mammoth flyer / elephantine mastodon hybrid

Before I became a university professor, I taught briefly in a public school. One day, in a class of seventh grade students, I came prepared to talk about usually unnoticed connections between familiar objects, and in particular, about skeletal structures. I brought with me to school that day various examples of medical x-rays, a plastic model of the skeleton of a mastodon, and the balsa wood wings of an unassembled model airplane. I displayed these on a table top in preparation for my talk. But I was then distracted by some other event in the classroom, and I briefly turned aside.

When I returned to the table, I found, to my surprise and great delight, that one of the students had spontaneously attached the airplane wings to the skeleton of the mastodon. I was so pleased by this invention that I permanently mounted the wings, added a wooden base, and painted the hybrid construction. Obviously, a new idea had taken flight, and the title I later chose for it was the Mammoth Flyer. It appealed to a wide range of people, as was confirmed, a few years later, when it was stolen from an art exhibition.

rudimentary multiple nipples on a hydroplane

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Horn of Plenty. Digital montage (©2021). 

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Maurice Browne, Too Late to Lament: An Autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956, pp. 257-258—

[This is Browne’s account of time spent at the home of the parents of his friend and associate Robert Bell, whose] father, an eminent banker, terrified me, but I sat rapturously at his mother's feet; she had as many laughter-wrinkles round her eyes as there are waves in a field of corn.

One evening her famous brother-in-law, Alexander Graham Bell—Telephone Bell, as we younger folk inevitably nicknamed him—brought his charming deaf-mute wife [née Mabel Hubbard] to dinner as it was her disability which had first led him to the study of sound. During dinner he talked of a new hydroplane which he was building, the intensive breeding of sheep and rudimentary multiple nipples on human beings. Not one of us had an elementary acquaintance with one of his subjects, yet he held us all spellbound. After dinner his nephew and I steered him carefully into a corner: “How on earth did you keep us so interested in things of which we knew nothing?” For two memorable hours the old man thought aloud. Finally he reached a conclusion. “It is not primarily what a speaker says which interests his hearers—be he conversationalist, preacher, lecturer, actor or even writer—nor the words in which he says it, nor his manner of delivery, nor his personality; these things help or hinder but are secondary. The primary cause of sustained interest, I believe, is this. Each time that a speaker—or writer—pauses, for however infinitesimally brief a moment, he builds a bridge in his own mind over the silence between the word which he has last uttered and the word which he will utter next. If his hearers cross that bridge before him, he bores them; if they fail to cross it, or cross it too late, he loses them; if they cross it with him, he holds and keeps them.”

his pistol shot caused the weather vane to clang

Above Roy R. Behrens, Well-Healed. Digital montage, ©2021. 

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Robert Conot (recalling an incident in the life of Thomas A. Edison), A Streak of Luck. New York: Seaview Books, 1979, p. 118—

It was a case of the famous ogling the famous. One evening after he [Edison] and Fox, who roomed together, had gone to bed, a thunderous knock on the door shook them upright. In strode "Texas Jack" [John Wilson Vermillion, aka "Shoot-Your-Eye-Out" Vermillion], the top of his head brushing the door frame, his eyes bloodshot, and his hands on his gunbelt. Which one, he wanted to know, was Edison? When Edison manfully identified himself in a quavering voice, Texas Jack said it was a pleasure: he himself was the boss pistol shot of the West, and he wanted to meet the great inventor of the phonograph. Whereupon he pulled out his six-shooter and, firing through the window, caused the weather vane across the street to clang into a dizzy spin.

that's the second dirtiest leg in all knox county

Above Drawing from Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995, p. 14.

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Wilbert Snow, Codline's Child (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1974), p. 39—

One day working ln the garden, Polly Dan stumbled over a big rock and sprained her leg. The post-mistress telephoned for Dr. Hitchcock, who took a good look at her leg, probed the muscles, and said: “Aunt Polly, I'll bet that's the dirtiest leg in all Knox County.” “How much will you bet?” asked Polly. “I’ll bet five dollars.” “All right, it’s a deal,” she said. Thereupon she took off her other shoe and stripped down her stocking. “I washed that one because I knew you were coming.” The doctor lost the money, but he had a story which he loved to tell for the rest of his life.

The worms are now eating dead Ernest again

Above and below: Two photographs that surfaced only recently in the post-retirement agony of downsizing. They appeared side by side in an issue of The Northern Iowan, the student newspaper at the University of Northern Iowa, on October 14, 1975. I was an assistant professor then, and, as part of the freshman foundations program, had initiated a student competition called the Rube Goldberg Drawing Machine Contest, in which students were challenged to invent absurd self-operating contraptions that would somehow result in a "drawing" (loosely defined). I was also one of the judges, as shown above. The caption for that photo reads: "A judge at the Rube Goldberg content, Roy Behrens, did not seem to get a great deal of sleep the night before the contest, or he just saw a great looking piece of art." In the photo at the bottom, I have been joined in the judging by writer Robley Wilson (who was editor of the then-famous North American Review), who is attired in a fine-looking British judge's wig. The caption for that photo reads: "A large crowd was on hand…and some of them are shown looking at the first place entry in the drawing machine contest." I still remember the first-place winner, invented by a student named Mark Mattern. At the end of a sequence of absurdly unrelated events, it made a silhouette of a dog—with gun powder.

