Wednesday, December 31, 2008

"The Pleasures of Gertrude Stein"


New Year's Eve, and the notion of locating my copy of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook met with disappointment: I can't find it, can't remember where I might have stashed* it, and the only recipes I located on the internet were for a capon braised in champagne (wretched waste of the beverage) and for figs stewed in red wine with spices and hazelnuts. Therefore: Alice bows out of the scene, the chilled half-bottle of Taittinger will be sipped and not used as a basting fluid. We will raise a glass to Gertrude's writing, perhaps listen to her voice reading "Madame Recamier: An Opera" (Caedmon).

*"stash" of course evokes "hashish", the recipe for which Alice B. (for Babette)seems to be most remembered, and yes: I have partaken. Second year of university, a student later to become a federal Member of Parliament brought a pan of said brownies to the cafeteria to hand around to anyone willing to sample. I only recall the chocolate, not the aftereffects, and wondered, as now with the champagne, why Alice would choose to disguise her intoxicants in food. More mystifying to me by far than Gertrude's writing.

Another sip of champagne will toast Brooks Landon for introducing his writing course with "Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?" (from Sunwatcher's comment) plus a toast to Sunwatcher for passing on these words so true to the essence of Gertrude's message to writers.

I did find, however, my copy of Narration: Four lectures by Gertrude Stein, with an introduction by Thornton Wilder. She delivered these lectures in November 1934 to students at the University of Chicago.

Wilder writes, admiringly, in his introduction:

In the printed version of the lectures the individuality of the idiom has been enhanced by the economy of the punctuation, which has been explained by Miss Stein as being a form of challenge to a livelier collaboration on the part of the reader. "A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it . . . .the longer, the more complicated the sentence the greater the number of the same kinds of words I had following one another, the more the very many more I had of them I felt the passionate need of their taking care of themselves by themselves and not helping them, and thereby enfeebling them by putting in a comma . . . .A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make yourself know yourself knowing it."

This slender volume (62 pages)described as "models of artistic form" treating as they do her approach to writing and reading poetry and prose is my current project, although I have come across mention of another book to track down: Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science by Steven Meyer, published by Stanford University Press (2001). More about the experience of reading the four lectures, and locating a copy of the Meyer book, "next year" -- which is now less than six hours away.

Monday, December 29, 2008

"And now to begin as if to begin . . . ."

. . .or: "to begin is more interesting than to finish."

“I am very busy finding out what people mean by what they say,” she wrote, saving the sentence.

Reading Gertrude Stein is always beginning, never wanting to finish the reading and where the reading takes the reader.

And to the question, "Why Gertrude Stein?" the only answer is "why on earth not?"

My first encounter with GS was during post-graduate studies, domiciled temporarily in a women’s studies department of a university, and as relief from academic language I encountered a number of women who were not academics i.e. professors, researchers, such purposefully institutionally oriented people, but readers, support staff, book people, and me a student and we all shared the pleasure of simply getting together to read parts of Gertrude Stein’s writing that we enjoyed. Enjoyment was the point. Accompanied by food and drink. Occasional gatherings. We did not study Gertrude, we read Gertrude, and we delighted in reading her writing out loud to each other, for as one of us said, Gertrude’s writing asks to be read aloud, and then it came to pass as usual that time passed and changes occurred and then there were no more meetings.

This is more than nostalgia, though the flavour lingers.

Now, slanting towards the writing of contemporary poets who are (mostly) women, who could be categorized as “modernist”, I find that Gertrude’s writing is referred to again and again and so I begin to read her again. These same modernist contemporary women poets are also revisiting the ideas of feminism with new insights into the use of language and again, Gertrude is among us.

For me there is the spirit of exploration of all that Gertrude wrote and how it has struck up kinship with what is being written now, and more than anything I wish for a warm place with a few chairs, shared food and drink, and others who read her writing, and talk about writing, so we can take it from there, as if we were all here, her words alive among us.

Now though the cafe is only imaginary, the meeting place a medium that is less than technically hospitable, but the conversation can still come through.

Comments more than welcome, essential indeed, wherever they lead, circular, diagonal, criss-cross, back and forth, in the chairs under the awning of the Gertrude Stein Café.