Excitement

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 The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “Four. The bars had closed. I hadn’t scored and, anyway, I couldn’t feature another night with a grown-up, some accountant from Jersey City with a screw-on collar pin who wants to sixty-nine because he thinks it’s fair!” Horrified laugh. He’d been leaning across the sticky Formica table, scrutinizing me, his face in mine, but now he slammed back and disturbed the man behind him. “So, discouraged and rather tipsy”—a grimace to indicate his disgust with himself—“I came in here, ordered my mournful stack and two burned sausages, and looked in the corner and saw a divinity, a little blond god or goddess smiling at me. I could focus on him only by closing one eye, and I was so ashamed of myself I wanted to head home and hide. I’d fallen so low I was completely bitter and paranoid and really thought he and his little drag friends, all so chic and desirable, had decided to pick on me as a comically woebegone specimen. But finally this little goddess—I really wasn’t sure what sex she was, she’d been sewn into white jeans with green thread, she had an Hermès scarf tied to her shoulder bag—anyway, she came over and I bought her a cup of coffee and now she’s moved in, I can’t believe my luck, a perfect little boy-girl all my own, he makes me dinner just like a little wife and goes to sleep listening to rock ’n’ roll from the radio under the pillow, our whole nights are afloat on a sea of rock-’n’-roll wisdom.” I had dinner several times with Lou and Misty, but Lou never participated in the conversation. He preferred to watch me interview Misty. Then he’d watch Misty respond at tedious, childlike, mendacious length—I say “watch” us because he sat at some distance from us, as though we were actors having a quick runthrough and whispering our lines. His pleasure at having such a fabulous creature in his house was increased when he gazed at Misty from a distance. When summer came, we three went to Riis Park together, taking the subway all the way to the end of the line, then switching to a bus that let us off at the big Brooklyn public beach. One section was gay, and there, late in the long hot afternoon, these cute Puerto Rican guys would start dancing to a portable radio or even a stack of the latest 45s. Beers would pass from hand to hand, a circle gathered, the late sun stared into its own reflection, the smell of seaweed blended with the cooking smells drifting over from the takeout stands along the boardwalk, the smell of franks and steamer clams. Gay boys sat and combed each other’s hair or scampered into the nearly becalmed surf as someone’s mother, a Mrs. Meyer, “spritzed” herself by flicking drops over her shoulders from diamonded old fingers.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Lou, a black grease mark on his T-shirt, was standing beside me, holding my hand, chanting, “Gay is good.” We were all chanting it, knowing how ridiculous we were being in this parody of a real demonstration but feeling giddily confident anyway. Now someone said, “We’re the Pink Panthers,” and that made us laugh again. Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis. “This could be the first funny revolution,” Lou said. “Aren’t these guys great, Bunny? Lily Law should never have messed with us on the day Judy died. Look, they’ve turned the parking meter into a battering ram.” The double wooden doors to the Stonewall cracked open. I could hear the cops inside shouting over their walkie-talkies. One of them stepped out with a raised hand to calm the crowd, but everyone booed him and started shoving and he retreated back into Fort Disco. The city trash cans were overflowing with paper cups, greasy napkins, discarded newspapers. A new group of gays rushed up, emptied a can into the splintered-open doorway, doused it with lighter fluid, and lit it. A cloud of black smoke billowed up. “They’ve gone too far,” I said. A black maria came around the corner of Seventh Avenue and up Christopher the wrong way. The cops cleared the sidewalk, formed a cordon, and rushed the remaining bartenders into the van past the smoldering garbage, but the crowd booed even louder. Once the van had driven off, the cops pushed us slowly back from the bar entrance. Down the street, some of our men turned over a parked Volkswagen. The cops rushed down to it while behind them another car was overturned. Its windows shattered and fell out. Now everyone was singing the civil rights song, “We Shall Overcome.” The riot squad was called in. It marched like a Roman army behind shields down Christopher from the women’s prison, which was loud with catcalls and the clatter of metal drinking cups against steel bars. The squad, clubs flying, drove the gay men down Christopher, but everyone doubled back through Gay Street and emerged behind the squad in a chorus line, dancing the can-can. “Yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo,” they called. Lou and I stayed out all night, whooping like kids, huddling in groups to plan tomorrow’s strategy, heckling the army of cops who were closing off all of Sheridan Square as a riot zone and refusing to let cars or pedestrians pass through it. I stayed over at Lou’s. We hugged each other in bed like brothers, but we were too excited to sleep. We rushed down to buy the morning papers to see how the Stonewall Uprising had been described. “It’s really our Bastille Day,” Lou said. But we couldn’t find a single mention in the press of the turning point of our lives. [image file=image_rsrc1CE.jpg] GENET A Biography “A marvelous, irreplaceable writer.” —James Merrill

