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A History of Dots: Images of the Unbelievable, 1944

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The History of Dots, Part 12

This is a detail from an unintentionally astonishing photograph made in 1944—the last line of its caption forming the basis of the title of this post. (“Click on the dots below for photos from the Album depicting events which took place at those points.”)

It is the ultimate insult to consider these dots to be dots--though to some analytical eyes this is all they were; in extreme and unutterable cases, this is what they remain. 

 As you scroll down through these four images their origin becomes clear.

This photograph was one of a series made on 31 May 1944 by the 60 Photo-reconnaissance Squadron of the South African Air Force under the direction of the U.S.  Army Air Force--the purpose being to identify Nazi bombing targets, the principle object in this case being the IG Farben complex near the border town of Auschwitz.

 The base data reveals that sorties were flown and photographs made and presented from missions of 4 April, 31 May , 26 June, 25 August, 14 September, 21 December (1944) and 14 January and 15 February 1945. (See HERE for the rest of the photographs.)  The images were evidently captured as a result of the standard method of filming: taking pictures several minutes before and after reaching the target area to ensure that the primary objective is actually photographed; some of the sorties were executed to find the target, and others enabled to survey the damage done to the target (and to also see how quickly the targets were reconstructed). The “side” result is a record of the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps, the significance of which seems to have escaped notice at the time, although the camp of Auschwitz III was indeed labeled as a “Concentration Camp” in the original. 

IG (“Interessengemeinschaft”,  standing  for “Association of Common Interests”) Farben was a massive business concern composed of BASF, Bayer, Hoechst and other German pharmaceutical and chemical companies,  whose main political benefactor was the NSDAP and whose roots go back to the very formation of real Nazi power in 1932.  The basis for this mutual interest was principally the production of synthetic fuel and chemicals, but as the time pressed on that capacity expanded to many other roles essential for the functioning of the German military and the basis of Nazi power.  It is not possible to understate the importance of Farben to the production of the Nazi state and the waging of the war.

After 20 years of back and forth historians have come to the conclusion that major industries/industrialist such as Farben didn’t actually “back” Hitler in the early days (1932/3/4) per se—that is to say that large amounts of capital didn’t flow into the NSDAP bank accounts from Big Money sources, though they (the every large majority) certainly did acquiesce to the social programs of Hitler.  Business in general certainly did well under the Nazi regime before 1938.  The giant bonuses for both the government and business/industry came after the attacks and conquests beginning gin 1938—it was at that time that these businesses rolled into the cities of the conquered land and took the tools of industry, the raw material and any else of value to expand themselves and to also help support the war effort.  The utilizeable means of production did not limit itself to goods:  the captured population was also put to work as slave laborers and worse.  And this is where Farben really makes its pact with the devil, as it was far and away the worst offender of putting humanity into its industrial oil can, making expendable people all together more so, using them as another piece of machinery; the prisoners were worked and starved to death, and once they no longer provided some sort of value to Farben (and etc.), they were sent to be eliminated at the extermination centers.

These workers were generally “sold” by  the SS to private companies, though officially it was known as a “fee”. This practice broadened as the war grew on and the labor supply o these companies was drawn off by the army; by 1944 there were in fact millions of foreign workers doing labor in Germany itself, with companies like Volkswagen, Daimler-Benz, Krupp and Siemens taking solemn and completely lecherous advantage of the captured slave labor pool. 

Back to the photograph:  these “dots” were the humans who were the expendable slave worker units who were burned up like an old rag once their utility had been maximized.  The official reason for this mission was to locate the Farben synthetic rubber works and petroleum plants, some 2k from the Auschwitz compound.  One of the last images shows the destruction to the camps by the Nazis who were trying to hide what had been going on there as they prepared for the inevitable arrival of the Soviets (who would arrive two weeks later).

The arrows and annotations in these versions are the result of a reinterpretation of the images in 1978 by two photographic image analysts/interpreters at the DIA and did not appear of course n the originals of 1944. The arrows pointing at the "dots" were actually long lines of prisoners; there were arrows pointing to a rather long train heading off from a complex of tracks; there was the enormous barracks evidently housing a very large population within a town center; and there was the production of a fair amount of smoke from a not-small building.  It is a mystery why these images--one of which actually had Birkenau labeled as a concentration camp--didn't produce a military reaction by the Allies, the question producing its own considerable amount of interpretation and study. remember now these annotations were made in 1978.)   The photo does show how nestled the camps were in the town and in the busy countryside; the main entrance to the camp was (and is today) located on a busy street.  The walls around the compounds remind me of the walls around the Warsaw Ghetto--if you needed not to see the obvious, you wouldn't.  Except at the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps there was also the smell....   Revisionist Holocaust deniers have actually employed these images to their own evil ends, using a feeble analysis to support the notion that the Allies didn't act on the camps because the extermination and liquidation end of it didn't exist.   This would be the extreme (gamma ray) end of the spectrum of interpretation, and an ultra-violent, criminal and instantly disposable way of reading history.  In Part II of this post I'll have a look at some of the positions.

[Reading list in the continued reading section, below]

The Finnegan’s Wake of the 15th Century

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Since I had a go at early illustration earlier today in this blog I thought to write something about a book that is probably one of the most beautifully printed books not only of the Renaissance but of all time.  The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream) by Francesco Colonna was the greatest achievement by the greatest printer of the Renaissance (Aldus Manutius in Venice), a spectacular combination of story and type and design and illustration; an imaginative, secular Humanist self-romance like no other printed to that time.  ) See the entire text HERE.)

