Viridian Reading List (1)
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
A wondrous classic by a famous design curmudgeon that will forever
change your understanding of faucets and doorknobs.
Things That Make Us Smart : Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the
Machine by Donald A. Norman
The redoubtable and always opinionated Norman tackles the morass of
digital design.
Usability Engineering by Jakob Nielsen
After reading this book by Donald Norman’s business partner and
web-design guru, you will understand why software is so screwed-up, even
if you can’t figure out how to make it any better.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
Enlightening business-school work describing how technologies shape
industries so intimately that even the best-run corporations tend to be
blindsided by any genuinely novel tech development. Unlike most biz guru
book, this one has documented case studies.
Rebuilding the Reichstag by Norman Foster and David Jenkins
Ferociously wonderful book by Lord Foster of Thames Bank describing how
a hideous building that was a byword for genocidal cruelty has become
the most ecologically advanced capitol building in the modern world, and
one of the most “just plain beautiful” structures in Europe.
BOBOs in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David
Brooks
This work of “comic sociology” by a right-wing pundit tells you maybe
half… okay, maybe two-thirds of what you need to know about the new
American elite class of “bourgeois bohemians.” Worth it just for the
close study of their consumption patterns: cellphones, coffee and sport
utility vehicles.
Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: the Aesthetics of Consumerism by
Daniel Harris
Loose, riffing, Oscar-Wildeian essays on what makes consumer goods jump
of the wire racks, dwelling on hyped-up pseudo-qualities like
“deliciousness” and the “all-natural.” The spectacular chapter on “The
Futuristic” may be the best thing ever written on science fiction
aesthetics.
Industrial Design: Reflections of a Century edited by Jocelyn de Noblet.
A standout among end-of-the-century books, this design compendium by a
wide variety of mostly European experts covers not 100 but the last 150
years. Big enough to break the coffee table, but copiously illustrated
and full of fresh and interesting takes on the old stories.
Martin Johnson Heade by Theodore E., Jr. Stebbins, with contributions by
Janet L. Comey, Karen E. Quinn and Jim Wright
Awe-inspiring coffee-table book about a Viridian darling, the 19th
century American artist, Martin Johnson Heade. Heade was a nature
painter (specializing in storms and swamps) whose self-educated palette
always makes his meticulous landscapes seem remarkably uncanny.
The Art of Albert Paley: Iron, Bronze, Steel by Edward Lucie-Smith,
Albert Paley
Stunningly beautiful book about the phantasmagoric metalwork of Albert
Paley, who is far and away the greatest metals artist ever to come out
of Rochester New York.
Engineering a New Architecture by Tony Robbin
Remarkably interesting academic work about lightweight structures
supported with shells, cables and membranes. A good place to go if you
want to live in a concrete egg carton that thrums like a drumhead.
Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for
Granted, from the Everyday to the Obscure by Paul Lukas (1997)
It’s mostly outtakes from Lukas’s design-hobbyist fanzine, “BEER FRAMES,
the Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption.” Lukas is the kind of guy who
gets whimsically obsessed with knicknacks like cat toys, animal-cracker
packaging and canned sauerkraut juice. Enlivening, funny, and with a
nice eye for graphic and engineering detail.
Henry Dreyfuss: Industrial Designer, the Man in the Brown Suit by
Russell Flinchum
This is the best biography of a designer I’ve ever read. This may be
because Dreyfuss was nowhere near so kinky and multivalent a figure as
Tibor Kalman. Respectful yet frank, the book brings home its thesis that
Dreyfuss, through concentration, integrity and hard work, transcended
mere professionalism to become a major 20th century cultural figure.
Lavishly and effectively illustrated; the before-and-after shots of
cramped, backward products receiving the modernist Dreyfuss treatment
are well-nigh mind-boggling.
Malaparte: A House Like Me by Michael McDonough
Architecture history by Viridian fellow-traveller Michael McDonough. A
cranky Fascist/Futurist novelist/journalist builds a weird all-natural
tank of a house on a crag in Capri. The book is a “portfolio of unique
insights into the controversial artist and his provocative home.” Many
valuable life-lessons here for cranky novelist-journalists with
grandiose design schemes.
Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750 by Adrian Forty (1986)
Top-flight scholarly work on the interplay of designers, manufacturers
and advertising in Britain. I especially admire the eye-opening chapters
on “scientifically efficient” office furniture and “home labor-saving”
products. Very lucidly written with 272 marvellous period illustrations.
