August 2007 Archives

'The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes; he makes the best of us look like a piece of cheese.'

'W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, 1930.

Cologne Cathedral has intalled a new stained glass-window which was designed by the German painter Gerhard Richter. Here he combines the old (the cathedral) with the new (pixels). Already known as an outrageous colorist, I think he's topped himself with this one.

'The creature who grows in consciousness has as his supreme teacher Chance.'

'Louis-Ferdinand C'line, The Life and Work of Ignaz Philip Semmelweis, 1924, translated from the French by Robert Allerton Parker, 1937.

'By the 2nd century [the Chinese] already had the necessary tools for putting together printed material: paper, which they recently had discovered through experimentation with wood products; ink, which they had used for more than twenty-five centuries; and the final piece of the printing puzzle, surfaces bearing texts carved in relief. . . .

Some of these texts were sculpted into pillars of marble; they usually were Buddhist precepts. Pilgrims wanting to copy their wisdom merely applied wet sheets of paper, daubing the pillar's surface with ink to make the relief characters stand out on their crude copies. Other relief carvings were religious seals. Their use, which had become extremely popular, led the Chinese to experiment with inks, and a high-quality, fast-drying product was in use by the 4th century.

Over the next 150 years marble pillars and seals gave way to wooden blocks. Easier to carve and more manageable to handle, wooden blocks could accomodate type of almost any height and width, and the wood's natural porosity was superior for absorbing and transferring ink to paper. . . .

The oldest existing works printed by this method include . . . the first known book, The Diamond Sutra, a collection of Buddhist maxims and scriptural narratives, printed in China in 868.'

Charles Panati, The Browser's Book of Beginnings, 1984.

'[Yakov] watched the light and dark change. The morning dark was different from the night dark. The morning dark had a little freshness, a little anticipation in it, though what he anticipated he could not say. The night dark was heavy with thickened and compounded shadows. In the morning the shadows unfurled until only one was left, that which lingered in the cell all day. It was gone for a minute near eleven he guessed, when a beam of sunlight, on days the sun appeared, touched the corroded inner wall a foot above his mattress, a beam of golden light gone in a few minutes. Once kissed it on the wall. Once he licked it with his tongue.'

'Bernard Malamud, The Fixer, 1966.

'Sometimes Yakov lost sight of the words. They were black birds with white wings, white birds with black wings. He was falling in thoughtless thought, a stupefying whiteness.'

'Bernard Malamud, The Fixer, 1966.

'The modern comic strip started out as ammunition in a newspaper war between giants of the American press during the late 19th century.

The first full-color comic strip appeared in January 1894 in the New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer. The first regular weekly fully-color comic supplement, similar to today's Sunday funnies, appeared two years later, in William Randolph Hearst's rival New York paper, the Morning Journal. . . .

The Morning Journal started another feature, the 'Yellow Kid,' the first continuous comic character in the United States. . . . The 'Yellow Kid' was in many ways a pioneer . . . and it came to introduce the speech ballon inside the strip, usually placed above the characters' heads.'

'Charles Panati, The Browser's Book of Beginnings, 1984.

'The first regular organ for spreading the news dates to the Roman gazette Acta Diurna (Action Journal), which began dailly publication in 59 B.C.

Posted throughout the city in places where the population congregated, the paper was begun by Julius Caesar and was not all that different from today's tabloids; it printed social and political news, details of criminal trials and executions, announcements of births, marriages, and deaths, and even highlights of sporting and theatrical events at the Circus Maximus and Coloseum.'

'Charles Panati, The Browser's Book of Beginnings, 1984.

'The earliest preserved dictionary is an Akkadian word list from central Mesopotamia dating from 600 B.C. About this time the Western-style dictionary was emerging from the labors of Greek philosophers, who had begun to analyze speech patterns and language, establishing the roots of grammar and syntax.'

'Charles Panati, The Browser's Book of Beginnings, 1984.

'In Babylonia and Assyria a book consisted of a numbered collection of rectagular clay tablets, inscribed with cuneiform and packaged in a labeled container. A scholar needed several library scribes to help him cart a book from its shelf to a reading table.'

'Charles Panati, The Browser's Book of Beginnings, 1984.

'The first rag paper seems to have originated in one of the early imperial courts of China, when a clerk, Ts'ai Lun, in A.D. 105, concocted a formula out of fishnets, old rags, hemp waste, and parts of the mulberry bush.

