Author: JF Ptak

Manly Purity & Beauty; Soap vs. The Royal Evil, 1889

JF Ptak Sceince Books LLC Post 400

This is 1889’s mini-version of a gorgeous male, a man of purity, virility, and pimple-free skin. Also of scrofula-free skin, a condition description that seems to have faded from use after wide popularity for 500 years. The picture of this man was used by the Cuticura Soap Company (actually the Potter Chemical and Drug Company of Boston) to promote its product, a soap with a bit of prussian blue tincture and some other stuff whose manufacturers claimed would (not could) cure all manner skin aliments, including the loss of hair. The cure of scrofula–a form of tuberculosis affecting the lymph nodes of the neck and appearing as large welt-like dry abscesses–was no minor claim. Aside from its quack connection, the claim was also an affront to royalty, as for hundreds of years the skin condition of scrofula (“the Royal Evil”) was thought to be curable by a monarch’s touch; Henry IV was said to have touched thousands of people in this way. There was also a religious connection to the sovereign touch cure, with a ceremony included in the Book of Common Prayer from the Anglican Church. It survived in England until George I found the practice offensive and “too Catholic”.

An offshoot, Cuticura Resolvent, was offered to cure “every sort of blood disease”, while yet another product, Cuticura Anti-Pain Plaster, would cure rheumatism and kidney “pains and weaknesses”. That’s quite a heap of expectation from soap, and the American Medical Association too it to task as early as 1912, calling the soap’s effectiveness as a curative “remote”; somewhat earlier, in 1908, the British Medical Association found the use of Cuticura for its stated curative capacities for syphilis to be “without basis”. Pretty benign and reserved, I’d say, compared to what the AMA and BMA had to say about similar products.

The Cuticura identity is still in use–and popular–today, 143 years old, though so far as I know the modern makers make no claims for its soap to cure the Royal Evil. Today its just soap.

I’ll take this opportunity to reference this ideal of Manliness and Purity to a certain character from my younger daughter Tessie’s cartoon program, The Fairly Oddparents--this old man bears some resemblance to one Mr. Crimson Chin from that show. (I just like referencing kids’ shows.)

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Bad Ideas — Medicine, History of
Wholesale and Retail: the Timelessness of Bailouts and Corporate Thievery

JF Ptak Science Books Post 399

The largely-heroic Thomas Nast has proved–unfortunately–that his visual social commentary is timeless. For example, this iconic 1871 image of the wholesale theft and corruption of U.S. treasury and government funds by William “Boss” Tweed and his Tammany Hall conspirators versus the swift retribution to the retail theft of the destitute man trying to provide food for his starving family can still be run today on editorial pages–except of course that no one likes to see the faces of horrified children, their innocence and observation uncomfortably reflecting the true nature of the social situation.

Nast addressed his audience visually–the illiterate readers didn’t need a word of English to understand these images, knowing full well who the disgusting Tweed was and of course being well familiar with the folks in the bottom half of the cartoon.

The image is immediately understandable, and powerful.

Evermore so since Nast used terror in the face of the little child–seeing his father being beaten and arrested by at least three of NYC’s finest–to send the point home to the heart of any viewer who had one.I’m not an historian of this media, but over the decades I’ve seen many dozens of thousands of such images, and I think that I can say accurately that (at least before 1900) children are not used in such a way to make a political point.

The emaciated mother, the terribly-afflicted baby in her arms, the terrified sibling, all set against the jowly baker and the rotund Tweed make the image utterly heartbreaking, horrifying.

The faces have changed, today, and Tweed has been replaced by a host of others; the process is the same, though with different and more extravagant mechanics. And the money is bigger.

I doubt that there will be much trickle down from the trillion dollar bailout that would reach today’s version of this child–we’re just not reminded as often that there are still large populations of these children who might benefit from a tiny percentage of largese from something like the AIG bequest. I’m just saying that if say one-tenth of one percent ( .1% ) of the trillion dollars (and one trillion dollars looks like this: $1,000,000,000,000) coming down the sluice was tithed to the 10 million kids in this country who could really use some help that there would be one billion dollars more to help someone out. I know that this will not happen, mainly because those tenths of a percent add up–why, if you take 10 of them you’d get all the way up to one percent.

