JF Ptak Science Books

A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

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Author: JF Ptak

Bad Ideas Department: the “Terminal Box” and the Restructuring of Society, 1938

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The unnamed author of The New City, an American Plan of Social and Economic Reorganization (1938), makes a hard-edged plea for the formation of a new American society—and by “new” the author really means it, advocating a different economics, social structure and even the physical development of new cities and abandonment of the old physical and philosophical structures.

Sprinkled among the Swiftian notions of rightness, quixotic lancings of social ills and a general bombardment of the structure of society are some interesting and isolated points:
“America is the supreme user of the machine…ravishing the irreplaceable wealth of one of the earth’s richest continents, tearing down forests, looting the treasures of coal and draining the reservoirs of oil and natural gas, by methods scandalously wasteful.”

This leads the author to the Depression, “a decade of demonstration of the profit system’s inability to deliver to the people the needs of life, a painful heartbreaking demonstration”.

It is the profit-deliverers, not the machine s or people, who are to blame. One way of addressing the distribution system, was, unfortunately, Russia—“a form if society set up to overcome this impasse of the capitalistic system of production and distribution”. Of course the Russians, the Soviets, were just in the middle of their enforced starvation/gulag/brutalization period under Josef Stalin, the gigantic negative parts of which were still in general not known to the great unwashed.

The unnamed author dips lightly into Socialism, and then into Fascism and Nazism, though the only thing he/she really has to say about the later two is that “their answer [to economic woe] was in the seizure or control of the means of production by the state”, their own brutal means skipping off unnoticed into a pinkish glow, though the loss of personal freedom is “disdained”.

The New City is actually a new world order, a new governmental form to take advantage of technological advancements leading to “nationalized urbanization” The first city in this new order is Neopolis, and this pamphlet was a call to those who would stand as its citizens. (There’s actually a sort of application form, though all it really is a bill-of-sale for ordering more copies of the New City pamphlet.)

Even though the pamphlet is easily obtained, membership, the possibility of being a Neopolitan, is something entirely different. The difference is actually exceptional, perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this whole misguided idea. “Membership is to be carefully controlled at all times” we read. . “It is not desired to build up a huge and unwieldy membership of poorly-assimilated elements….interesting educational instruction…with tests to determine the fitness of the member for loyal, cooperative activity, leading, necessarily, to the elimination of those who may be found undesirable”.
That’s some pretty muscular, steroidal stuff, particularly after such a glancing blow against the Soviets and Nazis.

Since this is just an “abridgment” of a soon-to-be-written 250-page explanation of the concept, the complex and concentric organization of society is left mainly to the drawing of its plan, the physical layout of the city based upon this ideal.

The Seattle-based author never did quite make it past page 29, never did name themselves, and never provided a concrete place where all of this heady stuff was being think out. It is a sort of pretty design in a creepy/queasy way, there on the front cover, but that’s about as far as it goes. If anyone actually did send any money to this quack thinker, it wound up in a nicely metaphorical place: at “Terminal Box 3463”.

This may be the very best idea to come out of touching this pamphlet—a place where people can send correspondence regarding Bad and/or Dead or Dying Ideas: “Terminal Box ______”. I guess that box number would be pretty high by now.

(Uncle Joe, before he killed the children.)

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Architecture and Building — Bad Ideas
Blank and Empty History: Disappeared Legions of The Wrong

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Continuing my series of posts on The History of Blank and Empty (and Missing) Things, I come to this beautifully designed French pamphlet of 1931. The design is of less interest than what happened to its author, the exceptionally problematic and traitorous Jacques Doriot. Now Doriot (1898-1945) started off liberally enough, shooting out soon thereafter to explore the very furthest reaches of The Deep Left, and then, when that didn’t quite work out for him, blasting off to the nether regions of the wincingly bad singularities of The Deep Right. He scratched at the edges of political extreme idealisms, waiting for something to happen, something that would get him greater fame or more-reaching political power, but his fate would intercede.

