July 2008 Archives

“At first, as a girl, I loved blue, and now orange; but I find orange is the complement of blue. I only completed blue then, I made blue more forcible.”

—Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume One, 1931-1934, 1966.

“[T]here was a garden, a tangled and wild garden one could get lost in. And there were colored glass windows and through the core of the designs, a button of multicolored glass, one could see a prismatic, colored world in oranges, blues, water-greens, rubies. I kept my eye glued to those stones for hours, loooking at this prismatic world. Another world. It was my first sight of another world. Colors. Ruby-colored trees and a sky of orange.”

—Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume One, 1931-1934, 1966.

“What I sought in clothes was an evocation of the fairy tale. In New York, in winter, posing for a painter, I once arrived at nine in the morning in a vivid red velvet dress.”

—Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume One, 1931-1934, 1966.

“The merry-go-round turned and sang, and I imagined myself embarking on a dancing career with Miralles, dancing, which was so much like flying, from city to city, receiving bouquets, praise in newspapers, with joyous music at the center always, pleasure as colorful as the Spanish dresses, all red, orange, black and gold, gold and purple, and red and white.”

—Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume One, 1931-1934, 1966.

“A blue sky and the sun on the wall. The nurse had raised me to see the new day. I lay there, feeling the sky, and myself one with the sky, feeling the sun and myself one with the sun, and abandoning myself to the immensity and to God. God penetrated my whole body. I trembled and shivered with an immense joy. Cold, and fever and light, an illumination, a visitation, through the whole body, the shiver of a presence. The light and the sky in the body, God in the body and I melting into God. I melted into God. No image, I felt space, gold, purity, ecstasy, immensity, a profound ineluctable communion. I wept with joy.”

—Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume One, 1931-1934, 1966.

“She says, staring intently, ‘I thought your eyes were blue at first. They are strange and beautiful, grey and gold, with those long black lashes. You are the most graceful woman I have ever seen. You glide when you walk.’
    We talked about the colors we love. She always wears black and purple. I love warm colors, red and gold.”

—Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume One, 1931-1934, 1966.

“Russian voices and June’s incandescent face. Violet rugs and stained-glass windows, dusty lights and the plaintive chant of strings. June is the essence of all these, of candles, incense, flambées, fine liqueurs, exotic foods.”

—Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume One, 1931-1934, 1966.

“I pass through the house, painting a wall through which stains of humidity show, hanging a lamp where it will throw Balinese shadow plays, draping a bed, placing logs in the fireplace.
    Every room is painted a different color. As if there were one room for every separate mood: lacquer red for vehemence, pale turquoise for reveries, peach color for gentleness, green for repose, grey for work at the typewriter.”

—Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume One, 1931-1934, 1966.

“We corresponded. He sent books, and tried to teach me French by letters. I was not very disciplined. In one letter I wrote two pages without accents and then added one hundred accents at the bottom and said: ‘For you to distribute correctly.’”

—Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume One, 1931-1934, 1966.

“When we got to our room, I sat down on Ruth’s bed, close to the window—the sun had warmed the blanket—and she sat on mine over by the back wall. There was a bluebottle buzzing around, and for a minute we had a laugh playing ‘bluebottle tennis,’ throwing our hands about to make the demented creature go from one to the other of us. Then it found its way out of the window, and Ruth said:
    ‘I want me and Tommy to get back together again. Kathy, will you help?’ Then she asked: ‘What’s the matter?’”

—Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 2005.

“The snow was gray against the sky, soft on his lashes. It fell without a sound.”

—Cormac McCarthy, Child of God, 1973.

“Alone in the empty shell of a house the squatter watched through the moteblown glass a rimshard of bonecolored moon come cradling up over the black balsams on the ridge, ink trees a facile hand had sketched against the paler dark of winter heavens.”

—Cormac McCarthy, Child of God, 1973.

“He had eyes for a long blonde flatshanked daughter that used to sit with her legs propped so that you could see her drawers, She laughed all the time. He’d never seen her in a pair of shoes but she had a different colored pair of drawers for every day of the week and black ones on Saturday.”

