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 Art of Seduction (2001)

  Don Mateo wasted no time. He bought her a villa, gave her plenty of were not fear that makes money to decorate it. After eight days the house was ready. She would re- love interesting. With what ceive him there at midnight. What joys awaited him. kind of love do we embrace nature? Is there not a Don Mateo showed up at the appointed hour. The barred door to the secretive anxiety and horror courtyard was closed. He rang the bell. She came to the other side of the in it, because its beautiful door. "Kiss my hands," she said through the bars. "Now kiss the hem of my harmony works its way out skirt, and the tip of my foot in its slipper." He did as she requested. "That is of lawlessness and wild confusion, its security out good," she said. "Now you may go." His shocked expression just made her of perfidy? But precisely laugh. She ridiculed him, then made a confession: she was repulsed by him. this anxiety captivates the Now that she had a villa in her name, she was free of him at last. She called most. So also with love, if it is to he interesting. out, and a young man appeared from the shadows of the courtyard. As Don Behind it ought to brood Mateo watched, too stunned to move, they began to make love on the the deep, anxious night floor, right before his eyes. from which springs the flower of love. The next morning Conchita appeared at Don Mateo's house, supposedly to see if he had committed suicide. To her surprise, he hadn't—in fact —SØREN KIERKEGAARD, THE SEDUCER'S DIARY, he slapped her so hard she fell to the ground. "Conchita," he said, "you TRANSLATED BY HOWARD V. have made me suffer beyond all human strength. You have invented moral HONG AND EDNA H. HONG tortures to try them on the only man who loved you passionately. I now declare that I am going to possess you by force." Conchita screamed she would never be his, but he hit her again and again. Finally, moved by her The lovely marble creature tears, he stopped. Now she looked up at him lovingly. Forget the past, she coughed and rearranged the said, forget all that I have done. Now that he hit her, now that she could see sable around her shoulders. his pain, she felt certain he truly loved her. She was still a mozita—the affair • "Thank you for the lesson in classics," I replied, with the young man the night before had been only for show, ending as "but I cannot deny that in soon as he had left—and she still belonged to him. "You are not going to your peaceful and sunny take me by force. I await you in my arms." Finally she was sincere. To his world just as in our misty climate man and woman supreme delight, he discovered that she was indeed still a virgin.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "The game went on for a long time. My buttocks were ever the more sore. It felt quite enormous to me. I'm sure you understand the feeling. I felt swollen and huge, and very naked, and each welt was stinging under the paddle, and I was growing out of breath and desperate lest I fail, as I had to scurry every farther away from her to retrieve the gold balls. But the new sensation was this filling of me, the stuffing of my anus, which I had now to hold tightly closed not to expel the gold balls against my will. I soon felt that my anus was widened and open, and at the same time stuffed mercilessly. "The game grew more and more frantic. I soon glimpsed others watching from the doors. I had often to hurry past the hem of another Lady in waiting. "I worked harder and harder, was stuffed every the more firmly by those strong leather-sheathed fingers. And though the tears were pouring down my face, and I was breathing rapidly and hoarsely, I managed to complete the game with no more than four cracks of the paddle at any round of it. "The Queen embraced me. She kissed me on the mouth and told me I was her loyal slave and her favorite. There was a ripple of approval throughout the Court, and she let me lie against her breasts for an instant as she held me. "Of course I was suffering. I was struggling to hold in the gold balls, and also to not let my penis rub against her gown and disgrace me. "She now sent for a small golden chamber pot. I knew then what she expected of me. And I know I must have blushed furiously. I had to squat over it and expel the toys I had gathered, and of course I did so. "The day was an endless round of tasks after that. "I shan't try to tell you all of them, save I had the Queen's absolute attention and absorption, and I intended with all my heart to keep it. I still did not know for certain that I might not be sent back to the kitchen. At any moment, I might be sent back to the kitchen. "I remember many things. We were in the garden for a long time, the Queen walking among her roses as she much enjoys, and driving me along with that rod with the leather phallus at the end of it. It seemed sometimes she almost lifted my buttocks on the rod. My knees badly needed relief of the soft grass after the floors of the castle. And I was so sore and tender by this time that the slightest stroke of my buttocks brought pain. But she only walked about. And then she came to a little summer house of lattices and vines, and drove me ahead of her onto the flagstones there.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "O, this is too dreadful," Beauty gasped. Each person who had handled her or punished her had in some way admired her. And when she thought of her beautiful Alexi treated this way, she felt weak with fear. "Of course I did not know this was to be my regular station. I was taken out hours later when after the evening meal was served they again chose to rape me. Only this time I was thrown down and spread out on a large wooden table. And for their pleasure they paddled me again this time with coarse wooden paddles, saying the leather paddles they had used earlier were now too good for me. They held my legs wide apart, they lamented they would not torture my private parts without risking punishment. But by this they did not mean my penis which they punished a great deal with slaps, and rough handling. "I was frantic by this time. I cannot explain it. There were so many of