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 Detransition, Baby (2021)

  In the stone courtyard of the church, Thalia gives Reese a hug, then asks, “Want to hear a joke I thought up during the service?” Reese does. The joke is this: Q: What do you call a remake of a nineties romantic comedy where you cast trans women in all the roles? A: Four Funerals and a Funeral. Another girl, early in transition, wearing a black velvet dress, is standing near them. Reese recognizes her as one of those Twitter girls eager to offer theory-laden takes on gender. The girl has listened in on the joke and shakes her head—insensitive!—staring at them over her black-framed glasses with watery, wounded eyes. Reese pulls rank. “Oh come on.” She points to Thalia. “You know who gave Tammi her first shot? Thalia. Right in the butt. Who are you to say if she can make a joke or not?” “Maybe just not where other mourners can hear it,” the girl sniffs. “Here’s a better idea,” Reese snaps. “Maybe don’t stand around eavesdropping.” “Reese,” says Thalia simply, “it’s fine.” Then to the girl: “Sorry.” The girl bobs a tight acknowledgment, then raises a brow at Reese, waiting for her apology as well. But Reese refuses. She is granite willing the girl to go away. Fuck that girl. Let her go to as many of these things as Reese has been to and see if she doesn’t manage to develop a sense of humor. Eventually, the girl leaves, and almost immediately Reese regrets whatever enmity she made for herself in that unnecessary encounter. She’s lost patience for the baby transes—never a good look on an older girl. A little fountain burbles in the courtyard. It smells pleasantly of algae, and Reese moves closer, drawn by the cool of ionized air. Pennies flash in the pool at the base of the fountain, which seems blasphemous: wishing on coins in a church courtyard, when you could be inside praying for whatever it is that you want. “IT heard this thing’—Thalia holds the back of Reese’s elbow, pulling Reese back to the present—“from Andy, who made arrangements with the funeral home. He went to those two older women who run that family funeral home in Bed-Stuy—those two nice black ladies who did Eve’s funeral. After a few hours of setting things up, one of the two ladies asks him, ‘I’m sorry, but was Tammi a transgender woman?’ And Andy goes, ‘Yeah,’ and they, like, kind of exchange looks. One of them says they’re going to change their plans and will be getting the body from the morgue within the next few hours to bring to their funeral home.” “Why? Why would it matter that she was trans?” “The accident was out on Long Island, and I guess she got transferred to a morgue here. Apparently one where the morgue workers gawk at bodies of trans women—poke and laugh and shit.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  How is it, Reese wonders, that a bunch of New York men wearing flannel and slamming whiskey in a cabin is seen as a sorely needed release of their barely tamed and authentic manliness, but when she, a trans, delights in dolling up, she’s trying too hard? It’s not that Reese thinks her desire to dress up reflects some authentic self. It’s just that, unlike bros, she’s willing to call dress-up time what it is. Meanwhile, this starched woman has practically soaked her panties over the homoerotic escapades of her man upstate. Can you imagine if Reese confided in these women, with the same apparent horniness, about her Truvada birth control regimen? Social disaster! She decides for the ten thousandth time that heterosexual cis people, while willfully ignoring it, have staked their whole sexuality on a bet that each other’s genders are real. If only cis heterosexuals would realize that, like trans women, the activity in which they are indulging is a big self-pleasuring lie that has little to do with their actual personhood, they'd be free to indulge in a whole new flexible suite of hot ways to lie to each other. Sexy-Smart clinks on a wineglass with a spoon to ask for everyone’s attention, which mercifully averts Reese’s building desire to tender her opinions on gender to someone. “And now, the moment we've been waiting for,” Sexy-Smart says seductively, although, from the way that the women seem content to stay in the kitchen eating snacks, there is no way that anyone has been waiting for this moment. “We can move to the living room for the dOTERRA essential oils demonstration!” Shuffling with the herd into the sunset-drenched living room, Reese and Katrina take a comfortable love seat, and the other women settle in on the couch, chairs, and plush rug, in the way Reese remembered from middle school sleepovers, everyone finding a spot to watch the TV. Only instead of a TV there’s Sexy-Smart handing out brochures, and instead of blankets or pillows, each woman sets beside her a designer leather tote handbag in differing brands but the same essential boxy style, the sort that gets sold at Nordstrom to women who aspire to vacation in the Hamptons. Reese feels entitled to be judgy about boxy tote handbags, because she herself carries at that moment her own boxy Coach tote and her secret self aspires to aspire to vacation in the Hamptons. Sexy-Smart opens a copy of the brochure she has passed out, indicates a blank box, and tells the assembled women to write all of their ailments—both physical and mental—within that square.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  His smile is rueful, but he looks vaguely disappointed. “Business is all about people, Miss Steele, and I’m very good at judging people. I know how they tick, what makes them flourish, what doesn’t, what inspires them, and how to incentivize them. I employ an exceptional team, and I reward them well.” He pauses and fixes me with his gray stare. “My belief is to achieve success in any scheme, one has to make oneself master of that scheme, know it inside and out, know every detail. I work hard, very hard to do that. I make decisions based on logic and facts. I have a natural gut instinct that can spot and nurture a good solid idea and good people. The bottom line is it’s always down to good people.” “Maybe you’re just lucky.” This isn’t on Kate’s list—but he’s so arrogant. His eyes flare momentarily in surprise. “I don’t subscribe to luck or chance, Miss Steele. The harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. It really is all about having the right people on your team and directing their energies accordingly. I think it was Harvey Firestone who said ‘The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.’” “You sound like a control freak.