A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Point, and many other places... 5000+ total posts since 2008.. Contact johnfptak at gmail dot com
There's very little to go along with this image that I found in the April 1936 issue of Popular Mechanics, save that the massive ship will have no portholes, it will carry 7,000 and that the decks are enclosed ("sealed and air-conditioned"). So, basically, the ships is a tube with a few above-deck exposures and not much else.
It looks a little bit like an ark.
With coming events of the next few years, this ark would have been very busy had it ever been constructed.
Sometimes a word is just a word, and the elements of recognition sometimes inhibits that. Except in this case that the word seems to be just what it is and also indicative of what it would become.
Outsider, or outside, outside the recognition of "official" art, of critiqued-art, is the English language equivalent/translator coined in 1972 (by Roger Cardinal) to illustrate the term art brut ("raw art") created by Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet created with others Compagnie de l'Art Brut in 1948, which in some respect was a reaction to a new sort of displayed art that had begun its life in the early 1920's, mainly as the efforts of doctors treating psychiatric patients who were expressing themselves through their art. (Two famous examples include Dr. Walter Morgenthaler's Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (A Psychiatric Patient as Artist), published in 1921 on the work of perhaps the most famous people in the Outsider canon, Adolf Wölfli; and another being Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the mentally ill) published a year later by Dr Hans Prinzhorn.)
[Adolph Wolfi]
Well, "outsider" as we know it today in reference to the arts is definitely not what the editors of Punch magazine pursued in this cartoon for their issue of 6 May 1886. The "infuriated outsider" was simply an artist left outside a show, whose work was not accepted for exhibition. (And from the looks of it, the small work on the huge easel, being rejected for the "want of space" might not have been the reason for the artist not making the list.)
[Henry Darger]
This outsider was simply outside with probably-not outsider art. Henry Darger (1892–1973), Martín Ramírez (1895–1963), Paul Gösch (1885–1940), Charles A.A. Dellschau (1830-1923), Willem Van Genk (1927–2005) and so on were Outsiders, their work being Outsider/Art Brut and also being left outside for a long time. Far outside. In the far-deep outsider, further and deeper outside than the more aesthete outsider varieties of "outsider" art--like Impressionist, Cubist, Dada, Constructivist, Futurist--ever got outside.
[Willem van Genk, detail]
Anyway, I thought it curious to find the term stuck in the middle of a cartoon rant in an 1886 popular journal.
Here are some of my favorite (classic) books for children that I've culled from the lovely read.com pages at the Library of Congress. The baseball alphabet book is fantastic (and from 1884 I believe). The Peter Newell Rocket book is another marvelous thing (along with his Slant book, both of which sorta/kinda remind me of PEter Reynolds.) You can follow the linkis to beautiful images of the texts and illustrations. (All text below is from the LC site.)
"Baseball ABC" This guide to baseball literature features an illustrated paper cover and chromolithograph illustrations. Read This Book Now»
"The Rocket Book," by Peter Newell The upward progress of a rocket, lit in the basement by the janitor's son, causes some strange situations as it passes through 20 floors of apartments!
Reading Dickens now and stopping for a view of socially-conscious England via the excellent Victorian London website in the work of George Godwin's 79-page critical exposition London Shadows, a Glance at the "Homes" of the Thousands (1854). The images are awakening and abrupt--all the bitter observation of George Orwell, only told much more quickly, like a person trying to describe a raging house fire before the thing burned itself out. Its a powerful work, and I can't help but think that those reading it in 1854 must have been appalled not only by the deep visualization of the state of the working poor, but also by its scope, and the possible revelation of England's basic bedrock.
There are any more works to chose from at Victorian London--I decided to pry out the images from the Godwin work along with his commentary on them. It is truly a stunning work.
"When every man is his own end, all things will come to a bad end." COLERIDGE.
Addition to post #275 (from November 2008) on Ebenzer Howard's quixotic Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 1898, including this fabulous image:
Ebenezar Howard (1850-1928), London-born failed Nebraskan farmer, Chicagoan stenographer, London Parliamentary reporter and non-obscure semi-visionary of town planning in The Future, drew some mighty pretty images of cities best reserved for random placement in the Encyclopedia of Difficult Imaginary Places...continue reading here.
