Monthly Archives: May 2020

Bryan Wolfmueller and the world-famous Bagophanes

Posted on by
Reply

I was contacted by Lee Proudlove, a vicar in Nottingham and a reader of this blog. Like most of his colleagues he has been transmitting during the lockdown live-streamed services and sermons, scrambling as best he can up the steep learning curve. For ideas he searched the internet and came across Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller. He sent me a link to a video Wolfmueller did for Palm Sunday.

Before I even clicked to start, I registered two things –

  1. Peripheral stress. I’ve addressed peripheral stress before on this blog. If you are not too comfortable or secure, or if there are other stimuli snatching at your concentration, it can do wonders for control of normal nerves by masking their significance. In this case Wolfmueller appears to have decided to drive while preaching.
  2. A name that was new to me, claiming to be world-famous? Bagophanes? What a hook to grab passers-by! Anyone with any curiosity is going to stop for a closer look. Why do you think I used it in the title of this posting?

Without yet having heard a word from him I suspected that Wolfmueller was a smart man. Therefore I pressed “start”.

He opens with a self-deprecating account of how he had recently accidentally recorded a sermon without audio. Self deprecation is good so long as it isn’t making pre-emptive excuses in advance of a lousy performance. My impression was that it wouldn’t be that. Then, settling down to watch the rest, I was struck by a key question. How many ‘takes’ was this recording going to be able to accommodate? Did he have time to go on driving around merely to feed a gimmick?

The more I watched, the more everything fell into place. He has found a way of doing these videos that really works for his personality and is likely to resonate well with most viewers. Explaining something while driving, or listening to someone doing it, is such a familiar experience for anyone interested that the implied environment is as comfortable as can be. Occasional hesitations and/or “erm”, while checking for traffic, are so predictable as not to be noticed. Far from trying for the ‘perfect take’ (which if he even achieved it would be relatively boring) his target is simply to use a single take, warts and all, to put across a story and a message in an easily digested and memorable way. His being personable enables him to do that, while making any flaws in his delivery part of its charm.

Ah yes, memorable! I tell my trainees that the easiest way to make a speech memorable is to give it what I call a Face, a single phrase or sentence by which it will be remembered. Wolfmueller has gone for a single word – Bagophanes! I believe I shall never forget it, if only by remembering his slightly naughty alternative pronunciation. (Actually, on my side of the pond his alternative pronunciation is marginally naughtier – two countries divided by a common language.) I shall not impede your enjoyment by explaining Bagophanes. Suffice it that he has significance to the Palm Sunday story.

Martin Farquhar Tupper (1810-1889) said, “Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech”, and many others have made similar observations, but repeatedly pausing for upwards of ten seconds is brave to the frontiers of foolhardiness. Wolfmueller does that here. I doubt he would in a pulpit, but it works now because though he is silent and still, the surrounding image of scenery and traffic is far from still. Therefore we instinctively accept that he is pausing to allow the world to pass while he reflects upon a carpenter’s son riding a donkey, surrounded by people crying “Hosannah”.

I was right: he’s a smart cookie, and a fine communicator. My thanks to Lee Proudlove for bringing him to my attention, and also for pointing out that book sitting in the middle of the car’s backseat, held there by its own seatbelt. Bryan Wolfmueller is a Lutheran pastor and that book is a biography of Martin Luther – his ever-present backseat driver.

Trey Gowdy: editor’s nightmare

Posted on by
Reply

Universal lockdown may be easing, but there’s still a dearth of new speeches being delivered. Never mind: I am enjoying exercising archeology and unearthing some interesting samples to examine.

Trey Gowdy is no stranger to this blog, having previously been featured twice – here and here. Though he has retired from US Congress he still appears on television, consulted on the ramifications of political news. Most recently this seems to concern stories surrounding “Obamagate” which is about the only topic that can elbow Covid to one side on American news broadcasts at the moment. The story seems destined to run and run.

