A quote from Michael Coveny’s Guardian obituary of Sheila Ballantine (1928–2026), who was in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturio Ui with Leonard Rossiter and Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests, among much, much else.

Ballantine was her own woman and conducted a colourful private life at her own pace, settling in a mansion flat in Belsize Park, north-west London, in the early 1960s.

“Conducted a colourful private life at her own pace.”

A good friend of mine reads a lot of work by British women writers from the twentieth century, especially the middle decades. I sometimes pick up books for her if I see something good in a used bookstore, and that’s how I first read D.E. Stevenson and Angela Thirkell (whom I came to detest). Years ago I gave her a book by Phyllis Bottome, partly because it was a mid-century British woman writer in a nice paperback from Pan or Fontana or the like, and partly because of the name, which is childishly amusing.

My friend is also a great admirer of Virginia Woolf and the whole Bloomsbury Group, so when I saw the six volume set The Letters of Virginia Woolf in a store and confirmed she didn’t have it, I grabbed it. While I was browsing some of them I was surprised to see Phyllis Bottome mentioned! This is on p. 248 of The Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1932–1935, edited by Nicol Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1979). It’s from a letter Woolf sent to her nephew Quentin Bell (then in a Swiss sanatorium) on 18 November 1933 from Monks House:

I wonder if you’ve met Mrs Bottome, Nessa’s friend, who is a friend of Vita’s—a lady who, being married to a Forbes, sticks to Bottome heroically as her pen name. Dear me—I should never have had the courage to be Virginia Bottome.

(The first sentence quoted there has this footnote: “Phyllis Bottome (1882–1963), the novelist, who in 1917 married A.E. Forbes-Dennis. Vita had met her in Berlin.” “Nessa” is Vanessa Bell, Woolf’s sister and Quentin’s mother; “Vita” is Vita Sackville-West, mother of Nicol Nicolson, chief editor of the letters).

Bottome is mentioned on p. 251 in one line in a letter Woolf sent to Sackville-West on 22 November from 52 Tavistock Square, the Woolfs’ home in Bloomsbury in London. (It’s curious that she’s asking Sackville-West if she knows Bottome after just telling her nephew that they are friends.)

Do you know a woman called Phyllis Bottome?

I flipped to the index to see if Bottome is mentioned more, and discovered an error! Only her first appearance is mentioned, so I pencilled in the second.

Bottome, Phyllis, 248 & n, 251 [in pencil]

This all got me to checking Phyllis Bottome in Wikipedia, and I was amazed. She and her husband (apparently a spy) studied under and took analysis from Alfred Adler (whose biography she wrote, at his request), they started a school in Austria that had Ian Fleming and Cyril Connolly among its students, and she wrote dozens of books, among which is the 1937 anti-Nazi novel The Mortal Storm. What a life!

There’s a biography, The Constant Liberal: The Life and Work of Phyllis Bottome by Pam Hirsch, which I’m getting from the library and will keep at hand to help improve the Wikipedia article more. Hirsch wrote “Authorship and Propaganda: Phyllis Bottome and the Making of The Mortal Storm (1940)” in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 32 no. 1 (2012) (DOI: 10.1080/01439685.2012.648053). This is the abstract:

The Mortal Storm (1940) was MGM’s powerful contribution to the anti-nazi “genre” film. Adapted from a novel by the British writer Phyllis Bottome, the studio took some risks in producing a picture in which Germany was mentioned by name and in which the controversial political questions aroused by Nazi persecution of liberals, intellectuals and Jews were clearly represented. Bottome herself was an experienced propagandist, having been trained by John Buchan during World War One, and, during the Second World War, she was briefed by the Ministry of Information for propagandist purposes. Bottome was passionately engaged firstly with pushing the Hollywood studios to film her novel and then, once MGM bought the film rights, she tried hard to prevent the message of her book from being watered down by the studio. Simultaneously, she undertook an exhausting lecture tour though America in which she engaged her audiences with warnings about the Nazi regime’s behaviour in Germany. Bottome had lived for many years in Austria and then in Munich so, arguably more than any other woman writer of the period, she had seen first hand the reality of fascism. Her novel, The Mortal Storm (1937) had been a best-seller both had been in the UK and the USA, and the sell-out lecture tour guaranteed good audiences for the film. Although rarely taught on university film courses, where Chaplin’s The Great Dictator is more usually the token anti-nazi film discussed, The Mortal Storm challenged America’s isolationist position and was regarded with alarm by the German ambassador in Washington as an effective and dangerous piece of propaganda.

