The Wednesday Post

"The Stamp Collectors Stockbook": Page 5
From the Estate of Grandpa5000

It's the final page of this apparently random set of stamps from my grandfather's old collection!

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Hmm, isn't "Upper Silesia" a location that comes up occasionally in history books?  Some quick-and-dirty research shows that it's one of those areas of Europe that sits uncomfortably on the fringe of the established powers.  It looks like it was knocked around between Bohemia and Poland in the Late Middle Ages, was under the Hapsburgs after 1526, got claimed by the Prussians in 1742 and so became part of the German Empire when it coalesced in 1871.

With a mixed population of Germans and Poles, Upper Silesia didn't fit comfortably into the attempts to draw lines separating ethnicities that were all the rage after World War I.  After World War II, though, the German population was simply kicked out (as they were from almost everywhere in Eastern Europe) and the territory was given to Poland, except for a little chunk that's in the modern Czech Republic.

OK, but why and when would the region issue stamps?  And why in French?

Some quick digging shows us that these stamps were used in 1920-1922, when the postwar (ie. post-WWI) status of the area was still being sorted out.  And this gives us a pretty good working theory for why they would print stamps as "Haute Silesie."  During this period, elections were being held with the hope that the region would vote decisively to merge with Poland or with Germany (the vote, predictably, split down the middle).  Issuing stamps as "Górny Śląsk" or as "Oberschlesien" wouldn't do; that would appear to be predetermining the results of the election (only now do I notice that these those Polish and German terms for Upper Silesia are shown on little scrolls framing the little scene of rural prosperity).  French was useful as a neutral language, because nobody in the area spoke it.

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Hey, Karolinen and Deutsch-Sudwestafrika are totally copying from each other!  Parsons cites plagiarism!

Here's the story: after Germany unified in the late nineteenth century, there was much disappointment in Berlin that the subjugation of non-European peoples had already been pretty much completed by the French, British, Spanish, Portuguese, Russians, Dutch, and Belgians, and maybe the Italians.  And Danes. Since this made Germany look like a second-rate power, it became official policy to collect whatever places were left.  These were, as you would expect, generally considered pretty harsh and forbidding except by the peoples that lived there.  German Southwest Africa (Deutsch-Sudwestafrika) was the arid stretch between British South Africa and Portuguese Angola, and although it wasn't densely populated the Germans did their best to emulate the horrors perpetrated on Africans by the veteran colonial powers.  (Think I'm exagerating?  Look it up.  But cf. the Belgian Congo.)

Karolinen, which I've never heard of, was the German name for the Caroline Islands, which I've still never heard of.  They are, apparently, a widely-spaced archipelago northeast of New Guinea that Germany was able to pick up from Spain at fire-sale prices after the United States claimed its own overseas colony, the Phillippines, after the Spanish-American War.

Since I've been reading a lot of Agatha Christie lately, it's tempting to crack wise about the "Teutonic efficiency" with which the Germans used a single stamp engraving for multiple colonies.  But whatever.  They weren't issuing those stamps for long.  After World War I, Germany's colonies were split up among the victors.  German Southwest Africa, unluckily, was given to increasingly independent South Africa; it eventually became independent as today's Namibia in 1990.  The Caroline Islands were handed to Japan, which in turn had to fork them over to the United States after World War II.  They are now part of the Federated States of Micronesia, which became independent (as these things go) in 1986, and Palau, independent since 1994.  (The Philippines, meanwhile, became independent in 1946)

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Hey, speaking of U.S. territorial acquisition in the Pacific!  It took me quite a while to confirm my hypothesis about what's up with this nineteeth century stamp.  You probably have the same hypothesis.

It's a stamp from still-independent Hawaii, shortly before it -- as they say -- "became a U.S. territory."

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After those relatively obscure issues, here's another example of an incredibly common stamp.  It's from the Helvetian Republic, or as you and I usually say, "Switerland."  If you've spent time with stamps, you've seen dozens of these.  But I like them for their simplicity, fine engraving, mid-century vibe, and celebration of local detail.

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That leaves only my puzzle for the philatelically ambitious, which is: who is this dude with the awesome facial hair, and what was he up to that was so special in 1915-1917?  Feel free to just make something up; I have no idea...

That was the last page of the stockbook!  I hope you enjoyed looking through some of Grandpa5000's stamps with me!

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 2: Boltanski v. Bosch

Christian Boltanski
born 1944
French
Trounced David Bomberg in Round 1.

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Hieronymus Bosch
c.1450 - 1516
Dutch
Trounced Paris Bordone in Round 1.

