JF Ptak Science Books

The Microscopy of Boredom

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“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.

Bizarre & Naive Surreal Book Titles: Sex, God, Food, and Clean (and Colorful) Blood

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Continuing a minor thread on bizarre and spectacularly mundane book titles comes today's entries on the various uses of "sex" in finding high-ideal  religion and a proper waistline. Harry Haas had a very simple answer to sex (a concept that I was frankly surprised to see described in three words):"low cultural sex instincts" lead to "low cultural levels", the reverse evidently never entering the writer's mind.  Sex "was not a moral issue", but an instinct "which like other instincts must be satisfied in one way or another". It is also "Nature's unscientific way of propagating the human races--the pre-logical and instinctive, the animal way".  He asks the reader "why do some of us read these risque publications if they are so degrading? Tobacco Road and various other pornographic diversions, I mean "[sic]. Mr. Haas doesn't know, but he does believe that the sex problem was vast, "a modifying agent in our personality growth" which "is responsible for an enormous amount of neurosis (and) seen to be at the bottom of the world's greatest achievements".  This leads of course to babies "blind, crippled and diseased and mentally hopeless--all of which find their common origin in sex troubles, feelings processes or chemical changes.  Probably nine-tenths of our anxieties, if not the major cause of world unrest, can be traced back to sex". Mr. Haas then gets to his major and remarkably scarce question:  "could it be that the writers and interpolators of the Bible were themselves unconsciously afflicted with sex troubles?"  He then takes this issue far and wide, and frankly by this point everything got so muddied and biblical that I just lost interest.  But the title is still good enough to stand firm and true, even if the the author didn't get to an answer, except to suggest that you purchase his pamphlet on the  psychoanalysis of  the bible--it was available for one dollar, postpaid, and had something to do with Albert Einstein.  He published this booklet on his own  in Orangeburg, S.C., in 1941, while the world was hell bent on some religico-sex-fueled instinct war.

Ernst J. Stevens ("Chromo-dietician and Expert Human Analyst") let loose his spongy  Nulife Sex-Diet Book III of the Social Science Series (Illustrated) in 1934--it is one of that class of books that doesn't look right, doesn't feel right, and smells a little like it spent too long lost under the cushion of a chair in a bad place.  His book is a hopeless melange of shrinko-babble, blood coloring and therapeutic color use wrapped around dietary "laws" of dubious value.  Having dispensed with 10 chapters in 15 pages, Dr. Stevens takes on "Color, Music, Taste and Skin Odors" after having established a priority in "colors in our flesh, colors in our thoughts and colors in our foods" and their connects to color balance and blood cleansing skin beautifiers.  That sounds like a lot to deal with in 15 five-inch-tall pages, but that's the least of it--the true metier of the book was also woven through everywhere, the messages of vim and vigor and health sense and mixing of the sexes colliding at every level with everything else.  It is a powerhouse display of some sort of need that I cannot identify.  The title, of course, is super. 

 

Baroque X-Ray of the Soul: Jacob Boehme's "Psychologia", 1632

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This solar-systemesque plan of the human soul appeared in Johannes Werdenhagen's translation of  the expansive Jakob Boehme's Psychologia [graece] vera I[oanni] B[oemi] T[eutonici] XL quaestionibus explicata, printed in Amsterdam in 1632.  Boehme's (1575-1624)  original work waited for 8 years following his death to appear in print in any form, fearing during his lifetime that perhaps some retribution for his barrier bending work might find him--and it turns out to have been true, as this book (and the only one of Boehme's subsequently published works) made its way onto the Roman Index in 1633.  Boehme was a mystical panthesist and psychic who blended the Kabbbalah,  Valentin Weigel, Paracelsus and the Bible in doses wide and narrow, finding his own advanced-Lutheran voice in works concerned with sin, evil and redemption, populated with angels and grace and on and on, in a world view far-reaching and way to complex to go into here. 

Part of that philosophy is displayed in this map of the soul, found in Psychologia--it would've been fairly impenetrable to me had I not found an English translation (below) of the image, published in Forty Questions Concerning the Soule in 1655. 

I thought that I was going to try to make a summary of the map, but, honestly, it is too just involved and intertwined and complex to do this quickly, so I'll just let whoever cares to have a go at it under their own steam.  I will point out that the major geographical feature here is the cross at center, which is actually Christ's crucifix and the great delineator of the system of the soul. But this is a gross simplification of the work of an unschooled man who rose to be a cobbler before compiling his remarkable set of ideas.  I've included a few explanations of the 63 items incorporated in the map--it is a difficult go, particularly since this was part of only the first of the forty questions addressed in the book. 

