Truffles (1996 – 2010)
Loyal and Gentle Friend

“Look in my eyes, Lord, and my sins
will play out on them as on a screen.
Read them all.

Forgive what you can, and send
me on my path. I will walk on,
until you bid me rest.”
—Shepherd Book

I’ve stumbled upon a new means of relaxation at Open Yale Courses. It sounds strange that recordings of university lectures are relaxing but I find they are. Paul Bloom’s PSYC 110: Introduction to Psychology is far more interesting than television. I’m currently on lecture ten of twenty.

His has an enjoyable speaking style; the hour flies by. A sidebar at the end of Dr. Bloom’s lecture on Freud exemplifies his sense of humor.

“One other thing on Freud–just a story of the falsification of Freud. I was taking my younger child home from a play date on Sunday and he asked me out of the blue, “Why can’t you marry your mother or your father?” Now, that’s actually a difficult question to ask–to answer for a child, but I tried my best to give him an answer. And then I said–then I thought back on the Freud lecture and so I asked him, “If you could marry anybody you want, who would it be?” imagining he’d make explicit the Oedipal complex and name his mother. Instead, he paused for a moment and said, ‘I would marry a donkey and a big bag of peanuts.’ [laughter] Both his parents are psychologists and he hates these questions and at times he just screws around with us.” [source]

The lectures are available on the Open Yale Courses website as audio, video and text transcripts. There are reading assignments, which I skip. (I’m currently taking courses elsewhere with considerable reading requirements.) One could probably get most of the value found in the original course if they completed the assignments but that’s not really my objective. For me, the lectures are firstly informative and secondly entertaining.

I originally downloaded the audio files from iTunes U but found that I had to move the audio out of iTunes U and into music so I could create a playlists. The lectures show up out of order in iTunes U and I cannot for the life of me puzzle out how to rearrange the order except as a playlist.

It’s nice to find a gem among the dredge that we know as the internet.

I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with broadcast and cable news outlets. News outlets have sadly taken distinctly partisan roles in society. I find their content specious at best and makes for very poor commentary. (One notable except is Deutsche Welle.)

I recently stumbled upon spiked, which itself has a bias but its bias pleasantly lacks the shrill insanity commonly found nowadays. It’s not news but rather commentary on newsworthy events and trends. Even those articles with which I disagree will often have a point two I hadn’t considered. I find this to be the real value.

“spiked is an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms. spiked is endorsed by free-thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, and hated by the narrow-minded such as Torquemada and Stalin. Or it would be, if they were lucky enough to be around to read it.” —From the spiked about page, www.spiked-online.com

I ate too much last night. My wife had ‘girls night out’ which left me unsupervised as I made my dinner.

I powered through an entire package of Johnsonville Brats. Cause and effect… I was wide awake at 2AM, bloated as a poisoned pup. Uffda!

And, yes. It was worth it.

“What the hell”, says me? Good time to catch up on some random and completely unnecessary web browsing.

As it turns out, I learned something from Leo Babauta over on zenhabits.net. I had for years considered myself a minimalist. Whether other people agreed or not is irrelevant. It was my self-view. Leo brings up a good point, “[minimalism is] basically an extension of simplicity — not only do you take things from complex to simple, but you try to get rid of anything that’s unnecessary. All but the essential.”

It’s a nice distinction. I have some things that are unnecessary but I won’t jettison them until they becomes a nuisance. Not many things. Just some things. It’s more accurate to say, “I’m a practitioner of simplicity.”

Simplicity and minimalism are very closely related but not exactly the same. So, why split hairs? Because definitions are important. It’s how we see the world. Crisp, distinct definitions lead to a clear view of the world. Fuzzy definitions lead to a fuzzy view. Non-existent definitions lead to blind spots, things out there in the world that you simply cannot see.

