Eruditorum Press

Pounded in the butt by dialectical materialism.

Ordinary Torture (Book Three, Part 66: The CIA)

, , 2

Figure 1657

Content warning: Images of physical mutilation

Previously in Last War in Albion: Joyce Brabner, after getting into the world of comics by becoming a major figure in Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical comic American Splendor (and marrying Pekar in the process), is contacted by the Christic Institute, run by Daniel Sheehan, a lawyer who came to prominence during the Karen Silkwood case.

You’re tuning it out. I can see your ocular focus shifting. You’ve been trained to handle interrogation, in a very specific way. I bet you can even bypass ordinary torture. And none of these people picked it u. Because DHS is formed out of sixteen domestic agencies. And you’re from the Central Intelligence Agency. – Warren Ellis, Jack Cross

Silkwood’s family ultimately sued Kerr-McGee for negligence in the original plutonium poisoning, successfully recovering $1.38 million dollars in a settlement; Sheehan was among the attorneys in the case, and founded the institute in the wake of their success to pursue similar cases, using civil suits to right wrongs that the criminal justice system had proved inadequate for.

This was often a successful strategy—in one of their early cases, for instance, the Institute represented survivors of the Greensboro massacre, in which white supremacists shot and killed five participants in a “Death to the Klan” rally. State and federal prosecutions failed to secure any convictions, and so the Christic Institute led a successful civil suit to secure justice. But it is important to stress the degree to which the Christic Institute’s strategy was also one of public relations. Sheehan was always, in part, a legal impresario, and one who was prone to making sure he was prominently centered in stories about the group. This meant that the Institute could often be a blunt instrument; one media article about it quotes the leader of another public interest group as saying that “Danny Sheehan is to investigating what a depth charge is to sports fishing.” This bluntness would ultimately have significant consequences.

In 1984, the Institute represented Stacey Lynn Merkt, who had been arrested transporting refugees from El Salvador on behalf of the Catholic American Sanctuary Movement. In the course of working this case, Sheehan was visited by multiple religious leaders who repeated claims passed by unnamed government officials that the Sanctuary Movement was in fact smuggling known terrorists into the country. Perturbed by this dedicated misinformation campaign, the Institute began investigating their source, and soon found itself investigating the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Central Intelligence Agency was formed in 1947, in the aftermath of World War II. During the War the US had set up the Office of Strategic Services, its first effort at an intelligence agency. At its head was General “Wild Bill” Donovan, who quickly developed a taste for extravagant covert operations, dropping agents behind enemy lines to commit sabotage or exploring complicated gadgets and tactics—at one point he was investigating how to use bats as a bomb delivery system. In late 1944, Donovan wrote to Franklin Roosevelt arguing for the establishment of a permanent intelligence service.…

Continue Reading

The Firemen’s Ball (An American’s Guide to Czech Movies)

, , , , , 1

Miloš Forman is best known in the Anglophone world for his crowd-pleasing (if delightfully truculent) blockbusters One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus. Both relate the life stories of iconoclastic eccentrics who burn like a barn fire, disrupting the higher powers, and then die in obscurity.  Neither film exactly suggests that Forman was a politically dissident Czech Jewish child of Holocaust victims and whose initial films were banned by the Soviet authorities in Czechoslovakia before he resettled in the United States to become a filmmaker.

Yet this is the key to Forman’s anarchic spirit. His American studio films reflect his impish proclivities and emigration from an authoritarian government. Nobody sells outsider artists quite like Forman does. Yet his most countercultural and rebellious work hails from the first part of his career, when he was a pioneer of the Czechoslovak New Wave of filmmaking, a movement where Czechs and Slovaks used the medium of film to flip the bird at the Kremlin.

In the days before the Prague Spring, when the Czechoslovakians faced the possibility of democratic reforms, and the days following the Warsaw Pact invasion of the country, which quelled those hopes, some filmmakers pioneered a mode of filmmaking that viciously but furtively blasted the structure of Soviet authority. When the Czechs and Slovaks fell behind the Iron Curtain, those modes became stronger than ever.

So Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball is different from Cuckoo’s Nest or Amadeus. It lacks a countercultural protagonist with reckless countercultural tendencies hat results in his early death. Indeed, The Firemen’s Ball doesn’t have a protagonist, instead depicting a cast of Bohemian firemen driving to host a ball which their bureaucratic whims repeatedly thwart. They’re not exactly the kind of frigid authoritarians who’d be villains in Forman’s later work. The firemen — many of whom are played by real Czech firemen with no acting experience — are incompetent rather than malicious, attempting to honor their chairman who, unknown to him because of Soviet medical policy, has cancer. Yet instead of centering the ball around him, they try to protect a series of prizes which are stolen from them. At the start of the film, two firemen argue over whether to hold a latter in place while a man at the top of the ladder accidentally sets a banner on fire. This is revisited later in the film when the firemen are too late to save an old man’s house from burning down because they’re trying to save his prizes. These aren’t cartoon villains — they’re a much worse threat: bureaucratic oafs whose fixation on micromanaging non-issues in an extremely small space fucks everything up.

It’s hard to fathom why the Soviet Union had a problem with a film about incompetent bureaucrats failing to feed civilians. Yet after the Warsaw Powers invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Soviet authorities banned the film forever, which is difficult to fathom when a crucial moment features a panicked old man throwing a stolen ham onto a table and then fainting in front of a crowd.…

Continue Reading

An American’s guide to Czech literature & film

, , 6

I’ve spent the past several months researching my genealogy, primarily focusing on my Czech ancestry. To say it’s been an ordeal would be an understatement —  Czech-Americans don’t have WASP’s advantage of having their history accessibly documented (though they have a better shot at it than Black and Indigenous people in this country). To piece together my family history, I’ve read hundreds of pages of records, written more notes than I can hope to organize, and started to learning Czech, a language so complex that even other Slavic dialects want it to calm down.

While that may sound like an arduous exercise in self-torment, it’s been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. All of my recent writing has been shaped by my genealogy research in some way. Most notably, I wrote about it for The Statesman, Stony Brook University’s undergrad newspaper for which I am Opinions Editor, using Castle Garden in the Battery to discuss my second great-grandmother’s immigration journey. But there’s potentially hundreds of pages worth of material in my research, similarly to how Jack Graham made a whole Austrian economics beat out of his Neoreaction a Basilisk contributions. Eventually I plan to turn this project into a book (and you should really back my Patreon so I can eventually afford a research trip to the Czech Republic).

One of the byproducts of this research has been absorbing a ghastly amount of Czech cultural history. Consider this a holistic genealogist agency where unpacking a family history requires dissecting the world around it. Since many of my ancestors were farmers in rural South Bohemia, I’ve learned more Czech history than biographical details of Grandma Stazi’s life. This whole project is an absurd transatlantic psychogeography which I have no hope of selling to a general audience, and it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever done.

So while I prepare to write my eventual weird genealogy book, I figured I should turn my research to good use (i.e. monetization). One of the great joys of Czechophilia is the breadth of extraordinary Czech art. The cultural output of the Czech lands is often surrealist and detached in character, reflecting a culture fragmented by everyone from the Nazis to the U.S.S.R. It’s haunted, playful, creepy, and some of my favorite art in the world — perfect for an essay series with a vague sense of thematic unification.

For now, I’ll be focusing on Czech literature and cinema. Both have enough major works that I can paint a general picture without overwhelming myself. I don’t know how many entries this series will have — it probably depends on how much my readers like it. Most likely, I’ll be hewing to one book per author, hoping to represent distinct moments in Czech history. 

