Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 95

Posted on March 3, 2013 by admin

by Tom Hachtman

JAMAICA KINCAID QUOTING GERTRUDE STEIN?

Should we call it a new sighting in our search for signs of presence in the Steinian post-renaissance? Is it a QUOTE?

“She was thinking of her now, knowing that it would certainly become a Then even as it was a Now, for the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then, and that the past and the present and the future has no permanent present tense, has no certainty in regard to right now. (…) Every morning is the next morning of the night before: and the night before is Now and Then at the same time is the morning after the night before.”

GERTRUDE STEIN’S ABANDONED KNITTING

Could it be an unknown Stein, forgotten in some Paris attic of modernism? Is it real or is it a fake? The great Orson Wellesian question. Perhaps someone made a few cuts in the manuscript of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (could it be Alice, always the severe editor, thinking it was already a bit crowded down there?) Let’s listen to Blood on the Dining-Room Floor:

“Every day and every day she had to see that everything came out from where it was put away and that everything again was put away. That was their way. That had always been their way. Any way was that way. Any way, she came that way to be that way. In that way she passed each day and each day passed away which was a night too.“Anybody knows that a night is not a day.“She cried when she tried but soon she did not try and so she did not cry. As a day was a day it came to be that way. But it was never only a day, and that a little left it to her still to cry, because it was a day, but it was not only a day. Every day had a day in its way.”

Or has someone dared “venture into the parlour of modernism and pick up Gertrude Stein’s abandoned knitting”? (The Guardian)

Yes, as my favorite sleuth Tom Hachtman pointed out, the remarkable Jamaica Kincaid’s latest book, See Now Then, “channels Stein” – and not for the first time. Kincaid did it again. It may be irresistible. See Now Then takes up the knitting from her earlier Mr. Potter. But the new book review in the New York Times never picks up the thread. We are given a warning, however, that could have been issued for any of Stein’s books: “You will have to back up and reread many of the sentences here just to be certain that she isn’t, in some regard, attempting satire.”

Aha, satire! Another typical Steinian suspicion. Could she be taken seriously at all? Wasn’t she making fun of her readers? And particularly her critics? Perhaps, the reviewer speculates, the satire aims at Here but Not Here, the 1998 memoir of New Yorker writer Lillian Ross with whom Kincaid’s (ex-)husband allegedly had a long secret affair? We may never know.

The Los Angeles Times finds this tangled yarn “mesmerizing”; others, like the Wall Street Journal, describe it as “little more than chunks of Ms. Kincaid’s autobiography lumped onto the page like unshaped clay.” Interesting. This reviewer, quite unconsciously, may be hot on the trail of something – in case you remember Stein’s famous statement in Everybody’s Autobiography: “My writing is clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear…” The unconscious works its own funny way and maybe Kincaid’s “mud” will do just the same.

Be it what it may, whatever you can see now or then — mud-throwing, wool-gathering, channeling, satirizing, plucking music from the torn shreds of a marriage, read on, notice the word Stein as Kincaid sprinkles into the text, and be amused:

“But all that aside, for all that would have its then and has its own now, Mr. Sweet sitting on a stool in the studio above the garage, the dun-dun, wooo-wooo, whoosh-whoosh noise made by the clothes-cleaning machines, and he sat there, hovered above the black and white keys of that musical instrument made by the company called Steinway, his hands poised above those keys, his fingers extended, his fingers resembling his long-ago ancestors who lived in that long-ago era, and he composed more nocturnes, more nocturnes, and more of those: his life was not what he wanted it to be, not what he had imagined it to be even though he had not imagined it to be anything in particular other than he would be princely and entitled to doormen and poor but princely and entitled to doormen and sad because he loved ballet and Wittgenstein and opera and entitled to doormen, no matter what, there must be doormen.”

