Adam Thirlwell has an LRB review (archived) of “Francesca Wade’s graceful, exacting biography of Stein and Toklas,” and it’s one of the best things I’ve read about Stein — it makes me want to go back to an author I read and enjoyed decades ago but haven’t looked at much since. I’ll excerpt a section about her writing, with its “devotion to the cut”:
Stein loved the idea that writing might have esoteric meanings but that those meanings would be only faintly perceived by the abstract reader, that a text could simultaneously be plain while explaining nothing. The pleasure would have to be elsewhere. This may be the final lesson of Wade’s book, which explores Stein’s biography not for explanations, but in order to better enjoy the pleasure of her sentences as a kind of physical delight. In the end, you have to go back to where you started: the surface and its sentences. ‘All of which was literally true,’ Stein writes in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, ‘like all of Gertrude Stein’s literature.’
Early in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein describes the pictures she and Leo acquired as they began their collection: a Daumier and two Gauguins and a Cézanne landscape along with two ‘tiny canvases of nude groups’ and ‘a very very small Manet’. But two paintings in particular are given special emphasis: Cézanne’s Madame Cézanne with a Fan and Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. It’s as though the paintings together offered an ongoing possibility, that the most searching artistic experiments might need to be done through portraits – and that the best subject for an avant-garde portrait is your wife.
Stein wrote her first portrait in 1910, a text in three or four pages about Toklas. She describes Toklas telling stories to her dying mother (like Stein, Toklas’s mother died of cancer when Toklas was young) and then leaving her father and brother for the utopian bliss of the final paragraph, which is her love affair with Stein, a mutual balance of speaking and being heard:
She came to be happier than anybody else who was living then. It is easy to believe this thing. She was telling some one, who was loving every story that was charming. Some one who was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was almost always listening. That one who was loving was almost always listening. That one who was loving was telling about being one then listening. That one being loving was then telling stories having a beginning and a middle and an ending. That one was then one always completely listening.
Stein argued that her major advance was Three Lives, but it’s possible that the true advance in her methods was this portrait, and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas the moment is deliberately given its triumphant domestic setting, while Toklas is cooking supper for them one Sunday night:
She came in much excited and would not sit down. Here I want to show you something, she said. No I said it has to be eaten hot. No, she said, you have to see this first. Gertrude Stein never likes her food hot and I do like mine hot, we never agree about this. She admits that one can wait to cool it but one cannot heat it once it is on a plate so it is agreed that I have it served as hot as I like. In spite of my protests and the food cooling I had to read.
In the short portraits Stein continued to write, a series of statements are forced through multiple discriminations. It was a method she had begun in Three Lives and then developed at exhaustive length in The Making of Americans, but it works best in these short works, such as the portraits of Matisse and Picasso that would be published by Alfred Stieglitz in 1912 in Camera Work. Stein seems to have realised that everyone is having portraits made of them all the time, constantly being assessed and reassessed in conversations that go over the same limited ground. So each of her portraits is really a portrait of the way people talk. ‘He certainly very clearly expressed something,’ she writes in ‘Matisse’. ‘Some said that he did not clearly express anything. Some were certain that he expressed something very clearly and some of such of them said that he would have been a greater one if he had not been one so clearly expressing what he was expressing.’ ‘Matisse’ works like a fugue in the intensity of its repetitions, as it goes over and over the dilemma everyone felt about Matisse – was his clarity an emptiness or the form of his mastery? Stein had discovered that we use sentences in conversation with an untenable authority, that often we are using words that have no meaning or are only imposing meaning precariously, and that much of our language is based on minute differences in the placing of minute words, little connecting words such as ‘like’ or ‘some’, the words that are always so invisible and so difficult to assimilate when learning a new language, as in this early passage from ‘Orta or One Dancing’, which is in one sense a portrait of Isadora Duncan but is much more usefully seen as an attempt to define the word ‘one’:
Even if she was one and she was one, even if she was one she was changing. She was one and was then like some one. She was one and she had then come to be like some other one. She was then one and she had come then to be like some other one. She was then one and she had come then to be like some other one. She was then one and she had come then to be like a kind of a one.