Pleased with the relatively smooth, flexible product, the Chinese continued to use the formula, modifying it in time. But paper moved westward at a snail's pace; it reached Cental Asia only in 751 and Baghdad in 793.

The arrival of paper in Asia Minor put the brown rag material (for it had yet to be bleached) on Europe's back doorstep, and the Islamic culture eventually introduced paper production techniques to the Europeans by the 14th century. Paper mills soon flourished in Spain, Italy, France, and Germany, and with the invention of printing in the 1450s, the demand for paper skyrocketed.'

'Charles Panati, The Browser's Book of Beginnings, 1984.

'Individual printing characters originated some time between 1041 and 1048 through the industriousness of a Chinese alchemist, Pi Sheng, who mixed clay and glue to form the movable type, then hardened each character by baking it.'

'Charles Panati, The Browser's Book of Beginnings, 1984.

'The first system of writing, devised by the Sumerians, consisted of stylized representations of objects, known as pictograms.

The symbols, crude at first, were used primarily to record agricultural transactions and astronomical observations. Consequently, the first written words of which there is evidence were for nouns'particularly for stars and animals. Over the next hundred years Sumerian scribes combined noun pictograms with qualifying adjectives to arrive at symbols for such words as 'small bison,' 'big reindeer,' and 'bright star.' Clearly enamored of their new invention, scholars continued to modify their writing system, and by about 3200 B.C. it contained symbols for verbs; 'to sleep' for example, was represented by a recumbent man. These richer characters are called ideograms.

Greater refinement was needed, however, because the range of human communications by this time already encompassed abstract ideas.

These entered the Sumerian writing system about 3100 B.C. through the straightforward use of homonyms. For instance, to use and English example, a scribe might combine the noun symbols for 'bee' and 'leaf' to arrive at the abstract concept of 'belief.' But this enrichment of writing made for slower execution, and adherence to the use of pictures limited the number of ideas that could be expressed. These disadvantages the Sumerians overcame by simplifying their written symbols and teaching combined characters to the next generation as single words in their own right, known as phonograms.

A further attempt to facilitate the speed of writing, and to streamline it, eventually gave rise to the use of abstract symbols, each of which represented a unit of sound within a word, or syllable. This writing, known as cuneiform . . . was drawn by the scribe with a wedge-shaped stylus on a wet clay tablet. . . .

By the end of the third millennium B.C. the Sumerian writing system had become sufficiently rich and flexible to record the most complex historical events and literary creations. Inscribed on tablets in twelve columns, these literary compositions range from short hymns and longer myths to children's fables and scholarly essays to epic-length poems, some running a thousand lines.'

'Charles Panati, The Browser's Book of Beginnings, 1984.

'The Phoenicians were probably the greatest seafarers of the ancient world and inhabited regions that are now Syria, Israel, and Lebanon. Their principal cities were all ports . . . and one of their famous ports, Byblos, is known today as the point of origin where the Phoenician alphabet entered, and profoundly affected, the Greek world.

The Phoenicians' system of writing was unique. . . . [T]he Phoenicians, somewhere around 2000 B.C., severed the relationship between pictures and words for all time in all Occidental cultures. By creating symbols with phonetic values for single syllables and consonants, they thus devised the first almost-pure phonetic alphabet. (It still did not recognize vowels.)

The closest system of writing had been Sumerian cuneiform. It is unknown whether the Phoenicians arrived at their largely phonetic alphabet by simplifying Sumerian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics. . . .

Byblos was also the port from which papyrus traveled to Egypt and Greece, and the city's name has been immortalized in many Greek and Western words: biblion, Greek for 'rolled paper' or 'scroll'; and our words 'Bible,' 'bibliography,' and 'bibliophile.''

'Charles Panati, The Browser's Book of Beginnings, 1984.

'The Greeks adopted the Phoenecian alphabet (also known as the North Semitic alphabet) of twenty-two to thirty letters and called them by such words as alpha, beta, and gamma, which are phonetic imitations of important Semitic words, names in most cases: aleph (ox), beth (house), and gimel (camel). To these they added two letters supposedly signifying female and male genitalia'delta and phi.

In a stroke of genius, the Greeks decided to replace some of the Phoenician syllable letters with vowel sounds, thus producing the first purely phonetic, and true, alphabet, composed entirely of vowels and consonants. The Greek alphabet spread throughout the European world, undergoing minor changes, and gave birth to the Etruscan alphabet and then to the Roman.

