Tag Archives: memories

Monday’s Link Roundup.

Monday's Link Roundup

In this Monday’s Link Roundup my favorite piece is Why there really is no place like home.  For those of us who interview people about their lives, this lovely essay reminds us of the richness of stories wrapped up in our homes. Speaking of life stories, don’t miss A Story for Generations: Home Front Girl.  The author recounts what it was like writing her mother’s personal history.

  • A Story for Generations: Home Front Girl. “Imagine this: you have access to the diaries of your mother or father: Windows into your family’s past. Snapshots of moments of history. What would this process be like? To sift through documents, to piece together a life — and, ultimately, your own family history? Susan Morrison, the blogger and author at Home Front Girl Diary, has this very story to tell.”
  • How Can I Record Calls on My Smartphone? “As long as you’re just looking to record your consensual conversations with coworkers, you should be fine, but for everyone else, it’s a good idea to brush up on when it’s legal to record calls first. That being said, you have a few options.”
  • Why there really is no place like home. “Houses are such complex repositories. Everything we have lived and felt is there in the frame of a window that looks out to the trees, in the folds of the curtains, the cushions of a sofa, in the bathrooms we never liked and in the kitchens we adored, in the slope of a deck and in the sound and feel of the door that slapped shut when we let it close behind us. Purposeful and pragmatic and calming with their sensible roofs, their square proportions, their sturdy heft, the serious, watchful eyes of their windows, they have heard and seen everything.”
  • The Bookstore That Changed My Life. “The sign on the door said EXPERIENCED BOOKS. I found the store while wandering around my new neighborhood after moving to Salt Lake City. The door opened and a guy walking a dog exited. He said, “Go in man, you’ll definitely leave with something.” This reminded me of the shop in Stephen King’s Needful Things. But then, books remind me of everything, and everything reminds me of books.”
  • How to Use LinkedIn to Your Best Advantage. “While I don’t actively think about it, I do have goals for how I use LinkedIn. As a consultant, I want to be sure that prospective clients can find me. I have also used the site to ensure that potential employers or recruiters can find me, as well as to find employees or partners. I want to be seen as knowledgeable in my area of expertise, and connected both geographically and in my profession (digital content strategy). I’m also a big believer in karma, so I am happy to forward introductions or share prospective leads for jobs or projects. It may be odd, but I believe that “competitors” are extremely valuable people to know. Here are my recommendations about how to use LinkedIn to your best advantage.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Monday's Link Roundup

In today’s Monday’s Link Roundup, don’t miss Memoir of time spent with Grandma reveals old truths, young wisdom.  I’ve read excerpts and it’s definitely on my list of must-read books. I love magazines and if you do too, you’ll want to take a look at The Art of Making Magazines. Thinking of using audio to compliment your marketing? You may be on the right track. Check out Is Audio The Next Big Thing In Digital Marketing?

  • I grew up in the future. “The future arrived much earlier in our house than anywhere else because my mother is an emerging technologies consultant…I would never want to be too far away from those who live and work perpetually in the vanguard, who have chosen that risky, Schrödinger’s Cat-like existence. Even after growing up with my mother and the remains of a hundred half-baked ideas, such people’s willingness to ride the wave, their foolhardiness and their bravery, still provokes awe in me.”
  • The Stories That Bind Us. “The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative…The [children] who know a lot about their families tend to do better when they face challenges…” [Thanks to April Bell of  Tree Of Life Legacies for alerting me to this item.]
  • In the Digital Era, Our Dictionaries Read Us. “With the spread of digital technologies, dictionaries have become a two-way mirror, a record not just of words’ meanings but of what we want to know. Digital dictionaries read us.”
  • The Art of Making Magazines. [Book review] “If a magazine still is what it’s been for almost three centuries—an ink-on-paper “storehouse” of writing, published on a regular schedule—then the “media industrial revolution” (to use Tina Brown’s awkward phrase) is surely in the process of rendering many of our magazines obsolete. Seen historically, The Art of Making Magazines—a collection of twelve lectures by esteemed editors, proofreaders, designers, and writers delivered over the last decade to graduate students at the Columbia School of Journalism—may have barely made its deadline.”
  • Memoir of time spent with Grandma reveals old truths, young wisdom.[Book review] “The Truth About Luck tells the story – charmingly and fitfully – of how the author, Iain Reid, decides to take his 92-year-old grandmother on a fantastical trip in order to bond with her. Immediately, Reid remembers that he is a cash-strapped writer who hates flying in planes, is the owner of a crummy, decomposing car and whose general constitution is, in many ways, far frailer than that of his grandma: a fearless, funny, sage-like woman who served as a nurse in Second World War.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Monday's Link Roundup

