May 2007 Archives
'Thursday, May 31 brings us the second of two full Moons for North Americans this month. Some almanacs and calendars assert that when two full Moons occur within a calendar month, that the second full Moon is called the 'Blue Moon.''
'Joe Rao, SPACE.com, May 25, 2007.
'The lawyer's grey eyes tried not to laugh, but they leaped with irrepressible joy, and Alexei Alexandrovich could see that his was not only the joy of a man who was receiving a profitable commission'here there was triumph and delight, there was a gleam that resembled the sinister gleam he had seen in his wife's eyes.'
'Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1877, translated by Richar Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2000.
'[T]here was something in her that was higher than her surroundings'there was the brilliance of a diamond of the first water amidst glass. This brilliance shone from her lovely, indeed unfathomable, eyes. . . . Looking into those eyes, everyone thought he knew her thoroughly and, knowing, could not but love her. '
'Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1877, translated by Richar Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2000.
'[T]he children themselves repaid her griefs with small joys. These joys were so small that they could not be seen, like gold in the sand, and in her bad moments she saw only griefs, only sand; but there were also good moments, when she saw only joys, only gold.'
'Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1877, translated by Richar Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2000.
Meet Chan Yen. She wants to be known as the woman who looks like Chairman Mao. I am not making this up!
'Kitty had seen Anna every day, was in love with her, and had imagined her inevitably in lilac. But now, seeing her in black, she felt that she had never understood all her loveliness. She saw her now in a completely new and, for her, unexpected way. Now she understood that Anna could not have been in lilac, that her loveliness consisted precisely in always standing out from what she wore, that what she wore was never seen on her. And the black dress with luxurious lace was not seen on her; it was just a frame, and only she was seen'simple, natural graceful, and at the same time gay and animated.'
'Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1877, translated by Richar Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2000.
'He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.'
'Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1877, translated by Richar Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2000.
''Not bad,' he said, peeling the sloshy oysters from their pearly shells with a little silver fork and swallowing them one after another.'
'Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1877, translated by Richar Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2000.
''All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.''
'Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1877, translated by Richar Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2000.
'While going through his mail, Kelly Anderson of Salt Lake City recently discovered the personalized license plate on his 1978 Jeep for seven years was being recalled by the state Division of Motor Vehicles.
Why' The license plate bears just one letter: 'X.' The DMV says that violates a state rule against plates 'with combinations of letters associated with illicit drugs.'
Tax Commission spokesman Charlie Roberts says the license was revoked because the letter X is commonly used as a street name for the illegal drug ecstasy.'
'Paul Rolly, Salt Lake City Tribune, 5/25/2007.
Paul Dean's New Dotti Berry, collage, 21"x21", 2007. Brand new. I just framed it. If it looks familiar, and if the title seems familiar, that's because this is a slight variation of the collage Dotti Berry, from last year. OK. You got me there.
A dish of meat, potato, and vegetable served on a plate (usually blue) sectioned in three parts. This can also refer to the daily special.
'Diner Slang, www.americandinermuseum.org, 2007.
Put ketchup on an item.
'Diner Slang, www.americandinermuseum.org, 2007.
Mustard.
'Diner Slang, www.americandinermuseum.org, 2007.
A black coffee.
'Diner Slang, www.americandinermuseum.org, 2007.
Coffee with cream and sugar.
'Diner Slang, www.americandinermuseum.org, 2007.
Chocolate soda with vanilla ice cream.
'Diner Slang, www.americandinermuseum.org, 2007.
Vanilla milkshake.
'Diner Slang, www.americandinermuseum.org, 2007.
Gimme a hot dog with ketchup.
'Diner Slang, www.americandinermuseum.org, 2007.
A bowl of chili con carne, so called for its deep red color.
'Diner Slang, www.americandinermuseum.org, 2007.
A bowl of tomato soup.
'Diner Slang, www.americandinermuseum.org, 2007.
'All at once I felt almost happy. For the first time in a long time, life seemed really interesting. There was a rift'and a widening one'in the dead-gray monotony of existence.'
'Jim Thompson, The Nothing Man, 1954.
It's a sound absorber, an artistic acoustic panel for the wall of your studio, office or home. Paul Dean, 2007, red felt, 23"x23". I don't know if it's art or if it's product design. If it's art, then I need to give it a title. If it's product design, then I guess I'm done!
'[S]he was laughing. Her head was thrown back and the green eyes were crinkled and flashing, and that topside I'd mentioned was trembling and shivering. She was laughing all over. I could almost see the naked, rippling flesh, feel it shivering against mine, while the green eyes looked up into mine.'
'Jim Thompson, The Nothing Man, 1954.
Often without knowing their meaning, other cultures borrowed and altered Egyptian hieroglyphs to create new writing systems. Almost half of the characters of a writing that we call Protosinaitic came from hieroglyphs. The first true alphabet was probably invented by Egyptian scribes in the military, although there is a theory that Semitic copper-mining slaves created an alphabet as a code to help synchronize their escape.
