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 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 1 (1000 BCE – 100 CE) (2009)

  the patriarchal narratives contain one or two references to Philistines, who come from a later period of history, and there are many more to a people who are close relatives of the Patriarchs, called Aramaeans – Abraham is very precisely given a kinship to the Aramaeans in one family tree.7 The settlement of Aramaeans in areas reasonably close to the land of Canaan/Israel/Palestine was a gradual process, but other historical evidence shows that it cannot have begun any earlier than 1200 BCE, and that was a very different era from the supposed time of the Patriarchs; their arrival was in a time which followed a further great upheaval in the story of the Children of Israel.8 Altogether, the chronology of the Book of Genesis simply does not add up as a historical narrative when it is placed in a reliably historical wider context. Genesis and the four books that follow are traditionally known as the Pentateuch (‘five scrolls’), because, beginning with the final chapters in Genesis, they share a theme which is the tale of this new upheaval: Israel’s journey into Egypt and subsequent liberation to travel once more north-eastwards. The journey to Egypt led to some 430 years during which the descendants of Israel and Joseph lived under the rule of the Egyptian Pharaohs. While the narrative passes over those four centuries in complete silence, there follows a richly detailed saga of mass migration or ‘Exodus’ out of Egypt, with the aim of seizing the land of Canaan promised by Israel’s God to the Patriarchs of the Book of Genesis. In the course of this Exodus, God provides formidably precise sets of regulations for everyday life and also for furnishing and running a temple – a temple which in the event did not rise in Israel for another couple of centuries. Once more, there are problems in relating this disjointed account to much evidence in external history or archaeology. Yet at the heart of the Egypt and Exodus story is something which no subsequent Israelite fantasist would have wished to make up, because it is an embarrassment: the hero and leader of the Exodus, the man presented as writing the Pentateuch itself, has a name which is not only non-Jewish but actually Egyptian: Moses.9 Moses’s name is therefore a clue to connect a people who ended up in the land of Canaan/Israel/Palestine with a mass movement of people out of Egypt. Maybe the Egyptian migrants were only a small part of that later population, who then contributed their story of exodus to the greater identity of the people, whom we can now meet in their Promised Land in the Books of Joshua and Judges. The Book of Judges at last provides stories which begin to sit more robustly and extensively amid conventional historical and archaeological evidence, and that evidence fits into the period 1200–1050 BCE. The Israel revealed in this biblical text is not yet a monarchy but a confederation of peoples ruled by ‘Judges’, leaders in peace and war who are portrayed as being individually

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  anyone passed.” 1 The Ewells are unmistakably what southerners (and a lot of other people) called white trash. Americans today have a narrow and skewed understanding of white trash. One of the most powerful and most familiar symbols of backward attitudes associated with this unfavored group is that captured in newspapers and in television footage of 1957, showing the angry white faces of protest amid school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 2015, tattooed KKK protestors defending the Confederate flag outside the Charleston, South Carolina, statehouse evoked similar feelings, demonstrating the persistence of an embarrassing social phenomenon. The stock of the Food Network’s popular performer Paula Deen, a Georgia native known for her cholesterol-rich recipes, suddenly took a nosedive in 2013, when it was revealed that she used the “N word”; almost overnight, her down-home reputation sank and she was rebranded as a crude, unsophisticated redneck. At the other extreme, television viewers have been treated to such repackaged vaudeville characters as Jefferson Davis “Boss” Hogg in The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–85), which could be seen in reruns until 2015, when it was dropped because of the Confederate flag painted on Bo and Luke Duke’s car, “General Lee.” The very title of this show was a pun on class identity, since the Dukes are poor Georgia mountain folk and moonshiners, yet their name implies English royalty. 2 These white trash snapshots offer an incomplete picture of a problem that is actually quite old and regularly goes unrecognized. In their conversations about viral events such as those noted above, Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America’s colonial period and British notions of poverty. In many ways, our class system has hinged on the evolving political rationales used to dismiss or demonize (or occasionally reclaim) those white rural outcasts seemingly incapable of becoming part of the mainstream society. The Ewells, then, are not bit players in our country’s history. Their history starts in the 1500s, not the 1900s. It derives from British colonial policies dedicated to resettling the poor, decisions that conditioned American notions of class and left a permanent imprint. First known as “waste people,” and later “white trash,” marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children —the sense of uplift on which the American dream is predicated. The American solution to poverty and social backwardness was not what we might expect. Well into the twentieth century, expulsion and even sterilization sounded

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  She started to feel ashamed. She had curled her hands around Mikey’s almost concave stomach as she rode up on the back of his bike and it had been a cool ride. Something about the fact that her father was here without a car, that they were gonna have to walk back to their house, walk along the roads of New Canaan, in the heaviest weather, like people who couldn’t manage car payments, it embarrassed her. And she would have to defend her virginity to him. It was a burn, as they said at Saxe Junior High School. This was a burn. It was going to be an awful weekend. It was going to be a holiday weekend. There were going to be lectures and long, cruel silences. It would never end. She curled her tresses around an index finger—as she stood silently next to Mikey—and squelched tears. —Well, her father said. She joined him, didn’t say anything, looked back one last time at Mikey. In his haste, Mike had zipped his shirt-tail up in his fly. She thought of his beautiful red and brown pubic hair, the color and consistency of a baby’s first tangles, and her worries diminished. Love was bittersweet. Then, on the way by, she thrust a hand into one of the packing boxes and came up with a half-dozen loose pieces of Bazooka. —Services rendered, she called back to Mike. Her father sighed. They closed the Williamses’ front door behind them. Evidence of night was everywhere. The freezing rain fell horizontally. It was ten or fifteen degrees cooler than when Wendy had waited down at Silver Meadow. Sleet and freezing rain. The mixture fell threateningly on her and her father as they made their way, skidding and cursing, down the walk and into the driveway. She began to shout a feeble and grateful apology to her father, but it was hard to manage with the wind and the rain. You couldn’t hear. On Valley Road, an emergency snow truck lumbered past them, hissing and spitting sand on the accumulating slush. Its yellow strobe lamp swiveled on top. Wendy’s father took her arm roughly at the shoulder. —Baby doll, he called, and his voice seemed to come from some beyond. —Baby doll, don’t worry about it. I really don’t care. I’m just not sure he’s good enough, that’s all. We can keep this between us. She didn’t get where he was coming from. She could hear the apology. —Huh? —I mean, he’s a joker. He’s not serious. He’ll end up living off Janey and Jim, you watch. He’s just not worth it. And that’s not a family you want to be part of. —Dad. They walked in cinnamon slush. They sank deeply into it. The precipitation fell with a relentless uniformity.

