At the Women’s Memorial Labyrinth (Wiesbaden, May 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.
99% Gertrude Stein
Aquarie Stein is having another virtual birthday, Feb. 3rd. She is turning 138. Looking back at the year she just spent, culturally speaking, it was the 99% Gertrude Stein year.
The excitement created by her modern art collection and her still shockingly modern personality was not just for the ususal 1 % of avant-gardists and art enthusiasts. The traveling museum shows had record-breaking crowds, and every second day, educational events helped the 99% people (who had never read her) take her in, become part of the “scene”, the media frenzy, the there there. Everybody who was anybody in 2011 was 99 % Stein.
There were the scandals Stein always triggers like a badge of honor: lesbians sent from the museums because they were holding hands. Attacks against the museums by the press and blogosphere for “whitewashing” Stein’s survival in Nazi-occupied France which, to the hysterics, meant she must have been in cahoots with the Naizs and in love with Hitler.
It so happened that another extraordinary exhibition about an artist of German Jewish origin was shown at the same time. Charlotte Salomon was also there there, at the SF Contemporary Jewish Museum, while Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories ran on the floor above. It was one of those moments of serendipity that gives you a frisson, goose-pimples. Here was the brilliant young Jewish artist from Berlin who fled to the French countryside, like Stein and Toklas did. Sensing the narrowing trap by the Nazis she put down her life story in a frenzy, in over 700 watercolors overlaid with words. She created the first and most original of autobiographical “comic strips” – just in time before being betrayed, caught, deported to Auschwitz and gassed. She was 28 years old.
One of the memorable moments in Stein’s renaissance year for me was the autumn gathering of the Diane Middlebrook Salon, where new books are presented to an audience of women writers of great intelligence. I had presented Stein at the Salon a while ago. This time, among the Salonistas, I met author Gabriella Mautner, whose harrowing escape through Europe from Nazi persecution was fictionalized in a grippingly “real” novel, Lovers and Fugitives. The same day at the Salon, I met SF State and Stanford professor Mary Felstiner, biographer of Charlotte Salomon. Her study To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era gave me sleepless nights with its heart-wrenching suspense and brilliance. This was another serendipity in the rich year of Nazi survivor Gertrude Stein.
It was Thanksgiving time. Birthdays are reminders of giving thanks. An Aquarie myself, I am celebrating Stein’s 99% birthday by looking back at that outstanding Salon day when Mary Felstiner distributed, to everyone’s delight, her ”99% Thanksgiving Pie: All But the Upper Crust”. You surely won’t want to miss the recipe:
99% THANKSGIVING PIE: ALL BUT THE UPPER CRUST.
What will 99% of Americans eat for Thanksgiving dessert? Humble pie?
No, we’re too hungry and angry to settle for that. We’re losing jobs, insurance, housing, education, public services. So this Thanksgiving we’re demanding our just desserts, not a slash-and-reduce diet of Tea.
Let’s fill our tables with abundance, then fill our politics, so that every campaign speech and news clip repeats that brilliant number, “99%.”
And how do we make “99%” the watchword of the times?
How about this Thanksgiving we slice our pies for the 99%? We could name each slice for what we want more of, what we’re thankful for. Say, a big slice for public services, for our teachers, our firefighters, our police (they shouldn’t be sent to attack demonstrators; they’re the 99% too). Big slice for anyone improving our roads and bridges and levees and clinics. Slice for clever businesspeople who increase jobs and invent products. Nice slice for our families and partners and people who care for others. Juicy slice for our artists and writers and singers and filmmakers, who make American culture irresistible. Then a hefty slice for our workers, who do every job we need, and we do need jobs. A nutritious slice for our military, who serve the country. And one for our protesters, who keep it vibrant and on-track.
And here’s a recipe.
“99% THANKSGIVING PIE: ALL BUT THE UPPER CRUST.”
