Russell Davies

2021

Blog all dog-eared pages: Lecture

Lecture by Mary Cappello was the best book I discovered when writing mine.

Sadly it was a bit late in the process, so it's not in there a lot. But it's so good.

"Now the human voice is an instrument of varied power; it can enchant and it can soothe; it can rage and it can despair; but when it lectures it almost always bores"

"Midway between a sermon and a bedtime story, the lecture is knowledge’s dramatic form."

"In a 2013 interview for Jezebel, Anne Carson said, 'I’m really trying to make people’s minds move, you know, which is not something they’re naturally inclined to do … We have a kind of inertia, sitting and listening. But it’s really important to get somehow into the mind and make it move somewhere it has never moved before … Given whatever material we’re going to talk about, and we all know what it is, how can we move within it in a way we’ve never moved before, mentally?'"

"Aphorisms slow us down, and don’t wish to be consumed like advertising copy or slogans that tell us which way the wind blows and how to follow it. When twentieth century readers reduce Emerson’s lectures to quotable quotes along the order of daily affirmations or bon mots, memorable one-liners, decked out in needlepoint or plastered onto calendars, they inadvertently negate that most famous one—“to be great is to be misunderstood,” effectively neutralizing the dissonance at the heart of the lecture and the essay."

"When James Baldwin or Gilles Deleuze answer interview questions, it is not quite accurate to say that they reply “articulately”—it’s not that they are eloquent merely—it’s that they respond in essays, performative essays."

"The PechaKucha as contemporary innovative lecture claims to really condense the Power Point presentation, to insist on focus, but I think it confuses focus with speed."

"When I gave readings from a book on “awkwardness,” I used to build a performative silence into my opening remarks. When you do this, at first people think that you’re having a breakdown and act alarmed. The silence, which last a few beats, feels to the audience like an hour. What you are after, of course, is a breakthrough—a jolt born of disarming quiet to cut through the static and the noise."

"In the lecture, speech meets writing rather than serve as its passive or inert delivery system."

"Lecture: one person is required to think on her feet while all others are expected to think in their seat."

"The lecture will have succeeded, if, like the essay, it cannot be summarized, but only experienced."

"To lecture in the guise of the female body is always to risk attack, at best, and at worst, incomprehension—because we still have no way to figure intelligence in a female form, no way to picture a combination of startling truth and un-gendered beauty."

 

Not in the book: Nominally

I read quite a lot of books about writing and how to write for the PowerPoint book. Lots of good in all of them but the most useful thing was in Joe Moran's First You Write A Sentence. It was about 'nominalization'. 

"Writing drifts into obscurity when it overuses a certain kind of abstract noun: a nominalization. A nominalization makes a verb (or sometimes an adjective) into a noun. It turns act into action, react into reaction, interact into interaction. It gives a process a name. According to the linguist Michael Halliday, the nominalization emerged in the seventeenth century, with the birth of modern science. To describe what they were doing, these pioneer scientists needed a way of turning single events into general laws. Before then, to explain nature’s workings, or to write up experiments, they had to use a full clause, with a subject and a verb. The apple fell from the tree because this small spherical object was drawn to a much bigger one, the Earth. Nominalizations let them hide clauses, which describe an event, inside a noun, which gave that event a name. The apple’s descent was a result of gravitation."

"Nominalizations pack a lot into single words. Science needs them so it does not waste time going over old news. It is quicker to say that a hummingbird’s hum is made by its rapid wingbeats (a nominalizing noun phrase) than by its beating its wings rapidly. But if you bury too many verbs under nouns, you shut out the layperson, for whom the stuff that is old to an expert is new. And even experts find sentences chock-full of nouns uninviting – even when they know what the nouns mean. Brevity has been bought at the cost of clarity and ease."

"In the 1970s, the poet Elizabeth Bishop taught writing seminars at Harvard. Shy and nervous leading classes, she still managed to produce a long, confident list for her students headed ‘If you want to write well avoid these words’. Many of the words were nominalizations, like creativity, sensitivity and ‘most ivity-words’. Others were those dressed-up noun categories that have crept into daily use and distance us from the real: life-experience, relationship, aspect, area, potential, structure, lifestyle. Lifestyle, which back then was hyphenated or written as two words, was also censured by Christopher Lasch in a style guide he wrote for his students at the University of Rochester in 1985. ‘The appeal of this tired but now ubiquitous phrase probably lies in its suggestion that life is largely a matter of style,’ he wrote. ‘Find something else to say about life.’"

This has been a really useful thing to understand when helping people write clearly and readably. Partly as a useful framework in itself, partly because when googling it I realised that people are taught to use nominalization at university. It's seen as academic and objective. So when they get asked to write in business life that's how they think they should do it. Being able to say 'you're in a different world now, do things differently' is quite helpful.   

Values: 10 words.

A lot of people who read this blog will probably have to write 'values' some time. They'll have to summarise a corporate philosophy or organisational culture in a few, hopefully memorable words.

There isn't a lot of good advice out there about how to do this. So I'm going to collect examples, good and bad, and then, one day distill them into some advice. Here\s a good example (of some bad values), this ten word summary of Republicanism: "...a ten-word philosophy: Strong Defense, Free Markets, Lower Taxes, Smaller Government, Family Values."

Ha. I seem to have written this before. In 2013.

 

Naming satellites

Naming, as we know, is hard. This little bit from Andrew Blum's The Weather Machine is a useful reminder of how to do it. It describes a soil moisture-measuring weather satellite that was originally given the rather heroic name Hydros (the god of the waters). Soon, however, it instead became known as SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) because...

"...“We wanted it to be extremely clear just in the name, so when the folks at NASA headquarters are sitting in a closed room making decisions, there’s no question that it’s active and passive, and that it measures soil moisture.”"

ParkLit

I've come to love Regent's Park during lockdown. It's been a garden and a jogging spot and a place to meet friends. (And Friends). And so I've been noticing it popping up in literature and books and stuff and I thought I'd catalogue those references here.

Nice little project, I thought.

Except someone's already created an absolutely brilliant bibliography of Regent's Park Literature and Music.

They don't have this lovely little bit from Alan Bennett's diaries though:

"1 April: Almost out of piety and a respect for tradition I filch a couple of branches from the base of a balsam poplar on the north side of Regent’s Park. The buds are hardly open and thus are briefly heavily scented. Now in a glass on the sitting-room mantelpiece they bring a flavour to the room as they have done every spring for the last forty years."

 

Naming things

Delta CEO calling the delta variant by its formal name pic.twitter.com/71UlTYKwBn

— Hannah Sampson (@hannahbsampson) August 25, 2021

Government 'comms playbook' orders NHS trusts to describe new-build wings and refurbishments as 'new hospitals'https://t.co/eZWEjGBsee pic.twitter.com/un0NgHQ8R4

— Dave West (@Davewwest) August 26, 2021

Demented roosters

A magnificent collection of roadside photos - all now public domain.

Including this splendid poem.

Let the marketing begin

It turns out that my book is available for pre-order in various places.

I've learned from various podcasts that pre-orders are very important so please consider doing so. Then, in November, when it comes out, you'll get a lovely surprise - a gift from Past You.

WARNING: I cannot yet recommend the ebook version, I've not seen that yet so I'm not sure what it'll be like. The actual book is obviously magnificent because my trite and banal words have been elevated to the condition of art by Stef's design.

Notes from the deli: 1 or 2

"Should we be killing birds with stones at all?"