The Blue Men

“ ‘Man, I hope we meet some Tuareg guys.’
    ‘What guys?’
    ‘The Tuareg? You know the Tuareg.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘The Tuareg? They’re the blue men?’
    I wanted to throw rocks at his head.
    ‘Tell me,’ I said.
    ‘Blue men. I think that’s what the word means. Blue men. These guys were badasses. They’re like nomadic trader-thieves, who would spring out from the Sahara and rob caravans. They were insane. Blue eyes, blue skin and everything. Scariest people ever. Twelve feet tall.’
    I squinted at him, wondering how I’d get along if I ditched him in Casablanca.
    ‘You don’t believe me?’ he asked, offended. ‘Ask anyone in Morocco about the Tuareg. Or the blue men. Say blue men and watch them run in terror.’ ”

—Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, 2002.

the sky above Riga

“There is a corner of the sea that is deep but not so deep that it’s black. It’s the blue of a blueberry, violet in its heart, though this blue allows light through its million unseeable pores. The hue is evenly painted but electric, a klieg light pushing through a gel of cyan. But invading this blue are clouds of inky purple, billowing clouds curling in small waves, and they grow from below, splitting the sea between light above and dark growing from below.
    Turn it upside down and this was the sky above Riga.”

—Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, 2002.

A spot of optical excess

a dark and sinister thing

“I once met a woman with a serious phobia of butterflies, even dead ones pinned under glass; it would have been child’s play to mindfuck her by hinting at the presence of butterflies under the bed. The mindfucker is a student of human weakness and vulnerability, using these traits of create false beliefs and emotional chaos. Perhaps this is part of the reason the mindfucker seems a more unsavoury character than the bullshitter (for whom we reserve a modicum of pity). The mindfuck (in the negative sense) is a dark and sinister thing, going far beyond the merely cognitive wrongdoing of the kind perpetrated by lies and bullshit.“

—Colin McGinn, Mindfucking, 2008.

how it is on Athos

“ ‘[I]f the bones are found to be yellow like wax, that is the first sign that the Lord has glorified the righteous deceased; and if they are found to be not yellow but black, it means that the Lord has not deemed him worthy of his glory—that is how it is on Athos, a great place, where Orthodoxy from of old has been preserved inviolate and in shining purity.’. . .”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990.

blue wallpaper

“The walls were adorned with blue wallpaper, all tattered, it is true, and behind it, in the cracks, cockroaches swarmed in terrible numbers, so that there was an incessant rustling.”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990.

a fine-tempered blade of light

“Come out here where the roses have opened.
Let soul and world meet.

The sun has drawn a fine-tempered blade
of light. We may as well surrender.”

—Rumi, “Empty,” Rumi: Bridge to the Soul, translated by Coleman Barks, 2007.

Can & Did

Still Bush After All These Years

the color purple

“How daring it was to represent the quarterly shortfalls in revenue with the color purple—the color associated not only with kings but also with the skin of slaves, an obvious yet powerful homage to Alice Walker’s seminal novel. By rejecting the fixed ironic conventions of green and black (colors of mold, death, and despair) for profits and red (blood and lust) for losses, you transcended the common criticism that capitalism is animalistic and decadent. The postmodern color scheme instead offered a fascinating contradiction, one that simultaneously said, ‘I am master of my destiny,’ and ‘I am trapped by the projections required as a condition of my employment, and am but a slave to outcomes that are way beyond my control.’. . .”