Vertigo

First Thoughts

Ok these did get long. Sorry for the delay!

My recap and my thoughts are kind of intermingled now because I just flat out don't have the capacity to adequately write a plot-recap and then ruminate coherently.

This week (oof, "1 a day, everyone!" What a fool I was) me and my road dogs read Vertigo, chapter 9 of Dorley.

This is redundant, but Greaves is such a good prose writer. Again, I know she's doing important work &c., and exhuming a fictional imaginary that I wouldn't really have access to otherwise, and all that good higher-order stuff. But she's also just a really great popcorn-book-writer, and the combination is awesome.

Baby Dorley is Adorable

Hasan, Indira's childhood-friend-turned-boyfriend

Aww fuck yeah. Get it, Indira. Indira is the best. Glad that she gets to have an integrated life.

Going out on a Limb

Something I think is a little bit of a curiosity from the first section here is the childishness of the second-years, for lack of a better term. I think it's pretty well representative of the kind of retrenchment that e.g. college kids have, for one. It reminds me of Vacationland, by John Hodgman, in a chapter about speaking on a campus; Cody (in Vacationland) is smoking weed and drinking and having sex, but is also a child who wants to watch Toy Story 3, etc.

I've worked with trans women and become friends but, you know, that's work. We have personal connections but they're like, "Yeah. The https://en.cppreference.com/w/ is really good. Anyway, let's play Victoria 2 soon." Not, "please tell me deeply vulnerable things about your experience of gender."

So I guess my question is, being trans, often you'd end up going through a lot of physical changes. Like, I know there's a range, and some people get the full Dorley, whereas other people don't do anything, ah, surgical or chemical. But I've got a couple of questions about people along that whole gamut actually.

Does it feel like having a second childhood? Or a second adolescence? Or I suppose a first adolescence for a chunk of people.

Is being a first year an apt comparison that way? Dorley is, in some vague sense so far, a school book, so there's this implicit sense of progress.

Anyway, it just seems like whenever there's an extra-interesting little aspect of Dorley, it turns out that Dorley is talking about some really common psycho-social phenomenon, so this might be one of those times. Is that a thing? If so, what's that like? It sounds like you'd end up having a pretty broadly developed sense of empathy towards young people from kind of "doubling down." It also seems like it'd take you a little longer to get to access some of the self-conscious rhythms that you kind of get later on.

I feel a sense of risk in asking that question, so I want to be clear. If I'm clomping into a shitty stereotype and not realizing it, please ask and I'll take it down/out. I'm genuinely curious, but way more importantly don't want to hurt anybody by being a moron.

The Gender of Angels

Paige's hobby makes a ton of sense to me. Dorley-the-place is secretive, and comes with a distinctive set of norms that don't cleanly map onto any of the obvious categories, as Dorley grads aren't obviously any one flavor of gender.

I mean, ostensibly they're women, per the goals of the organization, but we already know of some nonbinary grads in good standing with The Programme. I guess the main thing is that they aren't cis-men.

Case in point, Christine is apparently trans/cis/not-quite-either depending on who's asking.

So, yeah, the gender of angels, keep it up Paige. Maybe someone will make sense of it in a way that isn't absurd on its face.

Pronouns are Impossible with Stef

I'm gonna go back to Stef/Stefan (he/him) for a while.

I guess, my stance is, if someone wants to be called something it's incandescently rude to call them something else.

And Stef is not a real person.

And Stef is decidedly, at great personal cost, (going to be) a woman.

But, if Stef were a person, it'd seem like really shitty behavior to use she/her pronouns at this chapter's point in his life.

So, given the present tense of a lot of this writing, I think it's probably the correct thing to just go with Stef's stated preference until those change?

All that said, maybe "He's a he until he's not," is some of the social structure of Dorley at work - the crowbar separation of early-recruits from their sponsors. I wonder if some of this is the structural/social coercion/isolation of Dorley?

That seems like a tidy metaphor for being raised as a gender you aren't. I'd imagine there's a ton of translation-stress that emerges in so doing.

The Boy Flasher and the Psychopath

Declan

Declan throws a whole fit about being kidnapped and force-feminized. Bad form.

In so doing, he accuses Stef of being an industry plant, which is apt in that it's kind of sort of inverse-true-false. Declan's kind of just precisely wrong about Stef, I suppose, but in a way that raises an interesting point. Is Stef extracting something from Dorley or vice versa?

I don't know a lot of people like Declan very well to be frank.

I have plenty of kinds of friends but they're almost all either calm, or "frantic-about-movies" frantic. It's tough to empathize with him, but it's also kind of fucked that I'm so tempted to completely objectify him as just a plot device, or just a villain. Throughout the chapter, Greaves emphasizes that each of the sisters used to be these kinds of men.

So by virtue of the fact that I care about those characters, I ought to care about Declan.

And, frankly, Dorley has marked Declan as a danger to society, but, you know, "rule of law" and all that.

So any physical struggle that Declan goes through should be in the same neighborhood of sympathy as like, the Price sisters' hunger strike and force feeding. That's not the perfect example, but I don't have the perfect example, so there you go.

