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.

Page 154 of 182 · 20 per page

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  feeling, and gut levels, with a clear awareness of the different aspects of this unified learning. I suspect that in its purest form, this occurs rarely, but perhaps learning experiences can be judged by their closeness to or remoteness from this definition. Let me give an example closer to the academic world. Roger Hudiburg (undated), a teacher in a Colorado junior high school, describes a number of the effects of his attempts to be open in his classroom. He says, “Openness scares the hell out of me—it also makes me feel good.” In its effect on learning he speaks of the shared learning through inquiry and discovery: Excited girl peering through microscope at snow crystals: “Wow, look at this, Teach!” Boy experimenting with electromagnetism inadvertently produces copper carbonate: “What’s this weird blue stuff? Where’d it come from?” He follows this for weeks, happy and excited. Others are surprised when they put alcohol and salt in snow and frost forms on outside of container: someone says “ice cream!”—they learn much more than this, for they fool around for days; in fact they turn the whole class on to their “freezer.” Students do learn in an open environment. They learn about the excitement and importance of discovery, about their capabilities, their limits, self-discipline, and responsibility. They also learn facts. How many? Who knows? I just know that they learn some facts. They know this, too. I don’t think I every really knew this before, and I don’t think that they did either. It makes me feel good to really know something and to know down deep that we are learning. Openness. . . . You’ve got to experience it, live it, do it! To me, this description sounds like learning by the whole person. It has plenty of cognitive elements—the intellect is working at top speed. It certainly has feeling elements—curiosity, excitement, passion. It has experiential elements— caution, self-discipline, self-confidence, the thrill of discovery. So it is another example of what I am endeavoring to speak about. THE CURRENT SITUATION I am deeply concerned with what is going on in American educational institutions. They have focused so intently on ideas, have limited themselves so completely to “education from the neck up” that the resulting narrowness is having serious social consequences. I think of a weekend attempt to close the communications gap at Columbia University—with trustees, administrators, students, and faculty participating. Some progress was made, but not much. It seemed as though the faculty could communicate only intellectual ideas, while the students were expressing deep feelings about their education and about the institution. Following this weekend, one of the students, Greg Knox, wrote a letter (Lyon, 1971). He tells how, as a freshman, he had heard a talk saying that the goal of the student at Columbia was to become a “whole man,” and this thought “blew” his mind. He continues:

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

  “Why do you smile?” he asked. “Because, sir, pay like water tends to find its level!” “What the devil d’ye mean by its level?” “The level,” I went on, “is surely the market price; sooner or later it’ll rise towards that and I can wait.” His keen grey eyes suddenly bored into me. “I begin to think you’re much older, than you look, as my nephew here tells me,” he said. “Put yourself down at a hundred a month for the present and in a little while we’ll perhaps find the ‘level,’” and he smiled. I thanked him and went out to my work. It seemed as if incidents were destined to crowd my life.... A day or so after this the taciturn steward, Payne, came and asked me if I’d go out with him to dinner and some theatre or other? I had not had a day off in five or six months so I said “Yes.” He gave me a great dinner at a famous French restaurant (I forget the name now) and wanted me to drink champagne. But I had already made up my mind not to touch any intoxicating liquor till I was twenty one and so I told him simply that I had taken the pledge. He beat about the bush a great deal, but at length said that as I was bookkeeper in place of Curtis, he hoped we should get along as he and Curtis had done. I asked him just what he meant but he wouldn’t speak plainly which excited my suspicions. A day or two afterwards I got into talk with a butcher in another quarter of the town and asked him what he would supply seventy pounds of beef and fifty pounds of mutton for, daily for a hotel; he gave me a price so much below the price Payne was paying that my suspicions were confirmed. I was tremendously excited. In my turn I invited Payne to dinner and led up to the subject. At once he said “of course there’s a ‘rake-off’ and if you’ll hold in with me, I’ll give you a third as I gave Curtis. The ‘rake-off’ don’t hurt anyone,” he went on, “for I buy below market-price.” Of course I was all ears and eager interest when he admitted that the ‘rake-off’ was on everything he bought and amounted to about 20 per cent. of the cost. By this he changed his wages from two hundred dollars a month into something like two hundred dollars a week.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “You’ve scratched the wood!” he said, letting his mouth dangle open about an inch wider than usual. “I wanted to make sure I got all the paint off,” I said. “My God, you got all the paint off and half the wood!” I tried to explain to him that when people used the table, they’d have it right-side up and wouldn’t be able to see the scratches underneath, but he never did give this type of argument much credit. “You can’t strip!” he said from his kneeling position next to the table. His tone was one of both outrage and sorrow, but mainly outrage. “You cannot to save yourself strip!” Right about then two of our better customers, Mrs Deffinbaugh and Mrs Seilhamer, came wandering back into the stripping room, I guess to see what the commotion was about. I noticed them all right, permed hair and pressed outfits, but even their presence couldn’t dissuade me from doing what I'd already started to do. My pent- up frustration with life, the chemieals singing in my head, and my own. poor judgment had blended together into a perfect storm of misbehavior. “T can so strip,” I said. “Check it out.” And I began to glide through the room, swinging my butt, pouting and vamping. I imagined myself