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 Wild (2012)

  “Hey,” I said back. He was handsome and looked a bit older than me, his dark curls skimming the tops of his shoulders. WILCO it said across the front of his T-shirt. “I love that band,” I said, gesturing to his shirt. “You know them?” he asked. “Of course I know them,” I said. His brown eyes crinkled into a smile. “Rad,” he said, “I’m Jonathan,” and he shook my hand. The music started up before I could tell him my name, but he leaned into my ear to ask in a delicate shout where I was from. He seemed to know I wasn’t from Ashland. I shouted back at him, explaining as concisely as I could about the PCT, and then he leaned toward my ear again and yelled a long sentence that I couldn’t make out over the music, but I didn’t mind because of the wonderful way his lips brushed against my hair and his breath tickled my neck so I could feel it all the way down my body. “What?” I yelled back at him when he was done, and so he did it again, talking slower and louder this time, and I understood that he was telling me that he worked late tonight, but that tomorrow night he’d be off at eleven and would I like to come see the band that was performing and then go out with him afterwards? “Sure!” I shouted, though I half wanted to make him repeat what he’d said so his mouth would do that thing to my hair and my neck again. He handed the marker to me and mimed that I should write my name on his palm so he’d be able to put me on the guest list. Cheryl Strayed, I wrote as neatly as I could, my hands shaking. When I was done, he looked at it and gave me a thumbs-up, and I waved and walked out the door feeling ecstatic. I had a date. Did I have a date? I walked the warm streets second-guessing myself. Maybe my name wouldn’t be on the list, after all. Maybe I’d misheard him. Maybe it was ridiculous to go on a date with someone I’d barely spoken to and whose main appeal was that he was good-looking and he liked Wilco. I’d certainly done such things with men based on far less, but this was different. I was different. Wasn’t I?

