Meta tags:

Headings (most frequently used words):

october, 2013, the, thursday, monday, tuesday, of, and, compass, rose, 31, 21, 17, 14, archives, blogs, about, me, valentine, from, satan, indian, summer, gift, outright, tropic, capricorn, stein, knitting, time, an, almanac, probable, subjects, with, notes, as, if, there, were, no, tomorrow, four, concoctions, delayed,

Text of the page (most frequently used words):
the (419), and (242), was (86), that (68), her (68), stein (50), she (49), which (45), were (43), but (42), for (38), from (36), with (33), not (30), this (30), had (28), work (27), our (26), there (26), his (26), one (25), frost (24), more (23), what (23), cheney (22), about (21), has (21), #october (20), have (20), time (20), may (19), like (19), its (19), poem (19), are (18), america (18), could (18), their (18), land (18), sense (17), years (17), over (16), been (16), own (16), who (15), than (15), just (15), when (14), all (14), people (14), even (14), being (14), world (14), kind (14), out (14), january (13), march (13), you (13), can (13), they (13), much (13), february (12), july (12), september (12), november (12), december (12), made (12), such (12), american (12), writing (12), june (11), here (11), new (11), self (11), life (11), into (11), would (11), voice (11), before (11), april (10), august (10), racing (10), still (10), simply (10), only (10), any (10), something (10), without (10), them (9), 2013 (9), might (9), other (9), americans (9), making (9), gift (9), after (8), yacht (8), another (8), having (8), most (8), event (8), some (8), first (8), many (8), things (8), now (8), curtis (7), faville (7), served (7), always (7), these (7), though (7), think (7), year (7), san (7), bay (7), often (7), how (7), art (7), experimental (7), between (7), then (7), meaning (7), country (7), nation (7), ourselves (7), outright (7), president (7), posted (6), days (6), among (6), rich (6), get (6), way (6), very (6), francisco (6), almost (6), last (6), toklas (6), understood (6), both (6), thought (6), place (6), does (6), line (6), seems (6), rather (6), possessed (6), become (6), real (6), personal (6), parts (6), heart (6), comments (5), live (5), play (5), power (5), off (5), course (5), ever (5), book (5), each (5), back (5), again (5), sailing (5), cup (5), don (5), never (5), know (5), future (5), good (5), artistic (5), rose (5), whom (5), until (5), while (5), language (5), prose (5), published (5), words (5), three (5), makes (5), james (5), didn (5), make (5), found (5), him (5), seemed (5), given (5), indian (5), summer (5), fresh (4), lime (4), shaken (4), your (4), spirit (4), few (4), two (4), public (4), money (4), sport (4), boats (4), annual (4), clear (4), whose (4), wanted (4), style (4), century (4), actually (4), weather (4), great (4), surface (4), possible (4), character (4), subject (4), well (4), lectures (4), use (4), serious (4), media (4), alice (4), partly (4), balance (4), lesbian (4), literary (4), genius (4), little (4), matter (4), picasso (4), since (4), relationship (4), works (4), interest (4), study (4), knitting (4), complex (4), early (4), phrases (4), statements (4), those (4), seen (4), result (4), continuous (4), feeling (4), through (4), intended (4), writer (4), ground (4), read (4), simple (4), usual (4), reading (4), question (4), head (4), poet (4), living (4), school (4), history (4), england (4), continent (4), dramatic (4), north (4), surrender (4), gave (4), withholding (4), rights (4), hundred (4), ours (4), dubya (4), dick (4), evil (4), view (3), posts (3), liqueur (3), triple (3), sec (3), lemon (3), gin (3), war (3), means (3), say (3), recent (3), come (3), old (3), everything (3), different (3), difficult (3), takes (3), sail (3), actual (3), oracle (3), end (3), large (3), see (3), action (3), week (3), strong (3), miles (3), challenge (3), half (3), multiple (3), races (3), whether (3), going (3), financial (3), curiosity (3), itself (3), describe (3), process (3), because (3), enough (3), late (3), isn (3), lightly (3), popular (3), throwing (3), getting (3), children (3), aspects (3), areas (3), exile (3), gertrude (3), stories (3), object (3), puppet (3), france (3), whereas (3), against (3), presumption (3), did (3), during (3), myth (3), figure (3), beginning (3), domestic (3), together (3), immediate (3), speaking (3), comes (3), child (3), thinking (3), painting (3), form (3), debt (3), build (3), quality (3), used (3), larger (3), revealed (3), limits (3), where (3), turning (3), reader (3), sentence (3), sounds (3), etc (3), whole (3), dead (3), conversation (3), mind (3), will (3), deliberately (3), round (3), important (3), acknowledged (3), academic (3), audiences (3), qualities (3), narrative (3), virginia (3), written (3), probably (3), podcast (3), indeed (3), feel (3), tender (3), buttons (3), berkeley (3), odd (3), writings (3), department (3), full (3), felt (3), literature (3), less (3), official (3), connection (3), poems (3), lay (3), god (3), unstoried (3), artless (3), unenhanced (3), lines (3), knows (3), conscience (3), patriotic (3), below (3), passive (3), deed (3), vaguely (3), realizing (3), westward (3), right (3), possession (3), suggests (3), perhaps (3), generalized (3), title (3), colonials (3), part (3), freezing (3), policy (3), bush (3), former (3), complete (2), home (2), swirled (2), order (2), ginger (2), beer (2), bourbon (2), recipes (2), needs (2), indulging (2), post (2), continues (2), wind (2), down (2), win (2), cheers (2), mild (2), stainless (2), steel (2), haven (2), name (2), contenders (2), day (2), clearly (2), earlier (2), men (2), wealth (2), pride (2), involves (2), competing (2), rest (2), professional (2), craft (2), golden (2), club (2), officially (2), challenging (2), entity (2), competition (2), team (2), points (2), watching (2), shore (2), events (2), around (2), along (2), near (2), harbor (2), occasion (2), today (2), friends (2), library (2), held (2), groups (2), ends (2), east (2), west (2), wasn (2), per (2), white (2), decided (2), race (2), present (2), versions (2), really (2), region (2), ordinary (2), suspect (2), side (2), small (2), handful (2), interested (2), none (2), especially (2), hand (2), boat (2), involved (2), owning (2), mischief (2), sea (2), true (2), delayed (2), tuesday (2), enumerate (2), publication (2), california (2), press (2), came (2), 1933 (2), put (2), identity (2), private (2), content (2), seized (2), opportunity (2), celebrate (2), colors (2), autobiography (2), nearly (2), consequence (2), position (2), insistence (2), woman (2), artist (2), writers (2), hemingway (2), earliest (2), matisse (2), gris (2), novel (2), image (2), commitment (2), feminine (2), settled (2), common (2), task (2), also (2), practical (2), addressed (2), lot (2), cubism (2), modern (2), visual (2), canvases (2), pictures (2), relationships (2), holding (2), dimensional (2), individual (2), sought (2), delve (2), implication (2), pretending (2), recognition (2), transformed (2), shown (2), reality (2), interesting (2), mirror (2), inanimate (2), possibility (2), purpose (2), immense (2), efforts (2), described (2), yoke (2), narration (2), once (2), listening (2), nonsense (2), delights (2), childhood (2), naive (2), turns (2), simplified (2), amused (2), contradictory (2), author (2), saw (2), referentiality (2), perfectly (2), story (2), architecture (2), paris (2), aren (2), apparently (2), functions (2), devotion (2), fictional (2), non (2), exists (2), spectrum (2), ostensible (2), account (2), music (2), confident (2), security (2), confidence (2), value (2), familiar (2), color (2), design (2), joyce (2), composed (2), 1914 (2), exhausted (2), later (2), landscape (2), either (2), beyond (2), modernist (2), painters (2), representation (2), telling (2), john (2), determined (2), state (2), favor (2), past (2), named (2), except (2), duration (2), ulysses (2), almanac (2), probable (2), occurred (2), brought (2), attention (2), wide (2), applications (2), awareness (2), reception (2), appreciation (2), certainly (2), manipulating (2), ironic (2), intellectual (2), junior (2), graduate (2), realized (2), original (2), revelation (2), ignored (2), mid (2), 1970 (2), returning (2), thesis (2), richard (2), office (2), explain (2), saying (2), change (2), turn (2), response (2), panel (2), silliman (2), blog (2), monday (2), direct (2), usually (2), clever (2), man (2), citizens (2), formal (2), empty (2), historical (2), national (2), claims (2), argument (2), portrayal (2), certain (2), chorus (2), voices (2), sound (2), piece (2), body (2), innocence (2), excuse (2), interests (2), implications (2), expression (2), stand (2), deeper (2), declaration (2), destiny (2), taking (2), settlement (2), colonial (2), deeds (2), vague (2), realization (2), serving (2), issue (2), occupied (2), inhabitants (2), anything (2), pacific (2), aside (2), seizure (2), military (2), forthwith (2), salvation (2), instead (2), weak (2), vanity (2), native (2), property (2), designed (2), primarily (2), long (2), goes (2), second (2), straightforward (2), massachusetts (2), possessing (2), unpossessed (2), mean (2), possess (2), claim (2), occupancy (2), sentiment (2), return (2), speak (2), implies (2), give (2), generosity (2), implied (2), whatever (2), dose (2), turned (2), viewed (2), righteous (2), kennedy (2), television (2), door (2), red (2), thursday (2), juice (2), concoction (2), take (2), tequila (2), area (2), meant (2), 100 (2), temperature (2), temperatures (2), inches (2), typically (2), prepared (2), recovery (2), radical (2), political (2), treated (2), table (2), foreign (2), george (2), better (2), agenda (2), fake (2), architect (2), derived (2), thousands (2), billions (2), dollars (2), halliburton (2), chest (2), compass (2), skip (2), profile, blogs, archives, subscribe, atom, older, newer, gently, excite, carbonated, amaro, angelico, drambuie, becherova, pomegranate, peach, schnapps, cointreau, cocci, galleano, drink, proportion, able, navigate, homeward, moderation, recommended, unless, already, digs, arrangements, chauffeur, available, car, diminishing, prosperity, boom, fruits, hyper, indulgent, continue, concentrated, top, percent, economic, pyramid, numbered, dream, playthings, carried, folly, imagination, vicarious, cocktail, mixes, bar, kitchen, inspiration, qualify, free, mixology, worse, hit, local, tavern, celebratory, toast, holdover, era, demonstrations, supplants, dogs, bark, caravan, moves, show, nationhood, infuses, countries, watch, marvel, spectacle, same, baseball, football, basketball, ice, hockey, soccer, auto, bike, international, olympics, exclusively, kings, knights, commerce, imagine, oneself, hoot, hell, chance, participating, dreams, mount, crew, competitively, participate, represent, clubs, gate, winner, usa, overcame, enormous, deficit, eight, final, spectator, viewing, limited, scale, efficient, revealing, filmed, helicopters, chasing, circle, sit, low, grandstands, case, marina, green, crissy, field, wife, ago, queuing, sale, avid, photographers, gathered, herbst, pavilion, piers, blown, promontories, catch, glimpses, plied, forth, waves, buff, winning, big, vertically, mounted, sails, following, easterly, elevating, hour, spray, flying, billionaire, larry, ellison, company, successful, software, companies, holder, contended, changed, wing, catamarans, hull, designs, call, formula, sold, city, tourist, revenue, generating, controversy, suitable, investment, concerned, ask, technicalities, elimination, reduced, number, participants, competitors, took, seriously, want, compete, sailboat, best, dangerous, seas, rough, uncooperative, desire, date, volunteer, deck, likelihood, venture, nil, expensive, hobby, undertakes, surmise, historians, roaring, twenties, dionysian, revel, inebriated, partying, senselessly, inflated, generally, fortunes, 20th, spent, legs, latest, fantasy, pastime, tomorrow, four, concoctions, scratches, array, categorical, headings, intend, cover, include, class, jewishness, hermeticism, sexism, automatic, biographies, provide, fruitful, research, edited, wanda, corn, tirza, latimer, university, 2011, seeing, five, __________________________, lionized, satirized, interviews, persona, maintained, double, experimentalist, let, exist, liberated, patriotism, welcoming, young, soldiers, waving, stars, stripes, cameramen, symbolized, dismissal, cruder, culture, provincial, commercialism, backwardness, showing, populism, cockiness, compensating, anxiety, jew, gifted, amateur, reportedly, haughty, egotist, convinced, embarrassed, condemn, younger, artists, regarded, inferiors, 1920, rumor, anywhere, presumed, tell, william, carlos, williams, attempts, cutting, malicious, constructed, prescience, champions, astonishingly, compositions, obliged, publish, publisher, dare, 1930, reputation, influence, conjurings, launching, pad, assume, populist, diminutive, grandmotherly, known, herself, professionals, established, permanent, 1908, lasted, death, 