Ballast Quarterly Review | Issues Online Now

Back issues of Ballast Quarterly Review are now online

We are delighted to announce that the ScholarWorks team at the Rod Library at the University of Northern Iowa is making rapid progress on the online posting of all issues of Ballast Quarterly Review. The magazine, a self-described "periodical commonplace book," ran for twenty years, beginning in 1985. Here is the story of how it began, and here is the link to the archived issues.

Above Photograph of Ballast Quarterly Review founder / editor Roy R. Behrens (1994) by Dave Rasdal, Cedar Rapids Gazette, Cedar Rapids IA.

Game, Stamps and Cash | Jake Manternach

Game parody © Jake Manternach (2016)

Above Hypothetical redesign of Mastermind code-breaking game, with the addition of a narrative theme, by Jake Manternach (2016), graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa.

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Roland Penrose (British artist and Picasso biographer), quoted in Elizabeth Cowling, Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006—

Autumn 1956
Don José [Picasso's father, artist and professor of art] became almost blind before he died. When shown a blank sheet of paper at art school he said to the pupil, "You should make your drawing stronger." He retired from post at school because of blindness. (p. 175)

12 May 1964
[While visiting Picasso in France] Before leaving we watched all-in wrestling on T.V. He makes a point of watching this program twice a week. J[acqueline, Picasso's wife] cannot stand it. So he usually watches alone. Affectionate goodbyes and inquiries about our next visit. (p. 264)

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Below Design for a block of postage stamps and the paper currency for an imagined country named Qualm (2016), by Jake Manternach.

Stamps and currency © Jake Manternach

Miami Art Deco Postage | Stephanie Berry

Stephanie Berry © 2014

Above Hypothetical postage stamp, commemorating Art Deco architecture, by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Stephanie Berry (2014). Reproduced below is a block of stamps that repeats and juxtaposes the single stamp to produce a synergistic whole.

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British sculptress Clare Sheridan, in a diary (1921) as quoted in Teresa Carpenter, ed., New York Diaries. NY: Modern Library, 2012, pp. 16-17—

Mr. [Horace] Liveright, my publisher, fetched me and took me to the Ritz where we dined with [various notable people, among them American financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch]…Mr. Baruch (whose name I mistook for Brooke) has white fair, fine features and stands 6 ft. 4. I gathered from the general conversation that I was talking to someone whom I should have heard of, and as I could think of no distinguished Brooke but [English poet] Rupert Brooke, I asked if he was related. And then Mr. Baruch rather reprovingly spelt his name for me. Instantly by a faint glimmer of memory, "Wall Street" came to my mind and I seemed to have heard in London that he was a friend of [her cousin] Winston [Churchill].

Stephanie Berry © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Danielle Schweitzer

Danielle Schweitzer © 2014

Above Hypothetical postage stamp, commemorating Art Deco architecture, by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Danielle Schweitzer (2014). Reproduced below is a block of stamps that repeats and juxtaposes the single stamp to produce a synergistic whole.

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Richard Neutra (Austrian-born American architect) in his autobiography, Life and Shape. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1962, p. 123. In this passage, he describes his experience as an army officer during World War I, when, accompanied by an orderly, he traveled on horseback through northeastern Montenegro—

[My orderly] was not obnoxious in any way. He didn't step on anybody's toes, or kiss any girls, or do anything else that might have caused trouble. His slow talk was like that of his Saxon ancestors. He came from Transylvania, the southeastern section of of Hungary near the mountainous Rumanian border. His home village was so underdeveloped that he had never seen a stairway. When he first beheld stairs, later on in a "hinterland" hotel, he climbed them on his hands and feet; he only knew how to use a ladder.

Danielle Schweitzer © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Gina Hamer

Gina Hamer © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Gina Hamer (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp from which the final block was made.

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Peter De Vries—

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

 

Gina Hamer © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Bailey Higgins

Block of stamps © Bailey Higgins 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Bailey Higgins (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp (one of several variations) from which the final block was made.

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Ralph C. Wood, The Comedy of Redemption (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988, p. 230—

[American comic novelist] Peter De Vries is so funny a writer that it may seem inappropriate to take him seriously. His puns are unabashed. Like the cleaning lady, he says, we all come to dust. The mere thought of cremation turns one of his characters ashen. De Vries's aphorisms are no less outrageous. The American home, we are told, is an invasion of privacy. Never put off until tomorrow, we are advised, what you can put off indefinitely. What is an arsonist, we are asked, but someone who has failed to set the world on fire? De Vries's vignettes are even more discerningly surreal. A chiropractor attending a patient throws out his own back. A husband who demands that his wife explain why she bought a mink coat is told that she was cold. Another wife sues her husband's mistress for alienation of his affections, and asks for $65 in damages.