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  Please include something on the topic of female ejaculation. I had a horrible experience last year in a damn Ivy League graduate school (social work) class with a professor who, in a course on human behavior in the social environment, made a big deal about how teenage boys masturbate more and are more sexually aware than girls because they have visible results. I contacted her outside the class to cite some textual evidence on female ejaculation (rather than anecdotal evidence), and she basically dismissed it all with the valid point that there simply hasn’t been enough research published on the matter. Why am I interested in this? Well, my lover is a kick-ass ejaculator. Not all the time, but on demand. If I ask her to squirt for me, it usually happens. It’s quick, and quiet, and quite arousing. Just at the point of orgasm, she gets very wet, but not normal wet…more like water, and my hand gets kinda pruneish, like when I’ve been in the bath too long, and then it’s a sudden O, after which there’s a big ole wet spot on the sheets. Love it. How she knew she could is beyond me…. We were talking once and she said very casually that she thought she could ejaculate, but that she’d been afraid of it, and always managed to hold back during orgasm. The next time we made love, I asked her if she would let it all out for me, and she did. Amazing. Suggested Web LinksANNIESPRINKLE.ORG(ASM) www.anniesprinkle.org BODY ELECTRIC www.bodyelectric.org chapter five The Road to Heaven Leads to You I love my body! At least, I try to. It’s my goal to say I love my body and really mean it. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT YOUR BODY? Many of us love our bodies. We love our strength and passion, and we love the pleasure we take in our flesh. We love our broad backs and strong thighs, love the way our bodies carry us through life. We love our full, rich lips, sharp teeth, and piercing eyes. We love our boyish smiles and lean bodies, love our well-defined muscles that ripple as we move. We love the dark berries of our nipples, the ripe plum swelling of our cunts. We love our graceful hands, the delicate slope from neck to shoulder and from waist to hip. We love our voluptuously long legs. We love our eagerness, our openness, the desire that gushes from our vulvas. We love our roundness: round face, round breasts, round belly, round butt, round thighs, the generosity of flesh we offer up to our lovers. I honestly like my body. Please publish that in your book. Some of us just really like our bodies.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  As long as there is some wind when you overtake a very large vehicle on a motorbike, there is there always a precise moment when the air snatches you. This moment comes when you have reached the front of the lorry, just before you start to pull over. There is an in-draught and your torso undergoes a double twisting motion. One shoulder is thrust forwards, the other backwards, and this movement is reversed just as sharply. You are like a sail snapping in the wind. Just seconds earlier you were cleaving through the space as it opened up before you. Suddenly, that space closes in and shakes you up, molests you. I like this feeling and I can identify it in very different situations: to feel that you are right at the heart of a space that opens and closes, stretches and contracts. And in that space you are like a rubber band that has been stretched and then released, and comes back to smack the hand holding it; you are alternately the subject which seizes its environment (even if only by looking at it) and the object which is seized. So, I felt, quite unexpectedly, in a sex-shop. I liked going there with Éric. While he kept the assistant busy with his requests, which were always extremely precise because he knew exactly what had just come out, especially videos, I would wander around the shop. The first picture I saw, whatever it might be (a girl holding her scarlet vulva open with her manicured fingers, her head in the background, slightly raised, her gaze floating above her body with the same lost expression as a patient trying to see their feet at the end of a stretcher; another one sitting back on her heels in the traditional pin-up pose holding her massive breasts in her open palms; a young man in a three-piece suit pointing his dick towards an older woman bending over her desk [she is a lawyer or ceo]; and even body-builders intended for the homosexual customers, strapped into G-strings which look minute in comparison to their bodies), any sort of picture, graphic, photographic, cinematic, be it realist or comic (a model posing in the underwear pages of a mail-order catalogue; great droplets of cum splattered outside the margins of a comic), every image I would say even at first glance makes me feel that characteristic enervation deep between my thighs. I leafed through the magazines on display, cautiously turned over the shrink-wrapped ones. Isn’t it wonderful that you can be aroused so freely, in full sight and full knowledge of all the other customers doing the same thing, even though each of them behaves as if they are searching through the display stands of their local newsagent? Aren’t there grounds to admire the apparent detachment you have there when contemplating pictures and objects that at home would certainly make you lose your composure? I liked to imagine myself in a mythical world where every shop offered that sort of merchandise, in amongst other goods, and where, with apparent nonchalance, you were gradually permeated by that warm feeling, absorbed in your perusal of organs reproduced in full colour which perfectly depicted their moist surfaces, and you might shamelessly turn and show them to the person next to you. ‘Excuse me, could I borrow your paper?’ ‘Oh, please do.’ Etc. The quiet, unassuming civility which reigns in a sex-shop spread to every aspect of social life.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  Hadn’t we both dreamed of this moment for months? Why would she want to stop? But to question her seemed pushy, insensitive. She was right to take it slow. We should be careful not to hurt each other. We stretched out on our sides, and she wriggled her hand into the back pocket of my jeans. We stared at each other, grinning. You don’t have your ears pierced, she said. She had two empty holes in each ear. No, I never wanted it, I said. It never felt like me. That’s amazing, she said, that you’ve always known yourself so well. She squeezed my ass. I smiled, pleased, and didn’t correct her. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] So you’re dating a woman, a friend said to me over lunch. Can I ask you something? I don’t know how to phrase this, but I think it’s interesting that you’re dating a woman who looks so—masculine. You can phrase it like that, I said. I think I like the juxtaposition of it, you know? The presence of both. I was learning what I wanted, and I applied myself to it like a student. Nora and I had the same chromosomes and the same parts. But we had different relationships to our gender. She queered the notion of woman, keeping her hair in a conservative businessman’s cut and standing with her legs set wide as a bouncer. She wore suits to court and, to see me, tucked-in oxfords with a modest two buttons undone. She had breasts, but she kept them pressed tight to her chest. She walked the line between man and woman, smudged it under her foot. I’d grown up watching “It’s Pat” on Saturday Night Live, a series of sketches about an androgynous, socially awkward character played by Julia Sweeney. SNL’s “Pat” sketches were a runaway success; they recurred from 1990 to 1994 and were even made into a movie. Pat was thick and short, with a lumpy torso under a blue Western shirt and tan belted pants. Pat was oblivious to the confused tittering that erupted when they walked into a room. The other characters in the sketch were always trying (and failing) to determine Pat’s gender, and if Pat mentioned dating, others reacted with revulsion. We kids thought this was hilarious, and we liked to do Pat imitations at recess. Androgyny: none of us knew the word, but we understood it as a pitiable mistake, a glitch in the system. We understood that there was a real thing—a real woman, a real man—that Pat was failing to be.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  And I learned why he had been such a successful hustler. “I know guys are always telling you this, and you think it’s a load of bullshit. But I’m really straight. I mean, I can get off with guys—any way till Sunday. But to do it I always have to think about girls. That’s why I like goin’ in the movies, so that I can get some good heterosexual stimulation from the screen.” Though I think a certain reticence is appropriate when discussing it, at least one reason Pietro and Kevin were memorable is that both, uncut, were hung (in a simile) like mules. Joey was not. On a scale of small, medium, and large I fall directly on the border line between the latter two. Joey was just under the middle of medium. But, sitting beside me in the Capri, talking, with his cut dick out, he explained, “I love to come, man. I mean I love to come more than anything in the world. And I like people to see me come. I like them to know I’m coming. I like them to hear me come. I like them to love it that I’m coming, too! Now: You want to suck me? You want me just to jerk off? Or what?” Between the time I’d first talked to him and now, Joey had developed a sore on the back of his left hand that was probably infected and was suppurating through its bandage. So I said: “Why don’t you jerk off?” “Sure. That’s easy.” Over the next twenty-five minutes, now losing his pants, now his shirt, now his shoes, next his socks, now standing and growling, now sitting all but in my lap, thrashing and flailing his free arm, now practically down between the seat and the back in front of him on the floor, he groaned and quivered and pumped till, lying back in the chair, ass up off the cushion, grinning and panting, he sprayed across his quivering stomach and began to rub his mucus around and over himself. “Oh, man . . . ! Oh, shit . . . ! Oh, fuck . . . !” Three of the five people who had gathered in the aisle to watch, applauded. When, finally, Joey began to sit up, collect his clothes, and put them back on, he asked, “Anybody want to contribute five bucks? I mean, you gotta admit, that was a good show, huh?” One older gentleman gave it to him. “Thanks, pops.” It went into his jeans pocket with the ten from me.

