JF Ptak Science Books

The Origin of British Bug Books

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The first book printed in England relating to bugs and bugiana, the first entomological work, owed its life to a considerable bibliographic heritage, and also offered up the beginning of a nursery rhyme

perhaps more repeated than any other over the last 470 years.  The book (Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum: olim ab Edoardo Wottono. Conrado Gesnero. Thomaque Pennio inchoatum: Tandem Tho. Moufeti Londinâtis operâ sumptibusque maximis concinnatum, auctum, perfectum: et ad vivum expressis Iconibus supr…) was “by” Thomas Moffett (or Muffet or Moffet), who acquired it after a number of others had, and after others had written (most) of it, as we see in the title, with the appearance of the names Gesnero (“Gesnero”), Thomas Penny (“Thomaque Pennio”), and Edward Wotton (“Edpardo Wottono”).  It is a considerable work very long in the making, and has hundreds of small and delightful illustrations, not the least of which is the appearance of the millipede on the book’s title page, which is my principal attraction here.

Mr. Moffett’s child, Patience, is* the Little Miss Muffet of the nursery rhyme. 

Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider, who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.

*Or perhaps not.  Patience was his stepchild who probably did not share her stepfather’s fascination for bugs and spiders; and as much as I like the idea of Patience being the model for the rhyme, she doesn’t reach far enough into the future, what with the first printing of the rhyme appearing in 1805.  But it does make a good story. 

Isaac Newton's Disappearing Name, 1711

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. I wrote briefly yesterday about a vast understatement on the work (“innovations”) of Isaac Newton lifting so little that virtually nothing else could exist, a black hole of a description of his life’s work.  An editorial oversight, I am perfectly sure.  I doubt that there is anything that I could actually add to the massive amount that has been written on the great and irascible man, though there is something that has stayed in my head for a long time without any real satisfactory answer.  Of the three superb, revolutionary works by  Newton, only one features the author’s name in near-fullness on the title page (Principia, 1687); the next, Opticks (first edition, 1704), appears with only his initials (“J.N”) at the end of the preface; and the third, his full treatment on his invention/discovery of the calculus (Analysis per Quantitatum Series, Fluxiones ac Differerntias cum Enumeratione Linearum,1711), appears with neither name nor initials.  The illustration on the front page features what may or may not be pure holy light emanating from the face of the creator; or is it Newton himself? It certainly looks like the old man, and among all of the great scientists and mathematicians of the modern age, Sir Isaac’s image is the best deserving of such an elevation.  In any event, I wonder why the disappearance of the name--it was not a standard practice, and the most immediate answer to me is that it was a (deserved, Leibniz notwithstanding) conceit.  I'm not sure.

Great Sceintific Understatement Department: Isaac Newton as the First and Only above Equals

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Earlier in this blog I’ve addressed some great understatements in the history of science and technology.  For example:

--the Wright brothers’ telegram to their father on the successful flight at Kitty Hawk, telling him to “inform Press” [sic], and misspelling Orville (“Orvelle”)

--the announcement of the invention of the telephone, giving Mr. Bell a scant 200-word mention in the London-based journal Nature.

--the alpha and omega element of the severe understatement of George Gamow on discovering the background radiation of the Big Bang.

--and the atomic bomb/nuclear Armageddon bit from the National Emergency Planning Council:  ( “Because of recent changes in the technology and potential tempo of war and because of the base power of force is in being (including equipment and supplies), there is general recognition that any future war in which the United States is engaged, especially if it is an unlimited nuclear war, may be decided without significant additional military demands upon the nation’s industrial economy.” Hmm. He continues: “That is not to say, however, that the post-attack economy would not face enormous logistical support problems.” There is no human element of this equation. “The logistic requirements of survival and recovery would present very heavy demands.”)

It is rare to see such terrific understatement concerning some of the scientific worthies, but this one (below) found in a  penetrating, interesting and very entertaining work  Devices of Wonder (2001) is really pretty remarkable.  The book illustrates an exhibition co-curated by Barbara Stafford (Chicago), and the passage comes in a part of the book by Frances Terpak.  I hate to take someone to task like this, particularly having written such a fine book, and further hate to drag anyone over coals that at all times wait for me, but Terpak' description of Newton's accomplishments as "innovations" (page 194)  goes far beyond the line.  Within two sentences she does discuss Newton's "monumental" stature and "great experiments", but alas the cat is out of the bag.  If Newton's Opticks and Principia and et cetera are "innovations", then virtually nothing else is; everything else being at least not-innovations, identifying a world of sameness.  I know that this is a simple editorial oversight, but it is a big one, at least in my head, and does fit perfectly (even if by mistake) into the blog's "great understatements" topology. 

Paul Klee, Henry Darger and Puppets, Real and Imagined

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While he was serving in the German army, Paul Klee’s 1917 journal entry (#1032) contained this pearl, coming being advice from his sergeant to him and the rest of the non-com grunts:  “Let’s not kid ourselves, at our workshop-- you won’t get ahead. There you’ll find advancement.”

Klee (born in the same year as Einstein and died in the second year of the European War, 1940) was a leading and inventive modern painter, who along with Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky created the Blaue Reiter movement, and who worked in close proximity to many of the major art movements of the new era.  He was an iconic, creative artist of vast influence.

