Gertrude Stein

[Hamlet]

... figured I'd put this author up here as a quick scan didn't bring up any old threads on Stein.

I'm currently reading "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" by Gertrude Stein, an account of Stein's time in Paris spent hanging out with Cezanne, Matisse, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald amongst others.

I suspect that like me most people will have at least heard of Stein if you haven't actually read her, I don't think she's much read, and even if they haven't read her, they'll probably know of he Hemingway connection. I have a volume of Hemingway's 49 first short stories, and he discusses "having written in many places..." and Stein as well as Spain would have been part of that experience I presume. I believe it was Stein who encouraged Hemingways to drop his flowery prose, and after losing a suitcase full of his early work, life intervened and he had to begin all over again, after picking himself up off the deck.

The Penguin edition intoduces the volume as:

"A light-hearted entertainment, this is in fact Gertrude Stein's autobiography and a roll-call of all the extraordinary painters and writers she met between 1903 and 1932. Audacious, sardonic, and characteristically self-confident, this is the definitve account by the American in Paris."

It's actually a little book written in a plain easy style and fairly short at 261 pages.

[Daniel del Real]

I suspect that like me most people will have at least heard of Stein if you haven'tactually read her, I don't think she's much read, and even if they haven't read her, they'll probably know of he Hemingway connection.

That's my case, and I particularly noticed her important figure as nurturing figure for the 20's generation in Paris by watching Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen. Now this book you're reading surely has a lot of connections on what is presented in the movie, with much more insight of the relations between those key figures of arts that time. Should be a really interesting text to grab.

[Engleberton Crabferry]

If you'd like a nice (fictionalised) biographical introduction to Stein, read this book here: The Book of Salt, by Monique Truong. The narrative is presented from the perspective of Stein and Toklas' imagined Vietnamese cook (more about the cook and her life really, but interesting nonetheless, and quite obviously based on the author's engagement with Stein as an artist).

I think Tender Buttons (1914) is Stein's most famous contribution to poetry. Highly idiosyncratic, and obscure, extraordinarily playful with language; subverting conventional modes of expression as a means of better understanding the object world. She seems to appropriate bits and pieces of language as means of returning to a kind of primordial way of viewing.

Here is her poem (from that collection), called A Carafe that is a Blind Glass:

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

It is quite strange, really. Elements of a certain type of stream-of-consciousness; the unlikely-seeming juxtaposition of certain words and phrases.
Here is another...

GLAZED GLITTER.

Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.

The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.

It is almost like a highly obscure version of that board-game you play where you have to try to communicate to your team mate what the word is without saying it or anything related to it! haha. Although I'm quite sure Stein would disapprove of this analogy!

[Engleberton Crabferry]

Here it is, online:

http://www.bartleby.com/140/1.html/

[Engleberton Crabferry]

A friend of mine sent me this once in response to a conversation we were having about meaning and linguistic significance, specifically in relation to Gertrude Stein's poetry. It is all about a condition called Wernicke's Aphasia:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKTdM...eature=related

I think it's quite interesting that Stein took the approach she did in discussing objects. It is almost the same, frenzied response to objects (though highly pre-meditated in Stein's poetry, of course) that a sufferer of this condition displays... As if speaking about the thing or object is something unplanned, unmemorizable, and uniquely contextual, altering every single time the object is approached...

[Hamlet]

Thanks for the Woody Allen reference Daniel, I'll keep an eye out for that film, by pure chance I'd recently picked up a Faber edition of Allen's screenplays.

Engleberton, I'm still looking though your posts, but will finish reading them when I have a moment.

Thanks anyway guys.

[Hamlet]

If you'd like a nice (fictionalised) biographical introduction to Stein, read this book here: The Book of Salt, by Monique Truong. The narrative is presented from the perspective of Stein and Toklas' imagined Vietnamese cook (more about the cook and her life really, but interesting nonetheless, and quite obviously based on the author's engagement with Stein as an artist).

