Eruditorum Press

They’ll all look up and shout “Save us!” And we’ll look down and whisper “Back us on Patreon.”

The Other Side of American Ritual

7

So, a short while back I discussed the mainstream American ritual cycle, and it was so much fun I thought I’d do it again, but from the other side of the looking glass. Because there are many other rituals available to us that are not a part of the mainstream, and which are frankly much more interesting than the ritual most people are talking about this year, namely New Year’s Resolutions.

But since we’re here, let’s use that as a template for unpacking some of the more interesting implications of “ritual” in of itself. In the last essay I quoted my favorite academic definition for ritual, “the more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances mostly not encoded by the performers.” And I certainly think a New Year’s Resolution fits into that. The timing of the Resolution is pretty invariant, coming on the coattails of a the latest Gregorian calendar. The Resolution itself is a formal utterance, that of a pledge. The curious part is the “not encoded by the performers” bit, because at first glance it seems the Resolution is entirely encoded by one’s choice for what to put into that particular box.

Which is where the “mostly” comes from. I, for example, have resolved to exercise regularly, one of the most common resolutions. But even if I’d come up with something less banal, say, to start a graffiti campaign against the local Chamber of Commerce, or to kill the next billionaire I meet, there are still “codes” around the New Year’s Resolution in particular that do not apply to ordinary “resolutions” made in the middle of summer. For one thing, we usually don’t go around asking people if they’ve recently made any resolutions; no, the timing of the ritual allows it to be social, catching people up in it even if they’re not making a resolution. Secondly, there’s an expectation that New Year’s Resolutions will largely fail.

And this is actually a rather strange entailment to a ritual, an expectation of failure. We don’t usually see that in ritual activity. Usually ritual participants expect some kind of success, which is why they even bother to ritualize in the first place. But I would argue that New Year’s Resolutions aren’t meant as resolutions per se. Sure, sometimes they work. And yet we really don’t expect people to keep these “promises.” That’s because, in my view, a New Year’s Resolution isn’t a promise… it’s a confession. It’s an admission of failure, either in one’s self, or the world around us. And that, I think, is the encoding inherent to the New Year’s Resolution that the performers really can’t change, no matter what resolution is offered.

 

Dr. Martin Luther King Day

So, one of the first “holidays” in the American calendar is Martin Luther King Day. This is relatively new, coming into being just 30 years ago as a federal holiday, which means a day off work for certain federal employees. As of today, only about a third of Americans now get the day off.…

Continue Reading

Cultural Marxism 2: The Player of Games

10

With The Player of Games, Banks’s series immediately becomes the legend of science fiction that it is. Simply put, it’s one of the most compelling premises in science fiction, on par with A Canticle for Leibowitz or The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: a post-scarcity utopia that conducts warfare via a board game.

Central to the idea of the Culture, and indeed to any self-respecting utopia is an abundance of leisure time. Or, put more succinctly, it’s inherently about play. The game, meanwhile, is naturally about war – a model of combat. The first time we looked at the Culture it was from the unusual perspective of them at war in the traditional sense. Now, in a novel explicitly set centuries after that, we get a novel in which they overthrow the Empire of Azad, which is bad for more or less the exact same reasons the Idirans were, except they do it playfully, on their own terms.

The key element in making this work is the protagonist, Jernau Gergeh, the eponymous gameplayer afflicted by that most beautiful of character motivations, boredom. He has played all the good games there are and mastered them all; only a handful of people in the world have any chance at beating him, and only in a handful of games at that. He is, simply put, a damn fine character. This is not because he is long on interiority or complexity; in fact he’s a tremendously simple and predictable character – an excuse for competence porn wrapped in a motivation that’s as sympathetic as it is disreputable. But he’s a tremendously effective lens for this sort of reenactment of the Culture/Idrian war, and fun to spend time with.

Another way of putting this is that Banks has efficiently figured out how to write a novel that’s mostly the good bits of Consider Phlebas, which is to say the more philosophical monologues, while leaving behind most of the pulp structuring that made that book drag in numerous places. For huge swaths of its page-count, The Player of Games is about people playing board games. Moreover, playing fictional board games that don’t actually have their rules explained on any level. And it’s scintillating.

It’s probably worth looking at how this improbable thing happens. Let’s take a representative passage from early in the book, when Gurgeh plays a game called Stricken against a young prodigy who turns out to be unexpectedly good. This is, notably, not from the part of the book where games have been built up to vehicles capable of representing fundamental cultural values – it just represents how Banks opts to write about fictional games.