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  But finally this little goddess—I really wasn’t sure what sex she was, she’d been sewn into white jeans with green thread, she had an Hermès scarf tied to her shoulder bag—anyway, she came over and I bought her a cup of coffee and now she’s moved in, I can’t believe my luck, a perfect little boy-girl all my own, he makes me dinner just like a little wife and goes to sleep listening to rock ’n’ roll from the radio under the pillow, our whole nights are afloat on a sea of rock-’n’-roll wisdom.” I had dinner several times with Lou and Misty, but Lou never participated in the conversation. He preferred to watch me interview Misty. Then he’d watch Misty respond at tedious, childlike, mendacious length—I say “watch” us because he sat at some distance from us, as though we were actors having a quick runthrough and whispering our lines. His pleasure at having such a fabulous creature in his house was increased when he gazed at Misty from a distance. When summer came, we three went to Riis Park together, taking the subway all the way to the end of the line, then switching to a bus that let us off at the big Brooklyn public beach. One section was gay, and there, late in the long hot afternoon, these cute Puerto Rican guys would start dancing to a portable radio or even a stack of the latest 45s. Beers would pass from hand to hand, a circle gathered, the late sun stared into its own reflection, the smell of seaweed blended with the cooking smells drifting over from the takeout stands along the boardwalk, the smell of franks and steamer clams. Gay boys sat and combed each other’s hair or scampered into the nearly becalmed surf as someone’s mother, a Mrs. Meyer, “spritzed” herself by flicking drops over her shoulders from diamonded old fingers. Someone had set up a white tent in the sand, not the usual boy-scout sort but a noble tent right out of a medieval movie, and three black drags kept going in and out of it to change clothes. Misty was in raptures over a Dionne Warwick look-alike. The dance gathered momentum. We were too zonked from the heat and beer and the sun’s stare to stroll over, but we lay on our sides and watched the virtuoso turns each soloist took, daring the next dancer to greater intricacies. I closed my eyes. I listened to the rhythmic clapping of the tribe. When I looked again, the red-haired Puerto Rican boy on the next towel over, wearing a swimsuit that said “Made in USA,” had finally stopped doing sit-ups and seemed to be sleeping. I felt far from the private beach of my childhood in front of our Michigan summer cottage. Now I was at once thrilled to be among so many poor people and afraid I had become one of them.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  We were passing below the women’s prison on the corner of Eighth and Sixth, just next to the old Jefferson Market Courthouse, and two women on the street were calling up to the metal-shuttered windows. “Lorine, you cheat on me, bitch, I beat yo’ black ass, hear? I love ya’, honey, save ya’ love for mama.” Over the motor hum and the tocsin of impatient horns, these women called out to each other, their New York voices penetrating and forlorn. “Look at them, Bunny, they’re so heroic, these dykes, they don’t give a shit about all these Village Beatniks and dull-normals, they just want to wail out their love, keep that prison cunt faithful till release, ah!” and Lou pressed a broken hand to his chest as though he were a Saint Sebastian pierced by melancholy, “it’s so beautiful, this beautiful poetry of gay life.” On this hot July night the streets were thronged with people. Here a crowd circled a sidewalk artist sketching a solemn young man with waved hair and spotty skin. The sitter was posing as though his profile were about to go on the coin of the realm. He was the only one who couldn’t see how the sketch was coming along, this disappointment being patiently prepared for him. There, in the little park across from the Waverly movie theater, an impromptu game of basketball had broken out and bare sweaty black and tan torsos flashed through the dark, reflecting the lights surging up Sixth. Cars on MacDougal slowly waded through people like buffalo through flooded paddies. The sound of voices, of street musicians, rang off the brick walls of tenements. Above the streetlights shadowy families sat on metal fire escapes. Now we passed an ornate Italian coffee shop, flyblown mirrors hung in gilt frames dimmer than a helmet in a Rembrandt. The eagle atop the espresso machine flew imperiously through a cloud of steam. No faggots appeared to have strayed over to this side of Sixth Avenue, but once we recrossed it we were back among what Lou called the “Cha-cha queens, hairburners, and glandular cases.” A hissing trio like rattled snakes in an agitated basket were hanging out on a stoop, their lips flecked with foam. Another pair were dancing in the water of an open fire hydrant, shirts tied to expose their tummies. Lou was in a delirium: “Bunny, we’re home, you can press your ear to the pavement and hear the heartbeat,” and even though he made me feel such a prig, my heart did leap at all the possibilities this city offered to meet men. Before, I’d caught only half glimpses of queers, but like a hunter who pursues his deer deep into the night forest, at last I’d come upon a moonlit clearing filled with thousands of moving antlers, all these men. Lou had the address of a gay restaurant in the Village.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  He never stopped touching my knee or shoulder, sometimes tapping me, then abandoning his nerveless, unexpectedly heavy hand to my care. “Now look at little Jimmy here,” he said with a curator’s pride, “isn’t he fabulous?” A round-faced man of thirty trying to look twenty in skin-tight black jeans and white boots and an open white shirt tied high at the waist to show a hairless midriff came hopping up to us. He kissed Lou in a crisp stylization of a kiss and revolved into his arms as Lou reached down from the stool to embrace him. “Hi, toots, who’s the brainy chicken?” Jimmy jerked his head toward me, effortlessly lifted my horrible glasses off my face, and perched them on the tip of his adorable snub nose. “Don’t let me wreck your nerves, doll,” he whispered to me, very gal-to-gal, “I’m just the frisky type.” Lou lowered his eyes, charmed by such brassiness. We drank beer after beer, darted across the street to another bar, so I could see that bartender’s “perfect buns,” then headed down Rush toward the Chicago River where a little gay dance spot was hidden behind a restaurant with checked tablecloths. We watched couples foxtrotting cheek-to-cheek to Timi Yuro singing “Make the World Go Away.” A black man the color and shininess of eggplant was dancing with a white boy the shape and golden

