Stepping on Tender Buttons: “Peeled Pencil, Choke.”, “It Was Black, Black Took.”. “This Is This Dress, Aider.” Part 1 of 2

CARD SHARKS IN THE BUTTONS BOX

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

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

THE SUBPOEM ...................-          PEELED PENCIL, CHOKE: NUMBER 56

WORD COUNT......................-           3

STANZA(S)............................-           1

THE SUBPOEM ...................-         IT WAS BLACK, BLACK TOOK: NUMBER 57

WORD COUNT......................-           27

STANZA(S)............................-           2

THE SUBPOEM ...................-          THIS IS THIS DRESS, AIDER: NUMBER 58

WORD COUNT......................-           32

STANZA(S)............................-           2

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.....................................-           CHAOTIC WITH A SHIMMY

“These have not been ‘pretty little poems,’ and there's a threatening violence throughout.” Eleanor Smagarinsky

“It's carnage in there, is no letter safe?” Peter Treanor

“Nope, it's a balesome time for the alphabet.” Allan Keeton

PEELED PENCIL, CHOKE.

Rub her coke.

IT WAS BLACK, BLACK TOOK.

Black ink best wheel bale brown.

Excel lent not a hull house, not a pea soup, no bill no care, no precise no past pearl pearl goat.

THIS IS THIS DRESS, AIDER.

Aider, why, aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers.

A jack in kill her, a jack in, makes a meadowed king, makes a to let.

There is something historically old about the last three subpoems of section 1 “Objects.” While all three poems have a comma in its title, an old punctuation style that Stein eschews (only four subpoems of “Objects” have a comma in its title), the pencil, a tool important to a writer, came about in 1565 when someone put graphite (graphite was discovered in Borrowdale, England, in 1560) into a wooden shaft. Before the discovery of graphite, soft metals, such as lead, were used for writing. Graphite was known in those early days as black lead.

Black ink is featured in “It Was Black, Black Took.” The language of this subpoem points to some basic objects though some are negated—wheel, hull (husk or pod), house, pea, soup, goat. The title makes the Steiny Road Poet think of the chess piece called a rook, which is the king’s house or castle. The game of chess started possibly in Eastern India 280 to 550 BC. Chess is a game of strategy and Tender Buttons is Stein positioning herself in the male-dominated literary world. She is worried about being protected (covered) but also about advancing.

Gaming seems rampant in “This Is This Dress, Aider.” However, the word whow is a throwback variant of how  or how much that dates to the late medieval period into the early 1800s.

Among the topics discussed by the Buttons Collective were gender and grammar, Lesbian slang, sexual symbols, Hull House, King’s Meadow of Reading Abbey England, Edvard Munch, card games and chess, and knitting. Participating in this discussion were Karren Alenier [a.k.a. Steiny], Tamboura Gaskins, Dave Green, Allan Keeton, Nicola Quinn, Claudia Schumann, Eleanor Smagarinsky, and Peter Treanor. Here are a few highlights from the study session as well as some additional thoughts by Steiny:

OF RUBBER COATS & COCKS

Steiny led the charge of the Buttons Collective in a romp of sexual associations about “Peeled Pencil, Choke.” with the net result of a circumcised penis with a rubber coat (condom) or a rubber cock (dildo).

Karren Alenier: [a.k.a. The Steiny Road Poet]

Rub her coke==>rubber coat [condom]

Tamboura Gaskins:

Peeled pencil ==> circumcised penis

Choke ==> well...some like it rough

Rub her coke ==> rubber cock ==> dildo

However Eleanor Smagarinsky moved the discussion to a higher plane by quoting Roland Barthes short book The Pleasure of the Text, which addresses the demands Gertrude Stein puts on her readers—that is, the reader must engage with the text to derive something from it whether it is pleasure or knowledge.

PLEASURES OF TEXT

Eleanor Smagarinsky:

From The Pleasure of the Text, by Roland Barthes:

"The pleasure of the text is like that untenable, impossible, purely novelistic instant so relished by Sade's libertine when he manages to be hanged and then to cut the rope at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss."

"...the pledge of continuous jubilation, the moment when by its very excess verbal pleasure chokes and reels into bliss."

However, Karren still working on the visceral level added this:

Karren:

“Maybe Gertrude needs a rubber coat after she wears her pencil down to a nub because there were a lot of folks metaphorically throwing rotten eggs at her.”

