Eruditorum Press

Doxing gods

Like Breath on a Mirror (Deep Breath)

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Get it oooooon. Bang a gooooong. Get it on.

It’s August 23rd, 2014. Nico and Vinz are at number one with “Am I Wrong,”  with Ariana Grande and Iggy Azalea, Cheryl Cole and Tinie Tempah, and Charli XCX and herself also charting. Ed Sheeran tops the album charts. In news, since Time of the Doctor took its bow there’s been an Ebola epidemic, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, there was a military coup in Thailand, and Michael Brown was murdered by police in Ferguson, Missouri, kicking off the Black Lives Matter movement. We’re also in the last month of the campaign for the Scottish independence referendum, which isn’t technically the sort of thing that goes in these sections since it’s just sort of an ongoing thing, but clearly I’m out of practice and anyway it’s kind of relevant. Oh, and a week before this airs some jackass makes a big blog post about how an indie game designer he used to be dating supposedly cheated on him, which really doesn’t seem like it should be the sort of thing that should make a news section but actually serves as a perfect summary for how the news is going to go over the next three years and change.

While on television, Peter Capaldi makes his long-awaited third appearance as the Doctor, just over a year after his announcement. This was not, it should be stressed, an unusually long gap between announcement and first episode. Indeed, the gap was shorter than Smith’s, and looks set to be shorter than Whittaker’s as well. But there was a clear, if slightly ineffable difference between Capaldi’s debut and these others. With both Smith and Whittaker there was a tremendous amount of mystery over what their Doctor would be like—Whittaker because of the obvious gender issues, Smith because he was young, relatively unknown, and working with a new showrunner. But Capaldi was a known quantity—an already well-respected actor who, indeed, already had what would have been a perfectly good career-defining role in Malcolm Tucker. As a result, in addition to the usual excitement and goodwill a new Doctor gets there was an unusual level of expectation as to what Capaldi’s take on the character would be. And the promotion for Series Eight leaned into this, with trailers emphasizing the “where are we going,” “into darkness” and “am I a good man,” “I don’t know” exchanges from Into the Dalek and Moffat talking to Doctor Who Magazine about putting a “Capaldi moment” into every episode in which the Doctor “slightly alarms you.” By any sane accounting, Deep Breath had all the stars aligned – a pleasantly uncompetitive week just before the real heavy hitters of the fall debuted, a receptive audience, and a clear set of marks to hit. 

So why, then, is Deep Breath so ostentatiously cautious? This is, after all, the new Doctor story where you could most get away with just storming out of the gate as you mean to go on. Instead, however, Moffat consciously models the story on Robot, letting Capaldi wreck havoc on Smith’s supporting cast for seventy-five minutes.…

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The Big Bang Commentary

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“Pond.  Rory Pond.”

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Commentary time again.  Here’s Elizabeth and myself watching and talking about (and talking around… and often failing to talk about) the Series 5 finale ‘The Big Bang’.

Download here.

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Also, we’re re-upping the old commentaries at the Pex Lives Libsyn, as per requests.  One per month, starting this month with the commentary we recorded for the Hartnell classic two-parter ‘The Rescue’, which saw the introduction of Vicki.

Download Episode 1 here and Episode 2 here.

 …

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Lego Movie, It Follows

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By rights, Moffat should have left. Sure, he’d done a season less than Davies, but it was clearly time. Each of his three seasons had been a step down from the one before, with Series Seven being an openly miserable experience. The Day of the Doctor and Matt Smith’s departure provided an occasion where he could leave on a high. His style had become exceedingly recognizable and recognized, which is the phase right before utter stagnation. It was time to go, and if he didn’t he risked—indeed, given the tenacity of his critics, essentially ensured—that there would be accusations that he stayed too long. But, of course, he didn’t. He retrenched, got a new star and executive producer, and went back to try again. This is the story of how that went, and of what may be Doctor Who’s most unexpected golden age.

But to understand that unexpectedness we must first understand the landscape that Doctor Who was returning into. Because the problem wasn’t just that Moffat’s tenure looked long in the tooth on its own merits. It was that outside Doctor Who’s window, the world was catching up. In one sense this was not a surprise. Doctor Who was onto its eighth season, and while obviously it had an unusually strong precedent for long runs, the new iteration was definitely a televisual senior citizen. But it’s worth appreciating the degree to which both Doctor Who and Moffat’s defining arsenal of tricks had been absorbed into the popular culture.

