Ptak Science Books

War After the Peace: American, Philippine and Japanese Guerrillas, September 1945

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC   Post 566

Several years ago I purchased part of an archive of David Katcher*, who was the founding editor of the journal Physics Today. Before that, several years before that, in 1945, David Katcher was Lt. Katcher, serving as a correspondent/writer in the public relations office of the U.S. Army Headquarters of the Western Pacific (GHQ USAFPAC). There's a 6-inch stack of paper here with what seems to be his (and associated) mimeographed offprints of the daily grind of running the PR department of the Army in the Philippines, which, taken as a whole, is pretty interesting, showing the concerns and trials of the Army in reestablishing the government and infrastructure of the country.  Some of the individual reports/publications are stand-alone, straight-up fabulously interesting things, and so far as I can determine, have not been published anywhere else.  These two examples are both related to the subduing of the last remnants of the Japanese Army still fighting in the dense nether lands of northern Luzon, the Philippines, fighting after the surrender had been made (14 August 1945) and  signed (formally, on the USS Missouri, 2 September) , fighting after the war had ended. 

There's much more than can be written about fighting after  peace treaties ending wars--I know that the Germans were running around in Africa following WWI--but that's a very big story, and not for here.

DOCUMENT 1      (Issued 28 September 1945)

The first document relates the extraordinary story of Col. Russell W. Volckmann who from 1942 led a force of thousands of guerrillas against the Japanese and who, by September 1945, led a force of 20,000 in routing the last elements of the Japanese army.    (The entire text of his memoir written in 1954 as We Remained Behind: Three Years Behind the Enemy Lines in the Philippines  can be found here.)                                                                                                 

(see Continued Reading section, below, for the rest of this document)

DOCUMENT 2  (Issued 25 September 1945)

This short document relates the story of the capture of the last of the Japanese forces in Luzon, including the capture of some 40,000 troops, including General Yamashita ("The Tiger of Malaya") and soon-to-be-executed war criminal and beast of Manila.

I'll let the documents speak for themselves.

(Read more, below)

*from the Washington Post, 2 June 2002, the following obituary of David Katcher:

"David Katcher, 87, who retired in 1979 as special assistant in science and technology to the undersecretary of state for security assistance, science and technology, died of cancer May 31 at his Chevy Chase home.

Mr. Katcher was also senior policy analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology policy during the Carter administration. He was the 1947 founding editor of Physics Today monthly magazine, published by the American Physics Association, and he edited the journal for four years.

He had been an editor at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory before World War II and later executive secretary of a theoretical physics division of the Institute for Defense Analysis."

(Un-?) Necessary Emotion: Medical and Anatomical Illustration and the Human Spirit

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 565

Standard illustrations that give a little more than they need to have always been very interesting to me--sometimes this takes the form of completely unnecessary detail in almost-invisible expendable space fillers (as I've looked at in this series)

and sometimes it is in the most obvious places. 

Now, in this remarkable image from Hans von Gersdorff 's (who we met earlier in this blog) Feldbuch der Wunderartzney (Fieldbook of Wound Surgery, and printed in 1517) comes an unexpected bit of detail.  The machine, the surgical device, operates something like a cork-puller: it is meant to attach to and extract a piece of skull that had become embedded in the brain following a skull fracture.  The procedure looks as though it is just beginning--the man's head has been shaved, the fracture revealed, and the penetration about to begin.  The patient looks, well, I'm not so sure exactly what this look means--perhaps nothing, perhaps the man has brain damage.His right eye has drifted, his jaw set off to the the side and is jutting considerably.  I suspect that a simple view of the top of the patient's head would've been enough to illustrate the image, but--as seems to be more often than not in the 16th century--the illustrator has included not only the entire head, but has given the head character, history, emotion and dignity.  Everything necessary to imbue the surgeon-reader with with the sense of humanity associated with his trade and task. 

I should think that the same may be said for many of the illustrations from Georg Bartisch's Augendienst (The Treatment of the Eye, printed in 1583).  The woodcut at right is an example of Bartisch's suggestion for crossed eyes--the mask would be worn for different periods of time, the openings supposedly working to make the eye muscles assume their normal positions.  The remedy looks bizarre (and very symmetrical) from our point of view here in its future, but what seems very modern is the careful treatment of the illustration of the patient, who is erect, calm, well dressed and terribly decent. 

The thread of deeply humanized anatomy runs deep in the 16th and 17th centuries,where human bodies are dissected to show the different levels of our delicate existence.  The bodies are not simple cadavers, but seem to have some sort of "liveliness" in their post-living being.  This image (below) by Guido Guidi (1508-1569).in his De anatome corporis humani libri VII.
 (printed in Venice in 1611)  gives the beckoning skeleton a smile  to go along with its timeless  gesture for the remembrance  of mortality.

