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 The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  I had read a lot about the fashions and frivolity of Paris. These were in evidence in every street, but the churches stood noticeably apart from these scenes. A man would forget the outside noise and bustle as soon as he entered one of these churches. His manner would change, he would behave with dignity and reverence as he passed someone kneeling before the image of the Virgin. The feeling I had then has since been growing on me, that all this kneeling and prayer could not be mere superstition; the devout souls kneeling before the Virgin could not be worshipping mere marble. They were fired with genuine devotion and they worshipped not stone, but the divinity of which it was symbolic. I have an impression that I felt then that by this worship they were not detracting from, but increasing, the glory of God. I must say a word about the Eiffel Tower. I do not know what purpose it serves today. But I then heard it greatly disparaged as well as praised. I remember that Tolstoy was the chief among those who disparaged it. He said that the Eiffel Tower was a monument of man’s folly, not of his wisdom. Tobacco, he argued, was the worst of all intoxicants, inasmuch as a man addicted to it was tempted to commit crimes which a drunkard never dared to do; liquor made a man mad, but tobacco clouded his intellect and made him build castles in the air. The Eiffel Tower was one of the creations of a man under such influence. There is no art about the Eiffel Tower. In no way can it be said to have contributed to the real beauty of the Exhibition. Men flocked to see it and ascended it as it was a novelty and of unique dimensions. It was the toy of the Exhibition. So long as we are children we are attracted by toys, and the Tower was a good demonstration of the fact that we are all children attracted by trinkets. That may be claimed to be the purpose served by the Eiffel Tower. 26‘CALLED’-BUT THEN ?I have deferred saying anything up to now about the purpose for which I went to England, viz. being called to the bar. It is time to advert to it briefly.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  “Terrible? I’m awed by you! I’ve never heard of a woman with two husbands. Only men have done it until now.” I thought her adventurous leap beyond women’s traditional roles as remarkable as walking on the moon. She may not have been a great writer, but she was a pioneer, a breaker of boundaries, a daring explorer! I could see that she was pleased that I’d recognized her extraordinary courage, but she cautioned in a hushed voice, “You must never reveal it. People don’t understand.” “Well, I understand,” I said, pleased that I was uniquely qualified to do so. She had figured out how never to be abandoned, never caught short of a man. “It’s because your father abandoned you like mine did. By having two husbands you’re protected. You’ll always have a spare.” “That’s not it at all!” “It isn’t?” “No. I can’t leave either man because I know how it feels to be abandoned. I couldn’t inflict that on someone I love. I’m trapped by my compassion.” She looked completely sincere, but to me, an extra husband as an insurance policy remained a much more compelling reason. To emphasize her more altruistic perspective, Anaïs asked, “Don’t you recall the terrible pain when your father left? Could you cause someone that pain?” “No,” I said uncertainly. “But remember I told you I was glad my father left.” She was scrutinizing me. “If you cannot understand the cruelty it would wreak on Hugo and Rupert to learn of my double life, how can I trust you to keep my secret?” “Because I gave you my word.” I looked her in the eye. “Once I give my word I’ll never break it. It’s a matter of honor.” “At twenty-one, you haven’t had much opportunity to test your honor.” “Yes, I have. For some reason people have always told me secrets, and I always keep my word.” “What secret did someone ask you to keep?” She leaned into me conspiratorially. I thought about it. Which secret could I tell that wouldn’t harm anyone and might also impress her? “That my father was Jewish.” “Did someone ask you not to tell that?” “My father. I found out by accident when I was sixteen, when an aunt I’d never heard of came to see a play at the Coronet Theater and recognized my name on the program. She took me out to Canters Deli after the play and told me my father had broken off from his Jewish family and changed his last name. I was thrilled to find out I was half Jewish, because my best friend was, but when I talked with my father about it, he told me never to tell anyone.” “And now you have just told me.” She gave me a hard smile. She had caught me!