moving to the throbbing, brassy sound of that timeless classic “The Stripper”. My hand went to my goggles, which were strapped around my sweaty forehead, ripped them off, whirled them repeatedly overhead and tossed them at Mr Pickering. They missed him but horseshoed around one of the table’s upright legs, spun once and clattered down. Next I took off my rubber gloves, inch by inch, fondled them a bit and cast them aside. I never stopped moving; I’d seen this done before. Still in full strut, I removed my toolbelt, flipped it this way and that and dropped it at the ladies’ feet. Popeyed, they both sat back against the edge of a shipping crate and watched me intently. Mr Pickering stood up. He was watching me too, his permanent look of surprise more focused than I'd ever seen it. “James?” he said. But I couldn’t be stopped. I took off my workboots and socks and flung each in a different direction. I was wearing one-piece denim coveralls, and my hand found the zipper and tugged it down, lower and lower. When I got the zipper to waist-level, I stood straight and 360 Greg Fenkins

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  132 People still dreamed of going on Crusade and liberating Jerusalem, but in an important development, holy warfare was beginning to merge with the patriotism of national war. 2 India: The Noble Path F or the Aryans who migrated to the Indian subcontinent, springtime was the season of yoga. After a winter of “settled peace” ( ksema ) in the encampment, it was time to summon Indra to lead them on the warpath into battle once again, and the priests performed a ceremony that reenacted the god’s miraculous birth. 1 They also chanted a hymn celebrating his cosmic victory over the chaos dragon Vritra, who had imprisoned the life-giving waters in the primal mountain so that the world was no longer habitable. During this heroic battle, Indra had been strengthened by hymns sung by the Maruts, the storm gods. 2 Now priests chanted these same hymns to fortify the Aryan warriors, who like Indra before his battles drank a draught of soma. At one now with Indra, exalted by the intoxicating liquor, they harnessed their horses to their war chariots in the formalized yug (“yoking”) ritual and set off to raid the villages of their neighbors, firm now in their conviction that they too were setting the world to rights. The Aryans regarded themselves as “noble,” and yoga marked the start of the raiding season, when they really lived up to their name. As for the pastoralists of the Near East, Indian Aryan ritual and mythology glorified organized theft and violence. For the Indo-Aryans too, cattle rustling needed no justification; like any aristocrats, they regarded forcible seizure as the only noble way to obtain goods, so raiding was per se a sacred activity. In their battles they experienced an ecstasy that gave meaning and intensity to their lives, performing thus a “religious” as well as an economic and political function. But the word yoga, which has such different connotations for us today, alerts us to a curious dynamic: in India, Aryan priests, sages, and mystics would frequently use the mythology and rhetoric of warfare to subvert the warrior ethos. No myth ever had a single, definitive meaning; rather, it was constantly recast and its meaning changed. The same stories, rituals, and set of symbols that could be used to advocate an ethic of war could also advocate an ethic of peace. By meditating on the violent mythology and rituals that shaped their worldview, the people of India would work as energetically to create a noble path of nonviolence ( ahimsa ) as their ancestors had promoted the sanctity of the warpath. But that dramatic reversal would not begin until almost a millennium after the first Aryan settlers arrived in the Punjab during the nineteenth century BCE.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  All the time, the other five men clicked intently, spellbound as she was, their cameras touching her, chasing the light along her curves, fondling her breasts and bringing the nipples to explosive sensitive peaks, molding the tight curve of her thighs and hips. She turned before them, showing her bare bottom, aware that if she bent only a little, they would see the spread lips of her treasure. But she kept that from them. Then, late in the afternoon, the light beyond the windows ruby and gold, she wore the last costume, a tattered white shift that left her breasts and almost all of her legs bare. Charlie had stripped down to a single band of white cloth, the idea being that she and he were slaves together to a wicked sultan. “Now, Desi,’ Mr Bentley said, his voice warm and breathless, “take off the dress.” She did not hesitate, her heart trilling with power and excitement, but she held them in the infinite compliance of her motion, not pulling it over her head but letting the thin straps fall from her shoulders and the fabric pool around her waist, standing to roll it over her hips and down. With a little gesture of submissive flirtation, Desi stepped quickly out of the white cotton and dropped it, finally naked before them. The light on her treasure thrilled her, their eyes, their desire, pulsed through her sex. She welcomed them, wanted them, soared into an ecstasy that their eyes would drink, their cameras record. Charlie’s hands rested on her hips as ripples of pleasure flowed from her treasure, through her core, her heart, her fingers and toes, and she came right there, immortal on their film. Scheherazade. That was who she was. The servant of these men and their mistress, and the thousand and one tales had only begun to be told. “Oh, baby!” Bobby exclaimed to her in the car on the way home. “That was the best. You’re incredible.” “T liked it,” Desi laughed, drunk beyond the wine. “I liked it a lot.” Mr Bentley, his gaze hot and flashing, had handed her a $100 tip. Dr Barlow gave her 50 and the other men pooled another 100. They wanted her to come back, but Desi didn’t commit. Another idea bloomed in her soul. Calendar Girl 485 “Bobby?” she asked. “You ever been to San Francisco?” “Once,” he said. “Why?” “We could go out there,” she said, resting her hand on his thigh as the car rumbled down the lane leading away from Bentley’s house. “I could be a model and you could be my photographer.” “That’s ...” he started to say and then he laughed. “Why not? You’re amazing and you make me amazing. Those pictures I took the other day — they’re the best I’ve taken — well, until today.”

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  Clinic and everyone I could think of. I put up signs everywhere too and got zero calls even asking about it. I never think my ideas are so strange and am always surprised by how strange others think they are. Last fall I decided to approach the De Sillio kids about the idea of a workshop and to my amazement parents and kids were excited about it and parents willing to pay so I did one series of workshops, they talked me into doing another and every time I see the kids they beg me for another. These are children (a group of ten) from six to thirteen who knew they did not have to go or do anything they did not want to do and could walk out at any time. I am still staggering from the results and what it all means. In one sentence the kids seemed to understand immediately what I meant by believing they had the ability to be real and communicate directly and how that is different from much of our culture and the adult world but that I believed that it is possible to increase these qualities, become more aware of them and keep them as they grow. Two of these children are kind of hyperactive and I’ll never forget the picture of them as I told them—they suddenly stood still, their eyes grew big and they started nodding and they became deeply involved in the workshop. All of them reacted in that way, even those who usually don’t get involved in anything, have problems at home, etc. I still can’t believe it. Behavior and problems changed at home and in school and people commented on it. It was like watching something magic happen that I had very little to do with. I feel that it struck something very deep in the children that they could immediately recognize and use and I feel it would be that way with all children. Needless to say I am very excited and intrigued with all of this. I am not sure as to where to go with it. I thought of the possibility of working out of other growth centers such as doing groups for them or perhaps doing a workshop for children at the same time some of their parents might be involved in a workshop for themselves. These thoughts are all very new to me and I have no idea if something like that would be possible or even how to go about finding out.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  medieval liturgy and imperial sovereignty based on the assent of the people. The Pope’s journey north provoked extraordinary public excitement and reverence, not so surprising in Italy but in France far beyond expectations, even on the streets of the capital. Pius was revealed as an international popular celebrity, which was confirmed when, seven years later, relations with Napoleon broke down and he suffered arrest and exile like his predecessor. His tribulations, near-fatal illness in prison and then triumphant restoration to Rome as Napoleon’s power collapsed only affirmed what the Paris coronation began in shaping the charisma of the modern Papacy. [12] Alongside a revival of Catholicism in the parishes, the regime allowed a minimal restoration of male monastic life, but it considered that it had much less to fear from female religious Orders, particularly those that could take up the educational and charitable functions so prominent up to the Revolution. In fact, a remarkable number of new Orders were now founded for the same purposes, and Napoleon’s regime had too much else to think about to do much to stop them. These Orders took advantage of a relaxation in the Church’s rules on female religious from before the Revolution. In 1749, Pope Benedict XIV had arbitrated in a local row in Bavaria between the Bishop of Augsburg and a group of religious women in the diocese: as the ‘Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary’, they were still obstinately carrying on the work of Mary Ward, the would-be founder of a female equivalent of the Society of Jesus a century before (above, Chapter 14). Rather surprisingly, the Pope ruled against the Bishop and allowed his opponents a continuing existence as an ‘Institute’: effectively he recognized them as more than just a group of pious laywomen. In the post-Revolutionary era, women gleefully seized on this breach in the Council of Trent’s decree of female enclosure for their own purposes. [13] The Concordat was not designed to give women a greater active share in the life of the Church, but the vacuum was there to be filled – and not merely by nuns. The nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable re-enchantment of the world that the Enlightenment had sought to govern by reason; this reflected priorities among devout laywomen. The French Revolution was not the first time that women had guarded Christian practice through difficult times through observances they cherished (above, Chapters 10 and 14). Women kept the Church going through the worst phases of Revolutionary de- Christianization; they sustained their faith through their loyalty to Catholic customs that pre-Revolutionary clergy had often despised but did not now have the power to discourage – the cult of saints and pilgrimages, for instance. Such practices had a rich future at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  I think you guys would love each other.” Rosenblum is a hard-partying wild man who went to University of Vermont, the same college that Halligan attended, and competes in Tough Mudder events, the nutso races where people charge through ten-mile obstacle courses straight out of Navy SEAL basic training. Halligan says he’d love the introduction and that maybe we could get Rosenblum to come up to Boston and give a HubTalk, which is what HubSpot calls its speaker series, where interesting people come in and give a quick talk at lunchtime in the big conference room downstairs. I tell Halligan I’m sure that Rosenblum would give a talk. We could probably even set up a showing of The Naked Brand for everyone at HubSpot. Or better yet, we could arrange a big showing in Boston, at a theater, with HubSpot as a sponsor. The ideas are flying. We’re hitting it off! This is going great. Then Halligan says he has another mission for me. “It’s our blog,” he says. “It sucks.” I’ve looked at the blog, and he’s right; it’s awful. But I figure it’s best to be diplomatic. I tell him that I think the blog is pretty good, as corporate blogs go— but Halligan cuts me off. “No, it’s terrible. It used to be better. There were other people running it. But lately, I don’t know. It’s kind of embarrassing.” He turns to Shah. “Do you agree?” Shah agrees. We talk about how a lot of companies, especially tech companies, are hiring journalists and actually producing high-quality news sites. Some of them are doing a really good job, better than what we can do at a place like ReadWrite, if only because they have more resources. Halligan says he wants to produce material that raises awareness of HubSpot and establishes HubSpot as a “thought leader” in the world of marketing. I mention the idea of creating an independent site, sponsored by HubSpot but kept separate from the company. That’s what Adobe, a big software company in California, has done as a way to promote its marketing software. I know the guys who run the Adobe-sponsored site and have talked to them about how they launched it. Halligan and Shah are noncommittal. For now the deal is that I will come on board and find a way to produce better, smarter content that can be put out with the HubSpot brand attached to it. The work I’m doing will exist in a gray area—a mix of journalism, marketing, and propaganda. Halligan and Shah don’t know what this will look like, and neither do I. But it could be an interesting experiment. We shake hands, and I leave the meeting feeling pretty good. Two weeks later, in the middle of March, they make me an offer.