An alphabet is a distinct form of writing which is not pictographic or logographic, it is purely 'uniliteral.' Every character represents a number of phonetic variations, and the total number of characters is limited to somewhere between 20 and 27 marks. It is a supremely practical and adaptable system. Just as paper was only invented once, in China, and then gradually spread throughout the world, it is thought that this first alphabet has led, through imitation, to all the subsequent alphabets in the world.
There was never a country called Phoenicia, the Phoenicians were, rather, sailors and traders who lived in independent cities on the shores of the Mediterranean, sharing a culture and a language. The Phoenicians borrowed a few letters from the Protosinaitic alphabet, probably oblivious to their original meaning, to create the Phoenician writing system. Other cultures, in turn, borrowed from the Phoenician alphabet which was to be found throughout Mediterranean world.
The most significant of these was the Greek or Hellenic alphabet, the oldest alphabet still in use, as any visitor to modern Greece knows. The Greek alphabet was a parent to several other writing systems, most notably the Cyrillic alphabet that is still in use among several Slavic cultures, and the Latin or Roman alphabet which is currently in use in most of Europe and the Americas.
As Madge said in the old Palmolive commercial, 'You're soaking in it.'
'Paul Dean, Letterforms, 2007.
'[S]he was still so shaky that she could hardly cast a shadow.'
'Jim Thompson, A Hell of a Woman, 1954.
'It was about as genuine as a dime-store diamond.'
'Jim Thompson, A Hell of a Woman, 1954.
In the Nile valley, writing evolved from simple pictographs into the striking Egyptian hieroglyphics that are immediately recognizable, even today. Some of the characters serve as pictographs, but others serve as phonetic indicators of a particular sound, in exactly the same way that rebus writing indicates a sound by way of a picture. The same character can serve both functions; the specific meaning is determined by the preceding character, known as the determinant.
Egyptian hieroglyphics were intentionally difficult to read; combining the power inherent in writing and secrecy, the Egyptian priests created an intentionally cryptic written language. So complex was the code behind the characters that it was not until 1822 that they were finally interepreted, when Jean-Francois Champollion translated the Rosetta Stone, a massive stone tablet discovered by the French in the Egyptian harbor of Rosetta in 1799. There are three types of writing on the Rosetta Stone: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Demotic, a descendant of Egyptian hieratic writing. Able to translate the Greek, Champollion guessed that perhaps the text was the same for the other scripts, and he was correct.
Hieratic writing evolved as a streamlined variation of heiroglyphics, and was useful for everyday purposes. It became even more popular with the invention and subsequent popularity of ink and papyrus. Papyrus is an aquatic reed which can be harvested, sliced, soaked, woven and then mashed and dried. The result is a yellowish paper-like material, originally used in building houses, much like Tyvek is today, which was discovered to be an excellent material for writing with a brush and ink.
Papyrus has a few disadvantages when compared with paper, which was apparently only invented once, in ancient China, and had yet to reach the western world. Made of organic material, a plant, papyrus decays over time. And it breaks when it is folded, which is why it is traditionally rolled onto itself and then handled and stored as scrolls.
The importance of writing in the Egyptian religion of the time is difficult to overstate. Written language was regarded as the work of the gods, as this excerpt from The Egyptian Book of the Dead attests:
'Thoth speaks:
The ibis and the ink pot'these are blessed. For as the ibis pecks along the bank for a bit of food, so the scribe searches among his thoughts for some truth to tell. All the work is his to speak, its secrets writ down in his heart from the beginning of time, the gods' words rising upward through his dark belly, seeking light at the edge of his throat. We are made of god stuff, the explosion of stars, particles of light, molded in the presence of gods. The gods are with us.'*
'Paul Dean, Letterforms, 2007
*Awakening Osiris: The Egyptian Book of the Dead, translated by Normandi Ellis, 1988.
'She knew the oranges. She knew all such gimmicks, though never before had she been the victim of any. The oranges was an item from the dummy-chuckers' workbag, a frammis of the professional accident fakers.
Beaten with the fruit, a person sustained bruises far out of proportion to his actual injuries. He looked badly hurt when he was hardly hurt at all.'
'Jim Thompson, The Grifters, 1963.
'As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop his face was a sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony.'
'Jim Thompson, The Grifters, 1963.
The invention of writing occurred around 5,000 years in ancient Mesopotamia, a result of the trading involved in the world's first cities. Carved or molded seals were used to make impressions on clay. Cylindrical seals were rolled onto clay to impress the mark of the owner, the symbolic presence of the owner, onto sealed bags of merchandise. Hundreds of these 'cylinder seals' remain, and they are the richest artistic expression of their time. Framed in the rectangular impression they make when rolled onto clay, we find illustrations of animals, trees and people, the landscape of their times.
