Eruditorum Press

We don’t need AI to hallucinate.

“Love is the law, love under will.”: Love is Everything. Risk Your Life to Elope!!

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An artifice is a kind of symbol, in that it is meant to stand in for something else. An artifice is a symbol that is caricatured to emphasize certain truth-facets of the thing it represents. A spectacle is a kind of artifice, but a spectacle, following Debord, is an artifice that abandons truth in favour of the hollow simulacrum of truth, that is, falseness. Vacuousness. However, an artifice that knows itself, indeed, even a spectacle that knows itself, is an artifice that invokes truth and, in so doing, thus invokes its own true self.

Goddesses and ideas live on within words.

The pipe organ towers over Clicky Goldjeff’s wedding. It is, in fact, a literal “tower”, one and the same with a skyscraper that serves as yet another defining feature of Elenore City’s skyline. It appears to rise from the Earth itself, the blinding concrete and steel as much a part of the world as any natural object. Clicky, the son of a massively powerful cruise line mogul, is being married off to at least a dozen women, with the hope this will keep his “wandering eyes” at bay. The woman at the organ is Joanca, and it’s in truth only her who Clicky has eyes for, and she feels the same way. Joanca proceeds to demonstrate this by firing blindly into the wedding reception as the male model waitstaff, dressed in skintight bunny uniforms, look on in stunned silence. Joanca shoots apart the chains with which Clicky was escorting his brides out by and the two elope together in a blimp.

Kei and Yuri are called in by the elder Goldjeff to retrieve his son, whom he claims has been kidnapped in exchange for a substantial chunk of his fortune. The girls feign interest in the mogul, as this is what male viewers of a female-led science fiction show expect to see and this is what Goldjeff’s secretary, who is giving them a tour of the company headquarters, expects them to say. In truth, Kei and Yuri are making small talk and do not like homewreckers, as they confide to each other, and by extension us, when it’s revealed the secretary is also Goldjeff’s mistress. When Kei and Yuri speak to each other in private, we know they are expressing their true selves, as this has long since become a regular motif of Dirty Pair. The girls only act infatuated when they’re with a potential client, and Kei only teases Yuri when someone else is watching. Or rather, when someone else is watching diegetically-Kei and Yuri never actually speak in complete privacy, because there is a camera on them at all times. This is, after all, a television show. But it’s a television show written and produced by Kei and Yuri, so they write these scenes in as a form of textual metacommentary. Graffiti on the fourth wall. The Angels do this as an act of love, because they love each other.…

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Saturday Waffling (June 28th, 2014)

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Got in quite late this evening, so not a lot of lead-up. Projects are all going just fine. Swamp Thing probably won’t quite be ready for Friday, but the first entry or two will be, so the omnibus will just be late. I’m thinking of waiting until the end of the chapter and making this omnibus a free promotional thing anyway, with only Kickstarter backers getting the in advance version this time. So we’ll see.

But discussion. So. First off, minor (but all publicly released and announced) spoilers for Series Eight of Doctor Who, but. A debut episode featuring the Paternoster Gang and called “Deep Breath.” With no other information whatsoever, what would you guess this episode is about?

I think it’s clear that they’re bringing back the Myrka, personally.…

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Someone Fabulous Like Me (The Last War in Albion Part 50: Alan Moore’s Image)

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This is the tenth and final part of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore wrapped his Captain Britain run with a characteristically ambiguous story full of ambivalence over the nature of Britain itself. After a few installments written and drawn by Alan Davis, Marvel UK launched a solo series for the character.


