Quick Update

Wife and child at the town pool. I’ve got time for a brief update.

I just finished the first draft of my next book, now tentatively called “Life Incorporated” (and before that called “Corporatized.”) Now I’m working full time and hard on an overdue graphic novel for Vertigo, to be announced shortly.

The fourth and final volume of my comic series Testament will be out the second week of August. That same week, I’ll be speaking in Las Vegas at a meta-meeting about meetings.

I am going to teach one course in the Fall at NYU/ITP, but it’s only open to ITP students and it’s already filled. In October, though, I should be teaching another online course at MaybeLogicAcademy, looking at the issues in my new book and what to do about them. That course will then, hopefully, spill over once it’s done onto the “corporatized” bbs on this site.

I’m doing a big lecture in NYC, for free, at the Princeton Club, on November 14. It’s the annual Korzybski Lecture for the Institute of General Semantics (a big name for a lot of the stuff we talk about here: awareness, agency, communication, coercive language and systems). It’s pretty far out in the future, but there’s a symposium of some kind the next day that I’ll be at – and there’s not so many free events where I get to speak and interact with people to this extent. So it might be worth the trip and I wanted to give some advance notice.

A text version of my recent talk, below, at the Personal Democracy Forum is now available at TheEdge.

Okay – back to work.

Posted on 19 July '08 by Douglas, under Uncategorized, personal.

7 Comments to “Quick Update”

#1 Posted by Drew (19.07.08 at 19:38 )

New book title sound promising. Any teaser on the main thesis?

Thanks.

#2 Posted by Billy Lamb (19.07.08 at 23:40 )

ack.. broken link for the txt. file. I wanted to read that. :)

#3 Posted by M. Nestor (20.07.08 at 18:12 )

Great news, I’ve been looking forward to the book, and now to this graphic novel.

#4 Posted by M. Nestor (20.07.08 at 18:31 )

Oh, and thanks for posting the text of your talk, I’m still too stubborn and often deficient in attention span to listen at another’s pace, rather than reading at my own. ^_^

#5 Posted by Jeffrey (20.07.08 at 21:37 )

Not sure on the complete focus of your new book but those titles send very different messages to me. Life Incorporated sounds very much like a “What Color Is Your Parachute?” career guide.

#6 Posted by Caroline (21.07.08 at 09:50 )

And the anticipation mounts! Congrats on finishing the first draft.

Nov. 14 is my birthday…perhaps a trip to NYC would make a good present to myself. :)

#7 Posted by Douglas (21.07.08 at 15:23 )

ooh. I hope Life Incorporated wouldn’t sound like a self-help business book. But maybe some people will think of incorporating themselves as a good thing.

I remember when I first saw the book by that Stanford guy on “Persuasive Technologies” I thought it was supposed to be an expose on online coercion – and it turned out to be a how-to book. I’d hate to see my title work the other way around.

But there’s time.