Stein may have had the 1913 premiere of the Rite of Spring ballet in mind when the audience rioted because they didn’t like Stravinsky’s music and Diaghilev’s choreography.

Working aslant, Eleanor quoted from “Kyoto Panorama Project,” a short story in the story collection Disorientalism by Kyoko Yoshida

Eleanor:

.....If you turn your skin, flesh and fat inside out just like you do a sweater, you turn into a woman. You become a perfect woman, more real than any woman out there. Everybody knows it but no one dares to speak of it, this so-called open secret, and if you insist you've never heard of it, it's not that you've been ignorant but just oblivious.....

......Womanly women, sewing woman, office women, anchorwomen —they are all fake. They are all men's women. Lucky enough if you could meet a genuine woman ever. Rarer is a genuine man.

“Stein turns gender and grammar inside out, and this is really powerful in the sentence Rub her coke. Because, yeah, girls are ‘fancy on the inside,’ not the ‘outside.’ If you could turn a woman's body inside out, would you get a man? And vice versa. Is that the difference? Stein assigns a coke (cock?) to the woman (her), as compared to the titular ‘peeled pencil’ (penis?), which is (perhaps?) told to choke (get lost?). Lesbian couples are (endlessly, annoyingly, rudely) asked ‘Which is the woman and which is the man?,’ right....yeah....because that's what their love is all about, turning each other inside out so as to pretend to be a different gender....not!

“Much as it pains me to write this, there is no such thing as a ‘perfect woman.’ It gladdens me, however, to add that there is also no such thing as a ‘real woman’ (an offensive term). So I reckon Yoshida is having some fun with turning these concepts inside-out, and considering how wonderfully surreal her work is, I think she's winking at her readers—as is Stein.”

Peter Treanor:

“Peeling a pencil

rub her, rubber out (in the UK erasers are called rubbers)”

PEELED PENCIL, CHOKE.

Rub her coke.



“rub her (H) out. erase H from choke and you get coke.”



”Is there a word for a poem that does what it says it’s going to do in the text on the text? That’s what Stein done here I think.”

Allan Keeton:

“Beautiful, Peter! The poem just went ahead & rubbed out the h that the poem as peeled pencil wrote!”

Peter:

“It's carnage in there, is no letter safe?

Karren:

“Nah, Peter. No letter is safe. Not if Alice is letting them, renting them, rubbing them out!”

Allan:

“Nope, it's a balesome time for the alphabet.”

Eleanor:

“I bet the Oulipeans would have a word for that.”

While some might consider Peter’s observation about the relation of choke and coke trivial, Steiny knows that in the landscape of contemporary writing these kind of discoveries contribute to Stein’s renewal of the English language.

THE STRATEGY OF TOOK

Karren:

I keep thinking the Black Took is part of a perverted chess game -- the Black Rook. 

In chess, rook is the castle (home of the king) and Stein writes not a hull house so the house is not small like a husk (hull) but something grander perhaps.

hull  (hŭl)

n.

1.

a. The dry outer covering of a fruit, seed, or nut; a husk.

b. The enlarged calyx of a fruit, such as a strawberry, that is usually green and easily detached.

2.

a. Nautical The frame or body of a ship, exclusive of masts, engines, or superstructure.

b. The main body of various other large vehicles, such as a tank, airship, or flying boat.

3. The outer casing of a rocket, guided missile, or spaceship.

tr.v. hulled, hull·ing, hulls

To remove the hulls of (fruit or seeds).

While flipping letters of the title via a mirror (Koot Kclab, Kclab Saw Ti), Allan noticed that “It Was Black, Black Took.” uses the past tense verb was. The flipped was yields saw, the past tense of to see. Whenever Stein uses a past tense verb, the reader should pay attention since her emphasis is on the present moment, what one thinks of as now.

Now Steiny is rethinking the word took. Could it be the past tense of to take? Perhaps Stein is saying something about how she took the option to get published/printed as she did by self-publishing in 1909 her story collection Three Lives. By self-publishing she did not have to take charity or any other humiliation and this would account for the run of negatives: not a hull house, not a pea soup, no bill no care, no precise no past pearl pearl goat. The division of excellent into excel and lent might then mean that she lent herself the money for publication so she could advance (excel with) her work. Also one could read Black ink best wheel bale brown something like this: her books printed in well-defined black ink and sporting brown covers were bundled (baled) and delivered (wheel[ed]), making this a black, black took.

