Shame

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 Argonauts (2015)

  I learned this scorn from my own mother; perhaps it laced my milk. I therefore have to be on the alert for a tendency to treat other people’s needs as repulsive. Corollary habit: deriving the bulk of my self-worth from a feeling of hypercompetence, an irrational but fervent belief in my near total self-reliance. You’re a great student because you don’t have any baggage, a teacher once told me, at which moment the subterfuge of my life felt complete. One of the gifts of recognizing oneself in thrall to a substance is the perforation of such subterfuge. In place of an exhausting autonomy, there is the blunt admittance of dependence, and its subsequent relief. I will always aspire to contain my shit as best I can, but I am no longer interested in hiding my dependencies in an effort to appear superior to those who are more visibly undone or aching. Most people decide at some point that it is better … to be enthralled with what is impoverished or abusive than not to be enthralled at all and so to lose the condition of one’s being and becoming. I’m glad not to be there right now, but I’m also glad to have been there, to know how it is. Sedgwick was a famous pluralizer, an instinctive maximalist who named and celebrated her predilection for profusion as “fat art.” I celebrate this fat art, even if in practice I am more of a serial minimalist—an employee, however productive, of the condensery. Rather than a philosopher or a pluralizer, I may be more of an empiricist, insofar as my aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness). I have never really thought of myself as a “creative person”—writing is my only talent, and writing has always felt more clarifying than creative to me. But in contemplating this definition, I wonder if one might be creative (or queer, or happy, or held) in spite of oneself. That’s enough. You can stop now: the phrase Sedgwick said she longed to hear whenever she was suffering. (Enough hurting, enough showing off, enough achieving, enough talking, enough trying, enough writing, enough living.) The capaciousness of growing a baby. The way a baby literally makes space where there wasn’t space before. The cartilage nub where my ribs used to fit together at the sternum. The little slide in my lower rib cage when I twist right or left that didn’t used to slide. The rearrangement of internal organs, the upward squeezing of the lungs. The dirt that collects on your belly button when it finally pops inside out, revealing its bottom—finite, after all. The husky feeling in my postpartum perineum, the way my breasts filling all at once with milk is like an orgasm but more painful, powerful as a hard rain. While one nipple is getting sucked, the other sometimes sprays forth, unstoppable.

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

  up an odd collection of rationales in order to exonerate the third president from charges of immorality. One, Sally was beautiful (and Monica was cheap). Two, Clinton was an adulterer (and Jefferson was a widower of long standing). Three, Jefferson was a brilliant man whose words elevated him above his bodily urges (and the merely glib Clinton was unable to rise above his unimpressive origins). To conflate the impulses of Jefferson and Clinton was a leveling that upright Americans should not countenance. 30 Another editor saw the Lewinsky episode differently. After Clinton survived the impeachment ordeal and emerged stronger and more popular, he looked for explanations. If hating Clinton was irrational, then so was loving him. It was the “Elvis principle,” the journalist concluded, that subliminal desire all Americans have for kings. JFK had Camelot; Reagan was Hollywood royalty; Clinton and Elvis (“the King” to his millions of fans) were “rags to riches” monarchs. The kind of kings Americans looked up to were men with a hard-to-explain sex appeal and a gentle hubris. The point was that a little white trashiness could be a blessing in disguise. In the appearance-driven world of modern American politics, arrogance of style carried weight, and repressed, suit-and-tie candidates such as Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis were not in the same league as Clinton. To exude that redneck chic—to have a little Bubba—was better than being a dull, invisible, cookie-cutter politician indistinguishable from the pack. 31 Figuring out Clinton remained a favorite pastime. In 1998, looking on with horror at the trumped-up presidential adultery scandal, the novelist Toni Morrison drew her own conclusions. The violation of privacy, the ransacking of the presidential office when he was “metaphorically seized and body searched” was for her the kind of treatment black men faced. No matter “how smart you are, how hard you work,” you will be “put in your place.” Clinton had overreached. He was “our first black president,” Morrison mused. The “tropes of blackness” were apparent in his upbringing in a single-parent and poor household, and in his working-class ways, his saxophone playing and love for junk food. This Clinton really was Elvis-like. He was not the redneck Elvis who still had devotees in the 1990s, but the “Hillbilly Cat” Elvis of the 1950s, the youth who transgressed the boundaries between black and white—something that was only possible to do in comfort among the lower ranks of southern society. 32 Clinton’s title of “first black president” was reaffirmed at the 2001 Congressional Black Caucus Dinner. When Barack Obama ran for president in 2007, Andrew Young, the Carter adviser who had been a friend to Dr. Martin

