Eruditorum Press

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

How To Get Ahead in Colonialism

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If you’d like to hear me read a Weird tale, click here and you’ll be able to download my reading of Edward Lucas White’s ‘Lukundoo’.  See below for some background.

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‘Lukundoo’, though originally written in 1907, wasn’t published until 1925, when it was accepted by Weird Tales.  A very appropriate place for it to first erupt.

A best-selling author of historical novels in his day, the writer of ‘Lukundoo’, Edward Lucas White, started out writing uncanny stories.  He is largely forgotten now – except for ‘Lukundoo’, the finest of those uncanny stories, and a classic of Weird fiction.  And even ‘Lukundoo’ increasingly fades from our cultural memory.  It was once a frequently anthologised tale, and thus widely read.  But the ghost story anthologies which kept it alive – once a crucial rite in the childhoods and youths of many people – have long been in decline.

It will be a shame if ‘Lukundoo’ vanished into the interior.  It needs to be resurrected and theorised in the same way that many of Lovecraft’s tales have been.  It stands the comparison.  But it should also be better known by the general reader.  It is a very good myth to think with – even if doing so is far from a comfortable experience.  It is a startling tale, beneath the somewhat conventional genre trappings it wears like bandages to cover its dirty secrets.  It is queasy, febrile, hypnotic, disturbing, suggestive.

‘Lukundoo’ is also, without a doubt, profoundly racist.  Consider that a warning, and please heed it if you need to.  But – like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, written less than a decade earlier – it is profoundly racist because it is a profound examination of the psychology of colonialism, written from the anxious viewpoint of the colonialist.  It has nothing to say to us about the colonial subjects – beyond its assumption of their inhumanity.  Indeed, as in Heart of Darkness, such subjects are not subjects at all – at least not in the normal sense – but rather objects.  Objects of fear and loathing.  But ‘Lukundoo’ has interesting things to say about where such fear and loathing really comes from, and what it means.  It says more than it knows, because it knows more than it wants to.  China Miéville once described ‘Lukundoo’ as “the most unbelievably acute fiction of colonial anxiety – using monsters – I’ve ever read, and all the more remarkable because… I do not think [White] knew he was doing it at all”.  That ‘Lukundoo’ says far more to us than it is conscious of, is, of course, a large part of its unique, sickly, feverish power.

But I’m not going to tell you what ‘Lukundoo’ is about.  I hope you’ll listen to me read it and make up your own mind.  Alternatively, you can skip the experience of hearing me indulge my frustrated actor fantasies and just read it yourself, here.  I hope you enjoy it.  But I hope you’ll ponder it too.…

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Spirit Tracks: Chatting Retro with Bob from RetroRGB

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Remember how I had a podcast?
 
All joking aside, I’m really, really proud of this one. Please join me in extending a very warm welcome to the wonderful Bob from RetroRGB.
 
Bob has done tireless work gathering information on how to preserve every aspect of classic video games: Not just the systems and the games themselves, but the whole experience of retro gaming. From the best way to hook up your old consoles to a modern flatscreen digital HD TV to the best way to track down and safeguard a CRT to build your own personal arcade, Bob’s website RetroRGB is a wellspring of everything you’d ever want to know about the technical side of video game history and preservation. Over the course of an hour and a half, Bob and I share our thoughts on the retro lifestyle, some of our favourite video game memories and talk about what keeps us coming back to the old classics and retro aesthetics year after year.
 
This podcast is a real collaboration between RetroRGB, Eruditorum Press and the Forest of Illusions YouTube Channel. For the first time, I’m doing a proper crosspost: My YouTube viewers will get a video podcast (and, for the first time, get to see me in person), while fans of EP’s podcast network get an audio-only version hosted, as always on the Pex Lives Libsyn. But more to the point, Bob was kind enough to not just guest on my show, but actually do all the technical work recording, mixing and uploading it too. I could not have gotten this out in time today were it not for him, so I wanted to give him an impassioned public thanks here as well.
 