Sometimes there is a blank space in the composition. This was not 'white space,' as we use it today to relieve the tension of a cramped space or to improve a composition. This area was left open for the impressions made by the notched end of a stick. This angular mark, wedge-shaped, and later came to be named 'cuneiform' writing. Cuneiform is not a particular language, and it is not yet a true alphabet. These marks were used by a variety of Mesopotamian cultures in a many different way. Writing was originally used to help keep track of objects and transact business. In fact, you might say that writing is an advanced form of counting, and that it was city-scale commerce, and taxation in particular, which led to its invention. The vast power of written language, as opposed to spoken language, is not intuitively obvious. And writing, as opposed to speaking, has to be learned.
Cuneiform is a type of pictographic mark making, in which marks which originally represented an object, then begins to represent other concepts as well. For instance, to the ancient Babylonians, who meticulously watched the sky and over time transferred their local divinities to the stars, the pictographic mark for a star eventually came to represent divinity.
Babylon was the center of the Sumerian empire, which extended to many cities. In order to stabilize this society (and to confirm and extend his rule) King Hammurabi drew up a set of laws that were reproduced by the scribes of his time onto stone and placed throughout the land. Only one nearly complete set of these laws survives to this day. It is a black basalt stele which was created in approximately 1780 BCE, and was discovered in 1901 in the Persian mountains, where it had been stashed by ancient looters. This dramatic presentation of the Code of Hammurabi is now on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
It is impressive not only for its size'it stands eight feet tall'but for the dramatic illustration at its peak: the god Shamash, seated on a throne, handing to King Hammurabi a measured staff and a ring, perhaps a coiled rope. These may be the tools used in constructing buildings, and may represent the authority to built a stable society through a commonly understood system of laws.
This illustration, legible even to the illiterate, serves almost as a headline which catches the eye and leads it down into the laws themselves. These have been carefully carved, rather than impressed in clay, and have a striking harmonious and even texture. Hammurabi's numbered laws wrap around the entire glossy monument, and it is easy to appreciate the authority that these words once held. We do not know how closely other copies of these laws may have resembled this particular stele, but they were on display in cities throughout the Babylonian empire, Kish, Nippur, Eridu, Ur, and others, so that no one could plead ignorance of the law.
'Paul Dean, Letterforms, 2007.
'With the approach of autumn, a layer of long golden fur grows over their bodies. Golden in the purest sense of the word, with not the least intrusion of another hue. Theirs is a gold that comes into this world as gold and exists in this world as gold. Poised between all heaven and earth, they stand steeped in gold.'
'Haruki Murikami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World; translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1991.
'The walls were a white, the ceiling a white, the carpet a mocha brown'all decorator colors. Yes, even in whites, there are tasteful whites and there are crass whites, shades that might as well not be white.'
'Haruki Murikami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World; translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1991.
''It's a very indecent costume,' said Mrs. Davidson. 'Mr. Davidson thinks it should be prohibited by law. How can you expect people to be moral when they wear nothing but a strip of red cotton round their loins'''
'Somerset Maugham, Rain.
'Harry was enjoying his dinner. It was part of his'well, not his nature exactly, and certainly not his pose'his'something or other'to talk about food and to glory in his 'shameless passion for the white flesh of the lobster' and 'the green of pistachio ices'green and cold like the eyelids of Egyptian dancers.''
'Katherine Mansfield, Bliss, 1920.
JIMMY: I knew a party was kicked in the head by a red mare, and he went killing horses a great while, till he eat the insides of a clock and died after.
'J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, 1907.
JIMMY: Did you never hear tell of the skulls they have in the city of Dublin, ranged out like blue jugs in a cabin of Connaught'
PHILLY: And you believe that'
JIMMY: Didn't a lad see them and he after coming from harvesting in the Liverpool boat' 'They have them there,' says he, 'making a show of the great people there was one time walking the world. White skulls and black skulls and yellow skulls, and some with full teeth, and some haven't only but one.'
'J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, 1907.
'A large blueness that smelled of tar took shape beside me. 'No got the dough'or just tight with it'' the gentle voice asked in my ear.
I looked at him again. He had the eyes you never see, that you only read about. Violet eyes. Almost purple. Eyes like a girl, a lovely girl. His skin was as soft as silk. Lightly reddened, but it would never tan. It was too delicate. . . . He was not as big as Moose Malloy, but he looked very fast on his feet. His hair was that shade of red that glints with gold. But except for the eyes he had a plain farmer face. . . .'
'Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 1940.
'Her face was gray and puffy. She had weedy hair of that vague color which is neither brown nor blond, that hasn't enough life in it to be ginger, and isn't clean enough to be gray.'
'Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 1940.
'Seaweed colored eyes stayed on the bottle. A coated tongue coiled on her lips.'
'Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 1940.
'A bar was right in front of me and I was shaking again. But it seemed smarter to walk into the West Los Angeles police station the way I did twenty minutes later, as cold as a frog and as green as the back of a new dollar bill.'
'Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 1940.
'He wore a dark red tie with black spots on it and the spots kept dancing in front of my eyes.'
'Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 1940.
'The fog had cleared off outside and the stars were as bright as artificial stars of chromium on a sky of black velvet. I drove fast. I needed a drink badly and the bars were closed.'
'Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 1940.
'She reached into her bag and slid a photograph across the desk, a five-by-three glazed still.
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.'
'Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 1940.
'Myra's mouth dropped open. She turned from red to white, and then back to red again. I knew she'd probably give me all-heck when she got me alone, but for the present she wasn't talkin' back.'
'Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280, 1964.
Sub Rosa, a collage by Paul Dean, 30"x30". On display now through May 31st at the Baton Rouge Gallery. Don't miss the real thing!
'Sub rosa' is Latin and translates as 'under the rose.' Conversations that took place 'sub rosa' were regarded as private and confidential. The structure of this collage is based on the rose cut, a very popular diamond cut until the nineteenth century when the better know brilliant cut was invented.
As a species, human beings have been on this planet for about 150,000 years. For most of that time they resembled people, as we know them now, only physically. But around 47,000 years ago something dramatic seems to have happened. Here we begin to find archaeological evidence of ritual objects and ritual burials that suggest a culture that we can begin to recognize as human. One explanation for this relatively sudden change is the invention of something for which there can be no archaeological evidence: spoken language.
Spoken language involves abstract concepts and their recombination, and where spoken language leads, human thought will follow. With the birth of language came the birth of human consciousness as we know it today. The stream-of-consciousness thought process that we take for granted was a by-product of spoken language. Just try to stop thinking with words for a moment. For most people, this is almost impossible. Of course there is no archaeological evidence of ancient conversations, much less private thoughts. But just as children today seem to absorb language rather than 'learn' it, the human brain took to language like a sponge and shows no signs of ever leaving.
The evidence comes from scattered burial sites, and is particularly strong in those niches and cracks where this pre-historic cultural activity has remained unerased by the passage of time. Seeming almost miraculous when they were discovered in the mid-20th century, the cave art of modern-day France and Spain, including the famous caves at Lascaux, bring modern humans tantalizingly close to the once-living people of who created breathtaking work, with stable artistic conventions, from 40,000 to 20,000 years ago.
The specific purpose of these cave paintings is unknown and probably unknowable, but clearly they were an important cultural reference point. The dominant colors are red and black. The larger paintings are of very specific animals, rich in detail and in fascinating arrangements relative to each other. These portraits are skillfully woven into the undulating texture of the rock, for maximum effect when viewed by lamplight.
We also commonly find stencilled hand prints of red and black. It has been suggested that watching his hand merge with the cave wall as paint was blown through a tube maybe been a significant spiritual experience, a merging with an otherly underworld, but it might simply mean 'I was here,' a statement that still compels writers today. An early theory to explain the missing and partially missing fingers of many of these hands was that the violence inherent in the culture of the time explained the number of scars and amputations of the average cave man. A more plausible explanation is that they are 'clan signs' or signals that involved the folding of fingers.
Even simpler marks, dots and lines, appear alone and in groups. These marks probably signify a count of something . . . but what' Without a living, talking human to explain them, these marks remain mute. But Susan Wise Bauer, in The History of the Ancient World, calls these simplest of signs 'the seeds of writing.' In combination with pictographs, the simple marks that seem to represent an abstract concept, rather than a specific thing, and over the course of time, they will mutate and evolve into the characters we now know as our roman alphabet.
'Paul Dean, Letterforms, 2007.
Two recent movies that I might recommend, if you are inclined to trust me on movies, are Half Nelson and 10 Items Or Less. Half Nelson is about a crack addict history teacher. 10 Items Or Less is a wandering conversation between Morgan Freeman, as himself, and Paz Vega as a fed-up grocery store employee.
Two movies that I found entertaining and enlightening. For the sofa and the soul.
'Long after the firefly had disappeared, the trail of its light remained inside me, its pale, faint glow hovering on and on in the thick darkness behind my eyelids like a lost soul.
More than once I tried stretching my hand out in that darkness. My fingers touched nothing. The faint glow remained, just beyond their grasp.'
'Haruki Murikami, Norwegian Wood, 1989; translated by Jay Rubin, 2000.
Just for the heck of it, and let's say as a writing exercise, I have transcribed the legible text, in roughly the order it falls, from the first half of a sprawling accordion-fold collage book I made almost seven years ago. It's dated 10/7/00. (Seven years ago. This is a pre- 9/11 rant!)
A.R.:MANIFESTO (part 1)
A sense of reality: the evolution of mental pictures. Alien Radio. Future Shock. ARE WE READY' Practical Psychocybernetics. Heaven and Hell. For The New Age. Sense and Nonsense. Psychic Detectives. THIS IS IT. BELIEVE YOUR EYES! Defining Science Fiction. And other essays on Zen and spiritual experience. Diagram of eye movement in normal reading. From the Sufi. The Rolling Stones in Gimme Shelter. Back of eye. BrrRrraaNNG. COMMUNICATION / COMPUTATION / CONTROL. HOW THE DAISIES GO TO SLEEP. Form Constants and Ineffable Experiences. Psychology Made Simple. The sun is very large or very small. O starfall, once grasped from a bridge. UFOS AND HOW TO SEE THEM. Not to forget you. To stand! A match has a head but can't think. Man feel alien in a world without meaning. Amazing Science. Dread News. Amazing Truth Publications. FREE CATALOG. 1800 THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW EXISTED. One millionth copy edition. The Sacred Mushroom. Know The Door Of Eternity. A she-cat's prowl through the jungle of self. Destiny is tapping you on the shoulder. Microcosm. SCRIPT & SEAL. What is time' Five elements welded together to form one unit. WONDERLAND. Thermostatic control. A stereo dimension. Temperature control knob. SOME WILL BELIEVE'OTHERS WILL NOT. Much of the styling of a consumer object is simply sales promotion. THIS IS TODAY. International Radio. Produced with official NASA voice tapes and photographs. There are numerous interlinear decorations on all the plates in this section. The Subliminal Kid. A CELESTIAL ALPHABET EVENT. Magnified structure of malleable iron showing nodual carbon. Magnified structure of pearlitic malleable iron. NOW! ALL THE CRAP IN THE WORLD. AS SEEN ON TV! Rush of air. Fluttering. High pitch. A. R. Jet Set. Fig. 16. The general arrangement of the cerebrospinal nervous system. Fig. 10.20 Parabolic reflector. Marriage of the Sun and Moon. Mandala: two basic types, schematized. The Life And Death Of Stars. The most noticeable characteristic of consciousness is that it is continually changing. MAIN DECK. The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun. Close Encounters. Interstellar Overdrive. ILLUSION OR REALITY' The dot may be located as convenient. Diagram of three synapses. WHAT IS THE FUTURE' A trick you can play with a book. What is this' The Nile Song. Cosmic Trigger. Need the truth' WAS GOD AN ASTRONAUT' Why we find a seashell on the top of a mountain. The most exciting cult experience of all time! Rainbows of bursting color. Equivocal figures. Depth in space. Pulsating lights. Lenticular clouds. NOTICE! The Effect Of Continuity On Perception. The Stroboscopic Ballet. No poetry before ours. Completely revised. Proof of purchase. Mail this coupon. Finally finally finally. The miracle is on the inside! POETRY BEING BORN. The 'sound' of scents. New and exciting futuristic space age toys. Cut here. Trouble Funk. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Your own private sun. DO NOT OPERATE LAMP TOO CLOSELY TO SKIN. THE MOTHERSHIP CONNECTION. There was more. Slit-scan Stargate Corridor from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. 'My empire is of the imagination.' HIEROGLYPHIC INTERPRETATION. Cash will soon become illegal for all but very small transactions. To 'know' something intellectually and to experience it concretely are two very different things. Moon flowers. The First Book Of Time. The most eye-filling sight under the sun. DO NOT USE TOO LONG AN EXPOSURE. Stan Brackhage: Dog Star Man. 'The totality of consciousness, the reality continuum of the living present.' College student reading mathematical formulae. Things you should remember. Psychology Made Simple. Hoaxes. Hallucinations. Artificial satellites. Mirages. Beyond the senses are the objects, beyond the objects is the mind, beyond the mind is the intellect, beyond the intellect is the great Atman. Bright meteors. THE WORD SET FREE. THE COLLAPSE OF CULTURAL HIERARCHY. The Continuum Encyclopedia Of Symbols. What Jung believed about UFOs. The Space Age'Science Fact and Science Fiction. Visiting the East China Sea Fleet. THERE IS A GAP BETWEEN IDEA AND IMAGE. THE POWER OF YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND. FROM UNKNOWN WORLDS. FANTASY. Reality. REALITY. An Anthology of Modern Fantasy for Grownups. More Brilliant than Diamonds. BRIDGE THE GAP. Starfish. GODS FROM OUTER SPACE. Power. This Way. Volume. CAUTION: INVISIBLE LASER RADIATION DO NOT STARE INTO BEAM. Colors may bleed when wet. The Inner Sleeve. AR. The Ancients Called It COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS. A WHOLESOME LIFE IN THE BEST OF TASTE. July 1973. The Invisible College. Deluxe Revolving Police Style Warning Light. Terribly scary'but no danger'just fun excitement! HOLOGRAPHIC SCENE SETTER. The vision of P-Funk is clearly oriented toward uplift'of the individual, of black people, and of all people. THE PSYCHIC WORLD. SKY-RIDER OF THE SPACEWAYS. An entire campaign dedicated to the subliminal. Increasing your perception. The Now Generation. What is the secret of its strange power' The Resolution of a Lens on Film. Tru-Vue FILM CARD. Pats. Pending. How The Subconscious Affects Our Purchases. Where the past and present are as one. Background. Middleground. Foreground. INSERT IN VIEWER. Fooled Again. THE BOOK OF MARS. Part of a halftone enlarged to show the dot formation. Slumberland. Funny pictures for you to color. PROJECT BLUE BOOK 1 MARCH 1967. Figure/Ground. XPOSED! UNBELIEVABLE BUT TRUE! Your class hears the letters from your records'sees the letters on the charts. I EXAMINED A LIVE SPACE ALIEN. What Separates Psychic Experience From Mental Disorder' Dendrites. Cell body. NO MESSAGE. With Six Other Witnesses. 