Thursday, May 27, 2010

Why Proofread? ... Humble Pie Is not Tasty.

List of Corrections for Anonymous Writing Project

Page        Paragraph          Original              Correction
1                     1                   vision: we             vision. We
                       2                   Yet she                She
                                            books”                books,”
5                     2                   with on                with
8                top page             antimonies            antinomies
11                  n4                   Insituto                 Instituto
14                  1                     long fulfilled          long, fulfilled
                      2                       analyses                analyzes  (press requires American spelling . . . )
                                               as an moral         as a moral
15                 top                    thought, were        thought were
                                         “our, Hitler and after    “our Hitler and after
                      2                      lives, that                      lives that
                                           was adult, both          was an adult, both
18                  1                    themselves “Falling    themselves: “Falling
19                  3                    not what they do”;      not what they do;”
20                  1                        malgre                          malgré
                      2                    identity, not suffered     identity, nor suffered
25                  2                    categories                     categorize
                  in quote                 no mean                     no means
                      3                       Hitler, can                  Hitler can
                                               to think, and               to think and
29                 n8                      Heidegger”;                Heidegger;”
30               n10 top                her death the              her death, the
                    n27                     female pupil                female pupils
31               n61                       analyses                   analyzes
34                 2                        practice is due          practice are due
49                 2                        practice I                  practice, I
                                               but impossible)         but impossible,
50             2 bottom       form and specifically myth in        form, and specifically myth, in
51                                          Chapter 2 Notes         Notes
53                  1                      which came about       which come about
55                 top                     Hannah’s                    Hannah
                   2 in quote             fear  . . .  A                 fear. . . . A
59                  1                       chivalric                     Chivalric
61                  2                    change of roles seems        changes of role seem
63                 top                  the Castle                       the castle
                   mid page            knight asks                     knight, asks
                                            undisclosed hidden          hidden
66                  3                    Ate                                 Até
70                  n4                  events is                          events and
71                  n26                a corn on                         a horn on
                      n27                the first meaning               the first public meaning
72                n29 top            centre                              center
73                n64 top            centred                            centered
                      n71                                                        period placed at end
78                    1                  centre                              center
79                    2                  La Gioconda39;               La Gioconda;39
80                end of para       Head. Rosa                      Head, Rosa
                         1                 commentates                    comments
82                     2                 around Dr Tulp                 around Dr. Tulp
85                     2                  (1658)                              (1659)
92                     1                 Since most of                    Though most of
94                     1                 next-to-the-last                  penultimate
95                     1                 realligns                             realigns


