September 2008 Archives

“The paths made by deer and bear became roads and then highways, with towns in turn springing up along them and along the rivers Tallahatchie and Sunflower which joined and became the Yazoo, the River of the Dead of the Choctaws—the thick, slow, black, unsunned streams almost without current, which once each year ceased to flow at all and then reversed, spreading, drowning the rich land and subsiding again, leaving it still richer.”

—William Faulkner, ‘Delta Autumn’, Go Down, Moses, 1942.

“[F]rom time to time the great blue dog would open his eyes, not as if he were listening to them but as though to look at the woods for a moment before closing his eyes again, to remember the woods or to see that they were still there. He died at sundown.”

—William Faulkner, ‘The Bear’, Go Down, Moses, 1942.

“‘He gonter growl when he catches Old Ben’s throat,’ Sam said. ‘But he aint gonter never holler, no more than he ever done when he was jumping at that two-inch door. It’s that blue dog in him. What you call it?’
    ‘Airedale,’ the boy said.”

—William Faulkner, ‘The Bear’, Go Down, Moses, 1942.

“He was four inches over six feet; he had the mind of a child, the heart of a horse, and little hard shoe-button eyes without depth or meanness or generosity or viciousness or gentleness or anything else, in the ugliest face the boy had ever seen. It looked like somebody had found a walnut a little larger than a football and with a machinist’s hammer had shaped features into it and then painted it, mostly red; not Indian red but a fine bright ruddy color which whisky might have had something to do with but which was mostly just happy and violent out-of-doors, the wrinkles in it not the residue of the forty years it had survived but from squinting into the sun or into the gloom of canebrakes where game had run, baked into it by the camp fires before which he had lain trying to sleep on the cold November or December ground while waiting for daylight so he could rise and hunt again, as though time were merely something he walked through as he did through air, aging him no more than air did.”

—William Faulkner, ‘The Bear’, Go Down, Moses, 1942.

“There was always a bottle present, so that it would seem to him that those fine fierce instants of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the pagan’s base and baseless hope of acquiring thereby the virtues of cunning and strength and speed but in salute to them.”

—William Faulkner, ‘The Bear’, Go Down, Moses, 1942.

“‘We need numbers, letters, maps, graphs. We need scientific formulas to understand the structure of matter. E equals MC squared.’
    He wrote the equation on the blackboard.
    ‘How is it that a few marks chalked on a blackboard, a few little squiggly signs can change the shape of human history? Energy, mass, speed of light. Protons, neutrons, electrons. How small is the atom? I will tell you. If people were the size of atoms—think about it, Gagliardi—the population of the earth would fit on the head of a pin. Never mind the vast amounts of energy stored in matter. Matter. Something that has mass—a solid, a liquid, a gas. Never mind what happens when we split the atom and release this energy. Energy. The capacity of a physical system to do work. I want to know how it is that a few marks on a slate or a piece of paper, a little black on white, or white on black, can carry so much information and contain such shattering implications. Never mind the energy packed in the atom. What about the energy contained in this equation? This is the real power. How the mind operates. How the mind identifies, analyzes and represents. What beauty and power. What marvels of imagination does it require to reduce the complex forces of nature, all those unseeable magical actions inside the atom—to express all this with a bing and a bang on a black board. The atom. The unit of matter regarded as the source of nuclear energy. The Greeks of the fifth century B.C. proposed the idea of the atom. B.C., Miss Innocenti. Before Chewing Gum. Small, small, small. Something inside something else inside something else. Down, down, down. Under, under, under. Next time, chapter seven. Be prepared for an oral quiz.’”

—Don DeLillo, Underworld, 1997.

