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

  [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] Henceforth the two kingdoms went their separate ways. Situated near important trade routes, the northern Kingdom of Israel prospered, with royal shrines in Bethel and Dan and an elegant capital in Samaria. We know very little about its ideology, because the biblical editors favored the smaller and more isolated Kingdom of Judah. But both probably conformed to local traditions. Like most Middle Eastern kings, the king of Judah was raised to a semidivine “state of exception” during the coronation ritual, when he became Yahweh’s adopted son and a member of the Divine Assembly of gods.83 Like Baal, Yahweh was celebrated as a warrior god who defended his people from their enemies: “When he grows angry he shatters kings, he gives the nations their deserts; smashing their skulls, he heaps the world with corpses.”84 The chief responsibility of the king was to secure and extend his territory, the source of the kingdom’s revenues. He was therefore in a perpetual state of conflict with neighboring monarchs, who had exactly the same goals. Israel and Judah were thus drawn inexorably into the local network of trade, diplomacy, and warfare. The two kingdoms had emerged when the imperial powers of the region were in eclipse, but during the early eighth century, Assyria was in the ascendant again, its military might forcing weaker kings into vassal status. Yet some of these conquered kingdoms flourished. King Jeroboam II (786–746 BCE) became a trusted Assyrian vassal, and the Kingdom of Israel enjoyed an economic boom. But because the rich became richer and the poor even more impoverished, the king was castigated by the prophet Amos.85 The prophets of Israel kept the old egalitarian ideals of Israel alive. Amos chastised the aristocracy for trampling on the heads of ordinary people, pushing the poor out of their path,86 and cramming their palaces with the fruits of their extortion.87 Yahweh, he warned, was no longer unconditionally on Israel’s side but would use Assyria as his instrument of punishment.88 The Assyrians would invade the kingdom, loot and destroy its palaces and temples.89 Amos imagined Yahweh roaring in rage from his sanctuary at the war crimes committed by the local kingdoms, Israel included.90 In Judah too, the prophet Isaiah inveighed against the exploitation of the poor and the expropriation of peasant land: “Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, and plead for the widow.”91 The dilemma was that this callowness was essential to the agrarian economy and had the kings of Israel and Judah fully implemented these compassionate policies, they would have been easy prey for Assyria.92

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  “The girls were pissed off,” she told me, “but we couldn’t complain because of all the implications, right? If you complain and you’re on the list, you’re a prude. If you complain and you’re not on it, you’re ugly. If you complain about it being sexist, then you’re a humorless feminist bitch and a lesbian.” I heard about a boy who, claiming to have “magic arms,” would hug random girls in his New York City public school hallway and then announce his assessment of their bra size; about a high school boy who sauntered up to a stranger at a party in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and asked, “Can I touch your boobs?”; about boys at dances everywhere who, especially after a few (or more) drinks, felt free to “grind” against girls from behind, unbidden. Most girls had learned to gracefully disengage from such situations if uninterested. Boys rarely pursued. Several young women, though, said a dance partner had gone further, pushing aside their skirts and sliding a quick finger into their underwear. By college, girls attending a frat party may not make it to the dance floor at all unless they passed what one called the “pretty test” at the front door, where a designated brother “decides whether you are accepted or rejected, beautiful or ugly. He’s the reason you better wear a crop top in subzero weather or you’ll end up home alone eating microwave popcorn and calling your mom.” I’m going to say this once here, and then—because it is obvious—I will not repeat it in the course of this book: not all boys engage in such behavior, not by a long shot, and many young men are girls’ staunchest allies. However, every girl I spoke with, every single girl—regardless of her class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; regardless of what she wore, regardless of her appearance—had been harassed in middle school, high school, college, or, often, all three. Who, then, is truly at risk of being “distracted” at school? At best, blaming girls’ clothing for the thoughts and actions of boys is counterproductive. At worst, it’s a short step from there to “she was asking for it.” Yet, I also can’t help but feel that girls such as Camila, who favors what she called “more so-called provocative” clothing, are missing something. Taking up the right to bare arms (and legs and cleavage and midriffs) as a feminist rallying cry strikes me as suspiciously Orwellian. I recall the simple litmus test for sexism proposed by British feminist Caitlin Moran, one that Camila unconsciously referenced: Are the guys doing it, too? “If they aren’t,” Moran wrote, “chances are you’re dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as ‘some total fucking bullshit.’”

• From Three Women (2019)

