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.

Page 45 of 253 · 20 per page

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  Proctor had stopped laughing, and now smiled. “You didn’t come when you fucked me,” he said. The captain gave a grunt, glanced back. He kicked at the two figures on the floor. “Hey, there. Give each other a rest.” Niger yipped. Benny pulled his mouth from the raw shaft. The black foreskin slipped forward to the bulge. “That’s right.” The captain buttoned his fly and walked over to the steps. “Didn’t want to bother you. I didn’t think you could tell.” He shrugged again. Proctor turned up his hands and returned a mock smile. “I’ve always wondered what the devil’s secret was.” “I’m the devil now?” “You’ll do.” “I’m tired out today,” the captain said. Proctor made a motion with his chin. The captain looked back. Benny and Niger were curled together. The long muzzle lay on the boy’s hip. Benny’s fist loosened before his eyes; his breath gentled. “You’ve tired them out. I think you must be the devil.” The captain grinned. Then he said, “I’ve come six times today. Is that why you think so?” “But you’ve faked seven. That’s the important one.” The captain laughed and sat on the lower step. “Tell me about Catherine.” He leaned back and put his elbow on the pelt to look up at the artist. “You say I must spill my next shot glass full before midnight?” He looked around the room. A square clock had been painted, in grisaille , with four human orifices, two male and two female, at noon, three, six and nine. The long hand was a penis, the short, a hirsute sack: they swung round the day. “It was from an old Coca Cola advertisement clock,” Proctor explained. “A healthy buck like you should be able to recuperate in the few hours left.” “Catherine,” the captain repeated. “Prime me out with tales of her, unless you yourself are too tired—” “I never tire. And seldom sleep.” “But your mind is on other things, yes?” “I am simply pondering the fact that man and the devil share equally in the rewards to be gleaned from their enduring relationship.” The captain waited the explanation. “The obviation of the knowledge that both are going to die. Man has devised three systems for effecting the oblivion necessary for sanity. First, the whole bourgeois preoccupation—such a very good word, ‘preoccupy’—with work and the objects of its reward. Second, the religious erection—ahem—of a moral, ethical, and ritual matrix that must absorb man’s consciousness to be efficacious. And third is the erotic life in which we have chosen to submerge ourselves. I say we; more accurately, you. The artist is perhaps the only one free to indulge in all three, religious, erotic, and ergonic, simply to fulfill his calling. He reports to the practitioners of each what is going on within the circles of the others. That is why society supports him, I suppose.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  Nig: “Sure thing, Bull.” Dove moves his foot aside because the blood had reached it; leaves a track. Nig crouches down, reaches out as though to touch the body, says: “Oh shit . . .” changes his mind, and stands. On Bull’s pants, a dim of wet grew to a fifty-cent piece. He slapped the barrel a few more times. “I wonder what that poor piss-drinkin’ son of a bitch is starin’ at? Hey, nigger?” Bull gestured at the captain with his chin. “What you suppose he seein’ now?” Bull’s chest became a shaking hogshead of laughter. Laughing, he looked up. They came from the hatch door. some stood at the rails. Those at the dockside of the ship threw shadows on the deck. (Those at the far side threw shadows on the water.) The blonde girl leaned against the locker, fingering, at her breasts, her torn blue smock. Bull took a deep breath, looked around. “All right. Somebody help me get him out of the way.” Nig and Dove moved to grapple the carcass; but Bull swung at them with his rifle stock. “Get out of here!” They danced back, surprised. “You two bastards given me enough trouble tonight,” he grumbled. Bull swung again. They slunk, still grinning, to the rail. Dove left bloody footprints. Nig left none at all. “Come on, Captain. Help me get him put away.” With three running steps, and two walking, Kim came up beside them, took Bull’s gun. Watching the two men pick up the body, she turned her fist on the barrel. Was it warm from the murder shot, or the murderer’s belly? The expression on her face was not a smile; but it made Kirsten think of someone smiling. The captain hooked his hands under the corpse’s armpits. Bull picked up the ankles. As the hips left the deck and swung, one foot slipped Bull’s hand. The shoe heel banged. In the cabin a woman laughed. (Around the deck they look around.) Bull glanced at the hatch before he picked up the foot again. Nazi, breathing hard, stepped from in front of the gangplank to let them pass. He rubbed the wet hair on his chest. His breath was loud. The chain, with its swinging swastika, clinked on his wrist. His smile recalled someone in rage, or agony, or both. He was not thinking much of anything. Before the captain stepped from the gangplank to the dock, he hefted the body a little higher. Halved by the hull, the laughter shrilled and doubled back, more shrilly, through tones it had touched before. Light from the nearest porthole suddenly halved. The captain looked. A woman’s face pressed the glass, tongue caught at the corner of her mouth. Her fingers tipped the sill. Lamplight behind her exploded in loose hair, dimmed her features.