Auld Lang Syne

Oh Pippa, it's nice that you think that about the new semester, but let's be realistic.

Bethany: So I'm going to teach you how to do girl stuff? Steph: Yep. Bethany: Cool. I bet I'm really good at it.

This week I made my self-imposed, revised and slowed, schedule and read Your Sisters in the Dark. Let's get the culture flak out of the way and say that the title is really reminiscent of "Our Lady of the Underground." I know Hadestown became a full fledged musical later, but you should check out the Anaïs Mitchel / Ani DiFranco version if you only know the big one. And you should check out both if you know neither. And you should listen to "Untouchable Face" if you don't know Ani DiFranco. And you should listen to Anaïs Mitchell's Young Man in America if you don't know her. So I think that covers the title, more or less?

Anyway, roadtrip playlist in hand, we ride, road-dogs.

Wee Auld Explainer

I wanted to say, it's probably worth mentioning how I'm thinking of this book right now? The Stenordale of it all kind of shook something loose for me. And that's, taking this text entirely literally is of no value to me. What, am I supposed to say "Stenordale is problematic?" No, I think not. And, I've been drawing this line trying to come to a sense about the level of abstraction in the book for me.

What it is is like, these are realistic psyches in an intensely expressionistic environment. "What if Psychonauts' meat-circus level was abstract horror?" So I'm enjoying the way the characters collide, and enjoying interpreting the environment in which they live. Which means, right now I'm more interested in what Rachel's reaction says about real world reactions than what Rachel would feel in that moment, more interested in what Beth and Will are each feeling than what they ought to do. Like, if someone shows up with some new Unspeakalbe Horror, I'll probably talk about it, but meanwhile I think I've said more than my piece on the "real" world of Dorley as it stands.

Impressions and a Brief Mea Culpa

Impressions

I've been whining about chapter length for about six months, so I'm suspect, but in Enemies I think we start to get to a point where the slicing and dicing of the plotlines, while it facilitates motifs really well, limits the coherence of the piece in places. There's a lot to like in this chapter but it suffers from having to do so much. I wonder if my feeling on that is more rooted in my unfamiliarity with online fiction than anything about this work in particular. Nothing to be done about it if so, and I assume if I ever re-read this in print it will be edited to conform to a different genre standard. I think the Will of it all could benefit from some more undivided attention, that stuff was engaging but diffused by so much else going on. Maybe that's just Dorley late-chapter-in-the-volume shagginess, too. There are a lot of little small-chapter-sized bits with buttons on the scene, and each of them is a nice bite of fiction, but at a certain point it's kind of, y'know, expected. It deflates the writing to have one every section. Your mileage may vary, naturally; I'm an odd reader reading it in odd-sized bits and pieces and fits and starts.

Mea Culpa

On a completely different note, I'm grateful to Diana for getting me to pay a little more attention to how I was thinking about Will. That was a good thing to see before I started this chapter, and I gave a little bit of thought to how I'd gotten some of that wrong. Diana's always been really generous, so if she says I should be reevaluating, I trust her that I'm missing a beat. I think Melissa's story was a lot more legible to me than Will's for sort of implicitly misogynist reasons, giving it some thought. You can read "Everything Must Go" as a cis guy without any real intuition about the situation, and get a if not the gist. The sheer jarring distance between her perspective in puberty and mine tells me a lot of what I might need to know. And the structure of her story helps, too. It's like Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, or even Corpse Bride. Melissa feels hideous/dead/wrong until she gets to be Melissa, and even then there's still a lot of unresolved tension there. Bingo bango bongo, on to the next chapter. The structure is a familiar one, I want to say it's "Gothic" or "Victorian" but I don't really know what I'm talking about in that regard, that's just brain-noise. It just feels like, Melissa was a damsel in distress and Shahida cared for her and loved her still even past what she thought was death. In T.R. the Last Romantic, by H.W. Brands (the best bad historian) Roosevelt has this weird guilt spiral about the death of Alice Hathaway Roosevelt once he meets someone new. That's the feeling to which I refer most I guess, in talking about Shahida and Melissa. A sense that Melissa not yet existing or "Mark" being presumed dead wasn't a strong enough force to keep Shahida away. Anyway, Melissa's arc has a lot in common with other fairy tales about girls (and also Teddy Roosevelt apparently.) Will's story, on the other hand, has felt kind of un-parse-able, even though she basically told Steph she was trans a million years ago. That sense of Will's illegibility was, I think, my falling into basically the exact thing Greaves is describing that messed Will up so bad in the first palce. His mode of failure resembled a masculine mode of failure on the surface, so I just kind of ignored his transness. In a certain light, I can see it as doing more or less the same thing I was mad at Will for doing. I was denying Will's transness just like Will denied Bethany's. I'm not going to tear myself up about it, it's an honest mistake, worth thinking over. It's also a good reminder for me that not everyone in Dorley was like, singing "Casamir Pulaski Day" and acting wounded for the duration of their misspent youths.