 

*Another example of Boehme's style of writing:
"For he that will say, I have a Will, and would willingly do Good, but the earthly Flesh which I carry about me, keepeth me back, so that I cannot; yet I shall be saved by Grace, for the Merits of Christ. I comfort myself with his Merit and Sufferings; who will receive me of mere Grace, without any Merits of my own, and forgive me my Sins. Such a one, I say, is like a Man that knoweth what Food is good for his Health, yet will not eat of it, but eateth Poison instead thereof, from whence Sickness and Death, will certainly follow

Naively Surreal Bad Ideas: Marriage, Women, Satan and Fleshy Ribs

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Well.  In this tortuously ripped 1907 poetic headbanger on blame and retribution and innocence--and somehow ultimately about capital punishment--are neural squeezings that I have never seen or heard before, which are so loftily bad, and so logically weak, as to make a grown man puddle-up in amazement.  I don't want to get too far into this thing, as the entire entertainment part of the work can stop right at the sub-title, because this little pamphlet is just tremendously bad, it transcends being about bad; it climbs out of badness into the so-bad-it-is-good department, and then slips instantly into the bad-good-bad-bad genre.  

Listen:
Since woman has been made of a rib of man, and is the "pupil of man's schooling",

How then can woman obviate
the crimson flesh of shame;
when man becomes degenerate,
is woman then to blame?

For woman being part of man,
and should she cause an aching,
how can her sins be other than
the image of his making

It goes on from there, of course, but we really don't need to follow.  The answer, by the way, is "yes".

When I first saw Rev. Posey  Sr's.1947  pamphlet I thought that it read "How to be Happy Through Marriage".  Oops.  My mistake, though the title as it stands is infinitely more entertaining, what with the story being told in ten thrilling chapters (seeded over 28 sparse pages).  In the final installment of these prescriptions for happiness in spite of it all, we are reminded that "Satan is God's arch enemy", and that "IF YOU WOULD BE HAPPY KEEP SATAN OFF YOUR SHIP" and "do all to the glory of god" and MARRY IN SEASON".  DO NOT marry a man for a "meal ticket", or "to keep him from marrying someone else", and DO NOT marry too soon or too late. And so on.  [Caps in original.]

There's much more sage advice sprinkled liberally around biblical verses, but I think you've already gotten enough of the  flavor to appreciate the rest of the meal (food itself sometimes getting in the way of its promise).

Titles of The Sublime Mundane, 2: Salt and Wire

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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.

Titles of the Sublime Mundane: the Empty Calories of the Over-Obvious

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Sometimes publications have absolutely no pretense, stating exactly what it is that sleeps between their covers. And sometimes these titles seem more like declarative broadsides or posters and not books at all, the "book part", or any writing furthering the cover's statement,  being unnecessary.  The first example here (and one which begs the response "yup!"), Saturn Has Rings, written in 1944 by Donald Lee Cyr (of El Centro), should've stopped at the end of the title of chapter one, "A Rose has Petals".  But no, it didn't, and stretched itself over another fifty thin pages. 

Frederick Blaine Humphrey's Know Your Groceries (1931) takes an unexpected twist, spiraling into something called "biochesspathy", "natural dianetics", and somehow "applying the natural science of the Bible...to the philosophy of youth and health". 

The Book of Envelope Facts...yes.  This is actually a lovely book, in its very special way, with 55 pages of non-stop facts and semi-useless information on envelopes.  Chapter Two's "Arousing Interest with Envelopes" competes wildly with Chapter Three "Attracting Attention with Envelopes" and Chapter Four's "Creating Desire with Envelopes".  It is completed with eight pages of a glossary of envelope terms.

This last example, Alice Mills' Notes on Reading Aloud, really doesn't belong, because it is mainly on acting; but the title is so lovely I just couldn't resist. 

