St Joseph's, How & Why Wonder Books III & some Einstein Relativity & Astronauts

A look at some more How and Why Wonder Books . Apropos the Convent as I had these books in the 1970s. And here are the links for more on St Joseph's Convent in Sidcup

http://armourae.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-min=2015-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2016-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=1

http://armourae.blogspot.co.uk/2016_02_01_archive.html

http://armourae.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/st-josephs-convent-more-salvaged-from.html

nuns-
http://armourae.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/st-josephs-convent-nuns.html


On the How and Why books here are some that had a special interest for me. Only Deserts was the copy I owned, the others were recently acquired either online or via Ebay.

Not the most interesting title, by a long shot, I have an affection for this as it was bought for my murdered sister Bernadette Bazzoni when she was  8 in 1967.  Purchased by our father  as he had lived in the Sahara Desert as part of his army service in the 3rd battalion of the Coldstream Guards. He was also located in other deserts & the cold of the Korean War.

Time is a very interesting title! Dinosaurs was the most popular title, its a fascinating subject, but time is a complex subject.  At first it would seem a dull subject: time is just looking at a clock or a sundial.   But time is a philosophical subject & there is a question of whether the past or future have physical existence, that is is time relative, or are the past & future have no existence and only the present moment: that is, is time absolute.

Around the time of its publishing, there was proof  of time travel on the nuclear physics scale, as particles were observed having a life span greater than established life expectancy.  This extended life was due to Einstein's  Time Dilation effect of Special Relativity.

Also Cherenkov radiation effect & astronauts red blood cells living considerably longer than their 3 month life expectancy demonstrate time travel due to Time Dilation effect.

A book I always wanted but wasn't usually in  bookshops; I never saw it. It's intriguing as the portrait reminded me of Paul Newman & the execution of the painting is impressionistic:  Space Impressionism

Basic Inventions was featured along with all the published titles in the 1970s editions as a  series of small photos on the back cover.

This cover always fascinated me, it's in the style of the French Surrealist artists, before I knew what Surrealist art was, most of my father's huge art book collection, he trained at St Martins School of Art, was of the Classical & Renaissance  era.   One object that immediately draws the eye is the wheel with the triangular gear at the back of the illustration. Then at the same time there is the prominence of the lighted torch.  For me the simple illustration of the burning torch is very effective as there is something disconcerting about it. Maybe its a fire surrounded by so much wood.  I have been on film sets with lighted torches & felt completely comfortable compared to this image.

This is one of the finest illustrations of the whole series.A number of objects arranged around the centre of the wheel in the middle of the picture.  The absence of any human or animal presence prevents the observer making a connection with the picture, so achieving Bertolt Brecht's distancing effect  Verfremdungseffekt.  That wasn't the artist's intention but the effect of dissonance ensures the painting retains its sense of mystery

The Best of Times

I was the only boy in an all girl class & loved it -

It is the 1970s again & my Catholic school  St Joseph's Convent ( which was also a convent)  again! This isn't reminiscing though but an event that would interest a sociology or child psychology researcher.

In 1979 we were all in the second year of Mrs Lyons ( there are pupils from the Convent who read this site). We were met by our teacher with  her fashion styling that Margaret Thatcher appeared to later have purloined from her & our headmistress the fearsome Sister Theresa.

 There was nothing aggressive about Sister Theresa, but we knew she carried a cane & she was an imposing presence. We didn't know how much the boys in her class & 50 years earlier the girls she taught loved her as she made sure all them received the best education, and that she remembered just about all of them.

The  purpose of our teachers blocking our progress to our classroom, is that we didn't have a classroom.  The water tank had burst overnight & drenched our Victorian wooden desks.

So we were to be assigned to other classes. The problem was the class was to be sent to lower years and the teachers would have to teach two classes in the same period.  The 24 of us were divided off into the lower age group of back to Mrs Lonsdale, the girls class of Mrs Taylor & the kindergarten class presided over by Sister Antionette & someone else.

The least academic & most unruly boys were sent to the 4 year old  class. Their outspokenness was immediately replaced by embarrassment when they were surrounded by kids less than half their age.

So everyone is sorted out
Except me!

For me, Sister Theresa looked through her spectacles  & told me to go to my age group, the all girl class of Mrs Cullen. "You're friends with some of the girls &  you learn" or similar words my old nun said.

