June 2006 Archives

Treatment of seasonal affective disorder with large doses of exposure to bright light.

'Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003.

Periodic intervals of sleep during which the eyes move rapidly from side to side, and dreams occur, but the body is inactive.

'Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003.

Projective test that uses irregular patterns of ink as its ambiguous stimuli.

'Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003. Please note: the illustration is not an actual Rorschach inkblot, but is, I am assured, similar to the famous brand-name blots. What do you seeeee'

Instance of mass hysteria in which groups of people experience a simultaneous compulsion to dance and shout in the streets.

'Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003.

Person's general awareness of the surroundings, including time and place.

'Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003.

Also called eye-tracking; the ability to follow moving targets visually. Deficits in this skill can be caused by a single gene whose location is known. This problem is associated with schizophrenia and thus may serve as a genetic marker for this disorder.

'Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003.

Repeated sleepwalking that occurs during NREM [non-REM] sleep and so is not the acting out of a dream. The person is difficult to waken and does not recall the experience.

'Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003.

Ability to see, recognize, orient within, and negotiate between objects in space.

'Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003.

'Cephalopods are among nature's most colorful animals. Not even a chameleion . . . can compare with octopuses and squids when it comes to the variety and speed of color-changing wizardry. Cephalopods are unique in nature for in no other animals are color changes brought about by muscular control.

The strange, beautiful, and often startling color effects are the work of tiny pigment or color cells known as chromatophores which are located just beneath the skin. . . .

Among cephalopods the usual pigments are black, brown, red, yellow, and orange-red, and also many variations of those colors. No cephalod, however, has chromatophores with all these colors. Three pigments are the usual number in one animal.

The size of the chromatophores can be changed at will by the animals, as each cell is an elastic sac. Around it, radiating outward like spokes in a wheel, are microscopic strands of muscle. When these tiny muscles are relaxed there is no tension in the color sac and it remains small, so small that its pigment does not show. But when the muscles contract, they pull the chromatophore's wall outward in all directions, making it much larger. Now its color pigment shows.

There are many thousands of these color bodies in the octopus's skin and if they all happened to contract the creature would be a white or white-gray. When his chromatophores expand he takes on the color of their pigment and the change may take place as you watch. Many times you can actually see color ripple over his body.'

'Joseph J. Cook & William L. Wisner, The Phantom World of the Octopus and Squid, 1965.

'The squid's usual hue is a light shade of pearly gray or gray-white, peppered with small dots of red or reddish brown. . . .

[T]he color-changing ability of many squids works in reverse to that of the octopus. Instead of going into a 'fireworks' type of display, they tend to turn pale or lose color to the point of becoming practically invisible.'

'Joseph J. Cook & William L. Wisner, The Phantom World of the Octopus and Squid, 1965.

'If a man destroys the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye.'

'The Code of Hammurabi, from Law: A Treasury of Art and Literature, 1990. Hammurabi died around 1750 B.C.E.

'The Kaatsberg, or Catskill Mountains, have always been a region full of fable. The Indians considered them the abode of spirits, who influenced the weather, spreading sunshine or clouds over the landscape, and sending good or bad hunting seasons. They were ruled by an old squaw spirit, said to be their mother. She dwelt on the highest peak of the Catskills and had charge of the doors of day and night, to open and shut them at the proper hour. She hung up the new moons in the skies and cut up the old ones into stars. In times of drought, if properly propitiated, she would spin light summer clouds out of cobwebs and morning dew and send them off from the crest of the mountain, flake after flake, like flakes of carded cotton, to float in the air; until, dissolved by the heat of the sun, they would fall in gentle showers, causing the grass to spring, the fruits to ripen, and the corn to grow an inch an hour. If displeased, however, she would brew up clouds black as ink, sitting in the midst of them like a bottle-bellied spider in the midst of its web; and when these clouds broke, woe betide the valleys!'

'Washington Irving, from the postscript to Rip Van Winkle. The Sketch Book, 1820.

'Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed every hour of the day produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky; but, sometimes, when the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory.'

'Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle. From The Sketch Book, 1820.

'The honey comb that bee doth make
Is not so sweet in hyve,
As are the golden leves
That drop from poet's head!
Which doth surmount our common talke
As farre as dross doth lead.'

'Churchyard, quoted by Washington Irving in The Mutability of Literature. From The Sketch Book, 1820.

'The custom of decorating graves was once universally prevalent; osiers were carefully bent over them to keep the turf uninjured, and about them were planted evergreens and flowers. . . .

The nature and color of the flowers, and of the ribbons with which they were tied, had often a particular reference to the qualities or story of the deceased, or were expressive of the feelings of the mourner. In an old poem, entitled Corydon's Doleful Knell, a lover [declares]: . . .

I'll deck her tomb with flowers,
The rarest ever seen;
And with my tears as showers,
I'll keep them fresh and green.

The white rose . . . was planted at the grave of a virgin; her chaplet was tied with white ribbons, in token of her spotless innocence, though sometimes black ribbons were intermingled, to bespeak the grief of the survivors. The red rose was occasionally used in remembrance of such as had been remarkable for benevolence, but roses in general were appropriated to the graves of lovers.'

'Washington Irving, Rural Funerals. From The Sketch Book, 1820.

'Now trees their leafy hats do bare
To reverence Winter's silver hair;'

'Poor Robin's Almanac, 1684, quoted by Washington Irving in The Stagecoach. From The Sketch Book, 1820.

'[L]et not the dark thee cumber;
What though the moon does slumber,
The stars of the night
Will lend thee their light,
Like tapers clear without number.'

'Herrick, Night Piece to Julia, quoted by Washington Irving in Christmas Eve. From The Sketch Book, 1820.

'The Wassail Bowl was sometimes composed of ale instead of wine, with nutmeg, sugar, toast, ginger, and roasted crabs; in this way the nut-brown beverage is still prepared in some old families, and around the hearths of substantial farmers at Christmas.'

'Washington Irvingin a footnote to The Chrismas Dinner. From The Sketch Book, 1820.

'The brown bowle,
The merry brown bowle,
As it goes round about-a,
Fill
Still,
Let the world say what it will,
And drink your fill all out-a.'

'from a Wassail chanson quoted by Washington Irving in The Chrismas Dinner. From The Sketch Book, 1820.

'Radio telescopes have detected the cosmic black-body background radiation, the distant echo of the event called the Big Bang. The fires of creation are being observed today.'

'Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain, 1979.

'Galileo's impression was that the dark, flat areas on the moon were seas, real watery oceans, and that the bright and rougher regions densely studded with craters were continents. These maria (Latin for 'seas') were named primarily after states of mind or conditions of nature: Mare Frigoris (the Sea of Cold), Lacus Somniorum (the Lake of Dreams), Mare Crisium (the Sea of Crises), Sinus Iridum (the Bay of Rainbows), Mare Serenitatis (the Sea of Serenity), Oceanus Procellarum (the Ocean of Storms), Mare Nubium (the Sea of Clouds), Mare Fecunditatis (the Sea of Fertility), Sinus Aestuum (the Bay of Billows), Mare Imbrium (the Sea of Rains) and Mare Tranquillitatis (the Sea of Tranqullity). . . .'

'Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain, 1979.

'However dangerous . . . the shock of a comet, it might . . . only do damage at the part of the Earth where it actually struck. . . . Perhaps we should be very surprised to find that the debris of these masses that we despised were formed of gold and diamonds; but who would be the most astonished, we, or the comet-dwellers, who would be cast on our Earth' What strange beings each would find the other!'

'Maupertuis, Lettre sur la com'te, 1752. Quoted by Carl Sagan in Broca's Brain, 1979.

'[T]he Kaaba has been carefully preserved, although there seems never to have been a true scientific examination of it. There are some who believe it to be a dark, stony rather than metallic meteorite. Recently two geologists have suggested, on admittedly quite fragmentary evidence, that it is instead an agate. Some Muslim writers believe that the colour of the Kaaba was originally white, not black, and that the present colour is due to its repeated handling. The official view of the Keeper of the Black Stone is that it was placed in its present position by the patriarch Abraham and fell from a religious rather than an astronomical heaven. . . .'

'Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain, 1979.

'We have seen the highest circle of spiralling powers. We have named this circle God. We might have given it any other name we wished: Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence.'

'Nikos Kazantzakis, 1948. Quoted by Carl Sagan in Broca's Brain, 1979.

'Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe.'

'William Shakespeare, Henry V. Quoted by Carl Sagan in Broca's Brain, 1979.

'They came on the lot and were assigned offices, and we had a few amusing phone calls from them. Chico called shortly after they moved in and said they had found some black widow spiders in the office and 'somebody better send over some flies before they start eating us Jews.''

'Goldie Arthur, Irving Thalberg's personal secretary, quoted in Hello, I Must be Going: Groucho and His Friends, by Charlotte Chandler, 1978.

'I: What do you think was the secret of Chico's great charm for women'

GROUCHO: A certain look in his eyes.'

'from Hello, I Must be Going: Groucho and His Friends, by Charlotte Chandler, 1978.

'GEORGE BURNS: Going into the Pantages Theatre, there's Gracie and Susan, and Harpo and myself. And he loved black jellybeans. He couldn't get any black jellybeans, and all of a sudden there's a little candy store next to the theatre. It's during the war. All of a sudden he sees this candy store, and in the window there's black jellybeans. He went in and he says, 'How many black jellybeans have you got'' The guy says, 'Well, I got an order today, I paid thirty dollars for the black jellybeans.' Harpo says, 'I'll give you thirty-five dollars for all the black jellybeans.' Have you any idea how many jellybeans you can buy for thirty-five dollars'

Well, Gracie carried a bag of jellybeans, and Susan carried a bag, 'cause we're going into the theatre, and the little candy store would be closed when we left. And we couldn't walk down to where the car was or we'd have missed the beginning of the picture. So the four of us are carrying about twenty-five pounds of black jellybeans into the theatre. But . . . before we went out, he also bought some colored jellybeans'ten cents' worth of white, red, and pink jellybeans. That is, if we wanted a jellybean, he'd give us the colored ones because he didn't want anyone to touch the black ones!

GROUCHO: I don't blame him.'

'from Hello, I Must be Going: Groucho and His Friends, by Charlotte Chandler, 1978.

'I don't have any tricks. I have no talent at all. I can barely open a window.'

'Groucho Marx, as quoted in Hello, I Must be Going: Groucho and His Friends, by Charlotte Chandler, 1978.

'Some fishermen catching fish with trembling rod, or some shepherd leaning on his staff, or a plowman resting upon his plow handle saw them and was astonished; and, because they could make their way through the air, he thought they were gods.

Soon the island of Samos, sacred to Juno, was on their left, both Delos and Paros had been left behind, Lebinthos was on their right, and Calymne, rich in honey, had been passed, when suddenly the boy began to rejoice in the bold flight. He deserted his leader and, carried away by an eagerness for the sky, set his course higher.

The nearness of the destructive sun softened the fragrant wax'the fastening of the feathers'and the wax melted off. He shook his bare arms and, because he lacked wings, could not make use of the air. And his lips, crying out his father's name, were swallowed up in the dark blue water that gets its name, Icarian Sea, from him.'

'Ovid, Metamorphoses. Icarus and Daedalus, of course. From Classical Gods and Heroes, translated and edited by Rhoda A. Hendricks, 1974.

The king [Midas] went to the river as he was commanded. His power of changing things to gold colored the river and passed from his mortal body into the waters of the stream. And even now its sands, which took on the seeds of that metal and were colored by the sodden lumps, are hard with the ancient gold.'

'Ovid, Metamorphoses. Classical Gods and Heroes, translated and edited by Rhoda A. Hendricks, 1974.

The Roman goddess of the dawn; identified with the Greek goddess Eos.

'Classical Gods and Heroes, translated and edited by Rhoda A. Hendricks, 1974.

The goddess of the rainbow, she was a messenger of the gods, expecially of Zeus and Hera.

'Classical Gods and Heroes, translated and edited by Rhoda A. Hendricks, 1974.

The morning star. The name means 'light-bearer' or 'light-bringer.'

'Classical Gods and Heroes, translated and edited by Rhoda A. Hendricks, 1974.

The Roman goddess of the moon; sometimes identified with the goddess Diana.

'Classical Gods and Heroes, translated and edited by Rhoda A. Hendricks, 1974.

A daughter of the sea deities Phorcys and Ceto. She was a monster with wings, snakes in place of hair, and the power to turn people to stone with her glance.

'Classical Gods and Heroes, translated and edited by Rhoda A. Hendricks, 1974.

One of the Cyclades Islands. Parian marble was famous for its fine quality and whiteness.

'Classical Gods and Heroes, translated and edited by Rhoda A. Hendricks, 1974.

A Titan and the mother of Leto. Phoebe, whose name means 'bright one,' was later identified with the moon and with Artemis and Diana.

'Classical Gods and Heroes, translated and edited by Rhoda A. Hendricks, 1974.

In later mythology Apollo had the epithet Phoebus, meaning 'light' or 'bright,' and was often identified with the sun god Helios.

'Classical Gods and Heroes, translated and edited by Rhoda A. Hendricks, 1974.

'Known in the weather world as a circumhorizontal arc, this rare sight was caught on film on June 3 as it hung over northern Idaho near the Washington State border.

The arc isn't a rainbow in the traditional sense'it is caused by light passing through wispy, high-altitude cirrus clouds. The sight occurs only when the sun is very high in the sky (more than 58' above the horizon). What's more, the hexagonal ice crystals that make up cirrus clouds must be shaped like thick plates with their faces parallel to the ground.

When light enters through a vertical side face of such an ice crystal and leaves from the bottom face, it refracts, or bends, in the same way that light passes through a prism. If a cirrus's crystals are aligned just right, the whole cloud lights up in a spectrum of colors.

This particular arc spanned several hundred square miles of sky and lasted for about an hour. . . .'

'Victoria Gilman for National Geographic, June 19, 2006.

'[They s]end bubbles to the surface of this ooze
As glancing roundabouts you may observe.
Fixed in the slime they say: 'Sullen we were
In the sweet air cheered by the brightening sun
Because of sulky vapors in our hearts;
Now here in this black mud we curse our luck.'
This burden, though they cannot form in words,
They gurgle in their gullets'

'Dante Alighieri, The divine comedy, translated by Thomas G. Bergin, 1969.

'This is creation's melancholy vault,
The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom;
The land of apparitions, empty shades!
All, all on earth is shadow. . . .

This is the bud of being, this dim dawn,
The twilight of our day, the vestibule.'

'Edward Young, from Night Thoughts, 1741.

'Belacqua made a long arm and switched off the lamp. It threw shadows. He would close his eyes, he would bilk the dawn in that way. What were the eyes, anyway' The posterns of the mind. They were safer closed.'

'Samuel Beckett, from Yellow, the penultimate story in More pricks than kicks, 1970.

'I see at the confines of this restless gloom a gleam and shimmering as of bones.'

'Samuel Beckett, from The Beckett Trilogy: Malone, Malloy dies, The Unnamable, 1979.

'the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fulness of the great deep with its unchanging calm. . . . But at long intervals they close. . . . Perhaps it is then he sees the heaven of the old dream, the heaven of the sea and of the earth too, and the spasms of the waves from shore to shore all stirring to their tiniest stir. . . .'

'Samuel Beckett, from The Beckett Trilogy: Malone, Malloy dies, The Unnamable, 1979.

'One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go. One night or day. For when his own light went out he was not left in the dark. Light of a kind came then from the one window.'

'Samuel Beckett, As the story was told: uncollected and later prose, edited by John Calder, 1990.

'A dazzling gold-flecked 1907 portrait by Gustav Klimt has been purchased for the Neue Galerie in Manhattan by the cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder for $135 million, the highest sum ever paid for a painting.

The portrait, of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist and the hostess of a prominent Vienna salon, is considered one of the artist's masterpieces.'