In giving the letters Latin names, the Romans introduced the alphabet that is in use among Western nations today. The Latin alphabet had only twenty letters, the present English alphabet minus j, k, v, w, y, and z. The Romans added k for use in abbreviations and y and z to transcribe Greek words, producing a twenty-three letter alphabet.

After being adopted by English-speaking peoples, the alphabet gained its final three letters: w arose from a doubling, or formation of a ligature, of u, and j and v as consonant variants of the vowels i and u.'

'Charles Panati, The Browser's Book of Beginnings, 1984.

''Well, I have seen the Colosseum by moonlight'that's one thing I can rave about!''

'Henry James, Daisy Miller, 1879.

'The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling of the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the darkness, and sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up and swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them. The cold of the night made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips seemed to them deeper; their eyes, that they could hardly see, larger; and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on their souls sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied vibrations.'

'Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1856; translated from the French by Eleanor Marx-Aveling, 2003.

I've been working on the book. (Imagine that!) And, not that it matters to anyone but me, I'm not going to worry about the colophon. A colophon implies a certain persnicketyness or even perfectionism, and I don't want any would-be publishers to think I'll be difficult to work with.

And besides, my favorite colophons are WAY TOO LONG, like one my mother sent to me with a note ('Your father thinks this is a bit much'). Some colophons not only identify of the typefaces used, but describe them, summarize their general uses, and of course reveal briefly their history. (If Nabakov were still around he could probably work a whole novel into a colophon, the way he did with footnotes in Pale Fire.)

So . . . in the interest of actually finishing the book, I'm dropping the damn colophon.

'BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese couple tried to name their baby "@", claiming the character used in e-mail addresses echoed their love for the child, an official trying to whip the national language into line said on Thursday.'

I always thought the @ symbol looked a bit like a fetus in a womb. It's cute. Surely this name would be legal in 'our United States,' the 'freest country in the free world.' C'mon Hester!

I've been working on my book, Color Quotes. I am working with InDesign, which I recommend to anyone who happens to be designing a book, and yesterday I put all 22 chapters together as one. The count is . . . drumroll, please, 425 pages!!!

All that's left to create is a title page, a table of contents, some acknowledgements, and of course a colophon. (That's the identification of the typefaces and some notes about the design and production of the book. It's usually on a left-hand page at the bottom of the last page of the book, but I've seen them on a left-hand page near the beginning of the book too. I love colophons. My book's got to have one.)

I haven't even begun to think of a cover. In the industry, books and book covers are designed by competely different people, and now I know why. Each are completely different monumental design challenges. One is about reading, and one is about selling. I will not mind leaving the cover to someone else, but the idea here is to, basically, self-publish, as in print and bind, maybe with a hard cover and a bookmark ribbon, just a few copies of the book. When these fall on the desks of the publishers they will look so real that they won't be able to resist. There'll probably be a bidding war! Movie rights, for a quote book!

It's Saturday morning. I've been looking at blogs for a while. Real blogs, or realer than this. Realer people, with pictures of themselves and stories and thoughts about life. I found out yesterday that a former graphic design student of mine has dropped the 'profession' completely. After graduating from LSU he joined the Peace Corps and it completely changed his life. He lives in New Orleans now and is studying to be a nurse. He refuses to work for the Man any more and is only going to help people. His name is Dave, and he is still very funny. I know this because he has a blog, a real blog on Blogger, called I Just Want To Be A Tugboat Captain, which I have added to my links.

Wow! Dave! I am impressed and heartened and inspired. I am thinking of writing my thoughts out, like this, and maybe even posting a few pictures of myself occasionally. I feel like blogging, really blogging!

'[In the ninth century BC] appear winged genies . . . with human heads or sometimes the heads of birds of prey, whose task was to attract positive forces. Indeed, they hold in one hand a situla and in the other an object like a pinecone, with which they seem to sprinkle anyone who comes near them. . . . [A]s on the panels behind Ashurnasirpal II's throne at Nimrud, these figures also appear in composite scenes: twice behind the king, who is also depicted twice, once on each side of the Tree of Life, which itself is surmounted by a winged disc representing the great god Assur or the sun god Shamash.'

