“If you can’t say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me.”
…and with this Gertrude Stein quote we invite you to visit us this weekend at Triple Canopy‘s marathon reading of Stein’s The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress. The reading begins on Friday, January 18 at 7:00pm and will continue through Sunday, January 20. (full schedule)
Blonde Art Books has organized a book table featuring recent publications authored by many of the participating readers.
Below are the books that will be on display throughout the weekend.
Triple Canopy is pleased to present its second annual marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s enormously long and allegedly unreadable novel The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress. Over one weekend, an invited list of New York–based artists, writers, publishers, scholars, and other collaborators will gather in Greenpoint to perform the entirety of Stein’s text in a continuous read-in, expected to last 52 hours, more or less. The schedule of readers is below, including time slots for walk-ins. There will be coffee and donuts during the dawn walk-in hours; borscht and booze at dinnertime; and champagne toasts.
Gertrude Stein and The Making of Americans have been central to conversations between literature, art, and publishing for more than a century; and those histories and connections are, in turn, central to Triple Canopy’s publishing and programming in Greenpoint, online, and elsewhere. Stein composed The Making of Americans from 1903 to 1911, though it remained unpublished until 1925, in an edition of 500. The novel wasn’t reprinted in full until 1966, by Fluxus artist and poet Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press (New York), making the book available to a new generation of writers and artists. From 1974 to 2000, Paula Cooper Gallery hosted marathon readings of The Making of Americans around New Year’s Eve, including Higgins, Alison Knowles, and John Cage, among many others. Triple Canopy’s read-in revives and updates that tradition, marking the continuing, branching (if largely subliminal) course of Stein’s book through our culture.
The current edition of the novel, published by Dalkey Archive Press, will be available for borrowing or purchase throughout the read-in. Blonde Art Books will be selling work by readers. We’ll be tweeting (#MakingUSA) and livestreaming the Americans as they progress. The marathon inaugurates Triple Canopy’s fifth year—we hope to see you there!
BLONDE ART BOOKS 