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 Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  If the preceding account sounds like it was ripped from the pages of a cheesily written stroke book, don't let that slow you down. Go to Masa. Go now. Book late and show up on time. Sit down, shut up—and relax. He'll take it from there. Give yourself over to the experience. And enjoy. Cooking professionally is a dominant act, at all times about control. Eating well, on the other hand, is about submission. It's about giving up all vestiges of control, about entrusting your fate entirely to someone else. It's about turning off the mean, manipulative, calculating, and shrewd person inside you, and slipping heedlessly into a new experience as if it were a warm bath. It's about shutting down the radar and letting good things happen. When that happens to a professional chef, it's a rare and beautiful thing. Let it happen to you. THE HUNGRY AMERICAN Nearly five weeks of hotel rooms, airport lounges, mammoth meals, and equally mammoth amounts of drink, and yet, only thirty minutes out of Hanoi's Noi Bai Airport, I'm nearly levitating off the ground, absolutely giddy with excitement and pleasure. I'm no longer jet-lagged, burned out, or jaded. I'm alive. I'm hungry. And back in Vietnam. I start grinning idiotically right away, beginning with the warm welcome from Linh, waiting for me by customs, and continue on the ride into town. Out the window are rice paddies, narrow two-story homes decorated with rows of drying corn, gray skies, and bright red banners everywhere, most bearing the Tet (lunar new years) greeting: Chuc Mung Nam Moi; others are flags, yellow star on bright red field, anticipating Monday's anniversary of the founding of the Vietnamese Communist Party. (Though it's sometimes easy to forget it, this is still a communist country.) The road into town is crowded on both sides with motorbikes, bicycles, and scooters, most overloaded with passengers dressed in their Tet best: jackets and ties, children swaddled in blankets or netting, women with scarves and face masks covering everything below the eyes. Everyone is smiling and loaded down with holiday goodies. They carry fruit, flowers, traditional chung cakes still wrapped in artfully tied leaves, shimmering gold paper trees, bundles of bright red joss sticks. The center of the road is for four-wheeled vehicles, meaning that cars and trucks barrel at full speed, headlong into each other's paths down the center line, beeping maniacally, pulling out only at the last second. I am supposed to head straight to the Sofitel Metropole Hotel to check in, but Linh is a Hanoi native, anxious to show me the best of his hometown, and as soon as we pass the long, Russian-built Dragon Bridge over the Red River in the inner city, we pull over to an open bia hoi joint.

• From Like Family

  Maybe if she had been as pretty as Krista, or as smart and sassy as Aunt Gloria, she might have found her way free. Maybe if my sisters and I hadn’t kept ourselves so apart, hadn’t pushed Tina away with the same force we used with her parents, she would be standing on the walk with Penny and me, waving happily as the car lurched out of the drive. But we had, and she was stuck—right smack in the middle of Bub and Hilde, right smack in the middle of the backseat with her Seek-a-Word puzzle books and her giant bag of Fritos. Penny and I watched until the car rounded Bullard, then let out a good loud shriek. Without Bub and Hilde, the house expanded like a lung, rising weightless around us. We drank lemonade so thick with sugar that the granules rained toward the bottom of the jug. We stood with the refrigerator door open, took thirty-minute showers, let the dogs on the carpet. At night I used two fans and took a Popsicle to bed. I strung a dream in which I was a whole family, all by myself: the mother and the father and the baby playing with its toes. Since Bub and Hilde would be gone for a month, Penny and I decided a little redecorating was more than in order. Into the closet went the Holly Hobby plastic place mats, the skunk figurines, the table lamp in the shape of a rearing horse. We stripped the crocheted toilet-paper-roll holders, the crocheted seat covers, the crocheted toaster cozy. Penny eyed the curtain in Bub and Hilde’s bathroom that was really a terry-cloth towel, faded blue-and-gold tulips with a fringed bottom. It was so obviously a towel. What was Hilde thinking? “Chuck it,” I said to Penny, and she did. When we felt the house was as presentable as it was going to get, Penny and I hosted a party. We bought pizza and bad beer and let people come right in with their shoes on. I knew Hilde would have kittens if she saw the trail of dirt that was collecting between the entrance hall and the keg, and therefore felt a pure pleasure standing in the doorway, saying, “Come on in.” “Is it okay to sit up here?” Diane Rodriguez asked from the countertop by the kitchen sink. “Fine,” I said. “Totally fine.” I walked from room to room, touching tabletops and chair arms, leaving my prints everywhere. [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] SOMEONE’S BROTHER BROUGHT PORNOGRAPHY . I came in from the patio, my glass of gin and lime Kool-Aid sweating into my hand, and found the whole room riveted by this image on the TV screen: a woman, naked, riding a contraption like a bike that swept feathers over her clitoris when the wheels spun. She moaned, pedaling faster. Behind her a man walked by on stilts, his stiff penis waving like an arm. It was Caligula.

