Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  This eccentric teacher was also a Genius; every summer he played Falstaff in an outdoor theater and he’d once written a textbook on semantics. For Dr. Schlumberger, Chuck knocked himself out composing a novel about an oil driller in Oklahoma much given to epic drunks and fornications—a novel in which terse dialogue and tersely narrated violence alternated with nature descriptions of a shocking delicacy, silverpoint tracery against a wash of Chinese white. I read and praised Chuck’s book, and that made him like me. And the book made me like him, for though he continued to slouch about and swear and weep with laughter and refused to say an intelligent word, nevertheless I’d had that written glimpse into his temperament, and just as oils can be made fragrant by saturating them in the perfume of flowers, in the same way in my imagination Chuck’s character had been transformed by this literary enfleurage. Chuck decided we should visit a whorehouse. He picked up four day students from their houses and we lurched and wheezed in Chuck’s Chevy down through the black section of the city. It was midnight and though this was the weekend the streets were deserted; only here and there a few neon lights outlined the windows of a tavern. The bordello was a dingy wooden house behind a larger one. To get to it we had to squeeze down a narrow strip of sidewalk past a sturdy metal fence behind which a neighbor’s German shepherd kept barking and running back and forth. After we rang the bell for several minutes and Chuck pounded the door and sang a love song in warbling falsetto, which elevated the dog into new ecstasies of rage, the door at last was cracked open and a tall Negro man looked out. He had a tight black silk kerchief on his head and a few short white curly whiskers growing out of a shiny mole beside his mouth. Inside, two young black women and one woman who was white and middle-aged were sitting in slips in front of a television set. One of the black women had on pink-rimmed glasses and was knitting. The room beyond them, a waiting room lined with crude wooden folding chairs, was deserted and harshly lit. Three pictures leaned forward off the dirty walls, one a reproduction of a painting of Jesus praying in Gethsemane while his disciples dozed unmindful of the approaching Roman guards. The other pictures were of cloth behind glass, each embroidered with a motto: “Peace on Earth” and “Bless This House”—puns, I guess, but who could be certain. The house smelled of cooking fat and pork. “Now, you boys sit in here,” the white woman said, indicating the waiting room with a precise push of her hand, as though her hand were a croupier’s rake, “and choose your women.” We filed in under the harsh light. Chuck’s nose looked huge and cratered, his teeth as big as a dog’s.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  D. Salinger with Oscar Wilde to create an extraordinary novel.” What Holden Caulfield and Oscar Wilde might hold in common—at their varying levels of eloquence—is a strange hypervirtuous inability to defend themselves. The same cannot be said of the hero of A Boy’s Own Story . Unlike the aforementioned gents, our young narrator seems able to step from one conflagration, from one seduction and mentor to another, usually gaining more than he loses, all while destined, as Balzac put it, “to rise in the world.” Here is a boy soprano gifted with a choric range. The soloist as an entire Requiem in white Brooks Brothers bucks. As the book progresses, we feel more amazed by his philosophical and catlike sensuality, set alongside a more canine need for universal approval. And all refracted through his detachment, heightened by those unreasoning early punishments by his father. The narrator refers glancingly to his own rage. But it has gone, like the vision of gay men as “the hopeless workers” and straight ones as “happy elegant” diners, underground. He has engendered his own protective stance as a double agent in this rigged world: nothing escapes his astonishing perceptions. His eyesight seems laser able to, not simply register, but synopsize/diagnose every object and person in his purview. —And yet his insecurity, his essential hiddenness in a world so ravishingly visible to him, makes for a strange parallax framing. And yet, it is a split screen we soon adjust to. Using a term oculists employ, “we compensate for it,” one eye giving the other rest then automatically trading off that function. Our young guide is utterly in love with the retinal world and capable of rendering it, now with the folkloric simplifying capacity of N. C. Wyeth, now with a detailed feather-by-feather Audubon notation. And yet, knowing he is banished by his very desire, he stands ever to one side, commenting on the action, judging the dessert forks, remarking the relative allure of all those around him. He is unsparing of his own vanity, more generous with others’. We witness a fierce sustained emotional tussle, but one somewhat cushioned, offset, by an upholstered diction of surpassing humor, knowing reference, compositional refinement. We see this young man seek approval and admiration through clothes and savoir faire; we watch him search for a loving community however small, for some scrap of his father’s own vast distant power. And yet, this youth of the mid-twentieth century shows a potency quite different from that of those pinky-goldy youths in English pulp fiction. Selflessness does not rank high in his repertoire.