Well, it’s been a very long time since I stepped foot in here, but I have a few ideas on how I’d like to spruce the place up. First things first: I’ll open a couple windows and let some fresh air in. Rooms can get so stale and preserved-feeling when you leave them closed up for months at a time. Then, I think, I’ll take the sheets off the furniture and beat the rugs out. Lots of dust, but there’s a breeze coming through that should carry most of it away, and I can have a whip ’round with the vacuum later if it’s necessary. Light a gardenia candle and plump some cushions, and it’s just like home again.

And now we can go over the California Supreme Court’s Prop 8 hearing in comfort.

I missed almost all of Shannon Minter’s argument at the beginning. I was all ready to go, had my computer on and my earphones in, called up the California Channel’s site—and learned, like presumably thousands of other eager beavers, that the part of the series of tubes operated by the Cal Channel was clogged with enormous amounts of material. Okay, I thought, that’s quite irritating. Let’s see what they’ve got going on over at Queerty. Ah, excellent! A video feed! …Which is unfortunately just an embedded version of the Cal Channel feed, and equally inaccessible. So I was following along with Japhy’s Twitter updates, frantically clicking “Refresh” every 20 seconds or so, and then my computer turned off. Monitor too. It all just blinked off, and I couldn’t turn it back on. I tried toggling the power switch on my surge protector: nothing. I unplugged the computer and the monitor from the surge protector and stuck them straight into the wall socket: nothing. I called down to the Help Desk and informed the Helper there what was up, and he said he’d be up in a couple minutes to fix it.

Stung that I was missing what’s been described as the most important hearing the California Supreme Court has ever held, I tried another computer, which did at least get me back to the tweets. And then, just as the Helper came around, so did the news that someone else had been running a pair of space heaters (which I can’t very well scold, since it was 60 degrees in my office) and tripped the whole circuit. So the Helper flipped the breaker, I found out from someone else that the L.A. Times site was hosting a usable video feed, and al manner of thyng was wele, and Shannon Minter was just ceding the floor to Raymond Marshall.

I actually don’t remember Mr. Marshall’s argument all that much, nor Michael Maroko’s. I do remember Justice Kennard breaking in every other second to ask a two-hour question “just for the purposes of oral argument.” It didn’t take long for me to get right fed up with her contributions to the morning’s business. I thought Therese Stewart, when her turn finally came, was a knockout. She argued forcefully, intelligently, and with a legal precision that I thought did our side good.

Then came Chris Krueger from the attorney general’s office, about whom I think the less said, the better. Let me merely say that one should strive always to appear prepared when addressing a supreme court.

And yes, Ken Starr spoke. And yes, it was about as you’d expect.

More than the arguments—because we already know what they are, and we already know how they go—I’d like to focus on the justices. There were some very interesting currents aswirl (certainly) up on that bench. Now, I don’t really know from anything, and the veteran court-watchers I’ve read on the matter have said that predicting a case’s final disposition based on oral arguments is a mug’s game, so it’s not like any of this means anything. But it’s what I’m thinking.

The easiest conclusion to come to is that Ken Starr and his bigoted confederates lost big-time on the question of how Prop 8 affects the 18,000 or so same-sex marriages lawfully entered into between the time the Marriage Cases decision took effect and Nov. 5. I’d bet my lunch money that one’s going 7–0 against.

More complicated is the question of how the justices will vote on upholding Prop 8. It was pretty clear to me that Moreno and Werdegar are on the side of the angels here. At different times, they both put arguments in the attorneys’ mouths as to how the court could comport with established precedent and still find that Prop 8 had revised, rather than amended, the state constitution. I mean, Werdegar even straight up said, “There’s nothing that said a revision is limited to an alteration of the basic structure of government, right?” She’s convinced, and Moreno was right there with her.

Kennard we have obviously lost. I didn’t see how Maroko’s analogy, of an amendment that changed the title of women justices to “commissioner,” struck her (I had to get up for a quick second), but she was visibly struggling with the notion of overruling the electorate. I really want to be mean to her about this one, because from my point of view it’s so obvious what the proper decision is, but I can’t be upset that she’s taking seriously both the responsibilities and the limitations of her job. To a certain extent, she’s right; if I may stick John Marshall’s words in her mouth—for the purposes of oral argument—“it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” not to decide whether it approves of the law that has been enacted. But here’s the thing: As Stewart firmly reminded the court during rebuttal, the constitution of California establishes a distinction between amendment and revision, and provides different methods for accomplishing those two different processes. That means that it must be the duty of the judiciary, in interpreting the law, to draw the line between the two. That’s what the law is in this case. So I have to applaud Justice Kennard’s chariness of hacking away left and right at the expressed will of the voters with her great scythe of justice-as-she-sees-it, but she’s taking it too far in this case, and letting herself be persuaded (or covered) by some of the arguments she rejected in May. Deference is one thing, but capitulation is another.

Chief Justice George is an enigmatic one for me. The strongest signal I got from him is that it’s too easy to amend the California constitution. Oh, the disgust in his voice when he compared California’s over 500 constitutional amendments since 1879 to the federal constitution’s 27 amendments, in 100 more years. He’s too much a professional to let his dislike for the rules keep him from playing by them, but I wonder whether he might be interested in narrowing the set of situations where those rules apply. He did ask once or twice about the ratchet effect he heard implied in the petitioners’ arguments—the idea that rights could be granted under the equal-protection clause through amendment but could only afterward be removed through revision. I was pleased to hear Maroko (I think) admit that it sounds counterintuitive, but then explain how it actually isn’t. It was just a nice piece of candor and handholding in one place. I don’t know whether the chief was concerned that such an effect would be a bad one, but if so, I hope Maroko’s explanation helped assuage his worries. Also, one of the attorneys (I think a different one, but I don’t remember; it’s been a few days, and there were four squillion attorneys up there) made what sounded like an excellent argument: that the equal-protection clause itself was added through amendment, and certainly couldn’t now be removed simply by amendment. If that’s all true, that’s a nice point. But the upshot is that I don’t know how George stands on the issue. He shares some of Kennard’s concerns, but I suspect he’s more on our side than she is. After all, he wrote the Marriage Cases opinion; he’s got a little more on the line than she has.

As far as I can remember, Justice Baxter said very little during the hearing. He seemed mostly to be harping on the reinstitution of the death penalty in California, which was done through an initiative amendment. I’m of two minds on his focus on that. The first, and honestly most plausible, interpretation is that if it was okay for California’s voters to revoke the right to life of some convicts, after the state supreme court had granted it to them (by invalidating the death penalty), then it must certainly be permissible for California’s voters to revoke the right marriage of same-sex couples after the state supreme court had granted it to them. After all, life is a more fundamental right than marriage. There are some definite problems with this reasoning, most especially the way Prop 8 targets a group that the court recognized in May as a suspect classification, but it may be persuasive to Baxter.

The other interpretation of Baxter’s questions is kind of a goofball thing, but it’s…well, it’s not necessarily in the realm of the possible, but it might be peeking in from the lawn. Depending on who’s hearing the arguments and what the arguments are, in the wake of an overturning of Prop 8, the death penalty in California might fall. That would be a welcome (and most unexpected) unintended consequence of fighting for marriage equality.

I noted Justice Chin most for what appeared to be his serious consideration of a solution suggested by a pair of Pepperdine academics (and hundreds of blog commenters): the separation of civil marriage and religious marriage in California. He asked Maroko and Starr about their opinion of the state “getting out of the marriage business” altogether, and got a surprising agreement from the two attorneys. Both said that the state must provide marriage on equal grounds for all seekers (which doesn’t seem to square with Starr’s primary position on Prop 8, so now I’m confused), but Starr said it would be outside the court’s power to unilaterally convert all marriages to domestic partnerships. But if Chin is actually considering the idea that strongly, that sounds like he sees the current situation as one that requires a remedy, so he may not be out of reach for us. He was one of the bad guys in May, but this is a different question, and one that just may be plucking at him.

