kaffe in katmandu

Kaffe in Katmandu Says Goodbye

speh — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 08:52:00 +0100

It’s been a psychedelic ride with you guys, thank you for all the fun and the faces and so much dada during 2011, but after one year and infinite degrees of freedom, 946 posts written by 120 creative members, more than 36,000 visitors, 532 followers on tumblr and over 1000 on Twitter, the Kaffe in Katmandu says dada & good-bye & closes its doors high above the clouds. We’ll repost our best entries on Facebook as long as we feel like it. Happy New Year, cheerio & see you in the next project somewhere sometime!

Marcus Speh
Maitre d’, Penguin Pal

Photo: via 1000 Shipwrecked Penguins.

Another Dream by Berit Ellingsen In a crowded place that is...

speh — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 08:58:52 +0100

Another Dream by Berit Ellingsen

In a crowded place that is only doors and windows, and where people feel the need to come and go all the time, even in their sleep, there’s a wooden house like the ones at the coast, where the ocean takes love bites out of the land and the wind always whispers, only this in the mountains and the light is bright and rarified.

In the only room, with a checkered floor shaped like a circle, there are many tables and chairs. Here, women and men that look like you and me sit typing and drinking coffee. The coffee is black or brown or white, sweet or bitter, decaffeinated or hydrazine grade. Whatever way you like your coffee, the maitre d’ will graciously bring it to you.

In luminous letters that are mostly cosmic space and a tiny bit of matter, the men and women type prose and poetry and love letters and incantations and intentions and analyses and hopes and wishes about each other and the world. The process never ends and everyone can see what they write the moment the keys are pressed, like the thoughts in an infinite and interconnected mind.

[The author, Berit Ellingsen is a Norwegian writer and author of The Empty City.]

The Story, So Far: Marcus Speh

speh — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 08:17:00 +0100

«I’m an online writer. Apart from a few print publications, I can only be read online. Sometimes I feel “online” is like a birth mark: can’t get rid of it. Goes with you everywhere. Obscurely related to your gene pool. Not pretty perhaps but, in the right light, one might take it for a giant tick or for a smudge.

Of course “online” is not a smudge. It’s the dog’s bollocks, the bee’s knees of contemporary writing. It’s writing for billions out there, potentially. It means striking fear into the very heart of the publishing industry. It’s “occupy literature” before anyone thought of occupying anything anywhere.

That online community, however, is a tent settlement, albeit of unknown extension. It doesn’t really occupy anybody else’s space either: rather, it creates land where it needs more. A little like the Dutch people, who wrestled most of their land from the sea at no small a price. Though the modern Dutchmen, I hear, have plans to save the money for repairing their dams and will instead live in houses that shall float when the flood comes to fetch them.

Perhaps that is the future of online writing also: no more pioneering spirit of the wagon fort, sitting around a virtual camp fire sharing stories of the bravest tweet, the most daring Facebook thread or the latest Duotrope submission tracking tale, but life raft-like constructions that can come together when and where needed and that help writers survive and attach themselves to reading communities as readers can attach themselves to us. Futurology is all about the right metaphor.

“Goodreads,” I say to you, fellow online writers, and then I disappear in ‘Ulysses,’ which, in this case, is not a book by Joyce, but an app by German software engineers who like writers. There’s this dependency of course: not only the fear of the blank page (or the blank screen) but the fear that you might not have the best app on your iPad. That you might not have an iPad. That you might be as alone on the Internet as you are anywhere else.

Because, whatever the future of online communities might hold, whoever might be in it or not in it (anymore): the fact remains that writing happens inside your head first and last of all, as a dialogue between your many selves, a loner’s love. There’s no reason, of course, not to have a lot of fun with others along the way. Or, as in my case, connect with a multitude of writers outside of my Germanic exile.

* * * * *

My earliest published online (literary) work is also the earliest work I ever published: “Tickled Pink” at Metazen, in June 2009. My earliest online non-literary work dates back to 1989, when as a young physicist at CERN I worked with the group of people working with Tim Berners-Lee on the creation of the World Wide Web.

