Let's deal with the title, "A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass." It has a period. So it's a sentence, I suppose a title that's a sentence. How does the word "that" function, Max? In one sense, it's defining carafe. A carafe, that is to say, a blind glass. I.e. I.e. In other words. Are you going to be able to handle that one? Actually you do the three meanings of that, the way that works. And then you'll be off the hook, and I'll ask somebody else, maybe over on this side, to try to understand how a carafe could be a blind glass or could have any kind of relationship to it. Go ahead Max, let's see other two senses of the way that works. It's also instead of defining all carafes, It could also just be defining this particular carafe. A carafe that is a blind glass. This carafe is a blind glass. The boy that is going to the store as opposed to all other boys, and we call that a restrictive clause. And in that case, the comma doesn't belong there but she's messing with it. OK, go ahead. And with the comma there if we think grammatically we could also substitute 'which' in the sense 'which' typically follows the comma. And that would be a nonrestrictive clause, a phrase that is helpful, definitional, but can be removed without harming sense. A carafe, which by the way, is a blind glass. OK. So I turn to Allie and I invite you to be skeptical briefly because there's only brief time for skepticism. OK. No, I'm going to set it up though. All right. I know you're ready to be skeptical but I want to set it up. If it's possible that the very title of a prose poem, could in its syntactical existence be that open-ended that there could be three ways of dealing with a "that" clause, does that make you give up and does it frustrate you? Because it's hard enough to understand what she's saying semantically, even though we're not going to do a lot of semantic reading. Why would she make a mistake if she meant it as-- for instance, if she meant it as a restrictive clause why put the comma in there and mess this up? Why is she doing this? That particularly doesn't frustrate me or make me want to give up. I just question-- I mean, we haven't really talked about this yet, but I question kind of close reading. Like I feel like there's a bit of a contradiction in close reading Stein because if what she's trying to do is liberate the word from its connotations and associations isn't-- like to what extent then is close reading kind of insisting on the words' enslavement. Ok, who wants to respond to that? Did use the word enslavement? Yeah. Give me the phrase again. How much of the phrase? What was the phrase? Something, something, at least. Words' enslavement? Yes. Stein's liberating. Liberating--? Oh, if Stein is trying to liberate the word from it's connotations and associations. The word from its traditional, socially enforced, top down, "This is the way it means people... " So if it's trying to liberate it from like its traditional representations, then- To create a radical openness to many meanings, not just denotated in descriptive and depictive but other kinds of meanings. Oral, orally-associated, hearing-associated meanings, word-word relationships, etc... Yes? Then isn't close reading and kind of hashing out... It's obviously helpful but I think it's a little--. Isn't close reading that kind of liberational activity? I'm being a little facetious. Is it though? I don't know, Anna? I think we just demonstrated how that works. When we spent so much time on on the word "current" we show that-- In "A Long Dress." In "A Long Dress," when we just spent so much time talking about current and all the different ways that current-- all the different meanings that current could have. I think that shows you that close-- because I think in one sense close reading almost asks you to look for one particular readings. If you're going to have let's say like a feminist reading of a poem then like a certain word can really only mean one thing if you're going to keep at that reading. But we just showed that there are many different meanings possible and the fact that the poem itself is dealing with the process of making meaning, it means you have to use these words in these ways that could be interpreted in infinite ways. I think we need to think briefly about resistance to nonsense, to seeming nonsense. There was a time when people read Emily Dickinson and declared it to be nonsense. No one in this group would refute the idea that it is worth our while to do a close reading of a very difficult poem by Emily Dickinson so what- Did Stein enter a completely new space? Or you've just you've just crossed the line into a space where you think it's unproductive? Or you're just having some fun? I don't think it's unproductive, I definitely see how it works. I do think it's helpful but I also just think it's a little contradictory. I don't know. Can we contain contradictions? I mean what are we supposed to do if we read it once like a newspaper story and don't focus on its processes in its form, then we're reading poetry the way we would read prose that merely conveys information as opposed to language that's trying to do something more. Well, but I don't think that close reading is the only way to kind of really paid close attention. I don't think Stein would disagree with you. I think there's always something a little bit strange about close reading a poem, by a poet who really meant it to be read and should stand sufficiently for itself. So I don't completely disagree, but nonetheless we're kind of in the business of doing exactly what