Ptak Science Books

Borges in Reverse--Diary Absolutists of Everything.

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post in the Series on the History of Need.

There are diarists who record everything that happens and everything that they do during the course of a day. The diary entry is not a simple line or two of waking and seeing the morning sky--it is one that records the number of brushstrokes of the toothbrush, the amount of water used in drinking, the amount of time the tea steeps, the sound of the spoon on the saucer, how the cookie crumbles, and so on--and this all in the first half-hour of being awake. 

By necessity then people like this would be trapped in their own terrifying need to record their actions; having an adventurous day imperils their sense of balance and the ability to record the event. The course of the day is lost to the record of time, and it is as if whatever happened that wasn't recorded never happened at all.

The less that is done, the better, insofaras it would be easier to record and capture. On the other hand, though, that allows for more time to be spent on the diary description of the moment--not only the number of toothbrush strokes, but also the reflection of whatever appeared in the sink bottom, or what besides the face was seen in the mirror, or how many rice krispies were in the bowl, and so on.

In such cases, going outside and becoming a witness to the rest of the world's event would be impossible--even a stolen glance through a venetian blind could dictate a 30-minute entry.  The less to record that there is, the more recording of the lesser events could be made.  As with Dr. Zeno, there really never is nothing to not record. 

Its a scary thought, a life lived in an anti-Borgesian library like that, getting pulled closer and tighter into nothing.  Well, its that, or it is a more zen-like observation of the world around you.  Either way, the diarist is tied to a bad destiny. 

There are probably many variations on this theme:  people who must record everything that they purposefully look at during the day, or record everything that they hear but cannot see.  I imagine that there is someone who can look at  a notebook of drawn footsteps to see how their feet were placed in relation t the earth for every waking minute since 1965. 

Its a crushing amount of nothingness.  Unless of course that nothing was everything. 

[These images are really early and very impressive efforts by Etienne Marey in recording the pace of a horse, as seen in (Etienne Marey), "The Paces of the Horse", in Popular Science Monthly, December 1874--they have nothing to do with human locomotion.

On the Visual History of Silence, Chapter 17: Mapping the Silence of Housework in 1925

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1888 [An entry in the Museum of Impossible and Imaginary Things series.]

I found this lovely series of images at the fantastic Public Domain Review blog--I was very and instantly taken by them, as they immediately suggested themselves to repurposing. (They were truly meant to illustrate the proper posture of the domestic worker; but now of course they are open to vast interpretation, creative speculation, and mild fantasy.)  To this observer their original insistence is gone, even at an historical micro-level (except for a history of housework):  they aren't so much an illustration of housework and the postures by which a person would conduct them, but as a map of the silences encountered in the daily cleaning of a house.  It is all fiction of course, but the photographs do have an overwhelming sense of beckoning silence to them, even in their depiction of motion--even though they are a series on dealing with proper movement, they all seem strangely static, like marble.

And so they become a geography of house-bound silence, made by silent geographers, capturing moments of silence in moments of near-silent work.  And if I was the one compiling these geographic interests (and I might as well be), I would want to position the five greatest house-silences so that they could be found once again.  And so:

Location 60: back stairs, beyond kitchen.

Sounds and silence: olympic kneeling done in pursuit of dusting invisible pollens from floor. A very quiet Shaker step waits in the background. It is mostly the silence of the whitewashed stair that commands this image, and not the diligence of the dust.

 

Location 32: kitchen entry/semi-hall.

Sounds and silence: Old uncovered wooden floor and oak-handled broom, well-polished leather boots with new heals.  The silence is that which comes after the light sweeping is finished is the elusive "great grandmother sound" of satisfied work being completed.

 

The Museum of Sunrises

Item 38 in the Exhibition Catalog for the Museum of the Imaginary and the Impossible.  

See some of the other entries including:

 An Episode in the History of 20th C Art: Color-by-Number Noses, 

Picture Dictionary of Extinct Semi-Luxuries, Part 1,

NYC Miniatures, Glass Diaries, Cannon Alphabets and the Bio-Secrets of Sing Sing

The Stolen Convict Letter Collection

 

The Museum of Sunrises

[Detail of one section of the installation]

•  Imagist: Jorge Rugsis Loeb.   Artist of installation: T. Barnaby

• Installation: 75'x6' wall, into which are placed 4”x8” doors in 116 rows nine doors high, arranged at 4” interevals from 3'-6' from the ground. The doors cover foot-deep shadowboxes.