1946, household, senses, traditional, performing, duties, produced, entertained, guests, furniture, acquired, taken, interior, became, talismans, highly, articulated, locus, speaker, pace, wending, meditation, strive, outside, reach, issues, peruse, idleness, quiet, seclusion, circumscribed, meditative, toys, regards, curious, circling, fidgiting, engage, protected, precincts, characterized, hermetic, intense, emotional, meticulous, creatively, engaged, handled, requirements, philosophy, sufficient, unit, functioned, efficiently, got, done, atelier, domesticity, decades, relation, technique, movement, concept, stripped, appears, owe, syntactic, tricks, conjunctive, reduction, series, basic, directness, lack, descriptive, interpretive, leavening, define, precisely, affects, derives, cezanne, patchy, constructions, bits, daubs, closer, resemble, computer, generated, screens, totality, angles, simultaneously, space, overcome, intriguing, ultimately, fragmentary, tape, running, pauses, rests, varying, speeds, nodes, echoing, literally, examine, successively, reveal, opposite, sides, dots, fauves, pointillists, mosaic, steamroller, gerunds, participial, accretive, propulsive, inertia, overwhelms, happening, flat, erases, separate, agency, volition, tenses, perception, erased, deeply, connotations, iterations, increasing, complexity, structure, escape, complications, ignoring, abstraction, stretched, attempt, alter, enterprise, attempting, mimic, create, accountable, vivid, outlines, relations, society, phenomenal, objects, shapes, opened, realm, necessary, looks, feels, monument, tradition, camp, performance, block, elsewhere, cathartic, responsible, disposed, duty, food, eating, tasting, said, demonstrated, sanctimonious, frustrating, repetitiveness, sentences, deliberate, gibberish, stubbornly, covertly, witty, matronly, authoritative, pronouncements, wisdom, perfect, delighted, taunt, tease, game, behavior, audience, asking, rules, imagining, books, roundness, circularity, functional, rhythm, tenor, act, plays, juvenile, apprehension, simplistic, 1939, specifically, illustrations, clement, hurd, cosmology, aesthetic, productions, capable, adamant, letters, straight, accounts, 1935, 1938, 1940, 1945, demarcation, addressing, discretely, playing, irony, difference, natures, providing, coherent, satisfy, respective, hunger, digestible, tropes, fun, bite, sized, treats, provided, wars, particularities, variations, metaphor, scientific, level, imaginative, similar, methodology, accrual, subtly, altering, allowed, develop, structures, carry, valence, bias, threads, interlock, reappear, related, sequences, comforting, comfort, akin, working, problems, constitute, business, reference, addresses, undulating, thing, quietly, dissolves, replayed, told, pure, wonder, forthrightness, certainty, function, supported, natural, necessity, variation, repetition, steady, augmentation, overall, contrasting, elements, evolve, nesting, woven, primary, departures, undertook, publishing, 1909, abandon, henry, 1904, 1917, creative, somewhat, woolf, frustration, temporality, sequence, paragraph, adequately, portray, complexities, solution, problem, 1906, 1925, led, perceive, contemporary, specific, aptitude, possibilities, largely, suggested, objectifications, besides, longer, interpreting, sinclair, lewis, dos, passos, chosen, permanently, quixotic, experiences, rejecting, temporal, development, focusing, progress, rejection, unfolding, constitutes, repudiation, nominative, flatland, infinite, enumerations, nothing, quite, verbal, suggest, interactions, stitches, consciousness, hurdle, mimesis, ivory, tower, bowl, lives, inquiry, yesterday, accumulated, thoughts, concerns, ideas, list, exhaustive, proof, variety, bear, cases, actively, anticipated, considered, personality, keen, sensitivity, social, milieus, contexts, presence, importance, palpable, measure, addition, above, investigations, exclusive, relief, jewish, openly, habiting, required, adopt, stances, supremely, others, comic, caricature, undergraduate, robert, grenier, teacher, senior, introduced, selections, obviously, obscure, fascinating, quarters, mystery, comprehensions, liberating, remained, touchstone, succeeding, left, 1972, continued, morsel, banquet, mysteries, respect, modernists, insights, accomplishments, light, teach, dismissed, condemned, regnant, centers, couldn, mattered, conflicting, commitments, abandoned, teaching, secular, workplace, dropped, loose, contemplated, pursue, professor, bridgman, met, wheeler, hall, 1973, inquire, welcome, responded, negatively, surprise, thorough, devoted, worthy, pursuit, meeting, grad, ended, starting, government, point, attitude, towards, several, fertile, developed, academy, english, threshold, convulsive, period, critical, appraisal, values, preceding, sure, inkling, contribution, understanding, processes, infancy, pieces, reflective, featuring, group, moderated, filreis, including, rachel, blau, duplessis, bob, perelman, julia, bloch, remote, ron, link, via, http, ronsilliman, blogspot, com, post_9090, html, talking, subjects, notes, pablo, antonio, cuadra, songs, cifar, 1967, 