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  He had a handsome face projected onto too much flesh, black hair that geysered up at the end of the formal walkway of his part, large red hands that went white at the knuckles when he picked something up (a glass of whiskey, say) and a tender, satirical manner toward his wife, as though he were a lazy dreamer who’d been stirred into action by this spitfire. She said damn and hell and drank whiskey and had two moods—rage (she was always shouting at Kevin) and mock rage, an appealingly ardent sort of simmering, Virtue Stymied: “All right then, be gone with you,” she’d say, feisty and submissive, or “Of course you’ll be having another drink.” It was all playacting and intended to be viewed as such. She had “temperament” because she was Irish and had been trained as an opera singer. If she wandered into a room and found Kevin’s T-shirt balled and hurled in a chair, she’d start bellowing, “Kevin O’Malley Cork, get in here and get in here now . Look alive!” Nothing could restrain these outbursts, not even the knowledge that Kevin was out of earshot. Her arms would stiffen, her clenched fists would dig into her slim flanks and bunch up her dress, her nose would pale and her thin hair, the color of weathered bricks, would seem to go into shock and rise to reveal still more of her scalp. Because of her operatic training, her voice penetrated every corner of the house and had an alto after-hum that buzzed on in the round metal tabletop from Morocco. During the mornings she chain-smoked, drank coffee and sat around in a silk robe that revealed and highlighted her bony body. With her freckled face, devoid of makeup, rising above this slippery red sheen, she looked like an angry young man trapped in travesty as a practical joke. This couple, with their liquor and cigarettes and roguish, periodic spats, struck my stepmother as “cheap.” Or rather, the woman was cheap (men can’t be cheap). The husband, my father later decided, wasn’t “stable” (their money was by no means secure). Though they lived in a mansion with a swimming pool and antique furniture, they rented it, probably the furniture as well. The Corks were both “climbers,” he in business, she in society; they seemed to me fascinating shams. I especially admired the way Kevin’s mother, so obviously a bohemian, hard drinker and hell raiser, had toned down her exuberance enough to win invitations to a few polite “functions,” those given by the Women’s Club if not by the Steinway Club (the Steinway pretended to be nothing but a little gathering of ladies who liked to play four-hand versions of “Mister Haydn’s” symphonies, though it was in fact the highest social pinnacle). In pursuit of such heights, Mrs. Cork had reduced her damns and hells by the end of the week with us to darns and hecks . I had to admire the way Mrs.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  At home he sat in his office at the top of his house, which had been built to resemble a Norman castle, and from his windows he could survey the floodlit lawn. On the wall behind him hung a big, bad painting of waves crashing in the moonlight. He smoked cigars until the last hour before bedtime, when he switched to a pipe. Its sweet smoke filtered through the central heating or air conditioning into every corner of the sealed house. The pipe hour was the time to approach him for a favor or just a few pleasant words; I’d sit on the loveseat beside his blond mahogany desk and watch him work. Hour after hour he wrote with an onyx fountain pen in lowercase block letters that had the angle and lean elegance of Art Deco design; his smoke drifted up through the rosy light cast by the matching red shades on floor stands that flanked the desk. Even at the cottage he would set up an office and work till dawn when he wasn’t outdoors doing manual labor under artificial light, his “hobby.” But now a houseful of guests had forced him to modify his hours and habits. Had Mrs. Cork been a beauty he might have suffered the presence of her family more gladly; he was a great fancier of women and they brought out in him a courtliness as rich and old as the best port. His irritable misanthropy vanished in the presence of a beautiful woman. She could even be a child, a lovely little girl; she would still excite gallantry in him. Once a ten-year-old charmer who was staying with us announced at midnight that she wanted chocolate and my father drove fifty miles to a nearby town, dragged the owner of a candy store out of bed and paid a hundred dollars for twenty opera creams. He once gave the same amount as a tip to a full-bodied, glossy-lipped singer in an Italian restaurant who had serenaded him with a wobbling but surprisingly intimate rendition of “Vissi d’arte” to an accordion accompaniment executed by a hunchback with Bell’s palsy freezing half his face while the other half modestly winked and smiled. The only part of his customary life my father could maintain during the Corks’ visit was filling every waking moment with what used to be called “classical” music, though most of it was romantic, Brahms in particular. He had always had hundreds of records, which he played on a Meissen phonograph that stood as a separate, massive piece of furniture in one corner of his office.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Fred, it turned out, owned the store. He was a tall man with ragged red hair streaked prematurely gray and acne-pitted skin and workclothes that weren’t quite clean and hundreds of scraps of odd knowledge he stored in his head just as he secreted (in the pockets of his faded blue shirt or his baggy chinos or the blue vest from one secondhand suit or the brown jacket from another) tiny slips of paper on which he jotted notes for his stories. The slips were of five different pastel shades; whether this variety followed a system or merely injected random color into cerebrations so exalted they would otherwise have been uniformly gray I have no way of knowing—certainly at that age I had no way of judging him, only of gazing at him with awe. His eyes, magnified by thick glasses, never met mine. When he spoke to me he scrutinized a point precisely a foot to the left of my head. His voice was so soft and low and expressionless that one might have ignored him had Marilyn not listened to him with such deference. Since everything she did was theatrical, “listening” also had to be pantomimed: she stood like a schoolgirl and her hands, pointing down, were pressed together in inverted prayer. Her mouth was pursed, her head lowered; at a certain moment in Fred’s mutterings her head would start to bob wildly and those strange tones of assent that can only be transcribed as “Mmnn” would issue forth from her throat on a high, surprised note and then on lower, affirming ones—even, finally, on a very low grunt that bore the unintentionally rude message “Of course. Everyone knows that. Get on with it.” None of this was subtle. It was really quite ridiculously overdone—or would have been had Marilyn been concerned at all with the impression she was making on other people. As it happened, she wanted only to conform to a role she was simultaneously writing and reciting. The exact dimensions of that role became clear only as the years went by. She saw herself, I was to learn, as the grisette in a nineteenth-century opera—as Mimi or Violetta or Manon. Like them she was impulsive, warm-hearted, immoral and pious.