Christmas and Easter nihilists
This essay is going to need some substantial (though obviously not total) revision, and keeping the original in circulation feels wrong. A revised version will appear in the generally available edition of Neoreaction a Basilisk that will come out in 2017. …
Hello again. Where are we now, January 1996? Best we start wrapping this up, I suppose.
In a sense I never left, of course. Let’s see. Summer of 1995 was the first year of CTY, the big nerd camp that was the defining social framework of late middle school/early high school for me. Place those three weeks between Civilization and Chrono Trigger. I was still playing video games, but favored the PC – I got a Playstation around the time of Final Fantasy VII, and would get a Nintendo 64 for Christmas at the end of 1996, in my first year of high school, but neither captivated me. I was starting to intellectually specialize – at CTY I’d taken what was basically a college-level intro comp course, and was beginning to think of myself as, if not “a writer,” at least “a guy who could write.” This coincided with the regression of my ability in math, previously my best subject, as the handwriting requirements of algebra and ADD-taxing nature of drilling a problem over and over again made the subject stop favoring me. Indeed, the best paper I wrote at CTY was a descriptive essay about how much I’d hated my 7th grade math teacher. (Meanwhile, I got on quite well with my 7th grade English teacher, and ran into her at the supermarket earlier this year.) From there I’d gradually deflect from aspiring towards fiction to realizing a greater strength in criticism, a bias I’ve yet to correct despite occasional efforts.
But my exile from the Super Nintendo era was short-lived. The summer of 1997 introduced me to the wonders of NESticle, and I dove happily into the suddenly opened archives of my childhood. Then, in the fall of 1998, I got my learner’s permit, and early in 1999 could drive. This being western Connecticut, the main available attraction was the same thing it had been since the 1980s evenings spent with my mother: the Danbury Fair Mall. Or, in my specific case, the Funcoland about a block further down Backus Avenue, where I dove into a more materialist phase of retrogaming by picking up a NES and, not long after, a SNES.
Which is to say that there was a period of my life these games belonged to. Both of them were admittedly on the tricky end. Mega Man X3 was late enough in the SNES lifecycle that it was a relatively rare cartridge that coust upwards of $40 – I didn’t get to it until college when I’m pretty sure I drove upwards of forty-five minutes to a Gamestop that had one. Rockman and Forte, on the other hand, was originally an emulation concern – I remember playing it on the eOne my mother had bought on a lark, which probably means in early 2000. (I remember being baffled by a bug where jumping would simply fail on occasion, which I finally, after extensive testing, traced to the cheap keyboard that shipped with the flagrant iMac knockoff, which was apparently wired so that a particular key combination that was common when playing a side-scroller with the arrow keys would lock out a handful of other keys.)…
Right, so apparently we’re doing these by a margin of $3 on the Patreon. Cool. Thank you all for your support, and if you enjoy the reviews please consider supporting Eruditorum Press.
When I was waxing rhapsodically about Mr. Robot a few weeks ago I praised it for being a show that didn’t feel done revealing its range. By that standard at least, Class is a rousing success. The downside of this is that it also doesn’t quite feel like it knows what it wants to be, but that’s not inherently a bad thing for a show about teenagers. It’s smart and full of ideas, at least, and if these first two episodes don’t contain any moments of outright genius they at least clearly belong to a show that could deliver some.
It’s also a show that’s acutely aware of the expectations that are going to be put on it. Its opening gag is a Bechdel test joke, it namechecks Buffy with aplomb, it’s got the obligatory Peter Capaldi sequences, it’s given ostentatious levels of thought to its notions of diversity, and there’s almost a conscious sense of “OK, what’s the exact halfway point between Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures?” In the first episode this all gets a bit oppressive, and the show can fairly be accused of trying too hard, but even there it’s got some real charm.
