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.
Gertrude has had a meeting with the Zeitgeist. I had just posted # 39, the attempt of Proust, Joyce and Pound to Twitter (quite in vain, of course) whereas Stein revealed herself as the naturally born Twitterwit: “Toasted Susie is my icecream”. The same day, a message came flying by from Berlin and London: “”Why Twitter is Gertrude Stein in 2010″. Lo and behold. Read the rest of this entry »
What it would be like if Proust, Pound, Joyce and Stein had to be “authorpreneurs” and polish their FaceBook Fan pages and emit daily tweets?
Are there other writers who are sometimes overcome, as I am, by the merry absurdity of our post-modern writers’ lives?
Think about it. And then let’s boldly go where none of them has gone before!
Here’s James Joyce on Twitter:
“Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual int” Oops, he got cut off. Just when it got interesting.
How about Ezra Pound?
“It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let t” Darn, he got cut off too. Poor Pound. The best part went missing.
Should we even bother with Marcel Proust (for whom an entire page was often not enough to fit one sentence)? Okay Proust, give it a try:
“The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them” Yeah, that was predictable. Sorry, Proust. Try again.
Hi Gertrude Stein: how about a tweet today? (Could she do it? Would she do it? Gertie the perfect Twitterwit?)
“Toasted Susie is my icecream.”
Sure enough. A one-liner, the sexy sort. Why do something if it can be done.
This is a photographic appetizer of favorite pics of Gertrude Stein. Link
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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