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  I may mention in passing an amusing incident in connection with this wedding. The Registrar of European marriages in the Transvaal could not register between black or coloured people. In the wedding in question, I acted as the best man. Not that we could not have got a European friend for the purpose, but Polak would not brook the suggestion. So we three went to the Registrar of marriages. How could he be sure that the parties to a marriage in which I acted as the best man would be whites? He proposed to postpone registration pending inquiries. The next day was a sunday. The day following was New Year’s Day, a public holiday. To postpone the date of a solemnly arranged wedding on such a flimsy pretext was more than one could put up with. I knew the Chief Magistrate, who was head of the Registration Department. So I appeared before him with the couple. He laughed and gave me a note to the Registrar and the marriage was duly registered. Up to now the Europeans living with us had been more or less known to me before. But now an English lady who was an utter stranger to us entered the family. I do not remember our ever having had a difference with the newly married couple, but even if Mrs. Polak and my wife had some unpleasant experience, they would have been no more than what happen in the best- regulated homogeneous familes. And let it be remembered that mine would be considered an essentially heterogeneous family, where people of all kinds and temperaments were freely admitted. When we come to think of it, the distinction between heterogeneous and homogeneous is discovered to be merely imaginary. We are all one family. I had better celebrate West’s wedding also in this chapter. At this stage of my life, my ideas about #brahmacharya# had not fully matured, and so I was interesting myself in getting all my bachelor friends married. When, in due course, West made a pilgrimage to Louth to see his parents, I advised him to return married if possible. Phoenix was the common home, and as we were all supposed to have become farmers, we were not afraid of marriage and its usual consequences. West returned with Mrs. West, a beautiful young lady from Leicester. She came of a family of shoemakers working in a Leicester factory. I have called her beautiful, because it was her moral beauty that at once attracted me. True beauty after all consists in purity of heart. With Mr. West had come his mother-in-law too. The old lady is still alive. She put us all to shame by her industry and her buoyant, cheerful nature. In the same way as I persuaded these European friends to marry, I encouraged the Indian friends to send for their families from home. Phoenix thus developed into a little village, half a dozen familes having come and settled and begun to increase there.

• From Controversies of the Early Christian History (2013)

  134 o The author of the letter provides graphic accounts of the tortures infl icted on those who refused to give up their beliefs. o Christian authors celebrated the martyrdoms of other Christians to emphasize the idea that the pleasures—and pains—of this world are nothing in comparison with the joys of heaven.  Persecutions came and went through the early centuries of Christianity. Radical, sporadic persecutions came to a climax with the emperor Decius, who declared an empire-wide persecution of Christians in 249.  Over the course of the next 60 years, various imperial decrees urged persecution at different times and in different places. In about the year 312, the emperor Constantine converted and made Christianity a legal religion, but it did not become the state religion of Rome until the end of the century, in the year 380, under the emperor Theodosius. The ultimate shift from being a persecuted, to a favored, to an of fi cial religion changed everything, not only for Christianity itself but for the history of Western civilization for centuries to come. Ehrman, After the New Testament. Eusebius, The History of the Church. 1. Summarize the leading reasons Christians were persecuted in the early centuries of the church. 2. How do you explain the widespread animosity against early Christians among their Jewish and pagan neighbors? Lecture 20: Was Christianity an Illegal Religion? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  41 than Paul’s (Hebrews and James), and that oppression and persecution occurred in other communities than Paul’s (Hebrews, 1 Peter, Revelation). o In terms of political posture, they reveal a spectrum of attitudes toward the Roman Empire, from positive accommodation (1 Peter) to passive resistance (Revelation). o In terms of religious inspiration, the narratives of the Gospels, the poetry of Revelation, the powerful rhetoric of Hebrews, and the prophetic voice of James alert the historian to the fact that the earliest decades of Christianity had more vibrant and creative minds than only Paul’s. The Gospel Narratives • Pride of place in the New Testament collection is undoubtedly held by the four Gospels, not so much because they are historically accurate in their accounts of Jesus as because they represent irreplaceable witnesses and interpretations of the church’s faith in Jesus, for both ancient and present-day Christians. • The Gospel narratives appeared some 40 to 50 years after the death of Jesus and represent crystallizations of earlier traditions handed down in assemblies. The canonical writings reveal a range of attitudes about the Roman Empire, from positive accommodation and praise in 1 Peter to passive resistance to imperial oppression in Revelation. © iStockphoto/Thinkstock. 42 Lecture 6: The Diversity of Early Christianity o The memories of Jesus’s statements and deeds were, in all likelihood, transmitted orally in specific social contexts (worship, teaching) in the form of individual units, called “pericopes.” o Stages of composition probably preceded the writing of full narratives. The Passion account (from Jesus’s arrest to his burial) probably reached set form first. o It is possible that a collection of Jesus’s sayings was also gathered. Scholars hypothesize a source, called Q, whose material is found in Matthew and Luke. • The best explanation for the appearance of written narratives after generations of oral tradition is a convergence of historical factors around the year 70. o The death of eyewitnesses (often by martyrdom), such as Peter, James, and John, meant that the oral tradition lost important controls. o The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in the Jewish War against Rome meant the loss of the Jerusalem community, as well as the symbolic center for the movement in Jesus’s homeland. o The rapid increase of Gentile conversions meant that Greco- Roman more than Jewish perceptions would be at work among believers. o The threat was that the meaning of Jesus’s words, actions, and story could be lost with the loss of the Palestinian Jewish context. Writing them in the form of a narrative served to stabilize the tradition. • Despite obvious literary similarities to other ancient Greco- Roman and Jewish narratives, the Gospels share certain distinctive characteristics. Most important is the nature of memory found in them. The Resurrection is not simply an event at the end of the

