January 10 2008, 11:10 PM RT

I once had the fantastic luck to watch a man give a presentation about how to give a tremendous presentation. It was as you would expect, or possibly hope: the whole thing was delightfully, pointedly self aware. In five minutes, he told us in his thick Belgian accent, you will no longer notice my accent (and this was true). When you are speaking, he said, position yourself so that you are standing comfortable and balanced. In this way, he said, you will project an aura of confident competence, as I have been doing, which your audience will pick up on and respond to (as we had). He had many such tips and hints, tripped and stacked so as to create a presentation of themselves: it was artfully done. I learned a terrific amount. It was all a bit like taking a linguistics course about the language the course is taught in (also a recommended experience). I hope you get to see him one day.

One particularly salient point the gentleman brought up was that one of the reasons giving a presentation in front of a live audience is nerve-wracking thing is in part because it is a real-time exercise, and those are difficult. I can attest to this myself. Over the last two years, I have been very lucky (or something similar) to have the opportunity to regularly stand up in front of a crowd of folks sized somewhere from twenty to seventy (!) people and try to tell a story. These are in the main snarky folk, and want a good entertainment. I have learned much from the experience so far (more to learn, too!), and I can say with some hesitance and hope that I have done alright by them. They have been a good audience: challenging, fair, requiring me to deal with the unexpected, in real time, no net. It is a skill, to stand there and keep going (as well as when to stop!), something artisanal the knack of which comes only with scary, scary practice. I do not screw up to much, and when I do, they are patient with me. I thank them for it.

(I should point out that it's also tremendous fun!)

My brother, too, finds fun while dabbling in real time. He has a different medium: he spins songs together. There is a rigid timetable for this sort of thing: when one song is flowing from the speakers, the next must be carefully configured to match, both in tune and on time. He has only one song to do this in: the music must not stop. In his practice he has gotten better, and now can set the bar for himself with waiting until there are only a miserly sixty seconds left before he must spin up the next. He's getting quite good; the magic of modern technology allows me to follow along. The thing my brother fights has a term of art; when the songs slide together out of joint, or phase, or tenor, this is either a verb or an unarticulated noun: trainwreck. The other evening, one happened for the most prosaic of reasons, as he tripped over the line out and killed the feed. Such are the perils of real time.

Mr. Containment gave me some Chopin; it is angling careful through the rooms of the house, culturing the mad anarchy of the rain against the windows, filling corners with gentle distance.