The Other King James Version

Gareth Russell, The Six Loves of James I

James Stewart (Stuart) was crowned King of Scotland, probably illegally, at only ten months old, inheriting from Mary, the mother he barely met. He was raised under spartan conditions, with the expectation that he’d eventually command in battle against the English, the French, or his own barons. But by disposition, he was better suited to scholarship, theology, and poetry. Desperate and lonely, he sought companionship wherever he could find it.

Anglo-Irish author and historian Gareth Russell has written multiple biographies of European monarchs’ private lives. Russell admits he chose the “six loves” angle as a deliberate parallel to Henry VIII’s six wives, but pinning down exact numbers is difficult. He has to reconstruct James’ private life through diaries, letters, and other contemporary documents, many written in coded language. Because unlike Henry, James’ multiple dalliances were with men.

Russell describes James’ strict, cloistered education, under Presbyterian clerics who despised anything even slightly feminine. They taught him to distrust his mother’s legacy, women’s advice, and anything nurturing or fair within himself. (Poetry, back then, was highly manful, and James became an accomplished lyricist.) They also mostly denied him any friends his own age. His childhood seems bleak and lonely; no wonder he rebelled when he came of age.

Even before reaching adulthood, James began the royal prerogative of keeping “favorites.” These were all men; he showed little interest in women, either erotic or platonic. Rumors of James’ relationships ran rampant, though his contemporaries described them only obliquely, as addressing them directly would’ve been unseemly. Courtiers described James’ male favorites as “minions,” a word that had judgmental connotations that modern English has largely lost.

Understanding James’ relationships in modern terms is difficult. In early modern Scotland and England, sexuality was an action, not a state of being; the word “homosexual” wouldn’t be coined for centuries. Russell includes a detailed appendix on the processes of translating Jacobean-era social descriptions into modern English, because like race, sexual identity is a social construct, one which James’ contemporaries, like ours, often deployed maliciously.

In this book, Russell attempts to write a strict biography of James’ private life, not a history of his political reign. This proves difficult. Back when monarchs had actual political power, it was often difficult to separate kings’ private and public lives, especially when kings like James plied his favorites with the one gift a chronically cash-strapped monarch could give: aristocratic titles. Private life and public power were inextricably entwined.

Gareth Russell

James broadly favored good-looking men in their early to middle twenties. Most shared his scholarly inclinations, though in Russell’s telling, at last one favorite was a doofus whom James thought he could rehabilitate. At this late date, it seems painfully naïve to pretend James didn’t have sexual relationships with men, though his association with the King James (Authorized) Bible has made admitting that difficult for some commentators.

But again, James wasn’t homosexual in the current sense. He apparently never loved his queen consort, Anna of Denmark, though he certainly respected and trusted her. Sometimes he seems to have even liked her. They had seven children, and when Anna died, James was legitimately grief-stricken. Russell also identifies at least one, possibly two women James had as mistresses, affairs noted for their passion but not depth or durability.

From the monarchy of Scotland, James graduated to the monarchy of England. The English crown had less power under constitutional standards, but more prestige, and becoming King of England entangled James in European power politics. James’ willingness to trust male favorites with court authority left him vulnerable to aristocratic criticism, especially as he disfavored foreign wars, which contemporaries disparaged as terminally feminine.

Then as now, calling a man “feminine” was the highest insult.

In Russell’s telling, James’ private life seems a balance of contrasts. His strict Calvinist upbringing, with its disdain for women and femininity, probably influenced his relationships with men, in ways his teachers never intended. He wrote extensively on theology, but was ambivalent toward faith. He was proudly Scottish, but barely visited the nation after becoming King of England. He loved his favorites so deeply that he jeopardized his kingdom.

Most important, there’s no separation between King James and James Stewart. He trusted his wife, his lovers, and his sons with remarkable power. He experienced passionate love but jealously guarded the royal prerogatives, eager not just to be king, but to be seen as majestic. All subsequent British monarchs have descended from James, through a distaff line. He wasn’t always prudent, but he was always King.