The obvious place to start is with the relentless blockbuster factory that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Quietly chugging along in the background since the late Russell T Davies era, by 2014 Marvel was well into Phase Two of their cinematic expansion, going back over the franchises they’d used to build up to The Avengers to give them sequels while introducing a handful of new ones alongside them. The wisecracking sci-fi action-comedy of Guardians of the Galaxy might seem the more obvious 2014 comparison, but its primary debt is clearly to Star Wars, and anyway, it’s the whole we’re interested in more than the individual parts. Because what the MCU does on aggregate is apply a relatively consistent narrative structure to a bevy of different genres.

This isn’t done in the exact same way that Doctor Who does it, of course. Doctor Who has a narrative conceit that directly fuels its genre hopping. The Doctor can drop into any sort of story they please and muck it up. The MCU, on the other hand, accomplishes its genrefluidity by having access to any character Marvel hadn’t already sold off to Fox or Sony. And so over the course of Phase Two it moves from a technothriller to high fantasy to a political thriller to a Star Wars riff to its big crossover set piece before closing out with a heist comedy. And by Phase Three it’s cycling in even more approaches. The result moves more slowly than Doctor Who—only the political thriller and the Star Wars riff come out in 2014, for instance.…

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A Rather Large Announcement

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We do psychochronography here, and so recognize that any significant piece of information has a vast root structure of paths leading up to it and an equally vast structure of implications and consequences, both of which exist in stubborn defiance of any attempt to simply present it. When this information doubles as an event such that the moment of its revelation splits time into discrete “before” and “after” periods, the complexity of these structures only becomes more important. Stripping all of this away to formulate an Announcement, then, is a desperately theatrical and artificial act.

Nevertheless, I’ll frame this simply in terms of site business: the content previously published under the name Philip Sandifer will, going forward, be published under the name Elizabeth Sandifer.

There. Now we exist in a world of implications, which open up and branch outwards instead of leading portentiously towards the singular. For the sake of clarity, first a restatement: I am a transgender woman using female (she/her) pronouns. Now for things that follow from this.

In terms of this site going forward, basically nothing will change. I’ll still be starting TARDIS Erudtorum on Monday, I’m still publishing Volume 7 this year, I’m still getting back to Last War in Albion. That said, obviously this is going to shape and affect my perspective in future writing (and indeed has quietly been shaping it for some time already), including at some obvious points in covering the Capaldi era. Equally, I remain me, my interests and approaches remain mine, and this is not part of some radical revision of my basic worldview. I imagine I’ll do some very openly trans writing at some point—I’ve got the start of a storming epic in a Google Doc—but it’s not imminent, at least not here. (Twitter, on the other hand…)

In terms of books, this is the motivation behind the occasionally teased “all Eruditorum Press books are going out of print” thing: everything’s getting republished as Elizabeth. Neoreaction a Basilisk is ready to go and will be a seamless transition with no gap in availability over the next week or two. Once that’s out, I’ll be pulling everything else from sale while James works on updating the covers and I tinker the interiors. New editions will be rolled out one by one over the next few months, but if there’s anything you’re going to want, I recommend grabbing it now.

Most of the interior changes are being slated at “nice enough to reward the handful of people I know are going to rebuy them, but nothing so essential that anyone feels like they have to rebuy them.” TARDIS Eruditorum books will get a short and minor essay on a Big Finish thing or something similar. Recursive Occlusion will get something small somewhere in it. A Golden Thread will get a somewhat sizeable update that gets it caught up to the movie, while Last War in Albion may get essentially nothing—still deciding there. Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons will be going out of print for good.…

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Pandorica Opens Commentary

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Hello everyone.  This week it’s audio time.  Again.

Firstly, here’s a commentary I recorded with our esteemed site editor on ‘The Pandorica Opens’. Yes, we finally did it.

We had a lot of fun recording this, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy listening to it.

If things go according to plan, our commentary on ‘The Big Bang’ will be dropping next week. In true Moffatian tradition, our resolution to our own cliffhanger will entail a narrative substitution.

Then I’ll be back to my ruminations on Ron Paul, the Austrian School, Murray Rothbard, libertarianism, and the alt-Right.  People who give me as little as a dollar a month on Patreon can get instant and exclusive advance access to the next five posts in this series.  Also, I will be finishing my trilogy of posts about ‘Last Jedi’ at some point – promise.  My Patreon sponsors will probably get advance access to that as well.

