Pride

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)

  Before he had uttered a word, the audience was astonished, for he wore his old uniform from World War II, a uniform that everyone recognized and that created a strong emotional response. De Gaulle had been the hero of the resistance, the savior of the country at its darkest moment. But that uniform had not been seen for quite some time. Then de Gaulle spoke, reminding his public, in his cool and confident manner, of all they had accomplished together in liberating France from the Germans. Slowly he moved from these charged patriotic issues to the rebellion in Algeria, and the affront it presented to the spirit of the libera- tion. He finished his address by repeating his famous words of June 18, 1940: "Once again I call all Frenchmen, wherever they are, whatever they are, to reunite with France. Vive la République! Vive la France!" The speech had two purposes. It showed that de Gaulle was deter- mined not to give an inch to the rebels, and it reached for the heart of all patriotic Frenchmen, particularly in the army. The insurrection quickly died, and no one doubted the connection between its failure and de Gaulle's performance on television. The following year, the French voted overwhelmingly in favor of Al- gerian self-determination. On April 11, 1961, de Gaulle gave a press con- ference in which he made it clear that France would soon grant the The Charismatic • 115 country full independence. Eleven days later, French generals in Algeria is- sued a communique stating that they had taken over the country and de- claring a state of siege. This was the most dangerous moment of all: faced with Algeria's imminent independence, these right-wing generals would go all the way. A civil war could break out, toppling de Gaulle's government. The following night, de Gaulle appeared once again on television, once again wearing his old uniform. He mocked the generals, comparing them to a South American junta. He talked calmly and sternly. Then, suddenly, at the very end of the address, his voice rose and even trembled as he called out to the audience: "Françaises, Français, aidez-moi!" ("Frenchwomen, Frenchmen, help me!") It was the most stirring moment of all his televi- sion appearances. French soldiers in Algeria, listening on transistor radios, were overwhelmed. The next day they held a mass demonstration in favor of de Gaulle. Two days later the generals surrendered. On July 1, 1962, de Gaulle proclaimed Algeria's independence. In 1940, after the German invasion of France, de Gaulle escaped to En- gland to recruit an army that would eventually return to France for the lib- eration. At the beginning, he was alone, and his mission seemed hopeless. But he had the support of Winston Churchill, and with Churchill's blessing he gave a series of radio talks that the BBC broadcast to France.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  The bishops had not expected or wanted this rising, and because they were soon mostly in exile and the clergy dispersed to avoid government violence, leadership of the rebellion came overwhelmingly from laypeople. Cristeros drew their support from those regions of Mexico where there was a long tradition of lay leadership in the Church, where local culture took for granted the synthesis between religious and local life created by the missionaries of the Counter-Reformation. Scorning the government’s attempt to found a Mexican Catholic and Apostolic Church to rival the Catholic Church, they rallied to the Primate-Archbishop of Mexico’s instruction that laypeople should preside at every form of Catholic rite (including, in emergency, confessions, marriages and baptisms), short of consecrating the eucharistic elements. The clergy were not always pleased at the resulting lay initiatives and loss of clerical control, but in the end the government saw that it could not outface this massive affirmation of Church life, even despite its own popular support from anticlericals. ‘Those men drenched the earth with their blood, and if that wasn’t enough, they gave their very lives to bring our Lord God back again,’ was one proud Cristero reminiscence.40 The situation was like the early days of lay Korean Catholicism (see pp. 900–902), but on an enormously larger scale. One recent historian of these events points out what a distorted retrospective picture of the revolt was provided by John Paul II’s canonization in 2000 of twenty-two Cristero priests and only three laypeople.41 In reality, the events of 1926–9 in Mexico set a precedent for the realignment of relationships between priest and parishioner which was to be such a striking feature of Latin American Catholicism in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (see pp. 975–6). This was not the lesson which the contemporary Vatican drew from the conflict in Mexico, or from the other murderous confrontations between the Church and the Left which were simultaneously building up in Spain and Soviet Russia. Everywhere it saw the chief enemy of Christianity as socialism or Communism. The future of Europe was entrusted in 1919 to democracies, but of all the new states created by the victorious Allies, at the beginning of 1939 only Czechoslovakia was left as a functioning democratic republic, and it was about to be obliterated. The history of the interwar years is of democracy’s steady subversion by authoritarian regimes. Some rulers were traditionalists trying to restore the past, such as Hungary’s Catholic-dominated monarchy without a monarch, headed by the regent, Miklós Horthy, an admiral without a navy. Much more destructive were movements which despised the aristocratic past as much as they did bourgeois democracy, and espoused an extreme form of nationalism which degenerated into racism. Collectively they have taken their name from the Italian variant, which proved the most long-lasting, and which indeed seems still

