I have done battle with Enemies of Dorley Hall and lived to see the day.

But at what cost?

Well, none cost. Took me awhile. Finally joined the discord. Deactivated bluesky for awhile (what is social media if not "time I could have spent doing something else like blogging about a book?")

Enemies is a pretty unpleasant book. I'm thrilled we get Beth. I'm shocked at how much I give a shit about Will by the end. I love Frankie and Val's friendship. I warmed up to the slog through Stenordale. I think the way that Diana emerged is very cool. I definitely would not have finished this if it were the first book.

I'll have my write-up on chapter 37 done soon, I just have to figure out what the hell I think about it first.

And this is, I dunno. Prompted by reading Enemies at least. Maybe cooked too long in the skull.

Beth, Willian't

I don't know what I think about Beth's emergence. About Abby's family, or Melissa's friends, or Christine's family. Except to return to my first impression of Indira back when I liked her, that an integrated life was desirable if you can have it. Is Dorley a crutch for Beth? What would her life be if she were living with Teri? Is that silly to wonder?

Shocked to say this, but I like where Will's story is going more right now. I've spilled enough ink on the both of them that anything else feels desultory.

I keep on doing that. Wanting for the Hall to disappear. I'm reading the wrong series in some ways, or reading the wrong way. It's probably only natural; none of this genre appeals to me, it's Greaves' prose and the social readership that keep me around.

Pilledness

In my response to "In From the Cold," I wrote that Dorley was in a hypocritical/contradictory crisis. That it would need to reform, rebirth, or die. In the past I've also written about Dorley as a funhouse mirror for cisness. I've also written in the past about how contemporary manhood is sick. I've always kind of, squared the circle on that by creating or recycling internecine dichotomies.

• Graham Platner versus Zohran Mamdani
• Man versus man
• Mass Man versus the Qualified Minority.
• My generation versus gen-X and gen-Z and Boomers

I don't believe that Dorley is exactly an island. It's an institution with constituents who have agency. And factions, even, on a continuum of affinity. So, that shows an contradiction in my thinking right there. I think it's, you know, natural; Dorley is significantly both

• a fiction
• a small centralized localized institution

As opposed to a large, decentralized, fractious, distributed one like masculinity. So, logical consistency maybe fails in fiction; brains are fancy meat. But all the same, I should probably think about what that contradiction says about a) Dorley and b) my vulgar theory of masculinity.

Unsustainable Things Can Last

It's in vogue to respond to a particularly stupid contemporary event with some variation on, "Blah! Everything is gender." My instincts have usually led me to think that it hasn't always been so. Again, middle age. I am reading Diary of a Man in Despair. I am quoting Henrik van Loon. I am enjoying a nice snifter of something odd. I am bemoaning how things just aren't built the same as they used to be. Everyone loves a pathetic fallacy. Even me. Even you.

What if I'm wrong though?

What if it really has "always" been partly a series of cultural gender fights we've been fighting? The thing I'd reach for as a counterexample is, like, the American Civil War. It was, you know, about slavery which means race, to put forth an ice-cold take. So, you know, there's other axes in the mix, to understate things to an absurd degree. But, even there too, Lincoln was an acceptable moderate/unacceptable appeaser because he'd almost been in a duel (with I think the only person ever to be a Senator from two different states?) He was in a liminal space between the increasingly discredited honor culture and hierarchical poverty of the Southern Gentleman and the normal-fucking-person culture of Greater Yankeedom.

Of course, the Republican Party, especially the Illinois contingent, was enemies of two specific kinds of men:

• The kind who industrialized and financialized forced impregnation of enslaved women and beat nearly to death the man who dared mention it in the Senate.
• The kind who human-trafficked poor young girls out of Britain to be polygamously married to gross old Mormons first in Navu and then in Utah.

Et in arcadia ego.

