And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.
“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
This is part of a series focusing on a small fraction of the lovely artists books by Peter and Donna Thomas!
Today's item is a scroll on a wooden frame that the makers compare to Pandora's Box-easy to open, but harder to put back! (Don't worry- I got it rolled back up again safely.)
When unrolled, it features a quotation from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five, which begins: "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres." The text is on a backdrop of green and blue linoleum cuts by Donna Thomas.
Peter and Donna Thomas are "book artists from Santa Cruz, CA. They work both collaboratively and individually; letterpress printing, hand-lettering and illustrating texts, making paper, and hand binding both fine press and artists’ books." They have made over 100 limited edition books, often with Peter making the paper, and Donna doing the illustrations.
Check out more of Donna and Peter's books at Uiowa here.
The city of Dresden, Germany at the end of World War 2.
* * * *
American humorist Kin Hubbard said, "It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be." The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue... Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.
Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five pp 164-65 (1969)
"It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again."
Appearances: "The Sirens of Titan" (Kurt Vonnegut, 1959); "Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade" (Vonnegut, 1969); Slaughterhouse-Five (film, 1972)
Type: terrestrial planet
Location: Small Magellanic Cloud
Inhabitants: Tralfamadorians
Fun fact: in "The Sirens of Titan," the Tralfamadorians were mechanical creatures developed by a race of superbeings to search for meaning in existence.
Another fun fact: in "Slaughterhouse-Five," they were green, plunger-shaped organisms thst existed four-dimensionally, experiencing all of time at once.
Fun fact 3: in "Hocus Pocus" (1990), Tralfamadore is noted as the meeting place for transdimensional superbeings, while in "Timequake" (1997) it is noted as the meeting place for the personifications of chemical elements.