She was right I was friends with some of the girls who had come to my birthday parties, often made more sense to me: they weren't obsessed with football, and since the age of 5 I had adored   a girl of the same age named Nina.
Mrs Cullen was a scary figure. Over 60, her hands resting on a walking stick and afflicted with rheumatism, the only contact boys had with her was her booming voice "What are doing?!" and variations thereafter.

"Sister Theresa told me to come here", I said to the aged teacher shrouded in a heavy brown cardigan at her desk in the bottom left of her classroom by the window. My trepidation towards Mrs Cullen, given every strident outburst  I had seen, was replaced by surprise  as it transpired that Cullen was a patient, skilled and calm teacher. She had a similar style to our headmistress Sister Theresa.

For  at least 6 weeks we  remained in our allotted places. None of my classmates in our formerly all boy 9 year old class were pleased sharing a class with pupils aged 4 to 7.

Whereas I was very, very happy.

I had one of the finest teachers I have ever known, classmates who were not obsessed with football, sport, or whatever else. And classmates who for the most part  I was on good terms with.

In fact it was the best time in any of my education.

Finally we all regathered in our classroom on the first floor of the boys block. Back to Mrs Lyons obsession in finding any excuse to slap young boys, What was more offensive was her middle class affectations & trying to brain wash us into the 'respectability' of working in a bank!

This experience would be of interest to social psychologists or sociologists as being the only boy in a class of 24 girls is very rare, or just about unheard of!

News Ain't What it used to Be

1970s reflections again!

Around 10 years ago I saw the late, great Daily Telegraph  journalist Bill Deedes talking about changes in international reporting since the 70s. Bill's career started in the 30s as an African reporter, immortalised in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop  novel as William Boot reporting on the the Second Italo-Abyssian War of 1936.

With the emergence of online & 24 hour news coverage current affairs would appear to have benefited. Bill highlighted the opposite had happened.  International reporting on Africa had plummeted since the beginning of the 80s, and the new technology was being used to circulate an increasing national, media & celebrity news.  This pattern has continued spiraling like a tornado. Only some Twitter accounts & channels like Al Jazeera  provide blockade against the 'celebrity' news garbage.

I was always interested in international affairs; being an 'odd' child ie preferred books to football (greatly preferred), and my father's years in North Africa, the Middle East and  Korea provided a family interest in everything Arab, Israeli & further horizons.

The big international events in my early childhood were the arrival of Bangladeshi refuges, Vietnamese boat people & 3 TV events, that as Bill intimated would not be one TV news now as they were then:

BBC news started one evening, on a weekday, as I had come home from St Joseph's Convent, that Idi Amin of Uganda had been deposed.  Footage showed crushed wire fences where UNITA rebels had stormed in the final defeat of Amin, who fled to Saudi Arabia

The most startling news footage   I ever saw came from Iran in 1978. Ethiopia 84 was harrowing as opposed to shocking.

The ITN  5.45 news titles started.  This was in an age where news programmes emphasised news & not colourful graphics as their reason to broadcast.Superimposed on the  5:45 ITN News logo was new film of an Iranian soldier lying flat on top of a tall building, the cameraman standing behind him, as he fired a heavy machine gun, a weapon that can bring down a plane, into the crowds of Tehran below.

Of the crowds only the massed throngs which blocked out the pavements & road could be seen. But closer to the building, hidden by its balcony were the crowds that the Shah's soldier was firing live ammunition into.  He kept adjusting his position, so clearly aiming at the people.

I haven't seen any news footage similar to this broadcast on British news channels in 35 years.  It can be recorded but clearly  it is deemed too 'disturbing' for the public; whereas I do want to see what is committed by governments. In the case of the Shah of Iran, it was also his Prime Minister  Jafar Sharif-Emami who's actions by ordering the Black Friday massacre in October led to the riots now on the news.

The third one was the Khmer Rouge - that's for another post.

How And Why Wonder Books II

Another post on the excellent How and Why Wonder Books series of nearly 100 titles (see 9 February below). Previously  I described the high quality art work, especially the covers. How I was introduced to them via my late sister Bernadette Bazzoni  having  about 10 books bought by our father.

