About the Author

Name: Jimmie Moglia

Place of Birth: Torino, Italy

Residence: Portland, Oregon

Age: Though not clean past my youth there’s yet some smack of age in me, some relish of the saltness of time. (1)

 

 

Appearance: … careful hours with time’s deformed hand
Have written strange defeatures in my face (2)

Strengths. An unquenchable passion for what is totally, utterly and incontrovertibly useless.

Weaknesses: Take your pick.

Languages: I speak Spanish to God, French to men, Italian to women and German to my horse. My German is not what it used to be but it’s not the fault of the horse. Too many Germans speak English.

Education:
“You taught me language and my profit on it
Is, I know how to curse.” (3)
More to the point – in Italy I studied Greek for five years and Latin for eight. Only to discover that prospective employers were remarkably uninterested in dead languages. Whereupon I obtained a degree in Electronic Engineering at the University of Genova.

Career: Chronicle of Wasted Time (4). Skip to “Books written” if you so wish.

After some inconsequential meandering and being mellowed by the stealing hours of time  I was offered a job by a multinational manufacturer of Electronic Instrumentation in Portland, Oregon. Eventually I acquired a position with a rather Napoleonic title and became responsible for marketing in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. I worked for five years out of the island of Guernsey, Channel Islands. On returning to the US I became disenchanted with corporate life. Or rather, I could not acquire the mandatory proficiency in the corporate turn of phrase. The proverbial spade had become “an upward-downward, dynamic and portable soil management tool.” In fact the book “Your Daily Shakespeare” is my answer to an Orwellian language I could never learn.

Left without a job I invented another one. I put on the market a simple electric device that saved users literally thousands of dollars every year. I called the product MacInker and the company Computer Friends. As luck would have it Fortune was on our side. We sold over 350,000 units worldwide and introduced and manufactured a range of other popular computer related products.
Being the founder I was also the president of the company though I dislike the word. Its

Latin root means “sitting before” or “sitting above” others. And many agree that sitting is done with anatomy not routinely used for thought.

I could say more good things about my pursuits but… “there is not one wise man among twenty that will praise himself….” (5)

And now… “I set my life upon a cast and I will stand the hazard of the dye” (6),equally realizing that for me, for you and for everyone, “the lottery of our destiny bars us the right of voluntary choosing” (7).

And lest you object and raise questions about chance, choice or free will I say, “There are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” (8)

 

(1) King Henry IV part 2, act 1, sc. 2
(2) Comedy of Errors, act 5, sc. 1
(3) Tempest, act 1, sc. 2
(4) Sonnet 106
(5) Much Ado About Nothing, act 5, sc. 2
(6) King Richard III, act 5, sc. 1
(7) Merchant of Venice, act 2, sc. 1
(8) Hamlet, act 1, sc. 5

Books Written

• “Your Daily Shakespeare, An Arsenal of Verbal Weapons to Drive your Friends into Action and your Enemies into Despair”
• (In Italian) “Il Nostro Dante Quotidiano, 3500 modi di cavarsela con Dante” – (Our Daily Dante, 3500 ways to get away with it with Dante). This is the equivalent for Dante of “Your Daily Shakespeare”.
• “The Pleasures of Active Reading.” The companion book to the Memex device and system I invented to mark books non destructively.
• “The Art of Memory in the XXI Century”   or  How to Remember 500 Shakespearean Quotations Without Really Trying (guaranteed) with the Mnemonic Frame System (MFS).  It is a combination book/DVD. The book explains and illustrates the effective and amusing MFS. The MFS is based  on the principles of Simonides of Ceos, Cicero and others during the Renaissance, when memory was a subject in the syllabus of ALL students. It also incorporates the concepts of ‘Philosophic Painting” discovered by Philosophy Professor, Emanuele Gennaro.
  The DVD contains 500 Mnemonic Frames for Shakespeare quotes. One frame, one quote.
  Do not imagine effort, pain and suffering. You will quickly become captivated and elated at discovering the great memorizing power you never thought you had. And, more important, how you will quickly be able to recall, apply and interject the cutting punch-line into your conversation at the right point and time.

…. two in progress.