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The Primary Colors: Three Essays
Three interrelated essays on the primary colors presents the artistic, aesthetic, emotional, and economic dimensions of each color in an anecdotal format of poetry and humor.
288 pages, Paperback
First published August 25, 1994
30 people are currently reading
1115 people want to read
About the author
Alexander Theroux
51 books190 followersAlexander Theroux is a novelist, poet, and essayist. The most apt description of the novels of Theroux was given by Anthony Burgess in praise of Theroux's Darconville's Cat: Theroux is 'word drunk', filling his novels with a torrent of words archaic and neologic, always striving for originality, while drawing from the traditions of Rolfe, Rabelais, Sterne, and Nabokov.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews
March 10, 2013
These impressive “essays,” also titled All the Shit I Know About Three Colours in One Long Luscious List, finds Theroux in fact-gathering mode, compiling a remarkable range of information on beautiful blue, yucky yellow and romping red. Each page contains upwards of nine facts that can be supped on slowly like a delicious latte from your friendly tax-dodging conglomerate milky libation provider, or hurled into the gub like a fast-food product from your local beef and spud dispenser. Digging into his bottomless well of factoids from art and real life—books, painters, films, music, pop-culture, folklore, religion, history-in-general—Theroux once again demonstrates his reputation as the most underappreciated superbrain in American letters. A passionate pleasure and almost entirely free from verbose insults . . . but not quite! I like the colour blue.
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May 20, 2017Blue.
Yellow.
Red.
Lovely.
If you find yourself a little put-off by all our bluster about Theroux The Curmudgeon, The Cantankerous, The Opinionated, The Smarter-Than-Thou, (never to apologize for a large vocabulary, thank you) please find yourself a copy of his Primary Colors or perhaps his Secondary Colors. In these volumes you might indulge yourself in that rare bird, the Therouvian Essay, erudite and Burtonesque. The style is restful and the voice is endearing. Lovely.
Yellow.
Red.
Lovely.
If you find yourself a little put-off by all our bluster about Theroux The Curmudgeon, The Cantankerous, The Opinionated, The Smarter-Than-Thou, (never to apologize for a large vocabulary, thank you) please find yourself a copy of his Primary Colors or perhaps his Secondary Colors. In these volumes you might indulge yourself in that rare bird, the Therouvian Essay, erudite and Burtonesque. The style is restful and the voice is endearing. Lovely.
May 26, 2013
“Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in Basic Color Terms demonstrate exhaustively and empirically, the very simple thesis that anywhere in the world, as a language develops and acquires names for color, the colors always enter in the same order. The most primitive are black and white. Then red. Then either green or yellow.” – Alexander Theroux, The Primary Colors
This is a brilliant book that will open your eyes to the world of colour. It’s a collection of three essays based on the primary colours: blue, yellow and red.
Blue
“Its odd strength but soft moody ethereality is yet another enigma in the colour.”
“It represents tradition, contentment, timelessness, fulfillment, fullness and lasting immemorial values.”
Yellow
“Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.”
“I once knew a young woman from Moorestown, New Jersey, whose voice, I used to think, was pale yellow, as enervatedly she droned on and on in her dull, unimaginative way.”
Red
“Red is the boldest of all colors. It stands for charity and martyrdom, hell, love, youth, fervor, boasting, sin and atonement.”
“It is generally agreed that of all colors, red has the strongest chroma and the greatest power of attraction. It is at once positive, aggressive and exciting. It is strong, simple, primary.”
This is a very informative book; it taught me so much from categories such as literature, poetry, linguistics, art, history, religion, science, botany, mythology and culture. It was a fascinating read and has a lot of interesting personal anecdotes and references to literature and art that I will look up later. Alexander Theroux is extremely erudite and I found myself looking up words in a dictionary more than a few times.
It took a Google search for me to realize that Alexander Theroux is the brother of Paul Theroux, the famous travel writer, and thus the uncle of Louis Theroux, the journalist. What an incredible literary family!
This is a brilliant book that will open your eyes to the world of colour. It’s a collection of three essays based on the primary colours: blue, yellow and red.
Blue
“Its odd strength but soft moody ethereality is yet another enigma in the colour.”
“It represents tradition, contentment, timelessness, fulfillment, fullness and lasting immemorial values.”
Yellow
“Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.”
“I once knew a young woman from Moorestown, New Jersey, whose voice, I used to think, was pale yellow, as enervatedly she droned on and on in her dull, unimaginative way.”
Red
“Red is the boldest of all colors. It stands for charity and martyrdom, hell, love, youth, fervor, boasting, sin and atonement.”
“It is generally agreed that of all colors, red has the strongest chroma and the greatest power of attraction. It is at once positive, aggressive and exciting. It is strong, simple, primary.”
This is a very informative book; it taught me so much from categories such as literature, poetry, linguistics, art, history, religion, science, botany, mythology and culture. It was a fascinating read and has a lot of interesting personal anecdotes and references to literature and art that I will look up later. Alexander Theroux is extremely erudite and I found myself looking up words in a dictionary more than a few times.
It took a Google search for me to realize that Alexander Theroux is the brother of Paul Theroux, the famous travel writer, and thus the uncle of Louis Theroux, the journalist. What an incredible literary family!
Read
February 13, 2020When I was a child I would make lists of... nothing in particular... I'd sort out the largest cities in China in the World Book Encyclopedia, every shortstop in my baseball card collection, every model of car I'd see on the streets of my hometown, every dinosaur I could find the name of, you get the idea. Alexander Theroux does this with colors. He lists off all the things he knows that are red, blue, and yellow, and why they give him the feel they do.
And while this seems weird and pointless and frankly feckless when I describe it, it isn't. It doesn't come off like the obsessions of a nerdy, precocious child, or, for that matter, like the uncomfortable conversation you get stuck in on the bus next to an autistic adult and you realize you're too polite to shut him up, and also you're still feeling the weed you smoked at your friend's house... Rather, it feels like the delightful ramblings of an elderly eccentric, which is precisely what Alexander Theroux is. Too many old coots spend their time watching Fox News in their La-Z-Boys and imbibe opinions to be parroted at Thanksgiving. Three cheers to those who don't, the wonderful old grumps who brighten our lives with their wit and wisdom, even at their most cynical.
And while this seems weird and pointless and frankly feckless when I describe it, it isn't. It doesn't come off like the obsessions of a nerdy, precocious child, or, for that matter, like the uncomfortable conversation you get stuck in on the bus next to an autistic adult and you realize you're too polite to shut him up, and also you're still feeling the weed you smoked at your friend's house... Rather, it feels like the delightful ramblings of an elderly eccentric, which is precisely what Alexander Theroux is. Too many old coots spend their time watching Fox News in their La-Z-Boys and imbibe opinions to be parroted at Thanksgiving. Three cheers to those who don't, the wonderful old grumps who brighten our lives with their wit and wisdom, even at their most cynical.
March 24, 2024
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2024...
“I have always wondered, how expensive was blue for Botticelli? And whether his lavish use of royal blue for the dress and robe of the Virgin, for example, personally cost him anything? Did the rarity of blue affect compositions? And what about frescoes by people like Piero della Francesca? Their bright blue skies must have been costly—or had there been a cheaper way to do it? Did Marco Polo return from the Orient with new, better, more plangent, lambent, luminous, lacustrine blues? How was Maya blue obtained, and why were all those figurines of noblemen and women and priests found buried on the island necropolis of Jaina in Mexico covered in blue pigment?”
“The unclouded April blue eyes of Simonetta Vespucci, Botticelli s immemorial model? Blue is everywhere.”
