Book review: Epilogue

A part of me wondered why I was drawn to pick up Epilogue, Anne Roiphe's memoir about the year-and-change (some pun intended) she experienced as a newly-widowed woman, when I spied it on the library shelf.

And, I confess, that part of me continued to wonder as the rest of me worked through the inevitably sorrow-filled stories of Roiphe's earliest days post-loss: the mundane acts rendered surreal by the combination of shock, numbness and grief; the creeping realizations that however much of a life she had left, it was suddenly all she had left, the only certainty left to her. I am going through a phase of loss and loneliness and uncertainty in my own life, albeit one brought on myself; was I looking for clues on how to behave? Or of what lies ahead? Or of how to behave based on what lies ahead? Roiphe is 26 years older than I am; she is also almost exactly  one month older than my mother would have been. Am I just (foolishly) trying to assemble clues about my future by mining someone else's past?

Slowly, page by page, anecdote by anecdote, the reason for reading, and for writing, is revealed: the stories are connection, and connection is everything. The stories are vehicles of truth, and truth, however painful, is the only way to bring light to life. Truth and love. Roiphe's memoir is strung together by a hundred tiny stories of telling the truth rather than shrouding evil with silence, but it is also peppered with wonderful, hopeful story-lets describing the healing power of music, the crazy grace of a perfect, random moment, the perverse persistence of biological desire one alternately wishes for and away.

Funny, touching, shocking, enraging stories: a nightmarish story of attempted strangulation by lawsuit, which is strangely balanced by the nonsensical, stubborn insistence of her deceased husband's ex-wife to receive the full month's alimony for the partial last month of his life. A woeful story of a former friend who turns away; a string of new romances that mostly stop before they get a chance to start; a crushing story of a family rent by first the hiding, then the revelation of a family member's secret.

Threaded through are the gems good and modest writers leave without fanfare for our surprise and delight, that "trying is not the way to loving", or that psychoanalysts are the archenemies of the secret (lowercase, please, there is not an ounce of New-Age-rhymes-with-"sewage" in first-wave feminist Anne Roiphe). I am already dreaming up capes and costumes for Leslie and my first-shrink-slash-astrologer, both of whom are absolutely superheroes with attendant superpowers, IMHO.

Maybe you, like me, will have to apply yourself to the early-on pages of Epilogue with a bit of faith. This will come together; the glimmers I see here and there in these threads of stories will weave themselves into a whole that offers support, that helps carry me forth through this rough spot to the next bit of smooth going.

Roiphe herself is not much for faith. At first, she soldiers on for practical reasons, because not to do so would devastate those she would leave behind. She neither believes in a hereafter where she and her beloved "H." will be reunited, nor is she at all certain that a renewed interest in (or availability of) earthy delights is around the corner. But her stories, and their messages, and their energy, finally carry her forward, too. And somehow, in the end (or at least, by the end of her story here), we feel it together: that the point of a life, to paraphrase Jonathan Swift, is to live all the days of it.

xxx
c

• Buy Epilogue, by Anne Roiphe, on Amazon
• Read Wikipedia entry on Anne Roiphe

Book cover design by Christine Van Bree, © Harper Collins; photo of Anne Roiphe © Deborah Copaken Kogan

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Buying less, renting smarter, Part 1

My first shrink-slash-astrologer warned me early on that I'm a floaty type.

Which is to say, I enjoy wandering from thing to thing, but this can leave me very, very ungrounded. I think she even suggested carrying around a piece of hematite as a possible solution, and I dimly recall trying it for a bit: I found an old hunk lying around in one phase of The Great Purge of '09, and dispatched it to Goodwill forthwith.

Anyway, I know that looking at things soothes me and I suspect that having one reason I tend to collect them is that having them around grounds me.

Looking through new-to-me stuff, almost any stuff, from garage sales to flea markets to high-end department stores, is weirdly relaxing and comforting. When I'm browsing the stacks or the back 40 at the Kane County Flea Market or the racks at Bloomie's, a part of my brain that usually won't shut up is finally able to, but I also feel deeply cared for. Whereas other wonderful-to-me activities that also shut off that part of my brain, walking on the beach or doing Nei Kung or hooping, for example, are more stimulating than soothing, and still other experiences, like looking at art, are generally stimulating without being soothing.

Since I like these things or like the way they make me feel, it's really hard not to want to take some home with me. If I feel good in some object's habitat, it follows that I will also feel good around it when it's been removed to mine. And sometimes, I do. But often, I do not. This is where the clutter problem lives for many of us, I'm guessing, trying to replicate feelings. (The other part lies in wanting to hang onto them.)

When I am full-on monk, this problem will either go away or I'll have mad ninja skillz for dealing with it. For now, though, I need to be around stuff sometimes, and I need to have some stuff all the time, in order for my life to work the way I want it to.

The trick, then, for me, is coming up with ways to comfort myself that do not involve the acquisition of stuff I don't need, even cheap stuff. Because in addition to the cost of acquisition, there's a cost to maintain the stuff and to get rid of it, even with second-hand stuff, if you're going to do it responsibly.

The library is a terrific substitution for any browsing because the stuff you get there is the least "sticky", there are penalties for not getting rid of it! But even renting "for free" from the library comes at a cost: how much time am I spending returning stuff, checking due dates on returning stuff, rounding up stuff to return, etc.? So these are the ways I've come up with to minimize library "waste":

Book in advance. (No pun intended!) The Los Angeles Public Library has a searchable online database you can use to find an reserve books, which are then delivered at no cost to the branch of your choice. When I find a book I know I want to read that looks like it's been out for a while, I jump on the site, plug in my member number (which I have saved as a keystroke shortcut in TextExpander), and have it sent to me.

Walk to the library. When you live in L.A., you spend most of your mobile time in a giant backpack called "a car." The combination of picking up reserved books and walking to and from the library to do it has dramatically reduced the amount of books I haul, and is good exercise, head-clearing and better for the environment, as well. I'm really nervous because budget cutbacks have already reduced hours (and salaries, sadly) at my branch, which is older and smaller and likely to be an early candidate for closures. But I'll cross that bridge when they blow it up. Or something.

Limit browsing time. I used to go earlier in the day (a luxury of the self- or unemployed!). Now I go towards the end of the day, an hour or less before closing time. Which is earlier and earlier with every budget cut.

Keep a dedicated holding area. I wish I could remember where I got this tip, because implementing it has dramatically reduced my late fees. I have one small shelf devoted to library books on loan; the only other place in my apartment they're allowed to be is on my nightstand.

Manage due dates with a system. Before they moved to a fee model, I used LibraryElf to make sure I didn't rack up ridiculous overdue rates. Now that I'm bringing in less and reading more, I burn through books quickly enough that it's not an issue, but if you have problems getting stuff back on time, either a calendar reminder input into your own calendar as soon as you get home, or a LibraryElf subscription, might not be a bad idea.

That's probably already about as anal as it gets when it comes to a library strategy (although I didn't get into my Windex-ing the covers upon arrival at home, never know where that stuff has been). But if there are other things I'm missing or could benefit from, I'd love to hear them...

xxx
c

Image by IseFire via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup!

While I enjoy spreading the small-biz love via Referral Friday, I've been itching to create some other feature that both collects the fantabulous things I find stumbling around the web during the week here, rather than on third-party sites, and rustles up a little friendly P.R. for the deserving people who make them.

Of course, you can always track all the crazy stuff I bookmark, Stumble, Tumble, Facebook, star or tweet at any of those locations. Or all of 'em in one horrifying deluge of a fell swoop at FriendFeed. But, you know, only so many hours in the day, right?

Note! I am, uh, noting the original notation at the end of each item for two reasons.

• First, as a way of externalizing my thought process in bookmarking shared content. Why does one thing get posted to delicious while another gets retweeted on Twitter? Beats me! No, actually, I do have a semi-sorta strategy that I should probably outline at some point. But seeing things in action is (i.e. having examples to look at) is often more useful than plain, old telling.
• Second, as a rather shameless and transparent attempt to get you to connect with me in one of these other places. Because empire-building is all the rage these days, at least, it is here

Finally, the only three links I don't share anywhere else first are the ones that occasionally make it into the "little presents" column of my monthly newsletter. For those, you must subscribe! But as subscribing will make you thin, rich and happy beyond your wildest dreams, frankly, I'm baffled as to why you haven't signed on already.

