Disappointment

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 Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  Following his relapse back into porn, Corey scheduled a session with his therapist to try to understand how and why it had happened. After all the pain he had been through because of porn—his unhappy marriage, the sexual offense he committed, time in jail—he couldn’t believe he would slip back into using it again. “I knew if I didn’t figure out how I got there, I’d just go there again,” he said. With his therapist’s help, Corey created a timeline covering the period shortly before his relapse until after it was over. In his timeline he identified how he was feeling, what he was thinking, and what he was doing at each point in time. He wanted to identify what made him vulnerable to relapsing and might in the future indicate that he had entered Trigger Territory and was slipping into the Relapse Zone. Corey figured out that his relapse had begun when he started playing mind games with himself when he was feeling lonely and sexually frustrated. “First I convinced myself that I was only looking at swimsuit ads,” he said. “Then I began to look at catalogs that included lingerie. I tricked myself into believing all of it was safe and allowable. By the time I got to the porn sites, my sexual excitement had kicked in and I was already so caught up, it didn’t matter to me what I was doing.” Corey learned that even though lingerie and swimsuit ads are not technically porn, they gave him the same rush he used to get from porn. He didn’t even have to masturbate or have an orgasm, just searching for those pictures and thinking of searching brought on feelings of euphoria. It became clear that it wasn’t what he was looking at, but why and how he was involved that mattered in terms of triggering his relapse. Analyzing her most recent relapses for clues to prevent future occurrences, Marie discovered that what triggered her relapse back into using porn was feeling emotionally vulnerable and looking for something to soothe her feelings. “When I get really stressed out and feel like a failure in life, it’s like a little movie projector in my brain kicks on and starts showing the porn I’ve already seen to make me feel better. Then I get triggered into wanting to go buy and look at more porn. I’ve learned to pay attention to when I get stressed out and shift immediately into reducing stress and taking care of myself emotionally so that I feel better inside.”

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  awful compound like life in Georgia.” Blount’s Cracker President would have “a richer voice, and a less dismissable smile.” 31 There was probably more redneck in Jimmy than Blount realized. When speechwriter Bob Shrum resigned from the Carter team in 1976, he exposed a less compassionate candidate. The man who publicly advocated for miners when he spoke before a labor audience told Shrum privately that “he opposed increased black-lung benefits for miners, because ‘they chose to be miners.’” Seemingly lacking an understanding of class conditions, Carter right then revealed a mean streak a mile wide. Should miners suffer because they accepted the dangers of the job? He showed his mean side again in 1977 when he endorsed the Hyde Amendment for restricting Medicaid payments to poor women seeking abortions. In answer to a question from Judy Woodruff of NBC, the president did not defend his position on strictly moral grounds, but made a class argument instead: “Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people can’t. But I don’t believe that the federal government should take action to try to make these opportunities exactly equal, when there is a moral factor involved.” He basically held that the federal government should be able to deny poor women benefits because they were poor. The wealthy could do as they please, and the poor had to be disciplined. Carter was prone to the fatalistic view: poor women deserve their destiny, and coal miners must endure black-lung disease. In effect, the message was: don’t expect equality or compassion if you can’t help yourself. 32 America’s love affair with Jimmy Carter of Plains, Georgia, faded fairly rapidly. By 1979, his declining popularity was summed up in the parable of the swamp rabbit. It was a story the media refused to let go of, in part because the president’s staff refused to release images of the encounter until pressed. Carter told his own tale of the swamp adventure. Paddling a canoe, he saw a wild rabbit chasing his small craft and “baring his teeth.” He thought it was curious, and also funny. Reporters turned it into a modern version of the frontiersman’s vaunted boasting session. Instead of “Daniel Boone wrestling with bears,” one journalist chided, Carter was taking on “Peter Rabbit.” Others had the president sparring with Banzai Bunny, or the killer rabbit of Monty Python fame. It became a metaphor for a wimpy presidential leadership style, feeding the legend of the country boy who turned coward in what should have been familiar terrain —the marshy wilds of the Georgia backcountry. Jimmy Carter was not the hero of Deliverance; he was closer to Jimmy Stewart of Harvey, a feebleminded man

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  "If the chastity of the heathen," he objects to Augustine’s view of the corrupt nature of heathen virtue, "were no chastity, then it might be said with the same propriety that the bodies of unbelievers are no bodies; that the eyes of the heathen could not see; that grain which grew in their fields was no grain." Augustine justly ascribed the value of a moral act to the inward disposition or the direction of the will, and judged it from the unity of the whole life and according to the standard of love to God, which is the soul of all true virtue, and is bestowed upon us only through grace. He did not deny altogether the existence of natural virtues, such as moderation, lenity, benevolence, generosity, which proceed from the Creator, and also constitute a certain merit among men; but he drew a broad line of distinction between them and the specific Christian graces, which alone are good in the proper sense of the word, and alone have value before God. The Holy Scriptures, history, and Christian experience, by no means warrant such a favorable view of the natural moral condition of man as the Pelagian system teaches. On the contrary, they draw a most gloomy picture of fearful corruption and universal inclination to all evil, which can only be overcome by the intervention of divine grace. Yet Augustine also touches an