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Art History — Iconography — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Blank and Empty Things XXV: Magnetizing Thought

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 398

The imagines of this “empty man” (25th in a series on Blank and Empty Things in this blog)
is taken from one of the physio-electrical works of Auguste Forel
(1842-1931), a eugenicist, sexologist, socialist, myrmecologist,
neuroanatomist, shrink, social moralizer and member (at the very end)
of the Bahai’i faith…and also a man very much taken with himself. I
don’t much like him. (Outside of his racist views and semi-bizarre
socialist theories, he managed to politically opiate a four-volume work
on ants with vague wrappings of political theory and ant behavior.
Freud liked him. Case closed.)

I’m not so sure about what exactly these diagrams were supposed to
illustrate in the real-life of Forel’s scientific experience, and I
don’t care that much. What I do like is the imaginative taste it
implies, this blank-expressioned person waiting for the electricity to
do its work, giving him/her an idea, helping whatever currents exist
along the hemisphere of the brain to deliver its electrical-best.
All-in-all, if explanation was removed, the images would perfectly
depict a person devoid of thought; or, a person whose thought was being
directed. Plus a myriad of other things; base of it all though is that
there is a fair amount of blank/empty experience going on here.

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Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
“Correcting” Sight; Vision and Seeing

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Georg Bartisch (1535-1606) a brought-up-from-norhing-couldn’t-write-but-could-read barber-surgeon, from Dreseden, provided this spectacular illustration for his Ophthalmodouleia Das ist Augendienst (1583) (Treatment of the Eye). As opportunistic as this image appears for imaginative interpretation, it was purely a cloth over the eyes to “help” correct strabismus (crossed eyes). The slits in the cloth were meant to force the muscles of the eye to conform to their normal positions.

More substantial, and more magnificent, are a series of anatomical dissections, flap-books if you will of superimposed moveable sheets of paper, showing different levels of the human body. Finding these in 16th century books are quite rare, and I’ve included a series of six images showing the cut-aways of a dissection through the top of the head. It is fabulous, and accurate.

The images are all courtesy of :

Duke University Medical Center Library
History of Medicine Collections, Durham, NC
Photographed by Dr. George O.D. Rosenwasser

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Medicine, History of
History’s Heaviest Bad Idea: Maginot, the Million Ton Line in the Sand

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Poor Andre Maginot–his is the name behind what must be the heaviest bad idea in history–or at least among bad ideas that can have weight. The Ligne Maginot, or Maginot Line, was probably better referenced as the Maginot Hole, as once the advance came from the East, the “Line” was completely and totally ineffectual, and the soldiers in the miles of tunnels and fortifications became, simply, men in a hole. The thing about the Maginot Line was that it pointed to exactly the spot where the French Army could be found; therefore, the Germans avoided it.

It is difficult to believe that when all of this concrete was being poured and tunnels being dug along the German border between Switzerland and Luxembourg between 1929 and 1936 that someone, somewhere in France wasn’t reading the Illustrirte Zeitung, watching the growth of the Luftwaffe.

However, as much as that should’ve stopped this massive and insane project, it was not the airplane that buried the buried defenses–it was indeed the feared tanks. But the Panzers of Heinz Guderin and Erwin Rommel didn’t go through the Maginot Line, they went around it, passing through the supposedly impassible Ardennes. Case closed. Paris gone.

At least someone in France should’ve been reading their Clausewitz: “If you entrench yourself behind strong fortifications you compel your enemy to seek a solution elsewhere.”

But the drawings are pretty. And if you moved everything back in time 30 years the idea would’ve made more sense.

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Bad Ideas — Militaria — Technology, History of
Swimming Soviets and the Great Patriotic War, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 395

This image of swimming Soviet sailors of the Baltic Fleet is from The Illustrated London News for August, 1939. The sailors were “celebrating” the first Navy Day for the Soviet Navy, and no other way was better to do this than to swim 400 meters in formation and fully clothes–with rifles on their backs with no water protection whatsoever. Perhaps this group was just standing in 5 feet of water near the shore–I suspect not, though, because a bunch of these guys look as though they’re really struggling. We’re about a month away from the German invasion of Poland and the official start to the bigger part of the war that went global: Czechoslovakia and China had already experienced war for some time now.

