Can’t help yourself from talking? Like Joni Mitchell: “I’m always talking/Chicken squawking.”
Sounds like you could be an aspiring folk journalist!
But remember, an awkward phase can be handled. (And it is just a phase so please keep your phasers on stun — nobody wants to get hurt here.)
Did I say phase? I meant phrase.
Either way, self-deprecation that is also funny is your best move.
Here is an actual conversation that took place in an actual restaurant. We’re in the town of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and my friend Sally orders, “Rocky Mountain Oysters.”
SALLY: I had them once. They’re delicious.
HANK: Really?
SALLY: Yep.
HANK: Are you sure? I heard they’re slimy.
SALLY: You’re thinking of Oysters Rockefeller. Those are very slimy.
HANK: Oh.
WAITER ARRIVES
HANK: Um, how are these prepared, like fried or garlic oysters?
WAITER: They’re deep fried, served with a barbecue sauce, sir.
HANK: Mmm. Okay.
SALLY: See?
HANK: Sounds great!
FOOD ARRIVES
HANK: These definitely look deeply-fried.
WAITER: Yes, these are your beef bull balls, sir.
PAUSE
HANK: Oh.
SALLY: Oh.
Awkward, right?
Possible lesson: Never argue with a gal named Sal, for you will not win that conversation.
Back Pocket Banter
What’s your method to “smooth over” uncomfortable situations?
What did you say to get out of one?
When have you found it awkward to navigate life?
What is the strangest food you’ve ever tasted?
Activity Guaranteed To Ease Awkwardnesses
If complimenting a person about an item of clothing doesn’t get you out of an awkward phase, try the following: Do something silly. Lift your right arm above your head, and turning your body slightly to the right, bend that right arm at the elbow, waving your hand over your head with a shout of “Woo Hoo!” At once intimate and anti-intimate (especially if employed too closely, bringing unwanted physical contact), this shticklact* I watched displayed to perfection in 1976 by a British gentleman called David Bernstein at the border between Israel and Lebanon. It proved to be a terrific communication and ice-breaking tool with non-English speakers, also amusing those in uniform.
Lesson: Put an onus of awkwardness upon yourself. This will allow others to laugh and relax.
As more and more of our relationships play out over social media, with political squabbles passing for conversation and emojis standing in for genuine expressions of affection…
Meghan Daum, LA Times February 18 2016 on how Justices Scalia and Ginsberg could share common joys despite their political differences
People yearn to elevate the “national” conversation. When a culture like ours lacks decent political dialogue, comedians act as our philosophers and guides. We turn to Samantha Bee and John Oliver.
I do, for guidance.
Meanwhile, do you think texting has helped the national conversation?
I don’t. When you don’t have to face a convo-correspondent, you can grind them down and out by turning a give-and-take into a rugby grunt. It’s so easy to push and shove aint it? But screaming angry and lost is not a conversation.
Political conversation can be enlightening. Despite what you may take from current debates. And the best way to join a national convo? Start one. Locally. Here’s an example:
In August of 1968, I was sitting on the floor of our “family room” in Detroit watching the Democratic convention being broadcast on NBC. (My parents liked Cronkite, but Huntley-Brinkley were great covering conventions.) Suddenly there on our 19-inch Magnavox were policemen in Chicago swinging billy clubs at protestors, knocking them into dark streets.
I turned to my father sitting behind me. My father always watched TV shows from the sofa with the evening’s Detroit News on his lap.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Why are the cops beating up those students?”
My father folded the newspaper on his lap. The continuing mayhem kept flowing right there in front of us in uncut black-and-white news footage, and he seemed at a loss.
“I don’t know, son,” he said.
“I don’t get it,” said the 13 year-old son.
“I don’t understand that, either,” said the dad.
And this is when I first learned to – the phrase was already popular on protest buttons —“question authority.”
Because guess what? Authority did not have all the answers. Sometimes authority didn’t know what was going on. It was time for me to join the national conversation. (Ask your grandparents for more details.)
By Andy Rash
Back Pocket Banter
Perhaps some folk journalism seeds were planted during that 1968 Democratic convention. I remember seeing NBC News reporter Sander Vanocur brandishing his microphone like a weapon, flashing past competing convention floor reporters from ABC and CBS, adjusting the antenna on his portable headset—made him look like My Favorite Martian — and shouting: “Buzz off guys, this is my interview!”
