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…
The goal: to get to where the words fall, from a muse-filled sky, down through your mind, and off the end of your quilled tongue. Author Ken Kesey
Comedy loves heart. Paul Sills, founding guru at Second City
At the feet of the great satirist Paul Krassner *
Ready for a few folk journalistically-tested quick openers?
These convo firestarters tend to be terse, bent toward further conversage.
(For one-liners bent toward getting the heck out of a bad conversation in one quick of a hurry SEE WITCRAFT How to Extricate From Any Conversation — TK)
But hey, you take a chance, am I right? The cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty of “Macdoodle Street” fame in the Village Voice, drew one that I kept above my typewriter for years. Its theme: “You have to risk it all every day!”
Now some folks have, as it has become known through cultural history, “the gift for gab.” (In some parts of the country: “the gift of gab.”) Usually these high-energy individuals are able to get away with lines like, “Is that a smile? Are you smiling right now?”
Or this one:
Quick Opener, “Don’t they miss you?” Semi-startled, you answer: “Who?”
Quick Opener Comeback: “Heaven. I know they must be missing an angel right about now.”
Yuck. By adding authenticity to your game, you can avoid this superficial subtext–shallower-than-spit level of a conman. Here’s how to insert yourself into another person’s space. Do what Paul Sills, guru of Second City advises. His mother Viola Spolin wrote the first handbook on improvisational theater games and Sills told us in an NYC class one day something I’ve never forgotten: “Encourage the laggards.”
He meant that in the everyday battle for existence, leaning inside with a quick jab, uttering the first sentence, is not that hard. So try to encourage those you cannot.
“You are in the safest place in the universe,” he’d tell us. “On a stage.”
Our teacher was right. What a safety in freedom we all felt about firing that first volley. We could say anything. Perhaps Sills’ approach came from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” wherein Jacques says: “The whole world is a stage, and all the men and women merely actors.”
But how can you continue offstage, backstage, in real life, without acting out every anxiety, all your neuroses falling out all over everybody because after all, Shakespeare’s Jacques was a melancholy man after all.
Think of professional athletes who “make a play.” A folk journalist is just as serious about playmaking. (And often makes plays at being serious, too.) What do I mean by this?
Make a play for making room enough so a conversation can become as big as your subject’s world. Because when you explore, you find interesting people. People get more interesting by telling you a tale. They might reveal their dreams, or say something obscene, something simple as recalling an episode of their favorite show, or talk about where they went that time with their first love.
BACK POCKET BANTER (Other Quick Openers)
Noticing how pictures on the fronts of t-shirts are just about the same size as a small TV screen, “What is that funny thing on your shirt?”
From mall to boardwalk, it is easy to be encourageable, “Where did you buy that lovely dress? Did you make it yourself?”
“Is that good? What you’re reading. What’s it about?”
“I love the rain don’t you?” (Stolen from Woody Allen where his next line is, “It washes the memories off the sidewalks of life.” May be inapplicable in some western climes.)
“Do you hear that? What’s that song they’re playing?”
Even, “Whacha’ doin?” when gently expressed can get the ball to their side. The Beatles did a whole song with that as their title. **
“I really admire your shoes” is most always welcomed by young women.
And young men have been known to lead with one of the following three:
“Yo!” “Wazzup?” And, “Nice car! Hey!”
Or the equally played betimes: “Hey! Nice car!”
NEXT TIME:“Onward!” Author Henry Miller and radio storyteller Jean Shepherd both said this I think, although Jean (flicklives.com) was more known for “Excelsior!”
* Hear my conversation with Paul Krassner, publisher of The Realist and co-founder of the Youth International Party: The Yippies!
The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known. Pete Seeger
“There are few who do not ardently desire to become good conversationalists.” From the book “Twentieth Century Etiquette An Up-To-Date Book For Polite Society” by Annie Randall White
So what does a folk journalist do? And do you care?
That’s a lesson I learned out there: if you don’t care about your fellow conversant, why carry such a heavy microphone? (Although, yes, flash drive cards have gotten much lighter, I learned at the feet of folks carrying Wollensaks* and other portably massive recording machiens.)
Why stick a mic smack dab into the snoot of every Mr. and Mrs. America? Just to get a story?
Well, yes.
You’ll find them on every block. Spending forty years taking it to the streets of this great entertainment nation — not livingin the street, though I’ve interviewed the houseless and as Dylan said, Who aint homeless? — but as a foreign correspondent too, in Athens and Jerusalem, your friendly neighborhood folk journalist has been fired out of newsrooms from New York to San Francisco.