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The cops cleared the sidewalk, formed a cordon, and rushed the remaining bartenders into the van past the smoldering garbage, but the crowd booed even louder. Once the van had driven off, the cops pushed us slowly back from the bar entrance. Down the street, some of our men turned over a parked Volkswagen. The cops rushed down to it while behind them another car was overturned. Its windows shattered and fell out. Now everyone was singing the civil rights song, “We Shall Overcome.” The riot squad was called in. It marched like a Roman army behind shields down Christopher from the women’s prison, which was loud with catcalls and the clatter of metal drinking cups against steel bars. The squad, clubs flying, drove the gay men down Christopher, but everyone doubled back through Gay Street and emerged behind the squad in a chorus line, dancing the can-can. “Yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo,” they called. Lou and I stayed out all night, whooping like kids, huddling in groups to plan tomorrow’s strategy, heckling the army of cops who were closing off all of Sheridan Square as a riot zone and refusing to let cars or pedestrians pass through it. I stayed over at Lou’s. We hugged each other in bed like brothers, but we were too excited to sleep. We rushed down to buy the morning papers to see how the Stonewall Uprising had been described. “It’s really our Bastille Day,” Lou said. But we couldn’t find a single mention in the press of the turning point of our lives.

• From Vox (1992)

  143 gnarled around the hot-water tap and he circled fiercely around the clitty thing that controls the drain, and then when the whole rest of the tub was absolutely gleaming, he went to the drain itself—he set aside the filter thing, and he reached two fingers way in, and he pulled out this revolting slime locket and splapped it against the side of the tub, and then he really went to work on that drain, around and around the rim of chrome, and deeper, right down to those dark crossbars, that I'd never gotten to, he worked the scrubber sponge in there, grrr, more Ajax, more circling, more hot water. I mean I was in a trans port!" "I bet." "Then I held out the trash can, and he threw out the drain slime and the Rescue pad, and he rinsed his hands, and he stood, and in the midst of this newly cleaned tub he started to rinse off his cock and his legs, where a little oil had fallen, and I watched the water go over him, I watched the way the even spray of the showerhead in his hand made all the hairs on his legs into these perfect perfect rows, like some ideal crop, and he was quite hairy, and so I slipped off my shorts and unders and sat on the far end of the bathtub and propped my left foot against a washcloth handle and I hung my right leg out over the edge of the bathtub, so I was wide open, and I said, Tm a bit rank, too, do me,' so he started playing the water over my legs and then directly on my . . . femalia, and I held my lips open so that he could see my inner

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  A poisoned arrow. I want to kill off books, writers, publishers, readers. To write for the public doesn’t mean a thing to me. What I’d like is to write for madmen—or for the angels.” I paused and a curious smile came over my face at the thought which had entered my head. “That landlady of ours, I wonder what she’d think if she heard me talking this way? She’s too good to us, don’t you think? She doesn’t know us. She’d never believe what a walking pogrom I am. Nor has she any idea why I’m so crazy about Sirota and that bloody synagogue music.” I pulled up short. “What the hell has Sirota got to do with it anyway?” “Yes, Val, you’re excited. Put it in the book. Don’t waste yourself in talk!” Such Exquisite Torture—NexusSometimes I would sit at the machine for hours without writing a line. Fired by an idea, often an irrelevant one, my thoughts would come too fast to be transcribed. I would be dragged along at a gallop, like a stricken warrior tied to his chariot. On the wall at my right there were all sorts of memoranda tacked up: a long list of words, words that bewitched me and which I intended to drag in by the scalp if necessary; reproductions of paintings, by Uccello, della Francesca, Breughel, Giotto, Memling; titles of books from which I meant to deftly lift passages; phrases filched from my favorite authors, not to quote but to remind me how to twist things occasionally; for example: “The worm that would gnaw her bladder” or “the pulp which had deglutinized behind his forehead.” In the Bible were slips of paper to indicate where gems were to be found. The Bible was a veritable diamond mine. Every time I looked up a passage I became intoxicated. In the dictionary were place marks for lists of one kind or another: flowers, birds, trees, reptiles, gems, poisons, and so on. In short, I had fortified myself with a complete arsenal. But what was the result? Pondering over a word like praxis, for example, or pleroma, my mind would wander like a drunken wasp. I might end up in a desperate struggle to recall the name of that Russian composer, the mystic, or Theosophist, who had left unfinished his greatest work. The one of whom someone had written—“He, the messiah in his own imagination, who had dreamed of leading mankind toward ‘the last festival,’ who had imagined himself God, and everything, including himself, his own creation, who had dreamed by the force of his tones to overthrow the universe, died of a pimple.” Scriabin , that’s who it was. Yes, Scriabin could derail me for days. Every time his name popped into my head I was back on Second Avenue, in the rear of some café, surrounded by Russians (white ones usually) and Russian Jews, listening to some unknown genius reel off the sonatas, preludes and études of the divine Scriabin.