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 Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I hated discussion classes. I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn’t sound dumb, and I hated how it was all just a game of trying to figure out what the teacher wanted to hear and then saying it. I’m in class, so teach me. And teach me he did: In those fifty minutes, the Old Man made me take religion seriously. I’d never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, in the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them. And then he assigned us fifty pages of reading for the next day—from a book called Religious Studies. That afternoon, I had two classes and two free periods. We had nine fifty- minute class periods each day, which means that most everyone had three “study periods” (except for the Colonel, who had an extra independent-study math class on account of being an Extra Special Genius). The Colonel and I had biology together, where I pointed out the other guy who’d duct-taped me the night before. In the top corner of his notebook, the Colonel wrote, Longwell Chase. Senior W-day Warrior. Friends w/Sara. Weird. It took me a minute to remember who Sara was: the Colonel’s girlfriend. I spent my free periods in my room trying to read about religion. I learned that myth doesn’t mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting. I also learned that after the events of the previous night, I was far too tired to care about myths or anything else, so I slept on top of the covers for most of the afternoon, until I awoke to Alaska singing, “WAKE UP, LITTLE PUHHHHHDGIE!” directly into my left ear canal. I held the religion book close up against my chest like a small paperback security blanket. “That was terrible,” I said. “What do I need to do to ensure that never happens to me again?” “Nothing you can do!” she said excitedly. “I’m unpredictable. God, don’t you hate Dr. Hyde? Don’t you? He’s so condescending.” I sat up and said, “I think he’s a genius,” partly because I thought it was true and partly because I just felt like disagreeing with her. She sat down on the bed. “Do you always sleep in your clothes?” “Yup.” “Funny,” she said. “You weren’t wearing much last night.” I just glared at her. “C’mon, Pudge. I’m teasing. You have to be tough here.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  And then with me sitting watching The Brady Bunch, watching Marcia Marcia Marcia up to her Brady antics, Lara unbuttoned my pants and pulled my boxers down a little and pulled out my penis. “Wow,” she said. “What?” She looked up at me, but didn’t move, her face nanometers away from my penis. “It’s weird.” “What do you mean weird?” “Just beeg, I guess.” I could live with that kind of weird. And then she wrapped her hand around it and put it into her mouth. And waited. We were both very still. She did not move a muscle in her body, and I did not move a muscle in mine. I knew that at this point something else was supposed to happen, but I wasn’t quite sure what. She stayed still. I could feel her nervous breath. For minutes, for as long as it took the Bradys to steal the key and unlock themselves from the ghost-town jail, she lay there, stock-still with my penis in her mouth, and I sat there, waiting. And then she took it out of her mouth and looked up at me quizzically. “Should I do sometheeng?” “Um. I don’t know,” I said. Everything I’d learned from watching porn with Alaska suddenly exited my brain. I thought maybe she should move her head up and down, but wouldn’t that choke her? So I just stayed quiet. “Should I, like, bite?” “Don’t bite! I mean, I don’t think. I think—I mean, that felt good. That was nice. I don’t know if there’s something else.” “I mean, you deedn’t—” “Um. Maybe we should ask Alaska.” So we went to her room and asked Alaska. She laughed and laughed. Sitting on her bed, she laughed until she cried. She walked into the bathroom, returned with a tube of toothpaste, and showed us. In detail. Never have I so wanted to be Crest Complete. Lara and I went back to her room, where she did exactly what Alaska told her to do, and I did exactly what Alaska said I would do, which was die a hundred little ecstatic deaths, my fists clenched, my body shaking. It was my first orgasm with a girl, and afterward, I was embarrassed and nervous, and so, clearly, was Lara, who finally broke the silence by asking, “So, want to do some homework?” There was little to do on the first day of the semester, but she read for her English class. I picked up a biography of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara —whose face adorned a poster on the wall—that Lara’s roommate had on her bookshelf, then I lay down next to Lara on the bottom bunk. I began at the end, as I sometimes did with biographies I had no intention of reading all the way through, and found his last words without too much searching.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  statisticians.” He told my seminar and me of researchers at the University of Michigan who were generally optimistic about intuitive statistics. I had strong feelings about that claim, which I took personally: I had recently discovered that I was not a good intuitive statistician, and I did not believe that I was worse than others. For a research psychologist, sampling variation is not a curiosity; it is a nuisance and a costly obstacle, which turns the undertaking of every research project into a gamble. Suppose that you wish to confirm the hypothesis that the vocabulary of the average six-year-old girl is larger than the vocabulary of an average boy of the same age. The hypothesis is true in the population; the average vocabulary of girls is indeed larger. Girls and boys vary a great deal, however, and by the luck of the draw you could select a sample in which the difference is inconclusive, or even one in which boys actually score higher. If you are the researcher, this outcome is costly to you because you have wasted time and effort, and failed to confirm a hypothesis that was in fact true. Using a sufficiently large sample is the only way to reduce the risk. Researchers who pick too small a sample leave themselves at the mercy of sampling luck. The risk of error can be estimated for any given sample size by a fairly simple procedure. Traditionally, however, psychologists do not use calculations to decide on a sample size. They use their judgment, which is commonly flawed. An article I had read shortly before the debate with Amos demonstrated the mistake that researchers made (they still do) by a dramatic observation. The author pointed out that psychologists commonly chose samples