Eruditorum Press

The struggle in terms of the strange

“Wednesday’s child is full of woe/Thursday’s child has far to go”: Friday’s Child

, 5

What d’you think, Spock? I was thinking “Get Rid Of Slimy Klingons”.

D.C. Fontana has a rather unsettling habit of making my life extremely difficult.

She’s Star Trek’s first staff writer who is a woman and has written several of the most influential and groundbreaking episodes in the franchise, including two of my absolute, all-time favourites. Unfortunately, every single episode she’s been involved in I’ve looked so far in this project (save, debatably, “Tomorrow is Yesterday”) has been an infuriating, baldly reactionary disaster including, well, this one. In “Friday’s Child” we have, in no particular order, the Federation explicitly as the “good” empire to the Klingon’s “bad” empire, Kirk and Spock completely overturning the society and rules of an entire planetary culture pretty much for lulz, and, oh yeah, a pregnant woman, belittled and infantilized by just about every other character by being referred to as “the girl”, whom the show treats as both a comic relief and a burden because of her attempts to be headstrong and independent.

Let’s take a look at the most egregious and upsetting thing first: Not the imperialistic or Prime Directive issues; the show couldn’t give a toss about those here and neither should we until it decides to take another look at them. No, I’m instead talking about Eleen Akaar, because of fucking course I’m talking about Eleen Akaar. A proud, strong woman who doesn’t let any man touch her, yet who eagerly submits to Doctor McCoy when he proves his superior fortitude and asserts his dominance and authority over her, by, of all things slapping her and knowing more about labour and childbirth then her as well as every other woman in her society. This is so blatantly, obviously and stupefyingly misogynistic I’m actually speechless: There’s no reaction to that I can muster apart from stunned disbelief and disgust such that I actually feel dirty and personally hurt after watching this. Let’s try and move on as quickly as possible, lest this essay devolve into another screamy, infuriated diatribe a la “The Corbomite Maneuver” or “The Enemy Within”.

In an attempt to give Fontana some manner of credit and benefit of the doubt, because I truly find it almost impossible to believe a woman in her position could ever come up with something as hurtful and offensive as this, a large portion of the blame for the feminist nightmare of “Friday’s Child” should, both sadly and obviously, go to Gene Roddenberry. Had Fontana’s original draft gone into production, Eleen would have been depicted as an even stronger presence, explicit in revolt against the male supremacy of Capellan society, which believed women were mothers and homemakers and nothing else. The climax would have also seen her sacrificing the life of her child in order to preserve her own, which actually gels much better with Kirk’s line that Eleen “hates the unborn child she is carrying” and Eleen’s own dialog that in her culture, children belong expressly to the father (as well as the subtle implication early on that the only reason Akaar married Eleen was to give him a son in the first place).…

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A Found Object

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“A close equivalent to Brutalism’s avant-garde quotidian is in the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.  Banham makes a more than punning connection between the techniques of concrete brutalism and those of musique concrete, in that both are based on the use of manipulated found objects, both have a disdain for harmony but not for structure.  The Workshop applied musique concrete to TV jingles, soundtracks, mundane everyday sound.  What made both so valuable is that they were so totally immersed in everyday life.  Switch on the radio or walk out of the door to find yourself in a new world.”

– Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism
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On Writing and Shape

19

I was trying to think through an aspect of writing that is generally instinctive to me, to try to figure out what, if anything about it could be taught. This resulted.

A given piece of writing has what I can only describe as a shape. It’s what we usually call style, but we ascribe that more to writers, and this is really on a piece-by-piece basis. Calling it structure almost works, but feels too detached and under the surface, whereas shape is tangible and visible to the reader. It’s ironically difficult to describe, because it is, ironically, a thing I experience in an almost synesthetic way. It’s the aspect of reading and writing that doesn’t feel like words, but instead sensual and physical. This is a difficult thing to describe.

Instead of describing, then, let’s ask how we choose the shape for a piece of writing. The step after having the idea, in other words, ideas being basically trivial things that one generally has too many of, not too few. You don’t actually mean “where do you get your ideas from,” you mean “how did you get that idea to become a piece of art.” And this is impossible to teach, because each shape is unique and you can’t really just stamp out identical copies of a given shape. Well, you can, but it’s very, very hard to do in a way that’s worth doing.

