Tuesday, January 13, 2009

"the work writing itself" -- a divagation

In the previously mentioned (Jan. 9/09 post, essay by Jack Kimball, "Gertrude Stein and the Natural World") a phrase he used stuck with me:

"The work writing itself -- this is the natural, inclusive 'exciting' subject matter of her composition."

Of course the reference is to Stein. While wandering the web, however, and checking in at a blog, Night Hauling, that I've enjoyed for his idiosyncratic and often darkly amusing posts, I found a link to an interview with Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai)from if: the institute for the future of the book, a site that is currently "migrating to a new server" though the link at Night Hauling is still alive. Though the interview is long, it is highly recommended for anyone curious about what it means to be a groundbreaking writer in the sluggish world of publishing.

DeWitt's most recent novel, Your Name Here, is available via her blog, paperpools, as a pdf download for the modest sum of US$8 using Paypal. Although I hadn't previously known of her work (being more of a poetry hound than a regular pursuer of fiction)her interview prompted me to take the plunge and I now have a copy of the book to read on my computer with no intention of printing the near-600 pages: I'll wait until some savvy publisher gets it into print but meanwhile relish having the pdf version (which is surprisingly easy on the eyes) to read and re-read. Now I also have a copy of The Last Samurai, and am for the moment distracted by its spell also from reading the Gertrude Stein material on hand + related material + "all the other things I read", + the writing waiting to be written -- being so bedazzled by DeWitt's writing both on screen and in print (too) late at night with a vat of tea ever close at hand. (I never do anything at one sitting.)

(Surely all manner of reading/thinking/talking about modern/contemporary/revolutionary writing is on the menu at the GS Cafe.)

Kimball's sentence about "the work writing itself" could as easily apply to DeWitt with her counterpoint composition, serious and brilliant play with language and languages, and a narrative flow that is utterly captivating.

Coincidentally having received in yesterday's mail a CD of Angele Dubeau and La Pieta playing music of Philip glass (Portrait, on Analekta; recorded Nov. 2007 at McGill University) this description of the composer's oeuvre by Lucie Renaud (in translation here by Peter Christensen) struck me as equally descriptive of DeWitt's writing:

". . .he [Glass] treats the notion of time completely differently, not as a continuity but rather as a succession of moments that fall into one another ("une succession d'instants qui se jettent les uns dans les autres") without any relationship of cause and effect." And yet the result is not chaos, but flow -- in both his music and in DeWitt's writing -- with harmonies and shifts and subtle details that create meaning beyond the particulars.

I like the original French ("se jettent les uns dans les autres") for the shade of meaning that (for me) can't quite cross into English. The impossibility of pure equivalency across languages.

The growing pile of work by and about Stein that is stacking up here now leads me also along a path of translation, curious to find out how and where her writing has been translated, and also her own translation work. Two books I've recently received from the amazing online bookseller, Apollinaire's Bookshoppe deal with the act of translation, poetry in particular: Translating Translating Montreal (from pressdust; Montral) and At Alberta, by Nathalie Stephens (BookThug; Toronto) -- the latter being the publishing arm of Apollinaire's Bookshoppe, both the work of Jay Millar who, like Zaphod Beeblebrox, has a third arm, that of being a poet. One of the essays in the Stephens book is "WANT: L'INTRADUISIBLE (DESIRE IN TRANSLATION)" (also the keynote lecture at the annual translation conference 2006 at the University of alberta) which begins, "I will begin with the 'failure of translation.'"

And Translating Translating Montreal includes the theme of collaborative translation, and that takes me back again to Stein, and the work of Barbara Will, whose work-in-progress concerns an intriguing (and mysterious) episode of Stein's war years in France. Will's essay, "Lost in Translation: Stein's Vichy Collaboration" (from MODERNISM/modernity 11:4; 651-668; 2004) begins:

"In 1941, the Jewish-American writer Gertrude Stein embarked on one of the strangest intellectual projects of her life: translating and introducing for an American audience the speeches of Marshal Philippe Petain, head of state of the collaborationist Vichy government."

All this, and more, waiting to be explored.

Also coincidentally (again), Bud Parr at Chekhov's Mistress, a blog that I've been following for years with admiration, wrote a recent post (Jan. 10/09) about a forthcoming discussion (Jan. 23/09) at Housing Works Bookstore (New York): "Poetry in Translation Panel: Has the US Lost Touch with World Literature?"

He will be reporting on the discussion at Words Without Borders, another site where he posts his writing.

Enough for one sitting -- if it were snowing inside as steadily as it has been outside all morning, I'd be knee deep by now in more than books.

