Humiliation

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 Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘Fuck off!’ That was Alison’s reply. ‘Go away, you fool! Kiss you quick? You must be joking. God help me, you won’t get anything from me. I love someone else, in any case, who is far more of a man than you are. Go away now or I will throw something at you. Let me get some sleep. I need it. So go to hell!’ Absolon was in a miserable state. ‘Was ever true love so thoroughly abused?’ he asked her. ‘Could I be more miserable? Have pity on me, Alison, in my distress. Give me a little kiss. That’s the least you can do. For the love of Jesus, the man of sorrows, if not for love of me.’ ‘And, if I do,’ she said, ‘will you go away?’ ‘Yes. I will.’ ‘Then get ready. I must just do something first.’ She went over to the bed. ‘Keep quiet,’ she whispered to Nicholas. ‘And you will have a good laugh.’ Meanwhile Absolon had got down on his knees in front of the window. ‘I have scored,’ he said. ‘I don’t think she will stop at a kiss. Oh my sweetheart, be kind to me. Give me more.’ Then Alison opened the window in all haste. ‘Hurry up,’ she told him. ‘Come on. I don’t want the neighbours to see you.’ So Absolon wiped his mouth in preparation. It was very dark. It was still night, after all. ‘Here I am,’ said Alison. Then she put her naked arse out of the window. Absolon could see nothing at all, of course, and so he put out his tongue and gave her a French kiss. He was eagerly slurping her bum. But then he knew that something was wrong. He had never known a woman with a beard before. But he knew this much - he had licked on something rough and hairy. ‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘This isn’t right.’ Alison laughed out loud, and shut the window. Absolon shook his head, and began to walk away. But then he heard Nicholas laughing, too. He scowled in anger, and muttered to himself, ‘I’ll get my own back. Wait and see.’ Then he began to rub his lips and mouth with dust and straw and cloth and chips of wood - anything to get rid of the taste. He kept on repeating to himself, ‘What a mess! I would give anything to be revenged on those two. I would give my soul to the devil, I really would. If only I had turned away. If only I had not kissed that - that thing.’ His lust of course was now completely quenched. From this time forward, from the time he kissed the arse of Alison, he never looked at another woman. He was cured of lovesickness. Women? What were they to him?

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  23 In a gesture that resonates self-consciously with the tale of Medusa, Herculine h/erself writes of “the cold fixity of my gaze [that] seems to freeze” (105) those who encounter it. But it is, of course, Irigaray who exposes this dialectic of Same and Other as a false binary, the illusion of a symmetrical difference which consolidates the metaphysical economy of phallogocentrism, the economy of the same. In her view, the Other as well as the Same are marked as masculine; the Other is but the negative elaboration of the masculine subject with the result that the female sex is unrepresentable—that is, it is the sex which, within this signifying economy, is not one. But it is not one also in the sense that it eludes the univocal signification characteristic of the Symbolic, and because it is not a substantive identity, but always and only an undetermined relation of difference to the economy which renders it absent. It is not “one” in the sense that it is multiple and diffuse in its pleasures and its signifying mode. Indeed, perhaps Herculine’s apparently multiplicitous pleasures would qualify for the mark of the feminine in its polyvalence and in its refusal to submit to the reductive efforts of univocal signification. But let us not forget Herculine’s relation to the laugh which seems to appear twice, first in the fear of being laughed at (23) and later as a laugh of scorn that s/he directs against the doctor, for whom s/he loses respect after he fails to tell the appropriate authorities of the natural irregularity that has been revealed to him (71). For Herculine, then, laughter appears to designate either humiliation or scorn, two positions unambiguously related to a damning law, subjected to it either as its instrument or object. Herculine does not fall outside the jurisdiction of that law; even h/er exile is understood on the model of punishment. On the very first page, s/he reports that h/er “place was not marked out [pas marquée] in this world that shunned me.” And s/he articulates the early sense of abjection that is later enacted first as a devoted daughter or lover to be likened to a “dog” or a “slave” and then finally in a full and fatal form as s/he is expelled and expels h/erself from the domain of all human beings. From this presuicidal isolation, s/he claims to soar above both sexes, but h/er anger is most fully directed against men, whose “title” s/he sought to usurp in h/er intimacy with Sara and whom s/he now indicts without restraint as those who somehow forbid h/er the possibility of love. At the beginning of the narrative, s/he offers two one-sentence paragraphs “parallel” to one another which suggest a melancholic incorporation of the lost father, a postponement of the anger of abandonment through the structural instatement of that negativity into h/er identity and desire.