Anger

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

  “In public schools, kids will learn far more from studying the classics than from the mental junk food dished out by Judy Blume.” Thomas’s argument that parents and role models should act as correctives in an out-of-control culture extended well beyond the realm of children’s fiction. In 1981—the same year that Charles and Diana got hitched in London and MTV premiered with an infectious oh ah oh in “Video Killed the Radio Star”—sex education was under attack as well. There was a widespread political agenda to reroute the way kids were being taught to think about their bodies, steered by people who believed America, thanks to the civil rights and women’s movements, had taken an abrupt wrong turn in the 1960s. Too many adults, they thought, had been corrupted by their appetites, with activists and atheists spoon-feeding them crap. But kids—kids were still movable. The Right wanted to get back in the driver’s seat, escorting boys and girls toward traditional, Christianity-approved pairings: monogamous, heterosexual, breadwinner/homemaker relationships. In 1981, the Reagan administration quietly pushed through the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), which provided federal funding to programs that promoted abstinence-only sex ed. It was the first bill of its kind and was passed as part of the new president’s Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, aimed at making good on Reagan’s campaign promise to cut down on government spending. AFLA’s purported goal was to solve the fiscal crisis of teen pregnancy by teaching high schoolers that the only safe sex before marriage was no sex at all. This, supporters argued, would scale back on government handouts, because teen moms were almost always on the take. Really? Here’s how that logic went. Young women who gave birth out of wedlock grew up to be “welfare queens”—a racially coded epithet for mothers who had more and more children in order to live off the taxpayers by vampirically extending their benefits. While family life classes had always been designed to underscore the primacy of heterosexual marriage, the abstinence-only model went a step further by stressing that state-sanctioned male-female unions were the only appropriate context for sexual activity. This is just another angle on the pro-censorship argument, really; the thinking goes that if you can’t read or learn about it, it doesn’t exist. Once again, teens were being told that until they grew up and made it to the altar, they’d simply have to control themselves. Masturbation, contraception, and homosexual experimentation were not presented as ways to explore safer sex. The religious undertones in this approach were unmistakable. AFLA denied funds to programs that offered abortions or abortion counseling, according to Jeffrey Moran, the author of Teaching Sex . “Congress soon passed the so-called squeal rule,” he wrote, “which required federally funded family planning clinics to inform parents if their teenage children were seeking contraception or an abortion.” The controlling Republican Party was prepared to punish teens for getting pregnant by condemning them to poverty.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  She stepped behind her closet door, let her nightgown drop from her shoulders, pulled the sweater on, then gathered the nightgown around her waist so she could model the sweater for them. They whooped and cheered. Robo and Suzanne whistled. She couldn’t wait to wear it for Mason. “Wait until Mason feels how soft it is!” Robo said, as if she knew what Miri was thinking. It used to be Natalie who knew what Miri was thinking, but not anymore. Natalie was distant now, living in her own world. The other girls laughed until Robo switched gears. “I have something to tell you.” They could see from the look on her face it was serious. Miri pulled off the sweater, rebuttoned her nightgown, and sat on the floor with her friends, waiting for Robo’s news. She hoped it wasn’t serious, as in someone was going to die. She didn’t want to hear anything bad on her birthday. “We’re moving,” Robo said. “To Millburn.” They gasped. “But why?” Suzanne asked. “You already live in a beautiful house.” “My parents say it’s because of my father’s job. He’s building one of those new shopping centers nearby…but I think it’s because of…” She trailed off. “Let me guess,” Eleanor said. “The crash.” “Well, yes, even though they won’t admit it. Instead they say things like the schools in Millburn are really good.” Then, embarrassed, she added, “Not that there’s anything wrong with the schools here.” “But the crash is over,” Suzanne argued. “I know, but what can I do?” Robo wouldn’t look at them. Her friends. They’d been together for almost three years. At Battin they’d have three more. “I thought you have to be really rich to live there,” Suzanne said. “Only on some streets,” Robo said, growing defensive. “You’ll come visit. It’s not that far away. Just twenty minutes or so by car.” “Only another planet,” Eleanor said. “There’s a Lord & Taylor,” Robo said, trying to find something positive to say. “We can go shopping.” “You can go shopping.” Eleanor didn’t add that Natalie was the only one of their crowd who could afford to shop at Lord & Taylor. Until now. Who knew Robo’s parents—Milton and Pamela Boros—were rich enough to move to Millburn? “You sound angry,” Robo said to Eleanor. “Are you angry?” “No. Yes.” Eleanor shook her head and shrugged. “Maybe.” “Because it’s not my fault.” “I know it’s not your fault,” Eleanor said. “I’m just…I don’t know…disappointed because I always thought the five of us would be together all through high school.” Miri never would have guessed Eleanor cared so much. She had her whole life planned out, including winning the Nobel Prize in math or science. “I can’t control my parents,” Robo said. “If you want the truth, they didn’t even ask me. They took me and my sister for a ride last week and pointed to a house. ‘This is our new house,’ my father said. We’re moving before Lincoln’s birthday.” “Now?” Suzanne said.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Only then did she sit in Daisy’s swivel chair, in front of the Remington typewriter and the leather appointment book, calmly calling patients, asking them to call tomorrow to reschedule. She felt grown-up, helpful, even important, until her sister, Athena, phoned and gave her hell. “Why didn’t you call us? We’ve been worried sick. Really, Christina—grow up! Take responsibility. Did you give a second’s thought to Mama, who’s going out of her mind with worry?” “I’m sorry,” Christina said. “I tried to call but I couldn’t get through.” This was a lie. She hadn’t been thinking about her mother or Athena. “You should have come here.” Athena was using her holier-than-thou voice. “How far is the shop from your job? I’d say, five minutes, if that. And you should have stopped in at the restaurant to see Baba.” “You’re right,” Christina said. She’d learned the best way to avoid an argument with her sister was to agree. “I wasn’t thinking.” “That’s no excuse,” Athena told her. “In case you’re interested,” Christina said, “I saw it happen. The plane came right over Battin. I was outside on Williamson Street a minute after it crashed and exploded.” She was getting