Almost UBI (unknown by internet) but no longer. Her entry in Fielding's American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers (NY 1987) reads: Elizabeth Campbell. Born in 1893 in Iowa Falls...Studied with Alexander Nepote at Marian Hartwells School of Design, San Fran; and San.Fran Art Inst., ...Taught privately. Received grant from Montalva foundation, Cal. Exhibited at Cal. Palace, San Fran; Louis Terah Haggin Mem. Galleries, Stockton; and SF Museum of Art. Living in San Francisco in 1965. This painting is presented (on the rear of the canvas) to American composer Lou Harrison and his partner Bill Colvig from whose estate it was acquired in 2007. It has no title but always reminds me of a street grid. The painting came with some ephemera about her, a handout from the Maggie Kress gallery in Taos, a press cutting 'Beyond the Third Dimension' about her painting showing at San Francisco Museum of Art (undated but the 64th Annual Exhibition.) Also this artists' statement:

"I am intuitively aware that space-time-form - the expression of reality - is in the process of becoming; the three-in-one appearing in an act of simultaneity. Realizing this, I sought for an objective structure  that could express new plastic relations in other than the then employed dimensions, and which could in turn, express the spontaneity I experienced in this process. Musical forms - and their relation to time elements and spatial structure - have been of special significance and inspiration to me in painting."

Carew Finch (1908-1985) was a British, possibly Irish artist, who studied at Grosvenor School of Modern Art. The NIVAL Artists Database (National Irish Visual Arts) gives his dates, his full name as Richard Henry Carew Finch and notes that he worked in oils in the Abstract and Landscape genres and that he is listed in Buckman's Dictionary of Artists in Britain since 1945 (1998). The final note 'Virtually no information available on this artist' says much. The above picture (gouache?) has no name but may evoke a fairground ride..

The painting was bought from Jane England (England and Co) in London in the 1980s. At the time she was dealing in Outsider Art and lesser known 20th Century artists. Auction records show one painting sold in the last 20 years - a gouache entitled Rain Steam and Speed. Price unknown. Nothing more known. The Grosvenor School was both a bricks and mortar school (33 Warwick Square, Pimlico) and a 'school of artists' (mostly associated with printmaking) its better known members were Claude Flight, Iain MacNab, Cyril Edward Power and Sybil Andrews + the Swiss artist Lill Tschudi.

'A Victim'. CROOK FRIGHTFULNESS. Birmingham: Cornish, 1932; Birmingham: Moody Bros., revised edition, 1936.

A strange and slightly disturbing book. Some consider it unintentionally hilarious. It tells of how a young man whose business was rent collecting in London's East End became the victim of of a life-long 'persecution' by crooks, even as he travelled round the world - persecution by muttering and whispering, staring, gassing, obscenities and 'Ventriloquial Terrorism.' The writer believed that his tormentors possessed a "stethoscope apparatus that enable[d] them to hear [his] thoughts". The subtitle of the book gives something of its flavour : "They are the most powerful, terrible and pitiless killers, cunning, amazingly and enormously treacherous."  Bizarre Books (Lake and Ash) describes it thus:

Misha Black (born 1910 in Bacu, Russia died 1977) designed posters for London Transport 1936-1947. He was one of the most influential exhibition and product designers of his time. He designed posters from the age of seventeen. In 1928, he designed the stand for the Rio Tinto Company at the Seville Exhibition. This cover to the Cambridge magazine Experiment

is from the same year and must be one of his earliest published works. He was 18. The magazine was edited by William Empson, Hugh Sykes Davies, Humphrey Jennings and William Hare (Lord Ennismore) and Jacob Bronowski. See recent Man Ray post for an extract from it. He was later responsible for designing Westminster's iconic street name signs. He is covered on various design sites and at Wikipedia but information on his earliest work is sketchy.

