In my last post I reviewed Gertrude Stein’s poetry collection, Tender Buttons. It is a collection of prose poems about mundane objects, but described in very obtuse ways. It is split into three sections: Objects, Food, and Rooms.

In this post, I want to do a close reading of the first poem in the book, “A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass,” to show what Stein is trying to do in this little book which I’ve dubbed “pointer hell.” Here is the text of the poem (which is now public domain by the way):

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

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.

Whoa. If you’re anything like me, the first time you read that it sounded like word salad. But can we extract any meaning at all from it?

A carafe, that is a blind glass. Let’s start with the title and imagine this poem is the poetic equivalent of a still life piece of art. “A carafe” is pretty straightforward, that’s the object the poem is about, but what is a blind glass? Well, carafes are often made of glass and are like glasses which hold liquid. Perhaps it is “blind” because it is not transparent or it is filled with dark liquid, thus it cannot be seen though; it is “blind.” It is a kind of thing that is made in glass. It is a cousin because it is like a drinking glass, but different.

It is a spectacle because we are looking at the thing, but perhaps also because it is like the lens of a pair of eyeglasses (aka. spectacles). Light can pass through it and be distorted. But, it is nothing strange, just a regular old carafe.

Red wine inside the carafe could be the single hurt color. “Hurt” because it looks like blood or a purple bruise. The carafe is an arrangement in the sense that it was put there in a certain way.

Ok, here is where it gets really trippy: in a system to pointing. WTF?

Remember, this is a poem not a photograph like the one I’ve included above. This carafe the poem is discussing exists only in our mind’s eye. It was conjured up there by a series of words, by language. Language is the system that uses symbols to point at things and this carafe has been arranged within it to demonstrate the nature of language.

All this and not ordinary. When pondering the carafe in this way makes you notice the deeper nature of language it takes on all this meaning and thus is no longer just an ordinary object.

Not unordered in not resembling. When you see the object in this new way it seems different. It no longer “resembles” itself, but yet it still has order and meaning to it. Likewise, the poem might use words and syntax in an unconventional way, but this is not to say that they have no intended meaning behind them.

The difference is spreading. When you see the lesson of the poem, you start to notice it more… like the feeling you get by saying a common word over and over until it sounds foreign and weird. That feeling spreads throughout this collection like the refracted and distorted light through a blind glass, that is a carafe.

I can’t blame anyone for hating this book and its pretension. Stein was down with the whole “meta” hipster, overly self-aware, pseudo-intellectual, ironically un-ironic mentality way before it was cool. Perhaps it is even fair to describe this book and the sort of art it represents as dead-end, navel-gazing, mental masturbation. 99% of this kind of thing is utter garbage and not worth your time. Tender Buttons is that other 1%.

Stein treads the line between sense and nonsense so delicately here that an earnest close reading gives you the vague sense that the meaning is just out of reach and if only your arm was a fraction longer you could get a grasp onto something tangible. Like a weak swimmer caught up by flood waters, you struggle to grab onto mossy rocks or slimy roots. Your leg smashes against something solid underwater, but you can’t see what. Gasping for air you are as likely as not to get a mouthful of water. A bloated indistinct carcass floats by, followed by what is likely a human turd. Eventually this feeling ends because either you read the last page or you’ve given up on the assumption that meaning exists in this book and stopped reading.

As a computer programmer, the best way I can describe this book is as what we call “pointer hell.” This is when a computer program’s collection of memory and pointers into that memory get all jumbled up and whatnot. Things get confusing fast, then your computer crashes.

This is what Stein is doing with language. You see, words are merely pointers to things, not the things themselves. And sometimes, words are pointers to other words which are pointers to things. And so on. Stein drains words of their typical meanings and associations, reassigns them according to her whims (some detectable, some not), and meditates on the resulting “arrangement in a system to pointing.”

I get whiffs of commentary on sex, societal norms, and the patriarchy herein, helped along no doubt by my existing knowledge of Stein’s biography, but the overarching theme of Tender Buttons is the meaning of reference itself and how one can go about speaking of the nature of reference using the tools of reference. “[T]ranslate more than translate the authority, show the choice.”

Read this book at Project Gutenberg. See original page scans of the first edition at Archive.org. If you’re looking for a physical copy, I recommend the Dover Publications edition.

In a follow-up post, I will discuss the first poem in this collection, “A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass.”

In this frosty winter weather I keep thinking back to last autumn when I visited Robert Frost’s house in Franconia, New Hampshire. The colorful trees wrapped you in warm reds and yellows. All was quiet and peaceful.

