>No book is ever finished. No painting is ever finished. No experiment
>is ever finished. No thesis is ever finished. Hell no idea is ever
>finished either. Look at Marx's writings. He wrote so much, he just
>gave up making books out of it all. I mean what is Grundrisse?
"A poem is never finished, only abandoned" (Paul Valery).
ducking & covering before Justin, Carrol, & Michael Perelman get on my case,
Yoshie
Postscript:
At 8:23 PM -0800 1/12/01, michael perelman wrote:
>Sure, if Doug would teach me to write so that more people would read
>my little-read books.
For what's its worth, I have read many of your books & recommend them to all: _Class Warfare in the Information Age_; _The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation_; _The Natural Instability of Markets: Expectations, Increasing Returns, and the Collapse of Capitalism_; _The Pathology of the U.S. Economy: The Costs of a Low-Wage System_; & _Transcending the Economy: On the Potential of Passionate Labor and the Wastes of the Market_. I don't know how many copies of your books have been sold altogether; if not as many copies have been bought as should have, the problem must lie in pricing.
***** <http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/nov99/msg01278.html>
Transcending the Future by michael perelman 07 December 1999 01:07 UTC
I have been suggesting that people on the list keep costs informed about their work. Even Max was reticent about promoting his new book. Tom Walker is perhaps the only one to have given us a heads up.
All this talk about utopianism prompted to mention my newest book -- well, it's not a book yet -- but I am copy editing it and it is supposed to be out in the spring. Incidentally, Bill Lear read an early version of the manuscript and gave me wonderful suggestions.
I will give the blurb and the table of contents here.
Realizing Our Economic Potential explores the reasons why our economy fails to provide a more fulfilling way of life. Michael Perelman argues that the irrational dominance of markets imposes burdens of needless waste and lost potential, and furthermore, traditional economics is ill-equipped to approach such matters because of its focus on limits rather than potential. He offers case studies of economists' limited attempts to analyze waste, and paints a vivid picture of how a narrow preconception of human nature has precluded society from escaping the tight bounds of market organization. As an alternative, Perelman develops Charles Fourier's concept of passionate labor. Using examples ranging from wartime selflessness to blood donations and computer programming, he demonstrates that passionate labor has the potential to elevate both human performance and satisfaction well beyond the shallow limits imposed by markets. <snip> *****
In the next edition or printing of the same book, I think that the blurb should feature -- instead of examples ranging from wartime selflessness to blood donations -- Fourier's remark: "Love in the Phalanstery is no longer, as it is with us, a recreation which detracts from work; on the contrary it is the soul and the vehicle, the mainspring of all work and of the whole of universal attraction."
"Fourier es-tu toujours là?"
Here's a "A brief exegesis of André Breton's Ode à Charles Fourier" at <http://arthur.u-strasbg.fr/~ronse/CF/ode.html>.
And remember to put a sexy picture on the cover of each book....
Without a cool picture of Chow Yun-fat on the cover, Lisa Stokes & Michael Hoover's _City on Fire_ wouldn't have been so popular. See it at <http://www.cityonfirehkcinema.com/>.