Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  The dog hobbled the whining blind woman across the floor. The dragon reared and pranced beneath the Negro, nearing. Robby crawled the gritty boards, his pants twisted up about his ankles. The little beast rode his ass, jutting its head down to gnaw the pursed sphincter. Blood lay on his thighs like red string. The brass door swung open before him, and he gazed down the dark chancel. The dog, rutting the gut-hung red-head, yapped to his left. To his right, the master, laboring on the thrashing worm, ground his heel in ashes. “Robby?” (A man’s voice from the shadows.) “Come in here a minute?” The man who stepped from the door had short white hair, wore jeans, and a work shirt. He smiled and held out his hand. Something scuttled by Robby’s knee, paused before Proctor, flattened on the cinders. The fingers bunched. It sprang through the air. Proctor caught the hand, grinned at Robby, winked. Then he walked back into the dark. Robby felt desire. He felt it, suddenly and surprisingly, like a violent bird in the gut. As he crawled the dark, it struck out through his body and shook him. “Do you see what they’re doing to her?” the voice asked, in front of him. The hunger that was pleasure twisted down his belly. The twisting thing was a blade. Was a fire. His teeth clicked. His lips drew back. His shoulders shook. The cinders chewed his left wrist, his right palm. And pleasure beat its wings all about his body, near to knocked him over. Sensations, which, had they been visual, would have been sparks and metal, danced on the back of his neck, showered his shoulders, rolled in the valley of his back and behind. Other voices about him now, mumbling: male, male, male, female, male. They blundered over and around each other. He crawled between them, sick with ecstasy. “Oh, this must be getting you horny, boy!” The pressure at his belly’s base struck in the muscles of his thigh and stomach. He doubled, hit the floor. “Tsk, tsk, tsk! You ought to get down there, boy, and rip off a piece of that! I hope you realize the trouble I’ve gone through to set this up!” Robby’s breath went out of him. His throat ached. His arms locked across his chest. His heels dragged up cold coals. His sides cramped. But the pain circled pleasure. Black pleasure (with its white after image) worked between each bone and tendon. His bones burned. His muscles melted. “Get with it! Don’t tell me you’re just going to lie there leaking all over your leg?” An explosion, long, slow, dark, and before it ended, centered in it, overwhelming it, an explosion that was light, and long, and did not end. “You’d make some fine jail-house pussy, boy! You know that? These guys that can come without even touching themselves . . .”

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  Bull, here are the keys. To the cellar, to leash the beast. Nazi, you know the haunts of Nig and Dove. Up, up, all of you. Before I lay a stick to you. Come, we are ready to hunt her! Kirsten ran her finger around her left nipple as she stepped into the hall and lazily thought about her brother. She hung back from the hulking black ahead of her. His juices still drooled her thighs and made them slip. She caught sight of the long-armed, curly-headed boy; moved beside him. “Gunner . . .” whispered, and he turned, grinning at her like a gold cat. She took his hand, and suddenly he put his mouth on hers. She sucked in his tongue, and they stopped walking. She leaned against the wall and saw the others passing behind his shoulder, so closed her eyes. She touched his chest, let her hand slip to his trousers. He was bunching up her skirt. He liked it, because his tongue moved harder in her mouth. She pulled him back against the wall. “Hey,” he whispered, “any white man’s come in there?” She nodded, giggling. “But it’s way at the back.” Gunner took out his hand, licked, and a moment later dropped to his knees. Tongue and nose nuzzled deep in her. She held back the hem of her smock to watch him pry. She reached down to touch his scabbing shoulder, but he winced and knocked her hand away. So she closed her eyes and let thoughts drift with the thrust and warmth rising from the hard bud on the fore roof. He stood again, panting and wet to the eyes. She took his upswung cock and pulled her to him, lifted one leg, and guided, while he lay against her and butted at the opening. They both gasped when it slid. She held him about his shoulders, thrusting back to his thrusts, stroking his hair, while, with opposed rhythms, he tongued and plunged and tongued. Her mind curled through the sensational labyrinths till somebody touched her lightly and whispered, “Hurry, girl! Hurry! Proctor is waiting.” They gathered on the soaked earth behind the Hall, crushed into the narrow alley. “We’re ready,” Proctor called. “Keep together, and your voices down. Hey, there—” Gunner had caught at the artist’s hand. “What?” Tugging at Proctor’s wrist, Gunner demanded, “What’s down there?” He pointed to the window in the foundation. Proctor sat down on the steps; laughing, he clapped Gunner’s hips. “Why do you want to know?” “Who is it?” the boy insisted. Now Proctor rubbed his hands. “He was once a great scientist, but he fell in love with her whom we hunt.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  37 The Death of Date-o-Rama or The Romance of the Prose Every lover is a soldier. —Ovid Ill advised though it is, I start trolling for a beau—forget the semaphores Patti flaps in warning before my face. Reading St. Augustine’s memoir, I come across his seminal line: Give me chastity, Lord. But not yet. Which is my battle cry by the time David of halfway-house fame shows up. He leaves Boston to rent a boxy monk’s cell spitting distance from my house. Ponytailed David with his gangster Timberland boots and red bandana holding his head together. Not yet thirty, with the habit of referring to his less than bright local bed partners in meetings as the Bimbo Brigade, David must’ve seen me—a single mom in academia—as some final doorway toward a cleaned-up act. He’d looked like an old friend when he’d first rolled in that summer with a pal. Both were shopping for a cheap place to hole up while finishing freelance writing projects they’d taken advances for. (A prodigy like David did Harvard philosophy as a mere detour.) Over cheap Chinese, we all sat for hours reordering green tea and bowls of deep-fried whatnot till fortune-cookie slips confettied the linoleum booth top. Back in Boston, we’d always talked books—nobody had read more than David. When I’d whined in early meetings about not writing, from across the room, he’d shoot a conspiratorial grimace. He edited Joan’s dissertation before it was published, and a year later, he and I even swapped and slashed up each other’s first, sober