First Impressions

Christine can be the role model for girls who probably should have washed their hair this morning.

Dorley is piling on lies and secrets in a manner best described as "gleeful." This chapter culminates in a moment of catharsis for Stef that probably means more to trans readers, but I still thought it was really beautiful that Maria could help her like that. Everybody in this book with any power over Stef has wanted something from her (even Pippa, when she was still Stef's genuine sponsor), and Maria in that scene may be the only person not to objectify her so far.

The secrets have costs, and it's rewarding to see the novel depict those so honestly. I think a lot of writers might flinch from that, or interleave them a little bit more to heighten the tension and/or soften the blow. But, Vicky, Christina, Stef, Bea for that matter in her own way, are all hurting themselves and their loved ones with secrecy. As opposed to, say, Abby, Indira and even Martin. I don't think that's necessarily a stable equilibrium or anything, but this corner of the book is certainly driving at it.

I've been job-hunting and that's hard to fit in around the job I actually have. Also Greaves moves from writing short chapters to book-sized chapters and thus, the delay. I'm toying with the idea of sub-chapter posts to keep a faster cadence up, but I worry that I'll end up missing some of the structural elements of the story if I do that, since Greaves seems to pay a lot of attention to chapter structure.

This chapter spends a lot of explicit time on the core concept of Dorley, since now the boys in the basement know part of the story. And/Or/But every time we get into the ethics of Dorley within the text of Dorley, I feel like I'm going to O.D. on it, when there's just only so much to actually say. I am beginning to understand that my pace on this book is glacial compared to most readers, so I worry that I'm just recycling the same motifs because the last time I encountered them it was a month ago, whereas the last time a normal reader encountered them it was lunchtime.

But, for all that I am bravely soldiering on, this time on "You're Just Someone I Was Forced To Know".

Recap

The College Experience

Stef wakes up in her room with Pippa after a night of too much wine and a movie. It's apt that Stef has her first real college night in Dorley Hall. Presumably she had some dorm room drinking shenanigans before, but watching a movie and taking down a bottle or three of wine with a second year in your dorm is an almost quintessential collegiate experience. It's really sweet-sad how anxious she is when she wakes up about if "anything happened," and I'm glad that it didn't.

The Littlest Shit

Being cold all the time is definitely feminine-coded, but is it a physiological estrogen thing? I guess later Monica confirms it. I kind of thought it was just the square/cube law in the past, but Stef and the Basement Boys (dibs band name) are newly suffering because of a chemical change. Anyway, news to me but it kind of explains a lot of casual disagreement about the level of heat required.

Anyway, Stef and Aaron are still shower buddies. That's a nice trick to let us have private conversations with them, and an obvious venue to explore their vulnerability. Aaron's hyper-fixation on sexuality, Stef's self-harm.

It's initially strange to me that Aaron doesn't get on well with Indira. Indira is the best, so I tend to think that's a him-problem.

Sometimes the boy is his familiar self, the chatterbox, the wind-up toy whose stream of consciousness and endless innuendo can be interrupted only by food, sleep, or a good movie; sometimes, like now, he’s quiet, keeping even his eyes to himself.

I'd imagine, Aaron's going through a lot right now. He has a different sponsor, an increasingly different body, a very different internal chemical mix, and a different environment. It's probably healthy that he's taking the time to introspect. It's, still unclear to me which of the changes he's going through if not all of them are making him change. I am tempted to believe that Stef is the main agent here in his life. Because she's taken an interest in him as a human, and they share so much common ground. Short of that, I want to think that Aaron was an egg the whole time, and just hadn't realized what he needed yet.

And, there's a tension there that's probably worth digging up at some point (don't talk about Amartya Sen, don't talk about Amartya Sen,) between the necessary and contingent identities people hold onto. Like, Aaron as a character whose body has needs that aren't being met versus Aaron as a person whose spirit has needs that aren't being met presents some complications. For one, what am I, a Cartesian? Absurd on its face.

