In 1910 Gertrude Stein wrote the lines, “She is forgetting anything. This is not a disturbing thing, this is not a distressing thing, this is not an important thing. She is forgetting anything and she is remembering that thing, she is remembering that she is forgetting anything.” The piece was “Many Many Women” (1933), a genre-bending work featuring a series of paragraphs all describing unidentified women referred to by the pronoun “she.” Hallmarking Stein’s trademark development of abstraction and repetition in her “continuous present,” the idiosyncratic sentences invite the reader to search both anaphorically and cataphorically for the proper referents to the author’s slippery pronouns, as if to produce the feeling of forgetting itself. In choosing the present progressive over the simple present tense, Stein rejects a grammatical model that assumes a state of before/after change, induces telic events that follow one another, or gives the reader temporal perspective within the timeline that language creates. Rather, she stalls the forward movement of narrative time and action. The progressive refuses the finality of thought and generates an ongoing process of mental and physical activities that are overlapping and atelic. Forgetting, in this grammatical form, is shown to be suspenseful and dramatic. Repetition is less of a reenactment of the past than what Stein calls an “insistence” of what is happening. When the remembered thing turns out to be forgetting itself—“she is remembering that she is forgetting anything”—forgetting assumes the status of a positive word that resists the conquest of memory (“Many Many Women,” 119). It refuses us its referent (Stein never retrieves the object of the forgotten “anything”) and remains a limit case for referential language, which at once becomes free-floating and excessive. The possibility of forgetting anything opens up the possibility of forgetting everything, a leap permitted by the indefinite nature of oblivion’s grammatical forms. Such play on forgetting is only one of many instances exemplifying Stein’s life-long interest in a radical project of forgetfulness. Traditionally, the word “forget,” defined by the OED as “to lose remembrance of,” has connoted privation, defined by its opposition to or negation of other terms. Remembrance is the most obvious of these terms, but the opposition between forgetting and remembering has also served as a proxy for more subtle antagonisms: forgetting and justice, forgetting and truth, and even life and death. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, the concept began to acquire new conceptual capital for artists and philosophers. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, figures such as Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Ezra Pound, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti began to view forgetting as something active rather than lethargic, potentially willful rather than involuntary, positive rather than privative. On the one hand, forgetting’s antagonistic power became more relevant than ever to the revolutionary spirit of paradigmatic shifts in art and science. “A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost,” Alfred North Whitehead said. On the other hand, its changing status allowed it to acquire new meanings, shifting, for instance, the problem of memory from one of conservation to selection or suggesting that the things one can’t recall are in fact significant enough to be forgotten or repressed. The very existence of the word “forget” even begs the question of whether “to forget” is always synonymous with “not to remember.” Grammatically and logically speaking, “not to remember” is a negation of “to remember,” but forgetting—while it may sometimes have the same meaning as “not to remember”—is itself a third term. The very fact that we have it in our language suggests that “forgetting” has some kind of independence. The word significantly reminds us that forgetting is an actual process, not necessarily just the absence of another one.

Walking among a series of prints by the American wood engraver Lynd Ward (1905–85), Art Spiegelman was surprised to find himself transported from a chic Binghamton art gallery into a primordial forest. Though he had not left the gallery, Spiegelman was surrounded by networks of branches, trees, and woods reaching out at him from the prints on the wall. Within this gallery-turned-forest, Spiegelman gained a new appreciation of the power of Ward’s arboreal aesthetic. Singling out a particularly noteworthy print, Spiegelman describes “a panoramic treescape of a young man in shadows, groping and climbing through the dense neuronal wickerwork of dappled trunks and branches, carefully exploring and working his way through the maze of marks that surround him.” The print he describes, Pathfinder , is striking for its disorientation. The “treescape” evokes a sense of kinetic energy and of light within darkness. Trees fracture the perspective of the print as they partially block the human figure. The forest in Pathfinder is disorienting, tree branches are both barriers and bridges on the young man’s journey. Such disorientation is reinforced by the seemingly impossible perspective of the print. At once, viewers are positioned beside the young man, looking at him through the trees in the foreground, and on the forest floor, looking up at the canopy in the background. Ward uses an overabundance of trees to challenge viewers to reimagine their relationship with the natural world.