 

Certainly there can be no escaping the modesty of the model in Alexander Read’s (1580-1641). Somatographia Anthropine, or a Description of the Body of Man. . .By Artificiall Figures representing the members... (printed in London by Jaggard in 1616).  Even though she is displaying most of her abdomen, this person is still caring for her moral appearance.

Another example of this modesty can be found in the work of Adriaan van de Spiegel’s(1578-1625). Opera quae extant omnia (edited by Johannes vander Linder) printed by the famous Blaeu’s in Amsterdam
in 1645:  here we see the nearly full-term foetus ably displayed, the mother’s skin pulled back as if to form petals to the flower of the child (helped along by a strategically-placed plant in the foreground).

 

These images can go on and on--these are just a few scant examples.

Another quick example:  Johannes Remmelin’s (1583-1632) Kleiner Welt Spiegel, das ist, Abbildung goettlicher Schoepffung an des Menschen Leib.... (printed in Ulm in 1661) has many illustrations in which the anatomical model seems quite serene; ambiguous, sometimes, to what is going on, but at the same time looking inviting, welcoming even.

  All I'm saying is t hat there seems to be something special going on in these images--certainly a "something" that was lacking in most other (non-artistic) anatomies of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Emotion was certainly extracted from the examples of modern and recent-past anatomical studies. I feel a little happier with the artists and physicians who were interested in connecting humanity to these studies than the slabs of Netter and Grey, to say nothing of the Adam and Eve project or deeply modern technologies.  A little reminder now and then that there was something else connected to the viscera and bones and muscles and veins might not be too bad. 

A Map of The Office, 1942 -&- On the Cusp of Color: Bringing Color to Packaging

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 564

An Occasion An Appreciation, a badly-titled but butterly-produced and broadly-illustrated work is a shiny, slippery and slick celebration of gummed paper.  It may well be the Gutenberg Bible of gummed paper celebration books. 

The book is a silver anniversary (1917-1942) of the Mid-States Gummed Paper Company of Chicago, makers of gummed,.flat, non-curling special gum gummed papers.  It was a company started by box makers, the logical extension of that business. ("Gummed cloth tapes completed the manufactured joint of corrugated boxes, and gummed kraft sealing tape close the box," Indeed. Also its a nicely-written sentence, and a well-written book.)  There is a continuous reference throughout the book to "flat, really flat" gummed tape, something that is lost on me if I don't think about it--the use of splashy color throughout the work, though, isn't. 

The company's color tapes washed over a wide spectrum, adding an artistic touch to a packaging world which was largely black and white. It also produced color gummed labels for  packaging and advertising, which made all the difference. (To appreciate this all you have to do is wind your way through a year or two of LIFE magazine from 1939/1940 and see the vanilla- and blandly-colored boxes of cereals and cans of  such and so spread across the issues.  People are much more convinced to buy something that has a colorful, pictorial image on the box than one that is a white box with black lettering. )*

Another very interesting bit about this book is that it published an indexed map of the offices of the headquarters staff--which is a very unusual map to my experience, very.  I've got a small collection of office layouts/maps from the 1900-1940 period, mainly because it belongs to a period long ago and far away, even though the tail end of office design like this creeps its way into my own life, showing up at places like "computer headquarters" in tv shows like the Rockford Files in 1980. It is a wonderful insight into the way business was done, and I can just about see the polished red linoleum floors, open transoms and abundant oak everything, all swirling in cigarette smoke, populated with people wearing real clothing.

Yet another oddity is the map of the locations of the company--it definitely belongs to the Blank and Empty Things category of this blog--showing the five cities where it  had offices.  The resulting map though is quite unusual, as it shows just the five point and leaves the rest of the country jet black in a deep blue background, everything else missing. 

I know I've had some fun with this book, but I've got to say that it was very well done, very well written, and about as interesting as its topic could allow. 

* I believe that the first mass-produced book illustrated with color photos was by Leica for its labs, published in Berlin in 1938 (?).  color printing in photography had been around by a laborious process since at least the 1890's, but that's a different story

Humanist Secular Prints in the Renaissance: Bedroom vs Boredom Eyes

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 563

At about the same time as the development of a tonal system in the art/print world--which appeared later of course than that in the painting world, given the means of production for the printed medium--came the introduction of the deeply and occasionally troubled vernacular.  The examples below are works done in a cycle by the semi-problematic Israhel van Meckenem (ca. 1450-ca.1510), whose productive and highly-skilled period of productivity swirled around that of Mantegna*, Schongauer, Durer, de Barberi, and Raimondi.  He  is not well remembered in the histories of early printmaking, even though  he had magnificent skills, though not as prodigious as those of his contemporaries.  It is interesting to note that in addition to his artistic and technical prowess, van Meckenem also had a hard touch for business.  For example, answering a particular and immodest call, he produced images exploiting fears of death and eternal death.  Some prints  were, upon purchase and display, supposed to ward off the Plague.  Others presented images of Christ, purchased by hopefuls as indulgences to free them of the burden of thousands of years in Purgatory**.