Bad Titles Department: Huh? Confusing Nothingness, Making Stuff, and Radio Hair

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There is a constant and imaginary warfare going on among certain categories in this blog:  mainly, its "bad ideas" vs. "outsider logic" vs. "impossible books".  The result is that I just give up and fold them all into each other so I don't have to think about them at all.  I also haven't made many entries in these areas because, well, there's just so many of them to deal with--but I can tell you that they would make a fantastic Mystery Books gallery show, especially if the viewers were made to supply their interpretation of what the written material was all about from their problematic, time-sucking covers and titles.  And I can tell you that reading the content sometimes doesn't help to understand the title or the cover art, the logic of investigation passing through it all like a stony Bushism (where you know that something was said,  with words, but that's about all). 

Take for example Scorn Not That Which You Do Not Understand:  the title begs you to do so as you read it, though it took me a few turns to actually understand what it was saying.  The problem with the tiny pamphlet is that once you've read a few pages, you know a little less about the book before you knew it existed, which is a hard thing to do.  (The writing goes downhill after the title.) 

The Making of Things made me not want to know what was being made, and so I have not to this day opened it, though I judge from outside appearances that it was published around 1940 and is at least three pages long.  The title is just so on-beyond simple that knowing what it actually refers to is bound to disappoint. 

Station Hair, Hair and its Care, is a written radio broadcast from Station H-A-I-R (brought to you by George Elia of the Hair Culture Service of Milwaukee Wisconsin, and evidently with offices in the Lake Wobegon region near Overthere, Minnesota), taches us all how to have healthy, radiant and attractive hair good enough for radio.  In the looks-made-for-radio genre, my own hair (or whatever it is) is definitely in the hair-made-for-radio department, so long as I get enough bootblack to color my scalp. 

(This leads me to a semi-connected memory:  does anyone remember a street person in Manhattan, midtown, who was a drummer, with gigantic painted-on jet black eyebrows and painted-on black hair?  This wouild've been around 1970.  He was heavy, short, and would walk around with drumsticks and play on whatever was available, announcing, if I recall correctly, the famous drummer that he was immitating. He had to have been a famous street performer....Ring a bell with anyone.  Jeff?)

Blank and Empty Things: the Case of pre-Biblical "Missing" Eclipses, Refuting Darwin, and the Geology of Wrongness

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A History of Blank and Empty Things #35.

Mr. R.R. Menke, the author The Challenge from the Skies, Planetary Motion and its Solemn Witness Against Evolution and Higher Criticism, self-published his biblico-religico-astronomical diatribe against Charles Darwin in Huntington Park, California, in 1925.  What he launches in 51 labored pages against one of the most elegant ideas in the history of science  is simply, well, shocking; shockingly eyebrows-catching-on-fire bad, so-bad-it-isn't-even-bad bad.  Without reading the whole, um, thing, I do get the piercing whiff of a notion having to do with eclipses and the true date of seven (?) days of creation.  He uses some sort of chrono-alchemy layered in spreadable butter, the words made of microscopic asparagus, to prove his point that "as a consequence of the verified truth of these cycles of time, we are bound to believe that there were no eclipses before the prime date (5923 years ago)".  No eclipses before creation.  AND no precession  of the equinoxes, "no seasons before the prime date, no cycles of 360 years before the prime date".  Oh my.

His conclusion, by virtue of this magnificently weighty evidence (and which he doesn't even relegate to its own paragraph), is "Therefore Darwin's theory of evolution has no place in the domain of astronomical science..."  And this is so not so much, evidently, that there were no eclipses, and no seasons, and no 360-year cycles (?!), but rather, at the base of it all, there was nothing. No earth.  And since the earth is only 60 centuries or whatever old Darwin just doesn't work.  I have no idea why the eclipse business was necessary if Mr. Menke was going to argue that there was no "there" there for anything to happen, what with the impracticable nature of having something in nothing. 

There you have it.  There's more, much more, but frankly it just isn't worth the 20 minutes to dig out more.  I rarely read anything in Creation Sc__nc_ as there is nothing redeeming at all in it--I'm posting this today because it strikes me that this present work isn't necessarily singularly bad, but rather representationally bad.  Since the entire belief/hope/prayer system or whatever the Creationists claim as the intellectual/moral basis to their Principa in explaining the stuff of the universe is painfully wrong, and bad, and potentially harmful, I wonder why we should distinguish the levels of badness and wrongness?  It isn't as though  establishing a geology of wrongness will somehow categorize it all in such a way that something worthwhile could be discovered, like a miraculous toe-hold at the top of the  Sisyphusian hill they're trying to slide up.  And so perhaps Mr. Menke's work is just wrong, along with the rest of the others; perhaps the other side needs to deal with him as being one of their own more so than anyone else.  Certainly there are more elegant refutations than this unfortunate attempt, but that only makes the wrongness prettier:  a pig in a (white) wedding gown is still, after all, a pig.