Trained as a propagandist by John Buchan!

The Sound of Thinking: A Listener’s Companion to Conceptual Music, a new book by Craig Dworkin, has a chapter “Ut Pictura Musica” about art and music that led me to some great music that is related to my Listening to Art project (now a halfway through its six-year hiatus). Links go to Bandcamp releases.

• Chamber Works (2020) is several works composed by Luiz Henrique Yudo and performed by Apartment House; one is “The Donald Judd Harmonies.” Dworkin says these “are based on the artist’s multicolored metal wall sculptures from the mid to late 1980s: equal horizontal extensions (in contrast to the earlier vertical stacks for which Judd is best known) in which the uninflected, industrial forms in objective mathematical series are animated by the apparently subjective decoration of bright, motley colors on the surface of the austere steel boxes.”
• Life Without Machines (2020) by Sylvain Chateau, who uses Barnett Newman’s series The Stations of the Cross as visual scores. Dworkin says, “If Newman’s series appeals to a shallow spirituality, Chauveau’s Satie-like nostalgia feels more simulated than suffered,” neither half of which I agree with.
• Listening to Donald Judd (2014) by Stephen Vitiello, where (to quote the release notes) “high-precision microphones are placed directly on the surface of Judd’s ‘specific objects.’”
• Mathias Spahlinger’s Akt, eine treppe herabsteigend (Nude Descending a Staircase) is inspired by the Marcel Duchamp painting. Dworkin describes it: “With extended, overlapping glissandi in staggered descent (around the eighteen-minute mark) the work translates the pictorial problems of representing motion explored by Duchamp to the musical realm.” I can’t find a release of it.

See also:

• Inside Richard Serra Sculptures (2024) by Pedro Vian and Merzbow, which uses field recordings made in the location described.

I was interested to see Peter Rukavina note something about John Ruskin in his recent post Drawing Your Travels. He quotes in part from the book How to Travel:

But, in Ruskin’s eyes, there’s one thing we should do and that is attempt to draw the interesting things we see, irrespective of whether we happen to have any talent for doing so.

I think this book is the one he refers to, from the School of Life, founded by Alain de Botton, which intrigued me, because it reminded me of a post I made in 2009: Ruskin on cameras, where I quoted de Botton in the Globe and Mail:

Ruskin suggested that, when we go travelling, we keep the camera at home and instead resort to two things: drawing and writing. Even if we can’t draw at all, Ruskin asked us to have a go, and his book tells us just how we should start to do so.

I wish de Botton gave source quotes or citations. I have spent a while now and then looking for where Ruskin said this, but never had any luck. Maybe I’ll dig into it more now. I had a glance at “Ruskin and Photography” by Michael Harvey (Oxford Art Journal vol. 7 no. 2, 1984) (JSTOR link) and “Topographies of Tourism: ‘Documentary’ Photography and ‘The Stones of Venice’” by Karen Burns (Assemblage no. 32, April 1997) (DOI: 10.2307/3171405) but didn’t see anything right off.

Maria Popova wrote about this in 2015 in Art and the Mind’s Eye: How Drawing Trains You to See the World More Clearly and to Live with a Deeper Sense of Presence. She gives a lovely quote from Ruskin.

The Complete Works of John Ruskin are online at the Ruskin Society and his books are in the Gutenberg Project and on the Internet Archive. See also The electronic edition of Ruskin’s Venetian Notebooks for digitized versions of notebooks Ruskin kept while visiting Venice in 1849–50. They’re marvellous.

I keep a notebook-sketchbook whenever I travel, and I strongly recommend the practice. I do take photographs, but it’s far more interesting to me, and evocative, to look back at a sketch I made and some notes I took while sitting under a tree or at a cafe.

Morton Feldman tells this ancedote in a conversation with John Cage titled “The Nature and Goals of Our Music,” recorded for radio in July 1966 (dated by the mention of the death of D.T. Suzuki). It’s collected in Complete John Cage Edition 51: Radio Happenings (1966–1967) (mode289):

When I was living on 19th Street in that building with Barney Newman, who lived upstairs, I remember for about a year I took the phone out. And he came in one day, and he said, “Oh, may I use your phone?” I said, “Well, Barney, it’s disconnected.” He looked at me, and then he looked down at the phone for a long time, and he said to me, “You’re a hero. How is it possible? How did you do it?”