 
 

This series captured my eye because of the eyes it captured.  It is a lusty series of profane images, or at least they were one-way lusts and desires.  In general, the women in this series seem pretty resistant, if not militant and disgusted, by the fumbling and obvious (or oblivious) suggestions of the men.  The women are distant, arms crossed, leaning away, eyes averted.  In the example above, a church-going couple are, well , going to church, but the man/husband seems to be thinking of a different sort of worship--for her part, the woman/wife keeps her hands very prayerfully clasped, knuckle-busting tight; the scrolls in the back seem to be ready for the thought-balloon legend "oh dear sweet god leave me alone!".  The busty-jowled, pigdog man's emotion is clearly displayed in his fat-lidded eyes..  (As a humorous aside, if you look closely in the right bottom corner of the print you'll see a small doggie scratching itself, which I take to be the artist's statement on the whole scene.  I've included a detail at the bottom of this post.)

Next is this slightly ambiguous scene of a puffy-plumed man staring hard at his "date", sitting at the edge of a bed.  Her look is non-committal; his isn't.  (Perhaps she is pregnant? )  The wonderful bit about this scene though is the knife in the door above the latch, sunk deep into the wood by the man to keep whatever was going to happen private. 

The final image shows a dancing man--his purse loosened and on the floor to free him up, I guess--trying his best to impress his lady.  The woman, obviously, wants no part of the foolishness.  Her body language is slight but VERY clear.  He tries to hold her hand; she only lets him touch her, her fingers straight and her thumb relaxed, not gripping anything at all.  She just wants to get the hell out of there. 

And so we have a modest introduction to foolish sexual dalliance, ca. 1500.

 
 

* Andreas Mantegna has been credited with beginning printmaking in Italy, as has the Master of the Playing Cards in Germany. 

** Some of the prints were sold with indulgences for 45,000 years out of Purgatory.  The problem with these things is that no one knew if 45,000 years meant anything at all in terms of time-in-eternity.  My guess is that you'd need a whole lot of those things to make any difference at all. 

Imaging Mass Casualties: the Big Crowd series, continued.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 562

Few things capture the attention of the general reader quicker than a comparative display of what mass casualties looks like.  Putting an organized, recognizable face to concepts that are vastly removed from the common experience is very compelling, and demands thought.  (I’ve made a small number of posts on the display of quantitative data via the use of crowds and masses of people "The Department of What Things Look Like: the Casualties of the Somme, Visualized ", as well as the general confusion in images of enormous crowds "Crowds and the Press of Humanity: WWI German Prisoners, November, 1918"  , and also as the history of crowds in art  "Clarity and Confusion in Displays of Human Masses ".)

Today’s post (from the Illustrated London News for September 1932)  follows the line of the Somme Casualties  post, showing in two very striking images what large-scale death looks like.  The first, montaged,  photographic  image depicts the number of people killed (20,169)  in Britain over a three year period in automobile and other traffic/roadway accidents.  This does not include the number of people injured, which would be ten times greater than this image.  (I've included a magnified view of a small section just to show that this was not a picture of dots, but actually a lot of people, men mainly, wearing hats.)  In contrast, the caption-writer points out that this three-years period produced more deaths among the British than all years of the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815) combined.  This comparison was made in a plea for safety on the roads.

And as a matter of fact, deaths on the roads in the U.K. significantly decreased over the years:  from about 7,000 a year in 1932 to 2,900 or so in 2007.  In 2006 in the United  States, on the other hand, more than 13,000 people were killed  in alcohol-impaired traffic accidents alone; that represents about 30% of all traffic fatalities, which  numbered about 52,000.  A year.  This is also nearly the same number of all American service people killed in the Vietnam War.  For the same period of time,  driving deaths in the U.K numbered 2,900 people in a population of 61 million and for 230,000 miles of roadway;  there were 52,000  deaths in the U.S. in a  total population of about 300,000  driving on 4 million miles of roads.  When you look at the deaths per miles of roadways, the two country's statistics are very similar

The second image comes from an ad for American Locomotive in LIFE magazine for 11 January 1943.I t was a plea for industrial safety during a period of war, stating that in 1940 there were 52,000 people killed on the job (!) in the United States, with more than 2 million injured.  American Locomotive pointed out that this was equal to the loss of some 500 million man-hours (sic), which was not affordable to the country while fighting a two-front war.  It is a striking image, and must've commanded a fair amount of thought to anyone seeing it. The 52k figure sounds very big and too-strong to me, given that the American population was  132 million, meaning the work force was around half of that.  

A "Safety First" motto was developed from this effort.  (Say it and it's so (?))