Some liner notes:

 

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The Proverbs of Hell 25/39: Tome-Wan

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TOME-WAN: A miso or vegetable soup with rice. This signifies nothing more than the approaching end of the meal.

WILL GRAHAM: Can you explain my actions? Posit my intentions? What would be your theory of my mind?

HANNIBAL: I have an understanding of your state of mind. You understand mine. We’re just alike. This gives you the capacity to deceive me, and be deceived by me.

WILL GRAHAM: I’m not deceiving you, Dr. Lecter. I’m just pointing out the snare around your neck. What you do about it is entirely up to you.

HANNIBAL: You put the snare around my neck.

This is going appreciably differently from Will and Hannibal’s previous efforts to get people to murder the other for them. Hannibal’s first line is the closest thing to an explanation – at this point they are so enmeshed in one another’s psyches that trying to kill each other is, as Steven Moffat would put it, their flirting. Will, however, misses the real takeaway, which is Hannibal’s note that he has the capacity to deceive him. Spoilers: this is going to go badly for Will. (Admittedly that spoiler is basically just always true.)

HANNIBAL: Why did you tell Mason Verger I want to kill him?

WILL GRAHAM: I was curious what would happen. It’s true, isn’t it? You do want to kill him. Or you want me to. Either way, you’d like him dead. I’m just giving you a little nudge.

HANNIBAL: Mason is discourteous. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.

WILL GRAHAM: Are you thinking about eating him?

HANNIBAL: Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude.

Hannibal’s motive is at last stated explicitly, and it’s exactly what you’d expect: he eats people because they are ugly. Though in typical and glorious arrogance, he extends this to a general principle of cannibalism.

Will’s aesthetic has evolved rapidly over just a couple of weeks. There is still intimacy to his imagined murder of Hannibal – looking into his eyes as he cuts his throat. But there is an added vein of theater – Hannibal being fed to pigs, and the set piece of hanging him, slitting his throat, then dropping him to the pigs. Although we cannot reduce Will to a set of influences, it is in this case not even a little hard to track those influences.

WILL GRAHAM: Hannibal is trying to manipulate me into murdering one of his patients. Mason Verger. I can manipulate Hannibal into killing him instead.

JACK CRAWFORD: What’s Verger done?

WILL GRAHAM: Hannibal considers him rude. That’s motive enough. It’s as though committing murders has purged him of lesser rudeness.

This exchange shines light on an aspect of Hannibal’s pathology that’s usually overlooked, which is where his sense of excessive civilization comes from. Will’s hypothesis – that his murders purge him of baser instincts – is almost correct, but puts the emphasis in the wrong place (although the context begs to have the wrong question posed). It is not that Hannibal’s murders purge him of rudeness, but that they place him higher on the food chain than humans, thus rendering him more civilized than mere civilization.…

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Permanent Saturday: Paradise Is/Exactly like/Where you are right now/Only much, much Better

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While out walking, Garfield comes across a hill. There’s a sign planted next to the hill, indicating that Paradise can be found at the top.

This hill is different from the ones we normally see in Garfield; rounded moguls upon which the cat will lay back and look up at the clouds on a warm summer day. The prominence appears quite challenging even for a seasoned climber, which is probably part of the reason Garfield has the reaction he does upon seeing it. The general design indicates less a typical Garfield hill and more a location that showed up in the strip a few times in the earlier part of the decade: A jagged, rocky mountain whose summit we cannot see from the vantage point of the strip, but upon which dwells a Wise Man whom Jon tells us “has a long beard” and “says grand things about life”. To further the continuity link, one Wise Man strip features a sign that literally says “Wise Man” partway up the mountain, a kind of spiritual road sign or mile marker, with an arrow helpfully pointing to the summit, much as the sign for “Paradise” does here.

