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Turning things around...
Jul. 26th, 2012 07:58 pmBack when I called Buffalo, New York, my home, I spent probably more time than I should have at the Gene Gordon Magic Shop, which was run by a fellow named Howard Eldridge. It was Howard that hammered home to me the idea that a $40 book titled "101 Tips on Improving [pick your favorite subject]" that delivered one tip that saved (or earned) you $50 made the whole enterprise worth the investment, and any additional good tips were gravy.
There are variations on that theme, as well. As where someone takes a well-worn theme and lights a fire under its butt.
I've been reading something I picked up on Amazon by a certain Ron White, who has chops in the competitive memory field, holding forth on how to improve one's memory in 30 days. Now, given the amount of reading I've done on the subject, I would have told you, up front, that it wasn't likely that my investment of $2.99 in Mr. White's monograph would pay for itself, but strangely enough, it did. (I might add, I am really good at extracting this kind of stuff from my reading material.) It made me realize that a "journey" (in the sense the word is used by, say, Dominic O'Brien in his writings on memory) need not be a three-dimensionally valid path between imagined locations.
In other words, a journey may hop from one's kitchen, to the surface of the moon, to a bed in a James Bond thriller just (or almost) as easily as mentally walking into a room and looking around, noting the couch, the coffee table, and the rug.
(FWIW, a "journey" consists of a set of places (loci), arranged in an order that makes sense (to the person imagining the journey), that are used to aid in recalling a sequence of items. This technique, which was part of the education of any literate ancient Greek or Roman, is ultimately the source of our rather vague contemporary turns of the phrase "in the first place," "in the second place," and so on.)
* * * In more mundane areas, I sent off quite a bit of work today, including a translation that had bedeviled me in terms of two terms—скребло and скребок, and variations on said words—until I finally felt confident enough to plant a flag and defend my ground.
I am beginning to grok long-delivery jobs, in the sense of that certain je ne sais quoi that's required to integrate them into day-to-day work without the whole thing turning into some gawdawful dog's breakfast. It's pretty apparent to me that, without such work, invoicing this month would have been markedly weaker.
And so, another week is almost over. It's hard to believe. And here's my favorite recent photo, taken this morning while on my way to drop the car off for repairs:
You never know what you might run into on roads around here!
Cheers...
There are variations on that theme, as well. As where someone takes a well-worn theme and lights a fire under its butt.
I've been reading something I picked up on Amazon by a certain Ron White, who has chops in the competitive memory field, holding forth on how to improve one's memory in 30 days. Now, given the amount of reading I've done on the subject, I would have told you, up front, that it wasn't likely that my investment of $2.99 in Mr. White's monograph would pay for itself, but strangely enough, it did. (I might add, I am really good at extracting this kind of stuff from my reading material.) It made me realize that a "journey" (in the sense the word is used by, say, Dominic O'Brien in his writings on memory) need not be a three-dimensionally valid path between imagined locations.
In other words, a journey may hop from one's kitchen, to the surface of the moon, to a bed in a James Bond thriller just (or almost) as easily as mentally walking into a room and looking around, noting the couch, the coffee table, and the rug.
(FWIW, a "journey" consists of a set of places (loci), arranged in an order that makes sense (to the person imagining the journey), that are used to aid in recalling a sequence of items. This technique, which was part of the education of any literate ancient Greek or Roman, is ultimately the source of our rather vague contemporary turns of the phrase "in the first place," "in the second place," and so on.)
I am beginning to grok long-delivery jobs, in the sense of that certain je ne sais quoi that's required to integrate them into day-to-day work without the whole thing turning into some gawdawful dog's breakfast. It's pretty apparent to me that, without such work, invoicing this month would have been markedly weaker.
And so, another week is almost over. It's hard to believe. And here's my favorite recent photo, taken this morning while on my way to drop the car off for repairs:
You never know what you might run into on roads around here!
Cheers...
