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 A Boy's Own Story (1982)

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

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Dr. O’Reilly was not a good listener. He was always scooping up handfuls of orange diet pills and swallowing them with a jigger of scotch. As a great man and the author of several books, he had theories to propound and little need to attend to the particularities of any given life—especially since he knew in advance that life would soon enough yield merely another illustration of his theories. To save time, O’Reilly unfolded his ideas at the outset and then rehearsed them during each subsequent session since, as he explained, although these notions could easily enough penetrate the conscious mind, they soaked less readily into the hairy taproot of the unconscious. When he wasn’t presenting his theories, O’Reilly was confiding in me the complexities of his personal life. He’d left his wife for Nancy, a patient, but the moment his divorce had gone through, his wife had discovered she was dying of cancer. O’Reilly complied with her last wish and remarried her. The patient promptly went mad and was now confined in an institution in Kansas. O’Reilly, to console himself, was throwing himself into his work. He was taking on more and more patients. He saw the last patient at midnight and the first at six in the morning. Sometimes I would have both the last hour and the first and I would get permission from the school to spend the night on the analytic couch. I’d set the alarm for five-thirty. I’d arise and hurry over to O’Reilly’s apartment next door. It was decorated like a ship’s cabin, complete with bunk beds, coiled ropes on the walls, portholes for windows, a captain’s desk and red and green lights to indicate port and starboard. To awaken O’Reilly I’d put on his favorite record, “Nothing Like a Dame,” a song he considered “healthy.” I’d then make a cup of coffee for him and with it hand him his jar of Dexedrines. By six-thirty at the latest he was alert, dressed and ready to return to his office. I associate those morning hours with the smell of his lime cologne.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “Fucker,” Farnland said, but then he smiled, showing Charles his teeth, gnarly and green-yellow. Charles smiled back. Pathos was what Farnland had called his “dumb number.” It was, he said often during rehearsal, art’s most noble pursuit. One evening, one of the other dancers had jokingly said, What about ethos? And Farnland, from a seated position, had flung a hard-shell water bottle at her head. Then he’d shouted them all down for ten minutes about making snide little remarks and the terrors of their generation. What did any of them know about art? About anything? Charles half wished that Farnland would make a scene now. That he’d do something. But he didn’t. Farnland waved him off and pushed out into the hall. The noise from the class next door, the music, filled the room briefly, and then was gone. Charles flexed his fist and worked over his knee. Little old man, full of spite. But Charles had done nothing to stop him. • • • Charles cut through the courtyard, scattering a group of smoking students. They trailed white smoke, legible in the piercing daylight. His sweat had turned to a chalky crust, and he could feel it breaking up when he moved, cold sneaking in against his skin. The class had done its work. His muscles were warm, and he felt pliant, alive. He’d pulled the brace on to give his knee some relief. On the other side of the courtyard, he slipped into the dance library. Sophie often haunted the upper levels of the library in the media room, looking over old choreography. She could have streamed it on her phone in high definition, but she liked browsing through the years of archival footage, poring over little-known, minor dancers, taking bits here and there from everyone like a magpie. He found her sitting on the floor with an enormous album covering her entire lap. She was running her finger up and down the list, deciding which to take out. She leaned down over it, exposing the tender white nape of her neck. He kissed her there before she knew he was present, and she jumped, screaming. “Shh,” he said as he crouched. His knee crackled like static. “You are a menace,” she hissed, her eyes flashing. “What are you looking at?” He sat down to take the weight off. “Old shit.” She handed him the book, the pages yellowed, little black disks tucked inside plastic wrap, neat type glued next to each one. “God, you stink.” “I had practice.” “That’s not practice smell,” she said. “That’s not practice smell at all.” He squeezed his legs together, thinking that might help, but she just snorted at him. “Where’s your phone?” “I don’t know, dead probably,” he said, looking but not looking at the album. “I called you,” she said. “After you left last night.” “Oh, well, it died, so.