Joy

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 Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  THE NASTY BITS Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones ANTHONY BOURDAIN To Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee Contents Preface SALTY System D The Evildoers A Commencement Address Nobody Asked For Food and Loathing in Las Vegas Are You a Crip or a Blood? Viva Mexico! Viva Ecuador! Counter Culture A Life of Crime Advanced Courses SWEET Name Dropping Down Under My Manhattan Hard-core When the Cooking's Over (Turn Out the Lights, Turn Out the Lights) The Cook's Companions China Syndrome Finally. China. No Shoes The Love Boat SOUR Is Celebrity Killing the Great Chefs? What You Didn't Want to Know About Making Food Television Warning Signs Madness in Crescent City A View from the Fridge Notes from the Road The Dive BITTER A Drinking Problem Woody Harrelson: Culinary Muse Is Anybody Home? Bottoming Out Food Terrorists Sleaze Gone By "New York Muthafuckin' City." UMAMI Pure and Uncut Luxury The Hungry American Decoding Ferran Adria Everybody wants it. Brazilian Beach-Blanket Bingo The Old, Good Stuff Die, Die Must Try My First Time in Singapore, I hated it. A TASTE OF FICTION A Chef's Christmas Commentary System D A Note on the Author By the Same Author PREFACE I went seal hunting yesterday. At eight a.m., swaddled in caribou, I climbed into a canoe and headed out onto the freezing waters of the Hudson Bay with my Inuit guides and a camera crew. By three p.m., I was sitting cross-legged on a plastic-covered kitchen floor listening to Charlie, my host, his family, and a few tribal elders giggling with joy as they sliced and tore into a seal carcass, the raw meat, blubber, and brains of our just-killed catch. Grandma squealed with delight as Charlie cracked open the seal's skull, revealing its brains—quickly digging into the goo with her fingers. Junior sliced dutifully at a kidney. Mom generously slit open one of the eyeballs (the best part) and showed me how to suck out the interior as if working on an oversize Concord grape. From all sides, happy family members were busily dissecting the seal from different angles, each pausing intermittently to gobble a particularly tasty morsel. Soon, everyone's faces and hands were smeared with blood. The room was filled with smiles and good cheer in spite of the Night of the Living Dead overtones and the blood (lots of it) running across the plastic. A Bonanza rerun played silently on the TV set in the normal-looking family room adjacent as Mom cut off a piece of snout and whisker, instructing me to hold it by the thick, strawlike follicles and then suck and gnaw on the tiny kernel of pink buried in the leatherlike flesh.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Now joy was boiling up in her, in all of her, in every particle of her body, which felt to her like bubbles prickling her body all over. Margarita felt herself free, free of everything. Besides, she understood with perfect clarity that what was happening was precisely what her presentiment had been telling her in the morning, and that she was leaving her house and her former life for ever. But, even so, a thought split off from this former life about the need of fulfilling just one last duty before the start of something new, extraordinary, which was pulling her upwards into the air. And, naked as she was, she ran from her bedroom, flying up in the air time and again, to her husband’s study, and, turning on the light, rushed to the desk. On a page torn from a notebook, she pencilled a note quickly and in big letters, without any corrections: Forgive me and forget me as soon as possible. I am leaving you for ever. Do not look for me, it is useless. I have become a witch from the grief and calamities that have struck me. It’s time for me to go. Farewell. Margarita. With a completely unburdened soul, Margarita came flying into the bedroom, and after her ran Natasha, loaded down with things. At once all these things—a wooden hanger with a dress, lace shawls, dark blue satin shoes on shoe-trees and a belt—all of it spilled on the floor, and Natasha clasped her freed hands. ‘What, nice?’ Margarita Nikolaevna cried loudly in a hoarse voice. ‘How can it be?’ Natasha whispered, backing away. ‘How did you do it, Margarita Nikolaevna.’ ‘It’s the cream! The cream, the cream!’ answered Margarita, pointing to the glittering golden box and turning around in front of the mirror. Natasha, forgetting the wrinkled dress lying on the floor, ran up to the pier-glass and fixed her greedy, lit-up eyes on the remainder of the cream. Her lips were whispering something. She again turned to Margarita and said with a sort of awe: ‘And, oh, the skin! The skin! Margarita Nikolaevna, your skin is glowing!’ But she came to her senses, ran to the dress, picked it up and began shaking it out. ‘Leave it! Leave it!’ Margarita shouted to her. ‘Devil take it! Leave it all! Or, no, keep it as a souvenir. As a souvenir, I tell you. Take everything in the room!’ As if half-witted, the motionless Natasha looked at Margarita for some time, then hung on her neck, kissing her and crying out: ‘Satin! Glowing! Satin!

