Living is a thing we’re doing

The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing else is different, of that almost any one is can be certain. The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps every one can be certain. (Stein, Composition as Explanation)

In July 2008, over slick croissants and pats of butter on Lygon Street, Stein 09 was brainstormed. Two thousand and nine will be a year-long festival of Gertrude Stein. All acts, encounters, products of dumb banalities and intimacies; every word written and word effaced; all the grammars of consciousness and imagination; every plump chook roasted and omelette fried and sock darned and poodle groomed … all perceptive, cognitive and creative events of experience will contribute to a prolonged duration of engaged Steinian thinking-and-writing, writing-and-playing, playing-and-thinking.

From this improvised working bee, ideas about what kind of contemporary Australian poetic might emerge from strategic saturation of neo-Steinian activity were imagined. How might Stein intervene the lineages and chronologies of national poetic narratives? In re-imagining Australian experimentalism in terms of a Steinian poetic, could we somehow mobilise ideas about our own local circumstances that were not tied up with discourses of historical and cultural character? The very fact of our coming together over Stein in a fracas of mid-conference, post-booze, croissant-and-jam skill-share was meaningful. Yet Stein has always done well to elude the logics of her own biography, so her presence in wintry Carlton on this morning was no surprise. She is our contemporary in the sense that her ideas about language and experience, writing and thinking, composition, grammar and time are utterly relevant to our own various praxes. More than that, Stein’s oeuvre is, in so many ways, anticipatory of contemporary preoccupations. She seems to gesture towards key moments of late-twentieth century cultural, critical and philosophical thought.

In a literal sense, this paper is a Stein 09 event, a piece of writing with the project in mind. But more importantly, this paper suggests that the very living and thinking of my being-in-time, my sensing time and living with my own time-sense, as well as the living and thinking of my own sense of a poetics, is a Stein 09 event. To say that this paper is a composition, I must also say that there are other compositions at play, that to compose is to take note, to be aware, to keep moving, to find a way — as Stein would say, to make living a thing that I am doing.

There is a certain sense of playfulness, an admission of silliness in framing these conceptual-creative preoccupations, collective or singular, within a year and naming it a festival. Yes, I admit to being silly about this gestural act. But it is not a silliness that recourses to coolish irony or cynicism. It’s a serious silliness; there are serious concerns at play for me here. Whatever claims I make about the processual or durational events of Stein-induced attentiveness to poetics are claims that actively contribute to my sense of being-in-the-world, claims that demand the ongoing interrogation of my intellectual and creative practices.

cooking with stein, flo & benaud

for michael farrell

opening out onto a floured bench is
the dough, barely kneaded, just held
together with the blunt cuts of a butter
knife – the palms face-up but still
making slender butter. Flo Bjelke-Petersen’s

voice starchy and tea-towelly. the golden
rule of scone-making is to add the milk
gently – “milk me sugar” – “do not be
afraid” to add more if the mixture is dry:
the imperative voice, “soft not sticky”.

given the heat no one is expected to
exist near an oven and not sweat. it is
a simple causal relationship and
generally people are gentle about its
being true, or at least, being evident. when

a scone is brushed with milk – two fingers
miming, more or less effectively, a pastry
brush – it glosses up nicely. spread apart
they rise into each other, the extent can be
micromanaged with simple, kitchen-focused
mathematics:

algorithms hell-bent on decoding the
unknowable curvatures of a cricket ball –
“nice cherry” – and the ecology of baking
scone-nuts, clustered or spaced: “the
difference is spreading.”

algebra with whitehead & stein

one, the invariableness of the basic terms of interconnection
— the connectives — (or manage or arrange or value)
two, the invariableness of the unspecified entities indicated
by the symbols for ‘real variables’ (or relieve or better like)
three, the meaningfulness of the patterns of real variables
thus connected (or not at all as nearly once compared)
four, the irrelevance to the argument of the completion of
meaning infused into the basic connectives by the unspecified
real variables thus connected (or made it to be gained).
namely, the meaning as in assumption one is not in fact
invariable but the variation is irrelevant (or finally as lost).

