Vis-À-Vis: “Writing On The City, Writing On The Margins”

The G2 Gallery in Venice, California was the setting for the second Vis-À-Vis panel of the day. On the second floor of this venue, the audience was seated in the “Visions of the Arctic” color photography exhibition area. It was a larger space than the first panel’s venue and the established seating was adequate. However, the event was running behind schedule and the panel session began about a half hour later than expected. Before the panel began, copies of “Fiction France: A Selection of French Contemporary Fiction To Be Read And Translated” dated March 2009 were handed out to the audience.

This second panel’s authors were James Frey (Bright Shiny Morning), Richard Lange (This Wicked World), and Jean Rolin (Christians in Palestine) and the panel moderator was Olivier Barrot. Once again the panel focus was on the reading of excerpts from the authors’ works. James Frey read an excerpt from his book Bright Shiny Morning. Frey, who used to live in Venice, California from 1995 to 2002, said that his book has no single protagonist or story. He also revealed that about seventy-five percent of the statistics in the book are accurate with the remaining twenty-five percent being inaccurate (he made them up to serve his own purposes with the novel). The question then becomes, does Frey tell the reader which of the statistics are accurate and which are inaccurate?

Next, instead of from This Wicked World, Jean Rolin read in French, an excerpt from “Culver City”, a short story from Richard Lange’s Dead Boys. Then Lange read that same excerpt in English. Lange had attended film school at the University of Southern California, but discovered he did not enjoy the collaborative nature of film making and turned to writing. Los Angeles is the city that Lange really loves.

Finally, Jean Rolin read his entry in “Fiction France” (mentioned above), which is an excerpt from Un Chien Mort Après Lui (A Dead Dog After Him), while the French-reading people in the audience followed along in the publication. Rolin is in Los Angeles learning how to get around using the public transportation system. He recounted his travels from Los Angeles to Calabasas and from Long Beach to Malibu via bus and rail, remarking on the length of time it took to complete those two journeys. Rolin is doing this public transportation activity as part of his preparation for his next work. Besides, the only car he can drive is a Renault Ford and there probably aren’t too many of them in Los Angeles.

It was Jean Rolin’s book Christians in Palestine that I bought at the end of the session. This is a new subject for me, but sure to give a perspective on the Middle East not usually known. Unfortunately Jean Rolin had left by the time I bought the paperback, so I was unable to have him sign the book or talk to him. As I am also a taker of public transportation, I wanted to share my views of the bus traveler’s life in Los Angeles. Oh well, perhaps someday we’ll meet on a, sometimes inaccurately named, Rapid bus. Until then – Bon Voyage!


Images:
Left: Front cover of Bright Shiny Morning from the website visavisla.blogspot.com
Center: Front cover of This Wicked World from the website visavisla.blogspot.com

Right: Front cover of Christians in Palestine from the website visavisla.blogspot.com

Maria Tatar – 1945 – still living as of this post

Introduction

Remember the fairy tales of your childhood - Rumpelstiltskin, The Golden Goose, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, The Fisherman and His Wife, et. al.? Well, welcome to adulthood and the truth behind the “Once upon a time…they lived happily ever after” stories. In The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar provides insights to the tales, in all their variety, published by the Brothers Grimm, as well as folklore in general. Fairy tales as you never knew them. Fairy tales as they never were.

Dedication in The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales
“For Daniel & Lauren”

Excerpt from the chapter FACT And FANTASY: The Art of Reading Fairy Tales in The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales

“One of the chief sources of irritation for the interpreter of fairly tales is the nature of folklore sources. For nearly every tale, there are at least a dozen versions, in some cases hundreds of extant variants. In other words, rather than a single, stable literary text in which even the finest points of detail may function as bearers if significance, we have an infinite number of corrupt “texts,” spoken and written, each representing one version of a single tale type, and an imperfect version at that. No matter how gifted the transcriber of a tale is, he cannot fully succeed in capturing and recreating the spirit of an oral performance. Much s fairy tales invite interpretation, the facts of their origin and diffusion imply the impossibility of textually grounded interpretation. Even the anthropologist who can go straight to the source, observe the teller, study the community in which a tale flourishes, and record that tale still has nothing more than a single version, one no more and no less authoritative than other oral variants….