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  And back in Vietnam. I start grinning idiotically right away, beginning with the warm welcome from Linh, waiting for me by customs, and continue on the ride into town. Out the window are rice paddies, narrow two-story homes decorated with rows of drying corn, gray skies, and bright red banners everywhere, most bearing the Tet (lunar new years) greeting: Chuc Mung Nam Moi; others are flags, yellow star on bright red field, anticipating Monday's anniversary of the founding of the Vietnamese Communist Party. (Though it's sometimes easy to forget it, this is still a communist country.) The road into town is crowded on both sides with motorbikes, bicycles, and scooters, most overloaded with passengers dressed in their Tet best: jackets and ties, children swaddled in blankets or netting, women with scarves and face masks covering everything below the eyes. Everyone is smiling and loaded down with holiday goodies. They carry fruit, flowers, traditional chung cakes still wrapped in artfully tied leaves, shimmering gold paper trees, bundles of bright red joss sticks. The center of the road is for four-wheeled vehicles, meaning that cars and trucks barrel at full speed, headlong into each other's paths down the center line, beeping maniacally, pulling out only at the last second. I am supposed to head straight to the Sofitel Metropole Hotel to check in, but Linh is a Hanoi native, anxious to show me the best of his hometown, and as soon as we pass the long, Russian-built Dragon Bridge over the Red River in the inner city, we pull over to an open bia hoi joint. Eight or nine people sit at low tables on tiny plastic chairs outside what looks like an out-of-business garage. A large square keg of bia hoi, the legendary, fresh draft "bubble beer" of Hanoi, is situated prominently out front by the curb. You won't find this stuff in Saigon. The beer is made fresh daily, trucked or hauled to area shops—and quickly consumed. Most places serving it run out by four p.m., and what's trucked outside the city seems not to make it too far south. I haven't even taken a seat yet and the proprietor hurries to fill two glasses, challenges me to a chug-a-lug. I drain my glass and we repeat the process two more times before I've even settled into my little chair. The man's wife wants to show me her child, dressed up in his holiday best. An ancient Vietnamese gentleman in a weathered tweed jacket and jaunty beret, smoking from a bamboo pipe at the next table, offers me a puff and another beer. "Je suis un cineaste," he says. "Nous sommes tout cineastes." He indicates a few other smiling septuagenarians around him. Soon the beer is coming fast and furious. The owner insists on changing to a fresh keg. "How did you know this place would be open?" I ask Linh.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  There had been quite a heated discussion with Anna, because Stephen had insisted on riding astride. In this she had shown herself very refractory, falling off every time she tried the side-saddle —quite obvious, of course, this falling off process, but enough to subjugate Anna. And now Stephen would spend long hours at the stables, swaggering largely in corduroy breeches, hobnobbing with Williams, the old stud groom, who had a soft place in his heart for the child. She would say: ‘Come up, horse!’ in the same tone as Williams; or, pretending to a knowledge she was far from possessing: ‘Is that fetlock a bit puffy? It looks to me puffy, supposing we put on a nice wet bandage.’ Then Williams would rub his rough chin as though thinking: ‘Maybe yes—maybe no—’ he would temporize, wisely. She grew to adore the smell of the stables; it was far more enticing than Collins’ perfume—the Erasmic she had used on her afternoons out, and which had once smelt so delicious. And the pony! So strong, so entirely fulfilling, with his round, gentle eyes, and his heart big with courage—he was surely more worthy of worship than Collins, who had treated you badly because of the footman! And yet—and yet—you owed something to Collins, just because you had loved her, though you couldn’t any more. It was dreadfully worrying, all this hard thinking, when you wished to enjoy a new pony! Stephen would stand there rubbing her chin in an almost exact imitation of Williams. She could not produce the same scrabbly sound, but in spite of this drawback the movement would soothe her. Then one morning she had a bright inspiration: ‘Come up, horse!’ she commanded, slapping the pony, ‘Come up, horse, and let me get close to your ear, ’cause I’m going to whisper something dreadfully important.’ Laying her cheek against his firm neck she said softly: ‘You’re not you any more, you’re Collins!’ So Collins was comfortably transmigrated. It was Stephen’s last effort to remember. 2 Came the day when Stephen rode out with her father to a meet, a glorious and memorable day. Side by side the two of them jogged through the gates, and the lodgekeeper’s wife must smile to see Stephen sitting her smart bay pony astride, and looking so comically like Sir Philip. ‘It do be a pity as her isn’t a boy, our young lady,’ she told her husband. It was one of those still, slightly frosty mornings when the landing is tricky on the north side of the hedges; when the smoke from farm chimneys rises straight as a ramrod; when the scent of log fires or of burning brushwood, though left far behind, still persists in the nostrils.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Avec intends (as its name implies) that its impressive collection of wine be "best enjoyed with food, with friends, with company." From a wood-burning oven and single stovetop just across the long counter, an astonishingly good assortment of house-made salamis, artisan cheeses, and large and small plates like slow-roasted pork shoulder, smoked quail, lamb brochette, and whole roasted fish are slapped down by energetic and spectacularly knowledgeable servers who seem positively exuberant in their detailed descriptions of wine, cheese, and cured meat options. It's a great meal—and again, fun. As at L'Atelier, you look around and see people smiling, actually talking to each other, nicking food off each other's plates, and having what has been missing from so many moribund and pretentious dining rooms: a good time. There was a "well, what were you waiting for" feel when Mario Batali and his chef Andy Nusser opened Casa Mono in New York. By now, it seemed entirely right that we needed a place to eat perfectly wonderful small plates of Spanish- style tripes and cockscombs, blood pudding, and cured hams at a bare lunch counter. Great ingredients done right, by cooks standing a few inches away. Order a lot and dig in. That Mario himself is often to be seen happily picking from plates with his fingers sets an inspiring tone. But the boldest, wackiest, most reactionary of the defectors to casual counter- style services has to be Montreal's enfant terrible, Martin Picard. At the crowded, chaotic, and giddily retro Au Pied de Cochon, he's stood everything on its head. The one-time chef of the city's "best restaurant," the more twee and traditional "big plate/little serving/cappuccino of whatever" Toque, Picard broke entirely from his precious, haute roots and opened a rude, crude, over-the-top fabulous ode to excess, specializing in insanely mammoth portions of Quebecois sugar- shack-style indulgence. You know from the very beginning what you are in for: Bar snacks are oreilles de crisses, ear-shaped tidbits of fried pork rind. Picard himself, usually unshaven—looking more lumberjack than chef—is to be found, usually in food-stained T-shirt, presiding over the madness by a roaring wood- burning oven. Dino-sized plates of pot-au-feu (a whole game bird, four marrow bones, stacked with boudin noir and foie gras), cassoulet, pig's-foot stew, duck "in the can" (a half duck breast, foie gras, and cabbage, slow cooked in a can and poured over a crouton topped with celeriac puree), and poutine—the Picard version of the classic Quebec guilty-pleasure fave of frites drowning in demi- glace and cheese curds, topped with a thick slab of melting foie gras—all are prepared in front of you by Picard's fellow transgressors, a crew of T-shirted and funny-hat-wearing cooks with similarly impressive resumes. There are a few tables, stuffed between wall and counter, but the fun is to be had watching the dedicated but underdressed cooks in the crowded, nearly unworkable-looking open kitchen, gleefully lopping slabs of foie and throwing them around like cheap shortening.