Eruditorum Press

We don’t need AI to hallucinate.

Sat In Your Lap

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We did it. I hit $300 on the Patreon because of your support. Thank you so much to everyone who pledged (all 98 of you), shared the link, contributed to reaching the goals, or was just kind and supportive. This is quite literally life-changing for me. I can making a living off my passion without having to compromise financial security or my mental health. You people are amazing and I am indebted to you all. To be clear, $300 is a minimum though. I’m a disabled trans woman, and people will inevitably drop their pledges. Continued support would be great. But in the meantime, thank you. My life is better for your support. 

Demo
Sat In Your Lap (single)
Sat In Your Lap (LP version)
MV
Dance rehearsal (fragment, Looking Good Feeling Fit)

The aftermath of Never for Ever was a period of burnout for Bush. Prone to depressive burnouts after the completion of projects, she found herself drifting into a nadir of fruitless ennui, which she deemed “the anti-climax after all the work.” Completing Never for Ever in May 1980, Bush, not for the last time, put significant space between herself and the public, taking a holiday after an exhausting several months of recording. By the time Never for Ever was released in September, Bush was only just recovering from her creative inertia. Her timing was auspicious, as Never for Ever not only became her first #1 LP in the UK but the country’s first ever #1 studio album by a female solo artist ever. Never for Ever’s success was accompanied by heaps of promotion by Bush, including the usual run of performing songs on talk shows as well as signing albums for hundreds of fans at a time. Now she had more creative agency than she had previously, touting Never for Ever as “the first [album] [she] could hand to people with a smile.” Kate Bush the prodigy who sang “Wuthering Heights” was already a distant memory, transforming into Kate Bush the great 1980s British songwriter.

Yet Bush’s listlessness and struggle to write songs persisted for some time. It’s not hard to see why — the stress of Never for Ever’s production and the attention of the British public would be enough to put a damper on anyone’s creative output. It took seeing other musicians at work to get her motivated again. In September, Bush and her boyfriend Del Palmer attended a Stevie Wonder concert at Wembley Arena. Wonder was in a period of creative renewal himself. Having recently turned out a rare Motown flop in the distinctively titled Journey Through “the Secret Life of Plants”, he’d rebuilt confidence with his delightful Hotter than July LP. The concert broke Bush out of her writer’s block — “inspired by the feeling of his music,” as she later wrote, Bush got back to work on her songs, and forged a path towards her next album.

Bush’s work to date was largely harmonic, built around what notes went together interestingly on the piano.…

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Of Human Bondage Ep. 1: Dr. No & Patreon Update

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Hi all! I want to start this post with a quick update regarding the Patreon. The outpouring of support from friends and readers has been truly astounding. I cannot describe the thrill of waking up yesterday and realizing I would soon be able to live off my writing. The support of my community, the chance to fully dedicate myself to my craft, and not having to resort to a re-traumatizing job in order to survive makes for a tremendous feeling of support and gratitude. I cannot thank you all enough. You are amazing and have literally, materially changed my life.

Yet we musn’t declare victory too early. $300 is the goal at which I’ll feel safe living off Patreon, and at time of writing we’re just $17 short of that. Lots of folks have stepped in to get me to the $300 mark with promises to undertake various projects. Here are some things that will happen if I hit $300 on Patreon:

  • El will review Revolution of the Daleks. This is the only way she will do so.
  • Jack will write about the Big Finish audio Brotherhood of the Daleks, featuring the Doctor’s ties to Karl Marx. Yes, really.
  • My dear friend Will Shaw, author of the Black Archives book on The Rings of Akhaten and New Atheism, will write an undoubtedly delightful missive on the terminally execrable Sam Harris.
  • James Wylder will write queer monster stuff! With spiders!
  • Several other people have made offers I can’t recall off the top of my head, so let’s go with “& more!”

I literally cannot overstate how much getting to this tier would mean to me or how delightful any one of these little projects would be. So please back, or you can’t back, share the link. This is already putting me on a path to stability. 