Doriot began his career as a Communist and would do fairly well, politically speaking. A member of the Communist Party since 1902, he would become Mayor of St. Denis (near Paris) and a member of the Chamber of Deputies. A difficulty would arise and he quit the party, becoming a Fascist over the next few years. On the invasion of France, Doriot became a Nazi firebrand, committing himself to the cause, and living in lickspittle Vichy France.

Like another fellow ex-pat (Ezra Pound), Doriot made vicious anti-French/communist and pro-Nazi radio broadcasts from Paris in 1940 and 1941. In that year Doriot would take an uncommon step, a step towards disappearing, when he and Marcel Deat founded the Legion des Volontaires Francais (contre le Bolshevisme) (LVF)), which was a combat unit of French Nazi sympathizers that fought with the Wehrmacht.(Over time and the wear of war it was also known as The 33. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS Charlemagne (französische Nr. 1) and Charlemagne Regiment, as new elements were formed to replace the lost.) I could imagine that no one saw them as anything but pathetic, even their Nazi commanders, who would put them into the meatginder on the Eastern Front. The LVF was decimated and all but gone by the end of the war, though Doriot, somehow, survived it (with an Iron Cross awarded him in 1943), until he was killed by a strafing plane on 22 February 1945. The survivors of these groups met bad ends at the hands of the French (and the Soviets of course); some were imprisoned and sentenced to hard labor; many were summarily executed.

Groups like the LVF take their members and spin off towards oblivion, much like the Spanish pro-Franco troops that went to fight for the Nazis and were disappeared, or the poor black slaves of the (Western Band of) Cherokees who were made to fight with their Indian masters for the Confederacy, a deeper, darker place I could not well imagine.

(A detail of the crowd scene of the pamphlet on Communism and Unemployment.)

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Militaria
Blank and Empty History: Patrick Starfish, The Sopranos, Kasimir Malevich and Disappeared Madonnas

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 374    Removing the object from imaging is serious stuff

“This pencil is broken, why won’t it make words?” said Patrick Starfish in Spongebob Squarepants. “I can do this…I can use, my, um….brain!!” he declares, hopefully, with an intensifying anxiety and sweat. After some squirming and smoke and some not pretty inside looks at Patrick’s brain working, (Mr.) Squidward (Tentacles. who never wore paints, ever) )comes in and sniffs the room: “It smells like something broke in your brain and died” he says, removedly.   “ THAT’S the creative process!” says Patrick happily. Indeed!

In The Sporanos. one of the guys, Christopher (“Chris tu fuh”) Moltisanti, decides to write a screenplay about his um business life and buys a laptop for the process of creativity. He’s upset when he has a hard time of it, brick walls and all that, explaining to one of his cronies that “I even bought this computer, I thought the thing would come up wit sumthin’”.


In a sense, Kasimir Malevich was coming to this sort of non-objectivity, but instead of removing himself from the process like Christufuh and the beautiful Patrick, he removed the reality from his painting.

The Russian-born, ethnic-Polish Malevich (1878-1935) , the first of fourteen children, introduced the genre of Suprematicism in 1915, just a few years after Kandinsky’s first effort in abstraction (and the modern world’s first foray into non-representational art).   His first exhibition was exceptional and large—there were some many pieces that it must’ve been the case that he had been working for years with this idea. This was the “0.10” exhibition, and photos of the show in Petrogard, shows the famous Black Square in a place of honor, in the high corner of the room, like a religious icon. (When Malevich finally was laid down from cancer in 1935 the Black Square was hung above his body as he lay in state. It saw him into his world, and saw him out. And, as a matter of fact, his grave is decorated by the Black Square as well.) So many of these pieces are utterly recognizable that it seems almost impossible that they appear for the first time in the same, opening, introductory, show.