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Oh, my God,” she said, helplessly, as he pushed particularly hard, and pressed the front of his abdomen (which she noticed was flatter than Martin’s, despite his being so much older, fifteen or forty-five years, though she had only briefly glimpsed Martin’s soft stomach through his unzipped and partly pulled down pants) against her clitoris, and she thought of a dolphin, as if she was still in an ocean, and how it butted against you or something when it liked you and The Dead End Fob 161 you swam with it; he (or maybe just his erection) was like a strong and slippery dolphin, rock hard but really responsive, and making that little chirping radar sound, which she now realized was coming from her own open mouth. “It’s good, it’s good,” she said, and again she hadn’t meant to say anything at all. Then, suddenly, he stopped moving, obviously could move no more without ending everything, which meant that she was on, it was up to her; and instinctively she wrapped around him, from the inside and outside: outside with her arms — and inside she had never known she had such flexibility, like when you realize you can bend a finger back all the way without breaking it, only this was better, had never known that she could be tender with a grown man, not just her baby sister or her old kitty cat Monkey, kissing and kissing them — she was passionate, that’s what she was, and why had it been embarrassing to say before now? Then coming with him felt like (she could not stop comparing things; it made her feel safer to do it, put things in perspective so she wouldn’t feel she had entered. an environment alien and disorienting — it was still her own life, she had not gone insane, you know?) coming with him felt like that trick where the magician pulls out a tablecloth and all the plates stay put: and she was the tablecloth, the table, and the plates. And he came, too, immediately after, or actually during, though she suspected he’d started a little ahead of her, could feel him doing that pulsing that, of course, came from his heart and had been weaker in her hand when it came from Martin; and Owen’s sound was bigger: Martin’s was like air going out of a balloon and Owen’s was like one bursting, a whole float in, say, the Puerto Rican Day Parade: or he was a terrorist exploding himself along with everything else, and she had made him into one; and that was so exciting that it made her come again, or maybe it was just the end of her first orgasm, an aftershock, like they say there are in earthquakes. “I can’t stop,” she said, and perhaps that was another trick, because she wanted it to continue and thought saying that might be the spell to make it so.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Here we go!” she concluded. Her pussy engulfed my face again, and I simultaneously felt her hand begin to fondle my cock. Fondle isn’t quite the word, she was also busy slapping it from side to side. But she finally settled for encircling the shaft with her fingers and sliding them up and down and around. I smiled inwardly. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t have much luck with this, as I prided myself on my ability to resist ejaculation. This is silly, I thought, she can’t possibly mean to come in my face and make me shoot my load at the same time. There’s no way she can do that. But Bossetta was oblivious to my reasoning; she was beginning to tap into a wisdom far beyond my own. She began to set down a rhythm that ran from her hand to her crotch and back again. She was working to realize her ultimate goal, and nothing could stop her. It was from this point onward that things became rather strange for me, and I wondered again if shortness of breath and her commanding tempo had combined to distort my view of reality. Prades toaPirst 465 It was not a total hallucination, I was aware that the hotel room was still there around us, but everything else suggested that we were somewhere on a mountain top together with a temple in the background, and that she was a goddess who was somehow both consuming and nourishing my spirit. Except that she was a goddess who was also a demon with tentacles, and two of her tentacles were concentrated on possessing both my face and my cock. Her aroma became ever more alluring and irresistible, and I could tell from the clasp of her hand that my cock had grown larger and harder than ever before, both in length and girth. This added to my confusion, since I couldn’t imagine how she had done it. It was as though she had dug inside of me through some secret gateway and taken over part of my body. I was also still hoping to mount her from behind afterwards, and I wanted nothing to detract from my prowess when the time came. There are orgasms, and then there are orgasms. The most usual kinds are the ones that after a certain period of stroking and love-making you yourself have. They work fine, though they are expectable and to some extent unexceptional. And then there are the other orgasms, the ones you don’t have, the ones that suddenly sneak up and have you.’This was one of those orgasms. I was totally in the power of this goddess-demon who showed no sign of relenting or relinquishing her control over me. If anything, her passion had grown even stronger, and I felt the warning signs from between my legs as her massage grew ever more powerful.