On the bookshelves of the digerati
JENNIFER JAMES cultural anthropologist and specialist in cultural change and marketing intelligence.
A Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman. "Ackerman's teaching us how our senses work. My interest is with the nose. Smell was the first sense to develop in Homo sapiens, and in the animal kingdom it dominates in all relationships. I'm interested in smell as a market concept well beyond perfume and aromatherapy, and I think we need to know more about its connection to memory."
At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, by Stuart Kauffman. "All natural systems go through cycles of stability, chaos, and then stability again. The genius is to be able to look at the chaos and see the organizing system. Some people believe in God, and others believe in evolution. I don't think either holds all the answers, but I believe complexity theory will hold them together."
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, by René Girard. "I'm very concerned about violence. I think it's absurd to have violence in a world as civilized as ours. We are the only species that kills as a result of our cultural differences. Girard writes about how violence has been used in sacred ceremonies to control tension between groups. Sports are, in many ways, controlled violence rituals."
BRAN FERREN heads up the Creative Technology Group at Walt Disney Imagineering.
Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind, by Gerald Edelman. "Edelman describes a Darwinesque organizing principle for how self-awareness emerges from this mysterious object we call our brain. Somehow this fancy piece of meat makes me feel like me and you like you. To paraphrase Marvin Minsky, if people spent as much time thinking about how the brain works as they do proclaiming it's incomprehensible, by now we might understand it."
The Smithsonian Institution, by Gore Vidal. "This book actually manages to paint a more bizarre picture of our political leadership than what we hear on the evening news, which is no minor accomplishment. It's an extremely funny pseudo-history of life in the White House. Our White House."
René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonne, edited by David Sylvester. "Magritte is my favorite surrealist painter. Reading this is like reading the Encyclopedia Britannica or a great dictionary. To see the body of an artist's work in its entirety is a very different experience than reading someone's editorialized version. What you see through these volumes are the creative data points that defined his professional life. It's fascinating to connect these dots into one's own portrait of his personal life."
HARRIET RUBIN founder and publisher of Doubleday/Currency and author of The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women.
Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook, by Antony Sher. "Sher's book is a journal of taking on the role of Richard III, Shakespeare's prototype for every over-the-top leader. These leaders don't say, 'Here's what we have, now what do we do?' They say, 'Here's what we want, now how do we achieve it?' I'm learning to play Richard III because I want to be the kind of person who tests limits."
Jung's Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra, by C. G. Jung. "What we know about vision and creativity is so small and risk averse compared to pictures of intense minds at the very peaks of achievement. Jung's idea about power is that it's not something you acquire in small doses. You get the most when you travel from peak to peak. You have to live at extremes, and this book keeps raising the standard."
Monster: Living off the Big Screen, by John Gregory Dunne. "Dunne gives the reader a picture of what happens when a community of people live fiercely in their imaginations. Everything that happens on the big screen - aka the monster - happens on a personal scale in the lives of movie people. There are grades of enemies, from good enemies to homicidal enemies. All are essential to making a picture."
STREET CRED
Pix Are for Kids
Free to Disagree
Attorney Privilege
Pen and Think
Familiar Dissonance
Life with Bruno
A Cinematic World Away
Discounterculture
Jargon Watch
Graphics Card with a Charge
Berlin Diaries
Desktop Sound Factory
Shake Your Joystick
Ambient Awakening
ReadMe
The Lizard King
Cold New World
Pocket-Perfect Sound
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