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  The captain quieted him when they caught up. Kirsten pushed the handle. Gunner peered around her shoulder, followed her. The dog gained center floor, barked. The captain stepped in. “What do you want? What are you doing here? Who are you?” The captain stopped, barefoot, in the sawdust. Gunner and Kirsten blinked by his hip: Big like a barrel. Arms, shoulders, chest and belly, snarled with amber. Round head shaved smooth. Wide belt (iron studs) worn low enough to show where red belly-hair thickened toward pubic. His crusty pants were tucked unevenly in the tops of his boots. One hand fondled the stock of the rifle on the bar. On the mirror a calendar marked it Saturday the twenty-first. “I captain The Scorpion. It’s on your dock now. I’m looking for . . . someone—you?” “Bull, I’m holding the place down till the owner gets back.” Niger barked. “I like your dog, nigger.” Then Bull grinned. “I’m police in this town.” Leaving his gun, he walked with a listing stride to the captain, stuck out his hand — “You got business with Nazi? He’s out pickin’ up his new girl.” —thick with callous, gloved with red hair, nail wrecked with gnawing. “I just want to know something.” The captain shook. “About what?” Bull passed his fist on to Gunner’s hair, lifted Kirsten’s chin with a foreknuckle. “Fine kids.” The captain looked at the bare-chested lawman carefully. Then he said, “You can have them for an hour, if you can tell me what I want to know.” (Sometimes, everything flattens, becomes unreal, but . . .) Bull looked up, frowned. Then the frown broke on yellow teeth. “How old are they?” “The boy’s thirteen. The girl’s fifteen.” “You just sell them to pleasure strangers?” “You bought a lot of it, ain’t you, mister?” Bull frowned again. Then, still careful, he nodded. The captain said, “I got Gunner on the streets of an Indian port just below Bombay: six, and pimping among the sailors for Kirsten here. I bought both children from the woman who owned them. They’d been kidnapped from a northern ship. What they got from me is better than what they would have had.” Bull let his eyes drop to the girl. He stuck his finger under the neck of her smock, and brushed the upper slope of her breast with the red hair on his knuckle. “How would you like to sit in my face, little mama? Give your cunt some good tongue work.” Kirsten giggled. Bull placed his finger on Gunner’s nose. “My spigot’s got a couple of good pumps underneath. It’s a fat dick, an’ you suck it, it’ll pump you full.” He pressed the boy’s nose away. “How do you take to the idea of me licking out your sister’s pussy?” Gunner grinned, and scratched his pants with his thumb.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  The more perceptive among you by now have intuited (if only by the lack of space devoted to her) that Catherine is the passionate concern. Our first encounter focused on a recognition of death. At this writing, she is the only character whose fate I do not know. Bull, Nazi, Nig, Kim, Sambo, Dove, Benny, Gunner, Kirsten, you nameless beast in the cellar, and you too, we must hunt her, for she is terribly powerful. Captain, it is your addition to our entourage that steels me to face her. You bring an implication of mythic chaos with which to tempt her. She must be destroyed. She has spied on the devil, and now employs what she has learned to indulge freedoms that absolutely threaten us. Her scarcity in this narrative is the first sign of her power. You have no doubt deduced the standing competition between us. I have presented only an encounter during which, I think you will agree, she lost and I was a generous winner. There are very few of those. That there is no example I personally can bear to present where victory went otherwise, even to service that vaunted symmetry which I hold inviable:—there is the major indicator of her strength: That, as an obsession, she can so mar my intended effect of grace, gusto, and compression, simply by not showing up! It is her aesthetic and ethical elusiveness that make her the subject of the hunt. She is no figurine gratuite marked up to pay for the resonances of this tale. Her import is all I have not told you, am unable to tell you. Blame on her the distortions you have already noted in what I have tried to display. If you have any outrage left for that, then perhaps you will feel a little of what I feel for her. Yes, my view is distorted, but do not think it is small, or without compassion. Were it, believe me, it would generate no such obsession. She has spied on the devil. But so have you. So have we all, and indulged the irony of recognition, which, on a greater scale, is her only crime. Oh, she enjoys the theatre (perhaps gluts herself upon it), museums, has an entire life of the mind I have only implied. She reads of the destruction of young women in novels such as these and takes pleasure in it. She finds it amusing when innocent young men are executed for the unspeakable. But I need not go into her facility in the management of property, politics, or the division of money. Many of us have lain with her, not all against our will as did the poor monster mad in the cellar; most of us, not surprisingly have fared better than he. Notice I have spared you the evocation of sympathy for him as spur to our revenge. But, Captain, if you are compassionate . . .

