DJ Misc

“The beach was white as salt, and cut off from the world by a ring of steep hills that faced the sea. We were on the edge of a large bay and the water was that clear, turquoise color that you get with a white sand bottom. I had never seen such a place. I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.”

—Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary, 1998.

“. . . some meditation—evening meditation—for about one hour. Then, at eight-thirty, sleep. Most important meditation. compulsory meditation for everyone—even some birds. The most important meditation, not for Nirvana, but for survival.”

—The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, describing his typical evening, quoted by Pico Iyer in The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, 2008.

“[T]he Dalai Lama often talks about sleep as one of the most important activities of the day, even calling on old texts to suggest how sleep can in fact be positively used, as almost anything can, for the clarification of the mind. It appeals to him, I think, because it is one activity that every member of humanity has in common, and the nature of our sleep plays a large part in how clearly we see the world.”

—Pico Iyer, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, 2008.

“I saw a very great and peaceful brightness which was similar to a flame. This brightness had a lot of eyes in it. . . . Inside this brightness, there was another brightness which . . . had the clearness of purple lightning inside itself. I also saw the earth with people on it. The people were carrying milk in their vessels, and they were making cheese from this milk. Some of the milk was thick, from which strong cheese was being made; some of the milk was thin, from which mild cheese was being curdled; and some of the milk was spoiling, from which bitter cheese was being produced.”

—Hildegard of Bingen, a vision from Divine Works; quoted in The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination, by Constance Classen. 1998.

“Carl had never forgotten little Marie Tovesky’s eyes, and he was glad to have an opportunity to study them. The brown iris, he found, was curiously slashed with yellow, the color of sunflower honey, or of old amber. In each eye one of these steaks must have been larger than the others, for the effect was that of two dancing points of light, two little yellow bubbles, such as rise in a glass of champagne. Sometimes they seemed like th sparks from a forge. She seemed so easily excited, to kindle with a fierce little flame if one but breathed upon her.”

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913.

“The dawn in the east looked like the light from some great fire that was burning under the edge of the world.”

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913.

“When he reached the orchard the sun was hanging low over the wheatfield. Long fingers of light reached through the apple branches as through a net; the orchard was riddled and shot with gold; light was the reality, the trees were merely interferences that reflected and refracted light.”

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913.

“A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.”

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913.

“’Ask him, Alexandra, if it is true that a sea gull came here once. I have heard so.’
    She had some difficulty in making the old man understood.
    He looked puzzled at first, then smote his hands together as he remembered. ‘Oh, yes, yes! A big white bird with long wings and pink feet. My! what a voice she had! She came in the afternoon and kept flying about the pond and screaming until dark. She was in trouble of some sort, but I could not understand her. She was going over to the other ocean, maybe, and did not know how far it was. She was afraid of never getting there. She was more mournful that our birds here; she cried in the night. She saw the light from my window and darted up to it. Maybe she though my house was a boat, she was such a wild thing. Next morning when the sun rose, I went out to take her food, but she flew up into the sky and went on  her way.’ Ivar ran his fingers through his thick hair. ‘I have many strange birds stop with me here. They come from very far away and are great company. . . .’”

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913.

“On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the shard—black against molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.”

—Willa Cather, My Ántonia, 1918.

“She was a dark child, with brown curly hair, like a brunette doll’s, a coaxing little red mouth, and round, yellow-brown eyes. Every one noticed her eyes; the brown iris had golden glints that made them look like gold-stone, or, in softer lights, like that Colorado mineral called tiger-eye.”

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913.

“It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people’s educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.”

—Ian McEwan, Atonement, 2001. Wow. What an amazing book. This book takes something to another level.

Another perfectly good logo has gone bad. The new $30,000 logo for the UK’s Office of Government Commerce has been abandoned, after a few additional seconds of careful consideration. The story is here, the wittiest commentary is here, and a few other Logos Gone Wild can be found here. (Thank you Bruce Dean.)

”You would naturally like to know whether in my childhood I showed an interest in the ‘black art’. And how! As early as my fourth year the blackened hands of the chimney-sweep made a great impression on me. To have such lovely black hands—and without being scolded for it—that was the truest bliss, and I shortly announced that I too wished to become a chimney-sweep.”

