Exposure Dread

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  My classmates snickered. They pointed their fingers at me and giggled. Except for one. Gordy, the class genius. He raised his hand. “Gordy,” Dodge said, all happy and relieved and stuff. “I’m sure you can tell us the truth.” “Uh, actually,” Gordy said, “Arnold is right about petrified wood. That’s what happens.” Dodge suddenly went all pale. Yep. From blood red to snow white in about two seconds. If Gordy said it was true, then it was true. And even Dodge knew that. Mr. Dodge wasn’t even a real science teacher. That’s what happens in small schools, you know? Sometimes you don’t have enough money to hire a real science teacher. Sometimes you have an old real science teacher who retires or quits and leaves you without a replacement. And if you don’t have a real science teacher, then you pick one of the other teachers and make him the science teacher. And that’s why small-town kids sometimes don’t know the truth about petrified wood. “Well, isn’t that interesting,” the fake science teacher said. “Thank you for sharing that with us, Gordy.” Yeah, that’s right. Mr. Dodge thanked Gordy, but didn’t say another word to me. Yep, now even the teachers were treating me like an idiot. I shrank back into my chair and remembered when I used to be a human being. I remember when people used to think I was smart. I remember when people used to think my brain was useful. Damaged by water, sure. And ready to seizure at any moment. But still useful, and maybe even a little bit beautiful and sacred and magical. After class, I caught up to Gordy in the hallway. “Hey, Gordy,” I said. “Thanks.” “Thanks for what?” he said. “Thanks for sticking up for me back there. For telling Dodge the truth.” “I didn’t do it for you,” Gordy said. “I did it for science.” He walked away. I stood there and waited for the rocks to replace my bones and blood. [image "An illustration shows a brain composed of various patchwork patterns labeled ‘the brain of many colors.’" file=image_rsrc4SD.jpg] I rode the bus home that night. Well, no, I rode the bus to the end of the line, which was the reservation border. And there I waited. My dad was supposed to pick me up. But he wasn’t sure if he’d have enough gas money. Especially if he was going to stop at the rez casino and play slot machines first. I waited for thirty minutes. Exactly. Then I started walking. Getting to school was always an adventure. After school, I’d ride the bus to the end of the line and wait for my folks. If they didn’t come, I’d start walking. Hitchhiking in the opposite direction. Somebody was usually heading back home to the rez, so I’d usually catch a ride. Three times, I had to walk the whole way home. Twenty-two miles. I got blisters each time.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  And I was kind of suspicious that white people were really interested in seeing some Indians battle each other. I think it was sort of like watching dogfighting, you know? It made me feel exposed and primitive. “So, okay,” the sports guy said. “Are you ready to try again?” “Yeah.” “Okay, let’s roll.” The camera guy started filming. “So, Arnold,” the sports guy said. “Back in December, you faced your old classmates, and fellow Spokane tribal members, in a basketball game back on the reservation, and you lost. They’re now the number one–ranked team in the state and they’re coming to your home gym. How does that make you feel?” “Weird,” I said. “Cut, cut, cut, cut,” the sports guy said. He was mad now. “Arnold,” he said. “Could you maybe think of a word besides weird?” I thought for a bit. “Hey,” I said. “How about I say that it makes me feel like I’ve had to grow up really fast, too fast, and that I’ve come to realize that every single moment of my life is important. And that every choice I make is important. And that a basketball game, even a game between two small schools in the middle of nowhere, can be the difference between being happy and being miserable for the rest of my life.” “Wow,” the sports guy said. “That’s perfect. That’s poetry. Let’s go with that, okay?” “Okay,” I said. “Okay, let’s roll tape,” the sports guy said again and put the microphone in my face. “Arnold,” he said. “Tonight you’re going into battle against your former teammates and Spokane tribal members, the Wellpinit Redskins. They’re the number one–ranked team in the state and they beat you pretty handily back in December. Some people think they’re going to blow you out of the gym tonight. How does that make you feel?” “Weird,” I said. “All right, all right, that’s it,” the sports guy said. “We’re out of here.” “Did I say something wrong?” I asked. “You are a little asshole,” the sports guy said. “Wow, are you allowed to say that to me?” “I’m just telling the truth.” He had a point there. I was being a jerk. “Listen, kid,” the sports guy said. “We thought this was an important story. We thought this was a story about a kid striking out on his own, about a kid being courageous, and all you want to do is give us grief.” Wow. He was making me feel bad. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just a yucker.” “What?” the sports guy asked.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Everything is visible from a closet in my room which adjoins the one where he concludes his business; let's go there without making any noise, and above all be careful not to say a word both about what I am telling you and about what you are going to witness." It was a matter of such great importance to familiarize myself with the customs of this person who had offered me asylum, that I felt I could neglect nothing which might discover them to me; I follow hard upon Rosalie's heels, she situates me near a partition, through cracks between its ill-joined boards one can view everything going on in the neighboring room. Hardly have we taken up our post when Rodin enters, leading a fourteen-year-old girl, blond and as pretty as Love; the poor creature is sobbing away, all too unhappily aware of what awaits her; she comes in with moans and cries; she throws herself down before her implacable instructor, she entreats him to spare her, but his very inexorability fires the first sparks of the unbending Rodin's pleasure, his heart is already aglow, and his savage glances spring alive with an inner light.... "Why, no, no," he cries, "not for one minute, this happens far too frequently, Julie, I repent my forbearance and leniency, their sole result has been repeated misconduct on your part, but could the gravity of this most recent example of it possibly allow me to show clemency, even supposing I wished to? A note passed to a boy upon entering the classroom!" "Sir, I protest to you, I did not -" "Ah I but I saw it, my dear, I saw it." "Don't believe a word of it," Rosalie whispered to me, "these are trifles he invents by way of pretext; that little creature is an angel, it is because she resists him he treats her harshly." Meanwhile, Rodin, greatly aroused, had seized the little girl's hands, tied them to a ring fitted high upon a pillar standing in the middle of the punishment room. Julie is without any defense... any save the lovely face languishingly turned toward her executioner, her superb hair in disarray, and the tears which inundate the most beautiful face in the world, the sweetest... the most interesting. Rodin dwells upon the picture, is fired by it, he covers those supplicating eyes with a blindfold, approaches his mouth and dares kiss them, Julie sees nothing more, now able to proceed as he wishes, Rodin removes the veils of modesty, her blouse is unbuttoned, her stays untied, she is naked to the waist and yet further below.... What whiteness! What beauty!