worked up, her voice rising with her emotions. “I was there, Athena. I was there when people ran out of their houses screaming, on fire. Do you know what that was like? Do you even care?” Before she could slam down the receiver her sister said, “Well, that sounds terrible but I don’t see why you’re angry at me.” This time Christina did slam down the receiver. The palm of her right hand was bleeding from digging her fingernails so deeply into it. She hated Athena! She ran into the small, narrow lab where Daisy kept a row of white plaster-of-Paris figurines lined up on a shelf, each one a foot high, waiting for Dr. O to smash if he felt a temper coming on. Christina had witnessed his fury just once and it had scared her. How could this kind and generous man have such inner rage? What set him off? She only knew it never happened when there were patients in the office. She only knew that smashing one of the plaster-of-Paris figurines made him feel better. After, Daisy would sweep up the remains and Dr. O would carry on as if nothing had happened. Now, as the rage boiled up inside of her, Christina grabbed one of those figurines and smashed it. She thought she would feel better, but she didn’t. She slumped to the floor, her eyes closed against the headache coming on. She sat there, surrounded by the remains of Dopey, or whichever one of the Seven Dwarfs she’d smashed, until the phone rang. She went back to Daisy’s desk and picked it up, praying it wasn’t Athena again, or worse, her mother. “Good afternoon, Dr. Osner’s office,” she said, trying to sound professional. “Is this Daisy?” “No, it’s Christina.” “Oh, Christina. This is Mrs. Jones.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  He looked pleased. His smudgy mustache twitched. I removed my raincoat. I was wearing a black suit, a black shirt, no tie. We sat down in two easy chairs. “You know,” he said, scratching loudly his fleshy and gritty gray cheek and showing his small pearly teeth in a crooked grin, “you don’t look like Jack Brewster. I mean, the resemblance is not particularly striking. Somebody told me he had a brother with the same telephone company.” To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage … To look at the black hairs on the back of his pudgy hands … To wander with a hundred eyes over his purple silks and hirsute chest foreglimpsing the punctures, and mess, and music of pain … To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling—oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss! “No, I am afraid I am neither of the Brewsters.” He cocked his head, looking more pleased than ever. “Guess again, Punch.” “Ah,” said Punch, “so you have not come to bother me about those long-distance calls?” “You do make them once in a while, don’t you?” “Excuse me?” I said I had said I thought he had said he had never— “People,” he said, “people in general, I’m not accusing you, Brewster, but you know it’s absurd the way people invade this damned house without even knocking. They use the vaterre, they use the kitchen, they use the telephone. Phil calls Philadelphia. Pat calls Patagonia. I refuse to pay. You have a funny accent, Captain.” “Quilty,” I said, “do you recall a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?” “Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place. Paradise, Wash., Hell Canyon. Who cares?” “I do, Quilty. You see, I am her father.” “Nonsense,” he said. “You are not. You are some foreign literary agent. A Frenchman once translated my Proud Flesh as La Fierté de la Chair. Absurd.” “She was my child, Quilty.” In the state he was in he could not really be taken aback by anything, but his blustering manner was not quite convincing. A sort of wary inkling kindled his eyes into a semblance of life. They were immediately dulled again. “I’m very fond of children myself,” he said, “and fathers are among my best friends.” He turned his head away, looking for something. He beat his pockets. He attempted to rise from his seat. “Down!” I said—apparently much louder than I intended. “You need not roar at me,” he complained in his strange feminine manner. “I just wanted a smoke. I’m dying for a smoke.” “You’re dying anyway.” “Oh, chucks,” he said. “You begin to bore me. What do you want? Are you French, mister? Woolly-woo-boo-are? Let’s go to the barroomette and have a stiff—” He saw the little dark weapon lying in my palm as if I were offering it to him.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  pleasure? The god being burned in this sort, and perceiving that promise and faith was broken, he fled away without utterance of any word from the kisses and hands of his most unhappy wife. But Psyche fortuned to catch him as he was rising by the right thigh with both hands, and held him fast as he flew about in the air, hanging to him (poor wretch) through his cloudy journey, until such time that, constrained by weariness, she let go and fell down upon the ground: but Cupid left her not altogether, but followed her down and lighted upon the top of a cypress-tree, and angrily spake unto her in this manner: ‘O simple Psyche, consider with thyself, how I (little regarding the commandment of my mother, who willed me that thou shouldest be married to a man of base and miserable condition) did come myself from heaven to love thee. This have I very wantonly done, I know (and I have wounded mine own body with my proper weapon) to have thee to my spouse, and did I seem a beast unto thee, that thou shouldest go about to cut off my head with a razor, yea this head with its eyes that love thee so well? Did not I always give thee in charge against this danger? Did not I gently will thee to beware? But those cursed aiders and counsellors of thine shall be worthily rewarded for their pains. As for thee, thou shalt be sufficiently punished by my absence. And when he had spoken these words he took his flight into the air. * Then Psyche fell flat on the ground, and as long as she might see her husband, she cast her eyes after him into the air, weeping and lamenting piteously : but when he was flown clean away out of her sight, she threw herself into the next running river, for the great anguish and dolour that she was in, for 235 LUCIUS APULEIUS sed mitis fluvius in honorem dei scilicet, qui et ipsas aquas urere consuevit, metuens sibi confestim eam innoxio: volumine super ripam florentem herbis ex- posuit. Tunc forte Pan deus rusticus iuxta super- cilium amnis sedebat, complexus Echo montanam deam eamque voculas omnimodas edocens recinere ; proxime ripam vago pastu lasciviunt, comam fluvii tondentes, capellae. Hircuosus deus sauciam Psy- chen atque defectam, utcumque casus eius non inscius, clementer ad se vocatam sic permulcet verbis lenien- tibus: *Puella scitula, sum quidem rusticanus et upilio, sed senectutis prolixae beneficio multis ex- perimentis instructus. Verum sirecte coniecto, quod profecto prudentes viri divinationem autumant, ab isto titubante et saepius vacillante vestigio deque nimio pallore corporis et assiduo suspiritu, immo et ipsis marcentibus oculis tuis, amore nimio laboras. Ergo mihi ausculta, nec te rursus praecipitio vel ullo mortis accersitae genere perimas. Luctum desine et pone maerorem precibusque potius Cupidinem deorum maximum percole, et utpote adolescentem delicatum luxuriosumque blandis obsequiis promerere.'

