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 Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Rodin was forty years of age, dark-haired, with shaggy eye-brows, a sparkling bright eye; there was about him what bespoke strength and health but, at the same time, libertinage. In wealth he was risen far above his native station, possessing from ten to twelve thousand pounds a year; owing to which, if Rodin practiced his surgical art, it was not out of necessity, but out of taste; he had a very attractive house in Saint-Marcel which, since the death of his wife two years previously, he shared with two girls, who were his servants, and with another, who was his own daughter. This young person, Rosalie by name, had just reached her fourteenth year; in her were gathered all the charms most capable of exciting admiration: the figure of a nymph, an oval face, clear, lovely, extraordinarily animated, delicate pretty features, very piquant as well, the prettiest mouth possible, very large dark eyes, soulful and full of feeling, chestnut-brown hair falling to below her waist, skin of an incredible whiteness... aglow, smooth, already the most beautiful throat in all the world, and, furthermore, wit, vivacity, and one of the most beautiful souls Nature has yet created. With respect to the companions with whom I was to serve in this household, they were two peasant girls: one of them was a governess, the other the cook. She who held the first post could have been twenty-five, the other eighteen or twenty, and both were extremely attractive; their looks suggested a deliberate choice, and this in turn caused the birth of some suspicions as to why Rodin was pleased to accommodate me. What need has he of a third woman ? I asked myself, and why does he wish them all to be pretty? Assuredly, I continued, there is something in all this that little conforms with the regular manners from which I wish never to stray; we'll see. In consequence, I besought Monsieur Rodin to allow me to extend my convalescence at his home for yet another week, declaring that, at the end of this time, he would have my reply to what he had very kindly proposed. I profited from this interval by attaching myself more closely to Rosalie, determined to establish myself in her father's house only if there should prove to be nothing about it whence I might be obliged to take umbrage. With these designs, I cast appraising glances in every direction, and, on the following day, I noticed that this man enjoyed an arrangement which straightway provoked in me furious doubts concerning his behavior.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  As there is no remedy to sexual politics in marriage, Lucy very logically doesn’t marry. But it is also impossible for a Victorian novel to recommend a woman not marry. So Paul suffers a quiet sea burial. Had Brontë’s heroine “adjusted” herself to society, compromised, and gone under, we should never have heard from her. Had Bronte herself not grown up in a house of half-mad sisters with a domestic tyrant for father, no “prospects,” as marital security was referred to, and with only the confines of governessing and celibacy staring at her from the future, her chief release the group fantasy of “Angria,” that collective dream these strange siblings played all their lives, composing stories about a never-never land where women could rule, exercise power, govern the state, declare night and day, death and life-then we would never have heard from Charlotte either.188 Had that been the case, we might never have known what a resurrected soul wished to tell upon emerging from several millennia of subordination. Literary criticism of the Brontës has been a long game of masculine prejudice wherein the player either proves they can’t write and are hopeless primitives, whereupon the critic sets himself up like a schoolmaster to edit their stuff and point out where they went wrong, or converts them into case histories from the wilds. occasionally prefacing his moves with a few pseudo-sympathetic remarks about the windy house On the moors, or old maidhood, following with an attack on every truth the novels contain, waged by anxious pedants who fear Charlotte might “castrate” them or Emily “unman” them with her passion. There is bitterness and anger in Villette—and rightly so. One finds a good deal of it in Richard Wright’s Black Boy, too. To label it neurotic is to mistake symptom for cause in the hope of protecting oneself from what could be upsetting. What should surprise us is not Lucy’s wry annoyance, but her affection and compassion-even her wit. Villette is one of the wittier novels in English and one of the rare witty books in an age which specialized in sentimental comedy. What is most satisfying of all is the astonishing degree of consciousness one finds in the work, the justice of its analysis, the fairness of its observations, the generous degree of self-criticism. Although occasionally flawed with mawkish nonsense (there is a creditable amount of Victorian syrup in Villette), it is nevertheless one of the most interesting books of the period and, as an expression of revolutionary sensibility, a work of some importance.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Then a neck exquisitely turned, graved behind and on the sides with fais hair, playing freely in natural ringlets, connected his head to a body of the most perfect form, and of the most vigorous contexture, in which all the strength of manhood was concealed, and softened to appearance by the delicacy of his complexion, the smoothness of his skin, and the plumpness of his flesh. The platform of his snow white bosom, that was laid out in a manly proportion, presented, on the vermilion summit of each pap, the idea of a rose about to blow. Nor did his shirt hinder me from observing the symmetry of his limbs, that exactness of shape, in the fall of it towards the loins, where the waist ends and the rounding swell of the hips commences; where the skin, sleek, smooth, and dazzling white, burnishes on; the stretch-over firm, plump, ripe flesh, that crimped’ and ran into dimples at the least pressure, or that the touch could not rest upon, but slid over on the surface of the most polished ivory. His thighs, finely fashioned, and with a florid glossy roundness, gradually tapering away to the knees, seemed pillars worthy to support that beauteous frame at the bottom of which I could not, without some remains of terror, some tender emotions too, fix my eyes on that terrible machine, which had, not long before, with such fury broke into, torn, and almost ruined those soft, tender parts of mine, that had not yet done smarting with the effects of its rage; but behold it now! crest fallen, reclining its half-caped vermilion head over one of his thighs, quiet, pliant, and to all appearances incapable of the mischiefs and cruelty it had committed.