Ptak Science Books

The Tomb of Broken Dolls--an Appeal for Respect for Outgrown and Disabled Toys

This is one of my favorite posts, published here last year on 3 November.It is a fantastic idea, this memorial for lost and worn-out toys, and one which I think could work well in the U.S.

"No two toys are ever broken in the same way or with the same emotional results." Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason

At the beginning of my 10th month of blogging I'd like to open with these images showing the practice of an utterly fabulous idea--an eternal resting place and shrine for broken playthings.  This is an absolutely outstanding concept, and I simply have no notion as to why we don't have such observations in the United States.  (The following two details are from the larger images, below, found  in the 27 July 1929 issue of The Illustrated London News, page 157.) The story provides these two pictures and unfortunately scant details of the ceremony which was held at the Imperial Primary School at Sugamo, Japan. 

The first photo shows the detail of children offering flowers for the altar on which their tray of broken dolls is being venerated; and to the right is the detail of children bowing to the grave of "broken playthings", though the markings on the (grave?) stone indicate that it is for dolls.  It also seems to be a marker for a mass of toys, not that each toy would have its own marker; I suspect it to be enough to have a place where allot of kids could come to venerate objects in which they might have invested countless hours of their time, effort, attention and affection.  That it is a shared place and experience makes the monument all the more so powerful.

There are few better things to teach a child than to pay respects for something that has given them pleasure or helped them, or, say, for returning the love which has been showed them from their doll or toy.  It has always struck me as not-quite-right that a toy can be a beloved object one day and a dust-magnet the next, destined for the trash heap.  Certainly these are holy objects in themselves, and deserve a better and more kinder fate than being mixed with broken glass and greasy unmentionables. 

Are there greater things to be concerned with?  Yes, of course, but only on the face of it--I think that helping kids understand the underlying dignity of inanimate objects such as their playthings could give them a greater awareness for the other seemingly invisible things that they will find throughout their lives. Further I think that a visible, constant reminder for these objects would be really more like a memory-monument for a period of time, a place in nearly everyone's life in which held a certain purity and promise, a protected and beloved frailty of the human experience shared by all.  I can honestly think of no other monument that could reach across religious or philosophical or belief systems to arouse a feeling of common goodness than this. Everyone has had a toy that they've loved, and I have no doubt that if remembered these would be powerful emotions, and could be about the most common denominator we have on the planet.  I can think of no divisive element in such a monument of veneration.

Anthropomorphic Display of Quantitative Data: Flight Safety, 1912

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 815

Even though masses of people had been used in panoramic photography for some years (thousands of people, usually soldiers, gathered to form a living liberty bell, or portrait of George Washington, or some such thing) , I cannot recall the use of humans as a direct statistical aid as in this bio-bar graph, found in the pages of The Illustrated London News for 1912 (page 357). 

The article asks the question of whether air travel (and flight in general) was "safe", and responded by graphing its "yes" response with this image. The larger groups in the top half of the image represent the number of flyers flying for that particular country; the small groups below show the number of aviators killed.  (There is no date of reference in particular but it seems to me that these are total deaths since flying began in Europe in earnest in 1905.) The photomontage below shows a selection of some of the most famous dead aviators. The number of deaths as a percentage of those flying seemed quite acceptable in the year of publication (1912) ; however if these figures were iterated forward to 2009 the death rate would be staggering, sending many thousands of aviators (and crew and passengers) to their deaths each year.  In the United States we save that safety failure for deaths in automobile accidents, which still kill about the same number of Americans each year as were U.S. soldiers lost for the entire war in Vietnam.  In spite of this the odds for survival looked pretty good in 1912. 

The Value of Money and Almost-Useful Information

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 814   Blog Bookstore

I initially chose this pamphlet to be part of a larger series on terrific/unusual/bizarre cover designs--unfortunately its contents got in the way, a little.  The cover still borders safely on the unique, and so does most of its contents, except for the graphical analysis of the depreciation of worldwide currencies that appears on its back cover.  Here the information is actually pretty useful and unusual. It would've been more useful had the author included an end date for his comparisons--all we know is that he is looking at 1929 and the beginning of the Depression as a jump-off point, and we can assume that the end date is before the date of publication of the pamphlet (which actually isn't stated).  Still, the graph is almost very useful.  It is for this reason that Money and its Uses Winds Up in the "Blank and Empty Department" for its diligent but ultimately useless graphical display of data.

The Ape of God

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 813 

These two interesting and complex images of the goddess Isis1, dripping as they are with symbolism and reference, are most interesting to me because of the depiction of man as the ape of god.  (No, not the Wyndham Lewis  Apes of God reference to poseurs and scumbags and indolents in the art world, just man in general.)

