Disgust

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 Naked Lunch (1959)

  Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another -- the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) "Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapses. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existences as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host. "In Timbuctu I once saw an Arab boy who could play a flute with his ass, and the fairies told me he was really an individual in bed. He could play a tune up and down the organ hitting the most erogenously sensitive spots, which are different on everyone, of course. Every lover had his special theme song which was perfect for him and rose to his climax. The boy was a great artist when it came to improving new combines and special climaxes, some of them notes in the unknown, tie-ups of seeming discords that would suddenly break through each other and crash together with a stunning, hot sweet impact. "Fats" Terminal has organized a purple-assed baboon stick from motorcycles. The Huntsmen have gathered for the Hunt Breakfast in The Swarm Bar, a hang-out for elegant pansies. The Huntsmen strut about with imbecile narcissism in black leather jackets and studded belts, flexing their muscles for the fags to feel. They all wear enormous falsie baskets. Every now and then one of them throws a fag to the floor and pisses on him. They are drinking Victory Punch, compounded of paregoric, Spanish Fly, heavy black rum, Napoleon brandy and canned heat. The punch is served from a great, hollow, gold baboon, crouched in snarling terror, snapping at a spear in his side. You twist the baboon's balls and punch runs out his cock. From time to time hot hors-d'oeuvres pop out the baboon's ass with a loud farting noise. When this happens the Huntsmen roar with bestial laughter, and the fags shriek and twitch. Master of the Hunt is Captain Everhard, who was drummed out of the Queen's 69th for palming a jockstrap in a game of strip poker. Motorcycles careening, jumping, overturning. Spitting, shrieking, shitting baboons fighting hand to hand with the Huntsmen. Riderless cycles scrabbling about in the dust like crippled insects, attacking baboon and Huntsman.... The Party Leader rides in triumph through yiping crowds. A dignified old man shits at sight of him and tries to sacrifice himself under the wheels of the car. PARTY LEADER: "Don't sacrifice your old dried up person under the wheels of my brand new Buick Roadmaster Convertible with white-walled tires, hydraulic windows and all the trimmings.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Arab rioters yipe and howl, castrating, disembowelling, throw burning gasoline.... Dancing boys strip-tease with intestines, women stick severed genitals in their cunts, grind, bump and flick it at the man of their choice.... Religious fanatics harangue the crowd from helicopters and rain stone tablets on their heads, inscribed with meaningless messages.... Leopard Men tear people to pieces with iron claws, coughing and grunting.... Kwakiutl Cannibal Society initiates bite off noses and ears.... A coprophage calls for a plate, shits on it and eats the shit, exclaiming, "Mmmm, that's my rich substance." A battalion of rampant bores prowls the streets and hotel lobbies in search of victims. An intellectual avantgardist -- *'Of course the only writing worth considering now is to be found in scientific reports and periodicals" -- has given someone a bulbocapnine injection and is preparing to read him a bulletin on "the use of neo-hemoglobin in the control of multiple degenerative granuloma." (Of course, the reports are all gibberish he has concocted and printed up.) His opening words: "You look to me like a man of intelligence." (Always ominous words, my boy ...When you hear them stay not on the order of your going but go at once.) An English colonial, assisted by five police boys, has detained a subject in the club bar: "I say, do you know Mozambique?" and he launches into the endless saga of his malaria. "So the doctor said to me, 'I can only advise you to leave the area. Otherwise I shall bury you.' This croaker does a little undertaking on the side. Piecing out the odds you might say, and throwing himself a spot of business now and then." So after the third pink gin when he gets to know you, he shifts to dysentery. "Most extraordinary discharge. More or less of a white yellow color like rancid jism and stringy you know." An explorer in sun helmet has brought down a citizen with blow gun and curare dart. He administers artificial respiration with one foot. (Curare kills by paralyzing the lungs. It has no other toxic effect, is not, strictly speaking, a poison. If artificial respiration is administered the subject will not die. Curare is eliminated with great rapidity by the kidneys.) "That was the year of the rindpest when everything died, even the hyenas. ...So there I was completely out of K.Y. in the head-waters of the Baboonsasshole. When it came through by air drop my gratitude was indescribable....

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

  Work with some of these folks, even in the relatively roomy kitchens of Manhattan, and you're likely to see a number of practices they definitely do not teach at culinary school. Of course, expediency is one thing. Laziness is another. I hate, for instance, to see a cook "sear, slice, and flash," where instead of searing, say, a gigot, then finishing to proper doneness in the oven, he'll sear the outside of the mat, slice it nearly raw, then color the slices under the salamander. I've seen jammed-up cooks searing lamb, beef, and duck simultaneously—all in the same pan. I hate that too. And instead of reducing and mounting sauces to order, in a clean pot each time, some cooks keep a veritable petri dish of reducing sauce festering on a back burner, adding unreduced sauce as needed until the pot is a crusty, horrible abomination of oversalted, scorched, and bitter swill. Not for me, thanks —and not in my kitchen. The microwave was a blessing to full-time System D experts. I've seen veterans of three-star kitchens throw absolutely raw, unseared cote de boeuf for two into a microwave oven, presumably to "warm it up" to cut cooking time! One can be a proud practitioner of The System without resorting to food murder. With a fine set of moves, a strong, adaptable mind, and a certain threshold, a level beyond which one will not under any circumstances go, one can break all the rules and still make good food. One's customers will get what they wanted, when they wanted it. And no one will be the wiser. If Vatel, the famous French chef of years past who allegedly killed himself when informed that his fish delivery would be delayed, had been fluent in System D, he might have lived a longer, happier, and more prosperous life. We remember him, after all, only for his passing. Maybe we don't remember the name of whatever early pioneer of System D first gazed upon a snail in a moment of need and thought to himself, "Gee . . . maybe if I cram enough garlic butter in there, I can serve that!" But we're still eating escargots de Bourgogne, aren't we? THE EVILDOERS I'm on the subway after a long, hard day in the kitchen, my feet swelling up like twin Hindenburgs; my back killing me; fourteen hours of hot, sweaty, uncomfortable toil and two hundred eighty dinners under my belt; and I want to sit down. There are three seats in front of me in the crowded subway car.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  The Department is my very lifeline." He kisses the D.S.'s hand thrusting his fingers into his mouth (the D.S. must feel his toothless gums) complaining he has lost his teeth "inna thervith." "Please Boss Man. I'll wipe your ass, I'll wash out your dirty condoms, I'll polish your shoes with the oil on my nose.... "Really, this is most distasteful11 Have you no pride? I must tell you I feel a distinct revulsion. I mean there is something, well, rotten about you, and you smell like a compost heap." He put a scented handkerchief in front of his face. "I must ask you to leave this office at once. "I'll do anything, Boss, anything ." His ravaged green face splits in a horrible smile. "I'm still young, Boss, and I'm pretty strong when I get my blood up." The D.S. retches into his handkerchief and points to the door with a limp hand. The Buyer stands up looking at the D.S. dreamily. His body begins to dip like a dowser's wand. He flows forward.... "No! No!" screams the D.S. "Schlup... schlup schlup." An hour later they find the Buyer on the nod in the D.S.'s chair. The D.S. has disappeared without a trace. The Judge: "Everything indicates that you have, in some unspeakable manner uh... assimilated the District Supervisor. Unfortunately there is no proof. I would recommend that you be confined or more accurately contained in some institution, but I know of no place suitable for a man of your caliber. I must reluctantly order your release." "That one should stand in an aquarium," says the arresting officer. The Buyer spreads terror throughout the industry. Junkies and agents disappear. Like a vampire bat he gives off a narcotic effluvium, a dank green mist that anesthetizes his victims and renders them helpless in his enveloping presence. And once he has scored he holes up for several days like a gorged boa constrictor. Finally he is caught in the act of digesting the Narcotics Commissioner and destroyed with a flame thrower -- the court of inquiry ruling that such means were justified in that the Buyer had lost his human citizenship and was, in consequence, a creature without species and a menace to the narcotics industry on all levels. In Mexico the gimmick is to find a local junky with a government script whereby they are allowed a certain quantity every month. Our Man was Old Ike who had spent most of his life in the States. "I was traveling with Irene Kelly and her was a sporting woman. In Butte, state of Montana, she gets the coke horrors and run through the hotel screaming Chinese coppers chase her with meat cleavers. I knew this cop in Chicago sniff coke used to come in form of crystals, blue crystals.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  The physical changes were slow at first, then jumped forward in black chunks, falling through his slack tissue, washing away the human lines.... In his place of total darkness mouth and eyes are one organ that leaps forward to snap with transparent teeth... but no organ is constant as regards either function or position... sex organs sprout anywhere... rectums open, defecate and close... the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments.... The Rube is a social liability with his attacks as he calls them. The Mark Inside was coming up on him and that's a rumble nobody can cool; outside Philly he jumps out to con a prowl car and the fuzz takes one look at his face and bust all of us. Seventy-two hours and five sick junkies in the cell with us. Now not wishing to break out my stash in front of these hungry coolies, it takes maneuvering and laying of gold on the turnkey before we are in a separate cell. Provident junkies, known as squirrels, keep stashes against a bust. Every time I take a shot I let a few drops fall into my vest pocket, the lining is stiff with stuff. I had a plastic dropper in my shoe and a safety-pin stuck in my belt.You know how this pin and dropper routine is put down: "She seized a safety pin caked with blood and rust, gouged a great hole in her leg which seemed to hang open like an obscene, festering mouth waiting for unspeakable congress with the dropper which she now plunged out of sight into the gaping wound. But her hideous galvanized need (hunger of insects in dry places) has broken the dropper off deep in the flesh of her ravaged thigh (looking rather like a poster on soil erosion). But what does she care? She does not even bother to remove the splintered glass, looking down at her bloody haunch with the cold blank eyes of a meat trader. What does she care for the atom bomb, the bed bugs, the cancer rent, Friendly Finance waiting to repossess her delinquent flesh.... Sweet dreams, Pantopon Rose." The real scene you pinch up some leg flesh and make a quick stab hole with a pin. Then fit the dropper over, not in the hole and feed the solution slow and careful so it doesn't squirt out the sides.... When I grabbed the Rube's thigh the flesh came up like wax and stayed there, and a slow drop of pus oozed out the hole. And I never touched a living body cold as the Rube there in Philly.... I decided to lop him off if it meant a smother party. (This is a rural English custom designed to eliminate aged and bedfast dependents.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  It was especially disgraceful that thegns even go so far as to ask for places to build monasteries, as they themselves put it, for their wives, who in equal foolishness, although they are laywomen, allow themselves to be abbesses of the maidservants of Christ. That saying of the common folk suits them well: ‘wasps may well build combs but they store up poison in them, not honey.’ [35] Expressing similar sentiments, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History recounts the sad destruction by fire in 683 of Coldingham Abbey, blaming the wicked ways of the inmates – both women and men – presided over by the Northumbrian princess Æbba. A censorious passing angel submitted a critical report on Coldingham to a particularly austere male member of the community; the specific wickedness seems to have consisted of accomplished weaving and oversleeping, plus ‘feasting, drinking, gossip, and other delights’. Bede’s rhetoric of denunciation is so dramatic that the reader may forget his initial rather lame admission that the fire was the result of carelessness. Evidently two different visions of life in a royal monastic community were the real issue at Coldingham. [36] * By the end of the eighth century, these remarkable and individual Anglo-Saxon arrangements were coming to an end. Partly this was the result of a calamity for the whole island that began in the 790s: a sequence of destructive raids escalating to prolonged invasion by Scandinavians, who in their eruption into eastern Europe had been called Rus’ and here were known as Vikings or Danes. At first they were non-Christians with no sympathy for the religion that they found. Monasteries as comfortable and prosperous as Whitby or (the rebuilt) Coldingham were obvious targets for plunder and worse. The impact was greater in the east and north which bore the brunt of Viking attack and of which the Scandinavians eventually took territorial control, but everywhere there was disruption and demoralization. A painful recovery followed, particularly when the Scandinavians themselves made a spiritual U-turn and adopted Christianity; but there was no going back to the past. [37] Quite apart from the destructive impact of the Vikings, there were strong pressures for change from within the Anglo-Saxon Church that were given opportunity by the need for reconstruction, but which did not involve reconstructing exactly what was there before. The echoes of Bede’s accusing voice remained strong: his firm views on what monastic life should be like were echoed by monastic reformers of the ninth and tenth centuries. That was aided by the pride of Anglo-Saxons in being part of a greater sacred unity than their own land; that might trump ecclesiastical arrangements which had served dynasties well in the conversion years. This concept of unity was encapsulated in the Anglo-Saxon word ‘Christendom’, a ninth-century coinage by one of their own scholars, now anonymous, in the course of translating into Old English a four-century-old Latin Christian history.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  No matter how long it is I'll wait. When the priority numbers are called up yonder I'll be there.' "It was K. E. put out the Octopus Kit for Massage Parlors, Barber Shops and Turkish Baths, with which you can administer a high colonic, an unethical massage, a shampoo, whilst cutting the client's toenails and removing his blackheads. And the M.D.'s Can Do Kit for busy practitioners will take out your appendix, tuck in a hernia, pull a wisdom tooth, ectomize your piles and circumcise you. Well, K. E. is such an atomic salesman if he runs out of Octopus Kits he is subject, by sheer charge, to sell an M.D. Can Do to a barber shop and some citizen wakes up with his piles cut out.... " 'Jesus, Homer, what kinda creep joint you running here? I been gang fucked.' "'Well, landsake, Si, I was just aiming to administer our complimentary high colonic free and gratis on Thanksgiving Day. K. E. musta sold me the wrong kit again....' " MALE HUSTLER: "What a boy hasta put up with in this business. Gawd! The propositions I get you wouldn't believe it.... They wanta play Latah, they wanta merge with my protoplasm, they want a replica cutting, they wanta suck my orgones, they wanta take over my past experience and leave old memories that disgust me.... "I am fucking this citizen so I think, 'A straight John at last'; but he comes to a climax and turns himself into some kinda awful crab.... I told him, 'Jack, I don't hafta stand still for such a routine like this.... You can take that business to Walgreen's.' Some people got no class to them. Another horrible old character just sits there and telepathizes and creams in his dry goods. So nasty." Naked Lunch: The Restored Text The bum boys fall back in utter confusion to the brink of the Soviet network where Cossacks hang partisans to the wild wail of bagpipes and the boys march up Fifth Avenue to be met by Jimmy Walkover with the keys to The Kingdom and no strings attached carry them loose in your pocket.... Why so pale and wan, fair bugger? Smell of dead leeches in a rusty tin can latch onto that live wound, suck out the body and blood and bones of Jeeeeesus, leave him paralyzed from the waist down. Yield up thy forms, boy, to thy sugar daddy got the exam three years early and know all the answer books fix the World Series. Slunk traffickers tail a pregnant cow to her labor. The farmer declares a couvade, rolls screaming in bullshit. The veterinarian wrestles with a cow skeleton. The traffickers machinegun each other, dodging through the machinery and silos, storage bins, haylofts and mangers of a vast red barn. The calf is born.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  The sparrow falls to my trustful Webley, and a drop of blood gathers at his beak.... Lord Jim has turned bright yellow in the woe withered moon of morning like white smoke against the blue stuff, and shirts whip in a cold spring wind on limestone cliffs across the river, Mary, and the dawn is broken in two pieces like Dillinger on the lamster way to the Biograph. Smell of neon and atrophied gangsters, and the criminal manqué nerves himself to crack a pay toilet sniffing ammonia in a bucket.... "A caper," he says. "I'll pull this capon I mean caper." PARTY LEADER (mixing another scotch): "The next riot goes off like a football play. We have imported a thousand bone fed, blue ribbon Latahs from Indochina. ...All we need is one riot leader for the whole unit." His eyes sweep the table. LIEUTENANT: "But, chief, can't we get them started and they imitate each other like a chained reaction?" The Diseuse undulate through the Market: "What's a Latah do when he's alone?' P.L.: "That a technical point. We'll have to consult Benway. Personally, I think someone should follow through on the whole operation." "I do not know," he said for lack of the requisite points and ratings to secure the appointment. "They have no feelings," said Doctor Benway, slashing his patient to shreds. "Just reflexes... I urge distraction. ' "The age of consent is when they learn to talk." "May all your troubles be little ones as one child molester say to the other." "It's really ominous, my dear, when they start trying on your clothes and give you those doppelganger kicks...." Frantic queen trying to claw sport jacket off departing boy. "My two hundred dollar cashmere jacket," she screeches.... "So he has an affair with this Latah, he wants to dominate someone complete the silly old thing.... The Latah imitates all his expressions and mannerisms and simply sucks all the persona right out of him like a sinister ventriloquist's dummy.... 'You've taught me everything you are.... I need a new amigo.' And poor Bubu can't answer for himself, having no self left." JUNKY: "So there we are in this no-horse town strictly from cough syrup." PROFESSOR: "Coprophilia... gentlemen... might be termed the hurumph... redundant vice...." "Twenty years an artist in the blue movies and I never sink so low as fake an orgasm." "No good junky cunt hang up her unborn child.... Women are no good, kid." "I mean this dead level conscious sex,... Might as well take your old clothes to the Laundromat...." "And right in the heat of passion he says, 'Do you have an extra shoetree?' " "She tell me how forty Arabs drag her into a mosque and rape her presumably in sequence....

