University of Northern Iowa UNI ScholarWorks Ballast Quarterly Review Summer 2001 Ballast Quarterly Review, v16n4, Summer 2001 Roy R. Behrens University of Northern Iowa, [email protected] Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy Copyright ©2001 Roy R. Behrens Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ballast Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Behrens, Roy R., "Ballast Quarterly Review, v16n4, Summer 2001" (2001). Ballast Quarterly Review. 63. https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ballast/63 This Periodical is brought to you for free and open access by UNI ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Ballast Quarterly Review by an authorized administrator of UNI ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ' ' ~ · ·\ El B A A T Q U A R Ballast Quarterly Review Volume 16 Number 4 Summer 200 I. Copyright © 200 I by Roy R. Behrens, editor, publisher and art director. ISSN I 093-5789. E-mail <[email protected]>. FINLEY Ballast is an acronym for Books Art Language PETER Logic Ambiguity Science and Teaching, as well DUNNE as a distant allusion to Blast, the short-lived "Tommy," says I, publication founded during World War I by "spell cat," I Wyndham Lewis, the Vorticist artist and says. "Go to th' writer. Ballast is mainly a pastiche of astonish­ divvie," says the ing passages from books, magazines, diaries cheerub. "Very and other writings. Put differently, it is a jour­ smartly answer­ nal devoted to wit. the contents of which are ed," says Mary intended to be insightful, amusing or thought Ellen . "Ye shud provoking. not ask thim to spell," she says. The purposes of Ballast are educational, apo­ "They don't lam litical and noncommercial. It does not carry that till they get advertisements, nor is it supposed to be pur­ to colledge," she chased or sold. It is published approximately says "an'" she every three months, beginning in the fall says, "sometimes (more or less) and ending in the summer. not even thin," she says. To subscribe to Ballast or to order a gift sub­ scription, simply send in a mailing address and five first class U.S. postage stamps for each OGDEN single issue desired. In other words, to NASH receive Ballast for one year (four issues), we I hope my ask that each reader contribute a total of tongue i n prune twenty genuine unused postage stamps. Do juice smothers / not send postage meter slips. nor do we If I be little dogs accept orders by phone or e-mail. When sub­ and mot he rs. scribing, self-adhesive stamps are preferred. Short of that. send good-looking, antique or unusual stamps. In general we do not accept requests from outside the U.S. [In 1900, after Oard Hunter had painstakingly prepared all the apparatus for a Chautauqua chalk talk, it was undone accidentally by the famous orator William Jennings Bryan, who became entangled in the wires as he entered the stage for a lecture. When Bryan did not apolog ize, Hunter recalls,] I was aching for revenge ... With my pocket knife I grated an entire piece of soft red chalk into the inside of Bryan's headpiece. It was a hot morning, and after the lec­ ture Bryan placed the great broad hat on his perspiring head. The finely powdered red chalk mingled with the perspiration, and the classical face of William Jennings Bryan was literally streaked with bright-red pigment as he walked to his hotel. D AR D H U N T E R My Li(e with Paper: An Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), p. 24. R l Y R V I E W D GERTRUDE STEIN AND WILLIAM COOK: Le Corbusier's Iowa Clie nt Copyright© 200 I by Roy R. Behrens • News photograph of the arrival in New York of GERTRUDE STEIN (left) and A LICE B. TOKIAS, on Octo­ ber 24, 193•. For the next six months, they toured the U.S. pro­ moting Stein's latest book. The Autobiogra­ phy of Alice 8. Tok/as . THE FRENCH WORD for crow is le corbeau. Around 1920, the Swiss-French architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret ( 1887-1965) ALICE B . adopted t he p seudonym LE CORBUSIER as a TO KLAS way to allude to the annual task of his fore­ What is sauce fo r bears during the Middle Ages of cleaning the goose may out crows' nests from the local church be sauce for the steeple. gander but it it Le Corbusier went on to become one not necessarily of the most celebrated architects of the sauce for the twentieth century. W hat is not commonly chicken, the known is that one of his early clients was duck, the turkey, an Iowa-born artist