And in 1913, Heidelberg introduced something called the windmill platen press, which was produced into the late 1960s. Before that, small printing presses looked a lot like sewing machines. This reading of this subpoem also dovetails well with the Buttons Collective findings on “Book.”

Before Steiny leaves this association to printing, she will mention that printing has been seen in these subpoems of “Objects”: “A Plate.”, “Suppose An Eyes.”, “A Little Called Pauline.” Stein’s focus on regenerating the English language is heavily tied to the ability to get her work published and read. Thus Stein steeps Tender Buttons in the artifacts of printing.

SOUP KITCHENS AND GOAT PEARLS

Allan also researched the1890s settlement house known as Hull House (located in Chicago), which promoted education particularly for women, something Stein would have been aware of. Claudia Schumann mentioned that some of the settlement houses were known for their soup kitchens (pea soup) feeding indigents. She also suggested that other settlement houses, “offered no free food, billed you for care (service), and none of that ‘pearl pearl goat’ to step in.” Claudia pointed out that goat pearls are their excreted droppings. 

Allan rejoined that he thought no precise no past pearl pearl goat “sounds like knitting terminology— pearl 2, goat 1.”

Stepping on Tender Buttons: “A Shawl." Part 1 of 2

SIZING THE BUTTONS BOX

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

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

THE SUBPOEM ...................-          A SHAWL: NUMBER 54

WORD COUNT......................-           104

STANZA(S)............................-           6

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.....................................-           MELLIFLUOUS BUT STICKY

“Is this a prayer shawl or a fashion statement that masquerades as hat, undercoat and belt as well as other things?” Karren Alenier

“What interests me about a shawl is that it is a semi-permeable membrane, full of holes, like lace.” Mary Armour

A SHAWL.

A shawl is a hat and hurt and a red balloon and an under coat and a sizer a sizer of talk.

A shawl is a wedding, a piece of wax a little build. A shawl.

Pick a ticket, pick it in strange steps and with hollows. There is hollow hollow belt, a belt is a shawl.

A plate that has a little bobble, all of them, any so.

Please a round it is ticket.

It was a mistake to state that a laugh and a lip and a laid climb and a depot and a cultivator and little choosing is a point it.

Surely Miss Stein is up to something significant with all the subpoems in Section 1 “Objects” that pertain to things worn on the body or the body itself:

“A Method Of A Cloak.”

“A Long Dress.”

“A Red Hat.”

“A Blue Coat.”

“A Purse.”

“Eye Glasses.”

“A Petticoat.”

“A Waist.”

“A Handkerchief.”

“Colored Hats.”

“A Feather.”

“Shoes.”

“A Shawl.”

“This Is This Dress, Aider.”

and this is not to bypass:

“A Substance In A Cushion.” which has such words and phrases as costume, tassel, wear it, suit, trimming, sewing, sash

“A Piece Of Coffee.” Talks about silk, cotton, ribbon and something that may be strangely flattering

“Nothing Elegant.” which seems to have a sensitive leaning toward charm (does this point to fashion?) and things sewn

“Mildred’s Umbrella.” specifically mentioning a small sac (possibly a purse) and ribbon

“A Piano.” mentions button holder

“Chair.” which elicited extended commentary on what Civil War widows wore

“A Cloth.”, ample cloth seems to hint at Stein’s ample body

“Malachite.”, a stone used in jewelry

“Suppose An Eyes.” that features a white dress, worn lace, and leather.

“A Little Called Pauline.” sports such words as dressing, soles, spats, bow, sleeve, feather

The Steiny Road Poet conjectures that more than half of the 58 subpoems of “Objects” contain some touchstone to clothing, shoes, wearable accessories, or the body. Because Tender Buttons is a coded love poem from one woman to another, what covers the body is a logical and important theme for this work.  Clothing, particularly in Gertrude Stein’s time, represented constriction. Stein came out of the nineteenth century where women’s fashion was largely about sleeves, collars with lace, corsets, long skirts and dresses with layers of petticoats as well as hats, boots, and shawls.