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Guys who had gone to the same boarding schools and who belonged to the same country clubs or squash clubs doing business with one another. This fraternity was no guarantee of business acumen. Shackley and Schwimmer confronted old-boy business with academic disdain and with statistics—debt, assets, amortization, dividends, quarterly earnings figures. A little analysis, a few hot tips. The old brokerage houses weren’t prepared for it, and they didn’t like it. About this time Shackley himself devised an advertising campaign, perfected by one of the expensive Madison Avenue advertising firms, in which individual members of the Shackley and Schwimmer team were introduced in full-page advertisements. A huge full-face photograph, retouched, with copy beneath. Hood remembered his own, from 1969, with both pride and embarrassment. “Benjamin Paul Hood, Dartmouth College, ’57. First Boston, ’58–’65. Shackley and Schwimmer, ’65–. Specialty: Media and Entertainment Businesses. Outlook: Bullish.” And then the company’s bold proclamation beneath. Shackley and Schwimmer —The Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong . In the days following the advertisement, no one in the supermarket or at the country club mentioned it at all. It was as if the advertisement had fallen out of the paper altogether. As if its page had been excised or printed badly. No one mentioned it. Well, maybe the barber mentioned it, and the cleaning woman, but no one else. Hood wondered if it was the picture, of course. They had tried to whip his mottled, puffy features into an inoffensive and jolly paste. His beady eyes protruded from this pudding like some garnish, like unwanted raisins. They had clamped him into a tight shirt: he felt he would gag or asphyxiate during the photo session. And yet, his neck hung over that tightened collar, that tightened tie knot, like a precarious rock formation. Even Elena offered no encouragement about the advertisement. With the picture began the problems at the office. George Clair arrived not long after, in 1969, at the age of twenty-four. Harvard B.A. and M.B.A. Though he arrived at the office unaware of the so-called Woodstock generation and the Summer of Love, Clair grew his hair when he arrived at Shackley and Schwimmer. He purchased a tweed jacket with patches already sewn on the elbows. Clair gave new meaning to the idea of borrowed culture. He was full of clichés about Latin American debt and the ridiculousness of the Wage-Price Freeze, but he was more concerned with appropriating certain simplistic messages about film, music, and sports, and transporting them into the offices of his superiors. Ya gotta believe! Clair had remarked volubly throughout the autumn as the Mets scrambled for the pennant. Ya gotta believe! he would tell the secretary whose car had been towed. Ya gotta believe! he would say affably to Shackley about that weekend’s yacht club race or to Schwimmer about Nixon’s role in the conspiracy or the cover-up. And there had been Last Tango in Paris.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  We want sex and romance both, but not necessarily together. Most of us still think somewhere in our secret hearts that sex is nasty, and we hesitate to link it irrevocably with intimacy, love, and cherishing. But because of our training and because we long for love and intimacy, we hesitate to accept free sexual relations without intimacy and love. So prostitutes, who have cheerfully made the separation in their own minds, evoke a lot of hostility, much of it illogical and inconsistent. How dare they codify so bluntly that sex can be a product? And how dare they attract us to that idea so much? The whore-with-a-heart-of-gold, longing for love. The whore-who-deserves-it, the serial killer’s favorite target. When I asked Alex about this fantasy, this confused image, she said, “It was clear to me when I did finally start doing sex work, after thinking about it for many years, that all the fears and ideas I had about it weren’t true. Sometimes it does feel like I’m doing something spiritual and healing and sacred, and I do like knowing the history, that there was a tradition of temple prostitutes. At another time I could have been totally respected for this. And I like aligning myself historically with women who were rebels. “It’s still true that the worst thing you can say to insult a woman is to call her a whore. ‘You fucking whore.’ It’s hard to grow up hearing that all your life and not internalize it. I know I have and it pisses me off, because this is a great line of work and it sucks that I have to carry around everybody else’s shame about it.” 9Dreams are a normal, even mundane part of everyone’s life. Dreams are taken for granted, though even a brief examination of a single one reveals details terrifying and sublime. Fantasies are waking dreams, and at times I find it harder to talk about my fantasies than my actual sexual experience. What I do sexually is the product of many factors, not all of them sexually motivated. But what I imagine doing is pure—pure in the sense that the images come wholly from within, from the soil of the subconscious. The land of fantasy is the land of the not-done and the wished-for.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  The burden of his obsession with Pelagius weighs Augustine down. In order to attack and humiliate one or two charismatic and socially lionized rivals, Augustine found himself generalizing and making explicit ideas he had nurtured for years, nurtured without fully understanding where they had come from. Beliefs that had helped him to make sense of and give beautiful expression to the patterns of his own life proved harsh and self-defeating when he proclaimed them dogmatically. Worse, the controversy that ensued divided him from those he would have had as friends, made allies for him of some unsavory characters, and left him to spend his last years in a series of flame wars that pleased and impressed no one. Few could bring themselves to condemn him, but few could truly agree with him, and his intellectual heirs silently sidled away from him in the decades and centuries that came after. Anti-Pelagianism was of little concern at home in Hippo. It was a cause for big cities and fashionable churches, proclaimed in books and pamphlets sent back and forth across the Mediterranean. But the business of managing the home front—that fractious and venal clergy, that ever-volatile congregation—was at least as preoccupying for him. Augustine never managed his succession planning very well. In his first years in Africa, he and a few friends had seemed a force for reason, order, and cultural advance in his church, but those friends scattered to take up posts as bishops throughout Africa. Back at Hippo, they were replaced by nonentities, and none of them produced successors anything like themselves. Augustine chose and announced his own successor at Hippo, Eraclius, in a public ceremony, and he carefully kept a transcript of it in his files. Augustine had just returned from a sad trip to Milevis, where he installed the successor of his old and dear friend, the bishop Severus. Severus had not made his choice for a successor publicly known, and there had been awkwardness. Augustine in his turn wanted to avoid all ambiguity. He wanted also to transfer to Eraclius as much as possible of the administrative work of the church, to free himself to write and meditate on the scriptures. All we know of Eraclius’s earlier life is what we’ve already seen, that he had funded the construction of a chapel in the basilica at Hippo. No joy or lightheartedness animates Eraclius as he praises Augustine for combining eloquence with continence, authority with humility, and learning with patience. Eraclius describes his own sermon-making (and few have disagreed) as a cricket chirping in the presence of the swan, and he quickly vanished from the stage, perhaps dislodged or even killed in the upheaval after the barbarians captured Hippo.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Borrowed from the Hebrew tradition, the god who knows the heart and the kidneys (Psalms 7.10) becomes the authoritative source of self-knowledge, and with him the spirituality of Christianity is defined. Not any longer the Platonist seeking to find fullness in knowledge of the eternally remote One, the Christian is a fallen mortal who seeks to hide from the sight of his god (Genesis 3.8). That post-Edenic stage of personal confrontation and self-abasement is where Augustine lives and moves. Original sin is a cultural creation of the first order, a geological upheaval that raises mountains where none were suspected before. We are all unreliable narrators of our own lives, none of us authorities on the things we know most intimately. That sense of the contingency of human existence is a creation of him and his culture that will long outlive any formal association with his expressed doctrines. Not that we have not tried to escape it. The modern move, much discussed regarding Augustine in his relationship to the thought of Descartes in recent years,625 restores self-knowledge to the primacy of place, as the intimately knowing god withdraws to a higher and more remote judgment seat. It is only in late-modern and postmodern times that the self has been dethroned from self-knowledge and others reinstated. The biographical tradition embodies that arrogance of the other, empowered by trains of thought for which Freud can stand as the patron saint. The analyst, the biographer, the journalist—by now, anyone at all is presumptively a better authority on the innermost thoughts and motivations of the object of public attention. Only the other can surmise the hidden springs, plumb the subconscious motivations, and see the patterns the self is too close to see. Pirandello’s Right You Are (If You Think You Are) ends on a refusal to determine identity that leaves people playing different roles to different audiences, and for good reason. We know how to live in that world. We think we recognize it in Augustine, when he surrenders the quest for self-knowledge in book 10 of the Confessions after pressing it as hard and far as he could. He would agree with us that we are not who we think we are, and in that way he is easy for us to understand. But he would beg to differ when it came to saying what we really are, and how we might come to know what we are. He offers us no easy solutions, and that is kind of him. [image file=image_rsrc607.jpg] PURSUING AUGUSTINE FURTHERStudents of Augustine’s life are like Nabokovian butterfly hunters, trying always to snare the marvelous creature in their nets, pin him to their corkboards, and sketch his anatomy with elaborate care (with particular attention, still metaphorically speaking, to the genitalia). And yet he escapes.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  He is waiting for me in the kitchen, looking like the lord of the manor, relaxing in a bathrobe, refilling his coffee cup. I say goodbye and head to the door, which he opens for me as he waves a distracted farewell, coffee cup in hand like he’s sending me out on my way to work in the morning. This man, who had been so keen on meeting me at the subway station, does not offer to walk me back to the station or ask if I know where I am going. I feel cheap and know that I have given too much of myself to him – my pride and my sense of agency noiselessly handed over. I do not cry as I make my way back along the quiet leafy streets toward the subway, children brushing against me on their scooters, mothers jauntily pushing strollers toward the park to revel in the last hours of the day. I do not call any of my girlfriends to merrily spill the details of my latest sexual conquest. This afternoon of sex – dirty, animalistic, making me feel fragile – I do not want to share. For the first time in my life I feel an emotion that I’ve never felt before and it takes me some time to recognize: shame. Years ago, when I worked in a corporate office, my young female colleagues and I would whisper stories of bad behavior by men in senior positions as we rolled our eyes and warned each other which male colleagues were an actual threat and must be avoided at all costs and which were annoying but harmless. There were men who would invite us out for drinks and get a little too close at the bar, heedlessly placing their hands on our legs as they leaned towards us; men who would stand near our desks to chat during the day, jingling the coins in their pockets and commenting on the way our clothes fit; men who would make snarky comments about our boyfriends or husbands, and then seem to leer as they awaited a reaction. Those situations were marked by an imbalance of power, by our valid concerns that these men could make us or break us if we didn’t play the game according to their rules. The only power Kevin had over me was the power I readily gave him, as I never have to see him again if I don’t want to (and I don’t want to) and he has no way to influence any facet of my life. How do I justify having sex with him despite the fact that it was unequivocally clear to me and probably clear to him that I didn’t want to and that it was unlikely there would be repercussions if I had decided not to?