them, they were so crude, and my movements or sounds were nothing to them. The Queen had noticed my smallest change of expression. She had scoffed at my growls and struggles, but she had savored all of it. These crude cooks and kitchen boys rubbed my hair, lifted my face, slapped my buttocks and spanked me as if I had no sense whatsoever. "They would speak of me, 'What plump buttocks,' and 'Look at those strong legs,' and that sort of thing as if I were a mere animal. They pinched me, poking me, jabbing me as they pleased, and then they set to raping me. They greased me well with their cruel hands as they had done before, and when they had finished, they flushed me out with some crude piping attached to a wineskin filled with water. I cannot tell you the mortification of this, to be washed inside and out by them. The Queen had at least allotted to me privacy in these matters, as the needs of our bowels and bladders do not interest her. But to be emptied by this violent stream of cold water and in front of these piggish men made me weak and spiritless. "I was limp when they hung me back in the refuse. And in the morning my arms ached, and I was sickened by the stench that rose around me. Roughly they pulled me out and shackled me on my knees again and threw me down for some food on a plate. It had been a day since I had eaten; yet I did not wish to eat for their amusement, as they would not allow me the use of my hands. It was nothing to them. I refused the meals until the third day when I could endure it no longer and I lapped up the gruel they gave me like a hungry puppy. They never took the slightest notice.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And nothing more than that which could be violated. "But my face was aflame, my hands trembling, I obeyed. A great cheer went up from the crowd. Tears slipped down my face. With a long cane, Felix lifted my balls for them to see, and pushed my penis this way and that to display its defenselessness, and all the while I had to hold my buttocks apart and display my anus. Whenever I relaxed my hands, he commanded me sharply to pull the flesh wider apart and threatened me with chastisement. 'That will infuriate her Highness,' he said, 'and amuse the crowd immensely.' Then to a loud approving cry, the phallus was shoved securely back into my anus. I was made to press my lips to the wood of the turntable. And I was led back to my position beside the Queen's coach, Felix pulling my bridle over his shoulder as I trotted with my head lifted behind him. "By the last village I was no more used to it than at the first. But by this time Felix had assured the Queen that I displayed all conceivable humility. My beauty was unrivaled by that of any past Prince. Half the village youth of both sexes was in love with me. The Queen kissed my eyelids when I received those compliments. "There was a grand banquet that night at the castle. You've seen such a banquet as there was one held for you at your presentation. I had not seen it before. And I had my first experience of serving wine for the Queen and for the others to whom she sent me ceremoniously as a gift now and then. When my eyes caught those of Princess Lynette I smiled at her without thinking about it. "I felt I could do anything I was commanded to do. I had no fear of anything. And so I can say by then I had yielded. But the truest indication of my yielding was that both Leon and Lord Gregory -- when they had the chance -- told me I was obdurate and rebellious. They said I mocked everything. I said this was not true when I had the opportunity to answer, but I seldom had such an opportunity. "Many other things have happened to me since then, but the lessons learned in those early months were the most important. "Princess Lynette is still here, of course. You'll come to know who she is in time, and though I can bear anything from my Queen, from Lord Gregory, and from Leon, I still find it difficult to bear Princess Lynette. But I should stake my life on it that no one knows this. "Now, it's almost morning. I must return you to the dressing room, and also bathe you, so no one knows we've been together.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  In the Special Punishment Hall they had no need to stay on their knees and could stand around me as they liked. At once the round handle of a paddle was thrust in my anus. My legs were dragged wide apart. I was shuddering, and when the paddle handle proceeded to rape me with back and forth thrusts as roughly as any cock I'd ever received, I knew my face was red, and that my tears were threatening. Now and then in the midst of all this, I'd feel cool little lips pressed to my ear, my face pinched, my chin stroked, and then they would assault my nipples again. "'Beautiful little tits,' said one of the girls as she did this. She had flaxen hair, as straight as yours. 'When I've finished my work, they'll feel like breasts,' she said, and proceeded to stretch them, and stroke them. "All the while, to my shame, my cock was hard as if it knew its mistresses even when I refused to acknowledge them. This girl with the flaxen hair laid her thighs against mine, growing fiercer as she pulled on my nipples. I felt her wet sex against me. 'You think you are too good to suffer at our hands, Prince Alexi?' she crooned. I wouldn't answer her. "Then the paddle handle in my anus thrust harder and more roughly. My hips were pushed forward as cruelly as they had ever been by my stable boy Lord, and I was almost lifted off the floor by the thrusts. 'You think you are too good for us to punish?' she asked again. The other girls laughed and watched her as she commenced to slap my cock hard from right to left. I winced, I could not quite control myself. I wished for all the world that I were gagged, but I wasn't. She ran her fingers over my lips and my teeth to remind me of this, and commanded me to answer her respectfully. "And when I didn't she took her paddle now, and withdrawing the instrument of rape, she proceeded, as she kept her face next to mine, her eyelashes tickling the side of my face, to spank me soundly. Of course I was already sore as we all are, always, and her blows were very hard, and they were without rhythm. She caught me off guard and when I winced and groaned, all the girls laughed appreciatively. "My cock was slapped by others. My nipples twisted by them, but she had clearly shown her supremacy. 