"There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking." Thus begins "Composition as Explanation"--begging the questions to which this review is hoping to find answers: At what are we looking today when we look at Stein's work, both in terms of her artistic production and our literary canons? How are we looking at Stein's work today--as readers of different backgrounds, critics of various persuasions, scholars of specific interests, artists of numerous styles? And how does Stein's work perform its cultural work today--as a modernist revolution in epistemology, a postmodern given, an authentication of gendered and/ or sexual difference, or perhaps even a tender, tenacious anachronism, now that the Twentieth century--the one whose literature she claimed to have shaped--is drawing to a close? These are big questions, and the answers are being interesting, as the select pieces in this, our premier, issue of time-sense: a quarterly on the art of Gertrude Stein demonstrate.

Granted, this issue is still small, in keeping perhaps with Alice B. Toklas' strategy of granting only the most interesting and important people access to Stein, but the pieces in it demonstrate high academic and artistic caliber and probe deep into the questions I have just mentioned. While Moramarco's and Logsdon's pieces highlight the play within Stein's text and problematize her tease of the reader's investigative gaze, Rubery's short essay explores the connections between Stein's poetics and virtual reality, as the, as Butler would call it, "dematerialization," of time and space--quite in keeping with Stein's ideas on the continuous present. Jarraway's article pursues what he terms Stein's queer literary "self-authorization" in her earlier works through the discourses of Jamesian pragmatism and Butlerian ideas of the queer subject. And Kimball's essay shows how Stein reconstitutes a problematic "natural" through her experimental style and her disjointed epistemology. To this beautiful mix I was tempted to add one of my own essays on Three Lives, but decided not let the editor's voice speak too strongly at the beginning of this new journal. Rather, I would like to express my undiluted gratitude to these contributors who have entered our maiden voyage.

Remains to map out my wish list for the second issue, and, in fact, for the future of this review: I would like to see as many brilliant academic and artistic submissions come in as I received for this issue. As someone currently investigating Stein's work as (and in terms of) the politics of feminist performance theory, I would also like to encourage all the feminist scholars and drama- and performance critics "out there" to pour oil into the flames of the multifaceted discussion that this journal seeks to continuously rekindle. I welcome especially inquiries and offers for reviews of new material on Stein. As publication figures show, with the rise of cultural-critical approaches to literary scholarship, reading and writing about Stein is becoming fashionable again (not that her work had ever been unfashionable in the first place), so that a book-review section may become useful and necessary for Stein-scholars and Stein-aficionados alike. And, planning further ahead, as someone who successfully teaches various works of Stein in her first-year undergraduate classrooms, I would also like to ask readers to think about submitting short essays for a special "Teaching Stein in the Undergraduate Classroom"-forum that we hope to integrate into the June issue.

But let me close with a personal note of why I like "Baby Woojums" beyond the, to me, theoretical usefulness of her work, her transatlantic personality, and her revaluation of the word "interesting": Gertrude Stein likes dogs, and, as she writes in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, "listening to the rhythm of [her poodle Basket's] water drinking made her recognise the difference between sentences and paragraphs, that paragraphs are emotional that sentences are not" (New York: Vintage Books, 1990, 248). When a dog drinks, she explains in her later works, it concentrates all its emotion on the enjoying of drinking, and drinking becomes its being, just as paragraphs become the being of writing because they capture the supposed unstructuredness of enjoyment in more detail than a highly structured sentence does. Perhaps this connection between an animal and an art that came out of a similarly "animalic" process (that of automatic writing) appeals to the closeted Romantic in me. Perhaps it is the connection itself, almost like a metaphysical conceit, that integrates what T.S. Eliot bemoans somewhat later as a dissociation of emotion and intellect. But perhaps, aside from all theoretical somersaults and complications, it's also just that simple: Gertrude Stein is liking dogs, and dogs are liking Gertrude Stein.

At this point, I'd like to thank my great co-editors Sarah Kornfeld and Stafford, two wonderfully creative women, who continue to remind me about deadlines, about what is technically doable, and who keep me on my toes.

Sonja Streuber.
Davis, California, March 31, 1998.