View 2 comments. Feb 22, Madeline rated it did not like it Shelves: assigned-reading , ugh , poetry. A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
Gertrude Stein was once quoted as saying that Ernest Hemingway was "all bullfights and bullshit. At least Hemingway threw some bullfighting in every now and then. Read for: Modern Poetry View all 35 comments. Gertrude Stein drops acid and describes items from domestic life using language generally reserved for Georgia O'Keefe paintings.
I frequently found myself getting impatient with it in that itchy skin sort of way where I just wanted it to be over, while at other times it felt like I was having a lovely swim in a sea of Stein's sensory perceptions.
In short, I'm ambivalent. Or maybe I am reading too much into it in that regard? Whatever the case may be, I think it's pretty important to consider where your head is at while reading Tender Buttons , as it can have an unfair influence either way.
I guess I've been feeling more concrete and less "stream-of-conscious-ee" lately, and so wasn't in the open, fragmented, airy frame of mind necessary to take this thing on. This is one to be reread and reconsidered at a later date. The Broadcast album is definitely way, WAY better, though. Of that much I am certain. Review fail. Moving on, then View all 3 comments. This is kind of the literary equivalent of the guy who takes a shit and gets it put into a museum as sculpture, sneezes onto a canvass, etc.
I can see the argument that it's "profound" in its implied questioning of "what really is art" but is there a future in it? Does anybody enjoy it? Well, judging from the reviews, some people do. I don't, but usually when I don't like something I at least have a clue as to why other people do.
With Stein, I mean, it's nonsense, not the Lewis Carroll kind, but This is kind of the literary equivalent of the guy who takes a shit and gets it put into a museum as sculpture, sneezes onto a canvass, etc.
With Stein, I mean, it's nonsense, not the Lewis Carroll kind, but really just words thrown together at random.
What are the "pleasures" of such a text? The musicality of the words is still there, I get that big fan of the Ursonate. Maybe I was just so trapped in my normal mode of reading for content that I missed the beauty of the sounds. Honestly, though, I'm not in love with the sounds of conversational English words thrown together willy-nilly; I'd rather listen to someone speaking German for the sound of the words.
If I find myself long on sleep and short on hallucinations I open this little paperback and wait for the words to start pushing crazy around in my brain. Once thoroughly confused, I close the book, satisfied.
Its like pages covered in little droplets of word rain. Sep 24, Daniel Lomax rated it did not like it. It was a pea, a pea pour it in its not a succession, not it a simple, not it a so election, election with. In this sense her project is the literary counterpart of Stravinsky's "It was a garden and belows belows straight.
In this sense her project is the literary counterpart of Stravinsky's twelve-tone composition, a deliberate effort to break away from unnecessary constraints on the language of music, which themselves constrain the way we think.
The problem is that, in an overzealous attempt to emancipate the language, she exiles it. What appears in Tender Buttons is not really language, because it doesn't really mean anything. James Joyce's later works may be incredibly difficult to understand, but at least there is something to be understood. For a comparison, it might help to look to Don van Vliet, otherwise known as Captain Beefheart. He would often paint in black, white and grey, so that he explained your imagination could fill out the colours for itself.
But this is exactly the opposite of what Gertrude Stein does: she provides the vocabulary - the colours, if you like - and leaves you to make something of it, to form it into shapes.
One might as well put a dictionary through a blender. This isn't just a matter of style over substance. The two are inextricable. The style is the manner in which you deliver the substance, and if there is no substance I really don't think I can say anything of the style.
Stein wanted to sound lyrical, but again the way language looks and sounds derives from what it means. Have you ever overheard two people fluently speaking a foreign language on the bus, and it sounds like there are no gaps between the words? That's because there aren't. There aren't when other English people speak either: your brain inserts them for you. Everything about the way language looks, sounds, feels , can't be entirely pulled apart from what it means.
And I defy you to read bits like this It's a crap, a crap, crap a, a book, crap book, a crap book, it's crap. As such, Gertrude Stein's idea is more interesting than her book, the theory better than what it entails. Or as Voltaire wrote to Rousseau: "Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid". Jun 17, Mat rated it really liked it Shelves: prose-poetry , modernism , abstract , experimental. This reads like a cut-up, that is to say that the words, the words, words and the, have been scrambled or reassembled to create striking instances of imagery juxtaposed in surprising and exciting ways and highly original and fascinating collocations as a result.
This is a book to be appreciated in terms of its wordplay and harmonics rather than in terms of any strict notion of meaning. Just like in cubism, new and incongruous images and ideas are placed alongside more contiguous ones. If you are This reads like a cut-up, that is to say that the words, the words, words and the, have been scrambled or reassembled to create striking instances of imagery juxtaposed in surprising and exciting ways and highly original and fascinating collocations as a result.
If you are unfamiliar with Stein, this is definitely not a good diving-off spot so instead start with her more 'conventional' works such as Three Lives or even better the terrific Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas see my review on that for more information. May 04, Aileen rated it it was amazing. But just read this for fun. This is a book that literature classes can't deal with--and will make literature classes something you can't deal with.
Nov 21, Adrian Alvarez rated it really liked it. Well this isn't for everyone but like some of the others here on Goodreads I have an unjustifiable love for Tender Buttons.