Briefish Recapish

We have a few broad lines here:

Elle in 2002 and 2004 and 2019, before and during the transition of power at Dorley, illustrating the coming struggle.
Amy and Rachel in 2019, during their Disclosure. Amy is cool about stuff, Rachel is decidedly not, says some pretty fucked up stuff.
Melissa and Shahida, establishing the boundaries of who gets to talk to and meet whom, and underlining the danger of Amy's unfortunate aunt. Melissa needs to see Jenny Yau and Bea agrees.
Tabby and Will work the heavy bag of the soul and also the heavy bag of the gym, and Will gets enough of a post-workout runner's/boxer's high that it fixes her.
Frankie preps Declan for some fresh Hell, a "gala."

Elle and Beatrice

Did I know that Bea had black hair? Hair color changes, so maybe yes, maybe no, but in my mind she's still dirty-blonde or brunette-during-winter. I will be forgetting that, and assuming that Bea just looks lik Alyson Greaves' bluesky profile pic circa 2025.

One cannot be late when one works exclusively in the cracks between the floorboards of high society, just as one's deportment cannot be clumsy, one's appearance sloppy; one's reputation is rent.

We get some of Elle's perspective. She's early, she is nervous, she thinks of her mother. Understanding that sex work is a matter of fact for a lot of people in what I want to call "tricky paperwork" situations, which certainly includes Bea, her vocation here also works a lot like being a detective works in speculative fiction. Authors often use detectives as because detectives have an entrepreneurial but working class social station, and a lot of contingent social mobility. Bea's profession as a sex worker functions really similarly in these flashback sequences.

We either learn or are reminded of Kelly, the reason Elle is in this long struggle.

She should have told her to run.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it but this feels like a bit of foreshadowing, no? Elle overestimated her own power before, so she might be now once more.

Just the thought of it is intoxicating.

So Elle had a demographic interest in Kelly as well as a personal one. My spidey sense went off a little bit reading this. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but, "reshaped, refined into the feminine" feels like a bit of a red flag, as does "intoxicating?" People who act normal about stuff aren't usually intoxicated by the idea of you. Infatuation, at its closest, intoxicates someone because of the real experience of you. It's the 'it' of it all maybe, too? "[Crafted] by their own hands," kind of implies artifice, and object. Maybe this is too much quibbling with language, I write a lot about identity-construction &c., and "construction implies buildings, hardhats" would be a kind of a bullshit dig I think.

Hmm. I guess my worry is, if Elle is intoxicated by the idea of refining people, maybe she's not actually perceiving those people in good faith so much as she's just trying to get high off of the process. And, you know, she's an aristo, so she's kind of suspect on general principle in this setting, right?

But the waste required to create these women is unconscionable.

Glaswegian SSP voice: the Neo-Neoliberal Thatcherite mindset infects all human relationships, aye. The cauld maths of capitalism reinfarce a domineering hegemony, aull in the name of efficiency. In this essay, I wi-

One thing I like about these flashbacks is that you can kind of trace the cultural heritage that Bea works with. This little echo of "we don't like to waste people," even already in Elle's head, even a decade and a half ago.

[S]he wants her. And she wants to give her the world.

See and that's a rich little couplet. It sums up what I'd think about Elle at this juncture. She wants to have people, romantically and in that same kind of dangerous way as the other aristos. But she's also interested in giving something back (in return.) The dynamic is still ambiguous, and since she's powerful, that ambiguity is dangerous. Does this make her transactional? Generous? Is it simple noblesse oblige? Is it a deal with the devil? Who knows! The past with Elle is coming slowly into view; there's a bit of "War in the Heavens" about the whole situation. And then we learn something unconscionable

Elladine

Fuckinnnnn', ELLADINE?!?!

