that particular blue
“He stopped at the window and leaned his forehead against the pane. Over the machine-gun tower one could see a patch of blue. It was pale, and reminded him of that particular blue which he had seen overhead when as a boy he lay on the grass in his father’s park, watching the poplar branches slowly moving against the sky.”
—Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, 1941.
The ‘O’ in Obama
Meet Sol Sender (a pretty good name, that), the designer of the Obama logo (a plum assignment, this), at “The ‘O’ in Obama”, by Steven Heller.
gfhrytytu
“Please don’t tell anybody, but Mark Nechtr desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you’re going to die. Maybe it’s called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism, Or gfhrytytu. He doesn’t know. He wonders who the hell really cares. Maybe it’s not called anything.”
—David Foster Wallace, ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’, Girl With Curious Hair, 1989.
a twenty-page poem that’s all punctuation
“ ‘Why you’re pissed is that I only said I thought a twenty-page poem that’s all punctuation wouldn’t be much fun for anybody to actually read.’”
—David Foster Wallace, ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’, Girl With Curious Hair, 1989.
a big blue dog
“ ‘The ocean looks like a big blue dog to me, sometimes.’ Faye says, looking. Julie puts an arm around Faye’s bare shoulders.”
—David Foster Wallace, ‘Little Expressionless Animals’, Girl With Curious Hair, 1989.
cool as a lemony moon
“ ’I was convinced I could sing like a wire at Kelvin, high and pale, burn without ignition or friction, shine cool as a lemony moon, mated to a lattice of pure meaning.’”
—David Foster Wallace, ‘Here and There’, Girl With Curious Hair, 1989.
in Letterman’s putty-colored green room
“I smoothed the blue dress I’d slipped on in Letterman’s putty-colored green room.”
—David Foster Wallace, ‘My Appearance’, Girl With Curious Hair, 1989.
a yellow-green sky
“This storm’s not a really bad Midwest storm, she remarks, as they stand by the scarecrow in the horizontal rain. Too windy to be really dangerous. The bad storms always hide behind a dead calm and a yellow-green sky. That’s when you head for the cellar.”
—David Foster Wallace, ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’, Girl With Curious Hair, 1989.
ROSES ARE GREEN, VIOLETS ARE YELLOW.
A T-shirt from TypeTees, a subsidary of Threadless. I like the sentiment, and the colors are perfect. The font, Century Schoolbook, is a good choice. But . . . the letterspacing is too tight, AND SOMEBODY MUST HAVE HIT THE CAPS LOCK; THE MONOTONOUS OF CAPITALS IS ANNOYING AND EVEN, TO MY EYE, OBNOXIOUS. I would have preferred some lower-case letters. It’s poetry, right? I don’t understand why the variation in leading between colors was necessary, unless it was to give the screenprinters of error. And . . .
a hatch mark, a foot sign, rather than an actual apostrophe? Typographically, this shirt is a trainwreck. But still, it’s funny. I’ll give it a B+.
six butterflies
“There are nine different words in Maya for the color blue in the comprehensive Porrua Spanish-Maya Dictionary but just three Spanish translations, leaving six butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving beyond doubt that when a language dies six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth.”
—Earl Shorris, ‘The last word: Can the world’s small languages be saved?’, Harper’s Magazine, August 2000.