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 The Art of Seduction (2001)

  No god, no guru, no dogma could ever make one realize it. He himself was no god or messiah, but just another man. The reverence that he was treated with disgusted him. In 1929, much to his followers' shock, he disbanded the Order of the Star and resigned from the Theosophical Society. And so Krishnamurti became a philosopher, determined to spread the truth he had discovered: you must be simple, removing the screen of lan- guage and past experience. Through these means anyone could attain con- tentment of the kind that radiated from Krishnamurti. The theosophists abandoned him but his following grew larger than ever. In California, where he spent much of his time, the interest in him verged on cultic ado- ration. The poet Robinson Jeffers said that whenever Krishnamurti entered a room you could feel a brightness filling the space. The writer Aldous Huxley met him in Los Angeles and fell under his spell. Hearing him speak, he wrote: "It was like listening to the discourse of the Buddha— such power, such intrinsic authority." The man radiated enlightenment. The actor John Barrymore asked him to play the role of Buddha in a film. Tirst and foremost there can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt. ...In the design, the demeanor and the mental operations of a leader there must always be a "something" which others cannot altogether fathom, which puzzles them, stirs them, and rivets their attention . . . to hold in reserve some piece of secret knowledge which may any moment intervene, and the more effectively from being in the nature of a surprise. The latent faith of the masses will do the rest. Once the leader has been fudged capable of adding the weight of his personality to the known factors of any situation, the ensuing hope and confidence will add immensely to the faith reposed in him. —CHARLES DE GAULLE, THE EDGE OF THE SWORD, IN DAVID SCHOENBRUN, THE THREE LIVES OF CHARLES DE GAULLE 110 • The Art of Seduction (Krishnamurti politely declined.) When he visited India, hands would reach out from the crowd to try to touch him through the open car win- dow. People prostrated themselves before him. Repulsed by all this adoration, Krishnamurti grew more and more de- tached. He even talked about himself in the third person. In fact, the ability to disengage from one's past and view the world anew was part of his phi- losophy, yet once again the effect was the opposite of what he expected: the affection and reverence people felt for him only grew. His followers fought jealously for signs of his favor. Women in particular fell deeply in love with him, although he was a lifelong celibate. Krishnamurti had no desire to be a guru or a Charismatic, but he inadver- tently discovered a law of human psychology that disturbed him. People do not want to hear that your power comes from years of effort or discipline.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I put a gentle hand to my chest as I surveyed the situation. The turquoise blue swimming pool some distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that lawn, but within my thorax, and my organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea water in Nice. One of the bathers had left the pool and, half-concealed by the peacocked shade of trees, stood quite still, holding the ends of the towel around his neck and following Lolita with his amber eyes. There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness, his damp black hair or what was left of it, glued to his round head, his little mustache a humid smear, the wool on his chest spread like a symmetrical trophy, his naval pulsating, his hirsute thighs dripping with bright droplets, his tight wet black bathing trunks bloated and bursting with vigor where his great fat bullybag was pulled up and back like a padded shield over his reversed beasthood. And as I looked at his oval nut-brown face, it dawned upon me that what I had recognized him by was the reflection of my daughter’s countenance—the same beatitude and grimace but made hideous by his maleness. And I also knew that the child, my child, knew he was looking, enjoyed the lechery of his look and was putting on a show of gambol and glee, the vile and beloved slut. As she made for the ball and missed it, she fell on her back, with her obscene young legs madly pedalling in the air; I could sense the musk of her excitement from where I stood, and then I saw (petrified with a kind of sacred disgust) the man close his eyes and bare his small, horribly small and even, teeth as he leaned against a tree in which a multitude of dappled Priaps shivered. Immediately afterwards a marvelous transformation took place. He was no longer the satyr but a very good-natured and foolish Swiss cousin, the Gustave Trapp I have mentioned more than once, who used to counteract his “sprees” (he drank beer with milk, the good swine) by feats of weight-lifting—tottering and grunting on a lake beach with his otherwise very complete bathing suit jauntily stripped from one shoulder. This Trapp noticed me from afar and working the towel on his nape walked back with false insouciance to the pool. And as if the sun had gone out of the game, Lo slackened and slowly got up ignoring the ball that the terrier placed before her. Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Is there any doubt that societies can reshape such impulses? Photo: Christopher White, www.christopherwhitephotography.com Right now, girls’ necks are being elongated ring by brass ring in parts of Thailand and Burma to make them more appealing to men. Clitorises are being cut away and labia sewn together in villages all over North Africa to dampen female desire, while in glamorous California, reduction labioplasty and other cosmetic vaginal surgeries have recently become a booming business. Elsewhere, the penises of boys are being circumcised or split open in ritualistic subincision. You get the point. A few Native American tribes of the upper plains had an agreed-upon sense of beauty that led them to strap small planks of wood to their infants’ still-pliable foreheads.4 As the child grew, the straps would be tightened, as an orthodontist realigns a bite, bit by bit. It’s unclear how much brain damage, if any, resulted from this practice, but the otherworldly conical heads that resulted scared the bejesus out of neighboring tribes and white fur trappers in the area. Field sketch by Paul Kane5 And that may well have been the point, if you will. If their otherworldly