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Roads rendered impassable by wrecks and New England winter. Towns burned off the map by “controlled resource denial” bombing runs in the government’s last days as Pelosi and Ivanka fought over the dying federal body, D.C. carved into a neo-feudal civil war between factions that formed and collapsed on a daily basis. She slept, and in her dreams she lay on an operating table while Indi and her father stood on either side of her. Her father was naked, and though she wanted to look away her eyes were glued to the dark, curly hair between his legs, the curve of his circumcised penis. Indi was at the foot of the table. Had she been there the whole time? People watched them from the shadows, whispering to one another. “Hold still,” said her friend, pushing her skirt up around her hips. “If we’re going to make them match, I need you to hold very, very still.” Fran woke to the smell of the ocean and the juddering rumble of the Jeep crossing a stony stream. Or, no, not a stream. The ocean lay outside her window, four or five feet from the road’s edge. A tidal channel, then, and far across the water a forested shore, the tree line broken here and there by neat little white houses now falling into the sea. “Where are we?” “Portsmouth,” said Robbie. “We’re out on the north hook of New Castle Island. That’s Maine across the Piscataqua.” A concrete fort built back into the rough, rocky slope of the coast stood behind a mossy, birdshit-spattered brick wall, its rectangular bulk interrupted by a pair of raised semicircular platforms and a narrow observation roost with only a single slit, facing the sea, for visibility. The twisted skulls of men hung from poles set to either side of the drive. It looked straight out of Saving Private Ryan . Probably it was from World War II. Beyond it, the spit of land stretched from the main body of the island to a chain-link fence and, past that, a few wrecked sheds and outbuildings and a stretch of crumbling wall. At the end of the point stood a lighthouse, whitewash salt-eaten, widow’s walk rusted and sagging on one side where a support strut had come loose or rusted through. Beth and a few other girls were waiting in a cleared gravel yard not far from the water. Seabirds soared on the rising thermals and dove like falling lawn darts down into the waves. Teach led Ramona along the pier past a crew of city women loading barrels onto a flat-bottomed barge. “Siphoned diesel,” she explained. “We agitate it to see what’s still viable, then strain out settled detritus. Amazing how much fuel you can dig out of a few square miles of suburban wasteland. Land Rovers. Jaguars.