While he lived in this house, he wrote some of his most famous poems, including “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “Fire and Ice.” These were included in a collection entitled New Hampshire published in 1923, which is probably what earned him the Nobel Prize the following year. But, the poem that keeps coming to my mind these days is “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Indeed, Mr. Frost. Indeed.

Here are my personal top 5 favorite books in the order in which I discovered them.

1. Walden, Henry David Thoreau

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

I discovered him in high school along with Ralph Waldo Emerson (after whom I named one of my kids). Both of these guys blew my mind then and still do. Of everything Transcendental I’ve read, Walden is the most accessible and practical and appeals to both my intellectual and emotional side. Someday I will write an essay entitled “Why I Am Not a Transcendentalist,” but I still derive much meaning and pleasure from their writings and lives.

2. Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

I also discovered Tolkien in high school through The Hobbit. If it wasn’t for Lord of the Rings, then that book would be at this spot. The scope of Rings is so grand that it is not only an immersive masterpiece of fiction, but offers insight into so many areas of life: political philosophy, ethics, linguistics, literary theory, etc.

3. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!

Whenever I read that I want to stand up and shout “Yes! YES!” like Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School. I should be memorizing passages of this book like Bible verses. To put it anachronistically, this is the atheistic, seafaring American Lord of the Rings written 100 years earlier. Like Ishmael:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

4. Leaves of Grass (1st Ed.), Walt Whitman

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

I specify the 1st edition because it is a single, unified work dating from the outset of Whitman’s career. More common is the “Deathbed” edition from the end of his life which is quite different (ie. more discursive and diluted). It was inspired by an essay of Ralph Waldo Emerson‘s and Whitman sent him a copy when it was first published. I love Whitman’s celebration of personal experience and individualism.

5. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.

Elizabeth Bennet is the best character in all of English literature. You know that “what if” game where you imagine dinner with a favorite fictional character, historical figure, etc.? Mine would be having ice cream in the park with Lizzie and making fun of people who walk by. I love Lizzie Bennet. Don’t tell my wife.

This book is flawless. The characters are the realest real people ever to be not really real. The plot is more or less cliche (at least to moderns who have lived in this novel’s wake), but the characters are so fully formed and the writing is so good that you believe that these characters are making their own actual choices and are not mere puppets in the hands of the writer with an agenda. Instead, these are real people who just so happened to live this perfectly cliched life.

I was a Dragonlance fan as a kid well before I had even heard of Tolkien. While I appreciate Tolkien as an adult, even thinking back today I believe I would’ve still preferred Dragonlance in middle school. It is simply less pretentious. I have started re-reading the Chronicles trilogy (I’m into Dragons of Winter Night at the moment) and am aware how terrible the writing is. However, at the same time I am noticing that sometimes Dragonlance does something better than Tolkien.

The Dragonlance universe is a huge ripoff of Middle-Earth and many of its books are poorly written. Tolkien’s creation is vastly superior in a thousand ways. Let’s just get that out of the way up front. However, there are a handful of cases where Dragonlance outshines the master. Let me discuss a few:

1. The Portrayal of Magic

Tolkien’s magic is ill-defined, unhistorical, and hampered by his somber Christian piety. Dragonlance does it better. Its magic bears some resemblance to what real folk magic was actually like. It is a craft that human (or equivalent) beings practice to assert control over aspects of life they typically cannot control.

2. Paganism

Tolkien does us a disservice by co-opting much of the culture of pre-Christian Northern Europe and whitewashing their paganism. He tries to have his cake and eat it too by largely omitting religion while claiming his work is deeply orthodox Christian. I love the guy, but that is bullshit. Pre-historical England was pagan; Faerie tradition is fundamentally pagan. His monotheistic kludge sucks. Dragonlance does it better. It has a pantheon of gods. Clerics are assisted by them through prayers. The gods contend with each other. The magical system is related to pantheon.

3. More extensible

In A Secret Vice, Tolkien complained that artificial languages can suffer from “too many successive cooks”–a problem that I suspect he would also warn against in regards to large world-building projects. Certainly, Dragonlance has suffered this malady at times. However, Middle-Earth suffers from the opposite fate–no successive cooks. We are stuck retelling the same stories and digging up minutiae in Tolkien’s manuscripts. Lord of the Rings Online offers some hope in this area, but it is still rooted firmly in the existing narratives and is not the same medium. The canon is stagnant. To me, Middle-Earth has little hope of growing beyond what Tolkien gave us. Dragonlance does it better. Because it is not inextricably tied to its creators, it has expanded well beyond the period of the War of the Lance (to both past and future ages). The “open canon” model has its flaws, but navel-gazing pedantry isn’t one of them.