Distributed Presses

I fixated on Gertrude Stein when I was in high school: probably in a vein similar to how other fourteen year-old girls embraced Kate Winslet's performance in Titanic (heard of it? A bare-chested, charcoal-drawn, indie darling homage to early global warming propaganda?) or Justine Frischmann-era Elastica. It was a small town; I was bored and precocious; I used to memorize Dorothy Parker quotes to fall asleep at night. I finished reading The Making of Americans before I had my learner's permit and by the time I could drive myself to my part-time job as a clerk at the public library two towns over, I had exhausted all things Stein from Michigan's interlibrary loan network. The lowest grade I received in high school was in one of those early '80s curricula-building classes that never quite got cut (see also: Keyboarding, Fitness), even by my mid-'90s tenure at the school: Research Techniques. Since I spent five nights a week monitoring the rise of questionable periodical research by trenchcoat-cloaked men and auditing the reading habits of the only person I knew, for a fact, to have earned the address of 'Doctor' outside of the medical field, I felt as though the five-paragraph essay assigned might need a little tweaking. Uh, write what you know? I turned in a paper on Gertrude Stein written in imitation of Gertrude Stein, beginning with her invocation to Sherwood Anderson. I used no commas, no periods, and filled the resultant pages with something I might be game to now call 'a hybrid genre.' I'm not sure what I would have made of myself in high school; mind you, this was a floating suburb of postindustrial downriver Detroit, not Bronx Science. Luckily for me, I turned the paper in to probably the only instructor in the school familiar with Stein's work; unluckily, again for me, my angst and precocity earned me no good humor. Ultimately, I think it was my tendency to turn in prose poems about John Coltrane's version of "My Favorite Things" in lieu of an argumentative essay about Why Dogs and Not Cats or Yes, Virginia, There Really Is a Winona Ryder that ultimately felled me, but my absorption in Stein was the start.

Why should that matter here? Other than evoking a point in time for me to trace my desire to imitate a wholly singular voice that has informed so much of my adult relationship with Stein and her work, this is an episode in almost-listening. So much of what is kinetic candy in the writings of Gertrude Stein is what your own imagination adds to the experience: did she talk like this day-to-day with Alice and their poodle, Basket? What must she have sounded like? What would an off-the-cuff commentary, Tender Buttons aside, entail? Thankfully, the new 3-CD sets from the British Library, Spoken Word: American and British Writers can help us to reframe these sorts of queries. Stein's talk on "American Points of View" opens the American Writers set and is comprised of the only surviving recording of the author speaking spontaneously: an odd mirror to her written work. The sets have received a veritable mountain of good press lately, including posts at All Things Considered, Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the Paper Cuts blog at the New York Times, Maud Newton.com, the Chicago Tribune, Terry Teachout's About Last Night, and the New Yorker. More importantly, though, they've been plucked from the archives of the British Library and the BBC in the hopes that there are still a few of us out there, almost-listening: waiting to hear the voices that have informed so much of our own relationship with language.