Her many-coloured robe
“the apparition of a woman began to rise from the middle of the sea with so lovely a face that the gods themselves would have fallen down in adoration of it. First the head, then the whole shining body gradually emerged and stood before me poised on the surface of the waves. . . .
Her long thick hair fell in tapering ringlets on her lovely neck, and was crowned with an intricate chaplet in which was woven every kind of flower. Just above her brow shone a round disc, like a mirror, or like the bright face of the moon, which told me who she was. Vipers rising from the left-hand and right-hand partings of her hair supported this disc, with ears of corn bristling beside them. Her many-coloured robe was of finest linen; part was glistening white, part crocus-yellow, part glowing red and along the entire hem a woven bordure of flowers and fruit clung swaying in the breeze. But what caught and held my eye more than anything else was the deep black lustre of her mantle. She wore it slung across her body from the right hip to the left shoulder, where it was caught in a knot resembling the boss of a shield; but part of it hung in innumerable folds, the tasselled fringe quivering. It was embroidered with glittering stars on the hem and everywhere else, and in the middle beamed a full and fiery moon.”
—Apuleius (mid-2nd century), from The Golden Ass. Translated from the Latin by Robert Graves, 1950. The vision is of Isis.
The Soul
“An eye is meant to see things.
The Soul is here for its own joy.”
—Rumi, as quoted in The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, 2005.
different colors
“Variation in the stimulus offered to students . . . can gain attention. When teachers (like actors) vary their volume, pitch or rate of speech, they are varying the stimulus in ways likely to arouse the orienting response. When teachers write on the board in
different colors
or place
words in
unusual
patterns
they are more likely to elicit attention; that is, more of the information they want to be attended to ends up in working memory. Emotional stimuli also can capture attention. For example, words like “blood” or “gold” or our own name are likely to elicit an orienting response. Vivid similes and metaphors have the same attention-grabbing properties. Who would not attend further after hearing, “My love is like a red, red rose” or ‘He was known in the field as Doctor Death.’”
—N.L. Gage and David C. Berliner, from Educational Psychology, fifth edition, 1992.
7,000 jars of beer
“The Egyptian goddess Sekhmet was imagined as a lioness, whose ‘mane smoked with fire, her back had the colour of blood, her countenance glowed like the sun, her eyes shone with a fire.’ A document from c. 2000 BC tells the tale of how the goddess could not be halted in her slaughter of the human race. The gods, to save humanity, ordered the brewing of 7,000 jars of beer, to which was added a red powder so that it resembled human blood, and then this liquid was poured out over the fields. With the coming of morning the goddess gazed at her reflection in it, drank it all and returned to her palace intoxicated. So it was that humanity was saved.”
—Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, from The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, 2005.
the White Album
“[Yoko Ono] is a great artist, but people don’t talk enough about her work in terms of this crossover between art and music. She’s really an under-recognized precurser, an early Conceptual artist. I’m sure she had a great influence on John Lennon and The Beatles in the way they presented themselves. Their visual style was certainly influenced by her ideas. I don’t think the White Album, for example, could have existed without her art interest. . . .
In fact, when you think of it, the White Album is a perfect crossover object, a mix of pop music, Pop Art and Fluxus: a cross between a Richard Hamilton and a Fluxus edition.”
—Christian Marclay, talking with Kim Gordon in 2003. From Press Play: Contemporary Artists in Conversation, 2005.
Sexy Ida
“Don’t give your love to sexy Ida
‘Cause she’s the sister of a black widow spider’
—from Sexy Ida, by Ike & Tina Turner, 1974. I heard this on my AM radio just this evening. Man, I tell ya, AM 1260, Baton Rouge, rocks!
A smooth, closely shaven surface of green
“A smooth, closely shaven surface of green is by far the most essential element of beauty on the grounds of a suburban house.”
—Frank Jesup Scott, from The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds of Small Extent, 1870. As quoted in Poplorica by Martin J. Smith and Patrick J. Kiger, 2004.
velveteen
“It was sometime between 1930 and 1933, in the city of Papeete on the island of Tahiti, when an American expatriate painter named Edgar Leeteg walked into a shop that sold art supplies. . . . As was Leeteg’s habit, he flirted with the young Chinese woman behind the counter. Then he asked her to sell him some monk’s cloth, a type of canvas. ‘I need it to paint on,’ he explained.
‘We’re all out of monk’s cloth,’ the clerk told him. . . .
Then the clerk, on the verge of losing a sale, suddenly remembered that the shop’s owner had been pushing her to unload an overstock of another type of fabric. ‘How about some velveteen?’ she asked. ‘Could you paint on that?’”
—Martin J. Smith and Patrick J. Kiger, from Poplorica, 2004.
black velvet
“The Chinese used the plush fabric as an art medium as far back as the 1200s, and a century later, Marco Polo saw black velvet paintings in India. In Victorian England, black-velvet painting became a pleasant diversion for society matrons. . . . Few serious modern artists worked with it, in part because velvet had a tendency to soak up paint like a sponge and then cake grotesquely, until a landscape or scene started to resemble an aging hooker’s makeup. But [Edgar] Leteg, who as a youth in Illinois had seen a few Renaissance-era velvet paintings in a museum, had an epiphany. He figured out that thin, light strokes scross the fabric would keep the paint from soaking in too deep. His first efforts were female nudes, which had obvious appeal to his drunken-sailor clientele.”
—Martin J. Smith and Patrick J. Kiger, from Poplorica, 2004.
they are the brownest of all the brown elves
“They live ’neath the curtain
Of fir woods and heather,
And never take hurt in
The wildest of weather,
But best they love Autumn—she’s brown as themselves’
And they are the brownest of all the brown elves.”
—Patrick Chalmers, from The Puk-Wudjies, a poem published in Punch in 1910. According to Priscilla Johnston in Edward Johnston, 1958, Edward Johnston loved this poem and even created his own toy puk-wudjies.