Hypnerotomachia means “the strife of love in a dream”, and the reference to Poliphili refers to the narrator of the story, Poliphilo, telling of the love affair between Polia and Poliphilo—the master text of the whole story though is a description of ancient art and architecture,  all told in a wonderful ”macaronic mélange” of Italian and Latin, and which were the “exact accounts” seen in Poliphilo’s dreams about Polia.. It is a  modernist book for being printed in the last year of the 15^th century (1499), and stands for vitality and grace and superb design, and according to George Painter was the Finnegan’s Wake of the fifteenth century.  Painter continues, and writing that “Gutenberg’s forty-two line Bible of 1455 and the Hypnerotomachia of 1499 confront one another from opposite ends of the incunable period with equal and contrasting pre-eminence.  The Gutenberg Bible is somberly and sternly German, Gothic, Christian and mediaeval; the Hypnerotomachia is radiantly and graciously Italian, classic, pagan and renascent. These are two supreme masterpieces of the art of printing, and stand at the two poles of human endeavor and desire! “(Cited by Alan Thomas, Fine Books, 1967, pp 71-4).

 

Martin Lowry in his The World of Aldus Manututus  (Ithaca, New York, 1979) makes another interesting statement on this masterpiece: “(Hypnerotomachia) was a linguistic and literary debauch, choked with recondite imagery, erudite periphrases, and exotic verbiage: a work so bizarre that many critics have felt a certain uneasiness at Aldus' agreeing to print it.” 

It is truly an astonishing accomplishment, and its significance in the design of type and of the book really cannot be underestimated.  As E.P. Goldsmidt stated (in The Printed Book of the Renaissance, 1950, p. 52): "In the North an astonishing proportion of all Renaissance ornament and accessory design can clearly be proved to derive from Colonna..."

The book is summarized here and below:

 

Blank, Empty and Missing Things #44: Missing Detail in Illustrations

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The History of Blank, Empty & Missing Things #44

In America and Europe for much of the 19^th century books with illustrations received their color by the labor of small-handed women and older children.  For popular, inexpensive and widely distributed books engravings and woodcuts were often given their color by an assembly line process:  one person applying the red, another the blue, the third the green, and so on, until image was completed.  This was a fairly quick process—more than five colors was rare—and once done the sheets were left to dry before being sent off to be cut, folded, sewn, trimmed and bound.  The colorists wouldn’t really survive past the 1880’s or so, being replaced by machines and different sorts of coloring processes—the last book to be published for the mass market being the 1896 edition of Johnson’s Cyclopedia. 

This sort of distribution of artistic labor was not new to the 19^th century by any means.  Guilds dictating the strict observance of a painting’s preparation—making the canvas or preparing the wood, gathering the ingredients for making colors, making the colors, and so on—stretches back at least 600 years. 

I’m wondering about this because of an illustration that I found of extremely uneven accomplishment.  It occurs in Quintus Curtius Rufus The Life of Alexander the Great (“translated by several Gentlemen in the University of Cambridge”) and printed for Gilbert Cownly in 1687. (I can never let it pass that this is the year that modern science really began, with the publication of Newton’s Principia… .)  The engraving is the book’s frontispiece, and shows Alexander on horseback.

Of course there’s no real portrait of Alexander, though his “likeness” appears on coins from that period.  But the face in the engraving just doesn’t match up to the quality of the rest of the image.  The horse is a little nicer than standard for the period, and there’s a fair amount of detail in the background. 

The face of the great Alexander though is pretty bad, drawn in almost as an afterthought even though he is the subject of the book.  Maybe the engraving’s elements were divided and distributed in the workshop to, say someone good at horses doing the horse, another good at executing armor doing that, and so on, until someone realized that no one was there to engrave the face. And so perhaps it came to pass that Alex received this cheeky/jowly face with a single-muscled skinny neck.  (I notice that none of the riders in the background have faces.)  Maybe there was only one artist, and they just got tired or figured this face was good enough, and moved on to the next project; perhaps there was just one engraver who was late for dinner and did a too-fast job on the face.  And maybe the face was just good enough, no matter who did or or how many people worked on it.  I've seen this sort of uneven effort, this missing detail in a detailed work, many times over the years, and I've always wondered what the story was.  And I guess I always will. 

A Note on the History of Smiling

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Where do exhausted 1951 smiles go?

I don’t know when the first illustrated advertisement appeared, and I don’t know when the first picture of a smiling human face was used in that in order to sell a product displayed in a mass market printed publication.  My sense though is that the smiling, happy (and too-happy) face was first used in the first or second decade of the 20^th century, but that the general, templated use of the eagerly over-sized mega-toothed smile topped by wide-spirited painted eyeballs came into play in America right after the end of WWII.  The enthusiastic smiled-upon objects seem to become more slight and mundane as time passes, coming to a point fairly early on of the mysterious basis for this happiness over such modest products.  The smiles and happiness brought by these items was surely short-lived, the smile becoming a fossil, a relic, to simpler times and simpler consuming needs. 

Breezing through a hand volume of LIFE magazine for 1951 finds many examples, and quickly too:    how exciting can a bottle of 7Up possibly be?  This entire family seems to be serenading the object of their collected desires, the father certainly being the most moved of the bunch.  Baby has its own bottle and, of course, drum.

Is that Jerry Mathers smiling so contentedly at Mother brining in his hot water bottle?  (The doggie is staring at something to Mother’s left, probably focused on some trainer threatening/rewarding  it to make it seem  interested in the hot water bottle, too. )  It is hard to image this item bringing a smile to anyone’s face, at least from this standpoint in the future.  Its a simple rubber bag, brought to  a simple room.  In a weird and unexpected King of the Hill neighborhood sort of way,  the whole scene seems  very comforting. Maybe its the cowboy holster at the foot of the bed and the perfectly folded blanket that seals the deal.)

Pumps?  This is actually half of an ad featuring a number of very accommodating couples allowing themselves to be happy while looking at women's shoes.  I can't tell what is going on in the background, but in the foreground there are several of men infected with broad-beam smiles brought on by looking at a glass case filled with pumps.  The glass "treasure chest" seems to be guarded by garishly-festooned black men, a sign of the un-lliberated LIFE magazine times.  

