Georgia Wheatleigh

Archives for June 2021

Center for Convenience Advertisement

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Research facilities for Convenience practitioners have always existed. Here is a late-19th-century advertisement for one such facility.

Notice the lack of an address; the facilities’ locations were shared only among practitioners.

The advertisement urges visitors to select any topic of intense interest. The Centers were and are well-known for the breadth and depth of their materials

Going to The Center for Convenience?

Choose an itinerary of deep interest.

For example,

the entire sixth floor is exclusively for research.

There are modern resources and historic texts

as well as many other convenience clues

which mean so much for our profession.

Contact Anna for further information.

Dreaming and Plain Facts

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This convenience comes from the Positionality tradition. I personally love this tradition for its insistence on valuing different viewpoints and different dreams.

Positionality theory posits that no two people share an identical understanding for any given word or phrase.

Though practitioners fully recognize that words are fundamental, many also recognize that the words are placeholders for meaning.

Dreaming and Plain Facts

Verily, plain meaning is an illusion.

Different life-contexts, different mental worlds repudiate the principle.

The critical domain is figurative and symbolic;

what each means is likely different in some way.

How could it be otherwise?

Detail and Dream Finish

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This convenience writer warns against becoming obsessed with details.

My academic work on this piece makes the case that the text is addressing perfectionism.

I argue that the writer encourages a childlike, natural curiosity, and that she believes that this state of mind will deliver the kind and benevolent dreams sought by clients.

When she references the mother tongue, she is intimating that we each have a mother tongue, that is, a natural language that we immediately recognize and understand. This writer believes that the best dreams are delivered in that language.

The text derives from The Theory of Effect by John Bengo and C. T. Hinckley, published in 1850, and the image is from How to Make a Vegetable Garden by Edith Fullerton, 1905.

Detail and Dream Finish

Detail is useless, it is mischievous,

it dissipates the attention, drawing it from the principal point.

Benevolent dreams express what is natural to the mind,

the curious and attentive mind,

in the tone of the mother tongue.

The Best Case

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This convenience is from the philosophy tradition.

Its writer asks her clients to consider what might be a welcoming influence, and to ponder how much access the clients are willing to cede for new dreams.

The Best Case

The most essential threshold:

effort is wanted when the border is open to genial influences

(obviously).

But, what is genial?

And how far open?

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