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Having missed the meeting owing to prior obligation, I'm a little reluctant to dive in here. But Anne, I'm delighted to say that I do agree with your reading of the James-Stein connection, which you make much more subtly (and correctly) than folks who have published on it (alas). Those scholars see that Stein was engaged in "automatic writing" experiments with James and apply that same appellation ("automatic writing") to write off Stein's work as a parlor game of consciousness streaming. I think Anne has it right when she describes Stein learning from those experiments and applying techniques or strategies of writing and meaning creation to her (quite self-conscious) art.

I have spent time, too, in the castle of disappointment and want to mention that I think what we actually mean when we use the word is somewhat different than what the OED's notes on its origin suggest. (Surprise.) Where the OED describes a schematic "not coming to the point," which seems value neutral, what we mostly mean when we speak of being disappointed is not that a situation has not come to a "point," and end; rather we mean that the situation has come to a point and it has come to a bad end, in our judgements. Thus we may speak of being disappointed in the results of an election, or with a souflee, or with a movie we had hoped to enjoy.

Where we (and I use "we" in the grand style of the academy to pretend that I don't mean "i") run afoul of the OED, we speak of being "disappointed" by things that have *not* come to an end, which are, in fact, still dwelling in their own possibility, even if our own essentially sour outlook will not admit the possibility of a good outcome. Or even just an outcome that is different than the ones we project into the future. When we are disappointed in our children, marriages, bodies, governments, finances, professional lives, even in our swimming, we ought to (I ought to) ask ourselves, "Is it *really* over? Has that aspect of my life come to its *point*?" If we answer yes, then we should move on, expect no different, and accept the situation. If our answer is no, then we may still, if we dare, take up arms against a sea of troubles and etcetera.

In my middle age, I am feeling myself wanting to move out of the castle of disappointment, precisely because its thick walls give me permission to feel a peevish resentment for the way things are going instead of either mustering the actual (and difficult) courage to achieve *resignation* in the face of failure *or* to get going on achieving change. In cases where the jury is still out, the difference between our feeling of dwelling in disappointment and in possibility is simply a difference in attitude ( simple in a schematic way, not simple in terms of living).

Naturally, as Stein would say, there is a good deal always to be disappointed in, and I know that I feel in myself, simultaneously, dwelling in the possibility of Dickinson, the disappointment of real sorrow for the ends that some things have come to, *and* the peevish resentment of disappointment for the way things seem to be going in situations where I doubt that I will or can intercede to change them. I also feel in myself many other kinds of "dwelling" that do not fit into this simple distinction. And there are feelings that do not flow from the metaphor of "dwelling". *And* there are many things that cannot adequately or accurately be described as "feelings." I contain, as Whitman tells us, multitudes. But I am also, I tell him back, sometimes a container and sometimes not a container.

The big point (one of the big points) that I take from Stein is that there are not a limited number of kinds of difference. The distinctions that we make between two kinds of *anything* focus our attention on that separation as if there were not an infinite number of other ways of dividing the same thing. The danger is that one way of making a distinction begins to seem to us as if it is the whole game. We can play at form and content, or conservative and liberal, or directed/reacting and those distinctions may sometimes shine a little useful light on things. But the big light is that there is no single rubric which will organize things in a way that contains our experience. We get further (I do) when we admit that there are different differences from the ones that tend to guide our thinking. And by employing different differences from the ones we customarily use, we can both see more and more accurately, and we can see (better) what we can't see, what we aren't seeing.

I come to this work from the experience of feeling a tension between my own impulses for organizing inquiry and the ones that were in place for most of my formal education. I also come to these conversations from a deep pleasure in some of the processes that I learned because of or in spite of that education, and with a deep, warm feeling for the connections that I perceive (some rich and established, some incipient) between the things that interest me most and the things that seem to interest many of you. And I look forward to sitting and talking with you.

m.