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I could peer out through it onto a sidewalk bright with mica chips and frost, the permanent glitter and the passing. A radio played a rumba. I asked her news of Fred, and Marilyn said she’d lost touch with him, that the last she had heard he was still living with an Indian tribe in the Yucatán, where he’d gone to write his stories. And I recalled that when I was thirteen I’d run into him at the public library after not seeing him for a year. But he was no longer contained in his blue vest and brown jacket with his hair tousled but cut—no, now he was a wild man, something strapped with hemp to his back, his hair and beard flowing red and gray over his shoulders, his calves wrapped up to the knees in orange and red rags, feet shod in boots with cleats, eyes still big and averted behind glasses now mended with tape and his hands much redder and bigger and flatter somehow, as though he’d hammered each finger flat. I didn’t recognize him, but he touched me on the shoulder; and when I looked up into those eyes peering a foot to one side of me and saw the acne scars above the sprouting whiskers and heard his dull, mechanical and very soft voice, the sound of a voice choking on its own phlegm—well, then I knew him but didn’t want to, so drastically transformed was he. If he’d had an iguana on his shoulder he couldn’t have been more exotic. He told me he’d been in Mexico for a few months and was heading back there soon, that he had no money but lived by doing odd jobs—that this precariousness was necessary to his art. Before, in the shop, his dull muttering and his magnified, frozen eyes had seemed pitiable signs of shyness, but such an interpretation had fitted him only in his scruffy bourgeois guise, had fitted the sound of the clanking radiator and the smell of reheated coffee. Now that he was released out of his confining shop and had turned himself into a gaudy fetish, into a hank of streaked hair and bright rags, now his gaze seemed paralyzed by grandeur and his voice remote only because it was the sound of divinity. As a little boy I’d recognized that my imaginary playmate, Tom, was free but only by virtue of enduring total isolation; now Fred (but was this huge, mumbling, godlike bum really Fred?), now this new Fred was telling me mendicancy was the price of making art. And what finally became of him and his stories?

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X I With the thirst for knowledge, which God only can slake, keen within him, hastening along the impeded path to keep pace with his leader, and pierced with sympathetic grief for the souls at his feet, Dante pursues his way, till a shade coming behind them gives them the salutation of peace, to which Virgil answers. They are on the western side of the mountain, and the sun still neighbours the east, so that Dante casts no shadow, and the new-come soul does not recognize him as one still living in the first life; and so he gathers from the words of Virgil’s benediction that he and his companion alike are souls excluded from bliss. In answer to the question that hereon arises, Virgil explains his own state and Dante’s; and to the keen satisfaction of the latter, asks in his turn for an explanation of the earthquake and the shout. The shade answers that no material or casual thing can affect the sacred ways of the mount. It trembles only when some soul rises from lying prone with the avaricious, or starts from any other point of the mount to ascend to the earthly Paradise. The repentant souls, though they wish to gain the term and gather the fruit of their penance, are meanwhile as keen to suffer as once they were to sin; and when their present impulse unites with their ultimate desire and creates the instant will to rise, this in itself is a token and assurance that their purgation is complete, and the whole mountain rings with the praises of the spirits. May they, too, soon be sped upon their way! Virgil now asks the shade to reveal himself, and learns that he is the poet Statius. He combines with an enumeration of his own works a glowing tribute to the Æneid and its author; to have lived on earth with whom he would accept another year of exile. Virgil’s glance checks the smile that rises on Dante’s face at these words, but not till Statius has caught its flash upon his features. Pressed on either side, the Poet is finally released from Virgil’s prohibition, and informs Statius that he is indeed in the presence of that very one who strengthened him to sing of men and gods; whereon Statius, forgetting that be and Virgiltre empty shades, drops at his dear master’s feet to kiss them.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  She could not imagine having a better daughter. Kind, loyal, bright, hardworking. She had to hand it to her parents for raising such a fine young lady. She knew Christina’s father from his restaurant. Most days she’d go down to Three Brothers to get Dr. O a sandwich and coffee for lunch. He’d eat in his tiny lab, sitting on a high stool, thumbing through the lastest issue of Esquire or one of the other magazines he subscribed to. She brought her lunch from home and ate at her desk, between patients. Recently, Dr. O had asked her about Christina’s boyfriend. She told him Jack McKittrick struck her as a fine young man, an electrician with a good future. He was responsible and mature for his years. “But they’re so young,” Dr. O had said. That was certainly true. Christina just turning eighteen, Jack, what, maybe twenty-one? Daisy liked Jack. She sensed something different about him. And she liked the way he’d treated Christina the few times she’d seen them together. Daisy so wanted the younger generation to enjoy themselves today, for Dr. O’s sake. The annual holiday outing was his idea, and because it was important to him, Daisy did her best to organize the events and tickets. Dr. O needed a good day right now, a day to celebrate life and family and friends, a day without death. So follow Christina’s example, kids, and show some enthusiasm! Two: She should be pleased Steve was reading The Catcher in the Rye, and she would be if she hadn’t selected the same title for his Hanukkah gift, wrapped and waiting in her car. She’d planned to hand the bag with