• Construction: wooden frames with miniature antique wooden doors

Small environments constructed from samples of the sunrises collected via photography by Jorge Rugsis Loeb (1911-1982). Mr. Loeb made photos of the sunrise every day of his life, no matter where he was or what the condition, a photograph was made just at the moment of sunrise.

The images were collected by the Museum at the bequest of Mr. Loeb, who had decorated his Croton-on-Hudson home with images of every sunset in his life, beginning when he was 12 years old.

Mr. Loeb possessed an excellent memory for every image, though when pressed he admitted to “not liking” sunsets. “At the end of the day, there is always this” he would remark, gesturing at his sunrises. “I only regret that I didn't begin earlier. In life. I enjoyed the hour before sunrise, as there is no more perfect hour in the day. Anyone can do a sunset--after all, you can't have one without a sunrise."

The installation will be on display until December 23, 2012.

--With thanks to Eric Edelman, sunrise specialist.

An Episode in the History of 20th C Art: Color-by-Number Noses.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1056   (First post in our History of Noses series)

There is an entire dictionary of explanations for this odd image (appearing in LIFE magazine for 14 September  1953). Here's a candidate launched from this blog's Museum of Impossible Things department:  the photograph accompanies  a newspaper clipping from the Library of Congress' Newspaper Clippings Collections^!, an above-the-fold front-page obituary for a man with an unusual obsession, as follows:

[Obituary from the St. Florida News, from At, Texas. ]
<clip>
"The Mystery of the Secret Painter of At, Solved!"
<clip>
"Gileless, Newton. After a long illness of undescribed origin and affect, Mr Newton Gileless, at home. Newton was born in Aint, Texas before moving to At in 1916 “to get away from the negativeness”.  He had few friends and distant neighbors, and was fond of keeping overturned muffin-stuffed cowboy boots on his fence posts. He donated hard pancakes to the bench-sitting old men down by the Rexall, and kept a large box at the Post Office."

"Mr. Gileless’ prime mover of community interest was his secretive painting practices. For decades Mr. Gileless could be seen scurrying around town, or at in the fields, or along the dusty roads, or at the stream near the peach trees, carrying a large easel with a canvas attached with yards of paintin' rope..  He could be seen painting but only from a distance, as distance of quietness seemed the enabler for his painterly ambitions. The object of his interests was not known"

"Mr. Gileless’ estate was left to Bo Tanger, the regional coroner, who administered the last wishes and who revealed the close secret. “I finally got to see what Newton was painting”, said Tanger, "and its odd, even for here, where people's business is their own in private, and his was public". 

[Photo:  2nd grade class with their happy bequest of Mr. Gileless' artwork at At, Texas Primary School.]

"Mr. Gileless' continued artist pursuit was painting Color-by-Numbers portraits of Vaudevillean, comic and movie actor Jimmy Durante. There were more than 6,250 of these portraits found in Gileless' barn.  His will instructs (and provides the funds for) their distribution to 'as many good Texan second-graders as possible.  Yes.'  And so it was this that Mr. Gileless was painting in his secret painterly way, painting again and again, hoping for hte colors to improve with exposure to different surroundings, especially and evidently en plein air."

"When overly prompted on the mysterious Durante muse, Mr. Tang responded: 'Well sir, I don't know.  But Durante has showbusiness' biggest nose, and Mr Gilieless had but a scant smidgeon.  Maybe it was soulful envy.' " --Buck Smeal for the At Tattler Texas, 1 September 1953.

Notes.
1.  The Library of Congress decided in the midst of a space-saving fit to save only “necessary” bits from its newspaper collections and to discard the rest.  “We aren’t Mr. Borges”, one library staffer volunteered, “and we just thought that all of the other challenged stuff had to go”.  The Library’s reduction removed 92% of the newspaper collection “bulk”.  Another source said that “if you look at it in one way, what we dumped was mostly nothing, ‘cause the printed page is mostly white space and unused”.

