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 Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “We’re going to take a brief tour before we go to your hotel,” he announced. “It’s not too late,” he added, clearly for Danny’s benefit. “You can’t spend your first night in Jerusalem without seeing more than this shit!” He gestured out of the window. “I want to get your imagination working. Give you some ‘inspiration.’ ” He spoke the last word in ironical inverted commas, but I could tell that he was serious. It was a good idea, and I sat back and waited for the commentary, the patter of the guided tour. Nothing was forthcoming. We drove on in silence, broken only when Danny had a furious altercation with another driver at some traffic lights, leaning across me to yell at him out of the window, which he had yanked down to let in the cold city air. There was much clashing of brakes and shouting. Everybody in the adjacent car joined in, and Joel added his own clearly insulting contributions from the backseat. Finally the other car screeched off in high dudgeon. “Bastards!” muttered Joel contemptuously. “Wind up your window! It’s freezing in here!” He sniffed. “You know,” he said in a lighter tone, “I think it’s snowing. Karen,” he suddenly shouted expansively, “you’ve brought the snow with you from London!” I peered through my window. “It doesn’t look as if it’s snowing to me.” Joel guffawed—that is the only word for the sound he made. “It’s the holy snow of Jerusalem,” he snapped. “You don’t see, you just believe!” I laughed too, because it was funny, but my laughter was lost in Joel’s roars of mirth; I would learn that he was always convulsed by his own jokes. The atmosphere in the car lightened, and I could tell that—if only because I had occasioned a witty remark of his own—Joel felt more friendly toward me.