Sublime Mundane: a History of High School Lunches and the Commercialization of Children's Needs

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC  Post 561

This is another in a series of posts on the Sublime Mundane--books and pamphlets whose titles are nothing if not introductions to spectacular nothingness.  Sometimes these publications are indeed about disappearing wisps of lost lint, and sometimes not; sometimes the mundane and seemingly stupifyingly "normality" of their subject matter leads to something of deep depth.  Today's pamphlet, left, fits the second category. 
Part of the interest in this work--outside of its momentarily arresting title that has a potential for being a cascade of boredom-- is that it so quickly rights itself into an important topic.  That's not to say that it isn't a boring topic, as my quick and semi-feeble research reveals.  It does get interesting though when you consider that it took so long for the recognition that, since all of these children in school have been brought together, that there wasn't some sort of federally organized effort to make sure that the weakest members of this group had at least one decent meal a day.  That said, the earliest program were for students who could afford to pay for their lunches.  Perhaps it was assumed that, around the turn of the century, there were no lunch rooms per se and that children would eat wherever they could find the space, that many children were also going home for lunch, and that they were all being fed.  (I do remember that some classmates of mine in P.S. 29 would go home for lunch, and I remember wondering exactly what that was all about.  I can recall taking my brother for special every-so-often-Friday treats at Joe & Pat's Pizzeria for three slices and two cokes for a dollar back there in 1968.  But I digress.)  It actually took a little time before children's lunches at school were made to be free to those who needed it. 

Which brings us to Marion Nestle's Food Politics (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002), who discusses the early commodification of children's food: "School meal programs began during the Great Depression of the 1930's. From the outset, they had two purposes: to help dispose of surplus agricultural commodities owned by the government as a result of price-support agreement with farmers , and to help prevent nutritional deficiencies among low-income schoolchildren. Because chronic disease risk factors were not an issue at that time, the rules specified meals that used surplus commodities and were higher in fat, saturated fat, sugar, and salt---and lower in fiber---than recommended in later years."  All of which is detestable and unwholesome and immediately transparent.

Perhaps the really interesting stuff on feeding children at school starts here, in the 1930's, and that with the commercialization of children's biological needs, breaking the back of an agricultural finance problem in the school lunch rooms.  The lunch as commodity expands from massive leftover projects into something a little more insidious in the television age, when children not only get to dress their foods in the sorts of containers that they wanted (lunch boxes), but also were being deluged with displays of foods that they could select for themselves via television.  This commercialization process gets ramped up decade by decade, until in the 1990's and 2000's the lunchroom has in some cases become an extension of the t.v. commercial, and that local and state governments are counting the value of sugary waters, salt, and catchup packets while plying the rest of the arrested nutritional package with prepackaged conglomerate goodness.

And such is the value of the sublime mundane, at least for me--these items are filled with possibilities invisible to their titles. 

Even after all of this, I must confess that I would dearly like to have a Fireball XL5 lunch box to take with me into eternity.  All systems go!

Some interesting links with more than you need to know about school lunch history:

The Food Museum Online Exhibit:  School Lunch History
School Lunch Programs in the USA (according to city)
School Lunch Programs in Europe

The History of Dots and the Isotropic Universe: the Iconic Image of the Irregular, Dot-Filled Milky Way Galaxy of William Herschel

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 560

Lucretius (95-55 BCE), in his Nature of the Universe, stated that  since there is nothing outside the universe, it must be infinite: “the universe stretches away…just the same in all directions without limit”;  it stretches far and wide into immeasurable depths.  All that is in it, he reasons, is distributed equally and in the same way.  But this is not the case, even in light of Edward Milne’s cosmological principle (1933),  stating that all  places in the universe is alike—which is true, except that there are vast disturbances in very large local areas that distinguish themselves from other places.  The work of Gamow/Alpher/Herman  (1939) and Penzias/Wilson in establishing the cosmic microwave radiation  (CMB)  shows that the observable universe to be very close to homogeneous and isotropic, and of course accelerating. (Suffice to say for this short post that there are models-- Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) model for example-- which show the observable universe to be  "weakly" inhomogeneous and anisotropic; but generally and on average the isotropic models stand.) 

Perhaps the earliest published “bump” in the calm waters of the equal-distribution universe occurs with William Herschel (1738-1822), who in 1785 published a revolutionary image of the “Stellar System” (the Milky Way), showing its irregular pattern and the off-center placement of our sun amidst a panoply of other stars.(His image was remarkably and substantially correct, with the most grievous error being the placement of the sun too close to the center of the galaxy.) It was an image which bought the idea of a not-so-humano-centric idea into popular philosophy. This galacto-centric view remained until the work of Harlow Shapley's globular clusters in 1918.

This varied quite widely from the images of other astronomical observers and theorists such as Thomas Wright (1711-1786), who in his book An Original Theory of the Universe (1750) gives the Milky Way a friendlier, homogenous manner, overruling his earlier theory that the stars were “promiscuously distributed through mundane space” and delivering a theory of the stars organized in a regular pattern based upon a hierarchical center of some sort around which everything else was positioned.  He also provided this fabulous image of the centers of galaxies as an immutable, transcendent force, the eye of the creator, rather than the simple, positive dot.

