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 In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as High Fantasy After that, nothing is the same. At first, it does what it is supposed to do: confirm every single sneaking suspicion you’ve had about your own value for so long. You are lucky to have met her. You are not some weird, desperate mess. You are wanted. Better yet, you are needed. You are a piece of someone’s destiny. You are critical to a larger plan that will span many years, many kingdoms, many volumes. Dream House as Entomology “I know we were doing the polyamory thing when I was with Val,” she says. “But I don’t want to share you with anyone. I love you so much. Can we agree to be monogamous?” You laugh and nod and kiss her, as if her love for you has sharpened and pinned you to a wall. Dream House as Lesbian Pulp Novel The cover tells you what you need to know. Depraved inversion. Seduction. Lascivious butches and big-breasted seductresses. Love that dare not speak its name. There are censors to get past, so tragedy is a foregone conclusion. It was written into the DNA of the Dream House, maybe even back when it was just a house, maybe even back when it was just Bloomington, Indiana, or just the Northwest Territory, or just the still-uncolonized Miami Nation. Or before humans existed there at all, and it was just raw, anonymous land. You wonder if, at any point in history, some creature scuttled over what would, eons later, be the living room, and cocked its head to the side to listen to the faintest of sounds: yelling, weeping. Ghosts of a future that hadn’t happened yet.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  We’re not even boy-crazy, just bored, watching him from Elizabeth’s bedroom window. She has antiqued French Provincial furniture and a princess telephone. The room is a converted front porch, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a barricaded door we use as an escape hatch on summer nights. We’re reclining on the canopied bed, Elizabeth holding back the curtains with her toes so we can watch him without sitting up. We’re getting ready to dial him again, although we just did this less than an hour ago. “She won’t call him in,” I predict. Dave’s mother has a good sense of humor but it’s wearing thin. “This time I’m telling her who it is,” Elizabeth says, dialing with a pencil. There’s a chance she’ll panic and hand the phone to me so I roll off the bed and stand up for a while, out of range. I have my hair in two pigtails, thin ones, and I try to fluff them up a little bit. “You just wrecked them,” Elizabeth informs me, and then suddenly looks alert. “Hello? Is Dave there?” A moment of silence while she listens. “Could you just tell him it’s Brenda?” Brenda is the name of the most popular ninth-grader. We’re seventh-graders. Brenda wouldn’t be caught dead doing what we’re doing. “She’s getting him!” Elizabeth freaks out, tries to force the phone on me. I won’t take it and the receiver lies on the bed while we gesture to each other silently. Finally I hold it and we both listen, breathing steadily while he says his Hello? Hello? Just when we think he’s getting ready to hang up he says, in a controlled ninth-grader voice, “I know who this is .” I jam the receiver back on its cradle and we go nuts, leaping off the bed and running into each other. We pull the curtains shut and overlap them, Elizabeth gets a bobby pin from her dresser and pins them shut. We sit on the floor panting and staring at each other, wild-eyed and no longer bored. [image "art" file=Image00001.jpg] My best friend Elizabeth is tall, with lanky blond hair that looks like straw, a long thin face, and black-rimmed glasses in front of green eyes. These are her pre-beautiful days. I’m short and skinny with a pale face and limp brown hair. People are always asking me if I feel well. We met in French class, taught by Mrs. McLaughlin, the wife of Mr. McLaughlin, who teaches civics. She’s the cheer-leading coach, if that gives you any idea, snake-thin with a lantern jaw and hair teased into a brown bubble. She’s a monster, although her husband is likable enough. We all had to take French names, chosen from a list that got passed around the first day. We sat in alphabetical order and my last name starts with a B so I got a good one: Colette. Elizabeth, unfortunately, ended up with Georgette, because she comes at the end of the alphabet.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Finally, you need to also refine or cultivate those traits that go into a strong character—resilience under pressure, attention to detail, the ability to complete things, to work with a team, to be tolerant of people’s differences. The only way to do so is to work on your habits, which go into the slow formation of your character. For instance, you train yourself to not react in the moment by repeatedly placing yourself in stressful or adverse situations in order to get used to them. In boring everyday tasks, you cultivate greater patience and attention to detail. You deliberately take on tasks slightly above your level. In completing them, you have to work harder, helping you establish more discipline and better work habits. You train yourself to continually think of what is best for the team. You also search out others who display a strong character and associate with them as much as possible. In this way you can assimilate their energy and their habits. And to develop some flexibility in your character, always a sign of strength, you occasionally shake yourself up, trying out some new strategy or way of thinking, doing the opposite of what you would normally do. With such work you will no longer be a slave to the character created by your earliest years and the compulsive behavior it leads to. Even further, you can now actively shape your very character and the fate that goes with it. In anything, it is a mistake to think one can perform an action or behave in a certain way once and no more. (The mistake of those who say: “Let us slave away and save every penny till we are thirty, then we will enjoy ourselves.” At thirty they will have a bent for avarice and hard work, and will never enjoy themselves any more . . . .) What one does, one will do again, indeed has probably already done in the distant past. The agonizing thing in life is that it is our own decisions that throw us into this rut, under the wheels that crush us. (The truth is that, even before making those decisions, we were going in that direction.) A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself. —Cesare Pavese A 5 Become an Elusive Object of Desire The Law of Covetousness bsence and presence have very primal effects upon us. Too much presence suffocates; a degree of absence spurs our interest. We are marked by the continual desire to possess what we do not have—the object projected by our fantasies. Learn to create some mystery around you, to use strategic absence to make people desire your return, to want to possess you.