Two Lives: Gertrude And Alice, Janet Malcolm, c. 2007

A slim little hardcover. 

Janet Malcolm can often be difficult to read. She often has a strange way of writing.

This little book has to be a classic. A must-read.

The sticker price on my hardcover: $5.99.

At Amazon, the hardcover is now priced at $23.52 (list, $25). 

I'm not going to write (m)any notes on it tonight. I'm just going to enjoy the evening.

But first, a musical interlude. Link here. A huge thanks to whomever put this together -- 3-and-a-half hours of whiskey blues and video to accompany same.

I can hardly wait for summer. This will be awesome on the balcony or poolside until late into the evening. I don't drink whiskey / Scotch any more, but I may have to reconsider for the summer. LOL. 

I would love to be sitting in an easy chair with Pat or Linda next to me tonight. Linda would be agitated, anxious, ADHD. Pat would be pensive, reflective, with a penetrating gaze.

This might the summer of serious reading after a hiatus of several years. I've never quit reading, but I've not been reading like I read between 2004 and 2011, or thereabouts. 

My takeaway from this little hardcover: Janet Malcolm's interest in how Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas survived the war in occupied France, as Jews and as lesbians, and where everyone knew them.

Malcolm starts out with The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, by Alice B. Toklas (?), 1954, a response (?) to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein, 1933.

"The similarity of tone of the two books only deepens the mystery of who influenced whom."

Sort of reminds me of Socrates (never wrote) and Plato (who channeled Socrates in his writing). 

Hotel Penollet, Belley, Bugey, French Riviera, France, 1924: Toklas and Stein on their way to visit Picasso. The visit never happened; Toklas and Stein were distracted by the French scenery.

See the villa where Picasso was staying in 1924 at this link.