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. “Oh, I exercise control in all things, Miss Steele,” he says without a trace of humor in his smile. I look at him, and he holds my gaze steadily, impassive. My heartbeat quickens, and my face flushes again. Why does he have such an unnerving effect on me? His overwhelming good looks maybe? The way his eyes blaze at me? The way he strokes his index finger against his lower lip? I wish he’d stop doing that. “Besides, immense power is acquired by assuring yourself, in your secret reveries, that you were born to control things,” he continues, his voice soft. “Do you feel that you have immense power?” Control freak. “I employ over forty thousand people. That gives me a certain sense of responsibility—power, if you will. If I were to decide I was no longer interested in the telecommunications business and sell, twenty thousand people would struggle to make their mortgage payments after a month or so.” My mouth drops open. I am staggered by his lack of humility. “Don’t you have a board to answer to?” I ask, disgusted. “I own my company. I don’t have to answer to a board.” He raises an eyebrow. Of course, I would know this if I had done some research. But holy crap, he’s arrogant. I change tack. “And do you have any interests outside your work?” “I have varied interests, Miss Steele.” A ghost of a smile touches his lips. “Very varied.” And for some reason, I’m confounded and heated by his steady gaze. His eyes are alight with some wicked thought. “But if you work so hard, what do you do to chill out?”

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  patterned, organized, rich, deep, genuine, sensitive, sophisticated, real, living, concrete, natural, true to life, and understanding.” This is an attitude we can all recognize. When a human competes with a machine, whether it is John Henry a-hammerin’ on the mountain or the chess genius Garry Kasparov facing off against the computer Deep Blue, our sympathies lie with our fellow human. The aversion to algorithms making decisions that affect humans is rooted in the strong preference that many people have for the natural over the synthetic or artificial. Asked whether they would rather eat an organic or a commercially grown apple, most people prefer the “all natural” one. Even after being informed that the two apples taste the same, have identical nutritional value, and are equally healthful, a majority still prefer the organic fruit. Even the producers of beer have found that they can increase sales by putting “All Natural” or “No Preservatives” on the label. The deep resistance to the demystification of expertise is illustrated by the reaction of the European wine community to Ashenfelter’s formula for predicting the price of Bordeaux wines. Ashenfelter’s formula answered a prayer: one might thus have expected that wine lovers everywhere would be grateful to him for demonstrably improving their ability to identify the wines that later would be good. Not so. The response in French wine circles, wrote The New York Times, ranged “somewhere between violent and hysterical.” Ashenfelter reports that one oenophile called his findings “ludicrous and absurd.” Another scoffed, “It is like judging movies without actually seeing them.” The prejudice against algorithms is magnified when the decisions are consequential. Meehl remarked, “I do not quite know how to alleviate the horror some clinicians seem to experience when they envisage a treatable case being denied treatment because a ‘blind, mechanical’ equation misclassifies him.” In contrast, Meehl and other proponents of algorithms have argued strongly that it is unethical to rely on intuitive judgments for important decisions if an algorithm is available that will make fewer mistakes. Their rational argument is compelling, but it runs against a stubborn psychological reality: for most people, the cause of a mistake matters. The story of a child dying because an algorithm made a mistake is more poignant than the story of the same tragedy occurring as a result of human error, and the difference in emotional intensity is readily translated into a moral preference. Fortunately, the hostility to algorithms will probably soften as their role in everyday life continues to expand. Looking for books or music we might enjoy, we appreciate recommendations generated by software. We take it for granted that decisions about credit limits are made without the direct intervention of any

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  “Of course.” Christian pushes a button, and the music is caressing me once more. It’s a gentle, slow, sweet, and sure assault on my aural senses. “You like classical music?” I ask, hoping for a rare insight into his personal preferences. “My taste is eclectic, Anastasia, everything from Thomas Tallis to the Kings of Leon. It depends on my mood. You?” “Me, too. Though I don’t know who Thomas Tallis is.” He turns and gives me a quick unreadable look before his eyes are back on the road. “I’ll play it for you sometime. He’s a sixteenth-century British composer. Tudor, church choral music.” Christian grins. “Sounds very esoteric, I know, but it’s also magical.” He presses a button and the Kings of Leon start singing. Hmm, this I know. “Sex on Fire.” How appropriate. The music is interrupted by the sound of a cell phone ringing over the sound system speakers. Christian hits a button on the steering wheel. “Grey,” he snaps. He’s so brusque. A rasping, disembodied voice comes over the speakers. “Mr. Grey, it’s Welch here. I have the information you require.” “Good. Email it to me. Anything to add?” “No, sir.” He presses the button, then the call ceases and the music is back. No