RIP Professor...

Professor Randy Pausch, who gave us The Last Lecture, succumbed to pancreatic cancer today at the age of 47.

Rest in peace, Professor.

The Hero and the Outlaw

I finally finished reading Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson's The Hero and the Outlaw, which my cousin, the budding Jungian analyst, had recommended to me a few years back. Prior to launching her own strategic consulting firm, Mark was an EVP at Young & Rubicam. Pearon is a pioneer in the field of applied Jungian psychology and is the President of the Center for Archetypal Studies and Applications.

The book is a dense read which lays out 12 archetypes including the Innocent, the Explorer, the Sage, the Hero, the Outlaw, the Magician, the Regular Guy/Gal, the Lover, the Jester, the Caregiver, the Creator and the Ruler that can be leveraged to create brands that resonate with consumers. Later chapters apply the archetypes to organizations and illustrate how disconnects between the organizatonal archetype and the employee make-up could lead to employee dissatisfaction.

The one example that totally resonated with me was the discussion of the re-incarnated Volkswagon Beetle:

Jay Mays, the creator of the new Beetle...likes to say that the car's design concept is as simple as three concentric circles, invoking, but reinterpreting, the spirit of its earlier incarnation. But looking at the design through the archetypal lens, we see that the "face" of the new Beetle is virtually identical to the face of an infant - with big eyes and a high, smooth forehead...Now that face, the face of the Innocent, has found expression in a unique and charming automotive design...we look at the reincarnated Beetle and want to smile. We may not know why, but we feel that it would be really great to drive one, to own one. For some inexplicable reason, we would want to own one in a primary colour. What we intuit as consumers, but cannot express, is our delight that the Innocent has been resurrected in such a clever new way.


The emphasis above is mine: When I see a Beetle, without fail, I smile...even the thought of one makes me smile. There is a part of me that wants to own one in the cheery green above but I would never actually go out and buy one because it's too cute a car and I don't feel that I am a cute person, yet the thought of it gives me pleasure...My attraction to the lovable Bug was inexplicable to me before, but now I understand. The Beetle appeals to the Innocent in me.

Oh, and MAJOR pet peeve? The poor copy-editing! So awful and distracting! I had the same problem reading The Interpretation of Murder. Mark was referred to variously by her first name and her last name, which got to be rather confusing because her last name could be a first name, and I found misplaced articles and misspelt words. Why the sloppy copy-editing??! So unnecessary and very disappointing.

Profit from the Core

I read Chris Zook's Profit From the Core for the second time, not because it was so enjoyable the first time around that I felt the need to revisit it - I read it the first time to fulfill my CMA CLPD credits requirements - but because we've started a book club at work in our team and we've committed to reading a book every couple months for discussion, and this is the first title.

If you're ever in the mood for some business strategy, this is a quick read with some interesting case studies, including ones on Nike, Bausch and Lomb, and Dun & Bradstreet, and talks about how companies should focus on their core business in order to grow.

The Last Lecture

I finished reading Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture maybe a month ago but only just finished watching the lecture and it was amazing.

I first read about it in MorningNewsBeat, an industry eNewsletter I subscribe to for work and picked the book up soon after and was so glad I did because it's so very inspirational - a father giving a last lecture that's really meant for his 3 young children.

The topic and timing was so very interesting because 1) my father died of cancer abroad in China when I was a child so we never had a proper goodbye as he was there for treatment and 2) I had recently found out that wL's mother, who I already knew had died of cancer, kept her illness a secret and didn't tell her children or husband who was in Hong Kong at the time until she was literally in her deathbed. wL's birthday was just around the corner and I knew that I had to give him this book as a gift because I figured if there was anyone who would appreciate this book like I did, it would be wL.

From the dust jacket:

A lot of professors give talks titled “The Last Lecture.” Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can’t help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?

When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn’t have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave—“Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”—wasn’t about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because “time is all you have…and you may find one day that you have less than you think”). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.

In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.