Part of this is the relative underrepresentation of Czech literature in the literary canon. Franz Kafka is one of the only major Czech writers who readers already know, so I’m somewhat (if not entirely) disinclined to include him in this series (that and Kafka’s works being in German gives them a flavor distinct from some of these other writers).…

Continue Reading

An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy Ebook

0

FuBNG8UWYAM-FxM copy

I’m pleased to announce the release of the first volume of a new Patreon-exclusive ebook series Apocrypha Eruditorum, which will collect some of my essay series and writings that don’t and are unlikely to have a home in any other release. This inaugural volume collects my series An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy, which covers the movies in the Star Wars Saga, along with essays on some other films by Rian Johnson, and it’s available right now to all $10+ Patrons, who also have been getting things like my reviews of the second and third John Wick movies, Portal, and Portal 2 and should get four more pages of Britain a Prophecy sometime this weekend.

(Yes, that’s the actual cover. I’m extremely proud of it, though I should note that the actual photo was kindly provided by Peppa Bridger when I asked for something like it on Twitter.)

“But wait,” you may be asking yourself, “didn’t that series only ever get eight installments?” Well, that was true once, but now I’ve finally written the concluding essay on The Rise of Skywalker just so I can put this out. And it’s available to all my Patrons, not just ones at the $10+ level.

To give an update on the Patreon, at the time of writing it’s at $2,161, which is still nearly $1500 down from what I was making in March. So that’s not great. What I’d like to do, in the short term at least, is target $2700, which is the point at which it will at least cover my family’s rent. We’ve traditionally paid that every month with the Patreon, and so having the Patreon below that number is genuinely alarming. $2700 is still a pretty painful loss compared to before all this went down, but it’s at least manageable; I can make it at that level for half a year and then do a round of fundraising off the fact that my Doctor Who reviews are going to be Patreon-exclusive. But there’s still a ways to go between now and that level.

So please, if you haven’t backed the Patreon yet, get on that. $5 gets you all my publicly released ebooks and all my new writing. And if you have backed it, have you considered upping your pledge? I’ve already noted what the $10 tier gets you, but there’s gonna be something pretty fun coming for the $25 Patrons around… ooh… May 3rd? I think May 3rd. And even if you can’t back it or have hit the most you can afford to spend, please at least consider spreading the Patreon link around. I’ve got no advertising budget or anything; I depend on word of mouth and reputation. So whatever it is of mine that you like, please tell people, and tell them how they can help me afford to keep doing it.…

Continue Reading

Sunburn Tatters (Book Three, Part 65: American Splendor)

, 1

1651

Last War in Albion is produced with the support of my Patrons. My Patreon is currently in some trouble after a Patreon-mandated start from scratch to switch to per month billing, and is currently below the level of our monthly rent, which my family has historically relied on my Patreon to pay. If you enjoy my work, please consider supporting it.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore contributed a story to Joyce Brabner’s Real War Stories project. Brabner got into comics, as she tells it, by appearing in one—specifically Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor.

Only the gutter margins where the strata peeled back into sunburn tatters gave away the lawyers of human time compressed below, ring markings on the long-felled cement tree-stump of the Boroughs. – Alan Moore, Jerusalem

American Splendor gradually evolved from the meandering anecdotal form into more long form and piercing accounts of Pekar and his life. Many of the stories were simply several page accounts of conversations Pekar had with various people in Cleveland, while others offered more piercing accounts of Pekar, his anxiety, stubbornness, and sense of himself. A story in American Splendor #3 entitled “Awakening to the Terror of a New Day,” for instance, starts with Pekar on the phone with his ex-wife, trying to get back together, only to be rebuffed, at which point he loses his temper at her and is castigated for it, concluding that “I shouldna lost my temper. That’s one reason chicks don’t dig me. They’re scared a’ me.” He lays down in bed, wakes up anxious, masturbates, and is left feeling hollow and empty inside. He takes a bath, reflecting on his job, and how he doesn’t want to get out of the tub. “Sometimes I wish I could freak out,” he thinks, “have a nervous breakdown, anything to get away from the same routine.” Instead he rises from the tub, gets dressed, grouching about how his clothes are tattered but how he doesn’t want to spend money on new ones because “what could be more ridiculous than fat slobs spendin’ a lot a’ money on clothes. They’re gonna look lousy anyway.” He has breakfast, leaves for work, and decides on the walk that he should take the civic service exam and look for a government job. The comic ends with him sitting at the bus stop, resolving that “I gotta take the days one at a time… make a plan an’ try t’ follow it out. I might be able t’ make it if I get my ass in gear. I’ll check out the gover’mint gig scene an’ think over where I stand with th’ chicks I know. Mybe I’m overlooking someone. T’day’s Thursday. Tomorra’s Firday. Saturday I c’n sleep late.” A final caption notes that “Man looks wherever he can for hope,” and the strip ends. It’s elliptical, willfully unsatisfying, but more than anything is simply a poignant reflection on working class life in Cleveland in the 1970s.