—Cormac McCarthy, Child of God, 1973.

“Press close bare-bosomed night—press close magnetic nourishing night!
Night of south winds—night of the large few stars!
Still nodding night—mad naked summer night.”

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1892 edition.

“Across the narrow, quivering line of water, the delicate budding branches of young trees were limned black against the gold, orange,—what word is there to tell the color of that morning sky! And steeped in the splendor of it hung one pale star; there was not another in the whole heaven. . . .
    She stayed there motionless upon the brink of the river till the star melted into the brightness of the day and became part of it.”

—Kate Chopin, ‘Tante Cat’rinette’, from A Night in Acadie, 1897.

“The excitement was all over, and they were gone. How still it was when they were gone! Mamzelle Aurélie stood upon the gallery, looking and listening. She could no longer see the cart; the red sunset and the blue-gray twilight had together flung a purple mist across the fileds and road that hid it from her view. She could no longer hear the wheezing and creaking of its wheels. But she could still faintly hear the shrill, glad voices of the children.”

—Kate Chopin, ‘Regret’, from A Night in Acadie, 1897.

“She would not permit green tea to be introduced into her house, and those who could not or would not drink coffee might drink tisane of fleur de Laurier for all she cared.”

—Kate Chopin, ‘A Matter of Prejudice’, from A Night in Acadie, 1897.

“‘La belle Zoraide had eyes that were so dusky, so beautiful, that any man who gazed too long into their depths was sure to lose his head, and even his heart sometimes. Her soft, smooth skin was the color of café-au-lait.’”

—Kate Chopin, ‘La Belle Zoraide’, from Bayou Folk, 1894.

“He went and stood at the foot of the table, opposite to where Madame Delmandé sat, and let fall the box upon it.
    The thing in falling shattered, and from its bursting sides gold came, clicking, spinning, gliding, some of it like oil; rolling along the table and off it to the floor, but heaped up, the bulk of it, before the tramp.
    ‘Here’s money!’ he called out, plunging his old hand in the thick of it.”

—Kate Chopin, ‘A Wizard from Gettysburg’, from Bayou Folk, 1894.

“When she had made her way through the brush and scrub cottonwood-trees that lined the opposite bank, she found herself upon the border of a field where the white, bursting cotton, with the dew upon it, gleamed for acres and acres like frosted silver in the early dawn.”

—Kate Chopin, ‘Beyond the Bayou’, from Bayou Folk, 1894.

“He held the rose by its long, hardy stem, and swept it lightly and caressingly across her forehead, along her cheek, and over her pretty mouth and chin, as a lover might have done with his lips. He noticed how the red rose left a crimson stain behind it.”

—Kate Chopin, ‘In and Out of Old Natchitoches’, from Bayou Folk, 1894.

“You know how it is. A three-hundred dollar suit doesn’t knock your eye out. A Ming vase doesn’t shriek for attention. But the ultimate beauty, the perfection, is there; and you’ll always see it if you look long enough, see it and recognize it, regardless of whether you’ve ever seen it before.
    Even if you’ve caught so much crap in your eyes that you’re half-blind in one and can’t see out of the other . . .”

—Jim Thompson, WIld Town, 1957. The ellipses are his.

“‘Oh, now, really, Mr. McKenna,’ the operator laughed. ‘I’ll bet that’s your secret ambition, isn’t it? To be a writer?’
    ‘Well,’ Bugs shrugged easily, ‘why not? Nothing much to it that I can see, once you’ve got a plot. Just putting words down on paper.’
    ‘Now, that’s true, isn’t it? If you’ve got a good idea, why, anyone could make a good story out of it. It certainly can’t take any brains to do that.’”

—Jim Thompson, WIld Town, 1957.