Maybe there's something to be said about the disposability of men, Accursed Share-style, but he could also just be sketched this way because Greaves doesn't waste detail where it's not helpful.

Aaron

I still don't quite get Aaron, also surprised by Pippa's reaction to Aaron. I'm keeping an eye out on him because people have implied that it'll be a really interesting component of the story.

It kind of seems like Aaron is flirting with Stef with that wink, which, sure, I'd believe it -- why not? By any count, Stef-in-Dorley is a catch: outgoing, not a random assailant, not a cultist. Checks all the boxes.

But also, the Aaron/Stef dynamic reminds me of a lot of my friend (who we'll call) Bobby Redacted. We boxed together a ton when we lived in the same place, and he was always frankly kind of flirty. Also, pretty sure that dude's straight. Guys have made passes at me (brag) and this wasn't that, it was some kind of other thing. I guess it could have been some kind of weird power dynamic, but I digress.

Anyway, Bobby winked at me and, you know, flirted. And was kind of physically affectionate for a WASP (I mean, he isn't, but I am.) And, like, yeah boxing is intimate, but I really don't think that's what's going on exactly. Honestly I think he was a really handsome guy who genuinely liked women, and learned how to flirt better than he learned how to make friends with other men.

So, when we see that Aaron winks at Stef, it's Stef's narration that describes it as "an utterly baffling gesture." I initially found that language strange, but I'm now realizing that I was pretty baffled by Bobby's behavior too. "Don't hurt him too badly", with a wink, is familiar to me though. Because it is familiar, it is not so strange as it is just a kind of sociable noise, like "not if I see you first!" or similar.

Stef is primed to overinterpret Aaron's behavior in some ways, because Stef needs to build an alliance with him. And Pippa is primed to see sexual deviance, because of Aaron's history and social context as a recruit. So maybe it's nothing. But Greaves is a detailed writer, so I doubt it.

That all said, you know, you see dicks in a locker room. Is Aaron's exposure supposed to be notable in-the-paragraph to the reader? To me it wasn't, anyway.

I thought it was just Greaves doing a great job of treating Aaron's dick as incidental in the moment. When she includes a detail, she generally does so for a reason, and it's taking some getting used to. What a prose-writer, though.

Aunt Bea's B-Day

New (?) character alert!

• Nell (sponsor, maaaad)
• Faye (younger)

"Fine," Nell says, stepping aside. "She's all yours. Knock yourself out on her thick fucking head."

Something about this reminds me of a particularly bad day picking my daughter up from daycare, when an adult told us "Good luck with that one."

It's curious to see Pippa having such a hard time with Stef. The system not working with a compliant person is a really interesting detail. I suppose if the point is that these are all deeply toxic men being reformed, then the sponsor's role is sort of horrid in the early days. Again I'm reminded that someone can end up in Dorley by accident though. It's a little bit hard to read this book without thinking about the shadowy authoritarian kidnappings IRL at times. I somewhat doubt that that's the intended reading, and I don't mean to be a scold. It's kind of like reading Station Eleven during 2020.

Anyhow, Pippa has Stef-troubles, so Abby checks in on him and reaffirms the logic of the system, such as it is.

It's fitting that "You're going to be so pretty" exists in the context of their discussion of control. Because, that's the mechanism to control Stef actually, right? Whatever it takes to become someone who isn't "He" in Stef's mind is the carrot.

That should line up really smoothly with the system, but it's so antagonistic and violent that it doesn't. There's a kind of subtext around, I guess, passing, there too? Like the social pressure to pass as a method of subtle control?

Faye and Christine

Hey teens, let's wrap. You might think Jay Z is pretty cool, but you know who else was a real rad dude? That's right, the late, great, JC.

It's fascinating just how thoroughly everyone in this joint feels like an imposter.

Someone online was telling me that imposter syndrome is a really common experience, and it's written all over the whole set of people's inner lives.

To hear Christine talk to Faye, this place is, again, a moral catastrophe in excess of any plausible benefit. But hey, trust the process.

I'm glad to see Greaves include sponsors who are, just not acting right. There's this kind of surface link between Dorley and Greek Life. I wasn't in a fraternity, but I'd love to get someone who was to tell me what they think about this structure.

The sponsor-recruit relationship is ripe for abuses, given the hierarchical nature of it. Up until now we've mostly just had good and goodhearted sponsors.

Brief, Errant, Thoughts.

Yeah, man, good chapter.

I think Greaves is doing a really good job developing this theme of hierarchy and conformity.

We get Paige's gender of the Angels / "uninteresting women."

We see a few different ways that sponsorship isn't sufficiently safe as a system of reform for the recruits.

Stef gives us an inkling of all the ways that transness can break Dorley. I'm still basically thinking of Dorley as a multi-metaphor. One way it still seems to work for the book though is as a mirror for cisgenders' failures to account for trans people without resorting to systematic violence.

And something Greaves weaves through this hierarchical violent structure is, basically solidarity. The sisters are doing it themselves.

Or, I dunno, maybe the book is trying to express something entirely different, this is a dense work.

I should probably spend more time thinking about the names of these chapters, just as an aside.