The closest analogy to these texts might be minimalism in music: there is the same sense of tension and of excitement when a new note enters – when the word ‘dancing’ enters the vocabulary of Stein’s portrait after three pages it feels like a giant baroque decoration – and also the same danger of slackness or monotony. And they can’t be read quickly; they seem to require deep leisure time before and after, just as they were written, almost as if you have to be in Paris or the South of France, with many parties ahead of you, to be able to enjoy them.
In the summer of 1912, Stein and Toklas travelled to Spain. According to the usual logic of modernism set up by Picasso, where a sunlit holiday led to an avant-garde invention, Stein created a new mode:
hitherto she had been interested only in the insides of people, their character and what went on inside them, it was during that summer that she first felt a desire to express the rhythm of the visible world. It was a long tormenting process, she looked, listened and described. She always was, she always is, tormented by the problem of the external and the internal.
Having explored the idea of the portrait, she moved to the outside world, in a series of texts that became Tender Buttons, a book divided into three sections: ‘Objects’, ‘Food’ and ‘Rooms’. Not that an innocent reader will find their usual idea of description here.
In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the evening there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence and entirely mistaken there is pinching. All the standards have steamers and all the curtains have bed linen and all the yellow has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes sand.
This is the first paragraph of a piece titled ‘Roastbeef’, but as a description of roast beef it is useless. As a kind of impressionism, it becomes more interesting, but the larger pleasure is of language working through concrete nouns and abstract nouns, a series of harmonious shocks.
There’s something so physically delightful in the cadences Stein was discovering in the portraits and Tender Buttons that it’s often tempting to compare the way she was writing in 1912 to the way the artists she collected were working. Her friendship with Picasso has led to many comparisons – none of which, I think, is helpful. One giant difference is that in Picasso’s Cubism there was always a decisive move towards reference, as if Cubism offered a delirious scene of representation mimicking itself, but this is not what’s happening in Stein’s writing from the same period. Stein herself always said that Cézanne was formative for her writing (Madame Cézanne with a Fan, she wrote, ‘was an important purchase because in looking and looking at this picture Gertrude Stein wrote Three Lives’), that it was Cézanne who helped her think about composition in a new way because in his paintings ‘each part is as important as the whole’: a kind of all-over effect. But if there’s a real analogy to painting, it is Matisse’s Woman with a Hat that might be the more important. Mme Matisse’s dress has been stabbed and smeared with garish touches of hot pink and red and a kind of absinthe-y green, a multicoloured surface to represent a dress that Matisse boasted was, in fact, black. Colour floated free from any obviously referential function, and I think it’s possible to argue that the painting suggested to Stein that words could be used in the same way Matisse used colour, without any obligation of meaning. In this way, she found a new linguistic musicality, a kind of grammatical structure that functions in the absence of semantics. As John Ashbery wrote in 1957, comparing Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation and Henry James’s The Golden Bowl,
If these works are highly complex and, for some, unreadable, it is not only because of the complicatedness of life, the subject, but also because they actually imitate its rhythm, its way of happening, in an attempt to draw our attention to another aspect of its true nature. Just as … life seems to alter the whole of what has gone before, so the endless process of elaboration which gives the work of these two writers a texture of bewildering luxuriance – that of a tropical rainforest of ideas – seems to obey some rhythmic impulse at the heart of all happening.
