On communication, professional and otherwise.
by David Murray // 1 Comment
Children, whatever you do, do not look the American in the eye. Behold my latest dangerous international fuckaround, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
(The TV appearance, not captured online and somehow inaccessible from a DVD they made for me, went well. We talked for 20 minutes without commercial, like it was a friggin' C-SPAN authors thing. The next day the conference organizers who put me up to it got more press and more TV, some of it from Norway. What the hell.)
by David Murray // 1 Comment
Bouncing through Copenhagen’s town square the other night with Simon Lund-Jensen, an organizer of the speechwriting show I spoke at Tuesday, I heard myself spit out what immediately struck me as a damn good public-speaking technique that I’ve been using all along.
Or is it, instead, just the natural reaction of everyone who ever gives a speech?
You’ll help me know.
Very near the beginning of every talk I give, I locate one person in the audience—and she’s always out there—who idiotically agrees with everything I say even before I say it. She’s nodding and smiling, laughing and clapping, even when I’m only taking a drink of water. Without thinking about it, I find her and note her location, for she is, and will be for the rest of the speech, My Mommy.
Just as unconsciously and inevitably, I find her opposite. The dude who loathes me on sight, who has me pegged as a glib, smug hotshot. He sits with his arms folded—gee, I wonder if he realizes that his body language indicates that he’s closed off to my message?—making a point to glance at his watch whenever I catch his glare. And catch it I must, because Mr. Dickie must be dealt with too.
For the rest of the speech, when I need a little confidence that at least someone out there loves me, I look at My Mommy. Worst-case scenario, I catch her with her mind wandering, and she immediately snaps to attention and smiles real big and approving. Her smile says, “You’re wonderful.”
At other moments—usually when I’m about to make a real strong point, or say a defiant thing—I look over at Mr. Dickie, and I lay the thing on him straight. Sometimes I win him over, sometimes I just realize I’ve got nothing to fear from the guy: I’m up here, Buster, and you’re down there.
And really, those are the only two people in the audience with who I look at. Occasionally someone else will laugh particularly hard at something I say, and I’ll give them a glance. Or I’ll catch an odd look on someone’s face accidentally. But mostly, it’s just Mommy and Dickie, Mommy and Dickie, from beginning middle to end.
And in the end, I usually win. Because Mommy leads the applause, and Dickie, however grudgingly, is forced by peer pressure, to join in. And everybody else in the audience, I have to hope, is somewhere safely in between.
You can’t please everybody. But as a speaker, and as a writer too, come to think of it—you need to deal with Mommy and Dickie both.
by David Murray // Leave a Comment
As you know, I'm reading Hunter S. Thompson's letters from 1968-1975 as I weave around Copenhagen in a jangled trip that has already involved a whole sleepless night, a three-hour ramble across the city, mostly in pre-dawn darkness and a prime-time appearance on Denmark's national cable news channel.
I'm working desperately to balance the need not to have too much of the Tubor Christmas beer and the equally urgent need not to have too little. But the most salient pattern that's developed during the visit is that the loose belt from my overcoat keeps falling off and kindly Danes have to keep presenting it to me, from behind. Once, a cab driver had to stop because the belt was flapping alarmingly against the outside of his car.
The problem with the Thompson letters is this: I am a 42-year-old dad who needs to believe as much as half the time that the world is not entirely run by a mob of pigfuckers, waterheads, greedheads and atavistic monsters who could only be brought to account by equally vicious and deranged freaks who only need "an excuse to start shooting, just enough chaos to guarantee they won't get caught."
It's a charming and convincing worldview. And really, what has changed for the better since the late 1960s? Only two things: We have hospice care now, and I forget the other thing.
Hunter S. Thompson was a dad, too, when he was writing all this. Captain Kangaroo played in the Woody Creek house in the mornings. But he was a writer first. (As both Jann Wenner and Juan Thompson will no doubt attest.)
And I'm starting to think I'm a dad first: who needs to believe that there's just enough order and justice and sanity in the world that things might work out. Not "in the end," but just long enough for my kid to be able to contend with the shit when it's her time.
A dad first—I never realized this was a choice I had to make—but a writer last, I hope.
A writer at least honest enough to be compelled to divulge that, in between reading (and agreeing with) a savage attack on America, he just spent about $140 on a Danish-made blue polka-dot dress for an eight-year-old girl.
(Oh my gosh, I wish you should see it!)