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Reading List More from Dreams of Space - Books and Ephemera
A nice treat today as Caroline goes to the Moon! This was a popular French fictional series but I had not been able to find the one about the Moon trip until recently. The illustrations are beautiful and full color. Well worth examining each one for its details. Pierre Probst (1913-2007 ) introduced Caroline and her feisty animal friends to the French public in 1952, and added to the series for a decade. He created Caroline, based on his tomboyish daughter Simone. The illustrations are charming, full color, and with wonderful two-page spreads with great comic details. Caroline' is about seven years old, and has blonde hair with pigtails. She lives by herself among a band of friends - the dogs Bobby and Rusty, the cats Puff and Inky, the bear Bruno, a lion and a panther. Pierre Probst's greatest gift was for showing the human emotions on the faces of Caroline's animal friends, and his real daughter Simone can remember her father drawing from a mirror as he himself performed the grimaces and guffaws that he wanted to convey. Enjoy the adventure. (Sorry that some of the spreads get edges cut off.) Probst, Pierre. Caroline Sur La Lune (Caroline on the Moon). Paris: Grands Albums Hachette. (30 p.) 1965. I like Caroline's and her animal friends' faces as they undergo extra "G's" A really nice detailed illustration of approaching the Moon. I enjoy "fighting off" the meteors with tennis rackets.
The Spaceman at Home and at School was a pamphlet for elementary school teacher. It gave them ideas about how to teach about space flight in the classroom with vivid examples. It was not about the history of spaceflight but rather how to build on the "Space Race" excitement already in the classrooms of the time. Probably not too many copies of this one still around. It is a charming spaceflight craft and costume handbook. I found a copy that come from a retired teacher's classroom. Along with it she had reproduced drawings from the book and a play about spaceflight. She also had mimeographs to hand out of the play and to send home with parents who might have to create a costume. Miller, Ray. The Spaceman at Home and at School. Riverside, CA: Bruce Miller Publication. (24 p.) 1958. My 2016 blog post about this book and record https://dreamsofspace.blogspot.com/2016/09/space-horizons-unlimited-1957.html One of the copied plans for parents.
Some nice space pictures (to color) for you today. Coloring books may be one of the ultimate forms of ephemera. There were meant to be used, admired? and then thrown away. Yet many children owned them and there were at least 40 issued between 1950 and 1970 on space themes. If pictures are a universal communication then these children got a lot of input about what their future in space would look like. This particular one is full of futuristic dreams of what space flight might be from the viewpoint of the beginning of our men into space programs. Rockets and Space Coloring Book. New York: Treasure Books. (51 p.) 1960. This first batch seems to be copied from older 50's space images This image on the right above seems a little odd. It can't be on the Moon since there is a helicopter. What is the palm tree doing in the loading of the lunar ship? Does it leave from the tropics? Does it launch "single stage direct?" This image above also needs more explanation. Is this a Russian launch system? I don't remember it. "Ready for take-off" to aim at targets on Earth? That spaceship has a really big window
Die Mondexpedition is the original German book that was translated into English in 1969 as The Log of a Moon Expedition. It's full title at the time was Die Mondexpedition: 14 Mal 24 Stunden auf dem Mond roughly translated as The Lunar Expedition: 14 times on the moon for 24 hours. Which I simplify as "The Lunar Expedition: 14 days on the Moon." The author and illustration was Ludek Pesek, a well known space artist. See his Wikipedia article here. He illustrated space and planetary themes in books and National Geographic illustrations since 1963. This was his first science fiction novel which he chose to illustrate with lush paintings of an expedition to the Moon. I blogged about the English language copy of this book in 2009. If you have not seen these before I am happy to show you some wonderful art you might have missed. Pesek, Ludek. Illustrated by Pesek, Ludek. Die Mondexpedition: 14 Mal 24 Stunden auf dem Mond . Recklinghausen: Paulus Verlag. (126 p.)