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  Itd been a while since Jeannie had played at being extraverted Patty, but she hadn’t lost her chops. When Gene stripped her of the blue dress she’d exchanged with her twin for her pink one, she remembered to arch her back and pose for him, just as Patty might do. When he peeled off his white tee and dropped his blue shorts to his feet, she saw he was identical to his brother, right to the fair, sparse down on his balls. Certainly, his cock was every bit as impressive and as rock solid as her husband’s. His lips on hers were soft, and his tongue, as it tasted her lips and then her mouth, was luscious and questing, so like Pat’s, so familiar, but not Pat’s, so different. She was excited, and secretly shamed by how extra wet her pussy was when his tongue slid along her slit, in agonizingly slow strokes, and then dipped inside. He moaned. She felt it more than heard it, a low, deep exhalation that warmed her inside and out. “T love it when you lick my — um, my cunt,” she said. “Then [ll eat you until you can’t come any more,” he said. Inwardly, she groaned at the idea. But as he laved and nibbled and sucked her to one orgasm after another, Jeannie groaned out loud, with gusto. rae In the other bridal suite, Pat rolled Patty on to her belly. They were both naked and highly aroused from foreplay. “T want your ass, Jeannie,” he said. “I know how much you love it.” Patty shivered. Who’d have thought her fearful sister would’ve embraced this dirty act with such gusto. Still, she wasn’t about to be found out and so, though anal wasn’t her favourite, she giggled with delight and parted her legs wider, to welcome him. She hoped he’d take his time but he lubed his cock and leaned close, rubbing the head up and down her crack until it “caught” at her back entrance. “You want it?” he asked. “T want it.” “Tell me.” “T want it.” Patty paused, then added, “A lot.” “What do you want? Tell me. You know I like to hear you talk dirty.” “JT want your — um — prick in me, in my bum, in deep.” “Me too! I love to do your bum — Jeannie.” He leaned in, pushing _his way slowly inside her until she was full to the hilt with him. “To it,” he said. “Do it like you know I like it.” Oops! Jeannie hadn’t told her about this. He liked something that her sister did, something special, when he fucked her ass. Damn! 196 Madeline Moore

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The distinctively Florentine flavour of the five stories involving Bruno and Buffalmacco stems mainly from their being placed within specifically Florentine contexts, no opportunity being missed to pinpoint the exact location of particular narrative episodes. By contrast, there is one story, that of Monna Belcolore and the priest of Varlungo (VIII, 2), where the setting in the Florentine countryside ( contado ) is secondary in importance to its dazzling display of Florentine verbal wit. The wordplay here is a vital component of the narrative itself, which moves swiftly along by way of a series of lively and intricately assembled effusions of verbal humour, from the initial description of Monna Belcolore to the equivocal final paragraph, with its account of her eventual conversion to the priest’s way of thinking. Florentinisms and double meanings pour forth in a constant stream, and even the names of the characters contribute to the tale’s overall comic effect. Apart from Belcolore herself and her slow-witted husband, Bentivegna del Mazzo, the narrative includes a whole gallery of other characters whose sole raison d’être is to heighten the humorous effect by the very sound of their odd and at times equivocal Florentine names. And similar considerations apply to the various references to rustic pursuits, such as Belcolore’s flair for singing and dancing and the priest’s gardening skills that account for the curious presents he sends to the object of his lustful passion. No translation can convey the uniquely Florentine rustic tone of the original text, which is one of the most brilliant examples of humorous writing in medieval literature. Wordplay of a different order is to be found in the story of Friar Alberto (IV, 2), set in Venice, where the vain and foolish Donna Lisetta is variously referred to, by antonomasia, as Donna mestola, Donna zucca al vento, Madama baderla , and Donna pocofila . The conversion of such titles into fairly close English equivalents presents no great difficulty: Lady Numbskull, Lady Bighead, Lady Noodle, Lady Birdbrain. But Boccaccio confronts his translators with the most serious problems of all in the tale of Friar Cipolla (VI, 10), whose lengthy and ingenious sermon is shot through from beginning to end with puns and double meanings. Most of Boccaccio’s Italian editors maintain, with some reason, that the catalogue of far-flung places which Cipolla claims to have visited is mainly a list of localities in and around Florence, to which the writer has added a few of his own, such as Truffa (‘Swindleland’), Buffia (‘Prankland’) and terra di Menzogna (‘Spoofland’). The present translation dispenses with the possible Florentine associations of the passage. Truffia and Buffia are converted into Funland and Laughland, and terra di Menzogna into Liarland, thus hinting at a possible extension of the friar’s globetrotting to include the Baltic region and the Celtic fringe.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  “Hmm. You should come east for grad school. Gotta go. Do take extra precautions, won’t you?” When I put down the receiver, my heart was pounding. I thought it had gone all right. Hugo sounded cheerful when he hung up, but how could I know? I immediately phoned Anaïs. “That’s interesting Hugo called you so soon,” she said. At her request, I recounted my conversation with him, sentence by sentence. “You are a great actress, Tristine!” I felt triumphant, as when I’d won first place in a national high school acting competition. I started to ask Anaïs why Hugo believed I’d transferred from UCLA to USC, but she interrupted, “Can you come tomorrow evening to hear Rupert’s quintet?” Was she really inviting me? Or was she covering because Rupert had just walked in? I said uncertainly, “I’ll need your address.” “I’m going to put Rupert on the phone to give you directions,” she replied. “The music begins at six, but you should come earlier. You and I can go over some correspondence. Plan to stay for dinner before the music.” I was becoming a part of Anaïs’s life! “How long do you think it will take me to drive to Sierra Madre?” I asked. “Oh, we haven’t lived in Sierra Madre for two years!” “Did the forestry service relocate Rupert?” I asked. “No! He’s no longer with the Forest Service. He’s teaching secondary school in Hollywood, near our apartment here.” [image file=image_rsrc3R3.jpg] Anaïs’s faux Tudor building was in the flats near Fountain, a Nathanael West neighborhood: Swiss chalets next to Egyptian temples, Mediterranean terraces next to Moorish turrets. As I circled block after block for a parking space, I became increasingly disenchanted with Rupert for having left a cabin in nature for this congested grid of tired apartment buildings. Then it hit me—as I nearly hit an Impala pulling out of a parking space—Rupert was no longer a forest ranger. From what Anaïs had said, he hadn’t been one for several years, so he and Anaïs no longer needed to pretend they were married. Yet Rupert had introduced himself to me as Anaïs’s husband at Holiday House. Why? The only people who had heard him had been Christopher Isherwood, his boyfriend, Renate, and me. None of us would have cared that Anaïs and Rupert were shacking up. That’s what anyone who was cool was doing these days, according to Hugh Hefner. I added this to my list of things I wanted to ask her. After I parked and arrived at the apartment, Anaïs opened her cross-beamed door, wearing a long, embroidered caftan. “Please have a seat,” she said, indicating a nubby brown couch not unlike the one buried in my mother’s living room. “It’s awful, I know,” Anaïs apologized, “but Rupert refuses to part with it. He can be impossibly bullish.”

