Against this view it is urged that we underestimate the automatic powers of the normal subject. We are told that many of the acts which we usually do quite consciously might really be done without consciousness. In support of this assertion such facts are pointed out, as men completely undressing without knowing it, when their attention is distracted by other matters.

—Leon Solomons and Gertrude Stein, "Normal Motor Automatism" (1896)

Yes, you know how it is when that happens. (By the way, Solomons did the write-up.)

The days are wonderful and the nights are wonderful and the life is pleasant.

—Gertrude Stein, "Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia," 1913

MSA 13

It seems that the era of liveblogging is over, at least for me. In fact I barely tweeted, thanks to my janky phone. But I had a blast at MSA, as usual; I particularly enjoyed a talk by Karen Leick on Gertrude Stein's reception in the 1960s (the whole panel was great, in fact) and Benjy Kahan's provocative talk on climate and temporary homosexuality.

I felt that my own panel, "Against Innovation," went very well, despite a minor a/v fail; Stephen Ross and Joel Burges gave rich and interesting talks—Stephen's a metacritical meditation on haunting in modernist studies in several registers, and Joel's a clever look at the formalization of obsolescence in Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox. Ted Martin was our panel chair and kept things moving along admirably, and the people who showed up to the panel asked smart and difficult questions.

Beyond all the talks, of course, it was wonderful to see old friends and meet new people. MSA always wisely supplies ample breaks between panels and free-flowing coffee, which make for great conversations. I'm coming away from this MSA with lots of energy for my book, new readers for some unbearably delayed work in progress, and the general excitement of being reminded that I'm not the only one interested in these things.

I also came to the decision over the weekend that I should make a habit of posting my conference talks to the web, which is something that lots of people already do. I haven't done it in the past for a variety of familiar reasons—not feeling as though the idea were well enough developed or the talk well enough written; or the thought that I might develop the talk into an article one day.

Well, I'm starting to think better of these fears (let's call a spade a spade). It's not going to shock anyone that twenty-minute conference talks tend to be a little undercooked, for one thing. It's true, my conference talks aren't always well wrought urns. I think I can live with this revelation about my scholarly practice being made public. (By the way, my conference talks are also intentionally informal in tone—I believe I use the phrase "random garbage" in this one, for instance. I consider this a feature, not a bug.)

And as for thinking I might develop an idea—sometimes I do and sometimes I don't—but mostly I don't. And in this particular case, I'm pretty sure I won't. I have an article in the works that's related to the talk I gave at this year's MSA, but quite different in focus.

So, in short, here's my MSA 13 talk: "The Time-Sense: On Stein's Repetition."

"Popcock!" said Gertrude Stein.

With this unusually lucid and brief remark the writer who has grown famous for her "a rose is a rose is a rose" style dismissed recent efforts of scientists to explain her work.

"Popcock is popcock is science is popcock," Miss Stein might have been expected to say. But she did not, according to her report. For once, she failed to repeat herself or to bewilder her hearers.

The scientific explanation is that her writing is done with her wrist and not with her mind. Automatic writing is the scientific term for it. Miss Stein not only disagrees, but takes the view that her writing does not need explaining.

If you have seen her play, "Four Saints in Three Acts," or have read ay of her other strange writings, you probably feel that she needs as much explaining as that other famous "stein"—Einstein—who also always draws a capacity crowd but whom hardly anyone in the audience understands.

    —Jane Stafford, "Gertrude Stein Explained," Science News-Letter, 2 March 1935

It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition. (526)

    —Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation"

Beddini (reading a telegram): 'Come ahead stop stop being a sap stop you can even bring Alberto stop my husband is stopping at your hotel stop when do you start stop.' I cannot understand who wrote this.


Dale: Sounds like Gertrude Stein.


    —Top Hat (1935)

Etta Cone offered to typewrite Three Lives and she began. Baltimore is famous for the delicate sensibilities and conscientiousness of its inhabitants. It suddenly occurred to Gertrude Stein that she had not told Etta Cone to read the manuscript before beginning to typewrite it. She went to see her and there indeed was Etta Cone faithfully copying the manuscript letter by letter so that she might not by any indiscretion become conscious of the meaning. (713)
    —The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

All you need to know, really.