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I finally got out of that shitty gay life.” Yet it didn’t seem so shitty just now. We maintained, of course, the premise that we were sick, that our experience was limited, that we were missing out on the good things of life, and that our old age would be lonely. Worse, we anticipated a steady effeminization with the years. I knew I’d end up a seventy- year-old waiter, hair peroxided, camping with my gay customers and eyeing with hatred all the women customers I didn’t already know and share beauty secrets with, a wizened old bird lined from excessive dieting and unwilling to go out at night for fear of hoodlums. But just now that seemed a long way off. With Sean, of course, I pretended to be very studious and serious and even unfamiliar with gay life, but on nights when I was free I went out cruising. After the World’s Fair cleanup, gay bars started opening again, every month a new one. The Village gay life, which until now had collected along Greenwich Avenue, began to seep slowly down Christopher Street. Spring came, and boys were sitting on stoops almost all the way down to the Hudson. Every day I’d arrive at work later and later. We were supposed to be there at ten, but I never arrived before eleven. No one said anything. I had my captions to write, then whole paragraphs, but the company was so overstaffed that we were given two weeks to write a hundred lines. We typed on lined paper that gave the exact character count, but it didn’t matter, since every textblock was rewritten by all those idle editors over us. I closed my door and fell asleep on my desk, called all my friends, took two-hour lunches, had my shoes shined by a man who went from floor to floor with his kit and who once even offered to bump off anyone I wanted for two hundred dollars. I lived for my nights. I’d rush home and fall asleep in my clothes. Hours later I’d awaken, eat cottage cheese out of the carton and a whole tomato, then I’d dress for cruising and head out into the night. The appeal of gay life for me was that it provided so many glancing contacts with other men. At the gym I was becoming an old hand, and now I was the one to show the new guys how to work the lat machine or do heavy squats without injuring the back, but I never knew their names. At the bar I would buy drinks for “friends” and they for me, but again we seldom knew each other’s names.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  He’d pulled up one trousers leg and caressed his calf and said, “I’m feeling so gay tonight.” Then he shook his head as though he had curls instead of a close crop. He wasn’t smiling; he was completely serious. I didn’t know exactly what he meant but I knew he meant something quite precise. “Shut up, Morris,” Tex snapped in a cruelly direct voice and jerked his head to indicate me. I turned just in time to catch it. “And Morris,” he added, “lay off the fuckin’ eye-shadow for chrissake. I’m running a respectable operation here. One more warning you’re out on your little depilated tush.” I looked more closely at Morris. I couldn’t see any trace of makeup. Why would he wear it? I wondered. Do queers like that? Is that how they can tell who’s who? The joy of reading The Outsider had turned ugly. Snow whirled in a sudden updraft, then fell through the streetlights. Day after day the snow fell and the streets rang with the sound of shovels. People in fur hats and many layers of clothing tiptoed awkwardly over gutters piled high with the snow that street plows had turned back. At home I felt a constant tingling excitement just knowing that yesterday afternoon I’d seen Tex and again today I would snatch a few minutes with him. In Evanston, I stood in the bay window and looked out at Lake Michigan beating itself up. Ticking steadily inside me was the thought, half-thrill half-fear, that within my grasp, or almost, lay this other world. This “gay world,” you might say, with its mood swings turning slowly, then slamming you to one side like a roller coaster on a sharp turn. This world with its childlike enthusiasms and vicious attacks. I associated it with Morris’s silent pouting and the way he’d stroked his leg, licked his lips, and said, “I’m feeling so gay tonight.” Although I knew something would have to come out of my visits if I continued paying them, I feared what I hoped, and what I hoped I didn’t want to know. Tick, tick, tick. The excitement was in my pulse. I couldn’t think of anything else nor did I want to. I’d look at the mashed potatoes exhaling steam and I’d hear the ticking in my ears. In my bed at night as I peeked through the curtains at the old man across the way reading his paper and luxuriantly picking his nose, I’d hear the tick taking me nearer to my next encounter with Tex. The next afternoon Tex and I were alone in the shop. Morris was home with what Tex sourly referred to as a “sick headache” and Tex kept complaining about Morris’s inept bookkeeping. He was looking through the accounts and a long gray silence installed itself in the room.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The next morning, lightly silvered in hangover sweat, he finally let me plunge into that strong ass, but not before he’d greased me up with KY and produced his “trick towel.” He wouldn’t kiss or let me face him when I took him. But I could reach my hands around his waist and feel the shifting muscles of that long flat stomach working as he twisted and pushed back against me. It dawned on me the stomach scar was there from the time when the doctors must have inserted extra muscles, the long sexy kind—the interior ones gripping me now. I had to say the alphabet backward to keep myself from coming. The moment I looked at what I was doing to him, I could feel myself ready to explode. My come wanted to enter him in order to stake even the smallest claim on someone who seemed superior to me in every way. William Everett Hunton had talked as though the one who does the fucking is the “man,” but with Lou that didn’t make much sense. Obviously he was in control of everything we were doing. It didn’t occur to me that this shockingly intense pleasure could be sought after. If you’re someone mainly eager to please others, you don’t