James Montgomery Flagg (1877-1960) drew the same way that he lived: brash and arrogant.

Flagg’s confidence was understandable. He started his career at the moment when improvements in the printing process and the rise of popular magazines created a huge market for his drawing skills. Illustrators such as Flagg became national celebrities, and he basked in the attention. His famous poster, Uncle Sam Wants You, made him a household name. The press sought him out for his strong opinions. He consorted with hollywood stars, judged beauty contests, seduced young and impressionable models, frolicked at bohemian parties, and traveled back and forth to Europe with the beautiful people.

I like his work a lot. My biggest complaint is that Flagg rarely let a single well-considered line suffice where five additional lines might fit:

In this way, his style reflected his personality: never waste a minute reconsidering your initial line– just keep underscoring it again and again.

Flagg led a privileged life and had little understanding or sympathy for those who did not. He was a member of exclusive men’s clubs from whose barricades he merrily indulged his sexist and racist attitudes. His invitation to the annual minstrel show at the elite Lotos club in New York is a beautiful painting of an odious subject:

No fan of government welfare programs, here is Flagg’s sketch for the prestigious Dutch Treat Club of the government sodomizing the people.

Life was mighty fine for Flagg. But like many people who happened to be born at the right time, it never occurred to him that luck might have played a role in his success, or that the conditions that catapaulted him to fame might someday change. His pictures that once commanded the public’s attention were eclipsed by Hollywood pictures that moved and talked. Flagg found himself on the wrong side of history. He did not respond well to public neglect, and died a sour and bilious old man. But he left us some terrific drawings from his peak period.

JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG

Mark,

I read your leader on the above with interest. It reminded me of the following experience:

I once worked for a large Insurance company. My boss was a manager who came back off holiday to an inbox of several hundred e-mails.

He deleted them all and then sent a mail to everyone in the company along the lines of

“you won’t believe how stupid I’ve been. I’ve come back off holiday and accidentally deleted all the mail in my in-box. If you sent me anything important in the last two weeks, please resend it immediately”

Result: he got 7 (seven) resent e-mails.

I do admit that this is a tactic which can look suspicious if used too often and probably not a good idea if you get lots of important external e-mails. But it was impressive.

Cheers,

Colin

Colin Roberts comments on Back from Holiday

Decluttering my workspace and reading about the Collyer brothers led me to a 1953 book by Helen Worden Erskine, Out of This World (thanks, library). Erskine was a New York reporter who seems to have started working in the mid-1920s. She developed a niche as a chronicler of the lives of urban recluses and in 1938 “discovered” the Collyer brothers. The lives collected in Out of This World are those of men and women whose wealth enabled them to live on their own odd terms, in brownstones, mansions, and hotels; in dust, clutter, and unopened mail. Here’s one passage, from the story of Gertrude Tredwell (1840-1933):

Mr. Van Nostrand walked over to a framed floral arrangement. “This is seaweed. Aunt Gertrude used to have it sent in from the Jersey coast, then she arranged it in the form of flowers and pasted it on heavy drawing paper.”

“You’ll find them all over the house,” commented Mrs. Lonnberg.

“Making flowers out of seaweed was Aunt Gertrude’s life,” said Mr. Van Nostrand.

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Decluttering: a book recommendation

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clutter
Out of This World

Cappadocia in central Turkey is highly recommended.  Imagine the Moab if it had been inhabited for 4000 years by a succession of Hittites, Christians fleeing Romans and Persians, Greeks and Turks and you have some idea.

These faerie chimneys exist in the thousands and some are still inhabited.  One fellow showed me around his chimney house.  More in the extension.

Cappadocia

I’ve been using the technique I described in Procrastination Buster for most of this week now, and I’m finding it a very efficient way of processing stuff. Although it may appear to be very different from the techniques described in Do It Tomorrow, it is actually based on very much the same principles. It is essentially a method of converting an open list into a series of closed lists (in this case numbering two items each). The advantage compared with Do It Tomorrow is that it is more flexible and can be fitted a bit more easily into irregular time slots. The disadvantage is that some work items will take longer before they get dealt with than others. I’ve still got one difficult item which I put on the list at the beginning of the week and remains unactioned. That’s almost certainly a lot less items than would be left over with a conventional To Do list, but with Do It Tomorrow, I would have actioned all the items either the day they came up or the day after.

