Category Archives: Gertrude Stein

Drawing on the Walls at Shakespeare & Company

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Badaude is the bomb.  But you knew that; she's the one who designed the wonderful new banner for my blog this summer.  And apparently that task was quite inspiring to her, for when she met Sylvia Whitman in September at the Five Dials party (recounted here and here and here and documented here– this one caught me and Badaude sitting on a bench, front and center!) she suggested doing the same thing to Sylvia's wall that she did to my blog! And the result is so fantastic I can't even tell you! Look:

Shakes photo

But I'm not the only one who thinks Badaude's the bomb. BOMB thinks she is too! So Paul Morris interviewed her and you can read it here. An excerpt:

Paul Morris: Your illustrations are an interesting
fusion of image and text. How does your experience as an artist inform
your appreciation for literature in general—and for literary figures in
particular?

Joanna Walsh: [...] My drawing always relates to
writing, whether because I’m responding to a text or mixing my own
writing and pictures. Writers are also “commercial” artists—books have
to sell to a certain number of people in order to be published. This
doesn’t mean that I think “blockbusters” are better than “literary
fiction” because they sell more, but I am interested in the knife-edge
balancing act whereby writers write what they have to in such a way
that enough readers will want to go out and buy a copy.

In drawing the Shakespeare & Company writers—looking at the way
they presented themselves in the reference photos I used-I became
interested in how the image of being, and the story of becoming, a
published writer in Paris was so central to the myth their lives; a
myth so hugely attractive it frequently became their subject matter (Quartet, A Moveable Feast, Tropic of Cancer). This is why I chose the quote from Ulysses
(full excerpt at bottom), hidden in the wallpaper design of the mural,
in which Stephen Dedalus remembers his “Latin Quarter hat,” “puce
gloves,” and other “Paris fads” with which he—and no doubt his
hipster-goatee’d creator—furnished his Paris persona.

Here, on her own blog, she explains what it was like to draw on the walls of a 17th century building. (I made myself useful by erasing her pencil marks, handing her pens, and shelving books in the children's section with Sylvia and Gemma. Hey, if I'm only ever a handmaiden to genius, that's enough for me.)

And here is the text of the wonderful quote from Ulysses that snakes its way through the William Morris-inspired "wallpaper":

“My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want
puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other
devil’s name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: physiques, chimiques et
naturelles. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of
Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone:
when I was in Paris, boul’ Mich’, I used to. Yes, used to carry punched
tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere.
Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner
was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie,
overcoat, nose. Lui, c’est moi. You seem to have enjoyed yourself.”

around the internet on a tuesday on a friday

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I thought for sure I had hit "post" on this but in my haste I think I only saved it as a draft… ah well. Forgive my tardiness!

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Back in the States and back to the grind…

A couple of years ago, N got tickets to a play.  I listened to Noir Désir on my iPod on my way to the theatre.  When I arrived, I found that the play starred Jean-Louis Trintignant, and my stomach flopped over a little bit at the irony.  I mean, what do you do when the singer of one of your favorite bands accidentally beats his girlfriend (the actress Marie Trintignant, daughter of Jean-Louis) to death? Do you go on liking and listening to the band, now that the angst in their songs suddenly seems a little creepy? It’s a tough question, but I’ve chosen to go on loving Noir Désir and not to think about anything except the music.  Now, Cantat is out of prison.  Will Noir Désir go on making music?

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In case you didn’t hear, it was announced last week that Doris Lessing has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, and in celebration, the Guardian has compiled some of her interviews and criticism here. (I guess now I finally do have to read The Golden Notebook)

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My most recent Gridskipper post: Gentry Lane’s fabulous guide to Paris.

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In The New York Review of Books, Michael Kimmelman looks at Janet Malcom’s recent biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. From the very beginning of Kimmelman’s review, I’m interested, not only in the book, but in Malcolm’s preoccupations as a critic.

Toklas recalls how she and Stein hid in an area of provincial eastern
France called Bugey, where they kept a house in the town of Bilignin,
discovered one summer day in 1924 on the way to visit Picasso. When the
war broke out, they wheedled a military pass and drove to Paris,
fetched winter clothes, then settled back in the countryside for the
duration. Toklas’s tone is cheerful. Malcolm, who has made a career of
not taking writers at their word, asks herself what Toklas must be
hiding. Two Jewish Americans in occupied France, and she is reminiscing
about "Restricted Veal Loaf"? Why no mention of their Jewishness,
"never mind [their] lesbianism," she asks.

Malcolm’s book sounds like a necessary corrective to Stein’s and Toklas’s evasiveness, but may still only be the swing of the pendulum. The real work of the critic is of course to question the evasiveness of one’s subject but also to be aware of certain cues to which the critic himself is sensitive; in the case of Malcolm and other critics like her, those markers of marginality, such as Judaism or lesbianism, which critics have recently found to be sources of subversive power, and which those same critics have celebrated in other modernist writers. We all want Toklas to talk about her Jewishness, her lesbianism. But if she does not, we cannot blame her for it– we have to earnestly wonder why she does not. We can’t assume that her opinion of Jewishness or homosexuality resembles ours in the least.

But it sounds like Malcolm makes some good points, and it is on the strength of this observation that I plan to take a good look at the book:

For Malcolm, Stein’s writing [...] struggles constantly with the anxiety of disclosure. Wars I Have Seen,
her engrossing wartime memoir, "is a work of realism struggling against
itself," Malcolm believes. Reality has become so unreal during the war
that the experimental language of modernism suddenly fails Stein.

My own reading of modernism does not see it as a neatly separate category from realism– quite the opposite, in fact; I believe modernist experimentation to be an attempt to take reality to a whole new level– truly, modernism is sur-realism.  And Wars I Have Seen belongs to a very specific, late moment of modernism,  where form is no longer experimental for its own, aesthetic sake, but reflects back on previous experiments, and is left in a void, where everything, and nothing, is possible.