{"id":153311,"date":"2024-06-24T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-24T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/?p=153311"},"modified":"2024-06-24T11:09:20","modified_gmt":"2024-06-24T15:09:20","slug":"stein-hoisting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/2024\/06\/stein-hoisting\/","title":{"rendered":"Stein hoisting"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A hundred writers, online \u201cwriters,\u201d artists, gallery owners, has-beens, will-bes, and \u201cpeople doing literally anything interesting\u201d walk into a \u201cconcept space\u201d on the Lower East Side. They are here to read Gertrude Stein\u2019s The Making of Americans<\/em>, the 925-page experimental modernist novel considered to be the author\u2019s magnum opus. For those unfamiliar with Stein, or Americans<\/em>, here is a representative sample of the text:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cbeings\u201d but otherwise enjoyed myself. Seven people watched me read on the official live stream<\/a>. 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<\/mark>. 823 people are now watching the live stream. \u201cCrumps is reading. Honor is reading. Walt is reading. Harold Rogers is reading.<\/a>\u201d EVERYONE<\/mark> is reading!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does it all mean? A hundred-or-so scene kids\u2013\u2013and former scene kids, and scene adults\u2013\u2013walk 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 \u201cknown\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first Making of<\/em> Americans<\/em> reading was hosted in 1974, at the Artist\u2019s Space in SoHo; the next year, the event moved to the collector Paula Cooper\u2019s eponymous gallery a few blocks away. For the next twenty-five years, from 1975 to 2000, a who\u2019s who of SoHo denizens gathered at Paula Cooper every year on New Year\u2019s Eve to read The Making of Americans<\/em> in its entirety\u2013\u2013former readers include such heavyweights as Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and John Cage. (In 1986 and 1988, the group read Finnegan\u2019s Wake<\/em>, at Cage\u2019s request.) Sam Frank, one of the 2024 event\u2019s 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 \u201creal\u201d New York, the high-art, high-bohemia New York that has since been destroyed by taxes, or globalization, or \u201cthe internet,\u201d or something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em>, 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 \u201chipster\u201d aesthetic and the Occupy movement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Credit for the 2024 Stein-revival goes to Walt John Pearce, a writer, casting agent<\/a>, and Stein enthusiast vaguely associated with that thing called Dimes Square<\/a>. 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for the book itself, Americans<\/em> is light on plot and heavy on the kind of recursive sentences that could have been written by ChatGPT \u201cback when it was super buggy and would, like, get stuck in loops,\u201d per Christopher Thomas, a co-founder of Earth<\/a>, 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\u2019s 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 \u201cgoing on being living\u201d; chafe at the similarities between themselves and their children; slip quietly into \u201cthe beginning of the middle of being living\u201d until they are finally \u201cnot being living\u201d anymore. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At 8:25 a.m. on Sunday, Dean Kissick\u2013\u2013the reading\u2019s unofficial morning wrangler\u2013\u2013steps 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\u2019 stage, which has become a key character in pictures from the event. Some seem to think it\u2019s kind of . . . ominous? Kissick says that he was initially skeptical of the flag, which was Pearce\u2019s idea, but has grown to like it. Another writer replies that he\u2019s not sure how he feels about the flag, given \u201cwhat\u2019s going on with the war and everything.\u201d A third muses that the American flag is actually quite \u201cevocative,\u201d given \u201cwhat\u2019s going on with the war and everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, when I talk to Pearce, he insists that the flag was an \u201capolitical\u201d statement, a decorative flourish. \u201cStein was an American writer. The book is called The Making of Americans<\/em>. Her most famous portrait is in front of an American flag. It just made sense.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t 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\u2013\u2013and counterwhims\u2013\u2013of its moment, one that could offer its members a better shot at artistic immortality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frank has now lived through three generations of New York \u201cscenes.\u201d He views the recent Making of Americans<\/em> reading as an invitation for the next generation to \u201cturn up the heat.\u201d 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 \u201cat least everyone knew what the bar for a great novel was.\u201d For his part, Frank has since moved himself to Utah, far away from here, seeking inspiration in the rest of America.  \u201cMaybe I\u2019ll write it. Maybe someone else will.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a marathon reading of <\/i>The Making of Americans at Earth, New York.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2530,"featured_media":153312,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_eb_attr":"","advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","wds_primary_category":472,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[472],"tags":[745,635],"dispatch-city":[3291],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":"","value":"","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fb0bff29d65","label":"Participants","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_651c53615a3f7","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"object","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"

Gertrude Stein. Photo: Carl van Vechten, Library of Congress.<\/i><\/p>\n","value_formatted":"Gertrude Stein. Photo: Carl van Vechten, Library of Congress.<\/i>","value":"Gertrude Stein. Photo: Carl van Vechten, Library of Congress.<\/i>","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_651c536113a8e","label":"Featured Image Credits","name":"featured_image_credits","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"wysiwyg","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_651c53615a3f7","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","tabs":"all","toolbar":"basic","media_upload":0,"delay":0,"_name":"featured_image_credits","_valid":1}},"enable_paywall":{"simple_value_formatted":"No","value_formatted":false,"value":"0","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_66009169342f2","label":"Enable Paywall","name":"enable_paywall","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"true_false","value":null,"menu_order":2,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_651c53615a3f7","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"message":"","default_value":0,"ui":0,"ui_on_text":"","ui_off_text":"","_name":"enable_paywall","_valid":1}}},"author_meta":{"display_name":"Ginevra Davis","author_link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/author\/ginevra-davis\/"},"featured_img":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Gertrude_Stein_1935-01-04-e1719241297987-300x211.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Gertrude_Stein_1935-01-04-e1719241297987.jpg","coauthors":[],"tax_additional":{"categories":{"linked":["Dispatch<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Dispatch<\/span>"]},"tags":{"linked":["Books<\/a>","Culture<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Books<\/span>","Culture<\/span>"]}},"comment_count":0,"relative_dates":{"created":"Posted 6 days ago","modified":"Updated 6 days ago"},"absolute_dates":{"created":"Posted on June 24, 2024","modified":"Updated on June 24, 2024"},"absolute_dates_time":{"created":"Posted on June 24, 2024 11:00 am","modified":"Updated on June 24, 2024 11:09 am"},"featured_img_caption":"","series_order":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"mfb_rest_fields":["author_meta","featured_img","jetpack_sharing_enabled","jetpack_featured_media_url","coauthors","tax_additional","comment_count","relative_dates","absolute_dates","absolute_dates_time","featured_img_caption","series_order","jetpack-related-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153311"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2530"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153311"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153317,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153311\/revisions\/153317"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153311"},{"taxonomy":"dispatch-city","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dispatch-city?post=153311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}