appearance gave them a protective advantage by scaring potential enemies, it’s not hard to see how such a fashion statement could have evolved. From savoring saliva beer or cow blood milkshakes to wearing socks with sandals, there is little doubt that people are willing to think, feel, wear, do, and believe pretty much anything if their society assures them it’s normal. Social forces that convince people to stretch their necks beyond the breaking point, schmush the heads of their infants, or sell their daughters into sacred prostitution are quite capable of reshaping or neutralizing sexual jealousy by rendering it silly and ridiculous. By rendering it abnormal. The evolutionary explanation for male sexual jealousy, as we’ve seen, pivots on the genetic calculus underlying paternity certainty. But if it’s a question of genes, a man should be far less concerned about his wife having sex with his brothers—who share half his genes—than with unrelated males. Gentlemen, would you be far less upset to find your wife in bed with your brother than with a total stranger? Ladies, would you prefer your husband have an affair with your sister? Didn’t think so.6 Zero-Sum Sex We mentioned David Buss in our discussion of mixed mating strategies earlier, but most of his work concerns the study of jealousy. Buss doesn’t buy the notion of sharing food or mates, conceptualizing both in terms of scarcity: “If there is not enough food to feed all members of a group,” he writes, “then some survive while others perish.” Similarly, “If two women desire the same man…one woman’s success in attracting him is the other woman’s loss.” Buss has little doubt that evolution is “a zero-sum game, with the victors winning at the expense of the losers.”7

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  When I noticed it, I just shuffled the shards of plastic around, no one the wiser. But when a homeless woman set herself up in the back room one afternoon, Natasha found out. I’d had no idea how long the woman had been there. Maybe people thought she was part of the artwork. I ended up paying her fifty bucks out of petty cash to leave. Natasha couldn’t hide her irritation. “When people walk in, you make an impression on my behalf. You know Arthur Schilling was in here last week? I just got a call.” She thought I was on drugs, I’m sure. “Who?” “Christ. Study the roster. Study everybody’s photos,” she said. “Where’s the packing list for Earl?” Et cetera, et cetera . . . That spring, the gallery was putting up Ping Xi’s first solo show —“Bowwowwow”—and Natasha was up in arms about every little detail. She probably would have fired me sooner had she not been so busy. I tried to feign interest and mask my horror whenever Natasha talked about Ping Xi’s “dog pieces.” He had taxidermied a variety of pure breeds: a poodle, a Pomeranian, a Scottish terrier. Black Lab, Dachshund. Even a little Siberian husky pup. He’d been working on them for a long time. He and Natasha had grown close since his cum paintings had sold so well. During the installation, I overheard one of the interns whispering to the electrician. “There’s a rumor going around that the artist gets the dogs as puppies, raises them, then kills them when they’re the size he wants. He locks them in an industrial freezer because that’s the most humane way to euthanize them without compromising the look of the animal. When they thaw, he can get them into whatever position he wants.” “Why doesn’t he just poison them, or break their necks?” I had a feeling the rumor was true. When the dogs were set up, the wires connected, all the electric cords plugged in, Natasha killed the lights and turned each dog on. Red lasers shot out of their eyes. I petted the black Lab while the workers swept up the dog hair that had fallen out. Its face was silky and cold. “Please, no petting,” Ping Xi said suddenly in the darkness. Natasha took his arm, gushing to him that she was ready for outrage from PETA, a protest or two, an Op-Ed in the New York Times that would be publicity gold. Ping Xi nodded blankly. I called in sick the day of the opening. Natasha didn’t seem to care. She had Angelika fill in at the front desk. She was an anorexic Goth, a senior at NYU. The show was a “brutal success,” one critic called it. “Cruelly funny.” Another said Ping Xi “marked the end of the sacred in art. Here is a spoiled brat taking the piss out of the establishment. Some are hailing him as the next Marcel Duchamp. But is he worth the stink?”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Hysteria Spinal irritation Hysterical epilepsy Cataleptic fits Epileptic fits Idiocy Mania Death Baker Brown argued that surgical removal of the clitoris was the best way to prevent this fatal slide from pleasure to idiocy to death. After gaining considerable celebrity and performing an unknown number of clitorectomies, Baker Brown’s methods fell out of favor and he was expelled from the London Obstetrical Society in disgrace. Baker Brown subsequently went insane, and clitorectomy was discredited in British medical circles.4 Unfortunately, Baker Brown’s writing had already had a significant impact on medical practice across the Atlantic. Clitorectomies continued to be performed in the United States well into the twentieth century as a cure for hysteria, nymphomania, and female masturbation. As late as 1936, Holt’s Diseases of Infancy and Childhood, a respected medical-school text, recommended surgical removal or cauterization of the clitoris as a cure for masturbation in girls. By the middle of the twentieth century, as the procedure was finally falling into disrepute in the United States, it was revived with a new rationale. Now, rather than a way to stamp out masturbation, surgical removal of large clitorises was recommended for cosmetic purposes.5 Before becoming a target for surgery, the clitoris had been ignored by male authors of elaborate anatomical sketchbooks for centuries. It wasn’t until the mid-1500s that a Venetian professor by the name of Matteo Realdo Colombo, who had previously studied anatomy with Michelangelo, stumbled upon a mysterious protuberance between a woman’s legs. As described in Federico Andahazi’s historical novel The Anatomist, Colombo made this discovery while examining a patient named Inés de Torremolinos. Colombo noted that Inés grew tense when he manipulated this small button, and that it appeared to grow in size at his touch. Clearly, this would require further exploration. After examining scores of other women, Colombo found that all of them had this same heretofore “undiscovered” protuberance and that they all responded similarly to gentle manipulation. In March of 1558, Andahazi tells us that Colombo proudly reported his “discovery” of the clitoris to the dean of his faculty.6 As Jonathan Margolis speculates in O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm, the response was probably not what Colombo had anticipated. The professor was “arrested in his classroom within days, accused of heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft and Satanism, put on trial and imprisoned. His manuscripts were confiscated, and his [discovery] was never permitted to be mentioned again until centuries after his death.”7 Beware the Devil’s Teat