  Lina knows it’s not all Ed’s fault. Look, she has said to the women in the discussion group, I was crazy after I had the kids. Plus, my body takes a while to rebound, so I’m sure that turned him off over the years. I’ve on and off been crazier than a pet raccoon. And here I am telling my side, so obviously I’m emphasizing his faults and making myself out to be the victim. I’m sure. But I came to a breaking point. I stood in our yard looking out at the children’s playset and I thought about all that I’ve been missing all these years. I thought about being unhappy all the time. I thought to myself that if my husband just does what I ask, just loves me enough to love me, then I’d be happy. Why am I living this life? What’s the point of lying down in that bed every night? And I said if it gets to three months, I’m leaving. And then it was three months, and Lina became—not overnight, because it had been coming for years, but overnight it rose from under her flesh up to the surface—a woman who wasn’t going to be forgotten. She wasn’t going to be her sisters, fading into the shit greens and browns of winter Indiana. She wasn’t going to be every woman who has children and then cares for them and the house and has hobbies like pottery but nothing that feeds her otherwise. So as in a fairy tale one morning she wakes up and her skin is a different tone. Like the chicken stegosauruses in the clean oven, she has gone from yellow to brown. She is possessed of self. All the pain from growing up, of being told she wasn’t good enough, followed by marrying a man who felt like a cylinder, something to pass a life through without any accumulation of wisdom or inspiration. All those evenings watching him and his friends drink beer and talk about nothing and not touch her so what is the damn point of throwing all those beer cans for all those useless men into the garbage. What is the point of anything. What is the point of washing all his underwear. For a man who makes no decisions. For a man who does not even decide on the route of his day. All of that was shedding off like the weight she lost. Pounds of years. Pounds of desperation. No more, she says. That night, Lina makes dinner as always and puts the children to bed as always and then suggests to Ed that they go out to the hot tub. He says, Sure, perhaps because the way she asks is definitive. All the while Lina is thinking, This is it. You will grow a pair, Lina, and do what you need to do for yourself. Quit being lonely and unhappy.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I have had people who are otherwise loving and kindhearted tell me that they just don’t understand how people who go through this can get up in the morning. I have had people tell me that they would rather be dead than be what I am. I have heard people say that they just don’t believe that it can be that bad, that PTSD doesn’t exist, that families don’t do things like that, that I’m just doing it for the attention. (I will tell you right now that if someone were to offer me one crisp dollar bill for every single bit of attention being a survivor has ever gotten me, I would take the dollar.) Will everyone react that way? No. Of course not. And most people who do are not doing so out of malice; they just don’t know any better. It still doesn’t make it all right. I never want to stop anyone else from telling. For many people, all of the terrible responses are even more of a reason to be open, to be radically honest, to reveal the places that they have been hurt the most deeply. It helps lots of survivors to talk about it, and I want us to talk about it whenever and however we want. I will always listen. I want us all to listen. The more of us who come out as survivors, the harder it gets to ignore that there is too much to have to survive, the harder it gets to pretend like this doesn’t happen or it only happens to certain kinds of people. But that doesn’t mean you have to give your whole story to anyone who asks. Not telling my story doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I don’t have to be open about my experiences, about all of them or even any of them, to be a real survivor. I am a real survivor because I survived, even if some days it feels like I didn’t survive at all. Other people do not get to tell me what my experience means, or where they would like to place me in their pantheons of suffering. There is great danger in letting those around you determine what your experience means to you, and I have found that one of the best ways to combat that is to keep my story for myself. You can keep it to yourself today and tell tomorrow, and you can tell everyone you know and then never talk about it again. You don’t owe anything to anyone. Your story is not the currency you exchange for love, for understanding, for getting what you need. You are allowed to get what you need without justifying why you need it, regardless of what you choose to reveal and what you keep private. No one is entitled to that part of you and you have no responsibility—none—to make your experience easier or more palatable by constructing a narrative other people find acceptable.

• From Open (2009)

  NICK HIRES A CHILEAN STRONGMAN named Pat who never asks me to do anything he’s not willing to do himself, which I respect. But Pat also has a habit of spitting on me when he talks, and leaning over me while I’m lifting weights, drizzling sweat on my face. I feel as if I should show up for Pat’s workout sessions in a plastic poncho. The mainstay of Pat’s training regimen is a brutal daily run up and down a hill outside Vegas. The hill is remote and sunbaked, and gets hotter as you near the top, as if it’s an active volcano. It’s also an hour from my father’s house, which seems unnecessarily far. Nothing like driving to Reno for a run. Pat insists, however, that this hill is the answer to all my physical problems. When we get to the base and pile out of the car, he starts running straight up, and orders me to follow. Within minutes I’m holding my side, sweat rolling off me. By the time we reach the summit I can’t breathe. According to Pat, this is good. This is healthy. A battered truck appears one day as Pat and I crest the hill. An ancient Native American man climbs out. He comes toward us with a pole. If he wants to kill me, I won’t be able to fend him off, because I can’t lift my arms. And I won’t be able to run away, because I can’t draw breath. The man asks, What are you doing here? We’re training. What are you doing here? Catching me some rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes! There are rattlesnakes out here? There’s training out here? When I stop laughing the Indian says, more or less, that I must have been born with a horseshoe up my ass, because this is Rattlesnake Fucking Hill. He catches twelve rattlers every day on this hill, and he expects to catch twelve more this morning. It’s a flat-out miracle that I haven’t stepped on one, big and plump and ready to strike. I look at Pat, and feel an urge to spit on him. IN JULY I GO to Argentina as one of the youngest men ever to play for the U.S. Davis Cup team. I play well against Martín Jaite, from Argentina, and the crowd gives me its grudging respect. I’m leading two sets to none, ahead 4–0 in the third, waiting for Jaite’s serve. I’m hunched against the cold, because it’s the dead of winter in Argentina. The temperature must be thirty degrees. Jaite hits a let serve, then hits a bending unreturnable serve that I reach up and catch with my hand. A riot breaks out. The crowd thinks I’m trying to show up their countryman, disrespecting him. They boo me for several minutes.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  When I’m with him now, if any of the kids playing around in the pool near us who look like they were born fucking seals even GLANCE at him I shoot them a death look so sharp it slicks their hair back, reddens their smug little faces and … well. Let’s just say something a lot worse than water going into your brain. They’re lucky to have brains at all after I shoot them the look. It’s a look from my father. Still, at my son’s age, I was a racer. You know those little plastic wind-up bathtub things - contraptions with small flippers or limbs attached to internal rubber bands which, when wound, rotate at alarming speeds? Sending a little dolphin or boat or shark shooting across the tub? That’s what seven year old girl racers look like. Heads down. Twenty-five meters. Maybe one breath. Maybe. Whoever we were on land, once freed in water, we grew dangerously alive. My son’s been in swimming lessons - level A - three times now. At the end of the lessons they always hand me the green card that says mamma of Miles, your son can barely float, he’ll only hold his breath above the water, if he’s in the water without supervision he’ll sink to the bottom like a tire, and they smile, and I smile, and Miles beams, and then we go home and eat OREOS and I give him another one of my trophies. When I work with him alone in the pool, he clings to me like a little sea monkey until I let him put his full regalia back on. It’s his head. He doesn’t want to put his head in. When I ask him why, he answers incredulously, “Because the water will go in my nose and ears and go into my brain. Duh.” I look at him for a long minute. He doesn’t back down. “I see,” I said. “ Where’d you get that idea?” Quite convincingly, he responds. “Harry Potter.” Harry Potter. Goddamn that little bespectacled twit. I instantly know which Harry Potter scene he is talking about. It’s the one from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, where the five students have to compete in the Tri-Wizard’s Cup. One of the trials is an ocean dive to save trapped friends and loved ones who have been suspended underwater by strange little sea witches with pitchforks. Each student must figure out a magical way to breathe underwater, or they’ll die, and all their loved ones trapped underwater will die, water will go up all the noses and flood all their ears and drown all their brains unless they have special underwater gear. Total kid death fest if they don’t find a way to breathe underwater. Neville Longbottom, the buck-toothed nerd kid interested in animals and botany and ichthyology, gives Harry Potter magic Gillyworms. Then he grows temporary gills and webbed hands and feet. Christ. Why does anyone become a mother?

