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.

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).

 

Einstein steals tobacco from unsuspecting Bohr

Above One of a series of in process montages having to do with the Ballets Russes (the Russian Ballet). Copyright © Roy R. Behrens, 2024.

•••

Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr's Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 13—

[During a brainstorming session with Niels Bohr at Princeton University, in which Bohr paced around his office, he] then asked me if I could note down a few sentences as they emerged during his pacing. It should be explained that, at such sessions, Bohr never had a full sentence ready. He would often dwell on one word, coax it, implore it, to find the continuation. This could go on for several minutes. At that moment the word was "Einstein." There was Bohr, almost running around the table and repeating: “Einstein…Einstein…” It would have been a curious sight for someone not familiar with him. After a little while he walked to the window, gazed out, repeating every now and then : “Einstein…Einstein…”

At that moment the door opened very softly and Einstein tiptoed in [from an adjoining office]. He indicated to me with a finger on his lips to be very quiet, an urchin smile on his face. He was to explain a few minutes later the reason for his behavior. Einstein was not allowed by his doctor to buy any tobacco. However, the doctor had not forbidden him to steal tobacco, and this was precisely what he set out to do now. Always on tiptoe he made a beeline for Bohr's tobacco pot, which stood on the table at which I was sitting. Meanwhile Bohr, unaware, was standing at the window, muttering “Einstein…Einstein…” I was at a loss what to do, especially because I had at that moment not the faintest idea what Einstein was up to.

Then Bohr, with a firm “Einstein," turned around. There they were, face to face, as if Bohr had summoned him forth. It is an understatement to say that for a moment Bohr was speechless…A moment later the spell was broken when Einstein explained his mission and soon we were all bursting with laughter.

who can you truss? i'd walk a mile for a camel

source

EDWARD MARSH and CHRISTOPHER HASSALL, Ambrosia and Small Beer. NY: Harcourt Brace. 1965—

A soldier up for medical exam proved to have been wearing a truss for the past 6 years, and was classified as P. E. or Permanently Exempt. On his way out he gave this news to his pal, who immediately asked for the loan of the truss, which was granted. The examiner asked how long he had been wearing it, and he said “Six years," whereupon he was classified as M.E. "What's that?” he asked. "Middle East." “How can I go to the Middle East when I've been wearing a truss for 6 years?" “If you can wear a truss for 6 years upside-down, you can jolly well ride a camel for 6 months."

Henry Mayer's WWI Pasteboard Charlemagnes

Here are two views of a single illustration, created by Hy Mayer (aka Henry Mayer) and published in Puck (19 September 1914), vol 76 no 1959, pp. 12-13. It was accompanied by a text about the outbreak of World War I, titled “The Pasteboard Charlemagnes by Benjamin De Casseres. 

Mayer’s illustration, titled “Militarism: From the Craddle to the Grave,” is an upsidedown double image. As shown here, it appears to be the image of a child when viewed upright, but turned upsidedown, it looks like a German helmet with a human skull inside.

there is no better book about human creativity

Douglas Fowler, S.J. Perelman. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983, p. 83—

Continuing an ancient and honorable line of speculation into the nature of humor, Arthur Koestler has theorized [in The Act of Creation] that human laughter may be a sort of alternative satisfaction of “biological drives,” a substitute for “killing and copulating,” for planting antipersonnel bombs. The aggression implied in laughter—and laughter almost always involves ridicule, bringing low—is “sublimated, often unconscious,” but the mechanism of laughter surely involves a psychic effort to reduce or even imaginatively destroy its objects; and we can agree that a good part of the comic phenomenon might be understood as brutality without consequence.

•••

I discovered The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler’s classic book on science, art and humor, as a college freshman in 1965. It had been published the year before. At nearly 500 pages, it is not an easy read. Or, it might be better to say that the text, as one moves through it, is immensely pleasurable, stirring and insightful. That is especially true of Part One. In Part Two, as Koestler cautions, the wording thickens somewhat and the content grows more technical. But you must not be put off by this. 