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  The glorious tradition of "one cook, one dish" continues: one lone artisan, or a family of artisans, making the same wonderful dish—and no other—year after year, frequently generation after generation. That kind of close identification with a particular dish—that continuity—is nearly always a guarantee that one can expect something fresh and tasty. Case in point: A few days later, Linh pulls the car over unexpectedly on the side of a major artery. We head down an embankment to a shabby, litter-strewn neighborhood and proceed down a forlorn-looking alleyway to the smoky back entrance of Luon Nong Ong Tre, the Eel Shop. An open kitchen is heaped with dirty dishes. Two big pots steam on an outdoor charcoal grill. A few hard- drinking Vietnamese men are way over their limit inside, singing and shouting. On worn, brown bamboo matting outside, facing an unpaved intersection of narrow alleyways and disused heavy machinery, are a few low plastic chairs, a ratty umbrella or two, a few wobbly wooden tables. Neighborhood kids, squealing with delight, pick unripe oranges off an anemic-looking tree and hurl them at each other. Linh is rubbing his hands with anticipation. "What do you eat here?" I inquire. "Eel," he replies. "This is the Eel Shop. Only eel." "How did you find this place?" I ask. "A friend took me here. He knows I like eel—and he heard about it from a friend." I explain to Linh what the word "foodie" means and he seems very pleased. "Yes," he agrees. "Often, you must go off the road. You must investigate." As we wait for the food, we watch the comings and goings of the neighborhood, a small, rural village existing in the midst of a major city. A trash collector (a woman, naturally), in peaked round hat, face mask, and gloves, picks up trash bags and piles them onto an overloaded handcart. Bicycles containing improbably balanced display racks of housewares are pedaled slowly by. Women carry yokes of fresh vegetables and fruit, men sell lottery tickets, a man pulls up on a motorbike to collect spent cooking oil from the eel shop, another takes away edible waste for sale to pig farmers. Aluminum cans are whisked away to makeshift recycling operations, where they are heated in works and stamped on by sandaled feet. The impurities are sold for paint, the metal, of course, reshaped, reformed, reused. Apparently, a number of viet kieu (overseas Vietnamese) and their partners are becoming rather wealthy on the unofficial recycling of trash and garbage, prompting, it is said, one Central Committee member to muse chidingly, "We—all of us—always ask only the big questions. It took just one foreigner to ask a small question: 'Where does the garbage go?'" In the kitchen, live eels are quickly divested of their bones, sauced lightly, and stuffed into lengths of hollow bamboo with garlic. Both ends are plugged with blanched morning glory leaves and the bamboo is charred slowly over the outdoor charcoal grill.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Margarita looked back and saw some complex dark object catching up with her. As it drew nearer to Margarita, it became more distinct—a mounted flying person could be seen. And finally it became quite distinct: slowing down, Natasha came abreast of Margarita. Completely naked, her dishevelled hair flying in the air, she flew astride a fat hog, who was clutching a briefcase in his front hoofs, while his hind hoofs desperately threshed the air. Occasionally gleaming in the moonlight, then fading, the pince-nez that had fallen off his nose flew beside the hog on a string, and the hog’s hat kept sliding down over his eyes. Taking a close look, Margarita recognized the hog as Nikolai Ivanovich, and then her laughter rang out over the forest, mingled with the laughter of Natasha. ‘Natasha!’ Margarita shouted piercingly. ‘You rubbed yourself with the cream?’ ‘Darling!!’ Natasha replied, awakening the sleeping pine forest with her shout. ‘My French queen, I smeared it on him, too, on his bald head!’ ‘Princess!’ the hog shouted tearfully, galloping along with his rider. ‘Darling! Margarita Nikolaevna!’ cried Natasha, riding beside Margarita, ‘I confess, I took the cream! We, too, want to live and fly! Forgive me, my sovereign lady, I won’t go back, not for anything! Ah, it’s good, Margarita Nikolaevna! . . . He propositioned me,’ Natasha began jabbing her finger into the neck of the abashedly huffing hog, ‘propositioned me! What was it you called me, eh?’ she shouted, leaning towards the hog’s ear. ‘Goddess!’ howled the hog, ‘I can’t fly so fast! I may lose important papers, Natalya Prokofyevna, I protest!’ ‘Ah, devil take you and your papers!’ Natasha shouted with a brazen laugh. ‘Please, Natalya Prokofyevna, someone may hear us!’ the hog yelled imploringly. Flying beside Margarita, Natasha laughingly told her what happened in the house after Margarita Nikolaevna flew off over the gates. Natasha confessed that, without ever touching any of the things she had been given, she threw off her clothes, rushed to the cream, and immediately smeared herself with it. The same thing happened with her as with her mistress. Just as Natasha, laughing with joy, was revelling in her own magical beauty before the mirror, the door opened and Nikolai Ivanovich appeared before her. He was agitated; in his hands he was holding Margarita Nikolaevna’s shift and his own hat and briefcase. Seeing Natasha, Nikolai Ivanovich was dumbfounded. Getting some control of himself, all red as a lobster, he announced that he felt it was his duty to pick up the little shift and bring it personally . . . ‘The things he said, the blackguard!’ Natasha shrieked and laughed. ‘The things he said, the things he tempted me to do! The money he promised! He said Klavdia Petrovna would never learn of it. Well, speak, am I lying?’ Natasha shouted to the hog, who only turned his muzzle away abashedly.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  mass grave discovered in eleventh-century Cologne, probably explains Ursula’s crowd of butchered ladies, but more important was the framework that this pious fiction created for Merici’s reality. [71] A host of inspired celibate women did indeed mushroom out of her initial idea: again like the Beguines, a gift to the Western Church that its male leadership had not sought. [72] The Ursulines began working among the poor and teaching children in settings which men either did not want to or should not enter. In 1544, Pope Paul III supplied a Rule moulding them into something more like a traditional religious Order, but its model was still the free-form adaptability of the Augustinian Canons in the twelfth century. Crucially, the Ursulines made no provision for central direction, so it was difficult for the Church authorities to enforce a single pattern on Ursuline groups. The official Counter-Reformation attitude to the female religious life ran on the same lines as its enforcement of universal clerical celibacy: it sought to bring reality to medieval directives, in this case the papal decree Periculoso of 1298 ordering enclosure for all monastic women, which the Council of Trent reaffirmed in 1563. Where the hierarchy could enforce this, it did, for instance in the jurisdiction of the classic episcopal micromanager Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, where Ursulines became yet another Order of enclosed nuns. Elsewhere matters were not so straightforward, and, in the discreetly orchestrated confusion that continued in Ursuline history, the Society of Jesus was a crucial ally. The Jesuits could see the potential of such an energetic movement as a complementary partner in their own very varied enterprises, especially work among women that they had decided compromised their own mission. In the late sixteenth century, they took on spiritual direction of the Ursulines; they both fostered Ursuline expansion and took a major voice in how that expansion could operate. They encouraged choices among the originally varied aims of the Ursulines, steering them away from their work among the sick and the poor and promoting their interest in education, for which the sisters need not move around so much in the ordinary world. Ursulines had in the early decades normally been humble women and girls with little education: that began to change, as the Jesuits encouraged their aristocratic patronesses to send their daughters into the work, and in turn to educate daughters of the wealthy and powerful, just as the Society did for their sons. That usually did indeed mean building convents to house the ladies (predictably, usually paid for by a wealthy woman), but that had the appearance of chiming with the purpose of the Council of Trent, and the Society was as ready to adapt in this as in everything else. Yet in other circumstances, still in partnership with the Jesuits, foundations in an Ursuline style took other forms.

