JF Ptak Science Books

Things out of Place Department: a Cloud of Magnetism in the Sky Poked by the Needle of God

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 508

"And even though I'm sitting waiting for Mars
I don't believe there's any future in cause
Hole in the sky, gate way to heaven
Window in time, through it I fly..."

Black Sabbath, "Hole in the Sky", 1975

Well, there were many liberties taken with this title, though on the face of it, the title is correct (sort of).   This image comes from a relatively obscure (or at least quite rare) copy of  Joachim Dalance's work Traite de l'Aiman, divise en deux parties, la premiere continent les Experiences et la seconde les raisons que l'on en peut rendre... which was printed by Henry Weinstein in Amsterdam in 1687 (just across the waters in London Isaac Newton's fantabulous Prinmcipa Mathemtica was being printed in the same year).    This important work on magnetism featured a number of good and useful observations on magnetism, interspersed with some semi-useless bits:  the magnetically floated coffin of Mohamets is mentioned and disproved, the origin of magnetism is asserted by hypothesis and is not pretty, along with some "fanciful conception(s) of the magnet's potential"*; on the other hand, there is a mention of the invention of the compass, the real use of magnets, a mention of declination, and the orientation of a compass needle in a magnetic field is shown.  All pretty good stuff, considering the time.  (The magnum opus on the magnet was published in 1600m by William Gilbert and was called De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure (On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, and on the Great Magnet the Earth), though folks have been writing on magnetism since Aristotle and Thales)

M. Hofer, the author of the quote above, mentions that the pamphlet's images "are particularly good scientific illustrations", though doesn't mention this, figure 2, as being anything significant.  Trying to dissect the phenomenal imagery, which purports to depict the origins of the sources of magnetism, we see something like a "magnetic cloud" in the sky, about to be pricked by a needle held by the primum mobile.  That, or it is a missing piece of sky, a gapping hole, though not in the sense of what we're getting now in the ozone layer, or in the fantastic billion-light-year wide swath of nothingness in the foamy universe.  Perhaps it is more like the Black Sabbath lyrics after all, a hole in the sky, pricked by the creator, to loosen the fabric of magnetism and getting a glimpse of heaven.    Or something.  

[I should point out that Dalance was an out-and-about guy, with high-level correspondence, and who seemed to be at the right places at the right time.  Among many contributions to the sciences, Dalance--who was a friend of Henry Oldenbourg, helped introduce Huygens to the Royal Society as well as to the French Academy of Sciences, acting as an intermediary for the most part.  He seems to be an interesting guy.]

*--Ph. Hofer, Baroque Book Illustration, page 42

Bad Ideas: Advertisers in Your House and in Your Head, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 508

I have little doubt that in the near future we will be deluged with advertisement at any time and in any place, the ads made exactly for you, found for you by little crevices occupied by digicams with facial recognition software powered by the next 50 years of programming research, perhaps reaching into what has been defined as your genetic soul....and there will probably be no escaping it, unless you're able to pay somehow for the privilege of obscurity or silence.  The genre of force-feeding and creating need in the buying public for various bric-a-brac started was for real in the 1920's (this being in no small part the shrinkological efforts of the "father" of American behavioral psychology, John B. Watson) and cranked up considerably and with major dollars in the 1930's, when it was absolutely determined that 'proper" advertising could sell anything.  (Watson showed this with great effect when he determined that people didn't buy a "type" of cigarette more than they purchased the cigarette's image--and to determine the image what was improved was the walk-away catchphrase that purchasers could quickly identify with the product.  And so a lowly and failed cigarette brand structured for women was renamed and given a catchy sales tag--the cig was Marlboro and the phrase was of course "I'd Walk a Mile for a Camel".  Watson's contention was of course that people didn't buy the thing as much as they bought its promise, and the promise had to be delivered and reiterated to them endlessly, for years.) 

These two pamphlets naively displayed what the advertisers were really after, the continual search for the Golden Chalice--and that is to be in the head of the consumer, and then to be in their house, from initiating the desire to facilitating the purchase.  Both pamphlets were published in 1939 by the American Newspaper Publishers Association, and were a sales presentation for making sales presentations, an advertisement for the advertisers.  And they really did want to get into the mind of the public and insinuate them selves within the home. And both rate VERY high on the Creepy Scale.  

I should point out that the graphical representation of the statistical data in the second pamphlet is quite terrible--these efforts aren't in the top-99th percentile-bad category, but certainly are in the top 90%.  Easy. 