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Howbeit, the presence of these honest Citizens, could in no wise perswade him to leave his extort power, no nor yet to cause any temperance of his tongue, but the more they went about with gentle words to tell him his faults, the more would he fret and likewise fume, swearing all the oathes under God, that he little regarded the presence of the whole City, whereupon incontinently he commanded his servants to take the poore man by the eares, and carry him out of his ground, which greatly offended all the standers by. Then one of the brethren spake unto him somewhat boldly, saying: It is but a folly to have such affiance in your riches, whereby you should use your tyranny against the poore, when as the law is common for all men, and a redresse may be had to suppresse your insolency. These words chafed him more then the burning oile, or flaming brimstone, or scourge of whipps, saying: that they should be hanged and their law too, before he would be subject unto any person: and therewithall he called out his bandogges and great masties, which accustomed to eate the carrion and carkases of dead beasts in the fields, and to set upon such as passed by the way: then he commanded they should be put upon all the assistance to teare them in peeces: who as soone as they heard the hisse of their master, ran fiercely upon them invading them on every side, insomuch that the more they flied to escape away, the more cruell and terrible were the dogges. It fortuned amongst all this fearefull company, that in running, the youngest of the three brethren stombled at a stone, and fell down to the ground: Then the dogs came upon him and tare him in peeces with their teeth, whereby he was compelled to cry for succour: His other two brethren hearing his lamentable voice ran towards him to helpe him, casting their cloakes about their left armes, tooke up stones to chase away the dogs, but all was in vaine, for they might see their brother dismembred in every part of his body: Who lying at the very point of death, desired his brethren to revenge his death against that cruell tyrant: And therewithall he gave up the ghost. The other two brethren perceiving so great a murther, and neglecting their owne lives, like desperate persons dressed themselves against the tyrant, and threw a great number of stones at him, but the bloudy theefe exercised in such and like mischiefes, tooke a speare and thrust it cleane through the body: howbeit he fell not downe to the ground. For the speare that came out at his backe ran into the earth, and sustained him up.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  He looked longingly at the closed door as though he hoped someone would open it and end this eternal interview. “And are you quite sure you haven’t become an addict yourself?” he asked. “Shall I have the Narcotics people bring you some of their interesting literature on addiction? I’m sure they have some splendid brochures, they should, our tax dollars, you know …” And he went on mumbling to himself until I was able to slip out. No one was worthy of me. I had twenty minutes to kill before my rendezvous with Beattie, an interval I resented, so habituated had I already become to the tight scheduling of the great man, the man of the world. The headmaster, as it turned out, botched everything. He did bring in the narcs, who did give me a brochure about heroin; I was basalt with indignation. Mr. Beattie was fired, but he was allowed to hang around until well into the next semester. Since Beattie couldn’t say we’d had sex, at a faculty meeting he accused me and DeQuincey of being lovers. Good old Quince stood by me, though he was badly shaken; the accusation had been just accurate enough to scare him. At last Beattie left us; I didn’t see him again until three years later, when I was in college and he was playing drums in a two-bit band at a fraternity dance. His eyes locked with mine. I felt I should tell him how much I repented what I’d done to him. I’d used and discarded him—just as my dad had mistreated Alice, the Addressograph operator. Oh, there are lots of stories I could tell. Dr. O’Reilly, who of course turned out to be a speed freak, had a breakdown one day and had to be hauled off to a clinic for several years. My friend Howie, true to his prediction, died before he was twenty. I saw him when he was very ill in the hospital. He was yellow and bloated from nephritis. I had to hold a mirror for him while he trimmed his own hair: “Don’t want to leave my last haircut to these hacks,” he said gallantly, a trace of the old Nazi dandy having reemerged in extremity. At the funeral Howie’s father turned out to be a young middle-level executive for a big corporation. The funeral was held at the McCabe Funeral Home (I pronounced it “macabre”). I was a pallbearer. There was a Hammond organ toothlessly mouthing hymns as though the music were bread soaked in milk. Our handsome, oafish chaplain gave the sermon. He’d never spoken for two seconds to Howie, who in any event had been a militant atheist. Oh, and the chaplain was found soon afterward in another master’s wife’s bed and he was not only dismissed from Eton but also defrocked.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  again. These our adversaries closed the gates on the breast of my Lord who remained without; and turned to me with slow steps. He had his eves upon the ground, and his eyebrows shorn of all boldness, and said with sighs: “Who hath denied me the doleful houses?” And to me he said: “Thou, be not dismayed, though I get angry: for I will master the trial, whatever be contrived for hindrance. This indolence of theirs is nothing new: 7 for they showed it once at a less secret gate, which still is found unbarred. Over it thou sawest the dead inscription; and already, on this side of it, comes down the steep, passing the circles without escort, one 8 by whom the city shall be opened to us.” 1. No importance need be attached to the tradition based on this word, according to which the first seven cantos were written by Dante before his exile, and the composition of the work was resumed after a considerable interval. 2. The others being spirits. 3. Filippo Argenti’s disagreeable character is not sufficient to account for Dante’s special hatred. There is evidence to show that members of the Adimari family, to which Filippo belonged, were hostile to the poet himself. In Par. xvi Cacciaguida’s reference to them is anything but flattering. 