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I had sex with him because he expected me to and I feared that to rebuff his advances would be impolite, unseemly, and mark me as a foolish, unsophisticated tease of a woman. Now I feel debased, submissive and humiliated, and I fear that I have only myself to blame. Kevin did not hide what he wanted from me and I never said no, but I have to try to understand what got me here so that I never let myself get back here again. I know that my body is strong and powerful; my sexual prowess is burgeoning, drawing men in and reveling in the pleasure that I receive from them and give back. It is my sense of self that is waging a battle here: I can no longer rely on the person I have been until now to carry me forward. That person is still very much a part of me – polite, kind, funny, literate, maternal and compassionate but not so nice that I can’t also be snarky or sarcastic – but that person had no compelling reason to take a hard, cold look at herself to question what she was made of or who she wanted to be. I cannot let other people decide for me what I want and what I will give of myself. Not random Tinder hook-ups, not Michael, not my friends or even my children. At the end of the day, I have to answer to my harshest critic: myself. If I treat other people humanely or disrespectfully, if I constantly prioritize my kids’ wants and needs or sometimes defer their needs to my own, if I remain in the only box I have ever known or wanted for myself or find a meaningful life outside of it – it only matters that I stay true to myself. But how does a person stay true to a self she doesn’t even recognize anymore? The following week, I get a text from Kevin, asking if we can arrange another meeting. I am repelled by how transactional his language is and quickly decline, explaining that it turns out I don’t enjoy having sex without some morsel of emotional connection. He doesn’t respond and I delete his number from my phone. For a long time, I will look back at this event with regret that I made myself small, that I didn’t use my voice, and I will refuse to assign this man a number in my list of lovers – and yet I appreciate the information that the experience gave to me. Sex is like no other act – requiring physicality and vulnerability during which we literally open ourselves to another human being – and there are countless ways to revel in the pleasure and beauty in it or conversely to be defiled by it. I had viewed sex during my marriage as mostly ho-hum and up until now in my life post-marriage it has been life-affirming and revelatory.