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Before Scopes, Protestant fundamentalists tended to be on the left of the political spectrum, willing to work with socialists and liberals in the disadvantaged areas of the rapidly industrializing cities. After Scopes, they swung to the far right, where they have remained. The ridicule of the press proved to be counterproductive, since it made the fundamentalists even more militant in their views. Before Scopes, evolution had not been an important issue; even such ardent literalists as Charles Hodge knew that the world had existed for a lot longer than the six thousand years mentioned in the Bible. Only a very few subscribed to so-called creation science, which argued that Genesis was scientifically sound in every detail. Most fundamentalists were Calvinists, though Calvin himself had not shared their hostility to scientific knowledge. But after Dayton, an unswerving biblical literalism became central to the fundamentalist mind-set and creation science became the flagship of the movement. It would become impossible to discuss the issue rationally, because evolution was no longer merely a scientific hypothesis but a “symbol,” indelibly imbued with the misery of defeat and humiliation. The early history of the first fundamentalist movement in the modern era proved to be paradigmatic. When attacking religion that seems obscurantist, critics must be aware that this assault is likely to make it more extreme. The Second World War (1939–45) revealed the terrifying efficiency of modern violence. The explosion of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki laid bare the nihilistic self-destruction at the heart of the brilliant achievements of Homo technologicus. Our ability to harm and mutilate one another had kept pace with our extraordinary economic and scientific progress, and we seemed to lack either the wisdom or the means to keep our aggression within safe and appropriate bounds. Indeed, the shocking discovery that six million Jews had been systematically slaughtered in the Nazi camps, an atrocity that had originated in Germany, a leading player in the Enlightenment, called the whole notion of human progress into question. The Holocaust is sometimes depicted as an eruption of premodern barbarism; it is even seen as an expression of religious impulses that had been repressed in secular society. But historians and social critics have challenged this view. 37 It is certainly true that Christian anti- Semitism had been a chronic disease in Europe since the time of the Crusades; and while individual Christians protested against the horror and tried to save their Jewish neighbors, many of the denominations were largely and shamefully silent. Hitler had never officially left the Catholic Church and should have been excommunicated; Pope Pius XII neither condemned nor distanced himself from the Nazi programs. But to blame the entire catastrophe on religion is simply—and perhaps even dangerously—inaccurate. Far from being in conflict with the rational pursuit of well-organized, goal-oriented modernity, the hideous efficiency of the Nazis was a supreme example of it.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Western foreign policy has also hastened the rise of fundamentalism in the Middle East. The coup organized by the CIA and British Intelligence in Iran (1953) that displaced the nationalist, secular ruler Muhammad Mosaddeq (1880–1967) and put the exiled shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi (1878–1944) back on the throne left Iranians with a sense of bitter humiliation, betrayal, and impotence. The failure of the international community to alleviate the plight of the Palestinians has led others to despair of a conventional political solution. Western support for such rulers as the shah and Saddam Hussein, who denied their people basic human rights, has also tarnished the democratic ideal, since the West seemed proudly to proclaim its belief in freedom while inflicting dictatorial regimes on others. It has also helped to radicalize Islam, since the mosque was often the only place where people could express their discontent. The rapid secularization of some of these countries has often taken the form of an assault on religion. In Europe and the United States, secularism developed gradually over a long period, and the new ideas and institutions had time to trickle down naturally to all members of the population. But many Muslim countries had to adopt the Western model in a mere fifty years or so. When KemalAtatürk (1881–1938) secularized Turkey, he closed down all the madrassas and abolished the Sufi orders. The shahs made their soldiers go through the streets tearing off women’s veils with their bayonets and ripping them to pieces. These reformers wanted their countries to look modern, even though only a small elite sector was familiar with the Western ethos. In 1935, Shah Reza Pahlavi ordered his soldiers to shoot at a crowd of unarmed demonstrators who were peacefully protesting against obligatory Western dress in Mashhad, one of the holiest shrines in Iran. Hundreds of Iranians died that day. In such a context, secularism does not appear a liberating option. Sunni fundamentalism developed in the concentration camps in which President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70) interred thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood without trial. Many of them had done nothing more incriminating than handing out leaflets or attending a meeting. In these vile prisons they were subjected to mental and physical torture and became radicalized. 9 Sayyid Qutb (1906– 66) entered the camp as a moderate, but as a result of his imprisonment—he was tortured and finally executed—he evolved an ideology that is still followed by Islamists today. 10 When he heard Nasser vowing to confine Islam to the private sphere, secularism did not seem benign. In his landmark book Milestones, we see the paranoid vision of the fundamentalist who has been pushed too far: Jews, Christians, communists, capitalists, and imperialists were all in league against Islam.