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  45 • Despite such divergence in interpretation, the four Gospels converge in their understanding of the character of Jesus and of discipleship. o They agree that Jesus is defined by an absolute obedience to God rather than by career, popularity, possessions, pleasure, or power: “not my will but your will be done.” o They agree further that this radical obedience is expressed through dispositions of self-giving to others: He “gives his life for others” and is “the servant of others.” o They agree that discipleship is a matter of “following” Jesus and exhibiting the same character of radical obedience and self-emptying love. The Gospels as Fundamental Norm • The Jesus shaped by the canonical Gospels has served as a fundamental norm for subsequent Christians—all the more powerful because it is cast in the form of story. • The realistic narratives enmesh Jesus in the world of materiality, time, history, and the goodness of human bodies; the Gospels stand against all efforts to make Christianity a timeless, bodiless, anti- institutional religion. • The Gospels also provide a Jesus who can surprise, shock, and challenge comfortable religious accommodation: Christian reform movements have consistently appealed not to the “historical Jesus” but to the human Jesus of the Gospels who shaped subsequent history as the “historic Christ.” Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament. Stein, The Synoptic Problem. Strauss, Four Portraits, One Jesus. Suggested Reading 46 Lecture 6: The Diversity of Early Christianity 1. How does taking into account the full range of New Testament writings expand the understanding of Christian origins? 2. Discuss the distinctive character of the Gospels, especially with respect to the complexity of their composition and the nature of memory found in them. Questions to Consider

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  157 The Court of Justinian and Byzantine Christianity Lecture 22 T he emperor Justinian I (b. 483–d. 565) can be considered as pivotal a figure in the history of the Roman Empire as Constantine, both as the last of the “Roman” emperors and as the shaper of the Byzantine Empire. A man of astonishing energy and vision, he accomplished magnificent things in his effort to restore the Roman Empire to its former glory. Although his efforts fell short because of various adverse forces, his accomplishments were sufficient to secure a form of civilization that endured for another 1,000 years and, during the years of European “dark ages,” represented to visitors and admirers a vision of ancient beauty and new possibility. The Life of Justinian • Justinian is rightly called “great” because his long life and distinctive gifts enabled him to shape both the present and the future. • We have unusually good information on his life because of Procopius of Caesarea, a secretary to Justinian’s general Belisarius. o Procopius’s History of the Wars is an eyewitness account of both eastern and western conquests, as he accompanied the general. o His On the Buildings enumerates the great building projects of the emperor. And the Secret History is a not-always- flattering account of the life and times of the court, including an unfavorable portrait of Justinian’s consort, Theodora, and a riveting account of the ravages of the plague in 541–543. • Born in Dalmatia (on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea) in 483, Justinian’s path to power came through his uncle and adoptive father, who became the emperor Justin in 518. o Justinian functioned as a counselor and even co-ruler with Justin between 518 and his own installation as emperor in 527.

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  158 Lecture 22: The Court of Justinian and Byzantine Christianity In effect, through his uncle and on his own, Justinian exercised imperial power for 47 years. o He married a much younger woman named Theodora in 525. Procopius claims she was a former prostitute, but given his general hostility toward her, the information must be taken with caution. She proved to be a formidable power at Justinian’s side. o Justinian faced severe difficulties from the start of his reign: the loss of the western empire, the threat of the Persian (Sassanid) Empire at his eastern borders, the revolt of city factions against him in 532, and being personally afflicted with the plague in 540. Yet his great energy and his ambition drove him to significant accomplishment. • Justinian’s ambition was nothing less than to restore the former greatness of the Roman Empire through conquest, organization, and adornment; his ambition was abetted by a willingness to exercise supreme rule and to concentrate all control in himself, as well as the personal traits that accompany political greatness. o On the positive side, Justinian was brilliant, courageous, tireless, tough, and bold. Examples include his marrying and sharing power with Theodora and his brilliant commissioning and efficient construction of the great church Hagia Sophia. o On the negative side, he was ruthless and cruel. Witness the slaughter of his foes in the Nika rebellion or the blinding of General Belisarius in later life out of jealousy. o His religious disposition was sincere and grew stronger as he aged; his commitment to Nicaean Christianity went hand in hand with the willingness to suppress other traditions. The Restoration of Roman Greatness • By concentrating all power in himself yet making use of superb generals and administrators, Justinian went a long way at the political level toward restoring the greatness of Rome.

