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 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.

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

  [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] Indian religion had always endorsed and informed the structural and martial violence of society. But as early as the eighth century BCE, the “renouncers” (samnyasin) mounted a disciplined and devastating critique of this inherent aggression, withdrawing from settled society to adopt an independent lifestyle. Renunciation was not, as is often thought in the West, simply life negating. Throughout Indian history, asceticism has nearly always had a political dimension and has often inspired a radical reappraisal of society. That certainly happened in the Gangetic plain.71 Aryans had always possessed the “restless heart” that had made Gilgamesh weary of settled life, but instead of leaving home to fight and steal, the renouncers eschewed aggression, owned no property, and begged for their food.72 By about 500 BCE, they had become the chief agents of spiritual change and a direct challenge to the values of the agrarian kingdoms.73 This movement was in part an offshoot of brahmacharya, the “holy life” led by the Brahmin student, who would spend years with his guru, studying the Vedas, begging humbly for his bread, and living alone in the tropical forests for a given period. In other parts of the world too, Aryan youths lived in the wild as part of their military training, hunting for food and learning the arts of self-sufficiency and survival. But because the Brahmin’s dharma did not include violence, the brahmacharin was forbidden to hunt, to harm animals, or ride in a war chariot.74 Moreover, most of the renouncers were adult Brahmins when they embarked on their solitary existence, their apprenticeship long past.75 A renouncer made a deliberate choice. He repudiated the ritual sacrifices that symbolized the Aryan political community and rejected the family household, the institutional mainstay of settled life. He had in effect stepped right outside the systemic violence of the varna system and extracted himself from the economic nexus of society in order to become a “beggar” (bhiksu).76 Some renouncers returned home, only to become social and religious irritants within the community, while others remained in the forest and challenged the culture from without. They condemned the aristocratic preoccupation with status, honor, and glory, yearned for insults “as if they were nectar,” and deliberately courted contempt by behaving like madmen or animals.77 Like so many Indian reformers, the renouncers drew upon the ancient mythology of warfare to model a different kind of nobility. They evoked the heroic days in the Punjab, when men had proved their valor and virility by braving the untamed forest. Many saw the bhiksu as a new kind of pioneer.78 When a famous renouncer came to town, people of all classes flocked to listen to him.

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

  Harriet was then led to the vacant couch by her gallant, blushing as she looked at me, and with eyes made to justify any thing, tenderly bespeaking of me the most favourable construction of the step she was thus irresistibly drawn into. Her lover, for such he was, sat her down at the foot of the couch, and passing his arm round her neck, preluded with a kiss fervently applied to her lips, that visibly gave her life and spirit to go through with the scene; and as he kissed, he gently inclined her head, till it fell back on a pillow disposed to receive it, and leaning himself down all the way with her, at once countenanced and endeared her fall to her. There, as if he had guessed our wishes, or meant to gratify at once his pleasure and his pride, in being the master, by the title of present possession, of beauties delicate beyond imagination, he discovered her breast to his own touch, and our common view; but oh! what delicious manual of love devotion; how inimitable fine moulded! small, round, firm, and excellently white; then the grain of their skin, so soothing, so flattering to the touch! and of beauty. When he had feasted his eyes with the their nipples, that crowned them, the sweetest buds touch and perusal, feasted his lips with kisses of the highest relish, imprinted on those all delicious twin-orbs, he proceeded downwards. Her legs still kept the ground; and now, with the tenderest attention not to shock or alarm her too suddenly, he, by degrees, rather stole than rolled up her petticoats; at which, as if a signal had been given, Louisa and Emily took hold of her legs, in pure wantonness, and, in ease to her, kept them stretched wide abroad. Then lay exposed, or, to speak more properly, displayed the greatest parade in nature of female charms. The whole company, who, except myself, had often seen them, seemed as much dazzled, surprised and delighted, as any one could be who had now beheld them for the first time. Beauties so excessive could not but enjoy the privileges of eternal novelty.