La verdad es que mis lecturas están siendo un poco caóticas dentro de mi orden personal, pero no puedo programar nada, imposible hacerme una agenda por ejemplo, o una lista de lo que voy a leer a continuación o durante el año, porque todo dependerá siempre de la última lectura o de la que esté en curso, porque casi siempre, me llevará a un libro que no tenía programado, o que ni sabía que existía, pero yo diría que esta visceralidad a la hora de elegir las lecturas (o de que ellas me elijan a mí) es lo que convierte la literatura en una especie de aventura casi agónica por descubrir antes de que el tiempo vuele: es la eterna curiosidad.
“BLUE is A mysterious color, hue of illness and nobility, the rarest color in nature. It is the color of ambiguous depth, of the heavens and of the abyss at once; blue is the color of the shadow side, the tint of the marvelous and the inexplicable, of desire, of knowledge, of the blue movie, of blue talk, of raw meat and rare steak, of melancholy and the unexpected.
It can darken, it can obscure, it may float to and fro like a mist, evoking serenity and power. Mirroring each other, the sea takes its color from the sky.”
Luis Sagasti comentaba en Lenguas vivas que concebía la literatura como lectura más que como escritura, y realmente me tengo que sentir identificada. A este paso estas reseñas se van a acabar pareciendo a una especie de serial con un spin-off al final, porque ya comenté en mi última que la lectura de Lenguas vivas me había llevado directamente a los brazos de Alexander Theroux, así que se puede decir que ambas obras estarán ya permanentemente unidas en mi memoria. Empecé a leer esta última a mitad de la novela de Sagasti y la verdad es que reconocí muchas de las ideas que el autor argentino acabó desarrollando, aunque de otra forma, montando su propio universo. Pero el concepto de una imagen o de una cita a partir de la cual desarrollas un mundo totalmente personal, está ya aquí en esta novela que NO es una novela, (referencia a Markson) y aquí Theroux lo hace a través de los colores primarios, el azul, el amarillo y el rojo. “Wittgenstein says colors are forms of objects”, Theroux rescata esta cita de Ludwig Wittengestein y de alguna forma la desarrolla en una obra que me ha impactado por las mil y una perspectivas que le puede dar a la vida misma.
"Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "And you were a liar, O blue melancholy,"
[...]
"I tell you, Mr. [Samuel] Bowles," wrote heartbroken Emily Dickinson to the one man she loved probably more than any other, after he sailed for Europe, "it is a Suffering to have a sea—no care how Blue—between your Soul, and you."
[ ...]
Edgar Allan Poe was a red writer. It was the color, to him, of ghoulishness, living horror, lust, murder, and anxious foreboding—the ungovernable and tempestuous flames that destroy the Palace of Metzengerstein; the oppressive scarlet of the dungeon ("a richer tint of crimson diffused itself over the pictured horrors of blood>,) in "The Pit and the Pendulum"; and in "The Conqueror Worm," who can forget that "blood-red thing that writhes from out the scenic solitude"?
[...]
And one of the most magnificent sentences in all of literature, found in Moby-Dick (Chapter 70), takes its cue from this idea: "An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon upon the sea." Yellow is vagueness and luminousness...”
Los colores primarios es una obra compuesta de tres ensayos cada uno de ellos está dedicado a uno de estos colores, el azul, el amarillo y el rojo y la forma en que Theroux ensambla, combina y conecta diferentes ideas, recuerdos, citas, imágenes, con estos colores, convierte esta obra en una experiencia muy inmersiva. En ningún momento se detiene, el monólogo que funciona como un flujo de conciencia casi musical, no para hasta llegar hasta el final de cada uno de estos ensayos. No sé bien cuál será la técnica de Theroux, si las ideas le surgen y las va ensamblando o improvisando caóticamente o realmente está todo dentro un plan perfectamente estructurado, pero reconozco que me ha maravillado su capacidad para pasar de un tema a otro casi sin respiro. Cada color será su justificación para recorrer el mundo como en una aventura sin descanso, la literatura a través de citas, los pigmentos en las obras de arte, las lenguas, la religión, la música, la ciencia, el arte sobre todo, el cine, la historia, las civilizaciones antiguas… todo está aquí a través de sus colores primarios como tema guía.
“A parallel can be found in classical European languages, in which there is a striking lack of names for the green-blue range. The Icelandic word for blue (bla-r), incidentally, denotes every shade of blue and black and can describe the color of a clear sky, a fist of coal, or the sheen of a raven. What we call blue is always designated "dark" in Homer, in whose epic poems the color blue does not appear.”
“Scriabin, who believed musical keys implied equivalents in color, thought D major was yellow.
(I've listened repeatedly and actually can envision sunlight in Bachs Sonata in D Major, Wagners Polonaise, Borodins String Quartet No. 2 in D Major, and several of Haydns string quartets.) "My hearing became enormously keen," wrote Theophile Gautier, while smoking hashish. "I heard the noises of colors: green, red, blue, yellow sounds came to me in perfectly distinct waves."
Este tipo de obras abren la mente al lector a otras percepciones, a otras formas de narración, porque este aparente caos erudito no deja de estar reflejando la vida misma. En ningún momento responde a preguntas, sino que a través de los hechos, el lector irá construyendo su propio universo e interpretándolo a su manera. Hay algo concreto, detalles pequeñísimos que harán que cada uno de nosotros percibamos estos colores de forma distinta, y entiendo que esto es precisamente de lo que habla esta obra fascinante, de los diferentes matices que tiene la vida. “Strangely, blue is the only color we can feel so with blues in the night connoting sadness, isolation, even bruises.” Maravilla.
“Incidentally, the notion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder may be true in more ways than one. Most eyes contain three pigments—red, green, and blue—which absorb different wavelengths of light and send signals to the brain, so that it can calculate precisely which colors we see.”
♫♫♫ Paint it black - The Rolling Stones ♫♫♫
July 4, 2015
Yellow and Red finished.
Yellow: A Reading List
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Filmography:
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High Sierra. 1941.
High Society. 1956.
La fille aux yeux d’or. 1960.
Oklahoma! 1955.
Rear Window. 1954.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. 1949.
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The Squaw Man. 1914. 1918. 1931.
Till the Clouds Roll By. 1946.
Ultimo tango a Parigi. 1972.
Mentioned in the text:
Ackermann, Diane.
Barnes, Djuna.
Burton, Robert.
Dekker, Thomas.
Falcon Scott, Robert.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von.
Morris, William.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel.
Sand, George.
Thoreau, Henry David.
Yerby, Frank
Red: A Reading List
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Ibsen, Henrik. Peer Gynt. 1867.
Pope Innocent III. De Sacro Altaris Mysterio. (I, 64).
Jackson, Michael. The World Guide to Beer. 1977.
Jellinek, Paul. The Practice of Modern Perfumery. 1954.
Johnson, Ben. The Alchemist. (II, 3). 1610.
Juvenal. Satires. (XIV, 193).
Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. 1912.
Katchor, Ben. The Drink of Life. Comic.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 1962.
King, Stephen. The Lawnmower Man. 1970.
Langland, William. Piers Plowman. C. 1370-90.
Lavignac, Albert. Musique et musiciens. 1895.
Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 1928.
Lear, Edward. ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’. http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ll/dl....
Lindgren, Astrid. The Dragon with Red Eyes. 1985.
Linné, Carl von. Systema naturae. 1735.
Little Red Riding Hood.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. ‘Afternoon in February’. http://www.bartleby.com/356/52.html.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Tales of a Wayside Inn. 1863. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tales_o....
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. ‘The Evening Star’. http://www.bartleby.com/356/59.html.
McCormick, John. The Complete Aficionado. 1967.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick, or: The Whale. 1851.
Menotti, Gian Carlo. The Saint of Bleeker Street. 1954. Opera.
Middleton, Thomas. The Witch. (V, ii). C. 1609-16.
Miller, Arthur. A View from the Bridge. 1955. Play.
Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. 1936.
Morris, William. The Wood Beyond the World. 1892.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Invitation to a Beheading. 1936.
