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 My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  But living uptown had infected me with its own virus when I first moved there. I’d tried being one of those blond women speed walking up and down the Esplanade in spandex, Bluetooth in my ear like some self-important asshole, talking to whom—Reva? On the weekends, I did what young women in New York like me were supposed to do, at first: I got colonics and facials and highlights, worked out at an overpriced gym, lay in the hammam there until I went blind, and went out at night in shoes that cut my feet and gave me sciatica. I met interesting men at the gallery from time to time. I slept around in spurts, going out more, then less. Nothing ever panned out in terms of “love.” Reva often spoke about “settling down.” That sounded like death to me. “I’d rather be alone than anybody’s live-in prostitute,” I said to Reva. Still, a romantic urge surfaced now and then with Trevor, a recurring ex- boyfriend, my first and only. I was only eighteen, a freshman, when I met him at a Halloween party in a loft near Battery Park. I went with a dozen girls from the sorority I was rushing. Like most Halloween costumes, mine was an excuse to go around town dressed like a whore. I went as Detective Rizzoli, Whoopi Goldberg’s character in Fatal Beauty. In the first scene of the movie, she’s undercover and disguised as a hooker, so to copy her, I’d teased out my hair, wore a tight dress, high heels, gold lamé jacket, and white cat-eye sunglasses. Trevor had on an Andy Warhol costume: blond bobbed wig, thick black glasses, tight striped shirt. My first impression of him was that he was free spirited, clever, funny. That proved to be completely inaccurate. We left the party together and walked around for hours, lied to each other about our happy lives, ate pizza at midnight, took the Staten Island Ferry back and forth and watched the sun rise. I gave him my phone number at the dorm. By the time he finally called me, two weeks later, I’d become obsessed with him. He kept me on a long, tight leash for months—expensive meals, the occasional opera or ballet. He took my virginity at a ski lodge in Vermont on Valentine’s Day. It wasn’t a pleasurable experience, but I trusted he knew more about sex than I did, so when he rolled off and said, “That was amazing,” I believed him. He was thirty-three, worked for Fuji Bank at the World Trade Center, wore tailored suits, sent cars to pick me up at my dorm, then the sorority house sophomore year, wined and dined me, and asked for head with no shame in the back of cabs he charged to the company account.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  THE NEXT DAY, Reva came over to whine about her dying mother and prattle on about Ken. Her drinking seemed to be getting worse that summer. She pulled out a bottle of Jose Cuervo and a can of Diet Mountain Dew from her new huge lime green alligator-skin knockoff Gucci tote. “Want some tequila?” I shook my head no. Reva had an interesting method of mixing her drinks. After each sip of Diet Mountain Dew, she’d pour a little Jose Cuervo into the can to take up the space her sip had displaced, so that by the time she finished, she was drinking straight tequila. It was fascinating to me. I caught myself imagining the ratio of Diet Mountain Dew to Jose Cuervo in that can, what the formula would be to measure it sip by sip. I’d studied Zeno’s Paradox in high school algebra but never fully understood it. Infinite divisibility, the theory of halving, whatever it was. That philosophical quandary was exactly the kind of thing Trevor would have loved to explain to me. He’d sit across from me at dinner, slurping his ice water, muttering fluently about fractions of cents and the fluctuating price of oil, for example, all while his eyes scanned the room behind me as though to affirm to me that I was stupid, I was boring. Someone far better might be getting up from a table to go powder her nose. The thought stung. I still couldn’t accept that Trevor was a loser and a moron. I didn’t want to believe that I could have degraded myself for someone who didn’t deserve it. I was still stuck on that bit of vanity. But I was determined to sleep it away. “You’re still obsessed with Trevor, aren’t you,” Reva said, slurping from her can. “I think I have a tumor,” I replied, “in my brain.” “Forget Trevor,” Reva said. “You’ll meet someone better, if you ever leave your apartment.” She sipped and poured and went on about how “it’s all about your attitude,” and that “positive thinking is more powerful than negative thinking, even in equal amounts.” She’d recently read a book called How to Attract the Man of Your Dreams Using Self-hypnosis, and so she went on to explain to me the difference between “wish fulfillment” and “manifesting your own reality.” I tried not to listen. “Your problem is that you’re passive. You wait around for things to change, and they never will. That must be a painful way to live. Very disempowering,” she said, and burped. I had taken some Risperdal. I was feeling woozy. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘eat shit or die’?” I asked. Reva unscrewed the tequila and poured more into her can. “It’s ‘eat shit and die,’” she said.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I was all sharp corners at that point. Elbows, clavicles, hip points, the knobby vertebrae of my neck. My body was like a wooden sculpture in need of sanding. Reva would have been horrified to see me naked like that. “You look like a skeleton. You look like Kate Moss. No fair,” she would have said. The one time Reva saw me completely naked had been at the Russian bathhouse on East Tenth Street. But that was a year and a half earlier, before I’d gone on my “sleep diet,” Reva would go on to call it. She had wanted to “drop weight” before going to a pool party in the Hamptons for the Fourth of July. “I know it’s just water weight I’m sweating off,” Reva said. “But it’s a good quick fix.” We went on the one day of the week the baths were open to women only. Most of the girls wore bikinis. Reva wore a one-piece bathing suit and wrapped a towel around her hips every time she stood up. It seemed silly to me. I went nude. “What are you so uptight about, Reva?” I asked her while we were resting by the ice-water pool. “There aren’t any men around. Nobody’s ogling you.” “It’s not about the men,” she said. “Women are so judgmental. They’re always comparing.” “But why do you care? It’s not a contest.” “Yes, it is. You just can’t see it because you’ve always been the winner.” “That’s ridiculous,” I said. But I knew Reva was right. I was hot shit. People were always telling me I looked like Amber Valletta. Reva was pretty, too, of course. She looked like Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox put together. I didn’t tell her that then. She would have been prettier if she knew how to relax. “Chill,” I said. “It’s not that big a deal. You think people are going to judge you for not looking like a supermodel?” “That’s usually the first judgment people make in this city.” “What do you care what people think about you? New Yorkers are assholes.” “I care, okay? I want to fit in. I want to have a nice life.” “God, Reva. That’s pathetic.” Then she got up and disappeared inside the eucalyptus mist in the steam room. It was a mild skirmish, one of hundreds about how arrogant I was for not counting my blessings. Oh, Reva. The shower stall in her basement bathroom was small, the door clouded, gray glass. There was no soap, only a bottle of Prell. I washed my hair and stayed under the water until it ran cold. When I got out, I could hear the news blaring through the ceiling. The towels Reva had left for me on the sink were pink and seafoam green and smelled faintly of mildew. I rubbed the fog off the mirror and looked at myself again.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  children-colors … a passage in James Joyce: the colors of the spectrum; the “living rainbow” mimed by the “seven little graces.” It is from Finnegans Wake. The theme of the diversity and unity of all things is central to the constantly metamorphosing dream world of Finnegans Wake. The seven colors of the spectrum represent diversity and are most frequently personified by seven “rainbow girls” who oppose the archetypal mother, Anna Livia Plurabelle. The book opens with a reversed rainbow; the seven clauses in the second paragraph each contain a color, shifting from violet to red. Although not wrong, H.H.’s mention of a single “passage” is misleading because the motif is sustained throughout the Wake. To have the hateful Quilty “lift” from Finnegans Wake rather than Ulysses constitutes a rather private and thus thoroughly Joycean joke, based on Nabokov’s low opinion of the book he calls Punnigans Wake, or, in Bend Sinister, keeping its vast liquidity in mind, “Winnipeg Lake, ripple 585, Vico Press edition” (p. 114). “Ulysses towers over the rest of Joyce’s writings,” said Nabokov, “and in comparison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style the unfortunate Finnegans Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac I am.… Finnegans Wake’s façade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement” (Wisconsin Studies interview). Charles Kinbote sustains his maker’s negative opinion: “it would have been unseemly for a monarch to appear in the robes of learning at a university lectern and present to rosy youths Finnigan’s [sic—A.A.] Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid’s ‘incoherent transactions’ and of Southey’s Lingo-Grande (‘Dear Stumparumper,’ etc.) …” (Pale Fire, p. 76).

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Evade, evade. Never hand over a price list. Natasha paid me just $22,000 a year. Without my inheritance, I would have been forced to find a job that paid more money. And I would probably have had to live in Brooklyn, with roommates. I was lucky to have my dead parents’ money, I knew, but that was also depressing. Natasha’s star artist was Ping Xi, a pubescent-looking twenty-three- year-old from Diamond Bar, California. She thought he was a good investment because he was Asian American and had been kicked out of CalArts for firing a gun in his studio. He would add a certain cachet. “I want the gallery to get more cerebral,” she explained. “The market is moving away from emotion. Now it’s all about process and ideas and branding. Masculinity is hot right now.” Ping Xi’s work first appeared at Ducat as part of a group show called “Body of Substance,” and it consisted of splatter paintings, à la Jackson Pollock, made from his own ejaculate. He claimed that he’d stuck a tiny pellet of powdered colored pigment into the tip of his penis and masturbated onto huge canvases. He titled the abstract paintings as though each had some deep, dark political meaning. Blood- Dimmed Tide, and Wintertime in Ho Chi Minh City and Sunset over Sniper Alley. Decapitated Palestinian Child. Bombs Away, Nairobi. It was all nonsense, but people loved it. Natasha was particularly proud of the “Body of Substance” show because all the artists were under twenty-five, and she’d discovered them herself. She felt this would prove her gift for spotting genius. The only piece I liked in the show was by Aiyla Marwazi, a nineteen-year-old who went to Pratt. It was a huge white carpet from Crate & Barrel stained with bloody footprints and a wide bloody streak. It was supposed to look as though a bleeding body had been dragged across it. Natasha told me that the blood on the carpet was human, but she didn’t put that in the press release. “You can order anything online from China, apparently. Teeth. Bones. Body parts.” The bloody rug was priced at $75,000. Annie Pinker’s Cling Film series consisted of clumps of small objects wrapped in Saran Wrap. There was one of tiny marzipan fruits and rabbit- foot key chains, one of dried flowers and condoms. Rolled-up used thong panty liners and rubber bullets. A Big Mac and fries and cheap plastic rosaries. The artist’s baby teeth, or so she claimed, and Christmas-colored M&M’s. Cheap transgressions going for $25,000 a pop. And then there were the large-scale photographs of mannequins draped in flesh-colored fabric, by Max Welch. He was a total moron.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The speech that followed was all the more masterful for its calm and ironic contrast to Gladstone's. The members of Parliament were spellbound, and all of them agreed he had won the day. If Disraeli was the consummate social seducer and charmer, Gladstone was the Anti-Seducer. Of course he had supporters, mostly among the more puritanical elements of society—he twice defeated Disraeli in a general election. But he found it hard to broaden his appeal beyond the circle of believers. Women in particular found him insufferable. Of course they had no vote at the time, so they were little political liability; but Gladstone had no patience for a feminine point of view. A woman, he felt, had to learn to see things as a man did, and it was his purpose in life to educate those he felt were irrational or abandoned by God. It did not take long for Gladstone to wear on anyone's nerves. That is the nature of people who are convinced of some truth, but have no pa- tience for a different perspective or for dealing with someone else's psy- chology. These types are bullies, and in the short term they often get their way, particularly among the less aggressive. But they stir up a lot of resent- ment and unspoken antipathy, which eventually trips them up. People see through their righteous moral stance, which is most often a cover for a power play—morality is a form of power. A seducer never seeks to per- suade directly, never parades his or her morality, never lectures or imposes. Everything is subtle, psychological, and indirect. Symbol: The Crab. In a harsh world, the crab sur- vives by its hardened shell, by the threat of its pincers, and by burrowing into the sand. No one dares get too close. But the Crab cannot surprise its enemy and has little mobility. Its defensive strength is its supreme limitation. The Anti-Seducer • 145 Uses of Anti-Seduction T he best way to avoid entanglements with Anti-Seducers is to recognize them right away and give them a wide berth, but they often deceive us. Involvements with these types are painful, and are hard to disengage from, because the more emotional response you show, the more engaged you seem to be. Do not get angry—that may only encourage them or exacerbate their anti-seductive tendencies. Instead, act distant and indiffer- ent, pay no attention to them, make them feel how little they matter to you. The best antidote to an Anti-Seducer is often to be anti-seductive yourself. Cleopatra had a devastating effect on every man who crossed her path. Octavius—the future Emperor Augustus, and the man who would de- feat and destroy Cleopatra's lover Mark Antony—was well aware of her power, and defended himself against it by being always extremely amiable with her, courteous to the extreme, but never showing the slightest emo- tion, whether of interest or dislike. In other words, he treated her as if she were any other woman.