Category Archives: Uncategorized

Roger Kimball liberated

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In February, 2012 Hillsdale College hosted a conference called The Liberal Arts and Education Today. It included a lecture from Roger Kimball.

Kimball was one of the first speakers I featured on this blog. I see it was in June 2013. I remember that, having read his book The Fortunes of Permanence I went looking for an example of his speaking. I now see that, for a title to that post I stole a phrase from Shakespeare’s As You Like It which was rather pretentious of me, though I can see why I did it. The phrase was full of wise saws and modern instances because Kimball was fond of quoting others. Is he still like that?

Yes he is; but I’ll come to that in a moment.

The introduction is ably provided by Madeleine Smith, who studies rhetoric. I mention that because she would not need to look up the word when I point out the parapraxis in her final sentence. It’s a Neil Armstrong moment.

Kimball begins at 1:30. He is reading a script.

More than almost anyone you ever heard of, Kimball is immersed in the written word. He reads it, writes, it edits it and publishes it. Little surprise then that his idea of speaking in public is to write an essay then stand and read it. Also, in fairness, there are far too many public speaking teachers who sincerely believe that to be a correct way to go about it. They are tragically misguided.

What he has beautifully written, and what he is reading, is fascinating and brilliantly learned. I would love to read it, but I am unhappy hearing and watching his doing it.

I feel I am watching a prisoner. The real Roger Kimball is somewhere in there, unable properly to reveal himself. It’s not that he reads without expression – quite the reverse: he reads superbly, but look at his hands. When they are not hidden behind his back they are permitted just fleetingly to rise, illustrate a shape and then disappear again. Or they grasp the sides of the lectern, and occasionally we partially see an extension of the fingers. All my instincts, my experience, and his fidgeting tell me that his personality and hands are dying to be really expressive, but they are incarcerated by the written word.

He still quotes other writers almost to excess – some might call it gnomic, but these aren’t cheap slogans. They are excellent observations that are relevant to what he is saying. This again would be lovely to read, but frustrating to hear because many are so profound that you want to pause and let them sink in before moving on. That is a luxury not available to a lecture audience.

His hidden personality almost escapes at 25:40 when he explosively utters the word “but”. For a short while thereafter his hands are almost liberated. Almost…

Do you want to see the Kimball personality set free? Then keep watching till the end of the lecture, and then stay with it. The questions begin at 38:30, and with his replies we see him speaking spontaneously. Within a couple of minutes his hands come up and begin gesturing eloquently and generously as his liberated personality takes flight.

By the way, this niche interest of mine is not the only reason to stay for the Q&A. Hillsdale students ask excellent questions and this section is really stimulating. His new spontaneity does cause a drop of perhaps 5% of the literary merit of what he utters, but the compensation is at least 40% increase in audience engagement, and that’s a pretty good trade.

So if Kimball were rash enough to seek my advice, how would I suggest he prepare a lecture? As an experiment I would tell him to leave his desk and go for a walk in the countryside; think up three really good probing questions concerning his topic and message; answer them aloud to the landscape and listen to himself. I think he’d like what he heard.

Bill, Ben and Stan

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This period between Christmas and the New Year is one in which I prefer not to get too serious. Nevertheless I still browse for interesting speeches and interviews. Thus it was that I happened upon a late and lamented performer, whom I had known slightly, interviewing a man who had contributed generously to my very small childhood.

Though I earn my living helping people to speak I am a fan of nonsense-speak.

Peter Hawkins was a voice-artist who supplied the speaking for many famous TV stars, including the Daleks. But many years earlier my infant self used to hear him speaking “Oddle-poddle” (yes, they even gave it a name), the language spoken by Bill & Ben the Flowerpot Men. I even dared to speak it a bit myself.

Stanley Unwin was a hero to my youthful self. I would clamour never to miss his appearances on television and loved his performance in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Again I would try to imitate. In the nineties, when I produced and presented an arts programme on BBC Radio, I recorded with him a long-form, broadly biographical, interview. The recording subsequently required heavy editing, as we would regularly dissolve into laughter. He was a lovely man.

I will leave you with the one interviewing the other. It is introduced by the late Robert Robinson.

Happy New Year.

Dr Thomas Sowell thinks

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Yes, I know: Sowell was on this blog only ten weeks ago but in the mean time he has celebrated his 90th birthday. I think that’s worth marking.

But I have to admit that there’s also a far more prosaic reason for today’s posting. My computer is in hospital. If they can’t fix it, I’ll replace it. Meanwhile I am hobbling along on a tablet.