work. But he’d seemed like a stray and forlorn undergrad on Easter when Warren and I had invited him over. In Syracuse, I must bat my eyes at him or fluff my hair like some cartoon seductress (What a ma-yan!), for right after, David starts packing my mailbox with bulging envelopes. Logorrheic, he calls himself. Words just pour from his pen. His yards-long letters come hand-printed in weensy, meticulous mouse type, painstakingly footnoted. Soon he’s pleading his troth, signing his missives Young Werther (after a tragic swain in book and opera, with a crush on an older woman). David is the only guy rash enough ever to get my name tattooed on his bicep—in a heart with a banner. Even before we’ve kissed on the lips, he does this. Watching those flesh-colored band-aids peel off in a phalanx to show an arm scarred and bloodied, a thinking woman would’ve hied for the hills. My response is more pitiful. I think, Wow, he might really like me—a thought nobody past grade five gets to have about anything bigger than a hamster. I plant a big wet Texas mouth on his. It’s a sad testament to my virtue that an inked-up arm is all it really takes to bed me.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  Robby frowned. “What the hell is that?” “What the hell it sound like?” Nig said. “We work together,” Dove said. “I take the black pussy. Nig takes all the white comin’ by. You a good enough stud, you can pick up on it.” “Who pays?” Robby asked. “Sometimes women; mostly men. People up on Colson Hill give us a lot of work.” Nig, still scratching, drawled, “We put in a lot of practice time.” Robby shook his head once more. “Naw. It just doesn’t sound right. I stuck my share of pussy. I like action, sure. But there ain’t no need to go after it with a lead pipe. There’s enough to go around so you don’t have to fight it down.” Dove: “You ain’t found none around here, yet.” Nig: “I like it any way I can get it.” Dove: “It’s a good job.” “Well,” Robby said. “It just ain’t for me.” Dove stood up. Nig, laughing soft and warm, rubbed Dove’s left foot with his knuckles: “But it sort of made you harden up a little, huh?” Now he Stood too. Dove: “Hope you get some the way you’re lookin’ it.” They were walking down the street. Nig: “And get under the dock before Bull catches you out here.” Robby, calling after: “Yeah, okay.” He rested his arms across his knees, watching the two walk away. Rape artists. He frowned, and reached down to arrange himself. When he looked up they were beyond the street light. — A CARTOON: UPA — One had ten. One had more. “Man, I got to get into some white pussy tonight.” He leaned on Dove’s shoulder; scratched. “You gotta give me some white pussy tonight or you ain’t shit.” “Fuck off, nigger. You sound like that fool back there. What you gonna find on the street this hour. Don’t you think about anything else?” “Naw. What you thinkin’?” “Your big black dick up some tight white cunt.” And Nig cracked up, prancing. “Hey,” Dove said, “how’d you like the one we got this afternoon.” “Which one?” “The first one.” “Oh, man! How old you think she was?” “I dunno. Thirteen. She had some big titties. For thirteen. Could throw that ass around.” Nig came back and put his arm on Dove’s shoulder. “Watchin’ her suck on your peter while I was givin’ it to her, it got me so hot I think it made me come the third time. But that little nigger bitch sure knew how to give a couple of guys a good time, huh?” He rubbed Dove’s back. “We don’t get no more pussy, an’ you gonna get fucked again.” He squeezed Dove’s left cheek. “Dove, I think you like my dick in your hole. I think you was thinkin’ about my black dick up your tight white ass hole.”

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  Bull, here are the keys. To the cellar, to leash the beast. Nazi, you know the haunts of Nig and Dove. Up, up, all of you. Before I lay a stick to you. Come, we are ready to hunt her! Kirsten ran her finger around her left nipple as she stepped into the hall and lazily thought about her brother. She hung back from the hulking black ahead of her. His juices still drooled her thighs and made them slip. She caught sight of the long-armed, curly-headed boy; moved beside him. “Gunner . . .” whispered, and he turned, grinning at her like a gold cat. She took his hand, and suddenly he put his mouth on hers. She sucked in his tongue, and they stopped walking. She leaned against the wall and saw the others passing behind his shoulder, so closed her eyes. She touched his chest, let her hand slip to his trousers. He was bunching up her skirt. He liked it, because his tongue moved harder in her mouth. She pulled him back against the wall. “Hey,” he whispered, “any white man’s come in there?” She nodded, giggling. “But it’s way at the back.” Gunner took out his hand, licked, and a moment later dropped to his knees. Tongue and nose nuzzled deep in her. She held back the hem of her smock to watch him pry. She reached down to touch his scabbing shoulder, but he winced and knocked her hand away. So she closed her eyes and let thoughts drift with the thrust and warmth rising from the hard bud on the fore roof. He stood again, panting and wet to the eyes. She took his upswung cock and pulled her to him, lifted one leg, and guided, while he lay against her and butted at the opening. They both gasped when it slid. She held him about his shoulders, thrusting back to his thrusts, stroking his hair, while, with opposed rhythms, he tongued and plunged and tongued. Her mind curled through the sensational labyrinths till somebody touched her lightly and whispered, “Hurry, girl! Hurry! Proctor is waiting.” They gathered on the soaked earth behind the Hall, crushed into the narrow alley. “We’re ready,” Proctor called. “Keep together, and your voices down. Hey, there—” Gunner had caught at the artist’s hand. “What?” Tugging at Proctor’s wrist, Gunner demanded, “What’s down there?” He pointed to the window in the foundation. Proctor sat down on the steps; laughing, he clapped Gunner’s hips. “Why do you want to know?” “Who is it?” the boy insisted. Now Proctor rubbed his hands. “He was once a great scientist, but he fell in love with her whom we hunt.