extreme, when, on a false application of the passage of St. Paul: "Whatsoever is not of faith, is sin" (Rom. xiv. 23), he ascribes all the virtues of the heathen to ambition and love of honor, and so stigmatizes them as vices.1767 And in fact he is in this inconsistent with himself. For, according to his view, the nature which God created, remains, as to its substance, good; the divine image is not wholly lost, but only defaced; and even man’s sorrow in his loss reveals a remaining trace of good.1768 Pelagius distinguishes three elements in the idea of good: . Power, will, and act (posse, velle, and esse). The first appertains to man’s nature, the second to his free will, the third to his conduct. The power or ability to do good, the ethical constitution, is grace, and comes therefore from God, as an original endowment of the nature of man. It is the condition of volition and action, though it does not necessarily produce them. Willing and acting belong exclusively to man himself.1769 The power of speech, of thought, of sight, is God’s, gift; but whether we shall really think, speak, or see, and whether we shall think, speak, or see well or ill, depends upon ourselves.1770 Here the nature of man is mechanically sundered from his will and act; and the one is referred exclusively to God, the others to man. Moral ability does not exist over and above the will and its acts, but in them, and is increased by exercise; and thus its growth depends upon man himself.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  And with the misery of knowing half of the poems, published ones, weren’t any longer, or in two years would definitely not be, passable in myself because of their bland ladylike archness or slightness. And I become linked to the damn book again, weeding it out like an overgrown garden: once the weeds were scenic, but not anymore. And if [Adrienne] Rich wasn’t so dull, and Donald Hall so dull, and they putting in a hundred pages of dull published poems, I wouldn’t feel so lousy. It would have backed me up at Smith in my work, given me that toehold on my adult work instead of making me go on from a five year gap, and only 16 poems published in the last year. Worst: it gets me feeling so sorry for myself that I get concerned about Ted: Ted’s success, which I must cope with this fall with my job, loving it, and him to have it, but feeling so wishfully that I could make both of us feel better by having it with him. I’d rather have it this way, if either of us was successful: that’s why I could marry him, knowing he was a better poet than I and that I would never have to restrain my little gift, but could push it and work it to the utmost, and still feel him ahead. I must work for a state in myself which is stoic: the old state of working & waiting. I have had the most unfortunate hap: the bright glittery youth from 17 to 20 and then the breakup and the dead lull while I fight to make the experience of my early maturity available to my typewriter. Yesterday: I faced another fact square on: I have not only been grossly spoiled: I haven’t worked at all . Not one tenth hard enough. This I know now: it was outlined by our visit to the two young writers Mrs. Cantor sent over: they are both through with the first drafts of novels, 350 pages of typing: now that’s, simply mechanically, a hell of a lot of typing not to mention writing & rewriting. They have had six months to our six weeks. So what. I haven’t used six weeks. I haven’t written a poem for six months until this long exercise in freer speech and extended subject, and haven’t written a story since October except for one, “The Trouble-Making Mother,” which is a slick story, but one I consider good, which was rejected without a word from The Sat Eve Post , and a flashy light one about a mother’s helper which I consider artificial and not worth rewriting and which will, in a week, no doubt come back from The Ladies’ Home Journal along with the little “Laundromat Affair.” So what have I written: bad conscience about Mademoiselle and Harper’s and The Atlantic plagues me: they’d print anything I wrote that was good enough. So all I have to do is work.

• From The New Naked: The Ultimate Sex Education for Grown-Ups (2014)

  They had sex as often as five to six times a week when they were engaged and during their first year as a married couple, but it’s gradually been diminishing to something that’s more routine than exciting. It bothers them both. But they admit that they never talked about their sexual needs or desires when they were courting, or even after the wedding. They just did it. They need to get the spark and desire back into their sex life, pronto. Lewis: My emotional connection to sex has diminished. So has how often we do it. Carmen: I noticed it, too, starting around our first wedding anniversary. Lewis: We weren’t as spontaneous. Carmen: I didn’t want to have it as much, either. Lewis: Then she got pregnant, and her morning sickness was so bad that our sex life practically disappeared. Carmen: And when the baby was born, we were so tired we didn’t think about it. Lewis: Yeah, and nothing much changed after we had the second baby. Carmen: So here we are. Lewis: For me, it’s more like a biological urge that needs to be taken care of, and for women it’s much more connected to their emotions. Carmen: Sometimes I feel that Lewis just wants to do it and get it over with, so he forgets to connect with me first. That just makes me feel like he’s not interested in me or my body or my needs. Their pattern: Like many married couples, what was once a wholly satisfying sex life has dwindled to infrequent forays that leave both partners dissatisfied and frustrated. But instead of talking frankly to each other, Lewis and Carmen remained silent. Their love was clear, but their communication skills were not. My advice: I can tell they have a strong and loving marriage because they literally finish each other’s thoughts. They might be having a rough patch sexually, but they are in complete emotional sync, and that is a terrific sign for them being able to work this out. Also, they both know that sexual intimacy is one of the most important aspects of a healthy sexual relationship. So is being able to express their sexual needs and desires, and that’s what’s tripping them up right now. What I suggest they both do is be honest about what they want sexually. Use the “Five Things I Desire” list on page 238 to tell each other what they love about each other—and what they’d like to do and have done to each other. They can compare notes and take it from there. A certain amount of compromising might be needed at first—if, for example, Lewis wants sex four times a week and Carmen wants it less while they’re working things through, perhaps they can settle on twice a week—but they should be able to come up with a mutually satisfying solution.