In other exciting news, you can now listen to Of Human Bondage, the podcast where Kit Power, Sam Maleski, and myself discuss the James Bond movies of Eon Produtions. It’s an unusual Bond project, in that none of us are terribly sympathetic or reverential about our source material (what do you think we are, firing squad fodder?). Yet we retain a strange fascination with James Bond, having intelligent and riotously funny conversations about the pathologies and psychosexual weirdness of upper-class British white men that these films and Ian Fleming’s novels serve as a lens towards. It’s one of the most fun and cathartic projects I’ve ever engaged in, and feedback so far has been positive. Check it out. It’s a good time.

And thank you, everyone.…

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IDSG Ep59 The Heimbach Maneuvre / News Roundup

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In this bumper episode, Daniel tells Jack all about the recent response to us by Matt Heimbach and Jesse Morton on their Walk on the Right Side podcast.  Also, we do a news roundup, taking in Camilla Long, Lauren Southern, Andrew Neil, Ben Shapiro, Tim Pool and Hank Hill; Tucker Carlson and his writer Blake Neff, recently revealed as a racist forum poster; the arrest of Steven Baca; and the latest scary developments in Portland as ICE/DHS start black-bagging protestors, featuring the rise to instant fame of Tazerface.  Also… the triumphant return of Cantwell News.

Content Warnings Apply.

Permalink / Direct Download / Soundcloud

Notes/Links:

Cantwell’s additional charges. https://www.fosters.com/news/20200714/jailed-white-nationalist-from-nh-faces-more-charges

Blake Neff exposed: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/10/media/tucker-carlson-writer-blake-neff/index.html

Tazerface16 assulted. https://twitter.com/PDXzane/status/1285037835058180097?s=20

Tazerface aka “Chris David” describes the assault: https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1284999020188807168?s=20

Chad Loder thread on ABQ militia shooting: https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1272715820938850304?s=20

Steven Baca arrest: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/16/albuquerque-militia-shooting-protest/

Take a Walk on the Right Side Episode 6. https://anchor.fm/take-a-walk-on-the-right-side/episodes/Episode-6-Pandemic–Protests-and-Reciprocal-Radicalization-Gone-Wild-egk0ah/a-a2m68bt

Also, sorry about forgetting to announce the last episode here.  Here’s a link to Episode 58, Transphobia and The Right Stuff: https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/website/58-transphobia-and-the-right-stuff

 

 

…

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In the Name of the Fa

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There will be a new episode of IDSG along later today.  In the meantime, here is a substantially re-edited and rewritten/updated section of something I wrote and originally published for supporters only at my Patreon.  As it happens, the subjects discussed below have a fair bit of relevance to the main topic to today’s forthcoming new IDSG.

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On 31st May 2020, President Donald Trump tweeted:

“The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organisation.”

The statement is meaningless in real terms.  As has been widely remarked, ‘ANTIFA’ (even Trump’s use of all-caps is telling of where he’s getting his ‘information’) is not an organisation at all.  It is not a group of people who do things; it is a way of doing a certain thing, namely: opposing fascism.  To be specific: it is a strategy of direct action for confronting fascists, fascism, or things deemed liable to incite or encourage the growth of fascism.  It is a diffuse, rhizomatic, leaderless cloud of people; connected not by membership or hierarchy but by shared goals and tactics – and even that very broadly.  Nor, as has also been widely remarked, does Trump – or indeed ‘The United States of America’ (whatever he might mean by that) – have the ability to ‘designate’ (whatever he might mean by that) anybody or anything ‘a Terrorist Organisation’.  (…though Attorney General William Barr subsequently indicated that Trump’s threat – which he has made before – might be implemented in some form.  Since this was originally written, mysterious hybrids of ICE and the DHS have started their Orwellian black-bagging of protestors.  The lack of clarity and formal legal powers was never going to be a problem.  Indeed, the mutation of nebulous reaction and state gangsterism into intensely codified and punctilious legality, with liberals and centrists always taken by surprise, is a fascistic hallmark.)  

