David's tales of library love

I think: good movie.

2008-09-07T08:58:00.000-07:00

Paul Leduc (dir.) - What Do You Think? (¿Cómo ves?) 1985, 49 min. DVD SPANISH 300 WHA
The library has been getting a lot of good movies lately (and even more terrible terrible movies). I'm sort of conflicted about what I think of the allocation of library resources to so many DVDs, many of which have no merit whatsoever. But they have, so I think we all have to make the most of it.
I picked up What Do You Think? And took it out because it seemed like it might be about punks. Also because the director had made a movie about Frida Kahlo, and one based on John Reed's Insurgent Mexico. Set in Mexico City, What Do You Think? Has punks in it, although there is a lot of music in it and the bands are not punk bands. It also has scenes of industrial desolation and factories (making sheet glass in one, lime in another) juxtapozed with a song about the singer hating his job and quitting. There is a dream like procession of little kids in lucha masks beating on drums. Lots of poverty and shanties, lots of violence (including sexual assault), punks stealing a cop car and hijacking a plane (that's still on the ground) seemingly to have a party with a live band. There is a cool scene in a gay bar featuring Tito Vasconcelos, a famous gay activist in Mexico and legendary cabaret performer (interesting article from google books here from the book Corpus delecti : performance of the Americas by Coco Fusco, which is available from the U of Calgary library NX501 .C67 2000). Paul Leduc has directed a number of other films with Vasconcelos in them which look interesting (notably Dollar Mambo, a film with no dialog about the U.S. Invasion of Panama). So, definitely a worthwhile film. Very stylish and stylized. Not really a plot, more a tragectory. Also note, the DVD case says the film is 75 minutes but its really 49.

Nalo Hopkinson is a very good writer

2008-08-30T19:52:00.000-07:00

Nalo Hopkinson - Midnight Robber Science Fiction HOP
Hopefully many of you are familiar with Nalo Hopkinson, Jamaican born Canadian Fantasy/Scifi writer. Most of what she writes draws heavily on Caribbean folklore and traditions and Midnight Robber is no exception. In this case the Caribbean roots are often barely remembered ties to earth for colonists on Toussaint, which was originally colonized by peoples from the Caribbean. The main character is a young girl, Tan-Tan, who pretends to be the Robber Queen for festival. Later she is exiled to New Half-Way Tree.
To me this is what scifi can be. It is beautifully written, relevant to the real world, challenging and thoughtful. I really liked this book. The fact that it is about Carnival, Midnight Robbers and the planet is named after Toussaint Louverture didn't hurt either.

The Cry of Nature by John Oswald and some other stuff

2008-01-23T19:43:00.000-08:00

First when it's still fresh in my mind here is the text of The Cry of Nature by John Oswald hosted by animalrightshistory.org Hurrah! If you need details on John Oswald read the previous post.

There is also a lot of awesome stuff I have out from the Calgary Public Library right now. I'm not going to write a long post about any of it, so here is some short comments about each item.

Toumast - Ishumar (Real World, 2007) CD MAI WOR TOU
I don't really like the Real World label much, but every once in a while they still put out something good. In this case by the wonderful Kel Tamashek band Toumast. Here is their website. Give this cd a listen, please.

Jean Ritchie - Jean Ritchie's Dulcimer People 787.75 RIT
Jean Ritchie is one of the most wonderful musicians ever. She also has done a huge amount of scholarship on folk music in America. This is a book about dulcimer makers and dulcimer players from 1975. Wonderful! Also check out her cds including:
Ballads from here Appalachian Family Tradition (Smithsonian Folkways, 2003) CD PA RIT
Mountain Born (Greenhays, 1995) CD PA RIT and
Carols for All Seasons (Tradition, 1997) CD R CHR RIT

Mike Ritchardson & Rick Geary - Cravan (Dark Horse, 2005) Graphix 848 CRA R
Mike Richardson, founder of Dark Horse, has written a very interesting graphic novel here. Arthur Cravan was a true international man of mystery. A big influence on Dada, a friend of (and opponent of in exhibition matches) Heavyweight boxing champ and all around badass Jack Johnson, an acquaintance of Trotsky, and rival (at least when it came to women) of Marcel Duchamp. Cravan was an art critic who scandalized the art world and disappeared from Mexico without a trace. Richardson introduces the theory that he may have also been the reclusive and pseudonymous anarchist author B. Traven.

Allan Antliff - Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall 701.03 ANT
It took forever for the library to get this book in. I think I put it on hold last March and its been on order since then, finally coming in two weeks ago. The irony is that I don't have time to read it right now. Seems interesting and hopefully I'll get around to it. Don't forget about Antliff's excellent Only a beginning : an anarchist anthology 320. 57097 ONL an anthology of Canadian anarchist zines and newspapers.

Carol Steinfeld - Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants 631.86 STE
This might be the only CPL book with someone urinating on the cover! This slim but informative book teaches you how to use urine as plant food, as well as addressing some wider societal issues. A good companion to
Joeseph Jenkins - The humanure handbook : a guide to composting human manure 631. 875 JEN 2005

Vegetarians + Revolutionaries = ???

2008-01-13T16:03:00.000-08:00

Tristram Stuart – The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism From 1600 to Modern Times (WW Norton, 2006) 613.26209 STU.
This is a monumental book! 446 pages plus nearly 200(!) pages of bibliography, index and notes. Perhaps this is the first serious attempt at this type of history. At least it is the first that I know of.
There is definitely a lot of really interesting material in this book. I've found it very difficult to find information about vegetarianism and the English revolution, and this book is definitely a good start. It has a good chapter on Robert Crab (Chapter 3), the mystical revolutionary, vegetarian propagandist and hermit, and colleague of Thomas Tany. Also a chapter on John Robins the vegetarian prophet and sectarian mystic (Chapter 2). Chapter Five is a discussion of Thomas Tryon, another vegetarian propagandist on the sectarian left, and chapter Six is about John Evelyn, a vegetarian Royalist. Throughout this section Stuart does an excellent job contextualizing the ideas that influenced these figures, and the revolutionary period in general. First class. This is roughly the first one-hundred pages in the book.
I must confess that the next two-hundred or so pages held much less interest for me. The were bits and pieces that were fascinating. Some very interesting material about the influence of Hindu and Jain vegetarianism on Europe, not to mention speculation about Pythagoras (the ancient Greek philosopher, mathematician and vegetarian) and his influence on India (or vice versa). A lot of this part of the book is about the history of various vegetarian medical arguments. Humans are naturally herbivores, vegetarian diets cure disease, vegetarianism is a return to edenic perfection etc. I'm not criticizing Stuart for including this material or saying he did a poor job. Far from it, it was meticulously researched and well written. Clearly this is material that belongs in this book. It is simply not that interesting to me.
Chapter Twenty-One (p.295) is entitled “The Cry of Nature: Killing in the Name of Animal Rights in the French Revolution”. Oh hell yeah! It covers the life of John Oswald, Scottish atheist, vegetarian and revolutionary. In another interesting example of the reverse influence of imperialism, Oswald became a convinced revolutionary and anti-imperialist while serving in the English army in India. Appalled by the brutal treatment of the Indian people, he deserted and went native, becoming vegetarian in the process. He later walked back to Europe and was perhaps the first European to spend time with the Kurds in Turkey. Oswald later traveled to France to help foment revolution and was a conduit of communication between British and French Revolutionaries. Oswald was also a major influence on the French revolution in two ways. First he popularized vegetarianism, which was seen as a revolutionary challenge to the decadence and waste of the aristocracy, and the second was the pike. He trained the revolutionaries in the use of the pike (a long spear), and later died leading a regiment of pike-men (the regiment had included women, Oswald was in favor of women fighting in militias, but his second in command had sent the women home in Oswald's absence) against Royalists.
Chapter Twenty-Two is about the Marquis de Valady. Valady was an fascinating figure, who denounced his birth-right and threw his lot in with the revolutionaries. He was a vegetarian as well. He was executed during the terror.
The next few chapters trace the effects of the French revolution on radicals in Britain, as well as the vegetarian movement (the two movements intersecting in many cases). Vegetarianism was looked on with extreme suspicion and was associated with political radicalism. Prison brought together many disparate radicals who otherwise would never have met one another. Radical printers were brought together with authors they had never met. Fruitful partnerships were formed in some cases. Of course a huge number of these radicals simply died in prison from Typhus or any number of other diseases. There is a lot of really vital stuff in this section about radicals identifying with the revolutionaries from the 1640s, the Diggers, the Fifth-Monarchists and others (p.339). There are also striking similarities between Lord George Gordon, self styled biblical prophet and alleged reincarnation of Moses, and Thomas Tany.
There is a chapter (Twenty Six) that covers Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English poet, who was the son in law of William Godwin (often credited as the father of anarchism). Shelley's wife was of course Mary Shelley, the daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Frankenstein. They and their friends were vegetarians, sometimes nudists, and sex radicals.
In the final two chapters there are discussions of Peter Kropotkin, Elisee Reclus, Tolstoy, Emerson, Thoreau, Gandhi, Wagner, and Hitler. Pretty interesting stuff.
Stuart has done an amazing job here, pouring through mountains of source material, and writing a wonderful cultural history of vegetarianism. It whets the appetite for more work in this area. I'd love to see a book (or six) about the intersections of vegetarianism and the revolutionary movements. I know that the confluence doesn't stop in the French revolution. Reclus was a communard in the Paris Commune, and French anarchism at the turn of the twentieth century has a decidedly vegetarian flavor. The Bonnot Gang and many of the other illegalists were vegetarian tea-totalers. There were vegetarians in the Spanish revolution. And certainly the last few generations of anarchism, at least since the British anti-nuclear movement of the late seventies and then Crass and Peace Punk. This was also happening at the same time as the roots of the Animal Liberation Front. There was also a strong vegetarian influence on the utopian socialist experiments in North America, which continued with the back to the land movement in the seventies and intentional communities today. I have yet to pour through the bibliography of this book, and perhaps it will turn up more material in this area. For now I want to thank Tristram Stuart for this excellent book.

