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 Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  There was her great-uncle Earl who used to dress up like a matador when he got drunk, and her maternal grandfather, who’d been a bootlegger and who used to give her nickels to hear her cuss. I never heard anything more exotic than that. Most of the names block-printed in Grandma’s huge family Bible, which sat in a heavy plastic wrapper on her coffee table, meant nothing to me. The morning Mother decided to go back to Daddy, she and Grandma had a fight about whether her lipstick was too dark. Grandma had brought it up at breakfast and just clamped down on it like a Gila monster. Finally, Mother stuffed our new clothes in her dead father’s Gladstone bag and piled us in the car in our pajamas again. Again the old woman had crimped her hair. Just before we pulled out, she poked her clamp-studded head in my window. Some curls had sprung loose from the clips, so she looked for all the world like the stone head of Medusa that Mother had shown us in her mythology book. The old lady called Leechfield a swamp, a suckhole, and the anus of the planet before Mother cranked up the engine. The too-sweet smell of Grandma’s hyacinth perfume hung in the car till Mother lit a Salem. We drove all night, Lecia curled on the backseat. I stretched out dozing on the flat shelf under the rear windshield’s slope. The sheer stink of my hometown woke me before dawn. The oil refineries and chemical plants gave the whole place a rotten-egg smell. The right wind could bring you a whiff of the Gulf, but that was rare. Plus the place was in a swamp, so whatever industrial poisons got pumped into the sky just seemed to sink down and thicken in the heat. I later learned that Leechfield at that time was the manufacturing site for Agent Orange, which surprised me not one bit. That morning, when I woke up lying under the back slant of the windshield, the world smelled not unlike a wicked fart in a close room. I opened my eyes. In the fields of gator grass, you could see the ghostly outline of oil rigs bucking in slow motion. They always reminded me of rodeo riders, or of some huge servant creatures rising up and bowing down to nothing in particular. In the distance, giant towers rose from each refinery, with flames that turned every night’s sky an odd, acid-green color. The first time I saw a glow-in-the-dark rosary, it reminded me of those five-story torches that circled the town at night. Then there were the white oil-storage tanks, miles of them, like the abandoned eggs of some terrible prehistoric insect. In case you think I exaggerate Leechfield’s overall nastiness, Business Week once voted it one of the ten ugliest towns on the planet.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  During his tenure as personnel manager for Western Union, Miller was happily placed to exercise a perfect combination of sexual and economic power over the women applying to him for jobs: “The game was to Keep them on the string, to promise them a job but to get a free fuck first. Usually it was only necessary to throw a feed into them, in order to bring them back to the office at night and lay them out on the zinc-covered table in the dressing room.”17 As all Americans know, the commercial world is a battlefield. When executives are “fucked” by the company, they can retaliate by “fucking” their secretaries. Miller’s is “part-nigger” and “so damned pleased to have someone fuck her without blushing,”18 that she can be shared out to the boss’s pal Curley. She commits suicide eventually, but in business, “it’s fuck or be fucked,”19 Miller observes, providing some splendid insight into the many meanings we attach to the word. One memorable example of sex as a war of attrition waged upon economic grounds is the fifteen-franc whore whom Miller and his friend Van Norden hire in the Paris night and from whom, despite their own utter lack of appetite and her exhaustion from hunger, it is still necessary to extort the price.20 As sex, or rather “cunt,” is not only merchandise but a monetary specie, Miller’s adventures read like so many victories for sharp practice, carry the excitement of a full ledger, and operate on the Hat premise that quantity is quality. As with any merchant whose sole concern is profit, the “goods” themselves grow dull and contemptible, and even the amassing of capital pales beside the power it becomes. So enervating is the addiction to sex that Miller and his friends frequently renounce it: “Just cunt Hen…just cunt,” MacGregor sighs.21 Van Norden is ashamed of his own obsessive weakness, glad to make do from time to time with an apple, cutting out the core and adding cold cream.22 Sensually or emotionally, such a surrogate involves no special hardship, since one has so little sense of actual women in Miller’s accounts of intercourse. Apples, however, offer no resistance, and the enterprise of conquest, the fun of “breaking her down,” is lost thereby.23