Over the years, I have owned six or seven copies of this book, and yet I have never read the entire text in sequence, page by page from beginning to end. I don’t think it works best for that. But most likely I’ve read every word, in session lengths and sequences that seemed appropriate at the time. Even today, I still go back to it, because its concepts are so illuminating, and the writing is so perfectly phrased. I have learned immeasurably, I don’t deny, from other educational opportunities, and from other published sources, but I continue to be convinced that, at a critical point in my life, Koestler’s book provided a “big picture” framework for those.  

The entire book is now available free online. If the book seems somewhat daunting, you might first read an essay I wrote in 1998. More recently, I produced a short video talk on the subject, which is also free online. Near the end of the video, I recall an incident that took place in my classroom, back in 1968, when I was a 7-12 art teacher in a public school. In subsequent years, as a university professor (and as a grapher design and writer) I made frequent use of Koestler's approach to innovation—and I still use it to this day.

cliff-hanging illusions as used in early films

Above Advertisement for a Hal Roach 1923 film comedy starring Harold Lloyd, called Safety Last. It shows him hanging precariously from a high-rise window ledge, with a distant busy street below. But in fact that’s not the case. As shown in the diagram below (from E.G. Lutz, The Motion Picture Cameraman), it is all an ingenious camera trick, albeit one that looks utterly real. 

Lloyd posed for various scenes like this, such a below, in which he seems to be suspended from the clockface on a building. When movement is added, both that of the actor and those on the street, it is even more convincing.

Comparable tricks were later used by American artist and optical physiologist Adelbert (Del) Ames II in developing the Ames Demonstrations in Perception, which we have discussed at length in a triad of online videos, titled The Man Who Made Distorted Rooms.

an expatriate artist in Paris with Gertrude Stein

just published more>>>

what traveling with a wagon train was really like

Above Fred Stone was a famous Vaudeville performer, one of the best. He was also the best friend of Will Rogers. Among his many achievements, he played the Scarecrow in the 1902 stage production of the Wizard of Oz. He is shown above with David Montgomery, who was cast as the Tin Woodman.

•••

Fred Stone (in his autobiography), Rolling Stone. New York: Whittlesey House, 1945, pp. 3 and 5—

The day they were married, my father and mother hitched their team to a prairie schooner and joined the procession that was trailing out across Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado…

We went into Garden City, Kansas—so called because there wasn’t a garden within a thousand miles—with a train of seventy-three prairie schooners. People were traveling together for protection from the Indians, for there were still Indian raids over the prairies, and buffalo, bear, and deer were plentiful. But though I saw lots of Indians at Garden City, they were all friendly, and the only marauders father had to contend with were the white men who tried to steal everything in those covered wagons, from the bedding to the wooden wheels. So when father stood on watch all night, with a shotgun in his hand, it was not because any redskin was going to bite the dust. It was because some of his fellow travelers were as apt as not to take his prairie schooner apart in the night if there was anything in it they fancied.

i believe in the imaginative life and love to talk

© Mary Snyder Behrens

Above Mary Snyder Behrens, Edo Wan (1988). Textile collage with machine stitching. 38h x 45w. Private collection.

•••

These are the concluding words in Sherwood Anderson’s foreward to his autobiography, as published in Ray Lewis White, ed., Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs: A Critical Edition, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969, p.29—

I am an imaginative man. I believe in the imaginative life, its importance and would like to write of that. My readers, therefore, those who go long with me, will have to be patient…

…I shall tell the tale as though you, the reader, were a personal friend. We are walking together, let’s say, on a country road. The road follows a stream and the day is pleasant. We are unhurried. We stop at times to sit on a rock beside the stream. We arise and walk again and I talk.

I keep talking, love to talk. I am telling you that this thing happened to me, that that thing happened.

Do you wish I would stop talking, let you talk? Why then, dear reader, go write your own book.

Walter Hamady // book artist and paper maker

Above (and below) Title frame and other single frames from a new 20-minute video talk about Walter Hamady (1940-2019), prominent book artist, paper-maker, and collagist, who was well-known as a teacher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. 

Having earlier taught in Milwaukee for ten years, I had become aware of his work in the 1970s. Because of his liking for Ballast Quarterly Review (which I had founded in 1985), he and I began to exchange spirited letters (along with a mix of enclosures), once or twice or more a month. 