“She made the right guesses about Gurgeh’s pieces, capturing several strong beads in weak disguises; she anticipated moves he’d sealed in the Foretell shells; and she ignored the tempting traps and feints he set up.

Somehow he struggled on, coming up with desperate, improvised defences against each attack, but it was all too seat-of-the-pants, too extemporary and tactical.

…

Continue Reading

“This is our world, the world of the Information age”: In the Hands of the Prophets

, 4

In his Network Society trilogy, sociologist and Neo-Marxist Manuel Castells argues (among a great deal other things) that the titular concept, referring to the sociocultural, political and socioeconomic restructuring of the world and its methods of production through globalization and information technology, will inevitably, and perhaps ironically, lead to an increase in fundamentalism and violence beget from it. The argument goes that, far from opening up their eyes to a literal new world of possibility, those inclined towards a reactionary fundamentalist movement will, when exposed to new ways of thinking through globalization, instead dig their heels in even further and violently lash out against a perceived threat to their way of life.

Writing in 1998, and again in 2010, Castells seems ahead of his time, and I’ve often thought he got a beat on the direction the geopolitical climate was going well before it became evident to all of us. Living as we do in an age where it seems the world is poised on the brink of war between various assorted fundamentalist terrorist organisations and equally reactionary state governments, Castells seems downright prescient. And, airing in 1993, so does “In the Hands of the Prophets”: For its season finale, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine seems to have suffered the same fate as so much other science fiction before it, unwittingly predicting the future’s worst case scenario through cautious rumination on humanity’s worst impulses.

Writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe insists that “In the Hands of the Prophets” isn’t so much a condemnation of fundamentalism as much as it is a criticism of people who feel the need to impose their beliefs on others. Wolfe believes that anyone has a right to believe anything, so long as they don’t force anyone else to hold to the same beliefs and that this is ultimately the angle he was going for. When I was younger, I found this to be a deeply profound truism, though in retrospect the sentiment seems a bit shallower than would perhaps be desirable…For one thing I find it difficult to see how you can have one critique without the other: Fundamentalism by definition demands that its adherents hold to it without question, and the very reason it’s reactionary is specifically because it’s convinced it’s the one universal truth that everyone needs to be converted to, by force if necessary. A fundamentalism that retreats back into its own insularity to avoid contact with other ways of thought is not the fundamentalism we see manifesting in the world as a result of globalization and the network society, and it’s not the fundamentalism of Vedek Winn and her orthodox Bajoran terrorists.

Where I do see in Wolfe’s interpretation of his work, and especially in Commander Sisko’s position all throughout the episode, is a statement of a kind of anarchist ideal: “My philosophy is that there is room on this station for every philosophy”. Or perhaps “A utopia is a framework for utopias”, if you prefer.…

Continue Reading

The Abominable Bride Review

49

Well that was odd.

I’ve pointed out numerous times that Moffat’s default mode of storytelling is based on suspense over what kind of story he’s telling. With The Abominable Bride he substitutes this, with mixed results, for suspense over what the point of telling it is. This was always going to be a factor; you can’t pick up from a stunning cliffhanger with a one-off period special and not offer some meta-commentary on why. But it would have been possible to offer the answer “because it’s fun” and gotten on with it. And for the most part that’s what they do.

And yet the larger show hangs over it from the start, with the decision to do an extended recap of the series instead of just tearing into a big silly Victorian romp. The implication that this is going to advance the overall story of Sherlock is omnipresent. Which is where problems start to come up, because it doesn’t really. Which is hardly surprising; Series Four needs its hook. But the result is that a perfectly entertaining period piece about a murderous cult of suffragettes (that’s emphatically in favor of them, to be clear) gets bogged down with a bunch of Killing Joke level hero/villain mirroring.

It’s tempting to try to make this some sort of frock/gun point, and the iconography is literally there, but it’s weirder than that. On the whole, The Abominable Bride’s main instinct is to be a silly compendium of all the iconic Sherlock Holmes moments, done as a proper period piece but with the Sherlock cast. And so it goes out of its way to get the Reichenbach Falls and the first meeting in, makes sure to find room for everyone to make a cameo, visibly can’t get Laura Pulver’s schedule to work, et cetera. Sure, the only way they can justify Reichenbach is by doing the whole silly Inception business and banal mirroring, but the basic instinct is still “whee we’re putting Rupert Graves in mutton chops.”

