April 2008 Archives

”You would naturally like to know whether in my childhood I showed an interest in the ‘black art’. And how! As early as my fourth year the blackened hands of the chimney-sweep made a great impression on me. To have such lovely black hands—and without being scolded for it—that was the truest bliss, and I shortly announced that I too wished to become a chimney-sweep.”

“For a serifless roman . . . I should have liked a less pretentious name than Optima, a name that should more justly express the striving for simplicity. Upon the original drawing of Optima appears the designation ‘Neu Antiqua’, a name I had myself desired.”

“Surely there ought to be a Gutenberg monument in Detroit—for Henry Ford should long since have had one erected to the father of modern mass-production. Also, the first Ford cars were all black, and here too I see a somewhat fantastic parallel with Gutenberg’s printing, before the lovely bright colors came into use.”

—Hermann Zapf, About Alphabets: Some Marginal Notes on Type Design, 1970.

“The man who has taught the ABC to his pupils has accomplished a greater deed than a general who has won a battle.”

“He remembers it now, sitting in the dark window in the quiet study, waiting for twilight to cease. . . . The copper light has completely gone now; the world hangs in a green suspension in color and texture like light through colored glass.”

—Wiliam Faulkner, Light in August, 1932.

“It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the neutral grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair.”

—Wiliam Faulkner, Light in August, 1932.

“He did not see the waitress until the two overlarge hands appeared upon the counter opposite him and into sight. He could see the figured pattern of her dress and the bib of an apron and the two bigknuckled hands lying on the edge of the counter as completely immobile as if they were something she had fetched in from the kitchen. ‘Coffee and pie,’ he said.
    Her voice sounded downcast, quite empty. ‘Lemon cocoanut chocolate.’
    In proportion to the height from which her voice came, the hands could not be her hands at all. ‘Yes,’ Joe said.
    The hands did not move. The voice did not move. ‘Lemon cocoanut chocolate. Which kind.’”

—Wiliam Faulkner, Light in August, 1932.

“Try these new names on for size:

    Super Happy (yellow), Fun in the Sun (orange), Giving Tree (green), Bear Hug (brown), Awesome (dusty pink), Happy Ever After (blue), Famous (hot pink) and Best Friends (purple).”

—Paul Walsh, Crayola marks 64-count box's 50th birthday with new colors, StarTribune.com, April 10, 2008.

Yes, the 64-count box of Crayola crayons was introduced just 50 years ago. Not Crayola crayons themselves, which are about twice that age, but the BIG BOX, the one with the build-in sharpener. If bigger is better, the BIG BOX was best! But the problem with the big box, as I recall, was getting all the crayons and crayon pieces back into the box. I mean . . . forget it! Nevertheless, the big box was, and is, big news in the color community.
    Here’s another report, the announcement from Crayola, and in interesting list of Crayola color names through the ages from Wikipedia. (Thanks Mom!)

“So he lay on the cot, smoking, waiting for sunset. Through the open door he watched the sun slant and lengthen and turn copper. Then the copper faded into lilac, into the fading lilac of full dusk. He could hear the frogs then, and fireflies began to drift across the open frame of the door, growing brighter as the dusk faded. Then he rose.”

—Wiliam Faulkner, Light in August, 1932.

“It seemed to him that he could see the yellow day opeining peacefully on before him, like a corridor, an arras, into a still chiaroscuro without urgency. It seemed to him that as the sat there the yellow day contemplated him drowsily, like a prone and somnolent yellow cat.”

—Wiliam Faulkner, Light in August, 1932.

“The wagon goes on, slow, timeless. The red and unhurried miles unroll beneath the steady feet of the mules, beneath the creaking and clanking wheels. The sun stands now high overhead; the shadow of the sunbonnet now falls across her lap. She looks up at the sun. ‘I reckon it’s time to eat,’ she says.”

—Wiliam Faulkner, Light in August, 1932.

Attention current color students and color enthusiasts generally: I have just been alerted to an excellent color design resource, the brainchild and labor of love of web designer Janet Lynn Ford, and it goes by the name of Color Worqx. It’s a full-semester color course on a website, without those pesky projects, deadlines and critiques. 
    Attention current students: Check out the information on color combinations, and don’t miss the color scheme generator. (Thank you Mallory Guidroz!)