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  It’s a funny thing. Your face screws up when you’re coming and you roll your eyes and make uncouth noises and if you’ve seen yourself at that moment you probably think you look ridiculous. Still, there is absolutely no vision as glorious as the face of someone you’re crazy about when she’s in the throes of orgasm. When Elle began to shudder and her face transformed like that, right before she began to cry out, I started coming too, and it was the sight of her face, not my hands or the dildo or the original fantasy that sparked us, that pushed me to ecstasy. Eventually—after a romp in the backyard and another in the shower—we settled down to fall asleep in each other’s arms. Just as we were drifting off, Elle began chuckling. “What is it?” I mumbled. It was hard to be grumpy after coming approximately forty-seven times over the course of the night, but I’d almost been asleep. “I didn’t tell you whose partner I was covering for tonight.” She’d already explained that she’d only been scheduled to work until nine-thirty. She had, in fact, engineered the whole thing to act on our new fantasies. “Oh my god!” I said. “You got stuck with MacIntyre!” “Talk about the longest evening in history.” She moaned dramatically, the back of her hand against her forehead. “Every so often I’d catch him looking at me, and he’d see that I saw, and he’d go all red again. To make it worse, we had to patrol the beach parking lot.” I laughed. “So, did you catch anyone in the act?” She pulled me closer. “Only you, Destiny. Only you.” ABOUT THE AUTHORS RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL is a senior editor at Penthouse Variations, and formerly wrote the “Lusty Lady” column in the Village Voice. She is the editor of Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z and coeditor of Up All Night: Adventures in Lesbian Sex. Her writing has been published in more than fifty erotic anthologies, including Best Lesbian Erotica (2001, 2004, and 2005) and Best American Erotica 2004, as well as AVN, Bust, Curve, Diva, Girlfriends, On Our Backs, Penthouse, Punk Planet, Rockrgrl, the San Francisco Chronicle, Velvetpark, and other publications. Learn more about her at www.rachelkramerbussel.com. From East Anglia, England, LEE CAIRNEY writes about the imaginative loophole sex creates out of the boring contract of everyday life. “Cruising” is her first foray into the dirty and demanding twilight world, or so she likes to imagine it, of women’s erotica. DELILAH DEVLIN (DelilahDevlin.com) is an author with a rapidly expanding reputation for writing deliciously edgy stories with complex characters. SOPHIE MOUETTE is the pseudonym of two professional writers who also publish solo work in erotica, science fiction/ fantasy and other genres under other names. Sophie’s publications include an erotica novel, Cat Scratch Fever, and short fiction in the anthologies Best Women’s Erotica 2005, Sex… in the Sports Club, Sex…in the Kitchen, Sex…in Uniform and Sex…on the Move.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Raw fish also gave us a nice, clean, healthy protein buzz that went well with all the liquor we'd likely been swilling and made us feel better about the ravages of our various lifestyle choices. Over the years, chefs have accumulated many happy experiences at counters. We liked them. We wished we could have one for ourselves. Maybe the earliest, loudest shot across the bow—and the one that caused the widest ripples—was the opening of L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Paris. Robuchon, of course, is one of the very best chefs on the planet, one of the French masters, and L'Atelier was, then, a radical departure. The elegant but casual space in Saint-Germain is almost entirely kitchen, with counter space and seats snaking at angles around its perimeters. Black-clad counter "help" act as combination server-sommeliers, clearing and setting, suggesting and pouring wines, and chatting informally with customers, as one would expect at a favorite diner. The precisely plated and delicious food would be perfectly at home in the dining room of a traditional three-star restaurant, but in fact benefits from the more comfortable ambiance. I recently sat alone and had a nine-course menu decouverte and never felt the awkwardness of the solitary diner. The servers were friendly and talkative, and the usually jaded, seen-it-all Parisians on both sides and across from me were positively effervescing with pleasure, as if recently released from prison. Eating jewel-like fare such as La Langoustine dans un ravioli truffe au choux vert, Le Cepe en creme legere sur un oeuf cocotte au persil plat, and Cochon de lait en cotelettes dories (accompanied by Robuchon's ethereal yet butter-loaded mashed potatoes)—even an ironic tribute to the classic Le Riz rond—was a joy. Gone was the stodginess, the ceremony, the invisible straitjacket that usually accompanies a meal like this. Customers felt free to tear at bread from the baskets placed above them on the sushi-style display case and mop sauce with abandon. It felt liberating. I left feeling as if I'd seen the future. (Or at least very much hoping I had.) I've been a fan of Paul Kahan's Blackbird in Chicago for years. Unlike some of the Second City's other practitioners, the place never seemed full of itself, as much a bar with surprisingly good food as a destination restaurant. With the opening of Avec next door, however, Kahan and his chef de cuisine Koren Grieveson moved into even more customer-friendly territory. The long, honey- colored cedar-walled room holds five communal tables and a long wine bar designed to encourage a "convivial atmosphere."