'The Art and Architecture of Mesopotamia, by Giovanni Curatol, Jean-Daniel Forest, Nathalie Gallois, Carlo Lippolis, and Roberta Venco Ricciardi, 2007.

'Among the objects [from the eighteenth century BC] it is perhaps the Code of Hammurabi that is the most important. . . . Properly speaking, rather than a code, the text of 3,500 lines is a collection of penalties to be taken as a model. At the top of the stele, a relief illustrates that the king's decisions were just because they were inspired by Shamash [the sun god] himself, who was the god of justice since nothing escaped his attention. Hammurabi, wearing a long garment and a thick-brimmed cap on his head . . . stands with one hand raised in greeting or respect before the divinity on a throne above the Cosmic Mountain (with scales), who is identified by the rays coming out of his back. The god holds the insignia of his omnipotence, the circle and stick, which the king must be about to touch . . . in order to fulfill his role as unfailing, supreme judge.'

'The Art and Architecture of Mesopotamia, by Giovanni Curatol, Jean-Daniel Forest, Nathalie Gallois, Carlo Lippolis, and Roberta Venco Ricciardi, 2007.

'The ziggurat is the image of the Cosmic Mountain where all things begin and end, like the Egyptian pyramids, but whereas the latter are linked to death (although the pharaohs buried in them were destined for a kind of resurrection), the Mesopotamian buildings are linked to the source of life. In every case the ziggurat formed part of a vast cultic complex. At Ur this was associated with a raised courtyard, with direct access from outside through a monumental door. . . .'

'The Art and Architecture of Mesopotamia, by Giovanni Curatol, Jean-Daniel Forest, Nathalie Gallois, Carlo Lippolis, and Roberta Venco Ricciardi, 2007.

[T]he stele of Naram-Sin strikes us by its dynamism. Trampling dismembered enemies, the king leads his men in assaulting a mountain, with tremendous force. In scaling the mountain, Naram-Sin imitates on his stele the pose assumed by the triumphant sun god on many seals of the era. Firstly, therefore, the scene is a sort of epiphany, modeled on that of the god, and this parallel indicates that the royal victory has a metaphysical dimension. In fact, the mountain represents a reworking of the theme of the Cosmic Mountain. Placing the king at its summit, and thus at the center of the world, the image expresses here more forcefully than ever the decisive role of the king in the process of regeneraton.'

'The Art and Architecture of Mesopotamia, by Giovanni Curatol, Jean-Daniel Forest, Nathalie Gallois, Carlo Lippolis, and Roberta Venco Ricciardi, 2007.

'[Derived] directly from the Neolithic heritage . . . the Tree of Life, a classic in the history of religions, [is] often represented from the end of the fourth millennium BC onward in Mesopotamian iconography and, therefore, often mentioned in texts. In fact, almost any plant may be an allusion to it, such as all kinds of trees, primarily whole ones, but also branches, flowers, or shoots. We have to wait until the second millennium BC for its representation to acquire the more or less canonical form of a stylized tree in a set style. First of all, the tree alludes to the blood tie that links human generations over time. From this viewpoint, it can be compared with our own genealogical trees, but, whereas the latter describe the relationships of particular individuals, the former is more abstract. It extends to the whole of humanity, past and present, uniting the living with their mythical parents, like a sort of umbilical cord.'

'The Art and Architecture of Mesopotamia, by Giovanni Curatol, Jean-Daniel Forest, Nathalie Gallois, Carlo Lippolis, and Roberta Venco Ricciardi, 2007.

Has anyone seen the movie The Fountain' They might have called it The Tree for its tree of profound significance, which is somehow launched in a bubble of some sort from a mysterious Mayan temple toward a particular nebular cluster, the site of a soon-to-die star. But I don't want to give too much away. . . .

'For the whole of the fourth millennium BC, [Mesopotamian] society continued to become more hierarchical, which enabled the politico-administrative system to govern a developing society. The hereditary elites who held the reins of power were at the center of a vast, centripetal network that administered the region and fundamentally depended on their statutory capacity to mobilize the community's workforce. This energy reserve, governed by the size of the population, enabled them to undertake public works (irrigation, for example), build sumptuous buildings, organize foreign expeditions, and obtain craft products and agricultural surpluses. This, in turn, enabled them to satisfy their own needs, maintain their dependents, meet their obligations, trade, and in general assume all the burdens of their public and private duties. . . . It was the need to control all these activities that led to the invention of writing during the Late Uruk Period.'

