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 Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  All my sensations had gathered on the surface of the skin and underneath the outermost layer of skin I was empty, light as a feather, lighter than air or smoke or talcum or magnesium or any goddamned thing you want. Suddenly I was a Chippewa and it was the key of sassafras again and I didn’t give a fuck whether the girls were screaming or fainting or shitting in their pants, which they were minus anyway. Looking at crazy Agnes with the rosary around her neck and her big breadbasket blue with fright I got the notion to do a sacrilegious dance, with one hand cupping my balls and the other hand thumbing my nose at the thunder and lightning. The rain was hot and cold and the grass seemed full of dragonflies. I hopped about like a kangaroo and I yelled at the top of my lungs—“O Father, you wormy old son of a bitch, pull in that fucking lightning or Agnes won’t believe in you any more! Do you hear me, you old prick up there, stop the shenanigans . . . you’re driving Agnes nutty. Hey you, are you deaf, you old futzer?” And with a continuous rattle of this defiant nonsense on my lips I danced around the bathhouse, leaping and bounding like a gazelle and using the most frightful oaths I could summon. When the lightning cracked I jumped higher and when the thunder clapped I roared like a lion and then I did a handspring and then I rolled in the grass like a cub and I chewed the grass and spit it out for them and I pounded my chest like a gorilla and all the time I could see the Czerny exercises resting on the piano, the white page full of sharps and flats, and the fucking idiot, think I to myself, imagining that that’s the way to learn how to manipulate the well-tempered clavichord. And suddenly I thought that Czerny might be in heaven by now and looking down on me and so I spat up at him high as I could spit and when the thunder rolled again I yelled with all my might—“You bastard, Czerny, you up there, may the lightning twist your balls off . . . may you swallow your own crooked tail and strangle yourself . . . do you hear me, you crazy prick?” But in spite of all my good efforts Agnes was getting more delirious. She was a dumb Irish Catholic and she had never heard God spoken to that way before. Suddenly, while I was dancing about in the rear of the bathhouse she bolted for the river. I heard Francie scream—“Bring her back, she’ll drown herself!

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

  Bongani lived in Alexandra. Where Soweto is a sprawling, government-planned ghetto, Alexandra is a tiny, dense pocket of a shantytown, left over from the pre-apartheid days. Rows and rows of cinder-block and corrugated-iron shacks, practically stacked on top of one another. Its nickname is Gomorrah because it has the wildest parties and the worst crimes. Street parties are the best thing about Alexandra. You get a tent, put it up in the middle of the road, take over the street, and you’ve got a party. There’s no formal invitations or guest list. You just tell a few people, word of mouth travels, and a crowd appears. There are no permits, nothing like that. If you own a tent, you have the right to throw a party in your street. Cars creep up to the intersection and the driver will see the party blocking their way and shrug and make a U-turn. Nobody gets upset. The only rule is that if you throw a party in front of somebody’s house, they get to come and share your alcohol. The parties don’t end until someone gets shot or a bottle gets broken on someone’s face. That’s how it has to end; otherwise, it wasn’t a party. Back then, most DJs could spin for only a few hours; they were limited by the number of vinyls they could buy. Since parties went all night, you might need five or six DJs to keep the dancing going. But I had a massive hard drive stuffed with MP3s, which is why Bongani was excited when he saw me mixing—he saw a way to corner the market. “How much music do you have?” he asked. “Winamp says I can play for a week.” “We’ll make a fortune.” Our first gig was a New Year’s Eve party the summer we graduated from Sandringham. Bongani and I took my tower, my giant monitor, and all the cables and the keyboard and the mouse. We loaded everything up in a minibus and brought it over to Alex. We took over the street in front of his house, ran the electricity out of his place, set up the computer, set up speakers, and borrowed a tent, and people came. It was explosive. By midnight the whole street was packed from one end to the other. Ours was the biggest New Year’s Eve party in Alexandra that year, and to have the biggest party in Alexandra is no joke. All night, from far and wide, people kept coming. The word spread: “There’s a light-skinned guy who plays music on a computer. You’ve never seen anything like it.” I DJ’d by myself until dawn. By then me and my friends were so drunk and exhausted that we passed out on the lawn outside Bongani’s house. The party was so big it made our reputation in the hood, instantly. Pretty soon we were getting booked all over. Which was a good thing.