The first and second image both show Isis standing on land and in the water, bridging the two, being the goddess of each; she stands slightly bent over in each, and has long flowing hair, a symbol of her as the nurturer of the Earth, as is the  adornment of the fertility symbol of the Moon in her stomach/womb.  The two Isis carry different things: the first, a pail (symbolizing the Nile, which she controls and floods with her tears for the loss of her Osiris) and a sistrum (a musical instrument peculiar to her celebration).  The second image’s hand-connections are more complex:  Isis’ right hand is connected directly to the creator, reaching from a cloud above the upper firmament of angels; her left hand is connected to our title’s interest, the ape of god—man.  The ape/man is seated on the

 

Earth, surrounded by concentric spheres of animals, minerals, intellectual practices (I can easily see “arith”metic, “geom.”etry, “musica” and others represented), water and Earth, the planets(including the Sun) in their courses, the starry realms, and then several spheres of I’m-not-sure but heavenly and ethereal. Man as ape is seated chained to Isis, the giver of life, and contemplates (with dividers) a model of the sphere on which he is seated.

Notes

1. Isis (also know to different cultures as Minerva, Aphrodite, Ceres, Hecate) was an ancient Egyptian/Greco/Roman goddess, idealized as the perfect mother, the Great Mother, patron and issuer of nature, magic and fertility—the giver of life, a Madonna.  She was the daughter of Geb and Nut (god of the Earth and goddess of the sky) and husband of Osiris, and was in general very high-power stuff.

The History of the Internet: Remembering Vannevar Bush and the Memex (1945)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 812  Blog Bookstore

On this day, which may or not be the 40^th anniversary of the first use of the internet (and the 80^th anniversary of the collapse of the stock market of ’29, and Lucy A’s anniversary of her birth) it might be good to remember an earlier version of the internet and the semi-invention of the concept of hypertext: the MEMEX machine of the under-remembered Vannevar Bush. 

Vannevar (pronounced “van ee var”) was a flinty no-nonsense New Englander who was an organizational and mechanical genius who as a professor at MIT developed a remarkable analog computer that greatly advance computation capacities for solving differential equations.  This was in the 1930’s, and even after creating an improved electromechanical version of the machine still chose the wrong way to go in the soon-to-materialize digital computer revolution.  During WWII Bush was one of the most important Americans in the war effort, overseeing the entire scientific effort of the U.S.—an enormous effort dispatched beautifully (and successfully).  His importance in this regard is difficult to overstate.

But right there at the end of the war, when he was organizing a still-secret effort of controlling the spread of atomic weapons (before Hiroshima), Bush was also thinking about the future of the organization of human knowledge and memory.  And published it, too, in the popular Atlantic magazine in July 1945. (It was republished in a shortened version a few months later in September—it remains to this day, according to an editor at Atlantic, one of the most often-requested reprints) where it reached a reading audience of millions.  The article, “As We May Think”, outlined his idea for a device he called the MEMEX¹ (“memory” and  “index”), which compressed and organized all that its user could remember and whatever information would be obtained in the future via electromechanical apparatuses, and available with associative tracking between the microtext frames.  So all manner of book and papers and reports and newspapers and images would be microphotographed and stored in a beautifully-indexed mechanical retrieval system where it would live with the information of others.  There was also the possibility of real-time textual additions to whatever it was that was retrieved, the genetic precursor of hypertext.  Bush’s thinking has been deeply recognized (and also by the creators of the internet) as the intellectual grandparent of the modern internet. 

I just thought on this day that the man who saw more clearly into the future on advanced global communication and societal memory should be remembered on a day when his grandchild came into being.

Notes:

1. According to Bush, “the MEMEX is a sort of mechanized private file and library…. It uses methods such as microfilm storage, dry photography, and analog computing to give postwar scholars access to a huge, indexed repository of knowledge-any section of which can be called up with a few keystrokes."  Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Nick Montfort, ed (2003). The New Media Reader. p. 35. The MIT Press

The physical plant of the MEMEX:  “A memex consists of a desk, where on top are slating translucent screens on which material can be projected for convenient reading. Within the desk were mechanisms that stored information through microphotography. Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. When a longhand note, photograph, memoranda, and other things are in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film, dry photography being employed.”  Manovich, Lev. "As We May Think", The New Media Reader and wiki on The Memex. 

