all the sounds of the environment at once
“In 1969 . . . [part of] a special edition of Marshall McLuhan’s Dew-Line Newsletter . . . [was] a pack of cards, the “Distant Early Warning Deck.”. . . Each card has a quotation from a different thinker or artist. The five of diamonds is dedicated to [John] Cage, and bears the following: ‘[S]ilence is all the sounds of the environment at once.’”
—Charlie Gere, from Art, Time and Technology, 2006.
haunted Sixties culture
“[A] dream of technical control and of instant information conveyed at unthought-of velocities haunted Sixties culture. The wired, electonic outlines of a cybernetic society became apparent to the visual imagination.”
—David Mellor, from The Sixties: Art Scene in London, 1993.
The arc-light
“The arc-light shining into his window seemed for this hour like the moon, only brighter and more beautiful than the moon.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, from The Beautiful and Damned, 1922.
Madame Jouvenon
“Madame Jouvenon was . . . seated in La Sevillana eating a merinque. She was a bright-eyed little woman whose hair, having gone prematurely white, she had unwisely allowed to be dyed a bright silvery blue. To complete the monochromatic color scheme she had let Mlle. Sylvie dye her brows and lashes a much darker and more intense shade of blue. The final effect was not without impact.”
—Paul Bowles, from Let it Come Down, 1952.
furry beams of light
“When he looked at the sun, his eyes closed almost tight, he saw webs of crystalline fire crawling across the narrow space between the slitted lids, and his eyelashes made the furry beams of light stretch out, recede, stretch out.”
—Paul Bowles, from Let it Come Down, 1952.
a blind world
“The sun’s light filtered through his closed eyelids, making a blind world of burning orange warmth;”
—Paul Bowles, from Let it Come Down, 1952.
Paris
“The day opens in milky whiteness, streaks of salmon-pink sky, snails leaving their shells. Paris. Paris.”
—Henry Miller, from Tropic of Cancer, 1961.
Moldorf is word drunk
“Moldorf is word drunk. He has no veins or blood vessels, no heart or kidneys. He is a portable trunk filled with innumerable drawers and in the drawers are labels written out in white ink, brown ink, red ink, blue ink, vermilion, saffron, mauve, sienna, apricot, turquoise, onyx, Anjou, herring, Corona, verdigris, gorgonzola. . . .”
—Henry Miller, from Tropic of Cancer, 1961.
the proofreaders
“When the world blows up and the final edition has gone to press the proofreaders will quietly gather up all commas, semicolons, hyphens, asterisks, brackets, parenthesis, periods, exclamation marks, etc. and put them in a little box over the editorial chair.”
—Henry Miller, from Tropic of Cancer, 1961.
The blond hustler
“The blond hustler stands outside the Gold Cup Coffee Shop.”
—John Rechy, from The Sexual Outlaw, 1977.