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

  Then we’d go to the party. We’d invite the girl, who was usually thrilled to escape her mother’s prison. The guy would bring the beer, he’d get to hang out with the girl, we’d write off the mom’s debt to show her our gratitude, and we’d make our money back selling the beer. There was always a way to make it work. And often that was the most fun part: working the angles, solving the puzzle, seeing what goes where, who needs what, whom we can connect with who can then get us the money. At the peak of our operation we probably had around 10,000 rand in capital. We had loans going out and interest coming in. We had our stockpile of Jordans and DVD players we’d bought to resell. We also had to buy blank CDs, hire minibuses to go to our DJ gigs, feed five guys three times a day. We kept track of everything on the computer. Having lived in my mom’s world, I knew how to do spreadsheets. We had a Microsoft Excel document laid out: everybody’s name, how much they owed, when they paid, when they didn’t pay. After work was when business started to pick up. Minibus drivers picking up one last order, men coming home from work. The men weren’t looking for soap and Corn Flakes. They wanted the gear—DVD players, CD players, PlayStation games. More guys would come through selling stuff, too, because they’d been out hustling and stealing all day. There’d be a guy selling a cellphone, a guy selling some leather jackets, a guy selling shoes. There was this one dude who looked like a black version of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. He’d always come by at the end of his shift with the most random useless crap, like an electric toothbrush without the charger. One time he brought us an electric razor. “What the hell is this?” “It’s an electric razor?” “An electric razor? We’re black. Do you know what these things do to our skin? Do you see anyone around here who can use an electric razor?” We never knew where he was getting this stuff from. Because you don’t ask. Eventually we pieced it together, though: He worked at the airport. It was all crap he was boosting from people’s luggage.

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

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

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

  She’d told me to tell her when it started burning. She should have told me to tell her when it started tingling, because by the time it was actually burning it had already taken off several layers of my scalp. I was well past tingling when I started to freak out. “It’s burning! It’s burning!” She rushed me over to the sink and started to rinse the relaxer out. What I didn’t know is that the chemical doesn’t really start to burn until it’s being rinsed out. I felt like someone was pouring liquid fire onto my head. When she was done I had patches of acid burns all over my scalp. I was the only man in the salon; it was all women. It was a window into what women experience to look good on a regular basis. Why would they ever do this?, I thought. This is horrible. But it worked. My hair was completely straight. The woman combed it back, and I looked like a pimp, a pimp named Slickback. Bongani then dragged me back to the first salon, and the woman agreed to cornrow my hair. She worked slowly. It took six hours. Finally she said, “Okay, you can look in the mirror.” She turned me around in the chair and I looked in the mirror and…I had never seen myself like that before. It was like the makeover scenes in my American movies, where they take the dorky guy or girl, fix the hair and change the clothes, and the ugly duckling becomes the swan. I’d been so convinced I’d never get a date that I never tried to look nice for a girl, so I didn’t know that I could. The hair was good. My skin wasn’t perfect, but it was getting better; the pustules had receded into regular pimples. I looked…not bad. I went home, and my mom squealed when I walked in the door. “Ooooooh! They turned my baby boy into a pretty little girl! I’ve got a little girl! You’re so pretty!” “Mom! C’mon. Stop it.” “Is this the way you’re telling me that you’re gay?” “What? No. Why would you say that?” “You know it’s okay if you are.” “No, Mom. I’m not gay.” Everyone in my family loved it. They all thought it looked great. My mom did tease the shit out of me, though. “It’s very well done,” she said, “but it is way too pretty. You do look like a girl.” — The big night finally came. Tom came over to help me get ready. The hair, the clothes, everything came together perfectly. Once I was set, we went to Abel to get the keys to the BMW, and that was the moment the whole night started to go wrong.