Why Do a Selfie If It Can Be done.

What does a selfie do.

I have refused them so often and left them out so much and did without them so continually that I have come finally to be indifferent to them. …

As I say selfies are servile and they have no life of their own, and their use is not a use, it is a way of replacing one’s interest and I do decidedly like to like my own interest my own interest in what I am doing. A selfie by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it and to me for many years and I still do feel that way about it only now I do not pay as much attention to them, the use of them was positively degrading. Let me tell you what I feel and what I mean and what I felt and what I meant.

Alias: “The Bride of Gertrudestein“ (see Gertrude Follies # 69)

Happy Halloween!

“Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.” (Gertrude Stein, Last Operas and Plays)

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…”

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.

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.