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  159 • Through the military genius of Belisarius, Justinian gained back territories that had been lost—especially in the west—through defeats at the hands of barbarian tribes. o The Persian army was first defeated at Dara in 530, but when the Roman troops were subsequently defeated, Justinian secured an “eternal peace” with the Sassanid Empire through a tribute in gold. The breaking of the peace by the Sassanid Empire in 540 led to more tribute, setting a practice followed by successors. Security of the borders for the eastern Byzantine Empire was won by tribute more than the prowess of armies. o In 533–534, Belisarius defeated the Vandals in North Africa and restored an African prefecture to the empire. o Between 533 and 554, in a protracted and difficult campaign, Belisarius fought the Ostrogoths in Italy and won back much of the Italian peninsula. • Justinian buttressed the security of the empire through the use of mercenary armies and erected and interconnected fortifications throughout the empire, including the city of Constantinople, which he surrounded with a massive, impregnable wall. • He dramatically increased the wealth of the court through the cultivation of agriculture, trade, and industry. Finally, he imposed taxes and collected them efficiently. • Between 529 and 534, through the court official Tribonian, a legal genius, Justinian undertook the codification and revision of the vast and unwieldy body of Roman law that had accumulated over the centuries and shaped it into the Corpus Juris Civilis. o Consisting of the Codex, the Digest, the Institutes, and the Novellae, the Justinian law collection provides irreplaceable information about social processes and practices in the late Roman Empire. 160 Lecture 22: The Court of Justinian and Byzantine Christianity o It formed the basis for Byzantine law; through its dissemination in Italy, it became the basis for European legal codes in the 12th century and, later still, passed into Russia. Patronage of the Arts and Architecture • Justinian undertook massive building projects—beyond the building of walls and fortifications throughout the empire—especially in Constantinople. o The Church of the Holy Apostles and, above all, Hagia Sophia were all the more stunning for the speed with which they were constructed. Hagia Sophia was legitimately considered a wonder of the world. o The Great Palace, the gates of the city, and the massive cisterns built to ensure the city’s safety from attack were all splendid examples of architecture and luxuriously adorned with art. among the massive building projects undertaken by Justinian was the Hagia Sophia, then and now considered a wonder of the world. © iStockphoto/Thinkstock.

• From Action (2014)

  Figure out not only what you like and believe, but the specifics of why you like/believe it—and allow that others might not agree. Take stock of yourself and your tastes, but don’t consider your viewpoints immovably “correct.” This makes you a person who allows for imperfection, aka a good conversationalist and also not a pigheaded, essentialist nimrod. The minute you decide that you’re impermeably right about everything is the minute you shut yourself off to other kinds of interpersonal osmosis, which limits the social world around you and closes you off to all kinds of possibility and understanding. Plus, you stop learning, so you commit double homicide by also deciding it’s a wrap for the development of your brain. You don’t have to and probably won’t buck your opinion the second you’re presented with a variant one. Rather, you might become more certain of your prior conviction, and see how you communicate it in a new context, which exemplifies respect for what you believe. If you think something worthwhile and true, you are probably inclined to spread that idea, right? Some years back, it became clearer than ever that I didn’t need to mutually agree about every last one—or even most—of my beliefs, opinions, or tastes with a person in order to connect our two brains and bodies. This was thanks to a great extended sexual friendship with a Republican audio engineer named Rex. He took my boots off for me each time we got undressed, and when I was like, “Huh, dude?” he scoffed and said, “What, guys don’t take your shoes offa you? You’re too good for those idiots.” (?!??!!! This is not a thing… as far as I know?) Rex sent my mom flowers after casually spending time with her once and taught me about Ray Charles. If I had written him off because I thought he wasn’t “on the same page as me” in terms of politics, et cetera, I would have missed out on a lot, including the time we were fucking and he craned his gorgeous, craggy nose down right into my face, observing it like he was seeing me for the first time. (Told you it’s really appreciated when you make eye contact!) After, he said that that was the distance, or lack thereof, at which I was most beautiful to him. REX! Rex ruled. Keep your mind flung wide open. Treat people like they’re smart enough to understand you by being smart enough to take in, and allow for, their difference.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  To step into Bouchon is to step into a perfectly, seemingly effortlessly recreated French brasserie. The long zinc bar recreates Paris's famous La Coupole. The details are, typically for Keller, without a false note. It's another world, a little bit of France floating free of the grim realities only a few yards away. The menu is surprisingly traditional. Nothing daring about it in these early days. No boudin noir or tripes or even foie de veau or other less accessible brasserie classics; just perfectly—superbly—executed mainstream fare. A "Grand Plateau" of lobster, mussels, seasonal crab, shrimps, oysters, and clams, sourced from the same boutique purveyors used by the French Laundry and Per Se, was predictably awe-inspiring. Rillettes of smoked and fresh salmon could easily have been served at either of the motherships if scaled down and prettied up for their fancier rooms. Beignets of brandade de morue were light and fresh and as well seasoned and flavored as one could hope for. We ordered poulet roti, which is, as most professionals know, the measure of a cook's ability. You can tell almost everything you need to know about a kitchen by how they roast as simple a dish as a chicken. It was better than good. It was the best chicken ever. Moist, flavorful, inspiring in its simplicity. A flatiron steak frites made me miserable with its virtuosity. I had previously been comfortable with the idea that I served the best French fries in the country at my place, Les Halles in New York. I'm afraid we no longer hold the U.S. title. Needless to say, they know how to cook, and rest, a steak at Bouchon. Desserts (a tarte au citron and a chocolate mousse) were, yes, you guessed it, fantastic. They make it look easy. And it's easy to eat there. No behaving for the waiter. No jacket and tie required. Everything—the room, the service, the menu—conspires to make a beautiful argument that it is, in fact, possible to do it right in Vegas. That one can create a pocket of calm, casual, yet sophisticated pleasure, of culinary excellence smack in the middle of—yet comfortably removed from—the carnage and ugliness below. I found, I think, my perfect metaphor, had my final Vegas epiphany on my last day in town, as I hurtled face-down at accelerating speed toward the surface of the earth, free-falling from two miles above the desert, a Flying Elvis strapped to my back. When you jump out of a plane for the first time, the first thousand feet are pure adrenaline-pumping, endorphin-juiced thrill. Straight down, head first, your mouth stretched into a silent scream. Then you level off a bit, as Elvis taps your shoulder and you stretch your arms out, legs back, into the "banana position."