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The other newcomer, Howie, was my real companion, friend and enemy, someone whose room I couldn’t resist visiting though I didn’t want the other kids to see me going there. Howie had been a bleak, sit-in-a-stupor nihilist, he told me, but now he’d ascended to the discipline and heartlessness of the Nazi Party. A real Nazi. He’d written away for the “literature” of the American Renaissance Party and proudly showed me his foot-long library of books on race, the Aryan heritage, the Führer’s legacy, Communist lies about the “so-called death camps” and so on. He was almost as fat as he was tall. His eyes blinked and glowered and squinted and widened in mocking wonder behind the intense magnification of his glasses, but once denuded they lost all power of expression and seemed as pale and vulnerable as new skin under a bandage. Although he’d never traveled anywhere he was teaching himself French and of course German; he had pinned up photos of Berchtesgaden and the Riviera over his desk. He brewed espresso in a tin Napoletano that, when reversed, threw sputtering drops onto the glowing coils of the strictly forbidden hot plate, and he played over and over again his one record of Juliette Greco, the chanteuse beloved of the Existentialists, the waif who’d emerged out of the ruins of war with black eyes all pupils and lyrics all plangent, tough-guy sentimentality. Howie’s ties came from Charvet on the Place Vendôme because that had been Proust’s haberdasher. He and I shared the irregular, never-foreseen status of students too clever for afternoon study hall and too inept for afternoon sports. As a result we alone were free to spend those long vacant hours from two to six in the empty dorms or, when the weather was good, on walks through the baronial grounds of the estate. The weather, however, was usually polar and he and I then found our exercise in stubborn, smoldering debates about equality and democracy (I for, he against). I can still taste the bitter black coffee and hear the jolly accordion and sweeping strings of Juliette Greco’s accompaniment, music we’d have sneered at as polka-Polish or Hollywood-snythetic had it not been French, but that, since it was, we relished and hummed along to though neither of us was ever quite capable of translating the words (“Something … something … if you something I’ll always? Toujours? Is that toujours? Play it again”). Howie had a face only a medieval Japanese woman could have loved: perfectly round, pasty, just a wisp of fine hair above, below a dark, tiny dead rosebud of a mouth, the rudiment of a chin, like a child’s hand poking through a sheet, and those eyes, so arrogant and expressive with glasses, so myopic and defenseless without.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Instead of an elegant rally provoking true gay pride, a new “slave auction”—a parody of the earlier charade-would be held to raise money for the defense of the 40. Before 600 people, gay leaders—several of whom had long fought bravely and with dignity for the cause of gay freedom—posed on a stage as “slaves” and were “sold” to the highest bidder. A well-known minister, auctioned, proceeded coyly to do a mini-strip, removing his jacket, tie, opening his shirt. Another gay reverend offered “absolution when it's all over.” Part of the auction was conducted by a woman ridiculous in male leather pants. Further attesting to the interchangeability of roles—that the “master” in gay S & M is a closet “slave”—one man auctioned himself off as a “master”! The second auction unhappily converted other gays into seeming camp followers of the S & M faction. In a move reminiscent of a scene from Kubrick's Paths of Glory, in which an insane general is assuaged in his intent to court-martial and execute 100 men by being offered 3 instead, the District Attorney attempted to placate both cops and homosexuals by dismissing felony charges against 36 of those arrested; but, exhibiting the idiotic “logic” that only the law can tolerate, he charged the two sponsors of the auction and the two who had acted as auctioneers, with the afterthought felony-charge of pandering—the original charge of involuntary servitude being even more clearly indefensible. Against the 36 others, all charges were eventually dropped. And so the City of Los Angeles had been robbed of more than one hundred thousand dollars to bust a gay bathhouse on hoax charges. As the war went, it was a victory for the gay side. Despite the gay excesses, the police action had been so absurd that it drowned every other consideration. There was no public support for the action; none—not even from the conservative provinces. The cops had aroused citizen indignation. Gays had stuck with gays. Soon after, during a televised news conference, a visibly unnerved chief of police proclaimed that he would, once and for all, define the difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals. As psychiatrists, sociologists, psychologists, and laymen—homosexual and heterosexual—waited for the ultimate revelation, the chief—converting his arms into “wings” and fluttering his “tail”—did a baffling imitation of a “heterosexual bird” mating in a nest, and then of a “heterosexual (sic) bird” mating in the nest but this time saying, “Slam, bam, thank you, sir.” The difference still remains blurred. Of course there were major casualties on the gay front. Despite dismissed charges, some of the defendants lost their jobs; others were alienated disastrously from their families, who had seen their faces captured by the cop-alerted TV cameras.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