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Vote for the artist of your choice in the comments, or any other way that works for you. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for at least one month past posting.

At the Movies: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

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Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rupert Wyatt, 2011

Ebert: Three Stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 83%

Warning: sensitive readers are warned that I use the f-word in this review in a jocular fashion.

The problem with the big-budget Hollywood movie, no matter how interesting its premise or how loving its design, is that it has to make sure that its story can be followed by the dumbest teenager in the herd. There’s no room for the subtleties and delicate considerations that are the stuff of real life. You can’t have a animal facility where monkeys are subject to casual neglect; you have to have a place staffed with sadistic, grinning crazies who seemingly live to torment monkeys. You can’t have scientific research compromised by its uncomfortable relationship with the profit motive; you have to have scientific research wholly prostituted to the kind of leering avarice usually associated with mythical pirates. Relationships, even those peripheral to the plot, evolve or dissolve with explosive rapidity but no consequences. It’s a little bit like opera: nothing makes any sense except as broadly symbolic gesture, so all you can do is kick back and enjoy the ride.

Thus, Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  To be sure, it had some interesting aspects. First and foremost was its novel interpretation of the mad scientist archetype. The central human character, the scientist who sets in motion a two-forked road to an Ape-dominated planet, is mad. Barking, hopping, apeshit (so to speak) mad. He displays judgment so poor, and takes such appalling risks for such egregiously foolish reasons, and has such wild delusions of grandeur and invincibility, that he might as well be the Emporer Caligula hopped up on meth. And yet the movie portrays him as an ordinary, if not rather bland, affluent, suburban guy. This may be a keen and daring insight, for after all – contrary to what the movies usually teach us – pathology doesn’t generally show up wearing a Darth Vader outfit. So is Rise presenting us with an intelligent analysis of a way that destructive forces work in the world? Unfortunately, I don’t think so. Although it gives us one of the great mad scientists in movie history, I am not at all sure that the makers of the movie realize that he is mad. I think they see him as the hero.

There is lots of this kind of thing in Rise. A detailed example: the central Ape character, named Caesar, illustrates the principle of strength-in-unity to a fellow hyperintelligent simian by snapping one stick, but failing to snap a bundle of sticks. At the end of the scene, we have prolonged shot where “Caesar” ends up contemplatively holding what is basically a fasces, the Roman emblem of imperial authority. Which is freaking brilliant! But was it deliberate? Since so much else in the movie is handled stupidly, it’s really hard to tell.

For instance, the movie is too dumb to recognize the implications of its own title. The “rise of the Planet of the Apes,” after all, has dire and immediate implications for most of the viewing audience. Yet the film is – bizarrely, I think – unabashedly pro-ape. You can tell by the soundtrack: it swells when the apes do any rising, and gets all mournful when an ape gets injured. As an avowed humanist, I found this rather appalling, and may have somewhat distracted Mrs.5000 with my repeated cries of Come on, kill the ape! Kill the fucking hyperintelligent ape!!

I’m not giving away anything that’s not in the title by letting you know that, despite plentiful indications of trouble and numerous opportunities – I might mention here that the military seems conspicuously absent at the party – no one manages to kill the fucking hyperintelligent ape. But then, neither do the apes really rise all that far, either, and in fact the movie ends only having set up the scenario via which a rise of an ape planet becomes possible. Which is to say, it ends just where things would have gotten interesting. It doesn't quite end, though, before it cribs not just a concept but a whole scene from the much smarter film 12 Monkeys, and then rolls credits over a graphic that very attractively portrays the annihilation of humanity. Now THAT’s entertainment!

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Burra v. Burri

Edward Burra
1905 - 1976
British

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Alberto Burri
1915 - 1995
Italian

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Vote for the artist of your choice!  Votes go in the comments.  Commentary and links to additional work are welcome.  Polls open for at least one month past posting.

The Reading List: The Thomas Covenant Trilogy

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
by Stephen R. Donaldson


I. Lord Foul's Bane  (The Red One)
II. The Illearth War   (The Blue One)
III. The Power that Preserves  (The Green One)

This is neither here nor there, but one of my strongest memories related to the Thomas Covenant Trilogy is from maybe sixth or seventh grade. I was reading it on a school bus to or from some event, and a grown-up I didn’t know looked over the seat, saw the cover of Lord Foul’s Bane, and asked “Why don’t you read children’s books?” I found this a difficult question to answer. I remember the moment vividly. Having been asked why I didn’t read below my abilities – essentially, having had it pointed out as peculiar that I wasn’t taking an intellectual dive – was my first intimation that there were fully functional and even fully competent adults around me, who were basically dummies.