“....there must be a point beyond which there may be no abridgement of civil liberties and we feel that whatever the emergency, that persons must be judged, so long as we have a Bill of Rights, because of what they do as persons. We feel that treating persons, because they are members of a race, constitutes illegal discrimination, which is forbidden by the fourteenth amendment whether we are at war or peace.”-- A. L. Wirin, Counsel for the Southern California Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, speaking on the internment of Japanese-Americans, 1942
"We make these statements, not because we fear evacuation, but because we believe, to the bottom of our hearts, that the best interests of the United States, our nation are to be served by being permitted to stay, work, fight, and die for our country if necessary here where we belong."--Response by the Japanese American Citizens League to Internment Camps, 1942
This excruciating, heart-rending 1942 document was submitted by the Japanese American Citizens League (of Seattle, Washington) to the Tolan Congressional Committee with recommendations, proposals and requests in the event of the removal of Japanese citizens from “sensitive” areas in western America It is an exceptional report, a well-reasoned response to the developing and calamitous American fear of Japanese fellow-citizens; a fear which was swiftly leading itself to xenophobic actions the result of which was the internment of 120,000 American citizens in internment camps.
The Roosevelt administration’s Executive Order 9066 was the legal bombshell that gave the War Department the authority to authorize the removal of the Japanese (19 February 1942) and theoretically prevent those people from engaging in sub rosa and fifth column activities asd wartime terrorists fighting for Imperial Japan. The Tolan Committee was that of Congressman John H. Tolan (CA), chair of the House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration (!), undertaken at the request of Carey McWilliams (chief of the California Division of Immigration and Housing) who was trying to prevent or at least delay the coming removal of the Japanese. Needless to say, the operation backfired
The document is “heart rending” because Executive Order 9066--at its base terribly wrong, a weakness exhibited, a moral embarrassment of the highest order--was addressed by its authors in a logical, clarifying and accommodating fashion in a noble and valiant attempt to negotiate an untenable situation while making every effort to appease the aggressor without judgment and offense. It was an attempt at maintaining dignity and some sense of Constitutional freedoms for a group of people in a situation in which their dignity and freedoms were being withdrawn....at least their freedom was.
In the introduction to the document (titled Report submitted to Tolan Congressional Committee on National Defense Migration Emergency Defense Council Seattle Chapter Japanese American Citizens League, and published April, 1942) we read that people are willing to go and abide 9066, but that one of their main issues was where exactly it was that they were going, where they were being taken. That hadn't been established yet, and it makes me shake my head to think of the government establishing this order without a clear indication of any (?) of its consequences.
"[Introduction] A large number of people have remarked that they will go where the government orders them to go, willingly, if it will help the national defense effort. But the biggest problem in their minds is where to go. The first unofficial evacuation announcement pointed out that the government did not concern itself with where evacuees went, just so they left prohibited areas. Obviously, this was no solution to the question, for immediately, from Yakima, Idaho, Montana, Colorado and elsewhere authoritative voices shouted: "No Japs wanted here!"”
“[Resettlement] What will the government's policy be? Will communities be shifted as units to other sections? Will the Japanese be re-settled as family units? Will men and women be segregated and families split up? Will Japanese be scattered at random in the interior? These are questions that are arising in the Japanese communities in this area.”
Already thinking of the future and the end of the war, the authors wondered about the prospects for the return of the Japanese people to their former residences:
“[Return] “It is necessary to think of the future, of the day when this war will be over. Could the Japanese people, once evacuated, return to their homes? There is the great possibility that once the Jap-haters and outspoken opponents of the resident Japanese were successful in driving the Japanese out of this area, they would never permit them to return. A post-war campaign of hate and vilification when resident Japanese tried to get back to their homes and investments here, is a definite possibility should these elements score an initial victory.”
