Submitted by John Potthast, Oct 13, 2007 04:48

Adam Kirsh's review of Janet Malcolm's Two Lives is pleasant to read and a nice introduction to three maybe five new people for me. I had read Stein's delightfully written Wars I Have Seen. I mistakenly concluded that Gertrude wasn't Jewish since she had stayed in France. Stein shows a mastery of control of style by going back to fundamental rhythms of language in the voice. It is peculiar that I recall her "Pigeons on the grass, alas," somewhat repetitiously more than James Joyce's expressions in Portrait of An Artist from my first course in American Literature even if the Portrait may have had more immediate and powerful effects on me. Stein's influence was not only direct in her writing but indirect in her influence on Hemmingway. He probably had the courage to chop up his sentences in response to to her instruction to witness those daily American rhythms.

Tracy Karon incorrectly assumes that there is some kind of normal or standard brain or mental function. The physical dependence of ideas on the materials of life is unknown. Our greatest American playwright Eugene O'Neill was a drunk. Nobel prize winning writer Faulkner liked to drink. Our culture is greater by their work under the influence. Writing under the influence of marijuana has not been so much a matter of record but I am certain that it has been widespread. Marijuana and other drugs and we might think both of the beats but also Coleridge's "In Xanadu," supposedly one of the greatest, if partial, poem in the English language. We might note too Blake's visions likely caused by ergot. It is not under what influence but what is done with it. Blake's poetry is normally considered among the best lyrical poetry in English.

For all their drinking of wine, the French are not backward in their intellectual achievements. My reading of Sartre and Camus has made me conclude that they probably smoked pot. Awareness of effects allows one to be aware of physical reality, some basic matters of existentialism. The only area of intellectual thought I have found smoking marijuana limiting has been in mathematics probably because it is dependent on firm logic.

Not even stern religious fundamentalism will make your thoughts worth thinking. The mistake can be identified from a postmodern viewpoint, the mistake of thinking that individually we are thinking. It is rather our words that are thinking.

Patrick D. Hazard perhaps says that theology is the product of class consciousness. I am not sure I disagree with that. What is the usefulness of noting that? I am interested in discovering a postmodern viewpoint. Stein's innovations in writing explored territory that has been more appropriately revealed by the postmodern view. Of course what goes first is the plot and the narrative. I am critical of many "moderns" who think they are postmodern with the addition of few words - actually the first lesson of postmodernism. The key text is Foucault's Les mots et les choses. It hasn't been translated into English except the mishmash The Order of Things - also incidentally an application of the postmodernism to the problem of translation. At the time the words did not exist in English and the committee that R.D. Lang hired to translate were not able to do so.

I imagined that someone from Kansas did translate it properly, ten years later in the 80s. Because of the confusion of the titles in French and in English and in the sequel, The Archeology of Knowledge, also the subtitle of the original Les mots et les choses, I have not be able verify yes or no that there was another translation. The Order of the Things is the 'approved" translation but it is just trash.

Seeing the origin of the postmodern in Derrida's The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac I shouldn't wonder if the antidote to the mistakes of the modern may have something to do with what is postmodern. I see the origins of the modern as early as the 1600s at the same time.

The history of antisemitism in the late 1900s and early 20th century are complex in Europe and it is set generally in the context of racism and world history. One can see it in as varying fields as the Romantics and Atheneums, etymology, biology and genetics, literatures, archeology, religious wars and exploration (these latter two begin earlier and date at the beginning of Western Civ as an outproduct of Muslim Spain in my opinion).

There should be some kind of closure around here someplace but I can't find it - maybe the dates of Stein's life, 1874-1946. Our English professor gave us credit on the exam for writer's lives' dates.

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