Chesley Bonestell's Lost Industrial Lithographs #2 of 32

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 Site Looking from River Road

Whatever order Bonestell's lithographs originally had is now lost. But this bucolic scene (though not so to the workers in the field, obviously) of a cotton field untouched by construction, surely came first. It's a "before" picture. If you zoom in on the workers, you can tell that they were all Black and even make out the patterns of some of the clothing.

 

And for those who came in late . . .

In 1918, Chesley Bonestell was commissioned to create a series of lithographs chronicling the construction of the government cyanamide nitrates plant in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It would be many years before he began painting the astronomicals that made him famous, but he already had tremendous technique.

The lithographs disappeared from public view not long thereafter.

Recently, my wife, Marianne Porter, and I bought what we think is a complete set of 32 at an auction. We had electronic files made of them, which we're posting here, one every weekday until they're all online. Then we'll make a torrent containing the complete collection in high density form, for whomever wants them.

All the images are in public domain. You don't have to ask anybody for permission to download them and you may employ them however you wish.

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Chesley Bonestell's Lost Industrial Lithographs #1 of 32

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In 1918, Chesley Bonestell was commissioned to create a series of lithographs chronicling the construction of the government cyanamide nitrates plant in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It would be many years before he began painting the astronomicals that made him famous, but he already had tremendous technique.

The lithographs disappeared from public view not long thereafter.

Recently, my wife, Marianne Porter, and I bought what we think is a complete set of 32 at an auction. We had electronic files made of them, which we'll be posting here, one every weekday until they're all online. Then we'll make a torrent containing the complete collection in high density form, for whomever wants them.

All the images are in public domain. You don't have to ask anybody for permission to download them and you may employ them however you wish.

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Chesley Bonestell's Lost Lithographs

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"I don't know what that is, but I hope you get them."

 

That's what the lady at the auction house said when Marianne Porter told her that all Marianne wanted were the Chesley Bonestell lithographs. There were 32 of them in the lot, and it was clear nobody at Pook & Pook knew what they were.

 

Over a century ago, in 1918, when Bonestell was a young artist specializing in architectural renderings, he was commissioned to create a suite of lithographs documenting the creation of a nitrate plant in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. That he made them was a matter of record. But the lithographs themselves disappeared from public awareness. In Ron Miller and Frederick C. Durant III's The Art of Chesley Bonestell, the number of lithographs was speculated to have been ten.

 

This project was long before Bonestell began creating the astronomical paintings that would make him famous.  But his extraordinary artistic skill is on display in the array of techniques he employed. Some of which later informed the infrastructure of his visual documentation of future spaceflight technology.

 

Now Marianne and I are making those lithographs available to the public for free. Starting this Thursday, April 4, we will be posting one image every weekday on this blog.

When the entire series has been posted, a torrent will be created containing the complete collection in high-density format. All of the images are in the public domain.

 

 

Bonestell's astronomical art was not only beautiful in its own right but a major influence on early modern science fiction. Marianne and I are thrilled to be able to make these images available to whoever wants them.

 

 

 

Above: Marianne and me, examining our collection.

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Mars in 1995?

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Here's a curiosity--the cover story of the June 11, 1981 issue of Analog.  It wasn't fiction. "Mars in 1995!" by Bob Parkinson, with illustrations by David A. Hardy, was a sober explanation of how a manned mission to Mars would be feasible, only 14 years after that issue of the magazine came out. And though it didn't happen, many of the details of the imagined project showed up in subsequent robotic missions.

For me, the most interesting part of the article is a bit of background presented close to the beginning:

In 1970, at the height of its success with Apollo, NASA outlined its plans for a manned expedition to Mars before the end of the century. That was the pessimistic scenario--actually, they hoped that the first expedition would take place around 1987.

Alas, such plans required nuclear boosters, which for complicated reasons never came about. 

Perhaps this was just as well. We know a lot more about the long-term effects of living in space than we did in 1981, and it looks like such a voyage might require medical interventions that don't yet exist.

Still... The article is a glimpse back into a more optimistic era. Here's what Parkinson had to say about what the pessimists expected:

There are many in the space business who imagine that such an expedition belongs to the twenty-first century. By the mid-nineteen-nineties, they say, we may just be returning to the moon.

Thirty years later, we haven't yet done that either.

 

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John O'Hara . . . A Scandalously Neglected Master of the Short Story

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Recently, I picked up a copy of Collected Stories of John O'Hara, selected and edited by Frank MacShane, and what a good decision that was! It's far too easy to forget that at short story length, O'Hara was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. I've been working my way through it a story at a time, leaving space in between to think about what I've read and marvel at the craft of it.