Okay, then. Excelsior!

There are many, many reasons to follow Nathan Bransford, the generous literary agent who shares all kinds of nifty insider info to make writers smarter (and hopefully, keep the eager riff-raff from further beleaguering an already battle-weary publishing industry). But this odd one-off on why idiot writers might not know they are made my week. [delicious-ed]

Do you think Apple's iPad, debuting tomorrow, will revolutionize the publishing/computing/other industry? Or is it all just a bunch of hype and expensive nerdery? Either way, you must not miss my friend Alissa Walker's brilliant "unboxing" post. Delicious! [but not delicioused, tweeted!]

I've been enjoying the blog of one of my new, met-at-SXSW friends, Rogue Amoeba founder Paul Kafasis, since I got back from Austin, but this post on postmarks made me laugh out loud. Which is kind of annoying, because last I checked you were not supposed to be successful, good-looking, smart, nice AND funny. Especially (decades) before you turn 40. Hmph. [Stumbled]

This was passed around Twitter like a doob at a Dead concert, but on the off chance you missed it, Frank Rich wrote a brilliant and insightful opinion piece for the New York Times on the real roots of Tea Party rage. [Facebooked]

Last, but almost foremost, I would be staggeringly remiss if I did not point you to the inspiration for Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup!, my online pal, the London-based writer Delia Lloyd. Her own brilliantly curated Friday Pix feature is a guaranteed curation of timesucking awesomeness week after week, damn her eyes. Here are all the back issues; before you wave "bye-bye" to your weekend, you might want to subscribe to her blog so you don't miss another. [Not bookmarked this week, but HEY, she's the inspiration, fer cryin' out loud: she gets a slot!]

xxx
c

Image by via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Book review: The Color of Water

I am sure I was doing many valuable and useful things with my time back in 1996, but it's clear to me that one thing I was not doing enough of was the reading of excellent memoirs, nor even the reading about the reading of them.

How else to explain my egregious oversight in picking up one of the most engrossing, uplifting and flat-out amazing stories of true life to have hit the bestseller list so late that the 10th anniversary edition has already been in print for four years?

Fortunately, I'm fairly sure it's never too late to read The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, by James McBride. For those of you who weren't of reading age when it first came out (or who, like me, simply had your head stuck somewhere it shouldn't have been and missed it), The Color of Water tells the story of one Ruth McBride, née Ruchel Dwara Zylska, redubbed Rachel Deborah Shilsky by her Polish-Jewish immigrant parents upon their arrival in the U.S., a name the Orthodox-raised Ruth further Anglicized when she did the unthinkable for a rabbi's daughter born in the early part of the 20th century and broke away from her family. To marry a black man. And, after his death and the death of her subsequent husband, ultimately raise 12 children on her own, putting all of them through college.

Such a break! Such a story! And most of all, such a woman! At the core of Ruth McBride's story is the animating truth of the universe, love, love, love, which she freely admits and burns so brightly with, it's positively dazzling, dazzlingly positive. I confess to a certain grudging determination when I picked up the book from a stack of autobiographies at Bart's: I'm reading to learn, I told myself, and I can't learn about what makes a good memoir work unless I read the good memoirs.

Happily, steeling myself for an earnest-but-plodding slog was not only unnecessary, but a dazzling reminder of what a jackass I am, still making assumptions at the ripe old age of almost-49. "Page-turner" barely does this book justice; The Color of Water bubbles, crackles and glows with life, as much because of the brilliant writing skills of Ruth McBride's journalist/jazz musician son, James, as it is because of Ruth's own story. McBride flips between the stories of mother and son, the older story lending perspective to the modern one, the two intertwining in a vivid, real-life display of how our most difficult earthly clashes can become our most glorious heavenly gains.

It's a brilliant accomplishment and a huge gift to the world. If I could travel back in time to have read this 14 years ago, I would. The next best thing I can do is recommend that if you haven't yet, pick up a copy and read it today...

xxx
c

• Buy The Color of Water by James McBride on Amazon (affiliate link!)
• Visit author James McBride's website

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Photo of James McBride and Ruth McBride Jordan © Judy Lawne, via Oberlin College's website; image of book cover © Riverhead Books.

Book review: Improv Wisdom

Every once in a while, you read a book you wish came bundled in stacks of 11, so that you could keep your own copy but immediately, or maybe even upon finishing Chapter 2 or 3, share the experience with a solid two handfuls of people.

Improv Wisdom by Patricia Ryan Madson is exactly that kind of book. By her own admission (an adorable mea culpa in the epilogue, reflecting on the irony of taking 20 years to write a book about improv), it's the work of a lifetime, her own lifetime of learning and teaching improv to a variety of students, "civilians" and thespians alike, and folding into it the other modalities of learning and living she picked up along the way: tai chi chuan, Zen Buddhism and Constructive Living, to name a few.

The book fuses all these modalities but uses 13 core tenets of improvisation to suggest a simple, sturdy framework for living. "Just show up" winds faith and action together into something more useful and beautiful than either is on its own (and, as any adherent of Woody Allen knows, is 80% of success). "Pay attention," a chronically underutilized tool that will change almost anyone's game in startling ways, makes for what is probably my favorite chapter: in addition to some especially useful (and illuminating) exercises, it includes a moving story of epiphany and a number of surprises that absolutely got my attention.

I think that was the biggest surprise of the book, how delightfully light and unexpected the lessons were. As a survivor of the improv-as-career-propellant school, I girded my loins for Chapter One, which of course draws on the cardinal rule of all improv: "Say yes" (or, as the game goes, "Yes, AND..."). But rather than a heavy-handed, in-your-face talking-to about the necessity of throwing yourself off a cliff over and over again, it is a series of simple and slyly compelling nudges towards taking the kinds of small risks which will instantly and forever change your world. The words took me back to the pure joy of those early days of improv, when glory was so non-imminent the only sane reason to do it was for fun, and reminded me that when I apply those lessons to my daily life, waking up, releasing attachment to outcome, turning my attention outward rather than inward, how much more joyful and rich are my experiences.

Some chapters will resonate more or less, depending on where you're at in your journey. Some people will want to use Improv Wisdom as a guidebook, doing the exercises chapter by chapter, turning their focus to a different aspect of awareness-sharpening each week (or month or day). Some will read it all the way through for inspiration and insights; some will dip in here and there for the same reasons.

I'm hard-pressed to think of the person who could gain nothing from reading this wonderful little book, though. It's gentle, kind and inspiring in exactly the way you'd expect the work of a lifetime to be.

xxx
c

• Buy Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up by Patricia Ryan Madson on Amazon
• Visit the Improv Wisdom website
• See what Patricia Ryan Madson is reading via LibraryThing

Watercolor ©2010 Patricia Ryan Madsen.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the book in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Referral Friday: Bart's Books

Referral Friday is part of an ongoing series inspired by John Jantsch's Make-a-Referral Week. For more about that, and loads more referrals for everything from cobblers to coaches to gee-tar teachers, start here. Pass it on, baby!

Roughly 15 years ago, when I first moved to L.A., I read a story in the L.A. Times Travel section about a little town tucked in a magical valley about two hours from town. (Okay, 90 minutes: traffic was better in 1995.)

I was looking for day trips back then, ways to escape the relentlessly suburban landscape I had yet to appreciate, without breaking the dwindling bank that was sustaining us. The article mentioned places to eat (fine) and hike (uh, no) and even spa, if you were so inclined, but what drew my attention, and ultimately me, to Ojai, again and again, was mention of a little open-air used bookseller named Bart's Books.

I think I spent two hours and $75 I could ill afford there that day. I've spent many times more since, but now I'm savvy to the very drill the author mentioned in the piece: save up your books, bring to Bart's for credit, come away with more books.

There are indoor rooms with finer books, but without question, what makes Bart's Bart's (and makes me want to buy it and live there one day) is the sprawling outdoor area. The books do get dusty, and in places, a bit moldy: there ain't much precipitation here in SoCal, but we're generally ill-prepared for what we do get.