Just so everyone can eat it, this recipe is sugar-free, gluten-free, and vegetarian. And it’s an open pie, open to changes.
BOTTOM CRUST: 1/4 cup oat flour or rice flour; 1/4 teaspoon salt; 2 tablespoons oil or butter or margarine; one egg (optional); 4 tablespoons chilled water. Stir, chill, and pat into pie plate, bake 20 minutes with bottom pricked.
FILLING: Fill with cut-up apples, honey, a little salt, cinnamon, 2 tablespoons corn starch, bits of butter or margarine. Bake 30 minutes until soft. Or try a large can of pumpkin, a cup of milk or soy milk, 3/4 cup honey, egg (optional), 1/4 cup cornstarch, sprinkle of salt, cinnamon and nutmeg, teaspoon of vanilla, all poured into the 99% bottom crust. Bake.
“99% Thanksgiving pie” is one little act of creative resistance, using imagination to thwart the aims of greed and unjust power.
Creative resistance matters. Last year, in Stanford courses on creative resistance, we gathered paintings and writings and music, recipes and jokes and graffiti that people created to keep humane values alight in times of war and genocide. Today, the Occupy movement is bursting with creative resistance. Just think of signs and chants at demonstrations: “We Are the 99%” and “Why is it easier to believe that 150 million Americans are being lazy than 400 Americans are being greedy?” and “Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out.” Think of the new songs and videos, of pepper-sprayed students calling to police, “Peace! You can go!” and a sign waved the other day in Palo Alto: “Inequities Occupy My Thoughts!”
How about adding your own skills to this outburst, this most energetic desire in decades to create change — a posting online, a poster at a march, a letter, a window display, a thoughtful gathering, a ritual? Maybe make a 99% pie. Name the slices. And share your pie around.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
[From Mary Felstiner. mf@sfsu.edu]
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GERTIE!
OBSCENE CRITIC, OBSCENE ACADEMIC
Phil Kennicott, Washington Post critic of Stein
Obscene: 1.Offensive to accepted standards of decency or modesty. 2.Inciting lustful feelings; lewd. 3. Repulsive; disgusting. (Free Dictionary)
The joy of making Stein the butt of jokes and ridicule started the very moment she started, a good hundred years ago. We must assume Stein embodied so many offenses to “common decency” that she triggered a response in kind: 1) lewd -repulsed 2), disgusted- offended, and 3) morally outraged. Targets for the punches mostly were literally her belly, the body of the lesbian, the imposing dyke with the big self-esteem; and the Jewish self-declared “genius” whose writing was sheer “nonsense.”
Examples from the past: Stein was “a huge squat mountain on a distant border of the literary kingdom” (Time Magazine, 1933). French critic Marcel Brion described her writing as “a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length… all fat, without nerve.” A “sausage, by-the-yard-variety“ according to Wyndham Lewis. She was “a clinical case in megalomania” (Tristan Tzara) and “her lack of modesty (made) her stubborn, as a caryatid would be had it eaten the house is was intended to support.” (Djuna Barnes). All this is repeated and summed up at present in comments by writer colleagues: for Cynthia Ozick, Stein’s most famous line, “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” is the “chant of a copycat Cubist” and “all that is left of Gertrude Stein.” (New York Times Magazine, 1996) Ex-feminist Elaine Showalter goes straight below the belt: “Stein seems more and more like the Empress Who Had No Clothes—a shocking sight to behold in every respect.” (A Jury of her Peers, 2009).
Stein’s present renaissance has triggered another old hat of hostility: questions about her survival in the French country-side during the Nazi-Occupation of France. As seasoned Stein expert Catharine R. Stimpson noted last November in her keynote address to the 2nd Annual Feminist Art History Conference in D.C.: “Stein’s detractors have been able to combine the standard attacks with a denunciation of her support of Vichy and Pétain.”