1977, epitaph, waters, oar, floating, fisherman, fue, solo, epitafio, sobred, las, aguas, remo, flotante, pescador, tropic, capricorn, rarely, unambiguous, jest, objective, distance, sets, assertions, verse, speaks, learned, cultivate, rustic, grudging, diffident, friendly, wonders, fellow, attitudes, presumptions, suffer, fools, gladly, fierce, independence, find, compelling, despite, blandness, poses, posed, conquer, accomplishment, backdrop, panorama, nor, conceit, careful, insist, note, politically, correct, hallmarks, blind, vindication, glass, rhetorical, speechmaking, sort, expecting, hear, funeral, consecration, special, stiff, backed, manner, purposeful, credence, displays, pompous, regard, protagonist, personifying, female, crucial, abrupt, choral, claiming, bogus, transgressions, committed, license, love, believe, exploration, nuanced, anthem, promise, created, justify, avarice, selfishness, hearted, ambition, exploitation, lies, acceptance, wholly, undeserved, exoneration, whitewash, taming, wilderness, profitable, charmingly, innocent, ring, commital, bland, evasive, rationalization, violent, sandwiched, single, parenthetical, begins, seem, chose, belonged, independent, british, tyranny, stealing, rightful, aboriginal, connotation, conquering, ohio, coast, legal, purchases, annexations, louisiana, alaska, southwest, involving, conflict, diplomatic, treachery, conciliatory, tone, withheld, prerogative, option, inevitable, tendency, knew, super, culpability, bit, human, populations, indians, customary, traditions, treaties, contracts, hoodwink, birthrights, occupying, tension, colonists, properties, access, stolen, remind, chorale, citizen, arguments, naked, appropriation, distinction, classes, ownership, farming, building, water, mill, sustenance, nurtures, mere, settlers, subservient, owned, colonies, weren, owners, phrase, tricky, mother, famous, least, occupants, hubris, excess, doesn, theirs, occupy, identify, attachment, affection, complicated, observation, exactly, ins, amalgam, natives, slaves, broadly, unified, monolithic, greatest, intention, precise, deity, empowered, away, lands, announces, religious, tinge, word, hymns, devotional, texts, signify, humankind, creator, strings, attached, reservations, recompense, tendered, accepted, guilt, moral, obligation, giving, receiving, gifts, personification, address, pronoun, impute, motive, acknowledge, effect, monologue, greek, exposition, dialectic, representing, deduce, fervor, handles, sovereignty, wrong, identified, ambivalent, broad, every, wrote, slipperiness, slyness, withholds, assertion, ambiguity, fast, caught, aphorist, rhymes, sounded, biblical, homily, mixed, franklin, poor, trusty, englander, taciturn, skepticism, traditionally, jingo, istic, smugly, complacent, forceful, colonization, defending, sacred, privilege, setting, ambiguous, conflicted, stayed, wondered, message, 1942, 1936, elect, inaugural, ceremony, 1961, distinctly, recall, telecast, facilitated, high, student, 8th, grade, campaigned, fall, blue, plastic, democrat, hat, handing, leaflets, apex, comment, cocchi, dry, vermouth, easily, imitated, putting, cream, sugar, mixers, aperitifs, proprietary, pretty, pick, choices, key, cabo, wabo, anejo, drinks, appropriate, balmy, brief, respite, dependable, winter, global, warming, patterns, becoming, pretext, hill, inundated

Text of the page (random words):
that she might be ignored or dismissed or even condemned by the regnant centers of artistic or academic power couldn t have mattered to me since i had no conflicting commitments in my life having abandoned professional writing and teaching for the secular workplace listening to the tender buttons podcast yesterday brought all of my accumulated thoughts and concerns of the past 40 years or so back to attention and i thought this might be the opportunity to enumerate some of the ideas i ve had about her work over time a list like this is by no means exhaustive the proof of the value of stein s work is in the wide variety of applications which may be brought to bear on her work and life applications in many cases which she actively anticipated and even considered indeed one of the aspects of her personality was her keen awareness and sensitivity to the social milieus and contexts not just of her work but of her presence in the world its reception and the meaning and importance of that reception she understood i feel that her writing had a palpable future a measure of appreciation that she would certainly not live to see and in addition she understood and was not above manipulating the public media world against which her experimental