Aaron pivots to asking about Stef(an Riley in Aaron's mind)'s going by "Stef" now. To be fair, nobody has mistaken Stef for a girl, and Stef is (more than) kind of girly. So they're both right. That sucks for her though, right, to be made as a woman but have to keep pretending not to be for her best friend? Fuckiiiiin' laaaame.

Actual Hair Care Question

Okay actually wait. Why do people use conditioner? Is it just that we can't make a shampoo that doesn't strip-mine your hair into oblivion? I'm pretty low-muss low-fuss with my hair at this point, but when I was like, using Hair Products, the conditioner would've been kind of redundant so I always skipped it in favor of a good once-a-week shellacking.

Melissa

Be a machine. Be not present.

Stef and Aaron get to talking about Melissa and something interesting is happening here. Aaron is like, kind of "lapping" Stef on being a human being, a little bit? Like, yes, Aaron did a series of bad things, but now he's the one opening up to Stef, while she hides. I don't know exactly what's going on there. Like, Stef has historically been really anxious around pretty girls and I suppose Aaron is unknowingly but surely becoming a pretty girl, so maybe Stef's shields are starting to come up? Is it just the weight of lying to Aaron? Someone explained the term "stealthing" to me the other day, is Stef like, inverse-stealthing as a man and getting lost in the sauce here?

Maybe I'm over-complicating it. Or worse, single-cause-ing it when there's a lot going on for Stef. She's grown a lot, but it's not like people evolve overnight usually. There's always a moment when you know something needs to change and then two years when you fuck around not changing it. That's a shared thing for everyone from, like, Tim Miller to Beatrice Quinn, so it'd be silly to dismiss it for Stef, who is still effectively a basement hostage.

I'm so relieved that Stef gives Aaron a hug.

Hmm. Aaron's worries about Elizabeth and his self-loathing leave me, ambivalent. On the one hand, I know there's a train of thought that all the boys in the basement are eggs. On the other, I think it's genuinely a very sweet story if Stef and Aaron have something entirely in common aside from their basement residence and class backgrounds. Maybe Greaves will offer something more definitive (or already has to people with better reading comprehension and sleep schedules) but the ambiguity is itself kind of an interesting meta-statement right? Their composite identities, not some singular slice of them, are why they've ended up so close so quickly, and all that.

Jesus Christ, I really have schlorped down the Aaron Koolade. Little shit.

Disclosure

2019 November 30 Saturday

Let's just check The Guardian to see if anything interesting happened...

London Bridge Attack? Well, I dunno. I'll keep an eye on it, doesn't sound terribly relevant yet.

Back at the Ranch

Oh hey, Christina has thoughts about makeup that are more complicated now. Good for her. I feel like she's gone from simply "I can't!", to "Her skin looks okay today so she skips foundation and just deepens her naturally pale lips and adds a little eyeliner." That's awesome, it always feels good to get better at something when you're working at it.

Twenty thousand, ugh, Pounds, Libra, Quid even (retches) plus room and board and tuition is pretty good, all told, for some part time IT work. Good for Christine. I wonder how you write up Dorley on a CV. Something like, "monitored mission critical compliance and licensure assets?"

but Paige had brought some new dresses around to show her, and one thing inevitably led to another

Yeah get it Paige. Paige da best. Christine is doing some procrastinated Dorley work, when she hears from Vicky.

Incidentally, I'm kind of treating the Christine-Vicky relationship as a little bit of a ticking clock to watch; we know from way back (uh, "Death by Chocolate"?) that Christine has a ferocious crush, and I swear to God Almighty if Christine hurts Paige I will be inconsolable.

Anyway, I love kagi-searching terms from Dorley because they are wrong 100% of the time. I'm fairly confident that "FFS Fund" is not, in fact, Vermont's Flexible Family Funding Disability Service, but good try gang (on the other hand, this seems like plenty of information, it's some trans thing the details of which are probably not urgent to me as a reader.)

