JF Ptak Science Books

Found Dadaist Art--Floating Eyes and Ears, 1650 & 1807

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I’ve written a few times in this blog (here, here and here) about what I think is found/unintentional antiquarian Dadaist art and would like today to continue that thread with the following two unusual pieces of art.

The first is a detail from the title page of Joseph de Casanova’s Primera parte del arte de escrivir todas formas de letras (1650). This is not the Casanova (Giacamo, 1725-1798) who most people would initially think of—the seductive womanizer of the 18^th century—but another, earlier, Spanish Casanova (1613-1692) who was important in the history of round hand script and the lettera bastarda.  Joseph Casanova ‘s evolutionary handwriting style was considerably lighter and easier than most styles, and his influence in changing handwriting practices was substantial.  What is interesting for me is the detail at the bottom of the engraved title page for his book, the emblem containing  “Labore et Constantia”.  Labor and consistency, decorated with a hand and compass, ever watching and listening with ears and eyes above and below.

[This design comes from (at least) one earlier source—the printer’s device for Christoph Plantijn (Antwerp, 1583), though without the eyes (below).] I like the floating aspect of the disembodied body parts, floating in their little sea of constancy, ruled by a compass. 

 The second image has another set of disembodied eyes/ears (among other things) and has all the flavor of the dada/surrealist flourishes of the frammenti of Piranesi. This comes from Bernhard von Montfaucon’s Greichische, Romische und andere Alterthuemer… (Nurenberg, 1807). When taken out of context, as a disembodied image, the von Montfaucon certainly has a dadaist taste for me, especially if you edit the image a little.

 

A Smiling Man at Work in a Smokey Fire, 1788

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There’s not much that I can say at this point about C.J. Leroux,  the author of the work in which this magnificent engraving was  published, Decouverte contre les incendies...¹ Without a pretty good library to hike to Leroux’s efforts remain a mystery to me, except for what I can deduce from the image.  The shack in the image is burning, and the man inside is fine, evidently protected from the fire by a special suit made of fire-resistant materials.  It is an interesting idea in protecting people from fire—sidestepping the issue of making the house more fire resistant by making the people in the house resistant to fire.  I suspect that the inventor/designer/theorist of such a gown had in mind the sale of millions of such things—that way if a fire struck a house in a dense section of Paris the entire neighborhood would don their suits and escpae the flames.  The neighborhood might not survive, but the people would.  That might not be the chief interest of the royals at that time who I am sure would be more interested in the physical plant and the real estate than the people crawling around inside it.  This display also begs the question of manufacturing the house so that some portion of it would be fire resistant which would (perhaps) save neighboring dwelling. 

Be that as it may, it really didn’t matter, as the materials for creating such a suit as the test man is wearing didn’t yet exist. Certainly nothing existed at the time that would allow someone to read, write and work through smoke and flames in a fiery furnace (“fournaise ardente”) all the while with  no inconvenience (“en etre incommode”)². The large mushroom-shaped cap would be a supply of oxygen, I guess; the smile on the face of the suit must betray a secret knowledge as to why the paper and pen are not on fire. 

It seems to be a nice piece of different thinking.

Notes:

1.  Full title:  Découverte contre les incendies, les dangers des eaux, de l'air méphytique ou contagieux et de plusieurs autres maux qui affligent l'humanité, avec un supplément contre les dangers des voyages et des chutes. Par C. J. Leroux  Published and printed by the author in 36 pages in Paris, 1788. 

2. The legend reads: “ Experience d’une personne qui lit, ecrit,  travaille, &c. dans une fournaise ardente, au  milieu des flames et de la fume, ans en  etre incommode.”

Odd Art Department: Art Brut in Advertising?

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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).

The Library of One Book

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Is this an image of a  librarian carefully reaching for a carefully placed book, carefully arranged in a carefully-odd Borgesian-style library housing only books of the same height and thickness?  Or is this a librarian in a Library of the Same Book, housing thousands of copies of copies of the same book, climbing the ladder to make sure that he had a copy of just the copy that was requested (“a copy held at least 5 feet from the ground, near a side window though not touching a vertical piece of wood”)? 