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  But having gone this far, having plunged this low, Genet studies the values of those who live above him so that he may further desecrate them. In doing so he acquires the pride of the utterly abject, a condition which turns out to be next door to saintliness. As a young beggar and whore in the Barrio Chino of Barcelona, Genet attained this sanctity and the unshakable self-respect of one who has truly nothing more to lose. Out of this sprang a wily urge to live. And for those who continue in downright ignominy, the will to live may very plausibly become the will to triumph. This whole cast of thought is generously supported by the French tradition wherein martyrdom is still the highest boon open to the religious imagination. In Catholic Europe sainthood remains, even among the renegades, the loftiest state of grace. That is why Divine, the hero/heroine of Our Lady of the Flowers, who is also Genet, is uncontestably a larger spirit than Darling, Gorgui, Armand, Stilitano, and all the other pimps. Not only has she greater courage, humor, imagination, and sensibility than the male oppressors before whom she prostrates herself; she alone has a soul. She has suffered, while they have not, because the consciousness required for suffering is inaccessible to them. And in Divine’s mortification, both in the flesh and in the spirit, lies the victory of the saint. Thus Genet’s two great novels, Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journal, are tales of an odium converted to grandeur. But together with the rest of his prose fiction they also constitute a painstaking exegesis of the barbarian vassalage of the sexual orders, the power structure of “masculine” and “feminine” as revealed by a homosexual, criminal world that mimics with brutal frankness the bourgeois heterosexual society. In this way the explication of the homosexual code becomes a satire on the heterosexual one. By virtue of their earnestness, Genet’s community of pimps and fairies call into ridicule the behavior they so fervently imitate: As for slang Divine did not use it, any more than did her cronies the other Nellys… Slang was for men. It was the male tongue. Like the language of men among the Caribees, it became a secondary sexual attribute. It was like the colored plumage of male birds, like the multi-colored silk garments which are the prerogatives of the warriors of the tribe. It was a crest and spurs. Everyone could understand it, but the only ones who could speak it were the men who at birth received as a gift the gestures, the carriage of the hips, legs and arms, the eyes, the chest, with which one can speak it. One day at one of our bars, when Mimosa ventured the following words in the course of a sentence “…his screwy stories…” the men frowned. Someone said with a threat in his voice: “Broad acting tough.”38

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Henry Miller Certain writers are persistently misunderstood. Henry Miller is surely one of the major figures of American literature living today, yet academic pedantry still dismisses him as beneath scholarly attention. He is likely to be one of the most important influences on our contemporary writing, but official criticism perseveres in its scandalous and systematic neglect of his work.1 To exacerbate matters, Miller has come to represent the much acclaimed “sexual freedom” of the last few decades. One finds eloquent expression of this point of view in a glowing essay by Karl Shapiro: “Miller’s achievement is miraculous: he is screamingly funny without making fun of sex…accurate and poetic in the highest degree; there is not a smirk anywhere in his writings.2 Shapiro is confident that Miller can do more to expunge the “obscenities” of the national scene than a “full-scale social revolution.”3 Lawrence Durrell exclaims over “how nice it is for once to dispense with the puritans and with pagans,” since Miller’s books, unlike those of his contemporaries, are “not due to puritanical shock.”4 Shapiro assures us that Miller is “the first writer outside the Orient who has succeeded in writing as naturally about sex on a large scale as novelists ordinarily write about the dinner table or the battlefield.”5 Significant analogies. Comparing the Tropic of Cancer with Joyce’s Ulysses, Shapiro gives Miller the advantage, for while Joyce, warped by the constraints of his religious background, is prurient or “aphrodisiac,” Miller is “no aphrodisiac at all, because religious or so-called moral tension does not exist for him.”6 Shapiro is convinced that “Joyce actually prevents himself from experiencing the beauty of sex or lust, while Miller is freed at the outset to deal with the overpowering mysteries and glories of love and copulation.”7

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  She didn’t even tell our parents or grandmother or me before she left. She called Mom from St. Ignatius, Montana, on the Flathead Indian Reservation, and said, “Hey, Mom, I’m a married woman now. I want to have ten babies and live here forever and ever.” How weird is that? It’s almost romantic. And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel. Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her. And a little scared. [image "An illustration of a book cover of ‘The Stranger from Montana’ by an unknown author. An excerpt from the book is included." file=image_rsrc4SF.jpg] Well, a lot scared. She was trying to live out her dream. We should have all been delirious that she’d moved out of the basement. We’d been trying to get her out of there for years. Of course, my mother and father would have been happy if she’d just gotten a part-time job at the post office or trading post, and maybe just moved into an upstairs bedroom in our house. But I just kept thinking that my sister’s spirit hadn’t been killed. She hadn’t given up. This reservation had tried to suffocate her, had kept her trapped in a basement, and now she was out roaming the huge grassy fields of Montana. How cool! I felt inspired. Of course, my parents and grandmother were in shock. They thought my sister and I were going absolutely crazy. But I thought we were being warriors, you know? And a warrior isn’t afraid of confrontation. So I went to school the next day and walked right up to Gordy the Genius White Boy. “Gordy,” I said. “I need to talk to you.” “I don’t have time,” he said. “Mr. Orcutt and I have to debug some PCs. Don’t you hate PCs? They are sickly and fragile and vulnerable to viruses. PCs are like French people living during the bubonic plague.” Wow, and people thought I was a freak. “I much prefer Macs, don’t you?” he asked. “They’re so poetic.” This guy was in love with computers. I wondered if he was secretly writing a romance about a skinny, white boy genius who was having sex with a half-breed Apple computer. “Computers are computers,” I said. “One or the other, it’s all the same.” Gordy sighed. “So, Mr. Spirit,” he said. “Are you going to bore me with your tautologies all day or are you going to actually say something?” Tautologies? What the heck were tautologies? I couldn’t ask Gordy because then he’d know I was an illiterate Indian idiot. “You don’t know what a tautology is, do you?” he asked. “Yes, I do,” I said. “Really, I do. Completely, I do.” “You’re lying.” “No, I’m not.” “Yes, you are.” “How can you tell?” “Because your eyes dilated, your breathing rate increased a little bit, and you started to sweat.”