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  on site. Hardly anyone was ever fired. The studio produced one animated film about every four years and in 1983 produced a meager three live-action films. They had not had a single hit film since The Love Bug in 1968. The Disney lot in Burbank almost seemed like a ghost town. The actor Tom Hanks, who worked on the lot in 1983, described it as “a Greyhound bus station in the 1950s.” Given its dilapidated condition, however, this would be the perfect place for Eisner to work his magic. The studio and the corporation could only move up. Its board members were desperate to turn it around and avoid a hostile takeover. Eisner could dictate the terms of his leadership position. Presenting himself to Roy Disney (Walt’s nephew and the largest shareholder of Disney stock) as the company’s savior, he laid out a detailed and inspiring plan for a dramatic turnaround (greater than Paramount’s), and Roy was won over. With Roy’s blessing the board approved the choice, and in September 1984 Eisner was named chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company. Frank Wells, the former head of Warner Bros., was named president and chief operating officer. Wells would focus on the business side. In all matters Eisner was the boss; Wells was there to help and serve him. Eisner wasted no time. He embarked on a major restructuring of the company, which led to the departure of over a thousand employees. He started filling the executive ranks with Paramount people, most notably Jeffrey Katzenberg (b. 1950), who had worked as Eisner’s right-hand man at Paramount and was now named chairman of Walt Disney Studios. Katzenberg could be abrasive and downright rude, but no one in Hollywood was more efficient or worked harder. He simply got things done. Within months Disney began to churn out a remarkable series of hits, adhering to Eisner’s formula. Fifteen of its first seventeen films (such as Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Who Framed Roger Rabbit ) generated profits, a run of success almost unheard of for any studio in Hollywood. One day, as Eisner explored the Burbank lot with Wells, they entered the Disney library and discovered hundreds of cartoons from the golden era that had never been shown. There on endless shelves were stored all of the great Disney classic animated hits. Eisner’s eyes lit up at the sight of this treasure. He could reissue all of these cartoons and animated films on video (the home video market was in the midst of exploding) and it would be pure profit. Based on these cartoons, the company could create stores to market the various Disney characters. Disney was a virtual gold mine waiting to be exploited, and Eisner would make the most of this. Soon the stores opened, the videos sold like crazy, the film hits kept pumping profit into the company, and Disney’s stock price soared. It had replaced Paramount as the hottest film studio in town.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  You plan your trip: Iowa to Boston, Boston to New York. In Boston she’ll show you her old stomping grounds; in New York you’ll both get to spend time with Val. Then New York to Allentown so she can meet your parents, Allentown to DC to meet your college friends, DC to northern Virginia for one of your oldest friend’s wedding, and then down to Florida so you can meet her parents. The idea of the open road lights you up. You have always adored driving great distances across your country: it is the only time you ever feel any kind of patriotism. Her parents don’t want you to drive. They worry about accidents; they beg you both to fly. You come to a compromise: you will drive to DC and fly to Florida from there. They pay for your tickets. Every step of the trip is sweet and sour. While you drive you slip your hand between her legs, jerk her off as you zip past cornfields and stopped traffic. (She is hot; you are stupid.) You fight near a rest stop in Illinois about, of all things, a Beyoncé song. (“If the lyrics were about how men ruled the world,” she says to you, “you’d hate this song.”) When she kisses you in a McDonald’s parking lot in Indiana, you both look up to see a group of men—a risk of men, a murder of men—standing there watching, laughing, pointing. One man does that tongue-waggle-through-the-fingers thing, which you have never seen anyone do in real life. You fly out of there as fast as you can; you don’t even buckle your seat belt until you’re back on the interstate. Dream House as AccidentIn Boston your friend Sam—who you still think of by his college nickname, Big Sam—overhears her making you cry, and acts cold and distant to her even though you just want him to pretend like he didn’t hear anything. Dream House as AmbitionShe takes you to Harvard’s campus, which you’d never seen, and you find yourself engaging in some kind of weird retrospective fantasy. When she shows you the undergraduate dining hall, which basically looks like Hogwarts, you keep thinking to yourself: Maybe I should have gone to Harvard? Maybe I should have applied? You keep thinking back to why you applied to the colleges you did, and you remember—for the first time in years—that you chose your college list almost completely at random. You wanted to go to a city and you wanted to get out of Pennsylvania; those were the only two criteria. You wish you could accurately describe the bone-deep ache of walking on that campus, the too-late realization that you’d fucked up your whole life by not having sufficient ambition. Who are you? You are nobody. You are nothing. She takes your arm as you walk among the buildings, as if you would have belonged there, as if you belong there, like she does.