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 Fermata (1994)

  I had not expected anyone to notice the cord leading into my desk, since I was in the back corner, and nobody in fact did. I let half an hour go by, watching Miss Dobzhansky discuss a kind of slitted sunglasses that the Eskimos whittled from bone to avoid snow blindness. She began to write the old spelling of Eskimo, with a q, on the board in white chalk. My hands were deep in my desk; my fingertips touched the wrinkle-finish black paint and the smooth toggle switch. As she embarked on the letter m, her back to the class, I flipped the switch. She didn’t finish the m. She and the class were without sound or motion. I said, “Hey.” I said “Hey” again. Nobody turned toward me. Far from being eerie or disturbing, the silence was, I found, quite comfy. This acoustical coziness, which is a consistent feature of the Fold, is the result, I think, of the relative sluggishness of the air molecules that surround me. Sound diffuses outward only a few feet, as far as I can tell. I’m often reminded of a line in the first stanza of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes”: “And silent was the flock in woolly fold,” My Fold is woolly. Presently (“presently” is right!) I flipped the toggle back to the off position, deactivating the machine. At once everyone and everything took up where they had left off. The world expanded, sounding once again as if it were recorded in stereo. Miss Dobzhansky finished writing Esquimaux. She gave no indication that she was aware that anything out of the ordinary had just happened; and as far as she was concerned, of course, nothing had happened. She turned toward us and began talking about a thin strip of land that she claimed had once joined Alaska and Asia, over which tribes had traveled, giving rise not only to the Eskimo, but to the American Indians of the lower states. I must have been looking at her with an expression of unusual attentiveness, or even of rapture, because her gaze landed on me and she smiled. I knew we had a special understanding. I knew also that she might be the most beautiful person I would ever know. I knew that she knew that I sometimes didn’t raise my hand to give answers to the questions she asked even when I knew the answers, because I wanted to give her the option of drawing out other kids, of calling on me only when she needed to, as a backup. Her explanation of the waves of Asian migrations across the Bering Strait interested me, so I let her finish before stopping the universe for a second time. As soon as she turned toward the blackboard again, to write Bering, I flipped the switch and took off all my clothes.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  “When Doc Johnson approached me to create a full body mould of myself, it was exciting to be at the forefront of this type of interaction, but it took a little bit of getting used to knowing that someone was probably using a mould of my entire body for their pleasure,” she said. “When it came around to creating my avatar for VirtuallyJenna.com, not only was it easier but it was exciting to be at the top of this new technology and a lot more fun to be able to make facial expressions and movements that would be linked to my image.” She said having a virtual version of herself feels “kinda like being cloned.” In this, she has realized the dream of many a science fiction fan—creating a clone of one’s self to do all the work, while the original human being sits back and reaps the rewards. Jenna Jameson confirmed to USMagazine.com in August 2007 that she was “done with porn forever.” In one sense that’s true—she does not have sex on camera any more. But her virtual counterpart continues to be the main player in thousands of user-generated sex scenes, and the resulting revenue helps feed the $30-million-per-year Club Jenna juggernaut. Usually when people think about having artificial entities to do humanity’s work for us, it’s in the context of robots, and it usually has to do with manufacturing or the military. But for entertainers—adult and mainstream—virtuality may be where the greatest threats and opportunities lie. Should it become the norm down the road that Hollywood celebrities maintain a virtual version of themselves to build their fan base or entertain the masses, there is a real chance that nobody will remember or acknowledge that this was another technological innovation first proved viable by the pornography industry. One of the other major players in the adult video game scene is a product called Bonetown. Unlike Virtually Jenna, which is basically a create-your-own-porn-scene application, Bonetown has gameplay and a narrative arc. It plays more like a traditional first-person shooter or sci-fi game. The driving forces behind this game have none of Jameson’s celebrity or mystique—they are a group of rough-looking twenty-something boys who clearly can’t quite believe their own good fortune to be working at the intersection of pornography, video games and their own business enterprise. I met Bonetown’s creators at AVN Expo in Vegas. Scruffy and gregarious, they appeared fresh out of school, familiar with the rules of the marketing game but playing it for the first time. Their booth had the game running in the background, demo copies for fans and full versions for the press. Their operation befit any slick start-up video game production company. I thought I was about to have a straightforward interview, the kind one might use as the basis for a newspaper business feature showcasing an enterprising group of young men who found a lacuna in the market and a means to fill it. Then they started talking.