Zitat des Tages von David Antin:
There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.
My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.
I'm standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I'm happy to see them go.
I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.
I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.
When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.
I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.
The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.
It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.
While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht.
I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.
My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.
I reserve the right to tell shaggy dog stories or even common jokes as part of what I'm doing. I don't give a damn if half the audience walks out.
There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.
Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.
I wanted to be an inventor, whatever I thought that meant then. I guess I was thinking of Edison or maybe James Watt. Or maybe even Newton.
I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.
The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.
While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.
I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.
From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.
I'm aware of my audience in a way, and I do try to engage with them while I'm trying to go about my business of thinking. I believe they help me by providing a focus.
The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.
When I got to the reading all the work, I was reduced to being an actor in an experimental play that I'd already written. And I didn't want to be an actor.
Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.
I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.
I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know.
I have spoken to expert audiences occasionally, but then no audience is expert over the whole range of things I want to explore.
You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.
My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldn't understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.
A myth is the name of a terrible lie told by a smelly little brown person to a man in a white suit with a pair of binoculars.
When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.
For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
