{I posted this and the previous 2 titles with cover photos having every ambition of entering texts soon after. Well, the road to good intention doesn't lead to anywhere. Here we are weeks to months later....I stressed myself out with the stack of books I wanted to read over spring break. In typical Jill fashion, I simply gave up. I honestly haven't finished an actual book since the last week of March (I believe). The interim has found me battling ear infections, stressed out "to the MAX!" and barely able to concentrate beyond the length of a moderately sized interweb article. I've bounced between books while finishing nothing.
I went to my trusty heirloom bookshelf and picked out some old standbys. Those have been my nightly reading, and so the next few forthcoming posts will essentially be a quote extravaganza largely excepting examination.}
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tolkas have fascinated me, from afar, for years. I got this mass market edition of the semi-biographical play years ago and finally read it. Combining my loves of scripts with stream of consciousness, this one hooked me immediately...and sent me running to Black & Read to find anything Stein wrote. Expect a review of Three Lives soon.
The lives that intertwined at 27 rue de Fleurus included the Fitzgeralds, Dali, Isadora Duncan, Cezanne, and Gertrude's brother Leo (of whom I am equally enamored)--en route to THE discovery of both Matisse and Picasso. Fascinating stuff. Reading this play I can smell the tea being served; the ingenuity filling the parlor is as palpable as the flair of those first paintings.
"They were a little worried the publishers about my punctuation which they did not consider satisfactory and they sent a courier to Paris to discuss with me the matter of proofreading. But it is proofread I said What about the question marks he said there are no question marks. I said question marks are out of the question. Anybody with any sense knows a question when he sees one and does not need any little marks to tie his shoes for him. Well surely you will want to put in a few more commas he said he kept looking at me and then quickly looking at Alice and then back at me again. I said it is true she is watching you very closely and after he left Alice counted the silverware she was not fond of publishers no."
"Sometimes at the sittings Picasso would discuss his ideas especially those concerned with cubism. You start with an object he would say and then you strip away all the traces of reality from it. There is nothing to fear because the idea will continue to be present and it is the idea not the object that is important. He was talking about painting of course but his ideas were pertinent to my thoughts on literature at the time Well while he was in Spain I finished the book I was writing but it was written in pencil and it was difficult to read and unfortunately typing is one of the things that makes me nervous ... Picasso said and I agreed that at the time ugliness and the confrontation of ugliness in art was beginning to unsettle people's pictures of life just a bit when it began to break and give way to the explosion that was and is the twentieth century. Always before ugliness was an effrontery to traditional esthetics but once those traditions were thrown into question ... A violin is just a thing but if you play it it becomes a feeling and if you paint it it becomes a feeling too it ceases to be a thing then a painting is never the thing that it is a painting of it is a feeling about that thing and so a painting of a violin without a violin in it can still be a painting of a violin and even a good one it is true nonetheless ... I was not interested in the principles of art ... A child with a piece of chalk and a blackboard is a potential Sistine Chapel in a way now that is not nonsense."
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