Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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

  Michael and Katherine’s love story, complete with fumbling sex scenes, is absurd, he says: “The reader’s reaction is laughter—anything from an embarrassed snigger to falling out of a chair with hilarity—when he ought to be moved or excited or enthralled.” Rees goes on to recommend reading the “excruciating” pages “aloud to family or friends so that they can all join in the fun.” But the book, he explains, isn’t just goofy—it’s offensive to its intended audience. Over and over again Rees makes the point that Blume’s coming-of-age plots are reductive and lacking in perspective and nuance. Blume is “doing the youth a great disservice,” Rees writes, by suggesting that “falling in love is not a matter of complex emotions… but that it is simply a question of should one go on the pill or not, swapping partners quite heartlessly, and whether one is doing it right in bed.” He goes on: “To serve them up the kind of stuff of which Forever consists is to underestimate totally their ability to think and to feel, not only about themselves but about the whole complexity of living that goes on around them.” Blume’s oeuvre, he concludes—in language so decisive and spicy that it would likely go viral in today’s literary landscape—is nothing short of an insult to the craft. “Judy Blume’s novels are the ultimate in the read-it-and-throw-it-away kind of book,” he announces halfway through the article. “In other words, they are not only short-changing the young; they are short-changing literature.” Damn, David! Reading the Rees essay now, a note of sexism stands out among the piece’s more aggressive flavors. He takes issue with Blume’s preferred topics, which also happen to be things that pertain to young girls. “What sort of picture would a being from another planet form of teenage and pre-teenage America were he to read ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ and ‘Forever’?” Rees asks. “He would imagine that youth was obsessed with bras, period pains, deodorants, orgasms, and family planning; that life was a great race to see who was first to get laid or to use a Tampax; that childhood and adolescence were unpleasant obstacles on the road to adulthood.” Rees sounds a bit like the alien being himself here, as if he’s never in his life interacted meaningfully with a female middle schooler. But according to Roger Sutton, former editor in chief of the Horn Book (though not at the time Marble in the Water came out), Rees was simply representing the publication’s point of view on most commercial children’s fiction at the time. “In children’s books, since they became a thing at the beginning of the twentieth century as a separate market of book publishing, there’s always been this battle between what kids want to read and what an adult thinks is good,” Sutton explained. “Always. And David Rees was expressing what at the time was a real Horn Book point of view, which is [that] high literary quality trumps everything.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Even quite massive houses of many rooms and wings engulfed their plots down to the sidewalk. This conspicuousness declared a pride and innocence: we have nothing to hide, and we want to show you what we’ve got. Tom’s house was a Mediterranean villa with six bedrooms and servants’ quarters over a double garage, but its gleaming leaded panes and the front door (thick oak gouged into griffins) loomed up just ten paces from the street. Once inside that door, however, I felt transported into another society that had ways I could never quite master. The Wellingtons were nice but not charming. The Wellingtons gave thought to everything they did. The staircase was lined with expensive, ugly paintings done from photographs of their four children. Their kids’ teeth were bound in costly wires, their whims for sailboats or skis or guitars were lavishly but silently honored, they were all paraded in a stupor past the monuments of Europe, their vacations down rapids and over glaciers or up mountains were well funded—but silence reigned. No one said a word. Dinner there was torture. A student from the university served. Mr. Wellington carved. Mrs. Wellington, a woman with a girlish spirit trapped inside a large, swollen body, made stabs at conversation, but she was so shy she could speak only in comical accents. She’d grunt in a bass voice like a bear or squeak like a mouse or imitate Donald Duck—anything rather than say a simple declarative sentence in her own fragile, mortified voice. The father terrified us all with his manners (the long white hands wielding the fork and knife and expertly slicing the joint). He radiated disapproval. His disapproval was not the martyr’s blackmail but a sort of murderous mildness: if he weren’t so fastidious he’d murder you. We watched him carve. We were wordless, hypnotized by the candle flames, the neat incisions and deep, bloody invasions, the sound of the metal knife scraping against the tines of the fork, the sickening softness of each red slice laid to the side and the trickle down silver channels ramifying back into a bole of blood. The odd thing is that the father’s spirit did not contaminate the house. His lair, the library, was even the sunniest, most relaxed room of all as the two little dogs, Welsh corgies, trotted from couch to front door at every disturbance, their small, shaggy feet clicking on the polished red tiles. The dogs, the children, his wife—all seemed to prosper in spite of his punitive reserve, his tight eyes, the way he sniffed with contempt at the end of every sentence someone else said. “Oh yes,” he said to me, examining his overly manicured hand, “I know of your mother … by reputation,” and my heart sank.