When we read and interpret a fairy tale, it is important to bring to it some knowledge of national and international variants of the tale. Once we realize that German female Cinderellas did not outnumber male Cinderellas until the eighteenth century, we look at the Grimms’ version of the story with different eyes. The discovery of male Cinderellas and Snow Whites in modern Turkish folklore invites further meditations and investigations. That Russian folklore has a male Sleeping Beauty reminds us that we must show caution in drawing generalizations about female developmental patterns on the basis of that plot. And we are obliged to think twice about male hero patterns when we come across a collection of tales depicting heroines who carry out tasks normally put to male heroes alone or who denounce fathers too weak to protect them from evil-minded stepmothers.”


Yesterday’s writer – Gloria Steinem
Tomorrow’s writer – Fay Weldon

Source: Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-691-01487-6. Excerpts: pages 42 and 47

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales
Center: Maria Tatar from the website people.fas.harvard.edu

Gloria Steinem – Sunday 25 March 1934 – still living as of this post

Introduction

Don’t remember when I first heard of Gloria Steinem, this icon of the feminist movement. There was a time when I regularly read the publication she founded, Ms. Magazine, but it has been years since I’ve picked up an issue. In any case, Gloria Steinem has been involved in all aspects of feminism since the late Twentieth century and her collection of essays in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions presents the various topics associated with the second feminist wave.


Excerpt from the chapter Words and Change in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“The nature of work has been a major area of new understanding, beginning with the word itself. Before feminism, work was largely defined as what men did or would do. Thus, a working woman was someone who labored outside the home for money, masculine-style. Though still alarmingly common, the term is being protested, especially by homemakers who work harder than any other class of worker, and are still called people who “don’t work.” Feminists have always tried to speak of work inside the home or outside the home, of salaried or unsalaried workers. Attributing a financial value to work in the home would go a long way toward making marriage an equal partnership, as the Equal Rights Amendment would also do, and toward ending the semantic slavery inherent in the phrase women who don’t work.

It would also begin to untangle the double-role problem identified in the sixties-that is, the double burden of millions of women who work both inside and outside the home-by defining human maintenance and home care as a job in itself; a job that men can and should do as well as women.

Equal pay for equal work, the concept with which we entered the sixties, fell short of helping women in the mostly female, nonunionized jobs of the pink-collar ghetto-another new term. Blue-collar workers, who are overwhelmingly male, usually earn far more than workers in mostly female jobs. What did equal pay do for the nurse, for instance, who was getting the same low salary as the woman working next to her? Equal pay for comparable work has become the new goal, and comparability studies are going forward on the many jobs done largely by men that require less education and fewer skills but still get more pay than jobs done largely by women.”

Yesterday’s writer – Zadie Smith
Tomorrow’s writer – Maria Tatar

Source: Steinem, Gloria. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983. ISBN 0-03-063236-6. Excerpt: page 155

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

Center: Gloria Steinem from the website feminist.com

Anaïs Nin – Saturday 21 February 1903 – Friday 14 January 1977

Introduction

A. Nin
Anon
A Nun
Non! Non!

The little bit of alliterate silliness above was written by me sometime in the early 1990s. And sometime earlier, a friend told me about the many diaries of Anaïs Nin, which I promptly began to read – starting with The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume One 1931-1934. People who manage to record their lives for any substantial length of time are incredible. Such discipline. I keep a journal very infrequently – the last stretch of time I wrote down was a five-day trip I took to San Francisco in December of 2008. No journal writing by me since then.


Excerpt from [Winter, 1931-1932] in The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume One 1931-1934

“I had a sense of preparation for a love to come. Like the extension of canopies, the unrolling of ceremonial carpets, as if I must first create a marvelous world in which to house it, in which to receive adequately this guest of honor.

It is in this mood of preparation that I pass through the house, painting a wall through which stains of humidity show, hanging a lamp where it will throw Balinese shadow plays, draping a bed, placing logs in the fireplace.

Every room is painted a different color. As if there were one room for every separate mood: lacquer red for vehemence, pale turquoise for reveries, peach color for gentleness, green for repose, grey for work at the typewriter.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension.

But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.

Unlike Madame Bovary, I am not going to take poison. I am not sure that being a writer will help me escape from Louveciennes. I have finished my book D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study. I wrote it in sixteen days. I had to go to Paris to present it to Edward Titus for publication. It will not be published and out by tomorrow, which is what a writer would like when the book is hot out of the oven, when it is alive within one’s self. He gave it to his assistant to revise.

