Eruditorum Press

Massively popular among unpopular people

Solid Dick 1½, or ‘Did Mary Whitehouse Have a Point?’

6

or ‘Young Men Are Dying For It’

or ‘Don’t Mention the Chasms’

 

When I complain about the ideological message of this or that text, am I not tacitly admitting that Mary Whitehouse had a point?  After all, isn’t the worry ultimately about the effect it will have?

We know that cultural artifacts influence people enormously. Moreover, most of us (and I definitely include myself in this) get most of our most deeply embedded ideas and assumptions about the world from fictional media rather than non-fiction. The News has a great influence on our ideas about the world… but, as Aristotle said, Tragedy is a great deal more philosophical than History because History treats of what happened whereas Tragedy treats of the kinds of things that happen, or that we think happen. Fiction is largely about representing our ideas about how people work and act in our society, about how they function in the world, and make the world, and interact with it. It is inherently social because to partake of fiction is to interact with all sorts of other people and social processes, and to take away from fiction an understanding of the world which then changes our interactions with it. This is one reason why unjust representations are such a big deal.

Fiction, I would argue, thus has a moral aspect baked into it. News, of course, partakes of all sorts of moral assumptions, and transmits all sorts of moral notions – often unconsciously to both journalist and consumer – but its essential claim is to represent fact, even if this is often spurious. Part of the appeal of fiction is that it bypasses fact and addresses itself to the socially ontological, to our notions of how the world is rather than the specific things which happen in it. Moreover, it directly addresses itself to morality, to our notions of justice and injustice. All fiction does this, whatever its content, because the act of reading or watching fiction is the act of imaginative empathy, of questioning oneself about how one would act if placed in the same position as the characters. (It’s important to note, in passing, that this is a great deal more complex than any platitude about ‘identification’.) This is partly why fiction is a great deal more popular than non-fiction.

Fiction is also crafted to appeal directly at a pre-rational, emotional level which by-passes intellectual judgements, at least as a first move (which is why you can be moved by utter trash). This is why its so immensely pleasurable, and also therefore so incredibly formative and influential. We’re also socialised to learn the art of reading (book or visual narrative) much earlier than we are taught to learn critical thinking or engagement with non-fiction. Stories are, after all, a form of play, and the role of play and games – experimentation ideally without fear of failure – in child socialisation is huge. So yeah, fiction has a terrific influence on how we think, how we view the world, society, other people, etc, on our normative assumptions about it, and on our moral judgements about it.…

Continue Reading

Comics Reviews (November 18th, 2015)

5

Vader Down #1

It’s a good week when this is the sort of thing occupying the bottom slot of my list, because there’s almost nothing wrong with it. You can, perhaps, tell that Aaron is better suited to his characters than Gillen’s – his dialogue for Aphra and company feels like a hollow imitation of the characters. But that’s a minor detail in a comic that giddily makes Vader seem tremendously powerful and tremendously fucked all at once. Good fun, and hard to imagine a Star Wars fan that isn’t going to be loving this.

The New Avengers #3

I love the pentacled Cthulhu villain that is Moridun. And the three-scenes-in-one banter at the start. And Power Man deciding to call out Wiccan on his name. And really most of this. And I’m fascinated by POD, a character I’m not actually sure I’ve registered as a thing before, but who is without a doubt the most interesting part of this issue. Good stuff; I think this is the current best of the Avengers books.

Ms. Marvel #1

Ms. Marvel punches gentrification. It’s as awesome as you’d hope from that description. The “artisinal sushi” line is probably my favorite of the week, and the backup story by Alphona is genuinely charming. Mike looks like a great character, and I can’t wait to see what Wilson ends up doing with her. While I definitely prefer Alphona’s art to Miyazawa’s, this series is clearly in wonderful hands as ever.

Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl #4

Gloriously out of left field, Phonogram swerves away from all of its apparent plots, connecting back to them only fleetingly and midway through, in an issue that’s mostly black and white for good measure. It’s the sort of thing that makes you genuinely surprised that we’re officially Done With Phonogram in two issues time, as it gestures to just how much there is to do with this world and these characters. How will this tie back in? Will it tie back in? What the fuck is Gillen doing? I have no idea, but I’m wholly confident it’s brilliant, so whatever. “I liked Claire Danes’s earlier, more difficult material” is definitely the second funniest line of the week though.…

Continue Reading

“42 Decks Of Sheer Adventure!”: Starship Mine

, 4

Superficially, “Starship Mine” resembles a basic, unpretentious action plot done pretty much just because Patrick Stewart wanted to take his shirt off, quip and shoot things. Which it is. But just like “Power Play”, this is an example of Star Trek: The Next Generation doing something counterintuitive with an action brief that we might not necessarily expect from an action sci-fi show that proves how aware of itself and its responsibility it’s finally become.

This is also something *only* Star Trek: The Next Generation could do, at least in 1993. That’s not to say the cast of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine couldn’t have handled a brief like this or that the setting would have precluded it, but the writing staff on that show has something of a problem handling action without it coming across as unreconstructed, bloodthirsty and grimdark and that’s ultimately what’s going to end up killing the series. That didn’t have to happen, of course, but circumstances will eventually dictate that’s what the final obituary will read. But that’s thankfully not for a good while yet. By contrast, Star Trek: The Next Generation has long since become keenly aware of its status and place in history, and a lot of careful thought went into ensuring that, while undeniably fun, “Starship Mine” never crossed the line into becoming a mindless run-and-gun military fantasy. And in fact, this story ends up being one of the most intriguingly provocative out of a year that’s been so stellar already.

Much of this is due to writer Morgan Grendel and Michael Piller. Grendel hates the moniker “Die Hard on the Enterprise” fans tend to appellate “Starship Mine” with (even though come on, it self-evidently is. Grendel even pitched it to Piller as exactly that) and prefers to read it as a story about how Captain Picard loves the Enterprise more than anything else and is willing to go to any lengths to protect it, citing the old naval “the captain goes down with the ship” trope. This is a problematic (and ahistorical) narrative device, but that Grendel invokes it here reveals some interesting things. Even (well, especially) divorced from the naval symbolism I like this idea because it shows how Captain Picard is someone who lives and breathes the spirit of voyaging so much he can’t conceive of ever doing anything else.

I particularly like the scene at the end of the teaser where he’s alone on the bridge, the last person on the ship before the “cleaning crew” comes aboard. He dawdles and takes his time, and Patrick Stewart’s expressions and body language sell the emotions of the moment. He’s in no rush to beam down to the starbase and takes no particular joy in being away from the Enterprise-None of the crew do. The Enterprise is their home and where they belong and they’re never going to be truly happy if they’re apart from it: They’re always going to act a bit restless and awkward, always going to be a fish out of water without someplace to go and discoveries to be made, just as the crew are at Commander Hutchinson’s reception.…

Continue Reading

Lost Exegesis (Walkabout)

, , , , , 14

So I guess we were right, back in the Tabula Rasa entry, about Locke’s first name being John, an invocation of the historical John Locke. We must be, like, psychic or something.

A brief history, then. John Locke was a very privileged white man, born in 1632, England. He went to Oxford, studied with such famous scientists as Newton and Boyle, and determined to become a doctor. By 1666, Locke had teamed up with Dr. David Thomas to run a laboratory, probably a pharmacy. Through Thomas, Locke met Lord Anthony Cooper (one of the richest men in England and later the Earl of Shaftesbury) and became his personal physician. Lord Ashley also helped secure a government job for Locke, and for the next ten years or so Locke lived at Lord Ashley’s estate. Locke eventually went back to Oxford and received a Bachelor of Medicine and a license to practice.

But Locke isn’t primarily known as a physician so much as a philosopher, indeed a founder of liberalism. Mind you, we’re talking about the 17th Century. Locke isn’t a “leftist” in the modern sense of the term. Rather, his philosophy forms part of the bedrock of capitalism, from his early theories on prices, money, unlimited accumulation, and a theory of government oriented around the protection of private property versus one that is motivated by, say, compassion. Much of this philosophy is rooted in his conception of our “state of nature”:

“To understand political power right, and derive it from the original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.”
— John Locke, Second Treatise

So it’s amazingly prescient, given the state of pigfuckery today that LOST’s Locke ends up bringing home a boar. But on the Island, John Locke is not presented as a literal embodiment of the historical figure, despite his constant admonishment, “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” On the contrast, he’s a frustrated man who has experienced a kind of rebirth, a literal “ascension” given the miraculous restoration of his legs.

