A hundred writers, online “writers,” artists, gallery owners, has-beens, will-bes, and “people doing literally anything interesting” walk into a “concept space” on the Lower East Side. They are here to read Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, the 925-page experimental modernist novel considered to be the author’s magnum opus. For those unfamiliar with Stein, or Americans, here is a representative sample of the text:
He was being living every day. In a way he was needing to be certain he was being living every day he was being living. He was being living every day he was being living. He was being living every day until he was not being living which was the end of the beginning . . .
The event, a three-day marathon reading, runs like clockwork, twenty minutes at a time. Christian Lorentzen reads at 5:00 p.m.; Zach Graham at 5:20; Joshua Cohen at 5:40. For my part, I read at 7:40 a.m. on Sunday morning. I had never seen the book before one of the event organizers put a copy in my hands; I fumbled a few “beings” but otherwise enjoyed myself. Seven people watched me read on the official live stream. Halfway through reading, I realized that I should have sent the link to my mom. At 6:20 p.m. on Sunday night, order breaks down. The sign outside the venue, which previously listed the run-of-show broken down by reader, now just reads EVERYONE. 823 people are now watching the live stream. “Crumps is reading. Honor is reading. Walt is reading. Harold Rogers is reading.” EVERYONE is reading!
What does it all mean? A hundred-or-so scene kids––and former scene kids, and scene adults––walk into a room. They read from a book that is ostensibly about America and the stories Americans like to tell themselves about who they are, but is mostly about the process of writing a novel, specifically the novel that is currently being read. Some of them are kind of famous. Some of them are famous, kind of. Most are merely “known” in the way that people who go to parties with people who are kind-of-famous tend to become known. All of them are writers, or artists, or the sort of people who once wanted to make something of themselves.
The first Making of Americans reading was hosted in 1974, at the Artist’s Space in SoHo; the next year, the event moved to the collector Paula Cooper’s eponymous gallery a few blocks away. For the next twenty-five years, from 1975 to 2000, a who’s who of SoHo denizens gathered at Paula Cooper every year on New Year’s Eve to read The Making of Americans in its entirety––former readers include such heavyweights as Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and John Cage. (In 1986 and 1988, the group read Finnegan’s Wake, at Cage’s request.) Sam Frank, one of the 2024 event’s organizers, grew up in SoHo with an artist dad and a writer mom, and recalls attending Paula Cooper readings with his parents in the 1980s. He remembers the Stein readings as epitomizing the old New York, the “real” New York, the high-art, high-bohemia New York that has since been destroyed by taxes, or globalization, or “the internet,” or something.
Like many children of old New York, Frank returned to the city after college to write. In 2007, he cofounded his own arts publication, the digital-only magazine Triple Canopy, which hosted its own sequence of Stein readings in Brooklyn between 2011 and 2014. The revived tradition fizzled again in the mid-2010s, along with the “hipster” aesthetic and the Occupy movement.
Credit for the 2024 Stein-revival goes to Walt John Pearce, a writer, casting agent, and Stein enthusiast vaguely associated with that thing called Dimes Square. Pearce was taken with the history of downtown duration readings and reached out to Frank for help. Together, they emailed over a thousand potential readers of New York past and present, including Paula Cooper (4:40 p.m., Saturday), the photographer Ryan McGinley (2:00 p.m., Sunday), and the author Lydia Davis (6:00 p.m., Sunday).
As for the book itself, Americans is light on plot and heavy on the kind of recursive sentences that could have been written by ChatGPT “back when it was super buggy and would, like, get stuck in loops,” per Christopher Thomas, a co-founder of Earth, our venue. Unlike anything artificial intelligence has yet written, however, the text reveals itself to be quite incisive over time: structures emerge slowly from nonsense, uncovering insights buried in pages of similar-sounding prose. The four main characters are Julia Dehning, Alfred Hersland, Martha Hersland, and her husband Philip Redfern; the fifth character, Julia’s little brother, dies young. Despite four of the characters being married to each other, none of them manages to build a successful relationship over the nine-hundred-odd pages; their lives are repetitive, dull, and frustrating, a bit like the experience of reading a book with more gerunds than standard nouns. They wonder if there is more to life than “going on being living”; chafe at the similarities between themselves and their children; slip quietly into “the beginning of the middle of being living” until they are finally “not being living” anymore.
At 8:25 a.m. on Sunday, Dean Kissick––the reading’s unofficial morning wrangler––steps outside to get some air. A group of four writers crowd around to congratulate him on an event well-done. One asks about the meaning of the large American flag hanging behind the readers’ stage, which has become a key character in pictures from the event. Some seem to think it’s kind of . . . ominous? Kissick says that he was initially skeptical of the flag, which was Pearce’s idea, but has grown to like it. Another writer replies that he’s not sure how he feels about the flag, given “what’s going on with the war and everything.” A third muses that the American flag is actually quite “evocative,” given “what’s going on with the war and everything.”
Later, when I talk to Pearce, he insists that the flag was an “apolitical” statement, a decorative flourish. “Stein was an American writer. The book is called The Making of Americans. Her most famous portrait is in front of an American flag. It just made sense.”
I don’t believe him, really; if only because politics-brain, the strange disease we all caught around 2015, never really goes away, even if you want it to. But I do believe that everyone who read on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday would much prefer a scene like the one Frank knew growing up: one with a sensibility less tied to the whims––and counterwhims––of its moment, one that could offer its members a better shot at artistic immortality.
Frank has now lived through three generations of New York “scenes.” He views the recent Making of Americans reading as an invitation for the next generation to “turn up the heat.” He is still waiting for someone to produce The Work that will definitively inaugurate a new era of literature; he fondly recalls the days of David Foster Wallace, when “at least everyone knew what the bar for a great novel was.” For his part, Frank has since moved himself to Utah, far away from here, seeking inspiration in the rest of America. “Maybe I’ll write it. Maybe someone else will.”