JF Ptak Science Books

Austrian Communist Manifesto for Democracy and Freedom (1944)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2889

First of all I mean no disrespect to the author/s of this work in discussing the pamphlet's appearance, or those who read it with interest, or to those who studied it, or to those who may have lived it and who may have paid the price for doing so.  I thought that this small work was remarkable in content and appearance. and in the way it sounds...the book's physical appearance seems to me to add to its history and story.

First of all this effort was written by someone associated with the Communist Party of Austria no later than 1944 and is titled Auf zum Kampf Freiheit und Wiedergeburt Osterreuchs, or The Fight for Freedom and Rebirth in Austria (or Let's Fight for Austrian Freedom and Rebirth).  This means that this was a highly incendiary work for an Austrian to possess in their Nazi-dominated country. The Nazis absorbed Austria ("annexed" is the word found more often describing the Nazi takeover and obliteration of Austria as a sovereign nation) Austria in March 1938 and were of course massively anti-Communist, except of course for the Communists in the Soviet Union, who Hitler externally tolerated in the public lull of his bitter hatred between the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the beginning of Operation Barbarossa  on 22 June 1941, a period where he was able to use the Soviet Communists to his advantage before attacking and killing millions of Russians.  

Auf zum Kampf is a manifesto of the Austrian Communist Party written during a meeting/party congress in 1944. The copy I am working with, the copy with so much presence, is (I expect) a much-reduced photographic copy of the original that was made for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the organization that morphed into the CIA.  It is 5"x 4" and 23 pages long. It is staple bound in homemade cardboard for use in the OSS library. (It even has a borrower's card in the rear pocket with three names, none of whom I could identify.)  The images were printed on a very thin photographic paper, and have a very exaggerated "papery" sound to them, even with the slightest touch...they have the feel of a thin vellum. It really does feel like an unusual document. 

Magritte, Bruegel, and Mid-western Streetlights (1908)

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I am somewhere between the 16th and 20th centuries with this image--I see a bit of Pieter Bruegel (d. 1569) in this, one of his involved  and diverse human landscapes set into a complex physical environment. In spite of its great and inquisitive artfulness, this photo was made to illustrate the streetlights of Central Avenue in Rio de Janiero for a speculative publication called Public Lighting for St, Louis, which was printed in 1908 and published to solicit opinion on the style of street lighting that was to take place in the city.  Fairly mundane stuff, except that several of the photos used in that slim pamphlet are quiet little sub-masterworks of nothing. I think too that the perspective here of the horizon disappearing down the avenue and the sky being about the same color as the street lend a certain arrogance to the realism of the thing.

I also see the possibility of Rene Magritte (d. 1967) at work here as well--or a Dada-reconstruction of his Golconda, if you applied a heavier gravity a bit and placed all of those raining bodies from his painting  carefully onto the streets of Rio.   Or it is a combination of the two...in any event it is an evocative photo, buried up to its eyeballs in total obscurity in this 1908 pamphlet, and which probably has not seen the light of day in a hundred years. 

Color, in Living Color! Occasional and Segmented Brutalist Design in Data Visualization. (1944)

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I've made a number of posts to this blog on color and the lack of it (for example, see the series on "Color and its Advanced Abuses") mostly concentrating on MONUMENTAL color or the lack of it when it could have been there (this, for example, exemplified in a beginner book on color theory with illustrations in glorious black and white). Today's example comes from a oversize pamphlet called The Story of Highways, which I think was a vehicle used to deliver highway stats to crowds of congressional interest. The 16"-wide pamphlet contains 26 graphs/charts that reproduce 30"x 40" posters used in a presentation somewhere to justify federal money spent on highways during WWII.  Some of them are unexpectedly colorful, very flat, and as I said in the title of this post, somewhat Brutalist in design. It isn't quite Soviet Style or Brut Soviet, but there are those elements that I think are pretty noticeable. And if not, they're interesting to see.

Is This the First Mention of the Word “Cybersex”?

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2888

At first it appeared that this was indeed the first appearance of “cybersex” (in 1970), and that it pre-dated the established conception of its first appearance by twenty years. But, well: no. After much ado, and after some very subdued and annoyed half-bored/boring interest, it turns out that this is a reprint of an article that appeared in 1967, three years previously.

“Science Fiction—Sex for Ever—a New Cybernetic Project Called Interfuck” is the in-your-face uncertain “title” of the article under consideration here, and it seems to be bouncing its little four-page self around without attribution. Its weirdness caught my eye, and I quickly zeroed-in on the unexpected word, “cybersex”. Now, there's a LOT of speculation going on in this short article about how all of that person-to-person-to-machine loop happens, and I have no interest in going through it—you can certainly read it for yourself, though, as I've scanned the thing and attached it below.

The article appears in a badly-titled booklet by O.D. Wells, How Could You be So Naive!, published by Artorga and distributed by Modern Books Limited, Berkshire. There are six other papers/articles in this issue in addition to the Wells, including mostly serious stuff: H. Maturan, “Neurophysiology of Cognition”; David Redman “Processing Information with Light”; Roland Fischer, “The Perception-Hallucination Continuum”; J.L. Synge (?!) “A Plea for Chronometry”' A. Battersby, How to Bury and Idea”; and the our problem, “Science Fiction—Sex for Ever—a New Cybernetic Project Called Interfuck [sic]”...plus a foreword by F.H. George.