Elements of Social Delinquency, 1947: Books and Records as Faithless Elements of the Decline of Morality

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 499

Only 62 years ago the basic contributors to the delinquency of American youth were recklessness, idleness, books and records, and this helpful pamphlet, Delinquency Prevention, the City's Future, published unattributed in 1947 for the Youth Protection and Delinquency Prevention Program for the city of San Diego, California, had many of the basic answers to the knotty questions of raising good-spirited anti-corrupt young folks.  This young woman, appearing on page 27 in the photo captioned "Undermining Influences--photo from Police Laboratory" stood before a neatly laid table packed with expediencies of social decay, and from the looks of it, she could barely stand to be there, even though she was protected by a mighty and invisible cloak of superiority.  (It seems that she is caught in mid-sentence, gingerly holding her MURDER magazine, jaw thrust forward, fixing the camera with a sharp left eye which was fortressed by a mighty and disproportionately-sized eyebrow.) 

Unfortunately, given the large-grain halftone of the original, I can't quite make out all of the titles of the offending magazines and records--most of the "men's journals" seem to deal with murder-kill-bang-bang-stockings and god knows that the records in 1947 were probably by Johnny Mercer (as I can hardly believe the SDPD could even acknowledge anything like the fantastic bluesy music on so-called "race labels").  Anyway the message here was that "wrong" reading and listening were corrupters and would lead to the end of society, inhabiting the young with "social ill" found "outside the hours of school and work". 

This program sought to remedy this invasion of "untoward influence" by more fiercly regulating the idle time of children, which meant filling that up with more school or workl or church or other fulsome and halo-inducing activities.  The city council also sought to diminish the capacity of the "juvenile hang out" of the soda fountain--who knows how many future SDS-ers were born right there in the Rexall on Main Street of Great Barrington, Massachusetts? Nursing a 10-cent coke and a 25-cent hamburger for as long as possible doesn't seem like sedicious activity from here in the future--and as a matter of fact, the soda fountain looks to me to be one of the first places where American teenagers could go socially to enjoy food and drink and spend money solely (or sort of) with members of their own age group.    This must've been a radical change from the other regulated avenues that teenagers could frequent in the earlier decades of the century. In any event, the soda fountain was a place where social callousness was begging to happen, waiting to be unleashed in its youthful fury to cripple The City.  I'm sure that San Diego was not alone its its 1947-American-desire to get crooked-standing girls and short-sleeved-sweater boys to go to school, "do activities related to school", go to church, and then stand *almost* holding hands in a problematic setting of shade and brightly dappled sun.  If these two are the final successful products of juvenile delinquency prevention and naive social engineering,, what is it that their very distinctive body language is saying? 

Some Vintage, Interesting, Declassified CIA Reports--Nuclear War and the Coming of the Communists

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

Following up on a few posts over the last two days on some striking CIA reports on such topics as the tactical employment of nuclear weapons in Vietnam are the following (the links taking you to the full documents), all taken from the CIA-Freedom of Information Act website of declassified reports:

Soviet Capabilities for Attack on the U.S. through mid-1955  

The Strategic Value of the U.S.S.R.  the Conquest of Western Europe and theNear East (to Cairo)  1948 

Probable developments in China,.  1949 

Probable Effects Soviet Union Atomic Bomb on the Security of the United States, 1950

Prospects for the Defense of Indochina against a Chinese Communist Attack, 1950

Prospects for Survival of the Republic of Korea, 1948

Things That Weren't Department: the Stalinist Take on WWII and How Nobody but the Soviets Mattered

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Sometimes things that people deem to be necessary to be just aren't, no matter how much they are needed:  WMD, attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin, the Lone Sniper, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Heaven, racially-based inequalities, Virgin births, free will, intelligent design, and so on. 

This is part of a recently declassified CIA briefing on a 1959 Soviet history of World War II, told in only the way that a ruthlessly dogmatic entity could tell it, all found on the CIA site, with the full 61-page text Current Intelligence Staff Study; the Soviet History of World War II, (Reference Title: Caesar X-59),   here.

