Eruditorum Press

We’re all for praxis, just not for going outside

Outside The Government: For Tonight We Might Die

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It’s October 22nd, 2016. Little Mix are at number one with “Shout Out to my Ex,” with James Arthur, the Weeknd, Sia, Ariana Grande, and Calvin Harris also charting. In news, most of 2016 has happened. The US Presidential election is in full swing, Theresa May is in 10 Downing street, Jeremy Corbyn has survived an attempt to replace him as head of the Labour Party, and UKIP is in its usual chaos. 

While on television… well, actually, let’s start there. Class is on television in a sense that we’ve never really dealt with before. It’s a BBC Three show. But unlike Torchwood, which premiered ten years earlier to the day, BBC Three in 2016 is an online only channel following a round of budget cuts that resulted in the shuttering of BBC Three as a broadcast channel. This move contained a wealth of decisions about priorities and privilege. For instance, BBC Four, the more adult-oriented channel with a heavy focus on arts and entertainment programs, remained in place. Instead what was axed was the channel focused on the 16-34 age group and on experimenting with new programs and new talent. 

As a hedge against the obvious (and true) perception that taking it off the air consisted of some sort of deemphasis of BBC Three the BBC looked for some high profile programs to commission for the new online service. Unsurprisingly given that their previous Doctor Who spinoff was among the network’s biggest hits, one of these, announced a month before the decision to pull the plug on BBC Three was actually formalized, was another spinoff: Class. Tragically not the result of hiring Jack Graham to write an openly Marxist Doctor Who spinoff, Class is instead a series by acclaimed young adult author Patrick Ness in which kids at Coal Hill School (now Coal Hill Academy) fight aliens. 

In practice, this was a flop. The first episode pulled 660,000 people on iPlayer, with 1.1m tuning in in early 2017 for a BBC1 re-airing. By episode two, those numbers fell to 300,000 and 600,000 respectively. The BBC1 airing would eventually bottom out at 300,000, while the BBC Three version dropped to 195,000. Its AIs ranged from 70 to 82, with five of the episodes coming in below 80. This was in no way a good enough performance on the part of the new BBC Three’s flagship program, and so Class wrapped after a single season to minimal alarm and consternation. 

None of this is unfair per se; Class was in practice a deeply flawed piece of television that, in lieu of finding its own voice, borrowed several others, mostly Joss Whedon’s. It routinely lacks the courage of its convictions, slouching towards genericism even as it flirts with more interesting alternatives. It is frequently hokey and way too proud of itself, such as its invocation of the Bechdel test in its ninth line and its super knowing “it’s like the Hellmouth” exchange at the end.…

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Wuthering Heights

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I’ve been admiring Christine Kelley’s Dreams of Orgonon since before either of them were called that. It’s smart, insightful music criticism that lived up to its obvious debt to Chris O’Leary’s Pushing Ahead of the Dame and was no small influence on my own decision to make a song by song Tori Amos blog my next project. So when I needed someone to fill in for a few months while Jack wrote his book, asking her to crosspost her work to our site was the obvious choice. And when it became evident that her first post for us would be Kate Bush’s first big hit, well, that just seemed like destiny. It’s my absolute pleasure to give Christine a bit of a boost and to have her on the site. If you want to read the story thus far, her blog archives are over here. But for now, welcome to the site, let’s get on with it. -El

A misty morning

Begin with an instrumental call-and-response in the form of a spine-tingling arpeggio which is met by the same figure repeated an octave higher. Eight seconds in come the vocals, which sound as though a bog witch has put on a frilly dress and gone out to cruise for men. Eventually the song ushers in the chorus, with its soaring invocations of the romantic lead of the sort of 19th century novel for which Cliffs Notes were invented. Let’s begin, then, with the obvious question that would have been on the minds of anyone listening to the #1 single on March 11, 1978: what the fuck are we listening to?

To answer that question, it’s useful to look at what “Wuthering Heights” isn’t. The basic set-up of an unknown 19-year-old artist’s debut single based on a classic novel hitting #1 screams “novelty song.” (David Bowie, of course, became known with a novelty single influenced by sci-fi literature and cinema.) Yet “Wuthering Heights” lacks a key ingredient of the novelty format: calculated cynicism that preys on its audience’s liability to fall for a shtick. Bush lacks this predatory instinct. She’s fluent in populist language, but for her pleasing the market is a subordinate priority to using its tropes in the order of making new kings of music.

Tom Ewing has identified the particular strain of populism in “Wuthering Heights”: “[it’s] a power ballad… it also has an absolutely steely conviction in its own seriousness and worth; it stares down even the merest notion that it might be ridiculous.” One suspects this sort of familiarity helped land “Wuthering Heights” on the charts. For all that Bush aims at and successfully hits on “music people haven’t heard before,” there’s an intelligence and understanding of pop language to “Wuthering Heights” that keeps it anchored in the sensibilities of 1978.

I Wish I Were a Girl Again

A frequently remarked-upon aspect of this insight is Bush’s age. She recorded and released this song at 19. The Beatles were singing “Love Me Do” at that age.…

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I Don’t Speak German, Episode 2

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Nearly forgot I now have wednesdays to post whatever subsidiary stuff I have.

