Category: Impossible Books

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 555

“Contrive to have as many treats
for your mind as you can, as many things to which it can fly from itself”   Sam.
Johnson.   (James Boswell, Ominous Years, pg. 287

Boredom is a powerful thing.  It is also, at least as a word if not as a
concept, relatively young—it first appeared in Dicken’s Bleak House in 1852,
with the word bore making an earlier appearance in 1762. (Bitter Ambrose Bierce
redefines “bore” as a person who speaks when you wish them to listen.)  Boredom is distinct from Melancholy, which
relates more to depression than to boredom, and is an idea and word thousands
of years old.  Boredom is a universal
constant, a wide acknowledged entity of enormous reach and singular acuity—and the
fact of the matter is that you cannot translate boredom into a narrative.  You can create art depicting boredom, and you
can tell what boredom is, but you cannot, really, cannot write a novel with a
boredom narrative.  Unless you’re Jane
Austen.  It is a tired pursuit of
tireless insipidity which simply escapes capture in the form of a novel—or I
should say, a novel that you’d like to read, or was readable.  Boredom still awaits its Quixote.  Melancholy on the other hand has many, not
the least of which is one of the most unreadable and fascinating books in the
canons of English lit, Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy (which would be an interesting film if another Burton,
Tim, got his hands on it.).

I was thinking about boredom in
terms of some of the printed material  in
my Naïve Surreal category—those are the pamphlets where the meanings of their
titles and subjects, once popular in their day, are now aloof and unhinged,
floating in the present with almost no bearing on what their original logical
intent was.  And so these titles
sometimes take on a fantastically removed appearance, and sometimes they are
simply simple, so simple that they can be at first blush quite boring.  But they’re boring only for a moment, until
the brain wraps itself around the illogic of them, and then they become not
boring—fascinating, sometimes.  And what
is that tiny space between the wide widths of boredom and fascination?  How microscopic are those pores between the
two entities? And what exactly is that place where boredom and fascination meet?  

We Think a Point Has Been Missed (published in March, 1933) is an odd example, going from boring to puzzling to incredible to disappointing to interesting all in about a minute.  It is a lovely title to be sure, flying at the heights of the sublime mundane, hiding in its own obvious nature.  Opening the booklet we find that it was published by the Columbia Broadcasting System, and at first blush it seems a fainting on miniature problems of the naiscent radio company.  But it turns out that it is actually fairly topical:  CBS wanted to make it very clear that the eight-minute radio broadcast of President Roosevelt on  March 4th 1933* was a significant and exceptional use of the new medium,  CBS points out that “Roosevelt did advertising’s most significant job…advertising ‘courage” and “conquered despair”, and that those eight minutes  over the radio “added cash value of the nation….commodity markets pulsated, dollars rose around the world, demand for department store credit rose 40 percent”.  In short, this was an early recognition of the extreme value of immediate access to a national population.  

The Roosevelt speech, which went without quotation in this short report, was his inaugural address, the day of his taking the reigns from Herbert Hoover–the “All  we have to fear is fear itself” speech, which did indeed galvanize the nation, delivered virtually immediately via radio. (“God bless Roosevelt; god bless radio” intoned Will Rogers.)   It is one of the country’s best inaugural speeches, made at a time when the country needed one, there in the depths of the Great Depression in the late winter of 1933.  But all of this is so far down in this slender seven-page book that the speech almost smokily wisps its way through it, the main emphasis being the importance of the delivery system and not the stuff of delivery.  Its a queer little thing, all of its importances semi-hidden, made more pronounced in this particular copy since it was owned by Roosevelt.  

The second example or boring-interesting is the ultra-under compelling Don’t, which when published in 1926 threatened directions for advising improprieties in conduct and common errors of speech.  Written by “Censor”, it dragged itself through 76 pages of nitty dialog details that are in a way interesting as a window on correct conduct during the roaring times.  Ultimately though the text doesn’t survive interest, and all we’re left with is the very unusual title. 

