Adam Gopnik, one of Waldo's favorite writers for over twenty years, has a recent appreciation of Gertrude Stein in The NewYorker (Waldo believes Gertrude Stein should be appreciated all the time):
font-size: 16px; line-height: 25px;">But, far more often, we are convinced by the truth of her observations, and are still astonished by the beautiful bluntness with which they’re stated. Explaining perfectly why plain-as-pudding French politicians often had daring youths on the extreme left or right, Stein tells us that all Frenchmen have to be revolutionary: “How could you be civilized if you had not passed through a period of revolt, and then you had to return to your pre-revolt state and there you were you were civilized.” There is also her shrewd observation on the surrealists that “they missed their moment of becoming civilized, they used their revolt as a public not a private thing, they wanted publicity not civilization.” (And she’s right; publicity is the opposite of civilization.) Or her lovely riff on dogs: “One has a great deal of pleasure out of dogs because one can spoil them as one cannot spoil one’s children. If the children are spoiled, one’s future is spoilt but dogs one can spoil without any thought of the future and that is a great pleasure.” Or her comment on how naming a thing defuses it in French: “Now the word une guerre des nerfs [a war of nerves] has entered their language it no longer has any effect upon their nerves.”"Somehow," Waldo muttered, typing furiously in his bath,"That last one reminds me of the situation in Syria."
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