• From City of Night (1963)

  As I watch from the steps—aroused by the prospect of what may happen and wanting it to happen—Chi-Chi’s face, contorted angrily, seems painfully aware of the crushing fate of her tattered lace dress. And I will think later that in that moment she must have felt the paint like pain on her face. In a moment of recognition—recognizing herself in the eyes of the other world, in the eyes of those leering men and women, in the harsh waiting eye of the camera, recognizing herself prematurely in the picture which would be laughed at, disbelieved—as she stands there like an animal who may or may not be trapped by the hunters, and, if trapped, is determined to wound back savagely—in that moment, she may perhaps have faced that image of herself: because her whole massive body seems to be struggling against something—perhaps that absurd fate—against the shackles of that dress, those rings, beads, sequins. And I will wonder later if Chi-Chi was seeing, then, smothered in youthworlds of humiliation and derision, the youngman— himself! —crushed by that something too overwhelmingly unfair to define. If she didnt see that, I will remember it in her; and the memory of Miss Destiny, planning her impossible Wedding—the memory, too, of Trudi, resigned to The Beads—the thought of Kathy—will fuse with that remembered sight of Chi-Chi—and I will wonder if Miss Destiny’s evil angel had not, that once, relented—was perhaps even smiling graciously, if only for a few moments, over Chi-Chi. Because Chi-Chi still stands menacingly before that man, those other people. And the man doesn’t move, as if the queen-eyes from a strange, forbidden world are not only making it difficult for his finger to click the shutter but are warning him in other, reverberating ways. Chi-Chi is unmistakably a man as he faces that entrapping group and yells: “Father-fuckers! I’ll take you on together or alone! Prove to Me what big men you are! Whos first?—whos first? All of you? Come on!” And the fists wait. Like moths attracted to this blazing inner light emanating from Chi-Chi, the other queens, silent and tense, watched as if seeing a part of themselves, long ago throttled, stunningly revealed in this wide-eyed Cassandra. And still, no one moves toward Chi-Chi to answer his challenge. And as the man makes a sudden nervous motion as if to take the picture, Chi-Chi lunges at him like a grotesque jack-in-the-box. The enormous fist crashes into his face. The camera falls to the ground, the bulb smashes. The man staggered, reeled against another man, and fell, sprawled on the ground, dazed, at his wife’s feet. Chi-Chi’s manfists are still clenched like a champion boxer’s, ready for the others. But no one moved.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In Luke’s congregation Jews and gentiles were discovering that, like Abraham at Mamre, when they reached out to the “other,” they experienced the divine. The story also shows how the early Christians understood Jesus’s resurrection. They did not have a simplistic notion of his corpse walking out of the tomb. Henceforth, as Paul had made clear, they would no longer know Jesus “in the flesh” but would find him in one another, in scripture, and in the ritual meals they ate together. Jesus was acquiring mythical and symbolic status, but like any mythos, this would make no sense unless it was put into practice. In his letter to his converts in Philippi in Asia Minor, Paul quoted a hymn already well-known to the Christian communities, which shows that from this very early date (c. 54–57) Christians saw Jesus’s life as a kenosis, a humble “self-emptying.” 31 Although, like all human beings, Jesus was the image of God, he did not cling to this high dignity, But emptied himself [heauton ekenosen] To assume the condition of a slave. ... And was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross. Because of this humiliating descent, God had raised him high and given him the supreme title kyrios (“lord”), “to the glory of God the Father.” This text is often quoted to show that Christians saw Jesus as the incarnate son of God from the very beginning, but Paul was not giving the Philippians a lesson in Christian doctrine. He had introduced the hymn to them with a moral instruction: “In your minds, you must be the same as Christ Jesus.” There must be no competition among you, no conceit; but everybody is to be self-effacing. Always consider the other person to be better than yourself, so that nobody thinks of his own interests first, but everybody thinks of other people’s interests instead. 32 Unless they imitated Jesus’s kenosis in the smallest details of their own lives, they would not understand the mythos of the lord Jesus. Like all great religious teaching, Christian doctrine would always be a miqra that would make sense only when translated into a ritual, meditative, or ethical program. When he gave Jesus the title “lord,” Paul did not mean that he was God. The careful wording of the hymn made it clear that there was a distinction between the kyrios and God. Even though Paul and the evangelists all called Jesus the “son of God,” they were not making divine claims for him. They would have been quite shocked by this idea.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “Away,” Dean said curtly, and that word, thrust at Lance like a stone, makes the whisperers realize they have not turned up in vain. Lance dodges the stone, clings to the façade of composure. The conversations of those who understand—and soon, aware, of those who dont—stop abruptly as if the needle had been removed from a record. The whispers, ready to be released at any moment, are balanced like a great rock on a cliff, ready to tumble disastrously. Jamey, who had left the room before Dean came in, walked in at the wrong time: “My God,” he says, “I was almost Raped in the powder-room.” But no one laughed. It was as if someone had coughed during the crucial moment of a drama. “Whats happened?” he said, and then he saw Dean and Lance staring tensely at each other. And Jamey squints his eyes victoriously. Dean marched past Lance, past the staring eyes—into the bedroom. Lance is behind him, gliding past the stares knifing him brutally, ready to repay him now for his beauty, for the anarchy of that beauty. Chick steps quickly before Lance, whispers frantically: “Lance!—dont go after him!— theyre watching you!” But Lance brushes him aside and follows Dean into the bedroom. The door closes. From behind that closed door come voices, alternately raised, lowered. Now the door of the bedroom swings open, and Dean walks out, his clothes thrown carelessly over his arm. Lance stands momentarily at the door. And now he will do what will delight all of you who have hated him for his unquestioned reign: Lance will follow Dean.... He catches up with him, pulls on the clothes draped over the youngman’s arms. The clothes spill on the floor: Lance’s façade crumbles before us. “Dean—dont—go—” he pleads. (And is he pleading as much for his life as for Dean? I wonder.) “I have to talk to you—come back into the bedroom—I—” The pressure of Lance’s hand noticeably becomes heavier on Dean’s shoulder. Dean jerks viciously away from him. And he lashes: “Dont touch me, you fuckin faggot!” And the door, slammed by Dean, refuses stubbornly to close—swings open, wide open, admitting the coming night. The whispering has not yet been unleashed. Lance must admit his fall—with a look, a word. He stands before the door, his back toward us, facing the night.... And what is he staring at beyond the door? Is he looking at the disappearing figure of Dean? Or is he staring past the youngman? Does the same ghost that had hovered that afternoon on the beach, that night on the cliff, loom now at that door?... Lance doesnt move. Perhaps he cant face the buzzing bees behind him yet. Or is he acknowledging at last the old, old man who has waited patiently for his revenge?...

• From City of Night (1963)

  There was Carlo, an actor, whom I met coming out of the subway head, who took me home and for a week came on strong—“helping me out”: How sad that I should hang around the streets. If I move in with him, he’ll give me Everything I Need. And when I was almost conned, he got a job in Hollywood, and, with apologies, split, giving me $5.00 that night—and a smiling! triumphant! goodbye!... And Raub—a bastard—whose frog-shape and inclinations make me remember him as a “fraggot”—the fraggot with the enormous black-velvetdraped bed on Park Avenue: I was swiftly succeeded by, as I had very briefly succeeded, a string of others.... And there was Lenny from New Jersey, whom I saw twice a week, until one night he didn’t show; and I learned later he’d been arrested for selling pornographic pictures. There was, too, Im perversely glad to tell you, a cop met in an extension of the same world of 42nd Street. After midnight walking from the west to the east side, I crossed Central Park, and he was out rousting the bums sleeping in the park—the wagon parked a distance away. When he stopped me, I came on I was square: Just Now Came To The Big City. And he goes through the identification scene. “Well, you havent really seen New York then,” he said. “Maybe I can meet you somewhere on my day off and I’ll show you around.” I saw him a couple of times, but My Pride won out: To be with a cop—even for scoring—humiliated me, and that stopped. Feeling that recurrent guilt which will come on me unexpectedly in that life, I placed an ad in the Sunday paper for a job: “YOUNGMAN desires gainful employment”—and the number of the telephone in the hallway where I lived. “Can you come up now?” the faintly-British-accented male voice on the telephone said. It was Sunday evening. I took down an address on Sutton Place. “Take a cab,” the voice said, “and I’ll reimburse you when you get here.” In a fashionable apartment overlooking the East River, I face an elegant silver-haired man. At the door he had started, looked at me in surprise. “What kind of a job are you looking for?” he asked me after offering me a drink. “Anything that I like and that pays.” “Oh?” he said. “That must cover a lot of territory.... I have an opening,” he said. “What kind of work?”