What struck me today was this image of Klee’s hand-made toys and this seldom-seen image of the puppets he created for his boy, Felix, around 1922.  (Felix was 13, Paul  43.)  Evidently Klee made 50 or so of these puppets, 30 of which have survived.  They are lovely and whimsical and are examples of quick, creative work with found and manipulated objects.  I can certainly visualize Klee getting drawn into the project—his diaries too show that he was interested in his son’s development, taking note of the different small, developmental things that lots of folks can miss when their child is growing up.  The puppets are intimate, made for his son for play, and are composed of bristle and bone and nutshells and electrical outlets and bits of gingham and cloth and wire and buttons.  Stuff from the junk drawn or whatnot box.  Klee did construct more elaborate puppets for his connection with the theatre, and of course was also a sculptor.  But I do like these little puppets, much in the same way as I enjoy the small toys made by Alexander Calder for his kids.

And somewhere in there imagining Klee getting a little lost in constructing these puppets arose the image of Henry Darger, the severely-imaginistic, primarily invisible-in-life  outsider artist who found his fame in post mortem glory.  Darger’s  (1892-1973) work—and life—were discovered only after his death, when his apartment in Chicago became an archaeological dig by his landlords, and his massive and outré output became “discovered”.  The process of discovery seemed not to interest Darger in life, as he had extremely limited contact with people and was basically an Invisible in work, pushing mops and brooms for most of his life to make his rent.  In the meantime, in the lifetime not at work, Darger was very busy in his own created world, typing out a 15,000-page novel/world called  The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion…  (This is just one of his works of fiction—another is a 10,000-page work called  Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago, and another is a  work of autobiography (?), where Darger spends 200-odd pages on his early life before slipping away into a 4,800-page diversion on a tornado called “Sweetie Pie”.)

His artwork was primarily concerned with this constructed environment of the Vivian girls, and I must say that it is fascinating to me, but only forensically—I don’t “enjoy” it per se, even though it is phenomenal, and fantastical.  The subject matter—often veering into bestial brutality towards children, with lots of dripping redness--is just too deeply twisted and disturbed for me to enjoy, though I do have an appreciation for the stuff that surrounds it all. 

And so what does this all have to do with Paul Klee and puppetry?

Nothing, except in a fiction that I’ve had in my head about Darger (pictured at right)   for as long as I’ve known about him, and which is also wholly unsupported by fact or reasonable supposition.  Listen:  from the first moments that I knew of him, I pictured Darger returning to his rooms at night after a day of cleaning, mopping, scrubbing, taking abuse for spills not cleaned, and then reliving the entire day at night in miniature.  In my own story, Darger created small figurines and puppets through which he re-enacted his day, complete with sets of the rooms in which he worked.  Perhaps he lost himself in these moments, finding a vindication in miniature stages in his second-story walk-up that he couldn’t in his daily life, allowing his creative, 50,000-page nighttime imagination to open up. 

That’s what I had in my own head when I saw the image of the Klees’ theatre, and puppets.  Certainly my Darger idea is not what Klee had in mind; nor is it anything that was in Darger's mind, either.  Just mine.

Gorgonzola Cheese, Red Wine, Lemon Soap. Joyce's "Ulysses".

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 716 

I just came across these image that I made on a trip to Dublin some years ago.  Carrying the bags for my wife, Patti Digh, who was actually working there, I described my own work by going on a Ulysses tour. It was Sweny's and Davy Byrnes (seems like two e's are missing there, no?)  that I liked the most--particularly so for the chemists, because it looked as though nothing major had happened in there in  years, or at least that was the sense of the smallish creaking shop.  I wanted some lemon soap.

 

 Sweny’s is described by Brendan Kilty in his book on the great chemist’s shop, called simply Sweny:  “It is the epiccentre of some extraordinary events in literature and history. If you stand at Sweny’s door and describe a circle with a radius of 100 yards give or take you will find your North point outside the birthplace of Oscar Wilde on Westland Row and your South point at his home at No. 1 Merrion Square. To the west, you will still find the faint paint of Finn’s Hotel on the gable of Lincoln Place. Nora Barnacle, James Joyce’s lover and ultimate wife, worked here as a chambermaid and it is from the front door of Finn’s Hotel that she spied on Joyce as he stood outside Wilde’s house when she deliberately stood him up on the evening of the 15th June 1904.”

Some of the uses of  Swenys in Ulysses occurs as follows:

"Sweny's in Lincoln place. Chemists rarely move. Their green and gold beaconjars too heavy to stir. Hamilton Long's, founded in the year of the flood. Huguenot churchyard near there. Visit some day."

And also the following:

"THE SOAP: We're a capital couple are Bloom and I. He brightens the
earth. I polish the sky.
_(The freckled face of Sweny, the druggist, appears in the disc of the
soapsun.)_

SWENY: "Three and a penny, please."
BLOOM: "Yes. For my wife. Mrs Marion. Special recipe."

"At that point, the time I was there, you could still buy lemon soap--loose, or three to a small wooden box.  I still have mine and it still has a fine scent..."