• From Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies (2020)

  - Well they talk about, in the '80s slasher films, the final girl, who was usually a virginal figure. I believe that's all about, "Halloween." - "Halloween," might have started this craze where the good girl keeps her clothes on, and she lives. But the bad girl gets undressed, or has sex. - Oh, fantastic. - [Irv] And she gets slaughtered. - A lot of teen guys, underage guys, were allowed to see slasher films. They were not allowed to see teen sex comedies. And the irony was, why is it okay to see people being killed and slaughtered, but not okay to see a naked body having sex? - What I find so funny about this idea, of the good virgin who keeps her clothes on, is Jamie Lee Curtis herself has made so much fun of it. And her big quote is that she didn't show her tits until she went legit. It wasn't until she moved out of horror films into serious movies that people started to ask her to take her shirt off. - By the way, food and rent are not the only things around here that cost money. You sleep on the couch. - Jamie Lee Curtis was not the only star to kind of perform in these surprising nude scenes. Take somebody like Malcolm McDowell, who went off of movies like, "If," and, "Oh Lucky Man!", and, "A Clockwork Orange," to take the really controversial lead role in, "Caligula." - Malcolm McDowell will always be remembered for, "A Clockwork Orange." But he will also live in infamy for playing the title role in Tinto Brass', "Caligula." [squeals] - Do I know what the plot is of, "Caligula?" I haven't got a fucking idea. And it's a fascinating part of Roman history. - All anyone remembers from it, is how mad Malcolm was. - And I didn't want to play him as a madman, because that's boring and there's no. If he's mad, he's mad, that's it. There's no moral issue with it. - [David] Sleeping with his horse, having sex with his sister, burying people up to the neck, and then cutting their heads off. All these scenes of torture. - We kind of came up with this thing that he was an anarchist, that he was destroying the Roman Empire from the top. Sound familiar? - Caesar, emperor of Rome, lord of the world. - Lord of the world? I didn't want to do any nudity in Caligula, because everybody else was nude in that movie except me, pretty much. And they go would you, I went nope, nope. Everybody else can, and I'm not going to. So that's the way that was. I know, I said it's pretty stupid, if I'm in a rainstorm, not to be naked. So I figured that was okay. But no making love to this, I didn't take my stuff off. - More conviction.

• From Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies (2020)

  I would say that, "Star 80," affected my career far more than, "Personal Best," did. "Star 80," was more difficult for people to watch. - It's about this meteoric rise of this girl who worked at a Dairy Queen in Canada. - May I take your order now? - I'll like something sweet, soft, and white, you. - [Mike] To Playmate of the Year, and then co-starring in a film by Peter Bogdanovich, with whom she also had a romantic relationship. - You shouldn't chew gum, it's got sugar in it. - [Mike] That ends horrifically, with pimpy husband, Paul Schneider, murdering her with a shotgun. [gun fires] And violating the corpse, and then blowing his own head off. [gun fires] - And in a film like, "Star 80," nudity is absolutely necessary. It's like, well in a Playboy movie, or a movie about about Playboy. - That's called the bunny dip. - [Eric] You're gonna see some breasts, it's their life. - There was a big misinterpretation about how I got the role. - It was so much attention over her breast augmentation, it was ridiculous. - Yeah, I wouldn't have gotten the role, had I not had breasts, that's absolutely the truth. - She had that done for the movie. Yeah she did, and so? - But I did it for me. I wouldn't have done that because of a movie. - August. - Oh Mr. Hefner, thank you. - I gotta be honest with you. When I first got the script of, "Star 80," I thought it was horrible. - What's wrong with him? - Well, he's got the personality of a pimp. - But it's Bob Fosse. - Bob Fosse did not want me for that role. You're Tom boyish, you're from the mountains, you're not a Playboy, you're not a sexy, girly type girl. And I wasn't. And that's exactly why I wanted to play her. - I had a certain manager, kept saying why aren't you a star? Why aren't you still a superstar? And I said with what movies, with what work? There is no work. And he put me in a certain movie called... - [Announcer] "Chained Heat." - There is a scene with John Vernon. Got a little too excited. And I'm gonna be as polite as I can about this. He didn't follow the rules of working with stunts. [slap lands] [crying] He hit me hard. Not okay. No. The movie I signed to do, was not the movie that we were filming. They kept giving us script changes. And I'm thinking, this is not okay with me. My feeling is, I would rather see a breast, even a penis, then I would violence, that's me. [laughing] - The reason I think that the women in prison movies were so important, especially in the '80s where, "Rambo," and, "Commando," was coming out. Women in prison, that works worldwide, translates very well.

