august

[mammuthus]

"we read these forms on the page, but it bears repeating that traditional native american literatures originate as oral performances. they are offered to audiences as dramatic events in time, language for the ear, rather than objects in space for the eye. and in performance, a pause, a quickening of pace or a sudden retardation, a gesture, or a lowering of the voice affects meaning. not suprisingly, scholars differ about the best way to transfer performance to the page. some have opted for a stylized typography where type size and arrangement seek to convey something of the feeling of what an actual performance might have been like. others, acknowleding that black marks on a white page cannot reproduce a living voice, have left it to the reader to imagine these words in performance."

i like that.