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  4. Again, he sent forth other servants, saying, Tell them which are bidden, Behold, I have prepared my dinner: my oxen and my fatlings are killed, and all things are ready: come unto the marriage. 5. But they made light of it, and went their ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise: 6. And the remnant took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew them. 7. But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth: and he sent forth his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city. 8. Then saith he to his servants, The wedding is ready, but they which were bidden were not worthy. 9. Go ye therefore into the highways, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage. 10. So those servants went out into the highways, and gathered together all as many as they found, both bad and good: and the wedding was furnished with guests. 11. And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment: 12. And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless. 13. Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 14. For many are called, but few are chosen. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxix.) Forasmuch as He had said, And it shall be given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof, He now proceeds to shew what nation that is. GLOSS. (interlin.) Answered, that is, meeting their evil thoughts of putting Him to death. AUGUSTINE. (de Cons. Ev. ii. 71.) This parable is related only by Matthew. Luke gives one like it, but it is not the same, as the order shews. GREGORY. (Hom. in Ev. xxxviii. 2.) Here, by the wedding-feast is denoted the present Church; there, by the supper, the last and eternal feast. For into this enter some who shall perish; into that whosoever has once entered in shall never be put forth. But if any should maintain that these are the same lessons, we may perhaps explain that that part concerning the guest who had come in without a wedding garment, which Luke has not mentioned, Matthew has related. That the one calls it supper, the other dinner, makes no difference; for with the ancients the dinner was at the ninth hour, and was therefore often called supper.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  had been accused of Judaism as a student in 1527 simply because of his strict religious observances. He later said, defiantly, that he would consider it an honour to be descended from Jews: ‘What? To be related to Christ Our Lord and to Our Lady the glorious Virgin Mary!’ He and his first three successors as General of the Jesuits were all firmly opposed to the limpieza statutes and ecclesiastical anti-Semitism, and the Jesuits only gave way in the end because their attitude was ruining recruitment in Spain. In fact it was the moderate line the Jesuits took on the Jews which lay at the bottom of their ferocious 200-year struggle with the Dominican Inquisition. The rule seemed to be that, in a period of intense religious conflict, everyone needed to have an obsessional enemy, but no one could cope with more than one at a time. In Spain, orthodoxy hunted Jews but very rarely witches. The Jesuits were pro-Jewish (up to a point) but prominent witch-hunters. Burning of witches increased wherever they triumphantly carried the Counter-Reformation, especially in Germany, Poland and Franche-Comté; and in the Low Countries, where they were less successful, they intensified witch-hunting after a proclamation by Philip II in 1590, which declared witchcraft ‘the scourge of the human race’. Jesuits were associated with the most savage campaign, conducted around Trier by Archbishop Johann von Schoneburg, and his suffragan, Bishop Binsfield. In the years 1587–93, the archbishop burned 368 witches in some twenty-two villages, leaving two of them with only one female inhabitant each. As with the Inquisition against heretics, officials who dragged their feet were liable to become victims: thus Schoneburg had the University Rector, Dietrich Flade, chief judge of the electoral court, arrested for leniency, tortured, strangled and burned. The hunters constantly alarmed the authorities by stories of vast and growing conspiracies of witches; once they were allowed to torture they produced not only scores of victims but hundreds of accusations – thus justifying their forecasts. Some hunters were paid by results: Balthasar Ross, minister to the Prince-Abbot of Fulda, made 5393 guilden out of 250 victims, 1602–5. There seems to have been a fairly steady correlation between the intensity of the Protestant-Catholic struggle and the number of witches accused and burned. Just as there had been a lull in the early sixteenth century, ended by the Lutheran Reformation and its violent consequences, so there was another lull just before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618. Then, with the Catholic reconquest of Bohemia and parts of Germany, the witch-trials multiplied. This last great phase of witch-hunting was the product of Catholic-Protestant rivalry, since hunters on both