think much about your own pleasure; taking pleasure is not a survival skill, while giving it most certainly is. Lou and I saw each other every day. I stopped going to work, but it didn’t matter, since Lou had lots and lots of loose money in his pockets and he picked up checks without seeming to notice; his carelessness made a mockery of all those hours I’d crouched inside trucks. With a red face I started to explain the lie I’d told the countertenor, but when I confessed the apartment was actually my mother’s, Lou wasn’t interested in either the truth or its distortion. He’d never stopped to wonder how a college kid had his own apartment on the Gold Coast or why it was full of matronly clothes. He was only concerned with realizing his own myths and explaining them to me in order to convince himself. He found anything extreme to be “beautiful” or “moving,” even “heartbreaking,” and his favorite phrase was “shimmering with ambiguity.” He divided all homosexuals into “boys,” “men,” and “vicious old queens.” A man (laborer, truckdriver, even “high-powered exec”) must lust after and love a boy, who would be “beautiful” or at least “cute” but given to sudden enthusiasms, usually reckless and foolish. A man was brawny, cruel, except to the boy, whom he cherished, although sometimes cruelly. The man could be forgiven if he beat someone up, the boy if he bleached his hair. The boy felt a natural affinity to girls, with whom he was always exchanging makeup tips. The man had once fucked girls but now had no further use for them.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Bambara’s text attempted to rectify this need for self-study, but she soon realized the perhaps too-ambitious scope of the book. Among a few of the topics in her twelve-point list were to “set up a comparative study of the woman’s role as she saw it in all the Third World Nations; examine the public school system and blueprint some viable alternatives; explore ourselves and set the record straight on the matriarch and the evil Black bitch; pay tribute to all our warriors from the ancient times to the slave trade to Harriet Tubman to Fannie Lou Hamer to the woman of this morning; interview the migrant workers and the grandmothers of the UNIA; analyze the Freedom Budget and design ways to implement it; thoroughly discuss the whole push for Black Studies programs and a Black university; get into the whole area of sensuality, sex (and is not in original); and finally “chart the steps necessary for forming a working alliance with all nonwhite women of the world for the formation of, among other things, a clearing house for the exchange of information.” As this “list grew and grew,” she came to understand it as a “lifetime of work,” of which the anthology constituted “just a beginning.” 56 In many ways, though, Black women who hoped to fulfill the ambitious intellectual projects she laid out were beginning again. Fannie Barrier Williams, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and Victoria Earle Matthews had been calling for racial knowledge production about Black women since 1893. Over three-quarters of a century later, however, Black women still were not seen as experts on their own social condition, and, indeed, if Ebony is to be believed, not capable of any appreciable expertise at all. Bambara’s list of items of study, however, did offer a set of priorities for Black and women-of-color feminisms that have been taken up across a range of disciplines at the present date. The priorities she laid out continue to inform new avenues of study within the broader fields of Black feminism and Black Studies. Black Woman did effectively take up the charge from Pierce’s Ebony article to lay out a “new definition of Black femininity.” So, for instance, in Bambara’s oft-cited essay “On the Issue of Roles,” she faced head-on the question of “the Black woman’s Role in the Revolution,” by questioning both the binary definitions of masculine and feminine and offering up her own structural account of Black gender categories. Calling stereotypical notions of masculine and feminine “a lot of merchandising nonsense,” Bambara argued that gender binaries militated against “what revolution for self is all about— the whole person.” These questions about the relations of gendered identities to revolutionary politics implicated each other, for “the usual notion of sexual differentiation in roles is an obstacle to political consciousness, [because] the way those terms are generally defined and acted upon in this part of the world is a hindrance to full development.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  My last year in boarding school during Christmas vacation in Chicago, I met a small Texan with bad eyes, bad skin, and the smell of Luckies on his breath. Tex ran a book and record store next to an art house showing movies near the Loop. “Art movies” were still new then. The label might mean Gina Lollobrigida jiggling provocatively up and down hills on a donkey or it might mean Gérard Philipe meeting an early death as the crazed painter Modigliani. Despite the range, art meant Europe, and something European shed its glow on Tex. I’d get on the elevated train in Evanston and ride an hour each way late in the afternoon just to escape my mother and sister and spend thirty minutes with him. He loved books. I remember running with him down the street one gray winter afternoon when the sun, discouraged by a cold reception, had withdrawn. Tex had nothing on but a tweed jacket and a ratty scarf steeped in smoke, itself the color of smoke. He was racing like a kid to the post office to carry back to the store two boxes of books, all copies of The Outsider by Colin Wilson. I carried one box. Tex had ripped open the other and was juggling with it as he read random pages to me. “Listen to this, will you,” Tex shouted with a sudden reemergence of his warm Southern accent. Generally he tried to sound contained, as though he’d just sucked a lemon, but now his mouth was filling up with hot sweet potato pie. In another instant we were back in Tex’s cozy store, which had been temporarily confided to the care of his pouty