Hence the Opening Eye motif at the beginning of the episode.

As mentioned in the exegesis of Pilot Part 1, the Opening Eye is fraught with symbolism. An awakening, becoming aware of an inner truth, a spiritual revelation. Even a resurrection. But Locke’s eye isn’t meant to be “read” in the same way as Jack’s. Locke’s right eye (or, rather, “eye”) is bifurcated by a scar running vertically down “across” is center. His insight, then is “crossed” with Jack’s.

In one sense, we could say Locke’s resurrection is exteriorized as opposed to interiorized. His body has been reborn. He can walk. But is just as angry and self-oriented as before the crash, as evidenced by his casual dismissal of Michael’s injury in favor of his own self-aggrandizement in pursuing the boar.…

Continue Reading

Seveneves, Vox Day, and Blowing Up the Moon

11

This is an essay from my forthcoming collection Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: Notes on Science Fiction and Culture in the Year of Angry Dogs, out on December 27th, and available for preorder on Amazon. (Print will be available when the book comes out on December 26th.) 

There are two obvious angles to take on Seveneves given the discussions that make up the rest of this book. The first is to attempt to decipher Vox Day’s hatred of the book, an effort that involves getting deep into the weeds of scientific racism. The second is to try to figure out what it is with blowing up the moon these days. In the spirit of Seveneves itself, then, we’ll try to do both without any regard for whether they actually fit together.

First the moon. As with the other obvious touchstone here, Kill the Moon, its destruction is part of a larger story that wrestles with the changing status of space travel as a signifier in science fiction. In this regard, on a basic level, it serves as a symbolic breaking of a barrier. In 2015, it appears entirely likely that the moon will prove to be the furthest point humanity reaches prior to its extinction. And in both Kill the Moon and Seveneves its destruction is the impetus for rejecting that in favor of a different sort of future.

In Kill the Moon at least this is a reasonably complex event rooted in the long history of Doctor Who, which stretches back through the new frontier liberalism view of space travel, and serves to reconcile that utopian vision with the present day. And ultimately, Doctor Who taking place in a universe where the only thing that decisively isn’t canon is the Fermi Paradox, which means that this reconciliation ultimately has to be a restoration of a very classic mode of science fiction, which it is, with the shattered moon ultimately restored so that the future we long dreamed of can arrive.

Seveneves, on the other hand, is a Neal Stephenson novel, and thus focused first and foremost on the technical and material realities of the world. Where Kill the Moon is firmly about space as a symbolic concept, Seveneves is about the ways in which space travel is a massively difficult science and engineering problem. Or, to put it another way, it’s about why the classic sci-fi fantasy of space travel is not plausible in the first place. It’s a novel of radiation sickness, tiny and fatal punctures, and fuel conservation. Being Neal Stephenson, all of these technical bits are brilliant and gripping, of course, but they are very much the focus of the exercise.

And so in Seveneves the moon’s destruction exists to create a much harder problem that will require humanity to solve the hard problems of space. But this puts the book in something of an odd position. Stephenson has to advance the current state of space technology just a little bit past the present day in order to come up with a plausible way for humanity to survive (most obviously in the form of plausible asteroid mining), and has to create an entirely artificial and ostentatiously unexplained planetary crisis in the form of the moon exploding in order to justify it.…

Continue Reading

“She most lives”: Dax

, 6

So I need to get something off my chest right off the bat. The entire teaser and first act of this episode manifestly do not need to exist. They’re nothing more than horrid, stock Male gaze-y Damsel in Distress capture/escape/chase science fiction bullshit. Obviously, the writers wanted that precious “conflict and drama” and, because they’re science fiction writers, they think the best way to do that is to abduct a pretty, doe-eyed young woman who pleads for mercy while helplessly immobilized by the Standard Female Grab Area and then lead the macho military men on a chase through corridors on a starbase as they spout protocol at one another.