A classic.
When Things Start to Think by Neil Gershenfeld, 1999
Best book I’ve ever seen out of the MIT Media Lab. Thin on handwaving,
ruthless toward megahype, it’s chock-a-block with provocative techie
ideas. If you’re the kind of guy who wants to power your laptop with
your ductile piezoelectric shoe-soles, you’ve found your guru in Neil
Gershenfeld. Especially good are the dizzying chapters on “The Personal
Fabricator” and “Smart Money.”
The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas L.
Friedman
Don’t let the fact that it’s a New York Times bestseller fool you. The
guy is the Foreign Affairs columnist for the New York Times, after all.
A very thoughtful, profusely anecdotal work on the real-life meaning and
consequences of global capitalism. The chapter on “Globalution”
demolishes more foreign -affairs cliches than I can count.
Theory and Design in the First Machine Age by Reyner Banham, 1960.
It’s not for everybody. In fact, I don’t know who the hell this book is
for, except maybe Philip Johnson, who blurbed it. It’s a brutally
detailed history of Modernist architectural doctrine. It’s like having
your preconceptions crushed with a reinforced-concrete Bauhaus I-beam. I
found this book so painfully engrossing that I missed a flight in the
Denver airport.
The Sun, The Genome, and the Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolutions
by Freeman J. Dyson, 1999
As Freeman Dyson gets older, and keeps being proven right when everybody
else in the sciences has no idea what they’re doing, Freeman Dyson
writes ever more simply and limpidly. This book is about the arcane
depths of science policy, space exploration, Internet bandwidth, solar
power, and genetics. A ten-year -old whose second language was English
ought to be able to parse every sentence. And will people do it the way
Freeman Dyson wisely recommends? No. And twenty years from now, will it
be dead obvious that this is the way we should have done it? Yes.
Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey, 1997
Erudite essays on contemporary aesthetics just don’t get any more
rockin’ than Dave Hickey. He’s a bohemian Texan art gallerist somehow
turned Las Vegas academic. This book reads like Flaubert and Lester
Bangs celebrating the triumph of chaos theory in a post-consumerized
low-rider Cadillac. “The presumption of art’s essential goodness is
nothing more than a political fiction that we employ to solicit
taxpayers’ money for public art education.” That’s tellin’ em, Professor
Hickey!
Robert Dawson and Gray Brechin’s Farewell, Promised Land: Waking From
The California Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Recommended by Julia Witwer (jlwitwer@uci.edu)
“It’s a chronicle of the destruction of California ecosystems and
indigenous populations, with a collection of archival images and recent
photographs taken by Dawson. It is not straight Viridian green, I think.
There is a measure of nostalgia here that might cause impatience, for
one thing. And a somewhat short-sighted focus, occasionally, on the lost
“beauties” of CA. Oddly enough, though, considering the history it lays
out, the book isn’t (or isn’t just) elegiac; it’s unsettling.
The pictures embody (for me) that unheimlich energy of the classic
“Viridian Disaster.” One definition of the uncanny is the abrupt
appearance of an absence–ghosts, but also rifts, gaps, and breaks.
FAREWELL, PROMISED LAND has a lot of this, a catalogue of
undistinguished and chilling monuments to lost people and things. The
other side of the unheimlich is here too, the appearance of a haunting
“excess” that destabilizes the specious orderliness of “business as
usual”.
“Unhomely”: not just the alien, but the alien hanging out in the living
room. The manmade “lunar” landscape of the motherlode. The empty
swimming pool at the edge of the Salton sea.”
The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski. Hardcover, paperback.
Engineering guru Petroski talks very lucidly and practically forever
about the tiny, almost invisible incremental improvements in forks,
paper clips and zippers. Worth the price of the book just to change your
intimate relationship with forks.
Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion 1885-1945,
selections from the Wolfsonian design museum, edited by Wendy Kaplan,
Thames and Hudson Press, 1995.
This book was the prize in the first Viridian design contest. A fine
compendium of twentieth-century posters, furnishings and gizmos, many of
them with blatant political and ideological leanings. Valuable
historical material here, for it’s hard to find other compendiums of
Italian fascist finery. As totalitarian dictators go, the Duce had some
rather gifted designers.
Hot Designers Make Cool Fonts by Allan Haley, Rockport Publishers
This book was the prize in the second Viridian Design contest.
