Chit Chat with Gertrude Stein

[still.trucking]

Steam Bath
I would so love to see that play again. 33 years since I saw it and I still recall so many songs and scenes.

And I still draw comfort from the Soul Stirrers singing "All is well" as Oedipus stands before his grave.

Stein's Statistical Paradox, not Gertrude but Charles.

Even So. she could do the math too.

[Gertrude] Stein recognized the onset of enlightened false consciousness in herself and turned from it.
http://books.google.com/books?id=pNHvUp ... ry_r&cad=0

Still looking for Hemingway's one true sentence but no longer feel the need to be in love.

[still.trucking]

Hello Gertrude
Are you lonely tonight?

In essence, what Gertrude Stein's work represents is an example of the most extreme subjectivism of the contemporary bourgeois artist, and a reflection of the ideological anarchy into which the whole of bourgeois literature has fallen.

What was it that Gertrude Stein set out to do with literature? When one reads her work it appears to resemble the monotonous gibberings of paranoiacs in the private wards of asylums. It appears to be a deliberate irrationality, a deliberate infantilism. However, the woman's not insane, but possessed of a strong, clear, shrewd mind. She was an excellent medical student, a brilliant psychologist, and in her more "popular" writings one sees evidence of wit and some wisdom.

And yet her works read like the literature of the students of padded cells in Matteawan.

Example: "I see the moon and the moon sees me. God bless the moon and God bless me and this you see remember me. In this way one fifth of the bananas were bought."

[stilltrucking]

I heard someone call you an idiot the other day.

"Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot"
by Michael Gold
first published in The New Masses
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Gertrude Stein recently returned to America after an absence of many years. In Paris, where she lived as a forbidding priestess of a strange literary cult, Gertrude Stein accumulated a salon frequented by some of the outstanding names of the modern art world and acquired the reputation of a literary freak. People either gaped at her published writings, or laughed at her incomprehensible literary epigrams- "a rose is a rose is a rose ."
She was looked upon by those who believed in her as the greatest revolutionist in the history of contemporary literature, and by those who scoffed as the perpetrator of a gigantic literary hoax.

As it happens, neither of the two opinions is wholly correct. Her "revolution" resembles a literary putsch, and if her writing is "a hoax" nevertheless she earnestly believes in it.

In essence, what Gertrude Stein's work represents is an example of the most extreme subjectivism of the contemporary bourgeois artist, and a reflection of the ideological anarchy into which the whole of bourgeois literature has fallen


http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/ ... -gold.html