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  Many women find nothing sends them into orbit quite like a tongue and lips licking, sucking, and nibbling on their clit. For others, oral sex is just not intense enough to bring them to orgasm. The tried-and-true tongue-to-clit method is still the only thing besides my Hitachi Magic Wand that never fails to bring me to orgasm. Many women come from penetration—either vaginal or anal—without any clitoral stimulation at all. The first time I came with a partner, it was a vaginal orgasm—my girlfriend was finger-fucking me. That’s still how I come best, and I can have many, many orgasms in a row that way. Others find their orgasms are intensified when clitoral stimulation is combined with penetration, either vaginal or anal. I don’t come without clitoral stimulation. But when vaginal penetration is added, it’s like a deeper experience; it reaches into my insides and clenches me with intense pleasure. Different kinds of stimulation produce difference experiences of orgasm. Some women make clear distinctions between the orgasms they experience from clitoral stimulation versus penetration. Vaginal orgasms feel as if they happen deeper in my body; they feel more like contractions. A clitoral orgasm is sharper, more like an intense tingling that spreads over my body. I’m multiorgasmic, and I need one of each to feel really satisfied. Some women reach orgasm with sufficient attention to their nipples. Others come from fantasy and mental stimulation. Tantra practitioners move erotic energy through their bodies, experiencing energy or whole-body orgasms. I have very intense concentration and my mind becomes my orgasm. I can ride it for a fairly long time. Some women come from pain and other intense sensations of S/M play—and some tops are known to come simply from administering to their bottoms. My favorite way to come is from caning someone. We don’t need any other contact but the cane with her ass, to make me come—if I can hurt her enough. I come from doing, rather than from being done. I can come from pain. From clitoral stimulation. From hard fucking or fisting. I can come just from having my nipples pinched hard. I can come from sufficient mental stimulation with no body contact. Getting Her OffI love orchestrating someone else’s orgasm. Rarely do sex guides give sufficient attention to the pleasures of facilitating another’s orgasm. Discussions of orgasm are typically about getting them, not giving them. Yet getting a partner off is central to lesbian sex. It’s thrilling to feel a woman come in your mouth, to find yourself gripped between her powerful thighs, or to feel her vaginal contractions clamp down on your hand. It is CRUCIAL that my mate has an orgasm—my jaw can lock up and I won’t stop until I feel her body pop and her moans quicken and muffle and she tries to run away from me.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I still have my calendar from 2016. In the square for that Saturday, the day of my first date with Nora, I wrote only a reminder to follow up on a freelance check I was waiting for and, at the bottom, the word Nora. Where was June while I was out? I have no record of it. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] For our second date, Nora suggested a karaoke bar with private rooms. This was bold, and I liked it. Walking from my car, I caught her silhouette against a streetlamp at the end of the block, her hands shoved in the hip pockets of her jeans. She looked like a man, like a woman who looks like a man. She held her back straight, her stance wide. Her shoulders were square above the sloping dunes of her chest. I liked the contradictions of her body. A thought came like an elbow to the ribs, or a wink: She’s waiting for you, kid. I wanted to run to her. She’d reserved a room for us, closet-size and dim, at the end of a corridor. We sat down on a leather bench along one wall, close enough that our legs touched. I couldn’t believe I was with her. Would I ever get used to this? Did I want to? I slid my arm along the bench behind her, and we pulled at our beers and queued up songs before we could chicken out: “9 to 5,” “Edge of Seventeen,” and “You Belong with Me”—a duet, so on-the-nose it smarted. I couldn’t look at her when we sang. When would we kiss? The knowledge that we would, of course we would, rose steadily along my spine like an airplane gaining altitude. I climbed onto her lap and took her face in my hands. When I touched her, her skin was smooth, a woman’s. Can we go to your house? I said. I don’t know, she said shyly. Why not? I bit her lip. I thought she was teasing. I don’t think we should sleep together yet, she said. I ran my hand over her hair, as spiny as cut grass, and bit her again. No, really, she said. I don’t want to be the first pancake. You know how people always throw out the first pancake? I laughed. I never do that! I said. I love the first pancake. Then I leaned in closer and said: I wouldn’t do that to you. She led the way to her house. There was a sectional in the front room, and we climbed onto it. I felt beneath her shoulder blades for the band of her bra. It was a sports bra, racer-back, tight as a bandage. She smelled like Dove soap and, up close, Old Spice deodorant. I wanted her skin on my skin. I peeled off my shirt, tugged at the hem of hers. She took my hand and squeezed it, then pressed it away. Not yet, she said.

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  Sex parties, workshops, S/M demos, and other overtly sexual gatherings are prime places for meeting a new sex partner—or even a lover. The advantage of these events, of course, is that you can be sure to find someone who shares your particular sexual style—since talking about sex is encouraged, and cruising is often the whole point of the evening. (More on sex parties in chapter 16, Play Parties and Public Sex.) Sex Talk GuidelinesHow do you tell your hot new girlfriend her cunnilingus technique leaves a lot to be desired? How do you tell your lover of five years that you’re dying to try out a new sexual technique, sex toy, or play partner? Before you enter couples counseling, try these basic pointers: • Emphasize the positive. “I’d really like your tongue on the shaft of my clit. But I need firm, steady strokes to come—and please don’t stop once I start moaning” will yield a more positive result than “I hate when you change what you’re doing just when I’m about to come.” • Be specific. In her eagerness to please, “a little harder” might sound like an invitation to trade in her dildo for a jackhammer. How about 10 percent harder? 20 percent harder? • Be polite in turning down offers for sex. A kindly spoken “no, thank you” is a perfectly adequate response. “What? Are you kidding?!?” will tarnish your karma. • Be polite in asking for sex. Even if you’ve been living in bliss for a decade, your partner isn’t required to put out for you. She’s a human being, not a domestic resource. Say “please.” Make it hot for her. • If you need it, ask for it. Do you need lots of cuddling after sex? Time alone? A protein shake? • Practice compromise. This doesn’t mean that you engage in sex you don’t want—or that your partner should engage in sex she doesn’t want. But sometimes it’s fine to put your wants on the back burner. (Your wants, that is, not your needs.) • Ask your partner what she wants. You can practice active listening by checking to make sure you heard her correctly. “So, are you saying that you really don’t find nipple stimulation a turn-on?” Who knows? Maybe she just told you that she loves having her nipples sucked—but not until she’s well aroused. • Practice nonjudgmental listening. As they say at the San Francisco Sex Information hotline, watch the “Ick!” response. You may not find her fantasies at all erotic, and you’d do well to turn down requests for sex acts that turn you off. But you don’t have to make her sex “bad” just to say no to it. • Talk in a nonsexual setting. It’s easier to talk about sexual needs in a nonsexual context than in the heat of the moment. Grab a mug of tea and sit down at the kitchen table (unless, of course, that’s where you’re planning to have sex).

