November 2008 Archives

“What went on in No.1’s brain? He painted to himself a cross-section through that brain, painted neatly with grey water-colour on a sheet of paper stretched on a drawing-board with drawing-pins. The whorls of grey matter swelled to entrails, they curled round one another like muscular snakes, became vague and misty like the spiral nebulae on astronomical charts. . . . What went on in the inflated grey whorls? One knew everything about the far-away nebulae, but nothing about the whorls.”

—Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, 1941.

“ ‘ “It is necessary to hammer every sentence into the masses by repetition and simplification. What is presented as right must shine like gold; what is presented as wrong must be black as pitch. For consumption by the masses, the political process must be coloured like ginger-bread figures at a fair.” ’ ”

—Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, 1941.

“He stopped at the window and leaned his forehead against the pane. Over the machine-gun tower one could see a patch of blue. It was pale, and reminded him of that particular blue which he had seen overhead when as a boy he lay on the grass in his father’s park, watching the poplar branches slowly moving against the sky.”

—Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, 1941.

Meet Sol Sender (a pretty good name, that), the designer of the Obama logo (a plum assignment, this), at “The ‘O’ in Obama”, by Steven Heller.

“Please don’t tell anybody, but Mark Nechtr desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you’re going to die. Maybe it’s called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism, Or gfhrytytu. He doesn’t know. He wonders who the hell really cares. Maybe it’s not called anything.”

—David Foster Wallace, ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’, Girl With Curious Hair, 1989.

“ ‘Why you’re pissed is that I only said I thought a twenty-page poem that’s all punctuation wouldn’t be much fun for anybody to actually read.’”

—David Foster Wallace, ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’, Girl With Curious Hair, 1989.

“ ‘The ocean looks like a big blue dog to me, sometimes.’ Faye says, looking. Julie puts an arm around Faye’s bare shoulders.”

—David Foster Wallace, ‘Little Expressionless Animals’, Girl With Curious Hair, 1989.

“ ’I was convinced I could sing like a wire at Kelvin, high and pale, burn without ignition or friction, shine cool as a lemony moon, mated to a lattice of pure meaning.’”

—David Foster Wallace, ‘Here and There’, Girl With Curious Hair, 1989.

“I smoothed the blue dress I’d slipped on in Letterman’s putty-colored green room.”

—David Foster Wallace, ‘My Appearance’, Girl With Curious Hair, 1989.

“This storm’s not a really bad Midwest storm, she remarks, as they stand by the scarecrow in the horizontal rain. Too windy to be really dangerous. The bad storms always hide behind a dead calm and a yellow-green sky. That’s when you head for the cellar.”

—David Foster Wallace, ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’, Girl With Curious Hair, 1989.

A T-shirt from TypeTees, a subsidary of Threadless. I like the sentiment, and the colors are perfect. The font, Century Schoolbook, is a good choice. But . . . the letterspacing is too tight, AND SOMEBODY MUST HAVE HIT THE CAPS LOCK; THE MONOTONOUS OF CAPITALS IS ANNOYING AND EVEN, TO MY EYE, OBNOXIOUS. I would have preferred some lower-case letters. It’s poetry, right? I don’t understand why the variation in leading between colors was necessary, unless it was to  give the screenprinters of error. And . . .
a hatch mark, a foot sign, rather than an actual apostrophe? Typographically, this shirt is a trainwreck. But still, it’s funny. I’ll give it a B+.

“There are nine different words in Maya for the color blue in the comprehensive Porrua Spanish-Maya Dictionary but just three Spanish translations, leaving six butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving beyond doubt that when a language dies six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth.”

—Earl Shorris, ‘The last word: Can the world’s small languages be saved?’, Harper’s Magazine, August 2000.

“Colors challenge language to encompass them. (It cannot; there are more sensations than words for them. Our eyes are far ahead of our tongues.)”

—Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise, 2002.

“In sun that burns white-hot I say aloud the names of Nevada mines for a coolness that a word might bring. The Blue Fern Mine. The Blue Goose Claim. The Blue Jay, Blue Matrix, Blue Friday, Blue Silver, Easter Blue MInes. Mines that come in shades—New, Royal, and Sky Blue—and in certainty: the Right Blue Claim.”

—Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise, 2002.

