Twelve experienced faculty members from across the United States present their analyses of ground-breaking modern American poets in richly illustrated video lectures. The course highlights both major poets—from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson through T.S. Eliot, H.D., Amy Lowell, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others—and influential movements. The course mixes historical overview with close readings of individual poets and poems. Most courses give only one instructor’s point of view. This one matches the diversity of US poetry with lectures by a score of talented faculty. They bring their special perspective to the material while also presenting a coherent view of more than fifty years of US poetry. Throughout the course the lectures are illustrated with vivid images of the events, people, and places mentioned in the poems themselves. Readings by both the poets themselves and experienced faculty highlight the texts. On screen displays of text and quotations make it easy to follow the material. This is a course that takes advantage of the medium to bring you sights and sounds that would be difficult to incorporate in classroom lectures.
'A Cessation of Resemblances': Stein / Picasso / Duchamp (Part 1)
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Del curso dictado por University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Modern American Poetry
45 calificaciones
De la lección
Module 2
The Difference Women Made
Conoce a los instructores
Cary NelsonJubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences
English Department
[MUSIC]
My name is Marjorie Perloff.
I am a professor Emeritus at Stanford University.
And the lecture today is going to be about Gertrude Stein,
Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, their relationship.
And it's not just about poetry but about relationship of poetry to the visual arts.
In 1935, as Gertrude Stein recalls it,
Picasso was suffering from what we might call painter's block.
Finding himself at an impasse in his personal life, for two years,
he stopped painting altogether, taking up writing instead.
He commenced to write poems, Stein remarks, but
this writing was never his writing.
After all the egoism of a painter is not at all the egoism of a writer,
there's nothing to say about it.
It is not.
No, and her book Everybody's Autobiography
in 1937 Gertrude Stein recalls telling the great painter, who was perhaps her closest
friend, your poetry is more offensive than just bad poetry.
I do not know why it is, but it just is.
Somebody who can really do something very well,
when he does something else which he cannot do.
In which he cannot live it is particularly repellent.
Now you, I said to him, you never read a book in your life that was not written by
a friend and then not then and you never had any feeling about any words.
Words annoy you more than they do anything else, so
how can you write you know better.
All right go on doing it but don't go on trying to make me tell you it is poetry.
Now Stein's almost visceral reaction was prompted not just as is often assumed,
by Picasso's invasion of her territory, or
by her surprisingly traditional insistence on the separation of the arts.
The deeper reason, and we tend to forget this,
when we discuss the relationship between Stein and Picasso.
Is that Picasso had never so much as pretended to read any of Stein's writing.
For him, Gertrude was a wonderful patron and
pal he loved coming to her salon gossiping with her on a daily basis.
But her writing especially given that it was in English,
a language he couldn't after all read was hardly within the radius of his discourse.
Not surprisingly,
when he did take on poetry in the mid 1930's his models with a then
prominent French surrealist beginning with his good friend André Breton.
Here for example is the opening of a typical Picasso prose
poem from 1935 as translated from the spanish by Jerome Rothenberg.
I mean, a dish, a cup, a nest, a knife, a tree, a frying pan, a nasty spill, while
strolling on the sharp edge of a cornice, breaking up into a thousand pieces.
Screaming like a madwoman and lying down to sleep, stark naked,
legs spread wide over the odor from a knife that just beheaded the wine froth
and nothing bleeds from it except for lips like butterflies and asks you for
no handouts for a visit to the bulls with a cicada like a feather in the wind.
Now this passage is characteristically surrealist
in it's mysterious juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images.
A tree, a frying pan,
a cornice screaming like a mad woman, the emphasis is on violence.
Stark naked legs spread wide over the odor from a knife,
and its collocation of elaborate metaphor and simple syntax.
A passionate advocate of Picasso's early cubism, which has been often observed
as a technique Stein herself adapted in such compositions as Tender Buttons, 1914.
Picasso's surrealist poetic mode is antithetical to Stein's own,
with her avoidance of concrete nouns, syntactic anti ambiguity, and
it's reliance on indeterminate pronouns, articles of prepositions,
to produce a poetic construct she took to be appropriate for the 20th century.
The surrealist Stein remarked dismissively in her discussion
of Picasso's painting of the early 1930s, still see things as everyone sees them.
They complicate them in a different way, but the vision is that of everyone else.
In short, the complication is the complication of the 20th century, but
the vision is that of the 19th century.
Now, this critique of surrealism, whether just or
unjust, is echoed by another of Stein's contemporaries, Duchamp.
In describing his famous box of 1913-14, the so-called green box.
It should appear Carbone, Marcel Duchenne explains that his assemblage of
miscellaneous notes placed inside the box was designed as an art object,
not to be looked at in the aesthetic sense of the word.
Indeed, to remove the retinal aspect
which had dominated painting from Corbay to the present.
And he says.
Before, painting had other functions, it could e religious, philosophical, moral.
If I had the chance to take an antiretinal attitude,
its unfortunately hasn't changed much, our whole century is completely retinal,
except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat.
And still they didn't go very far.
In spite of the fact that Andre Breton says he believes in judging
from a Surrealist point of view,
deep down he's still really interested in painting in the retinal sense.
It's absolutely ridiculous, it must change.
So here you have the beginning of the idea of painting as not a matter of
what you see, the painter painting what he sees, but of something more conceptual.
Duchamp's critique of the retinal has it's counterpart in Stein's writing, but
the two artists have rarely been linked.
For all the critical studies devoted to the relationship
of Stein's debt to Cezanne.
To Cezanne and Picasso or as in the current exhibition of the Stein's
collect on Matisse or to the cubism of Juan Gree.
What has been curiously ignored is the reverse situation, the influence of any
of Stein's verbal composition on the visual artwork of her contemporaries.
