March 2007 Archives

Amber is the time capsule par excellence: truly forever amber. It formed initially as a resinous blob oozing from a wound or cut on one of several kinds of trees. . . . Insects and other creatures get caught in the ooze. Time darkens it and hardens it. After a few hundred years it becomes copal (often yellow and slick); then after a million or so it acquires the indefinably deep, golden-brown colour of amber. Amber is a resistant material that eventually finds its way into sedimentary rocks. But amber beads still carry within them the trapped insects, sealed until the end of time istself.

Richard Fortey, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, 1998.

Then there are Jewel beetles (Buprestidae), which in the living fauna shine with iridescent greens and blues as precious as emerald: and so they do in the Messel [fossil] specimens, a dance of colours preserved so perfectly as to mock time.

Richard Fortey, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, 1998.

White bread and tea passed, in the course of a hundred years, from the luxuries of the rich to become the hall-marks of a poverty-line diet. Social imitation was one reason, though not the most important. . . . White bread, though it was better with meat, butter or cheese, needs none of these; a cup of tea converted a cold meal into something like a hot one, and gave comfort and cheer besides.

J. Burnett, Plenty and Want, 1966; Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, 1985.

White-handed mistress, one sweet word with thee.

Honey, and milk, and sugar; there is three.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It.

This is the land the sunset washes,
These are the banks of the Yellow Sea;
Where it rose, or whither it rushes,
These are the western mystery!

Emily Dickinson, This is the land the sunset washes.

I cant be dying,its too rouge,
The dead shall go in white.
So sunset shuts my question down
WIth clasps of chrysolite.

Emily Dickinson, It cant be summer,that got through.

Freddy Wallaces boat, the Queen Conch, 34 feet long, with a V number out of Tampa, was painted white; the forward deck was painted a color called Frolic green and the inside of the cockpit was painted Frolic green. The top of the house was painted the same color.

Ernest Hemingway, To Have And Have Not, 1937.

Oh, nerts to you, she was saying to the third tourist, who had a rather swollen reddish face, a rusty-colored mustache, a white cloth hat with a green celluloid visor. . . .

How charming, said the green visored-man. Id never hear the expression actually used in converstaion. I thought it was an obsolete phrase, soemthing one saw in print inerthe funny papers but never heard.

Ernest Hemingway, To Have And Have Not, 1937.

Photos by Kari Cesta. For similarly shocking pictures and more information, scroll down to part 1 of this continuing series.

. . . a tincture
Of force to flush old age with youth, or breed
Gold, or imprison moonbeams till they change
to opal shafts!

Robert Browning, Paracelsus, 1835.

There were jellyfish of every size: white, gently pulsing discs as delicate as spun glass; small pink barrage balloons decked with beating cilia . . . ; an occasional orange monster with tentacles that promised evil stings for fish or mammal.

Richard Fortey, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, 1998.

Imagine that the history of the world is represented by a clockface, say, then the the appearance of blue-green bacteria in the record happened at about two oclock, while invertebrates appeared at about ten oclock, and mankind, like Cinderella suddenly recalling the end of the ball, at about one minute to midnight. I do not know whether such images are useful other than as encyclopaedia illustrations.

Richard Fortey, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, 1998.

There cannot be a more important event than the greening of the world, for it prepared the way for everything that happened on land thereafter in the evolutionary theatre. A love of green is not just a sentimental attachment to rural holidays remembered from youthful days, green days. It runs deeper than that. In desert countries the rich sheikh celebrates his fortune with a garden sequestered away from the sun. We admire grandeur in wild scenery, mountains, canyons, deserts and glaciers. In such territory eventually this majesty begins to pall; a vague sense of dissatisfaction creeps in. Something is missing. But in greenness there is repose. It has been proved that the green wavelengths are least irritating to the retina. Red is angry, blue is cold, but green is restful.

Richard Fortey, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, 1998.

Joshua said, O sun, stand thou still at Gibeon, and O moon in the valley of Aijalon. So the sun stood still and the moon stopped.

The Bible, Joshua 10:12-13.

The extremely violent nature of the eruption of Krakatoa on August 26th to the 27th, 1883, was known in England very shortly after it occurred, but it was not until a month later that the exceptional character of some of the attendant phenomena was reported. Blue and green suns were stated to have been seen in various tropical countries: Then came records of a peculiar haze; in November the extraordinary twilight glows in the British Isles commanded general attention; and their probable connection with Krakatoa was pointed out by various writers.

The eruption of Krakatoa and subsequent phenomena, a report by the Royal Society of London, edited by G.J. Symons, 1888.