This man seems overly exuberant with the pleasure brought him by his underwear, though he is at least alone while experiencing this private Underwear Emotion. (In many other ads by Jockey there's a man & boy setting, each usually with big smiles, straddling things to show the comforts of their underthings, caught in what seems today to be pre-porny trash poses of extremely dubious ease...no one today would ever come close to publishing such a thing in today's (legitimate) advert community.) So too for the woman who seems to match appreciation for her new engagement band with the fortitude of her bra--it isn't exactly clear that the ad is celebrating  uplifted pointy breasts with  marriage proposals, but  it  doesn't take too much  of  a  leap to get there.

There was a time that the *something* that made us smile didn’t make us smile any longer.  The smile is gone, gone to where smiles go once they’re no longer needed, replaced by thin-lipped satisfied need.There was a time in 1951 when advertisers thought their products to be so appealing that they used monumentally misplaced smiles to convince the buying population of the United States to purchase their product, expecting I guess to produce that photographed smile onto the face of every purchaser, or at least to image the smile in the consumers' noggins. That smile didn’t last long—after all, we’re just talking about 7Up and underwear. 

I wonder about the issue of the  impossible smile of promised  pleasures like these, and how it changed over the years. As a casual observer of  millions (?)  of these  sorts of things over the years,  my own general impression is that the smiles are  era-dependent and semi-generational.  Or not.

1932 as an Annus Mirabilis

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My daughter Emma started a collection for my wife Patti last year--for Mother’s Day—of books with dates as the main part of their title. For example:  Roger Crowley’s 1453, James Chace 1912, Andrew Brieford 1066, Charles Mann’s 1491, David McCullogh’s 1776, and that elusive 1968 that I can never find.  It is a wonderful idea, and probably something that could be expanded as a real collection. 

I mention this because I was thinking about Big Years, enormous years, the annus mirabilis. 1905 is the first date that springs to mind in this category, but it is almost entirely dedicated to one person—Einstein—and not that much miraculously else, though it can probably be argued that those four papers in the Annalen were enough for enormous contributions spread across four very big people.  Einstein really did have that good a year.

I like the year (for the sciences, anyway) 1932.

It isn’t thought of in the same way, say, as 1543, which was a great year for things big and little. Nicolas Copernicus saw (finally, basically from his deathbed) his  "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) published in Nuremberg, while the Brussels-born, brilliant and troubled Andreas Vesalius had Johannes Oporinus  print his revolutionary treatment of the human body "De humani corporis fabrica" (On the Fabric of the Human Body). Copernicus said the things that any thinking person was thinking about the structure of the solar system and universe at large, while Vesalius conducted his brave overthrow of the deeply ancient Galenic system of anatomy.

1932 isn’t 1666, either, though 1-sign-of-the-devil’s stupendous nature was related in a way to that of 1543.  1666 saw a great heavenly event—the naming of the comet known as Halley’s—and a horrendous biological one, with the great plague of London,  which killed upwards of 100,000 people.  (It was a bad year overall for the city—the winter of 1665 was terrifically cold and was followed by the plague.  At the tail end of the plague came the Great Fire of London [the diarist Samuel Pepys referring to it as 'a most horrid malicious bloody flame']).  It seems more like an annus horriblius more than anything else. Except of course for Issac Newton, who had a very fine year this year.

And 1932 wasn’t 1453 or 1066 or 1968 or 1776 or 1918 or 1945.  Perhaps it is close to 1859, which saw the  publication of what may be the most revolutionary work of the 19^th century in  Darwin'  On the Origin of Species.  Bunsen and Kirchhoff added spectacular content when they figured out (with the aid of earlier work by Fraunhoeffer and others) the internal constitution of the stars with a telescope equipped with A spectroscope—truly an unthinkable breakthrough to even a well-rounded mid-19^th century mind. 

What happened in1932 was another sweeping array of discoveries in the large and small.  Carl Anderson identified the positron while James Chadwick discovered the neutron and the Joliot-Curies’ made their monumental discoveries in radiation (called “one of the most important discoveries of the century... the consequences of the discovery of artificial radioactivity are immense" from Segrè, From X-rays to Quarks, 198-199).  Iwanenko described the neutron as a constituent f the nucleus, while Heisenberg described the nucleus as composed of protons and neutrons.  Knoll and Ruska built the electron microscope, allowing a vision of the interior parts of the interiors of the smallest things, offering images almost as spectacularly new as Hooke’s two centuries earlier.  Looking up and out, in the same year, Lev Landau postulated the existence of neutron stars while Karl Jansky invented radio astronomy.  (Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler also had a big year this year.)*

It is tempting to include 16 months or so of 1925/6/7 in this list, if for no other reason than the people making the great innovations were so very young--the term for these German physicists is Knabenphysik (boy physics, boy physicists), and what they did was invent the new quantum mechanics and change the face of physics.  It all came about at the end of the era of the old quantum theory (which comprised the years 1900-1925), and pretty much all at the  University of Goettingen.  The 1925 players were Werner Heisenberg (age 23, with his PhD. under Sommerfeld), Paul Jordan (age 22 with his Ph.D. under Born), Wolfgang Pauli (25, with his doctorate under Sommerfeld) and P. (aul)A.M. Dirac (22, and who wrote the world’s first dissertation on quantum mechanics).  The odd person out in this group though was perhaps the strongest: Erwin Schroedinger was 37 in 1925, definitely the “Old Man” of this set.  On the other hand there were three men of mountainous importance in physics who also made vast contributions to the new physics, even though  they were, um, more mature:  Max Born (in his mid-forties), Niels Bohr (about the same age) and Arnold Sommerfeld (who was 60 when he founded the quantum mechanics of metals).

In any event, I like 1932.  Next time we'll look at another Big Year:  1948.

*Some of the books released in this year was also a bumper crop:  Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway; Light in August, William Faulkner; 1919, John Dos Passos; The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett; Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell; Young Lonigan, James Farrell; Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder; and Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

 

A Note on the History of Simultaneity

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There is a great, unifying factor drawing together Aztec glyphs, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Marcel Duchamp, the Renaissance Sienese Sassetta, Guillaume Appolinaire, William S. Porter—they all display disparate chronological sense to a single story.