There is a lot in this thinking that is entirely new to me, stuff that I've never thought of before, all brought about by a structured and corrupted historiographic establishment bent on controlling the past.  The CIA report discusses the ways in which the Soviet history excised the importance of all non-Soviet intervention of any kind; and, basically, that the actions of the non-Soviet Allied forces throughout the course of the war merely served to forestall the inevitable, single-handed dominance of the Soviet Union in winning World War II.  The breadth and depth of this incoherent and savagely twisted history is staggering.  For example, D-Day, the Normandy Invasion, the Invasion of Europe, did absolutely nothing, had no significant effect whatsoever on the outcome of the war--it, again, served only to lengthen the time of the war so that the Soviet Army could eventually finish it.  The Battle of the Bulge meant nothing.  The dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan meant nothing.  The two years' worth of supplies sent by the United States to the struggling soviet Union in 1941 and 1942 meant nothing.  Early Soviet defeats in '41-'42 meant nothing.  The inability of the Soviet Union to determine the coming attacks from Germany in Operation Barbarossa meant nothing.  If the effect was extra-Soviet, then there was no cause--in this line of reasoning, the storytelling was so devastated that in the end, not even nothing was nothing. 

Yes it is true that the Soviet end of the war is undertold and that the Soviet Union suffered tens of millions of soldiers and civilians killed, but their response to telling the story of the war is so far beyond wrong that it isn't even that.  It is nothing, except of course that there are millions of people who believe it.  And in the wars of propaganda, that is a victory, and that is when nothing becomes something.

• (Excerpt from page 11 of the CIA report)

Nuclear Weapons and Vietnam, Part II: Richard Nixon & Henry Kissinger

JF Ptak Science Books Post 493

Richard Nixon continues a post from last night on the Executive Branch and the considerations for using nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War.  Yesterday's document related to the Johnson administration in 1966, Richard Nixon took up the issue in the first year of his failed presidency, in 1969, brainstorming the idea of first strike to end the war.  This of course was a an early decision of his on the war, before it became much more politically expedient for him (in 1971/2)  to prolong the war so that he could run for re-election to end the war in his second term--a more repugnant decision unmatched and unchallenged until he was nearly checked by the embarrassment who just left office.  As part of a study codenamed "Duck Hook" the following memorandum (Tony Lake"Memorandum from and Roger Morris, NSC Staff, to Captain [Rembrandt] Robinson, Subject: 'Draft Memorandum to the President on Contingency Study', 29 September 1969, Top Secret/Sensitive. Source: folder 4: VIETNAM: (General Files), Sep 69-Nov 69, box 74, National Security Council Files: Subject Files, Nixon Presidential Materials Project, National Archives.") concerning "military expediency" was introduced into the thought pool, stating that the President should at bottom-line have considered the use of nuclear weapons against the North Vietnamese.  Melvin Laird, the Seretary of Defense at the time, thought the proposal for the tactical use of nuclear weapons to be "laughable" and completely off the table.  However, he also said that for Henry Kissinger, nothing was off the table:  "(for Kissinger) Laird recalled, "nothing was out of consideration" with respect to Vietnam; the nuclear threat was "always . . . there as an option." That was "not my approach," and he said that he had told Kissinger at the time, "just forget it."(--George Washington University website, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 195, Edited by William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball.)

In typical fashion, Henry Kissinger was not necessarily "for" the use of nuclear weapons against North Vietnam, but was in favor of using massive, brutal force against military targets--he said that he had ruled out the use of a "nuclear weapon", but had not ruled out the use of a "nuclear device". 

 

 

In a summary of the issue (in another of this series of Top Secret-Eyes Only declassified documents) of the bombing of North Vietnam by Kissinger and addressed to the President (though, as the editors at GWU point out, there is no evidence that this was actually read by Nixon), retains the question about the use of nuclear weapons--the editors reaching the conclusion that the documents were "implying that the matter was still up in the air or on the table".

 

 

Using Nuclear Weapons in the Vietnam War: a Perversion of Logic in a Top Secret CIA Report, 1966

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 492

I cannot remember ever thinking about this, or reading about it, or havng any serious consideration of the use of any sort of nuclear weapons against the North Vietnamese or the Chinese at any time during the Vietnam War.  Or after it, for that matter.

But it makes sense that the issue was discussed and analyzed and vetted, if for no other reason than to dismiss it.  And here it is, in small part, on the CIA website of declassified materials.  What makes this document so uneasy to me is that even though it addresses the issue of the war not quite being winable and the use of nuclear weapons being (basically) not acceptable and perhaps tactically irrelevant, the idea, at the end of it all, isn't completely let go.  It wasn't the idea that you whisper into a helium balloon and then set free--it was tethered in a final "what if" circumstance and let stand for further thought. 