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 2 (4 BCE – 451 CE) (2009)

  formerly established metropolis of the Jews in Palestine is the city of God is not only base, but even impious – the mark of exceedingly petty thinking’ – a remarkably risky statement in view of the enthusiasm of his imperial patrons for the Jerusalem project.17 One has to remember that Eusebius was bishop of a neighbouring Palestinian city, Caesarea, and the metropolitan (presiding bishop) within the whole province of Palestine, so he was not inclined to look favourably on his junior episcopal colleague’s archaeological good fortune and all that stemmed from it. His comments continued to be echoed by such diverse major figures of the later fourth century Church as the brilliant preacher Bishop John Chrysostom, the scholar Jerome and the monk-theologian Gregory of Nyssa, who, after some unfortunate experiences when visiting the city, commented sourly that pilgrimage suggested that the Holy Spirit was unable to reach his native Cappadocia and could only be found in Jerusalem.18 That for many people was of course precisely and triumphantly what it did suggest. Scepticism was generally drowned out by the eagerness of people seeking an exceptional and guaranteed experience of holiness, healing, comfort – increasingly a self-fulfilling prophecy as the crowds swelled, to the delight of the souvenir traders and night-time entertainment industry in the Holy City.19 There was now a proliferation of relics of the wood of the Cross. Earlier the usual Christian visual symbol for Christ had been a fish, since the Greek word for ‘fish’, ichthys, could be turned into an acrostic for the initial letters of a Greek phrase, ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour’, or similar devotional variants. Now the fish was far outclassed not only by the new imperial Chi-Rho monogram referring to the same word, but also by the Cross. Crosses had featured little in public Christian art outside written texts before the time of Constantine; now they could even be found as motifs in jewellery.20 Pilgrimage, from having played a seemingly minor role in Christian life, was now launched as one of its major activities. The life of Judaism had once revolved around one great pilgrimage: to Jerusalem. For Christians, Jerusalem would be only the principal star of a galaxy of holy places that has never since ceased to proliferate. Shrines have come and gone, but some, like Jerusalem itself, or Rome in the West, have never lost their appeal to the Christian faithful. Jerusalem and the spectacularly large Church of the Holy Sepulchre begun by Constantine became host to a liturgical round which sought to take pilgrims on a journey alongside Jesus Christ through the events of his last sufferings in Jerusalem, his crucifixion and resurrection. Already in the 380s the Jerusalem liturgy had arrived at a state of elaboration lovingly described by an exotic visitor, Egeria, a member of one of the first western European communities of nuns, who had travelled all the way from the Atlantic coast of Spain (we are