[Published at Northville Review.
Illustration: © “Ceaseless murmuring” Carlye Birkenkrahe]

MUSIC OF IRELAND by Lucien Quincy Senna you say your heart...

speh — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 09:17:38 +0100

MUSIC OF IRELAND by Lucien Quincy Senna

you say your heart aches
for the music I make
Mama scented fleurs
a long ocean of flourescent spatter
that grass green clinic
splashed the fragile waters
Admitted me to the drum
calling you Sir
when you declared we’d stay away
a forest of non-decisions
moss, fern, emerald quiet lives
Dundalk
Singing to Bach
his silent nights
Apart we are.

[Photo: Annie Griffiths Belt; Farmer, Dingle, Ireland, carrying his eleventh child. via National Geographic.]

In Memory of Colby Price, Chihuahua (1996-2011) by Darryl...

speh — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 12:17:05 +0100

In Memory of Colby Price, Chihuahua (1996-2011)

by Darryl Price

A dog is a being that’s,well,

A dog. Can that also make him

A person? Only love can. That’s

What I think. A life has a sound

It makes, a certain sound like no

Other. When an animal you

Know dies the house bows its head and

Closes its eyes for awhile. It

Will open them again eventually.

When an animal

You love leaves the planet all your

Feelings float to the surface like

A bar of soap, easy to spot,

Impossible to push back down.

The old familiar winds pack up

For good, the new cooler ones are

Strangers for now. Goodbye little

Boy of mine, goodbye old man, my

Imperfect buddy for the short

Run. I’ll miss your cork nose. Your funny

Smile. The last time I took you

For a bath and a toe nail trim

They said you had fallen asleep.

Classic Colby. Enjoy the stars.

Salvation Santa by Susan M Gibb Jack leaves for work at seven...

speh — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 12:11:00 +0100

Salvation Santa by Susan M Gibb

Jack leaves for work at seven a.m. He gets coffee at the diner on 6th and East Elm. He takes it black with two sugars. It keeps him warm and awake. He cannot afford the prices at the trendy coffee shops and only once did he let someone buy him a latte. He didn’t think it tasted four dollars’ worth.

In front of the diner he sets up his pot and rings his bell and all day watches people rush by him, a Salvation Army Santa. He is a fifty-one year-old former aeronautical engineer but he hasn’t worked as that for almost three years. He had a job at Home Warehouse for nine months until they closed several stores. A few months later they had to give up the house.

A woman drops two quarters into the pot. Ho-ho-ho, Merry Christmas! he says. She smiles as if she had written a check for five hundred dollars. Smug. Her coat is fine camel hair wool and she wears a bright holly green cashmere scarf with matching gloves and hat. He suspects that she’ll be buying a laptop computer for her children for Christmas. She’ll get diamond earrings from her husband, or maybe a large sapphire ring. Claire, he remembered, preferred the pale blue of tanzanite.

He stamps his feet, he is cold, but the cold doesn’t cut into him quite as much anymore. Officer, he calls out, can you watch this for me for a minute? The policeman walks over but he won’t take the bell. Jack puts that on the ground just under the pot. He hurries into the diner, heads for the men’s room and relieves himself. He washes his hands and buys a coffee and buttered hard roll on his way out. Thank you, Officer, he says, and picks up the bell.

Every day three bankers walk by just after noon. They converse as they walk at a brisk pace, weaving around people who aren’t walking as quickly, or who stop to dig into a pocket for change. Each of the bankers looks Jack in the eye, still talking to each other, not missing a step nor a word. None of them ever throws a coin into the pot. Jack holds their stare with his own. You’re all assholes, it says but they don’t seem to care.

Merry Christmas to you too, Santa! says an unbelievably tiny old woman. She bites off a mitten and digs around in her purse to come up with three dollar bills that she drops into the pot. Cold today, she says, pulling the mitten back on over fingers blue not from cold but poor circulation, Jack believes. He smiles at her, a smile a bit warped with shame.

As the afternoon loses its sunshine and the dusk sneaks in with its cold, Jack starts to pack up his gear. It has been a good day. He’s been given two coffees, a hot chocolate, a cup of soup and a rough mental count of about seventy-three dollars in the pot. He sighs and climbs the three flights up to his room at the Y, glad that he can at least now pay the rent.