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  It is better to go out of the body and to raise one’s self to the Lord, than to leave Cappadocia to journey to Palestine." He did not succeed in making peace, and he returned to Cappadocia lamenting that there were in Jerusalem men "who showed a hatred towards their brethren, such as they ought to have only towards the devil, towards sin, and towards the avowed enemies of the Saviour." Of his later life we know very little. He was in Constantinople thrice afterwards, in 383, 385, and 394, and he died about the year 395. The wealth of his intellectual life he deposited in his numerous writings, above all in his controversial doctrinal works: Against Eunomius; Against Apollinaris; On the Deity of the Son and the Holy Ghost; On the difference between ousia and hypostasis in God; and in his catechetical compend of the Christian faith.1962 The beautiful dialogue with his sister Macrina on the soul and the resurrection has been already mentioned. Besides these he wrote many Homilies, especially on the creation of the world, and of man,1963 on the life of Moses, on the Psalms, on Ecclesiastes, on the Song of Solomon, on the Lord’s Prayer, on the Beatitudes; Eulogies on eminent martyrs and saints (St. Stephen, the Forty Martyrs, Gregory Thaumaturgus, Ephrem, Meletius, his brother Basil); various valuable ascetic tracts; and a biography of his sister Macrina, addressed to the monk Olympios. Gregory was more a man of thought than of action. He had a fine metaphysical head, and did lasting service in the vindication of the mystery of the Trinity and the incarnation, and in the accurate distinction between essence and hypostasis. Of all the church teachers of the Nicene age he is the nearest to Origen. He not only follows his sometimes utterly extravagant allegorical method of interpretation, but even to a great extent falls in with his dogmatic views.1964 With him, as with Origen, human freedom plays a great part. Both are idealistic, and sometimes, without intending it or knowing it, fall into contradiction with the church doctrine, especially in eschatology. Gregory adopts, for example, the doctrine of the final restoration of all things. The plan of redemption is in his view absolutely universal, and embraces all spiritual beings. Good is the only positive reality; evil is the negative, the non-existent, and must finally abolish itself, because it is not of God. Unbelievers must indeed pass through a second death, in order to be purged from the filthiness of the flesh. But God does not give them up, for they are his property, spiritual natures allied to him. His love, which draws pure souls easily and without pain to itself, becomes a purifying fire to all who cleave to the earthly, till the impure element is driven off. As all comes forth from God, so must all return into him at last. § 166. Gregory Nazianzen. I. S. Gregorius Theologus, vulgo Nazianzenus: Opera omnia, Gr. et Lat. opera et studio monachorum S.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  gradual end to the wave of invasions of non-Christian peoples from north and east which had been a constant source of insecurity during the ninth and tenth centuries. 10. Cluny and the Santiago Pilgrimage Nevertheless, most people would not have experienced the new system as a deliverance; it was characterized by new forms of exploitation. In a search for new sources of wealth, and with the prospect of greater stability in their territories, the nobility turned to squeezing revenues out of the lands which they controlled through more productive farming. Some of their enterprise was directed to expansion of cultivation – draining marshes, clearing forest – but whether in old or new farming communities, they regulated their land and the people on it ever more closely. From the tenth century many areas of Europe witnessed the purposeful creation of a network of new village settlements, with many more legal obligations on their newly gathered inhabitants. A large proportion of the rural population was reduced to serfdom: farmers became the property of their lords, with obligations to work on the newly intensive agricultural production.4 Economic productivity dramatically rose as a result. There were better food supplies and more wealth. Surplus wealth and the need for ready exchange in

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Mark’s after the trials which followed Charles’ advent in Italy had begun, went away impressed with the friar’s piety and candor, and declared that he predicted with certainty to him and to the king, "things which no one believed at the time and which have all been fulfilled since."1183 On the other hand, such solemn prognostications failed of fulfilment, as the extension of Florentine dominion even to the recovery of Pisa, made May 28, 1495, and the speedy conversion of the Turks and Moors, made May 3, 1495. The latter purported to be a revelation from the Virgin on his visit to paradise. Where a certain number of solemn, prophetic announcements remained unfulfilled, it is fair to suspect that the remainder were merely the predictions of a shrewd observer watching the progress of events. Many people trusted the friar as a prophet but, as conditions became more and more involved, they demanded with increasing insistence that he should substantiate his prophetic claim by a miracle. Even the predictions which came true in part, such as the coming of Charles VIII. across the Alps, received no fulfilment in the way of a permanent improvement of conditions, such as Savonarola expected. The statement of Prof. Bonet-Maury expresses the case well. Savonarola’s prophetic gift, so-called, was nothing more than political and religious intuition.1184 Some of his predictions were not in the line of what Christian prophecies might be expected to be, such as the rehumiliation of Pisa. The Florentines felt flattered by the high honor which the prophet paid to their city, and his predictions of her earthly dominion as well as heavenly glory. In his Manual of Revelations he exclaims, "Whereas Florence is placed in the midst of Italy, like the heart in the midst of the body, God has chosen to select her, that she may be the centre from which this prophetic announcement should be spread abroad throughout all Italy." No scene in Savonarola’s career excels in moral grandeur and dramatic interest his appearance at the death-bed of Lorenzo the Magnificent, in 1492. History has few such scenes to offer. When it became apparent to the brilliant ruler of the Florentine state that his days were numbered, he felt unwilling to face the mysteries of death and the future without the absolution priestly prerogative pretends to be competent to confer. Savonarola and Lorenzo loved Florence with an equal love, though the one sought its glory through a career of righteousness and the other through a career of worldly dominion and glittering culture. The two leaders found no terms of agreement. Lorenzo had sought to win the preacher by personal attention and blandishments. He attended mass at St. Mark’s. Savonarola held himself back as from an elegant worldling and the enemy of the liberties of Florence.