Who is this husband? A satire of the husband Stein gave her heroine in her 1940 novel Mrs. Reynolds? Perhaps yes, perhaps not, for…”sometimes people mistook him for a rodent, he scurried around so. And he was not a rodent at all, he was a man
capable of understanding Wittgenstein and Einstein and any other name that ended in stein, Gertrude included…”

Posted in Events, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, News | Tagged Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, Einstein, Everybody's Autobiography, Gertrude Stein, Jamaica Kincaid, knitting, language, Lilian Ross, modernism, Mrs. Reynolds, Paris, Quoting, quoting gertrude stein, satire, See Now Then, The Guardian, The New York Times, Tom Hachtman, Wittgenstein, Words | Leave a comment

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 94

Posted on February 3, 2013 by admin

Another Happy Birthday, Gertrude Stein!

What is eternally 39 year-old Alice bringing Gertie for her celebration? You bet it’s something she baked, some “entertaining refreshment,” “effective,” “ecstatic,” “brilliant,” “ravishing” — in short, a “food of paradise”. To be exact: “the food of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises.” Often quoted, often repeated, sometimes verboten, always imitated, the stuff of Urban Legends: here is the recipe. Not just from her famous Cookbook — no, here recited by Alice in 1963, in old Alice’s original, delicious-malicious, slightly trembling but still snooty cigarette voice, recited for all eternity:

on Pacifica Radio [MP3 link] (4’46″): http://t.co/wqWfraRG

This little radio gem was sighted by friend Tom Hachtman, cartoonist extraordinaire, who also sighted G & A on a heavenly Super Bowl Sunday cheerleading team:
http://www.nowwhatmedia.com/pages_folder/stripmall_pages/gert_pages/gertrudesfollies.html

Enjoy a small sample appetizer of the whole cartoon here:

Then put the brownies in a super bowl and Bon Appetit, Gertrude and Alice, in Saint Tom’s, Saint Theresa’s (or some other) artistic paradise!

Posted in Events, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, News, Urban Legends | Tagged 39, Baudelaire, Birthday, Cookbook, Gertrude and Alice, Gertrude's Follies, quoting gertrude stein, Superbowl, Superbowl Sunday, Tom Hachtman, urban legend | Leave a comment

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 93

Posted on January 9, 2013 by admin

Bye-bye 2012!

BYE-BYE SUMMER OF STEIN

The cartoon by Rick Meyerowitz, “The Girls of Summer,” brings home the sad fact. The year-long Summer of Stein ended last year. In May 2012, the last of the big exhibitions on Stein closed. Gertrude – watch out – threw her last ball. Or was that a grenade? Did Meyerowitz see Stein launch a last retort in the controversies that had raged over her political sporting from one summer to another?

If you have a Google Alert set on Stein you know it: All quiet again on the Gertrude front. “Le Gang Stein” (Meyerowitz) is off the field. No more media attacks and daily blog matches. Academe has locked her back into the ivory tower. Quietly the Gertrude Stein Society held a symposium at the Yale Beinecke Library, discussing Stein’s hermetic poetry in Stanzas in Meditation, debating how to teach Stein in the classroom. From political upheaval back to the normal diet of scholarship.

We may have to wait for another decade, another generation, another slew of big media events to bring Stein (and Toklas) back into the limelight.

RECENT SIGHTING OF GERTRUDE STEIN

Meanwhile, in the world of arts and media, sightings of the redisappeared have been reported. I count myself a witness. I spotted Stein in full glory in Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach. How could it be otherwise?

The landmark cultural event of the seventies that was finally revived in 2012, revealed Stein’s inspiration more clearly now than in 1976. The many repetitions of abstract, wonderfully absurd texts in Einstein on the Beach ring in today’s ear like pure Steinese, enhanced by the wonderfully repetitive score of Phil Glass, who knew what he was doing. Less obvious but as striking when you see it: an entire scene of the so-called opera is designed as an homage to Gertrude Stein. I pointed it out in my review of the piece and want to repeat it here:

“Without Stein’s inspiration, another scene in Einstein would in fact be unthinkable. The scene is called The Building. A toy-like house-front shows a woman in a “tower” window, counting with her hands. Below her window, one by one, men gather in the street, and just stand there for some length of time, not doing much of nothing, until again one by one, they leave and the scene is over. Stein: “It is a much more impressive thing to any one to see any one standing, that is not in action than acting or doing anything doing anything being a successive thing, standing not being a successive thing but being something existing. That is then the difference between narrative as it has been and narrative as it is now.” (Narration, 1935)

The congruency between the repetitive happening-not-happening onstage and the repetitive happening-not-happening in the music creates a “being something existing” that is hard to define, but is thrilling in its hypnotic presence. I felt both strained and elated coming out of the theater. Thrilled to witness that this new narrative of then is still the narrative par excellence of now.”

