Rambling

I just feel like rambling.

I wish I could write like Dylan Thomas. I was once told, while studying film in London that cinematically, I was a poet. I've tried my hand at poetry since I was in eighth grade, some of it, from tie to time, has even been reasonably good. but I never had the poetic sensibility of that Welshman. My writing may have more in common with Ernest Hemingway, sparse, concise though I'd say that I'm fonder of a complex sentence than he. Perhaps I have a little leaning toward the style of James Agee though he could write a five hundred word sentence without pausing to blink. One of the beauties of his writing was that he could use every form of punctuation in one sentence as easily as I can burp.

In the mid '60s, when I was experimenting with things like Milltown and dexedrine, I could talk for hours, digressing and digressing until anyone who would listen felt lost. Somehow I would manage to  return, layer by layer, finishing each point I'd made until I returned to the original point of my tirade. More than once, my friends whom I'd tortured in that fashion would say things like, "Oh, wow. You made it all the way back."

I'm the oldest person to have ever competed in the National Debate Tournament. aMusingly, it was the 50th NDT and I was 50 years old. Now there's a story: I was at lose ends. The television show I had worked on as music editor for nine years, Smurfs, had ended and the show I'd worked on after that, Midnight Caller, had ended too. Music and sound editing were migrating, because of technology, from the Film Editors Union to the Sound Recordist's Union and I didn't want to make that move. Technology was passing me by. So I went back to college to rediscover myself and in the process, not wanting to take Public Speaking, I took a course at Los Angeles City College in Interpretive Reading (I'd had pretensions of acting in my teens). The first assignment was to read a poem, This is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams:

I have eaten 
the plums 
that were 
in the icebox 

and which 
you were probably 
saving for breakfast 

Forgive me 
they were delicious 
so sweet 
and so cold

I tried my best to sound like a seventy five year old man writing a note to his wife to leave on the refrigerator door; a wife whom he rarely saw and who probably, at this age, slept in a different bedroom. After ten or fifteen of my classmates had done their versions of the poem, it became my turn. After listening to all of them, ideas of how to approach the reading tumbled through my brain. I got up and walked to the podium. I can't believe how my knees shook and my mouth went dry. I read; well, by then, it was memorized so I spoke. My wobbling pins added just a bit of quaver to my voice but my lack of hydration prevented my use of the sibilant whistle like that dirty old man in The Family Guy has. It was over and I sat down, amazingly, not dripping off the chair like a Dali watch. The class ended and as I headed out I found myself walking beside Jean D. the class instructor. She spoke.
"That was very well done. You should join the forensics team. Would you like to come to our office to see what it's all about?"
I didn't have another class just then, and as I was "rediscovering" myself, I said, "Sure."

So, two semesters of interpretive reading competitions and a tiny bit of parliamentary debate at the end of the second semester saw me paired up with a partner for debate competitions the following year. Interestingly, LACC is a member of the NDT. I don't recall why but it is one of a very few of the two year schools that is. The NDT was coming up and there was a competition amongst the applicant schools for selection to the tournament. We fielded two teams against a couple from USC. In the end, my partner, Art, and I won an invitation. At a debate competition at UCLB, their debate coach came up to me and whispered in my ear, "You mother fucker, I never got to go to the NDT." He had, become a friend over the previous year and a half so I took that in the spirit it was meant. Our invitation was our coach's first shot at the NDT too.

We were off to Wake Forest in North Carolina. It was our first year of Debate. We were raw in spite of my having spent two weeks, the previous summer at a debate camp at George Mason University, near McLean, Virginia. While there, I discovered how important reading speed is. Cases can be quite lengthy and it is incumbent on the pro side to state it completely. The first time I heard an NDT standard case read, I was agog. I could barely understand it. Everyone else at the debate camp understood but I was nonplussed. With some practice, after a while, I got my reading speed up to 270 words per minute. John F. Kennedy, who also competed at the NDT still, as far as I know, holds the record at an astounding 500 words per minute. 

Art and I came last, not winning a single debate. We were seventy eighth out of seventy eight. Oh well, in every race, someone has to finish last. When we got back to Los Angeles, Art and I were interviewed by the L. A. Times and I provided a comment which I had considered carefully for days. It was misquoted, of course. I told the reporter, "I would rather be the worst of the best than the best of the rest."

On the promise of a debate scholarship, which I never got, I decided to transfer to West Virginia University. I applied and got in. By the time I got there, the coach who had offered me the scholarship had moved on to another university and, after contacting members of the debate team, I learned that they had been expecting me but, sadly, the debate team was full up and didn't require any more members. Oh well. I was enrolled in the Communication Studies program there and was starting to learn the social science of human communication which is vastly broader than the uninitiate might imagine. 

A few weeks into the semester, I had occasion to telephone my LACC debate coach and let him know that WVU was trying to turn me into a social scientist. His comment? "Don't let them forget that you are a rhetorician!" My thought after harkening back to my Milltown days? "Dude, you have no idea."

Hemingway reputedly said, "Write drunk, edit sober." I try to take at least half of that advice.