No matter. The books are impossible to find and a delight to look for; mustiness just adds to the experience. I'll confess to a slight dip in my interest level with a changing of owners a while back, but I have all kinds of problems with change, so let's just say it's me. Truth be told, there have been some nice, if subtle improvements over the past two years, chief among them how many more of my books seem to get accepted for trade-in. (Or hey, maybe I'm just reading a better class of book!)

If you're doing a tool up or down the California coast, consider making a small detour inland to walk the magical streets of Ojai: maybe get a bite, maybe do some shopping, maybe even get yourself a little hot spa action.

But if you do turn off to Ojai, you must stop by Bart's. All books are more enjoyable for being browsed under sunny blue skies...

xxx
c

Image by communicatrix via Flickr. You may reuse under this Creative Commons license.

Book review: Sweeping changes

Many moons ago, going solely on a hunch, I stumbled upon doing the dishes as a way of setting things right.

It was a magical bit of accidental reframing for me. Dishes were an especially loathed task growing up, for all sorts of reasons having to do with feminism and feeling trapped in a life and a house not of my choosing.

Ironing, on the other hand, was a quieting, calming task I chose. Like most of my favorite soothing things, it required just enough attention to disengage my brain from whatever it was currently sweating out, and not so much that I couldn't have Brady Bunch reruns on in the background.

Sweeping Changes: Discovering the Joy of Zen in Everyday Tasks, helps reframe all kinds of potentially irritating chores into balm for the soul (not to mention actions that get the house nice and clean.) Author Gary Thorp, a lay-ordained monk in the Shunryu Suzuki Roshi tradition, explicates the dull to-dos of maintaining one's life and space, the scrubbing of toilets, the preparation of meals, and yes, the sweeping of surfaces, in Buddhist terms: how we care for the things around us determines how we care for ourselves and the world around us.

If we approach a dirty sink, or carpet, or even (or especially) a toilet with loving kindness and our full attention, we improve our ability to approach the more complex challenges of life the same way. And if we go one level deeper, we start getting in our bones that the Buddha lives in everything: not just the clean sink underneath, but the dirty water that fills it. We honor the space walled off arbitrarily by the exterior of our home but not at the expense of the space outside of it, because we see that everything, the floor, the dust, the mites living in the dust, are all part of one, big, interconnected system.

I loved Thorp's friendly, light, easygoing style so much, I probably read the book too fast. If you pick up your own copy (there are new hardcover and paperback copies available starting at $5.99 and $10.90, respectively, with abundant used copies for far less), I'd keep it by the bed or other (ahem) temporary reading station to dip into here and there, for inspiration. Maybe it's different for zen cats, but us civilian kitties can get balled up in our Buddhist underwear pretty darn quick.

If you take nothing else from it, I'd suggest taking these two things: pay more attention to your tasks, and less to how perfectly you do them.

Easier on the surfaces and what lies beneath yours...

xxx
c

• Buy hardcover version of Sweeping Changes by Gary Thorp on Amazon
• Buy paperback version of Sweeping Changes by Gary Thorp on Amazon

Image by CarbonNYC via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

UPDATE (8:51 am): In my rush to post, I neglected to mention that John E. Simpson's comment on a previous post originally pointed me to this wonderful book. I'm horrified, not only b/c I'm such a credit-where-credit-is-due apologist, but b/c I want to maximize the chances I'll find other great book (and other) suggestions in the comments section. My apologies, John!

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Referral Friday: Groupon

I am mad for deals, especially when they converge with my guilty desire for self-indulgence and my weird attraction for making a game of whatever I can.

Groupon, a daily deal for some various local goody, neatly satisfies all three needs in one digital swoop. After signing up for your city's deals at the main website, you receive a daily email with a deal which you can buy into for a specified window of time, 24 hours, usually. The trick is that the deal gets "unlocked" (i.e., available for purchase) only after the number of people willing to commit to purchase reaches some predetermined critical mass. (Here's more about the "why" behind it and the inspiration for it, The Point, on Groupon's "about" page.)

Not every deal will appeal to everyone; then again, how much money and time does any one person have? It seems like I've got less of both with each passing day. But I've scored some sweet deals for taking a small risk, not only delighted with the savings, but happy to have been introduced to some terrific new resource I might not otherwise have found out about (which is pretty much the incentive for offering door-buster deals as far as the vendors go).

One word of warning: if you're a hoarder-of-happy like I am, beware, those expiration dates creep up more quickly than you'd guess. In the last week, I've gotten a haircut, my car detailed, and $20 worth of expensive takeout. Thank the heavens the relaxation types at the place I still have a massage coming to me get that some of us are foot-draggers (especially when the feet in question have a plantar wart we'd just as soon eliminate before humiliating ourselves in front of a total stranger...)

xxx
c

• Sign up for Groupon via this link and when you buy into your first Groupon, I get points in my account towards more Groupons OR
• Sign up for Groupon via this link and remain blissfully shill-free, I'm good, either way!

Available Groupon cities as of this writing:

• Albuquerque
• Atlanta
• Austin
• Baltimore
• Boston
• Charlotte
• Chicago
• Cincinnati
• Cleveland
• Columbus
• Dallas
• Denver
• Detroit
• East Bay
• Fort Worth
• Fresno
• Houston
• Indianapolis
• Jacksonville
• Kansas City
• Las Vegas
• London
• Los Angeles
• Louisville
• Memphis
• Miami
• Milwaukee
• Minneapolis / St Paul
• Nashville
• New Orleans
• New York
• Oklahoma City
• Omaha
• Philadelphia
• Phoenix
• Pittsburgh
• Portland
• Raleigh / Durham
• Sacramento
• San Antonio
• San Diego
• San Francisco
• San Jose
• Seattle
• Sioux Falls
• St Louis
• Tacoma
• Tampa
• Toronto
• Vancouver
• Virginia Beach / Norfolk
• Washington DC

(All of those city links? Also SHILL-FREE.)

Image by Joe Shlabotnik via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license. Especially good story and comments thread on this one, too.

Book review: The Four Agreements

For someone who never actually read The Four Agreements, I have thought an awful lot about it in the three years since I didn't actually read it.

Generally, I thought about how great it would be if there really was some very simple and straightforward "Practical Guide to Personal Freedom," as the subtitle promises, a four-part pact one could make with oneself that provided a clear-cut path of guided self-instruction.

Specifically, I kept turning over Agreement #1, "Be Impeccable with Your Word", in my head, wondering if its stickiness meant that for me, that particular agreement was the key. In the three years since I've been paying attention to my habits, I've noticed that my mouth gets me in more trouble than any other part of me after my brain: I'm forever over-promising and under-delivering, when every smart business guide out there advises doing exactly the opposite. So when a copy jumped out at my on the "Most Requested" shelf at my beloved Bart's Books on a recent trip to my equally-beloved Ojai, I figured I'd pick it up and use it in tandem with my friend Jason Womack's new book, The Promise Doctrine, and once and for all, I'd whup this over-promising thing.

Imagine my surprise when I found that for three years, I've had the wrong takeaway rattling around in my poor, overloaded brain. Memory is faulty, but it's faulty in reliably illuminating ways: what I'd conveniently forgotten was that being impeccable with one's word meant not using it in vain, against yourself or anyone else. Negative self-talk? The root of most problems, since the Toltecs (the tradition author don Miguel Ruiz hails from) believe that you need to get right with yourself before you can truly get right with the rest of the world. Being impeccable, literally, not doing harm with one's word means not using it as a destructive force in any way, but instead using it to tell the truth, to express love (which, in a bit of sneaky-pete dovetailing, turns out to BE the Truth) and build good things, like bridges of communication.

And there's a special circle of hell reserved for those who use their words to gossip. Bonus-extra? You're living in it. No, really, you're making a hell on Earth when you participate in word slime, either by spreading it or letting it land. Very practical, those Toltecs, to hell with the Hell of certain religions who shall go unnamed: let's get this man-made hell sorted first, anyway.