investigations and rather exclusive life style were shown in ironic relief her identity as a jewish intellectual and an openly co habiting lesbian required that she adopt stances by turns supremely confident at others indulging comic self caricature so here is a kind of almanac of probable areas of study or inquiry which have occurred to me over the years as a result of my reading of her work and reading and thinking about her life stein and time no time there is no question that one of the primary departures that stein undertook after publishing three lives in 1909 was to abandon narrative narrative by the time of late henry james the golden bowl 1904 the ivory tower 1917 and early james joyce ulysses was composed beginning in 1914 had become in a creative sense exhausted in the work of both late james the joyce of ulysses as well as the somewhat later efforts of virginia woolf we can see a frustration both with the temporality of sequence and with the limits of the sentence and the paragraph to adequately portray the complexities of thought and feeling stein s solution to this problem which she had addressed head on in the making of americans written 1906 08 but not published until 1925 had led her to perceive that the landscape of contemporary narrative prose was either exhausted and probably beyond her specific aptitude or interest or she saw other possibilities largely in the new early modernist painters picasso matisse gris etc which suggested objectifications of representation that she could make more out of than just telling stories besides she was no longer interested in interpreting the course of american life i e of sinclair lewis or john dos passos as she had chosen to live permanently in france in a kind of determined state of quixotic exile the continuous present one experiences in stein s experimental writing is a consequence of her rejecting all temporal development in favor of focusing on the progress of her mind through language this rejection of past and future or an unfolding of event constitutes a repudiation of mimesis her work exists in a nominative flatland of named things and relationships infinite in its enumerations nothing is quite real except the verbal qualities which suggest interactions and stitches in the duration of consciousness once you get over this hurdle in her work it all makes sense stein and knitting i used to wonder what it was about stein s work that made it feminine as a self confident lesbian she possessed a forthrightness and a certainty about her place and function in the world which was supported by her financial security her confidence in her own work was of the kind that takes as perfectly natural a sense of its own necessity and value one of the qualities of stein s experimental work is her use of the woven variation for those familiar with her work there is repetition nesting steady augmentation and an overall design of color and contrasting elements which evolve out of the process of the order of her words and phrases knitting is a complex art and one whose particularities and variations aren t a metaphor for stein s work on any scientific level but there is an imaginative process which is similar in its methodology in experimental writing like stein s in which the accrual of apparently simple though subtly continuous altering functions is allowed to develop into larger structures which carry the valence or bias of those functions threads of meaning interlock and reappear but do not build into complete pictures or related sequences of event there is something comforting about her work a comfort which is akin to the settled devotion to a task rather than the working out of problems which constitute the usual business of fictional or non fictional prose stein s work exists only in the time of its reading not as reference to another spectrum of event its ostensible subject addresses only the play of its immediate undulating surface it is not about in the sense of being an account of another thing without its own self referentiality it quietly dissolves into nonsense it can be replayed but not re told in that sense it has the quality of pure music stein and narration stein was perfectly capable of making adamant sense and this was something she did over and over again in her letters and in her conversation and lectures as well as in her straight prose accounts the autobiography of alice b toklas 1933 lectures in america 1935 picasso 1938 paris france 1940 wars i have seen 1945 and so on she may be the first important author who acknowledged the