Elevator Pitch for Wine

I've been thinking about the "elevator speech," wondering if I should add it to my public speaking class activities.  An "elevator pitch" is a short (one minute or less) promotional presentation selling oneself or a product to another person who is riding the elevator with you (or in a similar, trapped position in which they need to listen to your proposal). 

Tom Kelly from Enoteca Website

At yesterday afternoon's Newport Market wine tasting (you'll notice they don't take their web presence seriously), I was observing elevator pitch's for wine.  A handsome young man named Tom Kelley, the Northwest Ambassador of Small Vineyards, a division of August Wine Group, was pouring four delicious Italian wines.  Shortly after the tasting began, he was giving a short pitch with each pour.  These were memorized and usually contained two or three words about the flavor (rich, jammy, tobacco, etc.), place of origin, and vineyard.  He had pictures of some of the winemakers and a picture of decorative tower with a flock of birds rising upwards.  (Frankly, this particular type of picture annoys me:  the cliche image of architecture with birds in liftoff.)  I picked up a wonderful and very cheap bottle of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo from the La Quercia estate.

I enjoyed hearing each pitch and wondered if he'd have the energy to keep it up until six.  I didn't go back to find out.   But I will got back to buy more of the Montepulciano.

The Meaning of Laschcar

As I walked the dog yesterday, I heard a story on PRI's The World in which reporter Mustafa Quadri talked about "lashcars."  The lashcars are defined as an "anti-Taliban tribal militia, or lashcar."  These words were used by the voice introducing the story.

Then Mr. Quadri, sounding very "classic BBC," tells the sad but millenially common story of an area divided by war.  Much of the story comes through through his editing of his interview with Irshad, a lashcar member from Adezai, a village that had become a fort.  Irshad says he knows about "80 %" of the local Taliban because he was involved in local elections and sporting events before the fighting started.  Now, he says, if a Taliban would pick him up, they'd kill him and if he caught a Taliban, the man would be killed.

This true story saddens and horrifies while making me thankful that I don't live in this situation.

Strangely enough, however, my very first response to the story was my response to the word "laschcar."  It brought a mental image of painting of dark menacing man with long mustachios. On boats.  With big swords.   I think I saw this painting when I was in high school.  (Or, Dr's Freud and Jung, did I just dream of that shadow with its long steal/stele?)  Later on, looking at 19th Century paintings in museums, I would run across pictures of "lascars."  The men in the paintings were dark skinned and usually not presented as heroes of the image.  They were often subsidiary characters, decorations, part of "exotic" locals.

So as I listened to Mr. Quadri's story, I felt he was playing on my old, orientalist biases to get me to think of the Afghanis being as different from me as the Victorians imagined these dark skinned men.

It seems to be true that both laschcar and lascar mean a military group of some kind.  But the lascars were not evil, though they were treated and pictured as far less "good and decent" than the white folks of the Victorian period.  Perhaps to justify their misuse. As historian Diane Robinson-Dunn notes,
they were simply "Asian sailors" or sometimes "Asian or African sailors."  They were predominantly Muslim and dark skinned.  And they have an honorable history.  So the old, "white man's burden" images that popped to mind were probably not what Mr. Quadri was intending me to imagine as I listened to the story.  Though he does spend a lot of time emphasizing the bloodiness of the Afghanee quarrel.

Why not FREEDOM?

My colleague Terry Krueger had an article in the Bend Bulletin today in which he used a metaphor* to describe the growing size of our classroom syllabi.  The tenor of the metaphor was the classroom syllabus.  The vehicle was a novel.  The ground was the concept of "things with many pages."  His point was that the current institutional expectation that we clearly state every possible do or don't and our graded or behavioral response thereto has encouraged us to produce syllabi greater than the 2-6 typed pages  we received when we were but graduate students.

The novel he offered as an example was one known for its length: War and Peace.

Now, my question.  Why use this particular example?  Why not Freedom?  Why not Middlesex?  Why not some other great contemporary tome, popular or literary? 

Perhaps because a more creative metaphor would have called attention to the writing of the piece rather than to the point that appears when we extend the metaphor to the inevitable question, who is going to read either?**

Of course it could be we're looking at one of the differences between a readerly and a writerly text, and because Terry's purpose is persuasive, I think, I think he's probably thinking of his audience.  (That's at least three thoughts and plenty enough for one post.


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*By the way, if you surfed to t-bob's homepage, you could see her interest in Great Pyrenees, an appropriate obsession for a college teacher.  I mean, not everyone can have a poodle.
** If you click to these pages, please make sure you read Dan Coleman's comments.