Eruditorum Press

Less concerned with who’s first up against the wall than with how to decorate it

“What war hasn’t been a war of fiction?”: The Storyteller

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One of the big advantages Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has, regardless of whether or not Star Trek fans think it’s actually an advantage or not, is, as we have established, its stationary location. But this asset doesn’t just apply to the titular space station, it also applies to the nearby planet: After all, the whole point of setting this show so close to Bajor in the first place was to allow for development of one specific planetary society above and beyond what just having a representative as part of our crew would facilitate.

The biggest problem Star Trek has from an ethical anthropological standpoint is its well-known predilection to fall into the “planet of hats” issue. In less netspeak terms, this means Star Trek has an annoying tendency to depict extraterrestrial civilizations as monocultures in service to metaphor and allegory. Star Trek isn’t the only sci-fi-fantasy work to have this problem (in fact I’d argue it’s effectively endemic to the genre) and I don’t even think it’s anywhere near the worst perpetrator of it, but it is a problem Star Trek is famous for having. There are a number of reasons for this, most of which have to do with the inherent problems of using people or groups of people as dolled-up metaphor in this way, but the one that’s relevant to tonight’s discussion is the inescapable fact that a voyaging starship can’t stay in one port of call long enough to flesh out any given society to the realistic extent they really deserve. Because in theory this is something Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is primed to alleviate and another huge reason why it’s such a necessary second perspective on the Star Trek universe. With our city’s proximity to Bajor, there’s really no functional narrative reason why it need be depicted in the traditionally shallow and superficial sci-fi-fantasy way.

(Actually I tell a lie for the purposes of argument. Star Trek’s biggest problem from an ethical anthropological perspective isn’t the planet of hats issue, it’s the Prime Directive. But I’m not about to dig up that old chestnut again.)

“The Storyteller” is the first episode to really grapple with the potential this setup offers the show, and it succeeds with flying colours. We get not one, not two, but *three* different representations of Bajoran culture that differ from what’s been established thus far across both the A- and B-plots and the story even throws us Kira in specific opportune moments to further the contrast. There’s of course the village of the Sirah that Julian and Miles visit, but also the Paqu and Navot delegations that Commander Sisko has been asked to mediate between. In each case, we get to see glimpses of folk belief and cultural norms and attitudes that differ just enough from established dogmatic Prophets theism that it’s uniquely memorable: The first Sirah obviously talks a lot about destiny and chosen ones being sent from on high wand whatnot, but it’s obvious this is mostly rhetorical bluster and the village has a special set of folk spiritualism all its own based around the Dal’Rok and the telling of the tales that’s found nowhere else on Bajor.…

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Saturday Waffling (December 12th, 2015)

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Exciting things afoot, as ever; recording a commentary for Paradise Towers with Jack tonight, another podcast on Monday, and setting up some more of those for the future. The neoreaction book is at 30k, and looking like it’ll be ready to do a thing in early 2016. (Doing a thing being different from “be published,” of course.) I have some fun essays lined up for the near future. Last War in Albion Book Two Chapter Four is going to be very, very fun.

And I’m really happy with Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, which gets the finishing touches put on it this week. I think it is my best book, in a sort of raw quality sense. It feels like it hangs together as a book, which is always a risk with a kind of disparate essay collection, and this is a very disparate essay collection. It’s very much the “demonstrate what I do” book, anchored by three novella-length pieces: the title essay, Recursive Occlusion, and the V for Vendetta chapter of Last War in Albion, with a series of shorter and more discursive pieces in the middle. A winning move in my ongoing war with 2015.

What’s been the highlight of your year? …

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“Jesus! Jesus is here!”: Rightful Heir

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I don’t know how you screw up a concept like “Klingon Ice Monastery”, but they do.

You know, I think I’m just done listening to stories about Worf and Klingon heritage. Especially as told by Ron Moore.

Here’s another episode I vaguely remember liking that completely turned me off on the rewatch. It’s not one I have really fond memories of from back in the day-This was an episode I only caught once TNN started rerunning Star Trek: The Next Generation in the early 2000s. Consequently I’m not super broken up about having “Rightful Heir” fall flat for me as I don’t have any particularly potent nostalgia affixed to it and this season has been strong enough it can afford to give us a few duds at this point in the year….Even if we do seem to have, since “Suspicions” (and looking ahead to next week), crossed over into the Enterprise variant of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s month and a half long water-treading session.