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

  It really was too bad that nobody had written a life of the Prophet to which Western people could relate. Then it hit me. Perhaps I should write it myself. I resumed my pacing, but this time thinking furiously. My book could set the Prophet in the context of his time, and I could angle it to a Western person who was confused by the controversy and had an inbuilt cultural suspicion of Islam. In the West we took it for granted that Islam was the religion of the sword; I myself had assumed that it was an inherently violent religion until I had started to study Islam seriously. In the new book, I could deal with this question when telling the story of Muhammad’s war with Mecca. When I described the Prophet’s relationship with his wives, I could discuss the position of women in Islam. I could look into the real meaning of the episode of the so-called Satanic verses that had inspired Rushdie’s novel, talk about the nature of scripture and what was entailed in the concept of divine inspiration. Feeling more excited and positive than I had felt for a long time, I went upstairs to my study, typed out an eight-page proposal, and faxed it to Felicity Bryan so that she could see it as soon as she came into the office on Monday morning. I was eager to begin, but it was months before we could find a publisher. Once again, most people who saw the proposal turned it down flat, convinced that the topic was too dangerous and that I would be joining Rushdie in hiding. There were the usual gloomy jeremiads. “Muslims won’t like it, you know,” a friend warned me solemnly. “They’ll see it as provocative to have not only a Westerner, but a Western woman, writing about their Prophet!” Others could not see why I wanted to get involved at all. I would appear to be siding with Islam, a position that would put me even further beyond the pale in London at the present time. It was just not politically correct right now. Finally, however, Liz Knights of Gollancz saw that the project had possibilities, and offered a small advance. Because I felt that time was of the essence, I agreed to deliver the manuscript on New Year’s Day 1991. Like The First Christian and The Gospel According to Woman, Muhammad began as a polemic. I wanted to refute the accusations of Rushdie’s partisans and set the record straight.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  A week after that I had a revelation while browsing in Kibbeson’s Discount House of Electricity on Mass Ave. after work. I realized that all I had to do was buy a handful of really cheap remaindered switches—perhaps the one-hundred-milliamp push-button switches with the twelve-millimeter bushings, which looked especially promising—and carry them around in my pants pocket. I had a hunch that if I held one tightly and pressed it with my thumb while thinking as hard as I could of an hourglass being spun in a centrifuge, I could easily force a minor concession from the elemental forces and descend into the temporal Cleft that way. Even if the switches burned out after only one Drop, as the race-track-transformer toggle had, they were cheap enough that I could afford it. I bought a bunch of different microswitches and tested them out on the street, fumbling with them in my pocket as I frowned out at the traffic. None of the momentary-connection push-buttons worked, to my surprise, but an undistinguished-looking plastic sixteen-amp spade-terminal rocker-switch did beautifully. I bought a dozen for five dollars.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “Starting to feel nice,” called Marian politely. Then her voice changed to a command. “Now pump the brake. “She held the hem of her skirt with her chin so that she could look down at her spread vadge. The road was pounding the Van Dilden’s cockshape into her stinging cuntskin. She reached back and twisted the Fusilier in her ass. Her clit looked as if it were ready to jump up and propose a toast to old friends; the other end of the double-header was sitting solidly to one side of it, talking in the fast, even, confident nasty-rumor language that vibrators use with their clit-clients. She felt a gorgeous huge thick-muscled orgasm moving slowly up her legs and fanning out toward all orifices. She spat her skirt out. “Pump the brake harder!” she commanded again. “Oh shit! Oh God! That’s it. Pump it. Brake, brake, brake. That’s it, like that. FUCK ME WITH YOUR TRUCK! JACK THAT BIG UGLY DICK AND FUCK MY ASS WITH YOUR TRUCK!” The UPS man, his leg pushing the brake-pedal in rapid rhythm to the long white-knuckled strokes of his fist, looked as if he couldn’t hold back another second. The truck lurched and rocked. A box from Harry and David’s tumbled over beside Marian. She grunted down against her toys, feeling them stretch her sex-holes to the point of pain. “Now watch me come!” she called to the front seat. “Keep pumping the brake and watch this hot little cunt come! I’M COMING! AAAAAAAAH, fuck fuck fuck, coming, I’M COMING!” She pressed the silicone snake-head harder against her clit and let the truck-chassied orgasm bump and grind through her. The UPS man had his head cranked around and was watching her crammed crotch, pop-eyed. He made a vowelly groan and lifted his butt clear off the seat. “Oh, here it comes!” he said. With a final upward fist-stroke, his squat thick dick blew a united parcel of peckerpaste all over the sleeve of his uniform. “Ooh, yeah babe. Ooh yeah.” He put the truck in neutral and the two of them caught their breath. Marian stood unsteadily, smoothing her skirt. The Royal Welsh Fusilier fell out of her ass to the floor with a snakey thump. The UPS man sighed happily. “The tightest ship in the shipping business,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s me,” said Marian.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 1I AM GOING TO CALL MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY THE FERMATA, EVEN though “fermata” is only one of the many names I have for the Fold. “Fold” is, obviously, another. Every so often, usually in the fall (perhaps mundanely because my hormone-flows are at their highest then), I discover that I have the power to drop into the Fold. A Fold-drop is a period of time of variable length during which I am alive and ambulatory and thinking and looking, while the rest of the world is stopped, or paused. Over the years, I have had to come up with various techniques to trigger the pause, some of which have made use of rocker-switches, rubber bands, sewing needles, fingernail clippers, and other hardware, some of which have not. The power seems ultimately to come from within me, grandiose as that sounds, but as I invoke it I have to believe that it is external for it to work properly. I don’t inquire into origins very often, fearing that too close a scrutiny will damage whatever interior states have given rise to it, since it is the most important ongoing adventure of my life.

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

  Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucius, Lao-tzu, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upanishads. In killing Muslims and Jews in the name of God, the Crusaders had simply projected their own fear and loathing onto a deity which they had created in their own image and likeness, thereby giving this hatred a seal of absolute approval. A personalized God can easily lead to this type of idolatry, which is why the more thoughtful Jews, Christians, and Muslims insisted that while you could begin by thinking of God as a person, God transcended personality as “he” went beyond all other human categories. I wrote the book with mounting excitement. It represented a quest and liberation for me. No wonder I had found it impossible to “believe” in God; no wonder my attempts to bludgeon myself into orthodox “faith” had led only to sterility, doubt, and exhaustion. No wonder I had never experienced this God in prayer. Some of the best mystics would have told me that instead of waiting for God to condescend to me, I should create my own theophanies, just as I cultivated an aesthetic sense that enabled me to experience the transcendence of art. The personalized God might work for other people, but he had done nothing for me. I was not a chronic failure, but had simply been working with a spirituality and theology that were wrong for me. My approach had been misguided. Because I had assumed that God was an objective fact, I had thought about God using the same kind of logical, discursive reflection that I employed in my secular life. Rational analysis is indispensable for mathematics, medicine, or science, but useless for God. The nuns were not to blame for teaching me to pray in this way, because (I now discovered) the whole of Western theology had been characterized by an inappropriate reliance upon reason alone, ever since the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rationalism had achieved such spectacular results that empirical reason came to be regarded as the sole path to truth, and Western people started to talk about God as an objective, demonstrable fact like any other. The more intuitive disciplines of mythology and mysticism were discredited. This was the cause of many of the religious problems of our day, including my own. It was, therefore, with huge exhilaration that I completed my book one hot and sultry afternoon in July 1992 and sent the manuscript off to my publisher. There was a sense of wonder and delight as all the ideas I had gathered fitted together—and a heady freedom as the load that I had carried around for thirty years fell from my shoulders. I no longer needed to think about religion as a source of sorrow and secret shame.