The second episode, meanwhile… I mean, there’s just so much potential in that cut from a Hannibal pastiche to the (one fears over-)aggressively youth-friendly credit sequence. And the episode mostly aims to pay that off. Its denouement is genuinely ballsy, underplaying the way in which it subverts a genre standard into something much smarter about masculinity and abuse. And this is typical of the comparison. Where the first episode seems at pains to make sure it lampshades all the moments where it’s being derivative and struts at all the moments where it’s not, the second is much smarter about what it overplays and underplays. The moment where it kills Mr. Armitage does some varied heavy-lifting, both from Buffy and in terms of ostentatiously establishing the show’s “anything can happen” cred. But what’s interesting is how the show revels in the transgressive glee of ripping apart the sympathetic headmaster inherited from the parent show but then undersells the degree to which doing so genuinely alters where things are going.
Which feeds into the most interesting card the show plays, Miss Quill. Like everything in it she’s cut from existing and well-defined cloth, but putting what we might describe as the “Moffatrix” trope in the Sarah Jane role is an inspired choice. She’s consistently the thing that most enlivens the first episode, at times managing to make even Greg Austin’s character (basically the Luke Smith role, only actually gay not Dumbledore gay) seem interesting. I don’t think Jack’s watching this, and he’s probably happier that way, but I admit that I wondered what he’d think of the ex-revolutionary who openly and not without reason accuses her situation of being slavery.…
Meaning, as distinct from information, is an entirely human creation. It does not exist ‘out there’. It is an emergent property of human existence, of animals which have consciousness, which is itself a system of reflections of reflections. The essence of conscious human awareness is the experience of looking at something or someone, and knowing that you are looking at them, and thus looking at your own looking. It is the awareness of a hall of mirrors inside your head. And then one becomes aware of the returned look of the other, and the implied hall of mirrors inside their heads. And then one imagines their mirrors mirroring your mirrors. Their infinite regression amplifies your own. And it is this multiplicity of reflections, and of reflections of reflections, that ignites the quest for meaning.
There is something in the very act of looking that entails or demands interpretation. The eye delegates a great deal of the task of looking and seeing to areas far further back inside the head. The interpretation of this inherently incomprehensible chaos of multiplying reflections is going to bring about an attempt at finding meaning, or at least a feeling that meaning must be possible, and that it must be findable, and thus also that the failure to find it represents a tragedy or an injustice. Or the idea that meaning does exist ‘out there’ or ‘up there’, but that it is beyond us.
We see so many things around us. They are “snapshots of processes”, as Lewontin and Levins said, but this is hard for us to believe in our guts, even if we understand it. The things we see are inherently symbolic to us because that’s just how we think. We could hardly do otherwise: all thought is symbolic. We see meaning thus endlessly and omnipresently implied by everything around us. And then we realise, or feel, that our very awareness of such things is based on interpretation, and interpretation that can never be settled because it is all and always based on endlessly recursive series of reflections. And thus, once again, we become certain that meaning exists; that it exists ‘out there’; that the symbols which make up the world must ‘mean something’; but that we are incapable of grasping those meanings. The ultimate meaning, or meaning repository, must be. And it must be somewhere where we can’t see it. And it must be greater than us.
We then give ourselves permission to fall into a great chain of suppositions, all underwritten by the great conscious meaning that must be out there. Even if we call it something other than ‘god’, it doesn’t matter. And, of course, there is always a temptation to start using this ineffable and unknown underwriter as a prop. The symbol becomes the thing (the essence of magical thinking… which shows how grounded magical thinking can be, if used correctly). The absence of an explanation, the gap where we put the question of meaning (as if on the eternal back burner), becomes itself the explanation.…
Rough week. Let’s get started.
Black Panther #7
Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn’t actually think that ending works, does he? I mean, everything else is the sort of thing he usually does, which is to say use an issue to advance each of his plotlines a few pages with no real thought to the issue’s overall cohesion and often minimal thought to whether the events depicted form a satisfying chunk of story in their own right, but as I’ve been saying for, well, seven issues now, that’s legitimately hard stuff that I’m willing to give him time to work out. But come on. Other than that, no new problems here and no new merits either.
Patsy Walker aka Hellcat #11
Another oddly organized issue – the cut away to Black Cat for the final cliffhanger scene is jarring and ends up feeling underweight just by dint of the lack of scene length and the fact that we skipped over Bailey actually getting captured. And it’s not like the previous scene ends on a particularly good end-of-storyline-for-the-issue note either. As always some lovely bits in the middle, but the overall messiness detracts.