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  John hitchhiked where he could have trained, ferried where he could have flown, itinerary dictated thoroughly by whim; I ate and slept deck passage on steamers all over the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. The reports that have come back to me of that time from those who knew me then are that I was personable, even engaging, lively, intense, and very dirty. I could have been called, if the word has meaning, innocent at eighteen. By twenty-three I had engaged in only the most desultory amorous experiences. But by twenty-five there was nothing I had not done. You see me now? No act I have committed since is not some variation or repetition of something done before I finished my first quarter century. It began, I remember, with liquor and the old woman who lived on the top floor of the house where I took an apartment near school. (And then, hadn’t I thought it ended the next morning with the sixteen year old girl, her granddaughter, who lived downstairs, and who had been an initiate since she was half that age?) On the continent, it blossomed. In the night alleys of the capitals of Europe I sold myself to old men and bought the favors of young women. I met the Count, and for him, shortly, supervised the entourage he traveled with, a harem of adolescent delinquents from the gutters of Madrid, Rome, Copenhagen, and Marseilles. He used to say I should have been named ‘Petronius.’ Everywhere we visited we brought sensuous, chaotic laughter, the hysteric merriment of the depraved. I hunted new girls to appease his boys who demanded such payment for servicing the Count himself. I hunted new boys to replace the ones lost through the general temperament of such young men, or to the police (all were thieves: half had passed time in correctional institutions), or the ones who had fallen out of favor with our master. “He abandoned us in Zurich. “I do not know why or for where. I had been with him for five months. That morning I looked into his room, dawn was just bruising the mist in the pale valley beyond the curtains. The revelry from last night’s party had reduced to the sobbing of one peasant girl of the neighborhood who had taken coffee with the Count and two of our rougher company the day before. “The Count, his clothing, his jewelry, his paintings, were gone. In truth, I felt neither shock nor surprise. I had always been paid amply: I myself left within the hour. The others? Where they went, I do not know. One of the girls, and three of the boys, I had even developed slight infatuations for, though I suppose I held my master in contempt. Still, I left.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  CATHERINE FROM THE ALTAR:I could be crass and simply begin by saying: that I am sitting here on this stained napkin, my legs spread, a cross in one hand, a cock in the other, and still I have time to think, means (by definition, no?) you’ve failed. But I beg the point. Who can satisfy me? You, or you, or you? None of you comes at me with that complete, unbridled lust to which I would quite happily give myself up. I have seen more of it through a ship’s porthole hours ago than any of you can demonstrate. The rest of you arrive with variations of pride, resentment—Oh, Jonathan, that you blame on your obsession with me whatever imbalances mar your creation as proof of my culpability: for shame! That may be enough to keep a stiff dick or a sloppy box. I do, however, demand more than that, even without broaching the swamp of love that already you have so dishonestly touched your toe to—let’s be honest—not to prepare for the truth you had to tell, but to mask that other you have so unfairly left for me. Seven times between noon and midnight? Frankly, Captain—and I am sure more than one of you has had the thought trickle through—if the devil can’t accomplish that with ease, he isn’t much of a man. Had you set your task, Jonathan, as the rounded and rich rendering of the interface between the actual and the ideal, I would be bound, however reluctantly, to accept any amount of moral slippage. But what am I—what are any of us—to do with such concise and conscious striving after the false note, the mawkish, and the thin? No, the lack of interest you have shown in your satisfaction since sunset is indicative of something more. A new age? Perhaps it signals an inchoate uncertainty whether or not you really want to give up this present one. After all, it’s been quite good to you. It has granted you all these previous joys. Are you willing to relinquish them for the fifty-fifty possibility of pain or pleasure? As well as a certainty of the unpleasantness bound to accompany the adjustment period? What is required here, someplace between the kisses and the bites, the whips, the thrusting loins, the tensed buttocks, is one consciousness that will move freely to its own total engulfment in pleasure. Though I look over all your assembled faces, from the most demented rapist to the once-a-Sunday diddler who retires to the john with dirty novels, the self-consciousness in all of you prohibits just that step, that one extension of the will which causes not the fantasy to become concrete—for that happens all the time, and we pay for it—rather for the concrete to crumble with the advent of the fantastic. That is revolution. Lord, my crotch aches for it. I would have you all until I passed out if I thought there were the least chance of giving birth to it.