So let’s instead think of it as a bit of decision-making. That is, what sorts of thought processes might go into shape. A couple examples from my own work:

The Rose post had several competing concerns that defined what it had to be from the start. It had to be a “big” post in some fashion. As I approached it, it became obvious it was also part of a big period for the blog and my life, as my Kickstarter did far better than expected and was coinciding with the planned relaunch of my blog under a new name, and on top of that I’d very recently moved.

Eventually the phrase “initiation ritual” hit me – the idea that the Rose post should be an initiation for the new blog and the new series. The other thing that heavily influenced the post’s shape early on was thinking about the opening paragraph – the music/news paragraph. People ask why I do this sometimes, since the news rarely ties in very much with the subject of the article. The answer, ultimately, is to have a bit of structure – something I can reach for when I need something to ground a post. I wanted something beyond numbers to mark the time, and I figured popular music was good because it helped evoke the shape of a time. And news stories serve a similar purpose. It’s just a brief litany to conjure up the feel of right before the story aired.

But in this case, the news section ran into the problem that the obvious piece of news to include is, of course, Rose itself.…

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Outside the Government: Ghost Machine

, 43

What do you mean I have to take the battery out to swap
games?

It’s October 29th, 2006. McFly are at number one with “Star Girl,” with Beyonce, Razorlight, and Amy Winehouse also charting. In news, George W. Bush signs into law a bill ordering the construction of a fence on the US/Mexico border, and severe wildfires caused by arson rage in California. On television, meanwhile, Torchwood airs its third episode, Ghost Machine.

With Ghost Machine we see Torchwood finally starting to show off its range, moving beyond the straightforward focus on alien presence and into other genres. This is not a surprise as such – Doctor Who, after all, has long used science fiction to do more than traditional sci-fi stories. Nevertheless, it’s another step in the process of Torchwood mirroring the 2005 season of Doctor Who and using each of its early episodes to stake an entirely new claim for what the series can be. Having established itself as the sexy X-Files, Torchwood calmly (and thoroughly in line with how The X-Files actually worked, as distinct from the usual memory of The X-Files in which the day-to-day is completely overshadowed by the godforsaken mytharc) moves on to doing a ghost story in which the eponymous piece of alien technology is little more than a MacGuffin to set up the real plot, a fairly classic ghost story of long forgotten crimes.

Ghost Machine is, however, a thorough oddity. Structurally speaking, it’s bizarre – the first twelve minutes focus entirely on investigating the alien artifact, not on what turns out to be the story’s real plot, the unsolved murder of Lizzie Lewis. Even after that Lizzie Lewis’s plot, if you’ll pardon the choice of a word that tips my hand a bit, haunts the narrative, slowly exerting its influence. This is interesting, because in most regards this is bog standard “and now for the supporting cast” material – having done two episodes setting up Gwen, we now expect that we’ll see focus episodes on Ianto, Tosh, and Owen. (This actually gets quietly subverted with the fifth and sixth episodes, which hold off from focusing on Tosh. If this weren’t delaying the other female character, it would be easier to be happy about that.) And sure enough, Ghost Machine expands Owen’s character considerably.

On one level this is necessary, as Owen is by miles the least sympathetic character on the team at first. This isn’t just because of the fact that the first episode sets him up as a rapist – that is bad, but it’s fairly obvious by this point that Russell T Davies was not actually trying to make Owen that unsympathetic and evil. At this point the “obviously not what the writer’s intent was” defense used for Mark Gatiss in The Unquiet Dead applies, though in this case the blindness involved in missing the fact that you’re having one of your male leads become a rapist really does deserve serious condemnation. It really is the single worst thing Russell T Davies has ever written.…

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“…a uniquely portable magic.”: Metamorphosis

, 7

Love is possible.

The obvious way to open this post would be with some cheekily prescient call-forward to Star Trek First Contact, the consensus-second-best Star Trek movie, in which Zefram Cochrane (who is introduced here) plays a significant role. However, that essay is going to be wild and crazy enough without having to deal with baggage from “Metamorphosis” on top of it all, so let’s leave the future to the future for now.