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  And why should this night be different from any other night—despite the fact that we are flying in a 747 and eating unkosher food? “The Jewish science,” as anti-Semites call it. Turn every question upside down and shove it up the asker’s ass. Analysts all seem to be Talmudists who flunked out of seminary in the first year. I was reminded of one of my grandfather’s favorite gags: q : “Why does a Jew always answer a question with a question?” a : “And why should a Jew not answer a question with a question?” Ultimately though, it was the unimaginativeness of most analysts which got me down. OK, I’d been helped a lot by my first one—the German who was going to give a paper in Vienna—but he was a rare breed: witty, self-mocking, unpretentious. He had none of the flat-footed literal-mindedness which makes even the most brilliant psychoanalysts sound so pompous. But the others I’d gone to—they were so astonishingly literal-minded. The horse you are dreaming about is your father. The kitchen stove you are dreaming about is your mother. The piles of bullshit you are dreaming about are, in reality, your analyst. This is called the transference. No? You dream about breaking your leg on the ski slope. You have, in fact, just broken your leg on the ski slope and you are lying on the couch wearing a ten-pound plaster cast which has had you housebound for weeks, but has also given you a beautiful new appreciation of your toes and the civil rights of paraplegics. But the broken leg in the dream represents your own “mutilated genital.” You always wanted to have a penis and now you feel guilty that you have deliberately broken your leg so that you can have the pleasure of the cast, no? No! OK, let’s put the “mutilated genital” question aside. It’s a dead horse, anyway. And forget about your mother the oven and your analyst the pile of shit. What do we have left except the smell? I’m not talking about the first years of analysis when you’re hard at work discovering your own craziness so that you can get some work done instead of devoting your entire life to your neurosis. I’m talking about when both you and your husband have been in analysis as long as you can remember and it’s gotten to the point where no decision, no matter how small, can be made without both analysts having an imaginary caucus on a cloud above your head. You feel rather like the Trojan warriors in the Iliad with Zeus and Hera fighting above them. I’m talking about the time when your marriage has become a menage à quatre. You, him, your analyst, his analyst. Four in a bed.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

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

• From 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.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Natasha’s star artist was Ping Xi, a pubescent-looking twenty-three-year-old from Diamond Bar, California. She thought he was a good investment because he was Asian American and had been kicked out of CalArts for firing a gun in his studio. He would add a certain cachet. “I want the gallery to get more cerebral,” she explained. “The market is moving away from emotion. Now it’s all about process and ideas and branding. Masculinity is hot right now.” Ping Xi’s work first appeared at Ducat as part of a group show called “Body of Substance,” and it consisted of splatter paintings, à la Jackson Pollock, made from his own ejaculate. He claimed that he’d stuck a tiny pellet of powdered colored pigment into the tip of his penis and masturbated onto huge canvases. He titled the abstract paintings as though each had some deep, dark political meaning. Blood-Dimmed Tide, and Wintertime in Ho Chi Minh City and Sunset over Sniper Alley. Decapitated Palestinian Child. Bombs Away, Nairobi. It was all nonsense, but people loved it. Natasha was particularly proud of the “Body of Substance” show because all the artists were under twenty-five, and she’d discovered them herself. She felt this would prove her gift for spotting genius. The only piece I liked in the show was by Aiyla Marwazi, a nineteen-year-old who went to Pratt. It was a huge white carpet from Crate & Barrel stained with bloody footprints and a wide bloody streak. It was supposed to look as though a bleeding body had been dragged across it. Natasha told me that the blood on the carpet was human, but she didn’t put that in the press release. “You can order anything online from China, apparently. Teeth. Bones. Body parts.” The bloody rug was priced at $75,000. Annie Pinker’s Cling Film series consisted of clumps of small objects wrapped in Saran Wrap. There was one of tiny marzipan fruits and rabbit- foot key chains, one of dried flowers and condoms. Rolled-up used thong panty liners and rubber bullets. A Big Mac and fries and cheap plastic rosaries. The artist’s baby teeth, or so she claimed, and Christmas-colored M&M’s. Cheap transgressions going for $25,000 a pop. And then there were the large-scale photographs of mannequins draped in flesh-colored fabric, by Max Welch. He was a total moron. I suspected that he and Natasha were fucking. On a low pedestal in the corner, a small sculpture by the Brahams Brothers—a pair of toy monkeys made using human pubic hair. Each monkey had a little erection poking out of its fur. The penises were made of white titanium and had cameras in them positioned to take crotch shots of the viewer. The images were downloaded to a Web site. A specific password to log in to see the crotch shots cost a hundred dollars. The monkeys themselves cost a quarter million for the pair. • • •

