating something. It’s fair to ask what it is. To some extent the answer has to be “read the damn book,” of course; I’m trying to make a living here. But we can talk about this without undue spoilers, so let’s do so. To frame the question in a way that makes complete sense given my past work, what the fuck do I have against Eliezer Yudkowsky? 

After all, he is in many regards the odd man out in Neoreaction a Basilisk. That I would take a pop at Mencius Moldbug, a neo-fascist nutjob two doors down from Vox Day, is easy enough to understand.…

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“You Klingon bastard! You’ve killed my son!”: Bloodlines

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In the last book when I wrote about “The Survivors”, I mentioned that as far as I was personally concerned, the most notable thing about it was that it was a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode I somehow never managed to see in 25+ years and thus knew next to nothing about. It’s a strange thing to have a fresh experience with a show you know this well. Back in the days of the TNN reruns, “Bloodlines” was that episode for me. Even moreso, in fact: At the time, I had no idea this episode even existed, in spite of owning a fair few reference guides and episode lists. It was like watching a brand new, never-before-seen episode of my favourite show for the first time in seven years, and was definitely an experience I savoured.

At the time I was pretty warmly receptive to “Bloodlines”: There was nothing I found explicitly objectionable and I more or less had an enjoyable evening with it. Over the years though it has faded from memory somewhat, partly due to my hazy 1980s-90s memory combing with my hazy 2000s memory conflating it with “Suddenly Human”. Revisiting it for this book, however, the pretense is entirely gone and it’s evident this is a mediocre, ill-advised misfire. In fact it turns out that part of the reason I kept confusing this episode with “Suddenly Human” is that they’re basically the same story: Captain Picard takes on a troubled young man with a predilection to get into trouble, adopts the role of a father figure and tries to be a mentor for him. The difference this time is that we’re meant to believe that the kid in question, some guy named Jason who’s so forgettable I’ve already forgotten his last name and I just had Memory Alpha open a minute ago as I sat down to write this, actually is Captain Picard’s son for much of the runtime, though he actually isn’t.

As a result of this basically just being “Suddenly Human” again but with a Ferengi genetics experiment revenge plot tossed in for good measure (oh yeah, DaiMon Bok is back, did you miss him? He was supposed to be the main thrust of the plot, but he’s even less remarkable than Jason whatsshisface), all of the criticisms I had of that episode still apply. There’s been, over the course of the series, a peculiar fixation on forcing Captain Picard, a man who is not a parent and manifestly was never meant to be one, into a parental role, to the show’s detriment. First of course we had Wesley Goddamn Crusher, and the seven year on-again-off-again abortive plot to make him Captain Picard’s surrogate son. Then we had this episode’s antecedent in “Suddenly Human”, “The Inner Light” and its directionless follow-up “Lessons” (where the notion lurked around the paratext if it wasn’t overtly dealt with), and now this. I’m probably forgetting some things, but those are the most notable instances.…

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Why Jack and I Will Write About the Austrian School for Money

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EDIT: Text of a Twitter DM exchange where Jack and I accidentally started hashing out the essay appended to the bottom.

The Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter is presently having its second-best day so far, meaning that it’s stormed through the “Theses on Trump” threshold, and we’re now looking at the $8000 stretch goal of me and Jack writing an essay on Austrian School economics. (Also, there’s now a Twitter poll for what the order of the next two stretch goals should be. And a $7000 mini-stretch goal on the Kickstarter to check out.) Unlike “Theses on Trump” and “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate,” there’s no demo of the Austrian School essay written – it doesn’t even have a for-certain title yet. But I can at least talk a little about why it’s a thing, and why I asked Jack to write about it. (And Jack will be along later to add his perspective.) And if it sounds interesting, well, the link’s at the top of the post.

