Speaking of conversations, the other day in a New York Times’ new feature called “Here to Help,” came this offering: HOW TO HAVE MORE ENGAGING EVERYDAY CONVERSATIONS.
Wow! The New York Times has spoken! I guess I don’t have to offer any more tips now do I?
I’ll link to the article at the bottom of this column, but here is the opening of their story:
” Ask people what they miss most about college, and many will mention something similar: the intellectual stimulation of living near hundreds of thousands of potential friends, studying physics, psychology and literature, with the time to talk over a meal or some drinks late into the night. But there are ways to keep that conversational spirit alive no matter where you are. Here are three pieces of advice.
Unite around a common interest
Be friendly, open and polite
Don’t overthink it “
I want to add these most excellent convo kickstarters from my friend Nick O’Connor, lines he says he heard Spalding Grey try out:
What do you do for fun?
What happened to you on the way over here?
So as I head to a college reunion in Middletown, Connecticut, I’ll leave you this link to the Times column and make sure that as I walky the old campus I talky into the night with me old college chums…
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:
Listening to President LBJ turn it up in Austin, TX
If one person in a conversation takes the rhetorical levels up to 10 every time, the other person has to rebut at Level 10 and turn monstrous, or retreat into resentful silence. Rhetorical passion, which feels so good, can destroy conversation and mar truth and reconciliation.David Brooks, NY Times Dec 15 2015
Hello again, your neighborhood WalkyTalky here, listening like a folk journalist to people like Lyndon Baines Johnson above, U.S. President 1963-1968; well, that’s a reasonable facsimile thereof standing cardboard lifelike outside the play, “All The Way” by Robert Schenkkan in Austin last spring.
And my biggest fear for the longest time? The fear of having a bad conversation.
My whole body felt bad afterwards, it was like trying to titrate off anti-depressives with my insides going jiggly bzzzzz all over.
Not a good feeling. And during awful chats, are you like me? Do you feel flushed with thoughts flashing through you like, Beam me up please I beg of you, let’s the two of us you and me just wallow off into some other sector goodbye cruel world…
Right?
I felt like I was the only conversational taking-parter in the world who had ever suffered through one like this. Or ever made mistakes.
“We made too many wrong mistakes,” is a line from the great Yogi Berra I obviously hadn’t learned yet. Now, as you get older you get more relaxed (especially if you remember to quote more Yogisms) and you realize: that’s how intense youth is.
In youth, every line you try is like a pitch in the playoffs – so much seems to be riding on it. When you want to say what’s really on your mind — and why not, what’s the point of conducting a real conversation? — you speak your mind, you go to extremes. You let it all out in a howling howling howl, living like what Tropic of Capricorn*author Henry Miller meant when he wrote: “The main thing in life is not to understand it or mold it or even love it…but to drink of its undying essence. Round and round one goes, always over the same ground, always returning to the dead center: the unacceptable now.”
sketch by Flash Rosenberg
Whew.
Enough with the arguing, later in life of course, you learn to keep it in. (“Sit Down And Shut Up!” was recurring mocking rejoinder on Stephen Capen’s radio shows when I produced him in San Francisco and New York) I’m not saying that’s necessarily a good thing, keeping it in more, because of course the more and more you keep in the more you may eventually collapse from your insides and fall to your knees because of what life has done to you, until only by wailing out in shuddering screams re it all may you wake the rest of you up inside.
But think about it. Everyone is looking for an honest conversation. Why? Because nothing’s more refreshing than that. And if you are honestly open about yourself – “try it, they’ll like it”—you might feel better, too.
Or as Sarah Hepola, personal essay editor at Salon put it in her book* *: “The big arc of all personal essays is it’s all their fault and then I realize it’s all mine.”
So best to fess up Parker!
* Henry Miller’s more popular novel is Tropic of Cancer. I like Tropic of Capricorn from 1961, banned in USA for 30 years, which opens with: “Once you’ve given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.”