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

  Their ideals, expressed in such typically sixties slogans as “Do what you feel,” “Let it all hang out,” “Go with the flow,” and “Do your own thing,” were, on the face of it, the antithesis of the ideals of my convent, and yet there was also a similarity. Both boys had rejected the utilitarianism of their parents, yet, although they had no theological beliefs, they had embarked on what in other ways amounted to a religious quest. They had turned their backs on society, were seeking what gave life intrinsic value, and had rejected money and worldly success, just as I had when I had entered my convent. They had no time for institutional faith or the authoritarian structures of Christianity, but practiced transcendental meditation in the hope of changing their thought structures. Other postwar Britons also sought personal transformation; they wanted to be “somewhere else.” Some went off to Kathmandu; others merely took drug-induced trips. Even the Beatles, who had outraged Christians in the United States by declaring—correctly—that they were more popular in Britain than Jesus Christ, had spent months with a guru in India. People were beginning to experiment with new ways of being religious. I could not see it at the time, but by asking me to take Jacob to Blackfriars, Jenifer was in tune with this trend. She understood that Jacob needed not a creed, but spirituality and rituals that could bring him a measure of peace. But for me, religion without belief was a contradiction in terms, and I had very little hope that the church, which had brought me to the brink of despair, could help Jacob to make sense of his frightening world. Moon rises!’ ” Jacob greeted me as usual, rushing along the narrow corridor to the kitchen. “ ‘Moon rises at twelve forty-nine a.m.’! Karen! Where are we going this morning?” “We’re going to—” I waited for him to finish the sentence. “Blackfriars!” Jacob roared with evident delight. He certainly seemed enthusiastic. “Do I look smart?” “You’re looking very smart indeed.” He did, too: white jersey, brown cord trousers, and hair brushed and curly. “Now, Jacob, you look at the papers while I make our toast.” “Karen.” He put his head round the door. “You won’t be angry, will you, if I spill coffee all the way down the front of my white jersey?” “Not if it’s an accident, no.” “But if I do it on purpose?” “Then I’ll be very angry indeed.” “Because, Karen, I’m going to do it!” He picked up his mug and regarded me hopefully. “Don’t you dare!” I thundered predictably. “Oh, don’t be severe!”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  When the brakes had cooled, he drove her home. And for several months afterward, whenever John the UPS man delivered a white box and Marian the librarian was at home, he helped her test out the sex toy that it was certain to contain. Without him, too, Marian had large numbers of outdoor-gasms on her ridem mower, helped by several dilda, and when she was done mowing and coming for the afternoon, she often arranged a towel in the sun in the back yard and lay there for an hour or two with her glasses folded near her hand, smelling the smell of cut grass and gasoline and sex juice on her fingers. [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 10AS A PIECE OF ROT THIS WAS, I KNOW, A SMIDGE KEYED-UP in places, but for a first attempt I felt it would do. It was fun to write. But much, much more fun was watching my sunbathing companion read it. I had spent so much time alongside her that I felt she was an old friend, and yet I had no idea how she would react. I stared at her mouth through the binoculars. (She had put on sunglasses.) Every line that she read was a personal triumph for me; every time she moved to the next page I was in absolute heaven. This was a pleasure the likes of which I had not known. Even before she started reading, the sight of her pulling the bag from the sand and undoing the silver twist-tie made my heart swat in all directions,like the Cocoa Puffs rabbit. I wanted her to be holding and reading my home-grown smut so, so much! I so much wanted to have inspired a feeling of quickened curiosity in her. To have done just that—to have created an expression of puzzled curiosity in the universe, where before there had been only a woman lying in a green bathing suit in the sun on the beach, digging in the sand.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I went on. “I think there’s a good chance, if we did that, that the Fermata would read us both as one single entity. We would have to be in a real state of union, though. I’d have to be way in there, and your legs would have to be really locked around me. We’d have to be holding each other extra tight, and probably we’d have to be kissing, too. We’d probably have to be in love. Our tongues would have to be chasing each other around, and your hands would have to be gripping my thrusting buttcheeks—” Joyce raised her hands. “Okay, I got it, I got the general idea.” “I’m not saying that it’s a guaranteed sure thing, but I do think it’s worth a try,” I said excitedly. “Are you with me?” “When would this happen?” She had the same sideways smile she’d had when I first asked her out. “We could set a date, if you like. Five minutes from now?” “That seems soon,” she said. “I’ve lost all conception of what ‘soon’ means. Don’t you want to lose all conception of what ‘soon’ means, too?” “I do, kind of.” She lowered her eyes. Suddenly I remembered birth control. “Shoot, that’s right. A condom is out, because there has to be total contact.” I made popping sounds with my lips, thinking. “You’re not on the pill, are you?” “There’s a man I see sometimes. So I still am technically, yes.” “You are? Oh—great! Perfect.” I waved my hands. “Forget we talked about that. Let’s talk about something else for a while.” I asked her to tell me more about her botanical drawing class. She described the difficulties of rendering bark. She talked about her teacher. There was a nice moment when she finished saying something, and took a bite of bread, and noticed that I was looking at her with an odd, gleeful expression, and her face filled with friendly curiosity. It was time. “May I?” I said. “May you what?” “Snap my fingers?” She drank the rest of her wine. “Okay.” I snapped my fingers.

