Alons-Y!

Until You Make It, chapter 33. I really enjoyed all of this Beth-perspective writing, and I'm getting over some of the visceral revulsion I had of the Stenordale parts of the book. Between the fallout from Bethany switching teams and my getting a little less critical-reasoning-blocked by the Stenordale unpleasantness, I had a good time with this chapter, even if it took me a million years to read it and write about it.

My routine is more or less back on track now for a few months, which ought to let me write these more often than I have been. We've relocated for the moment to the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts, which is, as it turns out, pretty great. It's way worse running terrain because there are like, humans who live here, but on the same account the Commonwealth has set up a ton of state parks on erstwhile railroads and stuff like that, so there are still good places. That's kind of an insane review of an entire region, but it's sort of my only dedicated hobby. Otherwise, it's like a version of southern Vermont that has "Some Stuff to Do" and "Any People Who Are Not Seventy." I don't think I've already covered this, if so I apologize for being repetitive. The point is, I'm doing alright, and thus The Read continues.

On the chapter, hey look, I'm a huge sucker for Bethany. She's such a fun character to spend time with, and it's cool to see a different kind of character's perspective during a period of intense personal growth. Steph grew up a ton in the first book, but I was at least as much paying attention to the setting as to the character for her big arc. And, Steph is kind of a turn on the shrinking violet coming-of-age protagonist in some ways. Watching Steph develop self-confidence is great and all, but watching Bethany bend her antics towards the good is a really distinctive trip. I don't think I've read a story with a character all that much like her before. I think she's hilarious, I think Greaves writes her with a ton of pathos, and I think it's all a really cool exploration of identity-development. I don't know the literature on that subject all that well. It'll come up briefly in Hume or in Sen or something, but it's never been an area of that much interest for me before reading Dorley. But it's, in a microcosm, kind of a fractal-nested little issue with regard to Bethany specifically. She's surrounded by people who changed but the rhetorical frame that she operates within, and that Will operates within, argues that you can't become trans, you can only discover/hide transness. Maybe that tension is totally sensible, but at least on its face it seems like a pickle.

I also kind of get the sense that Greaves likes many of her characters, but that Bethany has to be one of her favorite gremlins. Or maybe that's just me.

Teeny Tiny Recap

Again, not going to do the in-depth notes-driven-recap; that way lies never finishing anything.

• Will is an utter shit, "can't" become a woman, "can't" use people's names and pronouns.
• Bethany does a kind of schoolgirl-themed burlesque in part for herself and in part for Will's, uh, benefit?
• Melissa keeps reconnecting with her friends, faces the bridge.
• Jake is a monster creature, gets into a preliminary fight with Val, Trevor.
• Bea wants to speak with Melissa and Shahida, uh-oh?
• Bethany wears a more casual gray dress and talks to Will.
• Trevor runs off.
• Best friends Val and Frankie get drunk together again.

Melissa

I feel kind of bad that I don't anything particular to say about Melissa's pieces of this chapter? I think it's great that she gets to repair her life, etc., but it didn't do much for me. I think if it were the primary focus I'd probably dig a little deeper, but she's kind of bopping around, putting the pieces of her life back together. In another book, that might be the full book, but there's a lot else going on in this chapter.

I worry about what Bea will say to her and Shahida a little, but aside from the consequences, the out-of-Dorley part fell a little to the background for me. I don't think I quite experience places the way that Melissa experienced the site of her almost-death. There are places I've been really seriously injured before, but it's never been in that same context or at a tender age.

I can kind of reason about why it'd be powerful to return to such a place and make it smaller, but I don't have much common ground there. I guess, compare/contrast all of the physical description of Dorley Hall the building, especially earlier on in the series? Even then though, it'd be more sad than anything else for someone coming back to the hall to not feel anything; it's this locus of Sisterhood.

Stenordale

I'm changing my mind, or at least my stomach, about the Stenordale narrative. Earlier, I felt a little bit like it was taking the structural place of Melissa's or Christine's portions outside the Hall. And maybe that's still true; there needs to be some counterpoint to Dorley or else the scope has to turn much more towards what these women do in their mundane lives, and that's not necessarily where Greaves is interested here. We don't like, follow their studies in close detail.

But I also think, by the end of this chapter, that Stenordale is a really good foil for Dorley. If Dorley is this revolutionary place, and I think that's a fair claim, then Stenordale is its reactionary mirror. That's like, obvious, but it really comes into play beautifully with the contrast towards the end of the chapter between Declan and Beth.