We can read the prominence in this strip as the same as the Wise Man’s mountain, albeit within Garfield‘s established framework of negative continuity, because the strip’s nonverbal associative iconography makes us recognise the shapes and symbols of things, if not the details. It’s also thus not a problem that the mountain seems to be small enough to be covered in grass here, where in all its previous appearances it was a craggy peak, because although it had always been rocky before it had always been drawn differently in each of its previous appearances. Perhaps this also goes a way to making Garfield‘s setting feel more generic, and thus more relatable, as unless you happen to live somewhere near the American Cordillera, Alps, Himalaya or some other major mountain range, it’s likely there aren’t any mountains like that near your house. Perhaps though we’re just at the very base of the mountain this time (worthy of note is that this is the first Wise Man-style strip to open on a typical Garfield backdrop; all the others to date have been set in unique and quite atypical locales), which would tie neatly into the strip’s central joke.

We stand at outset, faced with the prospect of beginning a long and potentially arduous journey towards enlightenment. Indeed, nothing less than Paradise. And Garfield rejects the call, or rather, he rejects this call.

Mountain veneration and asceticism is common throughout Eastern spiritual philosophies, from the famous Tibetan Buddhism to the Five Mountains of Taoism to the Yamabushi of Japan. Although it’s from Eastern beliefs that the pop culture notion of the “wise mountain hermit” is probably derived today, mountain veneration is certainly not a practice limited to them, with parallels being found in belief systems the world over. Perhaps due to their height and structure or just because of their awe, mountains are seen as places that bring us closer to the gods, and to spiritual enlightenment.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 24/39: Kō No Mono

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KŌ NO MONO: An assortment of pickled vegetables. Janice Poon suggests that this signals the approaching denouement, and also makes a nice metaphor about the vegetables sharpening the senses, which is what Alanna needs. The reality is that the second season is not so much going off the rails as plummeting down the gorge, watching mournfully as the rails disappear into the sky.

The script calls this the Wildigo, which is the best part of the entire conceit. That a silly portmanteau is the best part speaks to the intense and pointless violence being done to the show’s narrative principles here. “Kō No Mono” is primarily structured around a cheap and theatrical bit of audience deception, maintaining the illusion that Will killed Freddie. This is already cheap – a way to manufacture drama out of structure when you obviously don’t have it in your actual character work. This is a common way for formally inventive storytelling to run aground – when the formal complexity becomes a way of making a story work in the first place instead of working better. Mostly Hannibal avoids it, not least because it’s got the core of the Harris books, which clearly and demonstrably do work dramatically. But here it’s out on a limb, dealing with stuff of its own invention and in the narratively tricky spot of mostly getting pieces lined up for a big dramatic finish, and it’s being found out.

But that is mostly a macro concern of the episode – a reason the whole doesn’t work. This specific scene, on the other hand, manifests a far more egregious problem. There have been various aspects of Will’s behavior that are hard to reconcile – we talked about his inexplicable sadism towards Freddie last week, for instance. And we’ll get to his at times bewildering mode of interaction with Alanna in good time, though that can mostly be reconciled. But those are questions of behavior. This, on the other hand, is firmly located in Will’s dreamscape. Hallucinatory as it may be, there is no room for subtle interpretations here – this scene is about Will’s horror at turning into Hannibal in the wake of killing Freddie. But, of course, he hasn’t done that. One doesn’t even really suspect he’d like to – Freddie annoys him, but his sense of murderousness has never focused on that. And using the dreamscape for narrative bluffing like this is massively problematic. The show can and does violate spacial and temporal coherence with aplomb in favor of this dream reality, but it can do this purely because of the implicit pact with the audience that the dreamscape is in a sense more real than mere reality – that it accurately captures the interior lives of the characters. To use the dreamscape for something that is mere narrative contrivance to generate unearned suspense is almost as fundamental a betrayal of the audience as abruptly caving on the “no sexual assault” rule would be.

HANNIBAL: Among gourmands, the ortolan bunting is considered a rare but debauched delicacy.

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Bloodmoon Episode 4: BloodRayne Part 4

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Last one of these for a little bit, but only because I need to record another session and get back up to where I left off because I lost this save file. Thinking of doing some other videos in the meantime though: I was gonna do one on Raiders of the Broken Planet and Metroid, but I found myself far less inspired by that game than I was hoping I would be. I could do Quake Champions, but that would just be me getting humiliated and curb-fragged over and over again. Maybe I’ll just end up gushing about Warriors All-Stars for an hour or two because, to paraphrase one of the achievements, it has in fact become my life. I’ll have to see how things go.

