(Extra-Earth alert! This is the third time that I have found a pamphlet illustrating a view of the earth with an extra alien-earth in the background.)
This 1929 pamphlet by Dr. (?!) Victor Segno is the poster child for the
sub-category of Advanced Strangeness in the Naive Surreal Collection of
our store. Segno is no stranger to dislocated and fractured ideas, and has a long history of preaching and
extracting money from the preached-to. Early on in his career he
spawned a not-terribly original idea called "mentalism" which involved
getting your "brain waves" correct and "harmonizing" your surroundings
with them, which somehow also had something to do with leadership and
success. But all of that involved sending Segno a dollar for a
pamphlet on brain-wave distribution. According to Segno's home-town
paper, the LA Tribune, there were something like 12,000 people who were
part of the runaway Segno train wreck--the Tribune couldn't understand
why, and didn't much care for Segno's quacky successes.
Suffice to say that quite a bit happens between 1902 and this 1929 effort, some of which involves considerable success and tiny-empire building in Echo Park. But Segno really does break the bonds of treacly abnormalism with "Into this World and Why", which offers a curriculum of soul/ghost extra-terrestrial astrological-astro dead/reborn beings to come and re-(!!) populate humans on earth. (Wait a minute--that idea gets picked up by L. Ron Hubbard, yes? Except that when L. Ron gets a hold of this idea there are 10,000 atom bombs involved and a new added process called "the clear". But that's another story.) After kind of reading this pamphlet, I have come to determine that the best thing about it--bizarro ideas or not--is the cover.
The cover, though is magnificent. Look closely, and you'll see
that there are five other earth's floating above the earth, all of
which are contributing not bodies but souls, souls a-piling up like
clustered grapes in places, souls being deposited back on earth for
another go around in existence. Segno explains to the humble reader
that the universe is divided into twelves sections, each populated with
a planet that looks like earth, all of which are superior to the
earth. These are soul-abodes for the dead of earth whose souls leave
and travel blah blah blah along the means of an undescribed process
called "radiography" of the brain waves. As you can see the humanish forms falling onto earth are empty, waiting as they were to fill up a body. Oy, vey.
And so the thing drags on for 52 pages, a length probably determined by the paper on hand. (But that wouldn't stay the case, as this pamphlet went into a self-stated 26th edition...if true, then there is no justice in publishing,) The only reasonably entertaining and proto-sci-fi idea that comes into play here is that in all of the universe it is the earth that is Hell. Earth is the place of punishment that souls are sent to until they get things right, at which time they leave for one of the other twelve earths. So it goes.
The other interesting bit on the cover is the representation of the giant mountains of Europe, which erupt above the earth's horizon. I figure that for these bumps to be so prominent that the mountains needed to be at least a hundred mile high.
This is 1889's mini-version of a gorgeous male, a man of purity,
virility, and pimple-free skin. Also of scrofula-free skin, a
condition description that seems to have faded from use after wide
popularity for 500 years. The picture of this man was used by the
Cuticura Soap Company (actually the Potter Chemical and Drug Company of Boston) to promote its product, a soap with a bit of
prussian blue tincture and some other stuff whose manufacturers claimed
would (not could) cure all manner skin aliments, including the loss of
hair. The cure of scrofula--a form of tuberculosis, affecting the lymph nodes of the neck and appearing as large welt-like dry abscesses--was no minor claim. Aside from its quack connection, the claim was also an affront to royalty, as for hundreds of years the skin condition of scrofula ("the Royal Evil") was thought to be curable by a monarch's touch; Henry IV was said to have touched thousands of people in this way. There was also a religious connection to the sovereign touch cure, with a ceremony included in the Book of Common Prayer from the Anglican Church. It survived in England until George I found the practice offensive and "too Catholic".
An offshoot, Cuticura Resolvent, was offered to cure "every sort
of blood disease", while yet another product, Cuticura Anti-Pain
Plaster, would cure rheumatism and kidney "pains and weaknesses".
That's quite a heap of expectation from soap, and the American Medical Association too it to task as early as 1912, calling the soap's effectiveness as a curative "remote"; somewhat earlier, in 1908, the British Medical Association found the use of Cuticura for its stated curative capacities for syphilis to be "without basis". Pretty benign and reserved, I'd say, compared to what the AMA and BMA had to say about similar products.