In other audio news, Wrong With Authority has produced two new podcast episodes I haven’t yet told you about here.

There was this commentary that Kit, Daniel, and I recorded on original Ghostbusters (a real giggle, this one), and this full WWA episode the whole gang recorded on Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.  Och aye, etc.

Our next WWA episode – of my choosing and hosting – will be on Anonymous, giving me the opportunity to fulminate over one of my silly bugbears: Anti-Stratfordianism.  Between this and the Austrian School, it seems I’m doomed to obsess over irrational reactionary narratives with the initials AS.  Autism Speaks next, as suggested by Erin Horáková on Twitter.

Happy listening. 

And watch the site for big announcements.

 …

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Outside the Government: His Last Vow

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It’s January 12th, 2014. Pharrell Williams is happily at number one, with Beyonce, Eminem, Ellie Goulding, and Pitbull also charting. In news, a cold snap in the US has all fifty states with at least somewhere below freezing, and a chemical leak in West Virginia leaves 300,000 without clean water. In the UK, the death of Mark Duggan, which kicked off riots in the summer of 2011, is ruled to have been lawful, while Keith Wallis pleads guilty for falsely claiming to have heard Andrew Mitchell call some police officers “plebs.” 

On television, meanwhile, the shooting star that is Sherlock Series Three finishes its arc across the firmament with the Moffat script. His Last Vow is an odd thing. There are days on which I think it might be Moffat’s greatest ever script. But I mean “great” in its most complexly troubled sense. Moffat has been open about the fact that Series Seven of Doctor Who and The Day of the Doctor were miserable experiences. If the latter was him hauling himself back into fighting shape, then, this is the script with which he means to take back the mantle of being one of the most essential voices on television. But that means that this story lacks the runaway sense of triumph the fiftieth anniversary had. This is the long, hard title fight in which Moffat goes the distance with a set of ideas that are right on the edge of his capabilities. The result is harder, spikier, and far less approachable. It’s also the far greater accomplishment. Chris O’Leary, writing about “Station to Station,” describes the song thusly: “One of the many lies we tell children is that there’s no limit to the imagination. Of course there is. Even the most consuming and perceptive of minds reaches its borders and retreats. Expanding the mind is dog’s work, as grueling as it’s often fruitless; few attempt it, fewer succeed in it, and those who do often come out twisted and torn. In 1975, binging on cocaine, living in paranoid isolation and making a rock record, David Bowie succeeded.” One doubts Moffat’s version of this involved quite so much cocaine, but there is a similar sense of an artist clawing his way, bloodied and stunned, to a peak he knows even as he reaches it that he will never surpass. 

But while Moffat’s script is the element that’s pushing to new heights, it comes off because he’s backed by an absolutely staggering array of talent. Cumberbatch, Freeman, and especially Abbington rise to the ambition of the material, while Nick Hurran shows why he’s become one of Moffat’s most trusted collaborators. With Moffat at the frayed ends of his powers, he needs everyone to show up. They do, and the effect is an entire show determined to see just how far it can push things. In answering that question, then, we basically have to start at the ending, in which Moffat comes down firmly on the side of shooting Rupert Murdoch in the face. …

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The Ron Paul Revolution (Part 1)

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In my opinion, any account of the rise of the alt-right, especially one which emphasizes the role of libertarianism, and thus the distal causal role of the Austrian School of economics, must begin with Ron Paul.

In his essay ‘On Social Sadism’, published in the journal Salvage, China Miéville recounts an occasion when

[a]t a debate between Republican candidates in September 2011, Wolf Blitzer, the chair, mooted the case of a hypothetical thirty-year-old uninsured man who becomes sick. ‘[C]ongressman,’ Blitzer asks Ron Paul, ‘are you saying that society should just let him die?’

‘Yeah!’ comes a shout from the audience. A smattering of applause. The shout is repeated, and again, and the applause grows.

