TALKING AND THINKING: DAVID ANTIN IN CONVERSATION WITH HAZEL SMITH AND ROGER DEAN H.Smith@unsw.edu.au _Postmodern Culture_ v.3 n.3 (May, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu Copyright (c) 1993 by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, Oxford University Press. David Antin is a "talk poet" who gives provocative talks which combine the genres of lecture, stand up comedy, story-telling and poetry. They juxtapose anecdote with poetic metaphor, philosophical and political debate with satirical comment. The talks are improvised, that is they are created during the performance and no two performances are the same. In his talk piece _Gambling_ (_Tuning_ 148), performed in the seventies, Antin refers to the recreativeness which dominates many poetry readings and which he is reacting against; simply reading a poem is like "returning to the scene of the crime/you try to reenact it and the more you try to bring it back to life the deader it becomes." The medium of the talk restores to poetry its lost oral dimension; the opportunity to bridge the gulf between creative process and product and the opportunity to create in a public forum. Although there is no written record of many of Antin's talks, some of them have been published in two volumes _Talking at the Boundaries_ and _Tuning_. David Antin was born in New York City in 1932 and graduated from New York City College and New York University. He is currently Professor of Art at the University of California at San Diego. He is married to the performance and video artist and film-maker Eleanor Antin. He is also a distinguished critic who has written on the visual arts, postmodernism, television and video art, and the role of art in technology. The context of the conversation was our forthcoming book _Discovering the Discourse: improvisation in the arts after 1945_ in which we are investigating the importance of improvisatory techniques and approaches in art, film, literature and theatre. In this book we will rebut the naive conception of improvisation as a purely spontaneous and intuitive process and demonstrate how improvisation has been a complex creative procedure used by many artists since 1945. We were particularly interested in David Antin's work because it is one of the few examples of improvised poetry. We wanted in the interview to ascertain how David went about his improvisations, what his technique for improvising was and how this related to the effect of the improvisations. The interview took place in San Diego in February 1992 shortly after David Antin's talk at Carroll's Bookshop in San Franscisco on the subject of _the other_. Although David's work over the years was the main focus of the interview, we also alluded from time to time to that specific talk. ----------------------------------------------------------- HS: In what sense do you think your talks are improvisations? DA: Probably in the same sense that most people's improvisations are improvisations. One person I could imagine myself in a relationship to, though I've never said it before, is Coltrane. Coltrane was constantly working over scales and examining other musical manoeuvres, to keep his hands on a lot of things that he could do; he was listening to timbres of different mouthpieces and playing with different ways of making music, so it is not as if he went in as a blank slate. Jazz improvisation is work that in some ways I feel very close to, because the language offers you a well-formed grammar. I am not interested in transforming English grammar, but I am interested in the full range of English and its varieties of speech- registers and its ways of movement from here to there. It allows you much more freedom than anybody really knows. I mean we know very little about the full range of colloquial English. In fact most grammar that is being used in the schools of the high levels of linguistics, which I did doctoral work in, I regard as highly idealized. There are so many things that it doesn't explain, although it's a very eloquent family of explanations for the things it does explain. But it seems to me that language is a reservoir of ways of thinking, because what I am really interested in, at least as much as language, is thinking: not thought but thinking. And the closest I can get to thinking is talking. When I started doing this I wanted to get close to the sound of thought, and then I realised the only way you can get the sound of thought is to think, to do a lot of thinking. Not all thinking is verbal, and you can get close to some of the things that are not generally thought to be linguistic by approaching things in a way that seems less discursive. That is, in some ways narrative and images seem less discursive so that you can reach towards images or towards semantics that are more governed by other ways of arranging things in your mind than merely what is taught to people as linguistics. So the goal is to articulate through thinking, to find my way and open up and explore the range of thinking, but to think about things in the course of it. So in this sense I have a lot of practice because I do it all the time, but Coltrane also played music all the time. It seems to me that Monk had a variably finite repertory of ways of moving, part of which may have been characteristic and part invented from time to time and carried from performance to performance. In that sense I am not any more original than Monk or Coltrane but very much like them. HS: I understand that. It is very important that improvisation shouldn't just be confused with spontaneity. Nevertheless, if you are going to give a talk, is there any degree of preparation beyond previous experience? DA: Sometimes there is but the preparation is not formalized. In other words when Peter Cole asked me to think about the idea of _the other_ I started thinking about a variety of things. I started thinking about the way the idea is used. Not