Also, Elle is like, really horned up about the Sisters. I'm still very confused as to how nobody bothered to murder Dorothy Marsden. That feels like priority number 1 for several people with means, motive, and opportunity. I get that it would be a Bad Idea Strategically. I am shocked at the collective self-restraint on display.

I don't really know what to say about Elladine's tea service with Maria and Barbara later. It maybe shows that she's at worst conflicted, or compromised, as opposed to just predatory? No idea what to make of this woman. Maybe she's learning that there are subjects inside the objects by which she's so aroused.

Later, Bea says she can measure a girl's limits, and that she can afford the time off for the budget. Because, she's underestimating the labor demands there, in light of the rest of the text so far. Everyone's scrambling like a TV hospital. Good help is hard to find; nobody wants to work anymore, y'know?

At the end of the chapter, Elle tells Bea what she knows about Declan. Does Elle know about Val, I wonder? And where is this going, exactly? I mean, obviously into COVID-19 at some point, but I'm getting a sense of a pretty big scope adjustment to this story, long term. I guess it can just keep rolling if it wants to do so. Anyway, denouement inbound in the next couple of chapters.

These backstory snippets mostly do a lot to make me sympathize with Dorley's predicament. They add some intrigue to the situation, they help contextualize the titular enemies. And they raise kind of an interesting question about the relationship between rights-seeking or safety-seeking and preexisting power structures. Is Bea better off running Dorley than she would be if she'd carried on Teri and Linda's legacy? Honest question, unclear answer, I think. She's bent her life to this peculiar Programme and changed it radically; that's nothing to sniff at. But she's also sacrificed so much of her time on that alter, and I assume that she's basically stressed all the time and getting bullshit sleep.

Melissa and Company's Story

Melissa can see some of the effect her collapse had on Shahida. That feels like a guilt hazard for her, just given her whole deal. On the other hand, Melissa and Shahida being together is more or less the precondition for either one of them not spiralling. So it might be kind of a stable structure for her; she is with Shahida and that forms the kind of mutual reinforcement each of the two need to thrive.

You know who she reminds me of? My gran.

Significant word choice? This may be reassuring to Melissa, but we know of a very bad Grandmother. I was surprised by how warm Shahida's gran turned out to be in her telling; a worse writer would have had her be a bit of an iron lady with a hidden heart of gold or something. I keep implicitly expecting a little more cliche out of Greaves than she delivers. I think that's because of the dramedy tone and the dorm-life aspects of the story, but it's nice to be consistently surprised, either way.

Shahida vs Melissa's attitude on Bea is worth digging into. I feel like if I pull back that wallpaper there's something there about role models and restrictions going on? I also feel pretty certain that what I'd really want is to hear a conversation between a cis woman and a trans woman on the passage, not to make an ass of myself trying to read too much into something that isn't there (but that's my brand, what else do I even do here?)

I'll stick to something a little bit less speculative; Bea's place here in Melissa's mind echoes Elle's knowledge that she has so much power over Bea. But I don't always think that Bea remembers that she is in such a comparative position of authority? She's less scary to us as we read about her past, and she knows her past intimately of course. But her Nieces and Niblings don't, usually. I don't think Bea would do anything to harm Melissa (putting that sentiment in a self-addressed envelope to timestamp it, let's see what happens next) but Melissa doesn't know that, and so she has to be, punctual.

In constrast to Melissa's finely tuned sense for danger, Shahida has to bonk her over the head with the fact that Melissa is loved. Which, hey, character growth: Shahida used to pour her love out and Melissa used to drown in it, but now she seems like she can just accept it and reflect it.

Today she can sort of see Lorna’s point, when she spoke of the Hall as an edifice, an artefact of cruelty, an aristocratic relic that has shed so much blood over the years that one could easily imagine its inhabitants barely noticing the spilling of a little more.

Well, yeah. There is that. Greaves keeps returning to this idea, of the cruelty that the past can give you as a legacy. I wonder what she's getting at there, if anything. It's certainly true, broadly. Revolution is a turning of the globe and it's almost the same globe today as it was yesterday. Maybe iit's just a little caution to the reader, "don't make anyone into a lolcow," that sort of thing.

What kind of mug do you want? Sinister or plain?

Lotta good buttons on the scenes within this chapter, again.