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  It’s a funny thing. Your face screws up when you’re coming and you roll your eyes and make uncouth noises and if you’ve seen yourself at that moment you probably think you look ridiculous. Still, there is absolutely no vision as glorious as the face of someone you’re crazy about when she’s in the throes of orgasm. When Elle began to shudder and her face transformed like that, right before she began to cry out, I started coming too, and it was the sight of her face, not my hands or the dildo or the original fantasy that sparked us, that pushed me to ecstasy. Eventually—after a romp in the backyard and another in the shower—we settled down to fall asleep in each other’s arms. Just as we were drifting off, Elle began chuckling. “What is it?” I mumbled. It was hard to be grumpy after coming approximately forty-seven times over the course of the night, but I’d almost been asleep. “I didn’t tell you whose partner I was covering for tonight.” She’d already explained that she’d only been scheduled to work until nine-thirty. She had, in fact, engineered the whole thing to act on our new fantasies. “Oh my god!” I said. “You got stuck with MacIntyre!” “Talk about the longest evening in history.” She moaned dramatically, the back of her hand against her forehead. “Every so often I’d catch him looking at me, and he’d see that I saw, and he’d go all red again. To make it worse, we had to patrol the beach parking lot.” I laughed. “So, did you catch anyone in the act?” She pulled me closer. “Only you, Destiny. Only you.” ABOUT THE AUTHORS RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL is a senior editor at Penthouse Variations, and formerly wrote the “Lusty Lady” column in the Village Voice. She is the editor of Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z and coeditor of Up All Night: Adventures in Lesbian Sex. Her writing has been published in more than fifty erotic anthologies, including Best Lesbian Erotica (2001, 2004, and 2005) and Best American Erotica 2004, as well as AVN, Bust, Curve, Diva, Girlfriends, On Our Backs, Penthouse, Punk Planet, Rockrgrl, the San Francisco Chronicle, Velvetpark, and other publications. Learn more about her at www.rachelkramerbussel.com. From East Anglia, England, LEE CAIRNEY writes about the imaginative loophole sex creates out of the boring contract of everyday life. “Cruising” is her first foray into the dirty and demanding twilight world, or so she likes to imagine it, of women’s erotica. DELILAH DEVLIN (DelilahDevlin.com) is an author with a rapidly expanding reputation for writing deliciously edgy stories with complex characters. SOPHIE MOUETTE is the pseudonym of two professional writers who also publish solo work in erotica, science fiction/ fantasy and other genres under other names. Sophie’s publications include an erotica novel, Cat Scratch Fever, and short fiction in the anthologies Best Women’s Erotica 2005, Sex… in the Sports Club, Sex…in the Kitchen, Sex…in Uniform and Sex…on the Move.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  The perfect mixture of pleasure and pain. I feel strangely in competition with David. They say "never let them see you sweat," but it's way too late for that. We're both in full lather. David swallows another slice of kidney, rubs his solar plexus, and grimaces, and I feel—to my shame—gratified by his pain. I'm surviving Szechuan. I'm making it through this most incendiary of incendiary meals in the fire capital of the world. And I'm loving it. The effect of all the peppers is almost narcotic in its endorphin- producing qualities. In fact, early hotpot chefs were rumored to lace their concoctions with opium, to keep customers coming back. It wasn't necessary. Those who survive their initial exposure to the dish can't help but return to it, like a beautiful but bad girlfriend. (Later, when I return to the States, I'll secrete two kilos of those magical hua jiao in my luggage, wanting never to be separated from them again.) The next day, at Chen Ma Po Dou Fu (which translates loosely to "Pockmarked Granny's Tofu"), I happily submit to another glorious if painful scourging and devour the restaurant's namesake dish: a bowl of meat and spice- stippled tofu awash in more palm oil, named for its likeness to its creator. I pick cautiously through a Szechuan chicken that is easily 80 percent dried chilies (one tries to pick around them) and 20 percent chicken, and, like so much of local fare, awash in yet more pepper-infused palm oil. As David said, even knowing my inevitable unpleasant gastroenterological destiny, I don't care. It's too good. My palate—if it doesn't burn out of my skull entirely—will never be the same again. The relatively friendly flavors of Beijing are a welcome change. And I concentrate, in the limited time I have, on what the capital city is best known for: duck. Duck so crispy, flavorful, juicy, and unctuous that it will ruin you for "Peking Duck" anywhere else. Li Qun Roast Duck Restaurant, located in an old hutong neighborhood near Tiananmen Square, is a crowded, ramshackle home turned eatery. Eager customers are squeezed around a central courtyard, jammed into small former bedrooms, their tables brimming with stacked plates of food. In the kitchen, the chef carefully positions head-on ducks over open peachwood flame in an ancient brick oven, turning them and moving them constantly to expertly crisp the skin. The meat is sliced and presented with the de rigueur pancakes, sliced scallion, and hoisin sauce—but it's better, much better, eaten straight and unadorned.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  But I won't. Vietnamese food can be great in Texas, or Minneapolis. But Vietnamese food in Vietnam, when outside the window it's Hanoi—a slice of an apartment building with faded, peeling facade just visible across the street; women hanging out laundry; the chatter of noodle and fruit vendors coming from one flight down; the high, throaty vibrations of countless motorbikes; Madame's two daughters giggling upstairs, perhaps laughing about the freakishly tall, unbelievably hungry American who sits downstairs, ineptly struggling to eat Mom's still-bone-in chicken with chopsticks—at such times, Vietnamese food tastes even better. Linh is happy. We're getting into shots of nep moi now, the vicious, delicious Hanoi rice vodka, and everybody at the table is in a festive holiday mood. Chris and Lydia finally put down their cameras and join us hungrily at the table. When we are finished with this, there will be tea, and Madame's award-winning blend of fresh roasted coffee, and 555 cigarettes, and Madame's lighter-than-air, crunchy coconut macaroons. Tonight, as the camera crew and I sit in comfortable rattan chairs at the Bamboo Bar of the drenched-in-history Metropole Hotel, drinking vermouth cassis and reviewing the day's events, we will all smile, and nod silently to one another—maybe uttering an occasional "Oh yeah!" to