The other three agreements, not to take things personally, not to make assumptions, and always to do one's best, fall naturally from the first. While any one of them could certainly stand alone, it seems like they work especially well as buttresses for that primary agreement. Not taking things personally, in this context, is the inverse of being impeccable with one's word: if you adhere to it, it stands to reason you'd have some protection against other people not being impeccable with their word. Not making assumptions works the same way (as if Felix Unger's stunning bit of definitive logic wasn't enough to convince you). And always endeavoring to do one's best is not just supportive of the first agreement, it's Do-Bee 101.

One warning for those interested in a four-simple-steps approach: if I haven't made it obvious, simple doesn't mean easy, especially here. I've screwed up enough times at both really simple and really easy stuff to know. It's not even easy to get through: at 138 pages, The Four Agreements is a short book but not an especially breezy read.

Or perhaps I should say that for some of us who could really use the information contained within, extraction will be easier if we take it slowly...

xxx
c

• Buy The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, A Toltec Wisdom Book on Amazon
• Read don Miguel Ruiz entry on Wikipedia (the personal site is down as of this writing)
• Read descriptions of the four agreements on Wikiquote

Image by midiman via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Referral Friday: 11:11

Referral Friday is part of an ongoing series inspired by John Jantsch's Make-a-Referral Week.* For more about that, and loads more referrals for everything from cobblers to coaches to gee-tar teachers, start here. Pass it on, baby!

Well, it happened again, South By Southwest is just around the corner, and once again, I'm going to be scrambling to get my new cards done in time.

Honestly, though, I only care about the cards because I'm so screamingly, trippingly excited to whip out my brand, spankin' new, super-foxy card holders from 11:11.

Who to the what now?

Don't worry if you haven't heard of them yet. You will. Jamila Tazewell & Patrick Ladro, the wife-and-husband co-owners of 11:11, makers of the world's cutest ready- and custom-made vinyl hold-y products, will be well-known soon enough. Oprah-known, if I (and you, only you don't know it yet) have any say in it.

The weird backstory

Patrick and Jamila found me in the most normal of modern ways: via Chris Guillebeau, when he announced his L.A. visit (which I helped pull together, as I am a crazy-mad fangirl of young Mr. Guillebeau). Only...he remembered me from somewhere else, like acting. Because he used to act in commercials, like I did, so he used to read my L.A. Casting column, and, well, you get the picture.

Speaking of pictures

This is where Jamila comes in. She's been designing these adorable business-card holders and checkbook holders and other groovy holder-type things for awhile. A-dorable. And since we all have all this stuff in common, and they like my stuff, as a kind of thank-you Jamila makes me a custom business-card holder and Patrick sends it to me. And I go NUTS for this thing because it's everything I want in something like that: cute, small, light and plastered all over with my picture.

So I say, "Hey! We need to make this a Referral Friday feature and get the word of this out there: can you give my readers a deal?"

And Patrick is like, "Hey! Righteous!" And even offers to send me a bunch more, so I can show them off at SXSW and totally make all the other cool kids jealous. HA. Take THAT, cool kids!

Anyway. Here's the deal.

Fabulous deal for readers of communicatrix-dot-com only! Go to the 11:11 shop on Amazon and...

• Buy any one 11:11 enterprises item on Amazon.com and get 10% off
• Buy 2 or more 11:11 items on Amazon.com and get 25% off

BONUS-EXTRA! I have it on good authority that if you buy two or more items with this code, 11:11 will throw in a random cardholder as a free gift. Rock the hell on, mighty soldiers!

Make sure to enter this promotion code at checkout: COMX9999

(Look, Ma! My own special checkout code!)

Offer good on orders placed from today, Friday, February 26th - Tuesday, March 2nd, and only on orders from the Amazon store. If you want custom items, well, you'll have to take it up with Jamila and Patrick yourself. And no discounts. That I know of, anyway.

This is my first special communicatrix offer and I am so excited to offer it. Don't be a jerk, order a bunch. Make me look good. For yourself! For your friends! Because how cute are these as gifts, right? You're gonna get one free if you buy two!

Full disclosure: the kids have thrown me a few of these for free, because that's how they roll. But I'm'a order me a jet-plane passport holder and a Siamese kitty checkbook cover anyway, full boat (minus discount!). Because that's how I roll, mothatruckas!

xxx
c

Full set of photos available to view at Flickr.

*And so you know, the SECOND ANNUAL Make-a-Referral Week kicks off on Monday. Hop to it for the info, and get on board the get-this-goddamn-economy-moving-for-the-little-guy train!

Book review: The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb

I am not one known for my godliness. Church makes me itch, I've been a doubter from way back before I knew there were such things, and, while I've been exposed to big, honking chunks of it thanks to eight years of Catholic school, I've never read the Bible all the way through. Those "begats," they always put me to sleep.

I've always found the idea of comic-book renditions kinda suspect, as well. Sure, there are some stories in there that lend themselves to literally graphic retelling: look what DeMille did with Exodus and 4 million extras; I do, at least once a year. But the various panels I'd seen made these efforts seemed more like sucker bets, ways of roping in kids and the egregiously impatient, more like Jesus porn than anything really illuminating. Illustration, like design, should earn its keep, not be reduced to cheap gimmickry or decoration.

Revelations from the genius of documentation

R. Crumb's cartoons have been illuminating things for me since I stumbled on them at the tender age of seven or eight, in a stack of other grownup-type reading material at my grandparents' apartment.¹ It took a while for my baby brain to catch up, but I now realize that Crumb's work was my first exposure to drawings carrying equal weight with words in grownup storytelling. Plus, you know, there were all of those great, dirty pictures. Way more interesting than the back issues of Playboy I also unearthed in Grampa's study (which to an eight-year-old were already pretty interesting).

Dirty subject matter will only get you off so far, though. Once you'd burned through the material a first time, for the naughty bits, you could go back and pore over the minutiae. I'm a fan of minutiae, by which I mean I can get a little OCD at times; re-reading early Crumb is very soothing, and it only gets better as he gets older and his talent deepens and his scope widens, not a lot, just enough to incorporate his other interests, like old-time blues and jazz, or the creeping industrialization of the countryside, or, now, really old stories about where we come from.

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb is book-ended by an illuminating forward, where he documents (in hand-drawn lettering) his impetus for creating the book and acknowledges the great amount of help given him in bringing it to life, and an equally illuminating commentary (in mercifully legible typeset characters) at the end, where he discusses various pertinent items concerning the content and background of the chapters.

Do yourself a favor and read the book all the way through first, without skipping ahead to peek at what are basically extended footnotes. While the commentary helps make some sense of a few really impenetrable parts, for the most part, I found myself fully sucked into these ancient stories, begats inclusive, in a way I never have before. I wondered about all the people I sprang from (at least half of them directly descended from Noah's son, Shem, according to this particular history); even more, I started to wonder about all the people and stories who weren't in the book, the ladies doing the begatting, for instance, and how some of their stories really, really didn't add up. Crumbs drawings pull you in and slow you down even as they make you want to race through and gobble the story up whole. Reading this version of some of the greatest stories ever told is maddening and intoxicating and, yes, interesting.

"Goddammit, this is a good book!"

As God is my witness, those are the exact words I spoke, out loud and without thinking, when I finished the whole shebang, and, I think, why Crumb's work is a triumph: it engages people who might not otherwise engage with these ancient stories, and provides a way for us to plug into the ancient throughline of humanity. Despite predictable accusations from certain quarters, the book is as far from titillating as you can get when you're talking about a work where every five seconds, it seems, someone is either smiting someone or begatting with them. As more reasonable members of the religious community seem to have pointed out, it ain't like the stuff isn't written in there, people.

It's unlikely that I'll have a conversion experience even having had my first connection with a holy text. But like my brothers and sisters on the other side of this great religious divide, I now have an interest in a story we share. That's a shared place, and shared places can be the beginning of mutual understanding, right?

Or not. But either way, it's a helluva good read...

xxx

c

• Buy The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb on Amazon (affiliate link)
• Watch video interviews of R. Crumb with Francoise Mouly (co-editor of the amazing RAW magazine)

¹By piecing together various stories, dated documentation and memories, I finally deduced that the underground comix in question had been a gag gift for my grandfather's massive 60th birthday bash, although given his interest in keeping up with the times as they were a-changin', he may have bought them himself: Gramps was hip to Dylan when Dylan was coming up on the scene, and had the ancient LPs to prove it.

