peter pan in scarlet
The title of the sequel to Peter PanJ.M. Barrie’s children’s literary classichas been revealed. The new book, called Peter Pan in Scarlet, will reveal what happened to the boy who never grew up. . . . It will be published on 5 October this year.
London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, which owns the copyright to the story, commissioned author Geraldine McCaughrean to write the sequel. . . .
The trustees stipulated the book must feature the original charactersPeter, Wendy, Tinkerbell, the rest of the Darling family and the fearsome Captain Hook. They have read and approved McCaughrean’s recently-finished manuscript.
McCaughrean said: “Neverland was such a marvellous place to spend my year.”
—BBC News, Friday, 20 January 2006.
nancys new white dress
Richard Dyer, in his study of whiteness in visual texts [The Color of Virtue: Lillian Gish, Whiteness, and Femininity, 1993], delineates the role of light in producing the glow of white women, a class- and race-specific image of femininity that manifests when idealized white women are bathed in and permeated by light.. . . He establishes the historical connections between light, blondness, and spirituality, noting how the properties of light (and fair coloring) have meshed, in traditional Western iconography, with the enlightenment privileged in Christian discourse. Religious art thus portays sanctified white people enlightened by the glow of haloes . . . and the figure of the woman as angel, enlightened and enlightening. . . . These descriptions apply to Nancy Drew. . . . Not only does her blue-eyed, blonde-haired prettiness make her appear angelic, her behavior epitomizes the traditional functions of angels: protecting, avenging, and ministering. . . .
When Nancy attends a college ball with her boyfriend [in Quest of the Missing Map by Carolyn Keene, 1942] we see . . . Nancys wardrobe: Nancys new white dress made on simple lines accentuated her attractiveness. Eschewing frippery and bright colors, Nancy Drew exemplifies the properly conservative white woman.
—Ilana Nash, from American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture, 2006.
xerographic
October 22 [1938]
In Astoria, NYC the first xerographic image was created
(derived from the Greek “dry” & “writing”)
—Edward Sanders, from America: A History in Verse, Volume 1, 19001939, 2000.
rainbows and meteors
“Some of the very earliest myths, probably dating back to the Paleolithic period, were associated with the sky, which seems to have given people their first notion of the divine. When they gazed at the skyinfinite, remote and existing quite apart from their puny livespeople had a religious experience. The sky towered above them, inconceivably immense, inaccessible and eternal. It was the very essence of transcendence and otheresss. Human beings could do nothing to affect it. The endless drama of its thunderbolts, eclipses, storms, sunsets, rainbows and meteors spoke of another endlessly active dimension, which had a dynamic life of its own. Contemplating the sky filled people with dread and delight, with awe and fear. The sky attracted them and repelled them. It was by its very nature numinous. . . .
At some pointwe do not know exactly when this happenedpeople in various far-flung parts of the world began to personify the sky. They started to tell stories about a Sky God or High God, who had single-handedly created heaven and earth out of nothing. This primitive monotheism almost certainly dates back to the Paleolithic period. Before they began to worship a number of deities, people in many parts of the world acknowledged only one Supreme God, who had created the world and governed human affairs from afar.”
—Karen Armstrong, from A Short History of Myth, 2005.
black cadillac
Whooah, baby,
Please come on back,
For youve got something of mine.
Im sure I like this black Cadillac in the morning,
My black Cadillac in the morning,
Yeah, my black Cadillac.
Lightning Hopkins, Black Cadillac, from the album How Many More Years I Got, 1962.
sunrise gold
Down the long road into Statesville, he walked toward a realm of gold, sunset had turned all the world to gold.
And next morning, he was on the great road again, walking into sunrise gold. The sun came up behind him like a big red full moon, a red that was full of yellow, a red orange warm gold that absorbed all the pinks and pale reds of the morning.
Julian Lee Rayford, from Cottonmouth, 1941.
some blue some purple
“Cut to Sam Trench at roadside.
TRENCH: Well something certainly is happening here at Tolworth roundabout, David. I can now see Picasso, he’s cycling down very hard towards the roundabout, he’s about 7550 yards away and I can now see his painting . . . it’s an abstract . . . I can see some blue some purple and some little black oval shapes . . . I think I can see . . .
A Pepperpot comes up and nudges him.
PEPPERPOT: That’s not Picassothat’s Kandinsky.
TRENCH: (excited) Good lord, you’re right. It’s Kandinsky. Wassily Kandinsky, and who’s this here with him It’s Braque. Georges Braque, the Cubist, painting a bird in flight over a cornfield and going very fast down the hill towards Kingston and . . . Piet Mondrianjust behind, Piet Mondrian the Neo-Plasticist, and then a gap, then the main bunch, here they come, Chagall, Max Ernst, Miro, Dufy, Ben Nicholson, Jackson Pollock and Bernard Buffet making a break on the outside here, Brancusi’s going with him, so is Gericault, Ferdinand Leger, Delaunay, De Kooning, Kokoschka’s dropping back here by the look of it, and so’s Paul Klee dropping back a bit and, right at the back of this group, our very own Kurt Schwitters . . .
PEPPERPOT: He’s German!
TRENCH: But as yet absolutely no sign of Pablo Picasso, and so from Tolworth roundabout back to the studio.”
—Monty Python, from the very first Episode One: Whither Canada, 1969.
lights, lights. lights
“Mardis Gras, a time when the old town came alive with magic and beauty, flags and bunting, pennants, and lights, lights. Lights strung around Bienville Square, red, white, yellow, blue, orange, green lights, all flashing and glittering. The fountain in the Square wrapped in colored lights. . . .
The night, the purple and red night, the flaring flames of orange torchlight wavering hippity-humpity through the exciting, magic realm of Mardi Gras by night. The great colored floats glittering in gold leaf and silver leaf, the tinsel scintillation of the floats rocking along beside the white robed Negroes toting their white metal boards against which the yellow torch flames danced. The white-robed mules pulling the floats, and on the floats, the symbols that spelled out a complete fairy legend, or a tale from classic Greek. There might be a dragon with open mouth gasping out black clouds of smoke, a green-and-orange dragon accentuated with gold leaf. Or thered be a ship, a galley with oars moving, with a silver sail, and warriors standing there in golden armor, warriors jigging and dancing and throwing out red, blue, white, yellow strings of serpentine to the crowds illuminated by the passing torches. Warriors in golden shining armor, reeling with the jerk of the float, gayly taking a swig from a bottle and passing the bottle around to the other warriors, all of them leaping and throwing out serpentine and silver-wrapped chocolate kisses.”
—Julian Lee Rayford, from Cottonmouth, 1941.
jove and juno
“The very first opera publicly performed in Venice, Andromeda, was already elaborate, as [this] account printed in 1637 . . . shows: ‘The sky opened and one saw Jove and Juno in glory and other divinities. This great machine descended to the ground to the accompaniment of a concerto of voices and instruments truly from heaven. The two heroes, joined to each other, it conducted to the sky. Here the royal and ever worthy occasion had an end.’”
—Leslie Horry, from A Concise History of Opera, 1972.
a ‘spectacle’ opera
“It would perhaps be more correct to describe this romance of the Crusades [Franz Gluck’s Armide] . . . not as a ‘decorative’ but as a ‘spectacle’ opera, for Armida’s magically transformed garden and the holocaust at the end, when her palace goes up in flames, bring to mind Parsifal and Gotterdammerung.”
—Leslie Horry, from A Concise History of Opera, 1972.