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  And this he had to do without complaint. Although the days of the troubadour are long gone, the pattern remains: a man actually loves to be able to prove himself, to be challenged, to compete, to undergo tests and trials and emerge victorious. He has a masochistic streak; a part of him loves pain. And strangely enough, the more a woman asks for, the worthier she seems. A woman who is easy to get cannot be worth much. Make people compete for your attention, make them prove themselves in some way, and you will find them rising to the challenge. The heat of seduction is raised by such challenges—show me that you really love me. When one person (of either sex) rises to the occasion, often the other person is now expected to do the same, and the seduction heightens. By making people prove themselves, too, you raise your value and cover up your defects. Your targets are too busy trying to prove themselves to notice your blemishes and faults. Symbol: The Tour- nament. On the field, with its bright pennants and caparisoned horses, the lady looks on as knights fight for her hand. She has heard them declare love on bended knee, their endless songs and pretty promises. They are all good at such things. But then the trumpet sounds and the combat begins. In the tournament there can be no faking or hesitation. The knight she chooses must have blood on his face, and a few broken limbs. Reversal When trying to prove that you are worthy of your target, remember that every target sees things differently. A show of physical prowess will not impress someone who does not value physical prowess; it will just show that you are after attention, flaunting yourself. Seducers must adapt their way of proving themselves to the doubts and weaknesses of the seduced. For some, fine words are better proofs than daredevil deeds, particularly if they are written down. With these people show your sentiments in a letter—a different kind of physical proof, and one with more poetic appeal than some showy bit of action. Know your target well, and aim your seductive evidence at the source of their doubts or resistance. Effect a Regression People who have experienced a certain kind of pleasure in the past will try to repeat or relive it. The deepest-rooted and most pleasurable memories are usually those from earliest childhood, and are often unconsciously associated with a parental figure. Bring your targets back to that point by placing yourself in the oedipal triangle and positioning them as the needy child. Unaware of the cause of their emotional response, they will fall in love with you. Alternatively, you too can regress, letting them play the role of the protecting, nursing parent. In either case you are offering the ultimate fantasy: the chance to have an intimate relationship with mommy or daddy, son or daughter. The Erotic Regression

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The holder may forego his charisma; he may feel "forsaken by his God," as Jesus did on the cross; he may prove to his followers that "virtue is gone out of him." It is then that his mission is extinguished, and hope waits and searches for a new holder of charisma. —MAX WEBER, FROM MAX WEBER: ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGY, EDITED BY HANS GERTH AND C. WRIGHT MILLS The Charismatic • 107 ing, androgynous, uninhibited, he was a man enacting strange fantasies be- fore the public. The audience sensed this and was excited by it. It wasn't a flamboyant style and appearance that gave Elvis charisma, but rather the electrifying expression of his inner turmoil. A crowd or group of any sort has a unique energy. Just below the sur- face is desire, a constant sexual excitement that has to be repressed because it is socially unacceptable. If you have the ability to rouse those desires, the crowd will see you as having charisma. The key is learning to access your own unconscious, as Elvis did when he let go. You are full of an excite- ment that seems to come from some mysterious inner source. Your unin- hibitedness will invite other people to open up, sparking a chain reaction: their excitement in turn will animate you still more. The fantasies you bring to the surface do not have to be sexual—any social taboo, anything repressed and yearning for an outlet, will suffice. Make this felt in your recordings, your artwork, your books. Social pressure keeps people so re- pressed that they will be attracted to your charisma before they have even met you in person. The Savior. In March of 1917, the Russian parliament forced the coun- try's ruler, Czar Nicholas, to abdicate and established a provisional govern- ment. Russia was in rums. Its participation in World War I had been a disaster; famine was spreading widely, the vast countryside was riven by looting and lynch law, and soldiers were deserting from the army en masse. Politically the country was bitterly divided; the main factions were the right, the social democrats, and the left-wing revolutionaries, and each of these groups was itself afflicted by dissension. Into this chaos came the forty-seven-year-old Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. A Marxist revolutionary, the leader of the Bolshevik Communist party, he had suffered a twelve-year exile in Europe until, recognizing the chaos overcoming Russia as the chance he had long been waiting for, he had hur- ried back home. Now he called for the country to end its participation in the war and for an immediate socialist revolution. In the first weeks after his arrival, nothing could have seemed more ridiculous. As a man, Lenin looked unimpressive; he was short and plain-featured.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  optimistic about whatever you are evaluating at the time. The prospects of a convict being granted parole may change significantly during the time that elapses between successive food breaks in the parole judges’ schedule. Because you have little direct knowledge of what goes on in your mind, you will never know that you might have made a different judgment or reached a different decision under very slightly different circumstances. Formulas do not suffer from such problems. Given the same input, they always return the same answer. When predictability is poor—which it is in most of the studies reviewed by Meehl and his followers—inconsistency is destructive of any predictive validity. The research suggests a surprising conclusion: to maximize predictive accuracy, final decisions should be left to formulas, especially in low-validity environments. In admission decisions for medical schools, for example, the final determination is often made by the faculty members who interview the candidate. The evidence is fragmentary, but there are solid grounds for a conjecture: conducting an interview is likely to diminish the accuracy of a selection procedure, if the interviewers also make the final admission decisions. Because interviewers are overconfident in their intuitions, they will assign too much weight to their personal impressions and too little weight to other sources of information, lowering validity. Similarly, the experts who evaluate the quality of