And here Duchamp, who's moved to New York in 1915 necessitated the accusation of
English, even if Stein's expatriation to Paris met at her art discourse.
Especially with the Spaniard,
Picasso was to be conducted in French, is the pivot of figure.
Now, Stein and Duchamp met, according to the autobiography of Alice B Tolklas,
a book I hope you will all get to read.
A fascinating book that was a bestseller in its time.
A fake autobiography where she writes it as if she is Alice, her partner, from
Alice's point of you, written in night and she describes Paris in 1913 as follows.
It was not long after this that Mabel Dodge went to America and
it was the winter of the armoury show which was the first time
the general public had a chance to see any of these pictures.
It was there that Marcel's Nude Descending the Staircase was shown.
It was about this time that Picabia and Gertrude Stein met.
I remember going to dinner at the Picabias' and a pleasant dinner it was,
Gabrielle Picabia full of life and gaiety, Picabia dark and
lively, and Marcel Duchamp looking like a young Norman crusader.
I was always perfectly able to understand the enthusiasm that Marcel Duchamp
aroused in New York when he was there in the early years of the war.
His brother had died from the effects of his wounds, his
other brother was still at the front and he himself was inapt for military service.
He was very depressed and he went to America.
Everyone loved him.
So much so that it was a joke in Paris when any American arrived In Paris,
the first thing he said was, and how is Marcel?
The young Duchamp, she wrote a few days later, did Mabel Dodge,
looks like a young Englishman and talks very urgently about the fourth dimension.
We know that Stein, at this time,
was keenly interested in questions of mathematics, and so this was a compliment.
Indeed, Stein's account in Alice B Toklas is unusually flattering and
without her usual malice.
Quite unlike, say, her references to Matisse or Pound or Hemingway.
Stein could be scathing, as she really didn't, she hated Hemingway.
And any time she had a chance, she made nasty remarks about him or about Pound.
She thought nobody was as good as she was, she was the genius.
So she could be very rude.
But she did really admire Duchamp.
Duchamp was the son of a notary in the little Normandy town of Blainville.
A fact Stein refers to with amusement in Everybody's Autobiography,
when she remarks how many artists,
Cocteau, Brunelleschi, Dali were the sons of notaries.
Duchamp was handsome and charming, and in 1917 Stein was made aware of
the brouhaha over Fountain by a letter from her friend Carl Van Vechten.
Fountain was just the urinal that Duchamp showed,
in order to upend what people thought was art, for
the Salon of Independants, where you were allowed to submit anything you wanted,.
And he found a urinal, and submitted that.
And that has become one of the most famous artworks of the early 20th century.
And she got a letter about it from her friend Carl Van Vechten.
This porcelain tribute was bought cold in some plumber shop,
where it awaited the call to join some bathroom trinity, and sent in.
When it was rejected by the salon of the independents,
Marcel Duchamp at once resigned from the board.
Stieglitz is exhibiting the object at the 291 Gallery,
and has made some wonderful photographs of it.
The photographs make it look like anything from a Madonna to a Buddha.
And it was called the Madonna of the Bathroom, that was its joke name.
And here it is, you're looking at it.
Now, did these ready-mades like the Fountain influence Stein's writing?
Yes and no.
Like Duchamp, her compositions resemble Duchamp's objects in
their wholesale rejection of the memetic contract.
By that I mean doing anything representational.
A rejection that, to my mind, goes well beyond cubist distortion.
And dislocation of what are, after all, still recognizable objects and bodies.
In this sense, Duchamp's dismissal of the retinal is also Stein's.
Such prose poems as A Substance in a Cushion and A Box in Tender Buttons,
for example, can be related to Duchamp's Green Box.
And his later, what he called Boite-en-valise, the French name for
little suitcases.
And you have them in museums versus in the,
if you go to Chicago, in the Art Institute you see a lot of these boxes.
In their emphasis on what can not be seen or inferred from the the outside.
More important, as different as their artistic productions were, Stein,
after all, did not use ready-made or found texts.
They drew on each other's work in striking ways, ways that have largely been ignored.
And the key text here is Stein's book, Geography and Plays, published in 1922.
After the war when Duchamp, having return to Paris, called Stein with a mutual
friend Henri-Pierre Roché, the discussion was evidently about Stein's
desire to publish a collection of the shorter experimental texts, poems,
prose pieces, portraits, and plays she had been writing since 1909.
For example, her masterpiece Miss Furr And Miss Skeene.
Walter Arensberg and Henry McBride were enlisted and Sherwood Anderson,
the writer, newly arrived in Paris in 1921, offered to write a preface.
After a number of rejections,
Edmund Brown's Four Seas Company of Boston agreed to publish Geography and Plays.
Next slide, which shows you the cover of that book,
surely one of Stein's most seminal collections and available today,
both at Project Gutenberg and Google Books.
And there's also a fine reprint edition with the useful introduction by
Serena Pandrum that you can buy on Amazon for relatively very little.
Geography and Plays contains the well known early portraits
of Harry Phelan Webb, Constance Fletcher, George Brock,
Carl Van Vechten, called one and Mrs. Whitehead.
The rhyming musical pieces like Susie Asado, Pink Melon Joy and
Accents in Alsace and the plays Lady Voices and What Happened.
Roughly at the center of the volume,
Gertrude Stein placed a poem called Sacred Emily 1913.
A ten page poem Duchamp's quite likely to have known,
which contains the first instance of what was probably Stein's most famous line,
a rose is a rose is a rose.
And later appearances offered tribute to the rose as merely itself.
Do we suppose that all she knows is that a rose is a rose is a rose?
The noun rose is preceded by the indefinite article a.
