The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein

I knew of Gertrude Stein's poetry (which is the only poetry ever and always to give me a headache), but was unaware she also wrote novels, plays, operas. That she lived in Paris. That she had a medical education from John Hopkins. That her best friend was Pablo Picasso. She knew pretty much everyone who was anyone, and, though I find her personality or something about her inner self to be abrasive and off-putting, her life and her thoughts are very interesting.

And yes, she wrote this "autobiography" of her friend of twenty-five years as a way of writing her own without having to really write her own, because the concept of doing this amused her. anyway...

I will have to look up some of her other work and see how I like it. Or at least how I might be able to use it. I found this book at a library sale quite by accident. I'm glad I read this before her other work and I wish I'd read it before any of her poetry!
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[of Matisse:] Every morning he painted, every afternoon he worked at his sculpture, late every afternoon he drew in the sketch classes from the nude, and every evening he played his violin. (p. 38)

I'm not sure which is the greater dream of mine: to be so organized, or to have so much time to myself!

As she always says of herself, she has a great deal of inertia and once started keeps going until she starts somewhere else. (p. 82)

That sounds a little strange but I think it's very true- the part about starting somewhere else. Or at least I can relate. I don't really ever stop one thing simply by stopping it, but instead and only by starting something else. This goes back to Shostakovich's saying that you can't find a fresh approach, it has to find you, and it can only find you when you have a fresh (new) approach to your life- ie, when you stop doing what you have been doing, and start something (or somehow) else.

She always says that americans can understand spaniards. That they are the only two western nations that can realise abstraction. That in americans it expresses itself by disembodiedness, in literature and machinery, in Spain by ritual so abstract that it does not connect itself with anything but ritual. (p. 91)

Disembodiedness as abstraction. Yes, perfect- and something I must think about more, because I feel something rumbling around in my subconscious in response to this.

But Henry McBride was firm, the best that I can wish you, he always said, is to have no success. It is the only good thing. He was firm about that. (p. 122)

Another point I agree with completely and hope to keep in mind.

Haweis had been fascinated with what he had read in manuscript of The Making of Americans. He did however plead for commas. Gertrude Stein said commas were unnecessary, the sense should be intrinsic and not have to be explained by commas and otherwise commas were only a sign that one should pause and take breath but one should know of oneself when one wanted to pause and take breath. (p. 132)

That is the main aspect of her writing that I noticed in this book: commas, or the lack of them.

How often I have heard her then and since explain that americans are republicans living in a republic which is so much a republic that it could never be anything else. (p. 152)

The maid at the hotel took great interest in my knitting for the soldiers. She said, of course madame knits very slowly, all ladies do. But, said I hopefully, if I knit for years may I not come to knit quickly, not as quickly as you but quickly. No, said she firmly, ladies knit slowly. As a matter of fact I did come to knit very quickly and could even read and knit quickly at the same time. (p. 165)

What a consolation- and inspiration! To think that I could learn to crochet or even knit and still be able to read at the same time! Woo, now I am even more encouraged to practice at crocheting.

[Said Gertrude Stein of a draft of Hemingway's novel:] There is a great deal of description in this, she said, and not particularly good description. Begin over again and concentrate, she said. (p. 213)

Something I need to keep in mind when I write. This novel, and that paragraph, made some of my mistakes as well as my purpose and ability as a writer much clearer to me. Let's hope it sticks.

As she used to explain to Virgil, the Catholic Church makes a very sharp distinction between a hysteric and a saint. The same thing holds true in the art world. There is the sensitiveness of the hysteric which has all the appearance of creation, but actual creation has an individual force which is an entirely different thing. (p. 228)

This is incredibly true. I have seen so many people (and sadly when I was younger I was included sometimes in that number) who think that simply being oversensitive and over reactive is a sign of the genius within or some such nonsense. No. Genius is not tied to drama but to one's own personal power, and personal power is evidenced by being solid and steadfast in what one has to face and courageous in what chooses to do- the exact opposite of the timid and insecure tendency towards hysterics.

