"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.