Talks

 I have been thinking about talks.

The public library in Galveston used to have them. People came, because there’s something satisfying about learning something in an hour — or an hour and a half, if you allow for questions.

The talks I have in mind are just talks. They are not lectures, written out and read, although I once heard an excellent one delivered that way by the great historian Peter Brown, an expert on Augustine of Hippo. The talks I have in mind are not delivered by someone consulting notes or fiddling with a computer projecting images onto a screen.

They are just talks — someone talking about a subject she knows well.

The person giving the talk has written the talk. The text could be published as an essay. But the person giving the talk is not consulting the text. She has the material in mind. And she has more material than she can deliver in an hour, and so she’s following cues from the audience. When she senses interest, she gives more detail. When she sees a puzzled face, she fills in context. When she senses interest is flagging, she moves on.

The text, which has been left in the speaker’s luggage, has a fixed length.

People who speak clearly tend to speak at about 150 words per minute. (I grew up in the day when reporters wrote for print and broadcast. I’m pretty sure the stylebooks included that guideline: 150 words per minute of broadcast time.)

The talks I’m imagining last about an hour. If you cut it off at 50 minutes, that’s 7,500 words, just 6,750 if you stop at 45. If you just an hour and want to include questions, a 30-minute talk is 4,500 words.

I’m suggesting a range: 4,500 to 7,500 words. I think that’s a good mark to aim for.

Oxford University Press has a laudable series of Very Short Introductions. My only quibble is that some introductions should be shorter.

Professor Barbara Lounsberry, an English professor whose work I admire, used to give talks on Virginia Woolf, Iowa, creative nonfiction and “The Charm of Diaries.”

I wish the Internet were full of such talks. Life is short, and such introductions are a good way to find a new interest that might surprise you, prompting further reading, further study.

But I also wish that libraries and other public institutions would sponsor them.

Just as churches, synagogues and mosques offer weekly services, I wish library offered weekly talks.

It seems to me that if ordinary citizens met regularly to learn together, something good might come of it.