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Therefore, it is in no wise necessary to give pleasures in order to receive them; the happy or unhappy situation of the victim of our debauch is, therefore, absolutely as one from the point of view of our senses, there is never any question of the state in which his heart or mind may be; it matters not one whit, the object may be pleased by what you do to it, the object may suffer, it may love or detest you: all these considerations are nullified immediately it is only a question of your sensation. Women, I concede, may establish contrary theories, but women, who are nothing but machines designed for voluptuousness, who ought to be nothing but the targets of lust, are untrustworthy authorities whenever one has got to construct an authentic doctrine upon this kind of pleasure. Is there a single reasonable man who is eager to have a whore partake of his joy? And, however, are there not millions of men who amuse themselves hugely with these creatures? Well, there you have that many individuals convinced of what I am urging, who unhesitatingly put it into practice, and who scorn those who use good principles to legitimate their deeds, those ridiculous fools, the world is stuffed to overflowing with them, who go and come, who do this and that, who eat, who digest, without ever sensing a thing. "Having proven that solitary pleasures are as delicious as any others and much more likely to delight, it becomes perfectly clear that this enjoyment, taken in independence of the object we employ, is not merely of a nature very remote from what could be pleasurable to that object, but is even found to be inimical to that object's pleasure: what is more, it may become an imposed suffering, a vexation, or a torture, and the only thing that results from this abuse is a very certain increase of pleasure for the despot who does the tormenting or vexing; let us attempt to demonstrate this.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  She sat down, and enjoyed my embarrassment—for actually I was even more afraid of her now in the full light of day. A delightful expression of contempt hovered about her upper lip. “You look at love, and especially woman,” she began, “as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view.” “You don’t share it?” “I do not share it,” she said quickly and decisively, shaking her head, so that her curls flew up like red flames. “The ideal which I strive to realize in my life is the serene sensuousness of the Greeks—pleasure without pain. I do not believe in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse than a heretic, I am a pagan. ‘Doest thou imagine long the goddess of love took counsel When in Ida’s grove she was pleased with the hero Anchises?’ “These lines from Goethe’s Roman Elegy have always delighted me. “In nature there is only the love of the heroic age, ‘when gods and goddesses loved.’ At that time ‘desire followed the glance, enjoyment desire.’ All else is factitious, affected, a lie. Christianity, whose cruel emblem, the cross, has always had for me an element of the monstrous, brought something alien and hostile into nature and its innocent instincts. “The battle of the spirit with the senses is the gospel of modern man. I do not care to have a share in it.” “Yes, Mount Olympus would be the place for you, madame,” I replied, “but we moderns can no longer support the antique serenity, least of all in love. The idea of sharing a woman, even if it were an Aspasia, with another revolts us. We are jealous as is our God. For example, we have made a term abuse out of the name of the glorious Phryne. “We prefer one of Holbein’s meagre, pallid virgins, which is wholly ours to an antique Venus, no matter how divinely beautiful she is, but who loves Anchises to-day, Paris to-morrow, Adonis the day after. And if nature triumphs in us so that we give our whole glowing, passionate devotion to such a woman, her serene joy of life appears to us as something demonic and cruel, and we read into our happiness a sin which we must expiate.”

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Upon all this I have principles to which, Therese, I adhere faithfully; poverty is part of the natural order; by creating men of dissimilar strength, Nature has convinced us of her desire that inequality be preserved even in those modifications our culture might bring to Nature's laws. To relieve indigence is to violate the established order, to imperil it, it is to enter into revolt against that which Nature has decreed, it is to undermine the equilibrium that is fundamental to her sublimest arrangements; it is to strive to erect an equality very perilous to society, it is to encourage indolence and flatter drones, it is to teach the poor to rob the rich man when the latter is pleased to refuse the former alms, for it's a dangerous habit, and gratuities encourage it." "Oh, Monsieur, how harsh these principles are! Would you speak thus had you not always been wealthy?" "Who knows, Therese? everyone has a right to his opinion, that's mine, and I'll not change it. They complain about beggars in France: if they wished to be rid of them, the thing could soon be done; hang seven or eight thousand of 'em and the infamous breed will vanish overnight. The Body Politic should be governed by the same rules that apply to the Body Physical. Would a man devoured by vermin allow them to feed upon him out of sympathy? In our gardens do we not uproot the parasitic plant which harms useful vegetation? Why then should one choose to act otherwise in this case?" "But Religion," I expostulated, "benevolence, Monsieur, humanity..." "... are the chopping blocks of all who pretend to happiness," said Roland; "if I have consolidated my own, it is only upon the debris of all those infamous prejudices of mankind; 'tis by mocking laws human and divine; 'tis by constantly sacrificing the weak when I find them in my path, 'tis by abusing the public's good faith; 'tis by ruining the poor and stealing from the rich I have arrived at the summit of that precipice whereupon sits the temple sacred to the divinity I adore; why not imitate me?

