Embarrassment

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 Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  10 Bound He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of [the rich] and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Julian, “Yes, they have more money.” —Ernest Hemingway, “Snows of Kilimanjaro” When two hearts beat as one, there are in-laws to bond with, or, in my family’s case, outlaws. But for our first years Warren and I never go to Texas, not once. (Later, I’ll resent this like hell, but I don’t recall arguing about it much.) Daddy’s dying in the house I grew up in, while Mother begrudgingly nurses him. Yet Warren’s sense of duty to his own family is a virtue I so hope will tether him to me that I try to take on his obligation as my own. Plus if I didn’t go with him, we’d wind up with separate holidays, and I have some daytime soap-opera notion of what it means to be wifely. Besides, Lecia and Mother visit us a few times per year in the way Warren’s far-flung siblings never would, and I fly home to see Daddy plenty alone. Yet for every conceivable holiday—from Easter lamb to Christmas ham—our tin-can car crunches up the drive to the Whitbread estate, which lures me in some ways and yet always saps me dry. This isn’t meant to sound peevish, for the Whitbreads are never not nice. But from the second I haul my bag up the curved stair, the place drains me of force like a battery going rust. Maybe it’s all the fine wines I take in. Of those many visits, I remember absolutely nil. Beyond sitting at a table while plates appear and get swept away, I can’t recount one damn thing we did. The estate sits spitting distance from New York, and those first years, I show up with clippings of art I want to look at or friends’ bands I plan to hear. We never—not once—go into the city. One doesn’t venture outside estate walls. Even the clawed furniture seems dug in to the deep nap of ancient rugs. But that doesn’t explain the lethargy that overcomes me there, the anesthetic effect of luxury. Instead of jogging, we read by the pool or walk down to feed carrots to the donkeys. The paper is meticulously studied, also The New Yorker. I sometimes poke around the attic or unused bedrooms, opening the ancient chests of drawers to catch whiffs of cedar or lavender sachet. It’s a readerly tribe, and I can slouch in a leather chair drinking with a book in my lap for hours as well they can—my one affinity. But no sense of connection ever evolves into closeness. Outside each other’s company, Warren’s parents refer to each other as Mr. and Mrs. Whitbread, so I’d never presume first names. Only once does Mr. Whitbread ring our house. It’s Warren’s birthday, and I answer as Mr.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  (Ignorant, I was, till she cried out, of the trick Mother and Lecia had played on me by dispatching me to explain the cremation to Aunt Gladys.) After the service at Mother’s house, I’m lowering to the table a bowl of mustard greens salty with hunks of fatback. Lecia asks, Where’s Warren? She’s upending a Tupperware carton of fried chicken onto a platter. He’s gotta be in the bathroom, I figure. Not long after that, my cousin Jim Ed—wearing, I believe, the same blazer from our granddaddy’s funeral when I was in sixth grade—asks, Where’s your good-looking husband? I’d like to shake his hand. Jim Ed has retired from coaching football, and he talks about how Daddy had taught him to catch the pigskin two-handed. My favorite cousin, Peggy Ruth, says, That man of yours oughta try these biscuits I brought. I know—as my husband does not—that you thumb a hole in a cold biscuit and fill it with a stiff smidge of creamery butter and a lolly gob of cane syrup and bite down so your chin is not spared the squish. And I know that the maple syrup Yankees favor is a paltry stand-in for the burnt-sugar taste you squeeze from sugar cane, whose white inner pulp is sheathed inside purplish-brown bark I can peel with a pocketknife. And where is Warren, anyway? Outside, the hundred-degree air is sopping. But someone had seen him in jogging clothes, so I look up and down the road edged with bleached oyster shells. Under mimosa trees, I cross the neighbor’s yard, past the garage where I was raped as a child. I come to the culvert I had on the night of the assault imagined my blue corpse floating in (not because the neighbor boy who was the culprit might have thrown me there, but because part of me knew I was already over). My silk blouse is wet at the pits, my pencil skirt at the waistband. I long to peel off my pantyhose. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I scan the landscape for Warren’s tall form: he’s nowhere. I’m not so much pissed that he’s vanished, just left town, which—given Mother’s penchant for flight—seems feasible even for Warren. Eventually, we call Lecia’s house, and her housekeeper says she let Warren in to shower. He didn’t have a car to drive back to my mother’s so he stayed on. Hours later, when we come in, he’s on the sofa alongside the basketball playoffs with the remote in his hand. (Did we fight about this? I can’t dredge it up.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Homology goes a long way in explaining how intersex genitals come to be. People whose genitals are “somewhere in between” experienced some slight variation in the hugely complex cascade of biochemical events involved in the growth of a fetus, from egg fertilization through embryonic development and gestation. This small change results in slightly different genitals in about one in sixty newborns.10 There’s nothing wrong with their genitals any more than there’s anything wrong with a person whose labia are uniquely large or small.11 It’s still all the same parts, just organized in a different way. For example, the male urethral opening may be anywhere on the head of the penis; rarely, it is somewhere along the shaft of the penis, but that too is just fine, as long as it doesn’t impede urination or cause chronic infection (which it usually does not). As long as the genitals don’t cause pain and aren’t prone to infection or other medical issues, they’re healthy and don’t require any kind of medical intervention. We’re all made of the same parts, just organized in different ways. This is why I don’t need to see your genitals to tell you that they’re normal and healthy. You’ve got all the same parts, just organized in your own unique way. Like many sex educators, I include photographs of a variety of vulvas in my anatomy lecture slides. Where do I find these photographs? On the internet, of course. My only difficulty is getting a diverse range—mostly I find images of the vulvas of young, thin, white, completely shaved vulvas. I have to search carefully to find great sex-positive images of older vulvas, vulvas of people of color and people of size, surgically constructed vulvas, and vulvas with all their pubic hair. One day I was sitting around a busy comics convention talking about this challenge with Camilla, who, like me, is a nerd and a former college peer sex educator. Unlike me, she has a degree in gender studies and studio art, is African American, and makes her living as an illustrator—all of which gave her insight into my little challenge. She said, “Seriously, Emily? You’re googling, what, like, ‘black vulva’? At work?” I shrugged apologetically. “Sausages, laws, and sex education lectures. You don’t want to know how any of them are made.” And Camilla said, “Let me guess: All you find is porny images, nothing artistic or empowered or body positive?” “Porn and graphic medical pictures,” I agreed. “I tried searching ‘feminist vulvas of color,’ but all I got was embroidery projects from Pinterest and Etsy.” Camilla laughed at that, but said, “Now think if you were a young woman trying to see what a normal, healthy vulva looks like. If you’re white, you’re all set, Tumblr is full of those. But if you’re Black or Asian or Latina, what is there? Porn and medical pictures. What does that tell you?”

