Eruditorum Press

Beneath the stones, the beach; beneath the beach, Cthulhu

Saturday Waffling (April 8, 2017)

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Just a heads up to everyone in case you’re just sort of sitting there going “oh, the Patreon always hits whatever goal Phil sets,” we’re currently only $1 over the threshold where I’ll be reviewing the next season of Doctor Who. And that’s because someone upped their pledge from $1 to $9 to ensure it would happen. Basically, what that means is that if anyone’s payment doesn’t go through at the end of the month, reviews will stop. Meanwhile, We’re a whopping $19 away from me doing podcasts for every episode, which is starting to look like it probably won’t. So this is a post, a week before the series starts, where I conspicuously link the Patreon in the hopes that you’ll go contribute.

I know that the world is awful and there are better things to spend money on than this site. And I’m honestly OK with not doing podcasts, or hell, not doing reviews. The idea of watching Moffat’s last season with the same intellectual privacy I watched his first has a real appeal. Equally, the podcasts were a blast last year and it just wouldn’t feel like a season of Doctor Who without it completely taking over the site, y’know? So I hope you can find a buck or two in your budget to toss towards the Patreon, because I’d like to do these things. But they take time, and there isn’t enough of that in my life at the moment.

In other news, work continues on both Neoreaction a Basilisk and Eruditorum Volume 7. The former will be out this summer, the latter hopefully this year. I’ll get back to Last War in Albion after Neoreaction a Basilisk is out the door, but that’s occupying my “write extra stuff” time. (Well, this month I’m just being naughty and writing the first chapter of my cyberpunk book because I haven’t had time to write something for myself in a year now and I deserve it.) 

Anyway. Thanks to everyone who does support the site, and who supports Jack and Josh in their endeavors. It’s a pleasure writing for you all. And if you do want Eruditorum Presscasts for Season Ten of Doctor Who, here’s that conspicuous Patreon Link again.

See you next Saturday, hopefully.…

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Podcasting Round-up

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No proper post today, sadly.  Too busy.  There is some more stuff in the pipeline, and it’s not all about Rogue One.  But for today you’ll have to be content with a round-up of recent podcasts of mine.

Firstly, I was recently a guest (again) on the excellent They Must Be Destroyed on Sight! movie podcast, joining Lee and Daniel to talk about the Coen Brothers’ 1996 masterpiece Fargo.  Check that out here. 

(You may recall I wrote something about Fargo once upon a time, that can be found here.)

My previous appearances on TMBDOS (tmbdos!) can be found here (Blood Simple & Blue Velvet) and here (both versions of Nosferatu).

Also, there’s Shabcast 30.  I gave this a rather desultory write-up when I posted it last week, because I was feeling cheeky.  And, it being a little unusual, I wanted listeners to encounter it without any expectations.  But it’s actually a fun episode, if very, very long.  Myself, Kit, and Daniel (with a brief guest appearance by James) discuss Series 1 and the Ninth Doctor… with various detours along the way… while in various stages of inebriation.  It’s a little early to say, but it may end up being a kind of pilot for a new format, the Drunken Whocast.  We’ll see.

The most recent Wrong With Authority didn’t get the downloading love I hoped for and expected, which is a shame since it’s our best yet (as of writing).  The gang talk Shadow of the Vampire (y’know… the movie about the making of Nosferatu where the vampire is real) and Gods and Monsters (about legendary horror director James Whale, played by Gandalfneto).  Download here.  And check out the back catalogue if you haven’t already.

And, last but not least, there’s the most recent episode of Oi! Spaceman, on which I guested to talk about ‘Rose’ and ‘The End of the World’.  Just in case Shabcast 30 isn’t long enough for you, you can also listen to more of me talking about Who 2005 here.

Nasdrovia!

 …

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Flight Simulator: Star Trek: The Next Generation – A Final Unity (PC, Mac)

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If you enjoy seeing me talk about video games, might I direct you to my new YouTube Channel, where I hope to do a great deal more of that in the near future? I also now have a Patreon of my own to go along with that, so should you choose to support me in any way I will be most gracious.

We’ve talked at length about the odd role the PC plays in the history of the video game medium in this project before. In brief, my argument goes something like this: Despite the fact the first widely available interactive electronic games were made as programming experiments for personal computers, they’re not, broadly speaking, “video games” in the way I personally conceive of them. There are two discrete traditions that make up what we call “video games” today, and a lot of the tension in video game culture probably stems ultimately from this: One comes from those early PC programming experiments and is largely European in origin, stemming from what is called bricolage couture in French. A branch of this took root in the United States where it syncretized with the liberalism-inspired New Age and Hippie movements and the country’s penchant for solipsistic ego-mythologizing to give rise to Silicon Valley.

