Category: Absurdist, Unintentional

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2203 (an earlier post continued and expanded)

“Sometimes a book is just entirely bad, and sometimes it is entirely nothing. It is impossible for a book to be both very bad and very nothing. Impossible.  Except for this book, whose badness is exceeded only by its nothingness, and vice versa“.  (probably not) Oscar Wilde

And so into this black hole of imaged Wildeian description we go, into a very real-ish book.

I found a novel tonight, bought long ago and long ago mostly lost.  It was written by a doctor who worked in the District Hospital in Lima, Ohio, and written in 1934.  The Lima Hospital was the largest poured concrete structure in the world when it was built in 1915, and stayed so until the Pentagon was completed.  The hospital was established for the criminally insane, had 14″-thick walls, and reinforced steel bars laid into the walls that went “right down to bedrock”. 

It was somewhere in there that this doctor wrote something that was really so toweringly bad that it escapes comprehension. I own the carbon copy of the unpublished work, which is typed on 14×8.5″ sheets of paper, front and back, running 94 pages. It is a very crowded affair, with 90 lines of single-space typed lines, making the work about 115,000 words long. 

There wasn’t enough space evidently for paragraphs, which gives the work a kind of insistent, casket-cramped cruelty.  To read it takes your breath away for its dullness–the book moves so weirdly and at the same time so very slowly that it doesn’t move at all even while moving.

A few months ago I found the seven-foot-long scroll of the book’s plan–a work of crowded magnificence of nothing and confusion, being very orderly at the same time.  It went to a friend of mine who created artwork around it, and as it happens made a very noticeable appearance in a very significant yearly show in NYC last week. I was stunned to find that there was actually a text to go with the scroll-outline–it emerged from the warehouse this week, so perhaps this too will find a very celebrated life as art as well. Certainly the book would go nowhere on its own as a book, though it stood a chance at surviving on the grounds of its considerble design weirdness, which is of a complexified beauty.

In the meantime, before all of the letters slide themselves off the page from sheer boredom and before the thing is resurrected as a magnificent artistic effort, I’ll share some ianges of the extra-ordinary book of reversed brilliant badness. I’ve also culled a few imaginary descriptions of the book from writers known and not:

Potboiler scribbler:

“He couldn’t speak.  He could barely see. Blinded by the flames ignited inside his eyeballs from the novel in his lap.  The words were like molten lead, sucked off the page by his eyes, forming a vacuum in his brain.  It was a bad book”.

The first-time published novelist’s approach:

“He couldn’t speak the words of the thoughts in his head, because they and all of his breath were stolen by the magic of the complete badness of the book in his lap”.

Gertrude Stein:

“The book was bad and bad, and bad was the book. Even the badness of the bad was bad, a whole new insight into being bad. It was the bad book by which bad books are called bad”.

Ernset Hemingway:

“He didn’t read the book so much as he looked through it.  It was easy–there was nothing there. As bad as it was, it could get no worse. So he shot it, and poured a drink”.

 You might wonder what this book is about.  Me too.

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

1502   tr. Ordynarye of Crysten Men (de Worde) iv. xxii. sig. ff.iii,   Suche synne is named yronie, not that the whiche is of grammare, by the whiche a man sayth one and gyueth to vnderstonde the contrary.  —  Oxford English Dictionary, in an example of the earliest usage of “irony” in English.

I wonder if there are such things as “small” and “big” ironies?  Perhaps it is more a question of small and big wonders. 

In any event, the Unselfish Society of this pamphlet refers to a eugenics Society, or eugenics in general, and was part of a Socratic dialog in the pamphlet concerning eugenic principles and education.  It feels more like backlash of theatrical Shavian wit, what with the eugenics folks being about as far removed from principles of un-selfishness as possible.  Or perhaps they are interested in “unselfishness” as a principle expressed by others in order to better the genetic and societal lot of the more-privileged people.  But the expectation of unselfishness in others is not being unselfish in yourself, unless you’re Ayn Rand.  And in this instance we’re talking about the so-called “positive” eugenics, and not the “negative” one, where there is an enforced elimination of what is deemed (by them) to be society’s “weak links”.  “Unselfishness” is not a currency expected (and sometimes extracted) from others and used for yourself.  

1883   F. Galton Inquiries into Human Faculty page 44.   “The investigation of human eugenics, that is, of the conditions under which men of a high type are produced.”

Full text here

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2162

“Motion-picture and method of producing the same.”

 

I’ve written a note earlier on this blog about the history of word balloons–it is the stuff that we think of today as the little clouds filled with words over the heads of comic book characters and such, but which had a long history stretching back at least to the Renaissance when speech was illustrated in a similar way, but with lovely scrolls instead of blank clouds (as we see above).

        See for example:

• The X-Ray of the Imagination:  Internal Dialog, Demons, Humors, and Picturing the Stuff of Thought–On the outer shapes of the inner container
• Word Balloons (Continued): an Early Version in a Printed Book, 1523  
• There’s also a few posts on the visualization of thinking, which comes close to this topic but not quite, as illustrated in teh post on Francis Galton’s groundbreaking and probably-the-first-paper-on-synesthesia Visualizing Numeracy)

The following illustrations though come at a great expense to the imagination, and were a weak but fully patented  attempt to replace spoken-word captions in the pre-audio motion picture–that is silent films before the Talkies.  In general I guess the complaint with illustrating speech during a photoplay was that the text card was a breakaway from the moving-picture part of the experience, necessitating a clean break from action so that the audience could read about what was being pantomimed.

Folks were well underway in processes to produce sound motion pictures, though up to this point–1917–the systems were separate recordings of sound and speech which would be played in conjunction/synchronously though not necessarily at exactly the right moments with the motion picture. Edison was hot on this trail but with blemished trials, combining his kinetoscope and phonograph in very early and novel attempts at producing a sound motion picture in the first decade or so in the development of moving pictures. The next 20 years in this development are fairly complex, but the matter is fairly well solved by at least three different technologies by 1923 with the production of successful continuous sound-on-film motion pictures, and then most famously and successfully debuting with The Jazz Singer in 1927.  

And then there is this colossal bit of overdeveloped-underdeveloped thinking that would link the seamless word of not needing text card interruptions with non-spoken speech–and coming just this shy of not meaning anything at all. The work is that of Charles F(elton) Pidgin (1844-1923) who was a very successful author of genre/historical romance books (though he did have an interesting-sounding title in The Letter H, a Novel). He was also an engineer of some sort with some advanced patents in calculating machines and devices, which is the way I came to his name (via a letter I have written to him by the director of the U.S. Census rejecting his tabulating apparatus because it basically produced too much info for too much money, but that’s another story). 

Pigdin’s idea–in short–was to have an inflating paper text bubble issue from the mouth of the actor during a scene–in that way the view could see what the other actors on the screen were “hearing”. 

[Source:  the lovely Google Patents, here.]

I know this might sound as though I’m judging a technological effort from the vantage point of the idea’s deep future, but I believe that this idea was a truly bad one right from the moment of conception, a two-beer idea that should’ve stayed in the bar, no matter if it was 1917 or 1967 or 2017.  Sometimes bad ideas are just bad ideas, top to bottom–and some of them are timesless, like this one.  

NOTES:

And from Pidgin’s patent, explaining it all: