time-sense: Gertrude Stein Online

It's good to be back! After a move of our headquarters from San Francisco to Oakland, numerous electronic disasters, and end-of-quarter time crunches, all of which have slowed the making of time sense down beyond even my terriblest nightmares, we are back, with new verve and a new and improved production plan for the timely quarterliness of time sense. But administrative glitches aside, let me now turn to this brand-new and very exciting issue: Vol. 1 No. 2 of time sense, I think, clarifies to a large extent, what and how Stein speaks to her readers, or should I say, "experiencers," and how her audience "talks back" to her.

Jason Fichtel's article on Stein's Postmodern drama raises many important questions around the play/ful self-denial of genre in Stein's plays. Fichtel points to specific passages here that do not seem to be ascribed to any character, but that float rather loosely in the plays' performance--turning Stein's linguistically self-reflexive plays into critiques of genre. And, of course, such genre criticism becomes automatically a critique of audience, as well. Dana Cook's compilation of first encounters with Gertrude Stein, then, gives voice to this audience--demystifying the nature of "audience," and grounding this term firmly in historical evidence. Not only do the passages cited here represent a wide variety of Stein's listeners, readers, friends, foes, critics, and aficionados. But these passages, arranged in collage-style, show how the multiple voices of Stein, in fact, reached a multiplicity of audiences, and how, in order to portray these audiences' impressions, one has to literally perform their voices. This is where Kassia Fleisher's performance-essay on Stein's poetics of autobiographical performance comes in. Fleisher, I think, identifies the performativity and the "double-speak" of Stein's texts--texts that put their audiences to work as much as one would generally put a text to work. In other words, meanings don't make themselves; they don't come without cooperation, play, frustration, and the many ways in which audiences engage with textual, personal, or cultural performances. Hence, Stein's practice of putting "texts" together, to be sure, cannot be discussed in linear ways; Fleisher's essay makes that clear. Instead, as with Stein's texts/ "performance pieces," Fleisher's text becomes what you as its reader make of it. You have the option of clicking back and forth between inner-textual links, and I would encourage you to do so, for then, the multiplicity of performativity that is encased in one "text," appears. Carmine Esposito's homage-poem performs Stein's Ida: a novel. While Fleisher encourages her reader to jump within the text, Esposito's poem jumps within the text, and, with a pictorial sense of collage that borders on e.e. cummings' or John Cage's experimental style, tries to make "time sense" of Stein's telling of Ida's tale. As in Stein's salon, Esposito's reader becomes a reader of a picture-in-words. This issue closes with Kate Oliver's delightfully playful, and delightfully simple, four poems on Stein's relationship with Alice B. Toklas.

We hope that you will enjoy this issue as much as you have enjoyed Volume 1 No. 1: Beginning Again, if we may believe all the friendly kudos that we have received since then. Please take a look at our list of topics for the upcoming issues. Thank you for reading time sense!