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I love some of Mann’s shorter works too and am just starting to reread all of him. This one is the first.” “I just reread The Transposed Head,” Artemis said. “What’s next on your list?” “I’m doing them in the order I treasure them. Next’ll be the Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy. And then, perhaps, Felix Krull. But,” he half rose, “won’t you sit down?” “And last?” asked Artemis, setting her bagel and coffee on the table and sitting down across from him. “The Magic Mountain,” Ernest responded, not missing a beat, revealing neither his sheer astonishment at hooking this catch nor his uncertainty about how to reel it in. “It just hasn’t aged well—Settembrini’s endless conversations strike me now as tedious. Also, at the bottom of the list is Doctor Faustus. The musicological concerns are just too technical and, I’m afraid, boring.” “I agree with you entirely,” said Artemis, reaching into her shoulder bag and extracting a ripe black avocado and several plastic bags of seeds, “though I never cease to be fascinated with the Nietzsche-Leverkühn connection.” “Oh, I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself—lost in our conversation. I’m Ernest Lash.” “I’m Artemis,” she said as she peeled her avocado, spread half of it on her bagel, and topped it with sprinkles of various seeds. “Artemis; a lovely name. You know, it’s warming up outside. How about grabbing a table and joining your twin out there?” Ernest had industriously done his homework. “My twin?” Artemis pondered as they moved to a table in the sun. “My twin? Oh, Apollo! The golden sunlight of brother Apollo. You are an unusual man—all my life I’ve lived with my name, and you’re the first person who has ever said that to me.” “But you know,” Ernest continued, “I must confess I may put aside Mann for a while so as to get to the new Wilkins translation of Musil’s Man Without Qualities.” “What a coincidence.” Artemis’s eyes opened wide. “I’m reading that book right now.” Reaching into her shoulder bag again, she pulled out a book. “It’s glorious.” From then on Artemis never took her eyes off Ernest. Indeed, her gaze was so fixed on his lips that every few minutes Ernest self-consciously brushed his mustache to dislodge any errant crumbs. “I love living in Marin, but sometimes it’s not easy to have a serious conversation here,” she said, offering him a slice of avocado. “The last time I talked about this book I was with someone who’d never heard of Musil.” “Well, everyone’s not up to Musil.” What a pity, Ernest thought, that a soul like Artemis had had to put up for any time at all with the tight-assed Halston’s company. For the next three hours they meandered happily through the work of Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Heinrich von Kleist. Ernest looked at his watch. Almost noon! What an extraordinary woman, he thought.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  We’re both certain we’ll never amount to anything, which only bothers us when we think about it. Right now we’re high on dope and each other, and the night air smells like rain. The road is white where the headlights hit it, and everything else is pure black. The car is old and bumperless, with a plywood fender that has a dent where an agitated friend of ours karate-chopped it. The tape deck is not for the faint-hearted; the sound inside the car is huge and all-consuming. Right now it sounds like someone is playing a guitar using a razor blade for a pick, and the question being asked is Are you experienced? The answer is No, we aren’t, but we’re working on it. Coming up on the long stretch before the giant Dip in Pavement and the subsequent railroad tracks, Eric glances over at me for an instant, assessing my mood, then pushes the lights off and we streak through the blackness down the center of the highway, dark moving inside of dark, our faces faint in the dashboard light. It sounds for a moment like the guitar player is saying Areyouanidiot? and then I decide to be into it. I put one arm out my window, to feel the night air and create some drag. He presses harder on the gas. The sky is distinguishable from the ground only because it is blue-black, and the land is black-black. There are stars. This is what they mean by barreling down the road. Not only could this be certain death, but we may take somebody else out, too, which is troubling. He isn’t thinking of any of that; in fact, he’s got his eyes closed, or else just the one I can see — he’s trying to freak me out. That settles it. I put my foot on top of his and press it to the floor. I close my own eyes and imagine myself leaning into it, certain death. Darkness and his girlfriend, Darkness, are out for a ride through the countryside in the summer night. We hit the dip and are airborne for a breathless millisecond, then there’s that long, terrible dope-inspired instant that stretches out forever, where you don’t know if there’ll be a train on the tracks or not, whether you’ll get to continue living. This time we do. “They clean your room and cook your meals so you can write about Stuart Garcia?” Elizabeth asks incredulously. She’s at her job in Chicago. “Apparently,” I reply. I’m in the wilds of upstate New York, at an artist’s colony, sitting in a phone booth drawing pictures and talking to her while she formats something on her computer, which keeps beeping. “You should say he was dangerous,” she suggests. I hate it here; why did I come here? All there is to do is write. “You always go through this,” she reminds me. There is the sound of a tiny bomb exploding, a ding, and she exhales loudly.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  unable to make a decision. He dared not enter Rome, fearing battle with the Colonnas and their many allies in the crowded streets. He would wait it out, but with time their options seemed to narrow, and the news kept getting worse—mobs had sacked the palace they lived in; what few allies they had in Rome had now deserted them; the cardinals were congregating to elect the new pope. It was August and the sweltering heat made Caterina—seven months pregnant with her fourth child—feel faint and continually nauseated. But as she contemplated the impending doom, the thought of her father began to occupy her mind; it was as if she could feel his spirit inhabiting her. Thinking as he would think about the predicament she faced, she felt a rush of excitement as she formulated an audacious plan. Without telling a soul of her intentions, in the dark of night she mounted a horse and snuck out of camp, riding as fast as she could to Rome. As she had expected, in her condition no one recognized her and she was allowed to enter the city. She headed straight for the Castel Sant’Angelo, the most strategic point in Rome—just across the Tiber River from the city center and close to the Vatican. With its impregnable walls and its cannons that could be aimed at all parts of Rome, the person who controlled the castle controlled the city. Rome was in tumult, mobs filling the streets everywhere. The castle was still held by a lieutenant loyal to Girolamo. Identifying