REQUIREMENTS (complete any 3):

1. Are you now, or have you ever been observed in smoking a pipe? What was in there? Who saw you? Describe your first time.

2. Submit both of the following:

        a. A photo of you smoking a pipe, taken by someone else.

        b. A note from your mother, or other reliable narrator, confirming the pipe-smoking incident. This should be sent in the form of a separate email, and should not be signed, “Joshua’s Mom,” for example.

3. Discuss this painting by Magritte. Is it or is it not a pipe? Why or why not?

4. Leonard Nimoy has written both I Am Not Spock and I Am Spock. How does this highlight the ontological dilemma raised by HiLobrow’s deliberate misquotation of Magritte?

ACTIVITIES (complete 1 or more):

5. Make a pipe cleaner animal. Attach ears and a tail. Googly eyes encouraged.

6. Draw a Venn diagram with the sets “iconic works of Surrealism” and “hit songs by 1980s R&B singers.” Populate the sets to the best of your ability. Identify the member of the intersecting set. Illustrate your example with the relevant image or music video. Karaoke is optional.

7. Write a poem about how terrible orange is, and life. It can be in the form of a 12-panel comic strip, if you wish. Stick some of the leftover googly eyes on it.

SHORT ANSWERS (complete any 2):

8. Name three Surrealist artists. Describe the peculiar combination of realism and fantasy that make up Surrealism.

9. Provide a short definition of Dada. What was its relationship to Surrealism? Who broke up with whom? What did WWI have to do with it? You may draw another Venn diagram if you wish.

10. What is poésie concrète? Give a concrete example, either from history or compose your own.

11. If words are used as imagery, should they be viewed or read?

12. Draw another Venn diagram with the sets “sardines” and “oranges.” Populate the sets. Identify the author at the intersection.

ARGUMENTS (win 1 or more):

13. Is the pipe the bow tie of facial accessories? Discuss.

14. Are images naturally treacherous? Why or why not? Would Werner Herzog agree with you?

15. Using our recent series as a guide, explain HiLobrow’s enthusiasm for the pipe. Or, explain it away. Be persuasive.

Email your name, mailing address, answers, links and any attachments to hilobrow at gmail dot com, with the subject line Merit Badge 2/Pipe Dreams. Please number your answers in order.

Not all of the steps will be possible. But all badges are earnable. Creativity is encouraged. If you would like to submit independent achievements for consideration, then we will consider them. There will be a $10 embroidery fee after the free badges have run out. In all cases, HiLobrow reserves the right of final decision, which will be arbitrary.

Important: by submitting material for this badge, you agree to allow HiLobrow to publish excerpts from your submissions at some future point (either linked to your name or anonymously, as you prefer).

One in a series of HiLobrow merit badges.

[All badges designed by Peggy Nelson, 2010]

“He crouched and fell forward with his face on my white tennis shoe tops, trembled away into his legs and shook down to stillness.” — Ed Gentry, in James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970). (NB: Earlier this month, it was the fortieth anniversary of Dickey’s novel.)

Hm. What make of white tennis shoes might Gentry, an art director (in the advertising business) living in suburban Atlanta in the late ’60s, have worn on a weekend canoe trip through the north Georgia wilderness? While packing, Gentry informs his wife that he’s going to wear an “old nylon flying suit” and “some tennis shoes” — but that’s not much help.

Might Gentry have been wearing New Balance or Reeboks? No, because these were designed for running — and therefore more expensive than “tennis shoes” (e.g., casual sneakers). Nikes were running shoes, too — besides, they didn’t exist as such yet. As for Pumas, though they were popular (a Pumas-sporting Joe Namath led the Jets to victory in Super Bowl III in ’69), they were “football shoes.” Gentry was wearing thin-soled tennis shoes: we know this because when he’s pushing a canoe (loaded with a dead body) along a shallow stretch of river, he remarks that he can “feel every pebble through the city rubber of my tennis shoes.” We also know he’s not interested in traction, because at one point he tells his macho friend Lewis that his (Gentry’s) philosophy of life is “sliding… living by antifriction… grooving with comfort.”

In keeping with his old flying suit, it’s likely that Gentry wore an inexpensive pair of tennis shoes — possibly a generic-style sneaker from Montgomery Ward. Or perhaps one of B.F. Goodrich’s models: e.g., Jack Purcells or P.F. Flyers (both later sold to Converse) are likely.