Neither.  These are shelves filled with nothing but uncut sheets of playing cards, housed for the playing card factory somewhere in Paris (?) “during the reign of Louis XIV”.  Playing cards, which were introduced to Europe via Marco Polo from China or traders coming from the Middle East or etc., are much older in Europe than one would think, I think, and by the time this print was made, playing cards were already quite popular there for two centuries. 

 

I can’t identify all of the activities of all of the twelve tables of card preparation here, though some seem pretty obvious:  the trimmer working near the pressman, the sorters and assemblers of decks of cards at the lower left corner, the paper preparer (?) just to the right of the man on the ladder, the pair of men preparing the type trays at middle-bottom, and that’s about it.  I’m not sure what everyone else was doing.  I’m not even so sure what’s going on with the sheets of cards on the bookshelves, the target of this post—it can’t be for drying purposes, as the sheets are too close together…perhaps it is just for storage of different sheets of cards for different decks.  

In any event I'm right or I'm wrong on this guess, about the same odds as being dealt "nothing" in a game of five-card poker (almost 1:1 odds), but that's fine:  I just like the composition of the print.

The Hidden Beauties of Barrels, Pig Bristles and Forgotten Escalators

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I wonder what is was like to be a traveling salesman hauling around hundred-pound barrels of pig bristles?

We don’t really find out the answer to that question in Origin and Development of the Paint Brush (1938), but that remarkable, far from the maddening crowd question does present itself in the text.  And that is why I love pamphlets like these.

Spending my professional life with the book, and being a reader, I’ve come into contact with and have been exposed to a good, solid, Big  Number of books, a Big Book of Big Numbers of books.  And so when the unusual creeps in or is stumbled upon, they shine like little novas in my book-sky.  And the ones that shine with their own special light are the titles come in three favorite flavors:  the Sublime Mundane, Outsider Logic, and Fantastic (and Impossible).  Today’s selection are from the first category, and exhibit titles and texts that look like non-luminous and uni-dimensional but turn out to be anything but mundane.

Earlier in this blog I’ve written on pamphlets entitled Flagpole Painting, School Safety Pioneers, Fortunes to be Made with Frogs, Where are the Dead?, How to Repair a Zipper, Mud’s Romantic Story, Soap in Everyday Life, The Fine Art of Squeezing, Salt Salesman’s Manual, Know Your Groceries, The Book of Envelope Facts (and others), and they’ve all shown a terrific inner quality that is completely hidden by their so-sleepy and yet strangely-compelling titles.  Like the paint brush history pamphlet.  Here are a few other new examples:

The Otis Elevator pamphlet (1947) is efficiently designed beneath its semi-bizarre cover, floating in odd typeface, completely lifeless design, mannequin humans, and washed-out pastels.  The Chinese coloring book style of its covers hides a superior content, complete with schematics and beautifully supplied with photos of elevators long-since removed from sight and memory. 

 

The Hooking pamphlet is not about its obvious contemporary counterpart, but is a luminous, luxurious introduction and stylizer to the science of hooking large objects to cranes via giant hooks and chains, and especially about how to keep yourself from being  crushed by tons of steel not hooked properly. 

The Mystery of Filters charm is wholly in its title and cover design, its text describing nothing but camera filters.  It is still a cool cover, nonetheless.

Elevators, published by Travelers’ Insurance Company, tried to protect themselves a little further by ensuring safe practices of elevator operation, mostly in industrial settings.  This was published in 1926 and was already in its seventh printing from its inception in 1913 when the elevator was just in its second decade of popular, relatively widespread usage. The haven’t-given-this-cover-design-a-moment’s-thought hides a thorough (and bland) treatment of elevator safety; too bad, the cover photosnap-art promises something more.  Its not there, except for this beautiful photo of an industrial elevator op with a tie.

And coming back to wood barrels that are not necessarily filled with pig (or wild boar) bristles but with something else less advanced comes this manual on making wood barrels.  Everything is there, everything you’d need to make a barrel (and a good one at that), and I admire this sort of fantastic dedication to what is essentially (to our modern mind) mundane—except that it is as dry as well-cured barrel wood.  But I admire it still,  as I do the Elevator pamphlet, because, well, they’re done right.