What happens at the end though, is this:  there is a consideration for what would happen if the U.S. DID NOT use nuclear weapons, which is on page 12, section 19--it is the "aha" part of this paper and the foot-in-the-door to Armageddon.  And what the CIA report from 1966 tells us is this, overall--it doesn't look good if the U.S. used nuclear weapons; but it also doesn't look good, perhaps, if we didn't.  Dr. Strangelove didn't have anything over these guys.  Finally, these astonishing folks throw up their hands and admit that the non-use wasn't, somehow, "within the scope of the paper". 

 

This is the cover sheet for the twelve-page report; click to enlarge.  The full text is below in the "continue reading section". 

The "Huh?" Department: Pig Graphs, Pig Checkers and Other Small Confusions. Naive Surreal Advertising Art

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 485

 

“Always remember, a cat looks down on man, a dog looks up to man, but a pig will look man right in the eye and see his equal.”--W.S. Churchill

Well.  Some things can just speak for themselves, as in the case(s) of these curious images brought to you by the graphic design folks working to push feed for Purina Company.  There were still tens of millions of farmers in the U.S. when this pamphlet was printed in 1935, and most of these farms were quite small, and so the Purina Company was reaching out with a broad stroke, right down to the neighborhood guy with 6 pigs on a half acre.  Of course what makes these images so appealing now is that they seem other-worldly, from a time that we have very little connection to even though it existed in the lifetimes of my parents.  The images are discordant, off-centre, not-quite-right--which places them perfectly into my Naive Surreal category.  The images are in their own accidental way quite surreal in that they look to be intentionally bizarre, when the opposite is true.

 

Nestled snuggly away though is this remarkable graph of pig value versus time--its interest has nothing to do with the data which I suspect was accurate and universally known to be so (at the time), but for the PIG MARKERS at the X/Y interface.  That is something I'm sure I've never seen before, and I pay very close attention to the history of the display of quantitative data.  It is a small jewel.  a pearl among, well you know.

 

As for some of the other images and their pig-centeredness, I can only speculate.  "Profit begins with the sow" is a solar porcine sunrise with little pig radiances.  "Purina Sow and Pig Checkers" I thought at first and continue to wrongly think that the cube in the middle was a loaf of bread (complete with shadow!), beautifully confounding the image-heading dichotomy; but it isn't.  It is still a small magnificance of confusion, thank goodness.

The Car as the Dominating "Life" Form in the U.S.: Finding Places to Rest the Populating Automobile, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 481

If I was an alien (of the outer-space variety) looking at the United States, I’d find it difficult not to assume that the biological units scurrying around the place were not put there to service the automobile.  Cars get born, then put on display, then selected and driven to their new home.  They get washed, and fed, and sometimes have their own places to sleep at night in their very own structure with their caretakers housed nearby.  They get taken out for airs in the morning and evening, resting while the humans labor all day to make enough money for their care and maintenance and feeding.  In the evening, they get brought back home and allowed to rest further.  They respond directly to inputs only and give no unsolicited response:  sort of like cats.  Fantastically large allowances are made for cars, humans going so far as to remove life- and atmospheric-sustaining biological units such as trees and good dirt so that the car can be taken virtually anywhere in the country on a path made specifically for them.  These pathways, which are padded and smooth, have ancillary bits attached to them so that the humans may walk beside them—houses and such are all connected to these paths to more easily enable the people to have access and maintain the car.  And, at the end of the day, humans breathe in the very excrement and excretia produced by the cars.  Placed under a microscope, the whole thing might resemble a biological unit, the cars being its very blood, everything else present to contain and move it.

 

These images from the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig, issue 4484, pp 239-240) for November 1930 speak to the exact issue of how to care for the now ever-present automobile.  Entitled “Wie Bringe Ich Meinen Kraftwagen Unter?”, the short article (by the engineer Botho von Romer of Munchen) addresses the need of what to do with cars at bedtime—where do we put them?  One answer was this spectacular carpark (“Garagenhof”) high rise—seventeen floors of parking (with two more underground), serviced by a variety of elevators, pointing out that varieties of this structure already existed in Chicago and New York

There was also the possibility of vast masses of sunken garages, their entrance way screwed into the earth leading to tunnels and networked warehouses where the cars could be safely deposited and removed from city streets.  There were also these two versions of the simple above-ground garages and parking lots:  the apartment block gives over the entire interior area to individual parking and garages (doing away with any greenspace), while the massive semi-cloverleaf design is made for nothing else in mind than to park the cars in the four semi-centers.