100                   1                 Rapunzel inability               Rapunzel-like inability
102                  top               and a Briar hedge              and a briar hedge
106                 n66                Motif K521.1                   (Motif K521.1).
108                  top                to see, squarely                 to see squarely
                          2                  long hot talk                     long talk
109                  top                 Once could                     One could
113                   3                    that involves                    that involve
                                              genders to can                 genders to
117                    1                  to an transcendent            to a transcendent
                          2                  can related                       can relate
118                    4                  We inassimilable              We are inassimilable
120                2 in quote         there is not                       there is no
                   just after quote        us, as us                       us, as us
121                     top                that others                      that of others
124                     n6                  handshake                     rapprochement
125                    n28             impossible difference         Impossible Difference
                           n37             These passages                -delete passages-
                          n50              quotation to be                 quotation would be
126                    n55                 in note 27                      in note 29
                          n58                 is topic                          is a topic
                          n63              Harper’s Magazine          Harper’s Magazine
129                      1               industrial revolution           Industrial Revolution
                                             applies to in an                  applies in an
130               1 in quote          . . .  we cannot                . . . [W]e cannot
132                 top                  the latter’s desire             his desire (the pronoun reference is clear enough)
                        1                     virginity                          sexuality  (Marina, at least, is not a virgin)
135                  1                     in Hegelian dialectic        dialectically
136                  1                   request of her mother’s     request of his mother’s
                        2                   when Marina agrees          once Marina offers
137                  1                  by sharing the same mistress        by being mistress to both
138              1 last line           nearly need                          need
139                  1                    man-made                          such cultural
140                  1                    colonizer--                         colonizer,
                                               underclass--                      underclass,
                                               serve as                            that serve as
141                  1                     use to so                           used to be so
142                  1                     man-made                        social
                      2 in quote          friends of tyrants               friend of tyrants
                 last line on page      may have engages            engages
143               top                    the existence of God         the absence of God
                       1                     ambivalence, close.,         close.
                       2                  although which Murdoch      although Murdoch
144                top                 being critical of                   deleted that phrase
                      n2                   In an 1978                         In a 1978 (US usage)
                      n7                    theatre                            theater  (yeh, I know, sorry for all the cultural
                                                                                                   imperialism there, press’s orders)
145               n17                    (1952) and                      (1952), and
146               n63                   she did have                      she did not have
147                 1                     ‘Sartre                                “Sartre
                                              also become                       also becomes
148                 1                     will write about                   will discuss
149                 3                     Murdoch properly              Murdoch properly,
153                top                    pour-soi: and                     pour-soi and  --deleted the :
                        1                    Sartre was, that                  Sartre was that
156              bottom               evocative visualization style to        evocative style of imagery to
157                  1                    Yet for Murdoch Sartre             Yet for Murdoch, Sartre
158                  1                    person male voice narrator         person male narrator
162                  2                  that humans” moral problems        that moral problems
                                             in their relationship                       in a relationship
165                  n1                  I will refer to                             --deleted repetition—
                                              (1903-1976) they                     (1903-1976); they
                       n16                hermeneutics of suspicion     Hermeneutics of Suspicion
                      n21                 negation of happiness           Negation of Happiness
166                n41                 rather then                            rather than
178                  2                   helps to makes                     helps to make
186                  2                   , i.e., death.                         , i.e. death.
188                 n42                sado-masochism                  sadomasochism
220                  n5                 she is some                          she is in some
                        n10                that there some                    that there is some
                        n23                one”s                                   one’s
222                  1                    Fisher                                  Fischer
                                               “goo’”                                 “good”
223                  1                    Fisher                                  Fischer
                                              Patti                                     Pattie
224                  top            with which I agree with              with which I agree
                                         works, i. e., that she                   works, i. e. that she
                          3                 Patti                                      Pattie
225                    1                Testament, connect                Testament and connect
                                             centre                                   center
226               mid page         argument against                     argument for
                     bot page          Murdoch here?                      Murdoch here.
227               mid page          ‘tranquility”                           “tranquility”
                                        he inspires, is whether                 he inspires, whether
228                  1                    Fisher                                   Fischer
229                  1                    of the inner                           of the interior
                        2                   The encounters others           Encounters with others
                                             an “other” which forces         an “other” forces
231             mid page             Patti’s                                   Pattie’s
                     near bot             text can we                          text, can we
232              mid page            to continental writing             to Continental writing
                                              human condition”                   human condition,”
235                n13                  statement disagree                 statement I disagree
                      n16                   2001. ‘I have                       2001. “I have
                                                assessment.’                       assessment.”
                      n19                   Mille                                   Miller
                      n24                   Gerde                                 Gerede  2x
236                n45                   ideas and                             ideas in
239                 2                      an symmetry                        a symmetry
240                top                    room to reader                    room to the reader
                   1 mid page           towards                               to
241                 1                    The Idea of Perfection,    “The Idea of Perfection,”
                                              platonic                             Platonic
                       2                    The argument of her           Her argument for her
                                             allows this; the task            allows this: the task
243                 1                    philosophy for the and        philosophy and
                                              by a reference                    by reference
                                             take possession of.             possess.
                                            thought, between demonstrating             thought, demonstrating
244                 2                    a love of good                      a love of the good
245                 1                correspondences that can be perceived, although
                                                                                                                      correspondences, although
247                 1                 whom her family approves of        of whom her family approves
248                 top               ethics of virtue                             virtue ethics
                                           that is to say “women                   that is “women

Thursday, February 25, 2010

On Graham's "Eve" because it has nothing to do with the essay in which I wrote it