You could also check out:
Colin Spencer - The heretic's feast : a history of vegetarianism 179. 3 SPE

Speaking of Wong Fei Hung

2007-12-28T08:59:00.000-08:00

Not that martial arts movies have much to do with history but I mentioned Wong Fei Hung in the last post, and realized that the library does have at least three movies with him as a character:
Once upon a time in China & America DVD CHINESE FICTION ONC. This is part six in the series. The first three are pretty good, but I haven't seen 4-6.

Last Hero in China DVD CHINESE FICTION LAS aka Wong Fei Hong's Iron Rooster vs. Centipide. Also starring Jet Li (1993).

Drunken Master III DVD CHINESE FICTION DRU. Staring Willie Chi as Fei Hong. Apparently Liu Chia-Liang (director of the first Drunken Master) made this film to get back at Jackie Chan for not letting him direct Legend of Drunken Master (aka Drunken Master 2). I haven't seen this, but apparently it's mediocre.

An extensive list of movies about Wong Fei Hung is here. To my personal taste Drunken Master, Legend of Drunken Master, Iron Monkey and Once upon a Time in China are better choices than the three that the library has (although I recall Last Hero in China was good). Also Fong Sai Yuk 1 &2 (aka The Legend and The Legend 2), which is about Fong Sai Yuk, not Wong Fei Hung, but star Jet Li and are both excellent.

Oh, and unrelated to Chinese Folk Heroes is:
The Legend of Zu DVD CHINESE FICTION LEG which is pretty excellent (although not as good as Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain). and
Shaolin Soccer DVD CHINESE FICTION SHA.

Korean Robin Hood

2007-12-28T08:33:00.000-08:00

Anne Sibley O’Brien - The Legend of Hong Kil Dong: The Robin Hood of Korea (Charlesbridge, 2006) YA GRAPHIX 398.209519 OBR
Hong Kil Dong is a fictional character based on a novel by Ho Kyun written in the early 1600s. The Tale of Hong Kil Dong was the first book written in the Korean alphabet, which had been invented in 1403 by Se Jong, the historical Korean King who is the “good king” in the story of Hong Kil Dong.
Hong Kil Dong was the illegitimate son of a court official. The shame of not being able to address his father as “father”, but rather having to address him as “minister”, drove him out of the household up into the mountains to learn martial arts from monks. Later Kil Dong meets a sage who teaches him secret martial arts techniques and magic. Kil Dong becomes the leader of a group of bandits. He is wary of them but it turns out that they are all honest people who were wronged by corrupt bureaucrats or monks. They change the name of the bandits to the Save-the-Poor-Army, and proceed to teach the corrupt monks and officials a lesson, stealing back all that they stole and redistributing it to the poor. Eventually word of this reaches the King, but despite the fact that his advisors say that Kil Dong is a murderer and an enemy of the poor the King Realizes the truth. Kil Dong becomes a minister for the King and they clean up all the corruption. Later Kil Dong leaves with his followers and sets up a utopian community on an island somewhere.
Of course, in real life the bandits don’t get to become ministers (except in rare cases, and in those cases only after they have betrayed their followers and turned their backs on the poor) and the King is never good. It is not corruption that victimizes common folk, but rather the system starting with the King. Not surprisingly writing about Hong Kil Dong didn’t win Ho Kyun friends among the powerful and he was executed as part of a conspiracy of illegitimate sons attempting to overthrow the government. It’s unclear if Ho Kyun was actually a conspirator, or was just singled out for his book. I don’t know about the kids who read this book, but I know what moral I drew from the story.
Oh yeah, the art is nice and the story is well told. Definitely a book I hope kids are reading. Definitely an emphasis on rebelling and liberty, and less emphasis on the good King part of it. Worth reading for old folks too.
Oh, there is also a North Korean martial art movie about Hong Kil Dong. I don’t think its available on DVD though. If anyone ever sees it let me know. Actually, looking again there are a whole bunch of South Korean movies featuring Hong Kil Dong, as well as a tv series from the 60s. Sort of like Wong Fei Hung and Fong Sai Yuk in Hong Kong cinema.
Here is the website for The Legend of Hong Kil Dong. Link.
Oh, the Library also has Kim Youg-Kol - Brave Hong Kil-dong ; The man who bought the shade of a tree KOREAN J YOU. If you read Korean.

Top 11 and Top 8

2007-12-13T19:08:00.000-08:00

It's nearing the end of the year and many people are making top ten lists. I don't read or listen to much that is current, and the library often takes 6 months to get anything, so chances are you won't be reading something from 2007 in 2007 if its a library book (unless its Harry Potter).
But here is my eleven favorite non-fiction books that I read this year and eight favorite fiction (I've included Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical graphic novel here because memoirs are somewhere in between, and the other list was already too long). Some of these books are available from the public library, some from the University of Calgary, and some from neither, but if you really want to read any of these book I'm sure you can hunt them down. I did. Some of them were reviewed in the second issue of my zine No Quarter, but that's not much help either, unless you have a copy. Anyhow, here's the lists:

Non-Fiction (in no particular order):
Paul Garon and Gene Tomko – What’s the Use of Walking When There’s a Freight Train Going Your Way? Black Hoboes & Their Songs (Charles H. Kerr, 2006)
Marcus Rediker – Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age(Beacon Press, 2004).
Frances Yates – The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972).
Michael Muhammad Knight - Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey through Islamic America (Autonomedia, 2007).
Raoul Vaneigem - The Movement of the Free Spirit (Zone Books, 1998).
J. C. Davis - Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Stevie Davies - Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution: 1640-1660 (The Women’s Press, 1998).
Luc Sante - Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (Vintage, 1992).
E. P. Thompson - Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New Press, 1993).
Sandor Ellix Katz - The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements (Chelsea Green, 2006).
Terence McKenna - True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise (Harper, 1994).

Fiction (again, in no particular order):
Cory Docktorow - Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007).
Élisabeth Vonarburg (translated by Howard Scott & Élisabeth Vonarburg) - Dreams of the sea (Tesseract Books, 2003).
Kim Stanley Robinson - The Years of Rice and Salt (Spectra, 2003).
Shani Mootoo - Cereus Blooms at Night (Grove, 1998).
Ursula K. LeGuin – Gifts, Voices, and Powers (Harcourt Children's Books, 2006, 2006, 2007).
Clark Ashton Smith – Zothique
Marjane Satrapi - Chicken with Plums (pantheon, 2006).
Neal Stephenson – Cryptonomicon (Avon, 2002).

Actually I listed Three books by Ursula K. Le Guin, so I guess it is a fiction top ten.

Who doesn't love Ursula K. Le Guin???

2007-12-13T17:53:00.000-08:00

Ursula K. Le Guin - Powers YA LEG

In many circles Ursula K. Le Guin is known mainly for things she wrote in the 60s and 70s. In SciFi circle for The Left Hand of Darkness or The Lathe of Heaven, in radical circles for the Dispossessed, her ambiguous anarchist utopia, and in YA circles for the Chronicles of Earth Sea. I agree that these are all excellent books, but Le Guin has been writing for more than 40 years and has published SciFi, Fantasy, non-scifi/fantasy fiction (ie literature if you are among those who can't consider 'genre fiction' literature), poetry, essays, ya and kids books. You are simply missing out if you read the Left Hand of Darkness, like it, but stop there.