• From Wild (2012)

  “There’s another guy up ahead named Greg,” I said. “I met him a couple of days ago and he said he’d still be there.” My insides leapt when I spoke Greg’s name, for no other reason than he was the only person I knew on the trail. “We’ve been following him for a good stretch, so it’ll be nice to finally meet him,” said Albert. “There’s another couple a fellas behind us. Most likely they’ll be along any time,” he said, and turned to look down the trail in the direction that we’d come from. “Two kids named Doug and Tom, about the same age as y’all. They started not long before you did, a touch south.” I waved Albert and Matt off and sat for a few minutes pondering the existence of Doug and Tom, and then I rose and spent the next several hours hiking harder than ever, with the single-minded goal that they would not catch up to me before I reached Kennedy Meadows. I was dying to meet them, of course—but I wanted to meet them as the woman who’d left them in her dust instead of the woman they’d overtaken. Like Greg, Albert and Matt had started hiking at the Mexican border and were by now well seasoned, logging twenty-some miles each day. But Doug and Tom were different. Like me, they’d started only recently on the PCT—not long before you did, Albert had said, and just a touch south. His words replayed themselves in my mind, as if replaying them would wring more meaning and specificity from them. As if by them I could discern how fast or slow I was traveling in comparison to Doug and Tom. As if the answer to that question held the key to my success or failure at this—the hardest thing I’d ever done. I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Immediately, I amended the thought. Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Leaving Paul and destroying our marriage and life as I knew it for the simple and inexplicable reason that I felt I had to—that had been hard as well. But hiking the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard. It was strange but true. And perhaps I’d known it in some way from the very beginning. Perhaps the impulse to purchase the PCT guidebook months before had been a primal grab for a cure, for the thread of my life that had been severed.

• From Wild (2012)

  “I’m heading back to Seiad Valley,” she said, and explained that she was cold, her feet were blistered, and her down sleeping bag had gotten drenched the night before and she had no hope of drying it out before nightfall. “I’m taking a bus to Ashland,” she said. “Come find me at the hostel when you get there.” I hugged her before she walked away, the fog enveloping her again in seconds. The next morning I woke earlier than normal, the sky the palest gray. It had stopped raining and the air had warmed up. I felt excited as I strapped on Monster and walked away from my camp: these were my last miles in California. I was less than a mile away from the border when a branch that hung along the edge of the trail caught on my William J. Crockett bracelet and sent it flying off into the dense brush. I scanned the rocks and bushes and trees, panicky, knowing as I pushed into the weeds that it was a lost cause. I wouldn’t find the bracelet. I hadn’t seen where it had gone. It had only made the faintest ping as it flew away from me. It seemed absurd that I’d lose the bracelet at this very moment, a clear omen of trouble ahead. I tried to twist it around in my mind and make the loss represent something good—a symbol of things I didn’t need anymore, perhaps, of lightening the figurative load—but then that idea flattened out and I thought only of William J. Crockett himself, the man from Minnesota who’d been about my age when he died in Vietnam, whose remains had never been found, whose family no doubt still grieved him. My bracelet wasn’t anything but a symbol of the life he lost too young. The universe had simply taken it into its hungry, ruthless maw. There was nothing to do but go on. I reached the border only minutes later, stopping to take it in: California and Oregon, an end and a beginning pressed up against each other. For such a momentous spot, it didn’t look all that momentous. There was only a brown metal box that held a trail register and a sign that said WASHINGTON: 498 MILES—no mention of Oregon itself.

