Monthly Archives: January 2019

Slavoj Žižek is a tonic

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In late 2018 the Oxford Union hosted a talk from Slovenian philosopher, Professor Slavoj Žižek. On this blog I have been known to quote Tom Lehrer’s definition of a philosopher, namely –

someone who goes around giving helpful advice to those who are happier than he is.

Let us see.

Within seconds of his starting I doff my rhetor hat to him. 

I have very often been asked by trainees to help them rid themselves of mannerisms that they have been told are a distraction. My standard answer is that they should be their natural selves, that their mannerisms are personal and natural to them, and if they try to eliminate them they will probably fail but if they succeed they will find them replaced by ‘anti-mannerisms’ which, being unnatural to them, will be a greater distraction. Therefore they should battle not the mannerism but the distraction. Be more interesting and your audience will not be distracted.

Žižek has tics. He has a shedload of tics. What is the collective noun for tics? Whatever it is Žižek has a big one; yet he appears to pay them no heed. His focus is entirely on his message and how to convey it, leaving no room for wasting any energy on irrelevances like tics. Bravo to him for that!

At his opening there are a few seconds of tic-enhanced searching through his papers while he marshals his thoughts. Thereafter he makes me wonder why he even bothered to bring the papers as he never again consults them. Another reason to doff my hat to him.

Does Tom Lehrer’s definition hold water? – are we happier than he? He repeatedly professes himself pessimistic, so we probably are. In particular I was happy I saw this speech.

I didn’t always understand the concepts he promoted, and when I understood I didn’t always agree; but being who I am and doing what I do, I am a sucker for when a speaker shows this level of commitment to his message.

I enjoyed it immensely. 

Jimmy Valvano: laugh, think, cry

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For this, my 400th posting on the blog, it is appropriate that I choose something a little different, a little special. This is both. For one thing this speech is 25 years old, for another it has been viewed on YouTube nearly 4.5 million times. I was pointed at it by a trainee.

Jimmy Valvano, known to his fans as Jimmy V, was a legendary basketball coach in the USA. In 1992 he was diagnosed with cancer. On 4 March, 1993 he delivered this speech at Madison Square Garden, accepting the first Arthur Ashe Courage Award.

We are primed for an emotional experience by the adoration shown by the audience. We see him leaning on someone’s arm as he climbs the steps onto the stage, but otherwise there are no strong clues to his illness.

After retiring as a basketball coach he had another career as a motivational speaker, and it shows. This is no stranger to the speaking platform.

In his opening he makes the point that today he has no cue cards, and that makes me wonder whether he usually did. My theory, from other things he says, is that this free speaking shooting from the hip is not quite the norm for him, but I’m not surprised how easily he does it.

I remember, as quite a small boy, observing to my parents how invalids always seemed to be more cheerful than other people (at that time WWII was a very recent memory, so people with war injuries were all around). Here we have a man on the threshold of death lecturing us how we should maintain our happiness.

And look at the energy with which he does it! If there was little sign of his illness at the beginning there is absolutely none now. He is being swept along by the intensity of his message. 

His prime message is, “Don’t give up: don’t ever give up,” but there is another recurring theme – almost a mantra – in this speech. He urges us to make sure that every single day we laugh, we think, and we cry.

I’m reminded of another mantra that we hear all over the place, that we should treat each day as if it were our last. Jimmy V makes me realise that we should deliver each speech as if it were our last. The wonderful uninhibited freedom with which he delivers this must surely owe something to his being conscious that he has nothing to lose. 

This is a classic piece of speaking and – guess what? – it makes us laugh; it makes us think; and it makes us cry.

At the end we see several friends almost carrying him back down the steps off the stage, and now we can see how ill he is. He died on 28 April that year.

Tim Martin should give paper the bullet

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Leave Means Leave, an organisation whose name gives us a strong clue that it is pro-Brexit, has been holding rallies around the UK for some months. On 14 December they held one in London, and on the bill was Tim Martin of Wetherspoons.

He claims that his accent is an amalgam of Northern Ireland and New Zealand. Those countries may be where he has spent most of his life, but I hear neither of those in his accent which is a one-off, but then Tim Martin is a one-off.

He has delivered speeches at other Leave Means Leave rallies and, having watched some, I can tell you that they essentially bear the same message. But they are not the same speech because the words he is using are different.

