(Roughly) Daily

Lou Beach is renown as an illustrator…

“Brand City,” Time

… and as a designer of album covers…

Blink 182, MCA

… but not so well-know as a writer.  At least, not yet.

Beach has just finished a collection of stories that he calls 420 Characters, explaining in his preface:

The stories you are about to encounter were written as “status updates” on a large social networking site. These updates are limited to 420 characters, which include letters, spaces, and punctuation. They provided a daily exercise in fiction writing for the author, who hopes you enjoy them and return to read more. They will be regularly updated.

For example:

‘Whatcha wanna go on a game show for?’ She was disinclined to answer, thought it obvious, but said: ‘To win money and prizes and shit.’ She ran a wet finger around the rim of her glass, couldn’t make it sing. He continued ironing the napkins. ‘You gonna wear a costume?’ She turned slowly, found his eyes hovering in the iron’s steam, stared until he looked away. ‘I do not intend to make a fool of myself.’

The book is due out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on December 6, but readers can find it online here.  More of Beach’s artwork is on display on his site, from which the examples above were selected.

As we distill, distill, distill, we might recall that it was on this date in 1948 that Edwin Land’s Polaroid Land Camera Model 95– the first “instant” camera, producing finished prints in about a minute– went on sale for the first time.  It was priced at a then-lofty $95 (to wit, the model number).

Polaroid originally manufactured sixty units of the camera. Fifty-seven were offered at Boston’s Jordan Marsh department store for the Christmas holiday.  Polaroid’s marketing department reckoned that the camera and film would remain in stock long enough to manufacture a second run based on customer demand.  In the event, all fifty-seven cameras and all of the film were sold on the first day.  Over 1.5 million units were sold over the next few years, before the company introduced new models.

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Horse Anatomy
From: Anatomia del cavallo, infermità e suoi rimedi by Carlo Ruini, Published in Venice, 1618.

Many more lovely lessons at Scientific Illustration.

As we sharpen our pencils, we might wish a feathery farewell to zoologist Alfred Newton; he died on this date in 1907.  One of the foremost ornithologists of his day, he was appointed (in 1866) the first Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge University. Though he suffered from injured hip joints and walked with the aid of two sticks, he traveled throughout Lapland, Iceland, the West Indies, and North America 1854-63.  During these expeditions he became particularly interested in the great auk– and was instrumental in having the first Acts of Parliament passed for the protection of birds.  He wrote extensively, including a four-volume Dictionary of Birds, and the articles on Ornithology in several 19th century editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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From artist and illustrator Neill Cameron, a celebration of superheroes, celebrities, comic characters– and the allure of alliteration:  “The A – Z of Awesomeness.”

As we parse our pleasures, then pause to ponder pain, we might recall that it was on this date in 1842 that anaesthesia was used for the first time in an operation– by Dr. Crawford Long.  Long, a physician and a pharmacist, used diethyl ether in the removal of a tumor from the neck of James Venable in Jefferson, GA; given success with Venable, Long then used ether in other surgeries and in childbirths.  He published the results of these trials in 1848 in The Southern Medical and Surgical Journal (an original copy of which is held in the U.S. National Library of Medicine).

It’s cool that Long is the subject of one of the two statues representing Georgia in the crypt of the U.S. Capitol.  It’s cooler that Long was the the cousin of Doc Holliday.

Crawford Long

From the end of the 19th Century through the middle of the last, the center rings of commercial art were window dressing (L. Frank Baum was a retail celebrity well before The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) and magazine cover and advertising art… as readers can see at Magazine Art– a wonderful online gallery of “magazine cover and advertising art from the Golden Age of American Illustration.”

As we wax nostalgic, we might pull out our manual typewriters to tap out a birthday greeting to “The Sage of Baltimore,” Henry Louis (H.L.) Mencken, born on this date in 1880…  The author of The American Language (and many, many other things) is credited with having coined the term “ecdysiast,” in response to a request from a practitioner who requested a “more dignified” way to refer to her profession.

Often called “the American Nietzsche” (by virtue of his scholarship on the German philosopher), Mencken might better have been considered “the American Wilde”; consider:

Democracy is the theory that holds that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Nature abhors a moron.

Puritanism – The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.

H. L. Mencken