May 2006 Archives

'Alk'idaa' jini. . . . In the beginning there was only darkness, with sky above and water below. Then by some mysterious and holy means, sky and water came together. When they touched, that's when everything began. That was the First World, which was like an island floating in a sea of mist. It was red in color and it was an ancient place. There were no people living there, only Nilch'i Dine'', who existed in spiritual form. . . . There was no sun or moon, and there were no stars. The only source of light was the sky, which comprised four sacred colors and glowed with a different hue and lit the world from a different direction according to the time of day. When the eastern sky glowed white, it was considered dawn, and the Nilch'i Dine'' would awaken and began to stir in preparation for the day. When the southern sky glowed blue, it was considered day, and the Nilch'i Dine'' went about their daily activities. When the western sky was yellow, it was considered evening, and the Nilch'i Dine'' put away their work and amusements. When the northern sky turned black, it was considered night, and the Nilch'i Dine'' lay down and went to sleep.'

'Irvin Morris, the opening passages of From the Glittering World: A Navaho Story, 1997.

'Rebel Without a Cause's uniqueness rests more in its cinematic syle and [James] Dean's performance than in its script. [Nicholas] Ray uses a variety of camera angles, a dislocated mise-en-sc'ne, tight close-ups, point-of-view shots, intense color, and rapid, turbulent cutting to successfully project the tension, anger, and sense of almost metaphysical alientation that permeates the film. There are also luminous, metaphoric sequences: the 'chicken run,' with a pinkish-white specter, Judy, signalling the beginning of the race in the center of a pitch-black runway lit by car headlights'an initiation rite or journey confronting death; and the scene shot in the vastness of the planetarium (which is located on a precipice) with its apocalyptic, end-of-the-world images of the galaxy exploding as the three alientated kids sit alone in the dark watching'all providing a powerful metaphor for the insecurity and isolation of adolescence.'

'Leonard Quart and Albert Auster, from American Film and Society Since 1945, 1991.

'She wept.'Life's purple tide began to flow
In languid streams through every thrilling vein;
Dim were my swimming eyes'my pulse was slow,
And my full heart was swell'd to dear delicious pain.'

'early Wordsworth, as quoted in The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, by John Brewer, 1997.

'The humblest literature'chapbooks, cheap abbreviated novels, almanacs and ballads'could be bought from itinerant pedlars and chapmen who travelled the coutryside selling reading matter, trinkets, gifts, household goods and toys. Inside his heavy pack the chapman carried traditional stories, first widely printed in the sixteenth century, moral tales with such forbidding titles as The Drunkard's Legacy and Youth's Warning Piece, joke and riddle books like Joaks upon Joaks, and severely abbreviated versions of such novels as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. . . . These slim, small volumes, often printed execrably, were popular staples among all classes. What they lacked in substance they made up in good value: their greatest virtue was that they were cheap.

Itinerant salesmen carried only these sorts of book because any others would have been too bulky or heavy for them. But in the bookshops these small or penny 'histories' shared the shelves with books of every size'from slim duodecimos (one twelfth the size of a printing sheet), octavos (an eighth of a sheet), quartos (a quarter of a sheet) to large folios (the size of a sheet with a single fold).'

'John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1997.

'At Drury Lane [theater] in January 1750 when the management proposed to repeat a play which the audience had driven from the stage the evening before, 'the Audience . . . pull'd up the Benches, tore down the Kings Arms, and would have done more mischief if Mr. Lacy [David Garrick's partner] had not gone into the pit, and talk'd to 'em, what they resented was giving out a piece again after they had damn'd it.' The Blackamoor Washed White, a comic opera written by the notoriously quarrelsome and much-disliked journalist and cleric Henry Bate, suffered a similar fate in 1776. After four nights of opposition during which 'numbers of the pit and boxes got upon the stage and blows passed between some of them', [actor and manager David] Garrick was forced to withdraw the play.'

'John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1997.

An advertisement by Thomas Bewick for the publication by subscription of A General History of Quadrupeds, 1788.

'John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1997.

'[Thomas] Bewick's fame rested on three publications. His A General History of Quadrupeds (1790), an illustrated history of four-footed beats, went through eight editions in Bewick's lifetime. His equally successful two-volume History of British Birds, a more complex and scientific study, appeared in 1797 and 1804; it was reprinted six times before his death in 1828. Lastly, the Fables of Aesop, a project conceived during a nearly fatal illness in 1812 and finally published in 1818, combined Bewick's love of nature with his penchant for trenchant moralizing. As Bewick himself recognized, these three lavish books transformed his life.'

'John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1997.

'In the DARK AGES, artistic hacks (ironically known as 'ILLUMINATORS') supported themselves by illustrating BORING PRAYERBOOKS with colorful little paintings; such tomes, affordable only to WEALTHY COLLECTORS, were known as 'Books of Hours,' sporting calendars, stories of Saints, and penitential Psalms, some taking MONTHS or even YEARS to complete! These MISERABLE VIRGINS should thus be thanked for their selfless contributions to the art of the GAILY-DECORATED PICTURE BOOK!'

'Chris Ware, from the third hardback volume of The Acme Novelty Library, 2006.

'The most important of [the] tourist knick-knacks [of Georgian England] was the so-called Claude glass. Sometimes a piece of coloured glass through which to look at the landscape, it was more usually a convex mirror that miniaturized the view and, in its compression of the landscape, made it look more general and uniform. It was a tool for capturing and manipulating nature, for making a frameable possession, and it required you to turn your back on what you wanted to see. In 1769 the poet Thomas Gray described looking at Derwentwater in the Lake District . . . using his Claude glass: 'saw in my glass a picture, that if I could transmit it to you, & fix it in all the softness of its living colours, would fairly sell for a thousand pounds. this is the sweetest scene I can yet discover in point of pastoral beauty.''

'John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1997.

'A fraction of an hour later, and all out of breath, I was knocking on the door. Then a strange thing happened. A grey little mouselike girl that I'd never seen before came to the door. It was all dark inside even though it should have been light, and she blinked for a few seconds before she could say anything. The dismal creature was a stranger and I started to say something, but she looked up at me with her unbeautiful eyes and said, 'Shhhh! They're all asleep, and I'm going too.' Exhaling I said yeah and went to sit on the stairs between the top floor and the roof. I was no more than four feet away before the lock clicked to behind me. I've always hated the idea of locks in general, and especially the sound they make as the people I just left lock me out. I always wait for my visitor to get well away before snapping the lock back, and I feel weak and mean if I forget.

So I sat on those seldom used stairs with my legs stretched out flat and stared at the steps between them. A leak in the roof was sending a steady drip drip onto the spot I was watching, and it had taken green. A little trickle ran from the pool down onto the next step, then the one after. I got caught up in the sound it made because the sound of running rippling water is one of the most timeless imaginable to me. It was no different there on the stairs than it would be in caverns much too deep to ever be found except by spiritual proxy like I was doing. I could hear it just so, just the way it was, and I ran my fingers through my hair, one . . . drip, two . . . drip, three . . . thinking how I'd like to give up my human consciousness and be found here the next day as a green carpet of moss, but not recognized. People seldom climbed over those steps and when it rained, I could drink cold water.'

'William S. Burroughs, Jr, a runaway on psilocybin mushrooms in Manhattan. The ellipsis are his. From the autobiographical Speed, 1973.

'Bill would be on the roof every night to watch the colors in the sky as soon as the sun was starting to set. . . . Transfixed and absolutely motionless, right hand holding the perpetual cigarette, lips parting to the sun, and himself stirring only to drop it when it burned his fingers.'

'William S. Burroughs, Jr, remembering his father, William S. Burroughs, in Tangier. From Kentucky Ham, 1973.

'What lies within our ken is but a small part of the universe.'

'John Locke, as quoted in The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century by John Brewer, 1997.

'Lucas, like Clint Eastwood in a tux . . .
Jumps off his trusty steed and shoots the technicolor breeze
Right beside a cactus there on his hands and knees
One too many Pabst Blue Ribbons on top of those green beans'

'the amazing, and often even humorous, Momus. The song Team Clermont, from the album Stars Forever, 1999.

'In the English language, there are fewer than thirty words whose major function is to designate a specific color. These include auburn, azure, brown, black, blue, cerise, crimson, cyan, dun, ecru, gray, green, indigo, khaki, maroon, mauve, puce, purple, red, russet, scarlet, sepia, taupe, ultramarine, white, and yellow'they are all defined in the dictionary as either a specific location on the spectrum or with the phrase 'as having the color of' or 'being the color' followed by the names of objects bearing the color. . . .

There are also colors that are named after specific objects'animals, vegetables, or minerals; their names, having been in use for a long time, have come to be regarded, when used in the proper context, primarily as colors. Within this group are such names as beige, buff, lavender, lilac, orange, pink, sienna, umber, rust, turquoise, silver, gold, emerald, sapphire, and fawn. And some of these names have lost their original meaning and now stand for the color alone. However, even with this list, the number of color names remains fairly small. Therefore we use a variety of linguistic devices to extend it.

1. Combining names for a single color that has two hue qualities, e.g., yellow-green, blue-violet, yellow-orange
2. Limiting names by the use of a modifier denoting lightness, e.g., dark blue, dark red, light red, light blue, light green
3. Limiting names by the use of a modifier referring to the degree of color saturation, e.g., dull red, bright red, dull green, bright green
4. Adding the suffix ish, e.g., yellowish, greenish, reddish
5. Using such descriptive adjectives as mellow, harsh, garish, or subtle'

'Joseph H. Krause, The Nature of Art, 1969.

'By the fifteenth century, paper mills had been established in Europe to meet the demands created by the increase in printing that resulted from the development of movable type. It was the availability of paper and the use in Italy, at about the same time, of the black chalk often referred to as Italian or black stone that brought about the birth of drawings as we know it today. The chalk, a soft natural carboniferous slate that could be cut into strips, gave to drawing a freedom and tempo that was not easily attained with the more traditional pen and ink or metal points. In addition to black chalk, red chalk (originally, hematite), ranging in color from a violet red to an orange red and often referred to by its French name, sanguine, became popular in the sixteenth century. White chalk (steatite or gypsum) was used either to highlight black- or red-chalk drawings or to prepare the tinted grounds on which the drawings often appeared.'

'Joseph H. Krause, The Nature of Art, 1969.

'As far as we know, the first scientific contemplation of color began with the work of Aristotle (384'322 BCE), who recorded that light was a necessary component of ordinary color perception. It was his contention that all objects impose a quality of 'blackness' on the white light that falls on them and that it is the qualitative aspect of this blackness, in relation to the white light, that makes for color differences. He considered the blackness to be a form of contamination that blocks out the colors not seen. Aristotle's theory stood until the seventeenth century and the beginning of scientific inquiry.'

'Joseph H. Krause, The Nature of Art, 1969.

'. . . in all whites produced by Nature, there . . . [is] a mixtue of all sorts of Rays, and by consequence a composition of all Colours.'

'Sir Isaac Newton (1642'1727), from his Opticks, or A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Infractions and Colours of Light.

'Architecturally, color operates in conjunction with light and surface quality. Dark, warm colors plus low polish and low light create a more inviting environment than do bright, cold colors coupled with hard surfaces and high gloss. Color and light are traditionally used to set the stage, not only in the theater but wherever mood or the manipulation of space is important, because the size of an architectural area can be perceptually increased or decreased by varying color and light.'