so small that they exposed themselves to a 50% risk of failing to confirm their true hypotheses! No researcher in his right mind would accept such a risk. A plausible explanation was that psychologists’ decisions about sample size reflected prevalent intuitive misconceptions of the extent of sampling variation. The article shocked me, because it explained some troubles I had had in my own research. Like most research psychologists, I had routinely chosen samples that were too small and had often obtained results that made no sense. Now I knew why: the odd results were actually artifacts of my research method. My mistake was particularly embarrassing because I taught statistics and knew how to compute the sample size that would reduce the risk of failure to an acceptable level. But I had never chosen a sample size by computation. Like my colleagues, I had trusted tradition and my intuition in planning my experiments and had never thought seriously about the issue. When Amos visited the seminar, I had already reached the conclusion that my intuitions were deficient, and in the course of the seminar we quickly agreed that the Michigan optimists were wrong.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  blushed and told him he should go, but the way she arranged herself on the another part of the garden sofa and looked back at him suggested he should do the opposite. Yet Meil- the other pair, who were cour still hesitated: she had told him to go, and if he disobeyed she might walking about together just as they had left them at cause a scene, and might never forgive him; he would have made a fool of first. Whereupon the lady, himself, and everyone, including his mother, would hear of it. He soon got well content, did say to the up, apologizing for his momentary boldness. Her astonished and somewhat gentleman in the like condition, "I verily believe cold look meant he had indeed gone too far, he imagined, and he said so and so hath played the goodbye and left. silly prude, and hath given his lady no other entertainment but only Meilcour and Madame de Lursay appear in the novel The Wayward Head words, fine speeches, and and Heart, written in 1738 by Crébillon fils, who based his characters on promenading." • Afterward libertines he knew in the France of the time. For Crébillon fils, seduction is when all four were come all about signs—about being able to send them and read them. This is not together, the two ladies did fall to asking one another 140 • The Art of Seduction how it had fared with each. because sexuality is repressed and requires speaking in code. It is rather be-Then the one which was cause wordless communication (through clothes, gestures, actions) is the well content did reply she most pleasurable, exciting, and seductive form of language. was exceeding well, indeed she was; indeed for the In Crébillon fils's novel, Madame de Lursay is an ingenious seductress nonce she could scarce be who finds it exciting to initiate young men. But even she cannot overcome better. The other, which the youthful stupidity of Meilcour, who is incapable of reading her signs was ill content, did declare for her part she had had to because he is absorbed in his own thoughts. Later in the story, she does do with the biggest fool and manage to educate him, but in real life there are many who cannot be most coward lover she had educated. They are too literal and insensitive to the details that contain ever seen; and all the time seductive power. They do not so much repel as irritate and infuriate you the two gentlemen could see them laughing together by their constant misinterpretations, always viewing life from behind as they walked and crying the screen of their ego and unable to see things as they really are. Meilcour out: " O h ! the silly fool! is so caught up in himself he cannot see that Madame is expecting him to the shamefaced poltroon and coward!" At this the

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Not ugly. Not unbecoming. But ordinary. Ordinariness was a plague you had to ward off in every possible way. You warded it off by redecorating frequently. Actually my mother thought that all the interior decorators (as well as clothes designers and accessory designers) in America were organized in an espionage ring to learn her most recent decorating or dressmaking ideas and suddenly popularize them. And it was true that she had an uncanny sense of coming fashions (or did I only imagine this, conned as I was by her charisma?). She did the house in antique gold just before antique gold became the most popular color for drapes and rugs and upholstery. Then she screamed that everyone had “stolen” her ideas. She installed Spanish porcelain tiles in the foyer before it caught on “with all the yentas on Central Park West"—from whose company she carefully excluded herself. She brought white fur rugs home from Greece before they were imported by all the stores. She discovered wrought-iron flowered chandeliers for the bathroom in advance of all the “fairy decorators"—as she contemptuously called them. She had antique brass headboards and window shades that matched the wallpaper and pink and red towels in the bathrooms when pink and red was still considered an avant-garde combination. Her fear of ordinariness came out most strongly in her clothes. After the four of us got older, she and my father traveled a lot for business, and she picked up odd accessories everywhere. She wore Chinese silk pajamas to the theater, Balinese toe-rings on her sandaled feet, and tiny jade Buddhas mounted as dangling earrings. She carried an oiled rice-paper parasol in the rain and had toreador pants made out of Japanese fingernail tapestries. At one point in my adolescence it dawned on me that she would rather look weird and ugly than common and pretty. And she often succeeded. She was a tall, rail-thin woman with high cheekbones and long red hair, and her strange get-ups and extreme makeup sometimes gave her a Charles Addamsy look. Naturally, I longed for a bleached-blond, mink-coated Mama who played bridge, or at least for a dumpy brunette PTA Mom in harlequin glasses and Red Cross shoes. “Couldn’t you please wear something else?” I pleaded when she was dressing for Parents’ Day in tapestried toreador pants and a Pucci pink silk sweater and a Mexican serape. (My memory must be exaggerating—but you get the general idea.) I was in seventh grade, and at the height of my passion for ordinaries. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” What wasn’t wrong with it! I shrank back into her walk-in closet, looking in vain for something ordinary. (An apron! A housedress! An angora sweater set!

