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 My Life on the Road (2015)

  After Thanksgiving the press breaks a top secret: Bush boarded Air Force One carrying a big hand-painted plastic turkey, flew to Iraq in the middle of the war, posed for photos with our troops and the turkey, and flew back to Washington—all at taxpayers’ expense. Who was that student? How did he know? • While traveling in Georgia, I see lawn signs for the reelection campaign of Max Cleland, a much-admired U.S. senator and a war hero who lost both legs and one arm to a grenade in Vietnam. I’m in Atlanta again in 2002 and see TV ads that call him unpatriotic, and compare him to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The excuse is only his vote against two of many antiterrorism measures. This is a Joe McCarthy–type Big Lie. Veterans in both parties protest the ad, and eventually it is removed. Still, its very extremity has created doubt in a where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire way. Cleland is defeated. A year later, I see this successful tactic rolled out nationally against U.S. senator John Kerry, also a Vietnam War hero, who is running for president. Television ads feature veterans who deny his heroism as a Swift boat captain. Though the charges are later disproved, they contribute to Kerry’s defeat. Swiftboating enters the English language as a verb that means attacking strength instead of weakness. In feminist and other social justice contexts, this has long been called trashing, attacking leaders for daring to write, speak, or lead at all.3 Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad. • In the presidential election of 2008, a banner year for Surrealism in Everyday Life, right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh opposes the Democratic candidacy of Hillary Clinton. He accuses her of wearing pantsuits to conceal “bad” legs. Instead, he supports Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate because she wears skirts to reveal “good” legs. Actually, Republicans have nominated Palin at the last minute to pick up some votes from disappointed Hillary Clinton supporters. This makes no sense. Palin opposes reproductive freedom and most other majority needs of women, enjoys shooting animals from helicopters, and has always earned more support from white male voters than from diverse female voters. Her selection is the biggest political mistake since the first President Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, expecting to get more votes from African Americans. Surrealism is the triumph of form over content. • For serial surrealism, nothing beats right-wing and religious efforts to confer legal personhood on fertilized eggs. This would nationalize women’s bodies throughout their childbearing years. Not surprisingly, the Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has failed, but many state and local tactics are succeeding, from bombing clinics and murdering doctors in the name of “pro-life,” to denying birth control as a part of health insurance, and closing clinics with impossible building regulations imposed by antichoice state legislatures. Over time, I’ve also noticed that local pickets of clinics often personify this surrealism.

• From Querelle (1953)

  74 I JEAN GENET branch-leaning, as it were, on himself. Querelle was waiting, head bowed, blood mounting to his _face; Nono looked at the sailor's buttocks: they were small and hard, round, dry, and covered with a thick brown fleece which continued on to the thighs and-but there, more sparsely-up to the small of the back, where the striped undershirt just peeped out from under the raised jersey. The shading on certain drawings of female rumps is achieved by incurving strokes of the brush, not unlike those bands of different colors on old-fashioned stockings: th at is how I would like the reader to visualize the bared parts of Querelle's thighs. What gave them a look of indecency was that they could have been reproduced by those incurving strokes, with their emphasis on rounded curves, and the graininess of the skin, the slightly dirty gray of the curling hairs. The mon strousness of male love affairs appears in the uncovering of that part of the body, framed by undershirt and dropped pants. "That's the way I like you." Querelle did not reply. The smell of the opium packet lying on the bed disgusted him. And there the rod was already, enter ing. He recalled the Armenian he had strangled in Beirut, his softness, his lizard-or birdlike gentleness. Querelle asked him self whether he should try to please the executioner with caresses. Having no fear of ridicule now, he might as well try out that sweetness the murdered pederast had exuded. "He did call me the fanciest names I ever did hear, that's for sure. One of the softest, he was, too," he thought. But what gestures of affection were appropriate? What caresses? His muscles did not know which way to bend to obtain a curve. Norbert was crushing him. Slowly he penetrated him up to the point where his belly touched Querelle, whom he was holding close, with sudden, fearsome intensity, his hands clasped round the sailor's belly. He was surprised how warm it was inside of Querelle. He pushed in farther, very carefully, the better to savor his pleasure and his strength. Querelle was aston- ished at suffering so little pain. ·

