Sometimes Yakov lost sight of the words. They were black birds with white wings, white birds with black wings. He was falling in thoughtless thought, a stupefying white- ness.
—Bernard Malamud, The Fixer, 1966.

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Jeff writes:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

I spilled red curry and Thai-dyed my shirt.

Q: In his song "Humanized," Jon Ryman sings, "I'm half alive, just like a Chinese figurine."  Are Chinese figurines indeed sentient?

A: Yes—but only the jade statues are sentient.  "Living Jade" (Jadeite, as opposed to Nephrite) displays mild intelligence.

Certainty #29:

"The sole certainty of life is found in the love that destroys all else."
—Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry, 2001

The man had on a brown suit, white shirt, and red tie, all of the same degree of cheapness, and all worn out to the same degree. The color of the suit was reminiscent of an amateur paint job on an old jalopy. The deep wrinkles in the pants and jacket looked as permanent as valleys in an aerial photograph. The white shirt had taken on a yellow tinge, and one button on the chest was ready to fall off. It also looked one or two sizes too small, with its top button open and the collar crooked. The tie, with its strange pattern of ill- formed ectoplasm, looked as if it had been left in place since the days of the Osmond Brothers. Anyone looking at him would have seen immediately that this was a man who paid absolutely no attention to the phenomenon of clothing.
—Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, translated by Jay Rubin, 1997.

"'Questionable' is a splendid word; I have always attached a great philological value to it.  It calls up a desire both to pursue and to avoid, or at any rate a very cautious pursuit, and stands in the twofold light shed by what is noteworthy and notorious in a thing—or a person."
—Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

When we're asked to weave stories out of the whimsical dictionaries we compile, we're left scratching our heads [oops—the Majestic Plural gets tricky!].  The lexicographer gathers the words for the writer to combine.  The satirist Dr. Boli knows what we're talking about.

True of False: Soup is as funny today as it was a few years back.

Clue:  This is according to the book The Sense of Humor.

Answer:  False.  “Soup is still funny, but not as funny as it was a few years back.”  (The answer is in black text on the black background.  Highlight it to view.)

Citation:  Max Eastman, The Sense of Humor (1921), p. 150.

I had a nightmare about a ghost shark.

Certainty #28:

"The only certainty is that of journeying towards a non-verifiable arrival."
—Paolo Bartoloni, Interstitial Writing, 2003

Saint Robert
Patron of Post Rock.

I dreamed I came down with stigmata.

Claggart deliberately advanced within short range of Billy, and mesmerically looking him in the eye, briefly recapitulated the accusation. Not at first did Billy take it in. When he did the rose- tan of his cheek looked struck as by white leprosy. He stood like one impaled and gagged. Meanwhile the accuser’s eyes, removing not as yet from the blue, dilated ones, underwent a phenomenal change, their wonted rich violet colour blurring into a muddy purple. Those lights of human intelligence losing human expression, gelidly protruding like the alien eyes of certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep.
—Herman Melville, Billy Budd, 1924.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

by Derpunk

All the Colors of the Wind

The air. A thing too intangible for color you think? ... The truth is all air is colored.
—John C. Van Dyke, The Desert

Anyone who thinks that air is invisible is impaired by a sort of color blindness. Indeed, the air is so alive with color that it could be likened to a rainbow that encircles the entire earth with pink, red, violet, gray, blue, and yellow. Ask a naturalist or a painter, and you'll hear descriptions of an airy spectrum that escapes the unobservant viewer. Carried by swirling dust particles and refracted by the prisms of water vapor, the colors of the air are best observed in a mass. Mountaintop vantages, canyons, desert expanses, or deep valley views are recommended. The warmer the temperature and the stronger the wind, the more color will be detectable. Rising heat carries finer dust particles deepening the air's hues, while high winds carry larger particles, brightening the coloration.¹

Here's how naturalist Richard Jefferies poetically recorded seeing the colors of the wind at sunrise one morning:

by James Jordan.

Color comes up in the wind; the thin mist disappears, drunk up in the grass and trees, and the air is full of blue behind the vapor. Blue sky at the far horizon — rich deep blue overhead — a dark-brown blue deep yonder in the gorge among the trees. I feel a sense of blue color as I face the strong breeze; the vibration and blow of its force answer to that hue, the sound of the swinging branches and the rush — rush in the grass is azure in its note ; it is wind-blue, not the night-blue, or heaven-blue, a color of air. To see the color of the air, it needs great space like this — a vastness of concavity and hollow — an equal cauldron of valley and plain under, to the dome of the sky over, for no vessel of earth and sky is too large for the air-color to fill. Thirty, forty, and more miles of eye-sweep, and beyond that the limitless expanse over the sea — the thought of the eye knows no butt, shooting on with stellar penetration into the unknown. In a small space there seems a vacuum, and nothing between you and the hedge opposite, or even across the valley; in a great space the void is filled, and the wind touches the sight like a thing tangible. The air becomes itself a cloud, and is colored — recognized as a thing suspended; something real exists between you and the horizon. Now, full of sun and now of shade, the air-cloud rests in the expanse.²

The COLOURlovers library is full of airy inspiration. There are colors of "thin" to "heavy" atmospheres as well as airless colors of suffocation.

NOTES:
[1] John C. Van Dyke, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances, 1903.
[2] Richard Jefferies, "Winds of Heaven," The Eclectic Magazine, 1886.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]