Eruditorum Press

A magical ritual to pay our rent

Fromm Frankfurt With Love (Part 2)

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Part 1 can be found here.

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The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.

– Marx, Capital vol.1, Chapter 1, Section 4

It is an historical irony that, though they today seem to embody a view of life dear to the moralistic Right, the Puritans were the ‘Left’ in the great political debates of the era of the European transition from feudalism to capitalism.  But, while ironic, this is hardly accidental.  They were expressing the views and imperatives of the rising class of bourgeois, this class being both product and inheritor of what is now the capitalist system.  This is, of course, the very market system the Austrians (and those like them, because they are by no means as distinct as they might like to think) are committed to defending as ‘moral’.  

In the essay from which we have been drawing, ‘Nietzsche’s Marginal Children’, Corey Robin quotes Hayek saying:

Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily re-created.

Ironically, for all his ostensible rejection of authority, Hayek is revealed as subscribing to the Protestant Misery Ethic, and for very good historical reasons which (in yet another delicious irony) are revealed by the Marxist class-based view of the Reformation and the rise of capitalism.

Robin also quotes Hayek thus:

So long as we can freely dispose over our income and all our possessions, economic loss will always deprive us only of what we regard as the least important of the desires we were able to satisfy. A “merely” economic loss is thus one whose effect we can still make fall on our less important needs…. Economic changes, in other words, usually affect only the fringe, the “margin,” of our needs. There are many things which are more important than anything which economic gains or losses are likely to affect, which for us stand high above the amenities and even above many of the necessities of life which are affected by the economic ups and downs.

A fascinating paragraph, which reveals staggering complacency amongst other things.  He essentially disregards either the existence or the moral sentience of those portions of the human race who can never regard economic losses as “merely” anything.

Meanwhile, Hayek’s loathing of government intervention (at least in the interests of the propertyless) stems from this idea of values, ends, and morals.  Government’s interference to make provision can only deprive us of the choice of ends and means to pursue on the market, and thus of our opportunity to create subjective values (what we value highly, what is lowly, etc), and thus of our very capacity to be moral.…

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To Switch a Witch

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With the re-release of her first two games on the Nintendo Switch, a third on the way and her creator already musing ideas for a fourth, Bayonetta is in the news again. And, as is typically the case with Bayonetta, she’s drawn quite a crowd and her fair share of controversy and anger. But of course, you can’t be a powerful, confident and self-assured woman and not.

Bayonetta is the modern day evolution of the archetype pioneered by Lara Croft and Rayne, and is the most honed, polished and refined version of that concept. She is an overwhelming, overclocked, unstoppable, inescapable feminine force of nature, and that confuses and frightens lesser people. The protagonist of an eponymous series of action games created by Hideki Kamiya and his studio Platinum Games (formerly Capcom Clover Studios), known for Resident Evil, Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry and Okami, Bayonetta is a witch who carves out her own niche in the war between Heaven and Hell by laying waste to legions of angels and demons as a one-woman mercenary army. She is pure magick, and, like all witches, she is liminal figure who stands outside of social norms and conventions. She makes the existing order profoundly uncomfortable because her very existence is an affront to their worldview and long-held assumptions.

From a video game history perspective, the best point in Platinum’s oeuvre with which to compare Bayonetta is the Devil May Cry series. A hallmark of the sixth generation, those games featured platforming and puzzle solving elements as a loose framework to show off their combat: An action system involving a complex mixture of light and heavy attacks triggering breathtaking combo moves. There was exploration, but the game generally progressed through a linear series of arenas where protagonist Dante would have to square off against wave after wave of enemies. The Bayonetta games are a spiritual successor to Devil May Cry and play the same way, but that’s not the only way they’re comparable: Devil May Cry’s story, and especially Dante, were known for being deliberately excessive camp parodies of melodramatic narrative.

Calling Bayonetta “over the top” is a horrible cliché that does not in any way convey the extent to which she absolutely revels in exaggerated camp. She is a magickally-infused exotic dance battler dominatrix who wears pistols for stiletto high-heels and summons Eldritch Abominations and medieval torture devices made out of her own hair. Hair that she also wears as a backless jumpsuit, and without which she is entirely naked. Bayonetta is the woman who codifies the phrase “orgasmic combat” par exemplar, she knows it, and she loves it: She spends every battle moaning and grunting in very specifically suggestive ways, her finishing moves all involve punishing her enemies in exactly the way you’re thinking and one of her in-game taunts involves her lying on her back, spreading her legs wide and shouting “Come On!”. And that’s not even just the beginning.