goodbye or thanks. I’m so glad that I never seriously entertained the thought of working for him. I shudder at the very idea. He’s just too controlling and cold with his employees. The music cuts off again for the phone. “Grey.” “The NDA has been emailed to you, Mr. Grey.” A woman’s voice. “Good. That’s all, Andrea.” “Good day, sir.” Christian hangs up by pressing a button on the steering wheel. The music is on very briefly when the phone rings again. Holy hell, is this his life—constant nagging phone calls? “Grey,” he snaps. “Hi, Christian, d’you get laid?” Christian sighs. “Hello, Elliot. I’m on speakerphone, and I’m not alone in the car.” “Who’s with you?” Christian rolls his eyes. “Anastasia Steele.” “Hi, Ana!” Ana! “Hello, Elliot.” “Heard a lot about you,” Elliot murmurs huskily. Christian frowns. “Don’t believe a word Kate says.” Elliot laughs. “I’m dropping Anastasia off now.” Christian emphasizes my full name. “Shall I pick you up?” “Sure.” “See you shortly.” Christian hangs up, and the music is back. “Why do you insist on calling me Anastasia?” “Because it’s your name.” “I prefer Ana.” “Do you, now?” We are almost at my apartment. It’s not taken long. “Anastasia,” he muses. I scowl at him, but he ignores my expression. “What happened in the elevator—it won’t happen again. Well, not unless it’s premeditated.” He pulls up outside my apartment. I belatedly realize he’s not asked me where I live—yet he knows. But then he sent the books; of course he knows where I live. What able, cell phone–tracking, helicopter-owning stalker wouldn’t? Why won’t he kiss me again? I pout at the thought. I don’t understand. Honestly, his surname should be Cryptic, not Grey.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  They had met when they were college students in Ann Arbor. Both had been involved in brief affairs with the same man, who unfortunately turned out to be an uninteresting swine, something that took each of them an unduly long time to realize. Leisha had been the first; he had met Susan only a month after they broke up. She’d become aware of Leisha at a party given by his roommate, Leisha’s then-current lover. Susan had been standing against a wall in the dark, drinking vodka from a plastic cup and watching this theatrical little creature flap drunkenly around a clearly more sober partner on the dance floor, all elbows, jerking hips and senseless knee-bending dips. Her partner suddenly hoisted her up and solemnly circled the room, holding her aloft over his head like a sacrifice as she squeaked, “Give me a break, Eliot, pulease!” Susan disliked her immediately. She thought: I’m a much better dancer, and, putting her drink on the windowsill, went to demonstrate it. (Much later she learned that Leisha hadn’t thought much of her dancing either. “It was like, okay, what does a girl do when she dances? She rotates her hips and sticks out her breasts a lot and undulates.”) Susan was aware of her intermittently after that—at parties, coffee shops, movies or walking at a distance with her stiff-hipped, mobile-necked poodle walk. She would hear Leisha’s name mentioned in gossip, usually in a tone of amused tolerance and in the context of some blighted romance, with the word “crazy” figuring prominently. Then Susan became friendly with a girl named Alex, who was, coincidentally, sharing a house with Leisha and another girl. Alex didn’t like Leisha either; she and Susan loved to talk about how trivial and fake she was.

• From The Lover (1984)

  I tell him I’m going to introduce him to my family. He wants to run away. I laugh. He can only express his feelings through parody. I discover he hasn’t the strength to love me in opposition to his father, to possess me, take me away. He often weeps because he can’t find the strength to love beyond fear. His heroism is me, his cravenness is his father’s money. Whenever I mention my brothers he’s overcome by this fear, as if unmasked. He thinks my people all expect a proposal of marriage. He knows he’s lost, done for already in my family’s eyes, that for them he can only become more lost, and as a result lose me. He says he went to study at a business school in Paris, he tells the truth at last, says he didn’t do any work and his father stopped his allowance, sent him his return ticket, and he had to leave. This retreat is his tragedy. He didn’t finish the course at the business school. He says he hopes to finish it here by correspondence. The meetings with the family began with the big meals in Cholon. When my mother and brothers come to Saigon I tell him he has to invite them to the expensive Chinese restaurants they don’t know, have never been to before. These evenings are all the same. My brothers gorge themselves without saying a word to him. They don’t look at him either. They can’t. They’re incapable of it. If they could, if they could make the effort to see him, they’d be capable of studying, of observing the elementary rules of society. During these meals my mother’s the only one who speaks, she doesn’t say much, especially the first few times, just a few comments about the dishes as they arrive, the exorbitant price, then silence. He, the first couple of times, plunges in and tries to tell the story of his adventures in Paris, but in vain. It’s as if he hadn’t spoken, as if nobody had heard. His attempt founders in silence. My brothers go on gorging. They gorge as I’ve never seen anyone else gorge, anywhere. He pays. He counts out the money. Puts it in the saucer. Everyone watches. The first time, I remember, he lays out seventy-seven piastres. My mother nearly shrieks with laughter. We get up to leave. No one says thank you. No one ever says thank you for the excellent dinner, or hello, or goodbye, or how are you, no one ever says anything to anyone.