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #13
The best of a weak bunch – this isn’t a particularly extraordinary issue of Squirrel Girl. The Ant Man jokes mostly fall flat (although I liked his bewilderment that Doreen actually talks to the squirrels versus bossing them around), consisting as they do of “major guest star acts one way the entire time.” There’s wit and charm, and an actually competently structured issue, but it’s still nothing near this comic at its best.…
Major Kira is holding down the fort in the Ops office, having a heated argument with a woman who demands she be allowed to open an establishment on the Promenade, even though there are no vacancies. It’s Maura, but if you didn’t read “Requiem” you wouldn’t know that. Just as things are about to get ugly, Jadzia Dax pages the Major to tell her they have a little situation she might want to take a look at. The situation in question is a fleet of Klingon warships, who have Deep Space 9 surrounded.
Kira orders Commander Sisko to be brought up to Ops at once, forcing Ben to give Jake and his baseball game yet another rain check. While still in his baseball uniform, Sisko meets with Captain Kol, the commander of the fleet’s flasghip, the ‘Avwi. As a staunch ally of the Federation, Kol offers his support and protection to Deep Space 9, which he claims will be the most strategic location in the forthcoming war with the Cardassian Empire. This takes Sisko somewhat by surprise, as he had been unaware there was a war between the Klingons and the Cardassians. Kol recaps the events of the prologue for anyone who might have missed it, explaining how their cruiser the K’Tang has been missing for several days, and an investigation has led the Klingon High Council to the belief it was destroyed by a Cardassian Galor Warship in an unprovoked attack. While Sisko presses for evidence, Kol is reluctant to provide any, but declares that he and his crew will stand by him no matter what. As Kol leaves, Sisko and Kira are unconvinced even the Cardassians would be brazen enough to provoke war with the Klingons, and they summon the senior staff to conference.
Over subspace, Commander Sisko express concern to Admiral Kernwill that the Klingons will expect the Federation to support them, and the admiral asks him to hold on until the Cardassians can send a delegation, and they can get negotiator Tal Berel to come out of retirement to sort things out. In Ops, Odo complains his security staff is overstretched dealing with the Klingon delegation, let alone having to handle a Cardassian one on a Bajoran station. Miles O’Brien pulls some people from engineering to help in the meantime, and Doctor Bashir offers his help too. Although Odo brushes him off with a snide remark, Sisko says he has a special mission for him: He and Dax will take the Rio Grande into the Gamma Quadrant to conduct their own independent investigation into the K’Tang‘s destruction to find out who really destroyed it and, if the Klingons are right and it was the Cardassians, why. But before they can take off, a Klingon named Koleth reports for duty. He was assigned to the mission by Kol, which annoys Commander Sisko because he didn’t go through him first. But Sisko lets him on, so long as he agrees to be subordinate to Dax.
As Dax, Bashir and Koleth depart through the Bajoran Wormhole, the Cardassian delegation arrives.…
We’re pleased to announce a new episode of Pex Lives. The description follows:
Look! Just when you thought we were down and out, we leap off the canvas and throw a few more hits.
We spend our first half catching up, then have an extended chat about Kevin’s hero Mike Love of the Beach Boys before dropping into ever cheerful Current Events. After that, we talk about a western from 1951 called the Furies and then just a little sprinkling of your Doctor Who content with the topical Curse of Peladon.
…
Reflecting on the fact that his last book was going to turn out to be the relatively slender and small-scale The Quarry, Iain Banks made the observation that “the real best way to sign off would have been with a great big rollicking Culture novel.” It’s difficult to imagine he didn’t mean Excession. Like The State of the Art before it, Excession is a novel about pushing the premise of the Culture to a breaking point. But where The State of the Art picked an approach to this that was fundamentally a dead end, Excession comes up with one that’s thrilling in its boundless possibilities. Ironically, it basically does this by taking the premise of The State of the Art and turning it on its ear. Where that novella asked “what if the Culture met us,” Excession asks “what if the Culture met a race even more advanced than itself?”
This leads to Excession’s – and arguably the Culture’s – most enduring contribution to the broader culture, namely the phrase Outside Context Problem. The passage where Banks describes this is very possibly the most-quoted paragraph of his career, and with obvious reason:
The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.