I found two brilliant examples from a large supply of speeches Gowdy made in the House of Representatives, and after agonising over them I made my choice. They say very much the same thing, even though – if the backdrop is to be believed – they were delivered on different occasions. This makes me wonder whether the behaviour being described was a habit of that POTUS of the time. The other speech was even more dramatic, generated a standing ovation in the House, and is certainly worth watching. But the one below has one particular feature of interest for students of public speaking. (Incidentally, Gowdy does not say what the video title below suggests.)

In these times of political hyper-partisanship everyone who puts his head above the parapet will be attacked. One attack method involves being misquoted. Even when your words are recorded on video you can still be misquoted by being edited. In the past few days there was an example of an American news anchorman accusing the US Attorney General of not saying something he should have said, when the footage of him actually saying it had been removed from the report. It was clumsy and quickly exposed, but it demonstrates the danger.

Cutting out a portion of a recording is the quickest and easiest way of bending, altering, or even reversing the meaning of what was actually said. But there are evasive precautions that a speaker can adopt to make that more difficult to achieve; and, whether by accident or design, Gowdy habitually uses one of the easiest.

Once the editor has decided what he wants to remove, his principal difficulty is in finding suitable edit points at which he can cut out and then back in again without it being noticeable. (In passing, there are electronic devices that will spot editing, however well disguised, but here we are concerned just with what humans can hear.) By far the easiest edit points are in the tiny pauses between sentences, and removing whole sentences is the easiest way to adjust meaning without appearing to impede the speech flow. Those tiny inter-sentence pauses are therefore going to be the editor’s prime targets.

All the speaker has to do is not pause between sentences. If during a sensitive part of a speech you stick your pauses in shortly before the last couple of words of sentences, and then run straight through into the beginning of the next, you are giving a potential editor a hell of a headache.

If you listen carefully you will find Gowdy doing exactly that.

Listening carefully is worth it anyway, because this is one hell of a good speech.

Andrew Klavan: a polished sapphire.

Posted on by
Reply

Think about the people you want to be around. Think about everything that’s the opposite of shallow and trendy. Think about four years of conversations you’ll never forget. That’s Hillsdale College.

(from the website of Hillsdale College in Michigan)

As a courtesy I habitually supply explanatory links for people, places and publications involved in my blog posts. That’s the first time in more than 460 posts that I have been so impressed as to reproduce words from a venue’s website. In April 2019, at Hillsdale College Andrew Klavan delivered the speech we feature today.

Declaration of interest: I’m a fan of Klavan’s, having discovered him years ago via his Revolting Truth videos. I listen to his podcast, The Andrew Klavan Show with its ridiculous opening signature song, preceded by an even more ridiculous one-minute flight of absurdity that sometimes reduces even him to hysterics. He makes me laugh, makes me think, keeps me abreast of the goings-on over the pond. I also appreciated his autobiographical book, The Great Good Thing. I reveal all this to warn that there’s a danger that you might find me fawning.

Klavan begins at 2:00, following an introduction by Abby Liebing. She reads her introduction, and that’s ok given that introductions are more than 80% factual information. However, if I had guided her, I would have urged her to dare to face the audience and not the script when giving us her name because I’m certain she knows her own name well enough not to read it. Yes, of course, the paper is a security blanket; but we want to see her face.

Klavan’s speech ends at 33:12. There follows nearly the same amount of time for Q&A.

He reads his speech, and suddenly I’m torn. He reads better and more expressively than almost anyone I’ve heard. In fact in passing I reckon virtually all of his podcast is read from a script; but you have to listen very closely to spot it because he has really mastered the art of writing in spoken – a subtly different language from written – English.

The writing is magnificent. For instance at 10:10 Klavan brings up the question of abortion, and a few seconds later gives us in just one, short, jaw-dropping sentence the strongest argument I’ve heard that abortion must not be the mother’s choice. And it’s based not on theology but biology.