Such a doll

Everyone knows that Teen Talk Barbie never said, "Math is hard; let's go shopping!" It caught on nonetheless; there was something about the phrase that made people think that, yes, this is just what a talking Barbie would say.

Speech is one of those things that is supposed to set "the human" apart from "the inhuman," as what Anca Parvulescu describes as "one in a series of properties invoked as [the] minimal difference, a catalog that offers something to hold on to whenever the human risks contamination with the nonhuman" (4).* Animated dolls occupy a special place in western lore as objects that particularly challenge that distinction, though these minimal differences like (realistic) speech and (real) laughter are sticking points where the distinction is nonetheless upheld.

Still, dolls and automata are powerful figures for women in particular, or rather, the distinction between a woman and a doll has frequently seemed to be particularly easy to erase, from Galatea to Coppélia to the aestheticized-into-objecthood daughter Pansy in The Portrait of a Lady. Michael Taussig notes of a collection of eighteenth-century automata that the figures represented include "everything but the white male. There are negroes in top hats and tight breeches, the 'upside-down world clock' with a monkey playing the drum, ... and women—especially women" (213-4).

Women's propensity to be confused with dolls, and the triumph of artificiality in that confusion, is perhaps one of the sources of anxiety that has long surrounded the Barbie doll in particular as an "unrealistic model" for girls. Barbie's nonhuman appearance—her slender foot perpetually extended for the high-heeled glass slipper that would make of her a princess—registers not as uncanny but as ideal.

The talking Barbie's speech is therefore the place where the inanimate doll gets a chance to seem more "lifelike," and, by the same stroke, the place where it is feared that her "lifelike" quality will reveal the lifelike dimension itself (what women are "really like") to be, in essence, no more than the mechanical, unthinking doll with which women are so often conflated.

Enter "Math is hard; let's go shopping!" As Benjamin Zimmer documents in the LL post linked above, "math is hard; let's go shopping!" is an abbreviated pairing of two real phrases that Teen Talk Barbie originally played,"Math class is tough" and "Want to go shopping? Okay, meet me at the mall." The urban legend version stages an exchange; the newly more-lifelike (talking) Barbie eschews "hard," intellectually challenging math in favor of (pleasurable?) shopping.

The two things are of course gender-coded. But more importantly, they're gender-coded on precisely the grounds on which women are confused with dolls. The math signifies intellectual activity, which Teen Talk Barbie legendarily renounces because it is "hard"; at stake here is not only intellect but volition, the will to take on what is difficult and to engage in ("hard") work. At stake is the possibility of being all there. Teen Talk Barbie doesn't have it, of course. But it is perfectly believable that she can engage in shopping, which Rachel Bowlby has described as, at least in certain versions, a fully automatized leisure activity. The female shopper, as figured in the late nineteenth century, is devoid of volition and powerless before the commodity, seized by an insatiable desire not genuinely her own. (The classic portrayal is in Zola's novel Au Bonheur des dames.)** She is rendered an automaton before the bargain table.

For the patently unrealistic yet more-real-than-real-women Barbie to come alive by saying "Math is hard; let's go shopping!" is thus a bigger betrayal than just the usual reinforcement of gender stereotypes around STEM fields. The whole point of automata is for them to become self-aware, rise up, and shake off their oppressors (us). The betrayal of Teen Talk Barbie, succinctly rendered as "Math is hard; let's go shopping!," is that she uses her moment of speech not to become self-aware and subvert the inhuman decorativeness for which she was designed, but rather to reject cognition and embrace the doll-like automatism that is already attributed to real women. That is: inhuman Barbie is representative of real women, more representative than the real women are, and what she "says" goes.

The above image is a Creative Commons licensed Flickr image. The photographer's caption reproaches Barbie for, well, being a doll: "empty-headed." Tellingly, the sole comment to date reads, "i've met women with a gaze like that... scary indeed."

Whatever women may do to protest the untruths of Barbie is moot whenever Barbie, and dolls in general, are already posited as the truth of women.