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  When I am being fisted I feel very aggressive, very primal, very “animalistic.” I get incredibly loud and I growl. It is probably the only time I am 100 percent selfish in sex, and I think if anyone tried to step in and stop it, I would snarl and snap like a wolf whose kill is being threatened! Also, my orgasms are different, less of a spike upward to orgasm and more of a long, slow ramp, indescribably intense and pleasurable with a hint of pain. —MARY When I am the fister, it makes me feel incredibly powerful! I feel like I am inside her soul, like there is total spiritual communion with her; to experience her complete surrender to me; to smell, hear, and see her arousal; to feel her opening to my hand, to my will! —MARY It arouses a feeling so intense in me that I feel as if I’m going to explode from the inside…and the orgasm I have is not the same as a clitoral orgasm, it’s much more intensified…it feels like I can’t take any more, but I don’t want the feeling to stop. —DENICE The experience of fisting is the purest transfer of kundalini, and the most intense intimacy, that I know. —CATHERINE A. LISZT For a while now, I’ve recognized that I finally “learned” how to meditate during my quest to be fisted. That sense of relaxation, of concentration and not-concentration, of openness, of wholeness…I was somewhat floored when I first realized that what I was doing was, essentially, meditating, and that this was why the sensation was so much more intense and fulfilling. I really couldn’t figure out why fisting was so different from other types of penetration, why that particular type of openness was something I was so intensely drawn to, until I thought about kundalini. The openness is the same as I get during my meditation /masturbation exercises, but there’s something further…the degree of connection…yes, it is like being touched, inside, not in my body but in my energy stream. It’s touch that goes beyond the physical into a different kind of sensation. —RENEE This is by no means a complete introduction to fisting. If fisting is an activity that interests you, I suggest reading A Hand in the Bush: The Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting, by Deborah Addington.4 Anal Sex Many women find the idea of anal sex off-putting, and usually it is because we are concerned about hygiene, or because it seems so invasive, or because we expect it to be painful. Transmission of AIDS and other diseases such as hepatitis can certainly occur through anal sex more quickly than through other forms of sexual play, but latex or nitrile gloves and condoms are effective barriers.

• From How to Be a Great Lover (1999)

  Ladies, as we’ve already discussed, men tend to be very visual creatures. Why not take advantage of it? There are much better ways to go about applying lubricant and I’m going to share with you some of them right now. Secret from Lou’s Archives Whether you’re pouring into your hand, his hand, or somewhere else, try pouring the lubricant from a distance of at least 6 inches to add to the visual for him and prowess for you. Just blobbing lubricant into your hand is pedestrian. ONE-HAND APPLICATION TECHNIQUES • No Dominance. Pour the lube into your nondominant hand (the one you don’t write with) and apply it with that one. In the same way that a drawing you did with your nondominant hand would be more free and less structured, so it is with the way you apply the lubricant. You’ll also get a different awareness about the feel and texture of his penis than you do when touching him with your dominant hand. • Playing Elsewhere. Pour a little pool of lubricant into his hand, bellybutton, or, if he’s laying on his stomach, the small of his back and dip your fingers into the pool to apply the lube elsewhere. Because the skin is our largest organ, this will expand the sexual sensation to other areas of the body rather than limiting it to just the obvious hot spots. TWO-HAND APPLICATION TECHNIQUES • Together from the Top Down. Starting at the head of his penis, work your already lubricated hands down slowly, massaging his entire shaft and testicles in warm moisture. • It Takes Two. He will be guiding your already lubricated hands as his applicators. Let him move them up and down his shaft, artfully applying the lubricant with the speed and pressure that feels best to him. Secret from Lou’s Archives Have him pour some lubricant into your cupped hands. By then rubbing your hands together seductively, you’ll not only warm up the lube, but you’ll also let him know how good it feels to you and how good you are soon going to make him feel. • Perfumery. Apply the lubricant to the inside of your forearms. Using the entire area between your wrists and your elbows, work his penis gently back and forth between them. NO-HAND APPLICATION TECHNIQUES