But just as New Balance and Reeboks were most likely too expensive, I’m guessing B.F. Goodrich-brand tennis shoes would’ve been too cheap-o for Gentry, who explains his taste in advertising graphics like so: “I didn’t as a rule like too traditional, cheap Boraxy ads, with screaming typeforms and an obvious and chillingly commercial use of sex, nor did I like the overly ‘creative’ kind of ad, with some farfetched or gimmicked-up formula or calculated craziness.” Gentry is middle-of-the-road: his sneakers wouldn’t be too cheap-o, I think.

How about Adidas? I don’t think so. Though their plain white “Rod Laver” and “Stan Smith” models would become extremely popular tennis shoes, neither was introduced before 1970. Also, as with Converse, I think Gentry would’ve mentioned the shoes’ make if he’d been wearing Adidas. We’re looking for something slightly more generic — though, again, not overly cheap-o.

Might Gentry have been wearing Converse All-Stars? It’s not impossible; Converse was a popular urban sneaker, and they were cheap but not cheap-o. We know he wasn’t wearing Converse high-tops: early in the trip, Gentry runs through the woods and “two or three soft, collapsing jumps” suffice to “fill my tennis shoes with leaf mold.” Later, when he’s recovering from his ordeal in a bed and breakfast, he says, “I slid off my tennis shoes and went to the door sock-footed.” Not high-tops, then. But was Gentry wearing low-top Cons? It’s a good possibility, but lacking any textual clues, we need to take our cue from the theme of Dickey’s novel: re-masculation.

What brand of tennis shoe might an emasculated man have worn in 1969? Certainly not Converse, which were macho as anything.

Aha! The answer suddenly becomes clear: Keds.

Though originally manufactured for men, by midcentury Keds were popular with women, too. What’s more, they were considered stylish among glamorous women like Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe and Jackie O (Mischa Barton is the Keds poster girl now) — and they were frequently celebrated by Vogue, Elle, and Women’s Wear Daily. Wearing Keds might easily have contributed to Gentry’s overall feeling of emasculation. Note how the male model in the 1962 ad above (perhaps one of Gentry’s?) is dressed exactly like his female counterpart.

So why didn’t Gentry say “Keds” if that’s what he was wearing? Keds were the the first shoe with a soft rubber sole — an ad man dubbed them “sneakers” in 1917, which helped popularize a slang term coined decades earlier by Boston schoolchildren (who were referring to tennis shoes). In the 1920s, Keds became the preferred footwear for pro tennis players — making an appearance at thirteen tennis championships. By midcentury, then, you could say “tennis shoes” and mean Keds, much like you could say “Coke” and mean soda pop, or “Kleenex” and mean facial tissues.

The shoes upon which the hillbilly killed by Gentry’s arrow trembled away into stillness were Keds.

An occasional series seeking to determine the make and model of fictional footwear.

James Parker’s serialized novel The Ballad of Cocky the Fox was scheduled to resume publication today. It will resume next Thursday, instead…

“[Chaplain Captain A.T. Tappman] moved slowly. He was downcast and burdened with self-reproach when he stepped without noise from the colonel’s office on his rubber-soled and rubber-heeled brown shoes.” — Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

I’m guessing that the Chaplain (who, in the first edition of Catch-22, is named Robert Oliver Shipman; this was changed in later US editions of the novel because the 1970 movie adaptation renamed the character) was wearing the Army’s “roughout” field shoe. Known by the Quartermaster as “Service Shoe, Reverse Uppers,” these shoes were manufactured with rubber soles and heels — unlike, e.g., the Army’s Type II Service Shoe, which featured a (squeaky) leather sole and rubber heel. Army footwear aficionados who disagree, please note three things before posting your own theories: 1) the Chaplain is based overseas, 2) the novel is set in ’44 and after, and 3) the Chaplain is not wearing combat boots — he’s wearing shoes.

An occasional series scrutinizing our favorite fictional footwear.

In his recent book The Lost Books of the Odyssey — an “ingeniously Borgesian novel that’s witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive” — author Zachary Mason, an Artificial Intelligence researcher, fictionalizes King Agamemnon’s attempts to build a fortress underground.

[Image: The walls of Troy slowly revealed].

Agamemnon’s choice of site, however, makes this task rather difficult: it is to be constructed in the sandy plains facing the walls of Troy.