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The Woman’s Movement in America was officially inaugurated with the Seneca Falls convention of July 19 and 20, 1848. This meeting also grew out of abolition, for at the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, mere women, were excluded from the proceedings,24 a circumstance that threw them together and into the alliance which resulted in the Seneca Falls adventure. Lucretia Mott was a Nantucket Quaker whose house served as a station on the underground railroad and a founder of the first female Anti-Slave Society. She was some twenty years older than Stanton, whom she coached to become the leading intellectual in the American movement. The “Statement of Sentiments” composed at Seneca Falls began with a simple paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence. Seventy-five years after the American Revolution, women were daring to apply this document to themselves, extending its premises—the proposition of inalienable human rights and the legitimacy of government relying upon the consent of the governed-even, and at last to their own case. The reforms they advocated here and in the women’s rights conventions which began to spring up everywhere, were control of their earnings and the right to own property, access to education and divorce, the guardianship of their children, and most explosively, the demand for suffrage. Of the 250 women who met at Seneca Falls, only one, a nineteenyear-old seamstress named Charlotte Woodward, lived to vote for president in 1920.25 The Wesleyan chapel which saw the birth of a great national and international movement is now a gas station, marked only by a sign on the sidewalk. And yet, in the sense of formal politics, the first insurrectionary gathering of the revolution had taken place. Through a New York Herald Tribune account of a Woman’s Rights Convention at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, the news of practical political organization reached Harriet Taylor in London, who greeted the event with enthusiasm in the Westminster Review. But there were still no feminist societies formed in England until the sixties. Mill presented the first suffrage petition to Parliament in 1866 and published his Subjection of Women in 1869. The movement now had strong and growing roots in England. It was given a wider international character when Susan B. Anthony began the international feminist movement during a visit abroad in 1883. Carrie Chapman Catt gave much of her life to the international, and in the years of reaction after suffrage was won in America, an international woman’s movement continued to function through various organizations, its latest manifestation the United Nations Committee on the Status of Women. By 1920 the number of nations who had granted some form of civil rights and the franchise to women was 26; by 1964 it was 104. Though it continues to be largely ignored, a profound social change had come about, its seed sown in nineteenth-century England and America.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  As sex is war, war is sexual. Can one deny “the physical core of life”? The connection between sex and violence appears not only as metaphor, but seems to express a conviction about the nature of both phenomena. A superficial reading might convince one that Mailer’s brilliant anatomy of these two cancerous personalities is rendered without any traces of admiring or positive identification. But in the last chapters of the book a subtle shift takes place in the treatment of Croft; a curious effort is made to persuade the reader that he is not mad but heroic. The novel goes GI and spoils itself in cheap patriotism.17 Years later Mailer not only admitted that his ideas about violence had “changed 180 degrees” since his first work, but even confided that “beneath the ideology of The Naked and The Dead was an obsession with violence. The characters for whom I had the most secret admiration, like Croft,” he remarks nonchalantly “were violent people.”18 The ambiguity intrudes again in Barbary Shore, the quasi-political novel that followed, in which an undercurrent hostility continues to connect, even equate combat and cruelty with sexuality. In a book whose overt message is a shocked protest against the extermination camps of Nazi and Soviet, the brutality of our century, the hero and the novel’s moral arbiter recalls with gratification how, as a soldier in enemy territory, he “made love from the hip:” I never saw the girl. Above my head in magnification of myself the barrel of the machine gun pointed toward the trees…I went back to the hay and stretched out in a nervous half-sleep which consisted of love with artillery shells and sex of polished steel.19 Mailer’s chief quarrel with Nazi genocide turns upon a point of style; he disapproves of the technological nature of the gas chambers. Having promised Germany “the primitive secrets of her barbaric age,”20 having offered the thrill of a chance to “stomp on things and scream and shout and rip things up and kill,”21 Hitler paid off with nothing but the scientific tedium of gas.