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Excommunicated, Aetatis 38On January 3 of the New Year, 1521, the pope, realizing it was long past the sixty days he had set, and having seen neither hide nor hair of Martin Luther, set his papal seal to a brand-new bull, which carried out the threat of the previous bull by officially excommunicating Martin Luther. But the power of this second bull went far beyond merely condemning Luther himself. It was a legal notice to all in the empire that whoever in any way aided or abetted this outlaw would also himself be excommunicated. It also declared that all territories or cities that supported him were officially under “interdict,” which is to say they were themselves as it were excommunicated from the church. They were forbidden to offer any of the seven sacraments of the church. This was the ultimate weapon Rome could use, denying the sacraments of the church—which is to say denying salvation itself—to any who did not now heed its warning. For people who knew hell was real and that the pope had this power, there could be no dithering. One would be gambling with one’s eternal soul. One of the cardinals, Pietro Accolti, who had had a hand in drawing up the bull, said the obvious: “It is hoped that as soon as the bull is published in Germany, most men will forsake Luther.”9 But quite the opposite happened, and Rome soon saw just how much authority it had lost, because once the bull had been published, many Germans even took it as an invitation to follow Luther’s Wittenberg example from a month earlier. They now staged book burnings of their own, boisterously casting their copies of the bull, and many other hated writings, into the flames. The distracted hedonist Leo and his curia had misplayed this situation from the beginning and would only blunder forward in increasingly foolish and tragic ways. Part of their miscalculation had to do with the ferocity of the sentiment into which Luther and his writings had tapped. Everywhere across Germany and in other countries too, Luther’s pointed questions and answers regarding Rome were being hailed and applauded by the common folk, who had never had any kind of champion, but also by figures as august and learned as Erasmus. Because Rome had not properly attended to the fire when it first broke out, the fire had eventually been able to go underground, and now it would flare up here and there and everywhere and never again be contained. But for Luther, it was during that first week of what would be a historic year that he saw there was no going back. And he officially bade farewell to the place he had once considered the spiritual home of every Western Christian:

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  down manure and die in a vacuous muck. Before it became that fabled “City upon a Hill,” America was in the eyes of sixteenth-century adventurers a foul, weedy wilderness—a “sinke hole” suited to ill-bred commoners. Dark images of the New World accompanied more seductive ones. When early English promoters portrayed North America as a rich and fertile landscape, they grossly and perhaps knowingly exaggerated. Most were describing a land they never had seen, of course. Wary investors and state officials had to be convinced to take the plunge into a risky overseas venture. But most important, it was a place into which they could export their own marginalized people. The idea of America as “the world’s best hope” came much later. Historic memory has camouflaged the less noble origins of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We all know what imagery springs to mind when patriots of our day seek confirmation that their country is and was always an “exceptional” place: modest Pilgrims taught to plant by generous Indians; Virginia Cavaliers entertaining guests at their refined estates along the James River. Because of how history is taught, Americans tend to associate Plymouth and Jamestown with cooperation rather than class division. And it gets ever more misty-eyed from there, because disorder and discord serve no positive purpose in burgeoning national pride. Class is the most outstanding, if routinely overlooked, element in presuppositions about early settlement. Even now, the notion of a broad and supple middle class functions as a mighty balm, a smoke screen. We cling to the comfort of the middle class, forgetting that there can’t be a middle class without a lower. It is only occasionally shaken up, as when the Occupy Wall Street movement of recent years shone an embarrassing light on the financial sector and the grotesque separation between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. And then the media giants find new crises and the nation’s inherited disregard for class reboots, as the subject recedes into the background again. An imaginary classless (or class-free) American past is the America that Charles Murray has conjured in his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (2012) . For Murray, an authority in the minds of many, the large and fluid society of 1963 was held together by the shared experiences of the nuclear family. When they watched The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, average Americans believed they were seeing their lives on the small screen. 1 Nothing could be further from the truth. Even in its innocent youth, television caricatured people by class types. One only need consider a few of the other popular shows of those halcyon years to prove the point: Petticoat Junction