The sadness for Stein and her future readers is that at the time no one wanted to talk about her with this kind of seriousness: instead, as Wade details, she was endlessly ridiculed in the newspapers […]. Although she is now routinely mentioned in histories of modernist Paris in the 1920s, only Hemingway seemed to read her with any understanding – Eliot and Joyce and Woolf had no idea what to make of her (for Woolf she was mostly a curiosity to be met at an Edith Sitwell party, ‘a lady much like Joan Fry, but more massive; in blue sprinkled brocade, rather formidable’) – and Hemingway didn’t want to talk about her in public. In A Moveable Feast, long after she was dead, he offered only a single sentence of measured praise: ‘She had also discovered many truths about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition that were valid and valuable and she talked well about them.’ Stein liked to present an image of herself as grandly aloof – ‘all alone with english and myself’. But in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas she makes clear her wish for appreciation: ‘After all, as she said, we do want to be printed. One writes for oneself and strangers but with no adventurous publishers how can one come in contact with those same strangers.’ […]
In her lectures, she argued for her years of abstraction, her effort ‘to tell what each one is’ or to ‘tell what happened’ without telling stories, to show ‘what made what happened be what it was’. But the problem with seeing subjects at such an abstract level – with all its musical syntactic pleasures – is that the largest pleasure of any subject is the gory detail that abstraction disallows. Without it, everything becomes weightless – which leads to Stein’s problem of excessive length. This is why her writing can be so uneven, because it was never clear either for Stein or her reader what a decision in writing for Stein might be.
This was also why the crisis between Stein and Toklas in 1932 was so useful. She had to do something for Toklas; she had to do it in a way that other people, not just Toklas, could understand; and she had to do it fast, which meant she no longer had the luxury of infinite length. It forced her writing to approach the things of the world, and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas it turned out that her writing could represent the world with poignant comical beauty. ‘I am trying to be as commonplace as I can be, she used to say to me,’ Toklas says towards the end of the book. ‘And then sometimes a little worried, it is not too commonplace. The last thing that she had finished, Stanzas in Meditation, and which I am now typewriting, she considers her real achievement of the commonplace.’ But Stein was wrong. It was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas itself that was the achievement. The ghostly conversational syntax, the manic precision of abstract discriminations, relaxes into an extraordinary mimicry of the way a voice talks when it’s telling a story. Her sentences are at their most beautiful when at their most dishevelled, as in the slouchy, innocent bravura of this from Paris France: ‘Once in talking to the Baronne Pierlot a very old french friend she said about something when I said but Madame Pierlot it is natural, no said Madame Pierlot it may be nature but it is not natural.’ We’re so used to voice as confession, as a form of radical honesty, that it can be hard to appreciate her socialised way of talking, which involves not precision but wish fulfilment, fantasy, repression, a devastating insistence on charm.
That “crisis between Stein and Toklas” is described earlier in the essay, and it’s a doozy: “in 1932, as they were packing to go to the country, Stein found the old notebook in which she had written Q.E.D., the novella about her relationship with May Bookstaver,” and Toklas was so jealous and enraged that she not only destroyed all Bookstaver’s letters to Stein but insisted on the removal of the word “may” from the text of Stanzas in Meditation, which she was then writing: “every instance of the word ‘may’ had been crossed out and replaced with another word (like ‘today’ or ‘day’ or ‘can’), often violating any sense of meaning or rhythm or rhyme.” All this over a decades-old affair! It’s worth reading the passage about how the scholar Ulla Dydo discovered this many years later.
Like many an LRB review essay, it’s more focused on the author’s thoughts about the subject than on the actual book; if you want a more conventional (middlebrow) review, Judith Thurman has one in the latest New Yorker (archived) — it’s lively and informative, but also condescending (“Even among the academics who consider her a pioneer of modernism, or an icon of transmasculinity, or a forerunner of deconstruction, her greatness as an actual writer is generally an article of faith […] Her cult lives on.”). If you want to experience the “mesmerizing voice” Thurman mentions, you can hear it on YouTube here.
By the way, I was pretty sure I’d quoted Thirlwell before, and it turns out it was in this post about Dostoevsky’s Двойник (The Double), in which I wrote “But this repetitiveness is essential to the effect Dostoevsky is aiming for (just as Gertrude Stein’s is to hers)…” It’s all connected!
