Keener sounds: Robert Erickson at Mills College

"WHAT IS IT FOR?", Ann asked, as we sat in her small comfortable small living room after the concert. We'd been reflecting on the concert we'd just heard, and its small audience — no more than forty or fifty people, I'd guess, scattered through the nicely restored concert hall out at Mills College.

It was a one-man concert: five pieces by Robert Erickson (1917-1997), who was my composition teacher, and who I suspect guided my career in other ways, and whom I thanked, partly, by writing his biography, Thinking Sound Music. (In fact it was Ann whose Fallen Leaf Press published the book, back in 1995.)

"I mean," she went on, "why do composers go on writing music; it's so hard." Left unsaid: "And so few seem to understand, or be interested, or even be aware."

Another few beats of silence, while I thought about my grandson Simon, another composer. Well, I thought, what is life for; it's for making more life. Same for music: we go on composing, so the next generation can compose.

A high percentage of the audience had in fact been other composers; many of us Eridkson's students, at one time or another. We're a loyal crew, partly for human reasons, partly for musical. Human: Bob was enterprising, patient, affable (though he could be crusty too), generally optimistic, practical, generous. (He refused any payment from me for my lessons, knowing I had hardly any money to spare.)

Musical: well, those reasons were evident at the concert. If there are musical "mavericks," Erickson is certainly among them. He was born in Marquette, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and grew up in a Swedish-American family in a backwoods setting; but his intellectual curiosity and his remarkably sensitive ear — encouraged by early teachers — took him ultimately to Chicago where he met Modernism. Industry, Modernism, and an innate gregariousness informed the rest of his career: teaching, broadcasting (he was an early music director at Berkeley's KPFAA), writing, above all composing.

We're so conditioned these days to think in terms of quantity. There are billions and billions of us humans on this planet, millions and millions in this state: if a concert has a small turnout, something seems wrong. But as Gertrude Stein said,

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.

The Making of Americans, p.289

Composers compose similarly, I think, though with luck we all work for colleagues as well as ourselves and strangers.


Unfortunately the fundamentally paranoid streak in the American temperament, which promotes healthy skepticism to outright mistrust, leads audiences — and, worse, what critical establishment remains — to reject convivia not themselves embraced as exclusive and "elitist." (Think, for example, of the contempt lavished on Stein's own salon.) So we who "like," want, and listen to new music have in the last fifty years become increasingly marginalized, not by our own activity (or lack of activity) but by what you might call a culture-historical process.

(The late Milton Babbitt wrote about this a generation and more ago, in an essay commissioned by the magazine High Fidelity. He called his article "The Composer as Specialist," but the editors re-titled it, without consulting him, "Who Cares If You Listen?" The title, much more widely read than the article itself (which in this online version is dry and "difficult", like much of Babbitt's music), contributed to the marginalization of new music in the United States.)

Erickson tended to shrug off failure and rejection. He preferred to focus on the positive values of whatever resulted from his work, the performances of his music, the work of his students; he met indifference or, worse, distraction — faculty meetings, for example — with a cheerful kind of inattention. He knew, I'm sure, that it's Pythagorus, Euripides, and Epicurus who are remembered, who are "important," not the hundreds of nameless citizens who ignored them at best, hounded them at worst.

Still, it's hard not to be discouraged at the inattention of even the musical community to work of such interest and beauty as Robert Erickson's. He taught at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State, and the San Francisco Conservatory: interestingly, only Mills College, among the important Bay Area music departments, seems to be curious about his work and influence. (He never taught at Mills, but one of his most celebrated students, Pauline Oliveros, oversaw the relocation of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, one of his "step-children," to Mills College in 1967.)

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AND WHAT OF HIS MUSIC did we hear Saturday night at Mills College? The evening began with a clip from a San Diego television story about Erickson's activity as a soundcatcher, prowling towers, airports, and electric substations with a shotgun mike and a portable tape recorder: he was always keen to find new sounds in everyday modern life, sounds that could contribute to his composition, either directly as sonic ingredients or indirectly as suggesting areas of sonic awareness.