The lecture runs just over one and a quarter hours but it's funny and insightful and heartwarming, and if you are so inclined, read the book. You will not be disappointed.

The Bookseller of Kabul

I finished The Bookseller of Kabul on my subway ride in this morning and...not sure how I feel about it...I didn't hate it, but I also didn't love it.

From the back cover:

This mesmerizing portrait of a proud man who, through three decades and successive repressive regimes, heroically braved persecution to bring books to the people of Kabul has elicited extraordinary praise throughout the world and become a phenomenal international bestseller. The Bookseller of Kabul is startling in its intimacy and details - a revelation of the plight of the Afghan women and window into the surprising realities of daily life in today's Afghanistan.

Instructions for Visitors

I picked up Helen Stevenson's Instructions for Visitors when I was in Hong Kong about 4 years ago and only just got around to reading it in the last week. I finished it a couple hours ago and am rather ambivalent about this particular title. I've read other literary travel about France before - always there's the element of romance - consider Sarah Turnbull's Almost French and Suzy Gershman's C'est La Vie - but I didn't find her written voice particularly engaging, which was rather a disappointment.

The Architecture of Happiness

I finished The Architecture of Happiness today and am a little sad that I have because that means I won't be spending the next subway ride home reading the erudite thoughts of Alain de Botton, my not-so-secret nerd crush.

His writing always strikes a relevant and oftentimes emotional chord for me and this book is no different. I had to re-read the following passage several times because he describes what has been top-of-mind for me the last few months as I've begun to commit and make purchases for my new home come August:

Our sensitivity to our surroundings may be traced back to a troubling feature of human psychology: to the way we harbour within us many different selves, not all of which feel equally like "us", so much so that in certain moods, we can complain of having come adrift from what we judge to be our true selves.

Unfortunately, the self we miss at such moments, the elusively authentic, creative and spontaneous side of our character, is not ours to summon at will. Our access to it is, to a humbling extent, determined by the places we happen to be in, by the colour of the bricks, the height of the ceilings and the layout of the streets...

...We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need - but are at risk of forgetting we need - within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.

In turn, those places whose outlook matches and legitimates our own, we tend to honour with the term "home"...

...We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.

AL teases me all the time about how much I have "going on up there" in my brain what with all the different virtual homes I have but I can't help it because there are so many different things that appeal to me for different reasons at different times - but in that moment, it feels like "me". So this was a helpful way to consider my seeming indecision about the interior design of my home.

Rereadings

I've read a number of books about writers writing about books and Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love is the most recent among them (the last couple include Anne Quindlen's Imagined London and Sara Nelson's So Many Books So Little Time).

Arthur Krystal's essay about H.C. Witwer's The Leather Pusher included an entire section about how readers grow over time, which struck a chord with me and he begins with Hugh Walpole, another writer writing about books in another collection of essays, who classified readers into two categories, "the ecstatic and the critical, allowing of course for the inevitable overlap."

Whether one becomes one kind of reader or the other, according to Walpole, depends on "some dominating influence" that appears in the life of every future reader, usually at the age of fourteen or fifteen, "that solves, partly, the question as to whether he will be in later life, an aesthetic or unaestehtic reader."...To be young was bookish heaven. At fourteen I read every word of every page; I didn't know you could skip words. Why should I when all authors were infallible; all narrators, reliable; every detail essential?...And reading was fun - not serious fun, mind you, but sequestered, magical, self-absorbed fun. Nothing mattered but the story: who won, who survived, who ended up happy, who came up short...Once the young reader gets past the stage where the brain sucks in books as if they were bubbles of oxygen, he or she begins to sense that Melville is doing something different from Steinbeck, and that Dickens and Balzac resemble each other in certain respects, but not in all. As children, we crossed wide-eyed and trusting into the writer's world, as adults we invite the writer into ours and hold him accountable for how he behaves there.

My earliest memory of reading is in the first or second grade when I used to read fairy tales. My favourite was Snow White and Rose Red and I can still remember the beautiful illustrations in the book. I grew into series reading in grade school and devoured Nancy Drew and The Babysitter's Club and teen romance series like Sweet Dreams and Sweet Valley High - I'd hole up in my bedroom for hours reading, yes, every word, even if I didn't like where the story was going, to escape into a world that was not my own. While I still enjoy books, as an adult, I'm far less patient with authors and don't feel nearly as guilty about not finishing a book once started if I find I don't like it.

The interesting thing about reading books in this writers-writing-about-other-writers genre is that they expose me to authors I've perhaps not heard of before and inspire me to pursue them further. Katherine Mansfield is a perfect example: I read some of her short stories in my high school extra credit Women in Lit English class* but didn't know much of her background and after reading about her life and stories through the eyes of Patricia Hampl in the second essay, I'm intrigued and have added her to my reading list.

* Yes, I was a nerd in high school. What of it, huh!?!?

Imagined London

I started Imagined London while waiting for my flight to Vancouver last Friday and finished it this morning. It was a good and quick read written by Anna Quindlen and serves as the armchair traveler’s tour guide through literary London – from Chaucer and Dickens’ Southwark to Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and everything in between.

My favourite passage comes in the last chapter:

…neither constitutes my most beloved place in this best beloved of cities. For that you must come down to Earth and wander aimlessly. Maybe just off Sloane Square, or in Cheval Place, or on Burnsall Street, or Elgin Crescent. Maybe in Notting Hill or South Kensington or Bloomsbury. Finally you will reach it: a house with a handsome gate or a small garden.

Around it, a street or two away, swirls the clamor of one of the busiest cities on Earth. Inside is—what? Did a debutante once wait there for her car? Did a maid slip out to meet her lover? Did street peddlers sell ribbons here, or fruit and flowers? Does it stand on the ruins of an older house, or a cow pasture, or even a Roman fort? Did the bombs shake its foundation and the modern real estate boom triple its value?

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.

And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

Adventures of a Curious Woman

Sometimes, in the course of my reading, I come across passages that articulate my feelings about something precisely—oftentimes it’s an idea that I haven’t fully thought out, but when I see it in print, the thought is crystallized in my mind. I came across just such a passage when I was reading Educating Alice, by Alice Steinbach. In relating her writing workshop experience, she writes:

…listening to literature read aloud—poetry being the exception—in no way approximates the experience of reading a writer’s work on your own. To become fully engaged in a story, I need to see the words on a page, to see how they fit together, how they shape ideas and meaning, and how they sound as my thinking voice says them.

‘Nuff said on that.


I’m inspired by Ms. Steinbach. I read her first book, Without Reservations, about 4 years ago and loved how she heeded the impulse to temporarily abandon her daily routine and responsibilities to travel and seek a new life. I love too, how she wrote herself postcards while traveling and mailed them back home as a reminder of her experiences.

In Educating Alice, she travels the world taking lessons and courses. I’ve always maintained that if I ever won the lottery, I’d go back to school, just for fun and study whatever interested me. After reading her book, I realize that my fantasy was too small and conventional.

Ms. Steinbach traveled the world stopping in cities like Paris, where she learned to cook at the Ritz-Escoffier Ecole de Gastronomie Française; she went to Kyoto and studied traditional Japanese arts through the Women’s Association of Kyoto; her course in Florence through the British Institute enlightened her about that city’s Art; while studying at the University of Exeter in England, she explored The World of Jane Austen; in Provence, she discovered secret gardens; and in Havana, she familiarized herself with Cuban architecture and art.

One of my favourite chapters was the one of her stop in Prague because many of the places she wrote of where familiar to me. I was last there in April and stayed in Mala Strana on Nerudova Street. I walked up the many steps to Prague Castle, explored Stare Mesto and Josefov, browsed the designer shops on Parizska Street and hung out in Ebel Coffee House in Tyn Square sipping a Hot Apple…those were a fun 3 days in a city where just about everywhere you turned, there was a beautifully-restored art nouveau building waiting to be wondered at…