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 Between the World and Me (2015)

  These truths I heard in the works of other poets around the city. They were made of small hard things—aunts and uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking from mason jars. These truths carried the black body beyond slogans and gave it color and texture and thus reflected the spectrum I saw out on the Yard more than all of my alliterative talk of guns or revolutions or paeans to the lost dynasties of African antiquity. After these readings, I followed as the poets would stand out on U Street or repair to a café and argue about everything—books, politics, boxing. And their arguments reinforced the discordant tradition I’d found in Moorland, and I began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as a kind of power. I was learning to live in the disquiet I felt in Moorland-Spingarn, in the mess of my mind. The gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon. It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this. Back then, I knew, for instance, that just outside of Washington, D.C., there was a great enclave of black people who seemed, as much as anyone, to have seized control of their bodies. This enclave was Prince George’s County—“PG County” to the locals—and it was, to my eyes, very rich. Its residents had the same homes, with the same backyards, with the same bathrooms, I’d seen in those televised dispatches. They were black people who elected their own politicians, but these politicians, I learned, superintended a police force as vicious as any in America. I had heard stories about PG County from the same poets who opened my world. These poets assured me that the PG County police were not police at all but privateers, gangsters, gunmen, plunderers operating under the color of law. They told me this because they wanted to protect my body. But there was another lesson here: To be black and beautiful was not a matter for gloating. Being black did not immunize us from history’s logic or the lure of the Dream. The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Chrissie, you ready, Snake-Charmin’ Woman?” Chris uncoiled the bullwhip and playfully snapped the end of it at Joyous Day’s feet. “Willing and able,” she replied. “Just waiting for you to get your jollies so I can get down to some serious sadism.” “White Devil Girl, you think you know serious sadism, you ought to let me do you up in my transcendental clamps sometime. Those clothespins are nothing, honey, they are strictly Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour. I got devices that would have you screaming for mercy in no time. Get you talking to the stars and walkin’ on the moon.” Chris laughed. “Oh, I’m sure you do. Didn’t mean to cast aspersions on your technique. Listen, I’m such a chickenshit, I have to be a top.” Joy nodded, laughed, and took a hit of beer. She handed the bottle back to Alex and walked over to Roxanne. “Hello, stranger,” she said. Roxanne raised her head, smiled a little, and softly said, “Hello.” Once more, Joy handled the pins as if they were the keys of some bizarre musical instrument. Roxanne cried out. Her head fell forward. “I can’t take much more of this,” she warned. “Oh, I think you can,” Joy replied. “I think you got no choice, workin’ girl. We got to get a little music out of you now. You are a dancer. Surely you got music in your soul.” Roxanne cursed her. Joy hit her across the face. The slaps echoed in the black chamber. Finally she gave her the “music” she wanted. The high-pitched screams brought the pack running to witness her pain. “No more,” Roxanne gasped. “Please. I’m sorry, I won’t talk back to you. Please. No more.” “That’s a better attitude,” Joy said. “Do you much better, considerin’ your true situation.” She tweaked at one or two of the clips. “So you want these off, I hear?” Roxanne nodded, eyes closed tightly, her teeth gritted. Joy put her lips close to her ear. While she talked, she touched the clips around Roxanne’s face. They were only gentle taps, punctuating the speech she made. “Roxie, listen here to me. You already have a lotta knowledge. I’m seein’ that you sat in school long enough to know they wasn’t going to tell you what you needed to survive. What is in books is ver’ precious, but you cannot write down everything that you discover. There is all sorts of knowledge. The whole world speaks to us, constantly, but we mus’ listen, not look with the eye that reads, but listen. You and I be not alone, the wise and powerful walk among us, the elder of days, an’ if they want you to know their names, they ain’t gonna write it down. They whisper it in your ear. An’ they say, follow me. Follow me to freedom. “Walk after me.” The clothespin at the top of Roxanne’s left ear was removed. “The flesh itself cannot hold you.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  “Lemme see one of those things, please,” Kay said to Anne-Marie. “No one ever died of pain alone,” Anne-Marie said briskly, handing her a length of rattan with a leather-wrapped handle. “But a good many people have died, or otherwise wasted their lives, because they lacked the discipline that pain alone can inculcate in a stubborn heart. It’s all in the wrist, dear.” Kay hit the padded top of the leather horse. “The idea is to aim for the surface beneath the buttocks, rather than the bottom itself,” Anne-Marie counseled. “Thighs are better, though. They don’t bounce as much, so the cane both crushes and burns. An edifying combination.” “Salutary, even,” Tyre confirmed, putting her own cane back on the rack. “If you mean it hurts like merry hell, I believe you,” Kay said, returning the implement to Anne-Marie. “Yes, but it’s an educational pain. Tidy, controlled, and very directed. The opposite of brutality.” “Oh, bullshit,” Tyre said. “Tell it to the British navy.” “But sailors were never caned,” Anne-Marie protested. “Military flogging and keel-hauling are usually excessive for the schooling of young ladies.” “Keel-hauling?” Kay said. “Now