Eruditorum Press

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Pain and Unconsciousness (Book Three, Part 61: Project Chanology)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Even as his relationship with DC and Time Warner deteriorated, Alan Moore supported his friend Steve Moore getting work novelizing the V for Vendetta and Watchmen films, in part because Steve Moore was supporting his ailing brother. In spite of this, DC abruptly cancelled the Watchmen novelization following a phone call between Moore and Gibbons.

“Engrams are a mental image picture containing pain and unconsciousness.” – Neil Gaiman, 1968 BBC interview

In response to this, Moore was incandescent, reasoning that this was “what that odd turn-of-phrase ‘quietly compliant’ was all about–that they expected me to be quietly compliant because I would have been thinking like them, and thinking ‘Oh, if I don’t do what they say they’ll take that job away from Steve.’  That had never even occurred to me.  I didn’t think that anyone could ever be that verminous. But, once I had thought that was probably what had happened, I immediately spoke to the people at DC. I told Karen Berger she could never call me again, and that I didn’t want anything to do with anybody at DC Comics. I was furiously angry and sickened at—at least what I’d perceived—had happened. I though that was completely unforgivable and subhuman.” He also took a moment aside at his wedding to Melinda Gebbie shortly after (which dates all of this to early 2007, a year or so after the release of V for Vendetta) to tell Dave Gibbons that he no longer wanted to discuss Watchmen with him at all.

Some time later, Gibbons—who Moore claims had not actually ever thanked him for the money as requested—called Moore to further discuss Watchmen. Specifically, Moore recounts, Gibbons relayed an offer from DC to return the rights to the book in exchange for Moore giving DC his blessing to do prequels and sequels. This, more than anything else in the story, is the bit that is difficult to quite make sense of. Did DC really see the rights to one of their most successful perennial sellers as worth giving up just for permission to do sequels and prequels—sequels and prequels they would eventually decide to do anyway? For that matter, what would the rights to Watchmen actually entail in this case? Clearly DC would retain a license to the characters, and it’s hard to believe they intended to let the original book go out of print, so what could they possibly have been offering Moore? 

Whatever the answer, Moore was thoroughly uninterested, angrily retorting, “No, no–I don’t want that to happen.  I don’t want these prequels and sequels to exist, and I certainly don’t want the rights to Watchmen back. DC has been abusing that book for a couple of decades. They presumably feel that it is no longer of much value to them, compared to the potential value of the sequels and prequels. So, they’re giving me back the spent carcass of a book that I was once very, very proud of.”…

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Erudite Waffles (1/28/23)

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Efforts to not feel impossibly behind on everything ever continue to flounder, and I’m starting this Thursday evening, so let’s see how much content we can create!

What I’m Up To

I finished “How to Be an Egg in the Age of Lilith Fair,” and it’s started going out to Patrons. Be on the site in a few weeks. So now I get a handful of days to look at fiction before the month rolls over and I have to figure out where my ten thousand paying words are coming from this time. 

You may notice a certain grind-hardened jadedness there.

Penn’s done layouts on the next scene of Britain a Prophecy, though I think now he has to bog down and do two big pieces of character design. 

Oh, and I went to New York and hung out with Lexi.

Obnoxious Vacation Recap

So yeah, Lexi’s usually Ithaca based, but is spending the first chunk of the year living in Brooklyn because she’s a big city girl at heart. The downside of this is that Penn and I don’t get to see our girlriend regularly. The upside is that when we do, we do it in Brooklyn. So we headed down on Friday. The Ithaca to New York drive is actually one of my absolute favorites—looping through the Poconos and then heading over the Delaware Water Gap is just gorgeous, and then you get the thrilling suspense of whether you get to suffer through the abject misery of the George Washington Bridge or the slightly different abject misery of beating your way through Manhattan. And it’s the perfect length to build what Penn and I refer to as my frog boil playlists, long multi-hour things that slide impishly among genres. Here’s the one we listened to, which moves slower than usual, preferring a sort of meta-frog boil structure that slides from the Lilith Fair stuff I’d been working on into harder stuff that’s closer to what Lexi listens to. Music as pretentious ritual and all. (Entertainingly, we brought Lexi our copy of Phonogram to borrow.)