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Inquiries were made, and they had the intention to put the wretch to death were she to be found; as for the rest, the Count discovered that the inheritance had made him much wealthier than he had ever anticipated he would be; the Marquise's strongbox, pocketbook, and gems, all of them objects of which no one had known anything, put the nephew, apart from his revenues, in possession of more than six hundred thousand francs in chattels or cash. Behind his affected grief, the young man had, it was said, considerable trouble concealing his delight, and the relatives, convoked for the autopsy demanded by the Count, after having lamented the unhappy Marquise's fate and sworn to avenge her should the culprit fall into their hands, had left the young man in undisputed and peaceful possession of his villainy. Monsieur de Bressac himself had spoken to Jeannette, he had asked a number of questions to which the girl had replied with such frankness and decision that he had resolved to give her his response without pressing her further. There is the fatal letter, said Therese, handing it to Madame de Lorsange, yes, there it is, Madame, sometimes my heart has need of it and I will keep it until I die; read it, read it without shuddering, if you can. Madame de Lorsange, having taken the note from our lovely adventuress' hands, read therein the following words: The criminal capable of having poisoned my aunt is brazen indeed to dare thus write to me after her execrable deed; better still is the care with which she conceals her retreat; for she may be sure she will be discomfited if she is discovered. But what is it she has the temerity to demand? What are these references to money? Does what she left behind equal the thefts she committed, either during her sojourn in the house or while consummating her final crime? Let her avoid sending a second request similar to this, for she is advised her ambassador will be arrested and held until the law acquaints itself with the place where the guilty party is taking cover.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  There is nothing fictitious about this episode but the gentleman's name.) ...one hour after these little girls have served me, reliable emissaries pack them off and sell them to the matchmakers of Montpellier, Toulouse, Nimes, Aix, and Marseilles: this trade, two-thirds of whose net profits go to me, amply recompenses the outlay required to procure my subjects, and thus I satisfy two of my most cherished passions, lust and greed; but reconnoitering and seduction are bothersome. Furthermore, the kind of subject is of infinite importance to my lubricity: I must have them all procured from those asylums of misery where the need to live and the impossibility of managing to do so eat away courage, pride, delicacy, finally rot the soul, and, in the hope of an indispensable subsistence, steel a person to undertake whatever appears likely to provide it. I have all these nests ransacked, all these dungheaps combed pitilessly: you've no idea what they yield; I would even go further, Therese: I say that civil activity, industry, a little social ease would defeat my subornations and divest me of a great proportion of my subjects: I combat these perils with the influence I enjoy in this city, I promote commercial and economic fluctuations or instigate the rise of prices which, enlarging the poverty-stricken class, depriving it, on the one hand, of possibilities of work and on the other rendering difficult those of survival, increases according to a predictable ratio the total number of the subjects misery puts into my clutches.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  8. Mendicants: Francis of Assisi and Louis of Toulouse Louis as a Friar and Bishop The war with Aragon ended in 1295, but the princes’ lives were thrown into upheaval by a series of family events. Their eldest brother, Charles Martel, heir to the throne, died from the plague that year, making Louis the heir. However, Louis renounced his claim. As soon as he was freed from captivity in October 1295, he went directly to Rome, and in December of the same year, before Boniface VIII, he was made a subdeacon. By May, he’d been made a deacon and ordained a priest. However, his father and brother Robert, now heir to the throne, exerted great pressure on him to accept a prestigious office as an ecclesiastic. That winter, he was made bishop of Toulouse against his will. Louis bargained with the pope: He would only accept the bishopric if he could take his vows as a Franciscan first. Instead of going directly to his diocese, he traveled to the Franciscan convent in Paris, where he served the other friars. By the spring of 1297, he had reached Toulouse but was soon off again. He was certainly in no hurry to execute his duties as bishop. Like Francis, Louis practiced an Louis made his extreme and physically taxing distaste for high rank asceticism. He ate simply or rejected food altogether and very clear, refusing insisted on traveling on foot or to appear in bishops’ by mule. He also instructed his robes and instead officials to examine the bishopric’s revenues, spend only on absolutely dressing as a simple necessary expenses, and give all Franciscan friar. other income as alms. He was still so unhappy as bishop that after only six months in the role, he resolved to travel to Rome and request that he be freed from his bishopric. He died en route on August 19 in his father’s castle at Brignoles and was buried in Marseilles. Charles II, eager for Angevin expansion, promoted the relatively new dynasty partly through advancement of the family saints. Within 3 years, the family appointed a procurator to campaign for Louis’s canonization. 61