• From The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  a different light. To repeat: On strictly methodological grounds it will be possible for the theologian to dismiss this new perspective as irrelevant to his opus proprium. This will become much more difficult, however, as soon as he reflects that, after all, he was not born as a theologian, that he existed as a person in a particular socio-historical situation before he ever began to do theology—in sum, that he himself, if not his theology, is illuminated by the lighting apparatus of the sociologist. At this point he may suddenly find himself ejected from the methodological sanctuary of his theologizing and find himself repeating, albeit in a very different sense, Augustine’s complaint that “Factum eram ipse mihi magna quaestio,” He is likely to find further that, unless he can somehow neutralize this disturbing perspective in his own mind, that it will be relevant to his theologizing as well. Put simply, methodologically, in terms of theology as a disembodied universe of discourse, sociology may be looked on as quite “harmless”—existentially, in terms of the theologian as a living person with a social location and a social biography, sociology can be a very dangerous business indeed. The magna quaestio of sociology is formally very similar to that of history: How, in a world of socio-historical relativity, can one arrive at an “Archimedean point” from which to make cognitively valid statements about religious matters? In terms of sociological theory there are certain variants to this question: If all religious propositions are, at least, also projections grounded in specific infrastructures, how is one to distinguish between those infrastructures that give birth to truth from those that give birth to error? And if all religious plausibility is susceptible to “social engineering,” how can one be sure that those religious propositions (or, for that matter, “religious experiences”) that are plausible to oneself are not 209

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Imagine, Madame, a circular cavern, twenty-five feet in diameter, whose walls, hung in black, were decorated by none but the most lugubrious objects, skeletons of all sizes, crossed bones, several heads, bundles of whips and collecti cutlasses, poignards, firearms: such were the horrors one spied on the walls illuminated by a three-wicked oil lamp suspended in one corner of the vault; from a transverse beam dangled a rope which fell to within eight or ten feet of the ground in the center of this dungeon and which, as very soon you will see, was there for no other purpose than to facilitate dreadful expeditions: to the right was an open coffin wherein glinted an effigy of death brandishing a threatful scythe; a prayer stool was beside it; above it was visible a crucifix bracketed by candles of jet; to the left, the waxen dummy of a naked woman, so lifelike I was for a long time deceived by it; she was attached to a cross, posed with her chest facing it so that one had a full view of her posterior and cruelly molested parts; blood seemed to ooze from several wounds and to flow down her thighs; she had the most beautiful hair in all the world, her lovely head was turned toward us and plainly wrought upon her lovely face, and there were even tears flowing down her cheeks: the sight of this terrible image was again enough to make me think I would collapse; the further part of the cavern was filled by a vast black divan which eloquently bespoke all the atrocities which occurred in this infernal place. "And here is where you will perish, Therese," quoth Roland, "if ever you conceive the fatal notion of leaving my establishment; yes, it is here I will myself put you to death, here I will make you reverberate to the anguishes inflicted by everything of the most appalling I can possibly devise." As he gave vent to this threat Roland became aroused; his agitation, his disorder made him resemble a tiger about to spring upon its prey: 'twas then he brought to light the formidable member wherewith he was outfitted; he had me touch it, asked me whether I had ever beheld its peer. "Such as you see has, however, got to be introduced into the narrowest part of your body even if I must split you in half; my sister, considerably your junior, manages it in the same sector; never do I enjoy women in any other fashion," and so as to leave me in no doubt of the locale he had in mind, he inserted into it three fingers armed with exceedingly long nails, the while saying: "Yes, 'tis there, Therese, it will be shortly into this hole I will drive this member which affrights you; it will be run every inch of the way in, it will tear you, you'll bleed and I will be beside myself."

• From The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  longer possible, and in which social world and socialized self confront the individual as inexorable facticities analogous to the facticities of nature. The latter process may be called alienation (5). Put differently, alienation is the process whereby the dialectical relationship between the individual and his world is lost to consciousness. The individual “forgets” that this world was and continues to be co-produced by him. Alienated consciousness is undialectical consciousness. The essential difference between the socio-cultural world and the world of nature is obscured—namely, the difference that men have made the first, but not the second (6). Inasmuch as alienated consciousness is based on this fallacy, it is a false consciousness (7). Put differently again, alienation is an overextension of the process of objectivation, whereby the human (“living”) objectivity of the social world is transformed in consciousness into the non-human (“dead”) objectivity of nature. Typically, the representations of human, meaningful activity that constitute the reality of the social world are transformed in consciousness into non-human, meaningless, inert “things.” That is, they are reified (8). The social world then ceases to be an open arena in which the individual expands his being in meaningful activity, becomes instead a closed aggregate of reifications divorced from present or future activity. The actual relationship between man and his world is inverted in consciousness. The actor becomes only that which is acted upon. The producer is apprehended only as product. In this loss of the societal dialectic, activity itself comes to appear as something other—namely, as process, destiny or fate. Three important points about alienation should be made here. First, it must be stressed that the alienated world, with all its aspects, is a phenomenon of consciousness, specifically of 104