An alternative explanation for this incident, looking back at it now, is that the woman had herself read the trilogy and, surprised to see it in the hands of a young person, sought impulsively to protect him from the relentlessly grim world view that the Thomas Covenant books embody. Eh, maybe. But if that was the case, she was too late on the scene. I was already on my second time through the books.

I read them a third time in graduate school, basking on a sunny rock in the Alaskan summertime. The current reading was my fourth foray.

You know how there are books that you really want to like, in which you recognize true excellence, but that you can just never quite warm up to? The Covenant books, for me, are not quite like that. It’s the other way around. I really kind of want to dislike them, but can’t quite seem to get there. The writing, plotting, and alien ecology are not great, but they are consistently good. None of the characters are convincing enough that you feel you should care what happens to them, but you find yourself (by which I mean “I find myself”) continuing to press all the way through, consuming the red one, the blue one, and the green one in turn.

The Plot: So there’s this dude in small-town American named Thomas Covenant who contracts leprosy. He loses half of his hand along with his family and friends, and everybody in town hates his guts. He’s very bitter. And then, he is transported to another world, a place of magic, health, and country folk who are obnoxiously (to him and us both) decent and wholesome. Recognizing an escapist fantasy, he is initially very careless in his behavior. As the fantasy begins to prove oddly persistent and convincingly detailed, he becomes angry, remorseful, confused, and riven with self-loathing. It doesn’t help matters that he’s kind of a jerk by nature.

This dream-world in which he finds himself is in the midst of a titanic struggle between the powers of good and evil. The good guys see in Covenant a reincarnation of a legendary figure of the past, and recognize his “white gold” wedding ring as an instrument of mammoth magical power. They want his help in fighting the bad guys, who are indeed very, very bad. He doesn’t want to get involved, however, because he feels that to acknowledge the reality of his dream world would be to abandon himself to insanity.

Tom Covenant v. Tom Bombadil

I think the reason why the Covenant books appealed to me as a kid was that they were so unlike Tolkien. Which is not to say that I didn’t love Tolkien, but rather that the fantasy genre was, at that point in time, completely saturated by The Lord of the Rings and its many lesser derivatives. There was not much I had read that wasn’t a bunch of selfless, virtuous guys (elves, dwarves, wizards, what have you) on a quest for weapons of power to use against some version of the dark lord. In this context, the character of Tom Covenant was bracingly different: not virtuous, not all that interested in questing, and a real-world human to boot. Tolkein’s Frodo and Donaldson's Thomas Covenant both walk hundreds and hundreds of “leagues” on ring-related missions, but where Frodo does it out of his love of right and trust in Gandolf’s wise authority, Covenant does it because he’s basically spineless and, although an inveterate complainer, he doesn’t know how to say “no.”

With fantasy having had thirty more years to develop, I’m less impressed now by Stephen Donaldson’s rebuttal to Tolkien than struck by his failure to fall further from the tree. For as much as the mood and characters of this trilogy are different from Lord of the Rings, the underlying bones are awfully similar. A bucolic land must resist the encroaches of an overinflated figure of pure evil, and only the power held in a ring – a ring! – which is in the possession of a naïve nobody can turn the tables. Even the narrative arc through the three volumes is nearly identical. Behold:

• Book I: A diverse questing party under the leadership of a magic-user forms around the ring-bearer; they run into trouble in underground caverns but escape in the end.
• Book II: As war erupts, the party divides in two parts; one will directly confront the enemy, while the other will endure strange perils in the mountains.
• Book III: Things look pretty grim at the siege of the last remaining city of the Good Guys. Fortunately, the ring-bearer more or less accidentally destroys the dark lord’s source of power!

In retrospect, it’s just a really interesting comment on fantasy literature up to that time that such a faithful reiteration of the Tolkien story, which incidentally also packs close allegories of elves, dwarves, wizards, and Nazgûl, was initially seen (and not just by me, mind you,) as the first radical departure from Tolkien. Even the writing style imitates Tolkien’s dusty, faux-archaic presentation and vocabulary, although without really attaining his dry (Donaldson would say “sere”) epic gravitas. Also like Tolkien, Donaldson throws in whole pages of dreadful poetry and songs, but I skip over that stuff and I assume that you do too.