Picture Dictionary of Extinct Semi-Luxuries, Part 1

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1016       

Luxury for the not-wealthy, the luxuries of the working classes, is a relatively new invention in the West.  Virtually unmolested except by the aristocracy, "luxury" was a thing defined to exclude nearly everyone in Europe, the United Kingdom, America and virtually any other place.  Not until the second Industrial Revolution did capital become more "absorbent" to those working for it, with the working classes allowed to be paid more and keep more of it--money in the hands of the mass of society became expendable on the stuff of life that wasn't necessarily "necessary".   This picture dictionary--collected but not assembled by the social muse and graphical strategist Malcom Mumbry (of Landrum, South Carolina, working-class neighbors to the wealthy in the horse country of northern South Carolina)--displays some of the many new luxuries of the 1880-1920's period, most of which have now been lost to the dust and short memory.

The images are beautiful and unusual--their content may be even more so, and generally unexpected and--occasionally-unimagined. We'll be making posts to this site until we can construct a few representative alphabets of lost luxuries--their initial presentation will  not be made alphabetically.

H     Hat Ennui.  

 

By the time this photo was made in 1920 hat-need had surpassed itself to the point where only ennui could quench the continuing hat-thirst.  So much so as a matter of fact that Giles Rope, a French playwright, wrote and co-produced  (along with Guy la Flembeur) "Ennui Chappeu", an absurdist work on the developing hat anti-lust.  Intended as a silent/violent statement against hat ennui, it became a pro-ennui sensation--not only did men want hat ennui, they evidently wanted to watch other men with hat ennui, as well. The play ran 85 weeks in Paris, 50 in London and 102 in New York, closing in 1926.

H  Hats, Bologna

 

Perhaps a more unusual hat story in 1921 was the appearance of party hats for over-sized bologna.  The delicatessen standard was new in 1921, and in order to make it more somehow appealing to customers the bologna were dressed in large, flat-brimmed party/sun hats.  By 1922, bologna hat racks began to appear in some eateries; by 1923, the hat craze was over, and bologna had shrunk. 

S  Sob-watching/sob-watchers

The somewhat wealthier classes were offered a short "Exclusive Hirelings" pamphlet by Bent Gruel Company (of Chicago),  where well-dressed "Attendants" could be hired to "engage at a distance". This amounted to polite watching--interested parties could now hire one (or more) of Gruel's sophisticated cadre to "attend to the visual needs deserted" of people in joy or crisis so that whatever it was being experienced was now not necessarily experienced alone. (In the above scene a client has hired three men to equidistantly observe her weeping by a painted window.)

M   Maid Fainting

For the millions of Americans who were newly affluent in 1925 but not affluent enough to afford a fainting maid that they could attend to came the Maid Fainting Society Inc of America.  Bonded in 15 states, MFSA sponsored overseas maids to faint in good American homes.  They were hired out at $4/hour (a handsome hourly sum in 1925), the fainting maids being allowed to keep half.  In 1926 a sub-cult of Extra-Tall Fainting Maids was born (an example of which is picture above), and provided an income to thousands for several years.  (One of the last silent films ever made, Fainting Maid Maiden, with Clara Bow, 1944, used this phenomenon as a basis for its story; by that time however the craze had passed, the war was on, and no one cared anymore for silent films about fainting maids.)

C   Cigar Cane Rentals

An excellent example of an extinct semi-luxury that was almost entirely based in England and which never caught on anywhere else in the world was cigar cane rentals.  As seen in this photo (made in London in 1922), well-intentioned better-clothed country pensioners were brought into the city and made to pose with their renter canes.  Wooden canes evidently deprived Londoners of a "cigar aromaticity" need that was fulfilled with these canes made of cigars.  The short craze lasted for about 15 months, during which time better than 500 cane renter holders were stationed around London at walking parks on any given evening.  It was an essential part of care rental to do so on brick, as the cigar cane tip made a distinctive sound  (a harley-like individuality if you may), which was enjoyed by the renter and the non-renter alike.  AS we can see in the photo above, nearly all of the cane renter men have already rented their canes, pushing the last two men with canes to the front for greater visibility.  