Gertrude Stein says that if you are way ahead with your head you naturally are old fashioned and regular in your daily life. And Picasso adds, do you suppose Michael Angelo would have been grateful for a gift of a piece of renaissance furniture, no he wanted a greek coin. (p. 246)

Yes, I often wonder at the nihilism of the modern age, where people have to reinvent the wheel at every turn, just to prove they can do it, I suppose. My own tendency towards old fashioned things these days has nothing to do with me getting older, you see. Not at all. Seriously though, I look more at the really old, and original, ways of doing things- not just the ways I grew up with which are now considered by some to be old fashioned.

(There is a lovely mentioning of the subject of hats on page 14.)
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I read this book from Thursday 21st until Thursday October 28th.

Born To Run, by Christopher McDougall: 3.5 stars

Born To Run, by Christopher McDougall

(eta: I just realized that I went from Of Woman Born, to Born to Run, and completely by coincidence as I got my hands on this one quite by surprise.)

Let's see- I started this one on Saturday, the 16th, and finished it last night, the 19th. Tracking down a mythical people who have kept their traditions alive well into the modern age, and realizing how much there is to learn from them? So much so that you can redefine yourself in a completely empowering way? I really enjoyed it. It inspires me. (Never mind the excitement of extreme sports and a few simply amazing races.)

I've always had problem feet. I've been in pain from my feet for as long as I can remember, even back when I was a little kid. I've tried to compensate for that or help that with all kinds of orthotics and special shoes and gimmicks and gadgets. But after reading this, I'm realizing all these things just made my problems worse. (The only thing I've tried that made a positive difference was doing toe exercises- basically, the opposite of stuffing my feet into ever more cushioning and confining spaces.) After reading this, I'm convinced I know not only how to ease the pain, but heal my feet completely, and also my knees, and lower back, and the headaches as well. And then I can get out there and move freely again. To maybe even run, myself. A wild thought!

But this story is not just about feet, or running.

Our modern feet are much like our modern selves: they ache because they are out of touch, and the more they hurt themselves overcompensating to re-establish that connection, the more we cut them off from the thing that would heal them, and the more they keep overcompensating and hurting themselves. We need to have some faith in ourselves- in and of ourselves- and reconnect with our roots and our world- because sometimes our technology causes our problems instead of healing them, exacerbates our problems instead of mitigating them.
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He seemed to live off the land when he ran, depending on korima, the cornerstone of Tarahumara culture. Korima sounds like karma and functions the same way, except in the here and now. It's your obligation to share whatever you can spare, instantly and with no expectations: once the gift leaves your hand, it was never yours to begin with. (p. 37)

This reminds me of the quote from Faded Sun where it is said that one never gives up what one needs in/to the desert, because the desert will never give it back. This is the other side of that same coin: never give away what you need, but never hold on to what you can spare. Most of my life I've freely given away... everything. I don't have a problem with giving away. But I did have a problem with holding on to what I need. Seeing how the two concepts are related and intertwined- By holding on to everything that I need, I am free to give everything else away; by giving away what I can spare, I am able to hold on to everything I need- somehow just made it click for me.

He turned around and trotted back down. "Okay, man, lesson one. Get right behind me." He started to jog, more slowly this time, and I tried to copy everything he did. My arms floated until my hands were rib-high; my stride chopped down to pitty-pat steps; my back straightened so much I could almost hear the vertebrae creaking.

"Don't fight the trail," Caballo called back over his shoulder. "Take what it gives you. If you have a choice between one step or two between rocks, take three." Caballo has spent so many years navigating the trails, he's even nicknamed the stones beneath his feet: some were ayudantes, the helpers which let you spring forward with power; others are "tricksters," which look like ayudantes but roll treacherously at takeoff; and some are chingoncitos, little bastards just dying to lay you out.

