Eruditorum Press

Sneakily taking the hinges off the doors of perception

“The one I love”: Rules of Acquisition

, 5

Along with “The Homecoming” /“The Circle”/“The Siege”, “Rules of Acquisition” is probably the first Star Trek: Deep Space Nine story that became genuinely iconic to me.

As I’ve mentioned before, though I was familiar with the show before this run of episodes, my familiarity basically consisted of dissociated images-The water bath clone scene from “A Man Alone”. Some promotional art of a runabout. The offhand conversation in the shadows under a staircase somewhere. That elusive scene of Dax on the parallel bars that I’m half convinced I completely imagined. Vivid as it was, my memory of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in its first season was fragmented, consisting only of brief flashes of lucidity. This is very much a consequence of the way I watched the show at that point: I could only ever catch the odd glimpse of it while flipping through the channels, because my local affiliates stupidly ran Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine opposite one another, and I wasn’t going to chance missing my favourite show to take a gamble on its younger sibling.

(This was not an uncommon happenstance, by the way: I am by no means the only one who made that decision when faced with similar circumstances, and that’s a major contributing factor to the failure of every post-Next Generation Star Trek series.)

So while my experience with Star Trek: The Next Generation was similar, I was always better researched on that show and it didn’t take me long to connect my sensory memories with actual plots and episode titles: I had enough reference guides, VHS tape rentals were not unheard of and eventually the reruns became commonplace enough I gained a working knowledge of that show rather quickly. But Star Trek: Deep Space Nine I pretty much literally never got to watch again for another ten years: Between the initial run of the first and second seasons and the DVD release in 2003, I had no material critical experience with actually physically watching the series whatsoever. As a result, there were only a handful of episodes of this show I was ever intimately familiar with at the time. And by no coincidence, these were the ones “novelized” in the issues of Starlog’s Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine that I owned, specifically issues five and seven.

The magazine itself is getting its own chapter in this book because it absolutely defined my exposure to and formative impressions of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s world so I have to keep myself from going into too much detail about it here. The reason it’s relevant to tonight’s episode is that “Rules of Acquisition” was the first episode covered in issue seven, which happened to feature our very own Jadzia Dax as its cover girl. This kind of sets the stage, because while I know “Rules of Acquisition” is kind of a sequel to last year’s “The Nagus”, as far as I’m concerned this one is all about Jadzia Dax: This is the story where the Jadzia Dax I know and love finally emerges fully formed and in bloom.…

Continue Reading

Lost Exegesis (The Moth) — Part 2

, , , , , , , , 4

You can find Part 1 of the essay here. Usually, the essay is spoiler-free until we get to the “Looking Glass” portion after an intertextual intermission. In this case our selected cultural artifacts are all much more interesting in how they function prophetically, so here’s your advance notice of spoilers from here on out.

Intermission

Saint Jack

SAWYER: Ah, damn. Didn’t I tell you? Word from the valley is Saint Jack got himself buried in a cave-in.

Let’s start with Saint Jack, a movie directed by Peter Bogdanovich based on the novel by Paul Theroux. Now, Paul Theroux, we should point out, isn’t just a novelist, he’s also justly known as a great travel writer, thanks to his travels to Africa, Singapore, and Japan. He’s earned the enmity of several governments, largely for bringing to light certain aspects of their countries which they’d preferred to keep covered up.

That said, I think the movie is much more celebrated than the book, so that’s what we’ll be attending to. It was shot in several months entirely on location in Singapore, under the pretense of being a standard rom-com (“Jack of Hearts”) as opposed to an adaptation of Saint Jack. After it was released, the movie was banned in Singapore for decades. So it’s got that, at least, in common with the book.

(What is it about “covering” things up? Come to think of it, Jack covers for Charlie at the end of The Moth, lying that Charlie has the flu to make his withdrawal more socially acceptable.)

