Gertrude Stein Critiques & Dismisses Walt Whitman's Work with a Wave of Her Hand Towards the Future...

                   




          LII.

   Leaves of gas, leaves of get a towel louder.


       --from Yet Dish






Walt Whitman as "leaves of gas?" You talk too much...and you never shut up...

The towel could be used to stop the gas leak; that is, the world as seen through the long exhalation of Leaves of Grass. Another big, male, totalizing poem. Notwithstanding the luminous bisexuality, the delightful polymorphous perversity and the imaginary social landscaping envisioning a much cooler America. Oh boy. Even genius doesn't last long round these parts. Once somebody intransigent like Stein has decided to originate the future, I mean. You put the towel under the door, of course. There is a huge critique, one senses, in that last word spoken without any emphasis whatsoever...

Alternatively, "get a towel" could be read as a jibe at Whitman's excessive cataloguing, and the way he seeks to saturation-bomb the mind with images. The "towel" could be used to soak this up, and there might even be a jibe about masturbation implict in that.

She is right. He is already being buried by noise.

That model doesn't morph as well.

Whitman was attempting to create that huge overarching poem like a hologram made of sound.

The way she uses "louder" is like someone making fun of a monochrome painting (say, a red one) by saying "More red."

It's not "loudness" of any sort that was needed there.

And she knew that.

She was such a man.