None of you need to hear my reasons for being alienated by this episode. I most certainly do not need to go into my litany of disagreements with Ron Moore’s philosophy, writing style and approach to characterization again. My issues with “Rightful Heir” are the same ones I had with “Redemption”, only magnified to an even greater extent because I no longer have the time or patience to humour them. Worf is by now cripplingly overexposed as a character and has had way, way too many showcase episodes, even just this season alone. And the only reason he is so overexposed is because he’s the only character (on either show, frankly) that Moore actually enjoys writing for because he’s also the only character Moore knows how to write for. That’s a big problem for a showrunner, and an ever-present one.

(Moore isn’t the sole showrunner of The Next Generation by a longshot, but given Rick Berman and Michael Piller’s promotion to franchise overseers, the complex web of the producer/writer relationship and Jeri Taylor’s position, he definitely is one of them. He’s certainly the most senior staff writer by this point. This does not, however, make him the best.)

I mean should I even make an attempt to derive some erudition about the Klingons from their depiction in this episode? What more is there to say? It’s Moore-type Klingons. Ridiculous cartoon Viking/Dwarf stereotypes who like to eat, drink and stab in no particular order. Even the monks. Especially the monks. There’s a ghost of an interesting idea where the Kahless clone calls out the Klingons at the monastery for forgetting the reason why they fight and it almost seems like the story is going down a kind of jihad route by framing this in terms of a righteous struggle. And then it doesn’t, because of fucking course it doesn’t. I should have given up my hopes to see non-warrior caste and non-cartoon Klingons after the first season ended.…

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Hell Bent Podcast

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For our season finale (until Christmas) I’m joined by the legendary Kate Orman, writer of an appallingly large number of very good Doctor Who books. The first half is interview about her Virgin Books novels and her recent Faction Paradox anthology Liberating Earth, the second (starting at about the hour and twenty minute mark for those with no interest in the Wilderness Years, which is to say, wrong people) on Hell Bent. You can get it here, and I recommend you do, cause it’s lovely.…

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Dialectic of the Doctors, Part 1

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1. Chickens, Eggs, Context

Remember the Bird Sanctuary in ‘The Three Doctors’? Makes me think of eggs and chickens. The solution to that riddle is that neither came first because both emerged dialectically, as the negations of previous forms, through the transformation of quantity into quality. The incremental changes of evolution.  Just as the chick is the negation of the egg, so they are one. Just as the egg/chick unity is the negation of older forms, so they are one with older forms, part of a sequence. Evolution is the natural Dialectic in action. Every form is transitional.

Dialectical materialism is one way of saying ‘Marxism’, but there is also the Dialectic of Hegel. Marx gets the dialectic from Hegel but, famously, he has to turn it upside down in order to set it on its feet.  Marx makes the dialectic material.  The dialectic of Hegel is thoroughly, even perversely, ideal.  (To clarify, ‘ideal’ or ‘idealist’ in the philosophical sense, in the sense of meaning something like ‘the realm of ideas or thoughts, or at least of ‘the immaterial’.)

Tell you what, let’s try to explain this in terms of ‘The Three Doctors’.

For some reason, ‘The Three Doctors’ strikes me as a story particularly suited to ruminations on the Dialectic. I could speculate as to why this is. Baker and Martin are, by accident or design, habitual dialecticians. The ‘weapon’ that will end the Atrios-Zeos war forever is peace (’Armageddon factor’); Axonite is mutable and spectacular capital and even has a ‘cycle’ (’Claws of Axos’); the Solonians have a natural lifecycle which is inimical to colonialism (’The Mutants’); there is a cycle of Edenic life into fallen drugs and fake euphoria (‘Nightmare of Eden’); there is an interrelated unity of contradictory micro and macrocosms (’Invisible Enemy’); Eldrad is a nightmare from (of) history and goes through a process of change from fossil to woman to tyrant (’Hand of Fear’). And there is wider context. The end of the 60s and the dawn of neoliberalism, for instance. There is the apparent failure of revolution and dialectical materialism in favour of antinomies of bourgeois thought – positivism/mysticism, reformism/conservatism. The producer of this story is a Buddhist and a Lefty, but also a BBC type. You can see where that all links together, I’m sure.

So lets dive in to this silly project. We might be able to explicate the Dialectic. We might manage the considerably more complex and challenging feat of explicating ‘The Three Doctors’. At the very least, it might be a giggle.

For me, anyway.

