August 2009 Archives
“He lay on his back in his blankets and looked out where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In that false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net.”
“His father stirred his coffee a long time. There was nothing to stir because he drank it black. He took the spoon and laid it smoking on the paper napkin and raised the cup and looked at it and drank.”
—Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, 1992.
“. . . he invited the strangers in to his house, where his two sons and daughters offered them several kinds of sherbet which they had made themselves, as well as drinks flavoured with candied lemon peel, oranges, lemons, citrons, pineapples, and pistachios, and pure Mocha coffee unmixed with the bad coffee you get from Batavia and the West Indies.”
—Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism, 1759, translated by John Butt, 1947.
35 Years in 3-D, a retrospective of stereoscopic 3-D art by Gerald Marks, will be on display September 3rd through September 17th at New York City’s School of Visual Arts. According to Greg Dinkins, the genius behind the New York Stereoscopic Society, the show will feature “early printed anaglyph work; polarizing projection of 3-D his photography, old and new; lenticular prints, transparencies, & computer screen; a Professor Pulfrich's Universe shadow room; his computer generated hologram done at the MIT MedialLab; and excerpts from his 3-D videos for the Rolling Stones.” Wow. If I happened to be in the greater NYC area, I wouldn’t miss it.
“As a symbol, X is a strike in bowling and baseball, a defensive player in a football diagram, a kiss at the end of a letter or text message. On maps, X is infantry or mountaintop. X multiplies (2x2=4), relates dimension (2x4), and signifies the unknown algebraic quantity (2x-4x). X prescribes medicine (Rx), reacts chemically (rx), raises a musical note to a double sharp, and refers to pins and lamps in circuit diagrams. . . .
X is a blank placeholder, but it is THE blank placeholder. No other letter quite marks the spot like X. A cross. A double slash. A burning band. It’s the way it looks, the innumerable ways it can be replicated, but also the way it sounds in the mouth. Eks. Its sound is that of swords crossing, a fillet hitting the frypan, a curse. A hex.”
“Every culture imbues its colors with positive and negative connotations. Yellow is joy and cowardice, the color of oak-tree ribbons and jaundice, Asian spirituality and Egyptian mourning. Red is love and vengeance, valentines and spilled blood. In China and India, red symbolizes good luck and celebration, while in other countries, red stands for socialism and slasher films. Everywhere, red and yellow are the fireworks of autumn. Red and yellow can be as beautiful as the robe of a Chinese emperor and as ugly as the dollops of ketchup and mustard on a cold beef patty.”
“Red Axanthic. Blonde Pastel. Lemon Blast. Peach Ghost. Orange Ghost. Butterscotch Ghost. Caramel Albino. Yellow Belly. Snowball. Banana. Pastel Jungle. Lesser Platinum. Mojave. Calico. Sable. Pewter. Goblin. Clown. Bumblebee. Killerbee. Piebald. Pinstripe.
These names do not refer to Pantone colors, paper stocks, fabric patterns, paint swatches, ice-cream flavors, or mixed drinks. they are the names of ball-python morphs. Ball pythons are popular because they’re calm, slow, rarely bite, and remain small, less than six feet in length. They eat mice and rats. One two-foot female inhabits a terrarium on my son’s desk.”
“ ‘Changing my skin color was intoxicating at first. I changed my skin color in the middle of my first dinner with my girlfriend’s parents. I turned blue, then yellow. I went to the bathroom, came out naked, and disappeared into the wallpaper. After a while, they got used to it. They called me the “Chameleon” and said I should have a sitcom. I actually did want to be an actor, but I discovered I didn’t like being laughed at. I saw a D.C. want ad for a modified spy, and the rest, as they say, is classified.’ ”
“Rising inside Grady was an ungovernable laughter, a joyous agitation which made the white summer stretching before her seem like an unrolling canvas on which she might draw those first rude pure strokes that are free.”
—Truman Capote, Summer Crossing, 2005.
“. . . Grady, whose green estimating eyes were like scraps of the sea. . . .”
“There was a spring rainbow in the sky, and the blending of a rainbow and a blue glittering convertible had been too much for her: in a car like that, she’d said, begging Clyde to take her for a ride, why, in a car like that you could reach the end of the rainbow before it faded away.”
—Truman Capote, Summer Crossing, 2005.
“Word of the Day: ASTERISM (12D: Constellation) — n.
- Printing. Three asterisks in a triangular formation used to call attention to a following passage.
- Astronomy. A cluster of stars smaller than a constellation.[ed. so ... NOT a [Constellation] ...]
- Mineralogy. A six-rayed starlike figure optically produced in some crystal structures by reflected or transmitted light.”
—Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle, August 20, 2009.
“Why make a book? Why bother? . . .
Making a book creates a midnight in which synaptic lightning illuminates our skull’s planetarium. It lets us peek into how we think we might work. . . .
A book is a delivery system for a hallucinogen you ingest though the eyes and digest in the mind. A book allows one imagination to taste the inside of another.”