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A memorable humorous passage from David Meyer's memoir of his friend Ernest Summers, in Ernie and Me (c2003)—

His name was Ernest Summers and he told this joke about himself: When he was dead the marker on his grave would read, "The worms are eating in dead Ernest." 
 

The Problems of Poets as Poets

Digital montage © Roy R. Behrens (2015)

William H. Gass, "The Soul Inside the Sentence" in Habitations of the Word (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), p. 119—

People call themselves poets and painters, and seek help for their failures, as I might come to a psychiatrist to discover the causes of my vaulter's block or to find out why I can't get anywhere in nuclear physics. Indeed, regularly people push through the turnstiles of the critic's day who feel very strongly the need to pass as poets, to be called "creative," to fit into a certain niche, acquire an identity the way one acquires plants there's no time to tend or goldfish that can't be kept alive, and their problems are important and interesting and genuine enough; but they are not the problems of poets as poets, any more than the child who tiptoes to school on the tops of fences has the steelworker's nerves or nervousness or rightly deserves his wage.

 

Space Suit Design Booklet | Austin Montelius

Space Suit Booklet © Austin Montelius 2015

Above Last semester in the Department of Art at the University of Northern Iowa, students in a course about the history of modern design (graphic, industrial and architectural) were assigned a major end-of-term project. They chose a research subject from the widest range of possibilities, with the aim of producing a formal research paper, an illustrated booklet, an information graphic (such as a chronological chart), and so on. The results were impressive to say the least. Among the finest was an exactly written and designed 32-page booklet on "the evolution of space suits in fiction and reality," produced by senior graphic designer Austin Montelius. The printed cover is above, with one of the opening spreads below. It was both flawless and ambitious, an admirable achievement in every regard.

Space Suit Booklet spread © Austin Montelius 2015

 The history of space exploration is one of Austin's many interests. He is especially knowledgeable of the development of the Russian space program, which he used as the subject for a stunning chronological chart which he designed for an earlier studio class (see below).

Art History Poster | Bailey Higgins

Art History Poster © Bailey Higgins 2015

Above Poster by Bailey Higgins, graphic design student, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa (2015), announcing a Call for Papers for the 5th Annual Art History Symposium at the same school on April 10, 2015.

•••

William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York: Random House, 1951, pp. 120-121—

[American expatriate painter Elihu Vedder in Italy] lived on a bare height somewhere in the fields of central Capri above the sea, and showed us his device for ridding his studio of flies. The screen door at the entrance was arranged in the usual two panels, one above, one below, a crosspiece in the center. But this crosspiece was set an inch back from the wire mesh, above and below, these edges thus remaining free.

"Flies always want to get out," he explained to us, "and will fly to the screen and the light of day. But we prevent them from escaping by barring the exits. [Instead] I leave a space for them. Thus I don't have flies." And he didn't, not many.

•••

Joseph Joubert—

To teach is to learn twice.

Illustrated Calendar | Winston Kearney

Illustrated calendar © Winston Kearney (2014)

Above Proposal for a page from an illustrated calendar, using digital montages in response to poignant quotes, designed by Winston Kearney, undergraduate graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, in a course called Graphic Design 1, as taught by Roy R. Behrens.

•••

From H.G. Barnett, Innovation: The Basis of Cultural Change. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1953—

They [artists and designers] strive deliberately to transcend the commonplace—that is to say, the habitual—configurations rather than to conform to them. In this, artists do not differ from inventors; and they are similarly constrained by the number of available configurations within their cultural tradition and the degree to which the internal cohesion of these habitual configurations resists their efforts to break them down and reintegrate them into new units.

Walt Whitman | Sarah Hedeen

Portrait of Walt Whitman (2012) © Sarah Hedeen

Above In a class about designing digital images, I asked my students to invent "interpretive portraits" of extraordinary men or women from the past, sung or unsung. Sarah Hedeen chose to portray American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), the so-called "father of free verse."

•••

Roy Paul Nelson, The Cartoonist: An Illustrated Story. Eugene OR: Seven Gables Press, 1994, p. 55—

Suddenly he got up, walked to the door, looked out, closed the door, bolted it, and came back in conspiratorial silence. He unfolded a worn sheet to reveal an elaborate but poorly drawn diagram of the male reproduction system with lots of marginal notes.

"This is for an idea I have for a new contraceptive to be taken by men the morning after," he explained. "Don't say anything about this to Mrs. Griffith."

Thomas Edison | Jessica Libberton

Portrait of Thomas Edison (2012) © Jessica Libberton

Above In a class about designing digital images, I asked my students to invent "interpretive portraits" of extraordinary men or women from the past, sung or unsung. This is a portrayal of genius and inventor Thomas Edison (1847-1931) by Jessica Libberton.

...

Thomas Edison—

Great music and art are earthly wonders, but I think cubist songs and paintings are hideous.

...

Richard Armour, It All Started with Columbus—

Since Edison suffered from insomnia, he invented the electric light, so he could read at night.

...

Keith Ellis, Thomas Edison: Genius of Electricity—

Edison was a giant. He had gigantic successes and gigantic failures. He had a giant's zest, a giant's power of recuperation, and a giant's vision.