As soon as I go to Paris too often, my mother looks disapprovingly out of her window, and does not wave good-bye. She looks, at times, like the old women who raise their curtains to stare at me when I take Banquo for a walk. My brother Joaquin plays the piano continuously, as if he would melt the walls of the house.

I take walks along the railroad tracks on bad days. But as I have never been able to read a timetable, I never walk here at the right time and I get tired before the train comes to deliver me from the difficulties of living, and I walk back home. Does this fascination for a possible accident come from the traumatic time when I missed such a death as a child? We had a servant in Neuilly (when I was two years old, and my brother Thorvald just born). My father must have seduced her and then forgotten hear. Anyway, she sought revenge. She took my brother and me on an outing and left the carriage, and me beside it, in the middle of the railroad track. But the signal gateman saw us, and as he had seven children of his own, he took a chance on his own life and rushed out in time to kick the carriage out of the way and carry me off in his arms. The event remained in our memory. I still remember the beds covered with toys for the seven children of the man who saved our lives.”


Yesterday’s writer – Anne McCaffrey
Tomorrow’s writer - Michèle Roberts

Source: Nin, Anaïs. The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume One 1931-1934. Harvest Book, 1966. ISBN 0-15-626025-5. Excerpt: pages 4-6

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume One 1931-1934

Center: Anaïs Nin from the website en.wikipedia.org

Katharine Hepburn – Sunday 12 May 1907 – Sunday 29 June 2003

Introduction

All right, Kate Hepburn’s life accomplishments are in the area of acting, not writing; but trying one’s hand in a different area, even later in life, can produce unexpected good results such as The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind. Thoroughly enjoyed Kate’s autobiographical memoir of life on the set of the Oscar-winning film, "The African Queen".

Dedication in The Making of the African Queen

“To Mother and Dad”

Excerpt from The Making of the African Queen

“Leopoldville, practically on the Equator, was our first destination. Heat—-damp---a barrage of amateur photographers---long flat-field-flat-town---very kind people. Heat—-hotel---French-speaking Belgians-—no panes of glass in windows-—porches—-high ceilings—blinds-—mosquito nets over beds-—painted cement floors-—dark, spare bathroom—-watch the bugs-—watch the water-—thoughtful people-—took care of us afternoon and evening. We went to bed early. Up at 4:00 a.m. And off again.

Stanleyville. Belgian Congo. Peter Viertel met us. One hour before, John Huston had taken off for our village at Biondo. Did you hear what I said? One hour before. We had flown halfway around the world to get to him. And one hour before, he had left on a private plane for our camp, which was just being completed—south-—down the Congo River about eight hours by rail and then west into the jungle by car another forty miles and no telephone. I can’t describe my emotions. You see, I didn’t know any of these people. The Bogarts seemed sweet but I didn’t know them. Peter Viertel? Well, I knew his mother, Salka Viertel, and he seemed nice. But gosh, I couldn’t be entirely honest with him. Not only had Huston gone to Biondo but he had taken his guns with him. Not the script! To this day he has never told me why he left. I suppose he was absolutely horrified at the thought of beginning the picture, and the sight of us was the knell of doom. It was an utterly piggish thing to do and it makes me mad to think of it even now—goddamn—goddamn….

If Peter Viertel, the writer, had not met us, no one would have. Dear Peter Viertel. He saved my sanity-—he sort of took me over and filled my time with golf and trips here and there and talk about the script. Peter Viertel was an absolute angel to me-—to everyone. Helpful—kind-—and a damned good writer. He eventually wrote a fascinating book about two men, White Hunter, Black Heart, sort of inspired by this experience. Thank God he was there.”


Yesterday’s writer – Lillian Hellman
Tomorrow’s writer – P. D. James

Source: Hepburn, Katharine. The Making of The African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind. Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. ISBN 0-394-56272-0. Excerpt: pages 21-23

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The Making of The African Queen

Center: Katharine Hepburn from the website imdb.com

Lillian Hellman – Tuesday 20 June 1905 – Saturday 30 June 1984

Introduction

Discovered Lillian Hellman through reading her first autobiography, An Unfinished Woman (like the title). Haven’t read or seen any of her plays; but I did read her subsequent autobiography, Penitmento: A Book of Portraits, and saw the film Julia, which is based on the portrait of the same name in her book.


