Eruditorum Press

Siding with bugs is praxis

Breakfast Blog Closing Imminently, Replaced By Craven Capitalist Consumption (A Prequel)

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I’ll admit it, I’m properly excited.

I liked where Doctor Who was going at the end of the Matt Smith era, even if I was at moments ambivalent about precisely where it was. And it feels like the change of Doctors is being used to take a breath, get in under the hood, and finish making the show they’ve been trying to make since 2011.

I think Capaldi’s a fantastic actor. He’s got a slight ostentatiousness to him that sets him apart from most of British television, where he spends most of his time lurking. He has the strange quality of underselling everything while still stealing scenes, which is of course the central joke of his ludicrously oversold Malcolm Tucker.

I still believe in Steven Moffat, in a very “I hitched my heart and soul on this series a long time ago, and I’m seeing it through to the very end” way. I remain calmly convinced that this will be seen as one of the great eras of Doctor Who, whatever may come in two or three years. I like the infusions of new talent, I mostly like the old talent they’re retaining or bringing back, and I like the sense of confidence it feels like the show has.

And I like that I don’t have to do it for TARDIS Eruditorum, to be perfectly honest. I like that I can see the end of that project, and that for a solid chunk of that end I get to be absolutely immersed in a hopefully fantastic chunk of my favorite show.

There was never any way I wasn’t going to write about it at all, though, now was there? And the exact means took me a while. I thought about doing it on Tumblr or somewhere out of the way, quietly. And I thought about trying to work for a larger site. Slate was very nice last year. And ultimately, I decided to just run a Patreon and do them for, well, you guys. The sorts of people who come to this blog on a Saturday. Which I tend to assume is pretty coextensive with my fanbase, such as it is. “My precious quasi-fame,” as Joss Whedon had it.

So here we are, a week from curtains up. $236.75 per episode, at the moment, according to the Patreon, which you are enthusiastically reminded you can still back if you would like to help support my decadent phase, as I eke dollar after dollar out of my tiny legion of fans to sustain my lifestyle of excess and grandeur. No, seriously, I need to buy heating oil this month. That shit’s expensive.

So, the plan is that reviews will go up here as soon as I can get them done. Which is reliant on how I watch the episodes, which, see, here’s the thing. I don’t have cable. It’s expensive, and I don’t actually watch much television. So I just buy Doctor Who on an iTunes Season Pass, which delivers the episodes to my hard drive in a way that’s trivial to output to the TV, and I’m happy as a clam.…

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All The Black is Ripe in Green (The Last War in Albion Part 57: The Burial, Rape)

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This is the seventh of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. Finding volume 3-6 are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore resurrected the Jack Kirby creation Etrigan for his second arc of Swamp Thing, taking particular relish in writing the demon’s rhyming dialogue, such as an extended monologue in sonnet form beginning “The toys about the nursery are set, for idiot chaos to arrange at whim”

“God will bury you. Nature will bury you. Time will bury your bones unseen. Total and absolute. Infinite amplitude. Till all the black is ripe in green.” –Seeming, “The Burial”
“The toys about the nursery are set, for idiot chaos to arrange at whim. He drools and ruins lives, his chin is wet and old or young, it matters not to him. The gracious lady and her root-choked beast have come to save the innocents from harm, to spare them from the monkey’s dreadful feast. What noble souls they have! What charm! And see! The children’s uproar brings to life their guardians: that most dedicated breed! Yet she betrays her husband, he his wife, though both of them are kind to babes in need. Should innocence be mollycoddled thus? I fail to see the reason for the fuss,” he says, before continuing with a few more stanzas. It is perhaps no surprise that Moore would excel at writing Etrigan, given that his speech patterns allowed Moore to slip into the iambic rhythm he usually relies on to make a passage bigger and more portentous. 
Figure 421: Matt Cable, dying from a
drunken car crash, is possessed by a demonic
force in the form of a housefly. (Written by
Alan Moore, art by Steve Bissette and John
Totleben, from Saga of the Swamp Thing #27,
1984. Click to enlarge.)
The second arc introduced other sizable elements of Moore’s run as well, however. On a story level, it continues a plot that Moore inherited from Pasko regarding Matt Cable and his descent into alcoholism. Moore has Cable get into a drunken car crash that kills him, allowing a mysterious spirit appearing in the form of a fly that offers to save him and that then crawls into his mouth, seemingly possessing him. On a practical level, it introduced a new editor for Moore in the form of Karen Berger, who would edit the remainder of his Swamp Thing run before going on to oversee the recruitment of other British writers and artists to create comics in a similar vein.
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“…and in this our love is everlasting.” Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia

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“Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.”
-Carl Jung

Though historians and completionist fans of the TV series were undoubtedly happy to have them, the episodes released as With Love from the Lovely Angels were not what paved the way for Dirty Pair’s future on Original Video Animation, nor were they even the first Dirty Pair OVA stories to be made. For that, we must travel back to December, 1985 and Sunrise Animation’s experiment-within-an-experiment: Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia, the first proper Dirty Pair movie.