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

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I am sure we saw her yesterday in that restaurant, in Soda pop.” “Sometimes,” said Lo, “you are quite revoltingly dumb. First, Vivian is the male author, the gal author is Clare; and second, she is forty, married and has Negro blood.” “I thought,” I said kidding her, “Quilty was an ancient flame of yours, in the days when you loved me, in sweet old Ramsdale.” “What?” countered Lo, her features working. “That fat dentist? You must be confusing me with some other fast little article.” And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy. 19 With Lo’s knowledge and assent, the two post offices given to the Beardsley postmaster as forwarding addresses were P.O. Wace and P.O. Elphinstone. Next morning we visited the former and had to wait in a short but slow queue. Serene Lo studied the rogues’ gallery. Handsome Bryan Bryanski, alias Anthony Bryan, alias Tony Brown, eyes hazel, complexion fair, was wanted for kidnaping. A sad-eyed old gentleman’s faux-pas was mail fraud, and, as if that were not enough, he was cursed with deformed arches. Sullen Sullivan came with a caution: Is believed armed, and should be considered extremely dangerous. If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look. And moreover there was a smudgy snapshot of a Missing Girl, age fourteen, wearing brown shoes when last seen, rhymes. Please notify Sheriff Buller. I forget my letters; as to Dolly’s, there was her report and a very special-looking envelope. This I deliberately opened and perused its contents. I concluded I was doing the foreseen since she did not seem to mind and drifted toward the newsstand near the exit. “Dolly-Lo: Well, the play was a grand success. All three hounds lay quiet having been slightly drugged by Cutler, I suspect, and Linda knew all your lines. She was fine, she had alertness and control, but lacked somehow the responsiveness , the relaxed vitality , the charm of my —and the author’s—Diana; but there was no author to applaud us as last time, and the terrific electric storm outside interfered with our own modest offstage thunder. Oh dear, life does fly. Now that everything is over, school, play, the Roy mess, mother’s confinement (our baby, alas, did not live!), it all seems such a long time ago, though practically I still bear traces of the paint. “We are going to New York after to-morrow, and I guess I can’t manage to wriggle out of accompanying my parents to Europe. I have even worse news for you. Dolly-Lo!