In poetry and grammar for example,
when Stein defines poetry as concerned with using, abusing, losing,
wanting, denying, avoiding and adoring, and replacing the noun.
She illustrates noun, the name of anything with the comment, when I said a rose is
a rose is a rose is a rose, and then later made that into a ring, I made poetry.
And later she declared, the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for
a hundred years, made people pay attention to it.
But in Sacred Emily, a rose is a proper name it has already appeared
in the opening section which goes like this.
You have it on the screen.
Compose compose beds.
Wives of great men rest tranquil.
Come go stay philip philip.
Egg be takers.
Parts of place nuts.
Suppose twenty for cent.
It is rose in hen.
Now this passage recalls Susie Asado, and it's punning and rhyming,
short and seemingly quite unrelated phrases.
Composed rhymes with rose, philip philip sounds like a bird call,
egg be takers puns on egg beaters,
place nuts seems to be a misheard reference to placements or place names.
Just as twenty for cent sounds like 20 percent.
But then again, since per means four, twenty for cent is oddly accurate.
By the time we come to the seventh line,
what might have conventionally been a rose in bloom becomes a rose in hen.
The eggs have already been laid with it's sound allusion to Don Quixote's beloved
horse, Rocinante.
As well as its erotic reference of the verb form rose, which functions here,
after all, rose is a verb in the past tense, right, he rose.
Then to rose a high frequency and hence boring proper name,
is contrasted to the sacred Emily of the title.
The reference is probably to Emile Zola,
a sacred cow indeed in the turn of century France.
The second line,
wives of great men rest tranquil, surely refers to the great author's death
while asleep in his bed from carbon monoxide poisoning from a blocked chimney.
Who died asleep in his bed while,
from a carbon monoxide poisoning from a blocked chimney.
Even as his wife, composed in the bed beside him, miraculously survived.
Again, this sculpture of Zola's tomb in the Palacho Cemetery in Paris.
The architect of the tomb was Philippe Solar, and
I think that's why the name phillip phillip is invoked in the poem,
as a bleak reference to the architect of that tomb.
Now, I don't mean to suggest that Sacred Emily is about The writer,
Emile Zola, Stein does not operate that way.
Rather so great so great Emily, so great so great Emily, becomes the occasion for
the celebration of Stein's own domestic happiness with Alice.
Alice B Toklas was her lifelong partner.
The sentence, rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is followed by these lines.
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
Loveliness extreme.
Extra gaiters.
Loveliness extreme.
Sweetest ice-cream.
Page ages page ages page ages.
Wiped Wiped wire wire.
Sweeter than peaches and pears and cream.
Wiped wire wiped wire.
Now, loveliness extreme in line two, with its allusion to Edmund Waller's famous go,
lovely rose, jostles, in a kind of dada fashion.
With those extra gaiters evidently needed for
protection are against extractors from difficult situation, and
sweetest ice cream echos other 1913 poems like Preciosilla,
where she has the famous line Toasted Susie is my ice cream.
The lines that follow introduce the phonemic play
that in these years became one of Stein's signature, sound play.
Pages ages, page ages, page ages, where the words, nouns, or
verbs merge with one another and also call the passages.
And the echolalia in Wiped Wiped wire wire where a single phoneme makes
all the difference.
The ugly monosyllables of wiped wire wiped wire, it's a kind of a tongue twister,
are in turn undercut by the cloying sing-song simile,
sweeter than peaches and pear and cream.
The critic Serena Ponram has remarked that sacred Emily
proceeds as an interplay of three extensive sets of reference.
The sexual, the domestic and the aesthetic.
I think that's accurate, the poem begins after all with compose, composition of
beds followed by the observation that wives of great men rest tranquil.
A reference to Stein's own wife as well as Ola's.
In need like Aide or Susie Asado, Sacred Emily is an erotic love poem for Alice.
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,
also a rose is eros, E-R-O-S, eros is obviously a pun on that.
By line 18 of the opening page, the erotic theme is distinctly audible.
Murmur pet murmur pet murmur.
Push sea push sea push sea push sea push sea push sea push sea push sea.
Sweet and good and kind to all.
And eros is the dominant motif of the entire book
coming to a kind of crescendo in Accents in Alsace, later poem,
that culminates in the passage Sweeter than water or cream or ice.
Sweeter than bells of roses.
Sweeter than winter or summer or spring.
Sweeter than pretty posies.
Sweeter than anything is my queen and loving is her nature.
Loving and good and delighted and best is her little King and Sire whose devotion is
entire who has but one desire to express the love which is hers to inspire.
In the photograph the Rhine hardly showed.
In what way do chimes remind you of singing.
In what way do birds sing.
In what way are forests black or white.
We saw them blue.
With for get me nots.
In the midst of our happiness we were very pleased.
I always loved that last line.
I always write that to people on cards or something.
In the midst of our happiness we were very pleased because it's so silly in a way,
obviously happiness, you would be pleased.
But in the midst of our happiness, we were very pleased.
Now Accents in Alcase is followed by a portrait
that was the last piece written for inclusion in Geography and
Plays, namely Next Life and letters of Marcel Duchamp.
Its nextness can I think be related to the fact that the year of its composition,
1920, Duchamp, back in New York,
had given birth to his female alter ego Rrose Selavy.
He made that name up.
Who from then on, and I'm going to show you examples of it, signed
many of his personal letters and paintings and played a major role in his art making.
Asked by Calvin Tompkins why he felt the need to invent a new identity,
Duchamp responded, it was not to change my identity, but to have two identities.
His first thought,
he said, had been to choose a Jewish name to offset his own Catholic background.
But then the idea jumped at me, why not a female name?
Much better than to change religion would be to change sex.
This was long before we ever thought about sex operations or anything like that.
Rose was the corniest name for a girl at that time,
in French anyway, and Selavy was a pun on c'est la vie, French.
