Getting organized . . . part 5

Finally, here are analog and digital tools together.

Post-It notes are almost too obvious to suggest. But here are a couple of less obvious ways to use them:

Keep a few on the inside of a notebook cover, on the back pages of a datebook, and so on. You now have an always accessible way to mark pages, leave notes on doors, and so on.

Use them for grocery shopping. Write your list on a Post-It and stick it on your wallet. When you get to the store, stick the Post-It to the handle of your shopping cart. When you're done, throw the Post-It in the trash.

I first thought to manage a shopping list in this way a couple of weeks ago. It seems so obvious! But I've never seen anyone else do it (my wife assures me that, yes, I have invented this way of shopping). It's a great way to keep your hands free and not have to wonder what aisle you left your list in.

Digital notes are also quite handy on your computer screen. There are several programs that create them; I like the free program ATnotes, which comes with a little desktop calendar too. You can use digital notes to keep track of things that are important to everyone in the house ("Return dvds by Thursday") and to make a running grocery list ("Buy salt"--because who remembers to buy salt?).

You can also use digital notes to keep track of chores. Say that four people are taking turns with the dishes. Make a note with the days of the week in a vertical column and, next to it, another note with the dish-doers' names in a column (repeat the names several times). Now, if you move the note with the names up and down, you have a perpetual calendar and no question as to whose night it is to do dishes. As you may suspect, this system is in use en mi casa.

You can also use digital notes to keep useful and inspiring words on your desktop, which isn't a bad thing to do if you're trying to get things done. (I have words from the Tao and from Aristotle on my desktop as I'm typing.)

So there are five simple tools. Except for the Palm, they can be had for relatively little money, and they might help a lot in your efforts to get and stay organized. Find what works best for you, keep your tools available, so that you can really use them, and get things done!

Links » Getting organized with simple tools: Part 1, 2, 3, 4

How to improve writing (no. 3 in a series)

Today's example, a newspaper headline, reporting on the lack of student attendance at a One Book, One Campus discussion:

One Book draws less than one student

The writer is clearly aiming for comic effect, but what does "less than one" mean? A less awkward headline:

One Book, no students

Too bad that it wasn't possible to write "One Book draws overflow student crowd." That's a headline I'd like to see.

Link » Other How to improve writing posts, via Pinboard

More Paris Review interviews

3703 students: These have us covered for the next two weeks--

Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, both interviewed by the poet Donald Hall.

There is no Paris Review interview with H.D. (or if there is, it's not listed on the website).

January 24

[W + (D-d)] x TQ
        M x NA

That's the formula a British researcher has used to determine that January 24 is the most depressing day of the year (at least in the British Isles). Here's an article to explain.

Psychologist Cliff Arnall (Doctor Arnall), the creator of this formula, seems like a good candidate for an Ig Nobel Prize. (I just nominated him.)

Good advice on looking at art

I learned from Joe that the first thing to do when looking at a work of art was to do just that--look. Let your eyes take in what is in front of them. Look at a picture from different distances. Look away and then look back, but, since each picture suggests a visual starting point in it, choose a different point each time you look. At this stage, try not to have any thoughts about the work, such as where it fits in the artist's oeuvre or in art history or social history. You can do that later. If you allow such thoughts at this point, they will distance you from your seeing. And so Joe's comments at an exhibition would be of the "Look at that red" variety, when the very thing I had overlooked was the fact that red was the star--perhaps the raison d'être--of the picture. . . . For me Joe's visual perceptions were literally eye-opening.

From Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard, by Ron Padgett (Coffee House Press, 2004). Joe Brainard, American painter, is also known as the author of I Remember. Ron Padgett, American poet, is the author of many books--poems, translations, and memoirs. He and Brainard met and became friends in high school, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

#1 COMEDY OF ALL TIME!

Those were the words (all caps) on the cardboard displays filled with copies of Troy.

Thanks to my son Ben, who has a fine eye for the incongruous and spotted this example in Walmart.

Frost interview

3703 students: The esteemed Paris Review is making all its interviews available on-line. You can find the PR interview with Robert Frost here, as a downloadable Adobe file.

Many of the best-known Paris Review interviews are collected in the paperback series Writers at Work. To make all the interviews available, for free, is a gesture of tremendous good will and generosity. Thank you, Paris Review.

Patriarchal names

From an article in today's New York Times:

The gesture to the mothers of France seemed to shake the sacred pillar of patriarchy.

New Year's Day quietly ushered in a change in France's law on last names. It abolished the centuries-old obligation that parents give the patronymic, or name of the father, to their children.

That means that a couple will now be able to give its newborn baby either the mother's last name, the father's last name or both names in the order the parents choose.

A "societal disruption," another proof that fathers are being forced "to renounce one by one the attributes of what used to be called their familial power," complained an editorial in Le Figaro, the center-right daily.

"This reform--we decree it silliness without a name," said a right-wing Roman Catholic newspaper, La Croix, in an editorial, calling the change a boon for genealogists, a nightmare for notaries.

Names are serious indicators of status in a country like France.

3009 students: You (who are now reading a poem about Odysseus, son of Laertes, and Telelmachus, son of Odysseus) can read the whole article here.

[Scroll down this page to "Two Actresses" to learn how to access Times articles.]

Overheard

"It's a great class. You never have to open a book. All you have to do is show up."

In the bank (overheard by a friend): "Tell the professor that I'm in Indianapolis and that the roads are really bad."

Roads not taken

3703 students: If you have some time, look at "What If...," a page devoted to mapping out (with some hilarity) alternative paths in life.