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  In writing this book, and now in working on the movie, and in my whole career, I would hope to be indigenous nostalgia’s greatest enemy. I hope that’s on my tombstone. I want that on my tombstone. JW: I want to talk to you about Diary showing up on so many banned books list. And didn’t it finally drop off? SA: It was in the top ten for nine years, but it never made number one. I was always number two. The two books that always kept me out were: Captain Underpants …So one year Captain Underpants was more dangerous than my book. All the conservative book banners of the country decided that Captain Under-pants was more dangerous than True Diary . And then another year it was And Tango Makes Three , which is about the gay penguins in the Bronx Zoo. So apparently, gay penguins and Captain Underpants are more politically dangerous than a reservation Indian boy seeking a better education. JW: It’s given you in many ways the chance to rail about intellectual freedom, and about kids and the things they read, and about freedom of speech. It’s given you this platform in a way. Every time they ban the book, I think— SA: Every time they ban the book, it becomes national headlines. I sell more books, so it’s actually lucrative for me. We call Banned Books Week in my house “Big-Assed Royalties Week.” On a personal level that happens, but it ended up happening that I was often asked to speak about censorship. I was talking with a friend, and the thing is, I feel most indigenous when I’m asked to speak on nonindigenous subjects, or not-exclusively indigenous subjects, so as a Spokane Indian writer, when I’m asked to speak about censorship, I feel most Indian, because I don’t have to talk about being Indian. What I do is…The brain I have, which has been acculturated Spokane, which has been acculturated Native American, which has been acculturated contemporary indigenous filtered through all these American experiences, is who I am. So I get to be who I am , so getting censored makes me feel like they’re censoring me the individual, and that makes me so happy. They’re picking on me . JW: I wonder if you ever heard from young readers about the issues of adults. I mean, adults are afraid that kids might see the word “boner” or read about masturbation or things that, of course, no high school kid has ever thought about in the history of time. SA: Well, in various places, kids actually led the efforts against the bans.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Thus, let me imagine, the abduction of a girl on one's own account will give a very lively pleasure, but abduction in the interests of someone else will give all that pleasure with which the enjoyment of this girl is improved by rape; the theft of a watch, the rape of a purse will also give the same pleasure, and if I have accustomed my senses to being moved by the rape of some girl qua rape, that same pleasure, that same delight will be found again in the seizing of the watch or of the purse, etc.; and that explains the eccentricity in so many honest folk who steal without needing to steal. Nothing more common; from this moment on, one both tastes the greatest pleasure in everything criminal, and, by every imaginable device, one renders simple enjoyments as criminal as they can possibly be rendered; by conducting oneself in this style, one but adds to enjoyment the dash of salt which was wanting and which became indispensable to happiness' perfection. These doctrines lead far, I know; perhaps, Therese, I shall even show you how far before too long, but what matter? enjoyment's the thing. Was there, for example, dear girl, anything more ordinary or more natural than for me to enjoy you? But you oppose it, you ask that it stop; it would seem that, in the light of my obligations toward you, I ought to grant what you request; however, I surrender to nothing, I listen to nothing, I slash through all the knots that bind fools, I submit you to my desires, and out of the most elementary, the most monotonous enjoyment I evolve one that is really delicious; therefore submit, Therese, submit, and if ever you are reincarnated and return to the world in the guise of the mighty, exploit your privileges in the same way and you will know every one of the most lively and most piquant pleasures."

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “It was impossible for it to be otherwise. Women in the old days had the belief that ‘God has given, God has taken away,’ that the soul of the little angel is going to heaven, and that it is better to die innocent than to die in sin. If the women of to-day had something like this faith, they could endure more peacefully the sickness of their children. But of all that there does not remain even a trace. And yet it is necessary to believe in something; consequently they stupidly believe in medicine, and not even in medicine, but in the doctor. One believes in X, another in Z, and, like all believers, they do not see the idiocy of their beliefs. They believe quia absurdum, because, in reality, if they did not believe in a stupid way, they would see the vanity of all that these brigands prescribe for them. Scarlatina is a contagious disease; so, when one lives in a large city, half the family has to move away from its residence (we did it twice), and yet every man in the city is a centre through which pass innumerable diameters, carrying threads of all sorts of contagions. There is no obstacle: the baker, the tailor, the coachman, the laundresses. “And I would undertake, for every man who moves on account of contagion, to find in his new dwelling-place another contagion similar, if not the same. “But that is not all. Every one knows rich people who, after a case of diphtheria, destroy everything in their residences, and then fall sick in houses newly built and furnished. Every one knows, likewise, numbers of men who come in contact with sick people and do not get infected. Our anxieties are due to