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  After wavering among reminiscences and anecdotes of guns, of dogs, and of former shooting parties, the conversation rested on a topic that interested all of them. After Vassenka had several times over expressed his appreciation of this delightful sleeping place among the fragrant hay, this delightful broken cart (he supposed it to be broken because the shafts had been taken out), of the good nature of the peasants that had treated him to vodka, of the dogs who lay at the feet of their respective masters, Oblonsky began telling them of a delightful shooting party at Malthus’s, where he had stayed the previous summer. Malthus was a well-known capitalist, who had made his money by speculation in railway shares. Stepan Arkadyevitch described what grouse moors this Malthus had bought in the Tver province, and how they were preserved, and of the carriages and dogcarts in which the shooting party had been driven, and the luncheon pavilion that had been rigged up at the marsh. “I don’t understand you,” said Levin, sitting up in the hay; “how is it such people don’t disgust you? I can understand a lunch with Lafitte is all very pleasant, but don’t you dislike just that very sumptuousness? All these people, just like our spirit monopolists in old days, get their money in a way that gains them the contempt of everyone. They don’t care for their contempt, and then they use their dishonest gains to buy off the contempt they have deserved.” “Perfectly true!” chimed in Vassenka Veslovsky. “Perfectly! Oblonsky, of course, goes out of _bonhomie_, but other people say: ‘Well, Oblonsky stays with them.’...” “Not a bit of it.” Levin could hear that Oblonsky was smiling as he spoke. “I simply don’t consider him more dishonest than any other wealthy merchant or nobleman. They’ve all made their money alike—by their work and their intelligence.” “Oh, by what work? Do you call it work to get hold of concessions and speculate with them?” “Of course it’s work. Work in this sense, that if it were not for him and others like him, there would have been no railways.” “But that’s not work, like the work of a peasant or a learned profession.” “Granted, but it’s work in the sense that his activity produces a result—the railways. But of course you think the railways useless.” “No, that’s another question; I am prepared to admit that they’re useful. But all profit that is out of proportion to the labor expended is dishonest.” “But who is to define what is proportionate?”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  When I say I’m glad to have a woman driver, she tells me that an Orthodox rabbi refused to get into her taxi at all, and her garage has so many male drivers that it’s like a locker room. Then she lists her previous jobs—house painter, school bus driver, and welder of decorative iron—as if to prove that she doesn’t need my help. She also yells expletives at drivers who try to cut her off, knits a row on an afghan square while we’re waiting at a tollbooth, and, altogether, is as in command of her small ship as a pirate on the high seas. To make up for underestimating her independence, I ask about the five male photo booth images on her dashboard, below a statue of the Virgin Mary and a blue Krishna. “Those are my old lovers—anyway, the ones I remember,” she says. “I find the path to spirituality lies through ecstatic sex—and the path to ecstatic sex lies through spirituality—don’t you?” Thankful that this is a rhetorical question, I just keep quiet while she goes on. “I had kids with two of them, a rock band with one of them, and they’re all still my best friends. Why? Because I taught them about sex, that’s why. Not just sex-sex, but stay-in-bed-all-weekend sex, Tantric sex, go-to-a-place-otherwise-only-music-and-drugs-take-you sex.” Trying to be cool, I ask why she has the Hindu god Krishna. “Because he’s the only male god who’s into Tantric sex. That’s why he’s always surrounded by women. I told my old lovers to pass that kind of sex on to their girlfriends and wives. Do you know, one guy’s wife called last year to thank me?” She pulls in at the airport, beating a limousine to the last open space, then lifts my bag filled with books out of the trunk as if it were a feather. “You should write about take-no-shit women like me. Girls need to know they can break the rules. If the nuns had told me that, I could have saved twenty years.” As I’m walking away, she calls after me, “You pushy broads helped—even a loner like me.” From her, this is high praise. • I leave home for Newark Airport and end up sitting behind a heavy older driver who looks like an angry Buddha. He brakes and careens his way through midtown traffic, muttering in Russian over the sound of Howard Stern’s talk show on the car radio. Stern is surpassing even his shock jock self by making jokes about two white teenage boys who have just shot and killed their classmates and teachers in Littleton, Colorado. He is suggesting they should have had sex with their girl victims first. I ask the driver to turn the radio off, but he’s too busy yelling expletives at people crossing the street. “Dirty, lazy peoples!” he shouts out the window, “You ruin this fucking country!” This last is aimed at three teenage Latino boys.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  To enter the Blue Mountain Clinic in Missoula, Montana, I have to pass picketers who are crowded at the edge of the legal buffer zone. They are shouting, “Abortion is murder!” and “Baby killer!” Inside, staff members show me around the clinic, which has been providing a full range of health services since the early 1970s. In 1993 its building was firebombed and completely destroyed by anti-abortion terrorists, even though, as with most such clinics, providing safe abortions is a tiny fraction of its health care mission. I understand that repairing the damage has taken two years and a lot of work. Now Blue Mountain is operating behind a slender buffer zone and a tall protective fence. A staff member tells me that one of the female picketers has come in when the men were not around, had an abortion, and gone back to picket the next day. This sounds surrealistic to me—but not to the staff member. She explains that women in such anti-abortion groups are more likely to be deprived of birth control and so to need an abortion. They then feel guilty—and picket even more. This restriction on birth control may also explain why studies have long shown that Catholic women in general are more likely to have an abortion than are their Protestant counterparts.4 When I visit clinics, I’ve learned to ask the staff if they have ever seen a picketer come in, have an abortion, and go back to picketing again. From Atlanta to Wichita, the answer is yes. Yet because staff members see the woman’s suffering and guard her right to privacy, they don’t blow the whistle. Meanwhile in Wichita, Kansas, Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors who performs late-term abortions—only about 1 percent of all procedures but crucial when, for instance, a fetus develops without a brain—is shot in both arms by a female picketer. He recovers and continues serving women who come to him from many states. I finally meet Dr. Tiller in 2008 at a New York gathering of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health. I ask him if he has ever helped a woman who was protesting at his clinic. He says: “Of course, I’m there to help them, not to add to their troubles. They probably already feel guilty.” In 2009 Dr. Tiller is shot in the head at close range by a male activist hiding inside the Lutheran church where the Tiller family worships each Sunday. This is done in the name of being “pro-life.” • I’m sitting next to a very old and elegant woman on a plane from Dallas to New York. Assuming that she needs company, I start a conversation. She turns out to be a ninety-eight-year-old former Ziegfeld girl who is on her way to dance in an AIDS benefit on Broadway with her hundred-and-one-year-old friend from chorus girl days—something they’ve been doing since the tragedy of AIDS first appeared.