The course of the article wasn't so obvious because it seemed that this was a bit of a sci-fi story wrapped around a parody and tied up with short anxieties, and the references in the article weren't accurate, and perhaps not real. Also the publisher, Artorga, is enigmatic, and sometimes to me seems to not take itself seriously even though there are some very serious contributors. There weren't that many places to turn to check this piece out after the first obvious choices proved to go nowhere.

It is difficult to find out anything about Artorga (“Artificial Organism”), though the “Paragram” of this work cites heavy hitters Gordon Pask, Ehinz von Foerster, W. Ross Ashby, and Stafford Beer as being “the Committee of Artorga” establishing it in 1958.

Anyway, “cybersex” as a word hunt was enough for me, and the earliest uses of the word were given as 1991 (Oxford English Dictionary), 1990 (Merriam-Webster), and then a myriad of other minor notes (almost all unreferenced) for the period 1985-1990. This example of course has them all beat, and by a wide margin.

It also predates just about all of the other “cyber-” created words prefixed to a wide variety of nouns, including a number of words that are slightly more removed than “cybersex”. There's “cyber-porn” from 1989; -romance, 1992; -smut, 1993; -friend, 1986; and -affair, 1994, for example. The only references I can find for earlier “cyber” prefixes are “cyberkid” which I've never encountered (1966); “cyberman”, which evidently has something to do with Dr. Who and also from 1966; and “cybertron”, as a sort of computer hardware reference, from 1961. All of this flows from the first introduction of “cyber” in its creation by Norbert Wiener (a very smart guy who also happened to control greatly to the US war effort in WWII with fire-control in AA weapons derived from his famous “Yellow Peril” book) in his work Cybernetics (1948). Oh yes--”cyberneticist” and “cybernetician” appear in 1948 and 1950.

Aether Ennui (1927)

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This story on the new Roxy theater appeared in Radio World in 1927, and it caught my attention with its peculiar empty space and loneliness in elements of the article's image. 

Even though we are reading about a new state-of-the-art performance and broadcast facility, a story filled with hope and possibility of another brand new stage opening, the imagery has that certain varnish of vague ennui.

There is also a lot of space, open space,  over-strong areas of nothing, flat, forbidding, and perhaps even a little cold and frightening. It does fit rather nicely into my collection of images and idea in the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things series on this blog.   

I've included the full illustration below.  

The Library of the Future (ca. 1960)

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The oblong pamphlet IBM Information Retrieval was published around 1959/1961 (this is an early evergreen pub with no date but the bibliography cites only 1957 and 1958 “recent” works)  and is a visual/expressive/schematic summation of the current state of affairs in info storage and retrieval delivered in a step-by-step presentation, concentrating on library applications. The main IBM machine at use here is the RAMAC (unnumbered) which made its first appearance in sales in 1956. This is a far more realistic (and existent!) peek at the possibilities of the control of information than the Bush MEMEX (1945, etc.), though of course it wasn't nearly as far-reaching as Bush envisioned, and didn't actually deliver the text to the end user, though it did deliver a great deal else, maintaining massive amounts of data in a usable format. It is a fairly scarce document, so I reproduced the small section on "the library of the future" which we are well passed, probably by 1975. 

• This is another example of something I'm just in the early stages of attention--when the time of effectiveness of what was reckoned to be part of the future and a great innovation turns out to have a very short lifespan and becomes outdated relatively quickly.  

When the New Deal of FDR Was Just Another Capitalist Ploy (1934)

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Harold Ware, 1889-1935, son of activist and Communist Ella Reeve Bloor, early member of what would be the Communist Party of the United States and suspected spy for the USSR, gave Franklin Roosevelt a very grabby and animalistic (in the bad sense of the word) hand for attacking/taking the goods of the poor working class...amidst much else. This occurs on the cover of his 1934 pamphlet--sold for 2 cents and written "George Anstrom"--The Government Takes a Hand, which was an indictment of the enforcement of class and racial conflict in the working classes of the United State. In particular Ware takes aim at the cotton workers and their plight. I've included some of what he wrote (below) as there's a lot of it that makes pretty good sense, and much of it which is correct. He does however take a dim view of the New Deal  and of the agricultural relief action of 1933/4, which Ware maintained was the theft of what little belonged to cotton workers.  In any event, here's a sampling from Ware's work:: 

"The Wall of Race Prejudice Set Up by the Bosses

Across narrow country roads white tenants and croppers see Negro neighbors pulling cotton like themselves. But more than that road separates them. Between them rises an invisible wall——the barrier of race prejudice-—deliberately set up by the boss class and its government agencies. That wall is built of fairy tales of white supremacy to keep the white toilers from uniting with the Negro masses against their common exploiters. From the cradle to the grave the poorest white child is taught to look down on, hate and fear his Negro neighbors."

"Any sign of protest from Negroes is met with instant terror. Boss inspired Ku Klux Klan raids and lynching parties are the order of the day. The Negro share croppers of Camp Hill, Alabama, organized and fought back against a lynch gang in 1931. They won their demands through organized struggle. But the bosses create a general scare of “Negro rebellion” to justify their chain gangs and other forms of suppression."