This idea was picked up by Immanuel  Kant (1724-1804) who in his own work, The Theory of the Heavens (1755), expanded on the multiple centers of creation(s) (an “endless immensity in an unlimited plenum of creations”) of cascading and separate galaxies, and detailed a vast system of disk-shaped galaxies which revolved around centers which in turn revolved around other centers, becoming far vaster, though all were centered on a dominant, universal center.

But it was Herschel's images of the dots that came closest, longest, to the most accurate and appealing depiction of the universe, especially with the location of our solar system's principal dot seen as a dot among dots in a universe of dots. 

 

A Battleship in Union Square: the “USS” Recruit, 1917, & the Invention of the Word “Landship"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 559

Well, perhaps this isn’t the origin of the word “landship”, but it does make for a snappy title.  The fact of the matter is that the Mayor of NYC, John Purroy Mitchel,  had this model of a ship (designed by Donn Barber and Jules Guerin, and sort of based on the USS Maine) built to attract greater numbers to the city’s recruiting station, as it lagged behind the established quota of 2000 enlistments for the Navy with only 900 men.  The 200 x 40 foot landship did the job, gaining 25,000 recruits (until it was disassembled in 1920), though it didn’t work very much magic for the mayor, who lost his election later in the year.  Actually, the gung-ho Mitchel lost his entire life in 1918, after volunteering for the Army Air Corps and dying in a training accident. 

History of Dots 7: Dots versus Lines, Engravings versus Half-tones

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 558

The history of illustration has some distinct phases:  from woodcut to wood engraving to engravings on metal to lithography to printing in colors to chromolithography...and then on to a process that would begin to do away with all of those processes, the half-tone.  This was a process whose foundation was laid in the 1850's by William Fox Talbot and brought to life in 1873 by Stephen Henry Horgan, though  it really wasn't commercially viable until  Frederick Ives  further deepened the process in 1881, finally becoming a staple in the printing industry in the mid 1890's.  The half-tone process would basically due away with the line-centric engraving process, as it was much quicker and easier to use, making images much more readily available to daily-printed media like newspapers.  Images that were drawn could be rendered without being engraved; also, one of its greatest advantages was being able to reproduce photographs, which was an enormous breakthrough, as a photograph automatically increased the veracity of the image. (During the U.S. Civil War, reader's of the illustrated

weekly journal Harper's Weekly trusted battlefield images more if the wood engraving appearing in the magazine was copied from a photograph rather than being from the sketchbook of the

correspondent on the scene.  The photograph would capture a particular point in time (nearly) instantaneously, whereas the war correspondent artist captured bits and pieces of an instant flavored with memory and subsequent action.  The phrase in the credit line. "Drawn from a photograph", had real value.)

And so it came to pass that the happy lives of dots and lines--so important and intertwined in such things as the Morse Code--made a particular and dramatic break with the triumph of the half-tone over the engraving in illustrating popular publications (from the 1890's to the 1980's). 

The image above at left is a magnification of an engraving from 1760;above right is a half-tone image of a 1905 Alfred Stieglitz photo; below left is a magnified sample of what the Stieglitz was composed of; and bottom right finds an illustration of the different combinations in size and color that would effect the composed final image in the final column. 

Getting the Future Wrong: Missing Beethoven and the Grosse Fugue

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 557

Dark is the present that denies change, or misunderstands it, or ignores it. I was thinking about this last night watching Ed Harris in an odd movie about Ludwig van Beethoven (“Copying Beethoven”, made I think in 2006)—more precisely it was about Beethoven’s time from 1824 to his death in 1827.   The movie introduced a woman who was sent as his score copyist as the Maestro worked the final days of the 9^th symphony. (There were copyists of course but not women; I couldn’t imagine a woman filling that role for Beethoven, and I’m not sure what was added to the general knowledge of the man by supplying a fictional character in a general grand biopic.  Seems to me that we would have all been better served if the movie was told from B’s point of view and that the copyist was a creation in his own mind, a fragmentary muse.)  It was an offhandedly annoying film, except when it touched on the Grosse Fugue, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen mentioned in any movie that I’ve ever seen. 

The Grosse Fugue was supposed to be the last movement in his String Quartet No. 13 (opus 130), but it was so difficult to perform, and it was so incredibly unlike anything else and so completely insistent in its originality that he was persuaded to replace the movement with another work, allowing the Grosse Fugue to survive in its own (opus 133) as a titanic single movement composition. The music was very hard and demanding—in the movie, the completely-deaf Beethoven sat facing the musicians at the front of the audience, and slowly but steadily as the piece was played the audience left, until at the end almost no one remained.  Ed Harris’ Beethoven was overjoyed that the musicians played the piece successfully, and then was shocked to see that there was almost no one left who had been listening—no one “got it.”  It was seen as a beastly piece of music from a beautiful beast who had lost touch—it remained so for a long time, too.  (The great Louis Spohr, along with almost everyone else in the 19^th century, found it “an uncorrected horror.”)  Anyway I liked the idea of tossing the Fugue into this mix—surprised, really, to see someone deal with the thing.