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

  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. Postwar Britain was not an easy place to grow up.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Kaplan says viewers see a qualitative difference between watching an adult film and, say, watching a nature documentary. They both have action, which means they face some of the same logistical challenges. But because porn films rely on creating an immersive fantasy for the viewer, the stakes are higher to get things right. So, while viewers can and do put up with erroneous words and the occasional string of gibberish generated by auto-captioning systems for mainstream television and movies, such errors simply won’t cut it with porn viewers. “It’s industry driven, but not in the way that things are usually industry driven,” he said. “It’s different just because they are trying make you feel at home with the movie you’re getting, and they want ‘home’ to be any part of the world.” Cheaper, faster, easier and less intrusive: these qualities are all touchstones of pornography—the areas where the adult industry shows the mainstream world how to do it. And there is more. Sometimes, no matter how seamless the captions and subtitles are, they only get in the way of what’s happening on-screen. Even people who like to follow the plot of their adult feature just want all the text to disappear during the sex scenes, when the nature of the communication is more self-evident. “What about multiple levels of captioning where you can actually choose no captioning during the sex scenes?” Kaplan mused. He said his initial discussions with adult movie producers had already generated a lot of interest on this front. “It ends up in this very weird and interesting area.” Weird and interesting has always been Kaplan’s bread and butter. A self-described “geek at heart,” he arrived in the world of multilingual adult film subtitling by way of technology. “I guess I’ve just always been hanging around computers,” he said. “I’ve always been intrigued by problems that are really complicated that people don’t understand, so I kind of jumped into the international side.” Some years ago, he hired a woman to work on a website for him. When he offered to give her a credit on the site, she warned him that she was associated with the world of adult entertainment—she happened to be a former porn actress—and gave him the option of keeping her name out of his business. “I said, ‘Where I work that is not a blocker—that is exciting,’ and I gave her a little icon. She became the webmistress instead of the webmaster. From there, I ended up going to a few industry events and it just snowballed from there. People said, ‘Maybe you can help with this project or that project.’ They said, ‘Hopefully you’re not offended by that,’ and I’d say, ‘Are you kidding? I can brag about this later.’”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Title : Tipping the Velvet Author: Sarah Waters ISBN : 9781101078198 Description: <p><b>"Erotic and absorbing...Written with starling power."—<i>The New York Times Book Review </i></b><br> <br> Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-hall stars in an all-singing and dancing double act. At the same time, behind closed doors, they admit their attraction to each other and their affair begins. [image "Cover for Tripping the Velvet" file=wate_9781101078198_msr_cvi_r1.jpg] Table of ContentsTitle PageCopyright PageAcknowledgements PART ONEChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7 PART TWOChapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14 PART THREEChapter 15Chapter 16Chapter 17Chapter 18Chapter 19 “Endearing ... an engrossing read. Nancy Astley, a butch Moll Flanders, is a remarkable character in a compelling novel readers won’t soon forget.”— The Hartford Courant “Engrossing ... a raucous, passionate adventure, and a rare, thrilling read.”— Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Rambunctious ... an amusing romp through late Victorian society.”— Library Journal “There’s a huge amount of history bursting from the cleavage of this first, fabulous, fin-de-siècle frock of a novel.... An unstoppable read ... It’s gorgeous.”— The Independent on Sunday “Lavishly crammed with the songs, smells, and costumes of late Victorian England. This could be the most important debut of its kind since that of Jeanette Winterson.”— The Daily Telegraph “This is a lively, gutsy, highly readable debut, probably destined to become a lesbian classic.”— The Observer “A marvelously lush, erotic, and bawdy first novel set in the glory days of seedy music halls.”— The Woman’s Journal [image "001" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_001_r1.jpg] This delicious, steamy debut novel chronicles the adventures of Nan King, who begins life as an oyster-girl in the provincial seaside town of Whitstable and whose fortunes are forever changed when she falls in love with a cross-dressing music-hall singer named Miss Kitty Butler. When Kitty is called up to London for an engagement on “Grease-Paint Avenue,” Nan follows as her dresser and secret lover, and soon after, dons trousers herself and joins the act. In time, Kitty breaks her heart, and Nan assumes the guise of a butch roué to commence her own thrilling and varied sexual education — a sort of Moll Flanders in drag — finally finding friendship and true love in the most unexpected places. Drawing comparison to the works of Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters’s novel is a feast for the senses — an erotic, lushly detailed historical that bursts with life and dazzlingly casts the turn of the century in a different light. Also by Sarah WatersAffinity Fingersmith The Night Watch [image "002" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_002_r1.jpg] RIVERHEAD BOOKSPublished by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