beefsteak & sex

‘What I call “feminine” and “masculine” is the relationship to pleasure, the relationship to spending, because we are born into language, and I cannot do otherwise than to find myself before words: we cannot get rid of them, they are there. We could change them, we could put signs in their place, but they would become just as closed, just as immobile and petrifying as the words “masculine” and “feminine” and would lay down the law to us. So there is nothing to be done, except to shake them like apple trees, all the time.’ Hélène Cixous

when i was researching my thesis last year, i came across a lot of writing about gertrude stein in terms of her sex. a typical analysis of stein’s work is that it is in opposition to the patriarchal conventions of narrative and poetic language: that is, it is does not follow the structures of a meaning-full*, rational, psychological language. it is not penetrative. instead, it is unknowable, disjointed, paratactic, mysterious, demanding. people who have written about stein, particularly her contemporaries (and mostly men), are dismissive of stein’s work and proclaim it unskilled and nonsensical. often, criticisms of her work are carried with a suspicion of her sexuality and her state of woman-ness. her work is understood to codify the sexual revelations of her relationship with her partner, alice b. toklas. this sensuality, a bodily joy drawn out in an oblique, discrete writtenness, can be ‘translated’ to represent a clitoris, a lip, an orgasm, or the opened-out sex of a woman’s body, but the translation is entirely interpretive. her work does not suggest a single interpretation, it offers the possibility of countless interpretations.

perelman says of stein, ‘her words displace all others’. her language is without an anchor, a vanishing point or a blueprint, it is radically geometric, radically decentred and radically spatialised. if public discourse idealises a static notion of a woman, then stein disputes this ideal radically. her work is not ‘feminine’, it is not emotionally revealing, psychologically self-reflexive, confessional, passionate or domestic**. i can imagine that it would have been an uncomfortable experience for the conservative male critic of the twenties to read stein, her language would have come up against the very limits of his linguistic understanding of a woman. his ideas of a woman’s softness, maternalism, emotionality and desire would have been challenged in an uncomfortable way. in this instance, the impossible nature of a woman’s sex as compared to a man’s ideal brings about a discussion of a woman’s art work and the failing of her femininity. by which i mean, when someone doesn’t ‘get’ stein, and they feel alienated by her poetics, they are likely to make a connection between her work and her person, her work and her sexuality.

any description of stein’s physical self is similar: she was broad, short-haired, stern-faced and wore dowdy smocks with strange indian sandals. her appearance apparently terrified many men, who saw her as a large, demanding, shrewd and loud woman whose ‘femininity’ came in a scary brand that borrowed from the certain traits of ‘masculinity’ that men felt empowered by. anne carson writes that her voice was ‘like beefsteak’, and that hemingway was scared of the sound of her laugh. her femininity, most likely fetishised by men in terms of her sexuality and her relationship with alice, was just as scary because it was unknowable, untouchable; it didn’t need a man. (no doubt a lot of her critics were flummoxed by the idea of what women actually did together, too).

though i am interested in the sex of stein’s work (as i am interested in the sex of all poetics), my own reading of stein is concentrated on the language’s surfaces, rather than its perceived inside-spaces and underneaths. whether or not there are clitorises and open thighs patchworked througout her language is not of particular concern to me. if i find, in the small poem-sentences of her work, a phrase which elicits a sensual response, then i enjoy the moment and move to the next. it is being present in her language that makes the experience of reading stein an experience of bodily and poetic pleasure.

* i use the word meaning-full here rather than meaningful to avoid the qualitative associations of the word ‘meaningful’. instead, in this instance, i mean quite literally, ‘filled with meaning’. this distinction was used by lyn hejinian, and i take it on with much appreciation.

** here i mean that her work does not conform to the historically gendered notions of femininity, it does not ‘express’ a desire for passion and an emotional interest in domesticity in the ways in which women are expected to. i am not implying here that stein is disinterested in desire, passion and the domestic space (tender buttons, for example, is a meditation on the poetics of domesticity), but that her interests are beyond the normalised understandings of women’s role in language (and in life).