There's a common thread there for my predicament I think. After the Civil War, southern culture didn't vanish. There are people in Wisconsin selling Confederate flags. There are people in Vermont wearing Confederate flags on their hoodies while they ride their motor-assisted bikes on the state route shoulder between towns. There is a Jeff Davis street in Juneau if I recall correctly. It's not like Firefly isn't about The Lost Cause (in space!) It's not like Teddy Roosevelt didn't hang out with his fancy Confederate veteran family and defend the peculiar institution of lynching.

We seem to have pretty well tamped down "dueling, specifically" but honestly I'm not so sure that's even a value-add. What did happen is a synthesis, maybe. And maybe that's inevitable after a culture war, even a total, kinetic, culture war. A, yes, bona fide Huntingtonian Clash of Civilzations.

Ethan Tapper's book taught me the term "wolf tree," with which I am intimately familiar; think Great Deku Tree-- the big rotting tree-carcas at the center of the field or the young growth forest, just waiting to dramatically change. Before one actually falls, though, it becomes host to plenty of saprotrophs, your big fancy mushrooms, your wood roaches, me, grabbing easy-burning kindling out of its core.

Maybe that's the gender regime in which I came of age. Even my legitimately horrible father told me about why feminism mattered when I was a little boy ("women are people and we all spent a long time acting like they weren't.") He's, degenerated since then. Information diets matter, apparently. Have I degenerated? Ortega y Gassets says roughly, a person is degenerate if they sincerely wish that they held their past station or a station only possible to a past life. I am not, then, quite a "de-gen."

Eventually a microburst or a heavy snow or a tropical storm or just an adjacent, unrelated treefall comes though. The biological death of the tree comes all at once to the casual observer (me, I'm the casual observer) but foresters would have foreknowledge of such. But, to thwart my wintertime depression and my Ibsenite sense that "one simply doesn't do that sort of thing," the biological death of the tree is not really to the ecological harm of the forest.

A bloom occurs. New trees have space to grow. Animals take refuge. Weirldy-online rurals use the scrap-rot as quickstarts for fires.

So, the legacy mode of manhood is rotten? Rotting? Dead? I'd like to think that this moment is the storm. I'm skeptical. When I was a teen, there was a genuine moment of wondering, "do we hold doors open? For whom?" That sounds so old fashioned and so trivial, but it was a recurring theme. "Do we say 'pussy' as a casual slur?" And we were groping towards a better world, I thought. Think, even. I was in the Midwest then, and in the cosmopolitan Midwest the answer became "we hold the door for everyone. We don't call people 'pussies' or '(R-Slur redacted as fully untypable for me today)." These are like, childish concerns almost, now. But, I was a child, more or less, so why wouldn't they be? And it didn't stick, or didn't take, or something, with a lot of people who now seem to have just been waiting to keep being horrid.

Ryan Broderick idly wondered if we (millennials) failed to perform cultural reproduction/transmission, and, apparently. Gen-Z is another Gen-X, even in nominal grammar. The tree is a bias. The bloom is a bias. We're, you know, not fallen angels we're (unevenly) rising apes.

When I was in school there was a "social reckoning" around philosophy professors being rampant sexual predators. Like, across elite universities. When I was a young professional there was a "social reckoning" around multiple rampant industries worth of sexual extractoin and assault. Now there's a burgeoning coverup for a, what, informal club of hyper-wealthy elite pedophiles who can't even follow the XBLA terms of service? Part of me thinks that we're just going to do this, collectively, grindingly and forever. "Is hookup culture bad?" "How do we feel about gross bald guys in blazers and driving loafers taking advantage of undergraduate women?" "Should most industries run on a dynamic of sexual terror?" "Has #metoo gone too far?" "Do we think that the President being a pedophile is worth talking about?"

The final goal is nothing to me; the movement is everything

Are we going anywhere or just pacing around in circles?

