Elaine Scarry: Imagining Colors (Seminar 2)

Professor Elaine Scarry
Harvard University

Seminar 2: "Imagining Colors"

Marta Sutton Weeks Lecture
Stanford Humanities Center

Wednesday, February 20, 2008, 4:00 pm

Edited by Peter Y. Chou
WisdomPortal.com

Preface: Professor Elaine Scarry presented her second seminar on "Imagining Colors" at the Stanford Humanities Center. A handout from her Dreaming by the Book was distributed containing Chapter 4 "Imagining Flowers". Since it was not available beforehand, I didn't get a chance to read it. I prepared myself for this seminar by finding my old notes on color from "ART-20A: Color" taken during Autumn 1993 at Foothill College. It took over three hours to reformat the files from my old 3-1/2" floppy disks to USB flash drive. The word files were converted to HTML files and the Adobe Illustrator eps files were rasterised to Photoshop jpg files. It was refreshing to discover what I learned about color some 15 years ago. I was delighted to locate Claude Bragdon's quote in his Four-dimensional vistas (1923) found in the Stanford stacks, and have added this to my Claude Bragdon: Seed to Fruit web page. My Notes on Color (1993) included quotes from Leonardo da Vinci and Josef Albers as well as Psychological Color in dreams. The 1993 survey of Book Titles on Color at the Stanford Library may be compared to a similar Book Color Survey in 2008, where the number of books have approximately doubled in 15 years.

Q & A:

Jeff: Jean Paul Sartre had said "You can't image the things in front of you."
Louis Zukofsky has written 80 Flowers [1978]—
It's a horticultural encyclopedia of 80 poems on flowers.
Here's a photocopy of some poems from the collection.

Elaine: I'm not familiar with the work, will you read us a sample.

Jeff: Zukofsky puns on the names of the flowers.
Thyme is an example. It's a pyrotechnic poem.

75 THYME

Takes time where wild the
thyme blows poor tom's a
cold relentless-vest muffler jacket coat
one bluegreen eye ate his
hope sevenyear fanned eyesack disrailing
bird's'-tread hie rose tree-budding fire
moon's flight twice sun's spider-manor-borne
litter letter words-justice thyme righting

Note: The above version is an exact typeset reproduction from the pirated copy
of Louis Zukofsky's 80 Flowers [1978] in the Stanford Library (PS3549.U47.E36.1978F)
as only 80 copies were printed originally by The Stinehour Press, Lunenburg, Vermont.
(Robert Hass: Louis Zukofsky)