Except then it’s got the whole addiction theme layered in, which it can’t come close to supporting. The focus on Mycroft’s heartbroken anguish at his brother’s overdose, played with career-best acting by Gatiss, is really a quite serious reframing of Sherlock’s narrative. I mean, obviously that’s in part the point – we’re clearly setting up a “Sherlock is very much living on the edge” plot, as follows necessarily from His Last Vow. And in that regard, the spectre of Nicholas Meyere’s The Seven Per-Cent Solution is not accidental.

But quite apart from how much I like that development, and much of that depends on who’s writing the opening episode of Series Four, it’s an awkward fit with the Victorian costume party. (To say nothing of an awfully sobering one for New Year’s Day, though that’s actually powerful and compelling.) And the result ends up undermining the whole endeavor, feeling as though they didn’t really believe their period piece could stand up on its own.

But if we’re being honest, it’s a mixed bag on whether it can.…

Continue Reading

Capitalist Pig 5: White Cocksuckas

, 10

A long overdue Patreon bonus essay for you. Last War in Albion will be back next week with a chapter of nonstop formalist gubbins. The Abominable Bride review will be up late tonight. Happy New Year’s, and may 2016 bring the end of western civilization. Tomorrow brings the end of the annual sale on my back catalogue. 

“Burn the land, boil the sea.” – Theme from Firefly

In Warren Ellis’s 2013 novella Dead Pig Collector the protagonist, Mister Sun, describes his job in terms of the title phrase, explaining that in China (“a place rife with pollution and disease”) pig farmers often face large-scale deaths of pigs due to the aforementioned pollution and disease, which presents a major challenge. “A small farm – and, in places like Shanghai, they’re all small farms – cannot spend what little time they have disposing of tons of dead pigs instead of maintaining their remaining assets.” And since the penalties for selling such pigs into the market are steep, “there are people who have learned to effectively and safely dispose of swine carcasses. If you have a stack of dead pigs, and you don’t want to go to prison, then you pay for a dead pig collector.” As Mister Sun explains all of this, he is pouring bleach through a pair of holes cut into a plastic sheet laid over a bathtub in order to break down the blood within. Mr. Sun, see, is a hit man specializing in the efficient and untraceable disposal of the resulting corpse. 

Many things are in the mix here – most basically this story from Foreign Policy, although Ellis changes the economic situation around in his story, eliding the fact that the government-hired dead pig collectors are in practice not getting work because the illegal pig traders offer a better economic deal – but one, almost certainly, is Deadwood, a television show that Ellis has raved about on many grounds, but most notably (and appropriately) for the way in which you want to call everybody a cocksucker for hours after watching an episode.

See, Deadwood has a minor but fan-favorite character in the form of Mr. Wu, the de facto leader of the Chinese population in Deadwood, who, among the many social roles he performs within the camp, keeps a bunch of pigs that are routinely used to dispose of the many bodies that pile up in the camp. Wu is an odd and somewhat troubling character. He’s a clear fan favorite, but for uncomfortable reasons mostly related to the stereotypical pidgin in which he speaks and the boundless enthusiasm of Keone Young as he shouts “COCKSUCKA” or his endearing mispronunciation of Al Swearengen’s name as “Swedgin.” And, of course, there’s something fundamentally depressing about the way in which the narrative reinforces its characters’ marginalization of the Chinese population by giving them, basically, a single speaking representative who, due to not speaking the same language as any of the other characters, rarely actually gets a plotline.

But for all of this, Wu’s presence in Deadwood is a potent image, and not just for the fact that it’s relatively novel to actually acknowledge the role Chinese immigrants played in American expansionism.…

Continue Reading

“We who are without kings”: Duet

, 2

There are classics, and then there are classics.

“Duet” needs no introduction. Even those who would be inclined to slag off Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s first season, either on its own merits or due to some rule of thumb about first seasons, readily admit that this is one of the very best episodes in the entire series. Any Star Trek fan worth their salt is going to go one step beyond and will likely posit “Duet” as one of the very best episodes in the *entire Star Trek franchise*. I’m not about to rock the boat on this one, not this time. “Duet” is absolutely superb.

The biggest reason why this episode is so phenomenally successful is that it’s completely unafraid to do something that Star Trek in general, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in particular, can do effortlessly well so long as it’s given the chance. “Duet” is a bottle show, one of many commissioned at the back end of the season to make up for the ludicrously expensive and overbudget episodes from earlier on in the year (c.f. “Emissary”, “Move Along Home” and “The Storyteller”): No new sets, no major effects shots to speak of and only a couple of guest stars, which is frankly heresy for US television sci-fi at this point in time. And it absolutely doesn’t need any effects shots or fancy effects to be one of the most chillingly gripping and powerful things ever. 80% of “Duet” is held together by nothing more then Nana Visitor and Harris Yulin talking to each other, and that is absolutely all this episode needs. Is there any joint performance in Star Trek that’s even remotely comparable to the show they put on here? I submit to you there may well not be.

We of course have to single Nana Visitor out here. Two weeks in a row she’s gotten some pretty unprecedented showcase episodes for her range, which is is two more than anyone who wasn’t named Patrick Stewart or Brent Spiner got at this point in the game six years ago. Nana also got “Progress” and “Past Prologue” to herself earlier on in the year, so things are already looking great for Kira Nerys. That’s a great indication of how quickly Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has attained a level of egalitarianism in comparison to Star Trek: The Next Generation: Although there are still a few characters this team struggles with (*ahem* Jadzia Dax), this is still a great sign. Again though, this is no indictment of The Next Generation, but rather a regret that really nobody who’s worked on it (*including* this team, who have obviously proven themselves fully capable on this side of the lot) ever got comfortable enough with those characters to afford them the same treatment. But either way, “Duet” is in a class of its own for Visitor: None of her previous showcases are on this level and, while some will come close, none of them really ever will be again.…

Continue Reading

The Beast of the Epiphany

9

The comedian Richard Herring has a Christmas story he tells about a thirsty cat in a bathroom. He was sitting on the toilet and reached across to turn the bath tap on for the cat, which then lapped enthusiastically at the water. He says he found the sight hilarious, but imagines that the cat also had quite an amusing view… though, as he goes on to observe, Jesus had the funniest view, getting the combined sights of the drinking cat and the “fat, defecating man”. Because, as Christianity teaches us, Jesus is always watching.

Now, I’m not sure I agree with Herring’s interpretation of Christian doctrine. He’s similarly dodgy in his representations of most religions, in his New-Atheisty way. He tends, as such people do, to take the worst and/or silliest possible interpretations of religious ideas and then generalise them, and to essentialise the religion he’s attacking along the lines of such thick-end-of-the-wedge strawmen. However, it’s also true that a) he’s unambiguously joking, what with saying most of this stuff as part of an open project of, y’know, being funny for a living, and b) he’s deliberately using his own infantile interpretation of religious ideas as part of his usual method of deriving irony from weaponised childishness.

(One day, when I write my massive series about Lee & Herring – comedians who fascinate me both as a team and as individuals – I’ll mean-spiritedly itemise Richard Herring’s many embarrassing forays into simplistic, Dawkinsian, secularist liberalism.)

More pertinently to this essay, there’s something on point about his combining of the concepts of Christmas and of surveillance… because, rather surprisingly, they turn out to be inextricably linked.

As we know, you’d better not pout, you’d better not cry, you’d better be good. I’m telling you why: Santa Claus is coming to town. He knows when you are sleeping, he knows if you’re awake; he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake.

It’s a perfect example of shit we’re told as kids that we take for granted, and which the world as a whole winks at or takes as fun, but which is actually bloodcurdling when you stop to really think about it. All over the world, children – including almost all the ones you know, and are at school with, and are friends with – are gearing up to receive presents from a magic, benevolent man… but you might not get any if you fail to obey the rules set for your behaviour by the unaccountable authorities above you, including those who claim to love you. If you disappoint or anger those authorities by infringing their laws, even in your deportment, you might find yourself deprived and excluded from a massive fun game that literally everyone else is getting to play. Of course, you could argue that very few kids these days genuinely believe they’re likely to wake up on Christmas morning to a stocking full of coal. I’m honestly not sure, looking back, if I believed stuff like that or not.…

Continue Reading

Comics Reviews (December 30th, 2015)

0

A surprising Marvel-free week.

Lazarus #31

Frustrating; I enjoyed most of this issue, which was a well-done play on fog of war in which we see a fight play out from the perspective of the boots on the ground and the people in the ops room, each with limited perspectives on the action. Great stuff. But the cliffhanger is 100% pure inscrutability for me. Is there a time jump? If so, why does this two page time jump serve as a cliffhanger and not the seemingly much more gripping events of the previous few scenes? Who is “her” in the immediately prior scene? I can find no setup for any of this in the issue. Perhaps it’s in some prior issue long buried in my stacks of comics, but yeah. Frustrating.

James Bond: Vargr #3

Ellis is in “make most of the book an action sequence” mode, which is not my favorite Ellis mode, and the action sequence in question – a fairly straightforward shootout in a warehouse – hardly merits the attention lavished within a book in which not a ton actually happens for the nominal protagonist even as things shift around him. Fine and entertaining, but not a particularly memorable issue.