Shackle called me up about 5:30 A.M. to see a glorious sunrise. . . . The sunset was even more glorious than the sunrise, for the sky was almost cloudless and we got the intense yellow ochreous glare after sunset uninterrupted by any clouds. It was almost uncanny. One felt as though something terrible was about to happenthe same sort of feeling that one gets in a dense yellow London fog, only this was beautiful, and magnificent, as well as terrifying. Everyone was on the bridge watching it.

Edwin Wilson, a member of Sir Ernest Shackletons expedition to Antarctica, Monday, 9 September, 1901.

[C]olors are used in the tea world as a system of categorizing the various teas in existence. In the West we are mostly familiar with what we call black tea. . . . In the last dozen years or so, green tea . . . has made a grand comeback. . . . More recently, we are being introduced to some of the rarest and most expensive teas: white teas. Three colorsblack, green, whitesounds simple. Yet white teas are a type of green tea, according to some. What we call black teas are considered red teas in China. And the Chinese oolong (or wu-long) tea . . . is not a recognizable color in Western languages, although in Chinese wu means dark, black. . . .

Beatrice Hohenegger, Liquid Jade: The Story of Tea from East to West, 2006.

Let us supppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690; Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, 2002.

A blank sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.

Mao Zedong; Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, 2002.

Only the newborn baby is spotless.

Khmer Rouge slogan; Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, 2002.

In 1997 an IBM computer called Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and unlike its predecessors, it did not just evaluate trillions of moves by brute force but was fitted with strategies that intelligently responded to patterns in the game. Newsweek called the match The Brains Last Stand. Kasparov called the outcome, the end of mankind.

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, 2002.

The difference in kind between our experience of red and our experience of green does not mirror any difference in kind in lightwaves in the worldthe wavelengths of light, which give rise to our perception of hue, form a smooth continuum. Red and green, perceived as qualitatively different properties are constructs of the chemistry and circuitry of our nervous system. They could be absent in an organism with different photopigments or wiring; indeed, people with the most common form of colorblindness are just such organisms.

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, 2002.

Give me your tears, gypsy, or I will take them.

Borat, in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, 2006.

I am half distracted, captain Shandy, said Mrs. Wadman, holding up her cambrick handkerchief to her left eye, as she approachd the door of my uncle Tobys sentry-boxa moteor sandor somethingI know not what, has got into this eye of minedo look into itit is not in the white . . .

Widow Wadmans left eye shines this moment as lucid as her rightthere is neither mote, or sand, or dust, or chaff, or speck, or particle of opake matter floating in itThere is nothing, my dear paternal uncle! but one lambent delicious fire, furtively shooting out from every part of it, in all directions, into thine

If thou lookest, uncle Toby, in search of this mote one moment longerthou art undone.

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. 8, 1765.

I refuse to see the most beautiful countries of the world microscopically reflected in the amorous mirror of your eyes.

Collette, The Vagabond; translated by Enid McLeod, 1955.

Standard street signs no longer exist in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. In response to the damage of Hurricane Katrina, locals have resorted to making their own signage system with hand painted letterforms or stencils and spray paint on plywood or telephone poles. Heres a look at this crude typography:

Essay and photos by Kari Cesta, a graduate student in Graphic Design at LSU. Isn't this shocking!

To write, to be able to write, what does it mean It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play round a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible work and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature half butterfly, half fairy.

Collette, The Vagabond; translated by Enid McLeod, 1955.

My street, under the greenish gas at this hour, is a morass of toffee-like, creamy mudcoffee-coloured, maroon and caramel yellowa sort of crumbling, slushy trifle in which the floating bits of meringue are lumps of concrete.

Collette, The Vagabond; translated by Enid McLeod, 1955.

[T]is evident to me, when they affirm, That they who have seen Paris, have seen every thing, they must mean to speak of those who have seen it by day-light.

As for candle-lightI give it upI have said before, there was no depending upon it . . .

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. 7, 1765.

I will not argue the matter: Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return moreevery thing presses onwhilst thou art twisting that lock,see! it grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.

Heaven have mercy upon us both!

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. 9, 1767.

Didst thou ever see a white bear cried my father, turning his head round to Trim, who stood at the back of his chair:No, an please your honour, replied the corporal.But thou couldst discourse about one, Trim, said my father, in case of needHow is it possible, brother, quoth my uncle Toby, if the corporal never saw oneTis the fact I want; replied my father,and the possibliity of it, is as follows.