So we got in late afternoon and started our trip with dinner, which was at Claro, a Mexican place in Gowanus we’d previously gone with Christine before my Neoreaction a Basilisk talk back in October. Within fine dining—a sphere in which I have numerous preferences on account of being a bougie cunt—I’m very partial to the more casual and relaxed style of fine dining. Which is to say that I’m always going to prefer a Brooklyn Michelin star to a Manhattan one, and this is firmly an established favorite now. 

Although in some ways the real highlight was the trip down, which we decided to take on foot in a spirit of psychogeography, and so had a nice two mile walk through Brooklyn to reflect on extremely pompous notions of cities as human-created gods and use the word “vibe” a lot. And then, at the end, there was food.

Christ, This Is Already Obnoxious, Can We Do a Tumblr Ask or Something?…

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The Devilish Nature of His Studies (Book Three, Part 60: The V for Vendetta Novelization)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: The Wachowskis oversaw a V for Vendetta film that heavily altered Moore’s story, making it into a Bush-era political allegory with a strong queer subtext. Moore wasn’t thrilled.

A man sits in silent contemplation of its dark secrets and exotic conjurations, his face lined and weary, aged by the devilish nature of his studies. – Steve Moore, Father Shandor: Demon Stalker

Amidst the merchandising generated by the film was a novelization of the movie script. This would usually be a banal bit of ephemera, but in the case of V for Vendetta it proved a curious and interesting detail of the overall event that was the movie by dint of the fact that it was written by Steve Moore. This immediately gave it a credibility and importance that movie novelizations generally lack, simply because it carried a tacit stamp of approval, or, at least, grudging tolerance from Alan Moore, without whose blessing there is no remotely plausible way that Steve Moore would have proceeded with the project. Moore’s assent was surely less about actually supporting the idea of a novel based on the script based on the disowned comic he’d written fifteen years ago than about supporting his best friend getting some money, but the fact remains that Steve Moore’s involvement meant that the novel served, at least in part, as Moore’s camp getting to put its own spin on the Wachowskis’ adaptation.

Those looking for scandal or for a “correction” to the Wachowskis’ version of the story will be largely disappointed. Save for one moment in which he impishly flags a major plot hole in the script by having Finch notice that the claim that the experiments on V were to produce the virus that Norsefire used to rise to power made no chronological sense (almost certainly what Alan Moore was talking about when he described “plot holes you couldn’t have got away with in Whizzer And Chips” given that he later noted that his friend had “done such a brilliant job on the novelization of the V for Vendetta film—even fixing a plot hole in the original screenplay for them”) and conclude that V’s account can’t be entirely honest, the novel is largely a faithful and straightforward adaptation of the film script, written in a breezy and direct prose style that reads fast and with clarity, working with an omniscient narrator who flits easily among viewpoint characters. If anything, it’s fair to criticize the novel for holding too closely to the at times drab liberalism of the Wachowskis’ vision—passages like one that describes Gordon’s satirical attacks on Chancellor Sutler as “satirical antics that, in many ways, were just as damaging to the powers that be” as V’s manifestos. 

Still, there are clear moments where he puts his own spin on events. This is clear from the beginning—after opening with the evocative and scene-painting fragment, “A strange, shadowy room, somewhere deep beneath the streets of London,” Moore continues with a bit of historical context that’s utterly absent from the film, which spends a couple minutes informing its presumed American audience who Guy Fawkes is but makes no effort to speak of “old, old London that had seen so much, in two thousand years of war and terror and despair.…

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Bug Report 6

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I chew a hunk of limestone and drench my body in wasp venom. The journey begins afresh. No time to read the rules, Cupcake. No time to go moisturizing a Seventh-Day Adventist. Just turn and walk through that forest of KFC drinking straws.