Agamemnon wanted a fortress on the wide plain before the walls of Troy but there was nothing to build with but a few trees and an unlimited quantity of sand. Therefore (at Odysseus’s suggestion) the Greeks dug the negative image of a palace in the white plain, a convoluted warren where cascades of fine grains trickled endlessly down the walls and into the tenuous corridors irregularly shored up with masonry.

Mason describes “frequent cave-ins and sand-slides that suddenly obliterated rooms, courtiers, armories, armorers, elegists and exits.” It was, Agamemnon says to himself, both forward-operating base and future tomb.

Following the wisdom of the court geomancers it was considered impious to exhume any of the collapsed rooms and tunnels, a sin on par with looting a tomb, so when more space was needed the miners struck out into virgin ground. Thus the new underground palace evolved dendritically, sending off new shoots in all directions, sometimes opposed by unforeseen aquifers or plumes of hard rock, working around these obstacles with ant-like tenacity.

The passages multiply and deepen until the fortress “resembled a vast inverted castle, its battlements and towers soaring into the depths of the earth. Now and then a district was separated by a landslide and till the miners could reconnect them to the king’s rule they lived with their own laws and minted their own coins,” forming separate subterranean administrations, split by the logic of collapsing sand and its unpredictable granularity.

[Images: Extraordinary photographs of sand by Larry Deemer].

The architectural nature of sand grains is something discussed by Michael Welland in his own book Sand. There, Welland introduces us to the complex internal structures of sand dunes:

The weight and pressure distribution within a pile of any granular material is determined by the way in which the individual grains contact each other and distribute the stress. Quite commonly, grain shapes and sizes mean that there are microscopic chains and networks of grains that are oriented and in contact with each other in such a way that they carry most of the pressure from the weight of the material above them. These chains seem to behave like the soaring arches of Gothic cathedrals, which serve to transmit the weight of the roof, perhaps a great dome, outward to the walls, which bear the load. In a sand pile, particularly one that is confined in a container of some sort, these chains perform the same function — they carry the stress outward to the container, rather than directly downward to the base of the pile.

The idea that dunes have internal Gothic cathedrals, arranged chain-like throughout their sandy massing, is an incredible thing to consider. The amorphous mounds of the deep desert are, in fact, both structurally intricate and gravitationally complex.

Agamemnon’s fortress is thus a mathematical model of collapse — an inhabitable diagram of the forces traveling through it — bulwarked and avalanching against itself into new formations and plans. It is an architecture of dynamic materials.

“[Stephen Dedalus'] gaze brooded on his broadtoed boots, a buck’s castoffs nebeneinander. He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein another’s foot had nested warm.” — James Joyce, Ulysses (first serialized, March 1918 to December 1920; first published in its entirety, 1922).

NB: The novel is set on June 16, 1904. We assume Dedalus is not wearing workboots, because his footwear is described as a buck’s (dandy’s) castoffs. (Of course, this might well mean that they’re Dedalus’ friend Buck Mulligan’s castoffs, but since Mulligan is something of a dandy, it’s still the same idea.) If anyone can provide us with an early 1900s image depicting fancy Irish men’s boots, please do! Until then, this advertisement from the December 1900 Montgomery Ward catalog will have to suffice.

PS: “Nebeneinander,” a term of which Dedalus is fond, is German for “side by side.” “Nacheinander,” another term that Dedalus uses, means “successively.”

An occasional series scrutinizing our favorite fictional footwear.

NB: Lionel Roberts and Karl Zeigfreid are pseudonyms of R L(ionel) Fanthorpe, who also wrote under the excellent pen names Othello Baron, Erle Barton, Lee Barton, Thornton Bell, Leo Brett, Bron Fane, Mel Jay, Marston Johns, L P Kenton, Oben Lerteth, John E Muller (with John S Glasby), Elton T Neef, Phil Nobel, Peter O’Flinn, Rene Rolant, Victor la Salle, Deutero Spartacus, Neil Thanet, Trebor Thorpe, Pel Torro, and Olaf Trent.

BONUS! Here are several other “X” titles by Fanthorpe, via the excellent website Fantastic Fiction.

