January 2010 Archives
“(I don’t suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn’t a hell of a lot he can do about it.)“
—J.D. Salinger, Seymour—An Introduction, 1959.
—J.D. Salinger, Seymour—An Introduction, 1959.
“I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I’m afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parenthesis: (((()))).”
—J.D. Salinger, Seymour—An Introduction, 1959.
—J.D. Salinger, Seymour—An Introduction, 1959.
“In one or two conveniently describable ways, his eyes were similar to mine, to Les’s, and to Boo Boo’s in that (a) the eyes of this bunch could all be rather bashfully described as extra-dark oxtail in color, or Plaintive Jewish Brown, and (b) we all ran to half circles, and, in a couple of cases, outright bags.”
—J.D. Salinger, Seymour—An Introduction, 1959.
—J.D. Salinger, Seymour—An Introduction, 1959.
“It was a day, God knows, not only of rampant signs and symbols but of wildly extensive communication via the written word.”
—J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, 1955.
—J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, 1955.
“Certain heads, certain colors and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me. Other things, too. Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her. I still have a lemon-yellow mark on the palm of my right hand.”
—J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, 1955.
—J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, 1955.
“Mrs. Silsburn examined the match folder. On its outside cover, in gold letters on a crimson background, were printed the words ‘These Matches Were Stolen from Bob and Edie Burwick’s House.’ ‘Darling,’ Mrs. Silsburn said, shaking her head. ‘Really darling.’. . .
‘We had a whole bunch of them made up last year,’ the Lieutenant said. ‘Be amazed, actually, how it keeps you from running out of matches.’ ”
—J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, 1955.
‘We had a whole bunch of them made up last year,’ the Lieutenant said. ‘Be amazed, actually, how it keeps you from running out of matches.’ ”
—J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, 1955.
“While there are worse NFL team logos, the Viking character cannot compete with the long (and I mean long) iconic history of the fleur de lis.”
—Prtty Shtty, “AFC and NFC Conference Championship predictions”, January 22, 2010.
“[A] white slurry [is] poured out onto a stainless steel table and dried to a fine, superwhite powder—cornstarch. Cornstarch comprised wet milling’s sole product when the industry got its start in the 1840s. At first the laundry business was its biggest customer, but cooks and early food processors soon began adding cornstarch to as many recipes as they could: It offered the glamour of modernity, purity, and absolute whiteness.”
—Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006.
—Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006.
“When [a cow] moves into a new paddock, she doesn’t just see the color green; she doesn’t even see grass. She sees, out of the corner of her eye, this nice tuft of white clover, the emerald-green one over there with the heart-shaped leaves, or, up ahead, that grassy spray of bluish fescue tightly cinched at ground level. These . . . entities are as different in her mind as vanilla ice cream is from cauliflower, two dishes you would never conflate just because they both happen to be white.”
—Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006.
—Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006.
“As soon as Ben announced he’d spotted his first morel, I began, exclusively and determinedly, looking down. There I found a thick carpet of pine needles amid the charred carcasses of pine. A morel resembles a tanned finger wearing a dark and deeply honeycombed dunce cap. They’re a decidedly comic-looking mushroom, resembling leprechauns or little penises. The morel’s distinctive form and patterning would make it easy to spot if not for its color, which ranges from dun to black and could not blend in more completely with a charred landscape. . . .
I found that if I actually got down on the ground . . . I could see the little hats popping up here and there, morels that a moment before had been utterly invisible. . . .
And then there was the ‘screen saver’—the fact that after several hours interrogating the ground for little brown dunce caps, their images will be burned on your retinas. ‘You’ll see. When you get into bed tonight,’ Ben said, ‘you’ll shut your eyes and there they’ll be again—wall-to-wall morels.’ ”
—Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006.
I found that if I actually got down on the ground . . . I could see the little hats popping up here and there, morels that a moment before had been utterly invisible. . . .
And then there was the ‘screen saver’—the fact that after several hours interrogating the ground for little brown dunce caps, their images will be burned on your retinas. ‘You’ll see. When you get into bed tonight,’ Ben said, ‘you’ll shut your eyes and there they’ll be again—wall-to-wall morels.’ ”
—Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006.
“Jet and japan were tawny and without lustre, when compared to the hue of Azora.”
—Horace Walpole, “A True Love Story”, Hieroglypic Tales, 1785.
—Horace Walpole, “A True Love Story”, Hieroglypic Tales, 1785.
“At some point in the first billion years of life, cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, learned to tap into a freely available resource—the hydrogen that exists in spectacular abundance in water. They absorbed water molecules, supped on the hydrogen, and released the oxygen as waste, and in so doing invented photosynthesis. . . . [P]hotosynthesis . . . was invented not by plants but by bacteria.”
“Chromosomes had been discovered by chance in 1888 and were so called because they readily absorbed dye and thus were easy to see under the microscope.”
“Take the case of the lovely Carolina parakeet. Emerald green, with a golden head, it was arguably the most striking and beautiful bird ever to live in North America. . . .