A night later, I lie next to a fragrant postman and tell him my dreams. We are deeply attracted to each other, and will soon do what others think impossible.

A three-foot tarantula erupts into our space, but we remain undistracted, coats of cobalt blue sleet blasting our minds into Latvian pudding. This is passion. Next comes a dinosaur skeleton, loud as a kindergarten barbecue disaster. It croaks a raspy shush, and the walls of the sun close in. But we revel undeterred in a bound body of stupidly real persimmon molasses.

I’m happy to serve you. You’re a veteran. You have a thing for plants and Cool Ranch lipstick. You know CPR, and that’s gonna come in handy.

I was there when you tried cauterizing those cows, every artery and sac. A septic disaster. But you were cute. I stood like a deity in the Sporting Goods section, caressing imperial-grade photos of forbidden Volvos. They had names like Bad Violinist and Veal Detonator—names that would sink whole economies.

Now a dance team gathers around you, drunk on falcon feathers. The stadium lights explode in cascades of swollen runes. My pancreas catches fire: a sympathy rupture, they call it. I cough up ancient lambs’ eyes. The radiance blinds me from within. There’s no escape. Every cloud is jackfruit when you look from above.

You are handed what they call The Million Dollar Questionnaire:

• Why do you glisten with golf lubricant?
• Are your tools cut from cold iron or hot lard?
• When did you suddenly wake as an old man, with a long white beard?
• How many times a day do you scream Mother, why was I born like this?
• Where is the stingray?

The teacher collects your paper and sighs at your answers. Her name is Laura Ingalls Wilder and her personal motto is: if you never liked me, don’t go to the funeral.

She feeds me saltines and I eat them. Waiter! These crackers are begging for a cauldron of shark stew! My hips become caterpillars. It’s time for another operation! Take your hands off me, Laura Ingalls Wilder! Why do you undulate squidlike into a pulsing lighthouse of cyberflesh? Not you too!

I reach for the knife. This is going to be great. My thighs melt clean off their femurs. Yogurt is splattered on the ceiling. Nobody knows where the door went. It’s just a gaping nostril in the wall. Echoing in the distance are the ecstatic screams of gorillas conquering a Wal-Mart.

And finally, the mailman and I fall asleep under the gutless night. The dreams are always about lung tissue, rubes in Kansas stockpiling it like 1998. The Beanie Baby craze all over again. Grease up, Jody. We’re hitting Forktown.…

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Erudite Waffles (1/21/23)

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Hello from sunny Brooklyn, where Penn and I are spending the weekend with Lexi being decadent and sexy queers. I’ll probably just post a vacation update in next week’s newsletter, because I like being a decadent and sexy queer. This one, meanwhile, will be brief because it’s been

What I’m Up To

an absolute clusterfuck of a week, frankly, though that’s mostly because we rearranged an entire floor of the house to change my office space and give Penn some studio space because he’s started playing with noise music. That already screwed up my posting of last week’s Last War in Albion, which is a real pity because it’s one of my absolute favorite posts from Book Three.

But yeah, I basically didn’t get to start work work until Tuesday, which led to some alarmed looks at the schedule and how much Last War in Albion I could realistically write this month. Thankfully that “How to Be an Egg in the Age of Lilith Fair” project came through when I needed it, and looks like it’ll be good for about three Patreon posts this month—the annotations, as of Thursday morning when I’m locking this in so I can queue it, are at 4600 words with seven more songs to write about, so look for that on Patreon next week or so. We’ll see—I might take the annotations and then take one more swing at the playlist, because I feel like I’m underrepresenting the cultural object itself. 

In Britain a Prophecy news, Penn just sent a four page scene to Nechama. Let’s see if I have anything I can run as a preview of that. Yeah, here, this is utterly spoiler-free and just a nice pair of Taz images. 