I think Tender Buttons (1914) is Stein's most famous contribution to poetry. Highly idiosyncratic, and obscure, extraordinarily playful with language; subverting conventional modes of expression as a means of better understanding the object world. She seems to appropriate bits and pieces of language as means of returning to a kind of primordial way of viewing.

Here is her poem (from that collection), called A Carafe that is a Blind Glass:

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

It is quite strange, really. Elements of a certain type of stream-of-consciousness; the unlikely-seeming juxtaposition of certain words and phrases.
Here is another...

GLAZED GLITTER.

Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.

The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.

It is almost like a highly obscure version of that board-game you play where you have to try to communicate to your team mate what the word is without saying it or anything related to it! haha. Although I'm quite sure Stein would disapprove of this analogy!

Unusual, you know, I didn't see any poetry anthols when I skimmed Amzon. She's credited with an even plainer style than Hemingway, and is considered by some, it seems, to be underrated. I guess fame, time, and literary output are all factors in this, but she has fallen into that unfortunate position of anybody who is moderately well read knowing of her, or at least her name -- even though they are unlikely to have read any of her actual work.

I think that along with Hemingway and Steins work, it's useful to bear in mind the background situation of WWI, what was it Auden said, something about the end of language being brought about by that war.

This is a big factor in the language experiments for that generation, and with some empathy and awareness of what that war did you can probably glean a better appreciation of the writing and writers who followed in its wake IMHO.

[Engleberton Crabferry]

Yeah, I think that's very true. Lots of experimentation going on. Allegedly a number of factors to consider, though: The 1st World War of course, but even before that, in 1910 (as Virginia Woolf oddly claimed, "Human character changed"; herself critically departing from/critiquing the linear narratives of the Edwardian Realists); the impact of Marxian theory, its revolutionary character with an emphasis on flux, as well as Freud and Jung's theories of the unconscious; the impact the likes of dream studies had on the (later) Surrealist formulations of Dali and Paul Eluard (in literature), but also even the stream of consciousness narratorial technique (which was a term coined by Psychologist William James [Henry James' brother]). I think also, if you look at the (Nietzschean) decline in religious faith/the rise in secularism (even the partial disillusionment amongst the literati of the enlightenment project generally - think of F T Marrinetti and the futurist manifesto!), you get as much of a firm grounding as is possible in understanding how things began to appear more fractured, more experimental and strange-seeming. Afterall, the modernist period (despite common misconceptions) is one still concerned with representing reality (in some ways an extension of Realism, rather than a departure from it!); albeit this time, the reality represented is the reality of the uncertain; the unconscious; the revolution, and yes, the shell-shock, and the uncanny experience of the day-to-day post-war...

[Hamlet]

Good post there sir, you've given me some references to look up, I'm aware of Dali of course, but not Paul Eluard, and I know of Futurism, some of this from related fields, I suspect, I think it had an impact on Architecture, but anyway.... I don't know of F.T. Marrinetti, so thanks for those references!

Yes, we've got this movements thing, acadeimics like to bundle things up into periods and then add a caveat, and we can get used to thinking like that, but as you've said, it begins earlier, is not purely the resullt of war, at least something as cataclysmic as WWI, I've read around Nietzsche and many of the ohters authore, but got interested, in the nonfiction area in WWI recently, I'd always had an appreciation like many of WWII from a factual pov, but it's the great war poetry that comes out of WWI which I'd read and interested me even as far back as early school, and with more recently reading some Woolf, and now Stein, it's sometimes interesting to wrap it all up.

This means a visit to the libarry to pick up some history books, the one I like I may have to buy sometime, it's the Penguin History of WWI... now all this is essential I guess to reading Stein and Hemingway et al, but it's by chance an area I was about to dip into again, and when I saw the "Autobio of Alice B..." it kind of spark a curiosity.