"Lesson two," Caballo called. "Think Easy, Light, Smooth, and Fast. You start with easy, because if that's all you get, that's not so bad. Then work on light. Make it effortless, like you don't give a shit how high the hill is or how far you've got to go. When you've practiced that for so long that you forget you're practicing, you work on making it smoooooooth. You won't have to worry about the last one- you get those three, and you'll be fast."

I kept my eyes on Caballo's sandalled feet, trying to duplicate his odd, sort of tippy-toeing steps. I had my head down so long, I didn't even notice at first that we'd left the forest. (pages 110-111)

Running, Life, same thing...

[T]here was never anything wrong with Jenni that couldn't be fixed by what's wright with Jenni. (p. 200)

Back straight
Knees bent and driving forward
Heels flicking back (p. 213)

[I]t's easy to get outside yourself when you're thinking about someone else. /Scott Jurek (p. 253)

And a note on Charles Bukowski/ Dharma Bums on page 145.
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A note on journalism:

The style of writing (in this book) is much like a magazine article, which is to be expected as the author is a journalist, having worked for the Associated Press and Runner's World magazine, etc. There tends to be more flash and sparkle with journalistic writing than I care for. I don't need to be continually impressed and enticed from word to word, sentence to sentence, with invented drama or hype. I'm looking for the story itself, the coherency of the writing, the connection to the people/subject I'm reading about, to pull me along. And yet, these journalistic kind of books are very popular and well-liked by many for the same reasons they put me off: being snarky, sensationalistic, and self-indulgent. And yes I'm putting Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Woman: An Intimate Geography squarely in that camp. (Also, Early Spring, if you're familiar with that one.)

I really can't stand it. I really, really can't stand it. Well, maybe I can stand it from Dave Barry or Erma Bombeck or Lewis Grizzard, but they write satire and humor. Somehow that's different. You're not supposed to take them seriously- they're being ridiculous; and they're poking fun at themselves as often as at their (additional) subject matter. But with the others, I'm sorry, I didn't pick up those books to be overwhelmed with waves of their oh so obvious talent. If they'd just tell the story without all the tricks that are supposed to keep me reading, maybe their talent (or lack thereof) would speak for itself.

Meh.

That being said, this book, though it read more like a magazine, was very enjoyable. The writing wasn't so full of self-importance that it overrode the story being told. A rare feat, McDougall!

And this story is well worth the read.

Of Woman Born, by Adrienne Rich

Of Woman Born, by Adrienne Rich

Patriarchy is the power of the fathers: a familial-social, ideological, political system in which men- by force, direct pressure, or through ritual, tradition, law, and language, customs, etiquette, education, and the division of labor, determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which everywhere the female is subsumed under the male. It does not necessarily imply that no woman has power, or that all women in a given culture may not have certain powers. (p. 40)

Under patriarchy, I may live in purdah or drive a truck; I may raise my children on a kibbutz or be the sole bread-winner for a fatherless family or participate in a demonstration against abortion legislation with a baby on my back; I may work as a "barefoot doctor" in a village commune in the People's Republic of China, or make my life on a lesbian commune in New England; I may become a hereditary or elected head of state or wash the underwear of a millionaire's wife; I may serve my husband his early morning coffee within the clay walls of a Berber village or march in an academic procession; whatever my status or situation, my derived economic class, or my sexual preference, I live under the power of the fathers, and I have access to only so much of privilege or influence as the patriarchy is willing to accede to me, and only for so long as I will pay the price for male approval. And this power goes much further than laws or customs; in the words of the sociologist Brigitte Berger, "until now a primarily masculine intellect and spirit have dominated in the interpretation of society and culture- whether this interpretation is carried out by males or females... fundamentally masculine assumptions have shaped our whole moral and intellectual history." (p. 41)

Again: some combination or aspect of patriarchal values prevails, whether in an Orthodox Jewish family where the wife mediates with the outer world and earns a living to enable the husband to study Torah;or for the upper-class European or Oriental couple, both professionals, who employ servants for domestic work and a governess for the children. They prevail even where women are the nominal "heads of households". For, much as she may act as the co-equal provider or so-called matriarch within her own family, every mother must deliver her children over within a few years of their birth to the patriarchal system of education, of law, of religion, of sexual codes; she is in fact expected to prepare them to enter that system without rebelliousness or "maladjustment" and to perpetuate it in their own adult lives. (pages 44-45)

Wow.