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “Anybody can imagine those elements of animality,” he said, and yet a great many readers wished that he had done it for them—enough to have kept Lolita at the top of the best-seller list for almost a year, although librarians reported that many readers never finished the novel. The critics and remedial readers who complain that the second half of Lolita is less interesting are not aware of the possible significance of their admission. Their desire for highbrow pornography is “doubled” in Clare Quilty, whose main hobby is making pornographic films. When Lolita tells H.H. that Quilty forced her to star in one of his unspeakable “sexcapades,” more than one voyeuristic reader has unconsciously wished that Quilty had been the narrator, his unseen movie the novel. But the novel’s “habit of metamorphosis” is consistent, for the erotica which seemed to be there and turned out not to be was in fact present all along, most modestly; and it is Nabokov’s final joke on the subject, achieved at the expense of the very common reader. Although the requisite “copulation of clichés” doesn’t occur in the novel proper, its substratum reveals some racy stuff indeed: “Duk Duk”; “Undinist” (fountain pen … repressed undinist … water nymphs in the Styx); “Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.” (Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.); the quotations in French from Ronsard and Belleau (Ronsard’s “la vermeillette fente and Remy Belleau’s “un petit … escarlatte”); anagrammatic obscenities (Miss Horn … Miss Cole); foreign disguises (souffler, souffler); and so forth—erotica under lock and key, buried deep in dictionaries and the library stacks. Until now, only a few furtive “amateur[s] of sex lore,” law-abiding linguists, and quiet scholars—good family men, all—have had exclusive access to this realm. The “incidental Dick” and “hole” of this passage are in the open—democratic, available references—on the junior-high level. redhaired guy: see here. Sade’s … start: Justine, or, The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791), by the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), “French soldier and pervert” (as Webster’s Second defines him). Like Lolita, Justine is prefaced by a Foreword resolutely “moral” in tone (in some editions, however, these initial paragraphs are not formally identified as a “Foreword”). The title character is an extraordinarily resilient young girl who exists solely for the pleasures of an infinite succession of sadistic libertines. She undergoes an array of rapes, beatings, and tortures as monstrously imaginative as they are frequent. Quilty has done a screenplay of Justine (Justine). souffler: to “blow.” my Lolita: the “Latin” tag (see the writer’s ancient lust and my Lolita) appropriately concludes this important paragraph, as it will the entire novel (do not pity C.Q.…. aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments … my Lolita). dreaming … of … 2020 A.D.: “2020” because he has perfect prevision; also a numerical reflection of the doubling that occurs throughout the novel (see Beale).

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  The “illness” that led frustrated women to the offices of vibrator-wielding doctors a century ago often led someplace far worse in medieval Europe. As historian Reay Tannahill explains, “The Malleus Maleficarum (1486), the first great handbook of the witch inquisitors, had no more difficulty than a modern psycho-analyst in accepting that [a certain] type of woman might readily believe she had had intercourse with the Devil himself, a huge, black, monstrous being with an enormous penis and seminal fluid as cold as ice water.”8 But it wasn’t only sexual dreams that attracted the brutal attentions of erotophobic authorities. If a witch-hunter in the 1600s discovered a woman or girl with an unusually large clitoris, this “devil’s teat” was sufficient to condemn her to death.9 Medieval Europe suffered periodic plagues of incubi and succubi, male and female demons thought to be invading the dreams, beds, and bodies of living people. Thomas Aquinas and others believed that these demons impregnated women on their nocturnal visits by first posing as a succubus (a female spirit who has sex with a sleeping man in order to obtain his sperm), and then depositing the sperm in an unsuspecting woman in the form of an incubus (a male spirit ravishing a sleeping woman). Women thus thought to have been impregnated by malevolent spirits flitting about like nocturnal honeybees were at special risk of being exposed as witches and dealt with accordingly. Any stories these women might have told regarding the true origins of their pregnancy conveniently died with them. Though now considered one of the finest novels ever written, Madame Bovary was denounced as immoral when it was first published in late 1856. Public prosecutors in Paris were upset that Gustave Flaubert portrayed a headstrong peasant girl who flaunted the rules of established propriety by taking lovers. They felt her character met with insufficient punishment. Flaubert’s defense was that the work was “eminently moral” on those terms. After all, Emma Bovary dies by her own hand in misery, poverty, shame, and desperation. Insufficient punishment? The case against the book, in other words, turned on whether Emma Bovary’s punishment was agonizing and horrible enough, not on whether she deserved such suffering at all or had any right to pursue sexual fulfillment in the first place. But even Flaubert and his misogynistic prosecutors could never have dreamed up the punishments said to befall immodest women among the Tzotzil Maya of Central America. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy explains that “the h’ik’al, a super-sexed demon with a several-foot-long penis,” seizes women who have misbehaved, “carrying them off to his cave, where he rapes them.” Little girls are told that any woman unlucky enough to become pregnant by the h’ik’al “swells up and then gives birth night after night, until she dies.”10