A Stone-Cold Masterpiece of Naive Art: Teresa Ottalo, ca. 1860

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As a collector of naive art--particularly produced with letters or numbers--and as a person generally interested in naive and outsider (and art brut and letterist and found )art, I was astonished to find this spectacular work by Terea Ottalo (ca. 1800-1870).  First of all, I make this to be about 200 lines long, and about 50 inches tall.  The words are, well, minute.

Secondly:  this magnificnet thing was EMBROIDERED.  Breathtaking, really.

I haven't yet found out anything about Ms. Ottalo, except some basic references of her affiliated "school" of art.

I do know that this, whatever it is, is a masterpiece. 

And an unfortunately smudgy detail, such as it is--I cannot offhandedly find a good, clear, high resolution image of anything at all by Ms. Ottalo.  This will have to do for now, but I think it gives a reasonable idea of the fineness of this work (found in Michek Thevoz's Art Brut, Skira, 1976)--this sample detail represents less than 10% of the overall image:                                                                                                                                        

Weird Questions and Weirder Answers Department: Curing Insanity

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Dr. C. Sterling Cooly wrote an incredibly-titled pamphlet of slim means called Should Insanity be Cured?  How could anyone proceed further than this?  Dr. Cooley wasn’t a eugenic apologist, nor was he an accountant for a life insurance firm—he was advocating a drugless cure for all different sorts of “insanity”, which was a term he doesn’t really stop to identify and classify, which of course is deeply problematic. 

 

Or it is so until you hear how one can treat the insane via his new drugless method:  chiropractic.  I didn’t see that one coming.  “An insane mind is a sick brain, a sick body is an insane body” writes Dr. Cooley with leading confidence, claiming that chiropractic can release “the power within…marvels of healing are performed not only in mental cases but in virtually ALL forms of disease”.  That’s a lot to live up to in theory, let alone in practice. 

Dr. Cooley was evidently a deeply important founder father of modern chiropractic, with a 50  year career in the area (1908-1957), and who was also very prolific--this is one work that he probably should've edited out of the publishing phase. 

Connections: from Plugging Gibraltar to Shakespeare’s Memories in One Step

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"Simply the thing I am shall make me live."

--from Jorge Luis Borges, "Shakespeare’s Memory"

 

It is interesting to pursue a loose thought to its not-necessarily logical end.  Such is the case with the Paneuropic ideas of Hermann Soergel (1885-1952). Soergel was a Bauhaus architect and author of a number of works on design and far more ethereal, floating-castle ideas. His most spectacular contribution—incubated in the mid-1920’s and still clinging by its fingertips as an idea among some current thinkers—was to put a dam across the straights of Gibraltar.  The dam would generate electricity of course, but most importantly to Soergel, it would also empty an enormous amount of water from the Mediterranean leaving vast new expanses of land to be developed and colonized over generations into the future.  The master plan at work was that the world would be divided into three economic spheres in the future, all beginning with the letter “A”:  American, Asia, and the new land to be created by Soergel, “Atlantropa”, which was the former Europe expanded into the new dry beds of the Mediterranean and North Africa.  And also of course Egypt, which would be covered with canals and semi-submerged by the new borders of the meandering sea.  This would be the way for Europa to compete with the rest of the world in the future. 

 

Perhaps it is actually three steps to get from the idea of damming up the straits of Gibraltar to the osmosis of Shakepeare’s memories into someone else’s brain—a squinting acquiescence of the middle touch being the brilliant Jorge Luis Borges.  You see it was in the Argentine master’s last published story, "Shakespeare’s Memory", that we meet Herr Soergel (as Hermann Sorgel) again.  But so far as I can remember Soergel exists only as a fictional character, with no reference to his real-life self.  In this wonderful story, Soergel inherits the memories of William Shakespeare—these bits come to him slowly but surely, until they start to conflict with his own memory, and things get difficult.  The man with Shakespeare’s memories winds up phoning strangers on the telephone, giving them away at random, until Soergel is left with his own mind again.  Superior as Bill’s memories were, they still weren’t Hermann’s, who wanted his own life back in the end. 

