July 2009 Archives

“But of all your wanings send us out your peppydecked ales and you’ll not be such a bad lot. The rye is well for whose amind but the wheateny one is proper lovely.”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“See the signs of suspicion! Count the hemisemidemicolons! Screamer caps and invented gommas, quoites puntlost, forced to farce! The pipette will say anything at all for a change.”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“Amid a fluorescence of spectracular mephiticism there caoculates through the inconoscope stealdily a still, the figure of a fellowchap in the wohly ghast, Popey O’Donoshough, the jesuneral of the russuates.”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“All the world loves a big gleaming jelly.”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“What I would like is a jade louistone to go with the moon’s increscent.”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“And it’s time that all paid tribute to this massive mortiality, the pink of punk perfection as photography in mud.”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“Prettimaid tints may try their taunts: apple, bacchante, custard, dove, eskimo, feldgrau, hematite, isingglass, jet, kipper, lucile, mimosa, nut, oysterette, prune, quasimodo, royal, sago, tango, umber, vanilla, wisteria, xray, yesplease, zaza, philomel, theerose. What are they all by?”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“. . . what roserude and oragious grows gelb and greem, blue out of the ind of it! Violet’s dyed! . . .
    Answer: A collideorscape!”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“Let me finish! Just a little judas tonic, my ghem of all jokes, to make you go green in the gazer. Do you hear what I’m seeing, hammet? And remember that golden silence gives consent, Mr Ankelgazer!”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“ . . . with a scrumptious cocked hat and three green, cheese and tangerine trinity plumes on the right handle side of his amarellous head. . . .”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“. . . the gleam of the glow of the shine of the sun through the dearth of the dirth on the blush of the brick of the viled ville of Barnehulme has dust turned to brown; . . .”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“Say them all but tell them apart, cadenzando coloratura! R is Rubretta and A is Arancia, Y is for Yilla and N for greeneriN. B is Boyblue with odalisque O while W waters the fleurettes of novembrance.”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“During dinner, it may be necessary to excuse yourself for a telephone call. However, it is far preferable to have a phone brought to the table. . . . [A]s a general rule, white telephones go with fish and poultry, and black ones with anything else.”

—Miss Piggy, Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life (As Told to Henry Beard), 1981.

“Don’t worry—the white wine came up with the fish.”

—Herman J. Mankiewicz, after being sick following a gourmet dinner. Quoted in MANK by Richard Meryman, 1978.

“Technicolor Yawn: Liquid Laugh.”

—Barry Humphries, glossary from Bazza Pulls It Off, 1972.

“Your right to wear a mint-green polyester leisure suit ends where it meets my eye.”

—Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life, 1978.

“It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people.”

—Charlton Heston in Soylent Green, 1973. Screenplay by
Stanley R. Greenberg.

“I believe I will dip my pink-and-white body in yon Roman tub. I feel a bit gritty after the affairs of the day.”

—W.C. Fields, My Little Chickadee, 1940.

“The violet hush of twilight was descending over Los Angeles as my hostess, Violet Hush, and I left its suburbs headed towards Hollywood. In the distance a glow of huge piles of burning motion-picture scripts lit up the sky. The crisp tang of frying writers and directors whetted my appetite. How good it was to be alive, I thought, inhaling deep lungfuls of coarbon monoxide.”

—S.J. Perelman, “Strictly from Hunger”, 1937.

“It is a gorgeous gold pocket watch. I’m proud of it. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch.”

—Woody Allen, The Nightclub Years, 1965–1968, 1972.

If you’re curious, but can’t watch it all, jump right to part 3.

“Hoost! Ahem! There’s Ada, Bett, Celia, Delia, Ena, Fretta, Gilda, Hilda, Ita, Jess, Katty, Lou (they make me cough as sure as I read them) Mina, Nippa, Opsy, Poll, Queeniee, Ruth, Saucy, Trix, Una, Vela, Wanda, Xenia, Yva, Zuluma, Phoebe, Thelma. And Mee!”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“. . . Jarl von Hoother Boanerges himself, the old terror of the dames, came hip hop handihap out through the pikeopened arkway of his three shuttoned castles, in his broadginger hat and his civic cholar and his allabuff hemmed and his bullbraggin soxandgloves and his ladbroke breeks and his cattegut bandolair and his furframed panuncular cumbottes like a rudd yellan gruebleen orangeman in his violet indigonation, to the whole longth of the strongth of his bowman’s bill.”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world?”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

“(The black stream, catching on a sunken rock,
Flung backward on itself in one white wave,
And the white water rode the black forever,
Not gaining but not losing . . .)”

—Robert Frost, “West-Running Brook”, 1928.

“Waken! my people, to the boughs green
With ripening fruit within you!”

—William Carlos Williams, “The Wanderer”, 1914.

“The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As sponges—buckets—do—”

—Emily Dickinson, “The Brain is wider than the sky” (#126), 1924.

“Inebriate of Air—am I—
And Debauchee of Dew—
Reeling—thro endless summer days—
From inns of Molten Blue—”

—Emily Dickinson, “I taste a liquor never brewed” (#214), 1924.

“The question is, what color will everything be at that moment when I come for you? What will the sky be saying?
    Personally, I like a chocolate-colored sky. Dark, dark chocolate. People say it suits me. I do, however, try to enjoy every color I see—the whole spectrum. A billion or so flavors, none of them quite the same, and a sky to slowly suck on. It takes the edge off the stress. It helps me relax.

    * * * A SMALL THEORY * * *
    People observe the colors of the day only at its beginnings and ends, but to me it’s quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonation, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses.
    In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them.”

—Markus Zusak, The Book Thief, 2005. The speaker is Death.

“ ‘Vheissu is hardly a restful place. There’s barbarity, insurrection, internecine feud. It’s no different from any other godforsakenly remote region. The English have been jaunting in and out of places like Vheissu for centuries. Except . . .’
    She had been gazing at him. The parasol leaned against the bench, its handle hidden in the wet grass.
    ‘The colors. So many colors.’ His eyes were tightly closed, his forehead resting on the bowed edge of one hand. ‘The trees outside the head shaman’s house have spider monkeys which are iridescent. They change color in the sunlight. Everything changes. The mountains, the lowlands are never the same color from one hour to the next. No sequence of colors is the same from day to day. As if you lived inside a madman’s kaleidoscope. Even your dreams become flooded with colors, with shapes no Occidental ever saw. Not real shapes, not meaningful ones. Simply random, the way clouds change over a Yorkshire landscape.’ ”

—Thomas Pynchon, V., 1963.

“ ‘Tell me of the weather today, Pocket. Tell me of the sky, and don’t skip a single cloud.’

—Christopher Moore, Fool, 2008.

—Roy Blount Jr., Alphabet Juice, 2008.

“Tradition holds, according to Richard A. Firmage in The Alphabet Abecedarium, that g was invented by a particular Roman: ‘Spurius Ruga, about 230 B.C. (and it appears that he derived some immediate benefit from it).’ Perhaps Ruga was awarded a g to insert into his hame anywhere he wanted. Since spurius in Latin meant ‘spurius’ or ‘false,’ if I had been him I would have slipped it into my first name somewhere. Spurigus or Spurgius. But it’s hard to put ourselves in the shoes of a person who lived that long ago.”

“By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and space.”