Naipaul, V. S. The Return of Eva Peron. 1980.
Nostradamus. Les Propheties de M. Michel Nostradamus. 1555.
Oates, Joyce Carol. On Boxing. 1987.
Paracelsus. Opus Paramirum. (I, ix. 196-201.)
Pendergast, Mark. For God, Country and Coca-Cola. 1993.
Plath, Sylvia. ‘Letter in November’. http://genius.com/Sylvia-plath-letter....
Plath, Sylvia. ‘Tulips’. 1960. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/....
Poe, Edgar Allan. ‘Al Aaraaf’ (1829, Poem); ‘The City in the Sea’ (1845, Poem); ‘The Conqueror Worm’ (1843, Poem); The Masque of the Red Death (1842); The Pit and the Pendulum (1842); The Fall of the House of Usher (1839).
Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo. 1300.
Proust, Marcel. À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. 1918.
Puccini, Giacomo. La Bohème. 1895.
Rimbaud, Arthur. Illuminations. 1874.
Rimbaud, Arthur. Vocals. 1870.
Roark, Garland. Wake of the Red Witch. 1946.
Robbins, Tom. Still Life with Woodpecker. 1980.
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von. Venus im Pelz. 1870.
Saunders, Frederick. Salad for the Social. 1856.
Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe. 1820.
Sexton, Anne. ‘May 30th’. Poem.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. 1611.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. ‘The Devil’s Walk’. 1812. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Dev....
Spengler, Oswald. Der Untergang des Abendlandes. 1926.
Steinberg, John. The Grapes of Wrath. 1939.
Stevens, Wallace. Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. 1942.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 1886.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897.
St. Vincent Millay, Edna. ‘The Shroud’. 1917. http://www.bartleby.com/131/12.html.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. 1726.
The Talmud.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. Idylls of the King. 1859-85.
Tennyson. Alfred, Lord. ‚Maud‘. 1855. http://www.bartleby.com/42/6491.html.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. 1847/8.
Thomas, Cathy. ‘Femina et Felis’. Poem.
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. 1869.
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. 1945.
Wharton, Edith. Etham Frome. 1911.
Yeats, W. B. Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. 1888.
Yeats, W. B. ‘Upon a Dying Lady’. 1919. http://www.bartleby.com/148/32.html.
Filmography
Color Me Blood Red. 1965.
Double Indemnity. 1944.
It's a Wonderful Life. 1946.
Jezebel. 1938.
La notte che Evelyn uscì della tomba. 1971.
Lipstick. 1976.
Love Me or Leave Me. 1955.
Manhattan Melodrama. 1934.
Miss Sadie Thompson. 1953.
One-Eyed Jacks. 1961.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 1975.
Peyton Place. 1957.
Pierrot le Fou. 1965.
Psycho. 1960.
Reap the Wild Wind. 1942.
Red Hair. 1928.
Red-Headed Woman. 1932.
Red River. 1948.
Show Boat. 1936.
Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs. 1937.
Strawberry Blonde. 1941.
Sunset Boulevard. 1950.
The Band of the Red Hand. 1938.
The Fabulous Baker Boys. 1989.
The Lost World. 1960.
The Spanish Dancer. 1923.
The Thing. 1982.
The Wild Bunch. 1969.
The Woman in Red. 1984.
Up in Arms. 1944.
Where the Sidewalk Ends. 1950.
Witness for the Prosecution. 1957.
Mentioned in the text:
Barnes, Djuna.
Camus, Albert.
Confucius.
Dostoyewski, Fyodor.
Alexandre Dumas, pere.
Ellis, Havelock.
Larkin, Philip.
Lucan.
Marvell, Andrew.
Mishima, Yukio.
Plinius.
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de.
Shaw, George Bernard.
Smart, Christopher. Spenser.
Stein, Gertrude.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles.
Warren, Robert Penn.
Yellow: A Reading List
Bibliography
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Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 1900.
The Bible. Proverbs 23: 31-2.
Branch, James. Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice. 1919.
Vergil. Eclogue V. C. 44-38 BC.
Brook, Maria Gowen. ‘Zophiel or the Bride of Seven’. 1833. Poem.
Bulfinch, Thomas. The Age of Chivalry. 1958.
Bulgakow, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. 1967.
Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan the Untamed. 1921.
Calasso, Roberto. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. 1988. Essay.
Cather, Willa. ‘Paul’s Case’. 1905. Short story.
Chambers, Robert W. The King in Yellow. 1895. Collection of short stories.
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Chaucer, Geoffrey. ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’. In: The Canterbury Tales. 14th century.
Child, Lydia Maria. Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times. 1824.
Comtesse d’Aulroy. ‘Le Nain jaune’ (‘The Yellow Dwarf’). In: Les Contes des Fées. 1697.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1899.
cummings, ee. ‘I sing of Olaf glad and big’. 1931. Poem.
Danger, Eric. How to Use Color to Sell. 1969. Non-fiction.
Davenport, Marcia. Of Lena Geyer. 1936.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853.
Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. 1870.
Dickinson, Emily. Poem 1045: ‚Nature rarer uses Yellow‘.
Dickinson, Emily. Poem 320: ‘There’s a certain slant of light’.
Doughty, Charles Montagu. Travels in Arabia Deserta. 1888. Non-Fiction.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. ‘The Speckled Band’. 1892. Short story.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. ‘The Yellow Face’. 1893. Short story.
Dryden, John. The Wild Gallant: A Comedy. Act 1, Scene II. 1663.
Du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca. 1938.
Eliot, T.S. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. 1915.
Erlanger, Rachel. Lucrezia Borgia: A Biography. 1978.
Fitch, Alt. The Breath of the Dragon. 1916.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925.
Frost, Robert. ‘The Road Not Taken’. 1920.
García Marquez, Gabriel. ‘Light is like Water‘. In: Strange Pilgrims. 1992.
García Marquez, Gabriel. ‘María dos Prazeres’. In: Strange Pilgrims. 1992.
García Marquez, Gabriel. ‘The Airplane of the Sleeping Beauty‘. In: Strange Pilgrims. 1992.
Gilbert, W. S & Sullivan, Arthur. Patience; or, Bunthorne’s Bride. 1881.
Gould, Chester. Dick Tracy. 1931-today. Comic.
Grosz, George. A Little Yes and a Big No. 1946.
Haggard, H. Rider. Allan Quatermain. 1887.
Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. 1930.
Hauser, I. L. The Orient and its People. 1876.
Homer. Iliad. Ch. XIX. 8th century BC.
Hood, Thomas. ‘Gold!’ Poem.
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Hughes, Robert. ‘The Rise of Andy Warhol.’ In: NYRB, 18 February 1982. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi....
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Jarry, Alfred. Ubu Roi. 1896. Play.
Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. 1912.
Kazantzakis, Nikos. Japan, China. 1963.
Kerouac, Jack. ‚The low yellow / moon above the / quiet lamplit house.’
Klein, Daryl. With the Chinks. 1919.
Larkin, Philip. ‘A Study of Reading Habits’. Poem. http://allpoetry.com/A-Study-Of-Readi....
LeBaron, Marie. ‘The Yellow Ribbon’. 1876. Poem.
Levin, Ira. Rosemary’s Baby. 1967. Novel.
Lindbergh, Charles. We. 1927.
Linné, Carl von. Systema naturae. 1735.
London, Jack. The Negro Showed No Yellow’. In: San Francisco Chronicle, 4th July 1910.
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Louys, Pierre. Aphrodite: mœurs antiques (Aphrodite: Ancient Manners). 1896.
Louys, Pierre. Les aventures du roi Pausole (The Adventures of King Pausole). 1901.
Lovecraft, H.P. The Shunned House. 1924. Short story.
Lowell, Robert. ‘In the cage’. In: Lord Weary’s Castle. 1947. Poem.
Mandeville, John. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. 14th century.