And now my Comment to the article in Scene4:
Karren Alenier’s article on the Washington Post’s obscene review of Gertrude Stein and the exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. brilliantly analyzes one particular case of openly declared “hatred” for Stein. This sort of hatred has followed Stein from the moment she began to publish, in the early twentieth century, but it is worth noting the context that gave rise to this “indecent exposure” in a serious newspaper like the Washington Post. Stein’s present renaissance with two epochal traveling exhibitions has brought out people like critic Phil Kennicott who, as Alenier reminds us, assigns himself, a “seat in the corner with the Stein haters that include ‘the worst sort of critics—anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes and philistines.’”
It is worth noticing that Stein’s old enemies found new fodder and an academic seal of approval for their attacks in Barbara Will’s book, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma (2011). The inflammatory book fed into the Stein controversy that was triggered by the exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, linked to the question how Stein and Toklas had managed to survive in Nazi-occupied France. Will’s speculations about the “true Stein” and her alleged “collaboration” with a fascist friend and fascist regime unleashed a cultural hysteria, a sort of license to kill that took over the media and blogosphere. I have no doubt that this cultural atmosphere provided the justification for the Washington Post to publish the infamous article.
Will camouflages the fact that her book is in fact about Bernard Faÿ, an intellectual friend of Steins’s from the twenties, a once respected historian and author who during the war became a Gestapo informer and persecutor of the Freemasons in France. Hardly anybody today would care about Bernard Faÿ and his twisted fate as a condemned collaborator who was ultimately pardoned by French President Mitterand. Gertrude Stein is being used to create a story that pretends to be sensationalist news when the facts and allegations have already been published and rehashed numerous times, most recently by Janet Malcolm in Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007).
I refer readers interested in the personal and political complexities of Stein’s survival to my analysis “Gertrude Stein a ‘Collaborator’, a ‘Nazi’?” published in the Los Angles Review of Books, in the Women’s Media Center as well as in my blog. Here I can only give one telling example of the perverse distortions propagated by this book that serves as the big canon in the latest wars against Stein: Will’s way of setting up Stein as a Hitler fan.
The academic professor tries to make use of the famous quote that every article nowadays repeats, wherein Stein suggests awarding Hitler the Nobel Peace Price, in 1934. (New York Times Magazine, ‘Gertrude Stein Views Life and Politics’) “‘I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize,’ she says, ‘because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.’”
The more objective commentators in the course of Stein research and biographical writing have recognized the irony – the Jewish humor with which Stein hands Hitler the price for his mockery of “peace.” Her irony is reinforced by many other anti-German, anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi comments one could quote from Stein’s work. Will, however, does not quote them. She doesn’t mention that a moment later in the same interview Stein says, “Building a Chinese wall is always bad. Protection, paternalism and suppression of natural activity and competition lead to dullness and stagnation. It is true in politics, in literature, in art. Everything in life needs constant stimulation. It needs activity, new blood.” In 1939, in Paris France, Stein equates Hitler’s “peace” with death for the arts and death for the country: “The characteristic art product of a country is the pulse of the country, France did produce better hats and fashions than ever these last two years and is therefore very alive and Germany’s music and musicians have been dead and gone these last two years and so Germany is dead well we will see, it is so, of course as all these things are necessarily true.” (Paris France, 1939).
Will isn’t stupid; she can’t quite get around Stein’s Jewish humor regarding the Nobel Peace Price for Hitler, but she nevertheless finds a way. She muses: “Stein probably wanted her audience to respond in both ways…” She claims there is “a strong element of conviction and intentionality in such pronouncements, as though (Stein) requires – indeed demands – that her words be taken literally.” She eradicates Stein’s Jewish humor by arguing, “her political ‘pontifications’ are not clearly ironic but apparently deeply felt.” (all quotes page 71-72).
Are we to take this sort of language – “probably wanted,” “as though she requires, indeed demands,” “apparently” — as clean, academic scholarship? To my reading eyes, this language is an obvious attempt to manipulate the reader .