immature wine to predict its future have a source of information that almost certainly makes things worse rather than better: they can taste the wine. In addition, of course, even if they have a good understanding of the effects of the weather on wine quality, they will not be able to maintain the consistency of a formula. The most important development in the field since Meehl’s original work is Robyn Dawes’s famous article “The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making.” The dominant statistical practice in the social sciences is to assign weights to the different predictors by following an algorithm, called multiple regression, that is now built into conventional software. The logic of multiple regression is unassailable: it finds the optimal formula for putting together a weighted combination of the predictors. However, Dawes observed that the complex statistical algorithm adds little or no value. One can do just as well by selecting a set of scores that have some validity for predicting the outcome and adjusting the values to make them comparable (by using standard scores or ranks). A formula that combines these predictors with equal weights is likely to be just as accurate in predicting new cases as the multiple-regression formula that was optimal in the original sample. More recent research went

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  At the start of their relationship, Disraeli sent the queen all of his novels as a gift. She in return presented him with the one book she had written, Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. From then on he would toss out in his letters and conversations with her the phrase, "We authors." The queen would beam with pride. She would overhear him praising her to others— her ideas, common sense, and feminine instincts, he said, made her the equal of Elizabeth I. He rarely disagreed with her. At meetings with other ministers, he would suddenly turn and ask her for advice. In 1875, when Disraeli managed to finagle the purchase of the Suez Canal from the debt- ridden khedive of Egypt, he presented his accomplishment to the queen as if it were a realization of her own ideas about expanding the British Em- pire. She did not realize the cause, but her confidence was growing by leaps and bounds. Victoria once sent flowers to her prime minister. He later returned the favor, sending primroses, a flower so ordinary that some recipients might have been insulted; but his gift came with a note: "Of all the flowers, the one that retains its beauty longest, is sweet primrose." Disraeli was envelop- ing Victoria in a fantasy atmosphere in which everything was a metaphor, and the simplicity of the flower of course symbolized the queen—and also the relationship between the two leaders. Victoria fell for the bait; prim- roses were soon her favorite flower. In fact everything Disraeli did now met with her approval. She allowed him to sit in her presence, an unheard- of privilege. The two began to exchange valentines every February. The queen would ask people what Disraeli had said at a party; when he paid a little too much attention to Empress Augusta of Germany, she grew jeal- ous. The courtiers wondered what had happened to the stubborn, formal woman they had known—she was acting like an infatuated girl. Wax, a substance naturally hard and brittle, can be made soft by the application of a little warmth, so that it will take any shape you please. In the same way, by being polite and friendly, you can make people pliable and obliging, even though they are apt to be crabbed and malevolent. Hence politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, COUNSELS AND MAXIMS, TRANSLATED BY T. BAILEY SAUNDERS Never explain. Never complain. —BENJAMIN DISRAELI The Charmer • 85 In 1876, Disraeli steered through Parliament a bill declaring Queen Victoria a "Queen-Empress." The queen was beside herself with joy.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Such sudden fame represented quite a change, for just a few years earlier, Josephine had been a young girl growing up in East St. Louis, one of America's worst slums. She had gone to work at the age of eight, cleaning houses for a white woman who beat her. She had sometimes slept in a rat-infested basement; there had never been heat in the winter. (She had taught herself to dance in her wild fashion to help keep herself warm.) In 1919, Josephine had run away and become a part-time vaudeville performer, landing in New York two years later without money or connections. She had had some success as a clowning chorus girl, providing comic relief with her crossed eyes and screwed-up face, but she hadn't stood out. Then she was invited to Paris. Some other black performers had declined, fearing things might be still worse for them in France than in America, but Josephine jumped at the chance. Despite her success with the Revue Nègre, Josephine did not delude herself: Parisians were notoriously fickle. She decided to turn the relationship around. First, she refused to be aligned with any club, and developed a reputation for breaking contracts at will, making it clear that she was ready to leave in an instant. Since childhood she had been afraid of dependence on anyone; now no one could take her for granted. This only made impre-sarios chase her and the public appreciate her the more. Second, she was aware that although black culture had become the vogue, what the French had fallen in love with was a kind of caricature. If that was what it took to be successful, so be it, but Josephine made it clear that she did not take the caricature seriously; instead she reversed it, becoming the ultimate The Natural • 63 Frenchwoman of fashion, a caricature not of blackness but of whiteness. Everything was a role to play—the comedienne, the primitive dancer, the ultrastylish Parisian. And everything Josephine did, she did with such a light spirit, such a lack of pretension, that she continued to seduce the jaded French for years. Her funeral, in 1975, was nationally televised, a huge cultural event. She was buried with the kind of pomp normally reserved only for heads of state.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Most of us are a mix of the devil and the saint, the noble and the igno-ble, and we spend our lives trying to repress the dark side. Few of us can give free rein to both sides, as Rasputin did, but we can create charisma to a smaller degree by ridding ourselves of self-consciousness, and of the discomfort most of us feel about our complicated natures. You cannot help being the way you are, so be genuine. That is what attracts us to animals: beautiful and cruel, they have no self-doubt. That quality is doubly fascinating in humans. Outwardly people may condemn your dark side, but it is not virtue alone that creates charisma; anything extraordinary will do. Do not apologize or go halfway. The more unbridled you seem, the more magnetic the effect. 