And now Justice Corrigan. I’ll tell you what, this is my only experience of her, but I think I kinda like her. She was witty, she was crisp, she demolished Krueger with a perfectly innocent-seeming “The question is withdrawn”—I really enjoyed her participation. I also think we may have her on this decision. She was insistent on clarifying with three or four of the petitioners’ attorneys that they were asking for a narrow rule: that an amendment that purports A) to revoke a right the court has recognized as fundamental B) from a specifically identified group the court has recognized as a suspect classification is properly a revision. That’s a very narrow rule indeed, and it has a focus and concern for equity to it that I think she may find powerfully attractive. Like I said earlier, I don’t know from anything, but I really think she’s considering siding with Moreno and Werdegar. She also seemed deeply disturbed to hear Starr argue that rights are defined by the people, and that a majority of voters could therefore validly amend the constitution to take away rights of free speech. When she pressed him on what the limits of this broad amendment power might be, he told her the people could vote in any new form of government they wanted (including, presumably, a form that is not democracy ["Hey, how did y'all become a dictatorship over there?" "Oh, we voted for it. I'm starting to think maybe the 47% who voted no but have been subjected to it anyway might have had the right idea..."]), and no branch of the actual government would have any authority to review that decision.

So I have a few predictions. Write them down so that you may ball up the paper you’ve written them down on and throw it at me when I turn up wrong.

1. Nobody votes to make Prop 8 retroactive with respect to marriages entered into while the law was that same-sex marriage was legal.
2. Moreno and Werdegar will find that this is a question of first impression for the court, and that they therefore have the power to decide a new set of criteria that may define a revision in addition to the ones already set out in California case law. They’ll say Prop 8 is a revision, and was improperly enacted.
3. Corrigan will join Moreno and Werdegar, and will be the one responsible for formulating the new set of criteria: a revision can also be a constitutional change that seeks to strip a suspect classification of a fundamental right.
4. Kennard will say it’s fine for the majority to take away whatever rights they want, as long as they do it as a majority.
5. Whatever the decision is, Chin will write a dissent arguing that the state should abandon marriages altogether, and issue only domestic partnerships.

Unfortunately, I’ve got no prediction on George. Looks to me like it comes down to him. We’ll know within…[counting on fingers]…86 days.

I: Once Upon a Time…

When I was about eight, my mother was hospitalized a couple times for kidney trouble. My dad would take me and my sister (who was about six) to visit Mom in the hospital. She had tubes coming out of her that I didn’t understand, and the doctors had given her a scratchy blue robe and slippers to wear. I know there was at least one surgery involved, and I suspect there must have been a second. I remember one day in the waiting room with my aunt, watching her work on her cross-stitching while I pawed through her plastic box of embroidery floss, rearranging the skeins according to some instinctual color scheme.

I remember another day when Dad, my sister and I were the only ones in the waiting room, so we were able to spread out. I took my calligraphy kit across the room to where a chair gleamed in a shaft of sunlight. I sat down on the floor and used the seat of the bright-lit chair as a table, where I read through the pamphlet in my calligraphy kit and learned the difference between italic and Gothic writing styles. I liked the Gothic-style alphabet better; it was more mysterious, full of extra strokes that made towers, chess pieces, and inscrutable knots out of the letters I’d been so friendly with for years.

I also learned fractions during that period. They were coming up in school anyway, and I was nervous about learning them, so I asked Dad to teach me. He explained what they represented and how to understand them, and then showed me how to add and subtract them. (He saved multiplying for my mom to explain from her hospital bed.)

The strongest memory I have of that time, though, is of a library book Mom read to my sister and me when we would visit her in the evenings: Dean Koontz’s Oddkins. I’m pretty sure my sister and I picked it because of the beautiful illustrations. The cover calls it “a fable for all ages,” but that’s really not true—I just found it again at the library, and rereading it, I have to say it has some wicked flaws that would never get by an astute adult reader.