“Turquoise changes color. Sometimes its color vanishes—one early source calls it ‘air green.’ The wearer can influence these changes. Turquoise is a sympathetic gem.”

—Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise, 2002.

“It has been shown that the words for colors enter evolving languages in this order, nearly universally: black, white, and red, then yellow and green (in either order), with green covering blue until blue comes into itself. Once blue is acquired, it eclipses green. Once named, blue pushes green into a less definite version. Green confusion is manifest in turquoise, the is-it-blue-or-is-it-green color.”

—Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise, 2002.

“In the funhouse mirror-room you can’t see yourself go on forever, because no matter how you stand, your head gets in the way. Even if you had a glass periscope, the image of your eye would cover up the thing you really wanted to see.”

—John Barth, ‘Lost in the Funhouse’, Lost in the Funhouse, 1968.

“Words begin as description. They are prismatic, vehicles of hidden, deeper shades of thought. You can hold them up at different angles until the light bursts through in an unexpected color.”

—Susan Brind Morrow, The Names of Things, 1998.

“The author would like to acknowledge that he does not look good in red. Or pink, or orange, or even yellow—he is not a spring.”

—Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 2001.

“There is no logic to San Francisco . . . a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It’s the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons. Why not pink, purple, rainbow, gold? What color for a biker bar on 16th, near the highway? Plum. Plum.”

—Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 2001.

“‘Drink, the Irish opium, was his solace. Only the sacred pint could unbind his tongue and naturally an excess of sacred pints had him prostrated in his ‘mulberrycoloured, multicoloured, multitudinous vomit.’”

—Edna O’Brien, James Joyce, 1999.

“Blue was a color which had for him, with his host of superstitions, a talismanic significance. It was the color of his eyes and the color which would grace the cover of the first edition of Ulysses. . . .”

—Edna O’Brien, James Joyce, 1999.

We’ve all heard the expression ‘purple monkey dishwasher,’ of course we have! But what does it mean? Well . . . if you have to ask, then you don’t know. And if you don’t know . . . just check The Urban Dictionary.

If you appreciate good design and have 25 minutes for a relaxing spot of twentieth-century British telly, you might enjoy this.

“Artist through, I’d been wont since boyhood when pissing on beach or bank to make designs and clever symbols with my water. From this source, as from Pegasus’s idle hooftap on Mount Helicon, sprang now a torrent of inspiration: using tanned skins in place of a sand-beach, a seagull-feather for my tool, and a mixture of wine, blood, and squid-ink for a medium, I developed a kind of coded markings to record the utterance of mind and heart. By drawing out these chains of symbols I could so preserve and display my tale, it was unnecessary to remember it. I could therefore compose more and faster; I came largely to exchange song for written speech. . . .”

—John Barth, ‘Anonymiad’, Lost in the Funhouse, 1968.

“If I’m going to be a fictional character G declared to himself I want to be in a rousing good yarn as they say, not some piece of avant-garde preciousness.”

—John Barth, ‘Life-Story’, Lost in the Funhouse, 1968.

“Zhang Huaiguan, a well-known calligraphic theorist of the Tang dynasty, claimed in his Critical Reviews on Calligraphy (Shu duan) that Cang Jie, the legendary creator of the Chinese script . . . had four eyes that were capable of communing with the Divinity. ‘He looked up to observe the changing view of the constellations, and gazed around to scrutinize the patterns on turtle shells and the tracks of birds and beasts. He picked a wide variety of beautiful forms and combined them into characters.’ According to Zhang, character construction occurs when people commune with nature and merge its beauty with their own spirit.”

—Ouyang Zhongshi & Wen C. Fong, Chinese Calligraphy, translated & edited by Wang Youfen, 2008.

“Commenting on the liveliness of ancient characters, Wei Heng (259-291), a calligrapher of the Western Jin dynasty, wrote in his On the Four Types of Scripts (Si ti shu shi) that they evoke ‘patches of clouds drifting leisurely in the sky, myriads of stars blinking from above, crops heavily laden with drooping ears, mountains undulating into folds, insects ready to crawl away, and birds just starting to take flight.’”

—Ouyang Zhongshi & Wen C. Fong, Chinese Calligraphy, translated & edited by Wang Youfen, 2008.