106 • The Art of Seduction By its very nature, the The demonic performer. Throughout his childhood Elvis Presley was existence of charismatic thought a strange boy who kept pretty much to himself. In high school in authority is specifically Memphis, Tennessee, he attracted attention with his pompadoured hair and unstable. The holder may forego his charisma; he sideburns, his pink and black clothing, but people who tried to talk to him may feel "forsaken by his found nothing there—he was either terribly bland or hopelessly shy. At the God," as Jesus did on the high school prom, he was the only boy who didn't dance. He seemed lost cross; he may prove to his followers that "virtue in a private world, in love with the guitar he took everywhere. At the Ellis is gone out of him." It is Auditorium, at the end of an evening of gospel music or wrestling, the then that his mission concessions manager would often find Elvis onstage, miming a perfor-is extinguished, and hope mance and taking bows before an imaginary audience. Asked to leave, he waits and searches for a new holder of charisma. would quietly walk away. He was a very polite young man. —MAX WEBER, FROM MAX In 1953, just out of high school, Elvis recorded his first song, in a local WEBER: ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGY, studio. The record was a test, a chance for him to hear his own voice. A EDITED BY HANS GERTH AND year later the owner of the studio, Sam Phillips, called him in to record two C . WRIGHT M I L L S blues songs with a couple of professional musicians. They worked for hours, but nothing seemed to click; Elvis was nervous and inhibited. Then, near the end of the evening, giddy with exhaustion, he suddenly let loose and started to jump around like a child, in a moment of complete self-abandon. The other musicians joined in, the song getting wilder and wilder. Phillips's eyes lit up—he had something here.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "buns" they preferred? I certainly noticed, because I was a girl at the time and those ads were designed to get my attention.) Once you ate a Hercules hot dog you never forgot it. Very quickly they had wide name recognition. A large food processing company offered to buy the rights and sell the hot dogs in stores, but Milton, mistakenly thinking that popularity is eternal, rejected it. Aside from inventing the Herculean frankfurters, my brother had little interest in the family business. "I'm an inventor," he said. "Not a hot dog man." In Grosse Pointe he fell into a group of boys whose main bond was their unpopularity. A hot Saturday night for them consisted of sitting in my brother's room, staring at Escher prints. For hours they followed figures up staircases that were also going down, or watched geese turn into fish and then into geese again. They ate peanut butter crackers, getting gunk all over their teeth while quizzing each odier on the periodic table. Steve Munger, Chapter Eleven's best friend, used to infuriate my father with philo- sophical arguments. ("But how can you prove you exist, Mr. Stephanides?") Whenever we picked my brotiier up at school I saw him through a stranger's eyes. Chapter Eleven was geeky, nerdy. His body was a stalk supporting the tulip of his brain. As he walked to the car, his head was often tilted back, alert to phenomena in the trees. He didn't pick up on styles or trends. Tessie still bought his 277 clothes for him. Because he was my older brother, I admired him; but because I was his sister, I felt superior. In doling out our respec- tive gifts God had given me all the important ones. Mathematical ap- titude: to Chapter Eleven. Verbal aptitude: to me. Fix-it handiness: to Chapter Eleven. Imagination: to me. Musical talent: to Chapter Eleven. Looks: to me. The beauty I possessed as a baby only increased as I grew into a girl. It was no surprise why Clementine Stark had wanted to practice kissing with me. Everyone wanted to. Elderly waitresses bent close to take my order. Red-faced boys appeared at my desk, stammering, "Y-y-you dropped your eraser." Even Tessie, angry about something, would look down at me— at my Cleopatra eyes— and forget what she was mad about. Wasn't there the slightest rumble in the air whenever I brought in drinks to the Sunday debaters? Uncle Pete, Jimmy Fioretos, Gus Panos, men fifty, sixty, seventy years old looking up over expansive bellies and having thoughts they didn't admit? Back in

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  To be part of a great seducer's club of conquests can be a matter of vanity and pride. We are happy to be in such company, to have our name broadcast as this man or woman's lover. Your own reputation may not be so alluring, but you must find a way to suggest to your victim that others, many others, have found you desirable. It is reassuring. There is nothing like a restaurant full of empty tables to persuade you not to go in. A variation on the triangle strategy is the use of contrasts: careful ex- ploitation of people who are dull or unattractive may enhance your desir- ability by comparison. At a social affair, for instance, make sure that your target has to chat with the most boring person available. Come to the res- cue and your target will be delighted to see you. In The Seducer's Diary, by Søren Kierkegaard, Johannes has designs on the innocent young Cordelia. Knowing that his friend Edward is hopelessly shy and dull, he encourages this man to court her; a few weeks of Edward's attentions will make her eyes wander in search of someone else, anyone else, and Johannes will make sure that they settle on him. Johannes chose to strategize and maneuver, but almost any social environment will contain contrasts you can make use of almost naturally. The seventeenth-century English actress Nell Gwyn be- came the main mistress of King Charles II because her humor and unaffect- edness made her that much more desirable among the many stiff and pretentious ladies of Charles's court. When the Shanghai actress Jiang Qing met Mao Zedong, in 1937, she did not have to do much to seduce him; the other women in his mountain camp in Yenan dressed like men, and were decidedly unfeminine. The