II: …A Terrible Book Was Written…

The book opens with a kindly old magic toy-maker, who makes stuffed animals that magically live (called Oddkins) and magically find themselves delivered to children who desperately need special friends. As the children escape their awful circumstances, the life fades out of the toys. The kindly old magic toy-maker is very ill, and before he’s able to get his whole household in order, he drops dead. It’s up to a small group of Oddkins to trek across town and find the kindly new magic toy-maker. Unfortunately for them, the death of the kindly old magic toy-maker has released from their decades-long coma a group of evil toys made by his predecessor and crated up in the secret subcellar (against the day they might return to their tasks of pinching and burning and stabbing children, it seems, although that’s never very clear; probably a mercy, come to think of it). A lingering aura of goodness from the kindly old magic toy-maker prevents the evil toys from conquering the workshop, so they strike out after the Oddkins to kill them before they reach the kindly new magic toy-maker. If their candidate for evil magic toy-maker (a man just released from prison) gets to the workshop first, he’ll get to take over, and it will again be an evil magic toy shop as it apparently was up until the Nazis were defeated. (I wish I were kidding.) Then there’s a climactic battle in a department store after hours, the evil toys are destroyed, the candidate for evil magic toy-maker goes back to prison on rather general grounds (“We’ve had some unsolved crimes around here. You’ll do!”), and the kindly new magic toy-maker assumes her responsibilities and explains to the Oddkins what happens to them when their useful lives are over.

III: …Containing Some Terrible Religious Ideas…

I’ll get to that explanation, because it’s part of what’s badly wrong with this book: the theology. It’s seriously confused, y’all. The kindly old magic toy-maker has drummed into the Oddkins’ heads a bunch of teachings that are supposed to pass for normal Christianity. The Oddkins have a strong idea of Heaven as a place of reward, for example, and in fact, when a runaway dog threatens their expeditionary party, the toy dog in the story admonishes him that he might not be good enough for Heaven:

“Ashamed? I should think so. If you have any hope of redeeming yourself and one day bringing credit to your loving mother, I’d advise you to put your tail between your legs right now, slink home, lick the hand of your master, and do what you’re told from now on. In time there might even be a place in the pastures of Heaven for you, though right now I think you’re destined to spend eternity running on sore and bleeding feet through a much hotter place than Heaven.”

Nevermind the incongruity of rewarding a domesticated dog with an eternity of life in a pasture—she’s telling him he’ll go to Hell and be given wounds that will never heal because he’s run away from home and snapped at a little troop of living stuffed animals. His only other option is abject self-mortification and total obedience. Clearly this is a children’s story.

There’s a weird, lopsided focus on Hell and the Devil in this book, too. The head evil toy (a marionette with a sword-cane and no strings) and the candidate for evil magic toy-maker are guided by catoptric visitations and telepathic instructions from the Devil himself; when the head evil toy fails, a tide of sewer rats comes to carry him to the Devil’s side, where he will sit forever with strings and without the power of independent movement, as a sign of the eternal punishments in store for failed Satanic minions.

Mentions of God, though, are scarce. One comes when the Oddkins pass through a zoo on their way through the center of town. The stuffed elephant sees a real elephant, then there’s some “inspirational” chatter among the Oddkins about why people need magic like living stuffed animals when they have the inherent magic of God’s creation around them every day. Or something. I might have been napping.

The weirdest bit of theology in the book is the kindly new magic toy-maker’s explanation of what happens to an Oddkin when it dies: It’s reborn as a flesh-and-blood animal of the same kind. (The oldest Oddkin, who is a stuffed version of some indistinct, extinct beast, gets to choose his reincarnated body from among all the species on earth. So that’s some consolation for the loss of species diversity, at least: free choice in reincarnation.) When the live body dies, the Oddkin’s spirit is taken to Heaven, where it will stay by the side of God—because God loves toys. I swear that’s in the book.