Friday, January 9, 2009

"words as landscape . . ."

The self-imposed project:
to read Jack Kimball's paper, "Gertrude Stein and the Natural World" from time-sense an electronic quarterly on the art of Gertrude Stein from a site devoted to scholarly writing.

Reason for reading:
sheer curiosity; can't imagine GS hiking through wild places leaving behind the comforts of 27 Rue de Fleurus where she can write day and night OR botanizing (where? in the Jardin du Luxembourg? watching "pigeons on the grass alas"?)or writing about the natural wonders of Montparnasse and other boulevards?

Kimball's essay sends me off in all directions. One of them to a paper (again online) by Jean Mills in The Philological Quarterly 22 March 04 where the phrase jumps out about Gertrude's use of "words as landscapes as opposed to words creating portraits of landscapes."

Now what? So far I'm absorbing that for GS the "natural world" is one of perceiving natural being that can be captured in the process of writing fully in the present, the work of writing being "natural, inclusive", not a matter of naming or lyricism.

Kimball writes: "We have anecdotes . . .about Stein's frequent outdoor writing sessions, how picnics and country drives provided placid backdrops for composition ostensibly addressed to a bewildering jumble of topics, but in fact transcribed in nature's company, unnamed cows, trees, birds and such. Stein writes in The Autobiography, 'I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.'"

Jane Palatini Bowers devotes a chapter in Gertrude Stein to Stein's plays, which she called "landscapes" and which Bowers neologizes (121) as "lang-scapes" since the plays do not "represent, evoke or in some manner correspond to a specific place . . . .Rather, the are about language and its relationship to the performance event . . . "

Other non-Gertrude books intervene, as they tend to in any ordinary day, if our customary forest (not unlike the Vashta Nerada) is a library.

Opened to Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places and chanced on this -- "Cultures that grow up in close correspondence with a particular terrain often develop idiosyncratic methods of representing that terrain."

The "cultural terrain" of GS: American cities. Her excursions: occasionally in her childhood to the outdoors in the Napa Valley but mostly books and more books. (Assuming that concepts of "culture" don't create "representations" but that people who grow up in those cultures do albeit not necessarily in a predictable or uniform manner.)

Then I also read some of the writings in Conjunctions: 49 "A Writers' Aviary" viz. Catherine Imbriglio's "Intimacy Poems" -- birds and humans, "interspecies meanings", daughter, mother, metempsychosis, gulls, cormorants, "real wings". Back to Bowers recounting an interview with GS about pigeons in the grass alas . . . and so it all comes back to the words again. Where no birds sing.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Gertrude Stein, dailiness, and "the proper music"

It has taken a couple of days for me to take stock of my involvement in reading and writing about Gertrude Stein's writing as I move also into the writings of others who have felt her influence and as I consider the limits of her influence on my own practice.

There's a candid and telling moment I thought I recalled in Ann Lauterbach's conversation with Charles Bernstein on the Penn Sound site (link provided in a previous post) about her feeling of being so intensely alive when writing and in a separate frame or world from the usual -- though strangely I couldn't find it when listening again, so perhaps it was something after all from The Night Sky, though I could swear I heard Lauterbach's voice . . . .Yet it's a feeling I strongly identify with. After hours spent absorbed in writing, the wrench of suddenly experiencing not only the change of the light as the day fades but also the unaccountable vanishing of time that alters my sense of mortality, then realizing that now the descent must begin into another world, into the necessities of those daily duties in support of being mortal, the descent into the world of household, of kitchen, of a disorder that can not be transformed by words.

In my absorption in the writing of GS (which will remain a consistent thread in my reading and thinking about writing generally)I had purposely avoided thinking about the details of her daily life. A burst of pique came from realizing that this woman whose writing is so revolutionary in fact lived a life of upper middle class privilege, of independent means, fully supported by the intellectual sympathies and domestic devotion of Alice Toklas, whom she describes as her "wife." It was Alice who tended to maintaining the household in all aspects in order to leave Gertrude free to be a "genius."

When Gertrude writes of domestic objects, as in Tender Buttons, they are very much present as the impetus for language but not in their capacity of involving time and labour in the process of living and not in their presence in the framework of her own lived time.

Ann Lauterbach talked with Bernstein about the "backdrop or thing that unleashes its power into the poem" and that you "take what you need from many different sources" though she tries to avoid the domestic because that's what women have for so long been expected to write about.

