terminal 3; notecard lectures

This was my first trip out of and back into the very new Terminal 3 of Cairo International Airport. Obviously, the idea was to take away some of the local color and make this look like another efficient global air hub.

That has some strong points, such as a much better selection of restaurants. Terminals 1 and 2 have always had about the lamest and least varied airport food of any major city in the world.

It also means that you don’t have 50 aggressive taxi drivers hassling you before you even have two feet inside the terminal. At first that felt nice, but then I felt a sort of brief mild panic, wondering where on earth I would find a taxi this time.

It actually wasn’t that hard… Just down a concrete ramp into the parking lot. And I got a really nice driver this time. Most of them are pretty personable, but this guy, whose name was Khaled, was especially friendly.

Can’t go to sleep yet, since my body’s still on London time, which is two hours earlier. But I’ll have administrative catch-up duties for the next two days, then the book-writing really gets going, and there will be posts about that, for all those who requested them.

I also wanted to make a post about how I handle notecard lectures, as opposed to prepared text lectures. There is a time and a place for both, but the basic idea is that the prepared text lectures need to be done as far ahead of time as possible, while I actually prefer to prepare the notecard lectures in just the last couple of hours before giving the talk.

The reason is that two different delivery styles are required. With a prepared text you want it to be smooth and engaging in a vaguely hypnotic sense (a cold medium, in McLuhan’s sense). But with notecards, it needs to be a bit more “aggressive showman” and in-your-face to keep the level of audience interest high. The latter requires some adrenaline, at least for me, and that’s much easier if you don’t start writing up the cards until maybe 2 or 3 hours before the lecture. In fact, I prefer for those to go right down to the wire if possible.

But at some point I want to make a longer post about the respective virtues of prepared texts and off-the-cuff presentations. Sometimes there are moralistic sermons against all prepared texts (“if you can’t speak about your own work without a text, then something’s obviously wrong”, etc. etc.). But I’ve increasingly come to think that there are specific venues that are more appropriate for each of the two styles. More on that some other time, though.