Bambi, Bolivia and Brainstorming

Enjoying the hell out of being here at Blue Mountain Center. The most remarkable part of a retreat like this is the ability to be just as private and busy as you want, but to be able to emerge and find really fun, interesting new friends who want to talk and hang out too. We’ve been having a good deal of rain (all day today, very dreary) but that’s been good for my writing. I have a link to give for a very interesting piece about developments in Bolivia forwarded to me by a friend. And I have a few pictures to tantalize you with… I took the half hour walk up to Lookout Mountain on Monday in the crystal clear sunshine (just like it was on Sept. 11 5 years ago when I was here too) and napped in the sun on a big granite slab, wrote in my journal and soaked up some nature. And then there are was my encounter with Bambi on my way up and my fascination with the turning leaves on my way down… see below for those. Also, below the pics I’ll post my Table of Contents to celebrate that I have the first eight chapters in solid first draft form…

Here’s where I am most days, with great view of the lake and the grounds… but muthahf****in’ hot when they turn on the heat!

And Lookout Mountain:

Table of Contents (September 13, 2006)
Intro: Something is Stirring
Ch. 1 Class Dismissed!
Ch. 2 What You See Me Doing, Isn’t What I Do!
Ch. 3 Science From Below
Ch. 4 DIY vs. Professionalism
Ch. 5 Outlaw Bicycling
Ch. 6 The Tinkerer’s Grail (grassroots, sustainable biofuels)
Ch. 7 A DIY, Working-Class World’s Fair (Burning Man)
Ch. 8 Virtual Spine of the Commons (Free software and network culture)
Ch. 9 Gardening the City (urban community gardens)
Ch. 10 Reinventing Adaptation (permacultural transf. of cities and ag, relocalization, decarbonization)
Ch. 11 Eluding Traps, Theirs and Ours (co-optation, guilt, fear, race and gender, rigidity, self-righteousness)

and I’m seeking great ideas for a title to this book so here’s a pile of keywords and ideas that I think are basic to its contents… I’ll make the winner a great dinner! (the working title is “Seeds of the New” but I’ve come to agree that it lacks the proper hook…)

Keywords, phrases, concepts:
Tinkering
Tinkers, smiths
DIY, techno-innovators, technovative Cognitariat
Producing a biologically sustainable cooperative commons of general abundance
Ecodaptation, eco-commies, eco-commons, eco-commonists
Self-emancipation of the working class is the “job” of the working class itself
Myth of the middle class (shhhh: it’s the well-paid fraction of the working class!)
Revolt against professionalism
Beyond subordination
Passionate work vs. paid work / Free vs. fee
The bifurcated life / Two jobs, one to pay bills, one to feel fully engaged
Inventing the world we deserve ““ Making a life worth living
Not “mere workers” but working very hard
Visiting the improvisational workshops of a 21st century Ecorenaissance
Escaping market life = escaping manufactured scarcity, shoddiness, suicide
A new world grows in the vacant lots of the old / Tinkering in the waste streams of late capitalism
Escape Hatch from barbarism and ecological collapse / Inventive Exodus: designing our way Out!
Invisible, stifled improvisational genius is a great untapped resource
An end to organized stupidity and nihilistic pointlessness, abolition of useless toil
Anti-economy, post-economic, “from each according to her abilities, to each according to her needs”
The unmeasured life pulls the plug on the Great Speed-up
Unleash engaged subjectivity
Unblock the buried, unrecognized, unappreciated creative potential in each person
Taking time and know-how out of the market to build the foundation of the next world
Invisible Revolution: An emergent, broad, self-organizing working class escaping class-ification
Cooperation and Mutual Aid vs. competition, isolation, and alienation
Full enjoyment not full employment! “Jobs” Don’t Work!
New thinking for the new century
The Left is dead, revolution is urgent (if not imminent) (!)
Out of the Guilt Trap, sidestepping co-optation
Pleasure prompts engagement, sacrifice stunts imagination / acting nullifies suffering
Generalized Abundance not Contrived Scarcity

Lastly, if anyone is hot to be an early reader for one or more of those first eight chapters, let me know!