Barney is Barnett Newman. I looked in the index of Barnett Newman: Here, the new biography by Amy Newman (Princeton University Press, 2025), but there’s no entry for Feldman.

A quote from Miles Davis, from a clip used in BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives episode on him. He was asked why he doesn’t revisit his old music.

Those songs, to me, don’t exist. You know, we don’t have time for “Body and Soul” and “I Got Rhythm,” you know, or “So What,” or Kind of Blue. Those things are there, they were done in that era, the right hour, the right day, and it happened. It’s over, it’s on the record. You know, people ask me, “Why’d you play this?” Go buy the record.

Compare to Marina Abramović when asked a question about an early work:

I hate these kind of questions. I can’t deal with sentimentality. To me, it’s so important: learn the lesson, move on. Learn the lesson, move on.

It was a nice day in Toronto today, and I was enjoying a walk along Bloor Street West near Ossington when I saw Toronto Darts & Games. Some juggling balls in the window caught my eye and I went in.

This is a fantastic store! They have juggling supplies, Rubik’s cubes, board games, card games, decks of cards, toys, puzzles (many types, including jigsaws), chess boards and clocks, backgammon sets, cribbage boards, polyhedral dice, and much more. And that’s not including darts: the back quarter of the space is all for darts.

I bought two sets of three beanbags made by Higgins Brothers, who are new to me, and I was delighted to find it’s in Dundas, which is near Toronto, just around the west side of Lake Ontario. A Canadian company making great juggling supplies! I think one set of beanbags I have was made by them, but they’re about twenty years old now and getting worn out. They’re still perfectly usable, though: that’s good manufacturing.

I also picked up two NexCubes, a 3×3 (basically a Rubik’s Cube but a different mechanism inside, I think) and a 2×2 (a Pocket Cube), which have very smooth workings (here is the set in the online store). The fellow said this is what speed cubers use.

Toronto Darts & Games will now be the first place I go for anything like this. It’s great to have a local store with such a big selection.

I’m reading the Accursed Kings series of historical novels (Les Rois Maudits in your actual French) by Maurice Druon, an immensely enjoyable telling of French and English royalty (and Aquitanian, Burgundian, etc.) in the early 1300s, with adultery, murder, poisoning, revolution, blackmail, executions, forgery, Templars, witches, babies swapped at birth, an escape from the Tower of London, the Avignon Papacy, Lombard bankers, the Queen of England (sister to the King of France) invading England from France with her lover and her son to take the throne from her husband, and more.

The books are rich with memorable quotes. Here’s one from the fifth, The She-Wolf of France (translated by Humphrey Hare):

You can think what you like of your friends, provided you don’t tell them.

And from the sixth, The Lily and the Lion:

Stupidity is no bar to enterprise; on the contrary, it tends to conceal difficulties which an intelligent man would consider insuperable.

I have a display up at the main branch of York University Libraries, where I work. It’s timed for Earth Day, and I call it Climate Crisis, Climate Action. Here’s the whole thing, which is just inside the entrance of the Scott Library in the unattractive alcove we use for displays.

The screen has ten slides in rotation. The PDF version of the slide deck is about 2.5 MB.

Here are the books (listed below). Electronic books have a dummy with a cover and QR code pointing to the catalogue entry.

Here is the table with my personal statement and free zines set out for people to take.

This is my signed statement:

Climate Climate, Crisis Action

This display is inspired by Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021). It is not actually about how to blow up a pipeline. It is about why people aren’t blowing them up now, and if they will start, and if they should start. It’s about pacifism, sabotage, and the role of radical and direct action to bring about major changes in society.

The climate crisis is happening and the global situation is going to get much, much worse. Some things are getting better, such as the quickly growing implementation of solar power around the world. But the years ahead are going to be bad, the decades ahead will be very bad, and the centuries ahead could be catastrophic.

Alone, we can achieve very little. Working together, we can do more. But when we work together we must be careful about who’s watching and listening.

Zines

The zines are:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation Pocket Guide: Protecting Your Data During a Protest
• Anne Pasek: Getting Into Fights with Data Centres
• Håkan Geijer (from Riot Medicine): How Not to Blow Up a Pipeline

They all get picked up every day. The little EFF guide has the fewest takers, but I hope those who do grab are the kind who will find it useful and practical. Pasek’s and Geijer’s zines are both popular. Many thanks to them for writing the zines, making them openly available, and formatting them for printing!

Suggestions for other zines are welcome.

Book list

This is my book list. Most but not all of the books are in the display. How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm is there in print and e. I like Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions and put them out whenever I can.