you’re talkin’ something that might bash some sense into EZ’s thick skull. If she survived to remember the lesson.” They all laughed, then turned as the door of the dungeon creaked and gaped wide. EZ, Joy, and Michael (who was, indeed, in Marine Corps dress blues) came in, staggering a little under the weight of a long, leather bag bound with straps and buckles. Alex brought up the rear. Her eyes never left Roxanne’s mummified form. Tyre pulled a robe down from a ceiling pulley and opened the panic snap at the end of it. She gestured for them to bring Roxanne to her, and unzipped the bottom of the bag. Two manacled feet in spike-heeled shoes were revealed. Alex unbuckled a strap that went around the outside of the body-bag at mid-calf height, and the three other women put Roxanne on her feet. After unbuckling the thigh strap, they continued unzipping the bag, up both sides. As soon as the chained wrists were revealed, tucked into the small of the girl’s back, Tyre stopped them and fastened the panic snap midpoint between Roxanne’s wrists. Alex unbuckled the strap that went around the upper arms outside the bag, and EZ and Joy finished unzipping and removing it. Michael rolled it up and stowed it behind the bar.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  Suddenly Sonoko stopped to retie a shoelace. She seemed to be taking a curiously long time about it, so I walked on to the gate and waited, looking out at the street. I did not yet realize that she had wanted me to walk on a little ahead of her and had employed this charming technique of an eighteen-year-old girl for just that purpose. Suddenly, from behind me, her hand plucked at the sleeve of my uniform. The shock I felt was like being hit by an automobile while walking along absentmindedly. ".. . Please . . . this . ." The corner of a stiff foreign-style envelope touched my palm. I closed my hand upon it so quickly that I all but crushed it, just as one might strangle a baby bird. Somehow I could not believe my senses as I felt the weight of the envelope in my hand. But there it was, an envelope of the kind favored by schoolgirls, held tightly in my own hand; I blinked at it as though it were something a person ought not to look at. "Not now—read it after you're home," she whispered in a voice that was small and choking, as though she had been tickled. "Where shall I send a reply?" I asked. "I wrote it—it's inside—the address in N Village. Write me there?'It is an amusing thing, but suddenly, parting became a delight for me. It was like the pleasure of that moment in a game of hide-and-seek when the person who is "it" counts and everyone runs to hide, each in the direction that pleases him. I had an odd ability to enjoy everything in this way. Because of this perverse talent my cowardice was often mistaken, even in my own eyes, for courage. We parted at the ticket gate of the station, not even shaking hands. I was in ecstasy over having received the first love letter of my life. I could not wait until I was home to read it, and I opened the envelope there in the elevated car, heedless of all eyes. As I did so the contents all but spilled out. There were several silhouette-cards and a sheaf of those imported colored postcards that seem to be the delight of mission-school students. Among them was a doublefold of blue notepaper, decorated with a Disney cartoon of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. Under the cartoon her note was written in neat characters that smacked of painstaking penmanship: "I was truly overwhelmed with gratitude for your kindness in lending me the books. Thanks to you, I have been able to read them with very profound interest. I pray with all my heart that you will be well even during the air raids.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  One afternoon your mother and I took you to visit a preschool. Our host took us down to a large gym filled with a bubbling ethnic stew of New York children. The children were running, jumping, and tumbling. You took one look at them, tore away from us, and ran right into the scrum. You have never been afraid of people, of rejection, and I have always admired you for this and always been afraid for you because of this. I watched you leap and laugh with these children you barely knew, and the wall rose in me and I felt I should grab you by the arm, pull you back and say, “We don’t know these folks! Be cool!” I did not do this. I was growing, and if I could not name my anguish precisely I still knew that there was nothing noble in it. But now I understand the gravity of what I was proposing—that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you submit to a loss of time. And now when I measure this fear against the boldness that the masters of the galaxy imparted to their own children, I am ashamed. — New York was another spectrum unto itself, and the great diversity I’d seen at Howard, solely among black people, now spread across a metropolis. Something different awaited around every corner. Here there were African drummers assembling in Union Square. Here there were dead office towers, brought to life at night by restaurants buried within that served small kegs of beer and Korean fried chicken. Here there were black girls with white boys, and black boys with Chinese-American girls, and Chinese-American girls with Dominican boys, and Dominican boys with Jamaican boys and every other imaginable combination. I would walk through the West Village, marveling at restaurants the size of living rooms, and I could see that the very smallness of these restaurants awarded the patrons a kind of erudite cool, as though they were laughing at a joke, and it would take the rest of the world a decade to catch on. Summer was unreal—whole swaths of the city became fashion shows, and the avenues were nothing but runways for the youth. There was a heat unlike anything I’d ever felt, a heat from the great buildings, compounded by the millions of people jamming themselves into subway cars, into bars, into those same tiny eateries and cafés. I had never seen so much life. And I had never imagined that such life could exist in so much variety. It was everyone’s particular Mecca, packed into one singular city.