greyness

Part of my definition of spending a productive afternoon involved sitting on a chair in the back yard reading David Batchelor's The Luminous and the Grey - part of my vague conviction that I'll teach a course on color, some day - that is, as something that I want to know more about, not that I actually want to write about, so maybe this gets written up as a proposal for our new General Education syllabus?  But interesting though Batchelor is on grey, and on the way that "grey is almost always the fall guy to colour, the dull-to-the-point-of-lifelessness monotony that threatens to engulf everything and everyone"(92) - whilst trying to redeem its importance from dull monotony - it seemed to me, looking round, that he doesn't give nearly enough weight to shadows.  The whole of the back of the house was dappled, by 3 p.m., with leaf-shadows that were certainly turning the yellow grey, though admittedly not quite the same dull grey as is created by the mesh netting in the back door (a back door that I go in and out of all the time - my study is the other side of it - that warning about los gatos has been there a year, I realize, as a directive to the very painters who turned the house yellow from its previous shade of old-lady-underwear pinkish beige).