CORNER MARKET WITH RICH FIELD

  Whole Earth : The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, by John Markoff Ambition guides my reading interests.  Thus, my fascination with the history of Whole Earth Catalog. I miss the days when I could use a physical book and thumb ahead to see where I'm going.  But only at one fourth through the ebook, I appreciate something this biography of Brand shows about creative momentum.  The first few pages are about how his family's  heritage of  mind and industriousness influenced this general attitude and character.  Within the first 40 pages we see the Beat scene and characters like Ginsburg and Kesey.  The Beat scene was beginning to fade a bit while cosmic folks like Michael Murphy and the Esalen Institute were just being founded. What I'm learning about the early Stewart Brand is the Power of Paradox.  Brand's anti-communist agenda meant he was a training leader in the ROTC until the conflict with authority and centralization meant he saw the military regime of bureaucracy as

    The outright Maoist juggernaut of Marxist hipness was stopped in my world with the arrival of The Beatles' song, "Revolution."  It was enough to stop the hipster triple-dog-double-dare toward trendy violence. But a residue and general tone of the SDS New Left remained in cultural command.  A a young man of an abandoned heritage and without ambition despondently assumes his peers have all the correct answers. But we huddled around Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog and I found my way back home. R. Buckminster Fuller, Maxwell Maltz, Norbert Wiener and others were found in the pages.  I even visited Galt's Gulch of Ayn Rand's unrealized ideal there.   My posts of Whole Earth Catalog have been going on for years.  I finally got Markoff's book released in 2022.  The opening pages chronicle a heritage of leading edge ambition that were an influence on Stewart Brand.    As I delve into this book I will also re-engage memories of what it was like being there.

  Before Stewart Kaplan, the astute businessman and esoteric author,  made Tarot decks appear everywhere.   When the Oriental oracle of secret Old China had us throwing hexagrams.  There appeared a brilliantly titled book to take advantage of the arising interest in Cybernetics and ESP. "The  Cybernetic ESP Breakthrough " by Katharine Sabin, showed how to use an ordinary deck of 52 playing cards as an oracle.   The appearance of duplicate suits in sets of two or the middle card in sets of three gave yes or no indicators with details that rivaled the specifics of the changing lines in I-Ching. Independent meanings of the four suits gave a general tone but permutations of combinations gave specifics.  Sabin's book was organized in a difficult way to read but with enough experience it began to speak.   That was 1968.     In 2022 there arrived a set of cards that speak beyond ordinary playing cards but refined for an enriching  worldview.  I speak of "The Four Games"

    It is Retrofuturist to recall how my father engaged full confidence and faith in building his business. He overcame the death of his own father which put him in charge of his family while still in grade school.  He had to quit school during the Great Depression.  The key was faith in action.  No particular religious affiliation, he still recognized a guiding force of goodness.  I have a name for that confidence in your rightness to be here and take action.  I call it "Intuitional New Thought" as espoused by many intelligent leaders.  Reading and theory were not dad's thing. Surviving and gaining abilities fighting in Patton's Third Army prepared the young man for work to come.  He had an intuitive calculation of what efforts would lead to economic gain while building in an aesthetic way. Fortunate family situation was that a brother became an architect with Dad's support.  The architect then designed Frank Lloyd Wright style Usonian homes.  Another brother und