Just that - a dog

That is author Stephen Kellogg with his dog Pinkerton, who inspired a series of children's books.

I can see the Dog in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights WANTING to be as cool as Pinkerton. He WANTS to misbehave and be loved for it. He WANTS to be able to hang out and flop around and do his own thing. But he can't; he can't bay at the moon at his own free will like that (not that a Great Dane bays at the moon, but still...).

Another reference: Read one of my favorite book's from when I was a kid -- Agatha's Feather Bed by Carmen Agra Deedy. Unlike the Pinkerton series, which I just find cute, Agatha is a reflective grown-up tale. The geese in it, who appeal to Agatha because they are cold after she buys a goose feather bed, remind me a LOT of the haunting figments inhabiting Goodhart.

Escaping association, so that now is always always.

I am in the middle of The Language That Rises, an enlightening look at Stein's process of creation. Early on in the book, right after calling Stein's unusual forms "anarchistic," Ulla Dydo writes this fabulous description of the work:

Her rejection of the rigid conventions of language led her gradually to dissociate herself from all inflexible forms, including hierarchical thinking, authoritarian organization, prescriptive grammar, and chronological narrative -- aspects of the patriarchy. In a sense, all her work is a demonstration of possibilities of grammar for democracy. She was interested in spacious, living sentences.

That's right: Stein is all about reversals and neutralizations -- of power, of thought, of association, of meaning, of men and women. (How Bryn Mawr!) Although the near-complete dissociation that Dydo refers to can be seen much more in Stein's early work than in DFLtL, I think this is a useful excerpt in terms of thinking of character arcs (or scores). These characters are not strapped down by conventions, hierarchies, or interpretations, not by others or by themselves. Similarly, they are always present, always living, never static.

In "Composition as Explanation," Stein says of people,

At any moment when you are you you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you you are not for purposes of creating you.

The relationship between actors and characters obviously complicates this statement; we do have to maintain constant memories so that our spontaneity makes sense. Still, the characters we play, however we play them, are themselves, not themselves as tied to anything. They're always working versions, not existing (written, mythical, conceived) versions.

In thinking about characters and time, a few other quotations come to mind:

What is the difference.
Between happened to be and it has just now or just or just then it has happened to happen or to have to have had to had to happen or to me.
(from "A Play of Pounds")

[A] play is this which makes it a play to play this.
(from "Byron A Play")

All changes. Are made. By liking. It. Best.
(from "They Must. Be Wedded. To their Wife.")

I reason like this. A proceeding with necessitates that recollection perfection selection and protection rhyme and that stupefaction action satisfaction and subtraction rhyme and that dearer clearer freer and nearer follow one another a proceeding which not any one dislikes stamps a play as a wonderful beginning.
(from "A Circular Play")

Gertrude Stein: Biography

This is a lovely site, with lots of nice photos and quotes.

Here is a lamentably stale encyclopedia entry I wrote for The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama:

Life. GERTRUDE STEIN (1874-1946) was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania but lived in Europe until her wealthy German-Jewish family relocated to Oakland when she was five. She led a privileged and independent childhood, reading prodigiously and frequently attending opera and theater. She attended Radcliffe (then Harvard Annex), studied psychology with William James and attended medical school at Johns Hopkins before expatriating to Paris with her brother Leo. There, she became a prescient collector of modern painting (Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso), the hostess of an enormously influential salon, the life-partner of Alice B. Toklas, an icon of the avant-garde, and the author of more than six hundred literary works. She achieved commercial success at 59 and was lionized by the media and public during her lecture tour of America in 1934. Although her celebrity outshone her artistic achievements in the popular imagination, Stein’s subversive, experimental writing project has influenced the generations after her and scholars and theater practitioners have become increasingly interested in her work.

Work. Although her best-known work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, is a straightforward if whimsical narrative, her importance as a writer comes from the thoroughness and breadth of her experiments in a wide range of genres. Important texts include her massive novel The Making of Americans, a cubist-inspired series of portraits called Tender Buttons, as well as a number of texts that bring together her singular poetic voice with her interests in philosophy, psychology, language and the rhythms of consciousness. Her style affects a naivete that is analogous to fauvism in art, a complexity and multi-dimensionality that gives her affinities with the cubists, and a penchant for strategies of non-meaning that link her with Dada. Her mixture of lush poetry and cryptically encoded eroticism anticipates both progressive queer writing and language poetry.

Plays. Stein’s eighty plays, many of which remain unproduced, constitute modernism’s most thoroughgoing departure from dramaturgical conventions, completely re-imagining our expectations of story, incident, and time and dismissing entirely conventional notions of character and dialogue. With few exceptions, her plays take place in a “continuous present” in which they are perpetually in a state of beginning and their revision is a frequent subject of the plays themselves. In later plays, like Four Saints in Three Acts, she expanded her aesthetic to include the notion of the play as landscape. While the theoretical dimension of her playwriting is heady and abstract, the texts themselves pay earthy, sensuous homage to the everyday, often incorporating into their unfoldings texts from letters, advertisements, and lists and characters from history, from her life, and from the newspapers. Her lecture/essay “Plays” is one of the most searching and vigorous theoretical documents of the modern theater.

Influence. Stein has had a crucial influence on the development of American avant-garde theater; her plays have been produced by The Living Theater, Judson Church, The Wooster Group, Anne Bogart, James Lapine, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson. Her influence is also keenly felt in the writing of her contemporary Thornton Wilder as well as Lee Breuer, Suzan-Lori Parks, and David Greenspan, and her notion of the play as landscape paved the way for environmental theater, site-specific theater, and performance art.

Plays.
Gertrude Stein’s plays are collected in these volumes: Geography and Plays, Operas and Plays, Last Operas and Plays. Also recommended is A Stein Reader edited by Ulla Dydo.

Bibliography.
Ulla Dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises : 1923-1934
Bonnie Marranca, Ecologies of Theater
Marc Robinson, The Other American Drama
Betsy Alayne Ryan, Gertrude Stein’s Theater of the Absolute
Renate Stendhal (ed.), Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures

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