Pekar’s work drew a number of admirers, although the comic remained a niche operation that ran at a steady but sustainable loss.…

Continue Reading

About Time 4.1 (And Other Reviews)

0

About-Time-4_2_1-Cover_web-scaled

So, first of all, thanks to everyone who joined my Patreon after my somewhat desperate Saturday appeal. We’ve still got a long way to go before this upheaval isn’t a major financial stress, so expect me to bang on about it for a while more, but the weekend was still a big relief.

To that end, I want to highlight a specific tier: the $10 a month tier, which gets you not only all my ebooks, Britain a Prophecy, and any new writing that isn’t intended for a specific venue, it gets you Britain a Prophecy serialized scene by scene as Penn and Nechama finish them, an exclusive set of ebooks called Apocrypha Eruditorum, more about which in a few weeks, and a log of all the media I watch, with reviews of a lot of it. I just posted one yesterday, which included a retrospective on Partners in Crime and a review of John Wick.

But one of the things I read last week was provided as a review copy, and it feels unfair to gate that review for Patrons. So here’s a sample of the sort of thing you can expect in the form of a review of the latest volume of About Time, Tat Wood’s exhaustive series of Doctor Who criticism.

About Time Volume 4.1: 1975-77

New volumes of Tat Woods’s astonishing About Time series are always intensely welcome events. In this case what we have is the first half of a revised version of Volume 4, which originally covered the Hinchcliffe and Williams eras in a single volume coauthored by Lawrence Miles that offered by far the scantest coverage of the series. Now we have the first half of a diptych, splitting Hinchcliffe and Williams into separate volumes and diving in with the kind of exhaustive hyper-detail that has characterized the series since Miles’s departure from it.

On one level, this is a small problem to have. Yes, About Time is marketing to a niche of obsessive fans—one that I’m obviously in having written what remains the only real Doctor Who criticism that you’d mention in the same breath as it. This is a staggeringly impressive book, full of rich detail and fascinating arguments. For the sort of obsessive Doctor Who fan it’s aimed at, it remains irreplaceable. I’d have much rather had it by my side than the original edition when writing the relevant era of TARDIS Eruditorum.

But that’s a literally unique use case, and for most use cases it’s hard not to feel like this edition is simply too much book. Certainly when one looks at the price tag—$40, twice the original edition, with Volume 4.2 slated to release in June for $45, ultimately more than quadruple the price. An expansion was certainly warranted—the original volume’s 328 pages are clearly too scant to do justice to six seasons of Doctor Who in the About Time attempts. But the new edition’s 864 pages and $85 price tag are equally clearly simply too much.…

Continue Reading

A Somewhat Urgent Plea for Support

0

doctor_who_spyfall_cropped-1

So, last week I was forced to launch a new Patreon because Patreon refused to allow me to change my existing one over to monthly billing instead of the per-post grind I’d been on since 2014. Since doing that, however, I’ve faced a $2000 a month drop in income. This isn’t strictly speaking a surprise—obviously you expect to lose some people when you have to sign up for a new paying service to replace the old one. But it’s a lot more dropoff than I’d been expecting, and frankly has blown an absolutely terrifying hole in our monthly budgeting. So I’m just going with an open plea here: if you have ever liked my work and generally thought “El deserves to be able to have food and housing while writing the stuff she writes,” now is the time to support it directly. Just $5 gets you all my ebooks, all the issues of Britain a Prophecy, and the whole of the Jodie Whittaker TARDIS Eruditorum to date.