 

2. Theses, Assertions, Gnosis

Central to the Dialectic are the categories of totality, contradiction, change, negation, and mediation.

Also central is the concept of unity.

Unity is, in fact, the meta-category when it comes to the Dialectic. Within unity, the other categories spin.

Unity is closely related to totality, but not identical with it. The totality cannot always be a unity, and the unity is not a totality, though the totality may be comprised of unities.…

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Comics Reviews (December 9th, 2015)

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Secret Wars #8

The splitting of issue #7 into two proves rough, mainly because #7 was just a big fight book, and two issues of punching in a series that’s past due for conclusion ends up being a bit of a hot mess. I’m invested in the main character conflict of this – Reed, Sue, Doom, and Valeria, essentially – and looking forward to its resolution, but everything else feels like it’s been going on for simply ages, persumably because of how it’s been going on for simply ages.

Guardians of the Galaxy #3

Bendis’s books are often slow, but this one is really being intolerable at the moment. Three issues in and it feels like virtually nothing has happened, and like nothing does happen in this issue. As ever Bendis remains good at character moments, but he’s not integrating those moments into any sort of directioned overall storytelling here. The return of Yotat is a complete non-thriller, three issues in there’s still no visible benefit to Ben Grimm’s addition to the team, and just… meh.

Star Wars Annual #1

Gillen does an espianoge done-in-one, which is a genre I don’t feel like he’s played with much outside of Alastor. Definite notes of Ellis throughout, which is basically where you’d expect Gillen spies to go, but with a nice, approachable Star Wars sheen that makes it distinctly fun. I assume this is continued in next week’s Darth Vader Annual, also by Gillen, but I base this entirely on the vaguely cliffhanger ending and not on anyone bothering to indicate this anywhere whatsoever in the issue – there’s not even a house ad for the other annual. That’s dumb. Anyway, this is fun.

Contest of Champions #3

After two issues that felt a bit slower and more setup-based than one necessarily wants for something basically pitted as “ultimate punch book,” this finally takes off and starts using its premise in full. Ewing is fantastic at playing with the deep weirdness of the Marvel Universe, and things like an Elektra Natchios Bullseye, the original Eddie Brock Venom, and a Rick Jones Hulk full of 60s idealism adn smashing are genuine treats, used here in fun ways. Glad to see this getting up to speed.

Trees #13

Some brilliant stuff in the first half, in which Ellis comes very close to tipping his hand about what he’s doing in this book, which is probably a good thing by issue #13 of something. The second half is more of a let-down, as Ellis does a basically wordless action sequence that, while drawn beautifully by Jason Howard, is brutal to follow given the absolute lack of reminders as to who anyone is. The incoming mayor seems happy with who’s getting shot, so that’s something, and I assume the fallout from this next issue will make some sense, but there was some distinct roughness here.

Radioactive Spider-Gwen #3

This picks up a lot, and is my favorite issue of the relaunched series to date, rescuing it from my half-considered drop.…

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Lost Exegesis (White Rabbit) — Part 2

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Part 1 of the essay can be found here. Unlike that part, this one will have spoilers of future episodes.

Alice in Wonderland

Next up in the Intermission is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll, and directly referred to in the dialogue and as well as being referenced by the episode’s title. Before we examine the manner of the title’s use, let’s take a brief look at Alice. Her adventures cover two books (the other being Through the Looking Glass) and are often issued as a twinset. LOST will certainly play with the Alice story in future episodes – the Season Three finale is titled after the second book, and Jack will read from the “Pool of Tears” chapter in Season Four.

Alice is ostensibly a children’s fairy tale ruled primarily an aesthetic, one that’s largely surreal and operates according to dream logic, what with all the talking animals and such. But the aesthetic is not completely arbitrary – rather, it relies primarily on finding new and strange meaning within the familiar, and in teasing out and secondary meanings for words that it can muster. The famous Jabberwocky poem, for example, is loaded with new portmanteau words, but they’re not meaningless words – rather, they are hybrids, and only sound unfamiliar until you examine the constituent components. There’s likewise a good deal of wordplay – “lessons” become “lessens” which means each teaching gets shorter – while other concepts presented are simply reversals of what we’d expect, like remembering the future instead of the past. And yet the Alice stories aren’t bereft of social commentary. Especially the first book, which presents all manner of British cultural institutions as being faintly ridiculous, albeit heavily disguised in certain aesthetic codes.