As someone who loves visual art, music, and writing, it often annoys me when people try to draw close analogies between stylistic developments in those very different areas of art. Beethoven was wise enough to state explicitly that he could not paint pictures with sound, and that the titles he gave to the movements of the Pastoral Symphony were merely meant to indicate what he had been thinking about—and what it might help the audience to think about—as he composed them. That hasn’t stopped people from trying to read very explicit images into abstract musical works. The same applies here, I think. Trying to draw close analogies between a writer’s particular literary style and two rather slapdash portraits by a pair of great painters is probably not a worthwhile endeavor.
Lucy church amiably. Pagoda, pagoda!
Thurber has an essay somewhere in which he objects to Stein’s
Pigeons on the grass
Alas Alice
on the grounds that pigeons are not alas, and may indeed be among the least alas of all birds. One feels that he may not have been entering into the spirit of the thing.
The quote from Thurman sounds “condescending” toward the academics rather than toward Stein herself. Or do you mean that in context it’s condescending toward Wade-as-biographer in particular?
I’m pretty sure the context in which I first heard of Stein/Toklas involved not rigorous experimental modernism but this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/food-matters/go-ask-alice-the-history-of-toklas-8217-legendary-hashish-fudge/. What can I say? It was the late Seventies.
“Stein’s are perhaps the only modernist works that make you laugh” says Thirlwell.
What, so Joyce and Proust are not modernists now?
Oaf. Perhaps he thought it sounded witty.
I too thought that was an odd thing to say. (Though to be fair, “makes you laugh” is not the first thing one thinks about Proust.)
Perhaps Proust is more “makes you smile.”
But anyone who has not noticed that Ulysses is funny has no business to be writing about Modernism.
I will concede that T S Eliot raises few chuckles.
Ezra Pound tries to be funny, but he hasn’t really got the knack of it.
[Reminds me of a splendidly true remark about Milton that I once saw: “None of the great gifts was denied him, except humour.”]
Franz Kafka is funny.
Ezra Pound tries to be funny, but he hasn’t really got the knack of it.
Wrong; you just don’t like Ez (which is a position I respect, of course). Just yesterday I opened the Cantos at random and found myself laughing out loud. That ain’t gonna happen with Marcel.
There’s also a really thoughtful and appreciative review in the new issue of Bookforum by Ryan Ruby. (https://www.bookforum.com/print/3202/in-search-of-lost-stein-62435) I’m looking forward to reading Wade’s book and already grateful for some of the writing that it has inspired.
Actually, I do like Ezra Pound’s poetry. (Also Milton.) But I stand by my opinion of his humour. (To be fair, Milton’s attempts at humour are much worse. Someone should have had a quiet word: “John. John. You know I love you and admire your poetry. It’s just …”)
Part of the trouble with what can all agree is Thirlwell’s Wrong Remark is delimiting Modernism, I suppose. Does Auden count as a Modernist? (I can’t say that I think of him that way myself, but I suppose he does. Perhaps he was, but got better.)
Waall (*spits tobaccy*), mebbe this is one o’ them there trans-Atlantic differnces in humoristic ‘preciation. Who’s on first, anyway?
It may be so.
Heh. From Matthew Cheney’s link:
I see lots of variation in sense of humour even among speakers of one language.
Claiming that someone with different sense of humour is unsuccessfully “trying” to replicate yours is, of course same as claiming that speakers of other languages are trying (very hard) to speak Russian (but producing French instead because, of course, they are silly).
I don’t think DE seriously could mean that. I guess it’s a joke, one of those jokes I don’t find funny at all.