On November 30 the Soviets would launch their own hideous offensive, though against Finland: the Winter War would bring international condemnation of the Soviet Union and give their new ally in Nazi Germany considerable pause. The Red Army was decimated by the wicked Stalinist purges of the late 1930’s–as much as 50% of the senior military cadre were disappeared and executed–and the army as a whole suffered. The early result of this action was that the Finns, though vastly out-manned and out-teched (the Soviet forces had four times as many soldiers as the Finns, 30 times as many aircraft and 200 times as many tanks), were able to last against the Red war machine until March. An end to hostilities agreement was reached in which Finland maintain its sovereignty and gave away 20% of its industrial base and 9% of its territory. The Soviets achieved a phyrric victory, the Finns achieved a major success, and the Nazis figured out that perhaps rather than keep the Soviets as a weak ally they might be able to make them into a dead -state enemy (turning against them with Operation Barbarossa).

In any event by 1945 my suspicion is that most of these men would be dead.

Most of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union would take place on land, with Russian military war dead amounting to a staggering 65% of all Allied deaths, with something like 13 to 15 % of the entire population (totaling 168 million) of the Soviet Union being killed during the conflict. The Soviet sailors would’ve had a better chance of survival, but not by much.

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Militaria
The $6,000 Ham Sandwich and the Ills of Labor Unions–the Republican Failure of 1936

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These little (3 by 1.5 inches) pamphlets, all published in 1936 by a group called “Men of America, Inc” of Chicago,
took a weird and dislocated aim at government (read “F.D.R.”) policies,
supporting an anyone-but-him position for the election of 1936. Or so
it seems. Its actually a little hard to discern the political needs
and desires of the group beyond defacing the New Deal programs and the
vast increases in federal spending on public programs; there’s nothing
positive that they can seem to say about advancing another platform. The little pamphlets attack the newly created broad social net of social security, and questions the efficacy of labor unions. Allot of this sounds surprisingly like the campaign rhetoric of Alf Landon, (1897-1987) the Kansas governor (1932 and 1934), oilman, millionaire and Republican who ran against Roosevelt in the spectacularly lopsided election of 1936. After that November Landon even lost his own shadow; Roosevelt completely and utterly defeated the republicans by an electoral landslide of 523 to 8, Landon sweeping like a cold chill wind in his victories in Maine and Vermont. Actually to be fair Landon scored 38% or so of the popular vote, but the country wound up being almost entirely blue in the electoral map.

I’ve included these pamphlets because of their quaint/stubby/rounded political imagery, a style once extremely popular with newspaper cartoon journalists (and baseball writers) in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and then almost completely gone (except for Gasoline Alley) by the start of the American World War II.

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Bad Ideas — Title Page Art, Beautiful
“Write for Dollars and for Sense”–a Bad Twist and Worse Advice for Authors, 1939

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A quickly-found pamphlet offers a rejoinder to yesterday’s post on making fistsfull of dollars selling poetry: selling prose. The idea is obvious, but the cover isn’t, and the ideas behind the idea of selling prose are anything but common, though they are uncommonly bad. The very often self-referenced author of this bit, James M. Ross, writes his way towards the heart of every scribbling wanna be, offering the tines of broken plastics forks and other charitable possibilities and false hope about how and where to sell your sweaty work. The publisher, “The House of Little Books” at 156 Fifth Avenue (a lovely 13-storey building built in 1895), brought out an oversize and skinny (and unpaginated) effort in Mr. Ross’s work, publishing the thing in 1939. I can’t imagine that it did many people outside the author much good, though it may have made an interesting prop under-the-arm prop for the subway ride home after work.