their holiday books to Corinne when they said goodbye at the train station in Elizabeth, so Corinne could put them under the Hanukkah bush. Steve could take it back to the bookshop and exchange it for another book, not that there was another as perfect for him as Catcher. She wondered who had given it to him, or had he taken it out of the library? If so, she should be doubly pleased. But she wasn’t. Three: She needed a stiff drink, the sooner, the better. ChristinaWhen they got back to Elizabeth, Daisy offered Christina a ride home from the train station. It was already dark and Christina was grateful she wouldn’t have to take the bus. When Daisy dropped Christina off at her house, she handed her a wrapped gift. “You might not want to put this one under the tree. It could be too personal.” Christina thanked Daisy and tucked it under her coat. As soon as she was safely in her room, with her back to the door, she ripped the paper off Daisy’s gift. No surprise that it was a book. Daisy bought all her gifts at the Ritz Book Shop, just up the street from the office. Christina didn’t know anyone who bought books the way Daisy did.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  She wasn’t a women’s rights activist, but she was deeply affected by the ideas coming out of the movement. One of Second Wave feminism’s aims was to demystify the female body once and for all, so that women could be more in control of their reproductive systems, their sexual experiences, and their lives. Tapping away at her IBM Selectric, Judy was absorbing feminist values and translating them, in real time, for her young readers. This is the genius of Judy Blume. It’s the single most important aspect of her legacy. Her work as a children’s writer did something nobody else could manage: it helped ensure feminism’s longevity. When Friedan published The Feminist Mystique in 1963, she argued that the activists who came before her—the First Wave suffragettes—had admirably won the vote but then hung up their sashes and failed to encode their values into American culture. “The fact is that to women born after 1920, feminism was dead history,” Friedan wrote. Or, as Kate Millett put it in Sexual Politics (1970), “When the ballot was won, the feminist movement collapsed in what can only be described as exhaustion.” By the war years of the 1930s and 1940s, the country no longer had an active women’s rights movement. The United States in the 1950s saw a return to patriarchal gender roles, leaving the Nineteenth Amendment in place but undoing much of the important social and cultural work of early feminism. Second Wavers didn’t want this to happen again. Friedan and Millett both agreed: a movement requires a multigenerational buy-in to maintain its momentum. And over in suburban New Jersey, a soft-spoken stay-at-home mom was listening. Writing cutting-edge books for kids, Judy Blume became the Second Wave’s secret weapon. This book is about how she did it. It takes elements from her life, her work (specifically, the controversial young adult novels she published between 1970 and 1980), and her battle against censorship to reveal how she brought up the next generation of women’s rights activists. Her characters and stories were more than just entertainment. They were a roadmap of open communication, bodily autonomy, and even sexual fulfillment. They taught young readers that we were allowed to expect more from our lives than the women who came before us. I am following that map from its starting point. Come with me. Rachelle Bergstein Brooklyn, NY October 25, 2023 Chapter One Housewife’s Syndrome “I went in the closet and I cried.” Before Judith Sussman had even graduated from college at NYU in 1961, she was married and pregnant. She had met a man—another New Jersey native, six years her senior—who could give her the life she thought she wanted: a suburban success story. When they first started dating, John Blume was a promising law student, preppy, clean-cut, with a round face and wry blue eyes. He had a job waiting for him at his father’s law firm in Newark. Was Judy smitten? It was tough to say.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Christ’s army, which it cost so dear to re-equip, was following the standard, laggard, fearsome and thin-ranked; when the Emperor who ever reigneth took counsel for his soldiery that was in peril, of his grace only, not that it was worthy; and, as hath been said, came to the succour of his spouse with two champions, at whose doing, at whose saying, the straggling squadron gathered itself again. To-wards that part where sweet Zephyr riseth to open the new leaves, wherewith Europe seeth herself reclad, not far off from the smiting of the waves, behind the which, because of their long stretch, the sun sometimes hideth himself from all, the fortune-favoured Calahorra 7 sitteth under protection of the mighty shield, whereon submits the lion, and subdueth. 8 Therewithin was born the amorous frere of the Christian faith, the sacred athlete, benignant to his own and cruel to his foes; 9 and, so soon as created, his mind was so replete with living virtue, that in his mother’s womb he made her prophetess. 10 When the espousals were complete at the sacred font, betwixt him and the faith, where they gave dower of mutual salvation, 11 the lady who for him gave the assent saw in her sleep the marvellous fruit destined to issue from him and from his heirs; and that he might in very construing be what he was, 12 a spirit from up here moved them to call him by the possessive adjective of him whose he all was. Dominic was he named; and I speak of him as of the husbandman whom Christ chose for his orchard, to bring aid to it. Well did he show himself a messenger and a familiar of Christ, for the first love made manifest in him was to the first counsel that Christ gave. 13 Many a time, silent and awake, was he found on the floor, by her who nursed him, as who should say, It was for this I came. Oh father his, Felice 14 in good sooth! Oh mother his, Giovanna 15 in good sooth, if the word means, translated, what they say! Not for the world for whose sake now men toil after him of Ostia and Thaddeus, 16 but for love of the true manna, in short season he became a mighty teacher, such that he set him to go round the vineyard, which soon turneth gray if the vine-dresser be to blame; and from the seat which erst was more benign to the just poor—not in itself, but in him who sitteth on it, and degenerateth— 17 not to dispense or two or three for six, not for the fortune of the next vacancy, not for the tithes belonging to God’s poor, 18 he made demand; but for leave against the erring world to fight for that seed wherefrom these four and twenty plants ensheaf thee.