The tweet is pure Trump in that it reeks of truculent political illiteracy, barely concealed sadism, paranoid terror, adolescent performative swagger, and a kind of egomania that can fairly be called Hitlerian since Hitler also messianically equated himself and his emotions with his entire nation.  What is remarkable, as ever, is how little it matters.  Because, as detached from reality as Trump’s statement may be, it nonetheless serves a very real, tangible political function and gives every appearance of being well crafted to be effective and dangerous.  And it manages this, as so often with Trump’s addresses, by being aimed far above the heads of the establishment and the professional pundits.  It not being aimed at them, their rebuttals also fail to connect with anything or anyone.  It is also characteristic of Trump that he manages to be an incredibly skilled politician via the unexpectedly effective tactic of being an irrational ignoramus.  Gibberish though it is, the tweet sends a very definite political message out into the ether where anybody and everybody can hear it and react to it as they choose – and of course Trump knows the kinds of people who will choose to react to it in a certain way, even if they only absorb it with, and as nothing more than, a shrug. …

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Chapter Eleven: By Another Mans (Look Upon My Works Ye Mighty)

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And so at last the story returns to where it began. Grant Morrison has, of course, been ever-present. As already discussed at length, his first professional credit predated Moore by five months. But he has been a shadow presence in the narrative, lurking at the edges, occasionally contriving to intersect it, waiting for his moment to take the stage in earnest. And now at last he arrives having always been here, and it becomes necessary to trace the story backwards, figuring out who he has been all this time. 

This is, of course, a strange moment in which to observe Morrison, as he remains resolutely unspectacular. The work through which he will define himself is still ahead, the earliest plausible instances of it not emerging until two months after Watchmen finishes, his American debut still almost a full year away. At this point his greatest accomplishment is Zoids, where he surely acquitted himself well, but where he no more established himself as an impending major talent than Alan Moore established himself as the man about to revolutionize comics with Skizz or Captain Britain. His career at this point has no V for Vendetta or Marvelman, nor even a Ballad of Halo Jones. To read the future out of this moment is to work in implication, finding patterns in the negative space. Getting it right is more about knowing the answer ahead of time than insight. 

As a result, it is easy to overreach—to confuse historical event and inevitability. On a very basic level, whatever larger conclusions and patterns are inferred, the answer to how Grant Morrison achieved what he did and how he took up his role in the War is simple: he put a lot of work into writing comics that changed the world. This work did not exist in a vacuum; plenty of extremely talented people have worked just has hard to have an insignificant fraction of the insight. Nevertheless, to treat Morrison’s career as some historically deterministic phenomenon that extended out of Alan Moore’s actions would be an egregious error. 

So too would it be to suggest, as Morrison repeatedly does, that his career could have happened without Moore. Did Morrison come to writing comics on his own? Yes. Did he have his own interests and influences that, while certainly overlapping with Moore, were nevertheless his, interpreted and responded in ways utterly and necessarily unique to him? Yes. But none of that changes the fact that the career Grant Morrison had existed in a large part because Alan Moore did it first. The wave of Karen Berger edited books that started with Animal Man happened because Alan Moore did Swamp Thing. The genre of literate, politically invested superhero comics for adults that Morrison made his name in originated with Marvelman and V for Vendetta. Morrison admits as much, both in 1985 when he acknowledges that “only the advent of Warrior convinced me that writing comics was a worthwhile occupation for a young man” and much later in Supergods when he describes how he and the rest of his generation hit the American superhero scene in the wake of Moore: “And so we arrived in our teens and twenties, in our leather jackets and Chelsea boots, with our crepesoled brothel creepers and skinhead Ben Shermans, metal tattoos, and infected piercings.…

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Breathing

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Breathing
MV
Comic Relief (’86)

My Patreon is doing tremendously well, having gotten over the $200 threshold thanks to my amazing backers. This is a huge deal for me. It means being able to survive off work that doesn’t interfere with my disabilities and allows me to focus on my writing. I can’t thank y’all enough. Yet nothing is quite nailed down – $300 is the point where I’ll be able to comfortably live off Patreon income until my seasonal job resumes, and the page has stalled at $206. So here’s some fun: at $225, I’ll cut a podcast with Daniel Harper (yes! the guy from “I Don’t Speak German!”), and at $250, Jack (the other IDSG guy!) will cut a podcast on “Alien” and “The Shining.” You don’t want to miss out on that now, do you? Of course not. Feel free to back, or at least share my work. Every bit helps. Thanks so much.