Aunt Bea reminds the pair that their recklessness came close to actual consequences; Amy's terrible aunt Miranda Woodley-Stone almost surely knows some of the worst people featured in this book, or at least shares a social circle. That's a pretty reasonable criticism. I was kind of expecting something a little dumber. Because, again, I keep expecting this to be a CW show given the dorm and the aristocratic-coldwar-spycraft, and it keeps on being a book for grownups.

[A]n indolent upper-class moraliser

Hey wait that's my thing what the fuck, Miranda!

Anyway, this all seems plenty reasonable, given the circumstances. Melissa gets to try and have closure, nobody's going to talk to the right-wing press. Just after their meeting there's this sequence of little logistical mix-em-ups that continues to show Dorley off as a place run on a shoestring staff.

To keep track that's:

One more external contact for Melissa
Bringing Abby in from the cold
Bea knows about the missing Peckinville Associates associates.

Amy, Rachel, Etc.

Amy and Rachel are also at Dorley today, also to talk to Bea, and moreover to receive disclosure.

Russ has a boyfriend, did I know that already? Hazard of reading this series over almost a year now. Poor guy, his dad's a fucking nightmare. Since Amy's in touch, eventually we're gonna see him again, surely. I wonder what his reunion with Steph and Melissa will be like. Rachel hesitaates to sign the super-NDA, which, sure, fine. I probably wouldn't, realistically. If any of my friends come back from the dead and it comes with a very spooky contract to sign, I'm going to opt for "not needing to know." Then she's miffed at The Horrors. And sure, posited. I'm not about to pretend I haven't done about 1 standard Hobbit's worth of moral handwringing about them. But then, she gets kind of awful, starts painting criminal accusations around with a broad brush. Amy tries to talk her down, but she escalates enough to make Pippa feel like shit (which forms the pretext for Melissa to meet Will.)

[D]o they strike you as traumatised by their experiences here?

Not the visual novel dialog branch I'd choose, Amy, but go off, queen.

Hath a Woman not Eyes?

I don’t know if that was ever going to be something that happened without you. I don't know if she’s real or not.

That's kind of what had me so tied up in this series before a wild Bethany appeared. "These women have chosen their lives, but the alternative seems to have been death," is on its face a Horror. But then, read that sentence a few times and, uh. So that attitude was, let's say unhelpful to me, in retrospect? Or, I can't read this book in concrete terms and get anything out of it, take your pick. Yeah torture bad. I could skip the book and know that, so it's worth tabling that.

Jodie, I think, was the "seed" girl? The seed grew, she's a plant now. She's no less a plant because she was a seed. The circumstances around your life are never yours. I'm a liberal because I'm American, because I'm sick, because my dad is a jerk, and because my grandfather was a Pinko. I didn't pick any of those things, they happened to me. What's the difference, really, between that and anything else? You choose from the menu. And, again, I can't take Dorley as a literal text because its origins are in NHS satire.

You're just happy the boy you had a secret little crush on for years is still alive

Well damn, that sort of thing is just out of bounds. Geez, you're in front of strangers for chrissakes. That would end a friendship all by itself, frankly. Is Rachel, ah, kind of a TERF? Or is that outrunning the evidence. Almost needless to say, the meeting ends, and ends poorly.

Paige rhetorically stiff-arms Rachel, which I appreciated. Paige has boundaries come hell or high water, and good for her. Color me curious what built that willpower for her, maybe it was just innate. Per her, it was Dorley itself. She and Steph have that in common, maybe.

HBICOC

Melissa is more included now. Or feels more included. Potato/tomato. It's remarkable how much she didn't get the sense of community Dorley is supposed to provide in her first run through. Which, kind of undermines some of the claims about saving-as-opposed-to-hurting people. Any total claim about an institution is bound to fail. And Melissa meets Will. And, yes, it is absurd. The whole edifice is absurd. And good for Will to learn the absurdity of the world. Good to be epistemically humbled by it. Good to know that reason has limits. That's not "Congregationalist Dudely", for what it's worth, that's "Wittgenstein Dork Dudely," so take it up with him.

Will's Story

Steph

...is such a sweetheart in these little vignettes with Bethany, but then she's like, really carrying a grudge against Martin. Uh oh here comes the part where my Will-blindspot makes me feel like I was a diiiick.