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

  When Anaïs was most honest with herself, she recognized there were advantages to her trapeze. For one thing, her cyclical appearances and disappearances kept her marriages fresh. Her husbands never tired of her because, unlike the usual wife, she could not be taken for granted. When she was gone, each man longed for her as for an absent mistress. For another thing, her double life tempered her restlessness. After her affair in Paris with Henry Miller, she had been infected with Henry’s lust and taste for variety, a greater threat to her marriage to Hugo than this predictable pendulum. Now she no longer picked up men at parties, no longer engaged in affairs. Her need for adventure, her appetite for wildness, was satisfied. Sometimes she could even see humor in her high-wire act, and sometimes it gave her an almost insane high. On the ground, she felt acutely and sorrowfully the shortness of life, measured by clocks and charts and heartbeats; but flying, she transcended the limits of time. Thirty thousand feet in the air on a Constellation jet, suspended between her men and safe from their demands, she was released from gravity. Aloft, she was Sabina—who defied life’s cruel restrictions of one love, one spouse, one life, one self. When the moon was a sliver, she eyed it from her window seat and imagined herself as Hecate, the moon’s dark face, flying invisibly and freely in the night sky. When the moon was round and bright, she thought of herself as Artemis, the huntress, the goddess owned by no man. And when the planet Venus greeted her at dusk or dawn, she knew herself as Aphrodite, faithful only to the essence of love. CHAPTER 17 Los Angeles, California, 1964 TRISTINE A DRY CRACK OF LAUGHTER came from the back of Anaïs’s throat. “I believed my absurd double marriage could not last a year, and it has lasted a decade.” I quickly calculated: when I’d met Anaïs in 1962, she’d already been a bigamist for seven years! I was excited by her daring. She was an outlaw like the bad boys I’d always been keen on, dangerous and sexy because they took risks and defied convention. I loved her terrible secret; she’d beaten the system of marriage that kept women down, and now that I knew it, she would have to keep me close. Her penciled eyebrows pinched irregularly and her eyes sought mine. “Now I’m dangling from the trrapeze by a thread and I need your help!” “I’ll help you,” I responded. “I think it’s great that you’re a bigamist!” “Please don’t use that word.” “Why not? I think it’s fantastic!” “It’s an ugly word. And besides it’s illegal.” “Well, smoking pot is illegal, but I know a lot of people who are doing it. So is refusing military service, but it shouldn’t be.” “So you don’t think I’m terrible now that you know?”

• From Controversies of the Early Christian History (2013)

  126 Lecture 19: What Happened to the Apostles?  John tells us that at times, he touched Jesus and felt a material body, but at other times, he touched Jesus and the substance was “immaterial and bodiless,” as if Jesus didn’t exist at all. He also tells of walking with Jesus but not seeing his footprints.  Later on, John tells what happened at Jesus’s cruci fi xion, which seems very much like what we saw in the Apocalypse of Peter. As John watches the crucifi xion, Jesus appears to him and explains that he is not suffering what he seems to be suffering.  Probably the most amusing story of the Acts of John has to do with an incident that occurred while John was on a missionary journey. At an inn, he fi nds that his bed is fi lled with bedbugs. To the amusement of his companions, John orders the bedbugs out, and they leave.  Such legends about the apostles were wholeheartedly believed by Christians for centuries. Today, scholars recognize that the Apocryphal Acts do indeed make for entertaining reading, and they’re useful for seeing how later Christians imagined and talked about the apostles of Jesus. Still, quite apart from the fantastic miracles they narrate, we don’t know whether these stories have any historical credibility or not. Ehrman, After the New Testament. ———, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament. Eusebius, The History of the Church. Suggested Reading 127 1. Which legends about the apostles strike you as the most interesting? 2. Do any of the stories about the apostles we considered in this lecture seem historically plausible? Questions to Consider

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  33 o It is selective, focusing primarily on two leaders (Peter and Paul), on the westward rather than eastward expansion, and on cities rather than rural areas. o It does not have good sources in some instances. The first eight chapters concerning the founding of the community in Jerusalem contain little actual fact; as a good Hellenistic historian, Luke fills the lacunae with impressive speeches and summaries. o It has definite biases. Acts emphasizes unity among Christian leaders, for example, as well as continuity between Israel and the church. o As an apologetic narrative that covers more than 30 years in 28 chapters (many of them consisting of speeches), Acts necessarily smoothes over a much rougher course of events. • Supported by other early writings (such as the letters of Paul), Acts is a reliable source for certain aspects of Christianity’s first expansion. o The expansion was amazingly rapid, its speed matched only by the spread of Islam, which had the advantage of arms and diplomacy. Within 10 years of the death of Jesus, there were Christian communities throughout Palestine and Syria; in 20 years, across Asia Minor and into Greece; and in 25 years, in Rome. o It spread through preaching in public but even more through personal contacts, such as the conversion of households and those Gentiles (called God-fearers) who frequented synagogues. o The expansion of Christianity was carried out in conditions of duress. The movement spread not necessarily because people accepted it but at least in part because of harassment 34 Lecture 5: Paul and Christianity’s First Expansion and even persecution, forcing early believers into frequent and difficult travel. o Christianity had to accomplish five transitions without a long period of stabilization and without strong institutional or textual controls: (1) sociological, from a rural itinerant movement to an urban household association; (2) geographical, from Palestine to the Diaspora; (3) linguistic, from Hebrew and Aramaic to Greek; (4) cultural, from dominant Jewish institutions to dominant Gentile culture; and (5) demographic, from Jewish majority to Gentile majority. • The diversity found in the writings of the New Testament, in terms of genre, perspective, and argumentation, are rooted at least in part in the diversity of experience and circumstance of the earliest Christian communities. The Life of Paul • During the roughly 40-year period of 30–70 C.E., three developments in Christianity occurred simultaneously. o Communities (churches = ekklesiai) were founded and nurtured in cities from Jerusalem to Rome; these communities had shared rituals, such as baptism and meals, as well as practices of preaching, prayer, and teaching. o In such social settings, oral traditions concerning Jesus were handed on in anecdotal fashion to legitimate and guide the practices of the community. o Leaders of churches, such as Paul, James, and the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, wrote letters to communities that were read aloud in the assembly. • Paul’s life is sketched both in Acts, where he dominates chapters 9–28, and in more fragmentary form in his letters.