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “As it turned out,” said Cass, with a smile. Then she looked at Vivaldo. “Ah,” she said, “did you happen to note a very small note in today’s theatrical section?” She went to the sofa and picked up one of the newspapers and returned to Vivaldo. “Look. Eric’s coming home.” “Who’s Eric?” Ida asked. “Eric Jones,” Cass said. “He’s an actor friend of ours who’s been living in France for the last couple of years. But he’s been signed to do a play on Broadway this fall.” Vivaldo read. Lee Bronson has signed Eric Jones, who last appeared locally three seasons ago in the short-lived Kingdom of the Blind, for the role of the elder son in the Lane Smith drama, Happy Hunting Ground, which opens here in November. “Son of a bitch,” said Vivaldo, looking very pleased. He turned to Cass. “Have you heard from him?” “Oh, no,” said Cass, “not for a very long time.” “It’ll be nice to see him again,” Vivaldo said. He looked at Ida. “You’ll like him. Rufus knew him, we were all very good friends.” He folded the paper and dropped it on the bar. “Everybody’s famous, goddamnit, except me.” Richard came into the room, looking harried and boyish, wearing an old gray sweater over a white T-shirt and carrying his belt in his hands. “It’s easy to see what you’ve been doing,” said Vivaldo, smiling. “We heard it all the way in here.” Richard looked at the belt shamefacedly and threw it on the sofa. “I didn’t really use it on him. I just made believe I was going to. I probably should have whaled the daylights out of him.” He said to Cass, “What’s the matter with him all of a sudden? He’s never acted like this before.” “I’ve already told you what I think it is. It’s the new house and kind of new excitement, and he doesn’t see as much of you as he’s used to, and he’s reacted to all of this very badly. He’ll get over it, but it’s going to take a little time.” “Paul’s not like that. Hell, he’s gone out and made friends already. He’s having a ball.” “Richard, Paul and Michael are not at all alike.” He stared at her and shook his head. “That’s true. Sorry.” He turned to Ida and Vivaldo. “Excuse us. We’re fascinated by our offspring. We sometimes sit around and talk about them for hours. Ida, you look wonderful, it’s great to see you.” He took her hand in his, looking into her eyes. “Are you all right?” “I’m fine, Richard. And it’s wonderful to see you. Especially now that you’re such a success.” “Ah, you mustn’t listen to my wife,” he said. He went behind the bar. “Everybody’s got a drink except me, I guess. And I”—he looked very boyish, very secure and happy—“am going to have a dry martini on the rocks.” He opened the ice bucket. “Only, there aren’t any rocks.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Some people in my life were still involved in religion. Jacob continued to attend Mass, because a member of the Blackfriars congregation had volunteered to take him. And then there was my sister, Lindsey. She had not stayed long in Canada. The man she had pursued had been a disappointment, and she hated the long winters. So she had married an Englishman whom she had met in Winnipeg and had driven all the way to California with him and their two Siamese cats. She had also become a Buddhist of the Nichiren school. I had no idea what that involved, but apparently it did not require her to wear a yellow robe or become a vegetarian. She chanted a mantra for about an hour each day, my mother told me. I found it hard to imagine this. Lindsey and I seemed to have changed places. “I don’t know what it is with this family and religion,” my long-suffering mother said in mock bewilderment. “Where did I go wrong?” Well, at least she didn’t have to worry about my religious obsessions anymore. My involvement with God was well and truly over. Pleased with myself, and with a mounting sense of excitement, I patted the bulky parcel containing three copies of my thesis, duly typed and bound in important-looking black covers with gilt lettering. It was a very satisfying sight. It had not been easy, but I had managed to complete this task. Against the odds, I had persevered, had shaped an idea and argued it through—like any other doctoral student. During these last few months, all the different themes had come together and fallen elegantly into place, almost of their own volition. My supervisor was pleased, and two professors whom I had consulted were impressed. Another, it was true, had been extremely rude about it, but my supervisor assured me that he did not approve of the close linguistic study of literature that I had attempted. Because he was known to have this bias, he would not be my examiner. So it all seemed hopeful. Here at least there had been no disaster. My mind still boiled with visions and paralyzing panic attacks, but this piece of sustained work was a guarantee of its ultimate integrity. The thesis was my passport to a job and a career, an earnest of my survival in a world that had once seemed so impossibly alien. I watched the girl behind the post office grille slap on the stamps and the registration forms. Then she put the parcel in a pile at the end of the room, whence they would be conveyed to Oxford.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Not that I thought what I was writing was necessarily by external standards good: it was simply that I was positioned right next to a woman who would be my audience, though she didn’t know it right then, and I was in her immediate presence creating for her alone an alternative “she” character, who, in thinking exactly as I wanted her to think about dildos and vibrators, would possibly entertain the real random “she” beside me. Basically I was feeling for the first time that heady paired combination of satisfactions that the sexual proseur can encounter at the outset of a new enterprise, as his long-neglected artistic ambition, however tentative or internally scoffed at—the wish to create something true and valuable and even perhaps in a tiny way beautiful—combines with basic grunting cuntlapping lust, the two emotions reinforcing each other and making you, or rather me, feel almost insane with a soaringly doubled sense of mission. At one point, finishing a paragraph, I shouted, “I am a writer of fucking erotica!” into the still close air. It was then, in fact, that the first twinges of dissatisfaction with the word erotica asserted themselves. I ditched the word permanently for its abbreviated replacement, rot, and I have never regretted it. Yes, I was out on the beach on a rotter’s retreat, with my cool and drying Arnus exposed to the sun, my cock as hard as an empty Calistoga bottle, but untouched for hours and hours. I was denying myself for my rot. Whenever I hesitated and needed inspiration, I simply rested my hand on the ass of the sunbathing woman beside me, sometimes sliding the fingers under her leg-hole, sometimes resting my hand on the