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

  According to Daddy, who broke horses for Uncle Lee in the summer of 1931, Uncle Lee and Annie stopped talking that very year, after they got into a fight about how much money she spent on sugar. Annie Gleason saddled up an old mule they kept to keep the horses calm and rode all the way into Anhuac, Texas, with her boots dragging in the dust. She bought a fifty-pound sack of sugar, turned the mule around, and rode straight back and into the barn where Daddy and Uncle Lee were just nailing the last square-head nail into a quarter horse’s shoe. Still mounted on the mule, Annie slid a jackknife from her apron pocket and, staring straight at Uncle Lee, she raised it up and jammed it down into the burlap bag strapped across the mule’s backside. The sugar poured out of the sack, Daddy said, like a liquid. We’re bass fishing with Cooter and Shug and Ben Bederman at the time I remember him telling it. We’re in Ben’s big fiberglass motorboat, which is way nicer than the little flat-bottomed rentals we’re used to. We each have a floatable red Coca-Cola cushion to sit on. I don’t know how old I am, but I haven’t yet outgrown the concept of fishing with Daddy, which must have happened when I was about eleven. I don’t even know yet that such concepts can be outgrown. All I know is that Cooter’s cigar smoke stinks to heaven. I jerk the banana-yellow lure across the surface of the water so its tiny propellers whir and stop, whir and stop. What in God’s name could a bass under water think that thing is, scooting along? I prefer a plastic worm sunk down in the bottom silt, but Ben has bossed me into this gadget. “And so what’d Uncle Lee do?” Cooter asked. Sometimes I think the Liars’ Club lets Cooter come along just because he always asks the next question. He’s never caught a fish the others didn’t make him throw back. “Do?” Daddy cocked his head sideways. “Ain’t nothing he could do. He just shakes his head and says, ‘You silly sumbitch,’ and that’s the last they ever spoke. Them three words.” “Tell how they split up the house, Daddy.” “This goes on,” Daddy says, “more than ten years.” He roots around in the cooler for a beer. “First they leave notes around the house. Grocery lists, that sort of thing. But pretty soon they leave off with that too. Then something funny happens. It’s like Lee knows what Annie wants before she even wants it. And viceyversa. Say she needs some lard or some such thing. In walks Lee with just-bought lard. Or he wakes up hungry for biscuits, and she’s got the jar lid pressed into the dough already.” Shug makes a mmh-mmh-mmh sound that says the wonders never cease. “Not a goddamn peep between them,” Daddy says. “Sleep in the same bed. Eat out the same pot.

