Why "Hermetic Poetry --> Hatred" Is False

There is a fancy word for a retraction of a previous statement, but I can't remember what it is. I could look it up in my Bedford, but you, my dear readers, likely don't care one way or the other, so why bother?

After class, I have begun to realize that there may actually be analysis that you can perform on Tender Buttons. Yes, indeed. It's not easy, and it can never be exhaustive, but there you go. It is like looking through a haystack for all the pieces of hay of a certain thickness. It will be exceptionally difficult, you will never find them all, but you could find some.

I am not yet convinced that we, as readers, have not just utterly hallucinated readings. I don't mean that in the sort of paranoid way I usually feel about texts. I am often worried we take too much out of a work, and only half of that is latent attachment to the intentional fallacy. Rather, it seems to me as though any reading of this text whatsoever will be a product of our imaginations. However, the professor and other students have more than adequately shown that you can make fairly compelling forays into the text. It would be sort of like plucking the leaf off of a tree two feet into the rainforest and saying you've explored a jungle, but it's better than I thought one could do. Perhaps Stein's work is less hermetic than I thought.

That, however, isn't really redeeming at all. Even if we can scratch some sort of significance from her words, it doesn't make it any good. Really, now, her project in painful and horrible nonetheless.

What does change "true" to "false" (in the post titles) is that I must admit she has some pretty images. I like "meadowed king." That's cool. And there's a smattering of others, too.

So I still dislike what she wrote, but I'm less entirely opposed to it.