I still have to break down the last seven pages of issue seven, but that wasn’t this week, just like a ton of newsletter isn’t going to be this week. In fact, all I’ve really got is

Tumblr Ask-O-Rama

Thoughts on Davies’ upcoming tenure as showrunner? Do you think he’s given Moffat a call?

At this point in my life and career I know enough people on the periphery of Doctor Who production that I hear things, and so I’m just gonna blanket decline to speculate on rumors.

But in the general case, I expect the show will be really good under Davies. It certainly was the first time. I’m excited to come back to Davies in my 40s and trans. 

Yeah, I have concerns about the lack of forward motion. Every year the bulk of Doctor Who remains under the control of Wilderness Years pro-fandom is broadly speaking bad for it—and I apply that judgment to the licenses, the show, everything. But also, the Chibnall era was clearly also bad for it, and in a much more acute crisis sort of way. I’m confident in Davies’s ability to right the ship and deliver a hit, which is almost certainly more important right now. 

But look, the guy who just did It’s a Sin wants to come write Doctor Who because he thinks he has some good, new ideas for it.…

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Pop Could Never Save Us – 01R

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The popcast, which we proudly introduced you to last week in its usual modern form, returns for its first time-bending trip into the Victorian cyberpunk HG Wells time machine for a look back in the charts in 1959. Holly has done an incredible and extraordinary job putting a unique listening experience together and it’s our pleasure to invite you to come hang out and take a look back at a period which has both great music and context to add to the era we’re enduring.

You can find us on iTunes, Spotify, and anchor.fm and you can still find that first, 2023 based episode (where we analyse the modern charts) which people have been very kind about. Jump on it!

We are @jameslatrmurphy and @fireh9lly on twitter. …

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By Understanding Her (Book Three, Part 59: V for Vendetta as Trans Cinema

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Previously in Last War in Albion: After a decade and change in development hell a film version of V for Vendetta was made in 2006, with a screenplay by the Wachowskis, fresh off the success of the Matrix trilogy. Moore, however, was aggrieved at producer Joel Silver’s false statements about his enthusiasm for the project, and went on the warpath.

The pang was hers, and my pang was mine, but I recognized they were a similar species. By understanding her, I felt seen. I saw myself.” -Kieron Gillen, “Colossus”

Moore even complained about the depiction of British culture, fixating on a scene in which Evey is being served breakfast, complaining that “They don’t know what British people have for breakfast, they couldn’t be bothered. ‘Eggy in a basket’ apparently. Now the US have ‘eggs in a basket,’ which is fried bread with a fried egg in a hole in the middle. I guess they thought we must eat that as well, and thought ‘eggy in a basket’ was a quaint and Olde Worlde version.” 

There’s a clear sense that Moore made his mind up about the film after Silver’s comments and that anything and everything that followed was simply more proof of what he’d already decided. Certainly that’s the easiest explanation for his outrage over the clearly minor “eggy in a basket.” And it is true that the film greatly simplifies the moral complexity that Moore tried to paint—V is a straightforwardly cherished freedom fighter, described by Evey in a fawning voiceover at the beginning and end of the film, culminating in her declaration that “No one will ever forget that night and what it meant for this country, but I will never forget the man and what he meant for me,” a piece of dialogue that seems far worse than much of what Moore complained about. 

Indeed, Evey is poorly served by the film in general, though the reasons why are largely ironic. The Wachowskis make the decision to give her much more agency—she’s hostile to the Norsefire regime from the start, and instead of starting as a desperate teenager who turns to sex work only to be busted by the cops she’s a career woman at the Mouth on her way to a date with a popular comedian. This is all very textbook screenwriting stuff—she’s the viewpoint character so, within orthodox theories of how movies are supposed to work, needs to be more than the meek little girl that Moore’s Evey begins as, and certainly not a prospective sex worker. The problem comes when it becomes time for her to leave V, a plot beat that is recast from being something V does to her to being of her own choosing after she attempts to betray V by warning Bishop Lilliman. From here her story proceeds similarly, with her hiding out with a man named Gordon (now the comedian she was going on a date with) and then being captured by V. This, however, significantly changes the subsequent tenor of her imprisonment and reading of the Valerie letter, and has the result of badly weakening her rooftop apotheosis when V reveals the deception.…

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Jack / IDSG Roundup

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Hey all, Jack here with some catch-up. Sorry I haven’t been posting here. Pure forgetfulness. Plus I’ve had a bit of a rough time these last few months. Thanks to El for helping me get through it.

