Blue, blue, blue

“Orizaba rooftop, Orizaba Rooftop,
Blue, blue, blue
Blue’s made of shiny everyway”

—Jack Kerouac, ‘Orizaba 210 Blues, 61st Chorus’, from Book of Blues, 1995.

festivity and merriment

Some pictures from last wednesday’s opening at the Baton Rouge
Gallery. These were taken early on, as you can see by the
daylight spilling through a doorway. As night fell the attendance increased
dramatically, and soon the galleries echoed with enthusiastic mingling and discussion. Eventually much of the
crowd
wandered to the back patio where live DJs played loud music, and there was much festivity and merriment. Everyone, or if
not
everyone, then very nearly everyone, had a very nice time.

The diamond that cuts through

“The diamond that cuts through
To the other view
That I painted all white for you”

—Jack Kerouac, ‘Orizaba 210 Blues, 19th Chorus’, from Book of Blues, 1995.

Rose

“‘Ah Rose,’ I cried,
‘Shine in the Phosphorescent
Night.’”

—Jack Kerouac, ‘Rose’, from Book of Blues, 1995.

its roseate hue

“At Grand Island he ate dinner, and the food sobered him somewhat. It
sobered him too much, in fact, for he could not stand himself sober
these days. He began drinking again, as soon as he was on the Verdon
train, and gradually the world reassumed its roseate hue.”

—Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder, 1946.

a mountain of gold

“And I laughed because everything was laughter. There was the smell of
fresh earth and yellow dust, and a great pile that was a mountain of
gold (like Pop is going to find); and the gold spouted downward from a
pipe in the sky, falling around my head, mounting above my feet like
golden sand, above my waist and shoulders. And I was looking into the
man’s eyes, far above, and he was looking down into mine, and I knew
that we were playing a game, that he was going to hide me beneath the
gold; and I could not understand why Mom came racing across the field
nor why the man’s teeth bared like a frightened dog’s. But I knew that
everything was good, and I laughed.”

—Jim Thompson, Now and On Earth, 1942.

until the sky was green

“[S]he’d saw away on that damn fiddle until the sky was green and you’d
sit with your eyes closed, tapping on the arm of your chair, and no one
dared to say a word. . . .”

—Jim Thompson, Now and On Earth, 1942.

a rainbow-haze of reds and yellows and blues

“The din was so terrific that the boys’ ears ached from it, but they
were too busy gawking to mind. The plant was one great seemingly
unbounded room, with steel rafters from which traveling cranes were
suspended. At one end of the room, the end which they were passing,
were the embryos of more than a dozen different types of farm
implements—the bare unpainted chasis of threshers, combines, mowers,
balers, and so on—drawn up in the manner of animals beginning a race.
(And indeed the men who worked upon them were racing.) Perhaps fifty
feet away was a parallel line, and here the embryos were a little
easier to identify for what they were, or would be. And beyond that was
a third line, and a fourth, and a tenth, each advancing the growth of
the implement by a step or two until it was finished.
     The last line was so far away that the men
were mere specks—bobbing bug-like fixtures, moving in what seemed to be
a rainbow-haze of reds and yellows and blues.
    Those were the spray-painters, Simpson explained,
and some of them made as much as seven dollars a day. He did not
explain that they had no teeth after six months, little eyesight after
a year, and that their occupational expectancy was about three years.”

—Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder, 1946.

a man ought to laugh

“‘When a thing’s funny,’ said Sherman, ‘a man ought to laugh. You
hadn’t ought to hold in anything like that.’ His hard blue gaze struck
the clerk like a blow. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Laugh.’”

—Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder, 1946.

I’ll set type by hand

“‘Seems to me I’d learn how to run one of the machines.’
    ‘I won’t! Never!’ Grant exclaimed so hotly that his
father almost looked upon him with favor. He liked a man with
principles, even if they were the wrong kind. ‘I’ll set type by hand,
like it was meant to be set, or not at all!’
    ‘Well, set it by hand, then,’ said Link. ‘There’s lots of papers that don’t have this Lin-o-type yet.’”

—Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder, 1946.