Fatboy Review 12 Days 2011 Day 1: Tore Renberg Day 2: Marcus...

speh — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 10:36:00 +0100

Fatboy Review 12 Days 2011

Day 1: Tore Renberg

Day 2: Marcus Speh

Day 3: Matjames

Day 4: Lynne Tillman

Day 5: Jonas Mekas

Day 6: Eva Orner

Day 7: Mitchell Kane

Day 8: Katy Darby

Day 9: Suleiman Amanzad

Day 10: John & Tom Turrell

Day 11: Elsa Braekkan Payne

Day 12: Nisrin Boukhari

A TOURIST IN SIBERIA by Carol Novack “A Tourist in...

speh — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 14:54:00 +0100

A TOURIST IN SIBERIA by Carol Novack

“A Tourist in Siberia” (first published in MILK) from Carol’s book “Giraffes in Hiding—The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack”. Recording by Marcus Speh who also wrote a tribute for her.

Carol Novack, publisher/editor of Mad Hatter’s Review & Press says about herself: “I would say that I’m an outside of the box writer, if I could recall where I put the box.” She blogs at «I am not who I think I am or is I whom?»

Update: ”Carol Novack is dead. She died of lung cancer today [29 December] at 8:55 pm. She was a genre-defying writer of lyrical and inventive work who single-handedly brought together thousands of artists from around the globe in collaboration and exploration as publisher of the groundbreaking Mad Hatters’ Review. She was also my good friend, quite irreplaceable.” —Larissa Shmailo

Woman in Tableaux [middle]: My Life, chapter 3 —...

speh — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 18:05:00 +0100

Woman in Tableaux

[middle]: My Life, chapter 3

— Vivre sa vie, Jean-Luc Godard

A street, thick-shadowed and mostly empty, with record shop, apartment, cafè, theater, is no real match for innocence. What she sees on the screen burns to the bone — Jeanne D’Arc in a fit of perfection or grief, not able to bend, not willing to stop, can’t help but question everything she touches, everything she wants — body and soul, body and soul. She gives herself only to herself, and finds that deliverance, sometimes, is no deliverance at all. You may believe in lines, but there aren’t any. Truth is nothing more than spirals of beauty and lust and essence and moment. Running like mad over the stiff mechanics of all things opposite, she lives simply because she says she lives, her words finding her at last — or should I say “at beginning” — finding her where she has always been.

(Excerpted from: Woman in Tableaux by Sam Rasnake; originally published at UCity Review. Photo: still from “La passion de Jeanne D’Arc”, 1928)

Source: “FOX” by Marcus Speh published at Necessary...

speh — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:01:00 +0100

Source: “FOX” by Marcus Speh published at Necessary Fiction.

Photo: Fox drawing by Freja Friborg.

The Number 4 by Christopher Allen Randall was done with being...

speh — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:05:05 +0100

The Number 4

by Christopher Allen

Randall was done with being Randall. He turned out his nightlight and lay face down on his bed. If not Randall, then what? A chunk of boxite? An apple pop-tart? A brilliant flash in the mind of a forgotten poet? An iron pot, the nest of hair in his parents’ shower drain? Love American Style, an electron searching for its mate, a kitchen table, the number four?

At the thought of becoming an even number, the soft blond down on Randall’s arms stiffened. He’d always envied the number four with its symmetry and its squatty complaisance. It had no deviant whims or passions. It was as innocent as a yoga tree pose, and even a kid could count to it.

Yet he’d be merely a number, wouldn’t he? He’d be stripped. Handless, eyeless, mouthless and manless. He’d be a stumpy hunk of fourteen-year-oldlessness—in effect Randalllessness. Then there was the problem of forever being stunted and boxy. Squatty, however, was better than spindly any day. He’d had enough of spindly.

Yet—Randall turned his pillow to the cool side—four-letter words and four-eyed geeks had sullied 4’s reputation. There was always that pop-tart and the forgotten poet’s forgotten thought. But all these options had a use-by date, except maybe Love American Style in syndication. (Would he be the whole series or just one show?) No, the number four was his best bet: it had longevity.