'Joseph H. Krause, The Nature of Art, 1969.

'The north pole is white. The south pole is black. The equator is a circuit of middle reds, yellows, greens, blues, and purples. Parallels above the equator describe this circuit in lighter values, and parallels below trace it in darker values. The vertical axis joining black and white is a neutral scale of gray values, while perpendiculars to it are scales of Chroma. Thus, our color notions may be brought into orderly relation by the color sphere. Any color describes its color quality, light and strength, by its place in the combined scales of Hue, Value, and Chroma.'

'Albert Munsell, describing his color sphere in A Color Notation, 11th edition, 1961.

'When I began . . . I believed that two canvases would suffice, one for gray weather and one for sun. At that time I was painting some haystacks that had excited me and that made a magnificent group, just two steps from here. One day, I saw that my lighting had changed. I said to my stepdaughter: 'Go to the house, if you don't mind, and bring me another canvas!' She brought it to me, but a short time afterward it was different again. 'Another! Still another!' And I worked on each one only when I had my effect, that's all.'

'Claude Monet, on his haystack series, as quoted in Monet by William C. Seitz, 1960.

'A palette nowadays is absolutely colorful: sky-blue, pink, orange, vermillion, strong yellow, clear green, pure wine red, purple. But by strengthening all colors one again obtains calm and harmony; there happens something similar to Wagner's music which, even though performed by a great orchestra, is nonetheless intimate.'

'Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his sister, as quoted in Post-Impressionism from van Gogh to Gauguin by John Rewald, 1958.

'Depth is found in blue, first in its physical movements (1) of retreat from the spectator; (2) of turning upon its own center. It affects us likewise mentally in any geometrical form. The deeper its tone, the more intense and characteristic the effect. We feel a call to the infinite, a desire for purity and transcendence.'

'Wassily Kandinsky, from Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1947.

'You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when You were four years old And he put his head to the window and set you ascreaming.'

'Mrs. William Blake, as recalled by Crabb Robinson, from Blake Records, 1969. Found in William Blake: The Critical Heritage, edited by B.E. Bentley, Jr, 1975.

'I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun. . . . To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination.'

'William Blake, in a letter to the Reverend Dr Trusler, 1799. Found in William Blake: The Critical Heritage, edited by B.E. Bentley, Jr, 1975.

''Tis but a night, a long and moonless night
We make the grave our bed, and then are gone!'

'William Blake, from The Grave, a Poem, illustrated by Twelve Etchings.

''France is sick'the very sky
Though sunshine light, it seems to me as pale
As is the fainting man on his death-bed,
Whose face is shown by light of one weak taper'
It makes me sad and sick unto the heart;
Thousands must fall to-day.''

'William Blake, from King Edward the Third. Spoken by Sir Thomas Dagworth on the eve of the battle of Cressy.

'As Tommy was sleeping, he had such a sight;
There thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black;

And by came an Angel, who had a bright key,
He opened the coffins and set them all free;
Then down a green vale, leaping, laughing they run,
And wash in a river, and shine like the sun.

Then, naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise up on pure clouds and sport in the wind:
And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father and never want joy.'

'William Blake, from The Chimney Sweeper.

'Sweet dreams form a shade
O'er my lovely infant's head;
Sweat dreams of pleasant streams
By happy, silent, moony beams.'

'William Blake, the opening of A Cradle Song.

'He [William Blake] can be excelled by none where he is successful. Like his thoughts his paintings seem to be inspired by fairies & his colours look as if they were the bloom dropped from the brilliant Wings of the Spirits of the Prism.'

'Frederick Tatham, from Life of Blake, composed about 1832 and first published in 1906.

'How the chimney sweepers cry,
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down palace Walls;'

'William Blake, from London.

'The Rhine was red with human blood,
The Danube rolled in purple tide,
O'er the Euphrates Satan stood,
And over Asia stretched his pride'

'William Blake, from Jerusalem.

'In a corner Mona and Paddy were sitting, huddled togehter, a few torn school primers before them. They were writing down little sums onto an old chipped slate, using a bright piece of yellow chalk. I was close to them, propped up by a few pillows against the wall, watching.

It was the chalk that attracted me so much. It was a long, slender stick of vivid yellow. I had never seen anything like it before, and it showed up so well against the black surface of the slate that I was fascinated by it as much as if it had been a stick of gold.

Suddenly, I wanted desperately to do what my sister was doing. Then'without thinking or knowing exactly what I was doing, I reached out and took the stick of chalk out of my sister's hand'with my left foot.'

'Christy Brown, from My Left Foot, his autobiography, 1954.

'Dostoevski once wrote 'If God did not exist, everything would be permitted'; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point.'

'Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 1948.

'Modern physics and physiology throw a new light upon the ancient problem of perception. If there is to be anything that can be called 'perception,' it must be in some degree an effect of the object perceived, and it must more or less resemble the object if it is to be a source of knowledge of the object. . . . Light-waves travel from the sun to the earth, and in doing so obey their own laws. . . . When they reach our atmosphere, they suffer refraction, and some are more scattered than others. When they reach a human eye, all sorts of things happen which would not happen elsewhere, ending up with what we call 'seeing the sun.' But although the sun of our visual experience is very different from the sun of the astronomer, it is still a source of knowledge as to the latter, because 'seeing the sun' differs from 'seeing the moon' in ways that are causally connected with the difference between the astronomer's sun and the astronomer's moon.'

'Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 1945. From the chapter entitled The Philosophy of Logical Analysis.

'The very language of tody's advertisements is charged with sexuality. Products in the more innocent fifties were 'new and improved,' but everything in the eighties is 'hot!''as in 'hot woman,' or sexual heat. Cars are 'hot.' Movies are 'hot.' An ad for Valvoline pulses to the rhythm of a 'heat wave, burning in my car.' Sneakers get red hot in a magazine ad for Travel Fox athletic shoes in which we see male and female figures, clad only in Travel Fox shoes, apparently in the act of copulation'an ad that earned one of Adweek's annual 'badvertising' awards for shoddy advertising.'

'Jack Solomon, from The Signs of Our Times: The Secret Meanings of Everyday Life, 1990.

''If you were a car, what kind of car would you be'' As a candy-red Porsche speeds along a rain-slick forest road, the ad's voice-over describes all the specifications you'd want to have if you were a sports car. 'If you were a car,' the commercial concludes, 'you'd be a Porsche.''

'Jack Solomon, from The Signs of Our Times: The Secret Meanings of Everyday Life, 1990.

'[Albert] Speer's most impressive architectural accomplishment was probably his stage-management of the 1934 Nuremurg Rally, for which most of Goering's stock of searchlighs was brought to the Zeppelin Field:

'The hundred and thirty sharply defined beams, placed around the field at intervals of forty feet, were visible to a height of twenty to twenty-five thousand feet. . . . The feeling was of a vast room, with the beams serving as mighty pillars of infinitely high outer walls. Now and then a cloud moved through this wreath of lights, bringing an element of surrealistic surprise to the mirage. . . . The effect . . . was like being in a cathedral of ice.''

'Bill Risebero, The Story of Western Architecture, 1979. The source of the quote within is unstated.

'ZABEL: My dream'

JEAN: Dream on your feet and you'll fall down. . . .

ZABEL: My dream is to sleep just one night between real white sheets. One on top, and another one under me.'

'from the subtitles of Port of Shadows, Le Quai des brumes, directed by Marcel Carn', 1938.

'Dress in rose color and say little.'

'Benozzo Gozzoli, The Journey of the Magi; Cosimo de' Medici's advice to a friend on a mission to another city. As quoted in Leonardo, by Robert Payne, 1978.

'Only the Florentines and the Venetians could dress like popinjays without looking ridiculous. And although Leonardo [da Vinci] wrote somewhat contemptuously abut the absurd and wonderful fashions of his time, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that on occasion he dressed up in all his finery, like any dandy. That he favored rose color, which was reserved for the nobility, suggests that he regarded himself as belonging to the nobility, by descent from his mother's side.'

'Robert Payne, from Leonardo, 1978.

'A . . . significant example of language turnover can be seen in the sudden shift of meaning associated with the ethnic term 'black.' For years, dark-skinned Americans regarded the term as racist. Liberal whites dutifully taught their children to use the term 'Negro' and to capitalize the 'N.' Shortly after Stokely Carmichael proclaimed the doctrine of Black Power in Greenwood, Mississippi in June, 1966, however, 'black' became a term of pride among both blacks and whites in the movement for racial justice. Caught off guard, liberal whites went through a period of confusion, uncertain as to whether to use Negro or black. Black was quickly legitimated when the mass media adopted the new meaning. Within a few months, black was 'in,' Negro 'out.'

'Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970.

'There are ten times the new styles and colors there were a decade ago. Every architect wants his own shade of green.'

'John A. Saunders, president of General Fireproofing Company, an office supply manufacturer, as quoted by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock, 1970.

'Wall Street was, in fact, one big White Anglo-Saxon Protestant subcult, and its members did tend to go to the same schools, join the same clubs, engage in the same sports (tennis, golf and squash), attend the same churches (Presbyterian and Episcopalian), and vote for the same party (Republican). . . .

In investment banking the old conservative WASP grouping still lingers on. There are still some old-line 'white shoe' firms of which it is said 'They'll have a black partner before they hire a Jew.''

'Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970.

'Out of . . . two sources, the beat subcult of the mid-fifties and the 'acid' subcult of the early sixties, sprang a larger group'a new subcult that might be described as a corporate merger of the two: the hippie movement. Blending the blue jeans of the beats with the beads and bangles of the acid crowd, the hippies became the newest and most hotly publicized subcult on the American scene.'

'Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970.

'In the mid-fifties, a small group of writers, artists and assorted hangers-on coalesced in San Fransisco and around Carmel and Big Sur on the California coast. Quicly dubbed 'beats' or 'beatniks,' they pieced together a distinctive way of life.

Its most conscpicuous elements were the glorification of poverty'jeans, sandals, pads and hovels; a predilection for Negro jazz and jargon; an interest in Eastern mysticism and French existentialism; and a general antagonism to technologically based society.

'Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970.

'Why do the motorcyclists wear black jackets' Why not brown or blue' Why do executives in America prefer attach' cases, rather than the traditional briefcase' It is as though they were following some model, trying to attain some ideal laid down from above.'

'Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970.

'After my mother's death, her maid became my nurse. . . . I think my father had a romantic mind. He took it into his head to build a house to live in during the summer. He bought a piece of land on the top of a hill at Suresnes. . . . It was to be like a villa on the Bosphorous and on the top floor it was surrounded by loggias. . . . It was a white house and the shutters were painted red. The garden was laid out. The rooms were furnished and then my father died.'

'Sommerset Maugham, from his biography, The Summing Up, as quoted by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock, 1970.

'Significantly, when some new set of stimuli hits us, both body and brain know almost instantly that they are new. The change may be no more than a flash of color seen out of the corner of an eye. . . .