40,000 YEARS AGO! NATURE'S ONLY RIVAL. Give your audience a strong reason to buy . . . fast! ESCAPE FROM ANY PAIR OF HANDCUFFS. Things To Come. THE GOD SIVA IN BRONZE. Legibility. The Closure Factor. The message arranged in 3 lines. Were The Ancient Astronauts Mistaken For Gods' WE ARE NOT ALONE. Led Zeppelin III. Superfly Presents STEREOLAB. Glyph. SPACE CRAFT CONVENTION. THE MARCH OF TIME. Aerial view of Stonehenge. THE ARROW OF LIGHT AWARD. Illusion or Reality' The glass bead game: the music of the spheres. Blow your mind. The only limitation is your own imagination. Design Variation. Signal Generator. AR. Radio Frequency. The white ball automatically rolled over from his palm to the top of his hand. THE EFFECT OF SUGGESTION ON BEHAVIOR. How A Snowflake Is Formed. THROUGH THE AGES. AR. Your Guide To Mental Pictures. Many type styles. Silver On Blue. UFOLOGY. FREE BOOKLET. Fig. 18. Over the brink of reason lies the strange world of THE MOST SENSATIONAL EXPOSE OF THE FREAK SIDE OF LIFE. Bend just until internal glass breaks. Shake well to mix chemicals. Fluctuations of Perception. WHITE GOODS. LADIES CLOAKS. The True Yoga. CAVE DRAWINGS OF STRANGE BEINGS IN SPACE SUITS. Unsolved. Stereographic Projections. Sunshine all year 'round. AR. ATARI. Futurism, which is only an accelerated sort of impressionism. RAZOR BLADE IN PYRAMID. PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS. NOW . . . new, short, easy way to profit enormously from your inner mindpower. Reusable. Recycled. Recyclable. Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. We believe whatever we want to believe. Demosthenes, 348 B.C. CAMOUFLAGE.
'In the new computer age, the proliferation of typefaces and type manipulations represents a new level of visual pollution threatening our culture. Out of thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones, and trash the rest.'
'Massimo Vignelli; Michael Bierut, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface, 2007.
'[Claudius, emperor of Rome from 41-54 C.E.,] invented three new letters and added them to the alphabet, maintaining that they were greatly needed. He published a book on their theory when he was still in private life, and when he became Emperor had no difficulty in bringing about their general use. These characters may still be seen in numerous books, in the record of daily events, and in inscriptions on public buildings.'
'Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, translation and footnote by Joseph Gavorse, 1931.
'The Yellow Turbans were much more than a simple group of rebels: they were a millennial sect looking forward to the coming of a golden age. The millions of Chinese who lived unspeakably hard and grim lives were looking not just for political solutions, but for immediate hope. The Yellow Turbans offered exactly this. Their leader, a Daoist teacher named Chang Chueh, claimed that the had the power to do magic. He announced that he could heal sickness. . . . He promised that if they took his medicines, they would be immune from wounds and could fight in battle without fear. . . .
By 182, the Yellow Turbans had a following of over three hundred and fifty thousand poor, desperate, landless, and angry Chinese. By 184, they were ready to rise up and fight against their oppressors.'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'[Cleopatra met Antony] in a barge with gilded stern and outspread sails of purple, while oars of silver beat time to the music of flutes and fifes and harps. She herself lay all alone, under a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed as Venus in a picture, and beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood on each side to fan her. Her maids were dressed like Sea Nymphs and Graces, some steering at the rudder, some working at the ropes. The perfumes diffused themselves from the vessel to the shore, which was covered with multitudes, part following the galley up the river on either bank, part running out of the city to see the sight.'
'Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives; Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'All the Britons dye their bodies with woad, which produces a blue color, and shave the whole of their bodies except the head and the upper lip.'
'Julius Caesar, on British soldiers, 55 B.C.; Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'[In 450 B.C., t]he Twelve Tables . . . were written out on wood and set in the Forum, where all could see them. . . . [T]hey were . . . the foundation of Roman law. Unfortunately the Tables were lost; what we know of them is assembled from quotes in various Roman documents.'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'To the northwest [of Rome], Etruscan cities controlled the copper, iron, and silver mines in the so-called Metal-Bearing Hills. This metal was traded to the Greek colonies along the Italian coast, and contact with the Greek trading cities brought the Etruscans face-to-face with the Greek writing system. The Etruscans began to use the Greek alphabet to label their own goods, using their own language written in Greek characters. Despite the recognizable letters, the language itself remains a puzzle: it appears almost entirely in brief inscriptions which have not been decoded.'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'There was no country called Phoenicia, nor was there a Phoenician high king. The independent cities along the coast were united by a shared culture and language; their writing system was the first to incorporate an alphabet.'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'Chinese script seems to have developed in complete independence from writing elsewhere in the ancient world. The earliest Yellow river signs were pictures, but the writing of China was the first to move beyond the pictorial by combining pictures: putting pictorial signs (called 'ideograms') together into 'composite ideograms' which represented abstractions and ideas.