If an album’s emotionality can be quantified in exclamation points, this recording by jazz saxophonist Jackie McLean seemingly defies competition. The double quotation marks, apostrophe, ellipsis, and 244 exclamation points suggest the slanted lines and dots of music notation. If we take the exclamation points to be quarter notes, this ‘score’ is one long tremolo (the rapid repetition of a single tone). Notice that the score even has a time signature: ‘it's time!’ Perhaps the three dots of the ellipsis indicate three beats to a measure. In any case, this album cover beautifully reminds us that there's punctuation in music and music in punctuation. (Album cover via www.gokudo.co.jp)

“‘Dad’s in the breezeway washing the car. Meanwhile way out here they were putting troops in trenches for nuclear war games. Fireballs roaring right above them.’
    ‘Positioned too close, you mean.’
    ‘That’s the story I hear. You look at your arm and see right through it. Basically your arm becomes an x ray of your arm. You can see right through the uniform cloth and the skin. The light’s so white. You can see blood, bones and what not. But that’s not all. You can see all this with your eyes shut. You don’t have to open your eyes. You see right through the lids. Ha!’”

—Don DeLillo, Underworld, 1997.

“The dune fields, the alkali flats, the whiteness, the whole white sea-bottomed world, the lines of white haze in the distance, the six-thousand-year-old mummified baby found in a cave near White City, yes, and there were animals that bleached themselves white over the eons, a once-brown mouse that color-matched itself to the gypsum drifts to escape the gaze of predators.
    The wind blew out of the Organ Mountains, busting up to fifty miles an hour, refiguring the dunes and turning the sky an odd dangerous gray that seemed a type of white gone mad.”

—Don DeLillo, Underworld, 1997.

“‘Long-distance, that’s the ticket. I got a cousin in Alabama, which he’s based in Birmingham, gets plenty of work long-hauling furniture and whatnot.’
    ‘I keep that in mind.’
    ‘Yellow yams from Birmingham.’
    ‘I place that on my list of things I need to think about.’
    ‘Greenest greens you ever seen,’ Antoine says a little croony.”

—Don DeLillo, Underworld, 1997.

“I walk in the door and see light strike the cool walls and bring out the color in the carpets, the apricots and clarets, the amazing topaz golds.”

—Don DeLillo, Underworld, 1997.

“Somebody hands you a piece of paper filled with letters and numbers and you have to make a ball game out of it. You create the weather, flesh out the players, you make them sweat and grouse and hitch up their pants, and it is remarkable, thinks Russ, how much earthly disturbance, how much summer and dust the mind can manage to order up from a single Latin letter lying flat.”

—Don DeLillo, Underworld, 1997.

Check this out: a nice abbreviated online history of graphic design from Nancy Stock-Allen, who teaches the subject at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

“The practicabillity of a type selection is as vital to typographic correctness as distinctive ‘atmosphere.’ An inharmonious color tone, a misfit size, an illegibility in mass, will transform the most appropriate ‘feeling’ into the most incongruous effect.’”

—Frederic Dannay, How to Use Modern Display Types, 1931; quoted by Steven Heller and Louise Fili in Typology: Type Design from the Victorian Era to the Digital Age, 1999.

“Type should be read. Too often . . . type is referred to as color. This is not wrong in itself, but leads to the next step which is to regard it as some grey matter which in turn can be cut up with scissors.”

—Erik Nitsche, quoted by Steven Heller and Louise Fili in Typology: Type Design from the Victorian Era to the Digital Age, 1999.

“Columns of justified and ragged type often were skewed beyond conventional margins; multiple type weights and faces from different type families were used unharmoniously in a single composition; and hot-metal type material (heavy rules and stock illustrations) were strewn willy nilly throughout the pages. A typical Dada design looked, in printer’s terms, like the contents of a hellbox (a receptacle for smashed and broken type bodies).”

—Steven Heller and Louise Fili, Typology: Type Design from the Victorian Era to the Digital Age, 1999.

“The meaningless lines or excrescences upon which so many modern designers, wthout ability to reach the higher beauties, rely, in their endeavor to conceal their lack of genius or taste, were never present in the type of the golden age of typography.”

—Frederic Goudy, The Art in Type Design, 1912; quoted in Typology: Type Design from the Victorian Era to the Digital Age by Steven Heller and Louise Fili, 1999. They add: “The golden age of which he speaks is the sixteenth century, when some of the classic ‘humanist’ faces (Bodoni, Garamond, Jensen) were introduced.”

