Three Interests Meme: Shortwave, Office Supplies, Primo Levi

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks to sasha_feather for these prompts

Happy to carry the meme along -- let me know you want prompts and I'll trawl your interests and offer you three to discourse upon.

Shortwave

I spent a long time in bed between 1988 and 1991, with limited attention span and no assistive technology to help me read. My favorite companion was the Sony compact shortwave radio on my bedside table. Before the internet, many countries funded education/cultural/propaganda broadcasts, bouncing these shortwave signals off the ionosphere and around the world. Programs were short, and I could follow cultural or scientific or travel stories that were 15 or 30 minutes long. 1989 was a busy year in the world, and I loved triangulating what was happening from various sources. Broadcasters shifted frequencies to ensure better reception with changes in daylight and solar weather. Learning the geeky details was the kind of puzzle I enjoyed and could still actually solve, supported by the dense listings in the Passport to Worldband Radio. Favorite programs include BBC (African and World Service); Radio Netherlands, Radio Canada International, Kol Yisrael, the Voice of America, and lucky catches like Finland.

Office supplies

My father sometimes let me play in his study where I could bang on the manual typewriter. I loved to fondle the typewriter eraser — a hard rubber disk spinning from a small brush to tidy up the rubber shreds afterwards. There were small dishes with paperclips, binder clips, flags (a precursor to post-it notes), several piles of softly folded galleys. Small materials which helped keep the grand Snowpiercer of academic publishing in motion. In sixth grade I discovered the magic of Letraset transfer lettering. I’d spend hours making little posters and booklets with different font designs. And this is why when I feel stressed, browsing an office supply store is a guaranteed pleasure. The staff aren’t pushy, and there’s actually thousands of things to admire.

Primo Levi

Introduced me to the lived experience of the Holocaust. Levi was an Italian Jew, born two months after my mother. He finished a university chemistry degree and was able to work until 1943, when he became an inept (by his own admission) anti-Facist partisan. On capture he avoided immediate execution by admitting that he was a Jew. He was sent to Auschwitz. His lab skills permitted him to work indoors, which helped him survive. Levi’s books — If This Is a Man and The Truce — detail his time in the camps and the year he spent wandering all over Europe on his journey back to Turin. His writing is a vital witness that survivors were often mendacious and cruel; that religion isn’t always supportive; that strangers can create a better world.

My favorite of his is The Periodic Table, 21 short stories/essays linked to 21 elements, from argon to carbon. Each is informed by Levi’s experience as a child, as a prisoner, as a chemist working with German colleagues after the war. The BBC is currently hosting a six-part audio presentation of eleven chapters from the work, including the exquisite conclusion, Carbon.

Bookshare has seven of his works

Your public library probably has it

English translations of these three works are available at the Internet Archive

https://archive.org/search.php?query=primo%20Levi&and[]=creator%3A%22primo+levi%22&and[]=languageSorter%3A%22English%22

If none of those work for you and you're interested in reading The Periodic Table, I'd be happy to give you one in your preferred format.

Comments

[sasha_feather]

Oh how interesting! I'd heard of Primo Levi but didn't know anything about him.

[luzula]

*puts The Periodic Table on my reading list*

[jesse_the_k]

I think of it as "one of the essential books of the 20th century." It's a modernist piece, yet accessible.

(I haven't reread it yet this millenium, gotta fix that!)

[starshipfox]

I have read Levi's poetry, but none of his prose. He's been on my radar for a long time, but I should definitely make it my business to check out more of his work. The BBC programme sounds great.

The information about short-wave radio is really interesting! Thanks for sharing.

[jesse_the_k]

I'm happy that opening my brain and letting facts trickle out can amuse.

Translated poetry is always a challenge, or do your read Italian?

[starshipfox]

Sadly, I don't read Italian, but I've always been interested in poetry in translation. While Frost may say, "poetry is what is lost in translation," I believe there is still much to be gained from reading translated poetry, and am grateful to have access to poetry from languages I will never speak. I'm reading a great book at the moment that takes 20 of Tu Fu's poems and explains the translation process and puts them into a cultural context: fascinating, but not so necessary with someone like Primo Levi, whose life is not so far removed from what is familiar to me. I've found a lot I like in Levi's poetry, and would recommend it, though I'm curious to explore his prose, too!

[adrian_turtle]

I love Primo Levi's work, especially for his insight into the craft of chemistry. I was a teaching assistant for a big lecture class back in 1991, and the professor assigned The Periodic Table. Presumably he was thinking he had a captive audience of 2000 first-year students, and he could make them read a book he loved. (You couldn't even get most of them to read the lab safety manual.)

I love the essays in Other People's Trades about chemistry, too. Even though they're about aspects of chemistry that are extinct like slide rules. So much of chemistry was directly, vividly, sensory when Levi was learning it in the 30s. Almost as much when Hoffman was studying in the 50s, and my father in the 60s. In the 80s, I had a separate class in "instrumental analysis," for all love. Kids these days aren't even told acids are intrinsically sour.

[wordweaverlynn]

Have you read Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks? It sounds right up your alley.

GIP is a picture of a gas!

[jesse_the_k]

The best part of Uncle Tungsten -- which was a delightful book -- was the real-life periodic table.