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  It sloped down toward you like a ski jump. If he bent his head, his scalp showed white. His handshake was limp, but a second after he’d removed this cold, boneless fillet from your hand he was slicing the air with a powerful snap of his fingers in response to some mental or recorded riff he was hearing. He’d squint and bite his lower lip and his head would bob up and down in an accelerating rhythm. Soon he’d be whispering, “And-a one, and-a two …” He had, it seemed, only one suit, a shiny gray sharkskin, the baggy pants radically pegged, the jacket’s lapels narrow and usually turned up as against a draft. On off hours he wore no tie but just a black shirt buttoned tightly at the neck to give him a throttled look. His neck and face and hands were pale and big; he seemed like a prisoner in a cheap suit he’s been given on dismissal. He projected a strong, almost rancid sexuality, but it was hard to place. It was too canny and too asymmetrical to seem robustly masculine in the old sense. He had a way of grabbing his crotch and holding it, sometimes even shaking it for a second while he was talking. I suppose he’d picked this up from the Negroes he’d met in the jazz world. This gesture seemed designed to lend an extra weight to his words. Or perhaps it was a proof to the listener that he was being honest, all there, a body behind his words. His ears were a shade pinker than his pale face. His eyebrows were very solid and dark and looked as though the draftsman had pochéd them in quickly. His upper lip was so thin as to form just a line, but his lower lip was full. On some days he laughed hysterically at simple statements; he’d double up and keep repeating an ordinary word someone had chanced to use as if he hoped to wring some new meaning out of it. When he held his crotch, his baggy pants would ride up to reveal how powerful his thighs were. He wore socks of bright pinks and purples and they were only ankle-high. His responses were sometimes weirdly delayed. Someone would ask him a question and he’d study his face a moment, two moments, before saying a soft, feathery yes or an even less audible no. I sat around with the Butt Club boys and Mr. Beattie on two or three different afternoons, but I didn’t like him. He reminded me of that hustler I’d met two summers ago. He had the same air of being a con man. Something shifty. One day Chuck told me Beattie was about to receive a shipment of marijuana. Did I want to buy in or at least try a joint or two? “What is it, exactly?” I asked. “Isn’t it like heroin?” Chuck laughed. “No. Great stuff, Beattie tells me. Makes you happy.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  THE THIRTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER Of the deceipt of a Woman which made her husband Cuckold. There was a man dwelling in the towne very poore, that had nothing but that which he got by the labour and travell of his hands: his wife was a faire young woman, but very lascivious, and given to the appetite and desire of the flesh. It fortuned on a day, that while this poore man was gone betimes in the morning to the field about his businesse, according as he accustomed to doe, his wives lover secretly came into his house to have his pleasure with her. And so it chanced that during the time that shee and he were basking together, her husband suspecting no such matter, returned home praising the chast continency of his wife, in that hee found his doores fast closed, wherefore as his custome was, he whistled to declare his comming. Then his crafty wife ready with shifts, caught her lover and covered him under a great tub standing in a corner, and therewithall she opened the doore, blaming her husband in this sort: Commest thou home every day with empty hands, and bringest nothing to maintaine our house? thou hast no regard for our profit, neither providest for any meate or drinke, whereas I poore wretch doe nothing day and night but occupie my selfe with spinning, and yet my travell will scarce find the Candels which we spend. O how much more happy is my neighbour Daphne, that eateth and drinketh at her pleasure and passeth the time with her amorous lovers according to her desire. What is the matter (quoth her husband) though Our Master hath made holiday at the fields, yet thinke not but I have made provision for our supper; doest thou not see this tub that keepeth a place here in our house in vaine, and doth us no service? Behold I have sold it to a good fellow (that is here present) for five pence, wherefore I pray thee lend me thy hand, that I may deliver him the tub. His wife (having invented a present shift) laughed on her husband, saying: What marchant I pray you have you brought home hither, to fetch away my tub for five pence, for which I poore woman that sit all day alone in my house have beene proffered so often seaven: her husband being well apayed of her words demanded what he was that had bought the tub: Looke (quoth she) he is gone under, to see where it be sound or no: then her lover which was under the tub, began to stirre and rustle himselfe, and because his words might agree to the words of the woman, he sayd: Dame will you have me tell the truth, this tub is rotten and crackt as me seemeth on every side. And then turning to her husband sayd: I pray you honest man light a Candle, that I may make cleane the tub within, to see if it be for my purpose or no, for I doe not mind to cast away my money wilfully: he by and by (being made a very Oxe) lighted a candle, saying, I pray you good brother put not your selfe to so much paine, let me make the tub cleane and ready for you. Whereupon he put off his coate, and crept under the tub to rub away the filth from the sides. In the meane season this minion lover cast his wife on the bottome of the tub and had his pleasure with her over his head, and as he was in the middest of his pastime, hee turned his head on this side and that side, finding fault with this and with that, till as they had both ended their businesse, when as he delivered seaven pence for the tub, and caused the good man himselfe to carry it on his backe againe to his Inne.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  But my father was pleased, more or less. He distrusted the headmaster’s English accent and melodious voice issuing from someone so obviously weak and fraudulent and American. Dad sniffed a little laugh at all the dark wood, dark sherry, crackling fire of small, evenly matched birchwood logs laid on brass andirons, the whole instant tradition of dear Eton, Anglican primroses amidst the alien corn. But even as he sniffed he nodded approval, for the pretensions were exactly what he was buying for his son, much as a cowpuncher might hire a French tutor for his children—airs fit an heir, even if distasteful to the patriarch. The headmaster philosophized about manliness over a feminine clutter of tea things, tiny pots of marmalade, eggshell-thin cups, a linen-lined basket of warm scones and a cozy embroidered on one side with an Art Deco archer kneeling nudely in Aztec profile, crossbow aimed at a five-pointed Gentile star (the archer was the school emblem, ad astra the motto). My father puffed skeptically on his smelly cigar, by now a misshapen stub black with spit, and asked for a Scotch and soda. For my father, sitting uncomfortably in that petit-point chair without arms, manliness was not discussable, but had it been, it would