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Uncategorized, Writing

Maybe Effective Communication is More than 7 Percent Verbal

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From our You Have Heard It Said But I Tell You desk, is only 7 percent of effective communication verbal?

Many people will note the importance of body language to being trusted or persuasive, and they may say spoken words are only 7 percent of communication, the rest being 38 percent tone of voice and 55 percent body language. Where did this idea come from?

It comes from reports on the communication research of Albert Mehrabian of UCLA during the 1960s. Philip Yaffe describes the two studies for Ubiquity. In one study, Mehrabian had his test subjects judge the emotion of a woman saying “maybe” in one of three different ways and then seeing a photo of her expressing these emotions. They guessed correctly more often after seeing the photo than by tone of voice alone.

In the other study, Mehrabian gave nine words, spoken in three different ways, and asked subjects to judge the emotion expressed. He concluded tone of voice carries a lot of weight in communication.

You can think it through yourself. Imagine the words “maybe” and “thanks” said in three different ways that would clue you in to what the person was saying. The excited maybe that hopes it works out, the uncommitted maybe, and the maybe that doesn’t want to say no to your face, at least in the moment. Nobody needed research to work this out. Was this Mehrabian’s actual conclusion?

Yaffe writes, “Professor Mehrabian’s conclusion was that for inconsistent or contradictory communications, body language and tonality may be more accurate indicators of meaning and emotions than the words themselves. However, he never intended the results to apply to normal conversation. And certainly not to speeches, which should never be inconsistent or contradictory!”

I am told Jonathan Edwards read his sermons with little emotion, addressing the back wall, yet his “The Excellency of Christ” is marvelous reading and “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” had people withering in the pews. Should we attribute this to the Holy Spirit’s use of the words? Sure, but how much human spirit is any of our words? Probably far more than 7 percent.

Uncategorized

Tolkien’s House Already Protected

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Once the Tolkien family home

You may have heard of a fund-raising effort to solicit a few million pounds for the purchase of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Oxford house on Northmoor Road. Big names from the movie adaptations have encouraged fans to donate to Project Northmoor.

The Tolkien Society says they will not support it, “citing its concerns that, among others, no Tolkien experts were serving as directors, that the building would not be open to the public, and that the plan they had seen ‘includes spiritual retreats,'” reported by The Guardian.

That smell of Christianity may be what scares The Guardian, but the Society has a number of reasons they decided against supporting the project, including that the house “is a listed building in a conservation area – with a blue plaque proudly showing its connection to Tolkien – meaning the property is well protected under the law and not in need of rescue.”

(via Prufrock News; Photo: Tolkien House, 2002, by Stefan Servos – Ardapedia/Wikicommons)

Authors, Creative Writing

The Master Ghost-Storyteller

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Lored Eaton is lining up another round of scary ghost stories for the most wonderful time of the year. I plan to contribute one, which you’ll find here on December 19. I hope you enjoy it; feel free to say you don’t.

One of the masters of the ghost story is M.R. James (1862-1936). His tales have been adapted for the BBC many times, though not this year according to The Critic.

Many of his tales originated from being read to favoured students or pupils around his study fire in the winter, or from told as Christmas Eve entertainments for his friends. Although not all of them followed the same formula, there were several ingredients that can be regarded as quintessentially “Jamesian”, and which constitute the archetypal festive ghost story.

The protagonist of his tales is usually a learned man and a bachelor, as James himself was, who is not an especially clubbable or sociable figure, but makes up for his slight misanthropy with a great love of books and manuscripts. He often finds himself in an unusual setting, such as an abbey library or in a quiet seaside town, and stumbles upon some document or artefact that has the unforeseen effect of unleashing supernatural powers upon him.

(via Prufrock News)

Fiction, Reviews

Echo Island Is Filled with Roaring Silence

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“Some things are meant to be calculated. Mystery isn’t among them.”

Jared C. Wilson, author of many books and articles we’ve discussed here, has a new young adult novel called Echo Island. When four diverse, high school friends return from a camping trip, they find everyone in their home town gone. All people, animals, and almost every sound are gone.

They don’t notice all of that at first. They notice their families missing; neighbors absent from public areas. Cars parked at churches and buildings without anyone inside. The power is out, even batteries are dead. And there isn’t a sound of any part of natural life, except the lapping of waves at the shore.

These aren’t necessarily church kids, but a couple of them think naturally of the rapture. Maybe the four boys were left behind: Bradley, the tough one; Archer, the smart one; Tim, the loyal one; and Jason (maybe he’s the one with common sense). But of the four, surely Jason would have been raptured with the others, and tons of other Echo Island residents would have remained. It wasn’t a Sunday School campground.