Questions
What do you think of our current discourse?
Do you ever write letters to a newspaper or call a radio talk show? What about?
A popular button worn during the revolutionary days of the 1960s said: “Question Authority.”* Do you ever question authority? What kind of response did you get?
Cultural Convo
Write a short thank you letter to a public figure who has had a positive influence on you.
Shoot an email to a local, statewide or national politician about something they said. See what kind of response you get and tell others about it.
Join “the national conversation” online or on a street corner. Annotate, annoy, amuse and inform others. With verses of your own devising, drive eyeballs open 24/7. “Write your ream or only dream.” Go ahead and pull a leg pull a face pull a prank. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters of the 1960s defined a prank as, “Something never been seen before: You bomb them, but you do it at night, with poetry.”
America is talkin’. It is this conversation that I find fascinating and vital. It is who we are – a highly opinionated, multimillion-voiced choir with Internet access. I think the anonymity allows people to honestly state what’s on their mind. The ugly Americans and all the rest come out to play.
Henry Rollins in The LA Weekly February 2014
In the mixed-up scrum of politics and media that our so-called national conversation has become….[it’s] a roiling cauldron of outside observers, all bent on ‘bearing witness’ to the situation.
Mark Leibovich, “Let Us All Bear Witness To The Conversation!” NY Times Sunday Magazine September 2014
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT WHAT WE TALK ABOUT LIKE WE NEVER TALKED ABOUT IT BEFORE
sketch by Flash Rosenberg
My compliments to the ocean.
Dick Cavett in a restaurant after being served a nice piece of fish.
A good folk journalist makes for a good emcee. Like Mr. Cavett, bringing the table together. A Master of Ceremonies. Bring on the Fun Conversations. That’s me!
How does one speak MC ?
Here’s one thing to try: Offer remarks that bring the most amount of people together at one time:
“Well, it looks like introductions are in order!”
“Did you make that yourself?”
“What’s your sign?” (Mine is Slippery When Wet. Thanks to Wavy Gravy for this.)
From “Twentieth Century Etiquette, An Up-To-Date Book For Polite Society” by Annie Randall White
So are you ready to emcee yourself?
[See QUICK OPENERS, DECEMBER 7 2015 for Paul Sills’ advice: “Encourage the laggards.”]
Expert Catherine Blythe suggests in her book The Art of Conversation aiming for about four minutes before cutoff. No longer than that. Keep that convo moving, “like a good game of Frisbee.” Otherwise, she says, it becomes boring — I mean, people and their freakin’ monologues, right?
Q: What is having to listen to somebody talk for fifty minutes and not getting paid?
A: The opposite of therapy!
How does a folk journalist avoid that happening?
A lot of people get into conversations just to let you know who they are. They have no interest in you. (Hard to believe, right?) So why bother listening to them playing the same tape made-to-impress? And how to get an edge in word-wise and actually have conversations with people who talk a lot?
Folk journalists know that wrangling the ego of such a talker takes semi-masterful talk techniqueing. So here’s how to enjoy listening to them, even as they go on and on ad infinitum.
The growing field of Ethnomonology* is here. Finally!
Taught online usually, for profit, and soon to be a major growth industry, ETM teaches that humanity’s monologues may actually teach us about said person rattling saying along. There’s the guy who narrates his lives as he goes through it. Often you see him with ear buds and a phone, describing what corner he’s approaching (BEING HERE THEN!). He often uses Elmore Leonard’s “marijuana tense”** which author Martin Amis describes as dialogue using a present participle that creates a hazy sort of meandering now: “Bobby saying,” and then the dialogue follows.
If this seems difficult to handle, don’t despair. Think this is hard — try living in Papua, New Guinea; at least one tribe there speaks in 17 different tenses.
Still however, you may find yourself learning very little by listening. Nothing, maybe?
When walking with such individually-linked to themselves lingua leaders, remember this: Out amongst his own self, desiring nothing more than to be marveled at/gazed upon, heard in all his incredible incrudibleness, which he believes after all to be the next evolutionary stage of a human being — doubtful: By observing you may still pick up a lot of visual information to enjoy and/or play with.
Or as Yogi Bear once put it: Heyyy Boo Boo, from this viewpoint we can get a better outlook! (Or was that Yogi Berra?)
