Ptak Science Books

Getting Hurt in the Streets of Paris and London: Visual Display of Data that is Pretty than it Deserves to Be...1911

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 383

Aside from looking allot like something that Max  Ernst could've produced (at about the same time), this graphic from The Illustrated London News for 11 March 1911 simply but powerfully portrays street accidents (for the year 1910) in london and Paris.  Beautiful and compelling, it is somewhat an empty gesutre, because as much as it describes the various types of accidents it fails to give us the total number of vehicles in use for each category; so, we can compare gross figures only, which is a little vacant.  We learn that the majority of accidents were caused by horse-drawn vehicles; in London, the number of "accidents" for this category was 6,033; for the same period the motor-car ("including motor-cycles") was 3,488--we have no idea about how many of these were actually on the streets not involved in accidents, or the amount of usage, and the like.  My guess is that there must've been--still--many multiples of horse-drawns vs. cars.  So, if there were ten times the number of horse-drawns on the street, these figures would tell you how dangerous the cars actually were  (producing half the number of accidents with one-tenth the number of vehicles); also, the horse-drawns were probably logging more street-time per unit in general, so the "danger" aspect of the motorized vehicle grows further still.

The other bothersome apples vs. oranges bit is the comparison of Paris and London; again, we don't have the total number of vehicles, or the populations in general, or pedestrian populations in particular, or the area of the cities, or the miles of raoa, etc. etc.  We do see though that Paris had four times the number of accidents than London, though this seems a pretty meaningless stat.  Nevertheless, I still like the design quality of the set of images even if the statistical quality is weak.  What can I say?  It is pretty, and I like the running man...

The Magnetic Sleep Doctor and the Shelf-Life of Dream Images

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 382

This interesting and semi-bizarre image shows a doctor of magnetism (and necrologer and astrologer and several other things) conspiring at the edge of science and the heart of all things dark to adjust the dreams of the formerly sleeping man.  The patient is awakening and the doctor is doing, well, things that I don't understand:  suffice to say that he was trying to assuage good dreams for the other man via the secrets of magnetism.

The mysteries of sleep and the dreamworld were hotbeds of investigation from all sides, and there is a fairly deep publication record on the subject for the 1550-1700 period. This image comes from Le Palais du Prince du Sommeil, ou est enseignee l'Onriomancie autrement l'Art de Deviner par les Songes, printed in Lyon by Jean Pavhlhe in 1670, and written by the spectre-like M. Mirbel, whose history and biography are just about non-existent. 

The idea of approaching sleep and dreams via magnetism is unusual even in the very unusual history of unusual ways of adjusting dreams--the interpretation of dreams is evidently closely related in mysterious and bendy ways, almost as convoluted and soft as the physical means used to induce them. 

The history of big dreams and dreaming in general is far bigger than the issue of fixing them, and much paler, considering the vast range of imagery.  Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections), Havelock Ellis (World of Dreams), Freud (oy vey), Shakespeare ("we are such stuff..."), Leonardo, Joseph (and the Pharohs), William Blake, Solomon and of course Daniel, and then on and on into the night.

Daniel's dreams (as in The Book of Daniel) were gigantic and full, and there have been many others who have recorded their dreams in the history of literature and religion.  I must say though that the dream of King Prasenajit (the ruler of Kosala,  located on the northeast of modern Uttar Pradesh, India), a disciple of Buddha, had a dream in ten parts which troubled him greatly, and when you look at its elements you can see why:

-Three jugs set in a row, one put against the other. The first and the last of the jugs are mutually exchanging the vapours of the liquids that are contained in them, vapours which never descend in the empty jug situated in the midst.
-A horse that swallows the food concomitantly through the mouth and through the anus.
-A tree full of flowers.
-A tree full of fruits.
-A man who is knitting a rope. Behind the man there is a sheep. The owner of the sheep eats the rope knitted by the first man.
-A fox lying down on a bed made of gold, and eating out of golden vessels.
-A cow suckling her own calf, against the law of nature.
-Four oxen that arrive, bellowing, from the four corners of the horizon. They are rushing upon each other, in order to start fighting, but all of a sudden they vanish, right before clashing their horns together.
-A pond surrounded by slopes. Its water is turbid in the offing, but clear near the shore.
-A huge torrent, entirely red.

This would give anyone pause, even more so if you were a disciple of the Buddha.  None of these images fit into my dream dictionary (especially the horse one), but perhaps they are deeply related to the times and not transferable over the centuries.  Which is an interesting way of looking at a particular time and understanding a bit of it that doesn't normally sink into the public record--the expression of dreams might tell a little more about the time and place than about the person.  This sort of made-up historiographic (?) approach reminds me a little of snooping around old Domesday books and business/city directories, looking at the sorts of jobs that were common once upon a time and now slipped away into the tar pit.  So to with dream imagery?  Perhaps like just about everything else, dream images may well have a shelf life.  (I was going to reference Twinkies as an example contrary to this, but I understand that a new something-or-other has been added to it/them to make it so that these fine products will actually go bad after a while, rather than like before, when it could be counted on the cockroaches nibbling on them into eternity following the death of Dr. Strangelove.  Perhaps a former-chemist/librarian out there knows what this ingredient is and will share the knowledge?)