This led to collaborations of one kind or another, eventually resulting in exhibitions, published essays, and an archive of his artist’s books. I saved everything, even all the envelopes and mailing containers, in part because they were always addressed to mutilations of my name, such as Corps du Roy, Rhoidamoto, Trompe L’Roi at Labbast, Royatolla, and so on. This continued for more than a decade, perhaps to the mailman’s amusement.

Looking back on what I have, I have now produced a video talk (a brief memoir-like tribute) titled BOOK ART: Walter Hamady’s Books, Collages and Assemblages, which can be accessed free online on my YouTube channel.

if Vincent Van Gogh had been a dentist instead

Woody Allen, “If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists” in Without Feathers. New York: Random House, 1975, p. 199— 

Dear Theo—

Will life never treat me decently? I am wracked by despair! My head is pounding! Mrs. Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth! That’s right!… I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing, with wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire! Now she is upset because it won’t fit in her mouth! She is so bourgeois and stupid, I want to smash her! I tried forcing the false plate in but it sticks out like a star burst chandelier. Still, I find it beautiful. She claims she can’t chew! What do I care whether she can chew or not! Theo, I can’t go on like this much longer! . . .

Vincent

hoop and holler when little pig got under skirt

Stark Young, The Pavilion: Of People and Times Remembered, of Stories and Places. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, p. 106—

My father had a brother-in-law, Uncle Henry Hargis, who had married my Aunt Elizabeth. She had been long since dead and the only thing remembered about her was that she went on wearing hoopskirts years after they were given up, because her legs were too weak for skirts pressuring against them, and that a little pig had got under the hoop one day and the more she kicked and screamed the higher he jumped.

wheel collapsed, heart pierced by bicycle spoke

Above Harry G. Aberdeen, graphite and watercolor (1936), from the Index of American Design. Collection of the National Gallery of Art. Public domain.

•••

Stark Young, The Pavilion: Of People and Times Remembered, of Stories and Places. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, pp. 155-156—

When I was a child I had seen a traveling medicine show where the climax was that a comedian should lie on the floor while some villainous character trampled on his middle and a stream of milk spurted up most comically out of his mouth. It was on that occasion that the star performer on a the bicycle, which at that time was a huge wheel with a small wheel at the rear, chose one of my little cousins and me to be carried in his arms, the right and the left, in thrilling figurations around the room, with danger stalking his tracks, or so we were supposed to believe; it was only a week later in some nearby town that he essayed to ride down a stairway and his wheel collapsed, and one of the spokes pierced his heart.

impromptu gymnastics strengthens muscularity

flag waving / anon

A.A. Milne, Autobiography. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1939, pp. 52-53—

The only occasion on which I spoke in the Debating Society was at what was called an “Impromptu Debate.” The names of the members were put into one hat, the subjects for speech into another. In an agony of nervousness I waited for my name to be called. It came at last, “Milne Three.” Milne III tottered up and drew his fate; not that it mattered, for one subject was as fatal to him as another. He tottered back to his desk and opened the paper. The subject on which he had to speak was “Gymnastics.”

I stood there dumbly. I could think of nothing. The boy next to me, misapprehending the meaning of the word “impromptu,” whispered to me: “Gymnastics strengthens the muscles.” I swallowed and said, “Gymnasthicth thtrengthenth the muthelth.” Then I sat down. This is the shortest speech I have ever made, and possibly, for that reason, the best.

• See also this great story about the “shotgun seminars” at Princeton, as well as this video essay about the nature of humor.

social media acronyms as practiced by victorians

Above A three-panel caricature, The Pair of Skaters (1873), by one of history's finest comic illustrators (often featured in Simplicissimus), the Norwegian artist Olaf Gulbransson. His command of movement and gestural line has never been equaled.