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  The same freedom of anonymity that allows you to change personas when the mood strikes allows others to manipulate and deceive. You have to be just as cautious in opening your heart on the Internet as you do bellied up to the bar. Websites by and for lesbian, bisexual, and queer women seem to multiply daily. Many of these are sprawling, multifaceted affairs with chatrooms, message boards, personal ads, uploaded erotica (both written and visual), links to other Internet resources—you name it. Internet resources include: • Message boards where users post messages on a variety of topics • Live chatrooms. Online chat used to require that you understand IRC (Internet relay chat) protocol. You still can cruise the thousands of IRC “channels” that feature explicit conversation on every imaginable topic. But you can also enter chatrooms on many websites, thus eliminating the need to understand IRC technology. • Personal ads and matchmaker services • Email discussion lists • Usenet newsgroups. The original Internet discussion forums, newsgroups are similar to email discussion lists—people post their views on a variety of topics. However, while only subscribers can post to most email lists, newsgroups are open to anyone who wishes to download the daily posts or post their own messages. So groups like alt.sex.bondage are heavy with spam, attacks on women and queers, and off-topic posts. See “Where to Meet Girls on the Web” in the resources chapter for a selection of websites and services. Play SafeRemember to exercise caution when meeting strangers—whether you make contact online or through a personal ad in your local paper. Talk on the phone before you make a date. Trust your instincts—if your gut says, “No way,” don’t go. You’re under no obligation to follow through on an initial contact, though standards of etiquette still apply. (Call if you have to cancel a date.) Cafés are a great choice of meeting place for first dates with strangers—they’re low-key, inexpensive, and public. Here are a few tips for safe play dates with strangers: • If possible, play at a sex club or party. • Bring your own safer-sex supplies. • Let your friends know where you’ll be. • Tell your date you’d like to give her phone number to a friend—a safe player will respect your caution. Sex PartiesAs Carol Queen so eloquently puts it, “Nice girls don’t go sniffing like beasts around warehouses full of men with erect cocks and women decked out in lingerie and smelling of hot pussy.” 3 Which is exactly what so many women love about play parties. Play parties can be shadowy affairs in dungeons equipped with elaborate bondage stations, or sensual afternoon soirees with soft music and seasonal arrangements of fresh fruit. Parties tend to take on an individual flavor, and everyone has her favorites.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The objective principle of Protestantism maintains that the Bible, as the inspired record of revelation, is the only infallible rule of faith and practice; in opposition to the Roman Catholic coordination of Scripture and ecclesiastical tradition, as the joint rules of faith. The teaching of the living church is by no means rejected, but subordinated to the Word of God; while the opposite theory virtually subordinates the Bible to tradition by making the latter the sole interpreter of the former and confining interpretation within the limits of an imaginary consensus patrum. In the application of the Bible principle there was considerable difference between the more conservative Lutheran and Anglican Reformation, and the more radical Zwinglian and Calvinistic Reformation; the former contained many post-scriptural and extra-scriptural traditions, usages and institutions, which the latter, in its zeal for primitive purity and simplicity, rejected as useless or dangerous; but all Reformers opposed what they regarded as anti-scriptural doctrines; and all agreed in the principle that the church has no right to impose upon the conscience articles of faith without clear warrant in the Word of God. Every true progress in church history is conditioned by a new and deeper study of the Scriptures, which has "first, second, third, infinite draughts." While the Humanists went back to the ancient classics and revived the spirit of Greek and Roman paganism, the Reformers went back to the sacred Scriptures in the original languages and revived the spirit of apostolic Christianity. They were fired by an enthusiasm for the gospel, such as had never been known since the days of Paul. Christ rose from the tomb of human traditions and preached again his words of life and power. The Bible, heretofore a book of priests only, was now translated anew and better than ever into the vernacular tongues of Europe, and made a book of the people. Every Christian man could henceforth go to the fountain-head of inspiration, and sit at the feet of the Divine Teacher, without priestly permission and intervention. This achievement of the Reformation was a source of incalculable blessings for all time to come. In a few years Luther’s version had more readers among the laity than ever the Latin Vulgate had among priests; and the Protestant Bible societies circulate more Bibles in one year than were copied during the fifteen centuries before the Reformation. We must remember, however, that this wonderful progress was only made possible by the previous invention of the art of printing and by the subsequent education of the people.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  There on the crowded corner, however, Lenny and Jeff and Frank were still hanging out—even while a scuffle between two young men created a widening circle under the Port’s marquee, till a sudden surge of police tightened it into a knot of attention. A policeman sped past my shoulder through the crowd, while the woman beside him shrieked. Then, for a solid minute, the knot pulled tight enough to become impenetrable to sight. Moments later, however, the same policeman led away a white kid in a blue-checked shirt, with a backwards baseball cap and a bleeding face (as he stumbled in the policeman’s grip, he bumped against Christos’s stand) while a Hispanic kid in a red jacket, shaking his head, talked to some other policeman. Beside me, tall Frank told me, “Wow! They got him. They actually caught him. Man, that was cool. I didn’t think they were going to get him. But they caught him!” Like Jeff, Frank, a longtime hustler on that corner, has no brief for violence that might keep his customers away. The third evening after the conference, at the back of the 104 Broadway bus, half a dozen riders (four middle-aged women, two middle-aged men), each with his or her copy of Playbill, spontaneously began to discuss the matinees they’d seen that afternoon. In the full bus, the conversations wound on, and I found myself talking to a woman next to me down from Connecticut, also just from the theater. It is spring and New York is full of contact, though I note that the conversation in the back of the bus was not cross-class contact, but pretty well limited to folks who could afford the sixty or seventy dollars for a Broadway ticket, and so partook a bit more of the economic context of networking—the Playbills acting as signs of the shared interest (and shared economic level) characteristic of a networking group. Also, characteristic of networking groups, what circulated among them was knowledge of what actors seemed good, what plays seemed strong or enjoyable, which musicals had good voices but weak songs, and which just did not seem worth the time to attend. Let me be specific. In the ten years I’ve known Todd, I’m sure the handouts I’ve given him, a dollar here, two dollars there (say, once a month), easily total $180 or more—that is, over twice the price of a Broadway show ticket. If, on the bus, however, one of the Playbill wavers were to ask me or one of the others with whom she had been chatting amiably, “Say, here’s my name and address. The next time you’re going to the theater, just pick up an extra ticket and drop it in the mail to me,” it would bring the conversation to a stunned halt; and however the theater-going passengers might have dealt with it in the public space of a twenty-minute bus ride, certainly no one would have seriously acceded to the request.