4. So far, only sins of incontinence have been punished. Within the City of Dis (or Pluto) are punished the graver sins of malice and bestiality (cf. Canto xi). 5. The angels that fell with Satan (cf. Rev. xii. 9). 6. Seven is not to be taken literally: cf. Psalms cxix. 164; Proverbs xxiv. 16. 7. These same demons had opposed Christ at the gate of Hell (cf. Inf. iii), when he descended to Limbo (cf. Inf. iv). 8. The angel whose coming is described in the next canto.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I controlled my breath and said: “Dolores, this must stop right away. I am ready to yank you out of Beardsley and lock you up you know where, but this must stop. I am ready to take you away the time it takes to pack a suitcase. This must stop or else anything may happen.” “Anything may happen, huh?” I snatched away the stool she was rocking with her heel and her foot fell with a thud on the floor. “Hey,” she cried, “take it easy.” “First of all you go upstairs,” I cried in my turn,—and simultaneously grabbed at her and pulled her up. From that moment, I stopped restraining my voice, and we continued yelling at each other, and she said unprintable things. She said she loathed me. She made monstrous faces at me, inflating her cheeks and producing a diabolical plopping sound. She said I had attempted to violate her several times when I was her mother’s roomer. She said she was sure I had murdered her mother. She said she would sleep with the very first fellow who asked her and I could do nothing about it. I said she was to go upstairs and show me all her hiding places. It was a strident and hateful scene. I held her by her knobby wrist and she kept turning and twisting it this way and that, surreptitiously trying to find a weak point so as to wrench herself free at a favorable moment, but I held her quite hard and in fact hurt her rather badly for which I hope my heart may rot, and once or twice she jerked her arm so violently that I feared her wrist might snap, and all the while she stared at me with those unforgettable eyes where cold anger and hot tears struggled, and our voices were drowning the telephone, and when I grew aware of its ringing she instantly escaped. With people in movies I seem to share the services of the machina telephonica and its sudden god. This time it was an irate neighbor. The east window happened to be agape in the living room, with the blind mercifully down, however; and behind it the damp black night of a sour New England spring had been breathlessly listening to us. I had always thought that type of haddocky spinster with the obscene mind was the result of considerable literary inbreeding in modern fiction; but now I am convinced that prude and prurient Miss East—or to explode her incognito, Miss Fenton Lebone—had been probably protruding three-quarter-way from her bedroom window as she strove to catch the gist of our quarrel. “… This racket … lacks all sense of …” quacked the receiver, “we do not live in a tenement here. I must emphatically …” I apologized for my daughter’s friends being so loud. Young people, you know—and cradled the next quack and a half. Downstairs the screen door banged. Lo? Escaped?

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Three paces the river kept us distant; but Hellespont, where Xerxes crossed, to this day a curb to all human pride, endured not more hatred from Leander for its turbulent waves ’twixt Sestos and Abydos, than that did from me, because it opened not then. “New-comers are ye,” she began, “and perchance, because I am smiling in this place, chosen for nest of the human race, some doubt doth hold you marvelling; but the psalm Delectasti 7 giveth light which may clear the mist from your understanding. And thou, who art in front, and didst entreat me, say if aught else thou wouldst hear: for I came ready to all thy questioning till thou be satisfied.” “The water,” said I, “and the music of the forest, are combating within me a new belief in a thing which I have heard contrary to this.” 8 Wherefore she: “I will tell from what cause that arises which makes thee marvel, and I will purge away the mist that offends thee. The highest Good, who himself alone doth please, made man good and for goodness, and gave this place to him as an earnest of eternal peace. Through his default, small time he sojourned here; through his default, for tears and sweat he exchanged honest laughter and sweet play. In order that the storms, which the exhalations of the water and of the earth cause below it, and which follow so far as they can after the heat,

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

  “We began to get letters from these people… It was Jerry Falwell [spearheading it], who had just sort of come on the scene.” Silsbee said it was obvious that the objectors were all following a script. “We came to understand that a lot of the letters were very much the same. It felt to us like it was a campaign that was all across the United States.” Sending angry letters was just one way that these fired-up folks would operate, Silsbee continued. “They’d go after school librarians, they’d go after teachers, and disrupt school board meetings and PTA meetings.” They accused certain books of promoting Secular Humanism, a once-obscure philosophy that became a conservative buzzword in the 1980s, much like Critical Race Theory today. Dating back to the nineteenth century, Secular Humanism hinged on the notion that humans are capable of behaving morally without the scaffold of religious or theistic dogma. But in the mouths of the Moral Majority and other right-wing groups, the term evolved to mean blatantly anti-religion and anti-God. “Thanks to Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority I went from being called a ‘Communist’ to being labeled a ‘Secular Humanist,’ ” Blume wrote in a 1993 essay for the New York Law School Review called “Is Puberty a Dirty Word?” According to her new Christian fundamentalist critics, Judy’s books were not only “undermining of parental authority”—as she put it in the same article—but undermining the sovereignty of Jesus Christ as well. You’d think the decision in Island Trees School District v. Pico would be enough to defang today’s most ban-thirsty elected officials and parents. But the Supreme Court’s ruling on that case didn’t go far enough, even according to the lawyer who argued