Yes, you are correct. That mark, from the International Phonetic Alphabet, represents a glottal stop. Spotted at Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo Emporium. (Thank you, Bruce!)

“The Sun is more Dry, Hot, Active, and Powerfull every way than the Moon . . . for we find she is Pale and Wan, Cold, Moist, and Slow in all her Operations; and if it be as Philosophers hold, that the Moon hath no Light but what it borrows from the Sun, so Women have no strength nor light of Understanding, but what is given them from Men.”

—Margaret Cavendish, The World’s Olio, 1655; quoted in The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination, by Constance Classen. 1998.

“When the moon is full, our brain is also full. We are then in full possession of our senses. But when the moon is new, our brain becomes emptier so that our sensory powers are injured.”

—Hildegard of Bingen, Divine Works; quoted in The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination, by Constance Classen. 1998.

“Prozac, the scientific name of which is fluoxetine, was the first drug whose public name was specifically created to evoke saleable images and ideas: in this case, the ‘pro’ connoting positivity, and the ‘zac’ the reassurance and exactitude of science. Since Prozac’s smashing success, it has become all but de rigueur that new blockbuster drugs have brand names that simultaneously soothe, invigorate, and inspire—the names of Viagra, Celebrex, Claritin, and others have all followed Prozac’s lead. . . . The stakes are so high that drug companies now work with branding agencies to select just the right name . . . a name like Zoloft, uplifting and scientific all at the same time. The hard decisive sounds of the letters X, Z, C, and D are attractive to drug namers. According to James L. Detorre, the president of the Institute (which came up with the names for Lipitor, Clarinex, and Allegra), ‘the harder the tonality of the name the more efficacious the product in the mind of the physician and the end user.’ The cost of developing a trade name for a drug is an estimated $500,000 to $2.5 million. Names are registered even before the drug exists. . . . The name Zoloft was invented by Frank Delano, a legendary marketing guru, who also created the names of Nissan’s Pathfinder and Quest minivans, GMC’s Yukon, and Primerica Financial Services.”

—Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation, 2008.

“I said, ‘I need an adjective that—’ and before I could further define my need, Roger said, ‘Clumsy and naked.’ I laughed out loud.”

—Leonard Stern, on the invention of Mad Libs, the word game, which is 50 years old, as of, approximately, now.

“[. . .] he now saw his apartment through his loved one’s eyes. ‘This was no ‘apartment’! This was a slot!—one of four created by cutting an ordinary front bedroom and rear bedroom in two. [. . .] The ‘kitchen’ consisted of the smallest ‘stove,’ ‘sink,’ and ‘refrigerator’ ever made squeezed into what had been a closet in a former, better life. The quotation marks spread like dermatitis in Adam’s brain as he thought of what must be going through the mind of the girl of his dreams. The ‘bed’ was a mattress on a cheap, unfinished flush door from a lumberyard, supported at the corners by cinder blocks.”

—Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons, 2004. The bracketed ellipses are mine.

If you think you know fonts, you might want to play The Rather Difficult Font Game.

The Next Page: Thirty Tables of Contents

“It being Monday night, Hoyt and eight or nine other Saint Rays had gravitated to the library couches and easy chairs, cracked leather upholstery and all, to chill, i.e., drift through the evening in as aimless and effortless a manner as possible, bolstered by the presence of others like themselves. Naturally ESPN SportsCenter was on the big plasma TV screen. Hot colors and orangey slices of postadolescent flesh flared in a Gatorade commercial . . . and now four poorly postured middle-aged white sportswriters sat slouched in little low-backed, smack-red fiberglass swivel chairs panel-discussing the ‘sensitive’ matter of the way black players dominated basketball.”

—Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons, 2004.

“Dashorn faked a pass to André and, without looking, threw the ball inside to Jojo. The orange core of the world—Jojo had it in his hands in the ::::::::::STATIC:::::::::: of fourteen thousand cheering souls.”

—Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons, 2004.