“For a serifless roman . . . I should have liked a less pretentious name than Optima, a name that should more justly express the striving for simplicity. Upon the original drawing of Optima appears the designation ‘Neu Antiqua’, a name I had myself desired.”

“Surely there ought to be a Gutenberg monument in Detroit—for Henry Ford should long since have had one erected to the father of modern mass-production. Also, the first Ford cars were all black, and here too I see a somewhat fantastic parallel with Gutenberg’s printing, before the lovely bright colors came into use.”

—Hermann Zapf, About Alphabets: Some Marginal Notes on Type Design, 1970.

“The man who has taught the ABC to his pupils has accomplished a greater deed than a general who has won a battle.”

“He remembers it now, sitting in the dark window in the quiet study, waiting for twilight to cease. . . . The copper light has completely gone now; the world hangs in a green suspension in color and texture like light through colored glass.”

—Wiliam Faulkner, Light in August, 1932.

“It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the neutral grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair.”

—Wiliam Faulkner, Light in August, 1932.

“He did not see the waitress until the two overlarge hands appeared upon the counter opposite him and into sight. He could see the figured pattern of her dress and the bib of an apron and the two bigknuckled hands lying on the edge of the counter as completely immobile as if they were something she had fetched in from the kitchen. ‘Coffee and pie,’ he said.
    Her voice sounded downcast, quite empty. ‘Lemon cocoanut chocolate.’
    In proportion to the height from which her voice came, the hands could not be her hands at all. ‘Yes,’ Joe said.
    The hands did not move. The voice did not move. ‘Lemon cocoanut chocolate. Which kind.’”

—Wiliam Faulkner, Light in August, 1932.

“Try these new names on for size:

    Super Happy (yellow), Fun in the Sun (orange), Giving Tree (green), Bear Hug (brown), Awesome (dusty pink), Happy Ever After (blue), Famous (hot pink) and Best Friends (purple).”

—Paul Walsh, Crayola marks 64-count box's 50th birthday with new colors, StarTribune.com, April 10, 2008.

Yes, the 64-count box of Crayola crayons was introduced just 50 years ago. Not Crayola crayons themselves, which are about twice that age, but the BIG BOX, the one with the build-in sharpener. If bigger is better, the BIG BOX was best! But the problem with the big box, as I recall, was getting all the crayons and crayon pieces back into the box. I mean . . . forget it! Nevertheless, the big box was, and is, big news in the color community.
    Here’s another report, the announcement from Crayola, and in interesting list of Crayola color names through the ages from Wikipedia. (Thanks Mom!)

“So he lay on the cot, smoking, waiting for sunset. Through the open door he watched the sun slant and lengthen and turn copper. Then the copper faded into lilac, into the fading lilac of full dusk. He could hear the frogs then, and fireflies began to drift across the open frame of the door, growing brighter as the dusk faded. Then he rose.”

—Wiliam Faulkner, Light in August, 1932.

“It seemed to him that he could see the yellow day opeining peacefully on before him, like a corridor, an arras, into a still chiaroscuro without urgency. It seemed to him that as the sat there the yellow day contemplated him drowsily, like a prone and somnolent yellow cat.”

—Wiliam Faulkner, Light in August, 1932.

“The wagon goes on, slow, timeless. The red and unhurried miles unroll beneath the steady feet of the mules, beneath the creaking and clanking wheels. The sun stands now high overhead; the shadow of the sunbonnet now falls across her lap. She looks up at the sun. ‘I reckon it’s time to eat,’ she says.”

—Wiliam Faulkner, Light in August, 1932.

Attention current color students and color enthusiasts generally: I have just been alerted to an excellent color design resource, the brainchild and labor of love of web designer Janet Lynn Ford, and it goes by the name of Color Worqx. It’s a full-semester color course on a website, without those pesky projects, deadlines and critiques. 
    Attention current students: Check out the information on color combinations, and don’t miss the color scheme generator. (Thank you Mallory Guidroz!)

Yes, you are correct. That mark, from the International Phonetic Alphabet, represents a glottal stop. Spotted at Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo Emporium. (Thank you, Bruce!)

“The Sun is more Dry, Hot, Active, and Powerfull every way than the Moon . . . for we find she is Pale and Wan, Cold, Moist, and Slow in all her Operations; and if it be as Philosophers hold, that the Moon hath no Light but what it borrows from the Sun, so Women have no strength nor light of Understanding, but what is given them from Men.”