Mr Ross was a writer of considerable experience–he claims, remarkably, that he was the “special correspondent” for a (listed) 50+ newspapers, plus the author of many plays and pamphlets and other tearsheets–though it really doesn’t bolster the gruelly advice that he offers to the dreaming writing reader. Most of the advice is for selling little pieces to newspapers, or selling tips and leads to newspapers, or at least telling where reporters may find a story with the hope of reward coming at the end. All of which doesn’t really sound like writing per se to me. Then again, the pamphlet is actually well written. Chapter One, for example is entitled, incredibly, “Where You Live Does Not Matter”, and makes the case for fame finding the writer no matter where the writer lives. Ross makes the case for various editors and owners of the NY Times having been small town boys–true enough, but they didn’t actually RUN their business from Chattanooga. They moved away. To New York City. Ross forgets that part, and mentions a few other famous small town writers to bolster his point: Roy Howard, Edna Ferber, Fanny Hurst, Irvin Cobb; though Edna and Fanny and Irvin didn’t stay small for long. Ross also mentions the dramatically- and difficult-to-say-three-times-fast named Westbrook Pegler (try it!), who I think started in a small town and stayed there. Not that there’s anything wrong with small place. I live in Asheville NC for crying out loud, so I’m not having a poke at the small experience–its just the name of the chapter and the logic of the writer that I’m having a run at.

Chapter Two doesn’t get much better: “Where is News?”.Perhaps if
the “is” was italicized the sub might’ve made a little sense. Chapter
Three follows close by on the heels of incredulity: “Many Newspapers
Pay for Tips” is a claim that I’ve not heard too often; but for Mr. Ross to make the claim that someone could make a living doing this
stretches the truth a bit. “As has often happened, items you telephone
in will finally be accepted without question and your pay check will
come along.”

As much as something can be tedious for only 40 pages or so, this is, and drags on for fourteen chapters, offering shamelessly and mainly useless tidbits for the flowering reporter/tipster/writer. Ross tells us to “Keep Your Eyes Open” (Chapter Eight) for stories that you might “find on the street”, and also to expand our horizons to include writing for “myriads of church publications”. And on and on; every one dead-data morsel that we are offered in this book takes the place of two good data points already in our head. No doubt if you read this book a thousand times you’d have nothing at all left in your noggin.

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On Becoming Nothing: French Collaborators in World War II

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This curious pamphlet surfaced today—an “expose” on the post-war automobile industry in France; I was curious to see how soon after the war this was published, and then was momentarily shocked to see that it was published in 1943, while France was still heavily occupied by the Nazis. And then of course I knew why there was any possibility of publishing something like this concerning a huge industry during a time of occupation (when things are normally ground to a halt): that the French people concerned with this effort had to have been at least part of the puppet Vichy government of Marshall Petain or were (also) Nazi collaborators. My vote would have been both. The author, Francois Lehideux, who died ten years ago at age 94 (1904-1998), was the head of the French automobile organization and working at the pleasure of the onerous Petain, and was in fact arrested in 1945 as a Nazi collaborator once the real French were back in power. (Lehideux was released a year later for lack of evidence, or something along those lines, though I am sure, like O.J., that everyone knew the true story. Petain, a glorious and important military leader of WWI, a heroic and towering figure, died in senility and was buried on the prison island he was sent to after his death sentence for his traitorous behavior was commuted. He lived to be 95.) Lehideux lived a long and trying and no doubt prosperous life. He was CEO of Renault (having married the founder’s niece in 1934), and then “worked” for the Vichy government (for which he received the meritorious Order of the Francisque, as did Francois Mitterand), was imprisoned, and then when he was released went to work for another organization comfortable with the Nazis, Ford Motor Corp. Maybe it was just old Henry–who was a fantastically bad anti-Semite and who received the highest civilian decorator from Adolf Hitler (an award he held on to)—and not the Company that was bad. Certainly Ford was not the morally-abusive capitalist who behaved intolerably during the war, as there were plenty of those: Occidental Petroleum, Brown Brothers Harriman (run in part by Prescott Bush (yes), who was convicted and fined under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1943), Chase Bank, and many others.

As Lehideux slipped closer to the grave he headed an organization that tried to rehabilitate the image of Petain; long story short, Lehideux could not leave his own sordid past alone, and while trying to cleanse himself by scrubbing up the traitorous and offal-stained Petain, was embroiled in and won a freedom-of-speech lawsuit regarding his adoration for the old dead meat-puppety pisspot. His “victory” was certainly odd and I’m sure that in his own mind his life during the war was vindicated, his role reversed to having helped France arise from the ashes. But all that happened really was that he was told that he could write what he thought, and nothing more. In effect he created a fourth referential gender category (as in der/die/das etc): zed. Nothing. I think he just became nothing in his victory. Or nothing until he was dead, and then he was at least that, which is a step-up from nothingness; but while he lived, the man was nothing. Except of course to the people in France who were injured or killed as a result of his compliances with the Nazis, and then he was less than nothing and should’ve become dead sooner. But I think he made himself into less and less until he finally achieved nothingness.