'The New York Times, just today. I say why not and right on!

'in the Philippines there is a group of people called the Hanunoo. They divide all colors into just four'mabiru, malagiti, marara, and malatuy. Marara, for example, includes those colors that we call red, orange, yellow, and maroon. If you show a Hanunoo man a red shirt and a yellow shirt he will tell you that they are both marara. If you press him he might add that the first is 'more marara' or the second 'weak marara,' but they will both remain as marara.'

'E. Fuller Torrey, The Mind Game: Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists, 1972.

'Divination is [a] technique commonly used by therapists, especially in Africa, to impress their patients. Nigerian babalawos, for instance, do not take a history from their patients. Rather a patient whispers his problem to a handful of palm nuts; the babalawo then casts the nuts and from their position makes a diagnosis.

Other methods of divination include throwing 'bones' (wooden blocks with markings), feeling the patient's pulse, constant gazing at water, star-gazing, watching the flickering of an oil lamp, listening to the wind, and watching the trembling of the hands. It should be emphasized that these procedures, frequently ridiculed in Western descriptions . . . are methods used by the therapist to increase his reputation and, thus, increase the patient's faith and expectations. Often the therapist is in possession of accessory information that allows him to make an accurate dianosis.'

'E. Fuller Torrey, The Mind Game: Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists, 1972.

'Mal ojo, the evil eye, is commonly used [by Mexican-Americans] to explain psychiatric symptoms. It is caused when a person with 'strong vision' admiringly or enviously looks at another. . . . Its causation is usually assumed to be inadvertent and the person is not held consciously responsible; implicit, however, is responsibility for unconscious desires. . . .

Clinically mal ojo occurs more often in the younger age groups. Headaches, crying, irritability, and restlessness are common symptoms. . . . Traditional treatments include prayers and 'sweeping' or 'cleansing' the patient with a raw egg. Another approach to treatment is to try and locate the person who inadvertently caused it (usually within the preceding 24 hours); if this person simply touches the afflicted the illness will be cured.'

'E. Fuller Torrey, The Mind Game: Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists, 1972.

'Simply, eye management in our society boils down to two facts. One, we do not stare at another human being. Two, staring is reserved for a non-person. We stare at art, at sculpture, at scenery. We go to the zoo and stare at the animals, the lions, the monkeys, the gorillas. We stare at them for as long as we please, as intimately as we please, but we do not stare at humans if we want to accord them human treatment. . . .

With unfamiliar human beings, when we acknowledge their humanness, we must avoid staring at them, and yet we must also avoid ignoring them. To make them into people rather than objects, we use a deliberate and polite inattention. We look at them long enough to make it quite clear that we see them, and then we immediately look away. We are saying, in body language, 'I know you are there,' and a moment later we add, 'But I would not dream of intruding on your privacy.'. . .

If we wish to put a person down we may do so by staring longer than is acceptably polite. Instead of dropping our gazes when we lock glances, we continue to stare. The person who disapproves of interracial marriage or dating will stare rudely at the interracial couple. If he dislikes long hair, short dresses or beards he may show it with a longer-than-acceptable stare.'

'Julius Fast, Body Language, 1970.

'The late Spanish philosopher Jos' Ortega y Gasset . . . felt that the eye, with its lids and sockets, its iris and pupil, was equivalent to a 'whole theatre with its stage and actors.'

The eye muscles, Ortega said, are marvelously subtle and because of this every glance is minutely differentiated from every other glance. There are so many different looks that it is nearly impossible to name them, but he cited, 'the look that lasts but an instant and the insistent look; the look that slips over the surface of the thing looked at and the look that grips it like a hook; the direct look and the oblique look whose extreme form has its own name, 'looking out of the corner of one's eye.'''

'Julius Fast, Body Language, 1970.

'[Jos' Ortega y Gasset] labels one look 'the most effective, the most suggestive, the most delicious and enchanting.' He called it the most complicated because it is not only furtive, but it is also the very opposite of furtive, because it makes it obvious that it is looking. This is the look given with lidded eyes, the sleepy look or calculating look or appraising look, the look a painter gives his canvas as he steps back from it. . . .

Describing this look, Ortega said the lids are almost three-quarters closed and it appears to be hiding itself, but in fact the lids compress the look and 'shoot it like an arrow.'

'It is the look of eyes that are, as it were, asleep but which behind the cloud of sweet drowsiness are utterly awake. Anyone who has such a look possesses a treasure.'

Ortega said that Paris throws itself at the feet of anyone with this look. . . . Robert Mitchum certainly had it and it set him up for years as a masculine sex symbol. Mae West copied it and the French actress Simone Signoret has it. . . .'

'Julius Fast, Body Language, 1970.

'I arise today
Through the strength of heaven:
Light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.'

'from Saint Patrick's Breastplate, a prayer possibly but not definitely written by Saint Patrick (387'493 C.E.). Quoted by Thomas Cahill in How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, 1995.

'The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil''

'Gerard Manley Hopkins, as quoted by Thomas Cahill in How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, 1995.

'The pages of most books were of mottled parchment, that is, dried sheepskin, which was . . . nowhere more abundant than in Ireland, whose bright green fields still host each April an explosion of new white lambs. Vellum, or calfskin, which was more uniformly white when dried, was used . . . sparingly for the most honored texts. . . . It is interesting to consider that the shape of the modern book, taller than wide, was determined by the dimensions of a sheepskin, which could most economically be cut into double pages that yield our modern book shape when folded.'

'Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, 1995.

A seventh-century monastery on Skellig Michael, off the Irish coast, and a page from the Book of Kells.

'At the outset there were in Ireland no scriptoria to speak of, just individual hermits and monks, each in his little beehive cell or sitting outside in fine weather, copying a needed text from a borrowed book, old book on one knee, fresh sheepskin pages on the other. . . . [T]hey found the shapes of letters magical. Why, they asked themselves, did a B look the way it did' Could it look some other way' . . . The result of such why-is-the-sky-blue questions was a new kind of book, the Irish codex; and one after another, Ireland began to produce the most spectacular, magical books the world has ever seen.'

'Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, 1995.

'[The scribal scholars of Ireland] did not see themselves as drones. Rather, they engaged the text they were working on, tried to comprehend it after their fashion, and, if possible, add to it, even improve on it. In this dazzling new culture, a book was not an isolated document on a dusty shelf; book truly spoke to book, and writer to scribe, and scribe to reader, from one generation to the next. . . .

In a land where literacy had previously been unknown, in a world where the old literate civilizations were sinking fast beneath successive waves of barbarism, the white Gospel page, shining in all the little oratories of Ireland, acted as a pledge: the lonely darkness had been turned into light, and the lonely virtue of courage, sustained through all the centuries, had been transformed into hope.'

'Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, 1995.

'Sad it is, little parti-colored white book, for a day will surely come when someone will say over your page: 'The hand that wrote this is no more.''

'Anonymous, from a manuscript quoted in How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, by Thomas Cahill, 1995.

'At its beginnings, the New Orleans Mardi Gras was based on the French Catholic pre-Lenten festivity calendar. It was celebrated in public at first by white men who appeared in blackface and strangely reenacted some of the moves that celebrated the bringing together of slaves from different plantations in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries after the crops had been harvested. . . . This was a time of serious play, deep play, in which all the resources of the community were called on in an amazing bonfire blast that could easily be interpreted as a riot.'

'Roger D. Abrahams, Blues for New Orleans: Mardis Gras and America's Creole Soul, 2006.

'The Zulu parade of New Orleans' black middle class and elite community, founded n 1909 as a reaction to white stereotypes of blacks as 'savages,' is a Carnival activity rivaled in scope and visibility only by the Rex parade on Mardi Gras day. Zulu members dress in Mardi Grass skirts and 'wooly wigs,' put on blackface, and throw rubber spears and decorated coconuts to the delighted crowds. Working class blacks . . . also invoke images of 'wildness' by masquerading proudly in sylized Plains Indians costumes.

The black 'Mardi Gras Indians' are hierarchical groups of men with titles such as Big Chief, Spyboy, Wildman, and Lil' Chief who dress in elaborate bead and feather costumes weighing up to a hundred pounds. The best-known costume makers say that their costume patterns come to them in dreams, and they take pride in never repeating a color or theme from year to year. After months of time and money invested in sewing costumes and practice sessions at local bars, a dozen or more 'tribes' appear early on Mardis Gras day to sing, dance, and parade through back street neighborhoods.'

'Roger D. Abrahams, Blues for New Orleans: Mardis Gras and America's Creole Soul, 2006.

'Umbrellas, both furled and unfurled, are seen in the Mardis Gras and jazz funeral marches of New Orleans, in Brazil, in the brushback dance of Trinidad, and again among the cakewalk dancers in the United States in the nineteenth and eartly twentieth centures. Ribbons are attached to the top of the open umbrellas, and feathered birds are used as finials, much as among the Asante people of Southern Ghana and elsewhere in Africa. The umbrella's use in New Orleans parades is symbolic, rhythmic, and practical in serving as parasols against the blistering sun. These highly decorated umbrellas are not used in the rain, however. . . .'

'Roger D. Abrahams, Blues for New Orleans: Mardis Gras and America's Creole Soul, 2006.

'he walked the endless Negro blocks to home because it was still day. He was suspicious of them by night or by day. What were they forever laughing about from doorstep to door that he could never clearly hear' Their voices dropped when he came near and didn't rise till he was past earshot. Yet their prophecies pursued him'

De Lord Give Noah de rainbow sign'

Wont be by water but by fire next time''

'Nelson Algren, from A Walk on the Wild Side, 1956. As quoted in Sustaining New Orleans: Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City by Barbara Eckstein, 2006.

'There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
It's been the ruin of many poor girls,
And me, O Lord, for one. . . .

One foot is one the platform,
The other one on the train,
I'm going back to New Orleans
To wear that ball and chain.'

'Rising Sun Blues, traditional, first recorded by bluesman Texas Alexander in 1928. Most commonly sung by men, including Bob Dylan and Eric Burden (of the Animals), the song is, ironically, a Storyville prostitute's lament. As quoted (and explained) in Sustaining New Orleans: Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City by Barbara Eckstein, 2006.

'Use number 2 pencils. Get a good pencil sharpener and sharpen about twenty pencils. When one is dull, grab another. . . .

Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white paper seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing. It may be true that you, the modern poet, must make the world as you go, but why be reminded of it before you even have one word on the page' The lines tend to want words. Blank paper begs to be left alone. The best notebooks I've found are National 43-581.'

'Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, 1979.

'Be glad of the green wall
You climbed across one day,
When winter stung with ice
That vacant paradise.'

'James Wright, quoted by Richard Hugo in The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, 1979.

'The arrangements for the transport of the Countess Mahaut [of Artois]'s household were in the accepted pattern. Since her usual retinue was only made up of some forty people it . . . probably only required some sixty horses . . . [with] many highly decorated saddles . . . worked in silk velvet with flowers of gold, others with pearls. Not surprisingly leather covers were provided for the safe transport of such precious objects. . . . [S]he made much use of a large four-wheeled chariot. . . . Not only was it provided when necessary with new wheels, well shod with iron, but there might also be a new cover of tan cloth, lined on the inside with samite. The interior was adorned with velvet curtains sprinkled with silver rosettes, striped hangings of perse (a fine, usually dark blue, woollen cloth), with the chains and rings to hang them, a carpet of seven and a half ells, and eighteen decorative silver knobs. . . . As Mahaut grew older she relied more and more on another litter. The one she used in 1321 was covered in scarlet, had a well-stuffed mattress with three cushions and two pillows covered with luxurious silk, striped with gold and silver, and filled with down. Its horses had saddle pads of velvet and housings of azure perse. For access there was a folding stool and a small ladder.'

'Margaret Wade Labarge, Medieval Travellers: The Rich and Restless, 1982.

'On the long, slow journey across northern France [King Henry V] was represented by a lifelike effigy made of boiled leather, clothed in a mantle of royal purple, crowned with a diadem of gold and precious stones, holding the royal sceptre in one hand and the golden cross and ball in the other. This effigy was laid on a bed on the top of the chariot carrying the coffin and was sufficiently raised to make the royal figure easily visible to all the onlookers. The illusion of a living king's formal entry was re-enacted at each town on the slow journey to Rouen and north to Calais. . . .'

'Margaret Wade Labarge, Medieval Travellers: The Rich and Restless, 1982.

'Picasso's smartest decision in 'Guernica,' a consummate feat of pictorial intelligence, was to limit its palette to black-and-white. He thereby . . . [implied] that war is no time for indulgence and, by evoking the look of a newspaper, factored in the modern experience of comprehending catastrophe (and of inflicting it) at a distance.'

'Peter Schjeldahl, Spanish Lessons: Picasso in Madrid, The New Yorker, June 19, 2006.

'It was not until the early eighteen-thirties that the English scientist and inventor Charles Wheatstone began to suspect that the disparities between the two retinal images were . . . crucial to the brain's mysterious ability to generate a sensation of depth'and that the brain somehow fused these images automatically and unconsciously.

Wheatstone confirmed the truth of his conjecture by an experimental method as simple as it was brilliant. He made pairs of drawings of a solid object as seen from the slightly different perspectives of the two eyes, and then designed an instrument that used mirrors to insure that each eye saw only its own drawing. He called it a stereoscope, from the Greek for 'solid vision.' If one looked into the stereoscope, the two flat drawings would fuse to produce a single three-dimensional drawing poised in space.'

'Oliver Sachs, Stereo Sue: Why Two Eyes are Better than One, The New Yorker, June 19, 2006.

'The shutting out of surrounding objects, and the concentration of the whole attention . . . produces a dream-like exaltation . . . in which we seem to leave the body behind us and sail into one strange scene after another, like disembodied spirits.'

'Oliver Wendell Holmes, describing the photographic stereo viewer experience in 1861. Quoted by Oliver Sachs in Stereo Sue: Why Two Eyes are Better than One, The New Yorker, June 19, 2006.

'Gazing at wallpaper with small repetitive motifs, [David Brewster] observed [as early as 1844] that the patterns might quiver or shift, and then jump into startling stereoscopic relief, especially if these patterns were offset in relation to one another. Such 'autostereograms' have probably been experienced for millennia. . . . Medieval manuscripts such as the Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne Gospels, for example, contain exquisitely intricate designs done so exactingly that whole pages can be seen, with the unaided eye, as stereoscopic illusions. (John Cisne, a paleobiologist at Cornell, has suggested that such stereograms may have been 'something of a trade secret among the educated elite of the seventh and eighth century British Isles.')'

'Oliver Sachs, Stereo Sue: Why Two Eyes are Better than One, The New Yorker, June 19, 2006.

'Writing, according to the latest theories, was invented in southern Mesopotamia for the first and perhaps the only time. The oldest written texts come from Uruk toward the end of the fourth millennium B.C. They were impressed on clay tablets with a reed stylus and then baked. The signs, though linear in form, are no longer purely pictographic, as in some of the preliterate drawings on clay, but considerably conventionalized representations of concrete objects. The new invention must have quickly proved its worth, for it apparently provided the stimlus to the beginning of pictographic writing in Egypt and Persia . . . by about 3000 [B.C.].'

'William W. Hallo & William Kelly Simpson, The Ancient Near East: A History, 1971.

'[Hammurabi's] most famous remains are the somewhat overinterpreted and perhaps misnamed Code of Hammurabi. Originally, it was an eight-foot-high black basalt stele erected at the end of his reign beside a statue or possibly idol of himself. So far as we can make out, someone seeking redress from another would come to the steward's statue, to 'hear my words' (as the stele says at the bottom), and then move over to the stele itself, where the previous judgments of the stewards god are recorded. . . . [T]he top of the stele is sculptured to depict the scene of judgment-giving. The god is seated on a raised mound which in Mesopotamian graphics symbolizes a mountain. An aura of flames flashes up from his shoulders as he speaks (which has made some scholars think it is Shamash, the sun-god). Hammurabi listens intently as he stands just below him ('under-stands'). The god holds in his right hand the attributes of power, the rod and circle very common to such divine depictions. Whith these symbols, the god is just touching the left elbow of his steward, Hammurabi. One of the magnificent things about this scene is the hypnotic assurance with which both god and steward-king intently stare at each other, impassively majestic, the steward-king's right hand held up between us, the observers, and the plane of communication. Here is no humility, no begging before a god, as occurs just a few centuries later. . . . There is only obedience. And what is being dictated . . . are judgments on a series of very specific cases.'

'Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976. That last bit reminds me of the Dog Whisperer. Does anybody know what I mean'

Central room in Roman house, often open to sky.

'Chester G. Starr, The Ancient Romans, 1971.

A parchment volume bound like a modern book, as opposed to a papyrus roll.

'Chester G. Starr, The Ancient Romans, 1971.

Sacrifice especially of first-born sons in Phoenician religion. (Not a god, as often defined.)

'Chester G. Starr, The Ancient Romans, 1971.

A hard, jet black, metallic-looking flammable rock that is the highest-ranking coal, the only version that can rightly be considered properly metamorphic.

'Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, 2001.

A soft, porous, and fine-grained limestone, characteristically white in color, most memorably found in the cliffs of southern Kent''the white cliffs of Dover.'

'Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, 2001.

A metallic-looking sulfide of iron, known jocularly as fool's gold.

'Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, 2001. This guy is so jocular!

A yellow-brown inferior iron ore, often found in large earthy masses in a variety of forms.

'Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, 2001.

Creole historically meant someone born in the New World, and in Louisiana it could refer to the offspring of French planters as well as the children of newly arrived slaves. Creole has also come to mean something entirely new, or a surprising mixture of ingredients, and can be applied to a style of cuisine, to music, clothing, architecture, literature, language, to a mode of behavior, or to a person of a certain color or social status. It has been said to be an impure state of being, but also the purest state possible.

As a social process, scholars and politicians have taken to calling creolization a way in which things or people of historically unrelated backgrounds and history come into contact and change over time.

'Roger D. Abrahams, Blues for New Orleans: Mardis Gras and America's Creole Soul, 2006.

'According to Felipe Garcia Villamil, a leading priest of the Kongo religion in Cuba, an initiate's possession is genuine when only the whites of the eyes show. Bembe sculpture captures this state by showing 'eyes that roll up.'. . . Just as the white eyes relate spiritual people to Bembe sculpture, so the famous New Orleans faith healer Mother Catherine Seals . . . before she died in 1930 made herself a spectacular robe beaded with the image of Jesus armed with a similar optic. Jesus guards her with the spiritual light of his eyes. They blaze with whiteness, like the white porcelain eyes found in Bembe figures.'

'Roger D. Abrahams, Blues for New Orleans: Mardis Gras and America's Creole Soul, 2006.

'For the monster [Grendel] was relentless, the dark death-shadow, against warriors old and young, lay in wait and ambushed them.'

'from Beowulf, prose translation by E. Talbot Donaldson, 1966. This monster is a bitch.

''Now quickly go to look at the hoard under the gray stone, . . . now that the worm lies sleeping from sore wounds, bereft of his treasure. Be quick now, so that I may see the ancient wealth, the golden things, may clearly look on the bright curious gems, so that . . . because of the treasure's richness, I may the more easily leave life and nation I have long held.''

'from Beowulf, prose translation by E. Talbot Donaldson, 1966.

'The fire-dragon was grimly terrible with his many colors, burned by the flames; he was fifty feet long in the place where he lay.'

'from Beowulf, prose translation by E. Talbot Donaldson, 1966. This reminds me, Lindsay's wire-haired fox terriers caught and eviscerated a huge rat last night!

'The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.'

'William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Found in Poets & Poems, Goldstone & Cummings, 1967.

'At one time the earth was probably a white-hot sphere like the sun.'

'Tarr and McMurry, cited by Thomas Wolfe on the title page of Look Homeward, Angel, 1929.

'Light traveled over the field;
Stayed.
The weeds stopped swinging.
The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.

Was it light'
Was it light within'
Was it light within light''

'Theodore Roethke, The Lost Son. Found in Poets & Poems, Goldstone & Cummings, 1967.

'In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;'

'Theodore Roethke, In a Dark Time. Found in Poets & Poems, Goldstone & Cummings, 1967.

'How long would it seem burning! Let there pass
A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze
Is infinite, eternal: this is death,
To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.'

'Robert Lowell, Mr. Edwards and the Spider. Found in Poets & Poems, Goldstone & Cummings, 1967.

Representation of one sense impression in terms which apply to another sense, as a 'blue note' in music. . . . Edith Sitwell writes that The morning light creaks down . . . and the French poet Baudelaire speaks of perfumes . . . green as grasslands.'

'Poets & Poems, Goldstone & Cummings, 1967.

'Dawn disrobes like a woman leaving her bath:'Dawn who has woven the loveliest of cloths.'

'a Vedic invocation to Usha, the Dawn, as quoted by Edouard Schur' in The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, translated from the French by Gloria Rasberry, 1961.

'O Agni, Holy Fire! Purifying fire! You who sleep in the wood, and ascend in shining flames on the altar, you are the heart of sacrifice, the fearless wings of prayer, the divine spark hidden in everything, and the glorious soul of the sun!'

'Vedic Hymn, quoted by Edouard Schur' in The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, translated from the French by Gloria Rasberry, 1961.

'What clearly proves that Soma represented the absolute feminine principle is the fact that the Brahmins later identified it with the Moon. As the Moon symbolizes the feminine principle in all ancient religions, so the Sun symbolizes the masculine principle.'

'Edouard Schur', The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, translated from the French by Gloria Rasberry, 1961.

'With the conception of Agni, the divine fire, we are very close to the core of the doctrine [of the Vedas] and its esoteric, transcendent foundation. In fact, Agni is the cosmic agent, the principle of the universe, par excellence. 'It is not only the terrestrial fire of lightning and the sun. Its true domain is the unseen, mystical heaven, temporary dwelling-place of the eternal light and of the first principles of all things. . . . Agni is the eldest of the gods, ruler in heaven as well as on earth, and he officiated in the abode of Vivasvat (they sky or sun) long before Matharicva (the lightning) brought him to mortals. . . . Master and generator of the sacrifice, Agni becomes the bearer of all mystical speculations of which sacrifice is the purpose. He engenders the gods, he organizes the world, he produces and preserves universal life; in short, he is cosmogonic power.

Soma is the teardrop of Agni. In reality it is the drink of a fermented plant poured as a libation to the gods during the sacrifice. But, like Agni, it has a mystical existence. Its supreme abode is in the depths of the third heaven where Surya, daughter of the sun, filtered it, and where Pushan, food-giving god, bound it. It is from there that the Falcon, a symbol of lightning, or Agni himself went and snatched it . . . and brought it to men. The gods drank it and became immortal; men also will become immortal when they drink it in the home of Yama, dwelling-place of the happy. In the meantime, here below it gives them vigor and fullness of life. . . . It nourishes, permeates plants, invigorates the semen of animals, inspires the poet and provides wings for prayer. Soul of heaven and earth, . . . with Agni, it forms an inseparable couple; this couple that lighted the sun and stars.''

'Edouard Schur', quoting heavily from the Vedas, I think, in The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, translated from the French by Gloria Rasberry, 1961.

'The Light was in the world, and the World was made by it, and the world knew it not.'

'The Holy Bible, John 1:10, as quoted by Edouard Schur' in The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, translated from the French by Gloria Rasberry, 1961.

'[The] division of mankind into four successive, primitive races was accepted by the oldest priests of Egypt. They are represented by four figures of different types and skin colors in the paintings of the tomb of Seti I at Thebes. The red race bears the name Rot; the Asiatic race with yellow skin, Amu; the African race with black skin, Halasiu; the Lybico European race with white skin and blond hair, Tamahu.'

'Edouard Schur', a footnote to The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, translated from the French by Gloria Rasberry, 1961; citing Lenormant, History of the Peoples of the Orient, Vol. 1.

'[T]he seeming continuity of consciousness is really an illusion. . . .

[The blind spot] is due to a two-millimeter gap on the nasal side of the retina where the optic nerve fibers are gathered together and leave the eye for the brain. The interesting thing about this gap is that it is not so much a blind spot as it is usually called; it is a non-spot. . . . [Y]ou cannot see any gap in your vision at all, let alone be conscious of it in any way. Just as the space around the blind spots is joined without any gap at all, so consciousness knits itself over its time gaps and gives the illusion of continuity.'

'Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976.

'In seeing any object, our eyes and therefore our retinal images are reacting to the object by shifting twenty times a second, and yet we see an unshifting stable object with no consciousness whatever of the succession of different inputs or of putting them together into the object. An abnormally small retinal image of something in the proper context is automatically seen as something at a distance; we are not conscious of making the correction. Color and light contrast effects, and other perceptual constancies all go on every minute of our waking and even dreaming experience without our being in the least conscious of them.'

'Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976.

'The gods are what we now call hallucinations. Usually they are only seen and heard by the particular heroes they are speaking to. Sometimes they come in mists or out of the gray sea or a river, or from the sky, suggesting visual auras preceding them. . . . Usually they come as themselves, commonly as mere voices, but sometimes as other people closely related to the hero.'

'Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976.

'Consider the eye-idols on black and white alabaster, thin cracker-like bodies surmounted by eyes once tinted with malachite paint, which have been found in the thousands, particularly at Brak on one of the upper braches of the Euphrates, that date about 3000 B.C. . . . [T]hey are suitable to be held in the hand. Most have one pair of eyes, but some have two; some wear crowns and some have markings clearly indicating gods. Larger eye-idols made of terra cotta have been found at other sites, Ur, Mari, and Lagash; and, because the eyes are open loops, have been called spectacle-idols.'

'Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976.

'As we have seen in earlier chapters, the gods customarily had locations, even though their voices were ubiquitously heard by their servants. These were often dwellings such as ziggurats or household shrines. And while some gods could be associated with celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, or stars, and the greatest, such as Anu, lived in the sky, the majority of gods were earth-dwellers along with men.

All this changes as we enter the first millennium B.C., when, as we are proposing, the gods' voices are no longer heard. As the earth has been left to angels and demons, so it seems to be accepted that the dwelling place of the now absent gods is with Anu in the sky. And this is why the forms of angels are always winged: they are messengers from the sky where the gods live. . . .

This celestialization of the once-earthly gods is confirmed by an important change in the building of ziggurats. . . . [T]he original ziggurats of Mesopotamian history were built around a central great hall . . . where the statue of the god 'lived.'. . . But by the end of the second millennium B.C., the entire concept of the ziggurat seems to have become altered. It now has no central room whatever. . . . For the sacred tower of the ziggurat was now a landing stage to facilitate the gods' descent to earth from the heaven to which they had vanished.'

'Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976.

'O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.'

'Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward, Angel, 1929.

'Nacreous pearl light swam faintly about the hem of the lilac darkness; the edges of light and darkness were stitched upon the hills. Morning moved like a pearl-gray tide across the fields and up the hillflanks, flowing rapidly down into the soluble dark.'

'Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward, Angel, 1929.

'I'm no scholar, Dick. I've never had your advantages. I'm a self-made butcher. I'm a carpenter, Dick. I'm an interior decorator. I'm a mechanic, a plumber, an electrician, a butcher, a tailor, a jeweller. I'm a jewel, a gem, a diamond in the rough, Dick. I'm a practical man.'

'Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward, Angel, 1929.

''Where is the road'' some one shouted.

'On the blueprint, of course. . . . You've got it all in black and white.''

'Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward, Angel, 1929.

'The day was like gold and sapphires: there was a swift flash and sparkle, intangible and multifarious, like sunlight on roughened water, all over the land.'

'Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward, Angel, 1929.

'Darkness melted over the town like dew: it washed out all the day's distress, the harsh confusions.'

'Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward, Angel, 1929.

'The sun had gone, the western ranges faded in chill purple mist, but the western sky still burned with ragged bands of orange. It was October.'

'Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward, Angel, 1929.

'If it weren't for you Mr Jukebox with yr aluminum belly roaring & thirty teeth eating diry drx.
yr eyes starred round the world, purple diamonds & white brain revolving black disks
in every bar from Yokamama to Pyraeus winking & beaming Saturday Nite
what silence harbor Sabbath dark instead of boys screaming and dancing wherever I go''

'Allen Ginsberg, Seabattle of Salamis Took Place Off Perama, from Planet News, 1961'1967.

'Oh say can you see in the dark you
observe Minerva nerveless in Nirvana because
Zeus rides reindeer thru Bethlehem's blue sky.
It's Buddha sits in Mary's belly waving Kuan
Yin's white hand at the Yang-tze that Mao sees,
tonge of Kali licking Krishna's soft blue lips.'

'Allen Ginsberg, Holy Ghost on the Nod over the Body of Bliss, from Planet News, 1961'1967.

'And the Sun the Sun the
Sun my visible father
making my body visible
thru my eyes!'

'Allen Ginsberg, The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express, from Planet News, 1961'1967.

'The yellow people, the brown people and the blacks are mentally unfit for directors in our form of government. You can not change these natural and God-ordained mental processes.'

'Tex Linder, Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture, 1948. Quoted by Lillian Smith in Killers of the Dream, 1949.

'Three ghost relationships'white man and colored woman, white father and colored children, white child and his beloved colored nurse'haunting the mind of the South and giving shape to our lives and our souls.'

'Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream, 1949.

'Night. No one prayed, so that the night would pass quickly. The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us.'

'Elie Wiesel, from Night, 1958, translated from the French by Stella Rodway, 1960.

This was broadcast late this morning on WPS1, and I thought I was hearing it live! But it actually took place a few weeks ago. Pictured above is reigning champion Ushio Shinohara, 74 years young. The contender (not pictured) had a percussion ensemble, bowled over the announcer, and even received an infinity sign (disallowed) from one of the judges. Nevertheless, Shinohara was proclaimed the winner. I found the picture, and there's another good one, here.

'Here should be a picture of my favorite apple.
It is also a nude & bottle.
It is also a landscape.
There are no such things as still lifes.'

'Erica Jong, as quoted by Tom Robbins in Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980.

'The hair of most so-called redheads actually is orange, but it was red, first color in the spectum and the last seen by the eyes of the dying, it was true-blue red that clanged like fire bells about the domes of Bernard Mickey Wrangle and Princess Leigh-Cheri.'

'Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980.

'Camels, it seems, hit the national market in 1914. . . . These particular cigarettes, an innovative blend of Virginia burley and Carolina bright with imported Turkish leaf included for taste and aroma, and with a generous amount of sweetening added, were created personally by R.J. (Richard Joshua) Reynolds in Winston-Salem, N.C., the previous year. The package also was designed in 1913. It was Mr. Reynolds's idea to name the new cigarettes 'Kamel' or 'Camel' to give them an exotic mystique befitting their Turkish ingredient, and it was Reynolds's young secretary, Roy C. Haberkern, who talked Barnum & Bailey into letting him photograph Old Joe, the cantankerous circus dromedary, for the title role on the pack. Who placed the pyramids in the background is unclear. The Camel label had been prepared for Reynolds by a Richmond lithography firm, and it was believed that an itinerant lithographer newly in the firm's employ applied the finishing detail, including the pyramids, shortly before he walked off the job. Nobody remembered his name, but they recalled that he was a talented draftsman and had flaming red hair.'

'Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980.

1. Lucille Ball, comedienne
2. Gen. George Custer, military maverick
3. Lizzie Borden, hatchetwoman
4. Thomas Jefferson, revolutionary
5. Red Skelton, comic
6. George Bernard Shaw, playwright
7. Judas Iscariot, informer
8. Mark Twain, humorist
9. Woody Allen, humorist
10. Margaret Sanger, feminist
11. Scarlet O'Hara, bitch
12. Bernard Mickey Wrangle, bomber

From this list, the analytically minded might conclude that persons with red hair tend to be either dangerous or funny.'

'Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980.

''What are you looking for in a typewriter'' the salesman asked.

'Something more than words,' I replied. 'Crystals. I want to send my readers armloads of crystals, some of which are the colors of orchids and peonies. . . .''

'Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980.

'Once, he spilled the dye all over his shoes. From then on, he dyed with his boots on.'

'Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980.

'In the clear desert night, the stars were as wild as popcorn.'

'Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980.

'Babe, it appears that you and I are no longer sucking the same orange.'

'Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980.

'All outlaws are photogenic, and I love that. 'When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free': that's a griffito seen in Anacortes, and I love that. There are outlaw maps that lead to outlaw treasures, and I love those maps especially. Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here, and I love that most of all.'

'Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980.

'I have a black belt in haiku. And a black vest in the cleaners.'

'Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980.

'The dawn came up like a Have-a-Nice-Day emblem. The sun shone like Mr. Happy Face himself, and the horizons were all smiles.'

'Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980.

'Iris (the flower, and also the part of the human eye), together with the beautiful word iridescent, have come to us from the Greek goddess Iris, whose outer form was the rainbow.'

'Owen Barfield, History in English Words, 1967.

'direct products of the Crusades may be found in our language in the words azure, cotton, orange, saffron, scarlet, sugar and damask . . . all of which come to us either from Arabic or, through Arabic, from some Oriental language.'

'Owen Barfield, History in English Words, 1967.

'For that same goodly hew of white and red,
With which the cheekes are sprinckled, shall decay,
And those sweete rosy leaves so fairely spread
Upon the lips, shall fade and fall away
To that they were, even to corrupted clay.
That golden wyre, those sparckling stars so bright
Shall turne to dust, and loose their goodly light.'

'Spenser, Hymne of Love. He goes on to say that love will last forever. From History in English Words by Owen Barfield, 1967.

'The sun, from rosy billows risen, had rayed
With gold the mountain tops, when at the foot
Of a tall beech romantic, whose green shade
Fell on a brook, that, sweet-voiced as a lute,
Through lively pastures wound its sparkling way,
Sad on the daisied turf Salicio lay'

'Garcilaso de la Vega (1503'-1536), Eclogue I, translated by Jeremiah Holmes Wiffen. From Nine Centuries of Spanish Literature, edited by Seymour Resnick and Jeanne Pasmantier, Dover, 1994.

'Green was the maiden, green, green!
Green her eyes were, green her hair. . . .

Through the green air she came.
(The whole earth turned green for her.) . . .

Over the green sea she came.
(And even the sky turned green then.)'

'Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1959), Green, translated by J.B. Trend. From Nine Centuries of Spanish Literature, edited by Seymour Resnick and Jeanne Pasmantier, Dover, 1994.

'Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.'

'Federico Garcia Lorca (1899-1936), Somnambule Ballad, translated by J.L. Gili and Stephen Spender. From Nine Centuries of Spanish Literature, edited by Seymour Resnick and Jeanne Pasmantier, Dover, 1994.

'The rose is said to have been given to the god of silence by Cupid to seal a promise not to reaveal the love of Adonis and Venus. Its origin was the blood of Adonis. . . . A symbol for secrecy and silence as well as for love, it was once used as the sculpted motif on the ceilings of banquet halls to remind diners that what was said . . . was . . . said sub rosa'under the rose and not to be repeated. . . .

The word 'rose' comes from the Greek roden, meaning red, and it is thought that once the flower's only hue was a deep, dark red. . . . Over the centuries it has been cultivated . . . into . . . as many as 250 true varieties. Roses that are as small as a little button or as large as a cabbage can be grown in a range of color from almost black through all shadings of red and pink to palest lavender to yellow to clear white.'

'Ann Tucker Fettner, from Potpourri, Incense and Other Fragrant Concoctions, 1977.

'Classically, lavender belongs to England. Of all the places in the world, this island is where it grows best and is most loved. . . . The Magic of Herbs, has this to say of it: . . . 'William Turner extolled it as a cure for colds and as a comfort for the brain, and advocted its use in indoor headgear, it was the gayest color the Quakers were allowed to wear, and it scented the ruffles of the Court exquisites.'

We get the word 'lavender' from the Roman lavare, to wash. They used it in their baths, presumably to sweeten their bodies, as there was no such thing as soap at the time. . . . Its perfume from both growing and dried plants is sweet, aromatic and strong. It has been an essential ingredient of medicines down through the centuries.'

'Ann Tucker Fettner, from Potpourri, Incense and Other Fragrant Concoctions, 1977.

'Lavender's blue, dilly, dilly, lavender's green,
When I am King, dilly, dilly, you shall be Queen.'

'Anonymous.

'I'll love you till Heaven
Rips the stars from his coat,
And the Moon rows away in
A glass-bottomed boat;
And Orion steps down
Like a diver below,
And Earth is ablaze,
And Ocean aglow.'

'William J. Smith, Now touch the air softly.

'East of the sun and west of the moon,
We'll build a dream house of love, dear.
Near to the sun in the day, near to the moon at night, . . .
Living on love and pale moonlight.'

'East Of The Sun, words & music by Brooks Bowman,
recorded by Tommy Dorsey, 1940.

'Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate;
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.'

'J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, 1955.

'Or there maybe 'tis cloudless night
and swaying beeches bear
the Elven-stars as jewels white
amid their branching hair.'

'J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, 1955.

'Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers, . . .
Cocking tails and prickling whiskers'

'Robert Browning, The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

'Then, like a musical adept,
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,
And green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled,
Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled'

'Robert Browning, The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

''Come in''the Mayor cried, looking bigger:
And in did come the strangest figure!
His queer long coat from heel to head
Was half of yellow and half of red;
And he himself was tall and thin,
With sharp blue eyes, each like a pin,
And light loose hair, yet swarthy skin,
No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin,
But lips where smiles went out and in'
There was no guessing his kith and kin!'

'Robert Browning, The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

'It was the color of rubber and ash, this jungle, from the many years without sun. It was the color of stones and white cheeses and ink, and it was the color of the moon.'

'Ray Bradbury, All Summer in a Day, 1954.

'There screen'd in shades from day's detested glare,
Spleen sighs for ever on her pensive bed,
Pain at her side, and megrim at her head.'

'Alexander Pope, as quoted in Anthology: Selected Essays from the First Thirty Years of The New York Review of Books, 2001.

'Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss.
It is all Hollywood, windowless,
The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,'

'Sylvia Plath, Lesbos (from Ariel), from Anthology: Selected Essays from the First Thirty Years of The New York Review of Books, 2001.

'Love is a universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision,
Blotting out reason.'

'Robert Graves, as quoted in A Curmudgeon's Garden of Love, compiled and edited by Jon Winokur, 1989.

'Thus [Andy Warhol's] painting, roughly silkscreened, full of slips, mimicked the dissociation of gaze and empathy induced by the mass media: the banal punch of tabloid newsprint, the visual jabber and bright sleazy color of TV, the sense of glut and anesthesia caused by both. Three dozen Elvises are better than one. . . . The rapid negligence of Warhol's images parodied the way mass media replace the act of reading with that of scanning, a state of affairs anticipated by Ronald Firbank's line in The Flower Beneath the Foot: 'She reads at such a pace . . . and when I asked her where she had learnt to read so quickly she replied, 'On the screens of Cinemas.'''

'Robert Hughes, The Rise of Andy Warhol, 1982, from Anthology: Selected Essays from the First Thirty Years of The New York Review of Books, 2001.

'I have never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back.'

'Zsa Zsa Gabor, as quoted in A Curmudgeon's Garden of Love, compiled and edited by Jon Winokur, 1989.

'One day, an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the earth.'

'Gloria Steinem, as quoted in A Curmudgeon's Garden of Love, compiled and edited by Jon Winokur, 1989.

'JW [Jon Winokur]: What are the results of the sexual revolution'

RMB [Rita Mae Brown]: A lot of bad novels in which the clitoris is described as the red pearl and the penis is always described as engorged and throbbing. Mercy.'

'A Curmudgeon's Garden of Love, compiled and edited by Jon Winokur, 1989.

'Blondes have the hottest kisses. Red-heads are fair-to-middling torrid, and brunettes are the frigidest of all. It's something to do with hormones, no doubt.'

'Ronald Reagan, as quoted in A Curmudgeon's Garden of Love, compiled and edited by Jon Winokur, 1989.

'There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again with a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels'

'Dylan Thomas (1914'1953), Poem in October.

'A sea of shining white mist was in the valley, with glinting golden rays striking athwart it from the great cresset of the sinking moon; here and there the long, dark, horizontal line of a distant mountain's summit rose above the vaporous shimmer, like a dreary, sombre island in the midst of enchanted waters. Her large, dreamy eyes, so wild and yet so gentle, gazed out through the laurel leaves upon the floating gilded flakes of light, as in the deep coverts of the mountain, where the fulvous-tinted deer were lying, other eyes, as wild and as gentle, dreamily watched the vanishing moon. Overhead, the filmy, lace-like clouds, fretting the blue heavens, were tinged with a faint rose. Through the trees she caught a glimpse of the red sky of dawn, and the glister of a great lucent, tremulous star.'

'Charles Egbert Craddock (Mary Noailles Murfree) (1850'1922), The 'Harnt' that Walks Chilhowee, from In the Tennesee Mountains, 1884.

'I am using old rags in my mill,
Where flowing water turns the wheel
That tears the rags and shreds them up.
Then I soak the pulp in water tub,
Mold the sheets, on a felt them lay,
And squeeze them in my press all day.
I hang them up to let them dry,
Snow-white and glossy, a treat for every eye.'

'Hans Sachs (1494'1576), the cobbler-poet. As quoted by Eugene F. Rice, Jr in The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460'1559, 1970.

'The immediate ancestor of the wooden press was . . . the press used in paper mills for squeezing water from the damp sheets, a device easily adaptable to printing. Most crucial was the invention of type'the mirror image of each of the letters of the alphabet made in metal by precision casting from matrices. . . .

[The] first printed books have a . . . curious characteristic: their pages so closely resemble those of manuscript books as to be virtually indistinguishable to the unpracticed eye. . . . [T]he practice suggests . . . that the earliest printers had no conception of the unique potentialities of their invention, that they considered printing only a new and particluar kind of writing. . . . Their difficulty in freeing themselves from traditional conceptions is explained by the fact that although typography was the greatest invention of the Renaissance, its earliest development was shaped almost exclusively by clerical tastes and needs.'

'Eugene F. Rice, Jr, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460'1559, 1970.

'On August 14, 1457, Fust and Schoffer issued the Psalms. The volume was printed on vellum. The type, printed in red and black, is noble and fits handsomely on the page. Each psalm, as the printers boasted in a note at the end, is 'adorned with the beauty of large initial letters'; the lacy design of these letters, ornamented with flowers and small animals and printed in red and blue, is masterly. Fust and Schoffer's Psalms is the oldest signed and dated book printed in Europe that has survived. In its sober magnificence it is also one of the most beautiful.'

'Eugene F. Rice, Jr, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460'1559, 1970.

'In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.'

'George Orwell, (1903'1950).

'Tell the truth, and so puzzle and confound your adversaries.'

'Sir Henry Wotton. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'If Jesus Christ were to come today people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.'

'Thomas Carlyle, D.A. Wilson, Carlyle at His Zenith. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'The modern newspaper is half ads and the other half lies between the ads.'

'Anonymous. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars,
I am the Red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek'
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.'

'Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and pastures blue ought to be sterilized.'

'Adolf Hitler, quoted by Dorothy Thompson, N.Y Post, January 3, 1944. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.'

'St. Ignatius of Loyola, Exercitia spiritualia, 1541. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'These flames . . . light up a new era. . . . Spirits are awakening, and oh, Century, it is a joy to live!'

'Joseph Paul Goebbels, spoken at the Nazi book-burning, May 10, 1933. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'Dark terror and misfortunes in the life to come oppressed the Egyptians and Etruscans, but never reached their full development until the victory of Christianity.'

'Bertrand Russell, Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind, 1946. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.'

'Benjamin Franklin. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.'

'Ferdinand Magellan, Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red, that man is a Communist.' You never hear a real American talk like that.'

'Frank Hague, N.Y. World-Telegram, April 2, 1938. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'My hat's in the ring. The fight is on and I'm stripped to the buff.'

'Theodore Roosevelt, 1912. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'Journalism consists in buying white paper at 2' a pound and selling it at 10' a pound.'

'Charles A. Dana. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'Yellow Journalism.'

'Ervin Wardman. Outcault's comic strip, The Yellow Kid, had appeared the previous year, 1895. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'As for the yellow (news)papers'every country has its criminal classes, and with us as in France, they have simply got into journalism as part of their professional evolution, and they must be got out.'

'William James, quoted by John Macy, Civilization in the United States. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe'the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.'

'Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago, had they happened to be within reach of predatory human hands.'

'Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.'

'Albert Camus, The Fall, 1957. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'All of the animals excepting man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.'

'Samuel Butler, Note-books. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'Life is short; live it up.'

'Nikita S. Khrushchev, N.Y. Times Magazine, August 3, 1958. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy' To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.'

'Walter Pater, The Renaissance. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of the subconscious from which it rises.'

'Sigmund Freud, quotation in N.Y. Times obituary, September 24, 1939. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'I cannot afford to waste my time making money.'

'Louis Agassiz, refusing an offer for a course of lectures. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures.'

'Pope Pius XI, Vigilanti cura, July 2, 1936. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'Some say, what is the salvation of the Movies' I say, run 'em backwards. It can't hurt 'em and it's worth a trial.'

'Will Rogers, Autobiography of Will Rogers, edited by Donald Day. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'The history of the world which is still taught to our children is essentially a series of race murders.'

'Sigmund Freud. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

Extra-violent poison. One glass and you're dead. Newspaper men drink it as they write their copy.

'Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'Power, like the diamond, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer; it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation.'

'Charles Caleb Colton, The Lacon. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'Well I asked my old pappy why he called his brew
White lightnin' 'stead of mountain dew
I took a little sip and right away I knew
As my eyes bugged out and my face turned blue
Lightnin' started flashin' and thunder started crashin'
Shhhoooh . . . white lightnin''

'George Jones, White Lightning, from Live Recordings From the Louisiana Hayride. I just heard this on WXYC, Chapel Hill. George Jones, right on!

'There are two forces that can carry light to all corners of the globe'the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here.'

'Mark Twain, speech, New York City, September 19, 1906. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'The law says that white is black; ignorance says, why not''

'John Henry Newman, Present Position of Catholics. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'The way to see by Faith is to shut the eye of Reason.'

'Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard, 1758. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

''A red is any son of a bitch who wants thirty cents when we're paying twenty-five.''

'John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.'

'Heinrich Heine, Gedanken und Einfalle., Vo. 10, quoted in The Nation, February 11, 1956; translated by Mina Curtiss. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.'

'Napoleon Bonaparte, Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'They are too bright, we shield our eyes and kill them. We are the dead, and in us there is no feeling nor imagination nor the terrible torment of lust for justice.'

'Heywood Broun, referring to Sacco and Vanzetti in New Republic, September 1, 1947. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'So we can dismiss the idea that sex appeal in art is pornography. It may be so to the grey Puritan, but the grey Puritan is a sick man, soul and body sick, so why should we bother about his hallucinations''

'D.H. Lawrence, Pornography and Obscenity, This Quarter (Paris), 1929. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'Her open eyes desire the truth.
The wisdom of a thousand years
Is in them.'

'Alfred, Lord Tennyson, To J.S., 1833. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'The world cannot endure half-darkness and half-light.'

'J. Robert Oppenheimer, Journal of the Atomic Scientists, September, 1956. From The Great Quotations, compiled by George Seldes, 1960.