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  And yet people ask me all the time, “How come sometimes my orgasms are great and other times they’re really not?” It’s as if we believe that orgasms are somehow different from other sensations, that they should feel a certain way, no matter the context. All orgasms are the sudden release of sexual tension. How that release feels depends on context. Which is why some orgasms feel amazing and others… really, really don’t. A handful of examples: A woman told me, red faced, that she had an orgasm during her exercise class. She was too embarrassed to feel any pleasure, and she was confused both by the orgasm and the lack of pleasure.6 A friend with major depression said she could have orgasms but she didn’t experience pleasure with them. I told her that was normal, that pleasure comes from context, and her context was gray and flat. Normal for a person with depression. An undergrad was turning paler and paler during my guest lecture about sexual assault. I had mentioned in passing that sometimes women have orgasms during rape and that that’s basically just a reflex, it doesn’t mean pleasure or consent. She came up to me afterward and said I’d changed her life with that one sentence.7 A woman periodically orgasmed in her sleep and would wake up midorgasm, sometimes from a dream, sometimes not, but always puzzled by the warmth and pulsing that were not necessarily accompanied by any particular enjoyment.8 Orgasms differ from each other because the context for those orgasms differs. The quality of an orgasm is a function not of orgasm itself but of the context in which it happens. all the same parts…The third thing orgasm isn’t: hierarchical. All orgasms are different, and there is no “right” kind or “better” kind of orgasm. It’s even hard to say that there are different kinds of orgasm—because they’re all made of the same basic parts (sudden release of sexual tension) organized in different ways. Instead of thinking about “kinds” of orgasm, we can think about different ways to have an orgasm. Here’s a small sample of the highly pleasurable orgasms women have described to me: Orgasm from clitoral stimulation. Orgasm from vaginal stimulation. Orgasm just from breast stimulation. Orgasm from having her toes sucked. Orgasm when her partner penetrated her (well-lubricated) anus with a finger, while pinning her to the bed by her hair. The most erotic sensation, she specified, was his warm palm resting gently on her butt cheeks. Orgasm when her partner slowly and gently stroked fingertips upward along her outer labia… again… and again… and again. She said, “What started out as an appetizer turned into the main course.” Orgasm without any genital stimulation, while she was giving her partner oral sex. She was so closely tuned to his arousal that when he came, she did, too. Are these clitoral orgasms, vaginal orgasms, breast orgasms, toe orgasms, butt cheek orgasms, labia orgasms, and oral orgasms?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  52 After considering the case in detail, and with Bucer acting as mediator, Melanchthon and Luther signed a memorial on December 10, 1539, in which they agreed that the landgrave could marry his concubine in secret, while remaining publicly married to his wife. This solution followed the example of the polygamous patriarchs of the Old Testament; and Luther himself had been rather willing to dissolve marital partnerships completely in circumstances where the old Church courts would certainly not even have granted separations “from bed and board” (that is, separations without the right to remarry). Much of Luther’s concern in marriage cases was pastoral, and as a result he tended to take the side of those whose dilemmas he could identify with, trying to find a solution that would help conscience. Philip went ahead and held a wedding on March 4, 1540, to which several dignitaries were invited. Melanchthon, who was with the landgrave at the time, was inveigled into attending, as was Bucer; the delighted landgrave sent Luther a cartload of wine, writing to him of his joy that, because his new wife was a relation of Katharina von Bora, he and Luther were now related. 53 The scandalous news soon got out, tarnishing the reformers’ reputations by association. Luther’s reaction was to deny everything. Unluckily for Luther, however, the duke of Saxony kidnapped the girl’s mother and forced her to surrender a copy of the marriage contract. The landgrave, of course, possessed a signed copy of the memorial of advice, and he was not slow to remind Luther of this fact. 54 Luther now argued that he had only countenanced the bigamy on condition that it was kept strictly secret, but this hardly looked like a principled stand. Meanwhile the landgrave’s preachers not only approved the bigamy, but one of them, Johannes Lening of Melsung, published a pamphlet defending it, to the great embarrassment of the evangelical movement, especially when Philip sent eighty copies for distribution to influential people. 55 For the Catholics, the affair was a propaganda gift, and it seriously compromised the evangelicals’ political position, as the scandal created the possibility of imperial proceedings that might lead to the landgrave’s deposition. 57. and 58. Portraits of the Elector and Anna Kasper Dornle. Luther knew that the bachelor Friedrich the Wise had kept a mistress for many years, and it was rumored that he had married her secretly. 56 In 1525, the year he died, the Elector had two nine-inch wooden boxes made. Inside were relief portraits, one box containing his own, the other an image labeled “Anna Rasper [ sic ] Dornle’s Stepdaughter.” The workmanship is of the highest quality. Visible only when the boxes are opened, they are monuments to a secret love. Her hair is braided under a fine hairnet, and she is dressed as a respectable woman.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Doonie tucked his board under his arm, saying, Y’all little bitches stand here and fight it out. I’m gonna carve those waves up like your mama’s Christmas turkey. Then they were running down the immaculate white sand with their boards—Doonie and Dave, Quinn and Easy and the quiet Forsythe. But by Orange County standards, the surf sucked. I overheard the California guys bitching about it as breaking in water too shallow: Not worth wasting the wax on, dude. They stood in small bands along the beach, tanned and bleached and orthodontured. And Lord, were they fetching, those boys. I spotted no stitches on anybody, no keloid scars from boiling water. They’d suffered no car wrecks in which an ancient axle had snapped. Nobody was missing any obvious teeth, either. In the ocean, long waves came with open-fanged mouths, drooling where the spray blew back only to bite down on my pals, who’d thrown themselves onto their homemade boards and were digging in. From the beach, it was a bitch to witness—not just the ass-whipping the sea was