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.

Page 202 of 447 · 20 per page

• 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.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  You get in your car, drive to a distant street, and pull over. You don’t have the space in your brain to cry. You pick up your phone and see that, on Freecycle, someone is giving away catalog cards from a defunct library. You drive to a local Panera, take a stack of cards from a very nice woman who is probably wondering why you look like you’ve been forced to eat dog shit at gunpoint. Back at your house you calmly add the pile of cards to your scrap collection because you think you’d like to make a collage. Very late, your girlfriend—or is she?—appears at your house and says she has to get back to Bloomington. Where has she been this whole time? She doesn’t say, but she kisses you. “I think we’re meant to get through this,” she says. “Don’t worry. Promise me you won’t worry.” Dream House as Natural DisasterI get bad heartburn. It’s the Zoloft, which takes the edge off my anxiety but brings along a bunch of awful side effects, like a good friend who can’t shed a bad lover. Every so often, I take my nightly meds and within a few minutes feel as though a hot poker has been shoved down my esophagus. I chew antacids and walk to the bathroom. Often the pain, or the force of the neutralization, makes me vomit. I become, functionally, everyone’s favorite science fair project. When I bend over the toilet, I think a lot about how my heart is a volcano, like that quote from Kahlil Gibran. It’s dumb but it moved me—spoke to my shifting tectonic plates—and I wrote it down on a Post-it I stuck on my desk: “If your heart is a volcano how shall you expect flowers to bloom in your hands?” It stayed there until a bad day, working on this book, when I suddenly loathed the quote with every ember of my being and crumpled it up and threw it away. Reader, do you remember that ridiculous movie Volcano, the one with Tommy Lee Jones? Do you remember how they stopped eruption in the middle of downtown Los Angeles? They diverted it with cement roadblocks and pointed fire hoses at it, and rerouted the lava to the ocean, and everything was fine? Sweet reader, that is not how lava works. Anyone can tell you that. Here is the truth: I keep waiting for my anger to go dormant, but it won’t. I keep waiting for someone to reroute my anger into the ocean, but no one can. My heart is closer to Dante’s Peak of Dante’s Peak. My anger dissolves grandmas in acid lakes and razes quaint Pacific Northwest towns with ash and asphyxiates jet engines with its grit. Lava keeps leaking down my slopes. You should have listened to the scientist. You should have evacuated earlier.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Out of frustration, anger, insecurity, fear, or impatience we suddenly found ourselves becoming unusually assertive. We did something a bit extreme to hold on to our job; we tried to push a colleague out of our way; we reached for some dubious scheme to secure easy and fast money; we went too far in trying to get attention; we turned belligerent and controlling with our partner; we became vindictive and attacked someone on social media. In such moments, we crossed a line and became aggressive. Most often, when we act this way, we rationalize our behavior to ourselves and to others: we had no choice; we felt threatened; we were being treated unfairly; people were being unresponsive and harming us; we did not start it. In this way we are able to maintain our self- opinion as the peaceful creatures we imagine ourselves to be. Although we will rarely notice this, we can also observe a subtler example of our aggressive tendencies coming to the fore. When we face intimidating types who are more aggressive than we are, we often find ourselves acting more submissive than usual, and maybe a bit sycophantic if they have power. But when we face people clearly weaker and meeker than us, often the lion in us unconsciously emerges. Perhaps we decide to help them, but mixed in with this is a feeling of contempt and superiority. We become rather aggressive in trying to help them, ordering their life, being forceful with our advice. Or if we have little sympathy for them, we might feel compelled to use them in some way for our own purposes, and maybe push them around. All of this occurs unconsciously; we generally do not experience this as aggressiveness, but nonetheless, as we compare our inner strength with others’, we cannot help but lower and raise our aggression level. We can notice this split—between what we think of ourselves and how we actually act at times—in the behavior of our friends, colleagues, and those in the news. In our workplace, inevitably certain people push their way forward and grab more power. Perhaps they take credit for our work, or steal our ideas, or push us off a project, or ally themselves rather vigorously with those in power. We can see on social media the delight people take in feeling outraged, in attacking and bringing down others. We can see the energy with which the press exposes the slightest flaw in those in power, and the feeding frenzy that ensues. We can observe the rampant violence in our films and games, all masquerading as entertainment. And all the while nobody admits to being aggressive. In fact, more than ever people seem so modest and progressive.