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Donna even came downstairs and made popcorn and put it in a big yellow bowl on the table for everybody to eat. She ate lazily, her large hand dawdling in the bowl. “It could be okay. Interesting people could come in. Even though that lawyer’s probably an asshole.” My mother sat quietly, pleased with her role in the job-finding project, pinching clusters of popcorn in her fingers and popping them into her mouth. That night I put my new work clothes on a chair and looked at them. A brown skirt, a beige blouse. I was attracted to the bland ugliness, but I didn’t know how long that would last. I looked at their gray shapes in the night-light and then rolled over toward the dark corner of my bed. My family’s enthusiasm made me feel sarcastic about the job—about any effort to do anything, in fact. In light of their enthusiasm, the only intelligent course of action seemed to be immobility and rudeness. But in the morning, as I ate my poached eggs and toast, I couldn’t help but feel curious and excited. The feeling grew as I rode in the car with my mother to the receding orange building. I felt like I was accomplishing something. I wanted to do well. When we drove past the Amy Joy doughnut shop, I saw, through a wall of glass, expectant construction workers in heavy boots and jackets sitting on vinyl swivel seats, waiting for coffee and bags of doughnuts. I had sentimental thoughts about workers and the decency of unthinking toil. I was pleased to be like them, insofar as I was. I returned my mother’s smile when I got out of the car and said “thanks” when she said “good luck.” “Well, here you are,” said the lawyer. He clapped his short, hard-packed little hands together and made a loud noise. “On time. Good morning!” He began training me then and continued to do so all week. No interesting people came into the office. Very few people came into the office at all. The first week there were three. One was a nervous middle-aged woman who had an uneven haircut and was wearing lavender rubber children’s boots. She sat on the edge of the waiting room chair with her rubber boots together, rearranging the things in her purse. Another was a fat woman in a bright, baglike dress who had yellow in the whites of her wild little eyes, and who carried her purse like a weapon. The last was a man who sat desperately turning his head as if he wanted to disconnect it from his body. I could hear him raising his voice inside the lawyer’s office. When he left, the lawyer came out and said, “He is completely crazy,” and told me to type him a bill for five hundred dollars.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He sighed. “You’re really not a masochist, you know.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. It always seemed like I was.” “You might have fantasies, but I don’t think you have any concept of a real slave mentality. You have too much ego to be part of another person.” “I don’t know, I’ve never had the chance to try it. I’ve never met anyone I wanted to do that with.” “If you were a slave, you wouldn’t make the choice.” “All right, I’m not a slave. With me it’s more a matter of love.” She was just barely aware that she was pitching her voice higher and softer than it was naturally, so that she sounded like a cartoon girl. “It’s like the highest form of love.” He thought this was really cute. Sure it was nauseating, but it was feminine in a radio-song kind of way. “You don’t seem interested in love. It’s not about that for you.” “That’s not true. That’s not true at all. Why do you think I was so rough back there? Deep down, I’m afraid I’ll fall in love with you, that I’ll need to be with you and fuck you...forever.” He was enjoying himself now. He was beginning to see her as a locked garden that he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off the flowers. On one hand, she was beside herself with bliss. On the other, she was scrutinizing him carefully from behind an opaque facade as he entered her pasteboard scene of flora and fauna. Could he function as a character in this landscape? She imagined sitting across from him in a Japanese restaurant, talking about anything. He would look intently into her eyes.... He saw her apartment and then his. He saw them existing a nice distance apart, each of them blocked off by cleanly cut boundaries. Her apartment bloomed with scenes that spiraled toward him in colorful circular motions and then froze suddenly and clearly in place. She was crawling blindfolded across the floor. She was bound and naked in an S&M bar. She was sitting next to him in a taxi, her skirt pulled up, his fingers in her vagina. ...and then they would go back to her apartment. He would beat her and fuck her mouth. Then he would go home to his wife, and she would make dinner for him. It was so well balanced, the mere contemplation of it gave him pleasure. The next day he would send her flowers. He let go of the wheel with one hand and patted her head. She gripped his shirt frantically. He thought: This could work out fine. Something Nice “What’s your name, sir?” The freckled woman wore green stretch pants, and had her red hair tucked under a neat pink scarf. “Fred?” She was making her naturally coarse voice go soft and moist as warm mayonnaise. “I’d like you to meet my girlfriends, Fred.”