So, since we last spoke, IDSG has released:

A bonus in which we hang out and chat with our friend Eiynah from Polite Conversations

An episode about Daryl Brooks and the ways the Right have weaponised him

A bonus in which Daniel and I chat about the death of the Queen

An episode in which Daniel tells me about the various ways the Right have reacted to the Ye situation

An episode in which Holly comes on to tell me and Daniel all about Ye

An episode in which I chat with journalist Annika Brockschmidt about the Reichsburger Coup attempt in Germany

An episode in which guest Sophie from Mars of YouTube comes on to talk about Caleb Maupin and the ‘Conspiracy Left’

A backer-only bonus episode in which Daniel and I chat about the Basic Instinct movies

And an episode in which Eric from ESG Hound talks with Daniel about Elon Musk and Twitter

In other news, I have started a Substack in order to curate tweaked versions of some of my old stuff that I like.

Oh, and IDSG is now on YouTube. I’m gradually uploading the back catalogue. Please like and subscribe, etc.

Love to you all.

J.

…

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Erudite Waffles (1/14/23)

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AI-generated art of a hand with too many fingers, and in the wrong places.

Another week, another whatever the fuck this is.

What I’ve Been Up To

Well, let’s start with the bad news: a communications disaster with the copyeditor on TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 8 means that I currently have a freshly edited manuscript for the already published TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7, no edits whatsoever on Volume 8, and a several month delay to that book. This is obviously very frustrating, and I apologize to everyone who’s looking forward to it.

Right. Onto better news. I finished reading Sandman: Book of Dreams, the 1996 short story collection co-edited by Neil Gaiman and some guy named Ed Kramer that I’ll need to Google in a second, but who I’m sure will turn out to be a perfectly upstanding gentleman whose involvement in the project doesn’t instantly derail all other conversation about it. Except, of course, the essay went out for Patrons yesterday, and you can read all about it yourself. Queuing this up on Friday morning, but I expect today will be spent looking at Storm Constantine’s Wraeththu or possibly reading some G.K. Chesterton. Or maybe REDACTED (because I want to keep that surprise for Patrons).

I approved Penn’s pencils on the next four pages of Britain a Prophecy #5, and he’s at work on inks. I also have a few annotations written for How to be an Egg in the Age of the Lilith Fair, so the odds on that happening continue to increase.

I also got some very promising news about a possible work for hire gig. 

The Obligatory Rant About AI Art

I saw a tweet the other day from someone talking about how one of their regular writing gigs had informed them that their services wouldn’t be needed anymore, as the website would be using AI to write articles in the future, though they could be offered a reduced rate editing and cleaning up the AI articles. This was presented as some grave existential horror about the threat of AI, whereas I admit my reaction was “well, that website will be out of business soon.”

Which is to say that I’ve found myself very unimpressed with the discourse over AI art. Obviously the AI art utopians, with their idiot speeches about making art accessible to anyone (working class art famously taking until the 21st century to exist) can simply be fired into the sun without further comment. But I also have precious little time for the “but copyright” crowd, being as I’m a middle aged Internet grump who has been arguing against the basic idea of copyright for literally more than half my life. (Here’s Neoreaction a Basilisk on libgen, btw!)

Anyway, all of this seems to me to spectacularly miss the actual problem with AI art, which is that it represents the accelerating replacement of art with content. Because the plain fact of the matter is that AI art sucks, and it sucks in ways that come down to extremely persistent hard problems in artificial intelligence that absolutely nobody has made any meaningful progress on in decades, the crux of these being that they blatantly lack any intentionality.…

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