The idea for a “model city” was proposed, or at least opened for discussion, as a possible place for the interned Japanese to go:
“[Model City] This is an ambitious plan entailing the creation of an all-Japanese city somewhere in the interior of the country, able to sustain itself as a self-sufficient unit. It would be financed originally partially by the Japanese themselves, partially by the government. Some important defense industry would be set up to give employment to Japanese labor, preferably one calling for skill and efficiency which Japanese workmen possess. The city would be governed by American citizens, who would elect a mayor and council, just as other American cities, and the Japanese, both American citizens and aliens, would be given an opportunity to practice the American ideals of democratic government which they have learned.”
“After the initial investment, the city could be expected to become self-sufficient and a center for the hinterland. It is altogether likely that such a city, as an experiment in democracy would be so progressive and would provide such advantages that friends of the Japanese would desire to share its benefits.”
“This would be a long-range project, to be continued in perpetuity. The objection of the time required to set it up would be overbalanced by the permanent nature of the project.”
After 38 pages of questions and planning, the authors of the report declare that the Japanese Americans affected by 9066 would comply (“to the best of our ability”) with whatever was demanded of them. They felt very strongly though that they could do more for their country by staying in their homes and fighting Japan just like any other American.
“[Conclusions] If it is for the greater good that evacuation be decreed, we shall obey to the best of our ability. But we are convinced that here in our homes and in our community is where we belong, where we can lend every ounce of our strength, and every cent of our resources, in creating the sinews of war so necessary to total victory. We are Americans. We want to do our duty where we can serve best. We make these statements, not because we fear evacuation, but because we believe, to the bottom of our hearts, that the best interests of the United States, our nation are to be served by being permitted to stay, work, fight, and die for our country if necessary here where we belong.”
[This document is for sale in our bookstore, here.]
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post [Part of a new series on the History of Fear]
There just seemed to be something going on with women and clothing and sex and fear and sci-fi trouble, or at least so on the covers of a spectrum of pulp publishers in the 1930's-1950's. Perhaps this had nothing more to do with anything than having a pretty woman posing next to the UNIVAC II in a 1959 issue of Computers and Automation. In any event, I stockpiled some of these images and collected them under the Fear-Sex heading, and for right now all I'm going to do is pass them along.
Are they really sexualizing danger? I have no idea what the content was of these issues, but from the looks of things, I'd throw hazard to the wind and say "yes", at least to the visual aspect.
(Don't forget to have a peek at an earlier post on Women in Sci-Fi Past-Future Distresses, here.)
I've been on a bit of a run on science fiction pulp covers of the 1930's-1960's, and I've collected some in this catch-all category of "Huh?" These are wonderful images, and I have no idea what they represent, except that the image transcends its intent, in a way, and stands strongly for itself in some sort of Found Absurdist kinda way. And once you look at it, most of all that one can say is "Well, there it is". .
There is nothing quite like the set and costume designs coming from the Soviet Union in the 1920's, and this collection of work by Anatol Petrizky (described below) attests to that. My interest is more in the design of the sets than in the costumes--and so far as I can determine none of those (reproduced in black and white) have yet been on the net. (This book is also offered for sale in the blog's bookstore.)
[FRONTISPIECE]
PETRIZKY, Anatol (1895-1964). [B. Chmury] Anatol Petrizky, Theatre-Trachten. [Anatol Petrizky Teatralni Stroi] Iintroductory essay by V. Khmury (Chmury). [Soviet Union]: StaatsVerlag der Ukraine, 1929. One of 1500 unnumbered copies. Design and images by Anatol Petrizky, text by B. Chmury.
This book was published in Ukraine in 1929; although this is not the time or place (I really just wanted to post about this book as a beautiful artistic piece of work), I could not let it pass without at least mentioning what man-made disasters lie ahead for the Ukrainian SSR and for the resst of the Soviet Union.
JF Ptak Science Books Post 1680 Part of a new series on the History of Fear
Perhaps you become scared of what is taught you or is available to you, or made available, or dreampt. Perhaps you can dream not-so-terrible things unless you have been exposed to them in one form or another, already. I can certainly recall from my childhood things that made me feel fear, and they weren't very fearful--not really--at all, though they were at the time, because there was no way for me to process the weird adaptations to my imagination.
