Category: Absurdist, Unintentional

Mobile Maginot: Movable Land and Floating Forts, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books Post 959

Nothing quite exceeds like excess said Mr. Wilde (and others) , and he/they could be no more correct when looking at this picture of a Movable Maginot Line—it is a mobile fort, complete with plane launching capacity, two dozen long canons, a crane, and a host of other stuff.

It looks as though it has ample room for all sorts of materiel though leaving little room for, perhaps, an engine. I just can’t see where it might be…perhaps it is near the not-room-enough-for-it-either ammunition compartment. Maybe they were in a smaller armed cart being pulled by the mothership? I reckon that this beast was 66 feet high, 100 feet long and 60 feet wide, which is a very big, heavy near-cube. Good luck with driving the thing in anything that was less than perfect conditions. A big profile like this, filled with guns and canons or not, also makes for a big target profile—a tall, broad target with flat/non-inclined sides. ( I should also point out that there are two 10’ loudspeakers mounted on the front of the fort to instill fear in the people that the thing was approaching with loud noise. The author points out that the Nazis used noise against the French with their “screaming dive bombers”, and so the fort would use the same tactics against the Nazis in the movable fort—not that the sound of the engines and the attendant noise wouldn’t’ve been enough of a fear factor in themselves…)

But the image of such a monster, sensical or not, was enough for the purposes of the pamphlet in which it appeared. The Brains to Win was a piece of British spirit/hope propaganda issued at about the time of the Battle of Britain in 1940, and it listed the sorts of technological breakthroughs that were going to push the nation over the top to victory. Some of the stuff was real, some not—like the moving fort/Howl’s Castle above, and the floating fort, below.

I’m not sure where a floating fort would make sense, especially one of that size. (Iterating the figures on deck into distance, it looks as though the deck on the floating platform was 150 or 200’ square. It would’ve looked like a big target from above.) Given the time and expense and material needed for such a thing, it seems that it would’ve been cheaper to make a moveable fortress not quite so big, with less of a profile, and more mobile—I think that this was called a “destroyer” or “battleship”.

But no matter, I’m just poking fun at some of the future vision that became archaic the moment it was drawn, punk retro-future. All the pamphlet was trying to point out in its 32 pages was that overall the Brits were smarter than the Germans and that would be the balance for victory in the war. “Hitler will get some very unpleasant surprises before this is over” the author very politely pointed out, no doubt with one eyebrow raised. The scientists agreed.

And they were right, which is all that matters.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Militaria — Technology, History of
On the Subjugation of Women: a review of some posts

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

I wanted to collect some of the posts on this blog on this subject as it seems as though I really don’t have a category for it in the archives…

What Goes into Making Human Robot Girls

https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2010/01/what-goes-into-making-human-robot-girls-1941.html

First Thing to Do is to Find Some Men: How to Get a Boy-Date, 1941

https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2010/01/the-first-thing-is-to-find-some-men-how-to-get-a-boydate-1941.html

How to Look Smart, or Pretty, but Not Both

https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/women-history-of/

Maintaining Women as a Subclass: Major Reinforcements from
Minor Non-sequitors

https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/10/maintaining-women-as-a-subclass-reinforcements-from-minor-nonsequitors.html

Missing Pieces of Women: Pope Joan and the Proper Girl of
the Ladies Home Journal

https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2010/01/missing-pieces-of-women-pope-joan-the-proper-girl-of-the-ladies-home-journal.html

How
FDR Made Women (1) Nervous and thus (2) Older. An Appeal to Vote Republican,
1936

https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2010/01/how-fdr-made-women-1-nervous-and-thus-2-older-an-appeal-to-vote-republican-1936.html

The Coming Sex War of 1919

https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2010/01/the-coming-sex-war-of-1919.html

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Women, History of
Imago Mortis: Immortal and Post Mortem Hair

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 958 Blog Bookstore

I think that in the contest of hair between mortality and immortality, never-ending time wins. This sentiment is based on seeing many images representing death and time over the years, not many of which I can not now produce on demand to make my argument a little more plausible, but, well, no matter. Two examples will suffice for now.