'The man wore a purple suit, a Panama hat over his shiny, slicked-down hair. He walked splay-footed, soundlessly.

The girl wore a green hat and a short skirt and sheer stockings, four-and-a-half inch French heels. She smelled of Midnight Narcissus.'

'Raymond Chandler, Pickup on Noon Street, from The Simple Art of Murder, 1950.

''I like to clock the ponies and play seven-card stud and mess around with little red cubes with white spots on them. I like games of chance, including women. But when I lose I don't get sore and I don't chisel. I just move on to the next table. Be seein' you.''

'Raymond Chandler, Guns at Cyrano's, from The Simple Art of Murder, 1950.

'The music softened and a tall high-yaller torch singer drooped under an amber light and sang of something very far away and unhappy, in a voice like old ivory.'

'Raymond Chandler, Guns at Cyrano's, from The Simple Art of Murder, 1950.

'She gulped the whiskey and a little more light came into her smoke-blue eyes.'

'Raymond Chandler, Nevada Gas, from The Simple Art of Murder, 1950.

'It is a reasonable guess that early humans scratched patterns in mud, daubed their bodies with colour, stuck flowers or feathers in their hair or danced in complicated patterns as did later peoples'but, if they did, nothing of that survives.'

'J.M. Roberts, from A Short History of the World, 1993.

'from somewhere about 35,000 BC onwards we have a pretty steady supply of [prehistoric] data from Europe. It was produced over a long period, until about 10,000 BC. . . . Much of what remains of it comes from a pretty restricted area, a number of sites in south-western France and northern Spain. The oldest things found there are little decorated and coloured objects, often of bone and ivory'carved spear-throwers, for example. Often they have engravings of animals on them. Then, in about 20,000 BC we begin a period perhaps 5,000 years long'which has left a splendid series of paintings and carvings on the walls and roofs of caves. Animals provide most of the subject-matter of these decorations. . . .

Interestingly, human beings are shown always very unrealistically, in an abstract, stylized way, whereas the animals are often drawn with close attention to detail. Perhaps to draw something realistically was to have power over it. Some scholars have tried to work out patterns in the way certain animals repeatedly appear, but this does not get us very far. It is a reasonable guess, though, that in societies without writing, these patterns carried messages to those who looked at them.'

'J.M. Roberts, from A Short History of the World, 1993.

'A blue sky. The nature of love. A child's smile. The "@" symbol.

Some things are so common place that you scarcely notice them. But that doesn't make them any less fascinating. Take the humble "@" symbol, for instance.

It's something we use dozens'perhaps hundreds'of times a day. This little "a" with the curved tail is inextricably linked to the instantaneous communication that we, as a society, are dependent upon.

But where is @ from, exactly'

Let's go back to the 6th or 7th century. Latin scribes, rubbing their wrists with history's first twinges of carpal tunnel syndrome, tried to save a little effort by shortening the Latin word ad (at, to, or toward) by stretching the upstroke of "d" and curving it over the "a".

Italian researchers unearthed 14th-century documents, where the @ sign represented a measure of quantity. The symbol also appeared in a 15th-century Latin-Spanish dictionary, defined as a gauge of weight, and soon after'according to ancient letters'was referenced as an amphora, a standard-sized clay vessel used to carry wine and grain.

Over the next few hundred years our plucky @ sign was used in trade to mean "at the price of" before resting on the first Underwood typewriter keyboard in 1885, then later rubbing symbolic shoulders with QWERTY on modern keyboards in the 1940s.

Then, one day in late 1971, computer engineer Ray Tomlinson grappled with how to properly address what would be history's very first e-mail. After 30 seconds of intense thought, he decided to separate the name of his intended recipient and their location by using the "@" symbol. He needed something that wouldn't appear in anyone's name, and settled on the ubiquitous symbol, with the added bonus of the character representing the word "at," as in, hey_you@wherever_you_happen_to_work.com.

And while in the English language, we know it as the "at symbol," it goes by many other unusual pseudonyms throughout the world.

* In South Africa, it means "monkey's tail"
* In Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia it's the "Crazy"
* In the Czech Republic, it's "pickled herring"
* The Danish refer to it as "alpha-sign," "elephant's trunk," or "pig's tail."
* The French often refer to it as "little snail."
* In Greece, it's "little duck."
* In Hungary, it's called "maggot"
* In Mandarin Chinese, it's the "mouse sign."
* The Poles say "little cat" or "pig's ear."
* Russians often refer to it as "little dog."
* There's no official word for it in Thailand, but "wiggling worm-like character."
* The Turks lovingly describe it as "ear."

But an "@" by any other name is just as sweet. Online, it's at the heart of every user's identity. It represents the breathless urgency of our connected culture: clear, concise, typographical shorthand for lobbing our thoughts, needs, and ideas to nearly anyone else in the world. Instantly.

Its ubiquity and urgency has transcended the Latin alphabet of its origins to worm its way into other language groups, including Arabic and Japanese.

And that, web wanderers, is where it's @.'

'Hewlitt Packard, at his website, here. This guy is smart! (Just kidding!!! I know who, I mean, what Hewlitt Packard is. I think.)

'I'm clever, handsome, gracefully polite;
My waist is small, my teeth are strong and white;
As for my dress, the world's astonished eyes
Assure me that I bear away the prize.'

'Moli're, spoken by Acaste in The Misanthrope, translated by Richard Wilder, 1965.

'Well, Sir, today a man in a black suit,
Who wore a black and ugly scowl to boot,
Left us a document scrawled in such a hand
As even Satan couldn't understand.
It bears upon your lawsuit, I don't doubt;
But all hell's devils couldn't make it out.'

'Moli're, from The Misanthrope, translated by Richard Wilder, 1965.

'Tartuffe' Why, he's round and red,
Bursting with health, and excellently fed.'

'Moli're, from Tartuffe, translated by Richard Wilder, 1965.

'Oh, to be sitting in the woods' deep shade!
When shall I witness, through a golden wrack
Of dust, a chariot flying down the track''

'Phaedra, from the play of the same name, by Jean Racine, 1677. Phaedra has a morbid fascination with death.

'He looked like a brown ghost at twilight'from hair to shoes he became the color of the building and of everything in it, and for that matter a hundred yards outside it. The building had to be left open, and when the wind blew Durham and Company lost a great deal of fertilizer.'

'Upton Sinclair, from The Jungle, 1906.

'The people who worked here followed the ancient custom of nature, whereby the ptarmigan is the color of dead leaves in the fall and of snow in the winter, and the chameleon, who is black when he lies upon a stump and turns green when he moves to a leaf. The men and women who worked in this department were precisely the color of the 'fresh country sausage' they made.'

'Upton Sinclair, from The Jungle, 1906.

'Night is the true reality. Day is made for people who imagine that there is a beginning and an end, and such people are under the misapprehension that the sky is blue and empty. The light hides the stars which are present. The light is a backdrop, is an illusion against which our thinking takes place. The night is boundless and reveals all.'

'Breyten Breytenbach, from A Season in Paradise, 1980.

'dreaming is a way
of thinking further
in the dark'

'Breyten Breytenbach, from A Season in Paradise, 1980.

'that light/that silver thing haunting the vineyards/
the sea upon which both fishermen/and lovedrunk can wander'

'Breyten Breytenbach, from A Season in Paradise, 1980.

'The rising sun has the terrible glow of hell, of a perpetual flame, of eternity. The moon at night has the wonderful comfort of a white flower one throws onto a coffin in the grave. . . . Or sometimes, so I feel, the moon is just a porthole looking out onto a light and cold universe. You see, to me the moon remains a metaphor'and the fact that the Americans walked on it, makes no difference, because the Americans also walked on the earth and didn't grasp the first thing about it.'

'Breyten Breytenbach, from A Season in Paradise, 1980.

'a handful of earth sweet and red
to clutch a world
in lands remote from here

a handful of earth, mute
yet bringing a touch of blue from the hills
of trees offering shade against the sun
of a sky filled with blue sun
and of ripening fruit'

'Breyten Breytenbach, from A Season in Paradise, on South Africa, 1980.

'And the east bloomed broader! The dome of gold grew brighter, the faint clouds here and there flamed with a flush of red. The frost began to glisten with a reflected color. The youth dreamed as he walked; his broad face and deep earnest eyes caught and retained some part of the beauty and majesty of the sky.'

'Hamlin Garland, from his collected stories, Main-Traveled Roads, 1930.

'In his restless life, surrounded by the glare of electric lights, painted canvas, hot colors, creak of machinery, mock trees, stones, and brooks, he had not lost, but gained, appreciation for the coolness, quiet, and low tones, the shyness of the wood and field.'

'Hamlin Garland, from his collected stories, Main-Traveled Roads, 1930.

'The 'best clothes' donned for Sunday and formal occasions might be of dark material, but daily garb ran the spectrum of colors. Russet was favored, at least in New England, but reds, yellows, blues, and greens were also common. . . .

The lively colored outfits of the first settlers became more subdued as men moved into the backcountry. As James Axtell has remarked, 'Colonial woodsmen quickly found that for stalking wild game or enemies'or being stalked'red coats, blue trousers, and yellow waistcoats were signal failures. Far better were the forest's natural dull shades of brown and green.''

'David Freeman Hawke, from Everyday Life in Early America, 1989.

'All regions liked mixed drinks, among them cider and rum, cider and mead, and, above all, flip, the recipe of which was[:]

beer sweetened with sugar, molasses, or dried pumpkin, and strengthened with some spirit, usually rum. Into this mixture a red-hot iron was thrust, which made the liquor foam and gave it a burned, bitter flavor.'

'David Freeman Hawke, from Everyday Life in Early America, 1989.

'Summer saw meals laced with huckleberries, blackberries, and blueberries (also called 'skycolored' berries).'

'David Freeman Hawke, from Everyday Life in Early America, 1989.

'The English reacted [to the native American Indians] by establishing military beachheads in a hostile land, building garrisons ringed by stout palisades. (For soldiers to go beyond the 'pale' meant to risk death.)'

'David Freeman Hawke, from Everyday Life in Early America, 1989.

'The glimpses of the infernal world that we get in Salem [at the witchcraft trials of 1692] are highly incredible. The witches say prayers by a tall black man with a high-crowned hat'always with a high-crowned hat. They ride on sticks and poles, sometimes they are on brooms, and sometimes three are on one pole. . . . The witches fondle yellow birds, suckling them between their fingers. . . . The witch usually sits on the great crossbeam of the meeting house, fondling the yellow bird.'

'Edward Eggleston, from The Transit of Civilization, 1900. As quoted in Everyday Life in Early America by David Freeman Hawke, 1989.

Newspaper advertisement, c. 1900. From an exhibition of pre-prohibition drug paraphenalia that you can see here.

'Greenback fly got your tail shakin'
Sitting on my slab of bacon
Greenback fly whatcha been takin'
It's mine mine mine all mine'

'Southern Culture on the Skids, Greenback Fly, from the album Dirt Track Date, 1995.

'Billy, . . . this damn house is haunted. It's obvious as a cop.'

'William S. Burroughs, as quoted by his son, William S. Burroughs, Jr, in Kentucky Ham, 1973.

'A man who is moved by the fog of his feelings spends most of his time out of focus and will create and respond to a style of blurred, 'mysterious' murk, where outlines dissolve and entities flow into one another, where words connote anything and denote nothing, where colors float without objects, and objects float without weight'a level of awareness appropriate to a universe where A can be any non-A one chooses, where nothing can be known with certainty and nothing much is demanded of one's consciousness.'

'Ayn Rand, the essay Art and Sense of Life, 1966. From The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature.

'Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog-like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.'

'Mickey Spillane, One Lonely Night, as quoted by Ayn Rand in The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature.

'down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man.'

'Raymond Chandler, from the introduction to his collection of short stories, The Simple Art of Murder, 1950.

'Blood began to move sluggishly down his cheek from a hole over his left eye. It moved faster. The hole got large and red. Joey Chill's eyes looked blankly at the ceiling, as if . . . things no longer concerned him at all.'

'Raymond Chandler, Spanish Blood, from his collection of short stories, The Simple Art of Murder, 1950.

'Pain filled his head. Light flared'blinding white light that filled the world. Then it was dark. He fell soundlessly, into bottomless darkness.'

'Raymond Chandler, Spanish Blood, from his collection of short stories, The Simple Art of Murder, 1950.

'The blonde turned her head. . . . There was hard green hate in her eyes now.'

'Raymond Chandler, Spanish Blood, from his collection of short stories, The Simple Art of Murder, 1950.

'She looked tall and her hair was the color of a brush fire seen through a dust cloud. On it, at the ultimate rakish angle, she wore a black velvet double-pointed beret with two artificial butterflies made of polka-dotted feathers and fastened on with tall silver pins. Her dress was burgundy-red wool and the blue fox draped over one shoulder was at least two feet wide. Her eyes were large, smoke-blue, and looked bored.'

'Raymond Chandler, The King in Yellow, from his collected short stories, The Simple Art of Murder, 1950.

'It was another bright, golden morning and it seemed that somehow things should adjust themselves on so pleasant a day.'

'Raymond Chandler, Pearls are a Nuisance, from his collected short stories, The Simple Art of Murder, 1950.

'Raven hair so quickly gray,
Ruddy cheeks soon past.
Man's unlike the ageless pine'
His fame and fortune, e'er in flux,
Gone in the flower-destroying blast.'

'Li Yu (1610'1680), from The Carnal Prayer Mat, translated by Patrick Hanan, 1990.

'An unpowdered complexion pale as any woman's,
Unrouged lips rosy as any maiden's.
Eyebrows so long as to meet his eyes,
A form so delicate as hardly to bear his clothes.
A jet-black crepe-silk cap he had,
Matching his face like a crown of jade.
Bright red tapestry-silk shoes he wore,
And stepped as lightly as if walking on clouds.'

'Li Yu (1610'1680), from The Carnal Prayer Mat, translated by Patrick Hanan, 1990.

''One day I was walking along the street when I noticed this woman sitting in her doorway behind a bamboo curtain. Although I saw her only through the curtain and did not get a clear view, I was struck by the pink and white glow of her complexion, like some priceless pearl radiating light.''

'Li Yu (1610'1680), from The Carnal Prayer Mat, translated by Patrick Hanan, 1990.

Get your digital clock t-shirt here.

'Most students of the modern Life Saver classify sparking as a type of triboluminescence, which occurs when something is crushed or torn, the something in this case being the hard crystalline sugar that Life Savers contain. . . .

Wintergreen sparking, it's believed, is actually a three-step process. Step One: When you shatter the sugar crystals with your teeth, electrons (which are negatively charged) break free. As a result, the atoms in which the electrons were formerly embedded become positively charged. In what amounts to a subatomic game of musical chairs, the free electrons dash around madly trying to find a new home.

Step Two: Meanwhile, as the sugar crystals disintegrate, nitrogen molecules from the air attach themselves to the fractured surfaces. When the free electrons strike the nitrogen molecules, they cause the latter to emit invisible ultraviolet radiation, along with a faint visible glow.

Step Three: The UV radiation is absorbed by the wintergreen flavoring, methyl salicylate. This then emits the fairly bright blue light you see. Pretty complicated, I admit.'

'Cecil Adams, from Why do wintergreen Life Savers spark when crunched', 'A Straight Dope Classic from Cecil's storehouse of human knowledge,' originally published on June 15, 1984.

Minerals that become luminescent during exposure to ultra-violet light, x-rays, or cathode rays are fluorescent. If the luminescence continues after the exciting rays are shut off, the mineral is said to be phosphorescent. . . . [S]ome minerals that appear only to fluoresce can be shown by refined methods to continue to glow for a small fraction of a second after the removal of the exciting rays. Consequently, the phenomena are considered by some to be the same.

'Dana's Manual of Minerology, sixteenth edition, 1955.