“The celebrated Tang dynasty writer Han Yu described how his contemporary Zhang Xu, a master in cursive script, was able to create a calligraphic counterpart for what he saw in nature: ‘mountains and rivers, valleys and cliffs, birds and animals, insects and fish, the flowering of trees and the seeding of grass; sun and moon, the constellations, wind and rain, water and fire, thunder and lightning, dancing and fighting, and the vicissitudes of all things in heaven and earth. Rejoicing over them, amazed by them, he would express them through his calligraphy. . . .’ This depth of expression available through the cursive script gave readers a level of aesthetic enjoyment that often exceeded their expectations.”

—Ouyang Zhongshi & Wen C. Fong, Chinese Calligraphy, translated & edited by Wang Youfen, 2008.

“‘What’s with these titles? “Dance of the Insecure”? “To the Mall”? “Threnody Jones and the Goat from Below”? “The Enema Bandit and the Cosmic Buzzer”? “Love”? “A Metamorphosis for the Eighties”?’
    ‘That last one is actually rather interesting. A Kafka parody, though sensitively done. Self-loathing-in-the-midst-of-adulation piece. Collegiate, but interesting.’
    ‘ “As Greg Sampson awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he discovered that he had been transformed into a rock star. He gazed down at his red, as it were leather-clad, chest, the top of which was sprinkled with sequins and covered with a Fender guitar strapped tightly across his leather shoulders. It was no dream.” Hmmm.’”

—David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System, 1987.

“But what of Lenore, of Lenore’s hair? Here is hair that is clearly within and of itself every color—blond and red and jet-black-blue and honeynut—but which effects an outward optical compromise with possibility that consists of appearing simply dull brown, save for brief teasing glimpses out of the corner of one’s eye. . . .
    And her eyes. I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.
    They are blue.”

—David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System, 1987. The ellipses are mine.

“By early 1956 . . . I could draw a straight line with a steel T square, for example. I could do simple pasteups and mechanicals. I could ‘spec’ type and do some primitive lettering. . . . I knew about repro proofs and photostats and Photo Lettering. I was trusted to black out cut lines on negative photostats, to cut mats, to ‘gang’ various small pieces of art for photostats. I managed to keep the job and was even given a small raise.
    But at night in the dark, alone with myself, graphic design seemed a chilly discipline. It was basically a function of the intellect, and I was still in the sweaty grip of romance, full of Hemingway, reading the poems of Garcia Lorca, soaking up James M. Cain, discovering the drawing of Heinrich Kley, copying George Grosz and Orozco. I still loved drawing human bodies, hair and teeth and flesh. I had much less interest in squares, circles, triangles, or the delicacies of Caslon Bold.”

—Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life: A Memoir, 1994.

“In the agency, I was trying to letter a line of copy in Clarendon Bold and suddenly Orozco tore across my mind. I sat at the bar in the Caton Inn with Catherine and imagined hard brown mountains, cactus, distant volcanoes; bandidos out of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; pyramids and lost cities; cantinas full of music and tequila and brown-skinned women.”

—Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life: A Memoir, 1994.

“It is the winter of 1939. I remember the kitchen, with its intricately patterned blue-and-red linoleum floors, and windows that opened into a garden where an elm tree rose higher than the house. The kitchen light was beautiful: suffused with a lemony green in summer, dazzling when winter snow garnished the limbs of the elm tree.”

—Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life: A Memoir, 1994.

”The gang at our end of the Neighborhood was called the Tigers, most of them Irish. Their great rivals were the South Brooklyn Boys, most of them Italian. They all wore variations on the zoot suit, brightly colored trousers with a three-or-four-inch rise above the belt, ballooning knees, tight thirteen-inch pegged ankles. The rear pockets were covered with gun-shaped flaps of a different color, called pistol pockets; sometimes a bright saddle stitch would run down the seam of the trouser leg. If the trousers were a bright green, the pistol pockets, narrow belt, and saddle stitches might all be yellow. Or the combination would be maroon and gray. Or black and tan. Or purple and pale blue. The colors and combinations were drastic, radical, personal, at once an affirmation of their owner’s uniqueness and a calculated affront to those locked in the gray dark memory of the Depression, the khaki and navy blue palette of the war, or suit-and-tie respectability.”

—Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life: A Memoir, 1994..