More coffee history. This club appears to have had a short life in the 1950s

The Aquarian Guide to Occult, Mystical, Religious, Magical London and Around. Francoise Strachan [Aquarian Press, London 1970]

A guide with names, addresses etc. Amazing collection - rainmakers, clairvoyants, robe makers, temple painters, even the artist who did the cover (Ken Crampton) is in there as a mystical painter, also an occult B & B in Coombe Martin, The Process -'Church of the Final Judgement (Balfour Place, Mayfair), Gandalf's Garden (hippy tea-room) The Ghost Club (founded 1862) Lodges, Priories, Cabalistic & Chivalric Orders, Druids, Avatars, Astrologers, Findhorn, Hypnotists, OAHSPE, Fuller D'Arch Smith (occult books), an Isis Unveiled Class, an exorcist, and a spiritual candle maker. The author, now known as Francesca Rossetti, can now be found on Library Thing.

From the papers of Edmund George Valpy Knox (1881 - 1971), comic writer, poet and satirist who wrote under the pseudonym Evoe. He was editor of Punch 1932-1949, having been a regular contributor in verse and prose for many years.This piece is probably from the 1950s after his editorship. In the archives is a good pic of him, at present unfindable (will upload soon) - for the moment this below. He was married to the daughter of the Winnie the Pooh illustrator E.H.Shepard. Mary Shepard in her turn illustrated Mary Poppins. His daughter from an earlier marriage was the Booker prize winning novelist Penelope Fitzgerald - known in the family as 'Mops' and author of the book below on the gifted Knox family.

Found in the UK mag Lilliput of April 1946. James Mason's response to recent Ben Hecht book I Hate Actors. A great actor and the best Humbert Humbert so far...look out for his coinage 'hambaiting' in paragraph 5.

  EVERYONE says that Walt Disney is the happiest producer in Hollywood because he does not have to put up with actors around his studio. Further evidence is to be found in in the title page of Ben Hecht's recent book "I Hate Actors." And I am prepared to testify that the feeling therein expressed is by no means peculiar to Hollywood.
  The abhorrence that flickers in a film producer's eye when the sanctity of his script or the ability of his pet director is rashly questioned by an actor is an awesome vision. It is as if the gates of hell swing open.
  For this reason I would recommend to this branch of our art only those aspirants who have exceptional resilience. Those without it are a prey to duodenal ulcers and persecution mania. For tho' the hatred may be mutual the struggle is unequal.
  The average producer's civility towards an actor extends only to the moment when the contract is signed. He is a skillful coaxer, all teeth and cigars, and even permits himself to say nice things about the fellow's acting in an effort to ingratiate. Then, almost before the ink is dry, he seems to say "O.K. We've got his signature. Now let's give him hell."

Continue reading →

Letter from the papers of Lady Glenavy. To her husband from Arland Ussher.

Percival "Percy" Arland Ussher (1899 -1980) was an Anglo-Irish academic, essayist and translator. He published The Face and Mind of Ireland (1949) and Three Great Irishmen (1952), a comparative study of Shaw, Yeats, and Joyce. This letter gives a good, and reasonably sympathetic, view of Beckett's masterwork as it was seen at the time that it was first performed.

Charles Henry Gordon Campbell, 2nd Baron Glenavy (1885–1963) was a barrister who married Beatrice the artist Elvery. He was a contemporary of D. H. Lawrence, to whom he was introduced by Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry. Known as Gordon Campbell, he served as Secretary of the new Department of Industry and Commerce. He was appointed a director of the Bank of Ireland. He and his wife were on the fringes of the Bloomsbury set.

I8 Green Rd
Blackrock

Dear Glenavy,

Let's go have a drink.
- No good, it's much too late. Everything shuts.
- Let's go to XX
- No. Too far. I haven't enough petrol.
- We'll find somehwere we can have coffee.
- Oh it's too much of a crush at this hour.
    I want to go to bed.
- It's so late, I know I shan't sleep.
- Why did we come? - Oh we had to see Godot.

Clovelly-Kepplestone was a private boarding school for girls in Eastbourne, Sussex. It flourished from 1908 until 1934 and was familiarly known to staff and pupils as "Clo-Kepp". There is a very comprehensive piece on it at Wikipedia. The annual school magazine of which we have the 1930 issue has a frontis of the charismatic Miss Frances Browne the 'principal' of the school (see below). The magazine is of a high order full of news of old girls and poetry, essays and humour from past and present Clo-Keppians.

