some notes on Stein

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.