• From The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000)

  In real human social life, conversational failures like that of Tommy Snookes are relatively rare. This is not because everyone is good at verbal display, but because those who are not learn to keep relatively quiet. People tend to socialize with friends and sexual partners who show roughly their own verbal ability level—their verbal compatibility has already determined which social relationships were formed. The majority of human conversation occurs between sexual partners and long-term friends. They have already chosen each other as mates or friends precisely because their first few conversations were mutually interesting, evoking mutual respect and attraction. Ordinary talk between old friends and lovers still includes sufficient verbal display to maintain mutual respect, but may not include the same verbal fireworks as the first few conversations did. That is why conspicuous verbal display plays only a minor role in everyday speech. Thus the costs of effective display and the risks of display failure look low. But this is an illusion: meet someone new, and these costs and risks surge back into salience. Many language researchers remain preoccupied with studying the principles of syntax, by inviting native speakers of a language to tell them which sentences follow the language’s grammatical rules and which do not. These decisions are called “grammaticality judgments.” From an evolutionary perspective, it seems peculiar for linguistics to focus on this very narrow sort of normative judgment. People often speak ungrammatically in real conversation, but such rule violations are almost always ignored. People are much more interested in normative judgments about whether a speaker is truthful, relevant, interesting, tactful, intelligent, and sympathetic. Traditional linguistics has exiled all such questions to the subdiscipline of “sociolinguistics,” which concerns how people use and judge language in real social interactions. Sociolinguistics is the evolutionarily crucial level of analysis, where all the social and sexual pressures that could have shaped language show themselves. But modern sociolinguistics is a small, underfunded social science that has proved highly skeptical of evolutionary psychology.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Come here,” I said, pulling him to me and then down onto his bed, kicking off my sandals as we went. We were still in our jeans, but he whipped his shirt off and I undid my bra and tossed it into the corner of the tent and we kissed and rolled on top of each other at a feverish pitch until we grew languid and lay side by side kissing some more. His hands traveled all this while from my hair to my breasts to my waist and finally to unbutton the top button of my jeans, which is when I remembered about my hideous patches on my hips and rolled away from him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you—” “It isn’t that. It’s … There’s something I should tell you first.” “You’re married?” “No,” I said, though it took me a moment to realize I was telling the truth. Paul flashed into my mind. Paul. And suddenly, I sat up. “Are you married?” I asked, turning back to Jonathan, lying on the bed behind me. “Not married. No kids,” he replied. “How old are you?” I asked. “Thirty-four.” “I’m twenty-six.” We sat contemplating this. It seemed exotic and perfect to me that he was thirty-four. Like in spite of the fact that he’d failed to ask me anything about myself, at least I was in bed with a man who wasn’t a boy anymore. “What do you want to tell me?” he asked, and placed his hand on my naked back. When he did, I became aware that I was trembling. I wondered if he could feel that too. “It’s something I feel self-conscious about. The skin on my hips … it’s kind of … Well, you know how last night I told you that I’m in the middle of hiking this trail called the PCT? So I have to wear my backpack all the time and where the hip belt of my pack rubs against my skin, it’s become”—I searched for a way to explain it that avoided the phrases tree bark and plucked dead chicken flesh—“roughened up. Sort of calloused from so much hiking. I just don’t want you to be shocked if …” I trailed off, out of breath, my words absorbed entirely in the immaculate pleasure of his lips on the small of my back while his hands reached around the front to finish the task of unbuttoning my jeans. He sat up, his naked chest against me, pushing my hair aside to kiss my neck and shoulders until I turned and pulled him down onto me as I wriggled out of my pants while he kissed his way down my body from my ear to my throat to my collarbone to my breasts to my navel to the lace of my underwear, which he nudged down as he worked his way to the patches over my hip bones that I hoped he would never touch.