“Metamorphosis” is a significant improvement over last episode, which is typically the case when Gene Coon is writing. What’s more interesting, however, is that this is very much Gene Coon for the second season: Building off of themes he introduced in “The Devil in the Dark” and clearly noticing the show’s landscape has been permanently altered in the wake of the bombshell that was “Catspaw”, “Metamorphosis” is the first clear, concrete step forward Star Trek has taken since, well, Coon’s last episode. It’s not perfect, not even the best script we’ve seen from Coon so far, and the particular kind of faults it has mean it’s ultimately less than successful, but this is still very much the sort of sign we should be looking for from Star Trek at the start of its second consecutive year on the air.

Charmingly, Coon’s next step from burning the show to the ground and challenging it to justify its existence and prove it’s capable of behaving in a peaceful, constructive manner is to give it an incredibly straightforward and intimate love story. Not a fake romance plot, like Nurse Chapel swooning over Doctor Korby just long enough to provide necessary drama in a floundering episode or when Kirk shacks up with any of his Desilu-mandated girls-of-the-week, but a real, actual love story between two people that takes a serious, mature look at what that concept is, how it’s expressed and how its interpreted. The Companion loves the stranded Zefram Cochrane, but is only capable of displaying her affection by keeping him alive and providing for him. But that’s not the kind of companionship he really needs, which prompts her to similarly maroon Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the commissioner. Cochrane can’t see this as love, because The Companion is not a being like himself, and when he finds out the truth he recoils in horror. And, in an actually lovely speech from Kirk, without doubt one of his most memorable scenes in the show so far, he points out to both of them that true love can’t be one-sided and that two people must be joined as equals for it to exist.

This speech is a watershed from Kirk, and his depiction in this episode is crucial to continuing his extradiegetic challenge given to him by Coon in “Arena” to grow and mature Star Trek. Much like in “the Devil in the Dark”, Kirk starts out angry and frenzied, even considering destroying The Companion if it means freeing the trapped shuttlecraft. But he is reminded by McCoy, in one of his best and, frankly, most welcome lines to date that “perhaps being a soldier for so long” has caused Kirk to forget he’s “also trained as a diplomat”.…

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Saturday Waffling (July 27th, 2013)

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Hello everyone. It’s one of those weeks where I constantly want to work on something other than what I am, and I find myself spoiled for choice – Last War in Albion’s coming along, but probably not quite ready for Thursday (we’ll see though). I have a bit of a fiction project that hasn’t died yet, which is unusual for my fiction projects, as they usually last under 48 hours, and this just crossed 48. Plus, of course, all the revisions ever, which didn’t get anywhere this week, because it’s a blog week. (Just finished Small Worlds, Countrycide and Greeks Bearing Gifts to write over the weekend.)

And we’re just in that obnoxious part of summer where it feels like it’s gone on a bit too long and like it’s high time for fall. Or maybe that’s just my reduced summer paycheck talking. I don’t know. At least it hasn’t been too extravagantly hot the last few days – we actually had the windows open instead of the air conditioning yesterday.

So, what are you trying to get done before the end of summer? For me it’s the Baker and Hartnell revisions, and will be a tight thing. But tell me about your goals – what deadlines are you chasing? What are you doing with your August?…

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Outside the Government: Day One

, 76

I’m somebody’s fetish.

It’s still October 22nd. Stupid double bills. In any case, Day One.

Thing one about Day One is all the sex. Torchwood gets a fair amount of stick for being an “adult” show in a childish and superficial way – that is, to be obsessed with sex and violence. On the one hand, Day One rather supports that claim by having the first thing Torchwood does once it sets up its premise by fighting the sex alien. On the other hand, the episode manages to have its cake and eat it too with that absolutely marvelous sequence of Carys walking through the streets assailed by all the images of sex around her. Which is to say, yes, Torchwood is flagrantly about sex on a regular basis, but this isn’t entirely unreasonable given the apparent centrality of sex to our day-to-day lives. And while sex may be frustratingly inescapable, it’s also, if we’re being honest, a topic that is poorly served by the bulk of television, which handles sex very badly if at all.

Torchwood is a mixed bag on this – as I noted, the sci-fi rape in Everything Changes is absolutely appalling. But this episode does quite well with a number of small but deft touches – having Carys’s phone conversation as she’s infected by the alien eventually play into the plot, for instance, or the quiet establishment of her home life. The scene where she confronts Eddie is a marvelous depiction of the real sorts of tangles of contemporary relationships, which don’t follow television’s usual unwavering lines of clear-cut boyfriends and girlfriends. It’s a step more complex than just having her go after an ex-boyfriend, and considerably more honest.

