Eruditorum Press

Less concerned with who’s first up against the wall than with how to decorate it

Fullhouse

, , 6

This essay was brought to you by 21 backers on Patreon.

Fullhouse
Tour of Life

As Kate Bush is thrust onto the world stage, she’s faced with the anxiety of hoisting the burden of fame and its consequential large audiences. Her long-lasting fear of being seen is finally vindicated as the pop charts latch their claws into her. Bush’s schedule was wildly different after a series of promotional appearances overtook her life and live performance became her major mode of getting music to the public. One of the most valuable relics of this era is a 1979 episode of the BBC programme Nationwide, which covers Bush’s rehearsals and opening night of her Tour of Life. It’s still the best documentary ever made about as it showcases Bush at her most frantic. For the duration of the programme, coordinates her music, dancing, and budget for the shows. It’s a short documentary, capping off at under thirty minutes, yet it feels busier than any other filmmaking about Bush. The most striking thing about the episode is how unflappable Bush appears as she moves from music rehearsals to dance lessons to business meetings. This Bush’s hour and she is adamant that fucking it up is not an option. It’s an inspiring watch, and viewing between plays of Lionheart and Never for Ever is crucial for understanding the arc of Bush’s career.

At the end of the Nationwide documentary, an interviewer asks 20-year-old Bush what’s next for her. Beaming with the elated hubris and optimism of youth, Bush quickly answers “everything!” An emblematic moment, this quote could retroactively be applied to The Kick Inside and used as its ethos, summing up the album’s precocious pursuit of the universe’s magic. Lionheart also fields the “everything” question, but with more alarm: “shit, what does one do with everything?”

Alan Moore has coined a concept called ideaspace, which can be roughly summed up as the events and concepts which exist solely in the human head (e.g. the idea of a chair as separate as a physical chair). In Moore’s view, these ideas have the same validity that external events do. The human mind is capable of holding entire worlds and constellations. This theory strikes me as evocative of “Fullhouse,” which is equally about events that occur in the human head. “Fullhouse” is Bush left alone with her thoughts and being forced to furiously mow them down in her car. This is expressed rather literally: as Bush careens down the road in her car, she sees her old self in the road and plows her over. It’s a starkly violent bit of metaphor, turning internal anxiety into an visceral external attack. This viscera continues throughout the song — in the second verse, Bush sings “my silly pride/digging the knife in/she loves to come for her ride.” The singer is reduced to a host for their anxieties, where they’re reduced to vessels for their most complex emotions. Trotting onto stages in front of massive audiences for the first time certainly feeds anxieties like this.…

Continue Reading

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 16 and 17 – Holocaust Denial

, , , 9

Sorry, I forgot to post last week, so here’s info about both this new episode of I Don’t Speak German and the last episode.  It’s fitting because they’re two parts of one topic. 

Episode 16 is on the Errol Morris documentary film Mr Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A Leuchter Jnr.  It’s about the Holocaust Denier Leuchter and his connections with other deniers such as Richard Irving.

Direct Download / Permalink

And Episode 17 is on Holocaust Denial Today, back on our normal beat.

Direct Download / Permalink

Content Warnings Apply for the Episodes and for the Notes Below

*

Show Notes for Ep 16:

A Militia Group Detained Hundreds of Migrants At Gunpoint At The Border

United Constitutional Patriots on Facebook

https://twitter.com/LCRWnews/status/1119902405821288448

https://twitter.com/leftkist/status/1118662484640976896

“Republican discussed violent attacks and surveillance with rightwingers”

https://twitter.com/jason_a_w/status/1120451594825420801

Republican Representative Matt Shea Planned Violent Attacks On ‘Communist’ Leftists, Leaked Chat Messages Show

Matt Shea connection to Christian Identity in 2018 (Ad-heavy but with good detail)

“Biblical Basis For War”

*

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr (YouTube)

Mr. Death Transcript

Analytical Chemistry segment from Mr. Death

The Nizkor Project (it’s okay to click through)

66 Questions and Answers About the Holocaust

“First of all, consider the implicit conspiracy theory. Notice how the testimony of every single inmate of every Nazi camp is automatically dismissed as unconvincing. This total dismissal of inmates’ testimony, along with the equally-total dismissal of the Nazis’ own testimony (!), is the largest unspoken assumption of Holocaust-denial.

