Potrzebie
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Shadow Waltz: Dave English as He Is Spoke
The world was warm and white when I was born:
Beyond the windowpane the world was white,
A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,
Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light,
Although the whiteness was almond and was bone
In midnight's still paralysis, nevertheless
The world was warm and hope was infinite
All things would come, fulfilled, all things would be known
All things would be enjoyed, fulfilled, and come to be my own.
--Delmore Schwartz
Among the fanzines I saw during the early 1950s, the drawings of Dave English always amused and impressed. Somewhere miles beyond the Saul Steinberg horizon, the lower-case signature "de" heralded fluid free associations and twisting, overlapping lines etched into ink-splattered mimeograph stencils spilling from cosmic trash barrels in the back alleys of the brain. Today, on the Internet, one can see a few, very few, of his drawings. Dig deeper, and you can find fiction written in English by English, a story titled "the little boy who bit people" (originally published in Charles Wells' Fiendetta).
Decades danced by before I finally met Dave English, and when I did, it was in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. A week later, they were selling T-shirts around Boston that read, "I survived the Blizzard of '78."
I had moved from Cambridge and was living in Somerville then. Someone at the Somerville public access television station pushed a camera to their studio window, better to capture snow flurries in the street below. To do a film review for Cambridge's alternative weekly, The Real Paper, I had to get through the snowfall to a screening of animated films scheduled for a showing at Harvard's Carpenter Center auditorium. The screening, however, was not at the Carpenter Center.
Instead, I traveled from Somerville's Lechmere station to the University Film Studies Center at MIT. Located at 18 Vassar Street, the Film Studies office was in MIT's historic, cavernous Building 20, a three-story, shingle-clad wooden barracks built in 1943 as a major site for radar research. It was a temporary structure, intended to be torn down after World War II, but for 55 years it housed a variety of labs, student clubs and academic departments until it finally was demolished in 1998.
Also in Building 20 was the Tech Model Railroad Club where members in 1959 wrote the early computer programs that set in motion the hacker dream and the personal computer revolution. See the opening chapters of Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984). Only two other journalists made it to the Film Studies screening. While the animated shorts unspooled, the wind began rattling a window. Someone entered the darkened room, and over the whir of the 16mm projector, I heard his odd, muttered warning as he left, "It's really coming down out there."
When I walked outside, I was stunned by the amount of snow piling up in white dunes. Trekking back to a snowbound Somerville wasn't a pleasant prospect. Better to simply go one subway stop into Boston, since I had a key to a friend's Beacon Hill apartment. Entering the Kendall station, I rode to Charles Street, where the streetlamps illuminated swirling clouds, sparkling like diamond dust in the twilight.
I walked two blocks on Charles through the gathering snowstorm, decided to get something to eat and went into a salad bar. Inside was a single customer. From plays I had seen, I recognized him as the Boston actor-mime Bill Barnum, who had given a memorable performance as Renfield in a local production of Dracula. ("Flies? Flies? Poor puny things! Who wants to eat flies? Not when I can get nice fat spiders.") Outside, snowdrifts began to bank against the front window. I said, "Bill, this is beginning to look like a genuine blizzard, so why are you hanging out here in a salad bar?"
His answer: "Oh, I was supposed to get together with Dave English. He should be here soon." When he gave this startling response, I decided I was in no hurry to leave. Some years earlier, the theater critic Larry Stark had told me that English lived in Boston and worked as a dishwasher in restaurants around the city, so I knew this was certain to be not just any Dave English but the Dave English. (Larry published A David English Sketchbook in 1958.)
"I'd like to meet him, Bill. Could you introduce me?"
"Oh, sure."
Ten minutes later, the door opened, gusts blew in, and so did Dave English, frost flying from his cap. He took a seat between Barnum and myself, settling in with an eager smile as I began sounding off, praising his fanzine drawings of the 1950s. When I was in high school in the early 1950s, I had assumed from the sophistication of his sketches that he was older, so I was surprised to learn that we were about the same age. As we discussed various fanzines, artists and writers, Barnum eventually fell silent, gave us a curious stare and asked, "Do you two know each other?"