Maurois, André. Patapoufs et Filifers. 1930.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick, or: The Whale. 1851.
Mencken, H. L. Prejudices: Fifth Series. 1926.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. 1949.
Miln, Louise Jordan. In a Shantung Garden. 1924.
Miln, Louise Jordan. It Happened in Peking. 1926.
Miln, Louise Jordan. Mr. Wu. 1918.
Mosley, Zack. The Adventures of Smilin’ Jack. 1933-73. Comic.
Morrow, William. The Wood beyond the World. 1894.
Neruda, Pablo. ‘El Buen Sentido’ (‘The Right Meaning’). In: Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems. Beacon Press, 1993, 236-9.
Nichols, Beverly. Father Figure. 1972.
Outcault, Richard F. The Yellow Kid. 1895-8. Comic.
Parker, Dorothy. ‘Big Blonde’. 1929. Short story.
Peacher, Georgina. Mary Stuart’s Ravishment Descending Time. 1976.
Percy, Walker. The Moviegoer. 1961.
Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. 1892.
Petroski, Henry. The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. 1990.
Plath, Sylvia. ‘Gold Mouths Cry’. Poem.
Plato. Theaetetos. 369BC.
Poe, Edgar Allan. ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’. 1845. Short story.
Proust, Marcel. À la recherche du temps perdu. 1908-1922.
Rohmer, Sax. The Yellow Claw. 1915.
Rohmer, Sax. Yellow Shadows. 1925.
Sacks, Oliver. ‘To See and Not See’. In: An Anthropologist on Mars. 1995. Essay.
Sandburg, Carl. Rootabaga Stories. 1922.
Santayana, George. ‘Before a Statue of Achilles’. Poem. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/....
Schulberg, Budd. What Makes Sammy Run? Random House: 1941.
Seuss, Dr. Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book. 1962.
Seuss, Dr. The Lorax. 1971.
Sforza, Caterina. Experimenti. 15th century.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act I, Scene 2. 1605.
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. 1601.
Shaw, Anna Howard; Blackwell, Alice Stone & Anthony, Lucy Elmina. The Yellow Ribbon Speaker.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or: The Modern Prometheus. 1818.
Sissman, L. E. ‘Tras Os Montes’. In: The Atlantic, May 1978. Poem. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/....
St. Vincent Millay, Edna. ‘The Plaid Dress’. Poem. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-pl....
Stevens, Wallace. ‘Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight’. 1947. Poem. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetr....
Stevens, Wallace. ‘Floral Decorations for Banana’. 1923. Poem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floral_D....
Stevens, Wallace. ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’. 1924. Poem. http://hellopoetry.com/poem/14586/sea....
Stevenson, Anne. ‘A Tricksy June’. In: The New Yorker, 21 June 1993. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/199....
Stout, Rex. Nero Wolfe novels. 1934-85.
Sue, Eugène. The Wandering Jew. 1844.
Tao, Li. How to Read Faces. 1989.
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. 1869.
Treichler, Paula A.; Russo, Ann & Kramarae, Cheris. A Feminist Dictionary. 1985.
Trevor, William. Excursions in the Real World: Memoirs. 1993.
Wells, H.G. The Island of Dr. Moreau. 1896.
West, Nathaniel. The Day of the Locust. 1939.
White, T. H. The Once and Future King. 1958.
Wilde, Oscar. ‘Symphony in Yellow‘. Poem. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/w....
Woolf, Virginia. Flush: A Biography. 1933.
Yeats, William Butler. The Celtic Twilight. 1902.
The Yellow Book. 1894-1897. Magazine.
Yellow Silk: Journal of Erotic Arts. 1981-1996. Magazine.
Filmography:
Dona Flor e seus dois maridos. 1966.
High Sierra. 1941.
High Society. 1956.
La fille aux yeux d’or. 1960.
Oklahoma! 1955.
Rear Window. 1954.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. 1949.
The Caine Mutiny. 1954.
The Lady from Shanghai. 1947.
The World of Suzie Wong. 1960.
The Squaw Man. 1914. 1918. 1931.
Till the Clouds Roll By. 1946.
Ultimo tango a Parigi. 1972.
Mentioned in the text:
Ackermann, Diane.
Barnes, Djuna.
Burton, Robert.
Dekker, Thomas.
Falcon Scott, Robert.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von.
Morris, William.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel.
Sand, George.
Thoreau, Henry David.
Yerby, Frank
Red: A Reading List
Bibliography:
Andrejew, Leonid. The Red Laugh. 1904.
Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso. 1516.
Balzac, Honoré de. La Fille aux yeux d'or. 1835.
Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 1900.
Baum, L. Frank. The Patchwork Girl of Oz. 1913.
Belloc, Hilaire. “When I am dead, I hope it may be said: "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.” Quote.
Benét, William Rose. ‚Jesse James‘. Poem. http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetr....
The Bible. Genesis 25:30; Exodus 26: 1-35, 36:1-38; Judges 8:26; 2 Chronicles 2:7; Proverbs 31:22, 31:32; Song of Songs 1:14, 4:13, 5:10; Wisdom 13:18; Jeremiah 22: 14, 36:18; Ezekiel 23:14; Nahum 2:3, 49:12; Luke 16:19; Revelation 6:4, 18:12.
Boccaccio, Giovanni. Il Decamerone. (VIII). 1351.
Boccaccio, Giovanni. Il Corbaccio. 1355.
Bonnefoy, Yves. ‘Le Lieu des Morts’.
Book of Kells. 800 AD.
Borges, Jorge Luis. El Aleph. 1945.
Brautigan, Richard. In Watermelon Sugar. 1968.
Brautigan, Richard. Trout Fishing in America. 1967.
Brjusow, Valerij. The Fiery Angel. 1908.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847.
Büchner, Georg. Woyzeck. 1879.
Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc. Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière. 1749-1788
Bulgakow, Mikhail. The Crimson Island. 1927.
Burgon, Dean. Petra: A Poem. 1845.
Cain, James M. Double Indemnity. 1936.
Calasso, Roberto. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. 1988. Essay.
Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. 1958.
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. 1966.
Capote, Truman. Answered Prayers. 1986.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. 1865.
Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass. 1871.
Cary, Joyce. The Horse’s Mouth. 1944.
Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. 1927.
Chapman, George. Bussy d’Ambois. (III, ii). 1603-7. Play.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’. In: The Canterbury Tales. 14th century.
Chilam Balam. 17th-18th century.
Clark, Kenneth. Florentine Painting: The Fifteenth Century. 1945.
Colette. Julie de Carneilhan.
Comstock. F. Ray. Polly Preferred. 1923. Stage production.
Constant, Benjamin. Le Cahier Rouge. 1807.
Cooper, James Fenimore. Red Rover. 1828.
Dante. Purgatorio. (II, 13-15; XXVI 7-8). 1472.
Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. 1850.
Dickinson, Emily. 165: ‚A Wounded Deer‘.
Dickinson, Emily. 1059: ‘Sang from the Heart’. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sang_fr....
Disraeli, Benjamin. Coningsby, or: The New Generation. 1844.
Doughty, Charles Montagu. Travels in Arabia Deserta. 1888. Non-Fiction.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Man with the Twisted Lip. 1891.
Drury, Tom. ‘Strong’. Short story.
Du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca. 1938.
Eluard, Paul. La Victoire de Guernica. 1938.
Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate. 1989.
Field, Eugene. ‘Red’. Poem. http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnL....
Flaubert, Gustave. Salammbô. 1862.
France, Anatole. The Red Lily. 1894.
Frazer, James. The Golden Bough. 1890.
Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. 1991.
Goodman, Linda. Star Signs. 1987.
Grahn, Judy. Blood, Bread and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. 1993.
Graves, Maitland. The Art of Color and Design. 1941.
Hakluyt, Richard. Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and the Ilands Adjacent. 1582.
Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. 1878.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 1850.
Hellman, Lillian. The Little Foxes. 1939. Play.
Herodot. Histories. (II, 60). C. 440 BC.
Homer. Odyssey. (IX, 212). 8th century BC.
Huxley, Aldous. Antic Hay. 1923.
Huysmans, J.-K. Croquis Parisiens. 1905.
Huysmans, J.-K. Là-bas. 1890.
Ibsen, Henrik. Peer Gynt. 1867.
Pope Innocent III. De Sacro Altaris Mysterio. (I, 64).
Jackson, Michael. The World Guide to Beer. 1977.
Jellinek, Paul. The Practice of Modern Perfumery. 1954.
Johnson, Ben. The Alchemist. (II, 3). 1610.
Juvenal. Satires. (XIV, 193).
Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. 1912.
Katchor, Ben. The Drink of Life. Comic.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 1962.
King, Stephen. The Lawnmower Man. 1970.
Langland, William. Piers Plowman. C. 1370-90.
Lavignac, Albert. Musique et musiciens. 1895.
Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 1928.
Lear, Edward. ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’. http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ll/dl....
Lindgren, Astrid. The Dragon with Red Eyes. 1985.
Linné, Carl von. Systema naturae. 1735.
Little Red Riding Hood.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. ‘Afternoon in February’. http://www.bartleby.com/356/52.html.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Tales of a Wayside Inn. 1863. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tales_o....
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. ‘The Evening Star’. http://www.bartleby.com/356/59.html.
McCormick, John. The Complete Aficionado. 1967.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick, or: The Whale. 1851.
Menotti, Gian Carlo. The Saint of Bleeker Street. 1954. Opera.
Middleton, Thomas. The Witch. (V, ii). C. 1609-16.
Miller, Arthur. A View from the Bridge. 1955. Play.
Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. 1936.
Morris, William. The Wood Beyond the World. 1892.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Invitation to a Beheading. 1936.
Naipaul, V. S. The Return of Eva Peron. 1980.
Nostradamus. Les Propheties de M. Michel Nostradamus. 1555.
Oates, Joyce Carol. On Boxing. 1987.
Paracelsus. Opus Paramirum. (I, ix. 196-201.)
Pendergast, Mark. For God, Country and Coca-Cola. 1993.
Plath, Sylvia. ‘Letter in November’. http://genius.com/Sylvia-plath-letter....
Plath, Sylvia. ‘Tulips’. 1960. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/....
Poe, Edgar Allan. ‘Al Aaraaf’ (1829, Poem); ‘The City in the Sea’ (1845, Poem); ‘The Conqueror Worm’ (1843, Poem); The Masque of the Red Death (1842); The Pit and the Pendulum (1842); The Fall of the House of Usher (1839).
Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo. 1300.
Proust, Marcel. À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. 1918.
Puccini, Giacomo. La Bohème. 1895.
Rimbaud, Arthur. Illuminations. 1874.
Rimbaud, Arthur. Vocals. 1870.
Roark, Garland. Wake of the Red Witch. 1946.
Robbins, Tom. Still Life with Woodpecker. 1980.
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von. Venus im Pelz. 1870.
Saunders, Frederick. Salad for the Social. 1856.
Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe. 1820.
Sexton, Anne. ‘May 30th’. Poem.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. 1611.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. ‘The Devil’s Walk’. 1812. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Dev....
Spengler, Oswald. Der Untergang des Abendlandes. 1926.
Steinberg, John. The Grapes of Wrath. 1939.
Stevens, Wallace. Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. 1942.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 1886.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897.
St. Vincent Millay, Edna. ‘The Shroud’. 1917. http://www.bartleby.com/131/12.html.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. 1726.
The Talmud.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. Idylls of the King. 1859-85.
Tennyson. Alfred, Lord. ‚Maud‘. 1855. http://www.bartleby.com/42/6491.html.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. 1847/8.
Thomas, Cathy. ‘Femina et Felis’. Poem.
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. 1869.
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. 1945.
Wharton, Edith. Etham Frome. 1911.
Yeats, W. B. Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. 1888.
Yeats, W. B. ‘Upon a Dying Lady’. 1919. http://www.bartleby.com/148/32.html.
Filmography
Color Me Blood Red. 1965.
Double Indemnity. 1944.
It's a Wonderful Life. 1946.
Jezebel. 1938.
La notte che Evelyn uscì della tomba. 1971.
Lipstick. 1976.
Love Me or Leave Me. 1955.
Manhattan Melodrama. 1934.
Miss Sadie Thompson. 1953.
One-Eyed Jacks. 1961.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 1975.
Peyton Place. 1957.
Pierrot le Fou. 1965.
Psycho. 1960.
Reap the Wild Wind. 1942.
Red Hair. 1928.
Red-Headed Woman. 1932.
Red River. 1948.
Show Boat. 1936.
Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs. 1937.
Strawberry Blonde. 1941.
Sunset Boulevard. 1950.
The Band of the Red Hand. 1938.
The Fabulous Baker Boys. 1989.
The Lost World. 1960.
The Spanish Dancer. 1923.
The Thing. 1982.
The Wild Bunch. 1969.
The Woman in Red. 1984.
Up in Arms. 1944.
Where the Sidewalk Ends. 1950.
Witness for the Prosecution. 1957.
Mentioned in the text:
Barnes, Djuna.
Camus, Albert.
Confucius.
Dostoyewski, Fyodor.
Alexandre Dumas, pere.
Ellis, Havelock.
Larkin, Philip.
Lucan.
Marvell, Andrew.
Mishima, Yukio.
Plinius.
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de.
Shaw, George Bernard.
Smart, Christopher. Spenser.
Stein, Gertrude.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles.
Warren, Robert Penn.
January 17, 2020
these aren't really essays. like there's no argument being made or whatever. the book is only few steps removed from being an actual list of every reference to the primary colours the author could find in the books in his library. just a non-stop barrage of facts that wash over you. you can read multiple pages at a time without even really visualising the colour being mentioned. if he was trying to do a minimalist meditative thing he succeeded and then some. i really think a markov text generator could have spat this out (maybe it would have even been better lol) but i'm not sure that matters. really enjoyable read and my edition even had the plagiarism removed.
September 14, 2020
Small reflections on a small – but highly enjoyable – book from Alexander Theroux.
Treat yourself to a three-course feast of delicious factoids, anecdotes, and ruminations on the colors Blue, Yellow and Red, in these three essays compiled in one volume, The Primary Colors. Theroux draws from movies, fiction, poetry, history, myth, anthropology, chemistry, physics, music, religion – well, you get the idea, it's Theroux.
Theroux begins with the color Blue: “Blue is a mysterious color, hue of illness and nobility, the rarest color in nature. It is the color of ambiguous depth, of the heavens and of the abyss at once; blue is the color of the shadow side, the tint of the marvelous and the inexplicable, of desire, of knowledge, of the blue movie, of blue talk, of raw meat and rare steak, of melancholy and the unexpected (once in a blue moon, out of the blue).” [1]
When discussing the color Red, Theroux asks the burning questions, things we've all wondered: “But could someone straighten me out here? The Thing – a 'super carrot' of a vegetable – in the movie of that name has no blood ('no arterial structure'), yet it needs it in order to live, or so it's explained, and so it goes about its mad plasmatic way killing. Why?” [178]
And,
“In 1923, when the picture The Spanish Dancer was being shot, the popular but imperious Pola Negri stopped production and left thousands of extras in the film waiting because the red of her satin dress ruffles failed to match the red of her slippers. (It was a black-and-white film.)” [243]
“War is red. Soldiers in India habitually carry red amulets as preparation for death, and Fiji islanders paint themselves red after killing a man. The combat uniforms of the Spartan army -- right down to their leather shoes -- were red, their rough tunics of wool dyed with madder. [214]
As I read, I found myself playing a mind game with Theroux to see if I could think of a prominent cultural reference to the color at hand that he might have missed. And in fact, he is so thorough in mining his examples, both familiar and obscure, I thought of only two.