• From Wild (2012)

  I put my coins in the little coin box, stepped into the shower, and luxuriated under the hot water, scrubbing myself with the sliver of soap someone had left there until it dissolved completely in my hands. Afterwards, I dried off with the same bandanna I used to wash my cooking pot and spoon with lake and creek water and dressed again in my dirty clothes. I hoisted Monster on and walked back to the store feeling a thousand times better. There was a wide porch in front with a long bench that ran along its sides. I sat down on it and looked out at Odell Lake while brushing my wet hair with my fingers. Olallie Lake and then Timberline Lodge and then Cascade Locks, I was thinking. Skip, hop, spin, done. “Are you Cheryl?” a man asked as he came out of the store. Within a moment, two other men had stepped out behind him. I knew immediately by their sweat-stained T-shirts they were PCT hikers, though they didn’t have their packs. They were young and handsome, bearded and tan and dirty, equal parts incredibly muscular and incredibly thin. One was tall. One was blond. One had intense eyes. I was so very glad I’d taken that shower. “Yes,” I said. “We’ve been following you a long way,” said the blond one, a smile blooming across his thin face. “We knew we were going to catch you today,” said the one with the intense eyes. “We saw your tracks on the trail.” “We’ve been reading your notes in the trail register,” added the tall one. “We were trying to figure out how old you’d be,” said the blond one. “How old did you think I’d be?” I asked, smiling like a maniac. “We thought either about our age or fifty,” said the one with the intense eyes. “I hope you’re not disappointed,” I said, and we laughed and blushed. They were Rick, Josh, and Richie, all of them three or four years younger than me. They were from Portland, Eugene, and New Orleans, respectively. They’d all gone to college together at an insular Minnesota liberal arts school an hour outside the Twin Cities. “I’m from Minnesota!” I exclaimed when they told me, but they knew that already, from my notes in the trail register. “You don’t have a trail name yet?” one of them asked me. “Not that I know of,” I said.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  “But there’s great news for your eyes: they can see! And for your ears: they can hear! I’m telling you the truth: many prophets and holy people longed to see what you see and didn’t see it, and to hear what you hear and didn’t hear it. “All right, then,” Jesus continued, “this is what the sower story is all about. When someone hears the word of the kingdom and doesn’t understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in their heart. This corresponds to what was sown beside the path. What was sown on rocky ground is the person who hears the word and immediately receives it with delight, but doesn’t have any root of their own. Someone like that only lasts a short time; as soon as there’s any trouble or persecution because of the word, they trip up at once. The one sown among thorns is the one who hears the word, but the world’s worries and the seduction of wealth choke the word and it doesn’t bear fruit. But the one sown on good soil is the one who hears the word and understands it. Someone like that will bear fruit: one will produce a hundred times over, another sixty, and another thirty times over.” (13:1–23) Jesus, telling stories about a sower sowing seeds, about weeds among the wheat (Matt. 23:24–30), about a seed growing secretly (Mark 4:26–29), and about a vineyard where the tenants refuse to give the owner the fruit (Mark 12:1–12), is allowing these ancient echoes to take root in the fertile and scripture-soaked minds of his hearers, to try to get through to them the message that what they have longed for is happening at last, but it doesn’t look as they thought it would! God is at last doing the great new thing he’s always promised for Israel—but the wrong people seem to be getting the message, and many of the right people are missing it entirely!