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Some gay magazine shops sell handcuffs (this perhaps primary symbol of gay oppression by straights has become the standard prop of S & M!). A layout in a non-S & M magazine features photographs of naked men in stocks (the implements used in even less enlightened times to punish homosexuals are now flaunted in “celebration"). S & M publications relish, in articles, stories, and photographs, the mimed torturing of “slaves” by “masters.” (I am speaking, throughout, about gay S & M. Manifestations of widespread heterosexual S & M—which may have similar dynamics—abound. Indeed, a cursory glance at S & M publications in any pornography shop—or a glance at straight classified columns listing items pleading for “humiliation”—would lead one to conclude that the occurrence of heterosexual S & M far, far exceeds that of gay S & M—although the numbers may be equivalent when proportions are designated.) The costume of S & M is unindividualistically standard. Stiff, posturing clients in leather bars often resemble mannequins manufactured, with varying degrees of attention, from one iron mold. The costume is total fantasy, having virtually no discernible context in reality; there is nowhere else one would wear it other than to a gay leather gathering—as specialized, say, as a space suit. Black is the dominant color: black leather vest and/or jacket and/or shirt, black chaps, black cap, dark sunglasses, black gloves, black belts crisscrossed at various parts of the body. (In effect, a costume of death—an effect corroborated by an article on necrophilia in an S & M magazine: As if the ultimate celebration of S & M were death.) Chains, straps, and bradded silvery studs on the leather paradoxically evoke the profuse use of necklaces and sequins on satin by transvestites. Keys, one earring, color-print handkerchiefs, worn on this or that side, the latter with this or that degree of exposure, are messages of varying degrees of dominance or passivity. (Confusion often results because these signals change from place to place.) The appeal of the costume is such that some gay men will go only with another in full regalia, in effect to make it with the costume. (It is possible for an S & M scene to include no real sexual contact, the body surrendered to the fetish, nudity shunned with an almost Victorian prudery.) In a leather bar with its oppressive props and its black-costumed males, there is a collective aesthetic ugliness. The extremes to which this world appeals are indicated by the emergence of a bar fashioned as a torture dungeon. A heavy prison steel door guards its entrance (a double horror when one considers the real prison sadism of Attica). Inside the dimlit bar are a torture rack, shackles for “slaves,” whips, electric prods (another double horror, evocative of Southern sheriffs), handcuffs, a ceiling hung over with military boots.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  The bottom is so deep, that we could see it nowhere without mounting to the ridge of the arch, where the cliff stands highest. We got upon it; and thence in the ditch beneath, I saw a people dipped in excrement, that seemed as it had flowed from human privies. And whilst I was searching with my eyes, down amongst it, I beheld one with a head so smeared in filth, that it did not appear whether he was layman or clerk. He bawled to me: “Why are thou so eager in gazing at me, more than the others in their nastiness?” And I to him: “Because, if I rightly recollect, I have seen thee before with thy hair dry; and thou art Alessio Interminei 6 of Lucca: therefore do I eye thee more than all the rest.” And he then, beating his pate: “Down to this, the flatteries wherewith my tongue was never weary have sunk me! Thereupon my Guide said to me: “Stretch thy face a little forwards, that thy eyes may fully reach the visage of that unclean and dishevelled strumpet, who yonder with her filthy nails scratches herself, now cowering low, now standing on her feet. It is Thais, the harlot, who answered her paramour, when he said: ‘Dost thou thank me much?’ ‘Nay, wondrously.’ 7 And herewith let our view rest sated.” 1. Literally, Evil Pouches. 2. See Canto xxxii. 3. The first Jubilee of the Roman Church was instituted by Boniface VIII in the year 1300. The bridge is that of Castello Sant’ Angelo, so called from the castle that stood at one end of it, while the mount is either Mount Janiculum, or, more probably, the Monte Giordano. 4. Venedico de’ Caccianemici, whose father, Alberto, was head or the Guelfs of Bologna. In politics he adhered to the family tradition and was a follower of the Marquis of Este, being finally exiled from his native city (1289). His sister’s seducer was either Obizzo II or Azzo VIII of Este (see Canto xii, note 12); probably the former, as Ghisola eventually married a certain Niccolò da Fontana in 1270, and Azzo did not succeed to the Marquisate till 1293. Dante alludes to the fact that several versions of the story had got abroad, according to one of which Venedico was innocent. There are two local touches in this passage. The word pickle is evidently selected with reference to the Salse, a ravine near Bologna into which the bodies of criminals were thrown; and sipa = sia is the Bolognese equivalent for the affirmative particle sì. The Savena flows two miles to the west, and the Reno two miles to the east of Bologna. 5. Jason is in this circle first, for having, on his way to Colchis, seduced Hypsipyle, the daughter of King Thoas of Lemnos, whose life she had managed to save, when the Lemnian women put all their males to death; and secondly, for having abandoned Medea, the daughter of King Æëtes of Colchis, whom he married as a reward for having enabled him to carry off the Golden Fleece, but whom he subsequently deserted for Creusa. 6. Little is known of Alessio de’ Intermine(ll)i, save that his family were prominent Whites of Lucca, and that he was still alive in the year 1295. 7. At the beginning of the third act of Terence’s Eunucbus, Thraso asks his servant Gnatho, with reference to a slave he had sent to Thais: Magnas vero agere gratias Thais mibi?—whereupon Gnatho answers: Ingentes. It should be noted that Dante holds Thais responsible for the messenger’s reply, and that his knowledge of the passage is evidently derived from the De Amicitia (§38) of Cicero, who quotes it as a typical instance of flattery, with the remark that the proper answer would have been magnas, rather than ingentes.

