‘dragon bones’

“The earliest record of written Chinese is inscriptions carved on turtle shells and oxen shoulder blades excavated from the ruins of the Shang dynasty (sixteenth to eleventh centuries BCE) capital at modern Anyang in Henan province. This type of writing is usually called “oracle-bone script,” and it was carved there for the purpose of divination. It was first discovered accidentally in Anyang in 1899 after a Qing-dynasty scholar, Wang Yirong, who was an expert on bronze script, found a strong resemblance between bronze script and the carvings on some “dragon bones” that had supposedly some curative powers and were perhaps given to him as part of a medicinal prescription. Currently, over 100,000 pieces of shells and bones with engraved script have been recovered through excavation in Anyang. A total of about 3,700 different characters have been identified from these artifacts; however, only about 2,000 of them have so far been deciphered. Closely related to the oracle-bone script is the bronze script that is carved on the surface of bronze vessels supposedly placed in palaces and used for sacrificial ceremonies at the times of Shang and Western Zhou dynasties.”

—Chaofen Sun, from Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction, 2006.

a focused intelligence

“In Africa . . . about 150,000 years ago . . . the first modern humans, Homo sapiens . . . appeared. . . .

Then, about 47,000 years ago, Homo sapiens, who had always looked like us now began to behave like us as well. After that time, their sites are flush with carvings, figurines, and other art. They performed elaborate burials. They decorated their bodies and clothes with shells, beads, and the teeth of animals. All of this implies a rich culture, a focused intelligence, and a probing, seeking, imaginative life, none of which had been present before.

There is no apparent reason for this sudden change. Richard G. Klein of Stanford University believes that the change was the result of a neurological change in the brains of Homo sapiens that occurred about 47,000 years ago. Specifically, he believes that this sudden neural alteration created the ability to speak a complicated language. Without language, symbolic thinking would have been impossible. With language, people did begin to think symbolically, and all our art and culture, our music and myths and tales, and all our religions are the result.”

—Gregory Curtis, from The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists, 2006.

Freemen of Color

“People of African descent have been in New Orleans, like the French, from the early eighteenth century. The city’s relative social and geographic isolation during its early history as a French colony and international port contributed to the unique black culture. Blacks were brought to the city as slaves from Senegal, Senegambia, and the Windward Coast of West Africa, as well as from the French Caribbean islands, especially Haiti, after the French Revolution. Some were trained as skilled laborers and crafsmen and were able to buy freedom for themselves and their families upon enactment of the so-called Code Noire, which made this possible for the first time. This gave rise to a community known as the “Freemen of Color.” The intermarriage of Freemen of Color with native Indians and French settlers resulted in the growth of Creoles—blacks of mixed ancestry.”

—Alan Govenar, from A Joyful Noise: A Celebration of New Orleans Music by Michael P. Smith, 1990.

Indian Red

“They do things in church, they sing and they dance and feel the spirit. That’s what church is all about. They praise the Lord.

With Mardi Gras Indians we do the same thing in a sense. We sing, we party, we dance, and we even have our prayer. We praise our past Indians when we sing “Indian Red.” It’s like an Indian national anthem.”

—Johnny “Kool” Stephenson, interviewed by Alan Govenar, from A Joyful Noise: A Celebration of New Orleans Music by Michael P. Smith, 1990.

glass architecture

“If we wish to raise our culture to a higher level, we are forced . . . to transform our architecture. We shall only succeed in doing this when we remove the element of enclosure from the rooms in which we live. We can only do this, however, with glass architecture, which allows the light of the sun, moon and stars to enter not merely through a few windows set in the wall, but through as many walls as possible—walls of coloured glass. The new milleu created in this way must bring us a new culture. . . . Then we should have a pradise on earth.”

—Paul Scheerbart, from Glasarchitektur (Glass Architecture), 1914; quoted in Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939, edited by Christopher Wilk, 2006.

More sun! More light!

“‘More sun! More light! Is the cry of our desperate age,’ wrote a female correspondent in a German nudist magazine. . . .

The nudist’s belief in the therapeutic power of sunshine gained medical credibility during the 1920s as the Swiss doctors August Roller and Oskar Bernhard, working independently, proved the efficacy of the so-called sun cure (heliotherapy) on tuberculosis. . . . Roller’s clinic in Leysin, Switzerland . . . incorporated sun balconies where patients could lie in the sun (they took the sun when it was low in the sky rather than when it was at its strongest). . . .”

—Christopher Wilk, The Healthy Body Culture, from Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939, edited by Christopher Wilk, 2006.

black-line engraving.

“In black-line wood engraving the burin removes all the surface of the block except the lines of the artist’s design; in white-line engraving, the surface of the block prints as a black background, while the burin removes the lines of the design which appear white in the impression. Blocks engraved with a combination of both methods achieved engravings of great strength and delicacy. . . .”
—Early Victorian Illustrated Books; Britain, France and Germany, 1820-1860, by John Buchanan-Brown, 2005.

a kick-ass red lipstick

“Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.”

—Gwyneth Paltrow, (b. 1972).

the snow’s incandescence

“Gleaming with the soft effulgence of a luminous dial, the snow’s incandescence, self-engendered, reached inward to probe the very soul of luxury and draw it forth through stone till it was visible. . . .”

—Jean Cocteau, from The Holy Terrors, translated from the French by Rosamond Lehmann, 1957.

the madness of art

“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

—Henry James; quoted by Azar Nafisi in Reading Lolita in Tehran, 2003.