JF Ptak Science Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad Ideas Department: Children, Tall Ladders and Bees

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From the Bad Ideas Department, and from the deeper/further "what the hell!?: sub-department, comes this bizarre offering.  I don't know what the photographer or writer or publisher or whomever was thinking--or, for that matter, what the graphics department was doing, when they put this photo on the cover of this skimpy children's rag, inducing an automatic cringe respond from any thinking person. The Child in Nature, Studies in Visualization is a mystery--what were these people thinking, or trying to think, or visualize? (And let me just point out that this was a "happy" book, not an Aesopian tale of possible woe and lessons-to-be-learned-the-hard-way book.) There is a picture on the inside of the result of this activity, but the swollen-up eye of the finger-poking child was just too much to bear, and so I just couldn't possibly publish it.  Released by the Expression Company (?) of Boston in 1939, I would hope that those responsible have gone on to receive their appropriate rewards. 

Its just shockingly, stupidly,  stupid.

Bizarre & Naive Surreal Book Titles: Sex, God, Food, and Clean (and Colorful) Blood

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Continuing a minor thread on bizarre and spectacularly mundane book titles comes today's entries on the various uses of "sex" in finding high-ideal  religion and a proper waistline. Harry Haas had a very simple answer to sex (a concept that I was frankly surprised to see described in three words):"low cultural sex instincts" lead to "low cultural levels", the reverse evidently never entering the writer's mind.  Sex "was not a moral issue", but an instinct "which like other instincts must be satisfied in one way or another". It is also "Nature's unscientific way of propagating the human races--the pre-logical and instinctive, the animal way".  He asks the reader "why do some of us read these risque publications if they are so degrading? Tobacco Road and various other pornographic diversions, I mean "[sic]. Mr. Haas doesn't know, but he does believe that the sex problem was vast, "a modifying agent in our personality growth" which "is responsible for an enormous amount of neurosis (and) seen to be at the bottom of the world's greatest achievements".  This leads of course to babies "blind, crippled and diseased and mentally hopeless--all of which find their common origin in sex troubles, feelings processes or chemical changes.  Probably nine-tenths of our anxieties, if not the major cause of world unrest, can be traced back to sex". Mr. Haas then gets to his major and remarkably scarce question:  "could it be that the writers and interpolators of the Bible were themselves unconsciously afflicted with sex troubles?"  He then takes this issue far and wide, and frankly by this point everything got so muddied and biblical that I just lost interest.  But the title is still good enough to stand firm and true, even if the the author didn't get to an answer, except to suggest that you purchase his pamphlet on the  psychoanalysis of  the bible--it was available for one dollar, postpaid, and had something to do with Albert Einstein.  He published this booklet on his own  in Orangeburg, S.C., in 1941, while the world was hell bent on some religico-sex-fueled instinct war.

Ernst J. Stevens ("Chromo-dietician and Expert Human Analyst") let loose his spongy  Nulife Sex-Diet Book III of the Social Science Series (Illustrated) in 1934--it is one of that class of books that doesn't look right, doesn't feel right, and smells a little like it spent too long lost under the cushion of a chair in a bad place.  His book is a hopeless melange of shrinko-babble, blood coloring and therapeutic color use wrapped around dietary "laws" of dubious value.  Having dispensed with 10 chapters in 15 pages, Dr. Stevens takes on "Color, Music, Taste and Skin Odors" after having established a priority in "colors in our flesh, colors in our thoughts and colors in our foods" and their connects to color balance and blood cleansing skin beautifiers.  That sounds like a lot to deal with in 15 five-inch-tall pages, but that's the least of it--the true metier of the book was also woven through everywhere, the messages of vim and vigor and health sense and mixing of the sexes colliding at every level with everything else.  It is a powerhouse display of some sort of need that I cannot identify.  The title, of course, is super. 