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For example, this 18th century directory for what dream images may "mean" are mostly foreign to the general experience, I would say.  On the other hand, to attach meaning to the importance of dreaming about stealing pepper may be a little quixotic, but much less so than interpreting it as a harbinger f melancholy.  I know that to even mention the business of pepper theft in 1650 tells us a lot about its importance and why it would've been stealable and can tell us something about the foods of the time, trade, commodities and such.  Thinking about it in terms of a predictive element may not be as fruitful...

A Forensic FoundWordist Poet's House of Page Numbers

 

 

We offer the following extract from a catalog of an obscure art gallery.  Our interest right now is drawn to Item 15 (below), on the found poetry of a man who derived that art from torn-off page numbers from books.  Enjoy!

___________________________________________________

 

Wiltin & Wanton Gallery. LLC

Archivist-Artists of Intellectual and Cultural Archaeology

A Collection of Significant Materials and Artifacts in the History of Literature, Science and Intellectualiana

The Catalogue of the Traveling Exhibit

June 2009 – January 2010

Featuring the Following Installations:

 

 

 

The United States in a Jar

William Gaddis’ Martinis vs. the Slouchy Suburbanite

The Real Pseudonym of America's Most Famous Yellow-Backer Outlaw

The Sweny Chemist Door of Leopold Bloom

The St. Elizabeth Window of Ezra Pound

Virginia Woolf’s un-buoyant Friends

Thomas Wolfe’s Refrigerated Collectibles

Picasso’s Puzzle to Rimbaud

The Holy Pants of God

The Convict Letter Collection

Archive of the Great Shadow-Sickened and Pretended “Firsts Prioritizer”

Babe Ruth’s Post Intellectual Hommage on Locating Lost Sound

The Stolen House

A Superb Broken Hanger Collection

The Great Shirt Diarist

Sigmund Freud’s Dream Book

Malevich’s Childhood Building Blocks

The End of Roundness in Van Gogh's Eye

Bartleby’s Checker

Acoustic Museum of Childhood Sounds

Kurt Goedel’s Psychiatric Cheat-Sheet and the Formalization of Boredom’s Logic

The Transcripts of the Woman Who Spoke to People Only Once

Diary of the Man Who Forgot Nothing

Michel Foucault’s Word Engine

The Broken Correlation Poetry of Found-Wordist Hignatio Norme

PAGE BREAK//Skip to pages 7-12 of the catalogue, items 14 and 15.
 

Item 14.

Shadow-Sickened Forger, Rotarian and Pretended “Firsts” Prioritizer’s Archive

Warren Frieda Namaton, Shadow-Sickened Art Historian and Forger

 

Obsessive Art Historian and Forger who altered Paintings to Suit his Theory and History

On the first depictions of (a) shadows (b) stirrups © forks (d) reflected images

Notices of  Namaton’s  (1930-1988) fame appeared in 1962 when he proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he located the earliest depiction of a fork in western art (this in Ambo Boyz’ (Flemish, fl 1470-1520) “Mock Muscle Flag-in-Absentio”).  Namaton used a simple jeweler’s loop to discover what had already been apparent to the naked eye—that a fork was visible on the thigh of lazy gentleman in a protohammock.  This discovery fueled Namaton’s career.  In a career that rocketed through 12 suburban colleges in less than 15 years, Namaton went on to establish the vaunted “Firsts” priority in some 30 fields—a record in the art world until the recent troubles with authentication—including the recognition of the first depiction of broken spectacles,  faux agony, subtle grief, confused belief, bewilderment caused by pain and stupidity, and so on.

 

His great recent work was on mirrors, reflected images, and, of course, his masterwork on the appearance of shadow and shadows. 

Namaton’s fame fell when his estate was released from a cold-storage security locker in Alexandria,Virginia. The bulk of his notes, his collection of prints and many hundreds of small oil paintings were acquired by a resident bookseller who was struck by a bus and killed while removing the estate.  It was in the sale of the bookseller’s estate that the Namaton notes came to the attention of Quiver McQuimby, a noted but retired historian of art historians in the new mixed field of the Baroque Revitalizers of Pre-Deconstructionist Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  He was astonished to find many examples of famous works of art to which Namaton had playfully (?) added shadows.  (There are more than 2,322 works of shadow-adds in this category in the collection). 

Item 15.

Poetry from Found-Wordist and Book Pathologist Mr. Ignatio Norme

Hignatio Norme, Found_Wordist and Page Number Collector (Boston, Mass.; 1923-1988)

The man who found obscure phi-related connectivity between random word placement, page number and the poetic ideal.

 

Mr. Norme’s work first came to the attention of the literati in 1922 when Dallas Headman of Case Western described it as “a unique approach to creativity”; this would be the only phrase ever used to evaluate Norme’s efforts in every review from 1922 to 1975, when his work stopped being noticed.  In a spectacularly prolific career Mr. Norme produced some 8,000 poems, most of which were produced on broadside sheets of paper or large pieces of wood.  The combination of the materials of production and the many tens of  thousands of books led to Mr. Norme’s house being an internal castle, letting in neither visitor nor light, a friendly singularity for his pursuit.  As his utilities and taxes were paid decades in advance, Mr. Norme’s death, and the discovery of his corpse, was not discovered until 2005, seventeen years after his passing.

