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.