Last Star, Straight Onto Mourning

Catriona Ward, Nowhere Burning

Poor adolescent Riley needs to escape her abusive foster home, and the impossible girl outside her second-floor window offers the sanctuary she needs. All Riley has to do is run away across the Colorado Rockies and learn to fly. As unlikely as that sounds, it’s better than staying put. But when she reaches Nowhere, the strange ruin of mid-century grandeur overlooking Boulder, she finds a compound of frightened fugitives like her, all somehow permanently children.

It wouldn’t be accurate to describe Catriona Ward’s latest book as a retelling of Peter Pan. More like a self-conscious homage. Ward, whose previous works have relied upon sudden reveals and last-minute surprises, offers three converging narratives building toward a secret she’s previously kept. But this time, the reveals don’t feel earned, not like natural extensions of the ongoing story. It feels like she’s deliberately lied in order to blindside us at the last minute.

In the first narrative, Riley escapes her abusive home situation, dragging along her brother Oliver, too young to understand what’s going on. They hike to Nowhere, the remains of a palatial mansion that burned years ago. There, a commune of adolescents has established a stable society without adults. Riley feels both drawn to and repulsed by their self-reliance, backed by simple, useful roles and their leader’s home-brew religion. They worship something that needs constantly appeased.

The second narrative follows Adam. An architect and builder, Adam contracts with prestigious actor Leaf Winham to build improvements on his Colorado mansion, called Nowhere. Leaf is charming and acclaimed, but distrusts fame, and prefers to keep his secrets. Adam feels drawn to Leaf, to the point where he abandons his life, including his pregnant girlfriend. Only when Leaf controls Adam, and he has nothing to return to, does Adam begin uncovering Leaf’s dark secrets.

Finally, documentarian Marc and his camera operator, Kimble, have decided to investigate the urban legends surrounding Nowhere and its cult of children. They want to become the first adults to approach the ruined mansion in several decades, and capture its secrets on camera. But the closer they approach the building, the more friction starts emerging from Marc’s deeply buried past, and it becomes increasingly clear that he’ll hurt his closest friends to keep his secrets.

Catriona Ward

It’s obvious, early on, that these narratives unfold out of sequence. Since Adam’s story unfolds in a Nowhere untouched by fire, it clearly precedes the other two. We read in expectation of how the building’s secrets, clearly known in the other threads, will come out in Adam’s past. Also, how exactly do the other two narratives relate? Marc clearly knows more than he tells Kimble, despite call her the sister he wished he’d always had.

The problem arises here. I’ve read two previous Catriona Ward novels, where plot points revolve around information the characters have, but don’t share. In Little Eve, the narrator is self-consciously telling the story and playing with narrative conventions, in the Agatha Christie style. In The Last House on Needless Street, the secrets are buried under facts the characters take for granted, and therefore haven’t thought about in years. We feel surprised without ever feeling deceived.

Here, the characters clearly know, and often think about, the secrets motivating their choices. They just don’t tell us. The revelations come as raw info dumps, sometimes several paragraphs long. Once the characters reveal the secrets they’ve nurtured, we don’t feel surprised or illuminated, as we have in previous Ward novels; we feel lied to. We can forgive that once, because people lie. But as lie after lie gets revealed, we feel manipulated, not enlightened.

This hurts because Ward’s set-up is so good. Besides Peter Pan, previous critics have compared Ward’s premise to The Shining and Lord of the Flies. Ward isn’t merely imitative, though; she uses these time-honored influences to question how good people with honorable intentions make, and constantly re-make, civilization. Leaf Winham, the charming narcissist, and the children’s religious rituals, are just two forms of community building that work well for adherents, until the moment they don’t.

Reading, I felt like Ward had devised characters, situations, and a nonlinear form that served her psychological writing style well. But she hadn’t figured how to tie the multiple threads together, so she pulled a Hail Mary and hoped we wouldn’t notice. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed, if her previous books hadn’t been so good that they set my expectations so high. Sadly, the product feels like a good premise, finished with a cheap rug-pull.

In the Hidden Corners of My Hometown

This West Coast modernist design just sprouts in the middle of a post-WWII development.

Flailing my way through protracted unemployment, I recently started driving DoorDash to get cash moving in. My community is too small to produce enough business for me to live off my gig, but it brings in enough to keep groceries on the table. The gig has provided another important education I didn’t realize I needed: despite living in one small city for over twenty years, I’ve discovered how much of town I just don’t know.