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Rome reserved crucifixion for two categories of people: those who challenged imperial rule (violently or nonviolently) and chronically defiant slaves (not simply occasionally disobedient or difficult slaves). If you were a murderer or a robber, you would not be crucified, though you might be executed another way. The two groups who were crucified had something in common: both rejected Roman imperial domination. Crucifixion was a very public, prolonged, and painful form of execution that carried the message, “Don’t you dare defy imperial authority, or this will happen to you.” It was state torture and terrorism. To proclaim “Christ crucified” was to signal at once that Jesus was an anti-imperial figure, and that Paul’s gospel was an anti-imperial gospel. The empire killed Jesus. The cross was the imperial “no” to Jesus. But God had raised him. The resurrection was God’s “yes” to Jesus, God’s vindication of Jesus—and thus also God’s “no” to the powers that had killed him. The twofold pattern executed by Rome and vindicated by God appears twice early in the book of Acts. The authorities crucified Jesus, but God raised him up (2:23–24). A few verses later, in only slightly different language, it is repeated: this Jesus who was crucified by the authorities God has made both Lord and Messiah (2:36). Of course, these words are from Acts, not Paul, but we cite them to illustrate the obvious and immediate meaning of “Christ crucified.” Executed by Rome exposed the nature of the rulers of that world: they “crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8), thereby revealing the character of the system of domination and violence that killed Jesus. Vindicated by God —raised by God—meant Jesus is Lord, and thus the powers that executed him were not. In language that confronted and countered Roman imperial theology: Jesus is Lord—Caesar is not. This is the primary meaning of Paul’s emphatic use of “Christ crucified” in its context in 1 Corinthians. In the brilliant, dense, and illuminating overture to the letter (1:17–2:16), Paul contrasts the “wisdom of God” and the “wisdom of the world” through a series of oppositions. Paul’s repetitions of the terms “wise” and “wisdom” and their opposites, “foolish” and “foolishness,” are like drumbeats dominating the section. “Powerful” and “power” (or “strong” and “strength”) are also set in opposition to “weak” and “weakness.” Paul uses and also reverses these contrasts in an almost breathtaking way. His rhetoric, his manner of thinking and expressing himself, requires attention. To illustrate, we quote most of 1 Cor.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  That is a claim repeated often today—by liberals sadly and conservatives gladly—as our leaders work on those “necessary accidents” in places like Iraq. Since 2000, therefore, we go on a regular annual pilgrimage to wander and ponder the shattered ruins of “our prototypes” in the Roman Empire of two thousand years ago. The other reason is that we are Christians traveling—but much more comfortably than he did—in the footsteps of Paul. We go to cities Paul visited, such as Antioch in Pisidia or Perga in Pamphylia. But we also go to ones Paul never visited, such as Aphrodisias in Caria or Priene in Ionia. There too we can see monuments to that Roman imperial theology against which he brought Pauline Christian theology as God’s alternative vision for global peace. That beautiful early fall morning, we come south from Ephesus to the city of Priene, which climbs up the base of Mount Mycale in a triumph of terrace over terrain. It was and is high above the Meander Plain and so—unlike Tarsus—far above marshes, mosquitoes, and malaria. The city has long been in ruins, but its mighty acropolis still towers above the ever expanding plain. And down there workers—now migratory ones from eastern Turkey—still toil in the cotton fields beneath the Mediterranean sun with little of the breeze that refreshes the heights above them. We climb up toward the ancient city’s main temple, dedicated to Athena, virgin goddess of war and wisdom—not oxymoron, but redundancy for the Greek empire and every empire before and after it. The temple complex was slowly but steadily constructed for three hundred years from the time of Alexander to that of Augustus, a tribute to the warrior goddess from one world conqueror after another. In the temple’s inner sanctum Athena’s cult statue was once helmeted; she held arms in her left hand and a statuette of Victory ( Niké ) in her right. On this late September morning, Athena’s great temple is indicated by only five of its original thirty outside columns. They were erected a half century ago by a local construction company to about 4 feet short of their original height. All around them is a vast array of shattered marble chunks and toppled marble drums destroyed by the area’s frequent earthquakes.