By the second decade of the twentieth century, the birds had been so relentlessly hunted that only a few remained alive in captivity. The last one, named Inca, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918 . . . and was reverently stuffed. And where would you go to see poor Inca now? Nobody knows. The zoo lost it.”
“She sells seashells on the seashore
The shells she sells are seashells, I’m sure
So if she sells seashells on the seashore
Then I’m sure she sells seashore shells.”
—Terry Sullivan, “She sells seashells on the seashore,” 1908; inspired by fossil collector and paleontologist Mary Anning.
“His eyes were an improbably vivid sky blue, not made for looking outward but for steeping themselves in the cerulean essence of dreams. . . .
The man with the sky blue eyes invites everyone to keep on working, fabricating, jointly creating: we are all of us dreamers by nature, after all, brothers under the sign of the trowel, destined to be master builders.”
“A night in July! What can be likened to it? How can one describe it? Shall I compare it to the core of an enormous black rose, covering us with the dreams of hundreds of velvety petals? The night winds blow open its fluffy center, and in its scented depth we can see the stars looking down on us.”
The password is “character”.
“Only a sheaf of peacock’s feathers standing in a vase on a chest of drawers did not submit to regimentation. These feathers were a dangerous, frivolous element, hiding rebelliousness, like a class of naughty schoolgirls who are quiet and composed in appearance, but full of mischief when no longer watched. The eyes of those feathers never stopped staring; they made holes in the walls, winking, fluttering their eyelashes, smiling to one another, giggling and full of mirth. They filled the room with whispers and chatter; they scattered like butterflies around the many-armed lamps; like a motley crowd they pushed against the matted elderly mirrors, unused to such bustle and gaiety; they peeped through the keyholes.”
—Bruno Schulz, “The Street of Crocodiles”, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, 1934; translated by Celina Wieniewska.
“I stepped into a winter night bright from the illuminations of the sky. It was one of those clear nights when the starry firmament is so wide and spreads so far that it seems to be divided and broken up into a mass of separate skies, sufficient for a whole month of winter nights and providing silver and painted globes to cover all the nightly phenomena, adventures, occurrences, and carnivals. . . .
On that night the sky laid bare its internal construction in many sections, which, like quasi-anatomical exhibits, showed the spirals and whorls of light, the pale green solids of darkness, the plasma of space, the tissue of dreams. . . .
The colored map of the heavens expanded into an immense dome, on which there loomed fantastic lands, oceans and seas, marked with the lines of stellar currents and eddies, with the brilliant streaks of heavenly geography. The air became light to breathe and shimmered like silver gauze. One could smell violets. From under the white woolly lambskin of snow, trembling anemones appeared with a speck of moonlight in each delicate cup. The whole forest seemed to be illuminated by thousands of lights and by the stars falling in profusion from the December sky.”
—Bruno Schulz, “The Street of Crocodiles”, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, 1934; translated by Celina Wieniewska.
“The sun went westering and took on an orange blush.”
“It was purple dusk, that sweet time when the day’s sleeping is over, and the evening of pleasure and conversation has begun.”
“ ‘If all the dew were diamonds,’ Pablo said, ‘we would be very rich. We would be drunk all our lives.’ ”
“She came in lapis blue, O heavenly sight,
A moon of summer on a winter’s night.”
“Bedecked in green she came, fair to behold,
As a pomegranate bud the green leaves enfold.
And when we asked, ‘What do you call this dress?’
She answered in sweet words meant to impress,
‘Since I have tortured many with my arts,
In this dress, I call it Breaker of Hearts.’ ”
“If water can turn cheeks into green fields,
My tears might have covered my cheeks with green,
Reflecting the same tincture in their flow,
Turning my face into a verdant scene, . . .”
“They entered through a vaulted gateway that looked like a gateway in Paradise and passed through a bower of trellised boughs overhung with vines bearing grapes of various colors, the red like rubies, the black like Abyssinian faces, and the white, which hung between the red and the black, like pearls between red coral and back fish. . . . The trees were laden with all manner of ripe fruits: pomegranates, sweet, sour, and sour-sweet; apples, sweet and wild; and Hebron plums as sweet as wine, whose color no eyes have seen and whose flavor no tongue can describe.”
“My story . . . is a strange and amazing one, which, if it could be engraved with needles at the corner of the eye, would be a lesson to those who would consider.”
(I.e., if a master calligrapher could by a miracle of his art write the entire story at the corner of an eye, it would then be read as a double miracle, one for the extraordinary events, one for the extraordinary art.)
—The Arabian Nights, translated (and annotated) by Husain Haddawy, 1992.
“Two backwoods brothers by the name of Granger, tall bony fellers with single thick black brows over long noses, looked like T’s. I knew this breed, knew that easing by in life was their ambition: Durrance must have signed them on to keep ’em from rustling his stray beefs. The frowns on those T faces told me they were worried . . .”
—Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country, 2008.
“Yf they say the mone is belewe
We must believe that it is true”
(If they say the moon is blue
We must believe that it is true)
—“Rede Me and Be Not Wrothe” (Read me and be not angry), 1528.