But if all your emcee attempts fail, chalk it up to what Holden Caulfield describes as, referring to conversations, “Goddam boring ones.” In Catcher In The Rye, he gets involved in more than two dozen confabs. But don’t worry, some of them he finds, “slightly intellectual.” ***
Finally, if still in doubt, you can blame it on The System, referring yourself to this Firesign Theater video:
First, know this going in: it is an impossible conversation. Or very very difficult. After a death. Words are insufficient. They just won’t work. Shakespeare may say it best. And it wasn’t just Bee Gees who sang about words being “all I have.”
Some folks first learn about death while at play. As a child in Detroit if you got caught, “counting the cars in a funeral” procession, your friends chanted that you’d be the next to die:
“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out
The worms play pinochle on your snout
They roll you up in a long white sheet
And lay you down six feet deep…”
Verse upon verse, funnily about the scary. This goes way back to, “Ring around the rosey/pocketful of posies/Ashes ashes we all fall down,” which I’ve just learned Snopes.com claims does not come from the plague in Europe in the 1300s. http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/rosie.asp
[But another children’s choosing-up-sides rhyme, Engine Engine #9 traingoing off the tracks is a death trip, too, right? See GOOD HUMOR MAN entry from December 22 2015]
Worm-play on your snout works as an amulet. We injected lyrical spells into each other, arming up via curses to crack us up. Said across a circle.
Do you know any others? Perhaps there exists an Allen Lomax-curated lp collection out there — “Children’s Funeral Procession Songs of the U.S. Possibly Lifted from Great Britain.” You sure don’t see processions anymore.
new mural off Abbot Kinney
When out of words dumbstruck we say someone is “at a loss” for words. Ram Dass [See DIRECTING CONVERSATION entry, February 2 2016] tries to counter this with his work with dying people in hospices. There he tries to “create a space” where someone can open up and express themselves – a space to maybe find words, continuing to play in the game of life before hanging up the skates.
“Tell me how your parents died,” she said. I couldn’t believe my ears.
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“What good is ‘Hello’?” she said.
She had stopped me in my tracks.
“I’ve always thought it was better than nothing,” I said, “but I could be wrong.”
“What does ‘Hello’ mean?” she said.
And I said, “I had always understood it to mean ‘Hello.’”
“Well it doesn’t,” she said. “It means, ‘Don’t talk about anything important.’ It means, ‘I’m smiling but not listening, so just go away.’”
She went on to avow that she was tired of just pretending to meet people. “So sit down here,” she said, “and tell Mama how your parents died.”
“Tell Mama!” Can you beat it?
Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Bluebeard
Can you beat that? Vonnegut!
When conveying the news about a death it’s weird today because you can’t just say, “You better sit down” like they always say in the movies. Most people are already sitting, in front of their computers.
When singer Dan Fogelberg died in 2007, I went online to remember one of his tunes and I was amazed to discover scores of comments, memorial pages created at a YouTube link. Everyone mourning together via text, sending memories in video. I don’t deal well with death, but this certainly helped. Obviously it wasn’t a face-to-face mourning. But I felt I was in the middle of a new kind of moving conversation.
Back Pocket Banter: Five Ways To Convo
Do people find you comforting?
How do you comfort people?
How do you deal with loss?
Do you go on YouTube and type up your memories?
If you could live and die during any period of history, which would you choose?
Obit of convo maven
Activity
Hug until the other person lets go. (Hey once we start hugging why do we ever let go? To get back to this thing the artist formerly-known as Prince calls life?)
Get into a conversation: According to many family traditions, funerals and weddings are the best times to catch up with uncles, aunts, cousins and cousins once removed. Ask about their lives and you’ll get good stories. How is that sister-in-law’s sister on the Cape and her kids at Keene State? There are Peace Corps missions and scientists and sports legends to learn about!
Family convos can remind you that funerals are to remind you that engaging in life is worthwhile and worth even more when humor, sadness, the spices of life and death—voila! —are added.
Bonus!
For conversations after funerals, actress Elaine Stritch recommended having a couple of drinks. She told me her next memoir would be called, “How Drinking Saved My Life.” In wintertime there’s Irish coffee, known for having loosened up many a tongue across the San Francisco Bay area. In summer the vodka tonic. I think I still prefer silence.