Foreword from Pentimento: A Book of Portraits

“Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter “repented,” changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.

That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged now and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.”

Excerpt from Theatre in Pentimento: A Book of Portraits

“It is strange to me that so many people like to listen to so many other people talk about the theatre. There are those who talk for large fees or give it away at small dinner parties and often their stories are charming and funny, but they are seldom people who have done much solid work. You are there, you are good in the theatre, you have written or directed or acted or designed just because you have and there is little that you can or should be certain about because almost everything in the theatre contradicts something else. People have come together, as much by accident as by design, done the best they can and sometimes the worst, profited or not, gone their way vowing to see each other the next week, mean it, and wave across a room a few years later.

The manuscript, the words on the page, was what you started with and what you have left. The production is of great importance, has given the play the only life it will know, but it is gone, in the end, and the pages are the only wall against which to throw the future or measure the past.”


Yesterday’s writer – Lorraine Hansberry
Tomorrow’s writer – Katharine Hepburn

Source: Hellman, Lillian. Pentimento: A Book of Portraits. Signet, 1974. Foreword: page 1, Excerpt: page 125

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Pentimento: A Book of Portraits

Center: Lillian Hellman from MD, March 1974

Lorraine Hansberry – Monday 19 May 1930 – Tuesday 12 January 1965

Introduction

Though I often have to confess that “Yes, I’ve seen the movie and no, I haven’t read the book”. In the case of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin In The Sun, I can say that “Yes, I’ve seen the movie and yes, I’ve read the play”. Although the play is her best-known work, it is Lorraine’s autobiography, To Be Young, Gifted And Black, that is the focus here. I will never write a comprehensive autobiography (although perhaps a selective memoir or two), so I do respect anyone who willingly presents their whole life to the world.

Excerpt from Chicago: Southside Summers in To Be Young, Gifted And Black

“For some time now-I think since I was a child-I have been possessed of the desire to put down the stuff of my life. That is a commonplace impulse, apparently, among persons of massive self-interest; sooner or later we all do it. And, I am quite certain, there is only one internal quarrel: how much of the truth to tell? How much, how much; how much! It is brutal, in sober uncompromising moments, to reflect on the comedy of concern we all enact when it comes to our precious images!

Even so, when such vanity as propels the writing of such memoirs is examined, certainly one would wish at least to have some boast of social serviceability on one’s side. I shall set down on these pages what shall seem to me to the truth of my life and essences…which are to be found, first of all, in the Southside of Chicago, where I was born….

All travelers to my city should ride the elevated trains that race along the back ways of Chicago. The lives you can look into!

I think you could find the tempo of my people on their back porches. The honesty of their living is there in the shabbiness. Scrubbed porches that sag and look their danger. Dirty gray wood steps. And always a line of white and pink clothes scrubbed so well, waving in the dirty wind of the city.

My people are poor. And they are tired. And they are determined to live.

Our Southside is a place apart: each piece of our living is a protest.”


Yesterday’s writer – Edith Hamilton
Tomorrow’s writer – Lillian Hellman

Source: Hansberry, Lorraine. To Be Young, Gifted And Black. Signet, 1970. ISBN 0-451-11080-3. Excerpt: page 45

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of To Be Young, Gifted And Black

Center: Lorraine Hansberry from the website en.wikipedia.org

Mollie Gregory – still living as of this post

Introduction

It was in 2003 that I first attended the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books which was held at UCLA. Because of my interest in film, on the second day of the two-day event, I went to a panel discussion titled “Women in Hollywood” in which Mollie Gregory participated, along with Norma Barzman, Cari Beauchamp, and Lynda Obst. This is from my journal: “Went to the book signing and decided to buy Mollie Gregory’s book “Women Who Run The Show”. When Mollie signed my book, she asked me what I did. I said…for art I did black and white photography….she mentioned two women in the book I should read.” – personal journal, Sunday 27 April 2003. In my copy of Women Who Run The Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood, Mollie wrote: “For Adrean Good luck in all your pursuits! Mollie Gregory April 27 2003.”