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  tor, plumbing his bottomless well of ignorance, “you wouldn’t have hangups about nudity and such things.” “We were brought up never to swim on Sundays and al ways to wear a T-shirt to the beach,” answered Pali. “Oh, how we must have fucked you poor bastards up the ass,” moaned the Pastor, standing on floor level and looking into the shadow under Pali’s towel, thinking of missionaries. Pali took a moment to ponder this. His embarrassment at the casual nudity forced him to keep his eyes above the Pastor’s jawline, and he refused to acknowledge Pastor Knarffssen’s erection. From the Pastor’s pale, boyish body, with its slim hips and small ass, there curving upward toward his chest sat a great fat colorless prick that glistened around the head as pre- cum dribbled onto the blond floor. “Actually most of the Christian missionaries to Samoa came from Rarotonga,” was Pali’s response. The Pastor tweaked the head of his prick, making it pink, and coated the round shaft with a palm full of stuff. The smallness of the Pastor’s torso made the long curve of his hard- on all the more incredible. But Pali’s discretion was boundless. Even a stiff dick with a heartbeat, trembling between his an kles in the steam, would not alter his respectful attention to his mentor’s words. The Pastor sat down on the bench at Pali’s feet with a sigh. “Gregg, why don’t you do your exercises?” he suggested. Gregg was not immune to the charms of the Pastor’s mem ber—it was the Pastor’s one physically alluring quality. But to day, he felt shy around Pali. Rather than taking the Pastor’s hidden cue, he began instead to actually exercise. Gregg started with stretches. He sat on the high bench op posite Pali. Spreading his legs, he touched his fingers to the tips of his toes. The sauna was quiet with only the sound of

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

  Consider the legal argument at the heart of the heat-of-passion defense: would a reasonable person have committed the same killing if he’d been similarly provoked without a chance to cool off ? The standard of the reasonable person, and the social norms behind it, is not merely reflected in the law—it is created by the law. It is a way of saying, “Here is what we expect a human person to act like, and we will punish you if you don’t conform.” It’s a social contract, a guide to behavior for the average person in a population of diverse individuals. And like all averages, the reasonable person is a fiction that doesn’t apply exactly to any single individual. It’s a stereotype, and it encompasses stereotyped ideas about emotional “expression,” feeling, and perception that are part of the classical view of emotion and the theory of human nature that supports it. A legal standard based on emotion stereotypes is especially problematic for the equitable treatment of men and women. The prevailing belief in many cultures is that women are more emotional and empathic, whereas men are more stoic and analytical. Shelves full of popular books portray this stereotype as fact: The Female Brain; The Male Brain; His Brain, Her Brain; The Essential Difference; Brain Sex; Unleash the Power of the Female Brain; and on and on. This stereotype affects even powerful women who are widely respected. Madeleine Albright, the first female U.S. secretary of state, wrote in her memoir that “many of my colleagues made me feel that I was overly emotional, and I worked hard to get over that. In time, I learned to keep my voice flat and unemotional when I talked about issues that I considered important.” 16 Take a moment and reflect on your own emotions. Do you tend to feel things intensely or more moderately? When we ask these types of questions in my lab to male and female test subjects—to describe their feelings from memory—the women report feeling more emotion than the men do on average. That is, the women believe they are more emotional than men, and the men agree. The one exception is anger, as subjects believe that men are angrier. However, when the same people record their emotional experiences as they occur in everyday life, there are no sex differences. Some men and women are very emotional, and some are not. Likewise, the female brain is not hardwired for emotion or empathy, and the male brain is not hardwired for stoicism or rationality. 17 Where do these gender stereotypes come from? In the United States at least, women routinely “express” more emotion when compared to men. For example, women move their facial muscles more when watching films than men do, but women don’t report more intense experiences of emotion while watching. This finding, if nothing else, might explain why the stereotypes of the stoic man and the emotional woman leak into the courtroom and have a significant influence on judges and juries.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “What the hell do you know about it?” “I know that I’ve read some of your work and that you give out little bits and pieces of yourself in it. If you don’t watch out, you’ll become a fetish for all sorts of frustrated types. All the nuts in the world will fall into your basket.” “That’s already happened to some extent. My poems are a happy hunting ground for minds that have lost their balance.” I was cribbing from Joyce, but Adrian wouldn’t know, being illiterate. In the months since my first book had appeared, I had received plenty of bizarre phone calls and letters from men who assumed that I did everything I wrote about and did it with everyone, everywhere. Suddenly, I was public property in a small way. It was an odd sensation. In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but then when it happens, you begin to feel like a whore. The disparity between your life and your work turns out to be as great as ever. And the people seduced by your work are usually seduced for all the wrong reasons. Or are they the right reasons? Do all the nuts in the world really have your number? And not just your telephone number either. “I thought we really had a good thing going,” Adrian said, “but it’s over now, because you’re so bloody terrified. I’m really disappointed in you…. Well, I guess it won’t be the first time I’ve been disappointed in a woman. That first day, when I saw you arguing at registration, I thought: that really is one splendid woman—a real fighter. She doesn’t take life lying down. But I was wrong. You’re no adventuress. You’re a princess. Forgive me for trying to upset your safe little marriage.” He turned the key in the ignition and started the car for emphasis. “Fuck you, Adrian.” It was lame but it was all I could think of. “Don’t fuck me—go home and fuck yourself. Go back to being a safe little bourgeois housewife who writes in her spare time.” That was the unkindest cut of all. “And what do you think you are—a safe little bourgeois doctor who plays existentialist in his spare time?” I was almost shouting. “Go ahead and scream, ducks, it doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t have to account to you for my life. I know what I’m doing. You’re the one who’s so bloody indecisive. You’re the one who can’t decide whether to be Isadora Duncan, Zelda Fitzgerald, or Marjorie Morningstar.” He raced the engine dramatically. “Take me home,” I said. “Gladly, if you’ll just tell me where that is.