Then came an electronic example of that: Roddy (1966), for tape; a work of musique concrète whose original sounds were improvised (following the composer's scenarios) on a percussion instrument made by clamping various lengths of steel rod to the sounding board of a piano, then altered and edited in the Tape Music Center studio.

To my ear the "performance" of the tape — I mean its playback in the spacious Mills College Concert Hall — was more artifact than expression. Roddy, like much tape music, seems to me to be chamber music, to need intimacy between listener and sound source; the separation of the loudspeakers, their distance from the listening ear, and the awareness of a lack of listening community within the audience all made the piece more intellectually interesting than artistically expressive. But the rest of the program more than made up for this.

I had never heard the Trio (1953), for violin, viola, and piano, in a live performance before, and was charmed and fascinated by its eccentricity. The piece is tonally melodic, brusque and edgy in its architecture. The piano writing is non-pianistic, often single-lined though also often chordal, given (like the string material) to insistantly repeated notes. Erickson never showed much interest, as far as I know, in jazz for itself; but his music often reminds me of bebop. (A lyrical episode reminds me, oddly, of Dvorak.)

But this Trio also made me think of his Swedish-American heritage. Violinist and violist saw away at their instruments, alternating between careful collaboration and go-it-alone soloistics, with a determination (and a beauty and skill, in this performance) that seems utterly unselfconscious, utterly uninterested in musical conventions other than those dictated by the instruments themselves. Two quick movements, three minutes, then four; and it's over.

Next came Pacific Sirens (1969), for tape (altered environmental sounds, this time from the ocean near San Diego) and a group of sustaining instruments (in this case cello, trombone, flute, bass clarinet, trumpet, clarinet, two contrabasses, and three percussionists). Conducted (which in this case really means rehearsed and shaped) by Steed Cowart, the performance seemed utterly authentic, with all the contemplative beauty I remember from performances years ago. The instruments handed off sustained pitches effortlessly, overlapping and merging, occasionally emerging more or less soloistically (trombone; flute-and-trumpet; rolls on suspended cymbals and drums), as one's attention, at the beach, drifts from one suddenly isolated observation of sonic or visual or even tactile detail to another, always aware simultaneously of the more generally undistinguished fabric of all these cumulative events.

After an intermission, Gloria Justen returned to play Summer Music (1974), another environmentally responsive piece; its ongoing, meditative violin melody counterposed to a tape recording of processed and filtered natural sounds — a babbling brook, in fact, considerably altered but retaining its sounds-of-nature atmosphere. And the concert ended with a truly magnificent performance of The Idea of Order at Key West (1979), a setting of Wallace Stevens's poem for soprano, flute, clarinet, trumpet, viola, and cello.

Where Pacific Sirens is concrete, using natural sounds as if to anchor the music's process, the procedure Erickson uses to build a sonic artistic statement reflective of his impressions on reading about the sirens who sang to Odysseus and the moaning, singing sounds sailors still hear when rounding certain rocks on the Italian coast; The Idea of Order at Key West is more abstract. Like the unnamed "she" of the poem, the composer makes his music

…beyond the genius of the sea,
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood…

The music proceeds by repeated held tones, spinning into more quickening elements, always contrasting those two ideas but within no immediately apparent structural process: it is incantatory, improvisatory, yet clearly carefully (if intuitively) measured out. Many composers have turned to Stevens for material; few, perhaps none, have so persuasively achieved a sonic equivalent of his poised, intelligent, crystalline yet often decorative poetry.

What Stevens writes about — the nature of song as a generative, mediating influence between singer and setting — is a central issue of music itself, and certainly of the composition of music. "She" is of course Wallace Stevens, and Robert Erickson, as she measures

to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang.…

as the poet and the composer are the single artificers of theirs, in their "Blessed rage for order…

The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Looking over these notes I realize how cunningly the program had been chosen and arranged, clearly and overwhelmingly setting Erickson in place as a composer whose music mediates musicianship and the environment. Perhaps this explains his neglect by the musical establishment, which is nothing if not urban, metropolitan even. The immediate effect of the material in the early Trio is very different indeed from that of Pacific Sirens or The Idea of Order at Key West; but on reconsideration they represent different moments in a body of work that's personal, intuitive though tremendously knowledgable, patient, aware of tonality but careless of conventions.