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  If circumcising a struggling, terrified boy without anesthesia wasn’t quite what a parent had in mind, Kellogg recommended “the application of one or more silver sutures in such a way as to prevent erection. The prepuce, or foreskin, is drawn forward over the glans, and the needle to which the wire is attached is passed through from one side to the other. After drawing the wire through, the ends are twisted together and cut off close. It is now impossible for an erection to occur….” Parents were assured that sewing their son’s penis into its foreskin “acts as a most powerful means of overcoming the disposition to resort to the practice [of masturbation].”13 Circumcision remains prevalent in the United States, though varying greatly by region, ranging from about 40 percent of newborns circumcised in western states to about twice that in the Northeast.14 This widespread procedure, rarely a medical necessity, has its roots in the anti-masturbation campaigns of Kellogg and his like-minded contemporaries. As Money explains, “Neonatal circumcision crept into American delivery rooms in the 1870s and 1880s, not for religious reasons and not for reasons of health or hygiene, as is commonly supposed, but because of the claim that, later in life, it would prevent irritation that would cause the boy to become a masturbator.”15 Lest you think Kellogg was interested only in the sadistic torture of boys, in the same book he soberly advises the application of carbolic acid to the clitorises of little girls to teach them not to touch themselves. Kellogg and his like-minded contemporaries demonstrate that sexual repression is a “malady that considers itself the remedy,” to paraphrase Karl Kraus’s dismissal of psychoanalysis. His smug satisfaction in tormenting children is striking and disturbing, but Kellogg’s “no child left alone” policy is anything but unusual or limited to ancient history. The anti-masturbation measures quoted above were published in 1888, but more than eighty years were to pass before the American Medical Association declared, in 1972, “Masturbation is a normal part of adolescent sexual development and requires no medical management.” But still, the war continues. As recently as 1994, pediatrician Joycelyn Elders was forced from her post as Surgeon General of the United States for simply asserting that masturbation “is part of human sexuality.” The suffering caused by centuries of war on masturbation is beyond calculation. But this we know: all the suffering, every bit of it, was for nothing. Absolutely nothing.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  37, made it a sport to torture him, making him run around the palace at top speed as penance for his stupidity, having soiled sandals tied to his hands at supper, and so on. As Claudius grew older, he seemed to become even more slow-witted, and while all of his relatives lived under the constant threat of assassination, he was left alone. So it came as a great surprise to everyone, including Claudius himself, that when, in A.D. 41, a cabal of soldiers assassinated Caligula, they also proclaimed Claudius em- peror. Having no desire to rule, he delegated most of the governing to confidantes (a group of freed slaves) and spent his time doing what he loved best: eating, drinking, gambling, and whoring. Claudius's wife, Valeria Messalina, was one of the most beautiful women in Rome. Although he seemed fond of her, Claudius paid her no attention, and she started to have affairs. At first she was discreet, but over the years, provoked by her husband's neglect, she became more and more debauched. She had a room built for her in the palace where she enter- tained scores of men, doing her best to imitate the most notorious prosti- tute in Rome, whose name was written on the door. Any man who refused her advances was put to death. Almost everyone in Rome knew about these frolics, but Claudius said nothing; he seemed oblivious. So great was Messalina's passion for her favorite lover, Gaius Silius, that she decided to marry him, although both of them were married already. While Claudius was away, they held a wedding ceremony, authorized by a marriage contract that Claudius himself had been tricked into signing. Af- ter the ceremony, Gaius moved into the palace. Now the shock and disgust of the whole city finally forced Claudius into action, and he ordered the execution of Gaius and of Messalina's other lovers—but not of Messalina herself. Nevertheless, a gang of soldiers, inflamed by the scandal, hunted her down and stabbed her to death. When this was reported to the em- peror, he merely ordered more wine and continued his meal. Several nights But I'm not instructing hillbilly girls from the Caucasus, \ Or Mysian river-hoydens—so what need \ To remind you not to let your teeth get all discolored \ Through neglect, or forget to wash \ Your hands every morning? You know how to brighten your complexion \ With powder, add rouge to a bloodless face, \ Skillfully block in the crude outline of an eyebrow, \ Stick a patch on one flawless cheek. \ You don't shrink from lining your eyes with dark mascara \ Or a touch of Cilician saffron. . . . \ But don't let your lover find all those jars and bottles \ On your dressing- table: the best \ Makeup remains unobtrusive. A face so thickly plastered \ With pancake it runs down your sweaty neck \ Is bound to create repulsion.