 

By 1930 the production of the automobile had been revolutionized to such an extent that virtually anyone with a job and less than five kids could actually afford a car.  It is interesting to note that at the average price of say 30 cents a gallon for gasoline (in the U.S.A.) that folks 80 years ago were paying pretty more per gallon (adjusted via CPI) than we are paying now at $1.87/gallon (in my mountain city at the far end of the pipeline). 

Institutionalized Racism and the Sale of Toys and Music and Frivolities

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 479

Leafing my way through a reprint of the Peck & Snyder Out & Indoor Sports and Pastimes Catalog for 1888, looking for baseball equipment and giant bagatelles, I found this stunning advertisement.  I knew of the tragic and long history of this form of "entertainment", as does everyone, but I must say I never considered the costume end of it.  And here it was.

The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, appeared as an American invention in the 1830's--much more so by the early 1840's.  It depicted  blacks in only the worst possible ways, as shiftless, lazy, buffoonish, stupid, flawed in almost every way, an idiotic race with a musical advantage, relayed in predictable units, accompanied by a developing genre of American music.  The ad here is for the accoutrement of the performers, layers of red rouge and carbon to build on white faces one of the lowest forms of racial archetypes that this country has produced. 

The astonishing thing is that it is just a simple ad in the middle of the page of the middle of a catalog for entertainment and sports bits--nothing special at all, nothing remarkable to distinguish this gaping hole of morality from the games and exercise equipment that surrounds it.  And that's the deep horror of stuff like this, this sort of stereotyping that was so lethal and filled with hate, and not making a ripple in the awareness of anyone's sense of correctness: the creation of this racial image was so complete that even its most base element could appear as an insignificant trifle in a sporting catalog. 

Even more extraordinary is this ad that appears just a few dozen pages later.  "The Enchanted Negro's Head" was a prop in a magic trick that involved drawing a knife across the neck of the black head. "The performer takes a small knife and says he will cut the head off"--I can imagine the sort of conversation between performer and audience before his action is undertaken, getting the audience ready to kill the "Negro Head".  It would not have been pretty.  And that's not all--once you were done with the "trick" part of cutting off the head, it "(could) be fixed to the top of a walking stick or umbrella....(to) form a great curiosity".

These characterizations appeared in uncountable forms in virtually every aspect of social life in this country, finding its insidious way even into something as seemingly innocent as a magic trick. It is the very vast smallness of this racism that make it so terrifically convincing and lethal. Looking at something like this makes me feel the enormous weight of the all that went into the attempted assassination of this race. 

**My friend Joy Holland--chief of the Brooklyn Room at the Brooklyn Public Library at the Grand Army Plaza in the heart of Brooklyn USA--recently started a wonderful history blog at the library called Brooklynology.  A recent post there talks about a minstrel-related find in their ephemera collection--it is quite interesting; take a look. 

Great and Unbuildable Department: Floating a Missing Manhattan (1975)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 470

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter..." John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

Agreeing with Mr. Keats or not, Robert Grosvenor had a delectable and memorable idea for a project in 1975:  testing the sea-worthiness of Manhattan island.  Grosvenor (b. 1937) was a well-known kinetic sculptor in Manhattan by the time of his detaching-Manhattan idea.  I found the summary of his project in Unbuilt America, by Alison Sky and Michelle Stone, of SITE, Inc. (seventh in a series called ON SITE), and published in 1976.  The book is a treasure trove of the unbuilt and the unbuildable, or the undoable, or the unnecessarily unattainable, though Grosvenor's part in this book is clearly one of the very few who did not (really) take his/her project seriously.  I do though like the simplicity of the presentation of the project, right down to the "Step 2" of preparation, which was the umbilical snipping of the bedrock of Manhattan and the attachment of the "flotation collar", which, I guess, would allow it to be moved around so long as flotation devices were attached. 

I'm not sure, but I don't think that Manhattan ever learned how to swim.  I'm also not so sure about where Manhattan would "go",exactly; but what would it matter, since the people living in Manhattan were already where they wanted to be?

