Graceless

1995, Susan Sontag, "The Art of Fiction No. 143," Interview with Edward Hirsch published in The Paris Review, No. 137, Winter, 1995, p. 7, [Hirsch:] Do you mind being called an intellectual? [Sontag:] Well, one never likes to be called anything. […] I suppose there will always be a presumption of graceless oddity—especially if one is a woman.

Such dutie as the ſubject owes the Prince, / Euen ſuch a woman oweth to her husband: / And when ſhe is froward, peeuiſh, ſullen, ſowre, / And not obedient to his honeſt will, / What is ſhe but a foule contending Rebell / And graceleſſe Traitor to her louing Lord?

For Modes of Faith let graceleſs Zealots fight; / His can't be wrong whoſe Life is in the right.

Not by one measure mayst thou mete our love; / For how should I be loved as I love thee? — / I, graceless, joyless, lacking absolutely / All gifts that with thy queenship best behove; — […]

There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably and keeping in the corners— […]

Current toys are made of a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature.

The boy sketched his roughhewn young contadino just in from the fields, naked except for his brache, kneeling to take off his clodhoppers; the flesh tones a sunburned amber, the figure clumsy, with graceless bumpkin muscles; but the face transfused with light as the young lad gazed up at John.

For it was approaching that uncanny time of year, the festival of Beltane, when the auld pagans were wont to sacrifice to their god Baal. In this season warlocks and carlines have a special dispensation to do evil, and Alison waited on its coming with graceless joy.