More in history
This week (and probably next) I want to talk a bit more Tolkien, but in a somewhat different vein from normal. Rather than discussing the historicity of Tolkien’s world or adaptations of it, I want to take a moment to discuss some of the themes of Tolkien’s work, which express themselves in the metaphysical architecture … Continue reading Collections: Why Celebrimbor Fell but Boromir Conquered: the Moral Universe of Tolkien →
We’ve prepared a poster in homage to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the self-styled “street gang with an analysis” active in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 1960s. Up Against the Wall Motherfucker gained notoriety participating in the occupation of Columbia University in 1968; they were instrumental in introducing anarchist politics into the hippie counterculture and resistance to the Vietnam War, emphasizing the importance of affinity groups and direct action. The text is taken directly from an Up Against the Wall Motherfucker broadside. Click on the image to download the poster. Our utopia is an environment that works so well we can run wild in it. Until our most fantastic demands are met, fantasy will be at war with society. Society attempts to suppress fantasy, but fantasy springs up again and again, infecting the youth, waging urban guerrilla warfare, sabotaging the smooth functioning of bureaucracies, waylaying the typist on her way to the water-cooler, kidnapping the executive between office and home, creeping into the bedrooms of respectable families, hiding in the chambers of high office, gradually tightening its control, eventually emerging into the streets, waging pitched battles and winning (its victory is inevitable). We are the vanguard of fantasy. Where we live is liberated territory in which fantasy moves about freely at all hours of the day, from which it mounts its attacks on occupied territory. Each day bring new areas under our control. Each day a new victory is reported. Each day fantasy discovers new forms of organization. Each day it further consolidates its control, has less to fear, can afford to spend more time in self-discovery. Even in the midst of battles, it plans the cities of the future. We are full of optimism. We are the future. Fantasy Armed In a time of escalating repression and desperation, it is bracing to revisit the avowed optimism of our revolutionary forebears. This optimism concerns not just whether it is possible to win, but what would constitute victory and who stands to benefit. Fantasy—the imaginative excess that escapes the confines of prevailing reality—is common to all human beings. The most repressed and conservative individual could ruthlessly suppress his tendency to daydream while awake, but nonetheless, every night, when he closes his eyes to sleep, he will dream uncontrollably. To side with fantasy is to side with the suppressed creativity within every human being against everything that is constraining about our institutions, everything that is suffocating about our rituals and routines. It means fighting on behalf of all against everything we do to limit ourselves and each other. Fantasy represents sensitivity to possibility itself. Anarchists aspire to create conditions in which all creatures are able can fulfill their potential on their own terms. This entails abolishing the boundaries between the excluded and the included, the subordination of what is called “wild” to what is called “civilized,” the subordination of the physical to the mental and the body to the mind. If fascists have gained the upper hand in our society for now, it is precisely because they have been so successful in subjugating fantasy, channeling it towards their narrow-minded pursuit of coercive power rather than letting it run wild and free. Fantasy can serve oppressors when it is caged and yoked to machinery of domination—but fantasy, liberated, liberates all in turn. The Source The original version of this text appears in two different forms. The collection Black Mask & Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: the incomplete works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, and the Black Mask Group presents it with two frames of an image of a primate, whereas page 46 of this collection includes three frames and an additional phrase: To put thought underground… so that wildness can come above ground. The more complete version bears the letters “ESSO” in the lower left, with a hand-drawn circle around them, standing for the East Side Service Organization. Sometimes known as the East Side Survival Organization, this was the business front that UAW/MF established to receive donations with which to support the hippie runaways and others who were living precariously on the streets of lower Manhattan in the mid-1960s. Those who want to learn more about Up Against the Wall Motherfucker can read Full Circle: A Life in Rebellion, a memoir by prominent participant Ben Morea, just released by Detritus Books this spring. You can consult Ben’s Instagram page to see some of his artwork. His now-defunct blog is archived here. Further Reading Up against the Wall, Motherfucker—The Game? Revisiting a Simulation of the 1968 Occupation of Columbia University Up against the Wall Motherf**ker : A Memoir of the ’60s, with Notes for Next Time, Osha Neumann
Leo Strauss was not just an ordinary philosopher or political thinker; his influence spanned continents and still generates discussion long after he died in 1973. So, who exactly was Leo Strauss? By delving into his time at the University of Chicago, how he approached classic texts controversially, and the lasting impact of his teachings, one […]