The other, by stark contrast, traces its lineage to places as disparate as the cathode ray tube manufacturing industry, public houses and amusement arcades and has become most associated with (and defined by) Japan and Japanese culture. The quick and dirty rule of thumb for determining which tradition you’re dealing with when you play an electronic game is to pay attention to the basic gameplay, with the divide more or less being over whether the game privileges real-time action or text-driven interaction and logic puzzles. Or, put another way, which does your game more closely resemble at its most fundamental level, Zork or Asteroids? I’m oversimplifying things to a massive degree here, and as the years have gone on there’s naturally been a lot of overlap and syncretism between these two styles, and most modern games are pretty hard to peg as being one or the other and not both to some degree. But the divide is still there, and I submit you can’t understand the history of the video game industry without being aware of it.

(I would like to stress here that I have never desired to place a *value judgment* on either of these two basic modes of gameplay: I may have my personal preferences, but I think they both have their own situational strengths and weaknesses that deserve to be acknowledged and talked about.)

The PC then is both one possible origin point for the modern video game industry and yet also occupies a weirdly limnal place within it. There’s no disputing early PC games were developed by and for a very specific audience [straight, cis wealthy, nerdy (they tend to be the same thing anyway) WASPy men], but the old joke in games journalism was that once consoles became the norm the PC *always* got the shaft with dramatically inferior ports of console games (though ironically enough in recent years, as of this writing, the PC has become the *lead platform* for many developers due to modern consoles becoming, in essence, shitty PCs).…

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The Proverbs of Hell 2/39: Amuse-Bouche

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We’re currently $11 shy of Doctor Who Season Ten reviews on Patreon, and $31 shy of podcasts. It’s probably not quite that bad, as there are some declined pledges from March that will hopefully straighten out, but if these are things you want, please support the site by backing it on Patreon.

AMUSE-BOUCHE: Literally “mouth amuser,” its function is much the same as an apéritif, but it is a bite-sized food item and thus more substantial, in much the same way that this episode, liberated from the amount of setup and exposition that “Apéritif” had to do, gets to be. A stuffed mushroom cap would be an entirely appropriate choice of amuse-bouche.

The tiered concrete at which his students sit give the sense of Will having retreated back into the bone arena of his skull.

The show’s distinctive establishing shots are as important as its richly saturated color palette in creating its Chesapeake Gothic atmosphere. The time lapse establishing shots, with clouds whizzing overhead, frame what happens as taking place outside of time, in a fractured dreamscape. Fractured time is a recurring motif in the show, where it serves to indicate the blurring of internal and external landscapes. Here the process is virtually literal.

 

HANNIBAL: You saved Abigail Hobbs’ life. You also orphaned her. It comes with certain emotional obligations, regardless of empathy disorders.

WILL GRAHAM: You were there. You saved her life, too. Do you feel obligated?

HANNIBAL: I feel a staggering amount of obligation. I feel responsibility. I’ve fantasized about scenarios where my actions may have allowed a different fate for Abigail Hobbs.

An endearing quirk of Hannibal’s pathology is that, while he certainly will lie when it’s required of him (“Pork,” for instance.), he prefers not to. This speech is one of the most nuanced. The second two claims are reasonably straightforward – especially “I feel responsibility,” although “fantasized” is the funniest of them. The first, however, is the interesting one, simply because it is honest. Hannibal really does feel just as much paternal attachment to Abigail as Will following what happened. Where Will (somewhat wrongly) views her as something like a human version of one of his rescued dogs, Hannibal is well aware that Jack’s suspicions of her are correct, and his paternal attachment is much more similar to her actual father’s. Which is to say, he both wants her as an apprentice and potential meal.

BEVERLY KATZ: Zeller wanted to give you the bullets he pulled out of Hobbs in an acrylic case, but I told him you wouldn’t think it was funny.

WILL GRAHAM: Probably not.

BEVERLY KATZ: I suggested he turn them into a Newton’s Cradle, one of those clacking swinging ball things.

WILL GRAHAM: Now that would have been funny.

Will’s sense of humor foreshadows his affection for Hannibal, whose aesthetic in his murder tableaus is not entirely dissimilar to making a Newton’s Cradle out of the bullets that killed Garret Jacob Hobbs.