One of the first things that Gertrude did with her brother Leo after she left her highly regimented life in the United States was set a new standard for dressing. She and Leo decided they would have clothes made from brown corduroy fabric, which was soft but durable. Gertrude wore a corduroy robe held together by a broach. The sister brother team also decided that sandals were preferable over shoes or boots. Releasing the body allowed for releasing the mind. Their Harvard teacher William James taught that to be a genius, one must break the constriction of habit. Within the study of “A Shaw.”, Steiny saw the connection of restrictive clothing, especially the uniforms (habits) of women college students (long skirts, long-sleeved blouses with ties at the neck—mimicking the shirts and ties worn by the male students,), as a way to hold women back from achieving creative potential. Those long skirts got in the way. Corsets sapped a woman’s breath and energy.

Among the topics elicited from the discussion of “A Shaw.” by the members of The Buttons Collective were:  fashion; wedding, birth and death traditions; shawl-as-stand-in-for-a-woman; cawl-caul-cowl; card/magic trick; and grammar, phrase construction, musicality. Here are some highlights from the discussion:

NINETEENTH CENTURY FASHION

Tamboura Gaskins:

“From what I understand, shawls were in fashion in the late 19th century--

The period of the 19th century up to the 1870s, when the fashion silhouette changed, was known as the "shawl period" because women in Europe and America wore shawls with almost all their clothing. At the beginning of that century, shawls were a necessity in a fashionable woman's wardrobe because dresses were thin and décolleté; it was a sign of gentility to wear a shawl gracefully.

“In light of this, I see hat as old hat, or old-fashioned.  So, could hat and hurt mean old-fashioned and insulting?”

SHAWL AS WOMAN; SHAWL IN WEDDING RITUAL

Pramila Venkateswaran:

“A shawl is mostly associated with a woman's garment, although men in the east do wear shawls. A shawl could be a stand-in for a woman. And a woman is hurt. In the next line, I am reminded of weddings in many cultures where the bride and groom are hidden under a shawl as part of the wedding ritual that culminates the binding or tying of the knot.

Wax is used to build stuff. Perhaps the shawl is this wedding wax that builds a marriage. But if the woman is hurt, does giving her a red balloon, as one would a child, pacify her? The under coat is like petticoat—again a word that was used as a substitute for female! And women are always sized up—whether it is their physical appearance, their talk, their accent, their whatever.

CAWL-CAUL-COWL

Mary Armour:

“This shawl reminds me of the Celtic cawl—babies born wrapped in a cawl.

Karren Alenier [a.k.a. The Steiny Road Poet]:

“OMG, Mary, yes but caul in American English. And look at this: A caul (Latin: Caput galeatum, literally, helmeted head) is a piece of membrane that can cover a newborn's head and face.”

 Eleanor Smagarinsky:

“I googled ‘Gertrude Stein caul’ and Karren's blog popped up!!!”

Perhaps the word spectacle refers to the wonder of birth, something Stein had hands-on experience with during her four years of medical training at Johns Hopkins University. While a spectacle is something extraordinary and might be deemed ‘a strange or interesting object or phenomenon,’ the process of giving birth is a natural occurrence among living entities. Therefore Stein adds that the spectacle is nothing strange but merely a single hurt color. The Steiny Poet now thinks that ‘A kind in glass’ could also refer to the transparent amniotic sac in which a fetus develops and parts of which may coat the baby in a bloody caul as it enters the world. [from Stepping on Tender Buttons: “A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass.”]

Karren:

“The caul can be associated with the amniotic sac and voilà the red balloon!”

Mary:

“My cawl is I think a Welsh or Scottish  spelling variant.  From Wikipedia:

A caul or cowl (Latin: Caput galeatum, literally, "helmeted head") is a piece of membrane that can cover a newborn's head and face.[1] Birth with a caul is rare, occurring in fewer than 1 in 80,000 births. The caul is harmless and is immediately removed by the physician or midwife upon delivery of the child.

“The en-caul birth, not to be confused with the caul birth, occurs when the infant is born inside the entire amniotic sac. The sac balloons out at birth, with the amniotic fluid and child remaining inside the unbroken or partially broken membrane.”

Karren:

“Look at that—A caul or cowl—here comes the cow again!!

so helmeted head—hat and hurt.”

Mary:

“Red balloons, afterbirth, red flags, a psychic cloak, a helmet. A caul bearer is a person who is born with the caul.”

Stepping on Tender Buttons: “Colored Hats.", “A Feather.", “A Brown."