The first example stands for many of its type: it is titled “Imago Mortis” (the World of Death) and appears in Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicum (more commonly known as the Nuremberg Chronicles), one of the greatest illustrated (or certainly the most lavishily illustrated) books of the 15th century. Printed by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg on 12 July 1493, the Liber chronicum was basically just that, a walk through the known and imagined knowledge of the mid-Renaissance with the great humanist Schedel acting in the role of conductor. There’s certainly much of interest and disinterest in this book; Schedel was not afraid to make a guess (and even a wild one) when facts didn’t fit or were unavailable. (For example, he famously re-used the same view of a city to illustrate different cities.)

The Imago Mortis here is more like the Dance of Death, a subject visited many times by many great artists over a period of 500 years or so. But my interest right now is only in the hair; particularly the hair of the figure at far right, whose (her?) hair seems to be not only flowing down her spine but through it and her ricase as well, spilling out in front of her across her pelvis.

I’ve written earlier in this blog on the second woodcut image: it appears as the printer’s mark (of Simonem Colineum, or Simon de Colines) in the
second volume of Johann Arboreus’ Theosophia, complectens difficillorum…, which
was printed in Paris
in 1540.

Time isn’t very pretty here, and is made to seem a little
Satanic, what with cloven hooves and the legs of some animal, strong torso and
swift wings—the hair hiding the eye(s) completes a picture of damnable doom,
and of whatever end we’re coming to.
Except for the righteous, though not quite: the word balloon describing
Time’s spoken admonition is “Hanc Aciem Sola Retundit Virtus”, which means “only
good deeds dulls the blade”. That doesn’t
necessarily mean “stops” the blade, which is bothersome. I think that if someone were coming for me I’d like the blade as sharp as could be…

I think the winner is Time, whose hair–although not quite as long as that of the dead–is far more luxurious, which at the end of the day carries it. Also, Time’s hair is connected to a scalp; I don’t know what the deads’ hair is connected to.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Art History
Outsider Logic Department: the Fabulous Curative Necessity of Fatty Meats

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 989

[see also my related posts on Women Meat Pioneers and of course Meat String and Curled Hair]

I have a suspicion that the author of Eat
Meat for a Successful Life, G.H. Brinkler
(a “N.D.”, doctor of nauturopathy, from the American School
of Naturopathy and the tautologically-surprising “founder” of the “Brinkler
Club”) had a compromised and possibly antagonistic personal history with
vegetables. And water, as Mr. Brinkler
is also the originator of the “Brinkler
Waterless Way to Health”, and a man who claims not
to have drunk any water in 35 years.

Most humans don’t do so well without water after a few days, though there
are extreme cases where people have survived for several weeks without water.
To have survived 1,820 weeks seems pretty much to be well on its way to being a
vastly under-appreciated record of human endurance.

But the main story here of course is the meat, with the waterless bit woven
through it like heart-ending marbling in a butt chop. Meat, as we are told by Mr. Brinkler, is
pretty much a “natural fixer” for just about anything. Lazy in the morning? A pound of pork on the broiler will cure
that. Sexual inadequacy? Solved with meat (ingestion). Poor memory?–the answer: meat, and lots of it. And not only just meat;
it definitely needs to be not lean. Big fatty meats are the greatest source of the
desired “muscle food”; lean meats, unfortunately, are only “nerve foods”. Somehow
the meat mixed with the waterless way induces the “nerve-ends” into a “more
natural” and strengthened existence.

The Brinkler follower should also chew their meat less. “The masticating fad might result in tiring
the jaws and gross undernourishment”.

I could go on and pull further quotes out of context from this piece, but
that would be mean. The pamphlet (1934) I have is the U.S. Copyright Deposit copy, and I suspect that there may not have been many copies other than mine. I think that all the
man was trying to do was sell broilers.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Outsider Logic
“Women are Human, too”: Human Resource Workbook for Females, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 988

In the history of archaic thought it doesn’t take very much at all to reach
the uncomfortable bits in the sulfurously tangled history of the subjugation
of women. But it is most interesting when you find the points at which the “backward-looking”
archaic parts are actually somewhat forward-looking for their time.