The film is possibly some of the best work by Bogdanovich and lead actor Ben Gazzara, who plays the titular Jack Flowers. Jack Flowers is an American expat living in Singapore in the 70s. He makes his living by running a brothel, which also supports his drinking. Jack makes it work because he does not judge the people in his life. It’s not like he’s in a position to without being a hypocrite, but then we see all kinds of hypocrites in Jack’s line of work. He doesn’t use force or intimidation or privilege to navigate the world – no, he looks at everyone as deserving of his attention and respect and warmth, and even when he’s proven wrong he does little more than walk away. So Jack is a “saint” in this rather spiritual respect, in how he manages his relationships, not in terms of his “sins.” He’s a saint, but he’s no saint.

The movie meanders for quite a while, basically a series of vignettes featuring Jack interacting with his clients, workers, and other people, but it’s got a couple of pivotal moments. The first is when the local mob takes down Jack’s place of business, wrecking his establishment and dispersing his people, while marking his arms with tattoos comprised of various epithets and obscenities. This is actually about the halfway point of the movie. Jack goes to another tattooist to put down more tattoos that effectively integrate the Asian hieroglyphs into pictures of flowers.…

Continue Reading

A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 3.06: The Climb

8

Go Up, Up The Magical Ice Wall Ahead

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister, the Hand of the King Tywin Lannister

Lions of Harrenhal: Jaime Lannister

Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow

Direwolves of Riverrun: Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark

Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish

The Burning Heart, Melisandre

The Kraken, Theon Greyjoy

The Direwolf, Bran Stark

Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly

The Stag, Gendry

Stags of King’s Landing: King Joffrey Baratheon

Bows of the Wall: Ygritte

Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys

Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae

Winterfell is abandoned and in ruins, Yunkai is empty.

The episode is divided into parts. The first runs three minutes and is set north of the Wall. The opening image is of the fire Sam is ineptly building.

The second runs three minutes and is set in the North. The transition is by hard cut, from a zoomed out shot of Sam and Gilly around their fire to Meera skinning a rabbit.

The third runs four minutes and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by dialogue, from Joren talking about his vision of Jon Snow to Jon.

The fourth runs eight minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Arya Stark.

The fifth runs two minutes and is set at the Wall. The transition is by family, from Arya Stark to Jon Snow.

The sixth runs six minutes and is set at the Dreadfort, though this is not disclosed. The transition is by hard cut, from the climbing party to Ramsey blowing a horn.

The seventh runs four minutes and is set in Riverrun. The transition is by dialogue, from Theon trying to guess which of Robb’s bannermen Ramsey is to Robb.

The eighth runs two minutes and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by dialogue, from Catelyn to Brienne talking about her.

The ninth runs four minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Jaime to Tywin Lannister.

The tenth runs three minutes and is set at the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from a broken pen to climbing.

The eleventh runs nine minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Sansa Stark. The second section is four minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Sansa to Littlefinger and Varys talking about her fate.

The twelfth part runs three minutes and is set on the Wall. The transition is by dialogue, from Littlefinger talking about chaos as a ladder one climbs to Jon reaching the top of the Wall. The final image is of Ygritte completing a Full Web with Jon Snow after seeing the Seven Kingdoms for the first time in her life.

Analysis

Let’s start with the official short description of the episode, if only because we’ve never done that.…

Continue Reading

“…which opens to that primeval cosmic night”: Dark Page

, 3

Memory Alpha is *really* letting me down in terms of screenshots.

The first thing that struck me upon rewatching “Dark Page” was the Cairn. In prehistoric times, a “cairn” was an artificial stone pile structure used as a trail marker or burial mound, or in ceremonial astronomical rites. Some cairns, especially in German, Dutch and Inuit territories, were considered totemic figures: They were known as “imitation people” or “stone men”, and considered effigies and representation of human forms.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Cairn are a telepathic species who communicate purely on the level of images. It’s an elegant and holistic form of communication that engenders a sense of cosmic oneness, and the show understands the real ramifications of this. The Cairn find verbal communication awkward and limiting, and the show makes no attempt to refute this assertion because it’s true. Language is built around artifice, an inaccurate facade constructed to represent and stand in for the ineffable whose only hope for success is to convey a general idea for a concept through simile, metaphor and mimicry. The true nature of reality is that great cosmic interconnectedness of all things, and the only way we can truly perceive and understand this is at a heightened state of conscious awareness: The realm of images, emotions and memory.

It makes perfect sense that this would be something Star Trek: The Next Generation would instinctively know, at least at a subconscious level. Art exists in the liminal space between language and the eternal, and is meant to serve as the modern shamanic pathway from one to the other. Thematically, Star Trek: The Next Generation was always destined to reach this point eventually because the realisation is ultimately little more than empathy writ universal: The macro- and microcosm both of the divine cosmology. But Star Trek: The Next Generation has also always been an artistic evocation whose true self lies within aesthetics-The utopian dream lives in the image of the navigator and is evoked through the picture of a brilliant blue voyaging starship adrift in deep space. It’s not the show and never has been the show: It’s the idea of the show and what the show inspires within us through the ideals it signifies. 

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

I relate to the Cairn. I relate to the hopeless struggle of trying to express yourself with words you don’t have, visions you don’t know how to communicate and images whose depths you may or may not even fully understand. That is, ultimately, what the story of this phase of Vaka Rangi is: You can never truly know what Star Trek: The Next Generation means to me and I can never truly explain it. And some days I don’t even feel like trying. Star Trek: The Next Generation doesn’t even fully understand itself, and it’s through the Cairn it’s finally openly admitting this to us. The show is a performative simulacrum of its true self and its true potential and always has been.…

Continue Reading

A Post On A Topic Selected By My Patreon Backers

11

I found myself weirdly fascinated in hindsight by the early reviews of Blackstar that praised it while professing a certain bafflement at the meaning of it all, such as a Guardian review of the title video suggesting that it might “just [be] 10 minutes of standard-issue pop promo surrealism.” And then, not long after, Bowie’s death emphatically answered most interpretive questions about the album. It is not merely that the early critics were wrong – the early claim that “Blackstar” itself was about ISIS, for instance, is flagrantly wrong, but not nearly as perversely funny. Rather it is that this particular claim is an almost precise opposite of the truth. Critics claimed the album was a lot of cryptic and meaningless pomposity. In reality, there was a master interpretive key that unlocked almost the entire thing – a simple fact on the level of “it’s about X” that made sense of the entire project.

German sentence structure allows relative freedom of word order; the result are sentences that build towards a climactic revelation as to their meaning, clauses and words carefully piled up in anticipation of an ending that will at last illuminate their purpose. Even in English, writing naturally points towards endings. There’s no such thing as a nonlinear narrative. It always points forward. As Roger Ebert puts it, “Here is how life is supposed to work. We come out of ourselves and unfold into the world. We try to realize our desires. We fold back into ourselves, and then we die.”

Implicit is the existence of a high concept; a grand idea. Everyone is supposed to have a magnum opus. With it, a theme; a clear message to communicate; a subject. But we do not simply communicate the message. We cannot. Instead we half-communicate it, sketching it, alluding to it, gesturing towards it. It is less meaning than direction. We say part of what we mean, and let it stand in for the whole. All writing is foreshadowing.

And nothing is more foreshadowed than death. Strange figures follow us and watch, judging us, recording our deeds and misdeeds, drafting an eventual critical judgment. Dread signs and ominous portents abound. We know, instinctively, constantly, that something is going wrong; some horror is slowly unfolding. It must be, for the alternative – to be directionless – would surely be worse. As Thomas Ligotti puts it, “being somebody is rough, but being nobody is out of the question.”

Ligotti, of course, is an apropos writer to discuss, and not just because he’s ruthlessly trendy. His stories work upon an associative logic, more lyrical than narrative. Things are not said, but alluded to. Niggling illnesses and lost time. In particular, recurrent images of puppets. The faces that look at us are animated by other things. Things we cannot see or know. We recoil in horror.