This assumption, which is not often spelled out, is that the attempted Jewish genocide never took place, but rather that a secret conspiracy of Jews, starting around 1941, planted and forged myriad documents to prove that it did; then, after the war, they rounded up all the camp survivors and told them what to say.”

“The conspirators also supposedly managed to torture hundreds of key Nazis into confessing to crimes which they never committed, or into framing their fellow Nazis for those crimes, and to plant hundreds of documents in Nazi files which were never discovered until after the war, and only then, in many cases, by sheer luck.

[…]

“Regarding postwar testimony from Nazis, were they all tortured into confessing to heinous crimes which they supposedly did not commit? This might be believable if only a few Nazis were captured after the war, or maybe if some had courageously stood up in court and shouted to the world about the supposed attempt to silence them. But hundreds testified regarding the Holocaust, in trials dating from late 1945 until the 1960s.”

Holocaust Controversies

Holocaust Controversies “Rebutting the Twitter Denial.”

Deborah Lipstadt, “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.”

Richard Evans, “Lying About Hitler.”

Nizkor on The Leuchter Report

Institute for Forensic Research, Cracow, analysis of Auschwitz in 1994

Holocaust Controversies on The Leuchter Report

Leuchter Report thoroughly debunked, by a fellow Nazi no less, in 1993 (page 32 in scanned “Liberty Bell”

Fred Leuchter interview 2015, with Jim Rizoli

David Irving “The Manipulation of History“

Another Voice For Freedom with Ernst Zundel: “Left-Wing” Violence on the Streets of Canada

Ernst Zundel, “Adolf Hitler — Artist, Architect, and Designer”

Highlights from the 9th IHR Conference (footage from this was used in Mr.…

Continue Reading

A Picture? I’ve Seen That Somewhere Before (Smile)

36

🤣😠🥵 don’t 🤬 🛠 that way

This post, to put it mildly, is not compatible with all devices. It should work fine on up to date Apple devices, and work adequately on most others. If it’s not working for you, an imperfect workaround is available here. And while we’re linking the Patreon, just $16 to go until my final fundraiser goal.

📅 April 22nd, 2017. 🎵🔝 Ed Sheeran’s “🔺 of You,” while ⤵️ in the charts are Julia Michaels, Kendrick Lamar, Clean Bandit, and Harry Styles. 🗞 Theresa May calls a snap 🗳 to try to secure a clear parliamentary majority for Brexit, which is going to go a bit 😬 for her, but that’s another entry. Mike Pence visits 🇰🇷 and goes to the border with 🇰🇵 and glare at it in a 🤔 attempt at ⚛️🚀 disarmament. And Bill O’Reilly is fired from 🦊 News due to his persistent tendency to engage in 🍆 assault.

📺, 😁. Frank Cottrel Boyce’s previous effort, In the 🌳🌳 of the 🌃 (or 🐅 for short), was a curiously mixed affair, combining 😍 ambition with deeply 🥴 execution. With 😁, however, he dials both back, going for a classic 🛸 setup instead of the quasi-🧙🏻‍♂️ approach of 🐅 and then playing it more or less straight. 😁 has essentially 2️⃣ purposes: giving 👩🏾‍🦱 her first proper adventure and exploring its own 🛸💡. The former means that the latter have to largely 🖍 in the lines, offering an easily recognizable set of tropes as a 🖼 against which the audience can clearly distinguish 👩🏾‍🦱. This is largely 😥, because 😁 has some 🤩💡, but, not unlike 🐅, precious little follow through.