It’s so strange: The main goal of the book is evidently to be a religious fable, which is fine. But the instructional elements grow fuzzier when the chosen plot requires some theological invention. As general character-building inspiration—the way children’s entertainment often strives to inculcate relatively uncontroversial values, such as kindness, curiosity, reading, etc.—it’s not all that bad, but the religious trappings are deeply odd, because there’s no branch of Christianity I know of that has room in its beliefs for living stuffed animals.

IV: …Compounded by Terrible Construction.

I think I’ve pinpointed the source of the troubling theology, and what’s interesting is that it seems to be a result of some questionable artistic choices—that is, Koontz’s (primarily structural) missteps lead him into a world where he can’t stick to any recognizable version of Christianity, but he doesn’t appear to recognize that fact. On the face of it, it should be a great allegory: The maker creates beings out of everyday stuff and animates them to lead lives of goodness and service to others, and they face difficulties in their pursuit of spiritual fulfillment. I can imagine something at least somewhat interesting being made out of that setup.

But a “properly” Christian story can’t have two Creators, so the toy-maker has to be a mere human (with powers that are never explained, probably because they can’t be). Suddenly the allegorical element is drained from the story, and it tries instead to be straightforwardlier didactic about living in proper reverence of God. It turns into a kind of religious realist story that is direly at odds with the fabulism inherent in a tale about walking, talking stuffed animals.

And there’s the problem. The cover calls Oddkins a fable, which explains the living toys, who can easily stand in for human beings in a non-literal story. But when that story also contains actual human beings, the toys can’t be metaphors anymore. What’s an author to do with them, then? Well, a clear-sighted author would choose to write either a religious fable about stuffed animals or a more literal book in which human characters explain to other characters how they should relate to God. But when an author can’t (or doesn’t) decide between the two, the result is a book that invents whole subfields of theology dealing with the relationship between God and animated toys, and tries to pass that off as standard doctrine, and then nobody wins. Especially not the reader.

V: The End

The Van Zandt County Criminal Justice Center—the county jail—in Canton, Texas, has repainted its cells pink and issued inmates jumpsuits it calls pink (but which are more like a dull magenta, really).

Stay with me here. I heard about it on our local news here in L.A., so the report may have been skewed. But it took a very different focus from the newspaper article I linked to. There was no mention made of “psychological benefits.” Instead, it was presented basically as a kind of psychological offensive, designed to make potential criminals want so badly not to be put in a pink room and made to wear pink clothes that they think twice about breaking the law in the first place.

Because pink is girly.

Everyone from the jail who was interviewed by the L.A. reporter brought up how they felt “unmanly” because of the pink clothes and walls. So I really see two big problems here, and they’re bound up together in a way I haven’t seen before. The first one is the idea that colors have anything intrinsic to do with gender, and specifically that pink is a girly color, and that men who wear it should feel humiliated and emasculated. It’s just more sexist U.S. American crap about masculinity, the kind of thing I hate, but it’s not surprising to me. I have, in fact, grown up as a man in the U.S.A.

What is surprising to me is that Van Zandt County would use its police power to reinforce—or, at best, exploit—that kind of thinking by specifically adopting a policy that threatens men (and I have yet to see any reference to female inmates at this jail) with coerced humiliation and emasculation through exposure to pink. “You’d better be good, or we’ll make you feel like a girl. Or even worse, like a homo.” I mean, really.

And while I admit that I am more inclined to see this kind of dynamic in a situation than is perhaps…accurate, I know I’m not making it up in this case, because I saw inmates interviewed about it, and that’s exactly how it’s going down. The “trusties,” the “good prisoners,” still get to wear their old jumpsuits, in blue or something. Which is to help encourage inmates, I suppose, to behave well enough that they’re no longer forced to wear women’s clothes.

