Category: Absurdist, Unintentional

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post    Part of the Uninentional Absurdist series

I’ve catalogued a number of pamphlets on this blog that  are on the Outsider/Found-Surreal/Uninentional-Absurdist spectrum, people who reveal their insights into the un-insightable, or their outsights into the great Outside world that is unseeable because it is unseen, or unknowable, or non-existent. Sometimes it is all-existent, though the insights bearing upon the issue are the unknowable, non-retrievable, self-referential, private-logic and private-language communications. Sometimes there is insight in that, but usually not.  

This day’s installment has the feel and look of something from the 19th century, but is it comes from 1912, and the rants and razor-vision is localized on Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.  I’m not sure what the author’s point was, because it is all fairly circular, a circle of words filled with a another circle of words, and who knows really where they go. 

and

and

And the full front page of one of the pamphlets:

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is the very striking cover design for a pamphlet written by Dr. Julius Klein (the assistant secretary of commerce) produced by the Institute of Makers of Explosives (103 Park Avenue, NYC, who of course made a large play for blowing stuff up as a positive driving force in the history of civilization.  And they are right in many cases, obviously, but the images and title taken out of context are very provocative. 

 Dr. Klein starts off by disabusing the reader of the “bad press” of explosives:  “a good many of us, I imagine, labor under a misapprehension about the explosives industry…we conceive of explosives as an instrumentality of havoc.  But that conception is utterly wrong.”  Utterly?  The man does have a point of course,  which he explains in subject headings like “Dynamite the Liberator”, “Many Unusual Uses”and “Explosives Release Raw Materials”  But “utterly”?  Its a real piece of heavily worked propaganda that makes the case for the economics goodnesses and misunderstood destructive values of TNT. 

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2350

Building on some reaching and questionable physical identification work of Sir Francis Galton, Raphael Pumpelly tried to make photographs of what scientists looked like. 

At a scientific meeting of the National Academy of Science in Washington D.C. Pumpelly (along with Dr. (Thomas Mayo) Brewer and the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, (Spencer F.) Baird) undertook the experiment to determine whether or not there was a certain composite “type” in groups of academicians.  He employed the justly-named head of the photography department at the Smithsonian, Mr. (Thomas Mayo) Smillie, to make a series of 2-second exposures of the scientists upon a single glass plate.  Two seconds per portrait was not long enough to make a defined portrait for a single sitter, but if there 15 or 30 such exposures on the same plate it was seen that collectively there would be a strong impression.  The resulting portraits are interesting in their won way, but probably not without the backstory.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2349                                                                                        

I came to this pamphlet from a design/composition point of view, finding in it a peculiar attractiveness in its gritty-typeface and loud speculation.  That said, the title is of little use to tell us of its contents, and so opening to page 37 (in deference to my wife Patti Digh who finds much significance in the number) I found on the opposite page the “it does not matter that the German people of the Reich have a different form of State from America”, and that the form of state so far as the Germans were concerned was “a matter of fate”.  

Interesting, and, well, unfortunate, because the publication date of the work is 1936.  The author, Mr. A.T. Fredex, implores the reader to consider that there is “no more a liberty-loving people than the Germans”, and that they are a free and liberated people.  The German state of today was subject of certain internal “troubles” and that successions of leaders–for the good of the people–were forced to keep the nation together with “more or less gentle pressure”.

And so the skeleton of the fleshy produce of the pamphlet is revealed.  “Already the sneers of the yellow and black races are haunting us”, writes Mr. Fredex, who continues in just the next paragraph that all that remains to happen would be for Socialist France to “mobilize her millions of Negroes” along with the help of “Bolshevist-Mongolian Russia” against Germany, which would be the last refuge of normalcy in Europe, the thing protecting the Western world from who-knows-what.  

All of this is in three paragraphs of one page.  Then comes the race part, the Teutonic purity and excellence part, and the horrors of race-mixing and “mixed blood” that will wind up dooming America.

I skipped ahead, or behind, to the end, where we are warned by Mr. Fredex to awaken our Nordic interests should Germany fail to hold back the assaulting races.

This is really quite a story to unfold in just two of the pamphlet’s 56 pages–the rest of which I think need no further exploration.  

The pamphlet cover, though, retains its interest, forensically speaking, and can only hint at the pamphlet’s evil and filthy contents.

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is a beautifully design object, and for a moment I thought that this might actually be a sympathetic-Communist pamphlet–something from the Paulist Press, for a Catholic high school system, and from 1936 when there were still plenty of Reds running around the U.S.–so I needed to look around the booklet a little bit. 

And of course I found out what it was really about just about instantly, and so there was no mistake about what the Passionate Father was really passionate about:

This is pretty strong stuff considering that Communists weren’t terribly uncommon in the U.S. half-way through the Depression, though that can be mostly due to the absence of the real story about what was going on in the Soviet Union under mega-murderer Joseph Stalin.  But really it is more the Socialists who were more popular in the off-party politics in America in the mid-’30’s.  In any event the author hit the Communists pretty hard based on their anti-god and anti-Catholic positions, so, naturally, there was very room left at the table of philosophy for the Communists.