Where it is 😎, however, is in terms of 👩🏾‍🦱. The dynamic between her and the 👨‍⚕️ is instantaneous and compelling. We’ve never really gotten to see Capaldi’s 👩‍⚕️ in “just having fun” mode. (The start of 🤖 of Sherwood is about the only exception.) Part of it is that Matt Smith got these equivalent episodes for 👩🏻, but most 👨‍⚕️ still have adventures late in a companion’s run that they get into while larking around. Consider the 👩‍⚕️ and 👩🏻‍🦰 in The 👧 Who Waited, for instance. Or the 👨‍⚕️ and 👩🏼 at the top of ❤️ and 👹. But Capaldi’s 👩‍⚕️ and 👩🏻 did not have a relationship in which the 👨‍⚕️ could easily switch into fun mode, simply because to do so would undermine all of 👩🏻’s carefully crafted obsessions. But the 👩‍⚕️ in 😁 is fundamentally different, literally sneaking off like a truant 👦 skipping 🏫 to have this adventure behind 👨🏻‍🦲 back. 👩🏾‍🦱 is both the cause and beneficiary of this, not only offering the 👨‍⚕️ a reason to go explore an 👽🌍 but getting to have a story that is, for surprisingly long stretches of its runtime, basically a 👐. As a result, we just plain see more of 👩🏾‍🦱 in her first adventure on an 👽🌏 than we did of 👩🏻 in The 💍 of Akhaten or 👩🏼‍🦰 in The 👹 ⤵️.…

Continue Reading

In the Warm Room

, 1

This essay was brought to you by 20 backers on Patreon.

In the Warm Room
Tour of Life

For all that Lionheart is positioned in the shadow of The Kick Inside, it diverges from its predecessor in significant ways. The Kick Inside is more or less an art rock album — a much quirkier art rock album than something like The Wall or Low, but nonetheless in a tradition that houses Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, and Genesis. There are certainly strands of art rock in Lionheart (which are most prominent in “Wow,” “Hammer Horror,” and “Symphony in Blue,” all the singles), but it’s frayed at the edges and beginning to pull away from its obvious tradition. There’s an edge of darkness to Lionheart, which wasn’t as prominent in Bush’s debut. It’s almost a Gothic album with a healthy dose of the pastoral thrown in. There’s also a folk touch to it, with its increased use of acoustic instruments (down to the influence of Paddy Bush). Lionheart is lonely, and its singer is left in France to ruminate on cultural fragments of England.

One of the quietest songs on the album is “In the Warm Room,” also one of the album’s acoustic songs. It fills the “Feel It” spot on the album, the one exclusively-piano song. “Feel It” used its slot on the album to explore sexual desire and seeking pleasure in ambiguous circumstances. “In the Warm Room” is just a dead end — a treacly, inept dirge of a love song. It actually is what male rock critics (a tautology if ever there was one) said her other songs were. It’s the nadir of the album, and a self-evident career low for Bush.

 “In the Warm Room” is that ever so ubiquitous and banal staple of popular music, a song where a man is encouraged to think about an offstage woman dying to sleep with him. The woman is typically voluptuous and seductive, a femme fatale of the highest pedigree: “she’ll tell you that she’ll stay/so you’d better barricade the way out,” “she’ll touch you with your mama’s hand” (which… ew). Women become a way to keep score, and the lady in the warm room is the ultimate conquest. It’s creepy and an indulgence of Bush’s most obsequious catering to misogyny.

If this song sounds male gazey, that is intentional. Bush claimed she often wrote songs for men, giving them what they want, specifically citing “In the Warm Room.” Such a decision is backwards for Bush, who’s always been a tad conservative in her outlook but manages to hides it behind radically conceptual songwriting (she’s stronger at navigating aesthetics than politics). And it’s just banal here — it’s depressing to see someone who once wrote a musical suicide note for an incestuous woman settling for writing a song about a dude who likes to get laid with spooky dames.

