I Say Gerty What Wonderful Buttons You Have

I found sound clips of Gertrude Stein here.

I tried to find a picture of young Gerty (because old people are gross of course) but I found she born 57 years old, and stayed that way her whole life.

I liked old GS she became very dear to me. I liked how violently passionate she was about parts of grammar most people are indifferent to. But she loved grammar all the way up the ladder even to the those big old nouns and verbs (although nouns can be quite inferior) more over she really seemed to hate those pesky punctuations that are almost implied at this point in english I mean who really needs all that, that clutter of question and quotation marks (exclamation points are foul like skunks caught in the dryer). Except sorry Gerty I love the semicolon. I think he's a handsome little guy with a lot of usefulness left in him. We don't have to send this punctuation out to pasture just yet.

I mostly loved steins ability to be incredibly poignant but at the same time really really weird:

"Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are."
"I said I found this out first in listening to Basket my dog drinking. And anybody listening to any dog's drinking will see what I mean."

At first I read this and thought she was ape shit crazy but if you think about it hard enough (or as Kasey said not hard enough) it makes perfect sense. That structure the beginning and end of it. It is a totally balanced thing. The rhythm the rise and fall of the action.

The part on page 227 about 3/4 of the way down begins with, After all the natural way. With stein you have to just give in to the crazy and just let follow it. The counting make sense though and it relates to that idea that she and fenollosa share that nouns don't describe they prescribe a meaning, when in reality things do things. A tree (sorry gerty) goes up and reaches out growing up roots digging deep.

I love her. She is very charming.