The Cuticura identity is still in use--and popular--today, 143 years old, though so far as I know the modern makers make no claims for its soap to cure the Royal Evil. Today its just soap.
I'll take this opportunity to reference this ideal of Manliness and Purity to a certain character from my younger daughter Tessie's cartoon program, The Fairly Oddparents--this old man bears some resemblance to one Mr. Crimson Chin from that show. (I just like referencing kids' shows.)
The largely-heroic Thomas Nast has proved--unfortunately--that his visual social commentary is timeless. For example, this iconic 1871 image of the wholesale theft and corruption of U.S. treasury and government funds by William "Boss" Tweed and his Tammany Hall conspirators versus the swift retribution to the retail theft of the destitute man trying to provide food for his starving family can still be run today on editorial pages--except of course that no one likes to see the faces of horrified children, their innocence and observation uncomfortably reflecting the true nature of the social situation.
Nast addressed his audience visually--the illiterate readers didn't need a word of English to understand these images, knowing full well who the disgusting Tweed was and of course being well familiar with the folks in the bottom half of the cartoon.
The image is immediately understandable, and powerful.
Evermore so since Nast used terror in the face of the little child--seeing his father being beaten and arrested by at least three of NYC's finest--to send the point home to the heart of any viewer who had one.I'm not an historian of this media, but over the decades I've seen many dozens of thousands of such images, and I think that I can say accurately that (at least before 1900) children are not used in such a way to make a political point.
The emaciated mother, the terribly-afflicted baby in her arms, the terrified sibling, all set against the jowly baker and the rotund Tweed make the image utterly heartbreaking, horrifying.
The faces have changed, today, and Tweed has been replaced by a host of others; the process is the same, though with different and more extravagant mechanics. And the money is bigger.
I doubt that there will be much trickle down from the trillion dollar bailout that would reach today's version of this child--we're just not reminded as often that there are still large populations of these children who might benefit from a tiny percentage of largese from something like the AIG bequest. I'm just saying that if say one-tenth of one percent ( .1% ) of the trillion dollars (and one trillion dollars looks like this: $1,000,000,000,000) coming down the sluice was tithed to the 10 million kids in this country who could really use some help that there would be one billion dollars more to help someone out. I know that this will not happen, mainly because those tenths of a percent add up--why, if you take 10 of them you'd get all the way up to one percent.
The imagines of this "empty man" (25th in a series on Blank and Empty Things in this blog)
is taken from one of the physio-electrical works of Auguste Forel
(1842-1931), a eugenicist, sexologist, socialist, myrmecologist,
neuroanatomist, shrink, social moralizer and member (at the very end)
of the Bahai'i faith...and also a man very much taken with himself. I
don't much like him. (Outside of his racist views and semi-bizarre
socialist theories, he managed to politically opiate a four-volume work
on ants with vague wrappings of political theory and ant behavior.
Freud liked him. Case closed.)
I'm not so sure about what exactly these diagrams were supposed to
illustrate in the real-life of Forel's scientific experience, and I
don't care that much. What I do like is the imaginative taste it
implies, this blank-expressioned person waiting for the electricity to
do its work, giving him/her an idea, helping whatever currents exist
along the hemisphere of the brain to deliver its electrical-best.
All-in-all, if explanation was removed, the images would perfectly
depict a person devoid of thought; or, a person whose thought was being
directed. Plus a myriad of other things; base of it all though is that
there is a fair amount of blank/empty experience going on here.
Georg Bartisch (1535-1606) a brought-up-from-norhing-couldn't-write-but-could-read barber-surgeon, from Dreseden, provided this spectacular illustration for his Ophthalmodouleia Das ist Augendienst (1583) (Treatment of the Eye). As opportunistic as this image appears for imaginative interpretation, it was purely a cloth over the eyes to "help" correct strabismus (crossed eyes). The slits in the cloth were meant to force the muscles of the eye to conform to their normal positions.
More substantial, and more magnificent, are a series of anatomical dissections, flap-books if you will of superimposed moveable sheets of paper, showing different levels of the human body. Finding these in 16th century books are quite rare, and I've included a series of six images showing the cut-aways of a dissection through the top of the head. It is fabulous, and accurate.