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Suffice it to say, when I finally buckled down to a life of legitimate toil in the restaurant business, I began to meet some real criminals, guys connected to organized crime, and I recognized right away that while they, apparently, had what it took to live a life outside the law, I did not. And I was curious about the differences between myself and these full-timers. What remained with me from my early, heady days of surreptitious entry was the love of conspiracy, an appreciation of clandestine meetings, the comfortably familiar phrase book, long ago codified and set down in Hollywood films, of the hard-core, professional bad man. La Cosa Nostra and, to a lesser extent, espionage, became obsessions. I wanted to know, for instance, how Kim Philby kept his mouth shut for all those years. How could a kid in his early twenties, still in college, keep quiet about his true loyalties? Especially when he was doing something as exciting as spying for the NKVD? How could he not, after a few beers, blab to his friends about his secret work for the Workers' Paradise—especially when he'd been loudly espousing unpopular political views to all and sundry? How could young Kim never, while trying to bed some breasty Marxist sophomore, have boozily confided that, "All this right-wing twaddle is a sham baby . . . I'm down with the International, bitch . . . and doing some serious motherfucking undercover shit! Now take off those panties!"

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  While I know nothing of my dad’s life before me, thanks to my mom and just from the time I have been able to spend with him, I do have a sense of who he is as a person. He’s very Swiss, clean and particular and precise. He’s the only person I know who checks into a hotel room and leaves it cleaner than when he arrived. He doesn’t like anyone waiting on him. No servants, no housekeepers. He cleans up after himself. He likes his space. He lives in his own world and does his own everything. I know that he never married. He used to say that most people marry because they want to control another person, and he never wanted to be controlled. I know that he loves traveling, loves entertaining, having people over. But at the same time his privacy is everything to him. Wherever he lives he’s never listed in the phone book. I’m sure my parents would have been caught in their time together if he hadn’t been as private as he is. My mom was wild and impulsive. My father was reserved and rational. She was fire, he was ice. They were opposites that attracted, and I am a mix of them both. One thing I do know about my dad is that he hates racism and homogeneity more than anything, and not because of any feelings of self-righteousness or moral superiority. He just never understood how white people could be racist in South Africa. “Africa is full of black people,” he would say. “So why would you come all the way to Africa if you hate black people? If you hate black people so much, why did you move into their house?” To him it was insane. Because racism never made sense to my father, he never subscribed to any of the rules of apartheid. In the early eighties, before I was born, he opened one of the first integrated restaurants in Johannesburg, a steakhouse. He applied for a special license that allowed businesses to serve both black and white patrons. These licenses existed because hotels and restaurants needed them to serve black travelers and diplomats from other countries, who in theory weren’t subject to the same restrictions as black South Africans; black South Africans with money in turn exploited that loophole to frequent those hotels and restaurants. My dad’s restaurant was an instant, booming success. Black people came because there were few upscale establishments where they could eat, and they wanted to come and sit in a nice restaurant and see what that was like. White people came because they wanted to see what it was like to sit with black people. The white people would sit and watch the black people eat, and the black people would sit and eat and watch the white people watching them eat. The curiosity of being together overwhelmed the animosity keeping people apart. The place had a great vibe.