Powers is the third book in the Annals of the Western Shore. I liked Gifts, first book and loved Voices. Powers is every bit as good as Voices, perhaps even better. Hopefully Le Guin keeps going with this series because it seems like they would only get better and better. The Annals of the Western Shore are pretty much stand alone books set in different parts of the same continent, although there is a thread that ties them together, so it would be better (although not essential) to read them in order. Powers follows the life of a slave named Gavir who is being educated to become the teacher in one of the nobel house of Etra. He eventually escapes and wanders around eventually finding himself in a rebel free city of escaped slaves, not entirely unreminisent of real life communities of escaped slaves like maroon communities in Jamaica, and Quilombos in Brazil. I won't give too much of the plot away, but merely comment that Le Guin manages the difficult task of writing a book that is appropriate for even young YA readers that also doesn't gloss over the horrors of slavery. Without being needlessly traumatising, she crafts a tale that has a lot of emotional resonance that gets beneath the superficial and asks some pretty tough questions. Very evident throughout this series is LeGuins love of words, of books, poetry and learning. Libraries play an important role in the second and third books, and poetry and ballads in all three. So if that sounds good to you like it does to me, read these books!

Some other Ursula K. LeGuin books:
Angelica Gorodischer(Ursula K. LeGuin translator)- Kalpa imperial : the greatest empire that never was SCIENCE FICTION GOR
The birthday of the world and other stories SCIENCE FICTION LEG
A fisherman of the inland sea SCIENCE FICTION LEG
The Dispossessed SCIENCE FICTION LEG

Ursula K. Le Guin's website is worth checking out too. Here.

More Desert Music

2007-12-06T17:02:00.000-08:00

Tinariwen - The Radio Tisdas Sessions (Wayward Records, 2000) CD MAI AFR TIN
Tinariwen - Amassakoul (Triban Union, 2004) CD MAI AFR TIN
Tinariwen - Aman Iman: water of life (Outside Music, 2007)CD MAI AFR TIN

The Kel Tamashek (meaning, "those who speak Tamashek", a preferred name to Tuareg, which is arabic for "abandoned by the gods") are a nomadic pastoralist people of the Sahara. With the dividing up of Africa by colonial powers and later the newly independent nations in the area (Mali, Niger, Libya, Mauritania, and Algeria ) the interests of the Kel Tamashek were not considered and their traditional teritory cut up by artificial borders. War, resource extraction, and global warming are among the factors threatening their traditional way of life. Indeed much of the Kel Tamashek population has been urbanized or forced into refugee camps. There have also been uprisings and Guerrilla movements in Niger and Mali.

Tinariwen, which means empty places, are considered to be the pioneers in Kel Tamashek music. They formed in 1982 in rebel camps in Libya. This style of music, Ishumar (meaning unemployed), which has also given its name to a generation, was created largely by Tinariwen. They were the first band to incorporate electric guitars and western style rock instruments into traditional Kel Tamashek music. They have had many cassettes through the years but the Radio Tisdas Sessions is their first cd. And what an introduction to western audiences! Absolutely wonderful. Tinariwen has ten members listed on this recording, including six guitarists. Very rocking stuff, despite (or perhaps because of) deep roots in traditional music. On the back of Amassakoul they are described as "Legendary poet guitarists and soul rebels from the southern Sahara desert", which seems a bit like marketing department talk meant to appeal to fans of Bob Marley or Bob Dylan, but it also underscores the reality that this is rebel music. Both in the sense that the lyrical content is often directly dealing with the struggles of the Kel Tamashek people and often specifically this generation, but also in the sense that it is part of the struggle to preserve their way of life, music and traditions. All music made around the world by peoples who are threatened is rebel music. Its interesting to note that one of the major forces threatening the Kel Tamashek is Uranium extraction in Niger, driven by the same industry poisoning the largely indigenous population of Northern Canada. Something to keep in mind as the push continues for nuclear power in Alberta.

So check out these cds if you are so inclined. Bill Weinberg conducted an excellent interview with Issouf ag-Maha about music the current situation of the Kel Tamashek on his excellent radio show The Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade on November 13, 2007 (and it can still be downloaded from the wbai archive here, although you'll have to scroll down and find it, download some other episodes too while you are at it). He also transcribed the interview and posted it on his website World War 4 Report, one of the best english language sites for information on the Kel Tamashek, as well as resistance around the world.
Oh, and the library has ordered Toumast - Ishumar (Realworld, 2007), another excellent Kel Tamashek band.
Also check out the Tartit albums I've mentioned before.

I'm selling books, cds, records, etc

2007-10-08T09:54:00.000-07:00

This blog is mostly about the library, but the next best thing to libraries is buying books from me!
Here is the link. Of course, it pretty much only applies if you live in Calgary (or Edmonton if you contact me before October 26th and come to the Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair to pick them up) because I'm probably not going to ship them to you (although you could ask I guess). They are good books at good prices. Please check it out.

Some huge art books about the Hudson River School

2007-09-25T05:59:00.000-07:00

Sandra S. Phillips & Linda Weintraub (eds) – Charmed Places: Hudson River Artists and Their Houses, Studios, and Vistas (Harry N. Abrams, 1988) 758.10974 CHA
John K. Howat – The Hudson River and Its Painters (Viking Press, 1972) 758.10973 HOW
John Wilmerding (ed) – American Light: The Luminist Movement 1850-1875 (Harper & Row, 1980) 758.10973 AME
The Hudson river school was around from the 1820s-the 1870s. They painted mainly landscapes notably of the Hudson river in New York state. Founded more or less by Thomas Cole. The Luminists were somewhat distinct and followed Frederic Church, who had been a student of Cole. Church had built his house across the Hudson from Cole's. Like many artistic movements the labels and distinctions largely came afterwards from art critics. Both groups tended towards a sort of spiritual or mystical view of nature, or something. The pictures are pretty nice anyway. Which is kind of cool because I never thought I'd say that about landscape paintings. So I looked at the pictures and read little bits and pieces of the various essays in these books. All three are huge oversize picture books.
I first heard of the Hudson river school in Kim Stanley Robinson's most recent book 60 Days and Counting. I've been looking a little at Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, early ecologists in general. One of the characters in 60 Days and Counting was very into Emerson and Thoreau, and was very impressed by an exhibit of Fredric Church paintings. I'm sure in person they are even more impressive than in these books. Then, as I've mentioned previously I got Peter Lamborn Wilson's Cross Dressing in the Anti-Rent Wars which has a poem Illuminism which is about the Hudson River School. One day I'll read more of the text in these books but for now I'll quote some of that poem and leave it at that:

3. Bladelock, Innes, Pinkam Rider
(telephone calls from Mick Taussig)

The Hudson River School painters are often accused of editing out or censoring from
their work all evidence of industrial ecocide & polution. Old photgraphs reveal a
different & and much less Romanic reality – denuded mountains, stinking mills, cement
mines, canals, factory towns, dairy farms where forrest once grew (& now grow again
thanx to the death of agriculture & indusrty in the Valley)

All this is ironic, and modern artists have further ironized the HRS worldview by
painting the censored bits back in – or their modern equivalents, highways, malls,
prisons, etc.

But the HRS was not painting “landscapes”. The American Romantic artists were
painting icons. Was it Thoreau who coined the term “American religion of Nature”?
Emerson? Anyway, the HRS landscapes are seen with god's eye as they should and
really do exist “in eternity”. The proper response is not based on admiration or disdain
for accuracy but on veneration (the theologically exact term for “worship” of icons) for
the works imaginal presentiality.

Fermenting Revolution pt. 2

2007-09-17T19:39:00.000-07:00

Sandor Ellix Katz – The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements (Chelsea Green, 2006) 641.3 KAT.
Sandor Katz gives us here an excellent introduction to a wide variety of what he groups together as America's underground food movements. He includes community gardeners, seed savers and activist against genetically modified food, illegal raw milk co-ops, underground bread clubs, vegetarians, road kill enthusiasts, insect eaters, raw food people, the slow food movement, indigenous resistance to government land theft, and grass roots herbalism and community health activism. All this and more. In many ways the strength and weakness of the book lies in the wide range and disparity in the groups covered. Although, only a weakness really if you assume that the purpose of the book is to form a large coalition or sew together some kind of cohesive big tent “food movement”, which doesn't seem to be Sandor's intention.