• From Escape (2007)

  But thousands of brainwashed believers still clung to him as their prophet and leader. This was further proof of what many had grown up believing: that evil outsiders were always poised to attack and persecute those who were doing God’s work. So Jeffs still exerted power. He ordered his followers to withhold the state tax they would normally pay on their houses that were owned by the U.E.P. This is a substantial amount of money, about a million dollars a year. None of Jeffs’ followers paid taxes. The administrator of the trust responded by going after Warren’s brother Lyle with an eviction notice. After he was forced to pay his taxes, others in the FLDS did, too. Rumors circulated in the community that Jeffs now had the ability to be transported directly by God from place to place. He would show up in the twinkling of an eye and disappear just as magically. Jeffs’ fanatical believers were convinced that this was why the authorities had so far been unsuccessful in capturing him. Jeffs fed into their perverse worldview by sending back stranger and stranger communications. He took full credit for the tsunami off Thailand that had killed hundreds of thousands in December 2004 and said that more disasters would befall those who were trying to stop the work of God. Warren’s response to what seemed like the beginning of the end for him was to marry and marry and marry again. The rumor was that he was up to 180 wives. He was marrying younger and younger girls—one of whom was my former second-grade student Jennet Jessop, who was fourteen at the time. What was also disturbing was the number of people who disappeared. Entire families would be moved out of the community during the night. To this day, no one knows where they are. Winston Blackmore and his first wife, Jane, lost their daughter, who disappeared with her husband. Since Brent Jeffs filed his civil suit in 2004, over a hundred young boys and girls were interviewed by the Utah attorney general’s office about their allegations of sexual and physical abuse by Warren Jeffs. The media became more aware of Warren Jeffs as the hunt for him continued. Stories were written about the men who’d been excommunicated and the hundreds of “lost boys” whom Warren Jeffs had arbitrarily banished from the FLDS. Johnny Jessop, one of the “lost boys” Dan Fisher has been supporting, can’t find his mother, Sue, and has filed a lawsuit against Jeffs to reveal her whereabouts. There have also been rumors that children were being taken from their mothers and sent to the FLDS compound in Texas—which is called the YFZ Ranch, which stands for “Yearning for Zion.” These were children who belonged to men Warren had kicked out of the cult. We heard that they were being sent away to be raised the way Warren wanted them to be raised.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  One or two of the “slaves” were nude, one wore a leather mask, some wore cockrings. While the “slave” mimed enormous pain and pretended to resist, testicles were squeezed by some of the posturing “masters,” buttocks spread, fondled. One “slave” was briefly turned upside down. Nipples and cocks were pinched with plastic clamps. It was very ugly theater of pain, ugly charade, like most gay S & M. Then the courtyard lit up angrily, a helicopter washed it in dirty light. “EVERYBODY FREEZE! THIS IS THE LOS ANGELES POLICE!” Thus, that April 10, 1976, at “2355 hours,” two reactionary forces collided in a battle of dizzying ironies and tumbling realities. Los Angeles cops attacked the gay “leather fraternity.” A clear vendetta—at the city's groan-ing expense—it was one of the most wasteful, reckless, needless, silly police raids in a long history of wasteful, reckless, needless, silly police raids. Why the leather faction? With its strange paraphernalia and chains, sinister props and costumes, it is clearly the most vulnerable and potentially embarrassing within the gay world. In television closeup, it would be captured in one of its ugliest moments. No matter that the leather faction was a minuscule segment, it would be depicted as representative of the homosexual world The fantasy auction would be flushed into home screens as real. This would counter gay gains, demands that homosexuals be employed as cops, and pressure that harassment stop. "These are the people demanding acceptance!” the bizarre newsclips would proclaim. Within the lighted circle of the hovering helicopter, cops poured into the bathhouse and arrested 39 men and 1 woman, the latter one of the organizers; an enigmatic presence among all the costumed men. (According to the police log, at least one courageous officer was wounded in the Battle of the Bathhouse: “hit in the mouth by an unknown male who was running past him … feels the blow was struck unintentionally … lost one tooth.”) The arrested men were paraded before representatives of the District and City attorneys offices (who had approved the raid beforehand) and—important to the police design, indeed essential—before television cameras alerted carefully in advance to create the desired circus. One of the “slaves” was brought out to be photographed semi-nude— and then returned inside to put his clothes on. The camera eye glared at confiscated “toys,” S & M props for make-believe pain.

