Eruditorum Press

The struggle in terms of the strange

The Great, Warm, Red-White-and-Blue Beating Heart of This Beleaguered Country (Book Three, Part 67: The Christic Institute)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The CIA was very bad, and then there was a bombing in La Penca, Nicaragua, that injured a journalist, Tony Avrigan.

In this, the eleventh hour, with the world poised on the brink of Red Armageddon, it is vital that we, as a nation, should rally around those symbols that are closest to the great, warm, red-white-and-blue beating heart of this beleaguered country. They are our hope and our inspiration, the legends that urge our people onward even in times of deepest crisis. -Alan Moore, Watchmen

Subsequent investigation revealed that “Per Anker Hansen’ was in fact a man named Vital Roberto Gaguine, an Argentinian leftist who had traveled to La Penca along with Swedish journalist Peter Torbiörnsson. Tobiörnsson was in fact a Sandinista sympathizer who had worked closely with a Nicaraguan intelligence unit called the Fifth Directorate, run out of the Interior Ministry by Tomás Borge, although he has always maintained that he simply thought Gaguine was a spy and not a bomber, and in his later career worked to expose the details of Sandinista involvement in the bombing. This has not entirely satisfied Honey, however, who, not unreasonably, points out that pinning the blame on the Sandinistas would have benefitted the Reagan administration, who instead stonewalled and obfuscated the investigation, and who points out a number of aspects of the bombing that remain unexplained.

The details of Gaguine’s involvement and Torbiörnsson’s complicity, however, did not begin to emerge until 1993, and Torbiörnsson’s full involvement did not emerge until 2009. Long before all of this, when the bulk of the evidence to be unearthed was still related to the CIA theory, Avirgan and Honey found themselves in touch with the Christic Institute, who felt that the evidence they had collected tied in with their ongoing investigations of the CIA. Ultimately Avirgan and the Christic Institute filed a $24 million lawsuit against a wide spread of people alleged to have been responsible for a conspiracy to commit the La Penca bombing along with drug and arms trafficking, illegal assassination programs, and more. It should be stressed that many of the underlying claims in the lawsuit were ultimately well-documented—the Iran-Contra scandal was, after all, real, and the lawsuit was filed months before it emerged into popular awareness. And, more to the point, the CIA really was responsible for a host of illegal activities including drug smuggling and illegal assassinations.

Despite its prescience, however, Avirgan v. Hull was a deeply ambitious lawsuit, and the Christic Institute had bad luck in drawing James Lawrence King as the judge. King was a Nixon appointee who would have a long career of conservative and pro-government rulings, and on June 23rd 1988 he dismissed the case, declaring that the Christic Institute’s case consisted of “unsubstantiated rumor and speculation from unidentified sources with no first-hand knowledge” and levying one million dollars in fines against the Institute for filing a frivolous suit.

It is undoubtedly the case that King was a particularly hostile judge, and opinion was sharply divided on whether his dismissal and penalties were unduly harsh, but even writers who are sympathetic to the Institute’s aims tend to suggest that the lawsuit was deeply flawed.…

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Daisies (An American’s Guide to Czech Movies)

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Věra Chytilová’s Daisies defies questions like “what the fuck is this?” It is simply unlike anything else in world cinema. I’ve watched films from every continent on the planet and cannot think of a single movie that compares to Daisies. It’s anarchic, ebullient and ruthlessly itself. In an era of petulantly formalist films, its blend of medium-breaking collages, jump-cuts and percussionist staccato soundtrack stands alone as a crowning achievement of drastic bizarreness. 

Yet this hour-and-16-minute chronicle of two women wreaking havoc in Prague is, in its own way, profoundly accessible and grounded. Yes, this is a film that starts with a montage of naval warfare, followed by two girls, Marie I and Marie II, declaring that “if the world is bad, then we are going bad as well.” It’s a cry against the ugliness of war. Yet it’s ultimately about the tumultuous journey of two girls failing to understand adulthood in a world that expects them to achieve it off the bat, a fact bolstered by its lack of professional actors in its lead roles. And like The Firemen’s Ball, it broadly relies on non-professional actors (its leads are played by a schoolgirl and a shop clerk).

More than many Czech New Wave films, Daisies benefits from the viewer knowing a spot of Czech. My Czech is far from proficient, but its simple dialogue, which replicates the speech patterns and worldview of children, was often clear to me even before I read the subtitles. But more importantly, there’s wordplay in the film that’s easily missed in English. In Czech, Ivana Karbanová’s line “I am a virgin” is “já jsem panna”, ending with a noun that can mean “virgin” or “doll.” The duo’s catchphrase, where one says “vadí?”, to which the other replies “nevadí”, meaning “do you care?” And “I don’t care” refers to a Czech children’s game. “Daisies is fundamentally childlike: a film that plays with adult ideas in adolescent terms.

