Where have I been, people keep asking. Right here, it turns out, giving birth to two books I’ve been incubating for many months. If you’re on my e-list, you received a notice yesterday that my two new books, The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future and The Wave, have been published. I’m almost too excited to type!
Both books can be bought for a 20% discount from a special page, a gift to my dear readers: to buy The Wave or The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future, just click the links in this paragraph and enter the discount code 76KPUKT8 when you check out.
The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future is non-fiction. One of its two main parts features 28 short chapters (most no more than a page or two) exploring emergent knowledge from many realms including commerce, anthropology, social science, medicine, spirituality, cognitive science, art, public policy, and others. Each chapter highlights stories, research, and emerging developments that point to a specific public interest in cultivating empathy, imagination, and community through artistic and cultural creativity. The Wave is speculative fiction: not utopian, because everything in it is doable, but a glimpse of this possible world that I hope will spark other social imaginations.
At my site, you’ll find testimonials from readers like Eric Booth, Peter Coyote, Bob Holman, Lucy Lippard, Van Jones, Jerry Michalski, Raymond Tymas-Jones, and Gloria Steinem. I’m thrilled to have the endorsement of these stellar individuals.
If you live near New York or the San Francisco Bay Area, please come to my launches: May 23rd at NYU and June 2 at the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley.
If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you know what I care most about are awareness and choice. I see our vast potential; I see our capacity to actualize it; I see that we are on the cusp of a new paradigm in which creativity, social imagination, and empathy will be given their true value. But I have absolutely no idea whether we will reach the tipping-point. That’s up to you, to me, to all of us.
I wrote these books to share a perspective that I hope will help others see the same potentials, discovering new ways to enact them. If you share that aim, please tell others about both new books. Tweet this blog. Like my Facebook page for the books. Suggest me as a speaker. Introduce me to new networks. If books can make a difference—and goodness knows they’ve made a huge difference in my life—I hope and trust these can help.
And I’m thrilled to be back at blogging. There are so many things I haven’t had time to write about this spring: how eager we were to have a story to fit the bombings in Boston, how almost any story—diehard IRA, white supremacists, Kazakh terrorists—would do, as if these neat tales actually explain anything. How George Bush discovered art….
I’m writing this heading home from Philadelphia, where the lilacs, dogwoods, redbuds, tulips, azaleas and other glorious blooms took my breath away. I didn’t have much time to walk, but at the back of my mind when I did was the awareness of people who have passed away in recent weeks. Bob Edgar, a lifelong fighter for social justice, will be hugely missed. Richie Havens’ passing seems somehow to herald the end of an era. I can’t precisely describe the rough sweetness of his music, but you can hear it in his take on this aptly named Beatles song “In My Life.” I honor the creativity of these great spirits who inspire me to repeat my constant mantra: I don’t want to waste my precious time on this earth. If I succeeded in my intentions, my new books are encoded with that message on every page. I hope you’ll want to see for yourself.
I can’t embed “In My Life” from YouTube, so here’s a wonderful medly of love songs sung by Richie Havens, “Tupelo Honey” and “Just Like A Woman.”
READ ABOUT The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future and The Wave.
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