This is not a Complete or Best Of volume--it leaves out "The Bucket of Blood," which to my mind is right up there with "Imagine Kissing Pete"--but it is chockablock with astonishing work.  "The Hardware Man" takes the rivalry of two hardware store owners a hundred years ago and invests in their conflict the moral gravity of two of Shakespeare's kings. "Our Friend the Sea" skirts the edge of melodrama but the big reveal, I think, is the contrast between the man the protagonist thinks he is and the man he is shown to be, to himself though not the world at large. "The Pig" has a very successful lawyer who has just discovered that he has six months to live. He confides in his best friend, mostly because he needs somebody to listen, but also because he has a difficult choice to make--and the friend's story of a combat incident in WWII is so apt that it convinced me it was how I should act, should the need ever arise. All these are clearly written with love of the form. "We'll Have Fun," whose meaning and intent I'm still mulling, required more research into the care and medicining of horses than the story's financial return could possibly have justified. (It also has a lesbian woman pleasantly free from all the tropes and assumptions of the times.)

And there is one story, but I'll not tell you which one, that reads light and frothy until, in the final sentence, O'Hara pulls the rug out from under the reader to show what's been hidden in plain sight all along.

During his lifetime, John O'Hara was known for his scandalous novels. O tempora, o mores! They are not scandalous anymore. Worse, a number of them were obviously quickly-written software for movies. As a result, his reputation is now greatly diminished. It was also unfortunate that his father's death while he was in prep school impoverished his family, which put the college of his dreams out of reach and left him too-obviously aware of his lack of social status ever after. Hemingway famously growled that someone "should start a bloody fund to send up a collection to send John O'Hara to Yale."

Forget all that. Read his short fiction. There is not a ghost of a whisper of fantasy or science fiction in anything of his I've read. Ignore that too. Read his short fiction. A lot of his stories start out looking like they're going to be formulaic. A pox on that as well. Read his short fiction.

The man was a master. He deserves to be remembered.

Above: The Library of America collection of O'Hara's stories. The volume I've been reading from doesn't have his picture on the cover.

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Michael Swanwick's Ten Rules For New Writers

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Michael Swanwick's Ten Rules for New Writers

1. Read everything. Read voraciously. Read so much that people who love you are concerned.

2. Write badly. Every day. Write prose so bad that writers whose work you loathe would spit on it. Then repeat. Repeat again. Repeat until you're sick of it. Then repeat.

3. Finish a story. You'll know it's done when every attempt to improve it makes it worse. You'll hate it. Send it out anyway.

4. Be rejected. Despise the editor as an idiot. Never entertain the notion that the editor might be right. The editor is an idiot.

5. Have your story accepted. Celebrate. Drink to excess. Do things you didn't intend. Use a condom.

6. Wait. You will be horrified to discover how long it can take for a work to see print. Go to the bookstore or the Web, depending, every day to see if it's out yet.

7. Exult. Your story/novel has been published at last. Now you can breathe.

8. Repeat all previous steps over and over. Repeat, repeat, repeat, for the rest of your life.

9. Die.

10. Spend eternity in Writers' Heaven, telling lies about how successful you were.

11/30/20

Above: Photo copyright 2023 by Marianne C. Porter. The text of Michael Swanwick's Ten Rules for Unpublished Writers is not copyrighted. Use it as you will. Have fun.

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Venice--and Why All the World Loves It

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Opus 40 in Saugerties, New York, is an ancestral work of landscape art. Sculptor Harvey Fite bought a played-out slate mine in 1938 and, shortly thereafter, began stacking slate to create a platform for his art. At some point, he realized that the platform was the art, and only one sculpture was placed upon it, as a focal point.

The result is a swooping and swirling topography of stone with narrow passages, pools of water, and short bridges, which you are allowed to walk upon. When was the last time you walked on a major work of art?

Wow.

The first time (of many) I visited Opus 40, I thought it was the best and only time I would ever get to walk on a world-class work of art.

And then I came to Venice.

I am by nature a creator. I use that term, rather than maker, because makers have physical skills I regretfully lack. But I share the common compulsion to make things. So, on my recent visit to Venice, I took dozens of photos and posted them on social media.

People praised me for the beauty of my photos.

No credit to me. Stand anywhere in Venice, close your eyes, point your phone in any direction, and click. Voila! A beautiful photograph.*

Because Venice, taken as a whole, is a physical work of art. I say that as someone who has wandered through many immersive works of art. For reasons of history and commerce and empire, the city of Venice is a coherent artwork. Start anywhere, wander wherever. You will be enchanted.

And if you take photos, they will all be beautiful.

And I have to add . . .

Ambling through obscure streets and sotoportegos, I was struck by how many people looked joyful. Couples taking selfies had unforced smiles. A woman reaching the top of the Rialto spontaneously broke into dance. Everywhere, one saw happy faces.

Of course, Marianne and I were there in January, where there are a minimum of tourists and all the usual reasons to be happy. But it was striking. And it made me happy in turn.

 

*I exaggerate. But only slightly.

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