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  He rubbed his lip with his thumb knuckle. “Did Proctor . . . ?” “Shhhh . . .” and nodded. She looked from the painting to the window. They could see lights from the houses of Colson Hill. Bull made a long, wordless sound, rubbed blunt fingers along his fat cock. Growled: “Get this pecker up your high-class Colson Hill pussy . . . pussy . . . pussy . . .” a fist around it, moving. Her blood-colored nails touched her thighs, her stomach, the underswell of her breast. “My boot,” she said. “You must dress me as I am in the picture.” He looked around. By the brick chimney that made a column in the room were the piled attire. She moved her foot forward on the floor boards. “My boot.” He bent and picked up the kneeboot. He stood, looked at her, looked at it. He held the metal-boned heel against his matted crotch. He moved his red flesh on the patent glister, walking across the floor. He stopped in front of her. Watched her. She blinked. Her face was: a small scar, not a quarter of an inch, below her mouth. Other than that, her face was. She shook her hair back off her shoulder. Blinked. Breathed in, suddenly, loosing the wrinkle from the skin under her arm. He bent his head. Dropped to his knees. The backs of his thighs on his calves sandwiched hair and sweat. He slipped his fingers beneath her instep, lifted her foot. With his other hand: touched the red nail on her second toe with his forefinger. She cleared her throat. He looked up, only as high as her crotch though. The ligament down from her groin shifted. She cleared her throat again. He looked up at her looking down. The bulb above darkened her face, exploded in the edge of her hair. “Dirty animal . . .” He fell on her foot, nipping, licking, sucking her smaller toes, barking. He curled on the floor, scraping hip and arm, to press the ball of her foot against his groin. She kicked him, twice. In the crotch; and when he gasped, in the face. “My boot . . .” On his knees, he pulled the leather around her toes, bending to let his tongue run her skin. The inside smelled of sweat, tasted of sweat. He fixed the flaps closed, pulled the laces— “Tighter!” —tighter, till lumped muscle glistened under the hair on his shoulders. Down, to lick the pale shin disappearing between the closing lapels. Straddling her foot, rubbing his red cock on the rough thongs, the smooth leather, he tried to pry his tongue beneath the boot’s rim, just above her knee. Now he looked up, twice. Once furtively. Then he hurled his face into her bush.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  “He abandoned us in Zurich. “I do not know why or for where. I had been with him for five months. That morning I looked into his room, dawn was just bruising the mist in the pale valley beyond the curtains. The revelry from last night’s party had reduced to the sobbing of one peasant girl of the neighborhood who had taken coffee with the Count and two of our rougher company the day before. “The Count, his clothing, his jewelry, his paintings, were gone. In truth, I felt neither shock nor surprise. I had always been paid amply: I myself left within the hour. The others? Where they went, I do not know. One of the girls, and three of the boys, I had even developed slight infatuations for, though I suppose I held my master in contempt. Still, I left. I recall I paused before Tossi, the great Moroccan, sprawled drunk across the chair arm, his workman’s pants at mid-shin, hands loose across a cock he boasted always stiff, even when he slept. I squatted between his knees and nuzzled him. I often gave him the same service Benny gives me—” (He gestured where the naked boy slept with the dog.) “—and Olaf or Pietro, the big blond Italian, would do for Tossi what you and the fishermen did for me. But Tossi grunted and pushed me away. Had he wakened I would have taken him with me. But he didn’t. The probable fate of the others? I’m sure the police apprehended them later. The money and the prestige of the Count held the law off us. Without him we were vulnerable. I knew that. So I left my favorite, drunken and doomed, without regret. Such departures are strange, and very easy.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  “He abandoned us in Zurich. “I do not know why or for where. I had been with him for five months. That morning I looked into his room, dawn was just bruising the mist in the pale valley beyond the curtains. The revelry from last night’s party had reduced to the sobbing of one peasant girl of the neighborhood who had taken coffee with the Count and two of our rougher company the day before. “The Count, his clothing, his jewelry, his paintings, were gone. In truth, I felt neither shock nor surprise. I had always been paid amply: I myself left within the hour. The others? Where they went, I do not know. One of the girls, and three of the boys, I had even developed slight infatuations for, though I suppose I held my master in contempt. Still, I left. I recall I paused before Tossi, the great Moroccan, sprawled drunk across the chair arm, his workman’s pants at mid-shin, hands loose across a cock he boasted always stiff, even when he slept. I squatted between his knees and nuzzled him. I often gave him the same service Benny gives me—” (He gestured where the naked boy slept with the dog.) “—and Olaf or Pietro, the big blond Italian, would do for Tossi what you and the fishermen did for me. But Tossi grunted and pushed me away. Had he wakened I would have taken him with me. But he didn’t. The probable fate of the others? I’m sure the police apprehended them later. The money and the prestige of the Count held the law off us. Without him we were vulnerable. I knew that. So I left my favorite, drunken and doomed, without regret. Such departures are strange, and very easy.