—David Barringer, There’s Nothing Funny about Design, 2009.
“IGNORE THIS BUTTON”
“Politenessman says: THANK YOU FOR LOOKING AT THIS BUTTON!”
—Ron Barrett, National Lampoon; quoted in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations, compiled by Fred Metcalf, 1986.
“Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, quoted in the film Beloved Infidel, 1959.
“Some claimed that light had a consciousness and personality and could even be chatted with, often revealing its deeper secrets to those who approached it in the right way. Groups of these could be observed in Monumental Park at sunrise, sitting in the dew in uncomfortable positions, their lips moving inaudibly. There were diet faddist who styled themselves Lightarians, living on nothing but light, even setting up labs they thought of as kitchens and concocting meals from light recipes, fried light, fricaseed light, light á la mode, calling for different types of lamp filament and colors of glass envelope, the Edison lamp being brand new in those days but certainly not the only design under study. There were light addicts who around sunset began to sweat and itch and seclude themselves in toilets with portable electric lanterns.”
—Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, 2006.
I recently bought the domain name apostrophewatch.com, and now that I’m researching that project, I have learned that there is alreadly more than one apostrophe oriented blog on the internet. Apostrophe Catastrophes, The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar and The Abuse of Apostrophes in Everyday Life (sadly discontinued) are all good, but Apostrophe Abuse is my favorite (see WASHROOM’S, above). These sites, and a Google image search of apostrophe mistakes, suggest that there is plenty of interest in the subject. Apparently I am not the only apostrophe watcher on the planet!
But what, you are perhaps wondering, could I add to this conversation? Well, I can call attention to the plethora of ticks, primes, inch marks, hatch marks, ‘dumb’ single quote marks and improper accent marks that masquerade as proper apostrophes every day. I can approach the apostrophe from a typographer’s perspective. (For a summary of what I mean, check out Apostrophes & Quotation Marks by Akira Kobayashi.) From a typographer’s perspective there is, incredibly, it’s an even junglier apostrophe jungle out there.
“We rightly shudder at promiscuous or misplaced apostrophization, for instance when a family named Bennett puts up a sign in front of their house that says The Bennett’s, thereby suggesting that there is only one, self-aggrandizing Bennett. (The Bennetts or The Bennetts’ would do.) BUt sometimes we hear that apostroophes should never be used in a plural. For instance in The Alphabet Abecedarium, by RIchard A. Firmage: ‘For clarity I have occasionally inserted the mark (usually with vowels, e.g.,O’s) although my preference is to be technically correct and omit them.’ Hey, Richard, don’t apologize. It’s helpful to use an apostrophe in the plural of a letter or number: T’s, w’s, 9’s. What is the reader to make of Ts and ws or even 9s? That last looks like nine shillings, or a typo. If you were to write, ‘There are four is in Mississippi,’ or for that matter, ‘four ss in Mississippi’—you see what I mean. ‘Four i’s and four s’s’ is the only way to go.”
—Roy Blount Jr., Alphabet Juice, 2008.
“Finnegans Wake. What only certain readers of Joyce’s text hear as I say these words is the absence of the apostrophe marking the possessive position of ‘Finnegan’ in relation to ‘wake.’ Others not aware of Joyce's grammatical revisions will hear—rather predictably—the operation of the apostrophe that they cannot see: Finnegan’s wake. Although the apostrophe cannot be enunciated, it makes itself heard. It also insists on being seen, precisely because it is not there: helpful editors and printers continue to reappropriate the apostrophe to its (appropriate) place. Indeed, the missing apostrophe of this title announces its presence and finds a life of its own against all efforts to eliminate its subversive workings in the Wake. The missing apostrophe of Finnegans Wake creates discomfort, if not outright embarrassment. . . . It produces a sense of unease, a stepping out-side comfortable boundaries of the known and predictable because it demands a putting aside of familiar reading strategies.”
—Shari Benstock, Apostrophizing the Feminine in Finnegans Wake, MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 35, Number 3, Fall 1989.
—Shari Benstock, Apostrophizing the Feminine in Finnegans Wake, MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 35, Number 3, Fall 1989.
“It was a long, very long, a dark, very dark, an allburt unend, scarce endurable, and we could add mostly quite various and somenwhat stumble-tumbling night.”
“The earth’s atrot! The sun’s a scream! The air’s a jig. The water’s great!”
“Bymeby, bullocky vampas tappany bobs topside joss pidgin fella Balkelly, archdruid of islish chinchinjoss in the his heptachromatic sevenhued septicoloured roranyellgreenlindigan mantle finish. . . .”
“Phopho!! The meteor pulp of him, the seamless rainbowpeel. Aggala!!!! His bellyvoid of nebulose with his neverstop navel. Paloola!!!!!! And his veins shooting melanite phosphor, his creamtocustard cometshair and his asteroid knuckles, ribs and members. Ooridiminy!!!!!! His electrolatiginous twisted entrails belt.”
“Not a salutary sellable sound is since.”