I never thought about the importance of definitions much until 1995 when I read The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams. Robin describes in chapter one—The Joshua Tree Epiphany—her experience on Christmas when she received a tree identification book. In this book was a description of a Joshua tree, a strange desert dwelling plant. She was sure she had never seen one until later that day. In the cul-de-sac where her parents lived were four houses with Joshua Trees in the front yard. Robin hadn’t seen her neighbors’ Joshua trees for thirteen years. Only when she had a definition—some way to distinguish Joshua trees from all other trees—was Robin able to see them.

Definitions allow us to distinguish between things and the distinctions bring _those_ things into view.

Distinctions matter. They affect one’s world view. But not all distinctions matter to all people. For some people, the difference between simplicity and minimalism may be irrelevant. Perhaps they are neither a practitioner of simplicity nor a minimalist and the difference between the two _is_ splitting hairs—in their world, in their experience. But in my world, in my experience, the difference _is_ important.

Connecting the dots. It behooves us to invest at least a modicum of interest on the definitions our friends and colleagues find important. It is the mutual set of distinctions which people hold that allows them to communicate with any degree of precision. Without a mutual set, it’s unlikely that any message will be heard. The words may be there but listener can’t hear them. Much like Robin couldn’t see the Joshua tree.

When I promised this morning that I would publish the list, I didn’t think it would be such an ordeal. But when I stared at the bald list of book titles and author names, I knew it was lacking. The soup just needed a bit more seasoning.

Of course, any speech draws upon a lifetime of experiences. These are the books pulled from the bookcase and stacked upon my desk from which I double-checked material.

Adele Westbrook and Oscar Ratti
"Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere"
ISBN: 978-0804832847

GOOGLE: "Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere"
SOURCE: http://books.google.com/books?id=AWAMSZfc97EC
AMAZON: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0804832846

Adele Westbrook studied philosophy at Columbia University and has since made a career in advertising and publishing. She is currently an executive for a New York City publishing company.

Oscar Ratti received a degree in classical studies and law from the University of Naples, where we was an intercollegiate Greco-Roman wrestling champion, as well as a member of the championship judo team. Mr. Ratti is a commercial illustrator, and he serves as a design consultant for traditional and web-based publications.

Ms. Westbrook and Mr. Ratti have together taught aikido in New York, working with youth groups at centers affiliated with the YMCA.

KELLY: “I’ve read a number of Aikido books and found this to be the most enjoyable and the most pertinent to somatic learning. It wasn’t written for that purpose so you’ll have to work at ’seeing the broader picture’. If you simply want a contextual basis for reading parts of Strozzi-Heckler’s ‘The Leadership Dojo’, I recommend speed reading the material. However, I invite you to participate in Aikido classes over an extended period, at least a year. My rationale is consistent with the following excerpt from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology:”

ITP: “It may seem paradoxical to include martial arts practice as an important aspect to being a therapist. When we think of the martial arts, words such as, ‘opponent’, ‘defeat’, and ‘against’ often come to mind. However, Aikido differs from disciplines such as karate, tai chi, and even yoga because it emphasizes the importance of blending with your partner. In Aikido, as in therapy, it is necessary to read body language and understand the intention of the person with whom you are working. These are some of the fundamental reasons that ITP requires the study of Aikido for our Residential students.” [complete article]

Richard Strozzi-Heckler
"The Leadership Dojo"
ISBN: 978-1583942017

GOOGLE: "Richard Strozzi-Heckler" "The Leadership Dojo"
SOURCE: http://books.google.com/books?id=87a_giMS88UC
AMAZON: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1583942017

Richard Strozzi Heckler, PhD is the founder and President of Strozzi Institute. A nationally known speaker and consultant on leadership and mastery, he has spent more than three decades researching, developing, and teaching the practical application of Somatics (the unity of language, action, and meaning) to business leaders and executive managers.

EXCERPT: “300 repetitions produce body memory, which is the ability to enact the correct movement, technique, or conversation by memory. It’s also been pointed out that 3,000 repititions creates embodiment, which is not having to think about doing the activity–it’s simply part of who we are.”

KELLY: “This was the book that pulled a lot of the other material together for me. It is not an academic study and I wouldn’t use it alone as an authoritative source. It does present a coherent description of somatic learning as practiced by the author in his training business. I suggest reading this material after having studied the other references mentioned in this list.”