Images by Rachel Kramer Bussell and ideowl via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Referral Friday: Shatterboxx Media

If you're reading this via email or RSS, you probably won't notice, but maybe, just maybe, you'll want to click on through to the other side today.

Because finally, as of today (or a little bit of yesterday that barely counts), I've managed to wrest this poor little blog from the ganky clutches of Frankenstein code I've cobbled together from various WordPress themes over the years, and into nice, clean Thesis.

Or rather, Jamie Varon and her team at Shatterboxx Media have.

Are you here yet, on the site? (Go on, do it! I'll wait!) Okay, even if you won't right now, at some point, you're going to need to visit the site for something, back issues of the newsletter archives** or to find that recipe for Strawberry-Chicken-Walnut Salad* you've been dreaming about for years but finally are going to make this spring, for reals. And when you do, that site's pages will load and reload and load again like a, well, I was going to make a luge joke, but it's really too soon, even if it is a dreadful sport I never saw the point of.***

That's because Thesis has been optimized within an inch of its life, or at least, a helluva lot better than Colleen's Third Grade Stabs at Fixing CSS Code (which is an insult to nine-year-olds everywhere, I know). I laughed, laughed, I tell you!, at the idea that cleaning things up could positively affect page load; I figured the biggest benefit would be that I could now go in and fiddle under the hood and actually change things, instead of that code just staring back at me in that mysterious, impenetrable way. But no, ZIPPITY-DOO-DAH, the pages, they are loading! Which means all sorts of other nerdy bits of goodness, like Google's bots having an easier time of indexing my pages and (we can only hope)  much lower "bounce rates" born of frustration.

What is most important to you, the reader (and I hope, potential blogger/website owner) is knowing about Jamie. She is fast, she is good, she provides excellent value and, glory hallelujah!, she is patient. We talked back in June of last year, after which conversation I immediately plunked down a 50% deposit (when you know, you know), after which...nothing. Because of me and my busy, busy schedule, and my massive disorganization and plate-spinning and such. Jamie just calmly emailed me now and again to touch base, to see what was what, to see if I needed any help/nudging.

When I finally gave the go-ahead, we had an easy-breezy 1/2-hour conversation about what I wanted vs. what had to happen; 24 hours later (if that), I had a schedule and a plan. Bada-bing, bada-boom! All of life should work this easily.

One more note: I'm not an affiliate for many items, even multiple items for the same person. I became an affiliate for Thesis because after installing it on The Virgo Guide to Marketing, I fell in love with its ease of use. There's massive support for Thesis, and a big user community. If you're really terrified of doing anything yourself, there's a community of nice Thesis devs like Jamie and her partner and team who can help you with what you need for a reasonable fee. But really, it's a great way to get your feet wet with webby stuff, because it's so danged simple.

Brava, Shatterboxx! Bravo, Thesis!

Now, let's get back to work...

xxx
c

UPDATE 7/16/10: While for now, this site is still using the Thesis theme, I can no longer recommend Thesis due to concerns I have about the ethics surrounding its release.

I may write a longer post about this, but for now, I'll simply say that I'm very concerned about the hard line Chris Pearson is taking on the WordPress license issue, and very upset with myself for not doing due diligence when researching replacement themes for Grid Focus. I'd been meaning to take down my affiliate links anyway (more on that, soon, too, in the form of a policy) so I've gone ahead and done that, but I'm really hoping that Chris will do the right thing and release Thesis under the GPL, the license that WordPress itself is released under, and which all iterations are supposed to carry.

I still recommend Jamie Varon if you have your heart set on a Thesis customization.

• Visit Shatterboxx Media's website

*Yeah, sorry, I know I didn't link to the actual post, but ain't it great how FAST the site loads!?

**Uh...what I said above.

***Unless Dreamhost is down, AGAIN, and nothing is loading, in which case all you'll get is a stupid "502 Error" page. Ugh.

Image by clevercupcakes via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

10 in 2010: Chunking out goals

As one of my 10 goals in 2010+ is "Get back on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet 100%," I probably should have spent Fat Tuesday whooping it up with all of the sugar, rice, wheat, chocolate, potatoes and etcetera (lots and lots of "etcetera" on the SCD) I won't be able to eat anymore.

Instead, I holed up in a favorite coffee shop with a green tea and, while I waited for my friend from Portland to show up for our visit, I set about breaking out this monstrous, slippery to-do into smaller, hopefully more manageable tasks.

Some goals lend themselves to chunks. As I've mentioned before, my breakthrough moment with "Read a book a week" came when Julien Smith shared his own chunking solution: read 40pp per day. It's obvious in hindsight, but when you're panicking at the thought of how to do something you've never done before (or haven't done since your early 20s), looking at books as roughly 280pp units and then doing some quick division ain't the first solution you try applying.

My new Nei Kung practice shakes out the same way: "Practice Nei Kung every morning" has a built-in chunking mechanism; it's expressed as a chunk. (The morning part I'm facilitating by tying it to a morning routine, which is another pro-tip Julien puts forth in his excellent post. I swear, I'll keep linking to it, so you might as well go read it now.)

Compared to reading and Nei Kung, "Get on SCD 100%" is a slippery mollusk. While being on "100%" is both a clear metric and in keeping with SCD tenets*, it doesn't help me "be" on SCD day to day. I like to-dos; to-dos make for a regular and orderly life.

So I sat down and brainstormed a number of activities I can do to help support my transition back to and then my staying on the SCD. They include:

• expunge cupboards of all SCD "illegals"
• cull non-SCD-legal and/or non-"keeper" recipes from recipe binder
• create running grocery list
• check running grocery list
• make SCD-legal baked goods in bulk (e.g. almond-flour cookies, breads, etc.)
• make SCD-legal freezer-portion foods in bulk (e.g. stews, chilis, pizza sauce, etc.)
• search new recipes for SCD-legalization possibilities
• shop farmers' market

Some of the items are daily things I can check off, and very small. Just because you've committed to a big annual goal doesn't mean every ding-dong day has to involve pushing a c*cksucking boulder up a motherf*cking hill. Some days, you just want to look at your running list and check the fridge, freezer or pantry for supplies. Other days you might only have the gumption to spend five minutes surfing epicurious for Paleo recipes you can convert, or even email a chef-y friend for suggestions on how to fabricate legal substitutes for some craved food.**

And there's no law that says you can't find to-dos that kill two goals with one stone. I'm also looking to make more plans with friends this year; who says one of them can't be "Go with so-and-so to farmers' market on Sunday"? Not me. I wouldn't say that.

One final note: to get myself started with the list, I asked myself a couple of "how and why" questions: how does the diet work for me, and why do I want to be on it?

When I initially got on, the answers were clear and obvious: to not die; to get out and stay out of the hospital. As I've moved further away from peril (praise the sweet baby jesus), it's become more difficult to come up with pressing reasons. To get off of meds? Yeah, a worthy goal; these immunosuppressants are hell on your liver, long-term. For me, the reasons are now tied to other things, like having the energy to really apply myself to my other big goals. I do NOT want another repeat of last December, when I viewed my previous year's list of goals and saw six or seven out of ten unaccomplished.

Therefore, since I know that in the moment those BIG goals aren't necessarily enough to keep me on the straight and narrow, I needed to look at some tactical stuff, too: what daily to-dos can I put in place to remove friction? To make it easy to say "no" to Mr. Delicious French fry, or at least, easier?

For me, it's about not letting myself get hungry and not letting myself feel deprived. So some of my to-dos can become:

• prep travel bags of snacks for on-the-go
• think up more games to keep myself motivated
• look at pictures of bloody transverse colon pre-SCD

Kidding on that last one, sort of. Truthfully, "Watch Ignite video" would make a really great to-do for a given day, since it is both a graphic reminder of what I went through to get here (and what I never want to go back to, ever), and a motivator to stay on track with one of my other goals, which is to do more speeches that I feel really make a difference.***

But that is another goal story for another day...

xxx
c

*At least initially, being on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet calls what our beloved Elaine called "fanatical adherence": the smallest cheat nulls the effect, since what you're striving for is a removal of all opportunistic, "bad" bacteria in the gut, and the slightest trace of something juicy will keep the bastards alive. Once you're on and symptom-free for two years, you can consider an indulgence here and there. Although as I seem to be an abstainer rather than a moderator when it comes to things like French fries or Italian bread with a gnarly crust and chewy tooth, I'm just off of it, period.