In the case of the color yellow, it was Aldous Huxley's first novel 'Crome Yellow' that came to mind – Theroux didn't mention it. For the color Red, it was the dreaded event-stopping Red Flag in auto racing (thinking here of my own passion, F1) that came to mind – Theroux didn't explicitly cite it, though, to be fair, he did proclaim red as signaling stop. Does that count?
As with any Theroux I've read, fiction or non-fiction, I was dazzled by his erudition, dictionary-bound by his expansive vocabulary, and always entertained and a bit more enlightened. Great fun!
Treat yourself to a three-course feast of delicious factoids, anecdotes, and ruminations on the colors Blue, Yellow and Red, in these three essays compiled in one volume, The Primary Colors. Theroux draws from movies, fiction, poetry, history, myth, anthropology, chemistry, physics, music, religion – well, you get the idea, it's Theroux.
Theroux begins with the color Blue: “Blue is a mysterious color, hue of illness and nobility, the rarest color in nature. It is the color of ambiguous depth, of the heavens and of the abyss at once; blue is the color of the shadow side, the tint of the marvelous and the inexplicable, of desire, of knowledge, of the blue movie, of blue talk, of raw meat and rare steak, of melancholy and the unexpected (once in a blue moon, out of the blue).” [1]
When discussing the color Red, Theroux asks the burning questions, things we've all wondered: “But could someone straighten me out here? The Thing – a 'super carrot' of a vegetable – in the movie of that name has no blood ('no arterial structure'), yet it needs it in order to live, or so it's explained, and so it goes about its mad plasmatic way killing. Why?” [178]
And,
“In 1923, when the picture The Spanish Dancer was being shot, the popular but imperious Pola Negri stopped production and left thousands of extras in the film waiting because the red of her satin dress ruffles failed to match the red of her slippers. (It was a black-and-white film.)” [243]
“War is red. Soldiers in India habitually carry red amulets as preparation for death, and Fiji islanders paint themselves red after killing a man. The combat uniforms of the Spartan army -- right down to their leather shoes -- were red, their rough tunics of wool dyed with madder. [214]
As I read, I found myself playing a mind game with Theroux to see if I could think of a prominent cultural reference to the color at hand that he might have missed. And in fact, he is so thorough in mining his examples, both familiar and obscure, I thought of only two.
In the case of the color yellow, it was Aldous Huxley's first novel 'Crome Yellow' that came to mind – Theroux didn't mention it. For the color Red, it was the dreaded event-stopping Red Flag in auto racing (thinking here of my own passion, F1) that came to mind – Theroux didn't explicitly cite it, though, to be fair, he did proclaim red as signaling stop. Does that count?
As with any Theroux I've read, fiction or non-fiction, I was dazzled by his erudition, dictionary-bound by his expansive vocabulary, and always entertained and a bit more enlightened. Great fun!
January 24, 2020
More facts than you can shake a stick at.
Shaking a stick would be more fun.
Shaking a stick would be more fun.
December 25, 2018
Que libro más raro. Fue como correr una maratón. En el buen sentido, si es que hay un buen sentido de correr una maratón.
Como ya tengo ganas de releerlo, aventuraré que hay dos o tres formas de leer este libro, el cual está plagado de imágenes (derivadas de los tres colores primarios que dan nombre a las tres partes del texto). Bueno, vamos:
1. Leer sin googlear: En esta oportunidad lo que hice fue disponerme a que el libro propusiera las reglas para su lectura, por lo que fui llevado por el autor de un lado para otro fugazmente, imaginando colores en lugares, olores, sensaciones, todos ellos tan diversos que a veces en un mismo párrafo podías dar la vuelta al mundo. La primera forma de lectura entonces sería dejar que el autor, con su exquisita forma de describir, construyera en uno las imágenes. Vale decir, uno se abstiene de googlear lo descrito en un animo desesperado de visualizar, al fin, lo leido. Puedo dar prueba del funcionamiento de este método.
2. Googlear junto con la lectura todo lo descrito por el autor: Ir conformando un libro suplementario con imágenes que se van ordenando compulsivamente en las tres carpetas principales que son los colores primarios. Ojalá leerlo de esta forma la próxima vez, ya que la magia de leerlo sin el googleo desenfrenado era muy especial, muy disfrutable, pero estoy seguro, sin embargo, que hacer este ejercicio enfermo puede llegar a traer satisfacciones inesperadas. Me imagino esas carpetas llenas de imágenes azules y se me erizan los pelos de los párpados.
Podría haber una tercera forma de abordar este texto, que supongo sería la de googlear algunas cosas, pero no voy por los términos medios. Espero que la próxima vez me encuentre con el segundo método y su re-lectura se convierta en una agonía-google que me lleve a la locura.
Gran libro.
Como ya tengo ganas de releerlo, aventuraré que hay dos o tres formas de leer este libro, el cual está plagado de imágenes (derivadas de los tres colores primarios que dan nombre a las tres partes del texto). Bueno, vamos:
1. Leer sin googlear: En esta oportunidad lo que hice fue disponerme a que el libro propusiera las reglas para su lectura, por lo que fui llevado por el autor de un lado para otro fugazmente, imaginando colores en lugares, olores, sensaciones, todos ellos tan diversos que a veces en un mismo párrafo podías dar la vuelta al mundo. La primera forma de lectura entonces sería dejar que el autor, con su exquisita forma de describir, construyera en uno las imágenes. Vale decir, uno se abstiene de googlear lo descrito en un animo desesperado de visualizar, al fin, lo leido. Puedo dar prueba del funcionamiento de este método.
2. Googlear junto con la lectura todo lo descrito por el autor: Ir conformando un libro suplementario con imágenes que se van ordenando compulsivamente en las tres carpetas principales que son los colores primarios. Ojalá leerlo de esta forma la próxima vez, ya que la magia de leerlo sin el googleo desenfrenado era muy especial, muy disfrutable, pero estoy seguro, sin embargo, que hacer este ejercicio enfermo puede llegar a traer satisfacciones inesperadas. Me imagino esas carpetas llenas de imágenes azules y se me erizan los pelos de los párpados.
Podría haber una tercera forma de abordar este texto, que supongo sería la de googlear algunas cosas, pero no voy por los términos medios. Espero que la próxima vez me encuentre con el segundo método y su re-lectura se convierta en una agonía-google que me lleve a la locura.
Gran libro.
May 20, 2017
Although written in '94 (or so the 'first published' blurb on the inside reads) this is perhaps a forerunner of the 'wiki-book'. Open your browser, type in a word to your search engine of preference (in this case either 'blue', 'yellow' or 'red'), wait for massed verbiage to appear on screen, go to first entry which is usually a Wikipedia entry. ........ NOW WRITE ON!!!
I waited some time to get hold of this book thinking, from the reviews that I had read and the opinions of other readers, that it might have something in it and be 'challenging' in the way that all good books are. I had to get a second hand copy from the States and was looking forward to it. So it was with a good deal of dismay that I got to page 20 and found just one factet after another with very little coherence.
This is not a book. This is not an exploration of the primary colours. Its absolutely gutter trash put together by someone seemingly playing on his reputation as a pretty damned good writer. A moderately challenged, internet obsessed teenager with half an ability to write could have come up with this muck.
Its gone straight back onto the second hand market and also has led me to question the writing ability of Alexander Theroux.
I waited some time to get hold of this book thinking, from the reviews that I had read and the opinions of other readers, that it might have something in it and be 'challenging' in the way that all good books are. I had to get a second hand copy from the States and was looking forward to it. So it was with a good deal of dismay that I got to page 20 and found just one factet after another with very little coherence.
