A few months ago, my dad told me this anecdote: In the late 1920s, a young man and his father were hiking in the Alps. The father jumped/fell/was pushed to his death, and the son was arrested for parricide. It was widely known that there had been much tension between the two, and at the trial it was argued that the Oedipus complex provided the motive for the alleged murder. Sigmund Freud wrote a letter in the young man’s defense, saying, in effect, that the mere presence of the Oedipus complex in no way distinguished the defendant from any other man alive. Such “evidence,” therefore, was insufficient proof of motive.

Although I don’t recall exactly how this story came up in conversation, my dad’s purpose was to convey his pleasure in Freud’s wit & wisdom. The anecdote was supposed to be entertaining, and when he told it, it was. However, I forgot all about it until just recently, when he reminded me of it at a family gathering. There was one detail of the story that I hadn’t paid attention to the first time around, but when he told it again, boy did my eyes pop.

Are you wondering where I’m going with this? Did you guess?

Yes! The young man was Philippe Halsman. The same Philippe Halsman who created the Jump! book.

Now doesn’t this put a whole different spin on the idea that Halsman kept asking people to JUMP???

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Actually, Halsman’s story is not at all funny. I’m sure if Pops had known the details he never would have told it with such relish. When Halsman was arrested in 1928 he became the target of a huge anti-Semitic smear campaign, one of the first Jewish victims of the rising Nazi party. He was thrown in prison even though there was no evidence of his guilt; his name was dragged through the mud, and he was treated with the grossest disrespect and injustice you could imagine. There was a big uproar, and many prominent people in addition to Freud (Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann) rose to his defense. There was another trial, and in another miscarriage of justice he was found guilty again. Eventually his sentence was commuted, but he was asked to leave Austria and never return. (Full article here.)

In this context, Halsman’s interest in photographing people in midair is poignant and compelling. I discovered that there’s a movie called Jump! It hasn’t been released in the US, though, and it doesn’t seem to be on Netflix either. I would love to see it.

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Well, the meme doesn’t seem to be going so well. I only know of two people who have done it: Valerie, and a non-blogging friend of mine who put his pictures on Facebook. I thought about creating a flickr group but it turns out there already is one. I guess I’ll have to join it.

C’mon you guys! Jump! And take pictures!

Philippe Halsman (1906–1979) was a famous portrait photographer. He photographed all kinds of celebrities, and his photos graced the covers of over a hundred different issues of Life magazine. Some of his photos (André Gide, Albert Einstein, Adlai Stevenson, John Steinbeck) even appeared on postage stamps.

Somewhere along the way Halsman had the magnificent inspiration to ask his subjects to jump. Amazingly, almost all of them agreed, and he ended up with hundreds of photos of famous people in midair. The Jump Book is the result: a collection of 191 of these incredible photos. I wish I could scan them all. I suppose if I just showed you a few of my favorites it would count as a fair use, right?

Believe it or not, this is Judge Learned Hand, a VERY BIG NAME in American jurisprudence, at age 80.

The Duke & Duchess of Windsor (he’s the former King of England who abdicated the throne in order to marry the American divorcée; she’s the American divorcée). It took me a moment to figure out why I had such a visceral response to this photo — and then I realized. Is he or is he not the spitting image of my grandfather?

Peter Ustinov, apparently an Xtreme Bookworm, since he couldn’t even put his book down for this!

Halsman with Mary Martin. Halsman was quite athletic, apparently, but you’d never guess it from his expression in this picture. Maybe he’s afraid she’ll fly off to Neverland, and drag him with her?

Jumpology

The photos alone would make this an amazing book, but even better than the actual photos is Halsman’s commentary. Half serious, half tongue-in-cheek, he analyzes the jumps and draws hilariously wise and witty conclusions from them. You see,

when we look at somebody’s face, we don’t know what he thinks or feels. We don’t even know what he is like. Everybody wears an armor. Everybody hides behind a mask…. [But] in a jump the subject, in a sudden burst of energy, overcomes gravity. He cannot simultaneously control his expressions, his facial and his limb muscles. The mask falls. The real self becomes visible. One has only to snap it with the camera.

Halsman goes on to joke about how much quicker and cheaper “jumpology” is than psychoanalysis, but when you look at the pictures you realize he might be on to something. He notices the difference between men’s and women’s jumps; who takes their shoes off first; who bends at the knee; who reaches up with their arms; whether jumping styles run in families. He notices that successful partners such as Simon & Schuster (yep, there was a real Mr. Simon and Mr. Schuster, and they both jumped) have diametrically opposed jumps, whereas the members of partnerships that didn’t last so long (Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis) had almost identical jumps.

What’s next?