Finding and paying attention to extremely ephemeral and dead pamphlets like this can be very stimulating, and rewarding; they can make you aware of points of view and thought that you never knew existed, and can hold nuggets to odd pathways of thinking that can only be excited by something similarly odd. Sometimes all you need is a little piece of exposed ephemeral thread; and then all you have to do is pull it.

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Bad Ideas — Militaria
Make Poetry Pay ((?) (!))

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 389

I wasn’t sure from the cover of this exceptionally obscure work by Frank
Engels if this was
supposed to be (confused by the tone and the extended double tilde) declarative or interrogatory, or whether poetry was
supposed to generate income or if you were supposed to hurt
it/extract-exact revenge. On opening the pamphlet, which was
published by Mr. Engels in the beautifully-named but
poetically-challenged Flushing, New York (home of the World’s Fair and
Archie Bunker) in 1937, we find that it does not disappoint, and assures that all of the classes of what this thing could be are accommodated.

In general, though, Mr. Engels wants to let you help him make money by telling you how to make money writing poetry of all sorts and shapes, and where to sell it, and how, and by what means. Engels tells us that “there are different schools of poetry, and each contributes something to literature”, and that the best poetry “makes vast appeals to the broadest interests of the reading population”.Poems can be short or “book-length”, and we’re bolstered by the “recent poll” taken where 62,000 readers in 252 newspapers in 39 states sent in the names of their favorite poems, and the 12-line “Trees” by Joyce KIL(L)MEr was third on the list. So it “doesn’t take much to be a poem liked by many”, and that you “don’t have to be a Longfellow” and write a book-length poem to make money in poetry.

It is best to appeal to “those fields of universal human appeal: grief, joy, hope, despair, love, simple truth, true humor”, especially when trying to sell poems to magazines. “Timelessness should be considered” we are warned, and that the poem be “neat and easily read”. Also, avoid selling the same poem more than once to a magazine, and “avoid this unfortunate error”.

Next we are told to consider “selling by mail”, selling “in pamphlet and card form”. I’m not sure what that means, though the poetic reader is told that “Boyd’s City Dispatch, 114 East 23rd Street, NYC, furnishes a list of 5,145 millionaires interested in art; they could , no doubt, furnish a list of wealthy poetry appreciators”. Oh, dear. Mr. Engels says that “old folks” who can no longer work but whose minds and poetry are good can make money in this manner.

Next genre for poetry sales is “greeting card verse”, which offers “opportunities for those who can turn out this sort of work”, and that the “Greeting Card editors are the friendliest editors in the publishing field”. The sales genre for “syndicating poetry”, for the “prolific versifier”, is just so far beyond reason, such an uninhabitable planet of possible expectations. that it is beyond comment.

Engels approaches direct selling as a possibility for the ease of being able to produce everything at home, with “Poems of varying lengths being produceable (sic) into a folder”. Engels explains that one of his own “little booklets” “of 14 rhymes totalling (sic) 308 lines…cost two cents a copy to print and sells for ten cents”. Also I found the following nugget: “poems about dogs artisitically (sic) lettered and framed can be sold direct or thru stores or agents for cents cents to a dollar, depending on size…”

This drags on for quite some time, even though its only three pages long. Perhaps the best of these selling scenarios, though, is the “trailer poet”. “There are quite a number of trailer poets, poets who live and travel in trailers, who make their livings by selling their poems…there are upwards of 300,000 trailer travelers in America as this is being written, and the prediction of trailer manufacturers is that the number will mount to millions. Think of it,a million of more roamers whose needs, from popcorn to poems, will probably be supplied by roamers”. Well. I’m not terribly sure about what “roamers” are in Engels’ mind, though I’ve got a good idea that they’re dustbowlers, trying to make their way somewhere where they were not unwelcomed. Engels reminds the reader that these people needed poetry too, and that they could be sold your poem pamphlet for 10 cents, if you had a good one to sell. If only the “trailer people” had a penny to spare…

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