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  This flies in the face of more than a hundred years of architectural practice. Our society wants to condense, distill, centralize, and giantize. But when this becomes a form—the form—of social engineering, whether in the form of upper-class residential neighborhoods with no stores and no working-class residences, whether in the form of business neighborhoods with no residences at all, or in the form of industrial neighborhoods with no white-collar businesses and no stores, the result is a social space that can do well only as long as money is poured constantly into it. Such locations have no way of producing the economic cushioning that holds things stable at the infrastructural level. While such neighborhoods may be, at their outset, provisionally convenient, or uncrowded, or even beautiful, they can never remain pleasant to move around in over any extended period. Without a web of social pleasantry, uncrowded soon becomes lonely; beautiful becomes artificial; and even the convenience of propinquity transforms into the oppressing necessity to be where one would rather not. Under such valuative shifts, all too quickly follow those material transformations wrought by time alone, where neat and well cared for become abandoned, dirty, filled with trash, and rundown, while another neighborhood, three times or five times or ten times as old, which has nevertheless been able to maintain that stabilizing web of lived social pleasantry and diversity, is perceived—however shabby it may be—as quaint and full of historical interest. What I and many other small voices are proposing is that we utilize consciously the same principles of socioeconomic diversity through which those pleasant, various, and stable neighborhoods that were never planned grew up naturally. Purposely we must reproduce those multiform and variegated social levels to achieve like neighborhoods as ends. If our ideal is to promote movement among the classes and the opportunity for such movement, we can do it only if we create greater propinquity among the different elements that make up the different classes. That is diversity. Today, however, diversity has to claw its way into our neighborhoods as an afterthought—often as much as a decade after the places have been built and thought out. (It is not just that there were once trees and public ashtrays on Forty-second Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. There were also an apartment house and grocery stores, an automat, a sporting goods store, clothing stores, bookstores, electronics stores, a cigar store and several newsstands, and half a dozen restaurants at various levels, all within a handful of meters of the Candler office tower—as well as the dozen movie theaters and amusement halls [Fascination, Herbert’s Flea Circus], massage parlors and sex shows for which the area was famous, for almost fifty years—fifty years that encompassed the heyday and height of the strip as the film and entertainment capital of the city, of the world.) Why not begin by designing for such variety?

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  “You agreed that you owed the Welches an apology.” “Yes sir.” “You promised to apologize, Jack. You gave your word.” I said again that I wanted to but couldn’t. Mr. Bolger lost interest in me then. I saw it in his eyes. He told me that he and Mrs. Bolger had hoped I would be happy with them, happier than I’d apparently been with my stepfather, but it didn’t seem as if I was. All in all, he saw no point in my staying on. He said he would call my mother that night and make arrangements to have her come and get me. I didn’t argue. I knew that his mind was made up. So was mine. I had decided to join the army. MY MOTHER DROVE down the next day. She huddled with the Bolgers for a couple of hours, then took me for a drive. At first she didn’t speak. Her hands were clenched tight on the steering wheel; the muscles of her jaw were tensed. We went down the road a few miles, to a truck stop. My mother pulled into the parking lot and turned off the engine. “I had to beg them,” she said. Then she told me what her begging had accomplished. Mr. Bolger had agreed to let me stay on after all, if I would put things right with the Welches by working on their farm after school. I said I would rather not do that. She ignored me. Looking over the steering wheel, she said that Mr. Bolger also wanted Father Karl to have a talk with me. Mr. Bolger hoped that Father Karl’s brand of religion might reach me, being closer to the one I was raised in than his own. My mother said I had a couple of choices: I could either go along with Mr. Bolger or pack up. Today. And if I did paok up, I’d better have a plan, because I couldn’t come home with her—Dwight wouldn’t let me in the door. It looked like she might have a job lined up in Seattle but it would be a while until she knew for sure, and then she would need time to get started and find a place. “Why didn’t you apologize to those people?” she said. I told her I couldn’t.