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

Woolf I

Madalyn Eastus has designed a picture book in which "a series of images made only of paper — cut, folded, and woven […] rely upon each other to create multilayered" offerings. It is evocatively titled Woolf. In the back matter is a set of principles set out in verse form. They are reproduced here with regard to the spacing:

no narrative – only pattern


no glue – just friction


reflection over horizontal
& vertical axes


cropping, symmetry,
surprise

A set of predictable actions; a set of unpredictable outcomes. The story is universal: to be charmed by pattern coming back again. Such a character pattern is!

And so for day 163
26.05.2007