• From Escape (2007)

  Loretta was the first of Merril’s daughters to be married off to the prophet, but she was not the last. Paula was next. She was as beautiful as her sister, Loretta. They looked almost like twins. Her wedding gown was princess style, but for the former nuss, this was hardly a fairy-tale wedding. Uncle Rulon was at least sixty years older than she. Her still smile barely hid her despair. She was very disciplined and determined to keep her feelings in check. I kept thinking of that day in school when we joked about having to marry an old man who was a rest-home patient. Rulon Jeffs was sitting in a chair because he wasn’t strong enough to stand. He had a palsy, so when he took her hand in his patriarchal grip the shaking was visible from quite a distance. The marriage was grotesque to me. Merril, of course, had no reason to hide his feelings. He was proud and overjoyed. Merril’s status within the community was enhanced when he married off Loretta to the prophet. But his obsession with power would soon make him want more. Merril was now considered one of the most exalted men in the community since he had married two daughters to Uncle Rulon. I noticed how differently we, as Merril’s wives, were treated in the community. We rarely had to wait in line at the grocery store or at the fabric shop. It was considered a privilege by other families to associate with us. No one wanted to offend Merril or anyone in his family since he now had a firm and direct connection to the prophet. Most people in the community usually only ever saw Uncle Rulon at church. Those who were able to make an appointment to see him usually found the meetings were kept short. There was time to make a tithe, but not to exert any influence. Merril’s inroads into the Jeffs family did not stop with Uncle Rulon. Several of Rulon’s sons started marrying Merril’s daughters. The one who married the most was the favorite son among the prophet’s seventy children, Warren Jeffs. Warren was gaining influence in the community, and often spoke for his father in church when he was too weak to attend. He was on the verge of becoming a rising star with the potential to take over the FLDS when his father died. I think Merril saw it as a shrewd move to marry as many daughters as he could to Warren. Warren was now in his late thirties. His three wives were churning out children; there were now about fifteen. My opinion of Warren had never changed since I had first met him shortly after marrying Merril. I thought he looked like a big nobody but also felt there was something creepy about him.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  He passed, by the isle of Lemnos, after the bold merciless women had given all their males to death. There, with tokens and fair words, did he deceive the young Hypsipyle, who had before deceived all the rest. He left her there pregnant and forlorn: such guilt condemns him to such torment; and also for Medea vengeance is taken. With him go all who practise the like deceit; and let this suffice to know respecting the first valley, and those whom it devours.” We had already come to where the narrow pathway crosses the second bank, and makes of it a buttress for another arch. Here we heard people whining in the other chasm, and puffing with mouth and nostrils, and knocking on themselves with their palms. The banks were crusted over with a mould from the vapour below, which concretes upon them, which did battle with the eyes and with the nose.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “_C’est moi, n’est-ce pas?_” And receiving an answer in the affirmative, Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgetting the favor he had meant to ask of Lidia Ivanovna, and forgetting his sister’s affairs, caring for nothing, but filled with the sole desire to get away as soon as possible, went out on tiptoe and ran out into the street as though from a plague-stricken house. For a long while he chatted and joked with his cab-driver, trying to recover his spirits. At the French theater where he arrived for the last act, and afterwards at the Tatar restaurant after his champagne, Stepan Arkadyevitch felt a little refreshed in the atmosphere he was used to. But still he felt quite unlike himself all that evening. On getting home to Pyotr Oblonsky’s, where he was staying, Stepan Arkadyevitch found a note from Betsy. She wrote to him that she was very anxious to finish their interrupted conversation, and begged him to come next day. He had scarcely read this note, and frowned at its contents, when he heard below the ponderous tramp of the servants, carrying something heavy. Stepan Arkadyevitch went out to look. It was the rejuvenated Pyotr Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he could not walk upstairs; but he told them to set him on his legs when he saw Stepan Arkadyevitch, and clinging to him, walked with him into his room and there began telling him how he had spent the evening, and fell asleep doing so. Stepan Arkadyevitch was in very low spirits, which happened rarely with him, and for a long while he could not go to sleep. Everything he could recall to his mind, everything was disgusting; but most disgusting of all, as if it were something shameful, was the memory of the evening he had spent at Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s. Next day he received from Alexey Alexandrovitch a final answer, refusing to grant Anna’s divorce, and he understood that this decision was based on what the Frenchman had said in his real or pretended trance. Chapter 23 In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there must necessarily be either complete division between the husband and wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be undertaken. Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them. Both Vronsky and Anna felt life in Moscow insupportable in the heat and dust, when the spring sunshine was followed by the glare of summer, and all the trees in the boulevards had long since been in full leaf, and the leaves were covered with dust. But they did not go back to Vozdvizhenskoe, as they had arranged to do long before; they went on staying in Moscow, though they both loathed it, because of late there had been no agreement between them.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X V I I I Our Pilgrim—more and more heavy-laden, yet rapid and unconquerable—is now with his Guide looking down into the Ninth Chasm; and briefly describes the hideous condition of the “sowers of Scandal and Schism” that are punished in it. First comes Mahomet: in Dante’s view, a mere Sectarian who had taken up Christianity and perverted its meaning. The shadow of him, rent asunder from the chin downwards, displays the conscious vileness and corruption of his doctrines. He tells how All his nephew “goes weeping before him, cleft from chin to forelock” He then asks what Dante is doing there; and on learning his errand and the likelihood of his return to earth, bids him give due warning to “Brother Dolcino,” a Schismatic and Communist, who is stirring up strife in Piedmont and Lombardy. Next come Pier da Medicina, Curio, Mosca de’ Lamberti of Florence, and lastly, Bertrand de Born. All of them have punishments representing their crimes. WHO, even with words set free, could ever fully tell, by oft relating, the blood and the wounds that I now saw? Every tongue assuredly would fail, because of our speech and our memory that have small capacity to comprehend so much. If all the people too were gathered, who of old upon Apulia’s fateful land wailed for their blood, 1 by reason of the Trojans, and of that long war which made so vast a spoil of rings, as Livy writes, who errs not; with those who, by withstanding Robert Guiscard, felt the pains of blows; and the rest whose bones are gathered still at Ceperano, where each Apulian proved false; and there at Tagliacozzo, where old Alardo conquered without weapons; and one should show his limbs transpierced, and another his cut off: it were naught to equal the hideous mode of the ninth chasm. Even a cask, through loss of middle-piece or cant, yawns not so wide as one 2 I saw, ripped from the chin down to the part that utters vilest sound: between his legs the entrails hung; the pluck appeared, and the wretched sack that makes excrement of what is swallowed. Whilst I stood all occupied in seeing him, he looked at me, and with his hands opened his breast, saying: “Now see how I dilacerate myself! See how Mahomet is mangled! Before me Ali weeping goes, cleft in the face from chin to forelock; and all the others, whom thou seest here, were in their lifetime sowers of scandal and of schism; and therefore are they thus cleft. A Devil is here behind, who splits us thus cruelly, reapplying each of this class to his sword’s edge, when we have wandered round the doleful road; for the wounds heal up ere any goes again before him.

