Interrupting Infinity Exclusive Commentary. © 2012 by David St.-Lascaux
Top: Gayle Salamon and A.B. Huber at the Gertrude Stein read-in at Triple Canopy in Brooklyn. Above: Peter Nowogrodzki. Photos by David St.-Lascaux, © 2012.
TO CELEBRATE THE OPENING OF 155 FREEMAN, Triple Canopy is conducting a marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress. I am pleased to be one of an invited list of New York-based artists, writers, publishers, scholars, and other collaborators gathering in Greenpoint to perform the entirety of Stein’s text in a continuous read-in. The entire list of readers is posted at Triple Canopy’s site at this link.
Readers present on Saturday morning included Gayle Salamon and A.B. Huber, Peter Nowogrodzki (all pictured above), Dan Visel (holding fort for Triple Canopy) and Elaine Angelopoulos.
Readers are using the handsome, current edition of the novel, published by Dalkey Archive Press, which will be available for borrowing or purchase throughout the read-in.
My excerpt had to do with the Hersland’s governesses, with stupid being, queerness, loving, and beginning and ending:
The first governess then was a foreign woman. She was a good musician…. It is very interesting that every one has in them their kind of stupid being…. No one was ever very certain whether keeping herself together was the queerness in her, whether it was governess queerness she had in her, no one was ever very certain of this in her not even her sister…. As I was saying she was a good musician…. Every one then every man and every woman have their own feeling in loving, their own way of feeling in religion, their own way of laughing, of eating, of drinking, of going on living, of taking what comes to them, of looking for things to irritate them or content them, their own way of beginning and of ending.
To attend the read-in, which is expected to run through late Sunday afternoon, 22 January, 2012, take the G train to Greenpoint, and walk a half-dozen blocks down Manhattan Avenue to Triple Canopy at 155 Freeman.
* * *
In their own words,
155 Freeman is an arts-and-culture venue and the home of three nonprofits: Triple Canopy, an editorial collective and online magazine, Light Industry, a cinema, and The Public School New York, an open-source classroom with no curriculum.
* * *
Triple Canopy is an online magazine, workspace, and platform for editorial and curatorial activities. Working collaboratively with writers, artists, and researchers, Triple Canopy facilitates projects that engage the Internet’s specific characteristics as a public forum and as a medium, one with its own evolving practices of reading and viewing, economies of attention, and modes of interaction. In doing so, Triple Canopy is charting an expanded field of publication, drawing on the history of print culture while acting as a hub for the exploration of emerging forms and the public spaces constituted around them. Triple Canopy is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization.
* * *
