Tina Brown's new US magazine, Talk, was launched a couple of weeks ago to a fitting amount of, well, talk - most of it understandably centred on an interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton and a stirring article by Richard Butler that practically accuses Kofi Annan of being one of Saddam Hussein's VBFs.
Other people seemed to think that was rather too much talk and that the really interesting element of the new magazine is the picture of Gwyneth Paltrow in S&M gear. But what is perhaps equally interesting about Talk, if not quite so immediately obvious, is the various pieces on the concept of talk itself. There is a feature on America's 50 best talkers; a column about the impossibility of reaching anybody by phone any more, and a piece penned by somebody who I think might be using a pen name (Vox Talkuli), about the historical place of conversation. Each was good in its own right and, taken together, they make a fascinating meditation on the place of conversation in contemporary America. For me, they were also an interesting reflection on the traditionally cherished position of talk in our own country. The piece about the best talkers in the US is sub-titled 50 Big Mouths We Hope Will Never Shut Up, and is a dossier of such people as Barbara Bush, Martin Scorsese, Susan Sontag and Maya Angelou. Each has a picture and a short epithet or quote attached - my favourite belongs to Scorsese and reads simply "Honestly, who knew?".
The first notable feature of the article is the tone of good-humoured intelligent wit that permeates the writing about these bigmouths. It would be hard to imagine a similar piece written in Ireland that wasn't shot through with snide vitriol. But, quite apart from this is the idea of talk that is being put forward. The majority of the talkers presented are known for their oration, their rhetoric, their mouthing off - fine, stirring and somehow, very American qualities, but not what I would consider talk. Talk is what we as a nation have always been known for and it's hard to describe but instantly identifiable. Talk is that admirable game of verbal ping-pong, where each player is in no rush to return the ball but might just bat it off the wall a few times before getting around to tossing it back. It's the way Irish people have of man-handling words that are completely unnecessary and cobbling them together in such a way as to make each of them particularly relevant within the logic of a certain sentence.
I have been thinking about the Irish and their reputation for what American's love to call blarney, because I have just returned from a holiday in Spain. I went thinking I was going to spend a quiet few days in Cadiz and ended up, through various twists of fate, travelling all over Spain in a Chrysler van. I'd love to know where I was exactly, but to be honest we travelled in a permanent state of being lost. This is oddly restful once you get used to it and give up the idea that you are going to see any of the tourist sights whatsoever. Instead of diligently checking out the Alhambra in Granada or the oranges in Seville, we spent most of our time talking to strangers about just where it was we were meant to be and how we might possibly get there. Or at least that is where the conversations would start.
About 20 times a day, Freddie, the driver, would roll down the window and tell somebody that, in the betwixt and between of things, the village that went by the name of Perdido didn't seem to be at the end of this road. This would usually be agreed upon at length, and then it would be explained that this was probably because, for some reason or another, the road didn't go there. It did, however, go somewhere else entirely, which was interesting because that was where we weren't going and here we were in a van headed that direction. At this point a third party would often be called in to join the general discussion about the ill-placedness of things in the region, as well as the weather and perhaps a spot of politics before, with a flurry of quick-fire conversation, it would be agreed that we were lost and there was no helping it. This was far better than any arid tourist site, and before long we were stopping and asking for directions even when we knew the right route, just for the fun of it. For a holiday spent wandering the back roads of the Spanish mountains and eating, it was extraordinarily exhilarating.
Which made me think about the Irish and their so-called love of talking and conversation: it's a passion that seems to be disappearing all too quickly.
It seems that nobody has time to talk anymore - not talk in the therapy sense, or in the political sense, or in the bitching sense, but in the good old-fashioned Flann O'Brien sense of the word: talk, blether, shooting the breeze, chewing the fat. As another article in Talk pointed out, the more methods of communication we add to our armoury, the less time we spend actually talking - we may not have got quite as bad as the US West Coast, where people ring each other in lunch hour so as to be sure to get voicemail rather than a living breathing person, but it's getting that way.
Emails, faxes, voicemail, television, film, music, magazines, Internet chat rooms - the ways are endless in which you can now avoid having a good rambling talk about anything at all. There's nothing better than just lobbing words at each other without ever intending to get anywhere except maybe back where you started. My time in Spain demonstrated to me just how much I missed this kind of Mobius strip of talk that has no beginning, no end and no real purpose. It reminds me of a friend who came here from the US many years ago and never managed to leave. She always explained why she stayed by simply saying, "a great conversation detained me". I wonder would she have changed her life for a voice mail message?