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

  In the fall of 1980, Karen Fleshman was a sixth grader at Mary Blair Elementary School when she heard the news that her favorite author had sparked concern among community members and was at risk of being purged from the school library. Fleshman, then an eleven-year-old “voracious reader” with glasses, braces, and a short feathered blond haircut, was furious at the thought that kids like her were going to be denied the chance to read her best-loved Blume books, including Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself . She came home one day and vented about it to her father, Roger. “He was a real nonconformist and he was someone who believed in standing up for yourself,” said Fleshman, who was fifty-three and living in San Francisco at the time we spoke. “So when I told him all of this, he was like, ‘Why don’t you do something about it?’ ” Fleshman took his advice, explaining that Blume’s novels were so important to her because they “really gave me a sense of community, gave me a sense of identity and permission to just be who I am.” She felt out of place in homogeneous Loveland, which had a history as a Sundown town, meaning it used discriminatory practices to maintain an all-white population. “By the time I’m growing up, it’s a big hotbed of the John Birch Society. And like literally, everyone is blond and blue-eyed and everyone goes to Church on Sunday… [and is] super into football. It’s that kind of place.” What it wasn’t was the kind of place that supported kids reading stories about puberty and masturbation. And so Fleshman went to the children themselves, asking them to sign a petition to present at an upcoming board of education meeting. Unlike Pico’s classmates, Fleshman’s peers eagerly rallied around her cause. “I’m talking to everyone,” Fleshman remembered. “I’m talking to the first graders.” Ultimately, she collected signatures from ninety-three students and one adult. Then came the meeting of the local board of ed, where Fleshman pleaded her case. To her shock, the board voted unanimously to keep Blume’s books in the elementary school library, persuaded by Fleshman’s advocacy and some additional pressure from the local independent bookstore, The Open Book. After Fleshman’s campaign was successful, the store’s owners wrote letters to the governor of Colorado and to Judy Blume herself, telling them what Karen had done. Fleshman received a letter of appreciation from the governor and—far more memorably—a thank-you note and a signed copy of Sally J. Freedman from Judy Blume. On the inside cover, Blume wrote: “For Karen, a brave young woman and a real friend.” “Oh my God, I just couldn’t believe it,” Fleshman said about seeing the inscription. All these years later, she’s an anti-racist activist who has a background working with immigrants and preparing young men and women of color for corporate careers.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  4 “O spirit, that discoursest so much of good, tell me who thou wast,” said I, “and wherefore thou alone renewest these worthy lauds? Thy words shall not be without reward, if I return to complete the short way of that life which is flying to its end.” And he: 5 “I will tell it thee, not for any solace that I expect from yonder, but because so much grace shineth in thee ere thou art dead. I was the root of the evil tree which o’ershadows all Christian lands, so that rarely is good fruit plucked therefrom. But if Douay, Lille, Ghent and Bruges had power, soon were vengeance taken for it, 6 and I beseech this from him who judgeth all. Hugh Capet was I called yonder; of me are born the Philips and the Lewises by whom of late France is ruled. 7 Son was I of a butcher of Paris. When the ancient kings came to an end, all save one given over to grey garments, 8 I found tight in my hands the reins of the government of the realm, and so much power from new possessions, and so rich in friends, that to my son’s head the widowed crown was promoted from whom began the consecrated bones of those. So long as the great dowry of Provence 9 had not taken shame from my race, it was of little worth, but yet it did no evil. There by force and fraud its rapine began; and then, for amends, 10 Ponthieu and Normandy it seized, and Gascony. 11 Charles came to Italy, and, for amends, made a victim of Conradin; 12 and then thrust Thomas back to heaven, 13 for amends. A time I see, not long after this day, that brings another Charles forth from France, 14 to make both him and his better known. Forth he comes, alone, without an army, and with the lance wherewith Judas jousted; and that he couches so, that he makes the paunch of Florence to burst. Thence shall he win, not land, but sin and shame, for himself so much the more grievous, as he the more lightly counts such wrong. The other, 15 who once came forth a captive from a ship, I see selling his daughter, and haggling over her, as pirates do with other bondwomen. O avarice, what more canst thou do to us, since thou hast so drawn my race to thee, that it hath no care of its own flesh? In order that the ill to come and past, may seem less, I see the fleur-de-lys enter Alagna, and in his vicar Christ made captive. 16 A second time I see him mocked; I see the vinegar and the gall renewed, and him slain between living thieves. I see the new Pilate so cruel, that this sateth him not, but, lawlessly, he bears his greedy sails into the temple.