“I always new I was a special, lovelier-than-average person. It only makes sense that Jesus would turn out to be someone fabulous like me.” – Alan Moore
Three months later, Marvel UK relaunched Captain Britain as a comic in its own right, with the idea being that the comic would also get US distribution and feature exclusively UK-created material. In practice this meant that Captain Britain was accompanied by a reprint of Steve Moore’s Abslom Daak strips from Doctor Who Weekly, a reprint of the first Night Raven strip from Hulk Comic, and a strip featuring the Free-Fall Warriors, obscure backing characters from a Doctor Who Monthly strip written by Steve Parkhouse.
Figure 369: Alan Davis revisits a famous
panel. (Written by Jamie Delano, in
Captain Britain #2, 1985)
This time around Captain Britain was written, on Moore’s recommendation, by Jamie Delano, who had impressed writing the Night Raven text pieces after Moore gave them up. Delano’s run faces the exact problem one would expect following Moore’s, which is that there’s not a lot to work with besides bringing back Moore’s own concepts. Sure enough the Crazy Gang appears, as set up by Davis, allowing Davis to recycle his best panel from Marvel Super-Heroes #377, followed by a version of the Special Executive from a hundred years earlier than the original called Gatecrasher’s Technet. By Davis’s account, it was not an especially happy collaboration – Davis described Delano’s scripts as “dark, strange, cerebral,” tales that “didn’t fit in the super hero genre,” and claims that he “was the senior partner, initially supplying plots and long story, then mutilating and reworking Jamie’s scripts,” which led to Delano departing the title after only thirteen issues. Davis, by this time, had found work in the US and was largely uninterested in continuing to work for Marvel UK wages anyway, leading to the demise of the series after its fourteenth issue, a conclusion written and drawn by Davis. After that the character reverted to the American superhero he always in reality was, making a couple of appearances in Claremont-penned X-Men annuals and a suitably dreadful two issue appearance in Captain America before Claremont and Davis used him along with some X-Men castoffs to create Excalibur, a supposedly British superhero team that was written and published in the United States and consisted 80% of characters created by Americans, a move that essentially brought the character full circle a decade after his creation.
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“A Hard Day’s Night”: Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys

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As a genre, science fiction, especially science fiction that is in some way descended from Golden Age Hard SF, seems largely focused on the machinations and inner workings of giant, authoritarian, monolithic institutions. Be it some futuristic extrapolation of the army, the navy, the intelligence sector, the police or huge, sprawling technoscience corporations, science fiction seems one the whole unsettlingly comfortable with mulling about the halls of power, likely owing to the genre’s futurist roots. Remember, James Blish, a member of the influential group of sci-fi writers the Futurians and the guy who novelized the original Star Trek series, thought, somewhat bewilderingly, that Pfizer would usher in a Trotskyist revolution so long as we pledged support to them and bought their products.

This is, suffice to say, equal parts untenable and unacceptable.

There are exceptions to this trend. The first two Alien movies, arguably The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf, bits and pieces of Doctor Who at various points in its history. Star Trek itself tends to go back and forth on this: Though the point of the franchise is very much that the Federation is anything but an unambiguous group of good guys promoting a utopia and how our crews operate under that knowledge, this fact seems to have been lost on a worrying number of creative teams and this isn’t as emphasized as frequently or as strongly as it really needed to be. Raumpatrouille Orion is better, though that crew is still a bunch of ace pilots. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was anything but this, but invoking Nausicaä in this case does feel a bit like bringing a nuclear bomb to a knife fight.

Then there is, of course, Dirty Pair. Kei and Yuri may job for the 3WA and United Galactica, but they have a much higher calling than that and, by virtue of being professional wrestlers operating by cyberpunk logic and the way this show has been portraying them, we’re very much meant to read them as working class characters. Even so, the series hasn’t done a story overtly about this yet, and this is what “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys” is about.

In some ways, this episode is “The Case of the Backwoods Murder” for Kei, with the Angels taking a job that puts them in contact with a childhood friend of hers who gets mixed up in the mission in some form. What this allows us to do is get a rare look at Kei’s backstory: Though the Sunrise anime and the light novels are of course two separate continuities, we can assume Yuri’s backstory is roughly similar here to what was described in “The Case of the Backwoods Murder”. In this episode though, we learn that our suspicions regarding Kei were correct: She grew up on a more urbanized planet and probably lived off of the streets. After Kaia, the leader of a fleet of space pirates who are after the precious gem the girls are tasked with escorting, introduces himself as someone from Kei’s childhood, Yuri even openly supposes he’s one of Kei’s “delinquent friends” from “back in the day”.…

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This Week in Comics (June 25th, 2014)

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Experimenting with tone a bit on these, for a couple of reasons, most of which are ones of trying to find a purpose for these while also enjoying doing them quite a bit. For the first few I was leaning towards comics evangelism, since I know contemporary comics are a niche medium. But someone asked me for some recommendations for good comics from the last few years the other day, and I had to admit, there weren’t that many that I enjoyed in a “tell other people to check them out” sort of way – more a cautious “if this is your sort of thing, you’ll probably enjoy it all right” way that is all too true for a lot of comics.