Certain things are taught to children as a matter of course, I guess, certain fearful things, like for example the oldish child's prayer ruminating on a sleeping death, or some exacerbating tale from the brothers Grimm--how else are children to come up with the ideas of not waking up or being boiled alive or eaten by a witch?
And so I wonder about the fear factor imaged and implied in these early wonder/sci-fi magazines, meant for distribution to high-adolescents and adults. They simply do not look so terrifying, though I guess it is because the true business end of FearSell USA Inc had not yet been prioritized in the national economy--and certainly it was orders of magnitude away from approaching anything that we have today. Even the constant state of storm/terror available to us in a relentless flow from a simple avenue like The Weather Channel must be a testament to the dept of our fear depravity.
The stories--or the ideas of the stories, anyway--seem scarier to me now than the images of them on the covers of these magazines. It would be an interesting thing to make a timeline of fearful images to see how these things changed over the decades. Or centuries.
I was reading Computers and Automation tonight and found this lovely short story in the July 1956 (volume 5, no. 7) issue. It is a short story written by Jackson W. Granholm (a biographical note on Granholm appears in the ACM notices here) on the application of a supercomputer put to solving a very particular--and peculiar--problem.
The story is called "Day of Reckoning", and tells the tale of the ever-working, highly-dependable-indispensible SUPERVAC being readied to accept the end-all program, readied like the countdown to the launch of Apollo 11 to receive the question, hauling on board into his storyline the other professionals who read the journal for tech reports and info, trying to keep them in his boat with a sci-fi tale based on his own work experience on some big machine at Boeing.
Finally, we see the question: "Describe the detailed design of your superior successor!"
Well of course the SUPERVAC had been working perfectly right up until this time, though with the problem submitted the computer began to behave erratically. It works for 12 hours or so, blinking and flashing away, until at 10:35 pm the MULL light went out, the solution reached.
"12 October 1957, 2230 PM PST, 0130 am GCT--PROBLEM 198BC12-XA--RECKON HAVE EXCELLENT POSITION HERE. NOT 2ISH RELINQUISH IT AT THIS TIME. THANKX. ROGER -- PDA**EM --OUT."
The best part of browsing books on shelves or in boxes or wherever the physical, non-digital place might be is the surprise, and the best surprise is the truly unexpected surprise. That is the beauty of browsing, to me, and this is what is disappearing as we replace shelved books with a monitor of some variety, whether it is at home or in the library. The glory of serendipity seems not quantifiable yet--the brain does too much stuff when you unconsciously parse a shelf or case or range of books. As you walk down an aisle of books, past hundreds or thousands of titles, you are seeing many of them though not necessarily registering them in your conscious experience; but your brain is working on this impulse of data even when your mind is wondering what you were doing at the library in the first place. When I go to the library, I like to think of it as going to the Serendipity House.
Finding the unexpected--and sometimes the unimaginable--is a pure joy, whether the found thing is monumental or useful or inspiring or informative or not. Sometimes it is the very simple satisfaction that a work exists on some very removed topic.
If you were to open the Atlas of Reading Experience and tried to find this title on school safety patrols, I imagine that the pamphlet would be represented in a part of the sea that seems very blank, but on micro-inspection it is obvious that there is a planktonesque sea of small islands with small islands off their costs of smaller items, and so on and so forth, resolving more minute detail and more islands, in a fractal world of smallness.
And somewhere in there would be School Safety Patrol Pioneers.
I really do love pamphlets like this whose titles make you stop and say "what in the world...?" or some such thing, usually though its just limited to the word "What" followed by a number of exclamation marks. This get s a little and needlessly more complicated when the exclamation points are combined with question marks, thus : "What!!" looks allot different from "What!!?", and seems much more interesting, too. I think that the most sublime pamphlets would resume the full complement of exclamations and questions available for my made-up review, which would be three apiece: "What!!!???" or "What???!!!" or any combination thereof (each of which would hold its on special secret analytical-emotional logic, god help us all), and would be the equivalent of a Perfect 10 or 5-Stars or Four Thumbs Way Way Up. (I think that the way this works is that the more exclamation points there are the louder you way "what" to yourself, and the more question marks there are the higher one would raise your eyebrows when seeing this for the first time. Maybe we're knocking on the door of the Visual Arithmetic of Exclamation Points and Question Marks, which seems like a long way to go to judge the imaginary meritocracy of the painfully mundane.)