assistant, Morris. We settled into a heap on the pink velvet loveseat by the window to read The Outsider to each other in excited snatches. That was the way Tex read, as though a new book were a telegram addressed to him personally. This one was about a whole fortune that a spiritual uncle somewhere off in England had willed him, since the book told us about existentialism and its roots and suggested that, over there at least, to be an outsider was not a cause for shame but a condition that could be capitalized on, even capitalized. Tex talked to me about the Human Condition. Because he didn’t introduce his ideas and he threw away the ends of sentences, he seemed to be letting me in on a conversation I’d be gauche to interrupt and question. The bitter coffee we drank, the sound of the discreetly murmuring announcer on the classical music radio station, and the sight of reflected spotlights tilting off varnished new books and records still in their cellophane wrappers—all of these things came together to excite me, especially since I knew Tex was gay. Morris, the assistant, even used that word when there was no one else in the shop.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Ignorant of the fact that almost fifty years previously a crazy Jew in South America had given birth to such startlingly marvelous phrases as “doubt’s duck with the vermouth lips” or “I have seen a fig eat an onager”—that about the same time a Frenchman, who was only a boy, was saying: “Find flowers that are chairs” … “my hunger is the black air’s bits” … “his heart, amber and spunk.” Maybe at the same time, or thereabouts, while Jarry was saying “in eating the sound of moths,” and Apollinaire repeating after him “near a gentleman swallowing himself,” and Breton murmuring softly “night’s pedals move uninterruptedly,” perhaps “in the air beautiful and black” which the lone Jew had found under the Southern Cross another man, also lonely and exiled and of Spanish origin, was preparing to put down on paper these memorable words: “I seek, all in all, to console myself for my exile, for my exile from eternity, for that un-earthing (destierro) which I am fond of referring to as my unheavening … At present, I think that the best way of writing this novel is to tell how it should be written. It is the novel of the novel, the creation of creation. Or God of God, Deus de Deo .” Had I known he was going to add this, this which follows, I would surely have gone off like a bomb…. “By being crazy is understood losing one’s reason. Reason, but not the truth, for there are madmen who speak truths while others keep silent….” Speaking of these things, speaking of the war and the war dead, I cannot refrain from mentioning that some twenty years later I ran across this in French by a Frenchman, O miracle of miracles! “Il faut le dire, il y a des cadavres que je ne respecte qu’à moitié .” Yes, yes, and again yes! O, let us do some rash thing—for the sheer pleasure of it! Let us do something live and magnificent, even if destructive! Said the mad cobbler: “All things are generated out of the grand mystery, and proceed out of one degree into another. Whatever goes forward in its degree, the same receives no abominate.” Everywhere in all times the same ovarian world announcing itself. Yet also, parallel with these announcements, these prophecies, these gynecological manifestoes, parallel and contemporaneous with them new totem poles, new taboos, new war dances. While into the air so black and beautiful the brothers of man, the poets, the diggers of the future, were spitting their magic lines, in this same time, O profound and perplexing riddle, other men were saying: “Won’t you please come and take a job in our ammunition factory. We promise you the highest wages, the most sanitary and hygienic conditions.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  But, over all the other pleasures that be there is that of fair ladies, who, so one but will it, are incontinent brought thither from the four quarters of the world. There might you see the Sovereign Lady of the Rascal-Roughs, the Queen of the Basques, the wife of the Soldan, the Empress of the Usbeg Tartars, the Driggledraggletail of Norroway, the Moll-a-green of Flapdoodleland and the Madkate of Woolgathergreen. But why need I enumerate them to you? There be all the queens in the world, even, I may say, to the Sirreverence of Prester John, who hath his horns amiddleward his arse; see you now? There, after we have drunken and eaten confections and walked a dance or two, each lady betaketh herself to her bedchamber with him at whose instance she hath been brought thither. And you must know that these bedchambers are a very paradise to behold, so goodly they are; ay, and they are no less odoriferous than are the spice-boxes of your shop, whenas you let bray cummin-seed, and therein are beds that would seem to you goodlier than that of the Doge of Venice, and in these they betake themselves to rest. Marry, what a working of the treadles, what a hauling-to of the battens to make the cloth close, these weaveresses keep up, I will e'en leave you to imagine; but of those who fare best, to my seeming, are Buffalmacco and myself, for that he most times letteth come thither the Queen of France for himself, whilst I send for her of England, the which are two of the fairest ladies in the world, and we have known so to do that they have none other eye in their head than us.[400] Wherefore you may judge for yourself if we can and should live and go more merrily than other men, seeing we have the love of two such queens, more by token that, whenas we would have a thousand or two thousand florins of them, we get them not. This, then, we commonly style going a-roving, for that, like as the rovers take every man's good, even so do we, save that we are in this much different from them that they never restore that which they take, whereas we return it again, whenas we have used it. Now, worthy doctor mine, you have heard what it is we call going a-roving; but how strictly this requireth to be kept secret you can see for yourself, and therefore I say no more to you nor pray you thereof.'