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  At this writing, she is the only character whose fate I do not know. Bull, Nazi, Nig, Kim, Sambo, Dove, Benny, Gunner, Kirsten, you nameless beast in the cellar, and you too, we must hunt her, for she is terribly powerful. Captain, it is your addition to our entourage that steels me to face her. You bring an implication of mythic chaos with which to tempt her. She must be destroyed. She has spied on the devil, and now employs what she has learned to indulge freedoms that absolutely threaten us. Her scarcity in this narrative is the first sign of her power. You have no doubt deduced the standing competition between us. I have presented only an encounter during which, I think you will agree, she lost and I was a generous winner. There are very few of those. That there is no example I personally can bear to present where victory went otherwise, even to service that vaunted symmetry which I hold inviable:— there is the major indicator of her strength: That, as an obsession, she can so mar my intended effect of grace, gusto, and compression, simply by not showing up! It is her aesthetic and ethical elusiveness that make her the subject of the hunt. She is no figurine gratuite marked up to pay for the resonances of this tale. Her import is all I have not told you, am unable to tell you. Blame on her the distortions you have already noted in what I have tried to display. If you have any outrage left for that, then perhaps you will feel a little of what I feel for her. Yes, my view is distorted, but do not think it is small, or without compassion. Were it, believe me, it would generate no such obsession. She has spied on the devil. But so have you. So have we all, and indulged the irony of recognition, which, on a greater scale, is her only crime. Oh, she enjoys the theatre (perhaps gluts herself upon it), museums, has an entire life of the mind I have only implied. She reads of the destruction of young women in novels such as these and takes pleasure in it. She finds it amusing when innocent young men are executed for the unspeakable. But I need not go into her facility in the management of property, politics, or the division of money. Many of us have lain with her, not all against our will as did the poor monster mad in the cellar; most of us, not surprisingly have fared better than he. Notice I have spared you the evocation of sympathy for him as spur to our revenge. But, Captain, if you are compassionate . . . Enough. I have evoked your mythic virility with which to challenge her. But I see our number has grown considerably, even while I maunder her. Then come.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  The captain clapped Robby’s shoulder. The blow struck with more laughter, broke with the waters on the pilings about them. Within the cage of his tensed muscles, Robby prepared some motion . . . “There—” Crack! “—he is!” The captain jerked his hand from the drifter’s shoulder. Whites ringing his pupils, Robby began to clutch at his side as if some insect had gotten into his shirt. He got down on one knee— Nig: “Hey, you got him, Bull!” Dove: “Look at the motherfucker go!” —opened his mouth, put one hand out to catch himself, then rolled over, face up and terrible with recognition. Bull clomped onto the deck, swinging his rifle from both hands. Nig and Dove, grinning, were behind him in a moment, peering around his elbows. Bull, licking first his upper lip, then his lower, stopped about three feet from the body. Both lips went into his mouth, then came out again. Blood crawled on the deck to catch between the boards, spreading from the puddle in an ordered grill. Shaking his head, Bull thumped the butt down and lay the barrel along his leg; the sight on the barrel’s tip flattened red stomach hair. (The shape defined where the metal stretches his pants is substantially thicker than the barrel.) “Shit. Guess I had to kill the stupid motherfucker, now, didn’t I? Priest wouldn’t let me alone no how. And you can’t let a man go running around the streets when everybody thinks he done something like that.” He scratched his bald head with the nubs of his hairy fingers. “I told that old black bastard you two got for a pappy you better watch out from now on. Take it easy next time. Bitch hadn’t a’ died, I wouldn’t a’ had to do this.” Dove: “Sure, Bull” Nig: “Sure thing, Bull.” Dove moves his foot aside because the blood had reached it; leaves a track. Nig crouches down, reaches out as though to touch the body, says: “Oh shit . . .” changes his mind, and stands. On Bull’s pants, a dim of wet grew to a fifty-cent piece. He slapped the barrel a few more times. “I wonder what that poor piss-drinkin’ son of a bitch is starin’ at? Hey, nigger?” Bull gestured at the captain with his chin. “What you suppose he seein’ now?” Bull’s chest became a shaking hogshead of laughter. Laughing, he looked up. They came from the hatch door. some stood at the rails. Those at the dockside of the ship threw shadows on the deck. (Those at the far side threw shadows on the water.) The blonde girl leaned against the locker, fingering, at her breasts, her torn blue smock.