• From Action (2014)

  You know how everyone wanted to make out with David Bowie? His specificity, and his exacting dedication to presenting the world with the person he was rather than the ideal of what other people might think is “sexy” or “masculine” or “human, in any sense” is why we were convinced he was so good-looking. (Well, that and his hypercolor eyes.) The sex-symbolization of a man who willfully tried to pass as an extraterrestrial among us earthlings imparts a cogent lesson: Be and look like you, and do not make a single apology, unless being deferential is a natural and crucial part of that you-ness. Confidence in the character and appearance you’ve got is not only the most attractive thing going, save for an unclassifiable eye color, but also the most comforting to others—it’s signing a permission slip allowing them to surface their idiosyncrasies, too. Consider how people always try to make comedians laugh: They’re attempting to exchange the social currency they think professional stand-ups find most valuable (usually while telling really bad jokes). If what, in your actions, you prove is valuable to you is unique strange foxadociousness, you will attract a trail of other unself-conscious foxes who’ve caught the scent of your freak pheromones. Besides, who wants to fuck a clod? OTHER CLODS, AND HOW THEY FIND THEM IS BY BEING CLODDISH. You are not that clod. If you are positive in your belief that you are, in fact, the worst and least attractive person who ever slunk shamefacedly through the atmosphere—the anti-Bowie—there are a few ways to dodge that insecurity, which, I’ll argue, is ultimately rather self-centered: I can say that with confidence, since, for a while, I couldn’t bear to say ANYTHING with confidence, and when I let my insecurities monopolize me, it’s the most I ever focus on MYSELF MYSELF MYSELF! When I quiet my life down because I’m afraid it looks funny otherwise, low self-esteem and narcissism deaden the air around me that other living beings could otherwise be deeply breathing in. Why would I do that, when, instead, I can go hunt for archival tour T-shirts at the thrift spot, or try to beat the old heads at chess in the park (never gonna happen), or get ten people I know haven’t met one another, but would true-to-definitely like one another, together in a room? No, I’d much rather stay here in bed, half-dressed, worrying that I’m inert, in large part because I am!!! That’s bad logic, plus solipsistic, plus a snore convention. You know who you are already, so whenever I’m picking myself apart, I remember that its more interesting to extend my hand out to someone else, regardless of who they are, to shake hello.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Guys who wake up every morning, brush their teeth, shower, shave, then go to work at the serious business of committing felonies, these are the characters who continue to dominate my reverie—and my fiction. Bank robbers, spies, enforcers, contract killers, loan sharks, confidence men, and racketeers . . . it's their consistency over time, their relentless adherence to the requirements of the job, that makes me, in my way, love them. Take a guy like Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, the former boss of the Genovese crime family, who I used as an inspiration for a character in Bone in the Throat. Here's a guy who, for thirty years, played the public role of a doddering, schizophrenic old man, appearing on the street for walk-talks with his soldiers in bathrobe and slippers, talking to himself, behaving erratically, moving his eyes and head in such a way as to indicate insanity—and all the while was running with an iron grip the largest and most ruthless criminal enterprise in the country. This crazy act kept him out of jail for most of his life—though the Feds did catch up with him in the end. You have to admire that kind of work ethic. They never caught The Chin on tape, telling a subordinate to "whack somebody out" or "put a rocket in his pocket." You never heard The Chin's voice playing over the courthouse speakers, talking about how he was going to "sever [somebody's] motherfuckin' head off" (one of my favorite Gotti-isms). The Chin played his part to the end. Gotti, to his detriment, surrounded himself with those other fascinating creatures of the criminal netherworld: informers. Listening to recordings of the embattled don in his Little Italy social club, berating his crew, bemoaning his gambling losses, contemplating the machinations and intentions of his rivals, there's a poignancy to the experience: Not only was the poor bastard being secretly recorded by the FBI, but sometimes three out of four of the close associates in the room with him were, or later became, government informants. It's hard these days, it seems, to get good help. So for purposes of fiction, organized criminality offers plenty of drama, plenty of situations in which characters find themselves in extreme circumstances with presumably difficult choices to make: Should I shoot my best friend today? What happens if I don't? Can I trust Paulie? After I kill him, when his kids come over to play with my kids, what should I tell them about Daddy's disappearance? Should I cooperate with the prosecutors? Can I survive the rest of my life eating jail food? These are the Big Questions in my kind of crime fiction. And of course, crime can be funny.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  The restaurant closed only because a few people in the neighborhood took it upon themselves to complain. They filed petitions, and the government started looking for ways to shut my dad down. At first the inspectors came and tried to get him on cleanliness and health-code violations. Clearly they had never heard of the Swiss. That failed dismally. Then they decided to go after him by imposing additional and arbitrary restrictions. “Since you’ve got the license you can keep the restaurant open,” they said, “but you’ll need to have separate toilets for every racial category. You’ll need white toilets, black toilets, colored toilets, and Indian toilets.” “But then it will be a whole restaurant of nothing but toilets.” “Well, if you don’t want to do that, your other option is to make it a normal restaurant and only serve whites.” He closed the restaurant. After apartheid fell, my father moved from Hillbrow to Yeoville, a formerly quiet, residential neighborhood that had transformed into this vibrant melting pot of black and white and every other hue. Immigrants were pouring in from Nigeria and Ghana and all over the continent, bringing different food and exciting music. Rockey Street was the main strip, and its sidewalks were filled with street vendors and restaurants and bars. It was an explosion of culture. My dad lived two blocks over from Rockey, on Yeo Street, right next to this incredible park where I loved to go because kids of all races and different countries were running around and playing there. My dad’s house was simple. Nice, but nothing fancy. I feel like my dad had enough money to be comfortable and travel, but he never spent lavishly on things. He’s extremely frugal, the kind of guy who drives the same car for twenty years. My father and I lived on a schedule. I visited him every Sunday afternoon. Even though apartheid had ended, my mom had made her decision: She didn’t want to get married. So we had our house, and he had his. I’d made a deal with my mom that if I went with her to mixed church and white church in the morning, after that I’d get to skip black church and go to my dad’s, where we’d watch Formula 1 racing instead of casting out demons.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  I’d gone to UCLA for grad school because it would keep me near Anaïs, and there I joined one of the earliest women’s consciousness-raising groups. Initially, my involvement with the group increased my admiration for Anaïs. Our method for raising our consciousness echoed the nonjudgmental intimacy of her Diaries. At our meetings, we went around in a circle sharing our personal experiences on a particular theme: mothers, fathers, siblings, lovers, to have or not to have children, professions closed to us, the many putdowns for being female we’d internalized. We confided to each other our secrets, trusting that anything said within the group would never leave it: a baby given up for adoption, years of spousal abuse, faked orgasms, an abortion, a sexual attraction to another woman, an unrevealed rape. Like snakes, our stories dropped into the pit encircled by our chairs, and we examined them wriggling there along with our shame and guilt. We murmured to each other, “It’s not your fault … That’s why we are meeting, so that someday it will be different for women.” By 1970, though, we had transformed into an action group with the goal of establishing a Women’s Studies program at UCLA. Those of us who were grad students put together proposals for classes we believed should be offered to undergraduate women, and our whole group, including faculty wives, university secretaries, and women from the community, pressured the administration to fund the courses. By August 1971, a number of us grad students were scheduled to teach the very first classes at UCLA that acknowledged the contributions of women in our respective fields. By that time, Anaïs had edited and published three volumes of her Diary. I made the first two volumes, then in paperback, required reading for my Identity through Expression: Women Writers class, offered through the English department. When I handed out a draft of my syllabus to my women’s consciousness circle for feedback, Clara, the most brilliant and beautiful of our remarkably attractive group, objected. “I guess you could include Nin for historical reasons, but you can’t call her a feminist author as you have it here.” Clara snapped her unpainted fingernails against my course outline and pushed back a cluster of copper curls that haloed her flawless face. With her continental sophistication acquired from having attended the Sorbonne and her impeccably correct leftist politics, Clara awed me as Anaïs once had. It bothered me that when I’d first let drop to Clara that I knew Anaïs Nin, she had been unimpressed, unlike everyone else who marveled that the exotic diarist was living, no longer in Paris, but right there in prosaic LA. The heavyset provost’s secretary asked, “Who’s Annis Nin?”