JACK CRAWFORD: Lecter gave you the “all clear.” Maybe therapy does work on you.

…

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Myriad Universes: Terok Nor

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Jadzia Dax and Doctor Bashir are taking time out from a camping trip in the Bajoran wilderness to visit a museum honouring the planet’s art, history and culture. Jadzia compliments the beauty of one of the pieces, whereas Julian tries to act like an art critic to impress her with his “knowledge” of different Bajoran styles. Jadzia is exasperated and, perhaps sensing he’s fucked up, Julian changes the subject. He asks her if any of her hosts went on class field trips to museums as children. Standing atop a towering balcony, the two gaze down into the museum below, where it just so happens one such field trip is underway right now.

It’s a large room, full of gigantic statues, all looming imposingly over the museum guests. A teacher is disappointed in her students, none of whom recognise the figure immortalized in stone before them. Her name was Charna Sar, who she says was a great hero of the Bajoran people whose name has been forgotten. The children wish to hear her story and the teacher obliges, but only on the condition they will continue to tell it themselves. The teacher begins the tale, saying the story of Charna Sar is intimately connected to that of a Cardassian by the name of Kotan Darek. We transition to a flashback, and return to the darkest days of the occupation. Darek has arrived at a prison camp, wishing to speak with a Bajoran prisoner named Charna Sar, which takes the camp’s commandant by surprise. Charna is a resistance member who’s been captured and sentenced to death, but Darek wants to pardon her, shocking both Charna and the commandant.
 
As they leave the camp, Darek explains that he’s been ordered to construct a orbital space station around Bajor that will serve as an ore processing facility. In addition to being in the resistance, Charna Sar is also Bajor’s greatest architect, and Kotan Darek wants her to help him build it, as well as serve as a liaison to the Bajoran labourers. Charna flatly refuses on the grounds the station would further the explotation and enslavement of her people, but Darek protests that the station will in fact automate the mining process, thus making life easier for those on the ground in the mines. Charna still isn’t convinced, but complies after Darek threatens to destroy the Barodeem, a library tower containing historical and cultural artefacts dating back centuries with a phaser blast (Darek then claims, however, that he would never have actually done it). The two leave for the station, which is already under construction. Darek says that it will be “the eyes and ears of Bajor and Cardassia’s greatest aesthetic triumph”.
 
Darek takes Charna aboard, showing her a common area under construction, and shows her the opulent quarters she’s been assigned, right next to his. After Darek leaves, Charna compliments his taste in clothing, and takes a look at the future Terok Nor‘s schematics. In keeping with a previous comment she made about the station being “typically Cardassian” and “function over form”, she extends the lengths of the docking pylons and takes a look at the air filtration systems.
…

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The Proverbs of Hell 1/39: Apértif

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APERTIF: A pre-dinner drink to whet the appetite. In this case, it is an expansion of the Garret Jacob Hobbs case, which, in Red Dragon, is essentially presented as a precursor to a precursor, the case Will worked before Hannibal.

WILL GRAHAM: I shoot Mr. Marlow twice, severing jugulars and carotids with near surgical precision. He will die watching me take what is his away from him. This is my design.

The idiosyncratic “design” sets up the show’s defining perversity: the idea of murder as something that is aestheticized. Significantly, it is Will who introduces this term, whereas Hannibal’s only murder of the episode is Cassie Boyle, which he commits as a pastiche of Garret Jacob Hobbs’s murders. So the two characters begin as doubly opposed. On one level, Hannibal is the creator in that he commits art murders, whereas Will, as the detective interpreting those murders, is the critic. On the other hand, it is Will who is presented as the imaginative figure, whereas Hannibal is reduced to a responsive role, reinterpreting other people’s murders.

It is also worth highlighting what, precisely, the design of the initial murder was. It is not the precision of the kill shot – the technical acumen with which Mr. Marlow’s death is executed. Rather, it is the psychological configuration he wishes to bring about that is the design. There is obviously a degree of megalomania here – a desire towards the demiurgic. But there’s also a healthy dose of a good old-fashioned Ballardian “make the external landscape match the internal one” to it. Regardless, the important takeaway is that murder is about far more than mere meat.

The pendulum is extrapolated from a throwaway line in Red Dragon. It immediately serves to introduce the fractured narrative space of Hannibal, simultaneously dividing space, time, and reality, all in multiple senses.