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Instead, she wound up listening to her driver describe her conquest of Sara. Tyre opened her own door, slammed it, stomped into the house, took off her clothes, laid down on the front hall carpet and masturbated, then went upstairs, changed into her leathers without bothering to take a shower first, and went out to hunt for the wolf-pack of women who would help Alex decide if Roxanne belonged to her or on the streets. Tyre didn’t hear from Alex for three weeks. Out of spite more than anything else, she instituted a once-a-week festival of gay male porn films and was surprised and disappointed when it filled up the house. “No accounting for taste,” she told Georgia, who gave her a strange look and said, “What’s good taste got to do with the price of ben-wa balls in Hong Kong, boss? You need a vacation or a new hat or something?” She thought yeah, I need something, but couldn’t quite figure out what it was until one day the phone rang just as she was about to dump out a mug of cold tea and leave the office. “Tyre? Alex.” Two words, and the edge on that voice ran up and down her spine. Old butterflies came back to life in Tyre’s stomach. “Yes?” The word came out in a whoosh. She was suddenly out of breath. “Things moved along any since I last saw you?” “Well, as a matter of fact, yes.” Tyre smiled at her reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall. She had done a good job with this, she had a right to be a little proud. “We can run that trip for you any time you like.” Alex whistled. “That was fast. Can I get a thumbnail sketch of your crew?” “I know you said you didn’t want anyone there who Roxanne knows. But Anne-Marie has asked for permission to join us. She says she would like to help give Roxanne a going-away party to remember.” “Mmm. I just thought the presence of strangers would make it much more intense. Isn’t Anne-Marie into all that frilly Victorian stuff? The evening I envisioned was more, uh, heavy metal.” “Anne-Marie’s specialty is caning. If anything, Roxanne’s prior experience with her will make her more intimidating, not less. She is also a lady, and a real lady is appropriate in any circumstances. I think she will be an asset. And she promised me she would leave her corsets at home.” “I trust your judgment. You’re the madam.” There was no hint of irony in Alex’s voice. Were they both going to pretend they had never lost their tempers with one another? Well, maybe that was the best strategy. Tyre took a deep breath and went on. “Then there’s Joyous Day, the photographer. You know her? She had a show at Quotidian Gallery last month.” “Yeah, we went to see her stuff. So she does more than take pictures of it, huh?” “Oh, yes.”

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Tyre knew that one of Michael’s favorite things was a blowjob from someone who was being worked over. She smiled and shook her head when her chauffeur, who really was an ex-Marine, climbed up on the table and forced Roxanne to lift her head and watch her unzip her fly. Michael and Anne-Marie were also old friends, and the nurse shot Tyre a look of delight. “Don’t think you got enough of this Marine Corps meat,” Michael said, and shoved it down her throat just as the first stroke of the cane landed in the crack between Roxanne’s buttock and upper thigh. Alex winced, but Roxanne held steady, her head bobbing up and down Michael’s cock, as the characteristic double-weal came up, livid on her fair skin. Anne-Marie bided her time. Tyre walked over to Michael, unbuttoned the high-necked, dark-blue tunic with narrow red piping and began working on her nipples with her sharp nails. Her cruelty was passed on to Roxanne, who found herself choking on the energetic cock in her throat, and Anne-Marie chose just that moment to strike her again. “Alex,” said Joy, putting a hand on her shoulder, “you are not used to lookin’ at this from the outside. So tell me, do you like it?” “I—” “You mus’ remember how good it make you feel to whip her yourself, I think. How good it feels in the muscles of your arm and here.” Joy put a hand between her breasts. “Your heart is poundin’ and poundin’ like a drumhead that’s gonna split. Feel yourself.” She took Alex’s hand and put it on top of her codpiece. “Come on, girl, half the women here playin’ with themselves. Check out your stuff. She gonna hit her soon again I think—yes. You feel your clit jump? Oh, yeah, this is good for you and for her. She like it so much, Alex, see how still she hold herself out of pride for you? That’s a beautiful ass she got. I mus’ say I want another handful of that girl of yours all t’myself.” Joy chuckled and mock-punched Alex on the point of her chin. “You seriously twisted girl, I like that ver’ much, just don’t try to straighten out now, or you break.” Kay was hauling EZ, who had gone AWOL to the bar, back into the circle by her ear. “You got eight hours of music set up at the very least,” she said. “We don’t need you providin’ a sound track for the rest of the fucking decade. Now park your butt here and watch this action with me or go play on the freeway.” She smacked her ass, then slid her hand into EZ’s back pocket. “I thought you said girls just played around with this shit. So far I’m in no danger of fallin’ asleep. Whyncha just admit you don’t know what the fuck you were talkin’ about? Or do you maybe like boys better’n girls after all, dipshit?” “Kiss my ass,” EZ hissed.