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  What to do? Lalah and Chloe (who are sharing one set of bunks) are not supposed to know— being, my mother thinks, too young—so Randy and I engage in some conspiratorial trips to the drugstore for supplies and go sneaking around the cabin looking for places to hide them. Of course I am so delighted with my new toy and my new sense of distinction in the adult world that I change my Kotex no less than twelve times a day, using them up almost faster than we can buy them. And the moment of truth arrives when the steward (a beleaguered Frenchman with a face like Fernandel and a temper like Cardinal Richelieu) finds the toilet stuffed to the top and overflowing. Until then I had not felt particularly oppressed by menstruation. It was only when the steward (who was certainly not thrilled about having to tend a cabin which resembled a girls’ dormitory) started yelling at me that I joined the ranks of potential radicals. “What ave you poot in ze commode?” he shrieked (or something to that effect). And then he made me watch while he pulled out the disintegrating Kotex glob by glob. Is it possible he really didn’t know what it was? Or was he trying to humiliate me? Was it really a language problem? (Comment dit-on Kotex en francais?) Or was it just that he was taking his frustration out on my menarche? I stood there turning red and muttering drugstore, drugstore, which (I am now given to understand) is a French word. Meanwhile, Lalah and Chloe were giggling to beat the band. (They knew it was dirty, even if they didn’t understand all the details. They certainly knew something was wrong or else why would I be running to the bathroom a dozen times a day and why would that scary man be yelling at me?) We steamed toward New York leaving a trail of bloody Kotex for the fishes. In my thirteen-year-old mind, the Ile de France was the most romantic ship in the world because it made a cameo appearance in “These Foolish Things"—that dreamily romantic song (played by my dreamily romantic father on the piano): A tinkling piano in the next apartment Those stumbling words that told you What my heart meant... (The poetry I was raised on!) Somewhere in the song, “The Ile de France with all the gulls around it...” is dreamily mentioned. Little did I know that the gulls would be diving after my bloody Kotex. And little did I know that by the time I got to sail on it, the Ile de France would be much the worse for wear and would rock and roll like an old tub, making nearly all the passengers seasick. The stewards were losing their minds.

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

  When Erika turned and saw me (her Ph.D. advisor), the device beeped loudly, to her embarrassed surprise and to the amusement of everyone else around us. Later in the day, I spent time wearing the device, and during a meeting with Erika, it beeped several times as I received emails from a granting agency. (So Erika had the last laugh that day.) 3 1 My lab has experimentally demonstrated the brain’s budgeting efforts hundreds of times (as have other labs), observing as people’s body-budgeting circuitry shifts resources around, and sometimes as their body budgets fluctuate in and out of balance. We ask volunteers to sit completely motionless in front of a computer screen and view pictures of animals, flowers, babies, food, money, guns, surfers, skydivers, car crashes, and other objects and scenes. These pictures impact their body budget; heart rates go up, blood pressures change, blood vessels dilate. These budgetary changes, which prepare the body to fight or flee, occur even though the volunteers are not moving and have no conscious plan to move. When our volunteers view these pictures during an fMRI experiment, we observe their body-budgeting regions controlling these inner-body movements. And even though our subjects are lying down, completely motionless, they simulate motor movements like running and surfing, as well as the sensations from moving muscles, joints, and tendons. The pictures also change our volunteers’ feelings as interoceptive changes in their bodies are being simulated and corrected. Based on these and hundreds of other studies, we now have good evidence that your brain predicts your body’s responses by drawing on prior experiences with similar situations and objects, even when you’re not physically active. And the consequence is interoceptive sensation. 3 2 To perturb your budget, you don’t even require another person or object to be present. You can just imagine your boss, teacher, coach, or anything else relevant to you. Every simulation, whether it becomes an emotion or not, impacts your body budget. As it turns out, people spend at least half their waking hours simulating rather than paying attention to the world around them, and this pure simulation strongly drives their feelings. 3 3 When it comes to managing your body budget, your brain does not have to go it alone. Other people regulate your body budget too. When you interact with your friends, parents, children, lovers, teammates, therapist, or other close companions, you and they synchronize breathing, heart beats, and other physical signals, leading to tangible benefits. Holding hands with loved ones, or even keeping their photo on your desk at work, reduces activation in your body-budgeting regions and makes you less bothered by pain. If you’re standing at the bottom of a hill with friends, it will appear less steep and easier to climb than if you are alone.