Excerpt from Beachhead: The 1970s in Women Who Run The Show

“It felt like a beachhead. Certainly each woman fought and struggled hard in different ways in a kind of war. “Women working today have never been in battle, but we were,” one woman, an entertainment lawyer, said. “I deserved war pay.”

1973 might as well be a century ago, so much has changed.

Before 1973, employment want ads were separated into jobs for men and women. In some states women could not invest in stocks without their husband’s written approval. Most women went to work in high heels and skirts. Society still frowned on women and men living together without benefit of a marriage license, “single parent” and “significant other” were unknown tags to define your personal setup, and baby boomers were a long way from retirement. Abortion was illegal and often dangerous. Face-lifts were something only movie stars did.

There were three networks-ABC, NBC, and CBS-and seven major film studios (Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Columbia, United Artists, MGM and Universal). A few independent producers turned out shows and films so constantly they resembled mini-studios. We went to movies in theaters and watched shows on television. If we missed a TV show, it was gone until rerun time. Video cassettes, VCRs, and personal computers did not exist; neither did CDs, laser discs, Home Box Office, CNN, or Blockbuster.

In January 1973, the Supreme Court made two momentous decisions: ruling on Roe v. Wade, the Court made first trimester abortions legal; it also declared in another case that job advertisements could not specify gender. Imagine scanning an ad for a mechanic that did not specify men only-or a cosmetics sales position not restricted to women. Reading those ads, imagination began to wander outside traditional limits for, perhaps, the first time.”

Author’s Note in Women Who Run The Show

“This book is based on more than 125 interviews conducted mainly in Los Angeles, in person and by telephone. I have also used secondary materials-books, magazine and newspaper articles, and some unpublished studies-to fix events by date, and to augment facts related in the interviews. But the thrust of the book relies on the candor and the memory of those interviewed, their sense of their own experiences, their point of view; their accounts are both factual and subjective, a cousin, perhaps, of the oral history. When accounts differed with others, I have noted it, but generally recollections did not differ much where they interconnected. Some of the women, and men, interviewed, did not want their remarks on the record, or asked that a portion of their remarks by kept confidential; therefore, some comments are noted as “anonymous.” Most interviews were done entirely on the record.”

Yesterday’s writer – Doris Kearns Goodwin
Tomorrow’s writer – Edith Hamilton

Source: Gregory, Mollie. Women Who Run The Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood. St. Martin’s Press, 2002. ISBN 0-312-30182-0. Excerpt: pages 1-2. Author’s Note: page 379.

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Women Who Run The Show
Center: Mollie Gregory from the website molliegregory.net
Right: Signed title page of my personal copy of Women Who Run The Show

Doris Kearns Goodwin – Monday 4 January 1943 – still living as of this post

Introduction

I had vaguely heard of Doris Kearns Goodwin in an academic context (she is an Historian). However, it was as an interviewee in Ken Burn’s excellent documentary film, Baseball (the sequel, The Tenth Inning is scheduled to air on PBS in the Fall of 2010), that Doris’s name has stuck with me. Doris is a baseball fan and in Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir, she recounts her childhood love for the Brooklyn Dodgers. As a baseball fan myself, I enjoyed the story of how her love of baseball evolved. I have been a Boston Red Sox fan all my life (Red Sox Box) and Doris became a Red Sox fan in her adulthood.

Dedication in Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

“In memory of my parents MICHAEL AND HELEN KEARNS and to my sisters, CHARLOTTE AND JEANNE”

Excerpt from CHAPTER ONE of Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

“ON A SULTRY FRIDAY evening that same summer, after months of listening to games on the radio, I saw my first game at Ebbets Field. As my father and I walked up the cobblestone slope of Bedford Avenue and approached the arched windows of the legendary brick stadium, he explained how, as a boy, he had watched the ballpark being built, since the place where he had been sent to live after his parents died was only two blocks away. He was at the site in 1912, when Dodger owner Charles Ebbets pushed a shovel into the ground to begin the excavation. And when the park opened a year later, he was in the bleachers watching the first official game, against the Philadelphia Phillies. He had seen the Dodgers win their first two pennants in 1916 and 1920, only to lose to the Red Sox and the Indians. He had sustained his love affair with “dem Bums” through the frustrating period of the thirties, when he Dodgers were stuck at the bottom of the division, into the happier era of the forties, when under General Manager Branch Rickey they began to look like a championship team. And now my own pilgrimage was about to begin.