The following John Buchan parody is a good example. The brief was to write a piece with the context of rain outside, a man and wife inside and an unexpected visit by a friend. The 3 subjects were Wodehouse, Edgar Wallace and John Buchan. We did the Wodehouse a few posts back and will do the Wallace only on demand.The authors are given as Phyllis Inglis (née Kay) C-K and O.G.C.

If happiness were really attainable through the doctrine of
everyone for himself, the world would at once become a
very happy place. (English Review, London 1918)

Filson Young (1876–1938) was a journalist, who published the first book about the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 only 37 days after the sinking.

Found in Ambrosia by Request ( A Companion Volume to Nectar in a Nutshell) Allen & Unwin 1946. Previous to the Titanic Filson Young had a succès de scandale in 1905 with a novel about prostitution The Sands of Pleasure (much admired by Jean Rhys.) Later James Joyce was disappointed when Filson's publisher Grant Richards failed to persuade Filson to write an introduction for the first edition of Joyce's collection of stories, Dubliners, which Filson had been one of the first to praise when the manuscript had reached him in his capacity as Richards' reader. What he would have made of Ayn Rand is unknowable.

A contemporary review of Man Ray's movie L'Étoile de Mer by N.N. Sen in the first issue of the  literary journal Experiment (Cambridge, 1928). It was edited by William Empson, Hugh Sykes Davies, Humphrey Jennings and William Hare (Lord Ennismore) and Jacob Bronowski.

N.N. Sen (Nikhil N. Sen) was a friend of Mulk Raj Anand (mentioned in an earlier posting on curries) and moved in the same circles in London in the 1920s. Not much is known about Sen; however, Anand mentions him extensively in his Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981). The Open University site has this on him:

From The Alchemical Almanac and Handbook of Herbal Highs (1971)  See 3rd Ear Band. An interesting list of long lost alternative 'head' shops. The epicentre of Ginseng seems to have been Portobello Road.

The funny thing with Marty Feldman is that he came up to me -it was at Swiss Cottage, London and asked me the way somewhere.

He was in a hurry and when he saw that I recognised him (who couldn't? - it was those eyes) he waved his hands in front of his face as if to say 'forget all that mate, just tell me the way!' I like to think I put him on the right road. That was about 1970.

Oddly enough I saw him again in a mall in Westwood (L.A.) window-shopping with a woman (wife?) early evening in the summer of  1972. I was on holiday. I did not bother him. [Sent in by Barry Cox - for which much thanks.]

Sold on the internet about 2001 - some of the cult designer's books.

Photo (below) of Le Corbusier and his wife taken by Gray at her house E-1027. Designed by Gray and built at Roquebrune Cap Martin in 1929. Oddly Le Cobusier died of of a heart attack while swimming off the rocks beneath E-1027 in 1965.

Small archive of books from her library and books about her. 21 books in all--9 books from her library dated from 1885 to 1961 and 12 books and pamphlets about her mainly 1970s and 1980s, mainly in English. These books were inherited from the designer Eileen Gray by her niece and executor the English painter Prunella Clough.  Books from Eileen Gray’s library include 1.‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ (56th thousand) presented to her and her sister Thora from her brother Jim. 2. Whistler's  - The Gentle Art of Making Enemies  (boldly signed by her on the half title)  1904 reprint 3rd ed. 3. Her copy of Walter Pater 1901 edition of ‘Greek Studies signed by her in pencil in 1903. 4.  William James ‘Text Book of Psychology’ 1892 with bold ownership signature. 5. A small leather bound New Testament (about 1890) presented to her by her mother in 1907. 6.  A ‘Works of Browning’ handsomely bound by Sotherans presented to her by her brother Jim on her birthday in 1905. 7. Her own copy of the French wraps edition of Antonin Artaud’s ‘Van Gogh. Le Suicide de la Societé.’1947. First ed. 8. G.Constant Lounsbery. Buddhist Meditiation in the Southern School.1950 Signed presentation copy from GCL to Eileen Gray  ‘in  admiration of her pursuit of beauty.’  9. ‘The Universal Self . A Study of Paul Valery’  by Agnes Ethel Mackay (1961) with a signed presentation to Eileen Gray  from the author ‘with affectionate homage.’ There are also 12 modern books and pamphlets on Eileen Gray collected by Prunella Clough including auction catalogues, a copy of a thesis ‘Eileen Gray, Un Autre Chemin pour la Modernité...Un Idee Choreographique’ in which the author mentions her indebtedness to Prunella Clough. Also the magazine Archithese, August 91 special Eileen Gray issue and an 1994 academic offprint ‘E.1027: The Nonheroic Modernism of Eileen Gray’ which is a signed presentation copy to Ms Clough.