Which is the other odd thing in writing about contemporary comics, which is that their sales are pathetic. For fun comparison, this week’s pick of the week sold 34,839 copies last month. Its runner up, the mega-successful Saga, sold 55,442. The top-selling comic of last month was the first issue of Original Sin, all the way up at 147,045. These numbers are expanded a bit by digital, but honestly, not by much.

Comics, in other words, really are a niche medium, and while it’s worth pointing to the good bits that shouldn’t be as niche as they are, when we are talking about Underwear Fetishists Punch People #Whatever or Countably Infinite Crisis on Fifty-Two Sins #0.437 Deadpool vs Batferret the truth is that this is an idiosyncratic paraphilia that we should go ahead and be honest about. Which is to say, since we’re largely discussing my embarrassing Marvel habit, let’s all acknowledge that anyone who gives a shit about how the latest issue of Guardians of the Galaxy is can therefore be assumed to be a fetishist as well.

Which is to say that I’m going to stop pretending that I’ll drop a comic just because it’s terrible every month. I don’t drop the equivalently priced Starbucks mochas just because they are essentially sugar weaponized into a slow-acting poison. I’m much more interested in this being a thoroughly partisan, modern equivalent to a fanzine column that will simply mouth off recklessly about where mainstream American comics should be looking at any given instant. Because with an audience as small as comics have, the fanzine is actually finally appropriate, as opposed to when they started and represented a tiny and irrelevant minority of the audience.

All of which said, they’ll be taking a week off next week, as I will be out of town and will not be able to get to the shop. Looking at what’s coming out, it’ll be Uber or Lazarus fighting for Pick of the Week (which will always be something I can recommend with a straight face that someone who is not me read), with Rocket Racoon and Moon Knight the dark horse candidates. Though if it’s a crap week, I could always pick Miracleman. Even though the really interesting issue of that is going to be in August.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 80 (Grey’s Anatomy)

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On October 6th, 2011, the American medical soap Grey’s Anatomy aired the fourth episode of its eighth season, entitled “What is it About Men.” The conceit of the episode was straightforward and clever: Grey’s Anatomy, normally a show dominated by and framed in terms of its female characters, did an episode in which the female characters were all pushed to the periphery and the focus was instead on the male characters. The voiceover narration that clumsily sets up the theme for a given episode, instead of, as normal, going to title character Meredith Grey or, as occasionally the case, going to a single other character, is instead split among all of the male characters, who opine about masculinity. 
This is, to be clear, a genuinely interesting take. Grey’s Anatomy is a heavily female-driven show, both for better and for worse. It passes the Bechdel test essentially every episode, which makes this episode’s unrepentant flunking of it an appreciably interesting thing. Because it is not as though this is suddenly an episode of Grey’s Anatomy that is envisioned as being “for” a male audience. This is still clearly conceptualized as women’s television, which is problematic in a number of ways, not least of all its existence as a category. All the same, the effect of “What is it About Men” is still interesting and worth highlighting: it provides a relatively rare cultural moment of the female gaze being applied to male bodies. It is first and foremost an episode about defining what masculinity is, and, crucially, defining a vision of masculinity that is desirable to women.
All of which is lead-up for the reason we care, which is that one of the major plot lines of “What is it About Men” concerns a crush at a sci-fi convention when five hundred people rushed the doors to try to be one of the first fifteen through them and thus to win a limited edition bit of Doctor Who merchandise (a plastic TARDIS signed by Russell T Davies). We should perhaps, because we are all anoraks of the most pathological sense, note that the actual TARDIS displayed was a perfectly ordinary and easily purchased toy that uses an electromagnet to make the TARDIS hover and spin over a base, and that the toy in question is clearly from the Moffat era, making the Davies signature an inexplicable anachronism. It is, in other words, seemingly written by someone who has looked Doctor Who up on the Internet as opposed to by a committed fan. (The episode also lands slightly astray on A Song of Ice and Fire, declaring a character to look like a Dothraki princess when that is at best a puzzling description, and then blithely overlooking some deeply inappropriate and stalkerish behavior in the course of that plot line. But then, valorizing completely inappropriate and abusive male behavior actually demonstrates a fairly thorough understanding of that fandom, doesn’t it?)
Nevertheless, there’s something of a cultural watershed here. If you told an American Doctor Who fan on October 6th, 2001 that a major piece of American network television would use the word “TARDIS” multiple times, it would have been unthinkable.
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“From One Heart To Another”: Criados’ Heartbeat

