red. Or pink, or orange, or even yellow
“The author would like to acknowledge that he does not look good in red. Or pink, or orange, or even yellow—he is not a spring.”
—Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 2001.
pink, purple, rainbow, gold
“There is no logic to San Francisco . . . a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It’s the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons. Why not pink, purple, rainbow, gold? What color for a biker bar on 16th, near the highway? Plum. Plum.”
—Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 2001.
mulberrycoloured
“‘Drink, the Irish opium, was his solace. Only the sacred pint could unbind his tongue and naturally an excess of sacred pints had him prostrated in his ‘mulberrycoloured, multicoloured, multitudinous vomit.’”
—Edna O’Brien, James Joyce, 1999.
a talismanic significance
“Blue was a color which had for him, with his host of superstitions, a talismanic significance. It was the color of his eyes and the color which would grace the cover of the first edition of Ulysses. . . .”
—Edna O’Brien, James Joyce, 1999.
purple monkey dishwasher
We’ve all heard the expression ‘purple monkey dishwasher,’ of course we have! But what does it mean? Well . . . if you have to ask, then you don’t know. And if you don’t know . . . just check The Urban Dictionary.
Design Classics: The London Underground Map
If you appreciate good design and have 25 minutes for a relaxing spot of twentieth-century British telly, you might enjoy this.
a mixture of wine, blood, and squid-ink
“Artist through, I’d been wont since boyhood when pissing on beach or bank to make designs and clever symbols with my water. From this source, as from Pegasus’s idle hooftap on Mount Helicon, sprang now a torrent of inspiration: using tanned skins in place of a sand-beach, a seagull-feather for my tool, and a mixture of wine, blood, and squid-ink for a medium, I developed a kind of coded markings to record the utterance of mind and heart. By drawing out these chains of symbols I could so preserve and display my tale, it was unnecessary to remember it. I could therefore compose more and faster; I came largely to exchange song for written speech. . . .”
—John Barth, ‘Anonymiad’, Lost in the Funhouse, 1968.
a rousing good yarn
“If I’m going to be a fictional character G declared to himself I want to be in a rousing good yarn as they say, not some piece of avant-garde preciousness.”
—John Barth, ‘Life-Story’, Lost in the Funhouse, 1968.
Cang Jie, the legendary creator of the Chinese script
“Zhang Huaiguan, a well-known calligraphic theorist of the Tang dynasty, claimed in his Critical Reviews on Calligraphy (Shu duan) that Cang Jie, the legendary creator of the Chinese script . . . had four eyes that were capable of communing with the Divinity. ‘He looked up to observe the changing view of the constellations, and gazed around to scrutinize the patterns on turtle shells and the tracks of birds and beasts. He picked a wide variety of beautiful forms and combined them into characters.’ According to Zhang, character construction occurs when people commune with nature and merge its beauty with their own spirit.”
—Ouyang Zhongshi & Wen C. Fong, Chinese Calligraphy, translated & edited by Wang Youfen, 2008.
the liveliness of ancient characters
“Commenting on the liveliness of ancient characters, Wei Heng (259-291), a calligrapher of the Western Jin dynasty, wrote in his On the Four Types of Scripts (Si ti shu shi) that they evoke ‘patches of clouds drifting leisurely in the sky, myriads of stars blinking from above, crops heavily laden with drooping ears, mountains undulating into folds, insects ready to crawl away, and birds just starting to take flight.’”
—Ouyang Zhongshi & Wen C. Fong, Chinese Calligraphy, translated & edited by Wang Youfen, 2008.