The book is about half descriptions of the people who make up these groups and half context about what they are struggling against. This is a useful approach because it gives readers a lot of really vital information about many of the huge problems with the way agribusiness works and how fucked up everything is, but also points to some of the things we can try to do to get around these problems, or to confront it head on. The scope of the problems in this society (with food and otherwise) are truly staggering and talking about them for too long without any sense that there are people fighting back, can be demoralizing.

I also didn't come away from the book with any sense of false hope. It's not a feel good book all the way through. Sandor has a mostly sunny outlook but he doesn't sugar coat things. He goes after the corporate co-opting of organic foods and exposes what a fraud its become. There is a useful chart on page 20-21 depicting the web of corporate ownership of organic companies. Pretty disgusting. There are also accounts of workers at organic distribution companies being told to fill boxes labeled “organic” with non-organic apples. Not a big surprise to be but I'm sure that there have been some yuppies who've read this book and started crying. Sandor talks about the watering down of the organic standards in many places and how slack enforcement is. Probably very disillusioning to the same people who love Al Gore and think energy efficient appliances are the solution to global warming. Another thing I like about this book is that it is very anti-consumerist. The point is not which products to buy, but rather how to move away from the passive consumption of food to an active engagement in the production of what gives us life.

Like any book that is a broad introduction to a lot of things, some of it will not be new information to people who are conversant in the issues covered. What makes this book so much better than so many books with a similar approach is the detail and amount of information. Sandor doesn't merely skim the surface but really gets to the heart of what's happening with food in the USA.

The only real drawback of the book for me is the parts about meat. There is a lot about farmers wanting o butcher their animals themselves, because it is cheaper, more ethical, and because they want to stay outside the industrialized processing of meat and maintain as much autonomy as possible. To a certain extent I find this admirable, and there is no doubt that there is a world of difference between farmers caring for animals that live outside, graze, see the sun etc and the horrors of factory farming. There is still a tension between this and the vegetarian ethic. Animals that are raised as compassionately as possible to be slaughtered are still being raised to be slaughtered. I'm not saying that Sandor should not have covered this topic. In fact I think he did a great job, and it is an important part of the book. Here is one thing Sandor says about vegetarianism: “In the cultural demographics I have encountered in my life, a significant portion of people, perhaps a quarter, perhaps a third, have experimented, at least briefly, with a vegetarian diet. When you experiment you learn things. Some people become committed lifelong vegetarians – and more power to them! Most of us return to various degrees of omnivorousness and post-vegetarianism, following our bodies cravings, as well as our cultures path of least resistance”(pp. 266-267). The whole of chapter 8: Vegetarian Ethics and Humane Meat is a pretty in depth exploration of the implicit tension between the two concepts. Of course the tension can never really be resolved. Humane meat will always only be humane relative to other butchering practices. There will always be an option more humane still.

Good Comics

2007-09-17T19:30:00.000-07:00

Cecil Castellucci & Jim Rugg – The Plain Janes (Minx Books, 2007) YA Graphix CAS
Minx books is a new imprint from DC Comics publishing (short) graphic novels with teenage girls as the target audience. The Plain Janes is their first title, and I have to say: so far so good. It would be very easy to do a lot of things wrong with an imprint like Minx, but The Plain Janes is not condescending, it doesn't try to hard. Its smart, has interesting multi-dimensional characters (four teenage girls named Jane, is well written and has nice art. Definitely a good start.
I won't get into the plot too much, because you should really read it. The subject matter is very compelling to me. One of the characters is dealing with the trauma of surviving a (presumably terrorist) bombing in Metro City. Her parents move the family out to a suburb and refuse to let her go back to the dangerous big city. Instead of shrinking in fear Jane befriends three other Janes at her new school and the proceed to carry out a campaign of public guerrilla art. Not surprisingly parents and local authorities freak out, and impose a curfew. The kids at the school band together to defy the curfew and things go from there. Definitely recommended. Also, its a pretty short read, so it doesn't require much of a commitment.
As an added bonus there are short previews for upcoming Minx titles. The CPL has Re-Gifters (Mark Carey, Sonny Liew, and Marc Hempel) on order, which is great, because it looks the best of the upcoming books. Its about a teenage girl into martial arts and Korean-American experience in Los Angeles. Good As Lily (Derek Kirk Kim & Jesse Hamm) looks good too, and is about a highschool girl who suddenly has three people thrust into her life. Namely herself at ages 6, 29, and 70. Clubbing (Andi Watson & Josh Howard) about a spoiled London teen moving to the countryside seems pretty terrible actually, but if the library gets it I may give it a shot. Anyway, I'm excited for Re-Gifters.

Tartit – Abacabok

2007-09-05T19:56:00.000-07:00

Tartit – Abacabok (Crammed Disc, 2006) CD Q MAL TAR

Tartit are part of the current cultural renaissance among the Tamasheq (also known as the Toureg), which has been going on in the wake of the Toureg uprising that took place in Mali in the early 90s. In fact the band formed in a refugee camp during the uprising. The Tamasheq are traditionally nomadic pastoralists and are known for their relatively egalitarian gender relations, including a woman's right to chose her husband (and to divorce him if need be), as well as the custom for men to wear veils and the women not.

Tartit consists of five women and four men. “The women sit down, sing, and play cyclic rhythms on their tinde drums, while the men sing and play stringed instruments, acoustic and electric”(liner notes). The music itself is wonderful, but I'm not sure I have the vocabulary to do it any justice. The liner notes describe it as hypnotic and trance-inducing. I suppose that is true in a sense, but a lot of music is hypnotic and trance-inducing that has little in common with Tartit. At times it reminds me of Central African sufi drumming styles. Indeed, it seems like sufism is an influence on Tartit, or at least it is referenced in the title track Abacabok (track 10). In any case, this is wonderful music that I encourage you to check out. Abacabok is their third album (The first one is Amazagh [Fonti Musicali, 1997] CD Q MAL TAR, the second is called Ichchila from 2000 which the CPL doesn't have) .

I first heard Tartit on one of my favorite radio shows, The Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade (Wednesday morning from 00:00-01:30 on WBAI New York, archived here). One of the tracks he played was track 9, Houmeissa. In the liner notes it is described with this quote: “I salute this white girl who wears her indigo veil and houmeissa around her neck”. Host Bill Weinberg speculate that the song is likely about Isabelle Eberhardt, French-Russian adventurer who spent a long time travelling around North Africa in men's clothing smoking hash, receiving initiation into sufi order, spying etc. It is doubtful too many white women have ever worn the indigo veil of the Toureg (which is worn by men, not women), so perhaps Bill is right. For more info about Isabelle check out the wikipedia entry. Eberhardt Press is a wonderful anarchist publisher named after her and they have a pamphlet of her writing available called Criminal: Writings by Isabelle Eberhardt. City Lights put out two volumes of her writings (The Oblivion Seekers and Departures) which are both good too.

Back to Tartit. Here is their myspace page.
Bill Weinberg and a bunch of others do World War Four Report, one of the few westen news sources that ever mentions the Tamasheq.
Please listen to either of their cds that the library has, or if you are outside of Calgary, and your librarians aren't on strike, get which ever ones your library has.

Vancouver Library Strike

2007-09-04T18:41:00.000-07:00

So, I don't always keep on top of the news. I try to follow as much as I can, but I don't watch TV or read newspapers. Main stream news makes my head hurt. If you've seen the movie Scanners you know what I mean. So Vancouver Public Library librarians have been on strike all summer, which would seem like it would be worth mentioning on this blog. Except I didn't find out until today. Of course, I doubt there was any coverage of it here anyway. I found out about it on my most trusted of news sources: Accordion Noir, the all accordion music show on Vancouver Co-op radio. It's a great show, give it a listen.

Here's the VPL website. The front page reads: The Library is Closed due to a strike by unionized employees. The cool thing is that they aren't charging late fees so you can keep stuff for the duration of the strike. The sucky thing is that the library is closed because the city is run by a bunch of pricks. It seems like most people are supporting the librarians which is awesome.

Here's a post on a blog called Union Librarian, which is about, you guessed it: libraries, labor and unions.

Here's a pretty good story too... I haven't really looked into this much, I just found out today, so maybe I'll post more stuff as I find out more.

God, don't know what I'd do if the library shut down for a long period. Hopefully something to support the librarians.