A whole clinical-seeming language to describe all the reasons they shouldn't transition.

Will adopted a theory of her mind that couldn't even express what she wanted any longer and that's why she "couldn't" call Bethany "Bethany" without a lot of effort on Beth's part. See, here's a tricky thing too. Like, there is a reason for why Will was acting so badly. But that's not an excuse, it's just a cause. It remains true that Will was acting really badly really recently. How do you know when someone's nature has changed, as opposed to when their disposition has shifted?

He’s very impressed with his own intelligence. And I think that can make people gullible.

That trap is brutal, though. He's just trapped in his own little microtheory. Like a dung beatle rolling a ball that keeps falling back down.

You think it’ll be okay? Going out like this?

For all the bluster, Bethany is still really new to this. She's lucky to have a partner like Steph to help her learn.

Autogroinophiles and Whatnot

Look I don't want to soap-box about it too much. It's someone else's soapbox to stand on, and that's bad form. But I do want to say, this whole thing about being arroused by being feminine makes a lot of sense intuitively. I remember the first time I got a haircut that wasn't a fucking bowl cut with kitchen scissors, I was like, 16? 17? and I basically entered a different dimension for the next week or two once I saw it in the mirror. I don't have a "haircut fetish" -- I'm not a haircel, not to yuck anyone's yums. Feeling good about yourself, feeling like yourself, makes you feel good. I'd expect that to be if not universal than at least pretty commonplace.

Disclosur3? D4sclosure?

How many disclosures today? Amy, Rachel, Will, end of list?

Why did he have to get so big?

When I'm taller than old buildings meant for their inhabitants to be, it's a logistical pain and a pain on the skull. It's not a reminder of something more than a bump on the head. So I'd bet it's a lot worse as an actually big person, in a society where that's masculine, in a country that has actually old buildings.

[H]e found other people who hated themselves just as much, and there he found his religion. One he defended from all threats to its veracity.

I wonder what name Will will pick. Also I gotta get a better handle on how to use pronouns for characters in flux like this. Will is unlikely to be the last. When it was Steph at a point like this, she just outright said "I'm 'he' until I'm not" and that made it easy enough. I dodged around Bethany's process a ton but I don't know how I'll handle that one here. I think I've settled on "she/her" for Will at this point in the post but haven't been consistent yet, and am not overly worrying about it yet since the text is still using "he/him."

Being as mad as Will is in this scene feels horrible. I hope Will doesn't have broken hands.

And there are sandbags in the B1 storeroom. Flood prep.

So they do have flooding problems. Who is the plumber of Dorley Hall?

Well, I feel stupid

Sounds like Tabby's taking Will to work out with the heavy bag?

Will Goes Boxing

Huh! Interesting that Will prefers the free-standing ones; I always liked the chain-hanging bags. They do get scuffed up pretty fast, but there's such good feedback for if you're doing it right. Maybe I've just never used a nice free-standing one, but you can get like, a beautiful clean "pop" off of the hanging ones when you get your form just right on a straight, and that feedback is like a drug. Can a non-Yankee fill me in, is this an Atlantic divide?

I don't remember, but I almost certainly must have talked about the women I boxed with. They were tiny, and very fast. It was probably kind of bad practice for them, honestly, other than getting to work the inside? And even then, if all of the boxing women are mostly sparring with men, then they're all just practicing fighting inside and kind of what's the point, in matches they're boxing each other. Some girl's gonna be the tall one. Whereas on the other side, it's friendly sparring, nobody's trying to get hurt, so for the bigger person in the ring it's a chance to try and really be on top of your form and keep up as best you can.

Reminiscing aside, being a woman boxer is like, a gender nightmare and has been for as long as there have been women or boxing, as far as I can tell. There are the openly old-timey sexist coaches, the near miss of mandated "boxing skirts" at the upper amateur levels as late as like, 2012 (see Katie Taylor for a good entrypoint), the more recent Olympic unpleasantness. The whole sport is like this red line over which paternalism totally loses its shit. You can extrapolate the rest. It's all obvious and leads inexorably down to the purity concern over if female athletes are sufficiently dainty to be a Credit to their Race, whatever that happens to mean that day.