According to his unpaginated journals, Mr. Norme’s pattern of poetic creativity and discovery involved removing all page numbers from the book he was reading and then choose a number of the “poem lugs” at random.  He would then reverse the number, go to that page of the book, and then add the page number and go to that line of the book, and tear out the number of words as indicated by the page numbers ending numeral.  The bits would then be assembled, and the page numbers glued to the walls of his house.  (We estimate that there were some 60 million page numbers glued to all surfaces of Mr. Morme’s home.  The house itself has been purchased by the
Museum of American Art, a full room of which will be on display in that museum’s Outsider Art collection in the Henry Darger wing.)

Mr. Norme found poetry everywhere he found it, seeing in the simplest verb the most compound noun; even when the poetry seemed not to find an external logical sensate, the internal phi-correlated word relations played in the mind behind all phases of knowledge, an unheard neuro-music that encapsulated the idea of unknown “correctness” in the vision of the poem. 

 

 

 

We are proud to offer this example, “Primo VI, the Analysis of Man//Fantasie brillantes” from 1945. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The poem is transcribed below:

Primo VI, the Analysis of Man//Fantasies brillantes

In a former treatise I imagined

 upon their reflection from worship

                                Subducta

be lost it might lie in oblivion.the ram of Helle, and the Life.

*

Helius, Hyperion’s sons

were the children of Mania;

they hjad the character of

an evil being past.

*

We all get wrong the moments we forget

                Some art to impress

Belief for divine beings, when it interposes between them and our souls,

was sometimes expressed

and not difficult to be understood.

*

The story worlds are condemned by them as free

governed by certain principles

mentioned as the Mother of all beings

consecrated to the sun and planets

drawing light if existence, must have

DEFINITE PROPORTIONS,

*

Divine attributes distinct

At every act of worship

Wherein

Penance after death,

Even in the midst of careless happiness

Imposes a cruel restraint,

The opposition which

More effected , shroud for the landscapes;

The analysis

To sanctuaries of another nature.

Midnight is not a Ambiguity,

Glowing ambition and high.

AND

I have mentioned, that great confusion

Has some allusion to those rites

By some, were esteemed the offspring of

Holy men.

The analysis of a child;

We may possibly discover their

Means by saying

Numberless absurdities arisen to the ruin of much good history. 

--

H. Norme, 1945.

 

Bad Ideas Department: First Image of a Hypnotized Chicken

JF Ptak Sciene Books LLC  Post 380

This non-metaphorical, truth-be-told image is the responsibility of the irrepressible everyone's-favorite-18th-century-Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher.  Fr. Kircher was extremely learned and had a superb memory and a great scientific bent; and for the stuff that he didn't know or hadn't read about or couldn't prove by experimentation or produce by logical means, well, he just made the stuff up and pressed on.  But there is *so* much that he got correct and he published such a terrific amount of material that we'll forgive these forays into The Twilight Zone  His detractors and critics  couldn't keep up with the man; almost nobody could--the bit about the hypnotized chicken that appears in his incredible Physiologia Kircheriana Experimentalis...(Amsterdam, 1680, edited and compiled by Kircher's pupil Johann Stephan Kestler), which is packed with so much diverse material that the chicken pretty much gets lost in the intellectual sauce.  Kircher's reach was deep, formalizing bunches of natural science expositions by physical and mathematical experimentation and proof, not the least of which was proving the lunar influence on the tides and the construction of a magic lantern (below) .

The hypno-chicken comes into the picture via Kircher's interests in the magnetic art and electricity, dabbling away at the edges of science in a precursor to Mesmerism.  He also came up a little short with his experimental proof that insects were born of animal dung, but, as I said, he got much more right than he did wrong, and forgive him his rush to publication on some things that he may not have been happy with.

To press the point only slightly (the list and breadth of his accomplishments is just too much for this prankish little post about the chicken), have a look at the partial list of his publications:

A partial list of Kircher's works include:

    * 1631 Ars Magnesia
    * 1635 Primitiae gnomoniciae catroptricae
    * 1636 Prodromus coptus sive aegyptiacus
    * 1637 Specula Melitensis encyclica, hoc est syntagma novum instrumentorum physico- mathematicorum
    * 1641 Magnes sive de arte magnetica
    * 1643 Lingua aegyptiaca restituta
    * 1645–1646 Ars Magna Lucis et umbrae in mundo
    * 1650 Obeliscus Pamphilius
    * 1650 Musurgia universalis, sive ars magna consoni et dissoni
    * 1652–1655 Oedipus Aegyptiacus
    * 1654 Magnes sive (third, expanded edition)
    * 1656 Itinerarium extaticum s. opificium coeleste
    * 1657 Iter extaticum secundum, mundi subterranei prodromus
    * 1658 Scrutinium Physico-Medicum Contagiosae Luis, quae dicitur Pestis
    * 1660 Pantometrum Kircherianum ... explicatum a G. Schotto
    * 1661 Diatribe de prodigiosis crucibus
    * 1663 Polygraphia, seu artificium linguarium quo cum omnibus mundi populis poterit quis respondere
    * 1664–1678 Mundus subterraneus, quo universae denique naturae divitiae
    * 1665 Historia Eustachio-Mariana
    * 1665 Arithmologia
    * 1666 Obelisci Aegyptiaci ... interpretatio hieroglyphica
    * 1667 China Monumentis, qua sacris qua profanis
    * 1667 Magneticum naturae regnum sive disceptatio physiologica
    * 1668 Organum mathematicum
    * 1669 Principis Cristiani archetypon politicum
    * 1669 Latium
    * 1669 Ars magna sciendi sive combinatorica
    * 1673 Phonurgia nova, sive conjugium mechanico-physicum artis & natvrae paranympha phonosophia concinnatum
    * 1675 Arca Noe
    * 1676 Sphinx mystagoga
    * 1676 Obelisci Aegyptiaci
    * 1679 Musaeum Collegii Romani Societatis Jesu
    * 1679 Turris Babel, Sive Archontologia Qua Primo Priscorum post diluvium hominum vita, mores rerumque gestarum magnitudo, Secundo Turris fabrica civitatumque exstructio, confusio linguarum, & inde gentium transmigrationis, cum principalium inde enatorum idiomatum historia, multiplici eruditione describuntur & explicantur. Amsterdam, Jansson-Waesberge 1679.
    * 1679 Tariffa Kircheriana sive mensa Pathagorica expansa
    * 1680 Physiologia Kicheriana experimentalis