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  Nazi told me you like to drink a guy’s piss. You know what I like: When I get all ready to come, say when maybe some little kid is sucking on my dick, I start to pee. It’s just like coming, only for a whole minute, you know? Mostly I just do it when I jerk off. I mean, I’d really like to do that. Yeah? Get down there, yeah! Like to have you around for a while, boy. You can take almost as much as I got to give. (Gunner has crouched down. Bull has one hand on Gunner’s shoulder. The other fumbles his fly.) Okay, now come on and do it. Use your teeth . . . harder, yeah, like that. Oh, yeah, fine. You’re doing real fine.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  Though I look over all your assembled faces, from the most demented rapist to the once-a-Sunday diddler who retires to the john with dirty novels, the self-consciousness in all of you prohibits just that step, that one extension of the will which causes not the fantasy to become concrete—for that happens all the time, and we pay for it—rather for the concrete to crumble with the advent of the fantastic. That is revolution. Lord, my crotch aches for it. I would have you all until I passed out if I thought there were the least chance of giving birth to it. You accuse me, Jonathan, of having gone on to stranger pastimes. Alas, I have only had to come to terms with the facts. You, who are the most timid, Master Proctor, are so terribly much closer to the efficacious being you seek to present me with. The confusion between Faust and his Demon is private as well as public. No, Captain, you will definitely not do. There now, your vanity certainly can’t be wounded. Perhaps I simply cannot satisfy you; I dare say if I presented that image of totally engaged lust I demand you to be, your balls would empty themselves in three thrusts. For it is the mystic, black devil who must be satisfied for the new age to begin—what a magnificent vindication for the poor violated girl on the parish sitting-room couch. She died, you know, twenty minutes after the priest left. I, who loved her, mourn her with this orgy. I am the one who has failed, if it makes you feel better. But commence a little sucking, fucking, shit-licking and the like; somewhere in this world there are creatures deranged with the desire for their own satisfaction, and in honor of their lust, I jam your cock between my legs, thrust my tongue up your pussy: and I try to forget that they are not among our number. We only imitate them, fantasize them as our masters or slaves, inform the momentary object of our passion with their attributes. With them, Captain, is the key to that most frightening of tomorrows. Kiss me. And Jonathan, you will remember each modeled thigh, each shadowed breast, the moonlight through the stained glass on the sweaty rumps and heels; remember it and render it in pigments submitted to the most exacting aesthetic on sized panels of masonite.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Pompous effing fop, I think. You should be shot. Another voice hasn’t read a word by Virginia Woolf. Students are starting to gape. Later, in my shared cubicle along a line of hissing radiators, I spread dozens of copies and start assembly-line stapling Mr. Nabokov’s memoir, the sentences I once worshipped now streaming in a hieroglyphic blur off my eyeballs, flooding me with gall.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  φαυλίζω, fut. Att. ἐῶ, to hold cheap, to depreciate, disparage, Twa or τι Plat. Legg. 667 A, Xen. Mem. 1. 6, 5., 4. 4, 14, etc. Ἂ φαύλιος, a, ον, -- φαῦλος, but only used of certain fruits, coarse, μῆλα φ. Teleclid. ᾿Αμφιμκτ. 2; φ. ἐλαία or φαυλία alone, a coarse hind of olive, produced from the κότινος or wild-olive, Theophr. C. P. 6. 8, 3, H. P. 2. 2, 12, Luc. Lexiph. 5, Poll. 6. 14. ; φαυλισμός, 6, depreciation, contempt, LXXx (Isai. 51. 7, al.):—so pav- λισμα, τό, Ib. (Zeph. 3. 11), Origen. φαυλιστής, οὔ, ὁ, a despiser, Eccl.:—fem. φαυλίστρια, LXX (Zeph. 3.1). φαυλό-βιος, ov, living badly or meanly, Schol. Ar. Ran. 425. φαυλο-διδάσκαλος, 0, a teacher of evil, Eust. Opusc. 163. 3. 1659 φαυλό-δοξος, ov, ill-judging, Eust. Opusc. 37. 82, φαυλο-κόλαξ, ἄκος, ὁ, a flatterer of bad men, Nicet. Ann. 174 B, Eust. Opusc. 261. 20. φαυλο-λογίοα, ἡ, evil or mischievous speaking, Eust. Opusc. 131. 44. φαυλό-νους, our, ill-disposed, Schol. Ar. Nub. 625. φαυλο-ποιός, dv, ill-doing, Eust. Opusc. 81. 83. φαυλορρεπῶς, Ady. to the side of evil, κλίνειν Eust. Opusc. 3. 50. φαυλορρημόνως, (ῥῆμα) Adv. speaking evilly or ill, Poll. 8. 81.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ὠμότης, τος, 7, rawness, esp. of unripe fruit, Arist. Meteor. 4. 3, 4, Theophr. Fr. 7. 4. 2. indigestion, crudity, in pl. ὠμότησιν ἁλί- oxerat Plut. 2. 