**I've been dreaming of those greasy sesame sticks you buy by the pound at Trader Joe's, and my friend Wayne said, "Oh, I love figuring out stuff like that." So there you go. Make someone else's day into the bargain.

***And who said you can't kill two goals with one story? Not me. Never me!

Image by Muffet via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

10 in 2010: Reading 52 books!

As I close out my goal-setting for the coming 12 or so months*, I thought I'd post a few of the more universally-relevant (i.e., non-private) ones to the blog for the hell of it.

The first one is the easiest (and thus far, most enjoyable): READ 52 BOOKS.

As I noted in an earlier post about goal-setting in general, I lifted the idea (with permission! and encouragement, even!) from Julien Smith, co-author (with Chris Brogan) of the wonderfully-written Trust Agents, the book I most often recommend to people looking to wrap their brains around the whole social media thing. Julien has written several times about his attempts to read more in general, and to read a book a week, specifically. In 2009, he figured out a key secret, read 40pp per day, and broke through to complete his goal for the first time.

Five weeks and change into 2010, I'm pleased to report that it's working out quite well. I'm 12 books into the goal, with another well underway. I wanted to front-load as much as I could, as I had the time now, you know, bank a few books, but really, the "52" is just a metric: my goal is to READ MORE BOOKS and READ BOOKS MORE OFTEN. So really, I'm hoping to read many, many more books than those 52; I'm just honoring my theme for 2010 ("MORE ROOM") by doing a little front-loading. It's not like I'm gonna stop once I hit that 52nd book.

I went back and forth on whether or not I should share my list of books read. Not that there are any especially compromising choices: mostly, it was about maintaining a level of privacy for myself and a measure of respect for authors in general. As you'll see from the running list I decided to make public, there are several books I've chosen not to review, and I don't want anyone getting the wrong idea about this. My decision to review is based on a whole slew of factors that have nothing to do with merit, among them available time, alignment with my personal goals for this site and my "brand" (such as it is), and perceived value to the people who read here regularly.

For the same reason, I've decided not to keep a running list of books I'm currently reading or that are under consideration. I'd love to read everything that catches my eye, and to finish everything I pick up, but one is impossible and the other, I've finally decided, is folly. Every book is not for me just like every person or food or sport is for me. (Actually, almost no sports are for me, but that's another story for another day.) And even though we're all grownups, I know I'd probably be hurt if, pardon me, when I write my first book and learn of that first friend or acquaintance or utter stranger didn't finish it. Ouch. But there it is. So this is my sad little fix for it.

Finally, some books require more integration and/or implementation before I can speak to their utility in a way that's illuminating.** For example, I could review Nonviolent Communication favorably right now in terms of the value and insight I got from a first reading of it, but that first reading made it abundantly clear that the real value of a book like that is the reward from implementing the system outlined within, and I can hardly do that until I've done that. It's also why I'm very comfortable reviewing really old (but useful!) books like Simple Abundance, Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life or The Little Book of Moods. (Look for other utterly non-newsworthy reviews on The Artist's Way and Your Best Year Yet in this space!)

That said, I do welcome any suggestions based on favorites I've already enjoyed. If you look at the list of books I've reviewed, period, you should get a pretty good idea: there's not a one under 3-stars, and 95% are 4-star and up. So feel free to be my human algorithm!

Just don't berate me if I don't choose, or choose to finish, your suggestion...

xxx c

*I'd intended a January 1 start date, like most of the rest of the goal-setting world. This got pushed to February 1, then Groundhog Day (the 2nd), and now we're looking at February 15th as a final-final start date. But a few goals are underway, and the "Read 52 Books" launched on January 1st, because I was hot-to-trot for it.

**This is not to say that timely reviews of all kinds of "how-to" books can't be immensely valuable, just that I'm not the person to write them. I'm very grateful for those early adopters with mad skills in a particular area and writing skills to match who get in there and do the important work of early reviewing.

Image by Photos8 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Referral Friday: Hotel Vertigo

Once upon a time, I was a medium-big traveler.

I never did it as much as my friends Shane or Chris, and certainly not as much as my father (o, he of the fabled American AAirpass!), but for a goodly stretch of my life, say, 22 - 32, I got around, and when I got there, I parked it in hotels.

I am a big fan of hotel-staying over couch-surfing, even when the couch is a lovely guest room with private bath or a beautiful detached guest house all to oneself on Mt. Tamalpais. (Yes, really. Another lifetime, and of course, friends of my father's.) Unless my generous hosts are nowhere near the premises, I have problems with staying in someone else's space.* Real, serious, physical problems.** Travel is hard enough on non-hardy introverts; throw a lot of activities into the mix, even activities you really, really enjoy, like hanging out with beloved friends, and you have a recipe for fried circuits and an exhausted nervous system, especially when you're talking Virgos with Cancer rising.

What I am not a big fan of is overpaying for comfort. I'm down with comfort, but when it edges into what I call luxury, I get uncomfortable. I like parking my own car, hauling my own luggage, brewing my own espresso. If I had my way, I'd either rent houses or have my own everywhere I went (which is a lot of houses, probably even Oprah wouldn't want to do that.) And yeah, I know that makes me just as much of a Wussy McWusserton, first-world person of privilege as any fatcat who stays at the Four Seasons on expense account. I guess my style is more "do whatever you can to fly under the radar while still protecting your soft, chewy center." If there's a tag like that.

So what I do now when I travel, especially right now, when I'm feeling a little bit tender and I need to travel, is find a great place with the right kind of "luxury" that doesn't break the bank. This means such critical stuff as clean, safe, sleepy-bye bedding and (premium) cable, basically, somewhere that is at least as nice as my humble little rent-stabilized one-bedroom in an undisclosed area of Los Angeles. (Which, now that I think of it, is exactly what I've always wanted from a home-away-from-home, which is why some of those places seemed Saudi-prince-level-luxurious back when I lived with drafts and vermin in my Brooklyn shithole.)

Enter the Hotel Vertigo in just-a-little-too-beautiful-for-me San Francisco.

Named after the legendary Hitchcock classic, the Vertigo is one of a fambly of charming San Francisco hotels, each of which seem to be hipster-rehabbed properties which might have fallen on hard times. It's beautifully decorated, loads of hipster color combo orange-'n'-brown, furry scatter pillows, and Vertigo art, with wonderful attention to Colleen-crucial details: kickass bed/bedding, non-chintzy bathroom and bath accessories, adequate setup for on-the-road computing. The wise folk who run it are exceptionally blogger-savvy: like the Roger Smith in New York (a place you can bet your ass I'll check out next chance I get, and similarly tout if it's great), they go out of their way to accommodate nerds, and as a nerd, I say, It's about fucking time this got me something!***

But they're nice to everyone, or at least, they were as far as I could see. Can I tell you what a relief it is to find service that is great without being obsequious or otherwise creepy? Because it is. Like my recent world-changing experience with Virgin America, I now believe that there is some way to staff up with normal, nice, smart human beings, and then empower and treat said staff well enough that they continue to act like nice, normal, smart human beings whose job happens to be helping you deal with life on the road.

Because then, not only do your customers get their reservations sorted out by an actual friendly human when they stupidly screw up their flight plans; not only do they  get their airport transfers handled with something bordering on elegance; you get wild, crazy evangelists to go forth and do all your promoting for you for FREE. ZOMFG, the world may end, it's such a radical business plan!

In my perfect world, there would be a wonderful little hotel like the Vertigo in San Francisco, or the Camas Hotel in picturesque Camas, WA, or the Jupiter in Portland, OR (only maybe a little quieter, for us fogeys), in every town I ever stepped foot in as a traveler: affordable, enjoyable, accommodating, non-icky.