Not becoming the garden, but thrown out of it, Eve presents Graham with an opportunity to meditate on the dangers and virtues of change/life/transgression and inevitability. In “Eve,” the poet works through the expansion of moments as a symbol of being captured. The view of Eden is that it was a place of innocence, but also of a radical servitude and limitation manifest as dollorous boredom: “Still noon: it is not clear how much / this green, looked-out upon, / tumbling towards the eye to land is dressed,” and “All day the green, / a sound like silk unspooling from the bolt.” In this unchanging green noon, Eve toys with the idea of change before the apple, the “Just now: like a feeling / behind one’s back.” She’s heard the “small, hissing if, oh if…” and responds almost unconsciously by playing with the gate to the garden, “I step through. I step back.” A shift in perspective leaps away from Eve’s subjectivity to some abstracted summary of the story of the fall: “Bless, blame, transvaluate— / Change context— / Unexpect        context.” Through that transvaluation abstracting the fall into a coined paradox, “unexpect,” condensing Eve’s wish for a break in monotony, the real disruptive gesture of the the poem emerges in that it uses the inevitability of the story—the choice, the explusion—as forgiveness. Rendering calamity on a personal scale, Adam is reported to say yes to her offer because “he knew / the deliberate anti-climax/ by heart” and almost gently commands her, “disorder my clothing, / count my ribs, / hide your face.” ---- PMRSC

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Ripped from A Poetics of Being Two

Ok, you lot are not sending submissions, so I'll just post some odd bits of my poetics book as I cut and reject them. They will be out of context, naturally. The Irigaray I refer to here is I Love to You: A Sketch for a Possible Felicity in History. The Hegel should be obvious.


The For-Later, Review and Extension

The human being appears at his most worthy when… he appears to be at once spirit and a particular individual.

Building worlds is not enough for the mind that reaches more deeply, yet a loving heart is ample for the spirit that constantly strives.

Novalis, Philosophical Writings



The mode of living, of becoming that Irigaray seeks to inaugurate is not encouraged now. In spite of the work done by various kinds of progressive and humanitarian movements, I don’t think that the culture of the West, and definitely not the U. S., has not moved into a new mode of being. Sexual and civil rights revolutions have had a tremendous impact in U.S. culture, but there is still tremendous pressure to limit the potential of the human being, both man and woman and of all races and creeds, for the sake of a smoothly running and familiar state-economy. The “utilitarian” state of affairs, Irigaray argues, should not continue, though it may. If the family is the basis of the state, the site of its possibility and continuity, as Hegel and many other philosophers have noted, then changes in the relations between men and women, the couple, and therefore between each of them and their child will imply and require changes in the shape, content, and function of the state. Hence, when one goes to the mountain to talk to Hegel, one does not go alone. Even Zarathustra had an eagle, a serpent and a lion with him on his mountain (with Hegel). Irigaray brought a host of divinities with her. In I love to You, she begins by summarizing Hegel’s description of love, or our culture’s failing as she interprets it:

How does Hegel define love between men and women? He defines it as it is still often practiced in our time, but also as it is defined by monotheistic, patriarchal religion, or ostensibly at the other extreme, by theories of sexuality, like the Freudian one. He defines it, on the whole, as we still experience it, in private and in public ... without managing to resolve the problem of the lack of spirit and ethics he observes. He also defines it in terms of his method. Which means that in order to overcome what he terms natural immediacy within the family Hegel turns to pairs of opposites. Hence he is forced to define man and woman as opposites and not as different.

This is still the case for us. There are still no civil rights proper to women and men ... ; there is still no civil law in our era that makes human persons of men and women ... . For want of such laws, our sexuality lapses into barbarity worse at times than that of animal society ... .

The woman is wife and mother. But, for her, this role is a function of abstract duty. So she is not this woman, irreducible in her singularity, wife of this man, who is himself irreducible, any more than she is mother of this child or these children. She is only attributed that singularity from the perspective of the man, for whom she remains bound to natural immediacy. As far as she is concerned, she is a wife and mother in as much as these roles represent a task vis-à-vis the universal which she discharges by renouncing her singular desires.