commemorate the day's events. We know we've got it good. We're happy to be alive. And still in Vietnam. DECODING FERRAN ADRIA EVERYBODY WANTS IT. "It's the most magnificent book you can find—anywhere in the world," says Eric Ripert, chef of Le Bernardin in Manhattan. He's talking about Spanish chef Ferran Adria's mammoth cookbook El Bulli 1998-2002, the first of three volumes that will track backward the development of recipes and procedures at the famed Spanish three-star restaurant. Currently available only in Spanish and Catalan, costing about one hundred seventy-five euros and weighing in at nearly ten pounds (with its accompanying guidebook and CD-ROM), it seems more the mysterious black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey than a cookbook. It is also the most talked-about, sought-after, wildly impressive and intimidating collectible in the world of professional chefs and cookbook wonks. If you're a hotshot chef, even if you can't read it, every minute without it is misery. Science-fiction and space-travel metaphors come up frequently when discussing it. "There's no cookbook like it. I love the fact that it's like Star Wars," says Wylie Dufresne, an unabashed fan of Adria whose WD-50 menu in New York was unapologetically created under the controversial Catalonian chef's influence. "He's going backward!" (The next book will cover the years 1994 to 1997.) "We're all looking at Spain. And Adria's ground zero." For years now, I'd been hearing from chef friends about their experiences at El Bulli.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  families shrieked, wept and rolled on the ground in their sense of transformation, and their delight that someone – not just their Saviour, but the Revd John Wesley – cared about them. Such behaviour was liable to break out repeatedly in Methodist revivals throughout the century, provoking in the increasingly institutionalized Wesleyan leadership a mixture of alarm, embarrassment and delighted wonder at God’s power. [35] Wesley’s answer was to establish an annual ‘Conference’ of his Connexional preachers, meeting under his own direction in various cities and towns through the kingdom. Conference exercised tight central control on these preachers, whose ministry was purposefully itinerant, and who were encouraged to be celibate to make that easier – the whole organization was remarkably like a Protestant version of the Society of Jesus. [36] The awful warning as to where uncontrolled emotional release might go was the crisis that hit the Moravians in the late 1740s in the middle of their transatlantic expansion. [37] This was the Moravian ‘Sifting Time’ – an uninformative label hiding a very considerable trauma that the Church in its denominational history long sought to obscure. Moravian community life and worship were centred on joyful celebration; equally important was their free use of medieval mystical themes that re-emerged in Lutheranism during the seventeenth century, despite the fact that Luther himself had largely rejected them. Moravian concentration on the wounds of Christ produced a great deal of cringe-making reference to his ‘side-hole’, pierced on the cross by the Roman soldier’s spear, but it was a different New Testament theme, the bridal union of Christ and his Church, that fatally excited the rapidly rising emotional temperature. Many activists in the Unitas Fratrum were very young to be placed in positions of leadership. Among them was Count von Zinzendorf’s son Christian Renatus, just out of his teens when made a presbyter in the Church, together with von Zinzendorf’s son-in-law Johannes von Watteville, regarded by many as the major actor in the disaster. Not for the first time in Christian history, many believers framed their perception of Christ’s forgiveness of sins as an absolute gift that included sins still to be committed – an ‘antinomianism’ (freedom from moral law) which was a dangerously logical extension of Martin Luther’s rejection of good works in salvation. They experienced union with Christ not merely through the joys of marriage, but in extramarital sex as well – their stripping-away of gender in mystical joy further extended to same-sex kisses and embraces. Young people plunged with delight into this proof of their freely given salvation. This was a repeat of the mystical promiscuity of Swiss radicals in the 1520s, and it has not proved the last time that new groups of Christians have improvised ethical codes encouraged by leaders with more charisma than self-discipline, threatening institutional and personal collapse. In this case, von Zinzendorf himself belatedly perceived where his own enthusiasms had led his movement.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  the opportunity arose in 1661–2 to revise Cranmer’s Prayer Book after Charles II’s restoration to the throne and the return of an episcopal Church of England, it is noticeable that one of the few wins that the triumphant bishops allowed Puritans in revising the Prayer Book was to make wedding Communion so optional as to become a dead letter; bishops were clearly not that concerned to defend it. The custom then more or less disappeared, but by then it had produced a cheering architectural consequence in the widespread preservation of medieval chancels in English parish churches, screened off as spaces for wedding Communions as well as Communions for the whole parish two or three times a year (see Plate 25). [54] Out of all this variety came the universal Protestant celebration of marriage and the family as nuanced by the progress of Reformation. Archbishop Cranmer did make one interesting innovation when he put into liturgical form a common sentiment in late medieval discussion of the family, taking it beyond Augustine’s bleak justifications of marriage as fides, proles, sacramentum (above, Chapter 9). From 1549 onwards, England’s wedding service affirmed that a major purpose of marriage was ‘for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other’ – the Scottish First Book of Discipline was clearly in the same frame of mind. Contemporary Catholic sources would not have disagreed, and indeed echoed the idea without giving it liturgical expression. What was different with Protestants was that theologians who overwhelmingly were married were saying this, and not only without a balancing exaltation of celibacy but with every evidence of personal delight. [55] One of the most charming examples comes from mid-seventeenth-century England: Jeremy Taylor, a bishop in the Church of Ireland in the latter years of his ministry. Taylor was one of the first English Protestant theologians whose work represented that distinctive Church of England evolution of a theology consciously negotiating between Protestantism and Catholicism, what would later be called ‘Anglicanism’. Repeatedly the twice-married Taylor revealed his delight in family life: no man can tell but he that loves children, how many delicious accents make a man’s heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society. On another occasion early in his career, Taylor preached a sermon that may have startled a dozing congregation by enthusiastically urging mothers to offer their own ‘exuberant fontinels’ to breastfeed their infants rather than relying on wet-nurses. This was not a sentiment to have enthused St Jerome. [56] THE PAPAL CHURCH : DEFENCE AND