Bad, Odd Jobs Department: Door-to-door Rabbit Meat Salesman. 1942

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 811  Blog Bookstore

Artists seem to have discovered street vendors a long time ago, beginning at least as far back as the 15^th century.  Annibale Carracci (1560 - 1609), a great Baroque master, committed dozens of street sellers to his notebooks but were all lost to time except for the copies of them that were made and etched by Simom Guillain in 1664.  These and prints like these provide glamor and realistic fragrance to the complexity (read=”grit”) of city life 400 years ago. The etching of the painting seller gives us an insight into what may have been a broken and glutted art market in Bologna in the 1590’s. 

Another master of common life was the sculptor Edme Bourchardon who engraved a series of dozens of such folks selling their stuff in the street, walking here and there, waiting to be given some money.  Bouchardon more so than Carracci/Guillain provides a little more grit to his grit, showing some more wear and tear to faces and clothing, giving the backgrounds some darkness and depth.  For example, “L’Orge de Barbarie” shows an itinerant woman peddler, playing her (revolving disk?) organ with a vieu optique  cabinet on her back:  neither of which was particularly light, nor made of some handy light asian hardwoods bought down at the local China-friendly Megalo-Mart.  *This* was a working woman. 

Fast forward a bit to the 20^th century and to an unusual pamphlet I found on the virtues and economic possibilities of selling rabbit meat from door-to-door.   It is just such a  sad little work; it looks like

nobody in the pamphlet wanted to be there, at all.  The woman in this picture being sold a box of rabbit choppings by the undertaker-like salesman (“you!”) looks at the gift as though she hoped for it to be a box of donuts.  And who wouldn’t?  Wouldn’t it be easier to imagine someone hopping out of their chair at the sound of the doorbell saying “hey, that’s the Do-Nut Man!” rather than “hot damn! The rabbit-pieces-in-a-box guy is here!”.   I should say so.  And that’s why I’m voting for itinerant rabbit-bit salesman as elevated in the Bad Jobs department. 

Oddly enough, one of the earliest surviving Renaissance artworks depicting street vendors is this:  a man selling rabbits.

The great money maker here might have simply been the publisher, Ralston Purina Company (of St. Louis, MO), which sponsored and published this pamphlet to excite people to grow their own small rabbit farms and to feed their bunnies Purina Rabbit Chow. 

There is an entire section of this pamphlet devoted to rabbit skin selling (illustrated), but I just can’t go there, what with section headings of “Skins from Meat Rabbits” and “Prime, Full-Furred Skins”. Also the bunny eared-nosed-eyed angora baby slippers  was just bloody indecent. (Did people really wear rabbit pelt coats? )

Odd Art Department: Art Brut in Advertising?

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 810  Blog Bookstore

 

There's not much in this illustration--the entire back page of an oversize pulbicity tourist pamphlet--to suggest any sort of professionalism, or training, or, well, ability.  But there it is, badly drawn, with unusual (if not bad) coloring, trying to entice people to visit this seaside resort in New Zealand. 

Maybe this is more “outsider art” than Art Brut.  Art Brut was a term used by Jean Dubuftet to describe raw/rough art produced by non-artists (and those mostly mental asylum residents¹).  Art critic Roger Cardinal coined “outsider art” as a English-language adaptation of the Dubuffet term², and has since come into use to describe unusual, technically naïve and unschooled Otherness of artworks.  This cover illustration is certainly bearing a pretty good-sized helping of otherness to it, from its pale, weird coloring to its basic inability to draw.  Somehow though it is attractive to me, and ultra-calming when it is not troubling.  It is just one of those peculiar works that is good and bad at the same time.

Notes:

1. A spectacular and early example of Art Brut is found in the phenomenally detailed, insightful-of-other-worlds work of  Adolf Wolfli.

2. "Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses - where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere - are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professionals. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade." - Jean Dubuffet. Place à l'incivisme (Make way for Incivism). Art and Text no.27 (December 1987 - February 1988).

History of Boredom: St. Joseph's Ennui in the Nativity?

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 809   Blog Bookstore

This woodcut, the work of the semi-anonymous "Italian Monogrammist" and printed around 1510, shows the newly arrived Christ in the arms of his mother, taking the airs outside the stable. What is unusual to me here is the attitude of St. Joseph, who adopts a dictionary-ready pose of nonchalance:  he is leaning against a tree, his left arm

 

propped up at the elbow on a tree limb, his feet crossed at the ankles, with a look of I-don't-know-what on his face.  He is definitely not of the standard Josephs that one sees in this scene.Perhaps he is communicating a certain type of tiredness, but I doubt it. The man is staring off into space, not looking at wife and baby, not looking at the many visitors coming through the tunnel in the mountain and excitedly rounding the nearby turn in the road, not looking at anything that we can see.  He's not seeing the invisible stuff either:  not the praying angels and not the sun-ray daggers.He's not tired, not excited about the baby and wife, not excited about the visitors, and in a pose of resident uncaring relaxation--boredom might be the easiest and best explanation, except, well, it doesn't make for a good story. 