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The odd name ‘Beguine’ still defies certain explanation, but it seems to be a term of ridicule verging on hostility, like the later description of English heretics as ‘Lollard’, meaning mumbler of possibly dubious prayers. That says something about the obscurity of the movement’s origins, and possibly about male suspicion and surprise that it should exist at all. Its recent historian has commented that it is ‘the only movement in medieval monastic history that was created by women and for women – and not affiliated with, or supervised by, a male order’. He points out some of the Beguines’ unusual characteristics: ‘a lack of overarching governmental structures, a low level of internal hierarchy, a tendency toward the sacralization of routine work, the use of dance and ecstasy in worship, and an emphasis on the continuity between female existence before and after entrance into the community’. [77] Despite all this informality, the Beguines won papal approval during the thirteenth century, in step with the various Orders of friars, while keeping their distinctiveness. It was a remarkable exemption from the effects of Periculoso, which must have been the result of benevolent and deliberately untidy thinking by some senior clergy, aware of the sheer usefulness of the Beguines in their urban settings. Not least among their oddities was the size of some of the communities (‘Beguinages’): several hundred strong in some places, and thus little female towns within a town, often surrounded by their own moat and walls, but readily welcoming visitors. One can still enjoyably tour some of the surviving examples and notice how different their informal clusters of cosy domestic buildings are from the classic monastery layout. Beguinages were home to the range of craft skills deployed by women, especially textile production on an almost industrial scale: very different from the delicate embroidery that became the speciality of many nunneries in the wake of their isolation from higher education. The Beguines nevertheless also provided education for both girls and boys in surroundings permeated with worship and spiritual exploration. Among the ranks of the Beguines in their expansion across central Europe was the excitable Viennese mystic Agnes Blannbekin, joyfully contemplating her celestial nudity. Their communal life went on to inspire further female initiatives in celibate life during the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation (below, Chapter 14). Without having to think much about it, the institutional Church had discovered one civilizing force amid the streets of its great cities – although not everywhere in Europe since, rather puzzlingly, the Atlantic Isles showed little interest in the Beguine movement, despite England’s close involvement with the Low Countries’ textile trade, and southern Europeans may have found the Beguines’ female assertiveness too much to handle. * More universal was the adoption of a new mode of conceiving the Christian family in Western Christianity, so that the copulating laity could take a decorous place alongside a well-regulated celibate clergy.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  He looked at Desi, and then back at the picture and lightly touched it, right in the middle of April’s treasure. “Somebody missed this,” he said, much as he might have pronounced a carburetor dead. “They ought to’ve airbrushed this.” “What’s airbrushed?” Desi asked in a whisper. “Tt’s a retouch they do on these girls,” he said, clearly pleased she had asked the question. “It’s why none of them other girls have p— why they don’t show hair down there. Come here.” The small office shrank to a tiny matchbox. She only took two steps before she stopped, her breast almost touching Bobby’s arm. She breathed his breath when he turned and smiled and ran his finger down May’s belly, the dark half moon of his nail skirting the top of the smooth, hairless labia. “See?” Bobby held April out and grinned. Desi took the page from him, her cheeks burning. “Desi,” Bobby said, nervous, and hopeful. “I sure would like to take your picture.” “Just sit still, Desi. Relax.” Bobby lifted her chin and brushed a wisp of hair from her dark mane so it hung to her eyebrow. She wore a crisp white shirt and a navy blue skirt. He shot against a background of azaleas, their blooms thin and pale at the season’s end. Bright in a clear sky, the sun had just begun to gather shadows as it settled over the town. Bobby said it gave her an aura. In his yellow linen shirt and black chinos, he looked like a college boy. “Put your arm up behind under hair, baby. Look just to my right.” He stepped behind the tripod, snapping several shots as she raised her arm, aware that it made her breasts stand out -against the white shirt. The straps and lace of her bra must show, she thought. What if I wasn’t wearing a bra? Her nipples stiffened. “Perfect, Desi. Don’t even breathe, baby.” 478 Angela Caperton The sun’s light kissed along the edge of her cheek and the nape of her neck, and pulsed between her legs. Disobedient, she turned her head the tiniest bit and smiled at Bobby, hoping her eyes and the flush she felt in her cheeks conveyed how much she wanted him. He looked a long moment, then disappeared behind the shutter with a steady click, click, click. When he showed her the pictures the next day, Desi stared at the girl painted in vivid colors, hardly believing it was her. “Baby, you’re amazing,” Bobby said. “There’s a dozen shots in here I could sell.” She leafed through the pictures. “Who’d buy them?” she asked as her treasure hummed. “IT don’t know. Glamour mags? Popular Photography? You're a natural, baby. The light loves you.”