When we stood up and stepped outside, ready to face the challenge, I was blasted in the face by a spray of frigid flakes. I expected Barnum and English to turn right and head for the Charles St. subway station. Instead, to my amazement, they turned left, which meant that they intended to slog across the Boston Common and then on to the North End, a staggering journey not unlike the perils faced by Scott of the Antarctic. I watched them walk away -- spectral ghosty men vanishing as they faded to white. Then, following the route of the ducklings in Make Way for Ducklings, I headed up the hill, a mini-Everest that would have left Robert McCloskey's ducklings sprawled on the sidewalk with ice-covered beaks.
A silent snow, secret snow fell while I dreamed in the darkness, and when I woke, the world had changed. I set out to meet some friends at the Hampshire House restaurant above the Bull & Finch Pub (the real-life Cheers bar) but had to circumnavigate a corner where the snow had drifted to a second-story height. With all vehicular traffic banned for a week, cross-country skiers left tracks on abandoned highways. Crowds of college students walked in groups through the middle of surreal Siberian streets.
I wrote the film review and somehow managed to get it to The Real Paper office in Cambridge. In Harvard Square so much snow was impacted over a narrow path between two buildings that walking the path actually brought one to a rooftop level. Some days later, a filmmaker phoned to congratulate me, pointing out that I was the only Boston film critic to get a review into print that week.
Dave English and I had exchanged mailing addresses, but I never saw him again. Where is he now? I don't know. Almost 40 years ago, English wrote chapters of his novel, The World Does Not Change (1970), which may or may not be influenced by Keeler. Sounds just like the kind of thing Fender Tucker might want to publish. So if Tucker can locate English and English completed The World Does Not Change, there's our happy ending. Meanwhile, I prefer to remember the Dave English who created mimeo magic with those dancing drawings of long ago. They drift softly through my memories. Where are the twilltone snows of yesteryear?
The world was warm and white when I was born:
Beyond the windowpane the world was white,
A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,
Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light,
Although the whiteness was almond and was bone
In midnight's still paralysis, nevertheless
The world was warm and hope was infinite
All things would come, fulfilled, all things would be known
All things would be enjoyed, fulfilled, and come to be my own.
--Delmore Schwartz
Among the fanzines I saw during the early 1950s, the drawings of Dave English always amused and impressed. Somewhere miles beyond the Saul Steinberg horizon, the lower-case signature "de" heralded fluid free associations and twisting, overlapping lines etched into ink-splattered mimeograph stencils spilling from cosmic trash barrels in the back alleys of the brain. Today, on the Internet, one can see a few, very few, of his drawings. Dig deeper, and you can find fiction written in English by English, a story titled "the little boy who bit people" (originally published in Charles Wells' Fiendetta).
Decades danced by before I finally met Dave English, and when I did, it was in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. A week later, they were selling T-shirts around Boston that read, "I survived the Blizzard of '78."
I had moved from Cambridge and was living in Somerville then. Someone at the Somerville public access television station pushed a camera to their studio window, better to capture snow flurries in the street below. To do a film review for Cambridge's alternative weekly, The Real Paper, I had to get through the snowfall to a screening of animated films scheduled for a showing at Harvard's Carpenter Center auditorium. The screening, however, was not at the Carpenter Center.
Instead, I traveled from Somerville's Lechmere station to the University Film Studies Center at MIT. Located at 18 Vassar Street, the Film Studies office was in MIT's historic, cavernous Building 20, a three-story, shingle-clad wooden barracks built in 1943 as a major site for radar research. It was a temporary structure, intended to be torn down after World War II, but for 55 years it housed a variety of labs, student clubs and academic departments until it finally was demolished in 1998.Also in Building 20 was the Tech Model Railroad Club where members in 1959 wrote the early computer programs that set in motion the hacker dream and the personal computer revolution. See the opening chapters of Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984). Only two other journalists made it to the Film Studies screening. While the animated shorts unspooled, the wind began rattling a window. Someone entered the darkened room, and over the whir of the 16mm projector, I heard his odd, muttered warning as he left, "It's really coming down out there."