But as with many visionaries, their insight into the future can be largely solitary—Beethoven’s visions lasted longer than most.

Johannes Kepler, in the midst of finally overthrowing the Aristotilean concept of the universe in his Harmonies of the World, writes to Urania, one of the nine Muses, the Muse of Astronomy (and also the favorite of John Milton in Paradise Lost):

“But now, Urania, there is need for a louder sound while I climb along the harmonic scale of the celestial movements to higher things where the true archetype of the fabric of the world is kept hidden. Follow after, ye modern musicians, and judge the thing according to your arts, which were unknown to antiquity. Nature, which is never not lavish of herself, after a lying-in of two thousand years, has finally brought you forth in these last generations, the finest true images of the universe. By means of your concord of various voices, and through your ears, she has whispered to the human mind, the favorite daughter of God the Creator, how she exists in her immortal bosom.”  It seems as though he could’ve been writing about a lot of things, not the least of which could’ve been our immortal Ludwig van. 

Beethoven’s Fugue, like some of the other late quartets would have to wait, unappreciated, not understood, for a hundred years, a little piece of the future swathed in black. A Dickensian-black, a Victorian mourning-black, when black in mourning (for women, anyway) was deeply black. Bombazine black (a lusterless, lightless black material that ensured nothing but black). Arnold Sommerfeld’s B-1 bomber black. 

And then somewhere in the earlyish 20^th century it wasn’t a figment of bad imagination anymore; the Fugue was recognized as a piece of modern music written hundred years too early. To top it all of Igor Stravinsky said that the Fugue was a piece of contemporary music that would always be contemporary.  Except of course when it was written as a piece of the future in a dim past.

The History of Dots 6: the Kingly Dot of Copernicus, 1543

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 556

“Diligent reader, in this new work you have the motions of the fixed stars and planets, reconstituted from ancient as well as recent observations, and embellished by new and marvelous hypotheses.

Therefore buy, read, and enjoy this work.”  --Title page of The Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs,by Nicolaus (Koppernigk) Copernicus,1566 (second edition)

Slim is the history of published books where authors directly beseech people--right on the title page--to buy their book.  But such is the case with the De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, which, when published, finally, in 1543, ushered in a new era of scientific explanation--it was perhaps the very beginning of what could be called "modern" science.  And the centerpiece of it all was a fine little dot that was the symbol of our sun.  It is also a little unusual that the standard symbol of the sun was presented so, even at this relatively early date for printing scientific treatises, as the sun was more often than not presented with the standard flaming circumference and human face.  (Earlier in this blog I made a word map of the first ten chapters of De revolutionibus.)

But the simplicity of the representation of the sun falls quite clearly within the author's tendency of directness an plain speech.  He presented his theory with ease and a calm matter-of-factness (which included 100 pages of tables, and 20,000 tabulated numbers) which, considering it was overturning an entire world view and threatening a basic tenant of the church, was pretty astonishing.  It was actually quietly shocking at the time, both in how the theory was presented and how it was received.

Copernicus states very simply that "the author of this work has done nothing to cause blame" in his revolutionary work.  He also states in the preface that he is not the first to work on the sun as the center of the solar system (and universe),  citing for example Philolaus the Pythagorean, Lysis and others. And he also widely recognizes that there was much more to come in the future, much in the line of the way of one of the very last lines of Kepler's Harmonia:  "there is still much more beyond".  

Copernicus certainly did not stand for disagreement with his work, as he thought that anyone invested with a certain amount of mathematical knowledge could in no way disagree with him simple as that.  I quote a rather lengthy bit from the  early stages of the book:

"Perhaps there will be babblers who claim to be judges of astronomy although completely ignorant of the subject and, badly distorting some passage of Scripture to their purpose, will dare to find fault with my undertaking and censure it. I disregard them even to the extent of despising their criticism as unfounded. For it is not unknown that Lactantius, otherwise an illustrious writer but hardly an astronomer, speaks quite childishly about the Earth's shape, when he mocks those who declared that the Earth has the form of a globe. Hence scholars need not be surprised if any such persons will likewise ridicule me. Astronomy is written for astronomers."

But so much has been written about this fantastic book that I'll not go into it here.  All I want to point out here in my tiny way is the urgency and importance of the solar dot--a simple representation of the sun, replacing the place of the earth in the primordial soup of the solar system, the very fabric of the  construction of the universe.