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  141 LECTURE 15 THE FIRST GREAT AWAKENING A revival is a form of what scholars sometimes call religious enthusiasm, that is, a subjective experience that makes your body respond and defies the rules of reason and logic. Almost all religious communities have some kind of ritual or gathering in which members express enthusiasm. In Christianity, the first revival was at Pentecost, which was recorded in the book of Acts, chapter 2. According to the account in Acts, Christ’s apostles were seated together and, in a rush of wind and fire, the Holy Spirit descended on the group and gave them the power to speak in tongues. 142The History of Christianity II Christian revivals are as old as Christianity itself. But they became an especially inf luential and common cultural form in Protestantism, after the Reformation. This lecture focuses on the grandfather of all modern revivals, the First Great Awakening. PRELUDE TO REVIVAL õThe First Great Awakening spanned the middle of the 18 th century, but its prelude begins earlier. The Puritans of Scotland held revivals starting in the 17 th century that they called long communions. They were basically rowdy, outdoor communion ceremonies that could last several days. õOne of the great early Scottish revivals happened at the kirk of Shotts, near the city of Glasgow. In 1625, a fiery young Presbyterian preacher named John Livingston started traveling around this part of the country, preaching on the need for true conversion to Christ. He was also a vocal opponent of the office of the bishop, which was a controversial issue in Scotland at the time, and he had been formally banned from the parish of Shotts. õBut that didn’t stop him. In June of 1630 he came to Shotts to join a few other ministers in celebrating one of these long communions. They preached pretty much nonstop for four or five days, day and night, and thousands of people from all over southwest Scotland came to listen. Some people were so overcome by his words that they fainted and fell to the ground. õThat wasn’t the only branch: In 1707, reports started filtering out of children’s revivals in a part of Europe called Silesia, in what is now Poland and eastern Germany. Children proclaimed they felt God’s grace. In the early 18 th century came bigger and bolder revivals, first in Europe, then moving along down the American coast and also up in the Canadian Maritimes. 143Lecture 15—The First Great Awakening THE CONVERSION OF GEORGE WHITEFIELD õWhen scholars talk about the First Great Awakening, they are usually referring to a series of revivals that began in the 1720s and 1730s in New England, the mid-Atlantic colonies, and Britain, followed by revivals that spread south and north along the North American seaboard, the last of which happened in the 1780s.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Maxie was so confused and flustered that he couldn’t disengage a bill without pulling the wad out of his pocket. Leaning over the coffin reverently I peeled off the topmost bill from the wad which was peeping out of his pocket. I couldn’t tell whether it was a single or a ten spot. I didn’t stop to examine it but tucked it away as rapidly as possible and straightened myself up. Then I took Maxie by the arm and returned to the kitchen where the family were eating solemnly but heartily. They wanted me to stay for a bite, and it was awkward to refuse, but I refused as best I could and beat it, my face twitching now with hysterical laughter. At the corner, by the lamppost, Curley was waiting for me. By this time I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. I grabbed Curley by the arm and rushing him down the street I began to laugh, to laugh as I have seldom laughed in my life. I thought it would never stop. Every time I opened my mouth to start explaining the incident I had an attack. Finally I got frightened. I thought maybe I might laugh myself to death. After I had managed to quiet down a bit, in the midst of a long silence, Curley suddenly says: “Did you get it?” That precipitated another attack, even more violent than before. I had to lean against a rail and hold my guts. I had a terrific pain in the guts but a pleasurable pain. What relieved me more than anything was the sight of the bill I had filched from Maxie’s wad. It was a twenty-dollar bill! That sobered me up at once. And at the same time it enraged me a bit. It enraged me to think that in the pocket of that idiot, Maxie, there were still more bills, probably more twenties, more tens, more fives. If he had come out with me, as I suggested, and if I had taken a good look at that wad I would have felt no remorse in blackjacking him. I don’t know why it should have made me feel so, but it enraged me. The most immediate thought was to get rid of Curley as quickly as possible—a five spot would fix him up—and then go on a little spree. What I particularly wanted was to meet some low-down, filthy cunt who hadn’t a spark of decency in her. Where to meet one like that . . . just like that? Well, get rid of Curley first. Curley, of course, is hurt. He had expected to stick with me. He pretends not to want the five bucks, but when he sees that I’m willing to take it back, he quickly stows it away. Again the night, the incalculably barren, cold, mechanical night of New York in which there is no peace, no refuge, no intimacy.

