THE DIFFICULTIES OF GERTRUDE STEIN, I & II
1. Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining Room Floor (Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts Books, 1982), 42. [BACK]
2. Gertrude Stein, How Writing Is Written, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974), 24. [BACK]
3. Woolf, The Waves, 132. [BACK]
4. Ibid., 238–39. This is not the first time in The Waves that Bernard longs for a language that could be a description of Samuel Beckett's. [BACK]
5. Quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 523. [BACK]
6. John Upham's quote ends an article in the New York Times on the murder of two Dartmouth professors by two teenage boys from this small Vermont town. See New York Times, Feb. 20, 2001, A12. [BACK]
7. I owe an enormous debt to Ulla Dydo for this and other information surrounding the events of the summer of 1933 on which Blood is based, as well as for crucial help in constructing a sense of the literary context of the book. We had many conversations about this piece over a number of years. Dydo's skepticism about its value (based in part on Stein's own disavowal of it) led me to think through my strong attraction to it in much more detail than I might have otherwise. [BACK]
8. Ulla Dydo, manuscript of The Language That Rises: The Voice of Gertrude Stein 1923–34 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming 2003). [BACK]
9. They are "The Horticulturists," "A Water-fall And A Piano," and "Is Dead." The first is unpublished; the others appear in How Writing Is Written. I take, from Ulla Dydo, the correct dates of the actual writing of these pieces to be 1933. (Haas gives the original publication date as 1936.) For more on the context of all four pieces see Dydo's The Language That Rises. [BACK]
10. This in instructive contrast to the sunny Our Town of Thornton Wilder, with whom she would become friends in the following year. Wilder acknowledged being influenced by Stein's The Making of Americans, to the point of saying his play was based on her work. Their interesting friendship is documented in Edward M. Burns and Ulla E. Dydo, eds.,The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996). [BACK]
11. Winnicott locates all creative cultural development in such "intermediate" zones, where precarious acts of play test definitions of reality. See esp. D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Tavistock-Methuen, 1984). [BACK]
12. In contrast to those novels that are called experimental because of their psychological or psychosocial content. [BACK]
13. In this essay I am beginning to apply a conjecture about the fractal nature of Stein's compositions with words. This is a thought experiment that is a work in progress for me. I will be examining fractals and the self-similar patterns of Stein's writing in greater detail—in relation to information theory and ideas of autopoiesis—in a volume on Stein to be published by the University of California Press. That book will include selections of Stein's work that are particularly relevant to this kind of reading. [BACK]
14. See, e.g., "Why I Like Detective Stories" (which I discuss below) in How Writing Is Written. [BACK]
15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1967), ix (italics mine). [BACK]
16. Stein, How Writing Is Written, 28–29. [BACK]
17. Ibid., 151. This is so close in spirit and language to John Cage's thought on the position of the contemporary artist (see esp. Cage's "Lecture on Nothing," in Silence [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961]) that I think it beautifully demonstrates Stein's influence—acknowledged by Cage—on his poetics. [BACK]
18. Tallique's debt to D.W. Winnicott and Michel Foucault is clear in this passage. [BACK]
19. The New York City Opera's year 2000 production of The Mother of Us All was a great triumph, praised by critics, playing to full houses in Lincoln Center. [BACK]
20. See Stanley Cavell, "The Fact of Television," in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation, ed. John Hanhardt(Rochester, N.Y.: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1990). [BACK]
21. See the interesting essay "Gertrude Stein on the Beach," in Gerald Weissmann, The Doctor with Two Heads and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). [BACK]
22. All of Wallace's books are currently out of print. Terrible People was available only in a large-print edition (Leicester: Ulverscroft Press, 1967) in the Washington, D.C., area public library system. [BACK]
23. "Sentences," in How To Write (Los Angeles, Calif.: Sun and Moon, 1995). [BACK]
24. "Finally George A Vocabulary Of Thinking," in How To Write, 293. [BACK]
26. Gertrude Stein, Last Operas And Plays, ed. Carl Van Vechten (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 74–75. [BACK]
27. Ibid., 55. [BACK]