delivering but the massive cheer of my friends taking it, the small and concentrated energy of repeatedly hurling themselves at impenetrable force. Mocking their inadequacy against those waves, one guy walking past said to his small-boned girlfriend, This is why they send the white trash to Vietnam. At some point, a guy as wasp-waisted as a Ken doll, with stomach muscles you could have bounced a quarter off, strolled over to where I sat. The sun shone through his long dark hair, making a halo around him. Maybe he’d seen our license plates, for he said to me, You Texan? I allowed as how I was. You interested in some acid? Ken said. When I told him I didn’t have any money, he smirked, saying, They make chicks pay for drugs in Texas? Which seemed to have no right answer to it, like the school bully in A Portrait of the Artist who asks Stephen Dedalus, Do you kiss your mother? Any answer seems cause for a butt-whipping. I shrugged. What do y’all do here? He unfolded a small square of surf magazine to reveal an orange tab of LSD. I knew right off I didn’t want it, but this boy was teen-idol darling. So I set the tab atop my tongue and faked swallowing, hoping for a weak dose. He also invited me to a graduation party a few weeks down the line in Laguna. Soon as he’d scrawled out an address and sketched a map for me, I hightailed it back to the truck to spit the tab out and wash my mouth with water from a sand-gritty milk jug.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  country club events, he’d learned to ignore the average soused-up human. I stop yanking at her hair and notice the buildings of Harvard—carved from various fine types of stone—slipping by like a kingdom I’d never gain the keys to. The whole city is so profoundly Caucasian. One of the city’s signature food items is a slablike whitefish devoid of the southern paprika and varicolored peppers that might make such a thing edible. Even its basketball team is thick with knobby-jointed midwestern farm boys whose pasty torsos evoke the aforementioned fish. Nobody ever wants me to have any fun. What’s the big deal? Ow, she says. This is payback for all those Tonette permanents you scalded my ears off with. Mother tries to catch Warren’s eyes in the rearview, saying, Warren, you’ve gotta come to Texas and see the pictures, of your wife. Do you think I look bad? You got in the back so quick I couldn’t see you, he says. His eyes are fixed on the lights of Boston. Master of diplomacy, I say. A compliment, this is, since—without such detachment—I still get whiplash from my own family’s turbulence. Warren, can you hand me my purse? she says. I’ll find the Shalimar. Can we stop and buy some Visine? I say. And some mouthwash, maybe? It’ll make us late, he says. And I need some cigarettes, Mother says, rummaging through her purse. She stops suddenly and looks at me. She touches her mother’s cameo at my neck, saying, I’d like to paint you like this. The road’s lights steamroll over us. I can see the sweat break out on Warren’s temples as I beg him to stop, though he hates being late. I’ve mostly tamped down Mother’s ash-white hair, and I’m using my fingers to comb through its natural waves, saying, You do have the best cheekbones, Mother. I can’t tell if there are tears in her eyes or she’s just high as she says, I don’t want to go if I’m gonna embarrass you. Warren pulls up outside a bodega and leaves us in the puffing car. Seeing his runner’s form in the unfamiliar structure of a suit brings a surge of ardor. Soon as he’s out of sight, Mother says, Harold and I share a glass of wine every now and then, when we go out dancing—Harold being the somewhat prissy young man of color hired to help care for Daddy. This gives me a sick feeling in my chest. I look toward the door Warren disappeared through, his presence an antivenin to the snakebite of Mother’s disarray. Our family’s so inadequately small compared to the profligate Whitbreads. My own daddy’s so out of things, he probably doesn’t actually know I’m getting married.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Third and finally, deal with any lack of lube-on-demand by supplementing with the fluid of your choice: your saliva or your partner’s (when there’s no risk of infection transmission), your partner’s genital fluids (ditto), store-bought lube, whatever. What is lube for? Reducing friction, which can increase pleasure, and it always decreases the risk of tearing and pain. And always use lube if you’re using protective barriers like condoms or dams. Lube increases their efficacy and makes them more pleasurable. Lube is your friend. Lube will make your sex life better.27 Sometimes people feel uncomfortable introducing outside sources of lube into their sexual connection. This hesitancy may stem from any number of life events or from simple inexperience with it or from a sense that using lube means you’re somehow inadequate. Remember the sanctity moral foundation: sex-related stuff gets categorized as “dirty,” even when it’s a bottle filled with something you find in many hair products. But you know now that genital blood flow has its own way of being in the world, which may or may not have anything to do with your sexual pleasure or desire. You know that lube is important because it reduces friction, which increases both health and pleasure. And you know that you get to choose which beliefs you nurture and which you weed out. If you decide to try using lube, here are some tips for talking with your partner about it: Playfulness, Curiosity, and Humor. It is literally impossible to feel stressed and anxious about something when your approach is playful, curious, and humorous. Let it be a little silly; let it be fun. This is about pleasure, remember? Make Your Partner Feel Like a Superhero. Communicating about sex feels risky sometimes because, above all, you don’t want to hurt your partner’s feelings. The simplest shortcut around hurt feelings is to make the conversation about all the things your partner does well, all the ways that they can increase your pleasure beyond its already skyrocketing heights, and all the delight you hope to add by incorporating this new element to your sexual connection. Choose Your Lube Wisely. Not all lube is created equal. Often it’s a good idea to choose lube together with your partner—shop together and pick something you both feel good about, so that you are both equally invested in it. Camilla explained nonconcordance to Henry. For her, nonconcordance was a perfect example of how the cultural narrative had failed to tell her the truth, and she was pretty pleased to find another way she was, yet again, totally normal. It was a little more complicated for Henry, because he was still figuring out the whole desire/wanting thing. He was trying to get comfortable with the difference between the brakes version of not wanting—“I want that to stop”—versus the accelerator version of not wanting—“I like that yet feel no urge to seek out more.”