Check out previous entries in the Bloodmoon series to catch up if you wanna: Here’s Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

I’m pleasantly surprised at, and very appreciative of, by the way, the reaction this series has gotten (really, any reaction at all). This project is not at all remotely what I originally envisioned it to be, and I’m glad people still seem to like it.

Anyway, here’s yer edited text from the video description:

Bloodmoon is a series that looks at the evolution and apotheosis of specific themes and archetypes throughout various video games via the medium of full playthroughs with open discussion prompts.

Questions and observations:

Consider this visual. A half-vampire heroine haunts the ruins of an abandoned and flooded Louisiana plantation manor house overrun with gun-toting zombies.

Zombies are, of course, a key part of Voodoo (really, Haitian Vodou) belief, being corpses reanimated into slavery by necromancers. Another type of Zombie mentioned in Vodou is the “Zombie Astral”: The inverse of what we think of as a normal Zombie, this kind of Zombie is a disembodied spirit-fragment that can be used to bring people good luck. Zombies are considered part of the “harmful magick” of the bokor, Vodou sorcerers. Like magicians in other premodern belief systems (or traditions derived from premodern roots), bokor can do either good or evil, and no value judgment is placed on the magick itself, for magick is but a tool.

The old Beauregard house is adorned with portraits of men in, presumably, Confederate uniforms (though the lighting in the game seems to make them look more Union blueish than the real thing). And notice again the use of stock “Great Masterpiece” paintings, such as what appears to be “The School of Athens”. Of course, this could merely be a reused texture in a middle-shelf sixth generation video game, but it does also put one in mind of, say, a middle-class estate trying to look intellectual by displaying prints of famous works of art.

Plantation houses, obviously, would not have had automobiles (or working freight elevators, for that matter). That the Beauregard house has one (and a sizable car garage to boot) indicates it was either retrofitted at some point to accommodate it, or, perhaps, that it’s not even a real plantation house, but instead some sort of “revivalist” McMansion.

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The Proverbs of Hell 23/39: Naka-Choko

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NAKA-CHOKO: A citrusy soup, used as a palate cleanser. Hannibal does suggest that a meat has citrus notes, but that’s a stretch. Not even Janice Poon tries to explain this one.

It is tempting to say that this episode opens with a revision of the previous one’s finale, but based on the scripts it’s more accurate to say that the previous episode’s finale was revised to be a streamlined version of this opening, cutting the actual fight scene down to Randall bursting through the glass (and making one other major change, which we’ll get to in a moment). Here we get the psychic landscape version, in which Will murders Randall-as-representation-of-Hannibal, which, in light of the cuts to the previous episode, becomes the sole and definitive version.

WILL GRAHAM: I’d say this makes us even. I sent someone to kill you, you sent someone to kill me. Even-steven.

HANNIBAL: Consider it an act of reciprocity. One positive action begets another.

WILL GRAHAM: Polite society normally puts such taboos on taking a life.

HANNIBAL: Without death, we’d be at a loss. It’s the prospect of death that drives us to greatness.

The other post-shooting script revision to the end of “Shiizakana” is the addition of the first line of this scene, which, while good for the line in that it gets to stand out as the solid punchline it is, but in hindsight is not as good an ending as a silent face-off between Will and Hannibal over Randall’s corpse and also screws up the start of this episode.

Hannibal’s happiness at Will not only killing someone again but at bringing him the corpse as a present, meanwhile, has him in an unusually loquacious mood, admitting casually to his artistic genius in a way he’s usually too polite for.

The scene of Hannibal washing Will’s bloodied hands, especially after a bit of dialogue in which killing Randall with his hands was equated with intimacy, is actually probably even slashier than the bondage murder at the start of “Shiizakana.” Astonishingly, however, it’s not the most explicitly homoerotic thing in the episode (homoerotic being distinct from slashy, though obviously not unrelated).