The images are all courtesy of :
Duke University Medical Center Library
History of Medicine Collections, Durham, NC
Photographed by Dr. George O.D. Rosenwasser
Poor Andre Maginot--his is the name behind what must be the heaviest bad idea in history--or at least among bad ideas that can have weight. The Ligne Maginot, or Maginot Line, was probably better referenced as the Maginot Hole, as once the advance came from the East, the "Line" was completely and totally ineffectual, and the soldiers in the miles of tunnels and fortifications became, simply, men in a hole. The thing about the Maginot Line was that it pointed to exactly the spot where the French Army could be found; therefore, the Germans avoided it.
It is difficult to believe that when all of this concrete was being poured and tunnels being dug along the German border between Switzerland and Luxembourg between 1929 and 1936 that someone, somewhere in France wasn't reading the Illustrirte Zeitung, watching the growth of the Luftwaffe.
However, as much as that should've stopped this massive and insane project, it was not the airplane that buried the buried defenses--it was indeed the feared tanks. But the Panzers of Heinz Guderin and Erwin Rommel didn't go through the Maginot Line, they went around it, passing through the supposedly impassible Ardennes. Case closed. Paris gone.
At least someone in France should've been reading their Clausewitz: "If you entrench yourself behind strong fortifications you compel your enemy to seek a solution elsewhere."
But the drawings are pretty. And if you moved everything back in time 30 years the idea would've made more sense.
This image of swimming Soviet sailors of the Baltic Fleet is from The Illustrated London News for August, 1939. The sailors were "celebrating" the first Navy Day for the Soviet Navy, and no other way was better to do this than to swim 400 meters in formation and fully clothes--with rifles on their backs with no water protection whatsoever. Perhaps this group was just standing in 5 feet of water near the shore--I suspect not, though, because a bunch of these guys look as though they're really struggling. We're about a month away from the German invasion of Poland and the official start to the bigger part of the war that went global: Czechoslovakia and China had already experienced war for some time now.
On November 30 the Soviets would launch their own hideous offensive, though against Finland: the Winter War would bring international condemnation of the Soviet Union and give their new ally in Nazi Germany considerable pause. The Red Army was decimated by the wicked Stalinist purges of the late 1930's--as much as 50% of the senior military cadre were disappeared and executed--and the army as a whole suffered. The early result of this action was that the Finns, though vastly out-manned and out-teched (the Soviet forces had four times as many soldiers as the Finns, 30 times as many aircraft and 200 times as many tanks), were able to last against the Red war machine until March. An end to hostilities agreement was reached in which Finland maintain its sovereignty and gave away 20% of its industrial base and 9% of its territory. The Soviets achieved a phyrric victory, the Finns achieved a major success, and the Nazis figured out that perhaps rather than keep the Soviets as a weak ally they might be able to make them into a dead -state enemy (turning against them with Operation Barbarossa).
In any event by 1945 my suspicion is that most of these men would be dead.
Most of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union would take place on land, with Russian military war dead amounting to a staggering 65% of all Allied deaths, with something like 13 to 15 % of the entire population (totaling 168 million) of the Soviet Union being killed during the conflict. The Soviet sailors would've had a better chance of survival, but not by much.
Burbling to the top of the massive (organized) heap of material that came my way from the library of Congress was this beautiful, six-page introduction to punching people, complete with original photographs of the author performing the sweaty necessaries of readying for the punching adventure. (My guess is that it was never mass produced,m and sent to the Library to protect a copyright application, as is the case of thousands of these LC items that I have.)
But not being a boxer a punch looks pretty much like a punch to me (unless it is George Foreman crushing the formerly indestructible Joe Frazier with an insane shot to the top of the former champion's head, a shot so devastating that Joe's nervous system did not know exactly what to do with all that speedy data*) and, frankly, other things come to mind with the word "punch" quicker than a fist.
First is the "punch card"
which used to be an information-transference
for programming computers, instructions being the little holes that were removed from the programming card and read as instructions by a little tiny set of people inside the large box that others referred to as "computers". (The original "computer", by the way, were people who did data entry and crunched same; they were carbon-based biounits. Karl Pearson's Tracts for Computers of 1911 was a work for exactly those people.) The punch card was a programming tool used by Jacquard to guide the operation of his loom in the late 18th century and employed widely in this trade after that. It uses as a computation instrument came later to the mind of Herman Hollerith, whose earliest crowning achievement was to put it to use in the tabulation of the American 1890 census. (The government balked with meeting his demands for the use of his invention, or were hesitant primarily so, and Herman took his good work overseas. A similar path would be followed by the Wright Brothers in about 15 years, as had happened earlier with Thomas McKenney and his going-begging collection of Indian portraits. National intellectual and monumental treasures like these sometimes had a terrifically terribly go of being accepted and compensated by our government.)