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Anyway, I thought you guys should know.” “Thanks,” I said curtly, and she stood for a while, looking at us, her mouth opening as if to speak, but the Colonel was staring at her through half-closed eyes, his jaw jutting out and his distaste uncontained. I understood how he felt: I didn’t believe in ghosts who used Morse code to communicate with people they’d never liked. And I disliked the possibility that Alaska would give someone else peace but not me. “God, people like that shouldn’t be allowed to live,” he said after she left. “It was pretty stupid.” “It’s not just stupid, Pudge. I mean, as if Alaska would talk to Holly Moser. God! I can’t stand these fake grievers. Stupid bitch.” I almost told him that Alaska wouldn’t want him to call any woman a bitch, but there was no use fighting with the Colonel. twenty days after IT WAS SUNDAY, and the Colonel and I decided against the cafeteria for dinner, instead walking off campus and across Highway 119 to the Sunny Konvenience Kiosk, where we indulged in a well-balanced meal of two oatmeal cream pies apiece. Seven hundred calories. Enough energy to sustain a man for half a day. We sat on the curb in front of the store, and I finished dinner in four bites. “I’m going to call Jake tomorrow, just so you know. I got his phone number from Takumi.” “Fine,” I said. I heard a bell jangle behind me and turned toward the opening door. “Y’all’s loitering,” said the woman who’d just sold us dinner. “We’re eating,” the Colonel answered. The woman shook her head and ordered, as if to a dog, “Git.” So we walked behind the store and sat by the stinking, fetid Dumpster. “Enough with the fine’s already, Pudge. That’s ridiculous. I’m going to call Jake, and I’m going to write down everything he says, and then we’re going to sit down together and try and figure out what happened.” “No. You’re on your own with that. I don’t want to know what happened between her and Jake.” The Colonel sighed and pulled a pack of Pudge Fund cigarettes of his jeans pocket. “Why not?” “Because I don’t want to! Do I have provide you with an in-depth analysis of every decision I make?” The Colonel lit the cigarette with a lighter I’d paid for and took a drag. “Whatever. It needs to be figured out, and I need your help to do it, because between the two of us we knew her pretty well. So that’s that.”

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  “But Daddy . . .” Betty Ann cut Randall off. “You heard your daddy, Randall. Now get dressed and go outside. All of you.” As the four of us left the kitchen, I heard Brother Terrell say, “Jesus stood in my room last night.” We shivered in a miserable little huddle on the tiny patch of a front porch. The gray mud of our yard oozed into the lighter brown mud of the dirt road that ran past our house and four other unpainted houses, and dead-ended at a dark, soupy field. Pam looked around. “What in the world are we gonna do?” It was cold and everything was still wet from last night’s rain. There was no dry place to sit or play. Randall sighed, and his swollen belly strained at the fabric of his thin plaid cotton shirt. “Well, if there’s nothing else to do, I guess we could play husbands and wives again.” His tone was regretful, as if he had exhausted all other possibilities. Pam allowed herself one comment. “You are a nasty boy.” She pointed across the street to the last house on the road. “I saw some kids there the other day. We could ask them to play.” Randall shook his head no. “Them’s worldly kids.” There were many reasons to avoid the unsaved. First of all, they were dangerous. Their picture-show-watching, ball-playing, honkytonking ways might tempt us from the straight and narrow. Second of all, they made us uncomfortable. Everything about outsiders—their clothes, speech, habits— seemed to belittle us, and that put us on the defensive. Mama mimicked the speech of the store clerks and bank tellers we encountered: “Oh mah. What dahling children. So smaht.” There was only one way to be in the world, one right way anyhow, and that was the way we were. Even local churchgoers with their smooth ways were suspect. They might be saved, but they were lukewarm at best, unwilling to make the required sacrifices. It was just a matter of time before God spewed them out of his mouth. These prejudices, spoken and unspoken, gave me, Pam, Randall, and Gary license to treat outsiders however we wanted, though I’m not sure the grown-ups would have seen it that way. If some local kid raised an eyebrow at the goings-on under the tent, we stalked and harassed them for the rest of the revival. Their brains would be splattered on the highway for making fun of God’s anointing. The devil would deep-fry them in a vat of boiling oil. Sores would cover their bodies and they would burn forever. We pronounced their doom in solemn oracular tones, and if they tried to defend

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

  My cautionary tale begins in the early twentieth century, when scientists inspired by Darwin and the mutant James-Lange theory were searching in vain for the essences of anger, sadness, fear, and so on. Their repeated failures eventually led them to a creative solution. If we cannot measure emotions in the body and brain, they said, we’ll measure only what happens before and after: the events that bring on an emotion and the physical reactions that result. Never mind what’s happening inside that skull thing in the middle. Thus began the most notorious historical period in psychology, called behaviorism. Emotions were redefined as mere behaviors for survival: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating, collectively known as the “four F’s.” To a behaviorist, “happiness” equaled smiling, “sadness” was crying, and “fear” was the act of freezing in place. And so, the nagging problem of finding the fingerprints of emotional feelings was, with the flick of a pen, defined out of existence.35 Psychologists often recount stories of behaviorism in the same chilling tones as a ghost story around a campfire. It declared that thoughts, feelings, and the rest of the mind were unimportant to behavior or might not even exist. During this “dark ages” of emotion research, which lasted for several decades, nothing worthwhile was discovered on human emotion (supposedly). Ultimately, most scientists rejected behaviorism because it ignores a basic fact: that each of us has a mind, and in every waking moment of life, we have