fabric; sometimes squeezing, sometimes lightly slapping. I tried putting the typewriter on her ass but found it was too unsteady to proceed. Once, though, I pulled her bikini bottom off and sat right down on her softness, looking out past her brown legs at the tableau vivant of the waves, ass to ass with my reader-to-be. It was pleasant to wiggle and circle around, feeling our massed loose-muscled ass-flesh move as one over our deep bones: it was almost a form of communication. And if I knelt beside her and pushed outward on her asscheeks, I could expose her ane, and I did this more than once, getting a great deal of pleasure out of feeling my own plein-air Arnality bared to the sky and holding hers open at the same time. Hers was a fine brown dot, like a tiny asteroid-impact crater, which repaid close study. Women’s anes never used to interest me in my teens and early twenties—I think that they are one of the true acquired tastes. They are discrete, singular, clearly bounded, focused, in contrast to the bounteous plied gyno-confusion of the vadge.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  I haven’t really thought this through (in homage to Wang?), but when I think about my more “personal” writing, I keep seeing that old Atari game, Breakout. I see the game’s plain, flat cursor sliding around on the bottom of the screen, popping the little black dot back onto the thick bank of rainbow above. Each time the dot hits the bank, it eats away a chunk of color, until eventually it has eaten away enough of the bank to “break out.” The breakout is a thrill because of all the triangulation, all the monotony, all the effort, all the obstruction, all the shapes and sounds that were its predecessor. I need those colored bricks to chip away at, because the eating into them makes form. And then I need the occasional jailbreak, my hypomanic dot riding the sky. In Christina’s feminist theory class we also read Irigaray’s famous essay “When Our Lips Speak Together,” in which Irigaray critiques both unitary and binary ways of thinking by focusing on the morphology of the labial lips. They are the “sex which is not one.” They are not one, but also not two. They make a circle that is always self-touching, an autoerotic mandorla. This image immediately struck me as weird but exciting. And a little embarrassing. It reminded me of the fact that a lot of women can jerk off just by pressing their legs together on a bus or in a chair or whatever (I came this way once while waiting in line to see The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant at Film Forum on Houston). While we were discussing Irigaray in class, I tried to feel the circle of my labial lips. I imagined every woman in the class trying to feel it too. But the thing is, you can’t really feel your labial lips. It’s easy to get juiced up about a concept like plurality or multiplicity and start complimenting everything as such. Sedgwick was impatient with that kind of sloppy praise. Instead, she spent a lot of time talking and writing about that which is more than one, and more than two, but less than infinity. This finitude is important. It makes possible the great mantra, the great invitation, of Sedgwick’s work, which is to “pluralize and specify.” (Barthes: “one must pluralize, refine, continuously”) This is an activity that demands an attentiveness—a relentlessness, even—whose very rigor tips it into ardor. A few months before Iggy was conceived, we went to see an art porn movie made by some friends, A. K. Burns and A. L. Steiner. You were feeling lonely, longing for a sense of community, identification. Unlike the close-knit, DIY queer scene you were once at the center of in San Francisco, the queer scene in LA can feel like everything else in LA: partitioned by traffic and freeways, oppressively cliquish and bewilderingly diffuse at the same time, hard to fathom, to see.

• From Another Country (1962)

  And he disappeared. Ida said, “Come on, follow me. They’ve got a table for us way in back somewhere.” She took Eric’s arm. “They’re doing me a favor, letting me sit in. I’ve never sung in public before. So I can’t afford to bug them.” “You see,” said Vivaldo, behind them, “you got off the boat just in time for a great occasion.” “You should have let him say that,” said Ida. “I was just about to,” said Eric, “believe me.” They squeezed through the crowd to the slightly wider area in the back. Here, Ida paused, looking about her. She looked up at Eric. “What happened to Richard and Cass?” “They asked me to apologize for them. They couldn’t come. One of the kids was sick.” He felt, as he said this, a faint tremor of disloyalty—to Ida: as though she were mixed up in his mind with the colored children who had attacked Paul and Michael in the park. “Today of all days,” she sighed—but seemed, really, scarcely to be concerned about their absence. Her eyes continued to search the crowd; she sighed again, a sigh of private resignation. The musicians were ready, attempts were being made to silence the mob. A waiter appeared and seated them at a tiny table in a corner next to the ladies’ room, and took their order. The malevolent heat, now that they were trapped in this spot, began rising from the floor and descending from the ceiling. Eric did not really listen to the music, he could not; it remained entirely outside him, like some minor agitation of the air. He watched Ida and Vivaldo, who sat opposite him, their profiles turned toward the music. Ida watched with a bright, sardonic knowingness, as though the men on the stand were beating out a message she had commanded them to convey; but Vivaldo’s head was slightly lowered and he looked up at the bandstand with a wry, uncertain bravado; as though there were an incipient war going on between himself and the musicians, having to do with rank and color and authority. He and Ida sat very still, very straight, not touching—it was as though, before this altar, touch was forbidden them. The musicians sweated on the stand, like horses, played loudly and badly, with a kind of reckless contempt, and failed, during their first number, to agree on anything. This did not, of course, affect the applause, which was loud, enthusiastic, and prolonged. Only Vivaldo made no sound. The drummer, who, from time to time, had let his eyes travel from Ida to Vivaldo—then bowed his head to the drums again— registered Vivaldo’s silence with a broad, mocking grin, and gestured to Ida. “It’s your turn now,” he said. “Come on up here and see what you can do to civilize these devils.