A WHITE BEAR! Very well. Have I ever seen one Might I ever have seen one Am I ever to see one Ought I ever to have seen one Or can I ever see one

Would I had seen a white bear! (for how can I imagine it)

If I should see a white bear, what should I say If I should never see a white bear, what then

If I never have, can, must or shall see a white bear alive; have I ever seen the skin of one Did I ever see one painteddescribed Have I never dreamed of one

Did my father, mother, uncle, aunt, brothers or sisters, ever see a white bear What would they give How would they behave How would the white bear have behaved Is he wild Tame Terrible Rough Smooth

Is the white bear worth seeing

Is there no sin in it

Is it better than a BLACK ONE

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. 5., 1761.

My uncle Toby blushed as red as scarlet as Trim went on;but it was not a blush of guilt,of modesty,or of anger;it was a blush of joy;he was fired with Corporal Trims project and description.

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 1759.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;they are the life, the soul of reading;take them out of this book for instance,you might as well take the book along wit them; . . .

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 1759.

There was an Old Person in Black,
A Grasshopper jumped on his back;
When it chirped in his ear,
He was smitten with fear,
That helpless Old Person in Black.

Edward Lear, There Was an Old Person in Black.

There were several empty seats at the bar and at the tables but Alvine did not want to commit himself to such a permanent step, for the customers were not ordinary bar types or even bohemian types but seemed a collection of Rorschach blobs in the watery pink light.

Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur, 1962.

Eighteen bucks, said Lou. I swore Id never wear a pink shirt but it was the goods that got me. Feel that material.

Dawn Powell, Angels on Toast, 1938.

As she talked her little brown eyes shopped over his person busily, price-tagging his corduroy slacks and checked shirt, recognizing his old sport jacket and mentally throwing it out.

Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur, 1962.

Three hundred cool dollars just like that. He stood still, breathing deep of the wonderful diamond-studded air, looking down beautiful Lexington Avenue, a street paved with gold, saw the little jewelry-store window right beside him and decided instantly he would go in and buy the silver writswatch on the blue velvet.

Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur, 1962.

The large bulbous nose, the greenish-gray hair and lashes, the gray-white eyes, all had the deathly color of leather buried for centuries in Davy Joness locker, and the neatly folled cloth bundle under his arm seemed a marinerss kit.

Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur, 1962.

He had to get back to his own Village, to the half-finished canvas he had deserted. He had to find again that green, the wonderful green, the true paint-green, the unearthly sea-bottom moon-green, not the lousy nature-green of trees and grass.

Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur, 1962.

The improbable red of the taller ones hair impressed him as stylish, while the smaller ones bright orange skirt lit up the dark corner like a forest blazean inviting touch, he thought.

Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur, 1962.

[A]ll his pictures looked alike to Lize. Great lozenges of red and white (I love blood, he always said), black and gray squares (I love chess, hed say), long green spikes (I love asparagus). All Lize had learned about art from her life with painters was that the big pictures were for museums and the little ones for art.

Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur, 1962.

Johathan heard a feminine voice . . . and turned to see a big girl with shrimp-pink hair laughing at his absorption.

Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur, 1962.

The hotel stationery was Wedgewood blue like the wallpaper, delicately embossed with a gold crest and a motto, In virtu vinci, a nice thought, whatever it meant, for a hotel. Nice paper, too. Paper like that could make a writer of you, if anything could.

Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur, 1962.

A fog had rolled in fom the bay and blurred out the meadow so the house seemed suspended in a ghostly haze, its two upstairs windows bleak eye sockets, its front porch railing the teeth in a deaths head.

Dawn Powell, The Wicked Pavilion, 1954.

Wharton himself had been no beaury, licked at the start by a nose that did seem an outrage, a mongrel affair beginning as the Hookley Roman then spreading into Egyptian, and possessing a perverse talent for collecting lumps, iridescent scales, ridges and spots so that it seemed to reflect half a dozen colors simultaneously, ranging through bruise-purple, cabbage green, mulberry red, baby-bottom pink and chalk white.

Dawn Powell, The Wicked Pavilion, 1954.

The very air of the room seemed charmingly alive with little floating dollar signs and fat little ciphers, commas, more ciphers, all winging around happily, waiting for a mere scratch of the pen to call them into action.

Dawn Powell, Angels on Toast, 1938.

Through the windows, curtained in heavy pink toile de Jouy, the afternoon sky seemed marvellously blue, with bubbling clouds stiffly whipped, looking as if the great chef Oscar himself had shot them out with a pastry-gun.

Dawn Powell, Angels on Toast, 1938.

[T]he radio was playing a Paul Whiteman recording of Afraid to Dream as sumptuously soft as the white bear rug in front of the great fireplace.

Dawn Powell, Angels on Toast, 1938.