sight alone of Jiang was enough to seduce Mao, who soon left his wife for her. To make use of contrasts, either de- velop and display those attractive attributes (humor, vivacity, and so on) that are the scarcest in your own social group, or choose a group in which your natural qualities are rare, and will shine. The use of contrasts has vast political ramifications, for a political figure must also seduce and seem desirable. Learn to play up the qualities that your rivals lack. Peter II, czar in eighteenth-century Russia, was arrogant and ir- responsible, so his wife, Catherine the Great, did all she could to seem modest and dependable. When Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia in 1917 after Czar Nicholas II had been deposed, he made a show of decisiveness It's annoying that our new acquaintance likes the boy. But aren't the best things in life free to all? The sun shines on everyone. The moon, accompanied by countless stars, leads even the beasts to pasture. What can you think of lovelier than water? But it flows for the whole world.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Making your deed as dashing and chivalrous as possible will elevate the restrained her from declaring her mind. But at seduction to a new level, stir up deep emotions, and conceal any ulterior last the heart's fortress, motives you may have. The sacrifices you are making must be visible; talk- which is honor's abode, was ing about them, or explaining what they have cost you, will seem like brag- shattered in such sort that ging. Lose sleep, fall ill, lose valuable time, put your career on the line, the poor lady consented to that which she had never spend more money than you can afford. You can exaggerate all this for ef- been minded to refuse. • In fect, but don't get caught boasting about it or feeling sorry for yourself: order, however, to make cause yourself pain and let them see it. Since almost everyone else in trial of her lover's patience, constancy, and love, she the world seems to have an angle, your noble and selfless deed will be granted him what he irresistible. sought on a very hard condition, assuring him that if he fulfilled it she would love him perfectly 3. Throughout the 1890s and into the early twentieth century, Gabriele forever; whereas, if he D'Annunzio was considered one of Italy's premier novelists and play- failed in it, he would certainly never win her as wrights. Yet many Italians could not stand the man. His writing was florid, long as he lived. And the and in person he seemed full of himself, overdramatic—riding horses naked condition was this: she on the beach, pretending to be a Renaissance man, and more of the kind. would be willing to talk His novels were often about war, and about the glory of facing and defeat- with him, both being in bed together, clad in their ing death—an entertaining subject for someone who had never actually linen only, but he was to done so. And so, at the start of World War I, no one was surprised that ask nothinginore from her D'Annunzio led the call for Italy to side with the Allies and enter the fray. than words and kisses. • He, thinking there was no Everywhere you turned, there he was, giving a speech in favor of war— joy to be compared to that a campaign that succeeded in 1915, when Italy finally declared war on which she promised him, Germany and Austria. D'Annunzio's role so far had been completely pre- agreed to the proposal, and that evening the promise dictable. But what did surprise the Italian public was what this fifty-two-was kept; in such wise year-old man did next: he joined the army. He had never served in the that, despite all the caresses military, boats made him seasick, but he could not be dissuaded. Eventually she bestowed on him and the authorities gave him a post in a cavalry division, hoping to keep him the temptations that beset him, he would not break out of combat.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  etiologically normal and then just as mysteriously vanished, to Des- demona's regret; a severe case of shingles that made her ribs and back the color and texture of ripe strawberries and stung like a cattle prod; nineteen colds; a week of purely figurative "walking" pneumonia; ul- cers; psychosomatic cataracts which clouded her vision on the an- 286 niversaries of her husband's death and which she basically just cried away; and Dupuytren's contracture, where inflamed fascia in her hand curled her thumb and three fingers painfully into her palm, leaving her middle finger raised in an obscene gesture. One doctor enrolled Desdemona in a longevity study. He was writing an article for a medical journal on "The Mediterranean Diet." To that end he plied Desdemona with questions about the cuisine of her homeland. How much yogurt had she consumed as a child? How much olive oil? Garlic? She answered every one of his queries because she thought his interest indicated that there was something, at last, organically the matter with her, and because she never missed a chance to stroll through the precincts of her childhood. The doctor's name was Miiller. German by blood, he renounced his race when it came to its cooking. With postwar guilt, he decried bratwurst, sauer- braten, and Konigsberger Klopse as dishes verging on poison. They were the Hider of foods. Instead he looked to our own Greek diet— our eggplant aswim in tomato sauce, our cucumber dressings and fish-egg spreads, our pilafi, raisins, and figs— as potential curatives, as life-giving, artery-cleansing, skin-smoothing wonder drugs. And what Dr. Muller said appeared to be true: though he was only forty- two, his face was wrinkled, burdened with jowls. Gray hair prickled up on the sides of his head; whereas my father, at forty-eight, despite the coffee stains beneath his eyes, was still the possessor of an unlined olive complexion and a rich, glossy, black head of hair. They didn't call it Grecian Formula for nothing. It was in our food! A veritable fountain of youth in our dolmades and taramasalata and even in our baklava, which didn't commit the sin of containing refined sugar but had only honey. Dr. Muller showed us graphs he'd made, listing the names and birth dates of Italians, Greeks, and a Bulgarian living in the Detroit metropolitan area, and we saw our own entrant— Desde- mona Stephanides, age ninety-one— going strong in the midst of the rest. Plotted against Poles killed off by kielbasa, or Belgians done in by pommes frites, or Anglo-Saxons disappeared by puddings, or Spaniards stopped cold by chorizo, our Greek dotted line kept going where theirs tailed off in a tangle of downward trajectories. Who knew? As a people we hadn't had, for the past few millennia, that much to be proud of. So it was perhaps understandable that during Dr. Mailer's house calls we failed to mention the troubling anomaly 287

