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 Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  If you were shy of soiling your hands they would explain to you very gently and intelligently just how these delicate mechanisms operated, what they did when they exploded, and why you must not waste even your garbage because . . . et ipso facto e pluribus unum . The thing that impressed me, going the rounds in search of work, was not so much that they made me vomit every day (assuming I had been lucky enough to put something into my guts), but that they always demanded to know if you were of good habits, if you were steady, if you were sober, if you were industrious, if you had ever worked before and if not why not. Even the garbage, which I had gotten the job of collecting for the municipality, was precious to them, the killers. Standing knee deep in the muck, the lowest of the low, a coolie, an outcast, still I was part of the death racket. I tried reading the Inferno at night, but it was in English and English is no language for a Catholic work. “Whatever enters in itself into its selfhood, viz., into its own lubet. . . .” Lubet! If I had had a word like that to conjure with then, how peacefully I might have gone about my garbage collecting! How sweet, in the night, when Dante is out of reach and the hands smell of muck and slime, to take unto oneself this word which in the Dutch means “lust” and in Latin “lubitum” or the divine beneplacitum . Standing knee deep in the garbage I said one day what Meister Eckhart is reported to have said long ago: “I truly have need of God, but God has need of me too.” There was a job waiting for me in the slaughterhouse, a nice little job of sorting entrails, but I couldn’t raise the fare to get to Chicago. I remained in Brooklyn, in my own palace of entrails, and turned round and round on the plinth of the labyrinth. I remained at home seeking the “germinal vesicle,” “the dragon castle on the floor of the sea,” “the Heavenly Heart,” “the field of the square inch,” “the house of the square foot,” “the dark pass,” “the space of former Heaven.” I remained locked in, a prisoner of Forculus, god of the door, of Cardea, god of the hinge, and of Limentius, god of the threshold. I spoke only with their sisters, the three goddesses called Fear, Pallor and Fever. I saw no “Asian luxury,” as had St. Augustine, or as he imagined he had.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I knew what was going to happen; I’d been told about it and I didn’t want to see. But my curiosity was stronger than my horror, and I couldn’t turn my head away. When the body, still strangely alive, was a few inches above the earth, they let it drop and, the moment it hit the bottom, everyone present was supposed, as is prescribed in the ritual, to join in a collective scream in order to stifle all noise. They screamed but imperceptibly too late, and I heard the horrible sound of the body as it fell. The gravediggers’ work was taken up again with their earlier mechanical cadence. Theirs was a practiced skill. To close the grave, they placed flat stones on it. In two minutes, Uncle Joseph had been shut away forever. Afterwards, we went to wash our hands at a consecrated fountain, for the sight of the body was supposed to have soiled us. Why the hands, I asked myself grouchily? Why not take a whole bath? But, like everyone else, I washed my hands. At the cemetery gate, a representative of the community fund waited for our donations. I passed him without giving anything and, as always, tried to make my uneasiness seem like disapproval. The trip back was even more carefree than the drive out had been. Discreetly encouraged by my companions, our driver slyly tried to pass the carriage in front of ours by going into a canter. The other driver avoided this and forced his nags to race. The passengers became interested in the race and, forgetting all propriety, began to urge their drivers on quite openly. We came back to town with our poor city-horses bulge-eyed from this unfamiliar effort, their manes flying tangled in the wind. The passengers laughed with excitement, as delighted as fans at a football game. Thanks to the crowd, I could avoid the obligatory return to the house of mourning and escape a new session of condolences and handshaking. It was too late when I got back to school. The sun had gone down and I know the housekeeper wouldn’t like the idea of lighting up the study hall for a single student. Besides, I no longer felt like working. Before returning home, I loitered a while, trying to get rid of my bad mood. But I didn’t succeed, and when I got back to the Passage, I was aggressive, ready to give blow for blow. I’d had enough of these histrionics and was ready to say so. I wouldn’t wait until they begged me to speak; I’d come right out with the statement that I would never again allow myself to be dragged off to such ceremonies.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  I was still in this phase when my father stuck the newspaper under my nose and said, “Did you see what your old boss is doing?” There was a small article on the upcoming mayoral elections in Westland. He was running for mayor. I took the paper from my father’s offering hands. For the first time, I felt an uncomplicated disgust for the lawyer. Westland was nothing but malls and doughnut stands and a big ugly theater with an artificial volcano in the front of it. What kind of idiot would want to be mayor of Westland? Again, I left the room. I got the phone call the next week. It was a man’s voice, a soft, probing, condoling voice. “Miss Roe?” he said. “I hope you’ll forgive this unexpected call. I’m Mark Charming of Detroit Magazine.” I didn’t say anything. The voice continued more uncertainly. “Are you free to talk, Miss Roe?” There was no one in the kitchen, and my mother was running the vacuum in the next room. “Talk about what?” I said. “Your previous employer.” The voice became slightly harsh as he said these words, and then hurriedly rushed back to condolence. “Please don’t be startled or upset. I know this could be a disturbing phone call for you, and it must certainly seem intrusive.” He paused so I could laugh or something. I didn’t, and his voice became more cautious. “The thing is, we’re doing a story on your ex-employer in the context of his running for mayor. To put it mildly, we think he has no business running for public office. We think he would be very bad for the whole Detroit area. He has an awful reputation, Miss Roe—which may not surprise you.” There was another careful pause that I did not fill. “Miss Roe, are you still with me?” “Yes.” “What all this is leading up to is that we have reason to believe that you could reveal information about your ex-employer that would be damaging to him. This information would never be connected to your name. We would use a pseudonym. Your privacy would be protected completely.” The vacuum cleaner shut off, and silence encircled me. My throat constricted. “Do you want time to think about it, Miss Roe?” “I can’t talk now,” I said, and hung up. I couldn’t go through the living room without my mother asking me who had been on the phone, so I went downstairs to the basement. I sat on the mildewed couch and curled up, unmindful of centipedes. I rested my chin on my knee and stared at the boxes of my father’s old paperbacks and the jumble of plastic Barbie-doll cases full of Barbie equipment that Donna and I used to play with on the front porch. A stiff white foot and calf stuck out of a sky-blue case, helpless and pitifully rigid.