The other big area that's interesting is that whole Joyce, Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land: I've recently listened to a reading of Ulysses on Radio 4, BBC, and a few weeks before, I heard The Waste Land recited, shame on me -- for the first time, both being better listened than read, Joyce said it was supposed to be read out, I understand, he was an actor, or something, no wait, a singer, which for some reason I can't quite picture!


A few strands wrapping up together neatly here, and I've never really considered myself to know anything but the minimum about the early 20th century... I had a friend who was a Proust fanatic, and he once said that Prost bridges the gap between the 19th and 20th centuries, he also thought him, bias he was a Proust scholar perhaps, that he was the greatest writer since Shakespeare.

But anyway, all that aside, Proust is close in time to those poets/writers, and I wonder, like most writers, what were their early influences, in that as you say, they've come out of a dreadful war and looking back at literature before the Great War, as Auden said, after that experience how can the human race, let alone language, remain the same, we go on writing as we did before, and so they are in a sense beginning over, it seems, rejecting the past.

I read a review of Hemingway's A FAREWELL TO ARMS, and it said something like: Hemingway aborted the stylish and adjective heavy prose of the past, and in particular influenced modern fiction and a few other comments about what he did with prose specifically, you'll be familiar with the comments so I wont try and oversimplify and mangle them, and referred finally to the effects on modern prose and fiction such as in the crime novel... so this was all a heck of a jump in the 1920s and thereafter; we tend to come to Hemingway from the pov of being used to spare prose, and so it may not seem like so much of a change to us. But back then!

And then as a tangent here, there's the whole Joycean thing, and talk since of the post-post modern novel struggling to come out from under the influence and shadow of Joyce, who had done everything and taken the novel everywhere it could go, only now, it seems, there's some talk in articles of the grip of Ulysses and stream of consciousness easing up, but I gather a few critics never accepted it in the first place, and we know Joyce is rarely read, a poll on Joyce in Ireland recently revealed only 1% of readers over there had bothered, I presume that was the ' of a literary bent' types?

[Engleberton Crabferry]

No, in fact, I think you did the right thing listening to Ulysses and the Wasteland before/whilst reading them. Poetry is traditionally an oral art form, afterall, and Ulysses (given that it has for its underpinning the Homerian epic) might as well be regarded in a similar light. Plus it is just too hard to read them both and understand them off-the-bat! ha ha! I've tried sooooo hard to finish Ulysses. I have read most of it (in pieces at different times); studied it momentarily. And I think I have to be honest and say now that I just don't enjoy it as a novel. It's information and vocabulary are partially esoteric, partially obscurantist, usually representational of the unconscious and the conscious mind, adoptive of an awkwardly comprehensible variety of forms, and although there are an abundance of things to say about its construction, critically speaking, I think perhaps it fails as a coherent work of entertainment (I am aware of course, that it's philosophy precludes this concern, and am sure people will take issue with this. Obviously, it is a personal preference).

The Wasteland, on the other hand, I think is amazing. Perhaps simply as poetry seems to host more convincingly, more succinctly and analysably coherent, the type of obscurity and representation I think I'm talking about (the distinction of the genres withstanding, of course).

I don't want to say too much about them here, as I feel like I'm sidelining Stein somewhat. But, interestingly, if you want to know something of the conventional differentiation of the genres of Modernism and Postmodernism, often the schematic underpinning of Ulysses (with Homer's epic, The Odyssey) and The Wasteland (with the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King), with ancient or Hellenic subject matter or legend generally, are further displaced and deconstructed in their Post-modern corollaries. I think (although I haven;t read him) somebody like Thomas Pynchon might offer a fitting comparison to Ulysses, [Gravity's Rainbow] itself allegedly drawing on an impossible-seeming variety of underpinnings, none of which act as a lynchpin for the activity, or a node of cultural stability with which to compare the action of the novel. In Ulysses, the dialogue with the ancient text arguably bolsters its own ambitions and sociological imperatives, endowing it rather with a sense of ultimate meaning and authority (arguably, that is, before you consider its own so-called "Post-modern" elements). The Wasteland arguably invokes the legend of the Fisher King, as well as reference to Ancient Sanksrit texts; to Dante and the Divine Comedy, to Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Ovid, and Homer, as a means of likewise grounding a kind of original or inter-generational wisdom; a kind of whisper through the centuries of something ultimate and fundamental, almost theological in its own right. It's "postmodern" equivalent in poetry I believe can be found in someone like John Ashbery; his poem Daffy Duck in Hollywood, for example; a poetry that serves to undermine the profundity of cultural exchange, and seeks to foreground the low-brow as well as the high (without privilege to either). In "postmodernity" there are no profundities. In "modernity" profundity, whilst relinquished in the case of religious experience, was frantically sought in the cannon, and in the construction of artistic meaning (hence Eliot and Joyce's efforts).