'You will beg me for mercy, Prince Alexi,' she said. 'I am not the Queen, you may beg me, for all the good it will do you.' They thought all that was amusing too, and she continued to spank me harder and harder.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She kissed Beauty. The Queen's rippling hair fell down around her, full of perfume, and for the first time, Beauty felt the velvety white skin of the Queen's face, and she realized the Queen's breasts were pressed against her. Beauty's hips moved forward, she started to gasp, but just before it became too much for her, this shock penetrating to her wet, throbbing sex, the Queen suddenly pushed her down and drew back smiling. She held Beauty's thighs. Beauty's legs were open. And the hungry little sex wanted for all the world for the legs to be crushed closed against it. The pleasure subsided slightly, back into that great never ending rhythm of craving. Beauty moaned, her brows knit in a frown, and the Queen suddenly pushed her off, slapping Beauty's face so hard that Beauty cried out before she could stop herself. "My Queen, she is so young and tender," said Prince Alexi. "Don't try my patience," the Queen answered. Beauty lay facedown on the bed crying. "Rather ring for Felix and have him bring Lady Juliana. I know how young and tender is my little slave, and how much she has to learn, and that she must be punished for small disobedience. But that is not what concerns me. I should see more of her, more of her spirit, her efforts to please, and...well, I have promised Lady Juliana." It did not make any difference how hard Beauty cried, they would proceed, and Prince Alexi could not stop them. Beauty heard Felix come, she heard the Queen walking about the room, and finally when Beauty's tears were now a steady silent flow, the Queen said, "Get down from the bed, and prepare yourself to greet Lady Juliana." LADY JULIANA IN THE QUEEN'S CHAMBER LADY JULIANA came into the room exactly as she had come into the Hall of Punishments, her steps light and springing, her round face full of prettiness and animation. She wore a rose pink gown, and there were pink roses threaded through her long thick braids with pink ribbon. She seemed too full of light and gaiety for the vast shadowy chamber with the torches throwing huge uneven shadows on the high arched ceiling. The Queen sat in the corner on a great chair that resembled a throne, her foot on a plump green velvet cushion. Her arms rested on the chair, and she smiled faintly when Lady Juliana bowed to her. Prince Alexi, sitting on his heels at the Queen's feet, very politely kissed the pretty Lady's slippers. Beauty knelt in the center of the flowered carpet, still much shaken and tear-stained, and as soon as Lady Juliana approached her she kissed her slippers as Alexi had done, only perhaps a little more fervently. Beauty was surprised at her response to Lady Juliana. She had been appalled to hear her name, and yet she almost welcomed her. She felt some connection with her. Lady Juliana had, after all, showered Beauty with affectionate attention.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Yes, everything’s brought to such a pitch of perfection nowadays,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, with a moist and blissful yawn. “The theater, for instance, and the entertainments ... a—a—a!” he yawned. “The electric light everywhere ... a—a—a!” “Yes, the electric light,” said Levin. “Yes. Oh, and where’s Vronsky now?” he asked suddenly, laying down the soap. “Vronsky?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, checking his yawn; “he’s in Petersburg. He left soon after you did, and he’s not once been in Moscow since. And do you know, Kostya, I’ll tell you the truth,” he went on, leaning his elbow on the table, and propping on his hand his handsome ruddy face, in which his moist, good-natured, sleepy eyes shone like stars. “It’s your own fault. You took fright at the sight of your rival. But, as I told you at the time, I couldn’t say which had the better chance. Why didn’t you fight it out? I told you at the time that....” He yawned inwardly, without opening his mouth. “Does he know, or doesn’t he, that I did make an offer?” Levin wondered, gazing at him. “Yes, there’s something humbugging, diplomatic in his face,” and feeling he was blushing, he looked Stepan Arkadyevitch straight in the face without speaking. “If there was anything on her side at the time, it was nothing but a superficial attraction,” pursued Oblonsky. “His being such a perfect aristocrat, don’t you know, and his future position in society, had an influence not with her, but with her mother.” Levin scowled. The humiliation of his rejection stung him to the heart, as though it were a fresh wound he had only just received. But he was at home, and the walls of home are a support.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The silence lasted for two minutes: Dolly was thinking of herself. That humiliation of which she was always conscious came back to her with a peculiar bitterness when her sister reminded her of it. She had not looked for such cruelty in her sister, and she was angry with her. But suddenly she heard the rustle of a skirt, and with it the sound of heart-rending, smothered sobbing, and felt arms about her neck. Kitty was on her knees before her. “Dolinka, I am so, so wretched!” she whispered penitently. And the sweet face covered with tears hid itself in Darya Alexandrovna’s skirt. As though tears were the indispensable oil, without which the machinery of mutual confidence could not run smoothly between the two sisters, the sisters after their tears talked, not of what was uppermost in their minds, but, though they talked of outside matters, they understood each other. Kitty knew that the words she had uttered in anger about her husband’s infidelity and her humiliating position had cut her poor sister to the heart, but that she had forgiven her. Dolly for her part knew all she had wanted to find out. She felt certain that her surmises were correct; that Kitty’s misery, her inconsolable misery, was due precisely to the fact that Levin had made her an offer and she had refused him, and Vronsky had deceived her, and that she was fully prepared to love Levin and to detest Vronsky. Kitty said not a word of that; she talked of nothing but her spiritual condition. “I have nothing to make me miserable,” she said, getting calmer; “but can you understand that everything has become hateful, loathsome, coarse to me, and I myself most of all? You can’t imagine what loathsome thoughts I have about everything.” “Why, whatever loathsome thoughts can you have?” asked Dolly, smiling.