Paul retired from politics in 2013, but his shadow is long on the libertarian Right.  After the above exchange, Paul – a former medical doctor and a fervent libertarian, indeed a ‘paleolibertarian’, a follower of the syncresis of libertarianism and far-right conservatism invented by Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell – suggested that the hypothetical man in the question should have a private medical plan.  “We’ve given up on this concept that we might assume responsibility for ourselves, that our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it,” opined Paul sententiously. He later clarified his position on Twitter saying that “[t]he individual, private charity, families, and faith based orgs should take care of people, not the government.”  Recognisably a species of the same weaselly ‘Big Society’ argument employed around the same time by the coalition government in the UK as its Tory leaders tried to find a way to reconcile lethal austerity with their claim to no longer being ‘the nasty party’. Charity as a moral imperative, supplanting the need for socialised care. Chilly Victorian workhouse morality, dressed up as a plaintive cry for us all to be nicer to each other (so no surplus value has to be diverted anywhere useless).  Paul’s iteration has a more overtly Christian flavour, as befits American politics, and a tang of his ostensible anti-authoritarianism, but it boils down to the same thing: a thoroughly neoliberal impulse to relieve the state of its responsibilities to its subjects, while framing this as asking the subjects to take back control of their responsibilities. In Cameron’s version, the emphasis was more on countering a supposed culture of dependence, whereas in Paul’s the emphasis was more on encouraging individual liberty.  But we’re splitting hairs. The difference here is, as I say, a matter of emphasis. And we learn a lot from the fact that the same argument, with tweaks for tone, can be advanced from what are supposedly ideologically distinct varieties of conservatism.

Neoliberalism is a broad church.  This has been true since its birth, since the Mont Pelerin Society included Austrians and monetarists, neoconservatives and ordoliberals.  It is key to its success. The collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas speaks to its status as a class project rather than a distinctly ideological one.  It’s one of the tragic ironies of history that the revolutionary projects of the ruling class are (or at least can be) marked by tolerance and cooperation between different branches of ruling class ideology, whereas the revolutionary projects of the working class have tended to be marked by the exact opposite.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 39/39: The Wrath of the Lamb

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THE WRATH OF THE LAMB: Reframing the title scheme for the back half of the season away from “Blake paintings” and towards “lines from Revelation,” and not entirely honestly. The title drop in the proceeding episode forces single vision, such that it can only refer to Will’s vengeance against Hannibal, although it’s not as though it would have been long on ambiguity without that.

I complained on Twitter a while back that there are no good instances of the deceptive edit, in which information is withheld from the audience purely by selectively editing around it so as to obscure it. The general problem with this is that it depends on selectively and covertly breaking the basic narrative codes of the medium, which state that editing is for communicating information, not for casual lying without any hints to this effect. Hannibal likely comes closer than most to being able to get away with it by the simple virtue of its editing never really suggesting a directly communicated reality in the first place. But the real reason it just about gets away with having an unseen cadaver in the room for this entire scene is just that the deception is mercifully short-lived.

It’s also worth noting that fully six minutes of this episode are pulled forward from “The Number of the Beast is 666.” To my knowledge the full details of the production of “The Wrath of the Lamb” have not yet been shared, but it’s evident that it was a troubled production, a fact that particularly affects the final fight scene, and the amount that had to get moved into it to get it up to its length seems to speak to that.

REBA MCCLANE: I drew a freak.

WILL GRAHAM: You didn’t draw a freak. You drew a man with a freak on his back. Nothing wrong with you, don’t let yourself believe there is.

REBA MCCLANE: I know there’s nothing wrong with me. In making friends, I try to be wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. I’ve been with a few. The blind attract them.

WILL GRAHAM: Not just the blind.

It’s probably not the show’s deftest handling of blindness to use it as a basis for equating Reba and Will, but equally, the moment of shared empathy is important, especially as it’s the one opportunity to interact with someone other than Dolarhyde that Reba gets. The more interesting line, however, is Will’s defense of Dolarhyde, which grants the reality of his split personality in a way that leaves Dolarhyde himself oddly blameless. 

WILL GRAHAM: Molly and I want it to be the same.

HANNIBAL: When life becomes maddeningly polite, think about me. Think about me, Will, don’t worry about me.

There’s a cut to Hannibal’s line, which is scripted to begin “Mutual assurances you try to exchange in the dark and in the day will pass through some refraction, making them miss their mark.” One assumes it’s for pacing reasons so as to get to the punchline faster, and in turn set up Will’s retaliation, but its a pity, as it’s a good line.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 38/39: The Number of the Beast is 666

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THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST IS 666: Last and in most ways least, it is to “The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea” what “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun” is to “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun”—a drabber and less chilling counterpart. The dragon is in an awkward pose that serves to expose the limitations of Blake’s anatomy, his face flattened in profile in such a way as to lose all animalistic grandeur. It is the one of the paintings to arguably look better when Fuller and company recreate it in “And the Woman Clothed in Sun.” Its one interesting element is the lamb-like figure behind the Beast from the Sea, a point of contrast and dissonance that enlivens the whole.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: It’s hard to predict when brittle materials will break. Hannibal gave you three years to build a family and a life, confident he’d find a way to take them from you.