The concept of displaying the passage of time, relating multiple events taking place at the same (or different) times, is really quite a lot older than the what is generally considered to be its recent modernist beginning.  Duchamp’s Nude Descending, which is a masterpiece of modernism displaying unfolding time and multiple perspective views across time of the same object, is the direct descendant of centuries-old artworks.  The Egyptians and the Aztecs certainly made use of this idea of multiple stories at multiple times in their stone storyboards.  Closer to the present is the genre of early Renaissance painting like Sassetta’s The Meeting of St Anthony Abbot and St Paul the Hermit (painted circa 1440), which shows several aspects of the story over time, and depicted on the same canvas. (We see the beginning of St. Anthony’s journey at top left, heading out on his journey as a younger man, winding his way through dark wood and along a curving trail; we see him a second time as an old man, and then lastly at bottom, elderly, finally meeting the other monk.)

The rollout of the Sassetta masterpiece (hanging happily at  the National Gallery in D.C.) reminds me a lot of the great hallmark of storytelling at the beginning of the twentieth century—no, not Barzun or Cendars, but Little Nemo (who predates all of the other greats who were to come in the next ten years or so).  Winsor McCay’s (1871-1934) Little Nemo in Slumberland (appearing in the Hearst newspapers beginning in 1902)—better yet, the comic strip in general—adopts a platform for storytelling that is nothing short of revolutionary.  By breaking out the development of the narrative in front of the reader and on one single sheet of paper gives the author fantastic maneuverability.  This is also seen in the early motion pictures of Edwin S. Porter (like The Ex Convict, 1905) and D.W. Griffith (The Lonely Villa, 1909) who both use a new concept of contrasting editing—cutaways from the main action and pace of the.

 

film and incorporating vignettes of actions that are related and happening elsewhere, sometimes all of it happening at once.   The story is able to develop multiple themes that are occurring at the same time but in disparate locations—the artwork of futurists Balla and Boccioni and the unclassifiable Duchamp reach for the same end, and so to (again) with Apollinaire and Cendars and the rest…and all of them coming into view in 1912/1913 or so.

There’s a lot to talk about on the tech end of this too, not the least of which is the work of Etienne Marey who made highly successful photographic investigations (in the 1870’s and 1880’s)
of all manner of locomotion, some of the results of which look like the x-ray of Duchamp’s Nude.  Perhaps the greatest early enablers of technological simultaneity are the telegraph and (more impressively) the telephone, both of which allowed people to be in two different places at the same time (so to speak).

Again, this is just a note, thinking out loud, about the concept of simultaneity, and I doubt that I've even broken the surface...I've not even considered the math and physical aspects of it all, not even a whisper about Einstein and Schroedinger.  I've just done a search and found two works by eminent historians of science on this topic which I should think would demand reading:  Max Jammer's Concept of Simultaneity (2005) and Peter Galison's Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps and the Empire of Time (2003).  I'd like to return to this post when I think I might have an idea of what I'm talking about...

 

Detail in Renaissance Paintings: Carpaccio's Venice

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 While finishing yesterday’s post on the occasional nothingnesses of details in Renaissance painting and using one of the painting by Vittore Carpaccio to make my point, I stumbled upon another image by this Renaissance master that was almost all detail, and of great somethingness.  The painting is  Il miracolo della reliquia della Santa Croce (“The Healing of a Madman”, painted in 1494), which is a large, extraordinary and detail-filled canvas of a street scene in Venice. The subject of the painting is Francesco Qerini, the Patriarch of Grado (which was the old name for the Patriarch of Venice, one of the four Sees, with patriarchs reaching back to the 6^th century), who was healing a mad/possessed man of whatever aliments finding safety in him, and evidently accomplishing the task with a tiny piece of the original cross of Jesus, given to Qerini ‘s patriarchy in the 14^th century.

The miracle itself takes up only a very small portion of the painting—you can find it in the upper left, in a spacious loggia, the “madman” (I think) crooking his head to look up at the outstretched crucifix; a quiet, almost secondary acquiescence to all of that other energy in the painting.  Even though not the intentional subject of the painting, it is the wooden  Rialto Bridge  (the version built in 1458) that takes center stage, though I guess one could say that the key area of interest was the city of Venice  itself.  Or the throngs of its citizens enjoying the airy passage through the city.  The focal point does seem to be the bridge, which had the capacity to open for taller ships, and was a focal point of transfer for the community. 

There is some reason for this outside of the artistic sense—the paining was one of nine commissioned by the Confraternity of the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, which was a major concern in Venice.So it would seem that Venice was meant to be as much a part of the appeal of the painting as was the miracle that called for the attention in the first place.  

This was a very crowded scene, the foreground and background material and subjects as important as the subject itself; it was a greatly democratized work calling as much attention to the city of Venice as the miracle being worked within it—and it still remains a calm and quiet vision  Perhaps it is the steadfast of the objects above the street, like the pot-like chimneys (at least 26 showing) and the clothes-drying poles with their flag-like fare that contribute to the quietness above the bustling city street.  Experts say that this is a superb rendering of the cityscape, with accurate coloring, a beautiful documentary of life in Venice  just at the end of the 16^th century.  In addition to the cityscape we see all manner of small life in the many people in the painting:  passengers in the gondola are carrying pets (at least one dog and a bird), the stores at the foot of the bridge, an open air market (with sellers lined up with small tables), plus all manner of styles in dress.

It is a wonderful example of the opposite of yesterday’s post:  something where all of its comparative “nothings” were the most important part of the unit.

Seeing Renaissance Pillows: a Short Bit on an Unnecessary Topic

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Evelyn, a dog, having undergone
Further modification
   Pondered the significance of short-person behavior
In pedal-depressed panchromatic resonance
And other highly ambient domains...

“Arf” she said.
—F. Zappa, One Size Fits All (“Evelyn the Modified Dog”)

I was going to write something completely different about these images for this post—but I fell completely into the beds of these paintings—actually, I missed the beds and made straight for the pillows.  I really didn’t have anywhere to go with this--no point, no cozy tie-ups—and when I told about my wife Patti Digh about this problem she wisely told me to forget about a point, and “send it out into the world”.  (Patti has no doubt that the subject of this post sounds like an unending and probably unendurable doctoral dissertation.)  And so when faced with my own set of sensory inputs that couldn’t come to some sort of comprehension, “arf”  sounded pretty good.