the people who circulate tall stories. One woman says that she has an excellent doctor. ‘Pardon me,’ answers the other, ‘he killed such a one,’ or such a one. And vice versa. Bring her another, who knows no more, who learned from the same books, who treats according to the same formulas, but who goes about in a carriage, and asks a hundred roubles a visit, and she will have faith in him. “It all lies in the fact that our women are savages. They have no belief in God, but some of them believe in the evil eye, and the others in doctors who charge high fees. If they had faith they would know that scarlatina, diphtheria, etc., are not so terrible, since they cannot disturb that which man can and should love,—the soul. There can result from them only that which none of us can avoid,—disease and death. Without faith in God, they love only physically, and all their energy is concentrated upon the preservation of life, which cannot be preserved, and which the doctors promise the fools of both sexes to save. And from that time there is nothing to be done; the doctors must be summoned.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  The first chapter from an early draft of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian , originally titled Water on the Brain CHAPTER 1 Let me introduce you to the Spokane Indian Reservation. First of all, the place is all pine trees, pine trees, pine trees. And then, after you look past all of those pine trees, you can see more pine trees. And after you walk past those trees, you run into a few more. If you picked up a rock, closed your eyes, and tossed the rock in any direction, you’d be a superhero surrounded by gazillions of untossed pine trees. I hate pine trees. Yeah, sure, they’re beautiful, I guess, in a pine-tree sort of way, all green and thin and tall, but there’s such a thing as too much beauty . You can be suffocated by beauty just like you can be suffocated by water. And yes, there is too much water on my reservation. There are gazillions of lakes and ponds, meaning there are also gazillions upon gazillions of mosquitoes. I read somewhere that an insect is born every time a human commits a sin, so that means we Spokane Indians are very busy. The Columbia River—one of the largest, most powerful, and most radioactive rivers in the whole dang world —forms one border of our reservation, which is shaped like a clumsy, incomplete triangle. The Spokane River forms the second border, and Tshimikain Creek forms the third side. Now, geographically speaking, the rez is not an island, but you still have to cross bridges to get to us. And yes, we Indians have to cross those same bridges to get out, so there’s definitely a whole lot of bridge-crossing on the rez. I hate bridges. But I hate mountains more. And I can’t stand canyons, either. Fields of wildflowers make me sneeze. And don’t get me started on starry, starry nights. Cougars, bears, and moose have walked through the middle of Wellpinit, the capital of the reservation. An elk once stood at my bedroom window and stared at me. And, hey, you nature lovers are probably excited about these animal encounters, but I’d like to teach you a lesson about wildlife. And maybe you’ll pay more attention to me because I live in the woods. I don’t like cougars and bears because they eat people . And I don’t like elk because they smell dead. And I absolutely hate moose because they are the biggest, meanest jerks in the entire world. Moose have bad tempers. Moose spit on you. Moose pee and poop on you. Moose will chase you down and stomp you to death. Bears and cougars are scared of moose.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  In her youth she had been kept by a gentleman, who, dying, left her forty pounds a year during her life, in consideration of a daughter he had by her: which daughter, at the age of seventeen, she sold, for not a very considerable sum neither, to a gentleman who was going on envoy abroad, and took his purchase with him, where he used her with the utmost tenderness, and it is thought, was secretly married to her: but had constantly made a point of her not keeping up the least correspondence with a mother base enough to make a market of her own flesh and blood. However, as she had not nature, nor, indeed, any passion but that of money, this gave her no further uneasiness, then, as she thereby lost a handle of squeezing presents, or other after advantages, out of the bargain. Indifferent then, by nature of constitution, to every other pleasure but that of increasing the lump, by any means whatever, she commenced a kind of private procuress, for which she was not amiss fitted, by her grave decent appearance, and sometimes did a job in the match-making way; in short, there was, nothing that appeared to her under the shape of gain, that she would not have undertaken. She knew most of the ways of the town, having not only herself been upon, but kept up constant intelligences in promoting a harmony between the two sexes, in private pawn- broking, and other profitable secrets. She rented the house she lived in, and made the most of it, by letting it out in lodgings; though she was worth, at least, near three or four thousand pounds, she would not allow herself even the necessaries, of life, and pinned her subsistence entirely on what she could squeeze out of her lodgers. When she saw such a young pair come under her roof, her immediate notions, doubtless, were how she should make the most money of us, by every means that money might be made, and which, she rightly judged, our situations and inexperience would soon beget her occasions of. In this hopeful sanctuary, and under the clutches of this harpy, did we pitch our residence. It will not be might material to you, or very pleasant to me, to enter into a detail of all the petty cut-throat ways and means with which she used to fleece us; all which Charles indolently chose to bear with, rather than take the trouble of removing, the difference of expense being scarce attended to by a young gentleman who had no ideas of stint, or even economy, and a raw country girl who knew nothing of the matter.