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

  Apollo flaying Marsyas. He wears high black boots, closely fitting breeches of white leather, short fur coat of black cloth, of the kind worn by Italian cavalry officers, trimmed with astrakhan and many rich loops; on his black locks is a red fez. I now understand the masculine Eros, and I marvel at Socrates for having remained virtuous in view of an Alcibiades like this. * * * * * I have never seen my lioness so excited. Her cheeks flamed when she left from the carriage at her villa. She hurried upstairs, and with an imperious gesture ordered me to follow. Walking up and down her room with long strides, she began to talk so rapidly, that I was frightened. “You are to find out who the man in the Cascine was, immediately— “Oh, what a man! Did you see him? What do you think of him? Tell me.” “The man is beautiful,” I replied dully. “He is so beautiful,” she paused, supporting herself on the arm of a chair, “that he has taken my breath away.” “I can understand the impression he has made on you,” I replied, my imagination carrying me away in a mad whirl. “I am quite lost in admiration myself, and I can imagine—” “You may imagine,” she laughed aloud, “that this man is my lover, and that he will apply the lash to you, and that you will enjoy being punished by him. “But now go, go.” * * * * * Before evening fell, I had the desired information. Wanda was still fully dressed when I returned. She reclined on the ottoman, her face buried in her hands, her hair in a wild tangle, like the red mane of a lioness. “What is his name?” she asked, uncanny calm. “Alexis Papadopolis.” “A Greek, then,” I nodded. “He is very young?” “Scarcely older than you. They say he was educated in Paris, and that he is an atheist. He fought against the Turks in Candia, and is said to have distinguished himself there no less by his race-hatred and cruelty, than by his bravery.” “All in all, then, a man,” she cried with sparkling eyes. “At present he is living in Florence,” I continued, “he is said to be tremendously rich—” “I didn’t ask you about that,” she interrupted quickly and sharply. “The man is dangerous. Aren’t you afraid of him? I am afraid of him. Has he a wife?” “No.” “A mistress?” “No.” “What theaters does he attend?” “To-night he will be at the Nicolini Theater, where Virginia Marini and Salvini are acting; they are the greatest living artists in Italy, perhaps in Europe. “See that you get a box—and be quick about it!” she commanded. “But, mistress—” “Do you want a taste of the whip?” * * * * * “You can wait down in the lobby,” she said when I had placed the opera-glasses and the programme on the edge of her box and adjusted the footstool.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The conflict continued with Rossetti who made a valiant effort to heal the disparity between sexuality and sensibility in the synthesis of The House of Life, a brave but not very successful attempt to unite masculine idealism (Courtly and Platonic) with a rich sensuality, more admirable for its intention than its achievement. Elsewhere Rossetti also indulges in fantasies of feminine sexuality, but with fewer reservations, less inhibiting restraint. The Blessed Damozel is a bid to eroticize Christian Platonism, not only via the warm, naked breast the damozel generously exposes to the bar of heaven, but in the even more ambitious notion that when the lovers of the poem are reunited in Dante Gabriel’s worldly paradise, they will be encouraged to practice their ardor, naked and unashamed before the eyes of the Blessed Virgin. Contemporary critics find the impropriety of all this more in their own hearts than in Rossetti’s; but it is undeniable that he has embarked on an impossible mission. Jenny, his finest poem, is the dramatic monologue of a prostitute’s client seeing, or trying to see, through the double standard and sexual politics to justice and the social and economic circumstances of Jenny’s fate. The poem is so subtle and sophisticated in technique, so ironic in the hermetic perfection of its only speaker, that one never knows, or perhaps Rossetti never has to divulge, whether it is the inherent evil in the world, “a toad within a stone,” or simply the way things have been arranged by fellows like our monologist, that is finally accountable for Jenny’s degradation. Unaffected by the usual Victorian melodrama and mawkishness when dealing with such a subject, Jenny is in the best analytical and rational vein of the novelists. The majority of Rossetti’s lyrics are not, and their chief contribution is to convert the fatal woman into a symbol such as The Card Dealer, or the bosomy Helen of Troy Town, abstract icons of death and fate. This distancing device will be useful for later poets like Swinburne and Wilde, as it makes Tennysonian moral scruples irrelevant and permits the poet to enjoy the fatal woman undisturbed. Tennyson preserved propriety by castigating the wanton Rose with vice and always pronouncing loudly for the Lily; Rossetti kept a shred of decorum by clinging to the notion of the Virgin, or Beatrice, or some other Lily, however secularized. Swinburne went all the way and pronounced loudly for the evil itself. In the course of his devotions to Dolores, “Our Lady of Pain,” he begs this pagan princess to “Forgive us our virtues,” “We” would change “the lilies and languors of virtue/For the raptures and roses of Vice.” It is at moments like this that Swinburne most reminds one of a prurient schoolboy jerking off.