Talking to Pierre Carbone, Duchamp explains that he added the extra R at
the beginning of rose because that gave him a further pun on the French
verb [FOREIGN] to water, to sprinkle, and hence, also to make fertile and rich.
And Selavy contains the name Lavy,
as common a Jewish name as Stein, Gertrude Stein.
Now the iconic image of Duchamps's Rrose is Man Ray's famous photograph
of 1920 in the next slide, 21 signed and now you see how the name is spelled,
lovingly Rrose Selavy, alias Marcel Duchamp.
In this soft focus photograph,
Rrose wears a cloche hat with a brim that comes down to her eyebrows.
It is the lack of facial hair, notes, that engenders sexual ambiguity.
Duchamp's shaved face and discreet smile,
generously framed by a fur collar, a punning displacement of facial hair,
invokes the illusion of a feminine presence.
Then again, this Rrose hardly looks like a woman.
Duchamp's own masculine features are unmistakable.
But the ambiguity is intentional, the image is riddling.
It wants Marcel and Rrose, masculine and feminine.
And I'm going to show you two further Man Ray photographs of Rrose Selavy,
this time in an even more elaborate head dress with a sweeping velvet cape and bead
necklace recalling Renaissance portraits of painters and even more ambiguous.
So Rose's first appearance in a Duchamp artwork was in the assisted ready-made
called Fresh Widow, Fresh Widow, in which
a miniature French window, painted an ugly blue-green like that of beach furniture,
contains eight glass panes covered with sheets of black leather.
The French window stands on a wooden base bearing large capital letters,
Fresh Widow, copyright, Rrose Selavy, 1920.
It's a brilliant pun made simply by erasing the letter n in both words.
A fresh widow, French window, all you have to do is take off the Ns.
A fresh widow is a recent one, here perhaps a war widow,
but also fresh in the sense of bold, not easy to repress or squelch.
What is this widow thinking?
We don't know because the leather panes are impenetrable.
We don't know what's behind them.
The window is also closed but the little knobs, it's just an ordinary little
window but with leather panes which make it very odd, you can't look through it.
Suggested could be opened.
Now, Rrose next appears in another so-called ready made,
Belle Haleine Eau de Voilette.
Beautiful breathe Toilet water.
Toilet water.
Whose punning title overtly plays on Belle Haleine, title of the opera, and
violet water, extract of violet.
But the perfume bottle itself in this slide, next slide, is empty and
Eau de Voilette, veiled water Invokes the eau de de
toilette of Duchamp's fountain which really has toilet water in it.
The bottle is labeled with one of Manor's photographs of Rose and
signed Manley and Rrose Selavy.
The same year Duchamp put together a small wired bird cage,
painted it white, and put inside some 152 sugar cubes, although marble.
They're made out of marble, and they're very heavy.
An ordinary fever thermometer, a cuttlebone, and a little porcelain dish.
The construction was named Why not Sneeze, Rrose Selavy?
The thermometer used to measure a girl's heat, the phallic shaped cuttlebone, and
female dish the sugar that is really cold marble.
These objects placed in an empty cage create a complex and
witty spectacle of unfulfilled desire.
For unlike all those erotic 18th century paintings of young girls who let the bird
out of the cage and watch it fly about, this cage doesn't contain a bird.
It's empty.
And a good sneeze is needed to change things to [FOREIGN],
water life, [FOREIGN].
Now what I find especially interesting is that when Marcel came back to France for
a stay in July, 1921, he started signing his letter to friends, eros c'est la vie.
Sometimes, with variants like Rose Mar-Cel, Marcel Rose.
Marcelavy, Selatz.
Mar-Selavy and so on.
After 1925 or so, the Rrose Selavy signature disappears, replaced by
Duchamp's nicknames, Douche and Tutor, but most frequently, simply Marcel.
The bisexual punning and word play, elaborate as it was in the early 1920s,
gradually decreased in volume, although Duchamp short book of puns,
Rose C'est La Vie, was not published until 1939.
Stein's own most playfully erotic verse,
happy happy happy all the happy, happy, happy all the, come in the same period.
In Alice [INAUDIBLE], Gertrude Stein recalls her first visit soon after
World War I, to Manrey's tiny studio, on the [FOREIGN],
where he showed his pictures of Marcelle Duchamp.
Manrey was photographing Duchamp as early as 1916, 17.
And the next and Rose C'est La Vie had not yet been born.
But it's hard to believe that Stein would not have been aware of Rose's presence
when she was composing her portrait in geography in place.
Conversely, although there's no proof that Duchamp based his pseudonym [FOREIGN] or
his sexy and feminine rose on her more equivocal roses,
its at least an astonishing coincidence that [INAUDIBLE] who never seems to
expressed a particular interest in Jewish culture would want to adopt a Jewish name.
And one that was the name of a lesbian writer whose name begins with an S even
as he chose as his first name the banal rose that Stein made so prominent.
The two artists in any case seem to have understood one another's work perfectly.
Now Constidis subbed Stein's portrait next, Life and Letters of Marcel Duchamp.
Let me say a word about her portraits.
Stein wrote a whole book, a number of books, called Portraits,
which was supposed to be the equivalent, obviously,
of visual portraits of famous people, photographic portraits, but
the fact is they are very abstract and you can't recognize the person.
And a lot of people have thought this is just gibberish, and in her biography of
Gertrude Stein, Janet Malcolm, I don't know whether you will be looking at that,
but it's a very annoying biography because she does do a whole biography of Stein,
but she says these things are just nonsense.
You can't make them out anyway.
It's sort of fun, but you can only read her Autobiography Alice B Toklas and
a few other things and that these writings, these portrait are kind of
just sheer word play and non-sense and we did try to show you that that's not so.