have included a good business suit, ambition, paying one’s bills on time, enough knowledge of baseball to hand out like tips at the barbershop, a residual but never foolhardy degree of courage, and an unbreachable reserve; to the headmaster manliness was discussed constantly, every day, and entailed tweeds, trust funds, graciousness to servants, a polite but slightly chilly relationship to God, a pretended interest in knowledge and an obsessive interest in sports, especially muddy, dangerous ones like lacrosse or hockey or rugby that ended with great sullen lads hobbling off the field to lean on sticks at the sidelines, the orange and blue vertical stripes of their jerseys clinging to panting diaphragms, bare knees scarred, blond hair brown with sweat, an apache streak of mud daubed across a wan, bellicose cheek. I was starting school in the middle of the year and knew no one. Two other fourth-formers were also entering between semesters, and they became my companions. One, whose room was just next door, had a Spanish mother. I once caught a glimpse of her trim body in a black suit, her glossy, painted red lips barely visible through the bouquet of violets she was sniffing to distract herself during a dull sermon in the school chapel, her eyes lifting and hanging there like amber worry beads bright from having been told so often. Heberto had those same fine eyes and his mother’s olive skin and those teeth as white as the apples he was always eating.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  When those in the center read the Bible to justify privilege, they are not satisfied with simply rationalizing their own social location. A desire also exists to define their power and privilege as a blessing from God, given because of their moral righteousness. When some evangelical Christians see a homeless person, usually their first reaction is to witness God's salvation to them. The homeless person becomes an object for conversion. For this reason, many Christian homeless shelters require the participants to hear a sermon before they are fed. If their souls can be saved, then God will bless them with material possessions. Direct action toward social justice (works) is minimized in favor of right belief (doctrine). Only the latter can save. While there is no denying that some poverty is caused by wrong choices, specifically drug and alcohol abuse, in many cases substance abuse is a means of escaping the hopelessness of existing on the margins of society. What can be expected when children living in the ghettos and barrios are forced to attend deteriorating school buildings without adequate books and supplies while the schools in the white neighborhoods on the other side of town have the latest technology needed to make their students competitive in a global marketplace? This inequality in educational opportunities is one of the factors eventually contributing to unemployment and homelessness. Unjust social structures also affect the ability to acquire adequate employment. For example, it took unskilled, unemployed whites in Detroit, representative of the rest of the nation's major cities, approximately 91 hours to generate a job offer, while it took unskilled, unemployed blacks 167 hours to obtain a similar offer.5 Social forces such as these produce opportunities for one segment of society and deny them to another. When this lack of opportunities leads to poverty, specifically in the extreme form of homelessness, the center rationalizes its privilege by blaming the victims for their poverty. An extreme form of justifying the center's “blessings” is a religious ideology known as prosperity theology. Simply stated, prosperity theology maintains that Christians are “children” of the King. Their Creator wants only the best for God's children and is ready to materially bless them if they have enough faith. To read the Bible from the center, from a social location of power and privilege, is to use the Bible to justify a lifestyle constructed through opportunities denied to most people on the margins. For some Christians from the center of power and privilege, the Bible is often read to uncover its mysteries, debate issues such as creationism versus evolution, or advocate personal salvation. Missing is any substantial discourse on sin as manifested in the social structures that create undue privilege for the center and a lack of rights for the powerless. Reading the Bible from the margins moves the discourse toward a concrete community-based plan of action.

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

  emotions... but that it is simply a question of should one go on the pill or not, swapping partners quite heartlessly, and whether one is doing it right in bed.” He goes on: “To serve them up the kind of stuff of which Forever consists is to underestimate totally their ability to think and to feel, not only about themselves but about the whole complexity of living that goes on around them.” Blume’s oeuvre, he concludes—in language so decisive and spicy that it would likely go viral in today’s literary landscape—is nothing short of an insult to the craft. “Judy Blume’s novels are the ultimate in the read-it-and-throw-it-away kind of book,” he announces halfway through the article. “In other words, they are not only short- changing the young; they are short-changing literature.” Damn, David! Reading the Rees essay now, a note of sexism stands out among the piece’s more aggressive flavors. He takes issue with Blume’s preferred topics, which also happen to be things that pertain to young girls. “What sort of picture would a being from another planet form of teenage and pre-teenage America were he to read ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ and ‘Forever’?” Rees asks. “He would imagine that youth was obsessed with bras, period pains, deodorants, orgasms, and family planning; that life was a great race to see who was first to get laid or to use a Tampax; that childhood and adolescence were unpleasant obstacles on the road to adulthood.” Rees sounds a bit like the alien being himself here, as if he’s never in his life interacted meaningfully with a female middle schooler. But according to Roger Sutton, former editor in chief of the Horn Book (though not at the time Marble in the Water came out), Rees was simply representing the publication’s point of view on most commercial children’s fiction at the time. “In children’s books, since they became a thing at the beginning of the twentieth century as a separate market of book publishing, there’s always been this battle between what kids want to read and what an adult thinks is good,” Sutton explained. “Always. And David Rees was expressing what at the time was a real Horn Book point of view, which is [that] high literary quality trumps everything. That’s what matters.” Blume, he went on, is “not literary,” thanks to a mixture of her preferred subject matter, the simplicity of her prose, her use of casual dialogue, and her avoidance of highly textured descriptions. (“I absolutely can’t write descriptive prose,” Blume acknowledged to Samantha Bee in 2015. “I can do characters and relationships and dialogue, but don’t make me describe anything.”) There was a sense in the late 1970s that when it came to books, giving children what they wanted to read was akin to