it. “We didn’t create the law that we would have liked,” Pico’s legal rep Arthur Eisenberg told WNYC in 2022. At the time, the Supremes argued that a political or ideological objection to a title isn’t a good enough reason to evict it from schools. Looking back, Eisenberg said he wished that they’d been able to legally enshrine curatorial power over libraries to the librarians. “Just as academic judgements should be left to the academics… decisions about the content of library collections should be left to the librarians.” Without that, the decision in Island Trees v. Pico still leaves room for the idea that certain books are too objectively vulgar or offensive or obscene for the eyes of children. Governor Ron DeSantis defends his stance on book removals in precisely this way: “In Florida, pornographic and inappropriate materials that have been snuck into our classrooms and libraries to sexualize our students violate our state education standards,” he says on his official website. In the 1980s, book challenges weren’t coming from government officials like they are now. But in the fall of 1982, one book was effectively banned by the federal government. It was called Show Me! , and it was a Germany-imported sex ed publication that came out in the US in 1975.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  ‘Come, boys, take men’s hearts unto you, and let us enter into every part of the house, and attack them that slumber therein. No delay, no cowardice in your hearts; let murder with drawn sword go throughout the dwelling. Such as we find asleep let us slay, and such likewise as resist let us kill, and so by that means we shall escape without danger if we leave none alive therein.’ Verily, ye judges, I confess that I drew out my sword, which I bore for this manner of danger, against those three abandoned robbers, willing to terrify and drive them away ; for I thought that it was the office and duty of one that beareth good will to this common weal so to do, especially since they put me in great fear, both for myself and for mine host. But when those cruel and terrible men would in no case run away, nor fear my naked sword, but boldly resisted against me, I ran upon them and fought valiantly, One of them which was the captain and leader of the rest invaded me strongly and drew me by the hair with both his hands, and would have beaten me with a great stone, but while he groped therefor, I proved the hardier man, and threw him down at my feet and killed him, I took likewise the second that clasped about my legs and bit me, and slew him also, thrusting him through the shoulder. And the third that came running carelessly upon me, after that I had struck him full in the stomach, fell down dead. Thus when I had restored peace and delivered myself, the house, mine host, and all his family from this present danger, I thought that I should not only escape unpunished, but also have some great reward of the city for my pains. Moreover I that have always been clear and unspotted of crime and well looked upon in mine own country, and that have 109 LUCIUS APULEIUS probe spectatus apud meos, semper innocentiam commodis cunctis antetuleram. Nec possum repperire cur iustae ultionis, qua contra latronse deterrimos commotus sum, nunc istum reatum sus- tineam, cum nemo possit monstrare vel proprias inter nos inimicitias praecessisse ac ne omnino mihi notos illos latrones usquam fuisse; vel certe ulla praeda monstretur, cuius cupidine tantum flagitium credatur admissum." 7 . Haec profatus rursum lacrimis obortis, porrectisque in preces manibus, per publicam misericordiam, per pignorum caritatem maestus tunc hos, tunc illos deprecabar. Cumque iam humanitate commotos, misericordia fletuum affectos omnes satis crederem, solis et lustitiae testatus oculum casumque prae- sentem meum commendans deum providentiae, paulo altius aspectu relato conspicio prorsus totum populum (risu cachinnabili diffluebant) nec secus illum bonum hospitem parentemque meum Milonem risu maximo dissolutum. At tunc sic tacitus mecum “ En fides " inquam * En conscientia: ego quidem pro hospitis salute et homicida sum et reus capitis inducor, at ille non contentus quod mihi nec assistendi solacium perhibuit, insuper exitium meum cachinnat,"

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  My master somewhat astonied at the strange sights which he saw before, and ignorant of the Latine tongue, roade on and spake never a word: The souldier unable to refraine his insolence, and offended at his silence, strake him on the shoulders as he sate on my backe; then my master gently made answer that he understood not what he said, whereat the souldier angerly demanded againe, whither he roade with his Asse? Marry (quoth he) to the next City: But I (quoth the souldier) have need of his helpe, to carry the trusses of our Captaine from yonder Castle, and therewithall he tooke me by the halter and would violently have taken me away: but my master wiping away the blood of the blow which he received of the souldier, desired him gently and civilly to take some pitty upon him, and to let him depart with his owne, swearing and affirming that his slow Asse, welnigh dead with sicknesse, could scarce carry a few handfuls of hearbs to the next towne, much lesse he was able to beare any greater trusses: but when he saw the souldier would in no wise be intreated, but ready with his staffe to cleave my masters head, my master fell down at his feete, under colour to move him to some pitty, but when he saw his time, he tooke the souldier by the legs and cast him upon the ground: Then he buffetted him, thumped him, bit him, and tooke a stone and beat his face and his sides, that he could not turne and defend himselfe, but onely threaten that if ever he rose, he would choppe him in pieces. The Gardener when he heard him say so, drew out his javelin which hee had by his side, and when he had throwne it away, he knockt and beate him more cruelly then he did before, insomuch that the souldier could not tell by what meanes to save himselfe, but by feining that he was dead, Then my master tooke the javelin and mounted upon my backe, riding in all hast to the next village, having no regard to goe to his Garden, and when he came thither, he turned into one of his friends house and declared all the whole matter, desiring him to save his life and to hide himselfe and his Asse in some secret place, untill such time as all danger were past.