Here are a few pointers which have surfaced for me this week while using this method:

• To Do lists always tend to suffer from list expansion – in other words they tend to grow faster than one can process the items. In order to avoid this happening it is important to keep the list well weeded by throwing out unnecessary items.
• As a guide you should be able to complete at least one circuit of the list during the course of an average day (bearing in mind that you will be actioning about half the items on the list on each circuit). If you can’t do that, you should take some time to weed the list.
• If you find yourself further from the end of the list at the end of the day than you were at the beginning, you are seriously trying to do too much! You need not only to weed the list, but look at your commitments too.
• Just as with Do It Tomorrow, you don’t necessarily have to do the whole of every item. You can always do part of it and then cross it out and re-enter it at the end of the list. This achieves the little and often ideal which I recommend in my books for dealing with major projects.

I’d be interested to hear from you in the Comments or in the Discussion Forum if you try out this method – and how you get on with it.

Progress Report

At one point or another, we’ve all experienced the heartbreak (yes, heartbreak) caused by fat AC adapters taking up more than their fair share of space on an outlet or power strip. The Power Strip Space Saver from ThinkGeek not only remedies this problem, but provides you with an extra plug-in to boot. And at $2.99, they’re not too tough on the old pocketbook, either. The Power Strip Space Saver is a nice (and way cheaper) upgrade to the previously-mentioned Power Strip Liberator. Then again, if you don’t mind its creepy, tentacle-like appearance, you can lose the power strip altogether with the PowerSquid.

Power Strip Space Saver [ThinkGeek via UneasySilence]

Stuff We Like: The Power Strip Space Saver

I read Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, by Gerard Prunier, and was quite impressed.  I thought “what a smart and unbiased introduction to such a difficult topic."  But why was I impressed?  I don’t know nearly enough about the topic to judge the material.

I was impressed because the author sounded so reasonable and so intelligent.  But I can’t cite any really good reason to believe this was more than a trick.  Prunier sure didn’t seem as if he were trying to talk me into a hidden agenda.

Bryan Caplan offers his heuristics for trusting a source or not; here’s Arnold Kling on the same.  Here’s David Henderson’s podcast on disagreement.

I tend to trust sources who use their intelligence to point out flaws in their own positions.  But is this more than an aesthetic preference on my part?  What’s so trustworthy about that?  Maybe I’m just looking for people who remind me of myself, and what’s so good about me anyway?

If my trust standard works, it is only because not so many people use it.  If more readers trusted on the basis of "using intelligence to publicly question one’s foundations,” that standard might be too easily to manipulate.

In other words, it is the stupidity of much of the audience (they can be fooled by simple tricks, complex tricks are not needed) which makes it possible for the more sophisticated readers to read signs of intellectual dishonesty and get closer to the truth.

Let’s say you have a medium – call it a blog – which is read only by very smart people.  Simple, relatively discernible tricks won’t be used.  Should those readers then have a special distrust of the authors? 

Can you judge a book by its cover?

The most thought provoking advice I read recently (from a well known stage hypnotist and NLP populist) was that you should pay attention to what you actually want to eat most, and eat that.

Try it: it’s surprising how often I find myself with a chocolate bar when, if I’m honest, the taste of chocolate is not what I really want.

Will Ross comments on Dieting and Health

From a book review of a recent biography of Beethoven by Doctor Mai: Diagnosing Genius: The Life and Death of Beethoven.

“The cause of Beethoven’s death was liver failure due to alcohol abuse. The autopsy was performed by Dr. Johann Wagner, who was assisted by Dr. Karl von Rokitansky. Rokitansky was a resident in pathology, and Beethoven’s autopsy was the first one he performed. He subsequently performed 59,786 autopsies in his outstanding career as a pathologist and became famous for his observations on the gross features of pathologic abnormalities of organs.

At Beethoven’s autopsy, Wagner and Rokitansky found — besides cirrhosis of the liver due to alcohol abuse — ascites, splenomegaly, pancreatitis, and thickened bones of the skull. The eighth cranial nerves were wrinkled and shriveled because they had been compressed by the thick skull bones, a finding consistent with Paget’s disease of bone, which can cause deafness. Other conditions that have been put forth as the cause of Beethoven’s deafness — including head trauma inflicted by his alcoholic father, syphilis, and otosclerosis — lack credibility. There is also some question of whether lead poisoning caused Beethoven’s illnesses. In 1996, a lock of his hair was found to contain high levels of lead. Lead poisoning was common in Europe during Beethoven’s time because wine contained lead that had leached from its containers.”

Beethoven

Ralph Waldo Emerson in a journal entry during January 1850 writes: “Love is temporary and ends with marriage. Marriage is the perfection which love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought. Marriage is a good known only to the parties, — a relation of perfect understanding, aid, contentment, possession of themselves and of the world, — which dwarfs love to green fruit.”

Love And Marriage