The Thin White Line: Concrete Ribbons as the Answer to the Air Raid Problems of London (1938)

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The Illustrated London News for 16 July 1938 was screaming at its readers--14 months away from the British involvement in WWII--that the MOST EFFECTIVE form of ARP (air-raid protection) was via the evacuation of London.  And of course what the "article" meant was the orderly evacuation of London, as decentralized evac during a crisis (i.e. bombing) would be an "appalling" and chaotic mess.  

The answer was elevated highways. 

The reader was told that "the cost of such roads will necessarily be high", but the high ticket price wouldn't be quite as bad as tearing down buildings and widening streets through central London.  The tearing/widening idea is so original and so shockingly bad I don't know what to say, if there was actually anything to say at all.  But then it is second only to the idea of building elevated roadways for evacuation purposes--road that look from the picture like they were four lanes wide.  These roads would have "the additional merit that under them the traditional appearance of London can be maintained unimpaired".  Stress that part about the appearance "underneath".  Not only that, the heartbeat of London evacuation=, these elevated roads, were evidently immune from bombs themselves; or at the very least nothing is mentioned about these roads being targets in themselves.  One bomb, one hit, one severed artery. (Looking back through the Bad Ideas Department I see Buckminster Fuller's tragically goofy idea for building a mile-high dome over midtown Manhattan that was "radiation proof"...he didn't say anything about it being impervious to actually being the direct target of a nuclear weapon, though.)

Generally when ideas are this terrificly bad there is usually a reason for it, a reason that transcends logic and honest coherent thought.  And that reason in this case was money. 

At a time when Nazi Germany was bursting at the seams for more people to fight and for  nations to devour, when there was a true and real fear of London being a target of German bombs, this simple and weak and strategically indefensible solution was proposed by one large and interested party.

The "article" is signed by the Cement and Concrete Association of Grosvenor Gardens, London.  And thus all is clear.

Things that Are Just Simply Wrong: War Gases and Babies; Protective Suits for Children and Babies, 1943

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There's nothing that shouts "WRONG" with greater voice than images like this.  Like pornography and art, things that are just plain wrong are instantly recognizable.  And this, my dear reader, is a fine example of that thinking. Anti-Gas Protective Helmet for Babies, Manual of Instructions was prepared for the Office of the Director of Civil Air Raid Precautions of Ottawa, Canada, and published in 1943.  I'm not sure that the image of the nurse in the gas mask isn't as disturbing, but the two of them together is just too much.  

I wasn't aware of the gas attack preparations in Canada--the situation was entirely different in Britain, where everyone was required to own one, and by 1940 more than 38 million had been distributed to the population.  But the planning was underway in Ottawa in '43 for the worst, as removed and distant from the war as just about any other place on earth--but the Air Raid Precautions people pulled no punches in their hearts and minds campaign, and I'm sure that it was very effective.  This little pamphlet certainly caught my attention.

Dead Letter Department #1: LIFE Magazine Subscription from 1940

JF Ptak Science Books LLC 

It seems to me as though I have quite a few of these old subscription or mail-back forms from the 1930's, '40's and 1950's.  In the spirit of Don Novello (aka Father Guido Sarducci) I thought that I'd start sending some of these little buggers back out, just to see what happens with them on the other end.  I have my doubts that there are very many pieces of antique mail making their way through the labyrinth of the U.S. Postal System, so perhaps it will give some of those folks in blue a little something to talk about.  Or not.  And so I put my $3.65 in the little envelope for a year's subscription to the fine LIFE magazine--if I could get into the Wayback machine, I'd enjoy 52 issues of LIFE in 1940 for just a few dollars.  Unfortuantely LIFE stopped being a weekly in 1972 and then sputtered along as a much-changed monthly for several decades until it completely left the track in 2007. 

It was an interesting magazine to be sure, though not without its problems.  For example, I looked through every page of LIFE from 1939 to 1945 and my impression was that there wasn't all that much war reporting in the thing until everything heated up (including America, finally) in mid-1942. (And by "very much" I mean, well, that I just expected more in the magazine about the World War than I was seeing, space being taken up by nonsense and Liliputian interests rather than the global conflict.) Up to that point there seems to have been far more non-war words/images than war-related. Even in 1942 there was more adveritising using men-in-uniform than there were actual stories depicting fighting men.  Things changed quite a bit in the magazine as the war became more "real" for the U.S. in 1943; still, the reporting didn't come close to that of the London-based Illustrated London News, where the war was real since 1940.  This is hardly scientific, only an impression, but having looked at the entire war coverage in LIFE and Illus London News I am left with a lingering impression of a remarkable difference between the two (similar) magazines.  More still for the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig), but that's another story.  Still the use of men-in-uniform to sell cigarettes or steel or whatever is pretty bothersome to me--there was a lot of that going on in LIFE, not so much at all in ILN, and almost none in the Illustrite Zeitung.