She cannot learn to walk while she is forced to use both hands to retain her dignity.

vs

Bethany looks at herself and sees no performance. No costume.

Maybe the whole time, but certainly by Enemies, Dorley is more about interior development than exterior perspective. Maybe we'll see Bea room-inspecting the Sisters later on or whatnot, but the skills-building lately is coming voluntarily and communitarily, not from a top-down norm. I take it that that means that Greaves is more interested in that topic than in the frame for the series, and so is letting that frame wither a little bit. And Stenordale really underlines that focus-on-interiority in its absence there. We get to see over Bethany's shoulder, but God knows what's going on with Declan and/or Dina, psychologically. He's in Jake's "care", which is to say, being made an object not a subject.

It's tough to untangle this completely. For one, at least Greaves (and maybe reality) are pretty committed to an embodied subjectivity. It's not enough to have a symbol for "I", you have to actually be yourself and do things to exist properly. The pleasure of being the cause. And in Dorley's fundamental prompt (as well as Dorley's history), there's an element of objectification. The place takes you and fixes you and makes you a new thing. Turning that from "new thing" to "new person" leaves some afterglow. Or, maybe you simply can't be a new person without doing anything because we are all apes. We are all doomed to condition our hair at some rate, including the rate of "0 times ever" because choosing not to have a hair-care routine is still choosing a hair-care routine.

This might all be groping for something I won't grasp. On another level, Stenordale is just exaggerating the reaction's capacity for incoherence. Stenordale believes that identity is inherent for subjects but that people can be objects. That the norms of any given or inherent identity will collapse without constant reaffirmation. I wonder, if you're trans, or even just a little younger than I am, if the kind of hyper-real signaling around masculine and feminine norms of the past decade feel like Stenordale. Constantly being called "he" when you ought not. Then, worse, being shown a version of "he"-ness that is impossible for anyone, and which depicts an exaggeration of your worst fears for your body's future. Being made a simultaneous political-football and fetish object. Dorley is this heightened stand-in for a lot of nascent institutions (I know, also a satire, also a community, also a building), and I guess I'm thinking of Stenordale as the prismatically-focused, No Exit version of the decaying world from which Dorley is trying to emerge.

Not sure where that leaves me, really. I'm at least less skin-crawlingly unable to engage with the Stenordale parts even if I'm not sure what they're for/doing, so chalk it up to so much verbal chewing and trying to orient myself a little bit late in the game.

Bethany

It is fucking hilarious that Bethany manages to full on become a girl before she realizes that she is trans. I don't know where I stand on like, the "general case of gender identity formation." I don't think that I need a good theory on it either, really. It's one of those things that just, has zero effect on my life. People have identities at the time you know them, and usually they tell you what those are in the terms that you need to be able to respect them. I know there are women who had to grow up under a holographic boyhood and who were never boys. But I can't help but think of Bethany as trans; she, you know, transitioned. It was feasible for her to become a woman, and she wanted to, so she became a woman.

Jake and Val and Frankie

Christ, she hopes Val doesn’t push him too hard.

It's strange that Jake calls Val "Vincent" but Declan "Dina." I guess, per his "overcooked piece of meat" comment about Val, Jake implicitly thinks that gender is captured entirely by its performance. Declan is a desirable object under masculine control, and that's Jake's rubric for womanhood -- desire and capture. Val is a subject, and that's Jake's rubric for manhood. It also feels like it touches on that notion of "masculine betrayal" that pisses the right-wingers off so bad in real life; that Val's subjecthood and her ultimately-chosen femininity are treason against the masculine by virtue of the fact that they are choices. I dunno, at a certain point you kind of just have to accept that some characters are going to be inscrutable bastards or else the "enemies" book would have problems.

Beth and Will

Will and Aaron, when he existed, defined a pretty curious dynamic. My model of Will was like, a gym rat sophomoric-atheist Redditor with unhinged rage issues and no capacity to be sociable. And that still kind of colors how I think of him even now that he's admitting this to-him-thwarted trans urge. I haven't take him sympathetically or seriously because he is so committed to being both self-serious and infantile. Which is one of the more familiar failure modes of masculinity to me; plenty of dudes in their early 20s go through a "Will" phase.