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  In fact, I confined my investigations exclusively to the coast, beach-hopping from Copacabana with its tourist hordes, big hotels, nightclubs, and family beaches, to the slightly more segmented Ipanema. In Ipa, there are beaches for surfers, beaches for gays, beaches for aging leftists and artists, a beach with a band shell for live music. The surf is stronger, and the social strata more intricate. A few blocks back from the beach, it's like Sutton Place. Ten blocks beyond? Slums that make the South Bronx of the 1970s look like Club Med. I traveled down the coast, through mountain tunnels to Barra (another one), a Montauk-esque beach community with even wilder waves and a less crowded beach—a sort of dress-down-if-you're-stinking-rich enclave strip of cafes and shops and modest but well-kept homes, a few full-bore pleasure palaces. I ate caldo verde (Portuguese kale soup), fried fresh sardines, and grilled chorizos and onions; drank cachaga and chopp; and looked out for good places to return for dinner. When the whole group was briefly reconstituted at the hotel, we set out for dinner at a churrascaria, a highly recommended place in Copa with an extensive buffet. But the minute we sat down, we knew it was a mistake. The meal was awful, pointless, and touristy. The Argentine beef was bland, chewy, and uninteresting. I felt like a carnival mark watching the bolero-jacketed waiters carving slices off indifferently grilled meat. There was only sirloin, filet, and round—no skirt or hanger or kidneys or interesting bits. I hate all-you-can-eat concepts to start with. Few foodstuffs, in my experience, are actually better festering under heat lamps, or growing oxidized on a buffet. A late-night sushi snack the next night was equally dreary. Taka's face, previously filled with enthusiasm as he discussed the films of Werner Herzog, went slack as he laid eyes on the limp graying tuna, the insipid California rolls. The bastards didn't even have Japanese beer! What was sensational was my first experience of feijoada, the national dish of Brazil. Feijoada is traditionally eaten on Saturday afternoon, in gargantuan, gut-busting portions, the idea being that after a full experience of this hearty mix of hooves, snouts, tails, and other meats stewed in black beans, one need not eat again for the rest of the weekend. Eager to find the best available, I strolled down the main drag of Copacabana, eyes peeled for locals, until I found a particularly busy cafe packed with cariocas happily digging in. Major score. My feijoada arrived baked in a massive earthenware crock, accompanied by plates of white rice, sauteed kale, and pork cracklins. It was breathtakingly good. Like so many truly great dishes, feijoada derives from desperate and humble circumstances. It's said originally to have been thrown together in impromptu fashion by African slaves, with leftovers pilfered or passed along from their cruel masters' plates.

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  We refer to this process as “pornifying” someone. It involves looking at people in a sexual way and essentially turning them into a character in a live ongoing porn production. Pornifying is a form of sexual objectification that tries to turn real life and real people into the same kind of fantasy that is portrayed in pornography. The more we look at porn and get sexually aroused by it, the more likely we are to experience the consequence of pornifying people in real life. Martha, a middle-aged artist, told us that she became concerned with how her porn use was affecting her when she realized how much she was pornifying the people in her life. “It’s more than merely noticing attractive people,” she said. “I’d go for a run in the park and reflexively scrutinize everyone I saw as to how sexually stimulating they were to me. I felt like an alcoholic who couldn’t go to a sports game, enter a restaurant, or a grocery store without sampling the booze. A guy might be praying in church, and I’d wonder how exciting he would be without his clothes on. I’d do it even when I didn’t want to be thinking of someone this way.” Not only can pornifying distract you from your real life, it can also turn you off to potential intimate partners. The dating pool becomes really limited when you’re only willing to relate with someone who looks and acts like a porn star. Zane, a college senior, said, “The girls on the computer are so hot. Their bodies are perfect. I’ve spent many hours fantasizing about being with them. But lately, it seems like I can’t accept imperfection in the women I meet. I’ll start talking with a really nice girl at a bar. She’s cute and has a great sense of humor, but my interest only goes so far. She’s not a ‘ten.’ She has flaws. Her boobs are too small, her waist too thick, or her thighs too wide. I know it’s wrong to be rejecting women because they don’t look like the image of the supermodel girls I find sexy. Porn has created a huge gap between the kind of woman I enjoy being with and the kind of woman I actually desire sexually.”

• From The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (2007)

  Their value is utilitarian, for they allow Jesus to emerge as a unique ethical teacher who is able to cut through whatever hampers anyone from living life to the fullest. This religious need is what, to a great extent, prompts the current description of first-century Judaism as mired in legal minutiae that trampled on individual needs, promulgating a warlike theology that had no place for peace, and obsessed with a purity system that marginalized women and promoted hatred of foreigners. Within this context, Jesus then emerges as a member of the ACLU, Greenpeace, the National Organization for Women, and the United Nations (on a good day). The social-justice Jesus who promotes a healthy interpretation of the Torah, peaceful response to oppression, the healing of women’s bodies, and the recognition that the God of Israel is the God of the Gentiles as well is enormously appealing, and enormously useful. The image may also be substantially true. The problem emerges, however, when these observations are enhanced by the depiction of Judaism as rejecting such concerns. Jesus was not the only Jew to care about these issues; his social-justice interests make him a Jew rather than distinguishing him from Judaism. Today, alas, given the general ignorance about first-century Judaism, there are few means by which the pastor or the priest would ever know this. The Educational Failure Departments of religion, seminaries, and university-based divinity schools are substantially to blame, through sins of both commission and omission, for the perpetuation of anti-Jewish teachings. Christian clergy and professors of seminary subjects ranging from Old and New Testaments through church history, theology, ethics, and pastoral care are not typically trained in Judaica. What they know about “Judaism” thus becomes an often intuitive sense derived from select readings of the Old and New Testaments. The situation is a particular problem for New Testament or early Christianity Ph.D. programs. Not all such programs require degree candidates to read such Jewish sources as the writings of Josephus and Philo, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the pseudepigraphical works (books dating to ca. 300 BCE –100 CE , usually written under the names of ancient worthies, such as 2 Baruch or 1 Enoch ), or the rabbinic texts. Instead, popular today are required readings in methods. Rather than introducing students to the primary sources, faculty train their acolytes on “how” to read them. The result is a Ph.D. candidate who can apply any type of critical theory (from poststructural, postmodern, postcolonial, feminist, womanist, mujerista, Min-Jung, queer readings, and autobiographical critique to whatever is of greatest interest at this year’s Modern Language Association meetings). There is much worth in these reading strategies and others, but there is no value to them if the student has no clue as to the content of the Letter to the Ephesians, let alone Philo’s Special Laws, Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews, or tractate Sanhedrin in the Mishnah.