Eruditorum Press

Gaze not into the abyss lest you accidentally write a book

“Here’s lookin’ at you”: Profit and Loss

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I’ve got a theory that Hollywood and the greater Los Angeles area are different from other big world cities. I mean granted every city is different in its own way because every place has its own unique energies, but even so there are general and superficial cultural similarities that we can notice if we do a comparative study of a lot of big cities. By those standards, I’ve always got the sense that Los Angeles is weirdly insular, at least the Hollywood area. It seems to operate less like a huge world city and more exactly like a small town with the exact same traditional relationship with vocational trade that’s existed throughout modern western history. Nobody is in Hollywood if they don’t want to be in the film industry, and if you grew up there you know everyone. Hollywood is an old European small town that just so happens to dominate the media of the entire country, as well as that of a few other countries.

It’s no secret that the Star Trek team are massive old Hollywood fans. I think that’s sort of a prerequisite for living in southern California. When you get right down to it, they’re all tradesmen and craftsmen who have worked their way up through a system that’s basically vocational apprenticeship and they naturally want to pay tribute to their old masters. That’s the reason genre romps, pastiches and “Let’s Do” stories exist to begin with: Art is built on imitation anyway, and I would imagine that’s merely amplified and concentrated by living and working in a climate like southern California’s film industry. Genre fiction is no different and isn’t on some higher plane: In fact, one of my favourite ridiculous things about the generally ridiculous movie Species is how it’s this serious, provocative sci-fi sexual horror movie that also desperately wants to be a breathless tribute to 1940s hard-broiled LA Noir pulp fiction because it’s endearingly, stupidly, hopelessly in love with Los Angeles. It’s “the city of the future”, you know! You can do anything and be anyone in the City of Angels!

But I’ll have to come back to Sil and her joyride of carnage through every LA landmark that’s been in every movie ever another day (though her movie is in production by now and, because synchronicity is everything, the earthquake that interrupted production on “Profit and Loss” is an actual plot point in Species). The point of the matter is that Star Trek is far from immune to this sot of hyperlocalized psychogeographic make-out session, and we’ve seen this plenty of times before (Vasquez Rocks, anyone?). And so with “Profit and Loss”, we get Star Trek: Deep Space Nine bending over backwards to borderline remake Casablanca simply because Casablanca is a classic of Old Hollywood and because it can. This sort of giddy-yet-pointless genre romp seems to be a reoccuring Thing for Quark stories, considering “The Nagus” was basically this but for The Godfather instead.…

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Happy Birthday, Your Majesty

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…their sovereign’s dominant role is to inspect
Row after row of the state’s armed forces –
Broken down in training, reconfigured from scratch
And then programmed to kill on command.

The sovereign is crucial to the lubrication of Britain’s wars
By its gulling soldiers into dutifully dying;
Then, after paying homage to such victims of state carnage,
By its encouraging arms-trade profiteering.

Arms-makers and their customers are brought together
At Windsor Castle to be honored with fly-pasts –
Monarchy and military business being intimately connected:
The UK’s ‘Defense Industrial Base’ is a royal brand.

A landowning cabal with its heraldry denoting privilege
Still forms an elite network that stakes out the land,
And retains monarchy as its god to deceive those living here
Whose Common land they once stole and enclosed.

The monarchy’s militarism echoes a time when royalty wasn’t flouted –
When to criticize royalty was treason and when those threatening
The status quo could be seized, and their limbs tied to horses
Which took off in every direction as they were whipped.

On seeing royal victims torn to shreds while still alive,
Royal minions sliced their hearts into sections
Then dispatched them across the country for public display,
As a warning to anyone considering rebellion.

In the past, the brute power of the monarchy was this unrestrained
Whereas now it pretends to more decorum
By dressing in fancy costumes, and awarding itself unearned medals,
And laying wreaths to those dying in its name.

For its politicized charisma still yields a large body-count;
Lives are still culled by its ‘Queen and country’ spell;
Royalty routinely pays its dead subjects with a march-past
When they’re boxed up and returned to where they once lived.

Meanwhile royalty’s own patriotism bears scant inspection:
It being revealed in 1915, in World War One,
That when millions were dying in Flanders for King and Country,
The King himself was tobogganing in St Moritz.

He returned to set a record for shooting Sandringham pheasants
As he cut his annual swathe through its wildlife;
Similarly, in 1939, George VI determined that the war
Shouldn’t “interrupt the grouse season at Balmoral.”