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  Between 1942 and 1945, he was a gunnery officer aboard the USS Bradford , a destroyer in the Pacific. After the war, he worked for the Southern California Gas Company. He wrote welding specifications for the pipelines that cross beneath the Los Angeles basin. He designed pipelines for the Gas Company for thirty years. 178 I did not know why my father cried that afternoon, after arguing with my mother. Now, I think they were tears of humiliation. 179 The shopping center’s designers calculated its psychological effects. The designers said drivers will become subconsciously anxious when they see so many rows of parked cars. The main parking lot at the shopping center slopes down from the May Co. toward the boulevard, three hundred feet away. The last row of parked cars before the highway is four feet lower than the street surface. The designers put the acres of parking lot below the passing traffic, so that anxious drivers wouldn’t see so many cars and miss the stores. 180 Ben Weingart’s shopping center was graded to stand out from the surrounding cars, the Los Angeles Mirror said, “like the screen in a drive-in movie theater.” 181 The shopping center had more than one hundred acres of parking when it opened. Joe Eichenbaum worried about the frustration of finding an empty parking space in so many acres of parked cars. He proposed a system of towers and lights that would direct drivers. A spotter on top of the May Co. building, and others in towers at either end of the mall, would activate a system of colored lights at the ends of the rows of parking spaces. The colored lights would show drivers where they could park. A control booth was put up on top of the May Co. building, but the rest of the system was never built. 182 Louis Boyar had faith in planning. He believed in a grid of streets meeting at right angles, and small houses centered on fifty-by-one-hundred-foot lots. Boyar had drawn and redrawn this plan for a city while building houses in Long Beach in the late 1930s. Occasionally, when the work got slow, he sat down with a map and drew straight lines into the white space of the Montana Ranch. He drew residential streets on the empty spaces in the grid laid out by Colonel de Neve, whose orders from the king of Spain specified house lots that were fifty-five feet wide by one hundred and ten feet deep. 183 The lots on Louis Boyar’s design were slightly smaller than those required by the king of Spain. Boyar’s lots were fifty by one hundred feet, or five thousand square feet. This was the minimum lot size allowed by Los Angeles County. 184 When places to live must be built quickly, cheaply, and profitably, they are built on a grid of right angles.

• From Querelle (1953)

  "Just what us old sea dogs ought to chomp on," he said to himself, ((the balls of handsome young men." Circumspectly, he turned round again . In front of the sprawling sailors, who from this distance looked like one great blob of virility, stood Querclle, his back to the Lieutenant. And Seblon caught just the righ t moment to see him bending his strong legs in their white ducks, hands resting on buttocks, straining ( the Lieutenant envisaged the congested face and the smile of the crewman waiting for deliverance, his eyes bulging out of his head, his smile freezing ) , straining even harder, and then letting fly-straight at him-a barraee of sonorous, lively, roughand-tumble farts-so loud that they seemed to rend those glorious white bell-bottoms truly from top to bottom ( Querelle did, indeed, refer to them as his "farting-gear" ) -greeted by a thousand cheers and salutes, the gales of laugh ter emitted by his buddies. 1\.,tortified, the Lieutenant quickly averted his eyes and 136 I JEAN GENET moved off. Querelle accomplished the most dangerous of his delights without consciously choosing to include a mistake ·in them, but as soon as he left the scene of a robbery, or even a murder, he immediately perceived the mistakes-at times, the several mistakes-he had, inadvertently, made. Quite often they weren't anything much. Some slight slip in the very act, a shaky hand, a cigarette lighter left behind in the dead man's fingers, a · silhouette shadow he had cast on some bright surface that he thought might have remained there permanently; bagatelles, certainly, yet sometimes he even feared that his eyes-having taken in the image-might render his victim visible to others. After each one of his crimes he reviewed it in his mind. That was when he discovered the mistake. His amazing retrospective lucidity uncovered the only one he had made. (There always was at least one. ) And then, so as not to be devoured by despair, with a smile on his lips, Querelle offered up this mistake, this error of his, to his guardian star. He convinced himself of the affective equivalent of this thought: "We'll see. I did it on purpose. On purpose. And isn't that a big joke." But instead of being down in the mouth with fear, he felt elated by it, living, as he did, in a deep, violent and finally organic belief in his lucky star. His smile was an act of sympathetic magic, directed at that star. He was certain that such a deity, the protector of assassins, was a joyful one-the sadness one could see, and even he could sometimes discern in that smile, rising into his consciousness only in those moments when he felt aware of the absolute loneliness such a most particular destiny imposed on him. "What would I do if I hadn't got it?" Which was as much as to say : "What would I be, without it?

