On the topic of the Homeric epics, Thomas Jones writes:
The illiterate performers who recited or sang epic poems in Ancient Greece did not learn them by rote. (Boris Johnson’s botched renditions of the Iliad are a double failure: failing to learn it by rote and trying to learn it in the first place.) Rather, a poet would improvise his song using formulaic words and phrases. Every performance was in some sense a new composition, but also a seamless continuation of the tradition. . . .
[Athena] is variously ‘Pallas Athena’, ‘grey-eyed Athena’, ‘the goddess grey-eyed Athena’ and so on according to the demands of grammar and metre: as Parry points out, ‘Homer had to hand a particular word for each of ten metrical exigencies that might arise.’ These didn’t always conform to logic. Ships are described as ‘hollow’, ‘swift’, ‘black’, ‘well-decked’, ‘seafaring’, ‘trim’, ‘many-tholed’, ‘curved’, ‘huge’, ‘famed’, ‘well-built’, ‘many-benched’, ‘vermilion-cheeked’, ‘prowed’ or ‘straight-horned’, according to where they appear in the line of verse rather than where, or if, they appear on the ‘wine dark’, ‘grey’ or ‘loud-roaring’ sea: the Greeks’ ‘swift’ and ‘seafaring’ ships are beached throughout the Iliad. ‘Early rose-fingered dawn’ is mentioned so often in Homer for much the same reason a blues singer might tell you he ‘woke up this morning’: in part to buy time while composing the next line.
This reminds me of a discussion we had the other day about improvisation in academic talks, when commenter Gec wrote:
Good improvisers spend a great deal of time preparing! It’s just that their prep time is not spent rehearsing a set performance.
I don’t know anything about acting, but I have a lot of personal experience playing jazz badly. Better players prepare by practicing riffs (roughly, snippets that form a kind of combinatorial repertoire or, at least, something to fall back on when you don’t have any better ideas), technique (boring stuff like scales, chord progressions, etc.), and building up a web of knowledge and references they can rely on to construct a long-form performance and build on what others are doing.
That jibes with my speaking style. I have lots of riffs (examples and ideas that I’m familiar with), technique (statistical methods), and a web of knowledge (decades of experience), and all that allows me to improvise a talk.
When planning a talk I often prepare some written text that I read word for word. Perhaps surprisingly, reading a well-written set of paragraphs word for word can work well in a live talk. I don’t think it would go so well for me to read two pages straight, but a few clean sentences can do wonders.
Most of the time, though, I’m working from a rough outline or sketched set of points, I’m doing a lot of riffing and transitioning, which I guess is like those Homeric bards and blues singers, that I have some phrases that sound good, and I use these as building blocks.
It’s slightly different in that an academic talk is made up not of words and music but of ideas, so it’s not so much that I stick in various phrases as that I stick in various ideas. I have a few hundred examples bouncing around my head at any given time, and when I speak, I can let them spill out, Tetris-style, to fill in the space.
More generally, it’s not just about giving talks; it’s about communication, laying out ideas and seeing how they fit as they come to mind.
It’s not just about me; you can do that too.
One of the pleasures of reading this blog is being able to generally count on seeing things like “jibes” spelt correctly rather than rendered as “jives”. And then the secondary pleasure of seeing the word “jibes” in a post that started out with a quote about sailing vessels.
It reminds me of the time I was traveling and on the day of my arrival I met up with two fellows I knew from online but had never met in person. At some point that afternoon, I remarked that a certain event reminded me of a scene in “Heart of Darkness”. Before I even started quoting the passage, both of them knew exactly what I meant and one of them started the quotation without me.
Always a good feeling when one realizes one is within their tribe, even when far from home.
This is super thought-provoking, thanks Andrew. I am mostly an improvisor as well, and would do better to memorize a few clear sentences, especially for the beginning of a talk, which I tend to spend hemming and hawing and building up a head of steam.
> t’s slightly different in that an academic talk is made up not of words and music but of ideas, so it’s not so much that I stick in various phrases as that I stick in various ideas.
I would suggest it’s kind of a combination.
I think to a large degree, when we communicate extemperaneously (or at least aren’t reading something aloud or saying something memorized), we’re using “chunks” of language that are already somewhat organized in our head. Those organized chunks are floating around waiting to be put together. They are of varying levels of complexity, going all the way down to two-word collocations (a quick Google returned “strong coffee” and “heavy drinker” as examples) to much larger (and more loosely organized) networks, or ideas, that might even be paragraph- or multiple-paragraphs long around a given topic sentence or thesis.
So when we give a talk, or are even just engagjng in off the cuff in a discussion about a topic we’ve thought and communicated about previously, we aren’t scanning through our entire vocabulary to pick each word sequentially one after the next, but putting together “chunks” of basically pre-assembled networks of various sizes. To the extent that we’ve talked about a topic or practiced a speech, we’ve built out and reinforced and created pathways to those networks, or chunks to as to have them more easily accessible extemporaneously.
Those two-word collocations (“strong coffee”; “heavy drinker”) can be so ingrained as to cause momentary confusions when seperated.
e.g. I had to read this headline in last weeks Nature several times before I worked out that it wasn’t about shark attacks!
“Shark researcher attacks lack of diversity in marine science”
“it’s not so much that I stick in various phrases as that I stick in various ideas. ”
Even if you’re an improvisor, fixed or specific phrases are useful because technical information almost always has specific words that best express the ideas. I speak from an outline, but I spend a lot of time hammering out the headings, subheadings and definitions with very exact language so they are logically very strongly coherent. It makes them a lot easier for me to remember when speaking and a lot easier for the audience too. It’s fine to wander around discussing them after they’ve been stated, but the exact language of the headings functions as an anchor for everything else and provides consistency for the audience.
“Good improvisers spend a great deal of time preparing! It’s just that their prep time is not spent rehearsing a set performance.”
On his TV show, Mac Davis would take a suggestion from an audience member for a song title and compose a “song” (generally a couplet or two) within a few seconds. I always assumed that he prepped a lot for this, but I could never figure out how. I’m sure he used just a few basic melodies, but it is still amazing.
I could only find this short snippet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duBq17G947s
Oh man, if you want to see improvisation, check out “Mock the Week,” e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6imVhpxyyGg
Jones must not be much of a classicist, or in his failed attempt to dunk on Boris, he would know that learning Homer by memorization and recitation was the standard way of learning not just Homer but many other texts as well in the Greco-roman world (and later), such as oratory or mathematics like the verbal formula of Euclid. (As must have been the case given how exorbitantly expensive a single complete manuscript of anything would be.)
His argument about the composition of Homer is irrelevant. What the *original* rhapsodists did has little bearing on what people did *after* it was fixed in a single text; one would no more just freestyle some sick hexameters about Achilles than one would just make up new verses when singing the Star-Spangled Banner. Indeed, teaching by memorization and recitation is how the Koran is still primarily taught, and woe betide the hafiz who argues that, since suras were conveyed orally in many variants until Omar ordered them compiled, his errors are irrelevant and he is entitled to improvise suras he likes better…
Well I guess that’s a challenge ain’t it?
I scra-haped my knee
When I fell of my bike
I tried to stop but I failed
But at least it’s not bleeding
I didn’t see the curb there!
I was looking elsewhere
I hit it just right
And I caught some air!
There’s no way that I could have pulled off a save
That stupid curb attaaaaaacked me!
And screwed up my whole day