The UK’s military-monarchy-complex is a cynical industry
For which the Queen was groomed by a General Browning
And, likewise, Prince William’s mentor has been Blair’s wartime apparatchik:
The UK’s former man in Washington, David Manning.

“It is Manning who is running the conflict with Iraq.”
Wrote John Kampfner, the author of ‘Blair’s Wars’.
Thus the heir to the heir is being initiated by a prime mover
In Britain’s centuries-long killing sprees.

While all the time royalty profits from arms, due to its Crown Agents
Who tend to its shares in Lockheed, makers of cluster bombs
And nurture bundles of the royal investments in BAE Systems –
In its Depleted Uranium shells and its landmines.

The latest landmines are designed to leap up out of the ground,
Triggered by children playing or walking nearby.
They’ll detonate in mid-air and they’ll sever limbs as bodies fall
While the shareholdings of the super-rich rise.…

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Drunken Marxist

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You were supposed to be getting Shabcast 18 this week… but it vanished into the ether, owing to a malicious and inexplicable failure of my recording software.  The Mailer Daemon collected it and conducted it to internet Hades.  It was great too.  I had Gene Mayes and (at last!) Jon Wolter in, and we chatted about Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, etc, in a podcast that was a lot sillier, funnier and more ribald than the subject matter really warranted.  But, as I say, it is lost forever, doomed to live on only in the memories of the three men who experienced it… which, in a way, makes it all the more precious.  One day, it will be the most sought of all lost Jack Graham-related media, and take on a near-mystical reputation, rather like London After Midnight, or Orson’s cut of Ambersons.  I actually remember very little about it, as I was somewhat drunk and we were recording in the wee small hours here in Britain, and I spent most of the discussion in a haze of fatigue and mild inebriation.  I seem to recall that we talked about the hip-hop musical Hamilton, which apparently at least one podcast listener is desperate to hear me talk about.  Well, that listener lost their one and only chance.  They’ll never hear what I said.  Not even the bit where the three of us imagined a hip-hop musical about Garibaldi, written by Umberto Eco, and I said I’d go to the theatre heavily armed and force the cast to perform for me at gunpoint.

So, as I say, this Thursday was supposed to be release day for the April Shabcast, which means I had no writing anywhere near ready.  Which means I had to either scrabble and really work hard, or fob you off with something I dashed off in another drunken haze the other night, and hope I get away with it. 

Guess which option I chose.

What follows is actually a revised and much-expanded version of something I wrote as a result of an online discussion I was having with Daniel Harper.  It is not a cogent argument.  It has become, to put it humblebraggingly, the outline of a groundwork of a personal theoretical position.  It is not meant to masquerade as an original and profound work of philosophy.  I am not an original thinker and I make no claim to be one.  I am not a philosopher and I make no claim to be one.  It is a semi-refinement of the outloud thoughts of a intoxicated man who, determined to embrace intersectional discourses while retaining the (to him) irreplaceably valuable core of Marxism, has been mulling this stuff over for a while and, even if he doesn’t fully realise this himself, needs someone tolerant to talk at.

Please feel entirely free to ignore everything below if Marxism does not interest you.  People interested in Marxism should, perhaps, feel even freer.

*

Classical Marxism has basically nothing specific to say about human diversity, sex, identity, gender, sex, stuff like that. …

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Comics Reviews (April 20th, 2016)

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James Bond: Vargr #6

This really fell apart for me in the denouement. It’s hard to be surprised by how many times Ellis did “and now for a long action sequence” in this book; it’s one of his preferred tricks, and the subject is suited to it. But as a conclusion to a six-issue arc an action-heavy ramp-up to a mournfully ambivalent conclusion is, to say the least, unsatisfying. Always a pleasure to watch Ellis at work, and he’s right to say that Jason Masters is visibly improving over the course of the series, but this is unquestionably a minor work.

Cry Havoc #4

Starting to have some trouble keeping everything straight here, though it’s firmly in “reread the first arc when it’s done” territory and not “annoyed at this” territory. Or perhaps just to obey the still-brilliant “for more information reread comic” edict and better parse out exactly what happens in Afghanistan this issue, as it all gets a bit odd and dependent on a firmer knowledge of how the supernatural is meant to work in this story than I have. Interesting, but definitely a comic in a lull for me.