Things out of Place Department: the Moon

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 This is a short entry in the “Things out of Place” department.  The image is lovely enough, and the depiction of the Moon is excellent, especially given the time of publication, which was 1683.  The Moon though, of course, is enormously out of proportion with the setting—I’m not sure why it needed a setting at all, but it has one, and it is odd.  The work is that of the prolific Manesson Mallet, who published this engraving as one of 677 in his massive Description de l’Univers, which appeared in five volumes.  I’m also not sure of how Mallet came to such greatness and capacity, as he started out his life (1630-1706) as a simple foot soldier under Louis XV, rising and rising in promotion and ability over the years until he became the chief inspector of forts.  He also wrote military books, including the three volume Les Travaux de Mars ou l'Art de la Guerre (1684), which he was somehow able to accomplish in the year after publishing his magnum opus.

I really couldn't figure out where to put his image, categorically speaking that is--it sort of fits into the small Extra Earth series, simply because the extra earths are big and way out of proportion.  But this is not "extra", and not the earth, but it is out of proportion and belongs in the sky; and, taken out of context, the image is very unusual, in a naive surreal kind of way...

Naive Combat and the Romance of Secret Death Holds: Utopiaic pre-Gore Imagery of Intentional Violence

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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. 

Alaska Calls: the Comma King Heads for the Hills. Naive Surreal Collection, Part 9.

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So.  I really couldn't tell what was going to happen in this pamphlet, a fine example from my Naive Surreal collection.  Unfortunately, it is a bit of only a lonely hearts tale, in spite of the monumentally-odd cover of the southern girl with hairy legs and a hobo switch and no shoes and a bare midriff in the wilds of Alaska.  The only thing that the text has going for it in the oddness department--with the exception of being badly written--is the enormous,use,of,the,comma.  I don't know what the record is for the badly-employed use of the comma might be, but, well, this little story must be making quite a run for it.  In the dedication, for example, which is ten lines and 100 words long, there are 18 commas.  More follow.  Many more. 

The cover must stand on its own--and it does. 

Is Dance Dangerous? The Naive Surreal Collection, Part 8.

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In the history of questions, this  ("Is the dance dangerous?") certainly must rank in the bottom tenth percentile.  Or at least I hope it does.  The question is the title of this small pamphlet, written by Porter Bailes (of the First Baptist Church of Tyler, Texas) in 1947, a work which is part of my Naive Surreal collection.  "If it's doubtful, it's dirty" is the major maxim that floats it way through this work, and proceeds to attacks it subject of "the"dance on its unholy, immoral, unnatural, imprudent, prayer-defeating nature. 

"Can any one stretch the imagination as to think of Jesus as being congenial and at ease in the atmosphere that the dance creates? No! Dancing is not to the glory of god. It never made anyone feel the nearness of god.  It robs us of the desire to pray. A dancing foot and a praying knee are not found long on the same limb."

And also:

"There are many fine people who dance.  They are fine not because they dance, but in spite of the dance."

And:

"The dance does not involve any moral requirements.  The more lewd the people are, the more proficient they may become. The gestures of the dance demand lewdness." 

Lastly:  "the tine of the dance makes it dangerous. Its hours are unearthly and abnormal"

And lastly last:  " The position of the dance make it dangerous.  For two normal people to place their bodies in the close personal contact that the modern dance demands and not have impure thoughts and unholy emotions stirred, would be very unnatural.  In truth, it is against all the known laws of human nature."

This is last just for my examples:  there are 20 pages of this.  It is remarkable that, in this highly restrictive and judgmental work,  the paper is allowed to bend. 

And not to be outdone, the author tells us that 97% of professional gamblers "attribute their habit to the practice of playing cards at home".  "The risk is too great, young people" Pastor Bailes tells us, "for you to start gambling--even at home".  He began to warm to this subject but I guess was saving this subject for later.

Fantastic and Inscrutable Titles: God and the Asylum of Ignorance. (Nazis by any other name...)