I have only read part of Proust's first book in the collection (Way by Swann's), but I love what I've read. Conveniently, his work is often cited as an early example of Stream-of-consciousness (although not utilizing the interior monologue, certainly concerned with the impressions filling the mind upon memory)...

I didn't know about Stein's prose fiction at all, so likewise, thank you for the information! I'll check her out a bit more if I ever have the time. I think, in terms of the poetry I've read of hers so far, I feel rather like I feel for Joyce's Ulysses anyway. Lots to say critically, but not much enjoyment upon cursory glancing! ha! Really quite laborious and difficult. But not to be discarded at all.

Here's a link to the Futurist Manifesto online. It's incredibly interesting to read (Albeit grossly fascistic and patriarchal!). Another thing that I find separates "Modernism" and "Postmodernism" (conventionally speaking) is the earlier period's proclivity for the manifesto, generally; for doctrine and prescription of human/artistic behaviour. The latter "movement" conversely finds itself habitually deconstructing doctrine, finds instead the impossibility of a permanent or sustainable ideology, and languishes thus...

[Hamlet]

Yes, all noted Mr Crabferry, and will post up a reply to this, as soon as time allows!

Thanks for the Futurist link btw! I'll come back and look over that.

There's a joke, I guess, or conceit in the title "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas", it's largely about Stein, written as though in Alice's hand, and although it includes details of Alice, it seems to focus on Stein, or perhaps "perceptions" of Stein, by a third party, and of the general scene, and the visits of the painters and aritistic set, but I suspect, that's the most pleasing thing about it, like you said, it's one you read for completeness and not so much for the pleasure.

That said, it's fairly short and would be a fairly quick read.

[Hamlet]

I've barely made it out of Book 1 of Proust, but I plan to read all of of 3600 pages of "In Search of Lost Time" eventually and hope that I wont wish afterwards that I could have my time back!

Vantage, I believe, publish the entire work in 6 volumes, and although I've had the translation arguments elsewhere, I think it's down to personal choice and these things can become silly. The Moncrieff and all of that...


But, ypou know, being practical - comfort actually plays a part here IMO, 6 books at around 600 pages apiece are easier to handle, and I will probably read it over a few years, or two at least, and mix a lot of other reading in inbetween. An Amazon reviewer, with some spare time said reading morning and night they'd fisnished up Proust in 5 weeks, that seems ideal to me, but who has the time, Proust, if read at all like Joyce, seems to require prolonged periods of convalescence, or pulling puling a long night shift somewhere to get through.

However, I dont think folks should be intimidated by it, just break it up into bite sized chunks, and read around Proust for a few months, or years before attempting it, I've done that since a friend pushed me to have a go at it, the same friend that was ramming the advice on translation down my throat, and in the end I just went my own way, as I always do.

Germaine Greer said something about Proust, seemed she'd gotten around to reading him, possibly towards the end of her career, and couldn't see what all of the fuss was about, accused him of babbling on about nothing in particular, quite a funny reaction.

Re above- if I've followed you, DECONSTRUCTION is the literary theory you are using, in part at least, to look over Joyce.