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I thrust my hand into my suitcase and began feeling around. In exasperation, I started tossing the clothes out onto the floor. “Damn it to hell,” I screamed. The floor was beginning to look like the aftermath of a car wreck. How was I ever going to clean up all that blood? I wasn’t. I was going to beat it out of Paris before the management got wise. What a bunch of useless junk I had in my suitcase. I could use my poems as sanitary napkins, couldn’t I? Charming symbolism. But unfortunately not very absorbent. Ah—what’s this? One of Bennett’s T-shirts. I folded it into a sort of diaper and dug up one (only one!) safety pin to keep it on me—after a fashion. How was I going to get out of Paris wearing a diaper? I’d just have to walk knock-kneed. Everyone would think I had to pee. Oh God—crime definitely does not pay. Here I had been wondering if my penalty for running off with Adrian was going to be a whole pregnancy of not knowing what color the baby was going to be and instead I’m the one in diapers. Why can’t my suffering at least be dignified? When other writers suffer it’s epic or cosmic or avant- garde, but when I suffer it’s slapstick. I hobble out to the hall in my trench coat holding my knees together to keep my diaper in place. Then suddenly I remember that everything which stands between me and destitution is in my handbag: passport, American Express card, traveler’s checks—and I hobble back to the room. Then out into the hall again, knock-kneed, barefoot, clutching my bag, and I seize the doorknob of the toilet and begin rattling. “Un moment, s’il vous plaît,” comes an embarrassed male voice. American accent. It’s August, after all, and there probably aren’t any French people within miles of Paris. “It’s OK,” I say, holding my diaper in place with my thighs. “Pardon?” He hasn’t heard me. He’s still trying to come up with French phrases as he squeezes out the last dollop of shit. “It’s OK,” I yell, “I’m American.” “Je viens, je viens,” he mutters. “Je suis Americaine!” “Pardon?” This is getting embarrassing. At this rate neither one of us will know what to do when he finally emerges. I decide to hotfoot it down to the next floor and try that toilet. So I hobble down the winding stairs again. The toilet on the floor below isn’t locked, but there’s no paper at all, so it’s down still another flight. Actually, I’m beginning to get pretty good at this. What adaptability we show in moments of stress! Like when I had my broken leg and devised all those ingenious positions for screwing with a long leg cast. Voilà!

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

  As you teach your children about emotion, try not to limit yourself to essentialist stereotypes: smiling when happy, scowling when angry, and so on. (This may be difficult, as you’re competing with TV cartoons that stick to Western stereotypes of emotion.*) Help them understand the variety of the real world, that a smile may mean happiness, embarrassment, anger, or even sadness depending on context. Try also to admit when you aren’t sure how you feel, when you’re guessing how someone else feels, or when you guess badly. Carry on full conversations with your young child, taking turns, even when she is a baby who cannot respond verbally yet. By the time a child is a toddler, the conversational pattern matters as much as the words themselves for building emotion concepts. My husband and I never used “baby talk” with our daughter but spoke to her in fully formed, adult sentences from the time she was born, pausing afterward to let her “respond” in whatever way she could. People around us in the supermarket thought we were crazy, but we did wind up with an emotionally intelligent teenager who actually talks to adults. (And she can torture me with three-decimal precision. I’m so proud.)21 Do your children have screaming fits or throw tantrums? You can help them master their emotions and calm down by using social reality to your advantage. When my daughter, Sophia, was two and in her tantrum phase, telling her to calm down had no effect, of course. So we invented a concept called the “Cranky Fairy.” Whenever Sophia launched into a tantrum (or if we were lucky, slightly beforehand), we’d explain to her, “Oh no, the Cranky Fairy is visiting. She’s making you feel cranky. Let’s try to make the Cranky Fairy go away.” Then we directed her to a particular chair—a fuzzy red one with a picture of Elmo from Sesame Street—as her special place for calming down. (No, it didn’t have little fuzzy red manacles.) At first we carried her to the chair, and sometimes she’d pitch a fit and kick the chair over, but eventually she would walk to it unasked and sit until her unpleasant feelings subsided. Sometimes she’d even announce that the Cranky Fairy was on her way. These practices might sound silly, but they have tangible effects. By inventing and sharing the concepts “Cranky Fairy” and “Elmo Chair” with Sophia, we created tools to help her calm herself. To her, these concepts were as real as money, art, power, and other constructions of social reality are to us.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  She carried an oiled rice-paper parasol in the rain and had toreador pants made out of Japanese fingernail tapestries. At one point in my adolescence it dawned on me that she would rather look weird and ugly than common and pretty. And she often succeeded. She was a tall, rail-thin woman with high cheekbones and long red hair, and her strange get-ups and extreme makeup sometimes gave her a Charles Addamsy look. Naturally, I longed for a bleached-blond, mink-coated Mama who played bridge, or at least for a dumpy brunette PTA Mom in harlequin glasses and Red Cross shoes. “Couldn’t you please wear something else? ” I pleaded when she was dressing for Parents’ Day in tapestried toreador pants and a Pucci pink silk sweater and a Mexican serape. (My memory must be exaggerating—but you get the general idea.) I was in seventh grade, and at the height of my passion for ordinaries. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” What wasn’t wrong with it! I shrank back into her walk-in closet, looking in vain for something ordinary. (An apron! A housedress! An angora sweater set! Something befitting a mother in a Betty Crocker ad, a Mother with a capital M.) The closet reeked of Joy and mothballs. There were cut velvet capes and feather boas and suede slacks and Aztec cotton caftans and Japanese silk kimonos and Irish tweed knickers, but absolutely nothing like an angora sweater set. “It’s just that I wish you’d wear something more plain,” I said sheepishly, “something people won’t stare at.” She glowered at me and drew herself up to her full height of five feet ten inches. “Are you ashamed of your own mother? Because if you are, Isadora, I feel sorry for you. I really do. There is nothing good about being ordinary. People don’t respect you for it. In the last analysis, people run after people who are different, who have confidence in their own taste, who don’t run with the herd. You’ll find out. There is nothing gained by giving in to the pressures of group vulgarity….” And we left for school in a cab trailing whiffs of Joy , and with Mexican fringes flapping, figuratively, in the wind. When I think of all the energy, all the misplaced artistic aggression which my mother channeled into her passion for odd clothes and new decorating schemes, I wish she had been a successful artist instead. Three generations of frustrated artists: my grandfather fucking models and cursing Picasso and stubbornly painting in the style of Rembrandt, my mother giving up poetry and painting for arty clothes and compulsive reupholstering, my sister Randy taking up pregnancy as if it were a new art form she had invented (and Lalah and Chloe following after her like disciples).