systematically, but as I was driving to school or doing something else like making coffee in the morning. And I took out books from the library to read, but not on the subject of _the other_. It struck me that I wanted to look at Marco Polo's travels. I did and it turned out to be a bad translation and I thought that maybe Mandeville's travels would even be more useful because they were more fanciful. So I took out several volumes and was browsing Mandeville before falling asleep at night. I also browsed through an older history of ethnology that I wanted to look at again and I re-read some of Levi Strauss's _Tristes Tropiques_, none of which I found specially important. It was just that I was preparing my mind and it wasn't that I needed, or was necessarily going to use any of this material: I thought it might have some edge-like relationship to what I was doing. I also looked at several old articles where the term got recycled but again not very seriously. I made a very light play with the material just to make myself cycle the information in my head very loosely. By the time I arrived for the talk I had no fixed idea of how I would begin and I had no fixed idea of structure. The structure normally is provided by the finite length of the tape, sometimes I will stop long before the tape runs out. So I talk for about an hour or 45 minutes: if I'm told that I have to go shorter I will run around half an hour. I can do very short ones if necessary, but then it is different, you don't have the luxury of manoeuvering in the same way. There are dictates which are purely practical, such as how much you can get on a side and there are the dictates of the range and type of audience which has a lot to do with social interplay and making things intelligible. Because it is not only thinking out loud, it's thinking out loud where you are sharing the thinking in some way with other people. HS: But how can you tell what the audience is like if you are not very directly interacting with them? How can you tell what the range of intelligence is? I was wondering all the time during the performance what kind of audience you were pitching it at. DA: You don't know what it is but you feel it out--at the beginning of a piece I have a tendency to be fairly exploratory, it doesn't start taking shape right away. There is a kind of prelude, you run a few scales to see how they work for you but also whether people find them intelligible, which may not mean that you will abandon them. But you get a sense from body language whether people are with you or not with you and there are ways of playing it that are so completely intuitive I don't even know how I do it. That is I spend a fair amount of time circling the material before plunging in, to achieve a readiness of mind and also a kind of tuning relationship--it's like tuning an instrument as a prologue. In other words in standard orchestral situations they tune because they have got to reach a particular pitch, but I have freedom of tuning because no one tells me whether I need just tempered or equal tuning. HS: One possibility improvisation provides is collaboration with other people, for example to collaborate much more with the audience. I have read about the incident at 80 Langton Place where the audience, made up largely of poets, made you interact with them. DA: I was actually interacting with them rather maliciously I thought. HS: During your talk I wondered whether it would end with a discussion and in some ways I was quite relieved that it didn't. DA: Most people are. I don't have a set feeling about it. My sense is that people are there of their own free will and I offer a kind of human engagement with them. In other words I don't deal with material that is impossible for them to deal with. I deal in a space that I presume this intelligent audience can arrive at in some manner. The length of the piece has something to do with the audience's interest, and sometimes the question is how much I can push the material and keep the audience still with it. I think that I can also tell whether people are dialoging with the piece. When I am talking what I say is never quite what I intend to say. There is a kind of relationship between the sense of one's own intentionality and what one does, because if one had a complete match between what one intended and what one said, one wouldn't have to go any further, one would never have to reformulate. So there is a kind of slippage and sometimes what you say is better than your intention and sometimes worse or sometimes merely to the left or right of it. And so I am always conducting a kind of dialogue with myself, as well as a dialogue with the audience, and the audience is always conducting a kind of dialogue with me, but also spinning off. I feel that's good. One of the reasons I use a less tight presentation mode is that I want the audience to have room to pursue its own interest and loop away and loop back, which I think they do. I think people associate off into things that are like my experience but different, and that they might have said in a different way. So they pursue their agreements and disagreements with me through parallels of support, this allows them a full-scale dialogue. And to the extent to which they are involved in it, they are interested in the piece and they have this kind of intense but intermittent attention. HS: It's still different from a direct dialogue with the audience. Have there been some instances (apart from the incident at 80 Langton Place) where people have spoken from the audience or you have actively encouraged that? DA: Sometimes but not a great deal, unless it happens, in which case sometimes I will respond to it in a way, loop it in and continue, but my performance is not aimed at that. Usually the audience doesn't feel inclined to do this, anymore than they would normally feel inclined to do it. Imagine an audience of musicians at a jazz performance. They