[T]he property possessed by some minerals of emitting visible light when heated to a temperature below that of red heat. . . . Fluorite for a long time has been known to possess this property; the variety chlorophane was named because fof the green light emitted.

'Dana's Manual of Minerology, sixteenth edition, 1955.

[A] property possessed by some minerals of becoming luminous on being crushed, scratched, or rubbed.

'Dana's Manual of Minerology, sixteenth edition, 1955.

'I am wide open
Reaching forever
I fly into the blue'

'Moby, from Into the Blue. Thank you Barb! I would go so far as to say that Moby is very into the blue.

The color of the fine powder of a mineral is knows as its streak. The streak is frequently used in the identification of minerals, for, although the color of a mineral may vary between wide limits, the streak is usually constant. This property can be conveniently determined in the laboratiory by rubbing the mineral on a piece of unglazed porcelain, known as a streak plate.

'Dana's Manual of Minerology, sixteenth edition, 1955.

A mineral is said to show a play of colors when on turning it several spectral colors are seen in rapid succession. This is seen especially well in diamond and precious opal. A mineral is said to show a change of color when on turning it the colors change slowly with position. This is observed in some labradorite.

'Dana's Manual of Minerology, sixteenth edition, 1955.

Some minerals possess a selective absorption of light in different crystallographic directions, and may thus appear variously colored when viewed in different directions in transmitted light. This property is known as pleochroism. If a mineral has only two such absorption directions, the property is called dichroism.

'Dana's Manual of Minerology, sixteenth edition, 1955.

A mineral is iridescent when it shows a series of spectral colors in its interior or on its surface.'

'Dana's Manual of Minerology, sixteenth edition, 1955.

A milky or pearly reflection from the interior of a specimen. . . . It is observed in some opal, moonstone, and cat's-eye.

'Dana's Manual of Minerology, sixteenth edition, 1955.

A mineral is said to show a tarnish when the color of the surface differs from that of the interior.

'Dana's Manual of Minerology, sixteenth edition, 1955.

Some crystals, especially those of the hexagonal system, when viewed in the direction of the vertical axis, show starlike rays of light. This phenomenon arises from peculiarities of structure along the axial directions, or from inclusions arranged along these direction. The outstanding example is the star sapphire.

'Dana's Manual of Minerology, sixteenth edition, 1955.

Any emission of light by a mineral that is not the direct result of incandescence. . . . The phenomenon may be brought about in several ways, apparently quite independent of one another. Most luminescence is faint and can be observed only in the dark.

'Dana's Manual of Minerology, sixteenth edition, 1955.

Miniature art by Willard Wigan.

'Dance on moonbeams
Slide on rainbows
In furs or blue jeans
You know what I mean'

'Bryan Ferry, of Roxy Music, Do the Strand, from the album For Your Pleasure. Until I looked it up just now, I always thought the line was 'It burns our blue jeans, You know what I mean' . . . and I thought I knew what he meant! Now, I don't know anymore.

'Colour is its own reward
colour is its own reward
the chiming of a perfect chord
let's go jumping overboard'

'Neil Finn of Crowded House, Fingers of Love, from the album Together Alone. Of course. Thank you Kevin!

'Karma karma karma karma karma chameleon
You come and go
You come and go
Loving would be easy if your colors were like my dream
Red, gold and green
Red, gold and green'

'Boy George, the heart of Karma Chameleon. Thank you David Evans!

?When your light shines purely
You will not be born
And you will not die.

As a silversmith sifts dust from silver,
Remove your own impurities
Little by little.?

?Buddha, from Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha, translated by Thomas Byrom, 1976.

?Gray hairs do not make a master.
A man may grow old in vain.?

?Buddha, from Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha, translated by Thomas Byrom, 1976.

?The fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.?

?Walt Whitman, from A Song of Joys; quoted in Silences: Classic Essays on the Art of Creating, by Tillie Olsen, 1978.

?April evening spreads over everything the purple blur left by a child who has used the whole paint box.?

?F. Scott Fitzgerald, from The Crack-Up; quoted in Silences: Classic Essays on the Art of Creating, by Tillie Olsen, 1978.

?Someone in our family had taken to wiping his or her ass on the bath towels. What made this exceptionally disturbing was that all our towels were fudge-colored.?

?David Sedaris, from Naked, 1997.

?When asked, most people say that my greatest asset is my skin, which glows?it really does! I have to tie a sock over my eyes in order to fall asleep at night.?

?David Sedaris, from Naked, 1997.

?The painting was about four foot by three and had a background of pointillist dots in varying shades of ochre. In the centre there was a big blue circle with several smaller circles scattered around it. Each circle had a scarlet rim around the perimeter and, connecting them, was a maze of wiggly, flamingo-pink lines that looked a bit like intestines.

Mrs Lacey switched to her second pair of glasses and said, ?What you got here, Stan??

?Honey-ant,? he whispered in a hoarse voice.

?The honey-ant?, she turned to the Americans, ?is one of the totems at Popanji. This painting?s a honey-ant Dreaming.??

?Bruce Chatwin, from The Songlines, 1987.

?In the beginning the Earth was an infinite and murky plain, separated from the sky and from the grey salt sea and smothered in a shadowy twilight. There were neither Sun nor Moon nor Stars. . . .

Beneath the Earth?s crust, however, the constellations glimmered, the Sun shone, the Moon waxed and waned, and all the forms of life lay sleeping: the scarlet of a desert-pea, the iridescence on a butterfly?s wing, the twitching white whiskers of Old Man Kangaroo?dormant as seeds in the desert that must wait for a wandering shower.?

?Bruce Chatwin, from The Songlines, 1987.

?Yea, though I walk through
The Valley of the Shadow of Death
I will fear no Evil
For I, Bruce, am
The Meanest son of a Bitch in the Valley.?

?anonymous, from a poster in a hotel bar, well, the hotel bar, in Burnt Flat, Australia. Cited by Bruce Chatwin in The Songlines, 1987.

?The Huns burn with an insatiable lust for gold.?

?Ammianus Marcellinus, quoted by Bruce Chatwin in The Songlines, 1987.

?To the Babylonian ?bab-il? meant ?Gate of God?. To the Hebrews the same word meant ?confusion?, perhaps ?cacophonous confusion?. The ziggurats of Mesopotamia were ?Gates of God?, painted the seven colours of the rainbow and dedicated to Anu and Enlil, divinities representing Order and Compulsion.?

?Bruce Chatwin, from The Songlines, 1987.

?I looked down, in the half-light, at the mass of blue and black figures, like the waves at night with a whitecap or two, and silver jewellery glinting like flecks of phosphorescence.?

?Bruce Chatwin, from The Songlines, 1987.

?And Oh! that was such a breast! The Moon-beams darting full upon it, enabled the Monk to observe its dazzling whiteness. His eye dwelt with insatiable avidity upon the beauteous Orb.?

?Matthew Lewis, from The Monk, 1794.

?Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape, and polished unto brightness. Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals.?

?Samuel Johnson, from his Preface to Shakespeare. Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, edited by Bertrand H. Bronson, 1958.

?Et nunc omnis ager, nunc omnis parturit arbos,
Nunc frondent silvae, nunc formosissimus annus.

Now ev?ry field, now ev?ry tree is green;
Now genial nature?s fairest face is seen.?

?Virgil, translation by Elphiston, as quoted by Samuel Johnson in an essay from The Rambler, No. 5. Tuesday, April 3, 1750. From Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, edited by Bertrand H. Bronson, 1958.

?The face of the dragonfly
Is practically nothing
But eyes.?

?Chisoku, a haiku; from The Moment of Wonder: A Collection of Chinese and Japanese Poetry, edited by Richard Lewis, 1964.

?These flowers of the plum?
How red, how red they are,
How red, indeed!?

?Izen (17?18th c.), a haiku; from The Moment of Wonder: A Collection of Chinese and Japanese Poetry, edited by Richard Lewis, 1964.

?In a gust of wind the white dew
On the autumn grass
Scatters like a broken necklace.?

?Bunya No Asayasu (10th c.), a haiku; from The Moment of Wonder: A Collection of Chinese and Japanese Poetry, edited by Richard Lewis, 1964.

?Young man,
Seize every minute
Of your time.
The days fly by;
Ere long you too
Will grow old.

If you believe me not,
See there, in the courtyard,
How the frost
Glitters white and cold and cruel
On the grass
That once was green.?

?Tzu Yeh, The Frost; from The Moment of Wonder: A Collection of Chinese and Japanese Poetry, edited by Richard Lewis, 1964.

?The new moon pours thin gold through the shaken wood frame of my door.?

?Tu Fu (8th c.), from Neighbors; The Moment of Wonder: A Collection of Chinese and Japanese Poetry, edited by Richard Lewis, 1964.

?Hitch your wagon to a star.?

?Ralph Waldo Emerson, as quoted in Night Light: A Book of Nighttime Meditiations, by Amy E. Dean, 1986.

?The Bookshop has a thousand books,
All colors, hues, and tinges,
And every cover is a door
That turns on magic hinges.?

?Nancy Byrd Turner, as quoted in Night Light: A Book of Nighttime Meditiations, by Amy E. Dean, 1986.

?The twilight, in fact, had several stages, and several times after it had grown dusky, acquired a new transparency, and the trees on the hillsides were lit up again.?

?Henry David Thoreau, as quoted in Night Light: A Book of Nighttime Meditiations, by Amy E. Dean, 1986.

?Joy enters the room. It settles tentatively on the windowsill, waiting to see whether it will be welcome here.?

?Kim Chernin, as quoted in Night Light: A Book of Nighttime Meditiations, by Amy E. Dean, 1986.

?You can observe a lot just by watchin?.?

?Yogi Berra, as quoted in Night Light: A Book of Nighttime Meditiations, by Amy E. Dean, 1986.

?Life is an experience of ripening. The green fruit has but small resemblance to that which is matured.?

?Charles B. Newcomb, as quoted in Night Light: A Book of Nighttime Meditiations, by Amy E. Dean, 1986.

?All our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.?

?Fracis Bacon, as quoted in Night Light: A Book of Nighttime Meditiations, by Amy E. Dean, 1986.

?The sky was a velvety black paw pressing on the white landscape with a feline delicacy, stars flying like sparks from its fur.?

?Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume, 1984.

??Where you on your way to, miss??

She turned and looked at Sethe with freshly lit eyes. ?Boston. Get me some velvet. It?s a store there called Wilson. I seen the pictures of it and they have the prettiest velvet. . . .

[V]elvet is like the world was just born. Clean and new and so smooth. The velvet I seen was brown, but in Boston they got all colors. Carmine. That means red but when you talk about velvet you got to say ?carmine.???

?Toni Morrison, Sethe and Amy meet in Beloved, 1987.

??What I have to do is get in my bed and lay down. I want to fix on something harmless in this world.?

?What world you talking about? Ain?t nothing harmless down here.?

?Yes it is. Blue. That don?t hurt nobody. Yellow neither.?

?You getting in the bed to think about yellow??

?I likes yellow.?

?Then what? When you get through with blue and yellow, then what??

?Can?t say. It?s something can?t be planned.??

?Toni Morrison, Baby Suggs and Stamp Paid conversing in Beloved, 1987.

?Now I know why Baby Suggs pondered color her last years. She never had time to see, let alone enjoy it before. Took her a long time to finish with blue, then yellow, then green. She was well into pink when she died.?

?Toni Morrison, Sethe pondering her mother?s last days in Beloved, 1987.

?As the afternoon progresses, our shadows grow longer. At night, in the dark, we become our shadows. That is as true today as then. In the old days, people were aware of it, that?s all. In the old days, the whole world was religious and full of interest.?

?Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume, 1984.

?Of our nine planets, Saturn is the one that looks like fun.?

?Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume, 1984.

?In largely vegetarian India, the beet is rarely eaten because its color is suggestive of blood.?

?Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume, 1984.

?Indigo.
Indigoing.
Indigone.?

?Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume, 1984.

?The stones striking the board?Black 95, White 96, Black 97?had an unearthly quality about them, as of echoing in a chasm.?

?Yasunari Kawabata, from The Master of Go, 1951. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, 1972.

?Cutters may take weeks to decide on a strategy for cutting diamonds, and the largest ones can take years to polish. Their internal flaws and fractures often determine not only their eventual weight, but their design as well. In general, it?s up to the diamond whether or not it will eventually be emerald-, brilliant-, or heart-cut. Cutters aren?t just producing a pretty geometric shape; they?re also manipulating it so that light will enter where the cutter wants it to, bounce around inside properly, and emerge from the top, creating brilliance. Also, cutting diamonds isn?t like sawing wood; only diamonds can cut diamonds and it can take hours for a saw to create a fissure in a stone. Diamonds can lose a lot of weight during the process and it?s not unusual for a cutter to grind off up to 50 percent of a diamond?s weight to achieve a higher degree of brilliance.?

?Greg Campbell, Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World?s Most Precious Stones, 2002.

?Ever since British geologists first discovered diamonds in Sierra Leone?s jungles in the 1930s, miners had been extracting some of the most valuable diamond wealth in the world from small muddy pits scattered throughout the surrounding rain forest. These small chunks and bits of milky-white carbon crystals are transformed into precious jewelry displayed on the hands, writst, necks, and ears of people around the world, many of whom have probably never heard of Sierra Leone. . . .

Most of those who live in Sierra Leone?s dense rain forests are farmers who have never set eyes on a diamond, but they have felt the stone?s impacts. Ever since diamonds were first discovered here in the 1930s the government has been unable to control the wealth for the benefit of its citizens, nor has it tried very hard to do so. Instead, the diamond fields have been plundered almost since they were first discovered, first by corporations, then by common thieves, and most recently by the armed thugs of the RUF [Revolutionary United Front].?

?Greg Campbell, Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World?s Most Precious Stones, 2002.

?It is a known fact that if you take a diamond out of the blue and you give it to any expert, they cannot tell where the goddamned thing came from. You take a diamond that?s been cut and polished and there?s no human being on earth who can tell with certainty where that stone came from.?

?Tom Shane, owner of jewelry retailer The Shane Company, as quoted in Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World?s Most Precious Stones, by Greg Campbell, 2002.

?if [Osama] bin Laden?s currency-to-diamonds conversion scheme worked?and the indication is that it did, for Al Qaeda operatives seem to have begun three years before the [9/11] attacks?the network kept up to several million dollars worth of assets in the form of milky white stones, the most compact form of wealth known to man.?

?Greg Campbell, from Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World?s Most Precious Stones, 2002.

?As far back as the sixteenth century, some societies had viewed diamonds as talismans of strength, fortitude, and courage, attributes undoubtedly derived from the stones? hardness, transparency and purity. Since diamonds were even more rare then than they are now, it?s not surprising that they quickly were ascribed magical qualities. Diamonds were said to reveal the guilt or innocence of accused criminals and adulterers by the colors they reflected. They were said to reanimate the dead and render the virtuous invisible. The stones were also believed to bring the wearer all forms of good fortune, unless it had a blood-red flaw in the middle, in which case it meant certain death.?

?Greg Campbell, from Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World?s Most Precious Stones, 2002. He cites as his source Kevin Krajick, Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic, 2001.

A zeppelin. (Google)

?JWANENG MINE, Botswana (Reuters) ? Moonlight glistens off a huge zeppelin airship as it glides over Botswana?s Kalahari desert. High-tech sensors on board probe the arid sands below, looking for buried diamonds.

This is De Beers? latest tool in its search for gems in Botswana, the world?s leading diamond producer by value.

The rigid dirigible with a disaster-scarred history carries classified U.S. technology, first developed for the military and still so sensitive that a photographer was warned not to film the equipment, provided and operated by U.S. firm Bell Geospace.

?This is the cutting edge. We?re pushing geophysics to the boundaries,? said Brad Pitts, who heads De Beers? airship exploration programme, launched last November.

?This is the only airship in the world being used for geophysical surveying.?. . .