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  He was the one who made me a good basketball player. Remember, I was the sick kid. The weak kid. The kid with seizures. But Randy got me on the basketball court and assumed that I would be good. He absolutely believed that I was good. He had so much confidence in himself that it made me confident in myself. And so, because of Randy, I was a good basketball player overnight. It was magical. And he and I led our sixth-grade team to an undefeated season and the VFW championship. But we didn’t even really need the other players. I think Randy and I could have won that league playing two-on-five. In practice one day, Randy and I played our seven teammates in a short game and beat them 21–6. Some of those teammates are here. I bet you’re still mad about losing to a two-man team. Ha! Yeah, it’s good to laugh at funerals. It’s good to be happy and sad at the same time. But you all know Randy was a great athlete. I couldn’t believe how many trophies he’d won. The first time I went to his house, I had to pick up and study every trophy. He was great at everything. Football, baseball, track, wrestling, boxing. I didn’t even play any of those sports. And he was better at basketball. At first. And I hate to say this at Randy’s funeral, with him right there in his coffin, unable to talk trash back to me, but I eventually ended up being a better basketball player than he was. I think he knew it, too. But he never admitted it. Randy would never admit to something like that. We played against each other only twice. In eighth grade. When I was at Reardan and he was still at Wellpinit. Randy won that first game in Wellpinit, when Billy Shawn and Marty Andrews were the refs. They weren’t even real refs. They were high school kids. And they fouled me out in the third quarter. But back in Reardan, when we had real refs, we swamped Wellpinit. We won the game by thirty points. And I guarded Randy and held him to two points. It would have been zero points, but my own teammate tripped me on the last play of the game, and Randy broke free and got a layup. They’d lost the game by thirty points, but Randy still talked trash at me because he’d scored that last hoop. He talked trash about that for years. “Remember that time when I faked you out and you fell down and I drove for that layup?” he’d say. “I got tripped,” I’d say. “And that was your only basket of the game.” “I don’t remember that,” he’d say. “And we beat you by thirty.” “Don’t remember that, either.” Randy and I never stopped being competitive. But basketball wasn’t the best thing that we shared.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In Bethlehem he presided over a monastery till his death, built a hospital for all strangers except heretics, prosecuted his literary studies without cessation, wrote several commentaries, and finished his improved Latin version of the Bible—the noblest monument of his life—but entangled himself in violent literary controversies, not only with opponents of the church orthodoxy like Helvidius (against whom he had appeared before, in 384), Jovinian, Vigilantius, and Pelagius, but also with his long-tried friend Rufinus, and even with Augustine.365 Palladius says, his jealousy could tolerate no saint beside himself, and drove many pious monks away from Bethlehem. He complained of the crowds of monks whom his fame attracted to Bethlehem.366 The remains of the Roman nobility, too, ruined by the sack of Rome, fled to him for food and shelter. At the last his repose was disturbed by incursions of the barbarian Huns and the heretical Pelagians. He died in 419 or 420, of fever, at a great age. His remains were afterward brought to the Roman basilica of Maria Maggiore, but were exhibited also and superstitiously venerated in several copies in Florence, Prague, Clugny, Paris, and the Escurial.367 The Roman church has long since assigned him one of the first places among her standard teachers and canonical saints. Yet even some impartial Catholic historians venture to admit and disapprove his glaring inconsistencies and violent passions. The Protestant love of truth inclines to the judgment, that Jerome was indeed an accomplished and most serviceable scholar and a zealous enthusiast for all which his age counted holy, but lacking in calm self-control and proper depth of mind and character, and that he reflected, with the virtues, the failings also of his age and of the monastic system. It must be said to his credit, however, that with all his enthusiastic zeal and admiration for monasticism, he saw with a keen eye and exposed with unsparing hand the false monks and nuns, and painted in lively colors the dangers of melancholy, hypochondria, the hypocrisy and spiritual pride, to which the institution was exposed.368 § 42. St. Paula. Hieronymus: Epitaphium Paulae matris, ad Eustochium virginem, Ep. cviii. (ed. Vallarsi, Opera, tom. i. p. 684 sqq.; ed. Bened. Ep. lxxxvi). Also the Acta Sanctorum, and Butler’s Lives of Saints, sub Jan. 26. Of Jerome’s many female disciples, the most distinguished is St. Paula, the model of a Roman Catholic nun. With his accustomed extravagance, he opens his eulogy after her death, in. 404, with these words: "If all the members of my body were turned into tongues, and all my joints were to utter human voices, I should be unable to say anything worthy of the holy and venerable Paula."