Typography is one of those geeky, nitpicking lines of creative work that
can become painfully fascinating. I don’t advise buying a typography
book unless you’re already a typography victim. Like me.
Nine Nations of North America, by Joel Garreau
A little dated now, but one of the best works of American culture theory
and American geography. A very original premise that is carried out very
convincingly.
Publications by Andy Goldsworthy:
Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature
Wood, by Andy Goldsworthy.
Andy Goldsworthy is a sui generis environmental artist who rearranges
the landscape with his bare hands and then takes arty photographs of the
results. This book favors his extensive work with bark, twigs, and
branches. This art is vastly more effective than any mere description
would suggest.
Stone, by Andy Goldsworthy.
The inimitable British artist does astonishing and otherworldly things
with boulders, ice, sand, and pebbles.
How to Break Into Product Design, by Pamela Williams.
We Viridians like to spend our time imagining cool devices that we might
buy, but if you actually want to be in the business of making and
selling things, you should have a look at this book first, and get some
sense of what you’re up against in the new global gizmo market.
Recommendations from our readers!
We recently asked subscribers to the Viridian Email List to recommend
books for our growing bookstore; here’s the first round of
recommendations.
Proceeds from our participation in the Amazon Associates Program will
fund the development of cool Viridian swag, which we’ll sell in order to
support the development of even more cool Viridian swag!
New! - A couple of emails received 6/8/99:
From Mike Stone, Managing Editor of Whole Earth Review:
You might be interested in Cool Companies: How the Best Companies Boost
Profits and Productivity by Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions ,” a new
book from Island Press by Joseph J. Romm. See
http://www.islandpress.com/books/bookdata/coolcompanies.html, which is
the sum of what I know about the book.
From Cassandra Thomas, catnhat:
Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Practical Guide for a Sustainable
Future. [Note from Jon L.: What we found at Amazon was a Mollison book
called Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual .] Every Viridan should read
this book. It is a practical guide to how we can maintain a high
standard of living while being part of a planetary system instead of
stomping on it.
Joel Garreau recommends (er, shameless plug) HIS OWN BOOKS!
Sez Joel:
I think Edge City: Life on the New Frontier , is a Viridian book because
it explores as its central theme the idea that we humans are creating
the biggest change in 150 years in the ways we build cities because we
at core want to take the forces of the city, bring them out to the edge,
and combine them with nature, to produce a garden. I demonstrate that
for all our grievous errors, as often as not we are succeeding, albeit
in our usual cockeyed ad hoc way. I am criticized for being guardedly
optimistic that this is at all possible. But that too is Viridian. And
meanwhile, I especially commend the last two chapters of the book to
Viridians. These would be the San Francisco chapter on “Soul”, and the
Washington chapter on “The Land.” I really poured my heart into those,
and I believe them intensely Viridian in aspiration. So there.
My earlier book, The Nine Nations of North America , is more widely
understood as Viridian, in that it celebrates the way North America
operates as if it were nine separate civilizations or economies,
regardless of political boundaries. This effort, chockablock with
interviews with real people, literally works from the ground up to
establish who we are, how we got that way, where we’re headed, and what
we value.
Recommended by Cosma Shalizi: http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/
Boy, check these out. Wow. I’ve gotta buy every one of them, except the
ones I’ve already got. A viridian bonanza! — Bruce S.
Philip Ball, The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature (Oxford
University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-19-850244-3)
No better place for budding techno-organicists to start understanding
self-organization, and how to make things that pull themselves together.
( Long, boring review .)
Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (MIT Press,
1981, ISBN 0262520583).
What was really going on in the Modernist design movement: corporate
sponsors, industrial policy, unacknowledge sources of inspiration, etc.,
etc.
Stephen Budiansky, Nature’s Keepers: The New Science of Nature
Management (Free Press, 1995, IBSN 0-02-904915-6).
Compelling case for tossing out all the cuddly bits of ecology —
harmonious ecosystems, self-regulating populations, balance of nature,
etc., etc. — while re-emphasizing the importance of actually
understanding ecosystems. Good on re-engineering ecosystems. Doesn’t
think large enough. ( Long, boring review .)
Joshua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell, Growing Artificial Societies:
Social Science from the Bottom Up (MIT Press, 1996, ISBN 0-262-55025-3).
A kind of guide to building your own SimEarth for technically-savvy
social scientists. We can use this to craft physical-social simulations
which combine fascination with awe-inspiring dread of what we’re doing
to the planet.
