Conversation as art

Fred, staying with friends Michael and Elizabeth, explains his current project.

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Fred: I am on a quest.
Elizabeth: Which is…?
Fred: I want to find perfectly formed conversations.
Elizabeth: Are there such things?
Fred: Just as there are many perfect poems, especially short ones, like haiku, so I think short conversations can a kind poem.
Elizabeth: Conversations as poems? Like when you say to the Chinese baker, “One wholemeal,” and she replies, “Two dollar fifty, love.” Short, but hardly poetic.
Fred: No, not that, it needs a bit more, like words, sensitivity of mood, rhythm.

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Voiceover

Can a conversation be a poem? Can a street seller’s chant be like an aria? Can a cave painting be seen as art? Can a chair be viewed as a sculpture?

Fred’s quest has parallels in fields where a mundane object can be made with sufficient, effort, craft and care that it has value beyond its use.

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Disappearing emails

SMS text exchange between Miles and Zuzanna

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Zuzanna: Y U not reply to my EMs? Sent 3 in last 2 days.

Miles: I replied. Sent U 5 EMs.

Zuzanna: Nothing frm U. Strange! Black holes in the Internet?

Miles: Did U MayB report one of my replies as nuisance mail? That would have blocked future mail from me 2 U.

Zuzanna: Oh. I might have. What to do?

Miles: Quickest if you make a new EM address and we'll test it.

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Voiceover

That report function for flagging spam can lose you friends and relations. When you press report, check who you've flagged. Totally unexplainable disappearances could be due to the recently highlighted Internet "black holes" where data just inexplicably vanishes. Interesting that Zuzanna and Miles are using SMSing as a backup channel.

Coffee shop plan

Frank, an energetic retired engineer in his 80s, has an idea for putting the roof of his small museum to use and shows Lloyd the approach he has in mind.

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Frank: Come on up.

Lloyd: This is the access?

Frank: It’s not so difficult.

Lloyd: This ladder is an antique. It’s an artifact.

Frank: My point. We’re only allowed to build a storage room for archives and artifacts on the roof.

Lloyd: Is that all?

Frank: But look at the view from up here. Great sight for a coffee shop. Recreate coffee houses as a modern place to work. Wireless and coffee.

Lloyd: But you can’t get planning approval for a coffee shop?

Frank: Not to say it can’t be done. Archiving is a foot in the door. Put in a kitchen and toilet and Bob’s your uncle.

Lloyd: And build in a new staircase.

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Voiceover

A major function of coffee houses, of which Edward Lloyd’s in London was one of the first in 1688, was that of being places for shipping underwriters to discuss insurance deals. Coffee houses then became, for a couple of hundred years, merely places to drink coffee and chat. But the wheel seems to have turned. Frank seems to view his rooftop as being a place where neo-nomads can, for the price of a coffee and a muffin, rent office space.

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The fragility of the politeness of bank tellers

Sarge comes on duty to take over the teller’s counter while Dave takes a lunch break.

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Sarge: Morning OK?

Dave: Kind of rough.

Sarge: (typing in password) Yeah?

Dave: You can say that again.

Sarge: Again?

Dave: The first hour I was polite.

Sarge: You are always polite, Dave.

Dave: I was my usual Dave the first hour. But 11 to 12, whew. I was my smiling self, but it was close.

Sarge: Close to?

Dave: Close to a blow-up. I mean, one woman brought in a hundred and seventy-five dollars in 1s, 2s and 5 cent pieces. Fifteen people in the line behind her as she counted them out. That sort of morning.

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Voiceover

The service industry: being nice to customers. It takes a toll on even the most naturally equable. Some banks refuse to accept those itty bitty cent pieces. But this bank, concerned about its public image, and needing to attract more customers, has a manager who exhorts his employees every morning: “Give them anything they want, with a big, big smile.” Could a beautician and a manicurist also help this branch's public image?

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Yevgenia Krasnova and surprises

Bill has only just begun Taleb’s Black Swan and Ray disabuses him of one of his assumptions.

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Bill: You’ve read the Black Swan?

Ray: I have.

Bill: Just begun it but I particularly like the story of this woman neuroscientist who wrote a book but no publisher would touch it, it didn’t seem to be either fact or fiction, so she put it on the Internet and there a publisher found it and he published it and before long her book was out in 40 languages. Just shows, the “experts” are not always right. Great story!

