JF Ptak Science Books

A Magnficiently Bad How-to on Writing: a Card Deck of Limited and Stolen Creativity

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 351

The title to this post probably does live up to itself--this bit, The Plotkey Magnified, by John Hamilton Curtis, reads as though it were written by a long-down-the-list loser of a Hemingway-imitation contest, and thunk-up with the vigor of a five-beer bar date. (Interestingly, the work, printed but not published in 1937, was prepared by the author for himself--we learn this info on the title page, along with the author's address, which was PO Box D, Eagle Rock, California.. It must've been a pretty small post office if their boxes were identified with letters.)  The subtitle to this work pretty much sums it up:  A Supplemetary Expansion of Curtis Magic Plotkey Combined with Slantng and Selling.  The one thing that the author forgot was punctuation and grammar, which somehow shook themselves loose of his book, and which I'm guessing were sold in those now-disappeared tiny paper bags that you used to get at Reiman's Hardware store in 1966.  He also forgot how to write, as some of his efforts are just truly bad, and occasionally painful.  For example, we have the following exceptional declaration:

And so, these two paragraphs speak for themselves in their own special way.

What Mr. Curtis was trying to do here with this publication was (a) make a little money  and (b) selling a manual of some calculated "ideas" for story and character development to people writing detective fiction for detective novels.  Nothing really works here--the author shouldn't have written it because he couldn't write, and certainly couldn't teach all of the stuff about writing that he couldn't have known;and the readers shouldn't have bought it because if they couldn't write before reading the book they doubley-couldn't write after using it. And I do mean "using" it rather than "reading" it.  Incredibly, the book is set up to have its ideas dismembered and set up in the fashion of a card deck, the reader dealing themselves out pieces of characters and scenes and locales, with Mr. Curtis offering more than two dozen (!)  different types of physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, vocational and avocation descriptions encompassing the totality of human nature.   Even though these descriptions of the human condition are minimal, liminal and sturdily stupid, they are funny in an outsider, disturbed vein of insight.    The 'physical personality" aspects like  athletic/wirey; fat/pig-like(?) rub up hard against things like the removed "spiritual" personality traits, which  include "christian, pagan, idealistic, infidel, unconcerned, back-slider, soulless-sinful".  Throw in the mental, and emotional stuff plus the interest and jobs sections and you can concoct some spectacular Frankensteinian-monster personality assignments:  for example, at random, you can develop a character for your detective story who is fat and pig like with a poor memory, a back-slider  who loves themselves only, is a trapper, and is interested in "entertainment".  Wow.  These ingredients can get mixed and coddled into a witches brew of old tripe that would compose an unlikely and heinous small town population that should probably be buried rather than read about--remember, you're supposed to use this cookbook as The Guide to Creativity for the short story you're trying to sell to "Muscle Culture". 

I must say though that what I take away with me from this experience is an idea for turning this book into some sort of naive-surreal card/board game that is made to produce purposefully bad fiction, the sort of writing that is really hard to do; writing good bad, where the loser is the winner in a game of retro-badness. Not easy. Soldier.

Van Gogh's People-Absent Portraits: the Empty/Blank Series, continued, part 13

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 350

Still another part of the developing theme of empty/vacant people/places is this consideration of Vincent van Gogh's portraits of absent people--that is, his paintings of famously "empty" chairs that he executed in the middle of December 1888 that were more portraits of the people that they belonged to rather than images of the chairs themselves.  Vincent actually described these chairs as "empty" in his wonderful letters (this one from February 1890) to his brother Theo, "one of an empty armchair, (actually Gauguin's chair)".  He described the painting as an effort to represent Gauguin's "empty place":  "this is a study of his armchair in dark brown-red wood, the seat greenish rush, and in the place of the absent a lighted candle and modern novels". 

The quotation marks around his "empty space" were in the original and quite purposeful.  Gauguin would leave Vincent at about the time Vincent went to the hospital (committed to the hospital, that is) for one of his "spells"; the painting though was made before Gauguin actually left.  Whether this is because he, Gauguin, removed himself or because he faded away only in Vincent's disturbed brain is just not known to me. 

The emptiness is a replacement for the men who weren't in their chairs--Vincent not in his simple/peasant chair, and Gauguin not in his darkish fancy chair. There are symbols galore and sailing away in both images, and much has been written on them (see for example H.R. Graetz The Symbolic Language of Vincent Van Gogh (McGraw Hill, 1963) so I won't address them here.  I was primarily interested in these two images for the different sort of emptiness that they represented--paintings of subjects that weren't there. 

The Tomb of Broken Dolls--an Appeal for Respect for Outgrown and Disabled Toys

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 349

"No two toys are ever broken in the same way or with the same emotional results." RobertGraves, Poetic Unreason

 I first wrote about this fabulous idea--a tomb or memorial for broken and lost toys--on this blog almost three years ago--it still seems like an utterly fantastic practice.

 This is an absolutely outstanding concept, and I simply have no notion as to why we don't have such observations in the United States.  (The following two details are from the larger images, below, found  in the 27 July 1929 issue of The Illustrated London News, page 157.) The story provides these two pictures and unfortunately scant details of the ceremony which was held at the Imperial Primary School at Sugamo, Japan. 

The first photo shows the detail of children offering flowers for the altar on which their tray of broken dolls is being venerated; and to the right is the detail of children bowing to the grave of "broken playthings", though the markings on the (grave?) stone indicate that it is for dolls.  It also seems to be a marker for a mass of toys, not that each toy would have its own marker; I suspect it to be enough to have a place where allot of kids could come to venerate objects in which they might have invested countless hours of their time, effort, attention and affection.  That it is a shared place and experience makes the monument all the more so powerful.

There are few better things to teach a child than to pay respects for something that has given them pleasure or helped them, or, say, for returning the love which has been showed them from their doll or toy.  It has always struck me as not-quite-right that a toy can be a beloved object one day and a dust-magnet the next, destined for the trash heap.  Certainly these are holy objects in themselves, and deserve a better and more kinder fate than being mixed with broken glass and greasy unmentionables. 

 

 

Are there greater things to be concerned with?  Yes, of course, but only on the face of it--I think that helping kids understand the underlying dignity of inanimate objects such as their playthings could give them a greater awareness for the other seemingly invisible things that they will find throughout their lives. Further I think that a visible, constant reminder for these objects would be really more like a memory-monument for a period of time, a place in nearly everyone's life in which held a certain purity and promise, a protected and beloved frailty of the human experience shared by all.  I can honestly think of no other monument that could reach across religious or philosophical or belief systems to arouse a feeling of common goodness than this. Everyone has had a toy that they've loved, and I have no doubt that if remembered these would be powerful emotions, and could be about the most common denominator we have on the planet.  I can think of no divisive element in such a monument of veneration.