JACK CRAWFORD: Where do you fall on the spectrum?

WILL GRAHAM: My horse is hitched to a post closer to Aspergers and Autistics than narcissists and sociopaths.

Positioning Will as on the autism spectrum is an interesting move with regards to his stated skill at empathy. In practice the show plays more than a little fast and loose with what exactly it is that Will does, and its resemblance to empathy as conventionally understood is tenuous. Nevertheless, given the common myth of neuroatypical people lacking in empathy, putting Will on the spectrum has to be taken as one of the show’s more charming conceits.

(In practice, neuroatypical people are good at understanding other neuroatypical people, just as neurotypical people are good at understanding other neurotypical people. The construction of empathy as something that only counts when it’s neurotypical serves a disturbing double purpose, both tacitly establishing that neuroatypical people don’t really count as human and routinely being trotted out as a justification for precisely that belief.)

ALANA BLOOM: Normally I wouldn’t even broach this, but what do you think one of Will’s strongest drives is?

JACK CRAWFORD: Fear. He deals with huge amounts of fear.

…

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Sex in the Time of Empire

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I was a guest on Daniel & Shana’s Oi! Spaceman podcast again, this time talking about ‘Rose’ and ‘The End of the World’.  But now, back to the ongoing saga…

 

The last time I wrote about Star Wars, I said that it sees the galactic politics and history it depicts as being essentially powered by neurosis, specifically male neurosis.  Rogue One very explicitly adheres to this pattern – though, laudably, it represents a counter-strain in opposition.

In Rogue One, the Death Star openly represents the immense strength and immense vulnerability of any imperial system, the simultaneously terrifying and ridiculous urges and principles which animate such systems.  At a different-yet-connected level, it represents the same mixture of dangerous power and ridiculous vulnerability within one of the techno-bureaucrats who run that system.  It sees the causal throughline as very clearly running from inside the heads of at least two men, out into the universe.

I have mixed feelings about this.  The thesis that politics comes from emotions and psychology, though I believe it is ultimately wrong, doesn’t necessarily have to collapse into a reactionary ‘fix yourself first’ ideology.  Psychology clearly plays a role in politics, and in resistance and struggle.  The subjective factor is important.  We are generally supposed to think that the ‘mass psychology of crowds’ is negative and scary, but crowds can also be expressions of unifying principles rather than just the loss of individuality, and collective struggles create dialectics of learning and cooperation that expand people’s political horizons.  This is why it is generally a mistake to too ruthlessly criticise mass political movements that, while broadly on the right side, also have imperfect or even pernicious elements.  A lot of people who demonstrate against Trump will have ideas that are retrograde, unpleasant, unhelpful, conventional, short-sighted… but they’re still better than anyone else because they’re there, on the street.  And the collective process of protest creates a space – found nowhere else within capitalism – in which people can encounter strange new people, and strange new ideas, face to face as it were, in struggle, in unity but not in conformity, where they can learn and grow and expand, can improve their political consciousness.  The social effect of mutual support and solidarity in struggle is a vital part of any radical movement.  This is undoubtedly psychological.  Indeed, it is only the vulgar reduction of psychology, society, etc into discrete and separate things (itself an aspect of bourgeois ideology) which sees the psychological aspect as being apart from the other dynamics of political struggle.  Anything that impedes this dialectic is to be shunned, including criticism that stops being constructive and becomes sectarian doctrinaire nitpicking, whether it comes from identity politics or from class politics.  (Again, the apparent schism is a false dichotomy.)

On the other hand, the way Rogue One – and Star Wars generally – depicts cosmic levels of political tyranny and turmoil as emanating directly from inside addled and repressed and anxious male brains can be, as it were, reclaimed. …

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Myriad Universes: Blood & Honor

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Returning from an exploratory mission in the Gamma Quadrant, Jadzia Dax informs us through a Science Officer’s Log that her team has discovered something unique: A mysterious blue glowing artefact of unknown origin. Also on her team aboard the runabout USS Orinoco are her erstwhile travelling companion Doctor Julian Bashir, and an operations division ensign called Jamie. Before they can dock, however, Julian gets an urgent call from Commander Sisko that he’s needed in the infirmary to tend to a medical emergency. Before he can even acknowledge, however, he’s beamed there directly from the runabout cockpit.