So . . . this summer I’ve been reading books from this list of the top 100 English-language novels since 1923, many of which I had never read, or even heard of before. Last night I finished An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, all 874 pages of it. Yes, I read it all. OK . . . I may have skimmed a few paragraphs of courtroom drama, but still, I finished it! My review? Uh . . . I would say it was interesting and ahead of its time. I will call it a powerful and insightful social satire. A few good color quotes (see below). A must to read if you’re trying to read everything on a list of the top 100 English-language novels since 1923.

“[I]n the orchard of a spring day later, between her fourteenth and eighteenth years when the early May sun was making pink lamps of every aged tree and the ground was pinkly carpeted with the falling and odorous petals, she would stand and breathe and sometimes laugh, or even sigh, her arms upreached or thrown wide to life. To be alive! To have youth and the world before one.”

—Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925.

“But canoeing fascinated him really. He was pleased by the picturesque and summery appearance he made in an outing shirt and canvas shoes paddling about Crum Lake in one of the bright red or green or blue canoes that were leased by the hour. And at such times these summer scenes appeared to possess an airy, fairy quality, especially with a summer cloud or two hanging high above in the blue.”

—Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925.

“The insidious beauty of this place! Truly, it seemed to mock him—this strangeness—this dark pool, surrounded on all sides by those wonderful, soft, fir trees. And the water itself looking like a huge, black pearl cast by some mighty hand, in anger possibly, in sport or phantasy maybe, into the bottom of this valley of dark, green plush—and which seemed bottomless as he gazed into it. . . .

And again he lowered his head and gazed into the fascinating and yet treacherous depths of that magnetic, bluish, purple pool, which, as he continued to gaze, seemed to change its form kaleidoscopically to a large, crystalline ball. But what was that moving about in this crystal? A form! It came nearer—clearer—and as it did so, he recognized Roberta struggling and waving her thin white arms out of the water and reaching toward him! God! How terrible! The expression on ther face! What in God’s name was he thinking of anyway? Death! Murder!”

—Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925.

“‘I bring you, Clyde, the mercy and the salvation of your God. He has called on me and I have come. He has sent me that I may say unto you though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white—like snow. Though they be red, like crimson, they shall be as wool. Come now, let us reason together with the Lord.’”

—Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925.

“The relation of light to transparent color is, when you come to look into it deeply, infinitely fascinating, and when the colors flare up, merge into one another, arise anew, and vanish, it is like taking breath in great pauses from one eternity to the next, from the greatest light down to the solitary and eternal silence in the deepest shades. The opaque colors, in contrast, are like flowers that do not dare to compete with the sky. . . . It is is these, however, that are able . . . to produce such pleasing variations and such natural effects that . . . ultimately the transparent colors end up as no more than spirits playing above them and serve only to enhance them.”

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from the ‘Supplement’ to his Farbenlehre [Theory of Color], quoted by Walter Benjamin in ‘A Glimpse Into the World of Children’s Books’, 1926, translated by Rodney Livingstone; from The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, 2008.

“Sitting before his painted book, [the child] makes the Taoist vision of perfection come true: he overcomes the illusory barrier of the book’s surface and passes through colored textures and brightly painted partitions to enter a stage on which the fairy tale lives. Hua, the Chinese word for ‘painting’ is much like gua, meaning ‘attach’: you attach five colors to the things. In German, the word used in anlegen: you ‘lay on’ colors. In such an open color-bedecked world where everything shifts at every step, the child is allowed to join in the game. Draped with colors of every hue that he has picked up from reading and viewing, the child stands in the center of a masquerade and joins in.”

—Walter Benjamin, ‘A Glimpse Into the World of Children’s Books’, 1926, translated by Rodney Livingstone; from The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, 2008.

“Just think of the many games that proceed from pure perception to fantasy: soap bubbles, parlor games, the watery color of the magic lantern, watercolor painting, decals. In all of these, the color seems to hover suspended above the things. Their magic lies not in the colored thing or in the mere dead color, but in the colored glow, the colored brilliance, the ray of colored light.”

—Walter Benjamin, ‘A Glimpse Into the World of Children’s Books’, 1926, translated by Rodney Livingstone; from The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, 2008.

