Years ago, I met an artist named Sarah Crowner at a bookstore called Dexter Sinister, located below a gallery I was publicizing as it opened, and she told me about a show she was doing in Berlin of work inspired by Beatrice Wood, a name I hadn't heard before. It turns out that Beatrice Wood is one of the most amazing women who ever lived, of course. I read a little about her and it inspired me to take up pottery myself, although I wasn't any good. It's a dream of mine to visit her former home and now museum in Ojai, California. Tonight I read her endlessly quotable autobiography, I Shock Myself, which begins with her birth in 1893, and her immediate desire to escape the fetters of bourgeois life, her chance meeting with Duchamp, and love affair with the author of Jules et Jim. Most of the early part of the book deals with the cluelessness that is a burden of her sheltered life, in often endearing terms. For instance, I was so naive about social customs that when a Wall Street tycoon, whom my mother hoped I would marry, took me to the Plaza Hotel for dinner, I volunteered to pay part of the check.
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