Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments Thanks to Stephen Yenser for introducing me to Gertrude Stein and her critics in 1986, for daring me to develop instructions for reading Stein, and for making me pay attention to every word—Stein’s, as well as my own. Thanks to Martha Banta for pointing out that my sudden interest in conversation analysis—as inspired by Michael Moerman and Edith Wharton—might be worth pursuing. Thanks to John Heritage for welcoming this novice into the field of conversation analysis, and for being willing to take on Stein at the same time. Thanks to all of them, as well as Jayne Lewis, for encouraging me with praise, challenges, and always more questions and wordplay. Thanks to Stein’s readers and critics for inspiring me to think in ways I never imagined, and to Gilbert Harrison’s generous donation to UCLA’s Special Collections. Thanks to the warm and helpful people who work there, especially Jeffrey Rankin, for enabling me to read Stein’s out-of-print works (many of which are now in print), gaze at photographs, and finger— among other memorabilia—one of her small gloves. Thanks to the many students who hesitatingly started into a Stein work and were open-minded and creative enough to notice that something wonderfully interesting was happening. These include Allison Raskin, Jake Bern, Aaron Dover, carine risley, Bryan Kocol, Suzanne Karpilovsky, and Tessa Ingersoll. Thanks even to some of the stubborn ones—Mike Hawes and Eugene Pino, for example—who kept asking for more reasons that they should come to appreciate Stein, too. To Bob Hiller, my eighth-grade American history teacher at Stanley School, thanks for teaching out of discontinued textbooks which showed that imperfect people can accomplish great things, and for truly thinking while he talked to us thirteen-year-olds. Thanks and love to my parents, Gene and Patty Cairns, for everything . Thanks and love to Emma Cairns Watson for her patience and her sweet kisses from the doorway of the study. Thanks for singing: “I am Rose my eyes are blue / I am Rose and who are you / I am Rose and when I sing / x Acknowledgments I am Rose like anything” (from Stein’s The World is Round). Thanks even more for saying unprompted to a friend, the week before this book was due at the press, “Let’s sing it like it’s a conversation!” Thanks and love to Robert N. Watson, who gave unofficial fellowships year after year, was my main reader and copy editor, offered suggestions without expecting me to take them all, arranged a year in Paris for the whole family, and not just accepted but encouraged my natural tendencies to do this (and almost everything else) differently. Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens ...