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 Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  90 The Buddha’s enlightenment had been based on the principle that to live morally was to live for others. Unlike the other renouncers, who retreated from human society, Buddhist monks were commanded to return to the world to help others find release from pain. “Go now,” he told his first disciples, “and travel for the welfare, and happiness of the people, out of compassion for the world, for the benefit, welfare, and happiness of gods and men.” 91 Instead of simply eschewing violence, Buddhism demanded a positive campaign to assuage the suffering and increase the happiness of “the whole world.” The Buddha summed up his teaching in four “Noble Truths”: that existence was dukkha; that the cause of our pain was selfishness and greed; that nirvana released us from this suffering; and that the way to achieve this state was to follow the program of meditation, morality, and resolution that he called the “Noble Path,” which was designed to produce an alternative aristocracy. The Buddha was a realist and did not imagine that he could single-handedly abolish the oppression inherent in the varna system, but he insisted that even a vaishya or a shudra would be ennobled if he or she behaved in a selfless, compassionate manner and “abstained from the killing of creatures.” 92 By the same token, a man or woman became a “commoner” (pathujjana) by behaving cruelly, greedily, and violently. 93 His sangha, or order of monks and nuns, modeled a different kind of society, an alternative to the aggression of the royal court. As in the tribal republics, there was no autocratic rule, but decisions were made in common. King Pasenedi of Koshala was greatly impressed by the “smiling and courteous” demeanor of the monks, “alert, calm and unflustered, living on alms, their minds remaining as gentle as wild deer.” At court, he said wryly, everybody competed acrimoniously for wealth and status, whereas in the sangha he saw monks “living together as uncontentiously as milk with water, looking at one another with kind eyes.” 94 The sangha was not perfect—it could never entirely transcend class distinctions—but it became a powerful influence in India. Instead of melting away into the forests like other renouncers, the Buddhists were highly visible. The Buddha used to travel with an entourage of hundreds of monks, their yellow robes and shaven heads demonstrating their dissent from the mainstream, walking along the trade routes beside the merchants. And behind them, in wagons and chariots laden with provisions, rode their lay supporters, many of them Kshatriyas. The Buddhists and Jains made an impact on mainstream society because they were sensitive to the difficulties of social change in the newly urbanized society of northern India. They enabled individuals to declare their independence of the big agrarian kingdoms, as the tribal republics had done.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  He continued his father’s reforms, making Mesopotamia a vibrant, rich, and creative region. The Jewish community at Ctesiphon (near modern Baghdad) became the intellectual and spiritual capital of world Jewry, and Nisibis, dedicated to the study of Christian scripture, another great intellectual center. 108 While Byzantine horizons were shrinking, Persians were broadening their outlook. When his ally Maurice was assassinated in a coup in 610, Khosrow seized the opportunity to conduct massive raids for slaves and booty in Byzantium. And when Heraclius, governor of Roman North Africa, gained the imperial throne in another coup, Khosrow embarked on a huge offensive, conquering Antioch (613), large areas of Syria and Palestine (614), and Egypt (619); in 626 the Persian army even besieged Constantinople. But in an extraordinary riposte, Heraclius and his small disciplined army defeated the Persian forces in Asia Minor and invaded the Iranian Plateau, attacking the unprotected estates of the Zoroastrian nobility and destroying their shrines before he was forced to withdraw. Utterly discredited, Khosrow was assassinated by his ministers in 628. Heraclius’s campaign had been more overtly religious than any previous war of Christian Rome. Indeed, so intertwined were church and empire by now that Christianity itself had seemed under attack during the siege of Constantinople. When the city was saved, the victory was attributed to Mary, mother of God, whose icon had been paraded to deter the enemy from the city walls. During the Persian wars a monk finally brought the Christological disputes to an end. Maximus (580–662) insisted that these issues could not be settled simply by a theological formulation: “deification” was rooted in the experience of the Eucharist, contemplation, and the practice of charity. It was these communal rites and disciplines that taught Christians to see that it was impossible to think “God” without thinking “man.” If human beings emptied their minds of the jealousy and animosity that ruin their relations with one another, they could, even in this life, become divine: “The whole human being could become God, deified by the grace of God become man—whole man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole God, soul and body by grace.” 109 Every single person, therefore, had sacred value. Our love of God was inseparable from our love of one another. 110 Indeed, Jesus had taught that the iron test of our love of God was that we love our enemies: Why did he command this? To free you from hatred, anger and resentment, and to make you worthy of the supreme gift of perfect love. And you cannot attain such love if you do not imitate God and love all men equally. For God loves all men equally and wishes them to “to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

• From The Art of Memoir

  meant actually being allied with him against herself. Publishing the book was a way to reclaim “what was left of me.” Harrison is a study in the courage a book can demand from its scribbler. From page one, you can hear her resolve to treat her young self—to my eye, anyway—to fairly unblinking scrutiny. The voice has the brutal detachment of a traumatized girl in a dissociative state during a rape. Or like some doomed prisoner speaking from inside an iron mask. Which—psychically speaking— seems apt. We meet at airports. We meet in cities we’ve never been to before. We meet where no one will recognize us. One of us flies, the other brings a car, and in it we set out for some destination. Increasingly, the places we go are unreal places: the Petrified Forest, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon—places as stark and beautiful and deadly as those revealed in satellite photographs of distant planets. Airless, burning, inhuman. Against such backdrops, my father takes my face in his hands. He tips it up and kisses my closed eyes, my throat. I feel his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck. I feel his hot breath on my eyelids. We quarrel sometimes, and sometimes we weep. The road always stretches endlessly ahead and behind us, so that we are out of time as well as out of place. She cuts herself no slack. It’s we meet, we quarrel, we weep. She speaks as an adult choosing, not as a girl with a gun to her head. Rather than praise the obvious precision and grace of this prose, Vanity Fair’s Michael Shnayerson calls Harrison “a tease” for not making herself smutty enough. It’s a painful book but not a sexually explicit one—an almost impossible feat given the topic. (Actually, the most carnal scene in The Kiss paints Harrison’s disinterested mother standing alongside a gynecologist’s table as he deflowers the girl with increasing large penis substitutes so she can go off to college with a diaphragm, and not get pregnant at seventeen as Harrison’s mother had with her.) Shnayerson’s “Women Behaving Badly”

• From The Art of Memoir

  master—to pick apart one sentence at a time how a book’s opener sets the terms for a whole book. Read that way, Herr summarizes all of memoir’s key elements. He lures us in with direct carnality, with information packaged in sizzling and evocative ways. His inner conflict never fades from you—the psychological stakes and that inner enemy that make the book cohere and lend us the impetus to keep reading stay on display. Mainly, he creates an intimate psychic space—a mind perceiving and remembering and analyzing and pondering with such variety that we cleave to it. Herr becomes, as you read him, as familiar and comforting as any friend. A book known for its bizarre, hallucinatory surface opens with the cheapest writing of all—dull recorded fact, describing a static physical artifact. After coming back from the bush, Herr studies the antique map left on the wall. It’s a quiet scene any reader can imagine herself inside. Then, line by line, he builds up to the jazzy surface his book is known for. The map embodies the book’s central worry—how “hard data” or “official information”—the stuff most reporters are shopping for— avoids the real impenetrable mystery of human suffering and nobility always evident in war’s carnage. A “real” reporter trucks in simple data. Luckily for us, Herr clung to his talent—that poetic sensibility and ear for dialogue and story and atmosphere. He left hard facts to the trusted journalists, letting his true nature shine through. There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, I’d lie on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. That map was a marvel, especially now that it wasn’t real anymore. For one thing, it was very old. It had been left there years before by another tenant, probably a Frenchman, since the map had been made in Paris. The paper had buckled in its frame after years in the wet Saigon heat, laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicted. Vietnam was divided into its older territories of Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China, and to the west past Laos and Cambodia sat Siam, a kingdom. That’s old, I’d tell visitors, that’s a really old map. If dead ground could come back to haunt you the way dead people do, they’d have been able to mark my map CURRENT and burn the ones they’d been using since ’64, but count on it, nothing like that was

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Tony was the nephew of the Palace’s manager, the celebrated Tricky Reeves, and therefore something of a catch for our Alice. My parents mistrusted him at first, thinking him ‘rapid’ because he worked in a theatre, and wore cigars behind his ears, and talked glibly of contracts, London, and champagne. But no one could dislike Tony for long, he was so large-hearted and easy and good; and like every other boy who courted her, he adored my sister, and was ready to be kind to us all on her account. Thus it was that Alice and I were so frequently to be found on a Saturday night, tucking our skirts beneath our seats and calling out the choruses to the gayest songs, in the best and most popular shows, at the Canterbury Palace. Like the rest of the audience, we were discriminating. We had our favourite turns - artistes we watched and shouted for; songs we begged to have sung and re-sung again and again until the singer’s throat was dry, and she - for more often than not it was the lady singers whom Alice and I loved best - could sing no more, but only smile and curtsey. And when the show was over, and we had paid our respects to Tony in his stuffy little office behind the ticket-seller’s booth, we would carry the tunes away with us. We would sing them on the train to Whitstable - and sometimes others, returning home from the same show as merry as we, would sing them with us. We would whisper them into the darkness as we lay in bed, we would dream our dreams to the beat of their verses; and we would wake next morning humming them still. We’d serve a bit of music-hall glamour, then, with our fish suppers - Alice whistling as she carried platters, and making the customers smile to hear her; me, perched on my high stool beside my bowl of brine, singing to the oysters that I scrubbed and prised and bearded. Mother said I should be on the stage myself. When she said it, however, she laughed; and so did I. The girls I saw in the glow of the footlights, the girls whose songs I loved to learn and sing, they weren’t like me. They were more like my sister: they had cherry lips, and curls that danced about their shoulders; they had bosoms that jutted, and elbows that dimpled, and ankles - when they showed them - as slim and as shapely as beer-bottles. I was tall, and rather lean. My chest was flat, my hair dull, my eyes a drab and an uncertain blue.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  His mother wore an enormous bonnet like a big blue halo, so he’d always introduce her by fanning his hands behind his head, saying Here comes Momma. My father comes into focus for me on a Liars’ Club afternoon. He sits at a wobbly card table weighed down by a bottle. Even now the scene seems so real to me that I can’t but write it in the present tense. I am dangling my legs off the bar at the Legion and shelling unroasted peanuts from a burlap bag while Daddy slides the domino tiles around the table. They make a clicking sound. I haven’t started going to school yet, so the day seems without beginning or end, stalled in the beer-smelling dark of the Legion. Cooter has just asked Daddy if he had planned to run away from home. “They wasn’t no planning to it,” Daddy says, then lights a cigarette to stall, picking a few strands of tobacco off his tongue as if that gesture may take all the time in the world. “Poppa had give me a silver dollar and told me to get into town and buy some coffee. Had to cross the train tracks to get there. When that old train come around the turn, it had to slow up. Well, when it slowed up, I jumped, and that dollar come with me. “Got a job threshing wheat up to Kansas. Slept at night with some other old boys in this fella’s barn. Man by the name of Hamlet. Sorriest sonofabitch ever to tread shoe leather. Wouldn’t bring you a drink from sunup to lunch. And married to the prettiest woman you ever seen. A butt like two bulldogs in a bag.” This last makes everybody laugh. I ask him how he got home, and he slides the story back on track. While I’m waiting for his answer, I split open a fresh peanut with my fingernail. The unroasted shell is soft as skin, the meat of the nut chewy and almost tasteless without salt. Daddy finishes his drink and moves a domino. “About didn’t make it. Hopped the Double-E train from Kansas City to New Orleans. Cold?” He glares at each of us as if we might doubt the cold. “That wind come inching in those boxcar cracks like a straight razor. It’ll cut your gizzard out, don’t think it won’t. They finally loaded some cattle on somewhere in Arkansas, and I cozied up to this old heifer. I’d of froze to death without her. Many’s the time I think of that old cow. Tried milking her, but it come out froze solid. Like a Popsicle.” “It’s getting high and deep in here,” Shug says. He’s the only black man I’ve ever seen in the Legion, and then only when the rest of the guys are there. He wears a forest-green porkpie hat with the joker from a deck of cards stuck on the side.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The Jihad and the suffering involved in it weighed heavily on his heart and his whole being in every limb; he spoke of nothing else, thought only about equipment for the fight, was interested only in those who had taken up arms.… For the love of Jihad in God’s Path, he left his family and his sons, his homeland, his house and all his estates, and chose out of all the world to live in the shade of his tent.81 Like Nur ad-Din, Saladin always traveled with an entourage of ulema, Sufis, qadis, and imams, who recited Quran and ahadith to the troops as they marched. Jihad, which had been all but dead, was becoming a live force in the region; it had been resurrected not by the inherently violent nature of Islam but by a sustained assault from the West. In the future any Western intervention in the Middle East, however secular its motivation, would evoke the memory of the fanatical violence of the First Crusade. Like the Crusaders, Saladin discovered that his enemy could be its own greatest foe. He ultimately owed his military success to the chronic infighting of the Franks and the hawkish policies of newcomers from the West who did not understand regional politics. As a result, in July 1187 he was able to destroy the Christian army at the Horns of Hattin in Galilee. After the battle, he released the king of Jerusalem but had the surviving Templars and Hospitalers killed in his presence, judging correctly that they posed the greatest danger to the Muslim reconquista. When he took possession of Jerusalem, his first impulse was to avenge the Crusaders’ massacre of 1099 but was persuaded by a Frankish envoy to take the city without violence.82 Not a single Christian was killed, the Frankish inhabitants of Jerusalem were ransomed for a very moderate sum, and many were escorted to Tyre, where the Christians maintained a stronghold. Christians in the West were uneasily aware that Saladin had behaved more humanely than the Crusaders and developed legends that made him an honorary Christian. Some Muslims, however, were more critical: Ibn al-Athir argued that this clemency was a serious military and political error, because the Franks managed to retain a narrow coastal state stretching from Tyre to Beirut, which continued to threaten Muslim Jerusalem until the late thirteenth century.83