Tracy Goss
"The Last Word on Power"
ISBN: 978-0385474924

GOOGLE: "Tracy Goss" "The Last Word on Power"
AMAZON: http://www.amazon.com/dp/038547492X

Tracy Goss is President of Goss-Reid Associates, a management consulting firm based in Austin, Texas. She specializes in working with CEOs and their senior management teams, worldwide, to invent and strategically plan an “impossible future” and to “re-invent” themselves and their executive cadre to successfully lead their organization into that future.

EXCERPT: “Language is the only leverage for changing the context of the world around you. This is because people apprehend and construct reality through the way they speak and listen. Or, as Martin Heidegger put it, “Language is the house of being.”

KELLY: “This is the best publicly available source of Cylon (i.e., what drives us is a mechanical process controlled by our structures of interpretation) doctrine. It may not be as accessible to readers who have not participated in a Cylon-esque education program. The material becomes clearer through experience. If you only READ the material, that’s okay. You will benefit from even just a conceptual understanding before reading the other reference material. I include ‘The Last Word on Power’ because it shares many aspects with somatic learning while remaining, in many ways, incompatible with somatic learning. Puzzling out exactly where is educational.”

Malcolm Gladwell  [wikipedia.org]
"Blink"
ISBN: 978-0316010665

GOOGLE: "Malcolm Gladwell" Blink
AMAZON: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0316010669

Malcolm Gladwell is a British-born Canadian journalist, author, and pop sociologist, based in New York City. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He is best known as the author of the books The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), and Outliers (2008).

KELLY: “I like Gladwell’s use of Paul Ekman’s work on facial expressions. While Gladwell isn’t an academic researcher, his treatment of facial expressions is both entertaining and easy to remember. I also like Gladwell’s treatment of John Gottman’s work on ‘thin slicing’. I integrated Ekman and Gottman’s work and juxtaposed that against Strozzi-Heckler’s material on somatic learning and what arose was in interesting postulate: ‘The mind makes its thoughts real for the body and the body/experience programs the mind.’”

James Robbins
"Build a Better Buddha"
ISBN: 978-0892540655

GOOGLE: "James Robbins" "Build a Better Buddha"
AMAZON: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0892540656

James Robbins holds two graduate degrees, a Master’s degree in English literature from the University of Texas at Austin, and a master’s degree in professional counseling from Amberton University in Dallas. His first book of non-fiction, Build A Better Buddha, was published in 2003 by Nicolas-Hays, Inc. In 2004, Tony Robbins, world-renowned peak performance coach, personally selected this book as motivational reading for his elite, international group of Platinum Partnership clients. Better Buddha examines a cross-section of East and West, integrating aspects of Western psychology with Eastern philosophy.

KELLY: “I don’t even know where to begin. Most of what’s being said today has been said millennia ago. A good primer.”

K. Anders Ericsson  [wikipedia.org]
"The Making of an Expert"
Harvard Business Review, July-August 2007

GOOGLE: Anders Ericsson "The Making of an Expert" filetype:pdf
SOURCE: coachingmanagement.nl

Dr. K. Anders Ericsson is Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University who is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading theoretical and experimental researchers on expertise.

EXCERPT: “By now it will be clear that it takes time to become an expert. Our research shows that even the most gifted performers need a minimum of ten years (or 10,000 hours) of intense training before they win international competitions. In some fields the apprenticeship is longer: It now takes most elite musicians 15 to 25 years of steady practice, on average, before they succeed at the international level.”

KELLY: “The Ericsson ‘10,000 hours rule’ is often cited and often used out of context. The paper is easily accessible (i.e., not pedantic) and I believe it essential to judging whether another author’s reference of Ericsson’s work is legitimate.”