The perfomances were marvelous; all the musicians deserve mention. They were, first of all, Christine Abraham, the magnificent soprano in The Idea of Order at Key West. She has a very fine instrument; her elocution was spot-on; and her musicianship admirable. I can't imagine anyone singing this demanding cantata better. Then there was Gloria Justen, violin; Nils Bultmann, viola; Belle Bulwinkle, piano; Gianna Abondolo, cello; Jen Baker, trombone, Tod Brody, flute, Rachel Condry, bass clarinet; Tom Dambly, trumpet; Peter Josheff, clarinet; Adam Lowdermilk and Richard Worn, contrabasses; and Daniel Steffey, William Winant, and Anna Wray, percussion. Steed Cowart presides over this Mills Performing Group.

Fortunately, while neglected by the concert hall, Robert Erickson is fairly well represented by recordings, including all titles mentioned here except Roddy and, regrettably, the Trio. (Maybe the Mills Performing Group will rectify that omission.) Four works can be downloaded free at Community Audio, among them The Idea of Order at Key West.

cultiver le jardin…

Excellenz von Schubert

YES, VOLTAIRE. It's from the close of Candide — now where did I put that book? — describing the moment when the eponymous hero of the book, finally disillusioned, gives up his quest for philosophy, turns his back on his tedious mentor Pangloss and his tedium… but let Voltaire tell it:

“Pangloss disait quelquefois à Candide: ‘Tous les événements sont enchaînés dans le meilleur des mondes possibles; car enfin, si vous n’aviez pas été chassé d’un beau château à grands coups de pied dans le derrière pour l’amour de Mlle Cunégonde, si vous n’aviez pas été mis à l’Inquisition, si vous n’aviez pas couru l’Amérique à pied, si vous n’aviez pas donné un bon coup d’épée au baron, si vous n’aviez pas perdu tous vos moutons du bon pays d’Eldorado, vous ne mangeriez pas ici des cédrats confits et des pistaches.’

‘Cela est bien dit,’ répondit Candide, ‘mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.’”

Pangloss frequently told Candide: 'everything's connected in this best of all possible worlds; for finally, if you hadn't been chased from a beautiful chateau with considerable kicks on your behind for the love of Mlle Cunégonde, if you hadn't been sent to the Inquisition, if you hadn't run through America on foot, if you hadn't given a good sword-slap to the baron, if you hadn't lost all your sheep in that fine country of Eldorado, you wouldn't be here eating pistachios and candied citron.'

'All very well said,' replied Candide, 'but we must cultivate our garden.'

Voltaire wasn't talking about a garden of his own, whether in Switzerland or France. Wikipedia provides a pretty good take on the quote (I recommend the entire entry, and that on Voltaire):

The conclusion of the novella, in which Candide finally dismisses his tutor's optimism, leaves unresolved what philosophy the protagonist is to accept in its stead. This element of Candide has been written about voluminously, perhaps above all others. The conclusion is enigmatic and its analysis is contentious.

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self-portrait, San José

WE SPENT THE WEEKEND in the improbable city of San José, which is greatly changed in the last forty years. (The addition of the acute accent to its name is one of those changes.) With over a million inhabitants it is now California's third city (after Los Angeles and San Diego), and the heart of the city, where we spent most of our time, is an odd survival of the old architecture and street-grid in the midst — well, there is no "midst" here; the city reminds me of Houston, where empty office-skyscrapers thrust up from blocks of bungalows in a wide-spread scatter fully dependent on the automobile.

We were there to attend the state finals in the mock trial competition organized by the Constitutional Rights Foundation. Our grandson Henry was participating, his high school (Laytonville) having won the Mendocino county competition.

We found the trials absorbing, Lindsey and I. We watched four of them, Laytonville arguing for the prosecution twice and the defense twice; and then a fifth one, in which Hillsdale High (San Mateo county) bested the San Francisco School of Performing Arts to win the state. (The national competition is set for May 6-8 in Philadelphia.)

Each high school fields two teams, for defense and prosecution, enacting a single murder case, the details of which are scripted but the arguments of which are apparently left to the teams. A real judge presides; the "jury" comprises a number of legal professionals who score each team member as to effectiveness. (The judge's decision is immaterial to the final rating of the student legal teams.)