Sun Ra – Concert For the Comet Kohoutek

2007-08-29T19:40:00.000-07:00

Sun Ra – Concert For the Comet Kohoutek (Abraxas / ESP Disk, 1973) CD MJ SUN

If you need some biographical info on Sun Ra check out the wikipedia entry or this site. When you are ready, proceed to the review:

As far as I know this is the first time this concert has been issued and I think the cd came out in 2007. The packaging is pretty minimalist and I couldn't find any more info on the ESP website. Nor is there any list of the personnel on this album, but they are top notch (As usual for a Sun Ra ensemble). Posthumous releases for most artists are usually a waste of plastic/vinyl but Sun Ra is definitely an exception. I hope they keep on discovering unknown recordings for years to come.
Apparently the group was hot on December 22nd, 1973 and much of the energy and mystery comes across on this recording. A very nice mix of the crazier free scronkyness and more laid back mystical jams, including a number of vocal pieces including Space is the Place. One of the Tracks (maybe Outer Space E.M.) broke it down: “What planet is this? Is it a planet of life? Is it a planet of death? If it is a planet of life why do people die in/of fear? This is not life but death in disguise”. I'm sure I have that slightly wrong but you get the gist. Track 4, Journey Through The Outer Darkness knocked me on my ass when I heard it. Total fucking madness. At times it reminded me of Merzbow or some of the electronic music on labels like Milles Plateau. I couldn't tell what I was listening to, but it sounded so crazy and new in 2007 and was recorded (live!) in 1973. I'm not a Sun Ra expert but have heard a pretty good range of his albums (like 15 or so) and this was a total surprise. If you like the crazier end of the Sun Ra spectrum definitely give this a listen. If not, well, too bad for you.

The library has lots of Sun Ra cds. They are all worth a listen. Here's a few:
Heliocentric worlds, volumes 1 & 2 (ESP Disc) CD MJ SUN v1-2
Heliocentric worlds, volume 3: the lost tapes (ESP Disc) CD MJ SUN v. 1-2
Pathways to unknown worlds + Friendly love(Evidence Music) CD MJ SUN.

There are 14 or so other cds. Also a biography which looks pretty interesting:
John Szwed - Space is the place : the life and times of Sun Ra 781. 65092 SUN S

Fermenting Revolution

2007-08-25T11:14:00.000-07:00

Sandor Ellix Katz - Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods (Chelsea Green, 2003) 641.7 KAT

I got chided in a review of my zine for using the phrase "fermenting revolution". I was reminded that revolution is fomented, and sour pickles are fermented. In this case I'm talking about a book by someone who is fermenting, if not revolution certainly something close.

In this book Sandor explores the many different culinary traditions from around the world that use live cultures (ie bacteria and yeast) in foods. These include very familiar ones such as sour dough, yogurt, sour kraut, kimchi, tempeh, wine and beer, and also ones that I wasn't familiar with such as Gundru (Nepalese pickled greens), Nuka (Japanese Bran Pickles), Kishk (Lebanese yogurt and bulgur ferment), all sorts of fermented breads and much more. He doesn't touch on traditions of fermented meat (which is fine by me), but runs the gamut of dairy (also addressing vegan alternatives) and vegetable ferments.

Sandor places these traditions within the context of resisting the homogenization (literally and figuratively) of food and culture around the globe, resisting GMO foods, and generally living more sustainable and fulfilling lives. Sandor is currently living with HIV and talks about coexisting with microbes as contrasted with the medical paradigm of being at war with them. This book is wonderful as much for the context and anecdotes (often about intentional communities in Tennessee where Sandor lives), as for the recipes. That being said I love the recipes as much or more than any cookbook (this is sort of a cookbook) I have ever read. I've been going through the book and have tried around 15 of the recipes thus far, with many successes and a few failures. I haven't worked my way up to making miso or tempeh, but who knows. Many of the recipes in this book are extremely simple and close to fool proof. Sour Kraut just needs cabbage, salt, water and a pail or crock (I use a 4L ice cream bucket). There are infinite varieties, but the basics couldn't be more simple. So please sign this book out and try a couple of the recipes, and in no time you'll have rushed out and bought it (like me).

It is also a wonderful book for those of us who garden, as it provides a myriad of ways to use and preserve all the extra produce we have. This year I've fermented kale, mustard greens, radishes and greens, turnips and greens, zucchini, horseradish root, and look forward to carrots, cucumbers and more. A wonderful, wonderful book.

Sandor has a newish book called The revolution will not be microwaved : inside America's underground food movements (Chelsea Green, 2006) 641.3 KAT I was going to say that the Calgary Public Library doesn't have it, but apparently they've got it in since I last checked. I haven't read it yet, but now have it on hold. Expect a post about it in a month or so.

A Cocktail Party pt 1

2007-07-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

I’m not much of a drinker myself, so in this case the cocktail is a mix of cds and an mp3 blog. The cds I have mentioned before in passing, and many of you may be familiar with them, as they are deservedly famous. The Secret Museum of Mankind is a 8 volume series put out by Yazoo Records. They feature ethnic music (as opposed to North American popular music) recorded between 1925-48 and originally released on 78s. Volumes 1-5 feature music from around the world. Great stuff from Africa, Polynesia, all over Asia, South America, Europe and Native North American music. There are also three stand alone volumes: Central Asia, East Africa, and North Africa, each obviously focusing on music from the particular region. These cds are all pure gold and feature some of the most wonderful music ever recorded. And lucky for us in Calgary, the Calgary public library has 5 out of 8. They have Vol. 1-2,4, Central Asia and North Africa. If you don’t want to stop there the library also has several other Yazoo releases in their Early Ethnic Music series including The Music of Madagascar, and Fire in the Mountains: Polish Fiddle Music vol. 1&2.
The mp3 blog in question is a relatively new one, it’s first post is from May 2007. It is so good!!!! Excavated Shellac is “A weekly blog dedicated to 78rpm recordings of folkloric and vernacular music from around the world”. If you look at the picture of his collection on the about page, I’m sure you’ll join me in hoping that the proprietor of Excavated Shellac keeps going for a very long time. Unbelievably wonderful music, and often equally rare, this is one of the best mp3 blogs I’ve ever seen/heard. Please check it out. Very much along the same lines as the Secret Museum series.
Also I should note that the people who do the Secret Museum of Mankind series also did a radio show called Secret Museum of the Air on WFMU. It’s not on anymore but you can listen to archives here.

I don't just buy books, I read them too...

2007-06-15T16:34:00.000-07:00

... and sometimes they are even library books. A couple examples worth noting:
Dreams of the Sea by Elisabeth Vonarburg
A couple years ago I picked up a copy of The Silent City, also by Elisabeth Vonarburg at a thrift store. I read the first 90 or so pages and was very into it. Then I discovered that the book was bound incorrectly and pages 92-120 or so were missing and 120-135 were included twice. I looked and the CPL didn't have a copy, I looked in used book stores to no avail. Today I finally found a copy at a book sale. Hurrah! In the mean time I noticed that the library had the first two books in a series by Vonarburg and I meant to read those books. I finally got around to reading the first: Dreams of the Sea. Wow! What a book. A haunting tale of human colonization of a Planet that was inhabited by a fairly advance civilization. The first colonists are haunted by the lingering presence of "the others", as they call them. As with most fiction proably the less I say the better. Vonarburg is perhaps the finest Canadian SciFi writer. She collaborated with Howard Scott to translate this from the french and they did a wonderful job. I can't wait to read A Game of Perfection, the second book in the series.

Voices by Ursula K. LeGuin
This is the second book in the new YA series by LeGuin, The Annals of the Western Shore. The first book, Gifts, was good but I think Voices is even better. Its all about secret libraries and story telling and occupation and cultural survival and resistance. Pretty heavy stuff for a young adult novel but Ursula has a gift for such things. I'm excited for the next book!

