I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood

“I have wanted to read the autobiography of artist/editor/fascinating person Beatrice Wood's ever since reading Peter Schjeldahl's 3/7/2022 New Yorker review of Ruth Brandon's Spellbound by Marcel: Duchamp, Love, and Art: "[Wood's] élan is legendary. James Cameron has said that he based Rose, the heroine of his movie “Titanic,” partly on her. Wood’s age, social class, and attitude all fitted the character, although she travelled on more fortunate liners. When I imagine her in a peopled room, she is in Technicolor, and the others, [Marcel] Duchamp included, run to tones of gray. ... Hellbent on breaking free of the expectations of her upbringing, Wood seems to me a singular, wild-card creative personality of the twentieth century. ... Did Wood have snakebit taste in men? Evidently, but in a way that was consistent with her homing instinct for the improbable in all of her life-changing decisions, which ultimately enhanced rather than vitiated her fate. Wood was a vegetarian and neither drank nor smoked. She never had a child. To live freely and yet remain at once autarkic and socially viable was no cinch for a single woman at the time. For Wood, there was the way of the world and then there was her way. ... In 1933, still casting about for a rewarding occupation, Wood took an adult-education class in ceramics at Hollywood High School. The training blossomed into a substantial career. She perfected a technique of lustrous glazing: forcing salts to the surface by starving kilns of oxygen. She had a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1940. Typical vessels of hers, employing various patinas, include vase forms with ascending multiple swellings, each with its own set of handles. The present market for them, though active, is less than robust, judging by prices—in the mere thousands—that I have found cited online. This signals a lingering, blinkered bias of art collectors against craft mediums. Those things are terrific. ... Having produced, at the urging of friends, an insouciantly unreliable autobiography, “I Shock Myself,” in 1985, [Beatrice] Wood expired thirteen years later, at the age of a hundred and five. She attributed her longevity, she once said, to 'young men and chocolate.'””