* Parvulescu is alluding to laughter in this description--laughter being another candidate for that minimal difference.

** There is also a twentieth-century "savvy" female shopper—the two kinds of shopper always exist in tension, as Bowlby explains. Judging from ads, the volitionless shopper seems to buy chocolate and desserts, while the wily shopper buys cleaning supplies.

See also the "X is hard" Snowclones Database entry.

Bowlby, Rachel. Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. Print.

Parvulescu, Anca. Laughter: Notes on a Passion. Cambridge: MITP 2010. Print.

Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Image: Barbie. Pete Lounsbury, 2004. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Apparently the semester is over

I've started many a blog post in the last few weeks, only to discard it, dissatisfied. I'm in a bit of a strange lull lately, despite having the usual gigantic heap of work on my hands. I submitted an essay relatively recently, but not the essay, and I'm on the fence about how deeply to revise the essay right now (versus after I hand it to some readers). Common sense tells me to cobble together something remotely worthy of a response and send it out for feedback, because I've been staring at the thing for too long. Reading the essay tells me to scrap the whole thing, go vegan for three weeks, maybe seek enlightenment, and then try again.

I'm hoping for some middle ground, since abandoning cheese just isn't going to happen.

I've meant to do some critical reflecting on the course I most recently taught, Didactic Modernism. I've actually written pages on the subject (scrapped). Partly those pages veered into reminiscences about books I've read, courses I've taken, things I wish I knew.

How you never really know what your students are thinking. How you, as a student, often only find out what you're thinking after the lapse of years. As a teacher, likewise.

How strange course evaluations are. How Alan Jacobs argues that course evaluations should be given at least a semester after the course has ended. How a student said that my expectations for the final exam made me "as pompous as Ezra Pound." How I chose to read this as evidence of the student's having learned that Ezra Pound expects you to know a lot, which is true. Also that Ezra Pound could be pretty pompous. Also true.

How another student said that Berkeley should give me tenure. How this saddened me for a variety of reasons.

In short, I seem to be too near to it still to do anything but ramble.

The essence of it is that it seems difficult to separate one's teaching methods from one's memories of being a student, even when you remember that you were by definition an atypical student. And I can't kick the belief that what makes a course a great learning experience is incredibly arbitrary and contingent. It is the lot of an English major to sit through many sub-par discussions. The trade off is that you've read Moby-Dick, and carefully. You forget the one, and remember the other, and return to it for the rest of your life.

How do you create the conditions for that? Well, you assign Moby-Dick, for one thing. But of course there's more to it. But what is that more, and for whom?

I was the kind of student who responded well to being set tasks. Given something hard to do, I rose to the occasion. I was a nerd; that's how I ended up in grad school! This is clearly not the case for all students. I've heard many students say that as soon as something is an assignment, they don't want to do it; it sucks out all their creativity and they stop trying. Also that if something isn't required, they won't do it.

This may be the first semester I've given an extra credit option. The option, in this case, was to do something slightly more onerous than a standard course blog post, in order to make up for missed blog posts of past weeks. Here was an interesting scenario. You couldn't lose credit, but you could gain it. There was no penalty for trying. (There is, some might point out, never any penalty for trying, insofar as getting no credit is always worse than getting a low grade. This seems to be beside the point when it comes to the psychology of grades.) Several students decided to do extra credit. Some really really needed it; some only sort of needed it. One asked if she could do it when she did not need it. There were easier and more difficult ways to do this extra credit, and some chose more difficult ways.

How can you rig a course so that it all seems like extra credit? Would it even be wise?

I once memorized "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" "for" a course, while studying for the final. The course was a pretext; I memorized it for the poem.

You never know when your students are doing that, or doing something like it for a different class--not that you necessarily want to know.

The pedagogical uses of grading continue to puzzle me. Clearly it functions differently for different people. In some ways it's a form of gamification, which some people find motivating and others find stressful and demoralizing. Grades certainly confuse the issue of learning.