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

  He was, as I afterwards learned in the course of the intimacy which this little accident gave birth to, an old bachelor, turned of sixty, but of a fresh vigorous complexion, insomuch that he scarce marked five and forty, having never racked his constitution by permitting his desires to over-tax his ability. As to his birth and conditions, his parents, honest and failed mechanics, had, by the best traces he could get of them, left him an infant orphan on the parish; so that it was from a charity-school, that, by honesty and industry, he made his way into a merchant’s counting house, from whence, being sent to a house in Cadiz, he there, by his talents and activity, acquired not only a fortune, but an immense one, with which he returned to his native country; where he could not, however, fish out so much as one single relation out of the obscurity he was born in. Taking then a taste for refinement, and pleased to enjoy life, like a mistress in the dark, he flowed his days in all the ease of opulence, without the least parade of it; and, rather studying the concealment than the shew of a fortune, looked down on a world he perfectly knew himself, to his wish, unknown and unmarked by. But, as I propose to devote a letter entirely to the pleasure of retracing to you all the particulars of my acquaintance with this ever, to me, memorable friend, I shall, in this, transiently touch on no more than may serve, as mortar, to cement, or form the connection of my history, and to obviate your surprise that one of my blood and relish of life, should count a gallant of three score such a catch.

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

  “Captain Pearse,” he said, his speech clear for the first time in weeks. And Pearse said at ease, Sergeant Karr. Then they were both wiping the wet off their faces, holding each other like a pair of frail old ghosts. Pearse sat on Daddy’s bed well into the evening, paging through old pictures. Once again, Daddy’s war talk came out clear. The effort tired him, though. He finally dozed off while the colonel was still peeling the foil top off some pudding. By phone, I heard the colonel’s fine tenor voice. “Your daddy turned down a battlefield commission after the Bulge,” he told me. “He didn’t like the idea of drinking at the officers’ club. Anybody above the rank of sergeant was what he called a poodle. ” After I hung up, Pearse drank black coffee from Mother’s bone-china cups till the small hours. He told her more war stories we’d never heard. Daddy was wounded twice, for instance. Once, a German soldier stuck a bayonet through his forearm, leaving a scar I’d seen a thousand times and never once asked about. Another time, a bridge they’d mined blew early and buried Daddy so completely in rubble that Pearse presumed him dead. They hadn’t even bothered digging for him. But a few days later, Daddy came riding up the road in another fellow’s Jeep. He had a big bandage wrapped around his head, and a grin a yard wide. In fact, Pearse thought the old head wound might have led to Daddy’s stroke. If so, the army might help us with some of our costs. Pearse had testified in a few cases like that, and both times the family got help. That’s how I wound up in Mother’s attic. We needed army medical records proving Daddy was head-injured in combat. I’d put off climbing up there for weeks, claiming I needed a good rain to cool things off. In truth, the attic scared me. An attic in East Texas is especially bad. The hot damp in such places accrues over years; all manner of organism can breed. Cardboard gets dappled with green mildew in patterns that put you in mind of chrysanthemums on antique wallpaper. You can hear roaches scuttle through papers in an East Texas attic, can practically feel their threadlike antennae reaching coward you all whispery. Plus you face the slight danger of stumbling across a snake. The summer before, Lecia’s attic had been infested with them. We’d heard thumps on the ceiling one night. Something heavy was falling from the inside attic rafters, without the scuttling sounds afterwards that a raccoon or rodent would make. Armed with flashlight, she was supposed to poke her head up there, scout around, and report back so she could let her exterminator know what he was in for. The fluffy pink insulation showed no small-animal scat, only what looked like old nylon stockings somebody had peeled off and strewn around.