There's a good deal of theater in all this, of course: the drama inherent in any courtroom scene, and that of the students as they learn, individually and as a team, from their mistakes and from their opponents; as they respond to completely different styles of questions from the judges; as they meet, best, or fail the crises developing from all these courtroom interactions.

To me, though, the greatest dimension of this theater was the dialectic of Laytonville and San José. Laytonville is an unincorporated community of a thousand souls, an hour's drive from the county seat of Ukiah. Our son and his wife run the local feed store, help out with the rodeo, and interact with much of the community. "I'm comfortable there," he says, "because it's the only place I've seen that's like Berkeley" — the Berkeley of the 1960s and '70s, he means — "all kinds of people, all of them interesting, all of them respecting one another's privacy."

Maybe that shouldn't be in attributive quotes; maybe I'm writing my own observation. Laytonville's citizens seem a deceptive lot, rustic and isolated but intelligent and quirky. The highschool kids are plugged into the world, of course, fiercely tap-tap-tapping at their cellphones, Facebooking and Tweeting. But the difference between their demeanor and that of their first opponents, from Marin county, seemed to speak a grand subject. Marin county per capita income is over $90,000; Mendocino's, and Laytonville's, is less than $20,000. The Marin kids, from Tamalpais High, came out strong, assertive, composed, confident; Laytonville, prosecuting a very weak case, struggled to find their footing.

Affluence, security, confidence: these are no doubt wonderful things, but I'm not sure they necessarily make good citizens, particularly in the context of a society that seems to overvalue individualism and commodity. The Laytonville kids can garden and hunt, ride and build. They use and enjoy the Internet, but for them I think real community trumps virtual community. They're competent and helpful, and my money's on them in case of catastrophe; I'm not sure the complex global community of banking, law, and marketing can survive as well.

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RETURNED SUNDAY NIGHT to Eastside Road, we entertained eight or ten friends with white wine, Alsatian onion tarts, Lindsey's absolutely delicious Savarin, and sight-readings of two of Gertrude Stein's little plays: What Happened a Play and Ladies Voices. Stein's plays, as I've written elsewhere,

…are famously overheard conversation, but they have an integrity, stylistically and theatrically, that comes from a single observer's point of view (far-reachingly intelligent though it be), filtered through a single writer's editorial and expressive technique.

I've always imagined those overheard conversations took place among settings exactly like Sunday evening's, gatherings of old friends and new, pleasingly fed and judiciously lubricated, comfortably seated and sheltered; and it doesn't hurt that we're in the country; it's quiet outside; and you can see the stars.

A gathering like this is something of a garden, I think. A courtroom is not; a courtroom is an arena. Stein writes somewhere that landscapes are useful settings for two purposes, battles and plays; but there are landscape plays and drawing-room plays, and I think her early short plays fall into the latter category. (Four Saints in Three Acts manages to contain drawing-room theater within a landscape play.) The comedy some of us first enjoy in Stein's theater comes from the apparent first-level non-consequence of these Cubistly juxtaposed overheard lines; the fascination some of us go on to enjoy, to contemplate and consider, comes from the resonance that arises from these lines and their very "meaninglessness," and that grows and enlarges, dissolving our linear and literal response to them in a greater, less specific, more timeless landscape of sound and society.

The landscape of downtown San José hesitates between old and new, always cluttered with wires, signs, and lines; it's almost unvaryingly hardend by pavement, glass, concrete; and the flow of its visible energies is herky-jerky, responding to the tyranny of stoplights for the motors first, pedestrians only secondly. There are of course a number of vacant storefronts. Restaurants, bars, and cafés tend toward the cheap and easy. The Peet's we found did make a decent, individualized cappuccino and was playing Mozart, but it took an humble place away from the main streets where the corporate-scaled faux-village St•rb•cks prevail.

There's a confusion in such a landscape, a disagreement of place and purpose, a disorder of clutter and irrelevance; a confusion that can't help but influence the sensibilities of its citizens. There's a lot of stuff there, but not that much There, as Stein might say. I think the natural, perhaps the normal mental response to such confusion is a shut-down, a turn-off, contrasting with the continual-onward, the opening-outward I feel on reading Stein, on conversing with friends, on hearing the birds and contemplating the stars and the garden.