In the history of the series, Affair of Nolandia is frankly every bit as important as “How to Kill a Computer” and The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair, and yet for some reason it tends to go frustratingly overlooked by fans. In spite of what its release date and medium of choice might have you believe, this is not an epilogue to the recently-concluded TV show, this is something consciously and manifestly different. Affair of Nolandia can trace its roots back to the same place as the very beginnings of the first series, but walked a markedly separate path to the screen. The story of how it came to be and what it helped bring about is just as interesting as the story it actually tells, and it reveals a lot about how prescient this franchise has always been.

During preproduction of the first series, it was decided very early on, for better or for worse depending on your perspective, to take it in a noticeably lighter and more irreverent direction then its source material. Though Haruka Takachiho’s novels are definitely humourous, they’re also quite explicitly science fiction with an emphasis on world building and ideas. For whatever reason, though I strongly suspect it had something to do with Sunrise in a sense always knowing how niche science fiction (at least this kind of science fiction) tends to be, the TV show was designed from the beginning to focus quite heavily on slapstick, anarchic parody and self deprecation.

That’s not to say it wasn’t intelligent, it obviously was, it’s just that as a consequence it traded in things like lengthy exposition and cohesive constructed worlds for heavy subtext, symbolism and a structure so unabashedly episodic that the one time it wasn’t was a big clue things had gotten serious. Sunrise knew that while this tonal shift would give the show more broad-strokes and mainstream appeal, it was also going to very probably alienate a huge portion of people coming to it from the novels. So, all while the first series was being produced by one team, Sunrise gave a second team the assignment to make an OVA movie completely unrelated to the TV show that would overtly cater to the novels’ hardcore science fiction fans.…

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Comics Reviews (August 14th, 2014)

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All-New X-Men #30

Faced with the need to fill an issue before “Last Will and Testament of Charles Xavier” wraps up and screws with the status quo, Bendis delivers what one might call a classic issue of X-Men, which is to say, one with no plot and all character beats. This is the strange parody of the X-Men as a franchise: it is in practice a relationship book/soap opera that occasionally degenerates into usually borderline incomprehensible sci-fi. So this, at least, is playing to its strengths. It’s the first issue where I’ve liked X-23, and the Jean/Emma stuff is quite solid too. Still not entirely enamored with Bendis’s take on Emma, but look, this is what X-Men comics exist for, so no reason to complain. A

Amazing Spider-Man #5

Dan Slott continues to be very good at writing Spider-Man. Much like All-New X-Men, this is a calm and efficient execution of what you’d expect a Spider-Man book to be, and with a solid cliffhanger. All the same, I’m feeling a bit lost in it – my decision to skip Superior Spider-Man because I was unimpressed with the premise feels like it’s not paying off, and like the renumbering to #1 is not entirely successful. It’s not that I don’t follow the plot, but I’m not engaging very thoroughly with much of the secondary cast. Perhaps I’m just not big on Spider-Man right now. Don’t know. But this may be one I drop soon to save some money. B+ on the merits, but a personal C.

Captain Marvel #6

I still suspect this first arc could have lost an issue, as it really bogged down for me in the middle, but the arc really has come together at the tail end, and this is very satisfying. I suspect it would work well even if you’ve not read the previous issues. There’s a lot of buzz on this book, and a really passionate fanbase, and this is an excellent place to try it and see if it’s to your taste. Currently it’s comic book sci-fi with a well-conceived lead in the “realistic psychological take on a good soldier” style that, for instance, Greg Rucka does so well with. Worth checking out. A

God is Dead: The Book of Acts Omega

Bought for the Kieron Gillen story, which is short, ludicrous, and an attempt by Gillen to get people to stop pretending Warren Ellis or Garth Ennis have a monopoly on comedic gratuitousness. It’s a nice sketch for a possible series, and I’d certainly like to see more if Gillen has ideas in this universe, but twelve pages is only long enough to get some gruesome jokes in, and not long enough to really establish the merits of the ideas. I can’t say with a straight face that it’s worth $5.99 for this story alone, and the other two stories are not that good. The main God is Dead arc fails utterly to convince me to try the book again, and Justin Jordan’s “The Great God Pan” is frankly horrible.…

