Stepping on Tender Buttons: “Malachite.” & “An Umbrella.”

LUDIC LUNCH IN THE BUTTONS BOX

THE BOOK ..........................-           TENDER BUTTONS

THE SUBBOOK ...................-           OBJECTS

THE SUBPOEM ...................-           MALACHITE: NUMBER 33

WORD COUNT......................-           18

THE SUBPOEM ...................-           AN UMBRELLA: NUMBER 34

WORD COUNT......................-           24

STANZAS..............................-           1 each

THE LEADER........................-           THE STEINY ROAD POET

CO-LLABORATORS..............-           MODPO STUDENTS/THE BUTTONS

GENRE..................................-           VIRTUAL OPERA

LOCATION............................-USA, UK, Australia, Philippines, S. Africa, Canada.

TIME......................................-           ALL HOURS OF EARTH’S CLOCK

TONE.....................................-           HEADY

“An umbrella is a contextual framework which attempts to cover everything.” Allan Keeton

MALACHITE.

The sudden spoon is the same in no size. The sudden spoon is the wound in the decision.

AN UMBRELLA.

Coloring high means that the strange reason is in front not more in front behind. Not more in front in peace of the dot.

To open this discussion by The Buttons Collective, the Steiny Road Poet suggested that the objects of “Malachite.” and “An Umbrella.”—spoon and umbrella—had handles. Then she suggested that how to get a handle on these two subpoems might be through the words decision and reason.

Among the association these subpoems elicited were: love-making; folklore of malachite; Egyptian cosmetics; copper & measuring spoons; fish lures; post-Stein umbrella pop culture: Mary Poppins, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Singing in the Rain, Jason Mraz’s song “The Forecast”; Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay “The philosophy of umbrellas”; tightrope walking; punctuation as symbolic spoons and exclamation marks; Pointillism & Matisse; Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots; the politics of mining; the malachite sunbird; and metapoetics. What follows are some highlights from the study session.

  

ON LOVE-MAKING

Allan Keeton’s first comments were, “I love these two. There is something erotic in all that fronting & behinding.”

Steiny agreed saying, “Allan, yes, they seem tactile and sexual. Spooning in 'Malachite.', a visceral description that seems like spooning in 'An Umbrella." with emphasis on front—front occurs 3 times.” 

Tamboura Gaskins saw “An Umbrella.” as “beautifully-expressed love note from Stein to Toklas”:

“Coloring high means that… ==> Because I am so high-colored… ==> Because I have such a strong, vivid personality…

“…the strange reason is in front… ==>… it is perceived, strangely, that I am in front… ==> …that I am the leader… ==> …that I am the dominant one…

“…not more in front… ==> …I am not more in front ==> …I am not the leader… ==> …I am not the dominant one… ==> I do not overshadow you

“…behind. ==> be ∙ hind ==> be a female deer ==> be a dear ==> B. dear ==> Alice B. Toklas, dear 

“Not more in front… ==> No, not better than you ==> not out in front casting a shadow on you

“…in peace of the dot. ==> Peace, be still, dot ==> Rest assured, do∙t ==> Be peaceful, doe T ==> Be at peace, dear Alice B. Toklas

“Simply marvelous!!  Great way to make up after a falling out!”

Steiny notes here that the discussion for “Water Raining.” speculated about the possibility of a love spat.

Eleanor Smagarinsky followed up on Tamboura’s love note interpretation with:

“Tamboura wrote:

… it is perceived, strangely, that I am in front…

“I'm tempted to see it also as:

...the stranger is always in front --- meaning: when I am in public (in front), I wear a different face .... a public persona ... and it seems perhaps like I don't love you... as if I am a stranger...

“The words front and back remind me of running a restaurant - there's the back of the house and the front of the house. I imagine, from what I've heard on some of our threads, that Alice was more back of the house and considered by most to be the woman behind the woman. Perhaps this is Gertrude's way of saying the work at the back of the house is more important than what I do at the front.” 

