May 2008 Archives

“He experienced a keen sense of happiness that she had been there to see him win and he waited avidly for the chessboards and all these noisy people to disappear in order the sooner to caress her. But the chessboards did not disappear immediately, and even when the bright dining room appeared together with its huge brassy bright samovar, indistinct regular squares showed through the white tablecloth and similar squares—chocolate and cream ones—were indubitably there on the frosted cake.”

—Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense, 1964. ‘He’ is a chess champion, quite obsessed with the game.

“(And why not, she reasoned, these troubled times knock one off balance so no wonder our Russian lads turn to drink, the green dragon and comforter, from time to time. . . .)”

—Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense, 1964.

“All through their girlhood [Celia] had felt that she could act on her sister by a word judiciously placed—by opening a little window for the daylight of her own understanding to enter among the strange colored lamps by which Dodo habitually saw.”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.

“[T]here was light piercing into the room. She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largess of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life. . . .”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.

“Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.

“Rosamond took off her hat, adjusted her veil, and applied little touches of her finger-tips to her hair—hair of infantine fairness, neither flaxen nor yellow. . . . [T]he two nymphs—the one in the glass, and the one out of it . . . looked at each other with eyes of heavenly blue, deep enough to hold the most exquisite meanings an ingenious beholder could put into them, and deep enough to hide the meaning of the owner if these should happen to be less exquisite.”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.

Hillsborough Street, Raleigh, North Carolina. I love these posters. I missed the exhibition mentioned in the one to the left, but I learned at GOTELLMAMA.ORG that the central poster is based on the Harlem Globetrotters logo and that it was printed with red, blue and copper ink.
    My friend Carl Dahle bought Michelle Obama a beer at The Raleigh Times the day that Barak Obama won the North Carolina primary. No, really! You can read all about it here.

“Drugs, as a general term, is an obfuscation of the War on Drugs. We hear the phrase ‘alcohol and drugs,’ as if alcohol were not a drug, and as if by drugs we all know what is being talked about. Addiction is an issue with tobacco, alcohol, and the opiates, but is not at all a property of the entheogens. Addiction to alcohol, a cellular poison, is characterized by physical and mental deterioration that is virtually absent in opiate addiction. Tobacco kills nearly half a million Americans each year, but there are no recorded deaths from marijuana. Each of these plants and substances has distinct properties, promises, and dangers. All that is served by lumping a group of them together is a government program of spiritual and political oppression aimed at cutting off all dialogue.
   
The War on Drugs is in essence a religious war. That is why drug offenders frequently get longer prison sentences than violent criminals. A drug user is worse than a criminal—no punishment is too severe, because drug users are heretics.”

—Dale Pendell, “Amrta: The Neuropharmacology of Nirvana”; The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry, edited by Andrew Schelling, 2005.

“‘The best piety is to enjoy—when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth’s character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight—in art or in anything else.’”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.

“She talked little; but that was an additional charm. She was melancholy, and seemed grateful; her presence was enough, like that of the evening light.”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.

“‘That is Mrs Waule’s gig—the last yellow gig left, I should think. When I see Mrs Waule in it, I understand how yellow can have been worn for mourning. That gig seems to me more funereal than a hearse. But then Mrs Waule always has black crape on. How does she manage it, Rosy? Her friends can’t always be dying.’”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.

“‘Mamma,’ said Rosamond, ‘when Red comes down I wish you would not let him have red herrings. I cannot bear the smell of them all over the house at this hour of the morning.’”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.

“Chang Chio, in the 2nd century, called himself the Yellow God and led an army of 360,000 followers, all wearing yellow turbans. They brought down the Han Dynasty. . . .

Chang Seng-yu, in the 6th century, painted a pair of dragons without eyes on the Temple of Peace and Joy, and warned that the painting should never be completed. A skeptic filled in the eyes, and the walls of the temple crashed to ruins as the dragons flew off. . . .

Chang Chu, a poet in the 13th century, wrote a line, ‘The cataclysm of red sheep,’ that no one has ever been able to explain. . . .

Chang Jen-hsi, in the 18th century, wrote a treatise on ink.”

—Eliot Weinberger, excerpts from “Changs”; The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry, edited by Andrew Schelling, 2005.

“‘He has got no good red blood in his body,’ said Sir James.
    ‘No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses,’ said Mrs Cadwallader.”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.

“I knew that Edward’s Bible held a secret as soon as I opened it and seen the word ‘Blood’ spilled on the first page, just ’neath the headpiece. It takes a singular creature to write the word ‘Blood’ in a Bible, and mind you to write it in crimson.”

—Edward Chupak, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder, 2008.

“Nothing that I might scrawl on the parchment would give a suitable accounting of Billy Bones. This parchment has pallor and so does not bring out the red in Bones’s face. The plume does not caper nearly as cleverly as Bones. Bones was a drunkard, but a sound rover, and maybe one of the best rovers that ever crooked a sword into a liver. I would need a torrent of quills to relate his rascality.”

—Edward Chupak, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder, 2008.