Odd Map Department: Corset Department Map, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books, LLC Post 808  Blog Bookstore

This finely produced, 75-page pamphlet listing all you needed to know about marketing and maintaining a corset department was produced by New York University in 1939.  Among the many things I’ve never thought of before this pamphlet featured a map of an idealized corset department, which to me looks to be large, sanitized and medicinal, an oddly institutionalized presentation of something that is pretty intimate.

The other surprise is how expensive these undergarments were.  For example, the Lily of France and Mme. Irene Corset Company (NYC) sold a girdle “for the heavy figure” (liberally sprinkling the word “heavy” throughout the description of the product like, well, sprinkles) for $132. The $132 corset is equal to about $2000 in today’s currency, or roughly a 15:1 increase. There were girdles and etc. in all price ranges, but the (1939) $30-$60 range seems to have been the most common; even still, the $30/low-medium quality item is about $430 in today's dollars, and the cheapest of them all at 5 bucks goes in today’s economy at 75 dollars or so.  I’m not familiar with the value of undies today, but this sure sounds like a whole hell of a lot of money. 

$132 for underwear in 1939 was a tremendous amount of money for the average person—even for the upper-middle class, it was a bunch, considering that you could buy a decent new car for $700.  It would also be equal to a half year’s worth of an average house rent ($28/month) and 1320 gallons of gasoline. 

It sounds like it was very expensive to keep the up with the idea of an ideal figure, which of course was partially create by this same sort of company, creating both need and demand for its product. 

1939 Price Comparisons:

Wages per year, average:  $1,730.00
Minimum wage: 30 cents/hour
Milk, by the gallon: 35 cents
Postage stamp, 1st class: 3 cents
Dow Jones: 131
Gas, average price of a gallon:  10 cents
Bread, by the loaf:  8 cents
Hamburger Meat, by the pound: 14 cents
Automobile, new, average:  $700.00
House, new, average: $3,800.00
House rent, average: $28.00/month

The Odd Department: Cartoons & Tongue-Stuffed Calve's Brains

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 807  Blog Bookstore

In the excitable, pulsing pile that is my collection of Naively Bizarre Literature--some 5,000 items now pushing themselves around like a 750-pound bad idea--comes this lovely, "what the  ____!?" title:  Let's Serve Something New. 53 Selected Recipes for the use of Liver, Heart, Kidney, Sweetbreads, Tongue and other Meat Specialties. Now, once I got the tongue part out of my 18-year-long vegetarian brain, I wondered about what on earth the other part of the ripping title and what "specialties" there might be.
But before I could get there I was stopped by these unique cartoon illustrations romping their way through the text with spectacular word balloons   There are SO many more words that could be injected into these balloons than the ones that were used, and so much more expected. But the zombie texts was inserted by the publisher, which was the American Institute of Meat Packers, whop no doubt were trying to force every last penny of profit out of whatever was left in the sluice sieves of the chopping room floor. 

If these cartoons were extracted from this source, and their balloons left blank, and if people were asked to supply new text, the original words would be the very last in a very long list of possible fillers.  

Removed from context, the illustrations are unexpected and hysterical; placed back into context, and well, they are a little wince-y. 

The recipes that decorate this pamphlet are no less unbelievable, at least from where I'm sitting, and I'm sitting hard:  stuffed baked liver with vegetables in liver dressing, pork liver fermiere, liver with brown liver gravy, liver Pasadena (liver and butter and broiled bacon swimming in bacon fat), liver dumplings stuffed with liver, creamed sweetbreads, kidney omlettes, baked stuffed heart with rice border, heart chop suey, scrambled brains, sauteed brains, creamed calves brains, cold jellied tongue, tongue omlette, tripe roll, baked pig's feet, and, not last, Tripe a la Mussolini (which is 1.5 pounds ogf tripe, bread crumbs, and tomato sauce).  (Spam stuffed with spam and spam jelly, braised in a light spam sauce, and covered in crackled spam.)

After everything was said and done, the other surprise meats didn't seem so surprising anymore, what with running up on the heals of delicacies like stuffed tongue and parboiled sumpin's: tails, feet and oysters (a la Waldorf) seemed as harmless as a Sunday Slider. 

Spam.