you warned us against. So no- Duly noting so long as it's-- if it's resistance, I want to talk about the psychology of it. If you're expressing resistance as in an almost Freudian sense then we're going to come back to it, I know will. But if you're expressing an intelligent sense of contradiction, "Gee, I'm not so sure we're going to get anywhere." And there doesn't it doesn't have the same kind of effect that solving a problem is. I actually do believe firmly that when we collectively close read, which is the format we're using here, we do solve problems and not only that but we educate ourselves as to how to face uncertainties of all kind. The uncertainty and meaning. The way we solve problems in our world is to face things that are hard rather than things that are easy. This is, I grant you, way on the hard side of that spectrum but nonetheless it kind of creates new kinds of muscles. It puts us in a condition where we can take things that we don't understand rather than sort of clinging which is the tradition in mostly popular on understandings of what we do with poetry. We cling to the things- little chestnut's that we know. Mending Wall, every morning I read Mending Wall and it makes me feel better stopping by Woods on a snowy evening. Not that that's an easy poem but why not learn how to cling to the thing that we never quite understood despite all our efforts. Alright, with that cheerleading, thank you for being honest, let's see what we can do with "A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass." So how could a carafe be a blind glass? Marjorie Perloff helps us a little. Does anybody want to at least start with what she suggests? She talks about a carafe being full of wine or some sort of opaque liquid. And mostly that's what it is. And of course, in Paris, in Stein's time--. Not opaque. Not opaque but not as transparent as water. And I think in Paris, in Stein's time they would have had lots of carafes of wine. Indeed. So I want to move to what Molly was going to say on that same point. But take a little-- Let's go to our meta-poetic genius over here. When we're talking about something that is not transparent does it make you think of language and poetry in general? Yeah, it's the opaqueness that comes when she rejects the representational meanings attached to language. She rejects representational, traditional representational strategies but keeps the urgency to reference. When you separate those two things you get something we don't understand. We don't understand in a traditional sense. So it doesn't make sense to close read it maybe historically or associatively, but she's trying to place emphasis I think on the order and function of various words in a phrase. And so here I think the preposition, and the comma and the punctuation get preference over, say, the noun which is less helpful, because of all the reasons that Anna cited. And so instead of like thinking of words in families that are ideologically loaded, as you were saying, the feminist meaning is the limiting in certain senses. Here she is trying to operate to a horizontal sort of spreading difference and differentiation through it. Ah, spreading difference, terrific. OK, we're going to come back to spreading difference. Molly, your thoughts? I think if we're reading this meta-poetically, one of the things Perloff talked about was not being able to use the blind glass to see things better. We can't use it to help us understand something better. Non-reflective glass. Right, and so I think a part of what she is saying in the title is that we cannot use the word itself carafe to understand carafe. Terrific. So anyone, how do we deal with the phrase and arrangement in the system to pointing? It's somewhat of a philosophical, it sounds almost like Ludwig Wittgenstein who was just starting to operate it around the same time. In what sense, what, how does that-- where does that phrase come from in the world of many rhetorics in languages and vocabularies? I've already hinted that it comes from a kind of linguistic philosophy world but can we say what it might mean? Well, pointing could be the referentiality of language. I've been using as my little-- my mini drama for denotation and indexical language, the pointing. The word points to the thing. So if we refer to an arrangement in a system to pointing, maybe of pointing. What do we refer to? Arrangement, what do we refer to? You can think about systematic language that every language has their own system of referentiate. Every language has a set of nouns, not every language but words that refer to things in words there are two actions,and to doing, and to feelings and kind of higher-- Like a code? Sure. This is very Wittgensteinian, Ludwig Wittgenstein, starts with a W. So when my mother and I-- sorry, I'm going to be a little memoiristic here, my mother and I used to communicate through my lunchbox, in the old days we had lunch boxes. In third grade or fourth grade, every day she would put a little slip of paper with a coded message to me usually, "Enjoy your baloney. I love you." Something just monumental like that. Or "This is just to say I've taken the baloney from the refrigerator. So you have no lunch today. Haha. Love Flossie." But this was in code and I rapidly figured out the code and it was simply A equals one, B equals two, so it was just numbers. So we developed a language, it was a language game we were playing and we developed a language. What we've done in arranging a system of pointing, let's say through high realism of the 19th century, or through the urgency, through the