That they make a lot more sense than you might think.
So bear with me here.
So here's the portrait on the screen.
A family likeness pleases when there is cessation of resemblances.
This is to say, the points of remarkable resemblance
are those which make Henry leading, Henry leading actually smothers Emil.
Emil is pointed.
He does not overdo examples.
He even hesitates.
But am I sensible.
Am I not rather efficient in sympathy or common feeling.
I was looking to see if I could make Marcel out of it, but I can't.
Not a doctor to me not a debtor to me not a d to me but a c to me a credit to me.
To interlace a story with glass and with rope with color and roam.
How many people roam.
Dark people roam.
Can dark people come from the north?
Are they dark then?
Do they begin to be dark when they have come from there?
Any question leads away from me.
Grave a boy grave.
What I do recollect is this.
I collect black and white.
From the standpoint of white all color is color.
From the standpoint of black.
Black is white, white is black.
Black is black, white is black.
White and black is black and white.
What I recollect when I am there is that words are not birds.
How easily I feel thin, birds do not.
So I replace birds with tin foil.
Silver is thin.
Life and Letters of Marcel Duchamp.
Quickly return the unabridged restraint in mentioned letters.
My dear Fourth, confess to me in a quick saying.
The vote is taken.
The lucky strike works well in difficulty.
It rounds, it sounds round.
I cannot conceal attrition.
Let me think.
I repeat the fullness of bread.
In a way not bread.
Delight me.
I delight a lamb in birth.
Now this is one of Stein's particularly opaque portraits and
readers seem to have avoided it as holy non sensical.
Stein herself after all says in the third paragraph,
I was looking to see if I could make Marcel out of it but I can't.
This presumably admitted her failure to portrait her subject,
then again she published a piece and gave it a very specific name, so
that the readers challenged will hereby challenge, to understand the portraits
meaning and actually wants to get the hand Gertrude Stein.
She is a very difficult modernist writer but, and it is a little bit like
deciphering cross word puzzles, but it's very worthwhile because once you get it
there are very few writers who can pack as much in and be so funny as she is too.
The title Next for
Starters can be understood either spatially or temporarily.
A can be next to b in a picture or a can be next in line.
At the grocery store in either case next is always a relational term.
One cannot be next alone,
now does mean Stein is relating next to the previous piece?
In geography and place called Toktee or Torktibathra or
that this composition is next on her list.
The question is left open, certainly the sub-title is parodic, life and
letters format.
So common in the middle brow portraits of the eminent Victorians, hardly seems
appropriate for the iconoclastic Duchamp who's hardly a man of letters.
Still the mock title does set the stage for Stein's opening sentence.
A family like this pleases when there is cessation.
A cessation of resemblances.
If it is implied we can get rid of representational art of poetry
of the need to make a portrait or still life look like its subject,
then it's particular family likeness can become pleasing.
And Duchamp's own work, In Advance of the Broken Arm.
This is an ordinary snow shovel that Duchamp bought in a hardware store and
suspended it in a wire from the ceiling.
There are a couple of versions of it, it doesn't resemble anything else.
But if, with the title In Advance of the Broken Arm,
that is from shoveling snow which was a novelty at the time and
other aspects of this shovel, this has become one of his very famous
iconic works that you have at the Museum of Modern Art, you have one in Chicago.
You have one in the Vale of New Haven, In Advance of the Broken Arm,
the snow shovel.
The readymade doesn't resemble anything else.
It's a snow shovel.
Like Stein's rose, it is what it is.
As for its family likeness the shovel has a very particular family,
the readymades that live with it in the Arensberg
collection in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
That is the great collection of Duchamp's work.
And he curated it himself and arranged them a certain way so you have the shovel,
the urinal, the bottle dryer.
Various, they're always simple objects that you could buy in a hardware store
with various erotic connotations and uniquely Duchamp's.
And they've become very famous.
The to whom my sell is now compared, almost surely Henry James,
whom Stein regarded as her model and again, Emile Zola,
who we just talked about a minute ago, France's great naturalistic writer.
Descriptive as Henry James is, he's never pointed like Zola.
Having made these analogies, the author hesitates.
Can Marcel really be placed in this literary context?
But quote, am I sensible, am I not rather efficient in sympathy or common feeling?
When you read this sentence aloud or
you hear it as you are now, you almost always read efficient as deficient.
Am I not deficient in sympathy would be the sentence.
What would efficient and sympathy mean?
For it is standard phrasing to refer to someone as deficient in sympathy or
common feeling.
Is efficient then perhaps a misprint?
Or does Stein purposely take the cliche and
invert it, calling herself not exactly overflowing with sympathy, but
at least efficient, capable of the common feeling that has made Zola such an icon?
It is the character of Marcel that seems to escape her.
Still, Duchamp's place in her life remains to be assessed.
Not a doctor to me.
Not a debtor to me.
Not a d to me but a c to me a credit to me.
Duchamp's not her mentor nor her disciple.
Indeed, not a d at all but a c for credit.
The c perhaps of Selavy for whose existence Stein can take credit.
And in the next sentence she pays homage to the large glass.
This is the famous The Bride and the Bachelor, also in Philadelphia and
in New York, probably one of the famous works of the 20th century.
I've written about it elsewhere, I'm not going to talk about it here.
But a very strange painting on glass where all her favorite icons come back,
the urinal, the shovel.
They are all in there somewhere.
To interlace a story with glass and with rope, with color and.
The portrait just wants to have control over her subject.
But the fact is that Duchamp, the dark Norman crusader, is a roamer.
He has, at the time of the portrait, gone back and forth between the US and
France again and again, and spent time in Argentina the last year of the war.
One could never be sure where he might be.
Any question leads away from it.