These are, of course, questions I've been pondering precisely because my students this semester were so very excellent. It so clearly wasn't all about carrots and sticks for most of them. So then--what? Did I already do my bit by assigning Gertrude Stein? Will my students remember Tender Buttons forever?

On these matters my course evaluations are silent.

I was just made aware that there is a movie coming out called How Do You Know (trailer). I would dearly love for this to be an adaptation of "Melanctha," but the odds aren't looking good.

I did notice that there's no question mark in the movie title, though, which is very Stein.

Automatism is modern

In the q&a after Sianne Ngai's recent talk here on zaniness (which was fantastic), I pulled a classic if annoying move and asked about one of my own research interests. One of the articles I've currently got in the hopper is about affective and domestic labor and states of automatism in women in the early twentieth century. According to Ngai, the zany mode originates in the commedia dell'arte character of the zanni, a personal servant whose job it is to manage social ties. Since Ngai had remarked on the almost compulsive quality of the zany, I asked her to expand on the connection between zaniness and automatism.

Ngai's response was to distinguish between the zany and "animatedness" (from her first book), animatedness being mechanical and evidence of a loss of subjectivity, whereas the zany is an excess of subjectivity, of constantly performing affective labor of various sorts in a manner that models the labor structure of late capitalism.

The follow-up question, had I wished to pull another classic yet annoying move, would have been this:

Isn't automatism sometimes precisely an excess of subjectivity?--subjectivity bubbling up through the body whether you will it or no? I think of psychoanalysis, of automatic writing, etc.

Zaniness, as Ngai so convincingly characterizes it, is automatic in the sense that it is compulsive; it can't be stopped. But I'm also backhandedly persuaded that automatism isn't quite the right word to describe that loss of will, at least in the postmodern context that interests Ngai. It seems to me that the main problem with thinking about zaniness as, on one hand, the form of labor in late capitalism, and on the other hand, as automatic, is actually a historical problem. There's something modern, and not postmodern, about automatism. The machine is only an interestingly strong point of comparison for a human being without will when machines are understood as meaningfully different from people to begin with. That notion starts to break down somewhere midcentury. To insist that machines don't have subjectivity--or rather, to make subjectivity the question to begin with--is a modern gesture. T. S. Eliot may be horrified by the typist's "automatic hand," but, typists all, we're not disturbed in the slightest. Click. Click. A general agnosticism about subjectivity characterizes postmodernism.

The zany may have a long history, but if late capitalism is where it truly comes into its own, then the question of automatism is moot.

Is criticism a métier?

I've come to think that criticism is defined by the cultivation of a particular kind of self, one that has the right feelings and perceptions as well as the right thoughts and professional training and work-disciplines.

What are the consequences of this understanding of criticism?

Thoughts, others?

I've been familiar with this book for a long time, but it wasn't until I bought my own copy that I saw the rather unfortunate dust jacket:



Turns out I really don't want to see Gertrude Stein's head sectioned like meat.

It seems to me that the popular mistrust of critics, especially when they write using specialized language, is structurally similar to popular mistrust of difficult writers like Gertrude Stein. Like that of Stein, the critic's status as a worker is always in question, and the critic's claim to cultural legitimacy is therefore always threatened.

We need to revisit the structures of feeling around work.

Written, extruded

Here's the journalist Janet Malcolm on Gertrude Stein, chiming in with a long, woman-hating tradition (on which see DeKoven and Stimpson) of describing Stein's writing as a kind of bodily effluvium:

Her literary enterprise was itself almost entirely work-free. Mabel Dodge’s four-volume autobiography, “Intimate Memories,” begun in 1924 (after her fourth marriage, when she became Mabel Dodge Luhan), gives us a rare glimpse of Stein at her desk during the long visit she and Toklas made to the Villa Curonia in 1912. It was late at night, and Stein was “writing automatically in a long weak handwriting—four or five lines to the page—letting it ooze up from deep down inside her, down onto the paper with the least possible physical effort; she would cover a few pages so and leave them there and go to bed, and in the morning Alice would gather them up.” Stein never, or hardly ever, revised (a rare false start to “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” exists among Stein’s papers), and in “Everybody’s Autobiography”she said that she never wrote much more than half an hour a day (but added significantly, “To be sure all day and every day you are waiting around to write that half hour a day”). Stein didn’t even type her work; she just oozed into her notebooks and Toklas did the rest.