 I now have about 77 of these, and the amount of detailed information in many of the humanities subjects: Crusades, Lady of the Lamp,Old Testament  is surprising. Some of the scientific texts such as Interplanetary Travel have suffered as a result of rapid scientific advance. Written in 1960 some of the stated 'facts' become erroneous following planetary probes and the Apollo missions.
And today the discovery of Gravitational Waves again renders some information in many physics texts inaccurate. The hypothesised wave by Einstein is now confirmed. Gravitational waves have been detected between galactic bodies & originated a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang

Titles published after 1974 are usually rare. Snakes published in 1975 above. It features the cheaper photograph which the Americans opted for to lower production costs at this time.

Another American title.Looks quite effective until you realise it's one desk lamp pointing at a curtain!


A British only title next! These are rarer as fewer were printed. Everyone wanted a copy of  Dinosaurs. This one is from 1970 as it's in the  transition from imperial to decimal coinage. Hence two prices:

Worst artwork of the series during the 'illustrated cover era'


Another rare one but with a fabulous artwork-

Here the very rare British title Heraldry

Finally the rare and expensive Arms & Armour with a stunning illustration-

The very last titles of the How & Why Wonder Book series-

Never seen or heard until recently these ones:

• 6596 Rare Animals       6597 Ancient Egypt 6598          Oil 6599 Parliament
• 6600 The Ice Age                 6601 Arab World - this will be very interesting as it predates the Iran Revolution & everything that has happened since

I'm in a book apparently!

My first speaking role in a movie, & my first movie, won awards. I only found out  a couple  of years later, that Are You Ready For Love, a title that has always made me squirm when anyone asks, "What movies have you done?" Got around 11 & I was a recipient with some others of the Monaco Angel Award (ensemble actors) & something else.
I've found I'm also in the book Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: The Complete Guide to the Movie Trivia Game. This is for my very brief appearance in the Dark Knight. Nevertheless a pleasant little surprise

War of the Worlds Jeff Wayne screws it up by revisiting it just like George Lucas with Star Wars

Back in 1978, I was at one of  my St Joseph's Convent (you will read a lot about the Convent on here) friend's home. He was excited about something  & that I should be prepared for it. He produced his elder bother's copy of Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of the War of the Worlds. Richard Burton said "No one  would believe- "  and I thought " I must become an actor". So surrounded by his Star Wars wallpaper  we experienced an aural revelation.

I did eventually train and do a quite a number of films & theatre in London.  Prior to that there  had been a year of naval college (place was falling into chaos but it impresses people on my CV), arts  & sciences studies.Then often part time  pharmacology,chemistry,physics,engineering, film & broadcasting, the acting with design, while attending  the classical music & psychology depts. Then part time  sound engineering & music production  and more recently forensic science.

As with everyone else who was in awe of the album I believed 'The Coming of the Martians',sides 1 & 2, that's what an LP has for those under 30, was the best. Of course everyone is wrong!

The 'Earth Under the Martians'  is musically & dramatically superior. The Red Weed could have been sketches by Alban Berg. The Spirit of Man is the strongest composition on the album & so amougst the best of any musical or rock opera.  And Richard Burton outdoes his outstanding narration on the The Coming of the Martians part.

Jeff Wayne doesn't write much! His next original composition was Spartacus 16 years later  which met a muted response & featured Catherine Zeta Jones descending into her 'wilderness years' until she was sitting in a Hollywood restaurant & famous sex-addict Michael Douglas spotted her.

To keep busy Jeff likes to revise his most famous composition, as does George Lucas to his Star Wars trilogy.  You should now see the iceberg looming.

The first thing Jeff Wayne did to 'improve' his classic album was alter the heat ray sounds. He ruined them. The loud blazing sound like a crash of thunder accompanying the searing light of lightning across blackened clouds was removed.  The next sacrilegious  desecration was lower the Martians in the mix. In the original the Martians ROAR their strident call for human annihilation  ULLA . A sound so powerful that it still has an impact 37 years later. Now they squeak by comparison.


 Ulla is Gaelic for apples apparently. The Martians invaded Earth in pursuance of  cider it seems.

Jeff decided that the lily needed even more gilding. By God he shoved that lily in a load of manure next!

A new version featuring the excellent Liam Neeson was announced. It would offer an alternative take.

Liam Neeson took the Richard Burton role of Narrator/Journalist. The emphasis here was on the Journalist role whereas in the Burton recording he was  the Narrator. Liam Neeson sounds like he is proof reading his newspaper article during the whole album.  This is more faithful to the book, but is devoid of Richard Buroton's immediacy & drama of someone actually living through  the end of  the world and recounting it in the present tense.