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

  They're used to assholes—and know how to deal with them. NOTES FROM THE ROAD God, I hated Singapore the first time I visited it (the experience described here). The heat, and the transition to the freezing cold bars, then back out into the heat again—it nearly killed me. As did the sheer volume of food and my general state of exhaustion. After many return trips, I've since come to love the place with a passion. (See "Die, Die Must Try,"). But back then, I was having a real problem adjusting. I've since become better at airplanes, airports, book tours, hotels, and so on, and whine about it a lot less. It's always amusing to me to see some twerp musician on Behind the Music complaining about "life on the road," or to hear some first-time novelist griping about the rigors of a book tour. Two years ago they were sitting in Mom's cellar noodling away on a guitar, or clacking away on a word processor, and now they're griping about the agony of fine hotel rooms and world travel and a fat publicity budget? That barely qualifies as work. I know what work is—or once knew. I still remember it, however faintly at times. Standing in a busy kitchen twelve hours a day is work. The rest is a privilege. I read this piece now and want to say, "Shut the fuck up, you spoiled, whining bitch! You're lucky anybody gives a shit about you at all in Singapore! Now sit down and eat the turtle fat, you lazy, bloated gasbag." THE DIVE Ahhh, yes. This piece. Written originally as an e-mail (never sent). At the time, I was heartbroken, in love, and feeling really sorry for myself. As self-serving as the piece may be, I was being truthful about one thing: When I jumped from that rock? I really didn't give a fuck. A DRINKING PROBLEM Another piece for the Brits. And who was I kidding? What's wrong with good food in a pub? There's a reverse snobbery to my position that's hard to defend. After an initial frenzy of overenthusiasm, many of the so-called "gastro-pubs" seem to have settled down to serve pretty simple, honest, and decent food—most of the time not incompatible at all with a good pint. I think I had my head up my ass when I wrote this thing. Had the ass-kicking actually occurred, I would have richly deserved it. WOODY HARRELSON: CULINARY MUSE I meant every word of this and still do.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  In one sense Clement exalted the institution of marriage, by picking up the metaphor from the letter to the Ephesians in seeing it as reflecting the monogamous relationship that the Church enjoys with Christ. The idea of a woman remarrying after the death of her partner infringed the simplicity of the trope; grudgingly Clement allowed that it might happen. However, remarriage after divorce was unthinkable, a collapse into ‘fornication’ or adultery against Christ. [40] This was a very different melding of the New Testament and the Greek philosophical tradition from the broodings of young Epiphanes. Looming behind Clement was Philo Judaeus, whose prose often reappears in Clement’s writings, unreferenced. Unsurprisingly amid Clement’s borrowings from Philo came the familiar Hellenistic Jewish circumscribing of what was approved sex even within marriage: heterosexual sexual acts should be solely for the purposes of procreation. In turn Philo had borrowed that principle from a particular strand in Greek philosophy already four centuries old by his own time, since it derived from Pythagoras. [41] Clement followed Philo, also explicitly noting that Pythagoreans make love ‘only for procreation, not for pleasure’ with their wives; it is significant that Clement even called Philo ‘the Pythagorean’. Yet Clement still advanced the Pythagorean and Philonic procreational rule on sex as if it was to be found in Paul’s epistles and the New Testament generally, which it is not. [42] What might be seen as the ‘Alexandrian rule’ of procreationism in marriage, beginning with Clement, has had a long afterlife in Christian thought. It still lies embedded in official Roman Catholic marriage doctrine, particularly in opposition to contraception. Other Alexandrians echoed Clement, perhaps via alternative theological and philosophical routes. Justin Martyr for instance had been taught by Pythagoreans in Alexandria and may not have needed Philo to link him to their conclusions that there was no middle way between sexual intercourse for pleasure or complete continence. Justin’s negative views on sexual pleasure also align with the rhetorical contrast that we have already noted him pioneering on the roles of Eve and Mary in losing and regaining salvation. [43] Like Justin, Origen did not share his teacher Clement’s preoccupation with Philo, but in line with what may have been his personal physical enactment of negativity on sex, Origen made a remarkable extension to a comment by Paul of Tarsus. Paul had suggested that married couples might agree to suspend their ‘marital debt’ to each other for a while to devote themselves to prayer (1 Cor. 7.5). If prayer was thus incompatible with sex, Origen suggested that ‘perhaps the same consideration should apply, if possible, to the place’; in other words, people should not pray in a building where sexual activity had taken place. It is worth speculating that if others in the third century hearkened to Origen’s squeamishness about this, it could be the origin of Christians embarking on a programme of constructing separate buildings called churches: spaces for prayer free of any possible sexual taint.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  He is so anonymous, grey and spectral the pusher don't remember him afterwards. So he twists one after the other.... Well the Buyer comes to look more and more like a junky. He can't drink. He can't get it up. His teeth fall out. (Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.) He is all the time sucking on a candy bar. Baby Ruths he digs special. "It really disgust you to see the Buyer sucking on them candy bars so nasty," a cop says. The Buyer takes on an ominous grey-green color. Fact is his body is making its own junk or equivalent. The Buyer has a steady connection. A Man Within you might say, Or so he thinks. "I'll just set in my room," he says. "Fuck 'em all. Squares on both sides. I am the only complete man in the industry." But a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones. So the Buyer hunts up a young junky and gives him a paper to make it. "Oh all right," the boy says. "So what you want to make?" "I just want to rub up against you and get fixed." "Ugh... Well all right.... But why cancha just get physical like a human?" Later the boy is sitting in a Waldorf with two colleagues dunking pound cake. "Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for," he says. "Some way he make himself all soft like a blob of jelly and surround me so nasty. Then he gets wet all over like with green slime. So I