And not only does Alice function as cultural commentary, it’s become a part of western culture itself. In his introduction to the year 2000 reprinting, science writer Martin Gardner says that he would not “consider a person educated” who has never read the books. Indeed, that a phrase like “the White Rabbit” can be part and parcel of our regular lexicon attests to that.

So this is where we get the title to this episode, which is directly invoked by John Locke: Jack is chasing his “white rabbit” just like Alice chased a white rabbit into a strange and magical place. Which, of course, suggests that the Island is a kind of “wonderland” and that it operates by different rules than the mundane world. This usage, however, has definitely become mundane in SF/F culture. In the Star Trek episode “Shore Leave,” for example, Dr. McCoy sees a White Rabbit (crafted much like the original illustration of John Tenniel in Carroll’s book) passing by shortly after transporting down to a new planet, which turns out to be an elaborate amusement park. The interactions that the various crewmembers have on the planet are derived from their subconscious, and that is likely a clue to understanding the nature of the Island.

Or perhaps we should consider The Matrix, where Neo follows “the White Rabbit” (this time a tattoo on one of his clients) to meet Trinity, and eventually Morpheus, who describes the experience of leaving the Matrix in Wonderland terms.…

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“Tracts of sea, sick at heart”: Battle Lines

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I tend to go back and forth on “Battle Lines”. I think it’s because, on paper, it sounds like an almost paint-by-numbers Star Trek story reminiscent of nothing so much as Original Series episodes like “A Taste of Armageddon”, “Day of the Dove” and their ilk (and indeed, “Day of the Dove” was a primary inspiration for “Battle Lines”). As such, what usually tends to happen is I watch the episode, like it a whole lot, then go a long while without seeing it, forget how much I like it and think “oh, it musn’t be that good. It’s basically an Original Series episode and I hate it when Star Trek: Deep Space Nine just chases the Original Series”. Then I watch it again and love it.

Writing this essay should finally break that cycle for me, because “Battle Lines” is most assuredly excellent.

Bear in mind I adored “Battle Lines” at the time, and that probably says something. I especially loved the gritty iconography of these ageless, immortal soldiers constantly slaughtering each other in a bombed out desert cave on a godforsaken moon somewhere with Major Kira and Commander Sisko caught in the middle. In hindsight, yes, it’s just another Planet Hell shoot, but for me this is among the most memorable uses of that venerable old studio. It’s probably because the slightly Mad Max-esque Ennis and Nol-Ennis have a kind of grungy, 1980s post-apocalyptic aesthetic to them that I quite like. We haven’t seen much of that in Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine since the aesthetic’s glorious peak in the Gatherers of “The Vengeance Factor”, costume designer Bob Blackman seemingly preferring to emphasize a kind of forced frumpiness in his outfits for the chronological 1990s.

It’s perhaps not coincidental then that “The Vengeance Factor” was the final episode aired in the chronological 1980s. However that said I find it really interesting, now that I’ve brought it up, how we seem to be seeing little echoes of “The Vengeance Factor”, or at least the zeitgeist it was a part of, showing up again this season. The Gatherers themselves showed up in “Vortex”, and they were every bit as fantastically 80s as there as they’ve always been. And in “Battle Lines”, we once again have a story about a ceaseless war stemming from clan conflicts that may have meant something at one time but which are beyond ancient and petty by now. It’s very fitting that little signifiers like this start to crop up again in Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine this season, as I consider 1993 and 1994 to be the real last hurrah of the Long 1980s, before the vibe finally gives way to the grimdark and apathy fueled Long 1990s and the climate we’re arguably still living in today. It’s also perhaps not a coincidence that this season is far and away the best the series has ever been.…

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Not Suitable for Kids

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 The BBC’s Moscow Correspondent, Steve Rosenberg, recently tweeted this:

Now, despite the air of handbag-clutching sanctimony, I agree with the implied criticism here.  If true, it’s wicked that Russian kids are having their history censored.  However, the other implication – that ‘we’ would never censor history for ‘our’ kids – is trickier to agree with.  Media Lens promptly responded to Rosenberg with: “Try reading a British or US kids’ history book on the Vietnam war (for example)”. 