• From Escape (2007)

  The school was a public school that was funded by the state, but it operated as a private school in fact. Virtually every student was a member of the FLDS community. Religion was taught openly in school, and if a subject contradicted our teachings, it was dropped. It was very common to get textbooks with entire chapters missing because they’d been cut out. We were taught things that were patently false—such as the “fact” that dinosaurs had never existed. In some classes, the teachers taught stories from the Book of Mormon. The school got away with this because everyone who worked there back then was part of the FLDS. The state had no reason to investigate because no one ever complained. I remember learning about sex on the playground when I was in the fourth grade. One of my classmates announced to the rest of us that her brother was teaching her how to have a baby. She had told him she didn’t want to learn, but he insisted. He wanted to show her, not just tell her. She said he pointed to the parts on his body and told her what he was going to do with them on hers. Then he did it. When it was over, he said this was how her husband would make babies with her. She said she hated it and hated him. We all felt repulsed by the story and said her brother was a big liar. We knew our parents would never do anything like that. But she said we were wrong. This was sex, S-E-X. When we went back into our classroom she got the dictionary and slammed it on a desk. She read us the definition of sex and we all felt uncomfortable. Just because it was in the dictionary didn’t mean it was true. We felt her brother was wicked, and we talked about this for months. Those with older siblings would come back with more information, so I finally had to conclude that it was true. We were never taught about sex in the FLDS. When we had health education in the fifth grade, the chapters about reproduction were cut out. Sex was something a husband was to teach his wife on their wedding night. There were women who married thinking babies came from kissing. One year Linda had a harrowing experience at school. Her teacher was a man with a reputation for not maintaining order well in his classroom. He’d promised Linda’s class that they could earn a paper airplane party as a reward for doing something well. Whatever it was, they managed to do it and earn the party.

• From Escape (2007)

  I went to sleep thinking that this weird night would be finished by morning. The next time I opened my eyes, I told myself, it would be over. I was wrong. In the middle of the night, I felt Merril pulling up my nightgown and then straddling me. I realized that he was going to try to have sex with me, despite the fact that his children were sleeping on the bed and floor beside us. The room was pitch black. I hated, just hated, having sex with the children around us. After it was over, Merril rolled over and went to sleep. I stared into the darkness, feeling like I had been raped in front of his sleeping children. I did not, could not, sleep for the rest of the night. I was in complete shock. Ever since I was married it had been one shock after another. I felt numb. Not anymore. This was a new low. I was shaking. The bright light of morning did nothing to banish my utter disgust and revulsion at Merril. For the first time in my marriage, I realized how much had been stripped from me. When I saw myself in the mirror I felt like I was looking at the shell of a human being—my spirit and dignity had been stolen from me. Merril decided to take all his wives to breakfast and left his daughters in charge of the thirty-four children. Barbara and Tammy were clearly annoyed that Merril had spent the first two nights of the trip with Cathleen and me. Cathleen was still reeling from Ruth’s naked nursing fiasco. Faunita used our breakfast time to educate Merril’s two newest wives about the abuses he’d committed against her. Ruth would not put food directly into her mouth. She tried instead to throw food in by the forkful. Her head was bobbing around to catch it and of course she missed every time. This was uproariously funny to her. Faunita continued her nonstop catalogue of the horrors of her marriage, telling Cathleen and Tammy that Merril had put her away ten years earlier. “Putting someone away” is shorthand in the FLDS for what happens when a man stops having sex with one of his wives. Faunita said he announced he’d never sleep with her again and that he’d not even given her a kiss since. I really didn’t want to listen to a diatribe about whom Merril was sleeping with or having a relationship with and whom he was not. I was still so traumatized from the sex the night before, I felt remote and numb. I couldn’t engage with anyone and didn’t want to participate in anything.