So, first of all, why this goes in a book with everything else. Which is pretty simple – the Austrian School is a tremendously influential school of thought within libertarianism. Moldbug’s a huge fan. So is Vox Day. So were Ted Cruz’s advisors, hence his insane plan to go back to the gold standard. So like Trump and Gamergate, it’s firmly in the alt-right constellation. But that’s why it’s relevant, not why I’m doing it.

The thing that doesn’t come up a lot with the Austrian School is that they’re insane cranks. And I mean that in an almost good way, because I’m an occultist and have a soft spot for lunatic crackpots. But there’s no question that’s what the Austrian School is. They reject the utility of both empiricism and mathematics to economics, instead building their entire system out of what they call “praxeology,” which is a narrative-based approach whereby the entire system of economics is derived as a set of supposedly necessary implications of the allegedly self-evident premise “individual human beings act.” They are not taken seriously by any actual reputable academic economists – their influence is entirely down to the fact that their conclusions flatter libertarianism, so their obvious methodological madness is largely overlooked or, even more humorously, adopted in spite of its flaws.

One of the things Neoreaction a Basilisk definitely is is a critique of the entire model of philosophy from first premises, so this sort of “start from an axiom and build an entire theory of how the global economy should function” argument is a particularly apt target. But I’m also fascinated because one of the default positions of libertarians tends to be that Marx is an economic crank. And there are certainly ways you can argue this – he’s not working in any traditionally mathematical/empirical mode either, after all, and has a similar tendency towards narrative approaches. As I said, I don’t think being a crackpot is a problem. But it’s definitely weird that they dismiss Marx out of hand as a crank while taking Mises and Rothbard seriously. …

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Shabcast 19, Part 2

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Today’s image is of Magneto killing some Nazis.  Because I like that.

The exciting conclusion to Shabcast 19 is now available to listen or download here.

Here are some links to things referred to in both parts of the conversation:

Here‘s some more info on Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the 2007 Boston Mooninite Panic, and the subsequent press conference.

And here‘s Susan of Texas on the awful Ross Douthat.

*

Also, here‘s a link to Kit Power’s new piece about Hillsborough.  It’s excellent.

And here‘s Norman Finkelstein talking some much-needed sense about the so-called anti-Semitism crisis in Labour.…

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Comics Reviews (May 4th, 2016)

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A-Force #5

You can pretty much see Marvel deciding this isn’t actually a book they care about anymore. Its lineup seems incompatible with Civil War II, its star writer is gone, and it’s clearly biding time til cancellation. Thompson is a perfectly fine writer – it’s notably not as though Wilson was slaying on it – but there’s an awkwardness here, such as Nico needlessly re-explaining the restrictions on her powers to a character who should know already. Meanwhile Ben Caldwell, much as I loved his Wonder Woman strip back in Wednesday Comics, is an awkward fit here, and the book as a whole just feels like disposable ballast for the lower end of the sales charts. Alas.

Radioactive Spider-Gwen #8

The Spider-Women crossover finally has a bit of a dud. Only a bit – this isn’t a bad issue or anything – but the decisiveness with which it’s moved on to Act Two is a bit jarring, and the structure of this issue ends up having Gwen be a spectator to the mostly less interesting Cindy Moon. Still, this is heads and shoulders above most Marvel crossovers, and I’m hoping this is just a bum issue (which, let’s face it, Spider-Gwen has been guilty of before). 

Invincible iron Man #9

The primary suspense of the issue is “is Tony Stark dead?” The answer to this is not hard to surmise. In his absence we get a scattershot assortment of scenes with the supporting cast, which are I suppose intriguing, but at this point “the road to Civil War II” is clearly a muddy slog down a meandering path that one highly doubts the payoff of. I’m half-tempted not to buy it. 

The Punisher #1

Picked up on a lark after realizing Cloonan was joined by Dillon on art. Largely enjoyed, but it’s Punisher-by-numbers at this point without anything that you can credibly call a new take on the character. Nobody draws people getting shot quite like Steve Dillon though. Anyway, if the Punisher is a character that appeals to you (not a statement you expect to get much traction at Eruditorum Press, let’s face it), this is probably one to check out.