“Or that electron,” he whispered, “searching for its mate. A mate would be nice.”

“Randy?” his mother was calling.

He held his breath. The number four probably wouldn’t reply to a mother it probably wouldn’t have and especially not one who criticized the way he dressed and the “sassy” way he talked and the way he sang Blondie songs with a hairbrush mic.

“Randy?” She was standing at his bedroom door.

The number four would be so easy to understand. For one thing, it would have no gender to question. It would be solid and would never think of ending itself. It wouldn’t even think of thinking! Yet neither would the iron pot or the kitchen table. But did he really want to be in the kitchen that much, scrubbed and scoured by his mother? No, the number four it was. After all, who’s ever told the number four, “You think too much” or “You walk like a girl” or “There’s something not quite right with you”?

“Randall Mason Black!” She was pounding on the door now.

A lipless smile spread over the world where Randall Mason Black no longer lived, where Randall Mason Black no longer fielded feral questions, where Randall Mason Black would never again sing harmonies with Blondie or feel odd in any way. The number four didn’t need to feel anything but boxy, solid and even.

[Published in: Pure Slush. Photo: The American Girl, Marilyn Monroe by Milton Greene, 1954.]

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

speh — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:04:00 +0100

The new DOGZPLOT is full of holy flash

THUMBLING by marcus speh

ONE WAY TO RIO by kevin o’cuinn

SOMETIMES I THINK A RELATIONSHIP BASED ON DAILY TEXTS IS POSSIBLE by elizabeth ellen

THE POINT OF THE BOTTLE by caroline kepnes

WEST KILL by adam moorad

MARION COOK DOESN’T PURCHASE SNACKER by lohel hochberg

MICE by carol deminski

DOGZPLOT is edited by barry graham and peter schwartz.

Photo: ’BIRTH OF CHRIST’ - rhys (via dogzplot)

DRAIN by FRANK HINTON, Metazen’s oldest available post...

speh — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:05:00 +0100

DRAIN by FRANK HINTON, Metazen’s oldest available post at May 11, 2009.

“I NEED TO SHOWER,” he said and sat up. Herbert could feel her eyes on him, he put a pillow behind him and covered his ass as he ran into the bathroom. He turned the water on, the shower was cold. Her bathroom was filthy and black hairs were twisted in neat little spirals all around the tiles of the bathroom. Herbert opened his mouth and let some of the cold water in, but spit it out. He thought faucets like these were the ones that carried the most germs.

Herbert couldn’t find any soap so he lathered himself up with shampoo. He felt immensely heavy inside of the shower stall. He got down on his hands and knees, the water splattered atop the fat of his back and ricochet onto the shower curtain. He looked into the rusted loop of the drain; he put his head very close. He listened to the sounds of the water falling down the drain.

“Help me,” he said, but the drain only gurgled.

Frank Hinton is the incredibly mysterious author of a new novel to come out in 2012 published by tiny hardcore press.

That Day by Sylvia Petter I´ll never forget the day the small...

speh — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:00:00 +0100

That Day by Sylvia Petter

I´ll never forget the day the small black-edged envelope arrived. I´d been cramming for my first uni exam and had gone outside to the garden when the postman came. It was Autumn and the camellia bush was in full bloom. I was pulling at the petals and munching a banana when he stopped by the letterbox next to the crate we left out for the milk bottles. My grandmother in Vienna had died and to prove it, there was a black and white photo of her in an open coffin. That was all. Her eyes were closed and her cheeks sunken in over the downward crescent of her closed lips.

My grandmother had visited us once in Australia. She´d come for Christmas and stayed three months. She couldn´t speak English and always wore black, even in the heat; all my friends´grandmas wore bermuda shorts in the summer. She´d carry a grey silk parasol whenever she went outside and she´d walk up the hill to church three or four times a week. She made me go to Mass with her on Sundays and her bony fingers would grip my hand. I´d try to shake them off, but she was stronger. She smelled funny, too, all musty and sticky at the same time. And she didn´t like the white bread I loved and wouldn’t even open the pot of Vegemite I gave her as a present. The only thing I liked about my grandmother was her bed. It had big springs and was great for jumping on when she was at church.

