Sometimes there's something surprising I learn from that T'Bway board:
The real meaning of Gertrude Stein's quote about Oakland, "no there there"
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-werner/oakland-in-popular-memory_b_1560227.htmlNearly 45 years later, Stein returned to Oakland on a lecture tour in 1935. By that time, the city had grown nearly 10 times to over 300,000 residents. When she tried to find her childhood home, it was no longer there. When she published Everybody’s Autobiographytwo years later, saying there was “no there there,” it was written to reflect painful nostalgia about her home being gone and the land around it being completely changed. The house where she grew up was on a sprawling 10-acre plot surrounded by orchards and farms. By 1935, it had been replaced by dozens of houses. Oakland held a special significance to her, and on her return, she found that Oakland had urbanized and changed from the pastoral place she remembered.
Gertrude Stein writes in her autobiographical novel, The Making of Americans, about her childhood in Oakland, where a child “could have all anybody could want of joyous sweating, of rain and wind, of hunting, of cows and dogs and horses, of chopping wood, of making hay, of dreaming, of lying in a hollow all warm with the sun shining while the wind was howling.” Returning to her home decades later to find it gone and to find Oakland no longer a place “of chopping wood, of making hay” struck her, and she wrote her famous “no there there” quote in response.