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  O fiddledee, O fiddledee, O fiddledum-dum-dee! And now I take leave of that young man sitting alone upstairs in the lugubrious parlor reading the Classics. What a dismal picture! What could he have done with the Classics, had he succeeded in swallowing them? The Classics! Slowly, slowly, I am coming to them—not by reading them, but by making them. Where I join with the ancestors, with my, your, our glorious predecessors, is on the field of the cloth of gold. Bref , daily life… Voltaire, though you are not precisely a classic, you gave me nothing, neither with your Zadig , nor with your Candide . And why pick on that miserable, vinegar-bitten skeleton, Monsieur Arouet? Because it suits me at this moment. I could name twelve hundred different duds and dunderheads who likewise gave me nothing. I could let out a pétarade. To what end? To indicate, to signify, to asseverate and adjudicate that, whether drunk or sober, whether with roller skates or without, whether with bare fists or six-ounce gloves, life comes first. Oui, en terminant ce fatras d’événements de ma pure jeunesse, je pense de nouveau à Cendrars. De la musique avant toute chose! Mais, que donne mieux la musique de la vie que la vie elle-même? The Voice—Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus BoschHere I must interrupt to relate what happened a few minutes ago when I was taking a nap. I say “taking a nap,” but more truthfully I mean—when I was trying to take a nap. In lieu of sleep I got messages. This business has been going on ever since I got the happy thought about the oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. This noon it was bad, very bad. I could hardly taste the delicious lunch my wife Eve had prepared for me. As soon as I had finished lunch, I threw a few sticks of wood on the fire, rolled myself up in a blanket and prepared to take my usual snooze before resuming work. (The more snoozes I take the more work I do. It pays off.) I closed my eyes, but the messages kept on coming. When they became too insistent, too clamorous, I would open my eyes and call out, “Eve, jot this down on the pad for me, will you? Just say ‘abundance’ … ‘pilfering’ … ‘Sandy Hook.’” I thought that in tabbing a few key words I could turn off the current. But it didn’t work. Whole sentences poured in on me. Then paragraphs. Then pages…. It’s a phenomenon that always astounds me, no matter how often it happens. Try to bring it about and you fail miserably. Try to squelch it and you become more victimized. Forgive me, but I must go into it further…. The last time it happened was while I was writing Plexus . During the year or so that I was occupied with this work—one of the worst periods, in other respects, that I have ever lived through—the inundation was almost continuous.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  The title describes my new-found situation to a T. My creative energy suddenly released, I spilled over in all directions at once. Instead of a book, the first thing I sat down to write was a prose poem about Brooklyn’s backyard. I was so in love with the idea of being a writer that I could scarcely write. The amount of physical energy I possessed was unbelievable. I wore myself out in preparation. It was impossible for me to sit down quietly and just turn on the flow; I was dancing inside. I wanted to describe the world I knew and be in it at the same time. It never occurred to me that with just two or three hours of steady work a day I could write the thickest book imaginable. It was my belief then that if a man sat down to write he should remain glued to his seat for eight or ten hours at a stretch. One ought to write and write until he dropped from exhaustion. That was how I imagined writers went about their task. If only I had known then the program which Cendrars describes in one of his books! Two hours a day, before dawn, and the rest of the day to oneself. What a wealth of books he has given the world, Cendrars! All en marge . Employing a similar procedure—two or three hours a day regularly every day of one’s life—Rémy de Gourmont had demonstrated, as Cendrars points out, that it is possible for a man to read virtually everything of value which has ever been written. But I had no order, no discipline, no set goal. I was completely at the mercy of my impulses, my whims, my desires. My frenzy to live the life of the writer was so great that I overlooked the vast reservoir of material which had accumulated during the years leading up to this moment. I felt impelled to write about the immediate, about what was happening outside my very door. Something fresh , that’s what I was after. To do this was compulsive because, whether I was aware of it or not, the material which I had stored up had been chewed to a frazzle during the years of frustration, doubt and despair when everything I had to say was written out in my head. Add to this that I felt like a boxer or wrestler getting ready for the big event. I needed a work-out. These first efforts then, these fantasies and fantasias, these prose poems and rambling divagations of all sorts, were like a grand tuning up of the instrument. It satisfied my vanity (which was enormous) to set off Roman candles, pin-wheels, sputtering firecrackers. The big cannon crackers I was reserving for the night of the Fourth of July.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  What is the meaning of it all? The air, torn to shreds, rushes by. Everything is flying by, bells, collar buttons, moustachios, pomegranates, hand grenades. We draw aside to make way for you, you fiery steeds. And for you, dear Jascha Heifetz, dear Joseph Szigeti, dear Yehudi Menuhin. We draw aside, humbly—do you hear? No answer. Only the sound of their collar bells. Nights when everything is going whish whoosh! when all the unearthed characters slink out of their hiding places to perform on the rooftop of my brain, arguing, screaming, yodeling, cart-wheeling, whinnying too—what horses!