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  The most pleasant and delectable tale of the marriage of Cupid and Psyches. There was sometimes a certaine King, inhabiting in the West parts, who had to wife a noble Dame, by whom he had three daughters exceeding fair: of whom the two elder were of such comly shape and beauty, as they did excell and pass all other women living, whereby they were thought worthily to deserve the praise and commendation of every person, and deservedly to be preferred above the residue of the common sort. Yet the singular passing beauty and maidenly majesty of the youngest daughter did so farre surmount and excell then two, as no earthly creature could by any meanes sufficiently expresse or set out the same. By reason wherof, after the fame of this excellent maiden was spread about in every part of the City, the Citisens and strangers there beeing inwardly pricked by the zealous affection to behold her famous person, came daily by thousands, hundreths, and scores, to her fathers palace, who was astonied with admiration of her incomparable beauty, did no less worship and reverence her with crosses, signes, and tokens, and other divine adorations, according to the custome of the old used rites and ceremonies, than if she were the Lady Venus indeed, and shortly after the fame was spread into the next cities and bordering regions, that the goddess whom the deep seas had born and brought forth, and the froth of the waves had nourished, to the intent to show her high magnificencie and divine power on earth, to such as erst did honour and worship her, was now conversant among mortall men, or else that the earth and not the sea, by a new concourse and influence of the celestiall planets, had budded and yeelded forth a new Venus, endued with the floure of virginity. So daily more and more encreased this opinion, and now is her flying fame dispersed into the next Island, and well nigh unto every part and province of the whole world. Wherupon innumerable strangers resorted from farre Countries, adventuring themselves by long journies on land and by great perils on water, to behold this glorious virgin. By occasion wherof such a contempt grew towards the goddesse Venus, that no person travelled unto the Towne Paphos, nor to the Isle Gyndos, nor to Cythera to worship her. Her ornaments were throwne out, her temples defaced, her pillowes and cushions torne, her ceremonies neglected, her images and Statues uncrowned, and her bare altars unswept, and fowl with the ashes of old burnt sacrifice. For why, every person honoured and worshipped this maiden in stead of Venus, and in the morning at her first comming abroad offered unto her oblations, provided banquets, called her by the name of Venus, which was not Venus indeed, and in her honour presented floures and garlands in most reverend fashion.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  When Judy lived across the bridge in New Jersey, she and Norma would meet for long lunches. After Judy moved out west to New Mexico, they maintained their relationship via long, intimate letters. A reserved brunette, Klein got her start publishing short stories in the 1960s, before she penned two successful books for children: Mom, the Wolf Man and Me , a YA novel, and Girls Can Be Anything , a picture book for younger readers. Wolf Man , which came out in 1972, is about Brett Levin, an adolescent girl growing up with an artistic single mother, who takes Brett to protests and lectures her about feminism. In an amusing role reversal, Brett wishes her mom was more conventional and sets her up on dates, hoping she’ll settle down and get married. Girls Can Be Anything has a more obvious agenda. In the 1973 book, two children named Marina and Adam bicker about the roles they get to inhabit in their games of pretend. Adam bosses Marina around, telling her that because he’s a boy and she’s a girl, he gets to be the doctor while she has to be the nurse. He’s the pilot, she’s the stewardess, according to Adam. He’s the president and she’s first lady. In between their playdates, Marina tells her parents about Adam’s demands and they assure her that he’s wrong. “Well, that’s just plain silly!” her father says when Marina shares that Adam told her women can’t be doctors. “Why, your Aunt Rosa is a doctor. You know that.” Bolstered by her family, Marina bravely stands up to Adam. “Adam, you know, you can be a pilot or a doctor… I’m going to be the first woman President!” Adam is skeptical. “It seems like according to you girls can be anything they want,” he says. “Well, that’s just the way it is now,” Marina answers before they work it out, each giving their presidential talks and celebrating with a dinner of potato chips, lollipops, and marshmallows. Klein, who died in 1989 at the age of fifty, dedicated the book to her daughter. “To Jenny,” it reads, “who, when she grows up, would like to be a painter, join the circus, and work at Baskin-Robbins, making ice cream cones.” Jenny is Jennifer Fleissner—not an acrobat or an ice cream vendor but today a gender studies professor at Indiana University Bloomington. Fleissner said that like Judy, her mother didn’t set out to be shocking with anything she wrote. “She was a very strong feminist,” said Fleissner, who is the older of Klein’s two daughters. “I think she would have said that the primary thing she was interested in writing about was writing honestly about sexuality and trying to do so in a way that was not shaming.” In her 1976 novel Hiding , Klein does just that. The novel is about an eccentric aspiring ballet dancer named Krii, who is struggling with how she wants to be a woman in the world.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  What is disappearing is the audience. Or rather an ardent, involved, often contentious gay audience. Perhaps gay fiction is now destined to be read by everyone—a fate indicated even by the publication of A Boy’s Own Story by the Modern Library. January 2002 Introduction “M EN A RE E ITHER L OUD OR S ILENT.” E DMUND W HITE’S A BOY’S O WN S TORY R ECONSIDERED O N I TS T WENTIETH A NNIVERSARY Allan Gurganus We differ from ourselves more than we do from one another. —Montaigne I A boy soprano floats a tone like nothing else in nature. When that sound is hovering on pitch, it can come directly through you like sovereign daylight. But if ever a boy’s note goes sharp, jump back: it’s sheet ice guillotining off a slate roof. Suspense—can the kid stay up there?