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  37 o Distinctions from Jews were harder, because they shared the same symbolic world of Torah. Should believers, then, be circumcised, or observe the Sabbath, or practice purity regulations? • The assembly that meets “in Christ” has egalitarian ideals: There is not Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free (Gal. 3:28), but meeting in the stratified location of the household (oikos) meant complications for those ideals. o Did the Jew have an advantage over the Gentile? Why or why not? What did that mean for common table fellowship? o Did males continue to have supremacy in all matters or only those in the household? Did the Spirit represent a liberation for females? o If all are “brothers and sisters” within the worship assembly, why did that not change the social status of master and slave when the worship ended? o The rich should not be honored if poverty is the ideal, but rich members of the community served as benefactors. Should they not be leaders, as well? The Vibrancy of the Early Christian Movement • Paul’s letters also bear witness to the vibrancy and energy of the nascent Christian movement as it exploded across the empire. • If early Christianity were simply the “Jesus movement” as a sect within Judaism, many of these issues would not have been raised; Jesus would simply have been another prophet or teacher. It was the power of the religious experience of the Resurrection that generated these great tensions. • Paul’s vision of the church as a “new creation” in which members are a “new humanity” in the “body of Christ” is a utopian conception 38 Lecture 5: Paul and Christianity’s First Expansion of community that had great appeal, but it also had the capacity to disrupt the order of society. • Already in Paul’s letters, it is possible to see how Christianity forced open accustomed cultural values and began to reshape them—not all at once, never completely, and not always successfully, but it is difficult to account for Christianity’s appeal through the centuries without recognizing this power for social change as one of its elements. Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic Historiography. Meeks and Fitzgerald, The Writings of Saint Paul. Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life. 1. How is the diversity of earliest Christianity—reflected in the writings of the New Testament—grounded in the conditions of its first expansion? 2. Discuss the proposition that Paul is the real “founder” of Christianity. Does this accurately capture his role? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  I do a few pushups and stretch my groin. Bridging from my back to my neck, I see a Channel 4 camera guy shooting videotape of me. He shoots me while I look upside down. He’s balding and he reminds me of Lemon Pie. And Lemon Pie reminds me that in about seven minutes my life will be back to normal. I’ll study during the day and work at night. I’ll develop a new routine and maybe make some new friends and enlarge my world a little. Williamson lets his man escape just at the buzzer and loses by a point. “Shit to the thirteenth, man!” shouts Balldozer as I walk out to the mats. “Banzai, man! Banzai!” yells the Big Konig. “May you live a thousand years!” I hear everything, as I always do. Kuch yelps and yips and screams, “Munch ’im up, Swain! Munch ’im up!” “It’s dinnertime!” yells Otto. “Eat ’im, eat ’im, eat ’im, eat ’im!” All the guys chime in. From the bleachers Leeland and Joretta and Sharon and Rosalie wave clenched fists. Tanneran screams unintelligibly. Dad claps and Cindy chants, “WIN . . . WIN . . .” along with the cheerleaders. Mom looks worried. Arney claps along with the chant. Carla smiles and shines and doesn’t make a sound. I’m calm as I enter the circle. Behind me trails a brief tradition. It’s made up, but it’s mine. Win or lose, the river flows again. Shute and I cross and shake hands. The whistle blows. Through me flows the power to blast Grand Coulee Dam to smithereens.

• From The Wrestler: A Life of Passion and the Pursuit of Greatness (2016)

  When I was in eighth grade, coach Mayabb (then head coach at Oak Park High School in Kansas City, Missouri) took it upon himself to help me grow in the sport. He did this first by teaching me to dream big. And he did so by taking me to the 2000 Olympic Trials where I had the opportunity to see the best in the country battle it out on the mat in order to represent the United States and face the best in the world at the Olympic Games. Believe me, it worked. Not only was I watching my wrestling heroes take to the mat live and in person, but I began to dream big…really big! I imagined myself on those mats one day, competing for a spot on the Olympic team and chasing after Olympic medals. And as Mayabb explained to me: “It starts with chasing after state and national titles.”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