“Dream logic” is the cliche descriptor of this sort of this. It’s not wrong as such; the unstable identities and shifting locations of dreams to resemble what we’re talking about.…

Continue Reading

“Love is Zero G”: Melora

, 2

Both this episode and its titular character are concepts that hail from the early days of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s pre-production. Melora Pazlar was originally going to be Deep Space 9‘s permanent science officer, but she was replaced by Jadzia Dax in part, ironically, for the very reason she has a tough time adjusting to the station in this story: The low-gravity environments she was adapted to proved too time-consuming and expensive to convey on a regular basis. The station, in a very real sense, could not accommodate her; a theme that underwrites this entire episode.

As an episode of television exploring the topical message it takes on, “Melora” is very good. It was put in the best possible hands: Writer Evan Carlos Somers, who served as a Guild intern during Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s first season before getting a shot at pitching his own stories in the second, was a wheelchair user himself and pushed for the chance to build a story around a the abandoned concept of a Starfleet officer from a low-gravity planet who had to use a wheelchair to navigate Earth-like environments. Somers also wrote “Melora” as a direct rebuttal of the appalling ableist issues of “Ethics” from the fifth season by showcasing a disabled person who is proud and accepting of who she is and the perspective she brings and doesn’t want to change to suit anyone else.

Understandably given his own perspective, Somers’ treatment is as laudable a depiction of mobility issues as we could expect. This episode always reminds me of a conversation that transpired during one of my seminars while I was still in the university system doing academic work in social studies of knowledge: One of my colleagues at the time was a disability advocate, and during a panel one day the question was posed to him whether “disability” was an appropriate term to use in his work. He felt that, from his experience, both “disabled” and “differently abled” were equally valid terms because while the people in question most certainly were not ashamed by their positionalities and in fact championed them, the infrastructure of modern society is not built with their needs in mind, and they are thus disenfranchised and excluded by it. So in a sense while they are merely “differently abled”, the material realities of modernity also leave them “disabled”. I think this a paradox that Somers captures incredibly elegantly in “Melora”.

Unfortunately, and by his own admission, Somers didn’t give himself enough time to groom his script with the level of care and attention that it really deserved, necessitating a successive series of rewrites by Steven Baum, James Crocker and Michael Piller. Though Melora herself is predictably handled well in Somers’ original draft, the other characters aren’t so lucky. From what I’ve seen of it, Melora actually comes across as a bit of a Mary Sue in it and ends up lecturing the rest of the crew, who seem to have collectively lapsed to a level of ignorance and thoughtlessness about her condition they really ought not to have.…

Continue Reading

Minnesota Biblical

, , , 12

Spoilers. And, more broadly, the assumption you’ve seen it.

 

In ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, Borges lists texts and writers which, as the title suggests, he sees as foreshadowing Kafka. It is strange that he omits Dickens, whom Kafka admired, and whose Circumlocution Office – in Little Dorrit – is surely a direct influence. The Coen Brothers could do justice to the Circumlocution Office, as indeed they could do justice to the absurd bureaucracy which tyrannizes Joseph K in The Trial, the bizarre events and grotesque characters encountered by young Karl Roßmann in Amerika, and the rural Zeno’s Paradox experienced by K. in The Castle (Zeno’s Paradox is one of the precursors Borges adumbrates). Indeed, in A Serious Man (2009), the Coens seem to take some affectual and stylistic cues from Kafka.

Borges also remarks:

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem “Fears and Scruples” by Browning foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics’ vocabulary, the word “precursor” is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

In the same way, the existence of many texts, including but far from limited to A Serious Man, has created Kafka as one of their precursors.