Zeppelins enjoyed a golden age in the 1930s when they carried passengers on hundreds of trans-Atlantic flights.

But they fell into disrepute after the spectacular 1937 Hindenburg disaster, when an airship burst into flames in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 35 people on board. . . .

?This (De Beers airship) might mean zeppelins could be used for other commercial applications,? said pilot Fritz Guenther as he steered the ship above Jwaneng, waving at curious people below.?

?Eric Onstad, for Reuters News, Zeppelin seeks diamond stashes in Kalahari, here it is: http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=834132006; posted just today, 6/6/0 . . . O . . . Oh shit!!!!!!!!!!

Diamond Dyes
Gold Dust
Gold Dust Washing Powder
Gorham?s Silver
Ivory Soap
Pearline Soap Powder
Pearltop Lamp Chimneys

?from a list of ?Leaders in National Advertising in 1890?s,? Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, eleventh edition, 1990. Their source: Presbrey, History and Development of Advertising.

An ad printed in one color only, usually black, on white paper. Most newspapers are printed in black and white.

?Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, eleventh edition, 1990.

Pilot light on TV cameras indicating which camera is on the air.

?Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, eleventh edition, 1990.

A standard method of showing process color inks on a four-color process proof.

?Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, eleventh edition, 1990.

Blank sheets of paper cut and folded to the size of a proposed leaflet, folder, booklet, or book, to indicate weight, shape, size and general appearance. On the pages of the dummy the layouts can be drawn.

?Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, eleventh edition, 1990.

Two halftone plates, each printing in a different color and giving two-color reproductions from an original one-color plate.

?Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, eleventh edition, 1990.

Outdoor ads in which electric lights are used to form the words and design. Not to be confused with illuminated posters or illuminated painted bulletins.

?Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, eleventh edition, 1990.

A tear in a poster, causing a piece of poster paper to hang loose.

?Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, eleventh edition, 1990.

Second or additional printing colors, using line [art] ot tints, but not process.

?Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, eleventh edition, 1990.

The process for reproducing color illustrations by a set of plates, one of which prints all the yellows, another the blues, a third the reds, the fourth the blacks (sequence variable). The plates are referred to as process plates.

?Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, eleventh edition, 1990.

An unwanted image appearing in a TV pictue, for example, as a result of signal reflection.

?Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, eleventh edition, 1990.

A working drawing showing how an ad is to look. A printer?s layout is a set of instructions accompanying a piece of copy showing how it is to be set up. There are also rough layouts, finished layouts, and mechanical layouts, representing various degrees of finish.

?Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, eleventh edition, 1990.

An outdoor sign built to order, designed to be conspicuous for its location, size, lights, motion, or action. The costliest form of outdoor advertising.

?Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, eleventh edition, 1990.

?While [James] Dean had done some professional racing early in his brief Hollywood career, he had been banned from participating in the sport by Giant director George Stevens for the duration of the lengthy, expensive shoot. Thus, once Dean?s scenes on the film were completed, he was raging to race again. . . . Consistent with this fervor, Dean had gone ?Hollywood? with his first pricey purchase?a silver Porsche 550 Spyder. . . .

James so related to this symbol of speed that he had his own provocative nickname, ?Little Bastard,? painted in red on the Porsche?s tail. . . .

Metaphorically, . . . speed defined Dean?s acting. . . . Dean?s tendency to constantly push the proverbial envelope was entertainingy exciting and dangerous. And it was a key reason why many people saw him as a ?Little Bastard.??

?Wes D. Gehring, from James Dean: Rebel with a Cause, 2005.

?[James Dean?s] antiheroic tendencies have resulted in some commentators calling him the ?first hippie.? Several rock stars, from the Beatles to Bob Dylan, have suggested this then-new development in music had Dean as a catalyst. For example, John Lennon once noted, ?I suppose you could say that without Jimmy Dean, The Beatles would never have existed.? Moreover, as one biographer has suggested, just the name James Dean has become a metaphor for rock music, such as in David Essex?s rock anthem, ?Rock On,? with the lyrics ?prettiest girl I?ve ever seen, see her shake on the movie screen, Jimmy Dean?James Dean.??

?Wes D. Gehring, from James Dean: Rebel with a Cause, 2005.

?I?ve been thinking about . . . that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you?re gold when you?re a kid. . . . When you?re a kid everything?s new, dawn. It?s just when you get used to everything that it?s day.?

?S.E. Hinton, from The Outsiders, 1967; as cited in James Dean: Rebel with a Cause, by Wes D. Gehring, 2005. The allusion is to Robert Frost?s Nothing Gold Can Stay.

?Shall I be sorry for myself? In Mortality?s name
I?ll be sorry for myself. Branches and boughs,
Brown hills, the valleys faint with brume,
A burnish on the lake. . . .?

?Christopher Fry, the Duke?s curtain speech, from the play Venus Observed, 1950.

??Will we talk about the black bird??

The fat man laughed and his bulbs rode up and down on his laughter. ?Will we?? he asked, and, ?We will,? he replied. His pink face was shiny with delight. ?You?re the man for me, sir, a man cut along my own lines. No beating about the bush, but right to the point. ?Will we talk about the black bird?? We will. I like that, sir. I like that way of doing business. Let us talk about the black bird by all means. . . .?

?Dashiell Hammett; Sam Spade and the fat man, conversing in The Maltese Falcon, 1930.

??You won?t?you can?t?treat me like that.? Her eyes were cobalt-blue prayers.?

?Dashiell Hammett, from The Maltese Falcon, 1930.

?What a breakfast that was! A snow-white tablecloth, sure enough queens ware dishes?not a speck of dirt on one of them; biscuits and broad slices of light bread; coffee and cream and milk, beefsteak and milk gravy, and potatoes and butter?butter, for a fact. It was the climax of a civilized breakfast, beyond the brightest dream of a starveling, but the way that oufit ate was a shame to civilization.?

?W.A. Chalfant, A Boy in California, from Gold, Guns & Ghost Towns, 1947.

?Literally, the traveling tented circus was ?here today?gone tomorrow.?

Since the show would usually be in town for only one day, and give only two performances, the circus management contrived ahead of time many ways to advertise. . . .

The most important tool used by the advertising crew was the lithograph or poster.

Posters of 1/2-sheet size or 1-sheet size (28"x42") were hung in store windows by the hundreds. Poster of larger sizes, such as 3-sheet (42"x84"), 6-, 9-, 16-, 20-, 28-sheet and many other sizes, including, rarely, 100-sheets, were pasted on sheds, barns, buildings, walls and fences. When appropriate space was not available, the billposters simply went to the local lumberyard, purchased the necessary material, built a board fence around a vacant lot, and then pasted their posters on it.

The circus poster was used profusely. The big railroad circuses thought nothing of using 5,000 to 8,000 sheets per town. If competition from another circus showed up, the quantity of paper used might easily double.

The fifty-year period between 1880 and 1930 was what might be called the great days of the circus poster. There were dozens of lithograph houses that turned out handsome work . . . loaded with action and all the colors of the rainbow.?

?Charles Philip Fox, from American Circus Posters in Full Color, Dover Publications, 1978

?in those days, if you were a musician, silver and turquoise were the thing. And with all their new money Led Zeppelin went out and bought the biggest, most grotesque and gaudy pieces they could find?huge silver necklaces with gigantic rocks of turquoise?and they?d drape these things all over me before they went onstage. They trusted me with their jewelry! You don?t know what this meant to a nineteen-year-old girl in 1969!?

?Miss Pamela [Pamela Des Barres], as quoted in Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, by Stephen Davis, 1985.

??I was just sitting there with Pagey [Jimmy Page]. . . . Pagey had written the chords and played them for me. I was holding a paper and pencil, and for some reason, I was in a very bad mood. Then all of a sudden my hand was writing out words. ?There?s a lady who?s sure, all that glitters is gold, and she?s buying a stairway to heaven.? I just sat there and looked at the words and then I almost leaped out of my seat.??

?Robert Plant, as quoted in Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, by Stephen Davis, 1985.

?That was the only period in recent history that delivered songs in color. Led Zeppelin, for example, would make you feel differently on each song.?

?Prince, cited in Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, by Stephen Davis, 1985.

??You can?t deny it, there is something wrong. Who ever heard of a Convent with a dirty Sunnyasi in its garden, and a man of Mr. Dean?s reputation going in and out like one of ourselves, and that scented ?Black Narcissus,? as Sister Ruth calls him,?and a very good name for him, too,?peacocking about in front of us all; in front of those young girls. I call it asking for trouble.??

?Rumer Godden, from Black Narcissus, 1939. In the film, ?that scented ?Black Narcissus?? is played wonderfully by Sabu.

?The sky had no colour, the earth was coloured only with dim toneless colour, swimming and indistinct. Then she looked up and saw that the Himalayas were showing in their full range, and were coloured in ash and orange and precious Chinese pink, deeper in the east, paler in the west.

The people called it ?the flowering of the snows?; and she thought that it was true: the mountain looked as if it flowered, stained with brilliant flowery pink; the spring of pink, of hill crocuses and almond trees and girlish cotton clothes. It seemed to come nearer, to spill across the valley and the terrace, to her feet.

It was light.?

?Rumer Godden, from Black Narcissus, 1939.

?Blow the Stars home, Wind, blow the Stars home
Ere Morning drowns them in golden foam.?

?Eleanor Farjeon, the entire Blow the Stars Home, from the collection Piping Down The Valleys Wild: A merry mix of verse for all ages, edited by Nancy Larrick, 1968.

?To the milk-white,
Silk-white,
Lily-white Star
A fond goodnight
Wherever you are.?

?James Guthrie, Last Song, from the collection Piping Down The Valleys Wild: A merry mix of verse for all ages, edited by Nancy Larrick, 1968.

?I?d like to be a lighthouse
And scrubbed and painted white.
I?d like to be a lighthouse
And stay awake all night?

?Rachel Field, I?d Like to be a Lighthouse, from the collection Piping Down The Valleys Wild: A merry mix of verse for all ages, edited by Nancy Larrick, 1968.

?Who saw the first
green light of the sun?
I, said the night owl,
The only one.

Who saw the moss
creep over the stone?
I, said the grey fox,
All alone.?

?Margaret Wise Brown, The Secret Song, from the collection Piping Down The Valleys Wild: A merry mix of verse for all ages, edited by Nancy Larrick, 1968.

?The belief that a black cat is lucky exists in Egypt, where all cats, regardless of color, were considered by the pharaohs to be sacred. The goddess Bast, the daughter of Isis, was represented with the face of a cat. . . . Cats were even mummified and buried with their masters. So, it came to pass that a black cat?s crossing one?s path meant good luck. A contrary belief, which arose the Middle Ages in Europe, made the black cat not a thing to be deified but a thing to be associated with witches. There were many who held to the belief that a witch could assume the form of a black cat. So, it came to pass that a black cat?s crossing one?s path meant bad luck.?

?G.B. Wooden, Popular Superstitions: A collection of everyday myths with their picturesque origins, Peter Pauper Press (my favorite), 1970.

?The opal . . . is considered an unlucky stone. . . . Ancient Orientals, fear-struck by the opal?s changing color, believed that it was alive and had a soul akin to that of the person who wore it. Some went so far as to say that the stone became dull when the owner passed on; others believed that it dimmed the eyes or caused blindness.?

?G.B. Wooden, Popular Superstitions: A collection of everyday myths with their picturesque origins, Peter Pauper Press, 1970.

?Three green chameleons race one another across the terrace; one pauses at Madame?s feet, flicking its forked tongue, and she comments: ?Chameleons. Such exceptional creatures. The way they change color. Red. Yellow. Lime. Pink. Lavender. And did you know they are very fond of music?? She regards me with her fine black eyes. ?You don?t believe me???

?Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons, from the collection Music for Chameleons, 1980.

?So: the object in Madame?s drawing room is a black mirror. It is seven inches tall and six inches wide. It is framed within a worn black leather case that is shaped like a book. Indeed, the case is lying open on a table, just as though it were a deluxe edition meant to be picked up and browsed through; but there is nothing there to be read or seen?except the mystery of one?s own image projected by the black mirror?s surface before it recedes into its endless depths, its corridors of darkness.?

?Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons, from the collection Music for Chameleons, 1980.

?Western Union
The cable from the Abbot of Gethsemani was yellow
WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU etc . . .
and I just said
okay?

?Ernesto Cardenal, Death of Thomas Merton, translated by Robert Pring-Mill, from A Merton Concelebration: Tributes from friends of the poet-monk, edited by Deba Patnaik, 1981.

?The monk meditates
by the table in the cell.
Nothing disturbs his tranquil eyes?
caravan of lights.?

?Miguel Grinberg, The Monk Whispers, translated by Deba Prasad Patnaik, from A Merton Concelebration: Tributes from friends of the poet-monk, edited by Deba Patnaik, 1981.

?The new cinema is an art of light, and it is bursting on the world like a new dawn.?

?Jonas Mekas, as quoted by Brad Darrach in The Underground Film, from Film 67/68: An Anthology by the National Society of Film Critics, edited by Richard Schickel and John Simon, 1968.

?They are apt to wear hair to the shoulders and beards to the ears; some smoke grass and turn on frequently with LSD. A few can count on a small, steady income from film rentals. But most Underground movie-makers, though their movies as a rule cost less than $500, feel lucky if they break even.?

?Brad Darrach, The Underground Film, from Film 67/68: An Anthology by the National Society of Film Critics, edited by Richard Schickel and John Simon, 1968.

?Color is exquisite in [Michelangelo] Antonioni?s films, and it is more than decor or even commentary; it is often chemically involved in the scene. In the shack in Red Desert, the walls of the bunk in which the picknickers lounge are bright red and give a highly erotic pulse to a scene in which sex is only talked about. In Blow-Up the hero and two teen-age girls have a romp on a large sheet of pale purple-lavender paper that cools a steamy little orgy into a kind of idyll.?

?Stanley Kauffman, Some Notes on a Year with Blow-Up, from Film 67/68: An Anthology by the National Society of Film Critics, edited by Richard Schickel and John Simon, 1968.

?There is still only one miracle, only one: the Taj Mahal. . . . [It] has the fascination not of a work of art but of a natural and eternal beauty like the sea, the sky, like the highest, most immaculate mountain peaks. It had the color of the granular ice on certain glaciers today as I contemplated it for the last time. Then, as evening approached, it changed to pink and azure, to green, to the ardent violet of steel just before it is tempred. And the bronze-green cypresses, the cobalt sky, and the enclosed waters that repeated the miracle?it is all imprinted inside my eyelids, as when one looks at something blindingly bright.?

?Guido Gozzano (1883?1916), from Journey Toward the Cradle of Mankind, translated by David Marinelli, 1996.

?After so many cities of marble, dazzling white, here is one entirely pink?Jaipur. The eye, weary of excessive light reflected from white walls, rests on these palaces as on the softness of certain textiles faded by time. Our imagination finally finds the city of the legend that has inhabited our dreams since early childhood. . . . Everything is pink, with delicate floral patterns: houses, arches, domes, mosques? minarets, pagodas? spires?all pink.?

?Guido Gozzano (1883?1916), from Journey Toward the Cradle of Mankind, translated by David Marinelli, 1996.

?There is . . . some evidence that at the very beginning of dynastic times, lower Mesopotamia did enjoy a measure of unity under the hegemony of Kish. . . . The epic tradition of the succeeding period looks back on a ?golden age? when the four quarters of the world lived in harmony. . . . Classical Sumerian mythology, which describes the gods as united in an assembly under the leadership of an elective executive, has been interpreted as reflecting an earthly form of ?primitive democracy? in the earliest dynastic period, based on a loose league of equals. . . .?

?William W. Hallo & William Kelly Simpson, from The Ancient Near East: A History, 1971.