The change in stimuli triggers what experimental psychologists call an 'orientation response,'. . . a complex, even massive bodily operation. The pupils of the eyes dilate. Photochemical changes occur in the retina. . . . We involuntarily use our muscles to direct our sense organs toward the incoming stimuli'we lean toward the sound, for example, or squint our eyes to see better. Our general muscle tone rises. There are changes in our pattern of brain waves. Our fingers and toes grow cold as the veins and arteries in them constrict. Our palms sweat. blood rushes to the head. Our breathing and heart rate alter.

Under certian circumstances, we may do all of this'and more'in a very obvious fashion, exhibiting what has been called the 'startle reaction.' But even when we are unaware of what is going on, these changes take place every time we perceive novelty in our environment.'

'Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970.

'When young people don outlandish costumes, thrift-store gowns and kooky hats, they touch off a subtle fear among the 'straights' in society because they announce, by their clothing, that their behavior is likely to be unpredictable. The strength of their attachment to their own subculture, at the same time, derives from the fact that within the group, unpredictability is reduced. They can make better predictions about the behavior of their peers and subcult colleagues than about the outside world.'

'Alvin Toffler, from a footnote to Future Shock, 1970.

'Sappho is best known for erotic poety, for she expressed her love frankly and without shame. She was bisexual, and much of her poetry deals with her homosexual love affairs. In one of her poems she remembers the words of her lover:

Sappho, if you do not come out,
I swear, I will love you no more.
O rise and free your lovely strength
From the bed and shine upon us.
Lifting off your Chian nightgown, and
Like a pure lily by a spring,
Bathe in the water.

In antiquity Sappho's name became linked with female homosexual love. Today the English word lesbian is derived from Sappho's island home.'

'McKay, Hill and Buckler, A History of Western Society, sixth edition, 1999. Quoting from Sappho by W. Barnstable, 1965.

Spanish for red. First applied to the Colorado River.

'Many State Names Have Indian Origin, unknown and undated newspaper clipping, citing as its source the American Automobile Association. Found in an old dictionary.

Named by Ponce de Leon on Pascua, Florida, feast of flowers, 1513.

'Many State Names Have Indian Origin, unknown and undated newspaper clipping, citing as its source the American Automobile Association. Found in an old dictionary.

Shoshone derivation. State calls it 'light on the mountains.'

'Many State Names Have Indian Origin, unknown and undated newspaper clipping, citing as its source the American Automobile Association. Found in an old dictionary.

From Dakota Sioux word meaning 'clouded or milky' water of the Minnesoa River.

'Many State Names Have Indian Origin, unknown and undated newspaper clipping, citing as its source the American Automobile Association. Found in an old dictionary.

Spanish, meaning snow-clad.

'Many State Names Have Indian Origin, unknown and undated newspaper clipping, citing as its source the American Automobile Association. Found in an old dictionary.

Choctaw coined word meaning red man, proposed by Rev. Allen Wright, Choctaw-speaking Indian.

'Many State Names Have Indian Origin, unknown and undated newspaper clipping, citing as its source the American Automobile Association. Found in an old dictionary.

Indian name (Wauregon) means 'beautiful water', referring to the Columbia River.

'Many State Names Have Indian Origin, unknown and undated newspaper clipping, citing as its source the American Automobile Association. Found in an old dictionary.

Red Island, first named by Adrian Block because of its red clay.

'Many State Names Have Indian Origin, unknown and undated newspaper clipping, citing as its source the American Automobile Association. Found in an old dictionary.

Named after its famous Green Mountains'the French word for green being 'vert' and for mountain, 'mont.' . . . When the state was formed in 1777, Dr. Thomas Young suggested combining 'vert' and 'mont' and Vermont was the result.

'Many State Names Have Indian Origin, unknown and undated newspaper clipping, citing as its source the American Automobile Association. Found in an old dictionary.

'They're out there.

Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.'

'Ken Kesey, the opening lines of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1962.

'She slides through the door with a gust of cold and locks the door behind her and I see her fingers trail across the polished steel'tip of each finger the same color as her lips. Funny orange. Like the tip of a soldering iron. Color so hot or so cold if she touches you with it you can't tell which.'

'Ken Kesey, from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1962.

'There was a cold moon at the window, pouring light into the dorm like skim milk.'

'Ken Kesey, from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1962.

'In south-western France before about 25,000 to 20,000 BC animals were incised in bold outline on the walls of caves. From about 18,000 BC red, black and yellow pigments were also being used, especially for stencil impressions of hands, many of them with disturbingly mutilated fingers. Such 'drawings' hardly prepare us, however, for the cave paintings. . . .

The earliest paintings in the most famous of the caves, Lascaux, seem to date from about 15,000 BC. During the following 5,000 years or so, cave painting continues with unchanging consistency, apart from slight local variations. . . . When the first examples were found at Altamira in northern Spain in 1879 most archeologists dismissed them as a hoax perpetrated by an artist friend of the caves' owner: few were able to believe that they could be prehistoric. Subsequent discoveries, especially those at Lascaux made by accident in 1940, left no doubt that they are Paleolithic, and scientific methods of dating have now established their approximate age. Their technique has also been analyzed. The pigments were derived from natural minerals'reds, yellows and browns from ochre and hematite; black, dark brown and violet from various types of manganese. These substances were ground to powder and applied directly on to the damp limestone walls and ceilings of the caves. First the outlines were painted with pads of fur or mosss, with primitive brushes of fur, feather or chewed stick, or simply with a finger, and then the outlines were filled in by spraying powders thorugh bone tubes. (Such tubes with traces of colour have been found in the caves.)'

'Hugh Honour & John Fleming, from The Visual Arts: A History, 1982.

'Symbols of such a size that their imagery can be recognized only when seen from far above were created in . . . widely separated parts of America. In the north, between about 500 BC and AD 500, earthworks called 'effigy mounds' were raised in the form of snakes and birds, presumably as ceremonial centres for the wandering tribes who lived by hunting and gathering on the great plains. . . . In southern Peru . . . the barren plateau between the Palpa and Ingenio rivers was used as a field for a gigantic network of inflexibly straight lines many miles long, zigzags and 'drawings' of animals made by removing surface stones to expose the yellow soil'the largest work of art in the world. The lines . . . [transform] an area of several hundred square miles into a temple without walls, an architecture of two-dimensional space, of diagram and relation rather than mass.'

'Hugh Honour & John Fleming, from The Visual Arts: A History, 1982.

'The illusionism of the architectural framework in which it is set is characteristic of painting in Italy at [the Hellenistic and Roman] period. Ambitious'spatial and not flat'decorative schemes appeared early in the first century BC, visually enlarging the space of rooms with columns, entablatures and other architectural elements. . . . Later, a further step was taken by visually opening the wall, sometimes completely, sometimes with make-believe windows, to disclose vistas of colonnades stretching into the far distance. In the first century AD this imaginary architecture was treated with increasing fantasy to conjure up buildings of a more insubstantial elegance than any that could be erected on earth. . . .

These various types of painting are usually categorized as the Pompeiian Syles I, II, III and IV . . . [because] by far the largest number of examples have survived there. One room in the house of evidently prosperous merchants combines all four illusionistic systems or styles'a dado of simulated panels of rare marbles; pictures hung on or set in the wall and surrounded by frames which seem to project forwards; windows opening on to views of airy structures; and, above, statues placed on top of the wall, beyond which fanciful buildings may be glimpsed in space.'

'Hugh Honour & John Fleming, from The Visual Arts: A History, 1982.

Graphic design by Isral Duke, from a graphic design course called Color. Isral earned an "A" for his careful cropping and the compelling expressionistic color treatment of this piece, created from a black-and-white half-tone of the interior of the Parthenon.

'The Pantheon was built under Trajan's successor, the Emperor Hadrian (AD 117'138), on the site of an earlier temple, which had been of an entirely different design but similarly dedicated to all the gods. . . . One passes from a world of hard confining angular forms into one of spherical infinity, which seems almost to have been created by the column of light pouring through the circular eye or oculus of the dome and slowly, yet perceptibly, moving round the building with the diurnal motion of the earth. . . .

The interior is substantially intact. The various types of marble, mainly imported from the eastern Mediterranean and used for the pattern of squares and circles on the pavement, for the columns and the sheathing of the walls'white veined with blue and purple (pavonazzo), yellowish-orange (giallo antico), porphyry and so on'still reflect and colour the light which fills the whole building.'

'Hugh Honour & John Fleming, from The Visual Arts: A History, 1982.

'If triumphal arches were conceived as historical statements, so, too, were the tall commemorative columns set up in Rome'another and even more peculiar Roman invention than the triumphal arch. The first was Trajan's Column, entirely covered by a marble band of figurative carving winding up its shaft and originaly topped by a gilded statue of the emperor (replaced in 1588 by a statue of St Peter). It commemorated his campaigns in Dacia (present-day Romania) in AD 101 and 105'6, the main events of which are depicted in chronological sequence from bottom to top. As the column originally stood between two libraries founded by Trajan, it has been suggested that the cylindrical helix of the carving was inspired by the scrolls on which all books were then written. To read this figurative history from end to end, however, was not as simple a matter as unrolling a parchment scroll. The reader must walk round the column no less than 23 times with eyes straining ever further upwards! The scale increases slightly towards the top, but the upper registers are hard to see and impossible to appreciate and must always have been so, even when the figures were picked out in bright colors and gilding.'

'Hugh Honour & John Fleming, from The Visual Arts: A History, 1982. Everybody's a critic.

Incarnation Initial from the Book of Kells, early 9th century.

'Examine it carefully and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art. You will make out intricacies so delicate and subtle, so concise and compact, so full of knots and lines, with colours so fresh and vivid, that you might think all this was the work of an angel, not a man.'

'Giraldus de Barri, twelfth century, on one of the great Celtic manuscripts, perhaps the Book of Kells.

Cover design by Herbert Bayer, 1940.

'[Herbert] Bayer perhaps best exemplified the principles promoted by the Bauhaus, especially its core concept that good design by itself could improve the human condition. Bayer fervently believed and enthusiastically promoted this idea despite all evidence to the contrary in Nazi Germany at that time. Also, throughout his long career, Bayer espoused the key Bauhaus goal of unifying all the arts into a single expression that he called 'total design.' Though best known as a graphic designer who created everything from signage to letterheads, Bayer also produced paintings, photographs, sculptures, earthworks, site plans and buildings.'

'Michael Paglia, from Herbert Bayer: Beyond the Bauhaus, an article in Modernism magazine, Summer 2005.

'In 1925, shortly after [Walter] Gropius asked him to head up the graphics and typography workshop at the Dessau Bauhaus, [Herbert] Bayer designed his universal type, a simplified sans-serif design limited to lower case letters. Bayer convinced Gropius to use only lower case letters for all Bauhaus communications, from magazines to signage to invitations. In fact, Bayer would use only lower case letters for the rest of his life, including for the titles of all his future art works.'

'Michael Paglia, from Herbert Bayer: Beyond the Bauhaus, an article in Modernism magazine, Summer 2005.

Sketch for a proposed mound with ring of water, Herbert Bayer, 1956.

'By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon named NIGHT
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule'
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE'out of TIME.'

'Edgar Allen Poe, from Dreamland. As quoted in The Power of Blackness by Narry Levin, 1958.

'these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes'of my lost love. . . .'