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

  Gruet was tortured every day for a month, after the inhuman fashion of that age.743 He confessed that he had affixed the libel, and that the papers found in his house belonged to him; but he refused to name any accomplices. He was condemned for religious, moral, and political offences; being found guilty of expressing contempt for religion; of declaring that laws, both human and divine, were but the work of man’s caprice; and that fornication was not criminal when both parties were consenting; and of threatening the clergy and the Council itself.744 He was beheaded on the 26th of July, 1547. The execution instead of terrifying the Libertines made them more furious than ever. Three days afterwards the Council was informed that more than twenty young men had entered into a conspiracy to throw Calvin and his colleagues into the Rhone. He could not walk the streets without being insulted and threatened. Two or three years after the death of Gruet, a treatise of his was discovered full of horrible blasphemies against Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Prophets and Apostles, against the Scriptures, and all religion. He aimed to show that the founders of Judaism and Christianity were criminals, and that Christ was justly crucified. Some have confounded this treatise with the book "De tribus Impostoribus," which dates from the age of Emperor Frederick II., and puts Moses, Christ, and Mohammed on a level as religious impostors. Gruet’s book was, at Calvin’s advice, publicly burnt by the hangman before Gruet’s house, May 22, 1550.745 2. Ami Perrin (Amy Pierre), the military chief (captain-general) of the Republic, was the most popular and influential leader of the Patriotic party. He had been one of the earliest promoters of the Reformation, though from political rather than religious motives; he had protected Farel against the violence of the priests, and had been appointed deputy to Strassburg to bring Calvin back to Geneva.746 He was one of the six lay-members who, with the ministers, drew up the Ecclesiastical Ordinances of 1542, and for some time he supported Calvin in his reforms. He could wield the sword, but not the pen. He was vain, ambitious, pretentious, and theatrical. Calvin called him, in derision, the stage-emperor, who played now the "Caesar comicus," and now the "Caesar tragicus."747 Perrin’s wife, Francesca, was a daughter of François Favre, who had taken a prominent part in the political struggle against Savoy, but mistook freedom for license, and hated Calvin as a tyrant and a hypocrite. His whole family shared in this hatred. Francesca had an excessive fondness for dancing and revelry, a violent temper, and an abusive tongue. Calvin called her "Penthesilea" (the queen of the Amazons who fought a battle against the Greeks, and was slain by Achilles), and "a prodigious fury."748 He found out too late that it is foolish and dangerous to quarrel with a woman. He forgot Christ’s conduct towards the adulteress, and Mary Magdalene.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  It is important to emphasize this early enthusiasm for modernity, because too many Westerners regard Islam as inherently fundamentalist, atavistically opposed to democracy and freedom, and chronically addicted to violence. But Islam was the last of the three monotheisms to develop a fundamentalist strain; it did not do so until the late 1960s, after the Arabs’ catastrophic defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967, when the Western ideologies of nationalism and socialism, which had little grassroots support, appeared to have failed. Religion seemed a way of returning to the precolonial roots of their culture and regaining a more authentic identity. Western foreign policy has also hastened the rise of fundamentalism in the Middle East. The coup organized by the CIA and British Intelligence in Iran (1953) that displaced the nationalist, secular ruler Muhammad Mosaddeq (1880–1967) and put the exiled shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi (1878–1944) back on the throne left Iranians with a sense of bitter humiliation, betrayal, and impotence. The failure of the international community to alleviate the plight of the Palestinians has led others to despair of a conventional political solution. Western support for such rulers as the shah and Saddam Hussein, who denied their people basic human rights, has also tarnished the democratic ideal, since the West seemed proudly to proclaim its belief in freedom while inflicting dictatorial regimes on others. It has also helped to radicalize Islam, since the mosque was often the only place where people could express their discontent. The rapid secularization of some of these countries has often taken the form of an assault on religion. In Europe and the United States, secularism developed gradually over a long period, and the new ideas and institutions had time to trickle down naturally to all members of the population. But many Muslim countries had to adopt the Western model in a mere fifty years or so. When KemalAtatürk (1881–1938) secularized Turkey, he closed down all the madrassas and abolished the Sufi orders. The shahs made their soldiers go through the streets tearing off women’s veils with their bayonets and ripping them to pieces. These reformers wanted their countries to look modern, even though only a small elite sector was familiar with the Western ethos. In 1935, Shah Reza Pahlavi ordered his soldiers to shoot at a crowd of unarmed demonstrators who were peacefully protesting against obligatory Western dress in Mashhad, one of the holiest shrines in Iran. Hundreds of Iranians died that day. In such a context, secularism does not appear a liberating option.