The first image is an oil on canvas (transferred from wood) by Garofalo (Benvenuto Tisi da Garofalo, Italian, Ferrarese, 1476?–1559) called Saint Nicholas of Tolentino Reviving the Birds and painted around 1530. The man in the bed is a deathly sick St. Nicholas, an Augustinian monk, who was attended by no fewer than six of his brethren.  They are shown offering him a plate of roasted birds, but Nicholas, a vegetarian, rose from his bed and in rejecting the food brought the birds back to life.  We see that long, bed-width pillow with a small cozy on top of it

In another painting of another Nicholas, Bicci di Lorenzo’s (Italian, Florentine, 1373–1452) Nicholas Providing Dowries (date 1433–35), we see the Bishop of Myrna in Asia Minor Nicholas pushing bags of gold through a transom and into a house. Sounds a little like St. Nick of Christmas lore, though this St. Nick was providing the dowries to three daughters of a destitute man unable to provide his offspring with money of his own. (Not having money for a dowry was a major deal in these times—without the money the women probably would not have been able to marry, forced to other not savory means for providing money for their daily needs to survive.  Here again we have a big red bed, with a bed-width pillow, and the smaller pillow on the top of it all.

The last example belongs to Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1460 – 1525/1526), in his The Dream of St. Ursula (painted 1495).  Again, the same:  red bed, big pillow (though no little fellow is visible).  There is a strange small ball-like object near her head at the base of the pillow, and her slippers are where they were when she stepped from them into the bed.  It looks like she has six books in her work area at the back of the room (as well as an hour glass on the desk).   There is a problematic burst of light on the ceiling from the high window to the left of the door—it doesn’t seem likely that this splash of light could be on the ceiling given the shadows in the room.  Oh well. 

And so.  There are more examples of these pillows, but we probably don’t need to look at more right now—just noticing them is probably enough. Sometimes finding interesting detail in the detail leads somewhere, and sometimes not. There is a continuing thread in this blog that looks at the importance of incidental detail in art, though today’s  post chooses the “sometimes not” option.

 

 

 

 

 

History of Normalcy, Part 1: "Girls"

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My wife, Patti Digh, and I have long talked about the history of normalcy—a history of what looks to be “normal”, or standard, or acceptable at one time that became not so over the course of time.  Buying and selling human beings, women and their children being property of her spouse, Chinese immigrants not have (any) legal rights, are three good candidates (among thousands) for this history.  It is an interesting proposition to think about—what things around you, or better yet, what thing you think or say or do, that look good and acceptable today might look embarrassing and unacceptable thirty years hence.  In 1935 one issue might’ve been accepting the codified behavior of treating women as less than equal of men, deserving less in the workplace (if they were in the workplace), less rights in the courts, less deserving of equality in general; by 1965, this viewpoint may have well been in the minority; by 1995 it begins to look fossilized; by 2025 it might well be unbelievable.  What are the issues of 2009 that could be the equivalent of the 1935 issue?

And so the first in th is series:  the October 1951 issue of Life magazine’s article by Carl Mydans (the great and esteemed war and documentary photographer), “Girl War Correspondent”.  It is a sympathetic look at a sharp minority in the American newspaper business:  the female war correspondent.  Or, in this case, the “girl” correspondent. One would hardly refer to Edward Murrow as “the male correspondent Edward R. Murrow”, or “Edward R. Murrow, Boy Correspondent”.  The “girl” in this case was Miss Marguerite Higgins (1920-1966), aged 30.  She was a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, and covered the war, boots on the ground, covering the war in Korea.  Mydans gives a creditable review of Higgins very active and dangerous participation in the war effort.  It was not the intention of the article though to look at where Higgins had been before Korea; particularly, what she had been doing in 1944 and 1945.  AS a matter of fact Higgins was a correspondent for the Herald Tribune in Paris and London in 1944/5, and later sent to Germany in March 1945.  She received a combat ribbon for helping in securing the surrender of SS guards when she witnessed the liberation of Dachau.. Afterward she covered the Nuremberg trials and the Soviet blockade of Berlin.

In spite of all that she was banned from covering the war in Korea.  If not for the personal appeal/demand of Douglas MacArthur (who telegraphed Higgins’superiors at the Herald Tribune “BAN ON WOMEN CORRESPONDENTS IN KOREA HAS BEEN LIFTED. MARGUERITE HIGGINS IS HELD IN HIGHEST PROFESSIONAL ESTEEM BY EVERYONE”) she and all other female correspondents would’ve been kept out of the war. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (in 1951, for Korea), and would go on to cover international affairs, winding up in Vietnam for Newsday in 1963.  As a result of her years of experience she wrote, in 1965 (!), Vietnam U.S. Our  Nightmare: The story of involvement in the Vietnamese tragedy, with thoughts on a future policy New York (Harper and Row).

In spite of it all, given her experience in WWII and her developing coverage in Korea , she was, in October 1951, still a girl. 

Nazi Propaganda and the Battle for Europe, 1941: the War at Sea

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 624   Blog Bookstore 

Propaganda Series #  14  (See listing below)
The Admiralty Regrets to Announce… was for years the standard beginning to an official British announcement concerning the loss of ships and sailors.  The phrase is used as the title to this work (by an unattributed writer known only as “an expert”) to immediately introduce the reader to the failings of the British navy.  It is of course a piece of Nazi propaganda, issued some time in 1941. (My copy is he U.S. copyright deposit copy and is stamped with a transfer date of September 1942; the pamphlets reads to me as though the U.S. had not yet entered the war.)  The great strengths of the German air force and navy are extolled and the failings of the British mercantile elaborated at great—and sometimes greatly imagined—lengths.  The booklet was published in French (except for the title) and answers its own repetitive question: “quelle est donc la situation relle de la marine commerciale anglais?”