herself, Caterina was let into Sant’Angelo. Once inside, in the name of her husband she took possession of the castle, throwing out the lieutenant, whom she did not trust. Sending word out through the castle to soldiers who swore loyalty to her, she managed to smuggle in more troops. With the cannons of Sant’Angelo now pointing at all roads leading to the Vatican, she made it impossible for the cardinals to meet in one location and elect the new pope. To make her threats real, she had her soldiers fire the cannons as a warning. She meant business. Her terms for surrendering the castle were simple—that all of the property of the Riarios be guaranteed to remain in their hands, including Forlì and Imola. A few evenings after she had taken over Sant’Angelo, wearing some armor over her gown, she marched along the ramparts of the castle. It gave her a feeling of great power, so far above the city, looking down at the frantic men below, helpless to fight against her, a single woman hobbled by pregnancy. When an envoy of the cardinal who was organizing the conclave to elect the new pope was sent to negotiate with her and seemed reluctant to agree to her conditions of surrender, she shouted down from the ramparts, so all could hear, “So [the cardinal] wants a battle of wits with me, does he? What he

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  We feel compelled to do more than we normally can, to work extra hard. We feel a charge of energy that comes from feeling connected to others who are working with the same urgent spirit. A point is reached at which members of the group do not even have to talk—we’re all on the same page and can even anticipate the thoughts of our colleagues. The above feelings are not registered rationally; they come to us in automatic bodily sensations—goose bumps, racing heartbeat, extra vitality and power. Let us call us this energy the social force , a type of invisible force field that affects and binds a group of people through shared sensations and creates an intense feeling of connection. If we confront this force field as outsiders, it tends to induce anxiety. For instance, we find ourselves traveling to a place with a culture very different from our own. Or we begin a job at a workplace where people seem to have their own way of relating to one another, with a secret language of sorts. Or we walk through a neighborhood of a much different social class than what we’re used to—much wealthier or poorer. In these moments, we are aware that we don’t belong, that others are looking at us as outsiders, and from deep within we feel uneasy and unusually alert, although in fact we may have nothing really to fear. We can observe several interesting elements to the social force: First, it exists inside us and outside us at the same time . When we experience the bodily sensations mentioned above, we are almost certain that others on our side are feeling the same. We feel the force within, but we think of it as outside ourselves as well. This is an unusual sensation, perhaps equivalent to what we feel when we are in love and experience a shared energy that passes between ourselves and the love object. We can also say this force differs, depending on the size and chemistry of the particular group . In general, the larger the group, the more intense is the effect. When we are among a very large group of people who seem to share our ideas or values, we feel quite a rush of increased strength and vitality, as well as a communal warmth or heat that comes from feeling that we belong. There is something awesome and sublime about this force multiplied in a large crowd. This increase in energy and excitement can easily shift to anger and violence in the presence of an enemy. The particular mix of people shapes the effect as well.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The matrix of function and consciousness, Yakovlev’s sphere of visceration, is in the primitive reticular formation. His methodical analysis of thousands of slices of brain tissue (histology) yielded a poetic vision in the great traditions of his countrymen, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Yakovlev delicately summarized his meticulous, lifelong investigations with the single encompassing statement, “Out of the swamp of the reticular system, the cerebral cortex arose, like a sinful orchid, beautiful and guilty.” Wow ... wow ... wow! A Personal Pilgrimage When I first encountered the ideas of Yakovlev, I registered the truth of his hypothesis viscerally. My gut rumbled in recognition; my emotions soared in excitement. And intellectually, I yearned to digest and savor the exquisite essence of this man’s genius. † I wanted to devour him alive—that is, if he was still alive. It took several days of persistent phone calls to locate him. He was indeed alive and well. This coming-of-age odyssey mutated to locating and meeting with some of my other key intellectual heroes. After finally receiving my doctorate from University of California–Berkeley in 1977, I sent copies of my thesis on stress to several scientists who were my intellectual mentors. This list included Nikolaas Tinbergen, Raymond Dart, Carl Richter, Hans Selye, Ernst Gellhorn, Paul MacLean and Yakovlev himself. I was on my way ... Yakovlev’s lab was in the basement of a dark cavernous building belonging (I believe) to the National Institutes of Health. I proceeded toward the door described to me by the receptionist. It was ever so slightly ajar. As I poked my head in, I was startled by the panoramic vision of shelf after shelf filled with bottles of pickled brains. An impish figure called out, motioning me to his desk. This octogenarian of small stature had a quiet and gentle presence belying his truly expansive character. With twinkling blue eyes and genuine enthusiasm, Yakovlev warmly invited me to sit down. He proceeded to ask me about my interests and was curious why I might have chosen to come so far to visit him. When I told him about my interest in instincts and about my ideas concerning mind-body healing, stress and self-regulation, he jumped up, grabbed my arm excitedly and took me from jar to jar sharing with me his vast variety of specimens, demonstrating the basic anatomical building blocks of the brain. From there he led me back to his desk and microscope; together we looked at slides of minutely thin slices of brain tissue. He narrated this viewing, waxing lyrical in his elaborate reasoning, as I imagined Darwin might have done in his laboratory a mere hundred or so years earlier.