complexity of social systems, through capitalisms, enabling people to rise and to collect things and easily identify things, the rigidification of international monetary systems, there a lot of kinds of ways you can talk about this. We develop a fairly systematic way in which the language functions referentially. So to refer to an arrangement and a system appointing, we're basically talking about that somewhat monolithic code that we don't think of as a code anymore we think of it as natural. But it's a code. So let's try new code, because if we try new code, we wind up having, as my mother and I did, to re-invent a different set of pointings and denotations. What are some of the plus sides of doing such a thing? We know what the downsides are. Allie reminded us partly what the downsides are what are the upsides? Dave, what's good about this? Once you describe something, it sort of accumulates baggage and you think about the baggage every time you're working on something. Once you do it often. Yeah, and it loses its original effect. I think of the Washington Redskins, because to me, that just--. Talk about losing meaning. It represents a football team that I dislike intensely. But you don't realize that Redskins is really an ethnic slur and the baggage is what you see. Because when you hear the word Redskins you think of a person in a helmet that's somewhat red and yellow as opposed to brown. I can't remember the colors. Rather than something more original, let's say. So when you use the word Redskins, after using it with other connotation, it loses its meaning. So while thinking about it differently approaching it differently. You can get back to the essence of what you're trying to describe. Nice, and the great thing about Tender Buttons is there is hardly anything as loaded ethically or indeed ethnically loaded as that, for better or worse. Stein is not so political in that sense and also ethical. This is a carafe with presumably some wine in it. So how do we deal with all this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling? The difference is spreading, let's let's deal with all this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. Who wants to try to translate that? Emily, take a shot at not unordered in not resembling. Good luck. It seemed-- maybe even pretty straightforward that it's not-- that it is aesthetic even if it's not completely representational, even if the resemblance isn't easily discerned, it's still it's an aesthetic system. It's still ordered even if it doesn't resemble. And ordered almost in a narrative sense. Generally, she's going to remake narrative she's not entirely non-error but nonetheless there is an order here. This is going to make sense. Allie, Allie, Allie this is going to make sense. But not by resembling. That's really hard. That's a real challenge. So now let's conclude by talking about the differences spreading. What is spreading? Anna, what is spreading? The difference could be the difference in-- once we kind of accept this new system of referentiality not representational-ness. The difference could be that newness in thinking about the way that we--. The difference between what and what? The difference between being strictly representational with language. And? And being more open and referential. So that difference is a newness of thought and this arrangement in the system. OK, that's the difference. The difference between that old kind of writing, pre-modern writing and what I'm trying to do. Difference is such a loaded word. Such a powerful, positive word, difference. I'm different. This difference. I am enacting a difference linguistically, and logically, a difference, semantically, a difference. And how would that be spreading? Ann-Marise, spreading, I love that word. Spreading through the contagion that she is starting anyway I think she's also trying to oppose it too like a vertical hierarchical sense of language. So spreading to me evokes the horizontal image. So difference that brings attention back to the particular versus the totally nature of the system. She thinks of it as a positive sense her detractors think of it as a pernicious sense. It's like a Pandora's box to mix the metaphor. Once you are self-conscious of the way "The Long Dress" was made and what a line is in a mad man sense, we're going to promulgate a line. Why? Because we want to sell new dresses because last year's dress-- Once all this becomes exposed, once the drawer is opened and you look at the works in it or the hood is opened on the car of poetry and you look in to see how it's made and that becomes a thing of beauty. There is no going back. There is no going back. And after the revolution that we're talking about the modernist revolution, it's very difficult to be a formally traditional poet, you're telling a poetic story without having at least to acknowledge that you are now reacting. And Stein's detractors spoke of her especially in the Cold War period as pernicious and like a disease. They talked about inoculating themselves against Stein. Against this kind of undermining of making sense. So this is very powerful. Well, she was dead by then but I think that the idea that this could be catching on, I think she might have been personally somewhat indifferent to that. I think she would simply see it as the truth. But this difference certainly is spreading and maybe even spreading to the fan of close reading of a Stein poem. I'm not a fan of close reading. I know, I said maybe it's even spreading. You have- you have- Look you're getting little Stein pox. You're getting the disease.
