June 2008 Archives

“For the world’s an Eye
And the universe is Seeing
Liquid
Rare
Radiant.”

—Jack Kerouac, ‘San Francisco Blues, 22nd Chorus’, from Book of Blues, 1995.

I finished Lucy in the Sky friday night, and saturday I took it to the Baton Rouge Gallery where I hung it and 9 other recent collages for an exhibition that I call Kaleidoscope Eyes. Yes, this is what the frenetic collage-making of the last several months has been all about.
  The show, which also features exhibitions by Anne Boudreau, Mary Lee Eggart and Mikey Walsh, will be up through July 31. The opening reception will be held Wednesday, July 2nd, from 7 to 9pm. There will be food, there will be wine, there will be beautiful people, and entertainment will be provided by vinyl-only DJs Neff, Martini and Misc. If you’re in the area, you won’t want to miss it!

“‘Can I have an orange?’. . .
 ‘Dat’s not a real orange, dear. All de fruit is plasticated. De flowers are plasticated also. I don’t believe the Lord meant me to spend de little housekeeping money I possess on perishable goods. Have some dates.’”

—Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 2000.

“Chalfens rarely made jokes unless they were exceptionally lame or numerical in nature or both: What did the zero say to the eight? Nice belt.”

—Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 2000.

“‘How are you doing on names? Any ideas?’
    Alsana is decisive. ‘Meena and Malana, if they are girls. If boys, Magid and Millat. Ems are good. Ems are strong. Mahatma, Muhammad, that funny Mr Morecambe, from Morecambe and Wise—letter you can trust.’”

—Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 2000.

“Alsana would say, ‘Little man, how about the blue one for Amma, hmm?’, pushing him into the primary colours section of Mothercare. ‘Just one blue one. Go so nice with your eyes. For Amma, Magid. How can you not care for blue? It’s the colour of the sky!’
    ‘No, Amma. The sky isn’t blue. There’s just white light. White light has all of the colours of the rainbow in it, and when it is scattered through the squillions of molecules in the sky, the short-wave colours—blue, violet—they are the ones you see. The sky isn’t really blue. It just looks that way. It’s called Rayleigh scattering.’
    A strange child with a cold intellect.”

—Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 2000.

“Directly in front of the Swede sat the model of the house. He could see now what he had not been able to envision from Dawn’s explanations—exactly how the long shed roof let the light into the main hallway throught he high row of windows running the length of the front wall. Yes, now he saw how the sun would arc through the southern sky and the light would wash—and how happy it seemed to make her just to say ‘wash’ after ‘light’—wash over the white walls, thus changing everything for everyone.”

—Philip Roth, American Pastoral, 1997.

“‘This is Rita. We’re going to make her a dress glove, size four. Black or brown, honey?’
    ‘Brown?’
    From a wrapped-up bundle of hides dampening beside Harry, he picked one out in a pale shade of brown. ‘This is a tough color to get,’ the Swede told her. ‘British tan. You can see, there’s all sorts of variation in the color—see how light it is there, how dark it is down there? Okay. This is sheepskin. What you saw in my office was pickled. This has been tanned. This is leather. But you can still see the animal. If you were to look at the animal,’ he said, ‘here it is—the head, the butt, the front legs, the hind legs, and here’s the back, where the leather is harder and thicker, as it is over our own backbones. . . .’”

—Philip Roth, American Pastoral, 1997.

“His father used to tell him, ‘Brownstone and brick. There was the business. Brownstone quarried right here. Know that? Out by Belleville, north along the river. This city’s got everything. What a business that must have been. The guy who sold Newark brownstone and brick—he was sittin’ pretty.’”

—Philip Roth, American Pastoral, 1997.

“She used to collect everything, catalog everything, explain to him everything, examine with the pocket magnifying glass he’d given her every chameleonlike crab spider that she brought home to hold briefly captive in a moistened mason jar, feeding it on dead houseflies until she released it back onto the golden rod or the Queen Anne’s lace (‘Watch what happens now, Dad’) Where it resumed adjusting its color to ambish its prey.”

—Philip Roth, American Pastoral, 1997.

“Ordinary Romans recognized, and usually respected, the distinctive dress of the elite. . . .
    At the very top of the cursus honorum, the censors wore all-purple togas to mark them out from the curule magistrates who wore the toga praetexta, while military commanders who qualified for a triumph, the Roman state’s highest award, were granted the most striking form of public dress available: the vestis triumphalis, which comprised the tunica palmata (a purple tunic with gold palm branches embroidered into it) covered by a toga picta (a purple toga emblazones with gold stars). Public dress thus contributed significantly towards dividing the Roman citizen body into its various status hierarchies. Rome was a culture of spectacle, and the spectacle of dress helped to emphasize some of its most important values.”

—Jonathan Edmondson, ‘Public Dress and Social Control in Rome’, from Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture, edited by Jonathan Edmondson and Allison Keith, 2008.