When I walked outside, I was stunned by the amount of snow piling up in white dunes. Trekking back to a snowbound Somerville wasn't a pleasant prospect. Better to simply go one subway stop into Boston, since I had a key to a friend's Beacon Hill apartment. Entering the Kendall station, I rode to Charles Street, where the streetlamps illuminated swirling clouds, sparkling like diamond dust in the twilight.I walked two blocks on Charles through the gathering snowstorm, decided to get something to eat and went into a salad bar. Inside was a single customer. From plays I had seen, I recognized him as the Boston actor-mime Bill Barnum, who had given a memorable performance as Renfield in a local production of Dracula. ("Flies? Flies? Poor puny things! Who wants to eat flies? Not when I can get nice fat spiders.") Outside, snowdrifts began to bank against the front window. I said, "Bill, this is beginning to look like a genuine blizzard, so why are you hanging out here in a salad bar?"
His answer: "Oh, I was supposed to get together with Dave English. He should be here soon." When he gave this startling response, I decided I was in no hurry to leave. Some years earlier, the theater critic Larry Stark had told me that English lived in Boston and worked as a dishwasher in restaurants around the city, so I knew this was certain to be not just any Dave English but the Dave English. (Larry published A David English Sketchbook in 1958.)
"I'd like to meet him, Bill. Could you introduce me?"
"Oh, sure."
Ten minutes later, the door opened, gusts blew in, and so did Dave English, frost flying from his cap. He took a seat between Barnum and myself, settling in with an eager smile as I began sounding off, praising his fanzine drawings of the 1950s. When I was in high school in the early 1950s, I had assumed from the sophistication of his sketches that he was older, so I was surprised to learn that we were about the same age. As we discussed various fanzines, artists and writers, Barnum eventually fell silent, gave us a curious stare and asked, "Do you two know each other?"
Harry Stephen Keeler
I remember English talking enthusiastically about his favorite novelist, the pulp writer Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967), who had edited America's Humor during the 1920s and also edited 10 Story Book from 1919 to 1940. Keeler was ranked by William Poundstone as "one of the strangest writers who ever lived." An apt description, perhaps, when one encounters a pre-Dickian detour by Keeler in a passage such as this from his X. Jones -- of Scotland Yard (1936):
Keeler outlined his working methods for that kind of convoluted writing in his article "The Mechanics and Kinematics of Web Work Plot Construction" for The Author & Journalist. According to Larry Stark, Dave English also enjoyed reading Lovecraft, Samuel Delaney and Henry James. But I only recall him urging me to read Keeler, whom I had never heard of back in 1978. Today, the "Keeler Renaissance" gathers steam with websites and occasional mentions of Keeler's influence on Futurama and Neil Gaiman. Back issues of Richard Polt's Keeler News can be read online here.
Keeler's novels have been brought back into print by Fender Tucker's Ramble House (which has also published Dick Lupoff's Marblehead: A Novel of H.P. Lovecraft). Keeler's reputation continues to escalate. At this rate, he may some day fill the gap left when Richard Yates became too famous to still be called the best-known "least-known" writer. Larry Stark, however, finds the notion of a "Keeler Renaissance" so preposterous that he laughed uproariously for a full minute when I mentioned it to him.
At some point, I asked English where he was living. He answered, "I live beneath a North End theater in an upholstered chair accessible only by using wooden planks to avoid stepping in the water surrounding the chair." I may not have the quote exactly right, but it was a vivid image that has stayed with me for years, reminiscent of playwright Alfred Jarry's bizarre living situation, a claustrophobic crib where visitors could not stand because his apartment was only half the height of a floor in the building.
Through the window I could see nothing but pure ivory whiteness as the clock edged toward 9pm. By that time, only two women were still working, cleaning up, and one of them called out, "Okay, fellows, we're closing up now."
