gertrude stein in space + time

course introduction

In some ways, you could read all of Gertrude Stein’s work as her answer to the narrative question, what is the shape of experience? 

Her answer: daily, ongoing, recursive, serial, confusing, delightful, a thing known bodily in every moment. 

How she makes her answer to that question elicits another question: how can writing be a medium of experience without the intrusion of what’s already been determined about that experience? 

All her work, as I see it, is an improvisational, experimental approach to that problem.

The question about the shape or medium of experience has been more commonly taken up by writers as a plot or structure question. As a question, it makes a generative opening for working beyond the doxa of certain kinds of standard narratives — Freytag’s pyramid, the Aristotelian digest, the hero’s journey, etc.

Stein takes it up as one of procedure — how is writing written? 

One of the problems of trying to make a course about Gertrude Stein is that she wrote so much. Her writing is daily, ongoing, recursive, confusing, delightful… She rarely edited her work. Some pieces are astonishing and others just another improvisation. It is exhausting to get through it all (and I haven’t, nor do I ever expect to). 

So I tried to chart a specific, limited path through the volume of her work that heads her proposition about that we could compose plays as landscapes. How can a play or opera answer an augmented version of the first narrative question: What is the shape of theatrical experience? 

course outline

part one: experimenting

1A: Becoming an Experimenter

1B: Repeating

1C: Portraits

1D: The Continuous Present

1E: Pleasure and Understanding

part two: landscape plays

2A: What is a Landscape Play?

2B: Four Saints in Three ACts

2C: The Mother of Us All

2D: Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights

2E: Listen to Me

part three: so what, a kit

3A: So What? Interviews on Influences

3B: Make Your Own Landscape Play Kit

how the course is organized

The course can be followed to various degrees of depth, depending on your interests. There is a sequence: each unit builds on the prior unit’s conceptual vocabulary. But you can always limit your reading to the summary option, boxed in orange at the top of each section.

If you’re interested in following an idea, there are further exercises and readings at the end of each section. The exercises offer ways to understand the material by either experimenting with Stein’s methods or reflecting on her principles in relation to your work and interests.

The course culminates in a make-your-own-landscape-play kit. You could skip to the end — but the course will provide you with a useful conceptual framework for the kit. 

You can always navigate around out of order using the course menu, which looks like this: 

BECOMING AN EXPERIMENTER

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?