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  8Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin, what really attracted me to Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl. She gave it not because she had divined something about me; it was just her style—and I fell for it. Actually, she was at least in her late twenties (I never established her exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods. I, on my part, was as naïve as only a pervert can be. She looked fluffy and frolicsome, dressed à la gamine, showed a generous amount of smooth leg, knew how to stress the white of a bare instep by the black of a velvet slipper, and pouted, and dimpled, and romped, and dirndled, and shook her short curly blond hair in the cutest and tritest fashion imaginable. After a brief ceremony at the mairie, I took her to the new apartment I had rented and, somewhat to her surprise, had her wear, before I touched her, a girl’s plain nightshirt that I had managed to filch from the linen closet of an orphanage. I derived some fun from that nuptial night and had the idiot in hysterics by sunrise. But reality soon asserted itself. The bleached curl revealed its melanic root; the down turned to prickles on a shaved shin; the mobile moist mouth, no matter how I stuffed it with love, disclosed ignominiously its resemblance to the corresponding part in a treasured portrait of her toadlike dead mama; and presently, instead of a pale little gutter girl, Humbert Humbert had on his hands a large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  rank male stench \ That wrinkles noses. . . . \ I was about to warn you [ women] against rank The Vulgarian. Vulgarians are inattentive to the details that are so impor- goatish armpits \ And tant in seduction. You can see this in their personal appearance—their bristling hair on your legs, \ 136 • The Art of Seduction But I'm not instructing clothes are tasteless by any standard—and in their actions: they do not hillbilly girls from the know that it is sometimes better to control oneself and refuse to give in to Caucasus, \ Or Mysian one's impulses. Vulgarians will blab, saying anything in public. They have river-hoydens— so what need \ To remind you not no sense of timing and are rarely in harmony with your tastes. Indiscretion to let your teeth get all is a sure sign of the Vulgarian (talking to others of your affair, for example); discolored \ Through it may seem impulsive, but its real source is their radical selfishness, their in-neglect, or forget to wash \ Your hands every morning? ability to see themselves as others see them. More than just avoiding Vul-You know how to brighten garians, you must make yourself their opposite—tact, style, and attention to your complexion \ With detail are all basic requirements of a seducer. powder, add rouge to a bloodless face, \ Skillfully block in the crude outline of an eyebrow, \ Stick a Examples of the Anti-Seducer patch on one flawless cheek. \ You don't shrink from lining your eyes with 1. Claudius, the step-grandson of the great Roman emperor Augustus, was dark mascara \ Or a touch considered something of an imbecile as a young man, and was treated badly of Cilician saffron. . . . \ by almost everyone in his family. His nephew Caligula, who became em-But don't let your lover find all those jars and peror in A.D. 37, made it a sport to torture him, making him run around bottles \ On your dressing-the palace at top speed as penance for his stupidity, having soiled sandals table: the best \ Makeup tied to his hands at supper, and so on. As Claudius grew older, he seemed remains unobtrusive. A to become even more slow-witted, and while all of his relatives lived under face so thickly plastered \ With pancake it runs the constant threat of assassination, he was left alone. So it came as a great down your sweaty neck \ Is surprise to everyone, including Claudius himself, that when, in A.D. 41, a bound to create repulsion. cabal of soldiers assassinated Caligula, they also proclaimed Claudius emAnd that goo from unwashed fleeces— \ peror. Having no desire to rule, he delegated most of the governing to Athenian maybe, but my confidantes (a group of freed slaves) and spent his time doing what he loved dear, the smell! — \ That's best: eating, drinking, gambling, and whoring. used for face-cream: avoid it. When you have

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Think it’s rational to be grossed out by eating bugs? Think again. A hundred grams of dehydrated cricket contains 1,550 milligrams of iron, 340 milligrams of calcium, and 25 milligrams of zinc—three minerals often missing in the diets of the chronic poor. Insects are richer in minerals and healthy fats than beef or pork. Freaked out by the exoskeleton, antennae, and way too many legs? Then stick to the Turf and forget the Surf because shrimp, crabs, and lobsters are all arthropods, just like grasshoppers. And they eat the nastiest of what sinks to the bottom of the ocean, so don’t talk about bugs’ disgusting diets. Anyway, you may have bug parts stuck between your teeth right now. The Food and Drug Administration tells its inspectors to ignore insect parts in black pepper unless they find more than 475 of them per 50 grams, on average.2 Some estimates suggest that Americans unknowingly eat anywhere from one to two pounds of insects per year. An Italian professor recently published Ecological Implications of Minilivestock: Potential of Insects, Rodents, Frogs and Snails. (Minicowpokes sold separately.) Writing in Slate.com, William Saletan tells us about a company by the name of Sunrise Land Shrimp. The company’s logo: “Mmm. That’s good Land Shrimp!” Three guesses what Land Shrimp is. Witchetty grub tastes like nut-flavored scrambled eggs and mild mozzarella, wrapped in a phyllo dough pastry…This is capital-D Delicious. PETER MENZEL AND FAITH D’ALUISIO, Man Eating Bugs Early British travelers to Australia reported that the Aborigines they met lived miserably and suffered from chronic famine. But the native people, like most hunter-gatherers, were uninterested in farming. The same Europeans reporting the widespread starvation in their letters and journals were perplexed that the natives didn’t seem emaciated. In fact, they struck the visitors as being rather fat and lazy. Yet, the Europeans were convinced the Aborigines were starving to death. Why? Because they saw the native people resorting to last resorts—eating insects, Witchetty grubs, and rats, critters that surely nobody would eat who wasn’t starving. That this diet was nutritious, plentiful, and could taste like “nut-flavored scrambled eggs and mild mozzarella” never occurred to the British, who were no doubt homesick for haggis and clotted cream. Good Grub. Photo: Glenn Rose and Daryl Fritz Our point? That something feels natural or unnatural doesn’t mean it is. Every one of the examples above, including saliva beer, is savored somewhere—by folks who would be disgusted by much of what you eat regularly. Especially when we’re talking about intimate, personal, biological experiences like eating or having sex, we mustn’t forget that the familiar fingers of culture reach deep into our minds. We can’t feel them adjusting our dials and flicking our switches, but every culture leads its members to believe some things are naturally right and others naturally wrong. These beliefs may feel right, but it’s a feeling we trust at our own peril.