That production decision was understandable, new album new interpretation. But then things got really bad:
Apparently there is a live drummer on the album & not a drum machine. The drumming is indistinguishable from a 1980 drum machine.  It is devoid of any  human qualities such as rhythm, swing (which Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward has amply) or variation. It sounds like someone reading a percussion sheet music and having never heard any of the music before.

And the clearly best part of the album, Spirit of Man? The Parson is delivered by a caricature Irish accent. Imagine a drunken impression of Frazer from Dad's Army. Beth, his wife,  now is a hysterical girl panicking because there's no biscuits  for afternoon tea or such like.

I know the two singers for the Parson & Beth are skilled singers probably from a musical theatre training, but by comparison to the original:
Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, screamed and roared like a soul ripped apart. Almost nothing can compare in rock,musical or opera.  He embodies the agony of a priest who's greatest strength is love & compassion drives him insane when confronted with the apocalypse of the Martian invasion.

Julie Covington played the original Beth. Her characterisation is of an unbreakable force  who saves her tortured husband's life & refuses to let him be engulfed by his insanity instead she fights indefatigably.

The new interpretations of Forever Autumn, Thunderchild & Brave New World are equally screwed up.

The Martians now sound more emasculated than previous tinkering. The Heat Ray  is now a cheap sound effect from a cheap early  Yamaha digital synthesizer; not the sonic gorgeousness of an analogue one.

So why did Jeff Wayne want to  mess around with such a  classic? For more money? No for this:

The revelation-
Jeff released a 7 cd collection of out takes & demos. The out takes include  informative A cappella from everyone & Richard Burton drinking coffee then saying into the microphone "shouldn't drink coffee when doing a voice over". 

The  demos are the 'thing'. In the 1975 demos the Parson & the other singers do sound like the new album & stage show. Clearly when the album was made the cast on the album were too good, they were above what Jeff Wayne intended. So the new War of the Worlds  album is to achieve the mediocrity he had hoped for,

Recovery of the Artifacts - How and Why Wonder Books

More Recherche musings this time the recovery of those artifacts from your childhood that should never have been forsaken or lost.  As with a previous post on the connection of childhood memory empowering hypnosis practices -
http://armourae.blogspot.com/2016/02/le-recherche-hypnosis.html
St Josephs Convent details at -
http://armourae.blogspot.com/2015/12/st-josephs-convent-primary-school.html

http://armourae.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/st-josephs-convent-this-is-reprinted.html


 this reflects on the impact of Affective Memory, those memories which release not only a visual or auditory memory but a whole engagement of all the senses plus an emotional response, which  Strasberg used as the whole basis of his Method Acting (overrated! I will always be an Artaud).

I have recovered copies of my late sister, Bernadette Bazzoni's, How and Why Wonder Books.The originals were disposed of 30 years ago as I had a rapidly expanding book collection which was taking over every piece of space- my mattress rested on a bed of books.
The most important one was the Wild Animals edition.

It wasn't just the contents that made this so valuable, as you can see the artwork in these books was also exceptional.
My sister's copy was battered with pages missing. Don't know if Bernadette or my infancy was responsible.
The other editions that needed to be recovered were the well known Dinosaurs,

  and  Reptiles,Planetary Travel,Magnetism,and Deserts.  The last probably bought by my father as a consequence of the years he spent in North Africa and the Sahara Desert.

Of the above I now have digital copies of all of them plus a paper copy of Wild Animals. I also always wanted a copy of Ballet which I saw only once at Longlands Primary School summer fair. Delighted to have that 37 years later,

That left my own purchases: Dogs, which I bought because it was there, from the stationary shop opposite my Convent on Hatherley Road. Another one I didn't particularly want was Deep Sea. So no hurry to replace those. But the ones I was eager to replace were my Butterflies and Moths, Extinct Animals. 

Both of these are amoungst the rarest of the series. They were amoungst the last printed, alongside Tower of London and the very last title Heraldry.  I now have both in digital copies & butterflies in a paper copy, I obtained both from Alfriston Zoo, more on that another time.

Some very fine illustrations in this book! It's the art work which has revived interest in these books which have been out of print since around 1979

This is not my original copy. The American editions had inferior photographic images, like this, in the late 1970s.  The British imprint used paintings. For Extinct Animals it featured a sabre tooth tiger killing an extinct species of crane. Extremely rare edition evidenced by no images on Google. One of the very best of the 78 books too.