—is always part of the magic. So young a voice lives tilted—quavering—between boyhood’s backyard pipings and the Niagara of puberty, roaring (basso profundo) dead ahead. The pathos, of course, is this timbre’s brevity. The life span of a great boy singer’s voice? I mean one strong enough to project through lungs nearly man-sized while still abrim with audible innocence. That, you must measure in months. A Boy’s Own Story is twenty years old. Can it be true? Oh dear, yes, I fear so. The Modern Library has chosen to provide a permanent choir stall for this youthful chorister whose curious range—now honeyed, now tannic, first sentimental, then intriguingly amoral—continues to command and enthrall us. Who is the child singing with such artful imbalance, now beguiling, now quite shocking? How has he fared in the stilled time of fiction? And, during his song’s first few decades, to what uses has it been put? How can a boy and his epic solo survive such chores, such honors? The subject of this book might be that brief eloquence between the fantasies of a dream-bound child and his implementing those through charm, sexuality, his wits. We trace the ascent of a playful yet sober young man who’s made himself up out of wishes and books. We watch him become the erotically negotiable self-aware young “player” who ends this book with a chesslike coup of controlled plotting. It is a move that his wily executive father might’ve admired. Nabokov, in a ventriloquized preface to Lolita , proposed subtitling his own masterwork “The Confession of a White Widowed Male.” He attributes this medicinal foreword to one John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. (Widworth, Mass.).

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  And being thus no lesse endued with eloquence, than with singular learning, he wrote many books for them that should come after: whereof part by negligence of times be now intercepted and part now extant, doe sufficiently declare, with how much wisdome and doctrine hee flourished, and with how much vertue hee excelled amongst the rude and barbarous people. The like was Anacharsis amongst the most luskish Scythes. But amongst the Bookes of Lucius Apuleius, which are perished and prevented, howbeit greatly desired as now adayes, one was intituled Banquetting questions, another entreating of the nature of fish, another of the generation of beasts, another containing his Epigrams, another called “Hermagoras”: but such as are now extant are the foure books named “Floridorum”, wherein is contained a flourishing stile, and a savory kind of learning, which delighteth, holdeth, and rejoiceth the reader marvellously; wherein you shall find a great variety of things, as leaping one from another: One excellent and copious Oration, containing all the grace and vertue of the art Oratory, where he cleareth himself of the crime of art Magick, which was slanderously objected against him by his Adversaries, wherein is contained such force of eloquence and doctrine, as he seemeth to passe and excell himselfe. There is another booke of the god of the spirit of Socrates, whereof St. Augustine maketh mention in his booke of the definition of spirits, and description of men. Two other books of the opinion of Plato, wherein is briefly contained that which before was largely expressed. One booke of Cosmography, comprising many things of Aristotles Meteors. The Dialogue of Trismegistus, translated by him out of Greeke into Latine, so fine, that it rather seemeth with more eloquence turned into Latine, than it was before written in Greeke. But principally these eleven Bookes of the “Golden Asse”, are enriched with such pleasant matter, with such excellency and variety of flourishing tales, that nothing may be more sweet and delectable, whereby worthily they may be intituled The Bookes of the “Golden Asse”, for the passing stile and matter therein. For what can be more acceptable than this Asse of Gold indeed. Howbeit there be many who would rather intitule it “Metamorphosis”, that is to say, a transfiguration or transformation, by reason of the argument and matter within. The Preface of the Author To His Sonne, Faustinus And unto the Readers of this Book That I to thee some joyous jests may show in gentle gloze, And frankly feed thy bended eares with passing pleasant prose: So that thou daine in seemly sort this wanton booke to view, That is set out and garnisht fine, with written phrases new. I will declare how one by hap his humane figure lost, And how in brutish formed shape, his loathed life he tost. And how he was in course of time from such a state unfold, Who eftsoone turn’d to pristine shape his lot unlucky told.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  While Judy, like any author, needed guidance when it came to building plot and character, her style—especially when writing in the first person—was always top-notch, as Jackson told School Library Journal in 2001. “It was the voice, the absence of adult regret, instruction or nostalgia,” Jackson said, that always convinced him that Blume’s books were a little bit magical. “She turns them over to the kids, to the characters,” he continued. And for Jackson, a children’s book’s greatest strength was always that rare whiff of authenticity baked into the pages. Jackson was dyslexic, which Silsbee said gave him a surprising advantage when it came to sniffing it out. “He told me, ‘This is the reason I got into doing children’s books, because I read at the same pace that children read.’ So when he read a sentence, it was like this unfolding adventure… He said, ‘That’s why I think I’m a good children’s book editor. Because I’m forced to slow down.’ ” Chapter Four Menstruation “Someday, it will happen to you.” By the fall of 1970, when Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was published, sex had busted out of the bedroom. A Time magazine cover from July 11, 1969, with the cover line “The Sex Explosion,” showed a nude man and woman about to embrace, shrouded only by a half-unzipped fig leaf. The models were members of the New York cast of the play Oh! Calcutta! , a surprise hit that had recently opened in an old burlesque theater where the actors performed almost entirely naked, portraying erotic acts from masturbation to group sex. The show, which got terrible reviews, was nonetheless packed night after night and commanded record ticket prices. Are You There God? emerged into a rip-roaring, in-your-face culture. Girls still formed secret clubs, but they conducted them while songs like “American Woman” by the Guess Who—a guttural anti-Vietnam anthem—and “Lola” by the Kinks—about a guy boogying the night away with a drag queen or a trans woman—thrummed in the background. Hair was on Broadway; the hippies barely wore clothes! The Summer of Love was in the rearview, as was Woodstock. Sure, Are You There God? — which took its iconic name from a typist, who used the novel’s first line as a placeholder—had its boundary-pushing moments, like when Margaret admitted to sneaking peeks at her dad’s copies of Playboy , or when she stuffed her training bra with cotton balls and admired how she looked in the mirror. But 1970 was an entirely different world than the one Judy grew up in. Or so she and Jackson thought. The critics mostly liked Blume’s slim coming-of-age novel. Kirkus gave Are You There God? a mixed review, calling it “fresh” and complimenting Blume’s “easy way with words.” However, the reviewer thought Margaret’s obsession with her body was immature, and considered whether the book sent the right message, given that she doesn’t gain perspective and grow out of it by the end.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  When asked what he had read as a boy, Nabokov replied: “Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—English, Russian, and French—than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Cambridge, England, between the ages of twenty and twenty-three, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several—Poe, Verlaine, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orczy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke—have faded away, have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned” (Playboy interview, 1964, collected in Strong Opinions [1973]). The Notes to this edition will demonstrate that Nabokov has managed to invoke in his fiction the most distant of enthusiasms: a detective story read in early youth, a line from Verlaine, a tennis match seen at Wimbledon forty years before. All are clear in his mind, and, recorded in Lolita, memory negates time. When queried about Nabokov, friends and former colleagues at Cornell invariably comment on the seemingly paradoxical manner in which the encyclopedic Nabokov mind could be enthralled by the trivial as well as the serious. One professor, at least twenty years Nabokov’s junior and an instructor when he was there, remembers how Nabokov once asked him if he had ever watched a certain soap opera on television. Soap operas are of course ultimately comic if not fantastic in the way they characterize life as an uninterrupted series of crises and disasters; but missing the point altogether, suspecting a deadly leg-pull and supposing that with either answer he would lose (one making him a fool, the other a snob), Nabokov’s young colleague had been reduced to a fit of wordless throat-clearing. Recalling it ten years later, he seemed disarmed all over again. On easier terms with Nabokov was Professor M. H. Abrams, who warmly recalls how Nabokov came into a living room where a faculty child was absorbed in a television western. Immediately engaged by the program, Nabokov was soon quaking with laughter over the furiously climactic fight scene. Just such idle moments, if not literally this one, inform the hilarious burlesque of the comparable “obligatory scene” in Lolita, the tussle of Humbert and Quilty which leaves them “panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Scott squatted heavily on this piece of furniture, her chin on her palm, as though she were Death meditating on its latest convert. Sometimes I’d want just to fly through, to kiss Tim or to leave my Latin assignment with her husband, but she couldn’t be ignored. She drank in all the oxygen around her and reversed the magnetism of all metals; one was drawn to her even by the fillings in one’s teeth. Her hair was black and dirty and cut into a pageboy only because hair must be worn in some style; undoubtedly she would have preferred it thick with twigs and matted with mud. She always wore a formless madras blouse flown like a flag announcing defeat over the battlements of her corpulent body. Her teeth overlapped. Her eyeteeth were unusually long and pointed and wet. Mrs. Scott was a poet. Her husband also wrote verse. It was understood between them that his lines were very learned but a bit dry and completely the work of the conscious mind, hence inferior. He was of the school of T. S. Eliot—classic, ironic, religious. Her poems, which appeared seldom but then cataclysmically after a night white with lightning, had been purloined from the danker, more sulfurous regions of the unconscious. She spoke with the lentor of alligators through skeins of Spanish moss white and frangible with death; epochs of prehistory bubbled voluptuously and broke with gluey smackings in the lower regions of her sinister art. On the day after one of her nights of vision I’d find her panting with fatigue on the couch, her eyes ringed in black, her smile slightly goofy with sanctity, a reminder that silly once meant “blessed.” I stood in front of the cobra throne, her couch, and said, “I understand from Mr. Scott that you’ve written a wonderful poem.” “Wonderful?” she asked, aghast, chuckling silently, her many teeth various beiges, yellows and browns, even the odd blue. “Did he say wonderful?” By now her body was heaving under the madras blouse with horrific scorn. “Well, I don’t mean to get him into trouble,” I said nervously. “That’s probably not the word he used; I just gathered that he’s crazy about your new poem.” The terrible silent chuckle continued behind clouds of smoke. The Cumaean Sybil swayed hysterically over the tripod. “Do you think I might hear it sometime?” I asked, my question unexpectedly sounding rude and trivial to my own ears. “Don’t make me read it today,” she begged. “Not today.” It seemed her energies, mortal after all, had already been taxed to the limit by creation. “Of course,” I hastened to assure her. “Help me up,” she said. I rushed to assist her. I took her hand and pulled. When she was at last standing beside me, breathing audibly, she let her eyes travel up and down my body in a surprisingly frank way. Then she scuttled off to the kitchen.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Then with teaching and with will together, with the apostolic office he moved forth, 19 like a torrent that a deep vein out-presseth, and his rush smote amongst the stumps of heresy most livingly where the resistances were grossest. From him then diverse streamlets sprung, whereby the Catholic orchard is so watered that its shrubs have the fuller life. If such was the one wheel of the chariot 20 wherein Holy Church defended her, and won in open field her civil strife,