'Edgar Allen Poe, from Ligeia. As quoted in The Power of Blackness by Narry Levin, 1958.

'DAGOO: What of that' [a streak of lightning] Who's afraid of black's afraid of me! I'm quarried out of it!

SPANISH SAILOR: (Aside) He want to bully, ah!'the old grudge makes me touchy. (Advancing.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark side of mankind'devilish dark at that. No offence.

DAGOO: (grimly) None.'

'Hermann Melville, from Moby Dick. As quoted in The Power of Blackness by Narry Levin, 1958.

'The symbolism of terror is universal. Otherwise, Death would not ride a pale horse in Scripture, and the Ancient Mariner would never have been bedeviled by an albatross. The glitter of Antartic snow and ice . . . was the single mystery that Poe had left unresolved. . . . One effect of taking mescaline, Henri Michaux has recently testified, is an impression of 'absolute white, white beyond all whiteness.' Truly, Melville seems justified in characterizing such an impression as 'a dumb blankness, full of meaning, . . . a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink.''

'Narry Levin, from The Power of Blackness, 1958.

'Though black frost nip, though white frost chill,
Nor white frost nor the black may kill
The patient root, the vernal sense
Surviving hard experience.'

'Hermann Melville, from Clarel. As quoted in The Power of Blackness by Narry Levin, 1958.

'Look how the floor of Heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;'

'Lorenzo, William Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.

'The earth was without form, and void; and darkness moved over the face of the abyss.'

'the Holy Bible, Genesis 1: 2, as quoted in The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History by Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1988.

'At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.'

'the Rig Veda, as quoted in The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History by Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1988.

'Blackness and darkness are almost always asociated with evil, in opposition to the whiteness and light associated with good. This is true even in black Africa. Blackness has an immense range of negative and fearful associations: death, the underworld, the void, blindness, night stalked by robbers and ghosts. Psychologically it signifies the fearful, uncontrollable depths of the unconscious. it is also associated with depression, stupidity, sin, despair, dirt, poison, and plague.'

'Jeffrey Burton Russell, from The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, 1988.

'The gods of the underworld, such as the Greco-Roman Plouton or Pluto, are lords of both fertility and death. The Devil's association with hell comes from his identification with the malevolent aspects of the subterranean lord. The red glow of hellfire, together with the red tint of land scorched by fire and with the color of blood, led to the association of the Devil with the color red.'

'Jeffrey Burton Russell, from The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, 1988.

'No Egyptian deity ever became the principle of evil, but one god, Seth, displays the destructive element more than the others. . . . Seth was a god of the dry, arid south, where the red deserts stretched lifeless to the rocky, burning mountains on the horizon. Because of Seth's association with the desert, he was usually portrayed as a reddish animal of unknown identity, and redhaired people were considered in some special way his own.'

'Jeffrey Burton Russell, from The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, 1988.

'How did you come to fall from heaven, bright son of the morning,
how thrown to the earth, you who enslaved the nations''

'Isaiah, Isaiah, 14: 12, King James Version of the Holy Bible, 1611. As quoted in The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, by Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1988.

'I saw Satan falling like lightning from heaven.'

'Jesus Christ, Luke, 10: 18, King James Version of the Holy Bible, 1611. As quoted in The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, by Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1988.

'The Devil is usually black, symbolizing the absence of light and goodness. His skin is black, or he is a black animal, or his clothing is black. Sometimes he is a black rider on a black horse. His next most common hue is red, the color of blood and fire; he dresses in red or has a red or flaming beard; redheaded men and women are more subject to his influence than others. Occasionally he is green, owing to his association with the powers of vegetation, of forest wilderness, and of the hunt. . . .

The Devil comes from the north, domain of darkness and punishing cold. Curious connections exist between Satan and Santa Claus (Saint Nicholas). The Devil lives in the far north and drives reindeer; he wears a suit of red fur; he goes down chimneys in the guise of Black Jack or the Black Man covered in soot; as Black Peter he carries a large sack into which he pops sins or sinners (including naughty children); he carries a stick or cane to thrash the guilty (now he merely brings candy canes); he flies through the air with the help of strange animals; food and wine are left out for him as a bribe to secure his favors. The Devil's nickname (!) 'Old Nick' derives directly from Saint Nicholas.'

'Jeffrey Burton Russell, commenting on the popular folklore of Europe in the middle ages. From The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, 1988. Santa is Satan . . . I knew it!

'. . . the prince of darkness, the enemy of the human race, . . . was bigger even than any of the beasts he had seen in hell before. . . . For this beast was black as a crow, having the shape of a human body from head to toe except that it had a tail and many hands. Indeed, the horrible monster had thousands of hands, each one of which was a hundred cubits long and ten cubits thick. Each hand had twenty fingers, which were each a hundred palms long and ten palms wide, with fingernails longer than knights's lances, and toenails much the same. The beast also had a long, thick beak, and a long, sharp tail fitted with spikes to hurt the damned souls. This horrible being lay prone on an iron grate over burning coals fanned by a great throng of demons. . . . This enemy of the human race was bound in all his members and joints with iron and bronze chains burning and thick. . . . Whenever he breathed, he blew out and scattered the souls of the damned throughout all the regions of hell. . . . And when he breathed back in, he sucked all the souls back up and, when they had fallen into the sulphurous smoke of his maw, he chewed them up. . . . This beast is called Lucifer and is the first creature that God made.'

'from The Vision of Tundale, a 'minor masterpiece' of the eleventh century. Found in The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History by Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1988.

'Alas, alas, and woe!
Lucifer, why did you fall so'
We who were angels so fair
and sat so high above the air,
now we've become as black as any coal,
ugly and tattered as a fool.'

'Dante (1265'1321), from his Divine Comedy. Found in The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History by Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1988.

'The tension between skepticism and credulity in the seventeenth century produced a new phenomenon, the black mass, a strange combination of disbelief in Christianity and belief in the Christian Devil. . . .

Several elements distinguish such phenomena from witchcraft: first, the focus was more exclusively on sex; second, the obscene rites were presided over by a priest. . . .

Such fantasies plumbed the lowest depths in the black masses of the 1670s. A brisk trade in fortunetelling, aphrodisiacs, and poisons was uncovered by the Paris police in 1678. As the scope of the crimes among reputable families and nobility was revealed, a special court was established to deal with them. The investigations brought to light magic and black masses as well as drugs and poisons. The affair got out of hand as people began to see how they might use lurid accusations against their enemies for their own political and economic advantage. In 1680 a number of priests were indicted for saying mass on the bodies of naked women at the center of a ring of black candles, of leading the congregation in sexual intercourse, of ritual copulation on the altar, of sacrificing animals, of murdering children and using their blood in the preparation of aphrodisiacs, of desecrating the Eucharist, of using the chalice to mix children's blood with sexual fluids, of invoking the Devil, and of making a written pact with him. . . . The king terminated the proceedings of 1682, issuing an edict eliminating prosecution for witchcraft. The black mass, a product of the cynical, skeptical, yet credulous seventeenth century, was not revived until the late nineteenth century.'

'Jeffrey Burton Russell, from The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, 1988.

'Toward the star trembling pale on the horizon
He pressed, leaping from one dark foothold to another. . . .
He ran, he flew, he cried out: Golden star!
Brother! Wait for me! I am coming! Do not die yet!
Do not leave me alone. . . .'

'Victor Hugo (1802'1885), from La fin de Satan, 'Satan's End'. Found in The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History by Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1988.

'The shadow belongs to the light as the evil belongs to the good, and vice versa.'

'Carl Jung (1875'1961). As found in The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History by Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1988.

'Duke Ludwig the Stern (1228'1294) of Bavaria, after executing his wife in a fit of rage, was so stricken with remorse that his hair turned white in a single night'although he was only 28'

'Ripley's Believe it or Not!, 18th series, December 1971.

'The red seal stamped on documents by the head of the taoist sect of China is believed capable of protecting them from evil spirits'

'Ripley's Believe it or Not!, 18th series, December 1971.

'The bones of the garfish are a vivid green'cooking makes them even greener'

'Ripley's Believe it or Not!, 18th series, December 1971.

'Persian girls dancing in village celebrations attach to the ends of their long tresses bells and gold and silver coins'

'Ripley's Believe it or Not!, 18th series, December 1971.

'The monastery of Potala in Lhasa, Tibet, is painted white, red and brown'the sacred colors of the Tibetans'

'Ripley's Believe it or Not!, 27th series, November 1977.

'The Silver Pavilion of Kyoto, Japan, built in 1483, was constructed without the use of silver . . . it was planned to cover it with silver but it was never done'

'Ripley's Believe it or Not!, 27th series, November 1977.

'The green wine of Minho Portugal, comes from grapes that are shaded by trees around the trunks of which the vines grow to a heigh of 30 feet'

'Ripley's Believe it or Not!, 27th series, November 1977.

'Japanese brides wear white paper hats to assure marital fidelity and an absence of jealousy'

'Ripley's Believe it or Not!, 27th series, November 1977.

'A white feather worn by a Papuan native, identifies him as a hero who has killed a man in battle'

'Ripley's Believe it or Not!, 27th series, November 1977.

'White clay in the shape of a snake, is placed outside a village by the Kaondes of Aftrica, to guard against malaria'

'Ripley's Believe it or Not!, 27th series, November 1977.

'When the Chinese invented paper around 200 B.C. . . . the first uses they found for it were as writing material, money, and playing cards. All three applications spread along trade routes, especially to places where divination and gambling with straws, beads, and pebbles (called lots, as in lottery) were already common. Since card games could be made more complex than the casting of lots, they tended to appeal to more literate cultures. Once priests, scribes, and warriors took up cards, they were further disseminated, along with the means to produce them, via conquest. . . . Christian crusaders and Venetian merchants eventually brought cards back to Europe, where Spaniards and Italians began playing with forty-card decks, and Germans made do for a while with thirty-six. By the early fourteenth century . . . Persians had developed a deck of fifty-two cards arranged in four suits, each with ten numerical ranks and three hand-painted court cards. The suits were Coins, Cups, Swords, and Polo Sticks, emblematic of the officers providing a sultan's court with money, food and drink, military protection, and sporting entertainment. As these and similar decks made their way to Italy, polo sticks became scepters or cudgels, which eventually turned into our clubs.'

'James McManus, from Positively Fifth Street, 2003.

'By 1470, French card makers in Rouen had settled on the four suits we're familiar with today. The church was represented by hearts, the state by spades, merchants by diamonds, farmers by clubs (which resembled more and more the clower they harvested). Earlier cards had been expensively hand-painted for the actual king and his court, but widespread demand among common folk soon led to mass production of uniform decks using woodcuts and stencils. Rouennais designers fashioned their court cards after historical figures. The king of spades was drawn to resemble David, king of the Hebrews, his sword modeled after the weapon he took from Goliath upon slaying the giant with a leather slingshot, which was shown lower down on his card. The club king depicted a stylized Charlemagne, the king of diamonds Julius Caesar, the heart king Alexander the Great. The four kings thus represent the Jewish world, the Holy Roman Empire, Rome, and Greece, the four main wellsprings of Western civilization. . . .