Not surprisingly, there's a truly awesome site on the topic, where Theodor Gray's Periodic Table empire intersects with Sacks' enthusiasm

[jesse_the_k]

damn!

I'm guessing the 1991 students didn't read much Levi?

Thank you -- I realize I've never read Other People's Trades, so now I have that to look forward to.

I agree that kids these days won't understand the materiality of our kid experiences. On the other hand, I can clearly imagine scribes whinging about the kids these days and their ridiculous need for spaces between the letters.

[adrian_turtle]

I'm guessing the 1991 students didn't read much Levi?

Maybe some of the students read Levi. It was one of those huge classes with a professor lecturing to ~500 students, and I only taught 50 of them. But some of mine got the book and mumbled that they'd get around to reading it real soon now, some said they'd get the book RSN, and others laughed more-or-less contemptuously at the idea of wasting their time on such a thing when they were supposed to be studying chemistry. Some of them probably read the book in the 30 years since then. (For all I know, some of them are reading this now. *wave*)

Some of the change in chemistry is materiality, and some of it is that whole ways of thinking have changed. One of the stories in Periodic Table is about a college class in qualitative analysis. It's very fiddly and requires a careful way of thinking and there's no point in doing it anymore. The "nature of the periodic table" is electronic structure, as most people see it now. Not how the ions turn color in solution.

On the other hand, I can clearly imagine scribes whinging about the kids these days and their ridiculous need for spaces between the letters.
Closer might be "Kids these days with their smartphones! They don't appreciate proper scribe work." Calligraphy for art or ritual can be very much valued, but it's different from when it was used for essential communication. And the word "scribe" is getting repurposed for a very different job.

[kiki_eng]

I'm always fascinated by radio - there's something about a voice suspended across space, present and not. Older technology and history is great, too. Shortwave sounds like a kind of fabulous ordinary adventure, basically. Do you still listen to it at all?

Office supplies are great. I'm a fan of art and industrial design. Office supplies tend to be useful but non-essential affordable items - and there are lots of substitutes (so many different paper choices! etc.) and, again, all of this history and technology, along with notions of creativity and order; it is very cool. (What does the pen look like, what is it made of, how does it work, what will you do with it? I feel like these are kind of glorious questions, almost like office supplies are explorations of the possible? Tools are fantastic.)

...and I've added The Periodic Table to my mental TBR list; thanks for the recommendation!

The internet filled the radio-shaped hole

[jesse_the_k]

in my life. Due to my newsfast, I've switched to podcasts -- I'm grateful that most non-news radio shows now make their archives available via podcast feeds.

Yes, fabulous ordinary adventure is exactly what it was. When I was insomniac I'd tune to the Dutch-language version. Dutch and English have very similar sounds and rhythms. When fed almost-decipherable input, turns out the brain shuts down.

I listened to a lot of radio growing up -- for six years I lived in central New Jersey, where I could listen to Philadelphia, New York, and NJ stations reliably (as well as the nighttime clear-channel AM stations, like WSM Nashville and WGN Chicago.) I blogged about how formative the radical NY FM station WBAI was for me in the late 60s. Are you now or have you ever been a radio fan?

I was a pen-and-paper civil engineering drafter in the late 70s, and the tools were amazing! I do not miss the Rapidographs, which required frequent cleaning (and always delivered a blob just where I didn't want it). The state of Wisconsin required ink on (heavily sized) silk for bridge plans. I took great pride in drawing radii with a bow compass.

MyGuy trained as an industrial engineer. We've got a ton of stuff nobody uses anymore but we can't seem to let go of: professional quality slide rules, drafting curves, Rotring pens, beam compasses, at least a dozen bottles of ink. After drafting, I slid into prepress work, so I also have a dangerous assortment of razors and a waxer and ...

Re: The internet filled the radio-shaped hole

[kiki_eng]

Yes, not having to tune in at a specific time has definitely changed the shape of things. What kind of podcasts are you listening to these days?

Radio was more of a background thing for me, growing up. I was a fan of The Ongoing History of New Music as a teen and would listen to Australian and English rock stations along with my terrible local alt-rock one. The Vinyl Cafe was also a significant radio thing for me around then - Stuart McLean had a gift for writing and performing stories that drew you in - I'd wander through a room with the show playing and end up captured, hanging out by a doorway on my way out, waiting for the story to end.

For the most part I am incredibly bad with audio-only media; I end up zoning out and focusing on something visual instead, so radio as background and music, especially, works better for me. I do still like finding international radio via internet and getting that variety, though, and I enjoy the shape of radio shows. They're definitely more of an occasional thing for me these days, though, along with the odd science podcast.

I took great pride in drawing radii with a bow compass.
When I took drafting in school in the 00s they made us draw circles free-hand as part of our training, and we used modelling software. I didn't pursue drafting as part of a career, and I'm not sure I've ever used a compass for drafting? Loads of other things, but not a technical drawing. (I'm a little amused by the technological gap.) They are great, though, and kind of beautiful. I've an elderly one from my grandfather along with ink and slide rules, yeah. There's something really great about the tools.

I have very vague notions of what prepress work involves that include the idea the people who do it may evolve opinions about adhesives and that it is a sort of complex collage-like exercise. How far off am I?