“In the Roman world, purple was a colour rich in splendour and symbolic value. The elder Pliny remarked on its ability to make every garment radiant and noted its particular association with the maiestas (majesty) of childhood. Though the romans called the colour purpura and used the term as a metonym for the child’s praetexta, the shade that adorned the toga more closely resembled garnet than purple. Roman purple varied in intensity, encompassing rose and scarlet shades, but in Pliny’s estimation, in its highest glory, it was the colour of congealed blood: ‘blackish at first glance gut gleaming when held up to the light.’ Blood represents and sustains life, and is a powerful, vital force. In many cultures shades of red are believed to protect babies, children, and pregnant women—in essence, to protect nascent life.”

—Fanny Dolansky, ‘Coming of Age in the Roman World’, from Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture, edited by Jonathan Edmondson and Allison Keith, 2008.

“[A] few authors tell us that the girl wore the toga praetexta, the toga bordered by a purple stripe, just as freeborn boys did. Why children wore the toga itself is unclear, but the wool of the garment and especially its purple band (likely woven directly onto the toga) had a general apotropaic significance. Persius described the purple stripe as the guard of pre-adolescence; . . . in a declamation attributed to the rhetorician Quintilian, the colour purple is described as the one ‘by which we make the weakness of boyhood sacred and revered’. . . .”

—Kelly Olson, ‘The Appearance of the Young Roman Girl’, from Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture, edited by Jonathan Edmondson and Allison Keith, 2008.

“Hobohemia was a complex and highly politicized social institution with its own unwritten system of laws, etiquette, mores, and division of labor. Although ‘tramp’ and ‘bum’ were sanctioned synonyms, ‘hobo’ specifically designated a wandering laborer (the word probably derives from ‘hoe boy,’ a seasoned farm worker).”

—Robbert Polito, Savage Art, A Biography of Jim Thompson, 1995.

“American fiction begins with Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), a sort of early-American Pop. 1280. Theodore Wieland hears a voice—he is convinced it is the voice of God—commanding him to ‘render’ his family ‘in proof of thy faith.’ He kills his wife and children, and then advances on his sister Clara. ‘This minister is evil, but he from whom his commission was received is God. Submit then with all thy wonted resignation to a decree that cannot be reversed or resisted. . . .’ Did the voice come from Carwin, the diabolical ‘biloquist’ (ventriloquist), or did it arise from Wieland’s own troubled imagination? The same questions of madness or calculation, God or the Devil [that arise in Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280] agitate Wieland.”

—Robbert Polito, Savage Art, A Biography of Jim Thompson, 1995.

“In a lot of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He’ll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can’t figure out whether the hero’s laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff—a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I’m not lazy, whatever else I am. I’ll tell you everything.”

—Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me, 1952.

“Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster sand shaped itself in whorls strangely symmetric like iron filings in a field and these shapes flared and drew back again, resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away over the playa. As if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality.”

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 1985.

“There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used them all, but there is only one plot—things are not as they seem.”

—Jim Thompson, quoted in Savage Art, A Biography of Jim Thompson by Robbert Polito, 1995.

“The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in the lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was.”

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 1985.

“On the day that followed they crossed a lake of gypsum so fine the ponies left no track upon it. The riders wore masks of boneblack smeared about their eyes and some had blacked the eyes of their horses. The sun reflected off the pan burned the undersides of their faces and shadow of horse and rider alike were painted upon the fine white powder in purest indigo.”

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 1985.

501 Government Street.

“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.”

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 1985.

“In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board.”

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 1985.

“Lambajan said nothing, and his silence spread outwards from him, muffling the hooting of taxis, the cigarette-vendor’s cries, the shrieks of street-urchins as they played fighting-kite and hoop and dodge-the-traffic, and the loud playback music emerging from the ‘Sorryno’ Irani restaurant up the hill (so called because of the huge blackboard at the entrance reading Sorry, No Liquor, No Answer Given Regarding Addresses in Locality, No Combing of Hair, No Beef, No Haggle, No Water Unless Food Taken, No News or Movie magazine, no Sharing of Liquid Sustenances, No Taking Smoke, No Match, No Feletone Calls, No Incoming with Own Comestible, No Speaking of Horses, No Sigret, No Taking of Long Time on Premises, No Raising of Voice, No Change, and a crucial last pair, No Turning Down of Volume—It Is How We Like, and No Musical Request—All Melodies Selected Are To Taste of Prop).”

—Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 1995.

“‘Adios,’ she added in Spanish, ‘I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘Sank you.’
    ‘Not sank you, Señora Gregorio, thank you.’
    ‘Sank you.’”

—Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947.

“Ah none but he knew how beautiful it all was, the sunlight, sunlight, sunlight flooding the bar of El Puerto del Sol, flooding the watercress and oranges, or falling in a single golden line as if in the act of conceiving a God, falling like a lance straight into a block of ice—”

—Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947.