He is using a list of bullet points and then trusting himself to say the words that come to him. That causes glorious episodes of Martin speaking spontaneously with his audience, with all the desired symptoms of sincerity and command of his subject, but those glorious episodes are separated by self interruptions while he dons his specs and peers at his list of bullet points. I itch to show him how easily he could bin that bloody paper and then shoot the whole speech from the hip. He’s almost there already.

His audience loves him because he’s such a refreshing personality, and that personality pours across the footlights onto the floor of the hall.

Except while he’s peering at his bloody paper.

    Yanis Varoufakis: Euro problem

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    In 2018 the Oxford Union hosted an address with Q&A from Yanis Varoufakis. Finding out the precise dates of these talks is never easy, and these days I have neither the time nor inclination to fish around, but I reckon that a few clues suggest it was mid-November.

    The talk was entitled The Euro Has Never Been More Problematic.

    Yes, well he’s done this before. 

    He even makes it clear that he has spoken at the Oxford Union before. Yet at the beginning I still see nerve symptoms – tiny ones, admittedly, but it confirms that everyone experiences a hump. Better speakers hide it better and dismiss it more quickly, but everyone gets one.

    This is a fine piece of speaking. It could be improved; for instance I found myself having to spool back a couple of times to clarify points he was making. His live audience couldn’t do that, and it indicates that his structure could be refined slightly.

    When working on trainees’ structures, I usually do it under the guise of making it easier for them to deliver without prompting from script or notes. Nevertheless I also point out that good structure carries a more important byproduct of making the speech easier for the audience to follow, and we always need to keep an eye on that byproduct. Varoufakis has comfortably outgrown the need for paper prompting, so he needs to factor in a conscious effort to discipline his structure for coherence. Though he speaks excellent English, his accent adds a hurdle to his coherence. The hurdle is small, but it will be enlarged for those students in this audience for whom English is likewise not their first language.

    [Regular readers of this blog will have spotted that when speakers are as good as this I just get more picky.]

    I am reluctant to comment on what he says, because he makes his arguments very well as you’d expect from a politician. He has been round the block a few times, so he is well informed. Nevertheless what I call ‘politician blinkers’ cause him, in my opinion, to be misguided in two or three areas; but I’d rather not get bogged down in that.

    The Oxford Union are to be congratulated yet again on platforming a good and wide range of speakers.

    Autodidacticism

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    New Year (if I might be allowed to indulge in a cliché) is a time for reflection.

    Here comes a reflective question. What really is the nature of this terror-inducing beastie, Public Speaking?

    Here comes the answer. Stripped of all the mystique that gets in our way, it is just talking. That’s all.

    I know it’s not quite the same as the other talking we spend our lives doing, because other details crash this party. For instance, you are standing while everyone else is sitting. You are facing in the opposite direction to everyone else who all just happen to be looking at you. You are the only one speaking – ah yes, there’s the respect that makes calamity…

    Usual talking involves other people speaking also. Dialogue (another word for conversation which is what we’re used to) is a process whereby people feed each other with thoughts, ideas, questions to be answered, and so on – two-way traffic. This is monologue – one way traffic – ay, there’s the rub. You have to do all the talking for a period of time that doesn’t include prompting from anyone else.

    So the first thing you need to learn is how to prepare your monologue so that –

    • you can deliver it like a proper speaker, in other words without script or notes,
    • you answer many of the questions they would have asked,
    • the audience can easily follow, understand, and remember what is said, and
    • both you and the audience can get full benefit from it.

    That can be quickly and easily taught and learnt. The second thing is how to deliver it – a different matter altogether. 

    Rubbish speakers speak at their audience; mediocre speakers speak to them; proper speakers speak with them. Speech delivery comes down to how well you can develop your relationship with your audience.

    Your relationship: your audience. No one else’s; this is entirely your province. And the most persuasive, engaging, compelling you can be is you. The real you.

    Oscar Wilde said, 

    Be yourself; everyone else is taken. 

    He was right. He also said, 

    To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up. 

    In that he was wrong. In his modishly brittle cynicism he was suggesting that you could be ‘natural’ only by posing; and that’s nonsense. Being natural is not so much difficult as scary, because certain guards need to be lowered. I’m not saying that you need to be bosom-buddies with everyone in the room, but each member of that audience should sense a connection of some sort. Built properly, an audience relationship can get quite personal.

    So personal that learning how to build it should likewise be your province: no one else can reach inside you as well as you can. And that’s why I do not teach people their delivery. I enable them to teach themselves.