--end, Part I

NYC Miniatures, Glass Diaries, Cannon Alphabets and the Bio-Secrets of Sing Sing

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1009

Lost commonness is never so sweet as when it is unexpectedly recovered--and today it has happened for the second time in three days via tremendously obscure sources working in the same almost entirely unused medium.  Several days ago I wrote about the lost work of a German diarist who recorded tiny advertisement images for posterity on glass slides. "Onkel Karl's Berlin" is an assembly of tiny advertisement images published mostly during the days of Weimar Republic; the artwork for these images are now almost entirely lost to time.  

Another entry is made here today in the infrequently dynamic glass diary category--"The New York City of Karl von Onkel".  Aside from the advanced astonishment of another similar collection is the almost miraculous similarity of the names of the collector/observer, neither of whom were related, and who were also separated by an ocean and 50 years in time.  These two diarists also shared a great closeness in their appreciation for the ephemeral bits of their attractive present, with Mr. von Onkel's dedication directed towards miniature business cards from NYC in the late 1870's, most of which were almost entirely unknown before the unveiling of this collection.

The highly  attractive but perhaps dubious other soaring aspect of originality in this later collection was the method used to record written information.

Mr. von Onkel constructed an alphabet composed entirely of cannon and cannon parts. 

What is more remarkable is that he evidently outfitted an 1872 Remington typewriter with these miniature cannon bits, replacing the English alphabet keys with his own creations.  No one has yet deciphered the entire 118-page manuscript (entitled in script "The Other Anthon"), as there seems to have been a further bit of cyphering added to the cannon mix--the elements of the cannon-part alphabet would (evidently) change every third line or so, making the decoding part of it toweringly difficult.  

For example, the letter "e" which appeared in the first line of page one was represented by a spoke/half spoke/screw/burned spoke--four elements for one letter! But this would change by line three, where the letter "e" became fuse/spoke/broken half-spoke/powder/harness--a delightful but maddening mess.  Thus "he saw a dog" might be rendered in 45 cannon part bits, all of which would change every few lines.  Without the encoding device and without the means of determining when and where the symbols were changed in representing the alphabet, it is impossible perhaps to ever know the contents of the manuscript. There is also the further added difficulty of "missing" cannon parts--these are "blanks" that weren't so, their nothingness standing for something depending on their placement in the page.  

On the other hand, it seems as though all Mr., von Onkel was recording was the information already printed on the business card--plus a veritable haiku of his personal observation. (This could be determined from the few English language entries in the journal.  His narrative for "Stemp's Used Nail Emporium" was "not on corner; walked past; where breakfast used to be", while "Phlob's Gun Enameling" was limited to simply "Walked past". Perhaps there is no need to know anything beyond this. 

There are over 3,000 slides in the van Onkel collection, covering everything from braided baby hair ropes to margarine slippers to corset burners--items all relegated to a history that is almost beyond memory. 

Carter Crotchgroin, a registered library card holder and patron of the Port Authority Department of Lost Things and renowned glass-transfer image collector, remarked that the Onkel collection ":is a savagely didactic ensemble, a color opera in shatterable black and white". 

"True and not so true", says Dr. Grownhand Heap, Director of the New York Center for the Advanced Invisible. As an Invisibility Expert, Dr. Heap has discovered the collection's beauties and its "unfortunabilities".  "It was not known until we investigated the background of the slides" said Dr. Heap, "that all of the background glassware was appropriated somehow from the state correctional facility at Ossining. More accurately, they came from the archives which held the Medical Welfare Support Society, which was a group of "medical" doctors intent on improving the position of society in general by experimenting on the prisoners. (The Socity existed apart from Sing Sing proper, their samples collected by the prison barbers.  Of particular interest is the sub-colelction of the blood and hair of every prisoner executed at Sing Sing, most of these being the work of one man, the longest-serving barber-of-the-condemned, Scott "Simple" Malfesance.)  The Society was disbanded in 1872 for its questionable practices, and it was thought that their medical collection was either removed to the archives in Albany or destroyed.   The slides contained blood and hair samples of every prisoner who was part of the Sing Sing system for the 1830-1873 period.  To find this sort of ancient biological archive is nothing short of phenomenal".