named WILLIAM or the guinea EDWARDS COOK ( 1881-1959), for whom he hen. designed an innovative four-level home called Villa Cook (or Maison Cook) on the outskirts of Paris. LE William Cook was born and raised in CORBUSIER Independence, Iowa, the county seat of A house is a Buchanan County in the northeast section machine for of the state. Inspired by the paintings of living in . J.M.W . Turner and John Singer Sargent (whom he apparently knew personally), he left home at age 18 to study art, first in Chicago, and then in New York. In 1903, he moved on to Paris, where he studied a 8 A A S T Q U A R painting with Adolphe-William Bouguereau. Several years later. while visiting Rome, he became the first American artist to be SALVADOR invited to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X. DALI While living in Paris, Cook became Karl Marx suf­ ac9uainted with the American writer fered from the GE RT RUDE STEI N, who invited him to the same kind of gatherings on Saturday evenings at her illusions as poor home at 27 rue de Fleurus. There he met Le Corbusier, dozens of now-famous Modernists, among whose recent them Stein's companion, ALI CE B. T0 KLAS, death filled me the dancer Isadora Duncan, the writer with immense Ernest Hemingway, and the artists Pablo joy. Both of Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Jac9ues Lip­ them were archi­ chitz. tects. Over the years. Stein and Toklas became close friends with Cook and his French mistress (whom he eventually mar­ ried), an artist's model named Jeanne Maol­ lic, who also worked as a femme de menage or cleaning girl. As described in Stein's autobiographies (The Autobiography of Alice B. Tok/as and Everybody's Autobiography). they vacationed together several times on the Spanish island of Mallorca, where Stein and Cook were especially interested in the "" Photograph of bullfights. The two couples delighted in Swiss-French architect each other's company, in part because of Charles-Edouard Jean­ neret. better known Jeanne's mistakes when she tried to speak as Le Corbusier. English (for example, she referred to the two women as " Mlle. Tosca and Miss Steins," which, she said, as Cook explained EDGAR to Stein, " is good enough as I know who TAFEL she means, and you are both so charming [When one of Le that you are not the people to make the Corbusier's 'chichi' over a little matter of names"). buildings leaked While working as a taxi driver in profusely during Paris, Cook taught Gertrude Stein to drive, a rainstorm, the using his two-cylinder Renault taxi cab. As owner demand- a result, Stein and T oklas as a team were ed he come to able to contribute to World War I by dri­ the house.] ving a converted Ford van named "Auntie" Arriving, Co rbu (which Stein had purchased through rela­ was asked what tives in the U.S.) as a medical supply truck to do about the for the American Fund for French Wound­ situation. The ed. "Cook does and he says and he is kind architect asked to all," Stein wrote admiringly of her friend. for "une piece of "He understands all. He is so kind." papier," which On March 2. 1922, Cook and Jeanne he took, folded Maollic were married. with Stein and Tok­ it into a little las standing in as witnesses. Like many boat, and artists and intellectuals of the time, Cook pushed it into was interested in Socialism and the Russian the water. Revolution, and at the end of that month, he left for two and a half years on an American Red Cross relief mission to the T R y R V W ------------- - - - 11 Caucasus region of the Soviet Union. His wife eventually joined him, but not before Stein had arranged for the photographer Man Ray to take photographs of her, to send to her Iowa in -laws. While living in the Caucasus. the PETER Cooks had tea in Georgia with the Ameri­ DE VRIES can dancer Isadora Duncan and attended I imagined ask­ her performance at the Tiflis Opera House. ing her whether Cook wrote to Stein that "it was nice to she liked Le Cor­ see someone who had come from the land busier, and her of the free and the home of the brave," but replying, "Love he thought her dancing was "a frost." At some, with a lit­ age 45, Duncan was loosing her figure. and tle Benedictine if Cook concluded that "there is a certain you've got it." relation between waistlines and dancing that cannot be gotten away from ... " During those same years, at Stein's urging, Cook made repeated attempts to assist the family of Picasso's wife, the Russ­ ian ballerina Olga Khokhlova.