First session was excellent. The directors are all VERY impressed with this group of participants. They are wicked smart, have excellent critical thinking skills, and are great movers; their parents and teachers should be very proud.
What follows is a kind of synopsis of what we went over in the readings that day:
Gertrude Stein
Her writings were whimsical and at first glance appear to just be nonsense. If it was nonsense though, it would be some of the most lovely sounding nonsense put to paper. She put so much care into the sound and rhythm of her words, the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables like beats in a musical composition. Thankfully however, it’s not nonsense. Stein said that the meanings was not in the sentence but in the paragraphs, and when we examine her texts in this manner each syllable becomes like a stoke of paint in a Velazquez painting. 
By itself it is a beautiful unit with it’s own variances in shape and color, interacting with its partners. Together they create forms (sentences)…
…and eventually greater meaning when the whole composition is taken into consideration.
Except Gertrude Stein isn’t painting royalty, she paints the everyday and the ordinary with the words of the ordinary:
Lovely snipe and tender turn, excellent vapor and slender butter, all the splinter and the trunk, all the poisonous darkening drunk, all the joy in weak success, all the joyful tenderness, all the section and the tea, all the stouter symmetry.
In that sentence she conjures a roast beef, not by describing what it looks or smells like, but with robust, solid even-syllabled words that roll off the tongue in a sensuous constant tempo that evokes the sturdiness and warmth of a roast beef. Reading Stein is somewhat akin to synesthesia, where the senses blur or combine: one tastes color, sees sound, numbers and letters have a specific color or personality, etc.
She referred to her writing as an “excess of consciousness” rather than automatic writing or stream of consciousness (this was probably to distance herself from the dadaists, as she differed from them greatly in politics). Regardless of what one calls it, the style fits her playful and multi-layered approach to composition, and allows for a variety of interpretations. One of the qualities which also serves to keep her work fresh sounding over half a century later is how she chose to write almost exclusively in the present tense, giving her work a sense of timelessness.
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