Anxiety

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 Action (2014)

  Important side note! Non-monogamy doesn’t necessarily mean you’re having full-on SEX with strangers (or whomever else you’re seeing on the side). Even if you’re not having sex yet, you might want to kiss other people, or go on occasional dates, while still considering yourself half of a couple. This is doable, so long as you and your partner set ground rules early on. For me, non-monogamy is more about circumventing a general discomfort I have with being told not to do something—the classic reverse psychology of “I didn’t want this thing until you told me I couldn’t have it!”—than it is about getting down with some new person every night of the week. The number one tenet of my own non-monoggo relationship with Wes was: Don’t tell me anything unless I ask—but be honest if I do. Like, let’s say I spent a day on my luxury yacht, the Amy Rows-Your-Boat-Ashore, with my two biggest celebrity crushes, Martha Stewart and Tupac, and after a few glasses of rosé, things got frisky and we had a three-way makeout (this is just a hypothetical and not a true story, so DROP THOSE PENS, Us Weekly!). The next day, if I were hanging out with Wes, and he asked, “So, did you get with anyone last night?” not even maritime law would exempt me from telling him the truth about this stuff, so I would say yes. Either he would be satisfied with that answer and move on, or, if he felt jealous and would rather know the reality of what happened than let his mind start spinning out paranoid fantasies, he might want to know more. If he asked for additional information, I’d answer him factually, but only to the extent to which I felt comfortable: I usually drew the line at describing nuanced details of physical encounters or identifying characteristics of the person (or celebrity businesswoman-rapper duo) I was fooling around with, for the sake of both our brains. While some people are cool with spilling everything about whose hands were on which deck, Wes and I knew we weren’t okay with hearing all the salty details, and we respected each other’s limitations.

• From Action (2014)

  My only anxieties about the people concentric to my partners and me: In what ways could my bad behavior make someone else unhappy? Would the mutual acquaintances my partner also dated resent me? Would they go sullen if I walked into a room or, God forbid, SPOKE to their now-steady boy/girlfriend? Would it mean that my family would be disappointed in me, should they happen to google my name and find either the copse of essays I’ve published about RUTTIN’ ’N’ SLUTTIN’ or the photo series of me ass-naked in a heart-shaped Jacuzzi, covered in McDonald’s cheeseburgers? (As you witnessed in an earlier chapter, I happen to love fine art and totally cotton to what venerated critic John Berger says about the depiction of women in artwork in Ways of Seeing: “Men look at women. Women look at themselves covered in fast food and get totally jazzed that they ever not only had, but executed, that clever idea.”) Or perhaps they would be disappointed by this very book in your hands? Would they, if not disown me, dispatch throat-clearing noises and half-joke-half-dig comments about my “… er [achhhhacchhhhachh]… free spirit” at family potlucks? (Open letter to each and every one of my uncles: I exhort you to just smile and pass the condiments without any wacky wordplay, however hilarious-seeming it may be, when it comes to this work of literature.) Would my friends decide I was that dreaded combo—boastful; shameful—and leave me if I ever let on how much I loved the D (and V)? God, why did everyone have to care so much about my sex life??? Of course, in reality, they don’t. As with my gloriously indifferent stoner roommate of yore, I have come to find that no one gives a dollar-menu burger about what I do in the buff. It’s funny to me that I could ever think that the people who love me would perma-seal the doors to their hearts because I take part in an activity that many, if not most, adults enjoy. There are few reasons for your own dear people to have to find out about and/or discuss your love life in the first place, so QUIT FREAKING OUT ABOUT IT, if you are.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  He opened the door with a spatula in hand, smiled, and said, “Miles, come in. I was just making an egg sandwich. Want one?” “No thanks,” I said, following the Eagle into his kitchen. My job was to keep him out of his living room for thirty seconds so the Colonel could get the Breathalyzer undetected. I coughed loudly to let the Colonel know the coast was clear. The Eagle picked up his egg sandwich and took a bite. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” he asked. “I just wanted to tell you that the Colonel—I mean, Chip Martin—he’s my roommate, you know, he’s having a tough time in Latin.” “Well, he’s not attending the class, from what I understand, which can make it very difficult to learn the language.” He walked toward me. I coughed again, and backpedaled, the Eagle and I tangoing our way toward his living room. “Right, well, he’s up all night every night thinking about Alaska,” I said, standing up straight and tall, trying to block the Eagle’s view of the living room with my none-too-wide shoulders. “They were very close, you know.” “I know that—” he said, and in the living room, the Colonel’s sneakers squeaked against the hardwood floor. The Eagle looked at me quizzically and sidestepped me. I quickly said, “Is that burner on?” and pointed toward the frying pan. The Eagle wheeled around, looked at the clearly not-on burner, then dashed into the living room. Empty. He turned back to me. “Are you up to something, Miles?” “No, sir. Honestly. I just wanted to talk about Chip.” He arched his eyebrows, skeptical. “Well, I understand that this is a devastating loss for Alaska’s close friends. It’s just awful. There’s no comfort to this grief, is there?” “No sir.” “I’m sympathetic to Chip’s troubles. But school is important. Alaska would have wanted, I’m sure, for Chip’s studies to continue unimpeded.” I’m sure, I thought. I thanked the Eagle, and he promised me an egg sandwich at some point in the future, which made me nervous that he would just show up at our room one afternoon with an egg sandwich in hand to find us A. illegally smoking while the Colonel B. illegally drank milk and vodka out of a gallon jug. Halfway across the dorm circle, the Colonel ran up to me. “That was smooth, with the ‘Is that burner on?’ If you hadn’t pulled that, I was toast. Although I guess I’ll have to start going to Latin. Stupid Latin.” “Did you get it?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. God, I hope he doesn’t go looking for it tonight.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Descartes beside his stove, in his cold, empty world, locked into his own uncertainty, and uttering a “proof” which is little more than a mental conundrum, embodies the spiritual dilemma of modern humanity. Thus, at a time when science and unfettered rationality were forging brilliantly ahead, life was becoming meaningless for an increasing number of people, who, for the first time in human history, were having to live without mythology. The British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) believed that there was a God, but for all practical purposes, God might just as well not exist. Like Luther, Hobbes saw the physical world as empty of the divine. God, Hobbes believed, had revealed himself at the dawn of human history and would do so again at its End. But until that time we had to get on without him, waiting, as it were, in the dark. 18 For the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62), an intensely religious man, the emptiness and the “eternal silence” of the infinite universe opened up by modern science inspired pure dread: When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair. 19 Reason and logos were improving the lot of men and women in the modern world in a myriad practical ways, but they were not competent to deal with those ultimate questions that human beings seem forced, by their very nature, to ask and which, hitherto, had been the preserve of mythos . As a result, despair and alienation, as described by Pascal, have been a part of the modern experience. But not for everybody. John Locke (1632–1704), who was one of the first to initiate the philosophical Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, had none of Pascal’s existential angst . His faith in life and human reason was serene and confident. He had no doubts about God’s existence, even though, strictly speaking, he was aware that proving the reality of a deity that lay beyond our sense experience did not pass Bacon’s empirical test. Locke’s religion, relying entirely on reason, was similar to the deism espoused by some of the Jewish Marranos. He was fully convinced that the natural world gave ample evidence for a Creator and that if reason were allowed to shine forth freely, everybody would discover the truth for himself.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He was also right to argue that Islam must change in order to deal creatively with these radically new conditions. But a religious reform could not of itself modernize a country and stave off the Western threat. Unless Egypt could industrialize, develop a vibrant modern economy, and transcend the limitations of agrarian civilization, no ideology could bring the country to the same level as Europe. In the West, the modern ideals of autonomy, democracy, intellectual freedom, and toleration had been as much a product of the economy as of the philosophers and political scientists. Events would shortly prove that no matter how free and modern Egyptians might feel themselves to be, their economic weakness would make them politically vulnerable and dependent upon the West, and this humiliating subservience would make it even harder for them to cultivate a truly modern spirit. But despite his hunger for modernity, Afghani, like the Iranian intellectuals with whom he was in touch, still belonged in many respects to the old world. He was a personally devout Muslim, who prayed, observed Islamic rituals, and lived according to Islamic law. 57 He practiced the mysticism of Mulla Sadra, whose vision of evolutionary change was deeply appealing to him. He also taught his disciples the esoteric lore of Falsafah, and often argued like a medieval philosopher. Like other religious thinkers of this period, he tried to prove that his faith was rational and scientific. He pointed out that the Koran taught Muslims to take nothing on trust and to demand proof; it was, therefore, admirably suited to the modern world. Indeed, Afghani went so far as to argue that Islam was identical with modern scientific rationalism, that the Law that the Prophet had received was at one with the laws of Nature, and that all the doctrines of Islam could be demonstrated by logic and natural reason. 58 This was patently false. Like any traditional faith, Islam went beyond the reach of logos and depended upon prophetic and mystical insight; and, indeed, that was how Afghani himself experienced religion. In another mood, he could write eloquently of the limitations of science, which “however beautiful, … does not completely satisfy humanity, which thirsts for the ideal and which likes to exist in dark and distant regions that the philosophers and the scholars can neither perceive nor explore.” 59 Like the Iranian intellectuals, Afghani still had a foot in the old world at the same time as he aspired to the new. He wanted his faith to be wholly rational, but, like any mystic of the conservative period, he knew in his heart that the mythos of his religion gave humanity insights that science could not. This inconsistency was, perhaps, inevitable, because Afghani was a transitional figure. But it also sprang from his anxiety. Time was running out, and Afghani could not wait to iron out all the contradictions in his thought.

• From Action (2014)

  If you welcome a new acquaintance to pay a call, do all you can to make that person feel safe. For all they know, your closet is stuffed not with the overflow from your long-suffering hamper, but with your secret scalpel collection, organized in fastidious order from sharpest to “still terrifyingly sharp.” Keep the lights on unless they ask that you turn them off, and don’t close the door to your room without first locking down the absolute certainty that they’re ready to take part in some private goings-on with you. And PUT AWAY YOUR MEDICAL INSTRUMENTS if you do for some reason have them, you fascinating lunatic. If you’re the visitor, follow my sister Laura’s lead: Make sure you let a friend in on your whereabouts, including the address, if you don’t know this dreamboat very well. Should something feel funny upon your arrival, text your friend that you’re leaving by X time, then let them know when you make a break for it. Home security isn’t the last of your concerns—sexual violence can and does happen everywhere. Your gut will tell you if something seems untoward, and I try not to get too plastered to properly hear mine if I’m looking to get down. I never get together with a stranger when I’m too wasted to function otherwise, no exceptions—and anyone who would sleep with you when you’re visibly throwed is probably not looking out for your best interests. If you’re on the town with a friend, make them aware of this rule in case you can’t be, via some encounter that goes something like, “YES OF COURSE I’D LIKE ANOTHER LONG ISLAND ICED TEA, FRANK. OH, SORRY—IT’S PETER, RIGHT, RIGHT.” (I have been quoted thusly once or twice in the past, as I am nothing if not an excellent conversationalist in every moment.) When you try to abscond home with Frankenpeter or whomever you’re into, your partner in crime will be there to remind you of the figurative KEEP OUT sign over your door instead. WITHIN BOUNDS [image file=image_639.jpg] Even when I haven’t had a hunch that someone means me ill, I am my own warden when it comes to preventing people from unintentionally causing me discomfort—and I try to take care of the people I’m having sex with, too. You might not know what someone’s history of abuse or trauma might be. It’s imperative that you ask your partner, out loud, if some new act you’re introducing into your physical hangout is okay with them. I don’t expect people to do this for quotidian-seeming above-the-waist touching ALL THE TIME, but, I think the more you ask, the better. It doesn’t have to slacken the fervidity of what’s going down! It’s impossible to guess what a person might feel skittish about. Something you think is not only totally on the level, but also distinguishes you as an elevated prime sex master, could be fraught with the BAD kind of nostalgia for your partner.

• From Action (2014)

  I don’t want to scare you off forever—most people are not angling to trap one another in these kinds of scenarios, but, if we’re going to have this consent-versation, we have to acknowledge the fact that consent, though essential, is fallible. I think the gigantic, looming threat of potentially messing up when it comes to consent, and then being forever after labeled an abuser, assailant, or rapist, is part of why some members of the genuinely non-monstrous majority population are afraid to discuss it—and are, as a result, more likely to mess it up. (This is a shame, since verbally consensual sex is good, healthy, and the crowd favorite among highly skilled, hot, and respectful hookup candidates. I’ve had myriad physical experiences with well-meaning, resolutely decent types who just didn’t seem to know how to address consent in a proactive and sexy way in the heat of the moment. As I mentioned, I have also been this species of person! I don’t think everyone who stumbles when it comes to discussing consent is a rapist/predatory beast—many of them have never been made to understand that rape and sexual assault are things they even have to think about committing, since they are convinced that “rape” is a terrible act with just one meaning that of course would never be demonstrated by them. (I exhort these people to get an inch of a clue.) Others don’t know how to bring up consent without getting skittish, feeling prim, worrying they’re killing some kind of moment/boner/wide-on, or otherwise shutting down. This makes me sad, because avoiding consent because it’s an “uncomfortable” topic actually steers people into the exact awkwardness they’re trying to avoid: It leads to situations where two amenable foxes who set out to have a great time together end up snarled in a morass of anxiety, which is, at least from the maps I’ve drawn up in the front covers of RoBZP (as one does with fantasy novels) not usually their intended destination. It sincerely doesn’t have to go down like that—in most cases, it is so easy for it NOT to go down like that! You just have to give each other directions. At its best, sex, or making out, or touching regions, or whatever affectionate physical contact you’re enjoying with another willing individual, is communicative and instructive in tons of ways. Every person has their own motions, methods, preferences, and modes when it comes to all these exercises. Learning someone’s personal specificities—and having them learn yours—is edifying and sexy and worthwhile. One important condition on which this is predicated, though, is mutual honesty and consideration, which—guess what—come from mutual consent.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Christians who were not Jews ‘Hellenes’, a word to which a sneer was attached, but it was probably during the third century that Western Latin-speaking Christians developed their own contemptuous term for this same category: pagani. The word means ‘country folk’, and the usual explanation is that urban Christians looked down on rural folk who stuck like backwoodsmen to traditional cults. More likely is that the word was army slang for ‘non- combatants’: non-Christians had not enrolled in the army of Christ, as Christians did in baptism.3 Christians cut across the normal courtesies of observing the imperial cult and that made them a potential force for disruption in Roman life. Indeed, the language they used in their enthusiasm for their saviour seems almost to be borrowed from the language which the imperial cult was developing in the lifetime of Jesus. So a Greek inscription found in Ephesus calls Julius Caesar ‘god made manifest’; the Emperor Augustus’s birthday was called ‘good news’ and his arrival in a city the ‘parousia’ – exactly the same word which Christians used for Christ’s expected return.4 It would be easy for sensitive Romans to hear such Christian usages as deliberate and aggressive plagiarism. For the authorities, one feature of the Christians’ exclusivity was particularly alarming: their frequently negative attitude to military service. No Christian of the first three centuries CE would fit easily into the army, since military life automatically demanded as routine attendance at official sacrifices as today it demands salutes to the flag and parades. The legacy of Christian sacred literature to state violence was contradictory. On the one hand there was the demonstrative imperial loyalty of Paul of Tarsus, alongside the memory of the victories won by the Maccabees and the frequent militancy described in the Tanakh, which centred on a land won by military conquest. On the other was the Saviour who had made forgiveness his watchword and who had rebuked his defender Peter for using a sword. Such uncertain messages made for perplexity: the debates produced a number of martyr stories of Christian soldiers who suffered because they refused to conform to military discipline, most of which were probably fabricated in an effort to encourage waverers to keep to a principled line. A more complicated fabrication was the story promulgated by Bishop Apollinaris of Hierapolis in Phrygia (Asia Minor) that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161–80) had recently recruited a legion of Christian soldiers, who saved him from defeat not by their military prowess, but by successfully praying for a strategically placed storm on the River Danube (conveniently for Apollinaris, a location a long way away from Phrygia).5 Apollinaris’s confident report of what was no doubt a pious rumour clearly reflected Christians’ anxiety to have their cake and eat it: to demonstrate their active and useful loyalty to an exceptionally capable and respected emperor