There are people who have said that “Uncle Ez” adopted from time to time some sort of very American homespun/cracker-barrel-sage affect even while spouting off about arcane notions that no one within five counties of the stereotypical front porch of that sort of stereotypical general store would have heard of. One source asserts that his propaganda radio addresses utilized “a weird, cloying L’il Abner dialect” presumably absent from recordings of interviews done under other circumstances, although I can’t say I’ve listened to enough recordings to confirm that characterization.
I would agree that there are times when you feel Pound is expecting you to be just as amused with what he just came up with as he is himself, but that’s a hard ask. At least if you’re a tough audience, as some of us perhaps sometimes are.
Here is beginning of Canto XXVIII
And God the Father Eternal (Boja d’un Dio!)
Having made all things he cd.
think of, felt yet
That something was lacking, and thought
Still more, and reflected that
The Romagnolo was lacking, and
Stamped with his foot in the mud and
Up comes the Romagnolo:
“Gard, yeh bloudy ’angman! It’s me”.
Maybe this Canto is not funny if you come from the Romagna (or Kansas, reading the rest).
Hardly; and I haven’t noticed him intending to be funny either. (…But I’ve read very little beyond Die Verwandlung, which we read in school.)
There are people who have said that “Uncle Ez” adopted from time to time some sort of very American homespun/cracker-barrel-sage affect even while spouting off about arcane notions that no one within five counties of the stereotypical front porch of that sort of stereotypical general store would have heard of.
Unquestionably.
I would agree that there are times when you feel Pound is expecting you to be just as amused with what he just came up with as he is himself, but that’s a hard ask.
Unquestionably; he didn’t come close to batting 1.000, but neither did Ted Williams. I’m happy with the occasional home run.
/parochial American references
Franz Kafka is funny
I’m told that Amerika is very different in tone from his other works. Never got round to reading it, somehow …
(The WP summary suggests that it’s grim enough to be going on with. Maybe you had to be there …)
Das Schloss is as much farcical as grim. It doesn’t have the nightmare vibe of Der Prozess at any rate, and the protagonist is not nearly as passive. Not that it actually gets him anywhere …
Is it just me who sees Kafka’s grotesque scenarios extrapolated from trivial failings as (darkly, ironically) funny? No, Google quickly found this — from the magazine of the Goethe Institute, no less
(I removed the first version of a double comment. I thought I used the edit window, but must have gone back to the previous view.)
Oh come on. Baseball references are understood everywhere from South Korea to Venezuela. It’s a cosmopolitan sport! (FWIW re Williams I just reread “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” the other day.)
WP on Kafka:
@JWB:
What is this “base ball” of which you speak?
(Reminds me of the observation that sales of baseball bats in Sarf London are surprisingly high given the fact that the game in question is comparatively little played here.)
@David E. it is not for me to explain Korean or Venezuelan culture to you … I may or may not have previously shared the anecdote of the time back in 1991 when I took a young German lady to a baseball game at Wrigley Field. (She was exploring the U.S. via Greyhound after finishing a summer internship at the UN, and I was importuned to give her a free place to stay in Chicago for a day or two by her UN supervisor, who was a college friend of mine.) I had not thought of myself as particularly enthusiastic or knowledgeable about baseball compared to the median American male of my acquaintance, but the numerous perfectly-reasonable questions she asked due to her bafflement revealed to me that I was in fact a fluent native speaker although of course like many native speakers I had difficulty in giving an accurate explicit explanation of the many complex syntactic rules and patterns that it turned out I understood full well at an implicit level. I had learned them at a young enough age that it was difficult to reconstruct the state of not finding them intuitive.
Please… Every schoolboy knows that “base ball” refers to the spherical object used by chemists during medieval times to neutralize acidic solutions.
Reminds me of the time I foolishly agreed to translate a Japanese medical article for a colleague; a compensation was discovering that the Japanese word for “eosinophil” is 好酸球 kōsankyū “love-acid-ball.”
it is not for me to explain Korean or Venezuelan culture to you
It’s OK, I’ll ask my daughter-in-law. What’s “baseball” in Spanish?