Which takes us back to appearances and second-life and the intersection of boredom and the fantastic.  I suspect that if we apply the microscope to that boundary that we see exactly what we want to see.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 543

Read last year’  March 11, 2008 entry “The X-Ray of the Imagination 2: Phrenology, Chinese Hell Scrolls, and the Beauty of the Thought Balloon”.

The covers of this book are too far apart. (A book review, in toto, by Ambrose Bierce)

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts. Charles Dickens

Following yesterday’s post on the Sublime Mundane are these pamphlets, which are as perfectly and invisibly mundane as can be, if we were judging them solely by their covers.  What turns out to be the case, though, is that they are beautifully composed,  very well written, and extremely informative.  They are  drop-dead serious.

The first is the International Salt Company’s Salesmans’ Manual for, yes, the selling of salt*.  The 12-inch tall , 6-ring binder instructional has 13 sections and is 75 pages long and strong; not only that, but most of the text is cut in two, so that there are some intricate associations that can be built between the bottom part of sec 2 page 8 and the top half of sec 4 page 2 and so on.  It is just brilliantly done,a work to be proud of!  And of course it looks like absolutely nothing and less than that, or that you’re whacking a quarter-inch brad with a 12-pound hammer.  Which may be the case, because the salesman who was familiar with all of these aspects of salt could put down just about anyone who got in between them and their salt sale.

Next are two 1945 versions of the unfortunately-named CRAPO Company’s product brochures,  makers of steel conduits, and who were evidently part of the Indiana Steel and Wire Company (of Muncie).  It turns out here, too, that these were packed with engineering data and construction practices for electrifying and improving electrical conditions in the great midwest.  The catalogs were also deftly  illustrated with elegant engineering drawings of their products.  So:  on  the outside, seeming nothingness for one book and badly-named for the other; inside, they are state-of-the-art, well written and bountiful.  They just look weird. 

*I am in no way demeaning the importance of salt here–I just don’t want to deal with the whole overwhelming issue of its important history.  Suffice to say that stuff hasn’t been much more important than salt over the last few thousand years.

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 487

Roy Rogers–not the singing cowboy but a black-shirted, black-suited, white-bow-tied private slickee cop–shows us here all of the secret and impossible moves from those fast-fighting sequences in those hundreds of 1930’s movies in which men would fight furiously and not lose their hats.  Or, the same guys would have no hats but would have wildly whipping grease-hair and would be knocked down with an open-fisted shot the chest, collapsing on conveniently-placed collapsing-couches.  But Mr. Rogers, who claims to have taught these methods “in leading theatres in in almost every country in the entire world” was serious about his craft, even though the images used to illustrate his serousness look naive and sweetly quaint to our 2009 eyes.  In a series of images that almost never show anyone with an open or grimacing mouth, Mr. Rogers tried to show his grasping audience the tricks of his trade, or the trade of his tricks,

with various methods of restraint, and head butts, and finger holds, and balance-upsetters, and, yes, even the “death” blow.  It is remarkable, really, how far things have progressed in the way of savage fighting in the last 62 years–things have gotten so ultra-modern, so (in the words of the lovely Anthony Burgess) ultra-violent, that these secret combat doings from 1947 look like baby-room wallpaper compared to the nastiness of today.  And yet teaching this stuff kept Mr. Rogers in white ties and jet-black clothing.

If only this sort of combat packed the modern nightmare with dread, what a better place we would wake to–for me, these are pre-gore images of violence which look strangely removed when viewing them from our post-gore world.  Blood as a result of violence in the movies of the 1930’s and 1940’s (and even into the ’50’s) was a rare commodity; blood after the late 1960’s was delivered by the buckets-full, and then by torrent. The delivery of the visual birth of administered violence is relatively new in the history of “entertainment”, and we might’ve moved a little beyond that, as well, as almost nothing is shocking anymore in our pictures of advanced and sometimes impossibly-violent violence.  I imagine that the thought of depicting violence in the movies via 2009 standards to Mr. Rogers back there in 1947 would’ve seemed as remote to him then as the possibility of a computer smaller than an automobile.  

In any event, I find this to be a remarkable and quiet piece of Americana, capturing some of the stuff of life not normally captured.