The Irritating Ms. Stein

BREWSIE AND WILLIE
by Gertrude Stein
          ©1946 I can’t even begin to tell what this book was about. Thankfully, with only 114 pages, it was short!
          This entire WW2-era book was about a group of American G.I.s gabbing about German women, Negro soldiers, finding a job when they get back home, and whether or not America should be an industrial nation.
          This was a book with no plot and really, no point. There was a total disregard for proper punctuation, and the conversations were all run together, repetitive and boooooooooooring!
          I agree with what author James Thurber had to say about Ms. Stein: “Anyone who reads at all diversely during these bizarre 1920s cannot escape the conclusion that a number of crazy men and women are writing stuff which remarkably passes for important composition among certain persons who should know better. … one of the most eminent of the idiots, Gertrude Stein.”
          I can’t believe someone actually published this drivel, and someone got paid to write it. The reader should be paid to read it!

A PRIMER FOR THE GRADUAL UNDERSTANDING OF GERTRUDE STEIN
by Gertrude Stein, edited by Robert Bartlett Haas
           © 1971 Good grief! Was this woman on drugs or what??? It’s hard to believe that someone got paid to write such nonsense! If I didn’t already know she lived and wrote in the pre-computer age, I’d suspect she’d used a random word generator to do her writing. It’s like that kit you can get which has words on magnets, and you randomly stick them on your refrigerator to make up poems.
           I never achieved anything approaching a “gradual understanding” of this woman, AT ALL! I usually like to give an author “three strikes and you’re out.” But after reading her BREWSIE AND WILLIE last year and hating it --- Ugh! I can’t take any more!
           ***sound of toilet flushing***