Including, notably, “I Thought It Would Hurt Me, And I Was Right (Spyfall),” my essay on the Series 12 premiere.

$10, meanwhile, gets you a weekly roundup of my media consumption with reviews, which this week is going to inlcude a retrospective on Partners in Crime along with a review of John Wick. But we’ll talk about that on Monday, when I hold back the next part of LWIA to post a review to this site……

Continue Reading

Fantasy Means Almost Nothing (Book Three, Part 64: Real War Stories)

, 0

Figure 1642

Before we get started, an update: my new Patreon, which I had to start from scratch after Patreon informed me that it was not possible to simply convert my Patreon of nine years over to per-month billing, is still $2400 a month short of the old one, which is an absolutely terrifying hit to my income. This new Patreon gives you more content—all my ebooks, Britain a Prophecy, and more—for less money than the old one, and if you want my work to continue I really implore you to support it.

Especially because, as of a few minutes ago, all Patrons got access to a pre-release ebook of Last War in Albion Volume 3, featuring this amazing cover.

So if you’re not currently a supporter of my work on Patreon, please do consider changing that.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Having finished his outstanding obligations to DC and free at last to pursue his own interests, Alan Moore moved on to other things.

There are things that happen out on the most violent edge of human experience that eclipse fiction by their sheer intensity – that you simply could not ever invent. The many accounts I’ve read of human experience in wartime reveal degrees of courage, cruelty, cowardice and even kindness that are beyond imagination. Next to that, fantasy means almost nothing. – Garth Ennis, interview with Unwinnable

One of the first of these things would see Alan Moore make his final trip to the United States in October of 1987, a few months after the publication of Watchmen #12. Although he was still a couple of months away from finishing his work on V for Vendetta, he did not visit the DC offices at all. Instead he went to Washington DC, where he met with members of a law firm called the Chrsitic Institute and with the American comics writer Joyce Brabner.

Moore had already worked with Brabner before on a volume called Real War Stories, published by Eclipse Comics the same month that Watchmen and Swamp Thing concluded. This was a comic produced with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, which, as Brabner explained it, “needed a tool to reach teenagers with information about the military. This was during the peacetime draft, when they were looking for smart white kids to sign up, and they had a very aggressive recruiting campaign around the time Top Gun was in the theatres.” The CCCO had originally envisioned and had the budget for a small indie book, but Brabner successfully argued that in order to have any impact on its intended audience “it had to be a color book with popular artists and writers if we were going to get the kids,” and so she worked with Eclipse Comics to bring the project to fruition. Moore’s explanation for his interest in the project, printed (along with similar statements from other contributors) at the outset of the comic, was simple: “Because I have a deep aversion to all forms of violence and war, and if I have to explain, I must fall back on the pacifist slogan that says ‘A bayonet is an instrument with a worker on either end of it.’”…

Continue Reading

A Major Update Regarding My Patreon

1

IMG_8990

Hi folks. I’m going to start with the big headline announcement, and then get into the myriad of details and obvious questions. But, basically, both of my existing Patreons, the one for criticism, and the one for Britain a Prophecy, are shutting down, and instead I have a brand new single Patreon that will cover all of my projects at a flat monthly rate. You can find that Patreon at the same url as my old criticism one, https://www.patreon.com/elizabethsandifer. If you backed either of my previous Patreons, you should be able to get a significantly improved set of rewards for roughly the same amount a month that you were paying before. (Note that if you were backing my criticism one, the number will be 5x whatever you were doing per post, because I always did five posts per month.)

It would mean a lot to my short term financial stability if you would go back that Patreon, because doing this means abruptly nuking roughly $4000 a month in income across both projects and if I don’t get the new Patreon up to that level quickly then I’m going to immediately be in serious trouble.