Also from Los Angeles to Santa Monica.
That’s the nature of the business. But you learn some things. A folk journalist gets nothing less than a learner’s permit for life.**
The world opens when you open with a question. Folk journalists are so freewheeling with questions, they can come off more as “suggestions.” They come with low-expectations. You are trying to create a space (ala RAM DASS; more about him later) where a person can feel comfortable to chat.
I’ve learned so much on mic. And off, of course, with the result being slapped, kicked (Ahh, Athens!), chased out of shops, run down streets by cops. All in the service of asking for that story never heard before.
The famous quote by E.M. Forster comes to mind: “Only connect.”
How?
By presenting voices from America. (More about STUDS TERKEL later) One records people professionally for radio, but also, any average woman-on-the-street-travelling-marshmallow-face-painted-every-kid-who-has-a-podcast gets to pop the vox populi by posing questions. Creating a space by invading someone else’s. The rightly timed question can bring a moment to life that might help a fellow find meaning in their own.
One of the beauties of this job is nobody knows where a conversation can lead.
How to make your great big convo begin?
Are you taking notes? Because poet Robert Bly (More on him, etc.) has the answer!
Bly says, “Ask a question. And listen.”
QUESTIONS
As a folk journalist, some approaches I’ll open with:
“What was the best year of your life?”
“How do you handle stress?”
“What is your conception of God?”
“What’s the richest you’ve ever been?”
“What is the most beautiful word in the (fill in) language?”
“What does this line mean: And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. ”
“Do you have a podcast?”
“How do you like your Burning Man experience thus far?”
TIP
Here’s a simple way to start (See Post on “Quick Openers”): “Need any help with that?”
Kind of an easygoing outreach that oft-times returns a response your way and who knows what’s next.
Because after that? (Don’t get nervous now) We’re off and running! And walking and talking and listen…
The Art of Listening: A good talker makes a good listener…. You pay your listeners by a few “brilliant flashes of silence” now and then, the compliment of supposing that they have something to say, and that you are desirous of listening to them.
Technology has replaced culture. But people haven’t noticed it’s gone yet.
Exene Cervenka of the band X
Interviewing a great screenwriter red carpet style
Ready to roll? Ready to roll your tongue and take WalkyTalky as your battle-blasted tool kit (at least five tools, in case MLB is interested)? My aim is to arm you with effective verbal lines of attack and retreat so that the amazing back-and-forth which makes conversations worth conducting in the first place, will feature you at your dazzling best.
Ready to play? Make a play? Be a playmaker?
As a folk journalist, I’ve always needed the quick and lively turns of phrase to help connect with folks I meet out in that non-stop networked-up world of there-aint-no-stopping-them-now big broadcast bluster. Whew, right? I’m hoping that WT.US* can likewise put a charge into your own back-and-forth badinage and b.s.
How?
First by employing sentences to power up yours and mine’s ancient art of conversation piece into a rebooting re-beautification project. You know how hard it is, right, you find yourself on line or off the cuff, negotiating your way through today’s hypestertextual state of the art conversationals that Say whaaaaa?
A failed state, alas. But here’s when it hit me: I was nursing another of those fabulous nitrogen-tapped cold brew on draft (heavy on the yak butter) nespressos at Open Latte. You know the joint, located on the border between Santa Monica and the rest of the continent.
And suddenly I realized: We live in incredible times.
The lesson is how to live them? By getting busy, hurry hurry hurrying to turn this crazy life into lively conversation? Let’s get our Convo on, etc?
Well, as it turns out, one of the best ways to do that, is by Slowwwing down.
I was having a conversation with my grandfather. He’d just turned 100. I tried to impress him by dropping some Shakespeare.
“Time is of the essence. Isn’t that right, Papa John?”
“Maybe time is the essence,” Papa John replied.
Next: A Learner’s Permit For Life!
* WTUS not affiliated with any radio stations, yet.
“In a world where the rules are breaking down, where the world is changing so fast in all directions that a lot of people have a sense of bewilderment. You don’t actually know what the rules are anymore.” Salman Rushdie
Hello again out there, Hank here, welcome to you all, to “WalkyTalky,” which is what I am, really, my reason for being here as a human, because I walk around town and I talk to people as a folk journalist, listening to them. Conducting conversations for NPR, newspapers, magazines, sites for sore eyes.