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The smell of wet hair, on the other hand, a woman’s wet hair, is much more powerful and lasting —why, I don’t know. I can remember even now, after almost forty years, the smell of my Aunt Tillie’s hair after she had taken a shampoo. This shampoo was performed in the kitchen which was always overheated. Usually it was a late Saturday afternoon, in preparation for a ball, which meant again another singular thing—that there would appear a cavalry sergeant with very beautiful yellow stripes, a singularly handsome sergeant who even to my eyes was far too gracious, manly and intelligent for an imbecile such as my Aunt Tillie. But anyway, there she sat on a little stool by the kitchen table drying her hair with a towel. Beside her was a little lamp with a smoked chimney and beside the lamp two curling irons the very sight of which filled me with an inexplicable loathing. Generally she had a little mirror propped up on the table; I can see her now making wry faces at herself as she squeezed the blackheads out of her nose. She was a stringy, ugly, imbecilic creature with two enormous buck teeth which gave her a horsey look whenever her lips drew back in a smile. She smelled sweaty, too, even after a bath. But the smell of her hair—that smell I can never forget, because somehow the smell is associated with my hatred and contempt for her. This smell, when the hair was just drying, was like the smell that comes up from the bottom of a marsh. There were two smells—one of the wet hair and another of the same hair when she threw it into the stove and it burst into flame. There were always curled knots of hair which came from her comb, and they were mixed with dandruff and the sweat of her scalp which was greasy and dirty. I used to stand by her side and watch her, wondering what the ball would be like and wondering how she would behave at the ball. When she was all primped up she would ask me if she didn’t look beautiful and if I didn’t love her, and of course I would tell her yes. But in the water closet later, which was in the hall just next to the kitchen, I would sit in the flickering light of the burning taper which was placed on the window ledge, and I would say to myself that she looked crazy. After she was gone I would pick up the curling irons and smell them and squeeze them. They were revolting and fascinating—like spiders. Everything about this kitchen was fascinating to me. Familiar as I was with it I never conquered it.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  With us he got a change of meat—Gentile cunt, as he put it. He liked Gentile cunt. Smelled sweeter, he said. Laughed easier too. . . . Sometimes in the very midst of things. The one thing he couldn’t tolerate was dark meat. It amazed and disgusted him to see me traveling around with Valeska. Once he asked me if she didn’t smell kind of extra strong like. I told him I liked it that way—strong and smelly, with lots of gravy around it. He almost blushed at that. Amazing how delicate he could be about some things. Food for example. Very finicky about his food. Perhaps a racial trait. Immaculate about his person, too. Couldn’t stand the sight of a spot on his clean cuffs. Constantly brushing himself off, constantly taking his pocket mirror out to see if there was any food between his teeth. If he found a crumb he would hide his face behind the napkin and extract it with his pearlhandled toothpick. The ovaries of course he couldn’t see. Nor could he smell them either, because his wife too was an immaculate bitch. Douching herself all day long in preparation for the evening nuptials. It was tragic, the importance she gave to her ovaries. Up until the day she was taken to the hospital she was a regular fucking block. The thought of never being able to fuck again frightened the wits out of her. Hymie of course told her it wouldn’t make any difference to him one way or the other. Glued to her like a snake, a cigarette in his mouth, the girls passing below on the boulevard, it was hard for him to imagine a woman not being able to fuck any more. He was sure the operation would be successful. Successful! That’s to say that she’d fuck even better than before. He used to tell her that, lying on his back looking up at the ceiling. “You know I’ll always love you,” he would say. “Move over just a little bit, will you. . . . there, like that. . . . that’s it. What was I saying? Oh yes . . . why sure, why should you worry about things like that? Of course I’ll be true to you. Listen, pull away just a little bit . . . yeah, that’s it. . . . that’s fine.” He used to tell us about it in the chop suey joint. Steve would laugh like hell. Steve couldn’t do a thing like that. He was too honest— especially with women. That’s why he never had any luck. Little Curley, for example—Steve hated Curley—would always get what he wanted. . . . He was a born liar, a born deceiver. Hymie didn’t like Curley much either. He said he was dishonest, meaning of course dishonest in money matters. About such things Hymie was scrupulous.