 

And so from the titanic, pan-europic technodream of Bauhausian Hermann Soergel to the dead brains and living memories of William Shakespeare, all through the fingers of the beautiful Jorge Luis Borges.  

I should point out that the image above comes from the Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig) for August 1931, and is a drawing by an artist named "AS. Christ" after Soergel's Panropa's ideas.

Pale Horses and the Lake of Fire: a Map to the End of the World

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There are, in my experience, very few antiquarian images depicting the end of the world in which we see the entire globe exploding or in pieces or in flames. This sort of image gets more play in the 20^th century, especially after 8 August 1945, but prior to that it is really very scarce.  I own a few images that appear in the 17^th and 19^th centuries, and another from 1929 (Das Weltbild which show a “giant ice ball” colliding into and completely destroying the earth). .  Then there is this new find, S.L. Lacy’s The End of the World, (necessarily) self-published in West Point, Virginia, in 1941.  It is a short and stocky, and bound in orange wrappers—its spine title (The End of the World) begs the casual reader to pull it from the shelf. It’s a simple book—studying the Bible prophecies and revelations on the end of all things—and it annoys and is insulting but doesn’t disappoint.

I started to breeze through the book (back-to-front as always) and opened the book to Chapter XIII, finding this delicious chapter heading:  “The Chronological Order of Final Things”, this being a full page pre-PowerPoint summation of the time-shrinking fireball that is rolling inexorably towards us all.  To say that one is able to put a period at the end of the world's flow of time, that someone is able to identify the point in the future where the future is no more, is "presumptive"--this in the most understated fashion as to offend even the highest of high-Victorians' sense of restrained propriety.  Wrapped in a comfortable Christian chrysalis of pre- and post-apocalyptic religious certitude, Mr. Lacy delivers his interpretation of biblical prophecy for the coming of the end, hustling it to the front of the religious line of things to come.

It seems that in 1941 the end was beginning, and Lacy saw all of the images implied by prophecy that were necessary to announce the glorious final days of broad retribution. This includes the list if the ten things indicating "the sign of The Times", one of which (Number 5) was "The Automobile" and another (Number 7) was "Increased Knowledge and Travel" (announced by Nathum 2: 3,4 and old dependable Daniel. 12:4, respectively.  There's nothing that doesn't fit into Daniel's visions or revelations, though Mr. Cash has certainly made a lovely song of them.)  When everything fits perfectly into a predictive model with no possibility of falsification (or of proof or disproof), then the model has no validity outside of a belief system in itself. Very tidy.

It is an annoying, cloying minor treatise, promising little more than The Lake of Fire awaiting almost all of us, even the sleeping dead, who would be scraped from their graves to be spit into this burning tragedy. 

Lacy does a lot of inspired interpretation and philosophizing, much of which he doesn’t seem to bother separating from biblical quotations—I don’t think it is intentional, just bad writing.  A random find in Lacy’s thinking dislodges the following  nugget:

“Satan is in the atmosphere above the earth, with access to heaven and earth with a circumscribed power over the atmospheric elements and the earth including the inhabitants”. 

 Oh dear.

But enough of this nonsense. What brought me to this work is the folding schematic map at the front of the book.  It is a slightly complex jumble of semi-circles and circular reasoning, and I have no interest in straightening out this jumbled linguine. What has my interest is the dissolving Earth part of the diagram, a part of the dead earth that comes between Calvary  and Heaven-on-Earth.  What makes this image different from the others though is that the Earth reappears—different from its former self having been vanquished and cleansed by all consuming fire, but the Earth nevertheless.  Or something like it.  Or nothing like it. 

 

Bizarre Titles with Real Content: the Fine Art of Squeezing

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, This Side of Paradise, Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, In Praise of Folly, the Divine Comedy,  Pride and Prejudice.

Sometimes magnificent titles of books deliver magnificent things.