demarcation between popular and academic audiences addressing each discretely playing to each one with an amused irony of their difference and contradictory natures she understood how providing each with a coherent story could satisfy their respective curiosity and hunger for digestible meaning s her academic audiences wanted architecture and tropes he popular audiences wanted fun and bite sized treats she provided both stein and childhood in the round from her earliest works stein s language plays with the juvenile apprehension of reality much of it is simplistic enough to be read by children and in 1939 she published a book the world is round intended specifically for children with illustrations by clement hurd in stein s cosmology aesthetic productions are deliberately round this circularity has a functional purpose not just in the style of her writing its rhythm and tenor but in what she saw as the self referentiality of the artistic act this roundness is demonstrated by the sanctimonious and often frustrating repetitiveness of her phrases and sentences their nonsense quality like deliberate gibberish which delights the childhood mind is both stubbornly naive and covertly witty stein the voice of her writing is by turns matronly child like and authoritative like a child she will make over simplified pronouncements as if they were revealed wisdom and then be amused by them with perfect delighted mischief her writing often seems to taunt or tease the reader as if it were a kind of game this kind of behavior seems contradictory in a serious writer she is challenging the limits of the relationship between author artist and reader audience asking what the ground rules are and imagining new play books james and the making of americans the making of americans is a steamroller of gerunds the participial insistence they were listening and they were making conversation a conversation about food as they were thinking and eating and tasting what was being said has an accretive propulsive inertia that overwhelms the reader the continuous happening of event in this flat time line erases separate agency individual volition and makes everything two dimensional tenses and individual perception are erased whereas james had sought to delve more and more deeply into the involved connotations and iterations of thought feeling and implication through an increasing complexity of sentence structure and multiple points of view stein sought to escape from these complications by simply ignoring them or pretending they didn t matter the abstraction of modern painting in which form and recognition were stretched and transformed had shown her that an attempt to alter reality was as interesting an enterprise as attempting to mimic or mirror it she could create interesting works of prose without having to be accountable to the vivid outlines or relations of people society or the phenomenal world of inanimate objects colors sounds shapes etc it opened up a whole realm of possibility things could be things without having any other intended or necessary purpose the making of americans today looks and feels like some immense monument to a dead tradition almost a camp performance intended to block future efforts i have described it elsewhere as a kind of cathartic throwing off of the yoke of responsible narration she could think of having disposed of that duty once and for all the great american novel stein and cubism much has been made over the decades about the relation between cubism as a technique of the modern movement in painting and stein s concept of literary form hemingway s early stripped down prose style in his first published stories appears to owe a debt to stein s syntactic tricks the build up of conjunctive phrases the reduction of event to a series of basic statements the directness and lack of any descriptive or interpretive leavening it s difficult to define precisely how picasso s visual language affects stein s work there s a mosaic quality in some of the canvases which derives from cezanne s patchy constructions the pointillists and the fauves used bits or daubs to build up larger visual pictures the closer you get to those canvases the more they resemble computer generated screens whose totality is revealed to be made out of dots if an object could be seen from multiple angles simultaneously then the limits of space in time in a painting might be overcome the result could be intriguing but ultimately fragmentary in writing where time is a continuous tape running from the beginning to the end with pauses and rests