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Some days all I did to be poetic was wander the public library in black clothes and muddy lipstick. Hell, I’d even moved to England for a spell, tramping around the hills looking at sheep and daffodils. How to go forward was otherwise foggy. Maybe the girls in my gym class had been right all along, and poetry was a trick on smart people—a bunch of hooey, fawned over by whining fops of the most stick-up-the-ass variety. The way an uncertain believer might stumble onto proof of God, the women at the group home fully converted me to the Church of Poetry. That first day I stood at the window of a dayroom looking down as the bus disgorged them. Shedding their coats and the clasped-on mittens that flapped from their coat sleeves, the women bumbled out. They dropped hats or pencils or keys or lunch boxes. One trying to find the end of her scarf turned around in a circle like a slow-motion cat chasing its tail. This halted the women behind her, a few of whom bumped into her and each other. As staff people herded them in, I felt my armpits grow damp. The faster ladies spilled into the room around me like kids lining up for a pony ride. A flat-faced woman with the severe and snaggled underbite of a bulldog stood introducing herself with a handshake before she sat. I’m Marion Pinski, she said. P like Polack Pinski. She wore a brown beret flat atop her head like nothing so much as a cow pie. Alongside her squeezed other women, whose heads seemed small as dolls’. Under narrow shoulders, their bodies went mountainously soft. And they were mushroom-pale, as if they’d been grown underground. It’s a shocking thing to face all at once so many kecked-up, genetically disadvantaged humans. In a country that values power and ease and symmetry, velocity and cunning, kinks in their genetic code had robbed them of currency. Somebody touched my foot. Looking down, I found a sandy-haired woman tugging on my boot buckle. Katie Butke, she introduced herself as. Katie was solid as a fireplug and clean as a boiled peanut, affable but unimpressed by the likes of me. Looking at her, I felt smart all of a sudden, also lucky. You could talk these women out of their bus tokens. Still, glad I’d dodged the bullet they’d caught almost implicated me in their handicap. (At the time I saw only their difficulties. Now I also marvel that they could with verve hug an individual they’d just gotten off the bus with, and that total strangers shampooed Katie’s red hair and rubbed lotion on her freckled arms.) I started off with Pablo Neruda and a thinly disguised Neruda imitator. Good poem vs. cliché. The staff people had warned me the ladies could get distracted and bored, but the Neruda snapped them to attention.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Title : Lit : A Memoir (P.S. Book 3) Author: Karr, Mary LitA Memoir Mary Karr [image file=image_rsrc437.jpg] For Chuck and Lynn Pascale and for Dev: Thanks for the light. Passage home? Never. —The Odyssey, Book 5, Homer (trans. Robert Fagles) ContentsEpigraph Prologue: Open Letter to My Son Side A: Now Side B: Then I Escape from the Tropic of Squalor 1 Lost in the Golden State 2 The Mother of Invention 3 Lackluster College Coed 4 There’s No Biz Like Po-Biz 5 Never Mind II Flashdance 6 Inheritance Tax Summer 7 The Constant Lovers 8 Temporary Help 9 There Went the Bride 10 Bound 11 In Search of Incompetence 12 Bent Bender 13 Homesick 14 The Inconceivable Meets the Conceivable 15 Journey of the Magi 16 Postal Partum 17 No Mom Is an Island III Self Help 18 Ivy Beleaguered 19 The Mokus Squirreliness of the Unmet Mind 20 My Concept of Commitment 21 The Grinning Skull 22 Mass Eye 23 Lather, Rinse, Repeat 24 Affliction 25 Reprieve 26 The Reluctantly Baptized 27 The Untuned Instrument 28 Halfway Home 29 Ceremony (Nonbelievers, Read at Your Own Risk: Prayer and God Ahead) 30 Hour of Lead IV Being Who You Are Is Not a Disorder 31 A Short History of My Stupidity 32 The Nervous Hospital 33 Waking in the Blue 34 The Sweet Hereafter 35 I Accept a Position 36 Lake-Effect Humor 37 The Death of Date-o-Rama or the Romance of the Prose 38 Lord of the Flies 39 God Shopping 40 Dysfunctional Family Sweepstakes 41 It Makes a Body Wonder 42 On the Road 43 The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius 44 The Bog Queen 45 My Sinfulness in All Its Ugliness Acknowledgments About the Author Other Books by Mary Karr Credits Copyright About the Publisher Prologue: Open Letter to My SonSIDE A: NOW Any way I tell this story is a lie, so I ask you to disconnect the device in your head that repeats at intervals how ancient and addled I am. It’s true that—at fifty to your twenty—my brain is dimmer. Your engine of recall is way superior, as you’ve often pointed out. How many times have you stopped me throwing sofa cushions over my shoulder in search of my glasses by telling me they’re tipped atop my own knobby head? The cake we had on that birthday had twelve candles on it, not ten; and it wasn’t London but Venice where I’d blindly bought and boiled and served to our guests a pasta I mistakenly believed was formed into the boot of Italy.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  For small steps forward, verbal praise or a note of thanks is appropriate, but bigger achievements require a tangible reward presented in a timely manner. These include actions that bring a financial benefit to the organization, save or win a big client, improve a major process, or make the organization better in a substantial way. Method 3: Preserve Gratitude’s Significance An employee we interviewed said, “My boss said I was going to be recognized in front of our team for reaching one year of service. The company did these service awards all the time, and they were nice things, so I said that’d be okay.” But when the big day arrived, the employee found out they were going to tack his award presentation on after another—a woman who was receiving a twenty- year service award. “All these people from outside our department showed up and it was like a eulogy,” he said. “Folks were crying and telling her how much they loved her. I wanted to crawl into a hole. I hardly knew anyone yet. When they got around to my turn, the people