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Shall I bring it out a little more? So we can tell?” She twisted the nipple a quarter-turn, crushed it. Alex grinned at her and judiciously applied exactly the same amount of pressure to the teat she held, then twisted it past that point. “Gonna tell me you don’t sweat, you glow?” she asked Tyre. “Looks like sweat to me. Looks good on you, like maybe you’re working hard for a change.” “I don’t mind working hard, and I don’t think you mind my being hard on you. You like this,” Tyre accused her, getting a grip on the other nipple and stretching them both out, until Alex saw tiny white stars. “I like this ,” Alex affirmed, and returned the hurt worse, until their hips slid past each other and their thighs interlocked, the long bone of the leg and the muscle over it pressed into the other woman’s mound, pushing the sensitive, swollen tissue back down until it flattened against the pubic bone. Hard and soft, hard and soft, their hands played on each other’s bodies, and they rocked in each other’s arms, seeking advantage, grappling. It was a kind of wrestling with no attempt to throw, but a quest for domination nonetheless. They both yelped at the same moment, but not from the pain of well-manipulated nipples. Their thighs separated momentarily, startled by the intensity of this pleasure, and its brevity. They groped for each other’s crotches. The sound of Tyre’s zipper was a long, continuous wail punctuated with a few sharp snaps as Alex’s studded crotch-piece was pulled off and dropped on the floor. “You’re wet,” Alex said. “Thirsty?” Tyre spit. “Empty, too,” Alex said, and fixed that. But Tyre had already thrust home between her legs, and they were both wet to the wrist. “You can’t keep that up,” Tyre said, fucking her, “you can’t keep it up while you—” “While I make you come? Is that what you were gonna say? Because it’s not gonna take me that long to—” “Lose it, give it up, you can’t help it—” “But I can help you, help you over the edge. Tell me you don’t want it.” Tyre’s entire free hand fell onto Alex’s breast and squeezed it, hard. “Show me how tough you are,” she hissed, “big leather stud, such a goddamn big girl, can you take it, can you?” They could not get away from each other, could barely keep on their feet. As Alex retaliated by flicking Tyre’s nipples, their mouths met and they swallowed the noise of a mutual surrender, predatory but also protective.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  I make the things you play on your itsy-bitsy obsolete tinkertoy tape machine.” “Go for it, champ.” “Yo,” EZ said sullenly. Kay smiled and shoved another can of Crisco under the electric can opener on the bar. She already had a small mountain of cans stacked up and ready for use. “I like that little swirl that’s always left on the top of the can after they fill it up,” she said, tucking a strand of blue-back hair behind her ear. “It’s the simple things in life, you know?” Tyre laughed. When she had first invited them to join in Alex’s scene, she had expected EX (who read like a lesbian to her) to jump at the offer. Instead, it was Kay who seemed eager and EZ who grumbled and held back. “Women don’t like the kind of shit we’re into,” EZ had said. “They’re just playing at it.” “So what?” Kay said. “You’re always tellin’ me I don’t know enough about how to get in your pants. Seems like a perfect opportunity for me to find out if there’s really any difference between the G-spot and a prostate gland.” “Aw, Kay, I’m gonna feel like a fuckin’ faggot.” “If you don’t feel like one now your’re dim, girl, just dim. I wanna see this. An all-girl version of the CMC Carnival. And if you don’t come with me I’m gonna leave you home all tied up with the TV turned to an empty channel.” Since Tyre had approached them and solicited their help with one of the Calyx’s fantasy scenarios, they had come back to the Calyx of Isis more often than any of the other dominatrices Tyre had enlisted. EZ alternated between eagerly helping Kay and getting underfoot until she got slapped down. Kay had acquired a following among the leather dykes, and EZ had acquired a nickname that nobody was going to say to her face unless they were ready to replace her. Kay flashed Tyre a grin as she went by juggling a stack of clean towels and cans of Crisco. “Never know when you might want some of this life-savin’ equipment right at hand,” she explained, and went around the room leaving trick-towels and grease in several strategic locations, singing, “Ur-gent, ur-gent, eee-mergency.” Tyre looked up to see Alex wiggling her eyebrows quizzically. “Shall we get poor Michael off the street before some cop asks her what’s in the body bag on the back seat?” she asked. “Absolutely.” They walked over to the bar together. While Tyre dialed the number, Alex went after another beer. “Where the fuck did you find a black refrigerator?” she wondered. “It was a hell of a lot harder than finding a sling, I can tell you that,” Tyre smiled. “Michael? We are ready. I’m going to send a couple of the thugs here outside to help drag the body in.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  “That’s right,” he said, as if he could read her mind. “I know a good cocksucker from a lousy one. So tuck your teeth in and take a deep breath, because I want to fuck your throat, honey.” He held her head still and bucked his hips, rolling the tip of his hard penis back and forth across the spot in the back of her throat that made her gag. Tears came to her eyes, her nose ran, and her mouth streamed with saliva and coughed-up mucus. Every now and then he let her up for air, but as soon as she had taken a deep breath, he seized her again, and filled her throat and pummeled it. It was deeply and perversely thrilling to be used this way, with just the right amount of cruelty. She found herself wishing she could taste his cock instead of the bland skin of the condom. And she was proud that she had made it hard, not one of the city cops in the front seat. These were dangerous thoughts, but she could not relinquish them. After a while, he let go of her, but she stayed on his dick, slowing down a little and taking it more shallowly, licking the shaft rather than simply swallowing and sucking. He let her, hissing every now and then with pleasure, until he couldn’t stand it anymore, then he grabbed both side of her head and fucked her face again, deeper and deeper until she thought she would strangle. “You’re fighting it,” he said, his dick invading her, provoking her reflexes, shaming and exciting her. “You ought to open your throat and just let it in. I can tell you love it, I can tell you want to do me real good, so just let it happen. Let me use your throat like a pussy. You don’t have to choke like that. You can breathe around it. Of course, it you want to choke—” And he held her extra tight for an especially vicious bout of sword-swallowing.