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Or otherwise; When we work with the labour of our hands, for example, cultivating our field or our vineyard, or any manufacture of wood or iron, we seem to be occupied with our farm; any other mode of getting money unattended with manual labour is here called merchandize. O most miserable world! and miserable ye that follow it! The pursuits of this world have ever shut men out of life. GREGORY. Whosoever then intent upon earthly business, or devoted to the actions of this world, feigns to be meditating upon the mystery of the Lord’s Passion, and to be living accordingly, is he that refuses to come to the King’s wedding on pretext of going to his farm or his merchandize. Nay often, which is worse, some who are called not only reject the grace, but become persecutors, And the remnant took his servants, and entreated them despitefully, and slew them. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Or, by the business of a farm, He denotes the Jewish populace, whom the delights of this world separated from-Christ; by the excuse of merchandize, the Priests and other ministers of the Temple, who, coming to the service of the Law and the Temple through greediness of gain, have been shut out of the faith by covetousness. Of these He said not, ‘They were filled with envy,’ but They made light of it. For they who through hate and spite crucified Christ, are they who were filled with envy; but they who being entangled in business did not believe on Him, are not said to have been filled with envy, but to have made light of it. The Lord is silent respecting His own death, because He had spoken of it in the foregoing parable, but He shews forth the death of His disciples, whom after His ascension the Jews put to death, stoning Stephen and executing James the son of Alphæus, for which things Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. And it is to be observed, that anger is attributed to God figuratively and not properly; He is then said to be angry when He punishes. JEROME. When He was doing works of mercy, and bidding to His marriage-feast, He was called a man; (homini regi) now when He comes to vengeance, the man is dropped, and He is called only a King. ORIGEN. Let those who sin against the God of the Law, and the Prophets, and the whole creation, declare whether He who is here called man, and is said to be angry, is indeed the Father Himself. If they allow this, they will be forced to own that many things are said of Him applicable to the passible nature of man; not for that He has passions, but because He is represented to us after the manner of passible human nature. In this way we take God’s anger, repentance, and the other things of the like sort in the Prophets.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  is a case, once again, of abuse of the text ‘compel them to come in’ – the text graven on every inquisitor’s heart. Exactly like Augustine, Muntzer used the parable of the wheat and the tares to justify destruction and persecution: ‘The living God is sharpening his scythe in me,’ he said ominously, ‘so that later I can cut down the red poppies and the blue cornflowers.’ When either the Augustinian or the millenarian takes over, the patient, reasonable man, the reformist, the Pelagian-minded liberal, learns to tremble. Muntzer detonated a peasants’ revolt, as had so many millenarians in the past; but he was executed before he could found his post-apocalyptic society. A decade later, in 1534, millenarians seized the German town of Munster, which they held until the following summer. This was by no means the first time Christian fanatics had seized a city in the West; there are many examples, especially in northern France and Flanders, from the twelfth century onwards. But Munster is the first case in which we have a proper documentation, and thus know what it was like to live under a medieval egalitarian terror. The episode began on 25 February 1534, when the religious radicals captured the municipal council and their leader, John Mathijs, announced a Christian popular dictatorship. The ‘godless’ were identified: one, a critical blacksmith, was killed by Mathijs on the spot, the rest expelled – ‘Get out, you Godless ones, and never come back.’ At the same time a number of radical refugees were admitted, to form a police-force and bodyguard for the leadership. The entire population was then re-baptized, the city fortified, all food, money, gold and valuables impounded and communized, and housing reallocated on a basis of need. Mathijs was killed in a sortie, and his replacement, John Beukels, the actor-son of an unmarried female serf, reconstructed the regime on a more formal basis. He ran naked through the town, lapsed into prayer, and then announced a new constitution: himself as messianic king, or ‘John of Leyden’, assisted by twelve elders or judges, as a committee of public safety. There was to be a new moral code. All books, except the Bible, were to be burnt. A long list of offences, including blasphemy, swearing, adultery, backbiting, complaining, and any form of disobedience, were to be punished by instant execution. There was to be control of labour, and compulsory polygamy. The regime was violently anti-women. A man sexually dependent on one wife, thought Beukels, was led about ‘like a bear on a rope’; women ‘have everywhere been getting the upper hand’ and it was high time they submitted to men. Hence any women who resisted polygamy were to be executed; and unmarried women had to

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther Burns the BullThus, on December 10—sixty days after Luther had read the bull himself—on the same wooden door where Luther had three years earlier posted his historic theses, Philip Melanchthon posted an invitation to an event, the likes of which had never taken place in Christendom. The poster described it as “a pious and religious spectacle, for perhaps now is the time when Anti-christ must be revealed.”7 But to what could this advertisement be referring? It referred to a book burning, but not of Luther’s works, as the papal bull against Luther had commanded. Rather it referred to the papal bull itself. In its way, it was what in the 1960s was called a “happening”—a theatrical event staged to make a public statement. And Luther’s fiery statement was that he was turning the tables by himself now symbolically excommunicating the false church that had thought to excommunicate him. One of Luther’s and Melanchthon’s avid students, Johannes Agricola, had been the one to organize the event, which was to take place outside the city gate, very close to the place where animals were butchered and on the very spot where the ghastly clothes and rags of those who had died of the plague were burned. Here by the repugnant carrion pit, Agricola and others had erected a pyre, and on the hour appointed—9:00 a.m.—after several hundred fellow professors and students had assembled as witnesses to this great moment, Luther cast into the flames one after the other the writings of the false church. Papal decrees were now defiantly hurled into the fire, and even a book of canon law found its way into the flames, and then the writings of Eck and Emser “the goat” too. Agricola had hectored his fellow Wittenberg students to contribute a copy of Duns Scotus’s commentary on the Sentences and Aquinas’s Summa. But in the end, none would part with their copies of these expensive books, else these prime examples of Scholastic teaching too would have fed the bonfire. And then, as these other works burned, Luther with a sense of drama like some magician reached into his cloak and produced the very papal bull that threatened to excommunicate him. He spoke the words from Psalms 21:10—on which he was during this time lecturing—“Because you have confounded the truth of God, today the Lord confounds you. Into the fire with you!” And then, in a final flourish, brazen and wild he flung the papal decree into the raging flames.8

