an ‘e’ tax

“We need to do something about this national tendency to try to make new things look like they are old.
    First off, we should enact an ‘e’ tax. Government agents would roam the country looking for stores whose names contained any word that ended in an unnecessary ‘e,’ such as shoppe or olde, and the owners of these stores would be taxed at a flat rate of $50,000 per year per ‘e.’ We should also consider an additional $50,000 ‘ye’ tax, so that the owner of a store called ‘Ye Olde Shoppe’ would have to fork over $150,000 a year. In extreme cases, such as ‘Ye Olde Barne Shoppe,’ the owner would simply be taken outside and shot.”

—Dave Barry, Ye Olde Humor Columne, from Dave Barry’s Greatest HIts, 1988.

hints and symbols

“Perhaps, I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke—a thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace—perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”

—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945.

Vernacular Baton Rouge: The TURKISH BATHS

a great Mediterranean moment

“The art world tends to be driven by its market, and throughout the ’50s and the ’60s it was a relatively small art world with dealers and collectors and one or two small museums. It was during that period that the most powerful and permanent American art in this century was made—from Abstract Expressionism and Pop, to Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. It was, in a real sense, a great Mediterranean moment created by 4000 heavily medicated human beings. And then in the late ’60s we had a little reformation privileging museums over dealers and universities over apprenticeship, a vast shift in the structure of cultural authority. All of a sudden rather than an art world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureaucracy—you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because like most conservative reactions to the ’60s it was aimed specifically at the destruction of sibling society—the society of contemporaries.”

the Alice-in-Wonderland side of religion

“‘But of course,’ she said, ‘it’s very unexpected for a camel to
go through the eye of a needle, but the gospel is simply a catalogue of
unexpected things. It’s not to be expected that an ox and an
ass should worship at the crib. Animals are always doing the oddest
things in the lives of the saints. It’s all part of the poetry, the
Alice-in-Wonderland side, of religion.’”

—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945.

a crock of gold

“‘Just the place to bury a crock of gold,’ said Sebastian. ‘I should
like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy
and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and
dig it up and remember.’”

—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945.

Real G-g-green Chartreuse

“‘Real G-g-green Chartreuse, made before the expulsion of the monks.
There are five distinct tastes as it trickles over the tongue. It is
like swallowing a sp-spectrum.’”

—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945.

reality in a dream

“It might have been at a time of night when people say they see reality
in a dream. Almost catching my breath, I looked on this strange scene.
By the dim light of the andon, I could see the Emperor doll holding an ivory sceptre, the Empress doll—its tiara bedecked with jewels, the ukon wild orange, the sakon
cherry, the porter carrying a long-handled umbrella, the Court Lady
holding up a food tray a little below the level of her eyes, the small
gold-lacquered mirror and chest, a small folding screen decorated with
shell, the rice bowls, the decorated candle shades, the balls of colored
thread, and again, my father’s profile. . . .
    As if I were seeing them in a dream, . . . ah, that is what I have already said.”

—Ryunosuke Akutagawa, The Dolls, from Exotic Japanese Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagaway, translated by Takashi Kojima and John McVittie, 1964.

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An On-Line Color Thesaurus