Why I Don't Always Want To Be A "Good Listener"

I overheard someone talking about “conversational narcissism” recently and, of course, Googled it to find out what it might be. It’s a name for the way people hi-jack a conversation you start and make it about themselves. So A starts talking about looking at new cars, and B says “Oh yeah, I was looking at (name fancy car and list high-end requirements)”. What B is supposed to do is talk about A’s search for a new car, not about herself.

The same site had some other articles about being a good conversationalist, so I took a look. Every one of them re-hashed the same old lines of the “it is better to be charmed than charming” variety. According to this line, a good conversationalist is someone who spends their time listening to the other person, prompting with questions and encouraging with non-verbal signals. This advice was given by nineteenth-century grandees to young men who needed to behave properly around nineteenth-century grandees and their numerous female relatives. The grandees and their female relatives had, of course, no interest in the opinions of young people without a station in life and were used to be being humoured as they wittered on about nothing in particular. This was the world where the advice “a good talker listens, not speaks” applies. Last time I looked, this is the twenty-first century and very few of us spend any time with grandees of any kind. And if we did, they would be disinclined to talk to us about anything, because the world has changed a lot since the days of long dinner parties in country houses. The old-school advice only works when there’s a hierarchy that makes one person the designated witterer and the other the designated wittered-to.

Absent the hierarchy, it’s a little trickier. You’re aiming to strike a balance between talking and listening that leaves both of you feeling okay about it. Why? Conversations, like any other human interaction, need to be reciprocally beneficial if you’re going to go on doing them. (That doesn’t mean equal talking, and it might mean you are the fascinated listener to a genuine authority on a subject in which you have an interest. There aren’t so many of those conversations. And don’t get pious and tell me that everyone can be fascinating about something and it’s my job to find out what. It’s as much my conversational partner’s job to try to be interesting to me as it is mine to be interesting to them.) As well as that, the other person may be tired or uninspired and wants you to carry some conversational load. They may find your questions intrusive, or worse, uninformed, and in either case will be gone fairly fast and pretty much forever. Putting them in the position where they do the talking may make them regard you as “hard work” or as someone who doesn’t share or say anything about themselves. Plenty of opportunities to mess up there.

From your side, being on the receiving end of a non-stop talker is okay if they are funny or interesting, but gets pretty tedious if they aren’t. They may be talking to be heard, not to start a discussion, and they don't need you at all, all they need is a nodding dog. That’s listener abuse: they should be paying a therapist, not using you for free. It’s like being at a big corporate meeting where they want to “deliver” a bunch of “messages”: after ten minutes you don’t want to be there and after twenty minutes your soul has shut down. And don't you want to share? Don't you want to be heard? Don't you want to find out that someone likes what you like? Because that's not quite the same thing as discovering that you like what someone else likes. The first is finding out that you can get along with other people. The second is finding that other people are prepared to get along with you. There is a huge difference.

A hefty dose of listener abuse made me give up on “social conversation” for a while. Why? Because I started to vanish. I was there to be an audience for other people, and audiences aren't equals. I wound up feeling alienated from myself. It meant I was with the wrong crowd. AA meetings can feel like that: the same old people bang on about the same old stuff with which I have no identification and I wonder what the hell I'm doing there when I could be, oh, washing my hair or doing press-ups.

So the next time you worry that you may be hi-jacking the conversation, check if feel you’re being treated as a person or an audience. If you think you’re being treated as an audience, then carry on hi-jacking. Or of course, you could make your excuses and leave.

Six Impressions Of A Woman On A Train

The other morning I found myself sitting next to a woman I guessed was in her late thirties / early forties, dressed and accessorised with informal style.

First impression: "married / LTR, confident, satisfied with her life and not badly paid to judge from the quality of the clothes." She wasn't conventionally pretty, but a grown man experienced in the ways on women would know that she was sexy as all hell and just the sort of woman he would want in bed. So I'm thinking: another person whose life is better than mine. God above, they're everywhere.

Then I saw the text she was composing on her smartphone. I know I'm not supposed to look, but I do. What can I say: if you want privacy, don't travel on a commuter train. So. What I saw was along the lines of: "I feel like my right arm is severed without you...we don't have time for cuddles and kisses... we never seem to have time to be together, it would be so nice to live in each other's pockets for a while...that was why the camping holiday was so good, such closeness..."

Second Impression: Huh? Wha? Did someone just pull back the curtain? Is this the real world? Can't be. This is a script note she's sending to the Eastender's writing room? Right? On a smartphone using the number-pad to type at 08:30? Not plausible. This is for real? This seriously sexy woman is pleading for some more body-time with her husband / boyfriend? I can't remember all the words, but at the time I didn't think she was complaining as a prelude to a negotiation. She was expressing hurt. That's why I was struck by it. A woman like her, so together on the outside, is hurting that much? Jesus! What's going on out there?

Third Impression: Camping? I know people do that, but it's suspicious. Decent people stay in hotels. With showers. And room service. And then, composing and sending a text that intimate at 08:30? Well, composing it, maybe, but sending it? That might constitute some kind of stalking. Or harassment. Speaks to possible craziness and imbalance. Don't decent people say these things, face-to-face, rather than by text? I suppose it might be the modern equivalent of the love-letter. And then the whole living-in-each-other's-pockets thing, which might be construed as unhealthily close. Well, for me it would, but I'm a dormant co-dependent. Maybe for civilians, it's okay. And who said the guy was her husband / boyfriend? Maybe she's the affair, hence the lack of time.