Growing a Junk Yard: Salvaging Fat, Bikes and Stockings for Guns and Tanks, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 379

Salvage (1943) is just simply brilliant!  It is a superb design, getting its inelegant point elegantly across to the reader, making the collecting of junk  a bona fide war effort, triumphant, superior; it delivers the message gorgeously.  Who wouldn't want to rush out and look for some metal scrap and bits and grow a neighborhood junk yard so that the community could build a tank?  Certainly these two boys--under the watchful guidance of a smiling cop in a black tie--couldn't resist, and from the looks of the progress billboard behind them, nor could anybody else in the neighborhood, as the community collected enough metal junk for 14 tanks.  (Or at least pieces and chunks for fourteen tanks.)

The community was Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and they certainly did their collecting-best.  The two photos below show (top) the scrap yard after two days of collecting, and (bottom) the end of the campaign two months latter.

"One pound of fat contained enough glycerin to make a pound of black powder, enough for six 75-mm shells. Twenty three hundred old nylon stockings contained enough nylon to make one parachute.
Thirty thousand razor blades contained enough steel to make fifty 30-caliber machine guns."   (Lingeman, Richard R. Don t You Know There Is a War On? The American Home Front, 1941-1945. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1970, 254-55).  When you have an entire town doing this, you can build tanks; when you have millions of people throwing together to collect this "junk", then you get part of a war effort.  It is also part of a giant propaganda hearts/minds machine, especially for the U.S., which was (and I use this word with some hesitation) cushioned from the effects of the war by two oceans--it reminded people who hadn't contributed a life to the war that there was actually something tangible going on, and that they could do something to help.  It kept peoples' minds in the game.  Rubber was another big concern, as was silk (the controlling exporter of both coming largely from overseas, and in the case of silk, the exporter was Japan.)  Of course there was the introduction of synthetics for both silk and rubber, but the point in fact was that there was indeed a shortage, and the donated and salvaged stuff was necessary. 

Here's a beginning picture for the burgeoning community scrapyard:                                                                                                                                             

Some interesting works relating to salvage drives:

Barringer, Edwin C. The Story of Scrap. Washington D.C:Institute of Scrap Iron & Steel Inc., revised edition, 1954.

Cohen, Stan. V for Victory: America's Home Front During World War II. Missoula Montana: Pictorial Histories Publishing Co., Inc., 1991.

And afterwards:

Hoopes, Roy. Americans Remember the Home Front: An Oral Narrative. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1977.

Lingeman, Richard R. Don t You Know There Is a War On? The American Home Front, 1941-1945. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1970.

O'Neill, William L. A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II. New York: The Free Press, 1993.

And here's one I'd like to see (the cover of):

Wolf, Howard. The Story of Scrap Rubber. Akron, Ohio: A.
Schulman, Inc., 1943.

Fat Redux, Redux: Fat Bullets, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 377

This is the third in the stumpy but cushiony series in this blog on fat, all of the items coming from my purchase of a 90,000-item pamphlet collection from the Library of Congress.  It was unimaginatively called, and stamped, "The Pamphlet Collection", and was organized into 2,800 or so document boxes, all of which were painstakingly categorized and alphabetized, but done so via a secret and mysterious way that I've never deciphered or understood.  Listen:  the pamphlets were organized indifferently in general but diffidently in particular, so an Aa-At box might've contained pamphlets categorized via title or author or place of publication or subject matter or publisher. The pamphlets' placement was almost random, but not quite, as there was a thin thread of logic tying them all together, but just not in a way that it would all be sensical. 

But back to fat:  it really is just the pamphlet's title that's so unexpected, as the content is all about replacing the oils and fats that had gone missing, sucked up by the war effort, that were actually pretty essential. For example, one pound of fat contained enough glycerin to make a pound of black powder, which is also enough to make six 75mm shells.  Butter, margarine, vegetable oils include: olive oil, palm oil, soybean oil, canola oil, pumpkin seed oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, peanut oil, grape seed oil, sesame oil, and so on, were definite parts of the diet and the economy, and, well, did actually have to be replaced.  There.  I've killed the humor in this title.  

Bad Ideas Department: the "Terminal Box" and the Restructuring of Society, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 376

The unnamed author of The New City, an American Plan of Social and Economic Reorganization (1938), makes a hard-edged plea for the formation of a new American society—and by “new” the author really means it, advocating a different economics, social structure and even the physical development of new cities and abandonment of the old physical and philosophical structures. 