might feel very responsive, someone might say, yeah, but they are not likely to start playing. There is a feeling that the audience generally has at an artwork that they interact with it by thinking about it, rather than that they immediately interact discursively with it. Although once in a while I'll say something that gets close and somebody will say something, usually not much, and I acknowledge it and bring it in a bit and that is fine. HS: As audience we're very conservative, I think: we're not used to participating and so I suppose we would have to be actively encouraged. DA: You have to be not only encouraged but also feel sufficiently ready. It is more than that, you have to feel a readiness with respect to a common range of the material and I think the lack of feeling ready is partly a sense that the material is not quite so common to them. In fact that was one of the complaints that the Langton Place people had which I was toying with, it was essentially that they knew very little about the material. I was dealing with a relationship between the figures of rhetoric and figures of mind and I was trying to retrieve the values of certain Greek terms because I thought they were useful. But when I got to a story in an area they felt they knew a great deal about or thought they knew something about, (they felt inclined to have an opinion about anorexia say, or what was called anorexia) it was funny because they hadn't really thought about that either. Which was of course one of the great difficulties for them, that is, they were thinking about it now for the first time in any significant way. And I think even they were tepid in their interventions because they really hadn't thought about it that much, and they figured I had thought about it more which was probably true. RD: Have you ever tried to set up a situation where you have a discourse between several people who are simultaneously thinking? DA: I've never tried to set it up because it is hard to do. Though I would certainly find it interesting. RD: Because that would be the analogy to the jazz performance. DA: It certainly would, it's just that you have to organise it and find people and find a terrain that you all feel you are willing to do it in relationship to. I did a thing in France at the Beauborg with several French poets a couple of years ago but I think they saw themselves as more supportive of what I was doing than I would have liked. It was fun talking with them but I found it hard to draw them out. I tried but it was harder for me to draw them out in those circumstances. HS: Could you give me any idea of the process by which you generate the talks, how you get from one item in them to another? DA: Well I look for a promising tangle, some kind of snarl of threads so to speak. I may not see all of them at once, I may see the end of a thread, the end of a couple of threads and I try to pick it apart, and find out what it consists of. HS: So you are holding all those threads together simultaneously in your mind? DA: I follow one of them and it either leads to another knot or I go back up to find another one and I might move into what seems like an end that I can't get out of and then instead of backtracking I will leap to one that was next to it. I will make a transition to the one that was further away but which I had left over there. So there is a way of dealing with it, as a problematic: it is a sort of playfulness, it is as if I took the notion of problem solving and thinking away from its seriousness into a kind of sheer pleasure, the idea of solving knots. You look for the great knot and then you try to solve it like the Gordian knot. To me the world is filled with some things that are knots and some things that are snarls and some things that are pleasant tangles and I try to find a way to open them up and see what they are made out of and this sometimes lead to new forms of ravelling. I knot and unknot and I am looking for an ultimately elegant knot structure which I will eventually work out of the remaining material. HS: That is actually what it feels like. RD: It feels like several successive modules in some cases doesn't it, particularly in _the other_. Did you have an awareness that it was likely that there would be five modules and that "Guattari" and "Saddam" and "molecular structure" would be amongst them, or were those things that mostly came to mind as it happened? DA: I think they come from a kind of experience and a set of attitudes and what sometimes happens is that you have clear cut modules but the number of them may differ and also they turn out not to be situated precisely in the same plane. In other words there are discrete concentrations usually, something leads to a concentrated module and somewhere another one may develop, but it generally turns out not to be module module module in total contiguity. I try to construct in a kind of cognitive space in such a way that the distances between the modules create openings for the mind and also begin to throw light on a space that seems like a meaningful quasi container, but a container filled with holes. In other words my relationship to a system is--the problem of systems is--that they don't have enough holes. So that they become fanciful and unreal: the trap of systematic thinking is that it is falsified through closure. I like systems, I find them illuminating, but what I find illuminating is the notion of systems that articulate and are elegant and in some way incomplete and clearly so. And it is a relationship between the one incomplete system and the other one which creates a kind of hyperspace, because the spaces between them become interesting. The principle of complementarity in physics is an example of concentration, on the non- fit between two situations, and it takes head on the difficulty of wave and particle and puts it right up front in physics. Well I don't want to necessarily argue that what