• From Querelle (1953)

  Standing there on the carpet, bare feet flat on the floor, her physique appeared no longer as imposing as it had when s�e was wearing her heels. The width of her hips didn't seem to make any sense now, as it did not sustain and balance the heavy folds of some silken material. Her breasts looked less aggressive th_an before. She became immediately aware of ali this, and also of the fact that anger can only be expressed in the tragic manner, which requires the buskin and unfolds only in a wellsupported, not in �he least pendulous body. Madame Lysia_!le regretted the passing of the regal era in women's fashions. She missed those corsets, bustles, whalebones that stiffened the body, making it appear both ferocious and authoritative enough to hold the baser instincts in check. She would have liked to be able to squeeze into a pink corset, bending its hard yet flexible stays, and feel the four garters dangling against her thighs. But she was naked, barefoot on the carpet. She felt monstrously inconsistent, falling apart desolate: "So I'm to be shamed into feeling like some fat frump in carpet slippers? But I am divine . . . " Then her �ind became instantly clouded with the vision, clear yet indescribable even to herself, of two sinewy and muscular bodies confronting the soft and crumbling mass of her own, overly corpulent one. She stepped i�to her shoes and regained a little of her proud bearing. "Robert . . . Robert . . . but Robert, look at me! I'm your 187 I QUERELLE lover. And � love you. You just don't understand how I feel , "I've got nothing else to say about that. \Vhat do you want, for crissakes. You're making mountains out of molehills." "But my sweet cabbagehead, I just want you to be the one and only. \Vhat makes me so unhappy is to see there are two of you. I'm afraid for you. I'm afraid you'll never be able to be yourself. Just think about that." She stood naked under the lighted chandelier. At the comer of his mouth Robert still retained the last vestige of a smile. But his eyes were somber, as he stared at Lysiane's knees and through them at some very distant horizon. "\Vhy did you say we did filthy things? That 'you were fed up with our filth'?" Robert's voice sounded as remote as his gaze, and as calm; but Lysiane, who had studied her lov_er's reactions, heard in it a willingness to embark upon the explication of geometrical theorems; within that voice was sounded an instrument-or rather, an organ-whose function it was to see. With that voice went an eye that was determined to pierce the darkness. Lysiane did not answer. "Well? That's what you said, dammit. What filth were you talking about?"

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  Between 1942 and 1945, he was a gunnery officer aboard the USS Bradford , a destroyer in the Pacific. After the war, he worked for the Southern California Gas Company. He wrote welding specifications for the pipelines that cross beneath the Los Angeles basin. He designed pipelines for the Gas Company for thirty years. 178 I did not know why my father cried that afternoon, after arguing with my mother. Now, I think they were tears of humiliation. 179 The shopping center’s designers calculated its psychological effects. The designers said drivers will become subconsciously anxious when they see so many rows of parked cars. The main parking lot at the shopping center slopes down from the May Co. toward the boulevard, three hundred feet away. The last row of parked cars before the highway is four feet lower than the street surface. The designers put the acres of parking lot below the passing traffic, so that anxious drivers wouldn’t see so many cars and miss the stores. 180 Ben Weingart’s shopping center was graded to stand out from the surrounding cars, the Los Angeles Mirror said, “like the screen in a drive-in movie theater.” 181 The shopping center had more than one hundred acres of parking when it opened. Joe Eichenbaum worried about the frustration of finding an empty parking space in so many acres of parked cars. He proposed a system of towers and lights that would direct drivers. A spotter on top of the May Co. building, and others in towers at either end of the mall, would activate a system of colored lights at the ends of the rows of parking spaces. The colored lights would show drivers where they could park. A control booth was put up on top of the May Co. building, but the rest of the system was never built. 182 Louis Boyar had faith in planning. He believed in a grid of streets meeting at right angles, and small houses centered on fifty-by-one-hundred-foot lots. Boyar had drawn and redrawn this plan for a city while building houses in Long Beach in the late 1930s. Occasionally, when the work got slow, he sat down with a map and drew straight lines into the white space of the Montana Ranch. He drew residential streets on the empty spaces in the grid laid out by Colonel de Neve, whose orders from the king of Spain specified house lots that were fifty-five feet wide by one hundred and ten feet deep. 183 The lots on Louis Boyar’s design were slightly smaller than those required by the king of Spain. Boyar’s lots were fifty by one hundred feet, or five thousand square feet. This was the minimum lot size allowed by Los Angeles County. 184 When places to live must be built quickly, cheaply, and profitably, they are built on a grid of right angles.