Such is the case with this odd and interesting little pamphlet, Women in Men’s Clothing, published by
the Vultee Aircraft Corporation, and published in 1943—it can be simultaneously
awkward as a broken product of its time and oddly, slightly, futuristic (with a grudging and clawing recognition of women as possible equals as members of the work force). Overall the publication looks pretty painful from today’s perch, but when you look a little past the winces you can see a little bit of recognition for women in general; at least this is far forward from anything that might’ve been published slightly before the war.

The pamphlet was intended as a human resources tool for managers and
supervisors in an aircraft production facility where women had been sought and
recruited to fill the very many vacancies brought on by the war. (Millions of women entered the workforce for the
first time between 1942-1945; millions of them exited too once the servicemen
returned from active duty to reclaim their jobs.) For most industrial supervisors, the prospect
of women in the workforce was not a welcomed one, and many had never before needed to think of such a diversified workplace. This slight publication translated the idea of “women/”wimmin” for these
men.

The “translation” of the understanding of women from home to the workforce doesn’t go very far to advancing the understanding of women at work–they’re pretty much the same (dogmatic, condescending, sexist, domineering).

All of that is pretty well summed up by the first picture in this series–the asterisked “equality” between men and women. I must admit that I don’t think I’ve ever seen this “equals, but” label before, or at least so deep into the century.

And of course “women are Human, too” needs very little comment…as is the case for most of the images in the pamphlet.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — History of the Future — Women, History of
Imaging Imagination: Diagrams of Humor & the Center of Levity, 1878

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 985

[Wood-eating woman tells a joke to distract three men sharing the last chair in creation in alternative chairless dot universe.]

Acerbic and punctilious, this work by an anonymous (Ambrose Bierce-like) late 19th-century
cataloger of human-ness attempted to diagramaitcally display the
sharing of humor among people. The resulting images–all unexplained, not indexed, and left to a logical imagination–fit very nicely into a developing section on this blog called Maps and Diagrams of
Imagination and Ideas.

{Woman finger-ingests chair presented to her by knee-connected chair-minions from talking-mustache close-male-pelvis universe.]

In reality this short, small, wordless publication’s images looks like natural philosophy textbook images displaying ideas like momentum and gravity…often they would be quite prosaic, with unnecessary natural accoutrement, little bits of added detail that had nothing really to do with the image displayed. The real intent of this document was to illustrate the center of gravity–it would’ve been more helpful if the publication had a title page or text of any kind for that matter, but since it doesn’t the mind ran free, allowing these representations to be a geometry of shared humor. Which of course they are not–but the images do have a certain coy funniness to them…

[Woman makes wooden point by stabbing Ear-lobed Mustache Man in the heart with her wooden palm finger.]

Some of the other posts that could be included in this Imagining the Imagination category include:

First photograph of a smell:

Mathematical Thinking being Thought

Map of Nothing:

A Map of Holes in the Sky:
Heaven

Map of Color-Sense Placement

Unexpected Sense Impressions from Antique Prints: Sound

A Map of Comparative Moralities for Women

{How it would be done if men gave birth.]

{She is smiling. What do the other expression imply?]

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas
Mathematical Art: “The End of Simple Multiplication”, 1814

JF Ptak Science Books Post 982

I found this fabulous example of multiplication in a student’s workbook, written out in 1814. Undoubtedly the sub-title, “the end of Simple Multiplication” was not intended to imply the literal end of multiplication (though the thought does invoke some interesting bits of fiction), just the result. It is simply a gorgeous object.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Industrial & Technological art — Information, Quantitative Display of — mathematics, logic
Alpha and Omega Department, #3

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

Sometimes the beginnings and ends of things show up in unexpected places. Penzias and Wilson at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, discovered that the reason for the “interference” readings that they were receiving in their instrument was not due to pigeon poop, but was actually the remnant radiation of the Big Bang. And it didn’t look like much, but the stuff that caused the end of the great American Western frontier was found in simple lines: ribbons of steel for the railroads, on the one hand; and twisted bits of sharp metal wrapped around wire, the barbed wire fence ultimately and very cheaply closing off the vast land into manageable parcels, on the other. Stories like these are legion.