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Father Burke had stopped tapping his fingers. His smile had faded and his eyes had gone cloudy. He’d let his face become old and weary, as though to say I had done this to him. Suddenly his eyes were homing in on me, a flicker of his tongue stung his lips back into life and he said, “But shouldn’t we set aside this philosophy”—generous dollop of irony to suggest that if he was interested in my soul he was bored by my mind, for my soul might be eternal but my mind was all too obviously adolescent—“and move on to something a little more urgent.” He pressed his fingertips to his brow and hid behind his hands. “Haven’t you something you want to tell me about?” he asked out of this manual tent, his voice hollow. But he was trying to intimidate the wrong person. I was, after all, a Buddhist. I’d never believed, or only in fleeting reverie, in a warm, concerned, touchy Christian God, who seemed all too obviously a conflation of what people wanted and feared. As a character, Burke intrigued me more than his deity. I appreciated the sense of drama he wanted to inject into my existence and I was flattered he thought I, or at least some essential if rather abstract principle within me, was worth saving. But I also felt surging within me a fierce need to be independent. Of course I responded to the appeal of divine hydraulics, this system of souls damned or crowned or destroyed or held in suspense, these pulleys and platforms sinking and lifting on the great stage, and I recognized that my view of things seemed by contrast impoverished, lacking in degree and incident. But the charming intricacy of a myth is not sufficient to compel belief. I found no good reason to assume that the ultimate nature of reality happens to resemble the backstage of an opera house. On a more emotional level I had an aversion to anything authoritarian. I might long for the capacious, sheltering embrace of a father but I detested paternalism. I was quite hostile to it, in fact. “Well, yes,” I said, “I am seeing a psychiatrist because I have conflicts over certain homosexual tendencies I’m feeling.” At these words Father Burke’s face lurched up out of his hands. Not the nervous little confession he had expected. He recovered his poise and decided to laugh boisterously, the laugh of Catholic centuries. “Conflicts?” he whooped, in tears of laughter by now. Then, sobering for a second, the priest added in a low, casual voice, “But you see, my son, homosexuality isn’t just a conflict that needs to be resolved”—his voice picked up these words as though they were nasty bits of refuse—“homosexuality is also a sin.” I think he had no notion how little an effect the word sin had on me. He might just as well have said, “Homosexuality is bad juju.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Oh, she simply hated her daughter! What I thought especially vicious was that she had gone out of her way to answer with great diligence the questionnaires in a fool’s book she had (A Guide to Your Child’s Development), published in Chicago. The rigmarole went year by year, and Mom was supposed to fill out a kind of inventory at each of her child’s birthdays. On Lo’s twelfth, January 1, 1947, Charlotte Haze, née Becker, had underlined the following epithets, ten out of forty, under “Your Child’s Personality”: aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate. She had ignored the thirty remaining adjectives, among which were cheerful, co-operative, energetic, and so forth. It was really maddening. With a brutality that otherwise never appeared in my loving wife’s mild nature, she attacked and routed such of Lo’s little belongings that had wandered to various parts of the house to freeze there like so many hypnotized bunnies. Little did the good lady dream that one morning when an upset stomach (the result of my trying to improve on her sauces) had prevented me from accompanying her to church, I deceived her with one of Lolita’s anklets. And then, her attitude toward my saporous darling’s letters! DEAR MUMMY AND HUMMY, Hope you are fine. Thank you very much for the candy. I [crossed out and re-written again] I lost my new sweater in the woods. It has been cold here for the last few days. I’m having a time. Love. DOLLY “The dumb child,” said Mrs. Humbert, “has left out a word before ‘time.’ That sweater was all-wool, and I wish you would not send her candy without consulting me.” 20There was a woodlake (Hourglass Lake—not as I had thought it was spelled) a few miles from Ramsdale, and there was one week of great heat at the end of July when we drove there daily. I am now obliged to describe in some tedious detail our last swim there together, one tropical Tuesday morning. We had left the car in a parking area not far from the road and were making our way down a path cut through the pine forest to the lake, when Charlotte remarked that Jean Farlow, in quest of rare light effects (Jean belonged to the old school of painting), had seen Leslie taking a dip “in the ebony” (as John had quipped) at five o’clock in the morning last Sunday. “The water,” I said, “must have been quite cold.” “That is not the point,” said the logical doomed dear. “He is subnormal, you see. And,” she continued (in that carefully phrased way of hers that was beginning to tell on my health), “I have a very definite feeling our Louise is in love with that moron.” Feeling. “We feel Dolly is not doing as well” etc. (from an old school report). The Humberts walked on, sandaled and robed.