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Planting her feet on the floorboard of the ridem, holding on to the steering wheel, she demurely flounced her skirt over the seat, and then, arching the small of her back and closing her eyes, she slowly lowered herself until she felt the buzzed brainless head of the Van Dilden nudge into her underthigh. She only had to readjust herself slightly, ticklish trickles moistening open her self-aware slypelips, and she was ready to be upfucked: she looked out smiling at the cars driving by and stamped on the throttle, and with a long groan that was masked by the sudden rev of the engine, her slopping cunt-ness was forced back and down on the full hand-poured width of the Van Dilden. She sat heavily down on it and mowed and mowed, and as she mowed it was as if the whole lawn was concertedly fucking her: every little hummock, every undulation of turf, every tough clump of thistle stalk was telegraphed directly via her autodick-fitted ridem directly into her boggled cervix, while all twelve pistoning horsepowers added their internal combustions to the party as well. She worked the lawn for ten minutes or more, risking a numb-out but successfully avoiding it, smiling again at the traffic because they couldn’t know the supreme full-pelvic cuntfucking she was giving herself as she mowed. She was lowering her head forward toward the steering wheel, just on the point of allowing herself to crooningly come, when she noticed the UPS truck pull over to the side of the road. The driver waved his clipboard at her and walked up with a long oblong box, stowing his sunglasses in his shirt pocket. Marian straightened and tried to collect herself. There was no way to turn the Van Dilden off without pulling up her skirt. She was covered with sweat. Above human hearing, her nipples were screaming for any knowledgeable mouth. She signed where the UPS man pointed, line 27, hoping the idling motor would hurry him off, and he almost handed her the box, and then said something she couldn’t hear. He gestured to the front porch questioningly with the box; Marian nodded. She watched him jog to the porch. He ran like a coach. She hadn’t noticed before that his eyes were attractive; his helpful hesitation was quite sexy when she was able to contrast it with the idea of the molded thing that was fucking her right at that moment. Nonetheless, she wanted him to drive off so that she could finish mowing. He was halfway down the slope to his truck when he stopped and came back with a “May I trouble you for something?” expression. “Yes?” she shouted. He said something she couldn’t catch. Reluctantly she cut the mower engine. “Sorry—what?”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Still enFolded, I walked briskly all the way to the Gap clothing store in the Copley Place Mall and took off the shirt of every woman in it (there were eleven women), singing the country-western Gap jingle from the seventies: “Fall—in—to—the—Gap.” I draped their bras over their shoulders. With no pants on, I walked around the racks of braided belts and along the walls of folded shorts and overdyed jeans. I knew from previous experience that there would be sand in some of the pants pockets—not because that particular pair had been worn to the beach and then returned, as I had once thought, but because the pants were sand-washed before they were sold. They came pre-supplied with their own memories of the Cape. I twirled slowly like a compass needle in the middle of the store, both hands on my tiller. I let my eye be surprised by each topless woman in turn, saying, “And you! And you! I’d forgotten about you! Wow, those are nice! Hi, how are you?” Having filled my brain with a multiplicity of naked Jamaicas (without coming, however), I redressed my wrongs, putting everything back where it had been, and made my way back to the MassBank building. At my desk, I snapped and emerged from my personal Gap full of self-assurance, fortified by secret acts of vulgarity, looking at Joyce, who, needless to say, hadn’t moved during my absence. “Would you like to have a snack with me sometime?” I asked her. “What kind of a snack do you mean?” she asked. “A dinner sort of snack.” “Oh.” She smiled sideways. “I need to talk to you. I’ve done you a wrong, and I need to unburden myself.” “I see,” she said. “Tonight?” “Hm.” She almost went for it. But then she said: “No, tonight is bad. I wish I could, but I’m probably going to have to stay late. I’m going to have to go over the stuff in that tape when you get it back to me. Thomas needs to look at it tomorrow morning.” “If I have it back to you in ten short minutes,” I said, “will you go out with me tonight?” “There’s an hour of stuff on that tape!” “I know that. I’m just saying, if I get it back to you in ten minutes, will you go out with me tonight? I know it’s a little strange, but it has to do with what I want to talk to you about.” “Okay, yes, sure,” she said.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  For days at a time Father left the shop for Mother to run, and set up a cockle-and-whelk stall on the beach. Alice and I were free to visit the Canterbury Palace every night if we cared to; but just as no one that July wanted to eat fried fish and lobster soup in our stuffy Parlour, so the very thought of passing an hour or two in gloves and bonnet, beneath the flaring gasoliers of Tricky Reeves’s airless music hall, made us gasp and droop and prickle.There are more similarities between a fishmonger’s trade and a music-hall manager’s than you might think. When Father changed his stock to suit his patrons’ dulled and over-heated palates, so did Tricky. He paid half of his performers off, and brought in a host of new artistes from the music halls of Chatham, Margate and Dover; most cleverly of all, he secured a one-week contract with a real celebrity, from London: Gully Sutherland - one of the best comic singers in the business, and a guaranteed hall-filler even in the hottest of hot Kentish summers.Alice and I visited the Palace on the very first night of Gully Sutherland’s week. By this time we had an arrangement with the lady in the ticket-booth: we gave her a nod and a smile as we arrived, then sauntered past her window and chose any seat in the hall beyond that we fancied. Usually, this was somewhere in the gallery. I could never understand the attraction of the stalls ticket; it seemed unnatural to me to seat oneself below the stage, and have to peer up at the artistes from a level somewhere near their ankles, through the faint, shimmering haze of heat that rose above the footlights. The circle gave a better view, but the gallery, though further away, to my mind gave the best of all; and there were two seats in the front row, at the very centre of the gallery, that Alice and I particular favoured.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  At first that summer I watched the wash with the lid up just because I enjoyed it—I liked imagining myself as an agitator, shouldering the water powerfully back and forth with my fins; but eventually I began to suspect that untapped temporal powers resided in the spin cycle. Nothing that could safely displace articles of clothing in a circle that fast could fail to be of help to me in my effort to discover a second way, after the race-track transformer, to remove the clothes of girls and women without their knowledge. There were words molded on the tops of the agitators’ spindles—ours said SURGILATOR—and one day I let my fingers rest lightly on this rotifer of meaning as its final acceleration began. The word, made slightly slippery from residual soap, circulated progressively faster under my touch until, vibrating into unreadability, its letters merged into a whirling probabilistic annulus, and I felt that the secret of spin had been communicated from the machine to me. And I was right—the secret of spin was indeed at my fingertips —but it took a while for me to discover how exactly to put it to work. At first I thought that I had to spin. I went outside at twilight and practiced whirling with arms outstretched, not too terribly troubled by the possibility that I might remind an onlooker of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, trying to get my red blood cells to crowd down my forearms with such force that the tips of my fingers would blow off and I would hemorrhage triumphantly over the pachysandra. But of course my fingertips held and time ticked on. (Fingertips are so durable. They don’t even explode when you use them as temp shoehorns; they just tingle for a second as your impassive heel forces itself past.) Even so, I knew I was on the right track experimentally when, just around that time, I came across a paperback about UFOs in a carousel at a Mass Pike gift shop. It was a collection of letters from the general public to the air force describing flying-saucer sightings, interior layouts, and so on. One of the letters was from a man who thought that UFOs were generating the antigravity forces on which they supposedly hovered by spinning quantities of loose dirt and boulders in a doughnut-shaped inner ring built into the perimeter of the spacecraft. The author of the letter supplied a rough illustration which showed the rotating fill and the resultant lift. I knew that his idea was flawed and foolish, but I also knew that he had rightly sensed, as I had, centrifugation’s evocative peculiarity, its possibly mystical potential. It wasn’t the pull of gravity that spin would neutralize, I felt; it was the pull of time.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  In any case, in view of the miserable fee, nobody with a name would have touched this project with a barge pole. “I’ve nothing against you personally,” Joel explained, while John was out of the room, “but you have no experience. Nobody knows you—you are not even—” He broke off, gesturing hopelessly at me but saying nothing. “Pretty” was clearly the word that, with a restraint that I would later realize to be quite uncharacteristic, he had managed to bite back. The only thing that gave him any hope at all was that I had once been a nun. “Perhaps we can make some scandal out of that,” he sighed, blowing the blue cigarette smoke out from his nostrils like a disconsolate dragon. In fact, the only person who had any faith in the project was John. “It’s going to be wonderful, darling!” he told me repeatedly. “You’re going to be a big hit. I’m going to make you a star!” I took all that with a pinch of salt. But for some reason, I wanted to make this film. I sensed instinctively that this was what I had been waiting for. It was odd that I should feel this. For years I had wanted nothing to do with religion; the thought of reading anything remotely theological had filled me with visceral disgust. But this was different. The reading I was doing now in preparation for the series was not devotional. It would have no bearing on my life, after all, but would be a purely academic exercise. The slight quickening of spiritual interest that I had experienced while writing Through the Narrow Gate had been submerged. In the robustly secularist atmosphere of Channel 4, any form of faith seemed absurd, and my early life an aberration. Where Nick found religion faintly upsetting, John hated it with the passion of a zealot. This, I was told, was one of the reasons why Jeremy Isaacs, the controller of Channel 4, had put him in charge of religion. This new channel had a remit to be different from the other three. There was to be no “God slot,” no Songs of Praise, no edifying discussions for the devout. “I want to open up religion and discuss it as critically as any other subject,” John was fond of saying. And he did, conducting his mandate as an antireligious crusade. “They’re all bonkers, darling!” he would exclaim incredulously when yet another pious broadcaster came to talk to him about the possibility of a commission.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  My family was not particularly devout, and my parents were horrified when I told them that I had a religious vocation. They thought, quite correctly as it turned out, that I was far too young to make such a momentous choice, but they allowed themselves to be persuaded because they wanted me to get it out of my system as soon as possible. I was usually quite a biddable child but I was anxious to test my vocation immediately, instead of waiting until after I had been to university, as my parents would have preferred. My unusual resolution in the face of their opposition impressed them, and they feared that I might spend my college years in a state of mulish obstinacy, failing to make the most of the opportunities of university life and longing for it all to be over so that I could do what I really wanted. So on September 14, 1962, I packed my bags and joined twelve other girls at the novitiate. Why was I so determined to take this step? The motivation behind this type of decision is always complex, and there were a number of interlocking reasons. It is true that at this time I was very shy and worried about the demands of adult social life, but even though the religious life might seem a soft option, it was tough, and I would not have lasted more than a few weeks if it had simply been a means of escape. I wanted to find God. I was filled with excitement and enthusiasm on that September day, convinced that I had embarked on a spiritual quest, an epic adventure, in the course of which I would lose the confusions of my adolescent self in the infinite and ultimately satisfying mystery that we call God. And because I was only seventeen, I imagined that this would happen pretty quickly. Very soon I would become a wise and enlightened woman, all passion spent. God would no longer be a remote, shadowy reality but a vibrant presence in my life. I would see him wherever I looked, and I myself would be transfigured, because, as Saint Paul had said, my puny little ego would disappear and Christ, the Word of God, would live in me. I would be serene, joyful, inspired, and inspiring—perhaps even a saint. This was, to put it mildly, an eccentric career option. I was almost the first student of my convent high school to become a nun. Birmingham, my hometown, was a materialistic place, where money was king. Most of my immediate family and friends were nonplussed—even slightly irritated—and I, of course, reveled in the sense of striking out and being just that little bit different. But I may have been more in tune with my times than I realized, since many of my generation, born in the last years or in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, had the same inchoate yearning for transformation.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  She looked skeptical at first, and then more interested. “Well, you know, I have to admit that in the past I’ve had some fleeting suspicions in that direction. I mean, why shouldn’t frequent or prolonged masturbational episodes aggravate, or even cause, CTS? But until now, no patient has spontaneously suggested it as a cause, and I’ve been reluctant to mention it. It’s definitely worth looking into. Perhaps we could scan you as you …” “Really?” I said. “You’d have me pleasure myself in one of those gigantic magnets? The ones like iron lungs, that take pictures of brain tumors?” “Well, why not?” she said. “And you’d use our dummy keyboard, too. We’re trying to simulate real-life conditions. We unfortunately can’t use real keyboards, because we can’t have any ferrous metal within the magnet.… Now, you don’t habitually masturbate wearing a studded cock ring or ball separator, do you?” “God no.” “Fine, because that might create real problems in a magnetic field of thirty thousand times earth gravity. So—I don’t want to put you on the spot, but are you sincerely interested? I’m thinking out loud now, which I don’t normally do, but my sense is that this could be an important new line of research. Who knows—you might make The New England Journal of Medicine. Anonymously, of course.” “Well,” I said, pleased, “I suppose if I can be of some small help to others …” A week later, I showed up at the MR wing of Common-health’s hospital at a quarter to six in the evening, after an untaxing day at an accounting firm. My arm hurt, which pleased me, because I felt that I wasn’t wasting anyone’s time. In a conference room, Dr. Orowitz-Rudman explained in her friendly, faintly ironic way what was going to happen to me: some reference dots were going to be painted on my arm and penis, so that the imaging system could keep a fix on these two elements as I moved. She said she wanted me to type and masturbate just as I would in real life. She got up, and then remembered something. “One thing I do have to ask,” she said. She looked through some drawers in the back of the room. “I’m looking for something with a particular shape,” she explained. She held up a tongue depressor, but rejected it: “A little unromantic. I should have thought to bring in a prosthetic penis-form of some kind.” “I could just show you mine,” I suggested. “No—no—then we have to get observers in here and worry about all sorts of things. Thanks for offering, though. Ah! This will do.” She brought out a stick of lipstick from her purse and handed it to me. “Can you hold that and show me roughly how you masturbate? I realize that it’s a little smaller than you’re used to.” I held it and stroked it several ways.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I snipped all the thread from my hands and amassed a load’s worth of dirty clothes from the floor of my room (supplemented by several towels) and I started a large warm wash with the lid open and the interlock jammed. While the wash churned through its preliminaries, I chose a new needle, threaded it, and pushed it through the thus-far-unsewn callus at the base of my left hand’s middle finger. I put the spool in place on the nail and wrapped the loose end of the thread around the post of the washing machine. Now, as the spin cycle began, it pulled the thread through my callus, through a part of me, in winding it onto itself. The thread tugged through the hole in my skin surprisingly easily, faster and faster. My hand lay on the sill of the washer, face up. The heat of the friction began to hurt; when it became almost unbearable, and I was on the verge of closing my fist on the thread to snap it, the event, or non-event, happened. Everything stopped. I looked into the tub of the washing machine and was thrilled to be able to see and even touch that fiction of the physical sciences, centrifugal force. Without suffering harm, I could now reach in and hold clothes that were in the midst of spinning at six hundred r.p.m. I put my hand in the machine. The remaining blue water, immobilized in its turbulence and yet still wet to the touch, was especially beautiful. The world was again available for undressing. But I knew that if the thread that ran through my callus broke, time would resume. So I was unfortunately tethered to the washing machine.