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

  The money kept rolling in and I was balling out of control. This is how balling I was: I bought a cordless telephone. This was before everyone had a cellphone. The range on this cordless phone was strong enough that I could put the base outside my window, walk the two blocks to McDonald’s, order my large number one, walk back home, go up to my room, and fire up my computer, carrying on a conversation the whole time. I was that dude walking down the street holding a giant phone to my ear with the aerial fully extended, talking to my friend. “Yeah, I’m just goin’ down to McDonald’s…” Life was good, and none of it would have happened without Andrew. Without him, I would never have mastered the world of music piracy and lived a life of endless McDonald’s. What he did, on a small scale, showed me how important it is to empower the dispossessed and the disenfranchised in the wake of oppression. Andrew was white. His family had access to education, resources, computers. For generations, while his people were preparing to go to university, my people were crowded into thatched huts singing, “Two times two is four. Three times two is six. La la la la la.” My family had been denied the things his family had taken for granted. I had a natural talent for selling to people, but without knowledge and resources, where was that going to get me? People always lecture the poor: “Take responsibility for yourself! Make something of yourself!” But with what raw materials are the poor to make something of themselves? People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing. Working with Andrew was the first time in my life I realized you need someone from the privileged world to come to you and say, “Okay, here’s what you need, and here’s how it works.” Talent alone would have gotten me nowhere without Andrew giving me the CD writer. People say, “Oh, that’s a handout.” No. I still have to work to profit by it. But I don’t stand a chance without it. — One afternoon I was in my room making a CD when Bongani came over to pick up his inventory. He saw me mixing songs on my computer. “This is insane,” he said. “Are you doing this live?” “Yeah.” “Trevor, I don’t think you understand; you’re sitting on a gold mine. We need to do this for a crowd. You need to come to the township and start DJ’ing gigs. No one has ever seen a DJ playing on a computer before.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It’s the most incredible thing.” “Oh, Jesus Christ, that record came out ten years ago,” said Rita. “Just because you’ve only heard it for the first time.” Eliot tore the record from its jacket, tossed the jacket across the room and knelt before the turntable. He lifted the needle and examined it, blowing delicately. Rita threw her long legs up and sat with her small bony knees together, her feet toeing in. “Who are you in love with?” “You know, she’s still showing those stupid home movies of you in the bathtub,” said Eliot. “She watches them and masturbates. It’s hilarious. She shows them to everybody.” “Who is it?” asked Rita. “This girl at the store named Daisy.” “Oh. I guess it figures.” She leaned forward to the cluttered table for a match. Her dark hair fell across her face with the graceful motion of a folding wing. She leaned back, exposing her face again. The lines under her eyes were deep and black with smeared makeup. “Got any pills, Joe?” Eliot jumped up. “Don’t say that!” he screamed. “Oh, you asshole,” said Rita. “Got any…socks?” “Sure.” Joey poured a colorful tumble into her palm. “What are you trying to do to me?” said Eliot through his teeth. “Are you working for them or what?” Joey looked around; they really had torn up the apartment. Dead plants were turned over in their broken pots, slashed pillows spilled yellow foam out onto the floor, cardboard boxes lay with their lids yanked open, their contents exposed and strewn. The filing cabinet was tipped over, its open drawers freeing a white dance of paper. At least the broken bottles had been swept safely into piles. Eliot’s rare book collection was preserved in a prim stack beside the couch. Joey could see the three Bartolovs he’d sold him. Eliot had been awed when he’d discovered that Joey’s pill connection was Alexander Bartolov, the famous poet. “Oh, come on Rita, just a little blow job,” said Eliot. “I won’t come or anything.” “Forget it,” said Rita. She lay back into the couch, her spidery white hand over her eyes. Her long limp legs recalled the flying grasshopper on Daisy’s valentine. “She’s still hot for you, you know,” said Eliot. “I still have to hear about the times you tied her up and spanked her.” “Can’t we change the subject?” said Joey. “Okay,” said Eliot cheerfully. “I’m going to the bathroom anyway. I’m nauseous.” “Don’t relax,” said Rita. “He’ll be back in a minute.” “It’s all right with me,” said Joey. He took a magazine off the table.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  õ In any case, Hoover wrote down what happened on this unusual night. At the call to prayer, he expected one person to pray, and then another, in an orderly Methodist fashion. But instead, he wrote “all with a single voice began praying in a loud voice,” and the noise grew louder and louder. People sang spontaneously, fell on the floor, and had visions. õ Just as in the United States, early Pentecostal revivals in Latin America broke down traditional rules about “respectable” worship, or women preaching. And just like in the United States, almost as soon as the revival began, so did schisms. Pentecostals broke away from Methodist churches, and then broke away again from one another. õ Early Pentecostal missionaries, both the foreigners and new local converts, did what savvy religious entrepreneurs do: They adjusted to meet the demands of the local market, and they took risks to meet potential converts where they were. For example, when a yellow fever epidemic hit the area, they didn’t stay inside in quarantine; they went out and evangelized sick people in their homes. Today, almost half of Latin American Protestants are Pentecostal. GRASSROOTS CATHOLIC REVIVAL õ The Protestant revival coincided with a long period of turmoil within the Latin American Catholic Church. By the 1960s, Latin American catholic leaders were having serious debates about the causes of poverty in their communities and the way church institutions were sometimes complicit in unjust economic arrangements that hurt the poor and made them more receptive to Protestant missionaries. õ These concerns came to the fore in 1968, when the bishops of Latin America met for a big conference in Colombia. Pope Paul VI came to open the conference in Bogota—the first time a pope had ever visited Latin America. Many Catholics wanted him to say something bold about the oppression of Catholics under many Latin American regimes. Lecture 32—Liberation Theologies in Latin America 317 õ But the pope showed up in a military helicopter, which was a bad sign. In his speech, he called on the church to defend the dignity of the poor, and he denounced the exploitation of peasants—although he warned Catholics not to trust any activists who claimed that violent revolution was the path to justice. In the end, he didn’t go quite as far in condemning powerful businessmen and politicians as many progressives would have liked. õ When the pope left, the conference moved to Medellin, and the bishops echoed the pope’s warning against radical politics that could tempt people to violence. But in context, their statements were pretty radical: They criticized big business, called for workers to organize, and called for agrarian reform to make it possible for peasants to actually earn a decent living on the land. 318 The History of Christianity II