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

  I wrote the book with mounting excitement. It represented a quest and liberation for me. No wonder I had found it impossible to “believe” in God; no wonder my attempts to bludgeon myself into orthodox “faith” had led only to sterility, doubt, and exhaustion. No wonder I had never experienced this God in prayer. Some of the best mystics would have told me that instead of waiting for God to condescend to me, I should create my own theophanies, just as I cultivated an aesthetic sense that enabled me to experience the transcendence of art. The personalized God might work for other people, but he had done nothing for me. I was not a chronic failure, but had simply been working with a spirituality and theology that were wrong for me. My approach had been misguided. Because I had assumed that God was an objective fact, I had thought about God using the same kind of logical, discursive reflection that I employed in my secular life. Rational analysis is indispensable for mathematics, medicine, or science, but useless for God. The nuns were not to blame for teaching me to pray in this way, because (I now discovered) the whole of Western theology had been characterized by an inappropriate reliance upon reason alone, ever since the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rationalism had achieved such spectacular results that empirical reason came to be regarded as the sole path to truth, and Western people started to talk about God as an objective, demonstrable fact like any other. The more intuitive disciplines of mythology and mysticism were discredited. This was the cause of many of the religious problems of our day, including my own. It was, therefore, with huge exhilaration that I completed my book one hot and sultry afternoon in July 1992 and sent the manuscript off to my publisher. There was a sense of wonder and delight as all the ideas I had gathered fitted together—and a heady freedom as the load that I had carried around for thirty years fell from my shoulders. I no longer needed to think about religion as a source of sorrow and secret shame. I felt physically lighter, as though I could float, as though I could now do anything at all. This euphoria was short lived. Pride came before a fall. I was due to go to Cambridge the following morning, to spend a week with Sally in a little apartment in Clare College. We did this every year, and it was always fun. Still enchanted with myself, while packing my suitcase I sprang—weightlessly, I thought—up a short flight of steps, misjudged it, came crashing down to earth, and broke my big toe in two places. I got little sympathy, of course. There is an indignity about a broken toe that people find hilarious. Two weeks later, I even detected my mother’s lips twitching as I hobbled across the room.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  She circled Marian’s clit with her end of the Fusilier, gazing at the base of the Klockhammer buried in the older woman’s ass. Marian, her mouth stuffed with purple cock, groaned and opened her legs for the pleasure. As Sylvie felt Kevin jabbing the other Welsh-head in and out of her own buzzing cunt-lips, she reached back and spread her asscheeks open and said, “That’s enough. Stop sucking my boyfriend’s dick and get it in my ass!” Marian pulled her mouth off of Kevin’s dick. “Okay, sweetie, it’s ready for you.” She squirted lube on Sylvie’s asshole. The squirt bottle made rude noises, but nobody cared. She pulled Kevin into position by his cock and tapped the head of his dick on Sylvie’s now-sloppy asscrack, circling it over the opening. Then she pointed it and held it still. “Okay, push in slow, Kevin. Open up for him, Sylvie. He’s going in.” “Push it in me! Fuck this ass!” cried Sylvie. Marian held Kevin’s cockshaft while it began to drive slowly in. It bent a little as he put his weight behind it; then, as Sylvie relaxed for him, it straightened out and filled her. “There he goes,” said Marian. “Fuck me with that dick, oooooooo!” said Sylvie. Kevin began making very slow long strokes. “That’s it, Kevin—fuck straight into her perfect ass—you’re getting it.” Marian took hold of the end of the vibrator in her cunt and started pulling it in and out in rhythm with Kevin’s steady dick-thrusts. Its length curved up and disappeared into Sylvie’s clim. She kissed Sylvie on the shoulder. “God, I like being connected to your sexy pussy, sweetie!” she said. Sylvie was looking straight ahead, taking little breaths as she pushed back on Kevin’s thickness. “You like him in your ass, don’t you?” Marian asked her. “I like him to fuck me hard!” said Sylvie. “Fuck my hot ass, Kev. I’m getting closer to the smiley face!” She looked at Marian. “That’s what we say when we’re going to come soon,” she breathlessly explained. Marian sprang into action. “Hold on, though—one last thing.” She picked up the little okra-sized dildo and slipped it over her middle finger and squirted some Astroglide on it. “Can I put this in Kevin’s ass?” she whispered. “I want to feel him fucking you when you come. Can I?” Sylvie blew up on her bangs and nodded. “Just hurry.” Marian flicked the okra-dick over Sylvie’s nipples and then dragged it down Kevin’s ribs and slid around to the base of his back and gripped the near cheek of his ass, so that her four fingers were near his asshole. “What are you doing?” Kevin said, freezing suddenly. “I’m putting some okra up your ass so you won’t feel left out,” said Marian. “I want to help you fuck Sylvie.