The marble rotunda at the entrance to the shrine looked like a train station in a dream, with dozens of gilded ticket windows scattered around the floor. The floor tiles were embellished with baseball stitches, and in the center of the domed ceiling hung an elaborate chandelier composed of a dozen baseball bats. As we started through a tunneled ramp into the stadium, my father told me that I was about to see the most beautiful sight in the world. Just as he finished speaking, there it was: the reddish-brown diamond, the impossibly green grass, the stands so tightly packed with people that not a single empty seat could be seen. I reached over instinctively to hold my father’s hand as we wended our way to seats between home plate and first base, which, like the thousands of seats in this tiny, comfortable park, were so close to the playing field that we could hear what the ballplayers said to one another as they ran onto the field and could watch their individual gestures and mannerisms as they loosened up in the on-deck circle. There, come to earth, were the heroes of my imagination, Snider and Robinson and the powerful-looking Don Newcombe; and there were the villains-the “hated New York Giants,” an epithet that was to us a single word-Monte Irvin, Sheldon Jones, and the turncoat Leo Durocher.”

Excerpt from the EPILOGUE of Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

“Although time and events outdistanced and reconciled my personal losses, my anger over O’Malley’s treason still persisted. At Colby College and in my first year at Harvard-where I would teach for almost a decade before leaving to become a full-time historian-I refused to follow baseball, skipping over the sports pages with their accounts of alien teams called the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants. Then, in my second year of studying for my doctorate, a young man invited me to Fenway Park. Allowing my desire for his companionship to overcome my principled reluctance, we took the subway to Kenmore Square in Boston, and together we walked up Lansdowne Street to the park. There it was again: the entrance up the darkened ramp disclosing an expanse of amazing green, the fervent crowd contained in a stadium scaled to human dimensions, the players so close it almost seemed that you could touch them, the eccentric features of an old ballpark constructed to fit the contours of the allotted space. I watched the players, the dirt scars which marked the base paths, the knowledgeable fans shouting their imprecations and exhortations.

For years I had managed to stay away. I had formed the firmest of resolutions. I had given myself irrefutable reasons, expressed the most passionate of rejections. But I could not get away. Addiction or obsession, love or need, I was born a baseball fan and a baseball fan I was fated to remain.”


Yesterday’s writers – Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Tomorrow’s writer – Mollie Gregory

Source: Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir. Touchstone, 1998. ISBN 0-684-84795-7. Dedication: page 7, Excerpt: pages 45-48, Epilogue excerpt: pages 253-254.

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir
Center: Doris Kearns Goodwin from the website achievement.org

Sandra M. (Mortola) Gilbert – Sunday 27 December 1936 – still living as of this post and Susan Gubar – 1944 – still living as of this post

Introduction

The first volume (The War of the Words) of Sandra M. Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s three-volume opus – overall title No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century - on women and writing, was a present from a long-time friend, Kathryn. I was so inspired by this first volume, that on a visit to London, I bought volumes two (Sexchanges) and three (Letters From the Front) from a bookstore on famed Charing Cross Road. My experience with actual writing is a hate/love one (hated writing papers in college/loved the positive feedback). Even though I am primarily a visual woman, I do enjoy a well-turned phrase and without the pressure of academic deadlines, I someday may turn some phrases – well I hope.

Dedication in The War of the Words

“In memory of Alexis J. Mortola and Frank W. David”

Excerpt from Chapter 5 – Sexual Linguistics, Women’s Sentence, Men’s Sentencing of The War of the Words

“In this chapter, attempting to integrate the divergent forces of power, language, and meaning, we will examine this relationship between sexual difference and the symbolic contract in an effort primarily to trace the permutations of the modern battle over language and secondarily to place recent ideas about sexual linguistics in a larger historical context. For, as we shall suggest, contemporary language theorists-female and male-participate in a long, bifurcated tradition of feminist and masculinist linguistic fantasy. That such a tradition demonstrably exists, moreover, implies an intuition of the primacy of the mother rather than the father in the process of language acquisition that assimilates the child into what Kristeva calls the “symbolic contract.” Thus questioning Kristeva’s identification of the symbolic contract with the social contract, we will draw upon precisely the complex literary history that we have already discussed-the history of the last one hundred years in England and America-to argue that the female subject is not necessarily alienated from the words she writes and speaks.