By the time of the Shang court's establishment at Yin, these 'composite ideograms' were sophisticated enough to record divine answers to questions. . . . A man or woman who sought guidance went to the Shang court to pose a question to the priests there. The priests brought out the cleaned and dried shoulder bones of cows or sheep (or, occasionally, a turtle shell), carved with patterns or marked with an inscription, and then touched the bone or shell with a heated metal point. When the bone cracked, the path of the crack through he pattern or inscription was 'read' by the priests and interpreted as a message, sent by ancestors who now passed their wisdom back to the living. The priest carved the results of the inquiry into the bone or shell, in signs cut by a knife and filled with paint.
The oracle bones show that the questions, no matter who asked them, were always posed in the name of the king.'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'The Minoans . . . evolved their own distinct script, following the old pattern that had developed thousands of years before: from seals on goods to pictograms, from pictograms to streamlined pictographic script. The earliest form of this script survives on a scattering of tablets and stone engravings across Crete, and is generally called 'Linear A' to distinguish it from its more sophisticated descendent: 'Linear B,' the version of Minoan script which spread north to the Mycenaeans.'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'[A]ll of the old Sumerian cities . . . were part of the empire centered at Babylon. . . .
This was no unruly empire; it was ruled by law. Hammurabi managed his growing conquests, in part, by enforcing the same code over the entire extent of it. The only surviving copy of this code was discovered centuries later in Susa, carved onto a black stone stele. Clearly the laws were intended to embody a divine code of justice (the top of the stele shows the god of justice, bestowing his authority on Hammurabi), but their showy presence in conquered cities also kept control over the conquered people. According to the stele itself, the laws were observed faithfully in Nippur, Eridu, Ur, Larsa, Isin, Kish, Mari, and other cities.'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Menes/Narmer celebrated his victory by building a brand new capital at Memphis, the central point of his brand new kingdom. Memphis means 'White Walls'; the walls were plastered so that they shone in the sun. From the white city, the ruler of united Egypt could control both the southern valley and the northern delta.'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'The Egyptians gave their country two different names. The land where the yearly flood laid down its silt was Kemet, the Black Land; black was the color of life and resurrection. But beyond the Black Land lay Deshret, the deathly Red Land. The line between life and death was so distinct that a man could bend over and place one hand in fertile black earth, the other on red, sun-baked desert.'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'[I]n Washington, D.C., . . . the President was having a little hand trouble of his own. Which is to say, the President had been caught red-handed, hands redder than a travel poster sunset, pimp red, a red that could enrage bulls and stop locomotives, but not blood red, for blood is sacred and the red that ran off the President's hands was the red of lies and deals and greed and arrogant megalomania.'
'Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, 1977.
'If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic. And it doesn't matter what it is that you select, because when it has been pushed far enough it contains everything else. I'm not talking about specialization. To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else. That's not it. That's tame and insular and severely limiting. I'm talking about taking one thing, however trivial and mundane, to such extremes that you illuminate its relationship to all other things, and then taking it a little bit further'to that point of cosmic impact where it becomes all other things.'
'Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, 1977.
'Buddha and Rama and Lao-tzu brought light into the world. Literal light. Jesus Christ also was a living manifestation of light, although by the time his teachings were exported into the West, Saint Paul had trimmed the wick, and Jesus' beam grew dimmer and dimmer until, around the fourth century, it went out altogether.'
'Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, 1977.
'Violet hills and burnt umber buttes rested in their still American places like novels on Zane Grey's bookshelf.'
'Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, 1977.
'Homer referred in The Odyssey to 'rosy-fingered dawn.' Homer, who was blind and had no editor, referred over and over again to 'rosy-fingered dawn.' Pretty soon, dawn began to think of herself as rosy-fingered: the old doctrine of life imitating art.'
'Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, 1977.
'Difficulties illuminate existence, but they must be fresh and of high quality.'
'Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, 1977.
'Nigi is Japanese for 'rainbow.' It also means 'two o'clock.' Thus, in Japan there are at least two rainbows daily.'
'Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, 1977.
'The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.'
'Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, 1977.
'The moon looked like a clown's head dipped in honey.
It bobbed ballishly in the sky, dripping a mixture of clown white and bee jelly onto the Dakota hills.'
'Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, 1977.
'It was simple to recognize the lair of a palm-reader. Outside her trailer or bungalow there would be a sign on which a silhouette of the human hand, wrist to fingertips, palm outward, was painted in red. Always in red. For some reason, and for all the author knows there may be a tradition here whose origins stretch back to the Gypsies of Chaldea, it would have been less surprising to find flesh-colored tights in General Patton's laundry bag than to find a flesh-colored hand on a palmistry sign near Richmond.'
'Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, 1977.
'I grew up in the shadow of a big bookcase: a tall Babel, where verses, novels, histories, row upon row . . . all mingled and murmured.'
'Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil.
'Since the days of cave painting, people have made marks to keep count of objects. We can call these marks the seeds of writing, since a mark means not Here is a mark, but something else. But the marks do not reach beyond space and time. They are voiceless unless the maker of the marks is standing there, explaining: This line is a cow; this one, an antelope; these are my children.'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'Written history began sometime around 3000 BC. . . .
Very early, a Sumerian who owned valuable resources (grain, or milk, or perhaps oil) would tie closed his bag of grain, smooth a ball of clay over the knot, and then press his seal on it. The seal, square or cylindrical, was carved with a particular design. When the ball of clay dried, the mark of the owner . . . was locked into the clay. The mark represented the owner's presence. It watched over the grain while he was absent.'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'Over the course of at least six hundred years, Sumerian pictograms . . . evolved into phonetic symbols. These symbols, made in wet clay by a stylus with a wedge-shaped edge, had a distinctive shape, wider at the top than at the bottom of the incision. . . . [I]n 1700 an Old Persian scholar named Thomas Hyde gave the writing the name cuneiform, which we still use. The name, derived from the Latin for 'wedge-shaped,' does nothing to recognize the importance of the script. Hyde thought the pretty signs on clay were some sort of decorative border.'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'[F]ar from being phonetic, hieroglyphs were designed to be indecipherable unless you possessed the key to their meaning. The Egyptian priests, who were guardians of this information, patrolled the borders of their knowledge in order to keep this tool in their own hands. Ever since, the mastery of writing and reading has been an act of power.'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'Hieroglyphs could preserve their magical and mysterious nature only because the Egyptians invented a new and easier script for day-to-day use. Hieratic script was a simplified version of hieroglyphic writing, with the careful pictorial signs reduced to a few quickly dashed lines. . . . Hieratic script became the preferred handwriting for business matters. . . .
Sometime around 3000 BC, an Egyptian scribe realized that the papyrus used as a building material in Egyptian houses (reeds softened, laid out in crossed pattern, mashed into pulp, and then laid out to dry in thin sheets) could also serve as a writing surface. With a brush and ink, hieratic script could be laid down very rapidly on papyrus.'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'Sumerian cuneiform died and was buried. But the lines of hieroglyphs have survived until the present day. A later form of writing, which we call Protosinaitic . . . borrowed almost half of its signs from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Protosinaitic, in turn, appears to have lent a few of its letters to the Phoenicians, who used it in their alphabet. The Greeks then borrowed the Phoenician alphabet, turned it sideways, and passed it on to the Romans, and thence to us. . . .'
'Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
'In a sunken area in the middle of the coffee lounge, a woman wearing a bright pink dress sat at a cerulean blue grand piano playing quintessential hotel-coffee-lounge numbers filled with arpeggios and syncopation. Not bad actually, though not an echo lingered in the air beyond the last note of each number.'
'Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1989.
'The carpet was an unappealing orange, the sort of orange you'd get by leaving a choicely sunburnt weaving out in the rain for a week, then throwing it into the cellar until it mildewed. This was an orange from the early days of Technicolor.'
'Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1989.
'The yellow glow of the light bulbs drifted about the room like pollen.'
'Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1989.
'Time. Particles of darkness configured mysterious patterns on my retina. Patterns that degenerated without a sound, only to be replaced by new patterns. Darkness but darkness alone was shifitng, like mercury in motionless space.'
'Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1989.
'They put him into a great chair they had among them, and which they had taken either out of the court itself, or one of its rooms or passages. Over the chair they had thrown a red flag and to the back of it they had bound a pike with a red cap on its top. In this car of triumph, not even the Doctor's entreaties could prevent his being carried to his home on men's shoulders, with a confused sea of red caps heaving about him, and casting up to sight from the stormy deep such wrecks of faces, that he more than once misdoubted his mind being in confusion, and that he was in the tumbril on his way to the Guillotine.
In wild dreamlike procession, embracing whom they met and pointing him out, they carried him on. Reddening the snowy streets with the prevailing Republican colour, in winding and tramping through them, as they had reddened them below the snow with a deeper dye, they carried him thus into the courtyard of the building where he lived.'
'Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
'In the black prison of the Conciergerie, the doomed of the day awaited their fate.'
'Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
'The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else.'
'Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
'He was . . . in the habit of declaiming to Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on the arts Mrs. Darnay had once put in practice to 'catch' him, and on the diamond-cut-diamond arts in himself, madam, which had rendered him 'not to be caught.''
'Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
'When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him.'
'Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
''And you in brown!' she said, indignantly turning to Mr. Lorry; 'couldn't you tell her what you had to tell her, without frightening her to death'''
'Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
'The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes.'
'Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.