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

  In the nick of time for me the war broke out between Chili and Peru: Chilian bonds dropped from 90 to 60: I saw Hamilton and assured him that Chili if left alone, could beat all South America: he advised me to wait and see. A little later Bolivia threw in her lot with Peru and Chilian bonds fell to 43 or 44. At once I went to Hamilton and asked him to buy Chilians for all I possessed on a margin of three or four. After much talk he did what I wished on a margin of ten: a fortnight later came the news of the first Chilian victory and Chilians jumped to 60 odd and continued to climb steadily: I sold at over 80 and thus netted from my first five hundred pounds over two thousand pounds and by Christmas was free once more to study with a mind at case. Hamilton told me that he had followed my lead a little later but had made more from a larger investment. The most important happening at Brighton I must now relate. I have already told in a pen-portrait of Carlyle published by Austin Harrison in the “English Review” some twelve years ago how I went one Sunday morning and called upon my hero, Thomas Carlyle in Chelsea. I told there, too, how on more than one Sunday I used to meet him on his morning walk along the Chelsea embankment, and how once at least he talked to me of his wife and admitted his impotence. I only gave a summary of a few talks in my portrait of him; for the traits did not call for strengthening by repetition; but here I am inclined to add a few details, for everything about Carlyle at his best, is of enduring interest! When I told him how I had been affected by reading Emerson’s speech to the students of Dartmouth College and how it had in a way forced me to give up my law-practice and go to Europe to study, he broke in excitedly: “I remember well reading that very page to my wife and saying that nothing like it for pure nobility had been heard since Schiller went silent. It had a great power with it.... And so that started you off and changed your way of life?... I don’t wonder ... it was a great Call.” After that Carlyle seemed to like me. At our final parting too, when I was going to Germany to study and he wished me “God speed and Goodspeed! on the way that lies before ye”, he spoke again of Emerson and the sorrow he had felt on parting with him, deep, deep sorrow and regret, and he added, laying his hands on my shoulders, “sorrowing most of all that they should see his face no more forever.” I remembered the passage and cried:

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  And we’re shooting the moon.” A year ago Yale might have let his nerves back him out of the whole thing, but he felt ready now. He was full, the past few weeks, of an energy he couldn’t name. It might have had to do with the way Julian had looked at him at the fundraiser, the residue of feeling chosen—or it might have had to do with the evidence all around him that life was short, that there was no point in banking on the future instead of the present. He said, “I want to do this.” “On a tangential note,” Bill said, pointing a long finger, “let’s talk about interns. Bear with me, because it’s related. So, there’s Sarah and there’s Roman. Both excellent. You were going to have Sarah, but I’ve been thinking I’ll swap. I want you to have Roman instead.” Yale was confused. “He’s an art history guy, right? He wouldn’t want to work in development.” “Well. Sure he would. We’ve discussed it. He’s interested in museum administration. Maybe that’ll be his next degree, who knows. He’s the perpetual student type.” “Okay, I—” “His dissertation’s on Balthus, so he’ll—well, it’s not exactly Nora’s period, is it, but close enough. He’s innocent. A lovely young man. I want you to have him.” Dolly was back in the room, putting out a bowl of mixed nuts. She said, “Roman is wonderful!” “Thank you,” Yale said to Bill. He wasn’t sure what had just happened, but it seemed that thanks were expected. “And I’ll take Sarah.” Dolly looked absolutely delighted. The opposite of how most wives would react to their husband bringing on a young female intern. She disappeared into the kitchen, and then Bill said, “And if you think it might be helpful, we can take him to Wisconsin with us.” —When the Sharps showed up, shrieking and laughing about the cold, Yale felt instantly more at ease. Esmé hugged him and exclaimed that Charlie looked just as she’d pictured. Yale had an excuse now to stand, to move around the room. The Sharps were only in their forties, but Allen Sharp held the patent on the shut-off device used in almost every gasoline nozzle in the world, and now they split their time between Maine and Aspen and a small place in the Marina Towers. They were odd donors, intensely interested in helping the Brigg build its collection—Allen had gone to Northwestern and Esmé had studied architecture—but with no art of their own. Beautiful people with matching chestnut hair, matching Greek noses. “I know we ought to start collecting,” Esmé had said to him once, “but I don’t see the point in hogging something.” Yale wished the Sharps would adopt him, would give him and Charlie a room in their little wedge of Marina Tower. Bill spread the photos on the coffee table and Yale told the Sharps the full story.

• From The Vagina Monologues (1998)