“We are going bad as well” is an adolescent declaration of war against a disorienting world. The world is burning, so let’s burn it more. And the film follows suit: aesthetically, Daisies operates like the play-acting young girls it follows. It plays with the medium of film, mixing analogue effects, strange montages and color grading. When the Maries are home in their apartment, the film adopts color, portraying the girls’ world as vibrant and lively. When the Maries take on false identities to troll lonely older men over dinner, Daisies often switches to sepia or black-and-white, turning into a Buster Keatonesque comedy of manners. Just take the scene where the Maries run with an old man towards a train, hopping on board it, and then trade places with the old man. It feels like something out of The General or Modern Times. And that’s before we get to the Maries deploying a Burroughsian cut-up technique to each other, where they use scissors to cut each other apart, while their animated body parts occupy a different part of the frame, before the film devolves into a flashy montage of percussionist snipping set to bits of the frame clashing against each other.…

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Out Today: 2000 AD #2330

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I’m absolutely over the moon to be able to announce that today sees the release of my professional comics debut, which you’ll find in this week’s issue of 2000 AD. It’s a Future Shock called “Look At Your Hands” that I’ve done with the stunning Laura Helsby on art, with two-time Eisner nominee Jim Campbell on letters. I am, as you can imagine, absolutely charmed and delighted to be breaking in via this specific route, which I think you’ll agree is by far the absolute funniest way I could possibly do it.

In any case, I hope you’ll check it out, not least because, in my entirely unhumble opinion, it’s really quite good. (I am in fact comfortable saying it’s better than “Killer in the Cab.”) Not only that, but there’s a nice one-shot Judge Dredd in there, new installments of Durham Red and Enemy Earth, and a Rogue Trooper story by Garth Ennis and Patrick Goddard. Yes, you read that right: my comics debut is in the same issue as a friggin’ Garth Ennis story.

You can snag it at your local newsagent or comic shop, or get it online from 2000 AD’s web store. And, since they’ve released it as a preview, I can at least give you the first page, which is enough to see our cool and exciting premise and just how incendiarily good Laura’s art is.

I’ll be posting detailed writers notes to the $25 tier of the Patreon this afternoon, and a big interview with me and Laurz at the 2000 AD website.…

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Ordinary Torture (Book Three, Part 66: The CIA)

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Content warning: Images of physical mutilation

Previously in Last War in Albion: Joyce Brabner, after getting into the world of comics by becoming a major figure in Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical comic American Splendor (and marrying Pekar in the process), is contacted by the Christic Institute, run by Daniel Sheehan, a lawyer who came to prominence during the Karen Silkwood case.

You’re tuning it out. I can see your ocular focus shifting. You’ve been trained to handle interrogation, in a very specific way. I bet you can even bypass ordinary torture. And none of these people picked it u. Because DHS is formed out of sixteen domestic agencies. And you’re from the Central Intelligence Agency. – Warren Ellis, Jack Cross

Silkwood’s family ultimately sued Kerr-McGee for negligence in the original plutonium poisoning, successfully recovering $1.38 million dollars in a settlement; Sheehan was among the attorneys in the case, and founded the institute in the wake of their success to pursue similar cases, using civil suits to right wrongs that the criminal justice system had proved inadequate for.

This was often a successful strategy—in one of their early cases, for instance, the Institute represented survivors of the Greensboro massacre, in which white supremacists shot and killed five participants in a “Death to the Klan” rally. State and federal prosecutions failed to secure any convictions, and so the Christic Institute led a successful civil suit to secure justice. But it is important to stress the degree to which the Christic Institute’s strategy was also one of public relations. Sheehan was always, in part, a legal impresario, and one who was prone to making sure he was prominently centered in stories about the group. This meant that the Institute could often be a blunt instrument; one media article about it quotes the leader of another public interest group as saying that “Danny Sheehan is to investigating what a depth charge is to sports fishing.” This bluntness would ultimately have significant consequences.

