An Adult’s Christmas in Wales

December 20th – January 3rd

1/4 turkey
1/4 chicken
1lb beef
1/4lb lamb
1/2lb pork
4 fish
12 potatoes
4lb carrots
4lb sprouts
3 tins peas
1/2lb yorkshire pudding
3 loaves bread
1lb cheese (assorted)
2 pints custard
1/2 apple pie
1/4 trifle
1 treacle pudding
1 portion xmas pudding
6 mince pies
3 salads (assorted)
9 bars chocolate
3 pkts biscuits
8 vol-au-vents
8 sausage rolls
1 curry (unremembered)
11 tangerines
1/2lb nuts (assorted)

56 pints lager
14 pints bitter
4 pints snakebite
8 measures whisky & ginger
6 measures vodka & orange
1/ bottle whisky
1/2 bottle brandy
3 bottles red wine
1 bottle white wine
6 cans lager
5 cans guinness
1 glass sherry
1 glass port
1 glass tia maria (unremembered)
2 snowballs

295 cigarettes
5 cigars

12 games pool (won 6, lost 5, 1 void)
4 games dominoes (won 1, lost 3)
1 game darts (abandoned)
1 game piggy in the middle with full beer can (unremembered)
12 plays jukebox
4 plays bandit (unsuccessful)

3 vomits
1 blackout (duration 2 hours)
1 successful adultery
5 attempted adulteries
3 fights (undefeated)

“Well it’s a time for the kids isn’t it.”

“Alice laughed: ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said; ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’

‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen.

‘When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”

–Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Magicians love to quote the six impossible things line. There’s something about the idea of deliberately believing in the impossible that appeals to a magician.

After all, if you simply believe in something that is impossible then you are merely deluded but to intentionally believe in the impossible, even for a moment, is an act of the imagination. Intentionally believing in the impossible is at the center of creative play.

I’ve had such a positive response to my post on Morning Comics that I thought I’d share this simple variation.

Taking the six-frame sheets of paper I describe in Morning Comics draw six impossible things. Imagine what the world would be like if these six things were true. Do this every morning just like the White Queen.

This is surprisingly hard to do when you first start. At first it feels like there are a limited number of ways in with things can be impossible.

Magicians have written a number of taxonomies of magical effects which include things like vanishes, appearances, penetrations, transpositions, levitations and so on. These taxonomies are always limited of course. They have to be playfully interpreted to allow new impossibilities to emerge.

Sometimes it feels like we have made everything in the world vanish and reappear, from coins and cards to the space shuttle and the Statue of Liberty. Then someone will find a new twist that will make the idea of something vanishing truly astonishing once again.

Starting the day having already created six impossible things is a joyful feeling. It makes dealing with the everyday improbable much less daunting.

I was recently talking to an economic journalist who claimed that The Thick of It was the most insightful analysis of New Labour he had ever come across. The program is about a collection of flawed people bluffing and blustering their way through embarrassing situations in a fictionalized political London village but it has little to do with real politics which is much more national, much more complex and much more dull.

This is not in any way a criticism of The Thick of It, which deserves all the awards and praise it has garnered, but of the mindset that sees comedy as something it isn’t even trying to be. Comedy can be a way of laughing at power but it is seldom the place to go for real political insight.

Comedians are revered in Britain. They sit on the panels for book and art awards. They are awarded honorary doctorates and professorships. They are all over our media in panel discussions, documentaries, newspaper columns and science shows. There is no topic of debate or area of discourse that can’t be improved by inviting a comedian.

Of course I’m being ironic and I really don’t want to be. I like comedy and there are some great comedians around right now but irony is the one of the dominant modes of comedy in Britain and it rubs off on me.

In David Foster-Wallace’s brilliant essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S Fiction he claims that irony is a short-term strategy that eventually becomes a cage. Irony comes to dominate the way we can think and ironic forms of comedy flourish. It becomes increasingly difficult to say what we really mean in a direct way as arch cleverness and swift wit take precedence over truthfulness and considered comment.

Why do I bring all of this up in Monkey Shouting which is generally about pitching, presentation and communication skills? When we value the sense of humor above all other character traits we can limit ourselves by forgetting to value other ways of communicating.