In our second episode, Daniel tells me all about former KKK Grand Wizard, “king of the angry Facebook grampas”, and man who wrote an autobiography it took 42 hours for him to record himself reading, ‘Dr’ David Duke.

Download or listen here.

As ever, we’re discussing fascism, racism and bigotry generally, so warnings apply.

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Blackstar

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Almost as soon as Doctor Who abandoned its post the world went to hell in a handbasket.

The first visible sign that 2016 would be a cacophonous disaster came ten days in when David Bowie died. Like Doctor Who, Bowie served as a sort of mass culture Lamed Wufnik; an enduring figure that lasted over countless cultural shifts steadfastly defending his corner, ensuring that the strange and wondrous had some quarter in any landscape. For a long time the two moved in sync—scrapping their way to the center of the culture over the 60s, co-founding glam in the early 70s, becoming shambling and gaudy wrecks in the mid-80s, and finding new, if niche life in the paranoid back alleys of the cyberpunk 90s. Then they began a period of effectively taking turns. Bowie held down the fort in the late 90s and early 00s with a respectable dotage that would have served as a perfectly acceptable final act, albeit one with the unsettled and partial ending of a minor album and a final world tour cut short by a heart attack. Then, as he pulled his great disappearing act, Doctor Who roared back to life. Finally, in 2013, they reconverged; Bowie re-emerged to drop The Next Day, adopting a new position of hiding in plain sight, issuing songs and videos as cryptic decrees unaccompanied by promotional appearances, interviews, or concerts. It was a perfect match for Moffat’s last act, the willfully abrasive and difficult Capaldi era. At last, the two enduring pillars of the British strange were back in sync, casting uncanny fire from the near shadows of popular culture.

And then they weren’t. Moffat’s departure was, of course, inevitable. The entire Capaldi era was a strange and unexpected extra, a second wind we had no reason to expect was possible. But it was thus necessarily borrowed time, a renaissance spent staving off a departure that felt inevitable in 2013. And in its way Bowie’s was too. Doctor Who may well continue til the end of time, but Bowie was always just a man, and men die. Like Moffat, he conjured a final act from nowhere, but inevitability has its way. The thing about endings is that eventually you get to them.

Psychochronography can be an art of apophenia. It’s not quite that one finds patterns that aren’t there; it’s just that one stitches them together with a spectral narrative. As I’ve noted, Doctor Who was almost certainly not designed as a sentient metafiction in order to protect Britain’s relationship with the strange. Nor was David Bowie actually the last line of defense holding the world back from a catastrophic descent into madness. And yet 2016 was exactly that. Scratch the surface of any year and you can find cause to declare it a miserable hellscape. And yet 2016 stands out. The grim running joke during the year was the litany of celebrity deaths that Bowie was the first notable one of. Every year loses some notable people, of course—2018 saw the deaths of Ursula K.…

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New Podcast: I Don’t Speak German

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As many of you will know, our very own Daniel Harper has been researching the so-called ‘alt-right’ (really the far-right) for more tha two years now, listening to their podcasts and YouTube shows, documenting what they say to each other in their own spaces. 

This new podcast series – entitled (very cleverly, I think) I Don’t Speak German – will be me in conversation with Daniel, giving him an opportunity to tell us what he heard.

We’re discussing fascism and racism, so this podcast comes with big warnings.

Here’s the first episode, on perhaps the best-known representative of the ‘alt-right’, Richard Spencer, his career, style, and ideology. The episode also touches on the origins of the term ‘alt-right’, the infamous ‘heilgate’ occurance after Trump’s election, etc.

Our episodes will cover one ‘topic’ per show. We plan to keep the episodes as short as possible, and crank them out regularly (in direct defiance of our usual operating methods).

The next episode will be on a more old-school fascist, David Duke, former Klan ‘Grand Wizard’ who spoke at Charlottesville.

Please consider spreading the news about this new show.

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In other news, I’m going to be taking a bit of a sabbatical from posting so I can work on the Shabgraff book I promised Elizabeth about 100 years ago.  It’s planned to be a compilation of the best of the blog, but expanded and rewritten, and with new material.  So I’ll be absent from Fridays for the forseeable future, though I’ll still be able to post podcast updates – and the occasional piece of writing, I hope – on Wednesdays.  (I’m still planning to do the Dracula movie series.)

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If you feel like helping me with these projects, here’s my Patreon.  And here’s Daniel’s, if you feel like you want to help him with his important project.…

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Cultural Marxism 8: Matter

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After an eight year furlough, Iain M. Banks returned to the Culture series in 2008 with Matter, the longest Culture novel to date. The problem is that it’s not entirely clear why he did this. Matter, to put it bluntly, is a mess. Were it not for Consider Phlebas’s intense lack of quite knowing what it wanted to do with this “Culture” idea, Matter would straightforwardly be the weakest novel in the series to date. The problem, from what I gather, is not that Banks has run out of ideas. I’ve not read Surface Detail or The Hydrogen Sonata yet, but they are apparently perfectly good books. It’s just that Matter… isn’t.