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

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  Inhibitions, instilled into us as we grow up, can prevent us from getting in touch with what turns us on in the first place. But change only needs a willingness to be open. Changes specific to your sexuality are not so difficult to manifest as you might think. True, you cannot make your body have an orgasm unless it wants to. But when we give our bodies permission to change, all kinds of things become possible. This was illustrated for me during the time it took to write this book. I drew my close friends into my research. They graciously accepted my calls at any time of day or night to answer questions like: Can you feel contractions in your vagina when you come? Do you have to stretch out your feet when you come? How long do your orgasms normally last? We found that our sexual horizons have expanded simply as a result of thinking intensely about orgasm, finding a language to express ourselves, and discovering new potential. We all seem to be having longer and more powerful orgasms. Hearing about what’s possible has given us the incentive to open up to other ways of being sexual. Discovering the range of what women define as orgasm has encouraged us to define our own experiences differently. The process of being orgasmic is constantly unfolding and evolving, if we allow it to do so. It is a journey, and the point of the process is the journey, not some mythical end product. From Pain to Pleasure, and Beyond… One of the remarkable things about the orgasmic state is how it acts as an analgesic; things we normally experience as painful may not be felt at all when we are in the throes of a climax. Gina Ogden, Beverly Whipple, and other renowned sex researchers have done a number of controlled studies that prove the remarkable power of orgasm to raise a woman’s pain threshold.2 Apparently, the greater the sexual pleasure, the stronger the analgesic effect. In Women Who Love Sex1, Gina Ogden describes how, during orgasm, a woman registers no pain response to a stimulus (steady pressure applied to the fingertip by an Analgesia Meter) that she was unable to tolerate only minutes before. Yet her ability to experience a sensual touch (a hair-thin filament brushed across the back of her hand) is increased. In Extended Sexual Orgasm3, the authors describe a group of arthritics who experience some freedom from pain for half an hour following orgasm. The question is, would they be free from pain for longer periods if they had extended orgasms? The Brauers claim that in some cases all of the following problems have been alleviated, if not cured by the regular practice of ESO: headaches; neck, back, and pelvic pain; menstrual pain; arthritic pain; stomach and intestinal complaints; prostatitis; high blood pressure; asthma and bronchitis; skin eruptions; depression; fatigue; anxiety; alcoholism; insomnia; and anger.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I love reading about crime. I like writing about crime. I like listening to wiretap recordings of gangsters, hearing the marvelously loopy, repetitive, elliptical, and wildly profane patois of two semiarticulate career criminals who think they just might be being recorded by the FBI, but have business to conduct anyway. It's poetry to me. In my apartment, CourtTV, the twenty-four-hour criminal justice cable network, is always on; the sounds of badly miked witnesses, recorded emergency calls, droning coroners, and preening lawyers are the background music to my leisure hours. While I sip my morning coffee in bed, friends are betraying friends on the stand, pathologists coldly recite the particulars of damage to bones and tissue, stone killers affectlessly describe the circumstances leading up to murder, dismemberment, arson . . . and worse. Lawyers aggressively examine and cross-examine, shrieking with feigned outrage, while outside my windows, car alarms whoop and wail—the occasional urban percussion of shattering safety glass when yet another young entrepreneur makes off with a car stereo. It's like jazz to me, and I miss it when I'm away. The familiar criminal sounds are almost comforting. A lot of crime buffs favor the lone sociopath, the serial killer, the pathological narcissist. They like maladjusted teens who listen to Metallica, shave their heads, and then go on killing sprees, or former bed wetters who kill their mothers, then describe how they could still hear Mom's voice, chastising them as they flushed her vocal cords down the food disposal. They thrive on the special little moments in criminal trials when, for instance, the best friend of this month's latest juvenile mass-murderer balks at admitting on the stand that he saw his buddy cry—this just after cheerfully implicating him in the slaughter of ten of his classmates: Lawyer: So, after emptying his weapon, am I to understand that Mr. Sprewell adorned his person with the blood of his victims? Is that correct? Witness: Huh? Lawyer: His face . . . he put blood on his face after killing them? Witness: Oh, yeah. He, like smeared blood on his cheeks . . . like an Indian, you know? Stripes like. He said it looked cool. Lawyer: And later. . . after you say you both went back to the defendant's home to play video games and kill his parents . . . did the defendant at any point cry? Witness: Cry? I don't know . . . I don't know if he like . . . cried. He was . . . you know . . . upset.

• From Escape (2007)