To post one of my speech critiques, I need a screenful of many windows and tabs from which I lift references, precise timings, URLs for hyperlinks, etc. It goes against the grain to have a week without a blog post, but robbed of my normal work environment I feel I just want to put a video here, and let it speak for itself. I cannot think of anyone better to do that than Dr Thomas Sowell.

By way of introduction I offer you a comment published below this video on YouTube –

As a black man I just want to say … this man changed my life and taught me how to think. I’ve never felt so free.

 

 

George Carlin still stands up

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I seldom cover after-dinner speeches on this blog, nor do I often cover stand-up comedy. My speciality is public speaking. After-dinner speaking and stand-up are quite different from that. In terms of pacing they are actually even different from each other.

Nevertheless I’m always prepared to make exceptions.

On May 13, 1999, The National Press Club in Washington D.C. invited the late George Carlin to deliver an after-dinner speech. (In fact it was after-lunch, but who’s counting?) Carlin died in 2008, so there’s a whole generation who never knew him and his work.

Carlin is introduced by the Club President, Larry Lipman. As tends to be the case with all club meetings a certain amount of time is taken, before anything else, with club housekeeping business. If you are less than fascinated by the housekeeping of 21 years ago, you can skip to the actual introduction at 2:50. Carlin begins speaking at 5:25, ends at 35:23 and the rest is Q&A.

His comedy routine here falls into the category of what I call The Cavalry School. It’s a rare process these days, consisting of galloping along, gags flying out all the time, audience constantly tittering, but almost afraid to laugh in case they miss any, and so on. (On my side of the pond, Ken Dodd was possibly the most prominent cavalry charger – though very different in actual style.)

Each charge, though, has to conclude sometime; and at the conclusion he hits them with a punchline, stopping in a welter of pent-up laughter before gearing up the next charge. That punchline pause is almost unknown today. For one thing it requires the speaker to be one hundred percent confident of the punchline. The confidence comes from having practised and tested his punchline technique to destruction. The testing would have taken place in a long series of differing comedy venues, a testing ground barely available any more. That is why today’s comics almost never pause on a punchline, forging on till the audience’s reaction forces them to pause. Some of us are old enough to remember when they always paused (like George Burns cueing us to laugh by taking a puff of his cigar).

When he made this speech Carlin had recently published a book called Brain Droppings, a volume in which, among other things, he explored some of the vagaries of the English language. His various cavalry charges here likewise study words, and he’s tailored them to his audience. His audience consists of journalists, and he’s speaking in Washington D.C. No prizes for guessing therefore that he charges while brandishing some of the political double speak that we still hear.

For that reason this speech stands up remarkably well today twenty-one years after delivery. Yes a sad student of speech like me may spot technical variations from today’s norm, but it is still funny.

There remains one further observation I think worth making. If we assume, as I think we may, that he was given a half-hour slot then he ended two seconds before the end of it. That’s professional.

Patrick Moore must be heard

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On 19 June, 2015, Ideacity opened its annual conference with a talk by Patrick Moore.

Anyone who has read any of Moore’s books, heard any of his speeches, or follows him on Twitter (I qualify on all three) knows what to expect. Those who haven’t heard of him get introduced by Moses Znaimer before the speech, and Moore himself fills in the gaps in his opening.

Nevertheless I have issues with that opening…

Znaimer’s introduction is very fine, containing personal reminiscence and just enough biographical material of Moore to tantalise us into wanting to hear the talk. It conveys respect, even affection, is shot from the hip, and short.

Moore’s opening bristles with unmistakeable nerve symptoms. I’m not surprised that he is nervous: every speaker experiences a Hump. But I expected someone of his experience to have developed better techniques to disguise it. It looks as if he has made an attempt by reciting the first couple of minutes by rote. The trouble is that he is uttering the rote like an automaton, and that’s one of the nerve symptoms. I rush to rescue: here’s some advice…

He kicks off with autobiographical ethos. Ethos is good, autobiography is good, automaton aside he does it pretty well, but contrary to widespread opinion there is no divine edict that says it has to be at the beginning. In fact there is a strong case to avoid autobiographical material at the very beginning.

Nerves are a form of vanity because you are concerned with what the audience thinks of you. A very good defence against nerves is to force yourself to think not of yourself but to focus on your message and the audience, and how they are bonding. How do you possibly not think of yourself when you’re talking about yourself? Enter the James Bond Film Opening, because it makes you hold up the autobiographical ethos for a minute or two till the Hump has receded. It’s much easier to talk about yourself after the nerves have been tamed and put in their place.

