Dry Ice Factory

I knew that there had been two other books in the Riverside series published since Swordspoint, but I incorrectly assumed that the next published book, The Fall of the Kings, must be the next in the series. Turns out that the third published book, The Privilege of the Sword, is actually chronologically next in the series. Alas, it features the one character from The Fall of the Kings that I actually liked, even though she only makes a very late, deus ex machina kind of entry into the story. Worse, The Fall of the Kings is not a complete story in itself and seems to be the first half of a duology. I say "alas" and "worse" because I disliked The Fall of the Kings enough that, following my disappointment with a second reading of Swordspoint, I've lost interest in reading any more of the series. I might have been better off reading The Privilege of the Sword instead, but who knows? Maybe a full novel about the mysterious Jessica Campion wouldn't have worked for me either.

Anyway, The Fall of the Kings was co-written by Ellen Kushner's wife, Delia Sherman. I remarked in my review of Swordspoint that it still stands out as unusual in the fantasy genre for lacking magic and for being set in an imaginary world that's completely separate from our own, not a fairyland or otherworld that we can access through a portal, as in much traditional fantasy. The latter continues to be true in this novel, but this time there's a vastly richer history developed for this imaginary world, and the richer history includes magic. Somewhere on the internet I ran into a review describing the Riverside books as "alternate universe historical fiction." That's pretty close to it. It's an alternate universe in which things developed very much like they did in our universe's Europe up through the Renaissance, in terms of political organization and technology, but with almost none of the specifics the same, and of course now with real magic too.

If magic was non-existent in Swordspoint, it's contested here. Specifically, it's contested academically. This is very much a university novel, and one focus is an academic debate within the History department over whether references to wizards and magic in the historical past were metaphorical or real. Everybody agrees that a kingdom was formed when kings from the north came south with their wizards and formed a union via marriage with a queen in the south. This kingdom lasted for a few centuries before the last king was murdered by a cabal of southern nobles, leaving a noble-run polity without a king as discovered in Swordspoint. Historians are clear that every one of the ruling kings in the past had a wizard, but what they disagree about is whether the wizard actually practiced magic or whether they were frauds manipulating the credulous in order to gain power.

One of our protagonists, Basil St Cloud, is a revolutionary new historian who believes that the textual evidence that magic existed should be taken at face value and not dismissed as metaphorical nonsense. He delves into paraliterary sources such as ballads and personnel lists looking for more proof of his theory, while his rival, Crabbe, accepts the received academic wisdom of the day. If this sounds a little like the debate between scholasticism and empiricism in the Renaissance, it should, and that's part of the problem I had with the book. Why reinvent these debates in an alternate history? Well, I guess it's because they really want it to be about magic, and so they overlay another layer of secret history similar to The Golden Bough or The White Goddess regarding a past religion of a sacred king who is sacrificed to fertilize the land, which history has been masked, as Frazier and Graves claimed, by later religions who for political purposes appropriated parts of it while rejecting other parts.

What's weird about this to me is that Frazier and Graves were specifically arguing that there was an old matriarchal pagan religion that was overthrown by the patriarchal monotheistic religions such as Christianity, but at least in this first book, that dimension is missing. Here we get into the other thing I disliked about the book (and about Swordspoint on second reading too), but I have to tread carefully here, because I'm highly aware this may be my own bias speaking. Which is to say, the other focus of the story is the sexual relationship between St Cloud and the noble descendant of not only Alec from Swordspoint but of the Duke who killed the last king. This is Theron Campion, who is heir to the Duke of Tremontaine and an itinerant student at the University. Campion is actually bisexual (as were Alec and St Vier in Swordspoint) and a great beauty much lusted after by many characters in the novel. He has a passionate relationship with St Cloud, which reaches derangement of the senses levels. This is not a pornographic work, but there's a lot of description of male beauty, studly strutting and rutting, swelling members, tormented lust, and sweaty sheets. A lot. I can appreciate male beauty with the best of them, but I got really tired of the sexual obsessiveness. If you're into hot gay sex, your mileage may vary.

I do think it's daring and different to make a gay relationship the center of story like this, but I'm not sure that it makes sense, unless I'm completely misunderstanding the allusions to Frazier and Graves. Why make a gay relationship the center of a fertility cult? Possibly this is part of a subversive move that will be made clear in the next book, and we'll find that the mystical Land is the female principle that can only be fertilized by sex between two men, I don't know. That could actually end up being an interesting idea, but what I found in this part of the story seemed repetitive and non-sensical. I'm tempted to throw in a joke about ineluctable masculinity, just in case I turn out to be completely wrong-headed in my interpretation.