'The Art and Architecture of Mesopotamia, by Giovanni Curatol, Jean-Daniel Forest, Nathalie Gallois, Carlo Lippolis, and Roberta Venco Ricciardi, 2007.

'This was the golden age of Mesopotamian civilization: at the latest at the end of the fourth millenium, in the so-called Late Uruk Period, architecture attained great heights, and the visual arts flourished, with the appearance of figurative scenes exalting the power of the king. It was also at that time that writing came to be invented: the resulting release of cultural and intellectual energy can only be imagined. Writing was then used exclusively in the economic sphere, primarily as a memory aid, but it nevertheless enables us to recognize that its inventors spoke Sumerian, an agglutinative language without any known parallel.'

'The Art and Architecture of Mesopotamia, by Giovanni Curatol, Jean-Daniel Forest, Nathalie Gallois, Carlo Lippolis, and Roberta Venco Ricciardi, 2007.

''[T]he world has a heritage of great value. The Mosaic code of the Bible owes some of its principles to some of the laws formulated by Hammurabi, who was called the law-giver. From their system of arithmetic, in which they used the multiple of twelve as well as our familiar ten, we derive our sixty minutes to the hour and 360 degrees to the circle. Arabia gave us our numerals, which are still called Arabic to distinguish them from the Roman system of notation. The Assyrians invented the sundial. The modern apothecary symbols and the signs of the Zodiac originated with the Babylonians. Comparatively recent excavations in Asia Minor have revealed that there was a magnificent empire there.'

'A magnificent empire'' Homer dreamed. 'Where' In Ithaca in California' Away out to hell and gone' Without any great people, without any great discoveries, without sundials, without numerals, without Zodiacs, without humor, without anything' Where was this great empire'''

'William Saroyan, The Human Comedy, 1943.

By popular request . . . OK, there was one request, from Tom, (Tom, are you out there') for some YouTube links.

By Tom's special request, then, here are four, no five Roxy Music videos from early 1970s. I present these because JUST TODAY I heard a rumor, on WFMU, that a new Roxy Music album is in the works, but has been delayed because Bryan Ferry is suffering from writer's block. (Well, he's got a lot to live up to.)

Street Life

Out Of The Blue

Virginia Plain

Ladytron

Editions Of You

'It was a great big white elephant of a house, the kind crazy movie stars made in the crazy '20s.'

'narrator, Sunset Blvd., 1950.

Click here or on any speech bubble to read the rant Die Speech Bubble Logo, Die at eachday.com.

'The invention of the microscope is variously attributed to the Dutch spectacle-maker Zacharias Janssen in 1590 and to Galileo, who announced it in 1610. In 1656 the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes noted with wonder: 'There are now such Microscopes . . . that the things we see with them appear a hundred thousand times bigger, than they would do if we looked upon them with our bare Eyes.''

'Cynthia Wall, The Bedford Cultural Edition of The Rape Of The Lock by Alexander Pope, 1998.

'Transparent Forms, too fine for mortal Sight,
Their fluid Bodies half dissolv'd in Light.
Loose to the Wind their airy Garments flew,
Thin glitt'ring Textures of the filmy Dew;
Dipt in the richest Tincture of the Skies,
Where Light disports in ever-mingling Dies,
While ev'ry Beam new transient Colours flings,
Colours that change whene'er they wave their Wings.'

'Alexander Pope, The Rape Of The Lock, 1712.

'[For] we have the Power of retaining, altering and compounding those Images, which we have once received, into all the varieties of Picture and Vision that are most agreeable to the Imagination; for by this Faculty a Man in a Dungeon is capable of entertaining himself with Scenes and Lanskips more beautiful than any that can be found in the whole Compass of Nature.'

'Joseph Addison, On The Pleasures of Imagination, Spectator 411, 1712.

'[Virgil's] schooling trained him in Greek and Latin. The pupil with a stylus made his letters on a wax tablet which could then be smoothed. He listened to the teacher's lesson and read or recited his exercises aloud. He wore the Roman tunica, a sleeved shirt reaching the knees, and after his fifteenth year the Roman toga, a white woolen full-length robe, passed over the left shoulder, brought from behind under the right arm, and then thrown again over the left shoulder. . . .

Tall and dark-haired, with a dark complexion, Virgil retained in Rome a shy and countryfied air. He had a fine reading voice. He was not robust.'