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The room smelled of perfume. Besides that, the smell of a red-hot iron was coming from somewhere. Margarita Nikolaevna sat in front of the pier-glass, with just a bathrobe thrown over her naked body, and in black suede shoes. A gold bracelet with a watch lay in front of Margarita Nikolaevna, beside the box she had received from Azazello, and Margarita did not take her eyes from its face. At times it began to seem to her that the watch was broken and the hands were not moving. But they were moving, though very slowly, as if sticking, and at last the big hand fell on the twenty-ninth minute past nine. Margarita’s heart gave a terrible thump, so that she could not even take hold of the box right away. Having mastered herself, Margarita opened it and saw in the box a rich, yellowish cream. It seemed to her that it smelled of swamp slime. With the tip of her finger, Margarita put a small dab of the cream on her palm, the smell of swamp grass and forest grew stronger, and then she began rubbing the cream into her forehead and cheeks with her palm. The cream spread easily and, as it seemed to Margarita, evaporated at once. Having rubbed several times, Margarita glanced into the mirror and dropped the box right on her watch crystal, which became covered with cracks. Margarita closed her eyes, then glanced once again and burst into wild laughter. Her eyebrows, plucked to a thread with tweezers, thickened and lay in even black arches over her greening eyes. The thin vertical crease cutting the bridge of her nose, which had appeared back then, in October, when the master vanished, disappeared without a trace. So did the yellowish shadows at her temples and the two barely noticeable little webs of wrinkles at the outer corners of her eyes. The skin of her cheeks filled out with an even pink colour, her forehead became white and clear, and the hairdresser’s waves in her hair came undone. From the mirror a naturally curly, black-haired woman of about twenty was looking at the thirty-year-old Margarita, baring her teeth and laughing impetuously. Having laughed her fill, Margarita jumped out of her bathrobe with a single leap, dipped freely into the light, rich cream, and with vigorous strokes began rubbing it into the skin of her body. It at once turned pink and tingly. That instant, as if a needle had been snatched from her brain, the ache she had felt in her temple all evening after the meeting in the Alexandrovsky Garden subsided, her leg and arm muscles grew stronger, and then Margarita’s body became weightless. She sprang up and hung in the air just above the rug, then was slowly pulled down and descended. ‘What a cream! What a cream!’ cried Margarita, throwing herself into an armchair. The rubbings changed her not only externally.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Stephen rested her elbow on the mantelpiece and stood gazing at Mary with her chin on her hand. As she did so she was struck once again by the look of youth that was characteristic of Mary. She looked much less than her twenty-two years in her simple dress with its leather belt—she looked indeed little more than a schoolgirl. And yet there was something quite new in her face, a soft, wise expression that Stephen had put there, so that she suddenly felt pitiful to see her so young yet so full of this wisdom; for sometimes the coming of passion to youth, in spite of its glory, will be strangely pathetic. Mary rolled up the stockings with a sigh of regret; alas, they would not require darning. She was at the stage of being in love when she longed to do womanly tasks for Stephen. But all Stephen’s clothes were discouragingly neat; Mary thought that she must be very well served, which was true—she was served, as are certain men, with a great deal of nicety and care by the servants. And now Stephen was filling her cigarette case from the big box that lived on her dressing table; and now she was strapping on her gold wrist watch; and now she was brushing some dust from her coat; and now she was frowning at herself in the glass for a second as she twitched her immaculate necktie. Mary had seen her do all this before, many times, but to-day somehow it was different; for to-day they were in their own home together, so that these little intimate things seemed more dear than they had done at Orotava. The bedroom could only have belonged to Stephen; a large, airy room, very simply furnished—white walls, old oak, and a wide, bricked hearth on which some large, friendly logs were burning. The bed could only have been Stephen’s bed; it was heavy and rather austere in pattern. It looked solemn as Mary had seen Stephen look, and was covered by a bedspread of old blue brocade, otherwise it remained quite guiltless of trimmings. The chairs could only have been Stephen’s chairs; a little reserved, not conducive to lounging. The dressing table could only have been hers, with its tall silver mirror and ivory brushes. And all these things had drawn into themselves a species of life derived from their owner, until they seemed to be thinking of Stephen with a dumbness that made their thoughts more insistent, and their thoughts gathered strength and mingled with Mary’s so that she heard herself cry out: ‘Stephen!’ in a voice that was not very far from tears, because of the joy she felt in that name. And Stephen answered her: ‘Mary—’

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  The signature dish of stuffed pig's trotters is exactly that: two enormous pig's feet, absolutely jammed with foie gras and sauced with a rich onion cream sauce. It's too much. It's too loud. The kitchen looks like a train wreck. The portions are crippling. You won't want to think about foie gras for weeks after eating there. And it's an absolute joy to experience. Everyone—from customers, to cooks, to service staff, to the chef—seems happy to be there. The cooks will tell you so themselves, as they race to fill orders from postage-stamp-size work spaces, elbowing each other to get at one of the endlessly refilled crocks of mashed potatoes. There's no "attitude." It's about food—and company—and the enjoyment of both. It may well be the antidote to every other restaurant in North America. A LIFE OF CRIME "Why didn't you give him a beatin' then?" "Well, 'cause . . . uh . . ." "I told ya. Forget this other shit. Give him a fuckin' beatin'." "Well, the uh . . . I was waiting to hear from you." "I told you yesterday . . . What are you, Chinese? Hit him. This guy's nobody, and if he's somebody, I don't