BALLAST Quarterly Review / all issues online

At the moment I am preparing an online class session on the experience of founding a magazine in 1985. The magazine was BALLAST Quarterly Review, which I began in Milwaukee, while teaching at the university there. In 2002, a substantially different account of how that magazine began was published in an essay / interview titled How BALLAST Began, which can still be found online. 

The magazine's publication continued for 21 years. It was chosen by Milwaukee Magazine as one of "the best things in Milwaukee" and was also featured prominently in the Whole Earth Catalog, Communication Arts, AIGA Journal, and other publications.

Elsewhere, I have said that BALLAST was an online commonplace book. For those who may not know the term "commonplace book," it is a notebook or scrapbook of sorts in which someone collects interesting information (bits that trigger a double take) that he or she has run across. I had initially posted such findings (both text and image items) on a bulletin board in the hallway outside my office at the university. It became popular, as students who were passing by would check for the newest additions. With BALLAST I began to post such things not in the hallway but in a self-published quarterly mailing.

Throughout the life of the magazine, this forced me to keep reading, in search of flotsam and jetsam to include. In time, I also published essays and a multitude of book and film reviews, all of which were then republished in the journal Leonardo (MIT). But at least half of the pleasure derived from the inclusion of visual components that my students and I or others produced, or from historic sources. All issues of the magazine have since been scanned for reposting on the internet by the ScholarWorks division of the Rod Library at the University of Northern Iowa. Anyone can now search, read online, or download (free of charge) all issues of BALLAST as printable pdfs.

Simultaneous contrast / its role in art and design

In a popular online video talk, there is an overview of the function and importance of simultaneous contrast in art and design.

Its relevance to color theory was popularized by the teachings of Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus, and by Josef Albers (also from the Bauhaus) while he was teacher at Yale.

Its significance, as I try to show, is far greater than in the teachings of Itten and Albers. It had been researched and written about much earlier, in the nineteenth century, by the French scientist Michel Eugene Chevreul, who was the person who gave it the name.

RELATED LINKS

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? / Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage / Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage / Optical science meets visual art / Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness / Under the big top at Sims' circus

sight unseen talk coming to Burlington Iowa

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

Expatriate: from Iowa to the heart of France

Janet Hulstrand (Brooklyn Bridge)

I was initially drawn to this book simply because of its title. I grew up in the American Midwest, wandered off to other surrounds, then returned in 1990. This memoir was too much to resist: A Long Way from Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France. Unlike the author, I did not end up living abroad (she eventually settled in France), and yet in reading the book I found that we had shared concerns in our quest for home away from home.

The book’s subtitle is as appropriate as its title. It turns out that the author was not actually from Iowa. But some of her immediate relatives were. They lived in towns on the state’s northern border, or in Minnesota, which is where she was actually from. But it hardly matters, since as her account confirms, the Midwest is the Midwest, more or less, and customs do not radically change simply by crossing the border. 

This book is in essence the author’s search to find herself. It is from a female point of view, so she is especially determined to learn more about the inner lives of her mother and grandmother (her mother’s mother). Did they somehow influence her writer’s inclination? In search of her beginnngs, she revisits her family’s origins in such Iowa communities as Cresco, Bonair, and Lime Springs. In Iowa, Cresco is commonly said to be the hometown of five US Navy admirals, as well as that of Nobel Prize laureate Norman Borlaug. In addition, Lime Springs is the birthplace of Iowa poet Joseph Langland (author of The Wheel of Summer, and The Sacrifice Poems).

As the book progresses, the author documents her path in search of a life as a writer, just one part of her eventual self, which blends in with her additional roles as a student, marriage partner, parent, teacher, New Yorker, and expatriate. She ran into rough terrain, as have we all to some extent, but survived the challenges admirably. Like so many who search for an unknown, her life has been sometimes a zigzag, a meander, but a largely eventful and colorful one. In an especially candid moment she says that, more than anything, it was her skill as a typist that enabled her to survive, while pursuing her goal as a writer.

For many years, she and her family lived in New York City and Washington DC, in advance of deciding to settle in France. The various things that happened to her—and the people who became her employers as well as her friends—are among the most compelling. It was of particular interest to read her account of working as an assistant for Caroline Kennedy (the daughter of JFK), Andrew Young, Paul Robeson, Jr. and others.

Today, Janet Hulstrand lives in France (below, in her author’s photograph, there is a loaf of French bread in her arms), where she writes books and teaches occasional courses about French culture for Americans, and literary aspects of Paris. She also writes for magazines, and has published two other books, including Demystifying the French: How to Love Them, and Make Them Love You, and (as coauthor) Moving On: A Practical Guide to Downsizing the Family Home. 