Art Deco Stamp © Bailey Higgins 2014

 

Miami Art Deco Postage | Kat Bartlett

Miami Art Deco Stamp © Kat Bartlett

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Kat Bartlett (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp from which the final block was made.

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Alec Guinness, My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997), p. 46—

During one Christmas holiday in London I was taken to a fancy dress ball at the Town Hall in Kensington and I went as a candle and candlestick. I was sixteen. I fashioned a white tubular arrangement out of cardboard to go on my head, and from crepe paper a yellow and blue candle flame; also a wide white cardboard collar. I won the first prize, which was a large, brown, fiber suitcase. But it was a humiliating experience as so many people flicked their cigarettes into my collar and then said, "Sorry, thought you were an ashtray."

Miami Art Deco Stamp © Kat Bartlett

Miami Art Deco Postage | Andrew Girod

Andrew Girod © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Andrew Girod (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp from which the final block was made.

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Dard Hunter, American Arts and Crafts-era designer and papermaker, My Life with Paper: An Autobiography. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958—

A newspaper composing stick held about two inches of type—fifteen or sixteen lines. My father would always refer to the length of an editorial or any set matter as so many “sticks.” At noonday lunch I have often heard my mother ask about articles that were to appear in the paper that evening. For instance, my mother would say: “Did they have a large funeral for old Joe Basler?” and my father would answer: “One of the largest this year, about eight and a half sticks” (p. 10).

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[On a visit to Hammersmith, England, in 1912] I was only a few blocks from [Kelmscott Manor] where the famous modern edition of Chaucer had been printed, but the irregular streets had misled me. Upon inquiring the way to the old workshop of William Morris, I was surprised to be told by the young real estate agent that he did not know where William Morris had lived. He had never heard of Morris, and asked me if he had previously been the proprietor of a low rooming house for mendicants (p. 56).

Andrew Girod © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Shane Rumpza

Shane Rumpza © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Shane Rumpza (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp (one of several variations) from which the final block was made.

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William L. Shirer, 20th Century Journey : A Memoir of a Life and the Times (Vol 1). Boston: Little Brown, 1976, p. 193—

We stage-struck youngsters (sometimes I would work as an extra stagehand, moving scenery and props between acts [at Green's Opera House in Cedar Rapids IA], when a great star I wanted to see at close hand came to town) grew up in Cedar Rapids on a strange legend about Sarah Bernhardt. It was that she had been born Sarah King in the village of Rochester [IA], twenty-five miles down the Cedar River from us, that her mother had died when she was five, that she had run away soon afterward, entered a French convent at St Paul [MN], and, having learned the new language, set off to Paris, where she began her fabulous career in the theater. The legend grew when in 1905 it was reported that a veiled but elegantly dressed woman had stopped off briefly at Rochester to lay a bouquet of roses on the grave of the elder Mrs. King. When reporters noted that Sarah Bernhardt had played an engagement at nearby Iowa City the previous evening, they put two and two together, as reporters sometimes are tempted to do, and concluded that it was the great Parisian actress who had made the mysterious visit to the grave of one who must have been her mother. Ergo! The great Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous French actress of our time, was an Iowa girl!

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William L. Shirer, ibid, p. 18—

[The American novelist] Sinclair Lewis had worked as a telegraph editor and editorial writer on the [Waterloo IA] Daily Courier in 1908, the year after he graduated from Yale. He was fired after ten weeks, the editor informing him, Lewis told me once, "Young man, you'll never make it as a newspaperman. You can't write."

Shane Rumpza © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Cassandra Beadle

Cassandra Beadle © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Cassandra Beadle (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp from which the final block was made.

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William James, The Principles of Psychology—

In the meaningless French words “pas de lieu Rhone que nous,” who can recognize immediately the English “paddle your own canoe”?

 H.G. Wells, as quoted by Simon Nowell-Smith, compiler, The Legend of the Master (London, Constable, 1947), p. 149—

•••

I once saw [Henry] James quarreling with his brother William James, the psychologist. He had lost his calm; he was terribly unnerved, He appealed to me, to me of all people, to adjudicate on what was and what was not permissible behavior in England…I had come to Rye with a car to fetch William James and his daughter to my home at Sandgate. William had none of Henry’s passionate regard for the polish upon the surfaces of life and he was immensely excited by the fact that in the little Rye inn, which had its garden just over the high brick wall of the garden of Lamb House [Henry’s residence], G.K. Chesterton was staying. William James had corresponded with our vast contemporary and he sorely wanted to see him. So with a scandalous directness he had put the gardener’s ladder against that ripe red wall and clambered up and peeped over! Henry had caught him at it.