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  He stole a glance to his left and‘found that the elderly ladies had already departed, doubtless wagging their heads at the shocking brazenness of the youth of today. Or maybe, Charley thought as Alice rubbed her hardened nipples against his chest, maybe the two old women were grinning, remembering their own fearless adventures from youth. Perhaps they came here to reminisce, he considered, maybe in another time they too had come here with lovers, far from the prying eyes of parents and elders. Like a clicking kinetoscope, images of fumbling lovers shedding period costumes filled his imagination and Charley raised his hands and buried them in Alice’s hair, aching to bury himself inside her, in that warm wet cunt that always welcomed him, clutching hungrily at his thickness. Alice broke the kiss long enough to look over her shoulder toward their neighbour on the benches. The man continued to stare into the depths of his paper, stubborn to the last. Alice shifted around so that she was sitting across Charley’s lap, her back to the reader, her arse planted between his thighs. She moved Charley’s hand around to cup her small breast and moaned aloud, leaning back into his other arm. Charley let his eyes dart toward the man on the bench who seemed rigidly still, as if anger had frozen him like a statue. Charley leaned in to bite Alice’s neck, his thumb flipping across her popped nipple and she moaned happily again, squirming in his lap with 300 C. Margery Kempe tantalizing nearness, her heat adding to his own. His cock seemed to swell even further. It was too much for the man. With a sudden explosion of noise, he wadded up the newspaper, stuffed it in his carrier bag and muttered under his breath as he strode off with a stomping step that was wasted on the soft ground. They were alone. “Quick now,” Alice said huskily, her eyes bright with desire. She hopped off his lap and led him by the hand into the tangle of plants behind the bench. It wasn’t much cover, Charley thought, suddenly worried. There was another building visible through the bower. Would someone see them? But Alice was already reaching under her dress to slip off her knickers, tossing them into her bag without another thought and standing legs apart, looking at him with a wicked grin. Charley felt a whimper rise to his throat, but reached down to unzip his trousers. He couldn’t quite resist looking over his shoulder, but they were alone so far.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  or red. Zoe didn’t really need much convincing. She could barely restrain her giggles as she stripped down and slid behind the cheap plastic curtain. At first, they just kissed and rubbed their wet bodies together under the shower spray. Then Bobby took the lead, gliding the white bar of soap over her breasts, moving it in tight circles over her nipples. She leaned against him, reveling in the sensation, an odd combination of cool and rigid, slippery and soft. Then Bobby turned the soap sideways and pushed it up into her cleft, brushing her clit with it, then moving back up over her mons and belly. Only when he had her nearly sobbing with lust did he stop the teasing to press the soap steadily between her labia and pinch her nipple just the way she liked it. Zoe rode the makeshift sex toy, thrusting against the slick, rounded edge, until she came in silent gasps, the hot water lashing her face and chest. She fell to her knees and gazed up at him, his ringlets wet against his shoulders, his bittersweet chocolate eyes glowing. It was her turn to please him. Greedily she took him in her mouth, her head nodding — Yes, yes, ’m doing a dirty thing. ’'m sucking off a guy in the shower in the men’s bathroom. Bobby’s thighs tensed, his cock grew thicker and harder between her lips. She knew it wouldn’t be long before he gave her that warning tap on her shoulder. Some guys whined and gave her shit because she didn’t like to swallow, but Bobby had always been cool. Yet suddenly, kneeling on the shower stall floor, she felt ready to do something even more wild and daring. She wanted to watch him come, and she wanted to taste it, just a little, before it dissolved in the pulsing spray. She pulled away and met his eyes. Come on me, Bobby. Spray me with your iz. Of course, she didn’t actually say such things out loud. Zoe had never had the nerve to tell a guy the crazy things she dreamed of doing during sex. The words always got all tangled up in her throat. But Bobby seemed to understand. He reached down and brushed her cheek with his fingertips. “Do you want me to come on you?” He made the words sound almost romantic. She bowed her head and nodded, blushing at her own perversity. Bobby took his dick in his hand and began to pull on it with practiced strokes, aiming it straight at her. Zoe tilted her head back, lips parted. She knew Bobby masturbated in the shower — what guy didn’t? — but it gave her a secret thrill to be here with him, watching and waiting. 56 Donna George Storey

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

  I’m compelled to notice that if I tell the other happenings in this eventful year at as great length as I’ve told the incidents of the fortnight that brought me from Chicago to the ranch at Eureka, I’d have to devote at least a volume to them, so I prefer to assure my readers that one of these days if I live, I’ll publish my novel “On the Trail” which gives the whole story in great detail. Now I shall content myself with saying that two days after reaching the ranch we set out, ten men strong and two wagons filled with our clothes and provender and dragged by four mules each, to cover the twelve hundred miles to Southern Texas or New Mexico where we hoped to buy 5000 or 6000 head of cattle at a dollar a head and drive them to Kansas City, the nearest train point. * * * * * When we got on the Great Trail a hundred miles from Fort Dodge, the days passed in absolute monotony. After sunset a light breeze usually sprang up to make the night pleasantly cool and we would sit and chat about the camp-fire for an hour or two. Strange to say the talk usually turned to bawd or religion or the relations of capital and labor. It was curious how eagerly these rough cattle-men would often discuss the mysteries of this unintelligible world, and as a militant sceptic I soon got a reputation among them; for Dell usually backed me up and his knowledge of books and thinkers seemed to us extraordinary. These constant evening discussions, this perpetual arguing, had an unimaginable effect on me. I had no books with me and I was often called on to deal with two or three different theories in a night: I had to think out the problems for myself and usually I thought them out when hunting by myself in the daytime. It was as a cowpuncher that I taught myself how to think:—a rare art among men and seldom practised. Whatever originality I possess comes from the fact that in youth, while my mind was in process of growth, I was confronted with important modern problems and forced to think them out for myself and find some reasonable answer to the questionings of half a dozen different minds.