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  Things been pretty good since. He was the first person in this town I really talked to. And after a couple of weeks, when I’d got work—in the police office, not out on the road—I asked him, “Hey, did you tell anybody to give me that job?” He said no. “What have you been doing for me?” I asked. “You been talkin’ to the people up on Colson Hill?” And he said, “No. Just listening to you.” “You been telling me things too, though,” I told him. He said, “It has to do with the way I listen.” He knows a lot of people, in this town, in other places. They even come to see him. He listens to a lot of people, I guess. And it changes things. I been lawman here for almost three years. And it’s been a good sight more peaceful town. I asked him if he thought I ought to take the job—got it by being deputy first. “Why not?” he said. I said, “Well, someone like me, you know . . .” He said, “How’s being instant babies gonna hurt your being law?” And you know something, we don’t hardly have any women criminals in this whole town no more. (He picks the gun up. The barrel taps the floor; he rears back on the chair, the dark stock flattening his thigh.) Bethy threw another little bitch. Shit, she must be six or seven years old now herself, though I ain’t been back much. I sure would like to get back there and take a look at her. You think a little girl six or seven could take my dick? Little girl gettin’ knocked up by her pappy ain’t all that bad. Or her grand-pappy. I like it sweet and smooth and young. Or real rough, one. Ain’t too far from here. And sometimes I just get to thinkin’, about that sweet little pussy waitin’ over there in the next town for me, someplace, you know? THREEFAUST IN ITALYToday, Wednesday after St. Vitus, 1528, one who calls himself Dr. Jorg Faustus of Heidelberg has been told to spend his penny elsewhere, and has promised not to resent or mock such summons of the authorities. —Record of expulsion from the minutes of the Town Council of Ingelstadt The captain walked beside the brick wall of the bar. At the alley, he turned, as if a thought had taken him. Five steps in, he thumbed apart the buttons of his pants, and turned to the wall. His water ran the cinderblock foundation, puddled. He moved the stream back and forth, breaking it on the bars of the cellar window. He heard his stream inside on the cellar floor. His puddle darkened the earth. Buttoning, he turned to go, when he saw: two hands, barred with ligaments, cabled with veins and scaly with dirt, grasp the wet pipes. The captain frowned, stepped back. Someone inside was licking the dripping bars.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  PART IIFlashdance“So, Papa, are you feeling good now that you’re in my hands?” “No,” Papa said, “I’m feeling bad.” Then Semyon asked him, “And my brother Fyodor, when you were hacking him to pieces, did he feel good in your hands?” “No,” Papa said, “Fyodor was feeling bad.” Then Semyon asked him, “And did you think, Papa, that someday you might be feeling bad?” “No,” Papa said, “I didn’t think I might be feeling bad.” —Isaac Babel, “The Church in Novgorod” 6Inheritance Tax SummerWe picked on down the row, the woods getting closer and closer and closer and the secret shade, picking on into the secret shade with my sack and Lafe’s sack. Because I said will I or wont I when the sack was half full because I said if the sack was full when we get to the woods it wont be me…. If the sack is full, I cannot help it. —William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying The young poet I’ll wind up marrying tours my grad school for a week. Rumor has it, he’d been the star of genius Robert Lowell’s last class at Harvard. Drawn by his shy smile and decorous bearing, I right off start getting to the cafeteria early so as to slide my tray next to his and sit in the scent of detergent he gives off. Afternoons, we walk through the woods to a sandy stretch of beach alongside a green river, and one day we find inner tubes impressed in the sand as if placed there by wood nymphs. Given the golden aura of ease Warren moves in, I figure this kind of crap must happen to him all the time. His quiet formality counteracts the grungy, drunkenly proffered offers from pierced boys I’ve shrugged off in various punk bars of late—waiters and turnstile-jumping musicians. Do you think it’s okay if we borrow them? The hot rubber is warm in my hand as he asks, for I’m greedily rolling what I instantly decided was my inner tube to the water’s edge. We’ll bring them right back, I say, impressed to have met such a stand-up citizen. The inner tubes plop into the green swirl, and we wade in behind. Arms and knees hanging over, we let the current take us. Occasionally, deliciously, my foot brushes his muscled calf, which makes me go all creamy in my center like a stuffed chocolate. He seems vaguely stirred by my blue-collar credentials, that I paid my way through schools with all manner of unsavory tasks and now hold down community teaching jobs. That night I call my sister to make my crush official. Well, he’s Ivy-educated, so he’s not an idiot, she says. What does he look like? Superman. Her silence on the phone is passive doubt. I swear, like that actor. Very patrician-looking, cheekbones out to here, square jaw. Also those long dimples, very fetching—deep enough to hold a dime. Is he short? Six-five, I say.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The dining room lights dim just as I clock out, and I make out strains of some symphony piped into the bar. My head cants like a blue tick hound’s. Maybe I owe myself a drink. I’ve been dug in on Warren’s one-or-two-beer policy, part of re-forming myself to fit him. As for doing with so little alcohol, so safely squirreled away do I feel in our book-lined rooms, undergoing my willed overhaul, that I could almost subsist on his breath alone. In my old life, I never kept liquor in my apartment, for—while I could go without for weeks—I never knew when I’d wind up draining anything around. And around the punk bars where I hung out in grad school, if I got lured into the alley and offered cocaine, I could snuffle up the stuff, but I lacked both the money and the recklessness to be a bona fide cokehead. Only once did I incur a debt, and having to sell a TV to pay it back curbed future coke binges. At a few all night parties, I sat among half-strangers in a screaming sweat on a sagging couch—jaw clenched, eyelids stapled to my forehead—while some leering dealer suggested I go back to his place. A small point of pride: I never said yes. The scene scared me. I scared me. I wouldn’t call my pre-Warren drinking out of control because I had control. So long as I didn’t leave my apartment, I didn’t drink. In Cambridge, that person no longer exists. With an invisible eraser, I’m internally rubbing hard at the core of her, and Warren’s steady, unwavering gaze is lasering away her external edges. Soon she’ll be mist. I stand at the bar, its tiered bottles like a shiny choir about to burst into song. With only five or six dollars in tips, how much trouble can I get in? Warren will pick me up soon, and the bar’s on the cusp of closing early. At one end, a man in evening clothes with long gray hair swept back sits behind a sherry glass. On the stool next to him, a tipped violin case. Across from him is the despicable waiter, cradling a brandy snifter. His normally pony-tailed hair’s undone. The waiter says, Buy you a farewell cognac? I say thanks and settle in with coat covering my grease-spattered uniform. The waiter downs his own drink. Standing, he slides spare bills across the bar, adding—before he flips his cashmere scarf around his neck Lautrec-style—At least I’ve helped you to master the fish knife. I hold the glass globe in my hand as the dim yellow lights slide off its perimeter, and boy, does that drink slide down like scorched sunshine. I’m just draining it when the manager—no doubt eager to see me leaving—flies up and buys me another. And right before Warren comes, I ponder a third. What the hell, right?