The children’s books written and illustrated by VIRGINIA LEE BURTON (1909-68), whose father was an MIT engineer and mother an artist (who abandoned her children to foster care), are as fancifully yet precisely engineered as a cuckoo clock. She won the 1942 Caldecott Medal for The Little House, in which the sharp angles of industrial civilization creep close to, then engulf the anthropomorphized, gently rounded title character. Her best-known book is Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939); Choo Choo (1937), Katy and the Big Snow (1943), and Maybelle the Cable Car (1952) also feature an anthropomorphized piece of industrial equipment — Katy is a snowplow — whose existence is threatened by larger, newer, brutal and sinister avatars of technological progress. (Was Burton steampunk? She was DIY, anyway: in 1938 she founded the Folly Cove [Gloucester, Mass.] Designers, a textile collective whose whimsical wallpaper, tablecloths, etc., are gorgeous, and highly collectible.) My favorite Burton story is the un-quaint, non-partisan yarn Calico the Wonder Horse, or the Saga of Stewy Stinker (1941), in which not a single machine (unless a stagecoach counts) appears. Reading it to my children, like my father used to read it to me, I’ve decided that Burton’s stories are themselves technologies — ones whose joints have been concealed by organic designs — which seem less crafted than grown.

***

On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Fred MacMurray.

READ MORE about members of the Partisan generation (1904-13).

READ MORE HiLo Hero shout-outs.

NB: The sixth book in Horler’s Dr. Paul Vivanti series.

[Image: "Guatemala Tikal D8006" by youngrobv].

Easily one of the most interesting things I’ve read in quite a while is how a team of particle physicists from UT-Austin plan on using repurposed muon detectors to see inside Mayan archaeological ruins.

In the new issue of Archaeology, Samir S. Patel describes how “an almost featureless aluminum cylinder 5 feet in diameter” that spends its time “silently counting cosmic flotsam called muons” — “ghost particles” that ceaselessly rain down from space – will be installed in the jungles of Belize.

There, these machines will map the otherwise unexplored internal spaces of what the scientists call a “jungle-covered mound.”

In other words, an ancient building that now appears simply to be part of the natural landscape — a constructed terrain — will be opened up to viewing for the first time since it was reclaimed by rain forest.

It’s non-invasive archaeology by way of deep space.

[Images: The muon detector, courtesy of the UT-Austin Maya Muon Group].

From the UT-Austin Maya Muon Group website:

The first major experiment of the Maya Muon Group will bridge the disciplines of physics and archeology. The particle detectors and related systems are designed specifically to explore ruins of a Maya pyramid in collaboration with colleagues at the UT Mesoamerican Archaeological Laboratory. The Maya Muon Group will travel to La Milpa in northwest Belize to make discoveries about “Structure 1” — a jungle-covered mound covering an unexplored Maya ruin.

Pointing out that dense materials block more muons, Patel explains that a muon detector can actually detect rooms, spaces, and caves inside what seems to be solid:

A detector next to a Maya pyramid, for example, will see fewer particles coming from the direction of the structure than from other angles: a muon “shadow.” And if a part of that pyramid is less dense than expected — containing an open space for, say, a royal burial — it will have less of a shadow. Count enough muons that have passed through the pyramid over the course of several months, and they will form an image of its internal structure, just like light makes an image on film. Then combine the images from three or four devices and a 3-D reconstruction of the pyramid’s guts will take shape.

Referring to a muon detector already at work on the campus of UT-Austin, Patel writes: “The detector sees in every direction, so it also records muon shadows from the adjacent university buildings, and can even identify empty corridors. Silently, with little tending, it takes a monumental x-ray of the world around it.”

“The resulting image,” he adds, “will be almost directly analogous to a medical CAT-scan.”

[Image: The muon detector, courtesy of the UT-Austin Maya Muon Group].

Install one of these things in New York City and see what you find: moving blurs of elevators and passing trucks amidst the strange, skeletal frameworks of skyscrapers that stand behind it all in a labyrinthine mesh.

[Image: A diagram of how it all works; from this PDF by Roy Schwitters].

Patel goes on to relate the surreal story of physicist Luis Alvarez, who used muons “to scan the inside of an ancient structure” — in this case, Khafre’s pyramid at Giza. “Working with Egyptian scientists in the late 1960s,” we read, “he gained access to the Belzoni chamber, a humid vault deep under the pyramid.”

Like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft story, “Alvarez’s team set up a muon detector called a spark chamber, which included 30 tons of of iron sheeting, in the underground room.”

Foreign physicists building iron rooms beneath the pyramids! To search for secret chambers based on the evidence of cosmic particles.