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A PHONE CALL from the north, yesterday, got me to thinking about the instrumental extensions at the end of sung phrases of Homer. The singing of Homer is perhaps an arcane subject, but it fed right into the weekend's contemplations. Homer, and the Greek poets who followed him, composed his work; there seems to have been no distinction between "poetry" and music. Ancient Greek was an inflected language in more ways than one: melody — the contrasts and connections of pitches articulated the lines as much as did rhythm — those of the quantities, the lengths, of the syllables.

As my Corvallis friend sings it, Homer's Greek is insinuating, mesmerizing, constantly forward-spinning. The mind can only deal with so much of this rich texture of voice, sound, language, meaning, narration. At the end of certain sections, then, the voice falls silent for a few moments, and the accompanying harp extends the line, giving the singer's voice and the listener's mind a bit of rest.

At least that's what I think the purpose of this extension is. But what is the resulting effect? It lies in what's meant by the expression "letting something sink in," allowing time for external functions, outside the intentionality of the singer and the hearer, to make their own little adjustments to context; to configure — sounds, rhythms, meanings — within a kind of perceptible landscape.

I believe that language, meaning, narration, and music were originally inseparable, like self and society. Homer's Iliad is tragic for its record of war, violence on both an individual and a societal level: but in that degree the tragedy's trivial, compared to that of its example of the devolution of thought and language from a position of prayer and praise toward one of argument and persuasion.

Well: all this in my garden this sunny Tuesday. I think when Candide turns to his garden it's to give his mind time to settle. I think you gentle reader for letting me wander here in mine.

(There's an interesting page about singing Homeric Greek here; on it is a link to a performance of Demodokos' song about Ares and Aphrodite. My Corvallis friend says it's pretty good; it sounds a little rushed to me.)

Gertrude Stein: two plays, part one: What Happened

WE DO LIKE TO GO to the theater, Lindsey and I. We see all the plays in Ashland at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; we see nearly all the plays in Los Angeles (Glendale, actually) at A Noise Within. We catch occasional plays closer to home, in Berkeley or San Francisco or even up here in Sonoma county, in Santa Rosa or Sebastopol.
We like the standard repertory; we like new plays; we like the classics; we like drama originally in other languages. We'll be in Glendale in a week or ten days to see Shakespeare, an adaptation of Dostoevsky, and Michael Frayn's wonderfully funny Noises Off (confusingly, perhaps, at the repertory company called A Noise Within, playing its last season this year in Glendale before moving next season to a new house in Pasadena).

I have a lot of favorite playwrights: Chekhov, Shakespeare, Euripides, Moliere, Pirandello, to name five who come quickly to mind. Behind them come dozens more — I won't go into that now; maybe some day I'll draw up a list of Top Hundred. (I did that years ago for composers, listing them by nationalities; it was an amusing little exercise.)

Right now, though, my irreducible Favorite Playwright is Gertrude Stein. I met her dramatic work over fifty years ago, through Virgil Thomson's setting of her Four Saints in Three Acts. This began an enthusiasm that's never ended — you can read its history in my little book Why I Read Stein. I've set two of Stein's plays as little operas myself, and would love to finish the trilogy if someone would only promise to produce it. (Ladies Voices and I Like It to Be a Play have been produced; What Happened A Play remains to be composed.)

Well. When I heard the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley was producing a number of one-act plays, and that among them would be two of Stein's plays, I was absolutely delighted and made plans to drive down to see them, and Sunday we saw two of the three programs, one with What Happened A Play, the other with Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about what we saw. Each program opened with Eugène Ionesco's Salutations: five actors, hundreds of adjectives, recited in alphabetical order, in two quite different physical productions. The afternoon production continued with Suzan-Lori Parks's Devotees in the Garden of Love in a strikingly beautiful physical production, with impressive acting by Jessica Charles, Kelly Strickland, and Dekyl Rongé, but delivered so stridently (as was much of the Ionesco) that the intelligibility of the lines was all too frequently lost completely.
After the intermission the program promised What Happened. What we got was that play, in all its textual beauty, with interpolations of perhaps improvised, perhaps written-out lines having little to do with Stein's play, sometimes in Spanish, nearly always mundane.
A director's note may explain this:

…I initially intended to clarify at some length Stein's approach towards language and art with the hope of assisting the audience in "understanding" this admittedly challenging yet beautiful text. But, in the end, I realized that such definitive understanding is exactly the opposite of what she intended. Therefore, please just sit back and watch, hear, think, and feel. Sometimes we push too much for a singular meaning.

