Gertrude Stein's birthday is today is today is today

Her most famous quotation, "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" from her poem "Sacred Emily" always makes me think of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."   For Stein, the name is it; it evokes imagery and realities that are that word; because of what the word has meant, continues to mean, it encapsulates that thing/concept.  In the play, names don't signify reality, but are technicalities to be overcome.

Stein's other famous quotation: "To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write[,]" makes me weary.  A sweet friend called me a writer yesterday when introducing me to someone else.  I've never called myself that.  I write, but I don't "write is to write" to the 8th degree.  Perhaps the word, writer, signifies too much to me; things/realities I know that I will never attain.  And then again, it's a technicality--I may not be a writer, but if I write, what am I then?

I remember reading Stein's work for the first time.  I was in the Centre Pompidou in Paris--how appropriate as she wrote that America is her country, but "Paris is [her] hometown."

I was sitting close to the window viewed here and was trying hard to concentrate on the page instead of the traffic going up the tube.  I felt that what I was reading was important.  I read it aloud, a style like the work of the Impressionists, or Cubists.  It had a texture I was unused to, and in the Word Portraits, I felt as if I were back in the salon days of the 1900s with the great artists and personages of her time. I wanted to emulate her appreciation of great art and creation of great literature.  Though she is not a major player in the Western Canon, her Three Lives, which I read a couple of years ago, does things with character and point of view that are so unusual and touching that she can hardly be overlooked.

She once wrote that  "Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."  I wonder what she would think today in this information age and reality television.  We certainly seem to have lost something.

 Happy Birthday, Gertrude!  Bon anniversaire! Shawna, the poem linked above reminds me of the one you linked to last week, that German guy?--similar style.  Hers was written one hundred years ago though--a true avant garde!