That YouTube snippet really is mesmerising: thanks, Hat. Hearing it is actually quite illuminating regarding what Stein was attempting with her remarkable style; rather as with hearing Berryman reciting his Dreamsongs.
Pagoda, pagoda …
(I’ve never forgotten reading Lucy Church Amiably, which is more than I can say of many works of fiction. Or whatever it is …)
All I know about baseball I learnt from reading nonfiction popularisers like Stephen Jay Gould and running their baseball analogies in reverse.
Sister Wynona Carr has, similarly, helped me to understand baseball through the analogy of theology.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=z0dMYEJEOEg
Shoutout to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taish%C5%8D_Baseball_Girls
for the no doubt extensive subset of Hatter anime fans. The protagonist turns out to be your impeccably ladylike, indomitable and indestructable grandmother, from when she was still a vulnerable teenager. She’s awesome.
…sales of baseball bats in Sarf London are surprisingly high…
That’s what happens when government prohibits people to keep firearms at home.
DE, as I told: as long as men are ashamed to wear women’s clothing and do girly things, women will be seen as inferiour (and likely feel so too).
I have a mixed feeling about another story about girls doing what boys do.
Would be is actual for Tunisia, though, maybe for the Japanese too. In Russia it’s normal for a woman to be into sports and I have a mixed feeling.
Well, this is what Kafka’s biographer Reiner Stach says (Ist das Kafka? 99 Fundstücke):
Same here – I’ve said often that Gould explained evolution through baseball in Full House, and now that I’ve read it, I understand evolution, but I still don’t understand baseball.
There’s also a number of cultural references that I understood before I learned they’re baseball metaphors. Ballpark estimate/not in the same ballpark – years later I learned a baseball stadium isn’t called stadium, but ballpark…
Ballparks are called “stadiums” too. The formal names of famous major league ballparks include Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, Wrigley Field….
Generically it’s a ballpark, though.
In Dick’s alternative history it’s something the Japanese built, enamoured with pre-war American popular culture.
The extended baseball game sequence in Stray Dog depicts how quickly the sport became popular in Japan after the war, under American occupation. It’s also an indication of how life in Japan has settled back into relative normalcy in 1949,* albeit a rather different normalcy than before. (Shimura’s character expresses surprise that the pickpocket who lifts Mifune’s character’s gun at the beginning has switched to wearing dresses to look respectable, rather than kimonos.)
* Drunken Angel the previous year, which shared a lot of cast and crew, including director and stars, showed a much more chaotic and unhealed Japan. They make an interesting contrast; I think we saw them the same day at the Kurosawa-Mifune film festival.
The extended baseball game sequence in Stray Dog depicts how quickly the sport became popular in Japan after the war, under American occupation.
Nope, it had already been popular for almost a century, and the first professional league was formed in 1936.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that baseball hadn’t already been popular before 1945. However, my understanding was that the game’s popularity exploded even more, and very rapidly, after the war.
Ah, that’s very likely — everything American got extremely popular (except among leftists).
Asking the internet what wackadoodle Yukio Mishima (not a leftist) thought of baseball …
Now I have a vague and uncertain recollection that one of the other gaijin kids I knew in Tokyo in the Seventies was maybe the son of one of the expat American ballplayers, but I can’t remember the name. There were only two or three gaijins allowed per team back then and only twelve “major” teams, so if there were a complete list of gaijins playing in the 197x season (not that huge a number) some surname might ring a bell, but wikipedia at least in English is not that obsessively detailed about Japanese ball compared to the American sort.
Asking the internet what wackadoodle Yukio Mishima (not a leftist) thought of baseball …
I imagine that he would have preferred
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemari
Hailing from the ancient Chinese game of cuju, both of them written with the characters 蹴鞠. The meaning is evidently “kickball”.
Apparently, after that 1949 season was when Nippon Professional Baseball split into the two six-team leagues that exist today (still with six teams each).
