Reading Influences

“Who’re your influences?” Jimmy Rabbitte asks, interviewing applicants responding to his Hot Press ad for members of a new Dublin soul band he’s forming and will manage, in Roddy Doyle’s hilarious “The Commitments.”

He judged on one question: influences.
– Who’re your influences?
– U2.
– Simple Minds.
– Led Zeppelin.
– No one really.
They were the most common answers. They failed.

“The Commitments,” Roddy Doyle, 1987. First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, July 1989, page 21.

I thought of Jimmy while following links from a recent Matt Mullenweg post in which he linked to two apparently well read and seemingly productive and influential workers in the tech industry – Dan Wang and Zhengdong Wang. They both show on their sites their reading, and I’m interested in influences – what have they read, and what not. And what might I list as foundational in my influences. Combining the two, that is, trying to form a kind of Dublin soul band (or book club) with reading suggestions anyone in an influential position in the tech industry might benefit from I present my influences (list limited to what might be relevant to those involved in compute, scaling, A.I., and the future of humanity and machines):

Marshall McLuhan: The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media.
Buckminster Fuller: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.
Henry David Thoreau: Walden.
John Cage: Silence and A Year From Monday.
S. I. Hayakawa: The Use and Misuse of Language.
Jose Maria de Eca de Queiros: The City and the Mountains.
Hugh Kenner: The Pound Era.
Susan Sontag: On Photography.
Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex.
Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space.
Richard Brautigan: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

I made the reading list and this post because where Dan and Zhengdong show their reading on their sites, I didn’t see mention of any of these books, and they are deep cuts, and as cuts on a kind of playlist, I think they emerge into a significant whole. I hope the techies don’t, as Jimmy did:

Jimmy shut the door on that one without bothering to get the phone number. He didn’t even open the door to three of them. A look out his parents’ bedroom window at them was enough. (21)