Then there are the uneven, unruly titles hiding great works like Aristtotle’s On Youth and Old Age, On Life and Death, On Breathing; Das Kaptial, On the Origin of Species, Paradise Lost, Brothers Karamazov,  Tractatus Logico-Philosohicus.

There are badly-titled books that are just bad--we don't need to get into that right now, wounding the wounded.

And then sometimes a book title promises a lot and delivers it--but not the "a lot" that you expected.  The Fine Art of Squeezing, god knows, is a title that demands attention.  I thought, well, I'm not sure what I was expecting--possibly it would actually be on squeezing things. (I've seen many examples of this sort of bizarre title/content continuity, so I thought it a possibility.)  But  the story here is delivered by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and details their properties being nationalized--squeezed--by the government of Mexico in 1938.  It is one of a series of pamphlets, and it evidently sucked up every bit of creativity at Standard Oil:  The Question of Subsoil Rights in Mexico and The Accustomed Practices in Cases of Expropriation and Confiscation are two titles that deliver the contents' good accurately and dryly.  This singluarly-titled work also has chapter headings that equally lovely and bizarre:  "The Revolutionary Squeeze", "The Constitutional Squeeze:, "The Concession Squeeze", "Strangling the Goose "and other fortifies the reader with the possibility of a surreal experience.  It is not, of course--it is a competent and direct summation of Standard's deal with Mexico. 

 

Soap...in Everyday Life is another one of those lovely naive titles, though it only hides a very accurate and authoritative display of Soap Knowledge, published by the Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Co. The draw to this pamphlet for me stops as soon as you open it.  (It is a happy little soap-making theme on the cover, though.)

Thirst is another disappointment--weird title and design, and was written in 1937 (and self-published) by Elzoe Prindle Stead.  The joy of the title is quickly dissolved by the content, with chapter headings such as "Born Once", "Once to Die", "Going to Hell", "For Him of the Second Death", "Forgotten or rejected Savior", and "Jesus goes to the Cross.  Its a major proselytizing vehicle which defines itself with the last chapter title, "Why Not". 
 

Outsider Logic Department: Earth Clocks, Ocean Spigots, and Mystery Exhausts

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Several years ago I purchased a very large collection of pamphlets of the Library of Congress.  It was all housed in 2400 blue document boxes, all the document boxes were labeled and neatly ordered.  The problem was that the classification scheme really didn’t relate to one thing in particular, and the judgment which set one pamphlet in a box wasn’t the same through and through—the alphabetization could have related to author or title or region or keyword or publisher.  In short, each box was an adventure—and a lovely, bizarre one at that.

It may be a unique one, too.  The one thing that really did hold this thing together as a collection was that the vast majority of the pamphlets were not located in any other libraries in any part of the world.  Now for many of them it was probably okay for the work to slip into a bliblio-singularity, but for thousands and thousands of others, it was a good save.

And here’s the larger rub:  as I classified and segregated the pamphlets into the “normal” areas of interest, I also started a pile of good-god-what-is-it pamphlets. The GGWII material was extraordinary—some had fantastic covers (and which many times was the most interesting thing about the publication), some had extreme titles, some had ludicrous subject matter, and some were just, well, bizarre.  As the GGWII pile grew into the low thousands, I started to box them for a rainy day project, because I frankly didn’t want to deal with them.  Some of the pamphlets’ covers/subject/title were rather mundane, pedestrian things when they were originally published; however, the high-winded sands of time ripped the flesh from this commonness, making them somewhat unapproachable, unknowable, and incredible--this group was called The Naïve Surreal .   A subset of this group are works that were not approachable and enveloped by their own unique needs from the day they were born; pamphlets made of the stuff of incomplete dreams and adventurous vocabulary—the Outsider Logic group. 

The Naïve Surreal has all manner of representatives:  pamphlets with just question marks or exclamation points as the title, or histories of unknown things, or beginning with “The Story of ______ “ [mud/zippers/a stone/a bubble/etc].  You get the picture.  The Outsider Logic pamphlets are really very difficult to categorize—perhaps that is their unintended  job.