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  One can remember many things about the woman one has loved but it is hard to remember the smell of her cunt—with anything like certitude. The smell of wet hair, on the other hand, a woman’s wet hair, is much more powerful and lasting—why, I don’t know. I can remember even now, after almost forty years, the smell of my Aunt Tillie’s hair after she had taken a shampoo. This shampoo was performed in the kitchen which was always overheated. Usually it was a late Saturday afternoon, in preparation for a ball, which meant again another singular thing—that there would appear a cavalry sergeant with very beautiful yellow stripes, a singularly handsome sergeant who even to my eyes was far too gracious, manly and intelligent for an imbecile such as my Aunt Tillie. But anyway, there she sat on a little stool by the kitchen table drying her hair with a towel. Beside her was a little lamp with a smoked chimney and beside the lamp two curling irons the very sight of which filled me with an inexplicable loathing. Generally she had a little mirror propped up on the table; I can see her now making wry faces at herself as she squeezed the blackheads out of her nose. She was a stringy, ugly, imbecilic creature with two enormous buck teeth which gave her a horsey look whenever her lips drew back in a smile. She smelled sweaty, too, even after a bath. But the smell of her hair—that smell I can never forget, because somehow the smell is associated with my hatred and contempt for her. This smell, when the hair was just drying, was like the smell that comes up from the bottom of a marsh. There were two smells—one of the wet hair and another of the same hair when she threw it into the stove and it burst into flame. There were always curled knots of hair which came from her comb, and they were mixed with dandruff and the sweat of her scalp which was greasy and dirty. I used to stand by her side and watch her, wondering what the ball would be like and wondering how she would behave at the ball. When she was all primped up she would ask me if she didn’t look beautiful and if I didn’t love her, and of course I would tell her yes. But in the water closet later, which was in the hall just next to the kitchen, I would sit in the flickering light of the burning taper which was placed on the window ledge, and I would say to myself that she looked crazy. After she was gone I would pick up the curling irons and smell them and squeeze them. They were revolting and fascinating—like spiders. Everything about this kitchen was fascinating to me. Familiar as I was with it I never conquered it. It was at once so public and so intimate.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  We used to compare notes sometimes sitting in the chop suey joint around the corner from the office. It was a strange atmosphere. Maybe it was because there was no wine. Maybe it was the funny little black mushrooms they served us. Anyway it wasn’t difficult to get started on the subject. By the time Steve met us he would already have had his workout, a shower and a rubdown. He was clean inside and out. Almost a perfect specimen of a man. Not very bright, to be sure, but a good egg, a companion. Hymie, on the other hand, was like a toad. He seemed to come to the table direct from the swamps where he had passed a mucky day. Filth rolled off his lips like honey. In fact, you couldn’t call it filth, in his case, because there wasn’t any other ingredient with which you might compare it. It was all one fluid, a slimy, sticky substance made entirely of sex. When he looked at his food he saw it as potential sperm; if the weather were warm he would say it was good for the balls; if he took a trolley ride he knew in advance that the rhythmic movement of the trolley would stimulate his appetite, would give him a slow, “personal” hard on, as he put it. Why “personal” I never found out, but that was his expression. He liked to go out with us because we were always reasonably sure of picking up something decent. Left to himself he didn’t always fare so well. With us he got a change of meat—Gentile cunt, as he put it. He liked Gentile cunt. Smelled sweeter, he said. Laughed easier too. . . . Sometimes in the very midst of things. The one thing he couldn’t tolerate was dark meat. It amazed and disgusted him to see me traveling around with Valeska. Once he asked me if she didn’t smell kind of extra strong like. I told him I liked it that way—strong and smelly, with lots of gravy around it. He almost blushed at that. Amazing how delicate he could be about some things. Food for example. Very finicky about his food. Perhaps a racial trait. Immaculate about his person, too. Couldn’t stand the sight of a spot on his clean cuffs. Constantly brushing himself off, constantly taking his pocket mirror out to see if there was any food between his teeth. If he found a crumb he would hide his face behind the napkin and extract it with his pearlhandled toothpick. The ovaries of course he couldn’t see. Nor could he smell them either, because his wife too was an immaculate bitch. Douching herself all day long in preparation for the evening nuptials. It was tragic, the importance she gave to her ovaries. Up until the day she was taken to the hospital she was a regular fucking block. The thought of never being able to fuck again frightened the wits out of her.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Like a soft prick slipping out of an overheated cunt I, the still unhatched, making a few abortive wriggles, but either not dead and soft enough or else sperm-free and skating ad astra , for it is still not dinner and a peristaltic frenzy takes possession of the upper colon, the hypogastric region, the umbilical and the postpineal lobe. Boiled alive, the lobsters swim in ice, giving no quarter and asking no quarter, simply motionless and unmotivated in the ice-watered ennui of death, life drifting by the show window muffled in desolation, a sorrowful scurvy eaten away by ptomaine, the frozen glass of the window cutting like a jackknife, clean and no remainder. Life drifting by the show window . . . I too as much a part of life as the lobster, the fourteen-carat ring, the horse liniment, but very difficult to establish the fact, the fact being that life is merchandise with a bill of lading attached, what I choose to eat being more important than I the eater, each one eating the other and consequently eating, the verb , ruler of the roost. In the act of eating the host is violated and justice defeated temporarily. The plate and what’s on it, through the predatory power of the intestinal apparatus, commands attention and unifies the spirit, first hypnotizing it, then slowly swallowing it, then masticating it, then absorbing it. The spiritual part of the being passes off like a scum, leaves absolutely no evidence or trace of its passage, vanishes, vanishes even more completely than a point in space after a mathematical discourse. The fever, which may return tomorrow, bears the same relation to life as the mercury in a thermometer bears to heat. Fever will not make life heat, which is what was to have been proved and thus consecrates the meat balls and spaghetti. To chew while thousands chew, each chew an act of murder, gives the necessary social cast from which you look out the window and see that even human kind can be slaughtered justly, or maimed, or starved, or tortured because, while chewing, the mere advantage of sitting in a chair with clothes on, wiping the mouth with a napkin, enables you to comprehend what the wisest men have never been able to comprehend, namely that there is no other way of life possible, said wise men often disdaining to use chair, clothes or napkin. Thus men scurrying through a cunty cleft of a street called Broadway every day at regular hours, in search of this or that, tend to establish this and that, which is exactly the method of mathematicians, logicians, physicists, astronomers and such like. The proof is the fact and the fact has no meaning except what is given to it by those who establish the facts.