Karnak #3

Ellis in full-out “my reading list, let me share it with you” mode, the basic perversity of Ellis being that this is generally preferable to Ellis writing action sequences. This time we have an issue based heavily on the work of Eugene Thacker (a significant figure in Neoreaction a Basilisk) and also on Karnak literally screaming at people until their heads explode. This is a ridiculous comic in all the best ways, and the new artist is a strong choice as well. …

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“Reoccurring dreams”: Eye of the Beholder

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It’s always an event when I return to a story that left such an indelible impression on me it literally shaped my own visions. And there are few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, or of anything, that are as deeply ingrained in my imagination as “Eye of the Beholder”.

I count up to the double digits, at most, the moments in media that were so primally formative they completely changed my life. Many of them are from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and at least five of them are from this season. We’ve seen two of them already and there’s another two to go, but “Eye of the Beholder” may well be the most momentous and personally meaningful. The degree to which the imagery and iconography of this episode have haunted me all my life, and haunted really is the only truly fitting term, is almost completely unparalleled. Why this episode stuck with me to the unbelievably powerful degree that it did, to the point rewatching it actually gave me chills due to how familiar it felt (even though, prior to this rewatch, I’d only seen it twice)…I have no explanation. Except for, perhaps, that it’s really damn excellent.

But it has, and watching it again was like reliving a dream from long, long ago buried deep within the recess of my psyche: I remembered, vividly and to the last detail, the nacelle control room that features prominently in the plot. The hallucinations of the psychic imprint that constantly replay themselves. the lingering single-take shots where the camera follows Deanna Troi as she pensively meanders through the Enterprise‘s corridors. And, above all else, the unforgettable image of Deanna standing on the landing gazing into the pulsing heart of the ship’s warp nacelle. I remember that the way I remember my first birthday, and the first house my family lived in when I was a young child. In fact, it literally was reliving a dream for me: After it was announced that TNN would start airing Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns, which would be the first time in seven years I’d have the chance to see the show again, I got so excited the show started to infiltrate my real, actual dreams. As the date approached, I distinctly remember having an incredibly lifelike dream where I was onboard the Enterprise myself. I was accompanied by Deanna Troi, dressed exactly the way she was in this episode, who took me on a tour of the whole ship so I could reacquaint myself.

One of our stops was the nacelle control room from “Eye of the Beholder”. And, just as I had been reminded once before on TNN, as I watched this inexplicably powerful episode for only the third time in my life, I couldn’t help but notice that room looked exactly the way I saw it in my dream. The only difference is that now I can tell it’s a stage set.…

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Neoreaction a Basilisk: Excerpt One

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In preparation for the May launch of our Kickstarter for it, we’re running excerpts of Neoreaction a Basilisk. This is from quite early in the book while I’m introducing my three main characters of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land.

And yet at every turn in Moldbug’s argument, Marxism seems to lurk, indeed, haunt the text. Every argument he makes about the Cathedral’s insidious suppression of the obviously preferable alternative has, to an even vaguely Marxist-familiar reader, an immediate counterpart pointing inexorably to the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is tempting to suggest that Moldbug is a failed Marxist in the sense that Jupiter is a failed star, its mass falling tantalizingly short of the tipping point whereby nuclear fusion begins. Over and over again, Moldbug asks questions much like those that Marx asked, and his answers begin with many of the same initial observations. But inevitably, a few steps in, he makes some ridiculously broad generalization or fails to consider some obvious alternative possibility, and the train of thought fizzles into characteristic idiocy.

The most obvious symptom of this is how rarely Moldbug actually takes a swing at Marx himself, despite the fact that he’s self-evidently the biggest single villain of his philosophical system. It’s not a pattern that’s quite noticeable on the paragraph-to-paragraph level; it’s just that when you do searches on his blog you discover that in the more than one million words he published as Mencius Moldbug he’s mentioned Marx a mere hundred-and-thirteen, and that’s including his uses of “Marxism” as a generic term of derision. And none of them constitute anything like an extended engagement with Marx’s thought. Sure, you can argue that this isn’t so much an oversight as a demonstration of contempt, but the fact remains – there’s a confrontation that’s obviously waiting to happen that Moldbug endlessly deferred. (Hitler, by comparison, makes four hundred and sixty-nine appearances.)

