There’s a Stein quote for every occasion

Hunting down the airplane quote from yesterday in Everybody’s Autobiography, I found another passage I’d marked out of sheer homesickness when I lived in Ann Arbor:

I also lectured in Brooklyn and that was interesting… because I met Marianne Moore and because an attentive young man accidentally closed the door on my thumb and we had to go into a drugstore to have it fixed. It was dirty the drugstore, one of the few things in America that are dirty are the drugstores but the people in them sitting up and eating and drinking coffee and milk that part of the drugstore that was clean that fascinated me. After that I was always going in to buy a detective novel just to watch the people sitting on the stools. It was like a piece of provincial life in a real city. The people sitting on the stools and eating in the drugstore all looked and acted as if they lived in a small country town. You could not imagine them ever being out in the streets of New York nor the drugstore itself being in New York. I never had enough of going into them.

Their own contemporaries

In the past week, I have had both an MRI and a CAT scan (both for entirely unthreatening conditions, worry not). So I feel qualified to tell you that if you have a choice between the two, choose a CAT scan — it’s faster, quieter, and you get to ride back and forth on the little exam table inside something that strongly resembles a donut. The MRI machine, on the other hand, is loud, oppressively small, and takes a lot longer. It did, however, give me time to think about Gertrude Stein. In Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein talks about flying all over America during the book tour for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and looking down from the plane.

Quarter sections make a picture and going over America like that made any one know why the post-cubist painting was what it was. The wandering line of Masson was there the mixed line of Picasso coming and coming again and following itself into a beginning was there and the simple solution of Braque was there…. [I] always wanted the front seat so I could look down and what is the use, the earth does look like that and even if none of them had seen it and they had not very likely had not but since every one was going to see it they had to see it like that.

Or, as she put it in an earlier lecture, “No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept.” Why was I thinking about this? Well, the MRI is, as I said, loud. But it was loud in a particular way — a persistent thunk thunk thunk, with a ch-ch-ch-ch-ch bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp layered on top of it at irregular intervals and varying pitches for the bomp. That is, it sounded a lot like a minimalist composition. It wasn’t a particularly good minimalist piece of music: it was more like a first draft by a novice composer. But it brought home to me how much Reich and Glass and all the rest were completely of their time, in all the ways Stein was talking about. And in the same way that when Stein looked down from an airplane and could see art where others saw an incomprehensible otherness, I owe the hours I’ve spent with Glass and Reich for the ability to find beauty while lying utterly still in a magnetic-resonance imaging chamber for half an hour as my arms and legs slowly fell asleep.

The Pogues, New York 3/16

I had a seriously bipolar week last week — some ridiculously high highs and some nastily low lows — but one of the highest points of all was getting to attend the first New York show of the reunited Pogues’ tour. (Well, not quite all the Pogues reunited. My college friend Kenji would say that the Pogues without Cait O’Riordan is just a bunch of drunk Irish guys, and much as it pains me to admit it, he has a point, except for the part where they’re not all Irish.) Shane MacGowan is heavier now, and has longer hair — he looks kind of like Bono’s older brother, if Bono’s older brother was a toothless alcoholic. I could understand maybe half of what he was saying, and I was doing better than most of the people around me. But he is still a rock star: you couldn’t take your eyes off him when he was on stage. And he can still sing, and he still has that banshee howl. And the band was playing fierce and hard, and they were all happy to be there, and when the audience howled for “Fairytale of New York” Jem Finer’s daughter came out to sing the female part, and she and Shane danced across the stage together while fake snow fell in the Nokia Theater. It was nostalgia, and celebration, and bacchanal and sadness all mixed in together, the way the Pogues have always been, and it was wonderful to be a part of it, even fifteen years later.

Grammar nerds of the world, unite!

I got name-checked on Eschaton, for noting (in comments) that an article Atrios pointed to misquoted Kanye West’s famous “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”* in a way that introduced stereotypically “black” grammatical errors. This can only reinforce my street cred as a massive, massive grammar, spelling, and punctuation nerd. Holla! * One of my favorite throwaway moments in the last Arrested Development episodes was the T-shirt Franklin had on that read “George Bush doesn’t care about black puppets.” Perfect.

Hedda Gabler

Were it not completely sold out, I would encourage everyone I know to go check out the Sydney Theater Company’s production of Hedda Gabler at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Cate Blanchett is acting a smoking hole through the center of the BAM Harvey stage in the title role. Her Hedda is by turns terrifying and trapped, violent and weak, petty and brave — all the contradictions held together in the form of a woman who has had to keep all of her anger and ambition inside, where it has rotted and leaked out as a pestilence. The rest of the cast is fantastic, with a Tesman whom you can actually believe Hedda might have convinced herself she could be satisfied, and a completely unrecognizable Hugo Weaving playing Judge Brock as an utterly charming menace — a combination, I realized when I thought of it, of his two most common screen personae. I was riveted to the stage by Blanchett’s performance most of all, and in no small part because I could not remember how the play ended. I haven’t read the thing in at least ten years, since I took a seminar in grad school on gender and the 1890s with Martha Vicinus. Vicinus is aptly immortalized in James Hynes’s novel The Lecturer’s Tale as a vampire turned department chair, about which the less said the better. She was also the only professor I ever had, in my all-too-lengthy education, who refused to approve a paper topic that was appropriate for the class because she just wasn’t interested (a New Historicist reading of James’s Portrait of a Lady: she told me she didn’t like James, so he was out of bounds. For a class on gender in the 1890s. Sound effect: my head exploding). So my memory of the class, and the rest of the reading, tends to be colored by her ability to suck the life out of the material we did cover. There was nothing bland about this production, though, and it added a lot to my enjoyment in the end to be watching it half-blind: for all the “aha, right, here we are” of the guns coming out in the first act, there was a “holy shit, that’s right, she destroys it” in the last. I had thought about seeing the awesome-sounding Heddatron before this (it has, sadly, already closed) but I’m glad I didn’t: I got to feel the force of Blanchett’s performance, and the vivid ferocity of the production, without newer memories cluttering my view. Although I will admit, I do find myself wanting to reread Hynes, or at least the opening department meeting scene…