The World

I had some thoughts earlier. Sitting on the toilet, where you usually have thoughts.

About the changes. Changes in society and with my life.

This morning reading the review of Gertrude Stein's new non-autobiography by someone else. See what I did there?

And inspiration. Hemingway's one sentence about her. She had a good rhythm, but I couldn't dance to it. Had to move away from that lesbian flame.

That was two sentences of course I took some liberties. And watched the Dead Poet's society again recently. I mean it was on Netflix.

I've read enough Stein including the non autobiography. In fact I took a pleasant copy of her book, "How To Write" along with me on a trip to Europe in 2019. I walked with her down the famous street she lived on near the Luxembourg park. Jardin. My French is not so good. She did unlock a rhythm. The tradesman who was standing in front of the plaque laughed at us in that typical French condescending way when he realised what we were doing. Looking back at us walking down the street. The Frenchman who helped us find our keys to the AirBnB was much more pleasant. He was just a neighbour and stood back when he realised what it was we were doing. Then when we figured out how to unlock the box, departed with a Wahla!

My thoughts starting flowing in the toilet. As they usually do, and they were quite gone by the time I got to this point, with my fingers on the slightly too small crowded keyboard which has the action I like, it's a quiet and has good resistance. It's hard to find a good keyboard, I should probably just start dictating words, practice speaking. Talking to a thing, a microphone of some sort, I have a good headset and also a good Rode podcaster microphone. The sound of one's own voice, always unpleasant. Unpleasant to hear. Stein is here. Stein is there. She did unlock that rhythm. I learned about Parataxis today. As opposed to a hierarchy of words. My writing is about to be Interrupted. An interruption is coming. Let's start a new paragraph, where the Interruption takes place, but until then we will keep writing. And I will stop now to just sip some coffee. Ah. There are voices. Not schizophrenic ones, but because I have a read a great deal, and I'm not bragging, but just coming across this book review in the London Book review publication, brings me back. Brings the voices back. Or is it just her voice, but it's been years since I've read much of Stein's work, but she is still there. Is this her voice? Surely it's not, it's my memory of the way she writes, and the thoughts are coming from my cerebral cortex? The door squeaks. It sounds like our dead cat, her ghost somehow infiltrated the door hinge. A cry to pay attention to me. That is a thought I didn't want to have, but that is what happens. While you are waiting for the interruption to take place. To break the chain of thought. The chain of thoughts. Is there a chain? A daisy chain? Is this just free association? Blavatsky was more into the automated writing. Automated, heh. Automatic writing is I think what they called it. The squeak is more adamant now, but not yet insistent. And I wanted to say something about typing. The tactile nature of it. The enforcement of the letter placement, that allowed typewriter salesman to more easily find the word typewriter in order to type it and sell machinery. And now we have plastic keyboards. And we have voice recognition. We have so many technologies, and now the AI will write poorly for us all on its own. No thanks, I can write poorly for myself thanks. If I'm writing a resume then I will write the cover letter poorly and then you can make something of it. If I'm writing automatically in the way Stein taught me, then maybe I will just go back later and have you fix the spelling issues. I'm quite sure I spelled schizophrenic wrongly. My spelling is not so bad. Much better than my French. I wonder if the comedians write this way. There is always that return to the gag. Like the gag order that has been placed somewhere. But now I am talking about politics, and it's bright and sunny out this early spring Southern Hemisphere day and I'm so far away from it all. Let's not think about it right now. Write now. Drink the steadily cooling coffee now, it is a bit chilly this morning. These are not Steins word, though she is the Matron. The Maven? That word was in the article today, and of course it makes us think of the java code manager thing. I know a few MVN commands I have had to learn. Gertrude would not be a fan of Java. With all of it's structures and its types. Type. That was the title of the Coblage post today. It was a typical Coblage post as I remember, I read it mostly. Lets say I skimmed it. It seemed to make sense and the Kubernetes. Now that is a hard word to spell (it has one t). A Greek word meaning helmsman or something. The pilot of the boat. Oh those programmers really like to name their things. So clever. The clock is ticking, the coffee is draining. The words have stopped flowing. The stillness of the mind, it's quieting now. But the floor is creaking and soon the door. The black bird is fluttering in the middle of the valley's air. The valley out my window. A little restaurant there. The train station. All the houses. The trees. Grey clouds rising over the far hills. I almost said the far side. Which would invoke Gary Larson's famous comic strip. I picture that one sock hiding behind the dryer's door, making break for it. The domestic tranquillity. The crossing gate lowers, and the train comes from the North. The door squeaks open. The Chinese characters stuck to my monitor. Ren fourth tone and shi second tone. Renshi, to know or to recognise. Pound didn't know anything about Chinese. Maybe an intuition. Whatever he got from Fenollosa. I'll have to go back and look up that name. (it has two Ls) Damn the modernists. Except Stein, she was one of the oldest of them. It said in the article. Her life preceding mine quite neatly by a century.

And just like that the interruption happened. And I enjoyed a Matcha/Anko doughnut with white chocolate glaze. Although now I am beginning to regret the caloric intake. Maybe I will go for a run later. I would have mentioned Bowie's changes song had I gotten around to it, but that was an obvious association. Or was it?