Pretty much any electrical outlet in the storm.
Times are tough, right tough for folks looking for a good talk. Am I right?
Like my friend Kris in North Dakota says, “the thing is” technology connects us in so many new ways. At the same time things appear to be pulling apart everywhere we look. But just as a few fantastic discoveries have changed the world, I’m confident there’s enough time left to discover another.
Imagine the voice of the radio announcer, stirring up underneath himself such stirring music that aides him as he intones: And, as we find ourselves more and more forever facing books on computers and faces inside our phones…friends, do you tend to, in the face of it:
1) Shut down and just say nothing at all?
2) Bark at it all from the outside you chirping tweety bird maddog blogging machine that you most wannabe?
or are you finding yourself
3) Disconnecting, into what Beatle John called, Iiiiiii…solation.*
4) Taking up an armful of words in order to fire back, and thusly: Engage!
Because here comes your chance to hitch a ride on the road to better handling a confusing world’s daily swirl of events.
How?
By using words to take action with!
People are always excited when I tell them I’m writing this web log. Because they see new conversations everywhere they look and work on their iChatty Cathy podcasting home-studio screens of some sort or another sort. They agree with me that modern youth’s socialization doesn’t prepare them for presenting one’s self well in the oldest form of the art: face-to-face conversation.
Another way of saying this is, Can we tawk?
WalkyTalky will present fun ways to forget your social fears and forge ahead, screenlessly happy again.
How?
By helping you converse – take part in actual conversations— by pulling from your quiver the sharpest words fireable — zing! fling! sing!– for any occasion. Perfectly useable at any appropriate (and inappropriate) time, by employing at-the-ready retorts, references from movies, songs, TV cartoons from 1964 and yes, by going even deeper (like that’s possible), you’ll win your life with words. Some of these things you’ve never heard before (thanks ghod!) but can one day utilize to your own delight, because I’m telling you folks, We’ve got a great big Convo and baby we’re gonna ride! [SING-A-LONG PARODY OF “CONVOY” FROM MOVIE “CONVOY” TK]
So let’s roll.
Why and why now?
Because as Beck sings, My time is a piece of wax fallin’ on a termite/who’s choking on the splinters.
Typical folk journalist conversation with typically friendly North Dakotan
The other night I was on a panel with three authors. Sponsored by IWOSC (Independent Writers of Southern California), the topic was “Nostalgia,” and when the moderator turned to me and I leaned into the microphone, this came out: “I’m nostalgic for good conversation.”
Well, the evening proceeded and indeed, a fascinating back-and-forth ensued, with writers trading stories from the biographies they’d completed about old-time Hollywood figures like Spike Jones, Cecil B. DeMille, the Marx Brothers, even Elizabeth Montgomery from the show Bewitched.
At one point, after moderator Bob Birchard said he saw Richard III on a TV show called Omnibus in the 1950s, I threw in: “Ever wonder why with all these new channels today, there’s no Shakespeare kind of Bard-TV thing presenting all the films made from his plays?” Which led to a conversation about theater vs film vs TV, etc.
A folk journalist doesn’t just ask questions. He makes suggestions. Suggestions that instead of getting simple “yes” or “no” answers, lead to something more: creative conversation.
“Feel the buzz of the holidays in here?” I said today to someone at Peet’s.
In this web log I’ll show you what helps me, as a folk journalist, connect with people. How when we walk and talk our way daily through a jungle of what passes like a parade of people here, there and everywhere — mixing metaphors just like that may in fact help you engage in life at your dazzling best.
Ready to play?
“How?” you’re still wondering?
I’m getting to it.
In Gloria Steinem’s new book My Life On The Road, she calls for, “in-person politics and face-to-face organizing. She extols the virtues of conversation circles in arousing empathy and creating connections, but insists that such breakthroughs are simply not possible online. ‘The miraculous and impersonal Internet is not enough,’ she writes.”
Ann Friedman, reporter on the piece, says Steinem is “foolish to play down” the potential of conversing on the web.
Do you agree? With whom? And why?
Next Time: Saying Whaaaaaaa? Let’s Talk About How We Try and Talk with each other, because I mean, really, who doesn’t like a good talking to, right?
Thanks to IWOSC folks over there: Jordan R. Young, Herbie J Pilato, Robert S. Bader, Gary Young, Flo Selfman, moderator Bill Birchardhttp://www.iwosc.org