Will rehashes another Hitler story, this one reported as hear-say by editor/publisher Jay Lansing. In 1934, Lansing heard Stein say that Hitler and Napoleon were both “great men.” For Will, this unquestioningly gives the other Hitler comment a sinister “deeper meaning”. Again, she won’t accord Stein the benefit of a doubt. Was this another flagrant irony that was missed? Was Stein perhaps referring to the fact that both Napoleon and Hitler were in fact small, demented men and that most of the so-called “great men” of our history (from Alexander the Great onward), idolized by the masses, shared the megalomania that led to mass murder in their conquerors’ wars? It goes almost without saying that Will would ignore quotes like this one: “There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. “ (Everybody’s Autobiography, 1936)
Will insists on finding a dirty under-belly in Stein at every turn. Three years before WWII, Stein commented in a letter to her friend W.G. Rogers: “…disguise it to yourself as you will the majority does want a dictator, it is natural that a majority if it has come to be made up of enormous numbers do, a big mass likes to be shoved as a whole because it feels it moves and they cannot possibly feel that they move themselves as little masses can, there you are, like it or not there we are. “(W.G. Rogers, When This you See Remember Me) This very realistic assessment, again with ironic-sarcastic undertones, is seen by Barbara Will as “chilling,” a proof that Stein “firmly distances herself “ from democracy: “Stein argues for the power, and, arguably, the rightness of authoritarian leadership.” (Will, p. 97.)
This sort of biased intimation is found throughout the book — a book that has not yet been unmasked in its hostile, dishonest intentions. Will’s earlier academic work, Gertrude Stein: Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” (2000) provided valid, useful, even enthusiastic Stein research. But since then, the author has “probably, as though, apparently” suffered a conversion experience.
She can be added to the detractors mentioned by Alenier’s article and take her “seat in the corner with the Stein haters that include ‘the worst sort of critics—anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes and philistines.’” If we still wonder about the true intention of these attacks, these wars against Stein, I suggest going to the root of the word obscene:
obscenitas, is latin derived from either ob-scaena, meaning against the scene of a stage (off-stage);
or it might be derived from obs-caenum — of mud or filth (Origins, the Etymological Dictionary by Eric Partridge).
The intention, I argue, is to blast Stein off the stage and out of her sunny spotlight by besmirching her image in the exact fashion we can trace back to the origins of the term obscenity.
Quirky Genius Turns Literary Kingdom to Mud
“They ask me to tell why an author like myself can become popular. It is very easy everybody keeps saying and writing what anybody feels that they are understanding and so they get tired of that….they do not know it but they get tired of feeling they are understanding and so they take pleasure in having something that they feel they are not understanding…. My writing is clear as mud but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear…” (Everybody’s Autobiography)
Here she sits (in Gertrude and Alice and Fritz and Tom by Hans Gallas and Tom Hachtman, see my blog # 82) and sips her tea, perfectly unperturbed, as the year of Stein rolls to its last breath. What a year it’s been. A roller-coaster. The month of May brought the so-called “Summer of Stein”: her wild come-back with exhibitions and events in San Francisco. Then came the brooding fall with the political controversies over the controversial author who was not always “politically correct.”
While the exhibitions continue to delight most viewers and trouble a few in Washington, D.C., and Paris, France, the fall harvest added another show: ”Insight and Identity” at the Stanford Gallery in D.C., a playful look at Stein’s impact on artists today. Some of the familiars who had already wandered through my blog appeared in the show: author and Stein collector Hans Gallas as the initiator of the show, Bay Area artist Katrina Rodabough with her “textually” designed Stein dresses, conceptual artist Gisela Züchner-Mogall with her monumental work of copying The Making of Americans” over and over again into patterned pages of imagination.
New artistic insights into Stein were also proposed this fall in Paris: author and Stein expert Marjorie Perloff (Wittgenstein’s Ladder) talked about parallels between the work of Stein and Marcel Duchamp, telling us it’s time to look beyond the obvious Stein-Picasso link and find a new, exciting territory to explore.