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  As a high school English teacher, I find that one of my most critical challenges is selecting reading material that both captivates and instructs my students. I’m always reminding myself that most of my students are not future English teachers; they won’t all adore parsing literature because it’s a fun puzzle, or simply love reading for reading’s sake. Many of them view English class as an exercise in endurance—and for some, survival. Assigned books are so often the lima beans of the high school experience, to be suffered or dodged. Sometimes, however, a novel comes along that flaunts the label “selected text.” It instructs students while captivating them. They cannot put it down. They come to class each morning ready to talk about the “crazy stuff” that happened in the book last night. They read too fast and finish before the due date. Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is this book, the unicorn of assigned reading: a book every kid wants to read. Why? I asked a few students who recently read The Diary, as we call it. “It’s relatable to kids and stuff they’ve gone through.” “It’s funny, so it keeps you reading. Even the sad parts are funny.” “It gives us a chance to talk about stereotypes.” “It was so good—this is the only book I’ve ever read.” That final comment is a reprise of a line I hear every year, sometimes more than once per year. You may wonder, how do students make it to high school without ever having read a book? Despite the best intentions and efforts of all these students’ elementary, middle, and high school teachers, librarians, parents, and others, these students have never found a love for reading. They’ve not felt the connection to a character that compelled them to reach for that book again. They haven’t found a story line that warrants giving up outside time, or social time, or video-game time for reading time. The Diary, by stark contrast, does all of that and more: It opens an avenue for students to talk to each other about literature and about heavy themes handled with a light touch. The savvy teacher elicits and unpacks these themes, never skimming over the crucial features of the text that allow readers to move past the surface comedy and spectatorship that propel us through the plot. These themes—themes of adolescence, racism, loss, family, redemption, friendship, and prejudice—touch nearly every aspect of this text. The book opens up an American experience with nuance, humanity, and honesty, one about American Indians, who are nearly always invisible in contemporary American culture.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Her mouth, however, was her best feature; not only was it perfect in its outline, but her almost pouting lips were so cherry-like, sappy, and luscious, that you longed to taste them. Such a mouth must have played the deuce with the men of strong desires who looked upon it—nay, it must have acted like a love-philtre, awakening the eager fire of lust even in the most sluggish hearts. In fact, few were the trousers that did not swell out in my mother's presence, notwithstanding all their owner's efforts not to shew the tattoo which was being beaten within them; and this, I should think, is the finest compliment that can be paid to a woman's beauty, for it is a natural not a maudlin one. "Her manners, however, had that repose, and her gait that calmness, which not only stamp the caste of Vere de Vere but which characterize an Italian peasant and a French grande dame, though never met with in the German aristocracy. She seemed born to reign as a queen of drawing-rooms, and therefore accepted as her due, and without the slightest show of pleasure, not only all the flattering articles of the fashionable papers, but also the respectful homage of a host of distant admirers, not one of whom would have dared to attempt a flirtation with her. To everybody she was like Juno, an irreproachable woman who might have been either a volcano or an iceberg." "And may I ask what she was?" "A lady who received and paid innumerable visits, and who seemed always to preside everywhere—at the dinner-parties she gave, and also at those she accepted,—therefore the paragon of a lady patroness. A shopkeeper once observed, 'It is a red-letter day when Madame Des Grieux stops before our windows, for she not only attracts the gentlemen's attention, but also that of the ladies, who often buy what has caught her artistic eye.' "She had, besides, that excellent thing in woman:— ⁠'Her voice was ever soft, Gentle and low;' for I think I could get accustomed to a plain-featured wife, but not to one whose voice is shrill, harsh, and piercing." "They say that you looked very much like her." "Do they? Anyhow, I hope that you do not wish me to praise my mother like Lamartine did, and then to add modestly, 'I am after her own image.'" "But how is it that having become a widow so young, she did not marry again? Rich and handsome as she was, she must have had as many suitors as Penelope herself." "Some day or other I will tell you her life, and then you will understand why she preferred her liberty to the ties of matrimony." "She was fond of you, was she not?"

