Where He Cannot Follow
We lie awake at night in a tent and I say 'Tell me about your uncle and his friend because they seem like very bad men. Well, we wanna keep away from them.'
Not Even Close to Alright
I had a much better time with this one. Leigh, Frankie, and Diana are the coolest parts of the series right now from my perspective.
The thematic tension between:
- Diana as redeemed in Dorley's eyes
- Frankie as dubious of redemption full stop
- Leigh, unable to redeem herself to herself enough to steadily move forward yet
Is all my shit.
In Dorley, Dorley associates guilt with redemption with suffering. That's shown to us as a deeply unhealthy thought in "Where He Cannot Follow." But that unhealth does not negate the community. It's just an associated cost. A disordered way of living. See also Melissa; punishing her body because of what it used to try to do (grow larger) even though she would be much better off moving forward.
It's not that Dorley wants her to be healthy; Dorley encourages disordered eating for the recruits on several levels. It's that Shy and Abby want her to be healthy. And they wouldn't be together without Dorley. The community is not the institution. The community has value. But the institution persists and enables and disables.
This time I read Where He Cannot Follow.
Wait, what Happened?
- Diana meets some friends for coffee
- Christine gets out of the house
- Beth takes a shower
- Leigh goes to the gym
- Abby and Shy try something new
- Edy is losing a half-brother and gaining a sister
Role and Expectation
Aunt Bea should be Aunt Bea.
This is a fun little taster of something Dorley spends a lot of ink dealing with. The idea that one should be some role. Which is prattle, basically. Roles aren't been, they're performed. So it's fun to see that in such a low-stakes case like this. That's all.
Diana
We have no choice but to stan a dysgraphic queen.
And talking to me... worries you?
For all that Dorley is oblivious at times to their more terrifying behaviors, Dorley isn't.
But in the absence of trust, desperation wins out
In Dorley, desperation has been almost a precondition of trust from the jump.
I Haven’t Showered in Four, Five Days?
The parallels between Beth and Diana in this chapter are great. Both of them emerging from personhoods that have been annihilated, both under extreme duress.
The Britishness of Dorley kind of comes into view here again. I don't want to over-or-undersell anything, but the method and disposition of class conflict in England are roughly "totally batshit" from an American background. Not that we don't have a stupid class complex of our own, of course, just an alien one.
I think that our Uneasy Street style contemporary moment is still more to do with the Middletown studies than the aristocracy, despite obscene wealth and income inequality. Our terrible right wing billionares are an outgrowth of a business class that can never see itself as being outside of the middle. Every time you go up a tax bracket, you spend a little bit more, the people around you get a little bit richer, and before you know it you're "middle class" in your self-identity but a multimillionare. Well not you, or me for that matter, but one. Which is all just to say, "old money" in America barely exists as a social footprint in comparison.
And there's just more of a political-ideological separation between the Brahmin and Merchant classes here on civil rights issues or something? Like, take Beth's family. They were trying to move classes, from Merchant to Brahmin, more or less. First off, in the States they might have just skipped that as pointless. And second, if they'd wanted to, a 4 year degree at a libarts college or research university would have done the trick. The US's university system is, to a not insignificant degree, for mass-class production, and on top of the genuinely upper-middle-class production organ there's a lower-upper-class equivalent.
Anyway, Beth. She's having trouble. The identity formation she began needs confidence and she only sometimes has it. Also she's stuck inside forever. I'm coming around to the idea that these two chapters at least are there in part to help remind the reader that there are Horrors in the torture-basement books.
Frankie
Frankie and Ollie being friends constitutes a significant portion of my renewed good cheer about and trust towards the series.
Put someone through enough trauma and the old personality kind of... breaks down. The new self is tailored to survival.
If Dorley really is a horor-drama, this scene is a masterpiece, the way it juxtaposes Beth's identity-breakdown, Ollie's recent near-death, Melissa's continuing disorder, and Diana's origin. Just a swirling trauma gyre.
Redemption's a pointless concept, anyway.