Then there's the lovely Davey Byrnes pub, which makes a number of appearances throughout the book. 

"He entered Davy Byrne's. Moral pub. He doesn't chat. Stands a drink now
and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once."

And then there is:

Davy Byrne came forward from the hindbar in tuckstitched shirtsleeves, cleaning his lips with two wipes of his napkin. Herring's blush. Whose smile upon each feature plays with such and such replete. Too much fat on the parsnips.
"--And here's himself and pepper on him, Nosey Flynn said. Can you give us a good one for the Gold cup?
"--I'm off that, Mr Flynn, Davy Byrne answered. I never put anything on a horse.
"--You're right there, Nosey Flynn said."
"Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather with the chill off."
"Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves there."
"--I wouldn't do anything at all in that line, Davy Byrne said. It ruined many a man, the same horses."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snowflakes and Fort Construction--Scamozzi & Palmanova

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 715

My apologies for the formatting problem below--Typepad again has struck with its incongruities. Again.  Did I mention "again"?)

Vincet Scamozzi, a gifted and powerful architect (and whose portrait appears, weirdly, disjointed and floating and entirely out of place in the frontispiece to his famous book, completely separated from the connectedness of his work) was also the designer of this gorgeous star “fort” at Palmanova, in northeastern Italy—mainly the Turks—but nothing ever threatened the place.  Until Napoleon, that is, who took the town without a flight in 1793. 

This is actually a plan for an entire town, the brainchild of its Venetian benefactors,  the very essence of which was fortification, repulse, security and defence. An 18th century  Maginot Circle, so to speak—it was a perfectly designed system for a fortified town for the time in which it was designed (1593).  It was supposed to stand to face the enemies of Venice I wonder if anyone derived inspiration in fort design from snowflakes?  It seems a little doubtful, perhaps, since snow wasn’t dealt with in scientific detail until the every busy Johannes Kepler wrote his treatise on the six-cornered snowflake; and it also wasn’t seen under a microscope in its fabulous detail until 1665 by Robert Hooke.  This was also about the time that modern canon tech was about to make these sorts of designs not terribly practical. [Just last week I mentioned that a fort on the island next to the island that my family vacations on, Tybee, just south of Savannah , is home to the first rifled canon attack on a stone fort—the result was brutal and definitive, the day of the fort was done. Until of course the tinny home fort was invented by the American federal government to protect hundreds of millions of people form devastating nuclear attacks by building steel and stone bunkers under a bit of earth in the backyard, making every person their own bit of royalty, reigning over one’s grave.  

But that’s another story. Kepler thought very deeply about snowflakes as a result of a serendipitous encounter with one—his sympathico correspondence with a snowflake on his coat led to him publishing (in 1611) a short treatise called A New Year’s Gift, or On the Six-Cornered Snowflake, thinking that perhaps the snowflake’s six-cornered symmetry revealed something much deeper about the basis of nature and the universe. He was racing himself towards a significance of the facultas formatrix, or morphogenetic field, and its relationship to everything else, as Kepler was looking for a great pattern, his own 17th century Grand Unified Theory. The 26-year-old  Robert Hooke seems to be recognized as the first to throw the snowflake under a microscope, publishing drawings of them and just about everything else that he saw in his monumental (and tall, being 13-inches high) Micrographia (1665)--the first truly scientific book of modern times.  The largest of the large images was saved for the flea, showing the unsuspecting public the great and beautiful nature of what seemed like a fantastical beast (under magnification).  Snowflakes appeared in the book, revealed in their intricate and seemingly-symmetrical nature.  They were fantastic, not-yet imagined images. In between these two giants was another--Rene Descartes--who was actually the first to render a relatively accurate pre-microscope image of a snowflake and did some very good thinking about their structure.]

Perhaps though it is the opposite, perhaps most of these pre-Renaissance Western European forts do bear resemblances to snowflakes, though without attribution.  (I just did a quick google search on some of the major writers on the construction of forts, and "snowflake" makes not one appearance.) Of course there is no mention of any biological acuity in ancient and near-ancient city plans that bear striking resemblences to human biological units.  I guess you really don't need to have any idea about on the subject of crystal growth or know what super-cooled cloud droplets look like in order to design something that looks like one...

Paradise Alley: Slavery in Alaska, 1899

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The Klondike Gold Rush, or the great Alaskan Gold Rush, took place at the very tail end of the 19th century (starting 1896/7) along the Klondike River near Dawson, Alaska.  It was a wild, woolly (literally) time, with communities of thousands springing up in just a few days--Klondike itself grew almost immediately to 40,000, stretching all human services, food being the scarcest commodity.

One service to humans that was ably met was sexual, filled by legions of prostitutes, some of whom arrived in the Klondike of their own free will, and others, not.  This photo, made near Dawson, shows "Paradise Alley" (behind front street) an almost-overnight series of rough-hewn log bungalows sweatily constructed for lonely needs. There were evidently 70 of these little huts, all in a row, each with the woman's name above the door, presumably rendered in chalk.  (It seems that the photos I've seen of women in the Klondike show many smiles, but no toothy ones.)