So. Will's hesitation and subsequent getting over it is kind of powerful, and in conversation with a long tradition of getting worried and/or confused about women boxing. And it's of a kind with getting over the surface of Will's "masculine" size. That and, of course, boxing is violence, so for Will who's been pent up and literally-self-restrained and had a problem with it, this moment of being shown that it's okay has to be huge. Shows that Dorley isn't out to entirely erase Will. Also surfaces another faultline, this time between Tabby and Maria.

Compare/contrast the "violent baking" from earlier in the series; Dorley has really adjusted its perspective on Dorley over time I think?

Group Meeting

Please. At worst, I retraumatised him.

Are me the baddies? "What measure of sympathy do you owe someone who treated you badly yesterday?", I guess is the question. Some, surely. But Bethany's understandably really wrapped up in her own newness: new relationship, new gender, new name, new wardrobe. And Will was, well, a jerk. You can empathize and still think someone was an asshole.

The Christian rebirth is also about forgiveness.

I am missing so much of what's going on between Steph and Martin. I don't understand why this is a dig, or why Martin gets extra loathing, or any of it. I'm tempted to say "this is British stuff" and skitter away into the cold light of the New England sun.

You're very, very bad at pretending not to be a girl.

Boom, roasted. It's so funny because, we're introduced to Steph as a cybersleuth driven by effectively seeing a ghost and tortured by her own inner sense of inadequacy and the world's cruelty. But by now she's like, kind of coming across as a naïf. Our little ingenue.

Then, Will bursts onto the scene and is actually adorable. She had a good workout, sounds like. She's gonna be so sore tomorrow, her poor knuckles are probably fucked, too. Also, ugh, this is a stupid quibble, but her hands were probably broken punching the cinder block, right? How does Dorley deal with that? Surely at least someone's had to go to intensive care over an appendix or something? Which I think brings us back to Melissa meeting Will, full circle.

Stenordale

Last but not least, Stenordale. The plan is coming together. Maybe.

Trevor discovers Val's gradually adopted womanhood. That reminds me of Bethany's creation of herself. Interesting of Greaves to spend time on Trevor's identity "not being budged." There's an interesting tension in Greaves' writing between well-grounded characaters with their plausible hobbies, and the inescapable fact of how abstractly allegorical this series gets in places. "Oh the basement dungeon seems psychically infeasible," I might as well say. I don't think pigs can walk on two legs, drink brandy, and run an actual farm either, so what's the point of contention really? Once you know it's there, that contrast makes for a lot of fun.

Anyway, Val in 2019, like Elle in 2002, is on her own warpath.

You and I get to go for a run.

Oh no I'm going to write words about the gendered politics of running. Skip this if it's tedious and accept my apology; this one is for me.

Here's that pesky biopolitics of sport again. Cardio is "safe" for girls. Self-disciplinary in some ways, even. Distance running especially is objectively books-level boring, makes you skinnier, and doesn't give you any of the big violence muscles, per Trevor's case. And look, I get to say this. I have literally won (minor) prizes in (also minor) ultramarathons: it's a boring sport (that I love like a lunatic) that's like 50% people with some kind of body/mind trauma, and 50% people with other neural spices in the mix. I feel like this is going to sound completely unhinged. But, long moderate-intensity cardio is the way of exercise-bulimic upper-middle-class sorors, often as not. I do not say this as a dig, these are my coreligionists in some way. We share a hobby and a lot of women got into distance running to discipline their bodies into compliance with a white hegemonic norm of perceived bloodlessness. Not me though, I'm built different, or something (I'm not; I like running a lot but I discovered it because I wanted to be thinner because it was the aughts and we were all listening to Bright Eyes' "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning," and everyone hated fat people pathologically even compared to today.) I sound like I'm eating crickets out in the desert, but I'm still like 90% sure that's part of what Greaves is illustrating in the contrast of bodily-self-development between Dorley and Stenordale.

And, if not, hopefully I didn't give anyone any new worms; learn to use the heavy bag, it's fun. That's the main point. Or, learn to use the speed-bag. It's also fun, and it will make you better at playing musical instruments.

Now to become even less-hinged:

Perhaps the cult of technical speediness, just as in sports, conceals the impulse of mastering the terror of running, by turning it away from one’s own body and at the same time high-handedly outbidding it: the triumph of the increasing mile-marker ritually attests to the fear of being pursued.

