Quoting Gertrude Stein

April walk on memory lane. Exactly 65 years ago, Gertrude and Alice were back in California for the first time since the beginning of the century. On April Fools Day 1935, they were invited to a Hollywood party where they met Charlie Chaplin, Collette Goddard, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Anita Loos and many other stars. “After the dinner all those people were seated in front of me , and I did not know what it was all about or what they wanted, and finally one blurted out, ‘What we want to know is how do you get so much publicity?’ So I told them, ‘By having such a small audience. If that small audience really believes, they make a big noise, and a big audience makes no noise at all.’”
On April 8, having pioneered renting a car, they drove into San Francisco where they stayed at the elegant Mark Hopkins Hotel. Gertrude lectured on “Narration“: “It is a rather curious thing that it should take a hundred years to change anything that is to change something, it is the human habit to think in centuries and centuries are more or less a hundred years and that makes a grandfather a grandmother to a grandson or a granddaughter if it happens right and it often does happen right…
I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do when they live where they have to live that is where they have come to live which of course they do do.”
She also talked about “How Writing Is Written,” “Pictures,” and “Poetry and Grammar” at Stanford, the San Francisco Women’s City Club, Cal Berkeley and Mills College, Oakland.
“My lectures are to be a simple way to say that if you understand a thing you enjoy it and if you enjoy a thing you understand it,” she explained on the Pathé newsreel about her America tour.
Alice liked the tour so much that she wanted to live in America again. But Gertrude preferred Paris. In Oakland, she had seen that the wild, romantic 10-acres land of her childhood home, where she and her older brothers used to roam, largely unsupervised, was built over. It was all gone: “There is no there there.”
On the 19th, they flew back to Chicago for their final two weeks in America.

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. Continue reading →

This is a photographic appetizer of favorite pics of Gertrude Stein. Link

Male anthologies, oh wonder! Some comfort is needed when the world stands on its head (men’s feet on top of women’s heads, again).

Let’s turn to our sexy forebears and get a good laugh out of this yet unpublished cartoon by Tom Hachtman (author of the comics book “Gertrude’s Follies”). Not surprisingly, this cartoon was some time ago refused by the New Yorker. In happy memory of Gertie who loved repeating I am repeating my blog post # 15 with Stein’s 10 comments on the Publishers Weekly debacle:
“Their origin and their history patriarchal poetry their origin and their history patriarchal poetry their origin and their history. …
Patriarchal poetry is the same as Patriotic poetry is the same as patriarchal poetry is the same as Patriotic poetry is the same as patriarchal poetry is the same.
Patriarchal poetry is the same.”
As I said in my comment to the New York Times blog ( http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/2010s-best-are-all-men/#preview) all you have to do is replace the keywords in this remarkably lucid quote from Stein’s “Bee Time Vine” with “Publishers Weekly 10 Best Books of 2009″ and “Houghton Harcourt Mifflin’s 2010 Best American series” and you get the rhyme.
Cheers!

A very swell Valentine from Gertrude to Alice is in order. It will warm your hearts. It is from “Portraits and Prayers”:
“When you hear her snore
It is not before you love her.
You love her so that to be her beau is very lovely.
She is sweetly there and her curly hair is very
lovely.
She is sweetly here and I am very near and that is very
lovely.
She is my tender sweet and her little feet are
stretched out well which is a treat and very
lovely.
Her little tender nose is between her little eyes
which close and are very lovely.
She is very lovely and mine which is very
lovely.”
It would be hard to find a funnier, more tender love poem than this one in modernism. But that reminds me: you will find a another very lovely homage to Alice from She Writer Gerry Miller if you go to my post # 32 and scroll down to the most recent comment.

More about the yearly conference of the American Literature Association (ALA)

http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/english/ala2/american_literature_association_2010.htm

dedicated to Gertrude Stein, taking place in San Francisco from May 27 to May 30:

The link tells you about where and where to stay. A particular focus of the conference will be Gertrude Stein and the detective novel. My talk is titled:

“Geographical and Language Landscapes: Translating Blood on the Dining Room Floor“

In my next blogs, I will tell you more about my adventures with Stein’s one and only detective novel.

Stay tuned.