This column for Process is about poetry that tries to make sense of sharing time together as it passes. For that I turn to John Ashbery, about whom I have never been willing or able to write, except in a very brief and unsatisfying conclusion to my first book. I live with several of Ashbery’s poems ricocheting around in my consciousness, along with stray lines by Herbert, Dickinson, McKay, and Rich. The idea of writing something about his poetry is particularly daunting because it carries a lot of emotional weight. More than anything else, the name Ashbery calls to mind the people who shaped and continue to shape what I know or feel about poetry. So when I think about Ashbery, the situation in which I think about his poetry is, almost automatically, a social one.

Rain in Lisbon often made me think of notation, of glyphs and dashes inscribing a page |/. I know this sounds too romantic, too neat, particularly for a rain that would often fall in unruly sheets, dislodging cobbles, stripping trees, and running thick with dirt and debris. There was something in the geometry of its fall, however, oblique strokes driven by Atlantic winds that would swing in an arc of directions, backlit by the amber lamplight. Each long strip of water was visible, and, in the labored rate of its fall, traceable.

Sitting in my apartment, in parks, and on my roof, I have tried to keep track of the ebb and flow of the seasons in the relentless monotony of a socially distanced New York. Keeping track has been made all the more difficult by the seasonal monotony that my research asks of me—working on a dissertation about literary representations of the tropics has me fixated on heat even when I do not feel it.

Let everyone make h[er]self an amateur —Clive Bell, Art, 1920

Always mornings. Early. And there should be coffee. Breakfast will come later, but the best hours are now—when the world is still blanketed, the mind “puddled in dream melt.” [1] There are particular parameters for the page. The margins must be wide. The font Goudy Old Style or Garamond in a squeeze. Carriage returns between paragraphs. No indentation. I once justified my text; now I like the ragged edges. To write The Names (1982), Don DeLillo had to change his method. He began typing single, numbered paragraphs, each on its own leaf: a microclimate that allowed him to “see a given set of sentences more clearly.” This is a logic that makes sense to me. I learned to write from my mother. She taught me to revise a sentence aloud before putting it into print. To move from breath to inscription can be a mystical practice. The look of letters has long astonished, inviting cryptic explanations. The 22 paths connecting Kabbalah’s Sefirot—emanations of the divine Ein Sof—correspond to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The Latin “A” is an abstracted, phonetic descendant from an Ox hieroglyph. Flip it over and you can still see the creature’s horns: ∀. These ideas are important for the writers I study. They reveal a profound longing—the desire to rekindle a relationship between text and the body, at once archaic and arcane, and to locate the origins of writing in the sensual world.

For this two-part installment of Process, I asked eight scholars who had just finished a book—their first or their fourth—to write informally about their experience. Conferences often feature roundtables about writing and publishing, but I thought it might be a good addition to have some personal anecdotes, stories less attached to the mechanics of the industry and more to the quiddities of the book-writing process. A book might arrive as an artifact, but it begins as a dream or a compulsion or a hunch. No review or reading, however generous, does justice to the messiness of the life that seals itself into the final object of the book, as though in anticipation of the spell that may someday release it. The intent here is not so much to demystify as to re-enchant.

We modernist scholars are all digital modernists now, and for a variety of reasons. [1] Listening to recent debates in both modernist studies and the digital humanities, one would not think this was the case. [2] Digital scholarship is often presented as the preserve of a special inter- or infra-disciplinary conversation distinct from the professional fields that contribute to it, thus presenting digital scholarship as a set of methods distinct and particular to digital humanists.

My process of writing this blog post about the writing process was slow, circuitous, and emotionally fraught. I started out with a clear idea of my overall structure—or so I thought—but ended up abandoning it after several hours of drafting, redrafting, and repeated applications of my Delete key. Frustrated, I tried free-writing for twenty minutes: an unstructured word-dump to find out where “writing to think” might get me. Unfortunately, it got me nowhere. By that time I had already spent...