The Colorman Read Online Free PDF Page B

She was irritated by Penelope, but resisted the burden that disliking a person requires. How this person so homely of face could be so supremely confident and superior? But Rain refused to engage in those sorts of judgments. She didn’t believe in them and so tried to nip them off before they could bloom into a whole thought about this woman’s skeletal thinness and wide, high breasts and perfect slope of hip all shown off in draped linen and ruched silk. Something in her ashen, unprimped face was belligerent. Something in her embrace and exploitation of popular culture, her exploitation of the utterly unexploitable. Nope. I can’t go there, she demanded of herself.
    Rain rejoined Karl in the increasing crowd.
    â€œI’m going to head out for drinks with them. You want to join us later?”
    â€œUh, Gwen’s?” Rain asked.
    â€œOh, God, yeah,” Karl said. “Totally forgot. I’ll…uh…”
    â€œGo ahead. Just meet us there around nine, okay?”
    â€œHey,” Karl said. “Did I say congratulations?”
    Rain gave him a single peck on one cheek.

PURPLE
Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things just don’t seem the same
Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why
’Scuse me while I kiss the sky.
    â€”J IMI H ENDRIX
    P urple is richness beyond measure, the sensuousness of wine-stained lovers’ lips and the quenching sweetness of grape and berry. Purple is also injury and death: the florid purple of a bruise, the darkening face of a choking victim, the opalescence of rotting flesh.
    The term “purple prose” was coined by Horace, referencing the pretension of sewing bits of purple into garments to feign wealth. It is fussy, overwrought, and nobody’s falling for it, anyway. Purple dyes were more precious than gold at that time, so faking it in this way was the ancient equivalent of dripping in cubic zirconia and gold plate. There’s a double layer of humiliation. That it’s fake, and that you’re working so hard to appear to be something that is false to begin with.
    Purple is royalty, a connotation that has everything to do with the extreme value of the pigments available for cloth-dying in antiquity. Tyrian purple was the original purple dye, created from tiny, snail-like mollusks. Only the super-rich royalty could afford such expensive stuff. It was the true holy grail the pigment-making alchemists worked toward—the gold created from the “philosopher’s stone.”
    Though found in nature both in flora and precious stones, purple was the most difficult to reproduce as a colorant. Thus purple as a moniker persists to this day in its air of rarity and oddness, per purple cow.
    Some theories hold that the earth was once more purple than green, that a purple-appearing, light-sensitive molecule called retinal was more commonly found than our familiar green chlorophyll. Could this explain the “wine dark seas” of the Odyssey and the many other confusing color terms in ancient languages? Perhaps this explains the more intricate delineation of indigo and violet after blue in our essential, and older, breakdown of primary colors in Newton’s R.o.y. G. B.i.v. spectrum as opposed to the more current-day color wheel’s triad (red yellow blue) and hexagonal wheel (adding the complements orange, green and purple), with it’s one simple “purple” now comprising the stretch at that end of visible energy.
    The Greeks described colors ranging from dark to light, rather than hue to hue along the rainbow. Was this simply a matter of descriptive terms, of translation? Like the proverbial dozens of words the Inuits use for snow compared to our own single word? Perhaps we are color Inuits, lovingly distinguishing shades where ancient peoples just didn’t see meaningful distinctions. Could we have evolved out of color blindness over the millennia? Or did our color sensitivity just shift toward