another good book lately

The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation by Dennis Tedlock -- fascinating. This is the guy who did the good translation of the P0pul Vuh. He talks a lot about pauses, body language, word emphasis and accent in Zuni and Mayan storytelling and how wrong it is to write it down as prose, and how inadequate prose (and poetry too) is for conveying the meaning of a story that's told out loud. What looks like boring or meaningless repetition when transcribed might have been wildly meaningful when spoken. The stories and his interpretations are great. Especially cool - his poetic rendering of a speech he gave at some academic conference.