Love, as Hegel writes of it, is therefore not possible on the part of the woman... . She has no right to singular love nor to love for herself. She is thus unable to love but is to be subjugated to love and reproduction ... . Love, for her, amounts to a duty—not a right—establishing her role within humankind where she appears as man’s servant. (20-22)
This is Paz’s vitiation, Lacan’s formulation of feminine lack, Freud’s conundrum, dearth out of which the Romantics wished to love their way to plenitude. Reason left to its own devices, leaves us in this morass that turns love and desire against us. Irigaray asks, tantrically, in her ethics that we risk our way out.We must interpret and go beyond this order in that it represents alienation from the human for both sexes and for humanity as a whole, alienation leading the human species to its loss. For love seems to remain a natural affliction, its only possible redemption being the spiritual authoritarianism of a community dominated by a patriarchal father. Of love, we know only the singularity of sensible desire bereft of a for-itself, the torments of attraction for the other, the weight of sinfulness and the price we pay for our redemption. We know about the loneliness of desire, the desperation of rejection or of wanting the impossible, the pathological derangements of the drives, the destitution of parting. We know, too, the passionate resurgence of desire for someone, a singular desire for the one feeling it but an inexpre­ssible, ultimately irrational desire, with no language for the one who inspires it and thus an aspiration dev­oid of any possible reciprocity except for the annihilating reciprocity this kind of mentality produces. We also know the shame of desire, its engulfment in the loss of identity, its chaos, its dr­ug of disillusioned tomorrows. We still know nothing of the salvation love brings, individual and collective salvation. (IL 29, emphasis mine)

The horrible paradox of a goal and a torment, of a trick set up long ago as this annihilating reciprocity. We are out here, we humans, in historically lucky countries, making up the world for the first time, confused, timid, unsupported, or relatively undominated by church, state, codified spiritual tradition, and still there are many who would quash such cultural and social change: out of fear, out of resentment, out of tradition. I’m thinking of the religious right specifically, and people who assume that their lifestyle is applicable to everyone, or who remain within traditional roles out of simple comfort. At least the religious right practices some kind of critical engagement with their lives and the culture around them, even if the results of that critical activity are anathema to my sensibilities or desires for people. We have a serious conversation to have about what makes for human flourishing, once we get over the culture wars. There is nothing at all secure that precludes a return to the family Hegel was describing, nothing at all that stops the pendulum except our will and creativity and vigilance.

In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the family expresses the ethical sphere in natural immediacy, that is unconsciously, but is “an ethical entity,” that is consciously ethical, “only so far as it is not the natural relationship of its members” (268). The family’s relationships cannot simply be given by the accidents of blood or affection, for there is no consciousness there:
the ethical connection between the members of the Family is not that of feeling, or the relationship of love. It seems, then, that the ethical principle must be placed in the relation of the individual member of the Family to the whole Family as the Substance, so that the End and content of what he does and actually is, is solely the Family. (269)
Irigaray’s shift is precisely that it is in the relationship of love that the ethical relationship takes place. Love is, for her, as much or more a choice than an accident of mood or proximity. Love is both an accident of fate, and a fate that one must choose, as Paz puts it. The relations of the family members differ greatly from a system in which the family member (he) is both the whole of the family and sacrifices himself completely to it without maintaining his envelope, his separateness. Inside the family, he is not substantial, not real, for “it is only as a citizen that he is actual and substantial, the individual, so far as he is not a citizen but belongs to the Family, is only an unreal impotent shadow,” just a father, not even a lover, and not a man (270). Man’s being does not take place in the Family in Hegel’s ethics. He does not exist there, and he may still in our culture not find of his being or sense of self there. The activity of the family does not center on man’s activity as a citizen or an employee, and Hegel sees no reason therefore for man to integrate himself into the family as much other than a sacrifice that is the whole of the family. The family is far too much a feminine cultural space for that. This love is so far from ethics that:
the relationship of husband to wife is in the first the one in which one consciousness immediately recognizes itself in another, and in which there is knowledge of this mutual recognition. Because this self-recognition is a natural and not an ethical one, it is only a representation, an image of Spirit, not actually Spirit itself... . This relationship therefore has its actual existence not in itself but in the child—an “other”, whose coming into existence is the relationship, and is also that in which the relationship itself gradually passes away. (Hegel 273)
If this is the case, what blindness is it that convinces the husband and wife in love to have children? Is the child the only real embodied instance of their love, and the death of it? When people live unconsciously, automatically and passively, allowing the work and the child and the demands of the state to railroad them along, I can see how this would happen. Since for Hegel the basis of this thrust is the nation, I can see why the state would want it this way (273). Love, especially a love that is conscious and ethical, that determines its own course, makes the state nervous because it does not always play by the state’s rules or into its hands.