For me, the year ended in several high notes. In November, at the Second Feminist Conference in D.C., keynote speaker Catharine R. Stimpson, an eminent Stein scholar, took a public stand against Stein’s old and new detractors. In the present “Stein wars,” I was not the only one any more speaking up in Stein’s defense.
My arguments, first, of course, expressed in this blog, appeared in Ms. Magazine in November and in the LA Review of Books in December. Lots of reactions proved that readers are waking up to the complexities of the historical and personal situation Stein and Toklas found themselves in during the war. Many shades of color were added to the all-black picture drawn by the media and the blogosphere. Academic Barbara Will, with her tendentious, inflammatory book Unlikely Collaboration, is not the only recent detractor of Stein. Stimpson pointed out the “relentless and redundant hostility” of writer Elaine Showalter. Once a pioneering feminist critic, Showalter’s history of American women writers, A Jury of her Peers, is, in Stimpson’s words, “a compendium of attacks on Stein, none original, but presented as being mostly fresh. Here is Stein, the fat, egocentric monster who thought she was a genius and who manipulated people, especially Toklas, into serving her. … The final chop of Showalter’s little hatchet revises folklore, ‘Stein seems more and more like the Empress Who Had No Clothes – a shocking sight to behold in every respect.’ “
Not only men (like critic Phil Kennicott in the Washington Post), but women, too, descend to expressions of unmasked obscenity speaking of Stein, which shows the deep cultural anxieties and gender worries caused by the big, imposing lesbian author who turned their literary kingdom into mud.
Words, funny words and funny funny pictures and Paris in a new picture book!
"Once there were two amusing American ladies..."
It begins:
“Once there were two amusing American ladies, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. They lived in a mighty marvelous apartment in Paris…, ” and goes on to describe a Thanksgiving visit by two naughty American boys, which is based on a real story. It’s now the story of a book for children of ALL ages, by Hans Gallas, illustrated by Tom Hachtman: Gertrude and Alice and Fritz and Tom. One of the boys is/was author Fritz Peters (Boyhood with Gurdjeff), the other is his brother Tom. “We are always the same age inside,” to quote Gertrude Stein.
I had announced the marvelous book already last May, in my Post # 65, and now there is the there there in all its funny words and funny pictures, in time for Hannukah, Solstice, X-mas and the New Year, which will of course be another year of Gertrude Stein. You can order the book directly from the author’s colorful, enticing book page, at www.gertrudeandalice.com, or at Amazon.
Guess what Fritz and Tom discover at 27, rue de Fleurus? “It looks like a museum! I hate museums, everything in a museum is musty and moldy.” The story takes up from there and takes the boys, guess where? To the Louvre!
An interesting detail: no dogs in the picture. The visit happened before Gertrude and Alice got Basket the poodle and Pépé the chihuahua.
To see Basket in his wooly war-time coat, open another new book, the handy little calendar book Everyday Dogs: A Perpetual Calendar for Birthdays & Other Notable Dates by Mary Scott and Susan Snyder (Heyday, Berkeley, $14.95). It says, “What do Gertrude Stein, John Muir, Jack London, Queen Victoria, and your next-door neighbor all have in common? Dogs.” They failed to mention yours truly and Hans Gallas as well. “Woof! A dog fancier’s delight — ideal for birthdays and yearly events.” But they quote Gertrude. Voilà.
Now don’t forget to enter Gertie’s Aquarian birthday into the book: Feb. 3.