Is it just a small selection of modernist gibberish? Is there a great key that can be used to unlock significant meaning from Stein's famous tome of word salad? Maybe not. I don't really know.
Keeping in mind her project to paint with language like an artist Then again, that is how I'm starting to think of modernism in general. All meaning making aside, I love this book. I couldn't tell you why. I just like the way the words sound. The pleasurable catharsis of meaning always feels just out of reach so the work never provides that sort of satisfaction. Still, in a weird sort of tantric way, there is simply joy in the way Stein rolls around in language. That's the entire poem.
Frustrating if read in a certain way, beautiful if read in another. There were longer poems and certainly poems that tested my endurance and focus but all in all this is a book I'm going to dip into every once in a while because it reminds me what the best poetry can: that language doesn't only convey meaning in one way and that reading language doesn't always have to recite the same discourse. Oct 27, J. Keely rated it it was ok Shelves: poetry , reviewed.
Mostly a collection of self-pleasuring on the topic of difference for its own sake. Some ear there for sound and concept, but mostly ringing as an overbearing attempt to be new. Stein's hatred of punctuation strikes one as an affectation, but then so do most of her opinions or ideas. I suppose Hemingway's sense that she was 'always right' stemmed from the lacking of his imagination beyond that which bolstered his sense of self, and perhaps in that their true connection.
Stein's importance to l Mostly a collection of self-pleasuring on the topic of difference for its own sake. However, notable selections include "Suppose an Eyes," "A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass" in which she seemingly announces her intentions towards Cubism, as well as "In Between," which is often read as a feminist poem because of its strong though abstract themes of sensuality. Another noteworthy poem is "Orange In" from "Food," which contains both the repetition and word-combining that many consider to be cubist.
Still avant-garde and experimental ninety years since its first publication, Tender Buttons has inspired generations of experimental poets, providing inspiration for the Language movement, as well as a variety of imitations— both successful and not.
She is beloved and cited as influence by many poets and novelists, including William Gass, Sherwood Anderson, E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, and Harryette Mullen. National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. Normative grammar relies on subject and object distinctions, and to the degree that Stein generates a writing that is prior to this binary, she also reaches for a form of experience prior to normative legibility.
The illegible faithfully leaves a minimal margin of otherness intact. It also conveys a refusal to reduce all things to thematization. Illegibility at the level of the signifier thus occurs because Stein gestures to the writing of a nonhuman language, if such a thing is possible.
The relation of objects to other objects cannot be reproduced in a human-based subject-verb-object grammar. Thus, if objects themselves could talk, perhaps indeed their speech would sound like the subjectless segments of Tender Buttons.
Of course, inanimate objects have no thoughts and no mouths, but this still does not mean that objects have no bearing on matters of concern in the world. Objects have narratives of their own, narratives not dependent on our observations and our language. Objects themselves do not have their own intentions, but this does not mean they are entirely reducible to the realm of human intentions.
Bruno Latour has discussed repeatedly how objects need not be recognized as full-fledged subjects but still perform as agents, doing things in the world. Furthermore, the stories of objects are not necessarily reducible to the normative rules of our language — hence the need for a new language and new form of communication, giving modernist form a particular mandate.
That this communication will be at least partially anthropomorphic does not defeat its relevance for representing nonhuman language. The existence of things is defined by activities and conditions such as use, disuse, juxtaposition, being out of reach, contact, breakdown, repetition, etc.
Words can replicate these relations and not appear to make sense, from the viewpoint of standard grammar. But from the viewpoint of things, these relations, written as words, are descriptive fantasies of the world objects exist in. Stein uses so much repetition in part because this is a primary mode of existence of technical objects, especially modern machines.
Indeed, there is something inhuman about repetition to begin with — computers will ponder forever the difference between a zero and a one. Yet even inanimate things speaking need not be far-fetched — modernist objects as various as newspapers, telephones, gramophones, and dolls emit language shaped partially by their material qualities as things.
If a toilet, perhaps this is the first poem ever written as an ode to toilet paper. Stein often emphasizes politeness and courteous behavior, a politesse applicable to persons and things, even in seemingly vulgar situations. Politeness is her default mode of attention to persons and things in a writing that does not decide beforehand who or what can or cannot speak. The refusal of reference in Stein is also a refusal to make language centered on human usage.
Why do this? Modernists experimented with narrative forms that did not necessarily center on the self or the human species. Daily experience is composed of a variety of animate and inanimate interactions, many of them not directed to humans or not yet legible to the recipient. Writing that really reflects daily experience must somehow capture the simultaneous knowledge, limits of knowledge, and other forms of knowing that are not directed at us.
If we talk of the perspective of the carafe according to the carafe itself, what would we say about food, which includes an animate component? Still life art, or indeed any set of objects on a table, comprise a composition.
Composition applies to things intentionally constructed or unintentionally combined, things artificial as well as natural, a landscape painting or the nutritive ingredients in a soil. Stein composed her work out of whatever ingredients she came upon, from commonly used words, everyday objects, personal sensations, and local affairs, to major historical figures and events.
These all constituted a continuous surround around her. Instead, she wrote in an aesthetics of surrounds, observing them and living in them. Donald Gallup New York: Knopf, , Cited hereafter as Writings.
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