Other sighting are to be reported in the next blog. Stay tuned.

Posted in Events, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, News | Tagged Beinecke Library, Einstein on the Beach, Gertrude and Alice, Gertrude Stein, Le Gang Stein, Narration, opera, Phil Glass, quoting gertrude stein, Renate Stendhal, Rick Meyerowitz, Robert Wilson, Stanzas in Meditation, Summer of Stein, The Girls of Summer | Leave a comment

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 92

Posted on September 30, 2012 by admin

How right or how wrong does it get when Gertrude Stein appears in the movies? I had a second look at Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris — and compared his Gertrude to her twin in Alan Rudolph’s cult classic, The Moderns:

http://www.scene4.com/0912/renatestendhal0912.html

Posted in Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, News, page articles, Urban Legends | Tagged Alan Rudolph, American painters, Elsa Raven, gays, Gertrude and Alice, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Midnight in Paris, Out of the Past, Paris, picasso, Scene4 Magazine, sexy, The Moderns, Woody Allen | Leave a comment

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 91

Posted on June 9, 2012 by admin

Why the Witch-Hunt Against Gertrude Stein? Tikkun Magazine

It’s fascinating how the story of Stein’s war years and survival refuses to settle into a consistent story line. I wrote about Assemblyman Dov Hikind, commentator Alan Dershowith and their distortions of history in their attempt to bully the Metropolitan Museum. Dovkind, Dershowitz and others wanted the wall text of the exhibition “The Steins Collect” to follow their own version of the story – i.e. the urban legend based on the rumor-mill of Stein’s detractors. Even the White House got caught in the cauldron of hear-say and allegations against Stein, dis-inviting her on the sly from the official celebration of Jewish Heritage Month. For the details see my essay “Why the Witch-Hunt Against Gertrude Stein?” in Tikkun Magazine. Continue reading →

Posted in Events, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, News, page articles, Urban Legends | Tagged Alan Dershowitz, Alan Riding, And the Show Went on, Dov Hikind, Gertrude Stein, Jewish, Jewish Heritage Month, Michael Lerner, Rabbinical tradition, The Steins Collect, Tikkun, urban legend, White House | 3 Comments

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 90

Posted on June 1, 2012 by admin

There or not there? Gertrude Stein Day at the American Literature Association Conference

Me, Denny Stein and Hans Gallas

“It’s the critics who thought about form, I thought about writing.” (Gertrude Stein)

Imagine my surprise, when I asked my academic audience at the lecture panel whether they were aware of the Stein controversy, Stein the “urban legend,” the Metropolitan Museum crisis and the White House scandal. They had not heard of it. Any of it.
Academia sometimes seems like a far-away, foreign land. Where else would the speakers invited to an intellectual conference have to pay a fee in order to share their papers? I can’t come up with another example. The 400 panels in a long weekend were offered once again at the Hyatt in San Francisco by academics most of whom also had to pay for their air tickets and hotel rooms.
But anywhere, there we were, a morning panel of outliers, bringing news of the year-long raging controversy regarding Stein to Academe.
This was only the third year of Stein’s “official” existence as the object of an scholarly Society. My blog post in 2010 reported the birth of the Gertrude Stein Society and the panel I shared with Gisela Züchner-Mogall, the German-Australian artist who since then has made several appearances on my blog, the most recent one sharing one of her Stein brooches or “tender buttons” with me. Gisela was present once again, this time in the audience, and she had brought more “tender buttons” for the panelists –before heading to New York to see the last days of The Steins Collect and get Gertie’s very personal view of her ALA day.

