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A birthday is a birthday is a birthday is a birthday. And today is Gertrude Stein’s!
The poet and avant-garde art advocate was born on February 3, 1874. Correction: poet, art advocate and thrower of AWESOME parties. I know, she looks so serious and anti-fun. Don’t be fooled. With her partner Alice B.Toklas, Stein hosted salons in Paris that still haunt lit-nerds’ dreams. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Picasso, Matisse… they all hung out at Stein’s place.
Folks have a lot of opinions about Stein’s work. Her poems are masterpieces of sound and nonlinear thought, like cubist paintings converted into language. Or they’re wackadoodle streams of nonsense, or disastrous attempts at experimental literature, or the work of a very committed 20th-century troll (“haha, joke’s on you, you thought this was literature!”)
Decide for yourself. Here’s an excerpt from her Tender Buttons:
LUNCH. Luck in loose plaster makes holy gauge and nearly that, nearly more states, more states come in town light kite, blight not white. A little lunch is a break in skate a little lunch so slimy, a west end of a board line is that which shows a battle beneath so that necessity is a silk under wear. That is best wet. It is so natural, and why is there flake, there is flake to explain exhaust. A real cold hen is nervous is nervous with a towel with a spool with real beads. It is mostly an extra sole nearly all that shaved, shaved with an old mountain, more than that bees more than that dinner and a bunch of likes that is to say the hearts of onions aim less. Cold coffee with a corn a corn yellow and green mass is a gem.
