Andy Warhol - Gertrude Stein from Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twenthiet Century, 1980Well, I’ve finally finished Stein’s Long Novel – it only took a year. But it’s not a record – it took me ten years to read Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain which was a little longer than Castrop was up on that mountain. I don’t include here the serial novels – I’m still working on Marcel Proust’s Times Remembered Past (finished four of seven volumes), Henry Miller’s Rosy Crucifiction (two of three volumes). But to be honest I didn’t read every word – I skipped a lot of repeating and that is a lot of what she writes. And so in honor of the accomplishment, this will be an all Stein (all the time) compliation.
-Everyone has then their own way of being important inside them from the things in them each one that are virtues in them to them, or vices in them to them, or strong things in them, to them, or weaknesses in them to them – Stern
-
How are you to know
That you know
This is a very hard
Type of knowing to be known
-
It is a very hard type
Of knowingAnd when known or at
Least believed to be know
It is still hard to really
Be knowing
It is really knowing
-
It is much easier to not
Be knowing
This type of knowledge
In oneself and strange
But true it’s much easier to know
It of someone else that that one
Has this knowledge
Of oneself
-
The Long Novel (The Making of Americans) contains approximately 650,000 words. I’d be interested in seeing word frequency analysis of the text. I’d bet that the total vocabulary is less that 5,000 words and the repetition would be unlike that of any other English language text or codices. Has anyone ever done such a linguistic analysis of Stein? But of course it has been done – one only need query the Internet - http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/trs/2008-33/2008-33.pdf. Well that’s not exactly what I had in mind – what I wanted was a relative word frequency index for Stein and a comparison with other English writers such as Shakespeare or Faulkner for example. A 5,000 word vocabulary is about the minimum that one would need to communicate in English – I would argue that it is probably about what you would find in a soap-opera or in a telephone conversation. If Stein can do it, why can’t I. I tried that argument in the sixth grade about Hemmingway’s grammar and I was told that yout have to know the rules before you can violate them (sort of the same as saying that ignorance of the law is no excuse).
Remember the argument I had with Joe regarding English being the richest of any language in an earlier post - will this is along that same lines. There is more to language than the size of its vocabulary and there is more to a writer than the number of big words that they know.
Remember the argument I had with Joe regarding English being the richest of any language in an earlier post - will this is along that same lines. There is more to language than the size of its vocabulary and there is more to a writer than the number of big words that they know.
-
To be using a new word in my writing is to me a very difficult thing. Every word I am using in writing has for me a very existing being. Using a word I have not yet been using in my writing is to me very difficult and a peculiar feeling. Sometimes I am using a new one, sometimes I feel a new meaning in an old one, sometimes I like one I am very fond of one one that has many meanings many ways of being used to make different meanings to every one. Sometimes I like it almost always I like it when I am feeling many ways of using one word in writing. Sometimes I like it that different ways of emphasizing can make very different meanings in a phrase or sentence I have made and am reading. Always in writing it is in me only one thing, a little I like it sometimes that there can be very different ways of reading the thing I have been writing with only one feeling of meaning – Stein
A metaphorical way of viewing the process of writing – a hygienic approach (and more than I really wanted to know about her:
It should come out of me without pressing without any straining in me to be pressing. I can be doing thinking to be helping. I should not be doing any pressing and straining. I have been doing a little it has not come to be a complete thing simply coming. It is to be then to re-begin to come out from me. Always each thing muse come of completely from me leaving me inside me just then gently empty, so pleasantly and weekly gently empty, that is a happy way to have it come out of me each on that is making itself come out fairly quickly, very slowly with a burst or gently, any way it feels a need of coming out of me, but being out of me I must be very pleasantly most gently often weakly empty – Stein
"But she does not look like her portrait" - and Piscasso replied "She Will"
Writing as a form of constipation
What different people
People can be
What they create
And why
The structure by which
They do what
It is that they do
Some follow form
To a style conform
And are very boring
Others are original
And very incomprehensible
Some do just as theyHave been taught
And they will get by
Some take what
They have been shown
And use it as a model
And they shall be praised
Although never meritoriously
But good enough to get paid
Some never try
And some try too hardSome make it look
Effortless
Some are worth quoting
And a few lucky ones
Do it for the fun of it
There are many many
Ways of doing it
As there are those
Who do itAnd everyone who is
Worth noticing
Does it a little differently
This is very noticeable
Gertrude Stein claimed
That she was a genius
And that she only ever
Met four
You would have to be
To make words come out
From the other end
Some take a hatchet
To words
Some massage
Their words
Stein sits down And extrudes them
Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything. Disillusionment then is living that gives to many then melancholy feeling, some despairing feeling, some resignation – Stern
It is a very queer thing this not agreeing with anyone. It would seem that where we are each of is always telling and repeating and explaining and doing it again and again that someone would really understand what the other one is always repeating – Strein
What a tale this
Story that Stein told
About the Battle
Of the Marne
She had to take the
Streetcar into Paris
Where she would catch
A taxi back
But the taxis were not being
Allowed to leave the city
The driver winked
She had to go back
To Boulogne the way
That she had come
On the hill above the
Marne
That night the taxies
Ferried the soldiers
Out there
And saved France
That’s the story as
Gertrude Stein told it
She wore her white beret
And her blue denim jeans
On the streetcar out as
Far as the Battle of the Marne
Extraordinary things happen
All the time in every
Place
Just not here; just not now
Paris! To be ridiculously
Delighted
Everything has a core
Time – a past and a future
It starts now
If not present at the point
Of origin. Much shall be missed
It is impossible to be
Everywhere at once
It passed by undetected
It will go by unsensed
If not present at the point
The amount they agree is important to you until the amount they do not agree with you is completely realized by you – Stein
It’s not the bareness of
Of the winter landscape
Or the many ways that snow
Reflects light
That attracts the poet
It is that nothing distracts
There is nothing else
But to write
Like Gertrude Stein with
Her scribbled and dirty
And lined paper late at night
Which Alice shall dutifully
Type up the next day
Undistracted, dutifully working
You write a book and while you write it you are ashamed for every one must think you are silly or a crazy one and yet you write it and you are ashamed, you know you will be laughed at or pitied by every one and you have a queer feeling and you are not very certain and you go on writing – Stein
Just wanted to say:
Gertrude Stein has
Now left the arena
Some are doing ordinary living without any need in them to have courage in them to do that thing, to be every day completely living ordinary living. For some it takes courage to be killing anything like a buzzing thing or a fly, to buy anything, to sell anything, to eat anything, to decide anything, to like anything. Some and someone is telling this to me and I am listening do not need courage for any such thing – Stein
When some one having been feeling all their living one way of feeling living comet to be feeling in them another way of feeling living, that is very disturbing to them – Stein
And Gertrude lived in France from 1907 until her death in 1946 with Alice B Toklas who wrote a cookbook if not her own autobiography. Her most notable recipe was the one for ‘Haschich Fudge”. I lived across from her family home in San Francisco – or would have if it had not been razed to build an medical/dental office building. And there is that photograph of Alice in St Mark’s square feeding the pigeons and I stood there too. There is a sense of reality in a geographic connection – that you are looking, feeling, remembering, thinking, hearing some of the same that some one else may have seen, felt, remembered, heard and that is so much different that being told, being shone what someone else saw, felt, herd, remembered. These little connection across time mean something – they mean something to some. They don’t mean anything to some other ones. We can do with place what we can never do with time. Place is something personal unlike any artifact.
No comments:
Post a Comment