Equally, however, there is something willfully provocative about having your second episode feature the sex alien. Even though it is, all things being equal, a pretty good sex alien, it’s still visibly and tangibly a stunt. Then again, this is in many ways the same structure that Doctor Who used in 2005 – take the second episode and go as far in a given direction as it is possible to go. So, yes, Day One has the sex alien, but it has it for the simple reason that putting the sex alien in at the start means that you effectively settle the “how far will this show go” debate in one handy shot. You really can’t get away with calling Torchwood “shocking” in terms of content after this episode, which is a useful bit of armor for the series. It’s a technique akin to Paul Abbott’s decision to work both an assassination and a nude shot of Chloe Sevigny with a prosthetic penis into the first two minutes of his actually very good 2012 Hit & Miss – by getting all the prurient bits of its premise on the table immediately it prevents the show, in the long term, from being defined by those bits.

I could go on in this tone for a while yet, beginning a defense of Chris Chibnall as a writer, but there’s an underlying issue here I want to address, which is that Torchwood seems to require a level of defensiveness.…

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“Trick or Treat/Trick or Treat/Trick or Treat for Halloween”: Catspaw

, 6

Little known fact: Back in the day they used to have Enterprise moon pendants.

Well, to start things off I’d like to say that coming off of Raumpatrouille Orion and The Prisoner it’s rather exasperating to tune in for the brand new season of Star Trek and see Captain Kirk stomp around the bridge in a huff and bluster about people failing to follow landing party procedure. It would have been very nice to be able to open this post with a hearty declaration that the show has finally turned a corner with the first story produced for the new year, especially with a premise as tantalizing as the one this episode has. But no, “Catspaw” is aggravatingly business as usual.

Which is really rather puzzling, because it has the makings of something incomparably bizarre and interesting to talk about. First of all, this episode has the single most bonkers pitch in the history of the franchise: It is literally a Star Trek holiday special. I’m not even kidding-The only reason “Catspaw” exists is because somebody, most likely at NBC, decided Star Trek really needed to have a Halloween special. So, we get fifty minutes of Kirk, Spock and McCoy wandering around a stereotypically spooky haunted castle with witches, skeletons, black cats and evil wizards. There are any number of reasonable, plausible reasons for this premise to go hilariously and catastrophically off the rails but, in a moment of genuine insight, Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon make the actually sane and sensible decision to give the story to the only person on staff remotely capable of taking this quite literal nightmare pitch and turning into something other than an unmitigated disaster: Robert Bloch.

Bloch only had one other Star Trek script to his name at this time: “What Are Little Girls Made Of”? early on in the first season, an episode that could charitably be described as not going quite according to plan. However, before we run to the hills screaming, it’s worth pointing out Bloch was actually an extremely respected and influential author, penning a little novel called Psycho, so perhaps the failings of the previous story can and should be laid once again at the feet of Gene Roddenberry, who decided he needed to rewrite the whole thing in the middle of primary filming. Thankfully Roddenberry seemed to see no need to do similar micromanaging here, so with “Catspaw” we get a better glimpse into the sorts of things Bloch is actually interested in talking about, which seems to be pretty clearly “horror”. Not just any kind of horror, though: The type of horror Bloch seems to fancy the most, especially when it comes to writing Star Trek, is descended from the works of US novelist H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft was a prolific early 20th century writer with a particular interest in uniquely mystical and cosmic variety of psychological horror. In Lovecraft’s works, the universe is really the domain of vast, incomprehensible ancient monsters who exist so far above and beyond the realm of human comprehension that to even glimpse one or speak its name would drive a person to complete and inconsolable madness.…

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For Amusement Only, Really

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Some writers have embarrassing juvenilia. I have that too, actually, but mostly I have embarrassing academia. The death of Douglas Engelbart a bit ago struck me a bit because his “mother of all demos” was a fairly sizable topic within my dissertation, which, of course, nobody will ever see because it’s a dissertation and nobody ever sees those, and revising it into a book is not really a priority given my estrangement from academia.