 The pamphlet’s 32 pages (illustrated with 24 photographs of various blow-ups and bombings, plus one graph and three maps) are dedicated to winning the French hearts and minds, trying to convince the conquered population that there really wasn’t any help coming, and that the British could not even supply themselves with the necessaries to run a country, let alone a war.

In the map at right we see the  ports and shipping centers that were bombed by the Luftwaffe (with London located by a big red dot).  Another map shows the stockade-like presence of the Nazi navy securing its impregnable wall against the arrival of foreign trade and supplies to Britain.  

This post is one of a series on propaganda maps which occasionally appear in this blog.   Like Thomas Nast political cartoons and war photography, a map can instantly and overwhelmingly display not only data but sentiment as well. The maps published in this pamphlet by the Nazis are were certainly immediately understandable to just about anyone, French-reading or not, literate or not--the images needed no words, especially when surrounded in the text by vicious images of German military might.  Overrun or not, Petain-ized as it was, France was still offering aid to its allies and resistance to the Germans--the more minds that could be won over with propaganda of this sort meant one less to have to worry about as an active enemy.

A Listing of Some our the Propaganda-related posts in this Blog

Nazi Propaganda: Scaring the Will-to-War, 1935

Maps as Propaganda: the Nazi's Use of Maps in the Hearts and Minds Campaign in Occupied and Holland and France, 1943

 

The Propaganda of Restricting Infomration: Dorothea Lange's Photos at the Japanese "Relocation" Camp, Manzanar, 1942

Psychological Warfare--Aerial Propaganda Leaflets and Surrender Tickets, WWII.

Maps as Propaganda: the Turning of the Tide, January 1943

 

Humanitarian Propaganda--Hope for those at Home, September 1944.

Nazi Propaganda: Scare Tactics in a Hearts and Minds Campaign, 1940

A Propaganda Effort Equating the New Deal and Nazism, 1935: the Power of Willful Forgetting

The Atomic Bomb: 6 August 1945. Propaganda Leaflet Dropped on Japanese Cities

The Polish "Threat" to Germany, 1939:   Nazi Propaganda on the Perceived Polish "Invasion"

 

Propaganda Maps #2: the Nazis. the Big Lie, and Cartography

 

Graphical Display of Data: the R.A.F. and Luftwaffe Present Their Cases, 1938-1940

 

 

San Francisco, 1906: Pictures within Pictures. The Great Earthquake and Fire.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 623  Blog Bookstore

The following two images were found in the Illustrated London News for 30 April 1906, and shows the "shanty town" built near the site of the major destruction in San Francisco following the earthquake of 18 April 1906.  Actually the tragedy is more appropriately called the "San Francisco Fire" of 1906, as the major destruction was caused by the raging fires set off by the earthquake.  The end result was 485 or so blocks of the city were destroyed leaving a quarter-million people homeless.  That this orderly development was referred to as a "shanty town" by a sniffy Brit reporter is appalling--unless of course the offending word meant something different 103 years ago.  It looks orderly and well-developed to me.  I also happened to notice two small girls in the detail--just about the only people in the picture.  They could still be alive....

 

 

The bottom two pictures were taken during the conflagration:  the first was the fire still raged, and the second was made days after the fire  from a  tethered balloon observation point. 

I made myself 6-foot-long prints of these images; nearly every 2x2 inch area of the enlargement is a picture in itself.  These images are clickable and will expand if you click in the expanded version.  

 

 

For a contemporary film of the event via the Library of Congress, see here: http://loc.gov/item/00694425

 

Panoramic images via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, see the following link for these and a number of others:  http://loc.gov/search/?in=&q=panorama+san+francisco+fire&new=true&st=

A few eyewitness reports, from the Eyewitnesstohistory.com website: 

"Of a sudden we had found ourselves staggering and reeling. It was as if the earth was slipping gently from under our feet. Then came the sickening swaying of the earth that threw us flat upon our faces. We struggled in the street. We could not get on our feet. Then it seemed as though my head were split with the roar that crashed into my ears. Big buildings were crumbling as one might crush a biscuit in one's hand. Ahead of me a great cornice crushed a man as if he were a maggot - a laborer in overalls on his way to the Union Iron Works with a dinner pail on his arm." (P. Barrett).

"When the fire caught the Windsor Hotel at Fifth and Market Streets there were three men on the roof, and it was impossible to get them down. Rather than see the crazed men fall in with the roof and be roasted alive the military officer directed his men to shoot them, which they did in the presence of 5,000 people." (Max Fast).

"The most terrible thing I saw was the futile struggle of a policeman and others to rescue a man who was pinned down in burning wreckage. The helpless man watched it in silence till the fire began burning his feet. Then he screamed and begged to be killed. The policeman took his name and address and shot him through the head." (Adolphus Busch).

Fossils of Almost No Value? Statistics, Prisons, and Meaninglessness

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 622   Blog Bookstore

The fossil record is generally one of the richest and most compelling histories of the development of life on earth, a far-reaching, cumulative record of extraordinary importance.  There are the other, occasional, fossils that stand only by themselves, and seem to have almost no use in the current time, living almost entirely within themselves. The following statics seem to fall into that category—they seem to be only a tombstone for an era, providing nothing except to tell the story of what happened, existing only for that purpose, with no compelling utilization for anything outside understand a small piece of life for the year the stats were gathered. 

The cause for this sentiment was found in a government publication called Expense of Convicts of the United States  (Letter from the Comptroller of the Treasury…), 1 February 1859).  The following comes in the first paragraph:

“I….report that 50 cents per months is allowed for rent of prison for each prisoner in all the States and Territories uniformly.”

What this means is that the U.S. Treasury would pay 50 cents to the state for keeping a federal prisoner.  That is 50 cents per month, or about 1.7 cents per day. And that was also for rent of the cell, exclusive of all else, each state furnishing the government with the added cost, separately.