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  But when you looked at it up close, when you examined the pages separately, or the parts separately, when you examined one lone individual and what constituted him, examined the air he breathed, the life he led, the chances he risked, you saw something so foul and degrading, so low, so miserable, so utterly hopeless and senseless, that it was worse than looking into a volcano. You could see the whole American life—economically, politically, morally, spiritually, artistically, statistically, pathologically. It looked like a grand chancre on a worn-out cock. It looked worse than that, really, because you couldn’t even see anything resembling a cock any more. Maybe in the past this thing had life, did produce something, did at least give a moment’s pleasure, a moment’s thrill. But looking at it from where I sat it looked rottener than the wormiest cheese. The wonder was that the stench of it didn’t carry ‘em off. . . . I’m using the past tense all the time, but of course it’s the same now, maybe even a bit worse. At least now we’re getting it full stink. By the time Valeska arrived on the scene I had hired several army corps of messengers. My office at Sunset Place was like an open sewer, and it stank like one. I had dug myself into the first-line trench and I was getting it from all directions at once. To begin with, the man I had ousted died of a broken heart a few weeks after my arrival. He held out just long enough to break me in and then he croaked. Things happened so fast that I didn’t have a chance to feel guilty. From the moment I arrived at the office it was one long uninterrupted pandemonium. An hour before my arrival—I was always late—the place was already jammed with applicants. I had to elbow my way up the stairs and literally force my way in to get to my desk. Before I could take my hat off I had to answer a dozen telephone calls. There were three telephones on my desk and they all rang at once. They were bawling the piss out of me before I had even sat down to work. There wasn’t even time to take a crap—until five or six in the afternoon. Hymie was worse off than I because he was tied to the switchboard. He sat there from eight in the morning until six, moving waybills around. A waybill was a messenger loaned by one office to another office for the day or a part of the day. None of the hundred and one offices ever had a full staff; Hymie had to play chess with the waybills while I worked like a madman to plug up the gaps. If by a miracle I succeeded of a day in filling all the vacancies, the next morning would find the situation exactly the same—or worse.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  With the world fluttering away on the last wings of a hollow snore I see the door opening to admit Grover Watrous. “Christ be with you!” he says, dragging his clubfoot along. He is quite a young man now and he has found God. There is only one God and Grover Watrous has found Him and so there is nothing more to say except that everything has to be said over again in Grover Watrous’ new God-language. This bright new language which God invented especially for Grover Watrous intrigues me enormously, first because I had always considered Grover to be a hopeless dunce, second because I notice that there are no longer any tobacco stains on his agile fingers. When we were boys Grover lived next door to us. He would visit me from time to time in order to practice a duet with me. Though he was only fourteen or fifteen he smoked like a trooper. His mother could do nothing against it because Grover was a genius and a genius had to have a little liberty, particularly when he was also unfortunate enough to have been born with a clubfoot. Grover was the kind of genius who thrives on dirt. He not only had nicotine stains on his fingers but he had filthy black nails which would break under hours of practicing, imposing upon young Grover the ravishing obligation of tearing them off with his teeth. Grover used to spit out broken nails along with the bits of tobacco which got caught in his teeth. It was delightful and stimulating. The cigarettes burned holes into the piano and, as my mother critically observed, also tarnished the keys. When Grover took leave the parlor stank like the backroom of an undertaker’s establishment. It stank of dead cigarettes, sweat, dirty linen, Grover’s oaths and the dry heat left by the dying notes of Weber, Berlioz, Liszt and Co. It stank too of Grover’s running ear and of his decaying teeth. It stank of his mother’s pampering and whimpering. His own home was a stable divinely suited to his genius, but the parlor of our home was like the waiting room of a mortician’s office and Grover was a lout who didn’t even know enough to wipe his feet. In the wintertime his nose ran like a sewer and, Grover being too engrossed in his music to bother wiping his nose, his cold snot was left to trickle down until it reached his lips where it was sucked in by a very long white tongue. To the flatulent music of Weber, Berlioz, Liszt and Co. it added a piquant sauce which made those empty devils palatable.