Off the Page: Loud Cows: A Talk and a Poem About Reading Aloud

Note in The Wave in the Mind: "'Off the Page' was a talk for a conference on Women and Language held by graduate students of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California in Berkeley, in April 1998. In getting it ready for this book, I didn't change the informality of the language, since the piece not only is about reading aloud to a live audience but was written for performance. The audience was by no means all women, but they were more receptive to uncomforting remarks about gender equality than most academic groups. I have performed the poem 'Loud Cows' at that meeting, in New York, and elsewhere, and it appears as a frontispiece in The Ethnography of Reading, edited by Jonathan Boyarin."