Photo Gisela Züchner-Mogall

The morning panel this year was called “Gertrude Stein On View” and all the speakers happened to be friends, all of us local. Denny Stein, a real-live member of Stein’s family, was talking about the 30-year correspondence between her own grandmother, who was a cousin of Stein’s, and Gertrude who was fondly attached to her. Thirty years of yet unpublished letters. Denny Stein presented a Powerpoint with postcards from the edge, written during the Occupation of France, and interpreted Stein’s ways of slyly getting past the censors by writing her best Steinese, saying all was well not so well but all well.
Hans Gallas, probably the world’s most eminent collector of Stein’s first editions and memorabilia of Gertrude and Alice, shared some of his book treasures on the screen and on the desk, woven into amusing anecdotes about how Stein’s books got published. If you have never set eyes on one of the books Stein and Toklas published in the thirties in their own publishing venture, Plain Edition, you would not necessarily grasp the double and triple meanings of the word “plain.”

Hans has also made many appearances on my blog, with cross references to his gertrudeandalice blog and news about his first book, “Gertrude and Alice and Fritz and Tom,” illustrated by another friend, Tom Hachtman.
Newer books on Stein, like his or my photobiography were missing from the scanty book stalls; the once overcrowded book room at the ALA was only half there there. What could it mean? The general book crisis has reached the ivory tower of the ALA?

On the afternoon panel “Gertrude Stein In Places,” we heard about possible influences of Jazz on Stein’s language (by Andrew Vogel), about Stein’s contributions to “Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde” (by Katie E. Strode), and challenging notes and musings about Stein’s style and rhetoric: “There are different ways of making of, of course,” presented by Sharon Kirsch from Arizona State University.
Kirsch talked about the books on the style of writing that were fashionable when Stein came of age, holding up the ancient canon of rhetoric centered on “exactness” – on “seeing what you describe.” Kirsch showed how Stein followed and bent those classic rules, for example in the Portrait of Picasso where Stein riffs on the “exactness of resemblance”:
“Exact resemblance to exact resemblance, the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance. Exactly as resembling exactly resembling exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because.”
And later, in 1935, Stein sums it up, “It’s the critics who thought about form, I thought about writing.”
Between and after panels, gourmet Hans Gallas took the panelists on long promenades through San Francisco, to be rewarded by superb meals at BlueStem and Il Fornaio restaurants where everyone agreed that Gertie got it right: “Books and food, food and books, both excellent things.”

Posted in Events, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, News, Urban Legends | Tagged American Literature Association, Books, controversy, food, Gertrude and Alice, Gertrude and Alice and Fritz and Tom, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein Society, Gisale Zuchner-Mogall, Hans Gallas, Plain Edition, The Steins Collect, Tom Hachtman, urban legend | 1 Comment

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 89

Posted on May 15, 2012 by admin

Gertrude Stein: Genius Wanted – Unwanted by White House

The scandal has finally reached the highest levels (so far?) with the White House striking Gertrude Stein from the list of “generations of Jewish Americans (who) have brought to bear some of our country’s greatest achievements and forever enriched our national life.” On May 1st, the beginning of Jewish Heritage Month, the list originally named Aaron Copland, Albert Einstein, Gertrude Stein and Justice Louis Brandeis. Then the controversy raged again, this time pushed by Orthodox Assemblyman Dov Hikind and Manhatten Borough President Scott Stringer’s incessant defaming of Stein as a “Nazi collaborator.” The American hysteria over Stein’s survival during the WWII has never abated. I have written a lot about it, to the point where some concerned liberal friends in Europe started wondering if enough hadn’t been said already about the topic. Now we know otherwise. On May 2nd, all the Jewish names were eliminated by the White House celebratory comments. Gertrude Stein was uninvited, an irony not lost on people who remember that in 1934, Stein and Toklas were invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to have tea with her at the White House.