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Of course," I said impatiently, covering the fact that I had never quite realised that. "Of course. And it's true that Dawn was never exactly brilliant or enthralling company unless you saw the point of him. I remember coming in one day and finding he'd been waiting for me for hours. Graves was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him as if he was trying to mesmerise him or get him to reveal some potent but unguessable quality he had. He was really trying to get down there with him. I said later how poetic a picture it had been—poetic was one of our permitted terms of acclaim—and he turned quite nasty. 'Poetic!' he said. 'He talked prose to me all afternoon!'" Willie didn't smile. "I feel rather sorry for Graves, being left all alone at nights, being told to turn his music down by Head of House W. Turlough, whilst his best friend, actually probably his only friend, was running round naked on the cricket pitch with someone who was clearly more attractive than he was. If I'd realised at the time I'd have been nicer to him." I gave a humorous snarl at this attempt at a joke. "What became of Graves, by the way?" "I wonder." The last time I'd seen him was vividly clear to me, shocking and secret. Or maybe it didn't matter. Willie ought to know these things. We were both men of the world, of different but adjacent worlds; and we were about the same age now, though Willie seemed to me to have entered the placid, incurious middle phase, the semi-sedation of hetero expectations, whilst I was still running loose, swerving and tripping through the romantic undergrowth outside. He must be thirty-five, I was thirty-three, would be thirty-four in the week after Christmas; but as always I felt that my age was only a term of convenience, an average age, and that one moment I was donnish and past it and the next a bewildered youngster scarcely out of school. I took my glasses off again to spare his embarrassment. "Do you know about Mr Croy's?" I said. "No, is it a prep-school?" "Not exactly." I gazed at the overlapping aureoles the lamps cast across the ceiling, and saw again the astounding scenes in that house. It was years after school, it was after Cambridge, in my own brief spell as a schoolmaster, on a rainy half-holiday, when I made one of my irregular, urgent visits, and found Graves there, with a crew-cut and ear-rings, and the young assistant from Levertons flushed and greedily at work on him, ribbons of saliva down his chin. "Well, the thing about it is . . . " I said. "What is it, sweetheart?" Willie asked quietly. I smirked at the new endearment. "You see . . ." "Can't you sleep?"

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  On the second day of their courtships the couples visited a palace outside the city. The chevalier was all charm, making Mademoiselle de Saint-Germain laugh uproariously at his witticisms, but Matta did not fare so well; he had no patience for this gallantry business, and when he and Madame de Senantes took a stroll, he squeezed her hand and boldly declared his affections. The lady of course was aghast, and when they got back to Turin she left without looking at him. Unaware that he had offended her, Matta imagined that she was over- come with emotion, and felt rather pleased with himself. But the Chevalier de Grammont, wondering why the pair had parted, visited Madame de Senantes and asked her how it went. She told him the truth—Matta had dispensed with the formalities and was ready to bed her. The chevalier But if, like the winter cat upon the hearth, the lover clings when he is dismissed, and cannot bear to go, certain means must be taken to make him understand; and these should be progressively ruder and ruder, until they touch him to the quick of his flesh. • She should refuse him the bed, and jeer at him, and make him angry; she should stir up her mother's enmity against him; she should treat him with an obvious lack of candor, and spread herself in long considerations about his ruin; his departure should be openly anticipated, his tastes and desires should be thwarted, his poverty outraged; she should let him see that she is in sympathy with another man, she should blame him with harsh words on every occasion; she should tell lies about him to her parasites, she should interrupt his sentences, and send him on frequent errands away from the house. She should seek occasions of quarrel, and make him the victim of a thousand domestic perfidies; she should rack her brains to vex him; she should play with the glances of another in his presence, and give herself up to reprehensible profligacy before his face; she should leave the house as often as possible, and let it be seen that she has no real need to do so. All these means are good for showing a man the door. —EASTERN LOVE, VOLUME II: THE HARLOT'S BREVIARY OF KSHEMENDRA, TRANSLATED BY E. POWYS MATHERS 138 • The Art of Seduction laughed and thought to himself how differently he would manage affairs if he were the one wooing the lovely Madame. Over the next few days Matta continued to misread the signs. He did not pay a visit to Madame de Senantes's husband, as custom required. He did not wear her colors. When the two went riding together, he went chas- ing after hares, as if they were the more interesting prey, and when he took snuff he failed to offer her some. Meanwhile he continued to make his overforward advances. Finally Madame had had enough, and complained to him directly.