• From Between Us

  90 ​struck by the fate of another Clinton: Victoria L. Brescoll and Eric Luis Uhlmann, “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead?,” Psychological Science 19, no. 3 (2008): 268–75. The quote is from Maureen Dowd, “Who’s Hormonal? Hillary or Dick?,” New York Times, February 8, 2006, as cited on Brescoll and Uhlmann, “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead?,” 2008, p. 268. 90 ​there is an emotional glass ceiling: Among female job applicants, those who did not express any emotion, rather than being either sad or angry, were perceived to be most effective leaders. Angry men were perceived effective, as were neutral-looking men (Brescoll and Uhlmann, “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead?”). 90 ​Davin Phoenix makes this point precisely: Davin Phoenix, “Anger Benefits Some Americans Much More than Others,” New York Times, June 6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/opinion/george-floyd-protests-anger.html?referringSource=articleShare. 91 ​anger among the Kaluli . . . is a power move: Edward L. Schieffelin, “Anger and Shame in the Tropical Forest: On Affect as a Cultural System in Papua New Guinea,” Ethos 11, no. 3 (1983): 181–91. The quote appears on p. 183. It is not clear if the anger dynamics of Kaluli women are the same as those of men. 91 ​in so-called honor cultures: There are honor cultures around the world, and anger has been described as playing the role of claiming or reclaiming honor in the ones I know. There is quite a bit of anthropological work on honor cultures in Mediterranean regions (most notably Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986]; J. G. Peristiany, Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974]). 91 ​claim to precedence: Ayse K. Uskul et al., “Honor Bound: The Cultural Construction of Honor in Turkey and the Northern United States,” Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology 43, no. 7 (2012): 1131–51; Angela K.-Y. Leung and Dov Cohen, “Within- and between-Culture Variation: Individual Differences and the Cultural Logics of Honor, Face, and Dignity Cultures,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 100, no. 3 (2011): 507–26. 91 ​honor in the southern United States: Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); quote appears on p. 5; The original “asshole” experiment was reported also in D. Cohen et al., “Insult, Aggression, and the Southern Culture of Honor: An ‘Experimental Ethnography,’ ” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70, no. 5 (1996): 945–60. 92 ​separating children . . . at the Mexican border: The family separation policy was introduced under U.S. President Donald Trump’s tough immigration policy and adopted across the U.S.-Mexico border from April 2018 until June 2018. Under the policy, more than four thousand children were separated from their parents, some of whom never saw each other again (“Immigration Policy of Donald Trump,” Wikipedia, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_policy_of_Donald_Trump).

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  YOU CAN TELL A LOT ABOUT A PERSON FROM SEEING them in the water. Some people freak out and spaz their way around like giant insects, others slide in like seals, turn over, dive down, effortlessly. Some people kind of tread water with big goofy smiles, others look slightly broken-armed and broken-legged or as if they are in some kind of serious pain. I swam, once, with Ken Kesey. In a man-made reservoir up near Fall Creek. Puffy with drink, his bulk rounded and bulged around his former reputation. It was night swimming. Five people, I think. Totally, completely, unapologetically, rocket shot high. The moon kept coming in and out of focus as the clouds moved around. And the water was warm yet, so it must have been late summer, but in my mind it has the crisp clarity of fall for some reason. If it had been fall we would have frozen our tits off. So sometime in late summer less than a decade before he died, we entered the waters. Man-made reservoirs smell like dirt and concrete mixed with algae. I dove down into the black and opened my eyes. Looking into lake water at night is like looking into deep space while drunk. Black, and blurry. I resurfaced and strong-armed into a glide, went down, came up again, then took a look back, and saw his unmistakable head and burled broad shoulders. “Goddamn girl, what are you, some kind of mermaid?” he said. Spitting a stream of water. Yeah. In the black reservoir water we swam around each other looking at the sky, treading water, floating on our backs and letting our feet break the surface. Sometimes Kesey’s belly rose up like an island. We shot the shit, mostly he told stories … That’s a bald faced lie. Just now I made it sound like we casually shot the shit out there, but really my brain was as numb as a wad of cotton and I couldn’t think of anything interesting to say, so I just let him talk and I don’t even remember what he said because my head was expanding and contracting like an idiot’s. And he wasn’t really in the water with me. He was on the shore. But then he must have said something from somewhere that penetrated, because I opened my mouth, and it was nothing nothing nothing words until it wasn’t nothing anymore, and I was listing all the horrible things people had said to me since my baby died. Things like: “You know, it’s probably better that she died before you got to know her.” Or: “ Well what you really want in your 20s is the freedom to party.” Or my personal favorite, from my father’s sister, fascist catholic: “The saddest part is that she’ll go to hell, isn’t it, since she wasn’t baptized.”