Many of the people I work with in my pitching and presenting training want to add some comedy to their talks. That’s not a bad idea but it is a risky strategy unless you are sure you are naturally in tune with your audience. Making people laugh can help you to communicate but unless your comedy has a point you may simply entertain to no useful end.

So the rewards of comedy are not certain but the risks are great. Consider this…

There is no easier way to destroy your connection with an audience than trying to make them laugh and failing.

Read that last line again, its important.

A professional comedian can recover from a failed gag but it always hurts. It takes boldness and practice to die and to try again the next night. If comedy is not your calling be careful how you attempt it.

Personally, I’ve got a terrible memory for jokes, I remember them all. And when I’m socializing with friends I’m often telling jokes both good and terrible. But I use humor very sparingly in my professional talks and performances. It is seldom the best way to communicate anything of real depth and when it is the best way those examples need to given space to to be really effective.

Our culture nudges us towards using humor as our main way of communicating with each other. But the next time you’re about to trot out a gag to liven up a talk consider a truthful story instead.

Honest, I’m not joking.

Is it the sad beauty of brevity? Is it the sense of concentrated purpose? Is it the highlighted feeling of time passing? Is it the fun of destroying something slowly through running? (I hinted at the magical aspect of destruction in my last post.)

The most touching aspect of the Mayfly is the way that you write the date you begin using them onto the side of the shoe. There is something about this that reminds me of the marks on doorframes where children’s heights have been measured as they grow. By noting the Mayfly’s birthday we are giving it a simple, symbolic life.

This isn’t as kooky as it sounds. We respond to many objects in our world as though they are alive. We give our cars names,  we love our gadgets, we argue with our software, some of us sat thank you to the ATM.

We treat our objects as familiars and as companions that go with us on our journeys of adventure.

We love to populate the world with imaginary creatures. From angels and faerie folk to aliens and A.I.s, our books, films, and game-worlds are teeming with life. Everything moves, everything speaks, everything is alive. The Mayfly even has a faerie name.

Materialism may have vanquished our early animism but we are still wired to see faces in the undergrowth.

It seems that without all the spirits and little people inhabiting every tree and rock we find the world a bit lonely. So we have begun to breath life back into everything. In virtual worlds, in smart objects, in robotics, in responsive environments, in the stories we tell.

Philosophy emptied the world, now media and technology are repopulating it. We are all Dr. Frankenstein trying to make friends.

By the way, there’s an interesting discussion on Matt Jones’ blog about the Mayfly.

Mother and Child Divided - Damien Hirst

The aged catch their breath,
For the nonchalant couple go
Waltzing across the tightrope
As if there were no death
Or hope of falling down;
The wounded cry as the clown
Doubles his meaning, and O
How the dear little children laugh
When the drums roll and the lovely
Lady is sawn in half.

(W. H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Collected Longer Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.)

There is an aspect of the grotesque, the violent, and the sinister in much performance magic and there are numerous sources within our psyche and culture that drive it. One aspect of this is that magic is essentially transgressive. It shows things as they cannot be and this is very close to showing things as they should not be.

Violence is something that should not happen and our reactions to it can be quite strong even when it is staged. All societies have taboos against violence which are deeply embedded in belief, custom and law. However, Robert Neale makes the point that, “People who break taboos are immoral – or insane – or holy.”

The staging of taboo breaking is a rehearsal of reaction. We watch taboos being broken in order to experience how we fell about such acts. In the Aristotelian view such theater must have the correct closure or it does not provide catharsis. What is this closure and what closure does a magic performance provide?

In Aristotelian theater the protagonist is a taboo breaker, in fact it is this that makes him the hero of the play, and he must get his comeuppance or there is no catharsis.

In contrast a magician will saw a woman in half but will not get punished. Instead he will simply put the woman back together again and everything is fine once more. It may be argued that the magician is not actually the hero protagonist in such theater, that he instead represents the gods themselves and is the deus ex machina solving all problems.

Its not just women of course. On a smaller scale cards are torn and restored, lengths of rope are cut and restored, coins are lost into thin air and found again with a gesture. These are small acts of destruction that work dramatically and psychologically.

When I ask someone to sign a playing  card with a permanent marker they are often quite surprised. They probably have one pack of cards at home that they have had for years. To destroy a card from this deck would mean they would have to buy another deck. The small act of sacrificing a card for someone’s entertainment helps to make the magic a kind of gift.