 

Legislating a Change in Pi Day (3.14): When 3.2 was "Almost" Pi, Indiana, 1897

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The issue of establishing scientific validity and fact through political and religious machinations, rumination, fascinations and condemnations has a grindingly used, odd history, and little of it comes to much of a good end.  Usually it is just a bad idea, or a wronger-than-bad stinkingly non-idea; that, or something with a sickening wiff of eau de maison funeral perfumery.  I’m not so sure about whether anyone has legislated that a point in space exists, or that non-Euclidean stuff is twisted, or that the world (as in “Earth”) began precisely at 11:11 am (?!) on the first day of the first week of the first month of the first year 4004 BCE.  Biological matters have been taken more seriously in the legislature and courts, at least in my country, than stuff in physics and math—the meaning of death has more or less been legislated, while the whole issue of sustainable “human” life has been battered around for decades (with the last administration’s elephantine approach to things like stem cell research now just being lifted following eight years of abuse).  Many examples begin to emerge when looking deeper into the history of science, especially with the influence of the churches, hammering evidently tender belief systems on top of scientific endeavors.

The issue with mathematics and the law seems mostly limited to weights and measures and time, which is logical; I’m not so sure about the more ethereal stuff, except for the very famous example of the Indiana pi debacle of 1897.  It was in this that the solemn state legislature was nearly hoodwinked by an amateur semi-mathematician, crank and number cruncher named Edwin Goodwin, who persuaded the people who need to persuaded and had a bill* introduced in the Indiana General Assembly—it basically established that the value of pi be set at 3.2   t his makes not too much sense until you realize that the only good that could come of this tripe is to use it in one of a never ending series of attempts at squaring the circle. 

The bill of course almost made it all the way through—it started life in the place where it should’ve ended, in the Committee on Swamp Lands, and then blazed its way through Education and eventually passed unanimously by the Indiana house.  Had it not been for the serendipitous acuity of Purdue professor C.A. Waldo—who alerted the state senators about its humbug nature, where the bill was finally shuttled into its everlasting postponement….in the Committee on Temperance. 

 

*A Bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth and offered as a contribution to education to be used only by the State of Indiana free of cost by paying any royalties whatever on the same, provided it is accepted and adopted by the official action of the Legislature of 1897.

Naively Surreal Bad Ideas: Marriage, Women, Satan and Fleshy Ribs

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Well.  In this tortuously ripped 1907 poetic headbanger on blame and retribution and innocence--and somehow ultimately about capital punishment--are neural squeezings that I have never seen or heard before, which are so loftily bad, and so logically weak, as to make a grown man puddle-up in amazement.  I don't want to get too far into this thing, as the entire entertainment part of the work can stop right at the sub-title, because this little pamphlet is just tremendously bad, it transcends being about bad; it climbs out of badness into the so-bad-it-is-good department, and then slips instantly into the bad-good-bad-bad genre.  

Listen:
Since woman has been made of a rib of man, and is the "pupil of man's schooling",

How then can woman obviate
the crimson flesh of shame;
when man becomes degenerate,
is woman then to blame?

For woman being part of man,
and should she cause an aching,
how can her sins be other than
the image of his making

It goes on from there, of course, but we really don't need to follow.  The answer, by the way, is "yes".

When I first saw Rev. Posey  Sr's.1947  pamphlet I thought that it read "How to be Happy Through Marriage".  Oops.  My mistake, though the title as it stands is infinitely more entertaining, what with the story being told in ten thrilling chapters (seeded over 28 sparse pages).  In the final installment of these prescriptions for happiness in spite of it all, we are reminded that "Satan is God's arch enemy", and that "IF YOU WOULD BE HAPPY KEEP SATAN OFF YOUR SHIP" and "do all to the glory of god" and MARRY IN SEASON".  DO NOT marry a man for a "meal ticket", or "to keep him from marrying someone else", and DO NOT marry too soon or too late. And so on.  [Caps in original.]

There's much more sage advice sprinkled liberally around biblical verses, but I think you've already gotten enough of the  flavor to appreciate the rest of the meal (food itself sometimes getting in the way of its promise).

Titles of the Sublime Mundane: the Empty Calories of the Over-Obvious

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Sometimes publications have absolutely no pretense, stating exactly what it is that sleeps between their covers. And sometimes these titles seem more like declarative broadsides or posters and not books at all, the "book part", or any writing furthering the cover's statement,  being unnecessary.  The first example here (and one which begs the response "yup!"), Saturn Has Rings, written in 1944 by Donald Lee Cyr (of El Centro), should've stopped at the end of the title of chapter one, "A Rose has Petals".  But no, it didn't, and stretched itself over another fifty thin pages. 

Frederick Blaine Humphrey's Know Your Groceries (1931) takes an unexpected twist, spiraling into something called "biochesspathy", "natural dianetics", and somehow "applying the natural science of the Bible...to the philosophy of youth and health". 