It is infrequent to find the two combined though in a simple, single photograph. This is the case, for me, in this small (1-inch tall) image found in an obscure publication called The Kentucky Mountain Echo, a True story of the Mountains, published in 1929. The small, delicate pamphlet seemed the physical opposite of the stories that it told, rocky and rough bits of life from the Kentucky mountains, hardscrabble farms, luscious woods and company coal mining towns.

The Rev. Bud Eversole is pictured here–along with his dog–at the spot in his farm in which he was taken by the guiding light, the holy spirit; an invincible vision took hold of him and never let go. Rev. Eversole continued to work his farm and taught the scriptures for free for many years afterwords as a roving minister. He marked the spot of his conversion with a pole; he also determined that the pole would mark his grave, the ultimate place of rest for him at the very spot where he was “born”.

For all that it symbolizes, the image looks pervasively unsettled to me–Rev. Eversole (I have no idea if that was his real name or if it was a post-conversion creation) looks like he is waiting for something, anything, even for the late afternoon sun to just hurry up and warm his back. This area of his farm just looks a mess, not like a small farm kept between and along rolling hills (no treat, that). The Rev. doesn’t tell me much, except that he was obliged to allow his dog in the photo, and took off his broad-brimmed hat to have his picture made. Perhaps that is all that he wanted to say.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Boredom, History of
War of Nicknames: 19th Century Criminals vs. Modern Mobsters vs. mid-Century Baseball vs. Mathematicians & Physicists

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 979

[See my earlier post on the change in 19th century Western literary figure nicknames]

Inspector
Thomas Byrnes published a remarkable mug book and history of criminality in his
1886 Professional Criminals of America. It is remarkable how often the hundreds of
people detailed in this book went on to long, vast, storied and a well-traveled
careers, stopping here and there for a few years in Sing Sing or Dannemora,
before moving on to riper pickings in other cities. But what I’ve focused on in this book,
unfortunately or not, are the categories of crimes and the nicknames of the
criminals, many of which strike me as prosaic.

[The interesting image below shows the only criminal in their sick/death bed,a accompanied by two rather ordinary guys who–uncommonly–are not looking down.]

The nicknames include such lovelies as Big Rice, Mollie Matches, Doctor Dick, Hoggie, Fairy, Blink, Nibbs, Funeral, Deafy, Milkman, Poodle, Daigo, Shang, Bugs, Shone, Bad Boy and Tit. The women ha dfar fewer nicknames, the three of the best of that limited selection being Mother Hubbard, Black Lena, Big Bertha and Kid Glove Rosey.

Their classifications of crime included boarding house thief, swindler, pennyweight, confidential operator, bogus custom house collector, sawdust gamer, scarper, river thief, tip lifter, window smash, skingamer, and butcher cart thief. (At some point I’ll need to write a little something about the originator of the “Butcher Cart Thief”, Big Frank McCoy. Big Frank didn’t steal butcher carts–he would make his daring escape after robbing bank in a passing butcher cart. He’d rob the bank and spring onto the back of a cart to make his getaway. I think that this tells us that in NYC, for example, in 1882, there were so many of these carts in the streets that a person could actually get lost in a sea of the things…perhaps like hiding in a cab nowadays. Quite a little peep into a time long passed.)

But
in the annals of nicknames these are not my choices for the most colorful, or
descriptive. Leaving out all other categories
(political, religious, musical, military will just have to wait for a more
rainy day) of nicknames except for mobsters (as in “The Mob”), professional
American baseball and physicist/mathematicians

[And from the female end of the book:]

Baseball
has provided ceaseless though a little limited entertainment, tending sometimes
toward the poetic overstatement (the Chairman of the Board, The Mighty Slider,
The Great Significance) though it does get down to business in the ‘40’s and
‘50’s (the golden age of BB nicknames).
Here are a few examples, minus the racist stuff: Pork Chop, Tater, Gummy, Whale, Pickles,
Rawmeat, Spud, Bunny, Beast, Kitten, Possum, Slug, The Rat, Pudge, Tomato Face,
Buttercup. (The most effective nicknames could’ve been made by combining two of the single names: “Spud Rawmeat”, “Pudge Slug” or “Gummy Buttercup”, for example.) There’s an awful lot of them
dealing with food, and a whole heck of a
lot dealing with facial features; they all seem to outweigh ball playing
ability, by far.