Black Magick #3

I’m intrigued by the worldbuilding here, which is inclined to hold off on much in the way of explanations of how the book’s view of magic works. Broadly speaking the answer seems to be “Wicca only with more explosions,” which is fine, but it sits on a weird cusp between not needing to be explained and being mysterious. Still, this was a great deal of fun. Nicola Scott turns out reliably gorgeous art, and Rucka writes excellent cops. I wish this would put more cards on the table of one sort or another, but I’m enjoying it a lot.

Mercury Heat #6

The first arc of this ends, and at this point what it’s doing feels properly clear and exciting. Not entirely sure I like the ending, more as a “how this sets up interesting things for the future” than in terms of effectiveness on its own; Luiza’s final decision is interesting and in character, but also one of those things that delays rather than advances the plot. But on the whole, a funny and smart book. Love the themes of colonialism introduced this issue. Good stuff, and I’m glad Gillen fits weird Avatar work like this into his schedule.…

Continue Reading

In Case You Missed These Fabulous Opportunities To Give Phil Money

5

I mean, this is all in posts sitting not far below this one on the site, but hey, those posts went up the weekend after Christmas and were easy to miss, so here we are again.

First off, Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, my sprawling anthology about science fiction in 2015, from the Sad Puppies to the anthropocene extinction to Kabbalsitic enlightenment at the hands of Doctor Who, is out. Here’s the US link, here’s the UK link, here’s the Smashwords link. I genuinely think this is my best book ever, and encourage you to buy it. And if you’ve got it, please consider leaving a review, as those sorts of things are important. 

Second, the annual sale on my back catalogue is going on until January 2nd. Details on that are in this post.

Finally, just so that there’s some content, this essay on Donald Trump, white supremacy, and Adele’s “Hello” is the best piece of criticism I’ve read this week, and you should totally check it out.

Back… probably this evening actually with comics reviews, just based on how my day is likely to be shaped. 

Oh, hell, let’s make it an honorary waffling post: how was Christmas? (Whether you celebrated it or not.)…

Continue Reading

“All the world’s a stage”: Dramatis Personae

, 4

An often overlooked entry from the first season, “Dramatis Personae” was always one of my favourite episodes to think about, even if this time around I found it a little difficult to actually watch. As is increasingly the case, the reason for this is not so much due to the quality of the piece itself as much as the fact it’s dealing with televisual storytelling norms that I find myself less and less inclined to watch as I get older.

The title says it all: “Dramatis Personae” is an exploration of performative themes, which on the one hand is nothing new, but on the other this episode is more textually overt about it than most. Writer Joe Menosky’s original idea was inspired by his observation that people tend to follow a kind of socially approved (and very, very stock) script whenever major life events happen, and there seem to be a very slight number of scripts generally available. This means that, no matter how different and unique the individual circumstances are, absolutely everyone’s story about, for example, falling in love is going to sound exactly the fucking same. Menosky saw this as a kind of voluntary self-imprisonment within a very bad pulp fiction play, and he was interested in exploring what that was like and why it happened. In a Star Trek context, this theme took the form of a telepathic matrix that was transmitted like a a virus.

For my money, this is a genius concept and a perfect fit for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. As a kind of science fiction urban community, the show offers a great setting to explore how this manifests on the level of populations and, even though this episode doesn’t end up taking the approach that “Babel” did, dealing with a disease outbreak is a solid plot to throw at a team of scientists and administrators working in a metropolitan environment. The handling of performativity itself “Dramatis Personae” does mark an interesting evolution from the way it’s been handled in the past: On Star Trek: The Next Generation, much of the performative facade comes from the cast themselves looking for room to play around with the roles they’ve been given, although at this stage the show is finally beginning to fully plumb the recesses of its sham theatricality, and this will come to a charged head next season. Here though the performativity is a crucial aspecct of the textual narrative, and that’s not actually something we’ve seen a ton of to date, although, like I said, this is starting to change.

With “Dramatis Personae” Menosky has in a sense penned a kind of spiritual follow-up to “Frame of Mind”, where the extradiegetic themes about being imprisoned in a stock set of narrative tropes become diegetic. The form this takes on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a bit more straightforward and traditional than what Brannon Braga pulled on Star Trek: The Next Generation, with the crew literally being taken over by other characters as opposed to the structure of the narrative reality itself breaking down (which is, interestingly enough, a certain kind of theatrical approach).…

Continue Reading

«‹ 134 135 136 137 ›»