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  At trial, Kathleen Enstice testified that Timothy was born alive and had died by drowning. She testified that her conclusion of a live birth was a “diagnosis of exclusion”—that is, she could not find evidence that the baby was stillborn and did not have another explanation for his death. Her testimony was exposed as unreliable by the State’s own expert witness, Dr. Dennis McNally, an obstetrician/gynecologist who examined Mrs. Colbey two weeks after the stillbirth. Dr. McNally testified that Mrs. Colbey’s pregnancy was at high risk for “unexplained fetal death” because of her age and lack of prenatal care. Enstice’s conclusion was further discredited by Dr. Werner Spitz, who had authored the medical treatise Enstice had relied on in her forensic pathology training. Dr. Spitz testified for the defense that he would “absolutely not” declare a live birth, let alone a homicide, under the circumstances of this case. With no credible scientific evidence that a crime had occurred, the State introduced inflammatory evidence that Marsha was poor, a prior drug user, and obviously a bad mother for not seeking prenatal care. Police investigators went into her home and took photographs of an unflushed toilet and a beer can on the floor, which were waved in front of the jury as evidence of neglect and bad parenting. Mrs. Colbey consistently maintained during multiple interrogations that the baby was stillborn. She told investigators that her son was born dead and never took a breath, despite her efforts to revive him. Mrs. Colbey rejected the State’s offer of a plea agreement, pursuant to which she would have gone to prison for eighteen years, because she was adamant that she had done nothing wrong. The prosecution of Marsha Colbey eventually caught the attention of the press, which was titillated by another “dangerous mother” story. The crime was sensationalized by the local media, which lauded the police and prosecutor for coming to the aid of a defenseless infant. Demonizing irresponsible mothers had become a media craze by the time Marsha’s trial was scheduled. Tragic narratives of mothers killing their children were national sensations. When Andrea Yates drowned her five children in Texas in 2001, the tragedy became a national story. Susan Smith’s effort to blame random black men for the death of her children in South Carolina before later admitting to murdering them fascinated crime-obsessed Americans. In time, media interest in these kinds of stories grew into a national preoccupation. Time magazine called the prosecution of Casey Anthony, the young Florida mother ultimately acquitted in the death of her two-year-old daughter, the “social media trial of the century” after the story generated nonstop coverage on cable networks.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  She has the loose, jaunty swing and perch of the double-barreled sex, all her movements radiating from the groin, always in equilibrium, always ready to flow, to wind and twist and clutch, the eyes going tic-toe, the toes twitching and twinkling, the flesh rippling like a lake furrowed by a breeze. This is the incarnation of the hallucination of sex, the sea nymph squirming in the maniac’s arms. I watch the two of them as they move spasmodically inch by inch around the floor; they move like an octopus working up a rut. Between the dangling tentacles the music shimmers and flashes, now breaks in a cascade of sperm and rose water, forms again into an oily spout, a column standing erect without feet, collapses again like chalk, leaving the upper part of the leg phosphorescent, a zebra standing in a pool of golden marshmallow, one leg striped, the other molten. A golden marshmallow octopus with rubber hinges and molten hoofs, its sex undone and twisted into a knot. On the sea floor the oysters are doing the St. Vitus dance, some with lockjaw, some with double-jointed knees. The music is sprinkled with rat poison, with the rattlesnake’s venom, with the fetid breath of the gardenia, the spittle of the sacred yak, the bolloxed sweat of the muskrat, the leper’s sugar-coated nostalgia. The music is a diarrhea, a lake of gasoline, stagnant with cockroaches and stale horse piss. The drooling notes are the foam and dribble of the epileptic, the night sweat of the fornicating nigger frigged by the Jew. All America is in the trombone’s smear, that frazzled brokendown whinny of the gangrened sea cows stationed off Point Loma, Pawtucket, Cape Hatteras, Labrador, Canarsie and intermediate points. The octopus is dancing like a rubber dick—the rhumba of Spuyten Duyvil inédit . Laura the nympho is doing the rhumba, her sex exfoliated and twisted like a cow’s tail. In the belly of the trombone lies the American soul farting its contented heart out. Nothing goes to waste—not the least spit of a fart. In the golden marshmallow dream of happiness, in the dance of the sodden piss and gasoline, the great soul of the American continent gallops like an octopus, all the sails unfurled, the hatches down, the engine whirring like a dynamo. The great dynamic soul caught in the click of the camera’s eye, in the heat of rut, bloodless as a fish, slippery as mucus, the soul of the people miscegenating on the sea floor, popeyed with longing, harrowed with lust. The dance of Saturday night, of cantaloupes rotting in the garbage pail, of fresh green snot and slimy unguents for the tender parts. The dance of the slot machine and the monsters who invent them. The dance of the gat and the slugs who use them. The dance of the blackjack and the pricks who batter brains to a polypous pulp.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  It was front-page news all over the country. White people lost their shit. Oh my word, it was insane. The security guard was arrested and put on trial and found guilty of animal abuse. He had to pay some enormous fine to avoid spending several months in jail. What was ironic to me was that white people had spent years seeing video of black people being beaten to death by other white people, but this one video of a black man kicking a cat, that’s what sent them over the edge. Black people were just confused. They didn’t see any problem with what the man did. They were like, “Obviously that cat was a witch. How else would a cat know how to get out onto a soccer pitch? Somebody sent it to jinx one of the teams. That man had to kill the cat. He was protecting the players.” In South Africa, black people have dogs. [image file=image_rsrc2TU.