This is a detail from a photo seen in Pierre Berton's The Klondike Quest (a big, beautiful book of high rank for a popular history, interestingly published with a more shouty title in America as Klondike Fever) showing the working women of Dawson working at other trades.  I particularly like the picture of the high-collared white-dressed angel-woman witht he axe on her shoulder...and the woman behind her, under the make-shift cloth awning, her hat tiled forward and her hand jauntily on her relaxed hip.

Prostitution wasn't legal, nor was gambling or the encyclopedia of con games that evolved here--but all certainly flourished, with many fortunes made outside the gold fields. Mr. Pantanges started his movie house empire here, and Donald Duck's Uncle Scrooge started his pile of money bags, as did many other people.  But the 12.5 million ounces of gold wasn't exxactly distributed with equality to the dozens of thousnds, and probably hundreds of thousnads of people who came to the Klondike looking for their fortunes.  I'm certain that in this vast game of winners and losers, there was moreof the later and less of the former. 

                                                                                                                                                                               

This image of miners waiting to register their claims gives us a pretty decent idea of the clientelle available to these women.  Oy.  Seems to me an impossible way to live--for the women, that is.

                                                                                                                                                        

Blank and Empty Space: Tobias Stimmer's Spare Portraits

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This is part of a continuing series of posts on Blank, Empty and Missing Things.

Paolo Giovio’s (also known as Paulo Jovio, 1483–1552) Elogia vivorum bellica 
virtute illustrium (or "Praise of Men Illustrious for Courage in War") published 
in 1554 and Elogia virorum literis illustrium (1577) are two of the most 
beautiful woodcut productions of the later 16th century. They were illustrated 
galleries, a sort of supra-advanced Renaissance LIFE magazine of famous 
people in the arts and military. They were, in general, the first time the portraits
of the vast majority of these 180+ people had been seen in a printed forma, 
the mysteries (if any) of their appearance revealed to the public. The work was 
more than thirty years in the making, with the woodcuts (after the paintings by 
Giovio) being worked by Christopher van Sichem, Bernhard Jobin and the great 
Tobias Stimmer. The portraits included authors, poets and various other 
humanists, as well as military people and their support, plus natural scientists 
and medical people. 

I like these images because of their determined simplicity—at least the portraits 
themselves were simple (done with a real respect for open, blank space), though 
the borders were anything but. This portrait by Stimmer,for 
example, shows very wide spaces of white, un-tapped pieces of the woodblock, 
leaving them open for interpretation. 

Liverpool, the Battle of Britain, and Alois Hitler, 1940-1942

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It is ironic that the last day of blitz bombing against Liverpoolin WWII claimed the house at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, the home of Alois Hitler (Jr.) (1882-1956), Adolf’s brother.  Alois and family survived because they were at the delivering end of this effort--Berlin--during the war,  Alois serving beer throughout the course of the conflict to happily favored stormtroopers.  But at one time before WWI the Hitlers lived there at #102 until abandoning England for the Vaterland.  There is a long and unsubstantiated rumor that Adolf lived there too in 1912/13 attempting to avoid Austrian conscription, but that claim seems entirely unsupported to historians, though it has proved fertile imaging ground for the theater..  Alois Jr. seems to have been a violence-prone washout, and unwanted and unacknowledged by his half-brother, winding up with far right wing proclivities post-war. When those plans fizzled, he signed photos of his brother for tourists for a few dollars each, providing a bit of his own surrealist-concrete theater. He did contribute a son—Heinz Hitler--to the war effort.  Heinz, Hitler’s nephew, was taken prisoner in Operation Barbarossa and sent to Moscow's 17^th-century Butyrka prison, a truly evil place, which was once home to 20,000 “political” prisoners taken during the Great Purge, among much else.  Heinz melted into the stone after months of interrogation, which must’ve turned into sport after the first few days.

That’s not what I wanted to write about here, though.  It is the image of the crowd on the back cover of this pamphlet, Your City, a citizen’s guide to Liverpool, published in October 1945.  It seems to me that the crowd scene here numbers about 4000 people, which is representative of the number of Liverpudians killed between 1940-1942 in the German air attacks on the city.  Liverpool was the second-most lethal city to be in during the war for air attack (following London’s losses of better than 30,000), due to its importance in the production of war-necessary goods.

In a true stiff upper lip, deeply old-school, and very highly admirable fashion, there is no mention of the war, no mention of damage from air raids, no mention of anything untoward.  No photos of anything bombed out.  Nothing.  This was also pretty much in line with the official reporting on the bombing, which for obvious reasons was greatly downplayed in the press.  (There is no need to provide free reporting on the effectiveness of your enemy’s bombing campaign to the enemy.) This was a simple vision of the future, and a call for all citizens to register a concern with the proper functioning of their city.

The large crowd scene struck me as a very quiet memorial to those killed in these terror attacks.

Waiting for the Atomic Goodbye: Yucca Flats, ca. 1955

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 710

This indelible image has two big residences for this blog, as follows:

Perspective 1:  Waiting to Say Goodbye Department, part 2. 

