Piggybacks and Ponytails

Genius by association???

This is the first note I took while reading Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Three question marks. Who is this Ms. Toklas? Does writing about dinner parties with Picasso and Fernande, walks with Matisse and talks about Hemingway with Sherwood Anderson make someone legitimate? Is this the story of one's life she wishes to share? Afternoons with friends and weekend visits extended to a summer in the British countryside? Would I hope to hang the hat of my fame on social associations with artists and writers and travelers and lovers? The artist, the writer, the traveler, the lover who lets me hang her portraits in my foyer and read his poetry on a Pacific boardwalk, hand her her luggage from the trunk of the car and keep him warm in the sloped center of a lumpy bed?

I suppose you might be onto something, Gertrude. My story, perhaps, would not be so different. Not so different at all. While, indeed, it seems the best tales set up the philosophical proofs without consciousness of its systems (please see The Heights of Cinema, below), really, without any self-consciousness whatsoever - let them find us in the rafters, let them chase us through the 'Performers Only' backstage dressing rooms - when it comes down to it, Picasso is just Pablo is just Kate and Anderson is just Sherwood is just Steph, and it is most important that each was at my side, not that rafters were extraterrestrial. I can climb the ladders on my own, test all the doorknobs with the twist of my own wrist. What I cannot do is create this kind of proofing on my own, without association.

Notes to my reading end thus:
p. 212: the commonplace, success

No questions.