How about something like this? “It was wet and cold, and all things considered a bad time to be bobbing about in the middle of the ocean in an inflatable boat, trying to face down a Russian harpoon gun…” Continue in this vein for around a minute (avoiding the word “I”), then, “Let’s go back to the beginning of the story.” Swing into the existing opening.

I can come up with many more suggestions. These things are easily fixed, and every speaker should be at the top of his game from the starting gun.

Moore approaches the top of his game about two thirds through his opening, and the talk comes into its own at 5:00. It lifts still higher with the onset of passion, and never looks back.

The planet’s environment is hugely important, but all sensible and informed scientific study has been hijacked and swamped. The warmist establishment has such a political stranglehold on mainstream media that people never hear the dissenting science. Society suffers, particularly the poorest, and by a cruel irony so does the environment.

This is why voices like Patrick Moore’s must be heard.

Yavuz Aydın and sinister pairing

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On 18 February, 2020, at the 12th Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, there was a plenary address from Yavuz Aydin. He was a Judge in Turkey till the attempted Coup d’État in July 2016, when he was one of tens of thousands of victims of a purge by the Erdoğan administration.

I remember little of detail about that attempted coup, its news having been rather buried under the British reaction to the result of the EU referendum a couple of weeks earlier. Nevertheless I do recall – cynic that I am – how it seemed after its failure to have had for Erdogan the markings of what students of politics call a ‘beneficial crisis’.

At this moment Turkey is heavily in the headlines, as it attempts to help huge numbers of migrants pour into Europe via Greece. So let’s see if we can learn something more about the Turkish government, if only from a source that may have a jaded view of it.

I am also interested to see how a senior and experienced jurist puts his case in a foreign language.

What a gentle, audience-friendly, opening! The slightly shy smile and soft tone are exactly what are needed to generate audience empathy. It may be his genuine natural self, though I wonder whether he looked and sounded like that when sentencing convicted felons.

The way he lays out his story of the mass purge is beautiful. He makes his narrative clearer than the finest crystal. I am impressed. And then at around the seven minute mark everything changes.

He admits it: he says that he’d intended to make this all about himself, but now there were more important matters to cover. The silken narrative gives way to a stumbled, fumbled, rather garbled description of children being drowned trying to cross the sea to freedom in Europe.

The interesting thing is that though this is now rather messy, it is not a jot less compelling. It confirms what I often say to my trainees that passion is worth buckets of technique. It is a very fine address indeed.

But I have a personal conundrum.

Probably because I spend my life helping people express themselves, I have an interest in something called ‘idiom pairs’. These are pairs of words, often clichés, that colloquially are joined at the hip. At root they come in two distinct categories –

  • Antonyms: words that are opposites – e.g. “high and low”
  • Synonyms: words that essentially mean the same – e.g. “bright and shiny”

But often overlooked is a mysterious third category, and this concerns pairs of words that are perceived absolutely to belong together but often actually don’t. For example, “rich and famous”. We all know of many famous people who are definitely not rich, and rich people who shun publicity; and yet that idiom pair is rooted deep in our culture. It is trying to consider why that interests saddos like me. So where am I leading with this?

Aydin repeatedly rattles off a pair of words, obviously translated literally from the idiom of his own language – “judges and prosecutors”. Not “judges and lawyers”, but “judges and prosecutors” suggesting that they are two sides of the same coin. For one brought up in a culture of adversarial, supposedly impartial justice and innocent-till-proved-guilty I find that faintly sinister.

But that’s just me.

Boris Johnson talks a good fight

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At the beginning of February, 2020, barely hours after the UK ceased to be a member of the EU, the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, delivered a speech in the painted hall of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. It was entitled, Unleashing Britain’s Potential.

The speech generated a fair amount of comment in the press and on social media so, as is my habit, I waited a while for the dust to settle before I addressed it.

Whoever was in charge of filming this video was so determined not to miss anything that the camera was switched on and left to its own devices while the throng awaited the PM’s entrance. You don’t have to wait: he enters at 3:14 and begins speaking at 3:20. He finishes at 31:04, turning to Q&A.

Nearly half a century ago I was involved in organising a gastronomic banquet in this Painted Hall; and the guests from all over the world barely noticed what they were eating, so grand is the setting. The PM opens with a detailed and scholarly, if slightly anarchic description. While admiring the work that went into it, he describes it as “slightly bonkers”. It makes for an amusing opening to the speech.

