Change of address

Hi everyone,

Firstly, thanks for your patience and interest in finding and following my random and rather inconstant blog.

As I mentioned recently, we are now changing address. The current address (on wordpress.com) will no longer be updated, but all content has been migrated to my new site, which achieves a longstanding desire of bringing my business website and blog together.

Henceforth, my blog will be available at: http://burningpine.com/blog/.

If, like me, you still favour RSS to collate all your day’s reading, there is an RSS feed at: www.burningpine.com/feed.

I hope to see you across there. I also hope, having just re-started, that I don’t lose too many along the way.

Andrew

 

 

The decision is more important than pride

A great post from Seth Godin on new information requiring new decisions.

We often struggle with an irrational attachment to sunk costs but:

“What’s lost is lost, we can’t regain what went down in the flood.”

Bob Dylan, The Wedding Song

Or:

“Things without all remedy

Should be without regard: what’s done, is done.”

William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 3, Scene 2
 

Rock and roll rhetoric: White Room

“In the white room with black curtains near the station.

Black-roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings.

Silver horses run down moonbeams in your dark eyes.

Dawn-light smiles on you leaving, my contentment.”

White Room (Brown, Bruce), Cream

Maybe a text-book example of asyndeton in rock lyrics. Poet and lyricist Pete Brown paints his scenes in staccato phrases:

Black-roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings.

 Or

 Platform ticket, restless diesels, goodbye windows.

It’s a powerful effect that builds a scene – or a case – phrase by phrase, image by image.

While we’re poking around in the lyrics, don’t you just love these parallel images, one in the opening verse, one in the final:

Silver horses run down moonbeams in your dark eyes.

 and

Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.

 And, what about those poor tired starlings?

Here’s Cream’s farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall:

From the 1968 album Wheels of Fire:

Wheels of Fire (1968)

The neuroscience of memorable messages

Way back in June, I spotted this on Michael Wade’s Execupundit blog.

It took me until last week to sit down and watch it, however. But, I was so impressed, I’m currently reading Carmen Simon’s book Impossible to Ignore.

Anyway responsible for crafting memorable messages should find the video worth a watch:

This is the book (which I’m still reading):

And, there’s also this podcast (which I haven’t yet listened to):

Slice Planner: a daily planner that merges paper and digital

Via The Cramped, is news of a fantastic concept currently on Kickstarter.

It’s a diary / planning solution that combines the visceral delight of real paper and pencil with the sheer and shareable convenience of digital. What a great idea! You can plan your day on paper, then use your phone’s camera to synch it with your calendar in Outlook, Google or Apple.

More than that, the smartphone app uses augmented reality to highlight any diary conflicts back onto the view of your hand-written page.

The Daily Stoic

This looks interesting.

From Brain Pickings, a review of a new book, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman.

Having read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and a little Seneca, I’ve wanted to learn more about Stoic philosophy. It feels very contemporary, very  relevant to today (and a long and stony walk away from the common understanding of the word).

This might be a starting point.

The Great Books …

This is a great find, courtesy of Anderson Layman’s blog, the Wikipedia entry for the Great Books; 161 books for every personal library.

Some examples to whet your appetite:

29. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations

42. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks

71. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy

158. Franz Kafka – The Castle

 

 

 

Essentials 101, the complete list from Nicholas Bate

The full 101, well worth a ponder:

96. Visit places where there is no concrete, no electricity, no wi-fi. Just as a simple reminder of where you really are and its wonder and power.

 

Talk your way to power

Language lover and Inky Fool, Mark Forsyth on the figures of rhetoric.

Entertaining and informative:

His book The Elements of Rhetoric is highly recommended for anyone with an interest in effective language.

A couple of others are Sam Leith’s You Talkin’ To Me?

and Joseph Romm’s Language Intelligence.

 

 

 

The most regretful people on earth …

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Mary Oliver, via Brain Pickings.