Malevich wrote later about the Black Square:

“The black square on the white field was the first form in which non-objective feeling came to be expressed, The square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling.” (See Roger Lipssey, An Art of Our Own, 1988)

Malevich’s vision on the emptying of form comes again from the 0.10 show:

“Only when the conscious habit of seeing nature’s little nooks, Madonnas, and Venuses in pictures disappears will we witness a purely painterly work of art.
“I have transformed myself in the zero of form and have fished myself out of the rubbishy slough of academic art.
“I have destroyed the ring if the horizon and got out of the circle of objects…”

Three years later Malevich would advance the idea to its logical end came Malevich’s “Suprematist Composition, White on White, 1918”. I’d reproduce it here but it is a little pointless, especially digitally, what with its incredible subtleties lost in the electromagnetic sauce. I had the please and opportunity to see this in D.C. at the National Gallery’s homage to Malevich in the early 1990’s, and I can say that the painting is absolutely magnificent.

Malevich didn’t see as much as he sensed the world (so he wrote), and made the structures go blank and empty to fill them again with what he knew.

“And knowledge is of two kinds, one turning its eyes towards transitory things, the other towards things which neither come into being nor pass away, but are the same and immutable forever. Considering them with a view to truth, we judge that the latter si truer than the former.” Plato, Philebus

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Art History — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Blank and Empty History: a Map of the Village of Missing Slaves

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In another (twentieth) in this blog’s series on Blank, Empty and Missing Things, I offer this map, a heartbreaking map, of an empty, abandoned village of peacefully-living runaway slaves in Jamaica, in about 1825.

The name of the town, extraordinarily, was “We No Sen, You No Come”. It meant, basically, that the slaves living there would not leave their town, wouldn’t seek anything from the outside, would not interact, would not interfere; in return, they didn’t want anyone visiting, coming to them. interfering in any way; just wanted to be left alone, to live. And from the account of this supportive, understanding and sympathetic publication, that is exactly what these people had done for eleven years.

But then something happened. The owners of the enormous estate wanted the “banditi runaways” gone. The slaves evidently had 200 acres under domestication, hidden in the far reaches of an enormous 100,000 acre estate. The “hunting party” left heavily armed, accompanied by 250 troops, as well as “confidential and baggage negroes”. (The term “baggage negroes”, as impossible as it might seem today, was a well-worn, heavily used term through the 18th and mid-19th centuries.) They approached the small town and encountered a very slight resistance, something like a guard, and killed them. Retreating somewhat after the initial attack, the scouting party returned, and then found the village completely empty. (Some reports say that there was more limited fighting, with casualties on both sides; some say that there were more slaves killed.) After whatever happened happened, though, the return to the little village found it abandoned, with everything still in place. The members of the village had “disappeared”. Or at least I hope that they did, and didn’t get “disappeared”, men, women and children all, as in the famous Floridian “Negro Fort” case and Andy Jackson. Perhaps these people were fortunate to actually escape.

Key to the numbers on the map:

1 The track of the Militia and Maroons.
2 House built of cedar, shingled and floored.
3 The largest building, 70 feet long, and open in the centre.
4 A hut.
5 Hogsties.
6 Wood.
7 Provision Grounds and Coffee Piece.
With the exception of No. 2, the houses were all wattled and thatched, the
floors terraced.

Two Contemporary Accounts

From the British Slavery Record, 1825:

“WE NO SEN’, YOU NO COME.”

“Some years ago a number of Negroes, in Jamaica, escaped fromthe cruel bondage of their task-masters ; and, retiring into an uninhabited part of the island, built a little town, which they called, ” We no sen\ you no come.” Here they lived some years peaceably, industriously, and comfortably, upon the fruits of their labor ; having about two hundred acres of land, thickly planted with provisions, in the finest condition, with abundance of hogs and poultry. They thought that, if they kept themselves at home, ihey could not be discovered ;
and if they did not meddle with others, others could not meddle with them. However, in the year 1825, they were discovered by the whites, who sent out an armed force against them, destroyed their town and provision-grounds, and killed, took prisoners, or dispersed, the whole of this happy and peaceable community.”