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  rival Great Britain.74 Its weakness, however, in another contrast with Britain, was government finance. France had never established a proper national banking and credit system, and thanks to the centralizing impulse of its monarchy, failed to maintain a national representative body which could cooperate in raising revenue. This was disastrous even when France was victorious in war, as happened when the French supported Britain’s former North American colonies in their War of Independence after 1776. Within four years of the Treaty of Paris recognizing the United States (1783), the French government faced bankruptcy, and it had no effective means of cutting through France’s archaic revenue system. A run of terrible harvests and consequent famine inflamed the political temperature still further. An assembly of notables called in 1787 refused to help solve the financial crisis; so did an assembly of the clergy, who had jealously guarded their ancient right to tax themselves. However, the clergy raised the whole level of the argument by pointing out that their privileges survived from a time when all taxation had been levied with the consent of the feudal estates of the realm meeting as the States General. The clergy, or at least an idealized image of the good and conscientious curé (parish priest), became hugely popular nationwide – for the moment.75 The idea of reviving this representative institution therefore met with great enthusiasm, and if Louis XVI and his successive ministers had been more adroit in using it, they might have carried out substantial reform without disaster. Unfortunately the King was not a decisive man. Having assembled the States General in 1789 after more than a century and a half in abeyance, he could not make his mind up on vital procedural matters. In an atmosphere of expectation and with a torrent of suspicions and grievances already released by the summoning of the delegates, he lost the initiative. On 17 June 1789 the ‘Third Estate’, those delegates neither clergy nor noblemen, declared themselves a National Assembly; they were soon joined by dissident clergy and noblemen from the First and Second Estates. Further clumsy moves from the King increasingly destabilized the situation; rural France fell into turmoil. On 26 August 1789 the Assembly passed a Declaration of the Rights of Man, owing much to the American Declaration of Independence thirteen years before. It is worth noting what a break with the past this was, a high point of Enlightenment optimism: it was a declaration of rights, not accompanied by a declaration of duties. It took half a decade of mounting atrocity in war and revolution before duties were officially formulated. It was still likely that France would develop a monarchy under a constitution, a tidier version of the British system, but the religious question pushed events a stage further. The National Assembly was as determined to reform the Church as

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  We are weak; the strong instruments are in the hands of our opponents; separated and divided, we stand against storms that threaten to annihilate us, God forbid. Laws that injure our inmost being will make our situation tragic and unbearable. We must therefore maintain our guard and repulse the attacks against us from within the government.72 But in the 1950s, conditions were not right. Agudat Israel had broken with the Labor government in 1952 on the issue of drafting women into the IDF, and had not been represented in the Knesset since. But after the Likud victory in 1977, Agudat became a member of the coalition government. The Moetzet G’dolay ha-Torah (Council of Torah Sages), the advisory body of Agudat, thus brought elderly rabbis, whom the Zionists had mentally consigned to the scrap heap of history, close to the centers of power. But the old hostility between Hasidim and Misnagdim, muted for decades, surfaced once again in the council; they began to see one another as rivals, in competition for the same funding. This led to the emergence of new Haredi parties and new political players. Rabbi Eliezer Schach, for example, head of the Ponovez Yeshiva and leader of Lithuanian Jewry in Israel, became worried about the influence of the Sephardic Jews, who had immigrated to Israel from the Arab countries after 1948. Many of the Sephardics were coming under the influence of the Hasidic members of Agudat Israel, and Schach feared that this increased Hasidic constituency would draw funds away from the Misnagdic yeshivot. To counter the danger and to woo the Sephardics, he founded a new Sephardic party, Shas Torah Guardians, with the Sephardic Chief Rabbi, Ovadia Yosef. Sephardics did not have the same aversion to Zionism as the European Jews. Until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, they had not been persecuted in the Muslim world and had not developed a ghetto mentality. They were not squeamish about taking part in state affairs and took to political life with gusto. In the 1984 elections, Shas won four seats in the Knesset.