Gary William Flake, The Computational Beauty of Nature. (MIT Press,
1998, ISBN ).
Serious but accessible guide to constructing computational models,
especially of chaotic, fractal, & adaptive systems. Almost certainly
useful to designers who want to replace the physical with the
informational. ( Long, boring review .)
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991
(Vintage Books, 1994, ISBN 0679730052).
The nightmare from which we are trying to awake.
Philip Morrison and Kosta Tsipis, Reason Enough to Hope (MIT Press,
1998, ISBN 0-262-13344-X).
Philip Morrison is one of the wisest and most humane scientists alive;
also one of the inventors of the atom bomb. This is his eminently
sensible, if not yet sufficiently Viridian, advice on how to keep from
blowing ourselves up, or making most of the species so miserable it
would welcome that as a relief. ( Long review. .)
Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge, 1957, ISBN
0415065690).
How to avoid wasting your time trying to predict the future, define your
terms, and re-build society from scratch, when you could be figuring out
how to make things work and change them for the better.
Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (MIT Press, 1996/1969,
ISBN 0-262-69191-4).
A few hundred years from now, this will be one of the few books they’ll
pick out to show what was good and important in 20th century thought —
if anyone still reads books a few hundred years from now. Essential
reading for anyone who cares about design, or thought, or the thinking
that goes on in design, including social design.
Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (Blackwell,
1996, ISBN 0-631-20045-2).
The result of mating Richard Dawkins’s “memes” with some actual
knowledge of cultural anthropology and cognitive psychology. A must for
people who want their ideas to take over the world. ( Long, boring
review .)
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (Dover Books, 1992, ISBN
0486671356 but 2nd ed. dates to 1942).
Classic on the mechanical design of organisms, and using very simply
physical-chemical mechanisms to get adaptive, elegant, functional forms.
Plus the man wrote like an angel.
Yi-Fu Tuan, Escapism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, ISBN
0801859263), Cosmos and Hearth (U. Minnesota Press, 1996, ISBN
0816627312), Passing Strange and Wonderful (Island Press, 1993, Kodansha
1995, ISBN 1568360673) Morality and Imagination: Paradoxes of Progress
(U. Wisconsin Press, 1989, ISBN 0299120643), The Good Life (U. Wisconsin
Press, 1986, ISBN 0299105407)
Beautifully-written, impeccably-researched books about the interface
between nature and culture, and the refashioning of nature by culture.
Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
(Graphics Press, ISBN 096139210X) Envisioning Information (Graphics
Press, 1990, ISBN 0961392118) Visual Explanations (Graphics Press, 1997,
ISBN 0961392126)
Maybe the best books ever written about how to make visual displays
which are at once useful and compelling. I’d really like to see an
interface to global climate models built along Tuftean lines.
(((Bruce Sterling concurs: this Tufte guy really is something special.
Probably the greatest antidote ever to the “circus-poster effect”
typical of hasty cut-and-paste-style digital design.)))
The World Bank, World Development Report 1998–1999: Knowledge for
Development. (Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-19-521118-9).
Appalling lumpentechnocrat prose, but _lots_ of interesting stuff about
bringing information, knowledge and electronic communications (not
always clearly distinguished) to the poor, using IT in poverty-reduction
schemes, controlling pollution through public pressure and disseminating
information, etc. Also the best available statistics on the world’s
distribution of wealth, resources, information, health, etc., etc.
[End of Cosma’s recommendations!]
Ted Byfield recommends: “Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Disenchanted Night: the
Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century is pretty short
(definitely a Viridian virtue) and excellent.”
(((Bruce Sterling remarks: “Disenchanted Night” has some very
interesting material on the European history of energy and lighting
practices. Another Schivelbusch book, The Railway Journey is even
better. I’m stuck in the middle of the most recent Schivelbusch book, on
the history of drugs and spices .)))
Ted Byfield recommends: “Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against
the Tyranny of the Market (nyc: new press, 1998) also weighs in at a
whole 108 numbered pages and calls a spade a spade.”
Ted Byfield recommends: Pierre Bourdieu, On Television (nyc: new press,
1998), a hefty 104 pages, pins the tail on the arsehole.
Edited by Ted Byfield (and a vast cast of nine other people):
Readme! Filtered by Nettime. ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge,
from Autonomedia
(((bruces remarks: “Nettime” is a mailing list for anarcho, Euro-lefty,
digital-arts people. Nettime is what WIRED would be if WIRED came out of
a squat in East Berlin, and had no funding, no ads, no paper and no ink.