In any event, I think that the (completely) unexpected beauty and idea of this pamphlet is just delectable--kind of like experiencing a superb slice of buttered toast.
This masterpiece of the forgotten obvious, The School Safety Patrol Pioneers, printed by the American Automobile Association in 1941 really does pay an homage in shades of white to the great leaders and benefactors of the Crosswalk Warriors. The great leaders though were not children, I'm sorry to report, but grownups whop dedicated their lives to the concept of crossing the street safely
(It sounds like I'm poking fun, but I'm not, really. What an enormous undertaking it was to write this 20-page effort--really. Could you imagine trying to research such a topic today? I can and can't--it would be an enormous heartache to undertake--unless of course you had this pamphlet in hand. My mind reels about trying to figure out where to start such a project. Honestly--it would be tough.
The design of the pamphlet is neat and clean, and very orderly, reporting on some of the leaders of this field, "then" and "now". One then-and-now reads" THEN--Supervisor, Physical and Health Education, Philadelphia; NOW--Supervisor of Safety Patrols, Philadelphia". More often then not though they read like this: "THEN--Principal, John Muir Grade School, Seattle; NOW--Deceased." I wish the writer had gone into a little more detail on the person's life before death took command, but all-in-all, this little pamphlet mobilized great, quiet wonders on its depth and efficiency in reporting on the history of crossing guards, and I'd rate it a "What !!?".
Now if I could only find something on the history of school hall monitors...
The Laws of Irritability was a marvelous-sounding title (to our ears, in this year) for a rather important medical treatise on the contraction of muscles. It was a medical treatise by Felice Fontana1 (1730-1805), and had nothing to do with what we would think of as irritability, and certainly was a long way from a book like Robert Burton's beautiful and slightly unreadable (and fairly unendurable) Anatomy of Melancholy, even as much as we would like it to be. After all, wouldn't it be lovely, somehow, in a automated-Dickensian way, to see that there were 32 laws of irritability, and that this was the first of the afflictions like ennui and depression and so on that could be modified and codified, and I guess eventually commodified? (Making these things into commodities didn't have to wait for anything at all in the way of proof or scientific merit went; after all, they were published in published books, which would have to be purchased, so there's an instant commodification to them.) But alas the Laws of Irritability were nothing of the sort, referring to a set of observations and deductions more real than half-imagined self-references.
But all of this leads me in a very uncommon route to articulated clowns and skeletons, and of course artificial leeches.
This entire post started with the imaging that this book (below) by Fausto Nicolini, Vita di Arlecchino ("Harlequin's Life", published in 1958) and which contained a rather unusual bit to it-actually it didn't so much "contain" it but displayed it. The front and back covers were both illustrated with clown images--clown images that could be copied, its sections cut apart, and re-assembled into a working cut-out paper puppet. Now I've been dealing with scarce/rare/non-existent books for 30 years, and I cannot recall a similarly-covered book, where the reader could turn its cover into a puppet. But here it was.
[Click, enlarge, print and cut out your own dancing harlequin--the back cover is below.]
It reminded me of another work, a beautiful anatomical treatise by Jean Baptiste Sarlandiere, first published in France but eventually printed and published in New York in 1837 as Systematized Anatomy, or Human Organography. The sample below shows exactly how the book was laid out, almost as an instructional on how to reconstitute the body--a cut-out book, made to be separated and then pulled together again as a whole, the joints articulated with string or brass brads, a book no longer now a little puppet, "A real live boy". (And yes it happens to be an Italian author--Carlo Collodi--who gave life to that naughty marionette...this is a tough story for kids, I think, even though I muscled my way through it with our younger daughter, leaving out some of the brutal stuff.)
And it is via Sarlandiere that we get to our leeche issue, because it was he who fashioned the response tot he endemic leech shortages of the 1820's and 1830's with his creation of the artificial leech.
