The main street of Fort Curtis
“Any description of the main street of Fort Curtis can begin and end inside this very sentence. Beyond that I find only redundancy. The same six words identify the thing to be described and serve to describe it. The main street of Fort Curtis.”
—Don DeLillo, from Americana, 1971.
the bibles in this town
“‘I’ve just realized how few black faces I’ve seen since I got here.’
‘Even the bibles in this town are white,’ she said.”
—Don DeLillo, from Americana, 1971.
a writer of blank pages
“Brand . . . as it turned out, was a writer of blank pages. That’s how I think of him, definitely a novelist, by all means a craftsman of high talent—but one who chose words of the same color as the paper on which they were written.”
—Don DeLillo, from Americana, 1971.
a special place
“[T]he office itself seemed a special place, even in its pale yellow desperate light, so much the color of old newspapers; there was the belief that you were secure here, in some emotional way, that you lived in known terrain.”
—Don DeLillo, from Americana, 1971.
Mars Tyler’s sofa
“The door of Quincy’s office was orange and his sofa was dark gray. Some of us in Weede’s group had doors of the same color but sofas of a different color. Some had identical sofas but different doors. Weede himself was the only one who had a red sofa. Weede and Ted Warburton were the only ones with black doors. But Mars Tyler’s sofa was ecru, a shade lighter than Grove Palmer’s door. I had all this down on paper. On slow afternoons I used to study it, trying to find a pattern. I thought there might be a subtle color scheme designed by management and based on a man’s salary, ability, and prospects for advancement or decline. Why did no two people have identical sofas and doors? Why was Ted Warburton allowed to have a black door when the only other black door belonged to Weede Denney? Why was Reeves Chubb the only one with a primrose sofa? Why was Paul Joyner’s perfectly good maroon sofa replaced by a royal blue one? Why was my sofa the same color as Weede’s door? There were others who felt as I did.”
—Don DeLillo, from Americana, 1971.
an orange tie
“At work I dressed in the establishment manner, which, granted, was not without a touch of color, the establishment having learned that every color is essentially gray as long as everyone is wearing it. So I did not hesitate to show up for work in an orange tie, but never more orange than the orange others wore.”
—Don DeLillo, from Americana, 1971.
graytalk
“In the evening we sat in the camper on Howley Road and listened to the radio. A war summary came on. I did not listen to the news, merely to the words themselves, the familiar oppressive phrases. It was like the graytalk of the network—not what something meant and often not its opposite.”
—Don DeLillo, from Americana, 1971.
colorless
“‘I want to be colorless.’”
—Don DeLillo, from Americana, 1971.
brooch-operas for M’lady
“Tuesday afternoon, Reich left Monarch tower early and dropped in at the Century Audio-bookstore on Sheridan Place. It specialized mostly in piezo-electric crystal recordings . . . tiny jewels mounted in elegant settings. The latest vogue was brooch-operas for M’lady. (‘She Shall Have Music Wherever She Goes.’) Century also had shelves of obsolete printed books.”
—Alfred Bester, from The Demolished Man, 1951.
The Mesopotamian seal
“The Mesopotamian seal has a peculiar shape, a small cylinder engraved on the outside, and thus impressing its distinctive design when rolled over the clay of a tablet or the sealing of a package of merchandise. . . .
The seal engravings, many times more numerous than all the other works of art that have come down to us, disclose most fully the richness and vigour of this first great phase of Mesopotamian culture.”
—Henri Frankfort, The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, fourth edition, 1970. The blank area of the cylinder seal pictured above was for further cuneiform inscription.