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Wally is already in the party mood and so am I, because it’s my nineteenth birthday. I have on a microscopic swimming suit, a Rolling Stones T-shirt, and Wally’s helmet. He has on cut-off blue jeans, sunglasses, and a baseball cap. Every once in a while he’ll holler, “Hold on!” and then execute an amazing maneuver that involves other vehicles on the road. I’m absolutely terrified, and keep imagining what skin on pavement would feel like. Nevertheless, I can’t quit egging him on. The water is like cold silk when you first get in. Elizabeth and I float ourselves around on air mattresses until we see a water snake swimming directly toward us with its head stuck up like a periscope. We take off for the beach and sun ourselves on an outcropping of rock. Somewhere in the vicinity, Wally is tapping the keg while others are running speaker wire. Eventually music comes forth and beer makes its way over to where we are. Guys start catapulting themselves into the water. I get special treatment because it’s my birthday. People keep calling me over to their cars and vans. “Here,” they say generously. “Do some of this.” In an effort to stay awake for my birthday, I decline almost everything. I’m a famous lightweight; even beer in the afternoon makes me sleepy. I stretch out on my rock and let the sun bake me while the others swim and get wasted. Elizabeth keeps up a running monologue next to me which I can tune in and tune out at will. Wally comes over to shake water on us from time to time; we bat him away like an insect. Sometime during the early evening he produces three pills, one for each of us. “What are these?” I ask him. He looks at one of the pills closely, turning it over in his hand. “’Lilly,’” he reads. “They’re lilies, that’s what. Red ones.” Down the hatch. Within an hour I’m singing a medley of Beatles tunes to anyone who will listen. My legs are not working correctly. “Hey, Jude,” I say to the guy sitting next to me. His name is Tom. “Did you have any of those red lilies?” He doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Elizabeth is nowhere in sight but I can see Wally off in the distance, slapping his leg and laughing silently and hysterically. He squints over in my direction and motions me to come hither. I point to my legs and shake my head. We give each other the peace sign. There’s a fire going, and some people are roasting things over it. I hear my name being called. “Liz is looking for you,” Tom tells me. He stands, stretches, and heads for the beer. She comes tripping up, still in her swimming suit, with a man’s workshirt over it. “Let’s take a walk,” she says. She’s listing slightly to the right, but other than that, doing okay. “I can’t stand up,” I tell her.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  6 Lecture 1: Stories and Storytellers Movement, storytelling either tried to evaporate the narrator out of the work altogether or tried to embed the narrator inside the story. Realism had a profound impact on the literature of non-Western cultures and is still the most popular mode for ¿ ction across the world. The fourth part of this course will deal with a century of experimentation in stories and storytelling. Prompted by the erosion of foundations of belief and a radical subjectivity, writers created new techniques—such as broken chronology, interior monologue, and stream of consciousness—to try to capture in their stories a sense of life as it is experienced, not as it is reported. The Postmodernist Movement used the relationship between art and life as its subject and theme. We will use literary examples from various countries to illustrate the international impact of Modernist and Postmodernist literature. We will also see how literary techniques from one era get played out in another.Two terms will be central to this course: literature and history. It is important that we take time here to de ¿ ne them as they will be used in this course. By literature we mean primarily poems, plays, short stories, and novels, with occasional excursions into what we might call “philosophy” or “religion.” By history we mean an effort to see the storytellers of the world as an international community across time and space, in which individual members learn from each other, are in À uenced by each other, and rewrite each others’ stories. We will try to read individual works as living pieces, which still have much to say to us. We will also see each work as a separate current that eventually À ows together with others to make up an ocean of stories. This lecture concludes with a warning about possible side effects of a course like this one. Reading books can be addictive, become all-consuming, and disrupt our ordinary routines—costs which most of us gladly incur for the pleasures of a good story. Ŷ What we think we know, we can de¿ ne. What we aren’t sure that we know, we put into stories. 7 Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 1. Can you think of any American books that attempt to de ¿ ne American culture and national identity and try to describe what it means to be “American”? If so, which ones, and what do they say about us? 2. When you read a story written long ago, are you usually more interested in what the story tells us about the people for whom it was written, or in the ways the story still addresses our contemporary concerns? Do you think that the two ways of reading are compatible with each other? Questions to Consider Essential Reading

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  “That’s a little extreme, but yeah. I became different with her, more cautious, not as free. I guess it stopped me from being aggressive or passionate or desiring her in that way—really giving myself to her, or taking her, when normally that’s how we were together. It was definitely a shift.” “Couldn’t do that to the mother of your children?” I ask. “Apparently not,” he answers. “Let’s talk about this whole Madonna/whore business,” I continue. “It has deep psychological roots. A lot of men find it difficult to eroticize the mother of their children. It feels too regressive, too incestuous, too oedipal. What you need to remember is that she’s their mom, not yours. At this point, I recommend anything that can introduce a little healthy objectification. Anything that might distinguish her from ‘the mother.’” Carla had been quiet for much of the session, but the following week I had no doubt she’d been paying attention. Laughing, she told me the story. “I really wanted to let go with Leo. I wanted to give him an involved, prolonged, great blow job. Not just the compulsory head, not just the polite head. But I knew there was this thing with the wife, ‘the mother.’ Would he let me? So I initiated this game and said, ‘You know, we can have a couple of different kinds of sex and you can call it what you will, but if you want this blow job to continue it’s going to cost you.’ I said, ‘A hundred bucks if you want that kind of head. A hundred bucks.’ I thought the money would be fun, but I was really into seeing if Leo could de-role that mother. Well, you don’t pay the mother of your kids for a blow job, do you? You don’t pay your wife for a blow job. It was a lovely experiment, that’s all I’m going to say.” “Maybe you could start taking credit cards. Keep a credit card machine by the bed,” Leo jokes. Carla’s playful erotic intervention has stayed with me for years. In one gesture she cleverly captured and subverted the whole issue: how to retrieve the lover from the mother. Leo feared expressing the rawness of his desire to the mother of his children, a woman too worthy of love and respect. Carla took a risk, interrupted the pattern, and invited him into an erotic complicity. She uncloaked the repression and became a sexually provocative, slutty woman who demanded to be paid. In the midst of this explicitly staged endorsement of blatant sexuality, Leo’s lustfulness was finally unleashed. Escaping the Siege of Family Life

• From Cleanness (2020)

  E, kopele , N. said, bastard, slow down, why are you rushing, and Z. turned and smiled, still walking, moving backward along the street. We don’t want to be late, we’ll miss the show, he said. He made a motion with his hips, a little Turkish shimmy, before he turned back around. The club was a short walk away, on Tsar Osvoboditel, part of a complex that housed one of the city’s most luxurious hotels. We showed our lichni karti to the two men stationed at the door, their torsos obscene with muscle, and then descended a long carpeted staircase that was lit dimly by red lights set high along the walls. There were mirrors mounted every few feet, and I found myself stealing glances as we passed, seeing how incongruous a group we made, wondering what people would make of my presence with these men so much younger than I, still boys really. The music got louder as we approached the glass doors separating the corridor from the club proper, and it overwhelmed me as Z. pulled them open and we stepped through into a cavernous, dark room strafed by lights that spun somewhere above us. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke, abrasive as sand, despite the new law that had passed months before; I could see it hanging beneath the only steady illumination, above the bar in the center of the room, where four men in identical black suits were mixing drinks. We made our way single file through the crowded space, toward the corner farthest from the entrance, where there were a few unclaimed tables, small and chest-high, each with an ashtray and an unopened bottle of gin. Nearer the bar people stood with bottles and glasses, moving their shoulders and hips, dancing in place. There wasn’t a dance floor, though what else could be the point of the place; the music was so loud it was almost impossible to talk, after only a minute of it my ears ached. A young woman walked over to us, holding a tray above her head as she angled her way through the crowd. She wore a white blouse several sizes too small, exposing her navel and buttoned just barely above her breasts, which she allowed to touch Z., casually erotic, as she leaned over and brought her face to his. She shouted something into his ear as she placed three glasses and a small bucket of ice on the table. He reciprocated her gesture, putting an arm around her shoulder, and N. and I looked at each other and laughed. Z. was always theatrical with women, a cartoon Lothario at sixteen who had grown into real seduction; it was like he breathed sex as he exchanged comments with the server, they could almost have been kissing as they moved mouth to ear.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Through Little Bawang, who had forced more and more confessions from teachers, Fangpu learned that Secretary Ding had had affairs with at least two female teachers, revealing his audacious hypocrisy. He was the one continually ranting against Western decadence and was always admonishing the male and female students at Yizhen to keep their distance from each other. Bawang and Fangpu ransacked his office and found that he had been hoarding food coupons and possessed a fancy radio and bottles of nice wine, all hidden away. Now posters attacking Ding filled the walls. Even Jianhua felt indignant at his behavior. Soon Ding Yi was paraded through school and then through the town of Yizhen, on his head the most enormous dunce cap, decorated with drawings of monsters, and a very heavy drum hung around his neck. As he drummed with one hand while holding the cap with the other, he had to chant, “I am Ding Yi, ox demon and snake spirit.” Citizens of Yizhen, who knew Secretary Ding, gaped at the spectacle. The world had indeed been turned upside down. By the middle of the summer, most of the teachers had fled. When it came time to form the committee to run the school, only a few remained to serve as chairman of the committee, and with Fangpu as the student leader, a little-known and rather harmless teacher named Deng Zeng was named chairman. Now the work team left YMS, and Deng and the committee were in charge. And as the students progressed in making revolution, Jianhua began to feel increasingly excited. He and his friend Zongwei carried old spears and swords as they patrolled the school looking for spies, and it was just like in the novels he loved to read. He and the other students marched in columns into town, waving enormous red flags, carrying large posters of Chairman Mao and copies of his little red book, chanting slogans, banging on drums, and crashing cymbals. It was so dramatic, and it felt like they were indeed participating in revolution. One day, they marched through Yizhen tearing down store and street signs that were vestiges of prerevolutionary China. Mao would be proud of them. In Beijing, some students had formed groups to support and defend Mao in his Cultural Revolution; they called themselves Red Guards, and their members wore bright red armbands. Mao gave his personal approval to this, and now Red Guard units began to appear in schools and universities around the country.