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  The letter from Northwestern’s admissions office arrived on a Friday afternoon, and, judging from how thin the envelope was, I knew before I ripped it open that I had been rejected. My shoulders started to shake as I scanned the page and the words began to sink in: “We regret that we are not able to offer you admission.” This can’t be, I thought. I have to go there. I need to go there. My friends were getting into their dream schools. Do these jerks in admissions not know how hard I work? I marched upstairs and put on my mother’s best Diane von Furstenberg dress, a string of pearls, and a pair of espadrilles and, with Patty at the wheel, took off in the family station wagon for the admissions office. This isn’t a good idea, Patty said. But I had never been shy about taking matters into my own hands. The year before, when the orthodontist had yet to remove my braces, despite several promises to do so and junior prom fast approaching, I took some wire cutters and a pair of pliers and did the job myself. The orthodontist stared at my mouth in disbelief on my next visit. In forty years of practice, he’d never seen a kid take off her own braces. Get in here, he called to his assistant. Then the two of them put a new set of braces right back on and adjusted the bill accordingly. If I could take off my own braces, I could sweet-talk my way into Northwestern. Sorry, the admissions officer said. This is a world-class school, highly competitive, and your grades and test scores just aren’t good enough. Not good enough. I stood up to leave, those words ringing in my ears. Patty was waiting for me in the parking lot when I stormed out. I jumped in the car and slammed the door so hard we both thought it might fall off. Now what? I had to get out of that house. At the same time, I was terrified of what might become of me if I left home. Look what had happened to each of my older siblings when they came back from college. Mary Kay grew distant. Nancy and Jake dropped out and were now so confused and depressed that they could barely get out of bed. Would that happen to me, too? I didn’t have anyone to talk to about my fears. I had alienated most of my friends by being so irritable and angry. Mary Kay had moved out of the house into an apartment in the city after she graduated. My parents certainly weren’t any help. As far as I was concerned, they were a major part of the problem. Even Patty seemed to be of little use to me anymore. Our Tiger Pit adventures were long over, and the space between our beds was more of a gulf. We barely spoke.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  The best thing that could happen to the theater district is that, on the eventual breakup of the organizations, the theaters are sold off to a number of smaller and competing organizations. A number of the city’s many theatrical experimental groups—La Mama, the Manhattan Theater Club, the Theater for the New City, Westbeth, CBA in Brooklyn, the LAB—should be given Broadway outlets, among precisely those theaters that Rich noted as too small to produce megaprofits. I do not think there is anything nostalgic or any yearning for authenticity in my suggestion that what is far more likely to happen, however, is that the remnants of the organizations will be bought up by a single megacorporation, and the “throwaway” theaters will go the way of the old Helen Hayes and the Morosco, torn down to make way for more office buildings and hotels. (For all this love for the theater, under pressure from the Forty-second Street Development Project or its avatars, since 1980, at least five theater buildings in the area have already been pulled down [the old Helen Hayes, the Morosco, the Adonis, the Circus, and one on the south side of Forty-second between Sixth and Seventh, whose name I cannot find out] and five more [including the Capri, the Eros I, the Cameo, the Venus, and two on the north side of Forty-second Street between Sixth and Seventh] have been totally remodeled into something that can never be used as theatrical space again. Nor does this count any of the nine theaters on Forty-second Street that stand closed and awaiting demolition. Since that time, one theater has been built—the New Victory children’s theater—and one, the New Amsterdam, has been renovated. This should give the lie to any protestations of serious concern with theater in New York made by any spokesperson of the Forty-second Street Development Project. What the project wants to do is exactly what its managers wanted to do in the 1970s when this plan got under way: build its office towers and its mall—and preserve a handful of theaters as museum pieces . . . only because they don’t think they can get away with destroying them all.) The remaining theaters will be, at best, theatrical museums for more glitzy productions of Guys and Dolls, Grease, and The King and I, and, at their worst, new and bigger and more gorgeous productions referring to less and less of the social and material world around us. The amount and variety of Broadway theater will be drastically reduced—and with it will go the aura of theatricality that Mr. Stern has cited as one of our city’s most valuable assets.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The struggle with Lewis the Bavarian was a little afterplay compared with the imposing conflicts between the Hohenstaufen and the notable popes of preceding centuries. Europe looked on with slight interest at the long-protracted dispute, which was more adapted to show the petulance and weakness of both emperor and pope than to settle permanently any great principle. At Henry VII.’s death, 1313, five of the electors gave their votes for Lewis of the house of Wittelsbach, and two for Frederick of Hapsburg. Both appealed to the new pope, about to be elected. Frederick was crowned by the archbishop of Treves at Bonn, and Lewis by the archbishop of Mainz at Aachen. In 1317 John declared that the pope was the lawful vicar of the empire so long as the throne was vacant, and denied Lewis recognition as king of the Romans on the ground of his having neglected to submit his election to him. The battle at Mühldorf, 1322, left Frederick a prisoner in his rival’s hands. This turn of affairs forced John to take more decisive action, and in 1323 was issued against Lewis the first of a wearisome and repetitious series of complaints and punishments from Avignon. The pope threatened him with the ban, claiming authority to approve or set aside an emperor’s election.119 A year later he excommunicated Lewis and all his supporters. In answer to this first complaint of 1323, Lewis made a formal declaration at Nürnberg in the presence of a notary and other witnesses that he regarded the empire as independent of the pope, charged John with heresy, and appealed to a general council. The charge of heresy was based on the pope’s treatment of the Spiritual party among the Franciscans. Condemned by John, prominent Spirituals, Michael of Cesena, Ockam and Bonagratia, espoused Lewis’ cause, took refuge at his court, and defended him with their pens. The political conflict was thus complicated by a recondite ecclesiastical problem. In 1324 Lewis issued a second appeal, written in the chapel of the Teutonic Order in Sachsenhausen, which again renewed the demand for a general council and repeated the charge of heresy against the pope. The next year, 1325, Lewis suffered a severe defeat from Leopold of Austria, who had entered into a compact to put Charles IV. of France on the German throne. He went so far as to express his readiness, in the compact of Ulm, 1326, to surrender the German crown to Frederick, provided he himself was confirmed in his right to Italy and the imperial dignity. At this juncture Leopold died.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  accused of wasting money and Works Progress Administration man-hours. A reporter for the Saturday Evening Post argued that the community was not even functioning as an organ of relief because the screening process was geared toward accepting only those applicants whose success seemed assured, rather than bringing in the folks who most needed government assistance. In the end, Congress ensured the failure of Arthurdale by refusing to support a factory that would have produced furniture for the U.S. Post Office while providing the community with a steady source of employment. 39 Arthurdale cast a long shadow. The bad publicity it received colored the reception of other planned communities, as the FSA director testified before Congress in 1943. But the deeper problem of Arthurdale was rooted in its emphasis on home ownership. Even successful communities such as those outside Birmingham and Jasper, Alabama, failed in their mission to help the poorest, ultimately retaining only middle-class residents. Without subsidies, poorer families were not a worthy credit risk. A resident of Palmerdale who worked at the Birmingham News-Age Herald explained that he actually had two jobs instead of one: he worked at the newspaper from 9 p.m. until early morning, and then went home to care for his fields. True, he freed his family from debt and fed his four children with canned goods, but the homestead model only served to double the labor of families like his, rather than to ease their burdens. 40 The publicity generated by the RA and FSA contributed to unrealistic expectations and time-mangled appearances. Some photographs of Palmerdale, and Penderlea in North Carolina, showed sharp-looking homes, ornamented with children on bicycles; another showed a man with a mule-drawn stone-boat (or it might have been a plow)—an apt scene in an 1840s daguerreotype, perhaps, but out of place in depicting a modern home. Barely hanging on to his symbolic existence, the yeoman had become a quaint (and contrived) artifact of a once- pristine American life. 41 Penderlea Homesteads in North Carolina was showcased as the government’s solution to tenancy. The residents were not wealthy, but they were happy amid “pleasant, congenial, and beautiful surroundings.” But perfect homes did not make perfect communities. Sabotage emerged from within the ranks of residents. Cliques formed in Penderlea, leading some to refuse to participate in community activities and to ridicule those who tried to do things “by the book.” Tensions flared as residents failed—or refused—to adjust to a middle-class environment: detailed records had to be kept, parliamentary rules had to be used at meetings, and household conveniences that wives had never seen before were included in

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Standing on a modern and insubstantial hammock-style desk chair, he tied the end of the rope around a nail he had already pounded into the top of the closet frame. —This knot’s called a bowline, he said. He let the noose swing free now, and in the meager light of Sandy’s swivel desk lamp its shadow swung with it, its ominous double. —Mayday! Mayday! —Not gonna give him a chance to share any last words, huh? Wendy said. She pulled the tags again. —Get this message back to base! Back to base! To base! —Won’t do any good, Sandy said. I’ve tried everything. His tone was so woeful that Wendy was certain it was true. Disappointment about G. I. Joe with Lifelike Hair weighed heavily on Sandy Williams. —Mayday! Mayday! Get this message back to base! Sandy slid the chair back under the desk and stilled the noose, that awful pendulum. —Okay, bring the prisoner here, he said. —One more chance. She couldn’t let it go. Wendy climbed off the bed and carried G. I. Joe toward his executioner. —Girls are always sticking up for the criminal. But I’m afraid, Sandy said thoughtfully, it’s not gonna do any good. Wendy yanked the dog tag one last time. And behold: —Major, incoming copter! Joe said. —Far out! —It’s just chance, Sandy said. Maybe one time every fifty or so he says that, even though it’s usually a different one. Something about a medic. He folded his arms. Together they stood over the prone body of G. I. Joe with Lifelike Hair, now supine on the folded comforter at the foot of Sandy’s bed. Somehow the idea of trying him again, of going back to the well one more time, felt pointless to Wendy. She recognized a moment here in which she saw the machinations of