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Tyre rubbed a yellowing bruise high up on her left buttock. “She poses her own models. And there’s Kay and EZ, two women who usually hang out at men’s bars. Bikers.” “Are they into women?” “They’re into each other. When they heard about this, they jumped at the chance. They haven’t met many women who dig their scene. They usually pick on cute little faggots. They get these boys totally wasted and then drag them home and make them earn their red hankies. Think Roxanne will look good in red?” There was a long silence. “Alex? You there?” “Yeah, just counting. So that makes five, with me. I really would like to round up a few more. To make it genuinely scary, you know?” “Oh, I haven’t given you the whole list yet. Do you know Chris— um, Chris what-is-it, yeah, McPherson? She plays drums for Mutilation.” “Great. Then all we need is one more top, and we’re set.” Tyre’s throat was very dry. She took a big swallow of cold tea, gagged, and blurted, “No, we don’t. There’s me.” The laughter she dreaded did not materialize. “No shit?” Alex finally said. “Does that mean you’re not pissed off at my any more?” “There’s no reason to be pissed at you, and I think maybe I owe you an apology.” “Naw. If I let you apologize you’ll be pissed for sure. I’m real glad to hear you’re going to be there. I was planning to keep on saying ‘We need one more top’ until you included yourself in.” “You cocksucker,” Tyre sputtered, laughing. “You should be so lucky. So is this why this whole thing pulled itself together so quickly, ’cause the madam wants to see my girlfriend get thrown to the lions?” “Well, to be truthful, yes. The idea of it excites me tremendously.” And it means I get to see you again, she told herself silently. “Great, great, fabulous. God, I don’t know how I would have come up with another excuse to see you again.” Damn the woman and her ingenuous honesty. But Alex was still talking. “I am so jazzed, I can barely stand still. Best news I’ve had all year. Well, okay, let’s schedule this deal. What about next Saturday? That give you enough time to round everybody up, hey?” “Well, it would be, but Mama Kali, the Denver bike club, has scheduled a run for that weekend. I don’t think you want to string Roxanne up in the middle of that crew.” “Maybe for our first anniversary. If we ever have one. So when is the space available?” Tyre checked her desk calendar. “The first weekend of next month. And after that it isn’t free again until June.” “Okay. That’s it, then.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  Experience showed that no one paid his subscription for the mere asking. It was impossible to call frequently on members outside Durban. The enthusiasm of one moment seemed to wear away the next. Even the members in Durban had to be considerably dunned before they would pay in their subscriptions. The task of collecting subscriptions lay with me. I being the secretary. And we came to a stage when I had to keep my clerk engaged all day long in the work of collection. The man got tired of the job, and I felt that, if the situation was to be improved, the subscriptions should be made payable annually and not monthly, and that too strictly in advance. So I called a meeting of the Congress. Everyone welcomed the proposal for making the subscription annual instead of monthly and for fixing the minimum at £ 3. Thus the work of collection was considerably facilitated. I had learnt at the outset not to carry on public work with borrowed money. One could rely on people’s promises in most matters except in respect of money. I had never found people quick to pay the amounts they had undertaken to subscribe, and the Natal Indians were no exception to the rule. As, therefore, no work was done unless there were funds on hand, the Natal Indian Congress has never been in debt. My co-workers evinced extraordinary enthusiasm in canvassing members. It was work which interested them and was at the same time an invaluable experience. Large numbers of people gladly came forward with cash subscriptions. Work in the distant villages of the interior was rather difficult. People did not know the nature of public work. And yet we had invitations to visit far away places, leading merchants of every place extending their hospitality. On one occasion during this tour the situation was rather difficult. We expected our host to contribute £ 6, but he refused to give anything more than £ 3. If we

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  Seven years after I saw the pictures of those doors, I received my first adult passport. I wish I had come to it sooner. I wish, when I was back in that French class, that I had connected the conjugations, verbs, and gendered nouns to something grander. I wish someone had told me what that class really was—a gate to some other blue world. I wanted to see that world myself, to see the doors and everything behind them. The day of my departure, I sat in a restaurant with your mother, who’d shown me so much. I told her, “I am afraid.” I didn’t really speak the language. I did not know the customs. I would be alone. She just listened and held my hand. And that night, I boarded a starship. The starship punched out into the dark, punched through the sky, punched out past West Baltimore, punched out past The Mecca, past New York, past any language and every spectrum known to me. My ticket took me to Geneva first. Everything happened very fast. I had to change money. I needed to find a train from the airport into the city and after that