who had come from other departments couldn’t just up and walk away, so they stayed and watched my miserable little one-year award being given. A couple of my team members said nice things, but compared to the lovefest we’d all just witnessed it was embarrassing.” He darkly joked that it was like giving out the Sound Mixing Oscar after the award for Best Picture. He added, “Later, when my manager told me we’d be celebrating my three-year anniversary—that was the next one they gave out an award for—I told him they could do it without me. There was no way in hell I was going to be there.” The point: Whenever you express gratitude, do not dampen the result by combining it with other business. Also, do not minimize accomplishments. If you talk about lessons learned (Rebecca sure has come a long way) or if you try to socialize the experience (Good work, Trey. I wish I could recognize everyone on our team), you will most likely diminish the positive effect your gratitude would otherwise have provided. The last warning is to acknowledge the difference between recognition and celebration. Some managers are reticent to single out individuals. Instead of recognizing the above-and-beyond contributions of one or two people in each staff meeting, say, they’ll take the whole team to lunch once a month. That’s not recognition, it’s a celebration.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Since dissimilar reports concerning the marriage of Luther will reach you, I have thought it well to give you my opinion of him. On June 13, Luther unexpectedly and without informing in advance any of his friends of what he was doing, married Bora, but in the evening, after having invited to a supper none but [Bugenhagen] and Lucan the painter, and Apel, observed the customary marriage rites. You might be amazed that at this unfortunate time when good and excellent men everywhere are in distress, he not only does not sympathize with them, but, as it seems, rather waxes wanton and diminishes his reputation, just when Germany has special need of his judgment and authority. . . . The rumor, however, that he had previously dishonored her is manifestly a lie. Now that the deed is done, we must not take it too hard, nor reproach him; for I think, indeed, that he was compelled by nature to marry. The mode of life, too, while, indeed, humble, is, nevertheless holy and more pleasing to God than celibacy. . . . I have hopes that this state of life may sober him down, so that he will discard the low buffoonery which we have often censured.12 We also know that Melanchthon’s wife, Katharina, was not at all fond of Luther’s new bride, and Melanchthon’s reference to her merely as “Bora” is startling in its brusqueness, because nowhere else is she ever referred to in this way. Melanchthon’s wife had doubtless seen a good deal of Bora during those first two months when Dr. Baumgärtner was courting her, often in the Melanchthon home, because he was a friend of theirs, and perhaps during this time Melanchthon’s Katharina had observed some traits in Bora of which she disapproved. Perhaps it was even they who helped Baumgärtner make his decision not to return to wed her. If this is true, how much the worse it must have been to discover that she had parlayed this setback into the grand prize of Luther himself. But Melanchthon was not the only one displeased by the news of Luther’s marriage. The canon law aficionado Hieronymus Schurff was torn with deep concerns. “If this monk marries,” he wrote, “the whole world and the devil will laugh, and he himself will destroy everything he has done.”13 Luther saw it quite the opposite way, but he knew that people would have an opportunity to snicker or cluck at it if they liked. Even the eely Erasmus had spread the false rumor that Luther had taken advantage of the young nun and was only marrying to cover his beastly tracks.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  And, as she began to be praised for her team-oriented, on-time work, Sara began to slowly change. Liz also continued to meet with Sara regularly to help her with her self-awareness. Instead of challenging her to change, Liz invited Sara to be actively involved in her coaching and think of ways that she could improve her sense of urgency on projects and where to devote the bulk of her time. With patience, said Liz, the result has been a salesperson who now has increased confidence and self-awareness, and is getting a lot more done. Method 6: Discuss the Issue Openly Talking with people about such personal issues as being a perfectionist can be quite uncomfortable, we know. But with the right approach, an honest discussion can really open people’s eyes to the issue, and then, with that recognition, make headway. Many people who suffer from perfectionism don’t see that’s the case. Benjamin Cherkasky is a great example. It took him years, and a graduate degree in counseling psychology from Northwestern, to help him spot his tendencies. The best way we’ve found to help employees see the problem, and for managers to talk with them about it, is to kindly acknowledge that they clearly like to get things right and that’s appreciated. Since discussing the problem that someone seems to be somewhat perfectionistic can lead them to be defensive, the phrasing is important. Consider this typical well-intended but potentially inflammatory conversation between manager and employee: Jared, you’ve got high standards, just like me. I see that you always try to make sure all the details are attended to and everything is done exactly right. That can be a good thing. Now, as I want you to progress in this organization, let me coach you a little. I’ve had to learn that focusing on improving things from 95 percent to 100 often bogs you down. You can get tunnel vision in getting something perfect that can cost you more than it does to move on to the next project. Let me give you an example of where I saw this with you recently . . . That’s not a terrible conversation. But notice a few subtle differences in the next exchange (in bold), and how the manager personalizes the conversation and deflects blame off Jared to the issue itself. Jared, you’ve got high standards, just like me. I see that you always try to make sure all the details are attended to and everything is done exactly right. That can be a good thing. Now, as I want you to progress in this organization, I’ll tell you something I had to learn.