This is the space age
“I would suggest that academies be established where young people will learn to get really high . . . high as the Zen master is high when his arrow hits a target in the dark . . . high as the Karate master is high when he smatshes a brick with his fist . . . high . . . weightless . . . in space. This is the space age. Time to look beyond this run down radioactive cop rotten planet. Time to look beyond this animal body.”
—William Burroughs, Academy 23: A Deconditioning, The Village Voice, 1967.
why we dance
“We, all of us, have a need to identify our bodily rhythms with those of the cosmos.
The wind in a forest of fir. The spilling of grain in the fields. The migration of bird and seed. The trek of atom and star.
That is why we dance.”
—Tom Robbins, To Dance, Helix magazine, 1967.
the night of the full moon
“It was the night of the full moon. Flaring like a white-hot coin, so brilliant that it hurt one’s eyes, the moon swam rapidly upwards in a sky of smoky blue, across which drifted a few wisps of yellowish cloud. The stars were all invisible. The croton bushes, by day hideous things like jaundiced laurels, were changed by the moon into jagged black-and-white designs like fantastic woodcuts. . . .
“Look at the moon, just look at it!” Flory said. “It’s like a white sun. It’s brighter than an English winter day.”
Elizabeth looked up into the branches of the frangipani tree, which the moon seemed to have changed into rods of silver. The light lay thick, as though palpable, on everything, crusting the earth and the rough bark of trees like some dazzling salt, and every leaf seemed to bear a freight of solid light, like snow. Even Elizabeth, indifferent to such things, was astonished.”
—George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.
handsome soldiers in pistachio green
“Battalions are trucked into the city to rehearse for the elaborate military parades. Security is heightened, government buildings are spruced up and repainted, and billboards promoting the army are hoisted above major intersections and roundabouts. The oversized boards look more like movie advertisements than army propaganda. Painted in soothing pastel colours, they depict handsome soldiers in pistachio green uniforms marching down pale yellow roads and cheered by crowds of onlookers. Above the parade, a fleet of pink fighter planes glides placidly through a postcard-perfect blue sky.”
—Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.
‘the time of the green spectacles’
“Tun Lin refers to the years under Ne Win as “the time of the green spectacles”. To look at something through green spectacles, he explained, is to look at a thing that is bad and be forced to think of it as good. The phrase has a curious history. The battles and bombs of the Second World War devastated Burma’s paddy fields and plantations, and by the time the Japanese army eventually occupied the country farmers found it hard to grow any edible produce. Even the farm animals and pack-horses refused to eat the parched grain, because of its unhealthy-looking white colour. The Japanese, fearful that the donkeys they needed to transport munitions in the mountainous terrain of Upper Burma would starve, came up with an ingenious solution. They fashioned spectacles out of green-tinted glass and wire and hooked them around the donkeys’ ears. “The donkeys saw that the grain was green and happily ate it,” explained Tun Lin. “That’s what we had to do during our years in Burma’s Animal Farm. The entire nation was forced to wear green spectacles just like those donkeys.”
—Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.
white ants
“All these book collections . . . had one thing in common: they were gradually disappearing. Their pages were being glued together by damp and mildew. Pull any book from a shelf in Burma and it will be followed by a sprinking of powder-like dust, the work of white ants relentlessly munching their way through thousands of texts all around the country.”
—Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.
glaring white sunlight
“They went out into the glaring white sunlight. The heat rolled from the earth like the breath of an oven. The flowers, oppressive to the eyes, blazed with not a petal stirring, in a debauch of sun. The glare sent a weariness through one’s bones. There was something horrible in it—horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching on and on over Burma and India, over Siam, Cambodia, China, cloudless and inerminable.”
—George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.
swaths of English flowers
“In the borders beside the path swaths of English flowers‘phlox and larkspur, hollyhock and petunia’not yet slain by the sun, rioted in vast size and richness. The petunias were huge, like trees almost. There was no lawn, but instead a shrubbery of native trees and bushes—gold mohur trees like vast umbrellas of blood-red bloom, frangipanis with creamy, stalkless flowers, purple bougainvillea, scarlet hibiscus and the pink Chinese rose, bilious-green crotons, feathery fronds of tamarind. The clash of colours hurt one’s eyes in the glare.”
—George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.
Elizabeth’s head was beginning to swim
“The merchandise was foreign-looking, queer and poor. There were vast pomelos hanging on strings like green moons, red bananas, baskets of heliotrope-colored prawns the size of lobsters, brittle dried fish ties in bundles, crimson chilis, ducks split open and cured ike hams, green coco-nuts, the larvae of the rhinoceros beetle, sections of sugar-cane, dahs, lacquered sandals, check silk longyis, aphrodisiacs in the form of large, soap-like pills, glazed earthenware jars four feet high, Chinese sweetmeats made of garlic and sugar, green and white cigars, purple brinjals, persimmon-seed necklaces, chickens cheeping in wicker cages, brass Buddhas, heart-shaped betel leaves, bottles of Kruschen salts, switches of false hair, red clay cooking-pots, steel shoes for bullocks, papier-mache marionettes, strips of alligator hide with magical properties. Elizabeth’s head was beginning to swim. At the other end of the bazaar the sun gleamed through a priest’s umbrella, blood-red, as though through the ear of a giant.”
—George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.
An all-metal blonde
“Fanquist was one of those take-a-second-look dames. You know what I mean, don’t you? An all-metal blonde with a build-up that does things to you, and a figure that weakens your resistance.”
—James Hadley Chase, Get A Load Of This, 1942.