HANNIBAL: Don’t go inside, Will. You’ll want to retreat, you’ll want it as we want to jump from balconies, as the glint of the rails tempts us when we hear the approaching train. Stay with me.

WILL GRAHAM: Where else am I going to go?

HANNIBAL: You have everywhere to go. As long as you buttress your mind against deterring forces like guilt. You should be quite pleased. I am.

Hannibal’s first line is interpolated from Hannibal, where it’s originally used to describe Clarice’s desire to step inside Hannibal’s old cell, as opposed to a retreat inside one’s own mind. But for all that I tend to go on about the distinctive flair of Harris’s language, it’s worth noting that Hannibal’s second line, at least based on my searches, appears to be entirely the product of Steve Lightfoot, seamlessly picking up on the textual tone of the preceding Harris line even as he comes nowhere near the sheer flair of Harris’s metaphors.…

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I Just Can’t Help Podcastin’

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You find me, EP readers, in the midst of my annual Elvis Kick, the time of the year where, werewolf like, the Presley geek within rises and takes the wheel for about six months. Hence the title of this post, a kinda play on Jumpsuit Elvis’ I Just Can’t Help Believin’, the BJ Thomas cover I’m playing and replaying at an aggressively antisocial volume.

(“We all immediately understood that, James! Don’t talk down to us, the audience! And don’t anticipate our reaction within the body of the text, who do you think you are? Jim Gaffigan?”)

Alright, the business of the day. Lots of fun and unusual bullets in my arsenal this time out.

Kevin and I haven’t yet had the chance to reconvene in my podcast marriage, Pex Lives, after how we spent our summer vacation, but, barring a terrible catastrophe, we’re all go for Sunday, so keep your eyes peeled and your ears open for that one. We pride ourselves on being scheduling geniuses and have, let me be clear, never made any ridiculous mistakes around a) the clocks changing, or whether GMT is all year round, b) which weekend “Next weekend” means, c) one of us going on the drink when we intended to record. I’m very excited.

I continue to be a proud part of Wrong With Authority and all its footnotes and spin-offs. I recently recorded a commentary with the big brother I never had, Kit Power, while I was operating at about 60% with a malignant hangover. We had drank whiskey and watched a full Bruce Springsteen show on DVD the night before, but the hangover had nothing to do with that. We talked 1931’s Frankenstein, a film that will forever hold a powerful spell over me. I think it’s a good listen.

http://wrongwithauthority.libsyn.com/footnote-3-frankenstein-1931

I’ve got two new episodes of City of the Dead to tell you about, with the still-fresh co-host Mr Lee Russell. I’m a huge Lee fan, as I’ll tell anyone, whether they be a friend online like yourself, or a stranger unfortunate enough to sit next to me on a long train ride. He’s simply one of the best podcasters in the business, as far as I’m concerned, and would be pulling down Adam Carolla money if this world’s laughable claims to be a meritocracy were true. We’re still journeying through the Amicus filmography and quietly plotting future moves. I’ve relaxed on mic with him now and the show’s really coming out nice. 

http://pexlives.libsyn.com/city-of-the-dead-14-asylum

http://pexlives.libsyn.com/city-of-the-dead-15-tales-from-the-crypt

Speaking of the astonishingly underrated, I spoke with my good friend and drinking buddy, Ric, a Squid From Space, on 2017’s horror graphic novel House of Penance.

http://pexlives.libsyn.com/panel-talk-with-ric-house-of-penance

And, in the most unexpected turn, at the start of the year I had the pleasure of sharing a microphone with Jersey’s most charming man and talk about the genuinely interesting philosophy, racial politics of a long-ignored phenomenon, the Mr Men books. I’ve been sitting on this one for a while because my recording set-up was kinda fucked at the time, but I listened back and I think that this is a great leap into the imaginative worlds of children’s fiction and the questions that simply go unasked.…

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Book Launch: The Next Generation

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In honour of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s 30th Anniversary today, Vaka Rangi Volume 2: Star Trek Phase II, Original Film Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation (Season 1) is now available for order from certain online retailers.