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It Isn’t Really a Disease at All (Closing Time)

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My god, there really is an action figure set based on “Children
of the Revolution.”
It’s September 24th, 2011. One Direction are at number one with “What Makes You Beautiful,” while Pixie Lott, Example, Calvin Harris, and Maroon 5 also chart, the latter continuing to just hover at #2 with “Moves Like Jagger.” In news, the US policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is finally repealed in favor of letting gay and lesbian service members serve openly, the NBA lockout results in cancelling a bunch of preseason games, and Occupy Wall Street starts getting some press coverage.
While on television, it’s the sequel to The Lodger, namely Closing Time. “You know that absolutely brilliant thing you did? Do it again” is, as assignments to creative people go, something of the biggest nightmare imaginable. Almost certainly, after all, you used the best ideas you had for the concept on the first go-around. Especially in the realm of something comedic, where you’ve almost certainly done a winnowing process the first time around, since the way being funny tends to work is that you try about five to fifty times as many ideas as you actually need so that you can cut the 80-98% that aren’t actually good enough. So the comedy sequel is an absolutely brutal thing.
And that applies very well here. So much of why The Lodger works is that it gets in, it executes a couple of great gags about the idea of the Doctor trying to live with a perfectly ordinary person, it throws in a romantic comedy plot, and then it finishes up and makes way for the Pandorica. It doesn’t need five minutes more, little yet forty-five. And in a real sense, a sequel is a terrible idea, because it cannot possibly live up to the original. All it can be is “the next best forty-five minutes of Craig/Doctor jokes.” 
And so from the start, Gareth Roberts makes an extremely sensible decision and makes this a different premise. This isn’t “the Doctor moves in with Craig again.” Indeed, in many ways Craig is a completely different character such that, other than a single scene in which he pouts at the Doctor, he’s a basically functional companion who broadly speaking understands how Doctor Who stories work. Given that the entire premise of The Lodger was that the Doctor was living in the spare room of a romantic comedy and mucking everything up, the change to a setup in which the primary guest star is now good at being in a Doctor Who story is such that it barely seems to count as a sequel.
So instead, the story focuses on the fact that Craig’s a father now. What’s interesting here is that this really doesn’t follow from The Lodger in any particularly logical sense. Fatherhood is not a logical follow-up to any of the issues there except inasmuch as sometimes when people fall in love there are babies. Craig isn’t out of character as such, but precisely none of the concerns that defined him in The Lodger are still in play here.
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“…dispersed in clouds of narrative language”: R-Really?! For Beautiful Women, “Canon” is the Keyword to Escape (With Love from the Lovely Angels Part 2)

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One consequence of subverting the stock Big Epic Season Finale plot four times over means that any attempt you do actually make to close your filming block off with a bang is sort of by necessity going to be unsatisfying. Somehow I think I’ve heard that somewhere before. The sensible solution would be, of course, to not do a Big Epic Season Finale plot for your season finale.

Regrettably, Sunrise do not adopt the sensible solution.

We have a hostage situation where the head of 3WA security, a painfully generic megalomaniacal villain, takes over the research firm (which is in a gigantic volcano for some reason), kidnaps Gooley and threatens to blow up Elenore City with a big-ass Lazer Cannon if he’s not given some exorbitant amount of money. The plot is bog standard “we leave nobody behind” military fueled science fiction: Kei and Yuri go against the 3WA’s board of directors to rescue Gooley and they positively leap at every single opportunity to sacrifice their lives for each other, which is supposed to cut against them bickering throughout the episode’s entire runtime. Kei gets a big, dramatic speech at the end when she thinks Yuri is killed that is meant to be a parody of such speeches, but it feels stilted, goes on way too long and is nowhere near as effective as the subtext in “Something’s Amiss…?! Our Elegant Revenge”. The episode tries to rack up tension with exasperating pulp stalling, and the villain even gets a speech of unfiltered misogyny (yielding the story’s one good line when Kei responds with “For a young guy, you sure are old-fashioned”) in an attempt to force some strangled moral out of the past 26 weeks.