Over the next couple days, the boys wander the island, looking for other survivors and clues to what took everyone away. What they find is completely out of this world.

The story is great fun. It was a good follow-up to Koontz’s The Taking, because when the rain starts to fall, I initially thought of the devastating apocalypse that comes in Koontz’s downpour.

I suspected part of the solution right away, but I did not anticipate where Jared ran with it or his larger story scope. He has given it spiritual depth that many will enjoy and perhaps others will find a challenge to their assumptions. Surprises, laughs. No dogs though; that will probably cost it one out of thirty stars.

Photo by Rosie Fraser on Unsplash

Goofing

Finding Yourself: You Alone Are the Way

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It’s the season for believing. The magic of Christmas is all around us, if we will believe in it. Friends, punks, readers of all ages, what we need more than anything is to believe in ourselves.

Trust yourself. Work to know yourself.

To know the you that is the real you.

Not what others tell you about you, but only what you tell yourself.

Because you are the way.

When Jesus said, “I am the way,” he was roleplaying with his disciples to show them what they should believe about themselves. Each one of us is the way, the truth, and the life. Each of us can repeat Jesus’s words for ourselves.

No one can choose your path for you. You are the way.

Look at yourself in the mirror and say, believe, speak into existence, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.”

No one can choose your path for you, especially not your parents, friends, experienced leaders, school people, therapists, or well-meaning uncles.

They don’t know the real you or your way. You are your own way.

You may ask why I bring up Jesus’s words if all you need to know is yourself. For those who find comfort in Christian things, wise and self-satisfied thought-and-feeling leaders, like myself, need to find ways to make Jesus’s words say what we want.

Plus, it’s Christmas. The babe of Bethlehem did not speak at the time, but the sentimentalism we feel in Christmas can inspire us to believe anything. Don’t you agree?

(Between you and me, a quick read of the gospels will show you the primary message is that you’ve got this. Jesus knew, like so many of us do today, that you are all you need to be you.)

Banish the hesitation you may have about what you are able to do, and do that thing you long to do. Believe you can, and you can.

Do you believe in Santa Claus? He will be real for you.

Do you believe in mansions? Minecraft awaits.

Do you believe you’re a fish? Man, yeah!

You brought yourself into existence by your own mighty will and now you’re the awesome fill-in-the-blank you are today.

But who am I to tell you anything? You don’t need my words. You have your own.

Your way. Your truth. Your life.

Until it’s over and you return to the dust from which you came and your words waft away like a fume of stink.

Non-fiction

Reject History or Embrace It Blindly?

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Alan Jacobs’s new book, Breaking Bread with the Dead, looks like a good read for the winter months ahead. Kevin Holtsberry reviews the book that’s subtitled, “A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind,” calling it “sorely needed.”

Our polarized culture seems to offer two competing visions of engaging with the past. The defilement perspective views history as “at best a sewer of racism, sexism, homophobia, and general social injustice, at worst an abattoir which no reasonable person would even want to peak at.” Its vision is limited to the now. What matters in this moment is all that matters, and it judges the past accordingly, throwing most in the ash heap.

Another perspective approaches the past as a unifying, idealized, almost sanitized, source of universal values and character traits. This produces a reverence for the past that is also locked into the present: “To say ‘This text offends me, I will read no further’ may be shortsighted; but to read a ‘great book’ from the past with such reverence that you can’t see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is no better. Indeed, in foreclosing the possibility of real challenge it is worse.”

Rather than either of these views, we should read history expecting to be challenged. Heroes, leaders, and all manner of influential people were no less human than we are. Their sins may have been egregious, but would we have made the same ones had we lived in their day?

Poetry

No richer gift has Autumn poured From out her lavish horn!

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Quaker, poet, and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier wrote “The Corn Song” in 1850, and it became one of the things elementary teachers recommended to students to read every Thanksgiving. He was one of our most popular poets at one point, but perhaps you haven’t seen this one.

Heap high the farmer’s wintry hoard!
Heap high the golden corn!
No richer gift has Autumn poured
From out her lavish horn!
Let other lands, exulting, glean
The apple from the pine,
The orange from its glossy green,
The cluster from the vine;

We better love the hardy gift
Our rugged vales bestow,
To cheer us when the storm shall drift
Our harvest-fields with snow.

Through vales of grass and meads of flowers
Our ploughs their furrows made,
While on the hills the sun and showers
Of changeful April played.

We dropped the seed o’er hill and plain
Beneath the sun of May,
And frightened from our sprouting grain
The robber crows away.

All through the long, bright days of June
Its leaves grew green and fair,
And waved in hot midsummer’s noon
Its soft and yellow hair.