—I know that this is the only life, this life of the writer, and the world may stay put, get worse, sicken and die, all one, because I no longer belong to the world, a world that sickens and dies, that stabs itself over and over, that wobbles like an amputated crab…. I have my own world, a Graben of a world, cluttered with Vespasiennes, Mirós and Heideggers, bidets, a lone Yeshiva Bocher, cantors who sing like clarinets, divas who swim in their own fat, bugle busters and troikas that rush like the wind…. Napoleon has no place here, nor Goethe, nor even those gentie souls with power over birds, such as St. Francis, Milosz the Lithuanian, and Wittgenstein. Even lying on my back, pinned down by dwarves and gremlins, my power is vast and unyielding. My minions obey me; they pop like corn on the griddle, they whirl into line to form sentences, paragraphs, pages. And in some far-off place, in some heavenly day to come, others geared to the music of words will respond to the message and storm heaven itself to spread unbounded delirium. Who knows why these things should be, or why cantatas and oratorios? We know only that their magic is law, and that by observing them, heeding them, reverencing them, we add joy to joy, misery to misery, death to death. Nothing is so creative as creation itself. Abel begot Bogul, and Bogul begot Mogul, and Mogul begot Zobel. Catheter, blatherer, shatterer. One letter added to another makes for a word; one word added to another makes for a phrase; phrase upon phrase, sentence upon sentence, paragraph upon paragraph; chapter after chapter, book after book, epic after epic: a Tower of Babel stretching almost, but not quite, to the lips of the Great I Am.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  If at the time we’d been called on to make a comment about this anonymity, we would have said it was “sad” or “pathetic,” but a second later we would have been smiling and feeling that surge of popularity as we walked down Christopher greeting one guy after another, adding another detail to the mental dossier we were compiling on each acquaintance (Oh, Blondy is with Spare Parts—I wonder if Spare Parts is keeping him. No one’s ever figured out till now how Blondy can afford so many new cashmere crewnecks on a dental hygienist’s salary. Oh, and there’s Mike the Barber with his ratpack. I wonder if Mike will say hi to me when he’s with that glam bunch—he did!). On Saturday afternoon while I was working out, a handsome stranger in a bomber jacket came in, walked slowly, arrogantly through the gym and locker room, came right up to me, shook my hand, introduced himself, asked me to pull up my T-shirt, which I stupidly did. He rubbed the back of his hand on my new washboard abs and said, “Nice. You’ll do. Here. Call me.” And he left. And I called the number on his printed trick card and went over, but the good part was just having been chosen like that at the gym. Sean looked sad and I said so. He smiled and stood. He swayed slightly and leaned on my shoulder as he passed me on the way to the window. He climbed out on the fire escape and pissed into the dark. “Did I say something wrong?” I called to him. He stepped back in and said, “It’s just—” “What?” Sean shrugged. “Oh, nothing.” “I’m strong. Don’t worry about hurting me.”

• From Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication (2002)

  53 of a letter allegedly by Clement of Alexandria, another important church father from near the end of the second century. The letter is a remarkable document. It is allegedly written to an otherwise unknown Theodore. In it, Clement addresses a question Theodore had raised about the existence of a second version of the Gospel of Mark. Clement indicates that Mark had, in fact, produced two versions of his gospel, the one popularly known (that is in our New Testament) and a second more secret one intended only for the spiritual elite. But members of a heretical gnostic sect known as the Carpocratians, notorious for their wild and licentious activities, had gotten hold of this secret version of the gospel and falsi¿ ed it for their own purposes. Clement then goes on to narrate two passages found in Mark’s secret gospel. One is an account of Jesus raising a young man from the dead who then is said to have loved Jesus and come to him later at night “wearing nothing but a linen robe over his nakedness.” Jesus is said to have spent the night with him, teaching him the mysteries of the Kingdom of God. The other account is a shorter and more bland account of Jesus refusing to see several women who had come to see him. The questions surrounding the text were numerous and momentous: When was the letter copied into this book of Ignatius? Could it have been a forgery? Did the letter actually go back to Clement of Alexandria? If so, was there really a second version of Mark? And if that was so, was Clement right that it was a secret version? Or could it have been the original version of Mark that got changed because of its possibly offensive overtones? If it did go back to Mark, what does that tell us about the practices and activities of the historical Jesus? Smith was obviously ecstatic about this once-in-a-lifetime discovery. He photographed the relevant pages and spent the next ¿ fteen years of his life analyzing them, getting expert opinions on different aspects of the problem. Companion palaeographers (experts in ancient handwriting) agreed that the letter did, in fact, represent an eighteenth-century style of handwriting. Experts in Clement of Alexandria by and large agreed that the letter