The Book of Envelope Facts...yes.  This is actually a lovely book, in its very special way, with 55 pages of non-stop facts and semi-useless information on envelopes.  Chapter Two's "Arousing Interest with Envelopes" competes wildly with Chapter Three "Attracting Attention with Envelopes" and Chapter Four's "Creating Desire with Envelopes".  It is completed with eight pages of a glossary of envelope terms.

This last example, Alice Mills' Notes on Reading Aloud, really doesn't belong, because it is mainly on acting; but the title is so lovely I just couldn't resist. 

Bad Titles Department: Huh? Confusing Nothingness, Making Stuff, and Radio Hair

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There is a constant and imaginary warfare going on among certain categories in this blog:  mainly, its "bad ideas" vs. "outsider logic" vs. "impossible books".  The result is that I just give up and fold them all into each other so I don't have to think about them at all.  I also haven't made many entries in these areas because, well, there's just so many of them to deal with--but I can tell you that they would make a fantastic Mystery Books gallery show, especially if the viewers were made to supply their interpretation of what the written material was all about from their problematic, time-sucking covers and titles.  And I can tell you that reading the content sometimes doesn't help to understand the title or the cover art, the logic of investigation passing through it all like a stony Bushism (where you know that something was said,  with words, but that's about all). 

Take for example Scorn Not That Which You Do Not Understand:  the title begs you to do so as you read it, though it took me a few turns to actually understand what it was saying.  The problem with the tiny pamphlet is that once you've read a few pages, you know a little less about the book before you knew it existed, which is a hard thing to do.  (The writing goes downhill after the title.) 

The Making of Things made me not want to know what was being made, and so I have not to this day opened it, though I judge from outside appearances that it was published around 1940 and is at least three pages long.  The title is just so on-beyond simple that knowing what it actually refers to is bound to disappoint. 

Station Hair, Hair and its Care, is a written radio broadcast from Station H-A-I-R (brought to you by George Elia of the Hair Culture Service of Milwaukee Wisconsin, and evidently with offices in the Lake Wobegon region near Overthere, Minnesota), taches us all how to have healthy, radiant and attractive hair good enough for radio.  In the looks-made-for-radio genre, my own hair (or whatever it is) is definitely in the hair-made-for-radio department, so long as I get enough bootblack to color my scalp. 

(This leads me to a semi-connected memory:  does anyone remember a street person in Manhattan, midtown, who was a drummer, with gigantic painted-on jet black eyebrows and painted-on black hair?  This wouild've been around 1970.  He was heavy, short, and would walk around with drumsticks and play on whatever was available, announcing, if I recall correctly, the famous drummer that he was immitating. He had to have been a famous street performer....Ring a bell with anyone.  Jeff?)

Blank & Empty Things 36: Sold Shadows and Fat Chairs (Peter Schlemiehl and Joseph Bueys)

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On the heels of my last post on the usefulness of constructing geologies of wrongness and on the extraction by Creationists of something from nothing comes today’s bit, where something really does come from nothing, and where (again) nothing of something is extracted from nothing. 

1)  Something from Nothing

How old are shadows?  Or, really, how old is the depiction of the shadow in the history of western art?  The shadow predates the modern re-discovery of classical perspective by a thousand years—little bits of shadows pop up here and there in deep antiquity, certainly way before Uccello and Alberti and the rest came along.  On the other hand shadows do escape notice of many painters in the 15^th century (and during the period of being very comfortable with the century-old realignment of perspective), which is odd, unless all of those works were depicting scenes at high noon or thereabouts. 

The something-from-nothing part with shadows comes from the odd and somewhat creepy story of Peter Schlemihl (Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, "Peter Schlemihl's Remarkable Story") written in 1814 by the semi-ruined Franco/German aristocrat Adelbert von Chamisso.  In one adventure, Peter, unfortunately poor in a land of the wealthy, makes an agreement with a mysterious grey man (who is probably the devil) to sell his shadow for a bottomless purse of gold.  In an 1861 British edition of this work, the great George Cruikshank portrays the very moment when the shadow is being literally lifted from the ground by the mysterious grey man—the point of contact between his hand and the shadow just gives me the willies.  The grey man’s own shadow, arching behind him, is also very threatening and terribly offputting to me.  Perhaps it is just a  great wrongness, making the shadow something from its vast nothingness.  (And the story goes that the gold is never-ending, but people are so repulsed by Peter not having a shadow that it makes his life supremely difficult—so much so that the grey man returns with a new deal, offering to Peter his shadow and the endless purse if only he would relinquish his soul when he died.  Peter begs off, throws away the purse, and lives without his shadow and without money.)