Recently I read my 2nd cartoon strip in two days where the cartoonist drew an animal texting. In the first one, a dog texts a picture of doo doo to his owner. In the second one, a dog sniffs along using an app called, “Ipeed.”
Yes, pets are texting. Commenting on humans, of course. But have we reached the end of communication, people?
Now, I’m a fan of communication. A very big fan. (Cue NYC joke: “Are you a Giant fan?” “No, I’m an air-conditioner.”) Like most folks, I can also be incommunicado. Just not feelin’ it. You feel me? And when that happens? I seek music. Music. When nothing else works. When they’re nothing left to say.
Especially when death is closing in all around. All these rock stars 69-ing. Dying at the age of 69 or close to it. And my favorite Uncle Billy on his last legs in the suburbs of Detroit…
So I go to the movies to hear music:
Elvis Costello’s 2015 performance doc called Detour. Costello is an excellent communicator about conversation. His songs contain lyrics like,”I guess the reason we’re not talkin’/There’s so little left to say we haven’t said.”
From the same song, this one works when trying to talk about death:
“While a million thoughts go racin’ through my mind
I find I haven’t said a word”
Another great EC song is “Talking In The Dark.”
“Without you, I’m not conversational
Without the sense of the occasional
Without you, I miss talking in the dark
When the barking and the biting is through
We can talk like we’re in love or talk like we’re above it
We can talk and talk until we talk ourselves out of it”
In Detour, ” Elvis has a gigantic TV onstage and he goes and stands inside it. Hilarious! He sounds like an old vaudeville performer only with modern lyrics. In fact, his final song? “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime?”
Music makes me feel so much better.
Because meanwhile, everybody’s 69-ing. 69 used to be about sex, now it’s about death. David Bowie and Alan Rickman, dead at 69. Dan Hicks, Maurice White, and Glenn Frey, each 74.
My Uncle Billy made it to 79. His father, my grandfather Papa John, made it to 102. Something in the math is off there. More about Uncle Billy TK soon.
Did you get all this? Any of it? What I’ve been trying to say? Yes? Then I have communicated with you. A better way perhaps — through storytelling, the way Elvis Costello does it.
KATHARINA: Where did you study all this goodly speech?
PETRUCHIO: It is extempore, from my mother-wit.
KATHARINA: A witty mother! witless else her son.
TAMING OF THE SHREW
Would you like to conduct better convo with your relatives?
Who wouldn’t! Conversations with a parent can be so fraught.
And here’s one reason why: Mothers make up words all the time. How do they do that? And how can you keep up with them? Either they get them brand new hot-off-the-pusses of their babies and keep a journal, or they stole them or I don’t know where they got them.
For instance, my mom always hated us kids sitting around doing nothing.“Why are you sitting around like a bump on a log? Good gravy! Criminently!”
Right there are three things at least I never understood. No wonder I was raised up so screwed up. Years before drones, heat-seeking mom missiles left me under a barrage of zingers.
Fathers are more about mixed messages. “I won’t die until I see you’re successful,” Dad would say. So wait, meaning that if I become a success, then you will die? Nooooo!
“You just gotta have that old confidence!” went another well-wrought Da-da-ism. Well, um then, how do you get that?
No idea. By contrast, mothers can lead you into the most embarrassing conversations ever.
THE TYPING TEST
During one of our best, I was smack in the middle of a typing test in New York City, in the kind of yellowing midtown employment office where 80 wpm w/14 mistakes is kinda lousy, but in the late 1980s could still get me “temp work.”
I grabbed an empty desk and gave a call back to Detroit while waiting for the woman doing the scoring to return.
“A typing test?” Mom asked right away.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, affecting dullness, my go-to affect when feeling attacked. “A typing test. I’m 35. At 35 a typing test.”
“Did you tell them you were a writer?”
“Yes, I said to the lady: ‘I should be writing the copy for this. This Royal Typing test? Not taking it, but writing it, ha ha.’”
“I just read an article —“
[I cut this part for many reasons. Moving now to later in our conversation.]
“You sound depressed.”
“Well, it’s just that, I’m already at the age pro football players retire.”
“So? You’re not married, you don’t have another mouth to feed.”
“I know. I mean I should be, but I’m not. Well at least I’m not divorced yet.”
“You’re still seeing Michelle?”