How can these pieces or aspects of being alive -- these persistent repeated incidents of "hauling wood, drawing water", the routine of living, be capable of being integrated into a creative life? Or do they continue as background against which writing is resistance? Or is it only a matter of ongoing gender politics that a female who is writing even considers domestic tasks as a form of anguished interruption? What is the "real work?" I doubt that Edmund Wilson or Vladimir Nabokov or a host of other male writers considered it an issue at all that meals must be cooked, laundry laundered, floors swept, and the myriad chores done that constitute the round of daily life. Even Virginia Woolf had "servant problems."

Years ago I recall reading an essay by feminist (Judy Syfers, premier issue of Ms. Magazine in 1971) who claimed that what she needed was "a wife" to take care of domestic matters thus freeing time for her career. As a humorous piece satirizing traditional gender roles in heterosexual marriage, it echoes what Villiers de l'Isle Adam wrote in his play Axel (1890) with reference to the dream of living in a carefree fantasized future: "Vivre? Les serviteurs feront cela pour nous."

Is it a matter of gender or of class or the heady drug of writing that casts such shadows on domestic work?

Paris appealed to Gertrude for the "calm and peace necessary to her mode of life and work" (Brinnin 47) and "[h]er appreciation of Parisian virtues is made largely on a basis of ease -- physical ease, to a great degree, but more importantly, intellectual and spiritual ease." (Brinnin 48)

I especially note: But more importantly, intellectual and spiritual ease and the relation to physical ease. The primary concerns of Gertrude and Leo moving into the flat on Rue de Fleurus were where to hang paintings.

Part of my project will be to find evidence (perhaps in the "gray proletarian stories she wanted to tell"? Brinnin 57) of G's experience of domestic duties. But the stories (in for example Three Lives) concerned not people of her status as Brinnin goes on to elaborate:

Inarticulate humanity had always fascinated her; she now saw ways to record the whole sound and sense of the unlettered yet massively human type of servant she knew. No further observation was necessary; for years, in many households, including her own, she had studied such women with a natural human curiosity as well as with her scientifically informed eye. But to record the matter was one thing; to make the proper music was another. Gertrude's problem was twofold, yet one answer would serve.

The emphasis is mine. Gertrude was in a class apart from those who served her, they were her material for study, her intellectual stimulus, and the issue was to make "proper music" of such matters.

My partner has commented slyly that my grumbling about Gertrude's freedom from household tasks might smack of a tendency towards social realism, yet I doubt that my aim is to compare the writing of GS to Jack London's Martin Eden (now largely unread). There remains the question always for me of relating life to art.

Brinnin is astute in noting her naive approach towards her "subjects": "By a ceaseless flow of half-articulated thoughts, worn phrases of speech and homely inflections from domestic life, she would match Cezanne's iteration of the qualities of light." (62)

So indeed she was marginally aware of the daily drudgery of life as experienced by others; they were to be the raw material of her fiction, to be transformed into art, her literary form of impressionism.

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Rose and her story around again


My friends have finished reading The World is Round, story of Rose and her dog Love and I can't locate in my offspring's room the copy given to her as a child by an adult friend. Though I understand that this book also contains the famous words Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose("she would carve on a tree until it went all the way around") that were originally written for Stein's poem "Sacred Emily" they are now the lines most often associated in the minds of people largely unfamiliar with Gertrude Stein's writing with what her writing is. The recurrence of the rose like a mantra is so unlike the kind of advertising jingles that permeate the brain such as "double your pleasure double your fun with double-mint double-mint double-mint gum" from years ago and in repetition maddening and manipulative though at heart meaningless. The Stein rose mantra goes round only until it settles in and doesn't jangle the brain.

There are countless poems with the Rose Emblematic: My Love is Like a Red Red Rose; A rose by any other name would smell as sweet; Rose thou art sick; Strew on her roses roses and never a spray of yew -- all these flood in with their metaphorical odour of love, disease, and death. Gertrude's rose is rose and nothing but and is assigned no symbolic content, no colour, no scent, no qualifier of any kind. It is simply there and plainly so. No suggestion of beauty or truth but haunting for all its insistent "thereness" that both plays with meaning and provokes questioning.

Today I've been reading and re-reading Ann Lauterbach's essay "Slaves of Fashion" about poetry that doesn't take risks, doesn't push boundaries, doesn't work (or play) as a "place of discovery." For her Gertrude Stein's writing seems a kind of touchstone for poetry that ventures and a reliable one and also for me a kind of tonic and restorative and an actual lodestar in a culture drowning in debased language.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Or to begin again

No: not Gertrude Stein, but Ann Lauterbach. Her ninth collection of poems, Or to Begin Again,

". . . takes its name from a sixteen-poem elegy that resists its own end, as it meditates on the nearness of specific attachment and loss against the mute background of historical forces in times of war." This being part of the publisher's (Penguin) blurb, with the book to appear March 2009.