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She yanked at the lobe, tearing out his tiny blue earring. It pinged on the floor, sparkled and rolled away. “Shit!” he screamed. He dropped to his knees and felt the floor with his palms. “Don’t you have any self-control?” “I don’t give a shit about self-control. Get the fuck out.” “Will you just wait until I find my earring?” “I don’t care about your fucking earring. Get out before I kill you.” “God, you’re so irrational.” He listened for sobbing from outside the slammed door. There was none. His ear was bleeding and his face burned, but he was oddly exhilarated. He was sorry Diane was so upset, but there was something stirring about a violent tantrum. It was the sort of thing he liked to tell stories about. — The street was buzzing with junkies and kids with big radios. They stood in a jumbled line against buildings and crawled out of holes in the walls and fences. They mumbled at him as he walked past. “I got the blues, I got the reds, I got the greens and blacks, the ones from last week.” He walked three blocks to Eliot’s apartment; he didn’t expect Eliot to answer the door, but he buzzed anyway. He was startled when Eliot’s suspicious voice darted from the cluster of tiny holes that served as an intercom. “It’s the F.B.I.,” said Joey. There was a grudging silence before the buzzer squawked. When Joey reached the apartment door, Eliot poked his head out, one finger to his lips. His wispy brown hair stuck out in a ratty halo; his round, thin-lashed eyes were hysterically wide and moist. “Whatever you do, don’t mention drugs,” he whispered. “If you have to refer to them at all, say ‘gum’ or something. Only don’t be conspicuous.” “All right,” said Joey. “They’ve got the place wired,” explained Eliot. “We tore the apartment apart and we still can’t find the bug. Are you sure you weren’t followed?” Joey nodded. Eliot stretched his neck and stared into the empty hall, blinking his damp eyes hard. Satisfied, he let Joey in. Rita was lying on the couch in front of a partially dismantled TV screen with a soundless picture on it. Her large feet hung over the edge of the couch, her hands were limp at the ends of her thin, prominently veined wrists. Her head drooped sideways on her slender, listless neck, almost falling off the couch. When she saw Joey she lifted her head, and her dark eyes lighted. He flapped his hand at her and sat on a hard-backed chair. “Diane threw me out of the house,” he said. “Yeah?” said Eliot. He got on his knees and began looking through the records scattered on the floor. “It doesn’t matter. I wanted to move anyway. I’m in love. It’s all over between Diane and me.” “You should’ve made that decision five years ago,” said Rita. Eliot whirled around, waving a record. “You’ve got to hear this.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He looked as though he expected me to take offense. “A lot of people do,” I said. “It was either that or I would’ve shot those miserable blankety-blanks next door and I’d have to get a lawyer to defend me anyway. You know the story?” I did. He was suing his neighbors because they had a dog that “barked all goddamn day.” I listened to him talk. It surprised me how this short conversation quickly restored my sensibility. Everything seemed perfectly normal by the time the lawyer came out of his office to greet the client. I noticed he had my letter in one hand. Just before he turned to lead the client away, he handed it to me, smiling. “Good letter,” he said. When I went home that night, everything was the same. My life had not been disarranged by the event except for a slight increase in the distance between me and my family. My behind was not even red when I looked at it in the bathroom mirror. But when I got into bed and thought about the thing, I got excited. I was more excited, in fact, than I had ever been in my life. That didn’t surprise me, either. I felt a numbness; I felt that I could never have a normal conversation with anyone again. I masturbated slowly, to put off the climax as long as I could. But there was no climax, even though I tried for a long time. Then I couldn’t sleep. It happened twice more in the next week and a half. The following week, when I made a typing mistake, he didn’t spank me. Instead, he told me to bend over his desk, look at the typing mistake and repeat “I am stupid” for several minutes. Our relationship didn’t change otherwise. He was still brisk and friendly in the morning. And, because he seemed so sure of himself, I could not help but react to him as if he were still the same domineering but affable boss. He did not, however, ever invite me to discuss my problems with him again. I began to have recurring dreams about him. In one, the most frequent, I walked with him in a field of big bright red poppies. The day was brilliant and warm. We were smiling at each other, and there was a tremendous sense of release and goodwill between us. He looked at me and said, “I understand you now, Debby.” Then we held hands. There was one time I felt disturbed about what was happening at the office. It was just before dinner, and my father was upset about something that had happened to him at work. I could hear him yelling in the living room while my mother tried to comfort him. He yelled, “I’d rather work in a circus!

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  In the midst of this triumphant demonstration of spiritually destructive osmosis I sat with my feet planted on the big desk trying to communicate with Zeus the Father of Atlantis and with his lost progeny, ignorant of the fact that Apollinaire was to die the day before the Armistice in a military hospital, ignorant of the fact that in his “new writing” he had penned these indelible lines: Be forbearing when you compare us With those who were the perfection of order. We who everywhere seek adventure, We are not your enemies. We would give you vast and strange domains Where flowering mystery waits for him would pluck it. Ignorant that in this same poem he had also written: Have compassion on us who are always fighting on the frontiers Of the boundless future, Compassion for our errors, compassion for our sins. I was ignorant of the fact that there were men then living who went by the outlandish names of Blaise Cendrars, Jacques Vaché, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, René Crevel, Henri de Montherlant, André Breton, Max Ernst, Georges Grosz; ignorant of the fact that on July 14, 1916, at the Saal Waag, in Zurich, the first Dada Manifesto had been proclaimed—“manifesto by Monsieur Antipyrine”—that in this strange document it was stated: “Dada is life without slippers or parallel . . . severe necessity without discipline or morality and we spit on humanity.” Ignorant of the fact that the Dada Manifesto of 1918 contained these lines: “I am writing a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and I am against manifestoes as a matter of principle, as I am also against principles. . . . I write this manifesto to show that one may perform opposed actions together, in a single fresh respiration; I am against action; for continual contradiction, for affirmation also, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain for I hate good sense. . . . There is a literature which does not reach the voracious mass. The work of creators, sprung from a real necessity on the part of the author, and for himself. Consciousness of a supreme egotism where the stars waste away. . . . Each page must explode, either with the profoundly serious and heavy, the whirlwind, dizziness, the new, the eternal, with the overwhelming hoax, with an enthusiasm for principles or with the mode of typography. On the one hand a staggering fleeing world, affianced to the jinglebells of the infernal gamut, on the other hand: new beings. . . .” Thirty-two years later and I am still saying Yes! Yes, Monsieur Antipyrine! Yes, Monsieur Tristan Bustanoby Tzara! Yes, Monsieur Max Ernst Geburt! Yes! Monsieur René Crevel, now that you are dead by suicide, yes, the world is crazy, you were right. Yes, Monsiuer Blaise Cendrars, you were right to kill. Was it the day of the Armistice that you brought out your little book—J’ai tué?