Sprinkled among the Swiftian notions of rightness, quixotic lancings of social ills and a general bombardment of the structure of society are some interesting and isolated points: 
“America is the supreme user of the machine…ravishing the irreplaceable wealth of one of the earth’s richest continents, tearing down forests, looting the treasures of coal and draining the reservoirs of oil and natural gas, by methods scandalously wasteful.” 

This leads the author to the Depression, “a decade of demonstration of the profit system’s inability to deliver to the people the needs of life, a painful heartbreaking demonstration”. 

It is the profit-deliverers, not the machine s or people, who are to blame.  One way of addressing the distribution system, was, unfortunately, Russia—“a form if society set up to overcome this impasse of the capitalistic system of production and distribution”.  Of course the Russians, the Soviets, were just in the middle of their enforced starvation/gulag/brutalization period under Josef Stalin, the gigantic negative parts of which were still in general not known to the great unwashed. 

The unnamed author dips lightly into Socialism, and then into Fascism and Nazism, though the only thing he/she really has to say about the later two is that “their answer [to economic woe] was in the seizure or control of the means of production by the state”, their own brutal means skipping off unnoticed into a pinkish glow, though the loss of personal freedom is “disdained”. 

The New City is actually a new world order, a new governmental form to take advantage of technological advancements leading to “nationalized urbanization” The first city in this new order is Neopolis, and this pamphlet was a call to those who would stand as its citizens.  (There’s actually a sort of application form, though all it really is a bill-of-sale for ordering more copies of the New City pamphlet.)

Even though the pamphlet is easily obtained, membership, the possibility of being a Neopolitan, is something entirely different.  The difference is actually exceptional, perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this whole misguided idea.  “Membership is to be carefully controlled at all times” we read. . “It is not desired to build up a huge and unwieldy membership of poorly-assimilated elements….interesting educational instruction…with tests to determine the fitness of the member for loyal, cooperative activity, leading, necessarily, to the elimination of those who may be found undesirable”. 
That’s some pretty muscular, steroidal stuff, particularly after such a glancing blow against the Soviets and Nazis. 

Since this is just an “abridgment” of a soon-to-be-written 250-page explanation of the concept, the complex and concentric organization of society is left mainly to the drawing of its plan, the physical layout of the city based upon this ideal. 

The Seattle-based author never did quite make it past page 29, never did name themselves, and never provided a concrete place where all of this heady stuff was being think out.  It is a sort of pretty design in a creepy/queasy way, there on the front cover, but that’s about as far as it goes.  If anyone actually did send any money to this quack thinker, it wound up in a nicely metaphorical place:  at “Terminal Box 3463”. 

This may be the very best idea to come out of touching this pamphlet—a place where people can send correspondence regarding Bad and/or Dead or Dying Ideas: “Terminal Box ______”.  I guess that box number would be pretty high by now. 

(Uncle Joe, before he killed the children.)

Blank and Empty History: Disappeared Legions of The Wrong

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 375

Continuing my series of posts on The History of Blank and Empty (and Missing) Things, I come to this beautifully designed French  pamphlet of 1931.  The design is of less interest than what happened to its author, the exceptionally problematic and traitorous Jacques Doriot.  Now Doriot (1898-1945) started off liberally enough, shooting out soon thereafter to explore the very furthest reaches of The Deep Left, and then, when that didn't quite work out for him, blasting off to the nether regions of the wincingly bad singularities of The Deep Right.  He scratched at the edges of political extreme idealisms, waiting for something to happen, something that would get him greater fame or more-reaching political power, but his fate would intercede. 

Doriot began his career as a Communist and would do fairly  well, politically speaking.  A member of the Communist Party since 1902, he would become Mayor of St. Denis (near Paris) and a member of the Chamber of Deputies.  A difficulty would arise and he quit the party, becoming a Fascist over the next few years.  On the invasion of France, Doriot became a Nazi firebrand, committing himself to the cause, and living in  lickspittle Vichy France. 

Like another fellow ex-pat (Ezra Pound), Doriot made vicious anti-French/communist and pro-Nazi radio broadcasts from Paris in 1940 and 1941.  In that year Doriot would take an uncommon step, a step towards disappearing, when he and Marcel Deat founded the Legion des Volontaires Francais (contre le Bolshevisme) (LVF)), which was a combat unit of French Nazi sympathizers that fought with the Wehrmacht.(Over time and the wear of war it was also known as The 33. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS Charlemagne (französische Nr. 1) and Charlemagne Regiment, as new elements were formed to replace the lost.)  I could imagine that no one saw them as anything but pathetic, even their Nazi commanders, who would put them into the meatginder on the Eastern Front.  The LVF was decimated and all but gone by the end of the war, though Doriot, somehow, survived it (with an Iron Cross awarded him in 1943), until he was killed by a strafing plane on 22 February 1945.  The survivors of these groups met bad ends at the hands of the French (and the Soviets of course); some were imprisoned and sentenced to hard labor; many were summarily executed. 

Groups like the LVF take their members and spin off towards oblivion, much like the Spanish pro-Franco troops that went to fight for the Nazis and were disappeared, or the poor black slaves of the (Western Band of) Cherokees who were made to fight with their Indian masters for the Confederacy, a deeper, darker place I could not well imagine. 

(A  detail of the crowd scene of the pamphlet on Communism and Unemployment.)