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  But to be honest,” Reva began, “I’m concerned about your health. You’ve lost at least three pounds since you started taking all those medications.” Reva was expert at guessing the weights of things and people. “What about the long term? Are you going to take pills for the rest of your life?” “I’m not thinking that far ahead. And I might not live that long.” I yawned. “Don’t say that,” Reva said. “Look at me. Please.” I blinked my eyes open and turned to face the perfumed haze on the armchair. I squinted and focused. Reva was wearing a dress I recognized from a J. Crew catalogue the year before: a raw silk shift in a shade of pink I could only describe as “taffy.” Orange-hued lipstick. “Don’t get defensive, but you’re kind of off these days,” she said. “You’ve been sort of distant. And you’re just getting thinner and thinner.” I think that bothered Reva more than anything. She must have felt that I was cheating in the game of skinniness, which she had always worked so hard to play. We were about the same height, but I wore a size 2 and Reva wore a 4. “A six when I’m PMSing.” The discrepancy between our bodies was huge in Reva’s world. “I just don’t think it’s healthy to sleep all day,” she said, popping a few sticks of gum in her mouth. “Maybe all you need is a shoulder to cry on. You’d be surprised how much better you’ll feel after a good cry. Better than any pill can make you feel.” When Reva gave advice, it sounded as though she were reading a bad made-for-TV movie script. “A walk around the block could do wonders for your mood,” she said. “Aren’t you hungry?” “I’m not in the mood for food,” I said. “And I don’t feel like going anywhere.” “Sometimes you need to act as if.” “Dr. Tuttle can probably give you something to get rid of your gum addiction,” I told her flatly. “They have pills for everything now.” “I don’t want to get rid of it,” Reva replied. “And it’s not an addiction. It’s a habit. And I enjoy chewing gum. It’s one of the few things in my life that makes me feel good about myself, because I do it for my own pleasure. Gum and the gym. Those are like my therapy.” “But you could have the medication instead,” I argued. “And spare your jaw from all that chewing.” I didn’t really care about Reva’s jaw. “Uh-huh,” she replied. She was looking straight at me, but was so entranced by her gum chewing, her mind seemed to drift off.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  For obvious reasons, I preferred my house to his for the games of chess we had two or three times weekly. He looked like some old battered idol as he sat with his pudgy hands in his lap and stared at the board as if it were a corpse. Wheezing he would meditate for ten minutes—then make a losing move. Or the good man, after even more thought, might utter: Au roi! with a slow old-dog woof that had a gargling sound at the back of it which made his jowls wabble; and then he would lift his circumflex eyebrows with a deep sigh as I pointed out to him that he was in check himself. Sometimes, from where we sat in my cold study I could hear Lo’s bare feet practicing dance techniques in the living room downstairs; but Gaston’s outgoing senses were comfortably dulled, and he remained unaware of those naked rhythms—and-one, and-two, and-one, and-two, weight transferred on a straight right leg, leg up and out to the side, and-one, and-two, and only when she started jumping, opening her legs at the height of the jump, and flexing one leg, and extending the other, and flying, and landing on her toes—only then did my pale, pompous, morose opponent rub his head or cheek as if confusing those distant thuds with the awful stabs of my formidable Queen. Sometimes Lola would slouch in while we pondered the board—and it was every time a treat to see Gaston, his elephant eye still fixed on his pieces, ceremoniously rise to shake hands with her, and forthwith release her limp fingers, and without looking once at her, descend again into his chair to topple into the trap I had laid for him. One day around Christmas, after I had not seen him for a fortnight or so, he asked me “Et toutes vos fillettes, elles vont bien?” from which it became evident to me that he had multiplied my unique Lolita by the number of sartorial categories his downcast moody eye had glimpsed during a whole series of her appearances: blue jeans, a skirt, shorts, a quilted robe. I am loath to dwell so long on the poor fellow (sadly enough, a year later, during a voyage to Europe, from which he did not return, he got involved in a sale histoire, in Naples of all places!). I would have hardly alluded to him at all had not his Beardsley existence had such a queer bearing on my case. I need him for my defense. There he was, devoid of any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glum repulsive fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life, triumphantly ignorant of the English language—there he was in priggish New England, crooned over by the old and caressed by the young—oh, having a grand time and fooling everybody; and here was I.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  She was trying to embolden herself by making eye contact with the enemy. I could see the fear in her eyes, as though she were staring into a black hole she might fall into. “At least I’m making an effort to change and go after what I want,” she said. “Besides sleeping, what do you want out of life?” I chose to ignore her sarcasm. “I wanted to be an artist, but I had no talent,” I told her. “Do you really need talent?” That might have been the smartest thing Reva ever said to me. “Yes,” I replied. She got up and ticktocked across the floor in her heels and shut the door softly behind her. I took a few Xanax and ate a few animal crackers and stared at the wrinkled seat of the empty armchair. I got up and put in Tin Cup, and watched it halfheartedly as I dozed on the sofa. Reva called half an hour later and left a voice mail saying she’d already forgiven me for hurting her feelings, that she was worried about my health, that she loved me and wouldn’t abandon me, “no matter what.” My jaw unclenched listening to the message, as though I’d been gritting my teeth for days. Maybe I had been. Then I pictured her sniffling through Gristedes, picking out the food she’d eat and vomit up. Her loyalty was absurd. This was what kept us going. “You’ll be fine,” I told Reva when she said her mother was starting a third round of chemo. “Don’t be a spaz,” I said when her mother’s cancer spread to her brain. • • • I CAN’T POINT TO any one event that resulted in my decision to go into hibernation. Initially, I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything. I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me. I started seeing Dr. Tuttle in January 2000. It started off very innocently: I was plagued with misery, anxiety, a wish to escape the prison of my mind and body. Dr. Tuttle confirmed that this was nothing unusual. She wasn’t a good doctor. I had found her name in the phone book. “You’ve caught me at a good moment,” she said the first time I called. “I just finished rinsing the dishes. Where did you find my number?” “In the Yellow Pages.” I liked to think that I’d picked Dr. Tuttle at random, that there was something fated about our relationship, divine in some way, but in truth, she’d been the only psychiatrist to answer the phone at eleven at night on a Tuesday. I’d left a dozen messages on answering machines by the time Dr. Tuttle picked up. “The biggest threats to brains nowadays are all the microwave ovens,” Dr. Tuttle explained on the phone that night. “Microwaves, radio waves.