Bush plays it with such po-facedness too: the song crawls, shapelessly wandering in various modes of A (switching between major and minor) as Bush croons the lyrics in a warmed over Billie Holiday impression.…

Continue Reading

Before Your Ancestors Had Turned the First Wheel (The Pilot)

40

And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China

Just a quick update on our Patreon fundraiser, we’re just $28 a week from our final “help El actually be able to build savings instead of constantly bleeding out her Kickstarter money” goal of $700 a week. Thank you all so much for making this possible. I’m unbelievably excited to be going back to being a full-time writer. That said, this final threshold is important, so of you can help put us over this final line, please stop by the Patreon. Your support is extremely welcome. (Also, I’ve got Game of Thrones reviews for $2 patrons…)

It’s April 15th, 2017. Harry Styles is at number one with “Sign of the Times.” Lower in the charts, the remnants of the Sheeraning continue, along with Clean Bandit, Drake, and Martin Jensen. Since Sherlock, meanwhile… well, let’s start with UK news. It’s simpler. The UK triggered Article 50 and began the actual Brexit process, starting what was at the time a two year clock to departing the European Union. The new pound coin was released. And that’s basically it for major news. In the US, meanwhile… well, Donald Trump is inaugurated as President. He almost immediately commences with an attempt on his promised ban on Muslims entering the country, which immediately triggers a rash of lawsuits and protests. Less than a month later, Michael Flynn, his National Security Advisor, is forced to resign after it emerges that he lied about pre-election contacts with Russia. It emerges that another Trump advisor, Sebastian Gorka, is a member of a Hungarian Nazi group. Neil Gorsuch is nominated to the Supreme Court to take the seat that Mitch McConnell kept Obama from filling. The Dakota Access Pipeline protests are forcibly crushed. And that gaffe where the Oscars accidentally name the wrong film as Best Picture. Yeah. It’s been a big few months.

Thankfully, at last we have Doctor Who to distract us. The Pilot is a strange artifact. Its title is justified within the narrative, but clearly pulls a double duty, meta-referencing the common terminology for the first episode of a series, shot as a proof of concept for network approval. Moffat, in other words, is proclaiming a clean start. This is, of course, a partial lie. This is not a new beginning for the show, but rather an epilogue that’s marking time so Chibnall can finish saying “not all men” before casting Jodie Whittaker. But the mild perversity of that double duty is the point of the exercise here. Moffat has spoken in interviews of his idea of a mayfly Doctor, in which you do a bit of stunt casting for a Doctor who regenerates at the end of their first story. (He sort of did this with John Hurt, but that’s beside the point.) Here we get a mayfly series—a from first principles revamp of Doctor Who that starts with its expiration date already marked on the calendar. 

Indeed, the ways in which it’s not a fresh start are easy to rattle off.…

Continue Reading

Oh England My Lionheart

, 7

Oh England My Lionheart
Tour of Life

This essay was brought to you by 17 backers on Patreon. Many thanks to the lovely people who give me some money to read my stuff every month. El’s not the only person who needs a bit of help here. If you’d like to help a low-income queer writer trying to get herself on the ground, please consider backing me. I’m planning Q&A livestreams and essays which will be available exclusively on Patreon. In fact I’m doing a Q&A livestream tomorrow at 2 PM EST, so if you back me now you can tune in and ask me some questions. I’m in a difficult place financially, so any support would mean the world to me. You can find my Patreon here.

It’s difficult to imagine Kate Bush heralding from any place except England. It’s certainly easy to understand why she’s popular in countries outside the U.K., but Bush is a uniquely English phenomenon. She came from pastoral England and often sings about British culture. Her work, especially on Lionheart, is full of allusions to English and Irish folklore, and she’s predominantly influenced by British music (glam rock was also a chiefly UK-locked phenomenon). Unlike most British rock singers, Bush doesn’t shy away from singing in an English accent, as she herself has pointed out. Bush is uniquely hard to categorize as an artist, but she’s consistently staked herself out as an English singer.