• From Wild (2012)

  I went back to the hostel and walked quietly past the beds where women unknown to me lay sleeping and into the little alcove under the eaves, where Dee and Stacy slept too, and I took off my clothes and got into the real actual bed that was astoundingly mine for the night. I lay awake for an hour, running my hands over my body, imagining what it would feel like to Jonathan if he touched it the next night: the mounds of my breasts and the plain of my abdomen, the muscles of my legs and the coarse hair on my pudenda—all of that seemed passably okay—but when I got to the palm-sized patches on my hips that felt like a cross between tree bark and a plucked dead chicken, I realized that under no circumstances while on my date tomorrow could I take off my pants. It was probably just as well. God knows I’d taken off my pants too many times to count, certainly more than was good for me. I spent the next day talking myself out of seeing Jonathan that night. All the time that I was doing my laundry, feasting at restaurants, and wandering the streets watching people, I asked myself, Who is this good-looking Wilco fan to me anyway? And yet all the while, my mind kept imagining the things we might do. With my pants still on. That evening I showered, dressed, and walked to the co-op to put on some Plum Haze lipstick and ylang-ylang oil from the free samples before strolling up to the woman who staffed the door at the club where Jonathan worked. “I might be on the list,” I said casually, and gave her my name, ready to be rebuffed. Without a word, she stamped my hand with red ink.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  “Mmm, dinner.” “So who invites you?” Rena said, hopping up to sit on the counter, unscrewing the cap of the vodka. She poured three fingers into each glass. “Oh, these girls not starve Sergei,” he said. He opened the oven, peered in at the bubbling dish I was making for Yvonne, a broccoli-and-cheese casserole, to build her up for the baby. She’d been stunned to watch me put the ingredients together, she hadn’t realized you could cook without a box with instructions. Sergei bathed his face in the smell and the heat of the oven. I cut a tiger into a leather scrap, reminding myself that Sergei was just Rena with a better facade. Handsome as a Cossack, a milky Slavic blond with sleepy blue eyes that caught every movement. By profession, a thief. Rena occasionally moved merchandise for him, a truckload of leather couches, racks of women’s coats, a shipment of stuffed animals from Singapore, small appliances from Israel. Around here, he was a constant sexual fact. He left the bathroom door open while he shaved in the nude, did a hundred push-ups every morning, his milky white skin veined with blue. If he saw you were watching he’d add a clap to show off. Those wide shoulders, the neat waist. When Sergei was in the room, I never knew what to do with my hands, with my mouth. I looked over at Yvonne across the table, bent over piles of little bags and leather scraps, sewing, patient as a girl in a fairy tale. Any other girl would be sewing the ruffles on her prom gown, or knitting baby shoes. Now I felt bad about making fun of her earlier. “Sure, I’ll go to baby class with you,” I said. “If you think I’ll be any use.” She smiled down at her sewing, ducking her head. She didn’t like to show her bad teeth. “It’s no sweat. I do all the work. All you gotta do is hold the towel.” “Huff ’n’ puff,” Niki said. “Bunch of beachballs blowing it out the wrong end. A real laugh riot. You’ll see.” Niki broke off another chunk of hash, put it on the pin. She lit it and watched the smoke fill the glass like a genie in a lamp. When she took the hit, she broke into a coughing fit even worse than mine. “None for me?” Sergei asked, pointing at the shot glass. “Fuck you, Sergei,” Niki said. “When did you ever buy us any?” But she put a little out for him anyway, and I tried to ignore the way he looked right at me as he stooped to put his lips where mine had been. But I felt my face burn right up to the hairline. We all ate, except Rena, who smoked and drank vodka. As soon as she left the room for a moment, Sergei leaned over, broad white hands folded before him.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  When I rang the doorbell, he answered in a maroon bathrobe. A Joe Jones album was playing on his hi-fi. Jones was his favorite singer, he explained. (We laughed about the coincidence of the names.) He had an all but complete collection of everything Jones had ever released. I’d brought him some tiny, innocuous house present. “Oh,” he exclaimed while opening it. “Hey! That’s so nice!” Hoke’s apartment had warm gray walls, on which hung a couple of pieces of abstract sculpture, one of which surrounded a clock. He offered me a glass of wine. We sat down, Hoke on the couch and me in an armchair, for some conversation. I remember I asked him, “Why are you sitting on your hands?” He laughed. “’Cause they’re so big and ugly. And I bite my nails so bad. My mother used to make me sit on them, for an hour, every time she caught me chewing on them. It never broke me of the habit—it just got me in the habit of trying to hide them whenever I could.” “I think you have the most beautiful hands I’ve ever seen,” I said. “They look like hands that have done something, put things together, taken them apart. You can look at them and see how they hold and heft their own histories—in a way that’s . . . well, breathtakingly beautiful.” “These . . . ?” He pulled them out and looked at them. “You gotta be kiddin’.” “As far as I’m concerned,” I told him, “movie stars should have hands that look like that. They’d be a lot more popular.” “Yeah?” Hoke laughed. “Name me a movie star who bites his nails.” “Brad Davis,” I told him. Davis was then only a few years away from his fame in Midnight Express. “He does?” “Yes,” I said. “And if you want some more heartthrobs, there’s Andy Gibb and—” “No. That’s okay.” “—but their hands are nowhere near as big and as strong as yours, so you have them beat out by miles,” I finished up. Hoke said, “Mmmm.” Because it made him uncomfortable, I changed the subject. And about ten minutes later, yes, we were in bed. Forty minutes after that, with both of us laughing pretty hard—me in my underwear and on the couch and Hoke once more in his bathrobe, in the chair this time—Hoke offered the best analysis possible of what had been, alas, a three-quarter-hour sexual fiasco.