Of convenient access is her blog, called Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road.

Janet Hulstrand (in France)

 

Independence IA / episodes in its colorful past

There are twenty-five essays in a new book by Roy R. Behrens about American Midwest history, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: MEMORY TRACES OF IOWA’S PAST (Ice Cube Press, 2025). Two of the essays center on events and people who lived in Buchanan County, in the city of Independence, Iowa.

One of those essays, titled “Occupant of a House by Le Corbusier,” documents the life of Iowa-born artist William Edwards Cook, who was born in Independence in 1881. Determined to pursue a career as a studio artist, Cook studied drawing and painting in Chicago and New York, then moved on to Paris, where he continued his studies with French Academy masters. He remained in Europe for the rest of his life, living as an expatriate in Paris, Rome, and Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

While Cook never became a well-known artist, his life was notable for other reasons: He became a close and long-term friend of the American writer Gertrude Stein, who often mentioned him (and Iowa) in her books. It was he who taught her how to drive. He was also the first American to be invited to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X. Using his inheritance from his parents, Cook commissioned the now-famous Swiss architect Le Corbusier (who was unknown as the time) to design a Cubist-style residence on the outskirts of Paris, which is now referred to as Villa Cook or Maison Cook.

Cook continued to live in Europe until he death in 1959. But he came back to visit his Iowa family on a number of occasions, the details of which he recounted in his correspondence with Stein, of which hundreds of pages have survived, in the archives at Yale University. 

In Behrens’ book, a second essay (titled “Horse Racing’s One-Time Pooh-Bah”) recalls the meteoric career of a Buchanan County creamery owner named Charles W. Williams, who established a horse racing center (called Rush Park) on the western edge of Independence, in the 1880s. Through amazing successes in horse breeding and racing, he built up enormous wealth, which he then used to construct an unusual kite-shaped race track, and a lavish hotel and opera house (The Gedney). His phenomenal rise concluded in 1892, in the wake of an economic crash, at which time he moved on to Galesburg, Illinois, where (believe it or not) one of the stable boys was the poet Carl Sandburg.

Detailed accounts of Cook and Williams as Iowa history legends are provided in Behrens’ book, DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025), which can be purchased online here.

Webster City, Iowa / author witnesses atrocities

Near the end of WWII, [Iowa-born novelist Mackinlay] Kantor was serving in Europe as an American war correspondent. Embedded with the US Army, he arrived at Buchenwald, the German concentration camp, in April 1945, one day after its liberation by the Allies.

Twelve days later, he wrote a letter to his wife, Irene, attempting to convey the dread of what he had recently witnessed. That letter has survived and is quoted in a memoir by the couple’s son. While its content is disturbing, it does not begin to compare with the horror of having been present.

Shortly after the end of WWII, Kantor embarked on writing Andersonville, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. During the American Civil War, Andersonville had been a camp for Union POWs, where 13,000 prisoners died from malnutrition, scurvy, diarrhea, and dysentery.

In side-by-side comparisons of photographs of starving inmates in German concentration camps and the barely-surviving prisoners at Andersonville, the resemblance is all too disturbing—especially at this moment when the world is once again at war, and non-combatant fatalities and other atrocities are as commonplace as ever.

•••

The full story is told in a new book of essays by Roy R. Behrens, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025), which can be ordered online here.  

is he related to German architect Peter Behrens

Iowa / past and future new book public events

Just posted on LinkedIn. For details, see online link to new book at DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025).  

Famous modern photographer from Des Moines

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[Gertrude] Käsebier (née Gertrude Stanton) had a photographic studio on Fifth Avenue in New York…Her career had taken off late in the 1890s, when Alfred Stieglitz published and exhibited her photographs. She was, he asserted, “the leading artistic portrait photographer of the day”…

As an adult, Käsebier lived most of her life in the east, but her childhood was more diverse than that. She was born in 1852 in Des Moines, Iowa, and spent her first eight years in what was then called Fort Des Moines. When her family moved westward to profit from providing supplies to prospectors, her father became the first mayor of Golden, Colorado.
    
It was while living in Iowa and Colorado that she became intrigued by Native Americans, specifically Lakota Sioux. She later recalled that, during her childhood, it was a simpler, less treacherous time.…

The full story is told in a new book by Roy R. Behrens, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025). 

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from Tipton, Iowa, to the California gold fields

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In early 1849, Sarah Royce and her husband were living in a small community about three miles from Tipton, Iowa, 60 miles west of the Mississippi River.