At around the six-minute mark he reaches the matter in hand, namely that Britain released from the shackles that have bound it to a failing enterprise of protectionist tariffs, needs now to get out into the wide world and exercise some free trade. He speaks of the teachings of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Richard Cobden; and no one can deny that Boris talks a good fight.

I find myself made anxious when at 8:25 he says that “politicians are failing to lead”. Smith, Ricardo, Cobden, et al, don’t teach that politicians need to lead; they teach that politicians need to get the hell out of the way. Boris knows this, and he’s a words man, so why does he use wrong words?

At 13:30 “We will be governed by science, and not by mumbo-jumbo!” He’s speaking of doing free trade deals, but I wish he was speaking of Climate Change. What has possessed the man to espouse the preposterous ambition to be “carbon neutral” by 2050? Futile, probably impossible, a short-cut to national bankruptcy, and utterly pointless given that the entire Climate Change religion is a tax-raising, citizen-controlling, political adventure based on mumbo-jumbo and not science. He has been quoted as saying that he doesn’t really ‘get’ climate change. Half an hour spent drilling past the fluff in which the creed is coated and simply looking at the actual data would be a good start. Or he could watch some of the YouTube videos on Tony Heller’s channel.

If, as it appears, he has Churchillian ambitions he really does need to get a grip.

In terms of his delivery it’s a stirring speech, and it is certainly refreshing to see a Prime Minister appear to exhibit a spine made of something other than marshmallow.

So he can talk the talk, let’s see how well he walks the walk.

Jonathan Aitken on the shoulders of giants.

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On 21 December, 2015, at the Richard Nixon Library in California, Jonathan Aitken delivered a speech entitled ‘A Biographer’s Journey’, comparing the subjects of his two best-selling biographies – Richard Nixon and Margaret Thatcher. Though I habitually attach, for readers that need it, an explanatory hyperlink to the name of the speaker and key people mentioned, I believe that at least two of them require no introduction, and anyway if you watch this video you will come to learn more about all of them than a link can offer. But if you insist –

Jonathan Aitken Richard Nixon Margaret Thatcher

As I habitually also, as a courtesy to the author, include links to books that are mentioned let us attend to them now. All these are authored by Jonathan Aitken.

Frank Gannon, aide to President Nixon, delivers the introduction and apologises that – unlike Nixon and Thatcher – he cannot speak without notes. Was this a specific appeal for me to teach him? Alas no.

That apology notwithstanding he proceeds to shoot most of it very capably from the hip. It’s a truly excellent introduction, affectionately delivered, replete with personal memories and fulsomely advertising all but one of the books listed above. I have heard few introductions that lasted as long as nine and a half minutes and none that so deserved to.

It has been said that punctuality is the politeness of princes. Aitken begins his lecture at 9:30, and passes to Q&A exactly 40 minutes later at 49:30. That sort of precision is super-professional and very rare.

And now I am slightly at a loss for words. This is just such a beautifully constructed and delivered lecture that I shy away from cheapening it with comment. Yes I know he regrettably has notes. Sadly the word ‘lecture’ strictly means a reading, and there are here a few occasions that I feel the reading makes the delivery a little pedestrian, but when his face comes up and he addresses us spontaneously it eclipses those brief shortcomings.

He’s a very fine speaker, and what he has given himself to say is fascinating throughout. I concede that I may bear an advantage in being old enough to have lived through the period in question, but of the many hundreds of speeches I have sampled for this blog (perhaps three times as many as have been actually reviewed) I think this the most enjoyable. I urge you to watch it.

Here’s your answer, Alice

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Yesterday out of the blue I received from you a timeline message on Facebook saying that you were confused by all the conflicting messages and didn’t know how to vote in tomorrow’s EU referendum. Could I provide guidance?

Our brief public exchange quickly looked like turning into a slanging match between various factions that joined in.  I eventually pointed out to everyone that they were trespassing on a conversation I was having with my stepdaughter, and could they please calm down? You deleted your post. Today I shall spend eight hours travelling, with a two-hour meeting in the middle. What better way to spend all that time on trains, writing you a slightly fuller reply? I shall keep it as short as I reasonably can, though that may well make it a little simplistic. Bouncing around in a train isn’t the best environment for checking data details. This is broad-brush time.

I’m not surprised you are confused. The past weeks have seen a tsunami of prejudices, claiming to be facts, pouring over us from all sides: arguments over economy, sovereignty, security, immigration, free trade deals, and so on. It may surprise you to learn that I intend to address essentially none of those.

