Retallack on Waldrop on Stein

Judicious situation of a quotation.

What exceeds anything in [Otto] Weininger's philosophically pretentious, utterly congested "deductive morphologies," as well as Stein's own reductive cataloguing, is the way she has begun to conjecture in the act of her writing that, as Keith Waldrop has put it, "the essential of 'each human being' is a rhythm ... [and] to express that rhythm expresses the person. There is actually no need to talk about the subject."

Joan Retallack is quoting from Keith Waldrop's introduction to Useful Knowledge (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988) in her introduction to Gertrude Stein: Selections (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

And so for day 2298
29.03.2013

Learning Absorbing

Towards the end of How I Read Gertrude Stein Lew Welch shares this realization:

Stein has everywhere stated that she "hears" speech rhythms, and I have only recently been able to do so. It is a very exciting thing to be able to do, and to be able to do it one has to be able to listen to "meanings" and "rhythms" as if they were two separate things.

It is almost impossible to do this if one simply sets out to learn it. I tried to just learn to do it, and found that I could not do both at once. I was left staring after a question was asked me, simply because I did not hear the question, I only heard the rhythm and the rising inflection that indicated to me that a question had been asked. So I stopped trying. But suddenly one day I found that I was doing it quite naturally because I had been reading so much of Stein.

Setting out. Taking it. Setting out.

And so for day 2015
19.06.2012

Sightings

Sujata Bhatt. Brunizem. "The Women of Leh are such —"

The appearance of Stein in this poem seems mysterious until one discovers that the dedicatee was a translator of the correspondence between Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein. The poem is dedicated to Jürgen Dierking. He would go on to translate Bhatt.

in that place I dreamt
and I saw Gertrude Stein selling
horseradishes and carrots. There was no mistaking
those shoulders — but she fit in so well
with her looking-straight-at-you eyes.

And by association we leap to Gertrude Stein's Idem the Same: A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson (for which the Poetry Foundation nicely supplies a recording of Stein reading). However it is to the textual history I draw your attention, to the notes provide by Ulla E. Dydo, long time scholar of Stein and the notebooks (see A Stein Reader) which on page 376 informs us

On the back of the notebook for this piece are tiny private love verses to Toklas. Some become sections of the text. In the notes, details of "A Very Valentine" appear in more personal form than in typescript and in print. The original line "Very Stein is my valentine very Stein and very fine" becomes in print "Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine." Stein and Toklas are each other's valentines, two lovers who are one, idem the same.

Let us return to the figure of Stein in Bhatt's "The Women of Leh are such —". We find her at the end of the poem.

Then she turned aside to talk with the tomato seller,
still keeping an eye on the dzo — it was hard to believe
but there was no mistaking that poise.

Idem, the same.

And so for day 1652
22.06.2011

Carafe: Clean & Shining

First the opening of the "Objects" section from Gertrude Stein Tender Buttons (1914).

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

Next a household hint from the The Original Boston Cooking School Cook Book 1896 by Fannie Merritt Farmer

HINTS TO THE YOUNG HOUSEKEEPER

To Wash Carafes. Half fill with hot soapsuds, to which is added one teaspoon washing soda. Put in newspaper torn in small pieces. Let stand one-half hour, occasionally shaking. Empty, rinse with hot water, drain. [W]ipe outside, and let stand to dry inside.

Compare the rhythms. Description and instruction. Cousins. Sparkling.

And so for day 1410
23.10.2010

Anybody's Everybody

Juliana Spahr based on her reading of the autobiographies and the multilingual context of the composition of Stein's work argues that

It is not that Stein's fragmentation is in itself necessarily revolutionary, but rather that her alignment of it with immigrant and other nonstandard Englishes provides a new perspective on the ramifications of fragmentation. And most importantly, it points to the importance of linguistic patience and respect in a country where everyone might not be fully fluent.

From "'There Is No Way of Speaking English' The Polylingual Grammars of Gertrude Stein" in Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity.

And it so happens per chance that I come across in the same day's reading a quotation from Denise Riley (The Words of Selves) as selected by Norma Cole in a talk collected in To Be At Music

Any I seems to speak for and from herself; her utterance comes from her own mouth in the first person pronoun which is hers, if only for just so long as she pronounces it. Yet as a human speaker, she knows that it's also everyone's, and that this grammatical offer of uniqueness is untrue, always snatched away. The I which speaks out from only one place is simultaneously everyone's everywhere; it's the linguistic marker of rarity but is always also aggressively democratic.