Scott Wallin is right to reject singular meaning, but wrong, I think, to multiply it unnecessarily. He is particularly wrong, in my opinion, to let his audience assume everything heard here was Gertrude Stein's. Her plays are famously overheard conversation, but they have an integrity, stylistically and theatrically, that comes from a single observer's point of view (far-reachingly intelligent though it be), filtered through a single writer's editorial and expressive technique.

Stein herself discusses this better than I can. (She's as redoubtable a critic as she is a playwright.) I quote from Jason Fichtel's useful discussion 'When this you see remember me': The Postmodern Aesthetic of Gertrude Stein's Drama, posted at time-sense, an on-line quarterly I'm going to have to explore:

I think and always have thought that if you write a play you ought to announce that it is a play and that is what I did. What Happened. A Play. . . . I realized then as anybody can know that something is always happening. Something is always happening, anybody knows a quantity of stories of people's lives . . . everybody knows so many stories and what is the use of telling another story. What is the use of telling a story since there are so many and everybody knows so many and tells so many. . . . So naturally what I wanted to do in my play was what everybody did not always know or always tell.

[from Stein's Lectures in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), p. 207]

Blood on the Dining-Room Floor

DETECTIVE STORIES are not my favorite genre, though in remote antiquity I raced through the Dorothy Sayers list, and there was a time, forty years ago, when we enjoyed watching Perry Mason, god save us.

Going through the Stein shelves, though, I reflected that I'd never read Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, and got it down to look it over. It's a curious book, written in 1933 after a six-month writer's block, an extraordinarily rare even in Stein's life. I read it because I had just read Monique Truong's novel The Book of Salt, whose central figure is the Vietnamese cook Stein and Toklas employed for years at about that same time.

Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is "about" a couple of mysterious events, one involving the unexplained death of a local hotel-keeper, in and around the town of Bilignin, where Stein and Toklas had taken a country house for their summers. We visited that house in the summer of 1974, when it was empty. The gates were unlocked, so we simply walked into the property, not daring to enter the house of course, but walking around behind to a terrace overlooking a magnificent view west across the valley below; to the north in the distance a hilltop castle.

It's a quiet village, hardly more than a few farmsteads and a cemetery to the south, and here, in 1933, Stein and Toklas settled into the country summertime routine you may know best from Wars I Have Seen, which recounts daily life there. Recently the Bilignin house has taken on a darker side: Stein apparently obtained the lease through the assistance of Bernard Faÿ, later a collaborator in the Vichy government; somehow she and Toklas, hardly Aryan, were left alone there throughout World War II.

But that's in the future: at the time of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor Stein was undergoing a writer's crisis. Having begun writing relatively conventionally in 1903 and '04 with Q.E.D. and Fernhurst,, unpublished and unknown until 1950, she moved to her more ruminative style in her first early masterpiece, Three Lives, finished in 1906. In the next two years The Making of Americans finished off any conventional fictional narrative interest in her writer's mind, and her immersion in Cubism, as it was being evolved by her friend Pablo Picasso and his colleague Georges Braque, permanently influenced her own work. The first published examples of this were her portraits of Picasso and Matisse, in Alfred Stieglitz's review Camera Work, in 1912; Tender Buttons, written that year and published in 1914, is perhaps the early peak of this style.

Stein continued the style through the plays and portraits of the 'teens and '20s, gathered in Geography and Plays(1922) and Operas and Plays(1932), but continued to meditate in her writing on writing itself, in Useful Knowledge(1929) and How to Write(1931).