I'll admit there are some parts that just lost me- I don't see how the quotes fit in etc. - and I'm not sure if it's me or what. But then there are some brilliant passages. Definitely worth reading for those (and how she expands on them). It's nice to see her take on some of the other feminist writers, too, for what it's worth.

>re: Motherhood and Daughterhood

...whatever our rational forgiveness, whatever the individual mother's love and strength, the child in us, the small female who grew up in a male-controlled world, still feels, at moments, wildly unmothered. When we can confront and unravel this paradox, this contradiction, face to the utmost in ourselves the groping passion of that little girl lost, we can begin to transmute it, and the blind anger and bitterness that have repetitiously erupted among women trying to build a movement together [or just living life] can be alchemized. Before sisterhood, there was the knowledge- transitory, fragmented, perhaps, but original and crucial- of mother-and-daughterhood. (p. 226)

Few women growing up in patriarchal society can feel mothered enough; the power of our mothers, whatever their love for us and their struggles on our behalf, is too restricted. And it is the mother through whom patriarchy early teaches the small female her proper expectations. The anxious pressure of one female on another to conform to a degrading and dispiriting role can hardly be termed "mothering", even if she does this believing it will help her daughter to survive.

Many daughters live in rage at their mothers for having accepted, too readily and passively, "whatever comes." A mother's victimization does not merely humiliate her, it mutilates the daughter who watches her for clues as to what it means to be a woman. Like the traditional foot-bound Chinese woman, she passes on her own affliction. The mother's self-hatred and low expectations are the binding-rags for the psyche of the daughter. (pages 246-247)

"I have always gotten more support from men than from women": a cliche of token women, and an understandable one, since we do identify gratefully with anyone who seems to have strengthened us. But who has been in a position to strengthen us? .... Men have been able to give us power, support, and certain forms of nurture, as individuals, when they chose; but the power is always stolen power, withheld from the mass of women in patriarchy. And, finally, I am talking here about a kind of strength which can only be one woman's gift to another, the bloodstream of our inheritance. Until a strong line of love, confirmation, and example stretches from mother to daughter, from woman to woman across the generations, women will still be wandering in the wilderness. (p. 249)

The double messages need to be disentangled. "You can be anything you really want to be" is a half-truth, whatever a woman's class or economic advantages. We need to be very clear about the missing portion, rather than whisper the fearful subliminal message: "Don't go too far." A female child needs to be told, very early, the practical difficulties females have to face in even trying to imagine "what they want to be." ....

"You can be anything you really want to be"- if you are prepared to fight, to create priorities for yourself against the grain of cultural expectations, to persist in the face of misogynist hostility. Interpreting to a little girl, or to an adolescent woman, the kinds of treatment she encounters because she is female, is as necessary as explaining to a nonwhite child reactions based on the color of her skin.

It is one thing to adjure a daughter, along Victorian lines, that her lot is to "suffer and be still," that woman's fate is determined. It is wholly something else to acquaint her honestly with the jeopardy all women live under in patriarchy, to let her know by word and deed that she has her mother's support, and moreover, that while it can be dangerous to move, to speak, to act, each time she suffers rape- physical or psychic- in silence, she is putting another stitch in her own shroud. (pages 251-252)

In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture. Throughout this book I have been thrown back on terms like "unchilded", "childless", or "child-free"; we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself. "Unchilded", "childless" simply define her in terms of a lack; even "child-free" suggests only that she has refused motherhood, not what she is about in and of herself. (p. 253)

That is an issue for me. I have for quite a while been tired of being Wo-Man or Fe-Male and I am no longer a girl. I am not merely a wife or a mother or a daughter. Why have we no word? Besides Person which implies that you have no gender whatsoever and so is false. (woman, btw, comes from wif-man, meaning literally wife of man where man means person. so wife of a person. because women weren't persons.)