I’ll bet you can guess how I feel that Jadzia Dax is the character who gets the treatment in question. But what makes it even worse is that this actually doesn’t make any real dramatic sense! Think about it: How much more dramatic would it had been if, rather than deciding to indulge their Buck Rogers fantasies, the writers actually let us know this was going to be a courtroom drama from the start. Imagine if in the teaser the Klaestronians approach Dax in the corridor, validate her identity, and than flatly state “Jadzia Dax, you are hereby under arrest on suspicion of treason against the Klaestronian people and the first degree murder of General Aredlon Tandro, my father”. Tandro, Jr. slaps handcuffs on Jadzia, we pan up to a shot of her stoic and unmoved expression, and then fade right to black and cue credits.

Casting doubt on characters like Kira, Quark and Odo is one thing. Quark is set up to be a shady dude right from the start, from her first appearance Kira’s loyalty to us is in question (though if you’ll notice, that seems to have all be resolved as of this episode: Kira is one of Commader Sisko’s staunchest allies all throughout the investigation. Uh oh, the crew seems to be getting along! Guess it’s time to cancel the show then!) and before we got to know him better we could imagine Odo being the kind of person who might take his dedication to justice a bit too far. But Dax? The wise woman of DS9? I mean hell, if you’re looking to shock the audience and get them to distrust the characters (I mean, I personally don’t think that’s a great idea, but this team sure seems to think so) I can’t think of a blindside bigger than accusing Dax of all people of murder. High treason…OK, maybe. But murder? That’s a twist worthy of a teaser.

The rest of the story has its ups and downs and has a lot of fruitful material to discuss, and is obviously one that’s quite important to me, but that whole first sequence absolutely mars the episode and singlehandedly consigns it to the rubbish portion of this season it otherwise could have marked the end of.…

Continue Reading

Sleep No More Review

90

This is solidly Gatiss’s best-ever Doctor Who story. It is in several regards outright brilliant, in a giddy and brave way that makes a perfect little quiet breath of an episode in the tradition of Love and Monsters or Blink, which it most obviously resembles. I’ve not, obviously, run the timing of it, but it certainly feels like a Doctor-lite episode, sharing their structural trick of treating a Doctor Who story as a defined thing happening inside another story. But where those stories put the Doctor into a very different sort of story, here he’s put into a found footage horror film. The result, very cleverly, is a story that gradually unravels into two separate stories, with the Doctor falling out of the narrative instead of slowly overtaking it.

This unraveling is by some margin the highlight of the episode, and is done with deft panache. Information is conveyed through the subtle shifts of the narrative rules, so that the found footage approach moves gradually and cleverly from being a gimmick to being the entire point of the episode. This is handled smartly on multiple levels, including Gatiss’s script, Justin Molotnikov’s direction, and Reece Shearsmith’s performance, which is a beautifully clever blend of familiar forms of Doctor Who acting that shifts cleverly with each twist. The final scene is particularly beautiful, with just the right amount of ecstatic thrill in his evil plan and clear relish in his transformation into dust. What a finish.

On top of that, many of the ideas here are genuinely great. I imagine Jack and Jane will both be over the moon with aspects of this. The leisure time destroyed by unchecked capitalist growth rises up and consumes us, our dreams taking revenge on us for our failure to attend to them. The dust is watching us, and the story it tells about us will kill us. I mean, these are just the sorts of sentences you live to write as an anarcho-Marxist occultist television critic, you know?

There are, however, two significant weaknesses. The first is, simply put, the irreducible flaws of Gatiss. Even when he, as he does here, has genuinely brilliant ideas, he’s rarely inclined to push them particularly far. Given a concept with all the metaphorical heft and conceptual possibility of sleep monsters, we really should have something more interesting than the smashy brutes that are the Sandmen. He doesn’t even go as far as indulging in the obvious grossness of literal snot monsters with people getting transformed into Sandmen and crumbling to dusty snot as they die or anything. Just smashing, and a bunch of kills in the form of “oh no one got in the room with you and we cut to black.”

Beyond that, he remains infuriatingly rubbish at giving his characters interesting arcs or things to do. The supporting cast makes that of Under the Lake/Before the Flood look like Osgood or Ashildir; they’re banal cannon fodder for corridor runs. Clara gets to trip and fall into a box.…

Continue Reading

The State of the Site: A Technical Update

2

Hello kind friends!