Then came the interruption of the celebrated Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas(1933), which made her popular and led to her return to a lecture tour of the United States in 1934 and 1935. I think this sudden fame and popularity combined with her dedication to her craft and her awareness of the lasting significance of the Cubist moment — which precipitated a deep divide between abstraction and representationalism among writers as well as painters and composers — had something to do with the crisis that resulted in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor.

In any case, in that book Stein returns to a Cubist sort of interpenetration of two planes: one of meditation on the act of writing; the other the observations, seen and overheard, of ordinary events of daily life — in this case, in a small village in the French countryside.

Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is probably best read twice: once quickly through, on its own terms; then again with thought given to various annotations. The edition I have was published by the Creative Arts Book Company (Berkeley) in 1982 in an edition with a helpful afterword by John Herbert Gill; it has been made available on the Internet. The first time through you'll perhaps be irritated and/or bored; this is a frequent response to Stein's writing. One reads a new book (new to the reader, I mean) burdened with the experience of all that prior reading, and most of that prior reading is pretty commonplace. Not the content of the texts, perhaps; but certainly the form or style. Even Henry James remains "difficult"; not that many readers go past, say, Mrs. Dalloway.

But I find Blood on the Dining-Room Floor a charming book, read not terribly closely, say in bed. The crime, if it was a crime, let alone its perpetrator, never really appears; the entire affair's presented as if a matter of village gossip, narrated through innuendo and arched eyebrow, certainly not laid out in at-first-and-then sequential narrative.

A closer reading introduces two major matters of interest: Stein's technique — what you might call composition as composition — and the significance of that technique as a witness to the intellectual revolution of her time, a revolution that is still proceeding and has yet to be noticed, let alone understood, by the vast majority of readers.

Among the other Internet annotations of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, Craig Dworkin's Five Words In A Stein, addresses the first of these matters. I like it, partly because I'm drawn to language-play. Dworkin makes a case, and the pun's intended, for reading Blood as a text influenced by Stein's early family language, presumably as German as it was English; and he's alert, perhaps too alert, to subtle implications of the words and phrases that occupy Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, as restless guests occupy a country hotel. (Or refugees occupy an occupied zone.)

The second matter is the subject of Joan Retallack's Writers – Readers – Performers / Partners in Crime (published in How2, vol. 1 no. 6, Fall 2001), a paper given within a colloquy on "The Politics of Presence: Re-reading the Writing Subject in “Live” and Electronic Performance, Theatre and Film Poetry." Where Dworkin concentrates on a reading, even a deciphering of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, though, Retallack goes much further, using Stein's book as a launch pad for an interesting sketch of a proposal, that while

…literature is an engagement with possible forms of life — as all language games (written or spoken or performed) must be

the fact remains that

…the explosion of forms that we've seen throughout the 20th century… poses difficulties for traditionalists — e.g., narrators of coherency, tidy story-tellers as guardians of logics of identity and convention.

The next sentence is crucial:

Ther narrator of continuity is (albeit often unawares) at odds in a world whose vulnerabilities have more to do with contiguity. Contiguity is the spatial dimension of coincidence.

Stein's crisis, in the months before Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, was born of the mutual incompatibility of "narrative coherence" and awareness of contiguity, particularly of the dislocating Cubist appearance of contiguity. Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is a meditation on the disruption of daily life that is a constant characteristic of daily life. (It's tempting to consider the dialectic between Toklas as daily life and Stein as meditation; Stein's nightly writing "miracle" as quotidian and Toklas's morning typing as a completion, almost a repair, of the interruption which is Stein's work.)

The Moment of Cubism, to use John Berger's apt and memorable formula, was a historical moment on the scale of the Enlightenment, the expression of a handful of visionaries who refused to let convention or authority (and the two are politically synonymous) cloud their eyes as they looked at a world of human consciousness (and subconsciousness) that had changed. Language, whether verbal, pictorial, or musical, always reflects the "interruptions" of such moments. ("Interruption" in quotes, because it's an interruption that connects.) A fascinating example of this was posted the other day on Mark Liberman's Language Log: time and distance themselves have changed in the human consciousness, as is testified by the history of our words.

I can't think of a more pleasant way of entering a contemplation of all these matters than a reading of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor. It's already led me to Useful Knowledge, and soon back via Geography and Plays, I suspect, to the Geographical History of America. In which case I'll report back here.