WIPPED

As the spring cautiously extends its tippy-toe into the frosty meadows, we are once again all united in the great capital of sandwiches and smoothies – londON.
Our upcoming brush with humiliation, also known as the WIP has left me with an uncomfortable ikkyness which won’t shake.
For those readers who don’t know, a WIP is an oral presentation of research, however, the audience receives a word-for-word written version of our oral presentation a week in advance. This fact has left me wondering why it is I must dress warmly and waste my hard-earned cash actually getting myself on the tube from Wimbledon to South Kensington, when sending an e-mail actually delivers my presentation with the grace and speed of…well, an e-mail. Has the art of rhetoric been completely abandoned? What motivates the robotic reading-out-of-pages which is considered academically correct, but promotes both boredom and (in my view) an uncanny sense of dislocation. And if we are doomed to read out of pages, can there be no mystery left to how we deliver words from their inkish prison into the air and minds of our listeners? Must we anchor our understanding in the visual, with a hat tipping gesture to our other senses?
When I imagine myself reading to an audience what is not poetry or a play and what they have in their hand to read at their discretion, I am haunted with the image of a ventriloquist sitting with his puppet on his knee. The WIP promotes the sensation that I am the puppet, fronting for the literary mind which is myself but also treacherously not so.
I feel the WIP embodies perfectly what Philosopher Gilbert Ryle has called the ‘Doctrine of the Ghost in the Machine’ in which the mind and body are perceived as separate entities, mistakenly assumed to be of the same category type. Woody Allen has described this perfectly in Love and Death: ‘The mind embraces all the nobler aspects…while the body has all the fun’. My puppet-existence is my mechanical existence as my body. I am a mechanical function delivering pre-written words (and it matters not they are my words, written by me). My mind has already embraced the nobler aspects of research and writing. It has solidified its eternal existence in the form of text. I will die, but my printed none-sense will live on.
What I thought I’d do, but have decided against, was put my Word document into a PDF file. Adobe Acrobat has a reading feature for PDFs which sounds kinda like the bastard-son of a Mitsubish elevator and Texas Instruments Speak-and-Spell (for those born before the 1980s). This way, the idea that speech is the product of thought, and not of text, can be demonstrated. When speech becomes the product of text, with the absence of the nuances of orality, it is almost impossible, and certainly unbearable to listen to.
If presentations are to be delivered orally, they should employ the full spectrum of sensory stimuli that speech can offer. Reading out of a page if like having sex through a big wolly blanket. Or perhaps it is like having oral sex by licking your eye balls (did I need to put in a PG warning for that one??) While some may have this odd fetish, it seems highly unnecessary to impose it on those who don’t.
n.