A less-sympathetic position appears in the Montego Bay Gazette:

“THE RUNAWAYS IN TRELAWNY.
[From the Montego Bay Gazette, j “
We have been favoured with a perusal of a letter from a respectable gentleman
at Dromilly, who has taken the earliest opportunity of relieving the
anxiety of the community respecting the [second] party who went after
the runaways in Trelawny. It states, that about 4 o’clock on Monday
evening, the party entered the town belonging to the runaways, when they
were fired upon by them, but happily without effect. The fire was returned
by the Militia, when two of the runaways fell, and another was taken prisoner;
the remainder dispersed. They had about 200 acres of very fine
provisions, in full bearing, with abundance of hogs and poultry. The Maroons
were left in possession of the town, and the Militia returned to Dromilly,
from whence Col. Scott proposed sending a gang of negroes to destroy
the provisions, &c. The houses appear to be of considerable magnitude,
are well built, shingled and floored. This expedition then, if such
it may be called, has succeeded in so far as dislodging from one of their
haunts a Banditti that have been for years collecting; but we fear much is
still left to be done; and we think, that instead of destroying the provisions
and houses at the settlement, now in possession of the Maroons, it would
have been better to have sent troops to occupy it, and from thence to send
out detachments to scour the woods, as there cannot be a doubt of the
runaways having other places of retreat, and are still in possession of arms
and ammunition ; and until they are totally routed or destroyed, the pursuit
should not be abandoned. — The bodies of Mr. Sutherland and Mr.
Gallimore, who were shot on the 26th ult. were found within a few yards
of each other.
It would appear, from a plan taken by order of Lieutenant-Colonel
Scott, that the number of runaways is very great, or that they have been
many years in constructing the buildings : one is 70 feet long, another
40, and few under 25: and we again repeat, that instead of being destroyed,
they ought to have been preserved and occupied as a military post for
some time at least, or until the whole of the Banditti are properly accounted
for.”

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Blank and Empty Space: Reference-Free Language(s), Babel

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Empty and Missing Things, Part 19.

Returning to Jean-Jacques Scheuchzer’s* magical, inventive, fact-bending naive-surreal work on universal history based on the Old Testament, I’ve found these two glorious and odd images of the Tower of Babel. The first (“Genesis Cap.XI.v.4. Orthographia Turris.Mediummetalis”) is terrific, shocking even in its abrupt construction and flat-out stumpiness, because it is one of a very small minority that shows the structure to be canonical, with a little church at top. The enormous stairway is just completely out of proportion to the purpose of the structure, the effort falling into some sort of odd advanced-child category.

If Italo Calvin’s “Invisible Cities” or (better yet) Jorge Borges’ “The Circular Ruins” were to be illustrated, this image would fit right in.

The other very unusual bit here, is that Scheuchzer also provides a plan for the city that was to be built around the tower–I’m pretty sure that I haven’t seen references to this before, and the Biblical references to it are no help whatsoever in determining its physical aspects.

There are probably very few things that could be as blank or as empty as combative, competing, nonsensical and completely self-referential language or communication. Well, except for Scheuchzer’s very empty town plan locating the tower in an urban setting–a listless place of surrounded circles of nothingness for a place in which everything is said and nothing is understood. Ground Zero for blank

language.

Notes:

Two interesting books that I should mention that address the ideas
of fantastic/imaginary architecture and decay are C. W. Thomsen, Visionary
Architecture: From Babylon to Virtual Reality, (Prestel, 1994) ; and Paul Zucker, Fascination of Decay (Gregg Press, 1968).

*

Kupfer-Bibel, in welcher die Physica sacra, oder geheiligte
Natur-Wissenschafft derer in heil. Schrifft vorkommenden naturlichen
sachen, deutlich erklart und bewahrt, printed in Augsburg and Ulm
by C.U. Wagner, 1731-1735. Offered in four volumes, illustrated with
758 plates, it is a magnificent work, if not altogether correct, or
even near- correct, with an enormously confused pedigree, implying the
wisdom and text of the Bible (and the old Testament at that) as the
background for a physical history of the world.

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Architecture and Building — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Blank and Empty Space: the Empty Earth, 2nd Day, Genesis XI

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Blank and Empty series, Part 18.