Cassandra Beadle © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Kaisee Wiesmueller

Kaisee Wiesmueller © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Kaisee Wiesmueller (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp (one of several variations) from which the final block was made.

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Audrey Flack, Art & Soul: Notes on Creating (New York: Penguin Arkana Books, 1991), p. 118—

When I was a student at Yale, [American painter] Stuart Davis came as a visiting artist. He walked into my studio and looked for a long time at my paintings and then began to speak. As he spoke, his cigarette never left his lips. It wobbled up and down at the corner of his mouth. I watched as the ash got longer and longer and finally flopped onto his shirt. As the cigarette burned down and got shorter and shorter, I realized that I hadn't heard a word he'd said. I was afraid that the cigarette would burn his lips, which had already turned brown from years of tobacco—life process interfering with art.

Kaisee Wiesmueller © 2014

Block of Postage Stamps | Tanner Heinrichs

Block of postage stamps © Tanner Heinrichs

Above and below Proposal for a block of postage stamps for an imaginary country called the Republic of Villanella, designed by Tanner Heinrichs, graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, in a course called Graphic Design I, as taught by Roy R. Behrens.

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Leslie Hall, quoted in Steven J. Zeitlin, et al., eds., A Celebration of American Family Folklore (NYC: Pantheon Books, 1982), p. 88—

About a year after my grandfather died I took a trip across the country and stopped in St Louis to see my grandmother. It turned out that they had a lot of money tucked away here and there—money under the mattress, in different banks, fifties here and there. It all added up to close to one hundred thousand dollars. When I stopped again on the way back, I went into the house and my grandmother says, "Oh, Leslie, I have something for you, upstairs. I had thought about giving it to you on your way across the country." And here I was, old greedy me thinking that maybe she had found a hundred dollar bill under the mattress and was thinking of giving it to me. So I followed her upstairs, toward the bedroom where she all of a sudden makes a cut into the bathroom, and she opens the cabinet and pulls out these two huge bottles of mouthwash and she says, "Your grandfather was going to use these but he didn't get a chance."

Labels, Stamps, Currency | Blake Schlawin

Luggage labels © Blake Schlawin 2014

Above and below Proposals for luggage labels, postage stamps and currency for an imaginary country called Sequitur, designed by Blake Schlawin, graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, in a course called Graphic Design I, as taught by Roy R. Behrens.

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William H. Gass, interviewed in Tom LeClair and Larry McGaffery, eds., Anything Can Happen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 158—

I think contemporary fiction is divided between those who are still writing performatively and those who are not. Writing for voice, in which you imagine a performance in the auditory sense going on, is traditional and dying. The new mode is not performative and  not auditory. It's destined for the printed page, and you are really supposed to read it the way they teach you to read in speed reading. You are supposed to crisscross the page with your eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see it flowing on the page, and not sound it in the head. If you do sound it, it is so bad you can hardly proceed… By the mouth for the ear: that's the way I like to write. I can still admire the other—the way I admire surgeons, broncobusters, and tight ends. As writing, it is that foreign to me.

Block of stamps © Blake Schlawin 2014

Currency © Blake Schlawin 2014

Postage & Currency | Andrew Struik

Block of stamps © Andrew Struik (2014)

Above and below Proposals for postage stamps and currency for an imaginary country called Fiasco, designed by Andrew Struik, graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, in a class called Graphic Design I, as taught by Roy R. Behrens.

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Thomas Berger, "Touring Western Europe, 1956: Excerpts from a Journal" in an issue of Antaeus devoted to journals, notebooks and diaries. No 61, Autumn 1988, p. 43—

Taken by Dr. Haas to find [Sigmund] Freud's house. He was not sure of the number and stopped at one point on the Berggasse to ask a woman who is sweeping the sidewalk, "Could you tell us which of these houses was Freud's?" She had no idea. "Doctor Freud?" No, sorry. She went on sweeping. "I'm sure it's along here somewhere," Dr. Haas told me. We were about to return to the car when he had a bright idea. "Actually," he said to the woman, "it was Professor Freud." "Ja!" said she. "Professor Freud lived just there," pointing.

Currency © Andrew Struik (2014)

Postage & Currency | Tony McDermott

Block of stamps © Tony McDermott (2014)

Above and below Proposals for postage stamps and currency for an imaginary country called Sfumato, designed by Tony McDermott, graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, in a class called Graphic Design I, as taught by Roy R. Behrens.

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Polly Gardner, quoted in Elizabeth Stone, Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us. New York: Times Books, 1988, p. 61—

In town, they called my grandfather Applejack. Do you known what applejack is? It's before moonshine becomes moonshine. If you won't wait for it to ferment, it's applejack. My grandfather just drank a whole lot of applejack. And dated other women. Finally my grandmother said, "Enough is enough," and she left him, which was pretty strange for the 1920s. She raised her six children herself. She did people's laundry by night and was waitress at the Greyhound bus station in the day. The one poignant note: even though she'd thrown him out, she did his laundry for him until the day he died.