“Melancholy is a the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.”

—Henri Frederic Amiel, quoted by Eric G. Wilson in Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, 2008.

“It is now that we understand the great profundity of the old idea of the memento mori (remember that you will die). Meditative souls of the Middle Ages often adorned their tables with skulls or kept close by etching of skeletons engaged in the danse macabre. Later, during the early Renaissance, funeral art featured grim reapers or skull and bones. Even later large clocks had engraved upon them mottoes, such as ultima forsan (perhaps the last) or vulnerant omnes, ultima necat (they all wound, and the last kills) or, perhaps the best known, tempus fugit (time flies). Seen in the light of Keat’s linkage of melancholy, death and beauty, these motifs do not appear to be morbid but rather celebratory, vibrant gestures toward life’s ambrosial finitude.”

—Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, 2008.

“The Wave obviously thought of Buster Roth as a lower thing, a big-time college coach who made more than a million in salary plus at least twice that in endorsements, public appearances, life-is-like-a-basketball-game motivational speeches for businessmen, and swoosh deals, as they were known because of the swoosh symbol of the Nike company, still the biggest swoosh dealer of them all. In a swoosh deal, the coach dresses the entire team, from top to bottom—jerseys, shorts, basketball shoes, and socks—in the company’s products, with each item identified by a logo—in return for . . . nobody ever seemed know exactly how much. But it was known that Nike all by itself had a $200 billion advertising budget and that swooshing, also known as ‘branding,’ was their most important form of advertising. As coach of last year’s national champions, Buster Roth had just signed a new swoosh deal, this time with the up-and-coming And 1. The numbers being bruited about were phenomenal. Whatever the sum, every cent of  it went to Coach.”

—Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons, 2004.

“Driven by a desire for happiness at the expense of sadness, bolstered by capitalistic seeing and virtual reality, obsessed with abstraction and delusion, most of us are walking around half blind. Does this blindness partially account for a recent study, reported in Psychological Science, that found that happy people are more likely to be bigots than sad people? Does this inabiity to see clearly further account for the fact, revealed in the 2006 Pew Report on Social Trends, that Republicans, who can be a somewhat warlike bunch, are happier than Democrats? Is our nation’s happiness, its crass self-satisfaction, its wretched contentment, partially responsible for its getting behind a recent war that never should have occurred?”

—Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, 2008.

“Everywhere we look, we see the big yellow smiley face. Everywhere we listen, we hear ‘Have a nice day.’”

—Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, 2008.

“It should not be surprising that [Benjamin] Franklin worked on the Declaration of Independence. In this document, of course, we learn that everyone enjoys an inalienable right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ What many of us don’t know, though, is that ‘the pursuit of happiness’ is secretly connected to the ownership of property. In his Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), John Locke, the great British philosopher, claimed that everyone has a right to ‘life, liberty, and property.’ This statement lies behind the famous sentence in our declaration. This covert connection between happiness and property confirms what Franklin proposed throughout his work: the true road to earthly joy is through the accumulation of stuff.”

—Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, 2008.

“The crowd in the great hall had swollen. Boys and girls, practically all of them white, were crammed together from one end to the other. The heat was worse than ever. The girls grinned with their mouths open and laughed at anything and nothing at all. The music was a never-ending chain-reaction freeway pileup with slivers of human cries and shrieks.”

—Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons, 2004.

“‘That’s not Sarc Three, Bev, that’s only Sarc Two. I mean, it’s almost as obvious as Sarc One. I can’t believe they let you out of Groton without passing Sarc. Sarc One is when I look at you, and I say, “Ohmygod, a cerise shirt. Cerise is such an in color this year.” That’s just ordinary intentionally obvious sarcasm. Okay?’
    [. . .] ‘Now . . . in Sarc Two you say the same thing, only in a sympathetic voice that sounds like totally sincere. “Oh, wow, Bev, I love that color. Cerise. That’s like so-o-o-o cool. Unnhhh . . . no wonder it’s so like . . . in this year.” By the time you get to the “So in this year,” your voice is dripping with so much syrup and like . . . sincerity, it finally dawns on the other person that she’s getting fucked over. What you’ve really been saying is that you don’t love the color, you don’t think it’s cool, and it’s not “in” this year. It’s the delay in it dawning on her that makes it hurt. Okay?’
    [. . .] ‘Okay. In Sarc Three you make the delay even longer, so it really hurts when she finally gets it. We’ve got the same situation. The girl’s getting ready to go out, and she has on this cerise shirt. She thinks it’s really sexy, a real turn-on, and she’s gonna score big-time. You start off sounding straight—you know, flattering, but like not laying it on too thick. You’re like, “Wow, Bev, I love that shirt. Where’d you get it? How perfect is that? It’s so versatile. It’ll be perfect for job interviews, and it’ll be perfect for community service.”’”

—Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons, 2004. The bracketed ellipses are mine, the others are Wolfe’s.

Fool’s Paradise, with your host Rex, is an all-obscure, all-45s, all-rock-n-roll gumbo brew, heavily seasoned with audio samples from scores of vintage movies. Fool”s paradise is one of the most distinctive shows, no, wait . . . THE most distinctive show in all of internet radioland. You don’t want to miss this! It all happens every Saturday afternoon, from 1-3pm EST, on the fun 91, wfmu.

“‘My fellow Americans, I drank a pint of walrus milk once for a bet. I speak fluent Eskimo. I once ate all the gherkins in Belgium. My brother's got a yak in his loft. I fell asleep on a night bus once and woke up in Munich, and had to get a lift back on a camel. I used to live on an iceberg. I've got a waffle-maker that works underwater.’”

—Mark Steel, riffing on lies in You couldn't make it up (unless you're Hillary, that is), at the Belfast Telegraph. Oh, the Irish, how they love to make fun of the American politicians.

I’ve got a new idea. Every once in a while I’ll mention my favorite DJs and radio shows, alll of which will be available to you by way of the clickable radio dial to your left when the proper planets are in allignment, that is, when the show on. And so, let us begin.
    One of my favorite radio programs is Temporary Village, with Art Crimes (not his ‘real’ name), on kfjc, every Thursday, from 10:00am to 2:00pm, PST. Click here, right now, and you’ll catch the lat 36 minutes of today’s show!

—Henry David Thoreau, quoted by Victor Carl Friesen in A Tonic of Wildness: Sensuousness in Henry David Thoreau; from Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by David Howes, 2005.

“Of the warm colors, red is Thoreau’s favorite: he loves to see any redness in vegetation. It is the color of colors, he says in ‘Autumnal Tints,’ and speaks to our blood. Red foliage, he writes, shows nature as being ‘full of blood and heat and luxuriance.’ While Thoreau delights in the feast for the eyes provided by reds, oranges and yellows, he realizes that they cannot be the staple of his diet. Thus he writes of yet another warm color, but one sober in its aspect: ‘Brown is the color for me, the color of our coats and our daily lives, the color of the poor man’s loaf. The bright tints are pies and cakes, good only for October feasts.’”

“Thoreau is . . . rapturous at times about cool blues and azures, but these tints, found predominantly in the sky above and in the waters which reflect it, are often wedded to meditation. These color suggest a limitless space to Thoreau and serve as a stimulus for far-reaching thoughts. For example the sight of his ‘elysian blue’ shadow on snow causes Thoreau to reflect about the nature of his own being: ‘I am turned into a tall blue prussian from my cap to my boots, such as no mortal dye can produce, with an amethystine hatchet in my hand. I am in raptures at my own shadow. What if the substance were of as ethereal a nature?’”

“Touch, taste and smell. The sensory bases of both domesticity and witchcraft. One of the horrors of witchcraft, in fact, was that it made use of the domestic instruments and practices that were intended to keep women safely at home to transgress the social and cosmic order. A pot might be used for cooking dinner or for brewing a spell, a needle might be used for sewing clothes or for piercing an effigy, a broom might be used for sweeping the floor or for flying out the window. The tactile, gustatory and olfactory practices which were expected to keep women confined to close quarters, were transformed by witchcraft into media for mastering the world.”

—Constance Classen, The Witch’s Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity; from Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by David Howes, 2005.