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

  The eleven-year-old needed to be honest enough that young readers could see themselves in her, but not so bitter that she was off-putting. Early drafts of It’s Not the End of the World show Blume striving to find that balance—with Dick Jackson’s input, of course. Many of his notes had to do with making sure Karen had enough depth that she didn’t come off as a whiner. He wanted, for instance, to build in plenty of positive relationships on the page so that her rage toward her parents didn’t seem like her default. Sure enough, in the published book, Karen has a supportive friendship with her lifelong neighbor Debbie Bartell and is intrigued when a new girl comes into her life—a wry, New York Times –obsessed child of divorce named Val, who shocks Karen by shaving her legs in front of her. Karen also looks up to her paternal grandfather, who she calls Garfa. Garfa lives in Las Vegas, and when he visits New Jersey in the wake of the separation, the pair conspire to stop the divorce in its tracks. She writes him private letters to update him on her progress, although her tone becomes increasingly resigned. “I have discovered something important about my mother and father,” she says. “When they are apart they’re not so bad, but together they are impossible!” Judy also played around with the scope of the book, originally planning to track the Newmans through Bill’s dating life and quick remarriage. Up through the third—and close to final—draft, he walked down the aisle with a woman named Sandy, who had a young daughter, Beth. Karen wasn’t a fan of either of them. And eventually, Jackson suggested that Bill’s second marriage plot was contributing to the problem of Karen’s likability. Was it appealing, he wondered, to watch her begrudgingly accept her new stepfamily and continue to resent her father? Judy agreed and lopped off the entire sequence. The finished novel ends with Karen making peace with the circumstances of the divorce and having a B+ day. Blume worked to soften Karen’s hard edges throughout the revisions but not at the expense of the character’s righteous, and rightful, indignation. Karen is angry. At moments, she’s mean and sarcastic. She doesn’t bottle up her feelings like a nice girl. After she first finds out about the breakup, she gives Debbie a hard time just because she can. “I was making Debbie feel bad and I was glad,” she says. “Sometimes I am a mean and rotten person.” Later, in a fight with her mother, Karen takes a cutting snipe at her: “All you care about is yourself! You never think about me!” Kids are allowed to blow off steam in Judy Blume’s books, even if the fallout is ugly. And so Karen yells. Margaret taunts. Tony Miglione resents his parents and spies on his next-door neighbor while she changes.

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

  That’s what matters.” Blume, he went on, is “not literary,” thanks to a mixture of her preferred subject matter, the simplicity of her prose, her use of casual dialogue, and her avoidance of highly textured descriptions. (“I absolutely can’t write descriptive prose,” Blume acknowledged to Samantha Bee in 2015. “I can do characters and relationships and dialogue, but don’t make me describe anything.”) There was a sense in the late 1970s that when it came to books, giving children what they wanted to read was akin to feeding them soda and french fries—empty calories, lacking in real nutrients. But what if kids gravitated toward Blume’s books because they contained unexpectedly nourishing ingredients that couldn’t be found elsewhere? “Dick, he once said to me, ‘We’re writing sugar-coated bitter pills,’ ” Silsbee remembered. “Judy’s books—I don’t think of them as bitter, but I think of them as sometimes teaching hard lessons that nobody will talk to you about, like [about] God.” The sweetness, the girlishness—Blume’s novels aren’t worthwhile in spite of these attributes, but there’s no doubt that these attributes tended to distract from their worth. Then the bans started, first with a trickle. In the mid to late 1970s, the public conflict about children’s books started to shift from what kids should be reading to what they should be allowed to read at all. There’s a difference. The first is a debate about the benefits (if any) of spending time with certain novels, while the latter concerns access. In 1976 in Levittown, Long Island, the conflict came to a head when the school board voted to remove eleven books—including Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the anonymous drug diary Go Ask Alice , The Fixer by Bernard Malamud, Black Boy by Richard Wright, and The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers , a collection edited by Langston Hughes—from the school district’s library shelves. At the time, five high school students pushed back and ultimately brought the board to court with the help of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). The case was headed up by a then-seventeen-year-old high school senior named Steven Pico, who argued that the decision to remove the books violated young readers’ First Amendment rights. The publicly elected school board in the all-white district of Island Trees had determined that the offending titles were “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy,” according to a press release quoted in the New York Times . But Pico, as the president of the student council, disagreed. He felt that the challenges were targeted, unjustly pointed toward minority voices. “Two of the authors banned in Island Trees were among the most important Jewish-American writers, Bernard Malamud and Kurt Vonnegut,” he said over email. “Half of the books banned in Island Trees were written by and about Black writers, among them two who were Black and gay: James Baldwin and Langston Hughes.” As Pico told CNN in 2022, the board was acting unilaterally, without wider community input.