I do puts it right up front like that but I have treated it with casual obviousness. That is I allow this complementarity situation to develop where one story doesn't fit over the other story in such a way that one completely clarifies the other (I don't believe in total clarification) but on the other hand it throws light onto it. RD: But it is a logical necessity that thinking could not have a complete closure really isn't it? DA: It can't have complete closure. RD: So what I was going to ask was,why so much emphasis on making that necessary failure overt? I can see the attraction but why is it attractive to you? DA: Well it doesn't turn out to be a failure, because what I really am doing is partly making a polemical case for what I believe is real thought, real thinking, as opposed to what has come to stand for rationalism in the history of Western thought, which is a straw man: the notion of the totally closed logical system which has only one little hole in it that is unfortunate because there is a paradox lurking in the corner. This particular form, has dominated rational and irrationalist thought in Western European discourse to the point of annoyance finally, but what you actually find is that structures, because they have holes in them, don't become useless. On the other hand rational thought is different from what people think it is, and rationality is an exaggeration of the kind of clarity of mind and the possible mental tactics that can be deployed to think usefully, meaningfully and creatively, and it seems to me these are very poorly understood. So part of the purpose of my work is to illuminate, by example, the nature of real thinking, in which art-thinking shares a great deal with scientific- thinking, and we have a lot in common although we will do things that may be done differently we may not do some of the things that scientists may do and we may do a great number that they do. And even if you do what they do, what they do doesn't look like what they say it is, because when they write the article they always do it backwards. The article is not the thinking. RD: We art thinkers would not have such a tendency to prioritise as scientists would have would we? DA: No, and my work is about the unity of thinking and the absolute absence of the dichotomy between what we call irrational artistic thought and rational thought. It basically engages with the idea of raiding across the two terrains to insist on the unity of the terrain. Logic is a function of human character, people are basically in some sense logical when they think at all. But logic is broader than that. The truth-table fable is a fantasy but if you could lock down the categories in such a way and you could position them rigidly between here and there, you could quantise between the true and the false in a particular curious way. But usually the categories are too slippery for anything significant to be put into this position for very long. What happens is that the slippage in anything you use generally causes you to have to approach it in a number of different ways, "as long as this holds to be true" and "as long as this is like that then it follows from that that this is this." HS: Do you feel there is a sense in which you adopt a persona in your talks? Reading through the talks I sometimes felt there was a persona of a kind of naive person struggling to understand certain things, for example in the talk where you speak about the third world and what the third world actually is. DA: There is in a sense a persona but the persona develops, because as soon as you begin representing yourself at all, anything you represent has a fictional property. As soon as a representation occurs it's partly untrue, it's partly fiction, but it develops its own inertial moment, its own commitments and a lot of these things derive essentially from a kind of philosophical positioning. In other words you can approach it in a different way: "what if we didn't start by accepting belief in all these things that everybody always knows, what if we didn't know this, how could we examine this belief." So the naivety is ultimately based on the belief that we know too much and that it is founded on too little. We are standing on a swamp or a cloud and we rely on these well known things, that are well known to be true, but how true are they? So in a way you take things everybody knows so it sounds naive to say them, but if you say "third world" by now everybody seems to have forgotten what the first and second worlds were. I mean is there a second world? What do you mean by a world? Are there more than that? In other words if the third is invented largely as a function of a quarrel between one and two and you develop a kind of economic theory on the basis of this, the third gets to be built up largely on not belonging to one or two. And then you call it unified, but the relations that either the one or two might have can be extremely bizarre, and furthermore you can imagine a unity of victimization but the victims might not like each other if they were unified. For example, it is not obvious that the Jehovah's Witnesses, the gypsies, the Jews, and the communists in the concentration camps of the Nazis really were very friendly with each other, or they were only as long as you had the barbed wire around the camp, and they were often treated in different ways. So it seems to me, without being naive, you can't ask the right questions. HS: But can I go back to the issue of the relationship between the first person and yourself, because that has been worked out in so many different ways in post- modern poetry and yours seems to be very interestingly situated with regard to that. Do you feel you have a strong sense of talking about your own experience, or do you sometimes tell lies about your own experience? DA: Very often. No, it is all mixed! I basically feel that my talks should be no more reliable than conversation