This one's for Pynch -- a rather incisive review/essay by Lynn Tillman:
Reconsidering Gertrude Stein
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Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is called a genius, and it’s from that vantage her writing is read — or not read, since awe and reverence are regularly met by dismissal and ridicule. . . .
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I enjoy Stein most as a theorist: her ideas startle me, in whatever form they appear. (I call myself an inexpert.) One of those ideas was that becoming a classic could kill a work of art. Readers’ responses should shift . . . with changing times to make a book new(er); otherwise it doesn’t truly live in the present. If Stein becomes an endpoint for literary invention — a classic — her work can’t be read in the present tense. I figure that if Stein were alive now, she’d be rambunctious differently. And she wouldn’t be writing like Gertrude Stein.
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