2.13.08 | Stein

1. 2.13.08 | Stein • Business • Discussion question is posted. • For tomorrow, read through the first ‘On the porch’ chapter at least. • Finish up on Composition as Explanation. • Continuous present & Beginning again and again • A CARAFE • What do you do with Stein? • HW • Read Famous Men. • Post to the GoPost by Friday @ 9.

2. Stein reads Stein: • http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Stein.html • If I Told Him: A Complete Portrait of Picasso • The Making of Americans

3. Composition as Explanation “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition , it confuses, it shows it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this make what is seen as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition.” 179

4. What’s different? “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of composition and the time in the composition” 181 COMPOSITION & TIME

5. What is “Composition”? “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition , it confuses, it shows it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition” [179].

6. Cont. “Each period of living differs from any other period of living not in the way life is but in the way life is conducted and that authentically speaking is composition. After life has been conducted in a certain way everybody knows it but nobody knows it, little by little, nobody knows it as long as nobody knows it. Any one creating the composition in the arts does not know it either, they are conducting life and that makes their composition what it is, it makes their work compose as it does. Their influence and their influences are the same as that of all of their contemporaries only it must always be remembered that the analogy is not obvious until as I say the composition of a time has become so pronounced that it is past and the artistic composition of it is a classic. And now to begin as if to begin. Composition is not there, it is going to be there and we are here. This is some time ago for us naturally. There is something to be added afterwards” [179].

7. So, what is her composition? “Continuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things. And then there is using everything. This brings us again to composition this the using everything. The using everything brings us to composition and to this composition. A continuous present and using everything and beginning again” [179]. “There was a groping for using everything and there was a groping for a continuous present and there was an inevitable beginning again and again and again” [180].

8. Simply different. “I naturally kept simply different as an intention. Whether there was or whether ther was not a continuous present did not then any longer trouble me there was or there was not, and using everything no longer troubled me if everything is allike using everything could no longer trouble me and beginning again and again couldno longer trouble me because if lists were inevitable if series were inevitable and the whole of it was inevitable beginning again and again could not trouble me so then with nothing to trouble me I very completely began naturally since everything is alike making it as simply different naturally as simply different as possible” [180].

9. Time. • Time of composition and time in composition. • Of composition is easy. She talks about that for half the essay, the only thing that is different is how generations are looking, right? • So what is time in composition? • The time in the composition is a thing that is very troublesome [182]. • Distribution. • Equilibration. “There is at present there is distribution, by this I mean expression and time, and in this way at present composition is time that is the reason that at present the time-sense is troubleing that is the reason whhy at present the time-sense in the comosition is the composition that is making what there is in composition. And afterwards. Now that is all” [182].

10. 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.

11. Marjorie Perloff • “Stein herself insisted that Tender Buttons was entirely "realistic" in the tradition of Gustave Flaubert. "I used to take objects on a table, like a tumbler or any kind of object and try to get the picture of it clear and separate in my mind and create a word relationship between the word and the things seen," she recalls in "A Transatlantic Interview—1946" with Robert Bartlett Haas. What she no doubt means is that reference remains central to her project even if representation does not. Unlike her contemporaries (Eliot, Pound, Moore), she does not give us an image, however fractured, of a carafe on a table; rather, she forces us to reconsider how language actually constructs the world we know.” • http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19342

12. HW • Read Famous Men. • Look carefully at the photos in the front. Think, perhaps about what it means to start a book not only with photographs, but with these photographs. • Do read the Cast of Characters, the epigraph quotations from Marx and others, poem to Walker Evans, all the stuff you would usually skip to get to the story. • Then, after all that, read the first ‘on the porch’ chapter. • GoPost by Friday @ 9pm. • Discussion area is called Week 7 All-Class Question. • Instructions are posted in the discussion area.