the green eyes
“[S]he was laughing. Her head was thrown back and the green eyes were crinkled and flashing, and that topside I’d mentioned was trembling and shivering. She was laughing all over. I could almost see the naked, rippling flesh, feel it shivering against mine, while the green eyes looked up into mine.”
—Jim Thompson, The Nothing Man, 1954.
new writing systems
Often without knowing their meaning, other cultures borrowed and altered Egyptian hieroglyphs to create new writing systems. Almost half of the characters of a writing that we call Protosinaitic came from hieroglyphs. The first true alphabet was probably invented by Egyptian scribes in the military, although there is a theory that Semitic copper-mining slaves created an alphabet as a code to help synchronize their escape.
An alphabet is a distinct form of writing which is not pictographic or logographic, it is purely “uniliteral.” Every character represents a number of phonetic variations, and the total number of characters is limited to somewhere between 20 and 27 marks. It is a supremely practical and adaptable system. Just as paper was only invented once, in China, and then gradually spread throughout the world, it is thought that this first alphabet has led, through imitation, to all the subsequent alphabets in the world.
There was never a country called Phoenicia, the Phoenicians were, rather, sailors and traders who lived in independent cities on the shores of the Mediterranean, sharing a culture and a language. The Phoenicians borrowed a few letters from the Protosinaitic alphabet, probably oblivious to their original meaning, to create the Phoenician writing system. Other cultures, in turn, borrowed from the Phoenician alphabet which was to be found throughout Mediterranean world.
The most significant of these was the Greek or Hellenic alphabet, the oldest alphabet still in use, as any visitor to modern Greece knows. The Greek alphabet was a parent to several other writing systems, most notably the Cyrillic alphabet that is still in use among several Slavic cultures, and the Latin or Roman alphabet which is currently in use in most of Europe and the Americas.
As Madge said in the old Palmolive commercial, “You’re soaking in it.”
—Paul Dean, Letterforms, 2007.
Don’t think I didn’t do my research for the above quote. Click here for a nostalgic treat. Well, it’s nostalgic for me, but my first words, according to my parents, were “was brought to you by.”. . .
she could hardly cast a shadow
“[S]he was still so shaky that she could hardly cast a shadow.”
—Jim Thompson, A Hell of a Woman, 1954.
a dime-store diamond
“It was about as genuine as a dime-store diamond.”
—Jim Thompson, A Hell of a Woman, 1954.
Egyptian hieroglyphics
In the Nile valley, writing evolved from simple pictographs into the striking Egyptian hieroglyphics that are immediately recognizable, even today. Some of the characters serve as pictographs, but others serve as phonetic indicators of a particular sound, in exactly the same way that rebus writing indicates a sound by way of a picture. The same character can serve both functions; the specific meaning is determined by the preceding character, known as the determinant.
Egyptian hieroglyphics were intentionally difficult to read; combining the power inherent in writing and secrecy, the Egyptian priests created an intentionally cryptic written language. So complex was the code behind the characters that it was not until 1822 that they were finally interepreted, when Jean-Francois Champollion translated the Rosetta Stone, a massive stone tablet discovered by the French in the Egyptian harbor of Rosetta in 1799. There are three types of writing on the Rosetta Stone: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Demotic, a descendant of Egyptian hieratic writing. Able to translate the Greek, Champollion guessed that perhaps the text was the same for the other scripts, and he was correct.
Hieratic writing evolved as a streamlined variation of heiroglyphics, and was useful for everyday purposes. It became even more popular with the invention and subsequent popularity of ink and papyrus. Papyrus is an aquatic reed which can be harvested, sliced, soaked, woven and then mashed and dried. The result is a yellowish paper-like material, originally used in building houses, much like Tyvek is today, which was discovered to be an excellent material for writing with a brush and ink.
Papyrus has a few disadvantages when compared with paper, which was apparently only invented once, in ancient China, and had yet to reach the western world. Made of organic material, a plant, papyrus decays over time. And it breaks when it is folded, which is why it is traditionally rolled onto itself and then handled and stored as scrolls.