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  We took in, voluptuously and indiscriminately, oh, I don’t know, one hundred and fifty or two hundred programs during that one year, and during some of the denser periods of movie-going we saw many of the news-reels up to half-a-dozen times since the same weekly one went with different main pictures and pursued us from town to town. Her favorite kinds were, in this order: musicals, underworlders, westerners. In the first, real singers and dancers had unreal stage careers in an essentially grief-proof sphere of existence where-from death and truth were banned, and where, at the end, white-haired, dewy-eyed, technically deathless, the initially reluctant father of a show-crazy girl always finished by applauding her apotheosis on fabulous Broadway. The underworld was a world apart: there, heroic newspapermen were tortured, telephone bills ran to billions, and, in a robust atmosphere of incompetent marksmanship, villains were chased through sewers and storehouses by pathologically fearless cops (I was to give them less exercise). Finally there was the mahogany landscape, the florid-faced, blue-eyed roughriders, the prim pretty schoolteacher arriving in Roaring Gulch, the rearing horse, the spectacular stampede, the pistol thrust through the shivered windowpane, the stupendous fist fight, the crashing mountain of dusty oldfashioned furniture, the table used as a weapon, the timely somersault, the pinned hand still groping for the dropped bowie knife, the grunt, the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in the belly, the flying tackle; and immediately after a plethora of pain that would have hospitalized a Hercules (I should know by now), nothing to show but the rather becoming bruise on the bronzed cheek of the warmed-up hero embracing his gorgeous frontier bride. I remember one matinee in a small airless theatre crammed with children and reeking with the hot breath of popcorn. The moon was yellow above the neckerchiefed crooner, and his finger was on his strumstring, and his foot was on a pine log, and I had innocently encircled Lo’s shoulder and approached my jawbone to her temple, when two harpies behind us started muttering the queerest things—I do not know if I understood aright, but what I thought I did, made me withdraw my gentle hand, and of course the rest of the show was fog to me. Another jolt I remember is connected with a little burg we were traversing at night, during our return journey. Some twenty miles earlier I had happened to tell her that the day school she would attend at Beardsley was a rather high-class, non-coeducational one, with no modern nonsense, whereupon Lo treated me to one of those furious harangues of hers where entreaty and insult, self-assertion and double talk, vicious vulgarity and childish despair, were interwoven in an exasperating semblance of logic which prompted a semblance of explanation from me. Enmeshed in her wild words (swell chance ... I’d be a sap if I took your opinion seriously ... Stinker ...

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

  4 9 When you categorize with your multisensory concepts, you’re also regulating your body budget. When you played with a ball as a baby, you categorized it not just by its color and shape and texture (and by the smell of the room, the feel of the floor against your hands and knees, the lingering taste of whatever you last ate, and so on), but also by your interoceptive sensations in the moment. This allowed you to predict your actions, like swatting the ball or putting it into your mouth, which influenced your body budget. As an adult, when you learn that an event is an instance of some emotion, such as “Embarrassment,” you likewise capture the event’s sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and interoceptive sensations together as your concept. And when you make meaning using that concept, your brain again takes into account your entire situation. For example, if you surface from under the ocean waves onto the beach and notice that your swimsuit has fallen off, your brain might construct an instance of “Embarrassment.” Your conceptual system samples instances of embarrassed nakedness from your past, which is more taxing on your body budget than the refreshed nakedness after stepping out of a sauna, or the comfortable nakedness after a passionate afternoon with your lover. Depending on the immediate circumstances, your brain might also sample fully clothed instances of “Embarrassment” where you felt exposed, like answering a question wrongly in class, but not more private embarrassment like forgetting your best friend’s birthday. Your brain samples from your larger conceptual system, as you’ve seen, according to your goal in a given situation. The winning instance guides you to regulate your body budget appropriately. 5 0 All categorizations are based on probabilities. For example, if you are on vacation in Paris and you perceive a stranger frowning at you in a subway car, you might not have any past experience with that stranger or that subway, and you might not have visited Paris before, but your brain does have past experiences of other frowning people in unfamiliar places. Your brain can then construct a sample of concepts, based on past experience and probability, to use as predictions. Each added piece of context (Are you alone or is the car crowded? Is it a man or a woman? With raised or furrowed eyebrows?) allows your brain to hone the probabilities until it settles on the best-fitting concept that will minimize prediction error. This is categorization with emotion concepts. You aren’t detecting or recognizing emotion in someone’s face. You aren’t recognizing a physiological pattern in your own body. You are predicting and explaining the meaning of those sensations based on probability and experience.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Beauty obeyed, her face so red that her eyebrows and eyelashes gleamed golden in the sun, and the Prince kissed her. "Come here, old man," the Prince said to the old Cobbler. "Have you ever seen such loveliness?" "No, your Majesty," said the old man. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, and his legs were slightly bowed. His hair was gray but his green eyes gleamed with a special almost wistful pleasure. "She is truly a magnificent Princess, your Majesty, worth all the deaths of those who tried to claim her." "Yes, I suppose so, and worth all the bravery of the Prince who did claim her," smiled the Prince. Everyone laughed politely. But they couldn't conceal their awe of him. They were staring at his armor, at his sword, and above all at his young face and dark black hair that fell to his shoulders. The Prince drew the Cobbler closer. "Here," he said, "I give you permission if you like just to feel her treasures." The old man smiled at the Prince gratefully and almost innocently. He reached out, and hesitating a moment, felt Beauty's breasts. Beauty shivered, and tried obviously to repress a little cry. The old man touched her sex. Then the Prince drew up her little leash so that she was standing on tiptoe; her