Yucca Flat is a big, wide place in the desert, about 65 wide-landscape miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada.  As part of the Rhode-Island-sized Nevada Test Site (NTS) it is also the most irradiated and radiation-polluted place in the country.  It was the site of some 749 nuclear tests--about 80% of all the nuclear tests carried out at NTS. And it shows, and will show, pretty much forever.

This remarkable photo of a test shot was made at Yucca in the mid-1950’s—in the dark.  Actually it was dark, pre-dawn before the viewing station of observers was completely, Georgia-O’Keefe-like illuminated by the brilliant explosion.  The people here were gathered at “News Knob”, about seven miles away from the detonation point, and all wearing dark, welder-strength goggles to prevent the blindness that would’ve occurred if they looked at the explosion without protection—best yet was to wear the goggles and have your back turned to the flash (as some in this picture did).

This is perhaps the greatest single photo demonstrating the power of nuclear explosions. You can see the devastating effects, and the giant rising mushroom clouds and all, but they’re like photos of the Grand Canyon—nothing really captures the essence of the thing.  This image makes the entire idea somewhat “habitable”, graspable, in a weird, visceral way, placing the power of the event in an imaginable context. 

Perspective 2: Where to be and Where to Look Department; Turning Around.

This is another monumental photographic image in the turning-completely-away-from-what-everyone-else-is-looking-at department, following such massive images as Ed Clark’s  iconic FDR photo.  Just as Mr. Clark pointed (see my post from last year), the picture to be made was not the newsreel shot of the President’s casket being borne to the train, but it was in the face of the accordionist, who Mr. Clark found by turning away from the scene being recorded by a hundred other photographers.  It was his picture that told the emotional story of that evident.  Just as is the case with this anonymous, undated photo from the test shot at Yucca, bringing the unimaginable back to some degree of human understanding.

Notes:

Photo from Frances Fralin, The Indelible Image, Photographs of War, 1846 to the Present, based on a show at the Corcoran Art Museum, Washington DC, 1985, and published by Harry Abrams. 

Estimating Casualties in the Invasion of Japan, July/August 1945

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It is interesting to visit William Shockley again (after having seen his work on the economics of the atomic bomb here), this time weighing in on the prospects of an atomic bomb-less WWII Pacific endgame.  The results are not pretty, and weigh the number of casualties as seen in past invasions of widely-interpreted type.  Shockley describes his work in a letter (21 July 1945, "Proposal for Increasing the Scope of Casualties Studies")  to Edward L. Bowles, an MIT Radlab guy who was brought to D.C. in 1942 to help develop RADAR.  The content is summarized in the following three paragraphs taken in their entirety from CASUALTY PROJECTIONS FOR THE U.S. INVASIONS OF JAPAN, 1945-1946: PLANNING AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS by D. M. Giangreco in the Journal of Military History, 61 (July 1997). pages 521-82

“As for Dr. Shockley's initial report to Dr. Bowles, it was not submitted until after Stimson had left for Potsdam. He proposed that a study be initiated "to determine to what extent the behavior of a nation in war can be predicted from the behavior of her troops in individual battles." Shockley utilized the analyses of Dr. DeBakey and Dr. Beebe, and discussed the matter in depth with Professor Quincy Wright from the University of Chicago, author of the highly-respected A Study of War; and Colonel James McCormack, Jr., a Military Intelligence officer and former Rhodes Scholar who served in the OPD's small but influential Strategic Policy Section with another former Rhodes Scholar, Colonel Dean Rusk. Shockley said:

"If the study shows that the behavior of nations in all historical cases comparable to Japan's has in fact been invariably consistent with the behavior of the troops in battle, then it means that the Japanese dead and ineffectives at the time of the defeat will exceed the corresponding number for the Germans. In other words, we shall probably have to kill at least 5 to 10 million Japanese. This might cost us between 1.7 and 4 million casualties including [between] 400,000 and 800,000 killed."

“W. B. Shockley to Edward L. Bowles, 21 July 1945, "Proposal for Increasing the Scope of Casualties Studies," Edward L. Bowles Papers, box 34, Library of Congress. Attached: "Historical Study of Casualties," by Quincy Wright. Dr. Shockley extrapolated these numbers from earlier analyses summarized in Health and others compiled by the Military Intelligence Division from field reports. No accurate total of German military and civilian deaths was available at the time he prepared his report, but the number was eventually set at roughly 11,000,000. Japan was not invaded and finished the war with just over 7,000,000 casualties, most of them from its armed services on the Asian mainland in fighting from September 1931 to September 1945.”