Stepping on Tender Buttons: “A Drawing.” Part 2 of 2

BLUESKYING THE BUTTONS BOX

THE BOOK ..........................-           TENDER BUTTONS

THE SUBBOOK ...................-           OBJECTS

THE SUBPOEM ...................-           A DRAWING: NUMBER 30

STANZAS..............................-           1

WORD COUNT......................-          38

THE LEADER........................-           THE STEINY ROAD POET

CO-LLABORATORS..............-           MODPO STUDENTS/THE BUTTONS

GENRE..................................-           VIRTUAL OPERA

LOCATION............................-           USA, UK, Australia, Philippines, S. Africa, Canada.

TIME......................................-           ALL HOURS OF EARTH’S CLOCK

TONE.....................................-           EXPANSIVE

“Maybe it's just what comes up in our minds is just part of the overall way things work in the universe—The Theory of Everything.” Karren Alenier

A DRAWING.

The meaning of this is entirely and best to say the mark, best to say it best to show sudden places, best to make bitter, best to make the length tall and nothing broader, anything between the half.

To review, Peter Treanor set out the following comment like a plate of milk for a finicky cat and then we Buttons all moved on to other topics as noted in Stepping on Tender Buttons: “A Drawing.” Part 1 of 2:

The meaning of this is

And there is the goddess Isis

NOT TO MISS MYTH

Fifteen days later the Steiny Road Poet mining the artifacts of the study session on “A Drawing.” challenged Peter to revisit the possible connection the myth of Isis might have on Tender Buttons and this particular subpoem.

Peter who sees anagrammatically, reconfigured this is as th Isis. For the moment, Dear Reader, we will ignore the disembodied th.

While Steiny is fully aware that Stein scholars say that Gertrude Stein’s writing contains no allusions, Tender Buttons is not like any other work Stein wrote. Against all counsel, Steiny and her band of merry Buttons have been enjoying the rich associations that the letters, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, titles have been eliciting. Indeed many of the associations look mightily like allusions—passing references made obliquely to obscure things or ideas.  What made Steiny interested particularly in pursuing the Isis association—as big a reach as this is (oops, can’t avoid the IS-IS-ness), was research she was doing on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire where one scholar talked about how Apollinaire reconfigured old myths regularly in his poetry. Because Stein considered him a brilliant mind and said so in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Steiny thought it might be worth going out on a limb to look at Isis.


SISTER-BROTHER PAIRS

So Peter dug in saying, “I think she [Stein] would be drawn to the strong female goddess imagery, and the relationship with her brother especially. Even if their relationship wasn’t sexual ( GS and Leo), it was intense and productive. And was so completely ripped apart when Alice came along as lover, it seems like there were intense feelings and tensions between brother and sister that may or may not have been overt and/or realised. Isis and Osiris produced Horus (god of cultivation, farming). GS and Leo gave birth to the infants of Modernism.”

She [Isis] was the friend of slaves, sinners, artisans and the downtrodden, but she also listened to the prayers of the wealthy, maidens, aristocrats and rulers.

“Seems to be a great description of GS's role in the salons of Paris,” Peter glossed.

She married her brother, Osiris, and she conceived Horus with him [after Osiris was dead and resurrected]. Isis was instrumental in the resurrection of Osiris. It was believed that the Nile River flooded every year because of the tears of sorrow that Isis wept for Osiris.

“Well,” Peter wondered. “She and Leo were certainly very close, a marriage of minds, if nothing else. And obviously linked together with a passion, the nature of their complete and catastrophic split points to a great intensity.”

After she assimilated many of the roles of Hathor, Isis's headdress is replaced with that of Hathor’s—the horns of a cow on her head, with the solar disk between them, and often with her original throne symbol atop the solar disk. Sometimes she also is represented as a cow, or with a cow's head. 

Peter said, “Associations with the cow and GS does describe her [Gertrude] and Alice as cows and having a cow, as having an orgasm.”