Ray: Great story, indeed. I suspect you have only read up to the chapter on Yevgenia.

Bill: Yeah. How did you know?

Ray: If you turn the page, you’ll find a footnote. “To those readers who Googled Yevgenia Krasnova, I am sorry to say that she is (officially) a fictional character."
­­­­­­­­­_________________
Voiceover

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan) is a writer who surprises you on every page. Near the beginning of The Black Swan (he uses the black swan as a symbol of the unexpected since in the northern hemisphere swans are conceived of as all being white), Taleb tells the story of Yevgenia Krasnova, which has the reader believing it to be a true tale, for it is narrated matter of factly, yet on the first page of the next chapter, Taleb informs us that the story was a mere tale, a fiction. Yevgenia’s story is another manifestation of the black swan syndrome.

Isaac Singer said, "A story means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises."Taleb goes one better, heaping surprise on surprise. He tells the surprising story of Yevgenia and then surprises us with a comment on the story. As if he has taken Yogi Berra’s “Surprise me” to heart.
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Murdering the magnolia (Part 1)

Spud is annoyed about having to cut down the magnolia tree in the garden.

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Spud: So I’m over next door and Peter, he says, that magnolia is a problem, Spud, they get real big and their roots go for miles.

Polly: I told you when you planted it. You plant a magnolia on the boundary and the roots go under the ground and lift the neighbor’s paths and then they sue you. Did Peter say he was going to sue you?

Spud: Not in so many words. He’s always been right neighborly. He did look at me a little sharp though.

Polly: So you going to take it down? Or you going to be contrary as always?

Spud: I’m going to take it down. I’m going out there with the chainsaw tomorrow, first thing.

Polly: Really? I never knowed you cave in so quick to what someone tells you to do. Bet Peter showed you some tree roots had already crawled under the fence into his place.

Spud: No, no. But I’ll let you in on a secret, Pol. Promise you won’t let on over the fence?

Polly: Depends.

Spud: Well, I found a big fat magnolia root pushing up through our brick driveway.

Polly: Our brick driveway? Lawdy me, Spud. You go out there and cut down that there magnolia right away at dawn tomorrow. They’s dangerous trees, magnolias. I heard you can wake up one morning and find they’ve pushed your house over.

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Voiceover

Where do Spud and Polly live? The American South. Sure. But how can you tell this? Magnolias? They grow anywhere. Could Polly be Dolly of Steel Magnolias? Polly don’t look like Dolly.

That leaves the language. The adverb in “really big” coming out as “real big.” “Right neighborly” standing for “really neighbourly” elsewhere. Polly’s “I never knowed you…” for “I never knew you to…” The prosecution rests its case with: “Lawdy me…” and “They’s dangerous trees…” Spud and Polly have just gotta be from somewhere south of Alabama.

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Cyclical argument

Anil wonders if the problem is in the ignition switch.

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Dipak:I don't think so.

Anil: Then what are you thinking the problem could be?

Dipak: These machines are a problem. We are relying on them so much they are ruling our lives and governing our behavior.

Anil: That's all very well but we must be arriving at Chandrapore before dark.

Dipak: You see? If we were not having a machine we would not have been setting out for Chandrapore.

Anil: I am beginning to see what you are saying. And if we did not have to go to Chandrapore we would not have to be relying on this machine.

Dipak: Life was simpler when we walked everywhere.

Voiceover

It is not only Dipak and Anil who becme ensnared by circular reasoning. When Descartes wrote, “I think, therefore I am,” he was employing a circular reasoning because by saying, “I think…” he was already declaring that he existed.

Perhaps life was simpler when we communicated only using the simple present.

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Competitive conversation

Helga finds it difficult to change the subject when talking to her elderly mother. Her older friend Astrid, has some observations on this.

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Helga: I was talking to her last night, and you know, as usual, from minute 1 to goodbye, it was all about health. The heart, the nausea, the back ache.

Astrid: It’s all old people are conscious of. Haven't you noticed, it’s all about health and the past. The aches and pains and how things were better before.

Helga: And young people talk about their plans and the future and what they’re going to do, almost never health.

Astrid: Maybe diet.

Helga: But sometimes I think old people talking about health are almost competing. My back pain is a lot worse then your back pain. You think you have a bad knee? That’s nothing! I can’t even get up the steps without my stick.