What do you sacrifice as a gift for your audience?

The general reaction to the idea of not smiling was one of relief. Trying to put on happy face because they’d been told to do so in presentation skills training or by books on networking was obviously a burden to many people. Phew!

“So when we approach new people what face are we making?”

This is a great question and it would be glib to say “our true face”, because if we find socializing or presenting difficult – and most of us do, public speaking is the number one phobia in the world – then our true face may be a look of terror.

Another issue we discussed is that most of us don’t know our own faces very well. We don’t really know what we look like when we are experiencing most of our huge palette of emotions. We see a tiny fraction of the possibilities in photographs and videos and we may try out a few cool poses in the mirror but unless we actively explore them our own faces are an uncharted country to us all.

I’ve been studying Paul Ekman’s work on emotion and facial expression for a number of years now. He has tried to classify the basic emotions that we can express with the face and the estimated 10,000 ways in which they can be mixed to express more complex feelings. Ekman created what he calls “the first atlas of the human face”. Its a fun game to look at his work and try to see how your own face expresses these fundamental emotions.

The great Spanish magician Juan Tamariz suggests an exercise for learning how to express emotions using only your eyes. You take a large paper bag and place it over your head. Make eye-holes in it so that only your eyes are showing then look in the mirror and try to express various emotions. Some, such as happiness and fear, are quite easy. Others, such as apprehension and anticipation, are more of a challenge.

Some of us are better at expressing emotions the others. For a number of complex and problematic reasons involving gender politics and notions of beauty and display women are generally more emotionally expressive than men. Savvy performers will  invite women audience members onstage rather than men for this reason especially if their performance has any element of challenge to it. Men are more likely to respond to perceived challenge by shutting down or becoming competitive. Women are more like to open up and play.

So what face do you make when approaching a group of strangers or stepping onto a conference stage?  One of expectation, anticipation, excitement and hope? A complex mix. What does that look like in your mirror?

[Update: I just discovered a book called In Character by photographer Howard Schatz. He took shots of actors expressing emotions by responding to complex character situations. How would you express these difficult emotions?]

I’m really glad that I had a hernia operation when I was 23 or I may never have met George Theiner.

We were both being treated in Kings College Hospital and George made a powerful impression on me both because he took the poems I was writing very seriously and because of the gentle and easy way that he befriended everyone on the ward.

I visited George at his home a couple of times after I left the hospital but he passed away before I could really get to know him. It was only at his memorial service that I understood how influential he had been through his writing, translating, and his editing of Index on Censorship.

I was already a fan of Miroslav Holub, who George had translated, and we spent a lot of our time together discussing his poetry. Holub fascinated me because he was both an eminent scientist and a well-known poet. I later became both a poet and a scientist myself achieving eminence in neither field.

I loved the way George would talk about poems and poets. He told stories of writers who had been brave and heroic both in their writing and in their lives.

I won’t attempt to recreate the way George told these stories. Instead here is one of my one of my favorite Holub poems.

Zito the Magician
(Translated by Ian Milner and George Theiner)

To amuse His Royal Majesty,
he will change water into wine;
Frogs into footmen;
Beetles into bailiffs.
And make a Minister out of a rat.
He bows, and daisies grow from his finger-tips,
And a talking bird sits on his shoulder.

There.

Think up something else, demands His Royal Majesty.
Think up a black star. So he thinks up a black star.
Think up dry water. So he thinks up dry water.
Think up a river bound with straw-bands. So he does.

There.

Then along comes a student and asks: Think up sine alpha greater than one.

And Zito grows pale and sad: Terribly sorry.
Sine is between plus one and minus one.
Nothing you can do about that.
And he leaves the great Royal Empire,
Quietly weaves his way through the throng of courtiers,
to his home
in a nutshell.

I love this description of a magician as someone who “thinks up” things but who comes to the limit of imagination when he gets to mathematical ontology. Zito understands the limitations that science places on us.

For Holub, the magician is one of the roles that a scientist plays. The dreamer scientist. The willfully creative scientist. The playfully hypothesizing scientist.

Magic often works through showing the unexpected. In the mind of the observer the rule A is always followed by B is broken when C occurs instead.