The Real Problem of Thomas Covenant

Many people have trouble getting past the character of Covenant, and this is understandable. He is – I can’t really think of a better word – surely one of the more dickish central characters in all of literature. His continuous frettings and grumblings and callousness are certainly grating to that part of you that wants to “identify” with a “likeable” character. Then too, his reaction to leprosy and to his treatment by the world seem completely overcooked and unrealistic – until, irritatingly, we learn that Steven Donaldson’s father was a doctor who devoted much of his career to the treatment of leprosy, so maybe Donaldson Jr. knows what he’s talking about.

My own pet peeve about the Covenant character is that, through three books of being told that his wedding ring is the most powerful object in the world, and even when he begins to buy into the reality of that world, he never expresses the slightest interest in how it might work. What it might be used for. And that doesn't ring true to me. Even someone who doesn’t have any interest in power, even someone who actively wants to avoid the responsibility of power – I think that if enough people mentioned to them that the most powerful artifact in the world happened to be attached to his hand, he would eventually say “Huh. How does that… work, exactly?"  I can deal with ol’ Tom as an unlikeable character, because that’s how his artist intended him. As such an oddly uncurious character, he doesn’t seem fully human somehow.


There is at least one additional trilogy of books about Thomas Covenant and his adventures in "The Land," as it’s called. I read it as a kid, but disliked it for what I remember as a depressing mood of pervasive despair. Since this first trilogy is nothing if not suffused with a depressing mood of pervasive despair, it’s almost hard to imagine how the second series managed to up the ante.

The Covenant books are, despite their flaws, essentially a pretty good genre read. They were probably important, too, in helping the genre start to escape the shadow of its too-dominant twentieth century master. But I suspect this reading was my last go-around, and I don’t think I’ll wade into the second series. Other worlds await.

It's the Book Arts!

an occasional Thursday feature highlighting the work of Mrs.5000 and other fabulous book artists.

"Studio Cards"
Laura Davidson, 2010

Regular Playing Card Size
Deck of Cards in box.

The Studio Cards are a relatively recent acquisition in the Michael5000 Book Arts Collection, having been a Christmas gift from Mrs.5000.  They constitute a eminently serviceable deck of standard playing cards, but with each card individually "drawn from the visual language of Boston book artist Laura Davidson."


Each suit is also associated with a theme.  Spades are very specifically birds; hearts are trees, stones, and other natural items; diamonds are buildings and architecture; and clubs are vases, cups, and other containers.

Naturally the trouble with this kind of thing is that, although it is ostensibly for playing card games with, one hates to scuff or bend the 54 little objets d'art.  I think I'm going to play a round or two of solitaire with my deck today, though, just to authenticate the deck of cards as a deck of cards.  I'm like that.

If you wanted a deck of your own, or are shopping early for Christmas for your own husband, there are purchasing instructions here.

The Wednesday Post

Unremarkable Greetings
Gifts of Mrs.5000, Christmas 2011

S.F. FREEWAY INTERCHANGE, U.S. 101


This scene shows 7 traffic arteries in the foreground, with Coit Tower left, Telephone Bldg. center and Bay Bridge right -- downtown San Francisco, Calif.

Nov 19th (1957)  Dear Dad,

I am writing this card and putting a 3¢ stamp on it and will mail it at the same time I mail the registered letter now let me know how long after the letter that you receive this card. Bring your Xmas seals along to put on cards now I guess I have everything. Love Mother.




Silver Moon Motel
212 S. Beach Blvd
(State Hwy. 39)
Anaheim, California
Phone: JAckson 7-1102
Jack J. Tilley, Owner


Anaheim's most recommended family motel.  With 44 modern units.  Where commercial rates prevail year around.  Kitchens, Television, and Radios.

[August 26, 1963]

Hi -- guess who stayed here on your recommendation -- nice place.  Wayne loves the pool.

Since Sat. afternoon have seen Knott's and D.land -- oy, my poor feet!  Going to go to Marine land today - gerri, art, Milana, & Wayne.

Casino and Tennis Court, Greenbrier Hotel, White Sulpher Springs, W. Va. (2000 Ft. Elevation)

This one is framed, but if I recall correctly the caption says something to the effect that this woman is a professional wildlife scientist, and you really shouldn't feed bears like this yourself.

In case you're wondering, 212 S. Beach Blvd. still seems to be a motel:

...and the Greenbrier Hotel is not only a going concern, but a vast cluster of buildings that looks like the presidential palace of a nineteenth century empire plopped down in the West Virginia hills.

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If you would like to receive "Casino and Tennis Court, Greenbrier Hotel," complete with cheerful message and anachronistic postage, send your name and mailing address to our new email address, InfiniteArtTournament@[The popular email service that rhymes with "female"].  [Claimed] Yes, I know I owe some of you postcards.