As for Aaron, his mile-per-minute mouth, self-deprecating hedonism, and serial sexual harassment were like, Dionysian to Will's Apollo? I think that's the context where the schoolgirl outfit and the dark grey dress are most interesting to me. The first was performance and even bordered on self-conscious satire, right? Really doing it up in a way that kind of ripped the band-aid off for Bethany, and that let her focus her petty streak into something healthy and productive.

And the schoolgirl outfit is like, definitely Bethany. It's for real, too, right? She's putting in this genuine sincere effort, not like, half-assing it. But it's also coming from a kind of chaotic, theatrical, pleasurable, exuberance. Even though she wants Aaron dead and buried, and even thought she is running towards her new self, she brings some atomic parts of her past self with her. All that said, Aaron used humor and performance as a constant shield, and never seemed to feel good about his appearance, but Bethany can look cute in a dress without having to be ashamed about it. So that move from a performance-for-others (Bethany performing a teenage boy's fantasy, as she thinks of it at one point) to learning something for herself through performing (Bethany learning she looks cute in a dress) constitutes really significant personal growth. Because before she was Bethany she rarely or even never felt physically confident, and now she does. That's huge! I'm so happy for this fictional character. Anyway, Bethany gets to keep the irrepressible parts of her old self, but she's not stuck in that same limited rut any longer. Her whole world has expanded.

Aaron screams at her but she doesn’t care; no-one ever looked at him like this.

I've been thinking about Bethany as a post-Aaron phenomenon, but maybe they're more like lenses over a common "heap or collection of different perceptions." Different selves, in the Humean sense. And in that case Bethany and Aaron would both be hanging around for awhile while that heap keeps accumulating. So the old Bethany is maybe dead, but not, like, gone.

I don't really have any friends who stayed in that "Will" phase. Which says more about the limits of self-denial than it does about my good taste in friends probably. Eventually you're either such a dick that you don't have any friends anymore, or you run into something that humiliates you. But in either case, it's childish to think that you're one of a select few people who "gets it."

That word kind of paints me into a corner where I have to realize that I owe even Will a little compassion, even knowing nothing about the woman he'll become. And that's where I empathize again with Bethany here. She's just done this huge piece of personal work and now she's going to have to re-identify with Will. Being right early is miserable. Other people learn what you already knew and then they want to tell you about it and you have to let them.

I had this libertarian friend who voted for Gary Johnson and then became the most vocal democratic socialist alive in 2017, and, what are you gonna do, right? Glad to have him, glad he got better, but it was exhausting to talk to him for a few years there because he'd like, discover the existence of red-lining and it'd be this whole fucking thing. This is all very miserly, very ugly, of me I know; I'm trying to be truthful not to be decent in this. A decent person would've just been grateful and supportive. But, you know, it's obnoxious.

[T]here are women like Will in every community of trans women.

How does someone like Will even learn not to be that way, absent basement fun-time struggle sessions? Blind luck? And reading this, I realize too that, my attitude towards Will really isn't taking into account his transness at all. I'm still very much in the mode of comparing him to my friends who are men, looking at their shared symptoms or whatever. That's an extra layer of difficulty too, I'd imagine; Will's attitude is a symptom of his closet, but the same attitude can also just be a symptom of being a guy experiencing being a shit-bag.

March of Time

Just another thought on Stenordale, that it's the bad old days coming back, and this is all being written during a period of the bad new days. There are just going to be some things that are too many leaps away for me to get intuitively, but maybe that's what else is going on there. The world seemed to be opening up, and now the ugly reaction to that is grotesquely imitating an imaginary past.

Or, I don't know; point is I'm at least getting something out of the Stenordale parts now, better late than never.

Errant Thoughts

Bethany is Fucking Brutal and I Love It

I hear you are a girl, Will, so why am I so much better at this than you?

Bethany needs a fucking hype man that shit was ice cold, God damn.

You're pathetic with an event horizon.

pew pew!

My Comparisons! My Contrasts!!

I think I'm leaving a lot of meat on the bones of this one when it comes to the interplay between Stenordale and Dorley, but at a certain point you simply run out of time. What is there to say about Trevor and Bethany and Dina and Will? Presumably a ton more, but I'm a little out of steam.

Video Games

They make good ones:

• Dunno if it'll be anyone's thing but I've been enjoying Scarlet Hollow a lot. It's just a little episodic visual novel, nothing as intense as, like, Kentucky Route Zero or anything, but it's kind of cozy horror.
• Also, today before I finished writing about this, I started Demonschool, which totally rules at least early on. It sounds, so good and I really like its sensibility so far.