In today’s Monday’s Link Roundup, don’t miss Going through ‘treasures’ at my childhood home. If you’ve ever wondered why you’ve held on to your High School Yearbooks all these years, this is the article for you. And if you’ve wondered why the need for a good editor, be sure to read 7 Deadly Myths and 3 Inspired Truths About Book Editing.

  • How to Use LinkedIn to Your Best Advantage. “While I don’t actively think about it, I do have goals for how I use LinkedIn. As a consultant, I want to be sure that prospective clients can find me. I have also used the site to ensure that potential employers or recruiters can find me, as well as to find employees or partners. I want to be seen as knowledgeable in my area of expertise, and connected both geographically and in my profession (digital content strategy)…Here are my recommendations about how to use LinkedIn to your best advantage.”
  • Going through ‘treasures’ at my childhood home. “It struck me that I had kept all these boxes so that one day – this day, the day we cleaned out the crawl space – an older me could look through them and be reminded of who I had been. The boxes held examples of what I had valued and thought important enough to keep. They were signifiers of phases of my life, souvenirs from years past.”
  • Going In-Depth. “…is the free digital genealogy magazine presented by The In-Depth Genealogist. In each monthly issue, you’ll find guest articles, regular columns, and free resources such as Ask Ephraim and MIAA to help you along your family history journey. As with all IDG products, we strive to create a resource for every genealogist, no matter the age, stage, or focus of your research. Enjoy a new issue on the 15th of each month.”
  • 7 Deadly Myths and 3 Inspired Truths About Book Editing. “I’ve edited lots of books — children’s books, fantasy, memoirs, self-help, textbooks, and especially books about myths. Myths? I like myths. Heck, I love myths… If we’re talking about myths in the more negative sense of “untruths,” however, I like them less — especially if they’re myths about my profession and vocation.There’s a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding about editors and what they do. Here are seven of those myths that I’d like to clean up:”
  • The Essentials of Web Design That Works. “Our sites are created for human interaction. And we human beings — for all our splendiferous variety — share some universal behaviors, no matter where we’re from. As publishers to the open web, we ignore these behaviors at our peril. What are they? I thought you’d never ask. Here are a handful of essentials for designing websites that humans want to read …”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Monday's Link Roundup

In this Monday’s Link Roundup you’ll find a fascinating article on memory – The Mysteriously Memorable 20s. It seems that we more easily recall events from our early adulthood than any other period in our lives. And for some charming and poignant images, be sure to check out Intimate Portraits of Old Folks Dancing.