• From City of Night (1963)

  The breeze had tossed her frizzled hair recklessly, the lace dangles over one massive shoulder. She leaned artlessly, ungracefully against the wall like some kind of lavender vine. As the flashbulbs popped around her, chasing away the returning yellowish islands created by the lights strung along the balconies, the lights from inside Les Petits and Sandy-Vee’s—she looked even more incredible. Like a football tackle in drag. Some careless foot must have ripped her lace dress, it dangles in a long tail. Feeling it on her legs, she tore off the piece of lavender cloth, held it now like a delicate lace handkerchief. With the other hand, she grips the cigarette holder in that still-ominous fist. I raised myself higher on the steps, sat looking down on the scene, feeling a sense of almost-heavenly safety to be watching the crowds from this distance—remotely. The man taking the photographs spots Chi-Chi—delightedly like an archeologist finding a rare treasure. He wears an absurd peaked hat, striped red and silver, photographic paraphernalia draped over his shoulders make him look like a futuristic decoration. His wife or companion—but she looks too much like him not to be his wife—his wife is a sadly puffed-up middle-aged woman in a starkly masculine-tailored suit. The man with the camera approaches Chi-Chi, while his wife, looking on incredulously at the sight of her, muttered in amazement: “My God!—look at the shoulders on that fairy!” Quickly, the two close in on Chi-Chi in visible fascination, followed by the others in their group—two men and two women—each face stamped with that contemptuous, incredulous smile. As if she were an animal which may escape, they pin Chi-Chi against the wall—like hunters, the man’s camera a gun. Adjusting the camera, the man said loudly to Chi-Chi: “Okay, sweetheart: Now you. I want to show your picture back home.” “Otherwise theyll never believe it,” laughed his wife, her laughter echoed by the others. “I mean,” said the man—and he grins with all the contempt of his ancestry, “I mean that I wanna show everyone back home what a real big fairy looks like.” Chi-Chi shook her head in bewilderment, as if dazed. The man’s wife rocks with bitter laughter, as if Chi-Chi’s humiliation will vindicate something inside herself, or perhaps erase something lurking uncomfortably. She stretched the rubber-smile to the point where it seemed her mouth would snap. Looking into the camera as he inches closer to her, the man addresses Chi-Chi: “Come on, sweetheart, you go ahead and give us a real big fairy pose!” “And dont forget to say ‘cheethe,’ his wife lisped poisonously.

• From City of Night (1963)