Ha, she did mention Tellurian, which is so obscure or obsolete that I didn't think anyone else knew it but me and some other nerdy people. It means "of the earth" and I guess if I HAVE to be defined in relation to something, I'd rather it be the earth. But, yeah, still, for now my name will have to do. Minus the patronymic. (Mia MoonRaven doesn't work for me either.)

>Yet ironically, precisely because they were not bound to the cycle of hourly existence with children, because they could reflect, observe, write, such women in the past have given us some of the few available strong insights into the experience of women in general. Without the un-acclaimed research and scholarship of "childless' women, without Charlotte Bronte (who died in her first pregnancy), Margaret Fuller (whose major work was done before her child was born), without George Eliot, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir- we would all today be suffering from spiritual malnutrition as women.

The "unchilded" woman, if such a term makes any sense, is still affected by centuries-long attitudes- on the part of both women and men- towards the birthing, child-rearing function of women. Any woman who believes that the institution of motherhood has nothing to do with her is closing her eyes to crucial aspects of her situation.

Many of the great mothers have not been biological. ... For centuries, daughters have been strengthened and energized by nonbiological mothers, who have combined a care for the practical values of survival with an incitement towards further horizons, a compassion for vulnerability with an insistence on our buried strengths. It is precisely this that has allowed us to survive; not our occasional breakthroughs into tokendom, not our "special cases", although these have been beacons for us, illuminations of what ought to be. (pages 256-257)

>Mothering and nonmothering have been such charged concepts for us, precisely because whichever we did has been turned against us.

To accept and integrate and strengthen both the mother and the daughter in ourselves is no easy matter, because patriarchal attitudes have encouraged us to split, to polarize, these images, and to project all unwanted guilt, anger, shame, power, freedom, onto the "other" woman. But any radical vision of sisterhood demands that we reintegrate them. (p. 257)

I know no woman- virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate- whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves- for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings. (p. 290)

[Women], in the solitary confinement of a life at home enclosed with young children, or in the struggle to mother them while providing for them single-handedly, or in the conflict of weighing her own personhood against the dogma that says she is a mother, first, last, and always. .... the mothers, if we could look into their fantasies- their daydreams and imaginary experiences- we would see the embodiment of rage, of tragedy, of the overcharged energy of love, of inventive desperation, we would see the machinery of institutional violence wrenching at the experience of motherhood. (p. 285)

"My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness... Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance... And yet at other times I am melted with the sense of their helpless, charming, and quite irresistible beauty- their ability to go on loving and trusting- their staunchness and decency and unselfconsciousness. I love them."

- from Adrienne Rich's journal as a young mother, from the back cover

Regenesis, by C.J. Cherryh

Regenesis by C.J. Cherryh

Mind-boggling.

I was going to reread Cyteen first, and then go straight into Regenesis. But something at the last moment urged me to just read Regenesis first. I think that was the better choice. And I think it was wise to wait this long dreadful wait before reading it, so that some of my excitement could temper a bit.

Cyteen is a seminal work, and written decades ago- Regenesis (its sequel) is not supposed to be exactly like Cyteen, or a mere continuation. I will say so, at least. I like it for what it is, and I'm glad I gave myself a chance to understand it on its own.

After that foray into the birthlabs etc, I'm starting Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born (an irresistible juxtaposition). I hope to reread Cyteen (and Regenesis) sometime this year to see how they do flow together, now that I'm not as likely to directly compare them.

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