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  There could be only one explanation for such results: In response to the trauma itself, and in coping with the dread that persisted long afterward, these patients had learned to shut down the brain areas that transmit the visceral feelings and emotions that accompany and define terror. Yet in everyday life, those same brain areas are responsible for registering the entire range of emotions and sensations that form the foundation of our self-awareness, our sense of who we are. What we witnessed here was a tragic adaptation: In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive. The disappearance of medial prefrontal activation could explain why so many traumatized people lose their sense of purpose and direction. I used to be surprised by how often my patients asked me for advice about the most ordinary things, and then by how rarely they followed it. Now I understood that their relationship with their own inner reality was impaired. How could they make decisions, or put any plan into action, if they couldn’t define what they wanted or, to be more precise, what the sensations in their bodies, the basis of all emotions, were trying to tell them? The lack of self-awareness in victims of chronic childhood trauma is sometimes so profound that they cannot recognize themselves in a mirror. Brain scans show that this is not the result of mere inattention: The structures in charge of self-recognition may be knocked out along with the structures related to self-experience. When Ruth Lanius showed me her study, a phrase from my classical high school education came back to me. The mathematician Archimedes, teaching about the lever, is supposed to have said: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” Or, as the great twentieth-century body therapist Moshe Feldenkrais put it: “You can’t do what you want till you know what you’re doing.” The implications are clear: to feel present you have to know where you are and be aware of what is going on with you. If the self-sensing system breaks down we need to find ways to reactivate it. The Self-Sensing SystemIt was fascinating to see how much Sherry benefited from her massage therapy. She felt more relaxed and adventurous in her day-to-day life and she was also more relaxed and open with me. She became truly involved in her therapy and was genuinely curious about her behavior, thoughts, and feelings. She stopped picking at her skin, and when summer came she started to spend evenings sitting outside on her stoop, chatting with her neighbors. She even joined a church choir, a wonderful experience of group synchrony.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Hubbard liked the technical sound of jargon from fields like psychology and software engineering, so he co-opted and redefined dozens of technical terms to create the impression that Scientology’s belief system was rooted in real science. The word “valence,” for example, has several definitions across linguistics, chemistry, and math, and generally refers to the value of something. But in Scientology, “valence” signifies possession by an evil spirit or personality, as in the sentence, “You sure mock up a good SP valence.” To a neuropsychologist, an “engram” is a hypothetical change in the brain related to memory storage, but to a Scientologist, it’s a mental image recorded after a painful unconscious episode from a PC’s past. Engrams are stored in the reactive mind and require auditing if the PC has any hopes of going clear (and if you can understand that sentence, mazel tov, you’re on your way to speaking fluent Scientology). The linguistic world Hubbard created was so legit-sounding—so inspired and comprehensive—that it sparked a host of copycat “cult leaders .” NXIVM founder Keith Raniere lifted all kinds of terms straight from Scientology, like “suppressives,” “tech,” and “courses,” as well as illusory, pseudo-academic acronyms, like EM (exploration of meaning, NXIVM’s version of auditing) and DOS (Dominus Obsequious Sororium, Latin for “Dominant Submissive Sorority,” a secret all-female club within NXIVM composed of so-called “masters” and sex-trafficked “slaves”). Like in Scientology, Raniere knew his followers were motivated by a desire for exclusive, erudite wisdom; his knockoff Hubbardese helped him exploit that.* In the style of Newspeak, Hubbard took dozens of common words that boast a range of colorful English meanings and reduced them to one incontestable Scientology definition. “Clear” means at least thirty different things in everyday English (easy to understand, empty or unobstructed, acquitted of guilt, free of pimples, etc.). But in Scientology, it has but one solitary definitio n: “a person who has completed the Clearing Course.” Using it any other way would be to demonstrate a lack of understanding of Hubbard’s texts. That would be considered PTS, a threat to the church, which you’d want to avoid at all costs. Scientology knows it has no power without its cultish language, but that the language is also what implicates the group as dangerously cultish. So, to stay as clandestine and protected as possible, the church holds a slew of copyrights on its writings, terminology, names, even symbols. Infamously litigious, Scientology frequently buries outsiders and defectors who comment on or satirize its language too publicly (oops) under groundless lawsuits and metaphysical threats that exposing untrained ears to mere talk of Xenu and other high-level Scientology concepts will bring on “devastating, cataclysmic spiritual harm.” On the phone with Cathy, I told her I hadn’t remembered Mr. Blue Suit talking about evil galactic monarchs or thetans during my experience at Scientology HQ that summer in LA. “Well, of course not,” she replied. “They don’t start you out with that stuff. They’d lose you.