So, Lorna's onto Vicky and/or Dorley in at least some ways. That's, probably fatal for their relationship, right? It's certainly not good to lie to your partner like that about something so a) big, and b) tied to money, and c) tied to their body.

Victoria Robinson: Okay she’s out of the shower, no more texts, I have to delete everything

This is such a bad sign, Vicky!

Also, motif of secrecy comes back into focus with Christine. Christine is an enthusiastic participant in Dorley, and Vicky is pretty close to having fled the place, but she's still connected to it by way of meds and material support for Lorna, ironically enough. That's an interesting relationship for Lorna to have with Dorley. She's getting, basically, scraps from the place and in return she's paying with the unease she's picking up from Vicky's lying.

Reverse Polarized by Dorleypilled Sistermaxxers

Julia and Yasmin are apparently characters in this book. I couldn't say if they've showed up before to be honest, but if they did I didn't pay enough attention (go figure.)

Yasmin is, understandably, upset at having been disappeared and mutilated.

We shouldn’t have to spend time with a bunch of— of sponsors, or the girls who ignored us while we were getting tortured and reshaped, just to go free!

Julie explains concisely.

You were there at the worst part of our lives

This couple gives us a good clue about what the frontier of conflict is going to be in this book I think. Maybe Greaves will pay that off, or maybe she'll undercut it (because it's not exactly a paint-by-numbers book now is it.) But, you know, a new kind of Dorley girl shows up, so it's worth paying attention to what they're supposed to be telling us.

The parallels I see are for Vicky and Lorna, and for Stef and especially Aaron.

Yasmin goes off on Christine about Dorley's insistence that the pair be more socially involved with the rest of the place and Rebel Girl Dorley is still a pretty good explanation at the moment. One point where I find myself confused is her insistence that she doesn't share any real bond with the other Dorley inmates. Reading it on the surface it's pretty strange behavior, this. Whatever Yasmin thinks of Bea, I'd expect her to at least have some empathy for the other girls. Maybe it's just a Rhinoceros situation from her perspective?

Dorley's first innocent.

The Big Day

We have been forced to wash out the majority of our subjects. So, this year, in the interests of being humane, we’re trying something new

Oh right, the crimes against humanity. Aaron was a geology major of all things?

Your expulsion from Saints was countermanded by your parents, as was any hint of actual disciplinary action

So I think this presentation is kind of half-directed at readers here, to give us a bit more exposition. And, this again raises that with Aaron in particular but really any of the trout-fucked family lines of narcissist rich people, they never had an opportunity for other reform to work.

And we’ve tried many different methods with the men, trying to replicate our results with the women; nothing works.

And that'd be for the audience of recruits more than readers I reckon. The language is for the institution's self propagation.

Incidentally, Stef is, really bad at the Judas Goat part in this scene. It of course highlights that she was never a man, but also, it'll be a miracle if anybody in the basement wants to talk to her after this.

Martin

I’m... borderline aristocratic. And I hate it.

Martin's reaction here deserves a few words. "I don't want to be anything." He's, probably coming out ahead on this whole thing. Everybody hates him still of course, but he's hopefully going to end up a non-passively-suicidal woman who "gets to" not be an aristocrat. The Britishness here is doing some work to let me take this seriously as a problem, to be honest. I can think about a few borderline aristocratic American households and they're pretty wildly varied depending on the provenance of the wealth and the region of the household. Maybe that's the same for the Brits but I get the impression from Dorley and I suppose osmosis that the Etonian influence is kind of homogenizing.

The Fallen General

Apt title. Generals are stereotypically and almost-always-in-fact men. And by definition martial and authorities.

The statue that washed away in a flood (water motif strikes again,) left a wreck.