This volume covers the years 1977-1988 and aims to tell the story of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s conception and birth over the course of that decade, starting from the fandom’s staunch resistance to letting Star Trek go in the late 70s leading to the abortive Star Trek Phase II project, which eventually morphed into the Star Trek film series. Every pitched Star Trek Phase II script is examined in detail, with particular emphasis on the ones that were eventually adapted into television episodes and movies: “In Thy Image” (Star Trek: The Motion Picture), “The Child”, “Devil’s Due” and “Kitumba”. Also covered during this section is the fanmade Star Trek Phase II web series and the famous and illustrious “Star Trek Trilogy”-Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Moving beyond fandom history, the book explores the other, less-frequently acknowledged pop culture influences on and antecedents of Star Trek: The Next Generation as well, such as Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Cosmos, Miami Vice, Alien and Aliens. New to the book version is a section on the history of 80s anime and its relationship to the contemporary science fiction scene, and how Star Trek: The Next Generation staffers like Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda were profoundly influenced by the work being done by Japanese genre fiction creators. This section’s brand-new essays are on Urusei Yatsura, Mobile Suit Gundam, Super Dimension Fortress Macross (and Macross: Do You Remember Love?) and two special revised essays on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Dirty Pair.

Speaking of Dirty Pair, longtime fans will no doubt remember the somewhat infamous run of blog posts through the entire Classic Dirty Pair anime series that accompanied the original version of this project (and that can still be found in Eruditorum Press’ archives). Regrettably this is one of the sections I had to cut for space concerns (the final book is already pared down from what I initially wanted it to be, and as it is I just barely squeaked in under Createspace’s upper page count limit with the biggest possible trim size), but don’t think for a moment I’ve forgotten about Kei and Yuri: I’ve decided that they, alongside Nausicaä, really deserve a project unto themselves, so one of my future books will be a rumination on the themes of animist utopianism in 80s anime, building off of a spun-off, heavily revised and expanded version of that section of Vaka Rangi. I can tell you right now this is not my next blog project, but it is one I’ve been in the serious planning stages of for awhile, so please look forward to that in the future.…

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Bloodmoon Episode 3: BloodRayne Part 3

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Edited text from the video description:

Bloodmoon is a series that looks at the evolution and apotheosis of specific themes and archetypes throughout various video games via the medium of full playthroughs with open discussion prompts.

Questions and observations:

Thunder and lightning is obviously an old horror trope. In the context of mythology and religion, however, they are sometimes seen as awe-inspiring signs of a divine presence. In the Yoruba religion, from which some of Voodoo is derived, Shango (also called Jakuta) is an Orisha, or divine spirit. A deified ancestor known for being a tyrannical ruler in life, his mortal reign ended when has palace was destroyed by lightning during a thunderstorm and has been associated with the natural forces of storms as an Orisha. He is also associated with the colour red, and was venerated highly in the African-American diaspora, whose ancestors valued him as a symbol of resilience and resistance during the time of slavery.

In spite of various controversies surrounding character design in video games, there is a certain multifacted way we, as players, can relate to avatars like Rayne. How, if at all, does this change when that level of agency is removed and the game is translated to something like a Let’s Play?

Take note of the paintings on the wall of Town Hall. George Washington (a noted slave owner). The Last Supper. Among other pictures of Great White Western Culture.

The Deputy is a certain kind of libertarian, not to mention Nerd Culture, ideal: The heroic lone wolf male alone during the apocalypse (a zombie apocalypse, no less) holed up in a super-secure makeshift fortress with “all the guns [he] needs” (note Rayne’s double entendre). It takes Rayne to point out it’s “only a matter of time” before the mutates and Mairaisreq “find a way in”, just like she did. Life, and nature, always finds a way, and fighting it will always be a losing battle in the end. And even so he can’t help but flirt with her and flaunt his rank. Not that this helps him realize she’s literally imprisoned.

BloodRayne on GOG

BloodRayne on Steam

Mods used:

BloodRayne XBOX 360 Controller Support

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