Accordingly, I’m serializing it here on a “whenever I’m hard up for content” schedule. I make no guarantees of its readability, quality, or entertainment value. Indulge me. It took a long period of my life and it seems like it should have some sort of a home.

I also make no guarantees that parts of it are not abandoned mid-revision, or that the citations are not in the odd markup language used by the citation manager software I used when writing it. In any case, hopefully someone will be entertained by this. It is, of course, academic writing, with all of the associated stylistic tics and occasional dryness. 

CHAPTER 1
THE DEMO AND THE PROBLEM OF PROGRESS

On August 6, 1991, at 3:31 PM, Tim Berners-Lee, an employee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) made a post to the alt.hypertext newsgroup responding to a seemingly innocuous question by Nari Kannan, who asked if there was any development towards “hypertext links enabling retrieval from multiple heterogeneous sources of information.”  In his response, Berners-Lee described a project he was working on that would do just this by creating a protocol, HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), via which hypertext files could be requested and returned by servers on the then-nascent Internet, complete with links that would, if followed, use HTTP to request files from other servers (Berners-Lee). The project was called WorldWideWeb, and this Usenet post marked its public debut.
This historical moment poses something of a problem for a media theorist. What, role does or did this moment play in terms of the World Wide Web as it is today? On the one hand, from a historical perspective, it is factually the case that Tim Berners-Lee created key parts of the basic technology that underlies the World Wide Web. On the other hand, the development of the Web does not slot so easily into a sort of “great man” theory, and there is a degree to which the centrality of this single event to the history of the Web belongs more to myth than history.[1]Associated with this dualism is a significant problem: on the one hand, there are clearly a set of events in the history of any medium that are historically significant in its establishment as a functional piece of technology.
…

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Outside the Government: Everything Changes

, 59

David, you have to try this. I call it standing in the rain looking
dramatic. xoxo, John

It’s October 22nd, 2006. My Chemical Romance are at number one with “Welcome to the Black Parade,” with Scissor Sisters, Girls Aloud, P. Diddy, and Meat Loaf also charting. Since the Battle of Canary Wharf, Twitter launched, a war broke out between Israel and Lebanon, and North Korea claimed to have conducted a nuclear test. While in the week before this story, the US actually gets around to confirming that North Korea had a nuclear weapons test, and the Iraq war keeps going badly.

On television, meanwhile, Torchwood debuts with Everything Changes. That Everything Changes tacks fairly straightforwardly to the approved Joseph Campbell playbook for origin stories is perhaps unsurprising. It is, after all, how you do these things, and no matter how popular Doctor Who is as a program, it would have been borderline suicidal to launch Torchwood with an episode that relied on the assumption that everybody knew who Jack was and what Torchwood did. And so we get an episode that, for most of its runtime, is a structural mirror of Rose: girl is witness to strange goings-on, investigates, and after a couple of tries is finally initiated into the mysteries of an already familiar series premise.

Like Rose, then, the premise of Torchwood lurks in the background of the episode. Much of the audience spends much of the episode knowing more than Gwen does about the show’s premise, and being introduced to it anyway. Captain Jack and Torchwood are both known quantities. Except that they’re not. Torchwood Three seems miles away from the slick corporate excess of Torchwood One, and, perhaps more importantly, Torchwood are clearly meant to be the heroes of this show, whereas just a few months earlier they were solidly villainous.

In this regard the outsider perspective is an odd barrier, in that Gwen asks what are, for the audience, mainly the wrong questions. The audience doesn’t need Torchwood explained so much as they need the relationship between this Torchwood and the Canary Warf operation from Army of Ghosts explained, but Gwen, as a genuine neophyte, doesn’t know to ask that question. Similarly, the question really isn’t who Jack is and where he came from, nor even why he’s immortal (the answer clearly being “some bit of technobabble involving Rose’s resurrection of him), it’s “how did he get to Earth in the present day and what’s he doing running Torchwood,” both questions that Gwen, not having seen The Parting of the Ways, fails to ask.

Which is perhaps the most interesting thing about Everything Changes. Structurally, at least, it hums along at a brisk and followable pace. The Campbell-style call to adventure narrative is so shopworn that it manages to obscure the questions the audience comes to the program asking. We know so much about how this episode works and enough about Jack and Torchwood that we think we have all of its twists figured out ahead of time.…

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