This is not a book. This is not an exploration of the primary colours. Its absolutely gutter trash put together by someone seemingly playing on his reputation as a pretty damned good writer. A moderately challenged, internet obsessed teenager with half an ability to write could have come up with this muck.
Its gone straight back onto the second hand market and also has led me to question the writing ability of Alexander Theroux.
January 19, 2010
I don't know how to review this book. It's like listening to minimalist music. Your experience might go from pleasant to annoying to sublime, or it could just stick in any of these.
Theroux writes three essays, each one about a primary color (blue, yellow, red). For each color, Theroux unfurls lists of associations and uses of the color. So in one paragraph we go from the earthy yellow color of urine to the otherworldy tones of yellow silk. Does this relationship mean anything? He keeps going. He throws in quotes and references for page upon page until yellow's presence in objects and writing and spiritual belief becomes something tangible but undefined and hazy. It's kind of remarkable.
It was so amazing, in fact, that after reading the first essay, I continued on to the second. That was a bad move.
This book can be savored, essay by essay, but moving from one color to the next feels like you're just reading down a list. Reading one color at a time gets you inside a cloud of references that form a picture of each color unlike any you've ever read or thought about. With the caveat of only proceeding one color at a time, this book comes highly recommended. Yellow will never be the same.
Theroux writes three essays, each one about a primary color (blue, yellow, red). For each color, Theroux unfurls lists of associations and uses of the color. So in one paragraph we go from the earthy yellow color of urine to the otherworldy tones of yellow silk. Does this relationship mean anything? He keeps going. He throws in quotes and references for page upon page until yellow's presence in objects and writing and spiritual belief becomes something tangible but undefined and hazy. It's kind of remarkable.
It was so amazing, in fact, that after reading the first essay, I continued on to the second. That was a bad move.
This book can be savored, essay by essay, but moving from one color to the next feels like you're just reading down a list. Reading one color at a time gets you inside a cloud of references that form a picture of each color unlike any you've ever read or thought about. With the caveat of only proceeding one color at a time, this book comes highly recommended. Yellow will never be the same.
October 9, 2010
I read this out loud over the course of a few weeks while I was sitting for another artist and it was wonderfully meditative for both of us. No story that required him to pay strict attention while he was sketching and no emotional content that would have altered my expressions too much. If you're like me and enjoy opening to random pages in an actual paper dictionary and reading for a while, you'll like this.
January 15, 2023
Theroux really channeling his inner child in this one. specifically the obnoxiously precocious kind of child who lists random assortments of facts about shit like the primary colours in an attempt to show off
i mean this, of course, in a good way
i mean this, of course, in a good way
March 4, 2021
Rather than write a review, this is a copy of a note I sent my niece, an artist, when I bought and sent her another copy:
Dear B
Of course, you are welcome.
What to say about this, well - The author Alex Theroux is an odd duck and strange cat. primarily a novelist and essayist. He is the lessor by fame than his brother and author Paul Theroux, but far and away, the more important of the two. He wrote the novel Darconvill’s Cat, which is out of print but regarded as one the greatest Novels of the 20th Century - If you can find the hard copy for less than $500, I’d suggest buying it and turning it around for a quick profit. :)
I thought you might appreciate this collection of essays on the primary colors; he has also done one on the secondary colors. I think this was on the wiki, but someone once compared his prose to exploring a victorian attic - I phrase I liked a lot. Why did I think you’d like it? There are about 70 pages each dedicated to examining each color. It is full of exploration, factoids, ruminations, and allusions. It is likely more of a “writerly” book, but who couldn’t do with a little aperitif to stimulate the mind before settling into the hard work of creation.
I think it was this sentence that most made me think of you: “Speaking of Tibet, typical of that country are its colored pavilions, with milk-blue roofs, clinging to the mountainsides, sometimes a mile high. And the blue fissures of those mountains that pass into Lhasa, walls of azure ice thawing softly above the holy city, while they remain the eternal dreams of Kew, continue unalterably as the facts of Katmandu.” And I thought what artist would not appreciate that sentence.
I’m not denigrating the book when I say the following but, I think it is to be read in small pieces, One takes away the best and likely the most, in small bites. If nothing else it is a great bathroom book to spend a couple of minutes going through when you have the chance.
Uncle J
Dear B
Of course, you are welcome.
What to say about this, well - The author Alex Theroux is an odd duck and strange cat. primarily a novelist and essayist. He is the lessor by fame than his brother and author Paul Theroux, but far and away, the more important of the two. He wrote the novel Darconvill’s Cat, which is out of print but regarded as one the greatest Novels of the 20th Century - If you can find the hard copy for less than $500, I’d suggest buying it and turning it around for a quick profit. :)
I thought you might appreciate this collection of essays on the primary colors; he has also done one on the secondary colors. I think this was on the wiki, but someone once compared his prose to exploring a victorian attic - I phrase I liked a lot. Why did I think you’d like it? There are about 70 pages each dedicated to examining each color. It is full of exploration, factoids, ruminations, and allusions. It is likely more of a “writerly” book, but who couldn’t do with a little aperitif to stimulate the mind before settling into the hard work of creation.
I think it was this sentence that most made me think of you: “Speaking of Tibet, typical of that country are its colored pavilions, with milk-blue roofs, clinging to the mountainsides, sometimes a mile high. And the blue fissures of those mountains that pass into Lhasa, walls of azure ice thawing softly above the holy city, while they remain the eternal dreams of Kew, continue unalterably as the facts of Katmandu.” And I thought what artist would not appreciate that sentence.
I’m not denigrating the book when I say the following but, I think it is to be read in small pieces, One takes away the best and likely the most, in small bites. If nothing else it is a great bathroom book to spend a couple of minutes going through when you have the chance.
Uncle J
January 4, 2014
This book is dense, written sort of like a stream of consciousness fever dream concentrated on anything which might happen to find itself related to either of the three primary colors, and I say that with admiration, it's completely what I wanted from this read. Theroux, in 268 pages rattle poetic hundreds interesting facts, anecdotes, references, and trivia about each of the colors, sometimes seemingly without rhyme or reason. The book has three chapters, Blue, Yellow and Red. I really enjoyed the sheer amount of information in this book, a bit like having a hyperactive and well informed dinner guest. But there were several points in the book where I had to check to see what decade it was written, and to the best of my knowledge it's from the 90s, but in all three chapters there are moments where the connection between color and people is done sloppily. It's easy to make the connection between red color and "red people", yellow color and "yellow people", and he does it without tact or further exploration and I must say it took me well out of the book. I still recommend it for anyone interested in color (he talks about minerals, dyes, paints, mythology, linguistics, customs, cinema, literature, etc) but be forewarned about phrases like, "but tell me are there any tattooed Negroes? What dye is used?" to which I answer, "Yes there are. Using the normal sort of ink, I suppose." His small paragraph on high yaller blacks or mulattos made me question how much he knew of the culture (being a part of it) which lead me question his authority on the Chinese and their connection to yellow only pages later. These are small objections, but questions or statements like these make me want to wring the book, take out all the bits I like, and confirm their truth or modern day relevance. Theroux seems very much like an entertaining friend whose word you later check with a quick google search.
January 5, 2024
Me motivé a leerlo a raíz de un comentario de un amigo sobre el trabajo de Michel Pastoureau (de quien soy fan) quien también escribe sobre los colores. Este libro es un registro distinto, donde el autor va concatenando definiciones, etimología, poesía, trivia, información histórica, completando y acumulando significado sobre el azul, el amarillo y el rojo. Me pareció muy interesante, con mucha información que no tenía.
Seguiré con The Secondary Colors: Three Essays del mismo autor.
Seguiré con The Secondary Colors: Three Essays del mismo autor.
August 13, 2008
Three separate essays, one on each on blue, yellow and red. They were highly enjoyable and readable and you left each essay with an overall impression of how each color is represented in nature and in society despite sometimes contradictory uses.