• From My People (2022)

  I had heard of Boko Haram. But the invitation came with a brief five-year history of the university and its goals: arming future leaders of Nigeria with the kind of education that will enable them to contribute to the development of the country. And it was the belief of the founder, Atiku Abubakar, a wealthy Nigerian who grew up in Yola, that the best preparation for achieving those goals was a Western-style education that grounded students in the liberal arts. He has explained that his commitment to that kind of education arose from his own education under the British system at the dawn of Nigerian independence, when he had British teachers who always said, “Repeat after me,” and slapped his hand when he didn’t. Later he came in contact with U.S. Peace Corps teachers who asked his opinion and showed him the value of critical thinking. (The Peace Corps honored him in 2011 for starting AUN. The plaque says that he has done more than any other businessman to support higher education. He also just endowed a Peace Corps speakers series.) The university board—whose members come from the United States, Nigeria, and other countries—helps guide the institution and its three schools: Arts and Sciences, Business and Entrepreneurship, and Information Technology & Communications. In its five years of existence, AUN has graduated some 1,250 students from around the continent, most having been on some degree of financial aid, since many are from poor families and are the first in their families to go to college. Those under age thirty who graduate must do a year of community service. The university has also launched other projects, including free secondary education and information technology instruction, as well as programs that teach teenagers how to farm—in order to stress the importance of preserving the environment—and teach local people how to recycle waste into useful economy bricks for building walls. They are literally building a new Nigeria. A new initiative involves a peace council aimed at fostering peace and harmony in the strife-torn region. Margee Ensign, a diminutive, highly energetic American from California who is the president of AUN, sent me a few statements from this year’s graduating class so that I could get some sense of the caliber of her students. Malabo Williams wrote: At AUN, I learned to believe in myself and the power of the idea. The endless readings and discussions with professors and students in class have ensured me that I can make my own story. Chidi Francis Ahanonu wrote: I remember my first day here, I was a shy person who could not open up to people and let my voice be heard. I could not stand in front of the crowd and give a speech or a presentation. However, as I progressed, I learned how to efficiently and effectively get my message across in my presentation, in my services to the community, and in every leadership capacity I find myself. What Manifah K.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Mrs. Cole, by the way, could not have given me a greater mark of her regard than in managing for me the choice of this young gentleman for my master of the ceremonies: for, independent of his noble birth and the great fortune he was heir to, his person was even uncommonly pleasing, well shaped and tall; his face marked with the small-pox, but no more than what added a grace of more manliness to features rather turned to softness and delicacy, was marvellously enlivened by eyes which were of the clearest sparkling black; in short he was one whom any woman would, in the familiar style, ready call a very pretty fellow. I was now handed by him to the cockpit of our match, where, as I was dressed in nothing but a white morning gown, he vouchsafed to play the male Abigail on this occasion, and spared me the confusion that would have attended the forwardness of undressing myself: my gown then was loosen’d in a trice, and I divested of it; my stays next offered an obstacle which readily gave way, Louisa very readily furnished a pair of scissors to cut the lace; off went that shell and dropping my uppercoat, I was reduced to my under one and my shift, the open bosom of which gave the hands and eyes all the liberty they could wish. Here I imagined the stripping was to stop, but I reckon short; my spark, at the desire of the rest, tenderly begged, that I would not suffer the small remains of a covering to rob them of a full view of my whole person; and for me, who was too flexibly obsequious to dispute any point with them, and who considered the little more that remained as very immaterial, I readily assented to whatever he pleased-In an instant, then, my under petticoat was untied and at my feet, and my shift drawn over my head, so that my cap, slightly fastened, came off with it, and brought all my hair down (of which, be it again remembered without vanity, that I had a very fine head) in loose disorderly ringlets, over my neck and shoulders, to the no unfavourable set-off of my skin.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  SA: So I wrote the book, and immediately I made him a cartoonist, in the first paragraph, in the first draft, on the first hour of writing, I made him a cartoonist. And part of it was, while working on my movie The Business of Fancydancing, I became good friends with one of the crew members who was friends with Ellen Forney, who ended up doing the art. I made him a cartoonist and I thought, of course Ellen Forney—this thirtysomething alternative bisexual woman from Philadelphia—can channel a fifteen-year-old reservation Indian boy. Of course, of course, of course. And I think even now, sometimes I hear from Natives wondering why I didn’t choose a Native: “Why didn’t you choose a Native artist? Why didn’t you choose a Native artist?” I wasn’t that conscious of the decision then, but looking back I realize that at the beginning of the creative process, if it had been a Native artist, they would have had too many opinions. [Laughs] They would have! They would have had their own ideas. JW: Because Ellen’s illustrations are so perfect, but they come so much out of the text. It’s like watching a great actor inhabit a role. SA: That’s what happened. The first third I dictated to her. I dictated in the book, I dictated over the phone, I dictated in person. So I was really in charge of all the illustrations at the beginning. And then it slowly became collaborative. And then by the end, the last third of the illustrations, she was coming up with her own ideas. She came to inhabit that character from an outside perspective, so I think my insider perspective and her outsider perspective combined to create this original character. JW: And in the end, Arnold talks again a little bit about the different tribes we can belong to. By the end, and having met Ellen, she— SA: She belongs to a thousand tribes at once. JW: She does! SA: I had never even thought about it that way—my collaboration with a white person, with a white woman, echoing the collaboration of Junior inside the novel. It never even occurred to me, Jess. JW: Yes, it did. SA: No, it never did. It never did. It never even occurred that my artistic collaboration with Ellen Forney mirrored Junior’s collaboration and introduction to the white world through the white kids in Reardan. JW: Another question I know you’ve gotten over the last ten years is about the movie. And whether there’ll be one.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Opposite me by the massive Renaissance fireplace sat Venus; she was not a casual woman of the half- world, who under this pseudonym wages war against the enemy sex, like Mademoiselle Cleopatra, but the real, true goddess of love. She sat in an armchair and had kindled a crackling fire, whose reflection ran in red flames over her pale face with its white eyes, and from time to time over her feet when she sought to warm them. Her head was wonderful in spite of the dead stony eyes; it was all I could see of her. She had wrapped her marble-like body in a huge fur, and rolled herself up trembling like a cat. “I don’t understand it,” I exclaimed, “It isn’t really cold any longer. For two weeks past we have had perfect spring weather. You must be nervous.” “Much obliged for your spring,” she replied with a low stony voice, and immediately afterwards sneezed divinely, twice in succession. “I really can’t stand it here much longer, and I am beginning to understand—” “What, dear lady?” “I am beginning to believe the unbelievable and to understand the un-understandable. All of a sudden I understand the Germanic virtue of woman, and German philosophy, and I am no longer surprised that you of the North do not know how to love, haven’t even an idea of what love is.” “But, madame,” I replied flaring up, “I surely haven’t given you any reason.” “Oh, you—” The divinity sneezed for the third time, and shrugged her shoulders with inimitable grace. “That’s why I have always been nice to you, and even come to see you now and then, although I catch a cold every time, in spite of all my furs. Do you remember the first time we met?” “How could I forget it,” I said. “You wore your abundant hair in brown curls, and you had brown eyes and a red mouth, but I recognized you immediately by the outline of your face and its marble-like pallor—you always wore a violet-blue velvet jacket edged with squirrel-skin.” “You were really in love with the costume, and awfully docile.” “You have taught me what love is.