There had been a flurry of rumors about the abundance of unclaimed land in California. They had also heard that gold was found, the year before, at Sutter’s Creek, about 45 miles east of Sacramento.

They soon joined the ranks of those who were called the “Forty-Niners” because, in 1849, they packed their essential belongings in covered wagons, and all but blindly headed west.…

The immensity of their journey, powered by three yokes of oxen, from Iowa to California, soon became apparent. It took them an entire day to reach the town of Tipton, having traveled only three miles…

As it turns out, Sarah Royce was the mother of Harvard Philosopher Josiah Royce, a colleague of William James and George Santayana at Harvard. He persuaded her to share her memories of that trek. The full story is told in a new book by Roy R. Behrens, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025). Online link.

Buffalo Bill's riotous night in Prairie du Chien

To be truthful, not all the midwestern engagements of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West were free of controversy. The most egregious example occurred in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, on the night of August 20, 1900.…

The full story is told in a new book by Roy R. Behrens, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025).  

Fort Atkinson IA: a sad Machine Age sacrifice

Fort Atkinson, Iowa

What can we do? Probably nothing, one suspects, as we witness individual lives daily impaired (while others of course are enabled) by the radical changes brought about by the “digital revolution”? 

I am reminded of the previous century and the devastating consequences of the “industrial revolution.” It took the lives of both my grandfathers, far in advance of my being born. 

One died from the lingering effects of his hand being mangled in a butterpress, when a fellow worker standing by inadvertently hit the power switch as my grandfather tried to repair the machine. The other died in a farm field, while helping his neighbors in harvesting wheat. 

In my new book, DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025) I tell the story of my grandfather’s death in a threshing machine, and how his wife and children (my father among them) somehow survived the following year by living in the ruins of an old US Army fort in northeast Iowa, called Fort Atkinson, adjacent to the Iowa town with the same name. Available to purchase now.

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Mt Ayr IA / Corn Parade WPA Mural Featured

There is lots of interest in the WPA (Works Progress Administration) murals that were funded by the government during the Depression. A surprising number have survived, and are often still on view in communities throughout the country. 

Of course there are some that are awful. But undoubtedly one of the finest still hangs in the US Post Office in Mount Ayr, Iowa. Created in 1941 by local artist Orr Cleveland Fisher, it is titled Corn Parade. 

It is one of the treasures included in a new book about aspects of Iowa history, a collection of twenty-five essays by design historian Roy R. Behrens, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa's Past (Ice Cube Press, 2025).

Orr Fisher, Corn Parade mural

he and i sat down together and became friends

Roy R. Behrens, Montage (detail)

Kurt Vonnegut, in William Rodney Allen, ed., Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), p. 68—

The most pleasant author I might see socially is John Updike. First time I met Updike, incidentally, which was very funny, was on the Boston shuttle down to New York. The plane was not crowded, and as I walked down the aisle, this voice came from a seat saying, "Are you really him?" And so I turned to see who said it and it was John Updike, and we sat down together and became friends.

ART / DESIGN TALKS begin Wednesday, May 7

NEW SERIES of talks on art and design, beginning Wednesday, May 7, 2025, at the HEARST CENTER FOR THE ARTS in Cedar Falls IA. Presenter: Roy R. Behrens.

Mary Snyder Behrens / currently exhibited work

Mary Snyder Behrens / 2025

Tomorrow afternoon marks the opening "artists' reception" for an exhibition (12:00-2:00 pm), titled the 2025 Group Fiber Show, at the Burlington Art Center (301 Jefferson Street) in Burlington, Iowa. 

Shown above is one of the featured works, a dress made entirely of used tea bags, titled The Tea Party Dress, created by Iowa-based artist Mary Snyder Behrens (2025). More examples of her work can be accessed online here.

Despite its recycled components, the elegance of this artwork is undeniable. To see it only in photographs is one experience surely, but its nuanced richnesses become far more evident when viewed in person. You won't regret it.

book design and when work is truly meaningful

Above Merle Armitage cover design for his book, George Gershwin, Man and Legend. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1958.

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Bernard Wolfe, Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer (Garden City NY: Doubleday and Company, 1972), p. 157.  

[THERE IS a Law of Laws] that says, it's not the paycheck you get that determines the value of the work you do, it's the inspired and organized energy you put into the project, the invention, inner direction, personal thrust no matter what payroll you're on, the best payrolls are your own, the best jobs are free-lance. That says, the difference between those who do and those who get done to and [who get done] in is what's hungered for, the life on your feet or the life flat on your back. That says, there are the active ones, the makers; then there are the passive ones, the made. That says, work ethic be damned, what we're talking about is the nature and direction of hunger, whether your need is to stiff the world a little or be steamrollered.