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc2TV.jpg] FUFIA month after we moved to Eden Park, my mother brought home two cats. Black cats. Beautiful creatures. Some woman from her work had a litter of kittens she was trying to get rid of, and my mom ended up with two. I was excited because I’d never had a pet before. My mom was excited because she loves animals. She didn’t believe in any nonsense about cats. It was just another way in which she was a rebel, refusing to conform to ideas about what black people did and didn’t do. In a black neighborhood, you wouldn’t dare own a cat, especially a black cat. That would be like wearing a sign that said, “Hello, I am a witch.” That would be suicide. Since we’d moved to a colored neighborhood, my mom thought the cats would be okay. Once they were grown we let them out during the day to roam the neighborhood. Then we came home one evening and found the cats strung up by their tails from our front gate, gutted and skinned and bleeding out, their heads chopped off. On our front wall someone had written in Afrikaans, “Heks”—“Witch.” Colored people, apparently, were no more progressive than black people on the issue of cats. I wasn’t exactly devastated about the cats. I don’t think we’d had them long enough for me to get attached; I don’t even remember their names. And cats are dicks for the most part. As much as I tried they never felt like real pets. They never showed me affection nor did they accept any of mine. Had the cats made more of an effort, I might have felt like I had lost something. But even as a kid, looking at these dead, mutilated animals, I was like, “Well, there you have it. Maybe if they’d been nicer, they could have avoided this.”

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  196The History of Christianity II õHowever, the abolitionist movement was full of Christians. From our modern perspective, most of these Christians held racist beliefs: Very few of them considered people of color to be fully equal to whites. But they believed that slavery was the work of Satan; it contradicted the biblical principle that all human beings are created in the image of God. õDifferent theologies drove their activism. For example, Quakers believed that God endowed humans of all colors with the same inner light, which puts all humans on the same spiritual footing. Quakers criticized slavery and banned their members from owning slaves earlier than many other religious groups. WOMEN REFORMERS õWomen played a huge role in the abolitionist movement. Many believed that the quest to win more freedom and respect for women was connected to the quest to free enslaved non-whites. õWhen historians tell the story of the abolitionist movement in Britain, one of the main protagonists is usually William Wilberforce, an evangelical Parliament member who campaigned in public and negotiated in back rooms for decades to build alliances with politicians and businessmen to end the British slave trade in 1807. But one of his most remarkable collaborators was an evangelical woman named Hannah More, who essentially served as Wilberforce’s chief propagandist. õShe worked alongside Wilberforce to try to swing the tide of British political opinion. In 1788, she published a long poem on slavery. Here are a few lines, which were fairly radical for their time: Whene’er to Africa’s shores I turn my eyes, Horrors of deepest, deadliest guilt arise; I see, by more than Fancy’s mirror shown, The burning village, and the blazing town: See the dire victim torn from social life, See the sacred infant, hear the shrieking wife! 197Lecture 20—Christian Missions and Moral Reform õMore really wanted her white reader to imagine the full, human life that enslaved people had in Africa before traders wrenched them from their families. She didn’t base her case for abolition on scripture verses: She was writing for an audience beyond likeminded evangelicals, and her main rhetorical weapon was human empathy. õThe Quaker abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick took another approach, one that aimed more at people’s pocketbooks. She went around her hometown, Leicester, in central England, and tried to persuade all the grocers to stop stocking sugar products and anything else produced by the slave plantations of the West Indies.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He enclosed a check for three hundred and eighty dollars, a little over two hundred dollars more than he owed me. It occurred to me to tear up the check, or mail it back to the lawyer. But I didn’t do that. Two hundred dollars was worth more then than it is now. Together with the money I had in the bank, it was enough to put a down payment on an apartment and still have some left over. I went upstairs and wrote “380” on the deposit side of my checking account. I didn’t feel like a whore or anything. I felt I was doing the right thing. I looked at the total figure of my balance with satisfaction. Then I went downstairs and asked my mother if she wanted to go get some elephant ears. For the next two weeks, I forgot about the idea of a job and moving out of my parents’ house. I slept through all the morning noise until noon. I got up and ate cold cereal and ran the dishwasher. I watched the gray march of old sitcoms on TV. I worked on crossword puzzles. I lay on my bed in a tangle of quilt and fuzzy blanket and masturbated two, three, four times in a row, always thinking about the thing. I was still in this phase when my father stuck the newspaper under my nose and said, “Did you see what your old boss is doing?” There was a small article on the upcoming mayoral elections in Westland. He was running for mayor. I took the paper from my father’s offering hands. For the first time, I felt an uncomplicated disgust for the lawyer. Westland was nothing but malls and doughnut stands and a big ugly theater with an artificial volcano in the front of it. What kind of idiot would want to be mayor of Westland? Again, I left the room. I got the phone call the next week. It was a man’s voice, a soft, probing, condoling voice. “Miss Roe?” he said. “I hope you’ll forgive this unexpected call. I’m Mark Charming of Detroit Magazine .” I didn’t say anything. The voice continued more uncertainly. “Are you free to talk, Miss Roe?” There was no one in the kitchen, and my mother was running the vacuum in the next room. “Talk about what?” I said. “Your previous employer.” The voice became slightly harsh as he said these words, and then hurriedly rushed back to condolence. “Please don’t be startled or upset. I know this could be a disturbing phone call for you, and it must certainly seem intrusive.” He paused so I could laugh or something. I didn’t, and his voice became more cautious. “The thing is, we’re doing a story on your ex-employer in the context of his running for mayor. To put it mildly, we think he has no business running for public office.