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  A few nights before the residency ends, he asks where I’d like to have our first solo dinner, and I say—provocatively, I hope—Montreal. I hope you don’t mind chipping in on gas, he says. Among young poets, this is standard, even on a date—is this a date? I gnaw my thumbnail . Before we hit the freeway, Warren stops for an oil check, though his car—a recent graduation gift—still has the dealer’s sticker on the rear window. What’s your dad do? I ask as Warren squeegees off the windshield. He’s a lawyer, Warren says. I don’t ask what kind of law because who knew there was more than one. Buckled into the driver’s seat, he adjusts the rearview with microscopic precision before even cranking the ignition—a care that opposes my haphazard plowing around in an uninspected Vega, its heater pumping out enough monoxide to give passengers a metallic-tasting headache. The mountain road hairpins under us, and the green valleys that open up in the windows can’t stop my fixation on his regal profile. Trying to impress him, I quote a new translation from Swede Tomas Tranströmer. Warren counters with “ Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness …” And watching his unkissed mouth shaping those plush syllables is the libidinal equivalent of a studly crooner mouthing a love song. Wordsworth? I say. Keats’s “Ode to Autumn.” Dang, I say with a Gomer Pyle grin—my mask in grad school, where I’d posed as a redneck aborigine just to warn everybody up front how far behind I was before it blatted out like a fart. Once there, I started burrowing nightly into the library to look up references everybody else nodded in recognition over. As a result, I’ve taken in a gnat’s portion of American and European poetry, but our banter—Warren’s and mine—includes his modestly correcting me on the English tradition. By the time we cross over into Quebec, I’ve scrawled a long list of books to wade through, impressed he can teach me so much. There’s a low-slung fingernail of moon in the orange sky, and I pretend to interpret the local license plate slogan— Je me souviens , I remember—as I am a souvenir . He smiles. You’re kidding, right? Not even I am that primitive. You’re not at all primitive, he says. Don’t lie, I say. But I secretly hope to pass for a girl he maybe went to prep school with, though I could’ve impersonated a baboon closer. In the restaurant, we give our names as Wally and Holly Stevens, a poet and his editor daughter. At a tiny candlelit table, I smell the red wine on Warren’s breath. As he passes over my menu, his hand touches mine, and the pulse in my chest grows so thunderous I fear he’ll make it out. This has to be a date, dammit.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  37 The Death of Date-o-Rama or The Romance of the Prose Every lover is a soldier . —Ovid I ll advised though it is, I start trolling for a beau—forget the semaphores Patti flaps in warning before my face. Reading St. Augustine’s memoir, I come across his seminal line: Give me chastity, Lord. But not yet . Which is my battle cry by the time David of halfway-house fame shows up. He leaves Boston to rent a boxy monk’s cell spitting distance from my house. Ponytailed David with his gangster Timberland boots and red bandana holding his head together. Not yet thirty, with the habit of referring to his less than bright local bed partners in meetings as the Bimbo Brigade, David must’ve seen me—a single mom in academia—as some final doorway toward a cleaned-up act. He’d looked like an old friend when he’d first rolled in that summer with a pal. Both were shopping for a cheap place to hole up while finishing freelance writing projects they’d taken advances for. (A prodigy like David did Harvard philosophy as a mere detour.) Over cheap Chinese, we all sat for hours reordering green tea and bowls of deep-fried whatnot till fortune-cookie slips confettied the linoleum booth top. Back in Boston, we’d always talked books—nobody had read more than David. When I’d whined in early meetings about not writing, from across the room, he’d shoot a conspiratorial grimace. He edited Joan’s dissertation before it was published, and a year later, he and I even swapped and slashed up each other’s first, sober work. But he’d seemed like a stray and forlorn undergrad on Easter when Warren and I had invited him over. In Syracuse, I must bat my eyes at him or fluff my hair like some cartoon seductress (What a ma-yan!) , for right after, David starts packing my mailbox with bulging envelopes. Logorrheic, he calls himself. Words just pour from his pen. His yards-long letters come hand-printed in weensy, meticulous mouse type, painstakingly footnoted. Soon he’s pleading his troth, signing his missives Young Werther (after a tragic swain in book and opera, with a crush on an older woman). David is the only guy rash enough ever to get my name tattooed on his bicep—in a heart with a banner. Even before we’ve kissed on the lips, he does this. Watching those flesh-colored band-aids peel off in a phalanx to show an arm scarred and bloodied, a thinking woman would’ve hied for the hills. My response is more pitiful. I think, Wow, he might really like me —a thought nobody past grade five gets to have about anything bigger than a hamster. I plant a big wet Texas mouth on his. It’s a sad testament to my virtue that an inked-up arm is all it really takes to bed me.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  This rare experience of being the one with the lower sexual interest was revelatory for Olivia. As a woman who always felt driven forward by her sexual interest, pulling her partner along with her, being the one who was standing still and being pulled, as it were, was an inspiring experience. She allowed herself to receive Patrick’s erotic attention. She allowed her arousal to build as slowly as it wanted to. She allowed it to happen, instead of feeling like it was dragging her forward. all the same parts, organized in different ways: “this is a restaurant”Nonconcordance is about the relationship between the peripheral system— the genitals—and the central system—the brain: two separate but interconnected systems. And the relationship between these systems varies from person to person and from context to context. To illustrate, imagine that a brain and a vagina are a couple of friends on vacation together, wandering down the street trying to decide where to have dinner. The genitals notice any restaurant they pass, whether it’s Thai food or pub grub, fast food or gourmet (while ignoring all the museums and shops), and say, “This is a restaurant. We could eat here.” She has no strong opinion, she’s just good at spotting restaurants. Meanwhile, the brain is assessing all the contextual factors I described in chapters 4 and 5 to decide whether she wants to try a place. “This place isn’t delicious-smelling enough,” or “This place isn’t clean enough,” or “I’m not in the mood for pizza.” The genitals might even notice a pet store and say, “There’s pet food in here, I guess…” and the brain rolls her eyes and keeps walking. They pass a museum, and the brain says, “I heard about a great café in this museum,” and the genitals respond, “This isn’t a restaurant.” But the brain has way more information than the genitals. So suppose the two friends go into the museum, and the genitals see the little café next to the gift shop. Then she says, “Oh, I see, this is a restaurant. We could eat here,” and the brain says, “Yeah, this looks great.” Both relevant and appealing! But it’s not always like that. In lesbian women, it’s more like this:11 The genitals notice only specific restaurants—diners, say—and don’t notice any restaurants that aren’t diners. Once they find a diner, the brain says, “A diner! I love diners,” and the genitals agree, “This is a restaurant, we could eat here,” unless there’s some pretty compelling reason not to, like a bunch of drunks brawling outside. Even then, if our friends on vacation came across that diner with a brawl outside, the genitals might still say, “This is a restaurant,” even as the brain dragged her away, shouting, “Let’s get out of here! Call the cops!” You should be able to chant this in your sleep by now: We’re all made of the same parts, just organized in different ways. The relationship between the brain and genitals follows the same principle.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  3 When Luther then published an open letter of congratulation to Koppe, he revealed that he had known all about the plan, which was an impudent snub to his old enemy Duke Georg. The women came from the upper nobility of his lands, but their families were unable to welcome them back for fear of offending their Catholic ruler—or so Luther argued. One of them was Staupitz’s sister. 4 Luther needed to settle the women in respectable marriages as soon as possible, so as to avoid malicious gossip, and thus found himself in the unexpected position of marriage broker. As a result, the situation forced him to think about female desire. In August 1524 he wrote to some nuns, candidly informing them that, although they might not like to think so, God had created them with powerful sexual urges, which they ignored at their peril: “Though womenfolk are ashamed to admit to this, nevertheless Scripture and experience show that among many thousands there is not a one to whom God has given to remain in pure chastity. A woman has no control over herself.” 5 It may have been that the subject came to mind because he was beginning to be tempted himself. The progress of this transformation can be charted through banter with his old friend Spalatin. While in the Wartburg, the subject of marriage had arisen more than once in their correspondence, but Luther insisted he had no sexual desires, and that marriage was not for him. Although Karlstadt, Jonas, and Melanchthon all married, “They won’t force a wife on me,” he had written in 1521: 6 When Luther first returned from the Wartburg he put on his old monastic habit again—the town council even presented him with a new one, specially made. 7 But there was no returning to the monastic life. Most of the monks had left under the impact of Zwilling’s fiery sermons and only the prior and a couple of old monks remained. The monastery was no longer a going concern. In mid-April 1525, having been busily arranging matches for the nuns, Luther could still joke to Spalatin: I do not want you to wonder that a famous lover like me does not marry. It is rather strange that I, who so often write about matrimony and get mixed up with women, have not yet turned into a woman, to say nothing of not having married one.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Do line cooks get misty eyed seeing a well run café pump out orders? For me seeing this guy gives an almost sexual thrill—like a horny teenager faced with a centerfold. Or more like a devout altar girl seeing a saint. Please don’t, Warren finally says in a voice barely audible. He places an empty purple shell in the bowl between us. What? I say. Don’t introduce yourself, he says. Admit you’re thinking about it. It’s true that my former grad school professor Bob translates the guy at Berkeley, so we connect at some small nexus. Warren and I both pick at our mussels till I say, Why not? It’s something I can tell our grandkids about. I touched the hand that wrote those words. I don’t want to be here for it, Warren says. He raises a finger for the check. Behind his napkin, he says, You don’t have to meet every famous poet. In his view, my appetite for social activity is voracious. I remember seeing an invitation to his college reunion on the kitchen table that year. The choices were: I can attend. I hope I can attend. I cannot attend. He circled the words to read I hope I cannot attend before sending it back. You’re at Harvard every day, I say. You record Seamus Heaney lectures (Harvard’s own Nobel-anointed poet). He was your teacher, even. You host poetry readings twice a month. The Greek waiter drops off the check, and I rifle my briefcase as Warren goes over the math. He says, Seamus is plagued by toadies. I don’t want to be one of them. I snatch the check from his hand, saying, I’m the boring stiff in a suit who comes in late to the reading and nobody talks to at the reception. I live in a business gulag. He says, Nobody thinks of you as a wallflower, Mare. I glance over at the Polish luminary, adding, I just want to shake his hand. Warren looks as if he’d like to sink through the floor, so I say, Go ahead. I’ll meet you at the car. As he slips on his coat, I say, Not speaking to Seamus is not treating him like a normal person, you know. He pulls on his stocking cap with a grimace. Seconds later, I shake the great laureate’s hand, and it shames me to say I’m so desperate to enter the world in which he’s lord that I get a shock of electricity doing so. We’re driving home when Warren says, You’d sit in his lap if he’d let you. He’s eighty, I say. I just wanted to touch him and see if he was real. Cambridge can make history come alive to you with its parade of big-deal writers. At MIT, we see blind Borges right before he dies. And if we bicker over our social differences, still a steady current of book talk flows back and forth.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  sharing your gardenJust as women are often taught to trust cultural messages about their body more than their own internal sense of what’s healthy, we often trust our partner’s opinions and ideas about our sexuality more than we trust our own. Especially if our partner’s sexuality is a better match with the standard narrative about how sex is “supposed” to work, we’re ready to believe that we’re broken. But you know better now, and you know how to make the most of any desire style. Embrace responsive desire. Adore it. It asks that your partner help you in creating good reasons for you to be turned on. Couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades have two things in common: They are friends who prioritize sex. Let’s be clear that it is normal for there to be times in your relationship when sex is not a priority, and in some relationships it is never a priority. But when the context is right, you long to welcome someone into your garden. When you do, remember that they are used to working in their own garden, and their garden is different from yours. Their body, their brakes and accelerator, the seeds that their family and culture planted, the way they were taught to tend the garden, may be similar to yours, or they may be totally different. If you and your partner are different from each other, remember that neither of you is better or worse—even if one of you conforms more to the cultural standard. A potato farmer would be plain old wrong to suggest that your roses should be growing underground. What works for aloe won’t work for tomatoes. I hope that anyone you like and respect enough to invite into your garden likes and respects you, too. Just as you’d want to help their garden thrive, so they should want to help your garden thrive. They just might not know how to do it. So you have to teach your partner about responsive desire. You’re not broken, you’re a tomato plant in a world that expects you to be an aloe. If you thrive on more water, tell your partner, and celebrate it together. Tell each other what contexts activate your accelerators and what contexts hit your brakes. Talk about the sexiest sex you’ve had together and what you can do to make it happen again. Good things happen when you create space in your relationship for responsive desire. When Olivia and Patrick flipped their desire styles on their heads by making Patrick, with his context-sensitive desire style, the initiator, he had to figure out what exciting things would propel him from idling to interested. Olivia patiently allowed Patrick space and time to explore his desire, and she was rewarded with an intensity of erotic experience that her own spontaneous style rarely allowed for.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  But given the right context, I believe every woman is capable of it, and, in my opinion, every woman deserves the opportunity to try it. Even if you don’t experience minutes of oceanic ecstasy, it will still be an hour well spent! how do you medicate a flock?The kitschy 1968 cult movie Barbarella imagines a forty-first century in which people take “exaltation transference pellets” to have orgasms, to save on the mess and bother of having sex. You take the pill, sit palm to palm with your partner, and within a minute your body pulses and your hair curls. Boom. Done. You can see the appeal. I want ecstasy to be easy and instantaneous, too, like taking a pill. Many of us live lives of constant tension, doubt, obligation, and effort. Couldn’t pleasure, of all things, just happen, without our having to work at it? The closest we can come to that in the twenty-first century is a vibrator. The right vibrator provides an intensity of stimulation for your accelerator that you just can’t replicate with any nonmechanical stimulation. Even if your brakes are still on—you’re stressed out, anxious, sad, or frustrated—a vibrator is often intense enough to generate an orgasm much faster than manual stimulation. A vibrator won’t necessarily persuade all the birds to fly in the same direction. It provides high-intensity stimulation for the parts of your brain that respond to sex-related stimuli; it can turn on the ons like nobody’s business, but it doesn’t turn off the offs. The idea of pleasure as an emergent property of the interactions of a collective of desires (aka a flock) is what makes medicating pleasure, arousal, desire, and/or orgasm so difficult. A drug would have to twiddle not just the accelerator and brakes but also the stress and the love and the body image and trauma history and the relationship trust and the other things that are known to impact women’s sexual wellbeing. Tugging one bird toward orgasm won’t help you if the rest of the birds are busy avoiding predators. Pleasure is an emergent property of the interaction of multiple systems— it’s a process, not a state, an interaction, not a specific area of the brain or the body. Pleasure is the whole flock. Pleasure is all of you. flying toward ecstasyWhat the science gives us is this: To have more and better orgasms, turn off all the offs and slow down how you turn on the ons. Give your whole brain time to get on the orgasm train.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In September 1524, Luther sent Glatz to Orlamünde, where Luther’s old rival Karlstadt had been causing some trouble. But Kathie was never interested in spending her life with Glatz, who some of his own colleagues characterized as “an old skinflint.” In fact, she was enough averse to Glatz that she eventually approached Amsdorf to tell him so. But she explained to him that she did not wish anyone to think she was averse to marriage itself, and she then rather forthrightly and forwardly said she was quite open to marrying either him—Amsdorf—or perhaps Dr. Martinus. Thus was the door opened, neither by might nor by power, but by a maiden, proud, strong willed, and available. But Amsdorf was even less inclined to marry than the little-inclined Luther and would remain a dedicated bachelor his whole life. So the question became whether the esteemed Dr. Luther himself could be persuaded to leap off that high crag from which he had been pushing so many others. There were so many other things pulling at him that it was nearly impossible for him to focus on personal matters. For one thing, there was Thomas Müntzer and the brewing rebellion of the German peasants. This would unleash upon the landscape a nightmare of blood and horror that would for a season seem to blot out the sun itself, making love and marriage the distant ideas of a forgotten world. CHAPTER SIXTEENFanaticism and ViolenceYOU BREATHE OUT NOTHING BUT SLAUGHTER AND BLOOD. —Agricola in a letter to Thomas Müntzer What courage has he, Dr. Pussyfoot, the new pope of Wittenberg, Dr. Easychair, the basking sycophant? —Müntzer, writing about Luther THE TROUBLES THAT Luther once had with those still hewing to the pope’s line on things were soon replaced by the troubles he would have with Karlstadt and then with Thomas Müntzer, and those with Müntzer would breed still greater troubles. But for Luther the question was always: What was God’s course between these extremes? We however take the middle course and say: There is to be neither commanding nor forbidding, neither to the right nor the left. We are neither papistic nor Karlstadtian, but free and Christian, in that we elevate or do not elevate the sacrament, how, where, when, and as long as it pleases us, as God has given us the liberty to do so. Just as we are free to remain outside of marriage or to enter into marriage, to eat meat or not, to wear the chasuble or not, to have the cowl and tonsure or not. In this respect we are lords and will put up with no commandment, teaching, or prohibition.1

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  In advance, I offer to pay my own way and warn all comers that I don’t so much as kiss. This is my way of demystifying the whole gender, plus giving myself wardrobe opportunities—an excuse for witchy shoes and lip gloss. There comes a string of good eggs who never make boyfriends, all ages and shapes. If it moves, I’ll date it. At a faculty party, I agree to dinner with a surgeon who turns out—how?—to be in his mid-twenties. (Our sole point of commonality is that I’d babysat one of his undergrad frat brothers.) I date a local mogul twice that age and stay friends with his family for years. A comedian and a fireman, a legendary undercover narc, the occasional prof or publishing dude, an arbitrager. None of these do I so much as press lips to. Only one straitlaced captain of industry even tempts me. Fit and well traveled, he shows up in a snazzy convertible, and it thrills me that he doesn’t drink. On our second phone call, though, he confesses a sex addiction that involves—among other shockers—hospitalization for masturbation injuries. Meanwhile, I’m broke enough to be filching toilet paper from the school bathroom. It’s Patti who suggests I put God in charge of my financial woes, which sounds nuts unless you’ve spent a few years during which prayer keeps you from driving into stuff. God’s just gonna tell me to have another tag sale, I say, I’d sold every silver pie server and cake plate we got for our wedding. So you know what God thinks now? (What is your source of information?) I confess I don’t much know what God thinks. Patti proposes that I pray to accept whatever reality I’m in, staying alert for practical solutions rather than issuing orders in prayer. It takes discipline to stop beseeching the heavens for wheelbarrows of gold ingots to roll to my door. I manage it for three or four nights max. Then—when Dev and I pick through trash piles for furniture—I find myself upending dresser drawers and (once) even pawing through an old golf bag in case somebody accidentally threw out any bearer bonds. After the mortgage, I have a few hundred bucks each month for every bill, morsel of food, and tube sock. During a sweaty night praying over a stack of unpaid bills, I literally kneel before them (in some ways worshipping my fear, it strikes me now). Because I signed up to take my whole salary over the nine-month academic year, all money clicks off in June. Even with summer jobs, I face missing mortgage payments. If I had a few years to cobble up a book, maybe some publisher with sufficiently low standards would pony up enough to pay off my maxed-out credit cards so I could qualify for a rust-bucket car loan. But that’ll take years. How to start while teaching, raising a kid, and working in some local restaurant?

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  “How is it different? I still love him exactly as much as I did the day we got married; I just seem to have emptied my ‘lust tank.’ Do people have a ‘lust tank’ that can be empty?” “No… well… sort of? Not really. It’s not so much a tank as… a… a shower,” I said. “A shower where sometimes there’s tons of hot water, and the water pressure and the showerhead are great, and other times there’s hardly any water pressure or the showerhead is all gummed up with schmutz. You can always take a shower, but all these contextual factors influence whether that shower is fantastic or frustrating.” “Contextual factors. So what is that in real life? Candles and flowers?” She was grimacing. “Bodice ripping?” “Those are circumstances. Situations. That’s part of it, but when I say ‘context,’ I also mean, like, brain states.” “Oh!” she said, brightening. “That sounds much more interesting than candles.” It is. And it’s what this chapter is about: how to get the water nice and hot and build up the water pressure. In their survey research on “cues for sexual desire factors,” Katie McCall and Cindy Meston asked women what turned them on, and found that the results divided into four general categories.2 Love/Emotional Bonding Cues, such as feeling a sense of love, security, commitment, emotional closeness, protection, and support in your relationship, and feeling a kind of “special attention” from your partner. Example: A woman told me the extraordinarily romantic story of a boyfriend who flew halfway around the globe to surprise her for their second anniversary of dating. Talk about closeness, commitment, and special attention. Yeah, that man got laid. Explicit/Erotic Cues, such as watching a sexy movie, reading an erotic story, watching or hearing other people having sex, anticipating having sex, knowing your partner desires you, or noticing your own or your partner’s sexual response. Example: A woman in her twenties told me of a time when she woke up in the middle of the night in her boyfriend’s apartment, to the sound of the upstairs neighbors having sex. The rhythmic squeaking and grunting instantly turned her on. She kissed her boyfriend awake and they listened together, then had fast, intense sex. Visual/Proximity Cues, such as seeing an attractive, well-dressed potential partner, with a well-toned body and lots of confidence, intelligence, and class. Example: A friend once said to me rhetorically, “What is it about the white cuffs of a shirt peeking out under a suit jacket?” I suggested, “Maybe a marker of a social status?” And she added, “That, and grooming. A man with pristine white cuffs is a man whose skin will taste good.”

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Romantic/Implicit Cues include intimate behaviors such as dancing closely, sharing a hot tub or massages or other intimate touch (like touching the face or hair), watching a sunset, laughing or whispering together, or smelling pleasant. Example: A woman in her thirties told me that she and her husband were saving up to remodel their bathroom, after they realized that a reason she was so keen for sex when they went on vacation was that they took long, hot (in every sense) baths together in the giant tubs at the B and Bs where they stayed. More baths, more sex. None of this is too surprising, but it’s always great to have data to back up our intuitions: A blend of erotic and romantic cues increases desire in women. McCall and Meston’s work tells us what activates the accelerator. In a series of nine focus groups with eighty women, Cynthia Graham, Stephanie Sanders, Robin Milhausen, and Kimberly McBride cataloged women’s thoughts on things that cause them to turn on or to “keep the brakes on.”3 These researchers found themes that have interesting parallels with McCall and Meston’s work. Here are the themes, with a quote from the research participants to illustrate each: Feelings About One’s Body. “It’s much easier for me to feel aroused when I’m feeling really comfortable with myself… it’s not as easy to feel aroused when I’m not feeling good about myself and my body.” Concerns About Reputation. “Being single and you know, wanting to be sexual with another person and thinking ‘okay, am I going to be too much?’ or ‘am I going to be not enough?’ or ‘what are they going to think of me because I’m doing these things?’…” Putting on the Brakes. “I think it’s like you might have some inclinations and then you’re like, ‘wait a minute, you can’t do that,’ you’re in a relationship or that guy’s a loser… and all of a sudden you just [think] ‘okay, fine, forget it, I can’t. That’s a bad idea,’ and just walk away from it.” Unwanted Pregnancy/Contraception. “Unwanted pregnancy is a big turn off and if you’re with a partner who seems unconcerned about that, then it really feels like a danger.” Feeling Desired Versus Feeling Used by Partner. “I like it when [men] caress not only, like, your body parts that get sexually aroused but just, like, your arms… it feels like he’s encompassing you and appreciating your whole body.” Feeling “Accepted” by Partner. “Even with my second husband, and we were together 16 years, he was not accepting of my sexual responses… I make a lot of noise or [with] my favorite way to orgasm, he felt left out… That was just the beginning of just really shutting down.” Style of Approach/Initiation and Timing. “His ‘game’… you know, how the man approached you, how did he get me to talk to him longer than like, five minutes?… [It’s] the ways he went about it.”

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Helfrich says, “I want to know about a challenge they feel ready to take on but haven’t been given the chance. Then as the time goes along, wow, the alignment that comes from giving them small tasks or opportunities that comport with what they shared with you builds their confidence that what they say really matters.” He told us about a member of his team who was the hub of coordination in the office. “But,” he said, “she was starting to feel like a reporting mechanism and wasn’t being given a chance to think creatively or strategically. She had this skill set as a conductor that was highly regarded, but it felt limiting to her.” While some managers might encourage the employee to lean into this strength, Helfrich knew that if she wasn’t allowed to stretch and grow, he might lose her. He asked if the employee would like to take the lead on a new project, allowing her to guide the creative process, which, he says, “unlocked career growth that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.” To conduct such development conversations, we recommend asking the following questions: What activities do you look forward to doing most at work? What is it about those tasks that energizes you? What tasks frustrate you? What is it about those tasks that’s demotivating? If you had a few wishes for your career, what would they be? Is there anything else you’re curious about that you haven’t been able to explore yet in your career? In order to capture what you learn from this and subsequent, ongoing conversations, we advise taking the approach recommended by Dr. Sydney Finkelstein, professor of management at Dartmouth College. He suggests managers create spreadsheets into which they enter the following information for each employee: General observations about working style and an assessment of the person’s potential. Feedback received about ways the person likes to be managed. Key motivators, including extrinsic rewards like financial compensation or manager-to-employee recognition as well as intrinsic drivers such as excelling in their work or having ownership of their decisions and actions. Possible opportunities for career enhancement, including what networking, stretch assignments, and promotion targets might be needed. The person’s stated long-term career and development goals. Feedback the leader needs to offer to help the person grow (including broader wisdom about the industry the leader wishes to impart over time). Then, before each development conversation, a quick perusal of their information can help pinpoint issues to follow up on that might have gone by the wayside in the hustle of day-to-day operations. Perhaps an employee said he’d like to present the team with an idea for improving a process, and you’d forgotten about that over the past few weeks. A ten-minute review of the spreadsheet allows you to put it back on the table and propose a first step for him to take. Method 7: Carefully Calibrate Growth Opportunities Employees who want to stretch their wings may not always be ready to fly.