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  The twins sit at the table with their coloring, the boy struggling to decide between red and blue to fill in the crude tree he’s drawn and the girl staring at him hatefully. Sylvia would like to go over there and color the whole thing green. It’s a disservice to let children go on thinking the world can be something it cannot. Her parents hadn’t let her think that sort of thing for long—that life could be what she wanted it to be, that all she needed was to try. “Sylvie,” the boy says with his cheeks between his hands. “Hungry.” “Is that a whole thought?” she asks, and he frowns, folds his arms across his chest. “Hungry.” “Five more minutes.” The boy licks his lips until his whole mouth is wet and bubbly with spit. Booger eater, she thinks. The girl cuts her eyes at him. “Sylvie. Hungry,” the boy says again. The fries crackle and hiss on the sheet pan. Sylvia wedges them free instead of letting them cool and transfers them to a plate that she leaves at the center of the table. They sit in a steaming mound flecked with coarse sea salt and red-pepper flakes. She hoists herself up onto the counter and watches the twins watch the fries. The boy licks his lips again. He is first, of course he is. Boys are greedy, always taking. But the world will make a mess of this boy. He’s all nerve and skin. Nothing between him and the outside. The food burns his fingers, and he drops the fries onto the table. He tries again, blows on one of the fries. Sylvia can see his mouth watering. He makes little chewing motions. Oh, he wants it bad. Like his father. Scratching at her bedroom door these last few nights. She has fewer reasons to say no, and the last time that she let him go down on her, he had seemed so grateful that Sylvia had only felt a little guilty and a little selfish. Impossible not to see the resemblance between their two wants. Sylvia tucks her knees against her chest and watches as he tries and fails, tries and fails, burns his mouth and his tongue. But he keeps trying. Eventually, he gets it in his mouth and keeps it there, chewing it into white mush. He smiles at her broadly, shows his food. “Good!” he says, as if approving of her. “Good! Like!” The girl, because she is smart, stabs a fry through with a crayon and blows on it. Then she shoves the whole thing into her mouth, crayon and all. She gulps it down. Good for you. • • • THEIR LUNCH doesn’t take long, and then Sylvia puts them down for a nap.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Feeling I was losing my time, I drove energetically to the downtown hotel where I had arrived with a new bag more than five years before. I took a room, made two appointments by telephone, shaved, bathed, put on black clothes and went down for a drink in the bar. Nothing had changed. The barroom was suffused with the same dim, impossible garnet-red light that in Europe years ago went with low haunts, but here meant a bit of atmosphere in a family hotel. I sat at the same little table where at the very start of my stay, immediately after becoming Charlotte’s lodger, I had thought fit to celebrate the occasion by suavely sharing with her half a bottle of champagne, which had fatally conquered her poor brimming heart. As then, a moonfaced waiter was arranging with stellar care fifty sherries on a round tray for a wedding party. Murphy-Fantasia, this time. It was eight minutes to three. As I walked through the lobby, I had to skirt a group of ladies who with mille grâces were taking leave of each other after a luncheon party. With a harsh cry of recognition, one pounced upon me. She was a stout, short woman in pearl-gray, with a long, gray, slim plume to her small hat. It was Mrs. Chatfield. She attacked me with a fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?) Very soon I had that avid glee well under control. She thought I was in California. How was—? With exquisite pleasure I informed her that my stepdaughter had just married a brilliant young mining engineer with a hush-hush job in the Northwest. She said she disapproved of such early marriages, she would never let her Phyllis, who was now eighteen— “Oh yes, of course,” I said quietly. “I remember Phyllis. Phyllis and Camp Q. Yes, of course. By the way, did she ever tell you how Charlie Holmes debauched there his mother’s little charges?” Mrs. Chatfield’s already broken smile now disintegrated completely. “For shame,” she cried, “for shame, Mr. Humbert! The poor boy has just been killed in Korea.” I said didn’t she think “vient de,” with the infinitive, expressed recent events so much more neatly than the English “just,” with the past? But I had to be trotting off, I said. There were only two blocks to Windmuller’s office. He greeted me with a very slow, very enveloping, strong, searching grip. He thought I was in California. Had I not lived at one time at Beardsley? His daughter had just entered Beardsley College. And how was—? I gave all necessary information about Mrs. Schiller. We had a pleasant business conference. I walked out into the hot September sunshine a contented pauper.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  These substances, since first they gathered joy from the face of God, have never turned their vision from it wherefrom nought is concealed; wherefore their sight is never intercepted by a fresh object, and so behoveth not to call aught back to memory because thought hath been cleft. Wherefore they dream, down there, though sleeping not; thinking or thinking not, they speak the truth; but more in one than other is the fault and shame. Ye below tread not on one path when ye philosophize, so far doth love of show, and the thought it begets transport you. Yet even this with lesser indignation is endured here above than when divine Scripture is thrust behind or wrenched aside. They think not how great the cost of blood to sow it in the world, and how he pleaseth who humbly keepeth by its side. Each one straineth his wit to make a show and plieth his inventions; and these are handled by the preachers, and the Gospel left in silence. One saith the moon drew herself back when Christ suffered, and interposed herself that the sun’s light spread not itself below; and others, that the light concealed itself of its own self; wherefore that same eclipse responded to the Spaniards and the Indians as to