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  Pinks and blues and lavenders. Organic forms again, for the first time in years. What a relief Paris must have been, the color, the ability to be soft again. I wondered how I would paint our times. Shiny cars and wounded flesh, denim blue and zigzagged dog teeth, bits of broken mirror, fire and orange moons and garnet hearts. IN THE FALL I signed up for honors classes again. Claire made me think it was worth trying. Of course you took the honors classes. Of course you wore your jewelry. Of course you signed up for art classes at the museum. Of course. In the empty studio in the basement of the art museum, we waited for the teacher, Ms. Tricia Day. My palms sweated onto the portfolio case Claire had bought me. She wanted to sign me up for an adult class in painting. There were teen courses, in photography, fabric art, video. But no painting. “We’ll go talk to the teacher,” she said. A woman came in. Small, middle-aged, with cropped gray hair. She wore khaki pants and black horn-rimmed glasses. She looked at us wearily, an overeager mother and her spoiled kid, asking for special treatment. I was embarrassed just being there, but Claire was surprisingly businesslike. Ms. Day went through my portfolio briskly, her eyes moving in sharp lines over the surfaces. The realistic things, Claire lying on the couch, poinsettias, and the L.A. Kandinskys. “Where have you studied?” I shook my head. “Nowhere.” She finished the portfolio and handed it back to Claire. “Okay. We’ll give it a try.” Every Tuesday night, Claire brought me to the museum, went home, and then returned three hours later to pick me up. I felt guilty for her willingness to do things for me, like I was using her. I heard my mother saying, “Don’t be absurd. She wants to be used.” But I didn’t want to be like that. I wanted to be like Claire. Who but Claire would make sure I had art class, would give up a Tuesday night for me? In art class, I learned to build a support, stretch canvas, gesso it smooth. Ms. Day had us experiment with color, with strokes. The stroke of the brush was the evidence of the gesture of your arm. A record of your existence, the quality of your personality, your touch, pressure, the authority of your movement. We painted still lifes. Flowers, books. Some of the ladies in class painted only tiny flowers. Ms. Day told them to paint bigger but they were too embarrassed. I painted flowers big as pizzas, strawberries magnified to a series of green triangles on a red ground, the patterns of the seeds. Ms. Day was spartan in her praise, blunt in her criticism. Every class there was somebody crying. My mother would have liked her. I liked her too. I carefully edited what I wrote to my mother. Hello, how are you, how’s the writing.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “‘Nothing of the sort, he lay there, jiggling like’, (“I guessed what she meant”, said Quain, “the poor devil in a blue funk was frigging himself to get a cock-stand.”) ‘I thought for some time’, Mrs. Carlyle went on, ‘one moment I wanted to kiss and caress him; the next moment I felt indignant. Suddenly it occurred to me that in all my hopes and imaginings of a first night, I had never got near the reality: silent, the man lay there jiggling, jiggling. Suddenly I burst out laughing: it was all too wretched! too absurd!’ “‘At once he got out of bed with the one scornful word ‘Woman!’ and went into the next room: he never came back to my bed. “‘Yet he’s one of the best and noblest men in the world and if he had been more expansive and told me oftener that he loved me, I could easily have forgiven him any bodily weakness; silence is love’s worst enemy and after all he never really made me jealous save for a short time with Lady Ashburnham. I suppose I’ve been as happy with him as I could have been with anyone yet—’ “That’s my story”, said Quain in conclusion, “and I make you a present of it: even in the Elysian Fields I shall be content to be in the Carlyles’ company. They were a great pair!” Just one scene more. When I told Carlyle how I had made some twenty-five hundred pounds in the year and told him besides how a banker offered me almost the certainty of a great fortune if I would buy with him a certain coal-wharf at Tunbridge Wells (it was Hamilton’s pet scheme), he was greatly astonished. “I want to know”, I went on, “if you think I’ll be able to do good work in literature; if so I’ll do my best. Otherwise I ought to make money and not waste time in making myself another second-rate writer.” “No one can tell you that”, said Carlyle slowly, “You’ll be lucky if you reach the knowledge of it yourself before ye die! I thought my Frederic was great work; yet the other day you said I had buried him under the dozen volumes and you may be right; but have I ever done anything that will live?