guess he come to some kinda awful climax.... I come near wigging with that green stuff all over me, and he stink like a old rotten cantaloupe." "Well it's still an easy score." The boy sighed resignedly; "Yes, I guess you can get used to anything. I've got a meet with him again tomorrow." The Buyer's habit keeps getting heavier. He needs a recharged every half hour. Sometimes he cruises the precincts and bribes the turnkey to let him in with a cell of junkies. It get to where no amount of contact will fix him. At this point he receives a summons from the District Supervisor: "Bradley, your conduct has given rise to rumors -- and I hope for your sake they are no more than that -- so unspeakably distasteful that... I mean Caesar's wife ...hrump... that is, the Department must be above suspicion... certainly above such suspicions as you have seemingly aroused. You are lowering the entire tone of the industry. We are prepared to accept your immediate resignation." The Buyer throws himself on the ground and crawls over to the D.S. "No, Boss Man, no...

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  By contrast, by the end of the sixteenth century, developed Lutheran theology had taken the hardest line possible against polygamy, declaring it to be against natural law as well as against the law of the Church. [38] There was good reason for this Lutheran U-turn, after the most alarming demonstration of both polygyny and Anabaptism in a horrific episode in the western German city of Münster. In the early 1530s, groups of excited radicals began converging on Münster, convinced that it was the New Jerusalem. Arriving in their thousands, in 1534 they seized control of the city’s Reformation, which had begun in conventionally Lutheran mode. A joint expeditionary force of Lutherans and Catholics besieged Münster, and under pressure, with the city running short of food, the radicals’ revolution became ever more bizarre in its biblicism. In July 1534 they instituted polygyny on the basis of the Old Testament, provoking horror and opposition in the city that needed savage armed force to suppress. Girls as young as eleven were forced into polygynous marriages. The final Anabaptist leader, a charismatic young Dutchman Jan Beuckelszoon (known to generations thereafter as ‘John of Leyden’), announced that he was the biblical King David reborn. His personal harem, living in bizarre luxury as the citizens starved, eventually numbered fifteen, although when hunger eventually reached even his Court, Beuckelszoon sent fourteen of them to seek refuge outside the city. When in June 1535 the besiegers burst into Münster after eighteen months, their revenge on the Anabaptist leadership was as grotesque as the events they were punishing. The iron cages in which the tortured bodies of Jan and his companions rotted are still displayed high up on the belfry of the parish church of St Lambert. [39] The trauma of Münster put paid to open Magisterial Protestant consideration of polygamy. Ironically, nevertheless, a favourite role model in Protestant sermons became the Old Testament Patriarch Abraham: a reassuringly fecund literal patriarch blessed in his fecundity by God, thus a better model for husbands than Joseph, and a symbol of faithfulness less liable to idolatry than Mary. Those definite plusses enabled preachers to ignore his undoubted polygyny. [40] Otherwise, when the former Capuchin friar turned respected Reformed Protestant preacher Bernardino Ochino published a dialogue on polygamy in 1563, it ended his career, even though in the text he spoke in his own character in defence of monogamy. Ochino left his latest adopted city, Zürich, in disgrace, and eventually found a refuge in a radical community in Moravia at Slavkov (Austerlitz). They welcomed him on the principle of sheltering a victim of Magisterial intolerance and honouring his daring speculations about the nature of the Trinity, rather than out of any sympathy for polygamy. Printed copies of his dialogue are vanishingly rare. [41] By the time of Ochino’s obscure death in 1564, memories of Münster had turned away even radicals from such experiments; like Luther, they had travelled a long way from their first excitements.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  We aren't a matriarchy here, Insh'allah . You know the experiment with rats where they are subject to this electric shock and dropped in cold water if they so much as move at a female. So they all become fruit rats and that's the way it is with the etiology. And shall such a rat squeak out, 'I'm queah and I luuuuuuuuve it' or 'Who cut yours off, you two- holed freak?' 'twere a square rat so to squeak. During my rather brief experience as a psychoanalyst -- spot of bother with the Society -one patient ran amok in Grand Central with a flame thrower, two committed suicide and one died on the couch like a jungle rat (jungle rats are subject to die if confronted suddenly with a hopeless situation). So his relations beef and I tell them, 'It's all in the day's work. Get this stiff outa here. It's a bring down for my live patients' -- I noticed that all my homosexual patients manifested strong unconscious heterosex trends and all my hetero patients unconscious homosexual trends. Makes the brain reel, don't it?" "And what do you conclude from that?" "Conclude? Nothing whatever. Just a passing observation." We are eating lunch in Benway's office when he gets a call. "What's that?... Monstrous! Fantastic!... Carry on and stand by." He puts down the phone. "I am prepared to accept immediate assignment with Islam Incorporated. It seems the electronic brain went berserk playing six-dimensional chess with the Technician and released every subject in the R.C. Leave us adjourn to the roof. Operation Helicopter is indicated." From the roof of the R.C. we survey a scene of unparalleled horror. IND's stand around in front of the cafe tables, long streamers of saliva hanging off their chins, stomachs noisily churning, others ejaculate at the sight of women. Latahs imitate the passers-by with monkey-like obscenity. Junkies have looted the drugstores and fix on every street corner.... Catatonics decorate the parks.... Agitated schizophrenics rush through the streets with mangled, inhuman cries. A group of P.R.'s -Partially Reconditioned -- have surrounded some homosexual tourists with horrible knowing smiles showing the Nordic skull beneath in double exposure. "What do you want?" snaps one of the queens. "We want to understand you." A contingent of howling simopaths swing from chandeliers, balconies and trees, shitting and pissing on passers-by. (A simopath -- the technical name for this disorder escapes me -- is a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army, and discharge cures it) Amoks trot along cutting off heads, faces sweet and remote with a dreamy half smile. ...Citizens with incipient Bang-utot clutch their penises and call on the tourists for help....