Blank and Empty History: Patrick Starfish, The Sopranos, Kasimir Malevich and Disappeared Madonnas

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 374    Removing the object from imaging is serious stuff

“This pencil is broken, why won’t it make words?” said Patrick Starfish in Spongebob Squarepants.  “I can do this…I can use, my, um….brain!!” he declares, hopefully, with an intensifying anxiety and sweat. After some squirming and smoke and some not pretty inside looks at Patrick’s brain working, (Mr.) Squidward (Tentacles. who never wore paints, ever) )comes in and sniffs the room:  "It smells like something broke in your brain and died” he says, removedly.   “ THAT’S the creative process!” says Patrick happily.  Indeed! 

 
In The Sporanos. one of the guys, Christopher (“Chris tu fuh”) Moltisanti, decides to write a screenplay about his um business life and buys a laptop for the process of creativity.  He’s upset when he has a hard time of it, brick walls and all that, explaining to one of his cronies that “I even bought this computer, I thought the thing would come up wit sumthin'". 
  

In a sense, Kasimir Malevich  was coming to this sort of non-objectivity, but instead of removing himself from the process like Christufuh and the beautiful Patrick, he removed the reality from his painting.

The Russian-born,  ethnic-Polish Malevich (1878-1935) , the first of fourteen children, introduced the genre of Suprematicism in 1915, just a  few years after Kandinsky’s first effort in abstraction (and the modern world’s first foray into non-representational art).   His first exhibition was exceptional and large—there were some many pieces that it must’ve been the case that he had been working for years with this idea.  This was the “0.10” exhibition, and photos of the show in Petrogard, shows the famous Black Square in a place of honor, in the high corner of the room, like a religious icon. (When Malevich finally was laid down from cancer in 1935 the Black Square was hung above his body as he lay in state.  It saw him into his world, and saw him out.  And, as a matter of fact, his grave is decorated by the Black Square as well.)  So many of these pieces are utterly recognizable that it seems almost impossible that they appear for the first time in the same, opening, introductory, show.

Malevich wrote later about the Black Square:

“The black square on the white field was the first form in which non-objective feeling came to be expressed,  The square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling.” (See Roger Lipssey, An Art of Our Own, 1988)

Malevich’s vision on the emptying of form comes again from the 0.10 show:

“Only when the conscious habit of seeing nature’s little nooks, Madonnas, and Venuses in pictures disappears will we witness a purely painterly work of art.
“I have transformed myself in the zero of form and have fished myself out of the rubbishy slough of academic art.
“I have destroyed the ring if the horizon and got out of the circle of objects…”

Three years later Malevich would advance the idea to its logical end came Malevich’s  "Suprematist Composition, White on White, 1918".  I’d reproduce it here but it is a little pointless, especially digitally, what with its incredible subtleties lost in the electromagnetic sauce.  I had the please and opportunity to see this in D.C. at the National Gallery’s homage to Malevich in the early 1990’s, and I can say that the painting is absolutely magnificent.

Malevich didn’t see as much as he sensed the world (so he wrote), and made the structures go blank and empty to fill them again with what he knew.

"And knowledge is of two kinds, one turning its eyes towards transitory things, the other towards things which neither come into being nor pass away, but are the same and immutable forever.  Considering them with a view to truth, we judge that the latter si truer than the former."  Plato, Philebus

Blank and Empty History: a Map of the Village of Missing Slaves

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In another (twentieth) in this blog's series on Blank, Empty and Missing Things, I offer this map, a heartbreaking map, of an empty, abandoned village of peacefully-living runaway slaves in Jamaica, in about 1825.

The name of the town, extraordinarily, was "We No Sen, You No Come".  It meant, basically, that the slaves living there would not leave their town, wouldn't seek anything from the outside, would not interact, would not interfere; in return, they didn't want anyone visiting, coming to them. interfering in any way; just wanted to be left alone, to live.  And from the account of this supportive, understanding and sympathetic publication, that is exactly what these people had done for eleven years.

But then something happened.  The owners of the enormous estate wanted the "banditi runaways" gone.  The slaves evidently had 200 acres under domestication, hidden in the far reaches of an enormous 100,000 acre estate.  The "hunting party" left heavily armed, accompanied by 250 troops, as well as "confidential and baggage negroes".  (The term "baggage negroes", as impossible as it might seem today, was a well-worn, heavily used term through the 18th and mid-19th centuries.)  They approached the small town and encountered a very slight resistance, something like a guard, and killed them.  Retreating somewhat after the initial attack, the scouting party returned, and then found the village completely empty.  (Some reports say that there was more limited fighting, with casualties on both sides; some say that there were more slaves killed.) After whatever happened happened, though, the return to the little village found it abandoned, with everything still in place.  The members of the village had "disappeared".  Or at least I hope that they did, and didn't get "disappeared", men, women and children all, as in the famous Floridian "Negro Fort" case and Andy Jackson.  Perhaps these people were fortunate to actually escape. 

Key to the numbers on the map:

1 The track of the Militia and Maroons.
2 House built of cedar, shingled and floored.
3 The largest building, 70 feet long, and open in the centre.
4 A hut.
5 Hogsties.
6 Wood.
7 Provision Grounds and Coffee Piece.
With the exception of No. 2, the houses were all wattled and thatched, the
floors terraced.

Two Contemporary Accounts

From the British Slavery Record, 1825:

"WE NO SEN', YOU NO COME."