My central Nebraska city has a population slightly above 30,000 people. By current American standards, that’s dinky, but on a historical basis, actually quite large. Legendary ancient cities like Chichen Itza or Babylon topped out around 20,000 people, the practical maximum for societies where the majority needed to farm, and urban infrastructure had to primarily support pedestrians and mule carts. Modernity can support much larger populations, though, mostly because of cars, electricity, and Portland cement.

Modernity has also produced something that ancient cities could’ve never supported: single use zoning. When cars put much larger distances within easy reach, citizens building a business in front of their house, a stable in back, and extra rooms for an inn on the side, makes less sense. American communities are now built in sprawling, monolithic ways that discourage visitors. There’s little reason to visit huge swaths of one’s own city without a prior invitation.

This results in acres upon acres, streets upon streets, where I’ve never visited—until now. DoorDash invites me into single-use residential neighborhoods I’ve never previously had purpose or permission to enter. Visiting these quarters for the first time, I witness eclectic architecture, some of it deliberately either minimalist or rococo, and differing ideas about how large the surrounding yard should be. I’ve also witnessed that, the newer the community, the less likely to contain sidewalks.

Very large lawns, without sidewalks or parks, encourage children to play close to home. Current urban design (which, often, means no design, just vibes) discourages children from one of childhood’s primal impulses, the desire to explore. Wandering away from home may be impractical in new developments and, depending on traffic patterns, unsafe. This means children only have opportunities to meet friends and make connections in officially approved spaces, mainly school and, for some, religious congregations.

Just one of a development of identical crackerbox duplexes with postage stamp lawns,
no sidewalks, and no curbside parking—completely hostile to visitors or teenagers.

The extreme opposite, I’ve observed, is small houses, mainly duplexes, on small lots. These are single-story houses with attached garages, requiring a large physical footprint. However, these developments also lack sidewalks, which means not only no pedestrians, but no curbside parking for guests. These houses seemingly go mainly to young families as starter homes, so maybe they don’t entertain much. But it dampens their ability to perform time-honored neighborhood rituals of group bonding through hospitality.

Small starter homes have no parking and no place to set up picnic tables. Larger homes for established families have space and parking, but are so far away that neighbors can scarcely see one another. Either way, these designs discourage traditional neighborhood activities, like block parties or tenants’ unions, and functionally prevent neighbors from getting to know one another. The McMansions, in particular, look awkward, flexing their design flourishes to impress neighbors they’ll never meet.

Traveling to shared spaces, like work or school, requires either an overland hike without sidewalks, or car rides that create traffic jams. My city is small enough that “jams” are fleeting annoyances. But larger unplanned cities like Houston, which is over forty percent paved, can be dangerous during the morning commute. Ambulances trapped in rush-hour traffic have become a notable part of the Houston experience. So was the city’s inability to drain after Hurricane Harvey.

Current urban design standards divide routine activities. This isn’t entirely awful, as most people wouldn’t want to live beside a lead smelter, kimchi cannery, or hog abattoir. But most people also can’t walk to restaurants, shops, or even their neighbors’ houses. All daily business happens enclosed in hermetically sealed, climate-controlled metal capsules. Ordinary people have diminished opportunities to make friends, discover quirky experimental businesses, or, as I’ve learned recently, see most of their own town.

Old cities like central London, Paris, or New York south of Houston Street are designed around human needs: useful sidewalks, homes designed to double as business sites, and multi-story structures that utilize vertical space as assertively as horizontal. We can’t just regress, because history goes proceeds, even when we wish it wouldn’t. But we can look to older spaces for inspiration for innovative ways to utilize newer, more current spaces that aren’t hostile to visitors.

The Deep, Dark Mines of the Uncanny Valley

T. Kingfisher, What Stalks the Deep

Shellshocked veteran Lt. Alex Easton’s sole qualification to investigate unexplained phenomena, is that they’ve seen it before without flinching. But where they previously fought ineffable monsters in their native Gallacia, a mysterious Eastern European land of dismal swamps and forests primeval, this time, they’ve been invited to America. But then, if there’s a place as old and as hostile to humankind as Gallacia, it must surely be Southern Appalachia.