San Francisco Opera may have already reached the zenith of this season (most reviewers thought so) with Händel’s one and only “comic” opera Xerxes from 1738 – a serious composition with slight comedy touches. Like so many baroque operas, Xerxes deals with kings and courtiers, power and passion, in an exotic, allegorical way. The anonymous libretto tells about the Persian king with very few historical references. What is important here is that Xerxes obsesses over his brother’s sweetheart and thinks he will be preferable to her because he is the king. Even a king with the eponym “The Great” sometimes has to learn the humbling lessons of humanity. The rest of the story follows the pattern of A loves B who loves C who is coveted by D, and ends with B marrying C while A must marry E whom he doesn’t love but who loves him. There is a juicy role for a servant of the aristocracy, and you can see Mozart’s Figaro and Don Giovanni and Rossini’s Barber come right out of this Händel with its amusing libretto and inspired music.
Read on at: http://www.scene4.com/1211/renatestendhal1211.html
Vive la France!
“I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free. And so France is and was.” (Paris France)
It is true, Stein was politically conservative, even at times reactionary, and this is part of the paradox of Gertrude Stein. The language revolutionary came from a proudly bourgeois, assimilated Jewish family with a great admiration for Washington and Grant. Clearly Stein felt you had to be rooted in solid ground in order to go out to the edge and not fall down. I never paid much attention to this wide-spread modernist paradox; it seemed irrelevant next to Stein’s monumental oeuvre of some 600 titles containing lots of poetry and little or no politics. I paid attention to the fact that from 1943 onward, Stein rooted for the Resistance, and to the fact that she had always expressed her profound dislike of Germany and Hitler, “There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. “ (Everybody’s Autobiography, 1936), and she had made brilliant statements about the difference between Germany and France: “The characteristic art product of a country is the pulse of the country, France did produce better hats and fashions than ever these last two years and is therefore very alive and Germany’s music and musicians have been dead and gone these last two years and so Germany is dead well we will see, it is so, of course as all these things are necessarily true.” (Paris France, 1939)
How could anyone loving France not want to stay in France, I asked myself, even (and maybe especially) when France was in grave danger? Just last September, when I was in Paris and spent a good week at the Loire, it was a shock to be reminded how wonderful France, life in France, really is. No matter that I had lived in Paris for almost 20 years and visited often, I had forgotten! Here, around San Francisco where you get the best food in America, the best coffee, best croissants, French cheeses and wines, I almost believed that the “Global Village” had succeded and obliterated the need to travel to France.
But then there I was, and there was the real thing again, and I can tell you there is nothing like it. Nothing you eat here tastes anything like a baguette, a croissant, a round of goat cheese, a glass of Loire wine, a fresh walnut from the Dordogne, big as a lime, tastes over there. You have to go half around the world to realize that French coffee, excellent in even the smallest bistro anywhere in the countryside, is a world apart. That French butter has almost nothing in common with what we can buy here as “European-style” butter. I could go on…
This and the beauty of the old villages, the way the sandstone catches the light throughout the day – I kept wondering and wondering how anyone could question Stein’s decision. She had grown up on 10 acres of Californian land, a tomboy, with goats and chicken and apple trees, and in her French village, where she and Alice spent every summer, she was rooted like an old tree by the time the war arrived. She loved her country neighbors, and they told her to stay: they would care for her and Alice. They would protect them.
The suspicious questioning of how Stein and Toklas were able to survive the war as Jews reveals a considerable ignorance of the conditions in Vichy and Occupied France and a troubled confusion of France with Germany. In Germany, half of the German Jews were trapped after 1938, and almost every one of them was murdered. In France, three quarters of the Jewish population survived in the same way Stein and Toklas did, with the help of friends and neighbors, and often even with the help of French officials who quietly ignored German orders. Not that it was easy or safe. Any day, they could have been denounced. Should they flee to near-by Switzerland – without legal papers, as they were advised – into the complete unknown? Without being able to take their beloved dogs?