'Robert Fitzgerald, postscript from his translation of Virgil's The Aeneid, 1983.

'What was a liber, a book, at Rome' A roll of papyrus on which the text was inscribed in ink with a reed pen. Publication consisted of the preparation and sale'or presentation as gifts'of copies made by hand. A wealthy man would have copyists on his household staff. There were bookshops, and Augustus founded a public library on the Palatine. Books were valuable, not owned by everybody, and by our standards hard to handle and to read. Words were not set off from one another by spaces but appeared in an unbroken line. You held the scroll in your right hand and unrolled it with your left. This is what Jupiter does metaphorically for Venus in Book I, unrolling the scroll of fate, and in Book IX, line 528, the poet calls on the Muse of Epic to unroll with him, as though on a scroll, the mighty scenes of war. In the first case the text is the future; in the second it is the past.'

'Robert Fitzgerald, postscript from his translation of Virgil's The Aeneid, 1983.

'To what extremes
Will you not drive the hearts of men, accurst
Hunger for gold!'

'Virgil, The Aeneid, between 29 and 19 BCE, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, 1983.

'So humid Iris through bright heaven flew
On saffron-yellow wings, and in her train
A thousand hues shimmered before the sun.'

'Virgil, The Aeneid, between 29 and 19 BCE, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, 1983.

'So Iris glided on the colored rainbow,
Seen by none, swift goddess, on her way.'

'Virgil, The Aeneid, between 29 and 19 BCE, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, 1983.

'Now dim to one another
In desolate night they walked on through the gloom,
Through Dis's homes all void, and empty realms,
As one goes through a wood by a faint moon's
Treacherous light, when Jupiter veils the sky
And black night blots the colors of the world.'

'Virgil, The Aeneid, between 29 and 19 BCE, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, 1983.

'A figure of fright, keeper of waters and streams,
Is Charon, foul and terrible, his beard
Grown wild and hoar, his staring eyes all flame,
His sordid cloak hung from a shoulder knot.
Alone he poles his craft and trims the sails
And in his rusty hull ferries the dead,
Old now'but old age in the gods is green.'

'Virgil, The Aeneid, between 29 and 19 BCE, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, 1983.

'There are two gates of Sleep, one said to be
Of horn, whereby the true shades pass with ease,
The other all white ivory agleam
Without a flaw, and yet false dreams are sent
Through this one by the ghosts to the upper world.'

'Virgil, The Aeneid, between 29 and 19 BCE, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, 1983.

'This way and that
He let his mind run, passing quickly over
All he might do, as when from basins full
Of unstilled water, struck by a ray of sun
Or the bright disk of the moon, a flickering light
Plays over walls and corners and flies up
To hit the high roofbeams and a coffered ceiling.'

'Virgil, The Aeneid, between 29 and 19 BCE, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, 1983.

''You people dress in yellow and glowing red,
You live for sloth, and you go in for dancing,
Sleeves to your tunics, ribbons to your caps,
Phrygian women, in truth not Phrygian men!''

'Virgil, The Aeneid, between 29 and 19 BCE, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, 1983.

'Here on his rustic bed they lay the prince,
Most like a flower a girl's fingers plucked,
Soft-petaled violet or hyacinth
With languid head, as yet no longer discomposed
Or faded, though its mother earth no longer
Nourishes it and makes it stand in bloom.'

'Virgil, The Aeneid, between 29 and 19 BCE, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, 1983.

'You haven't seen anything until you've refused your friend's wife a little favor. Because then, you'd be better off with a reputation of four and twenty Blue-Beards. a crook without a car! a defeated field marshal! your feet stink, your fangs, your breath! I'm telling you!'

'Louis-Ferdinand C'line, Fable For Another Time, 1952, translated by Mary Hudson, 2003.

'You can't compare gas to moonlight, it's something more . . . it's this wan greenish thing that stupefies you . . . floors you . . . you see strange things . . . people not quite dead, not quite alive, not quite anything . . . At the time these weird greenish creatures gave me hallucinations . . . there were so many of them!'

'Louis-Ferdinand C'line, Fable For Another Time, 1952, translated by Mary Hudson, 2003.

'And ny the castel swiche ther dwelten three;
That oon of hem was blynd, and myghte nat see,
But it were with thilke eyen of his mynde,
With whiche men seen, after that they ben blynde.'

'Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, c. 1400.

'There happened near the castle, to be three,
One among whom was blind and could not see,
Save with that inward eyesight of the mind
That still can shed its light upon the blind.'

'Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, translated by Neville Coghill, 1952.

'The gold of hem hath now so badde alayes
With bras, that thogh the coyne be fair at eye,
It wolde rather breste atwo than plye.'

'Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, c. 1400.

'What gold they have is mixed with such allays
Of brass, that, though the coin looks right perhaps,
When you begin to bend the thing it snaps.'

'Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, translated by Neville Coghill, 1952.

'Though I be hoor, I fare as dooth a tree
That blosmeth er that fruyt ywoxen bee;
And blosmy tree nys neither drye ne deed.
I feele me nowhere hoor but on myn heed;'

'Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, c. 1400.

'I may seem hoary, but I'm like a tree
That blossoms white before the fruit can be;
Blossoming trees are neither dry nor dead
And I am only hoary on my head.'

'Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, translated by Neville Coghill, 1952.

'Bright was the day, and blew the firmament;
Phebus hath of gold his stremes doun ysent,
To gladen every flour with his warmnesse.
He was that tyme in Geminis, as I gesse,'

'Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, c. 1400.

'Bright was the day and blue the firmament,
Down fell the golden flood that Phoebus sent
To gladden every flower with his beams;
He was in Gemini at the time, it seems,'

'Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, translated by Neville Coghill, 1952.

'And right so as thise philosophres write
That hevene is swift and round and eek brennynge,
Right so was faire Cecilie the white
Ful swift and bisy evere in good werkynge,
And round and hool in good perseverynge,
And brennynge evere in charite ful brighte.
Now have I yow declared what she highte.'

'Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, c. 1400.

'And just as these philosophers will write
To prove that heaven is swift and round and burning,
Just so was fair Cecilia the White,
As swift and ceaseless, turning and returning
To works of mercy, and round in her discerning
Of charity, and so I read her name.'

'Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, translated by Neville Coghill, 1952.

'Two mysterious processes'the rubefaction and albefaction of waters, i.e. reddening and whitening or clarifying a liquid' . . . are referred to in medieval textbooks of alchemy. . . .

It was part of the theory that when the ingredients began to turn yellow they were on the verge of becoming the Philosopher's Stone, by which all could be turned to gold. The Philosopher's Stone was held to be heavy, sweet-smelling, constant and pink, and to exist in powder form as well. . . .'

'Neville Coghill, endnotes from his translation of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, 1952.

'Blue for Chaucer's age was the color of constancy in love and green of lightness in love. This is echoed in 'Greenlseeves is my delight' and elsewhere.'

'Neville Coghill, endnote from his translation of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, 1952.

My brothers Jim and Bruce, and the famous Jay Joyner, at Atlantic Beach just a week ago.

I love quote books, probably because of ADD, the Attention Deficit Disorder which affects so many of my generation. I was born in, or I should say 'was brought to you by' 1958, for this was my first sentence fragment. I like to thumb through magazines, and books, from the back to the front and my eye tends to only stop on bite-size chunks. So quote books are, for me, just the thing for leisurely intellectual entertainment.

The first quote book that completely arrested my attention (the cover design by Paula Scher features a tasty looking yin-yang pretzel) was Zen To Go, edited by Jon Winokur. This little book managed to influence my thinking and my teaching profoundly and probably for all time. I began to collect quote books, such as another great Winokur collection, The Portable Curmudgeon, and dozens of 'gift books' from the Peter Pauper Press that I found in thrift stores, and classics like the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

'In China, orange stands for power and happiness, where it is also the auspicious hue of celestial fruit and the color of pride, hospitality, marriage, ambition, [and] benevolence.'

'Alexander Theroux, The Secondary Colors, 1996.

'Curiously, 'Applesins,' slyly like Apfelsine, the German word for orange, is the slang word for orange in Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange.'

'Alexander Theroux, The Secondary Colors, 1996.

'For centuries orange . . . was not the name of a color, in fact. Chaucer describes Chaunticleer: 'His colour was betwixe yelow and reed.' . . . And in 'The Canon Yeoman's Tale,' Chaucer uses the term citrinacioun, turning to citron. . . . Chaucer knew the color; he simply did not have a word for it.'

'Alexander Theroux, The Secondary Colors, 1996.