I remember English talking enthusiastically about his favorite novelist, the pulp writer Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967), who had edited America's Humor during the 1920s and also edited 10 Story Book from 1919 to 1940. Keeler was ranked by William Poundstone as "one of the strangest writers who ever lived." An apt description, perhaps, when one encounters a pre-Dickian detour by Keeler in a passage such as this from his X. Jones -- of Scotland Yard (1936):So, Jones says, for all practical purposes, in a world of space and "time," the "wrinkles" resulting from the "crime-stress" appear, in reality, as "deviations." Deviations in human conduct: deviations from normal habit, custom, and be likened to an explosion, or concussion, the force of which radiates out in all directions--not just into the future, he cautions--but also into the past!--definitely deviating the paths and conduct not only of the chief actors--but of all those who have intimate contact with them--and who, by that very relationship, are thus displaced in 4 dimensions from the chief actors. The maximum possible "deviation" in a murder is, Jones points out, that of the murdered man--whose course is deviated, for the first time, from living to being dead!
Keeler outlined his working methods for that kind of convoluted writing in his article "The Mechanics and Kinematics of Web Work Plot Construction" for The Author & Journalist. According to Larry Stark, Dave English also enjoyed reading Lovecraft, Samuel Delaney and Henry James. But I only recall him urging me to read Keeler, whom I had never heard of back in 1978. Today, the "Keeler Renaissance" gathers steam with websites and occasional mentions of Keeler's influence on Futurama and Neil Gaiman. Back issues of Richard Polt's Keeler News can be read online here.Keeler's novels have been brought back into print by Fender Tucker's Ramble House (which has also published Dick Lupoff's Marblehead: A Novel of H.P. Lovecraft). Keeler's reputation continues to escalate. At this rate, he may some day fill the gap left when Richard Yates became too famous to still be called the best-known "least-known" writer. Larry Stark, however, finds the notion of a "Keeler Renaissance" so preposterous that he laughed uproariously for a full minute when I mentioned it to him.
At some point, I asked English where he was living. He answered, "I live beneath a North End theater in an upholstered chair accessible only by using wooden planks to avoid stepping in the water surrounding the chair." I may not have the quote exactly right, but it was a vivid image that has stayed with me for years, reminiscent of playwright Alfred Jarry's bizarre living situation, a claustrophobic crib where visitors could not stand because his apartment was only half the height of a floor in the building.
Through the window I could see nothing but pure ivory whiteness as the clock edged toward 9pm. By that time, only two women were still working, cleaning up, and one of them called out, "Okay, fellows, we're closing up now."
When we stood up and stepped outside, ready to face the challenge, I was blasted in the face by a spray of frigid flakes. I expected Barnum and English to turn right and head for the Charles St. subway station. Instead, to my amazement, they turned left, which meant that they intended to slog across the Boston Common and then on to the North End, a staggering journey not unlike the perils faced by Scott of the Antarctic. I watched them walk away -- spectral ghosty men vanishing as they faded to white. Then, following the route of the ducklings in Make Way for Ducklings, I headed up the hill, a mini-Everest that would have left Robert McCloskey's ducklings sprawled on the sidewalk with ice-covered beaks.A silent snow, secret snow fell while I dreamed in the darkness, and when I woke, the world had changed. I set out to meet some friends at the Hampshire House restaurant above the Bull & Finch Pub (the real-life Cheers bar) but had to circumnavigate a corner where the snow had drifted to a second-story height. With all vehicular traffic banned for a week, cross-country skiers left tracks on abandoned highways. Crowds of college students walked in groups through the middle of surreal Siberian streets.
I wrote the film review and somehow managed to get it to The Real Paper office in Cambridge. In Harvard Square so much snow was impacted over a narrow path between two buildings that walking the path actually brought one to a rooftop level. Some days later, a filmmaker phoned to congratulate me, pointing out that I was the only Boston film critic to get a review into print that week.Dave English and I had exchanged mailing addresses, but I never saw him again. Where is he now? I don't know. Almost 40 years ago, English wrote chapters of his novel, The World Does Not Change (1970), which may or may not be influenced by Keeler. Sounds just like the kind of thing Fender Tucker might want to publish. So if Tucker can locate English and English completed The World Does Not Change, there's our happy ending. Meanwhile, I prefer to remember the Dave English who created mimeo magic with those dancing drawings of long ago. They drift softly through my memories. Where are the twilltone snows of yesteryear?
Click "memoir" for previous memoir installments.
Labels: bill barnum, dave english, delmore schwartz, dick lupoff, fender tucker, hackers, keeler, larry stark, memoir, mimeograph, richard yates
¶ 9:17 AM 5 comments
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Franklin Booth
.
Growing up on a remote farm in Carmel, Indiana, Booth developed his unique pen-and-ink style as the result of a misunderstanding. Living in a rural area and having no knowledge of printing technology, Booth used pen and ink to copy the images he saw in 19th-century magazines, yet he was unaware that he was looking at wood engravings. He thought he was duplicating the look of the originals, as noted by Jim Vadeboncoeur:
Booth's New York studio was on 57th Street from 1910 until his death in 1948, but for many years he returned to his hometown each summer. In 1914, Theodore Dreiser and Booth made an automotive road trip from New York to Indiana, which they documented in A Hoosier Holiday (1916), written by Dreiser with illustrations by Booth. When Booth proposed the trip, Dreiser said, "All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it". With full chapters on the idyllic way of life in Carmel, this book is regarded today as a forerunner to the American road novel and a possible influence on Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
In addition to Scribner's and Harper's, Booth's art was published in Century, Cosmopolitan, Everybody's, Good Housekeeping, House & Garden, Ladies Home Journal, McClure's, Redbook and more. His work was collected in Franklin Booth: 60 Drawings (1925), reprinted in 1978 by Woody Gelman's Nostalgia Press as The Art of Franklin Booth. The illustration at top was used on the cover of John Fleskes' Franklin Booth: Painter with a Pen (2002), the first title from Fleskes' Flesk Publications five years ago. The book features an introduction by Roy Krenkel (1918-1983), who was greatly influenced by Booth and Norman Lindsay (1879-1969). The paperback edition was issued by Flesk this past summer. Manuel Auad included a 16-page color section in his Franklin Booth: American Illustrator (Auad Publishing, 2006).
I previously posted in August a rare Franklin Booth (1874-1948) drawing which I scanned from the book Mimeograph Illustration Inset Portfolio: Drawings by Foremost Artists on Stencils Ready For Printing, published by the A.B. Dick Company (Chicago) in 1940. I say "rare" because how many copies of that catalog were ever saved by the schools and churches that used it? The newsprint paper quality prevented a full appreciation of Booth's line work, so here's another by Booth, a magnificent fantasy scene. When you enlarge, notice how the tiny figures in the distance provide a sense of scale amid the towering trees.
Growing up on a remote farm in Carmel, Indiana, Booth developed his unique pen-and-ink style as the result of a misunderstanding. Living in a rural area and having no knowledge of printing technology, Booth used pen and ink to copy the images he saw in 19th-century magazines, yet he was unaware that he was looking at wood engravings. He thought he was duplicating the look of the originals, as noted by Jim Vadeboncoeur:
Isolated on an Indiana farm and determined to be an artist, he studied what he saw on the pages of Scribner's, Harpers and the other illustrated magazines of the day. What he saw, and what there was to see, were wood-engraved images. Photographic reproduction was in its infancy and was used primarily for halftones of paintings. After all, everyone knew how to reproduce pen & ink work: you engraved it on wood. Booth, not knowing that the line and even the "feel" of the image was a product of the engraver, copied what he saw using pen on paper. By the turn of the century, when Booth was embarking on his incredible career, the technology had advanced enough so that his pen work could be reproduced as he crafted it. His style was an amazing amalgam of antique appeal and awesome artistry. Soaring, majestic scenes were crafted with thousands of lines, each placed in the precise position with respect to its neighbor to provide just the right density and shade...
The "old-time" feeling that hearkens back to the wood-engraved images of the 19th century really doesn't explain why modern art students are so taken with the approach. I think that what attracted interest then and now is the talent and compositional skills that were conspicuously absent in his contemporary mimics. These compositional abilities are even more amazing when one learns that Booth crafted his images a section at a time, painstakingly detailing a portion in ink that he had carefully penciled. He would complete a section in ink before applying the pencil to another part of the drawing. The innumerable strokes of the pen were prone to cause smudging if he were to have fully penciled the entire piece, so this piecemeal approach was his norm. To create and maintain a consistent and regular pattern and density of lines using this method must have been exceedingly difficult, yet he seems to have carried it off with aplomb.
Booth's New York studio was on 57th Street from 1910 until his death in 1948, but for many years he returned to his hometown each summer. In 1914, Theodore Dreiser and Booth made an automotive road trip from New York to Indiana, which they documented in A Hoosier Holiday (1916), written by Dreiser with illustrations by Booth. When Booth proposed the trip, Dreiser said, "All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it". With full chapters on the idyllic way of life in Carmel, this book is regarded today as a forerunner to the American road novel and a possible influence on Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The Carmel paean by Dreiser and Booth put the town on the map, so to speak, and their book has been reprinted several times, most recently in 1997 by the Indiana University Press and last July by Kessinger Publishing. Yet curiously, not even a single sentence about Carmel's famous native can be found in the town's official online histories. Although Carmel has invested more than $10 million in the development of the Carmel Arts & Design District and the recreation of "historic" Old Town Carmel where "fresh new facades... create a Main Street of old," one can search in vain for any online mention there of Booth. Instead, the favorite son is Leslie Haines, an electrical engineer who designed and installed an early traffic light in 1923 when the population of Carmel was still only a few hundred people.
In addition to Scribner's and Harper's, Booth's art was published in Century, Cosmopolitan, Everybody's, Good Housekeeping, House & Garden, Ladies Home Journal, McClure's, Redbook and more. His work was collected in Franklin Booth: 60 Drawings (1925), reprinted in 1978 by Woody Gelman's Nostalgia Press as The Art of Franklin Booth. The illustration at top was used on the cover of John Fleskes' Franklin Booth: Painter with a Pen (2002), the first title from Fleskes' Flesk Publications five years ago. The book features an introduction by Roy Krenkel (1918-1983), who was greatly influenced by Booth and Norman Lindsay (1879-1969). The paperback edition was issued by Flesk this past summer. Manuel Auad included a 16-page color section in his Franklin Booth: American Illustrator (Auad Publishing, 2006).
Labels: booth, drawing, krenkel, mimeograph
¶ 8:02 AM 4 comments
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Franklin Booth illustration (1940)
This illustration by Franklin Booth is scanned from the book, Mimeograph Illustration Inset Portfolio: Drawings by Foremost Artists on Stencils Ready For Printing, published by the A.B. Dick Company (Chicago) in 1940. Customers could order "Mimeograph Photochemical Stencil Insets" from this loose-leaf catalog of images, and these could be inserted into stencils, as explained: "A sharp knife or razor blade and adhesive Mimeograph Cement is all that is necessary for applying insets to stencils." The catalog itself was mimeographed, as noted: "This book in its entirety has been printed from photochemical stencils."
This illustration by Franklin Booth is scanned from the book, Mimeograph Illustration Inset Portfolio: Drawings by Foremost Artists on Stencils Ready For Printing, published by the A.B. Dick Company (Chicago) in 1940. Customers could order "Mimeograph Photochemical Stencil Insets" from this loose-leaf catalog of images, and these could be inserted into stencils, as explained: "A sharp knife or razor blade and adhesive Mimeograph Cement is all that is necessary for applying insets to stencils." The catalog itself was mimeographed, as noted: "This book in its entirety has been printed from photochemical stencils."
Labels: booth, illustration, mimeograph
¶ 4:20 PM 0 comments