Well, as with Swordspoint, I was continually distracted by the ways in which this world seemed like a thinly disguised version of our own history transposed for some reason into this Neverneverland, from the conflict between Medieval scholasticism and Enlightenment empiricism, the allusions to Frazier and Graves, and the twentieth century academic bohemian experience reimagined as nobles slumming it in crime-ridden but gentrifying lower class taverns. (Way too many scenes of students arguing in taverns, too.) The mix certainly didn't work for me, even though some of the elements are of interest. It was slightly maddening, because I felt I should like it, but it just irritated the hell out of me instead. Late in the book, Theron's bastard lesbian pirate sister enters the story and enlivens the proceedings immeasurably by being smarter and more competent than everyone else in the room, which makes me curious about The Privilege of the Sword, which is apparently all about her, but after not enjoying either of these other Riverside novels, I'm not willing to give a third a try without strong evidence that it's something I actually would enjoy.

"But nothing is more disruptive to domestic order than an unattached heterosexual male." (A.O. Scott in a review of the film The Kids Are All Right)

I haven't dug too deeply into the story of Elliott Rodger and his misogynist beliefs and recent killing spree, because I find it all too distressing. However, I've seen enough to know that Rodgers was a virgin and a frequenter of internet forums dedicated to the right of men to be sexually serviced by women. I had no idea such sites existed, although, as nauseating as the views expressed are, I guess it doesn't really surprise me. The thing is, none of the men I know ever expresses these kinds of ideas, which is no doubt a reflection both of my social circle and of the unacceptability of such views in polite company.

The closest I've ever come to someone who thinks like that was a guy I knew who was still a virgin in his late 30s and who may still be a virgin, for all I know. I lost contact with him a decade or so ago. He was a good looking guy and fairly gregarious, but he did have some emotional problems, including a terrible temper and deep self-esteem issues. It's not completely clear to me why he was still a virgin, but he himself would say it was because he didn't want sex without love and had been unable to find the love he needed in order to agree to sex. During the period I knew him he *almost* had sex with a mutual friend of ours one night after a party when she drove him home and they started making out in her car and one thing almost led to the next. However, even in that drunken, excited state he was able to stop himself, and that was possibly for the best, all things considered. There was another woman with whom he became good friends and with whom he fell in love, but although she went out with him a few times, mostly because she needed someone to talk to about her own emotional struggles, she never reciprocated the love and so there it ended.

This guy and I got into one argument about feminism that I recall, in which he took the position that women have all the power in society. It didn't matter to him that women make less money then men, have far fewer positions of power in government and corporate hierarchies than men, are subject to more physical abuse and rape than men, have a recent history of not being able to own property or vote, etc, etc. To his mind women can withhold love and sex from men, and therefore they have all the power. The end. Our understandings of what social power is were so alien to each other that it was impossible to even have much of a conversation about it, so we exchanged views rather heatedly and then moved on to other topics. Probably he didn't bring up his beliefs much because in our social circle his beliefs were, shall we say, not widely shared. I found them completely bizarre, in fact, but I could see how they grew out of his personal sense of powerlessness to get what he longed for in terms of a romantic relationship.

Still, while he wasn't a violent person and didn't express any hatred of women, I was appalled at the sense of victimhood in his beliefs. I guess that's the part I have a hard time understanding in all this. I'm not actually all that different from him in my attitudes toward sex and love, although I was willing to try sex without love a couple of times before I decided it wasn't for me. Probably because I'm less emotionally troubled than he, I've also had a chance to get into sexual relationships with a few more or less mutually-affectionate women, although none of them lasted very long. But for most of my life I've gone without a sexual partner because what I've really been looking for is love (if not, as some have accused, adoration) and have created all kinds of barriers around the process due to any number of fears and confusions and hypersensitivities, not to mention my basic passivity and probably deep down an anxious reluctance to be subsumed in another. The thing I don't understand, however, is how anyone can be in that position and think the difficulties are caused by women or by anyone but themselves. Is it just that I'm such a control freak that I always believe that the things that are or are not happening to me are my own fault? Maybe so. I've certainly been rebuffed by women who weren't interested in me despite my best efforts to interest them, and I guess I've considered that my failure rather than the fault of the women. I've tended to see myself as a failure at love rather than to see women as a powerful cabal who are denying me my needs and rights. I guess I'd rather feel like a failure than feel like a victim.