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  This dragon image pops up again and again as the main antagonist in the book. As his brother’s external needs dominate the house, David retreats more and more into his dreams and imagination. We see the family story unfold as David’s connection to his subconscious, Jungian world deepens. Soon, entire pages are drawn with nonliteral imagery. Doctors are cats, a dead grandfather is a giant-beaked bird, and the dragon of the disease grows increasingly larger and coils around itself over and over again. Epileptic is masterful because it examines deeply the connection between the artist’s drive to depict the inner world and the events of his childhood that created it. ARCHETYPES AND INNER WORLDS The drawings in Epileptic are such powerful renditions of an internal world, it’s no surprise they mimic the illustrations Carl Jung made when mapping out his vision of the unconscious. These samples from Jung’s The Red Book coupled with drawings from Epileptic show imagery and internal myth working its way through generations. MONSTERS by Ken Dahl Monsters (2009, Secret Acres) by Ken Dahl is all about his diagnosis with herpes. And he goes in for depicting the virus in as much gross and funny detail as possible. He wildly showcases the physiological details but he also finds amazing, graphic ways to depict humiliation, shame, and self-loathing. EXAGGERATION AND GROTESQUERIE There are many great visual solutions in this book. The herpes virus appears everywhere, streaming up from under the ground and later as the sun in the sky before it becomes a wrapper around his whole existence for a year. The virus becomes a constant companion he lives with and sleeps with in hilarious sections that feel like a bad roommate story. Ken by Ken And when he decides to learn more about it he shows himself literally diving deep into the disease to begin an instructive tour-de-force. Monsters is a wild book.You have to revel in drawing, and a sort of Mad-magazine-like grossness to draw like Dahl. His love for drawing and his personal, visceral subject matter are a perfect match. Visual Language MY STORY I tried everything I was capable of with this story and plenty I wasn’t. RATS AND RIVERS Simple things like finding the right metaphor for certain ideas. The financial realities of New York City and New York itself became an enormous rat sitting in the water, which dovetailed with images in my own imagination of my wife and I traveling by life raft down a river. That rat resurfaces a couple more times. And boats kept reappearing in my line of vision in reality, so they turned up in the book, too. So much so that sometimes, I’m not even sure what a particular metaphor meant—as in this example below of ancient Polynesian explorers making their way to Hawaii. When I drew it, I knew only that it was more alive than a simple illustration of the text.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And suddenly it was a great comfort that he was so near to her. "Now look up and to your left," he said now, and she could see his lips spread into a smile. "You see?" For one instant Beauty beheld what was surely an impossibility, but before she could look again, or clear the tears from her eyes, a great Lady came between her and this distant vision, and with shock, she felt the Lady's hands upon her. She felt the cool fingers gathering her heavy breasts, and twisting them almost painfully. She trembled, trying desperately not to cry out. For others had gathered around her, and behind her she felt a pair of very slow and calm hands parting her legs even more. And now someone touched her face, and another hand pinched the calf of her leg almost cruelly. It seemed her body was all concentrated then in its shameful and secret places. There was a throbbing in the tips of her breasts, and those hands felt cold as if she herself were burning, and now she felt fingers examining her buttocks and prodding even at that tiny and most concealed of openings. She couldn't help but moan, but she kept her lips tightly shut, and the tears fell down her cheeks. And for one instant she thought of nothing but what she had glimpsed an instant ago before the procession of Lords and Ladies had intercepted her vision. High up along the wall of the Great Hall, on a broad stone ledge, she had glimpsed a row of naked women. It had not seemed possible, but she had seen it. They were all of the young like herself, and they stood with their hands clasped behind their necks as the Prince had taught her to do, and their eyes were down, and she could see the glow of the fire on the curl of pubic hair between each pair of legs, and the swelling, pink nipples of their bosoms. She could not believe it. She did not want it to be so, and yet if it were so...well...again only confusion. Was she all the more terrified, or was she glad that she was not the only one enduring this unspeakable humiliation? But she could not even think of this, shocking as it was, for the hands were all over her. She had uttered a sharp cry to feel them touching her very sex, and smoothing the hair there, and then to her horror, as her face burned and she shut her eyes tight, she felt a pair of long fingers gliding into her sex and widening it.

• From Querelle (1953)

  186 I JEAN GENET "Your brother. Yo u live in one another." Robert's abrup � tone and his suddenly quite inhumanly hard eyes hurt her most cruelly. She hoped he would soon reach a high point in his anger that would aiiow him to spew out, all over those sheets, ali his love for his brother and for their alikeness. "And of course there's no room for me. You know there's no way I could pass between you two. You just leave me standing there. I can't squeeze through, I'm too fat for that ... That's right, that's right-I'm too fat!" Standing there on the carpet, bare feet flat on the floor, her physique appeared no longer as imposing as it had when s�e was wearing her heels. The width of her hips didn't seem to make any sense now, as it did not sustain and balance the heavy folds of some silken material. Her breasts looked less aggressive th_an before. She became immediately aware of ali this, and also of the fact that anger can only be expressed