Journal 1


Gertrude Stein and Hemingway had a peculiar friendship. Much has been written about how Hemingway learned from Stein. Something about repetition and the American idiom. Much has been written about how Hemingway assisted Stein. Much has been written about the ways the pair betrayed each other. Not much has been written about the whimsical and tender friendship of a then unknown matriarch of American letters and a young aspiring poet and journalist.

Gertrude Stein is hilarious. Her facility and wry sensibility paired with her intellect and sharp perceptive prowess become her to such a degree that despite her linguistic overhaul of the language her prose remains sociable and one finds a levity and grace in everything she has written. Cependant controversy has surrounded Gertrude from the onset and she has always embraced this just as she embraced celebrity later in her career. I would not call Gertrude Stein an abstract writer any more than I would call Picasso an abstract painter but both ventured further into ambiguity and reduction than anybody before them. Tender Buttons has its parallel in Cubism wherein forms are not so much abstract as dissociated or wrought and Stanzas in Meditation reminds me in its spontaneity and simplicity of late Picasso. Picasso and Stein also had refined noses for publicity. Stein apparently demanded that any magazine that published parodies of Tender Buttons also include her original because after all nothing could be funnier or more interesting.

I think there is a very interesting distinction between a journal and a diary and another fascination distinction between either journal or diary and a memoir. A diary happens to one whereas one keeps a journal. I see the events of a diary happening in a social sphere and the events of a journal happening in the psyche of the chronicler. A memoir is a kind of memory. Talking and conversing have similar connotative divergences. In no sense is one superior to the other. It is not only in the etymology of the word but in phenomenal divergences. I converse over a set topic and elaborate a theme. In this sense conversing has an element of the fugue whereas talking resembles a fantasia. Obviously any blatant statement such as these only have meaning so far as they spark a referent in the immediate recollection of the reader. I say immediate for a reason. Immediacy transcends vagaries. One would examine the distinction between journal, diary and memoir in the context of vagaries and how they come about. Anything vague in a diary, wherein one assumes the phenomena discuss has just transpired, would be due to linguistic shortcomings or a deliberate lapse. In the case of a diary not meant to be read one can assume anything deliberately vague to just be the result of either a lack of interest or attention or a subconscious repulsion. Most likely it would be the former. In the case of a journal any vagary would be a lapse in pursuit or perception if not as in the case of either other format a lapse in interest. In the case of memoir there is the transformation of memory: everything set to music etc.

Living in a once legendary arrondissement tends to confuse.  Time has an elastic quality there. Almost as though the density of the past had gravitational pull. Elements of the landscape are transfigured and become say the Linden tree that Erik Satie would walk by or an angular view  through rooftops that Picasso must have admired. Anything earthy is also ethereal. There is then the question of sentimentality to which there is no answer but what is the question. Tourists crowd the Place du Tertre and portraitists with charcoal and pad ply their trade. Hack galleries line the rue with so many not so starry nights. Still sunlight is lovely thing falling over Paris, especially in the morning from Montmartre. Crepuscular Montmartre is tender and blue.

Paris is a city where neighbors say hello. It is not really all that big of a city. If I see somebody around the neighborhood then most likely I will see them again. This is not true in New York and although I recognize the occasional by-passer and am friendly with the neighbors on my floor and those whom I work with still I can go to Irving Farm four days out of five for coffee and not recognize anybody but the barista. This is actually an architectural feature of the city. Skyscrapers conglomerate urbanites but also distance us.