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

  I threw myself on French like a glutton and this was my method, which I don’t recommend but simply record, though it brought me to understand everything said by the end of the first week. I first spent five whole days on the grammar, learning all the verbs, especially the auxiliary and irregular verbs by heart, till I knew them as I knew my Alphabet. I then read Hugo’s Hernani with a dictionary in another long day of eighteen hours and the next evening went to the gallery in the Comédie Française to see the play acted by Sarah Bernhardt as Doña Sol and Mounet Sully as Hernani. For a while the rapid speech and strange accent puzzled me; but after the first act I began to understand what was said on the stage and after the second act I caught every word and to my delight when I came out into the streets, I understood everything said to me. After that golden night with Sarah’s grave, _traînante_ voice in my ears, I made rapid because unconscious progress. Next day in the restaurant I picked up a dirty torn copy of Madame Bovary that lacked the first eighty pages. I took it to my room and swallowed it in a couple of breathless hours, realising at once that it was a masterwork; but marking a hundred and fifty new words to turn out in my pocket dictionary afterwards. I learned these words carefully by heart and have never given myself any trouble about French since. What I know of it and I know it fairly well now, has come from reading and speaking it for thirty odd years. I still make mistakes in it chiefly of gender, I regret to say, and my accent is that of a foreigner, but taking it by and large I know it and its literature and speak it better than most foreigners and that suffices me. After some three weeks Ned Bancroft came from the States to live with me. He was never particularly sympathetic to me and I cannot account for our companionship save by the fact that I was peculiarly heedless and full of human, unreflecting kindness. I have said little of Ned Bancroft who was in love with Kate Stevens before she fell for Professor Smith; but I have just recorded the unselfish way he withdrew while keeping intact his friendship both for Smith and the girl: I thought that very fine of him. He left Lawrence and the University shortly after we first met and by “pull” obtained a good position on the railroad at Columbus, Ohio.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  Unfortunately, this only makes him groan and fuck himself harder. I actually think he’s really going to come that quickly; I can see his bum cheeks clenching and he’s making far too much noise and soon he’s babbling: “God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I need to come so bad, God, I’ve been thinking about your tits all afternoon.” I yank on his arm and get his hand away from his cock as punishment. He squirms with frustration, but doesn’t try to start it up with his other hand, as though he were just waiting for me to stop him and a show of stopping him is enough. “All afternoon?” “Yeeessss,’ he whines, and I want to turn him around so much. I want to see his gorgeous face all crumpled with impatience and lust, and then I want to watch him tug his cock until it gleams. “Ts this something you’ve done before?” Oddly, I feel like a doctor. It isn’t a terrible feeling by any means. “What? Think about ... your tits .. . or jerk off at work?” That last bit comes out in a rush, and sets me glowing. Oh, to think of him doing himself in one of the stalls or in his cubicle under his desk! My clit twinges in sympathy. “Usually I... Usually I have to ... you know. Because I’ve been thinking about you.” “What do you think about me doing?” “T catch you. I catch you playing with yourself. Playing with your nipples with your shirt open and your skirt up.” Oh Jesus, that’s nice. I’ve done it before, too, in my office. With the door locked, of course, but sometimes I’m daring enough to leave the blinds open, hoping that some beefy window cleaner will chance by and see me as lewd as can be, legs spread open, fingers strumming my clit to a great big juicy orgasm. 324 Charlotte Stein I need to come so bad now that I can feel my clit straining against the material of my panties, and I’m wet enough to feel it when I move. Maybe I’ll make him watch while I bring myself off with that little buzzing dildo I keep in my bag. Maybe I'll make him lick my clit with his hands tied behind his back so that he can’t do himself. Maybe I’ll let him fuck me over the desk, great handfuls of my tits in his big hands, some window cleaner watching with his cock in his fist. Oh the possibilities are endless, when you’ve got a slut on your hands.