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  the Jews. Florence hath not so many Lapos and Bindos as the fables of such fashion that yearly are proclaimed from the pulpit on this side and on that; so that the sheep, who know not aught, return from their pasture fed with wind, and not to see their loss doth not excuse them. Christ said not to his first assembly: Go and preach trifles to the world;—but gave to them the true foundation; that, and that only, sounded on their lips; wherefore for their battle to kindle faith they made both shield and lance out of the Gospel. Now they go forth with jests and with grimaces to preach, and if loud laughter rise, the hood inflates and no more is required. But such a bird 14 is nestling in the hood-tail that if the crowd should see it, they would see what pardon they are trusting in; wherefore such folly hath increased on earth that without proof of any testimony the folk would jump with any promise. Whereby Antonio fatteneth his swine, and others too, more swinish far than they, paying with money that hath no imprint. 15 But since we have digressed enough, turn back thine eyes now to the true path, so that our journey may contract with our time. This nature 16 ranketh so wide in number that ne’er was speech nor thought of mortal that advanced so far: and if thou look at that which is revealed by Daniel, thou shalt see that in his thousands determinate number is lost to sight. 17 The primal light which doth o’erray it all, is received by it in so many ways as are the splendours wherewithal it paireth. Wherefore, since affection followeth on the act that doth conceive, the sweetness of love in diverse fashion boileth or is warm in them. See now the height and breadth of the eternal worth, since it hath made itself so many mirrors wherein it breaketh, remaining in itself one as before.” 1. The Moon (Diana), when at the full, rises just as the Sun (Apollo) sets, or sets as he rises. 2. Dante is careful in the use of splendour for reflected, not direct light. (Epist. ad Can. Grand., § 20-23, and Conv. iii. 14.) Therefore we must not understand this passage as declaring the manifestation of his own glory to be God’s motive in creation, but rather the conferring of conscious being, the sense of existence, upon his creatures. “In order that his creatures (i.e., his reflected glory, his splendour) might be able to say: I am.” This is in conformity with what Aquinas and others say as to love as God’s motive in creation. Cf. Canto vii, note 8. 3.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  But my father was pleased, more or less. He distrusted the headmaster’s English accent and melodious voice issuing from someone so obviously weak and fraudulent and American. Dad sniffed a little laugh at all the dark wood, dark sherry, crackling fire of small, evenly matched birchwood logs laid on brass andirons, the whole instant tradition of dear Eton, Anglican primroses amidst the alien corn. But even as he sniffed he nodded approval, for the pretensions were exactly what he was buying for his son, much as a cowpuncher might hire a French tutor for his children—airs fit an heir, even if distasteful to the patriarch. The headmaster philosophized about manliness over a feminine clutter of tea things, tiny pots of marmalade, eggshell-thin cups, a linen-lined basket of warm scones and a cozy embroidered on one side with an Art Deco archer kneeling nudely in Aztec profile, crossbow aimed at a five-pointed Gentile star (the archer was the school emblem, ad astra the motto). My father puffed skeptically on his smelly cigar, by now a misshapen stub black with spit, and asked for a Scotch and soda. For my father, sitting uncomfortably in that petit-point chair without arms, manliness was not discussable, but had it been, it would have included a good business suit, ambition, paying one’s bills on time, enough knowledge of baseball to hand out like tips at the barbershop, a residual but never foolhardy degree of courage, and an unbreachable reserve; to the headmaster manliness was discussed constantly, every day, and entailed tweeds, trust funds, graciousness to servants, a polite but slightly chilly relationship to God, a pretended interest in knowledge and an obsessive interest in sports, especially muddy, dangerous ones like lacrosse or hockey or rugby that ended with great sullen lads hobbling off the field to lean on sticks at the sidelines, the orange and blue vertical stripes of their jerseys clinging to panting diaphragms, bare knees scarred, blond hair brown with sweat, an apache streak of mud daubed across a wan, bellicose cheek. I was starting school in the middle of the year and knew no one. Two other fourth-formers were also entering between semesters, and they became my companions. One, whose room was just next door, had a Spanish mother. I once caught a glimpse of her trim body in a black suit, her glossy, painted red lips barely visible through the bouquet of violets she was sniffing to distract herself during a dull sermon in the school chapel, her eyes lifting and hanging there like amber worry beads bright from having been told so often. Heberto had those same fine eyes and his mother’s olive skin and those teeth as white as the apples he was always eating.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Speaking of sharp turns: we almost ran over a meddlesome suburban dog (one of those who lie in wait for cars) as we swerved into Lawn Street. A little further, the Haze house, a white-frame horror, appeared, looking dingy and old, more gray than white—the kind of place you know will have a rubber tube affixable to the tub faucet in lieu of shower. I tipped the chauffeur and hoped he would immediately drive away so that I might double back unnoticed to my hotel and bag; but the man merely crossed to the other side of the street where an old lady was calling to him from her porch. What could I do? I pressed the bell button. A colored maid let me in—and left me standing on the mat while she rushed back to the kitchen where something was burning that ought not to burn. The front hall was graced with door chimes, a white-eyed wooden thingamabob of commercial Mexican origin, and that banal darling of the arty middle class, van Gogh’s “Arlésienne.” A door ajar to the right afforded a glimpse of a living room, with some more Mexican trash in a corner cabinet and a striped sofa along the wall. There was a staircase at the end of the hallway, and as I stood mopping my brow (only now did I realize how hot it had been out-of-doors) and staring, to stare at something, at an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest, there came from the upper landing the contralto voice of Mrs. Haze, who leaning over the banisters inquired melodiously, “Is that Monsieur Humbert?” A bit of cigarette ash dropped from there in addition. Presently, the lady herself—sandals, maroon slacks, yellow silk blouse, squarish face, in that order—came down the steps, her index finger still tapping upon her cigarette.