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  very heavy drum hung around his neck. As he drummed with one hand while holding the cap with the other, he had to chant, “I am Ding Yi, ox demon and snake spirit.” Citizens of Yizhen, who knew Secretary Ding, gaped at the spectacle. The world had indeed been turned upside down. By the middle of the summer, most of the teachers had fled. When it came time to form the committee to run the school, only a few remained to serve as chairman of the committee, and with Fangpu as the student leader, a little-known and rather harmless teacher named Deng Zeng was named chairman. Now the work team left YMS, and Deng and the committee were in charge. And as the students progressed in making revolution, Jianhua began to feel increasingly excited. He and his friend Zongwei carried old spears and swords as they patrolled the school looking for spies, and it was just like in the novels he loved to read. He and the other students marched in columns into town, waving enormous red flags, carrying large posters of Chairman Mao and copies of his little red book, chanting slogans, banging on drums, and crashing cymbals. It was so dramatic, and it felt like they were indeed participating in revolution. One day, they marched through Yizhen tearing down store and street signs that were vestiges of prerevolutionary China. Mao would be proud of them. In Beijing, some students had formed groups to support and defend Mao in his Cultural Revolution; they called themselves Red Guards, and their members wore bright red armbands. Mao gave his personal approval to this, and now Red Guard units began to appear in schools and universities around the country. Only the purest and most fervent revolutionaries could be admitted to the Red Guards, and competition was fierce to join their ranks. Because of his father’s illustrious past, Jianhua became a member of the Red Guards, and now he basked in the admiring glances of fellow students and local citizens who noticed the bright red armband that never left him. There was one wrinkle, however, in these exciting events: On a visit home to see his family in the nearby town of Lingzhi, Jianhua discovered that local students had accused his father of being a revisionist. He cared more about farming and economics than about making revolution, said the students. They had gotten him dismissed from his government position; he had had to suffer through various struggle meetings in the jet-plane position. The family was in disgrace. Although he loved and admired his father and worried for him, he could not help but feel anxious that, if news of this disgrace reached his school, he might lose his red armband and be ostracized. He would have to be careful when talking about his family. When he returned to school several weeks later, he noticed some radical changes that had already occurred: Fangpu had consolidated

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  I’ve been reading and studying and exploring and rereading and rethinking and giving sermons from the Bible for twenty-five years, and I find it more compelling and mysterious and interesting and dangerous and convicting and helpful and strange and personal and inspiring and divine and enjoyable than ever. So you can relax—there’s a good chance you’re going to enjoy this. And you may even find yourself thinking, How did I miss this? Part 1 There’s Something More Going On Here1 Moses and His MoistureIn the book of Deuteronomy chapter 34, we read that Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died, yet his eyes were not weak nor his strength gone. A fairly straightforward verse, correct? Moses was old . . . and then he died. What else is there to say? Actually, quite a bit. Read the last half of that sentence again: yet his eyes were not weak nor his strength gone. Notice anything unusual? How about that phrase nor his strength gone? Moses has just died, correct? Dying, as a general rule, is what happens when your strength has gone. So why does the writer want us to know that Moses died but his strength hadn’t gone? A bit about the word strength here. The Hebrew scriptures were originally written in Hebrew, and in Hebrew the word translated strength here is the word leho. Leho literally means moisture or freshness. He died, but his moisture hadn’t left him? He passed on but still had his freshness? One translation reads nor had his natural force abated while another reads he still had his vigor while the JPS Torah Commentary notes that Ibn Ezra understood the verse to mean that Moses had not become wrinkled. (Please tell me you’re smiling by this point.) Moisture? Natural force hadn’t abated? He hadn’t become wrinkled? What does the writer want us to know about Moses? This phrase with the word leho here, just to make sure we’re all clear, is a euphemism for sexual potency. That’s what the storyteller here wants us to know about Moses at the time of his death. That’s right, friends, Moses, the great leader of the Hebrews, the liberator who led his people out of slavery, the hero who defied Pharaoh, the one who climbed Mount Sinai to meet with God, the towering figure of the Hebrew scriptures, when he died, he could still get it up. Just so you know. Which of course raises the question, Why? Why does the writer want the reader to know this? To answer that question, you have to go back, much earlier in the history of Moses’s people, to a man named Abraham. Abraham had many sons, and many sons had Father Abraham, and Moses was one of them.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Everything was as it should be, the set of my scarf, the alignment of my belt buckle, the angle of my cap, the drape of my two sashes. One was the Order of the Arrow sash, a red arrow on a brilliant white background. The other was my merit-badge sash. It was thick with proofs of competence. At camp that summer, with little else to do, I had worked myself into a delirium of badge-grubbing. I was a Life Scout now, with only one merit badge to go for Eagle. That badge was Citizenship in the Nation. I had already fulfilled the numerous requirements for it, including attendance at a jury trial to observe the rule of law, but Dwight refused to send in my papers. He wouldn’t explain why, except to say I didn’t deserve to be an Eagle. It was an issue between us. I shouldered my bag and left the diner. BETWEEN MY FLIGHT from the drugstore and my return, no more than fifteen minutes had gone by. An empty police car was parked outside the store with its light blinking. Calmly, eyes front and center, I walked past and up the street to the hotel where the banquet was to take place. Though an hour remained until chow time the lobby was already full of Scouts in OA sashes, preening themselves and looking each other