Gertrude's blue and Nabokov's blues: preludes to "difficult" reading

Happened to read on the same day a TLS review (February 4)by Thomas Karshan of three new books on Nabokov and find a two-week old article in the New York Times (February 1) reporting that N's theory of butterfly evolution has now been proven correct.

It wasn't N's morphological studies (and I have yet to read all of my hc copy of Nabokov's Blues, lepidoptery taking second place to other "fixed" objects (e.g. words pinned down)that captured me, but N's tetchiness about claims that his writing was difficult to read. Karshan writes:

Like many of the Modernists, Nabokov was of two minds as to whether reading should be easy or difficult. "I work hard, I work long on a body of words", he wrote, "until it grants me complete possession and pleasure. If the reader has to work in his turn -- so much the better. Art is difficult....

Without pursuing the clear physical element of "pleasure" and "possession" of a "body" of words, and my wondering at N. being called an upper case Modernist, I found myself thinking more about the notion of "difficult reading."

I chanced on a book on my shelves, lying almost hidden on other vertically arranged books because of its format: Jennifer Scappettone's From Dame Quickly, a collection of poetexts, a nonword attempt to approach the innovative way that her poems and word-collages explore text. Truly a modernist qua exploratory departure from received forms. First section of poems with an epigraph from Gertrude's Lucy Church Aimiably, reading in part: "see in the distance that there is elegantly speaking what there is to detach."

Scappettone's texts present a challenge to reading, but to label them difficult is to miss the headiness of what words can do. Her book is not a body and defies possession, or: the pleasure is not in the possession but in navigating the layers and shifts and sometimes fluent sometimes jammed constructions in which each phrase is loaded with import and sheer lyricism that always keeps moving and slipping into new meaning:

lean a sculpture of swan flank forever covered for now
on every imperfect death takes you to task afresh yet
it being swapped all over the place again as decadence
embracing on the night train after a scare and a deal with the conductor you were
never to agree upon the narrative again [34]

("never to agree upon the narrative again" sends me, scatters me off to Stefania Pandolfo's Impasse of the Angel, open nearby, but no . . .later)

There is Gertrude, waiting opposite, her turn to tell the story of blue, "associated with Picasso's return to Spain in 1902. For Stein, blue also means Toklas, whose blue eyes speak of tenderness and sexuality, as she wrote many times."
This, in Dydo and Rice's The Language that Rises.

More on all the blues at a later time when the sky returns to morning blue.

"writing in terms of discovery"

Reading "in terms of discovery" has brought me back, serendipitously, to Gertrude Stein but this time I will not just ingest her words and marvel once again at how she continues to connect me to what matters in matters of writing but voice it to the virtual void.

Rediscovering my copy of Jan Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy (University of Toronto 1992)thickly flagged with post-it notes and my own pencilled annotations by way of maintaining my ongoing dialogue with the book, I found this reference by Zwicky on page 171:

"John Hyde Preston, about Gertrude Stein:

She talks freely and volubly and sometimes obscurely, as if she had something there that she was very sure of and yet could not touch it. She has that air of having seen in flashes something which she does not know the shape of, and can talk about, not out of the flashes but out of the space between when she has waited."

This is cited from Preston's essay, "A Conversation" from The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 156, No. 2 (August 1935). Searching the internet in hopes of finding the entire piece archived, the first item I come across is from Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science by Steven Meyer. In his Prefatory Remarks he mentions Preston's conversation with Stein,

"shortly after she concluded her six-month lecture tour of the United States in 1934 and 1935, Gertrude Stein responded to Preston's confession of just how "miserable, despairing, self-doubtful" he still felt about his writing. Drawing on half a century’s experience in her chosen medium, she counseled him to write
without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. Yes, before in a thought, but not in careful thinking. It will come if it is there and if you will let it come, and if you have anything you will get a sudden creative recognition. You won't know how it was, even what it is, but it will be creation if it came out of the pen and out of you and not out of an architectural drawing of the thing you are doing." (p. 188, online version, )."

Meyer's book is one that I bought in my book hunt for ever more writing responding to Stein and her peculiar genius.

Now the chain from Stein's response to Preston as contained in his essay 76 years ago surfacing in Meyer's book in the 2001 paperback and earlier recorded also in Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy reaches me on this snow-heavy day with striking relevance to a recent workshop with Gail Scott at the Toronto New School of Writing.

Now I know how to proceed, what to send to Gail in response to her brilliant but all-too-brief hours with us, as a profound "thank you" for what has emerged for me, through Scott, as a Steinian continuum and a way of continuing.