• From Action (2014)

  How can you tell if someone is decent or just masquerading as a preschool teacher with nice hands that they don’t intend to employ for the purpose of murking you out? Honor your instincts, even if they seem overactively guarded. It’s good that you want to protect yourself. More on this in the part of the book in which I talk about how not following that imperative once led me to an unfortunate encounter in a pool painted to look like outer space—evidence that real-life courtship can be just as fetid as poorly vetted internet dalliances. If your cretin-meter isn’t chirping at you and you’re just concerned as to the quality of a potential internet-based lay, check for any overtly ablaze disaster flares, judgment-wise: Does their default photo find them “jokily” reenacting a meme with a disoriented-looking elderly woman (their grandmother?) near a pile of brownish dirty laundry? Are they strangely cryptic, or straightforwardly obfuscating, as to their age? Do they write anything at all about the preferred weight of their match-to-be? Given their lack of consideration in any of those capacities, I would also wager that you wouldn’t extract much enjoyment from any sexual encounter you shared with that person. It’s pretty easy to avoid inspiring a similar snap judgment in those perusing your profile photos. As we know, the elements of just about every site or app intended to put another warm body in the space occupied by your phone are usually thus: at least one photo and a truncated description of yourself, both of which communicate that you fuck like you’re tryna earn a degree for it. Here’s how to achieve that: • Include your face and the upper half of your body. • Wear something that makes you feel like a sexual comet. • That’s pretty much it! (I find that the less background and more PERSON in the picture, the more attention-locking it is.) Visual motifs to avoid: • If you are genuinely interested in internet liaisons, why would you decide that a picture of your pet hanging out by itself makes a great default? It’s cool if there’s a fur-face IN the picture (although you might alienate those with allergies… but who wants to have that conversation re: casual sex anyway?). Reconsider offering up your pet when asked to provide documentation of your sweet face, because no one wants to have sex with your cat (I truly hope). • Bottles of alcohol, especially in “club”-lookin’ environs. It’s cool—I love getting plastered, too. But making this the MAIN ELEMENT that you highlight in a photo—that you are not only of legal drinking age, but that you intend to show it off!!!—comes off like you might not have that much of a personality otherwise, or might not have the presence of mind to remember that you do.

• From Action (2014)

  I always worry that the videos I find on more generic porno search engines and amateur sites were leaked out of retribution without one of the parties’ knowledge. I like to stick to “sex-positive” porn sites, even though, as I mentioned upfront, I feel word-negative about the hippie-dippie hey-man-it’s-the-’90s-ish designation of that term. For amateur porn heads of my same ilk, here is the best way to find it: A few years back, the entrepreneur Cindy Gallop masterminded a blissful website called MakeLoveNotPorn. It collates the “Mike’s Droid” style of cinematography, except the encounters are blemished, realistic, and taken by their own willing, loving actors (including couples, friends, one-offs, and more). Everyone in the videos is stoked to participate. Think doubly hard about whether that’s the case for the porn actors in videos of people who, identity-wise, maybe have a harder time with sex work. (This is a fraught topic; I’m scared that by advocating for a reduction in demand for income these people have is also a detriment to them.) People in the sex industry, especially marginalized ones, deserve support, your agitating politically and spreading the word for their protection, and pragmatic and social resources in areas that extend beyond your laptop. If a person is willing to get off to the employees of a field that cannot yet legally provide sufficient working conditions for all of those involved in it, then that same person turns off their computer and scoffs at or blithely rebukes these people, that person is a jerk-off in EVERY sense of the word. Do not let your reluctance to seem like a free-spirited tree-nerd override and inhibit your ethical decency, will ya? After all, man, it’s the ’90s. We know better these days. GRAPHIC PHOTO-REALISM [image file=image_874.jpg] Failing the whole internet: Make your own porn, whether you’re doing so by means of still or moving images! Just smile for the camera, please, as we consider how to create fine works of art in both mediums. Taking skin photos is likely going to involve some self-scrutiny regardless of whether you’re trying to embody the very portrait of aesthetic grace or simply be arranged into a passably fuckable assortment of pixels. Don’t beat yourself up if you spend an hour agonizing over the perfect lighting and angles, but please know you can also take a blurry shot of your butt that will be attractive in its own right. Do what feels good. When in doubt, take your picture from slightly above you in order to fit more of you in it (as seen from a universally flattering viewpoint!), make sure your posture is long and strong, and see if you can muster a smile if your face is in the frame.

• From Action (2014)

  [image file=image_437.jpg] Commenting on a person’s weight or gender (e.g., in the latter case, making any remark that ends, “… for a boy/girl”), regardless of your intentions, is not a compliment. The rule of talking about other people’s bodies: Unless you’re saying something that, under an X-ray, breaks down to the elemental structure of “You look amazing,” you shouldn’t be saying anything. Last year, I lost a bunch of weight due to emotional stress. Initially, I was worried that my gauntness was going to lead people to classify me as “unhinged” or “unhealthy”—which are two bifurcations of the same root idea, that someone has a medical condition, but are not necessarily one identical fact. (This nervousness probably stemmed from the fact that both were totally true for me at the time.) I did find that others couldn’t seem to stop being twerps about my shaved-down form, but it was because they lauded it, which was far worse for me. One night, three different jackhole acquaintances at a single “fashion party” effused over my weight, saying, “You’re so skinny now! You used to be so big! You look gorgeous!” I’ve had pretty severe body issues throughout my life and have had to learn to shred through and past them, so I knew that this was cruddy and intrusive. I told each of them that I didn’t think what they were saying was in any way flattering, but it still made me feel tangled-up about my value as a person in relation to my weight. Like, I just came here to do tequila shots and maybe instigate a dance contest with a male model, and now I’m wondering how many calories I just nipped off of a toothpick when I downed that teensy passed appetizer, aka the one thing I ate today. Maybe calm down with that. (A bonus and so stunningly unexpected moral of this story: People who employ children as coatracks for the clothing of adult bodies are by and large vapid jackals, and part of how you can tell is because they scrutinize the bodies of others, and if that weren’t harsh enough, they do it out loud.) Later that night, I brought home a persistent club promoter (baaaaad mistake number one, but whatever). I had known him a few years back when I was a “professional” nightlife hostess, aka when I was skint and was paid to say “Hi there!! I’m Amy Rose and this is my party! Are you having fun?!” then go about my usual way of licking salt and limes and cheating my way to the top of the dance-off bracket. (Just get on the floor and twist your legs around dramatically and you win. You’re welcome.)