This is, in point of fact, a perfectly straightforward demonstration of what it looks like when a show tries to artificially inflate its stakes to do something self-consciously “big” to wrap up the filming block: It makes everyone and everything explode in a desperate effort to send the series off on an “epic” note, and it’s tragically unaware you can’t do this with Dirty Pair. The humour is back to feeling forced and inappropriate, it’s once again a story that isn’t really about anything except its po-faced epicness, and it has other problems too. As has become frustratingly the norm for late-period Dirty Pair, while the story is on the one hand trying to make a point about how special the Angels and their bond is, it still can’t resist the temptation to make Yuri the hero. Kei bumbles around as the comic relief, sticking her foot in her mouth, and making silly melodramatic speeches with Yuri as the consummate, quick-witted foil. Then there is, of course, Gooley himself, of whom I’ve spoken far too much lately. I’ll just say that it’s probably a bad sign that the episode had me agreeing with the board of directors’ plan to cause the volcano to erupt with him in it.…

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A Great, Great Partnership (The God Complex)

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No, no, that’s fine. I’ll find a different table. Really. It’s OK.
It’s September 17th, 2011. Pixie Lott has the number one slot with “All About Tonight,” with Olly Murs, Calvin Harris, and Ed Sheeran also charting. In news, a petrol pipeline explodes in Nairobi, killing 100, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is passed, putting an end to the practice of Prime Ministers getting to call for an election at a time they find strategically satisfying, and, on the day this story aired, a protest organized by Adbusters brought a thousand people to Zucotti Park in New York under the banner of “Occupy Wall Street.”
This last event did not end up getting any media coverage at the time, however, leaving plenty of room for everyone to pay attention to Doctor Who instead. And Doctor Who obliged, serving up a fairly marvelous episode with The God Complex. Let’s start with the less interesting bits, and build up to the real point. First of all, an obligatory complaint: the “Amy Williams” line is absolutely awful. Even if you try to pack in redemptive readings like that the Doctor is trying anything to break Amy’s faith in him so he can save her, the truth is that the episode doesn’t actually refute the Doctor. Of the writers on Doctor Who, it’s Whithouse who is most likely to go for a relatively unreformed deconstruction of the Doctor as a hero. This is someone who nicked a bit of Miracleman for a key scene in Being Human, so, you know, his influences are at least clear and consistent. And so the idea that the Doctor might not be a hero or worth having faith in isn’t something he pushes beyond the most superficial level in the script. In this regard, much as I like Whithouse as a writer, he’s behind the rest of the season, where Moffat has long since taken the “dark” hero notion on board and then moved past it. But that’s not a problem for the season – The God Complex ends up stating a set of positions that stories like A Good Man Goes to War and The Wedding of River Song exist to surpass. It really does think it’s “I wasn’t talking about myself” line at the end is the height of thematic resonance. Which it isn’t, but it’s a useful stooge in that regard.
But within that, taking a character who had previously been defined in part by the fact that her marriage was “Mr. and Mrs. Pond” and not her husband’s name, because that’s just how it works for a character like Amy, and reverting her to her maiden name to put her in her proper place and disabuse her of these silly ideas she has is absolutely horrifying. And within this episode, that’s what happens. “Amy Williams” is treated as Amy’s “correct” identity, while Amelia Pond is a deviant little girl who’s too invested in fairy tales. It should never have seen transmission, and is, for my money, the single most misogynistic moment of the Moffat era, and possibly of the new series altogether.
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“I’ll be back”: Eek! The Boy in the Manor is a Terminator (With Love from the Lovely Angels Part 1)

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Though its broadcast run is now over, Dirty Pair does actually still have two shots left in its barrel for us.

Due to insufficient ratings, the Dirty Pair TV show’s parent network NTV pulled the plug on it in December of 1985, canceling it before the final two episodes could air. There seems to be a lot of conflicting opinions about why the show was ended when it was, the most common one being that Dirty Pair was pretty definitively a cult sci-fi show, and that wasn’t enough justification for NTV to keep it around (which makes Dirty Pair’s status as “The Japanese Star Trek” all the more fun and fitting). But because Sunrise still saw a passionate and loyal fanbase for the show, they did something somewhat unprecedented. No, they didn’t sell Dirty Pair as a syndication package to air in perpetual reruns or create a sequel show called Dirty Pair: The Next Generation directly for a syndicated market, but they did do something that was just as novel from a Japanese perspective as Paramount’s handling of Star Trek was from a US one.

What Sunrise did was take the last two episodes, intended to air in January of 1986, and release them as Original Video Animation, or OVAs. OVAs are roughly comparable to what Western audiences might call “direct to video releases”, or DTVs, as that aptly describes what they are, but the contextual meaning OVAs have in Japan are quite different from what DTVs do in, say, the United States. Where DTVs are usually seen as no-budget schlokfests that weren’t good enough to be released in theatres, OVAs are seen as niche, cult works that might not attract a huge mainstream audience, but have a passionate enough following to justify putting them on home videos people might buy.