  He roars over to the skinny man, lifts him from the booth, dangling him like a puppet. The skinny man, lashing out with his nails, burying them into the fatman as if to puncture the inflated body, wrests himself free of the bear clutch. “You do!” the skinny man shouted—and he is crying now. “You really do! You really smell fat!” He begins to laugh, repeating over and over: “Fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat... FAT!...” until the word was drowned in the hysterical laughter, as the fatman—dodging Skipper’s drunkenly aimed fist—thrusts his arms almost pitifully into the encircling crowd and rams his way into the escape of the sheltering night. As he stormed out, I heard a familiar voice saying, “Let me through, let me through,” and in the fatman’s wake—pushing her way insistently toward the booth and Skipper—Trudi emerged out of the curious crowd. Small, frail, completely made up—understanding instinctively what had gone on—she gathered the spilled photographs from the floor—neatly—with the clippings, and she put them carefully into the envelope. Her head barely reached Skipper’s shoulders, and she looked at him with the compassion that only one outcast can feel for another. Now she put her arms about his waist, whispering softly to him: “Cummon, baby—screw the beads—lets go home.” She leads him through the crowd, unsteadily but firmly—Skipper willingly surrendering now completely to the drunkenness. Outside, the air is cool. Night embraces Main Street blackly.... I stand watching the people as they leave the bar in pairs or in desperate aloneness. A few feet away, I see Skipper bent over the curb, vomiting. Now a queen passes by, stands staring at Skipper.... And I hear Trudi—holding Skipper lovingly as he vomits rackingly into the street—challenge the queen’s suddenly bewildered stare: “Whats the matter, queenie?... Aint you never seen a man puke?” CITY OF NIGHT AFTER ALL, THERES THIS TO CONSIDER: The world’s no fucking good. “Youve got to pretend you dont give a damn and swing along with those that really dont — or you go under .” I needed hungrily to feel wanted—but when someone tried to get too close—someone met in that daily excursion through moviehouse balconies, bars, the park—I immediately moved away from him. I seldom saw the same person more than a few times during those months. Recurrently, around the others hustling those places, I felt a peculiar overpowering guilt because I was convinced I was not trapped by that world, as I was certain they were. Yet there were those other times when I felt even more hopelessly a part of it for having searched it out. It was a quandary so strangely disturbing—so difficult to understand—that I tried to force myself not to think about it—perhaps because I sensed even then that the answer to the riddle would entail something much too harsh to face.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Only a very few subscribed to so-called creation science, which argued that Genesis was scientifically sound in every detail. Most fundamentalists were Calvinists, though Calvin himself had not shared their hostility to scientific knowledge. But after Dayton, an unswerving biblical literalism became central to the fundamentalist mind-set and creation science became the flagship of the movement. It would become impossible to discuss the issue rationally, because evolution was no longer merely a scientific hypothesis but a “symbol,” indelibly imbued with the misery of defeat and humiliation. The early history of the first fundamentalist movement in the modern era proved to be paradigmatic. When attacking religion that seems obscurantist, critics must be aware that this assault is likely to make it more extreme. The Second World War (1939–45) revealed the terrifying efficiency of modern violence. The explosion of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki laid bare the nihilistic self-destruction at the heart of the brilliant achievements of Homo technologicus . Our ability to harm and mutilate one another had kept pace with our extraordinary economic and scientific progress, and we seemed to lack either the wisdom or the means to keep our aggression within safe and appropriate bounds. Indeed, the shocking discovery that six million Jews had been systematically slaughtered in the Nazi camps, an atrocity that had originated in Germany, a leading player in the Enlightenment, called the whole notion of human progress into question. The Holocaust is sometimes depicted as an eruption of premodern barbarism; it is even seen as an expression of religious impulses that had been repressed in secular society. But historians and social critics have challenged this view. 37 It is certainly true that Christian anti-Semitism had been a chronic disease in Europe since the time of the Crusades; and while individual Christians protested against the horror and tried to save their Jewish neighbors, many of the denominations were largely and shamefully silent. Hitler had never officially left the Catholic Church and should have been excommunicated; Pope Pius XII neither condemned nor distanced himself from the Nazi programs. But to blame the entire catastrophe on religion is simply—and perhaps even dangerously—inaccurate. Far from being in conflict with the rational pursuit of well-organized, goal-oriented modernity, the hideous efficiency of the Nazis was a supreme example of it. Rulers had long initiated policies of ethnic cleansing when setting up their modern, centralized states. In order to use all the human resources at their disposal and to maintain productivity, governments had found it necessary to bring out-groups such as the Jews into the mainstream, but the events of the 1930s and 1940s showed that this tolerance was merely superficial and the old bigotry still lurked beneath. To carry out their program of genocide, the Nazis relied on the technology of the industrial age: the railways, the advanced chemical industry, and rationalized bureaucracy and management. The camp replicated the factory, the hallmark of industrial society, but what it mass-produced was death.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  What this passage, which reveals otherwise undisclosed interiorities, exposes is that Eva's and Davis's sexual experiences are polarized. Whereas she analogizes him to a husband-thereby, in essence sanctioning their sexual intimacy-he likens her to a horse, reducing their relations to the animalistic, wherein sex with her translates not into intimacy but copulation. His assertion that he wants her only to "ride her" is reminiscent of his initial impressions of her as the embodiment of unbridled and "anormative" sexuality. To "ride," denotatively speaking, is to sit on, to manage, or to be carried to a finite destination (by an animal or inanimate object). It involves motion and a transitive element that does not entail reciprocity or a mutual exchange, in ways that render it exploitative. Davis's assertion that he wants to "ride" her typifies another dynamic: the sexual, the exploitative nature of sexual regulation, and-to allude to my previous discussion-the nexus of sexuality, power, knowledge, and control/conquest. Eva serves, to this end, as the means by which Davis reaches his "finite destination"-sexual stimulation, gratitude, and climax-in his "rein" (literally and figuratively) over Eva during their sexual engagements. Thus, in his notion of wanting "only" to "ride" Eva reverberate the ways sex, power, and conquest imbricate. Moreover, this scene, surprisingly, is one of the few instances in which, first, Eva is vocally expressive (with her expression marked by comprehension and linearity versus a stream of consciousness and unreliability) and in which she initiates dialogue; and, second, sexual intimacy is not punctuated by violent excess or other extremities of desire. The scene is marked, however, by a particular emotional and psychological assault that alters the terms of their sexual engagement. Eva reverts back to and is once again overcome by silence (non-speech or vocality), to which Davis responds by asking her to "[s]ay something." After this she reveals, through narration not verbalization: "He turned me toward him, and went in me" (102). Not only does this reflect the degree to which Eva now experiences sex (not in a matrimonial but rather an intrusive sense), whereby Davis dictates the terms of engagement. But it is also emblematic of the pornographic, based on Lorde's assessment in which Eva merely becomes the conduit by which Davis experiences sensation, simulation, and sexual ecstasy without feeling. In his assessment of the novel, Jerry Ward notes that what Eva learns is sex "got from the street": "From the university of the streets," he writes, "Eva learns that sex is fucking and women are bitches and men are eternally on the watch for a good lay. She has the will to resist sexual abuse, but the will is stunted."22 While provocative in its notion of "sex got from the street," I would argue and indeed add one critical distinction. Eva's will to "resist" sexual abuse is not so much stunted as her will to contest and inflict sexual abuse is both intensified and actualized.