book sales

2007-06-15T16:20:00.000-07:00

I just got back from the second week of the Servants Anon book sale hauling 55 books across town on a bus-train-bus. Combined with last weeks haul that’s 112 book. Shattering the old record. So the book sale season comes to a close, and the Servants book sale prove once again why it is by far the best book sale. The CBC book sale was mediocre this year. The highlight for me was getting Surfing Through Hyperspace:
Understanding Higher Universes in Six Easy Lessons by Clifford Pickover. And Benny the Bookworm just sucks.
So highlights of what I got include: Seven Philip K. Dick books, two Lord Dunsany books I’ve never even seen before Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley & The Hashish Man and other stories, two by Peter Kropotkin: In Russian and French Prisons & The Great French Revolution, two King Penguin editions of Stanislaw Lem, one with Solaris, The Chain of Chance, and A Perfect Vacuum, and one with Tales of Pirx the Pilot, Return From the Stars, and The Invincible. I also got a pb copy of The Investigators. A Loompanics book, Be Your own Dick: Private Investigating Made Easy by John Q. Newman. Political Writings of William Morris (edited by A. L. Morton), plus two Christopher Hill books: God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution & Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England. The Luddites: Machine Braking in Regency England by Malcolm Thomis. On Hagakure: The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan by Yukio Mishima. Three William S. Burroughs. There was an abundance of Marxist stuff, most of it not particularly interesting but I did pick up two by Rosa Luxemburg: Reform Or Revolution & Selected Political Writings (400+ pages), Bush in Babylon & The Leopard and the Fox by Tariq Ali, three by Georg Lukacs: Tactics and Ethics, Lenin, and History and Class Consciousness (I have no idea what I’m going to do with these but they were only $1 each. Who else is going to buy these books at a book sale?), and two by Herbert Marcuse: One Dimensional Man & Counterrevolution and Revolt. I got a whole stack of Ursula K. Leguin as well as other scifi by Elisabeth Vonarburg, Zenna Henderson, John Brunner, Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ, Rudy Rucker, Kim Stanley Robinson, H. P. Lovecraft etc. The Nawal El Sadawi Reader. The Foucault Reader. True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna. Sex for One by Betty Dodson. I got a really beautiful pocket edition of The Rosicrucian Enlightenment by Frances Yates (I reviewed this book previously).
I also got four books worth mentioning from a sort of thrift store: Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians & Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Helen Creighton’s Maritime Folk Songs, Simians Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature by Donna Haraway, and The Community Doukhobors: A People in Transition by John W. Friesen & Michael M. Verigin.

So I guess I have some reading to do! I also seriously need to get rid of loads of books (probably at least a couple hundred) both to make room for these new ones and also because I buy books I don’t have any intention of reading or even keeping (or books I like but have copies of already). So if you live in Calgary and you need books…

More occult related stuff, sort of

2007-03-25T12:16:00.000-07:00

Here is the first draft of a review that will be in No Quarter #2. Yes, the CPL has a copy of this book. Only one, which was irritating because the two times I took this out someone put it on hold so I couldn't renew it. Of course if I want to read more Frances Yates book I have to get them from the U of Calgary library. As a non-student I get them for two weeks with no renewals. Which makes reading books like this not a lot of fun.

Frances Yates - The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972, Routledge Classics 2001).
The Rosicrucian Enlightenment begins with a description of the wedding of Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine to Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of King James I of England. James was, for any of us a little foggy on the succession of English monarchs, the successor to Elizabeth I, who died without heir. The wedding between the Elector Palatine and Princess Elizabeth occurred in February 1613. To many this may seem like useless trivia, and you might be forgiven for thinking that this is not a very promising way to begin a book. Frances Yates was not, however, a conventional historian by any stretch of the imagination, and this is not a conventional book. It is not mired in the tradition of histories of great men and great deeds, of kings and generals. Rather it is about the history of ideas.
Frederick and Elizabeth’s wedding was seen as important because it cemented the support of King James, the most powerful protestant monarch in Europe, for his now son-in-law, who many saw as the great hope for protestants against the Hapsburg dynasty and the Catholic Church. Frederick was the focus of great excitement and a movement that placed millenarian hopes on his fortune. His wedding to Elizabeth was ascribed great political and mystical importance. Practically it also meant the strengthening of the forces of religious and political tolerance.
Shortly before the wedding Rudolph II, King of Bohemia had died. Despite being a Catholic and a member of the house of Hapsburg, Rudolph was a liberal and a champion of religious toleration. He was fascinated by alchemy, astrology and mathematics. Much to the chagrin of the rest of the house of Hapsburg, he moved his court from Vienna to Prague. Prague soon becoming a center of intellectual and political freedom. Rudolph received John Dee and Edward Kelley, the two great English Alchemists, Giordano Bruno, Italian philosopher and hermeticist (who was later burned at the stake in Italy), and many others. Because of toleration for Jews, Prague soon became a center for Cabalistic Studies. The reformed Bohemian church and the Bohemian Brethren, a mystical brotherhood connected to the church, thrived. Despite tension at Rudolph’s death the issue was put off until 1617, when Ferdinand of Styria, a staunch Catholic, pupil of the Jesuits, and enemy of heresy became King of Bohemia. He quickly ended the period of religious toleration and intellectual freedom. Rebels in Bohemia declared that the crown was not hereditary, but rather theirs to give to whomever they should chose. If you are following the story so far it will be not surprise that they offered it to Frederick, the Elector Palatine.
Frederick interpreted this offer in a millenarian and mystical light and he accepted, indicating that he felt it was his religious duty. As unlikely as this sounds, there is every indication that he was sincere. Convinced of support from England and the Union of Protestant Princes Frederick wrote the rebels to accept the crown of Bohemia on Sept 28th, 1619. He and his family traveled from Heidelberg to Prague, arriving with much fanfare and excitement, with mystical prints and hymns in their honor. The arrival of Frederick and Elizabeth ushered in a period of tremendous excitement, religious tolerance, and intellectual freedom. Or so it would seem. The details are a bit hazy, as much of the evidence was destroyed in the brutal reaction that quickly ensued. Frederick and Elizabeth, the so called Winter King and Queen of Bohemia only ruled a few short months. Frederick had assumed that he had the political support of his father-in-law, King James, to accept the crown of Bohemia. In fact, he did not. And without James’ support the Protestant Princes of Europe got cold feet. Frederick was virtually alone against the might of the house of Hapsburg and was crushed. Frederick’s short reign in the Winter of 1619-20 was a bitter disappointment for so many, and it ushered in the brutal Thirty Years War.
The story might end here if someone else was writing it, but Yates is just beginning. She is not primarily interested in the actions of Kings and Queens. She examines the ideas that lay behind these events, and she traces the spread of these ideas back and forth across Europe over many years. Specifically this book is interested in the two Rosicrucian manifestos published in 1614 and 1615, and a third similar work published the following year. These three works purported to describe a secret order of magician/scientists (remember the distinction between the two was by no means clear at the time) attempting to bring about a reformation in religious and scientific knowledge and the bring about a new golden age. At the time many people attempted to contact these Rosey Cross brothers, but with no success. Today there are many groups claiming to be descended from this original fraternity. Yates purposely avoids the discussion of any subsequent fraternal groups, but points out that there is no evidence to suggest that any fraternity actually existed at the time of the manifestos. She argues that rather than being literally true, as some have assumed, the manifestoes were a sort of instructive theatre. In addition to their rich alchemical and hermetic symbolism they were basically anti-Jesuit and pro-Frederick propaganda. Propaganda that was ultimately used by their enemies to create anti-occult witch hunts in several countries.
Through careful scholarship Yates traces the roots of this movement that produced the Rosicrucian manifestoes and culminated in Frederick and Elizabeth’s short period in Prague to John Dee’s visit to Europe (especially to Prague in 1583). Similarly she follows the flight of the ideas and the people who held them dear after the reaction during the Thirty Years War to England and ultimately to the founding of the Royal Society in 1660. Its interesting to note that these same ideas which Dee helped introduce three quarters of a century earlier came back to England and were circulating during the Revolutionary period (1642-51).
The Rosicrucian Enlightenment is rich in detail about intriguing characters like Robert Fludd, English alchemist, mathematician, and physician whose work was largely printing in the Palatinate during Frederick’s reign. Another typically Rosicrucian thinker was Michael Maier, who grew up in Prague during the reign of Rudolph II. Maier’s work on philosophy, alchemy and hermeticism was also published in the Palatinate during Frederick’s reign. Both were published by the same firm, that of Johann Theodore De Bry. De Bry seems to have been and interesting character, and Yates mentions that he may have been a familialist; that is, a member of the Family of Love, a proscribed sect that influenced many of the radicals in the English revolution.
Yates shows us in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment why she has such a reputation as a historian by sifting through a prodigious amount of source material, in an area where many of the texts were written anonymously, the material often has multiple levels of meaning, and is often intentionally misleading or vague, and where the waters have been hopelessly muddied by uncritical occultists and enthusiasts. This is a truly wonderful book; a milestone in the study of the history of ideas.

it's been a while

2007-03-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

So, I've been neglecting the ol' blogs in favour of the real world. I've been busy with zine stuff (Issue #2 of No Quarter coming soon. Check my other page for details), gardening related activities, preparations for the anarchist book fair, and personal stuff. I haven't stopped reading or loving libraries though.