BLOOMS IN THE BUTTONS BOX

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

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

THE SUBPOEM ...................-          COLORED HATS: NUMBER 43

WORD COUNT......................-           81

THE SUBPOEM ...................-          A FEATHER: NUMBER 44

WORD COUNT......................-           36

THE SUBPOEM ...................-          A BROWN: NUMBER 45

WORD COUNT......................-           21

STANZA(S)............................-           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.....................................-           DEVIL MAY CARE

“Measuring, volumes, quantities run through these subpoems. Differences and change. Underneath the detail, a scientist at work?” Karren Alenier

 “You can't have ‘pearl necklaces’ if you use those colorful hats!” Claudia Schumann

COLORED HATS.

Colored hats are necessary to show that curls are worn by an addition of blank spaces, this makes the difference between single lines and broad stomachs, the least thing is lightening, the least thing means a little flower and a big delay a big delay that makes more nurses than little women really little women. So clean is a light that nearly all of it shows pearls and little ways. A large hat is tall and me and all custard whole.

A FEATHER.

A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.

A BROWN.

A brown which is not liquid not more so is relaxed and yet there is a change, a news is pressing.

WHAT IS SAID IN THE BLANK SPACE

Mary Armour said both in jest and unwavering seriousness that “along with clitoral pearls and labial little ways, something here speaks to ekphrasis and Gertrude's perception of Modernist art, the blank spaces and volumes, proportions and relational perspectives.”

The Steiny Road Poet sees that discussion of the blank spaces (“Colored Hats.”) began in “In Between.” when Peter Treanor reflected on the separation of such words as “satin wood” and “foot path.” It led Karren [a.k.a. Steiny] to say, “I take this opening of space between certain words to be Stein protesting what she and Alice were not allowed to say in public—that they loved each other, that their love was a sacred trust.

THE CATALOG OF THINGS SAID

Among the associations made with this set of subpoems together and separately were: insects—a brown butterfly, a brown recluse spider, lightening bugs; signs of spring; sexual practice, pregnancy, and birth control; undergarments, cunnilingus, virgins; Civil war nurses, military caps and insignias; Little Women by Louisa May Alcott; the abolitionist John Brown; knitting; Penelope and weaving; black hatters (the headwear of Jewish Orthodox men); and writing and printing. Here is a mix of some of the highlights of the discussion and some thoughts from Steiny:

from Peter on “Colored Hats.”:

“Tall hats, curls that are worn, single lines, broad stomachs, (en) lightening, pearls of wisdom and little ways make me think big hats and curls.”

STEINY’S JEWISH ORTHODOX TAKE ON “COLORED HATS.”

Back in the 1950’s in America the word “colored” was a moniker applied to Black people in my not entirely assimilated Jewish community. So by that measure, Colored hats become Black hats, as in wide-brimmed felt hats with an exaggerated tall crowns worn by ultra-orthodox Jewish men who also wear side curls called payot. 

In Stein’s text, these hats and curls are accompanied by an addition of blank spaces, this makes the difference between single lines and broad stomachs. In defining Tzimtzum, Kabbalist Isaac Luria taught that God initiated creation by contracting his infinite light (making an empty/blank space) to allow for a conceptual space in which finite and spiritual could exist. Conceptually one might stretch the imagination here and say single lines could be the male sexual organ making the difference in a female to impregnate and cause a broad stomach (pregnancy).

Then in this passage: the least thing is lightening, the least thing means a little flower and a big delay a big delay that makes more nurses than little women, the inception of sperm (a flash of human chemical lightening) and egg flowers after a nine-month delay resulting in the female needing to nurse the child or children which might also be female and result in little women. So that clean light might indeed be God’s infinite light paving the way for the pearls of semen which create little children within the custard (a dish of milk and eggs) of the female orbit. Alternatively, lightening could also be (according to The Free Dictionary) “the sensation, experienced by many women late in pregnancy when the head of the fetus enters the pelvis, of a reduction in pressure on the diaphragm, making it easier to breathe.”

The large-brimmed hat with the tall crown contains an empty/blank space for the spiritual learning [(en)lightenment] that Jewish orthodox men acquire throughout their lives. Stein, who thought of herself as a male personae, might be saying this hat and what it represents may be how she thinks of herself (me) with all the observing, thinking, and writing she does.

Earlier in Tender Buttons, an association to Tzimtzum was made in the discussion of “Objects.” but on a more cosmic and spiritual level. Here Stein brings us in balance with the cosmic and physical world.