• From Best Erotic Romance

  Shopping for liquor has never felt so risqué, but on this trip, while I search for the perfect bottle of champagne, it feels illicit, like I’m cheating somehow. Maybe it’s because I didn’t give Derek a clue when he called to check up on me that I was planning this. Too much anticipation could spoil it. We rarely surprise each other anymore, even with flowers or naughty notes. It’s not that we don’t have a great sex life; it’s more that we each know exactly what to expect. Even asking for the high-end champagne feels like flirting. I wonder if the clerk sees my nipples harden; I chose a sheer bra rather than a padded one. I buy two large bottles and a few glass flutes, then bring them home and set them on ice. I strip off all my clothes and walk around the house naked to get in the mood. I have no idea if real strippers like to be au natural or not, but I know for me it takes a little getting used to. Even when we’re on vacation, at resorts where everyone is letting it all hang out, I still cling not just to my bathing suit but a cover-up too. Even a sheer one is better than nothing. But this time I have a little Britney Spears, a little Christina Aguilera, and a lot of courage racing through my blood. I don’t plan to drink the champagne myself; that would defeat my purpose if I used it to spur me on. The champagne is for Derek to enjoy…when I pour it all over myself. I get through a few Britney tracks, a few Christina, a little Rihanna, shaking my ass, my hair, my breasts, every part of me. I do it barefoot and in heels, and I get used to bending over, flashing myself, running my hands over my body. I’m flushed and filled with a new kind of sexual energy by the time I’m done. I slip into the deep peach silky nightie and start to curl my hair. Even though I plan to shake it all over, I have an hour to kill and want to make sure I look stunning for him. I want to make sure Derek knows how much I want him, not just tonight, but always, how much I’d do for him, with him, to him.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  The scar didn’t make him look tough; he was too anxious to look tough. “I never thought anything like this would ever happen to me,” he said. “I never thought I’d be in a lawyer’s office even once, and I’ve been here three times now. And absolutely nothing’s been accomplished. I’ve always hated lawyers.” He looked as though he expected me to take offense. “A lot of people do,” I said. “It was either that or I would’ve shot those miserable blankety-blanks next door and I’d have to get a lawyer to defend me anyway. You know the story?” I did. He was suing his neighbors because they had a dog that “barked all goddamn day.” I listened to him talk. It surprised me how this short conversation quickly restored my sensibility. Everything seemed perfectly normal by the time the lawyer came out of his office to greet the client. I noticed he had my letter in one hand. Just before he turned to lead the client away, he handed it to me, smiling. “Good letter,” he said. When I went home that night, everything was the same. My life had not been disarranged by the event except for a slight increase in the distance between me and my family. My behind was not even red when I looked at it in the bathroom mirror. But when I got into bed and thought about the thing, I got excited. I was more excited, in fact, than I had ever been in my life. That didn’t surprise me, either. I felt a numbness; I felt that I could never have a normal conversation with anyone again. I masturbated slowly, to put off the climax as long as I could. But there was no climax, even though I tried for a long time. Then I couldn’t sleep. It happened twice more in the next week and a half. The following week, when I made a typing mistake, he didn’t spank me. Instead, he told me to bend over his desk, look at the typing mistake and repeat “I am stupid” for several minutes. Our relationship didn’t change otherwise. He was still brisk and friendly in the morning. And, because he seemed so sure of himself, I could not help but react to him as if he were still the same domineering but affable boss. He did not, however, ever invite me to discuss my problems with him again. I began to have recurring dreams about him. In one, the most frequent, I walked with him in a field of big bright red poppies. The day was brilliant and warm. We were smiling at each other, and there was a tremendous sense of release and goodwill between us. He looked at me and said, “I understand you now, Debby.” Then we held hands. There was one time I felt disturbed about what was happening at the office.