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  After further political confusion in the Western Empire, Theodosius also seized power there in 392, and he had no hesitation in confronting the last resource of traditional strength in the senatorial aristocracy of the ancient capital Rome. That continued his previous policy in the East of ending all privileges for ancient priesthoods and closing temples wherever he could. Theodosius’s determination to tip the scales of society in favour of Christians had been startlingly witnessed in 388, when he forbade Christians and Jews to marry together, making it a crime on a par with adultery (which in theory carried the death penalty). This was the first time that Roman law had yoked marriage to confessional identity. ‘Christian marriage’, glimpsed in the writings of the Apostle Paul, was now an enforceable legal reality, subject to coercion. [9] * Among Theodosius’s other actions against previously sacrosanct customs was the ending of the Olympic Games in 393, after which celebration of the traditional divine pantheon, the Emperor closed them down for good. In Antioch, similar games lingered till 520, but by then the Greek custom of male athletes exercising naked had long ceased. [10] This end to the Classical cult of the male body was a fitting symbol of one of the most significant changes to Graeco-Roman society when the Empire officially turned Christian. Church leaders now had a chance to criminalize the centuries-old practice of male same-sex relations, condemned in New Testament Epistles from Paul of Tarsus and a successor-writer, and attacked thereafter (somewhat repetitively) by later generations of Christian writers. [11] Theodosius’s edict on the subject, issued jointly with his pliable co-emperors in 390, is first preserved in the contemporary writings of an anonymous Latin Christian author who was anxious to demonstrate how the Law of Moses in the Hebrew Bible agreed with Roman law – this eccentric project influenced Western Christian attitudes to law for centuries, including on sexual matters. [12] The Emperor made clear his revulsion that a soul enshrined in a body of male sexual characteristics should turn that masculine body to female sexual positions. This was taking traditional Roman disapproval of passive male intercourse and giving it a new spiritual dimension. In its condemnation of ‘the poison of shameful effeminacy’ enfeebling Roman society, Theodosius’s decree left far behind the assumptions about masculinity that once had constituted the rationale behind the heroic same-sex Theban Band. As a result, the imperial authorities rounded up male prostitutes in Rome’s same-sex brothels. It may be that those arrested suffered the penalty of being burned alive in public; certainly that was enacted in a revised version of Theodosius’s decree incorporated in a comprehensive codification of Roman law by his fifth-century namesake Theodosius II, which also extended the punishment to all passive males.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Then drugs, hypnosis, and --" Benway flipped a limp wrist. "Many subjects are vulnerable to sexual humiliation. Nakedness, stimulation with aphrodisiacs, constant supervision to embarrass subject and prevent relief of masturbation (erections during sleep automatically turn on an enormous vibrating electric buzzer that throws the subject out of bed into cold water, thus reducing the incidence of wet dreams to a minimum). Kicks to hypnotize a priest and tell him he is about to consummate a hypostatic union with the Lamb -- then steer a randy old sheep up his ass. After that the Interrogator can gain complete hypnotic control -- the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame. Needless to say, the sex humiliation angle is contraindicated for overt homosexuals. (I mean let's keep our eye on the ball here and remember the old party line... never know who's listening in.) I recall this one kid, I condition to shit at sight of me. Then I wash his ass and screw him. It was real tasty. And he was a lovely fellah too. And some times a subject will burst into boyish tears because he can't keep from ejaculate when you screw him. Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden. I was just scratching that lovely surface when I am purged by Party Poops. ...Well, 'son cosas de la vida.' " I reach Freeland, which is clean and dull my God. Benway is directing the R.C., Reconditioning Center. I drop around, and "What happened to so and so'?" sets in like: "Sidi Idriss 'The Nark' Smithers crooned to the Senders for a longevity serum. No fool like an old queen." "Lester Stroganoff Smuunn -- 'El Hassein' -- turned himself into a Latah trying to perfect A.O.P., Automatic Obedience Processing. A martyr to the industry..." (Latah is a condition occurring in South East Asia. Otherwise sane, Latahs compulsively imitate every motion once their attention is attracted by snapping the fingers or calling sharply. A form of compulsive involuntary hypnosis. They sometimes injure themselves trying to imitate the motions of several people at once.) "Stop me if you've heard this atomic secret...." Benway's face retains its form in the flash bulb of urgency, subject at any moment to unspeakable cleavage or metamorphosis. It flickers like a picture moving in and out of focus. "Come on," says Benway, "and I'll show you around the R.C." We are walking down a long white hall. Benway's voice drifts into my consciousness from no particular place... a disembodied voice that is sometimes loud and clear, sometimes barely audible like music down a windy street. "Isolated groups like natives of the Bismarck Archipelago. No overt homosexuality among them. God damned matriarchy. All matriarchies anti-homosexual, conformist and prosaic.