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  In my story, Caddy is in the present. She lives next door to a tard neighbor boyman. Because she is sexually insatiable, and because he both scares her with his too white skin and his too big for his body head and his giant pants bulge and the sounds that come out of him instead of language and his pure physical brute force, she goes over to his house one day and takes her clothes off in front of him. He bellows that Benjy bellow. Then he attacks her and fucks her and nearly crushes her. She loves it. She laughs until she cries and an ambulance comes. Trite. So after fantasizing about the dark alley and stomping around and cursing all things Chang Rae Lee that day, I decided to get a Ph.D. Fuck all y’all “writers.” Woo Hoo. I took a break from creative writing workshops - though I have to tell you - I positively HAUNTED the halls of the creative writing department. I don’t know why. I’d just find myself there, looking at bulletin boards, seeing what readings were coming up, grabbing random fliers from the office nerds. Twice I walked by a gorgeous tall guy with a ponytail who looked seriously like Marlon Brando but I didn’t talk to him. Writing student. Sometimes the choices we make come from jealous lame petty places. But they are as real as it gets. I entered the Ph.D. program. I went on to gloriously immerse myself in Derrida and Lacan and Kristeva and Foucault. In Homi K. Bhabha and Ed Said and Gayatri bad ass Chakravorty Spivak. In Dickinson and Whitman and Plath and Sexton and Adrienne you want some of this Rich and Ai and Eliot and PoundBeckettStoppardDurasFaulknerWoolfJoyce (though he kinda always made me want to piss on his grave) SyngeCortazarBorgesMarquezClariceL’InspecteurHenryMillerAnaissexatiousNinDerekWalcottBertoltBrechtPynchonSilko WintersonDjunaBarnesOscarWildeGertrudethemanSteinFlannerymotherfuckingO’ConnorRichardWrightBaldwinToniMorrisonRayCarverJohnCheeverMaxineHongKingstonSapphireDennisCooperKathyyoumakemefeellikemyskinisbeingsheeredoffAcker - cascades of authors kicking Chang Rae Lee’s scrawny little ass. Take that. Yeah. Up until he won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1995 and it was his book I was assigned to read. I can’t tell you how great that felt. But what nagged at me no matter how far into the literary intellectual pool I ventured, no matter how well I swam its waters, was the story I had yet to write. Itching my fingers like fire. Two terms later, I tried again. Graduate fiction writing workshop. This time the story I brought in wasn’t about voiceless women characters from literary history. This time the story was about my life. About fathers and swimming and fucking and dead babies and drowning. Written entirely in random fragments - how I understood my entire life. In the language - image and fragment and non-linear lyric passages - that seemed most precise. The story I brought in was called “The Chronology of Water.” Something was coming out of my hands. Something about desire and language. Chang Rae? Sorry I thought those things. Thanks for pissing me off all those years ago. Beautiful random nemesis. Love Grenade II

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Protestant schools flourished in south German cities as well as in the north. Then, in 1573, the Archduke Charles of Austria founded a Jesuit school. Freedom of religion was granted by the Diet of Bruck in 1578; but three years later the duke expelled evangelical pastors and forbade Graz citizens to attend the Protestant city school. The old duke died in 1590, and Protestantism again flourished during his son’s minority. When he attained his majority, however, the new Jesuit-trained duke announced: ‘I would rather rule a country ruined than a country damned’, and set about extirpating Protestantism by force. In 1598 he expelled all Protestant pastors and schoolmasters, and the next year he closed non-Catholic churches. The process was completed a generation later, in 1628, when 800 leading Protestant families were compelled to leave the country. The same forces were at work in Bavaria and, more spectacularly, in liberal Poland. There, Stephen Batory, elected king in 1574 on a platform of toleration, had allowed the Jesuits in as part of his policy of protecting both sides to the dispute. There were 360 in Poland by the time his successor, Sigismund III, a vehement Catholic, was elected in 1587. Thereafter, Catholics alone were appointed to office, and Catholic nobles were encouraged to evict Protestants from their estates; the courts ruled that Protestants might not use parish churches, and they were driven into the town halls; then, in 1607, the Protestant nobles were provoked into revolt, and its suppression marked the end of reform. As the papal nuncio reported: ‘A short time ago, it might have been feared that heresy would entirely supersede Catholicism in Poland. Now Catholicism is bearing heresy to its grave.’ The Jesuits were instrumental in turning the tide in Austria, Bavaria, in the prince- bishoprics of the Rhineland, and in Poland. Their city schools had a marked success in deflecting the bourgeoisie from reform to orthodoxy. But of course they worked chiefly through powerful individuals. Their last great success came in the 1680s, when Louis XIV’s Jesuit confessor, Le Tellier, finally persuaded the monarch to smash the Edict of Nantes and (it was said) actually drafted the revocation himself. But this influence was not exerted on the plane of morals and piety. In the confessional, the Jesuits and their powerful penitents had a lawyer-client relationship. The reason why they were popular confessors, especially of the great, was that they tended to identify good Christian behaviour with mere prudence, a kind of enlightened realpolitik redeemed only by religious intention: as Escobar, one of their moral theologians put it, ‘Purity of intention may be justification for acts contrary to the moral code and human law.’ They adopted the role of defence-advocate, trying to

• From The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido: A Couple's Guide (2003)