The War Department was very busy trying to figure out the American casualties for the final invasion of Japan.  In one famous paper, Memorandum for the Chief of Staff: Amplifying Details on Planners' Paper for Presentation to the President. (17/18  June 1945). prepared by General Hull, estimates for American casualties invading Kyushu (on the way to the mainland) were based somewhat on the very recent experiences at Okinawa. Kyushu was the site of an enormous Japanese military build-up in a final preparation for the defense of the homeland—there were more than six times the number of soldiers here than at Okinawa, totaling some 550,000.  By August 8, today, the American casualties at Okinawa were about 49,000.  There would still be a very long and bloody war to wage had not the Empire of Japan finally surrendered four days after the use of the second atomic weapon at Nagasaki.  Estimates are as follows (this taken from Douglas MacEachin, The Final Months of the War with Japan : US  Signal Detection, Invasion Planning and the Atomic Bomb Decision, CIA, 1999):

MacEachin continues:

“In an apparent effort to close or narrow the gap between presenting no casualty figures at all and presenting numbers that the Joint Planning Staff was unwilling to use with the President, the Army's Director of Operations, Maj. Gen. J. E. Hull, asked his staff for casualty figures for operations on Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Leyte and Luzon (both in the Philippines), and "overall figures on MacArthur's operations to date." He said these could be used as background at the upcoming meeting with the President, whom Hull described as "very much disturbed over losses on Okinawa." Hull then incorporated the following casualty figures into a summary of the longer report that had been prepared for the President's meeting.

Islands Invaded Earlier US

Killed/Wounded/MIA

Japanese Killed/Prisoners (Not including wounded) Ratio (US to Japanese)
Leyte    17,000  78,000 1:4.6
Luzon    31,000 156,000 1:5
Iwo Jima   20,000 25,000 1:1.25

Okinawa   34,000(ground) 7,700(Navy) 81,000 (Not a final count) 1:2”

And so what on earth are we left with, really? 200,000+ American  and 2 million Japanese casualties, plus untold destruction, in an atom bombless attack on the Empire. This is not part of an argument about using the bomb--there wasn't an argument to be made at virtually any high-level command structure about not using the bomb militarily...it just wasn't on the table.  (There were people who--like Eisenhower--were appalled with the military use of the weapon, but they weren't part of the groups whose charge was to figure out the bomb's deployment.) I'm just trying to illustrate the effects of war had there been no bomb at all, or if the impossible decision was made not to use it.  As it was, the bomb existed, it was used with virtually no hesitation, twice, and it brought the war to a close.  It must be remembered that even after Nagasaki, it still took the Japanese command three more days to decide to surrender, with the final acceptance occuring three days after that, on 15 August.  

Reporting Hiroshima in American Japanese Internment Camp Newspaper, 11 August 1945

JF Ptak Science Books LLC         Post 708 (Continuing #192)   Blog Bookstore

For another project I’ve been reading through the Manzanar Free Press Newspaper (volume 7, no. 12) and came upon this slight coverage of the bombing of Nagasaki, printed 11 August 1945.  What’s unusual here is that this newspaper was published by the “internees” at the Japanese Relocation Center (officially “The Manzanar War Relocation Center” and also called a  "relocation camp," "relocation center," "internment camp," and "concentration camp",)  at Manzanar, California.   110,000 people of  Japanese origin (including a large percentage of American citizens) were forcibly removed and imprisoned via the U.S. Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on 19 February 1942.   Manzanar was a semi-dead town 220 miles NE of Los Angeles, located in high desert with huge swings of temperature and unrelenting and challenging weather—semi-killed by the city of Los Angeles, which purchased the water rights to the region in 1929, forcing out the remaining inhabitants.  Manzanar had a peak population of about 11,000 before the Japanese were returned to what remained of their previous lives.

In this quick coverage, a report is made on the Japanese accepting the terms of the Potsdam Ultimatum, putting an end to the war.  The next part is of the reporting is very subdued, announcing the dropping of the second bomb,  theorizing that as many as 200,000-300,000 people may have perished in the bombing of Japan’s seventh largest city.  And not much more than that.  Two hundred words were I’m guessing all that was allowed by the powers-that-be at Manzanar.

Elsewhere in this same issue is a report on the meeting of the Manzanar Boy Scout troop.  And something on the graduating class of the Manzanar High School (the high school yearbook for 1945, the last class at Manzanar, was called “Valediction”).  Familiar trappings in an unfamiliar trap.

Manzanar is located near Lone Pine in the Owens Valley, which today suffers terrible environmental problems brought on by water-dependent LA sucking out all of the water in the region.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC         Post 708 (Continuing #192)   Blog Bookstore

For another project I’ve been reading through the Manzanar Free Press Newspaper (volume 7, no. 12) and came upon this slight coverage of the bombing of Nagasaki, printed 11 August 1945.  What’s unusual here is that this newspaper was published by the “internees” at the Japanese Relocation Center (officially “The Manzanar War Relocation Center” and also called a  "relocation camp," "relocation center," "internment camp," and "concentration camp",)  at Manzanar, California.   110,000 people of  Japanese origin (including a large percentage of American citizens) were forcibly removed and imprisoned via the U.S. Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on 19 February 1942.   Manzanar was a semi-dead town 220 miles NE of Los Angeles, located in high desert with huge swings of temperature and unrelenting and challenging weather—semi-killed by the city of Los Angeles, which purchased the water rights to the region in 1929, forcing out the remaining inhabitants.  Manzanar had a peak population of about 11,000 before the Japanese were returned to what remained of their previous lives.

In this quick coverage, a report is made on the Japanese accepting the terms of the Potsdam Ultimatum, putting an end to the war.  The next part is of the reporting is very subdued, announcing the dropping of the second bomb,  theorizing that as many as 200,000-300,000 people may have perished in the bombing of Japan’s seventh largest city.  And not much more than that.  Two hundred words were I’m guessing all that was allowed by the powers-that-be at Manzanar.