•••

A.A. Milne, Autobiography. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1939, pp. 131-132—

One way and another we [the author and his brother Kenneth John Milne] got a good deal of happiness out of it [preparatory school], if not always in the way expected of us. We sat together now, never to be separated, in the Mathematical Sixth, which meant that we occupied one corner of a room in which some lowly mathmatical set was being taught. Since we could not talk wthout disturbing the master-in-charge we wrote letters to each other: long letters detailing our plans for the next holidays. Interest was added to these letters by our custom of omitting every other word, leaving blanks which the addressee had to fill in. Our minds were sufficiently in tune for this to be possible without being easy; one could get the general sense without being certain of the exact word. As in my old French set, we then changed papers and marked each other's mistakes. Sometimes our communications were in initial letters only. During “second school,” for instance, it was certain that one of us would ask the other “SWGUSIB?” This clearly meant “Shall we go up-Sutts in break?” a question which expected the answer “Yes” and got it. Ken would feel in his pockets and decide that, since we already owed Father 15/6, we might as well owe him sixteen shillings. We did.

Herbert Simon / the fruits of being colorblind

Arcimboldo, Fruit Basket (c1590)

Above Painting by Giuseppe Arcimboldo titled Fruit Basket. Oil on panel, c1590. It is a reversible still life of fruit. Turned upsidedown (as shown here), it resembles the head of a person.

•••

Herbert Simon, Models of my life. NYC: Basic Books, 1991, p. 5—

Whether during his fourth summer or on some later occasion, the boy [the author] was among a party picking wild strawberries. The others filled their pails in a few minutes; there were only a few strawberries in the bottom of his. How could the others see the berries so easily amid the closely matching leaves? That was how he learned that strawberries are red and leaves green, and that he was colorblind. 

•••

Postscript As Simon comments in his autobiography, he would later marry a woman with red hair. In view of his being colorblind (he continues): “'How did you know her hair was red?' the perceptive reader might wonder. Well, I had early been told that there were no green-haired people, nor any red lawns. Ergo. . . ."

In relation to the use of ambiguous, pun-like images in art (such as this painting by Arcimboldo), it may also be of interest to view my recent video called EMBEDDED FIGURES, ART AND CAMOUFLAGE.

historical scholars / Gould in them there pillows

Joe Gould's Secret

Matthew Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962, p. 273—

Just when the troubles of Broom [magazine] were at their height, the eccentric little Joe Gould [aka Professor Seagull] fell upon me with demands for money—providing Shakespearean comic relief against the tension of our literary tragedy. We had published a few pages of his so-called History [An Oral History of our Time] in one of our last issues, but had announced at the same time that our magazine had no money to pay for contributions. Greatly excited at being put into print at last, Joe Gould refused to believe that he would not be paid an honorarium of some kind, and kept telephoning me at all hours. Beside myself with exasperation, I swore at him; whereupon this tiniest and most impecunious of historical scholars began to address me in a tone of severe formality, declaring that I had grossly insulted him and he was obliged to challenge me to a “duel”—a duel, with the midget Gould! Since it was he who issued the challenge, he requested that I name the weapons to be used.

“Pillows!” I roared into the telephone. “I’ll meet you with pillows at sunset tomorrow.” But he never came.

the essential link between humor and creativity

According to Arthur Koestler (in The Act of Creation), humor in all its various forms is rooted in mock confusions of two or more usually different components, which may then result in so-called bisociative acts. In one form or another, it is often delivered through bait-and-switch. The audience is “baited,” or led to believe that a particular train of thought is in play. And then, abruptly, as a result of the punch line, a disarming switch of attention occurs, and a momentary confusion erupts. The effect is a double awareness in which A is A, while, at the same time, A is also not-A.

In performing bait-and-switch routines, it is customary to feature a pair of comedians, one of whom, known as the straight man, is the person who sets up the pattern—the bait—for the audience. The second person ignites the laughter in the process of airing the punch line. In Abbott and Costello, Bud Abbott is the straight man, while Lou Costello makes the pretended confusions. In Burns and Allen, George Burns is the straight man, while his partner, Gracie Allen, is the sort-crosser. Sancho Panza is the straight man in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In Mister Magoo cartoons, Magoo’s impoverished eyesight leads him to mistakenly think that A is not-A, while Waldo provides the conventional view. In the case of Sherlock Holmes, it is the insightful detective whose cleverness takes us by surprise, while Watson underscores the norm. more>>>