• Abadi, Climate Radicals: Why Our Environmental Politics Isn’t Working
• Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang
• Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline
• Biehl, Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin
• Blake, Children of a Modest Star
• Mike Davis, The Monster Enters: Covid-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism
• Davis, The Earth First! Reader: Ten Years of Radical Environmentalism
• Di Ronco, Policing Environmental Protest: Power and Resistance in Pandemic Times
• Doherty, Surviving Climate Anxiety
• Dunion, Troublemakers: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Scotland
• Extinction Rebellion, This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
• Firth, Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action
• Fisher, Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action
• Fox, Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them
• Goldstone, Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction
• Gonstalla, Atlas of a Threatened Planet
• David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography
• Greenfield, Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire
• Hanieh, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market
• Henderson, Glacial: The Inside Story of Climate Politics
• Hermann, The End of Capitalism: Why Growth and Climate Protection Are Incompatible—And How We Will Live In the Future
• Huber, Climate Change as Class War
• Jakobsen, Anarchism and Ecological Economics: A Transformative Approach to a Sustainable Future
• Klein, A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency
• Kuyek, Unearthing Justice: How to Protect Your Community from the Mining Industry
• Liddick, Eco-Terrorism: Radical Environmental and Animal Liberation Movements
• Lynas, Our Final Warning
• Markley, The Deluge (see my 2023 review of this excellent novel)
• Martha F. Lee, Earth First! Environmental Apocalypse
• Maslin, Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction
• Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age
• McGuire, Geophysical and Climate Hazards: A Very Short Introduction
• Mendez, Climate Change from the Streets
• Menton and Le Billon, Environmental Defenders
• Nesbit, This Is the Way the World Ends: How Droughts and Die-Offs, Heat Waves and Hurricanes are Converging on America
• Oreskes and Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future
• Princhard, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction
• Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future
• Rosebraugh, Burning Rage of a Dying Planet: Speaking for the Earth Liberation Front
• Sawatsky, Anarchist Perspectives for Social Work: Disrupting Oppressive Systems
• Scheuerman, The Cambridge Companion to Civil Disobedience
• Schwartzstei, The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence
• David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth
• Welzer, Climate Wars: Why People Will Be Killed in the Twenty-First Century
• Mark Winfield (York) et al., Sustainable Energy Transitions in Canada
• Woodhouse, The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022 film)
• Night Moves (2013 film)

Academic freedom

In case you’re wondering, librarians and archivists at York have academic freedom, thanks for being members of the York University Faculty Association (a union). This is Article 10 (Academic Freedom) in our collective agreement:

10.1 The parties agree to continue their practice of upholding, protecting, and promoting academic freedom as essential to the pursuit of truth and the fulfilment of the University’s objectives. Academic freedom includes the freedom of an employee to examine, question, teach, and learn; to disseminate their opinion(s) on any questions related to their teaching, professional activities, and research both inside and outside the classroom; to pursue without interference or reprisal, and consistent with the time constraints imposed by their other University duties, their research, creative or professional activities, and to freely publish and make public the results thereof; to criticize the University or society at large; and to be free from institutional censorship. Academic freedom does not require neutrality on the part of the individual, nor does it preclude commitment on the part of the individual. Rather, academic freedom makes such commitment possible.

10.02 When exercising their rights of action and expression as citizens, employees shall endeavour to ensure that their private actions or expressions are not interpreted as representing positions of York University. Any published views of the Administration concerning YUFA shall be clearly identified as representing the views of the York University Administration.

I came across Compositor, a really wonderful site that has a huge collection of printers’ ornaments from the 1700s.

Eighteenth-century books were highly decorated and decorative. Their pages were adorned with ornaments that ranged from small floral embellishments to large and intricate head- and tailpieces, depicting all manner of people, places, and things. Compositor includes ornaments cut by hand in blocks of wood or metal, as well as cast ornaments, engravings, and fleurons (ornamental typography).

Here are four:

The project was overseen by Hazel Wilkinson, who cowrote “Computer Vision and the Creation of a Database of Printers’ Ornaments” (Digital Humanities Quarterly vol. 15 no. 1, 2021), from which I quote: “All of the content is in the public domain, so the images collected in Fleuron are freely disseminated for public use.” (Fleuron is the former name of Compositor).

For more on all this, and more images, you could browse English Printers’ Ornaments by Henry R. Plomer (1924).

Compositor would be a great source for illustrations and graphic elements to use on web sites.