Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Portraits and Other Short Works by Gertrude Stein

This collection of Stein's short work includes a range of materials dating from 1903 to 1932. Included in this collection of thirty-six works are a number of short sketches (portraits) of people she knew in Paris, Tender Buttons, Four Saints in Three Acts, "If I Told Him" (a remarkable poem about Picasso), and "Composition as Exposition" an essay derived from a lecture she gave on writing. I particularly liked "If I Told Him" for its playfulness. Stein's work presents an interesting challenge to the reader, because in some senses it demands to be both seen and heard--if you don't read it aloud you don't get the playfulness and the phonetic connections between words that are so important to it making any sort of sense, but if you don't see it, you'll miss the work she's doing with homonyms and punctuation.

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