This ad was found in a 1971 catalogue from a London 'head' business called 'Alchemical' - The Alchemical Almanac and Handbook of Herbal Highs.

3rd Ear Band
This music is a reflection of the universe as magic/ play/ illusion simply because it could not possibly be anything else.

Words cannot describe this ecstatic dance of sound or explain the alchemical repetition seeking and sometimes finding archetypal forms, elements and rhythms. Contradictions are their energy force, dualities are discarded in favour of the Tao, each piece is as alike or unlike as trees, grass or crickets. This is natural, magical, alchemical music that does not preach but just urges you to take your own trip.

If you can make it into this music you are adrift in fantastic Bosche - like landscapes, a strange acoustical perfume fills the mind, on some occasions a door seems to open, band and audience appear to float in a new dimension, transcending time and space where nothing exists except this very strange and beautiful music.

All the Third Ear band's albums are available from your local platter place or…through Alchemail.

Pamphlet from 1943. The pro Soviet text reveals that these are good men, mostly collective farmers, and the millions are in Roubles. A far cry from the current billionaire 'oligarchs'...

SOVIET MILLIONAIRES
A Russia Today Pamphlet
First Edition (1943)
by Reg Bishop

Printed and published by Fairleigh Press (T.U.all depts), Beechwood Rise, Watford, for the Russia Today Society, 150 Southampton Row, London, W.C.1. 14 pages.

THE news that there are Soviet "millionaires" - men and women who have been able to invest a million roubles or more in the country's War Loan - has come as a great surprise and, indeed, with a sense of shock to many people to whom the very word "millionaires" represents an evil influence in society.

Many of these "millionaires" are collective farmers. The emergence of Soviet collective farm millionaires means that Stalin's promise in 1933 that the Soviet Government aimed at making collective farmers well-to-do is on the road to fulfilment.

The very term "millionaire" is misleading, for there are many kinds of millionaires. Before the war one could be a millionaire in sterling, in dollars, in francs or any other currency. The possessor of a million pounds was nearly five times as wealthy as the possessor of a million dollars, and the latter was more than 25 times as wealthy as the possessor of a million francs. The possessor of a million Rumanian lei or Turkish piastres had still less money.

In other words, a rouble millionaire has not the wealth of a sterling millionaire. Even were a rouble millionaire to be possessed of as much money as a sterling one it would still not necessarily be either anti-social or anti-Socialist, because the atmosphere of social inequity which surrounds a millionaire is due not to the measure of his wealth but to the method of its acquisition, and his use of it to exploit others.

In all countries the law smiles upon the acquisition of wealth, but in all countries legal barriers are erected against certain methods of becoming wealthy. In a capitalist country, a man who acquires wealth by robbing a bank or by selling shares for non-existent gold-mines is arrested, tried and sent to gaol if found guilty. In the Soviet Union, a man who becomes wealthy by robbing a bank is also sent to gaol, but the socialist nature of the Soviet State requires it as equally immoral to acquire wealth by the exploitation of the labour of others, or by speculation; that is to say, buying in the cheapest market to sell in the dearest.

These methods are held to imply as great, or even greater, moral obliquity as robbing a bank, hence, whereas it is reasonable to suppose that in a capitalist country millionaires have acquired their status by means of the exploitation of others, or by tricky, though strictly legal, financial manipulations, in the Soviet Union the millionaire has acquired his roubles by his own toil and by services to the Soviet State and people.