  When one of the wicked was killed by the tomahawk of a resurrected Indian, he’d fall to the ground, seemingly from a heart attack. But what had happened was that the tomahawk had split his heart in two. When an autopsy was performed, doctors would find the severed heart and be at a loss to explain it. But only a few would know the truth. Most would think that the person hit by the tomahawk had died from a heart attack. No one would know that the resurrected Indians had been our saviors. Once the planes were knocked out of the sky, my cousins who were playing the role of government agents marched into the orchard. Once again the resurrected Indians came to our rescue without firing a single shot or hurling a single tomahawk. It had been prophesied to us that in the last days, any army that went up against the Lord’s people would drop dead for no apparent reason and the armies of Zion would be seen as great and terrible. In the game of apocalypse, the resurrected Indians protected us from the government. But that wasn’t enough. We were being invaded by the Russians in the east and the Chinese in the west. Once again, it was the people of God who turned the invaders back by participating in prayer circles. We all came out from our hiding places and gathered together in circles, pretending to listen to radio reports about the Chinese invaders, who had made it as far as Nevada. The Russians were poised at the Mississippi River. Women and children had been evacuated from cites. We were informed that the men who’d stayed behind to fight were now dead. As the Lord’s people, we were required to stand in holy places and watch the army of the Lord be made manifest. So we stood in our prayer circles believing that when the last days actually came, the Lord would fight our battles for us. The war was over, but our game was not. We then faced famine because we had not yet conquered enough land to sustain all the people who needed to live on it. We went back to the orchard, splitting into groups to hide. We had to make sure the food we had set aside for the end times wouldn’t be taken from us. Messengers were sent back and forth to communicate between the groups. If we were caught while we were delivering a message, we were killed on the spot. This part of the game made my baby sister, Annette, burst into tears. The game was fine when the resurrected Indians were fighting our battles, but now that we had to sneak messages back and forth, she was too scared. I loved every minute of it, though. This was a huge and exciting adventure for me. I thrived on being in the thick of things. But my cousin came out and called us all in for dinner.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Me? I'm bored by the lone nut and the sexual psychopath. I don't care to what degree Metallica recordings played a role in young Timmy's transition from honor student to thrill killer. I don't care "who dunnit" . . . or even "why he dunnit," and my tastes in crime fiction reflect that attitude: I'm interested in professional criminals. I'm interested in crimes where you know from the get-go why they did it: because it was their job to do it. As in the case of the mob-style execution of Gambino capo Paul Castellano, shot to death out front of a popular Midtown restaurant, it's the little things I want to know about: Before the killers loaded their weapons and dressed themselves in identical raincoats and hats, before they set out separately from their modest family homes in Staten Island and Queens, did the killers kiss their children, jot down brief shopping lists of groceries to bring back on their return? (One box Cheerios . . . half gallon milk . . . dozen eggs . . . tampons, large . . . two cans tuna, chunk style.) Did their voices tighten at all at the breakfast table when they told their wives that they might be a little late tonight? Did they program the VCR to tape their favorite sitcom? And what sitcom was it? It's the jargon of crime—the characters, the rituals, the workaday details—that fascinate me. Crime is hard work, after all. As a red-blooded American child, I always wanted to be a criminal. My heroes, like those of so many American children, were an unlovely assortment of back-shooters like Billy the Kid, bank robbers like John Dillinger, racketeers like Legs Diamond, capitalist visionaries like Bugsy Siegel, and innovators like Lucky Luciano. These were guys who did what they wanted, when they wanted, said whatever the fuck they felt like saying, and, in general, avoided the restrictions of societal convention—attractive qualities to a young kid weaned on the MC5 and the Stooges. Later, when I actually became a criminal of sorts, trying to support myself through a variety of harebrained drug-dealing schemes, sneak thievery, petty burglary, and fraud, I found to my dismay that a life of crime was difficult and unglamorous. It required that most dreaded trait, discipline, as well as a closed mouth and a lot of downtime, where money was going out and none was coming in. My coconspirators at the time were an unreliable lot, either talking too much or making dangerously stupid improvisations on our carefully hatched plans, and in my case, anyway, our few ventures into felonious activity were—at the end of the day—decidedly unprofitable. Which is how I became a chef. But that's another story.

• From Escape (2007)

  There was one caveat: before God slaughtered the wicked, he would allow them to try to kill his chosen people. (It should have made us wonder, but we didn’t.) We were taught that the government (which was wicked) would move into our community and try to kill every man, woman, and child. But since we had been faithful to God and kept his word, he’d hear our prayers and protect us. When we dashed into the orchard to play apocalypse, the first thing we did was run around looking for good hiding places. The wicked were coming with a large army and they were going to kill every one of us! They were even going to kill the babies. Our screams would make our young siblings panic. They had no idea what the game was about. To them it was noisy, frightening, and chaotic. We pretended we’d been sent to the orchard by our parents to hide. I felt safe and secure in my spot until my cousin Jayne blurted out, “I can see you! You’re going to be killed!” The other kids were shouting that planes were coming to attack us with bombs. There was more screaming and hiding. Some of the youngest children began to cry. It was at this moment that the resurrected Indians came to save us. The resurrected Indians were a uniquely FLDS concept. From what I’ve been able to piece together, it was a belief that originated with Uncle Roy or possibly one of his predecessors. We’d been taught that a lot of good Indians were killed when America was settled. God had already resurrected them because they were worthy and deserving, but he was waiting until the last day to allow them to vindicate themselves. In exchange for being given a shot at revenge, the resurrected Indians were required to take on the job of protecting God’s chosen people. Once saved, we would become the seedlings for a millennium of peace. But the devil had designs on the end game, too. He wanted to wipe us out so no one would be left on earth to do God’s work. The devil would engineer our destruction by using the government and other bad people to destroy us. Then the entire world would be consumed in darkness and he’d triumph. “Here come the bombers!” we’d yell. But then my cousins, who were playing resurrected Indians, would come charging out and start knocking the bombers out of the sky by aiming their tomahawks at a pilot’s head. The pilot would fall dead, crashing his plane to the ground.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  [image file=image_rsrc2U4.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc2U5.jpg] A YOUNG MAN’S LONG, AWKWARD, OCCASIONALLY TRAGIC, AND FREQUENTLY HUMILIATING EDUCATION IN AFFAIRS OF THE HEART, PART I: VALENTINE’S DAYIt was my first year at H. A. Jack, the primary school I transferred to after leaving Maryvale. Valentine’s Day was approaching fast. I was twelve years old, and I’d never done Valentine’s Day before. We didn’t celebrate it in Catholic school. I understood Valentine’s Day, as a concept. The naked baby shoots you with an arrow and you fall in love. I got that part. But this was my first time being introduced to it as an activity. At H. A. Jack, Valentine’s Day was used as a fundraiser. Pupils were going around selling flowers and cards, and I had to go ask a friend what was happening. “What is this?” I said. “What are we doing?” “Oh, you know,” she said, “it’s Valentine’s Day. You pick a special person and you tell them that you love them, and they love you back.” Wow, I thought, that seems intense. But I hadn’t been shot by Cupid’s arrow, and I didn’t know of anyone getting shot on my behalf. I had no clue what was going on. All week, the girls in school kept saying, “Who’s your valentine? Who’s your valentine?” I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Finally one of the girls, a white girl, said, “You should ask Maylene.” The other kids agreed. “Yes, Maylene. You should definitely ask Maylene. You have to ask Maylene. You guys are perfect for each other.” Maylene was a girl I used to walk home from school with. We lived in the city now, me, my mom and Abel, who was now my stepfather, and my new baby brother, Andrew. We’d sold our house in Eden Park to invest in Abel’s new garage. Then that fell apart, and we ended up moving to a neighborhood called Highlands North, a thirty-minute walk from H. A. Jack. A group of us would leave school together every afternoon, each kid peeling off and going their separate way when we reached their house. Maylene and I lived the farthest, so we’d always be the last two. We’d walk together until we got where we needed to go, and then we’d part ways.

