America in the throes of a romantic revolution. If Gertrude and Alice had known! The lesbian pioneers lived their lifelong devotion discreetly but nevertheless quite in the public eye. Nobody who wasn’t half blind could have misunderstood what was going on, even dear young Hemingway who was lusting after Gert.

Creating a heavenly wedding for G &A and inviting them to the big party of American newly-weds was easy: old-fashioned scissors and glue plus Google.

Search # 1: “fat women’s wedding dresses”. (No need to be offended. One of the intimate nicknames in G &A’s love life was “Fatuski”.)

Search # 2: “old-fashioned wedding dresses”.

A few minutes later, I knew how to dress them for the occasion. Queen Elizabeth II was the right frilly thing and body-type to fit Alice in a queenly fashion that would certainly satisfy her king, Gert the First and Only.

Search # 3: Which photograph among the 366 of my book Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures would be understated enough for these two women of wit? Page 139, no doubt. Alice grumpy comme toujours, Gertrude pleased because she just remembered a pleasing quote from her vast body of work.

Now the game for Facebook.

As I had promised 2 books to the 2 first winners who would guess whose wedding dress Alice was wearing in heaven, I didn’t give away how hot on the trail the first guess already was: Kate Middleton. Almost! And zap, right into target with the second guess! Fortunately, this didn’t convince the rest of the players, at least for a while. Some thought I would stay close to home and make up a not-yet-existing-wedding  dress for my life companion Kim (Chernin). (Note to winner Hannah Roche: Kim would look good, too.) In any case, for all my readers who are not on Facebook, here — for your contemplation and chuckles — are the propositions of the sophisticated fashionistas:

Marcel Duchamp in his femme alter ego Rrose Selavy (Duchamp was a friend of G & S and admired Stein’s style).

Pab’s christening gown: G & A were adoring aunties of Picasso’s first-born baby son, although there might  have been a bit of a size problem.

Coco Chanel. Interesting. Maybe there was a sailor collar at the back of her dress, in case…
Liz Taylor: close, as Gertrude and Alice visited Hollywood in 1935 and taught the stars gathered around her how to get as much publicity as she did (see page 183 in my book).

Q.E.: The mystery! Quod Erat… Could there be a D missing? Q.E.D. famously was the title of Stein’s hush-hush lesbian novel of 1903 that caused a big upset in the “marriage.”

And then, so close to home: Diana! Diana whose skirt was so huge it got all crushed in the fairytale coach…

Now Pierre Balmain: if G &A had really been able to marry, you bet Pierre would have designed some good, heavy corduroy wedding suits to two women ahead of their time.

So, congratulations again to the two winners, both from the British Queen’s own country, but one living in Kansas, USA. Look them up and send them thumbs up: http://www.facebook.com/quotinggertrudestein/posts/533944753319915

Alice to Gertrude: “What took them so long?”

Gertrude to Alice: “What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.”

Sources: Renate Stendhal, Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures; Gertrude Stein, Last Operas and Plays. Can you guess whose TRÈS CHIC wedding dress Alice is wearing? The first 2 successful sleuths will get my book!

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!

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.

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

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.”

Aquarie Stein is having another virtual birthday, Feb. 3^rd. 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!

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.

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.