*********************

“Outside gets inside, through her skin
I’ve been out before, but this time it’s much safer in.”

A refugee of fire and radiation self-sequesters in the only shelter it knows. It’s safe in here, it lies to itself, seeking the consolation of its comforting abode. Mother, where are the angels? I’m scared of the changes. Mother is silent, smothered by the asphyxiating light in the night sky. The being responds accordingly, attempting to preserve itself the only way it can: breathing, inhaling every last respirable substance in its vicinity. There are two possible trajectories: out and in, a cyclical dichotomy of breath its hope for life relies upon. Yet its perambulation towards personhood is mutable and futile. If the being is inducted into humanity, its christening into personhood will be a hydrodynamic baptism by fire. It is the first and the last, the honored and the scorned — its story begins where it ends. This is how Kate Bush imparts the awful truth: the world will end, now, and we will hear every syllable of its last, desperate cries for clemency.

What energy did Kate Bush put into her best song? “Breathing” was her “little symphony,” as Bush diminutively but proudly deemed it. Wrought over three tormented days at the tail end of Never for Ever’s Abbey Road sessions, “Breathing” had a rigorous parturiency. On some days, Bush worked for 20 hours, sometimes stopping to rest (often failing) or get high (keyboardist Max Middleton notes this seemed to relax Bush, rather than helping with any creative breakthroughs). More energy was spent on the sessions than Bush’s, however — far from accepting her band playing instruments like craftsmen, Bush was a spiritual taskmaster, making her session musicians play the song again and again until they “felt it.” Eventually it became a ritual, almost a spiritual transformation, which shaped “Breathing” accordingly. Even poor Brian Bath, who claims that Bush drove him to record his guitar part “about 200 times,” admits that “the song had changed, there was this extra thing happening in it.” Max Middleton insisted on amending his Fender Rhode part for each take, trying to make every performance more unnerving than the last.…

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Creeping Fascism and the Long Depression

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A Sketch.

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Fascism in Italy and Germany in the 1930 was a distal result of the Great Depression.  This vast crisis in capital accumulation and flow led not only to immense suffering among the working class but also to a devastation of the middle class.  This both stimulated the growth of a fascist mass movement (which always have their base in the middle classes) and created a political deadlock in normal democratic government.  This deadlock was so paralysing that powerful sectors of the ruling capitalist class – notably those in heavy industry, which stood to benefit directly from fascist government’s state programs and war preparation – were persuaded to relinquish the fig-leaf of democracy altogether.  Fascism is many things but it is always a desperate attempt on the part of a crisis-ridden capitalist system to overcome paralysing contradictions born of crises caused by its own economic laws of motion.  

The last big crash, commonly dated to 2008, led to what the Marxist economist Michael Roberts has called ‘the Long Depression’.  This refers to the inability of Western capitalism since 2008 to make a full recovery.  Beset by insufficient and stagating profit rates, and unmanageable build-ups of debt (fictitious capital, itself an attempt to compensate for insufficient profitability), capitalism has limped along waiting for an even bigger crisis which will eventually restore profitability (at least enough) by wiping out huge amounts of capital.  (This, by the way, confirms Marx’s analysis of capitalism as subject to an inherent tendency for the rate of profit to fall owing to increasing investment in fixed over variable capital (i.e. machinery, tech, etc over labour), thus lowering the amount of value produced by the system, it being abstract socially necessary human labour time that is the objective substance of value.)  It is this ‘Long Depression’ which has ultimately been the economic basis of what Neil Faulkner and co-authors have called ‘creeping fascism’.  Faced with a slow-motion crisis in the economic base, the capitalist superstructure has been subject to a slow-motion political crisis.  An ongoing crisis of capital accumulation has birthed a gradual crisis in the legitimacy and functioning of liberal democracy.  The markers are all too well known, the most seismic in the West being Brexit and Trump.  