[Image: An illustrated depiction of Luis Alvarez's feat; view larger!].

Indeed, we read:

Suspicion of the research team ran high — here was a group of Americans with high-tech electronics beneath one of Egypt’s most cherished monuments. “We had flashing lights behind panels — it looked like a sci-fi thing from Star Trek,” says Lauren Yazolino, the engineer who designed the detector’s electronics.

Alvarez’s iron room beneath the monolithic geometry of the pyramid — it’s like a project by Lebbeus Woods, by way of Boullée — apparently took one year to perform its muon-detection work.

One day, then, the team took a long look at the data — wherein Yazolino “spotted an anomaly, a region of the pyramid that stopped fewer muons than expected, suggesting a void.”

There were still undiscovered rooms inside the structure.

[Image: Wiring up the muon detector, courtesy of the UT-Austin Maya Muon Group].

Excitingly, when Roy Schwitters sets up his muon detector next to the tree-covered mounds of the Mayan city of La Milpa, he should get his results back in less than six months. Sitting there like a strange battery, the detector’s ultra-long-term abstract photography of the jungle hillsides vaguely reminds me of the technically avant-garde photographic work of Aaron Rose.

Rose has pioneered all sorts of strange lenses and unexpected chemical developers as he takes long-term exposures of Manhattan.

New York becomes less a city than a kind of impenetrable wall of built space.

[Images: Four photographs by Aaron Rose. View slightly larger].

Again, then, I’m curious what it’d be like to install one of these muon detectors in Manhattan: the shivering hives of space it might detect, as delivery trucks shake the bridges and elevators move up and down inside distant high-rises. What would someone like Aaron Rose be able to do with a muon detector?

Are muon detectors the future of urban art photography?

Perhaps it could even be a strange new piece of public art: a dozen muon detectors are installed in Union Square for six months. They’re behind fences, and look sinister; conspiratorialists leave long comments on architecture blogs suggesting that the muon detectors might not really be what they seem…

But the resulting images, after six months of Manhattan muon detection, are turned over as a gift to the city; they are hung in massive prints inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, near the Egyptian wing, and Neil deGrasse Tyson delivers the keynote address.

Or perhaps a muon detector could be installed atop London’s fourth plinth:

The Fourth Plinth is in the north-west of Trafalgar Square, in central London. Built in 1841, it was originally intended for an equestrian statue but was empty for many years. It is now the location for specially commissioned art works.

For six months, a shadowy muon detector will stand there, above the heads of passing tourists, detecting strange and labyrinthine hollows beneath government buildings where sprawling complexes from WWII spiral out of sight below ground.

Or perhaps muon detectors could even be installed along the European coast to discover things like the buried neolithic village of Skara Brae or those infamous Nazi bunkers “that lay hidden for more than 50 years” before being uncovered by the sea. As the Daily Mail reported earlier this month:

Three Nazi bunkers on a beach have been uncovered by violent storms off the Danish coast, providing a store of material for history buffs and military archaeologists.

The bunkers were found in practically the same condition as they were on the day the last Nazi soldiers left them, down to the tobacco in one trooper’s pipe and a half-finished bottle of schnapps.

So what else might be down there under the soil and the sands…?

I’m imagining mobile teams of archaeologists sleeping in unnamed instant cities in the jungles and far deserts of the world, with storms swirling over their heads, running tests on gigantic black cylinders — muon detectors, all — that stand there like Kubrickian monoliths, recording invisible flashes of energy from space to find ancient burial sites and old buildings underground.

[Images: Tikal, photographed by n8agrin: top/bottom].

Perhaps all the forests and deserts of the world should be peppered with muon detectors — revealing archaeological anomalies and unexpected spaces in the ground all around us.

Architecture students could be involved: installing muon detectors outside Dubai high-rises and then competing to see who can most accurately interpret the floorplan data.

[Images: "Sobrevolando Tikal, Guatemala," photographed by Eddie von der Becke].

Till one day, ten years from now, an astronaut crazed with emotional loneliness, riding through space with his muon detector, begins misinterpreting all of the data. He concludes — in a live radio transmission broadcast home to stunned mission control supervisors — that his space station has secret rooms — undiscovered rooms — that keep popping up somehow in the shadows…

More to the point, meanwhile, you can read a few more things about Roy Schwitters over at MSNBC – and, of course, at the UT-Austin Maya Muon Group homepage.