January 2009 Archives

“Horace met Snopes emerging from the barbershop, his jowls gray with powder, moving in an effluvium of pomade. In the bosom of his shirt, beneath his bow tie, he wore an imitation ruby stud which matched his ring. The tie was of blue polka-dots; the very white spots on it appeared dirty when seen close; the whole man with his shaved neck and pressed clothes and gleaming shoes emanated somehow the idea that he had been dry-cleaned rather than washed.”

—William Faulkner, Sanctuary, 1931.

“Tommy’s eyes glowed again, the pale irises appearing for an instant to spin on the pupils like tiny wheels.”

—William Faulkner, Sanctuary, 1931.

Thank you Natalie Smith!

“Though there was an east wind blowing, the sky was blue and there was a feeling of spring in the air. The High Street, with its colours washed clean by the wind and its lines sharp as though drawn with a new pen, looked like a picture by Samuel Scott, quiet and naive and cosy: now, looking back; then it looked like nothing but High Street, Blackstable.”

—W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, 1930.

“And sometimes the road was only a lane, with thick hawthorn hedges, and the green elms overhung it on either side so that when you looked up there was only a strip of blue sky between. And as you rode along in the warm, keen air you had a sensation that the world was standing still and life would last for ever.”

—W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, 1930.

“The sky was blue and the air, warm and yet fresh, crackled, as it were, with heat. The light was brilliant without harshness. The sun’s beams seemed to hit the white road with a directed energy and bounce back like a rubber ball.”

—W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, 1930.

“He moved along and stood finally in a room filled with images of Chairman Mao. Photocopy Mao, silk-screen Mao, wallpaper Mao, synthetic-polymer Mao. A series of silk screens was installed over a broader surface of wallpaper serigraphs, the Chairman’s face a pansy purple here, floating nearly free of its photographic source.”

—Don DeLillo, Mao II, 1991.

“I have the sort of eyelashes, black and shaped like bats’ wings, that imply I’m wearing eyeliner, and the good fortune this has occasionally wrought is nothing compared to the grief, the stares, the constant Robert Smith comparisons.”

—Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, 2002.

“The sun was everywhere and the landscape went curvy. Green hills, red hills, then hills covered in thin-trunked mop-topped trees. Then a huge red city, to the left of the road, Benguérir, red like barns, of clay and stone, ancient, unchanged and terrifying, low-lying and endless. A few miles later the land sprouted hills, olive trees—it was so green! Soft curves and such green. I had never lived anywhere with this kind of drama.”

—Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, 2002.

“ ‘Man, I hope we meet some Tuareg guys.’
    ‘What guys?’
    ‘The Tuareg? You know the Tuareg.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘The Tuareg? They’re the blue men?’
    I wanted to throw rocks at his head.
    ‘Tell me,’ I said.
    ‘Blue men. I think that’s what the word means. Blue men. These guys were badasses. They’re like nomadic trader-thieves, who would spring out from the Sahara and rob caravans. They were insane. Blue eyes, blue skin and everything. Scariest people ever. Twelve feet tall.’
    I squinted at him, wondering how I’d get along if I ditched him in Casablanca.
    ‘You don’t believe me?’ he asked, offended. ‘Ask anyone in Morocco about the Tuareg. Or the blue men. Say blue men and watch them run in terror.’ ”

—Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, 2002.

“There is a corner of the sea that is deep but not so deep that it’s black. It’s the blue of a blueberry, violet in its heart, though this blue allows light through its million unseeable pores. The hue is evenly painted but electric, a klieg light pushing through a gel of cyan. But invading this blue are clouds of inky purple, billowing clouds curling in small waves, and they grow from below, splitting the sea between light above and dark growing from below.
    Turn it upside down and this was the sky above Riga.”

—Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, 2002.

The new Animal Collective album cover, designed by Akiyoshi Kitaoka,

“I once met a woman with a serious phobia of butterflies, even dead ones pinned under glass; it would have been child’s play to mindfuck her by hinting at the presence of butterflies under the bed. The mindfucker is a student of human weakness and vulnerability, using these traits of create false beliefs and emotional chaos. Perhaps this is part of the reason the mindfucker seems a more unsavoury character than the bullshitter (for whom we reserve a modicum of pity). The mindfuck (in the negative sense) is a dark and sinister thing, going far beyond the merely cognitive wrongdoing of the kind perpetrated by lies and bullshit.“

—Colin McGinn, Mindfucking, 2008.

“ ‘[I]f the bones are found to be yellow like wax, that is the first sign that the Lord has glorified the righteous deceased; and if they are found to be not yellow but black, it means that the Lord has not deemed him worthy of his glory—that is how it is on Athos, a great place, where Orthodoxy from of old has been preserved inviolate and in shining purity.’. . .”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990.

“The walls were adorned with blue wallpaper, all tattered, it is true, and behind it, in the cracks, cockroaches swarmed in terrible numbers, so that there was an incessant rustling.”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990.