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I mean, he had two girls and two boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of us to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures.” ( Sade’s Justine was twelve at the start.) “What things exactly?” “Oh, things … Oh, I—really I”—she uttered the “I” as a subdued cry while she listened to the source of the ache, and for lack of words spread the five fingers of her angularly up-and- down-moving hand. No, she gave it up, she refused to go into particulars with that baby inside her. That made sense. “It is of no importance now,” she said pounding a gray cushion with her fist and then lying back, belly up, on the divan. “Crazy things, filthy things. I said no, I’m just not going to [she used, in all insouciance really, a disgusting slang term which, in a literal French translation, would be souffler ] your beastly boys, because I want only you. Well, he kicked me out.” There was not much else to tell. That winter 1949, Fay and she had found jobs. For almost two years she had—oh, just drifted, oh, doing some restaurant work in small places, and then she had met Dick. No, she did not know where the other was. In New York, she guessed. Of course, he was so famous she would have found him at once if she had wanted. Fay had tried to get back to the Ranch—and it just was not there any more—it had burned to the ground, nothing remained, just a charred heap of rubbish. It was so strange , so strange — She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, leaning back on the cushion, one felted foot on the floor. The wooden floor slanted, a little steel ball would have rolled into the kitchen. I knew all I wanted to know.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  In light of the hypersexuality of humans, chimps, and bonobos, one wonders why so many insist that female sexual exclusivity has been an integral part of human evolutionary development for over a million years. In addition to all the direct evidence presented here, the circumstantial case against the narrative is overwhelming. For starters, recall that the total number of monogamous primate species that live in large social groups is precisely zero—unless you insist on counting humans as the one and only example of such a beast. The few monogamous primates that do exist (out of hundreds of species) all live in the treetops. Primates aside, only 3 percent of mammals and one in ten thousand invertebrate species can be considered sexually monogamous. Adultery has been documented in every ostensibly monogamous human society ever studied, and is a leading cause of divorce all over the world today. But even in the latest editions of his classic book The Naked Ape, the same Desmond Morris who observed soccer players happily sharing their lovers still insists that “among humans sexual behavior occurs almost exclusively in a pair-bonded state,” and that “adultery reflects an imperfection in the pair-bonding mechanism.”18 That’s a major minor “imperfection.” As we write these words, CNN reports that six adulterers are being stoned to death in Iran. Before the hypocritical sinners throw the first stones, the male adulterers will be buried up to their waists. In a sickening gesture toward chivalry, the women will be buried to their necks, presumably to bring a quicker death to these women who dared consider their bodies their own. Such brutal execution of sexual transgressors is anything but an oddity, historically speaking. “Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism each share a fundamental concern over the punishment for a woman’s sexual freedom,” says Eric Michael Johnson. “Whereas any ‘man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife [both] the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death,’ (Leviticus 20:10) but any unmarried woman who has sexual relations with an unmarried man shall be brought ‘to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die’ (Deuteronomy 22:21).”19 Yet even after centuries of such barbaric punishment, adultery persists everywhere, without exception. As Alfred Kinsey noted back in the 1950s, “Even in cultures which most rigorously attempt to control the female’s extramarital coitus, it is perfectly clear that such activity does occur, and in many instances it occurs with considerable regularity.”20

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  A breeze from wonderland: there are several references to Alice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, the pseudonym of Charles L. Dodgson (1832–1898), English writer, mathematician, and nympholept (see Alice-in-Wonderland). “I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll,” said Nabokov, “because he was the first Humbert Humbert.” Nabokov translated Alice into Russian (Berlin, 1923). “I got five dollars (quite a sum during the inflation in Germany),” he recalls (Speak, Memory, p. 283). In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, a character speaks “in the elenctic tones of Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar” (p. 123), while in Ada, “Ada in Wonderland” (p. 129), “Ada’s adventures in Adaland” (p. 568), and the “titles” Palace in Wonderland (p. 53) and Alice in the Camera Obscura (p. 547) are variously invoked (the latter a play on the original title of Laughter in the Dark). “In common with many other English children (I was an English child) I have been always very fond of Carroll,” he said in the Wisconsin Studies interview. “No, I do not think his invented language shares any roots with mine [in Bend Sinister and Pale Fire]. He has a pathetic affinity with H.H. but some odd scruple prevented me from alluding in Lolita to his wretched perversion and to those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms. He got away with it, as so many other Victorians got away with pederasty and nympholepsy. His were sad scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-undressed, or rather semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade.” But it might seem as though Nabokov did allude to Carroll in Lolita, through what might be called “the photography theme”: H.H. cherishes his worn old photograph of Annabel, has in a sense been living with this “still,” tries to make Lolita conform to it, and often laments his failure to capture her on film. Quilty’s hobby is announced as “photography,” and the unspeakable films he produces at the Duk Duk Ranch would seem to answer Carroll’s wildest needs. Asked about this, Nabokov replied, “I did not consciously think of Carroll’s hobby when I referred to the use of photography in Lolita.” “I have only words to play with,” moans H.H., and several readers have been tempted to call the ensuing wordplay “Joycean”—loosely enough, since “Carrollian” might do almost as well, given Nabokov’s fondness for auditory wordplay and portmanteau words, and the fact that the latter usage was coined by Carroll. The family line is nicely established on Sebastian. Knight’s neatest book shelf, where Alice in Wonderland and Ulysses stand side by side, along with works by some of Nabokov’s other favorite writers (Stevenson, Chekhov, Flaubert, Proust, Wells, and Shakespeare, who encloses the shelf at either end with Hamlet and King Lear [p. 41]). For Shakespeare, see God or Shakespeare. metamorphosing: see not human, but nymphic. CHAPTER 30emeritus read to by a boy: an echo of the opening of Eliot’s “Gerontion”: “Here I am, an old man in a dry month,/Being read to by a boy …” See pastiches.