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Method 3: Preserve Gratitude’s SignificanceAn employee we interviewed said, “My boss said I was going to be recognized in front of our team for reaching one year of service. The company did these service awards all the time, and they were nice things, so I said that’d be okay.” But when the big day arrived, the employee found out they were going to tack his award presentation on after another—a woman who was receiving a twenty-year service award. “All these people from outside our department showed up and it was like a eulogy,” he said. “Folks were crying and telling her how much they loved her. I wanted to crawl into a hole. I hardly knew anyone yet. When they got around to my turn, the people who had come from other departments couldn’t just up and walk away, so they stayed and watched my miserable little one-year award being given. A couple of my team members said nice things, but compared to the lovefest we’d all just witnessed it was embarrassing.” He darkly joked that it was like giving out the Sound Mixing Oscar after the award for Best Picture. He added, “Later, when my manager told me we’d be celebrating my three-year anniversary—that was the next one they gave out an award for—I told him they could do it without me. There was no way in hell I was going to be there.” The point: Whenever you express gratitude, do not dampen the result by combining it with other business. Also, do not minimize accomplishments. If you talk about lessons learned (Rebecca sure has come a long way ) or if you try to socialize the experience (Good work, Trey. I wish I could recognize everyone on our team ), you will most likely diminish the positive effect your gratitude would otherwise have provided. The last warning is to acknowledge the difference between recognition and celebration. Some managers are reticent to single out individuals. Instead of recognizing the above-and-beyond contributions of one or two people in each staff meeting, say, they’ll take the whole team to lunch once a month. That’s not recognition, it’s a celebration. And it may create more anxiety for high achievers, who often are eager to know their work is valued. Individual recognition and team celebrations serve unique but different roles in building a high-performing team.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  If the Leipzig Debate had been a personal disaster, Luther’s recovery from the debacle was extraordinary. The proceedings had revealed him as a poor performer, liable to resort to personalized abuse, and unable to shine in oral, extempore debate. He had been “harsh,” as he himself admitted in the preface to the republished Leipzig articles, and he had not comported himself in the measured, peaceable manner urged by Mosellanus. Politically he had shown himself naïve at best, arriving with an armed gang of Wittenberg students, which was unlikely to win him support in the rival university town of Leipzig. Where Eck had schmoozed with the elite, Luther had barricaded himself in with his companions, failing even to exploit the audience he was granted with the duke. If Duke Georg had been open to the new theology before the debate, he certainly was not afterward, for the disputation had revealed clearly that Luther’s theology was a radical break with the traditional Church. This was a serious blow for the evangelical movement. The fact that the Elector’s cousin, and ruler of the other half of Saxony, was opposed to the Reformation would be a continuous problem for Luther until the duke died in 1539. And yet within a few months, Luther had again seized the initiative. This was partly because Germany’s humanist elite did not care for Eck, whose earlier attack on Erasmus had cost him their support. Men like Justus Jonas and Petrus Mosellanus mocked Eck as an ambitious show-off, engaging in gladiatorial combat with Luther for his own glory. The aggression and tricks of argument that pleased the crowd in Leipzig did not resonate well with them. Then, in the summer of 1520, Eck’s reputation took a sharp knock from which it never recovered, when a brilliant anonymous satire was published, full of puns, anagrams, and humanist wit. A fantastic flight of fancy that would have done Aristophanes proud, Eccius dedolatus was one of the best satires of the period—if Luther had described the Leipzig Debate as both a “comedy” and a “tragedy,” now it had become pure farce. In the satire, Eck has his own witch, Candida, run his errands for him. Ill from the effects of drink, he sends her to Leipzig to get Rubius’s advice and to fetch him a doctor, where the gatekeeper tells her “you’ll find the fellow keeping house in the nearest synagogue,” insinuating that Luther’s opponents are Jews. The highlight is their return to Ingolstadt by flying goat, which will only ascend when the names of Hoogstraaten and Pfefferkorn are uttered backward. As they fly over Nuremberg and Augsburg and on to Ingolstadt, Rubius, Eck’s close supporter, defecates all over the goat. He is, the author implies, a truly “shitty” poet.44

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  62. WB 5, 1600, June 25, 1530. Mules were of course famed for their sterility. The Papal Ass had been been found on the banks of the Tiber in 1496, while the Monk Calf, discovered in Saxony, had first been used by the Catholics to smear Luther; and then, with the help of Cranach, the Lutherans had turned the story around, arguing that this monster represented the monks and the Pope. 63. See the letters of August 1, 3, and 4, where Luther goes into the problem of human ordinances, strongly rejecting Melanchthon’s arguments, only to leave open the possibility that a saintly work, like that of St. Bernhard, might be acceptable if no one else were pressed to do it, and if other works, such as marriage and so on, were presented as more pleasing to God (WB 5, 1671, Aug. 1, 1530; 1673, Aug. 3, 1530; 1674; Aug. 4, 1530). He also argued in a letter to the Elector that because fasting, feast days, clothes, and all kinds of external ceremonies were matters of secular order, secular authority could make commands about this but the Church could not (WB 5, 1697, Aug. 26, 1530), a formulation that left it open to secular authority to do just this so long as consciences were not ensared (see 1707, Beilage, 595). He insisted that Communion could only be given in two kinds and that no compromise could be reached on this, but also admitted that the Visitation in Saxony had allowed Communion to be given in one kind only for the sake of the weak consciences, “but this should not be approved as right” (1707, Beilage, 591). 