the news by gertrude stein and lynn hejinian

" . . . so everything in the newspaper begins with its not being so and that like everything complicates and makes difficult telling and listening, it may complicate and the newspaper does by making it too easy, so much do they have to deceive the reader into feeling that yesterday is to-day that they have to make it too easy and in making it too easy they do do something they had not intended to do they make it no longer an exciting thing. . . . I said that once to a reporter and he said you have no idea I am sure how terribly hard we work. Yes I said but after you have done all that hard work you have to write it up as it would be if you had known it all beforehand. . . . There is no discovery there is mostly no discovery in a newspaper or in history, they find out things they never knew before but there is no discovery and finally if all this goes on long enough it is all too easy." Gertrude Stein, Narration

---

"In real life that is if you like in the newspapers which are not real life but real life with the reality left out, the reality being the inside and the newspapers being the outside and never is the outside inside and never is the inside outside except in the rare and peculiar cases when the outside breaks through to be inside because the outside is so part of some inside that even a description of the outside cannot completely relieve the outside of the inside." Gertrude Stein, Narration

---

"[T]hen there is the news itself, of course, dismaying in content and raising the question, over and over, of the efficacy (or inefficacy) of poetry in relation to the course of events; to read the news is to be reminded of the seeming imperviousness of the world to such improvements as might be suggested by artistic work and artistic thought. . . .When the term realism is applied to poetry, it is apt to upset our sense of reality. But it is exactly the strangeness that results from a description of the world given in the terms 'there it is,' 'there it is,' 'there it is' that restores realness to things in the world and separates things from ideology." Lyn Hejinian, "Strangeness"