Indeed, at one point late in his blogging career he proclaimed (not for the first time) that he was finally going to offer the red pill in a compact form before dramatically unfurling the statement “America is a communist country.” He even reduces it to an acronym. “AIACC can be interpreted in countless ways,” he proclaims. “All of these interpretations – unless concocted as an intentional, obviously idiotic strawman – are absolutely true. Sometimes they are obviously true, sometimes surprisingly true. They are always true. Because America is a communist country.” And then, as you’d expect, he begins to go through various interpretations to show how they are either obviously idiotic or true. And yet there is one interpretation that, astonishingly, never seems to occur to him: “America is in some meaningful fashion run according to the philosophical principles of Karl Marx.” In fact, literally none of the hundred-and-thirteen uses of the word Marx appear in the essay in question, “Technology, communism, and the Brown Scare.”

Moldbug posted five more times on Unqualified Reservations after that essay, and then retired the pen name.…

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Silhouettes and Shadows Watch the Revolution (Mega Man X)

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Yes, that’s really how it ends; the most secret of histories is always is the real one. That gnostic gap between what we know happened and what happened. The facts are these: Mega Man X, released in the US just past Christmas at the start of 1994, is the beginning of Capcom’s second line of Mega Man games. There are scads of these now, the franchise famously diluted past all sanity. But at the time, this was the only one. It wasn’t even a “line” at the time; just one game, a grimdark future timeline of the proper series (which was about to put out the baleful Mega Man 6 for the NES, 1994 being the last year of new releases for that console, by now redesigned as a slimline top-loader to resemble its successor, with a key bit of circuitry accidentally removed so that there’s a constant vertical striping effect on games).

The existence of such a game is in hindsight inevitable. Indeed, by 1994 it was in foresight inevitable – franchises in multiple media were doing self-consciously serious installments. In fact, it’s in some ways surprising that Mega Man is the first major video game series we’ve seen pull this trick. But the surprise is only that it got there first, not that it got there. The original NES series was clearly on the road to diminishing returns; a simple SNES iteration of its cartoon robot mayhem would visibly be out of step with the trends. With tastes veering towards Nemesis, the way to update the franchise would have seemed self-evident to literally anyone.  

In terms of master narratives, of course, this fits perfectly into the unpleasant and ugly turn that we’ve been tracking all project. The NES Mega Mans were charming family games. Mega Man X is unmistakably for boys. Less exclusionary than, say, Mortal Kombat, yes, but it’s still clearly got distinct opinions about who’s going to be playing, and its status as a revision of something that previously had a wider audience in mind makes it hard not to wince a bit at that.

But from my perspective there’s more to it – Mega Man X is the first game to exist on the wrong side of my Super Nintendo days.Simply put, there’s basically nothing from 1994 on that I actually played when it came out. A couple of games flitted at the edge of my awareness – both Mega Man X and Donkey Kong Country were definitely things I played other people’s copies of, along with, no doubt, a few others. And I was certainly aware that things like Super Metroid existed. But so far as I can tell I basically didn’t buy any Super Nintendo games after 1993, and indeed sold at least some of them off at recess for $15 a pop in the fall of that year.

But what replaced them? Again, I’m forced to reconstruct here, or rather, fail to. I had a PC gaming period in the late 90s, but there’s at least a year’s gap here.…

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“Goddess Remembered”: Playing God

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Attest to your goddess. In this form, she is the energy of life and creation embodied. She waits for you to realise that which you have always known about yourself.

Normally I write these at night. I’m a bit of a night owl by habit already, and I find that, when doing creative work, I perform far better at night. I’m much more focused during the evenings, whereas I tend to get distracted far too easily by the business and hustle-and-bustle of diurnal life. Today though I am breaking habit and writing this during the morning, but it seems to feel right. I am, after all, also very much a day person: Sunshine is a vital and fundamental part of my existence and I need to be around it and in it constantly or I get depressed. I am of the Sun and the Moon equally, which makes things annoying when I need to find time to sleep. I could say the same thing about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine-This is a show that uses a great deal of dark cinematography and colouring, and it’s of course a space-based science fiction series. And yet a sizable majority of my memories of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine evoke feelings of openness, brightness and warmth because, as I’ll discuss in further detail in following chapters, much of my experience of it came through comic books and magazines, including most, if not all, of this season. I have extremely vivid place-memories of reading about this year’s stories in such magazines beneath the warm and welcoming summer sunshine.

