If you didn’t read the post “Red plus Blue but not Green” I will read it to you, dramatically and enthusiastically, below. 👇
Reading commences as soon as you hit play. Enjoy!
Notes from the Captain
🫡 Ahoy!
Here we are once again, upon the high seas of creativity looking for land on which to construct our masterpieces.
Will they be purple?
This week I’ve been on the actual sea, paddling like I know what I’m doing. It’s glorious and makes a swell (swell, get it?) change from pedaling, though I’ve been doing that too. Janeen, is this a diary entry? No, and it’s also not the start of an epistolary novel, which The Color Purple is. I talk about that in the video.
I talk about a lot of things. Purple things. Like snails. And Prince. And togas. All these things are related. Take a watch, explore the supplementary material and share any thoughts you might have on subjects discussed with the rest of the crew in the comments.
Thangs from this episode…
👩✈️ Purple is not real
Watch either one of these to learn about how the brain creates purple. The “red plus blue but not green” line that inspired the post is in the first one.
And then watch this.
There was a bit in the above video on the snail, but there to tell you that the Purple Murex Dye mollusk does not look like a garden snail.
Some additional light (in some cases, talking about actual light) reading:
“The color purple is unlike all others, in a physical sense” - Via ZME Science
“Fermentation route for the dye of emperors” - Via Innovation Textiles
Some folks, instead of going the snail route, are trying fermentation to get Tyrian purple textiles.
“Tyrian Purple, the Color of Royalty” - Via Citizen Wolf
“William Henry Perkin: how an 18-year-old accidentally discovered the first synthetic dye” - Via Vox
William Henry Perkin - entry from Science History Institute
👩✈️ His royal Prince-ness
It’s the color (that doesn’t exist) that’s most associated with Prince, the artist formally known as, Prince Rogers Nelson—so why did Prince choose purple? One does not question royalty! Pleb! Felt like royalty, obviously, and he was on that level. Again, obviously.
Whew, Prince’s Favorite Color Was Purple After All
In the wake of Prince’s death, a very short history of the color purple
This may be the last superbowl I watched. A Prince concert where a game of football broke out. I can’t embed it because… NFL.
There are many great performances I could link to. But here’s one I found from the Special Olympics and it’s is fantastic.
And speaking of Prince, this is an excellent article talking about a documentary we’ll likely never see.
"The Prince We Never Knew" - NYT
👩✈️ Cosmic Latte
This has nothing to do with purple, but during my deep purple dive, I learned a bout Cosmic Latte—the name given to the average color of the universe.
In a 2002 paper published in the The Astrophysical Journal, Johns Hopkins University astronomers, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry, after analysing light from 200,000 galaxies described the average color of the universe as beige-ish white. It was soon assigned the hex code #FFF8E7 with RGB values (255, 248, 231).
The name of the color was to be decided after a poll. Though "Cappuccino Cosmico" received the highest votes, the scientists finalised Cosmic Latte because latteo means "milky" in Italian, the native language of Galileo, the first modern astronomer!
Via here
👩✈️ The Color Purple
The book. And the movie.
The book, by Alice Walker, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982. I’ve never read it. I am ashamed of this. But it’s easy to put that to right! Ordered.
The Healing Powers of The Color Purple
Fun fact, it’s an epistolary novel, aka that uses letters as part of the narrative. More on that below.
If you’ve never seen the movie, here’s the trailer to get you in the mood. One of Spielberg’s best.
👩✈️ Epistolary Novels
The Wikipedia entry on Epistolary Novels
“A brief history of the epistolary novel” via Writers Digest
Epistolary Fiction - via Smithsonian National Postal Museum.
Includes a section with a list of epistolary novels throughout history, up to 2015.
"Top 10 modern epistolary novels” - Via The Guardian, 2017
“Top 100 Epistolary Novels” - via Bookriot
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 was one of my favorite books as a teenager. There was a BBC television series made of it that I also used to watch. Ian Dury did the theme song.
Ok, I’ll stop rambling now. Thanks for listening/watching and sharing. If you want to share thoughts on any of the concepts in last week’s post—or just in general—feel free to leave a comment for the Captain (it me.)
I remain, as always, your faithful and after this morning’s dump in the ocean (I fell off my board before I even got a paddle stroke in) waterlogged captain. Now, go out and make things! And yes, that is an order.
Your Captain, Janeen 🫡
Shameless Podcast Plug
Listen to audio versions of early issues of The Stream on my podcast, Field of Streams, available on 👉 all major podcasting platforms 👈
Here’s Apple
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