Evidently the only state in the country that prescribed an exact amount for keeping a federal prisoner in a state institution was Maryland, “which received 30 cents per day for all expenses, rent, board, medical attendance, clothing, bedding, fuel, and etc” (italics in the original).  The rest of the states and territories had diverging and different expenses, from the southern district of New York at 25 cents a day for board, and ranging up to about 50 cents per day in  Michigan. Vermont charged an extra 60 dollars a year, in addition to the 6 bucks that they would get for the rent of a Vermont cell, to keep a prisoner—all expenses included—for one year, or about 18 cents per day, total. 

Unfortunately I don’t have the stats of how many federal prisoner there were in 1859, so I don’t know how much of a percentage of the budget was occupied by prison expenses.  But what I do know is that even with tossing around the CPI with multiplier effects and so on the figures translate in no way to keeping a person in prison today.   The cost of housing someone in prison per year is around $35,000 a year, or $100 or so a day.  Adjusting the 1860 dollar via CPI for 2009 makes that dollar worth about 25 dollars today, which would be a doubling and a doubling again of keeping someone in prison. 

I’m not so sure that those figures tell us much about what we pay, today. 

Next, I was having a breeze through The Prison System of the United States by S.J. Barrows (Commissioner of Prisons for the U.S.) which was published in Washington  in 1900.  One particularly interesting section was the publication’s solitary statistical table, “Appendix A”, which detailed the crimes of the 625 men incarcerated in the state of Michigan  in 1900.  Well over half of all those in prison were there for larceny and burglary, while about 12% were in the big house for violent crimes.  (Evidently 95% of this number were literate and 70% could “cipher” (that is, produce basic arithmetical skills)).  The total crime list (such as it was) includes the following:

Capital crimes (murder in the first and second degree) and manslaughter, along with murderous assault comprised about 1% of the total prison population.  Other violent crimes included assault with intent to do great bodily harm, rape, attempted rape, rape and assault composed another 3%. Further assaults were classified under (a) with intent to do great harm;  and then as assault on a female under 14 years; and on a female under 16 years  There were also the sexual assaults:  taking indecent liberties with female; with male child;  unlawful and carnal knowledge of a young child;   inducing female to enter house of ill fame.  These last two categories included about 5% of the prisoners.  Set aside form these were the crimes of adultery, abduction, incest and sodomy, which included another 3%.  So it seems that the violent offenders in prison in  Michigan  in 1900 totaled out at 12% or so. 

Burglary and larceny were the  largest categories, being subdivided into (a) burglary accompanied by actual assault; (b) larceny; (c) larceny from a dwelling;  (d) larceny from a shop in daytime; (e) attempting larceny from the person; (f) entering a church in daytime to steal; (g) breaking and entering a store in daytime;   (h) breaking and entering a store in nighttime;(I)  breaking and entering a dwelling in daytime; (j)  breaking and entering a dwelling;  (k) breaking and entering a railroad car.

Then there were a few largely vacant offenses:  Resisting an officer; Uttering and publishing a forged note, breaking out of prison, perjury, arson, false pretense, and malicious destruction of personal property, all combing for less than 2% of the jailed population.

The vast majority of prisoners in Michigan were imprisoned for non-violent crimes.  The federal fathers, in the meantime, recognized that people in prison shouldn’t be idle while paying their debts to society, and should fill their time with work that would occupy the prisoner and bring some income into the prison system:

“The moment we apply to the convict a different system of economics because he is in prison we go astray. When we subject to analysis the plans proposed for abolishing the competition of convict labor we find them based on false principles or expecting results not to be realized. The wiser way for the peace of society and the interest of the State is to place prison industries on the same ground as free industries, and defend that. It is also said in opposition to the contract system that contractors do not pay as much for the labor of convicts as free laborers command.”

In 2005 the federal offenses for which people are incarcerated include: Drug Offenses 59.6%; Robbery 9.8%;  Property Offenses 5.5%;  Extortion, Fraud, Bribery 6.8% ; Violent Offenses 2.7% ; Firearms, Explosives, Arson 8.6% ; White Collar 1.0%; Immigration 2.8%;  Courts or Corrections 0.8%;  National Security 0.1%;  Continuing Criminal Enterprise 0.8%;  Miscellaneous 1.5% .  54% of prisoner in state custody for the same time were incarcerated for violent crimes, with drug offenses coming in at 20% and property crimes at 19%.  The racial breakdown of prisoners in the U.S. is another tragedy: of the prison population in toto of 2.3 million in 2008 there were 4,777 black male inmates per 100,000 black males held in state and federal prisons and local jails, compared to 1,760 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white males—that means that the black incarceration rate was double and then double and then half-doubled again that of whites.  What this also means is that there were more blacks in jail cells than in college dorm rooms in 2008.

I'm not sure that any amount of creative statistical mathemartistry could bring these figures to life for some sort of practical application in 2009, the present situation in the prisons being so immense and pervasive.  Numbers and assorted data from the past usually have the capacity to help us see where we are today; as I said earlier, I think that these fossils are simply that:  dead.

 

Zeppelin Paper Model, 1924

JF Ptak Science Books Post 621  Blog Bookstore

This is a downloadable, clickable image of the makings for a zeppelin paper model--it is a lovely thing, and I just needed to share with anyone with a sharp exacto or a real pair of scissors. Pieces of the image should be printed so that the zep could be 18 inches long; or, of course, if you had a good steady hand, you could make a mini version, at this size.  The model itself is entitled Technisches Modell, Das Zeppelin Luftschiff (Modellierbogen Nr. 531, 532) and was printed and glued to cardboard by Esselingen at Munich ca. 1924.  The size of the original is 36 x 86 cm.

On Learned Ignorance: George Hartgill's Astronomical Tables

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 620    Blog Bookstore

According to negative theology, ‘there is not found in God anything other
than infinity.’  (Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia, vol. I, § 26)

“With respect to the intellectus, reason (ratio) is at the horizon…but with respect to the
sense, reason is at the zenith, things that are within time and things that are beyond timecoincide in reason.”(Cusa, De DoctaIgnorantia, vol. III, ch. 6, § 216

 

In my imaginary Encyclopedia of Interesting Title Pages, the Astronomical Tables shewing the Declinations….* by  George Hartgill** is very much middle fare,  very interesting but not overly so (I say sniffily), but very much worthy of attention.  The initial bit that caught my attention was small and sort of trifling: it seemed that the writer possessed  the temerity to place his own portrait on the title page across from that of Copernicus.  As it turns out, the selection was obvious and logical, though I wouldn’t know that until I pieced together the symbolisms of the page.  Aside from that, there was a fair amount of action on the title page, and for all of that it retained a certain spareness, a lightness in spite of itself.

The title page is an elegant call to synthesis of science, philosophy and religion in the understanding of astronomy. To start: at the top-center is the burning sun, “Apollo”, the great and perhaps most important of all the Olympians, the god of sun and light (among other things).  The arms of the heavens (signified by the arms reaching out from the Moon and Sun) embracing a globe of the earth within an armillary sphere. The arms carry the legends of “spientiae” (“wisdom”) and “veritatis  (“truth’).  Surrounding the title proper are five figures, the upper two being Hartgill and Copernicus.  The word balloon coming from Hartgill’s mouth says “per vidibilia invisibilem” or “ the visible and the  inivisible”, and touches the hand of wisdom; Copernicus’ balloon I can only partially read, but it seems to end “gloria dei” (to the glory of god), and ends under the arm of truth.  In turn these two figures rest on three others:  Ignorantia, Contemplatio and Philosophia. 

Ignorantia here is depicted by an entertainer decked out in bells.  He isn’t necessarily “ignorant” per se: the “ignorance” comes in multiple forms: one is of the intelligent and educated person knowing the things that weren’t yet known; another in terms of a belligerent ignorance, insisting on the known and the comfortable in the face of compelling new evidence stating otherwise; and also of simple ignorance of not knowing and not caring.  Contemplatio and Philosophia pretty much speak for themselves.  The three of them seems to support the advanced “ignorance” of Hartgill and the mathematical/philosophical Copernicus, all of which are illuminated by the wisdom and truth of the source of all light.  Its simply a wonderful, well-designed title page.

*Astronomical tables shewing the declinations, right ascentions, and aspects of three hundred sixty five of the most principall fixed stars and the number of them in their constellations after Aratus : as also the true oblique ascentions and descentions of all the said stars upon the cusps of every of the twelve houses of heaven according to their latitude….1656.

**Granger’s Biographical History of England (1824), says of Hartgill: (he was)…”chaplain to the Marquis of Winchester, was a painful preacher, a reverend divine, and a most excellent mathematician, as appears by his " Astronomical Tables;" which, according to the judgment of the best astronomers, could not have cost him Jess than seven years' labour, considering the perfection of the work.”

A Question of Appearance: Picasso, Jung, Miss California and Hungry Joe

JF Ptak Science Books Post 617  Blog Bookstore

I heard an interesting bit this week by Scott Simon of NPR.  He asked his audience to identify a British politician, asking us to listen to a news snippet—what he was after was for the audience’s reaction to the message.  It was an actor reading a widely circulated statement by Carrie Prejean (Miss California) in which she expresses her opinion on gay marriage and other topics.  Evidently people reacted more thoughtfully to the "educated" accent than to the same statement issued by a contestant in a beauty contest--the British pol vs. the dizzy right-wing blond.  The same message, different packages and appearances, different reactions.  

The three 19th century photographic portraits illustrating this post could well be images of the faculty at a modest New England institution of higher learning; professors with decent taste and posture, reasonably interesting-looking, confident.  But their names really didn't have much pull in the history of academic names:  the list of PopWhite, Hungry Joe, Grand Central Pete, Boston Charley, Pugsey Frank, Paper Collar Joe, Curly Chuck, and Deafy were criminals, and all of these pictures are from Inspector Thomas Byrnes' 1886 Professional Criminals of America, an early "mug book".  Their specialties weren't in the maths and physics; rather they were listed as "sneaks", "butcher cart sneak", "saw dust worker", "till tapper", "highwayman". "banco", "wagon thief", "house sneak", "hotel sneak", "general sneak", "general common thief", and so on.  The portraits don't betray the person, by any means.

 How this all comes to me was from reading a publication of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York City for 1940—I’ll keep the author and subject quiet for the moment.  It was an odd experience, reading this, because, well, I wanted to believe the author/analyst because he was in deep attack on his subject (an artist) whose personal life I’ve never cared for; on the other hand the attack was so myopic that I took offense with that, too.  I wanted to believe the analyst’s overall appreciation of the artist, but the means of getting their, the intellectual foundations, was just awful.  I wanted to believe the analysis, built as it was ruinous and a waste; and I wanted to believe that it was true for the subject—but if I removed the weight of their names, I’d have to come to an instant defense of the attacked party.  Pablo Picasso.

The analyst is none other than Carl Jung—who as a collector and interpreter of images I’ve long admired.  I don’t know what to say, really, about the psychology part of it all.  Jung begins by saying that he had “nothing to say on the expression of his (Picasso’s) 'Art' ", and needed to “put aside the question of aesthetics”.  To me , this is sweeping Picasso’s trade under the rug, which is something that needn’t and shouldn’t be done, of course.  

Jung continues:  “the psychic structure of Picasso’s problem, in so far as it expresses itself in his art, is thoroughly analogous to that of my (psychiatric) patients”.  He then starts a quaky, impenetrable paragraph that stretches out over two pages:  “non-objective art comes by its contents essentially from the ”inner” side.  This “inner” side cannot correspond to the conscious, because the conscious contains images of objects as they are generally seen, and they must of necessity appear in the way that conforms to general expectations…”   Then, to my reading, Jung seems to classify Picasso in one of two categories:  schizophrenic or psychotic.

Now as much as I’ve disliked the destructive personal path of Picasso, this is just altogether too much.  But it was the retained memory and associations of the names of these two men that so challenged (and at first conquered) my own analysis.

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