I'm not going to have time to write about it today, but it deserves some thought: the story of this pub reinforces the motif of water as femininity (tides, folks, I'm not kidding), and sort of introduces industrialization as the catalyst for the decay of the old (gender) order. I might have to follow up on that later.

Abby has, a secret from Dorley. I think Greaves is doing some kind of social-heist Ocean's Eleven right now and this is all clockwork setup. So, to that end I'm trying to just sit back and enjoy the ride, but the preponderance of lies is making my eye twitch.

... Several ... Seconds ... Later

Oh it's Abby's parents! Color me nervous, but here's hoping they're cool.

Christine's obsessed with secrets and lies actually? (IT, core to her entire personality, &c.)

Roast beef and cranberry sauce (I typo'd 'cranberry' and initially spellcheck corrected it to 'aberrant', so.) This clap is clap not clap normal clap. Seriously TERF island, get your sandwich game together.

Abby's family quickly accept her!

Sort of a trivial thing, but I really appreciate that Greaves has decent men in her book? She's really good about undercutting the claims about universally-toxic masculinity that Dorley implies at times. I think I'd have a harder time with this book if it weren't the case. Almost every time we meet a man outside the basement, he's a normal fucking guy. But you get my point. It's easy to engage with Greaves' writing because I can trust that she knows what a normal man ought to be. There's no, like, impossible hurdle that the text demands, it's usually framed as plain old decency. Anyway, that's not like, critical to the text, but it's one reason I feel like I can trust Greaves when she goes out on a limb that makes me uncomfortable.

Roast Beef and Cranberry Sauce is as Bad a Mutilation as Dorley

Pamela. Sponsor of Martin. Okay. Noted.

'I think — and, you have to understand, I’m speaking from personal experience, here — the opposite of that state isn’t being cis, necessarily,' Tabby says. 'It’s being indifferent.'

Oooh, that's an interesting thought.

That kind of implies a triangular spectrum.

One point being whatever is maximally trans, one point being maximally cis, and one point being whatever is minimally giving a fuck. The triangle might be best modeled as non-Euclidean though, I'm trying to imagine what "maximum gender-caring, 50/50 on some trans/cis spectrum" would do to a person, and if they're out there maybe I'll hear from them but that sounds like it'd be a tough hang. Or, y'know, maybe modeling gender as a 2-dimensional topologically triangular object is a bad use of time.

I'll have to noodle on this one but it stuck to the front of my brain pretty good, so I'll think about it on my run and come back to it later.

Several...Hours...Later

Okay! I gave it some more thought (faulty thought, the thought born of running, so take it with a grain of salt), and here's my edit for the triangular framing: it doesn't account for what I'd call strong gender ambivalence. I am certainly a man and it's something that I also recoil from. Like, my kid is both attracted and repelled by images of Spiderman, from Spiderman, she both wants objects of Spiderman affiliation (toothbrushes, &c.) and finds them scary. And that's me with manhood. And presumably a significant minority of people feel somewhat like that; discernibly of their gender, invested in its rituals and rites, and also kind of horrified by big ole chunks of it. Otherwise how would you get changing cisgender norms? You kind of need to have some element of dissatisfaction with the previous iteration to get to the next one.

Lengthy Aside About Dad Nonsense

And the company's better.

That's pretty true. I have guy friends, but honestly most of them I met through female friends (normally I hate "female" as a human descriptor, but it feels weird to write "girl friends" or "woman friends", something about that repeating "f" just feels better.)

There's definitely a good social lane, though, for "prefers the company of women" though. At least when you're younger. It gets a lot harder once you have kids, I find. Now we're friends with couples. It's strange. Neither my wife nor I picked this. Her best friend is a dude. My best man at my wedding was a woman. But I went to her eventual husband's bachelor party to go pretend to be manly in Michigan farm country and like, hit a nail into a stump and drink mead. Could've been having a goddamn martini but noooo.