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

  At the time we spoke, Lauren Harrison had worked as an elementary school librarian at a public school in the West Village for seven years. She said she stocked her shelves with the popular titles of the moment—all the Dog Man books, The Baby-sitters Club updated graphic novels—as well as inclusive picture books for early readers, like My Own Way: Celebrating Gender Freedom for Kids ; Our Skin: A First Conversation About Race ; and Antiracist Baby . Given the demographics of the families who attend her school, Harrison said she was surprised when she received feedback from a mom that her book selections were “too gay.” She recalled getting an angry email after reading the picture book Our Subway Baby —based on author Peter Mercurio’s real-life experience of finding an abandoned baby on the New York City subway and ultimately adopting him with his husband—aloud to the students. Harrison dismissed the email as “ridiculous,” with her principal’s blessing. “I loved that book, the kids loved it, they fought over who got to borrow it,” she said. “It’s offensive to me that that book’s offensive to you.” Harrison’s mother, Carol Waxman, is also a librarian and has worked in the Connecticut public library system for almost forty years. She had a harrowing experience after she helped plan West Hartford’s first drag queen story time in the summer of 2022. Waxman was enthusiastic about hosting the event as part of a larger local Pride celebration, especially given the town’s “very active Pride community.” But as soon as the story time was scheduled, the blowback started. “Well, it ended up being so controversial and difficult. Letters, phone calls, people came in to see me, furious,” Waxman remembered. She was shaken up by it, “because some of the letters to me were threatening. ‘This is on you, your career is at stake, you’re gonna throw everything away because of this,’ ” people were telling her. The town’s mayor and manager also received rage-filled correspondences, all from older citizens who stressed that they’d never, ever let their grandchildren attend an event hosted by drag queens. Reluctantly, officials made the decision to move the reading outside, in light of the threats of violence and vandalism against the library. And when it became clear that the event might need a rain plan, a nearby Barnes & Noble stepped up and offered to absorb it. “I went over to see it and it was packed,” Waxman said. She noted—as Blume has, too—that this moment’s increased appetite for censorship isn’t coming exclusively from the Right. Blume experienced this firsthand in April 2023 after expressing solidarity with J.K. Rowling, who has borne the brunt of major social media pile-ons due to her outspoken anti-trans views. Public response was so negative that Judy issued an aggrieved statement on X (then Twitter) clarifying that “I wholly support the trans community.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  According to a ninety-page report released by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a Washington, D.C.–based civil-rights coalition, justice and skin pigmentation continue to remain linked. Titled “Justice on Trial: Racial Disparities in the American Criminal Justice System,” the report found that 1) 74 percent of all those who are deported by the INS are of Mexican origin even though less than half of all undocumented people are from Mexico; 2) Latino/as are likely to be released in only 26 percent of their legal cases while non-Hispanics are released before trial 66 percent of the time; and 3) blacks who kill whites were sentenced to death twenty-two times more frequently than blacks who kill blacks and seven times more frequently than whites who kill blacks. Additionally, black youths are six times more likely to be imprisoned than white youths, even when charged with similar crimes and when neither has a prior record.4 Self-centeredness, as the sin of pride, pursues power and privilege at the expense or detriment of others in its attempt to replace God with the self. Yet no one is willing to admit one's own self-centeredness. Instead, most wish to proclaim their self-righteousness. Here is a dialectical conflict. How do well-meaning Christians read the Bible in order to reconcile a faith in Christ with their continuous pursuit of power and privilege? In other words, how is the Bible read to justify living amid wealth and privilege while others lack basic rights and necessities? The following example may help answer these questions. In reading the Gospels, we discover that Jesus spoke a great deal about money, our relationship to money, and the different relationships money creates. In fact, he mentions this subject more than he does heaven, the Spirit, God's kingdom, or his own messiahship. Jesus refers to money more than any other topic, clearly showing that he knew where our treasures lay. According to Matthew, Jesus provides his would-be followers with a clear choice: “No one is able to serve two lords. For they will either hate the one and love the other, or they will cleave to one and despise the other. You are not able to serve God and Mammon” (6:24). “Mammon” is an Aramaic word for wealth, money, or property. Here is the choice Jesus gives us: we can pursue self-centeredness and the power and privilege it provides or we can choose to follow God, but we can't do both. Nonetheless, those at the center, accustomed to its privilege, want to do both. And they believe that it is possible to serve God and to protect their power and privilege. This pursuit of power and wealth, masked under a facade of Christianity, inevitably leads to injustice, here defined as the undue privilege obtained by the powerful and the lack of rights existing for the powerless. Rationalizing injustices allows those at the center to continue benefiting at the expense of the margins while simultaneously defining themselves as good Christians.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Any examination of the biblical justification of patriarchy should begin with Genesis: “To the woman [God] said, ‘I will greatly increase your sorrow in your childbearing; you shall bear children in sorrow, and your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you’” (3:16). Read through the eyes of patriarchy, the passage is quite straightforward. God has ordained men to rule over women. Historically, men have always cited the Bible to counteract women's attempts to advance in society. The Bible has been used to condemn female actions toward empowerment as unbiblical. In particular, many men have interpreted Genesis 3:16 to mean that because women first ate the mango (or apple) from the forbidden tree, they were punished by God. Their eternal sentence was to be subservient to men. Yet the words spoken by God in Genesis 3:16 occurred after the fall of humanity, after the disobedience of Adam and Eve, after the entrance of sin into the cosmic story. The question that should be raised is whether it is God's will for women to be ruled over by men or whether God is simply foretelling what the consequences of sin will be for humanity, specifically women, in this verse. The next two verses might shed some light upon this