Jean-Jacques Scheuchzer created this cold, lonely, empty picture of the creator’s handiwork on the second day of “creation”. It is found in his Kupfer-Bibel, in welcher die Physica sacra, oder geheiligte Natur-Wissenschafft derer in heil. Schrifft vorkommenden naturlichen sachen, deutlich erklart und bewahrt, printed in Augsburg and Ulm by C.U. Wagner, 1731-1735. Offered in four volumes, illustrated with 758 plates, it is a magnificent work, if not altogether correct, or even near- correct, with an enormously confused pedigree, implying the wisdom and text of the Bible (and the old Testament at that) as the background for a physical history of the world. BE that as it may, Scheuchzer was an able scientist, professor of mathematics and physics, director of libraries, and somewhere in there he became one of the founders of paleontology. This work is a little hard for me to understand as piece of the history of science; its hard to get around the incredible ideas ensconced in deeply Baroque borders. This sort of encyclopedic approach to knowledge—especially without the Bible part—would have to wait another 45 years ro so for the great work of Diderot. For now, we are left here in 1735 with this picture of the empty Earth, waiting for the rest of it.

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Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Blank and Empty Things 17—Echoes and Silences Change Places, 1929-1931

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In the American motion picture industry, the sound technician position did not exist in 1927; in about 1000 days it would be almost as important as the director. 1927 marked the first year of the synchronous, simultaneous sound-on-film motion picture, with the first commercial production appearing in 1929. Prior to this, all dialog, all sound effects, were confined to the mind of the viewer. Two years later, sound was in, and silence (as an absolute, give) was out. The subtitles of having sound had an overwhelming effect on the medium—not only because the actors could speak, but because they could also act within the subtitles of now being heard. Whereas just the other day actors had to pantomime hearing different sorts of sound, or act in such a way that the audience knew that they were weeping—much had to be visually over-acted to support the lack of actually being able to hear things. Once sound was incorporated, the dramatic range of actors advanced exponentially. Of course there was also everything else outside of voice that could be incorporated by the director: ticking clocks, advancing footsteps, thunder, sirens, heartbeat, a soft wail, a chortle, an echo. And silence could now be used to its true effect, its importance rediscovered.

The last, true silent film came in 1931, with Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. Chaplin acted/directed/produced the film, which, interestingly, was not really, altogether, absolutely, a “silent” film. The movie—which directors Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tartofsky both selected as their fifth film in their top-ten all-time movie lists—actually used idiosyncratic and unintelligible sounds as speech in a spectacular salute to non-speech speech. This was one smart man.

The advent of sound curiously silenced the careers of some of the great silent-era actors whose voices were really just beyond reach and the range of the enjoyable. Clara Bow bowed out as a result of her deep Brooklyn accent, as did John Gilbert for his very high-pitched voice, and many others. Such are the few ironies that came along with this rich technical advancement, small price to pay for a piece of the future.

(Image at right is of Chaplin and Einstein at the premier of City Lights.)

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Inglorious Glory of the Atomic Bomb: National Geographic Society’s Mistaken Salute to Admiral William Blandy

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This odd graphic appeared as the entire front cover of the National Geographic Society’s Lecture Program pamphlet for 1946. It is strange to me, the use of the photo and its cropping, its brightness–weirdly, the image seems to me to be almost “happy”. The lead lecture for the series was Admiral William P. Blandy, who was one of the only leading military men (along with Dwight Eisenhower) to voice disapproval on the military use of the atomic bomb. Blandy (28 June 1890 – 12 January 1954, first in his class at USNA, Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance from 1941 to 1943; then Commander, Group 1, Amphibious Force, Pacific Fleet.) went on after the war to become the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Special Weapons, most notably in the early periods at Operation Crossroads.

