I intentionally planned for the final week of 2025 to be spent quietly at home.
I’ve been reading Q.E.D by Gertrude Stein, and thoroughly enjoying it. This is Stein’s first, and by far her most “traditional” novel. It was the first novel she wrote, although t is was not published until after her death, as it is also quite autobiographical. In the novel Stein, as Adele, explores her youthful passion and love for May Bookstaver. It is beautifully written and I am quite enjoying it, my first stop in a journey to read and reread the works of Stein in order.
I am going to have to jump ahead and reread the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas when I finish this, probably beginning tomorrow, as it is the book for my book club next week. I always thought that the Autobiography was one of Toklas most accessible works, but I hadn’t read QED until now. I also thought it was her least interesting work from a literary perspective. But that was 20-some-odd-year-old me. We will see what I think now.
Back in November I read Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, because it was suggested as a “bonus book” for book club and it was available at my local Barnes and Noble. I don’t know that I learned much that was new to me about Stein, or her writing, but I found the sections involving Leon Katz and his relationship to Stein fascinating. I don’t know that the biography changed anything about my perceptions of Stein, but it did prompt the decision to reread Stein’s works.
Katz, however, was pivotal in my own education and I suppose in the person I am now in some ways. He was a visiting professor at Vassar one year (on sabbatical from Yale) and I took two courses from him. One on drama, where we studied Genet, Becket, and Brecht, and another on modern novels, which included works by Stein, Barth and others I do not recall at the moment.
When I signed up for those classes I was mostly interested in older English literature, pre-1800 (and still am) and I thought of modern literature only as entertaining, insignificant, fiction. I wasn’t interested in studying it. But Klein changed my perceptions. I fell in love with the writing of the authors we studied, and I branched out into new to me territory, reading Apollinaire, Verlaine, and Éluard among others. I started going to BAM. This was in the late 70s and early 80s and fabulous things were going on. I became interested in modern music and dance, including modern opera through performances at BAM, and all this was led to the woman I have become. I am now an opera lover, but I came at it backwards, from John Adams and Phillip Glass, among others, back to the composers who are now considered classics in the genre. I still want hear and see new opera; I find I can easily grow bored with the standard repertoire. Much as I do love it, the same things tend to be performed again and again. Much like the classical musioc repertoire I suppose, where I also sometimes grow bored.
I am also reading a cookbook, Mokonuts. This book is not a selection for one of my cookbook clubs. I bought it just out of curiosity, because I saw an online preview and something caught my eye. I’ve never been to the restaurant, and really knew nothing about it until the book came out.
In fact I have a love/hate relationship with chef cookbooks. Sometimes I love them, even if they are books to read more than books to cook from, because the good ones teach me new techniques and new ways to think about and taste food. Those books do change the way I cook, and although I may not cook entire recipes from those books, they are a part of the cook I am today.
Other books are just too — something — not just cheffy, not just pretentious or ambitious; I suppose it is that they just don’t speak to me, don’t make me see the world with some new-to-me insight. This book does that — changes the way I think about food. In that sense, I think it is, in some ways, similar to books by Stein, and literary writers, or composers, or artists in other mediums.
This book does speak to me. I am reading as if it is a good novel, and already, even though I haven’t actually cooked anything from this book yet, it has changed the way I look at the food in my refrigerator when I open the door, the way I both think about and prepare the food I intend to eat. I have altered a technique here or there, and I am thinking about the ways I can use this book, thinking about the foods I buy, and grow, and cook,
There are cookbooks, rare actually, that so inspire me that I want to cook absolutely everything in the book, where everything seems full of potential and I feel like a kid in a candy shop when I open their covers. This is not one of those books, but it is very close. There is something I want to make, some technique I want to try on nearly every page. Some refinement. Some new insight. This book makes me want to run to the kitchen and play, but it also makes me want to sit back and savor flavors, to ruminate, to taste, and yes, to dream. I will not be making the recipes in this book in exactly the way they are presented. Those are recipes for this restaurant, not for my home. And yet, I will cook. I will also read. I will savor the words and the flavors as they drift through my head.
A new year. is dawning. A new idea is forming in my head. I am not the woman I was yesterday. I am not yet the woman I will be tomorrow. What ideas will take fruit?