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “No, just drive,” she ordered, lifting her skirt and kneeling over the Van Dilden. “Find a dirt road and drive on it. I want this truck to bounce.” “My pleasure,” he said. She turned the vibrator on to full and slid halfway down on it. While she squeezed Astroglide on the two ends of the Fusilier, he turned onto a dirt road in low gear. The truck rocked and lurched. “Oh, that’s it,” she said, feeling herself filled with unexpected lateral UPS-truck fuck-motions. Already aching from her earlier mowing, she was impatient. “Now stop for a second. I want you to stick one end of this in my ass.” She pulled her skirt up over her ass with one hand and leaned forward and passed him the double-headed vibrator. The head of the Van Dilden was still inside her. “Should I turn it on?” he asked, examining the little remote controller. “Yeah, I guess, but, mmm, the main thing is to stuff it in my ass right now.” He turned it on, using the little control box. The two buzzings were at slightly different pitches, wowing in and out of phase. Marian felt something hard push against the muscle of her ass. “That’s it,” she said. She relaxed against it and let its head go in. “Push it a little further. Wow. Now drive—oh fuck, just drive this fucking truck.” The UPS guy hopped back in his seat and put the truck in gear. Marian unbent her knees and sat flatly down on the Van Dilden with her legs extended in front of her. This had the effect of pushing the Royal Welsh Fusilier deeper into her ass. It was like a fleshy tail. “I’ve got toys up my cunt and up my ass,” she moaned. The truck started bumping and jostling. She pulled the length of the Fusilier up against her tailbone and bent it around her hip and found that, as she had hoped, the other end easily reached her clit. She pulled back its “foreskin” and held the slick second head against herself. “Oh, fuck” she said, feeling all of her circuits starting to get busy. “Is that about right?” called the UPS man. He was driving manfully from one gulley to the next, steering with one hand. His other, Marian saw, was in a fist, pounding up and down on his surprisingly meaty coral-gabled cock. His brown UPS pants were around his knees, the zipper splayed open and ready to rip. The dirt road sloped down.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  When he had left, Marian did the dirtiest thing she could think of, which was to drive fast to the supermarket, buy a copy of Cosmopolitan, drive home, pull the shades, and squat naked on her living-room floor directly over the magazine, opened to a full-page head shot of Patrick Swayze. “Look at what I’m showing you, Patrick,” she said, stroking the underside of her open thighs and pulling on a few pubic hairs to add a piquant sensation. Patrick’s eyes gazed unblinkingly up at her from between her legs, half obscured by her bush. “That’s right, look at what you’re making me do to my big clit,” she said. “Do you want to see my big fat cunt come? Do you?” Soon her eyes locked with Patrick’s and she sat suddenly down on his nose and half-smiling mouth, making the doubly slick magazine buckle. It was all so out of character for her that she felt glowing and refreshed afterward. The next week had a day and a half of rain, and the lawn needed a mow badly by Saturday. Kev couldn’t come by until three-thirty because of soccer practice. Marian spent the day pruning several overgrown lilacs and reading some more of the new biography of Jean Stafford. She felt, by the time Kevin showed up, that her sexual energy was very much under control and that she wouldn’t make some sort of regrettable pass at him. He explained how to drive the mower, with many apologies for the fact that he knew how to drive his own family’s mower better, saying that basically you did this and that and you had to watch out for this and that. She paid him fifteen for the lesson, which he at first wouldn’t take and then did take with fairly good grace, and she waved and began mowing. It was exhilarating to churn through the grass, especially when she drove up the slight grade toward the house and heard the engine strain a little. At first she mowed in a kind of boustrophedon pattern, back and forth, and then she changed to an Aztec square spiral pattern, homing in on the white tractor tire. As she got more confident about turning sharply and using the accelerator, she began to understand why David had wanted to own this machine—the feeling of being in control of it, cutting this wide swathe, was really terrific.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I spent some personal time with Ami Pro and a copier and saddle-bound a number of copies of these several stories, along with the one about Marian and the ridem lawn-mower, in pamphlet form, using as a cover the pale blue cover of something called Tales of French Love and Passion—a heavily ironic reissue of a cheesy 1936 edition of several mildly risqué stories by Guy de Maupassant that I had ordered through the Archie McPhee catalog. I left my homemade booklet in lots of places—in copies of Self and The American Scholar just before they were shoved through mail-slots, in women’s bathrooms at dance clubs, under the Gideon’s Bible in several rooms of the Meridien Hotel, on coffee tables during cocktail parties, inserted in the library’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy in the article on “Life, Meaning and Value of”—but nothing resulted from all this effort that was anywhere near as exciting to me as the simple sight of Michelle, the Cape Cod woman, dunking her dildo in her bathwater and shaking it off. The peak of my life-imitates-rot phase came on the Massachusetts Turnpike one Saturday. I was out for a drive. It was autumn and hormone levels were rising. I was idly thinking of following through on my Northampton