in general as absolute fact! You see what one depicts as true is a function of one's feeling and experience and all of it has its origins in things that are factual as far as I remember, but some of them are fantasies. And some of them are fantasies involuntarily, sometimes you remember things that are not true simply because your desire has already produced the representation. So that I have never gone out and notarised my statements, and my self-position is that people will take it as credibly as conversation. Now much of the experience is true or at least partially true and some of it is very true and some of it is fiction, but it is fiction that is true, in other words it is serious fiction, it's not fantasy. It is serious fiction in that it derives from a kind of experiential engagement with it. HS: How do you think the talks relate to your normal talk or your normal speech? DA: They are close but the situation creates a greater intensification of the characteristics. In a conversation with other people, in a social situation, you tend to encourage other people and allow other people to play and you may not have the space to take on one of these things. HS: The knotting and the unknotting you talk about wouldn't be so prevalent in a conversation would it? DA: No. But it has a relationship with some of the teaching that I do. HS: That was another thing that struck me when I saw the talk; it reminded me of the lecture situation in some respects. DA: Yes, well it draws on the lecture and on stand-up comedy. It is not really stand up comedy in that I really don't play gag after gag, I don't theatricalize myself like Spalding Gray. Spalding Gray, of course, is characterized as a performer who also does improvisation although his improvisations become somewhat memorized by the time he does the work. At least I think he said this and on another occasion he said he didn't, so I am not sure, he may work more like me than he indicated first time around. He comes from acting and so what he generates essentially is very markedly a persona of Spalding Gray. He theatricalises himself so he is his main actor and he positions Spalding Gray as bewildered and as a major victim of his own inadequacies and it is very charming. And what happens is that though he is his main actor, things befall him, whereas I tend to be sometimes an actor and often merely only an observer or sometimes an actor who is in there involuntarily but the action is the other people. I am not my main actor so my persona doesn't develop beyond necessity. It seems to me as long as you start saying "I" you have got a persona, especially if you say it three times in a row because the "I" begins to develop a configuration from its continuity. And you see Gray concentrates so much on the behaviour and the bewilderment of his "I" because he is his main actor, he produces not exactly a Chaplinesque figure but a certain kind of bewildered central figure. It is a more artefactually complete version of the naivety you say that you pick up in some of my pieces but my pieces are merely an attitude that enters into a discussion of something else, whereas in his case he then intrudes into and stumbles over it and falls into a trap deliberately and picks himself up out of the trap. HS: Well that is a very important distinction isn't it? DA: And so I don't build up the character and occasionally I get sucked into a case where I am a considerable figure but usually I am interested in something outside of the "I." The subject in my case becomes the vantage point from which to look. HS: How do the talks relate to the written transcripts of them, how do you actually notate them and what makes you decide where to notate the gaps? DA: It is very impressionistic. You see the media are really quite different so what I am doing with the talks is trying to create an experience for the reader which is an analogue structure of the performance. The media are really so different, that is performance has all these unknown things that are happening between you. The audience is there and they pick up a great number of things from the way you look, from what you are saying, the inclination of your head movement, they have many more contextual clues than is on the tape recording. The tape recording is in some ways totally bewildering for most people, because it contains stuff that people don't hear and it doesn't contain things they do pick up. Whatever is said they ignore certain things and slips at the time which they don't pay attention to. It is perfectly clear when an audience listens they hear the right thing. They hear what you intend to a very great degree, and a tape recorder records only what is acoustically available to it within certain filters, so the tape recording is the most bizarre mode of dealing with this material. The transcript then is an attempt to construct. I used to do it myself but now I get somebody just to type it up altogether with no pauses, or to pause wherever they think a sentence ends or not to worry about it. If I decide to listen to the tape, which I sometimes do, I listen all the way through and then I take the transcript and put it down over there. And then I look at the beginning and I read through it once and then I start typing and then I might look at it four pages later, six pages later, 12 pages later, I may look at it very closely in spots. So what happens is that I am typing, I am writing something with my own habits of verbal composition and in my head the image of what I have done, and I am recreating its image, I am not transcribing line for line. Often without doing anything of the sort it comes out almost as if it has been memorized, which is very startling. But sometimes what will happen is that I will come to a place where I didn't have room to do something at the time, the piece had a moment where I wanted to go on and for some reason I couldn't do it as fully as I would have