1) Long ago Edith Sitwell wrote, in her Poetry and Criticism, that Gertrude Stein "bring[s] back life to our language by what appears, at first, to be an anarchic process. First she breaks down the predestined groups of words, their sleepy family habits; then she rebrightens them, examines their texture, and builds them into new and vital shapes."2) In his essay on Tender Buttons for The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, Robert Grenier wrote that Stein was concerned with language not "as object-in-itself" but as "composition functioning in the composition of the world."
I don't think the Sitwell idea holds up, but it's helpful for starters, and I love the word "family" there.
from Robert Grenier, "Tender Buttons," in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (1984), p. 206
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