I’ve been on the nettime list for years now; my 1996 science fiction
novel HOLY FIRE is a kind of valentine to nettime, and ISEA, Ars
Electronica, and their many related, opaque, delightful,
Eurocybercultural concerns.
((Nettime is one of the few Internet lists that could generate a book
worth reading. Much of this book is frankly inexplicable — imagine
cyberfeminists whose first language is Latvian discussing why Deleuze
and Guattari made them start an interactive website — but there are
many gems amid the murk, and frankly, I rather enjoy a good postmodern
wallow in murk-for-murk’s-sake. Among the many rants included in this
bulging volume is “The Manifesto of January 3, 2000,” which was my first
rehearsal for the founding of the Viridian List. Many nettimers are also
in the Viridian List. The publisher, Autonomedia, deserves support for
their unflinching devotion to zero-commercial-potential nosebleed
postmodernism.)))
The Tribes of Palos Verdes ( St. Martin’s Press, 1998 ) This novel was
written by Viridian list member Joy Nicholson ( silverlake@ibm.net)
Bob Morris recommends: Ecology of Fear - Mike Davis - Metropolitan Books
With a chapter titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” ( since we, in
effect subsidize the wealthy to continually rebuild in Malibu after
fires ), one could assume the real estate interests in L.A. would attack
Davis unrelentingly. And they have. About the worst they’ve proven is
that some of his facts are wrong. His ideas though, are provoking. Mass
mindless boosterism has created an L.A. that is an environmental
disaster waiting to happen with a mindset that ignores nature. (((bruces
remarks: it’s a fun book to read and William Gibson is major devotee of
this Davis guy. For the record, however, I must proclaim that it is
extremely unViridian to get your facts wrong.)))
Bob Morris recommends: The More You Watch The Less You Know - Danny
Schechter - Seven Stories Press.
The title say it all, in this analysis of mass media and mass news, from
someone who has been in alternative and mainstream media for thirty
years.
Bob Morris recommends: Eat The Rich - P.J. O’Rourke - Atlantic Monthly
Press
Why is Tanzania, with huge resources, desperately poor, while Hong Kong,
with zero resources, quite wealthy? Why did Albania’s capitalism blow
up? Why does Sweden’s socialism work? And why does Shanghai have the
worst of both worlds? O’Rourke explores economics throughout the world
in this well-written and sometimes quite funny book. Useful even if you
aren’t a right-wing Libertarian.
Robert G. Kennedy III recommends: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
. Having won the 1998 Pulitzer for Nonfiction, it probably doesn’t need
any plugs, but I’m going to plug it anyway. I’m not even finished
reading, and it has changed my worldview. It will change yours, too.
It’s very Viridian, beings about germs, death, and the impermanence of
institutions.
Adam Lipscomb recommends: David Brin The Transparent Society While I
don’t agree with all of his thesis, there are some interesting points
raised re: corporate privacy that might be useful in preparing the
Viridian “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” next century.
(((bruces remarks: never trust anything any science fiction writer tells
you about anything, especially when he’s got some kind of big cranky
burr under his saddle.)))
Adam Lipscomb recommends: Gregory Benford Deep Time - A look at the
concept of building/thinking in long range terms, as well as some
fascinating proposals for global warming fixes.
(((The warning about not trusting science fiction writers goes double
for this Benford guy.)))
Warren Ellis is on the Viridian list, and he writes, uhm, scripts for,
er, “comic books.”
Warren Ellis remarks: Not only are my books “dull, irrelevant and
stupid,” but worse; they’re graphic novels. They do, however, seem to
sell quite well, and the referral fees might make you a few pennies.
TRANSMETROPOLITAN: BACK ON THE STREET
Written and created by Warren Ellis, illustrated by Darick Robertson
Best Graphic Novel: International Horror Guild Best New Comic
(International): British National Comics Week Awards
The first collected edition of TRANSMETROPOLITAN, a sf comics series
published by Vertigo, an imprint of DC Comics Inc. “Outlaw journalist”
Spider Jerusalem has been living up a goddamn mountain for five years
now, cheerfully hiding from life in general. Terrible legal pressures,
however, force him off his mountaintop and down into The City, the one
place he hates the most in all the world… and the only place where he
can write.