Significantly, the English woman who most publicly entered into the linguistic fray by defining a female literary tradition saw gender-marked words as potentially central to that tradition’s vitality. In one of the most famous yet opaque passages in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf introduces her notoriously puzzling concept of “a woman’s sentence.” Remarking that the early nineteenth-century woman novelist found that “there was no common sentence ready for her use,” she declared that the “man’s sentence” inherited by “Thackeray and Dickens and Balzac” from “Johnson, Gibbon and the rest” was as alien to her mind as “the [hardened and set] older forms of literature” were to her imagination (78-80). Her comment, like the literary history in which it is embedded, seems appealingly empirical. Those of us who wish to understand the relationship between genre and gender, Woolf seems to imply-even those who wish to examine the more ontological connection between sexuality and creativity-need merely analyze and classify linguistic structures.”


Yesterday’s writer – Marilyn French
Tomorrow’s writer – Doris Kearns Goodwin

Source: Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. The War of the Words. Yale University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-300-04587-5. Dedication: page v, Excerpt: pages 228-229.

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The War of the Words

Center Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar from the website virtual.clemson.edu

Noël Riley Fitch – 1937 – still living as of this post

Introduction

I met Noël on a lovely Parisian June afternoon in 2002 at a reception in her honor and we actually had a brief conversation in which geographical connections were discovered. Here’s the entry from my journal. “Went over to the Abbey Bookshop, but was a little early, so I went for a walk along St. Michel. When I returned to the bookstore, there were a number of people already there. Turns out that Noël Riley Fitch had led a walk on Île St. Louis in the morning and this is where they finished – just in time for Noël to be here for her reception….sign the three books of hers that I had….she has roots in Massachusetts. She and her husband live in LA (Brentwood) from January to April – she teaches at USC and then they spend the summer in Paris where Noel teaches an expatriate literary course at the American University. Her husband writes and edits books on food and wine. And there was wine, cheese and crackers (and water) for the reception. The owner of the bookstore, Brian, gave a little background talk about the street on which the Abbey Bookshop is located and then he introduced Noël Riley Fitch. She talked about the books she has written and told some Paris-related literary stories. After her talk, I hung around and talked to some of the people….There was a violinist playing at the end of the street….having the violinist come over to the bookstore and play. Such a pleasant afternoon – Literature, food and wine, music and meeting new people.” – personal journal, Sunday 23 June 2002. In my copy of her book, Literary Cafes of Paris, that she graciously signed, Noël wrote: “For Adrean With best wishes and happy drinking Noël Riley Fitch 23 June 2002 Paris.”

Dedication in Literary Cafes of Paris

“Dedicated to Gailyn Fitch, café sitter par excellence”

Excerpt from the Café de Flore entry in Literary Cafes of Paris

“’This afternoon I’m upstairs at the Flore, near the window; I can see the wet street, the plane tree swaying in the sharp wind; there are a lot of people, and downstairs there’s a great hubbub.’ So wrote Simone de Beauvoir in the late 1940s, on one of the many days that she worked at a table at the Flore. She wrote portions of her journal, Second Sex and novels such as The Mandarins in this venerable neighborhood café. Flore was founded in 1865 and named for a small statue of Flore, the goddess of flowers and mother of spring, that once stood in front of the door.

The café is homey, with its worn Art Deco interior of red banquettes, mahogany and mirrors. Outside it is characterized by cream-colored awnings with green and gold letters and by its location on the corner of two busy streets: the little Rue St-Benoit is crowded with foot traffic in the evenings when the restaurants are full; on the wide boulevard, the Flore sits between an excellent postcard shop and a distinguished bookstore, La Hune, next to the Deux-Magots.

Beginning with Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont in the late 19th century, nearly every French writer has spent time at the Flore. Yet the Flore has been identified with several distinct groups at different times, and each one has in turn determined the personality of the café. One of the first significant groups to make the Flore home was the political Right. L’Action Française wrote its first manifestos here in 1899 (they were printed nearby in Rue Cassette). The leader of L’Action Française was Charles Maurras, who lived at 60 Rue de Verneuil. He called his political memoirs Souvenirs de vie politique: Au signe de Flore.