So some news more than a month old. And not good news wither. Many of you may have heard that Terence McKenna's library was destroyed by fire on February 7th. Terence was an extremely influencial mystic and psychedelic researcher and visionary who passed away in 2000. His library contain volumes of unpublished writings and notes by Terence as well as one of the more important collections of occult and drug related books in existence. It included a 1659 folio of Isaac Casaubon’s A True and Faithful Relation of what passed between Dr. John Dee and some spirits, Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and many other rare volumes. The fire started at a Quizno's. Fucking Quizno's. The CPL had only one of his books: The archaic revival : speculations on psychedelic mushrooms, the Amazon, virtual reality, UFOs, evolution, Shamanism, the rebirth of the goddess, and the end of history, which is unfortunately now lost. Hopefully the find it. Its a very good book.

24 hours of Folkways!!!

2007-01-26T20:24:00.000-08:00

In 1999 CKUA co-produced a 24 part series with Smithsonian Folkways about the history and legacy of Folkways records, one of the greatest record labels of all time (and one of my favorites. It’s a very good series (although somewhat repetitive because it was made for radio and therefore they couldn’t assume the listener had heard the previous episodes, so if you listen to all 24 hours worth prepare to have folkways records introduced 24 times) and a good introduction to the label if you are not familiar. And if you are already a fan there is 24 hours worth of material, so you are going to get some info out of it, plus a lot of great music. The series covers a lot of the major people involved: Moe Asch, Harry Smith and the Anthology of American Folk Music, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Ella Jenkins, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs to name a few. There is also one episode each on music of the labor, civil rights, and women’s movement. See for yourself and download them here.

The Calgary Public Library has a pretty fair collection of stuff on Smithsonian Folkways.
They have the Anthology of American Folk music, which is a wonderful place to start. There is also a number of collections that bring together songs from many albums under one theme. All are very interesting and excellent: Classic railroad songs, Classic Canadian songs, Classic Mountain Songs etc.
Other favorites of mine include: Rahim Alhaj - When the soul is settled: music of Iraq,
Masters of old-time country autoharp, Pete Seeger – American Favorite Ballads Vol 1-3, Beaton Family of Mabou - Cape Breton fiddle and piano music, Jean Ritchie – Ballads from her Appalachian family tradition, Bosavi: rainforest music from Papua New Guinea, Lead Belly sings for children, Pete Seeger – If I Had a Hammer: songs of hope and struggle, Mike Seeger – Southern Banjo Sounds, Mountain Music of Kentucky, Rhythms of rapture: sacred musics of Haitian vodou, Blues by Roosevelt "The Honey-Dripper" Sykes, Drums of defiance: Maroon music from the earliest free Black communities of Jamaica, Central Asia in Forest Hills N.Y.: music of the Bukharan Jewish Ensemble Shashmaqam, Don't mourn, organize!: songs of labor songwriter Joe Hill, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry sing etc.

Of course for the full list why not use power search and search publishers for Smithsonian Folkways. While you’re at it why not search for Yazoo records, Pan records, Arc Records, Traditional Crossroads, AK Press, Black Rose Books, Cleis etc. It’s a good way to search.

blogging for choice the day after

2007-01-23T17:11:00.000-08:00

Childbirth by Choice Trust (ed) - No Choice: Canadian Women Tell Their Stories of Illegal Abortion

Eleanor J. Bader and Patricia Baird-Windle - Targets of Hatred: Anti-Abortion Terrorism

Suzanne T. Poppema - Why I Am an Abortion Doctor

Leslie J. Reagan - When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973

Laura Kaplan - The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service

Carole Joffe - Doctors of conscience : the struggle to provide abortion before and after Roe v. Wade

So yesterday was blog for choice day, but I didn’t know. Here are six books that the library has that are about abortion. They are all pro-choice, all by women and mostly history and auto-biography. I don’t like ethics very much for a variety of reasons. I definitely don’t think a pro-abortion ethical argument will convince you if you are anti-abortion, and hopefully that is not the case if you are reading this blog. I wish the library had Ninia Baehr - Abortion without Apology: A Radical History for the 1990s but it doesn’t. Haymarket Books had it not too long ago.
Some of these books I haven’t read so approach with caution and decide for yourself. Of course, you should do that with any book I, or anyone else, recommend.

RAW RIP

2007-01-11T19:33:00.000-08:00

Robert Anton Wilson is dead.
Definately one of my favorite writers and an influence on me. I bought my brother Prometheus Rising for xmas this year.
I hearby declare a moratorium on cool people dying for the rest of the year. Helen Hill and Bob are more than enough. Only reactionary assholes can die for the rest of the year.
For some reason the library only has two books by him:
Schrodinger's cat trilogy (which I suppose is actually three books) and Everything is under control : conspiracies, cults, and cover-ups.
The Edmonton Public Library has a bunch though which you could get through inter library loan or with the Alberta Library card if you visit Edmonton:
Quantum psychology : how brain software programs you and your world, Reality is what you can get away with, Tsog: the thing that ate the constitution and other everyday monsters, and Prometheus rising.
For some reason they don't have The Illuminatus Trillogy, but they have it in St. Albert in Young Adult Fiction! Holy Fuck, I wish I read Illuminatus as a young adult!
Goodbye Bob, we'll miss you.

Lovecraft, Proust, Antonin Artaud, & Annie Sprinkle

2006-12-10T10:59:00.000-08:00

Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves: Sushi, Psychedelics, Parallel Universes, and the Quest for Transcendence by Clifford A. Pickover.
I heard about Clifford Pickover on the internet in relation to Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson, which may not be entirely surprising considering the title of this book. What was more surprising was that the CPL has 17 of his books! I checked out two: Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves and Strange brains and genius : the secret lives of eccentric scientists and madmen. Strange brains was pretty interesting; mainly case studies of a bunch of Mathematicians and other scientists including Nicola Tesla and Ted Kaczynski, discussing their genius and also their quirks. I should note that the Kaczynski chapter is colored pretty strongly by Pickover’s unbridled technophilia. In any case I only glanced at this book.
Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves, on the other hand, I read all the way and enjoyed a great deal. A couple times he goes off on little techno utopian digressions, which are his right, as author, but which I can’t relate to. But mainly this book is an exploration of altered states, how we perceive the universe or other universes. He discusses Marcel Proust at length, and James Joyce, and DMT and the ‘machine elves’ that inhabit the worlds perceived by people who take large doses of this drug. The book is dedicated to these elves, and also to people who find Schrödinger’s wave equation beautiful to ponder. I mean, reading the title you can probably guess that this book bounces around a lot. The book explores the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and how language affects how we perceive the world, hallucinogens that derive from insects and fish, the drive of non-human animals to alter their consciousness by consuming ethnogens, Jewish mysticism and the names of God, fairy tales, H. P. Lovecraft, Antonin Artaud, time travel, Terence McKenna, Philip K. Dick, Annie Sprinkle, zombies, etc. If you find half these topics interesting then by all means check this book out. At his root Clifford Pickover is a scientist and a sceptic. Many of his other books are more straight ahead popular science books. He even has a Phd in some science area from Yale, which no doubt impresses many people. I mention this because true believers may find him a bit hard to take. If you are sure that DMT is a gateway to another universe you may find this book a little irreverent for your tastes. I however am not a true believer and liked this book a lot.

Unfortunately the library doesn’t have any of his Scifi series NeoReality. It does have a scifi book he co-wrote with Piers Anthony. Here is a list of the other books the library has:
The Möbius strip : Dr. August Möbius's marvelous band in mathematics, games, literature, technology, and cosmology
Calculus and pizza : a cookbook for the hungry mind
The paradox of God and the science of omniscience
Wonders of numbers : adventures in mathematics, mind, and meaning
Dreaming the future : the fantastic story of prediction
The stars of heaven
The girl who gave birth to rabbits : a true medical mystery
Surfing through hyperspace : understanding higher universes in six easy lessons
Spider legs with Piers Anthony
Time : a traveler's guide
Strange brains and genius : the secret lives of eccentric scientists and madmen
Black holes : a traveler's guide
Fractal horizons : the future use of fractals
Keys to infinity
Future health : computers and medicine in the 21st century
Visions of the future : art, technology, and computing in the twenty-first century

Boratmania, or something not entirely dissimilar

2006-11-25T17:29:00.000-08:00

With Borat sweeping the USA and Canada it strikes me that a great many people know exactly nothing about Kazakhstan or Central Asia in general other than what is in this movie. I’m not exactly sure what is in the movie, but I can make a few guesses. Does Borat talk about how Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia are in the middle of a tugging war between the USA and Russia over influence over oil fields, pipelines and their strategic importance in relation to the Middle East (and China)? Did he talk about the culture or music (other than having extremely good prostitutes according to the one trailer that I saw) or the fact that much of it was nearly wiped out by the Soviet Union, not to mention language? Anyway, I could go on but I’m not really interesting in talking at length about a movie I have little interest in seeing. Rather I wanted to point out some interesting stuff that the library has relating to Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia.