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  City staff watched her pass with guarded curiosity, pretending to hunch low over their desks while peering at her from the corners of their eyes. They were still nervous about the annexation, which they insisted on calling a “strategic partnership,” like they’d had any choice in signing it. It was a takeover, pure and simple, and everyone knew it. Ramona passed a conference room where a few dozen women sat taking notes from a slideshow presented by Joanne Scales, a Legion staff sergeant in drab fatigues, her long black hair thrown over one shoulder. On the projector screen behind her was a slide of a man cut open from his gonads to his chin, the filth of his cancerous insides laid bare. To either side of that ghastly incision were the bumps of his fledgling breasts. Teach’s office, appropriated after their two-day conference with the city council in the shadow of a thousand armed Legion soldiers, lay at the end of the hall behind smoked-glass doors that rendered its interior a landscape of dark blurs. Ramona took a moment to compose herself. She closed her eyes and tamped down every thought she didn’t need, every feeling she shouldn’t think about. Soft brown eyes and skin like buttermilk. She let it all drift away like leaves floating down a stream, then pasted on her best parade face and let herself in. The room within had been transformed, its bare concrete walls obscured by bookshelves and the prints Teach carried everywhere she went in a long, flat black case. Gerda Wegener’s sex doll portraits of her tranny wife, big Bambi eyes and pouty mouths and sleek, plump curves. Some nobody New England painter’s self-portraits, spindly hands, buck teeth, horsey face bracketed by shaggy brown hair. Hundreds upon hundreds of selfies salvaged from the wreckage of the internet and printed out on photo stock like Polaroids. Bodies posed in feminine contortion, shoulders wrenched to hide their breadth, faces upturned to obscure the jut of blocky jaws and the bulging knots of Adam’s apples. Dyed hair and stick-and-pokes and ragged, choppy bangs. The faces of the enemy. There was a map of the East Coast laid out on a long oak-top desk, the working roads highlighted in blue. Beyond it Teach stood by one of three tall, narrow windows, looking out over the plaza below and the skyscrapers that flanked the downtown area where the ruins of Logan Airport lay off of the tunnels and South Station bulked dark and silent but for its sole working route, the one connecting it with Providence. “You kept yourself together under fire,” said the older woman, turning from the window so that the light blazed around her in a golden aureole.

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

  Cortés and Pizarro were the heroes of the conquistadores (“conquerors”), men of low social status who went to the New World to become Spanish grandees. Their conquests were achieved with martial savagery and maintained by systematic exploitation. When they arrived in a new region, they would read out a formal statement in Spanish, informing the uncomprehending inhabitants that the pope had given their land to Spain so they must now submit to the Church and the Catholic monarchs: “We shall take you and your wives and your children, and make slaves of them and we shall take away your goods and do you all the mischief and damage that we can.”11 The Spanish did not need to import African slaves; they simply enslaved the local people to grow cash crops, work in the mines, and provide domestic labor. By the end of the sixteenth century, they were shipping on average 300 million grams of silver and 1.9 million grams of gold every year. With these unprecedented resources, Spain established the first global empire, stretching from the Americas to the Philippines and dominating large portions of Europe.12 The Spanish colonialists felt no compunction about their treatment of the indigenous peoples—they regarded the “savage” as scarcely human and had been horrified to discover that the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism.13 But at home the Dominicans adhered more faithfully to Christian principles and spoke up for the conquered peoples. The Church had no jurisdiction over these American “kings,” argued Durandus of San Poinciana in 1506; they should not be attacked unless they were actually harming Europeans. The popes should send missionaries to these new lands, Cardinal Thomas Cajetan argued, but not “for the purpose of seizing their lands or reducing them to temporal subjection.”14 Francisco de Vitoria maintained that the conquistadores had no right to “eject the enemy from their dominions and despoil them of their property.”15

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  But the Semi-Pelagian doctrine was the more popular, and made great progress in France. Its principal advocates after Cassian are the following: the presbyter-monk Vicentius of Lerinum, author of the Commonitorium, in which he developed the true catholic test of doctrine, the threefold consensus, in covert antagonism to the novel doctrines of Augustinianism (about 434);1878 Faustus, bishop of Rhegium (Riez), who at the council of Arles (475) refuted the hyper-Augustinian presbyter Lucidus, and was commissioned by the council to write a work upon the grace of God and human freedom;1879 Gennadius, presbyter at Marseilles (died after 495), who continued the biographical work of Jerome, De viris illustribus, down to 495, and attributed Augustine’s doctrine of predestination to his itch for writing;1880 Arnobius the younger;1881 and the much discussed anonymous