And, now I have this accidentally conservative life. Like, my spouse works for a small nonprofit that is all part time people with flexible hours. I work full time at a job that has flexible (but full-time-plus) hours. Because they don't make jobs that are part-time in my industry, really.

And both of those things were true before we had a kid, but it's also part of a broader path of least resistance. I look at my household and, I'm a breadwinner. I win bread. I'm also an involved dad, but that's a secondary identity after the first year or so. There are all of these little rituals that are ostensibly for either parent but are really for mothers. Play groups and story hours at libraries. Any weekday activity really. And when I bring my daughter there, everyone kind of looks at me like I'm a freak or a sexual predator. Conversations cease, unless one of the working moms with full-time jobs is there too, in which case we can form an alliance and like, talk shop.

So maybe yeah, there's cis people and then there's Cis People. I'm thinking about my best female friends and they're usually the former I suppose, or were at some point. Maybe you have to actively oppose it or you end up passively reinforcing it, once you're established enough. It's a pickle, because, I don't really want to exclusively hang out with the husbands, and the good ones don't really want to just hang out with the husbands either. We'll go out for drinks and talk about our kids and work and camping and hiking and baseball, but like, we'd all kind of rather be in mixed company, it's fairly obvious.

This is new to me, and I'm in a different phase of my life compared to a few years ago. But, I suppose it's also tough to say whether that's because I'm a father or because it's 2025. I'm pretty much sure that gender segregation is just a cocktail of reactionary politics, and plain ole misogyny. Except, I'm also kind of doing it, right? I'm not ringing up The Moms and asking if they want to hang out. It'd make people uncomfortable I worry.

State subsidized certified babysitters would fix this, also.

Fin de lengthy aside.

We Go for Guys who'll Benefit

Stef is hanging out playing cards while some Big Sisters monitor the situation.

They really do think they're doing reform. That's so interesting. It's like, weaponized therapy speak on a level I haven't seen since Bioshock 2.

Do you ever wash out guys who, maybe, could change who they are, but not the way you do it?

This is just, such a remarkably unfalsifiable claim to back. Look, for Martin, sure. I don't know, it sounds like Dorley will take care of him on at least some level (by means of hidden reliance on a faction of apparent aristocrats? Are we really escaping or just reinventing the same shitass wheel here?)

Reading it as self-justification, I guess these women feel like they couldn't have changed as men. Maybe that means that I should trust them. Maybe there's enough of a pattern of success there. But maybe they're survivor-biased all to hell on this stuff. Hmm, I guess, Lackey would probably tell me that there is implicit knowing-how evidence that creeps into knowing-that here. And, she might be right in that assessment. This too is a qualia thing. Goddammit. I can't believe this book is making me believe that qualia is real.

Silently he scolds himself for being too damn nice about all this. It’s too easy to get sucked in, to be on the sponsors’ side, when they’re offering him everything he wants, when he’s just seen a list of sins longer than a supermarket receipt scroll by on the TV.

I feel like this well (thinking about Dorley as "what if trans but cis?") is running dry at the moment, but again, Stef's being suckered in by all that's on offer is such a great (if inadvertent?) depiction of cis-ness in a nutshell. First you're not getting treated like a creep or punched in the face because your jaw line came in, next thing you know, and you think society is fundamentally just or something.

Anyway, Stef wants to check on Aaron, but, and this sucks shit, doesn't do so immediately or authentically. She was so brave by the end of last book and here she is getting folded into The Organization.

He should check with Indira first, though, before he goes banging on Aaron’s door. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and sends her a message, and while he waits for a reply, he tidies the common room.

God, and here's Stef already getting suborned by Dorley's institutional restrictions. The authority creeps in so fast to fill in the vulnerability that she and Aaron shared earlier this chapter.