over. I checked my bag and said hello to some acquaintances from other troops. One of them was in charge of setting up chairs. He asked me to help him out, and when that job was done he posted me at the door with a couple of other boys to greet the guests as they arrived. The three of us sparked each other. By the time people began filing past our table we were laying down a steady line of scintillant repartee. Between gags I checked off names on the invitation list, the second boy wrote them down on adhesive nameplates, and the third escorted the guests to their tables. Then she was there, in line behind an old couple. I looked up and saw her watching me. The room bucked but I kept my balance. I didn’t even blink. I checked off the old couple’s name, and made a friendly joke they laughed at. And then I turned to her. I gave her a welcoming smile and said, “Name, ma’am?” She stepped up to the table and stood there thoughtfully, holding her pocketbook in front of her with both hands. She still had on the white sweater and plaid skirt she’d been wearing in the store. I felt no fear, nor any surprise after the first shock had passed. I knew she hadn’t followed me here. Of course she would have a boy in the Scouts, and of course he would belong to OA.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  As part of this experiment we must not only accept human nature but work with what we have to make it productive. We inevitably feel the need for status and recognition, so let’s not deny it. Instead, let’s cultivate such status and recognition through our excellent work. We must accept our need to belong to the group and prove our loyalty, but let’s do it in more positive ways—by questioning group decisions that will harm it in the long run, by supplying divergent opinions, by steering the group in a more rational direction, gently and strategically. Let’s use the viral nature of emotions in the group but play on a different set of emotions: by staying calm and patient, by focusing on results and cooperating with others to get practical things done, we can begin to spread this spirit throughout the group. And by slowly mastering the primitive part of our character within the heated environment of the group, we can emerge as individuals who are truly independent and rational—the end point of our experiment. When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. —Eric Hoffer Keys to Human Nature At certain moments in life, we humans may experience an energy that is powerful, with sensations unlike any other, but this energy is something we rarely discuss or analyze. We can describe it as an intense feeling of belonging to a group, and we often experience it in the following situations. Let us say we find ourselves in a large audience for a concert, sporting event, or political rally. At a certain point, waves of excitement, anger, or joy move through us, shared by thousands of others. These emotions rise in us automatically. We cannot experience this when alone or with just a few people. In this larger group setting, we might be led to say or do things we would never have said or done on our own. In a similar vein, perhaps we have to give a talk before a group. If we are not too nervous and the crowd is on our side, we experience a swelling of emotion from deep within. We’re feeding off the audience. Our voice changes to a pitch and tone we never have in daily life; our gestures and body language become unusually animated. We might also experience this from the other side, when we listen to a charismatic speaker. That person seems to be invested with some sort of special force that commands our respect and fills us with increasing excitement. Or perhaps we find ourselves working in a group with a critical goal to reach within a short time frame.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  play on a different set of emotions: by staying calm and patient, by focusing on results and cooperating with others to get practical things done, we can begin to spread this spirit throughout the group. And by slowly mastering the primitive part of our character within the heated environment of the group, we can emerge as individuals who are truly independent and rational—the end point of our experiment. When people are free to do as they please, they usual y imitate each other. —Eric Hoffer Keys to Human Nature At certain moments in life, we humans may experience an energy that is powerful, with sensations unlike any other, but this energy is something we rarely discuss or analyze. We can describe it as an intense feeling of belonging to a group, and we often experience it in the following situations. Let us say we find ourselves in a large audience for a concert, sporting event, or political rally. At a certain point, waves of excitement, anger, or joy move through us, shared by thousands of others. These emotions rise in us automatically. We cannot experience this when alone or with just a few people. In this larger group setting, we might be led to say or do things we would never have said or done on our own. In a similar vein, perhaps we have to give a talk before a group. If we are not too nervous and the crowd is on our side, we experience a swelling of emotion from deep within. We’re feeding off the audience. Our voice changes to a pitch and tone we never have in daily life; our gestures and body language become unusually animated. We might also experience this from the other side, when we listen to a charismatic speaker. That person seems to be invested with some sort of special force that commands our respect and fills us with increasing excitement. Or perhaps we find ourselves working in a group with a critical goal to reach within a short time frame. We feel compelled to do more than we normally can, to work extra hard. We feel a charge of energy that comes from feeling connected to others who are working with the same urgent spirit. A point is reached at which members of the group do not even have to talk—we’re all on the same page and can even anticipate the thoughts of our colleagues. The above feelings are not registered rationally; they come to us in automatic bodily sensations—goose bumps, racing heartbeat, extra vitality and power. Let us call us this energy the social force , a type of invisible force field that affects and binds a group of people through shared sensations and creates an intense feeling of connection. If we confront this force field as outsiders, it tends to induce anxiety. For instance, we find ourselves traveling to a place with a culture very different from our own. Or we begin a job at a workplace