Eruditorum Press

A magical ritual to pay my rent

Erudite Waffles (2/4/23)

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THE PANCAKES OF WRATH ARE WISER THAN THE WAFFLES OF ERUDITION.

What I’ve Been Up To

I finished up the script for Britain a Prophecy #7, at least to the point where I need to hand it off to Bob for edits. Past that it’s been a research week—I’ve been working through Storm Constantine’s first Wraeththu book for a piece that’ll probably be out to Patrons early next week, and doing some other reading for LWIA v4. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Nine Inch Nails, which is once again Lexi’s malign influence, and am musing on serializing a Halo by Halo review series through these newsletter posts. 

Penn’s been doing character designs for Britain a Prophecy #5, which continues apace. Here, let’s give a preview of the uniforms for the fae army. 

We also got a new scene out for $10 Patrons, and a new behind the scenes post out for all patrons. 

Also, I just sold my first piece of fiction writing. No details I can share yet, but if you asked me “El, what would be your absolute top choice of ways to break into professional fiction writing” I’d be hard pressed to come up with a better one than this. I can’t wait for this one to come out. 

Some Movie Reviews

Man, it’d be *great* if I could post these here, but I actually gate my media reviews to my $2+ Patrons so you’ll have to go there to find my reviews of Cruising and Manhattan Baby.

Some Tumblr Asks

These I don’t gate! My asks remain open, and so, for what it’s worth, do Penn’s. 

Favourite Kibble track? (Alex’s goofy project)

“What Time Is It?”

How long do you think it will take for you to reach the present day in Last War in Albion? Another ten years? More?

There are way too many variables to even begin trying to predict that. What I’ll say is that it’s a project I generally enjoy working on, and that I regret leaving it fallow as long as I did, even as I recognize those years were not actually ones I was in a place to devote it attention. But also, it’s a lot of work, and there’s other stuff I want to do too, and, like, if I sell a novel or get an ongoing comic series that work is going to come out of LWIA time. So I can’t promise full time work on it for the next year/five years/ten years. Hell, I don’t like to promise full time work on it for the next month, because, as January showed, sometimes it turns out I really need to write 8000 words about 90s singer songwriters.

But I like Last War in Albion and I want to do right by the project. So I’ll do the best I can, but wouldn’t want to estimate any sort of timeframe beyond “well, hopefully before I’m dead.”

How much of Britain a Prophecy do you plan in advance vs write as you go along ?…

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“I never set my suitcase down”: Margo Price, country music, and the triumph of struggle

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CW: Infant death, reference to eating disorder

Music memoirs face biographies’ usual problem of being tasked with turning the inherently chaotic narrative of a person’s life into a coherent novel-shaped story.  Sometimes artists innovate in the space — Bob Dylan’s hilariously titled Chronicles Vol. 1 is notoriously 75% delightful bullshit. More often though, artists will spin an narcissistic mythology about themselves, reveling in the glories and pitfalls of stardom (which more often than not are the same thing).

Alternative country and rock singer-songwriter Margo Price is uniquely situated to dodge the music memoir’s trademark solipsism. Price’s brand of hippie-cum-psychedelic folkie demarcates her from any particular subculture. She comes out of the Nashville country music scene, but she has more in common with singer-songwriters who are external to mainstream country, such as Sturgill Simpson or Brandi Carlile, than Hot Country Songs blights like Florida-Georgia Line or Luke Combs. Price is by no means obscure — her first album landed her on Saturday Night Live, and she’s covered Cardi B’s “WAP” for The Daily Show. But Price’s brand of rollicking ballads about struggling to get by and alcoholic depression evince a working-class solidarity and folkie pride that don’t get much air time in commercial country.

Price’s memoir Maybe We’ll Make It counteracts the narcissism of memoirs by showing just how hard-won her career is.  The book tracks her losses, disappointments and tragedies in grueling detail yet with engrossing depth. Price’s childhood in rural Illinois is marked by an eating disorder and her Midwest family losing their farm. In early adulthood, she drops out of college, hits the road, and spends several impoverished years in Nashville hovels. By the time Price’s beloved dog has died and her apartment has been flooded with sewage, it almost seems like maybe part of Maybe We’ll Make It defines it. If one can ding the book for anything, it’s that Price’s listing of her various disappointments becomes almost repetitive. Which isn’t a terrible problem to have: plenty of strong albums have extraneous songs. And Price, who adamantly refrains from utilizing a ghost writer, writes astonishing prose. The book’s prologue reads like classic rural literature: “I watched the bloodred Midwest sun as it set past the crooked tree line at the edge of our property.” The book feels like Price’s songs sound: the tales and reflections of a traveling balladeer who’s seen a little too much and needs to write it all down.

The most heart-rending and upsetting part of Maybe We’ll Make It constitutes Price’s loss of her infant child Ezra, with a gut-punch where a doctor tells her “technically he’s still alive.” It’s a story about the endless process of building one’s life while incessantly falling short of outright success, a rebuke to the standard mythology of making it big at just the right moment. Ethan Hawke has spoken about how obscure country singer Blaze Foley makes strong biopic material because he never got a big break. Price shows that failure is often more instructive than success, resulting in an at times extraordinarily upsetting but profoundly moving piece of autobiography. …

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Pop Could Never Save Us – 02 – That Old Time Romance

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The popcast storms back to 2023!

Get caught up on charting pop music with your friends Holly & James. Here we talk about Flowers by Miley Cyrus (which James loved and Holly thought was kinda mid), Lewis Capaldi, Central Cee. The Weeknd, & Bugzy Malone!

You can find us on iTunes, Spotify, and anchor.fm and if you think there’s somewhere else you’d like to find us, let us know!

We are @jameslatrmurphy and @fireh9lly on twitter.…

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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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