In other words, OVAs share a quite similar audience to the kind of shows that would, in the US, go direct to syndication or cable, like, funnily enough, Star Trek. And, just as Star Trek: The Next Generation pioneered the viability of syndication for cult TV (just as it outgrew those selfsame cult TV roots almost immediately), so did Dirty Pair pioneer the viability of the OVA market for similar shows. OVAs also have a slight advantage over other avenues for niche properties, as, because they’re made completely in-house for home video, they’re not subject to any meddling by network executives or ratings figures, so they have the opportunity to be more unflitered artistic statements.

(In fact, OVAs tend to have on the whole higher budgets and production values then regular television shows as a result of this, another thing that sets them decisively apart from DTVs in the United States.)

These two episodes, “Eek! The Boy in the Manor is a Terminator” and “R-Really?! For Beautiful Women, ‘Canon’ is the Keyword to Escape”, tend to be grouped together in a subset of the larger first Dirty Pair series under a shared name that’s usually translated as either From Lovely Angel With Love or With Love from the Lovely Angels.…

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Saturday Waffling (August 9th, 2014)

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So, first of all, I have a bit of nice news – after polling the people who have backed the Patreon to fund reviews of Season Eight, the consensus is that people want the reviews to be open for everyone to read, which means those will be posting right here, replacing the Waffling for Saturdays. I will get reviews together as fast as I reasonably can so that people can have a discussion thread for the episodes as well.

Given that the Patreon backers are being so nice, you might consider joining them, not least because my apartment just ran out of heating oil, which means that half the Patreon is already spoken for, because it’s always bloody something isn’t it.

I want to talk a bit about the reviews at some point, if only to muse about the difference between writing TARDIS Eruditorum and writing episode reviews as the season goes, and on what criticism that’s based in the immediate present ought do differently than criticism that’s historicized, but that may be a next week topic anyway. In fact, I think that’s probably best.

Meanwhile, the Williams book has one and a bit extra essays left, which I’m hoping to take out this weekend.

As for talking, as we’re now exiting the “big summer blockbuster” phase of the year, what was your favorite big film of the summer? What did you actually see? What did you opt to pass up? And is there anything left this year you’re really looking forward to, film-wise?…

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The First Flower Grew (The Last War in Albion Part 56: America a Prophecy, The Demon)

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This is the sixth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. Finding volume 2-6 are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s first arc on Swamp Thing was a massive success, and DC immediately began a new promotional campaign for the book. Moore, Bissette, and Totleben, meanwhile, moved on to their second arc, the first issue of which drew its title by a print by Francesco Goya called “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” This print shares thematic ground with the work of Goya’s British contemporary William Blake, who wrote of Ahania, the female emanation of the mad god Urizen, who represents a higher form of intellect than the monstrous attempt to condemn the world to single vision. In Blake’s The Foar Zoas, Ahania was separated from Urizen and fell into a slumber, until eventually Ahania cast off her death clothes.
“It’s where Darkseid fell through existence to his doom. Leaving hell deserted. And there, in his absence, the first flower grew. So begins the myth of a new creation. Apokolips reborn as New Genesis.” – Grant Morrison
She folded them up in care in silence & her brightening limbs / Bathd in the clear spring of the rock then from her darksom cave / Issud in majesty divine Urizen rose up from his couch / On wings of tenfold joy clapping his hands his feet his radiant wings / In the immense as when the Sun dances upon the mountains / A shout of jubilee in lovely notes responding from daughter to daughter / From son to Son as if the Stars beaming innumerable / Thro night should sing soft warbling filling Earth & heaven / And bright Ahania took her seat by Urizen in songs & joy.” For both Goya and Blake, in other words, some sense of balance is required – it is just that Goya fears the passions of man running unchecked, while Blake fears the prison of law and religion weaved by reason. 
Figure 414: Sullen fires glowing across
the Atlantic to America’s shore. (America
a Prophecy Copy A, Object 5, written 1793,
printed 1795)
And in another sense, Blake is closer still to Goya, on an almost literal level. It is, after all, once Urizen has been bound by Los, the fallen, human form of Urizen’s opposite number, Urthona, that Los’s emanation, Enitharmon, is split from him and gives birth to the monstrous serpent Orc. Orc, within Blake’s mythology, is the spirit of revolution, and makes his most substantial appearance in America a Prophecy, the first of Blake’s three “continental prophecies,” in which Blake reworks the recent political history of the world into another iteration of his mythology.
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