in the tragic manner, which requires the buskin and unfolds only in a well supported, not in �he least pendulous body. Madame Lysia_!le regretted the passing of the regal era in women's fashions. She missed those corsets, bustles, whalebones that stiffened the body, making it appear both ferocious and authoritative enough to hold the baser instincts in check. She would have liked to be able to squeeze into a pink corset, bending its hard yet flexible stays, a nd feel the four garters dangling against her thighs. But she was naked, barefoot on the carpet. She felt monstrously in consistent, falling apart desolate: "So I'm to be shamed into feel ing like some fat frump in carpet slippers? But I am divine ... " Then her �ind became instantly clouded with the vision, clear yet indescribable even to herself, of two sinewy and muscular bodies confronting the soft and crumbling mass of her own, overly corpulent one. She stepped i�to her shoes and regained a little of her proud bearing. "Robert ... Robert ... but Robert, look at me! I'm your

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And she drove me at once to obey as I hopped up on the stool and with a great but quick effort managed to secure my balance. It was that same miserable squatting position in which my stable boy Lord had punished me. And all the Court could now see my genitals displayed if they hadn't seen them before. "'Turn around slowly,' she commanded, in order to show me to all eyes, 'so the Lords and Ladies can see the little pet that performs for them tonight!' and again she gave me numerous exquisite cracks of the paddle. There was a sprinkling of applause from the little crowd, and the sounds of wine being poured, and no sooner had I executed a complete turn, the slapping of the paddle ringing in my ears, then she ordered me to make a quick turn around the little stage on all fours with my chin and chest on the ground as I had done for her earlier. "It was here I had to remind myself of my intentions. I rushed fast to obey, arching my back, my knees apart, yet moving swiftly as the heels of her boots clicked beside me and my buttocks were writing under her blows. I did not try to hold their muscles still, but let them tense, let my hips even rise and fall as they were inclined to do, shrinking from the blows, yet receiving them. And as I moved along the white marble floor, the room a blur of faces over me, I felt this is my natural state, this is what I am, there is nothing before me or after me. I could hear the responses of the Court; they laughed at this miserable position, and there was a growing excitement to their talk. The little performance had them much engaged, jaded as they were. I was being admired for my abandon. I groaned with each crack of the paddle without even thinking to stop it. I let the groans come freely, and arched my back to even greater degree. "And when the task was complete and I was again driven into the center of the circle, I heard applause around me. "My cruel trainer didn't pause. She commanded me at once to hop upon another stool, and from that stool to one that was even higher. I squatted on each in turn, and when her spanks caught me my hips moved forward with them without restraint and my moans, my natural moans, were surprisingly loud to me. "'Yes, my Princess,' I said after each command, and my voice sounded tremulous to me, though deep, and full of suffering. 'Yes, my Princess,' I said again as she ordered me finally to stand before her, legs wide apart and slowly squat until I had achieved the height of which she approved.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She heard the rumbling of the old man's voice, and a woman say that the Prince's girl should serve the wine, should she not, so they might all see her? "And haven't they seen me," Beauty thought. Could it be worse than the Great Hall, and what if she spilled the wine? "Beauty, go to the sideboard and take the pitcher. Serve carefully and well, and come back to me," said the Prince, again without looking at her. Beauty moved through the shadows to find the gold pitcher on the sideboard. She could smell the fruity aroma of the wine, and she turned, feeling awkward and graceless, and approached the first table. "A common serving girl, slave," she thought, more keenly than she had thought anything when she had been displayed. With trembling hands she poured the wine slowly into goblet after goblet, and through her glazed vision saw smiles and heard whispered compliments. Now and then some haughty man or woman was quite indifferent to her. She was shocked once by a pinch on her rear and gasped to a general round of laughter. As she bent over the tables, she felt the nakedness of her belly, saw the chains shimmering as they connected her pinched nipples. Each common gesture made her feel more hopeless. She backed away from the last table, from a man who sat back with his elbow on the arm of his chair and smiled at her. And then she filled Lady Juliana's goblet and saw those bright round eyes looking up at her. "Lovely, lovely, O, I do wish you weren't so possessive of her," said Lady Juliana. "Put the pitcher down, my dear, and come here to me." Beauty obeyed and returned to the Lady's chair. When she saw the Lady snap her fingers and point to the floor, Beauty blushed. She fell to her knees, and then in a strange impulsive moment, she kissed the Lady's slippers. It seemed to happen very slowly. She found herself bending down towards the silver slippers and then she touched them with her lips fervently. "Ah, what a darling," said the Lady Juliana. "Give me only and hour with her." And Beauty felt the woman's hand on the back of her neck, caressing her, stroking her, and then gathering her hair back and smoothing it tenderly. Tears came to Beauty's eyes. "I am nothing," she thought. And there was that awareness again of some change in her, some quiet despair, except that her heart was racing. "I would not even have her here," said the Prince under his breath, "save my mother commands it, that she be treated like any other slave, that she be enjoyed by others. Given my own will, I would chain her to my bedpost. I would beat her. I would watch every tear, every change of color."