A detail of one of the slides clearly shows the blood samples; an etched numbering system refers to prison records which clearly identifies the prisoner.  

The contention now is to how to deal with the von Onkel collection--as art, or as a medical goldmine. 

In addition to his glass diary, Mr. Onkel was also a lateral brick collector, and was founder of the Louisville (Kentucky) Society of Line Collectors (a subsidiary of The Horizontal Society of Wilmington, North Carolina AND the Right Angle Society of Grove Park, Indiana).  A 20th century photo of the Louisville group celebrating their 25th anniversary in honor of their founder is shown below.:

 Additional images from the von Onkel collection can be seen below:

Museum of the Impossible: The Basis for Goedel’s Attempt to Formalize the Logic of Boredom?

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC  Post 730  Blog Bookstore

(#17.5) Goedel’s Psychiatric Cheat Sheets

This description appears on pages 85-87 of the guide to the G.R."Joe"

Museum of the Imaginary and the Impossible*
The physical location of the collection is just south of Savannah on Tybee Island, Georgia.

Catalogue #17.5 (maths)  Received by Museum:  2 January 1960 

Kurt Godel’s Psychiatric Cheat-Sheet;  The Logician’s Notes on Surviving the 50-Minute Hour

Kurt Goedel, this century’s greatest logician (inventor/discoverer of the uncertainty principle and destroyer of what was thought to be the nearly-completed castle of Mathematical Finality) fled/escaped National Socialist Germany in 1940 and settled in Princeton's ’s Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS).  Goedel’s remarkable logical ability was followed closely by his collection of singularities—in a world of uneven people at the IAS, Goedel’s Unusual Prominences were highly unusual, and for many “odd” people Kurt Goedel was the definition of their three-letter defining disclaimer.

On exhibit is a collection of the intellectual paraphernalia that Goedel evidently assembled to bring with him to a September 1949 therapy session with his Trenton psychiatrist, Dr. R. Blister Kent.  Goedel put together a number of thoughts on various scraps of material that he must have used as “thought prompters”—their existence and purpose was  revealed in a series of letters to the Postmaster of Princeton describing these iconic objects “as Tibetan prayer rags…they were supposed to assure me of a certain level of attention and suffice to bring my mind to the business of the therapy session….without my scribbled clues I would have found myself bored beyond the supplication of mortal words.”

We see here the contents of an aged manila envelope labeled “

Trenton  Dr. Can Not Sep49” including the following, (with Goedel’s notations in quotation):

(Two)  Pressed flowers  with “ask about the laundry”; (three) Ticonderoga pencils with penciled notes “at what time did I happen”;  matchbook cover (“Happy’s Coffee Happy Restaurant”) with “I thought to stay and I stayed to go…”; a U.S. penny with a penned “x” through Lincoln’s head and the tiny words “not to be The Eat”; a 2’ long and 1” wide rolled piece of paper with musings on the relationship between memory, truth and imagination; a menu for a 1954 formal dinner introducing the JOHNIAC computer at the IAS in which Goedel has drawn a self portrait next to all  listed honorees names except his own; and several other small, inscrutable items.

 In Goedel’s collected correspondence from his uninvited letters to the Dead Letter Office at the Trenton Post Office period it is can be seen that he was intending to construct a puzzle of these objects and writings which were believed to contain the key for his germinal theory on the mathematics of boredom.

“There is a small leap from genius to boredom; if that can be breached and the two great concepts brought together I believe that I can accomplish truly wonderful thinking” Goedel wrote.  “I believe in boredom.  It is the Kind Devil that allows thought to grow; it is the great emancipator of time.  Boredom always wins; if I can ally that great heaviness with the energy of genius in pure form [i.e. mathematical formalism—editor] there will be no end to my creation.” 