The Poem-amatic Fist Microscope and the Production of Art

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"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can
warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my
head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I
know it. Is there any other way?"
––Emily Dickinson

“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own
melting.”
––Robert Frost

I want to say right in the beginning that I mean no disrespect in any form in addressing the "found" nature of poetry in the larger landscape of the written word--a sort of Poetry Brut, awaiting discovery.   And the discovery is made rather simply, and randomly;  take your fist, clench it, and then open it to about the size of a dime so that you can see all the way across the interior of the fist,your eye placed at the "objective" made by the joined thumb and index finger. Get out a book, then press your eye against this "lens", placing it about a foot above a printed page.  Force your eye to bring the words into focus--if you were glasses for reading you may not need them for this exercise--I don't.  You can adjust the "focus" by making the opposite lens (formed by the pinky) a little smaller.  You've made a simple pinhole eyeglass with your hand.  Now bring your new optical tool to bear on a paragraph and record what you are allowed to see, recording each bit on a new line (as in a "standard" poetic format.  The results may be interesting!

My two examples are below:  the first is from Paul Klee's Diaries (and entry for 1916), and the second from Richard Allestreel's The Ladies Calling (an instructional for women printed in 1673).  Of course the Klee was already clsoe enough to poetry as it was, and teh Allestreel not far behind that; but the words rearranged give them an entirely new feeling, their messages both plainer and more hidden. 

This is a useless exercise in almost every way, though it was fun to do it, and it did help to point out some of the more-poetic aspects of these two works.  But poetry isn't just putting prose into a new printed format, nor is prose poetry writ bigger.   But it was a little fun.    

Example 1:
From Paul Klee’s Diaries, Trip to Tunisia,  16 April 1916, chapter 2:

In the evening, through the streets.  A café decorated with pictures. Beautiful watercolors.  We ransacked the place buying.  A street scene around a mouse. Finally someone killed it with a shoe. We landed at a sidewalk café.  An evening of colors s tender as they were clear…

And then Dissected and Rearranged with the Fist Microscope:

In the evening, through the streets
a café decorated with pictures
Beautiful watercolors, we ransacked
the place buying a street scene around a mouse.
Finally someone killed it
with a shoe.
We landed at a sidewalk café,
an evening of colors
as tender as they were clear

Example 2
The Ladies Calling
attributed to Richard Allestreel Oxford: Printed at the Theater, 1673
Part II Section III:  On Widows (opening paragraph)

“Now those Remains are of three sorts, his body his memory, and his children. The most proper expession of her love to the first, is in giving it an honorable Enterrment; I mean not such as may vye with the Poland extravagance (of which 'tis observed that two or three neer succeeding funeralls ruin the family) but prudently proportion'd to his quality & fortune, so that her zeal to his Corps may not injure a nobler relique of him, his Children. And this decency is a much better instance of her kindness, then all those Tragical Furies wherwith som. Women seem transported towards their dead Husbands, those frantick Embraces and caresses of a Carcass, which betray a little too much the sensuality of their Love. And it is somthing observable, that those vehement Passions quickly exhaust themselvs, and by a kind of Sympathetic Efficacy as the Body (on which their affection was fixt) moulders, so does that also, nay often it attends not those lesurely degrees of dissolution, but by a more precipitate motion seems rather to vanish then consume”

And then Dissected and Rearranged with the Fist Microscope:

Now those Remains are his body his memory,
his children. The most proper expession of her love to the first,
is in giving it an honorable Enterrment;
I mean not such as the Poland extravagance
prudently proportion'd to his quality & fortune,
may not injure a nobler relique of him, his Children.
 And this decency is a much better instance of her kindness,
 then all those Tragical Furies
Women seem transported towards their dead Husbands,
those frantick Embraces and caresses of a Carcass,
which betray a little too much
the sensuality of their Love.
somthing observable, that those vehement Passions
 quickly exhaust themselvs,
and by a kind of Sympathetic Efficacy as the Body (on which their affection was fixt) moulders, so does that also,
 nay often it attends not those lesurely degrees of dissolution,
but by a more precipitate motion
seems rather to vanish then consume.

Yes I am joking.  Mostly.