• From Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies (2020)

  So it makes the scene funny, and real, and gives me more empathy towards her. - I wonder whether anybody would even be in the mood for a drink if had to drive around half the night looking for an open market. - Did he kiss you tits, did you touch him? - Touch him? Touch him? - She has done so much nudity in so many different films that it just seems like it's part of her career. It doesn't seem like she's exploiting it, or being exploited, it's just that she's an actress who is completely comfortable with doing nudity. - When the empathy is apt, then you know it's necessary. When when the empathy is drained out, there's objectification happening. - "Showgirls," is just an old fashioned Hollywood story about how a gal comes to Vegas and wants to get naked so she can become a star. I've seen it a million times before. It actually, basically, is "All About Eve." - Did you enjoy that out there? - Yeah darling, I think I did. - I hate you. The Rena Riffel, Elizabeth Berkley, lesbian pole dance. Between the lighting, the music, the bumping and grinding, the reaction from the crowd. It encapsulates everything, "Showgirls," is about. - It's like jumping off a cliff, a short small cliff. Like okay, I'm just gonna do it. - Paul Verhoeven, and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas wanted to make the movie NC-17, deliberately. They wanted to get that rating. - Was I just taken advantage of, and I thought that I was being a really great committed actress, but really they were just turning me into like a soft core porn kind of performance? That movie has like ruined my personal life when it comes to relationships. I get like nudity shamed all the time. - When you do this, when you're a smart director, you make the audience accept it. You're not saying look, they're naked. Okay, they're naked, they would be naked. The same way as if you were making a movie about construction workers, you'd expect the characters to be wearing hardhats. It really is the same thing. - So Demi Moore in, "Striptease," the nudity was interesting because she didn't look anything like she did in, "About Last Night." The reason is she had breast implants, and I think she felt really good about herself, she looked amazing. Obviously did those nude scenes, with Burt Reynolds especially, that people remember. - You just don't know how much I worship you. - How much? - I wonder if you could look at the trajectory of nudity over one actress' career? - You can absolutely trace an actor's career via their nude scenes. Take Teresa Russell, for example, where she started early with, "Straight Time," then Nicolas Roeg's, "Bad Timing," then, "Eureka," then, "Black Widow," then Ken Russell's, "Whore," and, "Wild Things." And a very eclectic group of films from there as well.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  It feels important to pause and pay homage to the fact that many of the many gendered-mothers of my heart—Schuyler, Ginsberg, Clifton, Sedgwick—are or were or have been corpulent beings. (“Whom do I mean when I say ‘there’s nothing wrong with us’?,” asks poet Fred Moten. “The fat ones. The ones who are out of all compass however precisely they are located … My cousins. All my friends.”) Or, as poet CAConrad writes: “Coming from white trash has advantages people with money don’t seem to understand. For years, I’ve watched friends whose parents are doctors and bankers live in FEAR (even while rebelling) that they don’t achieve enough, aren’t good enough, clean enough, and especially NOT thin enough…. Now, if you don’t mind I have a date with a delicious smartass with a trick jaw who’s on his way over to my place with freshly made chocolate pudding and a can of whipped cream!” And yet, at the same time, it feels disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that on a literal level, having a small body, a slender body, has long been related to my sense of self, even my sense of freedom. This comes as no real surprise—my mother and her entire family line are obsessed with skinniness as an indicator of physical, moral, and economic fitness. My mother’s skinny body, and her lifelong obsession with having zero fat, almost makes me disbelieve that she ever housed my sister or me inside of her. (I gained fifty-four pounds to grow an Iggy—a number that appalled my mother, and gave me the pleasure of a late-breaking disobedience.) One time my mother saw her shadow on a wall at a restaurant, and before she recognized it as hers, she said it looked like a skeleton. Look how fat everyone is, my mother says, her mouth agape, whenever we visit her ancestral Michigan. Her skinniness is proof that she moved up, got out. A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother. I am a writer; I must play with the body of my mother. Schuyler does it; Barthes does it; Conrad does it; Ginsberg does it. Why is it so hard for me to do it? For while I’ve come to know my own body as a mother, and while I can imagine the bodies of a multitude of strangers as my mother (basic Buddhist meditation), I still have a hard time imagining my mother’s body as my mother. I can easily conjure my father’s body, though he has been dead thirty years. I can see him in the shower—tan, red, steaming, singing. I can conjure the slight oiliness of the curls on the back of his head, curls now present on Iggy. I can remember how certain clothes looked on him: a gray cable-knit sweater, his old Levi’s, his daily suit. He was a density of heat and energy and joy and sexuality and song. I recognized him.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Most erotic film ever made , Clair had said to his secretary with that earnest and sheepish expression. Most erotic film , he said, while cleaning an ear with his pinkie. Then he would go down the hall to remind one of the institutional sales representatives. —Shachter, he would say, have you seen Last Tango? What about that butter, huh? That crumbly butter? Most erotic film ever made! Shachter would look up from the phone, wave, and then shout it into the phone at the Fireman’s Fund. —Clair says see Last Tango . Most erotic film ever. Hood began to be isolated within Shackley and Schwimmer not long after Clair arrived. His assessments of things, of upcoming trends—suddenly they just didn’t want to hear from him at sales meetings. The salesmen began to report late on his revisions of quarterly figures, or they would double-check behind his back. Or they would ask who his sources were. As if he had to be joking. This was a long, slow, incremental process of isolation. Soon Shackley himself took up the issue. Hood was called into his office to explain why he hadn’t correctly identified the recent profit Gulf + Western was seeing, the profit as a result of Billy Jack . —Isn’t this a relevant earnings uptick? Shackley said. Isn’t this altering their figures in a way we ought to be expecting? Billy Jack? One tin soldier rides away? No one could have predicted the eminence of this Tom Laughlin, this established antiestablishment, middle-aged hippie in the Indian hat, who eliminated his antagonists with warmed-over martial arts. No one could have anticipated it. Except, as it turned out, George Clair. The office problems became worse during Clair’s romance with Last Tango . Of course, Hood didn’t go around talking about Bank of America or First National—Clair’s specialties. Out of the blue, though, Clair loved movies. Clair was first to discuss home videotaping and Super-8 as consumer electronics items that would soon transform the entertainment business. He was first to understand the importance of tabloid point-of-purchase magazines. At the weekly research meetings, Clair was constantly leaping in to help out with the media and entertainment securities. And it wasn’t that he wanted to cover entertainment stocks: he just wanted the space Benjamin Hood took up, Hood’s air and water and space and pension and office. Clair’s photograph was a gleaming pinup. He was a Best and Brightest male model. A Harvard M.B.A. who could play touch football and get misty-eyed over a Saturday Evening Post cover. By the time of Clair’s ad in the Journal , in 1971, Hood was beginning to see implications wherever he turned. Overlooked for an important lunch, not copied on an important memo, not tipped off on a hot stock. The hypocrisy and surveillance of office politics were closing in on him. There was a positive side to all this: Hood could read annual reports in peace; he could borrow them from the firm library for weeks.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Two of them were saints, if I know what a saint is; particularly Gupte who was found one morning with his throat cut from ear to ear. In a little boarding house in Greenwich Village he was found one morning stretched out stark naked on the bed, his flute beside him, and his throat gashed, as I say, from ear to ear. It was never discovered whether he had been murdered or whether he had committed suicide. But that’s neither here nor there. … I’m thinking back to the chain of circumstances which has brought me finally to Nanantatee’s place. Thinking how strange it is that I should have forgotten all about Nanantatee until the other day when lying in a shabby hotel room on the Rue Cels. I’m lying there on the iron bed thinking what a zero I have become, what a cipher, what a nullity, when bango! out pops the word: NONENTITY! That’s what we called him in New York—Nonentity. Mister Nonentity. I’m lying on the floor now in that gorgeous suite of rooms he boasted of when he was in New York. Nanantatee is playing the good Samaritan; he has given me a pair of itchy blankets, horse blankets they are, in which I curl up on the dusty floor. There are little jobs to do every hour of the day—that is, if I am foolish enough to remain indoors. In the morning he wakes me rudely in order to have me prepare the vegetables for his lunch: onions, garlic, beans, etc. His friend, Kepi, warns me not to eat the food—he says it’s bad. Bad or good what difference? Food! That’s all that matters. For a little food I am quite willing to sweep his carpets with a broken broom, to wash his clothes and to scrape the crumbs off the floor as soon as he has finished eating. He’s become absolutely immaculate since my arrival: everything has to be dusted now, the chairs must be arranged a certain way, the clock must ring, the toilet must flush properly. … A crazy Hindu if ever there was one! And parsimonious as a string bean. I’ll have a great laugh over it when I get out of his clutches, but just now I’m a prisoner, a man without caste, an untouchable. … If I fail to come back at night and roll up in the horse blankets he says to me on arriving: “Oh, so you didn’t die then? I thought you had died.” And though he knows I’m absolutely penniless he tells me every day about some cheap room he has just discovered in the neighborhood. “But I can’t take a room yet, you know that,” I say. And then, blinking his eyes like a Chink, he answers smoothly: “Oh, yes, I forgot that you had no money. I am always forgetting, Endree.