Obviously sexuality is a primary theme in the Bayonetta series.…

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Outside the Government: The Empty Hearse

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TARDIS Eruditorum will return on March 19th. But as a prelude, we’re rerunning lightly edited versions of some old essays from the earliest days of the Patreon, now reskinned as the Outside the Government essays for Series 3 of Sherlock. I would also be remiss if I did not note that we are in the final 48 hours of the TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7 Kickstarter, and it’s a nailbiter whether we’ll make all the stretch goals.
 
It’s January 1st, 2014. Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” has unseated Sam Bailey at number one, while Eminem and Rihanna, Lily Allen, Ellie Goulding, Katy Perry, and One Direction also chart. In the news, since Matt Smith got old and died it’s been exceedingly quiet. Obama signed a budget deal, marijuana was legalized in Colorado, incandescent light bulbs became illegal to sell in the United States, and Latvia adopted the Euro. While on television, Sherlock informed the audience that it was going to lie to them, and then went on to do just that. It had, in the tradition of fair lies, given ample warning. “It’s a trick. Just a magic trick.” And so, of course, it was. Indeed, The Empty Hearse is in effect a ninety minute exercise in arguing that the question of how Sherlock survived The Reichenbach Fall is irrelevant, or at least largely uninteresting.
To call this a bold response to one’s own iconic pop culture moment seems an understatement. And the reactions at the time are worth recalling, even if it is only a year on. First and most interesting were those who felt that The Empty Hearse was mean-spirited in its treatment of fandom, a criticism that focused especially on the depiction of slash fiction within the episode. And yet it’s difficult to quite articulate what about the portrayal of slash fans is offensive here. The only person to really mock them is Anderson, and Laura’s observation that her Sherlock/Moriarty slash is no more ludicrous than some of Anderson’s own theories is, in the context of the story’s larger attitude towards the idea of “solving” Sherlock’s survival, significant. She, at least, is in on her own joke, which Anderson never gets to be.

And it is, ultimately, the joke that’s at issue, which is where this episode’s boldness comes in. That The Empty Hearse was going to be read largely in terms of how well it resolved the cliffhanger was, of course, a foregone conclusion. You don’t get to have that kind of media coverage and then not be judged on how you stick the landing. Devoting an entire episode to it instead of, as they had with the cliffhanger of The Great Game, lampshading it with an absurdly trivial resolution was a necessity. But what wasn’t necessary was making The Empty Hearse into a ninety minute exploration of what it means to resolve the cliffhanger in the first place.

Which brings us to the second reaction, the accusation that the story was self-indulgent. Which misses the point in many ways.

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Your Favourite Audio

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I’m delighted to share the most exciting news of February. The eagerly awaited return of, and the link to, the new episode of Pex Lives.Kevin and I talk – for free, I’ll remind you, we’re just giving this stuff away – about the Peter Davison serial Kinda. Classic stuff to keep you company as you tidy that filthy hovel you call a home or commute to that job you can tolerate, or during the job itself, or however you listen to podcasts. i don’t know, you can do as you please. But it is lovely to be able to continue to sit down with Kevin and still be chatting nonsense at eachother about our favourite show after all these years. In this episode, Kevin binds me to a promise to write erotic Tegan focused Dr Who fanfiction when I get 50 patreon supporters. So, that’ll be a thing I spend my time doing.

http://pexlives.libsyn.com/44-kinda-or-the-not-we-must-know

Lee Russell is one of my best damn friends in the world and our Amicus podcast is excellent. Late last night, while recording an upcoming Wrong With Authority, my tongue slipped and I embarrassingly called him Lee Daniel. I don’t know who Lee Daniel is, but I’m sure he’s nice too. This is me and Lee, one of the most underrated characters out there on the internet, somewhere beyond the grave.

http://pexlives.libsyn.com/city-of-the-dead-18-from-beyond-the-grave

Speaking of WWA – the show about films which purport to be about historical events but which usually prove, on closer inspection, to be a catacomb of pointless lies – we’re starting to pick up a little bit of steam and get them out more quickly. We consider ourselves a supergroup, which means we often find ourselves wearing tights on dark city streets, slick with rain. The latest episode was hosted by me, which means I didn’t have to think very much and let my very clever friends be interesting as I asked probing questions like “What you think of movie? Good movie? Good.” Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.