“The business of printed lettering has now, under the spur of commercial competition, got altogether out of hand and gone mad.”

—Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography, 1930; quoted in Typology: Type Design from the Victorian Era to the Digital Age by Steven Heller and Louise Fili, 1999.

“‘Aunt Tempe shook out a dress and held it at an authoritative angle with her head tilted to match. ‘I must say I never heard of a red wedding before.’
    ‘American Beauty, Aunt Tempe!’ cried India, teasingly whisking it from her and beginning to dance about after Dabney, holding it high.
    ‘I stand corrected,’ said Aunt Tempe.
    ‘They fade out before they get to Shelley and Dabney,’ Laura told her consolingly.”

—Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding, 1946.

“‘Roxie, where are the Memphis mints?’
    ‘Great big pasteboard box yonder in de pantry, Miss Tempe,’ called Roxie. ‘Have to untie you de ribbon to git you a taste. But you ought to see dem Memphis ice slippers! Green!’
    Tempe went from the pantry to the back-porch icebox. ‘And hard as rocks—I know,’ she said. ‘And slippery—! People’ll lose them off their plates and they’ll slide across the floor from here to yonder, oh  me.’”

—Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding, 1946.

“The air was a kind of radiant haze, which disappeared into a dim blue among hanging boots above—a fragrant store dust that looked like gold dust in the light from the screen door. Cracker dust and flour dust and brown-sugar particles seemed to spangle the air the minute you stepped inside. (And she thought, in the Delta, all the air everywhere is filled with things—its the shining dust that makes it look so bright.)”

—Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding, 1946.

“Of all emblems, the circle or ‘tondo’ is the most soaked with meaning. From dimmest pre-history, it has symbolized the sun, whose power, in one disguise or another, flows through all matter. It represents, too, the seed and the cell, the head, the halo and the corona, bodily orifices, Zodiac wheels, the earth, the eye, and the egg, the unbroken cycle of life and the continuity of consciousness . . . as well as what Tibetans call the ‘mysterious golden flower of the soul.’”

“The square, too, has symbolic overtones. Early Chinese used it to represent the world. It also has been glorified as a sacred portal, and its four corners have served as visual metaphors for air, earth, fire, and water.”

“In downtown Seattle, for some reason, most of the excess buildings are beige. Seattleites complain of beige á vu: the sensation that they’ve seen that color before.”

—Tom Robbins, ‘Canyon of the Vaginas’, Wild Ducks Flying Backward; the short writings of Tom Robbins, 2005.

“Where are the men today whose lives are not beige; where are the writers whose style is not gray?”

—Tom Robbins, ‘Till Lunch Do Us Part’, Wild Ducks Flying Backward; the short writings of Tom Robbins, 2005.

“Pink is what red looks like when it kicks off its shoes and lets its hair down. Pink is the boudoir color, the cherubic color, the color of Heaven’s gates. (Not pearly or golden, brothers and sisters: pink.) Pink is as laid back as beige, but while beige is dull and bland, pink is laid back with attitude.”

—Tom Robbins, ‘The Eight-Story Kiss’, Wild Ducks Flying Backward; the short writings of Tom Robbins, 2005.

“The witch-girl who lives by the bend in the river is said to keep a fart in a bottle.
     It’s a poisonous fart, green as cabbage, loud as a shotgun; and after moonset or before moonrise, her hut is illuminated by its pale mephitic glow. For a time, passersby thought she had television.”

—Tom Robbins, ‘Moonlight Whoopee Cushion Sonata’, Wild Ducks Flying Backward; the short writings of Tom Robbins, 2005.

“I don’t believe that the world is made of quarks or electromagnetic waves, or stars, or planets, or any of these things. I believe the world is made of language.”

—Terence McKenna, quoted in ‘Terence McKenna’, Wild Ducks Flying Backward; the short writings of Tom Robbins, 2005.