“it’s a very strange movie
It is strange as dulcet gray.”

—Jack Kerouac, ‘Cerrada Medellin Blues, (Second Solo), 3rd Chorus’, from Book of Blues, 1995.

“I was broiled in the oven
Of heaven in the silver foil
Of Devil Jesus God
Which is Yr Holy Trinity”

—Jack Kerouac, ‘Horror’, from Book of Blues, 1995.

“My real choice was to go
to Princeton—I wanted
to be orange and black
on the football field”

—Jack Kerouac, ‘Orizaba 210 Blues, 50th Chorus’, from Book of Blues, 1995.

“Orizaba rooftop, Orizaba Rooftop,
Blue, blue, blue
Blue’s made of shiny everyway”

—Jack Kerouac, ‘Orizaba 210 Blues, 61st Chorus’, from Book of Blues, 1995.

“The diamond that cuts through
To the other view
That I painted all white for you”

—Jack Kerouac, ‘Orizaba 210 Blues, 19th Chorus’, from Book of Blues, 1995.

“‘Ah Rose,’ I cried,
‘Shine in the Phosphorescent
Night.’”

—Jack Kerouac, ‘Rose’, from Book of Blues, 1995.

“At Grand Island he ate dinner, and the food sobered him somewhat. It sobered him too much, in fact, for he could not stand himself sober these days. He began drinking again, as soon as he was on the Verdon train, and gradually the world reassumed its roseate hue.”

—Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder, 1946.

“And I laughed because everything was laughter. There was the smell of fresh earth and yellow dust, and a great pile that was a mountain of gold (like Pop is going to find); and the gold spouted downward from a pipe in the sky, falling around my head, mounting above my feet like golden sand, above my waist and shoulders. And I was looking into the man’s eyes, far above, and he was looking down into mine, and I knew that we were playing a game, that he was going to hide me beneath the gold; and I could not understand why Mom came racing across the field nor why the man’s teeth bared like a frightened dog’s. But I knew that everything was good, and I laughed.”

—Jim Thompson, Now and On Earth, 1942.

“[S]he’d saw away on that damn fiddle until the sky was green and you’d sit with your eyes closed, tapping on the arm of your chair, and no one dared to say a word. . . .”

—Jim Thompson, Now and On Earth, 1942.

“The din was so terrific that the boys’ ears ached from it, but they were too busy gawking to mind. The plant was one great seemingly unbounded room, with steel rafters from which traveling cranes were suspended. At one end of the room, the end which they were passing, were the embryos of more than a dozen different types of farm implements—the bare unpainted chasis of threshers, combines, mowers, balers, and so on—drawn up in the manner of animals beginning a race. (And indeed the men who worked upon them were racing.) Perhaps fifty feet away was a parallel line, and here the embryos were a little easier to identify for what they were, or would be. And beyond that was a third line, and a fourth, and a tenth, each advancing the growth of the implement by a step or two until it was finished.
     The last line was so far away that the men were mere specks—bobbing bug-like fixtures, moving in what seemed to be a rainbow-haze of reds and yellows and blues.
    Those were the spray-painters, Simpson explained, and some of them made as much as seven dollars a day. He did not explain that they had no teeth after six months, little eyesight after a year, and that their occupational expectancy was about three years.”

—Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder, 1946.

“‘When a thing’s funny,’ said Sherman, ‘a man ought to laugh. You hadn’t ought to hold in anything like that.’ His hard blue gaze struck the clerk like a blow. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Laugh.’”

—Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder, 1946.

“‘Seems to me I’d learn how to run one of the machines.’
    ‘I won’t! Never!’ Grant exclaimed so hotly that his father almost looked upon him with favor. He liked a man with principles, even if they were the wrong kind. ‘I’ll set type by hand, like it was meant to be set, or not at all!’
    ‘Well, set it by hand, then,’ said Link. ‘There’s lots of papers that don’t have this Lin-o-type yet.’”

—Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder, 1946.