His teeth, strong and yellow as field corn, were bared in a momentary smile. . . .

Dawn Powell, Angels on Toast, 1938.

In the Antarctic Circle, summer has begun. It is now light twenty-four hours a day. The sun disappears only briefly near midnight leaving a prolonged, magnificent twilight. Ice showers lend a fairy tale atmosphere to the scene. Millions of delicate crystals, thin and needle-like, descend in sparkling beauty through the twilight air.

Sir Ernest Shackleton; the last entries in his shipboard diary, 1915; Endurance: Shackletons Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing. Quoted by Andr Gregory in Bone Songs, 2006.

I would love to smother someone new.
Kill her with kisses on her fresh pink lips.
Tear out her eyeballs with my fingertips.
Love her to death in a deathly life.
Id be her vampire,
shed be my wife.

Andr Gregory, Bone Songs, 2006.

Turn on the lights,
turn on the lights,
the days are done,
I want the nights.

Andr Gregory, Bone Songs, 2006.

Its time.
A time to rake the golden leaves of autumn
and a time to sit by running brooks in summertime,
fishing with a golden fly
and wishing that these endless evenings never die or fade.

Andr Gregory, Bone Songs, 2006.

She walked up to me
And she asked me to dance
I asked her her name
And in a dark brown voice
She said Lola
L-O-L-A Lola

Ray Davies (The Kinks), Lola, 1970.

The ancient Chinese healers believed that the spirit and essence of the Great Mother Goddess flowed from the center of the Earth into plants and minerals. . . . The plants and stones that stored up the greatest amount of soul substance were the ones with good color. Jade, for example, was considered very powerful on account of its brilliant shades of green. The good color may be what attracted the healers also to the luscious, evergreen tea plant and might explain why, in China, tea as a beverage came to be known as the froth of the liquid jade, in honor of the much revered magical stone.

Beatrice Hohenegger, Liquid Jade: The Story of Tea from East to West, 2006.

In Morocco youll be awed by the precision with which green tea mixed with mint is poured from a metal pot several feet away into your glass. In Japan youll be handed a bowl of bright green whipped matcha or delicate sencha.

Beatrice Hohenegger, Liquid Jade: The Story of Tea from East to West, 2006.

A dreamer of pictures
I run in the night
You see us together
chasing the moonlight
My cinnamon girl

Neil Young, Cinnamon Girl, 1969.

The Brain is deeper than the sea
Forhold themBlue to Blue
The one the other will absorb
As SpongesBucketsdo

Emily Dickinson, The Brain is wider than the Sky.

And even when youre healthy
And your colour schemes delight
Down below those dandy clothes
Youre just a shade too white

Adam & the Ants, Kings of the Wild Frontier, 1980.

The method of the old masters was to darken the canvas with brown or red-earth ground and then pull gleaming lights out of the gloom with touches of thick oil paint. The technique is called chiaroscuro, a term meaning light out of darkness. And while modern art has generally moved toward brighter colors, the drama of shadowy spaces lit by shafts of light continues to attract some of our most imaginative painters.

Charles Le Clair, Color in Contemporary Painting, 1991.

The yellow/violet harmony can be summed up in a single wordexotic. For while red/green reminds us of trees and flowers, and orange/blue of earth and sky, the yellow/violet chord has little connection with everyday experience. Instead, we find it in rare butterflies, tropical birds, unearthly sunsets, costumes of the Far East, and the trappings of royalty.

Charles Le Clair, Color in Contemporary Painting, 1991.

[C]omplementary colors have tremendous psychological importance. They touch upon deep-seated, universal experiences. In even the most abstract art, green reminds us of natures greenery, red, of its flowers. And blue will forever stand for sea and sky, orange for fire, purple for royalty, and yellow for the sun.

Charles Le Clair, Color in Contemporary Painting, 1991.

A picasso blue or an Ad Reinhardt black canvas is almost never truly monochrome, as imitators working with a single tube of paint plus white sometimes think. Instead, all of the color variables are normally present, even when compressed into a narrow range. . . .

Charles Le Clair, Color in Contemporary Painting, 1991.

When I had every choice open to me . . . I used the same five or six color combinations. . . . Having imposed a system on the construction of an image, I found myself making shapes and colors I had never made before.

Chuck Close; quoted by Charles Le Clair, Color in Contemporary Painting, 1991.

After the war was over
I was coming home to you
I saw a rainbow at midnight
out on the ocean blue

Ernest Tubb, Rainbow At Midnight, 1946.

Tropical hot dog night
Like two flamingos in a fruit fight
Evry color of day
Whirlin around at night

Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart), Tropical Hot Dog Night, 1976.