  There’s this gorgeous twenty-four-year-old woman in our neighborhood and I stare at her all the time. One day she invites me into her car. She asks me if I like to kiss boys, and I tell her I do not like that. Then she says she wants to show me something, and she leans over and kisses me so softly on the lips with her lips and then puts her tongue in my mouth. Wow. She asks me if I want to come over to her house, and then she kisses me again and tells me to relax, to feel it, to let our tongues feel it. She asks my mama if I can spend the night and my mother’s delighted that such a beautiful, successful woman has taken an interest in me. I’m scared but really I can’t wait. Her apartment’s fantastic. She’s got it hooked up. It’s the seventies: the beads, the fluffy pillows, the mood lights. I decide right there that I want to be a secretary like her when I grow up. She makes a vodka for herself and then she asks what I want to drink. I say the same as she’s drinking and she says she doesn’t think my mama would like me drinking vodka. I say she probably wouldn’t like me kissing girls, either, and the pretty lady makes me a drink. Then she changes into this chocolate satin teddy. She’s so beautiful. I always thought bulldaggers were ugly. I say, “You look great,” and she says, “So do you.” I say, “But I only have this white cotton bra and underpants.” Then she dresses me, slowly, in another satin teddy. It’s lavender like the first soft days of spring. The alcohol has gone to my head and I’m loose and ready. I noticed that there’s a picture over her bed of a naked black woman with a huge afro as she gently and slowly lays me out on the bed. And just our bodies rubbing makes me come. Then she does everything to me and my coochi snorcher that I always thought was nasty before, and wow. I’m so hot, so wild. She says, “Your vagina, untouched by man, smells so nice, so fresh, wish I could keep it that way forever.” I get crazy wild and then the phone rings and of course it’s my mama. I’m sure she knows; she catches me at everything. I’m breathing so heavy and I try to act normal when I get on the phone and she asks me, “What’s wrong with you, have you been running?” I say, “No, Mama, exercising.” Then she tells the beautiful secretary to make sure I’m not around boys and the lady tells her, “Trust me, there’s no boys around here.” Afterward the gorgeous lady teaches me everything about my coochi snorcher. She makes me play with myself in front of her and she teaches me all the different ways to give myself pleasure. She’s very thorough. She tells me to always know how to give myself pleasure so I’ll never need to rely on a man. In the morning I am worried that I’ve become a butch because I’m so in love with her. She laughs, but I never see her again. I realized later she was my surprising, unexpected, politically incorrect salvation. She transformed my sorry-ass coochi snorcher and raised it up into a kind of heaven.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  We had found a ready-made philosophy reading Bataille but, when Henri and I look back on that fevered period, I think he is right when he says that our copulatory obsession and our missionary zeal derived more from a youthful playfulness. The bed in that tiny apartment was positioned in an alcove, which reinforced the feeling of snuggling in a hiding place, and when four or five of us thrashed about on it together it only meant that supper had turned into a round of ‘I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours’: the diners had tickled each other’s parts under the table with their bare feet, or perhaps someone had proudly raised up a finger covered in particularly clear and slightly smelly sauce. Henri would make a game of bringing along a girl he had met only half an hour earlier in some arcade, and it was an adventure for our whole little team to wander the streets at four o’clock in the morning, looking for some poor girl’s apartment, bent on disturbing her tidy bed. Half the time, the ploy failed. The girl would let herself be fingered, would let someone take off her bra or her tights, but would end the evening clamped to a chair explaining that she really couldn’t but, yes, she was very happy to watch, that was fine by her, yes, she would wait till someone could drive her home. I’ve sometimes caught glimpses of people, men or women in fact, taking refuge on an incongruous upright chair or balancing their buttocks on the edge of the sofa, unable to take their eyes off the pale limbs flailing the air a few centimetres away, a few centimetres which put them in a whole different time frame. They don’t take part so you cannot really say that they are fascinated. Lagging behind – or shooting ahead – they are the patient, studious viewers of an edifying documentary. Our zeal was, of course, only skin deep because the little challenges we set were intended far more for ourselves than for those we tried to initiate. Henri and I once failed on the boulevard Beaumarchais in one of the big, bourgeois apartments where intellectuals lived with bare parquet floors and inadequate overhead lighting. The friend who welcomes us has a thick beard, permanently parted by his bland laugh; he is married to a modern woman. All the same, she balks and goes to bed. We play at transgression, and I seem to remember quivering and roaring with laughter between their streams of urine. No, no, Henri corrects me, he was the only one to piss on me. In any event, what is for sure is that we had taken the precaution of getting into the huge cast iron bath. Then the three of us did go and fuck around on the balcony.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 2 (4 BCE – 451 CE) (2009)

  and made it part of the empire in the 240s, but before that its kings had let Christianity flourish. Later Syrian Christians celebrated this in the legend of King Abgar V of Osrhoene, who back in the first century was supposed to have received a portrait of Jesus Christ from the Saviour himself and to have corresponded with him. The fourth-century Greek historian Eusebius took a great interest in Abgar, preserving the supposed correspondence, although apparently as yet unaware of the portrait, and the elaborated legend gained an extraordinary popularity westwards far beyond Syria. Partly this was because it remedied an embarrassing deficiency in the story of early Christianity, a lack of an intimate connection with any monarchy. That was probably why Eusebius discussed Abgar, exultant chronicler as he was of the Emperor Constantine I’s new alliance with the Church, and in general a writer little excited by the Church on the eastern fringe of the empire.56 Equally, as the cult of relics gathered pace in the fourth and fifth centuries, there was sheer fascination for many devout Christians in the idea of a relic provided by Christ himself. In an elaborated version of the story, this portrait became the first of many Christian displays of a miraculous imprint of an image on cloth, which naturally possessed impressive powers as a result. Later, in 944, now known as the Mandylion (towel) of Edessa, the healing cloth was taken to Constantinople. Later still, taking the story even further west, it was linked to another mysterious expanse of cloth now preserved in Turin Cathedral as the shroud of Christ, despite the likelihood that this admittedly remarkable object was created in medieval Europe.57 The most bizarre outcrop of the Abgar legend was its redeployment in the interest of medieval and Tudor monarchs far away in England. Under his Latin name Lucius, King in Britium, the Latin name for the fortress-hill looming over the city of Edessa, Abgar became by creative misunderstanding King Lucius of Britannia, welcoming early Christian missionaries to what would become England’s green and pleasant land. Although the heroic error seems in the beginning to have been the fault of an author in the entourage of a sixth-century pope in Rome, the story became much beloved by early English Protestants when they were looking for an origin for the English Church which did not involve the annoying intervention of Augustine of Canterbury’s mission from Pope Gregory I (see pp. 334–9), but the Abgar legend was more generally pressed into polemical service by a remarkable variety of combative clergy in the English Reformation.58 This was a far cry from its original purpose as a self- serving story for the Syriac Church, designed to testify to its early and royal origins. That story probably reached its full elaboration at a time when Syriac bishops and local leaders were hoping to curry favour with or impress late Roman emperors in Constantinople. The legend’s back-dating to the first century

