Category: Absurdist, Unintentional

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Malevich it isn’t, though pre-Abstract art pre-Malevich it may be:

There are some good papers in this 1902 volume of Annalen der Physik, including Planck (“Ueber die Natur des weissen Lichts his paper on white light),  Stark, Quincke, Drude, Exner (“Ueber den Gleichgewichtszustand eines schweren Gases”)–I was drawn instead to the two big folding plates for O. Lehmann’s “Gasentladungen in weiten Gefassen” ( a longish 29-page paper in series IV, vol 7. pp 1-29, 1902.).  

Interestingly Lehmann writes about the dangers involved with these experiments–he’s using considerable pieces of glassware, some 40cm wide and 60 cm long (!) with glass as thick as 5-10 mm. That means there would be (and was!) a lot of large pieces of flying glass if the vacuum created in the tube crushed it, resulting in a sharp little explosion. He states (more or less) at the bottom of the page in a footnote: ” “The experiments are brilliant demonstration experiments at the same time, but it must be expressly pointed out that working with such large evacuated vessels is by no means without danger. It was shown that the 5–10 mm thick air pump bells with an internal width of more than 40 cm, which are commercially available, are unable to withstand the pressure of the outside air permanently. Such an egg, 40 cm wide and over 1 m long, was smashed by the air pressure soon after the vacuum was created, fortunately without causing any further damage, since I had covered it with thick cloths as a precaution, which did not allow the glass fragments to penetrate , Another vessel, 45 cm wide and 60 cm long, the parts of which had initially been individually tested for strength, withstood the full air pressure for about 6 hours, even during the passage of the discharges. But after it had stood untouched for about 5 hours, it was suddenly violently crushed into countless small fragments that flew up to 15 m, partly through the window panes. All fragile objects hit were damaged and individual pieces of glass even bored into the wooden doors of cupboards and other wooden parts, with such force that they got stuck in them.”

Anyway the patterns of discharges produced in the tubes were beautiful and can certainly stand on their own in the Found Art department. And so far as the Annalen goes, this is some of the most visually beautiful work produced by the journal over its long 220 year history.  

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This really has nothing to do with Hayao Miyazaki.’s world, though it does look as though it could be part of it—absent the need for and presence of water and imagining the anchor lines as legs. That’s what I see, anyway, in this beautiful plate of a river/port dredger. It is found in the French edition of Corneille Redelyheid’s La noivelle machine a creuser les ports et les rivieres (printed by the author in the Hague in 1774). The document (only 16pp long) describes the vessel and its uses—the engraving shows the scoops/bucket ladders in the middle of the boat—they would gobble up whatever the target was, with the refuse deposited in the two skiffs on either side of the boat. Its a lovely object, and if you close your eyes halfway the vessel takes on a vague absurdist patina, as though it was a massive SomeThing being propelled or skipped about on long excessively skinny legs. I like it.

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Aha! Another lovely image for the long “FOund Art”/”Found Dadaist” categories on this blog, this being an engineering simulation for the building of domes.  The image was found as an illustration in “The Supportive Power of Piles, Both as Wood and Iron, and the Use of the Latter, Either as Piles or Columns of Support for Foundations”,  found on pp 98-110, and pp 170-182, in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, vol 55 (3rd series), 1868.  

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  (An entry in the “Found Absurdist” category)

There’s a series on this concentrating on unusual things found “floating” in the sky, bits and bobs that are odd, or visual non sequiturs (“sequuntur”?) that just happen to use a landscape as a decorative visual for the viewer, and so on. There are many varieties of this atmospheriana, including floating cities, bombing ladies, eyeballs, hands, extra-earths, alien populations, and the unexpected like. Today’s entry is less involved than those, showing a disarticulated arm and shoulder floating above a gentle landscape…all this is, in real life, is an engraving showing a number of different varieties of engraving, all presented on one leaf rather than using several. The explanation for the image is boring, but the stand-alone of the unexplained floating arm isn’t.

Source:  Abraham Bosse, 1604-1676 (printmaker and artist), in his classic work on engraving and illustration, Traité des manières de graver en taille-douce…, 1645.

• https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k117103s

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

He said we were turning lunchtime into a 42nd street smut shop. —OED, [1977, Zigzag Apr. 28/3]

“Smut” is best appreciated when it’s unexpected smut. And that’s what this smut is in this post, the smut found in the 1851 volume of the Journal of the Franklin Institute, italicized in a running page header:

After the initial surprise of seeing it, you pretty much remember that “smut” has a number of definitions outside of the ones that you’d remember. (Like walking along 42^nd St in Manhattan to get to the library, though as a young teen back in 1969 you really didn’t see any exposed smut, though you could sure smell it when the smut-palaces that peddled the stuff had their doors wide open for a summer breeze that sucked the stale smutty putrefaction of smutty smut air onto the sidewalk—so I think I smelled smut before I actually saw any. Thanks, Deuce!)

The real point is that “smut” has a number of meanings before we get to Forty Second Street: plant fungus (“A smutted grain”), a type of coal, soot, and so forth. There is one definition—of a “smut” being a tiny insect–from the Oxford English Dictionary where the quotation of its use is sort of a beautiful terror/horror stand-alone, and it comes from the New York Daily News (of course!) in 1899:  “A trout..grubs in the weeds, chases larvæ, and revels in almost invisible smuts.”–Daily News 28 Dec. 6/4  

Then there are the extended employments of “smut” that are stumpy and poetic, the  “compounds of smut” as indexed by the OED (which is a memorable phrase all on its own):  smut bag, smut corn, smut fungus, smut mill, smut machine, smut spore, smut book, smut-note; smut shop, smut-hunting, and etc.

So like a limited version of the Seussian turtles-all-the-way-down concept of language/cosmology, “smut” can handle at least a few feet of this endless tower of word towers. 

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I should have begun this category/department long ago for the bits and bobs I’ve seen along the way on this blog. It fits in nicely with the categories on the History of Anticipation, the Department of Found Art and Poetry, the History of Nothing, and that sort. In any event, I’ll start it off right here (1.5 million words late) with this unlikely story and fascinating image regarding underwater fishing from a submarine:

Source: Popular Mechanics, October 1920.