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Religion seemed a way of returning to the precolonial roots of their culture and regaining a more authentic identity. Western foreign policy has also hastened the rise of fundamentalism in the Middle East. The coup organized by the CIA and British Intelligence in Iran (1953) that displaced the nationalist, secular ruler Muhammad Mosaddeq (1880–1967) and put the exiled shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi (1878–1944) back on the throne left Iranians with a sense of bitter humiliation, betrayal, and impotence. The failure of the international community to alleviate the plight of the Palestinians has led others to despair of a conventional political solution. Western support for such rulers as the shah and Saddam Hussein, who denied their people basic human rights, has also tarnished the democratic ideal, since the West seemed proudly to proclaim its belief in freedom while inflicting dictatorial regimes on others. It has also helped to radicalize Islam, since the mosque was often the only place where people could express their discontent. The rapid secularization of some of these countries has often taken the form of an assault on religion. In Europe and the United States, secularism developed gradually over a long period, and the new ideas and institutions had time to trickle down naturally to all members of the population. But many Muslim countries had to adopt the Western model in a mere fifty years or so. When KemalAtatürk (1881–1938) secularized Turkey, he closed down all the madrassas and abolished the Sufi orders. The shahs made their soldiers go through the streets tearing off women’s veils with their bayonets and ripping them to pieces. These reformers wanted their countries to look modern, even though only a small elite sector was familiar with the Western ethos. In 1935, Shah Reza Pahlavi ordered his soldiers to shoot at a crowd of unarmed demonstrators who were peacefully protesting against obligatory Western dress in Mashhad, one of the holiest shrines in Iran. Hundreds of Iranians died that day. In such a context, secularism does not appear a liberating option. Sunni fundamentalism developed in the concentration camps in which President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70) interred thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood without trial. Many of them had done nothing more incriminating than handing out leaflets or attending a meeting. In these vile prisons they were subjected to mental and physical torture and became radicalized. 9 Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) entered the camp as a moderate, but as a result of his imprisonment—he was tortured and finally executed—he evolved an ideology that is still followed by Islamists today. 10 When he heard Nasser vowing to confine Islam to the private sphere, secularism did not seem benign.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  While awaiting Onitsuka’s response, I realized that there was only one way to solve this cash flow problem once and for all. A small public offering. If we could sell 30 percent of Blue Ribbon, at two bucks a share, we could raise three hundred thousand dollars overnight. The timing for such an offering seemed ideal. In 1970 the first-ever venture capital firms were starting to sprout up. The whole concept of venture capital was being invented before our eyes, though the idea of what constituted a sound investment for venture capitalists wasn’t very broad. Most of the new venture capital firms were in Northern California, so they were mainly attracted to high-tech and electronics companies. Silicon Valley, almost exclusively. Since most of those companies had futuristic-sounding names, I formed a holding company for Blue Ribbon and gave it a name designed to attract tech-happy investors: Sports-Tek Inc. Woodell and I sent out fliers advertising the offering, then sat back and braced for the clamorous response. Silence. A month passed. Deafening silence. No one phoned. Not one person. That is, almost no one. We did manage to sell three hundred shares, at one dollar per. To Woodell and his mother. Ultimately we withdrew the offering. It was a humiliation, and in its wake I had many heated conversations with myself. I blamed the shaky economy. I blamed Vietnam. But first and foremost I blamed myself. I’d overvalued Blue Ribbon. I’d overvalued my life’s work. More than once, over my first cup of coffee in the morning, or while trying to fall asleep at night, I’d tell myself: Maybe I’m a fool? Maybe this whole damn shoe thing is a fool’s errand? Maybe, I thought. Maybe. I SCRAPED TOGETHER the twenty thousand dollars from our receivables, paid off the bank, and took delivery of the order from Onitsuka. Another sigh of relief. Followed by a tightening in the chest. What would I do the next time? And the next? I needed cash. That summer was unusually warm. Languorous days of golden sunshine, clear blue skies, the world a paradise. It all seemed to mock me and my mood. If 1967 had been the Summer of Love, 1970 was the Summer of Liquidity, and I had none. I spent most of every day thinking about liquidity, talking about liquidity, looking to the heavens and pleading for liquidity. My kingdom for liquidity. An even more loathsome word than “equity.” Eventually I did what I didn’t want to do, what I’d vowed never to do. I put the touch on anybody with ears. Friends, family, casual acquaintances. I even went with my hand out to former teammates, guys I’d sweated and trained and raced alongside. Including my former archrival, Grelle.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And the other day, when I saw you—you know, at the Rendezvous Room (though I hardly expect you remember), I said, My God, whats happened to Lance!—he looks terrible.” He stares calculatingly at Lance, and what he sees displeases him: It is again the Lance of the legend which Jamey must see destroyed. “And by the way, Lance-sweetheart, did you find him?... Oh, you know, whoever you were... looking... for... remember?—oh, look, theres Chick!” rushing away from Lance, leaving the words suspended behind him like a curse. “Chick, honey!” Jamey gushes. “I didnt expect to see you here—after that awful scene you had last night. I heard all about it! Did that tramp really rob you? Youve got to be more careful about picking anybody up on the Boulevard these days,” he says loudly, aiming at anyone here who might have been picked up on the Boulevard. Later I hear him say to someone else: “I think Lance is trying to fool us—hes not as happy as hes pretending. And what the hell’s happened to that little tramp Dean?” “I dont know,” the other answers. “I thought maybe he’d be here.... Youve got to admit,” he said, “Lance looks good.” “Dont let him fool you, honey, hes just pretending to look good. Dont you notice how there isnt too much light in here?” “Thank heaven for that, sweetie—you dont suffer from the dark yourself.” The stage is set. Lance O’Hara is surrounded by the waiting chorus.... But so far, Lance was perfect—laughing, moving from group to group, recalling incidents, love affairs, shamelessly flattering the extravagantly gushing women. “Didnt I tell you theyd all come?” he whispered to me. “The vicious fairies. And theyre disappointed it’s not a wake yet.” Like a summer storm in those areas where in one instant it changes from bright to thundering dark, it happened. Dean stood at the door—the same youngman who had talked to me that night on the Boulevard. Lance had been talking to someone. The sudden silence descending over the room like a blackwinged bird made him stop instinctively. All eyes alternated between the youngman at the door and Lance. Lance was suddenly livid, the circles around his eyes deepened. He whirled about, smiling—moving toward the youngman. “Dean! Youre just in time for the party!” His voice shook. The breathless chorus rehearses its lines. “Where have you been?” he asked casually, placing his hand falsely steadily on the boy’s shoulder. “Away,” Dean said curtly, and that word, thrust at Lance like a stone, makes the whisperers realize they have not turned up in vain. Lance dodges the stone, clings to the façade of composure. The conversations of those who understand—and soon, aware, of those who dont—stop abruptly as if the needle had been removed from a record. The whispers, ready to be released at any moment, are balanced like a great rock on a cliff, ready to tumble disastrously.