http://wrongwithauthority.libsyn.com/wwa-ep7-gangs-of-new-york

I’ll close this out with a plug for a patreon. Not my patreon, no, not the one over here https://www.patreon.com/jimslater  where you can get exclusive content from me for as little as a dollar a month, including very early drafts of the novel I’m writing with Kit Power and audio stuff. No, I’d collapse at such gauchery. I want you all to know that the man Daniel Harper has a Patreon and he is doing invaluable work researching the alt-right. Let me inject a note of seriousness into this post – Daniel is learning more than any of your favs about the fascists and fashish online and it is hardgoing work. Help look after a man who, I believe, will be vindicated in years to come for a far-seeing, far reaching project that will shine real light on where we are, how we got here, and where the racists will take us next.

https://www.patreon.com/danielharper

 

Alright. Thank you very much for your attention. Thanks to Phil for continuing to allow me an amplifier on his site.…

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Shabcast 36 – Jack Gets Shipped With Seven

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Yes, it’s the long-awaited (by a tiny number of people) return of the Shabcast. 

And for my big relaunch I’m joined by a mystery returning guest who has a kickstarter going for a new book about the McCoy-era and Wilderness Years of Doctor Who, complete with some chat about the Virgin New Adventures, the new series, and sundry other inevitable digressions.  Because it’s us. 

Bet you can’t guess who my guest is.

That’s a Kickstarter you should totally contribute to, by the way.  In fact I’d almost say you were morally obliged at this point. Here’s the link.

And here’s the new Shabcast.

And here’s my Patreon.

Happy listening and pledging-of-money-to-Kickstarters-for-new-books-about-the-McCoy-era-and-possibly-also-to-my-Patreon.

(Plus, you can still buy our mystery guest’s last book, to which I made a modest contribution.  It too was made possible because people funded a Kickstarter.)

 

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Thoughts on Dynasty Warriors 9: The Blue Dragon

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In order to understand what Dynasty Warriors is really trying to tell us, let’s first get back to basics. Why is a video game series adapting the history of the Three Kingdoms, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms in particular, called musō (“unrivaled”) in the first place, and why would this be the game to pioneer “1 vs. 1000” combat mechanic it is so (in)famous for?
 
The mascot character for Dynasty Warriors has always been Zhao Yun, and I do not believe this is either accidental or arbitrary. Zhao Yun is known as one of the Five Tiger Generals, who were famed as the most loyal and revered generals of Shu. It is Shu’s emperor, Liu Bei, who is generally considered to be the actual protagonist of Romance of the Three Kingdoms (if you had to pick one) at it’s his exploits and deeds that are depicted in the most positive and sympathetic light. However while Liu Bei is certainly not a supporting character in Dynasty Warriors (especially if you choose to play as him), it’s Zhao Yun who appears on the box art of all the mainline entries and who is oftentimes used as the series’ representative in crossover works and publicity materials. He is also tacitly implied to be the default player character.
 
Zhao Yun’s feats are sometimes seen to have been exaggerated, but again, Romance of the Three Kingdoms *is* historical fiction. We have to think of the book as being kind of like the Robin Hood tales, except very much older. In Romance of the Three Kingdoms and other Chinese folklore, Zhao Yun is depicted as a warrior of unmatched strength, but also boundless humility and loyalty who never boasted of his achievements, did not seek out conflict and refused to draw attention to himself: The epitome of the perfect martial artist who never started a fight, but would always finish one swiftly and decisively if he was threatened or saw someone come to harm.
 
Historically Zhao Yun was known as an uncompromisingly just, loyal and honourable man who was driven by a desire to bring peace to the common people, and the stories emphasize this part of his character to a great extent. Dynasty Warriors shows this as being the ideal he sees in Liu Bei and the reason he is drawn to serve under him. The game even assigns as his signature weapon the Dragon Spear, an unpretentious implement dating back to the Paleolithic era whose beauty is in its elegance and simplicity (indeed, it’s for these very reasons spears have long been favoured by warriors the world over in place of bulkier swords, including by the Vikings, whom pop culture has made almost synonymous with gigantic swords) and also references his auspicious Dragon associations and motifs (his style name even literally means “Little Dragon”). After his death, Wei Yan remembered Zhao Yun as “A gentle, affectionate, wise, miraculous being who called the land to order” and that “With him, neither accidents or disasters could disturb the peaceful balance he created.
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The Proverbs of Hell 37/39: And the Beast from the Sea

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AND THE BEAST FROM THE SEA: The one painting in the series not to have a direct representation or invocation in the series. The tense sexuality that exists between the Dragon and the Sun-Clothed Woman is replaced here by a raw homoeroticism—a theme that is not entirely uncommon in Blake. (c.f. Object 47 of Milton a Poem) The Beast from the Sea appears in Revelation 13, one verse after the Dragon, and is said to be given his power by the Dragon, creating a sense of heritage or supplanting. In Blake, the Beast rises below the Dragon, but has clear dominion over him. Of course, that’s always how supplantation begins. 