liked and I think it should be made more articulate. Some transcripts are twice as long as the talks originally were. Some pieces are very close to the literal form: the phrasing system seems to be very similar in both of them and you could hardly tell the difference between them. I remember a piece called _dialogue_ in my book _tuning_. I did this piece in Santa Barbara and they sent it back to me and I transcribed it and I added a whole story that I cite in the performance but didn't have room to tell it. But a reading audience doesn't suffer from the same psycho-dynamic as a listening one, you are in a different space, you are holding a book in your hand and so I simply told the whole story that I couldn't have told there given the difficulties of timing. So the version that I sent back to them was one and a half to two times the length of the other piece. I met the editor about a week later and she said she really liked it a lot and what she really liked was how completely identical my original version was with the performance! And so I have to say that there is a phenomonological issue at stake. It does vary from occasion to occasion depending on the commitments I have. I have a commitment to the performance, to the psycho-dynamics of improvisation, to doing the best I can, which always involves an engagement with an audience, and a commitment to material. And sometimes one has to be traded off against the other, you can't let the audience down. I have a responsibility to an audience to do it as well as I can in a way that allows them to be participants to the end, and so my sense of timing is partly related to that. I can stretch it, I can negotiate it but I am not a performer who is interested in violating audiences. My interest is essentially in engaging an audience, discoursing with an audience perhaps pushing it, but in some kind of social relationship that I find is humanly responsible. Now the problem is I don't always feel that I was responsible enough to some of the articulations I should have undertaken in relation to my loyalty to the material and then the question is how do I do it in the text in such a way that it doesn't violate the spirit of the performance? And there will be times when I will take up in the text a greater articulation of some of the material that I was handling in a performance, and then I have to construct a way of getting back from it into where I was before. It is as if a cadenza went wild and I take the cadenza way out and then I've got to come back in some way and I create an artifice for getting back to where I was before. HS: I think, actually, the transcripts are very successful because one of the things that struck me when I saw you talk was... DA: They sound like me. HS: Yes that it was very much what I had conjured up from the text. DA: Well that is the intention. RD: On the other hand another way of looking at that process of transcribing is that you are using the process of thinking but then you are also superimposing thought. DA: Well actually no. Just superimposing more thinking. RD: Except that you are presumably doing that over a much longer time-span and you are also thinking retrospectively about what you thought in the process of thinking when you performed--i.e., by now, thought. It is kind of a combination of the two, isn't it? DA: Well it is interesting--it is true in a way although I don't see it that way. I see it as thinking and rethinking, because it seems to me I don't write slowly either. I write almost as fast as I speak. I use a computer and I used to use a typewriter and I am an extraordinarily fast typist and the computer has made me even faster. So I don't use the system that many people use to write, which is built on endless revision; not because I don't want to do it, I just don't feel that way. I write almost the way I talk so I go pusssssh you know and I catapult myself along almost at the pace of my speaking. RD: That raises the other question which comes from the realization of the two stages. Why do you really need to do the performance verbally in public? Why can't you do the thinking at the computer. DA: I like the engagement. Somewhere in Levi Strauss' work he talks about the one thing that is so marked in all primitive art and that is almost lost completely in Western traditional art as we know it. And he says what isn't there is a sense of occasion, whereas occasion so dominates the art that he was talking about. For me the sense of occasion, of art being rooted in an occasion, is one of the central issues of its motivation. RD: Yes, well as an improviser I sympathise with that. Stemming from what you said at the beginning of the conversation and the comparison with Coltrane there is one major difference, it seems to me, between what you are doing in your talks and what they are doing. You are saying that you don't really want to transform grammar but I think that they did eventually transform the grammar of music and by the heyday of free jazz it became a primary objective almost. I don't think it was ever a prime objective of Coltrane's but it probably was of Cecil or Ornette. Do you not feel any temptation in that direction in spite of that? DA: Well grammar plays a different role historically in music. And in a certain sense the grammar of music is much more constraining and in some sense fairly trivial. As someone reasonably grounded in music my sense is that grammar in music is more of a straightjacket than grammar in language. So they really had to break with a lot, although they didn't really break with grammar if you take grammar to be a universal grammar. Supposing we take the notion of the universal grammar of music, a very loosely understandable psycho-grammar in a sense of what you can distinguish, that is based on the distinguishability of timbres, the limit and thresholds of what perception can in fact articulate in sound. It seems to me we don't know