I'm not versed in theory, but I have read quite a lot indirectly based around the theoires which came out of the 70s/80s, Jacques Derrida -- death and return of author-- or feminist, post-colonialist, deconstruction and historicist crit, but my take is allied to what a few critics have said in relation to Shakespeare, the writer who has always, with many breaks and gaps however, interested me the most.

These critics are folks like the late A.D. Nuttall, particularly for me his opening introductory chapter to SHAKESPEARE THE THINKER, published by Yale University Press and his MIMISIS, A NEW APPROACH or HORIZON, I believe it's called.

These texts take on historism and theory, and although I can see that in the case of Joyce, that an approach such as deconstruction can be a way into the work, a sort of lens through which to open it up, I've always felt instintively as much as anything else, that theory can be also be disabling, and clutter the mind at worst.

A friend studied his English Degree at Oxford, and over a beer we were discussing his time there, and he said matter of factly that his lecturer had told the class to avoid the critical texts and get used to making up their own minds... and that snippet registered with me, my mind stored it away, but it wasn't until I'd stumbled across some of the works above that I realized what had been going on in most Brit/American Universities in recent decades. And the "culture wars".

That particular lecturer, I presume, was concerned so he'd avoided such approaches, and since Historicism still holds in the academy, although as Nuttall said, it seems to be showing signs of losing its grip, it's something that I am still questioning! Nuttall accepts certain tenets of Historicism, as it's founder accepts it's a two-way mirror, Stephen Greenblatt. His "Hamlet in Purgatory" is an excellent book, but I'm digressing-

I don't know if you perhaps teach it or have studied it, perhaps you can offer an account of how it's affected your approach to literature or if any of the above rings true?

Another interesting example is Nick Hornby, who maddeningly said without qualification, 'my time at Cambridge University held me back as a writer', or had damaged him to some extent, again, at the time that he said it, I didn't understand, but I felt like he'd said something fairly significant and important there, he later went on to set up an imaginative school for children who wanted to become writers based upon stimulation the imagination by way of props, caves, and various fun, this seemed to me to be an extension of Hornby's concerns. I can only assume that he was referring to theory.

Brian Vickers is another favourite critical and trusted source: his APPROPRIATING SHAKESPEARE, is a fairly healthy riposte to the trend, and now, whenever I pick up say, an "Edition" of a Shakespeare text, or some other Elizabethan literature I'll consider theapproach for a few moments before I blindly read on.

I now understand the pov of most of the editord r schools I come across and have my favourites. It helps because if you understand where they fit within the wide matrix of these now -- largely separate -- and splintered schools of criticism, the so-called "fragmentation" within Shakespeare studies, as it's commonly labelled, you can separate it from the general information within the volume. Or set it alongside other essays and approaches.

I'm not completely against it, I remain open minded btw!

It must be very confusing to graduates however who are impressionable and who don't have the benefit at least of the history of recent theory?

[Engleberton Crabferry]

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point actually Hamlet. I sometimes think, perhaps (just maybe!) I have thrown myself too deeply into deconstructive theory, and, as you say, I think a far better approach (when starting out) is to formulate your own, unique responses to the literature that you're reading. I'm not teaching it yet (though I would love to!), but currently studying for an MA, and have progressively found a use in honing my knowledge of that particular type of criticism. I started out without much knowledge of theory at all, with just questions, as I'm sure most people do. And then I think perhaps thereafter one naturally veers towards a school of criticism that befits one's sensibilities, appropriating pieces here and there, adapting things when one sees fit! ... But really, I think, on a basic level, I have always thought in quite abstract terms anyway, and have progressively found myself in allegiance with philosophical skeptics. Derrida and the post-structuralists I suppose embody for me a specific type of modern skepticism.