  • A calligrapher explains his art. “One of the big differences between a type designer and a calligrapher is that nobody much wants to watch a type designer at work. Creating and refining a font is painstaking work that requires a fastidious nature, to say the least. Calligraphy is an action sport by comparison – measured in seconds rather than months – and watching a calligrapher at work is oddly thrilling.”  [Thanks to Paula Stahel of Breath & Shadows Productions for alerting me to this item.]
  • Avoid Pricing and Discounting Mistakes. “As a business owner, what do you do when sales are sluggish and you want to offer a discount, but you don’t want to imply that your products and services are worth less by lowering the price?”
  • Dear America, Join Me in Writing a Letter From the Heart. “I had a most humbling conversation yesterday with a vivacious, 17-year-old young lady named Victoria. In discussions of homework, careers and her future opportunities, we somehow managed to cross into an abyss of sorts and completely unknown to her: letters. It seems that over the past 17 years of her relatively young life, she has never sent or received a handwritten letter. Have we advanced that far or, better yet, declined that far to the point that the handwritten word is no longer relevant?”
  • Intimate Portraits of Old Folks Dancing.”The famed Martha Graham once described dance as “a graph of the heart.” In her ongoing series Viv(r)e la Vie!, which we spotted thanks to Feature Shoot, Spanish photographer Ana Galan captures old couples dancing in different countries across the globe.”
  • The Mysteriously Memorable 20s. “What is it about twentysomethings in general? Why are we so fixated on the no-man’s-land between childhood and stable adulthood? A little-known but robust line of research shows that there really is something deeply, weirdly meaningful about this period. It plays an outsize role in how we structure our expectations, stories, and memories. The basic finding is this: We remember more events from late adolescence and early adulthood than from any other stage of our lives. This phenomenon is called the reminiscence bump.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Monday's Link Roundup

In today’s Monday’s Link Roundup, a must-read is Amnesia and the Self That Remains When Memory Is Lost. It’s a poignant recounting of the power of the self despite the ravages of a brain tumor. For book lovers, I can’t think of a better vacation than visiting The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World.  Care to join me? ;-) And for photographers, don’t miss 25 Amazing Things That Happened in Photo This Year.

  • The Darkling Thrush. “Hope is not an easy word to use well, in poetry or out of it. Evoking hope too easily can feel kind of glib or damp; saying there is none, though the opposite, can feel sentimental in a similar way. The right shade of belief and doubt can seem impossible to express. In his great poem for a new year, “The Darkling Thrush,” Thomas Hardy gets that kind of meaning right, I think. Hardy says he “could think” of a “blessed hope” of which he is “unaware.”
  • The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World. “With Amazon slowly taking over the publishing world and bookstores closing left and right, things can sometimes seem a little grim for the brick and mortar booksellers of the world. After all, why would anyone leave the comfort of their couch to buy a book when with just a click of a button, they could have it delivered to their door? Well, here’s why: bookstores so beautiful they’re worth getting out of the house (or the country) to visit whether you need a new hardcover or not.”
  • Amnesia and the Self That Remains When Memory Is Lost. “Tom was one of those people we all have in our lives — someone to go out to lunch with in a large group, but not someone I ever spent time with one-on-one. We had some classes together in college and even worked in the same cognitive psychology lab for a while. But I didn’t really know him. Even so, when I heard that he had brain cancer that would kill him in four months, it stopped me cold.”
  • Ted Hughes on the Universal Inner Child, in a Moving Letter to His Son. “The analogy between the artist and the child is that both live in a world of their own making,” wrote Anaïs Nin in her diary in 1945. Four decades later, 23 years after Sylvia Plath took her own life at the age of 30, Ted Hughes (1930-1998) wrote to their 24-year-old son, Nicholas. The letter, found in Letters of Ted Hughes (public library), is superb in its entirety and a worthy addition to history’s finest fatherly advice,..”
  • The Best Google Features You’re Probably Not Using. “Google is a vast machine with all types of apps, programs, and tools. A lot of these—like Gmail and Google Docs—are clearly useful and beloved by many. But hidden inside Google’s network are some awesome, lesser-known gems that can make your life easier.”

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Encore! How Old Letters and Recovered Memories Bring Satisfaction and Hope.

We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others.
 ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 

Last week I was doing some spring cleaning and came across a collection of letters I had written to my parents some forty-five years ago. At the time, I was a young man teaching in Ghana. After University I’d joined CUSO, a Canadian voluntary organization similar to the Peace Corps, and had been assigned to the West African country for two years. I’d asked my mother to keep these letters as a partial record of my experience…Read more.

Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup, if you swoon over typography, you’ll want to take a look at Elegantissima: The Design and Typography of Louise Fili.  It’s a feast for the eyes.  And for a more mindful approach to living, be sure to read A Primer on Full-Screen Living.

  • What is Narrative Therapy? ” Narrative therapy starts with the understanding that everybody’s life is multi-storied to an almost infinite degree.  If I were to sit down with you, and you were to talk non-stop 24 hours a day for 30 days about different things that have happened to you in your life, you would only have just begun to scratch the surface of all the stories associated with your life.  That’s because  stories are much more than events themselves.  They are perspectives, ways of making meaning about the situations we encounter.”
  • Book Review: Patrick Nathan on Boarded Windows. “The act of remembering — on a literal level it’s an act of creation. Every memory is rebuilt anew every time you remember it… What you’re remembering is that memory reinterpreted in the light of today, in the light of now. […] The more you remember something, in a sense, the less accurate it becomes. The more it becomes about you and the less about what actually happened.”
  • Elegantissima: The Design and Typography of Louise Fili. “For more than three decades, graphic designer Louise Fili* has been producing some of the most consistently exquisite typography, frequently hand-drawn and building upon thoughtfully curated vintage sources. In her decade as art director for Pantheon Books, she created nearly two thousand book jackets, each with remarkable attention to detail.”
  • Boost Your Freelance Brand 100 Percent with Your Expert Status. “To build a lucrative freelancing career, it isn’t enough to have the best skills out there, despite what these reality television shows may indicate. But you do absolutely have to be an expert: you need to be the person that advises your client so that they get the result they want, not the project they asked for.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
  • This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It). “When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”
  • Book Review: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price. “When is a book a book, and when is it something more? What is it that matters about books, and where is that meaning made? Why, and how, do we value books? And how has the meaning of books changed: what did books mean in an era experiencing the rapid rise of print, and what do they mean to us now as we shift into the digital age? These are all questions raised by Leah Price’s engaging and incisive How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.”
  • A Primer on Full-Screen Living. “What’s full-screen living? It’s a life where we allow one thing to take up the entirety of our attention — going into full-screen mode, like a video on your computer — while allowing everything else to fade into the background. Let’s take a look.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Happy Labor Day! I hope you’re resting from your labors today. If you’re looking for an enjoyable diversion, why not check out my Monday’s Link Roundup?  Every week I bring you an eclectic  mix of articles that I find fascinating and that relate in some way to life stories, memories, and self-employment.

