August 2010 Archives

“Oh, I don't think there’s anything in that black bag for me.”

—Dorothy (Judy Garland), The Wizard of Oz, 1939.

—Tao Lang Pee [Noel Coward], “The Emperor’s Daughter”; Spangled Unicorn, 1932.

—Henrietta Whittlebot [Noel Coward], “Caprice de Noel”; Spangled Unicorn, 1932.

—Noel Coward, A Withered Nosegay, 1922.

“a promise of happiness

“The first song I knew

“All over the island there was a burgeoning of graffiti that took merry or malicious advantage of the fact that the Italians could not decipher the Cyrillic script. They mistook Rs for Ps, did not know that Gs can look like Ys or inverted Ls, had no idea what the triangle was, thought that an E was an H, construed theta as a kind of O, did not appreciate that the letter in the shape of a tent was the same as the one that looked like an inverted Y, were baffled by the three horizontal strokes that could also be written as a squiggle, knew from mathematics that pi meant 22 divided by 77, were unaware that E the wrong way round was an S, that the Y could also be written as  a V and was in fact an E, were confused by the existence of an O with a vertical stroke that was actually an F, did not understand that the X was a K, failed utterly to find anything that might be meant by the elegant trident, and found that the omega reminded them of an earing. Ergo, conditions were ideal for the nocturnal splashing of white paint in huge letters on all available walls. . . .”

”We took a breezy excursion and gathered jonquils from the river slopes. Sweet marjoram grew in luxuriant profusion by the window that overlooked the Aztec city. Jaded zombies acted quietly, but kept driving their oxen forward.”

“What did she forget? Lily white, basic black, snow white, black beauty, white christmas, black friday, white supremacy, black power, the color purple, people-eater purple, the color of money, long green, lawn green, lorne green, Lohengrin, the color of your parachute, the color of my true love’s hair, puce, mars puce, mars chartreuse, mars bars, little-boy blue, blue bayou, blues in the night, paint-the-town red, do-it-up brown, james brown, dorian gray, red skelton, red october, tom clancy red, better-dead-than red, better-ill-than teal, greenberg, goldberg, long-john silver, mellow yellow, electrical banana, yellow peril, yellow fever, mayonnaise yellow, mustard, relish, and onions.

“The very first thing I remember in my early childhood is a flame, a blue flame jumping off a gas stove somebody lit. It might have been me playing around with the stove. I don’t remember who it was. Anyway, I remember being shocked by the whoosh of the blue flame jumping off the burner, the suddenness of it. That’s as far back as I can remember; any further back than this is just a fog, you know, just a mystery. But that stove flame is as clear as music in my mind. I was three years old.”

"There was an Atlantide country sunk under the sea, a race of men and women born under water, whose first vision of earth and people was water stained and veiled. This race of men and women spread later over the earth, with water heaved eyes. Their eyes were the color of water. There was to them, at night, a kind of sulphurous transparency, and it always seemed as if their bodies floated, as if the flesh and bones were not brittle but made of rubber. They swayed on their feet, the feet as light and boneless as the feet of dancers. They stood on boneless toes, listening for ever distant sounds. The bells of the Atlantide, with their faint, water covered tones, which they feared not to hear in the zinc-voiced earth city, among zinc-voiced men. They were always listening for certain sounds, and searching for certain colors. When you put them in a water green room, where there were plants, or perhaps gold fishes, or cactus, or perhaps many water filled bottles, they stood at the threshold like a man troubled with a memory and then they swam into the room. They walked with a swimming stride. They seemed to cut through the air with a wide slicing of fins, they seemed to sense a direction which took no account of walls.

“ ‘Indian red,’ she sang. “Mars red, venetian red, cadmium red, vermillion, and rose madder.’ There was alizarin crimson, magenta, and that thorn in the backside of the sinful, sister terra rosa.

“Helicopter, helicopter, over my head,

“His complexion is perfect gallows.”

“And that White Sustenance—Despair.”

“A man that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green.”

“ ‘In the red’ frequently means financial loss, the color of the ink used to record the loss being used to indicate the loss itself. Then again, red is also associated with blood; and so through ferocious battles rivers of red routinely flow. Red is the color of the Russian flag, and hence a country can endure a red scare, or be subverted by reds. Red is a distinctive human hair color, and those who have it are often known by it. It is also the distinctive pigment in the plumage of Rhode Island chickens and Cincinnati baseball players. And when we get very angry, it is all that we see. On the other hand, we sometimes see nothing clearly after eating a bowl of red, on account of the tears the chili provokes. This string of reds could be continued indefinitely. . . . But we should probably stop before we see red sails in the sunset or scarlet women in the pink.”

“Why make so much of fragmentary blue

—Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles, 1950.