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  nevertheless more seriously affected than Catholics, because of their general rejection of allegory in interpreting the Bible unless absolutely necessary (see pp. 596–7). They were left with the literal sense of the biblical text, if sense there was (try some of the visions of Ezekiel), and scholarship proved alarming for literalists then as now. La Peyrère had been joined by Hobbes and Spinoza in pointing out a conclusion now obvious to the historically minded, but which with enough willpower can be avoided for centuries, that Moses could not have written the entire Pentateuch. As a result of this new scrutiny of the Bible, there was a growing feeling among some Western Christians that not merely other Christianities or even Judaism, but other world religions, might provide insight into truth – a conclusion opposed to the scabrous abuse in the Treatise of the three impostors.34 This new spirit of reverent openness directly related to the worldwide reach of Western power and trade by 1700. Islam seemed much less threatening politically as the Ottoman, Iranian and Mughal empires fell into decay. Now educated Europeans had a much better chance of understanding this other monotheism. Thanks to André du Ryer, a French diplomat who spent much of his career in Alexandria, they had access to a Turkish grammar in Latin and French translations of Turkish and Persian literary texts, something almost unprecedented in the West – but above all, du Ryer’s reliable translation (1647) of the Qur’an into French, which was rapidly taking over from Latin as the international language of scholarship. That translation was the source of all Europe’s vernacular translations of the Qur’an. English came first in 1649, not without incident in a turbulent year for England, the translation meeting a storm of abuse from all sides. Parliament briefly imprisoned the English printer, while one High Church pamphleteer ascribed the work to the Devil – rather paradoxically, since the principal translator appears to have been a former protégé of Archbishop Laud, and elsewhere denounced Copernicus, Spinoza and Descartes.35 The Jesuits had already stimulated Western curiosity about China; Franco-British rivalry in India aroused equal interest in the cultures and religions of the subcontinent. Sir Isaac Newton was among those who concluded from these various stirrings that all the world’s cultures sprang from a single civilization informed by knowledge of the divine, but scattered in Noah’s Flood.36 Between 1640 and 1700 a growing divide opened up between scepticism or openness on biblical matters among an educated and privileged minority, which parted with the passions of the Reformation, and continuing untroubled if miscellaneous beliefs among the multitude. In place of the idea which runs through the Tanakh and New Testament of a God intimately involved with his