There’s a lot to love here. Banks has always been a witty writer, but here he’s visibly taking on Douglas Adams as a major influence (also apparent in the book’s other great line about Outside Context Problems, namely that they’re something “most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop” – the performative hesitation of “rather in the same way” prior to the sentence metaphor is a dead giveaway, as is the oblique turn of the metaphor, which is in the same basic vein as Adams’s famous “hung in the sky in much the way bricks don’t,” although the harmony of form and function involved in having the sentence end with “a sentence encountered a full stop” is a bit of sparkle above and beyond the obvious influence). But he’s also just got a damn good idea there. Contact between civilizations of wildly differing technological capabilities is a sci-fi standard, but discussions of the phenomenon are almost always framed from the perspective of the technologically superior species – “first contact” and “the Prime Directive” and the like.…
Shana has officially unceremoniously kick
ed me off of the Firefly podcast, mostly because listening to me kvetch about sci-fi westerns and the American Confederacy is way more fun for me than for her, but thankfully for all listeners she’s replaced me with the wonderful Jessica from The Web of Queer, who will give the series the more sympathetic (or at least fannish) reading it (arguably) deserves.
This episode introduces the podcast audience to Shana and Jessica’s history with the series, then dives into a nice discussion of the kinds of themes surrounding gender we’re going to be dealing with over the course of Firefly‘s run. Kaylee’s love for strawberries, Inara’s profession, and Captain Tightpants, er, tight pants are all subjects of discussion. Also, some spontaneous singing of the theme song?
This should be a monthly-ish addition to the Oi! Spaceman family, and don’t worry, one of these days when I have the energy to write again I will come back to an examination of the Confederacy within the sci-fi Western in essay form. Maybe this will force me to watch the new Westworld series? …
Long time no waffle. Let’s see. First off, promotional considerations, which is to say that Jed Blue’s got a Kickstarter for an essay collection of his writings on anime. Jed’s a longtime friend of Eruditorum Press and a hell of a good critic, and if anime’s your bag I have zero doubt his book will be phenomenal, so please check it out.
I should also probably mention, since we’re a week away from the premiere, that Class reviews are still $13 from happening on the Patreon. But if we fail to meet that goal, I’ll still write short reviews of every episode for $2+ Patrons, so if you back the Patreon at $2 a week you’re guaranteed reviews either way. If you need to cap your pledges at <5 a month (the most I’ll ever end up charging you for) then that’s cool too – if you can avoid capping at just one pledge a month I’d appreciate it, but all support is always welcome.
As for where I’m at… Getting towards the end of “Theses on Trump,” which may end up having a different title at the end, but which I’ll refer to that way until I publish. It’s good stuff – I feel like I’m continuing to get a different read on the most oversignified topic in the world right now. Which is the key thing. And it’s not a piece that’s going to date instantly after the election, although I’ll be getting it up before the election.
Once that’s wrapped and I’ve got the Neoreaction a Basilisk books sent out (having a few hoop jumps with Lulu in pursuit of saving myself a couple hundred bucks, but looks like orders will go out next week) I’ll finally put the last formatting touches on Last War in Albion and open pre-orders for that, with books shipping in time for the holidays. Safe to assume I’ll release the long-embargoed next chapter around then, and probably start on chapter 7 too, as I’m starting to get itchy on that project again. Which is nice.
Blake annotations are delayed a bit, as my head’s been turned by a different project that’s more timely, but that also satisfies some of the “do something with a clear traditionalist streak” urges that I’ve been having in the wake of Neoreaction a Basilisk. Right now it’s firmly in the long slow research phase as I watch/read a whole bunch of stuff. Including, for the first time in any substantial project I’ve done actually, a whole bunch of anime. So speaking of which, I should go back Jed’s Kickstarter myself…
Actually, hell, I’ve been talking about it a fair amount on Tumblr, so let’s just put the cards on the table: I’m leaning pretty hard towards my next bespoke project being a history of cyberpunk, specifically one that avoids getting bogged down in proto-cyberpunk and instead treats the genre as basically starting with the twin punch of Neuomancer and Blade Runner in the mid-80s (with a soft start in 1980 along with Gibson’s career).…