64. WB 5, 1618, Beilage: 8th article. Luther’s authorship is almost certain; dating may be early July; and 1707, Beilage, 595. WB 5, 1691, Aug. 22, 1530 (Melanchthon to Luther); Eck had complained about the Lutherans’ addition of the word “alone” but had conceded the centrality of faith; he still insisted that works played a role in salvation, but only a small one; see also Spalatin’s less optimistic report of Eck’s position, Aug. 16, 1530, Förstemann, Urkundenbuch, II, 225–27. 65. At the same time, Luther’s slowness in replying also gave the negotiators in Augsburg more room for maneuver. So, for example, Spalatin wrote desperately asking for Luther to write with clear advice in response to the Catholic proposals, because he feared that Melanchthon might concede too much, WB 5, 1692, [Aug. 23, 1530], and see Beilage . Then, having heard nothing from Melanchthon, probably between his letters of August 8 and 22, Luther was annoyed to discover that Melanchthon had become part of a new commission with none other than the hated Eck as his opposite number.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Naturally the appalling news devastated his supporters, many of whom instantly lost their faith. The Rabbis attempted to erase his memory from the earth: they destroyed all the letters, pamphlets and tracts about Shabbetai they could find. To this day, many Jews are embarrassed by this Messianic debacle and find it hard to deal with. Rabbis and rationalists alike have downplayed its significance. Recently, however, scholars have followed the late Gershom Scholem in trying to understand the meaning of this strange episode and its more significant aftermath.48 Astonishing as it may seem, many Jews remained loyal to their Messiah, despite the scandal of his apostasy. The experience of redemption had been so profound that they could not believe that God had allowed them to be deluded. It is one of the most striking instances of the religious experience of salvation taking precedence over mere facts and reason. Faced with the choice of abandoning their newfound hope or accepting an apostate Messiah, a surprising number of Jews of all classes refused to submit to the hard facts of history. Nathan of Gaza devoted the rest of his life to preaching the mystery of Shabbetai: by converting to Islam, he had continued his lifelong battle with the forces of evil. Yet again, he had been impelled to violate the deepest sanctities of his people in order to descend into the realm of darkness to liberate the kelipoth. He had accepted the tragic burden of his mission and descended to the lowest depths to conquer the world of Godlessness from within. In Turkey and Greece, about two hundred families remained loyal to Shabbetai: after his death they decided to follow his example in order to continue his battle with evil and converted to Islam en masse in 1683. They remained secretly loyal to Judaism, keeping in close touch with the Rabbis and congregating in the clandestine synagogues in one another’s houses. In 1689 their leader Jacob Querido made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and the Messiah’s widow declared that he was the reincarnation of Shabbetai Zevi. There is still a small group of Donmeh (apostates) in Turkey, who live outwardly impeccable Islamic lives but cling passionately to their Judaism in secret.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Crazed to see my name in print, which would prove poethood, I mailed to hapless editors work bad enough that—in retrospect—I’m surprised the rejections didn’t come with a cyanide pill. One snotty bastard commented solely on my failure to hit the space bar after periods and commas. If you could bring yourself to use standard spacing after punctuation, we would find it most helpful. Two nights a week, Etheridge held a private poetry workshop at his house, charging young writers like me a pitiful hundred bucks to sit for four months in his living room while he conducted our discussions from the sagging trough of a chenille armchair. The green and imploding house he shared with his poet-wife, Mary, and their two kids (adopted from Africa back when it was odd) stood out amid the tidy tract houses. Everything about Etheridge’s place was off-kilter. The roof sagged. One gutter was untethered. The front screen door hung from a single hinge. Inside, the wood floors buckled as if frozen mid-earthquake. Add a few cypress trees, a front-porch glider, and a hound dog, and the entire tableau could have been picked up by tweezers and used as a set for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Mary, a smart, curvy blonde from Oklahoma, drew paychecks as a social worker plus writing and fighting against apartheid, but even if she’d cleaned from dawn till dusk, I believe that from whatever spot Etheridge occupied, chaos would’ve spread out like kudzu vines, for he was an addict of the first caliber. Allegedly sober, Etheridge ran his own beer-and marijuana-maintenance program. While he spouted lines from Dickinson, he kept a forty-ounce of Colt malt liquor between his knobby knees. Back then, in magazines like The New Yorker, stories were mostly about ex-Yalies wearing deck shoes. (Ray Carver was about to change all that.) By contrast, Etheridge lectured wearing a string T-shirt and dark pants of a stiff material that I swear to God looked prison issue. He turned his plaid house shoes into slip-ons by stepping on their backs. The Free People’s Poetry Workshop, he called us. What I wrote was mostly unintelligible, except for one bit about a suicidal dog. The first line went, alliteratively enough, Don’t do it, dog. The stuff I was fighting to avoid sometimes slipped out in vague disguise: a kid raped, a lost father, a woman on the shock treatment table. But because I refused to use sentences—just strung phrases willy-nilly—nobody understood it anyway. The word cerulean, I believe, was used. It’s experimental, I argued to the baffled readers arrayed on Etheridge’s furniture. It’s in-fucking-comprehensible, he shot back. Still, the first poems of mine that ever saw print were sent out under Etheridge’s aegis, in envelopes he paid postage on. Thrilled to see my name in type, I told my pal John, who’d wallpapered his bathroom with high-class New Yorker rejections. His response? Just as there’s a woman for every man, no matter how ugly, there’s a magazine for every poem.