Maybe the most popular "punch" was the so-called "Hawaiian" one, which was a sugar drink given to children made by a company which was a holding company of the American Dental Association. Just kidding about the dental part. But the "energy drink" was like many others during this period--pure badness that kids loved. It was originally designed as an ice cream topping when it appeared in the early 1930's, but when folks discovered, somehow, that the topping made a great drink when mixed with water, a new 2% or whatever fruit drink was born. The "punch" in it came from the wallop of sugar infused directly into the circulatory system. I don't know where the "Hawaiian" part comes from.
The most literary "Punch" comes in the form of the British magazine of that name, (Punch, or the London Charivari), a witty and dripping humor and satire magazine which appeared in 1842 and last until 1992. (Punches' longevity surpasses that of supposed brawler Ernest Hemingway and the tiny-fisted fury of the problematic (did anyone read that last bilge-piece thing he did of the imaginary early life of Hitler?)Norman Mailer.) I think that, like Harper's Weekly and other such political commentary journals of that time, if you can understand a tenth of the complex and complicated caricatures and commentary, then you really *do* know your history.
Probably the most-often referenced literary aspects though to the punch is found elsewhere, in countless magazines and comics destined for little hands, published by Dell and DC Comics and Marvel. Only the punch really doesn't appear so without the reference to the noise it sort of makes, "POW" (as my daughter Emma has reminded me. "Honey", I asked her, "what comes to your mind when I say the word 'punch'? "Pow" she answered immediately.) And who better to illustrate this point than the immortal Adam West? (And this of course is not a comic, but a TV show that was made from a comic book that used comic book word balloons[for the first time?] in a video format.) Maybe it is Batman who is the most famous literary puncher, and maybe not: there's Popeye, a man of exceptional prowess in the Department of Making Things Unconscious; and the Justice League Superman; the Hulk, who evidently did nothing but punch; and of course, my wife Patti Digh reminds me of "Punchious Pilate". There's also Sigmund Freud, a man who delivered a painful and boring punch to the unconscious and whose horrible thinking has been felt right down to this very day, the world suffering his made-up junk since his own annus mirablis of 1905.
Perhaps the greatest knock-out punch of all time (literally) was not the result of George Foreman or Jake Lamotta, but I.B.M. The I'll Be Moved Company is the endish result of the work of Willard and Harlow Bundy, the brothers who created the first time, or punch, clocks. Their company consolidated into the International Time Recording Company and then in 1911 reformulated as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) and then again into International Business Machines. The punch clock kept up to (or down to) the minute surveillance on the comings and goings of business employees (among other many other things), and was perhaps the most influential disruptor and capturing device of time since the invention of the mechanized clock. It delivered a true knock-out to the cushion of independently recorded renderings of when things "got done".
Lastly, I cannot leave the subject of punching without remarking that I cannot mention Rocky, and that I must simply end the whole thing with two words: Muhammad Ali.
A note on the 1973 Foreman/Frazier fight clip: its actually pretty tough to watch. If you don't care for combat like this, I'd stay away.
*Frazier was by far the superior boxer, but Foreman's punch was unbelievably devastating. In the 1973 fight between the two men, Foreman knocks Frazier down six times. Frazier looks pretty scary for the first 2 minutes and 17 seconds of this video, but at 2:18 foreman hits him with a left that basically ended the fight--Frazier probably didn't know where he was. At 3:16 in the comes the second knockdown, and then at 3:36 the third, at the bell ending the first round. At the opening of the second round Foreman just about lifts Frazier out of the ring, and then crushes his head at 5:10. Frazier was ready for the fight and he was probably about the best boxer in the world outside of Ali; but he couldn't hurt foreman, and then Foreman killed him.