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  form unto the nests; 9 the other blessedness, 10 which at first seemed content to twine the M with lilies, by a slight motion followed the imprint. O sweet star, what quality and magnitude of gems made plain to me that our justice is the effect of the heaven thou dost engem! Wherefore I pray the mind wherein thy motion and thy power hath beginning, to look upon the place whence issueth the smoke chat vitiates thy ray; so that once more the wrath be kindled against the buying and the selling in the temple which made its walls of miracles and martyrdoms. 11 O soldiery of heaven, whom I look upon, pray for them who have all gone astray on earth, following the ill example. Erst ’twas the wont to make war with swords; now it is made by withholding, now here, now there, the bread the tender father bars from none; but thou, who but to cancel, 12 dost record, reflect that Peter and Paul who died for the vineyard thou layest waste, are living yet. Though thou indeed mayst urge: “I have so fixed my longing on him who lived a solitary, and by tripping steps was drawn to martyrdom, that I know not the fisherman nor Paul.” 1. A disputed passage. We take it: “I was, all satisfied, gazing upon the reflection of the light of God which shone from Beatrice’s face. But she said, smiling,” etc. 2. William of Orange, like Rinoardo and Orlando, is a hero of romance, whereas Godfrey de Bouillon (d. 1100), conqueror of Jerusalem, and Robert Guiscard (d. 1085) of the house of Tancred (cf. Canto iii, note 12), are entirely historical. 3. Because they had ascended higher. 4. Jupiter is temperate or eauable, between cold Saturn and hot Mars. Cf. Canto, xxii. 5. Pegasus, the winged horse, struck out the fountain Hippocrene from the earth with his hoof, which fountain was sacred to the Muses. Hence the Muse is “goddess of the spring of Pegasus.” 6. Wisdom of Solomon, i, 1 (see Argument), 7. Note that M is the central letter of the Latin and Italian alphabet, which has no W. An M of the old fashion () may with a little ingenuity be transformed into the body and wings of a bird, the head gathering above the centre. 8. The method being to ask, “How many lambs, florins, or what not, shall I get?” then strike a brand and count the sparks for answer. 9. Dante is describing the work of God, whom no one can instruct (Isaiah xl. 13, 14; Job xxxviii. 4 sqq.), and from whom all knowledge comes into every mind. But why nests? Are the nests the heavens, nestling one within another? Or is the instinct of birds selected as the symbol of all intelligence save the divine? 10. The spirits that had formed neither the limbs of the M nor the head, but had twined round the former, now moulded themselves into the eagle’s body and wings. 11. The papal court. Cf. Purg. xvi and De Mon, bk. i. 12. The cancelling of excommunication being a source of revence.

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

  As for the “sickening” comment, Mercier explained that she was referring to one scene in particular. Toward the end of the book, the Freedmans order Chinese food in Miami and find a cockroach in their chop suey. Perhaps Judy was feeling vulnerable because she had already started work on a new novel; one that would expose her to criticism in an entirely different way. For one thing, it was her first project that was genuinely intended for adults. It also was unapologetically frank about sex and marriage, just like some of the highly controversial books that inspired her, by Erica Jong and Sue Kaufman. But in comparison to many of Blume’s books for children, this one wasn’t coming as easily. She had rented a small office in Los Alamos over a donut shop, and she had spent three months tinkering with the opening pages in order to get the main character’s voice pitch-perfect. In the meantime, she scarfed down way too many glazed donuts. Judy gave up the office and went back to writing from home. She kept going with the manuscript, likely knowing that this new book would drive some people crazy. It starts off with a bang—a housewife oversleeps and wakes up to find a naked man in a motorcycle helmet pleasuring himself on her front lawn. She calls the police, who treat her like a bored mom who made up the whole thing for attention. After that, her life becomes even more outrageous. Something about that motorcycle-riding exhibitionist—who later returns for a repeat performance—sets off a chain of events in which his audience-of-one suddenly recognizes that she’s stagnating. She leaves the house and stirs things up. She’s sick of being a wifey, and tired of being good. Wifey is Judy Blume’s Fear of Flying . Like Isadora, Sandy also hates planes, but she braves a flight early in the novel when the Pressmans head down to Sandy’s sister’s lavish new vacation property in Montego Bay. Her best friend, Lisbeth, gives Sandy advice about how to get over her phobia. Lisbeth “explained it as Sandy’s need to control her own destiny,” Blume writes. “If you were the pilot,” she said, “you wouldn’t be afraid. What you really ought to do is take flying lessons.” The novel expresses the deep frustrations of a housewife who is handcuffed to a humdrum husband. In Wifey , Sandy and Norman Pressman have two kids and a boring sex life. They get it on once a week, on Saturday nights, in their maid-tidied home in Plainfield, New Jersey. As lovers go, Norman is as predictable as they come: he climbs on top of Sandy, thrusts for “three to five minutes,” washes up afterward, and falls asleep. Foreplay isn’t really his thing. Sandy, who describes herself as “an adolescent at 32,” finds herself desperate to try something, or someone, new. Before she strays, she resolves to single-handedly spice things up in the bedroom.