661 B, cf. Diosc. 3. I. II. metaph. savageness rudeness, fierceness, cruelty, Eur. lon 47, Xen. Cyr. 4.5, 19, Isocr. 64 A, 227 E, Dem., etc. ; ἴσον λεαίνης καὶ γυναικὸς ὦ. Menand. Monost. 267 ; @p. kara Twos Luc. Phal. 1. 6; in pl., Id. V. H. τὸ 3. ὠμοτοκέω, to bring forth untimely, miscarry, LXX (Job 21.10); ὠμο- τοκοῦσαί τε... Kal νεκρὰ τίκτουσαι Dion. H. 9. 40. ὠμοτοκία, 7, miscarriage, Ptol. ὠμο-τόκος, ov, bringing forth untimely offspring, miscarrying, Call. Cer. fe 3 ὧμ. ὠδῖνες untimely, Id. Del. 120:—metaph. of a vine, Anth. P. 501 ne -τομέω, to cut (imposthumes) raw or before the time, Paul. Aeg. 6. 34 so verb. Adj. ὠμοτομητέον, Archig. ap. Galen. ὠμο-τρἴβής, és, gen. cos, pressed raw, wu. ἔλαιον oil from unripe olives, preferred for many purposes, Theophr. Odor. 15, Diosc. 1. 29. ὠμόῦπνος, ov, (ὠμός) with sleep rudely broken, with one’s sleep not slept out, ὧμ. ἀνιστάναι τινά Eupol. Incert. 8; wp. ἀναπηδᾶν Philostr. 371; ὧμ. βλέφαρον Manass. Chron. 5301. ὠμοφᾶγέω, to eat raw flesh, Arr. Ind. 28. 1, Porph. Abst. § 13, etc. ὠμοφᾶγία, ἡ, an eating of raw flesh, Plut.2.417C, Clem. Al. 11, Eus., etc. 3 , > 9 ὥμος — wry: beasts, λέοντες, θῶες, λύκοι Il. 5. 782:, 11. 479., 16. 157; θῆρες h. Ven. 124; of the Centaurs, Theogn. 542; of savage men, Thuc. 3. 94, Porph. Abst. § 13 ;--τὰ ὠμοφάγα Arist. H. A. 9. 1, 10, cf. P. A. 4. 12, 17 ;—ap. χάρις (cf. ἀνδρόβρως) Eur. Bacch. 139. Cf. ὠμάδιος, ὠμηστής. 11. rarely proparox. ὠμόφαγος, ov, pass. eaten raw, δαῖτες ὧμ., οἵ sacrifices offered to Dionysus, Eur. Fr. 475 a. 12. ὠμοφορέω, fo bear on the shoulders, Joseph. A. J. 3. 7, 2, Dion. Alex. ap. Eus. H. E. 7 22. ὠμοφόριον, τό, a νγοτηδῃ᾽ 5 tippet covering the shoulders, Byz.; ὡμόφορον in Anna Comn. 1. 346. II. in Eccl. an episcopal tippet, v. Ducang. ὦμο- φόρος, ὁ 6, one who bears on the shoulders, Epiphan.639 D, 643 B, al. ὠμοφροσύνη, ἢ cruelty of mind, Planud. ὦμό- pov, ovos, 6, ἣ, (φρήν) savage-minded, savage, like ὠμόθυμος, λύκος Aesch. Cho. 421; of persons, Soph. Aj. 931, Tr. 975, Ph. 194, Eur. El. 27, etc.; metaph., ὦ. σίδαρος Aesch. Theb. 730. Adv. ὠμο- φρόνως, Id. Pers. gil. aed (1, ἄκος, 6 or }, a prop for the forks of vines (v. ὦμος 11), Geop. 5:22 ὁμοιχαρούργητος, ov, (ὠμός) operated on before its maturity, of an abscess, Schol. Hipp. ὠμφύνω, f. 1. for ὀμφύνω in Hesych. ὦν, Ion. and Dor. for οὖν : v. sub οὖν II. Ova, ὦναξ, poét. and Ion. contr. for ὦ ἄνα, ὦ ἄναξ. ὥναιος, a, ov, (ὀνίνη μι) profitable, Inscr. in Carapan. Dodoné, pl. 38.1. ὠνάμην, ὥνατο, aor. med. of ὄνομαι, 1]. ; v. ap. Lob. Phryn. 12. 11. also of ὀνίνημι, ν. sub voc.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ὠμός, 7, dv: (v. sub fin.):—raw, undressed, Lat. crudus (v. Arist. Meteor. 4. 3, 4 sq.): 1. properly of flesh, raw, uncooked, Il. 22. 347, Od. 18. 87, al.; opp. to dmradéos, Od. 12. 396; to ἑφθός, Theophr. Fr. 8.2; ὠμὸν καταφαγεῖν τινα or ὠμοῦ ἐσθίειν τινός to eat one raw, proverb. ee savage cruelty, Xen. An. 4. 8, 14, Hell. 3. 3, 6; so, ὠμὸν βεβρώθοις Πρίαμον Wy Ae 35, Gf ΘΠ 15: 87: εἴς: 2. of vegetables, μυκῆτας ὡμοὺς .. φαγεῖν Antiph. Παροιμ. 1; κριθαί Luc. Asin. 17; cf. ὠμήλυσις. 3. of water, crude, opp. to dnabees, Alex. Πυθαγ. 1. 4. of fruit, uncooked by the sun, unripe, opp. to πέπων, Ar. Eq. 260, cf. Xen. Oec. 19, 19, Arist. Meteor. 4. 3, 4, 5. of metallic ores, wzsmelted, Byz.; and of pottery, wubaked, Geop. 10. 21,1: even of the earth which needs to be exposed to the sun, ws ἡ ὠμὴ αὐτῆς ὀπτῷτο Xen. Oec. 16, 15; so, κέραμος ὠμός Arist. Meteor. 4. 3, 7, cf. GipAve2. 0: 10; 6. of food, undigested, Plut. 2. 131 C, 133 Dz. II. metaph. savage, rude, fierce, cruel, [δεσπόται] ὠμοί τε δούλοις Aesch. Ag. 1045; ὦ. φρόνημα Id. Theb. 536; wun ξὺν ὀργῇ Id. Supp. 187; δαίμονες Soph. O. T. 828; τὰ... ᾿Αγαμέμνονος κλύεις ὠμὰ καὶ πάντολμ᾽ Eur. I. A. 9133 ὠμὸς és τινα Id. Hipp. 1264; and so in Prose, ὠμὸν τὸ βούλευμα... ἔγνῶσθαι Thuc. 3. 36; οὕτως ὠμὴ στάσις προὐχωρήσεν 10. 81 ; ὠμοὶ καὶ ἄνομοι Plat. Lege. 823 E; ὠμὴ ψυχή Ib. 718D; χαλεπὸς καὶ ὦ. Xen. An. 2.6, 12; τὸν οὕτως ὠμόν, τὸν οὕτως ἀγνώμονα Dem. 546. 23 80, b. neut. pl. ὠμά, as Adv, savagely, Il. 23. 21; but in Prose we have the regul. Ady., ὠμῶς καὶ ἀπαραιτήτως Thuc. 3: 84, cf. Xen. Vect. 6, 6; ὠμῶς καὶ σχετλίως Isocr. 390D; ὠ. καὶ πικρῶς Dem. 845. 9; ὠμῶς ἀποκτείνειν Lys. 155. 33; Sup., ὠμότατα διακεῖσθαι πρός τινα Isocr. 1098 E. 2. rude, rough, hardy (v. ὠμοκρατής), Sopb. Aj. 548; δηλοῖ τὸ γέννημ᾽ ὠμὸν ἐξ ὠμοῦ πατρός Id. Ant. 471; ὠμότερος συκοφάντης a more coarse, more unmitigated sycophant, aes 298. 29 :—Adv. rudely, coarsely, παρελθεῖν ὠμῶς καὶ ἀναιδῶς Id. 321. 8. (from I. 4) ὠμὸν γῆρας an un- ripe, untimely, premature old age, Od. 15. 357, Hes. Op. 703; cf. ὦμο- γέρων :---ὠμὸς τόκος an untimely birth, Philostr. 555. (Cf. Skt. G@m-as, am-as (crudus) ; Lat. am-arus; cf. O. H.G. am-pher (sorrell).) ὠμό-σαρκος, ov, raw, κρέας reel ὦὠμό-σττος, ov, eating raw meat, of the Sphinx, eating men raw, Aesch. Theb. 5413; xnAatow ὠμοσίτοις, also of the Sphinx, Eur. Phoen. 1025 ; σκύλακες Id. Bacch. 338. II. pass. eaten raw, Lyc. 654. ὠμο-σπάρακτος [a], ov, torn in pieces raw, Ar. Eq. 345. ὠμο-τάρϊῖχος, 6, the flesh of the tunny pickled, and so eaten (without being boiled), Nicostr. “ABp. I. 2, Alex. ᾿Απεγλαυκ. 1. 4; cf. Diosc. 2. 33 :—also ὠμοτάριχον, τό, Diph. Siphn. ap. Ath. 121 B.