and varying speeds and nodes of meaning and echoing relationships among words and things you could literally examine things or groups of things successively holding them up and turning them this way and that to reveal their opposite sides their three dimensional form s stein and domesticity stein established a permanent lesbian relationship with alice b toklas beginning in 1908 a relationship and commitment which lasted until stein s death in 1946 the domestic world of their household was in many senses traditional with alice performing the feminine duties while stein produced her serious work and entertained guests in her atelier the works of art and furniture which they acquired over the years were taken into this interior world and became talismans of their highly articulated life together in stein s writing the immediate settled locus of her speaking voice comes out of a strong sense of place of being in place this sense of being is the actual subject of much of her experimental writing of the speaker s pace and wending of meditation the voice of her work does not strive to get outside itself or to reach out to the world at large for issues or interest it is content to peruse things in idleness in the quiet seclusion of her study on the circumscribed common of her meditative surface she toys with and regards things the way a curious child might the thinking and circling and fidgiting are like knitting or any domestic task one might engage in in the protected precincts of the home also we now know that stein s and toklas s relationship was characterized by a complex private language hermetic and intense emotional and meticulous both were creatively engaged with the world toklas handled the practical requirements of their life together while stein addressed the world of art and philosophy together they were a self sufficient unit that functioned efficiently and got a lot done stein and genius there is a sense of presumption in nearly everything stein did a cockiness which is partly the consequence of her financial position and partly an over compensating insistence to balance the anxiety of being a woman artist a lesbian a jew and a kind of gifted amateur among artistic or literary professionals she was reportedly a haughty egotist convinced of her own artistic genius and she was not embarrassed to condemn younger writers and artists whom she regarded as her inferiors at a time during the 1920 s when her work was little more than a rumor in america or anywhere for that matter she presumed to tell hemingway and william carlos williams what she thought of their attempts she could be cutting and malicious this sense of her own genius was a myth constructed partly out of her prescience in being among the earliest champions of matisse and picasso and gris and partly out of the astonishingly novel compositions most of which she was obliged to self publish since there was no publisher who would dare to by the time she came back to america in the 1930 s the reputation of her influence and literary conjurings was large enough that she could use it as a launching pad to assume the populist image of the diminutive little grandmotherly figure the genius she always had known herself to be stein and populism when stein came to america after the publication of the autobiography of alice b toklas 1933 she was lionized and satirized in the press her lectures and interviews made her an object of curiosity but she understood how her public persona could be put to good use she maintained a kind of double identity one side the serious private experimentalist the other the media puppet of a rose is a rose is a rose and she was content to let both versions co exist and when the americans liberated france she seized that opportunity to celebrate her own patriotism welcoming the young soldiers and waving the stars and stripes for the cameramen whereas on the one hand her exile from america symbolized a dismissal of the cruder aspects of american culture its provincial commercialism its artistic backwardness she was not against showing the colors when it served her needs __________________________ this only scratches the surface of a possible array of the aspects of stein s character and the different categorical headings one might enumerate and i intend to cover more of them in future among the subject areas i would include stein and class stein and toklas stein and jewishness stein and hermeticism stein and self publication stein and sexism stein and automatic writing stein and exile biographies of stein provide fruitf...