tract Praedestinatus (about 460), which, by gross exaggeration, and by an unwarranted imputation of logical results which Augustine had expressly forestalled, placed the doctrine of predestination in an odious light, and then refuted it.1882 The author of the Praedestinatus says, that a treatise had fallen into his hands, which fraudulently bore upon its face the name of the Orthodox teacher Augustine, in order to smuggle in, under a Catholic name, a blasphemous dogma, pernicious to the faith. On this account he had undertaken to transcribe and to refute this work. The treatise itself consists of three books; the first, following Augustine’s book, De haeresibus, gives a description of ninety heresies from Simon Magus down to the time of the author, and brings up, as the last of them, the doctrine of a double predestination, as a doctrine which makes God the author of evil, and renders all the moral endeavors of men fruitless;1883 the second book is the pseudo-Augustinian treatise upon this ninetieth heresy, but is apparently merely a Semi-Pelagian caricature by the same author;1884 the third book contains the refutation of the thus travestied pseudo-Augustinian doctrine of predestination, employing the usual Semi-Pelagian arguments.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  This was a bold challenge. Calvin was willing to accept it, but the Council declined, fearing to lose the control of the affair by submitting it to the tribunal of public opinion. The friends of Servetus would have run the risk of seeing him defeated in public debate. That charge, however, which seemed to betray personal ill-feeling of Calvin, was afterwards very properly omitted. On the following day, the 16th of August, Berthelier, then smarting under the sentence of excommunication by the Consistory, openly came to the defence of Servetus, and had a stormy encounter with Colladon, which is omitted in the official record, but indicated by blanks and the abrupt termination: "Here they proceeded no further, but adjourned till to-morrow at mid-day." On Thursday, the 17th of August, Calvin himself appeared before the Council as the real accuser, and again on the 21st of August.1176 He also conferred with his antagonist in writing. Servetus was not a match for Calvin either in learning or argument; but he showed great skill and some force. He contemptuously repelled the frivolous charge that, in his Ptolemy, he had contradicted the authority of Moses, by describing Palestine as an unfruitful country (which it was then, and is now). He wiped his mouth and said, "Let us go on; there is nothing wrong there." The charge of having, in his notes on the Latin Bible, explained the servant of God in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, as meaning King Cyrus, instead of the Saviour, he disposed of by distinguishing two senses of prophecy—the literal and historical sense which referred to Cyrus, and the mystical and principal sense which referred to Christ. He quoted Nicolaus de Lyra; but Calvin showed him the error, and asserts that he audaciously quoted books which he had never examined. As to his calling the Trinity "a Cerberus" and "a dream of Augustin," and the Trinitarians "atheists," he said that he did not mean the true Trinity, which he believed himself, but the false trinity of his opponents; and that the oldest teachers before the Council of Nicaea did not teach that trinity, and did not use the word. Among them he quoted Ignatius, Polycarp, Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria. Calvin refuted his assertion by quotations from Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Origen. On this occasion he charges him, unjustly, with total ignorance of Greek, because he was embarrassed by a Greek quotation from Justin Martyr, and called for a Latin version.1177

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  the precedents of Gregory VI., 1046, Coelestin V., 1294, and Gregory XII., 1415. The pope’s coronation and enthronement were an occasion of increasing pomp and ostentation and were usually celebrated with a procession through the city from St. Peter’s to the Lateran in which the nobility and civil authorities as well as the pope and the higher and lower clergy took part. The tiara, or triple crown, seems not to have been used till the reign of Urban V., 1362–1372. This crown is regarded as symbolical of the pope’s rule over heaven, earth, and the lower world; or of his earthly power and his power to loose for time and eternity; or of Rome, the Western patriarchate and the whole earth. To this period belongs the development of the system of papal legates which proved to be an important instrumentality in the extention of the pope’s jurisdiction. These officials are constantly met with from the pontificate of Gregory VII. Clement IV. likened them to the Roman proconsuls. They were appointed to represent the Apostolic see on special occasions, and took precedence of the bishops in the regions to which they were sent, presided at synods, and claimed for themselves the respect due to the pope himself. Gregory VII., in commending a legate, quoted Luke 10:16, "whosoever heareth you, heareth me also."1879 He was represented by Cardinal Hugo in Spain and by other legates in Sardinia, France, Denmark, Poland, and England.1880 Hildebrand himself had represented the popes on special missions, and Adrian IV. won distinction by his successful administration of the legatine office in Northern Europe. Papal legates were present at the coronation of William the Conqueror, 1070. Legates had the reputation of living like princes and depended for their support upon the countries to which they were despatched. Their encroachment upon the prerogatives of the episcopate and their demands for money called forth bitter complaint from one end of Europe to the other. Barbarossa wrote Adrian IV., refusing