By the nineteenth century, as standard playing cards became double-ended, designers had to jettison the heraldry on the lower halves of the court cards. David's slingshot disappeared, making his kingship more generic. Two images that survive are the orb of Christendom cupped in the left hand of the club king, and the three-belled flower, emblematic of the Holy Trinity, held by his queen.'

'James McManus, from Positively Fifth Street, 2003.

'Some historians argue that the ace, or one, . . . made its counter-numerical switch from lowest to highest rank during the American and French revolutions, when it suddenly became possible for the merest commoner to become emperor, prime minister, or president. These days the ace represents whatever intangible force (such as God, Allah, aleph, I, the Arabic number one, or what physicists call a singularity) can overcome the most august human being.'

'James McManus, from Positively Fifth Street, 2003.

'Except for the sun and the occasional thermonuclear blast, [Las Vegas] is the brightest source of light in our solar system. Its most famous drink, in fact, is the Atomic Cocktail'vodka, brandy, Champagne, splash of sherry. Gamblers enjoying them in the fifties were treated, by paying slightly more for their rooms, to views of Johnny von Neumann's hydrogen bombs going off sixty-five miles north of town.'

'James McManus, from Positively Fifth Street, 2003.

'Established in the days of Estes Kefauver and J. Edgar Hoover, the Black Book is simply a three-ring looseleaf binder holding mimeographed records and mug shots of the thirty-eight 'Excluded Persons' barred for life from Nevada casinos.'

'James McManus, from Positively Fifth Street, 2003.

'The ace of spades is as black and as bad as things get'or as good, in the sense that Rhett Butler, Adam Cartwright, John Shaft, or Achilles is good. The ace of spades also is real, the most real, in that our willingness to 'call a spade a spade' shows us to be forthright, clear-eyed, realistic.'

'James McManus, from Positively Fifth Street, 2003.

'I ain't superstitious, but a black cat just crossed my trail.'

'Muddy Waters, as quoted by James McManus in Positively Fifth Street, 2003.

'Contemporaries did not call the plague the Black Death. Sometime in the fifteenth century, the Latin phrase atra mors, meaning, 'dreadful death,' was translated 'black death,' and the phrase stuck.'

'McKay, Hill and Buckler, A History of Western Society, sixth edition, 1999.

'Her blacks crackle and drag.'

'Sylvia Plath, from Edge; quoted by James McManus in Positively Fifth Street, 2003.

'I've fantasized for decades about having a World Series stack imposing enough to make brutal sport of my opponents, but I have zero actual experience in the role. Do I feel any pressure' Of course not. I . . . pour out my baggie of chips, stack them by colour, recount them. Not that I think anyone would have stealthily siphoned a pink or an orange this morning, but still: $276,000, all present and accounted for. Does it make sense to say that one loves little towers of tinted clay chips' Did Grandma Betsy shit in the woods' . . .

At $15,000 per round, the average stack would be blinded off in about seven rounds. I have more leeway, of course, with my four yellow five-hundreds, fourteen blue-and-white thousands, twenty-four orange five-thousands, and fourteen hot pink ten-thousands. (And yes, I'm convinced of it: love is exactly the word.) The floormen have requested that we keep all our pinks to the fore, this is to give opponents a fair chance to measure with whom they want to tangle. Or not.'

'James McManus, from Positively Fifth Street, 2003.

A club flush.

'Positively Fifth Street, by James McManus, 2003.

First three community cards, exposed simultaneously.

'Positively Fifth Street, by James McManus, 2003.

Five cards of the same suit.

'Positively Fifth Street, by James McManus, 2003.

Flop with three different suits.

From the text (p. 204): 'Raising to $1,200, I get three nasty callers, but the flop comes a ravishing K-J-8 rainbow. (The three different suits of a rainbow greatly reduce the chances of someone else's making a flush.)'

'Positively Fifth Street, by James McManus, 2003.

'[With] the delicate brushwork, exquisitely subtle colour harmonies and expansive centreless compositions of the Water Lilies . . . Monet's aim was still the presentation of an immediate experience of nature, but his water-lily garden at Giverny held for him intimations of infinity and his contemplative visions of it give the illusion of a glimpse into an endless whole. His almost spaceless views downwards, on to and through the surface of the pool become shimmering, impalpable curtains of colour. The natural world disappears into near-abstract patterns of vibrating light and atmosphere.'

'Hugh Honour & John Fleming, from The Visual Arts: A History, 1982.

'An extraordinary golden light, delicate, radiant, transparent, suddenly flooded the room, softly but clearly outlining its walls, gleaming equipment, and the figure of my teacher himself. And, at the same moment, I felt on my face and hands something like a warm breath of air. This phenomenon lasted no more than a second or a second and a half. Then heavy darkness concealed everything from my eyes.

'Lights, please!' exclaimed Lord Charlesbury and once more I saw him emerging from the door of the glass chamber. His face was pale, but illuminated by joy and pride.

. . . 'You saw that marvelous, steady, caressing light. Now do you belive in my project''

'Yes,' I answered heatedly, with profound conviction. 'I believe in it and I bow before an invention of great genius.''

'Alexander Kuprin, from Liquid Sunshine, 1913. Translated from the Russian by Lelant Fetzer in 1980.

'Hypocrites give attention to

form, the right and wrong ways of professing belief. Grow instead in universal light.

When that revealed itself out of nonexistence, God gave it a robe and a thousand different names,

the least of those sweet-breathing names being the one who is not in need of anyone.

When that comes, daylight looks dark, and when your foolishness, which doesn't recognize

such beauty, becomes visible to you, night dark will seem glowing beside it. Let your eyes

get used to light. Don't miss your own splendour!'

'Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207'1273), from the Masnavi, Book IV. The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, translated by Coleman Barks, 2001.

'Nonexistence contains existence. Love

encloses beauty. Brown flint and gray steel have orange candlelight in them. Inside

fear, safety. In the black pupil of the eye, many brilliancies.'

'Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207'1273), from Paradox. The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, translated by Coleman Barks, 2001.

'I feel the source of the power of Rumi's spontaneous poetic derives from his continual balance of surrender and discipline, his visionary radiance held in the level calm of ordinary sight. Splendor and practice, meditation and chore'somewhere in the dynamic of those lies the vitality and validity. . . .

The universe and the light of the stars come through me. (fana)

I am the crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival. (baqa)

The 'crescent moon' is undoubtedly some plywood device nailed over the fairground entrance. Baqa often includes a little joke about the grandeur.'

'Coleman Barks, from the introduction to The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, 2001.

'Volpone. Good morning to the day; and next, my gold:
Open the shrine, that I may see my saint.'

'Ben Jonson, from Volpone, 1606.

'Lady Wishfort. Fetch me the red'the red, do you hear, sweetheart' An arrant ash colour, as I'm a person. Look you how this wench stirs! Why dost thou not fetch me a little red' Didst thou not hear me, Mopus'

Peg. The red ratafia does your ladyship mean, or the cherry-brandy'

Lady Wishfort. Ratafia, fool. No, fool. Not the ratafia, fool'grant me patience! I mean the Spanish paper, idiot, complexion, darling. Paint, paint, paint, dost though understand that, changeling, dangling thy hands like bobbins before thee''

'William Congreve, The Way of the World, 1700.

'Tony Lumpkin. Ah! could you but see Bet Bouncer of these parts, you might then talk of beauty. Ecod, she has two eyes as black as sloes, and cheeks as broad and red as a pulpit cushion. She'd make two of she.'

'Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer, 1773.

'FELLINI: Making films in color is, I believe, an impossible operation. . . . In order to truly express the chromatic values of a face, a landscape, some scene or other, it is necessary to light it according to certain criteria, in function of both personal taste and technical exigencies. And all goes well so long as the camera doesn't move. But as soon as the camera moves in on the faces or objects so lighted, the intenstiy of the light is heightened or deadened; and, depending on whether the light is heightened or deadened, all the chromatic values are intensified or deadend; the camera moves, the light changes.

There is also an infinitude of contingencies that condition the color . . . these are the innumerable and continual traps that have to be dealt with, every day, when shooting in color. For example, colors interfere, set up echoes, are conditioned by one another. Lighted, color runs over the outline that holds it, emanates a sort of luminous aureola around neighboring objects. Thus there is an incessant game of tennis between the colors. Sometimes it even happens that the result of these changes is agreeable, better than what one had imagined; but it's always a somewhat chancy, uncontrollable result. Finally, the human eye selects and in this way already does artist's work, because the human eye, the eye of man, sees chromatic reality through the prisms of nostaligia, of memory, of presentiment or imagination. This is not the case with the lens, and it happens that you believe you are bringing out certain values in a face, a set, a costume, while the lens brings out others. In this way, writing becomes very difficult; it is as if, while writing, a modifying word escapes your pen in capital letters or, still worse, one adjective appears instead of another, or some form of punctuation that completely changes the sense of the line. However, in spite of these pessimistic considerations, the film I am working on is in color, because it was born in color in my imagination.

KAST: I have the impression that Giulietta of the Spirits is a film in which time does not exist: the past, the present, the future and the imaginary are mixed . . .

FELLINI: Yes, that's quite so. The color is part of the ideas, the concepts, in the same fashion as, in a dream, red or green have this or that significance. The color participates not only in the language but in the plot itself of the film This is why, in spite of deceptions or fears that attend shooting in color, I believe that color is an enrichment, with the disquieting, sinister, carnivalesque, in a certain sense lugubrious, tone that it brings with it.'

'Federico Fellini, interviewed by Pierre Kast, 1965. From Interviews with Film Directors, by Andrew Sarris, 1967.

'GODARD'The dialogue [in Red Desert] is simper, more funtional than that of your previous films; isn't their traditional role of 'commentary' taken by the color'

ANTONIONI'Yes, I believe that is true. Let us say that, here, the dialogue is reduced to an indispensable minimum and that, in this sense, it is linked to the color. For example, I would never have done the scene in the shack where they talk about drugs, aphrodisiacs, without using red. I would never have done it in black and white. The red puts the spectator in a state of mind that permits him to accept this dialogue. The color is correct for the characters (who are justified by it) and also for the spectator.'

'Michelangelo Antonioni, interviewed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1964. From Interviews with Film Directors, by Andrew Sarris, 1967.

'You know that a psycho-physiology of color exists; studies, experiments have been done on this subject. The interior of the factory seen in the film [Red Desert] was painted red; two weeks later the workers were fighting amongst one another. It was re-painted in pale green and everyone was peaceful. The workers' eyes must have a rest.'

'Michelangelo Antonioni, interviewed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1964. From Interviews with Film Directors, by Andrew Sarris, 1967.

'The psychology of quotation in literature is analogous to that in music: 'Even if a text is wholly quotation, the condition of quotation itself qualifies the text and makes it so far unique. Thus a quotation from Marvell by Eliot has a force slightly different from what it had when Marvell wrote it. Though the combination of words is unique it is read, if the reader know his words either by usage or dictionary, with a shock like that of recognition. The recognition is not limited, however, to what was already known in the words; there is a perception of something previously unknown, something new which is a result of the combination of the words, something which is literally an access of knowledge.''

'Donald Jay Grout, a footnote from A History of Western Music, third edition, 1980. He is quoting R.P. Blackmur, Form and Value in Modern Poetry.

?The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres. And in fact wrestling is an open-air spectacle, for what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky (a romantic value suited rather to fashionable occasions), it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.?