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

  I want to have a little boy, and maybe, a little girl.” Harriet is disgusted by this answer. “You’ll be a very boring person,” she responds in her signature blunt style. “No one will come and see you. I certainly won’t come and see you. I’ll be working.” Later in The Long Secret , Beth Ellen is acting grumpy and Harriet screams at her on the phone: “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?” “I’m—menstruating!” Beth Ellen responds before unceremoniously hanging up. That weekend, Harriet’s friend from the city, Janie, visits Southampton. No-nonsense Janie wants to be a doctor, or a scientist, which is why she’s comfortable talking about her body’s inner workings to Harriet and Beth Ellen. Janie explains the whole monthly process to the two friends, with Harriet wondering why she hasn’t gotten her period yet. “Now, you know the baby grows inside a woman, in her womb, in her uterus?” Janie asks them. “So, it’s very simple. If you have a baby started in there, the baby lives on the lining; but if you don’t have a baby, like we don’t, then the body very sensibly disposes of the lining that it’s made for the baby.” Janie’s tutorial lasts a total of six pages and includes medical vocabulary previously unheard of in fiction for children, like fallopian tubes. Fitzhugh and her original publisher, Harper & Row, were bold to include the section, given that referencing female bodily functions in anything but gauzy, euphemistic terms was considered taboo ( one popular Victorian-era nickname for the uterus was “mother room”). Indeed, the New York Times review of The Long Secret reverts to whispery language around the subject, even as it celebrates the book’s candor. “The Long Secret , moreover, observes in so many words that being twelvish entails, for a girl, a few more changes than children’s books have hitherto cared to recognize—heaven knows why,” the reviewer writes. Heaven knows why . That’s what Judy thought, too. Why couldn’t children’s fiction tackle complicated or even controversial subjects? Her revision of Iggie’s House did enough to convince Jackson and Verrone to sign her. Silsbee said Jackson knew that the finished book still “wasn’t up to what became her standard… but [he] just knew there was something there, and had to publish the book to get to know her.” Iggie was published in the spring of 1970, and the critics were underwhelmed. Kirkus Reviews , the industry’s book reviewing mainstay, described a hapless yet well-intentioned Winnie—who among many gaffes, introduces her new friends, the Garbers, as being “from Africa,” even though they’ve just moved from Detroit—as “the bumbling, besieged liberal at age eleven.” Ultimately, the reviewer found Winnie’s book-long crusade to garner support for Grove Street’s integration to be “occasionally forced… loose though not slack—in fact evanescent except for the rueful truth.” Blume has since distanced herself from Iggie’s House .

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

  I’m ‘mellowing out’ as my kids say.” She had come to expect certain kinds of dismissive reviews, like the one School Library Journal gave Forever , where it negatively remarked on the novel’s “quality.” In 1980, the Hartford Courant echoed this sentiment in an article about Blume, asserting that she “may never win any prizes for literary quality.” The Horn Book , a go-to resource for school librarians, had also never been impressed with her writing. But Dick Jackson assured Judy that delighting young readers was far more important than winning over judgmental grown-up gatekeepers. They were in it together, Peter Silsbee recalled. “He really hated stuffy children’s books,” Silsbee said of Jackson. The Horn Book , he continued, “had very high ideals of what children should read. And so he was always sort of thinking, that’s what I don’t want to do. I don’t want to write books for teachers, I don’t want to write them for adults, I want to write them for the audience they’re intended for.” But Jackson and Blume must have been surprised when the Horn Book came out with a nonfiction collection by the British young adult author David Rees, called The Marble in the Water: Essays on Contemporary Writers of Fiction for Children and Young Adults . Published in January 1980, the book contained an article called “Not Even for a One-Night Stand: Judy Blume.” From the very first paragraph, Rees, who taught English Lit classes at the prestigious boarding school Exeter, sets the tone of his assessment. “Perhaps the best thing to do with Ms. Blume would be to ignore her altogether,” he writes. “She is so amazingly trivial and second-rate in every department—the quality of her English, her ability to portray character, to unfold narrative—but that is impossible; she is ‘controversial’ on both sides of the Atlantic and her work is read and discussed not only by the young but by those adults who have serious concerns about children’s literature.” What follows is a scathing assessment of Blume’s body of work that arguably crosses the line to mean-spirited. Rees was punching up—Blume was more famous than he was, although he’d won awards in the UK for his novels—but nevertheless, his takedown goes so far as to suggest that the cadence of her prose is equivalent to that of a “shopping list… entirely forgettable, drab, flat.” He calls Are You There God? a “very bad book… a bore and an embarrassment, a complete waste of one’s time.” Fudge, according to Rees, is “wretched… a character the author clearly finds very appealing but who comes over to the reader as extremely tiresome.” Rees saves his harshest words for Forever , a novel he simultaneously disregards as unintentionally humorous while also getting charged up about its contents.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  15 “Sie affectione. simulata paulatim sororis inva- dunt animum ; statimque eas lassitudine viae sedili- bus refotas et balnearum vaporosis fontibus curatas pulcherrime triclinio mirisque illis et beatis edulibus atque tuccetis oblectat. Tubet citharam loqui, psalli- tur; tibias agere, sonatur ; choros canere, cantatur: quae cuncta nullo praesente dulcissimis modulis ani- mos audientium remulcebant. Nec tamen sceles- tarum feminarum nequitia vel ipsa mellita cantus duleedine mollita conquievit, sed ad destinatam fraudium pedicam sermonem conferentes dissimu- lanter occipiunt sciscitari qualis ei maritus et unde natalium, secta cuia proveniret. Tunc illa simpli- citate nimia pristini sermonis oblita; novum com- mentum instruit atque maritum suum de provincia proxima magnis pecuniis negotiantem iam medium cursum aetatis agere, interspersum rara canitie. Nec in sermone isto tantilum morata rursum opiparis muneribus eas onustas ventoso vehiculo reddidit. 