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  If circumcising a struggling, terrified boy without anesthesia wasn’t quite what a parent had in mind, Kellogg recommended “the application of one or more silver sutures in such a way as to prevent erection. The prepuce, or foreskin, is drawn forward over the glans, and the needle to which the wire is attached is passed through from one side to the other. After drawing the wire through, the ends are twisted together and cut off close. It is now impossible for an erection to occur….” Parents were assured that sewing their son’s penis into its foreskin “acts as a most powerful means of overcoming the disposition to resort to the practice [of masturbation].”13 Circumcision remains prevalent in the United States, though varying greatly by region, ranging from about 40 percent of newborns circumcised in western states to about twice that in the Northeast.14 This widespread procedure, rarely a medical necessity, has its roots in the anti-masturbation campaigns of Kellogg and his like-minded contemporaries. As Money explains, “Neonatal circumcision crept into American delivery rooms in the 1870s and 1880s, not for religious reasons and not for reasons of health or hygiene, as is commonly supposed, but because of the claim that, later in life, it would prevent irritation that would cause the boy to become a masturbator.”15 Lest you think Kellogg was interested only in the sadistic torture of boys, in the same book he soberly advises the application of carbolic acid to the clitorises of little girls to teach them not to touch themselves. Kellogg and his like-minded contemporaries demonstrate that sexual repression is a “malady that considers itself the remedy,” to paraphrase Karl Kraus’s dismissal of psychoanalysis. His smug satisfaction in tormenting children is striking and disturbing, but Kellogg’s “no child left alone” policy is anything but unusual or limited to ancient history. The anti-masturbation measures quoted above were published in 1888, but more than eighty years were to pass before the American Medical Association declared, in 1972, “Masturbation is a normal part of adolescent sexual development and requires no medical management.” But still, the war continues. As recently as 1994, pediatrician Joycelyn Elders was forced from her post as Surgeon General of the United States for simply asserting that masturbation “is part of human sexuality.” The suffering caused by centuries of war on masturbation is beyond calculation. But this we know: all the suffering, every bit of it, was for nothing. Absolutely nothing.

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

  Your bee-related simulations are rooted in your mental concept of what a “Bee” is. This concept not only includes information about the bee itself (what it looks and sounds like, how you act on it, what changes in your autonomic nervous system allow your action, etc.), but also information contained in other concepts related to bees (“Meadow,” “Flower,” “Honey,” “Sting,” “Pain,” etc.). All this information is integrated with your concept “Bee,” guiding how you simulate the bee in this particular context. So, a concept like “Bee” is actually a collection of neural patterns in your brain, representing your past experiences. Your brain combines these patterns in different ways to perceive and flexibly guide your action in new situations. 5 Using your concepts, your brain groups some things together and separates others. You can look at three mounds of dirt and perceive two of them as “Hills” and one as a “Mountain,” based on your concepts. Construction treats the world like a sheet of pastry, and your concepts are cookie cutters that carve boundaries, not because the boundaries are natural, but because they’re useful or desirable. These boundaries have physical limitations of course; you’d never perceive a mountain as a lake. Not everything is relative. 6 Your concepts are a primary tool for your brain to guess the meaning of incoming sensory inputs. For example, concepts give meaning to changes in sound pressure so you hear them as words or music instead of random noise. In Western culture, most music is based on an octave divided into twelve equally spaced pitches, an arrangment known as the twelve-tone equal-tempered scale. All people of Western culture with normal hearing have a concept for this ubiquitous scale, even if they can’t explicitly describe it. Not all music uses this scale, however. When Westerners hear Indonesian gamelan music for the first time, which is based on seven pitches per octave with varied tunings, it’s more likely to sound like noise. A brain that’s been wired by listening to twelve-tone scales doesn’t have a concept for that music. Personally, I am experientially blind to dubstep, although my teenage daughter clearly has that concept. Concepts also give meaning to the chemicals that create tastes and smells. If I served you pink ice cream, you might expect (simulate) the taste of strawberry, but if it tasted like fish, you would find it jarring, perhaps even disgusting. If I instead introduced it as “chilled salmon mousse” to give your brain fair warning, you might find the same taste delicious (assuming you enjoy salmon). You might think of food as existing in the physical world, but in fact the concept “Food” is heavily cultural. Obviously, there are some biological constraints; you can’t eat razor blades. But there are some perfectly edible substances that we don’t all perceive as food, such as hachinoko, a Japanese delicacy made of baby bees, which most Americans would vigorously avoid.

