On Stein from
The Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gertrude-stein
Read these 422 class blogs! Some great responses and insights here:
http://laurenrsblog.wordpress.com/
http://flynotdie.blogspot.com/
http://agallaherakg22.blogspot.com/
http://sweathe3.wordpress.com/
http://k0bbler.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/judith-butler-spahr/
On The Geographical History of America:
from
"The Last Book I Loved" (http://therumpus.net/2013/07/the-last-book-i-loved-the-geographical-history-of-america-by-gertrude-stein/) :
There is much braying about experimental writing today. What is truly
experimental? Does such writing even exist? The more fitting question
might be who has read Gertrude Stein beyond
Three Lives and
The Autobiography? Because whenever someone goes Duchamping about with language she is there.
The Geographical History of America
is the ultimate think piece, because the thought is raw—it sits on the
page newborn, squirming in blood, with the American placenta very warm.
Stein greatest commenter, William H. Gass, said of the book:
We
not only repeat when we see, stand, communicate; we repeat when we
think. There’s no other way to hold a thought long enough to examine it
except to say its words over and over, and the advance of our mind from
one notion to another is similarly filled with backs and forths,
erasures and crossings-out. The style of The Geographical History of America is often a reflection of this mental condition. (117-8)
...
The tussle between the human mind and human nature is the more
capricious theme in the book. A rancorous bout—which side can be taken?
Because without one we aren’t whole. This farrago into ontology is the
perfect complement to Stein’s lexical devolutions. See the ways of the
first sentence. “May say” repeats and she plays with the “any’s” and
“some’s” on “things” and “bodies,” with the sss of “sell something to
somebody” placed and then repeated as an unfriendly refrain. The last
line of comedy is the ye olde punchline and when she puts that leafy
tender at the end—a tender that is the current God, begetter, and
begotten—everyone chillingly remembers what really directs our life;
everyone except the rich, who have little need or interest in reading
fiction.
...
In a companion essay, “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So
Few of Them,” written in the same year as the History, she said:
There
are so few of them because mostly people live in identity and memory
that is when they think. They know they are they because their little
dog knows them, and so they are not an entity but an identity. And being
so memory is necessary to make them exist and so they cannot create
master-pieces. (360)
...
Why aren’t we writing like Gertrude? Because we are writing like
Hemingway (and Eliot in poetry) who was taught by Gertrude how to write
better. She clipped his sentences and he won the Nobel Prize—certainly a
chain of events reminding us how it has always been a man’s world. Two
eccentrics, Gertrude and Ezra Pound, took English Language writing into
the modern age and those they helped, who had more timid aesthetic
instincts, Hemingway and Eliot, collected the gold.
Stein created
individual works, including stricter poetry, plays, lectures, and two
more autobiographies, but they were all part of one giant book with many
gradations.
The History, supported and composed out of the
ideas in many of her lectures on method, is a hinge in that grand
design. Because her mind turned in the wake of the success of
The Autobiography—she
was confounded by it and eventually sad—her art had to ape these other
sensations. The History is a fittingly proud book because she returned
to “writ[ing] for herself and strangers,” taking “the oldest country in
the world” and attempting to give it a Geographical History.