Fourth Impression: she moved along the platform with considered pace, rather than the distracted movement I know I do when I'm Having An Emotion. Which makes me wonder if the text wasn't some kind of manipulation. But who comes up with "right arm is severed"? Those are not words I would forget or mis-remember. It's vivid, not the phrase someone writing a manipulation piece would use, unless they were scary cold. Against all my generated reasons for thinking otherwise, I'm going with this being real, but speaking to her being slightly scary.

Fifth Impression: Maybe that's the way she should respond to the situation she's in, rather than tolerating it until she winds up with a bitter and resigned soul, incapable of another relationship for the rest of her life. She can be sincerely expressing pain and setting up a negotiation at the same time. She's giving him advance warning of the end of the relationship if he can't do something to stop the hurt. That would explain the air of purposefulness. It might sound a little manipulative, but what's so noble about staying in a relationship that hurts? Maybe it's what an actual healthy person does.

Sixth Impression: I mentioned she was sexy as all hell? I did didn't I?

Hofesh Shechter: Political Mother

I've had a few cultural WTF moments, of which the longest-lasting and most memorable was a Glenn Branca concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall I chose at random. If you've never heard his music, it's made, or was then, by a group of musicians playing cheap and raucous guitars. Badly. At the end of the first piece, I asked the person sitting next to me if this was what they had expected to hear, and they told me it was. It's one of the few ways of making music I haven't clued into. That and Robin Holloway.

Anyway, to Sadlers Wells last Friday evening, to see Hofesh Shecter's Political Mother, again on spec. I should have known something was up from the buzzy, almost party atmosphere and the fact that the front ten or so rows had been removed and there were a lot of people standing in front of the stage. Then the lights went out. Dark. Then the music started, a string sextet, and some dancers came out and I was fine with that, I prefer abstract dance, and then the nine piece German Heavy Metal rock band on a platform above the string sextet blasted off, joined shortly by three drummers on the stage underneath the string sextet. That was a pretty good WFT moment. Loud as it was, the sound system was clear and precise, so it wasn't painful. The video below gives you an idea of the dancing, but no idea at all of the sheer physical presence of the music and the impact of the setting.



I would love to know how choreographers write for these large ensembles where the dancers are doing similar, but not the same, things at roughly the same time, except for four dancers who are clearly doing something slightly different. Especially when everyone has to make those fast wavy hand, body and leg motions. It's east enough to choreograph a bunch of classical swans, because they're all doing the same thing at the same time, and that's the point. I have the impression that Bob Fosse started by having everyone doing the same thing and then gave each dancer their own little variations. How Shechter deals with a troupe that size, I can only guess.

If you get the chance, you have to see this. Oh, it's probably some political allegory or statement or something, but I couldn't really care about that. It's damn good fun.

Short Break in Wales (5): Whitesands

I went to Wales because I read in Tatler (oaky, yes I know) that it was the best place in the UK to take a summer holiday with the kids. Go while school is still in and it should be okay for grown-ups as well. It is. Just before you get to St Davids on the A478 there's a right turn to Whitesands Bay, and it's another windy road that gets you there. There's a car park and the usual decent but not special cafe. Plus this.

Short Break in Wales (4): St David's Cathederal and Bishop's Palace

For reasons best known to themselves, but I suspect tied to my earlier remarks about the quality of the farmland, the Welsh liked to put their churches and cathedrals as close to the shore as possible. I'm willing to bet that there isn't a book on the Great Cathedral Boom of the 11th and 12th centuries that answers the questions a modern person would ask: how was it financed? where did they get all the labourers and craftsmen? and why was the so many craftsmen spare? what else wasn't being built while the cathedrals were? and why on earth were they built so often so many miles from anywhere, so damn big?

I didn't get the usual shots. The ruin is the Bishop's Palace. Cromwell and others really had it in for Bishops.

Short Break In Wales (3): Poppit Sands

Poppit Sands is hidden at the end of yet more narrow roads: you can very easily miss the right turn in St Dogmaels, which is less a village of itself and more a suburb of Cardigan. My parents used to take us down to a farm in St Dogmaels for a fortnight in summer. This would be back in the days of, well, after the opening of the M50 Ross-Spur and before the start of the construction of M4. Look it up. Anyway, the local beach was Poppit Sands. I had memories of it being wide at low tide, but not of it being vast. This is the view inland.

It's approached along this road. Really. This is one of the best beaches in Britain and it's approached by a single-lane country road.

What makes Welsh beaches special is this: sea, sand... and if you click on the photograph, you'll see cows. There's workable, in fact high-quality, farmland to within yards of the shoreline. Which tells you that there are no strong winds whipping the salt water onto the land and making it hard growing.

 It's all lush and gentle. They have coastguards on all the major beaches, with flags of mysterious (to me) significance, and they have decent if not European-quality cafes as well.

 The river in these shots is the Teifi - hence the official Welsh name Aberteifi for Cardigan.

Personally, I believe that no English childhood is complete without a summer holiday spent on beaches like this.

Soho Square Muggy Monday

About a week or so ago, it was very warm and humid.  This what happens to Soho Square when that happens. Someone comes along with a lorry and tips five tons of late-twenty / early-thirty somethings all over the grass. That this many people worked in Soho not in catering amazes me, but then the place is jammed with movie industry support businesses and various internet companies, and this is where all these folk work.

Click on the pictures: full-size and lots of detail.