ts big dogs 2014 edition #2 : GERTRUDE STEIN vs THE BRONTES

Three Lives, particularly "Melanctha," is unfuckwithable, although I haven't read it since the nineties. I've dipped into most of her work, reacting with the boredom and faint hostility that Pound inspires.

otoh Wuthering Heights and five or six of her deeply strange poems are fantastic in every sense. The formal daring of WH is itself impressive. Plus, is it the only work of lit in which characters hate with the ferocity of love, thus proving that hate is impossible w/out love?

Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfeld Hall are tuffer than you think.

Plus, is it the only work of lit in which characters hate with the ferocity of love, thus proving that hate is impossible w/out love?

You could say that of Moby-Dick too. I remember an old debate question: Does Ahab love the whale?

true

terrified to vote

because if Heathcliff finds out...

brontes are pretty different from each other! can i just choose emily? although i used to think i disliked charlotte just based on jane eyre and then i read villette, which is like jane eyre cracked right open and i had to acknowledge that charlotte was way better than i'd given her credit for.

if the work of any single bronte does more for you than that of gertrude stein plz vote bronte and inform us of your decision in a post below, unless yr chosen bronte is anne. if it is anne, then, hm.

if it's any consolation, Charlotte's poems are the worst of the bunch.

Stein can be v funny, eg:

I liked the photographers, there is one who came in and said he was sent to do a layout of me. A layout, I said yes he said what is that I said oh he said it is four or five pictures of you doing anything. All right I said what do you want me to do. Why he said there is your airplane bag suppose you unpack it oh I said Miss Toklas always does that oh no I could not do that, well he said there is the telephone suppose you telephone well I said yes but I never do Miss Toklas always does that, well he said what can you do, well I said I can put my hat on and take my hat off and I can put my coat on and I can take it off and I like water I can drink a glass of water all right he said do that so I did that and he photographed while I did that.

oh yeah I read the Alice B. Toklas

Like Janet Malcolm's book on Stein, specifically a scene where she takes a knife to The Making of Americans

That's all I have..

ignorant of all of these :/ but if i weren't i'd probably vote the brontes

jmm otm re moby-dick

I didn't get to contribute to the Bronte poll, but Charlotte is the best Bronte and would take this. I was hoping for a Charlotte vs Dickens poll or something so I could really get into it. Emily rules and WH is a contender for best Bronte novel. But Villette is as wild as WH and possibly my favorite novel period.. and then Jane Eyre was my ultimate page turning obsession.. AND Shirley is super-underrated because people think it's about mill owners and worker uprisings when it's really about the sequences where religion and business and politics are reborn as the domains of women in passages so beautiful I'm reduced to tears.

Emily is the best poet and her student essays are better and v sharp but three could be goat novels beat one. Grouping them together prroblematic.

fwiw another one i was considering was SHAKESPEARE versus EZRA POUND AND ALSO T S ELIOT

miglior fabbro

Considering a few couplings too

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

pigs

Local Oxfam has a copy of Making of the Americans and I'm like I dunno.

It's a singular novel, but I don't think I could have finished it without being in a very committed reading group, and I say that as someone who loves a good deal of Stein's later work. Three Lives, Tender Buttons, "Lifting Belly," the autobiographies, and Stanzas in Meditation are all more immediately rewarding.

I need to find myself into one of those reading groups that read Making of the Americans. I liked Three Lives a lot at the time and Janet Malcolm's short study of Stein's work is good. I'll chase the rest of the smaller works - thanks.