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

  clan with the plot of a Lifetime television feature. The joke was proven true to life two years later, when the backwoods candidate gave up her gig as governor and starred in her own reality TV show, titled Sarah Palin’s Alaska . 35 Palin’s candidacy was a remarkable event on all accounts. She was only the second female of any kind and the first female redneck to appear on a presidential ticket. John McCain’s advisers admitted that she had been selected purely for image purposes, and they joined the chorus trashing the flawed candidate after Obama’s historic victory. Leaks triggered a media firestorm over Palin’s wardrobe expense account. An angry aide categorized the Palins’ shopping spree as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.” 36 The Alaskan made an easy and attractive target. Journalists were flabbergasted when she showed no shame in displaying astounding lapses in knowledge. Her bungled interview with NBC host Katie Couric represented more than gotcha journalism: Palin didn’t just misconstrue facts; she came across as a woman who was unable to articulate a single complex idea. (The old cracker slur as “idle-headed” seemed to fit.) But neither did Andrew Jackson run as an “idea man” in an earlier century, and it was his style of backcountry hubris that McCain’s staffers had been hoping to revive. Shooting wolves from a small plane, bragging about her love of moose meat, “Sarah from Alaska” positioned herself as a regular Annie Oakley on the campaign trail. It was not enough to rescue her from the mainstream (what she self- protectively called “lamestream”) media. Sarah Palin did not have a self-made woman’s résumé. She could not offset the “white trash” label as the Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton could. She had attended six unremarkable colleges. She had no military experience (à la navy veteran Jimmy Carter), though she did send one son off to Iraq. Writing in the New Yorker, Sam Tanenhaus was struck by Palin’s self-satisfied manner: “the certitude of being herself, in whatever unfinished condition, will always be good enough.” 37 Maureen Dowd quipped that Palin was a “country-music queen without the music.” She lacked the self-deprecating humor of Dolly Parton—not to mention the natural talent. The real conundrum was why, even more than how, she was chosen: the white trash Barbie was at once visually appealing and disruptive, and she came from a state whose motto on license plates read “The Last Frontier.” The job was to package the roguish side of Palin alongside a comfortable, conventional female script. In the hit country single “Redneck Woman” (2004),