"Some years ago a number of Negroes, in Jamaica, escaped fromthe cruel bondage of their task-masters ; and, retiring into an uninhabited part of the island, built a little town, which they called, " We no sen\ you no come." Here they lived some years peaceably, industriously, and comfortably, upon the fruits of their labor ; having about two hundred acres of land, thickly planted with provisions, in the finest condition, with abundance of hogs and poultry. They thought that, if they kept themselves at home, ihey could not be discovered ;
and if they did not meddle with others, others could not meddle with them. However, in the year 1825, they were discovered by the whites, who sent out an armed force against them, destroyed their  town and provision-grounds, and killed, took prisoners, or dispersed, the whole of this happy and peaceable community."

A less-sympathetic position appears in the Montego Bay Gazette: 

"THE RUNAWAYS IN TRELAWNY.
[From the Montego Bay Gazette, j "
We have been favoured with a perusal of a letter from a respectable gentleman
at Dromilly, who has taken the earliest opportunity of relieving the
anxiety of the community respecting the [second] party who went after
the runaways in Trelawny. It states, that about 4 o'clock on Monday
evening, the party entered the town belonging to the runaways, when they
were fired upon by them, but happily without effect. The fire was returned
by the Militia, when two of the runaways fell, and another was taken prisoner;
the remainder dispersed. They had about 200 acres of very fine
provisions, in full bearing, with abundance of hogs and poultry. The Maroons
were left in possession of the town, and the Militia returned to Dromilly,
from whence Col. Scott proposed sending a gang of negroes to destroy
the provisions, &c. The houses appear to be of considerable magnitude,
are well built, shingled and floored. This expedition then, if such
it may be called, has succeeded in so far as dislodging from one of their
haunts a Banditti that have been for years collecting; but we fear much is
still left to be done; and we think, that instead of destroying the provisions
and houses at the settlement, now in possession of the Maroons, it would
have been better to have sent troops to occupy it, and from thence to send
out detachments to scour the woods, as there cannot be a doubt of the
runaways having other places of retreat, and are still in possession of arms
and ammunition ; and until they are totally routed or destroyed, the pursuit
should not be abandoned. — The bodies of Mr. Sutherland and Mr.
Gallimore, who were shot on the 26th ult. were found within a few yards
of each other.
It would appear, from a plan taken by order of Lieutenant-Colonel
Scott, that the number of runaways is very great, or that they have been
many years in constructing the buildings : one is 70 feet long, another
40, and few under 25: and we again repeat, that instead of being destroyed,
they ought to have been preserved and occupied as a military post for
some time at least, or until the whole of the Banditti are properly accounted
for."

Blank and Empty Space: Reference-Free Language(s), Babel

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Empty and Missing Things, Part 19. 

Returning to Jean-Jacques Scheuchzer's* magical, inventive, fact-bending naive-surreal work on universal history based on the Old Testament, I've found these two glorious and odd images of the Tower of Babel.  The first ("Genesis Cap.XI.v.4. Orthographia Turris.Mediummetalis") is terrific, shocking even in its abrupt construction and flat-out stumpiness, because it is one of a very small minority that shows the structure to be canonical, with a little church at top. The enormous stairway is just completely out of proportion to the purpose of the structure, the effort falling into some sort of odd advanced-child category.

If Italo Calvin's "Invisible Cities" or (better yet) Jorge Borges' "The Circular Ruins" were to be illustrated, this image would fit right in.

The other very unusual bit here, is that Scheuchzer also provides a plan for the city that was to be built around the tower--I'm pretty sure that I haven't seen references to this before, and the Biblical references to it are no help whatsoever in determining its physical aspects.

There are probably very few things that could be as blank or as empty as combative, competing, nonsensical and completely self-referential language or communication.  Well, except for Scheuchzer's very empty town plan locating the tower in an urban setting--a listless place of surrounded circles of nothingness for a place in which everything is said and nothing is understood.  Ground Zero for blank

language.

Notes:

Two interesting books that I should mention that address the ideas of fantastic/imaginary architecture and decay are C. W. Thomsen, Visionary Architecture: From Babylon to Virtual Reality,   (Prestel, 1994) ; and  Paul Zucker, Fascination of Decay (Gregg  Press, 1968).

 

*

Kupfer-Bibel, in welcher die Physica sacra, oder geheiligte Natur-Wissenschafft derer in heil. Schrifft vorkommenden naturlichen sachen, deutlich erklart und bewahrt, printed in Augsburg and  Ulm by  C.U. Wagner, 1731-1735. Offered in four volumes, illustrated with 758 plates, it is a magnificent work, if not altogether correct, or even near- correct, with an enormously confused pedigree, implying the wisdom and text of the Bible (and the old Testament at that) as the background for a physical history of the world.

Blank and Empty Space: the Empty Earth, 2nd Day, Genesis XI

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Blank and Empty series, Part 18.

Jean-Jacques Scheuchzer created this cold, lonely, empty picture of the creator's handiwork on the second day of "creation".  It is found in his Kupfer-Bibel, in welcher die Physica sacra, oder geheiligte Natur-Wissenschafft derer in heil. Schrifft vorkommenden naturlichen sachen, deutlich erklart und bewahrt, printed in Augsburg and  Ulm by  C.U. Wagner, 1731-1735. Offered in four volumes, illustrated with 758 plates, it is a magnificent work, if not altogether correct, or even near- correct, with an enormously confused pedigree, implying the wisdom and text of the Bible (and the old Testament at that) as the background for a physical history of the world.  BE that as it may, Scheuchzer was an able scientist, professor of mathematics and physics, director of libraries, and somewhere in there he became one of the founders of paleontology.  This work is a little hard for me to understand as piece of the history of science; its hard to get around the incredible ideas ensconced in deeply Baroque borders.  This sort of encyclopedic approach to knowledge—especially without the Bible part—would have to wait another 45 years ro so for the great work of Diderot.  For now, we are left here in 1735 with this picture of the empty Earth, waiting for the rest of it. 