There's an online audio of Lauterbach reading some of her poems from If In Time: Selected Poems 1975-2000 and Hum (Penguin 2005), and in conversation with Charles Bernstein.

By right-clicking on the links for "Full Program" and "Lauterbach in Conversation" you can save the file as an mp3 for repeated listening. I'm saving the pleasure for a complete listening tomorrow a.m.

I also found an interview of her (c. 5 pages long, online) that was published in Rain Taxi (the excellent Minneapolis small press book review journal -- will never give up my subscription to it even though it spurs me to spending far too much money on yet more books and even though the online edition offers even more substantial reading)in 2002. The interview can now be found on the blog ("Mappemunde") of the interviewer, Tim Peterson.

And yes: there is a reference in this interview to Gertrude Stein, getting back to "beginning" and "making new . . .".

Lauterbach: " . . .there's a much much earlier poem of mine which I don't think I kept, in which the first line is 'under the surface.' The poem is called 'Tremble in a Late Age,' because Gertude Stein said it was hard to write poetry in a late age. It's from my first book, actually. So I think I've always been interested in a kind of subversion, or submersion, or something that is about the relation of making new and compelling surfaces by getting under the surfaces of things."

"Tremble in a Late Age" is not to be found in any of the Lauterbach collections I have including the Selected Poems 1975-2000 . . . .if anyone knows the whereabouts of "Tremble", please post the reference.

All this because of/connected to reading American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Rankine & Spahr) and then finally finding my copy of The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience: as I pick it up where I left off on page 162, there's Gertrude again, in reference to present time: "Stein's reticulations, re/presentations of the present as wholly linguistic."

Friday, January 2, 2009

"the perfect sentence"

A bundle of copies of the Times Literary Supplement arrived in the mail early on New Year's Eve, sent as replacements for my messed up subscription. Have been gradually reading them. [Now I note -- appropriately -- that Microsoft has underlined the previous statement in wriggly green with the admonition: Fragment (consider revising).] This message appears a lot when I'm making notes or drafting a piece of writing, when the standard subject/predicate relationship is not conventionally satisfied.

What I came across in the Nov. 7/08 issue of the TLS (p. 15) was a two-column account(by a TLS editor) about a French writer name of Frederic-Yves Jeannet griping (in Le Monde) about Jean-Marie Le Clezio having been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

One of Jeannet's several complaints is his conviction that Le Clezio's language is "banal", the cure for which would be "to give the author a lesson in how to construct a sentence." This provoked a response by a professor of modern literature in Lyon, who in turn "criticized Jeannet for an 'obsolete and overtechnical vision of literature', and suggested that writing fiction is about more than attempting to create perfect sentences."

Had it not been for my recent readings of Gertrude Stein's lectures on writing, as well as the odd piece I've been reading about contemporary poetics, I might have pooh-poohed the business about the "perfect sentence" as a fit of schoolboy pique but I was curious to find out what Google would toss up when prodded about GS and the notion of the "perfect sentence."

Somebody "out there" has already created a partial concordance of Gertrude's reference to sentences with this tidbit:

"This is a perfect sentence because it refers to regretting."

the only context being:

"Way-laid made it known as quince cake. This is a perfect sentence because it refers to regretting. They regret what they have given. So far there is no need for a paragraph. I cannot see him. This is a paragraph."

though alas without reference to the piece of writing it was found in. The becauseness (not, according to M'soft, a real word) relating to the feeling of regret being captured.

Hardly equivalent to gospel and for me yet another example of Gertrude at play stating that something is because she says it is and because it is something she has written so therefore it is.

Yet another writer on the internet takes GS more seriously:

"The most important elements of poetry to me are sound and syntax. Vowels carry emotion. The interplay of consonants can be quite sensual, kinetic, frenetic, awkward or erotic. A well-tuned sentence will be meaningful, and beautiful, regardless of what the words might mean. I am always striving to write a perfect sentence. Like Stein, I like to begin again and again. Building context tends towards futility, it stifles sound."

Or: a perfect sentence will as a whole be meaningful (and beautiful) no matter what the individual word might mean.

This is somewhat at odds with conventional grammatical definitions, viz:

"A sentence is an expression of a thought or feeling by means of a word or words used in such form and manner as to convey the meaning intended." (from a 1953 reprint of a 1947 reprint of a paperback Barnes & Noble English Grammar -- a relic.)

