All letters are love letters.

Be it that you are in love with the sound of your own writing or that the receiver of the correspondence is the object of your affection, love is an integral part of any letter. Letters have a narrow target and intimacy that allow you to let your hair down, to talk directly and frankly about matters that you dare broach in no other forum. Unlike poems, those polished gems of verbiage and feeling, letters can be immediate and raw. Unlike essays, whose broad audience forces one to eschew particular topics or feelings in the name of privacy or taste (Facebook and MySpace notwithstanding), letters can be open and particularly poignant.

Sadly, the art of letter writing is in decline. For many years, the telephone has whittled away at the need for written communication and, what the phone has not obviated, shorter forms of correspondence like email and that hellspawn of Hallmark, the greeting card, seem to be contriving to destroy. When you add in the rising cost of postage, it is a wonder that letters survive at all.

This is a horrible state of affairs. From the Biblical epistles to the current-day "Dear John" letter, the letter has been the only written vehicle for deep and untrammelled communication, the loss of which will be a disaster for both reader and writer. The reader is left without frankness and depth. The writer loses not only practice in the expository form, but also loses the opportunity to practice the craft of emotional argument.

How can we reverse this trend? If you currently use the phone for personal communication, switch to email; if using email, switch to the handwritten letter. Increase the intellectual depth of your writing - find a witty quote pertaining to the subject, construct chains of arguments backed with real, cited facts, use the increased space to add color and joy to your writing. Increase the emotional depth of your communications. Tell your reader how you really feel about whatever you're writing about without restraint. Ask him or her how they feel. Do your best to make this emotional communication vector a two-way street and to prolong the written conversation.

In the end, the loss of the letter as a communication form would be tragic. If we continue to practice this "lost art", perhaps we can slow or reverse the trends that are driving this unique written form into extinction. After all, all letters are love letters - for you give the things most valuable, your time and your true feelings, when you communicate in this form.

May we all be writing to each other soon...

So what makes this book so bad? Well, to start with, every time one sees a bit of jargon, the reader is told that "all these fancy terms don't matter because you'll learn them as you go along". There are no actual trading tactics, discussed ther than the use of stop-loss orders and the advice to cut your losses and let your profits run. As for trading discipline, there are the usual bromides - be disciplined, plan your trades, understand your market, etc. - but very little information in the way of how or why you do these things or what resources are available to help you with this (again, you'll figure this out as you go along). It then directs you to find a broker to work with and to get in there and trade, making sure along the way that you know that options are "da bomb"!

Basically, any book that is directed at investors who need to have explained what technical and fundamental analysis are (entire chapters are devoted to this) and what the different types of charts there are (another chapter) and then throw that person into the hands of a (possibly corrupt) broker to "learn the ropes" of these fairly advanced market instruments is little more than a scam to make inexperienced investors think that there is easy money to be made in commodities so they can be fleeced. I've been studying the markets for the past twenty-five years, and I know you need a lot more savvy than this book imparts to actually make money in the commodities markets. Yes, it is easy to trade futures and options on commodities; what's hard is making money doing so. And the failure of this book to balance the latter information with the former is little more than investment advice malfeasance.

John Wiley and Sons, you get the suck of the year award for publishing this awful book.

The other book I finished was The Wisdom of Zen (you see how well my inner peace is doing with the preceding paragraphs) by Roger England and Anne Bancroft (no, not that one). It's a short book, with the authors writing a few introductory paragraphs to each chapter and letting the sages of the past and present do most of the talking via quotes. As to the wisdom part, I'm not sure I'm qualified to judge. For example: a well known koan goes "All things return to the one. To where does the one return?" My answer is "The one has never gone away. Why should it need to return." This would probably be seen as a glib and facile answer by a Zen master, who would see this as a sign that my "monkey mind" had not moved beyond simple word games. A better response would probably be to burn down the temple or to pick up the Zen master and throw him into a pond. In any case, it's a short read and a good overview of the religion. It made me want to check out the other books in the series such as The Wisdom of Christianity, The Wisdom of the Quar'an, The Wisdom of Judaism, The Wisdom of Baha'i, The Wisdom of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (upcoming, I'm sure), etc. Maybe they can send one of their editors over to Wiley - they seem to need them.

So what next? I picked up a copy of David Allen's latest, Ready For Anything, at the bookstore, and in preparation for reading that, I started to reread his Getting Things Done. Also, my hold copy of A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman came in - a splendid example of dialectic synchronicity. Maybe next time, I'll have the organization vs. disorganization face-off!
Posted 15:08: permanent link