chance in the universe, and she didn’t want to ruin it. Sandy was adorable in this light. He couldn’t wait. He wanted to dispatch Joe, because he had some dignity wrapped up in the notion of inferior goods and dumb culture and stupid America. He was one of those kids who spent hours in front of the television shouting That would never happen . Sandy Williams expected to be cheated. He was ready for it. And it came to pass almost every time, and in this way the world seemed good and true. When he seized his doll, therefore, he pulled the elastic that connected the dog tag to its interior machinery as though he were going to strangle Joe with it. He seized it as though his certainty about being ripped off was the one thing he knew. —We’ll attack north at the next pass! Joe said. Wendy noticed again how silent everything was, how silent the house was, now that the storm had settled in to do its worst for a while. Sandy was stunned by Joe’s loquaciousness. Absently he scratched his testicles.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  For the first time, I began to see that we couldn’t just buy everything we wanted on a whim. Old habits are hard to break. Holmer started hiding his new suits under their bed, and I began signing Nancy’s name on the charge slips for my new hauls. From what I could tell by listening outside my parents’ bedroom door, Holmer’s business was not going well. After he sued his former business partner, he got a job as the national sales manager for the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, where his name appeared on the masthead. That was great for a while, until he got fired, for what I do not know. Before long, he landed another job, overseeing publications for the American College of Chest Physicians. But he got fired from that job, too, and then he developed a bleeding ulcer. Was it his erratic behavior? His drinking? Both? Whatever the cause, as Holmer approached his midforties, the trajectory of his career was heading in the wrong direction. He had once been such a high roller that he had his own room at the Waldorf Astoria. His cousins came to him for loans. Now he was the one scrambling to pay bills, sharing an office next to the copy machine. One of his cousins hired him to work at his Michigan Avenue advertising agency, a gesture that we suspected was an act of charity, confirmed after one of his kids loudly and derisively announced to Danny on the St. Francis playground, “Our dad had to give your dad a job.” Now we were quitting the Michigan Shores Club. No more swim lessons. No more cheeseburgers and fries at the Chatterbox, the little diner inside the club. I tried sneaking in anyway one day after school and ordered a chocolate milkshake. A charge to number sixty-three, please, I told the waitress, looking around nervously. Brain freeze be damned, I sucked down the ice cream drink as fast as I could before she discovered what a little grifter I was. THE CROWD CLAPPED AND cheered, but I wept as Mary Kay and her Regina Dominican High School classmates promenaded down the aisle in their white caps and gowns that evening in June 1970. She’s graduating, not dying, my mother leaned over and whispered to me. It felt like something was being lost forever in that existential moment. Our cozy family life—crazy to many from the outside looking in but comfortable and familiar to me—was about to end. Our oldest sister would be heading off to St. Louis for college in late August. The ten of us would never live together again. If I had my way, I would have preserved us all in amber at that sweet spot of 1970 with the jazz of our family life thumping throughout the house: moppy-headed high school boys in their shiny Camaros and Corvettes racing up the street to pick up my glamorous older sisters, Mungo Jerry blaring from their car stereos.

• From The New Naked: The Ultimate Sex Education for Grown-Ups (2014)

  It’s also way past time for you to address your issues directly, especially your depression. Taking drugs is no way to deal with feelings of inadequacy and unhappiness, and will only lead to more serious problems down the road. All that does is help you avoid dealing with what you know needs to be dealt with, or worse (like ruining your health or getting you arrested). It’s vital that you focus now on getting a job and getting out of the house to lift your spirits and give you some clarity and direction in your life. I also recommend you explore why you feel you need to have a sexual relationship with someone who is so much younger than you. I talk to lots of men your age who have very young girlfriends or mistresses, but for most of them, the relationship is predicated on how much money and “security” the man can offer the younger woman. Clearly that’s not the case for you. The real issue here may be that your relationship has run its course, and now it’s time for both of you to move on. Neither one of you sounds happy with your current situation, so sit down with Vicky and have a reality-check conversation. If a relationship isn’t working, trying to force it won’t fix things. This doesn’t mean that you can’t be friends or support each other anymore. In fact, you might find that your age difference will make you better friends than lovers in the long run, which can be a healthy and satisfying relationship. So you both need to take an adult step toward a life that makes both of you happy, even if this means parting ways. EPILOGUENOW THAT YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING…Now that you’ve finished your sex education course and know what can go wrong and how to fix it, you can refer to this handy cheat sheet, which covers what your guy needs to know. It’s perfect for his short attention span and perfect for you to catch any problems on the run and solve them quickly. Part IIf he has any of these common sexual dysfunctions, explain to him that he needs to get help for them. Resolving them will spice up your sex life. Ask him gently: □ Are you overweight, especially with a big belly? Is your height more than double your waist size? Can you see your penis? □ Are your testicles small, like the size of small cherries? □ Are you getting less than six hours of sleep every night? □ Are you drinking too much alcohol, more than two drinks per day? □ Are you feeling depressed or unusually stressed? □ Do you have trouble with regular erections, especially getting or maintaining them? □ Are you ejaculating too quickly? □ Or are you having problems ejaculating at all? (Tell him you’ll love him no matter what the answer!) □ Are you having sex less than your wife wants you to?