• From My People (2022)

  In one form or another, it has nearly always been black nationalism—from the West Indian brand of Marcus Garvey and his followers to the more militant brand of Charles (Morris) 37X Kenyatta, The Corner’s chief present-day occupant, who is the spokesman for Harlem’s Mau Mau Society. A street-corner speaker’s identity can usually be determined by the articles with which he surrounds himself. The standard equipment for any Harlem street-corner speaker is a stepladder or a soapbox (or, on very special occasions, a wooden platform), when he isn’t standing on a car hood; a flag or two (the Garveyites’ was red, black, and green, and Kenyatta’s is orange, black, and green); an assortment of placards; and a collection plate, bucket, or hat. Some of the speakers, including Kenyatta, do not take up a collection, on the ground that (in Kenyatta’s words) “money makes a man sing a different song.” In the old days, Garvey, before he was sent to prison (and later deported to Jamaica), established a spiritual legacy. The Amsterdam News , Harlem’s durable weekly newspaper, commented in 1927, “In a world where black is despised, he taught them that black is beautiful. He taught them to admire and praise black things and black people. . . . They rallied to him because he heard and responded to the heartbeat of his race.” In Garvey’s absence, his followers extended both his word and his myth. The West Indians, who had come from societies in which class distinctions were more important than color, were hostile to the American Negroes, because—or so it is sometimes said—they could not understand how a black man allowed hatred based on color to keep him down. In exhorting their American listeners to abandon their docility, the West Indians who took to The Corner sometimes sounded a lot like the West Indian Ras the Exhorter (later Ras the Destroyer) in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man . At one such rally, Ras could be heard for miles around shouting, “We gine chase ’em out! Out!” To which a hearty voice from the crowd responded, “Tell ’em about it, Ras, mahn!” One day recently, as we were waiting on The Corner, with a number of other people, for Kenyatta to appear, we got into conversation with a slender West Indian in his sixties named James Thornhill, who used to speak on The Corner in the twenties and thirties but now mostly listens. We asked him how long he had lived in Harlem. Thornhill took us by the arm and walked with us a few steps away from the gathering. He told us that as a youth he had been a follower and bodyguard of Garvey’s. (Nearly everyone who speaks on The Corner has a small retinue, which stands on each side of his perch and surveys the crowd.) “I left the Virgin Islands to become a seaman,” Thornhill went on, in a voice that still had a slight lilt in it.

• From My People (2022)

  Mandela was forced to dig in a lime quarry, day in and day out, without protection for his eyes from the sun and dust, and suffered such lasting damage to them that, even after his release, he could not abide the flashing lights from journalists’ cameras. In time, he also developed tuberculosis, which made him vulnerable to problems with his lungs that continued until his death. After eighteen years, he was moved, along with Walter Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba, and Andrew Mlangeni, to Pollsmoor Prison, near Cape Town, which is where he was when I first went to South Africa, in 1985, when the country was in yet another state of emergency. Mandela, I had been told, busied himself with a garden he had planted. I stood on a nearby hillside and tried in vain to catch a glimpse of it or of him, but I had been followed by security police and so couldn’t linger long. I found that children in every black township knew his name, and not only his. One day, walking up to a small group of teenagers dancing in a circle and singing in Zulu, I asked what the words meant, and they told me breathlessly, “We want Mandela to be released, and Walter Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, Govan Mbeki, and all the other political prisoners.” Mandela’s marriage to the movement had produced children like these. But his daughter Zindzi was only eighteen months old when her father was sent to prison, and, along with her mother and sister, Zenani, endured night raids from security forces, along with banishment to a remote town. In 1985, young Zindzi stood before a crowd of thousands at Jabulani Stadium, in Soweto, and read a letter from her father that had been smuggled out of prison, his first public statement in twenty-one years. She began, “My father says . . .” and went on to read his refusal of an offer of conditional release that involved renouncing violence. It ended with the resounding words “Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts. . . . Your freedom and mine cannot be separated. I will return.” The speech invigorated the movement. But in time, and on his own, Mandela began discussions with the apartheid regime about how to bring about a peaceful transition. Five years and a day later, on February 11, 1990, to the surprise of even his comrades, both inside and outside the country, Mandela was released. He was seventy-one. He had been in prison for twenty-seven years. In the ensuing months, before he actually became president of the country, he spent time not only embracing the children of the movement but extending an olive branch to the whites who had never reached out to them or to him. He seemed to many to go out of his way to reassure whites that he believed in the words he had long ago spoken—that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.