The importance of writing in the Egyptian religion of the time is difficult to overstate. Written language was regarded as the work of the gods, as this excerpt from The Egyptian Book of the Dead attests:
“Thoth speaks:
The ibis and the ink pot—these are blessed. For as the ibis pecks along the bank for a bit of food, so the scribe searches among his thoughts for some truth to tell. All the work is his to speak, its secrets writ down in his heart from the beginning of time, the gods’ words rising upward through his dark belly, seeking light at the edge of his throat. We are made of god stuff, the explosion of stars, particles of light, molded in the presence of gods. The gods are with us.”*
—Paul Dean, Letterforms, 2007
*Awakening Osiris: The Egyptian Book of the Dead, translated by Normandi Ellis, 1988.
She knew the oranges
“She knew the oranges. She knew all such gimmicks, though never before had she been the victim of any. The oranges was an item from the dummy-chuckers’ workbag, a frammis of the professional accident fakers.
Beaten with the fruit, a person sustained bruises far out of proportion to his actual injuries. He looked badly hurt when he was hardly hurt at all.”
—Jim Thompson, The Grifters, 1963.
a sickish green
“As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop his face was a sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony.”
—Jim Thompson, The Grifters, 1963.
the invention of writing
The invention of writing occurred around 5,000 years in ancient Mesopotamia, a result of the trading involved in the world’s first cities. Carved or molded seals were used to make impressions on clay. Cylindrical seals were rolled onto clay to impress the mark of the owner, the symbolic presence of the owner, onto sealed bags of merchandise. Hundreds of these ‘cylinder seals’ remain, and they are the richest artistic expression of their time. Framed in the rectangular impression they make when rolled onto clay, we find illustrations of animals, trees and people, the landscape of their times.
Sometimes there is a blank space in the composition. This was not “white space,” as we use it today to relieve the tension of a cramped space or to improve a composition. This area was left open for the impressions made by the notched end of a stick. This angular mark, wedge-shaped, and later came to be named ‘cuneiform’ writing. Cuneiform is not a particular language, and it is not yet a true alphabet. These marks were used by a variety of Mesopotamian cultures in a many different way. Writing was originally used to help keep track of objects and transact business. In fact, you might say that writing is an advanced form of counting, and that it was city-scale commerce, and taxation in particular, which led to its invention. The vast power of written language, as opposed to spoken language, is not intuitively obvious. And writing, as opposed to speaking, has to be learned.
Cuneiform is a type of pictographic mark making, in which marks which originally represented an object, then begins to represent other concepts as well. For instance, to the ancient Babylonians, who meticulously watched the sky and over time transferred their local divinities to the stars, the pictographic mark for a star eventually came to represent divinity.
Babylon was the center of the Sumerian empire, which extended to many cities. In order to stabilize this society (and to confirm and extend his rule) King Hammurabi drew up a set of laws that were reproduced by the scribes of his time onto stone and placed throughout the land. Only one nearly complete set of these laws survives to this day. It is a black basalt stele which was created in approximately 1780 BCE, and was discovered in 1901 in the Persian mountains, where it had been stashed by ancient looters. This dramatic presentation of the Code of Hammurabi is now on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
It is impressive not only for its size—it stands eight feet tall—but for the dramatic illustration at its peak: the god Shamash, seated on a throne, handing to King Hammurabi a measured staff and a ring, perhaps a coiled rope. These may be the tools used in constructing buildings, and may represent the authority to built a stable society through a commonly understood system of laws.
This illustration, legible even to the illiterate, serves almost as a headline which catches the eye and leads it down into the laws themselves. These have been carefully carved, rather than impressed in clay, and have a striking harmonious and even texture. Hammurabi’s numbered laws wrap around the entire glossy monument, and it is easy to appreciate the authority that these words once held. We do not know how closely other copies of these laws may have resembled this particular stele, but they were on display in cities throughout the Babylonian empire, Kish, Nippur, Eridu, Ur, and others, so that no one could plead ignorance of the law.
—Paul Dean, Letterforms, 2007.
steeped in gold
“With the approach of autumn, a layer of long golden fur grows over their bodies. Golden in the purest sense of the word, with not the least intrusion of another hue. Theirs is a gold that comes into this world as gold and exists in this world as gold. Poised between all heaven and earth, they stand steeped in gold.”
—Haruki Murikami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World; translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1991.
there are tasteful whites and there are crass whites
“The walls were a white, the ceiling a white, the carpet a mocha brown—all decorator colors. Yes, even in whites, there are tasteful whites and there are crass whites, shades that might as well not be white.”
—Haruki Murikami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World; translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1991.