At the Women’s Memorial Labyrinth (News 2006)
This page is a potpourri of information and writing. The intention is to let you know about events (public appearances) and other News, and share Reviews, Reflections, Essays, and Lectures with you. I also want to link you to special people and sites. Please note the Gertrude Stein blog on the left side Categories.
My blog continues at http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blog/list?user=1fxhrwbaix6wi
She is turning 136 this year in her very own ageless way.
And here is the mythical birth as told in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:
“Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. As I am an ardent californian and as she spent her youth there I have often begged her to be born in California but she has always remained firmly born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. She left it when she was six months old and has never seen it again and now it no longer exists being all of it Pittsburgh. She used however to delight in being born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania when during the war, in connection with war work, we used to have papers made out and they always immediately wanted to know one’s birth place. She used to say if she had been really born in California as I wanted her to have been she would never have had the pleasure of seeing the various french officials try to write, Allegheny, Pennsylvania.”
This year will be a big re-birth year for Stein. Apart from the ongoing 75th anniversary of her lecture tour through the USA, the American Literature Association will hold its 21st Annual Conference from May 27 to 30 in San Francisco: 4 whole days dedicated to the one and only Gertrude Stein. (I will be speaking about her detective novel, Blood on the Dining Room Floor.) Next, THE STEIN FAMILY AS COLLECTORS will be an important exhibition in Paris, NYC and San Francisco, followed by the exhibition SEEING GERTRUDE STEIN, at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC.
Open your champagne and stay tuned!
Elina Garanca and Roberto Alagna in a new Met production, simulcast live in HD
Read my report at: http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/dec-2009/1209/renatestendhal1209.html
A rose is a rose by any other name… When I researched Stein photographs and texts for my photobiography I happened upon the man who created this amazing rose tattoo — an homage to Gertrude Stein. He turned out to be not only a tattoo artist but a writer, had worked with Kinsey on his sexual studies, and… been an intimate friend of Gertrude and Alice. So intimate that he was invited to summer with them at their country house in Bilignin. Samuel M. Steward, author of “Dear Sammy: Letters From Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas”, happened to live in Berkeley not far from where I lived myself. He became a friend who not only gave me permission to use his snapshots, but also told me revealing stories about the two women he adored. He explained to me, in fresh color, why Gertrude and Alice were so fond of the company of gay men — particularly, I want to add, of young, beautiful, sexy gay men. ( Sam was one of them. He looked like a sailor-boy from a movie by Kenneth Anger back then, in the late thirties.) Gertrude and Alice loved the sexual banter, the bawdy stories and repartées and dirty jokes they would exchange. Now I ask you: two “Victorian” ladies, in their sixties, keen on dirty jokes? How does that fit into the scholarly image of “frigidity” à la Ulla Dydo or Janet Malcolm? Rhetorical question!
Stay tuned.
I am relaunching my photobiography of Gertrude Stein with a blog on She Writes: “Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein”:
http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blogs/why-do-something-if-it-can-be
“Who was Gertrude Stein? The social and artistic dominatrix of the lost generation? The literary founder of modernism? The sensual companion of Alice B. Toklas? A ‘dictator of art’ or an ‘infant prodigy’? Stein, whose freedom with the written word ‘liberated language from the nineteenth century,’ remains a heroine hard to grasp. Now Renate Stendhal’s Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures (Algonquin) takes a good look at the slippery genius. After an astonishing, playful essay, the book opens into a revelatory combination of quotes, clips, and 360 photos of Stein and her wildly brilliant circle. The subtle minimalism of Stein’s cool face, repeating page to page like her own rhythmic sentences, brings a nuanced embodiment to our imcomplete sense of her. From a serious, chin-in-air profile of ‘Gertie’ at age three to a chin-in-hands portrait taken at age seventy-two, the woman is ‘a rose is a rose is a rose.’” ELLE Magazine
Was the great Karita Mattila miscast in the role of Tosca?
Read the review http://www.scene4.com/1109/renatestendhal-r1109.html
My portrait of the provocative artist has appeared in print, in the Arts and Culture section of Four Seasons Magazine, Issue 3, 2009, titled ”Spider Woman”.
http://magazine.fourseasons.com/articles/global/interest/arts_culture/spider_woman/My background article, “Influential 20th-Century Sculptors,” can be read at:
Click on “Read more” to see the whole article on Louise Bourgeois.
Four Seasons Magazine is now presented on YouTube :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5z9sv1KG5k
My memories of the great creator of dance theater in Germany go back to my school days. I saw her still dancing in “The Green Table” by Kurt Joos. My article refers back to the first time Pina and the Wuppertaler Tanztheater appeared in California and created “Nur Du/ Only You”.
link: http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/sep-2009/0909/renatestendhal0909.html
2 photos by Gert Weigelt
Review of the beautiful Anna in Verdi’s “La Traviata” (staged by Marta Domingo) at http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/aug-2009/html/renatestendhal0809.html. Is Anna Netrebko the new ultimate Violetta Verdy?
