The Shabgraff Book, Update #1

Hello there my lovely patrons.  As some of you may know, I'm taking a sabbatical from regular longform Friday posting at Eruditorum Press in order to write the Shabgraff book I've been talking about for ages, and which I promised poor Elizabeth a long time ago.

Luckily, El has lined up the amazing Christine Kelley to replace me on Fridays with her superb Dreams of Orgonon blog - a history of every song Kate Bush ever wrote - which will be temporarily relocating to EP.  So you'll want for nothing.  And I still have Wednesdays available to me to post whatever I have.  

At the moment, it'll probably be mostly announcements or updates on my various podcasts, be it Wrong with Authority (and its subdivisions), which I intend to continue with because it's just so much fun talking movies with that gang, or my new venture with Daniel, I Don't Speak German.  Not to sound pompous (too late), but I honestly think IDSG is the most important thing I have going on at the moment.  It is a chance for Daniel to finally start releasing into the wild some of the immense amount of knowledge and understanding of the far-right that he has acquired over more than two years of masochistically subjecting himself to their conversations, podcasts, YouTube videos, etc.  My aim is to help him structure his thoughts and arguments so that he can get his own writing project underway, while also providing a foretaste for listeners.  The nature of the far-right is a very important issue at the moment, and if I can do anything to shed some light on it, I'm not entirely wasting my time.

Having said all that, I'm not foreclosing on the possibility of posting some of my longform writing in the next few months.  I started a project last year about the many movie adaptations of Dracula and I'd really like to continue with that.  I also have some bits and bobs to finish, such as my stalled trilogy of posts on The Last Jedi - I have a final installment waiting to be assembled from lots of notes.  I wouldn't mind getting that out before people start arguing about the next one.  I also recently discovered that I have more stuff on the alt-right and libertarianism left over from the offcuts of the Austrians piece.  That could be knocked into postable shape.  I want to carry on slagging off J. K. Rowling because... my god, that woman.  And I'm tentatively working on something I'm calling Towards a Theory of Just What the Fuck is Going On, which would be my attempt - as a presumptuous, mediocre autodidact and pseudo-intellectual - to come up with a kind of overarching Marxist theory about where capitalism is going, and why/how fascism is on the rise again, drawing together Trump and Brexit and so on.  So, nothing too ambitious!  I'm going to indefinitely (but not permanently) table some other mooted projects, notably Xenomorph's Paradox (the Alien movies), Idiots Talk About Marx (self-explanatory), and Socialism Be Like (my ideas on the nature of a socialist society), if they can wait, and/or if I feel I need to devote more time and concentration to them than I can manage right now.

Meanwhile, as I say, it's time to focus mainly on the Shabgraff book.  I'm still toying with various ideas for it, but at the moment it'll probably be a collection of what I think are the best essays on Doctor Who from my blog, both the old one and the Eruditorum Press years, plus a substantial amount of new material - in the form of both expansions/rewrites of the old material and entirely new stuff to supplement it.  I may, for instance, both rewrite and finish Skulltopus.  The book will focus on Who rather than representing everything that used to go on at Shabgraff.  I'm thinking that it will be my 'settling of accounts' with the show.  I don't mean that after the book is done I'll stop watching or caring about or writing about Who.  Clearly that will never happen.  Rather I'm hoping the book will set the seal on something that has long been true of my writing, namely that it has moved on.  

I'm still undecided about what will end up in the book.  Reviewing and collating my old posts, I find that there is a lot more material that is 

a) thematically fitting, and 

b) essentially good enough,

than I thought.  Which is a nice position to be in.  

I'm also still undecided on exactly what form the book will take.  But I have some ideas.  I want it to be accessible to people who know nothing about Doctor Who, so I will have to introduce stories more thoroughly than I did for a fan readership.  I can't just say "In 'The War Games'..."  I have to say "In a 1969 story called 'The War Games' in which..." etc.  This will help address the issue of their being more classic series material than new series material, despite most people being more familiar with the new series... though, again, this may be something I address with new stuff.  I will have to use the stories more like parables than references.  Similarly, I will be employing Marxist concepts (and some others) which are also unfamiliar to most readers.  If I do the thing properly, the parables will be like illustrations which, in combination with my criticism and analyses, serve as intros to some of these ideas.  I don't want the book to be an indoctrination tool, so I want it to be enjoyable even if you're not buying any of what I'm saying.

I'd also like the book to have a throughline, a sort of narrative.  I'd like it to tell a story.  Luckily, there is a kind of story already implicit in the show's history - from its birth in the world of the long post-war economic boom and social-democratic consensus, through the rise of neoliberalism, to the present day of endemic crisis and neoliberalism in decay - and in how I've written about it.  And, as indicated, the story allows lots of scope for Marxist analysis.  And, to a great extent, that version of the story can be told through Doctor Who.  That isn't to say that Doctor Who is in any sense a Marxist history of this period.  Rather, a Marxist analysis of it - as a key and singular and significant product of the Western capitalist culture industries - can make it into a lens through which we can look at the history.  The fact of the show's position in time, and its extraordinary length, means that the lens is trained at the entirety of the period under discussion.  The fact of the show's unusual nature - owing to lots of contingent factors such as the peculiarly liminal social position and internal culture of the BBC - make it especially good as a lens.  This is the justification - and I think it's actually a good one - for doing something so apparently silly as writing a Marxist analysis of a children's SF/Fantasy television series which treats it as a key text for understanding late capitalism.  The only ultimate justification will be if it works.  And for that we'll just have to wait and see.  

The question of justification leads me to another issue with the book: tone.  One of the biggest challenges will be to balance earnestness with self-awareness.  I will want to emphasize that I'm not just mucking around or indulging myself, or just writing yet another book about Doctor Who to add to a market already saturated (to say the least).  I will want to show, seriously, that there is a point to the book.  That it has a reason to exist.  That it doesn't just exist because somebody had a hole in a schedule to fill.  That it isn't the book equivalent of 'Curse of the Black Spot'.  That it's a relevant and at least potentially helpful political intervention at this moment.  (This is partly why I want to press ahead with the 'Towards a Theory...' project mentioned above: it will feed into what the book says about our unfolding history.)  But, at the same time, I want the book to be fun, and to not come over as po-faced or comically self-serious.  It will be, after all, a book about a TV show about a time-travelling alien who fights monsters.  The point is that, while this is undoubtedly silly, silly things are not necessarily trivial.  Right now, we are all travelling at breakneck speed through an accelerating history... and there are plenty of monsters out there.

When it comes to yourselves, my plan is to continue to let you have advance access to podcasts when and if I can, and also to give you regular updates on the progress of the book (like this one), and maybe to give you advance peaks at new material being written for the book.  I might even write some new material directly at you.  (I wouldn't actually be surprised if some of the above forms the basis of a bit of the Introduction or something.)  I'm also toying with the idea of audio readings of some of the material.  But we'll have to see.

At the risk of sounding over-dramatic, I'm more grateful to you all than I can say for your support.  I'm especially grateful now that your support is helping myself and Daniel create IDSG which, as I say, I feel is the most important thing I'm doing now.  In its own way, it's an anti-fascist intervention.  But then I hope the book will be too, as well as being enjoyable for people to read.

Thoughts, comments, suggestions, etc, will be gratefully received.