Dov Hikind’s Urban Legends of Stein, “the Nazi”

Dov Hikind and his likes who beat the drum of Stein as a Hitler lover, a fascist, a Nazi collaborator, also bullied the Metropolitan Museum in New York into including more commentary on Stein’s survival in the show “The Steins Collect,” which is on the last leg of its journey from San Francisco to Paris to New York. The New York provincialness of these battles in the press and blogosphere doesn’t even take into account that the controversy and the whole rumor mill started a whole year ago with “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” in San Francisco. There is no such thing as an old hat when it comes to scandal-mongering. (See even the New Yorker blog)
I talked about Urban Legends before. Stein the Nazi now is a top favorite. In Dov Hikind’s words: “It is a matter of fact that, among other things, Stein lobbied for a Nobel Peace Prize for Adolph Hitler and was only allowed to remain in France and continue collecting art because she aided the Vichy government in its collaboration with the Nazis.”
There is not a single fact in this statement, but the more the nonsense of Dov Hikind is repeated the more it sounds like facts to people who don’t know any better. He trumpets around the notion that Stein “lost her soul”: “People need to know who owned this art and how she came to maintain it while her fellow Jews were being robbed, tortured and murdered. Indeed, the collection should be presented as collected and safeguarded by a Nazi Collaborator.”

Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight

Slowly, however, and finally, public responses are forming that bring back factual facts into the distorted picture. Some of the most eminent Stein scholars have united under Charles Bernstein to circulate a Dossier“Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight” . Ulla Dydo and Edward Burns repeat and add to their solid analysis of Stein’s survival; Joan Retallack and Marjorie Perloff join the dossier confirming their knowledge that Stein ”was no fascist.” It’s a great breath of fresh air in a poisonous atmosphere. I will write more about it, but here I would like to share how already in 1996 Burns and Dydo had debunked the rumor that Stein lobbied the Nobel Peace Price Committee for Hitler – a favorite for the Dovkinds of this world.

Stein did not campaign or lobby for Hitler and the Nobel Peace Price!

The rumor was spread in 1995 to the Israeli journal Nativ by the Committee member Gustav Hendrikksen. He was enraged by the nomination of Arafat and wanted to underscore the Jews’ failure to support their own interest– no matter to him that in 1937, Hitler had already decreed that no German could ever receive a Nobel Price in any category. Hendrikksen’s accusation was quoted in 1996 by the English language edition of Forward and subsequently denied by the office of the Nobel Peace Price Committee in Oslo. But the official correction of the outright lie has done little for Gertrude Stein’s reputation. (The evidence is found in The Letters of Thornton Wilder and Gertrude Stein by the eminent scholars Ulla Dydo and Edgar Rice.)
To be continued.

Posted in Events, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, News, page articles, Urban Legends | Tagged Arafat, Charles Bernstein, collaborator, Dov Hikind, Edward Burns, Eleanor Roosevelt, fascist, Forward, Genius, Gertrude Stein, Hendrikksen, Hitler, Jewish Heritage Month, Joan Retallack, Marjorie Perloff, Nativ, Nazi, Nobel Peace Prize, Orthodox, Scott Stringer, soul, Ulla Dydo, War Years, White House | 2 Comments

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 88

Posted on April 12, 2012 by admin

Another Round of Gertrude Stein Loves Hitler!

Sketch by Tom Hachtman

Perpetuating an Urban Legend about Gertrude Stein

Wouldn’t you know that the New York Review of Books wouldn’t pass up the chance to feed into the urban legend claiming that Stein really meant it when she quipped that Hitler ought to have the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1934.

The NYRB reviewed The Steins Collect, the traveling exhibition that finally reached the East shores at the end of February, opening at the NY Metropolitan Museum. 11 months in the running, one would imagine that reviewers had time to get acquainted with the show and its topic, gather correct information about Gertrude Stein and her siblings, about the Stein controversy (also in the running for 11 months), and that maybe even read some Gertrude Stein. The NYRB assigned the task to Michael Kimmelman, professor of architecture, who repeats and makes mistakes that are typical for someone coming to the task out of the blue.

“More than a hundred books” about Stein “in the past decade or so”? Sorry, the academic count is some 30 books and 70 dissertations.

If you present new books about and by Gertrude Stein, how can you mention Ida: A Novel and not know or leave out the more eminent new critical edition of Stanzas in Meditation, by the same Yale University Press?

Where Was That Famous Paris Salon?

Mr. Kimmelman states: “Michael and Sarah, husband and wife, … created a salon of their own on the rue de Fleurus.”