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  My first sight of the analytic couch constituted the primal scene, for only its existence jarred me into recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway over a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners (or the luxury of systematic, sustained and shared introspection, so sexual in its own way). All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes, but these communications cleverly ignore nonsexuals, those pale, penniless, underdeveloped bodies, blue nipples flung like two test drops of ink from a new pen across the blotting paper of a chest, or high, hairless buttocks, unmolded by hands into something lovely, something enticing, left pure and formless like butcher’s lard. The patient who always preceded me was the lady in the Persian-lamb coat; she left behind the peculiar perfumed smell of the paper tissues she wept into, a weak solution of those chemical towels handed out after lobster in family restaurants, and the heavier, more aggressive and I suppose offensive smell of her stubbed-out cigarettes (eight or nine in the sterling-silver cupped hand that served as the ashtray). These smells and the ghosts of smoke circulating through the sunlight, colloidal souvenirs, seemed to be the echoes of a just-completed drama by Racine in which lambent passions had glowed within the glass chimney of formal measures, in which all the action must occur offstage and is merely reported here and the only permissible emotions are the great ones—incestuous longings, guilt, and the impulse to murder—whereas the dimmer, more usual feelings of sloth, boredom, spleen, irritability are airily dismissed. For psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  8I did my best, your Honor, to tackle the problem of boys. Oh, I used even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called Column for Teens, to find out how to behave! A word to fathers. Don’t frighten away daughter’s friend. Maybe it is a bit hard for you to realize that now the boys are finding her attractive. To you she is still a little girl. To the boys she’s charming and fun, lovely and gay. They like her. Today you clinch big deals in an executive’s office, but yesterday you were just highschool Jim carrying Jane’s school books. Remember? Don’t you want your daughter, now that her turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes? Don’t you want them to have wholesome fun together? Wholesome fun? Good Lord! Why not treat the young fellows as guests in your house? Why not make conversation with them? Draw them out, make them laugh and feel at ease? Welcome, fellow, to this bordello. If she breaks the rules don’t explode out loud in front of her partner in crime. Let her take the brunt of your displeasure in private. And stop making the boys feel she’s the daughter of an old ogre. First of all the old ogre drew up a list under “absolutely forbidden” and another under “reluctantly allowed.” Absolutely forbidden were dates, single or double or triple—the next step being of course mass orgy. She might visit a candy bar with her girl friends, and there giggle-chat with occasional young males, while I waited in the car at a discreet distance; and I promised her that if her group were invited by a socially acceptable group in Butler’s Academy for Boys for their annual ball (heavily chaperoned, of course), I might consider the question whether a girl of fourteen can don her first “formal” (a kind of gown that makes thin-armed teen-agers look like flamingoes). Moreover, I promised her to throw a party at our house to which she would be allowed to invite her prettier girl friends and the nicer boys she would have met by that time at the Butler dance. But I was quite positive that as long as my regime lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck in a car, or go to boy-girl parties at the houses of schoolmates, or indulge out of my earshot in boy-girl telephone conversations, even if “only discussing his relations with a friend of mine.”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Why doe ye marvell, ye Orators, ye Lawyers, and Advocates, if many of our judges now a daies sell their judgements for money, when as in the beginning of the world one onely Grace corrupted the sentence betweene God and men, and that one rusticall Judge and shepheard appointed by the counsell of great Jupiter, sold his judgement for a little pleasure, which was the cause afterward of the ruine of all his progeny? By like manner of meane, was sentence given between the noble Greekes: For the noble and valiant personage Palamedes was convicted and attainted of treason, by false perswasion and accusation, and Ulisses being but of base condition, was preferred in Martiall prowesse above great Ajax. What judgement was there likewise amongst the Athenian lawyers, sage and expert in all sciences? Was not Socrates who was preferred by Apollo, above all the wise men in the world, by envy and malice of wicked persons impoysoned with the herbe Cicuta, as one that corrupted the youth of the countrey, whom alwaies be kept under by correction? For we see now a dayes many excellent Philosophers greatly desire to follow his sect, and by perpetual study to value and revolve his workes, but to the end I may not be reproved of indignation by any one that might say: What, shall we suffer an Asse to play the Philosopher? I will returne to my further purpose.