Even more than most of her albums, Lionheart is cohesively British. This is reflected by such songs as “In Search of Peter Pan” and “Wow,” both of which pile on staples of British culture, and the album’s title. “Lionheart” is a word mostly associated with England, conjuring up images of Richard the Lionheart and British staunchness. Its connotation is of fearlessness and an endless march, of “God Save the Queen” and Trafalgar. Even the cover of Lionheart suggests frigidity: Kate Bush sits in an attic with gold cloth draped around her, perched on top of a wooden chest, with a stuff lion’s face resting on the floor next to her. There’s a standoffishness to it which the anabatic, orientalist cover of The Kick Inside lacks. The cover suggests that this is a more serious album, one that’s placing itself in a lineage of British stalwarts.

The title track “Oh England My Lionheart” engages with this British tradition. It is a classical song in a fair few regards. Unlike most of Bush’s music, the song is played features acoustic instruments exclusively, including Richard Harvey’s recorder and Francis Monkman’s harpsichord. If reading that you thought “huh, this sounds like a Renaissance song,” you would be correct. Bush described the song as being done “madrigally.” It’s not difficult to imagine “Oh England My Lionheart” being used in a classicist production of Twelfth Night. “Lionheart” sounds like a folk song, with its fixed structure of repeated chords, its descending melody, and its lengthy descriptions of scenery. This isn’t the first time Bush has interacted with folk music, of course.…

Continue Reading

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 15 – Stefan Molyneux

, , 4

This week, after many requests, Daniel and Jack take a look at cult-leader, ancap, blowhard, bullshit-artist, white-nationalist, misogynist, narcissist, and phoney-philosopher Stefan Molyneux.

As always, warning apply.

Direct Download / Permalink / IDSG on iTunes

*

Show Notes:

Cantwell News!

Chris Cantwell takes a break

…but not for long enough

*

Martin Sellner background (ironically most of these links are in German):

https://www.kleinezeitung.at/politik/innenpolitik/5607530/Identitaere_Martin-Sellner-klebte-Hakenkreuze-auf-Synagoge_Wollte

https://kurier.at/politik/inland/identitaeren-chef-klebte-hakenkreuze-an-eine-synagoge/400457692

http://kuesselskameraden.blogsport.eu/2011/08/18/der-alpen-donau-dunstkreis/

https://www.nawartpress.com/were-not-nazis-say-austrias-sword-fighting-frat-boys-who-dream-of-a-germanic-europe/

*

Stefan Molyneux, cult leader:

Guardian article on Free Domain Radio, ‘deFOOing’, SM as cult-leader

On SM as cult leader, FDR ‘deFOOing’, etc

FDR Liberated – blog and forum for people who have escaped SM’s influence; collates lots of info on SM

FDR Liberated on Joe Rogan interviewing SM

Stefan’s wife, therapist Christina Papadopoulos, reprimanded by Ontario College of Psychiatrists for “professional misconduct” after encouraging SM’s fans to sever connections with their families (i.e. ‘deFOO’).  SM later lied about this to Joe Rogan.

Video from former Stefan fan detailing their disillusion

*

Stefan Molyneux, racist:

The 100 Year March: A Philosopher in Poland

Why I Was Wrong About Nationalism

“An Honest Conversation About Race,” with Jared Taylor

“The Truth About Slavery”

Stefan Molyneux on White Genocide in South Africa

Interview with Lauren Southern

Stefan Molyneux on Race and IQ

Eric Turkheimer episode, October 2015

*

Stefan Molyneux in Australia:

“When Media Interview Goes Very Very Wrong!“

*

Recent Molyneux:

SM is still giving internet therapy

SM pushing eugenics Idiocracy-style

SM is learning to play Minecraft from his daughter

SM blames female suffrage for the invasion of white countries

SM whines about antifascists opposing him

Stefan Molyneux on the Gillette ad

*

Dirt and Debunks:

Devastating review of SM’s The Art of the Argument.  And another.  And another.