The Microscopy of Boredom

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“Contrive to have as many treats for your mind as you can, as many things to which it can fly from itself”   Sam. Johnson.   (James Boswell, Ominous Years, pg. 287

Boredom is a powerful thing.  It is also, at least as a word if not as a concept, relatively young—it first appeared in Dicken’s Bleak House in 1852, with the word bore making an earlier appearance in 1762. (Bitter Ambrose Bierce redefines “bore” as a person who speaks when you wish them to listen.)  Boredom is distinct from Melancholy, which relates more to depression than to boredom, and is an idea and word thousands of years old.  Boredom is a universal constant, a wide acknowledged entity of enormous reach and singular acuity—and the fact of the matter is that you cannot translate boredom into a narrative.  You can create art depicting boredom, and you can tell what boredom is, but you cannot, really, cannot write a novel with a boredom narrative.  Unless you’re Jane Austen.  It is a tired pursuit of tireless insipidity which simply escapes capture in the form of a novel—or I should say, a novel that you’d like to read, or was readable.  Boredom still awaits its Quixote.  Melancholy on the other hand has many, not the least of which is one of the most unreadable and fascinating books in the canons of English lit, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (which would be an interesting film if another Burton, Tim, got his hands on it.).

I was thinking about boredom in terms of some of the printed material  in my Naïve Surreal category—those are the pamphlets where the meanings of their titles and subjects, once popular in their day, are now aloof and unhinged, floating in the present with almost no bearing on what their original logical intent was.  And so these titles sometimes take on a fantastically removed appearance, and sometimes they are simply simple, so simple that they can be at first blush quite boring.  But they’re boring only for a moment, until the brain wraps itself around the illogic of them, and then they become not boring—fascinating, sometimes.  And what is that tiny space between the wide widths of boredom and fascination?  How microscopic are those pores between the two entities? And what exactly is that place where boredom and fascination meet?  

We Think a Point Has Been Missed (published in March, 1933) is an odd example, going from boring to puzzling to incredible to disappointing to interesting all in about a minute.  It is a lovely title to be sure, flying at the heights of the sublime mundane, hiding in its own obvious nature.  Opening the booklet we find that it was published by the Columbia Broadcasting System, and at first blush it seems a fainting on miniature problems of the naiscent radio company.  But it turns out that it is actually fairly topical:  CBS wanted to make it very clear that the eight-minute radio broadcast of President Roosevelt on  March 4th 1933* was a significant and exceptional use of the new medium,  CBS points out that "Roosevelt did advertising's most significant job...advertising 'courage" and "conquered despair", and that those eight minutes  over the radio "added cash value of the nation....commodity markets pulsated, dollars rose around the world, demand for department store credit rose 40 percent".  In short, this was an early recognition of the extreme value of immediate access to a national population.  

The Roosevelt speech, which went without quotation in this short report, was his inaugural address, the day of his taking the reigns from Herbert Hoover--the "All  we have to fear is fear itself" speech, which did indeed galvanize the nation, delivered virtually immediately via radio. ("God bless Roosevelt; god bless radio" intoned Will Rogers.)   It is one of the country's best inaugural speeches, made at a time when the country needed one, there in the depths of the Great Depression in the late winter of 1933.  But all of this is so far down in this slender seven-page book that the speech almost smokily wisps its way through it, the main emphasis being the importance of the delivery system and not the stuff of delivery.  Its a queer little thing, all of its importances semi-hidden, made more pronounced in this particular copy since it was owned by Roosevelt.  

The second example or boring-interesting is the ultra-under compelling Don't, which when published in 1926 threatened directions for advising improprieties in conduct and common errors of speech.  Written by "Censor", it dragged itself through 76 pages of nitty dialog details that are in a way interesting as a window on correct conduct during the roaring times.  Ultimately though the text doesn't survive interest, and all we're left with is the very unusual title. 

Which takes us back to appearances and second-life and the intersection of boredom and the fantastic.  I suspect that if we apply the microscope to that boundary that we see exactly what we want to see.

Bad Ideas Department: Children, Tall Ladders and Bees

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From the Bad Ideas Department, and from the deeper/further "what the hell!?: sub-department, comes this bizarre offering.  I don't know what the photographer or writer or publisher or whomever was thinking--or, for that matter, what the graphics department was doing, when they put this photo on the cover of this skimpy children's rag, inducing an automatic cringe respond from any thinking person. The Child in Nature, Studies in Visualization is a mystery--what were these people thinking, or trying to think, or visualize? (And let me just point out that this was a "happy" book, not an Aesopian tale of possible woe and lessons-to-be-learned-the-hard-way book.) There is a picture on the inside of the result of this activity, but the swollen-up eye of the finger-poking child was just too much to bear, and so I just couldn't possibly publish it.  Released by the Expression Company (?) of Boston in 1939, I would hope that those responsible have gone on to receive their appropriate rewards. 

Its just shockingly, stupidly,  stupid.