It’s bad enough to believe that there are some colors that are just so inimical to proper manhood that merely wearing them somehow reduces you. But I recognize that lots of people have been trained to believe that. I’m having even more trouble with the idea that the local government is taking the position that men should feel that their masculinity is taken from them by pink clothes, and that it should threaten them with that fate. I mean, it’s a ridiculous starting point, as far as I’m concerned, but once you’ve accepted that starting point, it’s revolting to me to try to instill that kind of fear in people. For the police force of a government—that is, the arm of the government’s monopoly on legitimate violence—to broadcast to people that it will punish them by destabilizing what is for many of them a crucial and central element of their personality is barbaric. It’s a kind of willful disregard for a person’s psychological integrity that turns my stomach, and I hate that it’s being touted as a great new deterrent for crime.

Which, by the way, the sheriff or someone was interviewed in the segment, and he made a great big point about how, before they brought in all the pink, they averaged 170 or so prisoners in the jail. Once they started advertising about the new color policy (ew), the average number of prisoners dropped to 120-something, or 150-something. (My numbers are vague because I was so incensed by that point that I was seeing red with a large amount of white mixed in.) So it’s been great for keeping people from breaking the law.

A beautiful conclusion, I’m sure, but a load of crap. To say, on two or three months’ experience, without any evidence of direct causation, that making men fear that the county will turn them partly into women—just like the gays (it’s hard for me to keep track here of whom I’m deriding)—is the one thing that’s kept folks out of jail is absolutely unsupportable in the world of facts. With sociological phenomena like crime, and even more with second-order phenomena like crime that is then punished with jail time after the criminals are apprehended, there are lots and lots of causes that matter at the same time. And I’ll tell you this for free: a place that would enact a policy like this in the first place does not seem to me the kind of place that’s likely to have done the work necessary to make sure they’re telling the truth when they pinpoint a single cause for lowered prisoner rates.

Grr.

Rich and Sisyphus, in the comments at Acephalous, take a turn toward sci fi that tries to imagine other-than-the-case, more purely egalitarian kinds of human (at least, I take that as one of the implicit ground rules; watch as I violate it almost instantly) sexuality. That reminds me of Storm Constantine‘s Wraeththu, which I read some months ago at a friend’s insistence (and might not be remembering entirely accurately). It’s a series about a new species of beings, the Wraeththu, that supplant humanity, on the basis that they’re some sort of evolutionary progress—highly resistant to disease and death, and able to cure by magic almost all of what can afflict them—and are therefore more fit to survive.

I found the series an interesting failure. The writing was lovely; I haven’t read many books as broadly invested in imagery of all five senses, especially smell and taste. The problems were more conceptual and technical. To begin with, it seems to me the literary purpose of the Wraeththu is as an illustration of how sexual dimorphism and the more-or-less compulsory heterosexuality that comes with it breed trouble in a population. (They are also a condemnation of sexual repression, and an example of how to integrate sexuality more fully into identity and everyday life, but some portion of that comes through sex magic, so do with that what you want.) So they’re a race of hermaphrodites. Which is fine, by way of a mechanical solution to the “problem” of heterosexuality, but here’s the rub: To become a har—just as the human race is made of men and women, the Wraeththu race is made of hara—a human being must be converted through a ritual that involves, if I remember correctly, being drugged and then penetrated by a har, whose semen will corrode the human being’s insides (hopefully without killing him, although there’s a significant mortality rate) and cause what remains to transmute into Wraeththu substance.