By the way: how did Greek topos acquired its meaning as in “commonplace”?
And what exactly is this meaning?
I have an unpleasant memory from school: someone used the phrase “commonplace” (its literal translation, that is) which is not too common in Russian and was not used in any books I read. I asked why does it mean what it means (because Russian место is “a place”, it can’t mean “an idea” or “a phrase” or what it was), and received some grumbling to the effect that the phrase is so natural that there is nothing to explain here.
> [shout out to Taishō Baseball Girls] for the no doubt extensive subset of Hatter anime fans.
Its new to me, but sounds interesting! I’ll add it to my list.
(As far as anime and baseball goes, I’ve heard more about Ace of Diamond.)
“Taishō”
In my browser the link goes to the buffer in its normal form if I did any editing in the address field.
“normal form”
Human-readable form, I mean. Technically, of course, the form as in DE’s comment is better for programs:)
Kafka is built up by schoolteachers to have been some kind of grim nightmare figure.
Leaf through Kafka’s stories, letters, or anything beyond what you are told about in school and get a very different picture of him. Constant absurd, hilarious shenanigans.
My (somewhat outdated) electronic edition of the OED has the following paragraph (under topic):
I have an unpleasant memory from school: someone used the phrase “commonplace” (its literal translation, that is) which is not too common in Russian and was not used in any books I read.
You didn’t read Turgenev? From Отцы и дети:
(If you do a Google Books search on “общее место” you will of course find many other examples, but that’s one I’d be surprised if you hadn’t encountered.)
DM – above, on October 5, 2025:
I’ve said often that Gould explained evolution through baseball in Full House, and now that I’ve read it, I understand evolution, but I still don’t understand baseball.
DM – January 28, 2023:
I’ve read that one, in translation. It explains evolution through baseball. I understand evolution now. I still don’t understand baseball.
We’ve all said everything we have to say an infinite number of times, I’m afraid.
As Hat noted above, baseball was popular in Japan long before WWII. The Japanese took the sport to Taiwan 1895-1945, where it is still going strong. The film Kano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_(film) is based on a true baseball story from colonial times.
Well, David M. said he read the book in translation and one wonders how good a grasp the German translator had of baseball. I see that the UK edition of that book was accompanied by ‘an additional eight-page introduction entitled “A Baseball Primer for British Readers,”‘ but don’t know whether that was included in toto in the German edition.
Separately, there is apparently a 21st century Korean movie set against the background of the introduction of baseball there by American missionaries in 1905. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YMCA_Baseball_Team Which (that fact, not everything in the movie’s comedic plot …) is historically accurate, although I suspect the subsequent Japanese-rule era of 1910-45 played a quite significant role in the development of Korean baseball which local nationalists might want to play down in order to focus on 1905.
Oh, fascinating. No hint of it in the German version, which was translated directly “from the American”.
because Russian место is “a place”, it can’t mean “an idea” or “a phrase” or what it was
See also “Выбранные места из переписки с друзьями”. And “иметь место”. Judging by what can be found in the Russian National Corpus, it seems that extended use of место begins with manuals on rhetoric (Semyon Denisov. Rhetoric in 5 conversations [Семен Денисов. Риторика в 5 беседах (1706-1712)] is the first clear example). It is then indeed most probably a calque from Greek.
i find much of kafka (and much of stein) irresistably hilarious. pound’s attempts, however, strike me as the work of someone who desperately wants to “be funny” but is working entirely from secondhand descriptions* of the phenomenon**.
.
* and not particularly good ones, at that; biographies of lincoln, perhaps, or handbooks for Rotarian after-dinner speakers.
** part of the problem may be his (to my ear) cack-handed navigation of an apparent ambivalance about whether to try to ape the “american” stump-speech mode of his white nationalist roots or the “european” snide-reference mode of his “cultured” fascist peers. but i don’t think much of his abilities with collage/montage in general, so i expect those who do will see this differently.