Tender Buttons

Anyway, so one of the other organizers decides to read some of Tender Buttons. And as he says what he's going to read, the announcer -- an older woman, very friendly -- says, "ah, Gertrude Stein, the mother of us all!"

It was a bit surprising -- but then, I suppose there Stein has something of a reputation of being an ur-feminist? Or... well, there must be something about her that appeals to everyone. But... Tender Buttons?

So he read some of it, and it was, well, it was Tender Buttons -- non-narrative, playful, naughty, occult, disruptive, all those great things.

But, unconnected to this, she ended the program criticising another poem for not having any "meaning", by which she seemed to mean paraphrasable narrative content. And I had to wonder, what exactly is she making out of Tender Buttons, then?

And so: I have read some of the "experimental" criticism and appreciations of Tender Buttons, especially from the langpo types (like Lyn Hejinian), but there is a growing sense that Stein is claimed by all sorts of people as "the mother of us all", and I have no idea how they are reading Tender Buttons.

Do you know?

(This thread really can be about anything about Tender Buttons, though, that's just a question on my mind right now.)

surely the 'women's writing' readings of stein predate the language poets?

Her first wave of success was quite small, and established her as something of a figure among the literary avant garde during a time of much ferment and excitement within literary circles, but of little or no impact among readers.

Her second wave of success came when the press toook her up, first as a grotesque figure of fun, and then, when she proved to be highly quotable and full of real fun, as a celebrity on the order of Picasso. This second wave brought her wide name recognition, bigger publishers, and a small readership.

Her third wave was really a continuation of her second. When fame opened doors for her, she followed it up with her more popular and less experimental books, like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Wars I Have Known. In these popular books, the only vestige of her earlier experiments is a peculiar prose style that submerges an adult consciousness in a rather childlike voice. It is odd, but not offputting.

Then she languished for a while. In the 1960s she was mostly known for Alice's marijuana brownies.

Her reputation was revived by the feminist movement in the 1970s, who were looking high and low for women heros. She became an example of a woman artist who could be put beside a James Joyce as a peer of equal stature (provided you granted the dubious premise that she was never appreciated as his equal, only because she was a woman and a -gasp- lesbian, and therefore unjustly underestimated). This meant that she gained a huge new 'audience', who bought her books, puzzled over them, accepted them implicitly as the works of a genius, and who didn't care if they understood her or not.

The peculiarity of all this fame is that not one of her big surges in popularity have had the slightest thing to do with her Important Experimental Works like Tender Buttons, and if she hadn't been retailored, first as a media celebrity and then as a feminist hero, probably no one would remember her at all.

Which is not to say that her Important Experimental Works have no merit, but only that they have been honored as icons a thousand times more often than they have ever been read with pleasure.

H.D., I suppose, never wrote anything quite as accessible as the Autobiography or quite as quotable as "Rose is a rose is a rose".

i was interested to find that "rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" has a wikipedia entry.

i've been reading 'how to write', and the long unbroken paragraphs in 'arthur a grammar' really make me wonder what people did with writing like this before it picked up some kind of authoritative legitimation by language-poetry types (or whoever else you like). it's just like unbroken stretches of computer-generated garbage or SEO hooks.

I have no idea how to read Stein, but sometimes she makes me laugh (not at her).

Grammar may never.
Never may grammar.
A house may be ruined.
Not Arthur or grammar.
Grammar fair lay.
Arouse grasped really feeling.
Examples are rare.

yeah the 'short' parts are basically a constant delight. i love when she ends a bit by saying how she likes it or how good it is.

I have no idea how to read Stein ...

If anyone is looking for encouraging words w/r/t reading Tender Buttons / Stein, I think William Gass' A Temple of Texts has an essay somewhere near the beginning where Gass talks about picking up something of Stein's, can't remember what, staying up all night reading cover-to-cover, then staying up the whole next day/night re-reading it. What I remember taking away from it was Gass being at once perplexed and utterly elated by the way Stein blew up Gass' notions about "how to read."

Can't find the essay (and I know I'm grossly misremembering the specifics), but I think this little clip from this 1976 Paris Review interview kind of touches on it:

INTERVIEWER

You’ve said that when you first started writing you wrote only sentences. Was this the result of your philosophical skepticism about language or a program of exercises?

GASS

Experiments. I have no skepticism about language. I know it can bamboozle, but I am a believer. No. My experiments were stimulated by my reading of Gertrude Stein. I didn’t really get to know her work until I was in graduate school. Talk about having your head tipped. I suddenly realized that I didn’t know anything about the basic forms that I was supposed to be managing. Nothing. So I studied her very carefully. I am still studying her, and I have always learned a lot. She made me understand how little I knew about what could be done with the basic units of all writing. And she raised philosophical questions about what the basic unit really was, or whether there was one, and about the functions of grammar. In philosophy we were interested in some of the same things then, but we weren’t then raising important aesthetic issues. Now every issue is aesthetic. I don’t know which is worse. But one of the wonderful things about Gertrude is that her repetitions rearrange the aesthetic grammar of the sentence and impose this new or special grammar upon the ordinary syntax of English. When I started to examine what she was up to, I realized that I had to begin to get a feel, the way a painter would, of what happens when you try a sentence this way or try it that. To write sentences out of context is a fool’s business, but I set about doing the fool’s business. You can’t really talk very sensibly about the content of a sentence out of the context of its use, but you can talk a lot about the form of the sentence and how the forms are interlaced and how they interact within a sentence. I practiced a long time, I mean a long time, writing sentences and connecting sentences and generally fiddling around. I think I learned something. But not enough. I’m still doing it.

tender butts

strange mental links we make: read some of this today, and my first thought- it reads just like an Inform 7 script! don't think it'd be much of an adventure though.

I read 'blood on the dining room floor' the other day. I'm not sure how i feel about it.