16 “Sed dum Zephyri tranquillo Spiritu sublimatae domum redeunt, sic secum altercantes : « Quid, soror p dicimus de tam monstruoso fatuae illius mendacio ? 222 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK V a comfort will it be unto all the house! How happy shall we be that shall see this golden infant increase and grow '—who, if he be like his parents in beauty, as it is necessary he should, there is no doubt but a new Cupid shall be born.’ * By this kind of pretended love they went about to win Psyche by litile and little; but because they were weary with travel, they sat them down in chairs, and after that they had washed their bodies in warm - and pleasant baths, they went into a parlour, where all those wonderful meats and goodly haggis were ready prepared. Psyche commanded the harp to play, and it was done; the flute to sound, and so it was ; to make a quire, and song brake forth: but no person was seen, by whose sweet harmony and modu- lation the sisters of Psyche were greatly delighted. Howbeit the wickedness of these cursed women was nothing suppressed by the sweet and honeyed noise of these instruments, but they settled themselves to work their treason and snare against Psyche, de- manding with guile who was her husband, and of what parentage or race he was: then she (having forgotten, by too much simplicity, that which she had before spoken of ber husband) invented a new answer, and said that her husband was of a near province, a merchant in great affairs, and a man of a middle age, having his head interspersed with a few grey hairs ; which when she had shortly said (because she would have no further talk) she filled their lap full of the richest gifts, and bade them again be borne away of the wind. «In their return homeward, carried aloft by the gentle breath of Zephyrus, they murmured with themselves, saying :‘ How say you, sister, to so great and apparent a lie of doting Psyche? For first she 223 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Dame you have chosen (without my counsell) a young man to your lover, who as me seemeth, is dull, fearefull, without any grace, and dastard-like coucheth at the frowning looke of your odious husband, whereby you have no delight nor pleasure with him: how farre better is the young man Philesiterus who is comely, beautifull, in the flower of his youth, liberall, courteous, valiant and stout against the diligent pries and watches of your husband, whereby to embrace the worthiest dames of this country, and worthy to weare a crowne of gold, for one part that he played to one that was jealous over his wife. Hearken how it was and then judge the diversity of these two Lovers: Know you not one Barbarus a Senator of our towne, whom the vulgar people call likewise Scorpion for his severity of manners? This Barbarus had a gentlewoman to his wife, whom he caused daily to be enclosed within his house, with diligent custody. Then the Bakers wife said, I know her very well, for we two dwelleth together in one house: Then you know (quoth the old woman) the whole tale of Philesiterus? No verily (said she) but I greatly desire to know it: therefore I pray you mother tell me the whole story. By and by the old woman which knew well to babble, began to tell as followeth. THE FORTY-FIRST CHAPTER How Barbarus being jealous over his wife, commanded that shee should be kept close in his house, and what happened.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  By his example, Nabokov reminded younger American writers of the fictional nature of reality. When Terry Southern in The Magic Christian (1960) lampoons the myth of American masculinity and its attendant deification of the athlete by having his multimillionaire trickster, Guy Grand, fix the heavyweight championship fight so that the boxers grotesquely enact in the ring a prancing and mincing charade of homosexuality, causing considerable psychic injury to the audience, his art, such as it is, is quite late in imitating life. A famous athlete of the twenties was well-known as an invert, and Humbert mentions him twice, never by his real name, though he does call him “Ned Litam”—a simple anagram of “Ma Tilden”—which turns out to be one of the actual pseudonyms chosen by Tilden himself, under which he wrote stories and articles. Like the literary anatomists who have preceded him, Nabokov knows that what is so extraordinary about “reality” is that too often even the blackest of imaginations could not have invented it, and by taking advantage of this fact in Lolita he has, along with Nathanael West, defined with absolute authority the inevitable mode, the dominant dark tonalities—if not the contents—of the American comic novel. Although Humbert clearly delights in many of the absurdities around him, the anatomist’s characteristic vivacity is gone from the pages which concern Charlotte Haze, and not only because she is repugnant to Humbert in terms of the “plot” but rather because to Nabokov she is the definitive artsy-craftsy suburban lady—the culture-vulture, that travesty of Woman, Love, and Sexuality. In short, she is the essence of American poshlust, to use the “one pitiless [Russian] word” which, writes Nabokov in Gogol, is able to express “the idea of a certain widespread defect for which the other three European languages I happen to know possess no special term.” Poshlust: “the sound of the ‘o’ is as big as the plop of an elephant falling into a muddy pond and as round as the bosom of a bathing beauty on a German picture postcard” (p. 63). More precisely, it “is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive” (p. 70).24 It is an amalgam of pretentiousness and philistine vulgarity. In the spirit of Mark Twain describing the contents of the Grangerford household in Huckleberry Finn (earlier American poshlust), Humbert eviscerates the muddlecrass (to wax Joycean) world of Charlotte and her friends, reminding us that Humbert’s long view of America is not an altogether genial one.