  • In Andalusia, on the Trail of Inherited Memories. “There are scientific studies exploring whether the history of our ancestors is somehow a part of us, inherited in unexpected ways through a vast chemical network in our cells that controls genes, switching them on and off. At the heart of the field, known as epigenetics, is the notion that genes have memory and that the lives of our grandparents — what they breathed, saw and ate — can directly affect us decades later.”
  • The Next Big Idea From Twitter’s Founders? “Evan Williams and Biz Stone think their new site, Medium, could mark an “evolutionary step” in web publishing…their new venture, a platform for collecting and displaying stories, images, musings and more, isn’t just noteworthy for its web-visionary pedigree …In a sense, Medium’s intended to be a Pinterest for our own lives, an elegant repository for photos, projects, and stories we’ve actually lived, as opposed to a re-blogged clearing house for pictures of wedding dresses and eggs baked into avocados found elsewhere around the web.”
  • Apps for Journaling, Keeping track of your memories…“How do I keep my professional life separate from my personal life without driving myself crazy. I want to list a few apps that are possible solutions to this… I also want to list some differences between all of these that I have found.”
  • All About Me: How Memoirs Became the Literature of Choice. “Memoirs are the great equalizer of writing. In a genre utterly non-denominational, there is room for any story in any pattern of prose. The Christian Science Monitor reports that memoirs have seen sales increase from $170 million to $270 million since 1999. Most nonfiction MFA writing programs are geared substantially towards the genre; Hunter College even requires prospective students to submit a memoir proposal as part of their application. Many bookstores can count their autobiography sections among the most frequented and their popularity thrives.”
  • Anaïs Nin on Self-Publishing. “Besides artist and author, Nin was also a publishing entrepreneur. In January 1942, she sets up her own small press in a loft on Macdougal Street, and soon set out to print and self-publish a new edition of her third book, Winter of Artifice, teaching herself typesetting and doing most of the manual work herself.From The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944 (public library) comes this beautiful passage on the joy of handcraft, written in January of 1942 — a particularly timely meditation in the age of today’s thriving letterpress generation and the Maker Movement.”
  • Peter Sellers: His Life in Home Movies. [Video]“Peter Sellers was a compulsive home movie maker…In 1995, fifteen years after Sellers’s death, producers from BBC Arena sorted through his extensive archive and assembled some of the best footage for a film called The Peter Sellers Story. In 2002 they shortened it into The Peter Sellers Story: As He Filmed It (above), which tells the story of the comedian’s life almost exclusively with footage from his own camera.”
  • Attracting High-End Clients. ” Everyone wants to attract more clients. But I think it’s even more important to set your sights on attracting more High-End clients.”

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The Best of Monday’s Links Roundup.

These are some of my favorite articles  from last year. If you missed them the first time around, now’s your chance to catch up.

  • A Brief History of Film Title Sequence Design in 2 Minutes. “In his graduation project, an absolutely brilliant motion graphics gem, Dutch designer and animator Jurjen Versteeg examines the history of the title sequence through an imagined documentary about the designers who revolutionized this creative medium.”
  • A Crash Course in Marketing With Stories. “If you want your marketing to really sizzle, if you want people to remember it, you need to turn your marketing messages into stories. I’ve broken down the classical elements of story below so you can begin to think like a storyteller, and make your marketing messages stick.”
  • 10 Essential Books on Typography. “Whether you’re a professional designer, recreational type-nerd, or casual lover of the fine letterform, typography is one of design’s most delightful frontiers, an odd medley of timeless traditions and timely evolution in the face of technological progress. Today, we turn to 10 essential books on typography, ranging from the practical to the philosophical to the plain pretty.”
  • When Data Disappears. “…if we’re going to save even a fraction of the trillions of bits of data churned out every year, we can’t think of digital preservation in the same way we do paper preservation. We have to stop thinking about how to save data only after it’s no longer needed, as when an author donates her papers to an archive. Instead, we must look for ways to continuously maintain and improve it. In other words, we must stop preserving digital material and start curating it.”
  • Selling My Mother’s Dresses. “Some of my favorite things — including the sundress I’m wearing today and the Winnie the Pooh car that Jay is pushing our daughter in — are from someone else’s life. I find no joy in shopping at regular stores anymore…I love trying to sniff out a memory from a bud vase or a favorite song from a case of L.P.’s. The stains and broken switches, the bend in the knee of an old pair of jeans. Sometimes I just want to look at how many Mason jars one person can collect and imagine what they might’ve held. It’s comforting to know that someone has breathed and laughed inside a sweater before me. That I am part of a continuum.” [Thanks to Mary M. Harrison of Morning Glory Memoirs for alerting me to this item.]
  • Tracking Personal Histories Across Time. “Sander Koot’s series Back from the Future is a pairing of new portraits of the individual with an older picture of that person from years past.. he only photographs individuals after interviewing them. “In this project, I ask people to find old portraits of themselves, of which they have good memories,” says Koot. “When talking to them about the picture, you see them reliving the happy moment. Only after I know all the details about the past of that picture, (do) we start the shoot.”

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