These little (3 by 1.5 inches) pamphlets, all published in 1936 by a group called "Men of America, Inc" of Chicago,
took a weird and dislocated aim at government (read "F.D.R.") policies,
supporting an anyone-but-him position for the election of 1936. Or so
it seems. Its actually a little hard to discern the political needs
and desires of the group beyond defacing the New Deal programs and the
vast increases in federal spending on public programs; there's nothing
positive that they can seem to say about advancing another platform. The little pamphlets attack the newly created broad social net of social security, and questions the efficacy of labor unions. Allot of this sounds surprisingly like the campaign rhetoric of Alf Landon, (1897-1987) the Kansas governor (1932 and 1934), oilman, millionaire and Republican who ran against Roosevelt in the spectacularly lopsided election of 1936. After that November Landon even lost his own shadow; Roosevelt completely and utterly defeated the republicans by an electoral landslide of 523 to 8, Landon sweeping like a cold chill wind in his victories in Maine and Vermont. Actually to be fair Landon scored 38% or so of the popular vote, but the country wound up being almost entirely blue in the electoral map.
I've included these pamphlets because of their quaint/stubby/rounded political imagery, a style once extremely popular with newspaper cartoon journalists (and baseball writers) in the 1920's and 1930's, and then almost completely gone (except for Gasoline Alley) by the start of the American World War II.
A quickly-found pamphlet offers a rejoinder to yesterday's post on making fistsfull of dollars selling poetry: selling prose. The idea is obvious, but the cover isn't, and the ideas behind the idea of selling prose are anything but common, though they are uncommonly bad. The very often self-referenced author of this bit, James M. Ross, writes his way towards the heart of every scribbling wanna be, offering the tines of broken plastics forks and other charitable possibilities and false hope about how and where to sell your sweaty work. The publisher, "The House of Little Books" at 156 Fifth Avenue (a lovely 13-storey building built in 1895), brought out an oversize and skinny (and unpaginated) effort in Mr. Ross's work, publishing the thing in 1939. I can't imagine that it did many people outside the author much good, though it may have made an interesting prop under-the-arm prop for the subway ride home after work.
Mr Ross was a writer of considerable experience--he claims, remarkably, that he was the "special correspondent" for a (listed) 50+ newspapers, plus the author of many plays and pamphlets and other tearsheets--though it really doesn't bolster the gruelly advice that he offers to the dreaming writing reader. Most of the advice is for selling little pieces to newspapers, or selling tips and leads to newspapers, or at least telling where reporters may find a story with the hope of reward coming at the end. All of which doesn't really sound like writing per se to me. Then again, the pamphlet is actually well written. Chapter One, for example is entitled, incredibly, "Where You Live Does Not Matter", and makes the case for fame finding the writer no matter where the writer lives. Ross makes the case for various editors and owners of the NY Times having been small town boys--true enough, but they didn't actually RUN their business from Chattanooga. They moved away. To New York City. Ross forgets that part, and mentions a few other famous small town writers to bolster his point: Roy Howard, Edna Ferber, Fanny Hurst, Irvin Cobb; though Edna and Fanny and Irvin didn't stay small for long. Ross also mentions the dramatically- and difficult-to-say-three-times-fast named Westbrook Pegler (try it!), who I think started in a small town and stayed there. Not that there's anything wrong with small place. I live in Asheville NC for crying out loud, so I'm not having a poke at the small experience--its just the name of the chapter and the logic of the writer that I'm having a run at.
Chapter Two doesn't get much better: "Where is News?".Perhaps if
the "is" was italicized the sub might've made a little sense. Chapter
Three follows close by on the heels of incredulity: "Many Newspapers
Pay for Tips" is a claim that I've not heard too often; but for Mr. Ross to make the claim that someone could make a living doing this
stretches the truth a bit. "As has often happened, items you telephone
in will finally be accepted without question and your pay check will
come along."
As much as something can be tedious for only 40 pages or so, this is, and drags on for fourteen chapters, offering shamelessly and mainly useless tidbits for the flowering reporter/tipster/writer. Ross tells us to "Keep Your Eyes Open" (Chapter Eight) for stories that you might "find on the street", and also to expand our horizons to include writing for "myriads of church publications". And on and on; every one dead-data morsel that we are offered in this book takes the place of two good data points already in our head. No doubt if you read this book a thousand times you'd have nothing at all left in your noggin.
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