First of all, whuh? Really, we're going to just take Mabel Dodge Luhan at her word?

Ok, now that that's out of the way, I'm struck (and plain irritated) by the judgmental tone that Malcolm takes when it comes to Stein's writing. Lazy!, Malcolm scolds. "Work-free." It's as though Stein isn't writing so much as pooping. "Stein didn’t even type her work; she just oozed into her notebooks and Toklas did the rest."

There's a strange Protestant ethic running through the passage that suggests that there's something reprehensible about not doing your own typing (that is, if you're a woman!). Malcolm's Stein is indolent, lazy, not a worker but a sort of repulsive literary Jabba the Hutt (on which, again, see Stimpson).* Underlying this tone of revulsion is a sharp distinction, particularly inappropriate in Stein's case, between work and rest. If it's work, Malcolm seems to suggest, it's imbued with intention, attention, and is therefore art--and if it is not (as Stein might say), then not.

Where does Malcolm's work ethic get us in understanding Stein's actual writing?

Not very far, I think. Rather, I tend to think it gets us further in understanding a twinned horror of female literary accomplishment and the female body, which persists even at this late date.


*Full disclosure: Stimpson does not actually use the words "literary Jabba the Hutt." Probably to her credit.

I pretty much think Marjorie Perloff's review of Two Lives is right on, especially this part:

But then Malcolm—and this is what makes her book finally so unsatisfactory—has no use for the bulk of Stein's writing. She dismisses it early in Two Lives as "unreadable," making a sharp distinction between the "experimental writing" of Tender Buttons or the Portraits and nonfiction of the twenties and "conventional" work, like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the thirties to attract a larger public. I find this distinction dubious: even Alice B. Toklas uses a panoply of modernist devices, and certainly it has little or no plot or "rounded" characters. (94)

DeKoven, Marianne. "Introduction: Transformations of Gertrude Stein." Gertrude Stein. Spec. issue of Modern Fiction Studies 42.3 (1996). 469-483. Project Muse. Web. 25 July 2010.

Malcolm, Janet. "Gertrude Stein's War: The Years in Occupied France." The New Yorker (2 June 2003). The New Yorker. Web. 25 July 2010. This is an excerpt from her book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007).

Perloff, Marjorie. Rev. of Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm. Common Knowledge 15.1 (Winter 2009). Project Muse. Web. 29 July 2010.

Stimpson, Catharine R. "The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein." The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspectives. Spec. issue of Poetics Today 6.1/2 (1985) 67-80. JSTOR. Web. 18 April 2008.

The Dresses/Objects Project

It's a little annoying of me to blog something that is no longer on display, but I was busy, so there it is. A little over a week ago I went to see Katrina Rodabaugh's Dresses/Objects Project in San Francisco, an installation in response to Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons.

Rodabaugh is a printmaker, among other things. In the Dresses/Objects Project, she provided a number of women artists with fabric printed with three poems from Tender Buttons, all addressing the textile arts.

Of the project, Rodabaugh writes:

I created the The Dresses/ Objects Project as a collaborative, multidisciplinary project in collaboration with over 30 women artists from across the US, though most are based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Phase one of the project started in 2007 when I printed poems from Gertrude Stein’s book, Tender Buttons, on to recycled fabric with a letterpress. Then I sent the fabric prints to reputable artists and designers to craft into dresses and wearable objects. Phase two of the project consisted of a fashion photo shoot with various artists collaborating as dress models. The third and final phase of the project will include an installation of the dresses and photographs in an exhibition complete with multiple live performances.

The poems in question are:

A LONG DRESS.

     What is the current that makes machinery, that
makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a
long line and a necessary waist. What is this current.
     What is the wind, what is it.
     Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark
place is not a dark place, only a white and red are
black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is
scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it.
A line just distinguishes it.


A BLUE COAT.

A blue coat is guided guided away, guided and guided away, that is the particular color that is used for that length and not any width not even more than a shadow.