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And the first thing they do is completely torpedo each and every one of our expectations.

“Criados’ Heartbeat” is unbelievably subversive, even for this show. With its ominous countdowns, imposing and mysterious antagonist and seeming dramatic, game-changing plot twists, this is the kind of episode most shows would save for their season finale. And Dirty Pair casually tosses it at us five weeks in with another twenty to go. But we’ll get to all that later-This episode works on a multitude of different levels, so let’s take a look at the most obvious one first. One thing old school science fiction buffs like about Dirty Pair is its musing on trans/posthumanism, typically in the classic cyberpunk sense of body modification and upgrading or augmenting the human form through emergent biotechnology. This is the most visible in Adam Warren’s Dirty Pair adaptation for Dark Horse comics, but it’s a theme the franchise on the whole is known for, and, it’s worth noting, one it hasn’t actually looked at before now.

This manifests, obviously, in Criados himself, a literal mad scientist who, upon committing suicide two years prior to the events of this story, transplanted his consciousness into the computer core of a deep space automated hazardous waste processing facility. It doesn’t look like he did a particularly amazing job of it though, considering he’s become consumed by rage and has dedicated his existence to hunting down and killing Kei and Yuri, who he blames for his death after they shut down a drug smuggling ring he was involved in. And he’s brutal about it, tormenting them with horrific imagery via psychic projection and sending out entire starfleets to track them down and drag them to the space station, which is a meant for the disposal of dangerous toxic waste unfit for human exposure and actually called the Graveyard of Ships. Criados is clearly unhinged and evil and, given what we know about the loose cautionary tone pervading much of Dirty Pair, it’s possible to read this as a criticism of the kind of augmentation he attempted on himself.

But that’s not what I think this episode is actually trying to get at with this theme. As a character, Criados is, in fact, a revelation: It’s only mentioned very briefly when the girls are going over his biography, but Kei does state he had a particular fascination with the supernatural and life after death, which he, of course, managed to attain in the end through his transhumanist experiments. Combine this with his power of telepathy and his interest in hallucinogenics, which is what got him busted by the girls in the first place, and it starts to sound a lot more like Criados is a kind of futuristic shaman who was able to heighten and focus his own pre-existing power and abilities through technology. This alone is a breakthrough in speculative fiction: In the Blade Runner post I expressed concern about mainline transhumanism’s apparent ignorance and dismissal of humanity’s connection with the larger universe, meanwhile, in Dirty Pair, even Criados gets this, understanding transhumanism through his prior exploration of spirituality, and singlehandedly solving one of the biggest questions of mind and consciousness in the process.…

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Apropos of Nothing

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Bourgeois law sets up a system which seems, superficially, to draw its moral force from the common sense morality of ordinary people (in the West this is filtered through the formal Christian ethics internalised by our civilisation).  Its actual function, of course, is to promote and enforce a social orderliness which allows the relatively untrammelled existence of social hierarchy.