It’s news to nobody that Jadzia Dax is my favourite character on this show. It is, in fact, typically a three-way race between her, Tasha Yar and Geordi La Forge for my favourite character in all of Star Trek. But of those three, it’s no contest who has the most consistent and unforgettable personality. Jadzia Dax is a goddess-woman, a divine avatar who exists in the space between worlds beckoning us to join her. And this is her definitive story. Jadzia is “Playing God”, that is, playing at being a god, but not in the expected Robert Oppenheimer sense. Though diegetically mortal, Jadzia Dax is dressed in the trappings of the divine, her initiate Arjin also her prospective pupil and the play’s stand-in for us. Jadzia plays a goddess of fertility, love and lust: Wild and vivacious, she tries to make Arjin get over himself in order to make peace with and accept himself. Because only someone conscious and mature enough to do that will be able to accept cosmic love and light into themselves. It’s in that moment of ego death where we find clarity and gain the power to channel our own truest selves. True confidence and identity lies in the moment where we shed the anxieties and self-consciousness of youth while retaining its vive.…

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Saturday Waffling (April 16th, 2016)

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The Super Nintendo Project is back on Monday! I’m excited at least. The first two entries are really fun, and I’ve high hopes for the rest of the run. It’ll be going through the 1994 games, which I think there are five of total (the list’s on the other computer), then probably doing another Cultural Marxism or two, then back to Brief Treatise. 

Anyway, the first two entries are posted to Patreon. Which is about $2 a week away from me reviewing “The Red Woman” next weekend, incidentally. So, you know, never a better time to start backing and all.

Also this week we’ll have the first of five excerpts from Neoreaction a Basilisk that we’ll be running to promote its upcoming Kickstarter. You can seem, um, some of the response it’s been getting over at Nick Land’s blog. (The Tweets aren’t his, to be clear.) And I pop into the comments on that one too. And soon I’ll be recording the first of a couple of podcasts I’ll be doing on the book, talking with a couple people who have gotten to review the manuscript. 

Now I just need to finish the backmatter essay for this Last War in Albion chapter and see if I can get Chapter Six to actually follow the week after Chapter Five ends.

So, what’re your bets on how the Hugos will turn out?…

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Mind That Until Now Thought of Continuity, Our Torch, Then Saw It Flicker (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Thirty-One: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The War was revealed to have certain similarities to the life and work of William Blake, whose mythology was built around the dualism of the creator Los and the tyrannical geometer Urizen.

Figure 954: Los recoils in horror from his work as Urizen’s body assembles itself. (By William Blake, from The Book of Urizen Copy G, written 1794, printed 1818)

As Blake’s dualism suggests, his instinctive mode of resistance to Urizen, both within himself and without, was creation. Specifically, in Blake’s case, the creation of art. As The Book of Urizen itself makes clear by depicting Los’s failure, the point is not that this resistance will “stop” or “defeat” Urizen, or indeed any other figure one wishes to inveigh against. Indeed, the point is often simply a matter of need or compulsion. Much like Watchmen is simply not a thing one writes if one is capable of avoiding doing so, the ornately realized illuminated prophecies that Blake creates – especially the late career ones such as the fifty page Milton a Poem and the hundred page Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion – are not works that people create incidentally. In many ways, this is far more true for Blake than for Moore. Moore, after all, may not have been capable of stopping himself from writing Watchmen, but equally, he wouldn’t have written it were it not for the existence of a major comics company that wanted him to do a prestige project. It was a lucrative gig and, for all Moore’s eventual misgivings about it, a savvily chosen project. Blake’s work, on the other hand, was ostentatiously non-commercial. The illuminated prophecies used printing techniques of his own devising, not fitting into any existing market or practice. After an early flirtation with the relatively sellable notion of a children’s book of poetry in the form of Songs of Innocence, his illuminated work moved quickly and decisively towards the obscure and difficult. His insistence that each copy must be unique and of his hand severely limited sales. In short, Blake’s illuminated prophecies eschewed essentially every form of commercial sense known to man.

This is not to say that Blake lacked all business sense. He supplemented his work as a prophet with more conventional commercial illustration, thus generally managing to make ends meet, although it was at times a bitterly narrow thing. But Blake often resented this work, and the degree to which he was constantly haunted by paranoia about his friends and associates made things harder for him. As a result, he could turn on his employers, as he did with his patron at the start of the 19th century, William Hayley, who gave him lodging in a cottage at Felpham and a series of portrait commissions that kept him busy and well paid. He found the work deadening, however, eventually coming to describe Hayley as “an enemy of my spiritual life” and moving back to London, where he quickly started work on Milton and Jerusalem.…

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