Gertrude Stein by Michael J. Hoffman, 1976

I checked out every book in SUIE’s ‘brary on Stein, of which there were 10. Hoffman’s is without the usual palimpsest of others' annotations. I love those. As long as I can still read the text. Allegra Stewart’s GS and the Present (1967) is chock full of them, though I can’t tell what each of the three sets of notes was supposed to add up to. And no one will know I was there thanks to the judicious application of the Post-It. (And, her exploration runs nicely along with mine, so you’ll be hearing about this almost pre-Post-Structuralist analysis of a writer who BEGS for, hell necessitates the creation of, the P-S lenses, in my book.) Anyway, on the title page of Hoffman there’s an L shaped bracket at the H in Hoffman, then nothing. No underlining, no starts, no dots, no words. Until Chapter 7, “Theories, Explanations, and Autobiography,” of which the first page is dog-eared and in the margin of which in very large print and underlined three times, rapidly, sloppily, angrily?, relievedly? (nw, yes, but //ism matters to me), is the word END. Huh. --- Hoffman is mostly at pains to place GS in the avant-garde in order to defend her work from the likes of Wyndham Lewis, and that’s all taken care of in every way these days, so I’ll be skimming. But, END, huh. What was up with that? And was the beginning at the H back on the front page? And if so, what sort of fun going on there?

On another note, HEY JSTOR, dude, enable comments on your PDF files will you? The whole point of the digital document is that I should be to read AND Annotate it without printing it out. Mm'k? Thanks.