Frankie is unapologetic, guilty, and unjudging. She's an inversion of New Dorley. After all of the reflexive guilt and redirected punishment and crushing shame, the only thing left to do is to continue to live. Diana is redeemed by her brokenness in Dorley's eyes. Ollie is redeemed, at least in part, by his attempt to take his own life. He ceases to be nameless vermin, and becomes an object of care.
Dorley needs people to suffer so that it can save them. The argument the Hall would make is probably, these people were suffering and they need to see that they were suffering. Kotkin in Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, writes about how the proletariate of Russia were despised and so became the expected redeemers in the eyes of the empire. It's tempting to think that suffering equates to valor just because comfort does not. I definitely fall into that fallacy. Maybe not daily. Certainly at least monthly.
Ollie Again
So he’s going to thank her. For showing him the sun again.
I still find this plotline pretty offputting but I think I should probably trust the process or something, and see if it goes somewhere interesting.
Leigh
Well thank Christ, now I can stop saying "Will."
Chia
Love Chiamaka, Chiamaka da best. Greaves does this thing that I think is interesting where she sketches these hard-to-infeasible-to-impossible virtuous paths off to the side of the Dorley option. Like, of course Diana is going to choose Dorley in this scenario. It's the option that will help her medically, immediately, and without nightmarish publicity and state-incredulity and quite-plausible risk of assassination. And of course Bea sought vengeance/retribution against and dissolution of Old Dorley. But women like Chiamaka or Teri exist too, offering these lonelier, more tenuous, more austere niches or approaches or what-have-you. It's not a world in which all of the trans characters are posh, it's one where there's a very tempting bargain.
Weet Woot
Why are you dressed like a pumpkin spice latte girl?
Finally something sexy happened in Dorley. Only took 39 chapters.
A rabbit in a sundress with a big floppy hat on?
Finally something sexy happened in Dorley. Only took 39 chapters.
Errant Thoughts
W
God, to barely rememeber W.
Speaking of the ongoing motif of degenerate masculinity, I've been listening a lot to Okkervil River lately, and thinking about Texas, where my sister lives. What strikes me about both is, Texas is just so fucked now and it used to just be kind of strange.
I think about my grandfather who lived and died there, holding out well past the end of the New Dealer judicial last stand. Or Beto O'Rourke, chair-standing and Mars Volta-ing his way through the patio at Poison Girl. And I wonder about this Presbyterian fellow and wish him well but part of me thinks the party's over there forever.
I'd argue that Illinois is the most American place in America, but Texas is certainly the most color-saturated version of that claim. There used to just be something odd about Texas. Now there is just something Truck about Texas as far as I can tell. And the once-normal (a Presbyterian normie running for Senate) is seen as nearly abberant. People go to Texas because they are Truck, or because they wish to Become Truck.
I've mentioned before my formerly-gentle car-coats and driving-loafers trombonist friend from Wisconsin? Got into crypto, made a move on our mutual friend undoing decades of friendship with her? Moved to where else but Austin, Texas? The place is like a magnet for budding assholes.
My sister lives in Houston. When we visit it is 81 degrees F (27C) on Christmas. We go to Agora (is that place still open? How old am I? Whose hands are these?), a big mostly adequate coffee spot. We go to Memorial Park (a place that would be nice if it were 30 degrees F (uh, 17C?) cooler). We go to Sylvia's Enchilada Kitchen, or whatever. There are nice places and signs of progressive-liberal cities.
Someone even tried to build a light rail.
But the whole thing is like a place imagining itself not to exist. The hatches are battened down. Someone has a Kony 2012 poster. Someone has a Ron Paul 2020 sticker. I hear whispers of a man named Kinky Friedman.
I'm veering dangerously close to talking about authenticity (vomits violently) when I talk about the stuntedness of the liberal in captivity, but all I mean to get at is, a place can be wounded if enough goes wrong there for long enough. There must be a way out, because they're not exactly making places where less stuff went wrong, and sometimes things do get better.