the universal grammar of music. The grammar of language has just begun to be discovered with the appearance of people like Chomsky and the Russian formalists, and we hardly know what the real grammar of language is. RD: Nevertheless quite a few of our literary peers have felt inclined to attack it haven't they? DA: Yes though they usually do so on the basis of very insufficient understanding. RD: But as you have said in various ways already that doesn't necessarily undermine the validity of the enterprise does it, quite the opposite. DA: No, not at all, I'm perfectly happy with them doing it. If they start out from false premises and do terrific things. I've got nothing against it! It is the theory that I sometimes find foolish but the outcome of the work is often terrific. So in a sense if Coltrane or Ornette do things that are breaking up a grammar it is only when you take grammar in the narrow sense of the grammar of music, because if, for example, you suppose that the deep grammar of music is different from the grammar that was imposed on it, in my sense they look for the deep grammar. I would say they are looking for the deep grammar in music and that was the greatness of free jazz, the fact that it was so coherent. I taught one entire 3 hour course with a group of people where we tried simply to take one whole performance of the Coltrane group in 65 and we were listening to it and we tried to find a way to talk about it that made intelligent sense about the articulations and the moods that were made. And we needed a kind of theatrical vocabulary to discuss it and we were trying to re- formulate, and it seemed to us that the work was extraordinarily coherent and in some sense humanly grammatical because it was intelligible. RD: Do you recognise a group of improvising talk-givers in whatever country that are your peers, and if so have you considered trying to set up a condition in which you could collaborate with any of them specifically? DA: Well I don't know of any peers in the sense of having close relations although I know other people who work in the domain. RD: Yes I mean in the latter sense, a peer, somebody with an equivalent level of interest. DA: Yes they do but they are in a semi-commercial zone overlapping mine and have different aims. For example Garrison Keillor is an improvisor in certain ways. I am not sure whether he memorizes his stuff and maybe it is in story-telling that we overlap more than in improvisation, although I have a feeling he may improvise his stories. And there is a kind of connection, although not a connection of sensibility with Spalding Gray, though he is theatrical. And whereas my talks have a kind of philosophical linguistic commitment, in his there is a kind of theatrical but also psychological set of concerns. I don't know anyone who basically works that way that it would be easy to imagine working in relationship to. RD: So the idea of a collaboration with say a person who might use phonemic improvising, let's say a Bob Cobbing wouldn't really appeal because there isn't that cohesion between the two approaches? DA: No, although I am very inclined to the possibility of working with a musician because I could imagine working with some really contemporary musician, doing a piece for example with George Lewis. I could imagine doing things with him because the space that he operates in seems to me not unreasonably playful. It is both different enough and at the same time capable of being rhetorically innovative and I could see myself playing with it. RD: We have used musical and verbal improvising. It can be very interesting, you can make the relationship in lots of ways. DA: Yes, as long as you can figure out how to work together in a physical sense and a team-like sense. It seems to me that we could do it in ways that are not the most obvious ways. HS: And have you thought of doing anything, setting yourself up technologically in any way? Having for example a tape of yourself talking and then talking with that or something like that. DA: Well I did use the intervention of taped conversations for the _Archeology at Home_ and I was not enormously thrilled by that. And I did another piece, _Scenario for Beginning Meditation_, that was published in one of my books of poems. It has a set of questions with wide spaces between them and some responses to them. There were questions such as "is this the right time to begin" and I left spaces between them on the tape recording long enough so that I could answer the tape recording. And I went back the next day and I ran down the batteries of the tape recording so that I knew that it would be fairly weak and that it would get weaker and weaker. The sentences were philosophical reflections on the problem of beginning. The tape recording would talk and then I would try to answer the recording in a dialogue. I tried to respond because it was asking questions and I tried to answer it. The students were in the middle and as the tape recorder got lower and lower because I had deliberately run down the battery very low, I had to push through the students to hear the tape recording and be able to respond to it. So the piece was a sculptural piece because basically it forced the re-articulation of the space. The piece took a while to do and at the end I frantically leant against the tape-recording trying to hear what it said in order to answer it. So the piece was sort of funny but it was designed as a piece of sculpture but later I just published the questions. HS: Reading through _Talking at the Boundaries_ and _Tuning_ there didn't seem to be a major change in the way that you actually approached giving talks. When did you start the talks? D: Early 70's, about 71. HS: Do you feel that the talks you give now are very different in certain ways? DA: I think they vary enormously. Obviously there were changes because I am much more experienced at doing them. But on the other hand if you