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

  It is unfair to any institution to base our judgment of its merits and utility upon its perversions. The ideal Benedictine and Franciscan monk, we should be glad to believe, was a man who divided his time between religious exercises and some useful work, whether it was manual labor or teaching or practical toil of some other kind. There were, no doubt, multitudes of worthy men who corresponded to this ideal. But there was another ideal, and that ideal was one from which this modern age turns away with unalloyed repugnance. The pages of Voragine and the other retailers of the conventual life are full of repulsive descriptions which were believed in their day, and presented not only a morbid view of life but a view utterly repulsive to sound morality and to the ideal. A single instance will suffice. In the curious legend of St. Brandon the Irish saint, whose wanderings on the ocean have been connected with America, we have it reported that he found an island whereon was an abbey in which twenty-four monks lived. They had come from Ireland and had been living on the island eighty years when they welcomed St. Brandon and his twelve companions. In all this time they had been served from above every week day with twelve loaves of bread, and on Sabbaths with double that number, and they had the same monotonous fare each day, bread and herbs. None of them had ever been sick. They had royal copes of cloth of gold and went in processions. They celebrated mass with lighted tapers, and they said evensong. And in all those eighty years they had never spoken to one another a single word! What an ideal that was to set up for a mortal man! Saying mass, keeping silence, going in processions with golden copes day in and day out for eighty long years, every proper instinct of nature thus buried, the gifts of God despised, and life turned into an indolent, selfish seclusion! And yet Voragine, himself an archbishop, relates that "Brandon wept for joy of their holy conversation."563 Gifts of lands to monastic institutions were common, especially during the Crusades. He who built a convent was looked upon as setting up a ladder to heaven.564 Battle Abbey, or the Abbey of St. Martin of the Place of Battle, as the full name is, was built by William the Conqueror on the battle-field of Hastings and finally dedicated by Anselm, 1094. The Vale Royal in Cheshire, the last Cistercian home founded in England, was established by Edward I. in fulfilment of a vow made in time of danger by sea on his return from Palestine. He laid the first stone, 1277, and presented the home with a fragment of the true cross and other relics.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Disconnect her, boys.' He shows his gums in a feeble snarl.... 'Not for nothing am I known as Nellie the Repossessor.' "So they disconnect my own mother, the sainted old gash, and she swell up and turn black and the whole souk stink of piss and the neighbors beef to the Board of Health and my father say: 'It's the will of Allah. She won't piss any more of my loot down the drain.' "Sick people disgust me already. When some citizen start telling me about his cancer of the prostate or his rotting septum make with that purulent discharge I tell him: 'You think I am innarested to hear about your horrible old condition? I am not innarested at all.' " P.L.: "All right . Cut... You hate the French, don't you?" "Mister, I hate everybody. Doctor Benway says it's metabolic, I got this condition of the blood.... Arabs and Americans got it special.... Doctor Benway is concocting this serum." P.L.: "Benway is an infiltrating Western Agent." L.l: "A rampant French Jew..." L.2: "A hog-balled, black-assed Communist Jew Nigger. P.L.: "Shut up, you fool!" L.2: "Sorry, chief. I am after being stationed in Pigeonhole." P.L.: "Don't go near Benway." (Aside: "I wonder if this will go down. You never know how primitive they are....") "Confidentially he's a black magician." L.l: "He's got this resident djinn." "Uhuh... Well I got a date with a high-type American client. A real classy fellah." P.L.: "Don't you know it's shameful to peddle your ass to the alien unbelieving pricks?" "Well that's a point of view. Have fun." P.L.: "Likewise." Exit boy. "They're hopeless I tell you. Hopeless." L.l. "What's with this serum?" P.L.: "I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything.... Turn a massacre into a sex orgy.... "Or a joke." "Precisely. Arty type... No principles..." AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE (opening a box of Lux): "Why don't it have an electric eye the box flip open when it see me and hand itself to the Automat Handy Man he should put it inna water already.... The Handy Man is outa control since Thursday, he been getting physical with me and I didn't put it in his combination at all.... And the Garbage Disposal Unit snapping at me, and the nasty old Mixmaster keep trying to get up under my dress.... I got the most awful cold, and my intestines is all constipated.... I'm gonna put it in the Handy Man's combination he should administer me a high colonic awready." SALESMAN (he is something between an aggressive Latah and a timid Sender): "Recollect when I am travelling with K. E., hottest idea man in the gadget industry. "'Think of it!' he snaps. 'A cream separator in your own kitchen!' " 'K. E., my brain reels at the thought.' " 'It's five, maybe ten, yes, maybe twenty years away. ...But it's coming.' "'I'll wait, K. E.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The word sodomia was popularized in the eleventh century by Peter Damian in his polemic ‘Book of Gomorrah’ ( Liber Gomorrhianus ). It was an inescapably negative theological term, on the analogy of the older Latin word blasphemia ; thus Peter paired ‘sodomy’ with the sin of denying God, in the process ‘thinning and condensing’ the wrongdoing of the biblical city of Sodom from malpractices that were originally much more various. [27] Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, Damian’s contemporary and the major influence on canon law before ‘Gratian’, evolved the concept of ‘sins against nature’, in which same- sex acts were ‘always unlawful and beyond doubt more shameful than to sin by a natural use in fornication and adultery’; at least fornication and adultery were not active obstacles to the continuation of the species. All this marched in step with the developing doctrine that marriage must necessarily involve the potential for reproductive sex. It was the obstacle to reproduction that was ‘against nature’, so the same acts committed between men and women, or solo masturbation, fell into the same category. [28] This cluster of theoretical opinions already began crystallizing into legislation during the twelfth century. In 1120 a Church Council