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  He was night diving. He was flying without instruments. He was going to this party. When he followed Elena in, minutes later, it was with the elation of stiff drink. Thus elated, he elbowed past the Sawyers—gabbing with Dot Halford in the doorway—and worked his way into the conversation. He wanted to get to the bowl . —More than pleased to be part of the proceedings, he mumbled. And then he ceremoniously tossed his keys to Dot—a jaunty little toss—as though she were the parking flunky for the evening, and she, startled, angled under them with the bowl. For a moment she was frozen, with her carefully lipsticked mouth open wide, and then she made the catch. The keys were nestled among their brethren. The sound of keys seemed to follow. Dot frowned. The Sawyers said nothing. This giddy feeling evaporated almost immediately. In the foyer, surrounded by couples he hadn’t met, couples giggling nervously or ribaldly about the storm, the bowl, the party, their good luck, in the foyer, Hood ran into George Clair. From the office. Benjamin was on his way to the bar to get another drink, though he felt already that words were dissolving on his tongue, that the beginnings of WASP pronunciation were upon him—people always felt it was an ethnic thing. Then Clair appeared, in his bow tie and navy blue blazer. Elena was vanishing deep into the pantry of the Halfords’ house and Benjamin could feel himself stretch out toward her, to apologize again, but Clair was in his way. A faint fecal odor perfumed George always. The house of Shackley and Schwimmer had been at one time the most maverick and creative of the brokerage operations on the street. This was circa the Summer of Love. Though Hood hadn’t sampled the psychedelic cafeteria of that time, he often felt that he had come close—as close as those subordinates who smoked joints and finger-painted at Trinity Church at lunchtimes, who knew the unemployed musicians who played there, who could read the hidden messages in rock-and-roll album sleeves. Even Shackley and Schwimmer themselves had been known to turn up at Trinity now and then. They also went to parties to benefit the Black Panther Defense Fund. They opposed the Vietnam conflict. They were fellow travelers. Shackley and Schwimmer were Harvard-educated men who wore beards and studied like the Orthodox of their faith, though they were as secular as most of their Protestant counterparts. Sometimes they eschewed ties entirely or wore beat-up tweed jackets that must have been left over from their school days. Sometimes they ate at delicatessens and brought sandwiches back for the girls at the switchboard. What did they have going for them? They were smarter then everyone else. Shackley and Schwimmer’s reputation rested on this simple arrogance. Prior to S&S, the world of brokerage had been a world of congeniality and fraternity.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  he was “not some cornball rural hick.” Nevertheless, like the southern politician of the hillbilly school, LBJ loved to be flamboyant. On the campaign trail, he used his Texas vernacular to forge an intimate bond with the crowds. One columnist praised him for “digging down deeply into the basic urges of ordinary people.” Country-boy traits treated as liabilities before 1963 suddenly became an asset as the nation grieved the loss of its young president. 79 In 1963, LBJ’s tour in Kentucky included photographs of the president conversing with poor Appalachian families. #215-23-64, Inez Kentucky, LBJ Library Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas Johnson’s signature set of programs known as the Great Society attached to a different, and positive, variant of his southern identity. Upon passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, the president flew to Stonewall, Texas, to sign the bill at the one-room schoolhouse where he had taught during the Great Depression. While there, he referred to himself as the “son of a sharecropper.” His willingness to tackle poverty could be traced to his embrace of a modern South. In 1960, when he first ran for president, he echoed Howard Odum’s creed: his goal was to prevent a “waste of resources, waste of lives, or waste of opportunity.” By the time he launched the Great Society, the legislation he promoted focused on two distinct classes: the poor urban black population and the mountain folk of Appalachia. Seeing the Great Society as the

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  The art world is made up of a multitude of communities or families, and their rallying points – at the time when I started working as a critic – were more places of work, galleries and the editorial offices of magazines, than cafés. Naturally these little networks were breeding-grounds for casual romances. As I lived right on Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which was where the modern art galleries all were at the time, there was not far to go between an exhibition and a little cuddle. I can see myself on the pavement of the rue Bonaparte with a new painter friend, a shy boy who never really looked up as a smile spread across his face or as he peered at you through his thick glasses. I don’t remember how he led me to understand that he wanted me, probably very warily (‘I’d like to make love to you, you know’), perhaps even without touching me. I probably didn’t give much of a reply. What I remember was how resolute I was. I took him all the way to my room. He let himself be led, without realising that he too was urging me on, weighing me down with those subjugated but tentative eyes. My pleasure derives from the precise moment when I have made the decision and the other feels a bit taken aback. I have an intoxicating feeling of fulfilling a heroine’s destiny. But the best thing to put him at his ease is the girl-who’s-just-escaped-her-parents’-clutches speech, I explain daffily that ‘I want everything’. He carries on encouraging me with his attentive eyes. Someone who once took the same route has since admitted that my room under the eaves reminded him of somewhere you rented by the hour, and that the rather coarse fabric which served as a bed cover seemed like a tarpaulin which had been thrown over it to protect it from the activities that were about to take place!