In 1984, the Institute represented Stacey Lynn Merkt, who had been arrested transporting refugees from El Salvador on behalf of the Catholic American Sanctuary Movement. In the course of working this case, Sheehan was visited by multiple religious leaders who repeated claims passed by unnamed government officials that the Sanctuary Movement was in fact smuggling known terrorists into the country. Perturbed by this dedicated misinformation campaign, the Institute began investigating their source, and soon found itself investigating the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Central Intelligence Agency was formed in 1947, in the aftermath of World War II. During the War the US had set up the Office of Strategic Services, its first effort at an intelligence agency. At its head was General “Wild Bill” Donovan, who quickly developed a taste for extravagant covert operations, dropping agents behind enemy lines to commit sabotage or exploring complicated gadgets and tactics—at one point he was investigating how to use bats as a bomb delivery system. In late 1944, Donovan wrote to Franklin Roosevelt arguing for the establishment of a permanent intelligence service.…

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The Firemen’s Ball (An American’s Guide to Czech Movies)

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Miloš Forman is best known in the Anglophone world for his crowd-pleasing (if delightfully truculent) blockbusters One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus. Both relate the life stories of iconoclastic eccentrics who burn like a barn fire, disrupting the higher powers, and then die in obscurity.  Neither film exactly suggests that Forman was a politically dissident Czech Jewish child of Holocaust victims and whose initial films were banned by the Soviet authorities in Czechoslovakia before he resettled in the United States to become a filmmaker.

Yet this is the key to Forman’s anarchic spirit. His American studio films reflect his impish proclivities and emigration from an authoritarian government. Nobody sells outsider artists quite like Forman does. Yet his most countercultural and rebellious work hails from the first part of his career, when he was a pioneer of the Czechoslovak New Wave of filmmaking, a movement where Czechs and Slovaks used the medium of film to flip the bird at the Kremlin.

In the days before the Prague Spring, when the Czechoslovakians faced the possibility of democratic reforms, and the days following the Warsaw Pact invasion of the country, which quelled those hopes, some filmmakers pioneered a mode of filmmaking that viciously but furtively blasted the structure of Soviet authority. When the Czechs and Slovaks fell behind the Iron Curtain, those modes became stronger than ever.

So Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball is different from Cuckoo’s Nest or Amadeus. It lacks a countercultural protagonist with reckless countercultural tendencies hat results in his early death. Indeed, The Firemen’s Ball doesn’t have a protagonist, instead depicting a cast of Bohemian firemen driving to host a ball which their bureaucratic whims repeatedly thwart. They’re not exactly the kind of frigid authoritarians who’d be villains in Forman’s later work. The firemen — many of whom are played by real Czech firemen with no acting experience — are incompetent rather than malicious, attempting to honor their chairman who, unknown to him because of Soviet medical policy, has cancer. Yet instead of centering the ball around him, they try to protect a series of prizes which are stolen from them. At the start of the film, two firemen argue over whether to hold a latter in place while a man at the top of the ladder accidentally sets a banner on fire. This is revisited later in the film when the firemen are too late to save an old man’s house from burning down because they’re trying to save his prizes. These aren’t cartoon villains — they’re a much worse threat: bureaucratic oafs whose fixation on micromanaging non-issues in an extremely small space fucks everything up.

It’s hard to fathom why the Soviet Union had a problem with a film about incompetent bureaucrats failing to feed civilians. Yet after the Warsaw Powers invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Soviet authorities banned the film forever, which is difficult to fathom when a crucial moment features a panicked old man throwing a stolen ham onto a table and then fainting in front of a crowd.…

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An American’s guide to Czech literature & film

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I’ve spent the past several months researching my genealogy, primarily focusing on my Czech ancestry. To say it’s been an ordeal would be an understatement —  Czech-Americans don’t have WASP’s advantage of having their history accessibly documented (though they have a better shot at it than Black and Indigenous people in this country). To piece together my family history, I’ve read hundreds of pages of records, written more notes than I can hope to organize, and started to learning Czech, a language so complex that even other Slavic dialects want it to calm down.

While that may sound like an arduous exercise in self-torment, it’s been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. All of my recent writing has been shaped by my genealogy research in some way. Most notably, I wrote about it for The Statesman, Stony Brook University’s undergrad newspaper for which I am Opinions Editor, using Castle Garden in the Battery to discuss my second great-grandmother’s immigration journey. But there’s potentially hundreds of pages worth of material in my research, similarly to how Jack Graham made a whole Austrian economics beat out of his Neoreaction a Basilisk contributions. Eventually I plan to turn this project into a book (and you should really back my Patreon so I can eventually afford a research trip to the Czech Republic).

One of the byproducts of this research has been absorbing a ghastly amount of Czech cultural history. Consider this a holistic genealogist agency where unpacking a family history requires dissecting the world around it. Since many of my ancestors were farmers in rural South Bohemia, I’ve learned more Czech history than biographical details of Grandma Stazi’s life. This whole project is an absurd transatlantic psychogeography which I have no hope of selling to a general audience, and it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever done.