find another train to Paris. Some months earlier, I had begun a halting study of the French language. Now I was in a storm of French, drenched really, and only equipped to catch drops of the language—“who,” “euros,” “you,” “to the right.” I was still very afraid. I surveyed the railway schedule and became aware that I was one wrong ticket from Vienna, Milan, or some Alpine village that no one I knew had ever heard of. It happened right then. The realization of being far gone, the fear, the unknowable possibilities, all of it—the horror, the wonder, the joy—fused into an erotic thrill. The thrill was not wholly alien. It was close to the wave that came over me in Moorland. It was kin to the narcotic shot I’d gotten watching the people with their wineglasses spill out onto West Broadway. It was all that I’d felt looking at those Parisian doors. And at that moment I realized that those changes, with all their agony, awkwardness, and confusion, were the defining fact of my life, and for the first time I knew not only that I really was alive, that I really was studying and observing, but that I had long been alive—even back in Baltimore. I had always been alive. I was always translating.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  What time should I bring her by?” “Why don’t I send my driver, Michael, around for you at nine o’clock? Put Roxanne in a hood and manacles. If you like, I’ve got a mummy bag you can zip her into. Or you can just throw a cloak around her and stuff her into the back seat of the limo. Michael will give you enough lead time to get here on your bike. That way, Roxanne won’t know where she’s going or whether or not you are going with her. When Michael arrives, she can call me on the car phone. There’s a back entrance to the basement so we won’t have to carry her in through the main floor. The disco bunnies would pass out en masse.” “Aw, c’mon. It would be so good for them.” “Look, they have a right to their own version of a good time. Leather and vanilla don’t mix real well. I’m not very fond of 69 myself—“ “Yeah?” Alex said dryly. “Except in the context of dominance and submission, you bitch, and if I was about to come in my girlfriend’s sweet little mouth, I wouldn’t want to be interrupted by a series of harrowing screams or the sound of a belt hitting a bare butt. Look, don’t worry, this is going to be notorious, all right? The rumors are already circulating. We’re going to have to post Simba at the head of the stairs with a cattle prod to keep the voyeurs from using a battering ram on the dungeon door.” “The first weekend of next month, huh? How am I going to keep myself busy in between now and then?” “Well, I know what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to be taking each of the dominatrices on a tour of the dungeon we’ll be using, showing them how all the bondage equipment works. It wouldn’t hurt for you to get more familiar with the premises, either.” Alex’s voice went shy. “Oh. Yeah. Well, I been already. Last weekend. You, uh, you weren’t there I don’t think. So you wouldn’t know. That I was there. You know?” “Oh, ah, no, I didn’t, shit, um, know you were here. Well, god-dammit, why didn’t you tell me? I would have brought you down some champagne.” “For some reason the security guards didn’t seem to be too fond of me, and I didn’t think any of them would do me the favor of taking you a personal message.” “Oh. Of course not. Damn. Well, I guess I’ll see you for sure anyway the first weekend of—” “Next month. Yeah. Story of my life. But be still my heart, it should be a good one. Get lotsa beauty sleep.” “I promise.”

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  As a founding member of Samois, the first lesbian s/m support group, a columnist for the Advocate , and probably the best known sado-masochist in the world, Califia is known for being on the leading edge of lesbian erotica, and this book lives up to her reputation as a sex pioneer. Macho Sluts will undoubtably shock some and mesmerize others. As Califia says in her introduction, “When you are dealing with an area as permeated with ignorance and superstition as sexuality, it is more important to be honest than it is to be correct.” The eight stories in the book date from “Jessie,” 1977, to the newest, “The Spoiler,” from 1985. The latter is one of two stories which introduce male sexual actors. Califia argues well that lesbians should be able to write about and use men, gay or straight, in their erotic writing. “Jessie,” the notorious first chapter, has been a dyke j/o favorite since it first appeared in Coming to Power . The story is as hot as ever, and only adds to the unpredictability of the book as a whole. Aficionados of classic, old-fashioned B&D will swoon over “Finishing School,” an elegant tale of training, torture, and reward. The ending is a shocker: the first, but not the last, point in Macho Sluts where the reader gasps, “Oh my god, I can’t get turned on by this!” “The Calyx of Isis,” the book’s only major disappointment, is a dense story of tag-team s/m set in a mythical San Francisco women’s bathhouse. The story trots the reader through a varied s/m repertoire which leaves one exhausted rather than aroused by the end. Perhaps in smaller doses, divided into chapters, one for each set of the story’s dominatrices, “Calyx” would be a little easier to swallow. However, there is something for just about everyone: whipping, fisting, (genital and anal), piercing, heavy bondage, dyke cocksucking, and lots of sensimilla, sushi, and sake. Throughout Macho Sluts , Califia challenges dykes who write pornography, dykes who hate pornography, and everyone in between. “The Hustler” is a profoundly cynical but funny tale of a woman-dominated future in which expressions of sex are piously regulated. The outlawed individual (the Hustler) is oppressed by the “cud-chewing” (boring) majority. This is Califia’s revenge on the Dworkinite forces in the women’s movement. “The Hustler” will definitely piss off a lot of radical feminists, but then, they probably wouldn’t have gotten this far in the book anyhow. If any radical feminist were to read this far, she’d run screaming for the nearest copy of Gyn/Ecology by the time she got two pages into “The Surprise Party.” Califia lets fly with a right-on-target challenge to the idea that lesbian sexual fantasies should only have women characters. This story is not easy to read, and whatever a reader feels at the end, she will not be bored. Disgusted, maybe, turned-on, maybe—or fascinated, horrified, angry, or amused. Read this story.