WILL GRAHAM: And he has.

The blunt fatalism of this admission surprises, and doesn’t really seem to follow from any of Will and Molly’s interactions last episode. Nor is it entirely clear what’s going on here. Will asserts that he sees himself killing Molly over and over, which is consistent with his general psychological state, but feels very Season One, and kind of lazily disconnected from the show’s current concerns.

WILL GRAHAM: Bluebeard’s wife. Secrets you’re not to know, yet sworn to keep.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: If I’m to be Bluebeard’s wife, I would’ve preferred to be the last.

WILL GRAHAM: Is Hannibal in love with me?

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you and find nourishment in the very sight of you? Yes. But do you ache for him?

Bluebeard gives his wife a key to every room in the house while forbidding her from the basement, where it turns out all his previous wives are. The story goes more or less how you’d expect from there. Bedelia’s “would’ve preferred,” however, prompts Will to consider his relationship with Hannibal in a new light, leading to the meat of the exchange. Bedelia’s definition of love is revealing of her own pathologies, reducing love to its pathological components as opposed to treating it as an affirmative feeling. This is partially because of the understandable need to frame love in terms of appetite, but also because of Bedelia’s own callous detachment. Still, it’s slashy as fuck, so that’s something.

HANNIBAL: Will’s thoughts are no more bound by fear or kindness than Milton’s were by physics. He is both free and damned to imagine anything.

The odd turn of phrase is unsurprisingly from Harris—a description of Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs. But it’s an odd line. There’s no particular connection between Milton and physics, and the idiosyncrasy of the invocation provides another faint echo of Blake.

JACK CRAWFORD: What’s got your attention? God, the Devil and the Great Red Dragon?

…

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Outside the Government: The Sign of Three

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We continue to count down towards the TARDIS Eruditorum relaunch on March 19th with revised versions of some old blog posts on Sherlock. Proverbs of Hell will run its final two installments on Tuesday and Thursday this week.

It’s January 5th, 2014. Pitbull and Kesha are at number one with “Timber,” and while the rest of the charts are pretty similar to four days ago, we’ve got Avicii, Jason Derulo, Martin Garrix, and OneRepublic as artists we didn’t actually mention last week. News is about as sleepy as you’d expect for four days at the beginning of the year, although there’s some flooding in Wales, Scotland, and the west of England. On television, meanwhile, the third season of Sherlock continues its twelve day blitz with The Sign of Three.

Let’s talk about what Sherlock is. Although its main character is a detective, it is not quite a detective show, in that the solving of mysteries is not its main narrative engine. One suspects that had it been comprised of six hourlong episodes a season it would have been, as it would have had several filler episodes each run that would have ended up being case of the week romps, but the reduction to three episodes a year changed it into something weirder. Nevertheless, its basic dramatic engine is still closely related to that of the detective show: the moment of Figuring It Out. Its defining pleasure is the cathartic click as the puzzle box’s mechanisms slide into place in a moment of triumphant Aristoteleanism. Over ninety minutes, this produces an interesting effect. Because ninety minutes is also more or less your basic length for a film, there is a tendency to describe Sherlock in those terms – as periodic triptychs of Sherlock Holmes films. With two thirds of the episodes set as event episodes (that is, premieres or finales), it’s easy to get swept up in this.

Nevertheless, Sherlock is unmistakably television, and The Sign of Three is a prime example. It is well aware that it has no obligation to make a stirring case for its scale and scope. Its end is a self-consciously subdued homage to The Green Death. No effort is made to tease the impending threat of Magnusson. It is confident that people who are watching it will probably do so again in a week, and so does not engage in the sort of sprawling, ambitious cliffhanger that films (and, to be fair, series finales) do in order to hold interest over the course of months and years.

Perhaps more importantly, it shares Doctor Who’s willingness to push against traditional dramatic structures. If one pauses Sherlock to ask “how much time is left,”one is almost always slightly surprised—the big plot beats never happen at quite the moment they’re scheduled. The dramatic resolution of The Sign of Three comes a full ten minutes from the end, which isn’t unheard of, except that the last ten minutes are all quite subdued and tension free, as opposed to an exploration of the consequences of the climax or setup for something else.…

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