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  When Debbie was fourteen, she felt “impressed by the Lord” to marry Ray Blackmore, the community leader. Debbie asked her father to share her divine impression with Prophet LeRoy Johnson, who would periodically travel to Bountiful from Short Creek to perform various religious duties. Because Debbie was lithe and beautiful, Uncle Roy approved of the match. A year later the prophet returned to Canada and married her to the ailing fifty-seven-year-old Blackmore. As his sixth wife, Debbie became a stepmother to Blackmore’s thirty-one kids, most of whom were older than she was. And because he happened to be the father of Debbie’s own stepmother, Mem, she unwittingly became a stepmother to her stepmother, and thus a stepgrandmother to herself. Following Ray Blackmore’s death in 1974, Debbie’s father, Dalmon Oler, became the leader of Bountiful. He held that position until 1985, when Ray’s scheming twenty-nine-year-old son, Winston Blackmore, successfully forced him from power, ruined him financially, and very adroitly maneuvered to assume leadership of Bountiful himself. Relying on charm, coercion, and a network of spies that the KGB would have envied, Winston consolidated his power over the ensuing years. He is presently the presiding bishop of the church’s Canadian branch, superintendent of the Bountiful schools (which are funded by the taxpayers of British Columbia), editor of the community newspaper, and manager of all the community’s significant business interests. * The control he exerts over the lives of his followers is staggering. Winston has also fathered approximately a hundred children, at last count, with more than thirty wives. He answers to nobody but God and the prophet in Colorado City. After Winston pushed Debbie’s father out of the way, she and Winston became bitter enemies, but they remained tightly bound by a mind-boggling web of family connections. Although Debbie is just a year older than Winston, she is his stepmother. Her oldest daughter is his half sister. Debbie’s actual sister became the first of Winston’s numerous wives. One of Debbie’s stepchildren is Alaire Blackmore, seven years older than Debbie, who had been adopted by Ray Blackmore at birth. When Alaire was eighteen, she was married to Ray, her own adoptive father. Alaire was thus a cowife to Debbie as well as Debbie’s stepdaughter. After Ray died, Alaire was married to Debbie’s father; when Winston assumed power she was taken from Debbie’s dad and married to Winston—who was her own brother by adoption. Although these relationships are almost impossible to make sense of without a flow chart, such convoluted permutations are simply business as usual in Bountiful and other polygamist societies. For all their fecundity, Mormon Fundamentalists are strangely squeamish about sex. Boys and girls are forbidden to date, or even flirt, before marriage. Sex education consists of teaching children that the human body is a shameful vessel that should be veiled from the eyes of others at all times. “We were told to treat each other like snakes,” explains one of Debbie’s sons.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  He could do the crossword puzzle and correspond with his accountant. The phone never stirred in his office. He knew the trouble that lay ahead. But he hadn’t told his wife, hadn’t sought the counsel of his friends, hadn’t considered the future. He couldn’t say it out loud. He knew what was coming. While crosshatching his face each morning with the Wilkinson double-bonded, Hood swore that he would never live life like George Clair, at the expense of others, if he ever worked again—after that pink slip turned up in his In box. He would be a benevolent supervisor, a friend and confidante to working men and women, no matter how insignificant their positions. Then he would arrive late at the office and shout down his secretary, Madeleine, for failing to make his coffee light enough. Get your ass down there and get another cup! He was digging his own grave and holding it like a pearl inside of him. —Clair, George Clair, he said, overfilling his glass, plucking a single ice cube from the silver ice bucket. What a surprise. —Benjie! Firmly they clasped one another’s hands. Clair’s expression was inoffensive and slyly confused. Smile lines skirted the planes of his face. —What the hell has you here in New Canaan? —Well, it’s the funniest thing, Benjamin. I’ve been talking with some investors—a little outside venture, you understand, between you and me—about a scheme to manufacture a new Styrofoam packaging. It’s little S-shaped Styrofoam pieces that can help keep an item free from trauma during shipping. Really miraculous. Really remarkable. Delicate stuff, stuff that can get tossed around by the shippers, still arrives intact. It’s just going nationwide, the way I see it, nationwide. Anyway, it turns out one of the principal thinkers behind the whole project is your neighbor Jim Williams. How about that! Clair hoisted his glass a couple of inches. Benjamin was almost certain: Clair drank club soda and pretended it was gin and tonic. The blood rose in Hood’s face. That Clair and Jim Williams were bedfellows now augured some consolidation of bad energy in the universe. It was evidence of an order that chilled his bones. Either a paranoid assumption about the world was correct and it was filled with plots by human souls, occasionally selfish, occasionally generous human souls—plots that they pursued compulsively, recklessly, without regard for those they might harm—or else there was a force that ordered human society, ordered even the coexistence of plots and meaninglessness, that located oil under Arab countries and dust under Israel, that parched Bangladesh and froze the Baffin Bay, that raised up Richard Nixon from Checkers to dash him at the Watergate Hotel—while he realized the largest margin of victory in a presidential election in decades. Either way, Hood detested George Clair. Detested him. He was the truest suburban phony: without culture, without native character, who was compelled here and there only by expedience.