—” “Sure”, I broke in, heartsore at my gibe, “Sure, your French Revolution must live and the “Heroes and Hero Worship”, and “Latter Day Pamphlets” and, and—” “Enough”, he cried, “You’re sure?” “Quite, quite sure”, I repeated. Then he said, “You can be equally sure of your own place; for we can all reach the heights we are able to oversee.” * * * AFTERWORD TO THE FIRST VOLUME OF MY LIFE’S STORY. * * * I had hardly written “Finis” at the end of this book when the faults in it, faults both of omission and commission, rose in swarms and robbed me of my joy in the work.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  ‘I’m your friend and your doctor and anything but a fool: I’m sure I can cure you in double-quick time and you prefer to suffer. It’s stupid of you and worse—Come up now at once and think of me only as your doctor’, and I half lifted, half helped her to the door: I supported her up the stairs and at the door of her room, she said: ‘Give me ten minutes, Doctor, and I’ll be ready. I promise you I won’t lock the door again.’ “With that assurance I waited and in ten minutes knocked and went in. “Mrs. Carlyle was lying on the bed with a woolly-white shawl round her head and face. I thought it absurd affectation in an old married woman, so I resolved on drastic measures: I turned the light full on, then I put my hand under her dress and with one toss threw it right over her head. I pulled her legs apart, dragged her to the edge of the bed and began inserting the speculum in her vulva: I met an obstacle: I looked—and immediately sprang up: ‘Why, you’re a virgo intacta’ (an untouched virgin!) I exclaimed. She pulled the shawl from her head and said: ‘What did you expect?’ ‘Anything but that’, I cried, ‘in a woman married these five and twenty years!’ “I soon found the cause of her trouble and cured it or rather did away with it: that night she rested well and was her old gay, mutinous self when I called next day. “A little later she told me her story. “After the marriage”, she said, “Carlyle was strange and out of sorts, very nervous, he seemed, and irritable. When we reached the house we had supper and about eleven o’clock I said I would go to bed, being rather tired: he nodded and grunted something. I put my hands on his shoulders as I passed him and said “Dear, do you know that you haven’t kissed me once, all day—this day of days!” and I bent down and laid my cheek against his. He kissed me; but said: “You, women are always kissing—I’ll be up soon!” Forced to be content with that I went upstairs, undressed and got into bed: he hadn’t even kissed me of his own accord, the whole day! “A little later he came up, undressed and got into bed beside me. I expected him to take me in his arms and kiss and caress me.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  when our eyes met. Mrs. Bolger shook with sobs. Mr. Bolger put his hand on her shoulder. “What’s your excuse?” he said to Chuck. Chuck said there wasn’t any excuse. “Jack?” “No excuse, sir.” He looked at each of us. “Were you drinking?” We both admitted we’d been drinking. Mr. Bolger nodded, and I understood that this was in our favor, so great was his faith in the power of alcohol to transform a person. It also worked to our advantage that we ourselves had not suggested drink as a defense but confessed it as a further wrong. That left Mr. Bolger free to make our excuses for us. Chuck and I were ritually abashed, Mr. Bolger ritually angry, but the worst was over and we all knew it. We spent the rest of the morning at the kitchen table, working out a plan of reparation. Chuck and I would return the gasoline, which we had been too tired to pour into his tank. We would apologize to Mr. Welch, and we would give our word not to drink again. No mention was made of the promises we had already broken. We agreed to all of Mr. Bolger’s conditions but one—we would not tell him who had been with us. He harried us for their names, but it was plain to me that this was part of the ceremony, and that he was glad to find us capable at least of loyalty. Anyway, he must have known who the others were. We stood up and shook hands. Mr. Bolger made it clear that he did not want to lord this over us. He wanted to put the whole thing behind him, the sooner the better. Mrs. Bolger did not get up. I could see that she was still feeling the wrong of what we had done, though I did not feel it myself. CHUCK AND I loaded up the cans and drove them over to the Welch farm. It wasn’t that far through the fields, but to get there by car we had to drive up to the main road and then turn off on a winding, unpaved track still muddy from yesterday’s rain. Chuck went fast so we wouldn’t get stuck. The mud pounded against the floor of the car. We passed through scrub pine that opened up here and there to show a house or a clearing with some cows in it. Chuck swore a

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  Another film shows the whole of my body, behaving as it never would dressed, as I carry out my normal day-to-day tasks. Jacques, the director, makes me go up and down the stairs of our building twenty times in a dress of transparent black linen (there aren’t many people on the stairs at that time of day). As if I were wearing a normal, opaque dress and was being followed by an X-ray camera, you can make out from behind the pneumatic animation of the buttocks, and, from in front, you can see the trembling in my breasts each time one of my feet comes down on a step, while my pubic hair disappears into a wide shadow when it rubs up against the cloth. Even though my flesh has density, the silhouette is transient. For the next sequence, Jacques asks me to stand in the little shelter where the concierge works during the day, firstly with the top of the dress rolled down to my waist and then without the dress, and he asks me to adopt the various poses