Today’s emergent beauty from the Outsider Logic collection is .A. Alles Suggest theory The Clock of the Earth, printed in Pug, Pa., in 1935.  This pamphlet is only 18 pages long but I just couldn’t read it.

Here’s why:  the first sentence reads:

"The Clock of the Earth represents strange matter from inner-stellar space collected and compounded at the equator which accurately controls the revolutions of the seasons…"

It goes on but I just can’t type it out.  Sometimes there is a benefit to reading the Outsider Logic pamphlets, and sometimes the benefit is knowing the cover.

Mr. Alles’ cover is striking and deeply inscrutable, as you can see.  Somehow there is a system for the hour hand there at the equator, but it is mainly a secret, even though it is explained.  Why the geographic locations are printed in the white space surrounding the earth and connected to Addis Ababa, the Nile, Gizeh and the Great Petrified Forest and placed the way they are and connected to the equator clock will have to stand as art rather than explanation.

Most of the time superior, deeply-removed art like this cover is disappointed by the textual counterpart.  Mr. Alles may not disappoint with his writing, though.  He ends the book beginning the last paragraph with this:

“Four thousand years ago the open spigot on the equator at longitude thirty-one degrees east of Greenwich , flowing directly to the pyramids in Gizeh…. “ Then there’s something about “exhaust flow”.  Again, as I said, I just can’t penetrate this work.  I’m happy enough with the art, forever open to interpretation.

Things Out Of Place Department: Ledoux's Architecture of Multiple Planets

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A Cosmology Seeded in Salt?

It  is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?--Sherlock Holmes

I've written a little earlier in this blog about the beautiful Claude-Nicolas-Ledoux  (1736 —1806) being the 18th century Marcel Duchamp (or vice versa).  I was struck by this image by the master--a depiction of the Earth nestled in clouds amongst other  planets in exceptionally close proximity.  There was evidently very little explanation to go along with this idea, except that it was inspired by his utopian plan for the saltworks of the factory-village at Chaux. On the face of it there seems to be no physical connection between the two--it must be the philosophical connection that Ledoux was thinking about.  From my point of view the idea for the city of Chaux was of course idealistic, perfect, communal, with a vast sense of fairness and correctness, and of great sensibility.  It was a "gathering of brothers" as Ledoux wrote, a city of lodges of workers, gathered together for mutual profit.

Perhaps this vision of cushioned planets was a larger expression by Ledoux of heavenly gratuity?

Anthony Vidler points out (in his book The Writing of the Walls) that Ledoux described his utopian Chaux as a "galaxy of...utopian forms" (page 101).  Since Ledoux also described the architect as the "delegate of the Creator", perhaps he reverse-engineered a cosmology describing a mutually beneficial community of planets from a community of brotherhood gathered around the (admittedly important in 1780) production of salt. 

Or perhaps not--this may just be way to simple and, well, just wrong.

NOTE:  I do just want to point out here (and discuss at another time) that Ledoux was by no means the first to describe multiple-world systems.  One of the prettiest of the earlier attempts, for example, belongs to Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle who published this delightful rendition of an extra solar-systemic galaxy in 1682 in his Entretriens sur la pluralite des mondes.  This sort of thinking was somewhat well-established by the time Ledoux offered his idea around the time of the turn of the 18th century.  

Should we not come to the rescue of a cosmic phenomenon  trying to reveal itself in a sea of errors?  Peter van  de Kamp (1983)

For a beautiful romp, have a look at Ledoux's L'Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l'art, des mœurs et de la législatio. I've included a short list of projects (with links) in the expanded reading section below. 

Lonesomeness, Anti-Humans, Vestie Davis and the Quark

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I arrived at the subject of Lonesomeness in a roundabout way--taking my first look at the lovely 3 Quarks Daily site and thinking about Muster Mark and Humphrey Earwicker and Leon Ledermann and the quark's (pronounced "quork", by the way, this from the master's voice) phenomenologically-obsessed creator, Murray Gell-Mann.