In the first decade of this century, Apollinaire and his friends funded Les Soirees de Paris magazine here. The group that dominated the Flore environment in the following decade included Léon-Paul Fargue, André Breton and his Surrealist colleagues, and Picasso. After he moved to live in his studio nearby in Rue des Grands-Augustins. Picasso patronized first the Deux-Magots. He moved to the Flore in the late 1930s, where he engaged in lengthy political discussions joined occasionally by Marc Chagall. At the end of an evening the two exiled artists would exchange the matchbooks on which each had doodled. Janet Flanner says she saw Picasso there every night after 1945, sitting at the second table in front of the main door, sipping a small bottle of mineral water and speaking with his Spanish friends.”


Yesterday’s writer – Anne Fine
Tomorrow’s writer – Fannie Flagg

Source: Fitch, Noël Riley. Literary Cafes of Paris. Starrhill Press, 1989. ISBN 0-913515-42-6. Dedication: page 4, Excerpt: pages 23-24

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Literary Cafes of Paris
Center: Noël Riley Fitch from the website noëlrileyfitch.com
Right: Signed title page of my personal copy of Literary Cafes of Paris

Joy Adamson – Thursday 20 January 1910 – Thursday 3 January 1980

Born Free, Living Free, and Forever Free by Joy Adamson were the first books I read in which Africa was the setting and lions were the topic. The story of Elsa sparked an interest in seeing the animals and lands of that continent, which evolved into a desire to someday go on a photographic safari. That adventure still needs to be done. Although the whole relationship with Elsa intrigues me, I’m unable to experience that type of connection even on a small scale as I am allergic to cats. Would any of you cat lovers and owners ever want to have a really Big cat?

Publisher’s Foreword to Forever Free

“In Born Free and Living Free, Joy Adamson told the extraordinary story of her association with Elsa, whom she and her husband George had raised from a tiny cub to a full-grown lioness and then released to life in the wild. ‘By a passionate patience and an understanding love,’ as Sir Julian Huxley points out, a relationship was established that survived the release. When Elsa had mated with a wild lion and her three cubs, Jespah, Gopa, and Little Elsa, were born, she brought them to the Adamsons’ camp. And when she died prematurely, leaving her cubs unprotected, the Adamsons assumed guardianship over three lions raised in the wild. How they acquitted themselves of their unprecedented, heroic task is recorded in Forever Free.”

Dedication in Forever Free

“To all who help in the conservation of wild life.”

Excerpt from Chapter One – “The Deportation Order” of Forever Free

“It was on Christmas Eve 1960 that we received a letter from the African District Council ordering us to remove Elsa and her cubs from the reserve. The reason given by the council was that since Elsa was used to our company she might become a danger to other people.

We were amazed: the local authorities themselves had helped us to choose the area for her release, and up to now had regarded her as a great asset to the reserve. It had been her home for two and a half years, and during that time she had never hurt anyone. We were as anxious as they were to avoid the possibility of an accident, and had even offered to pay a good rent for Elsa’s territory, so that visitors could be kept out of it without financial loss to the game reserve.

Now, with the arrival of the deportation order, all we could do was to try to make the removal as little harmful to the lions as possible and find a satisfactory new home for them.

We wrote to friends in Tanganyika, Uganda, the Rhodesias, and South Africa, inquiring what the chances were of finding a good territory for the family in their countries, but, before finally deciding to remove Elsa and her family from Kenya, George wished to carry out a reconnaissance along the eastern shores of Lake Rudolf in the north of Kenya.

I was distressed by this plan. The country there is very grim, and I feared that game around the lake might be so scarce that Elsa and the cubs would become dependent upon us for their food supply. Besides this, the area is so remote, that in case of an emergency we should be very lucky if we were able to get any help. On the other hand, this very remoteness was an asset, for the fact that this country is inhospitable and almost cut off from the rest of Africa would at least ensure that the lions would be unlikely to become a pawn in political intrigues.

So, while we waited for replies to our letters, we made provisional plans for their removal to Lake Rudolf. We estimated that the journey would take two or three days and nights: we knew that the tracks would be very rough and that we should need to tow the cars through sandy river beds, stretches of desert, and over rocky escarpments.”


Tomorrow’s writer – Margery Allingham


Source: Adamson, Joy. Forever Free. Bantam Books, October 1967. Excerpt: pages 1-2

Images:

Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Forever Free
Center: Joy Adamson with Elsa from website fatheroflions.org