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Asa Turian, the author of this 1938 Outsider Logic pamphlet, was sort of steeped, in a light way, in gathering quotes from the moderns and the ancients--in the end, none of them seem to help. Ultimately he seems to me to create some new vocabulary to repackage the NSDAP, which even in 1938 was still gathering frothy American pro-Bund crowds at Madison Square Garden. (The scion of American Olympic sports and head of the International Olympic Committee, the  Nazi/racist Avery Brundage*, spoke to a crowd of 20,000+ American Bundists at The Garden in 1938, finding little fault with the Nazis.  He went on to a long and  distinct career-- some of which in deep furtherance of his political ideologies--as did thousands of other pro-Nazis.)  The title is taken from Exodus 32:1 and is a plea, very late in the Depression, from Turian to find some sort of Moses to lead the United States out of the despairing economic situation.  He notes that although many people were talking about the depression, no one was talking  (like Mark Twain's complaint about people discussing the weather) about what to do about it.  Which is odd because FDR had been hammering away at it for six years by the time this pamphlet was written.  No matter for Turian, who doesn't bother mentioning Roosevelt.

After quoting many, Turian suggests that the way out of the Depression was via a light Dictatorship ("an alternative between Democracy and Dictatorship by means of the separation of Government and Industry") that defies simple explanation.  Half-way through this Bush-IQ-thin text the Democracy part of this partnership slips away, saying simply that "we must maintain our present form of Government and resort to Dictatorship as well".  I think that the way this plays out is that a combination of democracy and dictatorship is just a dictatorship.  Industry is divided from government, and then  would be further divided "between Capital and Labor" and then "running it on a partnership basis" governed by the Corporate Dictatorship. He further suggests getting rid of money and putting the entire economy on a 100-billion (the unit of measurement not explained) "bartership basis".  I have no idea how this barter would work overseas, as international trade doesn't come up at all in Turian's economic homage to liberation logic, though there is a lot of discussion of "state controllership" and "the status of the corporation dictatorship".   There are some other societal revolutions that come and go, but the biggest of them all was the establishment of some sort of economico-religico tripartate God/Mammon/Something Else oracle to lead us away from all bad economic temptation.  Wow.   I'm not sure exactly what the author was getting at, but if you take away the barter bit, it sounds quite a bit like Nazism in different terminology.  I guess this just goes to show you that you can Reality-Compromised and still come up with either (a) your own version of Nazism or (b) a paint-by-numbers Nazi who changes the colors but not the numbers. 

*I'd like to discuss Brundage more fully at some point.  For now, let's just say that he was a man without quality.   It was Brundage who sold out Jim Thorpe in a rant against professionalism in the Olympics but who said nothing about the Olympic industry and paid Olympians in the Soviet Bloc.  It was Brundage who disqualified and exiled Tommie Smith and John Carlos in Mexico '68 for their giving the Black Power salute but who said nothing at all about the Nazi salute in his highly cherished 1936 Berlin games.  And it was Brundage who cluster fucked the 1972 Munich Olympics--in ways too numerous to go into here--and who allowed the games to continue after a one day interruption following the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by the Black September Palestinian terrorist group.  Brundage, as President of the IOC, spoke at the ceremony the day the Olympics restarted, and unbelievably equated the massacre of the Israelis with the boycott of the racist all-white Rhodesian team: (the bold is mine, just in case):
"The Games of the XXth Olympiad have been subject to two savage attacks. We lost the Rhodesian battle against naked political blackmail. I am sure that the public will agree that we cannot allow a handful of terrorists to destroy this nucleus of international cooperation and goodwill we have in the Olympic movement. The Games must go on...."

Why the man wasn't struck by lightning on the spot and turned into carbon sizzle is a sacred mystery. I am sure that a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion must've been on his library shelf. Or half-shelf.

The man was utterly shameful, and yet was the leading American for the Olympics for almost thirty years.

Private Smoe, Latrine Orderly, and a Sub-History of the Word "Latrine" in the Titles of Books in English

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 452

Is it possible that James Steveson's Paddington : report on the necessity of latrine accommodation for women in the Metropolis, published in 1879, is the first book published in English to use the word "latrine" in the title?! Well, in a lightly interesting and perhaps stupefying way, the answer is "yes".  And this just to get to this very obscure graphic.cartoon book, Smoe, the Latrine Orderly, by H.E. Swinney, published by the Ledger Company in Fort Worth, Texas.  According to WorldCat/OCLC, the massive cataloging tool used by librarians everywhere, there aren't any copies of this book in any library anywhere in the world.  I'm both surprised and underwhelmed.  The cartoons all appeared in the Fort Worth Army Air Field's newspaper "Lone Star Scanner", which is also a publication that doesn't seem to have survived anywhere.  H.E. Swinney may be Sergeant H.E. Swinney, who was present at Pearl Harbor on 7 December and who fought his way through WWII, though I'm not sure.