• From The Art of Memoir

  The detail of her hauling a scale to the library marks her an adorably obsessive kook, and we hope her passion for Russian lit will infect us. (Hint: it does.) Like Batuman’s work, Babel’s is also earmarked by shocking juxtapositions and unforgettable similes. One of his Red Cavalry stories begins, “The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head.” You can watch Batuman hone her talent for metaphor if you read the first version of this essay, as I did, in the literary cult mag n+1, where Tolstoy’s collected volumes first weighed as much as “a large timber wolf.” Most of us would’ve let the wolf metaphor stand—it’s jolting and funny and echoes a Russian landscape. But she rewrote, and the beluga whale is the far better animal, springing as it does from salty caviar, which echoes the lost empire of the czars. Plus the whale, like Tolstoy, is a behemoth, reigning in a rarer element than the wolf. It’s hard even to believe he’s a mammal like the rest of us. As you start out in rough drafts, setting down stories as clearly as you can, there begins to burble up onto the page what’s exclusively yours both as a writer and a human being. If you trust the truth enough to keep unveiling yourself on the page—no matter how shameful those revelations may at first seem—the book will naturally structure itself to maximize what you’re best at. You’re best at it because it sits at the core of your passions. Cheryl Strayed, whose Wild still rides the best-seller list, was blessed with a passion for poetry that informed her language. That and the discipline to keep a daily journal during her solo hike of the Pacific Trail gave her the skeleton of that book. Strayed speaks of truth as a quest: “I tell students they want to find the true, truer, truest story.” Her first draft scraped the surface, but she found deeper psychological truths in revisions. How you approach the truth depends on your passions—Russian books and surreal metaphor, journal keeping and poetry and hiking. You can witness two different talents approaching some of the same material by reading brothers Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff. Geoffrey’s seminal Duke of Deception (1979) partly grew from his extraordinary skills as a biographer: he used a historian’s

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  His chief military strategist, Zhang Liang, who had studied Confucian ritual in his youth, embodied Han ideals. It was said that a military text was revealed to him after he had behaved with exemplary respect toward an elderly man, and even though he had no military experience, he led Bang to victory. Zhang was not a bellicose man. He was a Daoist warrior: “not warlike,” weak as water, frequently ill, and unable to command on the field. He treated people with humility, practiced Daoist meditation and breath control, abstained from grains, and at one point seriously considered retiring from politics for a life of contemplation. 117 The Han had learned from Qin’s mistakes. But Bang wanted to preserve the centralized state and knew that the empire needed Legalist realism because no state could function without coercion and the threat of violence. “Weapons are the means by which the sage makes obedient the powerful and savage, and brings stability in times of chaos,” wrote the Han historian Sima Qian. “Instruction and corporal punishment cannot be abandoned in a household, mutilating punishments cannot be halted under Heaven. It is simply that in using them some are skillful and some clumsy, in carrying them out some are in accord [with Heaven] and some against it.” 118 But Bang knew that the state also needed a more inspiring ideology. His solution was a synthesis of Legalism and Daoism. 119 Still reeling from the Qin inquisition, people yearned for “empty,” open-minded governance. Han emperors would maintain absolute control over the commanderies but would refrain from arbitrary interventions; there would be strict penal law but no draconian punishments. The patron of the new regime was the Yellow Emperor. All empires need theater and pageantry, and the Han rituals gave a new twist to the ancient Shang complex of sacrifice, hunting, and warfare. 120 In autumn, the season for military campaigning, the emperor held a ceremonial hunt in the royal parks, which teemed with every kind of animal, to provide meat for the temple sacrifice. A few weeks later there were military reviews in the capital to show off the skills of elite troops and help maintain the martial competence of the min, who manned the imperial armies. At the end of winter there were hunting contests in the parks. These rituals, designed to impress visiting dignitaries, all recalled the Yellow Emperor and his animal troops. Men and animals fought as equal combatants, just as they had at the beginning of time before the sage kings separated them. There were football matches in which players kicked the ball from one side of the field to the other, to reproduce the alternation of yin and yang in the seasonal cycle. “Kickball deals with the power of circumstances in the military.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Maybe that’s as much of a reason as the other reasons people began to confuse the two of us with each other, despite decades of difference in age and a noticeable variance in complexion. In the most vulnerable places of my growth, while I was clearing out internalized oppression, I was replacing it with internalized Kai. Kai curated our Day of Truthtelling march in a way that calibrated the need for silent reflection and mourning, with the need for poetry, with the need for dancing to Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor,” and the need for shouting and call-and response in a way that I mimic daily in my meditation, poem-writing, dancing, mantra-chanting practice of loving this survivor, or as Kai would say, “Me, myself, personally.” In the foreword to This Bridge Called My Back, Toni Cade Bambara said “the most effective way to do it is to do it.”57 Kai finds pleasure in the papercuts of creating binder after binder, resource after resource, curriculum after curriculum, possible project after possible project for a movement that sometimes moves too quick to give much back. So the pleasure in the making has to be enough. Kai finds laughter in the incisive analysis of the worst, most pervasive monsters killing us. Kai stays up all night, so many nights, making things that just weren’t there the day before, visible or imaginable. She has this frenetic relationship to time and a cigarette-assisted alertness, like Toni Cade before her, that has taught me … not to smoke or stay awake but to understand that the possibility of this moment, the moment with a mess of sugar and beignets, the moment laughing on the porch swing, the moment looking for moss to borrow from the trees and wondering about why exactly the trees in the park in New Orleans have cement filling their openings, the moment disagreeing about the movie that might be brilliant or just torture, the moment one of us is recording one of us painting and talking about mothering, the moment sitting on the futon with the books under and behind it and next to it on both sides and with the succulent plants creeping close when I’m asking about Toni Cade Bambara, what exactly do you remember, and Kai remembers who she herself was at the time. Which is different than who she is now. And she loves that former self and this self with the same awake ferocity. Meaning whatever she learned from Toni Cade worked, is working. Dance until You Laugh until You Sing for Cara Page Cara Page has a laugh like a river that connects to an ocean that never ends. She did a lot to nurture that laugh, and I don’t know half of it. When she speaks her vision, she lowers her tone so the people in the ground and underwater can get in and harmonize. When she points her finger, the space crackles. Have you seen it happen?