  Rather than just go with the flow, I suggest to couples that once they recognize that they’re headed downhill, they stop and agree to take a time-out. They can separate if they wish, take a walk, clear their heads—do whatever is necessary to prevent further escalation. Then, if they desire, they can resume their conversation. The lengths of their breaks should be predetermined. I also tell couples that when one spouse needs a time-out, the other spouse must honor it. One of the reasons people are hesitant to break is that they fear that their spouses will not be willing to resume the conversation. This isn’t fair. If you take a break and one person still wants closure, it’s important to resume the conversation. Even if you don’t reach a resolution, it’s important for both people to have enough time to have their say. In my practice, I’ve noticed that many couples take a break from tough conversations. However, they do it in angry ways. One spouse leaves the room or leaves the house, and the other spouse becomes infuriated or feels abandoned. Time-outs aren’t bad; they’re good. But you have to have a game plan. You have to agree that it makes more sense to take a breather than hurt each other. Then you have to agree to reconvene with a clearer head. The infuriated spouse won’t feel angry anymore as long as s/he doesn’t feel abandoned. • Feelings aren’t right or wrong; they just are. One of the most common arguments I hear in my office revolves around one spouse’s discussing his or her feelings and the other spouse saying, “That’s not the right way to look at things,” or “That’s not the way it really is.” Boy, watch the sparks fly after that! No one wants to be told that the way you see things or the way you feel is incorrect. Everyone is entitled to his or her feelings. The way you see things is the way you see things. It’s not right or wrong; it just is. It’s essential that you steer clear from correcting your spouse when s/he discusses his or her perspective on things. Just listen. You can disagree, but understand that your opinion is just your opinion. It doesn’t make you any more correct. • Don’t mind-read.

• From The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido: A Couple's Guide (2003)

  If correcting your spouse’s feelings is a primo button pusher, mind reading is another one. How do you feel when your spouse tells you what you are really thinking or meaning when you say something that you wish s/he would take at face value or what’s it like for you when your spouse says, “Don’t tell me you were going to call. I know you had no intention of calling me last night,” or “I could tell you were in a really bad mood when you came home”? Do you just love it? No, not exactly. I bet you get angry. No one likes to be second-guessed. If we wanted to marry the host of the psychic hotline, we would have married him or her. So, avoid telling your spouse that you know better than him or her what s/he’s thinking, feeling, or doing. You’ll be on safer ground. • Leave the past in the past. Stick to the point. Conversations deteriorate when the kitchen sink is thrown in. If you want to have a productive talk, choose one or two points you’d like to discuss, and leave it at that. Don’t wander; stay focused. Even if what your spouse is talking about reminds you of past injustices, keep your thoughts to yourself if you really want to make headway. Keeping score and dredging up the past are excellent ways to push your conversation into quicksand. If you don’t want to sink, stay on track. • No exaggeration. Another way to guarantee detours from a productive conversation is to use the words, always and never, as in, “You always forget to introduce me to your friends,” or “You never say a kind word to me.” When you exaggerate rather than discuss the issues at hand—proper introductions or kindness—your spouse will be reacting to the fact that you’re overlooking the fact that sometimes s/he gets it right. Your spouse will take issue with your black-and-white thinking. If you don’t want that to happen, don’t exaggerate. Talk about a specific incident rather than a personality flaw. Even if you feel as if your spouse does something undesirable all the time, you’re probably wrong, and besides, it’s not the best way to handle things. • No name calling. This is my “No, duh” tip for constructive conversation. It’s amazing that I should even feel it necessary to include it; however, I do. When couples get frustrated, they put on their verbal sparring gloves and call each other names. It’s very, very difficult to recover when someone has called you a mean-spirited name. Once name calling begins, agree to take a time-out. • Don’t get discouraged if your partner doesn’t follow your lead right away.

• From Open (2009)

  He stares. Then starts screaming. Brad, who never raises his voice to anybody, comes apart. What do you want me to say, Andre? What is it that you want me to say? You tell me he’s too good. How the fuck would you know? You can’t judge how he’s playing! You’re so confused out there, so blind with panic, I’m surprised you can even see him. Too good? You’re making him look good. But— Just start letting go. If you’re going to lose, at least lose on your own terms. Hit the fucking ball. But— And if you’re not sure where to hit it, here’s an idea. Just hit it to the same place he hits it. If he hits a backhand crosscourt, you hit a backhand crosscourt. Just hit yours a little better. You don’t have to be better than the whole fucking world, remember? You just have to be better than one guy. There isn’t one shot he has that you don’t have. Fuck his serve. His serve will break down when you start making your shots. Just hit. Just fucking hit. If we’re going to lose today, fine, I can live with it, but let’s lose on our terms. The last thirteen days, I’ve seen you lay it on the line. I’ve seen you rip it, under pressure, maim guys. So please stop feeling sorry for yourself, and stop telling me he’s too good, and for the love of God stop trying to be perfect! Just see the ball, hit the ball. Do you hear me, Andre? See the ball. Hit the ball. Make this guy deal with you. Make him feel you out there. You’re not moving. You’re not hitting. You may think you are, but trust me, you’re just standing there. If you’re going down, OK, go down, but go down with guns blazing. Always, always, always, go down with both guns blaaazing. He opens a locker and slams it shut. The door flaps and clangs. The referee appears. We’re back on court, gentlemen. Brad and Gil walk out of the locker room. I notice that as they slip through the door Gil gives Brad’s back a furtive pat. I walk slowly onto the court. We have a brief warm-up, then resume play. I’ve forgotten the score. I have to look at the scoreboard to remind myself. Oh yes. I lead, 1–0, in the second set. But Medvedev is serving. I think again of the final against Courier in 1991, the rain delay that disrupted my rhythm. Maybe this will be payback. Tennis karma. Maybe, as that rain delay befuddled me, this rain delay will help me right myself.