give a fuck." —John Gotti, former Gambino crime family boss , discussing debt restructuring with an associate I love reading about crime. I like writing about crime. I like listening to wiretap recordings of gangsters, hearing the marvelously loopy, repetitive, elliptical, and wildly profane patois of two semiarticulate career criminals who think they just might be being recorded by the FBI, but have business to conduct anyway. It's poetry to me. In my apartment, CourtTV, the twenty-four-hour criminal justice cable network, is always on; the sounds of badly miked witnesses, recorded emergency calls, droning coroners, and preening lawyers are the background music to my leisure hours. While I sip my morning coffee in bed, friends are betraying friends on the stand, pathologists coldly recite the particulars of damage to bones and tissue, stone killers affectlessly describe the circumstances leading up to murder, dismemberment, arson . . . and worse. Lawyers aggressively examine and cross-examine, shrieking with feigned outrage, while outside my windows, car alarms whoop and wail—the occasional urban percussion of shattering safety glass when yet another young entrepreneur makes off with a car stereo. It's like jazz to me, and I miss it when I'm away. The familiar criminal sounds are almost comforting. A lot of crime buffs favor the lone sociopath, the serial killer, the pathological narcissist.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The fat man lowered himself to one knee, holding the top hat far out, made a bow, and started to prattle, mixing Russian phrases with French, some nonsense about the bloody wedding of his friend Guessard in Paris, and about the cognac, and about being mortified by his sad mistake. ‘Why don’t you put your trousers on, you son of a bitch,’ Margarita said, softening. The fat man grinned joyfully, seeing that Margarita was not angry, and rapturously declared that he found himself without trousers at the given moment only because in his absent-mindedness he had left them on the Yenisey River, where he had been swimming just before, but that he would presently fly there, since it was close at hand, and then, entrusting himself to her favour and patronage, he began to back away and went on backing away until he slipped and fell backwards into the water. But even as he fell, he kept on his face, framed in small side-whiskers, a smile of rapture and devotion. Here Margarita gave a piercing whistle and, mounting the broom that flew up to her, crossed to the opposite bank of the river. The shadow of the chalk mountain did not reach that far, and the whole bank was flooded with moonlight. As soon as Margarita touched the moist grass, the music under the pussy willows struck up louder, and a sheaf of sparks flew up more merrily from the bonfire. Under the pussy-willow branches, strewn with tender, fluffy catkins, visible in the moonlight, sat two rows of fat-faced frogs, puffing up as if they were made of rubber, playing a bravura march on wooden pipes. Glowing marsh-lights hung on willow twigs in front of the musicians, lighting up the music; the restless light of the bonfire danced on the frogs’ faces. The march was being played in honour of Margarita. She was given a most solemn reception. Diaphanous naiads stopped their round dance over the river and waved weeds at Margarita, and their far-audible greetings moaned across the deserted, greenish bank. Naked witches, jumping from behind the pussy willows, formed a line and began curtseying and making courtly bows. Someone goat-legged flew up and bent to her hand, spread silk on the grass, inquired whether the queen had had a good swim, and invited her to lie down and rest. Margarita did just that. The goat-legged one offered her a glass of champagne, she drank it, and her heart became warm at once. Having inquired about Natasha’s whereabouts, she received the reply that Natasha had already taken her swim and had flown ahead to Moscow on her hog, to warn them that Margarita would soon arrive and to help prepare her attire.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Some of them have been known and found to be habitable for thousands of years. Our task is to locate them, check them out, and work out whether we can make them our home. Others have found them before us, often leaving us accounts of how this happened and assessments of the difference that this made to the quality of their lives. And so, like the seafaring Polynesian navigators of old, we develop wayfaring skills and search strategies which allow us to locate even the most remote islands of beliefs that might allow us to flourish and live a good life of joy and wonder. I began my explorations by navigating my way to Marxism, and spent some time exploring its landscape and figuring out whether I could thrive there. Disillusioned, I began to island-hop, eventually alighting on Christianity, which proved much more resilient and engaging. It provided me with a stable refuge to weather life’s challenges and a secure base from which I could comprehend and participate in our complex world. I’m still there, happily settled. In the end, we are all believers, whether we like it or not, in that our lives and knowledge are grounded and shaped by assumptions and beliefs that lie beyond comprehensive empirical verification or rational proof. This is not a new idea; it has deep roots in ancient philosophy, and is now widely discussed in more pragmatic traditions of philosophy, building on Charles S. Peirce’s recognition of the fallibility of knowledge and William James’s reconstruction of belief in a world of uncertainty. Yet perhaps its moment has now come, as disillusionment with the alleged certainties and simplicities of the recent past gives way to a longing to reconstruct, move forward, and find beliefs that are stable, significant and supportive of a good life. Living in this vast space of ambiguity and uncertainty is an art, a skill that we have to learn. Happily, it can be done. Chapter 1 Believing: A Mental Experiment To believe is to be human; it undergirds our ability to imagine, experiment, relate to others and the world. From an evolutionary perspective, our capacity for belief is rooted in our histories as primates. 1 Although we tend to think of it as unique to human beings, it can be argued to emerge from certain primate traits, such as an ability to experience beauty and awe. 2 This spiritual sense is part of our configuration. 3 For most people, ‘belief’ provides ‘a framework for explaining the way things are (or should be), and is capable of influencing our behaviour, feelings, attitudes and decisions’. 4 Beliefs can lead to graciousness, inclusiveness, hospitality and love. Yet beliefs are dangerous, we are told. They inevitably lead to discrimination, tribalism and hatred. They certainly can. Yet it is not the category of ‘belief’ that is a problem; it is the specific beliefs which shape your way of living, whether for good or bad.