Under the Glass Bell

D.H. Lawrence

I read Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence last week. I dog-eared page 30 because of an amazing passage. So well written. Such great imagery.

Birkin, thinking about race or national death, watched his glass being filled with champagne. The bubbles broke at the rim, the man withdrew, and feeling a sudden thirst at the sight of the fresh wine, Birkin drank up his glass.

The words "The bubbles broke at the rim" bring the same translucent yellow glass of champagne into my head each time I read them. Such simple language, but so descriptive.

I haven't blogged much lately because I hate to whine when I'm blogging. God knows, I really have nothing to complain about, but I tend to go into super-whiner mode around move time.

The move is set for December 3rd. While we own the home, the previous owners are renting from us for the month of November. We should have keys and access to the house late next week. B and I are beside ourselves with excitement.

Our dear friends C&M had their baby two nights ago. B and I visited them in the hospital last night. Baby L is just gorgeous. Tons of curly, curly black hair. The new family is all doing well. Baby L. had a fever when born, so he is being kept in the special care nursery. We visited him in that nursery and were surrounded with teeny, tiny just-born human beings. The ten minutes we spent in the nursery left us both dumb-founded at the miracle of life. New life emerges every day. And thirty years from now the primarily instict-driven little creatures in front of us will be as complex and evolved as we are. Amazing to think about.

All week I've been strategizing about getting back into yoga. I do a couple of at-home yoga workouts each week, but it's not the same as going to class. There's actually a studio a half a block away from the new house that I'm going to try. I'm just not moving my body enough.

Off to focus on work today. The weekend will be full of weeding out our belongings and packing.

PS. We sold the condo. We close December 16th. Things are getting wrapped up neatly.

Gertrude Stein

I became interested in Gertrude Stein after reading a New Yorker article last May. Unfortunately, I have lost my copy, but the article fascinated me.

The crux of the article:

1. Gertrude Stein was an American writer who lived in France from the early 1900s until her death shortly after WWII. That means she was in Paris during both world wars.

2. Gertrude Stein was Jewish.

3. Gertrude Stein was a lesbian living who lived with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, for over 30 years.

4. Stein was known for a no bullshit attitude and wrote extensively about herself, her family and her friends. She wrote extremely personal accounts of her life.

5. Despite that, she wrote nothing about being a lesbian or a Jew living in occupied France throughout the holocaust.

I thought that strange and have been interested in her since. The first book of hers I read was "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas". It's not typical of her style. But I loved it because it's clever. Gertrude had been bugging Alice for years to write an autobiography. She never got around to it, so Gertrude wrote it for her. Thus, it's Gertrude speaking in her lovers' voice writing her lovers' story. Basically, it's Stein writing about herself, but getting away with building herself up to be a super-hero. Really funny!

But even better, Stein is one of those fabulously secure old birds who has an opinion about everyone and everything and is not afraid to blab about it. She had great friends. As one of the first patrons of the cubist art movement, she became close friends with Picasso, Matisse and scores of other interesting people. We get to hear about all of it.

Stein kept an atelier (parlor?) across the hall from her living quarters. Every Saturday night, artists and writers and other patrons of the arts would show up to hang out and scope out her art collection, which she hung higgledy, piggledy all over the walls of her atelier.

When Stein was working on a project, she wrote at night and slept during the day. She viewed herself as introducing cubism into writing. Most of her work seems unintelligable to the untrained eye. It's dense and hard to read. She left sentence structure and punctuation behind. She was more interested in rhythm and sound and repetition.

Here's an example:

From "Tender Buttons" written in 1914. [This was the book in which Stein first started experimenting w/ her non-traditional style of writing. She would list a word and then write what followed.]

"ROASTBEEF.

In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the evening there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence and entirely mistaken there is pinching. All the standards have steamers and all the curtains have bed linen and all the yellow has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes sand.

Very well. Certainly the length is thinner and the rest, the round rest has a longer summer. To shine, why not shine, to shine, to station, to enlarge, to hurry the measure all this means nothing if there is singing, if there is singing then there is the resumption."

For more info about Gertrude Stein visit:

TenderButtons.com

or ask to borrow one of my Stein books.