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

  As the musicians began to play, slightly out of sync, I took it as my cue to get into character. The givens were that I was a highly cultured, ladylike coed, sitting knees together, ankles crossed, hands gracefully folded in my lap. I was so interested in chamber music that I really wanted to be invited again to listen to Rupert’s quintet. In my imagination I practiced the lines I would say to him before I left, so that he would invite me back in Anaïs’s absence, and I could do my surveillance. My life had gone from being that of a shy girl from the Valley in hand-me-downs to that of a future college professor, who was also a spy like Mata Hari inside a sophisticated, decadent world. I was doing espionage for the world’s only female bigamist. It was surreal, as I now understood surrealism from the woman who’d known the surrealists in Paris. I was living inside her dreamscape and flying with her past ordinary life as though lifted by a sudden wind, free from the grim realism of existentialism. Anaïs had quieted her breathing and adjusted the rhythm of her diary writing to Rupert’s strokes on the cello. The script from the fine point of her Montblanc slanted deeply forward, pulled by the future, her high loops reaching for the sky. I marveled at the serenity of her face, the face of Djuna, wise and centered, calm as the mirrored surface of a lake. How was it possible with the life she led? CHAPTER 18 Los Angeles, California, 1964 TRISTINE EVERYTHING WENT ACCORDING TO PLAN. When Anaïs left for New York, Rupert invited me to his chamber music evenings and accepted my offer to help at the construction site. The first Saturday I showed up and desultorily added some small rocks to a wheelbarrow, as Rupert hauled lumber around shirtless and went on about how much he missed Anaïs whenever she was gone. He didn’t express any suspicions about her, nor did I have to fight off any advances from him. At the next chamber music evening he complimented me on looking pretty, but he regularly complimented every woman there. However, the following Saturday, when I wore jeans to help him move rocks, he said, “You should wear skirts. I’ve seen your legs; you shouldn’t hide them.” Thereafter, I wore pants, even to listen to Mozart. I finished my semester-end exams and watched my fellow students cheerfully disperse for the winter holiday. I was already depressed at the thought of going to my mother’s house for Christmas. Rupert, too, was blue when I visited him at the building site. Anaïs wouldn’t be back until after the holidays. He took a swig from the beer I’d picked up and asked, “Do you want to go to a party with me tonight?” “You mean like a date? No.” “No, as Anaïs’s friend.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Over the last several years, the #MeToo movement has laid bare sexual misconduct, male privilege, and “toxic masculinity” across every sector of society. That has sparked a much-needed reckoning. It should also provide parents of boys, and boys themselves, unprecedented motivation to transform the rules of male psychological development and sexuality. That is not an easy task, but it is an exciting one: raising boys to be compassionate and egalitarian; respectful of others’ boundaries; capable of connection, vulnerability, honest communication, emotional expression, and love; able to develop and sustain authentic relationships; able to be happier and more fulfilled; able to see women as true peers in the classroom, boardroom, and bedroom. Raising our boys to be the men we know they can become. AcknowledgmentsMany thanks to Jennifer Barth, Suzanne Gluck, Charis Denison, Cindy Pierce, Richard Weissbourd, Ashanti Branch, Debby Herbenick, Bryant Paul, Paul Wright, Rosalind Wiseman, Allison Stephens, Kathleen Brownbeck, Brian O’Connor, Yesenia Gorbea, Rebecca Milliman, Lara Bazelon, Brandon Nicholson, Sabina McMahon, Tony Nguyen, Deborah Roffman, Simone Marean, Rachel Simmons, D. Watkins, Aaron Retica, Laurie Abraham, Raha Nadaff, Douglas McGray, Pamela Paul, Judith Warner, Sarah Ross, Muriel Vernon, Laura Alberti, Tom Davey, Rachel Hanebutt, Rebecca Mosley, Mary Dunnewold, Virginia Witt, Thordis Elva, Leah Fessler, Himanshu Agrawa, Heather Larsen, Brandon Rein, Barbara McDonald, Tom Stranger, Peggy Edersheim Kalb, Diane Espaldon, Dan Wilson, Ina Park, Matt