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  He began to read again his technical works on the coal-mining industry, he studied the Government reports, and he read with care the latest things on mining and the chemistry of coal and of shale which were written in German. Of course the most valuable discoveries were kept secret as far as possible. But once you started a sort of research in the field of coal-mining, a study of methods and means, a study of by-products and the chemical possibilities of coal, it was astounding, the ingenuity and the almost uncanny cleverness of the modern technical mind, as if really the devil himself had lent fiend's wits to the technical scientists of industry. It was far more interesting than art, than literature, poor emotional half-witted stuff, was this technical science of industry. In this field, men were like gods, or demons, inspired to discoveries, and fighting to carry them out. In this activity, men were beyond any mental age calculable. But Clifford knew that when it did come to the emotional and human life, these self-made men were of a mental age of about thirteen, feeble boys. The discrepancy was enormous and appalling. But let that be. Let man slide down to general idiocy in the emotional and "human" mind, Clifford did not care. Let all that go hang. He was interested in the technicalities of modern coal-mining, and in pulling Tevershall out of the hole. He went down to the pit day after day, he studied, he put the general manager, and the overhead manager, and the underground manager, and the engineers through a mill they had never dreamed of. Power! He felt a new sense of power flowing through him: power over all these men, over the hundreds and hundreds of colliers. He was finding out: and he was getting things into his grip. And he seemed verily to be reborn. _Now_ life came into him! He had been gradually dying, with Connie, in the isolated private life of the artist and the conscious being. Now let all that go. Let it sleep. He simply felt life rush into him out of the coal, out of the pit. The very stale air of the colliery was better than oxygen to him. It gave him a sense of power, power. He was doing something: and he was _going_ to do something. He was going to win, to win: not as he had won with his stories, mere publicity, amid a whole sapping of energy and malice. But a man's victory. At first he thought the solution lay in electricity: convert the coal into electric power. Then a new idea came. The Germans invented a new locomotive engine with a self-feeder, that did not need a fireman. And it was to be fed with a new fuel, that burnt in small quantities at a great heat, under peculiar conditions.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Perhaps it was the guided tours of the dungeons, which kept turning into auditions or dress rehearsals for Alex’s scene, which made it easy for Tyre to keep her promise. She slept very well during the interregnum. In fact, she got so used to standing around in the dungeon, wearing full leather, waiting for someone to show up, that she barely registered the fact that this was it, the big night, the main event, until Alex strode in—an immaculate black knight in her racing jacket, codpiece pants, and engineer boots—counted heads, and said, “Who the fuck is missing? What did they do, call in sick?” Kay and EZ came swaggering in right behind her. They were dressed the same way they had been when Tyre tracked them down on Folsom Street. EZ wore black-leather chaps over 501s that had faded and faded until they were nearly white. Her motorcycle jacket was off the rack, no customization, and she wore a plain white T-shirt underneath it. Her black hair was very short, spiked out, and had platinum stripes bleached into it above and just behind her ears. She was thin and butch enough to look like a young, very cute, boy-punk. This made her a perfect piece of bait for Kay to throw into the shark-bars South of Market. Kay was a little older and more feminine. The blue jeans under her chaps were a bit newer than EZ’s, a pale blue instead of white. She had put a navy-blue rinse over her long, dark hair, and it showed in certain angles of the light. She wore a lot of tooled silver rings, hippie-looking things, which she loved to take off one at a time while a prospective victim stared at her hands in dread and fascination. Her jacket was virtually identical to EZ’s, but she had tied a red bandana around her left upper arm, whereas EZ wore a chain dog collar threaded under her left epaulet. Her T-shirt was made out of black ciré, and her boots had high heels instead of a plain cowboy walking heel. She made up for that by wearing Mexican spurs with long rowels. “Sorry we’re late,” EZ snickered. “We hadda see a man about a horse.” Alex kicked the door closed behind them. Her countenance was stormy. Of course, the telephone picked that moment to ring. Tyre intercepted Alex, who was headed for Kay and EZ with her hand upraised, and dragged her over to the phone. She kept an arm around her while she talked. Alex rubbed her face and velvety scalp all over the front of Tyre’s jacket, trying to calm down.