?Roland Barthes, The World of Wrestling, from Mythologies, 1957, translated from the French by Jonathan Cape, 1972.

?In the exhibition halls, the car on show is explored with an intense, amorous studiousness: it is the great tactile phase of discovery, the moment when visual wonder is about to receive the reasoned assault of touch (for touch is the most demystifying of all senses, unlike sight, which is the most magical).?

?Roland Barthes, The New Citroen, from Mythologies, 1957, translated from the French by Jonathan Cape, 1972.

?Or take a black pebble: I can make it signify in several ways, it is a mere signifier; but if I weigh it with a definite signified (a death sentence, for instance, in an anonymous vote), it will become a sign.?

?Roland Barthes, Myth Today, from Mythologies, 1957, translated from the French by Jonathan Cape, 1972.

?It is not hard to see why viewers at the 1865 Salon, where Olympia was first exhibited, resisted so strenuously her thin-lipped invitation. . . .

It is as though Manet, having accepted his friend Baudelaire?s challenge to be a painter of modern, urban life in all its transitory aspects, had decided to throw the challenge right back at the onlooker. Modern life in the industrial era implied fragmentation, dislocation, uncertainty, risk, it was full of ironic and inharmonious details?like the black cat arching its back at the end of Olympia?s bed.?

?Calvin Tomkins, the essay Manet and De Kooning, February 6, 1984. From Post- to Neo-: The Art World of the 1980s, 1988.

?The lovers were just entering the grounds of the pension. They were leaning toward each other as the water-oaks bent from the sea. There was not a particle of earth beneath their feet. Their heads might have been turned upside-down, so absolutely did they tread upon blue ether.?

?Kate Chopin (1851?1904), The Awakening, 1899.

?The white light of the moon had fallen upon the world like the mystery and the softness of sleep.?

?Kate Chopin (1851?1904), The Awakening, 1899.

?Pirate gold isn?t a thing to be hoarded or utilized. It is something to squander and throw to the four winds, for the fun of seeing the golden specks fly.?

?Kate Chopin (1851?1904), spoken by Edna in The Awakening, 1899.

??Something new, Edna?? exclaimed Miss Mayblunt, with lorgnette directed toward a magnificent cluster of diamonds that sparkled, that almost sputtered, in Edna?s hair, just over the center of her forehead.

?Quite new; ?brand? new, in fact; a present from my husband. It arrived this morning from New York.??

?Kate Chopin (1851?1904), from The Awakening, 1899.

?The golden shimmer of Edna?s satin gown spread in rich folds on either side of her. There was a soft fall of lace encircling her shoulders. It was the color of her skin, without the glow, the myriad living tints that one may sometimes discover in vibrant flesh.?

?Kate Chopin (1851?1904), from The Awakening, 1899.

?The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun.?

?Kate Chopin (1851?1904), from The Awakening, 1899.

?What embraces, in which the lilacs were crushed between them! What ardent kisses! What pink flushes of happiness mounting the cheeks of the two women.?

?Kate Chopin (1851?1904), Lilacs, from The Awakening and Selected Stories, 1984.

?Every child in Alice?s class poured his or her whole heart into the Get Well cards, and each was an object of art. One card showed a brilliant ball of gold glitter, which represented the gasoline fire at the Gregg?s home. The gold ball was connected by a long streak of silver glitter to the tiny stick figure of a little girl. This was the artist trying to put out the fire with a stream from a garden hose. The caption said, Get Well Soon, Glenn Gregg.?

?Lewis Nordan, from Wolf Whistle, 1993.

?There was nobody in the shop for a haircut this time of night, just Rage Gage, the barber, and a few friends, blues singers.

The light from the front window was yellow, and although it broke up a corner of darkness and the rain with its small strength, it seemed to turn to water and to run and fade like cheap dye, once it left the window.

The house was not a real barber shop, not originally, though it had been fixed up nice. It was only a Negro cabin with a barber pole out in front of it.?

?Lewis Nordan, from Wolf Whistle, 1993.

?poster design by Max Bill, 1931. Avant-Garde Graphics: 1918?1934, 2004.

?The most noticeable difference between graphics of the period between the two world wars and today is the absence of full colour in the former, although colour photography was pioneered in Russia well before the First World War. Few of the works in this book are in more than three colours; many are printed only in black and red. For a full-colour effect, designers were ingenious in overprinting two or three colours, and they exploited a traditional printing technique that spread ink of varying colours across the printing press rollers to give a rainbow effect.?

?Richard Hollis, from Art + Technology = Design, an essay in the wonderful (if you like this kind of thing) Avant-Garde Graphics: 1918?1934, 2004.

?Ten thousand years ago men were building round huts with red clay plaster at Tell Mureybit on the upper Euphrates River. About 7500 B.C. they took to building larger houses with neat square corners. . . . High in the hills between [the rivers Tigris and Euphrates] lies the site of Cayonu, where varied types of building were put up around 7000 B.C. Some have long parallel rooms on level dirt floors. Solid floors distinguish two larger structures; one is paved with flat flagstones as long as five feet, while the other has a striking orange-red floor with a mosaic of four kinds of limestone, all carefully polished. . . . Here, perhaps, we sense the inspiration for many great buildings of antiquity.

Five thousand years later these village cults had developed into the state-run religion of Sumer, first of civilizations. The house-size holy places had grown outward and upward to become the ziggurats, as low supporting platforms had been rebuilt time after time atop their predecessors. The shrine became the high holy of holies, enclosed within its own precinct in the heart of a walled city?the new way in which men had chosen to live.?

?Norman Hammond, from his introduction to Builders of the Ancient World: Marvels of Engineering, a National Geographic Society book, 1986.

?A subject is seated in a darkened room and two spots of light are flashed off and on alternately. When the interval between flashes is more than 0.2 sec, the subject sees two flashing lights; but when the interval is less than 0.2 sec the subject sees one light in continuous motion. . . . This phenomenon underlies our experience of movies, which are actually a rapidly displayed series of still photographs. . . . Apparent motion is an experience that emerges from simple sensations but cannot plausibly be reduced to them. It is, in short, a perceptual whole (Gestalt, in German), given immediately to consciousness and deserving direct study. The Gestal psychologists advocated a holistic psychology based on the mind?s perception of complete forms.

This experimental demonstration (called the phi phenomenon), which shows that conscious experience is not usefully reducible to bundles of discrete sensations, was the starting point of the Gestalt movement.?

?Thomas Hardy Leahey, from A History of Psychology: Main Currents in Psychological Thought, second edition, 1987.

?I used to love music, back when it had melody and chords and lyrics. But now it has no melody and no chords, just thwack-thwacking, and they even seem to be cutting back on the thwack-thwacking, so now it?s sometimes just thwa, and, as far as lyrics, do you consider these lyrics?

Hump my hump,
My stumpy lumpy hump!
Hump my dump, you lumpy slumpy dump!
I?ll dump your hump, and then just hump your dump,
You lumpy frumply clump.

I?m sorry. To me? Those are not lyrics.?

?Author Unknown. Found this on the flipside of the first page of a clipped copy of the David Sedaris essay in The New Yorker, April 10, 2006. Pretty funny, huh?

?The first two times my parents left for vacation, my sisters and I escorted them to the door and said that we would miss them terribly. It was just an act, designed to make us look sensitive and English, but on this occasion we meant it. ?Oh, stop being such babies,? our mother said. ?It?s only a week.? Then she gave Mrs. Peacock the look meaning, ?Kids. What are you doing to do??

There was a corresponding look that translated to ?You tell me,? but Mrs. Peacock didn?t need it, for she know exactly what she was going to do?enslave us. An hour after my parents left, she was lying face down on their bed, dressed in nothing but her slip. Like her skin, it was the color of Vaseline, an un-color really, that looked even worse with yellow hair. Add to this her great bare legs, which were dimpled at the inner knee, and streaked all over with angry purple veins.?

?David Sedaris, from The Understudy: The Week of Mrs. Peacock. The New Yorker, April 10, 2006.

When you throw a banjo into a dumpster and it hits an accordion.

?attributed to Willie Nelson by Little Jimmy K. (Jim, did I get this right?)

?A skinny yellow dog dragged a saddlebag full of harmonicas down the street in its teeth.?

?Lewis Nordan, from Wolf Whistle, 1993. Thank you Jimmy K, for the tip. I?m diggin? this crazy novel!

?When the light of the sun is spread out by a prism into a spectrum, the bands of color are striped also by some narrow, dark lines, which we now understand to mark the specific wavelengths at which light is absorbed by various elements in the sun?iron, magnesium, calcium, and others. Isaac Newton experimented with prisms and lenses in the years 1668?72, and based an entire theory of the nature of color and of light on the solar spectrum. He did not report the absorption lines. Was his equipment too primitive to reveal them? In 1961, William Bisson at M.I.T. built an apparatus like Newton?s, reconstructed the original experiments, and showed that the absorption lines would have been plainly visible. Bisson and a colleage reported this in a note in Science in 1962, concluding, ??We saw the lines,? and wonder why Sir Isaac Newton failed to achieve the distinction of being the founder of the science of spectroanalysis.? The question provoked Edwin Boring to argue, later that year, that Newton?s theory, not his apparatus, had no place for the lines; Newton?s theoretical expectations blinded him to the evidence. Boring added, ?To the observing scientist, hypothesis is both friend and enemy.??

?Horace Freeland Judson, from The Search for Solutions, 1980.

?And we looked straight into the eyes of the Council, but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons.?

?Ayn Rand, from Anthem, 1946.

?So we looked straight upon the Golden One, and we saw the shadows of their lashes on their white cheeks and the sparks of sun on their lips. And we said:

?You are beautiful, Liberty 5-3000.??

?Ayn Rand, from Anthem, 1946.

?We lay on our back, we threw our arms out, and we looked up at the sky. The leaves had edges of silver that trembled and rippled like a river of green and fire flowing high above us.?

?Ayn Rand, from Anthem, 1946.

?Never had we seen rooms so full of light. The sunrays danced upon colors, colors, more colors than we thought possible, we who had seen no houses save the white ones, the brown ones and the grey. There were great pieces of glass on the walls, but it was not glass, for when we looked upon it we saw our own bodies and all the things behind us, as on the face of a lake.?

?Ayn Rand, from Anthem, 1946.

'Of colours it is good to behold green, red, yellow, and white, and by all means to have light enough, with windows in the day, wax candles in the night, neat chambers, good fires in winter, merry companions; for though melancholy persons love to be dark and alone, yet darkness is a great increaser of the humour.'

'Robert Burton, from The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621; reprinted in 2001.

'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.'

'Paul, 1 Corinthians, 13: 12, King James Version of the Holy Bible, 1611.

'There is a surprising sentence about enigma in St. Augustine's treatise, De trinitate. Nobody, says Augustine, can really understand the word 'darkly' (for him, in aenigmate) in Paul's text, 'For now we see through a glass, darkly,' unless they have learned about tropes. For, Augustine adds, aenigma is a trope, a species of the genus allegory. He says this as a matter of course, not as some specialized or esoteric knowledge.'

'Eleanor Cook, Enigmas and Riddles in Literature, 2006.