• From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)

  But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. In prophetic tradition, the word pair of “righteousness” and “justice,” is a call for transformative investment in the common good that inevitably includes the vulnerable and the disenfranchised (see Isa. 5:5; 9:7). But of course that verse of summons is preceded in the same chapter by two accent points. On the one hand Amos reprimands Israel for the dearth of justice and righteousness in Israel (5:7; see 6:12), and identifies the economic abuse of the poor that will have a bad outcome for the exploiters: Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. 5:11 On the other hand, by a series of imperatives—“seek me,” “seek the LORD,” “seek good,” “hate evil and love good,” “establish justice”—Amos makes clear that engagement with YHWH, the God of Israel, is an equivalent to the practice of economic justice. The verses preceding 5:24 articulate a divine rejection of cultic practices (vv. 21–23); Israel’s liturgies had become a narcotic that screened out the economic realities of life. HOSEA Hosea belongs roughly to the same cultural-historical context of Northern Israel as does Amos. He reports that his passion for prophetic utterance has grown out of his anguished personal experience of a vexed and scandalous marriage. Out of that personal disaster Hosea is able to speak about the alienation that is coming between YHWH and Israel, a “breakup” that will end in suffering, displacement, and wretchedness. The exact linkage between the personal and the prophetic is a bit elusive, but it is not doubted that this poet is propelled, like every poet, out of his lived reality. It is evident that Hosea arose from the covenantal circles of Deuteronomy that were deeply committed to the Sinai covenant with its rigorous commandments and its inescapable sanctions of blessing and curse. Indeed in 4:2 Hosea specifically cites the commandments of Sinai. The best-known text of Hosea, in Christian usage, is verse 6:6, which is twice quoted by Jesus (Matt. 9:12–13; 12:7): For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. As we have seen in Amos 5:21–23, this prophet also looks askance at worship practices that function in Israel, as they often do, to legitimate worship as a substitute for covenantal activity. The pairing of “steadfast love” and “knowledge of God” refers to covenantal practices. In the tradition of Deuteronomy, those covenantal practices pertain to neighborly generosity and solidarity with a special regard for the poor, widows, orphans, and immigrants (see Deut. 14:28; 24:19–22). Thus Hosea links the reality of YHWH, the Lord of the covenant, to concern for the neighborhood.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  I recall I paused before Tossi, the great Moroccan, sprawled drunk across the chair arm, his workman’s pants at mid-shin, hands loose across a cock he boasted always stiff, even when he slept. I squatted between his knees and nuzzled him. I often gave him the same service Benny gives me—” (He gestured where the naked boy slept with the dog.) “—and Olaf or Pietro, the big blond Italian, would do for Tossi what you and the fishermen did for me. But Tossi grunted and pushed me away. Had he wakened I would have taken him with me. But he didn’t. The probable fate of the others? I’m sure the police apprehended them later. The money and the prestige of the Count held the law off us. Without him we were vulnerable. I knew that. So I left my favorite, drunken and doomed, without regret. Such departures are strange, and very easy. “You have asked me about the woman? Here she makes her first entrance into my wanderings. Let me introduce her by explaining that I moved down through Italy, keeping to smaller towns. A week from Zurich round me living with a grave digger and his son. Where the mother had gone, or, in truth, if there was actually blood between man and boy, I never knew for sure. The father, whose acquaintance I made in a narrow street lit by half a moon at midnight, had raised the child to his own tastes. They disinterred dead women, carried them to their shack—a print of the Virgin was tacked over the fire, and the roof leaked after any more than an hour’s rain steady—where, with dirty fingers, and stained teeth, father and son would bruise and tear the cold mouth, breasts, buttocks, and box. Though liking to lick, lip, and tongue the cool and putrid corpses, they preferred to give up their juice in something warm, wet and responding, while they groveled, growled and bit. Often they would perform this service for one another (reluctantly claimed the father), one on his knees, hugging the hips of the other, who lowered over the figure on the table flickering under the candles. But their real pleasure was to indulge the yellowing, lardy lumps together while somebody else—male or female, it was no matter—crouched for them. Often I saw their clotted hands meet, while man and boy exchanged congealed kisses, tongueing a bit of fat between them. “I met Guido, the grave digger, as I say, in a dark street. His black eyes followed mine, pulled me around.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  This savior, I shall attempt to show, deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar: nay, one can even say it spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate, reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star, no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer. Chapter 2The Jordan Is Not Just WaterTHE NEAR EAST AND MEDITERRANEAN types of apocalypticism are certainly the most literarily elaborated….However, if we widen our scope, we will find striking phenomenological parallels in the cultures of the Americas, Africa and Oceania, which can hardly be explained with reference to early historical connections with the above area, or by way of diffusion…. The revitalization of mythic material and its reinterpretation with reference to the contemporaneous situation is a recurrent feature in these movements. Tord Olsson, in Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East , David Hellholm, ed. (Tubingen: Mohr, Siebeck, 1979) TO THE PURIST the millennium can properly refer only to the fixed period of 1000 years that is found in the Judaic-Christian tradition. In our perspective, however, the term may be applied figuratively to any conception of a perfect age to come, or a perfect land to be made accessible. The picture will vary according as time is fitted into the scheme of the cosmos. The perfect age may come by an act of regeneration, time being bent back, as it were, to recapture some state of harmony in which the world began. It may have some of this quality of early freshness and yet come as time is running out. It will then last for a period that is fixed, variable, or indeterminate, and it may even form part of a cycle of ages. Or it may be an age to last indefinitely, with no doom ahead. Sylvia L. Thrupp, in Millennial Dreams in Action: Studies in Revolutionary Religious Movements (New York: Shocken, 1970) God Now Rested over Italy In the previous chapter the Jewish historian Josephus was mentioned in passing. It is now time to meet him more formally and consider him more fully. He was born into the priestly aristocracy of Jerusalem in 37 C.E . and appeared in Rome before the emperor Nero to defend some fellow priests in 64 C.E .