In 1939, they had made a mad dash to Paris to take a few things back to their country house, among them just two paintings from their vast collection: Picasso’s portrait of Stein and the Cézanne’s Portrait of Mme Cézanne. They didn’t find their passports, but they found the pedigree papers for Basket, their big poodle. This turned out to be a blessing as the Germans — with their racial obsessions — accorded special food rates to pure-bred dogs. No, they wouldn’t leave their dogs behind for a questionable safety for themselves. They would hold out and muddle through, all of them together, with their peasant neighbors and friends, a vegetable garden, with Alice’s kitchen artistry and Gertrude’s Black Market skills. Five years is a long time of deprivation. At some point, when all of France was occupied and all ties to America were cut, they had no source of money for an entire 6 months. Again, a friend and neighbor helped them out. But they ended up having to sell and “eat the Cézanne.” They had no heating and the language revolutionary who used to claim, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing,” would cut wood all day, walk miles and miles for an egg or a bit of flour, and weed her garden.
The two elderly Americans (even Alice turned 65 during the war) were not noticed by the Germans – only Basket was. He was admired – which reminds me: A new little calendar book has come out: Everyday Dogs: A Perpetual Calendar for Birthdays & Other Notable Dates, from Heyday Books in Berkeley. Of course, there is Gertrude, late in her life, holding a very furry Basket on her lap. You will see it by turning to the third week of January 2012.
Report about the new film by Wim Wenders, Pina, the opening of the Paris Opera with Salome by Richard Strauss, and a gender-bending artist from the time of Gertrude Stein, Claude Cahun, at the Jeu de Paume, : http://www.scene4.com/1111/renatestendhal1111.html
“Just for fun I sat down in my habitual café and started counting. It’s what I always do when I first arrive in Paris: I buy the Officiel or Pariscope, take a café table at the window of Le Rostand, right across the Luxembourg Gardens, and get an overview over the fashions and cultural programs of the moment. 322 films this week, not including the special-topic “festivals” (roughly 35). Almost 100 theater plays. The usual. The opera season was to open with Salome the next day. The sirens of the present time were wearing tights in a half-loose, sexy way that let the fabric bundle up around the ankles and slip down to very high heels. …” Read the rest of this entry »
Yes, I am not alone in taking on the war-mongers against Gertrude Stein and her survival in Nazi-occupied France, with their many ignorances, lies and innuendos… For a while, I felt quite lost in a desert, with bullets coming in right and left from the blogosphere and online magazines, the latest fired like a cannon-shot from critic Phil Kennicott at the Washington Post. But now comments are floating in from She Writers and others like a balm, and it’s heart-warming and encouraging to hear that others are seeing what I am seeing, and saying so.
The cartoon is by German-Australian, trés Steinian, artist Gisela Züchner-Mogall (whose work can be seen in the present exhibition on Stein at the Stanford in Washington Art Gallery in D.C.).
Here are some other thoughtful, thought-provoking comments Read the rest of this entry »
Giant Gertrude Stein Ridiculed By Little Male
If you want to see a fresh example of how a great woman author is being diminished by a male critic, with no holds barred, go to the Washington Post and read:
Review of Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, by Phil Kennicott (Sunday Arts)
You won’t easily forget the experience.
What is the occasion? The Stein exhibition from SF, Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, just opened at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. Everybody who is anybody is celebrating the event, talking about the present Stein renaissance (the other seminal exhibition, The Steins Collect, has moved to the Paris Grand Palais and will soon open in NY), except those who feel somehow excluded from the excitement because they harbor a deep, old resentment against Stein. Read the rest of this entry »
Gertrude Stein a “Collaborator“, a „Nazi“?
Questions abound. Suddenly everyone asks about Gertrude Stein’s whereabouts during WW2. How come she stayed in France when France was Nazi-occupied? Why didn’t she leave? Why didn’t she and Alice get the treatment of enemy aliens (i.e. Americans) like Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare & Company, who got rounded up in Paris and taken to the Vittel detention camp? Why didn’t they get deported like other Jews, other lesbians, other unwanted people? Were they protected somehow and for some reason? Was their collection of “degenerate” art, all those pictures by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, left behind in their apartment in Paris, protected too? Read the rest of this entry »