Most especially, perhaps, there is the scene between the protagonist of the movie, Larry Gopnik, and the father of one of his college students. Larry has failed Clive Park because he thought all he had to do to pass Larry’s Physics paper was recite the story about the cat. (You know the cat I mean.) Larry pointed out that he needed to understand the math too. He needed to understand the meaning of the story, rather than just the story. Because the story is an illustration of a paradox Schrodinger is identifying in quantum physics. The top layer of the story – about the box and the potential feline tragedy – is not the point, at least not in a test. It is the ability to grasp the maths that is being evaluated, not the ability to remember the illustrative metaphor. Clive’s father visits Larry after Larry rejects a bribe that Clive offered him and then steadfastly refused having offered. Clive’s father denies that a bribe was offered and threatens to sue Larry for defamation. He then claims Larry accepted the bribe and threatens to expose him. Larry points out that this means he is acknowledging that a bribe was offered, which Clive’s father denies and again calls defamation.…

Continue Reading

Comics Reviews (February 24th, 2016)

4

Oof. Rough week.

All-New All-Different Avengers #6

This has been a shocking disappointment of a book through and through, and does not improve with this issue, which consists of obvious plot beats, banal pop culture references, and relatively minimal characterization. I honestly had no idea it was possible to write Kamala Khan so dully. Dropping it for Assault on Pleasant Hill, and I think the odds of my picking it up again after are basically nil.

Digital code: FCMLM0YTC6RW

Chew #55

Oh, well, they didn’t fridge the character last issue. That’s nice I suppose. Past that, we’re in that “quiet issues before the end” lull that seemingly every creator-owned sixty issue series has to do, and it’s as dull as that usually is on a book that I’m just riding out because I’ve bought, well, fifty-five issues of it now and am not going to stop this close to the end. Still, it’s better than late Fables.

Saga #34 

I just… don’t care. There is nothing in this entire issue that I care about. No, that’s not quite true. There are sparks – little flashes here and there that remind one why this is such a beloved book. The interactions with Hazel’s teacher are genuinely good. The little seal guy is charming. The questions in the survey at the end are funny. Fiona Staples remains one of the best artists in the history of the medium. But I have to admit, I’m pretty on board with the growing Vaughan backlash that argues that he can’t structure an ongoing book and that his plots all feel the same. In any case, I’m done here.

Black Magick #5

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the week, or indeed of recent comics. Greg Rucka has always, for my money, been a little dicey on magic/horror (the Crime Bible stuff was always the weakest link of his Question/Batwoman stuff, and Veil was an almost complete misfire), and unfortunately that weakness has consistently overwhelmed his strength at police procedural stuff in this book. At the end of the first arc it’s impossible for me to find anything to invest in. The main character is a cipher, the supporting cast is indistinguished, everyone’s motivations are played too close to the chest, the larger threat is undefined. Does virtually nothing a first arc should. Tragic to see such a good team produce something this weak.

Karnak #2

I’m not a huge fan of the Warren Ellis “one long fight scene” issue, which is at this point a formulaic Ellis thing that appears in multiple books. This isn’t quite that, but it has eleven wordless pages, including seven pages of Karnak punching things silently at the outset. Which is fine – you know Ellis is going to throw one of these in. Zaffino kills with it, in a fitting finish to his brief time on the book. It’s just a rough way to come back after a three month delay to the book. Definitely something designed to work in an actually monthly comic.…

Continue Reading

“The register of machined-being belongs to the milieu of dream logic”: Phantasms

, 6

Warning: Star Trek: The Next Generation is going to resist you.

An alarm sounds. Dare you answer? 
Hello, Sil. 
“Do you ever have nightmares?” 
… 
“I have them. I think they tell me who I am.” 

PLEASE HOLD. YOUR CALL IS BEING TRANSFERRED. 