• From Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  "I, for my part, had to work hard to keep at bay the knowledge that pulsated under all those responses: that writing publicly about my sexuality could, until the day I die, be used as evidence against me. I could not forget, though I tried very hard, that were I ever to have to accuse a man of assault, my exploration of my sexuality on the page could bring me harm – could let a man off the hook. … The shudder is the spasm of recognition, and it's the collective warning: watch out."

• From Cultish (2021)

  “Like ‘old soul,’” Tasha tells me. To an average English speaker, “old soul” connotes someone with wisdom beyond their years. It’s a compliment. But in 3HO, it incited dread. “It meant someone had been coming back life after life, incarnation after incarnation, and they couldn’t get it right,” she explains. Even three years after escaping 3HO, Tasha still shudders whenever she hears the phrase.

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

  Prior to World War II, the first generation of trailers were jerry-rigged contraptions built in backyards, expressly used on hunting and fishing trips. When they hit the road in the thirties, right when Okies took to their jalopies along Route 66, one journalist called them “monstrosities,” shanties on wheels. War changed that. Faced with a severe housing shortage, the federal government purchased trailers for soldiers, sailors, and defense workers. As many as thirty- five thousand trailers were drummed into service, and because military and defense installations were everywhere, trailer towns suddenly popped up in unexpected places from Maine to Michigan to Texas. In places like Hartford, Connecticut, defense workers living in “trailer villages” were easily compared to colonists and gypsies. 26 The most remarkable account of trailer camps formed in defense centers came from the talented reporter Agnes Meyer of the Washington Post . Her dispatches as a “war correspondent on the home front,” as she called herself, were compiled and published as a book titled Journey Through Chaos. Well- bred American women were not supposed to see “chaos” up close. Indeed, though her family considered higher education inappropriate for a young female, Meyer graduated from Barnard College, studied at the Sorbonne, published a scholarly work on Chinese painting, and became the first woman hired by the New York Sun . Momentously, she went on to marry a multimillionaire who decided to purchase the floundering Washington Post. Their daughter, Katharine Meyer Graham, grew up to be the most influential editor of the family’s paper. 27 In 1943, Agnes Meyer was on a fact-finding expedition when she traveled to twenty-seven war centers. From Buffalo to Detroit, and all the way out to Puget Sound, Washington, south to California, and back east by way of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida, she described the people she saw with unsparing detail. Her most disturbing encounters occurred, not surprisingly, in the Deep South. She shone a light on the rows of tents, trailers, and run-down shacks in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama. She bemoaned the “neglected rural areas,” and called the white trash who migrated from there pitiful, ragged, illiterate, and undernourished. They had refused to move into respectable housing projects out of fear of the law—but mostly, Meyer believed, because they feared the “restraint of being members of a decent community.” Overwhelmed by the condition of their lives, by their physical and mental health and lack of prospects, she asked incredulously, “Is this America?” 28 It was the shipyards that brought workers to Pascagoula. Nearly five thousand new workers and their families crowded the small town on the Gulf of