So while I prepare to write my eventual weird genealogy book, I figured I should turn my research to good use (i.e. monetization). One of the great joys of Czechophilia is the breadth of extraordinary Czech art. The cultural output of the Czech lands is often surrealist and detached in character, reflecting a culture fragmented by everyone from the Nazis to the U.S.S.R. It’s haunted, playful, creepy, and some of my favorite art in the world — perfect for an essay series with a vague sense of thematic unification.

For now, I’ll be focusing on Czech literature and cinema. Both have enough major works that I can paint a general picture without overwhelming myself. I don’t know how many entries this series will have — it probably depends on how much my readers like it. Most likely, I’ll be hewing to one book per author, hoping to represent distinct moments in Czech history. 

Part of this is the relative underrepresentation of Czech literature in the literary canon. Franz Kafka is one of the only major Czech writers who readers already know, so I’m somewhat (if not entirely) disinclined to include him in this series (that and Kafka’s works being in German gives them a flavor distinct from some of these other writers).…

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An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy Ebook

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I’m pleased to announce the release of the first volume of a new Patreon-exclusive ebook series Apocrypha Eruditorum, which will collect some of my essay series and writings that don’t and are unlikely to have a home in any other release. This inaugural volume collects my series An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy, which covers the movies in the Star Wars Saga, along with essays on some other films by Rian Johnson, and it’s available right now to all $10+ Patrons, who also have been getting things like my reviews of the second and third John Wick movies, Portal, and Portal 2 and should get four more pages of Britain a Prophecy sometime this weekend.

(Yes, that’s the actual cover. I’m extremely proud of it, though I should note that the actual photo was kindly provided by Peppa Bridger when I asked for something like it on Twitter.)

“But wait,” you may be asking yourself, “didn’t that series only ever get eight installments?” Well, that was true once, but now I’ve finally written the concluding essay on The Rise of Skywalker just so I can put this out. And it’s available to all my Patrons, not just ones at the $10+ level.

To give an update on the Patreon, at the time of writing it’s at $2,161, which is still nearly $1500 down from what I was making in March. So that’s not great. What I’d like to do, in the short term at least, is target $2700, which is the point at which it will at least cover my family’s rent. We’ve traditionally paid that every month with the Patreon, and so having the Patreon below that number is genuinely alarming. $2700 is still a pretty painful loss compared to before all this went down, but it’s at least manageable; I can make it at that level for half a year and then do a round of fundraising off the fact that my Doctor Who reviews are going to be Patreon-exclusive. But there’s still a ways to go between now and that level.

So please, if you haven’t backed the Patreon yet, get on that. $5 gets you all my publicly released ebooks and all my new writing. And if you have backed it, have you considered upping your pledge? I’ve already noted what the $10 tier gets you, but there’s gonna be something pretty fun coming for the $25 Patrons around… ooh… May 3rd? I think May 3rd. And even if you can’t back it or have hit the most you can afford to spend, please at least consider spreading the Patreon link around. I’ve got no advertising budget or anything; I depend on word of mouth and reputation. So whatever it is of mine that you like, please tell people, and tell them how they can help me afford to keep doing it.…

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Sunburn Tatters (Book Three, Part 65: American Splendor)

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Last War in Albion is produced with the support of my Patrons. My Patreon is currently in some trouble after a Patreon-mandated start from scratch to switch to per month billing, and is currently below the level of our monthly rent, which my family has historically relied on my Patreon to pay. If you enjoy my work, please consider supporting it.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore contributed a story to Joyce Brabner’s Real War Stories project. Brabner got into comics, as she tells it, by appearing in one—specifically Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor.

Only the gutter margins where the strata peeled back into sunburn tatters gave away the lawyers of human time compressed below, ring markings on the long-felled cement tree-stump of the Boroughs. – Alan Moore, Jerusalem