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  The whole notion of fear learning is fraught with other problems. Rats in threatening situations do not always freeze. When you put them into a small box with tones and shocks arriving together at unpredictable times, rats indeed freeze, but in a larger enclosure, rats run away, unless they’re cornered, in which case they attack. If you restrain the rat during the tone (which shouldn’t matter, because the rat is going to freeze anyway), its heart rate goes down instead of up. Additionally, not all of these varied behaviors require the amygdala. To date, scientists have identified at least three alleged fear pathways in the rat brain, each associated with a specific behavior, all of them products of the mental inference fallacy. Finally, a simple behavior like freezing is supported by multiple circuits within a distributed network that is not specific to freezing or fear.47 In a nutshell, you can’t study fear by shocking rats unless at the outset you have defined “fear” circularly as “the freezing response of a shocked rat.” Humans, like rats, act in various ways when threatened. We might freeze, flee, or attack. We might also crack jokes, faint, or ignore what’s going on. Such behaviors might be evoked by distinct circuitry in the brain that is shared among mammals, but they are not inherently emotional, and they’re not evidence that emotions have biological essences. Nevertheless, some scientists continue to write that they’ve isolated highly complex mental states in animals. Baby rats, for example, when separated from their mother after birth, make a high-pitched noise that sounds like crying. Some scientists inferred that the brain circuitry responsible for the crying must be the circuitry for distress. But these baby rats aren’t sad. They’re cold. The sound is just a byproduct as the baby rats try to regulate their body temperature—part of their body budget—a task normally done by their absent mothers. It has nothing to do with emotion. The mental inference fallacy strikes again.48 From now on, any time that you read an article about animal emotion, watch for this pattern. If a scientist labels a behavior like freezing using a mental state word like “fear,” you should think, “Aha, the mental inference fallacy!” To be fair, it’s extremely hard for scientists to avoid the trap of mental inference. Grant agencies prefer to fund research that is directly relevant to humans. Scientists must also recognize that they are performing a mental inference in the first place, which is a nontrivial feat of introspection. And then they must be brave enough to face the criticism and scorn of their colleagues for swimming against the tide. But it can be done.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  a case history: among other things, Lolita parodies such studies, and Nabokov’s quarrel with psychoanalysis is well-known. No Foreword to his translated novels seems complete unless a few words are addressed to “the Viennese delegation,” who are also invoked frequently throughout the works. Asked in a 1966 National Educational Television interview why he “detest[ed] Dr. Freud,” Nabokov replied: “I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons” (this half-hour interview may be rented for a nominal fee from the Audio-Visual Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47401; the film, notes their catalog, is “available to responsible individuals and groups both in and out of Indiana”). When I queried Nabokov about Freud (by now a trite question), just to see if he could rise to the occasion once more, he obliged me: “Oh, I am not up to discussing again that figure of fun. He is not worthy of more attention than I have granted him in my novels and in Speak, Memory. Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care” (Wisconsin Studies interview). In Speak, Memory, Nabokov recalls having seen from a Biarritz window “a huge custard-colored balloon … being inflated by Sigismond Lejoyeux, a local aeronaut” (p. 156); and “the police state of sexual myth” (p. 300) is in Ada called “psykitsch” (p. 29). The good doctor’s paronomastic avatars are “Dr. Sig Heiler” (p. 28), and “A Dr. Froid … who may have been an émigré brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr. Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu” (p. 27). Since no parodist could improve on Erich Fromm’s realization that “The little cap of red velvet in the German version of Little Red Riding Hood is a symbol of menstruation” (from The Forgotten Language, 1951, p. 240), or Dr. Oskar Pfister’s felicitously expressed thought that “When a youth is all the time sticking his finger through his buttonhole … the analytic teacher knows that the appetite of the lustful one knows no limit in his phantasies” (from The Psychoanalytical Method, 1917, p. 79), Nabokov the literary anatomist simply includes these treasures in Pale Fire (p. 271). See Lolita, [PART ONE] c9.1, [PART TWO] c3.1, c11.1, c23.1, and c32.1; and patients … had witnessed their own conception, King Sigmund, auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac, and Viennese medicine man.