Bizarro World

Bizarre
compiled by Barry Humphries
London, Elek Books, 1965

Yes, it is the same Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everidge, with a little help from John Wells and Willie Rushton from the Private Eye gang. A miscellany of freaks, peccadilloes and peculiar essays and poetry.

Paradise Regained

A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-55
David Mellor
Lund Humphries, 1987

This fascinating catalogue from an exhibition at the Barbican, London, was the first to re-examine the Neo-Romantic movement, which dominated British art in the post-war years. It's interesting to see which artists have sustained a recognised profile, and which have disappeared into the margins. Mellor draws together many interesting themes, not least an early connection between surrealism, science fiction and pagan myth in the work of Graham Sutherland.

 

It is also enlightening to see the work of Gerald Wilde, a decidedly non-conformist painter who saw himself in the novel The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Carey and took on the persona of the fictional artist Gully Jimson.

The film adaptation, starring Alec Guinness (to whom Wilde bore a strange resemblance), is second only to Hancock's The Rebel in the canon of essential British art films. Wilde is sadly almost forgotten now. The few works available online show an energy and vision that would suggest an exhibition of his paintings is long overdue.

Early Steadman

A Little Treasury of Limericks Fair and Foul
John Letts
Illustrated by Ralph Steadman
London, Pan, 1971

He's dead, Jim...

Well, you would be forgiven for thinking that, given the recent inactivity on this blog. I've had a few distractions, and then I had a chat with my old pals from Mounds and Circles about our shared interest in the original Star Trek TV series, and found I had been press-ganged into a new project, What Is Brain?  Come and check it out.

We're going to revisit all 79 episodes and hopefully review them in an entertaining fashion. For the record: we are NOT Trekkies and we will be as disrespectful as necessary! There are plenty of good things about the old Star Trek, especially its dafter moments, but we will show no mercy when it becomes tedious and dull.

I used to enjoy the series when it was regularly shown by the BBC in the 70s and 80s but have absolutely no interest in any of the subsequent films or Next Generation spin-offs. I have owned three pieces of ST merchandise in my life, only one of which remains:

1. A model of the USS Enterprise that fired yellow plastic discs. I think I got this for my 6th birthday. I thought it was brilliant, though soon lost the little shuttle craft that came with it. Now missing, presumably lost in space.

2. A replica of a communicator that someone gave me in my early twenties. It reminded me of a cheap electric shaver and fell to bits just as quickly.

3. The picture disc of the soundtrack for the pilot episodes (pictured). The cheesy quality of picture discs is entirely appropriate for such recordings.

One to beam up.

Burra Alphabet

ABC of the Theatre
Humbert Wolfe
Illustrated by Edward Burra
The Cresset Press, London, 1930

Soviet ABC

I don't speak Russian or read Cyrillic but it's obvious that this textbook was designed to teach kids to read the alphabet. Published in 1989, it was probably one of the last products of the Soviet era, as we can see from the portrait at the start. In the beginning was the word, and the word was Lenin.

The Library and the Damage Done

Malicious Damage
The Defaced Library Books of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton
Ilsa Colsell
Donlon Books, London, 2013 

From the blurb:
"In 1962 John (Joe) Orton and Kenneth Halliwell were charged with, "larceny, malicious damage and willful damage," involving hundreds of books in the Islington Library's collection. Over the previous three years the pair had been stealing these books, removing thousands of illustrations and either using them to create alternative dust jackets for other books (which were then returned quietly to the library's shelves), or pasting them directly into a large collage spanning the interior walls of their flat. The reconfigured dust jackets were part of a decade of often shared creative endeavor. Malicious Damage looks closely at the collaged dust jackets still remaining within the archive at Islington Local History Centre and focuses on the early collaborative nature of Orton and Halliwell's relationship."

Interior wall collage in the Noel Road flat

Joe in cap

Kenneth in wig