Ben Burgis schools SM on what is and isn’t an argument

SM as anti-psychiatry and mental illness denialist

SM at RationalWiki

SM chronicled at We Hunted the Mammoth

Descent of Manosphere on SM

Potholer54 looks at SM’s conversation with climate change denier Christopher Monckton

Video documenting SM as liar and plagiarist

Video on SM and IQ racism from The Serfs

Video exposing SM as ‘race realist’ and white supremacist

Video by José ‘How Stefan Molyneux Repackages Social Darwinism‘

Sean debunks SM on Rome, the genocide of the Native Americans, and his ludicrous ‘film criticism’ re Star Wars and Wonder Woman and seriously just go watch every video by Sean.

SM’s video ‘The Truth About Karl Marx’ debunked

*

Stefan’s tweets (referenced in ep):

 

And in response to events after we recorded:

What a piece of shit.…

Continue Reading

Fundraising Update

2

The Patreon hit $600 this morning. Which means that I’m posting this after informing my boss that I’ll be stepping down at the end of the semester and not, as previously discussed, applying for a promotion. I’ve got four weeks to serve out because obviously I’m not going to be a complete asshole about this, but in less than a month I am going to be a full-time writer again.

Which… holy shit guys. When I set up that $200 a week goal, I thought it was a longshot. Not something we were going to blow through in thirty-six hours. I’m stunned and, uncharacteristically, at a loss for words. There are a lot of things I love about this job, but the feeling of support that you all give me is by far the thing that most often stuns me into a humbled and grateful silence.

That said, I noted in comments on my last post that I was not in any sort of immediate financial insecurity. This fact just changed. The Patreon is currently at $601, just a dollar a week above the threshold at which this adventure is affordable. Patreons go down over time. So while we’ve made an absolutely massive accomplishment that I’m so, so thankful for, we also need to keep going. I’ve set up two more Patreon goals. One at $650 a week, which marks the point where I can breathe a sigh of relief. If I’d had any idea that $200 was a 36 hour goal and not, as I assumed, a really hard slog that I optimistically might make before a job offer came through, this is where I actually would have set the “quit my job” line. It means that I can lose a big patron and not immediately be plunged into a crisis. It means that I can go decent chunks of time without raising alarms about the Patreon level. Above $600 is “not a crisis.” Above $650 is comfortable.

There’s also a $700 goal, which marks the point where the Patreon is 100% replacing the day job income and I’m not relying on Kickstarter money to make the math work. This means that I can avoid situations like what happened with the Eruditorum 7 Kickstarter where to fulfill it I’m going to have to run the Volume 8 Kickstarter, and that I can use any profit that’s remaining after a Kickstarter goes through for long-term savings projects like a house or a vacation or a vagina.

These are both really important thresholds too, even if they aren’t as flashy as quitting my job. And so to help us get to them, I’ve created two new Patreon tiers. For $10 a post, you can join in on quarterly voice chat hangouts. Who knows what these will be? I’ll do Q&As, I’m sure, but I might also drag in special guests, or look at all playing a game together, or maybe live-watching something. We’ll see, but it’ll be fun.

And then, at $25 a post, comes the really fun one: custom books.…

Continue Reading

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea: Broadchurch

, 30

I want to start with an update to yesterday’s appeal. When I made the appeal for boosting the Patreon by $200, I kind of doubted it could be done. Actually, not even kind of. It felt like the longest of long shots—a desperate appeal to avoid having to give up writing despite the fact that it obviously made the most sense for my financial security. Instead, we’ve blown past 2/3 of the goal in a single day. As I queue this up before dinner, we only have $61 to go, and what felt like an impossible dream is looking like it very well might happen. I am humbled and stunned and above all grateful to be so widely and deeply supported, and so, so thrilled that I really might get to continue on this mad ride. But we’re not there yet, and if you clicked away yesterday because it felt like a pipe dream, well… it’s not. But I still need your help. The Patreon link is right here. And with that said, let’s get on to dragging Chris Chibnall.

