evening light

“She talked little; but that was an additional charm. She was melancholy, and seemed grateful; her presence was enough, like that of the evening light.”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.

the last yellow gig

“‘That is Mrs Waule’s gig—the last yellow gig left, I should think. When I see Mrs Waule in it, I understand how yellow can have been worn for mourning. That gig seems to me more funereal than a hearse. But then Mrs Waule always has black crape on. How does she manage it, Rosy? Her friends can’t always be dying.’”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.

red herrings

“‘Mamma,’ said Rosamond, ‘when Red comes down I wish you would not let him have red herrings. I cannot bear the smell of them all over the house at this hour of the morning.’”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.

Changs

“Chang Chio, in the 2nd century, called himself the Yellow God and led an army of 360,000 followers, all wearing yellow turbans. They brought down the Han Dynasty. . . .

Chang Seng-yu, in the 6th century, painted a pair of dragons without eyes on the Temple of Peace and Joy, and warned that the painting should never be completed. A skeptic filled in the eyes, and the walls of the temple crashed to ruins as the dragons flew off. . . .

Chang Chu, a poet in the 13th century, wrote a line, ‘The cataclysm of red sheep,’ that no one has ever been able to explain. . . .

Chang Jen-hsi, in the 18th century, wrote a treatise on ink.”

—Eliot Weinberger, excerpts from “Changs”; The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry, edited by Andrew Schelling, 2005.

XTT Part 5: Diminuendo, and the Future

all semicolons and parentheses

“‘He has got no good red blood in his body,’ said Sir James.
    ‘No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses,’ said Mrs Cadwallader.”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72.

It takes a singular creature to write the word ‘Blood’ in a Bible

“I knew that Edward’s Bible held a secret as soon as I opened it and seen the word ‘Blood’ spilled on the first page, just ’neath the headpiece. It takes a singular creature to write the word ‘Blood’ in a Bible, and mind you to write it in crimson.”

—Edward Chupak, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder, 2008.

Billy Bones

“Nothing that I might scrawl on the parchment would give a suitable accounting of Billy Bones. This parchment has pallor and so does not bring out the red in Bones’s face. The plume does not caper nearly as cleverly as Bones. Bones was a drunkard, but a sound rover, and maybe one of the best rovers that ever crooked a sword into a liver. I would need a torrent of quills to relate his rascality.”

—Edward Chupak, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder, 2008.

Chuck Close / Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg: Cardbird 1