Get Time Machine for Gertrude Stein

Reading Rainbow. You remember Reading Rainbow right? Encouraging the young to read, good, old, classic-'Butterfly in the Sky' Lamar told us "But you don't have to take my word for it" and cut away to a bright eyed child hefting up a bright and colorful book. Although the clear agenda of that show (and as in all cases, the word 'agenda' should be read with evil undertones) is to promote reading, the child testimonials did a good job exemplifying the reasons people like to read: most simply, it's enjoyable.



For this week's assignment in my literature class, I had to read Gertrude Stein's convoluted mess of an impossibility: "The Autobiography of Alice Toklas by Gertrude Stein." Mired in relating this hopeless abomination to anything cerebral, I can't help imagine anything that could possibly be further from Reading Rainbow's enamoring ideal. If we lived in a strong-arm totalitarian government, that would permit someone younger than the age of consent, to be forced to read this book and then present it on television, the colorful 80's style transition effects would unveil a dead child slumped over and next to the smoking gun on the table, Gertrude Stein's book would be propped up. This book is insufferably pointless and bad. Not bad in the way that 'it's just not the material I'm interested in', because I've been known to enjoy reading biographies and autobiographies. Not bad in the way that I just couldn't 'get it.' Trust me, I got this book. I endured headaches and repeated flaring bouts of depression slogging from one uneventful page to the next, all babbling anecdotes as Gertrude Stein, devoted partner to Alice B Toklas, writes her autobiography for her and shifts the entire focus back on to Gertrude Stein.

I'm sure she thought it was very clever. I know she thinks everything she does is very clever. This entire book does nothing but recount all the ways Toklas (as written by Stein) thinks that Gertrude Stein is nothing short of a demigod of genius. There is no plot, there are certainly no nuances of a relationship between the two, THERE IS ONLY STEIN. Whomever Stein interacts with in one sampling to the next changes a little, but right as rain, each one doesn't do anything but tell Stein what a damn godsend genius she is.

Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not angry that this book has no substance; I've read lots of things in the spectrum of substance-lite to no substance. I endured a friend reading me her favorite Harry-slash-Drake fan fiction (And a big FU to Rowling by the way, I swear the only reason you conceived the polyjuice potion was to help sexually repressed fans toolbox their porn writing). Gertrude Stein manages to write in such a way that is cognitively impossible to comprehend. Reading this book, I'm painfully aware that she predates computers and spell check. Halfway through the book I'm fairly convinced that she predates the formal structure the English language, reading English literature a century further back never gave me this much trouble. Trying to read this alphabet soup of mis-punctuation I have to assume that the genius Mademoiselle Stein is illiterate and borderline mentally impaired. 49% of her sentences are fragments and another 49% are run-on-sentences with a jumble of punctuation. The remaining 2% of 'genius' are, of course, both:

"Gertrude Stein has never ceased to be thankful to her mother for neither forgetting or forgetting. Imagine, she has said to me, if my mother had forgiven her sister-in-law and my father had gone into business with my uncle and we had lived and been brought up in New York, imagine, she says, how horrible. We would have been rich instead of being reasonably poor but imagine how horrible to have been brought up in New York."

I literally pulled that off the page I was reviewing before I started writing this blog. I didn't go searching for it. Imagine, an entire book with nothing but those sentences, divided into seven chapters that themselves feel like individual books in a series! Now imagine that there is absolutely no point to anything written, other than of course, letting Gertrude Stein publicly self-service her ego. The chapters themselves are divided by time periods, which would help organize a coherent thought process, but those the time periods outlined are are really more of general topics than limitations to the stream of consciousness/dialog; Stein drifts back to events that happened before or to conversations that happened afterward with little recognizable indication between past-past, past-present, and past-future.

In short, this book is bad. Bad in a way that I thought no book could ever really acheive. Some books are bad because they have no real substance to them. Some books are bad because they are poorly organized or they're not well written. Some books are bad because you get tired of hearing the author parrot the people around them into saying how much they whorship the authors ever waking momment. This book does all the above, but in such a long, monotonous, utterly boring way that it can't even turn 'bad' full circle into 'so bad it's good'. This book made me not want to never read another book or anything else ever again. I wish there was a way to gouge this book from my memory. I wish I could locate the parts of my brain where this book, without consent, took up a part of my memory, so that I could set fire to it and sear it out of my existence forever. I wish I could invent a time machine for the sole purpose of going back and slapping Stein and her publisher full in the face... or damn near anything to try to stop what could quite possibly be the worst thing to ever happen to the english lanuage: this book. And so that's where they book got me. 'Get Time Machine for Gertrude Stein.'