thoughts and feelings and perceptions. These experiences, and their relation to behavior, must be explained in scientific terms. Psychology emerged from the darkness in the 1960s, according to the official history, as a cognitive revolution reinstated the mind as a topic of scientific inquiry, likening emotion essences to modules or organs in a mind that was thought to function like a computer. With this transformation, the final pieces of the modern classical view fell into place, and the two main flavors of the classical view—basic emotion theory and classical appraisal theories—were officially anointed.36 That’s what the history books say . . . but history books are written by the victors. The official history of emotion research, from Darwin to James to behaviorism to salvation, is a byproduct of the classical view. In reality, the alleged dark ages included an outpouring of research demonstrating that emotion essences don’t exist. Yes, the same kind of counterevidence that we saw in chapter 1 was discovered seventy years earlier . . . and then forgotten. As a result, massive amounts of time and money are being wasted today in a redundant search for fingerprints of emotion.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  The creative incentive for me is that you’ll be constantly . . . naive.” I think it disappointed him that I wasn’t begging him to tell me what the work was going to be about. It didn’t worry me that he could make sex tapes. He was obviously homosexual. I wasn’t threatened. “As long as the place is clean and empty and you’re gone before I wake up every third day, and I don’t starve to death or break any bones, I don’t care about your artwork. You have carte blanche. Just don’t let me out of here. I’m doing important work of my own. Tit for tat.” “Tit for tit makes more sense,” he said. “What about just burning your passport or cutting up your driver’s license,” he suggested. I knew what he was thinking. He was imagining how the critics would describe the video. He needed fodder for analysis. But the project was beyond issues of “identity” and “society” and “institutions.” Mine was a quest for a new spirit. I wasn’t going to explain that to Ping Xi. He would think he understood me. But he couldn’t understand me. He wasn’t supposed to. And anyway, I needed my birth certificate and my passport and my driver’s license. At the end of my hibernation, I’d wake up—I imagined—and see my past life as an inheritance. I’d need proof of the old identity to help me access my bank accounts, to go places. It wasn’t as if I’d wake up with a different face and body and name. I’d appear to be the old me. “But that’s cheating,” he said. “If you’re planning to walk out of here and go back to being the same person you are now, what’s the point?” “It’s personal,” I said. “It’s not about ID cards. It’s an inside job. What do you want me to do? Walk out into the woods, build a fort, hunt squirrels?” “Well, that would be a more authentic rebirth. Have you seen any Tarkovsky? Haven’t you read Rousseau?” “I was born into privilege,” I told Ping Xi. “I am not going to squander that. I’m not a moron.” “I might have to, like, downgrade to Super 8 then. Can I take down the blinds in the bedroom?” He pulled a handwritten document from his messenger bag. “Put the contract away,” I said. “I won’t sue you. Just don’t fuck this up for me.” Ping Xi shrugged. I gave him the key to the new lock. “If I need anything, I’ll stick a Post-it note here,” I said, pointing to the dining table. “You see this red pen?” Each time Ping Xi came over, he was to mark off the days on a calendar hanging on the door to my bedroom. Every three days, I’d wake up, look at the calendar, eat, drink, bathe, et cetera.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  My relatives are over, but they won’t think you’re being rude or anything. We don’t have to be at the funeral home until two.” We passed a high school, a library, a strip mall. Why anyone would want to live in a place like that was beyond me. Farmingdale State College, a Costco, five cemeteries in a row, a golf course, block after block of white picket fences with perfectly snowblown driveways and walkways. It made sense that Reva had come from a place as lame as this. It explained why she slaved away to fit in and make a home for herself in New York City. Her father, she’d told me, was an accountant. Her mother had been a secretary at a Jewish day school. Reva was, like me, an only child. “This is it,” she said as we pulled into the driveway of a tan-colored brick house. It was ranch-style and small, probably built in the fifties. Just by looking at it from the outside, I could tell that it had wall-to-wall carpeting, humid, sticky air, low ceilings. I imagined cabinets full of crap, flies flurrying around a wooden bowl of brown bananas, an old refrigerator covered in magnets pinning down expired coupons for toilet paper and dish soap, a pantry packed with cheap store-brand foods. It looked like the opposite of my parents’ house upstate. Their house was an eerily spare Tudor Colonial, very austere, very brown. The furniture was all dark, heavy wood, which the housekeeper polished religiously with lemon-scented Pledge. Brown leather sofa, brown leather armchair. The floors were varnished and shiny. There were stained-glass windows in the living room and a few large waxy plants in the foyer. Otherwise it was colorless inside. Monochromatic drapes and carpets. There was very little to catch your eye —cleared countertops, everything blank and dim. My mother was not the type to use alphabet magnets on the fridge to hold up my kindergarten finger paintings or first attempts at writing out words. She kept the walls of the house mostly clear. It was as though anything visually interesting was too much aggravation on my mother’s eyes. Maybe that’s why she ran out of the Guggenheim that one time she came to visit me in the city. Only the master bedroom, my mother’s room, had any clutter in it—glass bottles of perfume and ashtrays, unused exercise equipment, piles of pastel and beige- colored clothing. The bed was a king, low to the ground, and whenever I slept in it, I felt very far away from the world, like I was in a spaceship or on the moon.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We touched down in Salzburg long enough to visit Mozart’s Geburtshaus, stuff ourselves with Leberknödel, sleep fitfully and then continued on to Munich. We meandered through Munich and the Alps beyond, visited various castles built by Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, climbed the winding road to Schloss Neuschwanstein in a sudden drenching downpour, toured the castle with an army of potato-shaped hausfraus in orthopedic shoes who elbowed past us making guttural noises in their mellifluous tongue and turning beet-red with pride in their glorious national heritage of Wagner, Volkswagens, and Wildschwein. I remember the countryside around Neuschwanstein with almost nightmarish clarity: the picture-postcard Alps, the clouds hooked on the jagged mountaintops, the arthritic fingers of old snow sculpturing the Arětes, the silent horns of the peaks confronting the smoky blue sky, the velvety green meadows in the valleys (beginner ski slopes in winter), and the chalet-roofed brown and white houses placed as in a children’s game. Germany’s most famous castle is not in Schwetzingen or Speyer, Heidelberg or Hamburg, Baden-Baden or Rotenburg, Berchtesgaden or Berlin, Bayreuth or Bamberg, Karlsruhe or Kranichstein, Ellingen or Eltz—but in Disneyland, California. Amazing how much Walt Disney and Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria resemble each other mentally. Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein is a phony nineteenth-century evocation of a Middle Ages that never existed. Disney’s castle is a phony of a phony. I was particularly entranced by Ludwig’s centrally heated plaster grotto between bedroom and study, his plaster stalactites and stalagmites illuminated with neon-green spotlights, his murals of Siegfried and Tannhäuser (featuring fat blond goddesses with breasts as smooth as epoxy resin and blond-bearded warriors reclining in leafy glens on mossy rocks). I was hypnotized by Ludwig’s portrait with its paranoid eyes. And everywhere throughout the Schloss there was evidence of all that is corniest, most sentimental and nauseating about German culture—especially that boasting self-congratulatory belief in the spirituality of their “race": we are a geistig people, we feel deeply, we love music, we love the woods, we love the sound of marching feet.... Notice the cupids and doves hovering around Tannhäuser who reclines on a gray plaster rock leaning his painted satin elbow on the overmodeled drapery which flows from Venus’ overfed haunches. But notice especially how in this castle, these paintings, this country (as in Disneyland)—nothing is left to the imagination.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I FOUND MY WAY into the Met one afternoon in early September. I guess I wanted to see what other people had done with their lives, people who had made art alone, who had stared long and hard at bowls of fruit. I wondered if they’d watched the grapes wither and shrivel up, if they’d had to go to the market to replace them, and if, before they threw the shriveled strand of grapes away, they’d eaten a few. I hoped that they’d had some respect for the stuff they were immortalizing. Maybe, I thought, once the light had faded for the day, they dropped the rotted fruit out an open window, hoping it would save the life of a starving beggar passing below on the street. Then I imagined the beggar, a monster with worms crawling through his matted hair, the tattered rags on his body fluttering like the wings of a bird, his eyes ablaze with desperation, his heart a caged animal begging for slaughter, hands cupped in perpetual prayer as the townspeople milled around the city square. Picasso was right to start painting the dreary and dejected. The blues. He looked out the window at his own misery. I could respect that. But these painters of fruit thought only of their own mortality, as though the beauty of their work would somehow soothe their fear of death. There they all were, hanging feckless and candid and meaningless, paintings of things, objects, the paintings themselves just things, objects, withering toward their own inevitable demise.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  But Trevor was six foot three. He was clean and fit and confident. I’d choose him a million times over the hipster nerds I’d see around town and at the gallery. In college, the art history department had been rife with that specific brand of young male. An “alternative” to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments. As an art history major, I couldn’t escape them. “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep. They rolled their own cigarettes, didn’t brush their teeth enough, spent a hundred dollars a week on coffee. They would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger—usually Asian—girlfriends. “An Asian girlfriend means the guy has a small dick,” Reva once said. I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. They lived mostly in Brooklyn, another reason I was glad to live on the Upper East Side. Nobody up there listened to the Moldy Peaches. Nobody up there gave a shit about “irony” or Dogme 95 or Klaus Kinski. The worst was that those guys tried to pass off their insecurity as “sensitivity,” and it worked. They would be the ones running museums and magazines, and they’d only hire me if they thought I might fuck them. But when I’d been at parties with them, or out at bars, they’d ignored me. They were so self-serious and distracted by their conversation with their look- alike companions that you’d think they were wrestling with a decision of such high stakes, the world might explode. They wouldn’t be distracted by “pussy,” they would have me believe. The truth was probably that they were just afraid of vaginas, afraid that they’d fail to understand one as pretty and pink as mine, and they were ashamed of their own sensual inadequacies, afraid of their own dicks, afraid of themselves. So they focused on “abstract ideas” and developed drinking problems to blot out the self-loathing they preferred to call “existential ennui.” It was easy to imagine those guys masturbating to Chloë Sevigny, to Selma Blair, to Leelee Sobieski. To Winona Ryder.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Suddenly, a feeling rose up in me. I tried to squash it down, but it nestled into my bowels. “Pets just make messes. I don’t want to have to go around picking dog hairs out of my teeth,” I remembered my mother saying. “Not even a goldfish?” “Why? Just to watch it swim around and die?” Maybe this memory triggered the hemorrhage of adrenaline that pushed me to go back inside the gallery. I pulled a few Kleenex from the box on my old desk, flipped the power switch to turn on the lasers, and stood between the stuffed black Lab and the sleeping dachshund. Then I pulled down my pants, squatted, and shat on the floor. I wiped myself and shuffled across the gallery with my pants around my ankles and stuffed the shitty Kleenex into the mouth of that bitchy poodle. That felt like vindication. That was my proper good-bye. I left and caught a cab home and drank the whole bottle of champagne that night and fell asleep on my sofa watching Burglar. Whoopi Goldberg was one reason to stay alive, at least. • • • THE NEXT DAY, I filed for unemployment, which Natasha must have resented. But she never called. I set up a weekly pickup with the Laundromat and automatic payments on all my utilities, bought a wide selection of used VHS tapes from the Jewish Women’s Council Thrift Shop on Second Avenue, and soon I was hitting the pills hard and sleeping all day and all night with two- or three-hour breaks in between. This was good, I thought. I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation. Two I’D BEEN SEEING Dr. Tuttle once a week, but after I left Ducat, I didn’t want to have to make the trek down to Union Square that often. So I told her that I was “freelancing in Chicago” and could only see her in person once a month. She said we could talk over the phone every week, or not, as long as I gave her postdated checks for my copayments in advance. “If your insurance asks, say you were here weekly in person. Just in case.” She never caught on that I was having her call in my refills to my local Rite Aid in Manhattan.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I placed the piece of gum in her palm. Reva unwrapped it and stuck it in her mouth and flicked the wrapper over her shoulder and chewed and kept on driving. I stared down into the East River again, black and glittering with the yellow lights of the city. The traffic wasn’t budging. I thought of my apartment. I hadn’t been there in days—not awake, anyway. I imagined the mess I’d discover with Reva when we walked in. I hoped she wouldn’t comment. I didn’t think she would, given the day. “I always think about earthquakes when I’m on this bridge,” Reva said. “You know, like in San Francisco when that bridge collapsed?” “This is New York City,” I said. “We don’t get earthquakes.” “I was watching the World Series when it happened,” Reva said. “With my dad. I totally remember it. Do you remember it?” “No,” I lied. Of course I remembered it, but I’d thought nothing of it. “You’re watching a baseball game and then all of a sudden, boom. And you’re like, thousands of people just died.” “It wasn’t thousands.” “A lot, though.” “Maybe a few hundred, max.” “A lot of people got crushed on that freeway. And on that bridge,” Reva insisted. “It’s fine, Reva,” I said. I didn’t want her to cry again. “And the next day on the news they were interviewing a guy who was on the lower deck of the freeway and they were like, ‘What will you take with you from this experience?’ And he goes, ‘When I got out of my car, there was a brain jiggling on the ground. A whole brain, jiggling like a Jell- O mold.’” “People die all the time, Reva.” “But isn’t that just horrific? A brain jiggling on the ground like Jell-O?” “Sounds made up.” “And the newscaster was silent. Speechless. So the guy goes, ‘You wanted to know. You asked. So I’m telling you. That’s what I saw.’” “Please, Reva, just stop.” “Well, I’m not saying that would happen here.” “That didn’t happen anywhere. Brains don’t pop out of people’s heads and jiggle.” “I guess there were aftershocks.” I turned up the volume on the radio and rolled my window down. “You know what I mean, though? Things could be worse,” Reva shouted. “Things can always be worse,” I shouted back. I rolled the window back up. “I’m a very safe driver,” Reva said. We were quiet for the rest of the ride, the car filling with the smell of cinnamon gum. I already regretted that I’d agreed to let Reva sleep over. Finally, we crossed the bridge and drove up the FDR. The road was slushy. Traffic was very slow. By the time we got to my block, it was half past ten. We got lucky with parking, fitting into a spot right in front of the bodega. “I just want to pick up a couple things,” I told Reva. She didn’t protest. Inside, the Egyptians were playing cards behind the counter.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The poor lady was in her middle thirties, she had a shiny forehead, plucked eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features of a type that may be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich. Patting her bronze-brown bun, she led me into the parlor and we talked for a minute about the McCoo fire and the privilege of living in Ramsdale. Her very wide-set sea-green eyes had a funny way of traveling all over you, carefully avoiding your own eyes. Her smile was but a quizzical jerk of one eyebrow; and uncoiling herself from the sofa as she talked, she kept making spasmodic dashes at three ashtrays and the near fender (where lay the brown core of an apple); whereupon she would sink back again, one leg folded under her. She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul; women who are completely devoid of humor; women utterly indifferent at heart to the dozen or so possible subjects of a parlor conversation, but very particular about the rules of such conversations, through the sunny cellophane of which not very appetizing frustrations can be readily distinguished. I was perfectly aware that if by any wild chance I became her lodger, she would methodically proceed to do in regard to me what taking a lodger probably meant to her all along, and I would again be enmeshed in one of those tedious affairs I knew so well. But there was no question of my settling there. I could not be happy in that type of household with bedraggled magazines on every chair and a kind of horrible hybridization between the comedy of so-called “functional modern furniture” and the tragedy of decrepit rockers and rickety lamp tables with dead lamps. I was led upstairs, and to the left—into “my” room. I inspected it through the mist of my utter rejection of it; but I did discern above “my” bed René Prinet’s “Kreutzer Sonata.” And she called that servant maid’s room a “semi- studio”! Let’s get out of here at once, I firmly said to myself as I pretended to deliberate over the absurdly, and ominously, low price that my wistful hostess was asking for board and bed.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  [85] It seems superfluous to speak about fame, for who can doubt that good kings live in a sense in the praises of men, not only in this life, but still more, after their death, and that men yearn for them? But the name of wicked kings straightway vanishes or, if they have been excessive in their wickedness, they are remembered with execration. Thus Solomon says (Prov 10:7): “The memory of the just is with praises, and the name of the wicked shall rot,” either because it vanishes or it remains with stench. CHAPTER 12 WHAT PUNISHMENTS ARE IN STORE FOR A TYRANT[86] From the above arguments it is evident that stability of power, wealth, honour and fame come to fulfil the desires of kings rather than tyrants, and it is in seeking to acquire these things unduly that princes turn to tyranny. For no one falls away from justice except through a desire for some temporal advantage. [87] The tyrant, moreover, loses the surpassing beatitude which is due as a reward to kings and, which is still more serious, brings upon himself great suffering as a punishment. For if the man who despoils a single man, or casts him into slavery, or kills him, deserves the greatest punishment (death in the judgment of men, and in the judgment of God eternal damnation), how much worse tortures must we consider a tyrant deserves, who on all sides robs everybody, works against the common liberty of all, and kills whom he will at his merest whim? [88] Again, such men rarely repent; but puffed up by the wind of pride, deservedly abandoned by God for their sins, and besmirched by the flattery of men, they can rarely make worthy satisfaction. When will they ever restore all those things which they have received beyond their just due? Yet no one doubts that they are bound to restore those ill-gotten goods. When will they make amends to those whom they have oppressed and unjustly injured in their many ways? [89] The malice of their impenitence is increased by the fact that they consider everything licit which they can do unresisted and with impunity. Hence they not only make no effort to repair the evil they have done but, taking their customary way of acting as their authority, they hand on their boldness in sinning to posterity. Consequently they are held guilty before God, not only for their own sins, but also for the crimes of those to whom they gave the occasion of sin.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  When I righted myself, I felt a little swoon of panic at the thought of that lock on the door. If something happened to Ping Xi, I could die in here, I thought. But the panic vanished as soon as I flicked off the kitchen lights. I bathed quickly, put my laundry in, did a few exercises, brushed my teeth, took an Infermiterol, and went back to the bedroom. Nothing felt very deep yet. Everything was mundane and practical. In the moments waiting to lose consciousness, I imagined Trevor on one knee, proposing to his current lady friend. The self-satisfaction. The stupidity of wanting something “forever.” I almost felt sorry for him, for her. I heard myself chuckle, then sigh, as I drifted away, back into the cold. • • • THE SECOND AWAKENING WAS at midday. I came to with my thumb in my mouth. When I pulled it out, it was white and wrinkled, and I had a kink in my jaw that reminded me of the cramp I used to get giving blow jobs. This didn’t alarm me. I rose, alert and hungry, and went to the kitchen. Ping Xi had crossed six days off the calendar and stuck a Post-it note on the fridge that said, “Sorry!” I opened the fridge, chewed a slice of pizza, took my vitamins, and chugged a can of Schweppes. The trash can was empty this time, no liner. I left the empty soda can on the kitchen counter and thought only passingly of Reva and her Diet 7UPs full of tequila before I bathed, combed my hair, did some jumping jacks, et cetera. I made a mental note to change the sheets upon awakening, took an Infermiterol, lay down, massaged my jaw with my fingers, and lost consciousness. • • • THE THIRD AWAKENING MARKED nine days locked inside my apartment. I could feel it in my eyes when I got up, the atrophy of the muscles I’d use to focus on things at a distance, I guessed. I kept the lights low. In the shower, I read the shampoo label and got stuck on the words “sodium lauryl sulfate.” Each word carried with it a seemingly endless string of associations. “Sodium”: salt, white, clouds, gauze, silt, sand, sky, lark, string, kitten, claws, wound, iron, omega. The fourth awakening, the words fixated me again. “Lauryl”: Shakespeare, Ophelia, Millais, pain, stained glass, rectory, butt plug, feelings, pigpen, snake eyes, hot poker. I shut the water off, did my due diligence with the laundry, et cetera, took an Infermiterol, and lay back down on the mattress. “Sulfate”: Satan, acid, Lyme, dunes, dwellings, hunchbacks, hybrids, samurais, suffragettes, mazes. • • • SO MY HOURS WENT by in three-day chunks. Ping Xi was dutiful about the calendar and the garbage. One time I wrote a Post-it note and asked for Canada Dry instead of Schweppes.