Anna the websquid here, with an update on the site. In short, we are aware of the various issues afflicting the site, and I’m working on them as fast as I can. This is a part-time gig on my part, so the amount of time I have to work on issues is limited. But we know the captchas suck, we know about the mobile formatting issues, we know pages are loading slow, we know about the 502s.

The best way to report site issues or complaints: check our issue tracker, and if you don’t see the issue there, you can send an email to websquid@eruditorumpress.com. (Alternately, if you’re the sort of person who githubs, feel free to open an issue directly on the issue tracker.)

Some technical notes, for the curious:

I’m currently prioritizing the latency/availability issues. Our current webhost is proving to be a bad fit for our needs in a number of ways, chief amongst them the difficulty in setting up meaningful monitoring metrics. As a result, we haven’t even been able to reliably identify where in the stack the latency issues are occurring, or whether the 502s are related to backend server latency. The 502s are being returned by hosting-service-provided Apache reverse proxy frontends, and our application server backend (running on gunicorn) doesn’t report any errors at all, except for the occasional “worker timeout” that doesn’t correlate with the periods in which the 502s spike. It’s a bad situation, and I’m digging us out of it. This will probably result in some brief downtime sometime this weekend while I migrate the site to a new hosting platform.

Once we have the major operational issues under control, I’ll turn my focus onto the most painful user-visible site bugs. They’re all on my radar, I just have limited cycles to spend.…

Continue Reading

Capitalist Pig 4: Black Mirror, Grey Miasma of Bland Cultural Commentary

17

There is a moment in the first episode of Black Mirror, in which, in the midst of conjuring the future that is now our pigfucking reality, a character mentions that the Guardian has posted a brief column about the cultural significance of the pig. The script does not specify whether it is by Jonathan Jones, but it’s safe to assume that it is. Call it a headcanon, as the kids say on social media.

It’s a soft jab, to be sure, not least because Brooker is himself a Guardian columnist, offering such gripping insights as an unfunny ripoff of Jack’s “Tricky Dicky” series and this shitty thing about a German project to build an adaptive AI to play Super Mario World in which Brooker blatanty brainstorms for the forthcoming-to-Netflix twelve-episode third season of Black Mirror while demonstrating a complete lack of interest in any sort of material understanding of the technology he’s decided to undertake as his journalistic beat. Or perhaps more accurately a loving jab; after all, part of the heady genius of “The National Anthem” is the sublime coherence of its premise. In short, it works because the choice of fucking a pig is tremendously clever.

Well, no, that’s too simple. It works because it constrains itself to the world it’s set in. It’s still built largely out of satirical absurdism, but it keeps its excesses carefully chosen and strangely modest, and then follows them to a logical end. Put another way, it’s about a man who fucks a pig, but it takes its pigfucking seriously, not just following the premise to its inevitable and squealing conclusion but appreciably far past it as mass spectacle turns to mass horror and finally the same banal political reality that presumably preceded it.

The problem, to be blunt, comes when Black Mirror embraces technology, which it does with tedious half-heartedness. The second season episode “Be Right Back” is illustrative. In one sense it shares all the glimmering high points of “The National Anthem.” Its casting is impeccable – Haley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson are as good a leading pair as any show has ever had. It’s gleefully high concept, revelling in rural gothic iconography and cod-Frankenstein moments. It’s emotional and clever and well-done. And literally the only thing it has to say about the world is “social media’s kind of artificial, isn’t it?”

There are two problems here. The first is that Black Mirror, and indeed Brooker’s work in general, is irksomely non-materialist in its approach to technology. The aforementioned Mario AI column is instructive. Here’s the actual paper that inspired the article. What quickly becomes apparent here is the extent to which all of the enthused talk about how the AI “experiences basic emotions, is compelled to act by urges such as “hunger” and “curiosity”, and is painfully aware that he only exists within a meaningless two-dimensional artificial framework from which he can never escape,” in fact all that’s happened is that the researchers have come up with clickbait-friendly ways to describe the process of solving Mario.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 142 143 144 145 ›»