The End, I thought. But it wasn´t just because of her that I remember the 1st of May, 1966. I´d gone back to my room and couldn´t concentrate on Psychology 1 so I started taking a few peeks at The Valley of the Dolls, a book I was reading as a creative break from my cramming. I turned on the radio, but somehow „Born Free“ didn´t go with pills and sex, so I went back to look for Mum. And that´s when the thunder cracked and the rain pelted down.

Mum was sitting in her rocking chair by the large picture windows that looked out over the bush. Rain, like fat tears, ran down the panes. She just stared and rocked.
- What´s wrong, Mum?
- They´ll never be one now, she said.
- Who?
- It was just on the news. The German Democratic Republic is now a member of the United Nations.

So? I couldn´t understand why that made her so miserable. I thought it must have been the photo of my grandmother and how Mum was going to tell Dad when he came home. But the news? Politics? I remembered how Mum had reacted to the news four years earlier when a family had been shot trying to careen their van through the Berlin Wall. She´d been sad then too, but had somehow brushed it off. This time there was something horribly final about the way she was speaking.

- We have family there.
- I don´t know them.
Mum pressed the back of her hand against her cheek.
- I mean, what´s family, if you don´t know them? Have never met them? Why do we have to have countries, anyway?
- It´s a part of belonging. You´ll see one day.

I was in Berlin three days after the Berlin Wall fell. People were hammering at the cement and bits of the monster that had divided and killed its own people were strewn on the ground. I put a couple of chips in my pocket and headed for Checkpoint Charlie. The Wall was down and the main stream of East Germans to West Berlin had petered out. But the bureaucracy was still in place and so I paid 5 Marks to a dour-faced man in a tired grey uniform, and almost flinched as he thudded a stamp into my blue passport. East Berlin was dark and empty, a string of street lamps glowed sullenly as if still sulking at the bright lights on the other side. I took a deep breath and turned back to the West. Nobody stopped me. From my hotel room I called Australia. It´s true, Mum, I said.

Several years later, Mum´s niece and her husband, almost Mum´s age, came to visit in Sydney. I was in Geneva working on my first novel. Ask them how it was, I said. A man´s voice screamed in the background. She mustn´t write about us! Don´t say anything!
The niece´s husband died a few years ago, just after Mum passed away. He´d given Mum and Dad a handmade book of photos and writings. In the book, I found a photo of two couples. The niece and her husband, and Mum and Dad. It had been taken while they were visiting Australia . The photo had been ripped right down the middle.

Photo by: Papa Joe Hermit. The author, Sylvia Petter, is an Australian writer who lives in Austria. She is the author of Back Burning.

«I am floating in a world made entirely of text. Lines of white...

speh — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:34:59 +0100

«I am floating in a world made entirely of text. Lines of white courier type stretch away to the horizon, spelling out passages from Borges’s ‘s “Library of Babel”: “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries …” I look down and experience a sudden twinge of vertigo. Below my feet, strings of letters plunge down into an inky black void.»

from: Robert Coover: A Life In Writing — by Hari Kunzru in the Guardian.

Marc Vincenz reads Unfathomable Mammals for Kaffe in...

speh — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:51:00 +0100

Marc Vincenz reads Unfathomable Mammals for Kaffe in Katmandu

Poem published at PiF magazine, read for Kaffe in Katmandu by Marc Vincenz.