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  That’s how I remember it. She called it Kindred: Healing Justice. And now I understand. The healing comes from being kindred, which isn’t easy to live out but is already just true. Toni Cade Bambara called it sisters of the yam and corn and rice, etc. And I know for a fact Toni Cade Bambara would have cheered to hear Cara Page explain the connection between the chopping down of the rainforest and the unethical implantation of IUDs and Norplant, in the uteruses and arms of poor women of color, in front of a thousand people at the Sistersong Conference (my mom and I were there too). Not just because of the justified rage, not just because of the recognition and brilliance, but because what Toni Cade Bambara taught was that the cell and the creature and the circle and society and the galaxy are one thing organized by scale. And what Cara Page learned and is teaching us now is that when you tap into that relationship, the relationship of how relationship relates, that’s it. The whole body sings. The Reaching Hands Women for Cheryll Greene Cheryll Greene answered her own phone on the day she died. She held her grandson while her bones betrayed her. She listened to the cars crash, in her Harlem apartment overlooking the Hudson River and the West Side Highway. She mentored Black girls like we were gold that could grow if planted. She used a red pen like a magic wand in a red sea. What I mean is that she parted the way between what you thought you were saying and what you needed to actually say. She was magic that way. For Toni Cade Bambara, Cheryll Greene was a sister-friend and a lifelong collaborator. She was a listening ear and an honest critique. She was someone who Toni Cade could trust to love the people first and last, to believe in the people more than the divisions of genre and form, to believe in the love more than the market or the moment. In Cheryll Greene, Toni Cade Bambara recognized a kindred spirit. A Black woman willing to be anyone for the sake of the beautiful community. A Black woman who looked at other Black women and saw infinite possibility. For me, Cheryll Greene is a chosen mother. She is tea and warm berets. She is teacher, she is truth. She is sacred vulnerability and the voice of a village of grandmothers never displaced. She is a person who taught me to look at my wildest dreams as a rough draft and dream deeper. She is neither tact nor tiptoeing. She is where I get the gall to be grown.

• From The Art of Memoir

  Preface | Welcome to My Chew Toy Don’t follow me, I’m lost, the master said to the follower who had a cocked pen and a yellow pad. Stephen Dunn, “Visiting the Master” This preface is a squeaky rubber chew toy I have pawed and gnawed at for years. Problem being, memoir as a genre has entered its heyday, with a massive surge in readership the past twenty years or so. But for centuries before now, it was an outsider’s art—the province of weirdos and saints, prime ministers and film stars. As a grad student thirty years back, I heard it likened to inscribing the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice. So I still feel some lingering obligation to defend it. Partly what murders me about memoir—what I adore—is its democratic (some say ghetto-ass primitive), anybody-who’s-lived- can-write-one aspect. You can count on a memoirist being passionate about the subject. Plus its structure remains dopily episodic. Novels have intricate plots, verse has musical forms, history and biography enjoy the sheen of objective truth. In memoir, one event follows another. Birth leads to puberty leads to sex. The books are held together by happenstance, theme, and (most powerfully) the sheer, convincing poetry of a single person trying to make sense of the past. Changes in the novel have helped to jack up memoir’s audience. As fiction grew more fabulist or dystopic or hyperintellectual under the sway of Joyce and Woolf and García Márquez and Pynchon acolytes, readers thirsty for reality began imbibing memoir.

• From The Art of Memoir

  loose as a hard-slammed Ping-Pong ball, I found myself rolling into a graduate program in poetry—the only one that would take me sans college diploma, and then only on probation till I proved I wasn’t as dumb as I looked (which I probably couldn’t have been). I remember the room and the gray metal chair from which I first heard Geoffrey Wolff read about his con-man father. It was August in Vermont, and hot. Somebody turned off the gale-force floor fan as he stepped to the light wood podium so we could hear him better. With his Hemingway beard and polo shirt, Geoffrey looked like he’d be equally at home propping up a martini glass in some smoky jazz dive or on a Cuban swordfish boat. His wife was an elegant woman whose opinions people cared about. A Princeton grad who wrote for Esquire and the Washington Post, Geoffrey had all the credentials you’d need, but he wore them lightly. He was handsome and hearty, but he brooked no shit and seemed worried about nothing more than getting words down in the right order. At parties he dispensed pricey cognac, told riveting stories, and talked about jazz. The summer of 1978, the stuffy room he was reading in held fewer than a hundred exhausted, mostly young writers and their not-yet-forty-year-old professors. But the minute he started to read, a fine current sizzled through the air. People who’d been slumped in their chairs—mentors and tormentors mostly exhausted from a day spent poring over our medium-shitty pages—straightened up. We leaned forward. The occasional fly buzz became audible. Geoffrey had a strong voice, but he read from the book haltingly. It hurt him to read, you could tell. He plowed on, though, stopping sometimes to drink water, and nobody shifted. Hell, I hardly blinked. He was showing me a form of courage I knew I didn’t have. He was like some action-movie hero gunning down the enemy I’d faced my whole life—family lies—with such panache I couldn’t feature not enlisting. It was a heroic performance. And I wanted nothing so much as to have the balls to do the same with my own story. The audience exploded clapping after.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Her speaking voice was like her singing one - strong and healthy, and wonderfully warm upon the ear. Her accent was sometimes music-hall cockney, sometimes theatrical-genteel, sometimes pure broad Kent. Her set lasted no longer than the customary fifteen minutes or so, but she was cheered and shouted back on to the stage at the end of that time twice over. Her final song was a gentle one - a ballad about roses and a lost sweetheart. As she sang she removed her hat and held it to her bosom; then she pulled the flower from her lapel and placed it against her cheek, and seemed to weep a little. The audience, in sympathy, let out one huge collective sigh, and bit their lips to hear her boyish tones grow suddenly so tender. All at once, however, she raised her eyes and gazed at us over her knuckles: we saw that she wasn’t weeping at all, but smiling - and then, suddenly, winking, hugely and roguishly. Very swiftly she stepped once again to the front of the stage, and gazed into the stalls for the prettiest girl. When she found her, she raised her hand and the rose went flying over the shimmer of the footlights, over the orchestra-pit, to land in the pretty girl’s lap. We went wild for her then. We roared and stamped and she, all gallant, raised her hat to us and, waving, took her leave. We called for her, but there were no more encores. The curtain fell, the orchestra played; Tricky struck his gavel upon his table, blew out his candle, and it was the interval. I peered, blinking, into the seats below, trying to catch sight of the girl who had been thrown the flower. I could not think of anything more wonderful, at that moment, than to receive a rose from Kitty Butler’s hand. I had gone to the Palace, like everyone else that night, to see Gully Sutherland; but when he made his appearance at last - mopping his brow with a giant spotted handkerchief, complaining about the Canterbury heat and sending the audience into fits of sweaty laughter with his comical songs and his face-pulling - I found that, after all, I hadn’t the heart for him. I wished only that Miss Butler would stride upon the stage again, to fix us with her elegant, arrogant gaze - to sing to us about champagne, and shouting ‘Hurrah!’ at the races. The thought made me restless. At last Alice - who was laughing at Gully’s grimaces as loudly as everybody else - put her mouth to my ear: ‘What’s up with you?’ ‘I’m hot,’ I said; and then: ‘I’m going downstairs.’ And while she sat on for the rest of the turn, I went slowly down to the empty lobby - there to stand with my cheek against the cool glass of the door, and to sing again, to myself, Miss Butler’s song, ‘Sweethearts and Wives’.

• From The Art of Memoir

  Between 2005 and 2010, Philip Gourevitch closely observed the skyrocketing of nonfiction as literature at the editorial helm of that towering literary mag the Paris Review. (Gourevitch’s classic on the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, is also a masterpiece.) Here’s an excerpt of his speech as he stepped down, likening rebukes against memoir as a lesser form to the critics who once mocked photography for lacking the originality of painting: The past fifty years has seen an explosion of exciting new work in memoir, reportage, and the literature of fact in all forms and lengths and styles. And yet, I am afraid, there is a kind of lingering snobbery in the literary world that wants to disqualify what is broadly called nonfiction from the category of “literature”—to suggest that somehow, it lacks in artistry, or imagination or invention by comparison to fiction. . . . But the nonfiction I published was every bit as good as fiction. Youngsters may not recall the lengthy assaults against memoir from critics like William Gass* and Jonathan Yardley and James Wolcott. Their ultimately impotent campaigns put me in mind of how early novels were mocked for being mere “fancies,” lacking the moral rigor of philosophy and sermons and the formal rigor of poetry. So after fifty-plus years of reading every memoir I could track down and thirty teaching the best ones (plus getting paid to bang out three), I spent last year trying to cobble up what a physicist would call a Unified Field Theory or Theory of Everything about the form. I imagined a better me would have done this already. (A better me, says the nattering voice in my head, wouldn’t eat Oreos by the sleeve.) This better me has an alphabetized bookshelf and a mind parceled out into PowerPoint slides. She has a big fat overarching system. In search of such a system, I found myself last winter shoving a wobbly-wheeled cart at Staples. Hours later, I lunged all snow- spackled into the house like a Labrador dragging home kill in her teeth. I got presentation easels (three), aluminum-framed slabs of corkboard (four), flip chart (one), and boo-coup color-coordinated index cards and sticky notes.