Magicians observe that clever people, and scientists in particular, are often easier to fool than other people. Those who use logic for a living tend to come to trust it a little too much.

The greatest scientists have been those who somehow manage to avoid trusting logic too much.

“Miroslav Holub seems to expect his readers to act like scientists, who are curious in every direction, take nothing for granted, and are willing to accept any truth, however unexpected.”
- Matthew Zapruder, Verse (Volume 15, Numbers 1 and 2)

Dru’s Disruption is easy to describe in essence – identify conventions, disrupt them, develop a brand vision – but difficult to perform in practice. There are many ways to disrupt existing conventions but only a few of them will be both elegant and applicable to the brand in question. Its a simple idea that can be handled very beautifully or very badly.

Many magic effects work by disrupting conventional thinking. The magician Eugene Burger describes of the structure of a magic effect like so,

That’s fair.

That’s fair.

What the f**k just happened.

A magic effect isn’t a single happening, it is a story with a narrative structure, though often a very simple one.

Without the setting up of the fairness of the initial conditions we would just have a WTF moment and that isn’t a moment of magic it’s a moment of surprise.

Now surprise can be a wonderful thing if that is what you are trying to achieve but it tends to be emotionally short lived.

To give you a simple example: A coin suddenly vanishing when you are unprepared can be startling and fun but the feeling doesn’t last very long because you know that you weren’t ready. But if I show you a coin, let you hold it, then take it back and ask you to watch closely as I very cleanly cause it to vanish there will be a much great emotional impact.

Instead of saying, “I wasn’t ready.”

You will say, “I was watching as closely as I could and it still vanished.”

Surprise is close to confusion and as Dai Vernon, the great master of 20th Century magic, once said,

“Confusion is not magic.”

Brand disruption without careful preparation of the initial conditions will often give people the experience of short-lived confusion rather than deep and lasting astonishment.

A little theory. The 19th Century French physician Guillaume Duchenne identified two distinct types of smiles. A Duchenne smile involves contraction of both the zygomatic major muscle (which raises the corners of the mouth) and the orbicularis oculi muscle (which raises the cheeks and forms crow’s feet around the eyes). Duchenne smiles indicate genuine spontaneous emotions since most people cannot voluntarily contract the outer portion of the orbicularis oculi muscle. A non-Duchenne smile involves only the mouth and generally looks forced and fake.

With practice an actor can perform a relaxed Duchenne smile but most of us cannot do so voluntarily without looking like we’re holding in gas. This is a good thing because it means that most smiles that look genuine are actually genuine. Imagine a world where we couldn’t tell a genuine smile from a fake.

Note: It has been said that if you put a smile on your face you will begin to feel happy. Sadly, the research indicates that this is only true if you can put on a Duchenne smile.

Professional performers would never approach a group with a fake smile. It is far better to be relaxed and open than to put on a smile that makes people wonder what you find so funny.

A good performer will enjoy their work and will smile naturally when they are feeling that enjoyment but not before. When that smile of enjoyment appears people will know its for real.

Next: You’re not funny. No really, you’re not.

The feeling of having fun, chatting to people, and being entertaining is not something you can necessarily turn on and off like a light switch. For most people its more like a thermostat that takes time to warm up and cool down the room. It takes time to get into the swing of things and if you try to dive into being the life and soul of the party immediately you will make yourself and everyone else uncomfortable.

Many good performers who are booked to entertain a room for a couple of hours understand that they have to take a moment or two to get themselves into performing mode, so they start slowly. They approach a quiet group, or someone alone, and simply talk for a short while. They will then gather together a few of the people who appear to be by themselves and perform an effect designed to introduce them to one another.

Many people advise that you should match the energy level of the group you are in. For networking that’s good advice but for a performer the aim is to raise the energy and the way to do that is to be one degree higher than the people you are talking to. After a while they will naturally match you and you can slowly lead them higher. Your should know when to stop of course.

By raising the energy of the quietest groups in the room you bring everyone closer to a shared level and that creates a comfortable atmosphere for everyone.

If you aim for a big loud group first you will have to compete with the loudest people just to have a conversation. And you won’t be helping the general atmosphere of the room as much. The most you will do is create a group of noisy people who stand out uncomfortably from the rest of the room.

Next: Why you shouldn’t smile when you approach a group?