Hans Christian Andersen also provides a scary fairy tale in 1847 called "The Shadow", in which a man’s shadow slips away and is replaced by another shadow which slips back (slowly) into the old shadow’s place—but it is not what it seems:  "I have gone through the most terrible affair that could possibly happen; only imagine, my shadow has gone mad; I suppose such a poor, shallow brain, could not bear much; he fancies that he has become a real man, and that I am his shadow.”

2)  Nothing from Something from Nothing.

Yes, this is terribly convoluted, but the title fits the subject, and the subject is Josef Beuys (1921-1986), a German artist (or perhaps he was a performer in art) who broadly dabbled in conceptual art.  He came to prominence in the 1960’s, when the acceptance of these art performances was as much a work of art as the art piece itself, and, I guess, he has remained, his appreciations now gaining an antique patina. 

I wanted to address his work, Fat Chair.  The title doesn’t quite describe the work, which is a chair with a wedge of fat on it.  Many a critic’s eyebrow has been plucked trying in deep intellectual desperation to see something in this work. Under the weight of these artistic appraisals of this work, I’ve just got to say, really, sometimes fat on a chair is just that.  I can appreciate Beuys as an artist and performer of his times, but the deep thought that has gone into Fat Chair is a bit much for my taste, praising observers biting off much more than can be chewed.  For example, from one website we see:

“ ‘Fat Chair’ (1964) is much more about the physicality of the human body. To Beuys, fat as a material could be considered before form was considered… Fat…appealed to Beuys b

ecause it was a composite with no internal structure…Beuys placed fat with its “chaotic organic energy”, symbolising warmth, in the cold, rigid, man-made form of a right-angle. This form, which represented the coexistence of instinct and intellect was placed in the right-angle of a chair between seat and back. The fat also occupies space on the chair that would be filled with our digestive and excretive organs if we were sitting on it.”

Another website states “Fat…was an ideal material for Beuys to use to sign

chaos and the potential for spiritual transcendence. Fat has the ability to exist as a physical example of two extremes: a flowing liquid when warm and a defined solid when cold. Beuys also believed that fat was psychologically effective, in that "people instinctively feel it relates to inner processes and feelings."

I’m sorry to not include the references for these opinions—it is just to painful, too embarrassing to ascribe them blame.  And they are hardly alone in this hagiographic myopia, pulling these strands of something from nothing about nothing. 

I’d prefer to leave it all at nothing in regard to the Beuys (or to Andres Serrano or Damien Hirst and so on),  thinking about lovely Ludwig’s self-abandoned seventh proposition (“Where (or of what) one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence”).  Better yet, better to apply the one of the last lines of the great classic “The Street of Laredo” (the Johnny Cash version of course)—when the young dying cowboy is asked about who shot and killed him, he simply says, in the best cowboy fashion, “speak not his name, and his name will pass on.”. 

Blank and Empty Things: the Case of pre-Biblical "Missing" Eclipses, Refuting Darwin, and the Geology of Wrongness

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A History of Blank and Empty Things #35.

Mr. R.R. Menke, the author The Challenge from the Skies, Planetary Motion and its Solemn Witness Against Evolution and Higher Criticism, self-published his biblico-religico-astronomical diatribe against Charles Darwin in Huntington Park, California, in 1925.  What he launches in 51 labored pages against one of the most elegant ideas in the history of science  is simply, well, shocking; shockingly eyebrows-catching-on-fire bad, so-bad-it-isn't-even-bad bad.  Without reading the whole, um, thing, I do get the piercing whiff of a notion having to do with eclipses and the true date of seven (?) days of creation.  He uses some sort of chrono-alchemy layered in spreadable butter, the words made of microscopic asparagus, to prove his point that "as a consequence of the verified truth of these cycles of time, we are bound to believe that there were no eclipses before the prime date (5923 years ago)".  No eclipses before creation.  AND no precession  of the equinoxes, "no seasons before the prime date, no cycles of 360 years before the prime date".  Oh my.

