Eee Nee Mee Nee My Nee Mow

i've decided to start doing research on the backgrounds and inspirations of literary figures/people i find interesting. this first one will be on Gertrude Stein. i don't actually like MANY of her writings. she can get abit too.. cryptic. but there are several of her poems and quotations that i like. like this one i tried to draw inspiration from:

I caught sight of a splendid Misses. She had handkerchiefs and kisses. She had eyes and yellow shoes she had everything to choose and she chose me.

In passing through France she wore a Chinese hat and so did I.
In looking at the sun she read a map. And so did I.
In eating fish and pork she just grew fat. And so did I.
In loving a blue sea she had a pain. And so did I.
In loving me she of necessity thought first. And so did I.

How prettily we swim. Not in water. Not on land. But in love.

How often do we need trees and hills. Not often.
And how often do we need birds. Not often.
And how often do we need wishes. Not often.
And how often do we need glasses not often.

We drink wine and we make well we have not made it yet.

How often do we need a kiss. Very often and we add when tenderness overwhelms us we speedily eat veal.

And what else, ham and a little pork and raw artichokes and ripe olives and chester cheese and cakes and caramels and all the melon. We still have a great deal of it left. I wonder where it is. Conserved melon. Let me offer it to you.

anyway, here's the really concise biography. from an extract from a UPenn site from an entry from Encyclopedia Brittanica:

avant-garde American writer, eccentric, and self-styled genius (imagine). Stein spent her infancy in Vienna and Paris and her girlhood in Oakland, Calif. After further study at Johns Hopkins medical school she went to Paris, where she was able to live by private means. From 1903 to 1912 she lived with her brother Leo, who became an accomplished art critic; thereafter she lived with her lifelong companion Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967). In her own work, she attempted to parallel the theories of Cubism, specifically in her concentration on the illumination of the present moment and her use of slightly varied repetitions and extreme simplification and fragmentation. For general readers, she remained essentially the author of such lines as "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." Her only book to reach a wide public was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), actually Stein's own autobiography.

Here is a portrait of Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso (who was a quite good friend of hers, as was Ernest Hemingway (not my favourite writer he is so dark (i mean his writings lol))):