The Blackamoor Washed White
“At Drury Lane [theater] in January 1750 when the management proposed to repeat a play which the audience had driven from the stage the evening before, “the Audience . . . pull’d up the Benches, tore down the Kings Arms, and would have done more mischief if Mr. Lacy [David Garrick’s partner] had not gone into the pit, and talk’d to ’em, what they resented was giving out a piece again after they had damn’d it.’ The Blackamoor Washed White, a comic opera written by the notoriously quarrelsome and much-disliked journalist and cleric Henry Bate, suffered a similar fate in 1776. After four nights of opposition during which ‘numbers of the pit and boxes got upon the stage and blows passed between some of them’, [actor and manager David] Garrick was forced to withdraw the play.”
—John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1997.
A General History of Quadrupeds
An advertisement by Thomas Bewick for the publication by subscription of A General History of Quadrupeds, 1788.
—John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1997.
three lavish books
“[Thomas] Bewick’s fame rested on three publications. His A General History of Quadrupeds (1790), an illustrated history of four-footed beats, went through eight editions in Bewick’s lifetime. His equally successful two-volume History of British Birds, a more complex and scientific study, appeared in 1797 and 1804; it was reprinted six times before his death in 1828. Lastly, the Fables of Aesop, a project conceived during a nearly fatal illness in 1812 and finally published in 1818, combined Bewick’s love of nature with his penchant for trenchant moralizing. As Bewick himself recognized, these three lavish books transformed his life.”
—John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1997.
DID YOU KNOW . . .
“In the DARK AGES, artistic hacks (ironically known as “ILLUMINATORS”) supported themselves by illustrating BORING PRAYERBOOKS with colorful little paintings; such tomes, affordable only to WEALTHY COLLECTORS, were known as “Books of Hours,” sporting calendars, stories of Saints, and penitential Psalms, some taking MONTHS or even YEARS to complete! These MISERABLE VIRGINS should thus be thanked for their selfless contributions to the art of the GAILY-DECORATED PICTURE BOOK!”
—Chris Ware, from the third hardback volume of The Acme Novelty Library, 2006.
the sweetest scene
“The most important of [the] tourist knick-knacks [of Georgian England] was the so-called Claude glass. Sometimes a piece of coloured glass through which to look at the landscape, it was more usually a convex mirror that miniaturized the view and, in its compression of the landscape, made it look more general and uniform. It was a tool for capturing and manipulating nature, for making a frameable possession, and it required you to turn your back on what you wanted to see. In 1769 the poet Thomas Gray described looking at Derwentwater in the Lake District . . . using his Claude glass: ‘saw in my glass a picture, that if I could transmit it to you, & fix it in all the softness of its living colours, would fairly sell for a thousand pounds. this is the sweetest scene I can yet discover in point of pastoral beauty.’”
—John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1997.
a green carpet of moss
“A fraction of an hour later, and all out of breath, I was knocking on the door. Then a strange thing happened. A grey little mouselike girl that I’d never seen before came to the door. It was all dark inside even though it should have been light, and she blinked for a few seconds before she could say anything. The dismal creature was a stranger and I started to say something, but she looked up at me with her unbeautiful eyes and said, ‘Shhhh! They’re all asleep, and I’m going too.’ Exhaling I said yeah and went to sit on the stairs between the top floor and the roof. I was no more than four feet away before the lock clicked to behind me. I’ve always hated the idea of locks in general, and especially the sound they make as the people I just left lock me out. I always wait for my visitor to get well away before snapping the lock back, and I feel weak and mean if I forget.
So I sat on those seldom used stairs with my legs stretched out flat and stared at the steps between them. A leak in the roof was sending a steady drip drip onto the spot I was watching, and it had taken green. A little trickle ran from the pool down onto the next step, then the one after. I got caught up in the sound it made because the sound of running rippling water is one of the most timeless imaginable to me. It was no different there on the stairs than it would be in caverns much too deep to ever be found except by spiritual proxy like I was doing. I could hear it just so, just the way it was, and I ran my fingers through my hair, one . . . drip, two . . . drip, three . . . thinking how I’d like to give up my human consciousness and be found here the next day as a green carpet of moss, but not recognized. People seldom climbed over those steps and when it rained, I could drink cold water.”
—William S. Burroughs, Jr, a runaway on psilocybin mushrooms in Manhattan. The ellipsis are his. From the autobiographical Speed, 1973.
the colors in the sky
“Bill would be on the roof every night to watch the colors in the sky as soon as the sun was starting to set. . . . Transfixed and absolutely motionless, right hand holding the perpetual cigarette, lips parting to the sun, and himself stirring only to drop it when it burned his fingers.”
—William S. Burroughs, Jr, remembering his father, William S. Burroughs, in Tangier. From Kentucky Ham, 1973.
our ken
“What lies within our ken is but a small part of the universe.”
—John Locke, as quoted in The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century by John Brewer, 1997.
the technicolor breeze
“Lucas, like Clint Eastwood in a tux . . .
Jumps off his trusty steed and shoots the technicolor breeze
Right beside a cactus there on his hands and knees
One too many Pabst Blue Ribbons on top of those green beans”
—the amazing, and often even humorous, Momus. The song Team Clermont, from the album Stars Forever, 1999.
auburn, azure, brown, black, blue, cerise, crimson, cyan, dun, ecru, gray, green, indigo, khaki, maroon, mauve, puce, purple, red, russet, scarlet, sepia, taupe, ultramarine, white, and yellow
“In the English language, there are fewer than thirty words whose major function is to designate a specific color. These include auburn, azure, brown, black, blue, cerise, crimson, cyan, dun, ecru, gray, green, indigo, khaki, maroon, mauve, puce, purple, red, russet, scarlet, sepia, taupe, ultramarine, white, and yellow—they are all defined in the dictionary as either a specific location on the spectrum or with the phrase ‘as having the color of’ or “being the color” followed by the names of objects bearing the color. . . .
There are also colors that are named after specific objects—animals, vegetables, or minerals; their names, having been in use for a long time, have come to be regarded, when used in the proper context, primarily as colors. Within this group are such names as beige, buff, lavender, lilac, orange, pink, sienna, umber, rust, turquoise, silver, gold, emerald, sapphire, and fawn. And some of these names have lost their original meaning and now stand for the color alone. However, even with this list, the number of color names remains fairly small. Therefore we use a variety of linguistic devices to extend it.
1. Combining names for a single color that has two hue qualities, e.g., yellow-green, blue-violet, yellow-orange
2. Limiting names by the use of a modifier denoting lightness, e.g., dark blue, dark red, light red, light blue, light green
3. Limiting names by the use of a modifier referring to the degree of color saturation, e.g., dull red, bright red, dull green, bright green
4. Adding the suffix ish, e.g., yellowish, greenish, reddish
5. Using such descriptive adjectives as mellow, harsh, garish, or subtle”
—Joseph H. Krause, The Nature of Art, 1969.