One of the services offered by Google is the Google Alert. Signing up for a Google Alert means that you will be e mailed a link whenever the subject you’ve registered appears online in an article, blog, book title, etc.
Several years ago I signed up with “Gertrude Stein” and “Alice B. Toklas” as my Google Alert topics. Everyday I get between 15-20 Alerts containing references to GertrudeandAlice.
The most common Gertrude Alert pertains to her quote about Oakland, California that “There is no there there.” (In one Alert someone had thought she had said it about Los Angeles!)
Oakland in the 1890's when the there was there
The statement was made when she returned to the site of one of her homes in Oakland in 1935 and discovered that the house in which she had lived had been demolished and was no longer there. It is included in her book EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY .
What better way for someone to indicate the impermanence of a place. However, over the years people have interpreted it to mean that Oakland is insignificant when in fact Gertrude was referring to the absence of her house and all that it had meant to her.
Poor Oakland has suffered innumerable insults because of this quote and even two THERE sculptures and at one time a THERE flag flying over its City Hall have not been able to rectify the misinterpretation.
THERE sculpture, R. Mazzilli (1988)
THERE sculpture, Gillman/Keefer (2005)
The two most common Alerts pertaining to Alice either refer to the hashish fudge recipe, often called by its 1960s incarnation “Alice B. Toklas brownies” or the 1968 movie I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS which popularized the chocolate treat . The original fudge recipe given to Alice by the artist Brion Gysin was banned from the first U.S. edition of the cookbook in 1954 though it appeared in the British edition. Since 1960,however, with the first paperback copy of the book, the recipe has appeared in all subsequent editions.
Some of the other Google Alerts over the last year have included:
• Notifications from the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club (Washington D.C.) and Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club (San Francisco). Note both GertrudeandAlice were Republicans!
• The reference to Gertrude Stein by Peggy Olson in the TV show “Mad Men.”
• Text analysis tools to read Gertrude’s “unreadable” THE MAKING OF AMERICANS.
• Marquee Lofts for sale on Alice B. Toklas Place, San Francisco in the $700K range.
• A dramatized reading about Gertrude’s life in Bangalore, India.
AND
• From the BBC’s “Gardeners’ World” blog:
“I’ve got chickens – two lovely chooks that cluck and scratch! They have turned my garden from being a predictable suburban stretch to something far more exciting. I can’t help but skip down every hour or so to look at them. They are called Gertrude and Alice B. after Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
Gertrude is a fine looking bird, but difficult and slightly stroppy. Alice B. is hard working, less elegant and has a winsome personality.”
Two chooks, not GertrudeandAlice!
What more can I say, but “There, there!”
COPYRIGHT HANS GALLAS ©2009
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