“Come out here where the roses have opened.
Let soul and world meet.

The sun has drawn a fine-tempered blade
of light. We may as well surrender.”

—Rumi, “Empty,” Rumi: Bridge to the Soul, translated by Coleman Barks, 2007.

Graphics, Art, And Photography From The Obama Campaign.

“How daring it was to represent the quarterly shortfalls in revenue with the color purple—the color associated not only with kings but also with the skin of slaves, an obvious yet powerful homage to Alice Walker's seminal novel. By rejecting the fixed ironic conventions of green and black (colors of mold, death, and despair) for profits and red (blood and lust) for losses, you transcended the common criticism that capitalism is animalistic and decadent. The postmodern color scheme instead offered a fascinating contradiction, one that simultaneously said, ‘I am master of my destiny,’ and ‘I am trapped by the projections required as a condition of my employment, and am but a slave to outcomes that are way beyond my control.’. . .”

—Ross Brown, “Critique of Your Powerpoint Presentation Titled ‘Sales Forecast, Third Quarter,’” a recent feature at McSweeney’s.

Thank you Jenny Green!

I had never seen or heard his name until I saw this thumbnail sized picture of Reasons to be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barny Bubbles at DesignObserver. But as a young punk rock slash new waver in the late 1970s, I knew his work. I admired it all the way into a career in graphic design slash graphic design pedagogy. And yet I never knew his name. That’s not surprising, though. By the end of his career Barney worked anonymously or pseudonymously (that is to say, with a credit that was at least cryptic). Finally, through the book and by way of friends and fans, his story is being told. I haven’t read or seen the book yet, but I’ve been snooping around the internet . . . and these are a few of my favorite online Barney Bubbles information resources:

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/?p=1296

“Favoring beige, rust, and cocoa-brown in his professional wardrobe, soft and round-faced and vestigially freckled, with a helmetish haircut and a smile that always looked pained no matter how real the cheer, Terry Schmidt had been described by one of Scott R. Laleman’s toadies in Technical Processing as looking like a ’70s yearbook photo come to life.”

—David Foster Wallace, “Mister Squishy,” Oblivion, 2004.

“Fern, by the way, has reddish hair and slightly asymmetrical green eyes—the kind of green people buy tinted contact lenses to get—and is attractive in a sort of witchy way. I think she’s attractive, anyway.”

—David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon,” Oblivion, 2004.

“Dr. G. would later say that the whole my life flashed before me phenomenon at the end is more like being a whitecap on the surface of the ocean, meaning that it’s only at the moment you subside and start sliding back in that you’re really even aware there’s an ocean at all. When you’re up and out there as a whitecap you might talk and act as if you know you’re just a whitecap on the ocean, but deep down you don’t think there’s really an ocean at all. It’s almost impossible to. Or like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s part of, etc. There are all sorts of ways to try to express it.”

—David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon,” Oblivion, 2004.

“In dark times the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.”

—David Foster Wallace, from an interview with Larry McCaffrey published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993.

“If you are a native of the rain forest, you learn to distinguish many sorts of leaves. We learn to distinguish many different typefaces.”

—Virginia Postrel, “Pricing Beauty: Reflections on Aesthetics and Value, An Interview with Virginia Postrel,” Gain 2.0, AIGA Business and Design Conference, September 2002; quoted in A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink, 2005.

“I want a lavender Cadillac
Don’t want it green or blue or black
Just a lavender Cadillac”

—“I Want a Lavender Cadillac,” Maurice King & His Wolverines with Bea Baker, 1952.

“And Mitya, as he remembered, suddenly became terribly interested in his [the interrogator’s] big rings, one with an amethyst, and another with a bright yellow stone, transparent and of a most wonderful brilliance. And for a long time afterwards he recalled with surprise how these rings irresistibly drew his eye even through all those terrible hours of interrogation, so that for some reason he was unable to tear himself away and forget them as something quite unsuitable in his position.”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990.

“ ‘Snowball berries, how red they are!’ he whispered, not knowing why. Quietly, with careful, noiseless steps, he approached the window and stood on tiptoe. Before him lay the whole of Fyodor Pavlovich’s bedroom. It was a small room, divided all the way across by red screens, ‘Chinese,’ as Fyodor Pavlovich called them. ‘Chinese’ raced through Mitya’s mind, ‘and behind the screens—Grushenka.’ ”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990.

“ ‘For each blade of grass, each little bug, ant, golden bee, knows its way amazingly; being without reason, they witness to the divine mystery, they ceaselessly enact it.’ ”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990.

“ ‘Had you accepted the world and Caesar’s purple, you would have founded a universal kingdom and granted universal peace. For who shall possess mankind if not those who possess their conscience and give them their bread? And so we took Caesar’s sword, and in taking it, of course, we rejected you and followed him.’ ”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990. The Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition is addressing a reincarnated Jesus. This dusty old classic gets out there! I think I can detect its influence on David Foster Wallace, who mentions “The Brothers K” in Infinite Jest.