In the end though it felt like an endless stream of trivia about color. I didn't feel like he really paused long enough on any given aspect of a color or its use to dig in. Luckily it was a highly entertaining stream of trivia.
In the end though it felt like an endless stream of trivia about color. I didn't feel like he really paused long enough on any given aspect of a color or its use to dig in. Luckily it was a highly entertaining stream of trivia.
December 24, 2010
Fascinated with the history & psychology of the primary colors.
January 1, 2015
Diverting meditation on blue, yellow, and red. Good resource for found poems or tidbits for your own meditation . . .
Delicious. Comprehensive. Not overly taxing. Can be dipped into at random.
Delicious. Comprehensive. Not overly taxing. Can be dipped into at random.
December 10, 2013
Plagiarized??
Read this... http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/03/boo...
Read this... http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/03/boo...
October 8, 2016
akin to Gass' On Being Blue or Goethe's chromatic musings, these essays contain some of the most intoxicating prose I've imbibed in recent years - Theroux is a reader's writer
March 25, 2018
I will confess that I got this book, basically, for free; a bookstore was going out of business and you could fill a grocery bag to the top for $1 a bag! So, it was during a chaotic rushed shopping spree that I came across this book. Opened it to the middle and thought, "sure, I'll look at this at some point."
Well, over winter I got the flu and insomnia and they say you should never read anything THAT interesting if you're an insomniac because it will stimulate you. So, I grabbed The Primary Colors off of my shelf and found it to be just right.
It's a book about nothing and everything at the same time. Yes, it's about three colors but the author rambles (almost schizophrenically) on and on, often changing the subject mid-sentence. So, it can either bore you and wear you out, or as I learned towards the end, stimulate your brain.
I wonder how the author wrote the book. Is he a walking encyclopedia? Or, did he look through all of his encyclopedias for the info?? The information given about nearly everything in this world is overwhelming. But, I have to say: I actually did enjoy reading the book.
There were little bits here and there that were coy or stupid but it was okay for the most part. And heck, the price was right.
Well, over winter I got the flu and insomnia and they say you should never read anything THAT interesting if you're an insomniac because it will stimulate you. So, I grabbed The Primary Colors off of my shelf and found it to be just right.
It's a book about nothing and everything at the same time. Yes, it's about three colors but the author rambles (almost schizophrenically) on and on, often changing the subject mid-sentence. So, it can either bore you and wear you out, or as I learned towards the end, stimulate your brain.
I wonder how the author wrote the book. Is he a walking encyclopedia? Or, did he look through all of his encyclopedias for the info?? The information given about nearly everything in this world is overwhelming. But, I have to say: I actually did enjoy reading the book.
There were little bits here and there that were coy or stupid but it was okay for the most part. And heck, the price was right.
November 18, 2018
Honestly more enjoyable than my three-star rating or its relegation to the "abandoned" shelf would suggest. Theroux's phenomenal wit and endless supply of obscure facts made the first two essays fun if occasionally excessive rides. But it was around the Red essay's hundredth or so "who can forget..." that I began to see the horizon of this book's ambitions. Of all the possible flaws that could've brought down such a beast of erudition, it was disappointing to see simple repetition prove the penultimate blow, especially given that the author is the same man behind Darconville's Cat, a novel which practically drowns its readers with ever-mutating styles and explosive verbosity. One must ask why these essays do not embark on the same disregard for consistent form, instead choosing fill themselves with dull lists, cumbersome quotations, and bizarrely reserved wordplay.
So, yeah. Kind of boring. Still plan on giddily consuming Theroux's oeuvre, but I'll most likely restrict my readings to his fiction for the time being.
So, yeah. Kind of boring. Still plan on giddily consuming Theroux's oeuvre, but I'll most likely restrict my readings to his fiction for the time being.
January 29, 2024
Comencé el libro sin saber muy bien lo que iba a leer y me terminó sorprendiendo. Admiro la forma en la que esta escrito y cómo el autor va llevando la secuencia o recolección de datos... por momentos es como si leyeras poesía.
Me pareció interesante la amplitud de temas que se abarcan y que, a mi al menos, me llevó a salirme del libro e investigar, buscar imágenes, pinturas, libros, canciones que desconocía y ahora conozco gracias a este libro y que quedarán manchados con la luz de su color primario como protagonista.
Por momentos esperaba que se tocaran ciertos items respecto a algún color, pero no ocurría y me quedaba con ganas de la mirada del autor sobre ello. Aun así abarca tanto que entiendo no puede tomarlo todo y es simplemente un puñado del mundo.
Saqué varios datos curiosos que me impactaron sobre diversos temas y que nunca esta de más saber. Por momentos me perdía, porque no quería salirme del libro a googlear como mencioné anteriormente, pero se lleva fácilmente.
Linda lectura, fresca, rápida y culturalmente rica.
Me pareció interesante la amplitud de temas que se abarcan y que, a mi al menos, me llevó a salirme del libro e investigar, buscar imágenes, pinturas, libros, canciones que desconocía y ahora conozco gracias a este libro y que quedarán manchados con la luz de su color primario como protagonista.
Por momentos esperaba que se tocaran ciertos items respecto a algún color, pero no ocurría y me quedaba con ganas de la mirada del autor sobre ello. Aun así abarca tanto que entiendo no puede tomarlo todo y es simplemente un puñado del mundo.
Saqué varios datos curiosos que me impactaron sobre diversos temas y que nunca esta de más saber. Por momentos me perdía, porque no quería salirme del libro a googlear como mencioné anteriormente, pero se lleva fácilmente.
Linda lectura, fresca, rápida y culturalmente rica.
January 2, 2021
Azul. Esencial. Uno de los tres colores primarios.
∆ "Es el color de las profundidades ambiguas, de los cielos y al mismo tiempo, de los abismos"
∆ "...del 'blue talk', que es hablar con crudeza"
∆ " Vi a Venecia triste y azul porque a ella no le importó " cantaba Aznavour.
Apenas lo compré me resultó una lectura ensayista sobre los colores, con referencias literarias, artísticas, culturales, otras tantas basadas en la historia y la antropología y algunas que otras anécdotas del autor. Muy interesante!
Pero fue cuando comencé a pintar mi primer cuadro, hace unos meses atrás, que este bello libro, comenzó a tomar otro color, y realmente me inspiró a construir mi marina sin necesidad de copiar ninguna otra, simplemente encontrando esos matices del azul en cada una de las referencias sentidas en este libro único e irrepetible!
∆ "Es el color de las profundidades ambiguas, de los cielos y al mismo tiempo, de los abismos"
∆ "...del 'blue talk', que es hablar con crudeza"
∆ " Vi a Venecia triste y azul porque a ella no le importó " cantaba Aznavour.
Apenas lo compré me resultó una lectura ensayista sobre los colores, con referencias literarias, artísticas, culturales, otras tantas basadas en la historia y la antropología y algunas que otras anécdotas del autor. Muy interesante!
Pero fue cuando comencé a pintar mi primer cuadro, hace unos meses atrás, que este bello libro, comenzó a tomar otro color, y realmente me inspiró a construir mi marina sin necesidad de copiar ninguna otra, simplemente encontrando esos matices del azul en cada una de las referencias sentidas en este libro único e irrepetible!
May 10, 2024
I found this book rummaging through a used bookstore and it has proven to be one of the most unique reads I’ve encountered. Theroux is a professor, philosopher, and a ferocious reader who harnessed a startling array of knowledge into a witty look at the role primary colors in human history. The results are a pithy, quasi-encyclopedic panorama of the ways that blue, red and yellow spark the human imagination.
Read
May 2, 2025dnf like like halfway through the first essay i was really excited to read it after seeing a couple lines of it? but its just him listing things and like the prose is beautiful but idk i expected it to be an essay and make points and it wasn’t really
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