Maybe there is. But I won't know about them unless we all start telling each other. How about it, nerds? Give 'em up in the comments?

xxx c

*In case you're curious, I actually have a few outrageously generous and well-to-do friends who offer up their cush cribs to me while they're on the road, for which privilege I happily run out and buy them all manner of shit for their houses, from coffee machines to designer toilet brushes to wireless routers.

**There were times when The Chief Atheist or The Youngster and I stayed with his parents where I would not poop for a week. A WEEK. Thankfully, The BF was 100% fine with not staying on the family property; that he shared my convictions of "camping" meaning "staying at a motel without premium cable" was one of many reasons we lasted as long as we did.

***Seriously, they could not have been more delightful and accommodating at every turn

Image by karen.tkr via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Book review: Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin

I think I understand why people say they don't like a particular slice of culture, vampire fiction, for example, from the bookish point of view, or reggae, from a musical one, but it's always made me a bit sad.

By all means, bypass the crap, life is too short to read shitty science fiction, and the drive from your garage to the street is too long to listen to most Contemporary Country, but closing yourself off from all of it? That means you lose out on losing yourself in the far-out worlds of A Wrinkle in Time, one of the most enjoyable books from my childhood (and one I reread in adulthood) or singing along to Carrie Underwood's Sonny & Cher Show-era story song, Before He Cheats. So why would you do that?

I'm a shameless consumer of fine-quality "crap," by which I mean only "that which is not generally regarded as highbrow by anyone." I love Valley of the Dolls, The Brady Bunch, Showgirls and a slew of confectionary mid-century movies, not to mention my beloved Play Misty for Me. And really, I think my view makes more sense: is Take the Money and Run the "lesser" Woody Allen movie for being funnier, or am I really supposed to like Shadows and Fog more for its impenetrable artsiness?

I say roll with the finest in every genre and you can't go wrong! Balls-out comedy? Try Caddyshack or Blazing Saddles: well-written, well-acted and rollicking fun from beginning to end. Hot Western action? Take your pick, but I'd start with Shane or Deadwood (unless you're looking for campy, noirish Western, in which case it's Johnny Guitar all the way. There are great musicals (Singin' in the Rain), great chick flicks (Thelma & Louise), great horror films (Psycho), great melodramas (Gone with the Wind). There's even great porn, and if you don't believe me, you  haven't seen Deep Throat (but you should, unless you're really delicate).

I feel the same way about books, including celebrity tell-alls. Yeah, most of them are junky, but that just makes the good ones, I'm with the Band, Pamela Des Barres' super-dee-duper autobio chronicling her days on the Sunset Strip in groovy, rock-a-licious, '60s L.A., that much better.

This is my long-winded way of teeing up comedienne/actress Kathy Griffin's new memoir, ingeniously titled Official Book Club Selection, as the true slice of hilarious awesomeness it is. Okay, how awesome? It's I-read-the-whole-thing-on-my-Kindle-app-for-iPhone awesome! It's "I laughed out loud 25 times!" awesome. It's even well-written awesome. (Not that I think Griffin would be a bad writer, just that with everything she has going on, I figured there's no way she'd have time to write it. Maybe that's why she brought on Robert Abele to write it with her, uncredited up front, but credited front and center and in no uncertain terms in the acknowledgements. That, my friends, is the mark of a class act.)

I will confess that however prickly I may have found Kathy Griffin to be when I knew her at the Groundlings (her star was well on the rise during my tenure), she was always nothing but classy. She offered up her house for a mutual friend's memorial service, I'm not 100% certain she knew him well. And when I got my ass kicked to the curb and ran into her at a play elsewhere, she was the perfect combination of "That sucks" and matter-of-fact, allowing for bitterness but with a laugh, and always with compassion.

So yes, there's dish in this book. How could it have the Griffin imprimatur and not? But there is also tremendous heart and genuine humor, as well as a stunning example of the kind of tenacity and work ethic necessary to get from any old place to somewhere special.

I loved the hell out of this book; if you can tolerate the outré with your humor, I can't imagine that you wouldn't, too...

xxx
c

• Buy Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin on Amazon
• Visit Kathy Griffin's website

Image ©Random House or Kathy Griffin or someone else, but not me.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Referral Friday: Virgin America

Referral Friday is an ongoing series inspired by John Jantsch's Make-a-Referral Week. For more about that, and loads more referrals for everything from cobblers to coaches to gee-tar teachers, start here. Pass it on, baby!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFfcqQb1Vf4&w=475&h=381]

I got a little carried away by my newfound love for Sir Richard Branson's winged brainchild.

On my second trip in as many weeks, I plugged in the laptop, plunked down $12.50 for some in-flight WiFi and did a little screencast plug for the greatest thing to happen to commercial aviation since the 747 Lounge. Roughly five minutes; if you can't see it on your screen, you can view it on the YouTube.

xxx
c

Linchpin: An interview with Seth Godin on fear, change and the importance of making art everywhere

That Seth Godin has a new book coming out is generally a cause for celebration. Seth has a knack for teasing out one big, necessary idea and illuminating it in a way that makes it seem obvious, post-reveal, without ever coming across as obnoxious. That, my friends, is a gift.

So, too, is the way he chooses to share his gifts with the world. Seth regularly throws his weight behind people and ideas worthy of support, and has a special fondness for the Acumen Fund, an innovative, can-do nonprofit with a similarly iconoclastic chief executive, Jacqueline Novogratz. Moreover, he combines his various loves and interests in innovative ways, modeling the very behavior he describes so well in his books about marketing: for his latest book, Linchpin, he offered 3,000 early review copies to his readers willing to donate a minimum of $30 to the Acumen Fund; so eager/loyal are his readers, he hit his mark just 48 hours in, raising over $100K for Acumen.

In a further example of walking the walk, Seth reached out to a group of his regular devotees (or, in my case, an irregular one) to assist with promotion: would we read even earlier, advance portions of his book, and interview him about the material on our blogs, and post them all on one day in a big, glorious, central round-up of semi-anarchic, semi-choreographed promotion?

Uh, yeah. Yeah, we would do that.

So here is my interview with Seth on the themes of his latest book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? The interview questions are based on the advance pages I read; I've since read the entire book, and could have a whole other interview based on the chapters about Resistance and "There Is No Map." Who knows? Maybe I will!

But don't wait: buy your copy now. Like The Dip and Tribes before it, Linchpin is one of those "must-reads" that, thankfully, doesn't read like one.

xxx
c

THE INTERVIEW

Colleen Wainwright: It seems like a central theme of your book is that we've fallen asleep: as creative beings, as free thinkers, as true individuals. Do you have any practical tips on waking the hell up? Or accurately gauging whether or not you're asleep?

Seth Godin: We haven't fallen asleep, we've been put to sleep. Actively brainwashed and hypnotized by industrialists in search of compliant factory workers and eager consumers. Of course, our genes were complicit, but please don't blame yourself.

And we're all asleep. Some are more awake than others (Spike Lee or Shepard Fairey or the guys who started the Four Seasons). Still, we stick with the status quo way more than there is any reason to. We do this because the system has persuaded us it's the only way.

As you guessed, the theme of my book is not to tell people what to do, but to identify the hypnosis and give us words and concepts we can use to wake each other up. Either that or we can keep shopping at the mall, driving an SUV and figuring out how to pay for our McMansion while we stress out doing by-the-book work at our by-the-book company that's getting its ass kicked by some startup with no overhead.

You say flat-out that one doesn't have to quit one's job to start effecting meaningful change. My own experience with trying to do that, back in advertising, was akin to banging my head against the proverbial wall. Does it only work for certain industries? For people higher up on the organizational food chain? Isn't there a point where we have to say, "Nope, not gonna happen here," cut our losses, and move on?

I think there may very well be times you need to quit, but most people never even get close to that. Most people say "my boss won't let me" and give up because they've bought into two myths: the first is that (as we saw above) the safe thing to do is play it safe, and the second is that your boss is crazy enough to take responsibility for your art. Why would she? You can't go to her and say, "I feel like doing something remarkable, if it doesn't work, will you take the blame?" Not the way it works. It turns out that if you start smallish and do remarkable stuff every day... make connections, be human, do the work, focus on things that matter, go the extra mile... then every day you'll get more chances to make things change.