Blank and Empty Things 17—Echoes and Silences Change Places, 1929-1931

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In the American motion picture industry, the sound technician position did not exist in 1927; in about 1000 days it would be almost as important as the director.  1927 marked the first year of the synchronous, simultaneous sound-on-film motion picture, with the first commercial production appearing in 1929. Prior to this, all dialog, all sound effects, were confined to the mind of the viewer.  Two years later, sound was in, and silence (as an absolute, give) was out.  The subtitles of having sound had an overwhelming effect on the medium—not only because the actors could speak, but because they could also act within the subtitles of now being heard.  Whereas just the other day actors had to pantomime hearing different sorts of sound, or act in such a way that the audience knew that they were weeping—much had to be visually over-acted to support the lack of actually being able to hear things.  Once sound was incorporated, the dramatic range of actors advanced exponentially.  Of course there was also everything else outside of voice that could be incorporated by the director:  ticking clocks, advancing footsteps, thunder,  sirens, heartbeat, a soft wail, a chortle, an echo.  And silence could now be used to its true effect, its importance rediscovered.

The last, true silent film came in 1931, with Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights.  Chaplin acted/directed/produced the film, which, interestingly, was not really, altogether, absolutely, a “silent” film.  The movie—which directors Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tartofsky both selected as their fifth film in their top-ten all-time movie lists—actually used idiosyncratic and unintelligible sounds as speech in a spectacular salute to non-speech speech.  This was one smart man.

The advent of sound curiously silenced the careers of some of the great silent-era actors whose voices were really just beyond reach and the range of the enjoyable.  Clara Bow bowed out as a result of her deep Brooklyn accent, as did John Gilbert for his very high-pitched voice, and many others.  Such are the few ironies that came along with this rich technical advancement, small price to pay for a piece of the future.

(Image at right is of Chaplin and Einstein at the premier of City Lights.)

Inglorious Glory of the Atomic Bomb: National Geographic Society's Mistaken Salute to Admiral William Blandy

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This odd graphic appeared as the entire front cover of the National Geographic Society's Lecture Program pamphlet for 1946.  It is strange to me, the use of the photo and its cropping, its brightness--weirdly, the image seems to me to be almost "happy".  The lead lecture for the series was Admiral William P. Blandy, who was one of the only leading military men (along with Dwight Eisenhower) to voice disapproval on the military use of the atomic bomb.  Blandy (28 June 1890 – 12 January 1954, first in his class at USNA, Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance from 1941 to 1943; then Commander, Group 1, Amphibious Force, Pacific Fleet.) went on after the war to become the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Special Weapons, most notably in the early periods at Operation Crossroads.  

Crossroads was the nuclear weapons tests conducted during the summer of 1946 at the Marshall Islands, and included the fourth and fifth (Able and Baker) tests of atomic bombs (the first being at Trinity, the other two at Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The picture on the front cover of the NGS pamphlet is for Test Able—the Japanese battleship Nagato (shown in the painting below, listing, 1946), the ship in command of the Japanese forces for the attack on Pearl Harbor, was one of the ships used in this blast for test purposes.  It was not sunk in the explosion, nor was it sunk immediately afterwards when charges were detonated on her sides.  The ship did eventually list and sink.

The choice of this image for Bandy’s lecture bothers me.  He never liked the bomb, being more dissatisfied with “the breath of death” from the weapon—its radioactivity—than its immediate destructive power.  He referred to it as “a form of poison warfare”.

I don’t think he was much satisfied with his position.  Of his work there in the Marshalls he said:
"The bomb will not start a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy, as one of my critics labeled me, exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim."

Just so there is no confusion:

Blank and Empty History 16: Food & Shelter Ticket for the "Waste" of Society, 1917

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Think what you will of the religious organization of General Booth's Salvation Army, they really do some good albeit with a whomping hammer of the creator's message at the end of it all.  This is the 16th in a series of posts on the History of Blank and Empty Things, an unfilled, blank ticket for the promise of a safe and warm place to sleep and a good sturdy meal.  It was a promise for some sort of hope, for attention, addressed to "the waste" of society, the specialty of the Army, "fighting want and hunger and hopelessness", doing this via the "industrial home", training men for work and finding them jobs.  The Salvation Army was adamantly opposed to "wanton charities":  "the bread line breads bums; banish the Bread Line!; the professional beggar is created by indiscriminate charity..."  They took a very hard line.  On the other hand the hard line may not have worked all that well for far as filling the ranks for the soldiers of god; people certainly took advantage of the charity offered by the SA.  The financial report for the Industrial Home (in Washington DC) for 1917 showed that there were 122 meetings held, with an attendance if 4,300, with 34,921 meals supplied, and 21,215 beds made available--and only 21 "conversions".  

The blank admission card for the industrial home, shown below, seems to me a look at a piece of hope that may have been in the hands of a person who needed it; I can imagine staring at it, wondering what I should do with it, exactly; to take the help, or not.  In 1917, there weren't that many options....