Do you think Star Trek: The Next Generation is afraid of something? This is my diagnosis: A show haunted by the spectre of technocracy. Data was created as the ideal technoscientific glorified body: A sublime machine Vitruvian Man, a posthuman figure with no humanity. And this is what Data fears might be the sum total of his existence: An autocratic vision of humanity’s utopian future. Data fears reductiveness, because he fears reductiveness is built into his being. There is not that large of a gap between Data and Lore (“Descent”), and Data’s programmatic logic and rationalism does not by definition make him a progressive figure (“Gambit”). 
Arch-rationality seeks to purge itself of the marginal waste products that do not fit into its master narrative. Barbarians at the gates of Rome would tear the Enterprise down bit by bit, othered monsters who take the form of working class labourers. But the biggest threat of all is Deanna Troi, the scientist of the arcane: Female, feminine and tainted by the forbidden knowledge of the so-called “soft” sciences, she is the Eve figure upon who is projected the insecurities of the rational, patriarchal world. Rationality is gendered at its core, as is must be because rationality gets to define who is and isn’t “us”, and thus who is and isn’t deserving of a voice. And the fundamental other from the dawn of civilization is woman and the feminine. 
Data is afraid because he fears this part of himself. 
“There are no longer any haunted houses, but there are haunted beings”. That’s what Anne Dufourmantelle once said. She didn’t say it to me, but I overheard her say it in conversation with somebody else. Data is haunted by the ghosts of his past, which is his heritage. He may not like what he might hear if they call him. 

PLEASE HOLD. YOUR CALL IS BEING TRANSFERRED.

0.0.1 “You are watching me. I am talking, and you are listening” 

Technology is the praxis by which fiction is reifyed. All technology is fiction because all technology begins as an idea, and ideas exist within the imaginal realm. A book gives a fiction material form by conveying a simulacrum of ideas through the technology of printing and bound organic tree matter.
…

Continue Reading

Lost Exegesis (The Moth) — Part 1

, , , , 2

The moth is the obvious symbol of this story, so let’s start there. Both moths and butterflies are of the same family, Lepidoptera. The species, like many insects, goes through several developmental stages, resulting in complete metamorphosis. After an egg is laid, a larva or caterpillar emerges, which will shed its skin several times as it grows. Eventually it enters a pupa or chrysalis stage, cocooned and stewing in its own juices, and dissolving almost utterly. The imago or adult creature emerges, with wings and antennae, ready to reproduce and begin the cycle anew.

Locke is right: butterflies, not moths, get all the attention. Mythologically, for example, the butterfly is symbolic of Psyche (“psyche” is also a word that means “breath” and “soul”), a beautiful mortal woman who becomes a goddess. In this myth, Psyche is taken by Eros into Paradise, with only one rule to abide: She dare not see his face. Unable to resist, she lights a flame at their bedside one night, and is so taken by the beauty of her lover that she spills a drop of hot oil on him. He wakens, sadly, and asks why? She answers, “I had to know.” Psyche awakens and Paradise is gone.

Disconsolate, Psyche makes for a great river to end her misery, but she hears Pan playing his flute, and takes his counsel. She makes for the temple of Venus and dedicates herself to the Goddess, for her only hope of ever seeing Eros again is to become a goddess herself. She is set to impossible tasks, which she impossibly completes – sorting seeds from pebbles, procuring golden fleece, and retrieving water from the source of the River Styx. Her final task is to acquire the beauty cream of the goddess of the Underworld, Persephone. She returns with the beauty cream, but keeps it for herself rather than turning it over to Venus. Psyche opens the cream, and one deadly vapor emerges, ending Psyche’s life. The gods decree that she has succeeded by claiming her own power, and Psyche becomes a goddess and weds Eros.

The journey here is one of ego-death. The divine pours through when the ego dies, when it has finally let go. As such, the family Lepidoptera makes for wonderfully apt symbolism. Of course, Charlie isn’t a butterfly, he’s a moth, so he’s not as pretty, but the journey is nonetheless the same.

 

Charlie’s Heroic Journey: The Call to Adventure

The Heroic Journey follows a basic structure – hearing the Call to Adventure, the Hero ventures off to the Special Place to secure a Boon for the Ordinary World, a return that requires the development of a kind of Mastery through which the Freedom to Live is earned. As much as is made of the structure, however, this is largely beside the point. The structure simply allows the myriad of each journey’s particular details to be read metaphorically as a spiritual process of ego-death – and, subsequently, to position the spiritual process of ego-death in the material conditions of our ordinary lives.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 127 128 129 130 ›»