Blasted stone bald by an overeager bathroom and surrounded by household
appliances crazed by cheap drug emulators, Spider finds himself immersed
in the City and surrounded by people warping themselves into alien
bodies using fashion DNA templates sold by a collapsing ET enclave
somewhere in Poland…
“Brilliant future-shock commentary”
– SPIN
TRANSMETROPOLITAN: LUST FOR LIFE
Written and created by Warren Ellis, illustrated by Darick Robertson
“If you loved me, you’d all kill yourselves today.”
The second and most recent collected edition, wherein Spider Jerusalem
watches someone turn into fog as a lifestyle choice, learns everything
he needs to know from television, becomes Jesus, and is found to have a
kid with no head. Which doesn’t surprise anyone.
“In TRANSMETROPOLITAN Warren Ellis has put passion and commitment back
into adult graphic SF. With righteous anger, compelling action and a
tasty touch of modern cyberpunk sensibility, TRANSMETROPOLITAN reminds
us of what SF and the Fourth Estate should be about — and does it!”
– Michael Moorcock
Warren Ellis remarks: This one is a work-for-hire job I did on a
corporate-owned character, thrown in because it might make you a few
dollars, featuring as it does the popular X-MEN character WOLVERINE.
WOLVERINE: NOT DEAD YET
Written by Warren Ellis, illustrated by Leinil Francis Yu
It starts in Hong Kong in the 1970’s, with the best killer in the world;
the collapsing Scots assassin McLeish, who cannot murder without
drinking four bottles of Scotch first. It ends a day later, with a
fireball in Hong Kong Harbour — it was believed. Now the man who lit
that fireball is in New York… Logan, the enigmatic soldier who haunts
the 20th Century. And there’s a dead body in his bed with a chunk of
explosive stuck to it along with a calling card. The sign of McLeish,
who should be a twenty years’-soaked piece of filth on the bottom of
Hong Kong Harbour…
THE ART OF THE LONG VIEW by Peter Schwartz
(((bruces remarks: Running a corporate futurist scenario can be as
useless as telling a Tarot. It can be as gruelling and phoney as
encounter-therapy. However, scenario-modelling works at least as well or
better than any other fortune-telling technique, and if you have the
right people involved, it can break your deadening sense of habit and
dogma, defeat your sense of despair, and give you a useful, heartening
feeling that you have got a genuine grip on the driving forces of your
destiny. Many foggy, useless books have been written on the subject of
corporate futurism, but if you want just one, and a good one, THE ART OF
THE LONG VIEW is the one to have. (((I once had a conversation in an
Austin restaurant with Peter Schwartz, and a middle-aged couple at the
next table interrupted their meal to come over to abjectly beg Peter
Schwartz to tell them who he was, and how come he knew so much, and why
he talked so brilliantly.)))
How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
(((bruces remarks: This is the only book I’ve ever read that talks
convincingly about what happens to buildings after their architects and
builders are long dead and buried. A rare classic of the Viridian
“Embrace Decay” principle. )))
Jude Milhon is on the Viridian list. She writes books.
“I have two books that may not all be pulped yet:”
How to Mutate and Take Over the World and The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook
Stefan Jones recommends: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering by
Samuel C. Florman
“Informed, literate, passionate book, urging engineers themselves to
become more informed, literate, and passionate. Florman, a Civil
Engineer himself, skewers “anti technologists” like Dubos and Rifkin,
and attacks the common intellectual disdain for engineers and their
work; then, he just as skillfully takes on engineers for failing to
recognize the harm their creations can do when they do not take full
responsibility for their design and use. Florman’s ideal engineer would
fit right into the Viridian movement.” (((bruces remarks: I read Florman
with great attention and can only concur with Stefan’s wise remarks.)))
The Immense Journey by Loren C. Eiseley
Stefan Jones remarks: “A four star general visits a particle accelerator
installation. After the tour through the heart of the giant mechanism is
over, the chief physicist asks the officer for his impression. “Yes,
yes, very impressive. But what does it do for the defense of the
country?” “Nothing,” replies the scientist, “but it makes the country
*worth* defending.” There’s little “Viridian” in Eiseley’s essays about
animals, evolution, humans and humanity. But they are a wonderful way to
learn *why* we should give a damn about the environment, and a bracing
and effective solvent for the goo that comes to clogs one’s
sensibilities after too many years of reading technocratic-libertarian
tracts. Some of these essays have more sense of wonder than entire
science fiction novels. (((bruces remarks: unfortunately, that feat
isn’t difficult.)))
<-EWaste LINK