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It was already dark when he reached the city. He drove slowly through Times Square, fascinated by the night’s ugliness. He stopped for a red light and looked up at a movie marquee towering on the corner, its dead white face advertising The Spanking of Cindy. There was a short man in a black leather jacket standing by the box office, hunching his cadaverous shoulders in the wind. “Now there’s a queer,” thought Fred. “Wonder what he’s doing in front of that movie house?” He looked at the marquee again, and noticed that the billboard next to it was painted with a girl in jeans thrusting her bottom out, her blond hair swirling across her back, her mouth open in laughter. It was an ad for jeans, but it suited the movie; he vaguely wondered if it had been arranged that way. He turned his head to look at the other side of the street and saw a broken old woman lying unconscious in the middle of the sidewalk with her face against the concrete, her ragged dress spattered across her ugly thighs. He was disgusted to see a young man pissing against the wall not two feet away from her. People were stepping over her as if she were an object, vicious people, it seemed to him, swinging their arms and legs in every direction, working their mouths, yelling at each other, eating hot dogs or Italian ices. What would it be like to be among them? He watched a couple of hookers in miniskirts and leather boots kick their way through a pile of garbage, screaming with laughter. As soon as he got to a different neighborhood, he stopped at a Chinese flower store and bought Jane a single long-stemmed rose. “Just so you wouldn’t think I’d forgotten you,” he said when he handed it to her. “Thanks.” She laid it on the night table, between the bottle of baby oil and the flowered Kleenex box. “Were you sick?” “No. I just had some…things to do. Did you miss me?” “Yeah.” She began undoing her buttons. “Listen, Jane. Tomorrow night will be the last night I can see you for a while. I was thinking maybe we could do something special.” “Like what?” “Like you could call in sick and we could meet somewhere for dinner.” She put her hands in her lap and stared at him with something like alarm in her wide, smudged eyes. “We could have dinner, go to a movie or a concert—whatever you’d like. Then we could go to a hotel—or maybe your apartment—and spend the night together.” She looked at her nails and picked them. “Of course I realize that I can’t ask you to take a night off work without making it worth your while. You’d do all right.” “How much?” “Five hundred.” She didn’t say anything. “It could be very nice. We’d have time to really act like people in a relationship. What do you say?” “I don’t know.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  I felt I was doing the right thing. I looked at the total figure of my balance with satisfaction. Then I went downstairs and asked my mother if she wanted to go get some elephant ears. For the next two weeks, I forgot about the idea of a job and moving out of my parents’ house. I slept through all the morning noise until noon. I got up and ate cold cereal and ran the dishwasher. I watched the gray march of old sitcoms on TV. I worked on crossword puzzles. I lay on my bed in a tangle of quilt and fuzzy blanket and masturbated two, three, four times in a row, always thinking about the thing. I was still in this phase when my father stuck the newspaper under my nose and said, “Did you see what your old boss is doing?” There was a small article on the upcoming mayoral elections in Westland. He was running for mayor. I took the paper from my father’s offering hands. For the first time, I felt an uncomplicated disgust for the lawyer. Westland was nothing but malls and doughnut stands and a big ugly theater with an artificial volcano in the front of it. What kind of idiot would want to be mayor of Westland? Again, I left the room. I got the phone call the next week. It was a man’s voice, a soft, probing, condoling voice. “Miss Roe?” he said. “I hope you’ll forgive this unexpected call. I’m Mark Charming of Detroit Magazine.” I didn’t say anything. The voice continued more uncertainly. “Are you free to talk, Miss Roe?” There was no one in the kitchen, and my mother was running the vacuum in the next room. “Talk about what?” I said. “Your previous employer.” The voice became slightly harsh as he said these words, and then hurriedly rushed back to condolence. “Please don’t be startled or upset. I know this could be a disturbing phone call for you, and it must certainly seem intrusive.” He paused so I could laugh or something. I didn’t, and his voice became more cautious. “The thing is, we’re doing a story on your ex-employer in the context of his running for mayor. To put it mildly, we think he has no business running for public office. We think he would be very bad for the whole Detroit area. He has an awful reputation, Miss Roe—which may not surprise you.” There was another careful pause that I did not fill. “Miss Roe, are you still with me?” “Yes.” “What all this is leading up to is that we have reason to believe that you could reveal information about your ex-employer that would be damaging to him. This information would never be connected to your name. We would use a pseudonym. Your privacy would be protected completely.” The vacuum cleaner shut off, and silence encircled me.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  270The History of Christianity II õBergoglio was deeply suspicious of proposals for top-down political reform that promised to help the poor. He thought too many of these plans were motivated by manmade ideologies and an arrogant confidence in leaders’ ability to change human nature. But Bergoglio was even more worried about the murderous practices of the Argentinian government. õBetween 1976 and 1983, during what came to be known as the Dirty War, over 8,000 of citizens were “disappeared”—the government’s euphemism for dissidents who were kidnapped, tortured, and killed by state officials. Some scholars put the number even higher. õBergoglio couldn’t be a bystander even if he wanted to because the government was targeting radical priests in his own order. He had a choice, and he chose, in secret, to help the radicals. He hid a steady stream of activists in the rooms of the Jesuit college in Buenos Aires. õPriests who worked with Bergoglio later told stories of him going to meet with high-ranking officers to try to intervene for activists who had been arrested; once, after a meeting like this, he was so disgusted by the inhumanity of the officer that afterward he raced out and vomited. All the while, he was praying that the regime wouldn’t find out what he was doing. õIn the decades since the Dirty War, many human rights activists and liberal journalists have criticized Bergoglio for being complicit in the regime’s crimes. They even accused him of denouncing two of his own priests to the authorities, although in the view of many experts the evidence against him does not hold up. 271Lecture 27—Rebellion and Reform in Latin America õThe junta finally gave up power in 1983, and democratic elections brought some semblance of peace to Argentina. Bergoglio’s profile continued to rise. He was appointed a bishop in 1992, and Pope John Paul II named him a cardinal in 2001. But outside Catholic circles he was still relatively unknown until 2013, when Pope Benedict XVI abdicated and the papal conclave elected Bergoglio as his successor. He took the name Pope Francis, and adopted a stance of both accommodation and protest toward the modern secular world. SUGGESTED READING Gonzalez and Gonzalez, Christianity in Latin America: A History. Ivereigh, The Great Reformer. Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äWhat moral dilemmas faced priests like Jorge Bergoglio during Argentina’s Dirty War? äWhy don’t American political labels neatly apply to the leader of the global Catholic Church? 272

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  We worked and worked and worked, but no matter how many hours we put in, the business kept losing money. We lost everything. We couldn’t even afford real food. There was one month I’ll never forget, the worst month of my life. We were so broke that for weeks we ate nothing but bowls of marogo, a kind of wild spinach, cooked with caterpillars. Mopane worms, they’re called. Mopane worms are literally the cheapest thing that only the poorest of poor people eat. I grew up poor, but there’s poor and then there’s “Wait, I’m eating worms.” Mopane worms are the sort of thing where even people in Soweto would be like, “Eh…no.” They’re these spiny, brightly colored caterpillars the size of your finger. They’re nothing like escargot, where someone took a snail and gave it a fancy name. They’re fucking worms. They have black spines that prick the roof of your mouth as you’re eating them. When you bite into a mopane worm, it’s not uncommon for its yellow-green excrement to squirt into your mouth. For a while I sort of enjoyed the caterpillars. It was like a food adventure, but then over the course of weeks, eating them every day, day after day, I couldn’t take it anymore. I’ll never forget the day I bit a mopane worm in half and that yellow-green ooze came out and I thought, “I’m eating caterpillar shit.” Instantly I wanted to throw up. I snapped and ran to my mom crying. “I don’t want to eat caterpillars anymore!” That night she scraped some money together and bought us chicken. As poor as we’d been in the past, we’d never been without food. That was the period of my life I hated the most—work all night, sleep in some car, wake up, wash up in a janitor’s sink, brush my teeth in a little metal basin, brush my hair in the rearview mirror of a Toyota, then try to get dressed without getting oil and grease all over my school clothes so the kids at school won’t know I live in a garage. Oh, I hated it so much. I hated cars. I hated sleeping in cars. I hated working on cars. I hated getting my hands dirty. I hated eating worms. I hated it all. I didn’t hate my mom, or even Abel, funnily enough. Because I saw how hard everyone was working. At first I didn’t know about the mistakes being made on the business level that were making it hard, so it just felt like a hard situation. But eventually I started to see why the business was hemorrhaging money. I used to go around and buy auto parts for Abel, and I learned that he was buying his parts on credit. The vendors were charging him a crazy markup. The debt was crippling the company, and instead of paying off the debt he was drinking what little cash he made. Brilliant mechanic, horrible businessman.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 3: Woman’s semen is not apt for generation, but is something imperfect in the seminal order, which, on account of the imperfection of the female power, it has not been possible to bring to complete seminal perfection. Consequently this semen is not the necessary matter of conception; as the Philosopher says (De Gener. Animal. i): wherefore there was none such in Christ’s conception: all the more since, though it is imperfect in the seminal order, a certain concupiscence accompanies its emission, as also that of the male semen: whereas in that virginal conception there could be no concupiscence. Wherefore Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iii) that Christ’s body was not conceived “seminally.” But the menstrual blood, the flow of which is subject to monthly periods, has a certain natural impurity of corruption: like other superfluities, which nature does not heed, and therefore expels. Of such menstrual blood infected with corruption and repudiated by nature, the conception is not formed; but from a certain secretion of the pure blood which by a process of elimination is prepared for conception, being, as it were, more pure and more perfect than the rest of the blood. Nevertheless, it is tainted with the impurity of lust in the conception of other men: inasmuch as by sexual intercourse this blood is drawn to a place apt for conception. This, however, did not take place in Christ’s conception: because this blood was brought together in the Virgin’s womb and fashioned into a child by the operation of the Holy Ghost. Therefore is Christ’s body said to be “formed of the most chaste and purest blood of the Virgin.” Whether Christ’s body was in Adam and the other patriarchs, as to something signate?Objection 1: It would seem that Christ’s body was in Adam and the patriarchs as to something signate. For Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. x) that the flesh of Christ was in Adam and Abraham “by way of a bodily substance.” But bodily substance is something signate. Therefore Christ’s flesh was in Adam, Abraham, and the other patriarchs, according to something signate. Objection 2: Further, it is said (Rom. 1:3) that Christ “was made . . . of the seed of David according to the flesh.” But the seed of David was something signate in him. Therefore Christ was in David, according to something signate, and for the same reason in the other patriarchs. Objection 3: Further, the human race is Christ’s kindred, inasmuch as He took flesh therefrom. But if that flesh were not something signate in Adam, the human race, which is descended from Adam, would seem to have no kindred with Christ: but rather with those other things from which the matter of His flesh was taken. Therefore it seems that Christ’s flesh was in Adam and the other patriarchs according to something signate.