Throughout history there has been a remarkably consistent pattern to the way empires, even the biggest and strongest, eventually crumble and fall. Very ancient civilisations like the Sumerian were phenomenally rich and powerful but collapsed. Similar fates befell empires throughout history in both the west and east up to and including the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The mistake they all appear to have made was that their ruling elites became too detached and alienated from their societies – the people. Those elites, be they princes or politicians, lost sight of a hugely valuable truth, namely that the powerhouse of a society is in the combined ingenuity and industry of the ordinary people. As soon as the toffs forget that fact they are on a slippery slope, because that’s when they begin trying to run things through central planning; and central planning has always been disastrous.

You can be the cleverest person the world has ever seen, but just a handful of ordinary people with the right experience will wield greater wisdom than you. That is why central planning is a disaster: it always kills societies. The EU loves central planning almost as much as Stalin did.

But where is evidence of this ‘slippery slope”? All societies beginning to fail go through a similar process:

  • they start practising all manner of fiscal irresponsibilities like printing cash, introducing capital controls, borrowing far too heavily etc. Seem familiar?
  • they get more and more control of the news media, not overtly but covertly. They buy lots of advertising, they dole out honours, they cosy up to them in all sorts of ways. Seem familiar?
  • They move in on education, making sure that all the ‘right’ things are told the children. Seem familiar?
  • They invent ‘beneficial crises’, synthetic scares that cause the populace to be suddenly more inclined to do as they’re told. Seem familiar?
  • They find ways and excuses to undermine democracy, treating their electorate with barely concealed contempt. Seem familiar?
  • They hollow out, infiltrate and neutralise any and all organisations (the UK parliament for instance) that could challenge them.  Seem familiar?
  • They make sure, either by bribes or threats, that key members of society are on their side.  Seem familiar?
  • Politicians, who are elected to be representatives, start calling themselves ‘leaders’. Seem familiar?

Need I go on? Do we see a pattern emerging?

We live in interesting times. All sots of potential dark clouds are hovering over the international horizon. There is no such thing as the status quo – anywhere. When disasters threaten we will need to be nimble; we will need to be able to make key decisions quickly. Being shackled to a lumbering, crumbling hulk which is already threatening to collapse will only get in our way.

You may have noticed that there is one empire I haven’t mentioned – the British Empire. That one didn’t crumble away, but got turned into the Commonwealth. The process was admittedly resisted in some quarters but it all went off successfully, and now is a huge source of pride. There is a historic detail that might have had something to do with our rare achievement in doffing our empire relatively peacefully. We have a history of putting despots in their place. Think of Magna Carta in 1215, the English Civil War in the middle of the 17th century, the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Even the American Revolution was in a very real sense a case of Englishmen holding steadfastly to their rights – which is why Magna Carta is every bit as important to Americans as it is to the British. Think of the two world wars, when we rescued Europe from despots. Democracy has been bitterly fought for across the centuries by our forbears, and is part of our heritage. Could we really be on the verge of binning in it in one last democratic act?

Vote Remain and you vote away your vote.

As far as I am concerned there is simply no choice tomorrow. We must leave.

Camille Puglia needs KISS

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Why has it taken me this long properly to discover Camille Paglia? Is it merely because I am this side of the pond? Yes I had heard of her, but till I happened upon this speech I had not gone out of my way to probe beyond a vague awareness of her name. Now I have, and am castigating myself for many years wasted. She’s been around for all but about four months of my life and she’s my type of person, defined as one with whom I may certainly not always agree but will enjoy arguing.

Here she is talking at the Chicago Humanities Festival in 2012.

She speaks till 43:30. The rest is questions.

She’s promoting her book on visual art. She’s promoting the hell out of it. It is less than a month after publication. The book aims and claims to be groundbreaking. Where better for her to be promoting it than a Humanities Festival?

She tells us about the concept: she tells us about the content: she tells us about the tortured decision-making concerning its format. You may, like me, get so caught up in her self-ignoring, chaotic, stream of bullshit-free consciousness that you resolve to get a copy.

Bravo Camille: way to go: excellent selling job! One teensy detail…

What is it called?

Gentle reader, I have found it for you. It is called Glittering Images.

I have had trainees like her: natural communicators, unhampered by any of the inhibitions that hobble others. They have plenty to say, are eager to say it, have a punchy turn of phrase, a beautifully free style of delivery. They have everything going for them, except …

K.I.S.S.

Keep It Simple, Stupid.

She says it herself at 0:55. “Simplicity is hard.”

If I worked with her, that is where I would focus.