The first person to be publicly acclaimed as a millionaire was one, Berdyebekov… [the whole of the text can be found at http://cominternist.blogspot.com/2010/06/soviet-millionaires.html]

E.P.B Linstead was minor British poet. Full name Edward Philip Basil Linstead, he was born in 1909. No notice of death so he is probably still around walking on Wimbledon Common every morning aged 103. He is listed as becoming a director of a real estate firm in Wimbledon -Pentaberk Limited- at age 81. His wife or sister Mildred Linstead was also on the board a few years later. Not much on net except lists of his  books one of which is about Sierra Leone Morning at Mount Auriol (1948). There is also a novel Awkward for Joseph and this 1950 book Disorderly Poems - a slim volume of which Harrods is the first poem. It is slightly  Betjemanesque, with an echo of Auden ('buses going on unurgent errands') but there is also a proclamatory tone than you hear 5 years later in beat poetry...a short poem follows this showing Linstead in surreal mood like a Beresford Egan drawing or an oil by Edward Burra - Jelly-Cheeked Gentlemen.

Harrods

1943

When nothing whatever was happening in Hans Crescent
On one long afternoon of 1927 sunlight,
Swing doors ushered us to cool, to shadowed departments,
To secure linen-cupboard, close upholstery odours
–Reposed stabilised airs, sweet leather-scents of handbags–
Guests we came to palaces of immense peace, thick-piled,
Where wide pianos stood in lakes of varnished light
And under the glaze of a spell lay galleries of hushed china
–China which skated, slid, scraped plate-glass when we touched it.

Our saliva condensed, dripped at the sight of salt heaped shell-fish;
From fish-slabs tribute waters flowed to ferns ever-dripping–
Waters fresh-condensed from almost atomised fountains.
Mountainside mists fell over wire-twined flowers;
Carnations rose from moistures, maidenhairs,
Azaleas breathed as from Surrey nighttime gardens
–From all conservatories, steam-warmed, of the warm past
Or all former Conservative garden parties
(When servant night brings privacy to the paths
Owners' cigar-lights glow from the high terrace
And from tiered lawn to lawn fall the aubretias
To Mrs. Edward Laxton1 by her dark well-hoed border
Amongst the rising mould-smells, the mild rose-smells).

Tinily price-ticketted timepieces chime five o' clock ;
We climb the wooden-rodded, green-rigged stairs
To the secure wide sunlit first-floor tearooms
Which overlook Putney buses going on unurgent errands.
Soft roes we want–on salted watercress couches
–Fresh wet stems with the tingle of innate pepper.

–We clear our throats, speak thickened as we eat eclairs :
French-pastry-muffled, we sip, sip, excellent tea,
As saucers clink to the sweet restaurant music
And tongue-tips lick creamed cheeks at the last violin mouse-squeak.

  ¹ A rose.

Jelly-Cheeked Gentlemen

Jelly-Cheeked Gentlemen in Shaftesbury Avenue
Voluble and sorrowful on tolerable booze,
Fresh from a rendezvous, a frolic at the Monico
Pirouette skilfully on patent leather shoes.

From Book Lore: A Monthly Magazine of Bibliography November 1886 [London]. The Chinese thirst for knowledge in 2013 now manifested by their massive book digitising programmes. Not adepts in the art of war? - the view from 1886.

    The Chinese aptitude for rapidly acquiring knowledge is not so well recognised as it deserves. These patient, plodding people, with their cool, calculating minds, and simple tastes, are more than a match for European workers, no matter what business or profession they elect to follow. A correspondent of the Daily News, writing on the Chinese Question, which is at present forcing itself to the front in North Australia, states that on a recent occasion he took the chaplain's Celestial class, and found that their "hunger and thirst after knowledge, and the startling rapidity with which they got on, was something fearful to contemplate."

The Chinese have libraries in every town and most villages and their reading is of a solid and substantial character. Novels and religious works are everywhere excluded ; the former as too frivolous, and the latter as raising undesirable controversies between sects, which are as numerous there as anywhere else. It seems to us that we have much to learn from the inhabitants of the Flowery Land, adepts in everything except, unfortunately for them, the art of war.