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

  Then we’d go to the party. We’d invite the girl, who was usually thrilled to escape her mother’s prison. The guy would bring the beer, he’d get to hang out with the girl, we’d write off the mom’s debt to show her our gratitude, and we’d make our money back selling the beer. There was always a way to make it work. And often that was the most fun part: working the angles, solving the puzzle, seeing what goes where, who needs what, whom we can connect with who can then get us the money. At the peak of our operation we probably had around 10,000 rand in capital. We had loans going out and interest coming in. We had our stockpile of Jordans and DVD players we’d bought to resell. We also had to buy blank CDs, hire minibuses to go to our DJ gigs, feed five guys three times a day. We kept track of everything on the computer. Having lived in my mom’s world, I knew how to do spreadsheets. We had a Microsoft Excel document laid out: everybody’s name, how much they owed, when they paid, when they didn’t pay. After work was when business started to pick up. Minibus drivers picking up one last order, men coming home from work. The men weren’t looking for soap and Corn Flakes. They wanted the gear—DVD players, CD players, PlayStation games. More guys would come through selling stuff, too, because they’d been out hustling and stealing all day. There’d be a guy selling a cellphone, a guy selling some leather jackets, a guy selling shoes. There was this one dude who looked like a black version of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. He’d always come by at the end of his shift with the most random useless crap, like an electric toothbrush without the charger. One time he brought us an electric razor. “What the hell is this?” “It’s an electric razor?” “An electric razor? We’re black. Do you know what these things do to our skin? Do you see anyone around here who can use an electric razor?” We never knew where he was getting this stuff from. Because you don’t ask. Eventually we pieced it together, though: He worked at the airport. It was all crap he was boosting from people’s luggage.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Who better qualified than I? I thought so hard and fast between orgasms that my cock must have grown another inch or two. Finally I decided to make an end of it by turning her over and back-scuttling her. She balked a bit at first, but when she felt the thing slipping out of her she nearly went crazy. “Oh yes, oh yes, do it, do it!” she gibbered, and with that I really got excited, I had hardly slipped it into her when I felt it coming, one of those long agonizing spurts from the tip of the spinal column. I shoved it in so deep that I felt as if something had given way. We fell over, exhausted, the both of us, and panted like dogs. At the same time, however, I had the presence of mind to feel around for a few coins. Not that it was necessary, because she had already loaned me a few dollars, but to make up for the carfare which I was lacking in Far Rockaway. Even then, by Jesus, it wasn’t finished. Soon I felt her groping about, first with her hands, then with her mouth. I had still a sort of semi hard on. She got it into her mouth and she began to caress it with her tongue. I saw stars. The next thing I knew her feet were around my neck and my tongue up her twat. And then I had to get over her again and shove it in, up to the hilt. She squirmed around like an eel, so help me God. And then she began to come again, long, drawn out, agonizing orgasms, with a whimpering and gibbering that was hallucinating. Finally I had to pull it out and tell her to stop. What a quim! And I had only asked to take a look at it! Maxie with his talk of Odessa revived something which I had lost as a child. Though I had never a very clear picture of Odessa the aura of it was like the little neighborhood in Brooklyn which meant so much to me and from which I had been torn away too soon. I get a very definite feeling of it every time I see an Italian painting without perspective; if it is a picture of a funeral procession, for example, it is exactly the sort of experience which I knew as a child, one of intense immediacy. If it is a picture of the open street, the women sitting in the windows are sitting on the street and not above it and away from it.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  For there were among us, older boys who were beginning to read and who would entertain us by the hour with fantastic tales which they had gleaned from books such as Ayesha or Ouida’s Under Two Flags. The real flavor of knowledge is most definitely associated in my mind with the vacant lot at the corner of the new neighborhood where I was transplanted at about the age of ten. Here, when the fall days came on and we stood about the bonfire roasting chippies and raw potatoes in the little cans which we carried, there ensued a new type of discussion which differed from the old discussions I had known in that the origins were always bookish. Some one had just read a book of adventure, or a book of science, and forthwith the whole street became animated by the introduction of a hitherto unknown subject. It might be that one of these boys had just discovered that there was such a thing as the Japanese current and he would try to explain to us how the Japanese current came into existence and what the purpose of it was. This was the only way we learned things—against the fence, as it were, while roasting chippies and raw potatoes. These bits of knowledge sunk deep—so deep, in fact, that later, confronted with a more accurate knowledge it was often difficult to dislodge the older knowledge. In this way it was explained to us one day by an older boy that the Egyptians had known about the circulation of the blood, something which seemed so natural to us that it was hard later to swallow the story of the discovery of the circulation of the blood by an Englishman named Harvey.