Travel Tips for Serious Communicators, Part 1: What to Bring

I'm off on a 22-day Northern European trip to Stockholm, Helsinki, Tallinn, Copenhagen, Bergen, and Oslo, trying to get maximum daylight time. Since I will have plenty of waiting and traveling time between destinations, I have long used my knowledge from an accumulated four years of experience of life away from my home to realize that a book is an essential travel item. In this first of a six-part series on travel tips for serious communicators, I focus on books to bring along on a trip. As a form of communication, reading deserves a place in this series. Of course, you will bring a book you'd like to read, but there's more to it than that.

1. Free yourself from your electronic devices. I will be tethered to my phone throughout Scandinavia to get tips on nearby restaurants and entertainment, and to use GPS to get me to these places. For this reason alone, I recommend bringing an old-fashioned book, to break away from staring at the screen. I know you might well argue that a book is an extra item to carry, but are you sure you need everything in your suitcase?

2. Bring a hardcover. I know you're thinking that I've added a lot of carrying weight with the first suggestion. And now a hardcover? Is this guy crazy? Here's my reasoning. Books get beaten up on trips no matter how carefully you treat them. I handle my books as if I were a surgeon using a scalpel, and still my books get bumps and bruises on the road. Hardcovers can take a greater beating. Or take a softcover if you expect to discard the book at the end of your trip.

3. Bring a book based on your travel theme. If you're heading to Cuba, maybe bring along a fiction book with Cuba at least as a backdrop or a nonfiction book about the Cuban history or culture. Although I'll be among the Nordic people on this trip, I admittedly am breaking my own rule in favor of a hardcover of Alice Munro's Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014 for three reasons. First, I have been itching to read more fiction, which I have not done much of lately. Second, nearly every Norde speaks English and understands Americans even better than Americans do. Seriously. Third, the Nordes are masters of telling stories in my language through conversations and their museums, churches, and other points of interest.

4. Bring a book based on your packing space. I would love to take books from my collections of poetry, like The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, or drama, like The Collected Plays of Tennessee Williams, but they're just too heavy and space consuming. On the other hand, I wouldn't take terribly slim volumes either because I'll get through them too fast. Bring a book you can get through during your vacation.

5. Bring a book based on your downtime. Using my current trip as an example, I'll be on six flights and one overnight ferry. That's a lot of reading time, once I pass security and hit the air. That's why 600 pages of Alice Munro seem perfect for this trip. Later next month, I will be on a two-week trip to California, so I'll slim down on my reading. In August, I will be on a three-day trip only a hundred miles from home with the luxury of my car, so no book is too big, yet I will choose a book I can easily finish in three nights of reading.  

A huge, pleasurable part of my trips is planning for it back home months in advance. The book is a critical item on my reading list, and I often need a lot of time to deliberate on what's best for the journey. If you do the same, your vacation will be better. 

AI As a Writing Assistant, Part 1

Artificial Intelligence does not concern me about losing my job. In fact, AI serves as an excellent assistant. But as I write in "Using AI to Improve Creativity, Productivity, and Quality," we must remember we're the boss. In this and coming posts, I will show you what I mean. 

The content below, in Arial font, emerged from a two-word prompt that I wrote in Google: "writing tips." For decades, I have taught writing in the corporate, government, and academic worlds using precisely the tips that follow. But it's one thing to recite them; it's another to adapt them to the specific audience I am teaching, whether they be college students, junior staffers, or executives. Tone shifts based on who's writing to whom. It's yet another thing to understand the organizational culture in which I am working. Salespeople write differently from engineers, who write differently from accountants, who write differently from scientists, who write differently from IT specialists. And it's far more to see someone's writing on the spot and explain what works and what needs improvement.

Throughout this series, I will refer to AI help and explain some caveats. Here is the 471-word AI response to "writing tips." 

Finding Inspiration in Art

Hayley Young's exhibition, Orchid Fever      
at the 5-50 Art Gallery, through July 20.         

There's not a thing we humans can't write about. All we need is inspiration. Today I got a cosmic jolt to my imagination when I went to the opening of artist Hayley Young's exhibition, Orchid Fever, at 5-50 Gallery in Long Island City, New York. I've been following Youngs for several years now and continue to marvel at her evolution. In her paintings, I see more motion, rhythm, and symmetry than I am likely to see walking down a midtown Manhattan street at rush hour, with one exception: inYoungs's work, serenity defines the movement. Although orchids inspired Youngs to create the 14 pieces of this exhibition, what I experienced was a lesson in how color and shape can form a vast harmony of water, earth, air, flora, fauna, and humanity that I just can't find in any other form of communication. Yet her art inspires me to try to replicate what she does through words, and while I might not get there, creativity is more about the journey than the destination.

When I posted in this blog 13 years ago a four-part series on finding inspiration, I was trying to explain that a single evening in one's life holds multiple sources of inspiration, in my case a walk, a dinner, a look at Times Square, and a play, on March 22, 2012. During the pandemic, many of us even were inspired by sights we had taken for granted when walking in isolation in our neighborhoods. 

The 5-50 Gallery is a cool space, no more than 200 square feet of a converted garage in a hip area of the city. For a quick subway ride, the first stop in Queens from Manhattan (Vernon Boulevard and Jackson Avenue on the number 7 train), you can find inspiration through July 20 at Youngs's show. Look at the paintings a long time to get the flow and musicality of her work. You'll dance.

Lighthouse International Film Festival at LBI

I have been staying in Beach Haven, New Jersey, for the seventeenth annual Lighthouse International Film Festival. While the weather has not been kind to visitors this year, the movies have been. You could do worse than watch a movie on a rainy day. I've done just that many times over by watching 60 films: 3 feature-length narratives, 3 feature-length documentaries, 43 short narratives, and 11 short documentaries over five days. 

The LIFF is an internationally renowned juried event that screens excellent independent movies from around the world. I will not review any of them here. Enough to say that they're worth watching. You can get a brief description of all of them here. 

But I do praise the festival itself. It is well organized, reasonably priced, and content rich. The 200-plus staff  members are gracious and accommodating, and the venues are comfortable. It doesn't hurt that the LIFF takes place on Long Beach Island, commonly referred to as LBI, a barrier island legendary for its spectacular beach the full length of its 18 miles. The restaurants, bars, and shops are plentiful, and you can take early morning beach walks even in the June drizzle. The LBI vibe is positively chill. You'll feel a cool sense of community and as much entertainment as you can handle from Wednesday to Sunday. Remember the LIFF for next year.