(This isn’t a conspiratorial view, by the way.  Conspiracies undoubtedly happen – the ruling class, and their adjutants, are as capable of getting together and discretely working towards their own agendas and advantages as anyone else – but conspiracy is not the basis of the system.  Conspiracies are often criminal and, though frequently winked at by The Law, they are theoretically punishable.  They are, in a very real sense, an aberration.  An endemic aberration certainly – and more endemic the more confident the ruling classes get – but an aberration nonetheless.  It’s important not to be too cynical about the concept of law, to imagine that it is just a sham, and that everyone at the top knows it to be.  That isn’t how systems of control endure.  Systems of control endure by being extremely plausible both to those who are screwed by them and those who benefit from them.  Corruption is real.  It is a by-product of a system that generates unaccountable and hierarchical structures.  Corruption is also an important psychological category for making the system seem plausible, for making it seem to have validity and integrity.  Everyone – the corrupt and the non-corrupt – partly derives their idea of what constitutes legitimacy from their idea of what constitutes illegitimacy.)

Part of how bourgeois law manages to be an effective and enduring system of control is by appearing to be impartial in its normal operation, to be aimed at securing justice except in aberrant circumstances, and to be based on moral categories… and one way in which it manages this is by, to some degree, some of the time, actually bothering to be all those things.  You can get good results from the bourgeois justice system.  It has to be capable of working properly in order to look like what it claims to be.  You can trace the influence of popular ideas of morality in its structure and strictures.  This is, to the greatest extent, the accreted result of popular pressure to reform the system.  But then the absorbtion and adaptation of popular demands, the rationed distribution of progressive gains, the assimilation of democratic ideas, is another part of how systems of control survive.  Ultimately, all worthwhile conceptions of ‘justice’ come from the democratic impulse from below.  This isn’t to say that they come from the innate goodness of people, or the nobility of the oppressed, or the spirit of mankind, or anything like that.  Rather, the oppressed – always the more universal class because they are the most widespread and the most thwarted – develop the democratic impulse towards justice precisely because they are denied it.  Injustice breeds the idea of justice in people. …

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The Universe Cries Out Like A Newborn (Lets Kill Hitler)

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In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a duplicate of
Amy Pond’s infant daughter made out of synthetic flesh that
is sentient and has an identity but that is going to be callously
murdered in Amy’s arms just to hammer home the horrific
abuse that she has suffered and that the Doctor fails to understand
until River shows him how he has been blind. 

It’s August 27th, 2011. Wretch 32 is at number one with “Don’t Go,” with Emelie Sand, Maroon 5, and Christina Perri also charting. In news since a good man went to war, the President of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, fled to Saudi Arabia to receive medical treatment for injuries sustained during an attack by protesters upon the Presidential Palace. The Arab Spring also progressively heated up into the Syrian Civil War, and South Sudan becames a country. In tremendously symbolic news, the Space Shuttle program ended with STS-135, commanded by Christopher Ferguson. Anders Breivik did unimaginably terrible things. And Muammar Gaddafi’s government effectively falls in Libya the week this story airs.

While on television, Doctor Who is back after its summer break with the provocatively titled Let’s Kill Hitler. It is, unfortunately, here that we must abandon any pretense that Doctor Who under Steven Moffat can be said to consistently work. By any measure, this is clearly where it goes off the rails. The reasons for this are, on the whole, complex. First and foremost, the series seems to have turned into a production nightmare at this point. Moffat, as has been well documented at this point, simply turned out not to be as fast a writer as Russell T Davies was, and found overseeing fourteen episodes of Doctor Who and three double-length episodes of Sherlock while writing six of the Doctor Whos and a Sherlock (or two) to be more than he could manage while actually ever seeing his children or breathing. It’s an understandable problem – the schedule Davies maintained was inhuman, as The Writer’s Tale amply demonstrates, and the solution come to after the botched production of this season – slowing down and not trying to maintain quite as mad a production schedule for Moffat’s two hit shows – was a sound one.

And so Let’s Kill Hitler and The Wedding of River Song were the last two episodes shot for Season Six, and even still the scripts were appallingly late – to the point where they had to start preproduction without scripts in hand. What was shot were in effect Moffat’s first drafts. This introduces a degree of sloppiness to proceedings – a word that is a problematic bedfellow for Moffat’s puzzle box complexity. Last season Moffat made an entire reveal out of a fake production gaffe. This season, even if there are no howling continuity errors, there’s a constant sense that Moffat is making it up as he goes along. 
This is exacerbated by the basic twist implicit in Let’s Kill Hitler. There is a basic grammar to a season of Doctor Who that had, by this point, been well-established.
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