• From Middlesex (2002)

  Prohibition has ended, for one thing. In 1933, by ratification of all the states, the Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth. At the American Legion Convention in Detroit, Julius Stroh re- moved the bung from a Gilded Keg of Stroh's Bohemian beer. Presi- dent Roosevelt was photographed sipping a cocktail at the White House. And on Hurlbut Street, my grandfather, Lefty Stephanides, took down the zebra skin, dismantied his underground speakeasy, and emerged once again into the upper atmosphere. With the money he'd saved from the auto-erotica, he put a down payment on a building on Pingree Street, just off West Grand Boule- vard. The above-ground Zebra Room was a bar & grill, set in the middle of a busy commercial strip. The neighboring businesses were still there when I was a kid. I can dimly remember them: A. A. Lau- rie's optometrist's shop with its neon sign in the shape of a pair of eyeglasses; New Yorker Clothes, in whose front window I saw my first naked mannequins, dancing a murderous tango. Then there was Value Meats, Hagermoser's Fresh Fish, and the Fine- Cut Barber Shop. On the corner was our place, a narrow single-story building with a wooden zebra's head projecting over the sidewalk. At night, blinking red neon outiined the muzzle, neck, and ears. The clientele were mainly auto workers. They came in after their shifts. They came in, quite often, before their shifts. Lefty opened the bar at eight in the morning, and by eight-thirty the barstools were filled with men dulling themselves before reporting to work. As he filled their shells with beer, Lefty learned what was going on in the city outside. In 1935 his patrons had celebrated the forming of the United Auto Workers. Two years later, they cursed the armed guards 168 from Ford who had beat up their leader, Walter Reuther, in the "Bat- tle of the Overpass." My grandfather took no sides in these discus- sions. His job was to listen, nod, refill, smile. He said nothing in 1943 when talk at the bar turned ugly. On a Sunday in August, fist- fights had broken out between blacks and whites on Belle Isle. "Some nigger raped a white woman," one customer said. "Now all those niggers are going to pay. You wait and see." By Monday morning a race riot was under way. But when a group of men came in, boasting of having beaten a Negro to death, my grandfather refused to serve them. "Why don't you go back to your own country?" one of them shouted.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  By 1960, the Greek Orthodox congregation of Detroit's East Side had yet another new building to worship in. Assumption had moved from Vernor Highway to a new site on Charlevoix. The erection of the Charlevoix church had been an event of great excitement. From the humble beginnings of the storefront on Hart Street, to the re- spectable but by no means splashy domicile off Beniteau, Assump- tion was finally going to get a grand church building. Many construction firms bid for the job, but in the end it was decided to give it to "someone from the community," and that someone was Bart Skiotis. The motives behind building the new church were twofold: to resurrect the ancient splendor of Byzantium and to show the world the financial wherewithal of the prospering Greek American commu- nity. No expense was spared. An icon painter from Crete was im- ported to render the iconography. He stayed for over a year, sleeping in the unfinished structure on a thin mat. A traditionalist, he re- frained from meat, alcohol, and sweets, in order to purify his soul and receive divine inspiration. Even his paintbrush was by the book, made from the tip of a squirrel's tail. Slowly, over two years, our East Side Hagia Sophia went up, not far from the Ford Freeway. There was only one problem. Unlike the icon painter, Bart Skiotis had not worked with a pure heart. It turned out that he had used inferior ma- terials, siphoning the remaining cash into his personal bank account. He laid the foundation incorrecdy, so that it wasn't long before cracks began to branch over the walls, scarring the iconography. The ceiling leaked, too. 220 Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had re- mained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began. My godfather, Jimmy Papanikolas, took me from my father's arms. He presented me to Father Mike. Smiling, overjoyed to be cen- ter stage for once, Father Mike cut a lock of my hair and tossed it into the baptismal pool. (It was this part of the ritual, I later sus- pected, that was responsible for the fuzzy quality of our font's sur-

• From Middlesex (2002)

  In the interest of time, I offer you now a stock capitalist montage. We see Milton greeting his first customers. We see Eleni serving them scrambled eggs. We see Milton and Eleni standing back, biting their lips. But now the customers are smiling and nodding! Eleni runs to refill their coffee. Next Milton, in different clothes, is greet- ing more customers; and Jimmy the cook is cracking eggs one- handed; and Lefty is looking left out. "Give me two fried whiskey down!" Milton shouts, showing off his new lingo. "Dry white, 68, 203 hold the ice!" Close-up of the cash register ringing open and closed; of Milton's hands counting money; of Lefty putting on his hat and leaving unnoticed. Then more eggs; eggs being cracked, fried, flipped, and scrambled; eggs arriving in cartons through the back door and coming out on plates through the front hatch; fluffy heaps of scrambled eggs in gleaming yellow Technicolor; and the cash reg- ister banging open again; and money piling up. Until, finally, we see Milton and Tessie, dressed in their best, following a real estate agent through a big house. The neighborhood of Indian Village lay just twelve blocks west of Hurlbut, but it was a different world altogether. The four grand streets of Burns, Iroquois, Seminole, and Adams (even in Indian Vil- lage the White Man had taken half the names) were lined with stately houses built in eclectic styles. Red-brick Georgian rose next to En- glish Tudor, which gave onto French Provincial. The houses in In- dian Village had big yards, important walkways, picturesquely oxidizing cupolas, lawn jockeys (whose days were numbered), and burglar alarms (whose popularity