• From The Art of Memoir

  These were the first poems he’d written since he’d left China to work in a laundry in this country, and Maxine’s mother embroidered the characters in cloth to save them. When I donated the books with his commentary to the library at University of California, I didn’t tell my father. They gave a big party during which his marginalia were displayed in glass cases. He stood before it and said loudly, “My writing,” all night so onlookers could hear. Among all the dozens of pals and shrinks and acquaintances I’ve sent manuscripts to, I’ve never had a detractor. Which probably says more about their generosity than my accuracy, so I count myself more lucky than expert. For the record, here are my rules for dealing with others: 1.Notify subjects way in advance, detailing parts that might make them wince. So far, no one has ever winced. 2.On pain of death, don’t show pages to anybody mid-process. You want them to see your best work, polished. 3.As Hubert Selby told Jerry Stahl, “If you’re writing about somebody you hate, do it with great love.” 4.Related to the above: I never speak with authority about how people feel or what their motives were. I may guess at it, but I always let the reader know that’s speculative. I keep the focus on my own innards. 5.If somebody’s opinion of what happened wholly opposes mine, I mention it in passing without feeling obliged to represent it. 6.Don’t use jargon to describe people. It’s both disrespectful and bad writing. I never called my parents alcoholics; I showed myself pouring vodka down the sink. Give information in the form you received it. 7.Let your friends choose their pseudonyms. 8.Try to consider the whole time you’re working how your views—especially the harsh ones—may be wrong. Correct as needed. 9.With your closest compadres and touchy material, you might sit with them (same house or town, maybe not same room) while they read pages that may be painful for them. 10.I’d cut anything that someone just flat-out denies. Then again, in my family, all the worst stuff was long confessed to before I started writing the first tome. 11.Let the reader know how subjective your point of view is. This is in some way a form of respect to your subjects, who might disagree.

• From The Art of Memoir

  Dispatches landed the unassuming Syracuse dropout in the upper echelon of literati working in English. (John le Carré called it “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.”) The Vietnam War era perhaps ushered in the great age of the liar—Nixon confessing that he’d been bombing Cambodia all along after denying it, his collusions with Watergate burglars, his paranoid tapes. In the 1970s, kids like me who found Herr’s work in Rolling Stone or Esquire cherished him as the folk hero who’d called bullshit on the government reports we’d been fed about Vietnam for decades. Enemy body counts had been beefed up, a fact later confirmed in defense secretary Robert S. McNamara’s memoir. Our massive bombing runs had so decimated and exfoliated the country that we could never win the people’s faith. (“We never announced a scorched-earth policy, we never announced any policy.”) Drugs we went to jail for in the States were practically handed out with mess kits over there, and My Lai wasn’t an isolated incident. Herr’s cynicism about the big dogs made him a beacon. He even dubbed high command “The Mission”—ironically marrying military goals with so-called spiritual ones. In Vietnam, Herr tells us, whether we came feigning or intending rescue or not, we still wound up invaders. So Herr’s über-trippy view actually came off as “truer” than the other war noises we’d heard; but his was that new truth—it came with quotes around it. I sometimes wonder if Dispatches doesn’t mark that place in history when subjective truth began its rise to supplant historical and religious certainties—a trend that helped the current craze for memoir along. Coincidence doesn’t imply causality, but still. However a warped memory might have marred Herr’s unique take on that bloody patch of history, we trusted him more than we did officialdom, perhaps because he wrote like he was on acid half the time. He lacked the steely piety of official government dispatches. And his passionate sense of his own moral culpability— even for just watching the war—affirmed our national feelings of shame about the conflict. Herr claims much of Dispatches is mashed-up characters and unchecked facts. (It was published as fiction in France.) Despite that,