So
far as I can tell there are no good nicknames for physicists and
mathematicians, except for the ones that I’ll make up right now. Richard (“You Talkin’ to ME?) Feynman, Albert
(“Lady Boy” and “Big Soft”) Einstein, Paul (“Deep Face”) Dirac, Enrst (“’Stache Boy”) Mach, John
(“The Big Finger”) Nash, Ernest (“The Bone”) Rutherford, Erwin (“Slitty” or
“Tabs”) Schroedinger, Isaac (“Sparkles”)
Newton, Kurt (“Bad Water”) Goedel, Norbert (“Double Fisty”) Wiener, John (“Johnny the Push” or “Other God” or
“Sweet Suits”) von Neumann are all possibly pretty if not irreverent. They also don’t come close to the overall
winners in this restricted category of nickname appreciation, modern mobsters.

No
one, I think quite comes to grip with nicknames as does The Mob; there’s a
certain joie de morte there that escapes other groups, possibly because of its
terminating, enforcing qualities and expectations.

Pete the Killer, Frankie Shots, Jimmy the Monk, Louie
Two Gun, Tommy Scar, Louie Ha Ha, Joey the Animal, Teets, Richie the Boot, Joey
the Push, Nags, Fifi, Joe Bananas, Baldy Dom, Frankie the Bug, Big Nose Sam,
Butterass, Chicken Sticks, No Nose, Louie the Mooch, Joey Spoons, One-Ear
Frankie, Punchy, Richie Phone, Beany the Squint, the Blind Pig, Joey Beans, and
of course Jimmy the Sniff. And a host of
Big ____, Little_____, Crazy _____, Fat ______ whatever.

I think that The Mob takes this contest, fair and square.

(For the record, the entire text by Byrnes is located here; also, I have the original 1886 edition and a 1969 reprint available for purchase should the spirit move anybody.)

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Iconography
Image Archaeology–Images within Images Department, 1934

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 978

This
short post comes in the can’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover category, as the cover
is absolutely the most interesting component of this publication. Unless of course you’re interested in knowing
how many paid subscribers Liberty had in Asheville, North
Carolina in 1934.
Or Salida, Colorado.

That’s all there is to the innards of this pamphlet: circulation numbers
for a prancing, popular magazine. This
would’ve been of great concern to the folks trying to sell and distribute Liberty, showing
potential customers how far and wide the magazine was read. (And evidently it
was very popular: with a circulation per
issue of about 2.2 million, it was the sixth most popularly-read magazine in
the country, following Collier’s, McCall’s,
Ladies Home Journal and The Saturday
Evening Post, all of which had circulations between 2.3 and 2.9 million, so
Liberty was not far off from being
one of the most widely-circulated magazines in the country. It actually rose to
the number two spot for a little while during the war.)

This
is not to say that the magazine itself was a bore, what with writers like P. G.
Wodehouse, Robert Benchley, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert W. Chambers, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Murray Leinster, Sax
Rohmer and others making contributions here and there.

An
odd bit about Liberty—they “timed” their articles. The reader was told about how long, on average,
it would take to read each piece, taking about three hours to read the entire
issue. That’s something I’ve never seen
before.

So
the contents turned out to be a bit of a bore—the cover, on the other hand, is just
lovely, a beautiful and seamless piece of photo montage with some interesting
semi-hidden images. I quite like the image of the white-shirt-tie magazine stand purveyor that emerges from the shadows (above). And also the face that emerges from underneath the rear brim of the boater on the fellow standing in front of the stand.

This is just a lovely example of what ephemeral play one can draw from an unexpected source.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Boredom, History of — Perception — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at