Chap-Book Style Poster for Bicycle Club / 1895

Above Will H. Bradley, Bicycle Poster (1895).

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Billie Holiday—

They think they can make fuel from horse manure…Now, I don’t know if your car will be able to get 30 miles to the gallon, but it’s sure gonna put a stop to siphoning.

title slide / what have you to share with us today

Speaking of class meetings and education, while they still exist, I am currently preparing a series of three online talks (for OLLI Drake) about various aspects of art and design. One source of pleasure in preparing these is (of course) to share my ideas about the process of designing. Another source is the process of designing the slides that are actually used in the talk. This is the title slide for the third talk in the series.

•••

Vernon Fisher, Navigating the Stars (Chicago and Kansas City: Landfall Press & Karl Oskar Group. 1989). p. 24—

One little girl never brought anything to sharing time. Other children might bring an authentic Indian head-dress acquired on a vacation in Arizona, or a Civil War sword handed down from Great Granddad, but whenever the teacher asked: "Dori, do you have anything to share with us today?" she only stared at the top of her desk, shaking her head firmly from side to side. Then one day, long after her turn had mercifully passed, Dori abruptly left her seat and walked to the front of the class. With everyone's startled attention she began: "Today on the way to school I found something that I want to share." She held her arm stiffly out in front of her and began slowly dropping tiny pieces of shredded Kleenex. "See?" she said. "Snow."

dreams of fields / book of essays coming soon

An advance announcement has just been made by Ice Cube Press (North Liberty IA) of my soon to be published book, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past.

It’s a collection of twenty-five essays that I’ve published over many years. They are accounts of people and occurences in Iowa’s past, some of which are all but unknown, while others are familiar, but presented in a different light.

I doubt if many people know, for example, that Ralph Waldo Emerson walked across the winter ice on the Mississippi River to speak in Iowa towns, Cedar Falls among them. Or, what took place in 1939 when Frank Lloyd Wright and Grant Wood spoke at the same festival in Iowa City.

Who knows that Iowans from Manchester, including three of my great aunts, lived among the Navajo in New Mexico for three decades, promoted Native American arts, and published books about sandpainting and other traditions in Navajo life? One of the most celebrated American women photographers was Iowa-born, as was the artist who (unnamed) drew the cartoons for Robert Ripley’s syndicated features—Believe It or Not.  

The book is currently out for review. It will be officially launched at a reading on Sunday, August 17, at 2:00-3:00 pm, at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls. Mark that down!

In the meantime, don’t hesitate to share the news with others who yearn for the past of our state and our nation. More information can be found, and pre-orders can be placed online at <https://icecubepress.com/2025/01/27/dreams-of-fields/>.

metamorphosis / shape-shifting and animation

Of late we’ve been exploring the workings of metamorphosis, the transition of a single form from one shape to another. A phenomenon not unrelated to shape-shifting, evolution diagrams, and animation sequences.

Among the best inventors of metamorphic sequences was a Victorian artist named Charles H. Bennett (1828-1867). He was more generally known for comic illustrations, such as those for children’s books. He's worth looking into.

Above and below are examples from a series of metamorphic images that were initially published weekly in The Illustrated Times (c1863) as Studies in Darwinesque Development, which was later republished posthumously in a book titled Character Sketches, Development Drawings and Original Pictures of Wit and Humor (1872).

 

Buffalo Bill look-alike becomes an airborne hero

Wherever I’ve lived, I think I’ve always been interested in what has happened in the past in that state, region or location. South, East, West, Midwest. Wherever. I am often amazed by the things that I’ve found. This month I’ve published a new essay about an Iowa-born performer who partly made his living from pretending to be another Iowa-born showman, the illustrious William F. Cody or Buffalo Bill. 

The wannabe impersonator, who ended up adopting the name of Colonel Samuel Franklin Cody, eventually moved to Europe, where he became the British equivalent of the Wright Brothers—that is, he invented some of the first powered aircraft, and piloted what is considered to be the first airplane flight in England. You can find the entire story in the February 2025 issue of The Iowa Source (Fairfield IA), but it’s also online here.

dinner scraps of great horned owls and others

Wikipedia article: A pellet, in ornithology, is the mass of undigested parts of a bird's food that some bird species occasionally regurgitate. The contents of a bird's pellet depend on its diet, but can include the exoskeletons of insects, indigestible plant matter, bones, fur, feathers, bills, claws, and teeth. 

Photograph copyright © Mary Snyder Behrens 2025.