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  NATAL INDIAN CONGRESS Practice as a lawyer was and remained for me a subordinate occupation. It was necessary that I should concentrate on public work to justify my stay in Natal. The despatch of the petition regarding the disfranchising bill was not sufficient in itself. Sustained agitation was essential for making an impression on the Secretary of State for the Colonies. For this purpose it was thought necessary to bring into being a permanent organization. So I consulted Sheth Abdulla and other friends, and we all decided to have a public organization of a permanent character. To find out a name to be given to the new organization perplexed me sorely. It was not to identify itself with any particular party. The name ‘Congress’, I knew, was in bad odour with the Conservatives in England, and yet the Congress was the very life of India. I wanted to popularize it in Natal. It savoured of cowardice to hesitate to adopt the name. Therefore, with full explanation of my reasons, I recommended that the organization should be called the Natal Indian Congress, and on the 22nd May the Natal Indian Congress came into being. Dada Abdulla’s spacious room was packed to the full on that day. The Congress received the enthusiastic approval of all present. Its constitution was simple, the subscription was heavy. Only he who paid five shillings monthly could be a member. The well-to-do classes were persuaded to subscribe as much as they could. Abdulla Sheth also put the list with £ 2 per month. Two other friends also put down the same. I thought I should not stint my subscription, and put down a pound per month. This was for me beyond my means, if at all I was to pay my way. And God helped me. We thus got a considerable number of members who subscribed £ 1 per month. The number of those who put down 10s. was even larger. Besides this, there were donations which were gratefully accepted.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  They’re in a rack over the horse. Study of the classics is the best course for the improvement of young minds.” “I couldn’t agree with you more, although I come from a slightly different tradition,” Alex allowed. “An icon is an icon is an icon,” said Anne-Marie. “Your Roxanne is an archetype in her own right. Please, Tyre, what are the names of our other compatriots?” ”Hello, Alex, I’m Chris,” the next woman drawled. They enjoyed a hearty handshake. Chris didn’t have Alex’s height or bulk, but her rangy body looked hard, strong, and fast. She wore leather pants tucked into her boots. Each boot carried a throwing knife. At first it looked as if she was wearing a chest harness, until you looked closer and realized they were crossed bandoliers full of Chinese throwing stars. Alex couldn’t recall a single type of shuriken that wasn’t displayed there. Every inch of Chris’s torso, except for the traditional thin line down the middle of her chest where a kimono could fall open, was covered with tattoos. Tyre eyed the swirling water, fighting carp, Japanese chrysanthemums, and exotic goddesses with nostalgia, recalling the way the body suit ended at Chris’s buttocks, the two scalloped halves of it framing the crack between her white buns. Alex, unaware of the full extent of Chris’s tattoos, was still impressed by them, by the thirteen fish hooks she wore in her ears, and by her five-inch-long, purple Mohawk. It was enough to make one overlook the eight-foot-long bullwhip coiled in her hand. “What’s about to happen here is truly tribal, man,” she said, still shaking Alex’s hand. “I’ve been fasting for the success of your ritual. We have to bring the sun dance back into the century, or we’ll suffer spiritual extinction.” Alex was finally getting behind the sinsemilla and the beer, and started to dig what was happening. So everybody was a little loony-tunes. She herself was a grown woman who had sex in the skins of dead animals. Her intuition was that all of these women were solid. Let it rock and roll. “And this is Joyous Day,” Tyre said, giving the photographer a big hug. “If she likes you, you can call her Joy. How have you been?” “I’ve been doin’ fine, Tyre, but I’m doin’ even better now. Alex! You got a dirty mind in a healthy body, that means you’re definitely my kind of woman.” She had a Jamaican accent, a voice that made you want to keep talking. Alex grinned and took her hand. “Somebody been talking about me?” It would be hard to say which of the two, Chris or Joyous Day, was the most outrageous. Joy was an inch or so taller than Chris, and had long dreads. One of the dreads had been bleached. She also had facial cicatrices, like deep scratches from a tiger’s paw, on each cheek.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connection. But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away. Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather she could use this sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to hold herself back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend himself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the connection and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he was merely her tool. Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the war came, and they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with a young man unless he and she were verbally very near: that is unless they were profoundly interested, TALKING to one another. The amazing, the profound, the unbelievable thrill there was in passionately talking to some really clever young man by the hour, resuming day after day for months ... this they had never realised till it happened! The paradisal promise: Thou shalt have men to talk to!--had never been uttered. It was fulfilled before they knew what a promise it was. And if after the roused intimacy of these vivid and soul-enlightened discussions the sex thing became more or less inevitable, then let it. It marked the end of a chapter. It had a thrill of its own too: a queer vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion, like the last word, exciting, and very like the row of asterisks that can be put to show the end of a paragraph, and a break in the theme. When the girls came home for the summer holidays of 1913, when Hilda was twenty and Connie eighteen, their father could see plainly that they had had the love experience.