Would any of the speech’s brilliantly economic choice of words have been compromised if he had shot this speech from the hip? Possibly, but that would have been offset by the benefit of the words being transparently spontaneous. It would have been the same brain that conceived the words, albeit without the luxury of dwelling over each phrase, so right there is the compromise to be judged. The freshness of spontaneity or the sparkle of economy? An uncut diamond or a polished sapphire? That’s why I’m torn.

We can compare the two. At the beginning, from 2:42 Klavan morphs from the end of a brief thank-fest into some spontaneous musing on the state of society and whether it is appropriate to laugh at it. At 3:36 he moves to his script, and the colour minutely fades.

But now I doff my rhetor hat, become an ordinary audience member, and tell you that it is a stupendous speech. There are points here and there when I’d take issue with the detail of some of his arguments, but that’s part of the stimulus that makes it so enjoyable.

I often press the stop button when Q&A begins, but thinking I’d sample a little of it I then sampled all. Hillsdale College yields up some excellent questions. Most of them from students, but there is one questioner who describes himself as “seasoned”. We can see only the side of his head, but I reckon he’s slightly more seasoned than I, and I am more seasoned than Klavan. At any rate, Klavan for once is put on the back foot. His answer is pretty good but his body language suggests that it’s been a narrow thing. I’m glad I saw that.

I enjoyed the whole hour.

Ian Duncan Smith: humour and passion

Posted on by
Reply

I have a stock of speeches on which I draw when the supply of topical material thins. That supply is drying up. I wonder why…

Today we look at a speech from the beginning of last year, January 2019. A meeting of the Brexit Party, with its slogan “Leave Means Leave”, was addressed by the Rt Hon Ian Duncan Smith – widely known in Britain as IDS.

He makes early reference to an invasion by a mob which, during the previous speech, had invaded, chanted, and been invited to depart. I thought I’d tell you that, because otherwise a couple of seconds near the beginning of his speech would make no sense.

Then he pays deserved tribute to Kate Hoey, sitting behind him. She was on this blog not so long ago.

IDS does humour! More than twenty years ago he had a brief spell as leader of the Conservative party, and the Mainstream Media swung into their customary smear-fest. He was painted as being devoid of personality. Since stepping down from that he has studied, researched, and campaigned passionately on Work & Pensions, a brief not known to be all-singing-all-dancing, so that dreary image of him has rather stuck. How refreshing to see him opening with a very humorous passage, excellently delivered with skilled timing, several interim laughs and ultimately leading to a stunning punchline.

Then he turns to the passion, and very passionate it is. I tell my trainees that passion is worth bucketfuls of technique, but the dream ticket is to have both. IDS has both.

Even though the matter of Brexit is not currently headlines, it’s interesting to note those of his observations that still apply to our current predicament.

For instance, at 6:40 he talks of how the Establishment and its media echo-chamber delight in denigrating Britain. Every day during this current pandemic fiasco we are repeatedly misled about how the UK has Europe’s highest death-rate. In absolute terms, maybe, but not per capita. Taken per unit of population we are somewhere around the middle of the league table, but the bottom-feeders in the media never say so. If they wonder why readership and viewing figures are plummeting, it’s because the truth that belies their fake news is easily available on line.

The media also screams that USA has the world’s highest death rate, whereas again per capita it’s near the UK in the middle of the world’s league table. The unenviable top of the European table is San Marino, with a per capita death rate almost three times Britain’s; and if you take Manhattan out of the sample USA’s death rate is very low. The media never tell you that. It has long been said that a free press is a bedrock of a civilised society. It’s time to add a free internet to that; and even now the internet is threatened.

At 8:15 IDS has another go at the Establishment’s hatred for Britain, and swings into talking of his father’s generation in the war. They fought for freedom.

Hmmm. Freedom. Remember that stuff? Various wise people have made the observation over the ages that any society that endangers freedom, in favour of safety, winds up with neither.