Oh to be in France in the 1830's and be a illegal leech importer, for your fortune would have been made. Leeches were still very important in medicine--as a matter of fact Francois Broussais2 saw the leech as a cure to virtually every diseases, saw them as a way of relseasing the inflammation and swelling and other complaints caused the body via strange and odd assaults on the body--the leech was a good and measured response to external insult, applied frequently and very liberally.
Evidently consumption on all fronts was on the rise, prices went high, but the availability of leeches went down. In France alone, leech production (in 1836) fell from 50 million to about 18 million, all but 1 million of those staying within the country. And so it was Sarlandiere who came to the rescue with his "artificial leech"3, something that would replace venthouses and bleeding cups and of course the leech itself. It was something that he had already developed years before, but perhaps time had caught up to it.
His devices are shown below4 (expandable):
I'm unsure of the disposition of the artificial leech; Sarlandiere's medical instrument lay in wait for the Dutch leech crisis, and seems to have gotten everyone through the sorrowful state of leechless affairs as they existed. At least he published images of what his invention looked like for the rest of the medical world to see and comment upon, and possibly use, and replicate. This unlike other "advances" in instrumentation which were kept under wraps, and secret, such as in the case of the foreceps kept secret by the Chamerlains for several generations. At least the widespread trust in the leech didn't last much longer.
1. The work was published as De irritabiltatis legibus, nunc primum sancitis, et de spirituum animalium in movendis musculis inefficacia, revised and translated into Italian as Ricerche filosofiche sopra la fisica animale (1775)Fontana leges irritabilitatis constituit, ingeniosus homo et accuratus, published in 1767.
"Formulated after the model of Newton's principles in physics, the laws of Fontana on muscular irritability were an important but neglected contribution to the subject of muscular contractility. The first law concerned Haller's concept of contractility as a property of muscle fiber itself, and pointed out that a contraction follows only after some stimulus. The discussion displayed insight into the underlying nature of tetanic muscular contraction. The second principle was the refractory period discovered by Fontana in heart muscle and applied to better understanding of the function of other muscles. The original third principle was a disproof of the efficacy of a theoretical entity, the 'animal spirits' . . . In his fourth law, Fontana pointed out the loss of contractility which results from stretching or compressing a muscle, and certain medical applications of this principle. The fifth law was concerned with problems arising from atrophy of disuse."--Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, volume 5.
2. François Joseph Victor Broussais (1772–1838). Marie-Luce Jardin, Les Thérapies par les sangsues: les pratiques les plus anciennes aux traitements actuels hautement scientifiques, Université de Franche-Comté, Faculté de Médecine et de Pharmacie de Besançon, 2005, Thèse, pp. 32–3.
3. Jean-Baptiste Sarlandière, Bdellomètre du Docteur Sarlandière, Paris, Firmin Didot le jeune, 1819.
4. Teunis Willem van Heiningen, "Jean-Baptiste Sarlandière's Mechanical Leeches (1817–1825): An Early Response in the Netherlands to a Shortage of Leeches", in Medical History (Wellcome Trust), Med Hist. 2009 April; 53(2): 253–270.
And more on Fontana from the DSB ("Fontana, Felice." Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. 5. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008. 55-57. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 22 Dec. 2011):
I'm working right now on a post utilizing a classic story from the history of childhood, Pinocchio. No doubt everyone had some sort of classic image of this scamp in mind, but if you've ever read the whole thing the little non-wooden boy really was a bit of a terror, far removed from scampdom. Its probable that we have different images of some classic tales--in particular from the Brothers Grimm--where our minds have filled in the forgotten nasty parts of the classic tales with more child-friendly versions.
Which brings me to Carlton Sample, a lansman of mine over in Wilmington NC, who had a somewhat different vision for the old standby Mother Goose, and (self) published it in 1947. We're seeing the best part of Mr. Sample's work right here, what with the inside dripping with gooey doggerel (I swear that when you stand the book upright that one or two letters slide out of the bottom of the book every minute or so...its important to keep the book flat or the thing will be blank in about two days.) But his Mother Goose Streamlined is only necessary for his snapshot of the cigarette-smoking goose, driving blankly along behind the wheel of a convertible.
Sometimes a picture really IS worth a hundred and twenty-five words!
