6 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2015
    1. While colors are brighter and give more immediate plea- sure in new paintings than old, in excess these can cause satiety, causing us to turn back to the faded austerity of older paintings.

      Later, Hume also describes color in similar terms while referencing taste: Taste is a “productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation.” (Enquiry ... Principle Morals)

    1. effeminate Roman noblemen in Ciceronian invective

      Just a note that Cicero uses smell a LOT in De Oratore. He describes the orator, in fact, as a hunting-dog tracking down the scent of an audience in DO 1.223. It makes more sense to me now how that particular sensation might be relevant to audience identification, particularly in the context of porphura.

    2. We can conceive a colour as something detached from the people, objects and landscapes it coloured: we can picture "yellow" in our minds and transfer it straightforwardly

      Coldplay, "Yellow." The ur-text of synaesthesia?

    3. Russian has two distinct terms for our colour blue;

      Others may know more about this, but my Russian friends told me that one of the Russian words for "light blue" (голубой) is used as slang for homosexual. The other word (синий) is used more often for object-oriented color. This may be localized to Moscow, where I lived.

    1. Imagining disability as ordinary, as the typical rather the atypical human experience,

      I understand why Thomson exhorts this construction of disability as ordinary in the context of the article. I also wonder if some of the problems of visually "representing disability" discussed earlier in the article are reproduced here in the description of "imagination." It seems to me that our discussion of the sensorium has something crucial to add to Thomson's imagination of "practices of equality and inclusion."

    1. Thus it allows academics to harness the sensory knowing of ethnographic experience to contribute to existing scholarship.

      Brian Rotman in Becoming Beside Ourselves (Duke UP, 2008): ""For what the alphabet eliminates is the body's inner and outer gestures which extend over speech segments beyond individual words [...] the gestures which constitute the voice itself--the tone, the rhythm, the variation of emphasis, the loudness, the changes of pitch, the mode of attack, discontinuities, repetitions, gaps and elisions, and the never absent play and musicality of utterance that makes human song possible." (3)

      --An invitation to think "writing studies" as essential to the same project of "sensory ethnography"