Stein Kenneth collect Marcel's art,
which seems at this moment in time quiet uncollectable.
But she can recollect his chess playing, the black and white board to be mastered.
Black is white, white is black, black is black, white is black, white and
black, black and white.
But chess is also the paradigm for
Marcel's art, in which like her own, words are not birds.
They don't fly away.
And a few lines further down, the lucky strike works well and difficultly.
It rounds.
It sounds round.
The sentence evokes not only the cigarette brand, already in use in 1917,
Lucky Strike, and Duchamp was a big smoker, but also,
the difficulty of rounding out sound.
Duchamp's punning titles and anagrams came to be one of his chief signatures.
Is seen as a man of letters in both senses of the word.
Now Duchamp had by this time invented not only the word play of Rose Selavy but
also the elaborate verb play of his readymade titles that begin as early as
1915 with the famous bottle dryer called in French [FOREIGN],
which literally means a device to take the taste of out something.
Then you get this kind of phallic bottle rack.
You have a bottle rack that has no bottles on it, that has removed their taste, and
it's that kind of word play that appeal to Duchamp and also appealed to Stein.
And [FOREIGN], literally taking the taste out, so
that bottle rack which is just a small silver thing.
And by the way, the name readymades,
refers not only to the fact that Duchamp chose art from whatever he could find.
He didn't make it.
It was ready made, but also this was the beginning, 1917, or ready made clothes,
clothes that you buy off the rack.
Before that, people had clothes made by a tailor.
They went to the tailor.
You didn't have ready-mades but now you had ready-mades.
And, another famous readymade that Stein must've known from the period
was the Mona Lisa with a goatee and whiskers called LHOOQ,
L in french,
which we translate into English like she has a hot bottom or
she's a hot pants, or whatever.
And that Mona Lisa is showed everywhere.
You see it in magazines.
Duchamp's version of the Mona Lisa with the goatee and mustache called LHOOQ.
And their self-designations, Rose Selavy and the marchon du cell,
meaning the salt cellar.
He often signed his paintings with that salt seller Marcel Duchamp,
all kinds of puns.
Now how closely aligned is the composition of a portrait like Stein's next
to Duchamp's own work?
Negatively, the relationship is remarkably close.
In both cases, we can say the attack is on retinal art, or in the case of language,
on representational language, normal meaning, normal description of something.
In Stein's case, on retinal poetry.
In both cases, language is to be seen as well as heard.
And one letter, or rather phoneme, can make all the difference as
one deficient becomes efficient or a French window becomes fresh widow.
Again both Stein and Duchamp eroticize the actual language as in the egg
be takers and part of the place nuts of sacred Emily and
in the family of Duchamp's readymades from the [FOREIGN] to the [FOREIGN] to
the androgynous fountain, by Art Mutt and then Rose Selavy.
The fountain was signed by R Mutt, which was a play on the cartoon Mutt and Jeff or
in German, R Mutt, Armutt, just the letter R and the Mutt, M-U-T-T.
And nobody knew who had made it.
It was sent to the Salon anonymously and signed by R Mutt.
So people had a fit about it and it was not shown.
Although they had promised you can show anything you wanted and
was notorious in the endless articles about it in the newspapers.
Indeed, Stein's poetics is much, much closer to Duchamp's than to Picasso's
vigorous, masculinist and still essentially painterly aesthetic, even if
they're cubist, even if they're distorted, they're basically paintings, aren't they?
Consider Duchamp's playful treatment of Book art and page layout.
In 1922, Henry McBride, who had been close to both Stein and
Duchamp for years commissioned Marcel,
who was once again living in New York, to design a book for his art essays.
The resulting pamphlet was composed of 18 cardboard sheets held
together by three rings.
It's title, Some French Moderns Says McBride,
is spelled out in 27 separate file tabs attached to the right edge of each page.
When viewed from the verso, the same tabs spell out the name of the book's
publisher Associated Anonym Incorporated and the copyright.
Next slide.
Is designated as that again of Rose C'est La Vie and
Rose autographs it and you read for Joseph Solomon 40 years later by Marcel Duchamp.
So Rose Marcel's design also affected the typography and this got very common.
It was used in all kinds of places.
It's a wonderful book, Alfred Stieglitz the great photographer,
wrote to McBry who passed this sentiment to Duchamp.
In Paris, the young data poet, Peter heard about the project, and in turn produced
a book in English called "The Wonderful Book: Reflections on Rose C'est La Vie.
It's a little pamphlet.
Now this intriguing little pamphlet has been reproduced page by page
in Paul Franklin's book on Duchamp and
it varies other places in 1999 in his journal.
In the Frontest's piece, the first part of the title, next slide,
is dropped and Reflections on Rose C'est La Vie is followed by an epigraph
which is non other than the revealing sentence in Stein's portrait Next Life and
Letters of Marcel Duchamp.
I was looking to see if I could make Marcel out of it, but I I can't.
So obviously only Massot and Duchamp himself knew that book.
Now, why would Massot choose these words as his epigraph,
thus making an explicit link between Gertrude Stein and Rose C'est La Vie?
Duchamp.
The book itself turns out to be what is called a livre blanc.
It has 12 blank pages.
But the introduction by quote, a woman of no importance, and that reference is to
Oscar Wilde's 1893 play about a humble woman who learns her son's aristocratic
employer is her former lover and hence her son's father provides a clue.
And you get this on page 33 of that book.
P de M determined to write a wonderful book on Marcel Duchamp but
in each attempt he was overwhelmed by the difficulty of such a task.
For, I ought to explain, that any M has always declared he considers
Duchamp the greatest genius he knows.
To speak about the youth, the evolution, and
especially the life of Marcel Duchamp without blundering.
Might not one well hesitating, anybody would hesitate.