idea—the one about stripping everyone on Main Street and, if not mounding their clothes all in a single mound and dancing on it, then at least putting each person’s clothes neatly in a plastic grocery bag in his or her hand—the idea of a naked town discovering that it was carrying its clothes around in plastic bags thrilled me. (The sight of naked middle-aged women in the steam rooms of certain country clubs carrying their jewelry around in droopy plastic bags, because they are afraid that it will be stolen from their lockers, thrills me, too; I have been in the steam rooms with them; I have touched their moist plastic bags of jewelry.) My ambitions are not global in scope—I don’t think of nude nations or metropolises; but totally topless Main Streets of small towns, especially small towns with classy women’s colleges in them, yes. I decided that if I lost my nerve and couldn’t go through with denuding the whole town, I could at least replace the TV Guides in the rack at the supermarket with my personal Tales of French Love and Passion and watch how people reacted. But I never made it to Northampton. I got severely distracted by a woman in a car just past Worcester.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “I forgot. I’ll try. I’ll try. And so then he puts her tits back in her bra and tucks her shirt in and scampers back into the magnet and he lies there on the pad just where he was and snaps his fingers, and time starts up again, and he lies there thinking of the tits he has just sucked on, how great they felt in his hands, and it’s such a tremendous thought that he has to come, he doesn’t care how much it hurts—oh, that’s right. I want to come inside your magnet, doctor. It hurts, but I don’t care. I like you to take all kinds of graphic pictures of my nerve while I pump this hot nasty piece of meat off for you. I like being hard and hot in your core. Oh, doctor. Doctor? I’ve got to call you Susan when I come. Sorry. Is that okay?” “That’s okay,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “Just try to stroke a little slower, if it’s at all possible.” “Oh, thank you. Oh Susan, oh Susan, oh Susan, uff, uffuck. Tell me you want to see me come. I want to hear you say it.” I heard only silence over the intercom, and then: “As I said before, I do think it’s important for you to climax.” “I will climax, you bet, you got it. I’m going to think of your tits and climax. Oh, you gave me your lipstick to hold. That was so good of you. I wish I could’ve circled your lips and nipples with it. Oh that feels nice. Squeeze my meat, Susan. Squeeze it in your big magnetic hole. Open that hole up for me. Suck me in, baby. Oh God yeah. Tighten that force down on my cock, uffuck. Uffuck. Here it is: oh yeah, oh fuck yeah. Oh yeah! Urrrrr!” I let the comeshots jump up and land on my stomach muscles. I lay there for what seemed like a long time, breathing peacefully. “Am I done?” I beatifically asked at last. “Almost,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “Normally, at this point might you resume writing?” “If I’d been alternating writing and jacking, yes.” “Then could you type the baseline sentence again?” she said. “It might be useful to have. Remember it? ‘The cure …’?” “Don’t tell me!” I put the fake keyboard on my chest, avoiding the sperm, and typed the sentence from memory. The technicians dragged me out on the gantry and handed me a brown paper towel. I sat up, feeling a little sleepy and dazed, and put on my gown. In the control room, Dr. Orowitz-Rudman met me and led me to the room where my clothes were. “I think that went well, don’t you?” she said. “I’m sorry I fixated so totally on you.” “Don’t apologize,” she said. “We were fixated on you, you were fixated on us.” “It’s just that a woman doctor asking me to masturbate is like a dream come true …”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “That’s okay—come for me baby. She’s starting to come, Kevin! Shoot that hot juice up her ass for her! Fill her ass with that burning come!” Marian finger-fucked the okra-dick faster in and out of Kevin’s asshole, and he leaned forward to take it and then straightened up, lifting Sylvie by the hips right off the ground and pulling her back against his cock. “Now, Sylvie?” he said. “Oh, fuck me good, Kev! Fill my fucking fanny!” Sylvie shouted, looking in Marian’s eyes and then down at her toy-filled fuckholes. “Harder! Oh, yes! Fuck me real good, darling! SHOOT THAT HOT DICK UP MY FANNY-HOLE! OH! OH!” With an astonished expression, Kevin made one last long lurching shuddering push and started to come. “OH YES!” said Sylvie, feeling Kevin’s cock empty ounce after ounce of boiling scream-cream into her ass. “AH! I’M COMIIINNNG!!!!!” As pagan pleasures wracked her body, she did indeed make a huge grimacing smiley face. It was Marian’s turn now. She allowed the idea of Kevin’s squirting dick in Sylvie’s ass to merge with the sensation of Armande Klockhammer, Jr.’s in her own. She conjured up the sight of the dollar bills stuffed in his asscheeks as he danced with his back to the audience. She thought of the shouting women; the whomping music; the sight of him turning on the stage and tossing his heavy live meat around inside its black silk pouch as he looked out at all his women. All these memories were up her ass. She opened her eyes and said evenly, “Please watch me come, now, you two. Watch my asshole and cunt come around these huge horny cocks!” Then she threw herself back on the wet grass and lifted her legs and rested her feet on Sylvie’s back; she let them watch whatever they wanted while the brutish, hunky orgasm ennobled her body. “Oh nice … so nice … so nice …” she sighed as the clit-twitching ebbed. When the three of them had recovered a little, Marian rinsed off Kevin’s softening cock and lifted herself off the Klockhammer and sprayed it fresh. “Can we pick some more of your tulips sometime?” said Sylvie sweetly before she and Kevin, dressed once again in their matching outfits, left for the fish hatchery. “Anytime you want,” said Marian. “I love young love.” Naked, replete, she put her toys and her abandoned book on the tray and went indoors. Over the next year, with Kevin and Sylvie’s weekend help weeding and planting and mowing, her back yard became the envy of her neighbors.