Astrid: Well maybe competition runs through conversation of the old and the young, just the topics change. Like young guys. My car is faster then yours. And we women, you know my sister asked me just yesterday, what have you done to your hair? It was an opener so she could show off her new hairstyle.

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Voiceover

Competition in conversation, or capping what someone else is saying, may, as Astrid surmises, be seen in the talk of men and women, old and young, irrespective of topic.

You finish telling a story and someone else chips in with, “I remember once when Doris and I…"

Substitute “I remember once…” with “Have you heard the one about…” or “Let me tell you…” or “That’s nothing…” and you are in a round of storytelling where each punch line is expected to be more surprising than the last. If it isn’t, the narrator loses.

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Reflexivity

Diane explains to Juanita that she rewrote her proposal.

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Diane: I mean it’s a conference on language and when I finished the proposal I realized the whole paper was going to be about technology and I’d called it “Technical issues related to texting.”

Juanita: So you just renamed it “How texting affects how we talk”?

Diane: No, I had to throw out all the technical stuff and when I’d done that I saw there weren’t any language issues left.

Juanita: Hard.

Diane: So I designed a new study. I now have the subjects texting messages to each other.

Juanita: It’s been done.

Diane: Not this way. The messages they send have to be about problems with texting.

Juanita: Very reflexive. Texts about texting. Nice one Di.

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Voiceover

Exaggeration

Deborah asks Jessica if she wants to do dinner.

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Jess: Can’t tonight. Have to go to the dentist.

Deb: At night?

Jess: Emergency. I was biting into a chocolate last night and my jaw fell out.

Deb: Rubbish. You’re exaggerating again.

Jess: Only a little. Suddenly there were several teeth lying on the table front of me.

Deb: More like you lost a filling.

Jess: OK. OK. So which has the more dramatic impact? A jaw falling out, or a filling?

Deb: You have a point.

Jess: I have a dentist appointment. Can’t talk now. Gotta go.

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Voiceover

To overstate, to use hyperbole: these are alternative expressions meaning to exaggerate. The act of telling a story is enhanced by exaggeration, and for this we are given temporary permission, it is called artistic licence, dramatic licence, or narrative licence. The narrator is given permission to distort. Deb, holding Jess back in her story, is being a little too literal, doesn’t enter into the spirit, and so Jess has to work harder to hold and justify her role as storyteller. Perhaps that’s why she cuts short the fun and says, “Gotta go.”

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Triumphant

Hamlet e Ophelia si arrestano nel piazza per un gelato.
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Ophelia: I told you beware the ides of March.

Hamlet: They are not on us yet. Forsooth, I would trade my horse for another, yet the ice cream is good, so let’s tarry awhile here.

Ophelia: A dish fit for the gods. Yet it is neither ice nor cream.

Hamlet: What’s in a name? Chocolate by any other name would taste as sweet, nay?

Ophelia: Tis neither here nor there.

Hamlet: I like this place and could willingly waste my time in it. Yet that man is taking my likeness too oft for his own good, we must to horse before I beat him to a pulp. Triumphs for nothing and lamenting toys is jollity for apes and grief for boys.

Ophelia: Good sentences and well pronounced, my lord. On, on, to unpathed waters, to undreamed shores!

[Exeunt]

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Voiceover
Antique dialogue has been experimented with in modern contexts. Results are unpredictable; voices from the past can sound uneasy in the street clatter of industrialized society, but with a little suspension of disbelief, across a busy piazza, these Danish motorcyclists could be speaking Global English (in the Shakespearean sense).

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A mermaid's story

Agnete asks Hans for directions to the mermaid.

Hans: You want to go where?
Agnete: There is a statue in the town. I have heard it is famous.
Hans: There are many statues in the town.
Agnete: But this one is special. It is of a merperson.
Hans: The little mermaid? It is, shall we say, unprepossessing.
Agnete: I know, but its story is tragic. Oh so, tragic. She cuts out her tongue, pain in her legs is like knives when she dances, the prince does not marry her.
Hans: What kind of a man could inflict such pain, even on a fictional merperson? Are you sure you still want to go?
Agnete: But the ending is happy. She doesn’t kill the prince, becomes a spirit who does good deeds and goes to heaven.
Hans: It doesn’t sound a likely ending.

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Voiceover

Of course, this is not the original Hans Christian Andersen. But through these costumed guides the past replays itself, and with each replay, the past is a little differently interpreted. Can oral history be entirely relied upon? How deeply in the myth is the real event buried?
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