This is not a hugely controversial opinion about Matter. Most of the diagnoses center on the ending, which amounts to basically every major character in the book dying in rapid succession, starting when an ancient planet-killing machine wakes up with very little setup and eliminates the entirety of one of the three plot lines that had been occupying the book thus far, and culminating when everyone else dies stopping it. This has led to suggestions that Banks’s heart simply wasn’t in the book, or that he got bored writing it.

Color me dubious. The abrupt slaughter of the ending is too particular to be a mere product of laziness. Banks, who after all had a second career as a literary novelist, would surely have been aware of Fay Weldon’s 1986 novel The Shrapnel Academy, which famously and cavalierly ends with a bomb going off in a country manor and killing all of the characters. In Weldon’s case this is the cruel end to a blistering satire of class and militarism. Here it’s more of an abrupt turn—the book becomes a very different thing with relatively little notice. But there’s still a deliberate transgressiveness that suggests that Banks did not simply get tired of the book and write a two chapter equivalent of “rocks fall everyone dies.”

Nor does it quite work to say that Banks’s heart wasn’t in the book. The book is too substantial for that. In publicity for the book, Banks excitedly talked about how “it’s a real shelf-breaker” with four thousand words “of appendices and glossaries. It’s so complicated that even in its complexity it’s complex. I’m not sure the publishers will go for the appendices, but readers will need them. It’s filled with neologisms and characters who disappear for 150 pages and come back.” There are sizable enough chunks cut that he published one as a short story for a convention-exclusive book. None of this sounds half-hearted; it sounds like Banks tried to return to the Culture with an absolute barnstormer of a book.

And yet Matter is weak, and for reasons that go beyond its ending. It’s just kind of a boring book. It follows three main viewpoint characters (albeit with lots of excursions to other perspectives), the surviving children of King Hausk, the monarch of a race called the Sarl that live on the eighth level of what’s called a Shellworld—a planet comprised of nested levels.…

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Resolution Review

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*sigh*

I mean, it was fine in the sense that this is clearly as good as we’re going to get within Chibnall’s bold five year plan of “what if Doctor Who, only bad.” This is him firing on all cylinders, making a confident piece of self-consciously major Doctor Who that struts around like it knows it’s in its imperial phase. It’s the best script he’s written all year. And it’s perfectly entertaining, in a sort of straightforward junkfood television way. There are even a couple of bits—most obviously the parallelism between the Dalek making its shell and the Doctor crafting her sonic—that are actually intelligent, subtle, and interesting. As the Chibnall era goes, this is a triumph worth celebrating.

It’s still fucking crap TV Movie-tier television. I mean, you can see this from its basic conception. There’s no idea here other than “what if we brought back the Daleks with a real make them scary again vibe?” And so we get the bog standard tricks for that: one Dalek, its identity revealed fifteen minutes in, and we don’t actually see it in its case until fifteen from the end. There’s no larger concern here. This is just a story about how badass the Daleks are. We might fairly ask why, for the tenth Dalek story in fourteen years (and that’s ignoring loads of things like Day of the Doctor, The Pilot, and Twice Upon a Time where they appear in major roles) anyone thinks the Daleks need this sort of back to basics approach, but hey, we’ve had four completely distinct Spider-Man film franchises in that time so maybe that’s just the world we live in. Apparently it’s not one where we can use the Daleks in the course of, like, an actual idea. Instead we have to do this sort of sterilely self-conscious “event” that has no content beyond the franchise-level “the monster, it scary.” Except, no, this doesn’t go for any sort of emotional affect as nuanced and carefully crafted as fear. It’s just “the monster, it important.” In 2019, the Dalek is not a metaphor for fascism or for Nazis. It’s not even an existential threat to the series offering a narrative collapse. It’s a big bad in the sense that it is big and it is bad and there’s nothing else to it. This is Doctor Who reduced to pure spectacle, with no job to do other than sell toys. Except they don’t actually make a toy line anymore it looks like, so really it’s just selling itself, a serpent eating its own tail.

Meanwhile we have the Ryan’s dad plot, which makes up the episode’s drive for emotional resonance and aboutness. The actual resolution, with Ryan forgiving his dad to stop the Dalek, is certainly a successful firing of Chekov’s gun, but… I dunno, I just kind of feel like there are probably more people who need to be told that it’s OK to walk away from their abusive and neglectful family than who need a rousing message about forgiving them whenever they hit that part of the abuse cycle.…

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These Podcasts Were Made for Listenin’

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Hi, everyone. 

I don’t have anything for you today, though I am currently tinkering with a couple of things that might end up being postable. 

But neither of those are ready yet, so or today I’ll have to just point you towards a new episode of Consider the Ray Gun, the strand of WWA in which Daniel chats with someone about a book. 

This week it’s Kit rejoining Daniel for a conversation about the early Richard Bachman (Stephen King) novel The Long Walk.  Listen/download here. 

It’s every bit as good as their recent episode on Ender’s Game.

CtRG started as part of Oi! Spaceman, so previous episodes can be found here.

Happy New Year all.

 

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