• From My People (2022)

  Smith-Kearse said that her determination and that of the others like her was no doubt rooted in the intense race consciousness of the era in which she was born—a time that was characterized, she said, by mounting racial oppression and white resistance to black advancement. “Our parents knew the history of race,” she explained. “The denials. The struggles. And we didn’t hear anything else from the time we were born but get yourself ready to serve the race.” Indeed, Dr. Agnes Griffin, who was the only black woman in the 1926 class at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (there were eight in the class of 1977), said she never felt particularly “determined or strong-willed,” but was “just doing what comes naturally.” Retirement does not seem to be one of those things that come naturally to Dr. Griffin. One day last week, after she had taken care of three emergencies, which had extended her day by two hours, she said that she worked only four and a half days a week and was “thinking about retiring just a little more.” But she is concerned about her patients who, she said, “just keep coming back from all over New York.” Dr. S. Evelyn Lewis (Howard, class of ’27) is enjoying her retirement—traveling and living comfortably—although she said that few, if any of the doctors got rich from their practices. “It was two dollars in and three dollars out,” said the seventy-six-year-old physician, who practiced mostly in Brooklyn. “You might get twenty-five dollars for a delivery, but you don’t get rich that way.” Having watched the number of black women doctors grow—although neither she nor the others are satisfied that they have grown nearly enough—Dr. Lewis said she was “really surprised and almost overcome” that so many turned out for the luncheon to honor them. At the same time, when asked how she felt about being such an inspiration to so many, she said: “I see it as part of the service. “I am determined to keep fighting, not with fists, but with brains and dignity.” Civil Rights Pioneer Ruby Bridges on Activism in the Modern EraPBS NewsHour JANUARY 14, 2021 Judy Woodruff: Finally tonight, we turn to civil rights activist Ruby Bridges, who writes her own story in a new children’s book, hoping adult ears will listen too in these fractured times. Telling her story is special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who followed in Bridges’ footsteps when, sixty years ago this past weekend, Charlayne, along with Hamilton Holmes, desegregated the University of Georgia. This is part of our Race Matters Solutions series and our arts and culture series, Canvas. President Barack Obama: If it hadn’t been for you guys, I might not be here, and we wouldn’t be looking at this together. Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Ruby Bridges’ name is synonymous with civil rights trailblazing, immortalized in this Norman Rockwell painting entitled The Problem We All Live With .

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

  AN AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION NOTABLE BOOK Rave reviews for Mary Karr and The Liars’ Club “This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a back-up opinion…it’s like finding Beethoven in Hoboken. To have a poet’s precision of language and a poet’s insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, ugliest places in America is an astonishing event.” —Molly Ivins, The Nation “9mm humor, gothic wit and a stunning clarity of memory within a poet’s vision…. Karr’s unerring scrutiny of her childhood delivers a story confoundingly real.” — The Boston Sunday Globe “Overflows with sparkling wit and humor…Truth beats powerfully at the heart of this dazzling memoir.” — San Francisco Chronicle “Elegiac and searching…her toughness of spirit, her poetry, her language, her very voice are the agents of rebirth on this difficult, hard-earned journey.” — The New York Times Book Review “A dazzling, devastating memoir.… She paints an unsparing portrait of her struggle through a fractured childhood. Recounting one apocalyptic event after another, Karr’s voice never falters or rings false.” — Vogue “Bold, blunt, and cinematic…nothing short of superb.” — Entertainment Weekly “Superb… unflinching and hilarious. The Liars’ Club has that smack-you-in-the-face freshness that marks books that endure.” — Houston Chronicle “A brave, brilliant offering to the world” — Word “An astonishing memoir of a ferociously loving and dysfunctional family…Karr uses the rich cadence of the region and poetic images to shape her wrenching story.” — People “From painful matters, Mary Karr has fashioned a book of great warmth and humor, honest to the bone. The Liars’ Club is the vivid recollection of a childhood no one would have chosen, but such is the ferocity of Karr’s love for her family, and the gritty eloquence of her voice, that we enter her world with pleasure and leave it with regret.” —Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life “ The Liars’ Club shimmers with great truths, surely hard-won and well worth knowing. Mary Karr has made a fearless, poignant and often hilarious foray into the crazy darkness of an American childhood, and brought back a brilliant memoir of innocence and violence, loss and hope. This is a book of genuine humanity.” —Bradford Morrow, author of Trinity Fields “ The Liars’ Club promises to catapult Karr to the exalted level of New American Voice. From the fabric of a troubled and traumatic childhood, she has crafted a tale that resonates with the universal uncertainty of childhood…Her poetic touch illuminates a thousand sentences. Karr has drawn black gold from the [Texan] mud.” — Texas Monthly “Roll over in the pure luxury of a good book, sucking this story up through the straw of clean-to-the-bone writing. Karr’s is a childhood remembered without sentimentality, written with a songwriter’s ear for cadence, dialogue, place and time.