I myself, monomaniac that I am, was instantly reminded of ‘Victory of the Daleks’, in which Winston Churchill is presented to the kiddies as the Doctor’s bezzie mate; a naughty, fallible, but essentially heroic fighter against evil.  Nothing in that episode about, say, the Bengal famine, or the Black and Tans in Ireland, or the conspiracy to unseat Mossadegh, or the pointless firebombing of Dresden.  Sticking with Russia, Churchill was the leading British politician behind Allied ‘intervention’ (i.e. aiding the counter-revolutionary Whites) against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War… a war that (arguably) indirectly helped bring Stalin to power.  You might well argue that there is no place for such things in an episode of Doctor Who.  You could be right.  But don’t then tell me that there is a place for presenting someone like Winston Churchill, sans context, as a jolly and fiercely moral pal.

Of course hierarchical societies, which depend upon ideology to manufacture public acceptance or quietitude, are going to lie to their people, and they’re going to start early.  What’s interesting here is not the obvious fact that Russian kids’ history books and British kids’ TV shows are going to mislead them about the histories of their domestic ruling classes.  What’s interesting is the way the educated, orthodox, democratic, freedom-loving mind can notice – and be outraged by – this obfuscation when practiced by Russia, while completely failing to notice it when it is practiced by the BBC. 

You have to wonder how automatic it is, versus how deliberate. 

In Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Orwell has Party members practicing this very double standard openly and proudly, using it as a badge of honour.  It can be viewed as such because ‘we’ are good by definition, so any contortion of truth or good sense which benefits ‘our’ side is also good by definition.  Like many psychological habits, there’s no clear cause and effect, but rather a rabbit hole made of mutually-reflecting mirrors.  And I don’t think we need go to Oceania to see it.

The orthodox view of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it’s a satire of Russian totalitarianism… and yet Orwell sets it in Britain (as was).  He’s also having a go at British Communists who willingly and happily parroted the nonsense dictated to them from Moscow.  But familiarity with his wider corpus shows us that Orwell was quite aware of the same technique in the capitalist media.  The Ministry of Truth is at least partly drawn from his experiences within the BBC.

It would be unthinkable to do a Doctor Who story featuring Stalin without portraying him as evil. …

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Lost Exegesis (White Rabbit) — Part 1

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White Rabbit really does represent a rabbit hole for the series. The Pilot was, well, the pilot, the story to get you hooked. Tabula Rasa was what an ordinary episode of Lost television might look like, and Walkabout showed off all kinds of technical and emotional chops. And all of them played with certain intriguing aesthetics. This episode plays off each of the previous ones, demonstrating a certain structural and thematic continuity, while continuing to broaden the chasm gaping open upon the show’s Mysteries.

We should start with the Flashbacks and the Mirrors. Two episodes in a row now, we’ve begun with an Opening Eye in the focal character’s Flashback. This is an example of continuity, a way of visually juxtaposing two characters, in this case Jack to Locke. It also makes three of five episodes opening with the same image – this is now a part of the show’s overall language, a language that is largely symbolic or at least unspoken (which we’ll get to, I promise).

We’ll get to the Locke/Jack stuff in a bit, but first let’s take a longer look at these Flashbacks. Jack’s first is when he’s sitting on the beach, presumably meditating on the time when Mark Silverman got “jumped” by a couple of bullies. Jack tries to change what’s happening, but his efforts are useless – he gets punched in the eye, and the screen goes blank, filled in with the cries of what’s happening now on the Island, which is Charlie shouting Jack’s name while someone drowns at sea. Jack tries to save the drowning woman, but only comes back with Boone.

So there’s an obvious parallel here about the futility of Jack’s actions. Given the iconography in the other Flashbacks, though, one thing that might go unnoticed in this mirroring is what’s actually in the dialogue – the boy Jack tried to save when he was just a kid was named “Silverman.” A reflective surface, a mirror, and entirely symbolic. Which we only learn in the next Flashback, in what’s quite possibly the most important scene in Jack’s character development, the talking to he gets from his father.

FATHER: I had a boy on my table today. I don’t know, maybe a year younger than you. He had a bad heart. It got real hairy, real fast. And everybody’s looking at your old man to make decisions. And I was able to make those decisions because at the end of the day, after the boy died, I was able to wash my hands and come home to dinner. You know, watch a little Carol Burnett, laugh till my sides hurt. And how can I do that, hmm? And even when I fail, how do I do that, Jack? Because I have what it takes. Don’t choose, Jack, don’t decide. You don’t want to be a hero, you don’t try and save everyone because when you fail… you just don’t have what it takes.

Jack’s father tells a tale of failure – and failing is just what we’ve seen Jack experience twice in a row.…

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