Curator’s Notes:  Goedel had (many would say “suffered”) a life-long obsession with his health and the things that he thought impacted negatively upon it.   He believed that medicines that were given him by doctors were toxic, that water from the faucet was toxic, that the sun was toxic, that most foods he received were poisoned or toxic.  By 1970, when he was convinced (and forced) to seek medical help, his weight was recorded as 86 pounds even though he was 5’ 6’’ tall.  Goedel  had perhaps the world’s most singular interest in numbers; he was also extremely interested in the minutiae of daily life. 

Museum of the Imaginary & the Impossible: Stolen Convicts' Letters Collection

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC  Post 725  Blog Bookstore

(#123.2) The Convict Letter Collection

This description appears on pages 188-189 of the guide to the
G.R. "Joe" Gebors Museum of the Imaginary and the Impossible*
The physical location of the collection is just south of Savannah on Tybee Island, Georgia. 

Catalogue #123.2  Received by Museum:  5 July 1957.  Originator:  Eric Mintz , born Erich Mintz in Paterson, New Jersey, 1830; died Archer City, Texas, 1913.]

Short Description:  Mintz’s leather-covered wooden steamer trunk (ca. 1855), with its contents of of undelivered, stolen letters from convicts under prisoner warder Mintz's charge.

• Trunk:  wood and leather with metal clasps (broken). 32x28x44”. 
  
• Trunk Contents: 2,412 letters, including 112 self-folding envelope letters; 2300 letters in "modern" envelopes; 1 volume, “Diary”, with dated entries from 1850 to 1892..

Summary:

Mintz was a prison guard for more than half a century and “collected” letters that were written by convicts and entrusted to him for delivery to postal officials.  He performed the acceptance part but ignored the delivery and simply kept all of the letters.  Over his many years Mintz accumulated some 402 letters.  All remained unopened.  Mintz’own diary--a scandalous affair of mostly repetitious, feverous, arithmetical nightmares in which he recorded his counting of one through ten many thousands of times--reveals that he stole the letters because he “liked the way they felt”. In our experience we have seen that people can be committed to deep and long-term heinous aberrations--like this--without very much thought at all as to why they're doing it.  Mintz may or may not have collected money for postage; though even then the remuneration for theft over such a long period of time--and committed in such a way as to cause extended suffering for those waiting responses that were never to come--would have been insignificant.  There is also no evidence that he held the email "for ransom".

Mintz worked in 13 jails in 7 cities in two states, and collected letters from felons convicted of crimes such as wire cutting, brand stealing, chicken gutting, soil teasing, indiscretions with hoofed animals, stump mangle, murder, arson-murder, fright-murder, and wanton abduction. The letters, dating from 1850 to 1910, and ranging in locations from San Francisco to San Antonio, were found intact in a trunk in the estate of Samul Wundt, a trunk collector.  The letters--still unopened--are now all subject to inspection in a court of law to settle the question of ownership resulting from multiple lawsuits between the Mintz heirs (to recover all of the letters), the Wundt heirs (to recover the trunk with the letters), the descendants of the persons writing the letters (to recover the letters), and the state of California (saying that the letters belonged to the state because they were stolen by a California resident of California residents).  All in turn sued the state of California for allowing the thefts to occur.  There was one lawsuit filed against New York City, which was deemed responsible for the entire series of events because the city government invented the use of ships as prisons. This puts the Museum in a frightful place; we will not be a party to any lawsuit and will abide by the court's decision(s).

Mintz died in 1913, a suicide, in Archer City, Texas, by swallowing a deputy’s badge.  

*Just to make sure, the Museum of the Imaginary and Impossible is my own fiction.  Everything else on this blog is factual. 

Museum of the Imaginary and Impossible: Found Word Biblopathology Poetry

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 724

(#156.2) Found Word Bibliopathology Poetry

[This description appears on pages 67-69  of the guide to the G.R. "Joe" Gebors Museum of the Imaginary and the Impossible* The physical location of the collection is just south of Savannah on Tybee Island, Georgia.]

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

Catalogue #156.2  Received by Museum:  19 September 2006.  Originator:  Mr. Ignatio Norme [b. Boston, Mass, 1923; d. Hyannis, 25 January 1988.]

Short Description: 

Ignatio 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 1952 when Dallas Headman of Case Western described it as “a unique approach to approaching uniqueness”; 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 on 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.