Elsewhere in this same issue is a report on the meeting of the Manzanar Boy Scout troop.  And something on the graduating class of the Manzanar High School (the high school yearbook for 1945, the last class at Manzanar, was called “Valediction”).  Familiar trappings in an unfamiliar trap.

Manzanar is located near Lone Pine in the Owens Valley, which today suffers terrible environmental problems brought on by water-dependent LA sucking out all of the water in the region.

A History of Goodbye, Part I: "Goodbye" in Book Titles

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 707  Blog Bookstore 

Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio

("Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness"), said by Poe in his “The Purloined Letter” to be from Seneca¹.

Several posts ago I made reference to Jean Puget de la Serre’s wonderfully semi-vicious book The Mirrour Which Flatters Not (1639).   Serre was hardly an oasis of negativity in the early Enlightenment, writing as he was on matters epically moral—I must admit that I was attracted to the title of this condemning and biting book, and frontispiece illustration, which features a royal skeleton wormily seated  in a field of skulls holding the mirror that awaits us all. But as it turns out—ironically, too, perhaps—in the long parting salvo that seems to have been the crux of his book’s biscuit, Serre’s translator, Thomas Cary, is one of the earliest English writers to use the word “goodbye”.  Why this was done, I haven’t the foggiest notion—I do know that writers claim that this is a contraction of the parting salutation of “god be with you”, but that’s all I know on the subject. 

But it did cause me to think about the word "goodbye" and the whole concept of parting from something, or someone, and of change, and adventure , of something happening, flux, introducing or diminishing chaos.  If it is anything at all, the idea of "goodbye" will probably not lead to boredom; ennui is a definite some-percentage possibility,  but it is a direct promise of change for good or for ill or for nil.

And the best place I thought to start of looking at Goodbye is at the beginning,  in the titles of books, where "Goodbye" or "Good-bye" makes infrequent appearances. 

There are titles that say Goodbye to people:  Mr. Chips, Columbus, Picasso, Sister Disco, Mickey Mouse, Judge Lynch, Descartes. And Goodbye… to places: Berlin, Europe, Los Angeles, New York, Venice, Earth.

They are of varying qualities.  This is definitely judging a book by its title, but I think I’d rather read Death in Venice more so than Goodbye to Venice, which sounds like it might be a Weekly Reader version of  Mr. Mann’s big/little write. 

And of course Goodbye… to things, not too many of which sound very appealing:  Hangovers, Weight, Love, Sanity, Health, Life.  These are the books invisibly clamoring for space and life at the 25-cent table at the library sale as they wait their turn to say "hello" to recycling.

Then there are the Goodbye… titles that are Not Terribly Categorizable:  Goodbye Girl, Say Goodbye, and of course Never Say Goodbye, and the lovely Goodbye Blue Monday (the rest of the title of Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions…).  The Long Goodbye has always sounded languid and steamy and the-ice-is-all-melted-y to me.  Hello Goodbye just can’t seem to make up its mind. So far as I can tell there are no books simply entitled Goodbye, nor has anything ever been on bookseller shelves called Get Out, though there is a book called Go Away. Hello Goodbye either can't make up its mind or is welcoming Goodbye, which may or may not be a broken logical circuit.

The playing field gets very wide for book titles (and everything else) when “goodbye” gets more expanded, less demanding, more diplomatic, like, say , with Farewell My Lovely.

But that’s another story.  And so for this bit on the History of Goodbye, I use Mr. Graves, and say Goodbye to All That. 

Footnote

1. Evidently, it is not.  By the way, for all of the great amusement and entertainment taken from this great and wise short story, Poe received a payment of $12 in 1845.

Anti-Nazi Propaganda and the Triumph of Nazism in the U.S., 1943

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 706 

This striking image appeared in LIFE  magazine for 4 January 1943 as an appeal from American Locomotive for the American people to be aware of what might be expected of them in the very near future if the war did not go as planned.  It is doubtful that this ever could have happened, even if the tide of combat had not turned against the Germans by this point--the enormous sucking sound began in the war in the East as 90,000+ German soldiers surrendered at Stalingrad at about this

time in January, the fate of the Nazi regime had been decided at Potsdam, the war in the Pacific (Guadalcanal, Midway) was going the way of the Allies, and the invasion of North Africa was well underway, the noose beg

inning to tighten on Axis Europe.  This is a little fast-and-loose on the history of the war, but I think it generally accurate to say that no Nazi flags would be displayed in American courtrooms.  The other, last nail in this coffin was the beginn

ing of the Manhattan Project in June 1942, an undertaking which would lead to ultimate domination.  I think it safe to say too that there was no way that any other country (or alliance) could have produced the necessary (and terrific) amounts of energy, plus large manpower, plus expertise, plus the ability to maintain the massive project (all in s

ecret)--it was all simply too much. Had the Nazis been more successful in Europe and less adventurous in the East, and was somehow able to conquer it all (and this removing the U.S. from the equation), well perhaps then it could have been possible for Germany to develop the bomb.  on the third hand, given the rest of the development in the American war as dynamic, the U.S. would've bombed Germany (and etc.) with atomic weapons before they could have developed anything on their own.  all of this is trivial rumblings to be sure--I just wanted to survey the possibility of the Nazi overthrow of America.  The U.S. would've been too terribly much for anyone, especially given the experiment in the desert. 