—Margaret Cavendish, The World’s Olio, 1655; quoted in The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination, by Constance Classen. 1998.

“When the moon is full, our brain is also full. We are then in full possession of our senses. But when the moon is new, our brain becomes emptier so that our sensory powers are injured.”

—Hildegard of Bingen, Divine Works; quoted in The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination, by Constance Classen. 1998.

“Prozac, the scientific name of which is fluoxetine, was the first drug whose public name was specifically created to evoke saleable images and ideas: in this case, the ‘pro’ connoting positivity, and the ‘zac’ the reassurance and exactitude of science. Since Prozac’s smashing success, it has become all but de rigueur that new blockbuster drugs have brand names that simultaneously soothe, invigorate, and inspire—the names of Viagra, Celebrex, Claritin, and others have all followed Prozac’s lead. . . . The stakes are so high that drug companies now work with branding agencies to select just the right name . . . a name like Zoloft, uplifting and scientific all at the same time. The hard decisive sounds of the letters X, Z, C, and D are attractive to drug namers. According to James L. Detorre, the president of the Institute (which came up with the names for Lipitor, Clarinex, and Allegra), ‘the harder the tonality of the name the more efficacious the product in the mind of the physician and the end user.’ The cost of developing a trade name for a drug is an estimated $500,000 to $2.5 million. Names are registered even before the drug exists. . . . The name Zoloft was invented by Frank Delano, a legendary marketing guru, who also created the names of Nissan’s Pathfinder and Quest minivans, GMC’s Yukon, and Primerica Financial Services.”

—Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation, 2008.

“I said, ‘I need an adjective that—’ and before I could further define my need, Roger said, ‘Clumsy and naked.’ I laughed out loud.”

—Leonard Stern, on the invention of Mad Libs, the word game, which is 50 years old, as of, approximately, now.

“[. . .] he now saw his apartment through his loved one’s eyes. ‘This was no ‘apartment’! This was a slot!—one of four created by cutting an ordinary front bedroom and rear bedroom in two. [. . .] The ‘kitchen’ consisted of the smallest ‘stove,’ ‘sink,’ and ‘refrigerator’ ever made squeezed into what had been a closet in a former, better life. The quotation marks spread like dermatitis in Adam’s brain as he thought of what must be going through the mind of the girl of his dreams. The ‘bed’ was a mattress on a cheap, unfinished flush door from a lumberyard, supported at the corners by cinder blocks.”

—Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons, 2004. The bracketed ellipses are mine.

If you think you know fonts, you might want to play The Rather Difficult Font Game.

The Next Page: Thirty Tables of Contents

“It being Monday night, Hoyt and eight or nine other Saint Rays had gravitated to the library couches and easy chairs, cracked leather upholstery and all, to chill, i.e., drift through the evening in as aimless and effortless a manner as possible, bolstered by the presence of others like themselves. Naturally ESPN SportsCenter was on the big plasma TV screen. Hot colors and orangey slices of postadolescent flesh flared in a Gatorade commercial . . . and now four poorly postured middle-aged white sportswriters sat slouched in little low-backed, smack-red fiberglass swivel chairs panel-discussing the ‘sensitive’ matter of the way black players dominated basketball.”

—Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons, 2004.

“Dashorn faked a pass to André and, without looking, threw the ball inside to Jojo. The orange core of the world—Jojo had it in his hands in the ::::::::::STATIC:::::::::: of fourteen thousand cheering souls.”

—Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons, 2004.

“Melancholy is a the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.”

—Henri Frederic Amiel, quoted by Eric G. Wilson in Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, 2008.

“It is now that we understand the great profundity of the old idea of the memento mori (remember that you will die). Meditative souls of the Middle Ages often adorned their tables with skulls or kept close by etching of skeletons engaged in the danse macabre. Later, during the early Renaissance, funeral art featured grim reapers or skull and bones. Even later large clocks had engraved upon them mottoes, such as ultima forsan (perhaps the last) or vulnerant omnes, ultima necat (they all wound, and the last kills) or, perhaps the best known, tempus fugit (time flies). Seen in the light of Keat’s linkage of melancholy, death and beauty, these motifs do not appear to be morbid but rather celebratory, vibrant gestures toward life’s ambrosial finitude.”

—Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, 2008.