Dear Everybody,
(Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein)
I kindly invite you to participate in and contribute to a section of my dissertation that I am calling “Everybody’s Everybody’s Autobiography.” For this project, I am collecting audio recordings of individuals reading from Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography. With the help of Stephen Trothen, I am taking these recordings to create an installation wherein the recorded readings of Everybody’s Autobiography play from an old 1930s radio and can be tuned from one voice to the next.
The idea comes from reading about when Stein was introduced to radio during her 1934 tour of America and was astounded “not by what you knew but by what you felt, that everybody was listening…I was so filled with it” (“I Came and Here I am” 72;). Shortly after her tour, Stein began writing Everybody’s Autobiography. Part of my project focuses on how Stein incorporates the aural/oral quality of radio into practices of listening and speaking in her own writing of Everybody’s Autobiography. The opening line to Everybody’s Autobiography is “Alice B Toklas did hers and now everybody will do theirs” (3). This opening is an invitation for voices of readers to fill the text and continually shift meaning, as it is being spoken, from reader to reader. My project aims to do just that: to illuminate the presence of readers reading Stein, the affect of listening to Stein being read, and the remediation of radio in Everybody’s Autobiography.
There are two ways I am going to collect recordings:
1) recording sessions in Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto (of which you can find out about by following me on Twitter @philmiletic)
2) accepting submissions via dropbox from those who are unable to make the recording sessions. If you are interested in submitting a recording, please email me at philip.a.miletic(at)gmail(dot)com and we can discuss how you can get your hands on a copy of Everybody’s Autobiography (if you don’t have a copy of your own). I’ll also give you the link to the dropbox when you email me.
When recording, please follow these guidelines:
- You will have to read at least an entire chapter. This will allow us to better organize the files into the program we are using.
- Don’t worry about being “perfect” and read at your own pace. Reading Stein can be difficult. There will be times that you slip up, stumble over a word, change pace randomly, and so on. This is all fine and would not ruin your submission. You are, after all, live “on the air.” So just keep reading.
- Name your file like so: “Chapter#_firstandlastname”. We can accept any format for sound files.
I want to thank you all in advance who will be contributing or even just spreading the word to friends and colleagues who you think may be interested to contribute. Everyone who lends their voice to the ether will receive credit at the installation and in my dissertation. If you are unable to come to the installation once it is ready (we are aiming for early 2016), Stephen and I will be working hard on an online version afterwards.
I am looking forward to working with all of you, and I can’t wait to hear the voices of “everybody” populating Stein’s text. As Stein writes near the end of EA, “I like anything that a word can do. And words do do all they do and then they can do what they never do do. This made listening to what I had done and what they were doing most exciting” (EA 317-318).
with great gratitude and excitement,
philip miletic
Anything But My Dissertation! 