Bubble Cosmology: J.J. Grandville and a Soapy, Watery "Little Bang", 1844

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 705  Blog Bookstore

Finding the Big Bang in a bowl of soapy water.

Last year I wrote a little aboutJ.J.Grandville’s interplanetary bridge connecting some of the planets (and including a balcony constructed of Saturn’s ring [sic] in an early Victorian Grad Tour solar system walkabout.  Grandville (the pseudonym of Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, born in 1803 and staggering too quickly out of life in 1847) was an extraordinary talent working somewhat out and ahead of his time; he had superb visions of the future, and of the past, and most of them were fantastic and fanciful, though not without some very stinging social commentary.  He has been called a proto-Surrealist and I’d have to agree, though for me he had a larger production of social commentary in his work than any of the “real” Surrealists of the 20^th century.  For example, in his Un Autre Monde ("Another World") he depicts people’s  social stature literally—the taller and thinner, the more socially important; the shorter and stouter, the more disposable/replaceable; the images are funny, convincing and wincingly penetrative.

This being said, I have a special interest in the astronomically-based images that he produced, and so far as I can tell, there weren’t many of them in his vast output.  In chapter 25 (“The Mysteries of Infinity”) of Un Autre Monde Grandville rolls out the great maker of the universe, the Primum Mobile, the Motive Force, the First Mover.   The old scamp was busy and on display for Grandville’s character Hahbble, who floats around in the cosmos, and comes face-to-face with what in the end is Einstein’s dice thrower, as much as the great physicist didn’t want him to be, nor is he subtle (Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott,  aber boshaft ist er nicht!)  The malicious (“boshaft”) part would be supplied by someone else looking intent and dangerous, while the great maker turns out to be a magician who is happily creating the matter of all stuff by making it all out of bubbles.

(I feel relatively certain that Grandville is the first artist to propose the bubble theory of cosmology, and he is among a select and restrictive minority who allocated such a seemingly meaningless activity with the creation of creation.  I like its playful nature, though I wonder if his approach was seen as a deep mockery and perhaps heretically insulting to the religco-forces that helped and plagued the 19^th century. Mostly it seems he was left behind int he appreciation part of acknowledgment, glory faded before his eyes; his work wasn’t necessarily prized during his lifetime, and he had his share of brutal reviews for his great adventures.  Paul St. Victor, art critic, wrote that Grandville “wanted to dance on the clouds in leaden shoes”and “tried to get to heaven on a bus”.  That’s a tough go. Death did bring him some fame as M. Grandville slept with the worms; publishers used his illustrations mostly without gratuity to any estate, the images showing up all over the place through the end of the 19th century.  His cuts were used again and again,the blocks being progressively degrade until the fineness of Grandville's eye and incision were lost to overuse--it is easy to see the difference in crispness and clarity between the early printngs of his pictures with the later ones, his sharp edges getting rounded by greed and use and time.³)

I imagine this magician to be “almost” infinitely large and small (what does “almost” infinitely mean?) , blowing bubbles on a large galaxy scale, the bubbles containing other  galaxies; or smaller yet, other solar systems; and smaller yet, other planets.  And taking it down to the other extreme, he could be sub-atomic, blowing bubbles of existence and shaping the bumpies of quantum foam in spacetime, letting loose the primordial bits that would become molecules that would or would not rise from the unpretty Dirac sea, living just on the other side of measureable in space and time, shaving barely-measureable slivers away from Planck length¹ and Planck time².  Or maybe the old man is putting the white into Schwarzchild wormholes. 

 Maybe he’s just blowing the bubbles of possibility and chance, and his unacknowledged accomplice is injecting the mote in god’s eye.

Notes:

1. The Planck length 1.616 x 10 -35 (meters) which is the smallest measureable space in the universe (comprised of Planck’s constant, the gravitational constant and the speed of light) which in turn leads to

2.  Planck time, which is the amount of time it takes for light to traverse one Planck length in a vacuum,  5.39 x 10 -44 seconds), which is basically the smallest measureable unit of time, or for time that would mean anything. 

3.  While ill with his own fatal bit, he composed his own epitaph;  Here Lies Grandville; he loved everything, made everything live, speak and walk, but could not make a way for himself”. 

There’s actually quite  a nice turn of phrase in the wiki article on Grandville—quite nice, really—which I include here:  “Though the designs of Grandville are occasionally unnatural and absurd, they usually display keen analysis of character and marvelous inventive ingenuity, and his humour is always tempered and refined by delicacy of sentiment and a vein of sober thoughtfulness.” He evidently lived a hard-ish life, not the least of which were the deaths of his wife and two children in the early 1840’s.  

 Some of Grandville's other interesting works include:

Les petites miseres de la vie humaine (The Petty Sorrows of Human Life) 1843

Un Autre Monde  1844

Cent Proverbes  1845

Jerome paturot 1846

Les Fleurs animees (The Personified Flowers) 1847