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  “There ie a certain firebrand which, when Oeneus’ wife did lie In childbed of Meleager, she chanced to espy The Destinies putting in the fire: and, in the putting in, She heard them speak these words, as they his fatal thread did spin : 342 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VII thou rannest away alone, having forsaken and cast down thy fellow-servant, thy good master, thy pastor and conductor. Knowest thou not that even such as deny their wholesome help and aid to them which are in danger of death, are wont to be punished because they have offended against good manners and the law natural? But I promise thee that thou shalt not long rejoice at my harms, thou murderer ; . I will ensure thee thou shalt feel the smart of my grief, and I will see what nature can do.” . There- withal she unloosed her apron, and bound all my feet together to the end I might not help myself in my punishment : then she took a great bar which accus- ‘tomed to bar the stable door, and never ceased beat- . ing of me till she was so exceeding weary and tired that the bar fell out of her hands: whereupon she (complaining of the soon faintness of her arms) ran to the fire and brought a glowing firebrand and thrust it under my tail, burning me continually till such time as (having but one remedy) I all bewrayed her face and eyes with my dirty dung; whereby, what with the stink thereof, and what with the filthiness that fell in her eyes, she was well nigh blind, and so I enforced the quean to leave off; otherwise I had died as an ass as Meleager did by the stick, which his mad mother Althea? cast into the fire. ‘© lately born, like time we give to thee and to this brand’: . ; And when they so had spoken, they departed out of hand. Immediately the mother caught the blazing bough away And quenched.it. This bough she kept full charily many a day: : And in the keeping of the same she kept her son alive." But when she heard that Meleager had killed her brothers as the result of a quarrel about the spoils of the Calydonian boar,she threw the brand on the fire, thus causing his death. 343 LIBER VIII 1 Noctis gallicinio venit quidam iuvenis e proxuma civitate, ut quidem mihi videbatur unus ex famulis Charites, puellae illius quae mecum apud latrones pares aerumnas. exanclaverat. Is de eius exitio et domus totius infortunio mira ac nefanda, ignem propter assidens, inter conservorum frequentiam sie annun- tiabat: * Equisones opilionesque, etiam busequae, fuit Charite nobis, quae misella et quidem casu gravis- simo, nec vero incomitata Manes adivit. Sed ut cuncta noritis, referam vobis a capite quae gesta sunt, quae- que possent merito doctiores, quibus stilos Fortuna subministrat, in historiae specimen chartis involvere.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “Just holed up in the Beverly Hills Hotel bar and stayed spiffed for 72 hours.” Until his spouse Lauren Bacall phoned irately, “You get home tonight, with milk and orange juice for your son…or else!” Bogie got. 12 [image "image" file=Image00005.jpg] [image file=Image00005.jpg] MiriMiri was on her bed, reading her favorite columns in the Sunday paper, when the doorbell rang. She ran down the stairs to answer it. She was in a sour mood because Rusty wouldn’t let her invite Mason to dinner at The Tavern, where they were going to celebrate Henry’s engagement to Leah. “It’s not appropriate,” Rusty told her. “This is just for the immediate family.” “Nana is bringing Ben Sapphire,” Miri reminded her. “Yes, but she’s hosting this party, so if she wants to bring Mr. Sapphire, she can.” “He’s not immediate family.” “He’s picking up the bill.” “So you’re saying I should ask Mr. Sapphire about inviting Mason?” “Damn it, Miri! Don’t push me. And don’t you dare ask Nana or anyone else about inviting Mason.” So when the doorbell rang, Miri was more than glad to get away from Rusty. She wasn’t sure who she expected to find on the other side of the front door, but certainly not this woman in slacks and a matching wool coat with a big fox collar. A yellow Cadillac was parked in front of the house. Miri had never seen a yellow Cadillac on her street. The only yellow Cadillac she knew of belonged to one of the Levy brothers, who owned the department store on Broad Street. “Are you Miriam?” the woman asked. Her voice was smoky, her lipstick red, not a strand of her dark hair moved in the wind. “Do I know you?” Miri asked. No one called her Miriam. “I’m Frekki Strasser but my maiden name was Monsky. I believe I’m your aunt.” Miri grabbed hold of the door to steady herself. Rusty called from the upstairs window, “Who is it, Miri?” Jazzy music floated down from Rusty’s radio. When Miri didn’t answer, the woman called, “A voice from your past.” Miri didn’t turn, didn’t take her eyes off the woman, but she could hear her mother’s footsteps on the stairs. Rusty had been vacuuming. Her hair was carelessly tied back. She was in an old shirt with the flaps hanging out, worn slacks and beat-up moccasins. The woman held out her gloved hand. “Hello, Rusty. It’s Frekki Monsky Strasser.” “Frekki?” Rusty went pale. She made no move to shake Frekki’s hand, which floated in midair, until Frekki shoved it into her coat pocket. Rusty stood in front of Miri as if to protect her from this stranger. “What are you doing here?” “Unexpected events…” Now she used the same gloved hand to gesture toward the sky, and Miri knew it wasn’t God she was talking about. “Well, it made me stop and think, I have a niece, I should know her.” Rusty turned to Miri.