His conclusion, by virtue of this magnificently weighty evidence (and which he doesn't even relegate to its own paragraph), is "Therefore Darwin's theory of evolution has no place in the domain of astronomical science..."  And this is so not so much, evidently, that there were no eclipses, and no seasons, and no 360-year cycles (?!), but rather, at the base of it all, there was nothing. No earth.  And since the earth is only 60 centuries or whatever old Darwin just doesn't work.  I have no idea why the eclipse business was necessary if Mr. Menke was going to argue that there was no "there" there for anything to happen, what with the impracticable nature of having something in nothing. 

There you have it.  There's more, much more, but frankly it just isn't worth the 20 minutes to dig out more.  I rarely read anything in Creation Sc__nc_ as there is nothing redeeming at all in it--I'm posting this today because it strikes me that this present work isn't necessarily singularly bad, but rather representationally bad.  Since the entire belief/hope/prayer system or whatever the Creationists claim as the intellectual/moral basis to their Principa in explaining the stuff of the universe is painfully wrong, and bad, and potentially harmful, I wonder why we should distinguish the levels of badness and wrongness?  It isn't as though  establishing a geology of wrongness will somehow categorize it all in such a way that something worthwhile could be discovered, like a miraculous toe-hold at the top of the  Sisyphusian hill they're trying to slide up.  And so perhaps Mr. Menke's work is just wrong, along with the rest of the others; perhaps the other side needs to deal with him as being one of their own more so than anyone else.  Certainly there are more elegant refutations than this unfortunate attempt, but that only makes the wrongness prettier:  a pig in a (white) wedding gown is still, after all, a pig.

Inside-Out Privacy: Hermits, St. Simeon, and Cellular Phones

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"Language is just no damned good."--Marcel Duchamp

It seems to me that when cellular telephones first appeared, they were to deliver a certain amount of privilege, a promise of speed in communication that would allow for more personal time and privacy.  But that was many years ago, back when paying for cable television meant no commercials.  The promise, or possibility, of privacy as a result of using this Ponzi scheme of constant data streaming is a demolished and smoldering pile, missing the smolder and the pile.  There's just nothing in that smoking promise-hole:  no smoke, and not even a hole. 

What it is, I think, is privacy turned inside out:  everything on the inside is now on the outside, a great big visible and vocal outside. 

Privacy, which means to me the promise of some time in which to do a little thinking, is much more in line, say, with the pursuit of a personal space:  not necessarily like that of the beautiful hermit in the image to the left here, but it at least represents the possibility of quiet, which represents a possibility of order and image-making, which in turn represents dreaming or thought or perhaps nothing at all.  It does mean something to the lead monk in this engraving, which belongs to the beautiful Illustrium Anachoretarum Elogia sive religiosi Viri Musaeum ("The Museum of Hermits") of Giacomo Cavaccio (published in Venice in 1625).  This is a beautiful and remarkable book, with 32 full-page engravings punctuating 150 pages of text  surveying the literature and imagery of, yes, hermits.  Although living very simply, these hermits were all in order, living cleanly, with an impressive two-dozen or more books in their little huts.  St. Anthony, another very quiet thinker, lived in a similar fashion but without books and whose story was unknown until it came (post mortem by thirty years) to St. Augustine, appearing in his Confessions.

On the other hand, in the history of quiet asceticism (athletae Dei, "athlete of god"),a hermit without the need of a hermitage, or quiet, or aloneness, a hermit who turned the concept of private thought inside out, was St. Simeon Stylites.  I'm sorry to say that he sounded to me like a person in desperate need to be seen being thoughtful and to display his quiet and dedication loudly.  Chained to an ever-heightening pillar, doing sit ups and reciting his conversations with the creator of the universe, Simeon made it into heaven as a saint after treading the earth as one.  Still he seems to have been the opposite of the expected.

I wonder about this legacy of the invasion of the cell phone; I have little doubt that it is just the barest blink of future invasions of privacy to come, unstoppable and ultimately unwantable. M. Duchamp did say this about words--though he was talking about written and spoken, words--once they left the privacy of the brain, their meanings got all messed up. The interruption of privacy was what corrupted them and their meaning. ("I use it  (language) because I have to" Duchamp said.)  