Excuse me, but there was only one salon on that rue, and that was Gertrude and Leo’s at 27 rue de Fleurus! Michael and Sarah’s rival salon was in the rue Madame, a fact that looms large in the exhibition. How to get something this basic wrong, you may wonder.

And do you wonder, then, what Mr. Kimmelman knows about Stein and Hitler?He reports: “’Hitler should have received the Nobel Peace Prize,’ she meanwhile told The New York Times Magazine in 1934, and alas, she apparently meant it.”
Here we go again.

Where is Gertrude Stein’s Jewish Humor?

The lack of reading Stein, the apparent misreading of an obvious, cutting irony, the failure to explore the matter – what else is new? I have commented on it repeatedly, but the urban legend will last as long as critics like Mr. Kimmelman and colleagues review Gertrude Stein. What is the information the critic bases this on? Janet Malcolm and her (according to Mr. Kimmelman) “excellent” book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice? But Malcolm, mean-spirited as she loves to be, accords Stein her famous irony. So we can pinpoint the culprit. Mr. Kimmelman has read another book about Stein, he really has: Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaboration!

Language Manipulation

As I said before: Will uses highly speculative language to make her case against Stein. The great majority of Stein critics, biographers and academic experts have agreed about this obvious irony (which I see as a prime example of Jewish humor), and Will at first admits it, too. But then she twists it in her wily, willful 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 she requires – indeed demands –that her words be taken literally.” She denies Stein’s sarcastic 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 manipulation of the reader. Apparently the author has no argument, no evidence, and neither, alas, does Mr. Kimmelman.

Los Angeles Review of Books and Trivia: Voices of Feminism

In order to explore these matters again in greater detail than I did in the Los Angeles Review of Books and in my blog posts, I have summed up my studies of the Stein controversy of the last 11 months in an essay for the newly republished magazine Trivia: Voices of Feminism.
If you are interested in the urban legend being debunked, here is your chance!
Here Gertrude Stein fiction is decoded. The detective story,

Tinker Tailor Soldier Stein
is to be continued.

Posted in Book List, Events, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Urban Legends | Tagged 27 rue de Fleurus, academic, academic scholarship, Barbara Will, critic, feminism, gertr, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein blog, irony, Jewish humor, Los Angeles Review of Books, Metropolitan Museum, Michael Kimmelman, New York Review of Books, Nobel Peace Prize, NY Metropolitan Museum, Politics, quoting gertrude stein, review, The Steins Collect, Trivia: Voices of Feminism, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, Unlikely Collaboration, urban legend | Leave a comment

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 87

Posted on March 24, 2012 by admin

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER STEIN

85 % original Stein, 15 % John le Carré, 1 % Stendhal

This was not an accident and it was mentioned.

To try and cry and not to smile. To try and not inherit not now now and now and meek and beg her then, fillet it fold her names and diagrams and special sauces. Light the lamps and code the merlin which is craft. Kindly treat them as if they were your own.

Then someone went out to start a car. The telephone was not working that was a fact.

If he told them would they like it would they like it if he told them. Would he tell them would he like it. If they told him would he smile it.

Shutters shut and open, so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shot shot and so, and so shutters. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also.

If he told them would they like it would they like it if he told them. Would he tell them would he like it. If they told him would he smile it.

Shutters shut and open, so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shot shot and so, and so shutters. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also.

Feeling full for it. Exactitude is king. So to beseech so as for it. Exactly or as kings.

He was one who had observing coming out of him. He had observing being coming out of him. He certainly was one observing. He was then observing them. He was not any one. Of them. He had observing coming out of him. He certainly was observing her then.

Being observing Inningham busses only the wrong way staring. Left station lift leaning London, Karla and Bill and also. Left sharing everything another man’s woman. Genius is not another man’s woman, not many men’s woman who were boys together. Shop-soiled white hope and redbrick of and out of control. Turning his back turning him back back and in turn. Can a dog betray a circus. Dead is dead as is as can be. Dead.
All please smile a face which smiled in case that she did mind. For which if she did mind.

A little come they which they can be married to a man, a young enough man and an old man and a young enough man.

No and yes.

Any one saying no could be known to come to be left out. Out of what. Out of service. Not any one could leave ingratiating. Not any beg her man. Just which they smile or order which they smile.