That from Minima Moralia, which is sort of Adorno's scream into the void about being in California during the close and aftermath of World War 2. It's, fine. High-variance. He was like, in total identity collapse from the fact that fascism arose in spite of the material dialectic, and also is just a cranky weirdo. Anyway, that all aside ("oh no, I'm outside recreationally, what a, uh, terrorized perversion of checks notes 'bourgeois walking,'") it's an interesting contrast, where Will gets to box as part of her healing, but Trevor only gets to run after people are convinced he's not a threat.

Running, I believe, is a mostly harmless pursuit. But, getting shoved into a lane and staying there is, well, who am I writing to? You know.

Oh Right. Callum is Here, Too

Come to punch the moneymaker in the face again?

I know Frankie has led a life of despicable crimes against humanity and all, but I do love her personality. Jesus H Christ, what happened to Declan off-page?

Man cannot live on bread alone, Franks, especially not American bread. Have you ever tried it? It’s solid sugar. Anyway, I don’t trust the Smyth-Farrow kids. Too many new ideas.

Kind of the pot calling the kettle black for a person experiencing Britishness to talk shit about American bread, don't you think?

Anyway, seems like Dot is trying to get an extra side-hustle in human trafficking going. I suppose I'd thought she was in it for the love of the game.

Perhaps, before all this ends in darkness, he deserves someone on his side. Despite his past, despite the pain he's inflicted.

This is an interesting inversion from Will's predicament. Will's caretakers know that she needs someone on her side to get out of the darkness, regardless of "deserving" "forgiveness." Frankie is beginning to believe that even Declan deserves a friend. That ropes in Steph's conflict with Martin earlier (I can never remember that Steph thinks Martin is basically The Devil, that fact just slides off of my brain somehow) but of course it's all there in Edy and Adam's continuing exploration of grace.

This little scene also has me more or less convinced that Frankie is 100% certified gonna die escaping.

'Yes,' she says.

Is this telling us that Declan thinks of herself in those terms, or that Frankie thinks of him in those terms? Over-the-shoulder narration is tricky I suppose.

I'm curious what Callum is going to end up doing in all this. He's sort of a nothing right now, but he wouldn't be here if it weren't for some reason. Dorley is the generously apportioned character dramedy, Stenordale is the dramatic expressionist hellscape. So call it 50/50 Frankie dying, 50/50 Fraknie killing Callum to escape.

Rampant Speculation

I'm curious how/if the Peckinville presence changes the dynamic of the hall. I'm guessing that's a "next book" problem. Seems like it's kind of ripe for Christine's cohort to keep figuring out how to be in the broader world outside Dorley, plenty of opportunity for metaphor there. I'm also pretty much expecting Frankie to die next chapter or the one after. Finally, and this is I assume a Book 4 question, but Jake joined Peckinville, but that's either a really bad failure to read a CV, or an infiltration enabled by a betrayal, yes? Finally Jenny Yau seems like a crux where something Very Bad could happen. Either socially or in the war between the troutfuckers.

Errant Thoughts

I have been audience captured, by which I mean joining a discord server, not being spirited away into a basement.

Sponsorship

A circuit that completed for me reading this chapter is, sponsorship exists for Alcoholics Anonymous &c., but also for imigration. I'd always connected it to the former, because of the Martin of it all I guess, but Dorley is a culture and a kind of embedded state, so it works either way. Also maybe there's some incredibly obvious Britishism I'm just ignorant about. A nice little connection to one of Bhatt's essays where she draws an anology between imigration and transition, though.

No This is Actually Beyond the Pale

Laptops and tablets are scattered around and used communally

What.

3DS

Romantic women always have a 3DS (read: my wife loves her 3DS.) Also we're calling them "search action games" now, not Metroidvanias. Get with it Dorley. Actually we're calling them Hollowknightlikes now, get with it Dudely. The game they're talking about is a nod to Glow Worm, right? I'm getting a very "this is not a real game" sensation from this little exchange, but maybe that's because I'm based and PS-Vita pilled. Sony does what Nintendon't, nerd.

Rompers/Romphims/Rompthems.

'It's called a romper?' Steph asks.

Jesus Steph, read a book. Bambi-ass first-year.

Last and Least

I have no idea if I'm back on a weekly schedule or if this is just a lull. I have a bunch of work/visa bullshit to iron out this week and also I'm flying to loathsome Texas of all places. If you don't hear from me for awhile, I'm trying to get Jasmine Crocket to be my friend.