“I say that the moon come first. The moon come before the stars. The moon come even before the sun, I say. And before that the world was bleak, my hearty. The world was dark. The lions slept next to the lambs because the lions could not see their supper. Men bumped about in their Sunday clothing with nowhere to go and the world was filled with confusion. Women wore long dresses and carried parasols for no good reason so far as they could see. All was bewilderment.”

—Edward Chupak, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder, 2008.

“Gold is gold. Even the flames from the candles on board the ship sputter as the night draws to an end. There is no permanence to flame. Gold lasts forever. I looked in the bag. There was more than gold in that bag, my hearty. There was silver. There were jewels. Coins. There were precious stones of every colour. There was a dagger in the bag with red stones on its handle. I fancied that dagger as soon as I saw it. There were pewter forks and knives. There were plates. Fine ones, they were. There were pistols in the bag, and one of the pistols was so small that it fit into the palm of my hand.”

—Edward Chupak, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder, 2008.

“I smelled the Carolinas before I saw it. The stench of that country filled my nostrils. I would tell you that the country smelled like old fish, but that would be a libel on cod. They say that there are smells that can raise the dead, but this was a smell that could send a corpse back into the clay. Aye, the perished would leap back into the loam to flee this stench. When I remarked on the affliction, Mary said, ‘We are in the low country.’
    ‘We are in perdition,’ I replied. ‘Tom told me it would smell like this.’
    ‘No,’ Evangeline said. ‘It is just Albemarle County.’”

—Edward Chupak, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder, 2008.

“The beach was white as salt, and cut off from the world by a ring of steep hills that faced the sea. We were on the edge of a large bay and the water was that clear, turquoise color that you get with a white sand bottom. I had never seen such a place. I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.”

—Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary, 1998.

“. . . some meditation—evening meditation—for about one hour. Then, at eight-thirty, sleep. Most important meditation. compulsory meditation for everyone—even some birds. The most important meditation, not for Nirvana, but for survival.”

—The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, describing his typical evening, quoted by Pico Iyer in The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, 2008.

“[T]he Dalai Lama often talks about sleep as one of the most important activities of the day, even calling on old texts to suggest how sleep can in fact be positively used, as almost anything can, for the clarification of the mind. It appeals to him, I think, because it is one activity that every member of humanity has in common, and the nature of our sleep plays a large part in how clearly we see the world.”

—Pico Iyer, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, 2008.

“I saw a very great and peaceful brightness which was similar to a flame. This brightness had a lot of eyes in it. . . . Inside this brightness, there was another brightness which . . . had the clearness of purple lightning inside itself. I also saw the earth with people on it. The people were carrying milk in their vessels, and they were making cheese from this milk. Some of the milk was thick, from which strong cheese was being made; some of the milk was thin, from which mild cheese was being curdled; and some of the milk was spoiling, from which bitter cheese was being produced.”

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

“Carl had never forgotten little Marie Tovesky’s eyes, and he was glad to have an opportunity to study them. The brown iris, he found, was curiously slashed with yellow, the color of sunflower honey, or of old amber. In each eye one of these steaks must have been larger than the others, for the effect was that of two dancing points of light, two little yellow bubbles, such as rise in a glass of champagne. Sometimes they seemed like th sparks from a forge. She seemed so easily excited, to kindle with a fierce little flame if one but breathed upon her.”

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913.

“The dawn in the east looked like the light from some great fire that was burning under the edge of the world.”

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913.

“When he reached the orchard the sun was hanging low over the wheatfield. Long fingers of light reached through the apple branches as through a net; the orchard was riddled and shot with gold; light was the reality, the trees were merely interferences that reflected and refracted light.”

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913.

“A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.”

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913.

“’Ask him, Alexandra, if it is true that a sea gull came here once. I have heard so.’
    She had some difficulty in making the old man understood.
    He looked puzzled at first, then smote his hands together as he remembered. ‘Oh, yes, yes! A big white bird with long wings and pink feet. My! what a voice she had! She came in the afternoon and kept flying about the pond and screaming until dark. She was in trouble of some sort, but I could not understand her. She was going over to the other ocean, maybe, and did not know how far it was. She was afraid of never getting there. She was more mournful that our birds here; she cried in the night. She saw the light from my window and darted up to it. Maybe she though my house was a boat, she was such a wild thing. Next morning when the sun rose, I went out to take her food, but she flew up into the sky and went on  her way.’ Ivar ran his fingers through his thick hair. ‘I have many strange birds stop with me here. They come from very far away and are great company. . . .’”

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913.

“On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the shard—black against molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.”

—Willa Cather, My Ántonia, 1918.

“She was a dark child, with brown curly hair, like a brunette doll’s, a coaxing little red mouth, and round, yellow-brown eyes. Every one noticed her eyes; the brown iris had golden glints that made them look like gold-stone, or, in softer lights, like that Colorado mineral called tiger-eye.”

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913.

“It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people’s educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.”

—Ian McEwan, Atonement, 2001. Wow. What an amazing book. This book takes something to another level.

Another perfectly good logo has gone bad. The new $30,000 logo for the UK’s Office of Government Commerce has been abandoned, after a few additional seconds of careful consideration. The story is here, the wittiest commentary is here, and a few other Logos Gone Wild can be found here. (Thank you Bruce Dean.)