The thing is impossible.
We know that the author of the new Descending a Staircase lives on
chess and love.
The author of this book loves to recall a Sunday afternoon
when he slept in Duchamp's room, under the gaze of the king, the queen, and
the pawns in the chess game.
Black and white move on the checkerboard of life.
After years of hesitation, P de M brought me this book.
I preface it without the slightest hesitation.
It is perfectly idiotic or idiotically perfect.
But since it is my duty to be sincere, I must admit, for the benefit of the reader,
that this lazy, naughty little boy said to me the other evening.
[FOREIGN] An agreeable book must always be unreadable.
The illisible which hear a lot about now in the art world.
In her portrait, Stein presents Marcel as indefinable, unreadable.
She can not produce a coherent identity.
For what she knows about the artist's work, glass with rope, glass and
with rope with color in Rome his chest playing,
his dark northern heritage, she can't really make a hole out of it.
Then, although she didn't say it, what to make of Rose Ce la Vie,
that woman of no importance who is Marcel.
So she can refer to various facets of his work, the chess game various other things,
Lucky Strike, but you can't really make a coherent portrait of him.
This is the time where photography had replaced painting in many ways.
Because you could produce, anybody could produce a photograph of somebody so
that artists felt they really had to do something else.
They weren't just going to do a straightforward picture, and
think today with selfies, I mean they weren't going to do that.
So when she says I was looking to see if I could make Marcel out of it but
I can't, it looks ahead to such later responses
as John Cage's Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel.
This is made out of plexiglass and
the illisible is of course essential to our own aesthetic today.
You have whole books written with that, you have a lot of art shows now.
Texts that are purposefully unreadable and you make of them different things.
On the back cover of the wonderful book, Masao placed a series of Rose Selave's
choice puns [FOREIGN] The strangler and stranger, same word.
[FOREIGN] If you change the letters of ruin around, you get urinate.
[FOREIGN] All these ponds.
And, he evidently thought they could be related to Steinean word play.
And indeed they were and I'm just going to show you.
One example of that Marcel gives a perceptive summary of her language art.
It's on French and in English but
I'm going to read to you in English which my translation.
Everything here is weighed, released in doses, calculated, measured,
deduced, just as in a mosaic, each term encloses the next,
strictly, co-penetrating it like the planes and volumes of a still life.
Each element is broken down with such acuity
that its representation is equivalent to a new element.
We're present at an abstract recreation, from the inside out,
of the exterior world so that I can only call it a miracle.
One of the portraits Marceau probably had in mind was Stein's portrait,
Guillaume Apollinaire of the great poet, French poet, Apollinaire.
Which begins with the line, give known or pin wear,
a homophonic translation of the poet's name, Guillaume Apollinaire.
Give known or pin wear.
Very much like Duchamp's puns, Okay.
Throughout the 1920s, when Duchamp shuttled back and forth between Paris and
New York, he and Stein kept in touch especially through their mutual friend
the artist Picabia ,who I talked about earlier.
In December 1932 when Picabia was having an exhibition of his drawings
at the Gallery Leonce Rosenberg in Paris,
Stein was asked to contribute a preface to the catalogue.
Her preface turned out to be Stanza 71 of part five of her long and difficult
poem Stanzas in Meditation,which is always in the collective works of Stein.
And it was translated by none other than Duchamp.
And it's amazing, I discovered this and nobody had linked Stan and Duchamp,
two of the famous.
He's probably the famous one, but the famous artist of the 20th century, gee,
one of the famous poets, but we never linked it.
It was always just thought that she was like Picasso,
or like Cubis, but what does she have to do with Duchamp.
Anyway, Stanzas in Meditation was not published during Stein's lifetime but then
was published and with an introduction by the Contemporary Poet John Ashberry.
These ouster stanzas wrote John Ashberry reviewing the earlier edition 1956.
Are made up almost entirely of a colorless connecting word such as where,
which, these, of, not, have, about, and so on.
Though now and then Ms. Stein throws in an orange, a lilac, or an albert to remind us
that it really is the world, our world, that she has been talking about.
And he calls Stanzas in Meditation, which is a long poem,
very difficult, a hymn to possibility.
By that he means, you can make make all kinds of narratives out of it,
a hymn to possibility.
No doubt it's her most abstract or least retinal.
Or let's say audible work.
Stein's meditation, next slide,
begins with a fractured narrative like a passage from a children's book.
There was once upon a time a place where they went from time to time.
I think better of this than of that.
They met just as they should.
This is my could I be excited.
And well he wished that she wished.
All of which I know is this.
Once often as I say yes all of it a day.
This is not a day to be away.
Dear no.
And Duchant translates as follows,
I'm going to give you the French even if many of you don't know
French because I want to make an interesting point about it and
some of you may be able to catch some of this in the next slide.
[FOREIGN] Now the translation
is if anything even more prominently
rhyming than the original would
running with [FOREIGN]
rhyming with oui and so on.
Duchant follows the original very closely but he makes some subtle changes and
this is why it's often so important to read things in the original.
In the case of poetry, don't forget in French you have different pronouns for
he and she and everything is inflected so that the other words go with it.
So he eliminates the periods, which in Stein's poem,
terminate each line, emphasizing the separateness of each phrase.
Then too, in line four, this is my could I be excited,
gets an extra set of male female pronouns so as to emphasize the union.
[FOREIGN] And in line five the choice of [FOREIGN] rather than say
[FOREIGN] wanted or [FOREIGN] for wished and
then the switch from the second wish to the present tense,
[FOREIGN] which he desires, enhances the sexual element in this stanza.
It is as if Rose Sélavy could almost make an appearance.
In other words,
in the English by Stein you can't tell if the speaker is male or female.
It's purposely left completely ambiguous.