ALANA BLOOM: Maybe he’s trying to stop.

JACK CRAWFORD: You think there’s any way to push him to be self-destructive?

ALANA BLOOM: Push him toward suicide?

JACK CRAWFORD: Suicide suits me just fine.

WILL GRAHAM: If he’s really trying to stop, he’s not going to kill himself. How could he be sure his death would affect whatever’s inside him?

Will’s casual apprehension of the absurd logic of Dolarhyde’s difficulties in confronting the beast within is grimly funny. A crucial question, of course, is whether or not it would. Indeed, the metaphysical legitimacy of the Red Dragon is a point of considerable ambiguity here in a way that it simply isn’t in any other adaptation. Ultimately (and in contrast to Hannibal) the show suggests that Dolarhyde is not actually supernatural (the Dragon, notably, does not appear to survive his death), but it’s notable that Hannibal asserts his sanity towards the end of “And the Woman Clothed in Sun.”

HANNIBAL: This new twoness with the Dragon, it’s disorienting for you.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: The Dragon never spoke to me before. It was frightening.

HANNIBAL: What did it say?

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: It called my name. It wants her.

HANNIBAL: If it weren’t for the power of your Becoming, if it weren’t for the Dragon, you could’ve never had her.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: I put my hand on her beating heart. Heard the sound of her living voice. A living woman. How bizarre.

There is a dash of incel to Dolarhyde, although this is firmly segregated from his motivation for murder. Nevertheless, his clear sense of himself as someone it is “bizarre” to imagine touching “a living woman” positions him clearly adjacent to a certain and timely vision of toxic masculinity.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: Will Graham interests me. Odd-looking for an investigator. Not very handsome, but purposeful.

HANNIBAL: He has a family. Save yourself. Kill them all.

It was of course inevitable that Hannibal would do this. It’s a detail from the book, but in terms of this Hannibal it’s also a functionally inevitable consequence of his declaration that Will is family in “And the Woman Clothed With the Sun.” Indeed, there’s a real sense in which the entire Abigail Hobbs plot exists to recast this action, a long and expanding context for this exact moment. Despite that, however, it was moved from being the cliffhanger of “And the Woman Clothed in Sun” to being part of the same episode as the actual attack on Will’s family, a move that downplays the moment’s importance by reducing the amount of time audience affect is expended fretting about Molly from a week to about thirty minutes. …

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The Memes of Production

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Okay, so this popped up on my Twitter feed:

 

Now, it’s tempting, isn’t it?  A really desirable little chunk of cheese, just sitting there, saying “eat me!”, conveniently arranged on a nice wooden platform, framed by a kind of metal wire sculpture of some kind…

I mean, there are so many possible responses.  The person who I saw sharing this on Twitter responded with the admirably direct “because they’re stupid as shit”.  I myself contemplated several possibilities.  There was “So near and yet so far” and “Because they don’t know about Ockham’s Razor”, and a more serious one, which was “Of course they discriminate!  You have to when giving out grades!”  And so on.  It was gonna be great.  I was going to flip the right-wing narrative, revealing them to be – yet again – projecting their own sense of entitlement onto the people they hate.  I was going to point to their own desire for special treatment, their own snowflakehood, their own yearning for victimhood as a great big excuse, their own spoiled sense of grievance, which leads them to assume that they’re right because they feel they must be, and anyone who doesn’t let them win is evil.  Etc, etc, etc.  This is their narrative about liberals and socialists and feminists, and young people generally, and, of course, it is a far better description of themselves than it is of their targets.  And they remain blissfully unaware of how utterly they confuse their own babyish malcontentment with the legitimate complaints of others.  So this was a great opportunity to make this point again on Twitter.

But, yeah, to cut a long story short: it’s fake.  Because of course it is.  As they say: if something seems too good to be true, it usually is. 

