It's an interview....

    AMERICAN LANGUAGE

    An Online Book of Live Performances by Alan Reade
    1991-1999

     © Alan Reade, 1999

    In early November 1999, author and poet Nick Barrett interviewed Alan where they both work, the San Francisco offices of e-learning megacorporation DigitalThink. Here is what they chatted about, as fellow DigitalThinker Lisa Rothrauff snapped digital photos.


    Nick: Hi, Alan.

    Alan: Hi.... This is kind of weird.

    Weird? How?

    It just feels strange talking to you about something other than our jobs! We work two desks down from each other, but all we ever talk about when we take a break is....

    Instructional design? Portal sites? E-something-or-other?

    Yeah, stuff like that. But not to bore! For the reading audience, I should say that I know what you're going to ask me from e-mail you sent. Oh yeah, and that you've been to two of my shows and helped "test" the "American Language" part of the site. Was it you who suggested I get rid of the ugly mustard color for The Alphabet of Savages?

    Nope. Someone else.

    Well, I did. I went from a Morbid Maize to a sort of...Lemon Lift. Or maybe it's more of a Sunshine Yellow....

    Uh, yeah...well, I'll start right in with the content questions, okay?

    Okay. Shoot.

    All right, first of all, regarding "American Language," do you think the personal is always the political and vice versa? For example, "Allegiance," "Rewriting the Pledge," and "Helping Hand" [from The Alphabet of Savages] seem much more "political," although they are, of course, laden with residual traces of the personal. Pieces like "Confession" or "Danelle" [from TV or Not TV] move more toward the realm of the personal. Can you talk about these terms? What they mean to your work?

    Sure. First of all, I am on the Steinem boat in believing the political and personal are meshed. But, remember, my job is descriptive, not prescriptive. So if I make observations of things that involve the political, it's because they're intertwined...I can't separate them. For instance, I can't separate the words of the "Pledge of Allegiance" from its origins: an anthem created by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist, as a sort of rallying cry for the lower and middle classes to have equality with the upper classes. I'm fascinated at that idea, of someone using language to try to bring about real change--and by the fact that the pledge used to be done with the right hand raised, Hitler-youth style! And the piece I wrote about it, where the words just trail off and get garbled and mangled and then broken down to letters, is about how all that history has crumbled--the words are said now, but the meaning has somehow been lost. I mean, I had no idea what I was saying when I recited the Pledge in first grade. I just thought it was interesting that every morning we would talk to a flag.

    Just to key off that, you go as far to say that you are placing yourself within a broader cultural tradition--e.g., "the performance Walt Whitman."

    I never said that! Walt Whitman...?

    Work with me! Can you talk about some of your influences, and how they manifest themselves in your art?

    Well, I don't know how much of a cultural tradition performance art is really becoming. There are many well-loved performance artists, in America and the world, but they have only become part of a cultural tradition through really "traditional" means--books, CDs, videos, film. The real edgy work either becomes part of a retrospective or is forgotten. Americans don't have a place to "put" performance art yet, culturally. But I like to think of being part of a continuum. I've been influenced as much by the "lineage" of Leonardo Da Vinci and Alexander Graham Bell as I have been by, say, that of Homer, the Beats, other poets.

    I'm incredibly intrigued with the idea that language is our reality--not that it "represents" our reality, but that it is actually how we experience the world. I see you playing with this idea throughout, but most adamantly in "Helping Hand" [from The Alphabet of Savages]. I also see you toying with the idea that language as a symbol is not strictly limited to words. We are surrounded by image-language, and we are busily constructing our reality using that as a tool as well. Do you think our sensitivity (or numbness as the case may be) to these languages, particularly as culture speeds up, is going to move us to a new and better place, or to a worse place?

    Wow, what a question. Well, I think that the boom in literacy has been a big push of the 20th century. We still have problems in some parts of the world, but, let's face it, written language belongs to everyone now, not just the church, the state, or the aristocracy. Language enables people to understand the world around them and to do things--from knowing where to go for food to writing proposals--and so it can only be a good thing as people use these different "languages" more. And that includes programming code, software, telecommunications--not just what we have previously referred to as language.

    But I also look at whether the ubiquitousness of language really adds to the beauty of things, you know? Just because you can write doesn't mean you can necessarily write well. For instance, I think 19th-century letter-writers would be appalled at the lack of structure, of protocol, in our present e-mail. They would view it as rude, crude, lewd. So sometimes we lose form, beauty, and nuance in our rush for speed.