I can't help but think about the speed of deliverables in the Brave New World.  It reminds me of an observation made by Mikhail Matyushin, in 1915: "Only motion cystallizes outward appearance into a single whole...a speeding train fuses the separatness of the cars into a compact mass..."  He goes on to say that "when at last we shall rush rapidly past objectness we shall probably see the totality of the whole world", though I think that he got that part of it backwards, or perhaps inside out. 

Crowds #5: Clarity and Confusion in Displays of Human Masses.

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I do enjoy looking at pictures of crowds--big crowds.  Images of the crowd are much easier to find in the 19th century and onwards (and particularly in photographs), though big displays of human seas (such as they were) began to show up in the late 15th century, and then, more as a matter of course, in the early 16th century.  What is enjoyable for me are the numerous vignettes that make up the whole, discrete visions within the larger visual field, a sweep of smallnesses that can seemingly stand on their own had they been bigger. 

Depicting crowds can be a chore successful and not--for example, the image to the left, an amalgamated porridge of controlled mock combat, a sweeping chaos with appreciative bystanders, is so busy, and has so many constituent parts, that there 

really isn't a "whole".  I can hardly see the thing, for crying out loud, for all of the disconnected action.  The artist who produced this remarkably good/bad image for Georg Ruexner's fantastic Anfamg, Ursprung und Herkomen de Thirnirs in Teutscher Nation (published in 1530) clearly had interest only in the details of the action; and thus the overall image is a beautiful confusion of starts and fits, defiant in its general appeal to comprehension.  The impression to me is a miserably layered oneness of discordant activity, a sloppy relief of enormous detail, the whole worth far less than the sum of its parts. 
The only place that your eye gets a chance to rest and focus is on the two dozen or so spectators who are in the windows and balconies overlooking the small square where the tournament was taking place--their appearance, and also that of the small assembly of musicians at center, offer a calming influence to the rest of the picture.
One bit that leaps out at me, though, are the two small boys who seem to be having a fistfight, right there at the bottom-right of the image.  I can tell you that pictures of boys fighting finding their way into piece of renaissance art is a very rare thing.  Perhaps the artist was trying to send us a message, after all?

(I know this is a pretty big complaint, particularly since the book is a monumental work on The Tournament, and it was done within the first 65 years or so of the invention of movable type printing, but I just found the thing so opitcally  corrosive that I wanted to surface it. )

The second example, coming to us from Antonio Mongitore (L'Atto Pubblico di Fede Solennemente Celebrato nella citta di Palermo, 1724) depicts an earlier scene, and one of complexity and order.  Unfortunately, the cohesion centers around the execution of two tried/convicted heretics--god knows what they did to deserve this cleansing sentence. It didn't take all that much during the Inquisition to find yourself in deep black waters, as Mother Church seems to have been extraordinarily thin-skinned; the slightest abrasion to their slight slate of moral indignities could result in being hurt in foul way, and then burned alive at the stake. 

But in looking closer at this image, I'm not sure sure that these two unfortunates were actually being burnt--it may be that they were being roasted alive.

They are seated, and the pyre seems to be only behind them--perhaps the flames hadn't reached them yet; but people were in fact roasted, cooked alive, which may be even more girzzly than being consumed entirely by flames.  The two are being approached, or watched, or offered too-late benedictions by a line of clerics shielded by a crucifix--perhaps they were just reminding the condemned exactly who it was that they had pissed off. 

There is no doubt that this was a popular diversion for those not in fear of being burnt at the stake, as there are probably hundreds of people in attendance, including those in a semi-circle of pre-modern "skybox" accommodations--undoubtedly the holier folks.  Piety of witnessing best in privacy and all that. 

A Beautiful Book of Terrible Things: Artillery, 1623

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 522

Praxis Artolleriae Pyrotechnicae, printed in Osnabruck by Tilman Buchholtz for Johann Georg Schwaender, is one of those beautiful books of horrible things; beautifully designed and illustrated, with magnificent images of the horrifying necessaries that bind and tear nations and people.  Flying and land-based weapons o fall sorts filled these pages:  rocket, grenades, land mines, plus pyrotechnics and fireworks.  As jolly as this implement might seem, it is not a firework, at least not one for entertainment:  it was meant to dismember or kill.  Those "arrows" on the ring are not showing the direction of the flight of the module--they are spears.  This was a lethal weapon of the highest order--pretty, not-so-simple, and deadly.