Then again, I'm not an alpha male by any stretch of the imagination and have never aspired to be one. I lack aggressiveness and gumption, and I probably embrace failure all too easily. Even my emotional confusion is more or less passive and reserved. We all flounder in our own ways, I suppose, and my floundering has been certainly less destructive and perhaps slightly less self-defeating than some, but that's pretty much from sheer chance, not from virtue. I'm no evangelist, so it's not like I'm not going to advocate that lonely men should embrace a sense of failure over a sense of victimhood. I'm wandering without purpose yet again, for whatever it might be worth. Two cents, perhaps?

A lot of people suspect that South Carolina's Repulican Senator Lindsey Graham is a closet case, or at least like to joke about the possibility. Here's Americablog making the case for speculating on the topic without any actual evidence. Now it's certainly not the case that Graham is alone in this kind of treatment. Anderson Cooper of CNN was long a subject of speculation, and hey, it eventually turned out to be true! Former Florida Governor Charlie Crist is another one whose sexuality is a frequent subject of speculation.

This kind of speculation always makes me slightly uncomfortable, because a lot of people have assumed that I was gay for similar reasons: a long time bachelor who doesn't appear to be dating women. The fact that I've lived with a gay man for almost thirty years seems to seal the argument. Looked at objectively, I can't really blame people for drawing this conclusion, but it has bothered me from time to time to be misunderstood in this way. (It was particularly maddening at one point to discover that the entire staff of the Big Time Brewpub assumed I was lovers with a male friend with whom I frequently drank there, even though the reason I was always drinking *there* was so I could pine after one of the female bartenders.) To my mind it demonstrates the limitations of how we understand sexuality and its many variations. At various times I've tried half-heartedly or humorously to come up with terms to describe my own sexuality: autosexual (or wanker), perhaps, or maybe closet heterosexual. The fact that my sexuality is hidden or difficult to discern makes people project assumptions onto me, and while I haven't really suffered any kind of discrimination or ostracism as a result, it can be a lonely feeling to find that people don't see me for who I really am.

Because of this personal experience, I always feel a pang when people make jokes about Lindsey Graham (or Charlie Crist) being a closet case. On the other hand I do agree with the argument that Graham invites this treatment with is own vicious homophobia. It's a kind of quid pro quo or revenge. Nonetheless I think it narrows the range of human possibility to engage in this kind of counterattack. In an ideal world there would be room for closet heterosexuals (and asexuals) in the social imagination. Meanwhile, we deal with the reality we are served.

'Gay and lesbian soldiers will not stop fighting and dying on foreign battlefields all over the planet as a result of this vote. They will simply do so in secret. ... Those who voted to prevent a final vote on the Defense Authorization Act claim to honor the sacrifices of America's service members while demanding they bleed to death in the closet. They voted to ensure that the partners and families of those who have committed to giving their lives in service to this country receive no recognition, financial or otherwise, of what they have lost.'

-- Adam Serwer, "DADT Repeal Fails"

'Pretty much all of the gay men it's been my privilege to know and work with are more butch than I am.'

-- Comment by DoctorJay on "A High Tech Shaming, Cont." at TNC's blog (about the despicable Michigan assistant AG)

Need I really say anything after a subject-line like that? Indeed, is there anything I could say that would be half as interesting as the subject-line?

Well, okay, no, but Slate has an interesting exchange between Stephen Metcalf and Simon Reynolds regarding Reynolds' new book Rip It Up and Start Again, which is apparently about the postpunk era of 1978-1984. One thing that struck me repeatedly as I read the exchange was that we are talking 'bout my g-g-generation, even though the discussion frequently mentions bands I've never heard of before. I mean, Orange Juice? What, they're from Glasgow?!! Paging sneerpout! What have I been missing?

In case it isn't obvious, at the end of the page linked above, there is a link to another page of the discussion, which is where my subject-line comes from and which is a very interesting discussion of the glam roots of postpunk and all kinds of interesting ideas about sexual and gender dysphoria as reflected in the music:

'Talking about "the soft male" brings me round to your point about this U.K. indie-rock cult of heterosexual wimpiness. In the U.K. especially—but also with the Anglophile contingent in America—there is an abiding syndrome of boys who are basically straight but relate to a figure like, say, Morrissey. It's a mixture of identification and idolatry, with a tinge of homoeroticism. There was a heavily Smiths-influenced band called Suede in the early '90s; the singer, Brett Anderson, once described himself, notoriously, as "a bisexual man who's never had a homosexual experience."'

That doesn't really describe me (and I'm not a fan of any of the music mentioned there), as I'm not particularly into wimpiness per se, but I can certainly relate, particularly as it connects to Roxy Music, Eno, and Bowie. Has anybody read Reynolds' book? From this discussion, it sounds like exactly my cup of tea.