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Although, really, he could never suspect anything. Why would someone steal a Breathalyzer?” — At two o’clock in the morning, the Colonel took his sixth shot of vodka, grimaced, then frantically motioned with his hand toward the bottle of Mountain Dew I was drinking. I handed it to him, and he took a long pull on it. “I don’t think I’ll be able to go to Latin tomorrow,” he said. His words were slightly slurred, as if his tongue were swollen. “One more,” I pleaded. “Okay. This is it, though.” He poured a sip of vodka into a Dixie cup, swallowed, pursed his lips, and squeezed his hands into tight little fists. “Oh God, this is bad. It’s so much better with milk. This better be point two-four.” “We have to wait for fifteen minutes after your last drink before we test it,” I said, having downloaded instructions for the Breathalyzer off the Internet. “Do you feel drunk?” “If drunk were cookies, I’d be Famous Amos.” We laughed. “Chips Ahoy! would have been funnier,” I said. “Forgive me. Not at my best.” I held the Breathalyzer in my hand, a sleek, silver gadget about the size of a small remote control. Beneath an LCD screen was a small hole. I blew into it to test it: 0.00, it read. I figured it was working. After fifteen minutes, I handed it to the Colonel. “Blow really hard onto it for at least two seconds,” I said. He looked up at me. “Is that what you told Lara in the TV room? Because, see, Pudge, they only call it a blow job.” “Shut up and blow,” I said. His cheeks puffed out, the Colonel blew into the hole hard and long, his face turning red. .16. “Oh no,” the Colonel said. “Oh God.” “You’re two-thirds of the way there,” I said encouragingly. “Yeah, but I’m like three-fourths of the way to puking.” “Well, obviously it’s possible. She did it. C’mon! You can outdrink a girl, can’t you?” “Give me the Mountain Dew,” he said stoically. And then I heard footsteps outside. Footsteps. We’d waited till 1:00 to turn on the lights, figuring everyone would be long asleep—it was a school night after all—but footsteps, shit, and as the Colonel looked at me confused, I grabbed the Breathalyzer from him and stuffed it between the foam cushions of the couch and grabbed the Dixie cup and the Gatorade bottle of vodka and stashed them behind the COFFEE TABLE, and in one motion I grabbed a cigarette from a pack and lit it, hoping the smell of smoke would cover up the smell of booze.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  A permanent uneasiness took up residence in me that night. I couldn’t decide if my initial experience with the Holy Ghost was real or faked. If it was real, why didn’t I feel different? If it was faked, I had blasphemed and that was the point of no return that preachers had always warned against. “There is one sin for which there is no forgiveness, and once you cross that line there is no way back. God will turn you over to a reprobate mind. Even if you want to find your way back to God, you won’t be able to.” Did I have a reprobate mind? What exactly was a reprobate mind? Had God turned his back on me? These questions weighed on me for the rest of my childhood. Whenever I committed some wrong—watching The Monkees on TV, attending movies or high-school football games, making out with a boy, or God forbid, wearing slacks—they always resurfaced. I was never sure where God and I stood after that night, but I was pretty sure there was a vast amount of space between us. One night after evening worship, the Smiths gathered around their small kitchen table with other church people. I walked in just as Brother Smith pounded the table to make his point. “The Assemblies of God is the only church today that stands by the truth. Everybody knows they only kicked David Terrell out because he had two wives.” His back was to the door that led from the living room to the kitchen, so he did not see me enter the room. Sister Smith shushed him, and he and the others turned to look at me. My face grew hot, and I felt as if the floor had given way, as if I was standing there with nothing to support me, nothing to save me. Brother Terrell’s visits to our house in Houston, the gifts, the empty couch in my mother’s living room all came together in that instant, and I knew that my mother was one of those two wives and that it was an awful, shameful thing and that her shame was my shame. I knew, and from that moment on there was no way to not know.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Catholic composer William Byrd created a choral setting of a Savonarolan prison meditation; many other composers across Europe had previously done the same.63 In Savonarola’s own land his legacy remained alarming to those in power. A group known as the Piagnoni sprang up in Florence to preserve his memory; their organization might be seen as a particularly potent example of an Italian devotional gild or confraternity, emphasizing mystical meditation and missionary work, and promoting such Devotio Moderna classics as the Imitation of Christ. Although the Dominican Order throughout Italy was very wary of stepping out of line after the Savonarola debacle, friars continued to be prominent among the Piagnoni, and in later years the sizeable group of considerable scholars who were adherents were firm against Luther, while still continuing to advocate reform in the Church. The Piagnoni nursed the same combination of political and theological republicanism which had shaped the Savonarolan years, but after they succeeded in overthrowing the Medici afresh in 1527–30, their rule became a sadistic tyranny which did much finally to kill off Florentine republicanism and ensure the future of the Medici in power.64 Even after that, as the Society of Jesus, a new Catholic renewal movement, developed in the 1540s, its founder Ignatius Loyola still felt constrained to ban members of the Society from reading Savonarola’s writings, despite seeing a lot of good in them, simply because the friar’s fate still stimulated unseemly disagreement between supporters and detractors. As late as 1585, the Medici Grand Duke had to forbid Florentine monks, friars and nuns even to utter his name.65 The Piagnoni movement was only one symptom of the chronic neurosis and apocalyptic expectations which disturbed the Italian peninsula for decades after Savonarola was ashes. As in Spain, the mood affected high and low, powerful and destitute; female ‘living saints’ got a respectful hearing when they turned up to proclaim their message of imminent judgement in Italian princely courts. Through the sixteenth century and beyond, prophecies, accounts of monstrous births and wondrous signs became sure-fire money-spinners for the printing presses, as so often since in troubled times (see Plate 12). One text caused a sensation even though it remained in manuscript: the Apocalypsis Nova (‘New Account of the Last Days’). Announced in 1502, it claimed to have been written some time before by a Portuguese Franciscan, Amadeus Menezes da Silva, and certainly it built on earlier monastic or Franciscan literature in the style of Joachim of Fiore (see pp. 410–11). This ‘Amadeist’ manuscript, which still has its devotees, especially in the wilder corners of the Internet, predicted the coming of an Angelic Pastor or Pope, righting the world’s ill and heralded by Spiritual Men. A crucial task was correctly to identify these important

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  PIETISM AND THE MORAVIANS There was a force behind this expansion greater than British imperial power: the Protestant religious movements underpinning it were international. What is remarkable about these stories is their interconnection across Europe and the world, and the fact that they took both their immediate and their long-term origins from Protestant Germany.40 King George I came to England in 1714 from a Lutheran northern Europe very conscious of its own providential survival in the Thirty Years War, yet still not at ease. Battered by the armies of Louis XIV, it then suffered several further decades of calamities from the 1690s: a run of terrible weather producing famine, which nurtured epidemics, and from 1700 the Great Northern War, which, over twenty years, broke Swedish aspirations to great-power status in the Baltic and consolidated the imperial power of Peter the Great’s Russia (see pp. 541–4). Such catastrophes placed a heavy pastoral burden on Lutheran clergy in Scandinavia and Germany, and made them look for Protestant spiritual resources beyond their own tradition. Although they would have not wished to admit it, they were also trying to find a substitute for something which the Reformation had destroyed: monastic life and spirituality. With certain formal exceptions in Germany, which owed a rather accidental survival to their convenience for the German nobility, all monasteries, nunneries and friaries had disappeared from Protestant Europe, and all devotional life devolved to the parishes. Even there, parish gilds and confraternities had largely been dissolved or had concentrated on commercial purposes to avoid any hint of popish superstition.41 With the religious houses and gilds there had disappeared a host of Christian ministries and activities, from charitable work to itinerant preaching to contemplation, which the Reformation had done its best to replace, but with incomplete success. Now in compensation came a renewal of German and Scandinavian Protestantism, which has come to be known as Pietism. Pietists liked to emphasize the novelty of what they were doing, and certainly they were impatient with conservative (‘Orthodox’) Lutheran civil authorities and clergy who obstructed them, but there was little in their activities that was actually new or without precedent in Lutheran life. What they initially sought was an enriched use of the existing parish system, pulling parish life out of a mass of surviving pre-Reformation habits of worship to a more heartfelt expression of Christian faith, which would be more robust in the face of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Many deplored the divisions within Protestantism, which could plausibly be considered as contributing to the disasters of the seventeenth century. Lutherans ashamed of such schism paid more attention to their Reformed neighbours in the Netherlands and Germany,