to receive the papal legates because they came to him as plunderers and not as priests.1881 John of Salisbury and Matthew Paris joined St. Bernard in condemning their assumption and rapacity. Bernard succeeded in finding only two cases of incorruptible legates. One, Martin, who had been sent to Dacia, returned to Italy so poor that he could with difficulty get to Florence and would have had to foot it from there to Rome but for the loan of a horse. Bernard felt his description would be regarded as an idle tale, a legate coming back from the land of gold without gold and traversing the land of silver without possessing silver! The other case was the legate Gaufrid of Aquitaine who would not accept even fish and vegetables without paying for them so that no one might be able to say, "we have made Abraham rich," Gen. 14:23.1882 Salimbene, the genial Franciscan chronicler, also gives us a dark picture of papal legates of Northern Italy, some of whom he had known personally.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Repper had the reputation of being anti-Scientology, but she agreed to have lunch with Rinder, Rathbun, and Miscavige at the Fort Harrison Hotel. It turned out that she was a fan of the soap-opera star Michelle Stafford, who was a Scientologist. Repper was invited to Los Angeles to meet her at a Celebrity Centre gala. When she returned, Repper began hosting a series of dinners and lunches for local officials to meet other Scientology celebrities. Tom Cruise dropped by Repper’s house on several occasions to enjoy her famous coconut cake and schmooze with local officials including the mayor of Tampa and influential lawyers and judges. He showed clips of his movies and testified about how Scientology had changed his life. Fox News host Greta Van Susteren provided sunset cruises on her yacht. Repper held a brunch for Michelle Stafford; the guests were mainly women who were fans of The Young and the Restless , including the secretaries of local judges. Meantime, the church threw blacktie galas in the ballroom of the Fort Harrison Hotel, where Edgar Winter, Chick Corea, or Isaac Hayes would perform. The Pinellas County sheriff attended these events, along with the mayors of Clearwater and Tampa, as well as a number of lawyers and judges who had been targeted by the church as community leaders. Rathbun says that when Miscavige learned that Jeffrey Goodis and his wife were big fans of John Travolta, they were invited to a gala at the Fort Harrison Hotel, and Travolta was asked to thank them for their help. Rathbun says the star was told, “ This guy is really going to bat for us.” The church poured money into local charities. According to Rathbun and Rinder, the idea was to change the climate of public opinion and thereby influence the attitude of the courts toward the church. Rathbun says there was a parallel campaign to discredit Lisa McPherson’s family as gold diggers who were exploiting their daughter’s death. In a recent deposition, Rathbun estimated that the entire campaign to shut down the prosecution of the church cost over $20 to $30 million. (The civil suit brought by the family settled for an undisclosed sum in 2004.) SCIENTOLOGY WAS UNDER ATTACK elsewhere in the world as well. Germany, acutely sensitive to the danger of extremist movements, viewed Scientology with particular alarm. In Hamburg, in 1992, the state parliament created a commission to investigate “destructive groups,” a category that included the Church of Satan, Transcendental Meditation, and the Unification Church, but was mainly aimed at Scientology. Scientologists were barred from holding government jobs and forbidden to join Germany’s main political party, the Christian Democratic Union, because they weren’t considered Christians. The youth wing of the party organized boycotts of Cruise’s first Mission: Impossible and Travolta’s movie Phenomenon . The city of Stuttgart canceled a concert by Chick Corea when it was discovered that he was a Scientologist. Seventy percent of Germans favored the idea of banning the organization altogether.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  And what thinking being, upon knowing a woman to her depths, will not cry with Euripides: 'That one amongst the Gods who brought women into the world may boast of having produced the worst of all creatures and the most afflicting to man.' If then it is demonstrated that the two sexes do not at all sort agreeably with each other and that there is not one well-founded grievance of the one which could not equally and immediately be voiced by the other, it is therefore false, from this moment, to say that Nature created them for their reciprocal happiness. She may have permitted them the desire to attain each other's vicinity in order to conjugate in the interests of propagation, but in no wise in order to form attachments with the design of discovering a mutual felicity. The weaker therefore having no right to mouth complaints with the object of wresting pity from the stronger and no longer being able to raise the objection that the stronger depends for his happiness upon her, the weaker, I say, has no alternative but to submit; and as, despite the difficulty of achieving that bilateral happiness, it is natural that individuals of both sexes labor at nothing but to procure it for themselves, the weaker must reconcile herself to distilling from her submissiveness the only dose of happiness she can possibly hope to cull, and the stronger must strive after his by whatever oppressive methods he is pleased to employ, since it is proven that the mighty's sole happiness is yielded him by the exercise of his strong faculties, by, that is to say, the most thorough-going tyranny; thus, that happiness the two sexes cannot find with each other they will find, one in blind obedience, the other in the most energetic expression of his domination.