look at the two books, there are 16 talk pieces published in the two books and yet in the 21 years that I have done this I may have done 160 talks. And this is a very small subset of what I have done and in it is hard to have an idea of the range of the talks from the 16. I could publish more but in a way I am an oral poet who has book capability, and to be an oral poet you have to do 7 or 8 performances a year or you are not performing. It's important to be an ongoing performer. I will do about 5 or 6 this year; if you don't do it you can't keep your hand in it. There have been changes and I've got a book coming out with New Directions which will be out in Spring of 93. It is called _What It Means to be Avant Garde_. HS: Do you think there are certain topics that you are really obsessed with, which keep coming up time and time again in your talks? I am sure if I went through I could find certain recurring themes. DA: Probably some that come up more than others and new things show up once in a while. I like to think that I am not so completely closed that I always talk about the same things. On the other hand we have our habits and concerns and things that are not resolved. What is resolved I don't bother dealing with. For example in _the other_ certain things familiarly fit into it. On the other hand it was not a subject I had thought about in any significant way before and if you take it at the micro-level, some of the concerns are the same, but you are looking at them from different points of view. So my sense is that there is a mixture. I am sure if I went through the talks I would find things that were familiar, but then one isn't infinite in one's capabilities. ------------------------------------------------------------ The Interviewers: Hazel Smith, who lived in England until 1989, was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, has a PhD from the Department of American Studies at the University of Nottingham in contemporary American poetry and is currently a lecturer in the School of English at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She has a particular interest in the contemporary avant-garde and in the creative process, and her current research interests include performance- orientated and technologically manipulated poetry, and improvisatory techniques and real time manipulation in the contemporary arts. She has published articles in many journals and is currently writing a book collaboratively with Roger Dean on improvisation in the arts after 1945 for the publishers Gordon and Breach. Hazel Smith is also a poet and sound artist working in the area of experimental poetry and performance and has published in numerous international poetry magazines. She has also published three volumes _Threely_ (Spectacular Diseases Imprint 1986), _Abstractly Represented_: Poems and Performance Texts 1982-90_ (Butterfly Books 1991) and _TranceFIGUREd Spirit_ (Soma 1990). Some of her work was included in the 1991 Anthology _Floating Capital: new poets from London_, Potes and Poets Press, U.S.A.. Hazel Smith has given poetry and text performances in many different countries including Australia, Great Britain, USA, Belgium and New Zealand, and also on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), BBC and US radio. She has collaborated several times with artist Sieglinde Karl and musician Roger Dean and her performance work has been featured on several ABC programmes, and internationally, for example on France Culture. She is currently making a CD of her poetry and performance pieces and one is being released on CD by the US journal in sound, Aerial. Hazel is also a violinist. She is leader of the contemporary music group austraLYSIS and has performed solo and chamber music in many parts of the world including Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Norway and the Philippines. She has featured as soloist on several gramophone records. Roger Dean is an improviser, instrumentalist (playing double bass, piano and electronics), composer and musicologist. He has worked widely in Europe, Asia, Australasia, and the U.S.. He formed the European group Lysis in 1975, and its Australian counterpart, austraLYSIS, in 1989. He has made more than twenty five lp and cd recordings. Amongst his recent recordings are _The Wings of the Whale_ (with Lysis; Soma 783), _Something British_ (with Graham Collier Music; Mosaic GCM 871), _Moving the Landscapes_ (austraLYSIS, Tall Poppies 007) and _Xenakis Epei_ on the Wergo label. He has written more than 60 works, both completely notated pieces and also works for improvisers. He has used a range of compositional techniques, from serial, and freely atonal, to neotonal and other post-modern approaches; and composed for digital electronics also. Several scores have been widely distributed in his books (mentioned below); and in publications of Sounds Australian, The Australian Music Centre, Sydney, and Red House Press, Melbourne. Many are on commercial record releases on Soma, Mosaic, and recently Tall Poppies. Amongst his recent works are _TimeDancesPeace_, in which dancers and musicians work interpretively and improvisatorily with shared materials and methods of development. He has also collaborated with Hazel Smith in two large text-sound works, _Poet Without Language_, and _Silent Waves_, both written for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). He is active in musicology, with many articles and reviews published. His practical book _Creative Improvisation_ was published by Open University Press (UK/US) in 1989. It was followed by _New Structures in Jazz and Improvised Music since 1960_ (Open University Press; 1991). He has received bursaries and commissions from the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Australia Council, ABC, and Rikskonserter (Sweden). He also has a career in scientific research, and is the Director of The Heart Research Institute, Sydney, Australia.