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

  SA: True Diary coincided with this rise in young adult literature. I mean, Harry Potter was a kids’ book. When you look back at the chronology of Harry Potter, I don’t think there’s ever been a more dramatic example of somebody getting better, getting so much better as a writer in the public eye, like the dramatic increase. The first couple of Harry Potter books are very much children’s books, but as they went on, as the kids got older, and as J. K. Rowling got more experience, the books became…I mean, they’re biblical. Holy crap, they’re biblical. I’m going to argue right here that I think the Harry Potter books and the movies combined are more important in American culture than any other book or any other TV show, any other cultural phenomenon. I think they have more spiritual power, I think they have more political power, more everything. The first one came out in 1998, which is incredible when you think about Harry Potter. But my career and my thoughts about young adult were right in the middle of all that and so when young adult literature exploded—The Hunger Games; John Green; Thirteen Reasons Why, which is like the massive thing on Netflix right now—I accidentally became part of this amazing new phenomenon, the young adult book being a universally praised and admired genre. It remains the bestselling genre. If you want to sell books as a writer, write young adult. JW: And it seems like another boundary or border was crossed, because adult readers, of course, came along, but it also said kids can handle six hundred pages, they can handle dialogue about masturbation. It also stopped underestimating the fifteen-year-old reader, the thirteen-year-old reader. SA: It stopped being condescending. It really is a form of political rebellion. Young readers becoming political rebels by insisting on their own genre. When The Outsiders was published, nobody thought about it as being young adult. When The Catcher in the Rye was published, nobody thought about it as being young adult. Lord the Flies, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn…when we talk about so many of the great books of our past, they would be classified as young adult now. And that would be a great thing. We all became writers because of something we read when we were twelve. And I get to be that guy. It’s awesome. [image "An illustration of an artist poking their nose with the back of a paintbrush." file=image_rsrc4TT.jpg] Interview with Ellen ForneyHow long have you been drawing comics?

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

  “Not at all,” I said. “Yes, you do,” he said. “Okay, I do,” I said. I really didn’t, but Gordy believed in me. He wouldn’t let me give up. “The second time you read a book, you read it for its history. For its knowledge of history. You think about the meaning of each word, and where that word came from. I mean, you read a novel that has the word ‘spam’ in it, and you know where that word comes from, right?” “Spam is junk e-mail,” I said. “Yes, that’s what it is, but who invented the word, who first used it, and how has the meaning of the word changed since it was first used?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Well, you have to look all that up. If you don’t treat each word that seriously then you’re not treating the novel seriously.” I thought about my sister in Montana. Maybe romance novels were absolutely serious business. My sister certainly thought they were. I suddenly understood that if every moment of a book should be taken seriously, then every moment of a life should be taken seriously as well. “I draw cartoons,” I said. “What’s your point?” Gordy asked. “I take them seriously. I use them to understand the world. I use them to make fun of the world. To make fun of people. And sometimes I draw people because they’re my friends and family. And I want to honor them.” “So you take your cartoons as seriously as you take books?” “Yeah, I do,” I said. “That’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it?” “No, not at all,” Gordy said. “If you’re good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can’t be wrong.” Wow, this dude was a poet. My cartoons weren’t just good for giggles; they were also good for poetry. Funny poetry, but poetry nonetheless. It was seriously funny stuff. “But don’t take anything too seriously, either,” Gordy said. The little dork could read minds, too. He was like some kind of Star Wars alien creature with invisible tentacles that sucked your thoughts out of your brain. “You read a book for the story, for each of its words,” Gordy said, “and you draw your cartoons for the story, for each of the words and images. And, yeah, you need to take that seriously, but you should also read and draw because really good books and cartoons give you a boner.” I was shocked: [image "An illustration of two characters in conversation. The first asks if books should give a boner, and the other responds affirmatively. The dialogue continues with questions about excitement for books." file=image_rsrc4SG.jpg] “You should get a boner! You have to get a boner!” Gordy shouted. “Come on!” We ran into the Reardan High School Library. “Look at all these books,” he said. “There aren’t that many,” I said. It was a small library in a small high school in a small town.