You might fairly ask why I’m doing this, given that fact. The answer is multi-faceted. My longrunning Patreon for this site has always been a per-creation deal. That was because I created it in August 2014 to fund reviews of Peter Capaldi’s first season, and I’ve been locked into that ever since, churning out five posts a month every month for years. That’s been awkward for years, but in the last six months it’s become unmanageable as I transition to doing more fiction work. I really, really need to be on a “bill monthly” style of Patreon for my mental and physical health. Unfortunately, because Patreon is, technologically speaking, a steaming pile of garbage that survives mainly by dint of not having any direct competitors, it turns out to be impossible to convert a per-post Patreon into a monthly one. My only option was to start a new Patreon. So here I am, abruptly starting my Patreon from scratch despite the fact that my ability to eat and pay rent is dependent on it.

So here’s how things work on the new Patreon. The basic entry-level tier is $5 a month. That’s equivalent to the old $1 per post tier, and will get you all of the writing I do that isn’t for another venue. So, like, I’m not going to post those two REDACTED that I have coming out with REDACTED to it because I don’t own those, but any essays or short fiction I write? $5 a month. If I decide to go review every Cure album in another baroque effort to flirt with Lexi? $5 a month. And I’ll be posting at least one new TARDIS Eruditorum essay to the Patreon every month.

The $5 tier also includes all of Britain a Prophecy, which was previously a separate $5 a month pledge.…

Continue Reading

Trans visibility at Ezra Furman’s Brooklyn concert

, , , , 0

Williamsburg is a hodge-podge of different eras in Brooklyn’s history. Its upscale apartments reflect post-2005 gentrification. Its bodegas and food joints evoke the era when new Italian immigrants and Mafia soldiers lived in the neighborhood. And its queer artsiness is still highly visible.

When I arrived at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Thursday, March 23rd, I fell into line with a bunch of flamboyant queers. One of the first people in line was a trans woman. Plenty of folks were wearing leather. One gal was talking loudly about her girlfriend. This was definitely a Williamsburg crowd.

Equally, it was an Ezra Furman crowd. I first discovered Jewish trans singer-songwriter Furman a few years ago when a friend showed me Transangelic Exodus, Furman’s concept album about a queer person and their guardian angel fleeing an authoritarian government. Clearly this was extremely my shit, and I fell in love with the album, but for the longest time I failed to hear Furman’s other stuff (a mistake I still hadn’t rectified when I got to Williamsburg).

I wasn’t in the best of moods that night. It wasn’t the first time I’d been to Williamsburg while mourning a turn of events — that neighborhood has some weird associations for me. It’s not my favorite part of Brooklyn, which is probably BedStuy, nor is it my least favorite (Bushwick exists). But it was familiar enough to be comforting.

Lately I’ve been in an emotional downturn. I’ve felt isolated and abandoned in my personal life. My country is slowly orchestrating a legislative genocide against me. And I don’t belong where I am. It’s hard to be visible. Most of the time I feel invisible. Feeling seen when you’re dissociated and grieving feels as paradoxical as feeling loved as a trans person in America. 

Yet that night I felt love in Williamsburg. This was a crowd I belonged to — queer and decadent. The support act, Jeffrey Lewis, wasn’t quite my scene, but he wasn’t unhelpful. But when Furman herself came onstage, I felt like I was watching a trans priestess administer a ritual to heal every person in the room.

Furman, an up-and-coming Rabbi, is profoundly spiritual not just in her writing but in her performing style. The way she strives around onstage feels like nothing short of prayer — a cry to Adonai for help, yet a call of surrender. The way she lovingly caressed amplifiers is a kind of musical tenderness I’ve never seen onstage.

It was healing. It was thrilling. By the end of the night my ear drums were busted but it was worth it. When Furman broke into her classic glam hit “Suck the Blood from My Wound,” I hopped up and released an adolescent scream which I hadn’t heard from myself in about 15 years. One of the venue employees seemed both alarmed and charmed by my display.

More than a week later, I feel invisible again. But for just one night, I belonged to a community. A great trans Rabbi, Ezra Furman, helped me find God in my gender for just one night.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 14 15 16 17 ›»