School Sabotage and Survival

by

I’ve just read Back To My Beginnings by Paddy Staplehurst. It’s a memoir of growing up in St. Etheldreda’s in Bedford – a home for girls that was run by Anglican nuns. Paddy and her younger sister Bille arrive in 1944 to join an older sister, Dawn, after being taken into care by Norfolk County … Read more

Gertrude Stein: Collage and Code

by

While T.S.Eliot was skulking about in green face powder, Gertrude Stein was communing with Cubists and inventing linguistic collage. And – this is amazing – developing the code book for the Special Operations Executive of WW2.    Picasso was a frequent visitor to Stein’s salon and they became friends. While Picasso and the other Cubists … Read more

In the Salon with Gertrude Stein

by

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.– Gertrude Stein  As you know from my earlier post I have recently been chatting with Gertrude Stein about her life and particularly aspects of her work Tender Buttons (1914). This was all facilitated … Read more

A Little Called Gertrude Stein

by

There, there, said the parent to the anguished child whose ice cream fell to the gutter. There! There! said the whale watcher pointing at the spout on the horizon. There’s no there there, said Gertrude Stein when she visited Oakland in 1934 and found her childhood home razed to the ground. In what they called … Read more

Out of the London Mud Come the London Cabbages

by

A friend is reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World – and she’s been regaling me with stories of toshers, pure-finders, mudlarks and the sewers of Victorian London.  Here’s how the book begins: It is August 1854, and London is … Read more

The Fifth Fact

by

There’s a move afoot to rename the ten American military bases named for Confederates No more forts named for the traitors and white supremacists of the Confederacy. Here’s Elizabeth Warren on the subject: If they are to be renamed for successful military figures who were not traitors, how about Fort Tubman? Tubman – the first … Read more

For Marty, After All

by

Good friends, gone now. Their photographs on my wall. Until some stranger takes them down, throws them away. No reason to keep them after all. Last week I learned via a Facebook post that Marty Sternstein had died on April 18th. This past week has seen a a social media outpouring of tributes in his … Read more

Groceries Get Delivered, Learning Does Not

by

Knowing that as far as our Federal Government is concerned I am – along with pretty much everyone else –  expendable, I am committed to avoiding contracting COVID-19. So that means not going shopping. And it means arranging for deliveries. Almost a full time occupation in itself. And that means someone else taking the risks … Read more

The New Abnormal

by

It’s not coronavirus alone but it was almost a final straw on top of other financial threats. Schools are braced for a dose of tough reality.- UK private schools feel pandemic squeeze And so it begins – the great corona virus contraction of 2020. The old new normal is now the new abnormal normal. After … Read more