“Yes, I told her last night: I’m 35, I should be getting my kids to bed. Instead I’m still trying to get you to bed. But no, we’re not going together…no.”
“And the other one?”
“Her?”
“If that’s the one. I don’t know.”
“The other one took me to a dance concert. Well, it began as dance and then came a light show and there was some singing and a film.”
“Whaaaaa?”
“One of those new wave variety deals. But one of the dancers had a broken leg, and the singer had laryngitis, so the dancer had to sing and the singer had to dance.”
“Oy fa voy.”
“It was okay. The film was good.”
“Now what about Melissa?”
“No, we’re not, no.”
“You’re not seeing her anymore?”
“No. Because her life is a mess right now, she says. I said what woman’s life isn’t a mess right now. With everything that’s going on.”
“Wasn’t there another woman visiting from Boston?”
“Her? No, we’re not, no. She told me she’s been having some bad luck with her Ouija Board lately.”
“You don’t say!”
“Or something. She’s been seeing this mystifying oracle, I don’t know, it’s none of my business. I said, ‘Who has time for two-minute mysteries, baby: love me.’”
“You remember what I told you?”
“That moose meat rivals the best beef?”
“What?”
“I know – love is just peer pressure when you really need it the most.”
“Your father and I would like to see you…you know.”
“Sure I wanna be married; it would improve my social life! That’s like asking why do I trample on the environment? Because-the-guy-before-me-did! That’s why anyone gets married.”
“Well, your father and I –”
“No, I do. I wanna make my kids laugh. I want them to make me laugh.”
“So?”
“So everybody I know is either getting married, breaking up, having a baby, or dying.”
“Welcome to my world, that’s called being an adult.”
“Thank you! I wondered what that was supposed to feel like.”
“And wasn’t there one from last summer?”
“Her? No, we’re not, no.”
“Mindy?”
“I mean, we were, but now we’re not.”
“Not even seeing each other?”
“But that’s the great thing about voice mail: you don’t wanna see each other but you can pretend to still be talking. She leaves voicemails she says, just to put her voice into my energy field. ”
“Go on!”
“It’s like getting messages from another dimension.”
“Better than a poke in the eye from a sharp stick.”
“The last time with her she said she had to laugh to keep from throwing up.”
“Go on!”
“Remember the one who told me that before I met her I could barely butter bread?”
“No.”
“She told me for a guy who claimed to have his head in the game, I sure had it up my ass half the time.”
“The therapist?”
“Like, I couldn’t even look at her anymore without feeling I was sexually harassing her. So no, we’re not, no.”
“So go no.”
“So now you know.”
“Good gravy. Well, thanks for calling. You could call more often.”
“I’ve been trying to. You’re never home. Get your answering machine fixed, we’ll talk. Bye Mom – ”
[CLICK]
Decent convo but I get no closure because my mother just hangs up. She got that from her father, a member of Generation I from a time when a phone call wasn’t anything like a real conversation consisting of greetings and farewells. A phone call back then was an event! Witness this 1904 scene from the MGM musical, MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS *
Years before “Let the machine get it.” Before phone conversations became interruptions because a call bothers you in the middle of everything going on right then in your life. (Mostly texting.)
Five Questions For Folk Journalists
Do you have conversations with family members face-to-face?
How long do these exchanges last?
What would improve your conversations?
At what age did you have your best conversations with a parent?
Did your father or mother have any “catch phrases” passed on to your siblings?
Activity
Want more fun connection with beloved family members? Try some phrases/trite truisms a parent particularly pulled out for no rhyme and very little reason. (References from the ’50s and ’60s are all fair use, public domain and publically-domiciled cultural fodder.)
“Hey, there she is, the People’s Choice!”*
“Hello Old Timer!”
“Good Gravy!”
“It’s all grist for the mill.”
“Christ on a bicycle!”
Bonus! Another Excellent Mom Convo
Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson recalled a childhood conversation with his mother. She wanted him to understand that becoming a world-class athlete was not as far-fetched as he thought. She said Russell should ask himself: “Why not me?”
* In MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, starring Judy Garland and written by Irving Brecher and Fred Finkelhoffe, a phone call took an appointment to arrange. And a family to listen in.
There’s less cleaning up afterwards.
Kurt Vonnegut on why he preferred laughing to crying.