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Why now, Mother? I say, almost in tears. Why’d you have to start now? Ow, she says. She’s holding her ears as I tug. Don’t ruin your mascara. You reek of marijuana, I say. The city of Cambridge is sliding away behind us. At the boathouse, we pass somebody hauling a lone scull from the water. I apologize to Warren as I work at the vast rats’ nest of her head. I don’t smell anything, he says. With Warren, you can never know if this is impeccable denial or politeness. Maybe at all those heavy-drinking WASP country club events, he’d learned to ignore the average soused-up human. I stop yanking at her hair and notice the buildings of Harvard—carved from various fine types of stone—slipping by like a kingdom I’d never gain the keys to. The whole city is so profoundly Caucasian. One of the city’s signature food items is a slablike whitefish devoid of the southern paprika and varicolored peppers that might make such a thing edible. Even its basketball team is thick with knobby-jointed midwestern farm boys whose pasty torsos evoke the aforementioned fish. Nobody ever wants me to have any fun. What’s the big deal? Ow, she says. This is payback for all those Tonette permanents you scalded my ears off with. Mother tries to catch Warren’s eyes in the rearview, saying, Warren, you’ve gotta come to Texas and see the pictures, of your wife. Do you think I look bad? You got in the back so quick I couldn’t see you, he says. His eyes are fixed on the lights of Boston. Master of diplomacy, I say. A compliment, this is, since—without such detachment—I still get whiplash from my own family’s turbulence. Warren, can you hand me my purse? she says. I’ll find the Shalimar. Can we stop and buy some Visine? I say. And some mouthwash, maybe? It’ll make us late, he says. And I need some cigarettes, Mother says, rummaging through her purse. She stops suddenly and looks at me. She touches her mother’s cameo at my neck, saying, I’d like to paint you like this. The road’s lights steamroll over us. I can see the sweat break out on Warren’s temples as I beg him to stop, though he hates being late. I’ve mostly tamped down Mother’s ash-white hair, and I’m using my fingers to comb through its natural waves, saying, You do have the best cheekbones, Mother. I can’t tell if there are tears in her eyes or she’s just high as she says, I don’t want to go if I’m gonna embarrass you. Warren pulls up outside a bodega and leaves us in the puffing car. Seeing his runner’s form in the unfamiliar structure of a suit brings a surge of ardor. Soon as he’s out of sight, Mother says, Harold and I share a glass of wine every now and then, when we go out dancing—Harold being the somewhat prissy young man of color hired to help care for Daddy.

• From A History of God (1993)

  But once the scientific spirit had become normative for many people, it was difficult for them to read the Gospels in any other way. Western Christians were now committed to a literal understanding of their faith and had taken an irrevocable step back from myth: a story was either factually true or it was a delusion. Questions about the origin of religion were more important to Christians than, say, to Buddhists because their monotheistic tradition had always claimed that God was revealed in historical events. If Christians were to preserve their integrity in the scientific age, therefore, these questions had to be addressed. Some Christians who held more conventional beliefs than Tindal or Reimarus were beginning to question the traditional Western understanding of God. In his tract Wittenburg’s Innocence of a Double Murder (1681), the Lutheran John Friedmann Mayer wrote that the traditional doctrine of the atonement, as outlined by Anselm, which depicted God demanding the death of his own Son, presented an inadequate conception of the divine. He was “the righteous God, the angered God” and “the embittered God,” whose demands for strict retribution filled so many Christians with fear and taught them to recoil from their own “sinfulness.” 19 More and more Christians were embarrassed by the cruelty of so much Christian history, which had conducted fearful crusades, inquisitions and persecutions in the name of this just God. Coercing people to believe in orthodox doctrines seemed particularly appalling to an age increasingly enamored of liberty and freedom of conscience. The bloodbath unleashed by the Reformation and its aftermath seemed the final straw. Reason seemed the answer. Yet could a God drained of the mystery that had for centuries made him an effective religious value in other traditions appeal to the more imaginative and intuitive Christians? The Puritan poet John Milton (1608–74) was particularly disturbed by the Church’s record of intolerance. A true man of his age, he had attempted, in his unpublished treatise On Christian Doctrine, to reform the Reformation and to work out a religious creed for himself that did not rely upon the beliefs and judgments of others. He was also doubtful about such traditional doctrines as the Trinity, Yet it is significant that the true hero of his masterpiece Paradise Lost is Satan rather than the God whose actions he intended to justify to man. Satan has many of the qualities of the new men of Europe: he defies authority, pits himself against the unknown, and in his intrepid journeys from Hell, through Chaos to the newly created earth, he becomes the first explorer.