And only males can become Wraeththu. If a har has sex with a woman, she’ll automatically die. So they’re hermaphrodites, but they’re hermaphroditic males, always referred to by masculine pronouns. According to the elite tribe of Wraeththu, hara are supposed to balance the masculine and the feminine within themselves. (You see the biological determinism in this, I assume: Man parts make you behave one way, woman parts make you behave another. If you have both, that means you’re more advanced, in terms of what behaviors are available to you, than other folks.) Yet they still have gender roles—even though they don’t have genders. All hara are capable of conceiving, and it’s entirely voluntary; the receptive partner grows a “pearl” inside him that transits out of his body through some unspecified mechanism, and then the pearl expands and hatches a full-formed har of about the size of a nine-year-old human boy. The active har in a conception like that is still known as the father, and in one of the only cases presented in the trilogy, the father is relatively uninvolved in raising the child. Even the elite tribe, once they subjugate resisters through warfare (aggression, which they’ve supposedly rooted out of themselves thanks to their equal male and female natures) and become the ruling tribe, has a king called the Tigron whose consort is the Tigrina. That just looks so much like “lady Tigron” to me that I wonder whether Constantine intends it to undercut that tribe’s philosophy.

This persistence of gender roles after the fact of gender has ceased to exist dismays me. I’d like to see the end of gender roles long before the end of the human race (I’m kind of sentimental about my own species that way). On top of that, though, it’s a fairly obvious element of a series of what—if I were a certain kind of reader—I would call countermoves the text makes against its author’s intentions (or perhaps countermoves made through the text by the culture and ideologies in which the text was written, although I’m pretty sure at that point I’m moving into a different area of interpretation): The more she tries to efface the differences between “male” and “female,” the more the text sidesteps her and reinscribes those differences in places she hasn’t yet specifically swept them aside. I’m not kidding. At the end of the third book, the main character discovers the secret capital of a heretofore-unknown Wraeththu-analog race made exclusively of women.

So that’s the trouble that series has with imagining a new kind of sexuality (and that’s not even getting into the brothel one character finds himself working in where they specialize in pretending to be unwilling, since rape kind of doesn’t exist anymore). That’s basically what I meant above when I mentioned the conceptual problems of the series. There is one sex-linked stereotype, though, that I think gets a fantastic reworking, and that’s the otherworldly consumptive girl. In this case it’s a har called Cobweb, who has a child with a tribal war-chief. Cobweb’s basically the stay-at-home mom, except he’s also a powerful sorcerer. He’s long-haired and pale, spends most of his time indoors with the curtains drawn, and lives in a world of clouds and fallen leaves and the shadows of birds’ wings, from where he’s always trying to fight to keep his man—but that world is where he draws his power from. He inhabits that “sickly” world so fully that he’s able to do great deeds of magic and willpower that strongly affect the normal world.

The technical problems are somewhat more pedestrian, although they’re of the “visible machinery” kind that I’m always interested in—being able to see how a piece of art works. In the first book, having converted the main character (Pellaz) into a har, Constantine needs to show off the variations in her idea, so she sends Pellaz on a world tour, which is supposedly necessary for him to learn the various skills required to advance through the steps-and-castes system of Wraeththu civilization. It’s kind of funny, actually; you can almost hear the boards creak as Constantine shepherds you around the whole stage to show you every corner of the set she built. The third book’s basically more of the same, only with a different character and on a different continent.

So like I said, an interesting failure. If nothing else, I think it shows that Rich’s point—that only sci fi can really try to posit new relations to sexuality—while true, assumes an important qualification without expressly mentioning it: Sci fi’s the best arena for that kind of speculation, but that doesn’t give it an automatic leg up on speculating well.

Two—count ’em, two!—pirate items in today’s post. Let’s start with the most disappointing (it’s a very good place to start): Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. I loved the first movie (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl)—let’s face it, when you’re dealing with zombie pirates, you’re plumbing (plying?) deep undead waters of awesomeness. Dead Man’s Chest was significantly less awesome, and also at least one entire sequence too long: that whole bit with the cannibals on Pelegosto was just treading water. It had no effect on the plot, and wasn’t even a very interesting detour, outside of the makeup.

I’m not really sure why I expected At World’s End to be so much better than Dead Man’s Chest; optimism, maybe. In any case, while it had some good stuff, I thought it was poorly paced, trying to cram too much backstory into scenes that were already full to the gills with front story. I liked the front and back stories, as I understood them: the British armada vs. all the major pirates in the entire world, and the first Brethren Court, which gained mastery of the seas by binding the goddess Calypso “in her bones.” The trouble is that I didn’t feel they were particularly well told.