'The good master [Paul] teaches us . . . that 'with face unveiled' from the veil of the law, which is the shadow of things to come, 'beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord,' i.e., gazing at it through a glass, 'we may be transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the spirit of the Lord' . . . we shall see Him, not through a glass, but 'as He is'; which the Apostle Paul expresses by 'face to face'.'

'Augustine, as quoted in Enigmas and Riddles in Literature by Eleanor Cook, 2006.

'I was one day reading Young's Night Thoughts, and when I came to that passage which asks 'who can paint an angel,' I closed the book and cried, 'Aye! who can paint an angel'' A voice in the room answered, 'Michael Angelo could.' 'And how do you know,' I said, looking round me, but I saw nothing save a greater light than usual. 'I know,' said the voice, 'for I sat to him; I am the arch-angel Gabriel.' 'Oho!' I answered, 'you are, are you; I must have better assurance than that of a wandering voice; you may be an evil spirit'there are such in the land.' 'You shall have good assurance,' said the voice, 'can an evil spirit do this'' I looked whence the voice came, and was then aware of a shining shape, with bright wings, who diffused much light. As I looked, the shape dilated more and more: he waved his hands; the roof of my study opened; he ascended into heaven; he stood in the sun, and beckoning to me, moved the universe. An angel of evil could not have done that'It was the arch-angel Gabriel.'

'William Blake, as quoted in Major's Cabinet Gallery of Pictures: with Historical and Critical Descriptions and Dissertations, by Allan Cunningham, 1833. From William Blake: The Critical Heritage, edited by G.E. Bentley, Jr, 1975.

'In descriptions of enigma, the most common lexis and troping by far is that of light and dark. Down through the centuries, poets and rhetoricians and novelists and others routinely speak of enigma as 'dark' or 'obscure.' Johann Buchler's 1548 Parnasstus' Poeticus provides a list of modifiers for the Latin word aenigma. The list reads: 'caecum, durum, latebrosum, tenebrosum,' that is, 'blind (i.e. dark or unintelligible or concealed), hard, obscure, shadowy.'. . .

'Obscure' belongs to a whole family of synonyms that describe riddles and enigmas: veils, clouds, mists, and so on.'

'Eleanor Cook, from Enigmas and Riddles in Literature, 2006.

Sermo obscurus, a riddle or darke allegorie, as: The halfe is more then the hole.

'Richard Sherry, from A Treatise of the Figures of Grammar and Rhetoric, London, 1550. As cited in a footnote in Enigmas and Riddles in Literature by Eleanor Cook, 2006.

'Was not their error that they forgot the solid truth of Hesiod's saying that 'The half is often more than the whole'' He meant that when it is useful to get the whole, but the half is sufficient, then the modestly sufficient, the better, is more than the disproportionate, the worse.'

'Plato, from his Laws. As quoted in Enigmas and Riddles in Literature by Eleanor Cook, 2006.

'The central question in biology today was posed by William Harvey nearly 350 years ago: omnes ab ovo, everything comes from the egg.'

'Horace Freeland Judson, on embryology. From The Search for Solutions, 1980.

'Reader, in your hand you hold
A silver case, a box of gold.
I have no door, however small,
Unless you pierce my tender wall,
And there's no skill in healing then
Shall ever make me whole again.
Show pity, Reader, for my plight:
Let be, or else consume me quite.'

'Jay Macpherson, 'Egg,' from Poems Twice Told: The Boatman & Welcoming Disaster, 1981. As quoted in Enigmas and Riddles in Literature by Eleanor Cook, 2006.

''Yes, that is rich ore,' Al agreed in what would prove to be an understatement. What Ed had found was an outcropping of ore six or seven inches wide and some forty to fifty feet long. In some places, this ore was so nearly pure silver that they could press a half-dollar into it, pull it out, and see an exact mirror-image likeness of the coin left behind.'

'Odie B. Faulk, on brothers Al and Ed Schieffelin. Ed was the discoverer of silver and gold on the land which they would name Tombstone, Arizona. From Tombstone: Myth and Reality, 1972.

'Actually a miner needed little excuse to come to the new camp, for many of them were vagabonds at heart. He went to see each new 'elephant' (an expression of the day which had originated with P. T. Barnum's introduction of the circus elephant; 'to see the elephant' meant to satisfy one's curiosity). He might take a job for a day, a week, a month, or longer, and then he would leave for no better reason than finding a lump in his morning oatmeal or because the morning's hotcakes were 'out-of-round.''

'Odie B. Faulk, on working conditions in Tombstone in the 1880s. from Tombstone: Myth and Reality, 1972.

'The darkest hours of the night are those which immediately precede the dawn. We believe the time is not far distant when our grand old camp will rise from the waves and shake her crested head aloft with pride as of yore.'

'John Clum, editor of the Tombstone Epitaph, in February, 1900. As quoted in Tombstone: Myth and Reality by Odie B. Faulk, 1972.

'A party of distinguished arrivals were in Tombstone today, and their presence gave rise to the general hope that the dark murky clouds that have long hovered over Tombstone's industrial atmosphere would rise and reveal a luminous silver lining. Whispers, murmurs and rumors of the opening of the Tombstone mines under a consolidated management, would, if consummated, bring about a dawn of prosperity never equalled hereabouts, and the sunshine of consequent good times would start the sluggish commercial blood into the renewed activity and vigor of halcyon days.'

'John Clum, editor of the Tombstone Epitaph, October 21, 1900. As quoted in Tombstone: Myth and Reality by Odie B. Faulk, 1972.

'He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.'

'James Joyce, 'The Dead,' from Dubliners, 1914.

'Years pass by and leave things unaltered. The same narrow, red roads run through cotton- and cornfields. The same time-grayed cabins send up threads of smoke from their red-clay chimneys, doorways, and china-berry and crape-myrtle blossoms to drop gay petals on little half-clothed black children.'

'Julia Peterkin (1880'1961), 'Ashes,' from Green Thursday: Stories by Julia Peterkin, first published in 1924.

'Kildee sat in the doorway and looked out at the thick, black night. His muscular hands shook helplessly and clutched at the rough board step. His strength had left him. He felt weak. Shaken. Afraid. The darkness came up close. It filled his eyes and ears and nostrils. It slipped past him into the fire-lit room. The fire still burned. There was no other light to be had. But darkness filled the corners. Silent darkness. Black, dumb darkness. It told nobody what it was, or what it was doing. It was like death. It came. It went. Nobody could keep it away. Nobody.

. . . If God was mad with him for plowing Green Thursday, why didn't He strike him with lightning and kill him' That would have been easy enough. But to burn a baby'it wasn't square.'

'Julia Peterkin (1880'1961), 'Green Thursday,' from Green Thursday: Stories by Julia Peterkin, first published in 1924.

'The sun was going down.

Far across the cotton field it shone red. As Killdee lifted serious eyes to look at it, his lean, gaunt, black face saddened.

The sun that set in Baby Rose's grave was red, just like this sunset. Red like the fire that burned her tender baby flesh and killed her. He never saw a red sunset without thinking of little Baby Rose.

Now as he thought, his tired eyes filled with tears, and through the tears, the red coppery glow glistened, and flashed and gleamed mockingly before him.'

'Julia Peterkin (1880'1961), 'Teaching Jim,' from Green Thursday: Stories by Julia Peterkin, first published in 1924.

'On April 25th-26th, 1986, the World's worst nuclear power accident occurred at Chernobyl in the former USSR (now Ukraine). . . . At 1:23 a.m. the chain reaction in the reactor became out of control creating explosions and a fireball which blew off the reactor's heavy steel and concrete lid.

As fire, smoke and steam raged from the shattered reactor hall building, residents of the nearby city of Pripyat, standing atop the tallest apartment building in the city, spoke of a beautiful 'shining cloud' pluming from the shattered reactor.

What was this 'shining cloud'' How did it come into being'

In order to understand, one first must examine this excerpt from Chernobyl plant operator Alexander Yuvchenko, who was one of very few control room operators on duty that fateful day to survive the accident. . . . Yuvchenko stated: 'From where I stood I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor. It was like a laser light, caused by the ionization of the air. It was light-bluish, and it was very beautiful.'

To better understand this bluish light, one must first understand Cerenkov Radiation. In 1934, while he was studying the effects of radioactive substances on liquids, Pavel Cerenkov noticed that water surrounding certain radioactive substances emitted a faint blue glow, which is now termed Cerenkov radiation.

Cerenkov Radiation comes from particles traveling at a speed greater than the speed of light in the medium in which they are moving. Electrically charged particles emit Cerenkov Radiation, and in the case of the Chernobyl accident, an intense flux of high energy electrons emitted by the molten, naked core ionized the surrounding moist air and steam droplets belching from the reactor hall after the explosion, and caused them to glow light blue, as plant operator Yuvchenko observed.

No known pictures of the 'shining cloud' have been published, as the accident occurred when the Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, and all controversial media deemed damaging to the State was censored, seized or destroyed.'

'Mark Motz, posted at Smooth Operator, www.smthop.com, just yesterday.

'Film is such a potent medium that its greatest artists were often astonished by the power of their own creations. 'You could look at it forever,' Hitchcock said of one of his own compositions. Hitchcock created forms so eloquent they could bridge the gap between a warped genius and a mainstream audience; his screen world of polished surfaces, neurotic tension, concealed meaning and latent menace seemed vaguely familiar to most of us, if only from our dreams.'

'Hal Crowther, 'Movies, Mules and Music,' from the collection Gathering at the river: notes from the post-millenial south, LSU Press, 2005.

'I remember watching him and thinking, if I had to describe a Shakespearean character, it would be Tommy. He was big then, and he had that kind of Falstaff quality to him'red hair, and a red beard. He was amazing looking, and the word that comes to mind is probably charismatic. You looked at him, and you had to look back, because he had such a presence, he just exuded this personality.'

'original Red Clay Rambler pianist Mike Craver, on the father of the band, Tommy Thompson. Quoted by Hal Crowther in 'The Last Song of Father Banjo,' from the collection Gathering at the river: notes from the post-millenial south, LSU Press, 2005.

'The truth'which we've always known'is that race as an exclusive category is pure (or impure) fantasy in America. Black and white are words of pride and racist convenience, not scientific observation. They describe artificial tribes, and they're a sorry legacy from slavery and its hideous offspring, Jim Crow.'

'Hal Crowther, 'Who's Your Daddy',' from the collection Gathering at the river: notes from the post-millenial south, LSU Press, 2005.

'In antiquity, around the Mediterranean basin the color blue did not exist. Historian Michel Pastoureau explains that people saw it'the Greeks and Romans were not visually impaired as some historians have suggested'but they did not perceive it as a color, nor did they have a specific word for it. Even the sea and sky, so blue in that part of the globe, looked white, gold, or red to them. For Olafur Eliasson, the 39-year-old Danish installation artist whose main media are light and color, cultural blindness like this is a phenomenon that begs to be investigated.'

'Veronique Vienne, from the article Optical Magic, Metropolis magazine, May 2006.