Paul Ekman  [wikipedia.org]

Paul Ekman is a psychologist who has been a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He is considered one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century.[1] The background of Ekman’s research analyzes the development of human traits and states over time. He retired in 2004 as professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

John Gottman  [wikipedia.org]

John Gottman, Ph.D. is known for his work on marital stability and relationship analysis through scientific direct observations published in peer-reviewed literature. Dr. Gottman found his methodology predicts with 90% accuracy which newlywed couples will remain married and which will divorce four to six years later. It is also 81% percent accurate in predicting which marriages will survive after seven to nine years. Dr. Gottman is a Professor Emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington, and with his wife Dr. Julie Gottman now heads a non-profit research institute.

Albert Mehrabian  [wikipedia.org]

Albert Mehrabian (born 1939, currently Professor Emeritus of Psychology, UCLA), has become known best by his publications on the relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages. His findings on inconsistent messages of feelings and attitudes have been quoted throughout human communication seminars worldwide, and have also become known as the 7%-38%-55% Rule.

KELLY: “I recommend at least reading through the summary material on wikipedia as Mehrabian’s results are often misconstrued. As noted, ‘It is emphatically not the case that non-verbal elements in all senses convey the bulk of the message, though this is how his conclusions are frequently quoted.’ Nonetheless, Mehrabian’s work is adds to understanding somatic learning, in my opinion, in that voice and body are an integral element in projecting one’s message successfully or unsuccessfully; it’s not enough to focus strictly on language acts.”

Rolling Stone reports that Mazzy Star’s “Sandoval confirms her [sic] and her bandmate David Roback haven’t called it quits and they are still working on their anticipated fourth album. But she declines to give many specifics. ‘It’s true we’re still together,’ she says. ‘We’re almost finished [with the record]. But I have no idea what that means.’”

An album. Really? A NEW album.

Just when you knew you couldn’t get any luckier. I thought the group was done. This is huge. Entire swathes of a person’s life are painted in poetry. If you’re lucky, you’ll find your poet. Nearly a decade of my life, starting in the early nineties, bask in the smokey blue light of Hope Sandoval’s lyrics and David Roback’s music. Pure poetry.

BLUE LIGHT
So Tonight That I Might See (1993)

  There's a blue light in my best friend's room
  There's a blue light in his eyes
  There's a blue light, yeah
  I want to see it, shine

  There's a ship that sails by my window
  There's a ship that sails on by
  There's a world under it
  I think I see it, sailing away

  I think it's sailing
  Miles crashing me by
  Crashing me by
  Crashing me by

  There's a world outside my doorstep
  Flames over everyone's heart
  Don't you see them shining
  I want to hear them, beating for me

  I think I hear them
  Waves crashing me by
  Crashing me by
  Crashing me by

I’ve added this latest rendition of Blue Smoke to illustrate a point: The quantity and quality of non-video music is greater than that of video music. Okay. So it’s anecdotal. But this isn’t about science. It’s about sensation. In my world, the grooveshark player found every track but one: Helpless by Needle. But I’ll take Neil Young’s unplugged version. Not as good but does have a nice base coat of maudlin piano. And I prefer the Paul Weller’s Portishead remix of Wildwood.

One of the niftiest aspects of the grooveshark player is that it if you change (add, delete, modify) tracks in the playlist on grooveshark /after/ you embed the playlist, those changes propagate to the embedded player. That way, if I find Needle’s version, I can swap out the track. And like magic, my playlist just gets better.

One last thing. The garish colors are mine. In fact, when you create a widget, there are color wheels to adjust color on /everything/. I suggest you get a palette of coordinated colors before you start building the widget. I didn’t and in the end, my widget looks like a three year old colored it.

Yet another version of blue smoke using the embedr.com player. No one has the video of Needle’s cover of Neil Young’s Helpless. Shame. Needle has, in my opinion, the quintessential rendition. Anyway, Helpless didn’t make it it.

Another adaptation of blue smoke, this time using Yahoo Video as the source. Some of the videos were not found (Lenny, Helpless, Until the Morning).

Lenny and Fade Into You are the lynchpins of Blue Smoke and my substitutions make this something I call “an interpretive playlist”. However, I like the Paul Weller cover. Raw, courageous, authentic. Best of luck, Dylan.

An alternate view of the pensive playlist.