Some of the scenes were very nice. I liked when Davy Jones visited Calypso in her cell, and my favorite line of the whole movie came when Barbossa referred to Elizabeth as a fishwife and Pintel called her “Mrs. Fish.” (I don’t know, it was funny.) Also, the filmmakers did an excellent job, particularly in the whirlpool scene, of capturing the slow, impersonal heaving and swaying of a ship on the open sea.

But it just seems like a lot got dropped without being satisfactorily resolved, even in the event of a sequel. (Short example: Calypso turns into Daryl Hannah, crabs, and a maelstrom, then disappears. Yes, that enormous swirling hole ate Davy Jones much as the enormous toothed hole of the kraken’s mouth ate Jack at the end of the second movie, but then Calypso’s entirely out of there.) Also, the situation with Davy “Orlando” Jones and Good King Bess “I Have a Sinus Condition” Swann at the end was supremely unsatisfying. Putting aside for the moment any problems I might have (read: definitely do have) with choosing for another person an almost eternal existence as Davy Jones, without their having a say in the matter—putting that aside, it still makes no sense to me that a woman who could and would become king of the pirates, and whose every mortal connection and attachment has died (Norrington was killed in her sight; she saw her father float past in the land of the dead; she turned Will into Davy Jones), would choose a life of one night per decade with her man rather than join his crew and be with him forever. The film didn’t provide a single reason she might have for giving Will up to neverending servitude and then abandoning him to it. That bit really bothered me.

Much better is the second book of W.A. Hoffman’s Raised by Wolves series, Matelots. I reviewed the first book, Brethren, at the magazine—click that link to find the review reproduced on the book’s Web page. Or, to please my corporate overlords, I can direct you to the digital archive of Frontiers magazine, where you can find my review in the PDF of issue 25.04′s Agenda section. No matter where you read the review, please ignore the bit where I say “his characters”; I’ve since learned that Hoffman is a woman.

All the praise I laid on the first volume goes for this one, too: it’s engaging, funny, emotionally realistic and involving, and just brilliantly paced. As much as I was impressed by the clearly deliberate rationing of incident and character development in Brethren (which nevertheless felt natural), I’m even more impressed by that process in Matelots. Part of the reason is that it encompasses more characters this time around—Hoffman’s net is widening to include secondary characters and at least one much-promoted figurante. But also, where in Brethren that progression took the fairly obvious direction of “toward physical and emotional intimacy generally,” in Matelots it veers into areas that show Hoffman’s sophisticated understanding of sexuality and how it can be integrated into men’s lives. (No real word yet in the series on women’s sexuality, although there is a new lesbian character.)

(A brief and ultimately somewhat down-letting aside: I saw today in Richard Davenport-Hines’s fine bio of W.H. Auden a quotation from a letter in which Auden mentions his lover Chester Kallman bringing “his matelot” out to Auden’s Fire Island home. I was excited to see the word used in the wild, but further research convinced me it just meant “sailor,” as in, “Chet’s a big Fleet Week ho.”)

One more encomium for Matelots, and then I’m off: for all that it’s largely a historical-adventure novel, it’s also appealingly literary. The two central lovers, Will and Gaston, communicate much of the time by metaphor. They use a metaphorical classification system for describing the types of people in the world, and they’re constantly adjusting, inspecting, turning over, and expanding the metaphor to fit their experience. They have another metaphor (based on the first) that they use to help understand their relationship, and Hoffman returns to it frequently throughout the book, altering it slightly with each repetition, almost like the refrain of a villanelle, so that it illuminates a different aspect of its subject every time it recurs. Matelots is an immensely rewarding read, made all the better by its intertwining of literature (with its philosophical questioning and psychological complexity) and high pulp.