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  In 1978, these and thousands of other words coalesced into the first virtual world in human history. No images. No sounds. No holograms. Just a collection of sentences stored on a mainframe computer at the University of Essex in England. This world was known as MUD1. Admittedly, this is not the most spectacular name one could choose for what amounts to a new kind of reality. And those first sentences might not exactly seem to match “I have a dream” or “We shall fight on the beaches” in terms of firing the imagination or sparking revolution. Those words also might not suggest the start of a hotbed of sexual exploration and experimentation, but they were exactly that. That simple description of a tearoom was the start of many things. It was the entry point not just into the world’s first multi-player online computer game but also into a revolution in technology, business, entertainment and human interaction. Modern phenomena including Second Life, World of Warcraft and a slew of other Web 2.0 Internet applications all emerged from that primal MUD. And if Web 2.0 is just as foreign to you as is MUD1, just wait a little while—the virtual-world revolution has been going on for thirty years, but it is just getting started. Video games in 1978 were as different financially as they were technologically from those of the modern era. MUD1 cost nothing to play. In contrast, worldwide video-game sales in 2008 topped $32 billion (in the same year, combined sales of DVDs and Blu-ray discs only hit $29 billion) and featured near photorealistic graphics, multi-track audio, and voicing by Hollywood celebrities. Some things have remained constant. Games then and now involve Internet-based multi-player modes. Today’s “massively multi-player online role-playing games” and virtual communities like Second Life are the direct descendants of MUD1 and other early virtual worlds. These games have played a key role in an epic story of technological growth and change. They also reveal a unique aspect of the relationship between pornography and communications. The erotica that drove this technology was overwhelmingly user-created. Rather than professional pornographers making money selling to the masses, individuals were creating erotic material for and with other individuals. Because this medium was so personalized, its journey into the mainstream world has been slow. Even today’s multibillion-dollar online video-game industry is more notable for its potential than for its track record to date. In many ways, virtual worlds are now at a stage that email and the World Wide Web were in the 1990s—no longer marginal, but not yet mainstream. Today, the mainstreaming of video games and virtual worlds seems as though it was always inevitable, but in 1978, it was highly doubtful. Like so many other technologies, early text-based worlds were never guaranteed widespread success. They faced many technological challenges that many people bothered to overcome only so they could create and consume erotica.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I set the watch down just above my open book, the two curved segments of the band forming a seagull shape. Then I looked directly and inquiringly at Rhody again. Her eyes fell to her page. That was the big moment of the evening. We ignored each other from then on. Just after she asked for her check, she walked past me to the bathroom. I whisked out my mechanical pencil and restored the complete Inequality on my placemat and used the Fold’s ideal privacy to count the number of tampons in her purse. There were five. I erased time back on and let her use the bathroom. When she emerged, I Dropped again and counted tampons: there were now four. Since I have had miserable luck befriending women at the height of their periods, I didn’t try to say hello to her then. Instead, on my calendar I marked a day two weeks later, when she was likely to be at or near ovulation, and on that day I staked out her address on Marlborough Street after work. She got home around six-thirty. Half an hour later she reappeared in jeans. I followed her discreetly to the Harvard Book Store Café on Newbury. Just before she went into the store, I completed the Inequality on a pad of paper and slipped in ahead of her. I crouched in one of the aisles, near the Mrs. Humphry Wards, and erased my way into time. (I didn’t want to seem to have materialized out of thin air to anyone in the store.) I stood up, holding a random book; I put the book away; and then I pulled a Virago paperback off the shelf. I heard someone step into the fiction aisle, and I was almost sure that it was Rhody, and it was. I turned and regarded her blankly, innocently, and then went through a pleased frown of recognition. She returned the favor. (Naturally I was holding the book in such a way that my watch was plainly visible.) I will skip the “Weren’t you at the Thai Star a few weeks ago?” exchange that followed, since there was nothing newsworthy in it—I will just observe that, despite my having produced and directed the entire coincidence, I was as overjoyed and nervous and relieved when she started talking away about the subdued greatness of Mrs. Humphry Ward as if I really had fortuitously run into her. “You know what really interested me about you?” she said several weeks later, after we had been on a harbor cruise and had had lunch twice. “You may not remember this, but while you were reading that time at Thai Star, you took your watch off and put it just above your book.” “So you were watching me!”