Deconstruction is very difficult to explain. It is almost impossible, since it is nothing in particular; doesn't purport to contain any essential truths or wisdom. Rather, it seeks to challenge conventional wisdoms and political systems, religious doctrines, and ideologies of any sort. To speak slightly more complicatedly, it seeks to undermine what it calls the logocentric traditions of Western metaphysics. Humanity, according to the likes of Derrida, has set about forging ideologies based on the premise that the "word" is epistemologically superior in systems or structures (languages/ideologies). We can only be absolutely "present", have absolute "knowledge", at the mercy of such a system of metaphysics. Or rather, you might say that absolutism, doctrine and prescription for human behaviour, can only be legitimated if we take for granted that a word contains ultimate, unwavering meaning.

In short (in terms of its relevance to literature), post-structuralism (I believe) is responsible for subverting the likes of Freudian theory (its patriarchal, Eurocentric underpinnings,; much of which informs early 20th century art), for deconstructing Colonial narratives legitimating Colonialist oppressions, and for facilitating the dismantlement of ideological bias in misogynist, patriarchal structures inherent to much of Western modernity, prior to "post-feminism"... I think, very basically speaking, it is an interrogative tool which seeks to dismantle purported truths inherent to most theories, novels, poetries, politics, and speech prior to "Deconstructions" inception as a theory. On a very basic level I like it precisely because it does not provide answers at all, allows one to question, continually, instead...

Anyway ... I think it sounds amazing your interest in Shakespeare and Nuttall's taking-on of historicism and theory. I couldn't agree more that theory has a lot to answer for in terms of its thwarting comprehension and artistic endeavour... Interesting what you say about Nick Hornby as well. I think that's very true of other people I know who've tried to write creatively after having imbibed so much criticism. It is almost too self-conscious, too deconstructive a process for one to ever begin creating again! Although, I think perhaps a good example of somebody who has managed to strike a balance in his work (of criticism and creative construction) is Samuel Beckett. But then, with novels like Molloy, Malone Dies, and/or The Unnamable, theory/philosophy comes to occupy a central role in the "narrative" itself (a term I use loosely for Beckett, since in these works he appears not to concern himself with much linearity or comprehensibility at all...)... I dunno, I suppose if you're looking to read and write regular, comprehensible narratives, without a focus on meaninglessness and the postmodern, there mayn't be a need to think deconstructively anyway....

hmmm...

Yeah, I will take your advice on Proust, too. I don't know much about his translations. But it would be great if I had the time to read him all the way through. I'm not ready for it yet. Too much other stuff to read for my course... something to look forward to though!

[Engleberton Crabferry]

Also, what is IMO?

[Hamlet]

Oh, it's just IN MY OPINION, or IMHO, in my humble opinion, I always throw a few of those into my posts as the web has this tendency, without the benefit of being in person or tone sometimes, to sound like soapbox preaching, when all we're really doing is throwing up our best take onto the screen, given that we haven't refined posts in the way you refine essays, or pass them around for feedback, this web-communicating is a funny old game, I think that's why there's so much confusion and sometimes a few tears, as folks post fairly quickly.

I often return to posts to amend later, this forum for example, seems to stick, so you have to save and write and write and save, occasionally, but anyway, a few IMO seems to do the trick!

No problem with deconstruction, I understood everything your were saying, I think most of us have to struggle with theory, almost wrestle with it until we've made it our own, or found a way through that works, that's if you pursue deeper knowledge or meaning in works.

I've tended to read outwards from Shakespeare recently, the history, other dramatists, like Marlowe, Jonson, Dekker, Ford, Massinger, and even looked into some of the manuscript aspects to how these guys wrote, as we know each of Shakespeare's original copies were lost, and I find that interesting, intriguing even, because a few manuscripts from the time do still exist.

And there are a few academics, like Grace Ioppolo, or I think it's Greg Beal, who are actually looking into that side of things, rather than working back from the extant folios/quartos to ID what exactly was written and how!

[Engleberton Crabferry]

oh! haha. I should have got that. Thanks! I was thinking it was a code for some kind of critical stance! haha. Oh dear...