was only just beginning). My grandfather remained silent, however, as he toured his son's impres- sive new home. "How do you like the size of this living room?" Mil- ton was asking him. "Here, sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Tessie and I want you and Ma to feel like this is your house, too. Now that you're retired—" "What do you mean retired?" "Okay, semiretired. Now that you can take it a little bit easy, you'll be able to do all the things you always wanted to do. Look, in here's the library. You want to come over and work on your transla- tions, you can do it right here. How about that table? Big enough for you? And the shelves are built right into the wall." Pushed out of the daily operations at the Zebra Room, my grand- father began to spend his days driving around the city. He drove downtown to the Public Library to read the foreign newspapers. Af- terward, he stopped to play backgammon at a coffee house in Greek- town. At fifty-four, Lefty Stephanides was still in good shape. He walked three miles a day for exercise. He ate sensibly and had less of a belly than his son. Nevertheless, time was making its inevitable depredations. Lefty had to wear bifocals now. He had a touch of bur- 204

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  We pronounced their doom in solemn oracular tones, and if they tried to defend themselves, we invited them to step out from under the tent to settle things. I was too scrawny and way too chicken to fight, and Gary was too young. That left the Terrell kids to wage our battles, and they usually won.Pam walked to the side of the house and came back with an empty bucket. She scooped mud into the bucket with her hand and stirred it with a stick. She wiped her hands on her dress and looked at me thoughtfully. “Let’s play soda shop. We need some glasses.”The back door opened and out came Brother Cotton. “You kids having fun?”A chorus of “uh-huh”s affirmed our fun. Randall walked toward him. “Y’all done praying?”“No, son. I’m just going over to the tent to cancel the morning and afternoon services, so we can spend the day in prayer with your daddy.”Pam looked up at Brother Cotton and smiled. “Would you get some glasses for us?”“How many do you want, honey?”“Just four.”He stepped inside and brought out four of our best glasses, no questions asked. I realized for the umpteenth time how different life would be if I had dimples.Pam picked up the bucket. “Come on, Donna. Let’s play like we’re making chocolate milkshakes.”We mixed the mud in the pail until it had the right consistency and the right color and poured it into a glass. Pam wiped the sides with the hem of her dress and held it up. “Just like the chocolate malts from the A&W.”Randall took the glass. “That gives me an idea. Those kids at the end of the street? Let’s tell ’em these are real milkshakes and see if they’ll drink ’em.”Randall dispatched Gary and me to bring the kids to our soda shop. “They’ll trust y’all ’cause you’re about their age.”We found them, a boy and girl, sitting on the edge of their porch, hands propped on their knees as if waiting for something to do to come up and grab them by the hand. Gary called hi, but neither of them answered. We walked to the bottom of the steps and looked up at them. I made a megaphone of my hands and called, “My brother said hey. Can’t y’all hear?”The girl nodded yes.“We got chocolate milkshakes. Wanna come over?”They nodded. Neither of them said anything on the walk to our house. I asked the girl if they were idiots and she shook her head no.“Well, is your brother a deaf-mute?” Again she shook her head no.“If he is, you could bring him to the revival and get him healed. You know about the revival?”She nodded yes, but I didn’t believe her. “Do you know you’ll go to hell for lying?” She didn’t have time to answer because by then we were approaching our front stoop.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "Bathhouse? That's different." Milton turns away from the glass. He begins walking around the house, looking it over in a new light: the Stonehenge walls, the Klimt tilework, the open rooms. Every- thing is geometric and grid-like. Sunlight falls in beams through the many skylights. "Now that I'm in here," Milton says, "I sort of get the idea behind this place. The photo you showed me doesn't do it justice." "Really, Mr. Stephanides, for a family such as yours, with young children, I'm not sure this is quite the best—" 256 Before she can finish, however, Milton holds up his hands in sur- render. "You don't have to show me any more. Decrepit outbuildings or not, I'll take it." There is a pause. Miss Marsh smiles with her double-decker gums. "That's wonderful, Mr. Stephanides," she says without enthu- siasm. "Of course, it's all contingent on the approval of the loan." But now it is Milton's turn to smile. For all the disavowals of its existence, the Point System is no secret. Harry Karras tried unsuc- cessfully to buy a house in Grosse Pointe the year before. Same thing happened to Pete Savidis. But no one is going to tell Milton Stephanides where to live. Not Miss Marsh and not a bunch of coun- try club real estate guys, either. "You don't have to bother with that," my father said, relishing the moment. "I'll pay cash." Over the barrier of the Point System, my father managed to get us a house in Grosse Pointe. It was the only time in his life he paid for anything up front. But what about the other barriers? What about the fact that real estate agents had shown him only the least-desirable houses, in the areas closest to Detroit? Houses no one else wanted? And what about his inability to see anything except the grand ges- ture, and the fact that he bought the house without first consulting my mother? Well, for those problems there was no remedy. On moving day we set off in two cars. Tessie, fighting tears, took Lefty and Desdemona in the family station wagon. Milton drove Chapter Eleven and me in the new Fleetwood. Along Jefferson, signs of the riots still remained, as did my unanswered questions. "What about the Boston Tea Party?" I challenged my father from the back- seat. "The colonists stole all that tea and dumped it into the harbor. That was the same thing as a riot." "That wasn't the same at all," Milton answered back. "What the hell are they teaching you in that school of yours? With the Boston Tea Party the Americans were revolting against another country that was oppressing them." "But it wasn't another country, Daddy. It was the same country. There wasn't even such a thing as the United States then."