• From Escape (2007)

  I listened as she catalogued her disgust. “The preschoolers in this home do not have a mother willing to care for them. Barbara is only interested in supervising Merril every minute of the day. Ruth doesn’t love her children because if she did, she’d never allow herself to be inhabited by forbidden spirits. Faunita only comes out of her room at night when everyone is asleep.” Cathleen lowered her voice. “One night I woke up and heard Faunita slamming things around. I got up and listened at the bottom of the stairs. I could hear her talking to herself and complaining about Merril. I think she hates him.” I told her that I knew Faunita and Merril had a lot of problems in their relationship. The two of us made breakfast for the family: stacks of toast, two gallons of orange juice, and a large pan of scrambled eggs. I took a plate to Ruth’s bedroom. Ruth and Merril’s daughter Merrilyn was there. She was my age—the former nuss who’d shyly flirted with our teacher at the pencil sharpener a few years before—and looked exhausted. She’d been assigned to sit with her mother all night and scowled when I entered the room. I encouraged her to urge her mother to eat. She shot back, “I know how to take care of my mother. I have been doing it all my life.” As I turned to walk away I saw her stick her tongue out at me. Back in the kitchen, Cathleen had gathered the preschoolers around the table for breakfast. She was brushing their hair while they ate, yanking and pulling at the snarls. So much for her pristine sense of order and tidiness, I thought. I saw that Millie, a sweet four-year-old, was next in line. I knew she had a sensitive scalp so I took her into my bedroom, which was downstairs near the kitchen, and carefully combed her hair. When we returned to the kitchen, Merril’s teenage daughters were streaming in. They were annoyed about having to give up one of their bedrooms to Tammy and Cathleen. They had been so eager for additional mothers to counterbalance what they perceived as Barbara’s tyranny, but now they were starting to see the consequences. Tammy was vying for their father’s attention all the time. The house was more crowded. But above all, Barbara seemed to have a lock on Merril’s attention. With three wives waiting in the wings, they were more shut out now than ever before. Merril walked past the kitchen after sleeping with Barbara again. He sent one of the children in and asked that I bring coffee upstairs to his office. When I returned, Tammy was in the kitchen, her cheeks flushed with anger. I asked Cathleen what was wrong. “She knows,” she said. “Knows what?” “She knows Merril hasn’t been sleeping with me, either. He hasn’t slept with anyone but you and Barbara.”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  29 Ad istum modum palantes omnem illam depraeda- bantur regionem. Sed in quodam castello copia laetati largioris quaesticuli gaudiales instruunt dapes: a quodam colono fictae vaticinationis mendacio pinguissimum deposcunt arietem, qui deam Syriam esurientem suo satiaret sacrificio, probeque disposita cenula balneas obeunt ac dehinc lauti quendam fortis- simum rusticanum, industria laterum atque imis ventris bene praeparatum, comitem cenae secum adducunt paucisque admodum praegustatis olusculis, ante ipsam mensam spurcissima illa propudia ad illicitae libidinis extrema flagitia infandis uriginibus efferantur, passimque circumfusi nudatum supinatum- que iuvenem execrandis oribus flagitabant. Nec diu 392 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VIII his own body very strong to bear the pain of the blows, so that you might see the ground to be wet and defiled with the womanish blood that issued out abundantly with the cutting of the swords and the blows of the scourge : which thing caused me greatly to fear to see such wounds and effusion of blood, lest the same foreign goddess should likewise desire the blood of an ass for her stomach, as some men long for - asss milk After they at last were weary, or at least satisfied with rending themselves, they ceased from this bloody business : and, behold, they received from the inhabitants, who offered eagerly, into their open bosoms copper coins, nay silver too, vessels of wine, miik, cheese, flour and wheat; and amongst them there were some that brought barley to the ass that carried the goddess: but the greedy whoresons thrust all into their sacks which they brought for the purpose, and put them upon my back, to the end I might serve for two purposes, that is to say: for the barn by reason of my corn, and for the temple by reason of the goddess that I bare. In this sort they went from place to place robbing all the country over ; at length they came to a certain town, purposing to make good cheer there, being glad at a great gain they had gotten, where, under colour of divination, they brought to pass that they obtained a fat ram of a poor husbandman for the goddess' supper, and to make sacrifice withal. After that the banquet was richly prepared, they washed their bodies, and brought in a lusty young man of the village to sup with them; and when he had scarce tasted a few herbs before the supper they began to discover their beastly customs and inordi- nate desires. For they compassed him round about as he sat, to abuse him, but when mine eyes would 393 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From Escape (2007)

