What did it mean???????
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>>25351477That's a good point thanks anon
>>25351233https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYI5bhiebUwhad no idea this shit was named after a book
>>25351233>this makes sand.god this book fucking rules. Unironically. I believe it's Roast Beef. Truly an incredible poem.
>>25351233Trying to find "meaning" - in the way of making a semantic sense - you're not going to find. You read the book feeling a sense of meaning but it always slip away. Stop trying to make sense of it. You'll still feel weird senses of "meaning" float up, but you won't be able to make sense of them. It's pure prosody. Have you heard the lyrics to a song and thought "wow, that sounded great" but have no idea what it meant? This is like an entire book of that. So if you want to find "meaning" from it then, you need to take a step removed and ask why a book without logical sense would still be able to produce feelings of meaning. Why would it be deeply enjoyable? This would be the "meaning" of the book. Decades later,Chomsky would ask similar questions from an academic linguistic perspective with his famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
>>25351753This motorboat >>25351477 is better than this >>25352998 pretentious gobbledygook.
>>25351233There have been major attempts at "decoding" Tender Buttons by people 100x more autistic and dedicated than you, so I'd advise you to give up. This is Stein's most inaccessible book, and in this period writing has gotten the closest it's been to painting, visual arts, in that the point of the piece is the strategy of depicting objects. If you've read The Making of Americans or her other "portraiture" work (she calls them "portraits", and they're sort of in the tradition of Edgar Lee Masters' poems in the Spoon River Anthology, which was one of the most popular books in America at the time (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1280/pg1280-images.html, but denarrativized, since G.S. believed that depicting things was about the observation of current details rather than remembering people, which is often narrativized and generalized) you'll see that she's basically attempting to do what she did with people with objects. The poems don't really "mean", they're just a bundle of observations and associations related to household objects and the daily intimate life of her and Alice B. Toklas.Some comments from her own lecture, Portraits and Repetition:"So here we have it. There was the period of The Making of Americans portraiture, when by listening and talking I conceived at every moment the existence of some one, and I put down each moment that I had the existence of that one inside in me until I had completely emptied myself of this that I had had as a portrait of that one [...] These were the early portraits I did. Then this slowly changed to portraits of spaces inclosed with or without somebody in them but written in the same way in the successive moments of my realizing them. As I said if you like, it was like a cinema picture made up of succession and each moment having its own emphasis that is its own difference and so there was the moving and the existence of each moment as it was in me [...] Then as I said I had the feeling that something should be included and that something was looking, and so concentrating on looking I did the Tender Buttons because it was easier to do objects than people."It should be stated here that Gertrude Stein's writing is obviously compulsive and springs from experiments with automatic writing she did during her undergrad. You likely can't reverse-engineer the construction of these works, and, again, people far more autistic than you have tried: Gass has some entertaining essays on Stein, incl. one on Tender Buttons. But that isn't the best way to enjoy the book, in my opinion. >>25352998 was mostly right, but I don't think it's really totally about prosody, though Stein is a rhythmic writer; I think it's more about looking at the associations and trying to see things in new ways, or to explore what images come to you as you read. To do that, you need to ignore your preconceived ideas of what objects "look" like, is the best way I can say it in the character limit.
This: >>25351477.
After you're primed fiddling buttons you can dive for trout.
>>25355078>introduction by Billy CollinsUnexpected
>>25355079According to the intro he frequented the same bar as Brautigan, hovered around in the same social circle, and read Trout Fishing when it was just a manuscript.
>>25351477Sweating sweater puppies