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

  Begin Reading Table of Contents Copyright Page For Wellpinit and Reardan, my hometowns Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more. Tap here to learn more . Foreword “I was born with water on the brain.” The opening line from a masterful work by a genius storyteller. The other night I thought I’d try reading this book out loud to my nine-year-old son. The copy we have is worn and dog-eared, a first edition bought only a few days after it was published in 2007. At the time I didn’t yet have a son, and my daughter was still very young. I had bought Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian for myself, having already, before it was published, heard how amazing it was. With that opening line, Alexie brought me into the world of Junior—struggling artist, ballplayer, survivor of two very different kinds of education. And inside Junior’s world, I was awakened to life on the reservation—meeting people and finding myself in situations I had never imagined. Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, who has written extensively about the importance of children’s literature, talks about how books can be both mirrors and windows—mirrors in which readers can see themselves on the pages of literature and thereby know their existence in the world is valid and true, and windows into worlds they might never have imagined. This book is a window into Junior’s world—a window Alexie pulls the curtains back from and lovingly invites us into. But it is also a mirror for the many First Nations people who have not seen themselves in literature. It is hard to read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and not find a part of yourself in its pages. The other night, as my son and I ascended the stairs to his bedroom, I grabbed the book off the shelf—“Let’s just try it,” I said. My son, holding a comic book, said, “No.” Flatly. “Yes,” I said. “We’re going to give it a try.” I knew at once he’d love Junior and Rowdy and the many people he’d meet on the reservation. With that first line, my boy was hooked, the way I had been many years ago. The way my now-teenage daughter had been two summers ago, when she closed the book and exclaimed, “This book is so good, I can not believe it was assigned.” How does one author touch so many different people at so many different points in their lives? Alexie’s brilliance lies in his ability to speak truth to power with humor, grace, and love. He loves the characters he brings to the page, and, by extension, we fall in love with them, too.

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

  JW: And in a way that allowed you to go find who you were, to express yourself, to live. SA: I was not a courageous boy when he first moved to Wellpinit, but I left Wellpinit in a courageous way and I owe a huge debt to Randy for that courage. JW: Junior’s art, his drawings—was that a way to sort of allegorically write about your own writing? How did you decide he would be the funny artist that he is? 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.

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

  It’s Penelope, of course. And maybe Gordy. And do you want to know what the very best thing was about Wellpinit? My grandmother. She was amazing. She was the most amazing person in the world. Do you want to know the very best thing about my grandmother? She was tolerant. And I know that’s a hilarious thing to say about your grandmother. I mean, when people compliment their grandmothers, especially their Indian grandmothers, they usually say things like, “My grandmother is so wise” and “My grandmother is so kind” and “My grandmother has seen everything.” And, yeah, my grandmother was smart and kind and had traveled to about 100 different Indian reservations, but that had nothing to do with her greatness. My grandmother’s greatest gift was tolerance. Now, in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricity. In fact, weird people were often celebrated. Epileptics were often shamans because people just assumed that God gave seizure-visions to the lucky ones. Gay people were seen as magical, too. I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers. Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives! My grandmother had no use for all the gay bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians. “Jeez,” she said. “Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who’s going to pick up all the dirty socks?” Of course, ever since white people showed up and brought along their Christianity and their fears of eccentricity, Indians have gradually lost all of their tolerance. Indians can be just as judgmental and hateful as any white person. But not my grandmother. She still hung on to that old-time Indian spirit, you know? She always approached each new person and each new experience the exact same way. Whenever we went to Spokane, my grandmother would talk to anybody, even the homeless people, even the homeless guys who were talking to invisible people. My grandmother would start talking to the invisible people, too. Why would she do that? “Well,” she said, “how can I be sure there aren’t invisible people in the world? Scientists didn’t believe in the mountain gorilla for hundreds of years. And now look. So if scientists can be wrong, then all of us can be wrong. I mean, what if all of those invisible people ARE scientists? Think about that one.” So I thought about that one: After I decided to go to Reardan, I felt like an invisible mountain gorilla scientist. My grandmother was the only one who thought it was a 100 percent good idea. “Think of all the new people you’re going to meet,” she said. “That’s the whole point of life, you know? To meet new people. I wish I could go with you. It’s such an exciting idea.”