body stiffened and seemed to grow more tense and at the same time more lovely, breasts, and buttocks high, her calf muscles lifted, her chin and throat a perfect line down to her swaying bosom. "That's all. You must all go now," said the Prince. Obediently they backed away, but they continued to watch, as the Prince mounted his horse, and instructing Beauty to clasp her hands behind her neck, he ordered her to walk before him. Beauty led the way out of the Inn yard, the Prince walking his horse behind her. The people made way for her. They couldn't take their eyes off her lovely vulnerable body, and they squeezed against the narrow walls of the town to follow the spectacle to the edge of the forest. When they had left the town behind, the Prince told Beauty to come to him. He gathered her up and seated her before him again, and kissed her again, and scolded her: "You found that so hard," he crooned. "Why were you so proud? Did you think yourself too good to be shown to the people?" "I'm sorry, my Prince," she whispered. "Don't you see, if you think only of pleasing me, and pleasing those to whom I show you, it will be simple for you." He kissed her ear, holding her tight to his chest. "You should have been proud of your breasts and your shapely hips.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Voilà! Paper! But what atrocious paper! Talk about the history of the world through toilets—this toilet resembles nothing so much as an oubliette, and the paper seems to have dead bedbugs embedded in it. I lock the door, heave open the tiny window, toss Bennett’s bloody T-shirt out into the courtyard (thinking momentarily about sympathetic magic and all those tribal customs mentioned in The Golden Bough… will some evil sorcerer find Bennett’s T-shirt drenched with my blood and use it to cast a spell on both of us?). Then I sit down on the pot and begin devising a sort of sanitary napkin for myself with layers of toilet paper. The absurdities our bodies subject us to! Other than being doubled over with diarrhea in some stinking public toilet, I know of nothing more ignominious than getting your period when you have no Tampax. The odd thing is that I didn’t always feel this way about menstruation. I actually looked forward to my first period, longed for it, wanted it, prayed for it. I used to pore over words like “period” and “menstruation” in the dictionary. I used to recite a little prayer which went: please let me get my period today. Or, because I was afraid someone would hear me, I said: P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T. I used to chant this on the toilet seat, wiping myself again and again and hoping to find at least a tiny spot of blood. But nothing. Randy had her period (or “got unwell,” as my liberated mother and grandmother said) and so did all the girls in my seventh-grade class. And my eighth-grade class. What big bosoms and C-cup Maidenform bras and curly pubic tendrils! What stirring discussions of Kotex and Modess, and (for the very, very daring) Tampax! But I had nothing to contribute. At thirteen I had only a “training bra” (training for what?) I didn’t fill, a few sparse brownish-red curls (not even blonde, for all that I was a natural blonde), and information about sex gleaned from all-night marathons with Randy and her best friend, Rita. So the prayers on the pot continued. P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T. And then, when I was thirteen and a half (ancient compared to Randy’s ten and a half), I finally “got it” on the Ile de France in Mid-Atlantic, as we returned en famille from that disastrously expensive (though tax-deductible) European jaunt.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  She had antique brass headboards and window shades that matched the wallpaper and pink and red towels in the bathrooms when pink and red was still considered an avant-garde combination. Her fear of ordinariness came out most strongly in her clothes. After the four of us got older, she and my father traveled a lot for business, and she picked up odd accessories everywhere. She wore Chinese silk pajamas to the theater, Balinese toe-rings on her sandaled feet, and tiny jade Buddhas mounted as dangling earrings. She carried an oiled rice-paper parasol in the rain and had toreador pants made out of Japanese fingernail tapestries. At one point in my adolescence it dawned on me that she would rather look weird and ugly than common and pretty. And she often succeeded. She was a tall, rail-thin woman with high cheekbones and long red hair, and her strange get-ups and extreme makeup sometimes gave her a Charles Addamsy look. Naturally, I longed for a bleached-blond, mink-coated Mama who played bridge, or at least for a dumpy brunette PTA Mom in harlequin glasses and Red Cross shoes. “Couldn’t you please wear something else?” I pleaded when she was dressing for Parents’ Day in tapestried toreador pants and a Pucci pink silk sweater and a Mexican serape. (My memory must be exaggerating—but you get the general idea.) I was in seventh grade, and at the height of my passion for ordinaries. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” What wasn’t wrong with it! I shrank back into her walk-in closet, looking in vain for something ordinary. (An apron! A housedress! An angora sweater set! Something befitting a mother in a Betty Crocker ad, a Mother with a capital M.) The closet reeked of Joy and mothballs. There were cut velvet capes and feather boas and suede slacks and Aztec cotton caftans and Japanese silk kimonos and Irish tweed knickers, but absolutely nothing like an angora sweater set. “It’s just that I wish you’d wear something more plain,” I said sheepishly, “something people won’t stare at.” She glowered at me and drew herself up to her full height of five feet ten inches. “Are you ashamed of your own mother? Because if you are, Isadora, I feel sorry for you. I really do. There is nothing good about being ordinary. People don’t respect you for it. In the last analysis, people run after people who are different, who have confidence in their own taste, who don’t run with the herd. You’ll find out. There is nothing gained by giving in to the pressures of group vulgarity….” And we left for school in a cab trailing whiffs of Joy, and with Mexican fringes flapping, figuratively, in the wind.