of the job. Oh, if only you could leave home and go to work with nothing on like that! It wouldn’t only be the weight of the clothes we would be freed from, it would also be the heaviness of the body which they would take with them. I admit it: the role that Jacques makes me play coincides so precisely with my own fantasies that I am unusually disturbed, almost embarrassed to find myself more naked than naked. We go back into the apartment. There, by contrast, my body stands out very clearly against the white sofa. In the middle the hand comes and goes slowly, weighed down by a huge ring, and it is only the intermittent glinting of this ring that compromises the clarity of the image. My thighs and legs are spread wide inscribing an almost perfect square. That is what I see today, but at the time I knew that it was what the man behind the camera was seeing. When, without putting the camera down, he came to remove my hand, my organ in which he slid his was as tumescent as never before. The reason was immediately clear: I was already filled by the coincidence of my real body and these multiple, volatile images.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 2 (4 BCE – 451 CE) (2009)

  round this problem by securing his ordination as presbyter without reference back to Alexandria. This second incident led to a complete breach with Demetrius, and Origen retired to Caesarea in Palestine to continue his scholarly work, handsomely funded by a wealthy admirer; Eusebius’s account of these unfortunate events betrays a certain embarrassment.90 Origen’s thirst for martyrdom came close to formal fulfilment when he died as a result of brutal maltreatment in one of the mid-third-century persecutions. Origen’s importance was twofold as biblical scholar and speculative theologian, in which roles he exhibited interestingly different talents. As a biblical scholar, he had no previous Christian rival. He set standards and directions for the giant task which was already occupying the Church, of redirecting the Tanakh to illuminating the significance of Jesus Christ in the divine plan: creating the text of the Bible as Christians now know it. His biblical commentaries became foundational for later understanding of the Christian sacred texts.91 Origen’s biblical work showed a concern for exactness and faithfulness to received texts, something very necessary in an age when the text was still uncertain in many details; on that was based the exuberant adventure of the imagination which was his theology. As we will see, his theological work contains statements of extraordinary boldness, though often presented simply as theoretical suggestions for solving a particular problem. So radical were some of these that a whole group of his ideas were labelled ‘Origenism’ and condemned at a council at Alexandria a century and a half after his death, in 400. Origen’s thought and speculations have nevertheless gone on quietly fermenting in Christian imaginations ever since his time, providing a counterpoint to those who have seen him as a bad influence on Christianity. We will discover his admirers more than once setting their thinking over against the formidable Augustine of Hippo (see pp. 315–16 and 601–2). Much of Origen’s work consequently remains in fragments, though censorship cannot account for the loss of most of his unchallengeably admirable work, the crown of his biblical labours, the Hexapla. This was a sixfold transcription of the Tanakh in six different columns side by side, apparently beginning with the Hebrew text and a transliteration of it into Greek alongside four variant Greek translations, including the Septuagint. This columnar arrangement, which had precedents in official documents, but is likely never to have been used before in a book, was partly designed for use in the still-continuing theological debates with Judaism over the meaning of the sacred text of the Tanakh. There are various explanations of why there might have been different Greek versions of the Tanakh – the most obvious being that there simply were – but by the second century one possibility is that Jews had ceased to trust their Septuagint Greek

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  He picked Joe up, shook him, held him up to his own ear. —Let’s hang him anyway. —Sure, Wendy said. So they did. What’s a noose but a slipknot? Joe fit snugly, and Sandy pulled the knot tight, and there he was, dangling. The whole gesture didn’t satisfy, really. And it left Wendy and Sandy alone in the room. She asked if he could turn Joe’s face to the wall and Sandy tried, but the rope was really wound up the wrong way. He kept spinning back around to face them. And something strange was happening right then. Wendy noticed Sandy was sitting on the bed with his pillow across his lap. Some emotion was overtaking them. She knew what this meant. She knew that Sandy was emerging briefly from under the rock where he lived. Sandy had Wendy alone in his room, in this warm room, in the midst of a swirling winter storm when his brother wanted her, when his brother was looking for her maybe. The whole thing was a gigantic turn-on. Wendy wished she had a helium balloon and could inhale that stuff and whisper in her helium tongue in Sandy’s ear. She wished he had booties on the ends of his pajama legs. She wanted to tickle him with a peacock feather. She wished he was standing naked under the swivel lamp wearing only hockey skates. —Why’ve you been avoiding me? she said. Sandy actually smiled. —Not avoiding, he said. Then scowling again. She slid up on the bed, and one by one with exaggerated slowness, she removed her snow boots, like they were stiletto heels. Fuck-me pumps. She knew what was under the pillow, she