?Writing, according to the latest theories, was invented in southern Mesopotamia for the first and perhaps the only time. The oldest written texts come from Uruk toward the end of the fourth milennium B.C. They were impressed on clay tablets with a reed stylus and then baked. . . . The new invention must have quickly proved its worth, for it apparently provided the stimulus to the beginning of pictographic writing in Egypt and Persia . . . by about 3000 [B.C.].?

?William W. Hallo & William Kelly Simpson, from The Ancient Near East: A History, 1971.

?The language of the ancient Egyptians is written with a system of picture signs. A sign, representing a consonant, a group of consonants, or the word for the object depicted, can also serve merely as a picure at the end of a group of consonants indicating the meaning or category of the word (for example, legs for a verb of motion). . . . The formal script, in which the pictures are usually recognizable, is called hieroglyphic. It was used for inscriptions on stone and carved or painted on the wall surfaces. A cursive version of the same script, bearing roughly the same relation to the former as our handwriting does to letterpress of typescript, is called hieratic. The hieroglyphs were simplified so that the original picture is not immediately recognizable. This cursive variety, used for business documents and literary texts, was usually written with a reed or rush pen in black or red ink on papyrus, a sort of vegetable paper made from the stalks of the papyrus plant. Texts were generally written horizontally from right to left, the opposite of our system, but they were also written, for reasons of symmetry, from left to right or vertically from top to bottom.?

?William W. Hallo & William Kelly Simpson, from The Ancient Near East: A History, 1971.

?in 2006, [Dorothy Draper,] the woman who adored pink, red and acid green together, who loved wallpaper with cabbage roses the size of bowling balls, and who made her mark on hotels, resorts, restaurants, homes and department stores across the country from 1925 to 1960, is having a major revival.?

?Jura Koncius, Washington Post Staff Writer, from Dorothy Draper Design Revival: Still Astonishing, washington post.com, Thursday, May 18, 2006.

?Roman merchants . . . had a sense of advertising. The ruins of Pompeii contain signs in stone or terra-cotta, advertising what the shops were selling: a row of hams for a butcher shop, a cow for a dairy, a boot for a shoemaker. The Pompeiians also knew the art of telling their story to the public by means of painted wall signs. . . .

Outdoor advertising has proved to be one of the most enduring forms of advertising. It survived the decline of the Roman empire to become the decorative art of European inns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That was still an age of widespread illiteracy, so inns vied with one another in creating attractive signs that all could recognize. This accounts for the charming names of old inns, especially in England?such as the Three Squirrels, the Man in the Moon, the Hole in the Wall. In 1614, England passed a law, probably the earliest on advertising, that prohibited signs from extending more than 8 feet out from a building. (Longer signs pulled down too many house fronts.) Another law required signs to be high enough to give clearance to an armored man on horseback. In 1740, the first printed outdoor poster (referred to as a ?hoarding?) appeared in London.?

?J. Thomas Russell & W. Ronald Lane, from Kleppner?s Advertising Procedure, eleventh edition, 1990.

?[Thirty] pairs of gladiators will fight at Pompeii on April 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. There will be a full card of wild beasts combats and awnings [for the spectators]. Aemilius Celer [painted this sign], all alone in the moonlight.?

?painted on a wall, and preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius on August 24, 79 A.D. Found in The Ancient Romans, by Chester B. Starr, 1971.

?lapped though it was by pagan legend, Rome was pre-eminently the Sacred City of Christendom; and though the thronging pilgrims might marvel at the body of Pallas, they would turn from it with a shudder and cross themselves[,] . . . and seek more holy relics. The Romans made much profit by providing these gullible northerners with fragments of corpses?of dubious origins, but sanctified by the fact that they were purchased in Rome. And when the relics had been purchased and the shrines visited and the offerings of copper of gold made at the tomb of Peter, the pilgrims turned to explore the wondrous city, as pilgrims always had and always would. For them there was a species of guidebook, the Description of the Golden City, a fantastic mishmash of legend and garbled history compiled by scribes from oral traditions over many generations. Beginning with the foundation of the city by Noah and his sons, it took the pilgrim down to the present, guiding him to the great monuments of the past, explaining in confused and inaccurate detail the complex, interlocking machinery of imperial, papal, and civic government that ruled Rome. It also provided posterity with one of the few descriptions of the city during the dark centuries.?

?E.R. Chamberlin, from The Bad Popes, 1969.

?about the sixth hour of the day there occured an eclipse of the sun which lasted until the eighth hour. All faces were as pale as death, and everything that could be seen was suffused with the colors of yellow and saffron.?

?Raoul Glaber, from Chronique, 1824; cited by E.R. Chamberlin in The Bad Popes, 1969. The reaction to this eclipse foiled an assassination attempt on Pope Benedict IX (1032?1048).

?On February 26, 1500, Cesare [Borgia] entered Rome in triumph. He was dressed in his habitual black velvet, surrounded by a bodyguard dressed too in his somber colors. Caterina Sforza, the late Lady of Imola and Forli, was dragged behind him in golden chains and, after being displayed to the mob, was imprisoned in Sant? Angelo.?

?E.R. Chamberlin, from The Bad Popes, 1969. Cesare was the (obviously) illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI.

?The ?white powder? of the Borgia?a crude preparation of arsenic that was difficult to disguise and unpredictable in effect?became a magic potion employed at will by all members of the family; with it, they could strike down enemies far distant and at any fraction of time they desired.?

?E.R. Chamberlin, from The Bad Popes, 1969.

?One of the early signs of sleep deprivation is a visual distortion whereby objects appear to shimmer as if covered by a thin film of water. These distortions or illusions are caused by blurred vision coupled with an increased sensitivity to light. I remembered that Sheila had warned me about the freshly waxed floors two nights before. A shining surface is another example of a distortion due to sleep deprivation. When the janitor said that the floors had not been waxed or buffed for more than a week, I knew that Sheila?s eyes were not seeing the world correctly.?

?Ronald K. Siegel, Fire in the Brain: Clinical Tales of Hallucination, 1992.

?When children are playing alone on the green
In comes the playmate that never was seen.?

?Robert Louis Stevenson, from The Unseen Playmate. As quoted in Fire in the Brain: Clinical Tales of Hallucination, by Ronald K. Siegel, 1992.

?The way light falls on a body reveals its form. The way the body?s surface reflects the light reveals its texture. . . .

The distinction was, of course, known to that great explorer of visual reality, Leonardo da Vinci. He calls it the difference between light and lustre, lume e lustro. Nothing fascinated Leonardo more than the subtle gradations from light to shade which can be observed when an opaque sphere is placed near a window.?

?E.H. Gombrich, from Light, Form and Texture in Fifteenth-century Painting, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, CXII, October 1964.

?I have no memory of our flat in the native quarter [of Mexico City] . . . but the spiral staircase that led down from our top floor was banked with cool blue walls that kept out the heat. Perhaps I was just young enough then to feel the temperature of the color.?

?William S. Burroughs, Jr, from Kentucky Ham, 1973.

?I woke up the next morning looking into a ball of flaming magnesium as a fiendish intern pried my gummy right eye open to his twelve-gauge flashlight. This barbarism has, I think, something to do with ascertaining whether or not the patient needs methadone. . . .?

?William S. Burroughs, Jr, from Kentucky Ham, 1973.

?I interviewed Clarence sitting in his wheelchair . . . and he was talking about how he used to do up a kilo of pure heroin every thirty-six weeks. ?A shot of real stuff would kill one of these kids.? He gestured with a snowy claw to the guys playing cards around us. I asked him if he enjoyed sex and he said that?s how he?d like to die. ?Underneath heroin and on top of a woman.? Ecstasy sandwich, though I didn?t see how he could do it. Maybe they don?t make junkies like him anymore. ?What?s your favorite color?? I asked. (We had to keep these things simple for our readers.) And son of a bitch said, ?Brown. I don?t like white girls.??

?William S. Burroughs, Jr, from Kentucky Ham, 1973.

?It was a strange as Hell place for anything aesthetically pleasing, but for about ten minutes every day at sundown the TV room . . . was really quite beautiful. The windows looked out on the side at a vast expanse of bluish gray snow. . . . And there is something wonderful about the way the sun reaches across the reddening snow and hits the windows, filling the room with a reddish gold haze. It was rare meat for the senses, and because of the dull institutional construction of the place, people were always the most interesting objects present. I watched the toothless and suffering faces of three-legged cane bearing old men disappearing into the gold at the end of the room, it was that thick.?

?William S. Burroughs, Jr, from Kentucky Ham, 1973.

?Q. What does it mean when an invitation specifies a certain type of dress: Just what do ?white tie,? ?black tie,? ?formal? and ?semiformal? mean?

A. ?White tie? is the most formal evening wear?white tie, wing collar and tailcoat. This is almost never required today, except for official and diplomatic occasions and a rare private ball. For a woman, ?white tie? indicates a long gown should be worn.

?Black tie? or ?formal? is a tuxedo with a soft shirt and bow tie. Jackets may be white in the summer and black the rest of the year, or are available in patterns and many other colors. Women usually wear long dresses, but a short or cocktail-length dress is acceptable.

?Semiformal? means women wear dresses or good slacks and men wear sports shirts and slacks. Neither should wear T-sirts or jeans.?

?Elizabeth L. Post, from Emily Post on Entertaining, 1987.

?Q. What do place cards look like? Can I use any size card as a place card?

A. For formal dinners, place cards should be plain white, or white with a narrow gold border. Decorated place cards are acceptable for a special holiday such as Christmas or Thanksgiving, and cards for a wedding or twenty-fifth wedding anniversary dinner may be bordered with silver. Place cards also may be monogrammed in silver or gold, or a family crest may be engraved at the top. Place cards are generally about two inches long by three quarters of an inch high after folding in half, although they do vary somewhat.?

?Elizabeth L. Post, from Emily Post on Entertaining, 1987.

?Q. Which type of wineglass is used for what wines?

A. Sherry, which is served at room temerature, is poured into small, V-shaped glasses.

White wine, which is served well chilled, is poured into round-bowled, stemmed glasses.

Red wine, which is served at room temperature, is poured into less rounded, more tulip-shaped glasses that are narrower at the rim than are white wine glasses.

Champagne, which is served very well chilled, is poured into either flat, wide-rimmed glasses or into champagne flutes (stemmed glasses that are long and narrow).?

?Elizabeth L. Post, from Emily Post on Entertaining, 1987.

?You ought to love colour, and to think nothing quite beautiful or perfect without it; and if you really do love it, for its own sake, and are not merely desirous to colour because you think painting a finer thing than drawing, there is some chance you may colour well. . . . But to colour well, requires your life. It cannot be done cheaper.?

?John Ruskin, from The Elements of Drawing, 1857.

?Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch that you add in other places; so that what was warm a minute ago, becomes cold when you have put a hotter colour in another place, and what was in harmony when you left it, becomes discordant as you set other colours beside it; so that every touch must be laid, not with a view to its effect at the time, but with a view to its effect in futurity. . . . You may easily understand that, this being so, nothing but the devotion of life, and great genius besides, can make a colourist.?

?John Ruskin, from The Elements of Drawing, 1857.

?NEW YORK.? On June 27 and 28, Christie?s New York will sell an extraordinary single-owner collection: The History of the Book: The Cornelius J. Hauck Collection. Formed between 1945 and 1965, this unique ensemble features over 700 lots and documents the history of the book around the world. The sale offers remarkable examples of the book in all forms including Babylonian cuneiform tablets, Greek papyri fragments, Persian and Asian manuscripts, European medieval manuscripts, Hebrew manuscripts, fine bindings of all periods, and an interesting group of book-related curiosities. . . . The collection is expected to realize in excess of $4,500,000.

The breathtaking top lot of the sale is the Album Amicorum?Das Grosse Stammbuch of Philip Hainhofer, an illuminated manuscript on vellum and paper in German, Italian, Latin and French, 1596-1633 (estimate: $600,000-800,000). This renowned ?Book of Friendship? is a monument to the princes of Europe and court art. Brought together by Philipp Hainhofer (1578-1647), an internationally influential figure who was employed by the European princes as an art advisor and political agent, the Grosses Stammbuch contains signatures and coats of arms of princely persons, paintings and drawings and an ensemble of lavishly illustrated ?natural history? pages which are strikingly meticulous, delicate and elegant.?

?artdaily.com. Who?s got a few mil?

?[make] the white in your picture precious, and the black conspicuous.

I say, first, the white precious. I do not mean merely glittering or brilliant: it is easy to scratch white sea-gulls out of black clouds, and dot clumsy foliage with chalky dew; but when white is well managed, it ought to be strangely delicious,?tender as well as bright,?like inlaid mother of pearl, or white roses washed in milk. The eye ought to seek it for rest, brilliant though it may be; and to feel it as a space of strange, heavely paleness in the midst of the flushing of the colours. This effect you can only reach by general depth of middle tint, by absolutely refusing to allow any white to exist except where you need it, and by keeping the white itself subdued by grey, except at a few points of chief lustre.

Secondly, you must make the black conspicuous. However small a point of black may be, it ought to catch the eye, otherwise your work is too heavy in the shadow. All the ordinary shadows should be of some colour,?never black, nor approaching black, they should be evidently and always of a luminous nature, and the black should look strange among them; never occuring except in a black object, or in small points indicative of intense shade in the very centre of masses of shadow. Shadows of absolutely negative grey, however, may be beautifully used with white, or with gold; but still through the black thus, in subdued strength, becomes spacious, it should always be conspicuous; the spectator should notice this grey neutrality with some wonder, and enjoy, all the more intensely on account of it, the gold colour and the white which it relieves. Of all the great colourists Velasquez is the greatest master of the black chords. His black is more precious than most other people?s crimson.?

?John Ruskin, from The Elements of Drawing, 1857.

?I have actually heard people say that blue and green were discordant; the two colours which Nature seems to intend never to be separated, and never to be felt, either of them, in its full beauty without the other!?a peacock?s neck, or a blue sky through green leaves, or a blue wave with green lights through it, being precisely the loveliest things, next to clouds at sunrise, in this coloured world of ours.?

?John Ruskin, from The Elements of Drawing, 1857.

?Neither blue, nor yellow, nor red, can have, as such, the smallest power of expressing either nearness or distance: they express them only under the peculiar circumstances which render them at the moment. . . . Thus, vivid orange in an orange is a sign of nearness, for if you put the orange a great way off, its colour will not look so bright; but vivid orange in sky is a sign of distance, because you cannot get the colour of orange in a cloud near you. So purple in a violet or a hyacinth is a sign of nearness, because the closer you look a them the more purple you see. But purple in a mountain is a sign of distance, because a mountain close to you is not purple, but green or grey. It may, indeed, be generally assumed that a tender or pale colour willl more or less express distance, and a powerful or dark colour nearness; but even this is not always so. Heathery hills will usually give a pale and tender purple near, and an intense and dark purple far away; the rose colour of sunset on snow is pale on the snow at our feet, deep and full on the snow in the distance; and the green of a Swiss lake is pale in the clear waves on the beach, but intense as an emerald in the sunsteak six miles from the shore. And in any case, when the foreground is in strong light, with much water about it, or white surface, casting intense reflections, all its colours may be perfectly delicate, pale, and faint; while the distance, when it is in shadow, may relieve the whole foreground with intense darks of purple, blue green, or ultramarine blue. So that, on the whole, it is quite hopeless and absurd to expect any help from laws of ?aerial perpective.? Look for the natural effects, and set them down as fully as you can, and as faithfully. . . .?

?John Ruskin, from The Elements of Drawing, 1857.

?many noble pictures are painted almost exclusively in various tones of red, or grey, or gold, so as to be instantly striking by their breadth of flush, or glow, or tender coldness, these qualities being exhibited only by slight and subltle use of contrast. . . . And, in general, such compositions possess higher sublimity than those which are more mingled in their elements. They tell a special tale, and summon a definite state of feeling, while the grand compositions merely please the eye.?

?John Ruskin, from The Elements of Drawing, 1857.