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

  Gretchen Wilson rejected Barbie as an unreal middle-class symbol—candidate Palin’s wardrobe bingeing was her Barbie moment. Her Eliza Doolittle grand entrance came during the televised debate with Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. As the nation waited to see what she looked like and how she performed, Palin came onstage in a little black dress, wearing heels and pearls, and winked at the camera. From the neck down she looked like a Washington socialite, but the wink faintly suggested a gum-chewing waitress at a small-town diner. Embodying these two extremes, the fetching hockey mom image ultimately lost out to what McCain staffers identified as both “hillbilly” and “prima donna.” She was a female Lonesome Rhodes—full of spit and spittle, and full of herself. 38 Steve Brodner’s caricature of Sarah Palin as the celebrity-seeking hillbilly, which appeared in the New Yorker in 2009 . New Yorker, December 7, 2009 Sex formed a meaningful subtext throughout Palin’s time of national exposure. In terms of trash talk, daughter Bristol Palin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy was handled rather differently from Bill Clinton’s legendary philandering. Bloggers muddied the waters by spreading rumors about Sarah’s Down syndrome child, Trig: “Was he really Bristol’s?” they asked. A tale of baby swapping was meant to suggest a new twist on the backwoods immorality of inbred illegitimacy. Recall that it was Bill Clinton’s mother, Virginia, whose pedigree most troubled the critics. The legacy held: the rhetoric supporting eugenics (and the sterilization laws that followed) mainly targeted women as tainted breeders. 39 Sarah Palin’s Fargo esque accent made her tortured speech patterns sound even worse. Former TV talk show host Dick Cavett wrote a scathing satirical piece in which he dubbed her a “serial syntax killer” whose high school English department deserved to be draped in black. He wanted to know how her swooning fans, who adored her for being a “mom like me,” or were impressed to see her shooting wolves, could explain how any of those traits would help her to govern. We had been down this road before as citizens and voters. “Honest Abe” Lincoln was called an ape, a mudsill, and Kentucky white trash. Andrew Jackson was a rude, ill-tempered cracker. (And like Palin, his grammar was nothing to brag about.) The question loomed: At what point does commonness cease to be an asset, as a viable form of populism, and become a liability for a political actor? And should anyone be shocked when voters are swept up in an “almost Elvis-sized following,” as Cavett said Palin’s supporters were? When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win. 40 By the time of the 2008 election, Americans had been given a thorough taste of the new medium of reality TV, in which instant celebrity could produce a national idol out of a nobody. In The Swan, working-class women were being altered through plastic surgery and breast implants to look like, say, a more modest, suburban Dolly Parton. While American

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  So you can imagine how weird it was for me. I was mixed but not colored—colored by complexion but not by culture. Because of that I was seen as a colored person who didn’t want to be colored. In Eden Park, I encountered two types of colored people. Some colored people hated me because of my blackness. My hair was curly and I was proud of my Afro. I spoke African languages and loved speaking them. People would hear me speaking Xhosa or Zulu and they’d say, “Wat is jy? ’n Boesman?” “What are you, a Bushman?” Why are you trying to be black? Why do you speak that click-click language? Look at your light skin. You’re almost there and you’re throwing it away. Other colored people hated me because of my whiteness. Even though I identified as being black, I had a white father. I went to an English private school. I’d learned to get along with white people at church. I could speak perfect English, and I barely spoke Afrikaans, the language colored people were supposed to speak. So colored people thought that I thought I was better than them. They would mock my accent, like I was putting on airs. “Dink jy, jy is grênd?” “You think you’re high class?”—uppity, people would say in America. Even when I thought I was liked, I wasn’t. One year I got a brand-new bike during the summer holidays. My cousin Mlungisi and I were taking turns riding around the block. I was riding up our street when this cute colored girl came out to the road and stopped me. She smiled and waved to me sweetly. “Hey,” she said, “can I ride your bike?” I was completely shocked. Oh, wow, I thought, I made a friend. “Yeah, of course,” I said. I got off and she got on and rode about twenty or thirty feet. Some random older kid came running up to the street, she stopped and got off, and he climbed on and rode away. I was so happy that a girl had spoken to me that it didn’t fully sink in that they’d stolen my bicycle. I ran back home, smiling and skipping along. My cousin asked where the bicycle was. I told him. “Trevor, you’ve been robbed,” he said. “Why didn’t you chase them?” “I thought they were being nice. I thought I’d made a friend.” Mlungisi was older, my protector. He ran off and found the kids, and thirty minutes later he came back with my bike.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  What I did know was food, so I ate because I understood that I could take up more space. I could become more solid, stronger, safer. I understood, from the way I saw people stare at fat people, from the way I stared at fat people, that too much weight was undesirable. If I was undesirable, I could keep more hurt away. At least, I hoped I could keep more hurt away because in the after, I knew too much about hurt. I knew too much about hurt, but I didn’t know how much more a girl could suffer until I did. But. This is what I did. This is the body I made. I am corpulent—rolls of brown flesh, arms and thighs and belly. The fat eventually had nowhere to go, so it created its own paths around my body. I am riven with stretch marks, pockets of cellulite on my massive thighs. The fat created a new body, one that shamed me but one that made me feel safe, and more than anything, I desperately needed to feel safe. I needed to feel like a fortress, impermeable. I did not want anything or anyone to touch me. I did this to myself. This is my fault and my responsibility. This is what I tell myself, though I should not bear the responsibility for this body alone. 7This is the reality of living in my body: I am trapped in a cage. The frustrating thing about cages is that you’re trapped but you can see exactly what you want. You can reach out from the cage, but only so far. It would be easy to pretend I am just fine with my body as it is. I wish I did not see my body as something for which I should apologize or provide explanation. I’m a feminist and I believe in doing away with the rigid beauty standards that force women to conform to unrealistic ideals. I believe we should have broader definitions of beauty that include diverse body types. I believe it is so important for women to feel comfortable in their bodies, without wanting to change every single thing about their bodies to find that comfort. I (want to) believe my worth as a human being does not reside in my size or appearance. I know, having grown up in a culture that is generally toxic to women and constantly trying to discipline women’s bodies, that it is important to resist unreasonable standards for how my body or any body should look. What I know and what I feel are two very different things. Feeling comfortable in my body isn’t entirely about beauty standards. It is not entirely about ideals. It’s about how I feel in my skin and bones, from one day to the next.