Dixon, Danny Sager, Brian McCarthy, Julia Sweeney, Michael Blum, Mulan Sweeney Blum, Ruth Halpern, Eva Eilenberg, Cornelia Lauf, Ayelet Waldman, Sylvia Brownrigg, Rachel Silvers, Shari Washburn, Neal Karlen, Barbara Swaiman, Leslie Orenstein, Julie Ann Orenstein, Lucy Orenstein, Debbie Orenstein, and Ari Orenstein. To all the boys who spoke to me for this book, I owe you a huge debt of gratitude. Whether your story is in these pages or not, I could not have written without your honesty, insight, and trust. Special thanks to advisors Megan Ruppel, Sam Thomson, and Evelyn Wang, and to my absolutely indispensable interns: Brock Coylar, Maya Guzdar, Will Hoppin, Jacob Finkelman, and Katherine Reber. To Steven and Daisy, all my love and boundless gratitude for your support, faith, tolerance, cheerleading, and cuisine that reigns supreme. BibliographyAbbey, Antonia. “Alcohol’s Role in Sexual Violence Perpetration: Theoretical Explanations, Existing Evidence, and Future Directions.” Drug and Alcohol Review 30, no. 5 (2011): 481–89. Abbey, Antonia, A. Monique Clinton-Sherrod, Pam McAuslan, et al. “The Relationship Between the Quantity of Alcohol Consumed and the Severity of Sexual Assaults Committed by College Men.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 18, no. 7 (2003): 813–33. Abbey, Antonia, Tina Zawacki, Philip O. Buck, et al. “Alcohol and Sexual Assault.” Alcohol Research and Health 25, no. 1 (2001): 43–51. Allison, Rachel, and Barbara J. Risman. “A Double Standard for ‘Hooking Up’: How Far Have We Come Toward Gender Equality?” Social Science Research 42, no. 5 (2013): 1191–206. ———. “‘It Goes Hand in Hand with the Parties’: Race, Class, and Residence in College Student Negotiations of Hooking Up.” Sociological Perspectives 57, no. 1 (2014): 102–23.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  The line between crime fiction and real-life crime becomes fuzzy, often hilariously so. All the real gangsters have seen The Godfather, One, Two, and maybe Three. They've seen Good-fellas. And these films made a powerful impression. Recently I visited my favorite Web site, gangland.com—an online repository for up-to-date organized crime arcana—to find a transcript of New Jersey's De Cavalcante crime family members enthusiastically speculating on which among their number had provided inspiration for the Tony Soprano character on The Sopranos. Real-life gangster "Crazy Joe" Gallo, prior to falling down dead into his linguine with white clam sauce, is said to have practiced his Tommy Udo imitation in front of the mirror every morning. (You remember Tommy, the Richard Widmark character in Kiss of Death? The famous scene in which the giggling Widmark binds and gags an old lady into her wheelchair, then pushes her down a flight of stairs? "Heee-heee . . . heee . . . heeee"?) And there must be scores of aspiring Joe Pescis out there, taking the occasional break from the daily grind of extortion and murder to do dead-on impressions of Joe: "What? I amuse you? I'm a clown?" There is a powerful element of pure comedy, of classic schtick in the business of crime. With so many natural wordsmiths, mimics, movie fans, and practitioners of a century-old oral tradition, is it any wonder? And as Monty Python so astutely demonstrated many years ago, the basic elements of comedy all come down to the unexpected head injury, repeated blunt-force trauma to the skull. Whether it's Oliver Hardy getting a good smack upside the nut with a mishandled ladder, or a Colombo loanshark getting his brains spattered all over the dashboard of his shiny new Buick, the principle is the same—and it spells funny. Joe Pesci, thinking that today he's gonna be a "made guy," looks down at the floor, sees that the carpet has been rolled up—and has time only to say, "Oh shit!" before getting two behind his ear. Classic! Just like Oliver Hardy should know that a ladder will soon be bouncing off his face—because it bounced off his face in the scene before, and in the scene before that—Pesci's character should know that when a close personal friend invites you to a sit-down with the bosses, or says that you can have the front passenger seat ("That's okay . . . you sit in front"), there's every likelihood that a fatal head injury is imminent. There's a historic inevitability to both comedy and organized crime, and the punch lines are often the same.