What Pictures Tell Us: Medieval Treatment of Women in a Renaissance World

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There are all sorts of famous seats:  seats of wisdom, of power, of lameness, of government, of discontent, of honor, of learning, of war; there's the hot seat, the best and worst seats, a seat on the board, a seat on the bench, a seat at the bar; there are captain's chairs, endowed chairs, and famous chairs (like architectural gems/mules of Mackintosh, Wright, Saarinen, van der Rohe, Eames, Gehry, LeCorbu) and famous seats (at the original Yankee stadium or a Roman coliseum).  The seat pictured at left, though, is anonymous and lonely, but it is full of a story. 

Sometimes one discrete, odd image can tell you a lot of history or the story of its time:  It might seem simple and benign, but once you stop to think about it just  little, an entirely different story can emerge.  Take for example this woodcut from Jacob Rueff's De conceptu et generatione hominis, et iis quae circa haeac potyissimum consuderantur (in six books), published in Zurich by Christoph Froschauer in 1554.  It looks like it might be a seat straight out of an old WC, but it is actually a birthing chair.  And it doesn't look particularly inviting (or not threatening) for the tasks to come; and such was the state-
of-the-art of birthing children in 1554.  Well, earlier than that, really, because Rueff's work was an improved version of a still earlier work by Rosslin (Der swangern frauen). I look at this chair/seat, and I think,  "oh dear god", even with an historian's sensibilities, knowing full well that it hadn't been changed much for hundreds of years prior to this publication.  There's quite a bit in this book's 66 illustration to excite the historian of medicine, some of which are rather beautiful and demanding, like this astrological representation of anatomy (at right).  But it is still the chair in all of these pictures that is the most powerful to me. When all of the medical advancements and distractions were boiled away, and the discussion of the two types of foreceps was eliminated, it all came down to a woman in an uncomfortable, stiff-backed straight-up chair.   A chair with no cushion or throw or anything of any sort for the comfort of the woman, though there was an extensive dust ruffle flanking it.  And as great as the advancements were in medicine in the first part of the  16th century, dealing with women in labor was still a Medieval practice.

I should also point out that the Rueff book, as old as it was, was reprinted, translated, into English with many of its ideas riding out time intact, published in London eight decades later.  The chair was still there. 

Bizarre & Naive Surreal Book Titles: Sex, God, Food, and Clean (and Colorful) Blood

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Continuing a minor thread on bizarre and spectacularly mundane book titles comes today's entries on the various uses of "sex" in finding high-ideal  religion and a proper waistline. Harry Haas had a very simple answer to sex (a concept that I was frankly surprised to see described in three words):"low cultural sex instincts" lead to "low cultural levels", the reverse evidently never entering the writer's mind.  Sex "was not a moral issue", but an instinct "which like other instincts must be satisfied in one way or another". It is also "Nature's unscientific way of propagating the human races--the pre-logical and instinctive, the animal way".  He asks the reader "why do some of us read these risque publications if they are so degrading? Tobacco Road and various other pornographic diversions, I mean "[sic]. Mr. Haas doesn't know, but he does believe that the sex problem was vast, "a modifying agent in our personality growth" which "is responsible for an enormous amount of neurosis (and) seen to be at the bottom of the world's greatest achievements".  This leads of course to babies "blind, crippled and diseased and mentally hopeless--all of which find their common origin in sex troubles, feelings processes or chemical changes.  Probably nine-tenths of our anxieties, if not the major cause of world unrest, can be traced back to sex". Mr. Haas then gets to his major and remarkably scarce question:  "could it be that the writers and interpolators of the Bible were themselves unconsciously afflicted with sex troubles?"  He then takes this issue far and wide, and frankly by this point everything got so muddied and biblical that I just lost interest.  But the title is still good enough to stand firm and true, even if the the author didn't get to an answer, except to suggest that you purchase his pamphlet on the  psychoanalysis of  the bible--it was available for one dollar, postpaid, and had something to do with Albert Einstein.  He published this booklet on his own  in Orangeburg, S.C., in 1941, while the world was hell bent on some religico-sex-fueled instinct war.

Ernst J. Stevens ("Chromo-dietician and Expert Human Analyst") let loose his spongy  Nulife Sex-Diet Book III of the Social Science Series (Illustrated) in 1934--it is one of that class of books that doesn't look right, doesn't feel right, and smells a little like it spent too long lost under the cushion of a chair in a bad place.  His book is a hopeless melange of shrinko-babble, blood coloring and therapeutic color use wrapped around dietary "laws" of dubious value.  Having dispensed with 10 chapters in 15 pages, Dr. Stevens takes on "Color, Music, Taste and Skin Odors" after having established a priority in "colors in our flesh, colors in our thoughts and colors in our foods" and their connects to color balance and blood cleansing skin beautifiers.  That sounds like a lot to deal with in 15 five-inch-tall pages, but that's the least of it--the true metier of the book was also woven through everywhere, the messages of vim and vigor and health sense and mixing of the sexes colliding at every level with everything else.  It is a powerhouse display of some sort of need that I cannot identify.  The title, of course, is super.