Act I: The Woman Who Fell to Earth

The most impressive thing about Broadchurch is the unbridled, even cynical efficiency of its conception. Chibnall has suggested he had the idea for it going back to 2003, but from his account of the process this idea did not include characters, the plot, or a location so much as a vague idea to do a child murder story that would focus on the killing’s impact on the broader community. It wasn’t until 2011 that he started developing the program as a spec script after his time working on Camelot for Starz came to an end that was about as unpleasant as the series itself.

In 2011, however, the show’s influence is unmistakable: by that time Danish import The Killing, a brooding and meticulous crime drama, had made its bow on BBC Four, where it was a surprising hit, at least on the scale that BBC Four has those. The Killing, along with the late Stieg Larsson’s hit series of novels starting with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, jumpstarted the genre known as Scandi-noir. As a television genre at least, these involve making grimly serious crime dramas with a focus on place, both in their fascination with the lush desolation of their landscape and in their interest in in looking at community and social structure, and the way in which a traumatic incident like a major crime leaves a wound that traverses social strata. Think From Hell if it was actually a mystery, or, if you’re hell bent on staying in television, The Wire if it were.

So Chibnall gets to the deeply obvious idea that Britain has remote and desolate landscapes too and that there’s no reason they have to import difficult subtitled Scandinavian series when they can make this stuff on their own. And when I call that obvious, I mean it as a compliment. It’s a ruthlessly well-judged move, born of recognizing a growing trend and getting on board quickly and decisively.…

Continue Reading

The Future of This Site

16

Hey all. It’s not the Broadchurch post. Sorry. That’ll go up tomorrow. I need to use the big Monday post for something else this week. Because there’s a chance that when the Capaldi era of TARDIS Eruditorum ends I’m going to retire as a blogger. I don’t really want to do this, but there’s some things that have to happen for me to be confident that I can avoid it. Most of them involve the Patreon going significantly higher than it currently is. Like, to around $600 a post. I’ll explain the details below.

Three years ago, when Jill and I moved to Ithaca, she took a significant pay cut to do it, and in order to make the finances work I had to take up a part time job. I haven’t made a big fuss out of this because I enjoy some measure of privacy, but it’s been the big reason why my output over the last few years has been a bit sporadic. It’s why I’ve struggled at getting new Eruditoroum volumes out (or indeed revisions of the old ones), writing new Last War in Albion, or really doing anything that isn’t the weekly blog: because I literally have about 30 hours less a week to do it all in. I had hoped that I could make that balance work better, but I clearly can’t. And I’m coming towards a point where I might have to choose between trying to go back to writing full time and getting my output back towards where I can do weird projects like Neoreaction a Basilisk and get more books out or taking a full-time position somewhere and dramatically paring back my writing. As in, I’ve put an application for a full-time position at the place I’m working, and as it stands if I get it would give serious thought to taking it.

If that hapened, I would probably choose to focus on the weird side projects. I’d put books out occasionally and step back from blogging. The weekly grind makes money and is fun, but if I can only do one sort of thing it’s going to be the big ambitious stuff that takes more than a week to write. But I really don’t want to do that. I have ADHD (wow, this post is just full of confessions I’ve avoided making), and frankly a 9-5 job is really bad for my mental health. Writing is good for my mental health, and more fulfilling to boot. I really want to make wriitng work as a career. But to do that, it needs to pay more. About $15,000 a year more, specifically. Some of that can be achieved through book sales and Kickstarters. If I went back to writing full time I could commit to a book a year, and with it a Kickstarter a year. But the easiest route to that is via the Patreon, hence the $600 goal, which would make about $10k a year more for me and leave me confident I could get the rest from other sources and thus disinclined to take an a different job.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 52 53 54 55 ›»