• From City of Night (1963)

  All this happened within perhaps a week. And more. More—forgotten... incidents stretching into a crowded but somehow vastly empty plain. Within that period there appeared a face which at the time had little significance but which I would remember later. Outside of Coffee Andy’s—a good pickup place if you can avoid the periodically rousting cops—a very young boy whom I recognize as a hustler asks me for a match. “Howre you making it?” he asked me. “Okay.” I distrusted him. “Made it today?” I hesitate. He said impatiently: “Oh, man, dig: You dont have to play square with me. Save it for the hicks. Im cool—Im making the same scene you are.” He was at the most 18. He looked like hundreds of other youngmen in Hollywood, not tall, almost thin—slouched; his pants, beltless, loose below the waist: a street-hood type with brown hair—not really handsome but of a type that scores find attractive. He has a look that may be meanness or a premature bitterness at the discovery of what life is really like. “Man,” hes saying, his eyes shifting scanning the street for a prospect, “you know what Im gonna do tonight? Im gonna find me a rich queer and clip him for every coin—I mean, Im gonna leave him pantless!... But, see, I aint been here too long—and I dont know the scene too good yet. So, see, what I’d dig: I’d dig finding some swinging cat wholl help me clip the queer—you know—take him to a dark street—or some cool pad youre Sure of....” I know what hes leading to, even before he says: “You wanna help me?... See, one of us picks him up. Both of us jump him—split the bread. You make it much better that way.” Typically, hes talking tough—impressing himself—but he needs someone to give him courage: another’s rashness spurring him on to the action.... I havent answered him. For some reason, I dislike him. “My name is Dean,” he was going on now, extending his hand, trying to be friends. “I just got into town a few days ago, like I say. I hitchhiked—that cocksucker that gave me a ride, he laid some bread on me,” he boasts, “and he told me all about this scene.” Despite the masculine street-hood exterior, the tough jive-sounds, there is something vaguely, subtly soft emerging about him. “But, shit, man,” he says, “you know what Im gonna do, man, when I really get to pinning this scene, man? Im gonna find me a real rich queer so I wont have to hassle it, man. Hell, man, I been sleeping sometimes in the flix, until they kick me out—and, man, I dont dig that scene. It’s hoomilating!...

• From Educated (2018)

  I mapped the trip. I’d need to jump from purlin to purlin, about fifteen of them, spaced four feet apart, to get the chalk, then the same number back. It was exactly the sort of order from Dad that was usually met with Shawn saying, “She’s not doing that.” “Shawn, will you run me over in the forklift?” “You can fetch it,” Shawn said. “Unless your fancy school and fancy boyfriend have made you too good for it.” His features hardened in a way that was both new and familiar. I shimmied the length of a purlin, which took me to the framing beam at the barn’s edge. This was more dangerous in one sense—if I fell to the right, there would be no purlins to catch me—but the framing beam was thicker, and I could walk it like a tightrope. That was how Dad and Shawn became comrades, even if they only agreed on one thing: that my brush with education had made me uppity, and that what I needed was to be dragged through time. Fixed, anchored to a former version of myself. Shawn had a gift for language, for using it to define others. He began searching through his repertoire of nicknames. “Wench” was his favorite for a few weeks. “Wench, fetch me a grinding wheel,” he’d shout, or “Raise the boom, Wench!” Then he’d search my face for a reaction. He never found one. Next he tried “Wilbur.” Because I ate so much, he said. “That’s some pig,” he’d shout with a whistle when I bent over to fit a screw or check a measurement. Shawn took to lingering outside after the crew had finished for the day. I suspect he wanted to be near the driveway when Charles drove up it. He seemed to be forever changing the oil in his truck. The first night he was out there, I ran out and jumped into the jeep before he could say a word. The next night he was quicker on the draw. “Isn’t Tara beautiful?” he shouted to Charles. “Eyes like a fish and she’s nearly as smart as one.” It was an old taunt, blunted by overuse. He must have known I wouldn’t react on the site so he’d saved it, hoping that in front of Charles it might still have sting. The next night: “You going to dinner? Don’t get between Wilbur and her food. Won’t be nothin’ left of you but a splat on the pavement.” Charles never responded. We entered into an unspoken agreement to begin our evenings the moment the mountain disappeared in the rearview mirror. In the universe we explored together there were gas stations and movie theaters; there were cars dotting the highway like trinkets, full of people laughing or honking, always waving, because this was a small town and everybody knew Charles; there were dirt roads dusted white with chalk, canals the color of beef stew, and endless wheat fields glowing bronze.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Now she turned and addressed the group of goggling ladies. She said: ‘Nancy thinks it amusing, sometimes, to kick her little heels; and sometimes, of course, it is. But not tonight. Tonight, I’m afraid, it is only tiresome.’ She looked at me again, but spoke, still, as if to her guests. ‘She will go upstairs,’ she said levelly, ‘until she is sorry. Then she will apologise to the ladies she has upset. And then, I shall think of some little punishment for her.’ Her gaze flicked over the remains of my costume. ‘Something suitably Roman, perhaps.’ ‘Roman?’ I answered. ‘Well, you should know about that. How old are you today? You were there, weren’t you, at Hadrian’s palace?’ It was a mild enough insult, after all that I had said. But as I said it, there came a titter from the crowd. It was only a small one; but if there was ever anyone who could not bear to be tittered at, that person was Diana. I think she would rather have been shot between the eyes. Now, hearing that stifled laugh, she grew even paler. She took a step towards me, and raised her hand; she did it so quickly, I had time only to catch the flash of something dark at the end of her arm - then there came what seemed to be a small explosion at my cheek. She had still held Dickie’s book, all this time; and now she had struck me with it. I gave a cry, and staggered. When I put a hand to my face, I found blood upon it - from my nose, but also from a gash beneath my eye, where the edge of the leather-bound spine had caught it. I reached for a shoulder or an arm, against which to steady myself; but now all the ladies shrank away from me, and I almost stumbled. I looked once at Diana. She also had reeled, after dealing me the blow; but Evelyn was beside her with her arm about her waist. She said nothing to me; and I, at last, was quite incapable of speech. I think I coughed, or snorted. There came a splatter of blood upon the Turkey rug, that made the ladies draw even further from me, and give little moues of surprise and disgust. Then I turned, and staggered from the room. At the door stood Maria’s whippet, Satin, and when he saw me he barked.