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Since we’d met junior year, Reva could never soberly admit to any desire that was remotely uncouth. But she wasn’t perfect. “She’s no white lily,” as my mother would have said. I’d known for years that Reva was bulimic. I knew she masturbated with an electric neck massager because she was too embarrassed to buy a proper vibrator from a sex shop. I knew she was deep in debt from college and years of maxed-out credit cards, and that she shoplifted testers from the beauty section of the health food store near her apartment on the Upper West Side. I’d seen the tester stickers on various items in the huge bag of makeup she carried around wherever she went. She was a slave to vanity and status, which was not unusual in a place like Manhattan, but I found her desperation especially irritating. It made it hard for me to respect her intelligence. She was so obsessed with brand names, conformity, “fitting in.” She made regular trips down to Chinatown for the latest knockoff designer handbags. She’d given me a Dooney & Bourke wallet for Christmas once. She got us matching fake Coach key rings. Ironically, her desire to be classy had always been the déclassé thorn in her side. “Studied grace is not grace,” I once tried to explain. “Charm is not a hairstyle. You either have it or you don’t. The more you try to be fashionable, the tackier you’ll look.” Nothing hurt Reva more than effortless beauty, like mine. When we’d watched Before Sunrise on video one day, she’d said, “Did you know Julie Delpy’s a feminist? I wonder if that’s why she’s not skinnier. No way they’d cast her in this role if she were American. See how soft her arms are? Nobody here tolerates arm flab. Arm flab is a killer. It’s like the SAT’s. You don’t even exist if you’re below 1400.” “Does it make you happy that Julie Delpy has arm flab?” I’d asked her. “No,” she’d said after some consideration. “Happiness is not what I’d call it. More like satisfaction.” Jealousy was one thing Reva didn’t seem to feel the need to hide from me. Ever since we’d formed a friendship, if I told her that something good happened, she’d whine “No fair” often enough that it became a kind of catchphrase that she would toss off casually, her voice flat.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  They expected the rising succession of erotic scenes; when these stopped, the readers stopped, too, and felt bored and let down. This, I suspect, is one of the reasons why not all the four firms read the typescript to the end. Whether they found it pornographic or not did not interest me. Their refusal to buy the book was based not on my treatment of the theme but on the theme itself, for there are at least three themes which are utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned. The two others are: a Negro- White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106. Some of the reactions were very amusing: one reader suggested that his firm might consider publication if I turned my Lolita into a twelve-year-old lad and had him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in a barn, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, “realistic” sentences (“He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy.” Etc.). Although everybody should know that I detest symbols and allegories (which is due partly to my old feud with Freudian voodooism and partly to my loathing of generalizations devised by literary mythists and sociologists), an otherwise intelligent reader who flipped through the first part described Lolita as “Old Europe debauching young America,” while another flipper saw in it “Young America debauching old Europe.” Publisher X, whose advisers got so bored with Humbert that they never got beyond here, had the naïveté to write me that Part Two was too long. Publisher Y, on the other hand, regretted there were no good people in the book. Publisher Z said if he printed Lolita, he and I would go to jail. No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master’s chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown. I presume there exist readers who find titillating the display of mural words in those hopelessly banal and enormous novels which are typed out by the thumbs of tense mediocrities and called “powerful” and “stark” by the reviewing hack. There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  (I say this as a seasoned world traveler.) Then there’s the filthy rag of a public towel, hanging over a tiny wash basin which has only a cold water tap (for you to dribble cold water over your right hand—or whichever hand you happen to use). I did quite a lot of thinking about toilets when I lived in Europe. (That was how crazy Germany made me.) I once even attempted a classification of people on the basis of toilets. “The History of the World Through Toilets” (I optimistically wrote at the top of a clean page in my notebook) “an epic poem???” British: British toilet paper. A way of life. Coated. Refusing to absorb, soften, or bend (stiff upper lip). Often property of government. In the ultimate welfare state even the t.p. is printed with propaganda. The British toilet as the last refuge of colonialism. Water rushing overhead like Victoria Falls, & you an explorer. The spray in your face. For one brief moment (as you flush) Britannia rules the waves again. The pull chain is elegant. A bell cord in a stately home (open to the public, for pennies, on Sundays). German: German toilets observe class distinctions. In third-class carriages: rough brown paper. In first class: white paper. Called Spezial Krepp. (Requires no translation.) But the German toilet is unique for its little stage (all the world’s a) on which shit falls. This enables you to take a long look, choose among political candidates, and think of things to tell your analyst. Also good for diamond miners trying to smuggle out gems by bowel. German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything. Italian: Sometimes you can read