The purpose of the family is the child, the other of the man who is the family. The wife, the woman, and love have no valuable role to play in Hegel’s family or Hegel’s ethics. A woman’s only valued ethical (conscious) role is her reverent duty toward her brother—a relationship in which her (sexual) desire can play no role. So that’s very tidy. In the relationships of the ethical family:
It is not a question of this particular husband, this particular child, [note the mom-wife and sister are missing], but simply of husband and children generally; the relationships of the woman are based not on feeling [the only basis left if she attains to only natural immediacy] but on the universal... . [In] her vocation as an individual and in her pleasure, her interest is centered on the universal and remains alien to the particularity of desire; whereas the husband ... , since he possesses as a citizen the self-conscious power of universality, he thereby acquires the right of desire and, at the same time preserves his freedom in regard to it. (Hegel 274-5)
That is, love for one’s husband or child as specific people is not the operant here, but service and reverence on the principle of the specific [or not] woman’s duty to Husband and Child as universals—as ideas. The flights of what would soon be the Romantic experience of love run against the ethical for Hegel, as rash, unconscious flights of all kinds do. The Romantics would go searching for earthly relations, horizontal ones that were not prejudged battles. The co-existence of the body and the soul, of the carnal and the spiritual, a sensible transcendental was part of their project. Hegel, on the other hand, prefers that vertical axis of his universal. The particular, embodied lover is so confounding to that universal that she and he are simply ruled out. The tension between them, between love and ethics (duty), is one that still tears at the bonds humans try to form as husband and wife and as fathers and mothers and children. There seems to be no resolution, except in the neutered relationship between brother and sister where “her duty to him is the highest,” and “the brother is the member of the Family in whom its [the family’s] Spirit becomes an individuality” (Hegel 275). The son/brother, after all, carries the family name while the daughter/sister is to be absorbed into another family, to become a wife, not a lover, and to foster the individuality of some other family. Do we not, still, everyday thanks to the daytime talk shows, hear stories of husbands who cannot see their wives as appropriate sexual partners after the birth of children, or of wives who cannot picture themselves as lovers once they have children? Or, stories of women who put off their weddings once they discover that conversations with family and friends shift entirely from her interests, career, talents, dreams to talk of the wedding plans and how many children she will have and china patterns—she disappears as an individual, becomes a wife-function. Should she resist that disappearance into the service of the universal, she is labeled or often labels herself as selfish, as unwomanly.  How many parents are lost from their connection to each other by the all consuming focus on the child as substitute for their love between each other? How many episodes of Oprah have aired these dilemmas, or of The Jerry Springer Show have exploited this story and its pain for the edification of the viewing public? The flush, burn, rumble and rush of love-lust, the hunger, by definition realization of need, of emptiness, of the desire that springs from lack (and what do you or I have to offer from that condition?) comes smack against the ethical, the duty, of family, the lover, the obligation to give of oneself. The love of Romantic poems and romantic movies seems to get stuck on the side of life before marriage, as if the lack of boundary or envelope that form of love embodies is somehow dangerous. It is. It is as out of balance as the family of duty-only in Hegel. It is out of balance when compared to ethical love as Irigaray defines it. My, or your, purpose in love is not to lose myself in or to complete myself at the expense of the other, borrowing their identity or life. My, or your, purpose in love is to continue becoming on my own path and to encourage your becoming on your path, and to find a way that those two paths travel together. In the current therapist’s lingo: co-dependency is to be replaced with interdependency. Trouble is that one must first be independent in order to be interdependent.

Against Hegel’s description of our culture’s paralyzed, impoverished, and monstrous ideology of love, Irigaray brings the other language of Tantra; wherein, love is exchange in a “non-oppositional dialectic” which precludes the assimilation of woman by man, “[He] recognizes the other as what he or she already is and gives him or her the right or chance to exist” (IL 3, 9).  Love that is ethical is conscious, purposeful, attentive—a project, not an accident. In it the lovers have a relationship outside their relationship to the child, and each a relationship to the universal (or divine) outside their relationship to each other. If that the child, boy or girl, owes the parents nothing, neither accomplishment nor dutiful marriage in the name of family, she and he can live to be just himself or herself having “stolen” nothing from the parents’ love for each other as lovers. The other (woman-sister) is not the for-me of the self-subject (husband-brother). Everyone has the right or chance to exist.