knew, like a little pinkie, like the stump of an amputated digit, Sandy’s miniature, little penis. She slid up the bed beside him. She told him she wanted to be in his bed, between his sheets. Sandy actually began to shake. —We have to go to the guest room, he said. We can’t stay in here. What if Mike …? We should go in there and close the door. We can’t stay here. My parents— —Don’t worry about them. They’re at that party. They’re getting drunk. Falling all over each other and making jokes about McGovern and stuff. He looked like he was going to cry. Then he did. Wendy didn’t feel exasperated, but she didn’t feel sympathetic either. His tears were just embarrassing. He wasn’t proud of them either. He tried to disguise their tracks; he was going to claim it was because he was tired, or because he had some special eye disorder, or because of his very strong glasses that even now he wore with a clip-on attachment. He didn’t even know what the problem was. She asked him and he didn’t know. —It’s just, it’s just— So Wendy took little Sandy Williams by the hand—his hands trembled and hers did, too—and led him around the corner into the guest room.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Guys who had gone to the same boarding schools and who belonged to the same country clubs or squash clubs doing business with one another. This fraternity was no guarantee of business acumen. Shackley and Schwimmer confronted old-boy business with academic disdain and with statistics—debt, assets, amortization, dividends, quarterly earnings figures. A little analysis, a few hot tips. The old brokerage houses weren’t prepared for it, and they didn’t like it. About this time Shackley himself devised an advertising campaign, perfected by one of the expensive Madison Avenue advertising firms, in which individual members of the Shackley and Schwimmer team were introduced in full-page advertisements. A huge full-face photograph, retouched, with copy beneath. Hood remembered his own, from 1969, with both pride and embarrassment. “Benjamin Paul Hood, Dartmouth College, ’57. First Boston, ’58–’65. Shackley and Schwimmer, ’65–. Specialty: Media and Entertainment Businesses. Outlook: Bullish.” And then the company’s bold proclamation beneath. Shackley and Schwimmer —The Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong . In the days following the advertisement, no one in the supermarket or at the country club mentioned it at all. It was as if the advertisement had fallen out of the paper altogether. As if its page had been excised or printed badly. No one mentioned it. Well, maybe the barber mentioned it, and the cleaning woman, but no one else. Hood wondered if it was the picture, of course. They had tried to whip his mottled, puffy features into an inoffensive and jolly paste. His beady eyes protruded from this pudding like some garnish, like unwanted raisins. They had clamped him into a tight shirt: he felt he would gag or asphyxiate during the photo session. And yet, his neck hung over that tightened collar, that tightened tie knot, like a precarious rock formation. Even Elena offered no encouragement about the advertisement. With the picture began the problems at the office. George Clair arrived not long after, in 1969, at the age of twenty-four. Harvard B.A. and M.B.A. Though he arrived at the office unaware of the so-called Woodstock generation and the Summer of Love, Clair grew his hair when he arrived at Shackley and Schwimmer. He purchased a tweed jacket with patches already sewn on the elbows. Clair gave new meaning to the idea of borrowed culture. He was full of clichés about Latin American debt and the ridiculousness of the Wage-Price Freeze, but he was more concerned with appropriating certain simplistic messages about film, music, and sports, and transporting them into the offices of his superiors. Ya gotta believe! Clair had remarked volubly throughout the autumn as the Mets scrambled for the pennant. Ya gotta believe! he would tell the secretary whose car had been towed. Ya gotta believe! he would say affably to Shackley about that weekend’s yacht club race or to Schwimmer about Nixon’s role in the conspiracy or the cover-up. And there had been Last Tango in Paris.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  We went up a little gravel path blocked by a group of Japanese visitors who had actually been refused entry by the air-hostess-like girl on the door. The latter asked to see my Social Security card. Not in regular employment, I did not possess one, and even on the occasions when I was able to produce a payslip I would still be in the wrong because, even today, whenever confronted by a women taller than me I turn into an awkward child. We did go in, all the same. It was lit up like a dining room, there were a lot of people, lying naked on mattresses on the floor, and what unsettled me even more than the threat of the ‘employment officer’ was that people were telling jokes. A woman with very pale skin, no make-up and tousled hair which still had the vestiges of the same French pleat as the hostess, was making everyone roar with laughter because her little boy ‘really wanted to come with her this evening’. I can see Éric, who was always very practical, working his way along the skirting board looking for a power point, because we had managed to arrange a swap with a couple and it would have been nicer to dim the lights. There were little waitresses navigating between the bodies, holding aloft trays of champagne in flutes; one of them caught her foot in the electric cable and switched the light back on. She even accompanied the act with a loud ‘shit’. After that, I don’t recall us waiting for me to extract even the scantiest bodily emission.