Plenty of Dead Wood in the Forest

In the balance, I hope that that death bloom is the right metaphor. Not because I'll ever be anything other than a man of "this time" (2012), but because a malignant monoculture is blocking out the sun for so many kinds of people. The tree is dead, and until it has the good sense to fall over, a lot of other modes of life can't thrive. In some sense, to reform is to die, for an identity. I think that the degree to which any reform is "growth" versus "death" just comes down to how one's sentiments towards the change.

See also, Trevor versus Beth, I suppose.

One hold up is, something flatly unsustainable on its face can keep going for longer than one would think. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid.

What About Dorley's Factions?

The mirror to all of that is, what do I think about the continuum of Dorley's characters?

There is a great gyre of the cadre of Dorley. And it is jealous of its inhabitants. And it inducts people coercively (Amy, Rachel, Basementiers.) And they all end up loving it or claiming to. Eventually. Or else.

So the factions seem like Potempkin factions, but maybe that's because of too small a scope. Maybe Dorley is better understood as being about 3 (so far) modes of living. In the shadow of hegemony, as hegemon, or as insurgent. Bea's home between Old Dorley and New Dorley constitutes the first: finding liberty in potentially dire circumstances. Stenordale exemplifies the second: coming to an accommodation with the unthinkable. And New Dorley is the third. Either a mere change in government or an IWW-like hijacking of the bones of the prior order.

I Must Have an Escape.

Really the question to wrestle with in Dorley for me is always still, of course:

Under what conditions is life endurable?

The answer is either incredibly bleak or refreshingly hopeful depending on your outlook. Val is able to endure because she is able to become. She is able to become more free because she is able to endure. Contrasting Trevor, whose life in Stenordale was clearly unendurable for a span of decades. I'd take self-determination as the common thread here.

What Comes Up, Must Come Down

Except, still, Dorley is built around a cast of characters who at least nominally didn't self-determine. You cannot make a true believer at the point of a sword. So I'm curious to see what happens next with Beth. My first response is/was to be happy for her to have transitioned, because, that's what you do when someone makes a big life choice? You're happy for them. And I'm deeply curious to see what happens between Beth and Trevor. Her own womanhood seems sort of predicated on her belief that it is a uniquely correct choice. His own manhood seems coupled with shame that he can't simply go with the flow.

Woke Millenial Dad Club

In lighter news...

I feel like our parent-friends-group finally broke out of middle-school-dance mode. And a bunch of our friends from longer ago and farther away are having kids now. It's funny to see the guys who self-consciously semi-ironically adopted "(spiritually) dad behaviors" like 10 years ago actually be fathers now. I'm really curious to see how we all do at it. I don't know that Dorley had anything to do with it really, but writing about that feeling of being gender re-segregated at least made me less interested in going along with that implicit norm. Also just, once you've been a parent for longer maybe it stops feeling like you're wearing your own parent's shoes? Either way, that's been nice. I just, don't give a shit about football, I don't wanna golf, and I don't intend to start doing so.

Uncomfortable Admission

I've been mulling over for a few posts if this is the kind of thing I should share, but I think it's at least relevant even if it's not something that makes me seem very cool or self-assured. I know this series isn't for me, so I also don't think it makes sense to understand it as at me. But, you know, there are plenty of smart trans women who have written in depth about Dorley, this is what if the median cis guy does it. So it feels like, maybe worth being a little painfully honest.

Reading this book hurt my feelings in places. One of the reasons I was so glad to see Trevor make it out alive was because he's kind of the only dude lying around the series who doesn't suck shit right now. Which, duh and or obviously, probably. This is the forced transition mercenaries and violent aristocrats series; there probably aren't going to be a lot of winners on my side of the ledger. There were just times I had to slow down reading this volume because I'd pick it up and just feel like, everyone reading anything I wrote maybe thought of me as either a rapist-in-waiting or a farm animal or a subhuman. To be really clear, I don't believe that people really see me that way. At worst they see a me-shaped hole that way, maybe. Again, this is all way closer to "raw sense impression" than "thoughtful analysis," it's just a thing I have felt in the reading. I do not mean to claim anything about the text, just the impression.