• From Jesus and His Jewish Influences (2015)

  Jesus and His Jewish Influences Lecture 4 The Destruction of Solomon’s Temple I n this lecture, we follow the history of the kingdom of Judah until its conquest by the Babylonians and the destruction of Solomon’s Temple. The foretelling of the destruction of the First Temple by earlier prophets foreshadowed Jesus’s prediction that the Second Temple would be destroyed. The Gospel accounts that describe conversations between Jesus and his disciples about the end of days and place Jesus on the Mount of Olives draw on significant biblical traditions connected with the earlier Israelite prophets. Reforms of King Josiah ●● One of the most celebrated kings of Judah was King Josiah, who ruled from approximately 640 to 609 B.C. Josiah was loved by the biblical writers because of his religious reforms, which reasserted the centrality of the Temple of Jerusalem and its priesthood and eliminated local sanctuaries. In other words, because Josiah’s reforms were perfectly in keeping with the preferences and views of the biblical writers, they described him in glowing terms. ●● According to one biblical passage: “Then the king commanded Hilkiah the high priest to bring out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels that were made for the Baal, and the Asherah, and for all the host of the heavens. And he burned them outside Jerusalem in the lime kilns by the Kidron and carried away their ashes to Bethel.” ●● Notice that Josiah is clearing out objects of worship to gods other than the God of Israel in the Jerusalem Temple. This act demonstrates the continuing tension between inclusive and exclusive Yahwism among the Israelites, even in the 8 th and 7 th centuries B.C.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  If you're a chef, manager, or owner, you know the answer: Mexicans. Ecuadorans. Salvadoran guys (and women) from south of the border, many of them with green cards they bought on Queens Boulevard for thirty dollars. Ex-dishwashers with no formal training, minimal education; people who have often never eaten in restaurants as good as the ones they cook in. Manuel, the brilliant saucier at your two-star restaurant, puts on his best suit, combs his hair, dresses up his family in their Sunday best, and tries to get a table at the one-star place across the street. The aspiring actor/model/part-time maitre d' will break out in a flop sweat, trying to figure out where to hide him—if "La Migra" hasn't already grabbed him on the way to dinner. There is no deception more hypocritical, more nauseating, more willfully self-deluding than the industry-approved image of "the chef." We all know who is doing the heavy lifting, who's making that nice risotto with white truffles and porcini mushrooms, the pan-seared hamachi with sauce vierge, the ravioli of beef cheeks with sage and sauce madere . . . We know, to our eternal shame, who is more likely to show up every day, dig in, do the right thing, cook conscientiously, endure without complaint: our perennially unrecognized coworkers from Mexico, Ecuador, and points south. The ones you don't see hurling around catchphrases on the TV Food Network, or grinning witlessly at the camera after the latest freebie for the Beard House. What is the heart of the matter? The answer to this simple question: When was the last time you saw an American dishwasher? And if you saw one—would you hire him? If you're like me, probably not. The best cooks are ex-dishwashers. Hell, the best people are ex-dishwashers. Because who do you want in your kitchen, when push comes to shove, and you're in danger of falling in the weeds and the orders are pouring in and the number-one oven just went down and the host just sat a twelve-top and there's a bad case of the flu that's been tearing through the staff like the Vandals through Rome? Do you want an educated, CIA-trained American know-it-all like I was early in my career? A guy who's going to sulk if you speak harshly to him? A guy who's certain there's a job waiting for him somewhere else ("Maybe . . . like Aspen, man . . . or the Keys . . . I can cook and maybe hit the slopes on my days off, or the beach")? Or some resume-building aspiring chef ("Yeah, dude . . . I'm thinking of like leaving here next month . . . maybe going to do a stage with Thomas Keller or Dean Fearing... He rocks . . . My uncle has a friend who says he can hook me up . . .")?

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

  Judy wrote back, saying yes, she would very much like to sit down with Katz as soon as she was back in New York. “My life changed when I learned about the National Coalition Against Censorship… and met Leanne Katz, the tiny dynamo who was its first and longtime director,” Blume wrote in 1999, just two years after Katz died of cancer at the age of sixty-five. “Leanne’s intelligence, her wit, her strong commitment to the First Amendment and helping those who were out on a limb trying to defend it, made her my hero.” NCAC had started as an offshoot of the ACLU, where Katz was working at the time, but quickly became its own entity. The Coalition—made up of dozens of nonprofit groups, ranging from Planned Parenthood to PEN America to the National Council of Jewish Women to the United Methodist Church—was created specifically to fight against bans. Katz herself believed wholeheartedly in the primacy of the First Amendment, the worthiness of art, and the rights of citizens to access information, even about subjects that were controversial or complicated. She was also a staunch feminist. “The intense battles around the control of sexuality have always been fought on the terrain of women’s bodies,” she wrote in the New York Law School Review in 1993. “Women have long been barred from access to knowledge and information on sexuality, including reproduction, and have been excluded even from viewing or creating representations of their own bodies.” Women were barred from access to knowledge. Think about that. Katz did; she saw book challenges as just another way for the Right to control female bodies and minds. At this point, Katz and Blume were completely aligned. Connecting with Katz opened a valve for Judy, releasing years of pent-up pressure. She could finally exhale. “I used to feel so alone when I heard my books were being challenged and even banned,” Blume wrote in “Is Puberty a Dirty Word?” “I had nowhere to turn… Today, when I get a message from my publisher that a distressed teacher or librarian or parent or group of students is trying to defend one of my books, I put them in touch with Leanne Katz at the NCAC and from that moment we all work together, not just to keep my books available, but to assure readers of all ages that they will continue to have the freedom to choose.” In the same essay, Judy once again talked about the letters she received from children and adults whose exposure to her books turned out to be life-changing for them. She quoted a forty-one-year-old fan. “My periods began just before my twelfth birthday,” the woman wrote, “and for six months I suffered untold agonies that I was dying.