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  4To See or Not to See—The Consequences of Porn“When I was in law school, I invited a really smart, good-looking woman from one of my classes up to my apartment to listen to some music,” Brent, a twenty-seven-year-old attorney, recalled. “As she made her way into the living room to have a seat, I slipped into the kitchen to get us some drinks. Less than a minute later, she showed up at the kitchen door with a sour expression on her face and started making excuses about why she needed to go home. After I called her a cab and walked her out, I went back into my apartment. There, spread out on the coffee table in my living room next to a box of tissues, were some porn magazines and DVDs I’d forgotten about and left out from the night before. This nice woman hasn’t even looked at me since that night even though we sit near each other in class every day.” It took only that one incident to open Brent’s eyes to one of the consequences of his porn use: that a real woman with whom he might want to start a relationship had become turned off to him, not just sexually, but with who he was as a person. Even knowing this, Brent didn’t give up porn right away—he simply decided to hide it better when there was a chance he’d be bringing someone home. Brent’s response is completely understandable because when anything brings us pleasure, we don’t want to give it up. No one wants to stop doing something that is fun and exciting, that makes them feel better. Unfortunately, many of the things we do in life that promise or deliver instant pleasure also cause pain, or will eventually. All too often, however, because of our desire not to give up our quick pleasure fixes, we don’t see their dangerous side effects, or if we do, we are likely to look the other way when they stare us in the face. Alcohol is a good example of something pleasurable that may end up causing some people serious consequences. Many of us enjoy a glass of wine, a beer, or a mixed drink now and then. It tastes good, helps us unwind, and can take the chill out of a cold evening or a cold conversation. Like porn, alcohol is easy to obtain, comes in various flavors and strengths, and may be consumed privately or in more social settings. We also have a hard time avoiding it. Alcohol ads are everywhere encouraging us to drink, and alcoholic beverages are available in many venues.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  “Wild Bill,” as he was widely known, was so hyper as a boy that when the Dust Bowl fires stretched all the way to the woods of northern Wisconsin in the early 1930s, he would try to run toward the fire wagons. Fearful for his safety, his mother would dress him up like a girl, figuring that he’d be too embarrassed to go outside and be seen in a frilly frock. When that didn’t work, she tied him to a tree. One of the nuns who taught him at St. Robert School in Shorewood, Wisconsin, grew so tired of his shenanigans that she slammed him up against a wall hard enough that the clock hanging above him stopped and never started again. Holmer proudly claimed that the nuns kept the timepiece up there for years as a warning to other children about what could happen to them if they were as incorrigible as Bill Kissinger. But Holmer’s feistiness wasn’t the only reason my parents almost didn’t get married. My mother also worried about what Holmer would think if he knew the truth about her. My parents were fixed up on a blind date in the early spring of 1950 by Grandma, my father’s mother, of all people. Holmer was in his first year at Marquette University Law School, compliments of the GI Bill. My mother was teaching kindergarten at the Brown Street School in the poorest section of Milwaukee to children with disabilities, many of them the sons and daughters of immigrants with names like George Washington and Christopher Columbus. Grandma, who fancied herself a skilled matchmaker, spied my mother at St. Monica Catholic Church as she was returning to the pew after receiving Communion one Sunday morning, and the wheels began to turn. She knew about my mother from Bill Dorward, her new son-in-law. His parents played bridge with my mother’s parents. Grandma figured that this Jean Gutenkunst would be an excellent catch for her boy. Nice family, Bill Dorward confirmed, rubbing his thumb against the side of his index finger. Lotta this stuff. It was true. My mother grew up in Fox Point, one of the more exclusive suburbs of Milwaukee, where her father, Charlie Gutenkunst, was a village trustee. Charlie’s father, my great-grandfather, started a foundry on Milwaukee’s south side in 1885, where they manufactured tools for harvesting hay and later railroad parts, vises, clamps, wrenches, and braces. The Gutenkunsts were frequently featured in the society pages as one of Milwaukee’s most prominent families. They had a summer house on nearby Pine Lake, a Rolls-Royce, and a live-in maid, even during the worst days of the Great Depression. My mother, the oldest, and two of her three brothers attended private schools and took lessons in ballroom dancing, tennis, archery, horseback riding, and golf. Her father served as president of the Wisconsin Club and an officer at both the Town Club and the Milwaukee Country Club. Holmer’s family, by contrast, was always hard up for cash.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  After the baptism, there was a welcome into the community that involved a liturgical kiss. Well, you know, taking a bath in the nude and then kissing 329 sounds a little bit odd to outsiders, if it leaks out that that is what is happening. Moreover, the Eucharist involved “eating the flesh” and “drinking the blood” of the Son of God. There, you get the infanticide and the cannibalism again. Naturally, as word leaked out about what was going on, Christians were slandered for these kinds of “heinous” activities. In order to defend Christians against these charges, some of the apologists, like Justin Martyr and Tertullian, two people whom we have met already, went to some lengths to show that the rituals were both innocent and wholesome. Therefore, as it turns out, because there were slanders against Christians for these practices, we have some writings that survive that explain in greater detail what actually happened. If they had not been slandered, Justin Martyr and Tertullian would not have spilled the beans, but because they spilled the beans, we do know, and have a better sense of, what exactly was going on during these liturgical practices, because Justin Martyr and Tertullian tried to show that it was all completely innocent. For example, Justin Martyr, in his First Apology, explained to the outsiders why there was nothing untoward in these practices, and he laid out, in what took him about seven chapters, exactly what happened during these practices. He talked about how the baptism took place, how they had to fast in advance before the baptism, and to get baptized in water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then, he explained how they went and had this ritual kiss, and then celebrated the Eucharist meal. He described the thanks that was given for this Eucharist meal, and went ahead and gave a full description of it. Eventually, these practices of Eucharist and baptism became more complex, as church leaders tried to spell out exactly how they were to be performed. Just as the doctrine had to correctly be laid out, and you had to be correct in all the things you said, all the ins and outs of the doctrine, so, too, in your liturgical services. There was a right way to do a liturgical act, and a wrong way. Thus, these church fathers gave indications of both. One place that is found with particular clarity is in Hippolytus’ work, the Apostolic Tradition, mentioned in the previous lecture. In the Apostolic Tradition, we have a lengthy account of what one must do in preparation for the baptism, and so, he spelled out how many days in advance one needed instruction. There was actually a three-year waiting period before you could be baptized, a period of instruction, in which you learned the rudiments of the faith. Then, there was a complex set of preparatory rituals that involved 330