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  “Perhaps you should encourage him to live within the confines of our rules, lest he risk his place on this campus.” “Yessir,” the Colonel said. “Y’all can leave your lights on until you’re ready to go to bed. I’ll see you tomorrow, Miles.” “Good night, sir,” I said, imagining the Colonel sneaking the Breathalyzer back into the Eagle’s house while I got harangued at Jury. As the Eagle closed the door behind him, the Colonel shot up, smiling at me, and still nervous that the Eagle might be outside, whispered, “That was a thing of beauty.” “I learned from the best,” I said. “Now drink.” — An hour later, the Gatorade bottle mostly empty, the Colonel hit .24. “Thank you, Jesus!” he exclaimed, and then added, “This is awful. This is not fun drunk.” I got up and cleared the COFFEE TABLE out of the way so the Colonel could walk the length of the room without hitting any obstacles, and said, “Okay, can you stand?” The Colonel pushed his arms into the foam of the couch and began to rise, but then fell backward onto the couch, lying on his back. “Spinning room,” he observed. “Gonna puke.” “Don’t puke. That will ruin everything.” I decided to give him a field sobriety test, like the cops do. “Okay. Get over here and try to walk a straight line.” He rolled off the couch and fell to the floor, and I caught him beneath his armpits and held him up. I positioned him in between two tiles of the linoleum floor. “Follow that line of tiles. Walk straight, toe to heel.” He raised one leg and immediately leaned to the left, his arms windmilling. He took a single unsteady step, sort of a waddle, as his feet were seemingly unable to land directly in front of each other. He regained his balance briefly, then took a step backward and landed on the couch. “I fail,” he said matter-of-factly. “Okay, how’s your depth perception?” “My what perwhatshun?” “Look at me. Is there one of me? Are there two of me? Could you accidentally drive into me if I were a cop car?” “Everything’s very spinny, but I don’t think so. This is bad. Was she really like this?” “Apparently. Could you drive like this?” “Oh God no. No. No. She was really drunk, huh.” “Yeah.” “We were really stupid.” “Yeah.” “I’m spinning. But no. No cop car. I can see .” “So there’s your evidence.” “Maybe she fell asleep. I feel awfully sleepy.” “We’ll find out,” I said, trying to play the role that the Colonel had always played for me. “Not tonight,” he answered. “Tonight, we’re gonna throw up a little, and then we are going to sleep through our hangover.” “Don’t forget about Latin.” “Right. Fucking Latin.” twenty-eight days after THE COLONEL MADE IT to Latin the next morning—“I feel awesome right now, because I’m still drunk.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  It turned out to be an understatement. Beginning in January of seventh grade and continuing into the following August, my previ- ously frozen body underwent a growth spurt of uncommon propor- tions and unforeseeable consequences. Though at home I was still kept on the Mediterranean Diet, the food at my new school— chicken pot pies, Tater Tots, cubed Jell-O— canceled out its fountain- of-youth effects and, in all ways but one, I began to grow up. I sprouted with the velocity of the mung beans we studied in Earth Science. Learning about photosynthesis, we kept one tray in the dark and one in the light, and measured them every day with metric rulers. Like a mung bean my body stretched up toward the great grow lamp in the sky, and my case was even more significant because I continued to grow in the dark. At night, my joints ached. I had trouble sleep- ing. I wrapped my legs in heating pads, smiling through the pain. Because along with my new height, something else was finally hap- pening. Hair was beginning to appear in the required places. Every night, after locking my bedroom door, I angled my desk lamp just so and began to count the hairs. One week there were three; the next, six; two weeks later, seventeen. In a grand mood one day I ran a comb through them. "About time," I said, and even that was differ- ent: my voice was beginning to change. It didn't do so overnight. I don't remember any cracking. Instead my voice began a slow descent that continued for the next couple of years. The earsplitting quality it had had— which I used as a weapon against my brother— disappeared. Hitting the "free" in the national anthem was a thing of the past. My mother kept thinking that I had a cold. Sales ladies looked past me for the woman who had asked for help. It was a not unbewitching sound, a mix of flute and bassoon, my consonants slightiy slurred, a rush and breathiness to most of my pronouncements. And there were the signs only a linguist could pick up, middle-class elisions, grace notes passed down from Greek into midwestern twang, the heritage from my grandparents and parents that lived on in me like everything else. I grew tall. My voice matured. But nothing seemed unnatural. My slight build, my thin waist, the smallness of my head, hands, and 303

• From Middlesex (2002)

  I'm working up with the foregoing to a physical description of myself. Baby pictures of the infant Calliope show a variety of features on the freakish side. My parents, looking fondly down into my crib, got stuck on every one. (I sometimes think that it was the arresting, slightly disturbing quality of my face that distracted everyone's atten- tion from the complications below.) Imagine my crib as a diorama in a museum. Press one button and my ears light up like two golden trumpets. Press another and my stark chin begins to glow. Another, and the high, ethereal cheekbones appear out of the darkness. So far the effect isn't promising. On the evidence of ears, chin, and cheek- bones I might be a baby Kafka. But the next button illuminates my mouth and things begin to improve. The mouth is small but well shaped, kissable, musical. Then, in the middle of the map, comes the nose. It is nothing like the noses you see in classical Greek sculpture. Here is a nose that came to Asia Minor, like silk itself, from the East. In this case, the Middle East. The nose of the diorama baby already forms, if you look closely, an arabesque. Ears, nose, mouth, chin- now eyes. Not only are they widely set (like Jackie O.'s), they're big. Too big for a baby's face. Eyes like my grandmother's. Eyes as big and sad as the eyes in a Keane painting. Eyes rimmed with long, dark eyelashes my mother couldn't believe had formed inside her. How had her body worked in such detail? The complexion around these eyes: a pale olive. The hair: jet black. Now press all the buttons at once. Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has. As a baby, even as a little girl, I possessed an awkward, extrava- gant beauty. No single feature was right in itself and yet, when they were taken all together, something captivating emerged. An inadver- tent harmony. A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts. Desdemona wasn't interested in my looks. She was concerned with the state of my soul. "The baby she is two months old," she said to my father in March. "Why you still no baptize her?" "I don't 218 want her baptized," answered Milton. "It's a bunch of hocus-pocus." "Hokey pokey is it?" Desdemona now threatened him with an index finger. "You think Holy Tradition that the Church keep for two thou- sand years is hokey pokey?" And then she called on the Panaghia, us- ing every one of her names. "All-Holy, immaculate, most blessed and glorified Lady, Mother of God and Ever-Virgin, do you hear what my son Milton is saying?" When my father still refused, Desdemona unleashed her secret weapon. She started fanning herself.