bits of Corriere della Sera before you wipe your ass on the news. But in general the toilets run swift here and the shit disappears long before you can leap up and turn around to admire it. Hence Italian art. Germans have their own shit to admire. Lacking this, Italians make sculptures and paintings. French: The old hotels in Paris with two Brobdingnagian iron footprints straddling a stinking hole. Orange trees planted in Versailles to cover cesspool smell. Il est defendu de faire pipi dans la chambre du Roi. Lights in Paris toilets which only go on when you turn the lock. I somehow cannot make sense of French philosophy & literature vis à vis the French approach to merde. The French are very abstract thinkers—but they could also produce a poet of particularity like Ponge, who writes an epic poem on soap. How does this connect with French toilets? Japanese: Squatting as a basic fact of life in the Orient. Toilet basin recessed in the floor. Flower arrangement behind. This has something to do with Zen.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I had watched the police, one sunny afternoon, beat an old, one armed Arab peanut vendor senseless in the streets, and I had watched the unconcerned faces of the French on the cafe ter races, and the congested faces of the Arabs. Yes, I could be lieve it: and here it came. 370 NO NAM E IN THE STRE ET Not without warning, and not without precedent: but only poets, since they must excavate and recreate history, have ever learned anything tram it. I returned to New York in 1952, after tour years away, at the height of the national convulsion called McCarthyism. This convulsion did not surprise me, tor I don't think that it was possible tor Americans to surprise me anymore; but it was very tiightening, in many ways, and tor many reasons. I real ized, tor one thing, that I was saved tram direct--or, more accurately, public -exposure to the American Inquisitors only by my color, my obscurity, and my comparative youth: or, in other words, by the lack, on their parts, of any imagination. I was just a shade too young to have had any legally recog nizable political history. A boy of thirteen is a minor, and, in the eyes of the Republic, if he is black, and lives in a black ghetto, he was born to carry packages; but, in tact, at thirteen, I had been a convinced tellow traveler. I marched in one May Day parade, carrying banners, shouting, East Side, West Side, all around the town, We want the landlords to tear the slums down! I didn't know anything about Communism, but I knew a lot about slums. By the time I was nineteen, I was a Trots kyite, having learned a great deal by then, if not about Com munism, at least about Stalinists. The convulsion was the more ironical for me in that I had been an anti-Communist when America and Russia were allies. I had nearly been mur dered on 14th Street, one evening, for putting down too loudly, in the presence of patriots, that memorable contribu tion to the War effort, the Warner Brothers production of Mission To Moscow. The very same patriots now wanted to burn the film and hang the film makers, and Warners, during the McCarthy era, went to no little trouble to explain their film away. Warners was abject, and so was nearly everybody else, it was a tout, ignoble time: and my contempt tor most American intellectuals, and/or liberals dates from what I ob served of their manhood then. I say most, not all, but the exceptions constitute a remarkable pantheon, even, or, rather, especially those who did not survive the flames into which their lives and their reputations were hurled.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The struggl e, therefore, that now begins in the world is extremely complex, involving the historical role of Christianity in the realm of power-that is, politics-and in the realm of morals. In the realm of power, Christianity has operated with an unmit igated arrogance and cruelt y-neces sarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels. This particular true faith, moreover, is more deeply concerned about the soul than it is about the body, to which fact the flesh (and the corpses) of countless infidels bears wit ness. It goes without sayi ng, then, that whoever questions the authority of the true faith also contests the right of the nations that hold this faith to rule over him-contests, in short, their title to his land. The spreading of the Gospel, regardless of the motives or the integrity or the heroism of some of the missionaries, was an absolutely indispensable justifi cation for the planting of the flag. Priests and nuns and school-teachers helped to protect and sanctifY the power that was so ruthlessly being used by people who were indeed seeking a cit y, but not one in the heavens, and one to be made, very definitely, by captive hands. The Christian church itself-again, as distin guished from some of its minister s-sanctified and rejoiced in the conquests of the flag, and encouraged, if it did not for mulate, the belief that conquest, with the resulting relative well-being of the Western populations, was proof of the favor of God. God had come a long way from the desert-but then so had Allah, though in a very different direction. God, going north, and rising on the wings of power, had become white, and Allah, out of power, and on the dark side of Heaven, had become-for all practical purposes, anyway-black. Thus, in the realm of morals the role of Christianit y has been, at best, ambivalent. Even leaving out of account the remarkable ar rogance that assumed that the ways and morals of others were inferior to those of Christians, and that they theref ore had every right, and could usc any means, to change them, the collision between cult ures-and the schizophrenia in the mind THE FIR E NE XT TIME of Christend om-had rendered the domain of morals as chart less as the sea once was, and as treacherous as the sea still is. It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hy pocrisies of the Christian church.