Cronkite, Stein: From the annals of odd convergences

Al Filreis

Walter Cronkite met Gertrude Stein. Here it is, as reported by the NY Times:

A 1935 profile of Gertrude Stein from The Daily Texan, unearthed by the student newspaper of the University of Texas at Austin and published at its Web site, was written by Walter Cronkite, who was an 18-year-old undergraduate at the university when he wrote it. (Mr. Cronkite’s memorial service was on Thursday; a report by Brian Stelter is here.)

Speaking to Stein in advance of her appearance at the university’s Hogg Auditorium on March 22, 1935, Mr. Cronkite wrote that, even though he “imposed upon her at a late hour last night,” the author was “genuine — the real thing in person. Her thinking is certainly straightforward; her speech is the same.”

After recording her attire (“a mannish blouse, a tweed skirt, a peculiar but attractive vest affair, and comfortable looking shoes”), Mr. Cronkite talked with her about the proper role of the writer and the impact of the Great Depression, then in its sixth year.

Discussing her craft, Stein told Mr. Cronkite, “A writer isn’t anything but contemporary. The trouble is that the people are living Twentieth Century and thinking Nineteenth Century.”

Presaging former Senator Phil Gramm’s remarks about a “mental recession,” Stein said that the Great Depression was “more moral than actual. No longer the people think they are depressed, the depression is over.”

(Stein proved less prescient when she said that “those who know in France didn’t believe that there would be a war.” She added: “But then war is just like anything else. When people get tired of peace they will have war and when they get tired of war they will have peace. Don’t you, when you have been good for a long time, want to be bad?”)

After Mr. Cronkite noted the presence of “Miss Alice B. Toklas, Miss Stein’s traveling companion whose title is not ‘secretary,’ ” he wrote that she enjoyed her first trip to Texas. (“This is a beautiful big State of yours,” she told him.) And that’s the way it was.

April 28, 2011

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.