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  91 It is not simply missed opportunities that leave him the humiliation of his comfortable house and his regular habits. The opportunities, themselves, appear out of place. He prayed at first to be relieved of his life, and not to know when his prayer would be answered. When it was, he prayed for other people’s plans. 92 I learned about one of the thirty-two names on the city’s Vietnam memorial plaque. All I learned was that the name belonged to the son of a machinist. Even as an old man, in the 1980s, the machinist rode his motorcycle to work on the night shift at Douglas Aircraft. I spoke to him two or three times a year, but not about his son who had died in Vietnam. The old man continued to coach at the park near his house. He volunteered for twenty years to teach eight- and nine-year-old boys how to play baseball. Park sports have been coached by volunteers in my city since 1956. The coaches are often the sons, even the grandsons, of the first volunteers. Each year before he died, the machinist gave me $100 in cash to buy tickets to the city’s annual sports banquet for any coach or player who could not afford to go. 93 The question really was, who could be trusted to buy these small houses? Characteristically, the developers did not bother answering it. The subdivision’s sales manager said in 1951, “We sell happiness in homes.” His salesmen sold 30 to 50 houses a day, and more than 300 during one weekend, when the first unit of the subdivision opened. At one point, salesmen sold 107 houses in an hour. They sold 7,400 houses in less than ten months. Buyers only needed a steady job and the promise they would keep up the payments. 94 Sheetrock panels cover the interior walls of my house. Paint covers the plastered sheetrock. The walls have been painted white for more than thirty years. When my mother left the house to die in the hospital nearby, congestive heart failure had swelled her legs and feet, and made her clumsy. She sat on the edge of her bed and could not dress herself on the day she left. My father was outside, readying the car. I waited in the hallway, at the doorway to my room. At the last moment, she found a new fear. “Don’t come in,” she said to me. “I’m not covered.” She called out to my father, who came to the front door. “He can’t come in, he would see me,” she said to him. My father came back inside to help her dress in a clean nightgown and to keep from me the sight of my mother. I was thirty-one. After my father died, I had the rooms painted white again. [image "Image" file=Image00008.jpg] 95 His religion and living in this suburb have taught him shame. It is a lesson he takes on his daily walk to work.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  It was that same miserable squatting position in which my stable boy Lord had punished me. And all the Court could now see my genitals displayed if they hadn't seen them before. "'Turn around slowly,' she commanded, in order to show me to all eyes, 'so the Lords and Ladies can see the little pet that performs for them tonight!' and again she gave me numerous exquisite cracks of the paddle. There was a sprinkling of applause from the little crowd, and the sounds of wine being poured, and no sooner had I executed a complete turn, the slapping of the paddle ringing in my ears, then she ordered me to make a quick turn around the little stage on all fours with my chin and chest on the ground as I had done for her earlier. "It was here I had to remind myself of my intentions. I rushed fast to obey, arching my back, my knees apart, yet moving swiftly as the heels of her boots clicked beside me and my buttocks were writing under her blows. I did not try to hold their muscles still, but let them tense, let my hips even rise and fall as they were inclined to do, shrinking from the blows, yet receiving them. And as I moved along the white marble floor, the room a blur of faces over me, I felt this is my natural state, this is what I am, there is nothing before me or after me. I could hear the responses of the Court; they laughed at this miserable position, and there was a growing excitement to their talk. The little performance had them much engaged, jaded as they were. I was being admired for my abandon. I groaned with each crack of the paddle without even thinking to stop it. I let the groans come freely, and arched my back to even greater degree. "And when the task was complete and I was again driven into the center of the circle, I heard applause around me. "My cruel trainer didn't pause. She commanded me at once to hop upon another stool, and from that stool to one that was even higher. I squatted on each in turn, and when her spanks caught me my hips moved forward with them without restraint and my moans, my natural moans, were surprisingly loud to me. "'Yes, my Princess,' I said after each command, and my voice sounded tremulous to me, though deep, and full of suffering. 'Yes, my Princess,' I said again as she ordered me finally to stand before her, legs wide apart and slowly squat until I had achieved the height of which she approved. Then I must jump through the first hoop, hands behind my neck and somehow manage to squat again for her.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The words devastated Susan. On the spot, she knew she’d never forget them. But something about that incident steeled Susan’s spine. From the day Frank began dating her, he sensed an undergirding of strength in Susan. This girl, he thought, can handle anything. As high school drew to a close, Frank needed to decide on a future. He wanted to be a fighter pilot—a perfect way to combine flying and defense of his country. World War II had ended nearly a year earlier, but already tensions were building with the Soviet Union. No less an expert in looming tyranny than Winston Churchill now warned that “an iron curtain” had descended across Europe. Frank believed him. After scoring high on admissions exams, Frank enrolled at the United States Military Academy at West Point in the fall of 1946. Cadet Borman was all baby face and golden hair compared to his classmates. Many had already attended college, and at least half were veterans of World War II. In early fall, Borman tried out for the plebe (first year) football team. He’d been a star high school quarterback, but at this level he didn’t have the necessary arm strength. He joined anyway, as the varsity team’s assistant manager, in charge of gathering dirty socks and sweaty jockstraps. It was thrilling for Borman, who got to observe head coach Earl Blaik’s legendary intensity and to watch one of the young assistant coaches, Vince Lombardi, develop his own military coaching style. Borman fell in love with West Point. The rules, the order, the discipline—it all seemed designed to tune out distraction and allow a man to get on with what really mattered. As a kid, he’d already been different from his peers—he went after the things that were important to him, as if he were on a mission. At West Point, nothing mattered but the mission. He pledged himself to the academy’s motto—Duty, Honor, Country. It seemed to Borman that a person who believed in anything less wouldn’t get where he needed to go. All the while, Borman and Susan continued dating, if only by U.S. mail. She was still in Tucson, and they were separated by more than two thousand miles. West Point did not allow furloughs for plebes, even for holidays. Fearing he’d receive a breakup letter from Susan, Borman struck first, sending a letter to Susan saying they needed to cool their relationship. It only made sense, in light of their distance, his commitment to West Point, and the focus he’d need to make his new