I feel a meme coming on! Let’s all photograph ourselves in mid-air! My family will be at a Fourth of July barbecue later this afternoon, and I intend to bring my camera and see who’s willing to jump. I dare you all to do the same. If you’re reading this? You’re tagged! (Fred, this includes you!) When you post your jump pictures on your blog (preferably converted to black & white, emulating Halsman), please leave a comment with a link!

A great-grandchild? Was it possible? Is Amy a grandmother?

Were you as fascinated by Amy Carter as I was? Amy and I were almost the same age, and her father became president at the time that I was first starting to become somewhat aware of history, politics, the bigger world. (How could an American kid not be aware after the incredible red, white & blue summer of ’76?) I was always on the lookout for news and pictures of Amy. She seemed so sweet and nice, and she was a bookworm. I was sure that we would be best friends if only we could actually meet.

What I forgot, or never knew, was that Amy wasn’t an only child. She has older brothers, and Wikipedia tells me she is not yet a grandmother. In fact, her son was born the same year as my daughter. See? We have so much in common. I’m sure we’d be best friends, if only we could actually meet. :)

The fact is, I haven’t particularly felt like writing. In the last three months I’ve read hardly anything. Certainly nothing that inspired me to write. (I don’t necessarily mean write about a book. What I mean is, good writing makes me want to write, period.)

Actually, there was one thing I did intend to write about, and that was the death of Kurt Vonnegut. Had I gotten around to writing it, that post would have described a junior high-aged Bookworm at music camp during the summer of 1981. You would have read about how I and this cellist named Rebecca had both recently read Slapstick — we had nothing else in common but this, and our friendship was based solely on the book — how Rebecca and I would pretend to be neanderthaloids every time we saw each other. That is, we pretended to be the neanderthaloids when they were apart from each other, slobbering & drooling & barely able to speak. And worse, I would have confessed, we pretended we had Tourette’s like the boy in the book, cheerfully exhorting each other to take flying f*cks at rolling doughnuts at every opportunity. (We had NO idea Tourette’s wasn’t just something hilarious that Vonnegut had invented.) Hi ho. So it goes. Rest in peace, Mr. Vonnegut. God bless Interlochen. And aren’t you glad I never actually wrote that post? ;)

Anyway, in case you aren’t familiar with the work of Paul Farmer, he’s a doctor who dedicated his life — and we are talking about extreme personal hardship and sacrifice — to providing decent health care to poor people. His main focus has been helping the people of Haiti, but he has also worked in Peru, Russia, and other places. His work ranges from treating individual patients to fundraising to lobbying governments and NGOs like the World Health Organization. For example, he discovered that the WHO’s policy regarding the treatment of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis was actually making the problem worse. He not only managed to change the protocol but he also got the drug companies to lower the drug prices by ninety percent. Ninety percent! If that was all he did, it would still be amazing. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. (For details, read the book!)

Dr. Farmer’s work is fascinating. And even more fascinating is Dr. Farmer, the person. He has boundless energy. His IQ is off the charts. And he doesn’t let anyone off the hook. “WLs [White Liberals] think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves,” he says. “We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from the roaches.”

I admit it. I’m one of those stupid complacent lazy-ass WLs who thinks (would like to think) (used to think) the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to me personally. And Dr. Farmer’s very existence is a rebuke. My copy of the book came with “reader’s circle” discussion questions at the back. One of them says, “Kidder has never before written a book in which he made himself a character. Can you think of some of the reasons he might have had for doing this in Mountains Beyond Mountains?” Yes, of course. It’s because Kidder also feels like a stupid complacent lazy-ass WL in comparison with Dr. Farmer. At one point, for example, Kidder comments, “This view of drowned farmland, the result of a dam that had made his patients some of the poorest of the poor, was a lens on the world. His lens. Look through it and you’d begin to see all the world’s impoverished in their billions and the many linked causes of their misery. In any case, he seemed to think I knew exactly what he meant, and I realized, with some irritation, that I didn’t dare say anything just then, for fear of disappointing him.” Kidder allows the reader to identify with him and not feel quite so bad about not being a hero, because Kidder isn’t one either.

Kidder talked about this quite a bit during his lecture. He said that when he gave the first draft to his editor, they spent a lot of time discussing what the editor called “the problem of goodness” — how to write about this man without totally alienating the reader. I think he did an amazingly good job of it. By putting himself in the story, by discussing other people’s reactions to Dr. Farmer, by making “the problem of goodness” one of the major themes of the book, well… I still feel rebuked, but honestly? In a good way. This book is a call to action. And, incidentally, a great read.

Visit here if you want to know more about Dr. Farmer’s work or make a donation.