• From The Art of Memoir

  identify with. Yet we wander its pages with wonder and feel bereft as any exile at its end. Recently, from sheer frustration, I started combing it for what isn’t there, which—it surprised me to find—is the kind of deep link with an author that hooks me into most other great memoirs. Speak, Memory lacks long-run, personally dramatic stories of the type we associate with normal plots. There’s no dialogue; the occasional instant or anecdote, but very few scenes. You’re intimate with the writer’s thought processes without feeling he has anything in common with the likes of you. The writing is intoxicating and irresistible—but you can’t find your experience anywhere in it. His extreme refinement frees him from the humdrum where most of us live. Novelist Jenny Offill refers to him as “an art monster”: “Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. [His wife] licked his stamps for him.” The creature you find in Speak, Memory is rare enough to be zoo-worthy. He’s not just smarter but somehow more effete than most of us without seeming put on. Resenting him for it would be like resenting a gazelle for her grace. He doesn’t sound prissy painting himself as a cultivated synesthete who can hear colors and see music, nor vain talking as a polyglot who translates his own work back and forth into many languages. He’s just your standard virtuoso aristocrat from a gilded age. Which is the miracle of his talent. He has shaped the book to highlight his own magnificent way of viewing the world, a viewpoint that so eats your head that you never really leave his very oddly bejeweled skull, and you value things in the book’s context as he does, never missing what you otherwise adore in another kind of writer. In fact, if you could list some of the information Nabokov reports about his relationships apart from his magical atmosphere, you’d find he fails to meet many measures we use for being a halfway decent person. If we weren’t so in love with him, we might cringe from him. His aristocratic social mores and emotional quirks—absent the beguiling atmosphere he woos us into—could come off as foppish at best or malignantly misanthropic at worst.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  When she spoke, they listened. It was her voice, I think, which snared them - those low, musical tones, which had once lured me from my random midnight wanderings into the heart of her own dark world. Again and again I heard arguments crumble at a cry or a murmur from Diana’s throat; again and again the scattered conversations of a crowded room would falter and die, as one speaker after another surrendered the slender threads of some anecdote or fancy to catch at the more compelling cadences of hers. Her boldness was contagious. Women came to her, and grew giddy. She was like a singer, shivering glasses. She was like a cancer, she was like a mould. She was like the hero of one of her own gross romances - you might set her in a chamber with a governess and a nun, and in an hour they would have torn out their own hair, to fashion a whip. I sound weary of her. I was not weary of her then. How could I have been? We were a perfect kind of double act. She was lewd, she was daring - but who made that daring visible? Who could testify to the passion of her; to the sympathetic power of her; to the rare, enchanted atmosphere of her house in Felicity Place, where ordinary ways and rules seemed all suspended, and wanton riot reigned? Who, but I? I was proof of all her pleasures. I was the stain left by her lust. She must keep me, or lose everything. And I must keep her, or have nothing. I could not imagine a life beyond her shaping. She had awakened particular appetites in me; and where else, I thought, but with Diana, in the company of Sapphists - where else would those queer hungers be assuaged? I have spoken of the peculiarly timeless quality of my new life, of my removal from the ordinary workings of the hours, the days and the weeks. Diana and I often made love until dawn, and ate breakfast at nightfall; or else, we woke at the regular time, but stayed abed with the drapes close-drawn, and took our lunch by candle-light. Once we rang for Blake, and she came in her night-gown: it was half-past three, we had woken her from her bed.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I met her once and saw her smile. Sometimes I think about how tall she was, her broad shoulders, that jaw, the way her cheeks folded into her smile, those focused skeptical eyes. The lack of social niceties, that laugh. Octavia Butler was crushable. I truly think that we could have had a very dynamic sexual connection if I had been bold enough to flirt with her when I met her. I don’t know her sexuality (although there are others who have argued every position vehemently with me), but I know that Octavia Butler had a beautifully freaky mind and that she, like me, used masturbation to move through her creative blocks. Age, race, gender, species, time—nothing familiar could limit or otherwise dictate the kind of intimacy in which her characters could engage. Reading her work, which was offered up to me as dystopian writing, absolutely terrified me. But it also opened my young mind to a realm of aliveness and sexual adventure that I am still pursuing. I have a hypothesis that Octavia believed pleasure to be one of the most important strategies and activities for long-term survival. And that she knew how complicated it was to let pleasure be, to let it lead us. I even think she understood that the moral essence of the species was unveiled in these complications around what we desire and how we follow it or deny it. There are two levels at which I would like to examine the sensual realm of Octavia Butler. First, I want to examine the actual sexy encounters she wrote, to examine them with focus and rigid … rigor. Second, I examine the role that sex, pleasure, and relationship play in each of her projections of human systems in the future. First, let me list a few things that we encounter in Octavia’s work: Interspecies sex. Some might call it bestiality, but that’s only if you assume aliens are beasts. Octavia had Wild Seed’s shapeshifting Anyanwu in a full-out love affair with a dolphin, as a dolphin! Anyanwu also spent time as a shark, eagle, leopard, and wolf.45 And then when we meet the Oankali in Butler’s Xenogenesis series, all mating has to happen through their third gender ooloi, who have big elephant-trunk-like “sensory tentacles.” In the Patternist series, the Clayarks are a hybrid species with animalistic qualities that some humans still desire and mate with. Threesomes. The only way to get down with the aforementioned Oankali! It’s gonna be you, me, and our ooloi friend here. Shapeshifting/Body Snatching/Gender Switching Sex. Yeah, so Octavia taught me that if you can shapeshift into any form, including other sexes, and your boo-nemy can snatch whatever bodies are out there, then y’all can experience some gender-switching sex.