Miggs B with Paul Rand

If you’re curious, but can’t watch it all, jump right to part 3.

Ada, Bett, Celia, Delia

“Hoost! Ahem! There’s Ada, Bett, Celia, Delia, Ena, Fretta, Gilda, Hilda, Ita, Jess, Katty, Lou (they make me cough as sure as I read them) Mina, Nippa, Opsy, Poll, Queeniee, Ruth, Saucy, Trix, Una, Vela, Wanda, Xenia, Yva, Zuluma, Phoebe, Thelma. And Mee!”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

a rudd yellan gruebleen orangeman in his violet indigonation

“. . . Jarl von Hoother Boanerges himself, the old terror of the dames, came hip hop handihap out through the pikeopened arkway of his three shuttoned castles, in his broadginger hat and his civic cholar and his allabuff hemmed and his bullbraggin soxandgloves and his ladbroke breeks and his cattegut bandolair and his furframed panuncular cumbottes like a rudd yellan gruebleen orangeman in his violet indigonation, to the whole longth of the strongth of his bowman’s bill.”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

(Stoop) if you are abcedminded

“(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world?”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

And the white water rode the black forever

“(The black stream, catching on a sunken rock,
Flung backward on itself in one white wave,
And the white water rode the black forever,
Not gaining but not losing . . .)”

—Robert Frost, “West-Running Brook”, 1928.

Waken! my people

“Waken! my people, to the boughs green
With ripening fruit within you!”

—William Carlos Williams, “The Wanderer”, 1914.

The Brain Is Deeper Than The Sea

“The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As sponges—buckets—do—”

—Emily Dickinson, “The Brain is wider than the sky” (#126), 1924.

Inebriate of Air

“Inebriate of Air—am I—
And Debauchee of Dew—
Reeling—thro endless summer days—
From inns of Molten Blue—”

—Emily Dickinson, “I taste a liquor never brewed” (#214), 1924.

Vheissu

“ ‘Vheissu is hardly a restful place. There’s barbarity, insurrection, internecine feud. It’s no different from any other godforsakenly remote region. The English have been jaunting in and out of places like Vheissu for centuries. Except . . .’
    She had been gazing at him. The parasol leaned against the bench, its handle hidden in the wet grass.
    ‘The colors. So many colors.’ His eyes were tightly closed, his forehead resting on the bowed edge of one hand. ‘The trees outside the head shaman’s house have spider monkeys which are iridescent. They change color in the sunlight. Everything changes. The mountains, the lowlands are never the same color from one hour to the next. No sequence of colors is the same from day to day. As if you lived inside a madman’s kaleidoscope. Even your dreams become flooded with colors, with shapes no Occidental ever saw. Not real shapes, not meaningful ones. Simply random, the way clouds change over a Yorkshire landscape.’ ”

—Thomas Pynchon, V., 1963.

straight A’s

—Roy Blount Jr., Alphabet Juice, 2008.