A PETTICOAT.

A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.

I've always liked these particular poems, and once lectured at some length about "A Long Dress" for a twentieth century lit survey, and of course, that wonderful final gesture, "[a] line just distinguishes it," is the epigraph to my chapter on presence and the line in Paterson.

The dressmakers make a good deal of use of patchwork and pins, as if to emphasize the almost architectural constructedness of these pieces.



"A Long Dress" dwells on the seam, the "serene length" that is in itself technically nothing, merely the site where two pieces of fabric meet, and yet which also constitutes the dress both visually and structurally.



The seam likewise comes to the fore in these pieces, sometimes with jarring color juxtapositions, and sometimes with pins -- the most precarious and temporary seams are sealed not with thread but with metal.



Seams, stitching, and fabric also become a way to edit the poems:



In the above semi-erasure, much of the poem is veiled, though still faintly visible, a "rosy charm" peeking through. Three lines remain not only exposed but separated from the rest of the poem by firm boxes of stitching:

A LONG DRESS.

     What is the wind, what is it.

A line just distinguishes it.

Erasure is a not uncommon contemporary poetic gesture, and here the veiled presence of most of the poem resembles the cover of Janet Holmes's erasure The ms of m y kin.



But whereas on Holmes's cover the retained letters are merely brought into relief by color contrast, in the quiltlike object above, the stitched borders around the exposed text seems to isolate it from its original context, as if casting it out, making the lines, once a part of an energetic "current" of words, into a series of framed objects.



This rather Steinian dress likewise edits with seams and pleats:



This is not, in fact, a "long dress," but rather a stumpy and slightly masculine outfit reminiscent of Stein's favored and much-maligned gender-bending vests.



But whereas Stein was often accused of being frumpy and careless of her appearance, this boxy, masculine dress is incredibly fastidious, constructed of innumerable pleats and seams, as if to advertise the deliberateness and care that go into the performance.



The lines of "A Long Dress" (and "A Blue Coat") are thus revised by the lines of the short dress to overlap one another and stand head to toe, lines of the text always running parallel to but never in semantic harmony with the lines formed by the seams and pleats, the lines that "distinguish it."

The queer commentary of this vest-and-tie outfit seemed to me to be perhaps the strongest element of the installation, with its parallel lines of text and visual lines in an ambivalent pas de deux.



The installation was a pleasurable play on three Stein poems that I love, though the artist's statement and ultimately the installation itself left me dissatisfied. In the end, I couldn't help feeling that something had been phoned in. Something feminist.

By printing on fabric, Rodabaugh literalizes the text-as-textus pun with which we are all familiar, and by making that fabric into dresses, she explicitly appropriates a male medium for a female one. Now I, too, love me some Gilbert and Gubar, and part of the pleasure of this installation was a nostalgia for a 1980s feminism of difference, when we could embrace the madwoman in the attic and before we had gotten into deep gender trouble. It was a time when we could all just make fun of male writers for thinking the pen was "a metaphorical penis."

Yet that very nostalgia also sent up a red flag me. The feminism of this installation (like Stein's own all-too-attenuated feminism) was entirely latent and, it felt to me, unearned. The turn to dressmaking, fashion, and collaboration (between "over 30 women artists," as every bit of copy anywhere hastened to point out) as feminine domains, and consequently as signifiers of a feminist artistic discourse seemed to me to be a bit too quick, especially in the drapy, lacy, frilly and wispy dresses. Sure, these are "feminine," but does that make them feminist? When we resolve text back into textile, making it a matter of weaving and historically feminine arts, what is it exactly that we revise or challenge? Text as a medium? Text as a masculine medium? Or (butch, queer, self-proclaimed "genius," female) Stein's authority in that medium, as her words are scrambled and stitched and revised to resemble the "nonsense" that so many claimed her poetry already was? Or...?

Some of these are, of course, issues that Tender Buttons itself raises, and perhaps that's part of the point. But then, Tender Buttons was published nearly a hundred years ago.




Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Print.

Holmes, Janet. The ms of my kin. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2009. Print.