question. In them, God turns to man and curses the ground, stating that from now on man would have to till the cursed soil, only to produce “thorns and thistles.” The garden, and the effortless fruits it produced, will be gone. Only through the sweat of the brow will Adam be fed. Again, does this mean that it is the will of God for Adam and all of his descendants to work and labor in sorrow? No, of course not. It is God's will for Adam to continue living in the garden, being one with his wife and his Creator. By the same token, we ask if it is God's will that women be ruled over by men. Again, using the same reasoning, the answer must be no. It is God's will to return women to the garden, where “they were both naked, yet they were not ashamed,” where the relationship between the man and the woman was vulnerable yet safe, because no power relationship existed between them. Genesis 3:16 does not describe God's curse on women, any more than Genesis 3:17 does not describe God's curse on men. In both of these verses, God is foretelling the consequences of sin. Both the man and the woman wanted to be like God, so they ate the mango; both desired the power that came with being God. Instead, they have fallen to a state where social structures are created to deny them the power they sought: subservience to economic structures (agriculture as a way of surviving) for men, and sexist relational structures for women.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  According to Ezekiel, among the crimes of Jerusalem that led to its destruction was that “the people of the land have used oppression and practiced robbery; they have troubled the poor and needy, and have oppressed the alien denying them justice” (22:29). This theme continues through the minor prophets. Although an examination of this theme among the Hebrew prophets is beyond the scope of this book, we can focus on one prophet, Amos, as a representative of the whole. The Hebrew prophets proclaimed that God identifies with those who suffer under unjust structures. The prophet Amos was not concerned that the religious folks of his time showed charity to those who were marginalized; rather, he called for the creation of a new and just socioeconomic structure: Hear this, you who trample the poor and silence the humble of the earth. You who say, “When will the New Moon pass so that we may sell grain, or the Sabbath so we can market our wheat?” By diminished bushel and raised currency, by falsifying and tampering with the scales, you buy the helpless with silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals. Even getting paid for the sweeping of the wheat. Yahweh has sworn by the pride of Jacob, “Never will I forget all these things you have done” (8:4–7). Those who belonged to the dominant culture of Amos's time were good people who were faithful in their religiosity. They attended worship and offered sacrifices, yet they reconciled religious practices with an economic system that benefited them at the expense of others. For this reason, Amos informs the people that God was not appeased by their rituals; rather, God finds satisfaction only in the establishment of justice. I hate, I reject your feast days, and I will not delight in your festive assemblies. Even if you offer up to me burnt offerings or food offerings, I will not be pleased. I will not look upon your peace offerings of fattened animals. Take away from me the sound of your songs, and the melody of your harps, I will not hear them. Instead, let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing torrent. (5:21–24) Amos was not popular among the religious people of the dominant culture. Amos was an alien, a Judean from south of the border preaching in the northern nation of Israel. He had no religious training, being neither a prophet nor a prophet's son; instead he worked in the field, a shepherd who tended sycamore trees (7:14–15). Amos, an alien with a menial job, would be the equivalent today of an undocumented Latino, maybe working as a gardener in the exclusive suburbs of Washington, D.C., going to the National Cathedral to deliver God's message of justice. When the promised land was first settled by the Israelites, the land was distributed equally among the tribes and families so that everyone could have a similar living standard.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Equivocation In Dorothy Allison’s short story “Violence Against Women Begins at Home,” a group of lesbian friends gathers for a drink and they discuss a bit of community gossip: a pair of women recently broke into another woman’s house and trashed it, smashing glass and dishes and destroying her art, which they deemed pornographic. They spray-painted the story’s eponymous phrase on her wall. The friends debate police involvement and intragroup conflict mediation; but toward the end of the story, as they are parting ways, the problem crystallizes into a single, telling exchange: “Look, do you think maybe we could hold a rent party for Jackie, get her some money to fix her place back up?” Paula looks impatient and starts gathering up her stuff. “Oh, I don’t think we should do that. Not while they’re still in arbitration. And anyway, we have so many important things we have to raise money for this spring—community things.” “Jackie’s a part of the community,” I hear myself say. “Well, of course.” Paula stands up. “We all are.” The look she gives me makes me wonder if she really believes that, but she’s gone before I can say anything else. Queer folks fail each other too. This seems like an obvious thing to say; it is not, for example, a surprise to nonwhite queers or trans queers that intracommunity loyalty goes only so far, especially when it must confront the hegemony of the state. But even within ostensibly parallel power dynamics, the desire to save face, to present a narrative of uniform morality, can defeat every other interest. The queer community has long used the rhetoric of gender roles as a way of absolving queer women from responsibility for domestic abuse. Which is not to say that activists and academics didn’t try. When the conversation about queer domestic abuse took hold in the early 1980s, activists gave out fact sheets at conferences and festivals to dispel myths about queer abuse. 45 Scholars distributed questionnaires to get a sense of the scope of the problem. 46 Fierce debates were waged in the pages of queer periodicals. But some lesbians tried to restrict the definition of abuse to men’s actions. Butches might abuse their femmes, but only because of their adopted masculinity. Abusers were using “male privilege.” (To borrow lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu’s phrase, they were guilty of “[smuggling patriarchy] into lesbian utopia.”) Some argued that consensual S&M was part of the problem. Women who were women did not abuse their girlfriends; proper lesbians would never do such a thing. 47 There was also the narrative that it was, simply, complicated. The burden of the pressure of straight society! Lesbians abuse each other! Many people argued that the issue needed to be handled within their own communities. Ink was spilled in the service of decentering victims, and abusers often operated with impunity.