American Splendor gradually evolved from the meandering anecdotal form into more long form and piercing accounts of Pekar and his life. Many of the stories were simply several page accounts of conversations Pekar had with various people in Cleveland, while others offered more piercing accounts of Pekar, his anxiety, stubbornness, and sense of himself. A story in American Splendor #3 entitled “Awakening to the Terror of a New Day,” for instance, starts with Pekar on the phone with his ex-wife, trying to get back together, only to be rebuffed, at which point he loses his temper at her and is castigated for it, concluding that “I shouldna lost my temper. That’s one reason chicks don’t dig me. They’re scared a’ me.” He lays down in bed, wakes up anxious, masturbates, and is left feeling hollow and empty inside. He takes a bath, reflecting on his job, and how he doesn’t want to get out of the tub. “Sometimes I wish I could freak out,” he thinks, “have a nervous breakdown, anything to get away from the same routine.” Instead he rises from the tub, gets dressed, grouching about how his clothes are tattered but how he doesn’t want to spend money on new ones because “what could be more ridiculous than fat slobs spendin’ a lot a’ money on clothes. They’re gonna look lousy anyway.” He has breakfast, leaves for work, and decides on the walk that he should take the civic service exam and look for a government job. The comic ends with him sitting at the bus stop, resolving that “I gotta take the days one at a time… make a plan an’ try t’ follow it out. I might be able t’ make it if I get my ass in gear. I’ll check out the gover’mint gig scene an’ think over where I stand with th’ chicks I know. Mybe I’m overlooking someone. T’day’s Thursday. Tomorra’s Firday. Saturday I c’n sleep late.” A final caption notes that “Man looks wherever he can for hope,” and the strip ends. It’s elliptical, willfully unsatisfying, but more than anything is simply a poignant reflection on working class life in Cleveland in the 1970s.

Pekar’s work drew a number of admirers, although the comic remained a niche operation that ran at a steady but sustainable loss.…

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About Time 4.1 (And Other Reviews)

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So, first of all, thanks to everyone who joined my Patreon after my somewhat desperate Saturday appeal. We’ve still got a long way to go before this upheaval isn’t a major financial stress, so expect me to bang on about it for a while more, but the weekend was still a big relief.

To that end, I want to highlight a specific tier: the $10 a month tier, which gets you not only all my ebooks, Britain a Prophecy, and any new writing that isn’t intended for a specific venue, it gets you Britain a Prophecy serialized scene by scene as Penn and Nechama finish them, an exclusive set of ebooks called Apocrypha Eruditorum, more about which in a few weeks, and a log of all the media I watch, with reviews of a lot of it. I just posted one yesterday, which included a retrospective on Partners in Crime and a review of John Wick.

But one of the things I read last week was provided as a review copy, and it feels unfair to gate that review for Patrons. So here’s a sample of the sort of thing you can expect in the form of a review of the latest volume of About Time, Tat Wood’s exhaustive series of Doctor Who criticism.

About Time Volume 4.1: 1975-77

New volumes of Tat Woods’s astonishing About Time series are always intensely welcome events. In this case what we have is the first half of a revised version of Volume 4, which originally covered the Hinchcliffe and Williams eras in a single volume coauthored by Lawrence Miles that offered by far the scantest coverage of the series. Now we have the first half of a diptych, splitting Hinchcliffe and Williams into separate volumes and diving in with the kind of exhaustive hyper-detail that has characterized the series since Miles’s departure from it.

On one level, this is a small problem to have. Yes, About Time is marketing to a niche of obsessive fans—one that I’m obviously in having written what remains the only real Doctor Who criticism that you’d mention in the same breath as it. This is a staggeringly impressive book, full of rich detail and fascinating arguments. For the sort of obsessive Doctor Who fan it’s aimed at, it remains irreplaceable. I’d have much rather had it by my side than the original edition when writing the relevant era of TARDIS Eruditorum.

But that’s a literally unique use case, and for most use cases it’s hard not to feel like this edition is simply too much book. Certainly when one looks at the price tag—$40, twice the original edition, with Volume 4.2 slated to release in June for $45, ultimately more than quadruple the price. An expansion was certainly warranted—the original volume’s 328 pages are clearly too scant to do justice to six seasons of Doctor Who in the About Time attempts. But the new edition’s 864 pages and $85 price tag are equally clearly simply too much.…

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A Somewhat Urgent Plea for Support

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So, last week I was forced to launch a new Patreon because Patreon refused to allow me to change my existing one over to monthly billing instead of the per-post grind I’d been on since 2014. Since doing that, however, I’ve faced a $2000 a month drop in income. This isn’t strictly speaking a surprise—obviously you expect to lose some people when you have to sign up for a new paying service to replace the old one. But it’s a lot more dropoff than I’d been expecting, and frankly has blown an absolutely terrifying hole in our monthly budgeting. So I’m just going with an open plea here: if you have ever liked my work and generally thought “El deserves to be able to have food and housing while writing the stuff she writes,” now is the time to support it directly. Just $5 gets you all my ebooks, all the issues of Britain a Prophecy, and the whole of the Jodie Whittaker TARDIS Eruditorum to date.

Including, notably, “I Thought It Would Hurt Me, And I Was Right (Spyfall),” my essay on the Series 12 premiere.

$10, meanwhile, gets you a weekly roundup of my media consumption with reviews, which this week is going to inlcude a retrospective on Partners in Crime along with a review of John Wick. But we’ll talk about that on Monday, when I hold back the next part of LWIA to post a review to this site……

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