Sure, it's possible that your boss will fire you. But if she does, is that the place you wanted to be anyway? Fired for delighting a customer? Fired for making a difference?

Odds are, not only won't you get fired, you'll get asked to let others in on your secret.

I love the concept of "emotional labor": that it's both mission-critical and wildly difficult. Also--and possibly even more significant--is that emotional labor is the Rodney Dangerfield of efforts, rarely garnering respect. How do we change that? Or does everyone signing onto the program have to get down with being the nutty Van Gogh of their endeavor or organization, only (if ever) appreciated after the fact?

There's not nuttiness on the table here. I'm proposing that you embrace the fact that the only thing you get paid for (unless you're a brilliant programmer, chemist or race car driver) is doing emotional labor. Bringing guts and ideas and love to work when you and others don't feel like it. That's your job. And the people who do that the best keep getting rewarded for it. Dishwashers don't get to whine about their chapped fingers, and white collar workers like us shouldn't whine about how hard it is to be generous and creative and flexible.

Speaking of "emotional labor," your statement that "Work is nothing but a platform for art and the emotional labor that goes with it" may be my favorite phrase you've ever coined (and you've coined a lot of good ones). It's basically saying that *anyone* can create art with what they do, right? But is that true? Can you be a corporate cog--a very small piece of the machinery, with a very unsexy job--and make art? What does that look like?

If you work for a company that truly prizes cog-hood... say you're an insurance actuary, or someone assembling pacemakers... I'd argue you should get out, now. Why? Because every day you spend there is a day where you give up value and a bit of your life. On the other hand, at just about every other job there's a chance to lead and make change and connect and create tiny breakthroughs. Which lead to more than tiny ones. I know people at giant famous companies that get to do this all day, every day. How'd they get that job? Because they started, and they continued and they pushed until it was their written role.

So, for example,

• Laurie Coots at Chiat Day spends most of her time causing trouble, disruptions and the creation of opportunity.
• When Robyn Waters was at Target, her job was to transform the organization from a K-Mart wannabe to Wal-mart challenger by bringing style and art and color to the inventory and mindset of the company.
• Donna Sturgess gets to do similar work at GlaxoSmithKline. She finds high bars and encourages people across the organization to jump over them. She makes art and change for a living.
• And at Starbucks, Aimee Johnson runs the group that developed both the high-end coffee maker they acquired and the new line of Via coffee.

I've met similar people at banks (!) and even General Electric.

Okay. Let's talk about fear, one of my least favorite (and most consuming) topics. If lizard brain, the thing that makes us react in the scared, small, self-preserving way, that just wants "to eat and be safe", is the source of resistance, it's pretty important to resist succumbing to it. How does one do that? It's not like you can sit down and have a heart-to-heart.

My other goal here is to scare you to your toes. To scare you NOT of standing out, but to scare you about fitting in. To scare you about your diminished role if you refuse to do emotional labor. To create a new fear, a fear that's greater than the fear of being your artistic genius self. Boo.

Giving, "free" and the honored Native American tradition of potlatch are all good, but where does it stop? We may no longer equate dying with the most toys as winning, but a gal's gotta make a living...right?

The more you give away, the more you get. This is actually a secret plan to have what you want and need and hope for, because the market (bosses, hiring companies, the market) love free stuff, and they'll stand in line for more... they'll bid for more... they'll pay for more... if you're the one who can deliver it. Be generous, make art, make connections, do work that matters and you don't have to worry about making a living. The secret of potlatch was that the big chief could give away EVERYTHING and he'd be even richer the next week.

• Read the rest of the Linchpin interviews with Seth Godin at this Squidoo page
• Buy Linchpin on Amazon.com
  

Image by jurvetson via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Book review: Outliers

Love him (I do) or hate him (many do), what most people find most vexing about Malcolm Gladwell's books are the conclusions he draws in them.

Connecting a to b to c and coming up with 9. Telling story after fascinating story only to sum them up hastily with a big, fat WTF? Because, as others have pointed out, the same interesting and facile mind that skitters across the surface from topic to interesting topic can't possibly dig deep into any one of them, much less be a schooled expert who has been soaking in the stuff since she was knee-high to a grasshopper, statistics at her fingertips and facility with fusing them into insights which are both truly new and truly supportable.* Because hey, he may be quicker and a better wordsmith, but he gets the same daily ration of 24 hours as the rest of us mere mortals.

So if the news isn't so newsy and the conclusions a bit iffy, why read Gladwell? Aren't those books over there in the business section, away from the "fun" sections, meant to edumacate ourselves with?

I say read Gladwell for two reasons. First, because he's ridiculously readable. Eminently readable. Deliciously, dazzlingly readable. You can devour his books in a sitting or two, smacking your lips all the way, because they're loaded to the gills with well-told, interesting stories. Avoid accepting anything as gospel (gospels very much included) and you can enjoy a whole lot more of everything, especially most business books.

The other reason to read Gladwell is because within the wonderfully-told stories are many, many useful nuggets you can take with you and muse on later. I may or may not buy into the broken windows theory of crime prevention, but I like that it stops me in my tracks and makes me wonder, "Well, what of this?" I like that it starts a conversation in my head.

Similarly, in Outliers, one particular exchange stuck in my head. It's a conversation between a Korean employee and his higher-up, and it's soaked in the kind of rich subtext that kept Pinter in business. I won't quote the dialogue here (too lazy to type, plus that copyright thing), but here's the salient point: what looks on the (Western, non-Korean) surface to be one thing is, in the context of the speakers' native land, something entirely different.** And, well, that makes me think quite a bit about my own, supposably rock-solid communicationz skillz, and how I should maybe-possibly watch out for the assuming and get better at the communicationz-ing.

Do not read Outliers, then, to discover the secret of success. You already know it: be lucky, be good, and work hard. Gladwell seems to be pointing to luck as the x factor, which right there is kind of a no-duh conclusion, but he is also saying (and says he's saying, so we're clear) that each of us can factor into one another's success. Done and done.***

Read it to find the stories that will inspire you to do or think the next good thing in your life.

Done. And done...

xxx
c

• Buy Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell on Amazon
• Watch a crapload of free video featuring Malcolm Gladwell (he really shines as a speaker)

*Via Gladwell's wikipedia entry, this NYT piece by Steven Pinker and this brutally cold takedown by Maureen Track for The Nation.

**The cultural anthropologists call the detangling of codes like this unpacking, which I love. My favorite unpacking story ever was related by Grant McCracken on his blog, which has been on my "read first" list for years, and which you should subscribe to right now. And if you're in business, you should also buy his latest book, Chief Culture Officer, which I'll review here at some point in the next couple of months. Go! Go!

***For example, you are my success and (hopefully), I am yours. Plus, if you click on one of these links, I get a nickel or something, which is helpful right now, I won't lie.

Update: Brad Nack's 100% Reindeer Art Show

I took a quick trip up north and my friend Brad Nack took an equivalent trip down south and we met in the middle, at delicious Papa Lennon's in Meiner's Oaks, where I took possession of FOUR, count 'em, FOUR, of the 2009 reindeer he painted for his 100% Reindeer Art Show.

It was fascinating getting an up-close-and-personal tour of the paradox of choice. Which I now understand can be neatly summarized as the paralysis of choice. More is not necessarily better: more is more.

Of course, objectively, I think it's a good thing that there are lots and lots more reindeer out there for other people to adopt. Not only is each piece I saw uniquely wonderful, there's something equally wonderful about each one coming from this incredibly large and rich and diverse herd, if you will, of paintings. We are more than for being a part of, that kinda thing.

Anyway, you can see the four I'm coming home with here. And if you would like a reindeer in your family, you should visit Brad immediately. They are very affordable, and require far less maintenance than regular reindeer, or so I am told.

In the meantime, do more with less, steady on, and, as Gramps used to say, keep your pecker up!

xxx
c

• Buy a reindeer via Brad Nack's website
• Read about Brad Nack on my site

Image by Colleen Wainwright via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.