Marc Vincenz is Swiss-British and was born in Hong Kong during the height of the Cultural Revolution. His recent books include Upholding Half the Sky (MiPOesias, 2010), The Propaganda Factory, or Speaking of Trees (Argotist, 2011) and Pull of the Gravitons (forthcoming Right Hand Pointing, 2012). Marc’s poems are regularly featured on October Babies. His translation of Swiss poet Erika Burkart’s Secret Letter is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press; and in collaboration with the Icelandic artist Inga Maria Brynjarsdottir, a children’s book in verse, Animals of the Northern Lights. He currently lives in Iceland where he works as a journalist, poet, translator and book designer. Recent and forthcoming publications include The Potomac, Spillway, Poetry Salzburg Review, Atticus Review, Inertia and Pirene’s Fountain. Marc is Managing Editor of MadHat Press, Poetry and Non-Fiction Editor at Mad Hatters’ Review and on the editorial board of Open Letter’s Monthly. In 2011, his poetry was nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize.

vaya «letras caseras»

speh — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:09:27 +0100

«Bring us your fiction, poems, photos, films, works of art, and musings. Above all else be yourself, be honest.»

ann bogle, kaffe member, writer & editor at mad hatters...

speh — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:45:00 +0100

ann bogle, kaffe member, writer & editor at mad hatters review, talked to jefferson hansen about her life, flash fiction, narratives and all that it means to be a writer. ann is the author of XAM (Xexoxial Editions, 2011) and Country Without A Name (Argotist, 2011).

Captcha Poetry by Chris Galvin

speh — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:00:05 +0100

Eretorua

by Chris Galvin

Eretorua –somewhere in the land of the Māori
where I arrive with plans to birdel for a few days
I wander into the primal forest and azaib
the Osirko trees ’round me vimble maddeningly

Deeper into the woods I swashay
I do not fear these m3nasing trees
I carry a cloubb and I stride along the path
small cr8tres snarkle under my footfalls

I do not fear the wrsemelat farblx
nor do I hesitate when before me
an Y9brem rises, neckfolds whim-ering
I raise my cloubb and kamtr it hard

Zraacx! It hollers in agony but I
kamtr it again and again
the sting of the Y9brem is lethal
and I’ve still much to see in the forests of Eretorua

Photo: from Max Ernst, Une semaine de bonté (1934)

Was Gertrude Stein a Collaborator?

speh — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:18:08 +0100

lareviewofbooks:

RENATE STENDHAL

on Gertrude Stein’s latest revival and the enduring
questions about her wartime years.

Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories
Contemporary Jewish Museum
May 12 - September 6, 2011

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde
SFMOMA
May 21 - September 6, 2011

Barbara Will
Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma
Columbia University Press, September 2011. 320 pp.

Janet Malcolm
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
Yale University Press, September 2008. 240 pp.

Charles Glass
Americans in Paris: Life and Death under the Nazi Occupation
Penguin, February 2011. 544 pp.

W.G. Rogers
When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person
Greenwood-Heinemann Publishing, January 1973. 253 pp.

Gertrude Stein
Wars I Have Seen
Random House, 1945. 259 pp.

Gertrude Stein has had a renaissance and, right on its heels, a controversy. Two epochal recent exhibitions in San Francisco, Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (now at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.) and The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde at the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art (now at the Paris Grand Palais and soon to open at the New York Metropolitan Museum) have run into criticism for not sufficiently addressing Stein’s survival of World War II. Stein and her long-time partner Alice Toklas held out in the French countryside while France was occupied by the Nazis. So why weren’t they deported like other American enemies, Jews, and lesbians? Stein was apparently protected by a close friend of hers, Bernard Faÿ, an official in the Vichy Government who turned out to be a fascist and Nazi collaborator. Her collection of “degenerate” art, all of those pieces by Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne left behind in Paris, were saved as well.

Questions about Stein’s wartime survival have been addressed in many books. A few years ago they were raised again, more aggressively, by Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007). When Malcolm’s book came out nobody seemed to care, but now that Stein has had a comeback, the controversy has gained urgency. It was triggered by an article in the Bay Area Jewish Weekly that accused the Contemporary Jewish Museum of using Stalinist methods to preserve an idealized image of Stein. At the same time, Barbara Will’s new book, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma (2011) tries to show the “real” Stein in just one color: black. Visitors and bloggers who had never before read or studied Stein became enraged by certain details snapped up from the agitation: What? Stein had a Nazi friend? Stein said Hitler ought to get the Nobel Peace Prize? Stein a collaborator! Worse, Stein a Nazi! The scandal recently got to the Washington Post, prompting critic Phil Kennicott to review Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories and openly declare his “hatred” for her.