'One of [Olafur Eliasson's] most recent pieces is a direct attack on the universality of the white cube (The Light Setup). Installed at the Malmo Konsthall, in Sweden, the 16,145-square-foot exhibition was set in an empty hall illuminated by 1,500 fluorescent lights behind giant screens'some on the walls, some on the ceilings'programmed to deliver different shades of white light, each affecting the way people moved across space. 'I developed a system that allowed me to take a spectrographic reading of the exact quality of the white light in different parts of the world, at different hours of the day, and during different seasons,' Eliasson explains. Much like a perfumer mixing high-tech fragrance notes replicating natural ones, he was able to create visual cocktails of ivory, chalky, icy, creamy, milky, and pearly lights, debunking the idea that there is such a thing as 'pure' white.'

'Veronique Vienne, from the article Optical Magic, Metropolis magazine, May 2006.

A yellow corrugated iron disk lit with floodlights mirrors an actual sunset in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

'from Optical Magic, an article on installation artist Olafur Eliasson, by Veronique Vienne. Metropolis magazine, May 2006.

Attention please, all ART 4561 (Survery of Graphic Design History) students. Thanks to Lee (thank you Lee!) the study guide for our final exam is availble at www.LSUstart.com/paul. Please note that there are two parts, a part A and a part B.

The test will be multiple choice, simple identification, just like the midterm. All of the images in the study guide are also in our textbook (although the images are sometimes black-and-white rather than color and vice-versa).

The final will be held in room 201 of the Design Building (our classroom) at 3:00 pm on Thursday, May 11. See you there and then. . . .

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. ' House lawmakers were locked in a tense debate that Wednesday threatened to rock the chamber. Voices rose. Fists went into the air. Brows were furrowed.

The question: what should be Florida's official pie' . . .

'Ol' nasty key lime pie,' said Rep. Dwight Stansel, R-Live Oak. 'I can't understand how anyone in the world can present a bill making a state pie from a fruit that's not even grown in Florida.'

Stansel's passion aside, the tangy dessert prevailed, 106'14.

'Let's bring key limes back to Florida'and bring sunshine back to the state,' said Rep. Mitch Needelman, R-Melbourne.

'Local6.com, Central Florida, May 3, 2006. From the Associated Press.

'All through the morning rain
I gaze'the sun doesn't shine'
Rainbows and waterfalls run through my mind

In the garden'I see west
Purple shower, bells and tea
Orange birds and river cousins dressed in green

Pretty music I hear'so happy
And loud'blue flower echo
From a cherry cloud

Feel sunshine sparkle pink and blue
Playgrounds will laugh if you try to ask
Is it cool' Is it cool''

'Strawberry Letter 23, most famously recorded by The Brothers Johson in 1977. Written by Johnny Otis, Jr. at the age of 17 and recorded by him in 1971. According to someone on the internet: 'Otis wrote it for his girlfriend, who liked to send him letters written on strawberry scented paper. The song describes the feelings evoked by 'Strawberry Letter 22,' the title indicating the hope of another letter.'

'In 1952, Abstract No. One, a cubist still life, was awarded third prize at a San Francisco-area art show. After the competition, it was revealed that the richly colored artwork had been painted from a paint-by-number kit. An exhibition of kit paintings at the Smithsonian in 2001 and the accompanying book by William L. Bird, Jr. cite this competition as the start of the paint-by-number craze.'

'Eric Alberta, from Paint by Number, a 2003 calendar from Workman Publishing, New York.

'Culture, kitsch, or kitsch culture' Oriental Serenade reflects the West's fascination and centuries-old emulation of the arts of China. The passion of the red brushstrokes is made more vibrant by the serene pastel landscape.'

'Eric Alberta, from Paint by Number, a 2003 calendar from Workman Publishing, New York.

'Ceramics require a fire that begins gently and then rises to an inferno of red heat, at minimum, and yellow or close to blazing white heat at optimum. If you look inside the fire as it reaches temperature'and potters have done just this for thousands of years'you will see the pots or sculptures luminously glowing first red, then bright yellow in the swirling gaseous flames. It is a blinding, awe-inspiring sight, and it is fraught with dangers for the ware'and sometimes for the person attending the fire.'

'Suzanne Stauback, from Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind's Relationship with Earth's Most Primal Element, 2005.

'The Chinese call any high-fired clay body that makes a clear ringing sound when it is struck ci (tz'u) or porcelain. In the West, a body is considered true porcelain if, in addition tot these criteria, it is white and translucent. Porcelain is made of kaolin (white china clay), feldspar, and silica. Kaolin is named for the hill of Gaoling (Kaoling), which lies to the north of Jingdezhen (Ching-te-Chen). Kaolin is 40 percent alumina, 46 percent silica, and 14 percent water. It is highly refractory and pure white. Petuntse (china stone or literally, 'small white rocks') is a naturally occurring white, feldspathic powdery rock that occurs in China. It was added to kaolin to make porcelain. In the fires of a very hot kiln, petuntse melts and surrounds the refractory particles of kaolin, giving the body strength and making it smooth, almost glassy. Porcelain is fired to 2,280'2,370'F.'

'Suzanne Stauback, from Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind's Relationship with Earth's Most Primal Element, 2005.

'Song [dynasty] workshops excelled in firing techniques, methods of forming, carving, design, and glaze making. Glazes were quiet and subdued in appearance, yet, if you held a teacup in your hand or gave a bowl more than a glance, you would notice subtle variations. The longer you looked, the more you saw. . . . There were shimmering celadons, silky whites, iron-rich dark tenmokus (sometimes with the shadow of a single, saturated golden leaf fired into the interior of a bowl), and the legendary opalescent chuns (jun) with tints of blue and purple and red. In chuns, bubbles are suspended inside the fired glaze, thus bending and refracting the light, making the eye see blue, though there are indeed no blue colorants in the glaze. Reds, and purple flashes, came from the copper.'

'Suzanne Stauback, from Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind's Relationship with Earth's Most Primal Element, 2005.

'. . . it is the wonderful calligraphic blue and white porcelain dishes for which the Ming dynasty is best known and which were most popular in China and, as they were exported, throughout the Western world. Skilled artists dipped their brushes in cobalt and painted blossoms, birds, acrobats, magnolia trees, lovers, flowering branches, pavilions, and swirling vines and scrolls on porcelain dishes, teapots, bowls, teacups, vases, jars, ewers, and plates. There is something mysterious about the deep rich blue of cobalt together with the arctic white of porcelain that elicits a passionately positive response in all but a very few who behold the combination. Blue and white evoke a sense of serenity, purity, and, perhaps royalty in the user or viewer.'

'Suzanne Stauback, from Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind's Relationship with Earth's Most Primal Element, 2005.

'Hotels and restaurants rely on simple round white plates, 'hotel china.' 'Round and white has been the industry standard for a number of reasons,' Julie Gustafson wrote in the online magazine Hotel & Motel. 'White goes with everything, so there's no need to change dinnerware with the change of carpet and curtains. And chefs love a plain white background to set off their food.' . . .

Plain white hotel china has also entered the home. . . . It is dishwasher safe, inexpensive, and unobtrusive.'

'Suzanne Stauback, from Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind's Relationship with Earth's Most Primal Element, 2005.

'Most paper has 2%'10% ceramic as a so called filler material; some papers have even more. The ceramic is actually a very important active ingredient providing paper with opacity and whiteness, while controlling the flow of ink in writing and printing. Without the ceramic, ink would be absorbed by and smear into the paper. The ceramic also can provide color. Ceramic has been used for many centuries as an important paper additive, with china clays, such as kaolin, having very long histories as the applied a material.'

'Victor Greenhut, from Ceramics for Paper in Wachtman, ed. Ceramic Innovations in the 20th Century. As quoted in Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind's Relationship with Earth's Most Primal Element, by Suzanne Stauback, 2005.

'Islamic potters used cobalt on creamy white tin-glazed ware to great effect. Images of people and animals were considered idolatrous and were forbidden, but as is often the case, restrictions led to creative solutions. Working within the rules of their religious leaders, Islamic potters covered their wares with curvaceous calligraphy, delicate flowers, leafy vines, and intricate geometric patterns. . . .

Lustreware was an innovative answer to the stricture against metal tableware. Islamic potters discovered that if they painted designs on their already fired pots using powdered gold or silver or copper (metal oxides) mixed with a bit of water and perhaps clay, and then refired these pots at low temperatures in a reducing (smoky) kiln, the designs emerged from the kiln with a soft metallic sheen.

Lustreware is more understated than brightly gilt enamels or shiny metal pots, and has a rich and subtle complexity of tones that can only be achieved with skillful firing.'

'Suzanne Stauback, from Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind's Relationship with Earth's Most Primal Element, 2005.

'The invention of glassmaking was . . . dependent upon ceramics and in fact, in scientific circles, glass is considered a ceramic. The first glasses . . . were glazes. The Egyptians discovered that by mixing ashes (potassium), ground-up sand (silica), and natron (salt from dried lake beds), they could give their pots a shiny coating. What they were doing was 'fluxing' the silica. They learned by accident or through experiment that if they took a bowl of this glaze, especially one that had more flux and less silica, from the kiln while still molten, it could be poured into a clay mold and then cooled to form an object. Glass was equated with gems and was as highly prized.'

'Suzanne Stauback, from Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind's Relationship with Earth's Most Primal Element, 2005.

'In the sixteenth century, French potter Bernard Palissy (1510'1590) stunned the public with his brightly glazed platters covered with high-relief snakes, frogs, lizards, fish, lobsters, shells, flowers, leaves, and vines. Nothing like these highly original trompe l'oeil dishes had been attempted or conceived of before. Palissy's plates were encrusted with amphibians and reptiles so realistic they looked as if they were alive, and his artifice of mixing animals, shells, and flowers in juxtapositions that would never be encountered in nature dazzled the public.'

'Suzanne Stauback, from Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind's Relationship with Earth's Most Primal Element, 2005.

'The greatest ceramic artist of all, of course, is Mother Nature. With the tiniest speck of clay, a mere particle floating in the air, she seeds the magic crystals we know as snowflakes.'

'Suzanne Stauback, from Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind's Relationship with Earth's Most Primal Element, 2005.

'[Let us consider] the paradox of the 'immobile tracking shot', in which the camera does not move: the shift from reality to the real is accomplished by the intrusion into the frame of a heterogeneous object. For an example we can return to The Birds, in which such a shift is achieved during one long fixed shot. A fire caused by a cigarette butt dropped into some gasoline breaks out in the small town threatened by the birds. After a series of short and 'dynamic' close-ups and medium shots that draw us immediately into the action, the camera pulls back and up and we are given an overall shot of the entire town taken from high above. In the first instant we read this overall shot as an 'objective', 'epic' panorama shot, separating us from the immediate drama going on down below and enabling us to disengage ourselves from the action. This distancing at first produces a certain 'pacifying' effect; it allows us to view the action from what might be called a 'metalinguistic' distance. Then, suddently, a bird enters the frame from the right, as if coming from behinid the camera and thus from behind our own backs, and then three birds, and finally an entire flock. The same shot takes on a totally different aspect, it undergoes a radical subjectivisation: the camera's elevated eye ceases to be that of a neutral, 'objective' onlooker gazing down upon a panoramic landscape and suddenly becomes the subjective and threatening gaze of the birds as they zero in on their prey.'

'Slavoj Zizek, The Hitchcockian Blot, from the collection Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, edited by Richard Allen and S. Ishii Gonzales, 1999.