Some other beautiful terribles, published to about the year 1600, include: 

Roberto VALTURIO 1472 Vérone De re militari

Niccolo Fontana TARTAGLIA  1537  La Nova Scientia

Vanoccio BIRINGUCCIO  1540 : De La Pirotechnia

Conrad HAAS  1556 : Kunstbuch

Girolamo CATANEO 1564 : Opera nuova di fortificare, offendere et difendere, et far gli alloggiamenti campali.

Thomas DIGGES  1579 Arithmetical military treatise.

Gabriello BUSCA 1584 Istruzione dei Bombardieri.   1585  Della espugnatione et difesa delle fortezze.  1606 :Della Architeltura militare.  

Luys COLLADO 1586 Practica manuale di artegliera.

Jean BEAVIE 1591 Liège La pyrotechnie militaire

Daniel DAVELOURT  1597 Briefve Instructions Sur Le Fait De L'artillerie de France.
- 1606  L’Artillier.
- 1608 : L'Arsenal et le magasin d'artillerie.
- 1617  L'Art et la conduite des eaux sur le fait de l'Artillerie de  et ses dépendances

Joseph BOILLOT.  1598 Modelles, artifices de feu et divers instrumens de guerre 

Gabriele BUSCA da Milano 1605 Della espugnatione et difesa delle fortezze.
1598 Istruttione de' bombardieri.  

Eugenio GENTILINI  1598 Instruttione di artglieri.

David RIVAULT de FLURENCE 1605 Les elemens de l’artillerie concernans tant la theorie que la pratique du canon.
1608 L’invention description & demonstration d’une nouvelle artillerie qui ne se charge que d’air ou d’eau pure, & à neantmoins une incroiable force. Plus d’une nouvelle facon de pouldre a canon tres-violente qui se faict d’or, par un excellent & rare artifice non communiqué jusques à present. L’histoire du progrez & des premiers usages des armes à feu tant recentes qu’anciennes, est deduitte en l’avant-propos.  

Leonhard ZUBLER 1608  Nova geometrica pyrobolia - Neuwe geometrische Büchsenmeisterery.

Stepping UP to Heaven: the Beautiful Dead of Los Angeles

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 516

DEAD, adj.

Done with the work of breathing; done
With all the world; the mad race run
Though to the end; the golden goal
Attained and found to be a hole!
      —Squatol Johnes (Amrbose Bierce in his Devil's Dictionary.)

A first step up toward Heaven? What was Mr. Barton thinking, outside, perhaps, of filling up pages with words so that he could collect 10-cents apiece for them?  His pen was so filled with sugar (I'm sure that I got a case of The Diabetes just from reading the words) and his exaltations of being in the cemetery were so gloriously and morbidly obese that one could only but fling oneself under the next trolley to Burbank  to get to the luscious dirtnap promised for the departed at Forest Lawn. I mean, dirt never tasted sooo good.  This pamphlet, published in 1935, was basically a sales brochure for tourists--the sales number made for prospective departeds would have to had been something far more enticing--at least it would have had to cost a lot more to print.  But what I think the Forest Lawn people were doing was trying to control a little bit of public attention and sympathy to generate ever more interest in the

sales of cemetery privileges and internment bric-a-brac for the noticables who could afford it.  It was still very expensive to sleep with the worms at Forest Lawn, even in the Depression--it seems as though the price of admission at the lowest end was in the order of a few thousand dollars, which was a lot in those days. But if a lot is what is cost to be dead in an expensive place, well, then so be it.  The place was decorated with casts of Renaissance statues and other High Art exuda that it was, well, perfectly awful.  (Or  in the words of Darren McGavin, who plays/was the wonderful father from A Christmas Story, when gazing for the first time on a spectacularly ugly table lamp made of a resin model of a woman's (provocative) leg, gasps (just as you're thinking he's about to retch into his own hands): "Its...indescribably beautiful!".).  Forest Lawn is just so.  I guess that it must be, because there's a quarter of a million people buried in there, and a million people visit them a year.  What with sections called Eventide, Babyland (for infants, shaped like a heart), Graceland, Inspiration Slope, Slumberland (for children and adolescents), Sweet Memories, Vesperland, Borderland (on the edge of the cemetery), and Dawn of Tomorrow, how could this place not be indescribably beautiful?  Listen:  it is beautiful enough for people to get married there.  Ronald Reagan did.  Case closed. 