Some Marxists have been predicting this new crisis for some time, not least because of the continued failure of the system to restore profit rates and the continued build up of debt.  The same underlying conditions in place, and very little in the way of political or economic reform (of, say, the financial sector) having been achieved, the next crisis was imminent.  Few expected it would be as vast as the one just in the process of starting to hit, but then few predicted a global pandemic that would force global capitalism to essentially put capital accumulation on pause for months.  (It is worth remembering that, far from being a random unlucky happenstance, coronavirus itself is almost certainly a byproduct of capitalism’s abuse of the environment.…

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Army Dreamers

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Hello all! Since we only ever moved Christine off the site to make room for Boys in Their Dresses, and since that project has faltered while she keeps absolutely killing it, I thought it would be a good idea to put her back on the site.

More personally, as you probably don’t know if you don’t read my Twitter, my family has recently made the decision to legally adopt Christine, having already helped her relocate away from her abusive family and to Ithaca so she could transition safely. Christine is currently looking for housing, which is exciting for a trans woman in the middle of a pandemic. She’s also disabled and working through some pretty serious trauma of the sort you might expect when your story is “an abusive family so bad you moved across several states and were adopted.” We’re trying to give her some space to heal so she can go back to school and become the amazing and badass woman that anyone who has read her work can blatantly tell she’s going to be. But, well, there’s only so much we can do.

You have all been incredible in supporting me and letting me have the career of my dreams here. And so I’m asking you, if you enjoy her work at all, to do the same for her. We figure she can scrape by if her Patreon gets to $300 a blog post. That’s just over double where she is right now, so it’s not a small thing. But, well, my daughter needs help, so I’m asking you to do what you’ve done for me so many times and help an amazingly talented woman have the life and financial stability she deserves.

You can support Christine’s work at her Patreon.

Thank you, 
El.

Note from Christine: the Patreon is up to $139, which is hopeful and close to the halfway mark but not anywhere close to $300. Times are tough on everyone right now, but if you could share my work and the link to my Patreon, that would mean an insurmountable amount to me.

Army Dreamers
Music video
German performance (“Mrs. Mopp”)
Dutch performance
Friday Night, Saturday Morning

 

The senseless homicide, epistolary self-cuckoldry, and generational trauma in Never for Ever is a sort of horror writing from Bush. Her reverence for family and domesticity is clear throughout her work, and in how she lives — she stepped mostly out of public view for many years after the birth of her son. In Never for Ever, Bush explores what happens when families are torn apart by the infrastructure of modernity: weaponry, dissociation, social pressure, celebrity. Preliminary sketches of The Dreaming surface in the record’s soundscape of classical instruments and synthesizer innovations, underlined by trauma and madness. If Lionheart was Bush’s inward retreat in response to the world’s frightening instability, Never for Ever turns that lens outwards, exploring the impact of violence on families and survivors.

Bush has dabbled in folk music before, through engagements with parabolic theming, classical acoustic instrumentation, and straight-up rewrites of folk ballads.…

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Chapter Ten: Where The Moon and the Earth Were Joined (Two Riders Were Approaching)

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In order to understand Moore’s transformation it is necessary to fully understand precisely what Watchmen was and what it did. And to understand this it is necessary to appreciate one of its major thematic concerns, the prospect of nuclear annihilation. This aspect of the War entered the scene approximately one picosecond after the creation of the universe, when the electroweak force, unable to cohere once the universe cooled below 1015 K, split into the electromagnetic force, which would go on to underpin more or less the entirety of communication, and the weak nuclear force. This latter force was responsible for a phenomenon called beta decay, in which a neutron can transform itself into a proton by expelling an electron, along with other forms of radioactive decay. Together, along with gravity and the strong nuclear force, they create a delicate mathematical balance in which matter and life are possible. And yet within that crucial weak force is a terrifying implication.