T. Kingfisher’s “Sworn Soldier” novellas, starring Alex Easton, whose unique gender identity doesn’t translate into English, each delve into different horror subgenres. The first retold a Poe classic, highlighting a theme Poe introduced, but didn’t explore. The second followed the conventions of folk horror. This third unpack a theme popular in recent movies: the legend of mysterious humanoids dwelling in the caverns and mines permeating America’s eastern mountains.

Dr. James Denton, a supporting character from Easton’s first story, has telegrammed Easton for their help. He admits Easton isn’t particularly qualified, except that they’ve faced similar conflicts before, and he needs a partner who won’t ask stupid questions. So Easton crosses the ocean, rides America’s rails, and walks into West Virginia’s dark, forested mountains, a terrain from which more intrepid explorers have frequently failed to return.

Many American folk myths speculate that something dark and mysterious dwells underground, a horrible monster which we’ll uncover by mining for hydrocarbons or even just spelunking. This monster is usually whispered to be older than humankind, and eager for small provocations to resurge and take America from us. Of course, this is coded language. We “Americans” know who we stole this land from, and why they deserve to reclaim it.

Kingfisher salts these themes with a Lovecraftian influence which she acknowledges in her afterword, but which she doesn’t hammer needlessly. Rather, she describes two war-torn old souls, walking wounded, who investigate a land older than human conception. There, they discover a cavern that cannot possibly exist, guarded by a force so close to human, that its very existence personifies the uncanny valley. But that force is holding something worse back.

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

Reading this novella, I’m reminded of Stanisław Lem’s signal classic, Solaris. Both stories feature humans encountering an intelligence so different from themselves that they cannot truly communicate. Though Easton and Denton have more success than Kelvin in making peace, they struggle with some of the same problems. What does it mean to “communicate” with an intelligence that isn’t human? Or to speak individually with a collective intelligence?

But our protagonists bring something to the story that neither Lovecraft nor Lem considered: capitalists’ willingness to burn everything that doesn’t turn a profit. Lovecraft’s shoggoths and Lem’s ocean planet encounter humans primarily through scientists and explorers. Kingfisher’s primordial intelligence comes to light because humans dynamited the mountains and uncorked Earth’s mantle in search of power and money. Therefore, “first contact” means not curiosity, but pain.

I’ve become a particular Kingfisher fan because she reverses widespread cultural expectations. In this case, besides Easton’s blunt defiance of the Anglophonic gender binary, Easton also sees America as exotic and foreign, reading America back to Kingfisher’s audience. Burned out on conflict, Easton sees American glorification of the Spanish-American war as bizarre and uncivilized. America’s much-bandied national youth seems ridiculous amid Appalachia’s uncountable antiquity.

One could continue unpacking Kingfisher’s themes. Cartesian dualism versus the Freudian psyche, perhaps, or the failures of technological triumphalism in the face of Earth’s unimaginable age. Kingfisher plays with these thematic contrasts and reversals like Lego bricks, creating a whole that readers recognize from previous books, but which is entirely her own. Her ability to use common strategies to tell an uncommon story is why I’ve become a Kingfisher fan.

Although this story remains short, it’s the longest yet of Kingfisher’s Sworn Soldier novellas, over 170 pages plus back matter. This gives Easton space not only to investigate their themes, but also to confront the monster. But this story also has perhaps the largest company of characters yet, and Kingfisher doesn’t give everyone full development. Easton’s loyal batman Angus, in particular, gradually disappears from the story, which is disappointing.

That said, this story largely maintains the momentum of the previous “Sworn Soldier” novellas. Though I might wish the story was about fifty pages longer, to give every character the space they deserve, that would’ve changed the novella-reading experience. Kingfisher’s distinct voice and nonconformist attitude remain visible and keep the narrative popping. It reads like a slice of popular literature, just seen through a lens like you’ve never read before.

The White Privilege Party, Part 3

This essay is a follow-up to Dinner and Drinks at the White Privilege Party and The White Privilege Party, Part 2.

Woody Guthrie

If the fash hate one thing, it’s being called fash. Or even told they’ve done something fashy. Even when faced with their overwhelming fascism, or with subject experts like Timothy Snyder or Jason Stanley demonstrating their fashy tendencies, they become angry and defensive. President Taco’s claim to be “the least racist person there is” has become the tragicomic emblem fascists’ need to be seen as nevertheless good.

Returning this series to where it began, the question remains of whether protestors should use confrontational chants while challenging the current administration. Specifically, whether they should use Woody Guthrie-type songs to call fascists “fascist” to their faces. In conservative, semi-rural, and racially homogenous places, such boldness will precipitate conflicts, which discourages White protestors from getting involved.

“Fascism” is a notoriously slippery concept, since it adapts itself to local conditions. Snyder and Stanley have useful, but often inconsistent, definitions. For our purposes, let’s define fascism as the hardened and intolerant extreme of the hierarchy I described last time. Fascism not only requires some people to remain powerless for others to have powerful, and divides power racially, but enforces this mandatory division through arbitrary violence.

The history of hierarchical violence reveals something remarkable. As theologian James Cone writes, Jim Crow racial violence didn’t happen to kill the targets. It happened to remind survivors that the perpetrators would face no consequences, because they owned the system. Likewise, the Roman church didn’t burn witches and heretics to force conversions in early Christendom. It only burned nonconformists in the Renaissance, once its political power was unquestionable.

Put briefly, hierarchical violence happens when perpetrators know they’ll face no meaningful punishment. In my lifetime, Kyle Rittenhouse, George Zimmerman, and Bernard Goetz knew or suspected that the racially slanted justice system wouldn’t hold them accountable for shooting Black people or their White sympathizers. So they strapped on guns and went hunting on American streets.

We’ve watched “red states” legalize driving cars into protestors. We’ve watched them refuse to prosecute bullies attacking children. We’ve watched the current administration target harmless dissidents on camera, knowing they won’t be prosecuted, or even meaningfully reprimanded. The deferral of each consequence basically ensures that the next street-level fash will feel authorized to attack, maybe even to kill.

Equally importantly, perpetrators don’t see themselves as villains in this arrangement. Fashy narratives reinforce the belief that hierarchies are necessary, and therefore equality is oppressive. Any attempt to fix unfairness is innately unfair to those who benefit, or think they do. Therefore those protected by the status quo, even the poor and forgotten, are too likely to violently defend what dwindling privilege they have.

The term “extinction burst” has become modish recently. Once you remove reinforcement from previously rewarded behavior, the behavior becomes more extreme and calcified before it disappears. Recent discussions spotlight violence specifically, as America’s overall culture no longer rewards racism, homophobia, and other bigotry as openly as before. But that exact change puts protestors in conservative areas at greater risk.

Please don’t misunderstand, I know these forces are contradictory. People are violent because they know nobody will hold them accountable, but they know nobody will hold them accountable in the exact places where their dying ideology still matters. Florida, which legalized driving cars into protests, has one of America’s oldest median resident ages. Nebraska, where prosecutors won’t charge men who attack kids, remains substantially isolated from the larger economy.

This paradox underlies Critical Race Theory. CRT founder Derrick Bell claimed, with evidence, that racism has proven infinitely elastic as its successive justifications become obsolete. Violent economic necessity justified slavery, but morphed into organized bigotry under Jim Crow. Once the state withdrew support, bigotry became disorganized, like background noise. With each morph, the system excommunicates its former defenders.

The three vigilantes I named—Rittenhouse, Zimmerman, and Goetz—all retreated into anonymity after their acquittals, and became parodies of their prior selves, because their persons didn’t matter. They claimed “self-defense,” but their selves were an afterthought. Their supporters abandoned them because once they bolstered the narrative that White (or White-adjacent) people owned the system, that system no longer needed them.

White progressives fear angering the fash by calling them fashy to their faces, not only because fashies are violent, but because they’re as much displaced by the cultural shifts happening around them as the conservatives are. They’ll hang onto their illusions that they can persuade the fash, because the alternative is plunging headlong into uncertainty. The old system is dying, and to those accustomed to winning, that’s terrifying.