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The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.

David Antin

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David Antin
Art Critic
Performance Artist
Poet
Writer
the United States of America
David Abraham Antin
David Abram Antin
Talk
Paradoxical
World
Entertainers
Greece
Debate
Entertainment
Sophists
Pieces
Debates
Century
Entertainer
Public
Socrates

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Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.
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It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.
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I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.
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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.
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My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.
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There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.
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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.
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Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
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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.
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For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
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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.
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I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.
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I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.
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I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.
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My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.
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An art machine is a system whose parts when put in motion act upon each other in such a way as to cause you to see things differently
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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.
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From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.
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You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.
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I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
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