A Lieutenant Jayakar has been unfortunately killed in some sort horrible malfunction. She was escorting a diplomatic party from the Romulan Star Empire led by an Ambassador Jannek when something seemed to go wrong with one of they airlocks. Jannek himself is on hand to offer his condolences, and urges diligence to Commander Sisko in determining whether it really was an accident, or whether the Lieutenant was murdered. Odo reports that mechanical failure seems like the obvious initial culprit, but he would never accuse Chief O’Brien of negligence, and is far more inclined to point the finger at deliberate sabotage. There’s an obvious tension with the Romulan party present, but before Jannek can excuse himself Dax and Jamie arrive. We get the by-now stock Trill joke (which Jadzia even lampshades), wherein she tries to catch up with an old friend who doesn’t recognise her at first. Jannek, however, seems far more interested in Jamie: He compliments the wisdom in her assignment to Deep Space 9, and expresses a desire to get to know her better, a fact which leaves her and Doctor Bashir somewhat taken aback.

Some time later, Commander Sisko escorts Jannek to the floor of the Bajoran Provisional Government. The Ambassador is interested in opening up formal diplomatic relations with Bajor, but the Bajorans are suspicions. Not of the Romulans themselves, necessarily, but because the Romulans have dealt with the Cardassians in the past. Jannek contends that the Romulan Star Empire seeks to work with anyone who “shares its interests”, but it’s clear he’s going to have some work to do in swaying them. Back on the station, Jadzia, Julian and Jamie are running tests on the artefact in the lab when one of Jannek’s aides comes in suffering from abdominal pain. Turns out he had an allergic reaction to something he ate, namely some Klingon gagh.

After returning from their meeting with the Provisional Government, Jannek and Sisko are talking about Federation history, which is something the Ambassador is deeply interested in. He says Commander Sisko reminds him of the great Starfleet hero James T. Kirk, but Ben can’t see how, feeling that he and Kirk are really almost polar opposites, specifically mentioning how important family is to him, which he contrasts with Kirk’s desire to never be anywhere other than a starship bridge. Sisko does say that both he and Kirk are both “a product of our times”, and Jannek says he is as well.…

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Cultural Marxism 6: Inversions

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I’ve set the Patreon thresholds for reviewing Doctor Who S10 – $300 (currently $9 a week away) for reviews, and $320 for podcasts. So if you’re not backing Eruditorum Press on Patreon, now’s a great time to change that.

Inversions continues the basic trend that began with The State of the Art whereby Banks writes Culture stories whose premises amount to attempts to break the Culture. Having essentially exhausted the two extremes of premises with the form “what if the Culture met X,” however, Banks moves in a different direction by asking, essentially, “what if you took the Culture out?” This is, obviously, quite the feat, and there are aspects of Inversions that clearly don’t quite work outside of the original publication context. When Excession was first published, it very clearly declared itself a Culture novel on the cover. Inversions, on the other hand, was published with no such description. There were significant clues, including a “note on the text” omitted from subsequent editions that contained a conspicuously capitalized reference to one of the characters being “from a different Culture,” but broadly speaking, other than the fact that it was an Iain M. Banks novel instead of an Iain Banks novel, the book was not even overtly science fiction, little yet overtly a Culture novel.

Instead it unfolds with a structure that’s a sort of simplified version of the two-threads approach in Use of Weapons, only without the non-chronological storytelling. Instead the two narratives, titled The Doctor and The Bodyguard, unfold in parallel, switching back and forth between them. Each is set in a different territory on a planet with obvious resemblances to medieval Europe, and focuses on a mysterious outsider who’s a key confidante of the territory’s ruler, and who, it emerges, is clearly in fact a Culture agent. Neither chapter is told from this character’s perspective – the Doctor’s tale is related by her assistant, while the Bodyguard’s is simply told in the third person. And so audiences sit at a remove from the Culture for once, watching its manipulations from the outside, albeit with more understanding of what’s going on than any of the actual characters (including, by dint of the doubled narrative, the Doctor and the Bodyguard themselves).

The way this was intended to work, for a 1998 audience, was for the book to unfold with a shock of slow recognition. It’s not a particularly subtle problem – the reader is clearly supposed to figure it out fairly easily. But the moment of figuring out what’s going on in the book is clearly intended to be part of the book’s impact, and it’s something that’s diminished by calling it “book 6 of 10 in the Culture series” The question that unfolds instead – “in what sense is this a Culture novel” may seem only subtly different from “what sort of novel is this,” but it’s a difference with teeth, moving the book from one about discovering its structure to one about working backwards from a solution.…

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