  “That’s okay,” he said. He turned off the lights, took off his clothes except for his long underwear, and got into bed with me. He sat in the bed and stared at me. I was paralyzed. We didn’t even know each other. There was no way I was going to consummate the marriage. But I didn’t have that choice. He started kissing me. I felt gross. Nothing could be worse. Then he put his hands down the front of my nightgown and began to rub my breasts. His hands were cool and clammy. I had never been that close to a man before and certainly not without my clothes. I acted as repulsed as I felt, which seemed to feed something in him. He removed my nightgown and underwear and shifted his body on top of mine. I felt even more powerless than I had when my father told me I must marry. Merril spread my legs apart but could not get an erection. I felt angry, humiliated, and embarrassed. Should I fight him? I began to try to free myself, and after a few minutes he released his hold on me. I scrambled out of the bed, confused and disoriented, and found my clothes on the other side of the room. I was shaking so hard I couldn’t get dressed. I felt myself gasping for breath. I sat on the floor by the foot of the bed. I felt so unsafe. Merril got dressed and sat on the edge of the bed, saying that he felt it was important to be respectful of a lady’s feelings, but in reality he was covering up his own inadequacies. I said I was tired and wanted to sleep. He didn’t seem to care; he just stretched out on the bed and moments later began to snore. I got back into bed and stared at the ceiling until I finally fell asleep. When I awakened in the morning, Merril was in the shower. He dressed and left the room without saying a word. As soon as he was gone, I showered and dressed. I was about to leave and find my father’s family when Merril returned. “Come with me,” he said. I picked up my luggage and followed him to his van. He moved some things around so there would be a place for my bags. I felt panicked. We went to breakfast at a place nearby. Merril introduced me to some men there as his new wife. They were happy and excited for Merril. I felt like a complete object. One of the men made some lame joke that compared a new wife to a dog. Merril laughed and said dogs were better because they were more loyal. He made another joke comparing marriage to a bath. “Once you get into it, it’s not so hot.” The other men laughed. I had never felt so degraded.

• From Escape (2007)

  When we returned to the hotel we found unbelievable chaos. The children had been poorly supervised by Merril’s daughters and food was slopped over everything. Milk and juice had been spilled on the carpet and upholstery. Wet cereal was all over the bedspreads. It was shameful and disgusting. The kids never should have been allowed to take food into their rooms. When Cathleen and I had been in charge the day before, we’d made everyone eat outside and clean up afterward. No garbage was left behind. Cathleen now refused to ride in the van with Merril because of Ruth’s behavior the night before. She got on the bus instead, determined to endure the screaming and crying of the young kids and the arguing and commotion of the teenagers. When we arrived in San Diego we checked into the hotel and then the entire family ran to the beach. We didn’t change into bathing suits because we didn’t have any. Swimming was considered immodest. The children were overjoyed to see the ocean for the first time. The kids were jumping and splashing in the waves in their long underwear and layers of fundamentalist clothing. It’s a miracle to me that no one drowned. Merril, swept up by romance, decided to walk down to the beach from the hotel with each wife, one at a time, and kiss her at the ocean’s edge. This seemed to be the pinnacle of romance to him, and even Faunita got kissed, which made the children jump up and down because most of them liked her a lot. I was happy for Faunita but felt the whole ritual was stupid. Back at the hotel, we were hit with the onslaught of wet, sandy clothing from the beach escapade. We tried to find a way to dry the garments instead of hurling them into garbage bags to ferry home. Clothes were hung from every railing outside the rooms and on every chair inside. The next morning was the long-awaited arrival at the San Diego Zoo. Merril bought the tickets and we all entered the park. The older children split off and no one was assigned to watch the younger ones. Barbara and Tammy shadowed Merril; Ruth was in her own crazy orbit. Faunita tried to keep up, but with so many children, it was impossible. Ever since Truman had been left behind she conscientiously tried to stay on top of everyone’s whereabouts. Cathleen and I tried to help by taking some of the younger girls around with us.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Haee recensente pistore iamdudum procax et temeraria mulier verbis execrantibus fullonis illius detestabatur uxorem, illam perfidam, illam impudi- cam, denique universi sexus grande dedecus, quae suo pudore postposito torique genialis calcato foe- dere Larem mariti lupanari maculasset infamia, iam- que perdita nuptae dignitate prostitutae sibi nomen adsciverit : addebat et tales oportere vivas exuri femi- nas. Ettamen taciti vulneris et suae sordidae con- scientiae commonita, quo maturius stupratorem suum tegminis cruciatu liberaret, identidem suadebat mari- tum temperius quieti decedere. At ille, utpote in- tercepta cena profugerat prorsus ieiunus, mensam potius comiter postulabat. Apponebat ei propere, quamvis invita mulier, quippini destinatam alii: sed mihi penita carpebantur praecordia et praecedens facinus et praesentem deterrimae feminae constan- tiam cogitanti mecumque sedulo deliberabam, si quo modo possem, detectis ac revelatis fraudibus, auxilium meo perhibere domino, illumque, qui ad instar testu- dinis alveum succubabat, depulso tegmine cunctis palam facere. Sie herili contumelia me cruciatum tandem caelestis respexit providentia: nam senex , A. A verb seems to have dropped out of the text, Migraret is van der Vliet’s suggestion. : 440 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IX not appease his fury, but as necessity required he took the young man well nigh choked, and carried him out at the doors to the nearest lane. In the mean season I counselled his wife and did persuade her to leave his shop and absent herself at some neighbour's house till the choler of her husband was pacified, lest he should be moved against her, and do her some harm and to himself also. And so being