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

  Think of the last time someone handed you a red, juicy apple. You reached out for it, took a bite, and experienced the tart flavor. During those moments, neurons were firing in the sensory and motor regions of your brain. Motor neurons fired to produce your movements, and sensory neurons fired to process your sensations of the apple, like its red color with a blush of green; its smoothness against your hand; its crisp, floral scent; the audible crunch when you bit into it; and its tangy taste with a hint of sweetness. Other neurons made your mouth water to release enzymes and begin digestion, released cortisol to prepare your body to metabolize the sugars in the apple, and perhaps made your stomach churn a bit. But here’s the cool thing: just now, when you read the word “apple,” your brain responded to a certain extent as if an apple were actually present. Your brain combined bits and pieces of knowledge of previous apples you’ve seen and tasted, and changed the firing of neurons in your sensory and motor regions to construct a mental instance of the concept “Apple.” Your brain simulated a nonexistent apple using sensory and motor neurons. Simulation happens as quickly and automatically as a heartbeat.2 For my daughter’s twelfth birthday, we exploited the power of simulation (and had some fun) by throwing a “gross foods” party. When her guests arrived, we served them pizza doctored with green food coloring so the cheese looked like fuzzy mold, and peach gelatin laced with bits of vegetables to look like vomit. For drinks, we served white grape juice in medical urine sample cups. Everybody was exuberantly disgusted (it was perfect twelve-year-old humor), and several guests could not bring themselves to touch the food as they involuntarily simulated vile tastes and smells. The pièce de résistance, however, was the party game we played after lunch: a simple contest to identify foods by their smell. We used mashed baby food—peaches, spinach, beef, and so on—and artfully smeared it on diapers, so it looked exactly like baby poo. Even though the guests knew that the smears were food, several actually gagged from the simulated smell.3 Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  A combination of naïveté and deception, of charm and vulgarity, of blue sulks and rosy mirth, Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat. I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called goofing off—a kind of diffused clowning which she thought was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth—these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickels I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had! I still hear the nasal voices of those invisibles serenading her, people with names like Sammy and Jo and Eddy and Tony and Peggy and Guy and Patti and Rex, and sentimental song hits, all of them as similar to my ear as her various candies were to my palate. She believed, with a kind of celestial trust, any advertisement or advice that appeared in Movie Love or Screen Land—Starasil Starves Pimples, or “You better watch out if you’re wearing your shirttails outside your jeans, gals, because Jill says you shouldn’t.” If a roadside sign said: VISIT OUR GIFT SHOP—we had to visit it, had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactus candy. The words “novelties and souvenirs” simply entranced her by their trochaic lilt. If some café sign proclaimed Icecold Drinks, she was automatically stirred, although all drinks everywhere were ice-cold. She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster. And she attempted—unsuccessfully—to patronize only those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads. In those days, neither she nor I had thought up yet the system of monetary bribes which was to work such havoc with my nerves and her morals somewhat later. I relied on three other methods to keep my pubescent concubine in submission and passable temper. A few years before, she had spent a rainy summer under Miss Phalen’s bleary eye in a dilapidated Appalachian farmhouse that had belonged to some gnarled Haze or other in the dead past. It still stood among its rank acres of golden rod on the edge of a flowerless forest, at the end of a permanently muddy road, twenty miles from the nearest hamlet. Lo recalled that scarecrow of a house, the solitude, the soggy old pastures, the wind, the bloated wilderness, with an energy of disgust that distorted her mouth and fattened her half-revealed tongue. And it was there that I warned her she would dwell with me in exile for months and years if need be, studying under me French and Latin, unless her “present attitude” changed. Charlotte, I began to understand you!

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Think it’s rational to be grossed out by eating bugs? Think again. A hundred grams of dehydrated cricket contains 1,550 milligrams of iron, 340 milligrams of calcium, and 25 milligrams of zinc—three minerals often missing in the diets of the chronic poor. Insects are richer in minerals and healthy fats than beef or pork. Freaked out by the exoskeleton, antennae, and way too many legs? Then stick to the Turf and forget the Surf because shrimp, crabs, and lobsters are all arthropods, just like grasshoppers. And they eat the nastiest of what sinks to the bottom of the ocean, so don’t talk about bugs’ disgusting diets. Anyway, you may have bug parts stuck between your teeth right now. The Food and Drug Administration tells its inspectors to ignore insect parts in black pepper unless they find more than 475 of them per 50 grams, on average.2 Some estimates suggest that Americans unknowingly eat anywhere from one to two pounds of insects per year. An Italian professor recently published Ecological Implications of Minilivestock: Potential of Insects, Rodents, Frogs and Snails. (Minicowpokes sold separately.) Writing in Slate.com, William Saletan tells us about a company by the name of Sunrise Land Shrimp. The company’s logo: “Mmm. That’s good Land Shrimp!” Three guesses what Land Shrimp is. Witchetty grub tastes like nut-flavored scrambled eggs and mild mozzarella, wrapped in a phyllo dough pastry…This is capital-D Delicious. PETER MENZEL AND FAITH D’ALUISIO, Man Eating Bugs Early British travelers to Australia reported that the Aborigines they met lived miserably and suffered from chronic famine. But the native people, like most hunter-gatherers, were uninterested in farming. The same Europeans reporting the widespread starvation in their letters and journals were perplexed that the natives didn’t seem emaciated. In fact, they struck the visitors as being rather fat and lazy. Yet, the Europeans were convinced the Aborigines were starving to death. Why? Because they saw the native people resorting to last resorts—eating insects, Witchetty grubs, and rats, critters that surely nobody would eat who wasn’t starving. That this diet was nutritious, plentiful, and could taste like “nut-flavored scrambled eggs and mild mozzarella” never occurred to the British, who were no doubt homesick for haggis and clotted cream. [image file=image_rsrc67Y.jpg] Good Grub. Photo: Glenn Rose and Daryl Fritz Our point? That something feels natural or unnatural doesn’t mean it is. Every one of the examples above, including saliva beer, is savored somewhere—by folks who would be disgusted by much of what you eat regularly. Especially when we’re talking about intimate, personal, biological experiences like eating or having sex, we mustn’t forget that the familiar fingers of culture reach deep into our minds. We can’t feel them adjusting our dials and flicking our switches, but every culture leads its members to believe some things are naturally right and others naturally wrong. These beliefs may feel right, but it’s a feeling we trust at our own peril.