“Night: and once again, the nightly grapple with death, the room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful sleep, the voices outside the window, my name being continually repeated with scorn by imaginary parties arriving, the dark spinets. As if there were not enough real noises in these nights the color of grey hair.”

—Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947.

“At the end of her period of house arrest . . . Aurora invited Camoens inside, making him the second person on earth to see her work. Every inch of the walls and even the ceiling of the room pullulated with figures, human and animal, real and imaginary, drawn in a sweeping black line that transformed itself constantly, that filled here and there into huge blocks of colour, the red of the earth, the purple and vermilion of the sky, the forty shades of green; a line so muscular and free, so teeming, so violent, that Camoens with a proud father’s bursting heart found himself saying, ‘But it is the great swarm of being itself.’”

—Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 1995.

“[M]uch is being nailed down. Colours, for example, to the mast.”

—Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 1995.

‘The Bo Diddley beat has been used by many other artists, including Elvis Presley ("His Latest Flame"); Bruce Springsteen ("She's The One"); U2Desire"); The Smiths ("How Soon Is Now?"); Roxette ("Harleys And Indians (Riders In The Sky)"); Dee Clark, a former member of the Hambone Kids (see above) ("Hey Little Girl"); Johnny Otis ("Willie and the Hand Jive"); George Michael ("Faith"); Normaal ("Kearl van stoahl"); The Strangeloves ("I Want Candy"); Ace Frehley ("New York Groove"); Primal Scream ("Movin' on up"); David Bowie ("Panic in Detroit"); The Pretenders ("Cuban Slide"); The Police ("Deathwish"), Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders ("The Game of Love"); The Supremes ("When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes"); Jefferson Airplane ("She Has Funny Cars"); The White Stripes ("Screwdriver"); The Byrds ("Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe"); Tiny Letters ("Song For Jerome Green") and The Stooges ("1969"). The early Rolling Stones sound was strongly associated with their versions of "Not Fade Away" and "I Need You Baby (Mona)". The Who's "Magic Bus" also is based upon the distinctive "Bo Diddley Beat".’

—Wikipedia, Bo Diddley.

“Hail to the sacred vowels! Supreme salutations to the holy consonants!”

—Prayer to the alphabet, Tibetan monks; quoted by John Stevens in Sacred Calligraphy of the East, third edition, 1995.

“A is the first and most important of the Siddham characters. . . .
    Meditation on the letter A (ajikan) is an essential practice of esoteric Buddhism. Usually, the character is set on an eight-petaled lotus in the center of a round moon, and then mounted on a board or scroll. The mounted character is set against a wall in the meditation hall. After performing the prescribed ritual including prostrations, mantras, and mudras, the meditator sits in the lotus posture about one meter from the character.
    Pronouncing the A sound with each breath, he visualizes the moon, drawing it into his heart and expanding it gradually until its brilliance permeates the universe. Now from the center of the moon A is perceived as the essence of Mahavairocana—the distinction between worshiper and worshiped is effaced. Near the end of the meditation the moon and the letter are returned to their original form.”

—John Stevens, Sacred Calligraphy of the East, third edition, 1995.

“All ancient [writing] systems . . . hold one idea in common: writing is divine, inherently holy, with powers to teach the highest mysteries; writing is the speech of the gods, the ideal form of beauty. The Egyptians were taught writing by Toth, the scribe of the gods, and named their script ‘the divine’; Jehovah engraved the letters with his fingers when he gave the Commandments to the Hebrews; the Assyrian god Nebo revealed the nature of cuneiform to his people; Cangjie, the four-eyed dragon-faced wizard, modeled the Chinese characters after the movements of the stars, the footprints of birds, and other patterns that occurred in nature; and in India the supreme god Brahma himself gave knowledge of letters to men.”

—John Stevens, Sacred Calligraphy of the East, third edition, 1995.

“Write it large and in slow motion staring at the line. Watch the line. Pretend it is alive and you are just watching it.”

—Lynda Barry, What It Is, 2008.

“I have found that writing by hand slowly is faster than a computer-way of doing it, though I know it’s not easy the way a computer is easy. Tapping a finger is not as complicated as making an original line in the shape of an S.  Different parts of the brain are used when we make an S by hand and more of the body than a finger tap and images seem to come from this kind of being in motion. . . . Hand writing is an image left by a living being in motion. . . .”

—Lynda Barry, What It Is, 2008.

“Keep in mind as you read these words that you are paying no attention at all to the letters of the alphabet.”

—Lynda Barry, a typeset snippet in a collage from What It Is, 2008.

“He woke up the next day with a feeling of incomprehensible excitement. The April morning was bright and windy and the wooden street pavements had a violet sheen; above the street near Palace Arch an enormous red-blue-white flag swelled elastically, the sky showing through it in three different tints: mauve, indigo and pale blue.”

—Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense, 1964.