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Top Comments: Notebook #67: Conversations [1]

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Date: 2023-03-17

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Between DST and waiting to finish a diary during the Great Daily Kos Blackout, I’ve been trying to catch up on reading and sleep the past few days. While going through my mail I came across my week’s copy of The New Yorker and Hua Hsu’s book review of “Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation” grabbed my attention. I haven’t read the entire book review yet and I don’t even to buy the book; by TBR files already overfloweth.

Still, the subject matter is of some interest to me since I do like to converse and I don’t think that most people (including myself?) have very few conversations outside of their already established networks of friends and acquaintances; all of whom are probably in the “contacts” listing on their cell phones. And...perhaps the fact that Americans are have fewer conversations is the reason that many Americans are having an “epidemic of loneliness.”

Perhaps.

Cohen considers models of good, entertaining conversation throughout literary history and popular culture, from Jane Austen to Abbott and Costello. Her inspirations draw heavily from her areas of academic expertise, as she explores how conversation is woven into the fabric of French intellectual culture (the salon) or élite English life (the gentleman’s club). But her primary qualification here is that she is a self-professed “talker,” the sort of person who lives for chatty checkout lines, leisurely coffee dates, vigorous college seminars, and spirited dinner parties—as well as spirited daydreams about whom you would invite to your fantasy dinner party of historical figures...

The French salon and the gentleman’s club, for one, required disposable income, probably education, and the ability to afford a life of leisure so that one could attend these things. Of course, there’s also hair salons and barbershops, public transportation, those checkout lines at grocery stores, and the like for the proletarians among us.

Since I wear a bald head, I don’t do barbershops and I will admit that there are times that I miss going to the barbershop because of the conversations that take place there; even conversations that I don’t want to hear (although even with those I will admit to ear-hustling!).

My best friend is the type of person that will chat with nearly everyone throughout various stores, drive-in windows, and checkout lines and sometimes I find it nerve-wracking; I’m more of the “get-in and get-out” type who’s often left standing there with a hand on a hip when he does that sh*t.

Coffee houses I will do and I have some wonderful conversations there, particularly when I notice that someone is interested in similar things that I am interested in.

I do have social media and Zoom and the like, so I do have spirited discussions and conversations a lot but still...that type of communication is a degree of separation from face-to-face real life talk.

Because I am shy and somewhat self-conscious, I think that I have gotten a little too used to social media, though. In fact, that was the utter beauty of conference like Netroots Nation: On one hand, I felt like I knew many of my fellow Kossacks in the two Netroots that I attended. On the other hand, it did feel like I was meeting and getting to know strangers.

Which is why I feel as if I can’t wait to go to the next Netroots...or, to be more precise, I can’t wait for this year’s installment of Netroots to come to me because it will be in Chicago. And I am sure I will have plenty to converse about.

Comments below the fold.

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