Last word to Spahr on Stein

It [Stein's work] turns populist speech patterns into art. It argues that this art which appears strange and unusual to some can have roots in the common, the everyday, can include everybody. [...] We cannot afford to overlook works that suggest alternate ways of speaking English. Or, in other words, if Stein is not the democrat that I am arguing her work suggests she could be, still there is much to be learned from the anarchic democracy of the works themselves.

One can. Learn. One did. And does.

And so for day 1211
07.04.2010

Picture Exact Description

Steve McCaffery "Tenderizing Buttons" Open Letter Second Series. No. 6 (Fall 1973) p. 101 ---- The subject is Gertrude Stein or more specifically her writing and the flow is sometimes broken by spacing and other times by periods    here we go in media res

picture the thing through the belief is there you get the author's moments     apparently to hit on some connexion between exact description (certainly) and verbal spontaneity as the paradoxically most exact description is the most verbally autonomous. was-events become is-events to write with words as if the words did have no history.

And open to a remix

was-events become is-events to write with words as if the words did have no history through the belief there you get the author's moments. picture the thing    the most verbally autonomous verbal spontaneity as the paradoxically most exact description is apparently to hit on some connexion between exact description (certainly) and.

events were becoming being events

And so for day 945
15.07.2009

Graphograph

chronograph
phonograph
photograph
chirograph

A list of words, all containing the suffix -graph, to set in relation to this from Shirley Neuman in Gertrude Stein: Autobiography and the Problem of Narration.

What interested Stein [...] was [the] potential for replacing the linearity of the graph in autobiography (with its implications of cause and effect) by a multi-dimensional spatial configuration. [...] In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the "space of time" which replaces chronological progression in narrative provides a multiplicity of vantage points from which to perceive the persons and events of a given moment of narrative.

Neuman begins her study with Stein's experiments with the relation between the time being written and the time of writing. As she moves to the later works such as Paris, France and Wars I Have Seen she factors into account the time of readings. She concludes her book thus:

She transforms the genre into a profoundly impersonal one, a manifestation of the process of writing rather than an artifact of life. Her audience can no longer read as though it were standing invisibly "behind the scenes," part "objective" observer with his "delicate shade of superiority," part voyeur, part vicarious participant. Her readers must be her equals; their glimpses into the autobiography cannot be privileged but must be earned by the creative effort of their own minds recreating the process of Writing as they read.

This reminds one of Kaja Silverman's exposition of the three subjectivies (the speaking subject, the subject of speech, the spoken subject). See Trapdoor.

chirograph
photograph
phonograph
chronograph

And so for day 923
23.06.2009

Reading the Feeling for Stein

Passionate engagement is always wonderful to witness. It borders on obsession.

[...] as I painstakingly made my way through the manuscripts of her early notes and writings, I saw something else. A picture of Stein's writing as a record of where her body was and had been emerged; every day that she wrote etched itself, not by date, but by shifts in grip and posture and concern and ink, upon the page

Karin Cope. Passionate Collaboration: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein

I like the way she continues the story with a description of the experience of reading Stein aloud:

For to say the words aloud is to have made, already, a set of interpretive decisions about accent, intonation, scansion; in short, to have engaged the words — or Stein — in sort of animation.

I take the animation to be less spectoral and more cinematic.

And so for day 702
14.11.2008

Proofing, Reading, Discovering

Jonah Lehrer in the chapter "Gertrude Stein: The Structure of Language" in Proust Was a Neuroscientist

What Stein discovered was a writing style that celebrated its grammatical mistakes. In her most radical prose, she manages to make us conscious of all the linguistic work that is normally done unconsciously. We notice the way verbs instantly get conjugated (even irregular verbs), the way nouns naturally become plural, and the way we amend articles to fit their subjects. Stein always said that the only way to read her writing was to proofread it, to pay acute attention to all the rules she violates. Her errors trace the syntactical structures we can't see, as our "inside becomes outside." Stein showed us what we put into language by leaving it out.

what awe put into a we

And so for day 523
19.05.2008