On #clojure, Rich once mentioned that Jim Gray's "Transaction Processing.." influenced his design of clojure's STM. IIRC, he mentioned that the MVCC aspect of the STM and the commute operation were some of the ideas that he took from the book.

Another paper that gets repeatedly mentioned as being influential in Clojure's design is http://web.mac.com/ben_moseley/frp/paper-v1_01.pdf

Once you finish the above paper, you should also look at http://code.google.com/p/clojure-contrib/wiki/DatalogOvervie... for seeing one way of doing FRP in clojure.