• From Action (2014)

  [image file=image_809.jpg] Do you want to talk some good filth, but remain perhaps too nervous? Clear your throat and read this lexicon of non-wince-inducing things to say mid-liaison, complete with instructive ideas about when to dispatch each of them! Note: The following passage does not include the phrases “flesh bundle,” “yonic wizard,” or any of Jim Carrey’s “hit” catchphrases from either of the blockbuster hit franchises The Mask or Ace Ventura, aka the erotic lexicon I was very tempted to pass off as “smutsational” in this passage. Somebody stopped me… and that “somebody” was my own danged moral conscience. Fine! Or should I say… all righty, then… Articulating yourself with respect to filth is a gratifying undertaking. You’ll find you achieve better returns, sex-wise, if you hone the terms you use to speak about fucking, both in anticipation of it and during. That dialogue is at its very best when a person has mastered their personal smut-vocabulary, which is to say, exclamations more specific than, “I love it when you do that… thing… that’s happening!” If you’re not yet confident in your own dirty mouth, I have plenty to say. When I say personal vocabularies: Learning how to talk dirty from porn is like learning to speak French without any immersive instruction. Porn will give you a basic idea to work from, just like with blow jobs, but if you don’t expand on that yourself through interactions with actual people, your directives end up sounding like prerecorded customer service lines, and not even sex-centric ones. Since we’re not quite at the point in the future where we solely fuck robots, let’s enjoy human interfacin’ as best we know how, which is sometimes… flawed or unwieldy, pride-wise. That does not have to be the case each and every time, though—press “2” for more options, or let your fingers continue to do the walking via continuing to turn these pages. Talking about fucking is equally as hot when you’re not simultaneously living out the events you’re narrating. Some of my favorite filthy conversations have taken place over text, chat services, the phone, and long letters. The beauty of letting others overhear your dirty mouth before you’re together physically is framing yourself as v. buckwild without yet having to prove it, which is great if you’re titchy with new partners, which I can be sometimes. No matter how you conduct yourself in bed, sex-based correspondence allows you the freedom to dictate how that is perceived. The suggestion of you, and all the things you want to do, has the benefit of padding a memory/expectation of the way you have sex with the other person’s fantasy, as ghostwritten by you. You can make provocative revisions to your entry in another person’s sexual biography by annotating it before or after the fact of your introduction into the record.

• From Action (2014)

  When you DO go get tested, at whatever volume you do that, you can go to either your regular physician’s office or a sexual health–focused clinic like Planned Parenthood. There’s no one all-encompassing screening for each and every STI running rampant through the sheets, so you have a short conversation with a medical professional about what-all you’ve been up to, and they determine what diagnoses to test for. They ask you things about birth control, doye, but also inquire about more pointed parts of your sexuality—what body parts are involved when you bone, the genders of the people whom you bone, and so forth. If you don’t identify along the straight-and-narrow hetero spectrum of sexuality or gender identity, it can be assuring to have your tests conducted by a medical practitioner whom you know will treat you with respect and knowledge of non-hetero eros. You likely know that, like any other person, some doctors have inflexible, gross biases and prejudices about non-binary livin’ and lustin’. Here are a few good resources to help you locate practitioners minus these flaws: Planned Parenthood Mayo Clinic The Door As I mentioned: Even if you’re taking another form of birth control and are having monogamous sex with someone you trust, you honestly cannot know if they’re “safe” unless they furnish the proper paperwork. I’m not big on quizzing people, but it can be fun to get tested together. It isn’t as awkward or accusatory as it sounds! A dude of yore and I wanted to go latex-free, but we each wanted to show the other that that was a solid idea, STI-wise. We decided to make some sort of romantic display of it, I guess, by demonstrating that we’d accept whatever new results we learned of, or didn’t, as long as we found out and accounted for them together. Filled with loving resolve and determined to bareback it, we embarked on our modern, free-lovin’ errand, feeling mad adult and responsible and sexually in control. Nothing makes you feel like a person who acts with intelligent, capable intent like taking care of your body, so it’s pretty attractive to observe someone else as they do that. Neither my partner nor I anticipated any future-altering results (outside the more figurative one of a renewed and strengthened bond of trust shared by hopeful young lovers… nauseating, I know). Still, I can never help thinking, What if? in waiting rooms. It doesn’t matter if I couldn’t even manage to convincingly invent a symptom with the entire medical internet as my research assistant. Prior to a test, part of me upholds a worrisome conviction of some latent sickness patiently filing its nails in my bloodstream. In the waiting room, and not for the first time, my cohort and I talked about what might happen if one of us had an STI. “Will you still want to jump my bones if I somehow have whooping crotch?” I asked.