Van Helmont's Lovely Title Page and his Sorry Slip into Curative Magnetism

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 514

Joan Baptiste van Helmont's A ternary of paradoxes : the magnetick cure of wounds, nativity of tartar in wine, image of God in man.
(printed in London  by James Flesher for William Lee, 1650), offers its own unintended paradoxes (and joined the field of relatively few books with the word "paradox" in their title).  Purportedly a work of science, van Helmont offers the reader his views on the curative powers of the loadstone.  Of particular interest is Helmont's (1579-1644) discussion of the weapon salve, a cure for injuries caused by knives and swords. The unique feature of this ointment was that it was not applied to the wound but to the weapon which caused the wound, though in the midst of other very problematic scientific observations, this wasn't so bad.  For example, Helmont presented a recipe for making scorpions, which involved bricks, sunlight and basil, from which a scorpion would come. 

And what exactly is Helmont's place in the history of science?  Difficult to say:  he did make several important physical discoveries, and did present what some have called the modern approach to experimentation (firm insistence on relateable objects in empirical observation and so on); however, he was a reaching alchemist misty mystic who rejected syllogistic thought, mathematics*, human reasoning.  These are hard bits to let go.

All this said, what with scorpions and magnetic treatment of wounds, he comes close to the generation of infection in wounds:  "Upon the solution of Unity in any part the ambient air...repleted with various

evaporations or aporrhoeas of mixt bodies, especially such as are then suffering the act of putrefaction, violently invadeth the part and thereupon impresseth an exotic miasm or noxious diathesis, which disposeth the blood successively arriving at the wound, to putrefaction, by the intervention of fermentation. " With his magnetic sympathy, Van Helmont expressed clearly the doctrine of immunity and the cure of disease by immune sera: "For he who has once recovered from that disease hath not only obtained a pure balsaamical blood, whereby for the future he is rendered free from any recidivation of the same evil, but also infallibly cures the same affection in his neighbour...and by the mysterious power of Magnetism transplants that balsaam and conserving quality into the blood of...'
Problematic greatness just needs to be understood in greater detail than simply disregarding everything because someone disdains logic...

Note:

The interesting image in the middle of the title page is more religious symbolism than what seems to be a straightforward physics reference, and the bulk of it lies in the "lumen de lumine" inference, which in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed confesses faith in Jesus Christ as Lumen de Lumine (Light from Light).  Once you replace the optics with the divine, the rest of the image and its relationship to the contetns of the obok becomes more clear.

* Helmont thought about the restrictiveness of mathematics, and that the quantitative aspects of things that math addressed missed their interior qualities, thus making mathematics not able to see what things are.  Oopsie.

The Zero Minus Zero Department: David Lynch Marionette Explains Surviving a Nuclear Holocaust

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 512

I wouldn't look at this linked video if it is bedtime where you are.  It is a singularly creepy experience, at least for me, to watch this exceptionally bad marionette go through the paces of explaining how rural folks should/could prepare for the consequences of Atomic Armageddon.  Delivered to god knows where by the Department of Defense in  1965, this cretinous, bunch-crotched, simian-fingered, dead eyed, helmet haired, waxy marionette with a Joker mouth that goes from ear-to-ear wants to help in ways that make you want to run into the flames to drink a flaming glass of Pure Radiation.  As we watch the ten or so shorts unfold, the creepiness grows denser and bolder, watching the shaky walls behind hay bales in the basement fortress, collecting the errant cow to stuff it into the bomb shelter with a pat on the butt, the deeply disturbing profile of Marionette Man watching tv, the fully-dressed-wide-eyed-shocked-into-consciousness-zombie sleep, the black mirror, and on and on. 

These films are bizarre, errant, meaningless masterpieces, sugar coating the End of Things with flippant advice from a scary man moved with shining string--could such an important message be delivered with less care and still be delivered? Well, yes, of course, as anyone who can still remember "duck and cover" exercises can tell you. These supposedly "uniquely" stupid messages bombed onto the American population were basically part of an entire genre of visual seduction that induced an intellectual collitis that enabled such broadcast monologues to be delivered in the first place.  The best way to lie and have your message be believed is Lie Big, and these public betterment messages were among the Biggest Lies of the decade.