Crossroads was the nuclear weapons tests conducted during the summer of 1946 at the Marshall Islands, and included the fourth and fifth (Able and Baker) tests of atomic bombs (the first being at Trinity, the other two at Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The picture on the front cover of the NGS pamphlet is for Test Able—the Japanese battleship Nagato (shown in the painting below, listing, 1946), the ship in command of the Japanese forces for the attack on Pearl Harbor, was one of the ships used in this blast for test purposes. It was not sunk in the explosion, nor was it sunk immediately afterwards when charges were detonated on her sides. The ship did eventually list and sink.

The choice of this image for Bandy’s lecture bothers me. He never liked the bomb, being more dissatisfied with “the breath of death” from the weapon—its radioactivity—than its immediate destructive power. He referred to it as “a form of poison warfare”.

I don’t think he was much satisfied with his position. Of his work there in the Marshalls he said:
“The bomb will not start a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy, as one of my critics labeled me, exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim.”

Just so there is no confusion:

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons — Militaria
Blank and Empty History 16: Food & Shelter Ticket for the “Waste” of Society, 1917

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Think what you will of the religious organization of General Booth’s Salvation Army, they really do some good albeit with a whomping hammer of the creator’s message at the end of it all. This is the 16th in a series of posts on the History of Blank and Empty Things, an unfilled, blank ticket for the promise of a safe and warm place to sleep and a good sturdy meal. It was a promise for some sort of hope, for attention, addressed to “the waste” of society, the specialty of the Army, “fighting want and hunger and hopelessness”, doing this via the “industrial home”, training men for work and finding them jobs. The Salvation Army was adamantly opposed to “wanton charities”: “the bread line breads bums; banish the Bread Line!; the professional beggar is created by indiscriminate charity…” They took a very hard line. On the other hand the hard line may not have worked all that well for far as filling the ranks for the soldiers of god; people certainly took advantage of the charity offered by the SA. The financial report for the Industrial Home (in Washington DC) for 1917 showed that there were 122 meetings held, with an attendance if 4,300, with 34,921 meals supplied, and 21,215 beds made available–and only 21 “conversions”.

The blank admission card for the industrial home, shown below, seems to me a look at a piece of hope that may have been in the hands of a person who needed it; I can imagine staring at it, wondering what I should do with it, exactly; to take the help, or not. In 1917, there weren’t that many options….

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Working in the Crust Room: What our Grandfathers Did for Us

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The tanning industry was large and important in the United States, and stayed that way for many years, until the last few decades, anyway, when the work got farmed out to other countries and when leather was replaced by other cheaper and more toxic material.

This pamphlet–The Story of Leather, the Ohio Leather Company, and printed in 1935— is an introduction to the tanning business, and takes the reader on a tour of the plant. Unlike many pamphlets that I have here on this variety, this one doesn’t take the camera away to wait for the workers to change into work clothing that they would never in a million years wear on the job. The camera stays, the workers–all men–walk in front of the shutter, and the image is captured forever–or at least sort-of forever, as they are now for the first time (like the great majority of the images on this blog) offered to any/everyone on the internet.

The amazing thing for me is the high level, the high percentage, of unusual, intellectually-clamorous names that are given to the divisions of labor in the factory.

The Crust Room (!), Fat Liquor, assistant tackers, hair men, stackers, seasons, trip drivers, rolling jacks, nappers, grain buffers–all relate to something having to do with pulling, treating, stretching, and such to hides, or skin. As a matter this happened to a (claimed) 879,000,000 pounds of hide in the U.S. (That’s almost a billion pounds of skin, which means, I suppose, that it must be coming from at least 80,000,000 cows and sheep. A year.) Soaking tubs, unhairing machines (?!), scudding machines and lime paddles, chrome rooms, tanning drums, pickle paddles, fleshing machines; all telling an unpretty story. The pictures tell the rest of the story–most of the men look hot, wet, a little dirty and befouled, with many of them working in puddles; I would’ve expected that these men would have nice leather aprons to protect them from some of the dangerous machines and chemicals, but I don’t see any at all.

This was hard and dirty, stinking work. It was performed by peoples’ grandfathers, providing food for the table and money for an education for their children.

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Bad Ideas