Rodabaugh, Katrina, et al. The Dresses/Objects Project. June 25-July 18, 2010. Z Space, San Francisco.

Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. New York: Claire Marie, 1914. archive.org. Web. 24 July 2010. [Bancroft Library/CDL.]

Critical gestures like this are irritating to endure:

These tortured writhings are irritating to endure. But they constituted part of what Gertrude Stein had to experience in order to reach full subjectivity in her writing. (83-4)

Don't even get me started on the idea that Stein "gestat[ed]" her characters.

Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford UP, 1970. Print.

The novelist Gertrude Stein

Why do we tend to speak of Gertrude Stein as a poet? She was a poet, of course, but above all she was a fiction writer and an essayist.

The easy answer is that Stein was appropriated as an antecedent to the Language poets, a move that was instrumental in giving her the place in the canon that she has today.

But that kind of begs the question, because, after all, the Language poets themselves constantly pushed the boundaries between poetry and prose. My Life is often taught as an autobiography, for instance. And why not? It has sentences and chapters.

I'll be thinking further on this in the coming weeks. Ideas welcome.

Tell me true

It's another glorious morning on the Berkeley-Oakland border. On today's schedule: dissertating and grading. Just like every other day!

I've realized that this blog has gotten awfully earnest, and that it's been a while since I posted a hilarious photo of my environs (à la inappropriate Keats). I've actually been in hot pursuit of this photo for months, ever since I saw this ad on the side of an AC Transit bus. I'm pretty slow on the draw with my cell phone camera, so for a long time, every time I saw the ad the bus would pull away before I could snap the photo.

I finally managed it recently by lingering in the crosswalk to slow the bus down. Yes, I am that devoted, because it is basically teen Melanctha, and it's ingenious. Voilà:



The ad is for a teen dating violence hotline, one that looks like an admirable initiative, actually. You can see how it has "Melanctha" all over it. "HOW DO YOU KNOW?" reads the copy, which, of course, is the question in "Melanctha." The fake dialogue given to the teens even mimicks the question ping-pong between Melanctha and Jeff, the indefinite deferral of knowledge:

Teen Jeff: WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

Teen Melanctha: WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHAT DO I MEAN?

Why you ask me that, Jeff Campbell, when you know already what I am always saying to you?

The pop psychology subtext of this ad might be that miscommunication causes relationship problems ("drama"). But the ad explicitly makes the relationship into an epistemological problem, "how do you know?" -- the problem of other minds, conducing to language's capacity to create a naturalist (in the Zola sense) closed system ending in a spiral toward violence.

Dial down your drama, people. Do it for Gertrude Stein.

Clarity

Some months after she had left Johns Hopkins but while her supervisor, Lewellys Barker, was still trying to get her research published, Gertrude Stein defended her representation of sections of the brain by appealing to their clarity. Her language is striking; clarity for Stein means a physical cutting away, "clear[ing] away the underbrush and leav[ing] a clear road." This, she argues, is the substance of her contribution; her drawings are "diagrammatic," burning away irrelevancies and leaving only that which is to be known.

"Not that the books do not all tell the truth as I know it," she adds, "but that they tell so much more."

I usually think of revision in similar terms--a process of retrieving essences and slicing away error. It requires a certain emotional grimness.

I'm usually a big proponent of affectless writing; I abhor any suggestion that one needs to feel like writing in order to write. The inevitable emotional turbulence that comes with thinking one's writing is or is not going well, I tend to observe at a remove. I might be happy with my chapter or I might not be, but either way I'll work on it.

But for those times when I feel I have a mess on my hands and need to clean it up, clear away underbrush, leave a clear road, there is a feeling that I want--a slightly grandiose determination that wrongness will flee before my flaming sword.

Honestly, I think it works pretty well.


* * *

Unrelatedly: I am on a campaign to eliminate the word "congrats." It is a blot on the world's beauty.

Yes, my idea of clarity is remarkably similar to Gertrude Stein's; what of it?

The letter is not dated, but it is clearly from 1902. From the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, reproduced in Steven Meyer, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001), among other places.