at Nablus in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem pioneered punitive enactments with provision for burning sodomites, just like heretics, perhaps with the ancient provisions of Justinian’s Christianized civil code in mind (above, Chapter 8). The issue of male sexuality may have seemed particularly fraught in a militarized enclave surrounded by the ultimate Other, Islam, so often accused by Christians of harbouring sodomites, but the paranoia spread back across the Mediterranean into Western society. [29] A papal Council at the Lateran in 1179, which also took the first measures against Cathars, made enactments against clergy sinning ‘against nature’ with direct reference to the city of Sodom. From the thirteenth century this was increasingly echoed in the legal processes being developed by monarchs beyond canon law, as well as in ecclesiastical legislation. [30] An incentive was the most bizarre and extra-biblical of Western Christian claims about ‘sodomy’: that at the birth of Christ all the ‘sodomites’ in the world died, before he would condescend to enter this sinful world, since they committed sins against nature. This malevolent Christmas fable involved distorted citations of Jerome and Augustine, good evidence that it started life in learned and clerical circles before moving out to instruct the wider public. After surfacing in an anonymous poem of around 1200 in honour of Mary, it has an early association with the Orders of friars as they began their task of preaching and instruction in the thirteenth century, and they went on plugging away at it for centuries; it appears in a Christmas sermon by one of Francis of Assisi’s leading disciples, Bonaventure. It gained further currency through a standard text read, heard or recycled by the devout: the thirteenth-century Dominican Archbishop Jacobus de Voragine’s anthology of saints’ Lives known as The Golden Legend .

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  But when it was repeated and, to assist it, another joined in, more authoritative and prolonged, and to them was added a clearly audible guffawing and even some hooting, the findirector understood at once that something else scandalous and vile had happened in the street. And that, however much he wanted to wave it away, it was closely connected with the repulsive séance presented by the black magician and his assistants. The keen-eared findirector was not mistaken in the least. As soon as he cast a glance out the window on to Sadovaya, his face twisted, and he did not whisper but hissed: ‘So I thought!’ In the bright glare of the strongest street lights he saw, just below him on the sidewalk, a lady in nothing but a shift and violet bloomers. True, there was a little hat on the lady’s head and an umbrella in her hands. The lady, who was in a state of utter consternation, now crouching down, now making as if to run off somewhere, was surrounded by an agitated crowd, which produced the very guffawing that had sent a shiver down the findirector’s spine. Next to the lady some citizen was flitting about, trying to tear off his summer coat, and in his agitation simply unable to manage the sleeve in which his arm was stuck. Shouts and roaring guffaws came from yet another place—namely, the left entrance—and turning his head in that direction, Grigory Danilovich saw a second lady, in pink underwear. She leaped from the street to the sidewalk, striving to hide in the hallway, but the audience pouring out blocked the way, and the poor victim of her own flightiness and passion for dressing up, deceived by vile Fagott’s firm, dreamed of only one thing—falling through the earth. A policeman made for the unfortunate woman, drilling the air with his whistle, and after the policeman hastened some merry young men in caps. It was they who produced the guffawing and hooting. A skinny, moustachioed cabby flew up to the first undressed woman and dashingly reined in his bony, broken-down nag. The moustached face was grinning gleefully. Rimsky beat himself on the head with his fist, spat, and leaped back from the window. For some time he sat at his desk listening to the street. The whistling at various points reached its highest pitch, then began to subside. The scandal, to Rimsky’s surprise, was somehow liquidated with unexpected swiftness. It came time to act. He had to drink the bitter cup of responsibility. The telephones had been repaired during the third part. He had to make calls, to tell what had happened, to ask for help, lie his way out of it, heap everything on Likhodeev, cover up for himself, and so on. Pah, the devil! Twice the upset director put his hand on the receiver, and twice he drew it back.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  " I cut into the automat and there is Bill Gains huddled in someone else's overcoat looking like a 1910 banker with paresis, and Old Bart, shabby and inconspicuous, dunking pound cake with his dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt. I had some uptown customers Bill took care of, and Bart knew a few old relics from hop smoking times, spectral janitors, grey as ashes, phantom porters sweeping out dusty halls with a slow old man's hand, coughing and spitting in the junk-sick dawn, retired asthmatic fences in theatrical hotels, Pantopon Rose the old madam from Peoria, stoical Chinese waiters never show sickness. Bart sought them out with his old junky walk, patient and cautious and slow, dropped into their bloodless hands a few hours of warmth. I made the round with him once for kicks. You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them? Old junkies are the same about junk. They gibber and squeal at sight of it. The spit hangs off their chin, and their stomach rumbles and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body's decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will flop right out and surround the junk. Really disgust you to see it. "Well, my boys will be like that one day," I thought philosophically. "Isn't life peculiar?" So back downtown by the Sheridan Square Station in case the dick is lurking in a broom closet. Like I say it couldn't last. I knew they were out there powowing and making their evil fuzz magic, putting dolls of me in Leavenworth. "No use sticking needles in that one, Mike." I hear they got Chapin with a doll. This old eunuch dick just sat in the precinct basement hanging a doll of him day and night, year in year out. And when Chapin hanged in Connecticut, they find this old creep with his neck broken. "He fell downstairs," they say. You know the old cop bullshit. Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets. I could find my Mexico City connection by radar. "Not this street, the next, right... now left. Now right again," and there he is, toothless old woman face and cancelled eyes.