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Just finished Douglas Rushkoff's latest, a novel called Exit Strategy. Need I say any more than this: there's an endorsement from Morrison on the back, more than just, "I loved it" or something throwaway like that. It's based on the story of Joseph from the Old Testament, but I started to get the feeling that he was somehow working in Exodus, too. The whole thing is presented as a manuscript unearthed in 2208, hidden for 200 years in Internet code, which details the narrator's participation in creating an orgiastic online trading boom that would simply make it all the more worse when the economic model broke down. Additionally, there are footnotes throughout the book, explaining mundane details as one would to an audience reading 200 years from now, contextualizing items within their history. However, Rushkoff himself didn't write all these footnotes; he posted the book for free on Yahoo Internet Life and invited people to write their own from that perspective, many of which are included in the book. He thinks of those notes as Talmudic, and spoke of one day cutting out the book and just publishing all the footnotes in their entirety.
Now I'm a third through J.T. Ross Jackson's (We Can Do It! We Will Do It!) And We Are Doing It!: Building an Ecovillage Future. Jackson is the CEO of GaiaCorp, a mutual fund investment advisor group, which has a strict policy of investigating any potential investment's longterm impact on the environment, both natural and sociological. In his spare time, he's created a number of commune-like housing communities, wherein each family might have their own separate homes, but they then share communal areas and share responsibility for the upkeep of the general community, supplementing the others when they fall short.
Not quite sure what I'll read next. I've got so many damn books on my shelves waiting to be read, I'm just not sure which to give priority. |
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Anyway, just finished Eco's Serendipity: Language and Lunacy...interesting diversion for a few days, got me thinking about things only tangentially related, as Eco's writing usually does. Not as good as Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, though.