And now, with autumn’s moonlit eves,
Its harvest-time has come,
We pluck away the frosted leaves,
And bear the treasure home.

There, richer than the fabled gift
Apollo showered of old,
Fair hands the broken grain shall sift,
And knead its meal of gold.

Let vapid idlers loll in silk
Around their costly board;
Give us the bowl of samp and milk,
By homespun beauty poured!

Where’er the wide old kitchen hearth
Sends up its smoky curls,
Who will not thank the kindly earth
And bless our farmer girls?

Then shame on all the proud and vain,
Whose folly laughs to scorn
The blessing of our hardy grain,
Our wealth of golden corn!

Let earth withhold her goodly root,
Let mildew blight the rye,
Give to the worm the orchard’s fruit,
The wheat-field to the fly:

But let the good old crop adorn
The hills our fathers trod;
Still let us, for His golden corn,
Send up our thanks to God!

(Image: Whittier’s Birthplace by Boston Public Library)

Non-fiction

Maybe It’s Not True, but It Feels True

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Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution at Stanford offers a profound concept in his new documentary about what happened in Ferguson, MO, called What Killed Michael Brown? It’s the term “poetic truth.”

“People believe cultural myths, he says, not because they have examined evidence and found it credible but because they align with narratives they’ve already bought into. They feel true,” Megan Basham writes for World News Group.

This ideas touches all groups. I would say most of us feel something is true and are willing to defend it before we know the facts. That’s pretty much how life works. We can’t research everything. There’s too much information in general. The most practical solution is for us trust certain sources to tell us the truth, a trust we form largely by feel.

I suppose that means not only the righteous live by faith.

Uncategorized

‘A beautiful and ingenious machine’

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Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli created a book back in 1588, humbly entitled, The various and ingenious machines of Captain Agostino Ramelli. Maybe someone titled it for him. The Smithonian praises it, pointing out its influence on later engineers.

Of a reading machine design, Ramelli said, “This is a beautiful and ingenious machine, very useful and convenient for anyone who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are indisposed and tormented by gout. . . . Moveover, it has another fine convenience in that it occupies very little space in the place where it is set.”

Perhaps these words inspired students at Rochester Institute of Technology to build a couple of these book wheels using European beech and white oak and hand-cut gears.

“The actual construction may not have been worth the time with 16th-century techniques,” Ian Kurtz said, “I think Agostino was more so showing his understanding of how gear systems worked.” (via Atlas Obscura)

Fiction, Reviews

The Taking: When the Rain Compounds Your Fear

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His gaze tracked across the ceiling. “It’s not falling toward us anymore.” His voice quieted to a whisper. “It’s moving eastward . . . west to east . . . as big as two mountains, three . . . so huge,” whispered Neil. He made the sign of the cross–forehead to breast, left shoulder to right–which she had not seen him do in years.

Suddenly she felt more than heard a great, deep, slow throbbing masked by the tremulous roar of the rain.

“. . . sift you as wheat . . .”

I picked a good time to read Dean Koontz’s 2004 novel of apocalyptic horror, The Taking. We had a full day of heavy rain when I started reading, which was perfect atmosphere for blurring reality with imagination, if one were into that sort of thing. I don’t read horror novels, so I worried this one might work me over, but I’m fine. Don’t worry. Really, I’m fine.

The story begins with a sudden gullywasher of luminescent rain that scares coyotes onto the heroine’s porch. No thunder or build up. Just a heavy downpour with a slick glow in the water.

Molly Sloan is disturbed by her impression of watchful evil and the nasty feel and smell of the rain. She’s scared when her husband, Neil, cries out in his sleep. Later they turn on the news to discover the oceans have been sucked into the sky and poured out on the entire world. Chaos has broken out in many cities. The world appears to be under attack by aliens with unseen ships. At least, that’s the best theory they have so far.

Neil and Molly leave their house to try to team up with neighbors and find one of them dead in his bathroom. There’s evidence he tried to fight something off, but no evidence that his shotgun harmed anyone but himself. In another minute, this dead man would be in the shadows behind them, saying, “I think we are in rats’ alley.”

That’s a line from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

Eliot gets a lot of attention in The Taking, filling the role of one of Molly’s favorite authors. His words are quoted by a number of characters, which forms one thread of mystery that caused me to wonder if this apocalypse was all in Molly’s head. The most bizarre and disturbing events tie to her personal fears and tastes. I began to wonder if she was having a miscarriage or revisiting the trauma of abortion in the real world while the living dead, animated fungi, and dismembered townsfolk occurred in her mind. That would have made for a lousy book. The resolution Koontz offers is more of a spiritual take on alien invasion. More importantly, it works.