A Dictionary of Literary Devices by Bernard Dupriez considers that the reader's notion of "the sentence" is already understood and simply classifies them as "unary", "binary" and "ternary" according to their "organization of ideas" with this nugget:

"Absence of organization in the ideas expressed in some modern texts produces sentences christened in French 'invertebrate' or unarticulated. . . . The next logical step . . .is interior monologue." This latter illustrated by a quotation from James Joyce.

Hardly gospel, either of these, one a curio the other a devilish advocate.

Grammar hammered into grade-school lessons or categorized according to (translated) French rhetoric loses its power of glamour/magic. A word means. A sentence means. But it seems to be the poets or certain among them who are concerned with how we mean what we mean by what we say as Gertrude Stein stated she was herself busy trying to do through her writing.

Then and finally when I came across in a newly arrived book, American Women Poets of the 21st Century (Wesleyan 2002) Ann Lauterbach's "Poetic Statement" (363-367) with her writing about not sentences perfect or otherwise but the importance of fragments (though we are led to believe that fragments have no Meistersoft oops Microsoft meaning); reflecting back on Stein (and others) I am given pause: [here the line breaks indicate where text is in the original lined up on the right side of the page]

"For a while I have been interested in the notion of a whole fragment.
This fragment is not
one in which one laments a lost whole, as in Stein, Eliot, and Pound, but
of our unhandsome condition, where we suffer from having been being,
and in that
acknowledgment foreground what is: the abraded and indefinite
accumulation of an infinite dispersal of sums . . . ."

. . . which reminds me of GS writing that the "perfect sentence" is so "because it refers to regretting." Lauterbach's "lament [for] a lost whole."

This excerpt from Lauterbach doesn't at all do justice to the whole piece, in which Lauterbach carefully expresses the difficulty of constructing the "complexities in which we find ourselves" and the temptation to fall back into the "habit" of a stabilizing "logic of recognition."

Out of that moment of feeling twigged by what seemed a tantalizing notion of "the perfect sentence here I am now wading into deeper waters, not certain I really know how to swim without my grammatical life-preserver, that reliable stabilizer.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Stein's focus on the word is a love affair

From Dana Cairns Watson's Gertrude Stein, The Essence of What Happens : a kindly used o.p. copy ordered Jan 1/08 online from Alibris after finding a a page on Google Book Search with the words "New Year's Day", my search term this New Year's Day, to find out what G.S. was doing, alive or at least possibly no longer alive corporeally, this day.

The following an extended quote with lapses and the odd sigh:

Instead of telling us what she's talking about, Stein obliges us to figure it out. Without a right or wrong in view, the exercise forces readers into a more complete experience of single words -- their sounds, their spelling, their various denotations and connotations, their relatives . . . .According to [William] James:

"If we look at an isolated printed word and repeat it long enough, it ends by assuming an entirely unnatural aspect. Let the reader try this with any word on this page. He [sic] will soon begin to wonder if it can possibly be the word he [sic, again]has been using all his [sigh] life with that meaning . . . ." [more quoted here from his Principles, 726-727]

Stein [back to Watson's text] says she discovered this feature of words on New Year's Day 1927, when she was getting her hair cut short and reading with her glasses out in front of her, but she had studied James in the fall of 1893. Even one word, or a set of words, can give rise to an array of associations, considerations, and imaginings. Stein's focus on the word is a love affair -- but also a political campaign.

End of quotation from Watson's book via Google . . .now to wait for the book itself to arrive.

Randomly discovered: "Susie Asado", [composed by Virgil Thomson] was inscribed to Stein by Thomson on that very New Year's Day 1927. No idea if it was connected to the haircut.

Also found on the New Yorker site, "Talk of the Town":

". . . the 3rd annual non-stop reading of The Making of Americans, by Gertrude Stein, at the Paula Cooper Gallery, in SoHo. The first year's reading, on Dec. 31, 1974, was the idea of Jean Rigg, Alison Knowles, Annea Lockwood, and Ruth Anderson. 74 people participated in this year's reading which ran from noon, Dec. 31 until just after 2:30, Sunday afternoon, some 50 hours later."

At the site for the gallery (www.paulacoopergallery.com)one reads:

"For 25 years until 2000, the gallery presented a much celebrated series of New Year's Eve readings of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans and James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake." (There are references elsewhere to the Stein readings being a biennial event, alternating years being the readings of Joyce.)

My single and "lonely" word of the moment: INCANDESCENT. Probably from the Latin root, the intransitive verb candesco, -escere, -ui; "to become white, begin to glisten; to get red hot."

Incandescent will accompany me to the New Year's Day Poetry Marathon at the Beaver Hall Artists' Gallery downtown. Where perhaps the shade of Gertrude Stein might be found.