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gertrude stein

A ham is proud of cocoanut.

A CLOTH.

Enough cloth is plenty and more, more is almost enough for that and besides if there is no more spreading is there plenty of room for it. Any occasion shows the best way.

….

A TIME TO EAT.

A pleasant simple habitual and tyrannical and authorised and educated and resumed and articulate separation. This is not tardy.

….

APPLE.

Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please.
A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count out sherry and ripe plates and little corners of a kind of ham. This is use.

[from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein]

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Craft Notes & I Like __ A Lot / 20 Comments
November 6th, 2011 / 2:47 pm

Mark Bibbins sent this to me while I was talking to him

I went to the bar with Mark Bibbins after class.  He bought my first drink and then he bought my second drink and possibly my third.  I don’t remember.  I asked him about Gertrude Stein and he told me about Gertrude Stein but no great conclusions were arrived at.  No, wait.  One great conclusion was arrived at.  I came to the realization that when Gertrude Stein said “when painting becomes abstract it becomes pornographic” she was talking about pornography in the 1930s and not the pornography I usually look at.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  When we sat down, an actress walked in and Mark recognized her.  She walked over to Dean, the bartender, hugged and kissed him.  Mark said they were making out.  Then the realization happened.  Then we talked about money, power, and domesticated animals.  Mark has a cat named “The Pagoda.”  I remember being amazed at how good the name “The Pagoda” is, yet not acknowledging this in any way to Mark other than a brief nod of my head.   I talked a lot of shit about nearly every person in my MFA program in harsh and intolerant ways.  I tried to draw a picture of a cat on a napkin and failed and continued to do this over and over.  I made Mark do this with me.  Justin Taylor appeared.  I don’t think he recognized me with my beard on.  I made Mark introduce us for fun.  We talked about a few things.  I talked to another person.  It became late.  I don’t remember leaving the bar.  I took the wrong train and ended up in the wrong part of Brooklyn.  I could have easily taken another train and gotten home quickly, but instead I took the train back to where I had originally gotten on and just started over.  It took a very long time.  I’m going to be blogging here now.  Sup with you?

Power Quote & Vicarious MFA / 8 Comments
December 25th, 2010 / 3:17 am

Wind Call Swill Stein 2xQs Again

French rap is weird

1. Super thrilled to hear via twitter that Coffee House Press will be putting out a new collection by Brian Evenson, Windeye. Hopefully by 2011? No date word yet, but Evenson is the kind that I go stand in line for. If you haven’t read the titular story yet, it is gorgeous, and available via PEN America.

2. At Electric Literature, Melissa Broder interviews Ryan Call about, what else, litblogging.

3. James Yeh has a new chapbook out, 9/16/10, from a rad small press making beautiful objects, Swill Children.

4. The Complete Recordings of Gertrude Stein Reading Her Own Works @ PennSound

5. Interview with Dorothea Lasky by Nafiza Islam at Thoughts Interjected & interview with Patrick Somerville by Tobias Carroll at Vol 1. Brooklyn.

6. At Ubu, Doug Nufer’s Never Again, a 163 pg. novel with no word appearing more than once, which I discovered after an awesome conversation wondering if such a thing existed with Heather Christle and Christopher DeWeese, both of whom have books coming from Octopus in 2011 that I am also mega excited for.

Random / 7 Comments
December 10th, 2010 / 9:37 am

human nature has nothing to do with master-pieces

The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen you imagine them of course but you more or less describe the things that happen but nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting, one knows it by radios cinemas newspapers biographies autobiographies until what is happening does not really thrill any one, it excites them a little but it does not really thrill them.

It is awfully difficult, action is direct and effective but after all action is necessary and anything that is necessary has to do with human nature and not with the human mind. Therefore a master-piece has essentially not to be necessary, it has to be that is it has to exist but it does not have to be necessary it is not in response to necessity as action is because the minute it is necessary it has in it no possibility of going on.

And so always it is true that the master-piece has nothing to do with human nature or with identity, it has to do with the human mind and the entity that is with a thing in itself and not in relation. The moment it is in relation it is common knowledge and anybody can feel and know it and it is not a master-piece.

from “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them
by Gertrude Stein

Excerpts / 74 Comments
April 26th, 2010 / 1:25 pm

Go Jeeves! Go Life!

P.G. Wodehouse

“I just read in this morning’s paper that [P.G.] Wodehouse says that they give him $104,000 for doing nothing at Hollywood they keep him there but they do not use what they ask him to do.”

– Gertrude Stein, from a letter to playwright Thorthon Wilder (1936)

“It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”

– P.G. Wodehouse

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Power Quote & Web Hype / 13 Comments
January 26th, 2010 / 3:34 pm

Firmuhment

According to Firmuhment’s list of websites described as food, we are: “Good pea soup that the cooks took turns spitting in, garnished with dead flies.” I like. (Lots of other interesting erasures, destructors on here, including blackouts of Tara Reid, blurring of Gertrude Stein, so on.) (Thanks M. Rascher.)

Web Hype / 12 Comments
January 14th, 2010 / 3:53 pm

Literary Doppelgangers: Quartet

MICHEL FOUCAULT & CHRISTOPHER LLOYD

foucault08lloyd_001_l

Michel Foucault tells us of The Order of Things, which is pretty simple: Back to the Future, Back to the Future II, and Back to the Future III. Jeez, that was easy.  Call me a philistine, but I’ll pick those movies any day over freakin’ semiotics. Up until this post, I thought that photo of Lloyd was a Ron Mueck sculpture. In the age of mimesis, everything is suspect.

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Author Spotlight / 18 Comments
May 6th, 2009 / 7:09 pm