A Difficult Interviewee

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 18:26:01 -0800

Speaking of having conversations, I finished an interesting article in the September 4, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, "Bob on Bob," a review of a book that compiles excerpts of good interviews of Bob Dylan over the decades. But, as Bob is a notoriously difficult interviewee, the article largely analyzes several of these interviews Bob Dylan has given over the decades.

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan has been known to reduce many an erstwhile quote-grabbing interviewer to utter confusion partly because they are "looking" for someone who apparently isn't there. Here's a great excerpt from the New Yorker article:

If you were serious [in that musical age when rock and roll was moribund] you played folk songs. And to become a folksie, unless you actually were from Oklahoma, you invented a persona. The whole folk revival was make-believe anyway; it was urban kids trying to sound like hillbillies and sharecroppers. One of the folk music veterans when Dylan came on the scene was Ramblin' Jack Eliott, a singer with a cowboy twang who had once hoboed around with Guthrie himself. Ramblin' Jack was the stage name of one Elliot Adnopoz, a Jewish kid from Flabush whose father was a prominent surgeon. Cambridge was another center of the folk revival--its where Joan Baez got her start in the coffee houses around Harvard Square. (She was a B.U. dropout.) ...Artifice was the price of authenticity.

It seems that many folks see Dylan as less a philosophical visionary and more of a cultural opportunist with great musical talent. For Dylan, it was never about the "movement" but about the "song."

So, "finding" Dylan has been difficult. Here's something to think about: if someone were to look for you, really look for you, who would they find?

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Looking for the Other Person

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 17:49:08 -0800

One business commentator I like, Dale Dauten, aka the Corporate Curmudgeon, wrote in his column this past week of the art and science of conversations.

The Conversation

Lately he has been listening to some great conversations with executives (not always the easiest people to have conversations with) hosted by public radio personality Kai Ryssdal of the PRI radio program "Marketplace," available as podcasts here.

What is Ryssdal's advice on how to have a great conversation? Stay away from "yes" or "no" questions and be persistent in keeping the conversation going.

Dauten at this point recalls a line from a 1974 movie, The Conversation, in which Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert whose job it is to listen in on conversations. I've not seen the film, but I like this quote.

"At one point," Dauten writes, "Harrison Ford's character tells him: 'I'm not following you, I'm looking for you. There's a big difference.'"

By analogy, I think, in evangelism, God calls us to not simply follow someone in a conversation. We need to know "Who is this person, how has God made them? What makes them tick?"

I believe this is the secret for relationship building and for finding opportunities to enter into people's spiritual lives to point them to Jesus. You must LOOK for the other person. When you find him or her, you're in a good position to show and tell them the good news.

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Coffee Culture Kingdom

A Difficult Interviewee

Looking for the Other Person