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Because I knew these books were by living writers I looked down on them; my head was still ringing with the full bravura performance of history in the library—opera house. Those old books either had never owned or had lost their wrappers; the likenesses of their unpictured authors had been re-created within the brown, brittle pages. But these living writers—ah! life struck me as an enfeeblement, a proof of dimmed vitality when compared to the energetic composure of the dead whose busts, all carved beards and sightless, protuberant eyes, I imagined filling the empty niches above the opera doors under a portico, which was now home to sleeping bums and stray cats but once the splendid approach across diamonds of black-and-white-marble pavement to black-and-gilt doors opening on the brilliant assembly, the fans and diamonds and the magic fire circling the sleeping woman. At home I heard the muted strains of discordant music. One night my stepmother, hard and purposeful, drove back downtown unexpectedly to my father’s office after midnight. Still later I could hear her shouting in her wing of the house; I hid behind a door and listened to my father’s patient, explaining drone. The next morning Alice, my colleague, broke down, wept, locked herself in the ladies’ room. When she came out, her eyes, usually so lovely and unfocused, narrowed with spite and pain as she muttered a stream of filth about my stepmother and my father (he’d tried to lure her to one of those fleabag hotels). On the following morning I learned she’d been let go, though by that time I knew how to get the endless mailings out on my own. She’d been let go—into what? That man’s embrace around the waist set me spinning like a dancer across the darkened stage of the city; my turns led me to Fountain Square, the center. After nightfall the downtown was nearly empty. A cab might cruise by. One high office window might glow. The restaurants had closed by eight, but a bar door could swing open to impose on me the silhouette of a man. Shabby city of black stone whitened by starlings, poor earthly progeny of that mystic metal dove poised on the outstretched wrist of the goddess of the fountain.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  But she was not going to cry in front of this old man, in this old room, which smelled as musty as he did. She wished she could twirl. Twirl and twirl until she was so dizzy she’d collapse on the floor. She’d like to slap her taps on the wood floor under the rugs, making more noise than this old doctor had ever heard. She couldn’t believe her parents had brought her here. He was like a relic from the olden days. Something right out of a movie. “Why are you here?” he asked. “What do you think?” “I don’t have to think—I know the answer. I’m here because my parents brought me.” “Why do you think they brought you?” “To see you, obviously.” He ignored her sarcasm, not a good sign. “But why to see me?” “Because their friend who is our doctor told them to.” “Yes, but why would he make such a suggestion?” “Because you’re famous.” “Ah, famous.” “And because they don’t have any idea what’s going on.” “And you won’t tell them.” “That’s right. And I won’t tell you, either.” “Of course. Why would you tell me?” “Because you really want to know, don’t you?” “Yes. I’d like to help you get well.” “I’d like to get well so I can dance again. That’s what I do, you know. I dance.” “I hear you’re a very good dancer.” “You heard that from my parents?” “Is it not true?” “Yes, it’s true.” “So.” A statement, not a question. “Sew buttons.” “What is sew buttons ?” “Nothing…just an expression.” “To dance you have to be strong,” he said. “I was strong until I got sick. Now I just need some medicine to make me better.” Silence. She yawned. She was just so tired. When he called in her parents, when they were seated side by side on the sofa, the famous doctor suggested a rest home in the country for Natalie. He knew of one, just the right place for her, in Westchester County. But her father said it would be better if she could be closer to her family. He’d made some inquiries and suggested the Watchung Hills Children’s Home, in New Jersey. They were sending her away? She couldn’t believe her father would send her away. But she didn’t have the energy to argue. She’d argue tomorrow or the next day. She was sure she could persuade them to wait. Especially her father. In the car, on the way home from the famous doctor’s office, Natalie nodded off in the backseat, but she could still hear her parents talking softly about the children’s home in Watchung. And then, something about how, at the end of the school year, they would relocate as a family. Her father had been asked to open an office in Nevada in a place called Las Vegas—a place with clean air, wide-open spaces, where the girls could ride horses.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  As a matter of mere dignity, I preferred those who went about their comforts courageously and who chose to turn the lights off themselves. If, however, one wanted to take the old traditions seriously, then one would have to accept discomfort and return to using the Argand lamps. The tribe’s irritated anger delighted me; I knew just how to pique their troubled conscience. Unfortunately, however, I didn’t know how to accept triumph modestly, and almost no Friday night passed without my making some treacherous remark. How could I tolerate their compromises, I who could never allow myself any? At one of these bitter Friday evening dinners under the new light, we were already dozing in the torpor and silence of incipient digestion. I was in revolt against this heaviness of body and mind too, and sighed nostalgically whenever I read the menus advised by health magazines. Couscous with meatballs that had been cooked and cooked again in oil, fat marrowbone soup, boiled meat, grilled chick-peas, raw turnip with pickled red peppers. Suddenly, Elisa, my younger sister, burst into sobs. She often did this and began to cry vigorously without any preparation, like a phonograph record turned on in the middle. It was difficult to stop her. We would amuse ourselves by wondering how this swarthy, long-necked, frail, sickly little girl, thin and sullen as a crow, could have such extraordinary vocal powers. She was sobbing and speaking at the same time, and we guessed the usual reason for her despair. She could not manage to swallow her meat and cried for permission to spit out the big colorless cuds. This waste angered my father. In the ghetto, he said, no one ate meat as often as we; he had to work like a dog, despite his illness, to allow Elisa to spit out meat, her meat! Crushed and miserable, Elisa cried all the more lustily. My mother put in her two cents’ worth, trying to protect her daughter without further irritating her husband. Elisa had chewed her meat very well: “Didn’t you chew it well? Answer me! Didn’t you?” Of course, she had extracted all the juice from it, and the juices are the goodness, the soul of the meat! So she had only spat out the waste, the husk! We other children were never fooled by these maternal diversionary tactics which were always a bit too obvious. We protested vehemently that we didn’t care a damn whether the crow did or didn’t get the juices! But we ourselves were all sick of eating these lukewarm meatballs. My mother seldom dared to contradict her husband directly and allowed herself to be violent only if my father was being seconded in his views by the rest of us. She accused us of being stupid and wicked, and blasphemous too in daring to disturb the Sabbath peace.