This implication (and indeed the weak force itself) went unnoticed for approximately fourteen billion years, until German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman first achieved nuclear fission in 1938. Their work, of course, was simply a momentary endpoint of a larger chain of thought—the revolutions of theoretical physics that swept the scientific community in the early 20th century, upending the classical notions of the world and how it worked. Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and the rest, in a series of dizzying discoveries over the course of decades, unseated the idea of a fixed and knowable universe, finding instead a universe that is fundamentally ordered by human perception, where the act of looking shapes the thing being observed—a quantum revolution that brought, in its wake, the possibility of magic. And then, with Hahn and Strassman, a very different possibility.

Hahn and Strassman conducted an experiment in which they bombarded uranium with neutrons. Observing the result, they discovered to their astonishment that the process had created atoms of barium. Reading a letter about these results, their former colleague Lisse Meitner, a Jewish chemist who had fled Germany earlier in the year, she reasoned that if Niels Bohr’s theory of the atomic nucleus, which held that it worked more or less like a drop of liquid, were correct then a very large nucleus like uranium would be unstable—indeed, unstable enough that the weak force impact of a neutron could lead the nucleus to stretch and eventually snap like a cell dividing into two. Running the calculations further, Meitner realized that the result would have less mass than the original atom, and that the lost mass must be converted into energy—indeed, a tremendous amount of energy, at least for a single atomic reaction, although on its own it was barely enough to move a speck of dust.

Word of the discovery spread quickly, and in early 1939 Niels Bohr brought word across the Atlantic as he traveled to lecture at Princeton. This set off a wave of experimentation and theorization, in which several scientists including Leó Szilárd, Enrico Fermi, and Frédéric Joliot-Curie all came to the same realization: the reaction released more than one neutron.…

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Killing in the Name Of

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Fascism isn’t socialism.  This isn’t the sort of thing that one should have to say, but apparently it is.

Politics has content as well as form.  It is not, as fascism always tries to make it, a game of aesthetics.  No matter how superficially similar fascist and antifascists may be – and I contend that, with a very little good-faith scrutiny, they are not actually very similar at all – there is a world of difference, so much difference on every level that equivalence of any kind is a gross falsehood, a catastrophic failure of understanding.  It is the content of political action which gives it meaning, not the form.  And the content always ultimately derives from the class content, which ultimately derives from the class basis.  The class content and basis of fascism, whatever the rhetoric, is bourgeois, based on the defence of capital either directly or via the defence of those divisions and oppressions which are both generated by and bolster the rule of capital.  They don’t need to be generated by or to bolster capital to be wrong, but they are and do.  The class content and basis of antifascism, by contrast, is found in defensive reaction against the fascists’ project to divide the working class along lines of race in the interests of capital.

This is ultimately both why people can pull the “the nazis were socialists” bullshit – “National Socialists!  It’s even in the name!” – and why they’re wrong.  The question of why the Nazis called themselves socialists, and why fascism generally often flirts with left-wing rhetoric and even some superficially left-wing ideas, is complex.  What isn’t complex is the question of whether fascism is or is not, ultimately, a phenomenon of the left.  The answer is no, because of its content, which is ultimately its class content, and which is ultimately determinable via an examination of what it actually does.  

Fascism as a governmental form was a form of response to a crisis of capital accumulation. Fascism as a movement – at least in its classical form – also tends to arise as a reaction to the rise of a challenge, or perceived challenge, to capitalism from the working class, and from socialism.  Part of its process of evolution as a mass movement tends to be a certain aping of left movements in an attempt to assimilate some of their popularity and membership while opposing them.  The Nazis arose in Germany on the crest of a wave of reactionary, nationalist counter-revolution against the German Revolution of 1918-23, which caused the Kaiser to abdicate and flee, and the German generals to capitulate to the Allies in the First World War.  The defeat of the revolution was a combination of sharp turning points and slow decay.  But socialism remained a hugely popular idea with the working masses of Germany throughout the 20s and 30s.  

The ostensibly socialist Social Democratic Party (SPD) was huge, with a vast network of workers’ clubs, magazines, papers, camps, youth organisations, etc.

…

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