Friday, October 30, 2009

Noted in ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM:"

The essay appears in Joan Retallack's The Poethical Wager, possibly my favorite book of the last several years. On page 128 at bottom begins a paragraph, "Beyond the vanishing point lie shocking scenes: exposed negatives reveal a domimatrix with polymorphous perverse appetites and ambitions wreaking havoc in the popular maxiseries, "Civlization and Miss Content." It ends on 129, "To what extent have women been complicit in the substitution of the image of the female for the transgressive experimental feminine?" The whole paragraph is heavily boxed in with ink and marked with three ***, my symbol for "OH THIS IS GOOD."

The marginalia says, "archery, extreme freeze tag, dresses, roses, poking slugs with sticks // that vitality and curiosity in love, sex, work, sleep // enthusiastically living in the world lets us find out // --> 132."

Down the page a bit is this passage: " But the symbolic is not the only logical or associative order of meaning. There is metonymy, as well as metaphor; there are complex dynamic systems and fluidly interactive models, as well as equivalences. The phallus, like the romantic genius and strong poet and symbolic logic it props up, has got to go; the penis may get on quite well without it." 

Amusing to me is this: my marginalia here makes a romantic/Romantic appeal to the polymorphous pleasures of my own childhood, and while that vitality is part of Retallack's project, the implied innocence is most certainly not.

See 132: "Perhaps we can canel our ad nauseam encores as ambiguously smiling, subtextual female repressed. Perhaps we can assume the active textual project of entertaining multiple, complex possibilities/improbabilities/unintelligabilities in our languages and lives."

This crossroads of the postmodern and the romantic/utopian never ceases to fascinate.

Ken Got the Tone of this Project Jest Right


Friday, October 16, 2009

Exam Question: History of Aesthetics III -- by PMRSC

All Exam Questions have a closed audience (a prof, a class) and a closed system of reference (the content of the course). In this exam, the students were instructed to spend no more than 30 minutes on a response, and to think of responses as little position papers. I offer it as the first post in this project because it's the kind of partial and possibly wrong-headed thing you are encouraged to post here. Since, after all, had the class been discussing Pound's shorter poems, or Stein's "Lifting Belly" or her book How to Write and Pounds ABC's of Reading, this might have been a very different response.

3. “Pound and Stein are phases of the same thing.”

Thesis: Um, respectfully, no.

If you are William Carlos Williams, and you are right next to Stein-Pound, the two poets could seem to be doing the same thing, on some levels. Ideologically, Stein and Pound both reject WCW’s preference for the regional and the American. Stylistically, Stein and Pound both violate English syntax. Historically, Stein and Pound are both related in their experiments to Mallarmé and the Symbolists, who had the unfortunate habit of writing ideas but not things. Both Stein and Pound demonstrated in their poetry a preoccupation with language qua language. WCW wanted (1) lines that made sense (whether or not the poem ‘coheres’ is another question), (2) images that put one in mind of contemporary objects and situations, and (3)an absence of any sort of comparison (similes, metaphors, etc.) Stein and Pound might deliver 2 and 3, but 1 they took for an option.

But this similarity doesn’t seem to go as far as WCW claims it does. Their aesthetic commitments differ in both method and ideology. Stein, methodologically, strips the world away from language as completely as she can in poems like "Tender Buttons." There are nouns and verbs and some adjectives, and the syntax will not get you to sense, and the images will not get you to a recognizable world. These poems are a world, a very sensual one, unto themselves. Further, the poems refuse to invent a world for the reader. In her prose, Stein works with a method of repetition and a slow accretion or revelation of ‘meaning’ that seems to wobble long like time and evolution itself. Pound, on the other hand, used refrains, not repetition, to punctuate poems which violated syntax mostly by mixing languages and historical moments of languages. As much of a collage as Pounds poems are, they are not Stein’s confetti. The language still gestures to the world, but to so much of it that finding one’s place in it is difficult. And, most different of all, Pound is trying to create a world. Stein avoids tropes, Pound feeds on them. Pound, ideologically, is committed to remaking the world in his image, an image of ‘total’ learning and totally coherent order which must be wrested both from history and from the current seats of power. He’s a classicist, mannerist, militarist, fascist. The Cantos is the instruction book for leading this new world order. Stein, on the other hand, sees the militarist fascist tendencies in classicism and other vagaries of the tradition and wants all that to melt away.

"Tender Buttons" is the disordered juxtaposition of objects (read: persons, contexts, aesthetics) which might coexist joyfully once Pound’s axiologies are surrendered (which is an axiological move on her part, yes, yes.) They do similar things in dissimilar ways for opposite reasons.