[Engleberton Crabferry]

Also, just to bring it back to Stein, I think (in her poetry at least), we see something of a proto-postmodernistic stance, in that she does not privilege (or make logocentric) the word, but rather foregrounds the impossibility of the presence of the object... Perhaps this can also be seen in relation to Ezra Pound's imagism, which was far more exacting and prescriptive (Stein as "postmodern", Pound as "modern")...

Interesting also what you've said about reading outwardly, gathering a contextual setting for Shakespeare. I wish I understood (or had read, even) enough Shakespeare in the first place! I have a read a couple of plays by Jonson (The Alchemist and Volpone), and one by Marlowe (The Jew of Malta, I think), but only WATCHED a handful of Shakespeare;s as BBC productions (shame on me, I know!)... In fact, I think I have read most of Macbeth and Hamlet, as well as A Midsummer Night's Dream, but really not any of his other plays... one Sonnet ("Shall I compare thee"? haha. Clutching at straws now!)...

[Hamlet]

I was like that with around 7 plays, and then read the entire canon over a year on the page, I'd watched the plays, and been down to the RSC for a few productions, one of those was The Alchemist, but then having said that one day I'd just read all of them, did it over a year, it had to be on the page, you know, that was the objective I'd set myself, and it really does allow you to see how there are similariites, and how the same voice appears and uses the same turns of expression.
But anyway, I did have to really apply myself, and I can understand if anyone has read a few, because that was me.

The BBC productions are really good, as they try to follow the entire text. I think that's one of the best ways to see them, but...

yes, Stein. It's incredible isn't it, just how experimental and exacting some of these writers efforts were. I've never read any Ezra Pound, but often wonder hos successful these experiments were, do writers think, or even begin to think like that now, for example, the impression I get from "impossibily of the presence of the object" is that that could either succeed, or by way of a different thinking, be said to be incorrect, the object is there, but these writers decided it wasn't possible, and so adjusted their prose experiments or conception of their art accordingly.

[Hamlet]

btw- re "foregrounding of presence of objectare" - are you able to put any examples up of how Stein achieves this in her poetry, a few lines perhaps... or is that technically a bit tricky to illustrate?

[Engleberton Crabferry]

When I say "foregrounding the impossibility of the presence of the object" I am thinking specifically of Tender Buttons. And if you look at the poems I mention above I think you will see roughly what I mean.

I'll include one here, as well...

I think basically each of the poems in the collection involve an approximate strategy of an oblique sort of negation. That is, they hint at the "Object" without ever saying what the object is, referring rather to what it is not; something Ferdinand de Saussure and people like Ernest Fenellossa were saying (of semantic or linguistic meaning) at roughly the same time (for Structuralist thinkers such as themselves a word like "house" means "house" precisely because it does not mean "hovel" or "bungalow" or "chalet" or "castle"; it's "meaning" or "significance" manifests as a consequence of its distinction from other word-signs. Like Stein's objects, defined by what they are not...).

This one's called A Box (from the "Objects" section of the collection):

A BOX.

Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.

Notice how she refers to a 'circle' and a 'white way of being round', whilst continually evoking the sharpness of a 'pin' and a 'green point', only to 'point again' at the poem's closure, forbidding the longevity of a pure conception of anything spherical. Instead one imagines the circle or sphere to have popped; to have disappeared; the sharpness of the pin, as well as the initially grounded concept of things coming "out" of something (a motif itself invocative of a type of container), perhaps then conspiring to invoke the box, afterall. As the poem's title suggests, it is of course the box that Stein wishes us to consider (on one level or another). And, as I say, I think it is merely an experimental, frenzied structuralism at work in Stein's general poetic philosophy; the object never quite what it is, never quite there per se, but always like what it is not, and what is not there... a kind of thematic paradox of reality ironically mis-apprehended, slipping away or disintegrating, likenesses and dissimilarities manifesting in it place...