After a while it is all known. Not three are changed for three. Neither or or either, or there.

Tank her tail her scold her cry. Build away with neither as a guess. There is no further guess.

Thank you for anxiously.

No one is amiss after servants are changed.

Are they.

(Note: Two Academy Award Nominations for the new Tinker Tailor. It was time Stein wrote a “portrait” of the famously brilliant novel by John le Carré.

Stein quotes from Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, Picasso, The Making of Americans. John le Carré quotes from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Editorial input from Tom Lutz, LA Review of Books)

Posted in Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, News, page articles, Writing Coach | Tagged Academy Awards, accicent, Alec Guinness, Gertrude Stein, John le Carré, John Smiley, language, Los Angeles Review of Books, Paris, picasso, Tinker Tail, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tom Lutz, Words | Leave a comment

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 86

Posted on March 4, 2012 by admin

NO PUSSY NO!
How many scandals fit on the tip of a needle when the needle is Gertrude Stein? I ask you.
To my delight, I discovered the latest one in the latest blog post by my friend Hans Gallas: http://gertrudeandalice.com/blog/2012/02/18/pussy-pussy-bo-bussy-the-name-game/#more-3569.
Just as the political controversy, whipped up by furious Prof. Barbara Will (see previous posts), has returned to a snore, wroom! there is another sex scandal. The first one, you will remember, sent two lesbians packing from the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, because they’d been holding hands in the gallery. This one is the Hemingway scandal. Once again. His story has been rehashed by every Stein detractor. Trust Janet Malcolm and Barbara Will to happily rehash it again.
So, what happened? Let’s recap. Hemingway (A Moveable Feast) allegedly heard Gertrude and Alice behind closed doors,
“I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever.” Who was that someone speaking to “Miss Stein”? “A companion,” according to Hemingway who knew better but preferred to stay clean. He got an earful right then and there.”Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, ‘Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.’”
Poor old Hem, who was already confused. Hadn’t Stein tried to dissuade him from gay relationships (when she preferred the company of gay men to almost any other)? Wasn’t all this terribly corrupting stuff for a good, hard American man? Or was he drunk again? “The colorless alcohol felt good on my tongue,” he begins his tale. Fact is, he was mad at Stein when he reported his little hear-say. He had admitted that he wouldn’t have minded f… the lush, appetizing Gertrude. But instead, Stein and Toklas ended up kicking him out after a drunken visit to the rue de Fleurus. Was he very bruised?
What a horrid, cruel, sadistic relationship these two old dykes must have had! We shudder still. We are afraid for the innocents.
Enter Hans Gallas and his very amusing new book Gertrude and Alice and Fritz and Tom (viewed and reviewed in these pages). A story for kids with big, colorful, hilarious illustrations by cartoonist Tom Hachtman, and with dialogue by Alice and Gertrude, who — true to life — call each other Pussy and Lovey. Pussy, indeed.
Here is Hans:
“My first public reading of the book to a group of 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders in Oakland, CA was to happen a few weeks ago, but I had to postpone it temporarily. However, I did get an e mail from the teacher who had invited me, asking me, at the request of the principal, if I would change ‘Pussy’ to ‘Pussycat’ when I was reading the book to the children, ‘since the word now has developed a lot of negative connotations and our third graders are quite astute about picking up these things.’ My, my the loss of innocence.”
This book will be banned in America! It didn’t help that the illustrations were already cleaned up for kids by eliminating Alice’s ever-present cigarette. Literary history isn’t good for American kids. Literary lesbians aren’t good for American kids. Wouldn’t a relationship between a woman and a cat be much more proper? Let’s clean up that language, please. Clean up Gertrude Stein and make her kid-safe. By all means.
Read on and have a good laugh with Hans Gallas and Tom Hachtman, whose comic-strip-comment on the scandal ends the blog post, brilliantly…

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Barbara Will, Genius, Gertrude and Alice, Gertrude and Alice and Fritz and Tom, Hans Gallas, Janet Malcolm, language, Paris, pussy, pussycat, sex, sex scandal, Tom Hachtman, Words | Leave a comment

Quoting Gertrude Stein