The only thing that gave me pause was… well, this is Charlie Kirk, we’re talking about here.  A man so profoundly stupid its a wonder he remembers how to get his trousers on in the morning.  A man so deceiving of both himself and others that it isn’t too implausible to imagine him sticking his own head that far up his own ass and then waddling proudly into the town square and waiting for applause.  If anyone was going to self-own this spectacularly, it’d be… well, it’d be Ian Miles Cheong. Or Paul Joseph Watson. Or quite a few other people.  It’s a fairly long list, actually.  But Charlie Kirk’s definitely on it.  As I said recently, libertarians don’t understand their own dogma – they think the doctrine of ‘self-ownership’ requires them to constantly self-own in public. 

But, as it happens, Charlie Kirk doesn’t seem to have said this.  I searched for the quote and found only the meme.  And the meme is not to be found on Turning Point USA’s website, or in the festering cesspool of bile and bigotry and aggrieved whining and deluded ignorance that is their Facebook page.  And I trawled through a lot of their memes looking for it. …

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New Kickstarter Flash Goal, Podcast Appearance

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So this just got announced. Andrew Cartmel and Ben Aaronovich writing a 7th Doctor comic for Titan. This is, on the face of it, absolutely landmark. Comics were a huge influence on Cartmel, who drew a lot of his style from 2000 AD while freely plundering Alan Moore’s catalog. So having him do one of his periodic returns to the McCoy era in comics is immediately interesting. It’s a shoo-in for the McCoy book. Except I’m really out of stretch goal slots. So instead I’m doing a flash goal. If we can hit $10k by the end of the weekend, I’ll cover this miniseries in the book. Here’s the Kickstarter link. This would be an excellent time either to back it or to link it. We’re at $9192 right now, so $10k by the end of Sunday is ambitious, but it’s doable.

The fact that we’re closing in on $10k also means that the next stretch goal is an interview with Kate Orman. The last two books have both had interviews with prominent creators who are openly fans of the era being covered—Gareth Roberts talked about the Graham Williams years, while Rob Shearman offered a rousing defense of Davison and Colin Baker. And while Orman wrote some of the best 7th Doctor stories, I’m not going to be asking her about those. For one thing, I already did in a podcast a few years back. I’ll probably transcribe those answers for the book too, but this interview will be about the televised episodes and Kate’s own Doctor Who fandom, with an eye towards talking about why the McCoy era was able to spawn the New Adventures.

Finally, I stopped by the Galactic Yo-Yo podcast to promote both the Kickstarter and the Patreon (which reached $350! Still, backing it helps make sure it’ll stay over $350, so it’s still a good idea). I talk a bunch about McCoy, the New Adventures, and scads of wildly off-topic shit because I’m me, and then we settle into me explaining why Kill the Moon is a thing of perfect beauty. That’s available here for your listening pleasure/endurance. 

And Jack and I will be getting in the studio Tuesday for what I assume will be a Shabcast so we can provide one last exciting promotional kick at the end of the campaign. So look for that late next week.

Thanks for all the support.…

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Podcasting Blade Runner & Gangs of New York

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How do you do fellow kids?

This week I have no less than two new podcast episodes for you from Wrong With Authority.

Daniel and I just released a new episode of Consider the Reagan, the thread in which two or more of us watch and comment on a film released during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  This time it’s Daniel and myself talking about original Blade Runner (1982), followed by some chat about the recent sequel.

Download here.

(By the way, if you’re interested in my thoughts about Blade Runner, watch this space, because at some point I will start properly writing my vast project about the Alien series, and this will involve a fair bit of stuff about Blade Runner, because… well, wait and see.)

And the entire Wrong With Authority gang – James, Kit, Daniel, and myself – also just released a new episode covering Martin Scorsese’s 2002 historical crime epic Gangs of New York, in which Daniel Day Lewis gives one of the most memorable screen performances of the early noughts, and also Leonardo DiCaprio stands in front of the camera and pulls faces.

Download here.

We plan to have more such episodes for you fairly soon. 

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If you like our stuff, you might consider tossing us a dime on Patreon.  There’s no overall WWA Patreon, but we now all have individual accounts, here:

Me – Kit – James – Daniel.

And remember, Eruditorum Press has an overall Patreon.

And Phil’s Kickstarter for the McCoy/Wilderness Years book still needs your help reaching ever more enticing goals.

No pressure.  But if you don’t give at least one of us your money you are a bad person and will almost certainly go to Hell.

 …

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