Currency © Tony McDermott (2014)

Postage & Currency | Abby Michael

Block of stamps © Abby Michael (2014)

Above and below Proposals for postage stamps and currency for an imaginary country called the Republic of Lustspiel, designed by Abby Michael, graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, in a course called Graphic Design I, as taught by Roy R. Behrens.

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John Updike, The Centaur (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), pp. 80-81—

"The Founding Fathers," he explained, "in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't keep you. [As a teacher] I am a paid keeper of Society's unusables—the lame, the halt, the insane, and the ignorant. The only incentive I can give you, kid, to behave yourself is this: If you don't buckle down and learn something, you'll be as dumb as I am, and you'll have to teach school to earn a living."

Currency © Abby Michael (2014)

Block of Stamps | Amber Wessels

Synergistic Block of Stamps (2013) © Amber Wessels

Above Synergistic block of stamps on the theme of Art Deco Miami, by graphic design student Amber Wessels (2013) at the University of Northern Iowa.

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Rabbi David Aaron in Endless Light: The Ancient Path of the Kabbalah. Berkeley Trade, 1998—

One man who came to me for advice because he was contemplating a divorce told me mournfully why he thought the marriage went wrong. He said, "I know what my problem was. I was looking for a Ferrari and I got a Ford." I said, "I think the problem was you were looking for a car."

Miami Art Deco Postage | Evan Seuren

Miami Art Deco stamps © Evan Seuren (2013)

Above Block of hypothetical postage stamps by graphic design student Evan Seuren (2013), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp (one of two variations) from which the final block was made.

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Richard Critchfield, Those Days: An American Album. New York: Dell, 1986, pp. 375-376—

The dining table [in the family's house] was round and solid oak, an extension table  Jim bought when he was in medical school. The extra leaves hadn't come with it, so Jim sawed boards to fit, which we used when we needed to expand it for company. This gave the table considerable personality—you couldn't lean on the middle leaves with your elbows, or the other end came up like a teeter-totter and you got your dinner in your lap. The table was always in use. Here we ate on Sundays and holidays, brooded over jigsaw puzzles and chess sets, Monopoly games, Old Maid and ouija boards, built model airplanes, spread out magazines and newspapers, colored pictures with crayons, modeled with clay, wrote to Aunt Mary and Uncle Burke, puzzled over algebra problems, set sacks of groceries, piled up books or just sat and drank coffee and talked. At the height of the Depression there was a spell when everybody who was without work used to come over and spend hours sitting around our dining room table, decorating paper plates. Billy fringed a plate with tiny red diamonds he painstakingly cut  from an old pack of cards; he put the Queen of Diamonds in the center. Jimmy cut out characters from "Boots and Her Buddies" and "Thimble Theater" in the funny papers and painted on "Pappy," his nickname for Pat, in gold letters. A friend of Betty's named Elaine dropped in out of the blue and did an exotic ram's-head design. After she'd gone, Billy said, "Elaine always looks like she's been up all night." Betty's comeback: "Probably has."
 

Miami Art Deco stamp © Evan Seuren (2013)

In one corner of the dining room, by the hot-air register, was a big old Morris chair, where Betty, when she still worked at the bakery, would sit and fall asleep, she was so tired. Billy used to say, "Betty's spent half her waking life in a pink chenille robe." The stairwell to the attic was always loaded with things left there by somebody intending to take them up later: books, clothes, tennis rackets, skates, Tinker Toys, little trucks that always seemed to have a wheel missing. Like the road to hell, the stairs were paved with good intentions. 

Synergistic Postage Stamp | Stephanie Mathena

Synergistic Stamp (2012) © Stephanie Mathena

In the fall semester of 2012, I asked my beginning graphic design students at the University of Northern Iowa to design a synergistic postage stamp. This was done in two stages: First, they designed a single stamp, and second, they repeated that stamp so that it became a block (above). Once assembled as a block, the stamps produced new, unanticipated pattern consequences. In this particular solution, there's a wonderful interplay of figure and ground.

Synergistic Postage Stamp | Danielle Shearer

Synergistic Stamp (2012) © Danielle Shearer

In the fall semester of 2012, I asked my beginning graphic design students at the University of Northern Iowa to design a synergistic postage stamp. This was done in two stages: First, they designed a single stamp (above), and second, they repeated that stamp so that it became a block (below). Once assembled as a block, the stamps produced new, unanticipated pattern consequences.

Block of Stamps (2012) © Danielle Shearer