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Nabokov’s father was an outspoken foe of anti-Semitism. He wrote “The Blood Bath of Kishinev,” a famous protest against the 1903 pogrom, and was fined by the tsarist government for the fiery articles he wrote about the Beiliss trial (Maurice Samuel mentions him several times in his book on the Beiliss case, Blood Accusation [1966]—coincidentally published at the same time as Bernard Malamud’s novel based on it, The Fixer—and quotes from Nabokov’s reportage). Nabokov fils was also outraged by anti-Semitism, and, because his wife is Jewish, was sensitive to it in a most acutely personal way (witness the empathy for “poor Irving” [Irving]). Nabokov recalled going into a New England inn years ago, accompanied by his son and his son’s friend. Opening the menu, Nabokov noticed therein the succinct stipulation “Gentiles Only.” He called over the waitress and asked her what the management would do if there appeared at the door that very moment a bearded and berobed man, leading a mule bearing his pregnant wife, all of them dusty and tired from a long journey. “What … what are you talking about?” the waitress stammered. “I am talking about Jesus Christ!” exclaimed Nabokov, as he pointed to the phrase in question, rose from the table, and led his party from the restaurant. “My son was very proud of me,” said Nabokov. In Pale Fire, Kinbote and Shade discuss prejudice at length (note to line 470; pp. 216–218). Reader! Bruder!: German; “brother.” An echo of the last line of Au Lecteur, the prefatory poem in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857): “—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable, —monfrère!” (“Hypocrite reader —my fellow man—my brother.”). See oh Baudelaire!. the Gazette’s … Dr. Braddock and his group: see here. Gazette was not italicized in the 1958 edition; the error has been corrected. portrait … as a … brute: an obvious play on Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In searching for a title for his manuscript, the narrator of Despair considers “Portrait of the Artist in a Mirror,” but rejects it as “too jejune, too à la mode” (p. 201). For Joyce, see outspoken book: Ulysses. Brute Force: the actual title of a movie released by Universal Pictures in 1947, directed by Jules Dassin, and starring Burt Lancaster, Charles Bickford, and Yvonne De Carlo. Possessed was released in 1947 by Warner Brothers, directed by Curtis Bernhardt, and starring Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, and Raymond Massey. The titles gloss H.H.’s circumstances, and Brute Force—a prison film, which Nabokov thought he had seen—is thematically apt. Omen Faustum: Latin; Lucky Omen, or Lucky Strike cigarettes (pointed out to me by the philologist and Latinist, Professor F. Colson Robinson), a companion to “Dromes”; related to dies faustus, “a day of favorable omen,” or, specifically, “a day on which Roman religious law permitted secular activities.”

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And he to me: “Thou leavest, by that which I hear, traces so deep and so clear, that Lethe 10 cannot take them away, nor make them dim. But if thy words just now sware truth, tell me, what is the cause wherefore thou showest in speech and look that thou holdest me so dear.” And I to him: “Your sweet ditties, which so long as modern use shall last, will make their very ink precious.” “O brother,” said he, “this one 11 whom I distinguish to thee with my finger” (and he pointed to a spirit in front) “was a better craftsman of the mother tongue. In verses of love, and prose tales of romance, all he surpassed, and let fools talk, who think that he of Limoges excels. To rumour rather than to truth they turn their faces, and thus do fix their opinion ere art or reason is listened to by them. So did many of our fathers with Guittone, shouting in turn and praising him alone; but truth has prevailed at length with most persons. Now if thou hast such ample privilege, that ’tis permitted thee to go to the cloister wherein Christ is abbot of the college, do me there the saying of a Pater Noster so far as is needful to us of this world, where power to sin is no more ours.” Then perchance to give place to another following close, he vanished through the flames, like a fish going through the water to the bottom. A little forward I drew me towards the one he had pointed out, and said that my desire was preparing a grateful place for his name. Willingly he began to say: “So doth your courteous request please me that I cannot, nor will I, hide me from you. I am Arnault that weep and go a-singing; in thought I see my past madness, and I see with joy the day which I await before me. Now I pray you, by that Goodness which guideth you to the summit of the stairway, be mindful in due time of my pain.” Then he hid him in the fire which refines them. 1. The speaker is Guido Guinicelli (ca. 1230—ca. 1276; see Cantos xi, note 6, and xxiv, note 9), a member of the Ghibelline Principi family, of Bologna. Little is known of his life, save that he was Podestà of Castelfranco in 1270, and that he was exiled in 1274, together with the Lambertazzi (cf. Inf. xxxii, note 14; Purg. xiv, note 6); the city of his refuge and death may have been Verona. As a poet, Guido began as an imitator of the later method of Guittone d’Arezzo, but he soon outshone his model, and his best works (notably the famous canzone Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore, which may be said to mark an epoch in Italian literature), inspired much of the poetry of the Florentine school.