New Avengers #11

Slid pleasantly easily back into this book post-Standoff, which is nice. Ewing’s usual enthusiasm for the over the top thrills of superhero books is on full display, with the best Squirrel Girl he’s ever written, along with some damn fine Hawkeye, a fun late twist, and generally a reminder of how much I missed this book while it was doing a stupid crossover. And oh look, next issue is… a stupid crossover. Well, I guess that’s a point in Civil War II’s favor.

Klaus #5

The book’s failure to be a natural fit for when it’s coming out continues, but this remains some of the best work Morrison has done. Particularly fun this issue, though, is Dan Mora’s art, which flits between cartoonish excess and dark grandeur in a way that’s probably not suited to a lot of books, but is self-evidently the right angle for this one.…

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Eruditorum Presscast: David Gerard (Neoreaction a Basilisk 1)

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This month I’m joined by a variety of cool guests to whom I sent preview copies of Neoreaction a Basilisk to talk about the book. First up is David Gerard, who’s been volunteer copyediting the book, and to whom I serialized it as I was writing it in 2000 word chunks. We talk about why on Earth he agreed to do such a ridiculous thing, and about what’s so interesting (and frustrating) about the three major figures of the book, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land. It’s a fun chat, and you can check it out here.

And, more importantly, you can back Neoreaction a Basilisk on Kickstarter here – we’re just over $1000 away from “Theses on Trump.”…

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“All in the game, yo. All in the game”: The Wire

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Some mysteries should remain unsolved.

We all love a good mystery. I believe a wise man once said something to the extent of “And to many humans, a mystery must be solved”. There’s that nagging sense that there is some big truth out there that’s being concealed from you, and you can’t rest until you learn what it is, because of information wanting to be free, or any number of other justifications for the quest for gnosis we’ve come up with throughout the ages. In the United States, perhaps we’ve wed our thirst for mysteries with our romantic ideal of vigilante justice garnered from the media’s foundational myth of the “Old West”. Perhaps it’s this simultaneous desire to see a mystery solved and a perpetrator brought to justice by a lone lawman that has brought about things like the noir genre, and that speaks to something about who we are as a people. Just go and ask Odo. I think this same desire for a certain kind of disclosure is part of what fuels the appeal of conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking, the corollary of which is the romanticization and mystification of the intelligence community. I find it very satisfying that this selfsame episode introduces us to the Obsidian Order through Julian Bashir, possibly the second-biggest truth-seeker and mystery buff on Deep Space 9.

But the biggest mystery of all is of course Garak. The question of “Who Is Elim Garak?” (whoops, guess I spoiled a major plot point. Oh well) is a complicated one. But then again, so is the question of who any one of us are. Personal identity theory is more than just the continuity of consciousness in an android body. Let’s, for the moment, set aside the persistence of the self problem, and you go ahead and make of consciousness whatever you will. Are we, could it be argued, the sum total of our life experiences, and thus not only shaped by them but reducible to them? Perhaps on one metaphorical level each of us are nothing more than an amalgamation of events and interactions with other people. This is, after all, how we will all be remembered someday. There is no hidden platonic “real” you because a part of you behaves a certain way in social situations, and it’s by those facets you display in interactions through which you will be defined in the eyes of society. I never got far enough in philosophy to say with confidence if there’s a name for that theory, apart from perhaps “anti-solipsism”. Or maybe, post-structuralist reading writ large. Whatever the case may be, when we’re talking about fictional characters perhaps it could be argued this is literally who they are.

The identity and personhood of characters are intrinsically bound up with the stories that are told about them. Who they are to us is defined by how they behave in the snapshots of their lives we see and read, coloured by our own interpretations and perspectives, and perhaps what we need them to be at that particular stage in our own lives.…

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