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The campers, though younger than the usual cadets, were nevertheless submitted to the same military discipline. In fact our camping activity, beyond nature hikes and swimming lessons in a chlorinated indoor pool, consisted of nothing but drill and inspection. We learned to make a bed with hospital corners and to stretch the rough flannel blanket so taut a coin would bounce on it. Everyone owned precisely the same gear, stowed away in precisely the same manner. Shoes were placed just under the cot, each pair four inches from the next, each shoe of a pair two inches from its mate. Trumpets awakened us and sent us to bed. We marched to the mess hall where we were served cold mashed potatoes and boiled cabbage; more horribly at breakfast we ate bacon in congealed grease and scrambled eggs floating on hot water. After breakfast we marched double-time back to our tents, where we had an hour to prepare our quarters for white-glove inspection. Our captain saw everything and forgave nothing. He could find that single pair of kneesocks at the bottom of a steamer trunk that wasn’t properly rolled and he would hand out to the offender enough demerits to fill all his free time for the rest of the summer. He was a small, wiry man with black eyebrows so full that if they weren’t pressed or combed into place they would stick out in disconcerting clumps like brittle, badly cared for paintbrushes or could droop down over an eye in a droll effect at odds with the commands he was barking. His skin was a tan mask clapped over a face that always appeared seriously exhausted; the dark circles and drained, bloodless cheeks could be seen through the false health of his tan. I ascribed his weariness to irritation. In fact he was much older than the other instructors. He may even have been close to retirement age. He might have been ill and in pain and perhaps his irritation was due to his ailment. After lights-out he became someone new. Although he was still in uniform his tie was loosened, his voice seemed to have dropped an octave and a decibel, he had Scotch mysteriously and pleasantly on his breath, and his regard had grown gentle beneath its thatch of drooping eyebrows. He stopped by each tent, sat on the edge of each cot and spoke to each boy in a tone so intimate that the roommate couldn’t eavesdrop. My roommate was a tall, extremely shy and well-bred redhead from a small town in Iowa: someone who seemed not at all eager to confide in me or to seek my friendship or even comments, as though he recognized that this life, at least, was worth enduring only if it remained unexamined.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  son. But to the last budget of the ten, for the alchemy that I practised in the world, Minos, who may not err, condemned me.” And I said to the Poet: “Now was there ever people so vain as the Sienese? certainly the French not so by far.” Whereat the other leper, who heard me, responded to my words: “Except Stricca who contrived to spend so moderately; and Niccolò, who first discovered the costly usage of the clove, in the garden where such seed takes root; and except the company in which Caccia of Asciano squandered his vineyard and his great forest, and the Abbagliato showed his wit. 7 But that thou mayest know who thus seconds thee against the Sienese, sharpen thine eye towards me, that my face may give thee right response; so shalt thou see I am the shadow of Capocchio, 8 who falsified the metals by alchemy; and thou must recollect, if I rightly eye thee, how good an ape I was of Nature.” 1. See note 5 of the following canto. 2. It is now about one o’clock on the Saturday afternoon. 3. For Geri del Bello, the cousin of Dante’s father, see the table on p. 625. According to one account, he caused discord among the Sacchetti and was slain by a member of that family in consequence, his death not being avenged till thirty years later, when his nephews killed one of the Sacchetti. Buti says that the murder of Geri’s father was the origin of the feud. 4. Valdichiana and Maremma are selected as two of the most unhealthy districts of Tuscany, Sardinia being notorious for the same reason. 5. The inhabitants of the island of Ægina having died of a pestilence sent by Juno, Jupiter restored the population by transforming the ants into men, who were called Myrmidons (cf. Ovid, Metam. vii). 6. Griffolino of Arezzo obtained money from Albero of Siena by pretending that he could teach him the art of flying. On discovering that he had been tricked, Albero induced his father or patron, who was Bishop of Siena, to have Griffolino burned as an alchemist. 7. These four men were members of the Brigata Spendereccia, a club founded in the second half of the thirteenth century by twelve wealthy Sienese youths, who vied with each other in squandering their money on riotous living. The reference is to some expensive dish prepared with cloves, as to the nature of which the old commentators are not agreed. The garden is probably Siena. The Lano mentioned in Canto xiii also belonged to this “Spendthrift Brigade.” 8. Capocchio was probably a Florentine and a friend of Dante’s. The early commentators give anecdotes vouching for his skill as a draughtsman and his powers of mimicry. He was burnt at Siena in 1293, for practising alchemy.

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

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

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

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

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

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

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

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

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

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