[The story of the discovery of the quark is a little tricky; Gell-Mann was the first to publish his discovery, preceding the independently-established work and findings of George Zweig.  Zweig's quarks were called "aces", and after publishing his results in an internal CERN document, had considerable difficulty in placing the paper in The Physical Review, so much so that he abandoned the effort, only placing the paper in print years later. The CERN paper by Zweig is beautiful, even to someone like me--his high visual thinking (as with Richard Feynman) is highly apparent.  Gell-Mann has been insistent on referring to Zweig's work and its significance ever since its appearance in the first year of publication of the European Physics Letters in 1964.]
It is when fast forwarding through the experimental voyage for the picturing of the quark that we meet Leon Ledermann, whose animated semi-serious reference to the discovery of the anti-quark leading was his speculation on "anti-humans".  The idea of "anti-humans" is quite a lot to think about, and is something much deeper than simply not have humans being there.  But also something different from the anti-neutron, the anti-quark, anti-matter.

The anti-human led me to the "not being there" part, and then to the depiction of that idea, and the idea of Lonesomeness, in art. For me the very compelling imagery of lonesomeness is found in this painting at Coney Island by "part-time undertaker, newsstand dealer, and mortuary organist" Vestie E.  Davis (1928-1978).  It is a scene desolate of interaction,  Even when Davis begins to add people into his paintings (making them "sell better"), the  populations seem as brittle as Eliot's utterly precise diction in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.  In meek forebearance I add the artwork of Edward Hopper  Both of these men seem to give their canvases a reality that is stretched so thin

that it crystalizes the singular moment, and captures the lonesomeness of it all in the instant before the fabric tears.  This is lonesomeness no matter if the seen is vacant or filled with people; Hopper and Davis introduce a finite nothingness that too me is as cold and scary as the antiquarian tombstone for the unnamed "Wife of____", standing smaller and apart from the dead husband.

Maybe its the colors--or rather, for me, maybe its the color white. White is largely absent in nature, at least big (excluding clouds), at least that's what poets like Wordsworth said.  It is Goethe's vexing color, Melville's lonesomeizer.  White works to distance everything in the images I'm presenting here, helping to make it possible for lonesomeness to exist in a bleak landscape as well as one with lots of people. 

And so there you have it--I'm nowhere in this post except to have it serve as a placeholder for some sort of idea about quarks and space and absence and lonesomeness.  Just an exploration. 

Unusual Collections Department: a Collection of Roads

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 573

In my time I've encountered interesting people with advanced, iconic and unusual collections:  there's one fellow with a superb collection of (better than 20,000) cds with basically nothing to play them on (but of course he knew all  of the music, and listening was almost but not quite secondary); there's another with an audio outfit worth better than a quarter million with literally almost nothing to play on it.  Then there was the delightful fellow in the salvage business who collected cornerstones (!) and giant iron puddlers.  And of course the bee collector with dozens of thousands of specimens.  Oh yes!  And there was that time when I had a meeting with a man on something (on the day the Challenger exploded) unrelated to the spectacular collection he showed to me:  the world's largest, privately-owned 19th century mechanical toys.  It was really just unbelievable.  So was the man, who in the course of the day, as we sat watching the Challenger story unfold, performed on of the most amazing feats I've ever seen in my life. 

My friend Marty Weil chronicles the wants and needs of collectors of all manner of things, from bus passes to matchbooks to god-knows-what, in his excellent ephemera blog.  I collect dirt and antiquarian artwork by children, among other things.   Also, once upon a time I owned a very large collection of lower gastrointestinal dissections as well as gorgeously prepared wet dissections of salivary glands. 

And so it was that when I came upon this unusual image in The Illustrated London News for 21 May 1932 I felt a certain tenderness.  This is a pictre of a road collection, located somewhere in the U.S.,  and includes shelf upon shelf of cross sections of roads.  They happen to look like cubes of fat to me.  (We'll leave the bags of eyes story for another time.)  I understand the need  for  such a collection for engineering purposes; I just happened to like the idea (and the picture) of A Road Collection, and have it undisturbed by any explanation or insight.  Just a collection of roads. 

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

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC  Post 561

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

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

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

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

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

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

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