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  When Iggy was five months old, we took him with us to one of my best friends’ trapeze-burlesque shows, but were turned away at the door by a jovial Australian bouncer who told us that the show was 18+. I told him I wasn’t worried about exposing the five-month-old strapped to my chest, asleep, to my best friend’s foul mouth and naked body. He said the problem wasn’t my baby per se—it was that other people would see the baby, and thereby be reminded of the babies they might have left at home, and it wouldn’t feel to them like an adult night out. It would disrupt the cabaret atmosphere. I’m all for adult nights out, and for cabaret atmospheres. This isn’t a tract arguing for the right to carry a baby everywhere. I guess what annoyed me is that I wanted my friend to make the call, as she had invited us. Coming from the bouncer, I felt (paranoically? he was just doing his job) the specter of what Susan Fraiman has described as “a heroic gay male sexuality as a stand-in for queerness which remains ‘unpolluted by procreative femininity’” To counter this stand-in, Fraiman expounds on the concept of sodomitical maternity, described at length in a chapter titled “In Search of the Mother’s Anus,” which wends through Freud’s notorious Wolf Man case. A grown man in analysis (known to posterity as the Wolf Man) tells Freud about being a little boy—perhaps even a baby—and seeing his parents doing it “a tergo,” or doggy-style, on multiple occasions. “The man upright, and the woman bent down like an animal.” (It might be worth noting that this memory is pried out of the Wolf Man— it’s not his calling card of complaint.) Freud says that the Wolf Man was “able to see his mother’s genitals as well as his father’s organ; and he understood the process as well as its significance.” He also reports that the Wolf Man “assumed to begin with … that the event of which he was a witness was an act of violence, but the expression of enjoyment which he saw on his mother’s face did not fit in with this; he was obliged to recognize that the experience was one of gratification.”

• From The Girls (2016)

  I turned my back to the wall, shutting my eyes. Julian growling. “Are you a cunt?” he said. The headboard jacking against the wall. “Are you?” —I’d think, later, that Julian must have known I could hear everything.

• From The Girls (2016)

  It helped that I wasn’t mentioned in most of the books. Not the paperbacks with the title bloody and oozing, the glossed pages of crime scene photographs. Not the less popular but more accurate tome written by the lead prosecutor, gross with specifics, down to the undigested spaghetti they found in the little boy’s stomach. The couple of lines that did mention me were buried in an out-of-print book by a former poet, and he’d gotten my name wrong and hadn’t made any connection to my grandmother. The same poet also claimed that the CIA was producing porn films starring a drugged Marilyn Monroe, films sold to politicians and foreign heads of state. “It was a long time ago,” I said to Sasha, but her expression was empty. “Still,” Julian said, brightening. “I always thought it was beautiful. Sick yet beautiful,” he said. “A fucked-up expression, but an expression, you know. An artistic impulse. You’ve got to destroy to create, all that Hindu shit.” I could tell he was reading my bewildered shock as approval.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  and whips me some more. I squeeze my eyes shut and bite my lip and then finally cry out in pain as my entire body feels like it’s swollen and red. Then she ties my hands together. She binds my ankles, and wraps my wrists around the closet rod. Once I’m hanging helpless inside the closet, she slams the door shut. I kick the door and scream, not able to control myself from giving her such satisfaction. The afternoon light streaming under the closet door begins to disappear swiftly, and the sensation is as though I’m being buried alive—chained up and shoved into a small space, the way she’d do when I was little. When my voice is gone and I’m certain my wrists must be sprained, I have no choice but to give up fighting. I struggle to keep my mind from panicking as the numerous incidents of being tied or chained up caused my intense claustrophobia. I fight off a panic attack by counting, then praying for any image that could possibly slow my pounding heart. Then, I’m there: walking on the beach with my sisters and the kids, writing our names in the sand, floating in the water, and lifting up rocks to discover clams for dinner. I can taste the onion grass, feel the sway of the beach weeds bending against my knees in the breeze as we head out to swim on the floating dock. IN THE MORNING Norman comes in to cut me loose, and I direct him as he gets Rosie ready for school. “You two cannot miss the bus,” I tell him. “You have to eat today, and I can’t go to school like this.” Not only are my wrists scarred, but my image is, too. I work my stomach into knots wondering what I can possibly say to my friends after they witnessed how my mother treats me. Days later I’ve got bigger problems when the landlord opens the door and marches right past me, carrying our belongings out to the lawn. “But it’s hardly even spring yet!” I tell him. “You’re expecting us to sleep out in the cold?” “I’ve let you stay here three months,” he says, “which is two months more than your mother’s paid for.” I turn to the kids, trying to keep my cool for their sake. “You stay here with all our stuff. I’m going to call Cherie. I’ll be right back.” At the convenience store up the road, I beg the clerk for a dime to call Cherie. She shows up in her boyfriend’s car to get us and sets us up to sleep at Kathy’s house for the night. I dread her call to Cookie . . . who has no choice but to turn up the next morning with some BS story to try to rectify herself in front of Kathy’s mother. “Oh, just wait until they hear from my lawyer. I’m gonna sue their shorts off!” she says.