The pamphlet's  jokes and cartoons I can appreciate as having been funny once upon a time, making people laugh as they snapped their newspapers over their eggs at the PX.  Maybe they made people laugh for a few years, but probably not much more.  It makes me think for just a little about the average age for how long jokes are "funny".  I'd say that the Smoe funny lasted about 2 years 5 months and 5 days.  More or less.

The word "latrine" is from the French and from the Latin before that, and appears fairly early in English (1642 according to my 1933 OED), but for whatever reason, it just doesn't find its way into the title of any English books for more than two hundred years.

The reason I'm spending any time at all on this little pamphlet is because its title is so entirely unexpected.  And that, as the man said, is all I have to say about that. 

The History of the Future, Living Life Backwards, and a Wordle of Benjamin Button

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 451

Beginning life with the final kiss of a Shakespearean comedy is far more complex than it is interesting.  The ordeal of Benjamin Button, a current movie based on the 1922 short story by Scott Fitzgerald (found in his collection Tales of the Jazz Age), presents some very curious aspects of the physics of life--especially if it is more than just Mr. Button who gets to live their life out again in reverse.  It also isn't a very wide genre of literature, so far as I know.  Another good example of a life lived backwards is the book Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis, who tells the story of a problematic character named Tod T. Friendly. ("Tod T. Friendly" is also "Todt Friendly" or "death friendly, taking a piece of his name from German, which evidently Mr. Friendly was.)  On the other hand, the novel Stuart, a Life Lived Backwards doesn't make the cut, as Stuart does live his life forwards.  Christopher Homm, (homme?) written by C.H. Sissons in 1965, tells the story of the title character backwards, though his life is lived forwards as well.

(CLICK to enlarge.)

The idea of the future, or the having of a future, seems like it should be an ancient idea, and it is--though it isn't necessarily a universal idea.  Mesopotamians, Babylonians, Mayans embraced the idea of vast distances of time; early Christian faith, o the other hand, doesn’t necessarily have a great future, what with time ending at Judgment Day.  Hinduism and Buddhism have a sense of the future, though there is some very problematic circularity involved with it.  The true scientist bits about the concrete possibilities of vast amounts of time extending into the millennia are found in Charles Lyell (Principles of Geology) who in 1830 took up some earlier work and made it possible to think of the age of the earth in terms of millions of years.  Charles Darwin was also a cultivator of the past and possible future, as was Hermann von Helmholtz, who predicted the ultimate age of the sun, meaning that time's arrow had the possibility of being hundreds of millions of years long.  These were startling, epochal ideas, and all came within a period of thirty years, creating for the world a fluidity of scientific thought such as had never been seen.  The future came to life in the hands of novelists like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley, not to mention the fabulous worlds of Robert Heinlein (who launched his terrific series of articles on the history of the future in the March 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction--just a month after John W. Campbell had evidently coined the term in the same magazine.  I can't leave this without mentioning Edward Bellamy, a great trailblazer in this area of thought, and his work Looking Backwards, which was a view of a socialist utopia live din the year 2000 by an 1887 man who had fallen into a 113-year-long sleep. 

But the difficult part of multiple people living their lives backwards comes in the multiplicity of changes that would be caused by two actors adjusting their behavior for the "future" based on lives they had already "lived".  I can't imagine the implications of the "butterfly effect" when spread across a broader spectrum than just Mr. Button.

I haven't seen the movie, but I have now read the Fitzgerald story, and the idea is very disturbing, like coming out of Alzheimer’s to climb right back in again.  The worst of it seems t take place not at the end of the reverse life, but right before--Mr. Button enters Harvard as a genius sportsman with his years of expertise and learning already under his belt--four years later, though, as a senior, he is struggling, his brain and mind slipping away, his knowledge restricted to that of a 16-year old boy.  And it just gets worse from there, though his ability to distinguish his diminishing capacity grows dimmer and dimmer, thankfully, the closer he comes to his cradle grave.  Its a difficult story to read.

(In a cursory look I don't see anything interesti9ng with anything read backwards in Mr. Button's story.)