Indira comes by to talk, and explains the risk of having to forced feed Aaron. I, maybe should've seen this coming, right? Like, I've been prattling on about the Price sisters for a month and a half, it was bound to come up. But Jesus God in Heaven, for all of the Dorley apologia out there, this stuff is beyond the fucking pale in literally-not-figuratively the same ways that British Imperialism in decline was. Unpill your heart because this is a war-crimes torture dungeon with an adjunct reform wing and pretty good internal PR.

Thankfully for me as a reader (and you as a reader of this), we don't go there, and instead Stef, audience surrogate and change agent, intervenes.

A-A-Ron

Like you’re standing in front of me as a distraction because you’re in league with the insect queen, and she’s behind me, ready to implant her eggs.

Aaron's understandably upset. Again, and I hate to stress this overmuch, but these are irredeemably bad conditions in which to hold even a kidnapping victim. Even a traitor to the cause of liberty, or a terrorist. Actually both. Dorley is just a mishmash speedrun of the worst parts of the last half of the 20th c. in that respect.

I'm also pretty sure that Stef being recruited like this is, you guessed it, a foul on the play? A war-crime or a crime against humanity. War-crime might be a stretch, but I don't know how you'd categorize Dorley as a cobelligerent. They're institutional, they're aristocrat-backed, they're kind of a little state-let.

What Stef did here is just, awful actually. For one it's, either a lie or a half-lie. For another, it's under duress with the alternative as, what, forced-feeding? It's power-imbalanced since she's working from the inside, it's all just, well yeah, awful.

I mean, what, they told Aaron they were going to forced-feminize him and he skipped lunch, that's the crisis?

Backing up from the irredeemable institutional rot and unforgivable personal behavior on Stef's part, let's read this as satire, or analogy or whatever. Is this what it's like to hear you'll grow up to be a man if you're secretly a little girl? Do young trans children have this kind of a crisis? I'm pretty ignorant on how trans people come out to themselves, you know. I guess I've been thinking of it as, you're like eleven years old and something starts feeling wrong, but that's just because I don't know what the truth is at all.

That he'll live, in some form or other.

This is an eloquent inversion of an equally strange axiom from cisness I guess, "That he'll live and die a boy and a man," you might phrase it.

And, pivoting, how must Stef feel? Rejected, per the text. But is that affection even real? I know Greaves is affectionate towards Aaron from the writing, and it's manifest that Aaron and Stef have a deeper bond than simply "torture cell roomies," but are they Julia and Yasmin, just good friends, or nothing to each other? I don't know, I feel like Stef made a massive error here. Not Greaves though, who seeded the possibility of loathing your "Sisters" and their paradigm and never speaking to them again with Yasmin and Julia earlier. A nice bit of foreshadowed tension, that.

Toasted Bagels, Yet Another Crime Against Humanity

Does Britain have good Bagels? And like, the bagels, if they're good, they're baked. You bake them. They're already cooked. You don't need to toast them. What a house of iniquity is this. Unforgivable.

Anyway, Stef is recapitulating with Edy, and she asks if he loves Aaron. And, TBD.

Edy has a good head on her shoulders about love. Curious to hear people who know so much about Dorley's past talk about Dorley's own reform. There's kind of a meta-virtue there, on its face. Dorley is about reforming people (like, literally re-forming their bodies and identities as well as reforming them into good citizens), and in its current incarnation it's also about self-reform. Just, a whole monument towards the power of extreme crimes when directed towards reform.

For his sake? No. Never in a million years will I be okay with that.

So here's, ironically, the forced-crimes bit of the recruitment for Stef, per the Eck paper.. It's funny because she's a willing volunteer and all, but there it is anyway.

Stef and Edy go to see Maria. Stef mentions not liking to look at her body, and Edy tells her that that will change. It's kind of inscrutable to me. I understand that Stef doesn't want to look at her body because it's wrong, but that idea is still honestly pretty hard for me to, like, sympathize with. Not like I don't intellectually get it, but, is it like finding a tick or a leech on you?

Maria's Flat

Stef and Maria discuss Stef's options for leaving and being cloistered away from the basement. It's to her credit that she declines, I suppose. I, am still perhaps being a little too wounded about this forced-feeding business. This is fiction, after all.

Maria tells Stef a about grandmother, and about how she came to embrace womanhood despite the barriers in place. I, fuck man, I don't know, you read the thing. She talks about basically a nesting doll of denial and rejection and depression, but with the unhelpful addition of intentional torture. I think, being a fake person, a person in a shell in a shell, is something that a lot of people in despair go through. What Maria talks about really resonated for me, though not in a "man in a woman in a man in a" kind of way. More, being an automaton to get through the week, then thinking you've broken through, then drifting back into being the robot. I spent years doing that.

[D]esigned to keep us from becoming the women they made us look like and, when that proved ineffective, designed simply to force us to hide it.

After Maria's flat, Stef goes back to her room. She, I guess, really takes a fresh look at herself after that, and something clicks. This is one of those times I'm very aware that I might be reading something that means a lot to other people but not very much to me. It's striking how much difference a few millimeters makes for Stef. I guess, she's been experiencing her body as getting further and further away from what she wants for a decade at this point, and this is the first time she's seen it get closer to being what she is? That's an unimaginable relief to me, is all. Like, yeah, that sounds like it'd be good but also like your sanity would be shattered by the first thing so, plaudits to Stef for managing to function in the time since age 11 or so.

Errant Thoughts

Guy who's only Writing About Gender: I'm Getting a lot of Gender, Here.

At least on Bluesky, everything is gender a lot of the time. I think, so far as that goes, it makes a ton of sense in our moment. I know not everyone is an American, but the politics of the USA are elephantine and the world is not that big a room.

Ta-Nehisi Coates famously described Trump as the first white President, and in his second term, he's the first male President, too. But, I wonder if everything is also gender because we (the professional/managerial class in American discourse?) are god-awful at talking about class, race, ethnicity.

I'm not saying we're good at talking about gender, but in some ways it has its ebbs and flows and frankly its uncomfortable repeating patterns. Like, I swear that the Title IX protests going on when I was in school about abusive professors were over literally the same stuff as Me Too. And it seems like we make herky jerky 2 steps forward and 1-3 steps back progres on it.

Rising Tides, the Possibility of Transitioning, the Industrial Revolution

God, I really wanted to write more about The Fallen General, but I'm out of realistic time so I'll keep this too brief.

The flood that washed out the no-longer-materially-supported statue of an authority figure, a military man, is some real Dorley shit. The waters of the tide are a motif for Greaves here that does seem like honest-to-God symbolism for progress and femininity. The statue is of a literal imperial patriarch. I think it's hard not to connect the dots. But then the glass supporting the reconstituted man is in tension with that, presumably on purpose. The general has no feasible support in a world where scarcity is no longer necessary, but his depiction remains because it's useful to the ruling class.

Honestly, this pub lined up with how I think about "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" and Clara Mattei's amazing The Capital Order. We're in this moment (century, whatever) of overproduction. Another way to think about it might be like a rocket ship. There's only so much fuel to burn, so you'd better make it count. We have entire industries devoted to solving scarcities of demand we're so materially blessed. And that's not isolated to the richest nations honestly, the middle income nations are doing historically anamolously well. Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics makes a good point about the moment as well. Why so much talk on surplus? Because it seems to me like it enables both the disolution of the old imperial orders and transition itself. The material project for this stuff has only been possible for a moment but just like with the broader idea of sufficiency for all, we're still puking from a hangover at the close of this scarcity-driven war of each against all we did for the vast majority of recorded history. To quote my second favorite product of British economics education, Keynes, In the long run almost anything is possible, and in the short run we are still alive.

That's dissatisfying, I think. I'm very likely going to return to the subject and try to get at more of what I think Greaves is doing with this pub and Abby's family. It's a profoundly good passage of literature, there's just so much going on there.