But when he translates it, he turned it into a man.
You'll see in the next part.
Because he knew Stein really wanted to be a man.
She always wanted to write from a male point of view, and so
after the admission of the line forget men and women which he translates [FOREIGN],
and the meditation culminates in the following passage.
The thing I wish to say is this.
It might have been.
There are two things that are different.
One and one.
And two and two.
Three and three are not in winning.
Three and three if not in winning.
I see this.
I would have liked to be the only one.
I would have liked to be the only one.
One is one.
If I am would I have liked to be the only one.
Yes just this.
If I am one I would have liked to be the only one which I am.
But we know that I know.
That if this has come to be one of this too to this
one not only now but how, this I know how.
Now Duchant's version, and I'll just read it through quickly, but
I want to point out that here the pronoun forms, he changes it around, so
that he makes it part feminine, part masculine in this way.
[FOREIGN] The thing I wanted to say is this.
What could have been and then [FOREIGN].
They're two different things.
One is one.
Translated here in the masculine [FOREIGN] and
the feminine would be [FOREIGN] that's in the plural so you can't tell.
[FOREIGN] three and three.
[FOREIGN] and then now look at this next line, [FOREIGN].
I would have liked to be the only one, but
he puts that in the feminine text referring to her [FOREIGN].
I would have liked to be the only one, one on one.
if I could have been loved to be the only one, that's exactly it.
If I would have, I would have liked to be served the only one, which I am.
But we know what it is, if this one has come, this one to be one, [FOREIGN].
[FOREIGN] which is masculine, because if it were feminine it would be [FOREIGN].
Pas seulement maintenant mais comment ceci je sais maintenant.
So when he translates it, he subtly has her say I'm a woman but
I'd really like to be a man.
And you don't get that in the same way in the English.
It's much subtler.
And I'm surprised she wasn't annoyed by it actually because he spells it out.
He never talked about that to her, but
clearly what he's saying here, her real dream.
And that was true of Stein.
I mean, she only hung around with men.
She was not a feminist.
She was very rude to most women, put them down,
what she wanted to be was one of the boys, really.
The French cannot quite reproduce Stein's clip monosyllabic lines with their rhyme
and paragraph, not only now, but how.
This I know how.
But Duchant captures her tone, the one subtle change he makes is
the revealing remark, I would have liked to be the only one which in English
has no gender designation becomes [FOREIGN].
And further in translating line 13,
if I am one, I would have liked to be the only one.
Duchant creates an odd split making odd one masculine, un, but
the only one left so feminine.
If I would have liked, I would have liked to be the only one.
Now, to conclude in her own writing, Stein never gave herself away so fully.
Her pronouns usually have a studied indeterminacy.
She never anywhere would have said publicly I really want to be a man,
she would say it in her diaries and so on.
But Duchant playfully implies that Stein is all too aware to be that the only one
is to be a male one.
Indeed a man like because at that time, to be an artist women hadn't
really become famous artists would have been to be a man like Picasso.
And she adds proudly, which I am [FOREIGN] indeed she is the one.
It's what Stein had always wanted.
Yes, just this.
Now here Duchant embellishes the lines slightly making it [FOREIGN].
Yes, nothing but this exactly.
Why the extra emphasis?
Because Duchant sympathizes with Stein's need to be exactly the only one.
It was a need not felt by Rose Selavy for
Rose could always shift back to become Marcel.
Marcel Duchamp in fact himself was not bisexual.
He was very much a man, he had the confidence.
From his perspective une could become un any time.
Stein on the other hand was who she was.
She couldn't adopt another identity as readily as did Marcel.
Indeed the ironic distance so central to Duchamp's oeuvre, was not her [FOREIGN].
Serious if also very funny and single-minded,
she understood that three and three are not winning.
Three, whether at the love triangle at the back of the stanzas in medication,
or in her relationship to Picabi and Picasso was a crowd, three's a crowd.
Unlike Duchant and here she had been more like Picasso,
she had no desire to be a translator of someone else's work, she was the only one.
This one not only now but how, this I know now.
So Marceau must Selave, Rose selave,
Fresh Widow, the Rose of Arrow had no such ego.
Certainly he too wanted to be one, to have autonomy as creator but for
the sake of his close friend Piccabia, who was getting a bad press in these years,
he was quite willing to do a quick translation of
a verbal composition whose indeterminacy in word play he could obviously relish.
Especially a composition by an author as sympathique as Gertrude Stein.
This I know now.
It is this dismantling of the form and the disillusion of identity.
The Stein of a rose is a rose is a rose, and
Marcel rose were nothing if not natural allies.
Indeed from the vantage point of the 21st century
it is Duchant rather than Picasso or the Cubist.
Duchant rather for
that matter than polymer, a maxtra club who stands next to Stein.
Now when it appeared in the Piccabio catalog and the periodical orb,
Stein's stands of 71 was
introduced by an epigraph by Piccabia which I will translate for you here.
Life doesn't like magnifying glasses, that's why she gave me her hand.
Now that might be a sly allusion to the poet George Anus and
coming to Stein in the Spring 1929 issue of Orb
called Rose is a Rose on Stein both in French and in English and I translated it.
In Spain one day, dressed in purple and rings on her fingers,
Gertrude Stein was astonished that on the street, someone kissed her hand.
Now why was she so
thrilled that someone kissed her hand because they didn't usually.
They didn't know what she was really.
She was a very masculine woman but she wanted that kind of flattery and
she wanted to be recognized.
And in the French here [FOREIGN] verses, Stein has implied,
her verses are not the bloating magnifying verses of traditional poetry,
the [FOREIGN] but it is cited by Duchamp, one in one and two and two next.
So I take it that these two artists, are they great artists of the early century,
that are next to one another.
Thank you.
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