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

  reflect on, white trash invented a country of their own within the United States. In its most benign incarnation, this substratum of the amorphous American class system was no longer to be categorized as an inferior “breed” (with undesirable genetic traits) so much as a product of cultural breeding that could easily be shed and later recovered—a tradition, or identity, that one did not have to shy away from in order to gain acceptance in mainstream society. In its worst form, however, white trash identity dredged up a person’s early traumatic experiences, repressed childhood memories. A not insignificant part of that was sexual deviance, a problem that still hovers over white trash America today. Hollywood gave the country an enduring symbol of that deviance, and the unwanted’s recourse to barbarism, in its adaptation of James Dickey’s violent thriller Deliverance (1970). Set in rural Georgia near the South Carolina border, the film, released in 1972, seared into the national imagination its devastating portrait of white trash ugliness and backwoods debauchery. No matter whether it is cast as urban or rural, religious or secular, Anglo- or other hyphenate, the search for national belonging is never new. Despite the nasty cultural memory jarred loose by the retrogressive message in Deliverance (and especially the horrific rape of Ned Beatty’s character), the backcountry of America never completely lost its regenerative associations. Appalachia remained in the minds of many a lost island containing a purer breed of Anglo- Saxon. Here, in this imaginary country of the past, is where the best of Jefferson’s yeoman “roots” could be traced. Most of all, there was a raw masculinity to be found in the hills. A larger trend was turning America into a more ethnically conscious nation, one in which ethnicity substituted for class. The hereditary model had not been completely abandoned; instead, it was reconfigured to focus on transmitted cultural values over inbred traits. An inherent paradox added to the confusion over the nature of cultural identity. Modern Americans’ largely blind pursuit of the authentic, stable self was taking place in a country where roots could be, and often were, discarded. In the American model, assimilation preceded social mobility, which required either adoption of a new identity or assumption of a class disguise in order to insert oneself into the desired category of middle class. Yet by the late 1960s the middle class had become the most inauthentic of places: the suburbs provided indelible images of foil-covered TV dinners, banal Babbittry, and bad sitcoms. People took part in staid dinner parties, evocatively portrayed in The Graduate, where the talk was of a career-making investment in plastics—and what better stood for inauthenticity than unnatural products invented by chemists? There

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “Slide your feet into the stirrups, please,” she says, and I feel the blood rush from my face when the doctor walks in the door. After barely an introduction I feel the heat of his examining light between my legs, and my body clenches with the touch of his medical instruments. Suddenly I’m back in that foster home seven years ago, on the winter night when my sisters were locked out in the cold and Norm was banging on the door. “Let my sister go!” he’d screamed. This doesn’t feel much different. I feel violated, isolated, and quite certain that this makes it official: I never want to allow a boy to touch me again. It seems like no one besides Camille will give me a straight talk about womanhood, although some adults do seem to care enough to fumble through a few tidbits. On the last day of freshman year, I go home with my friend Sheryl, whose mom takes us to the park at the Wood Road School. I catch her eyeing my orange tank top before she says, “Girls, this is probably a good time to bring this up, and I’m only going to say it once: Never sit on the same swing with a boy.” Sheryl and I look at each other bewildered. “Mom, why?” she asks. “Because there are two swings: one for each of you. So you can swing, and he can swing, and you can even swing at the same time . . . but separately, you see. Never together.” We break into a fit of laughter. “Mom,” Sheryl says. “What about the teeter-totter?” “Girls, I’m serious: There will be no bumping on the swings.” “Thank you very much for that informative birds and bees talk, Mrs. Z,” I say, and Sheryl and I run for the swings, wrapping our arms around our shoulders with our imaginary swing-bumping boyfriends. That summer, Cherie is tied up with the baby. Camille’s still at the Petermans’ but often working twelve hours a day. I spend my days babysitting the kids on Addie’s street or with Sheryl and Tracey, taking the nine A.M. bus to Smith Point Beach and hopping the five P.M . bus home. We buzz about the thought of entering tenth grade and trying out for gymnastics. Secretly, I’m also excited because it’s the first time I’ll start the school year with a close-knit group of friends and a wardrobe I’m actually not embarrassed to wear. The first week of school I’m dumbstruck when the gymnastics coach reads my name off the list of girls who made the cut. “Coach,” I say, while the other girls are busy in huddled squeals. “I couldn’t even take a stab at the bars.” “Your upper body needs some strengthening, but your legs are cut and you’re strong on the beam.