There is a wonderful range of Central Asian music available at the library.
There is a great series co-produced by Smithsonian Folkways and the Aga Khan Trust For Culture called Music of Central Asia. The library has the first three volumes.
Vol 1: Tengir-Too: Mountain Music from Kyrgyzstan
Vol 2: Invisible Face of the Beloved: Classical Music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks
Vol 3: Homayun Sakhi: The Art of the Afghan Rubab
Wonderful liner notes plus a CD and a DVD. The DVDs are unfortunately each quite short, around 30 minutes each, but still well worth watching and the CDs are all wonderful. On the DVD for Vol 3 Homayun Sakhi describes his neighbourhood in Kabul that he left behind to go to Pakistan and later the US. “I have a lot of memories of Kucheh Kharbat, the musicians quarter in Kabul, where 400-500 musicians lived. Young and old alike played instruments. We were all playing music or making instruments. Every night we would go to someone’s house and play music. It was as if our street had been blessed and people made pilgrimages there. At night wherever you looked you would hear something nice. From one place you’d hear a Rubab; from another, a tabla. When things got bad in Afghanistan our street was completely destroyed. The whole area where musicians lived was decimated, and their instruments were buried under the earth”.
Music and art is often one of the first casualties of war as it is of religious fundamentalism. I feel like any media coverage of the war in Afghanistan (any of the wars) portrays Afghans as backwards and in need of Americans (and Canadians and Europeans) to sort out the mess that they’ve made of their dust-bowl country. There is never any talk about how US funding for Osama bin Laden and the mujihadin lead to the rise of the Taliban or that so many of the problems in Afghanistan have to do with cold war rivalries between the United States and the Soviet Union. Or that despite the ravages of war and civil war, and the Taliban, Afghanistan has still retained a lot of its culture. Now all of Central Asia is in a similar position.
The Islamic music of Central Asia is very much influenced by Sufism, the mystical path in Islam, and is as far away from fundamentalist Shiism or Wahhabism as you can get. Here are some cds that the library has:
Songs from the Steppes: Kazakh music
Ochilbek Matchonov - Music from Central Asia: Uzbekistan on the Silk Road.
The music of Uzbekistan (this is a wonderful collection recorded in 1970 by one of the worlds greatest song collectors Deben Bhattacharya)
Inside Afghanistan (another collection of Deben Bhattacharya’s recordings)
The secret museum of mankind Central Asia: ethnic music classics 1925-48 (This is a wonderful series in general on Yazoo, a label which re-releases music originally released on 78s, much of it Blues)
Central Asia in Forest Hills N.Y.: music of the Bukharan Jewish Ensemble Shashmaqam
Khomus: Jew's harp music of Turkic peoples in the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia
Afghan Ensemble – Songs from Afghanistan

This is just a small sampling of what the library has and is based largely on my personal taste. I didn’t include anything from Tuva (for example the excellent Huun-Huur-Tu, who recently played a show here in Calgary) or Siberia (check out the excellent series Siberie on Buda Musique. The library has Vol 1-4, 8,9).

I wanted to mention two books
Fabled Cities of Central Asia: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva by Vadim Evgenevich
Gippenreiter is a wonderful coffee table sized books with lots of info about the aforementioned cities and Central Asia in general.

The hundred thousand fools of God: musical travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York) by Theodore Craig Levin is part travel books, part ethnomusicology but one hundred per cent interesting and readable. It also has a very good cd that it comes with.
For analysis about what’s happening in Central Asia that is more informed than this blog please try World War Four Report. Also the raio show Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade (download episodes here) often covers Central Asia and generally plays excellent music from all over the world, including Kazakhstan and its neighbors.

Some books that I've got recently pt 2

2006-11-19T18:46:00.000-08:00

And while it pours rain in BC, it pours books into my library. In this case from a book liquidation website that shall remain nameless. Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law by E.P. Thompson was an exciting find. E.P. Thompson was colleagues with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rude, A.L. Morton. This book looks really interesting and tries to connect Blake to the radicals in the English revolution through the Muggletonians. Another book on my to read Top 50. I also got Making History: Writings on History and Culture by E. P. Thompson, a collection of his essays. Captain Swing by Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude, about the Captain Swing uprisings in the 1830s in England.
On a completely un-marxist-historian related note I also got Hallucinogens: A Reader edited by Charles S. Grob. A nice collection with stuff from Terence McKenna, Huston Smith, Andrew Weil and a bunch of others.
Perhaps most exciting of all was Granny Made Me an Anarchist:General Franco, The Angry Brigade and Me by Stuart Christie. The autobiography of the most famous Scottish anarchist to ever participate in a plot to assassinate General Franco, the Fascist dictator of Spain. He was also tried and acquitted as an accused member of the Angry Brigade, Britain’s best known anarchist bomb throwers. Plus Christie is a long time anarchist publisher and generally interesting dude. This book catapulted itself to the number one spot on the to read top fifty. I’m already half done.
I also got a bunch of vegetarian cook books which I haven’t used yet.

Some books that I've got recently

2006-11-18T18:16:00.000-08:00

I have been reading a lot of books lately. So logically enough I’m going to talk about a lot of books I’ve bought lately. Not that the two are mutually exclusive…
Anyway, yesterday I went to Baskerville Books, the best used book store in Calgary (tied with Barb’s) by far. Once again they provided me with books I was very happy to find. Norman Cohn – Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom. I just finished an earlier work from Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. Definitely one of the more interesting books I’ve read in a while (I actually have two copies of Pursuit of the Millennium, so if anyone is interested in a copy I could let one go for a reasonable price). Hopefully I’ll be posting a review of it soon. Cohn considers Europe’s Inner Demons to be a bit of a companion to Pursuit of the Millennium, although a lot more about the official church’s treatment of the heretical/radical sects, rather than about the sects themselves. Europe’s Inner Demons is definitely on my Top 50 to read list. Neither of these books are available at the public library but both are at the U of Calgary library which is accessible with an Alberta Library Card which is free if you have a public library card. I also found The City of the Singing Flame by Clark Ashton Smith. Wow! So excited about this one!!! Most probably know Clark Ashton Smith, if they know him at all, as a contemporary and correspondent of HP Lovecraft. I think I like him even more than HP Lovecraft. Finding copies of his books is a rare happening and cause for celebration.
I was recently in Colorado Springs visiting my parents and happened across a few good finds there. Brain Plague by Joan Slonczewski was a good find. I read it on the trip home and liked it quite a bit. She is officially on my scifi love list. I’ve read 5 books by her now and 3 were excellent the other 2 very good. Brain Plague is about humans being hosts for sentient microbe colonies, some of whom see their hosts as Gods, some who see their hosts as tools to be exploited and with natural resources to extract. An extremely interesting book. Slonczewski’s background as a Phd biologist shines through as well as her critical attitude to technology and bio-engineering. It is quite devoid of the uncritical technophilia which pervades so much of the writing in the sort of futurist/trans-human vein. Not that this book falls squarely into that area. Any way, a very interesting book. Set in the same universe as A Door into Ocean (maybe my all time favorite sci-fi book. Definitely top 5) and Daughters of Elysium. The Library has Brain Plague, Daughters of Elysium and The Wall Around Eden (which is not as good as the other two but still good).
I also got The Ultimate Threshold: A Collection of the Finest in Soviet Science Fiction translated and edited by Mirra Ginsburg. A very nice hc book club edition from 1970. A bit of a steal at $3 I must say. My final purchase in Colorado was William Morris on History (ed. Nicholas Salmon). Some of you may know Morris as one of the founders of the British Arts and Crafts movement and a prominent designer of wallpaper and fabric. Some may know him as one of the modern fathers of Fantasy (and an influence on Tolkien). He was also a prominent Socialist. Some even claim that he was an anarchist, although A L Morton argues very strongly against this characterization. Let us say that he was a socialist with very libertarian tendencies. And this is a smallish collection of his writings on history.

New Zine plus the Hungarian Revolution

2006-10-27T18:53:00.000-07:00

So I haven’t posted here in quite some time. No excuses, but as a small consolation I have finished a zine about Halloween. Its called From Idle Hands the Devils Work: Radical Interpretations of Halloween. I posted some of the material from the zine on my other blog here. Its available from me or in Calgary at Haymarket Cafe
I wanted to mention the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 because it was the 50th anniversary of its beginning this week. Of course assholes like George W. Bush talk try to recuperate it as an anti-communist, pro capitalist revolt. Hopefully many are aware that it was actually a social revolution with a wide scope.
The Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade episode this week is very interesting comparing Hungary in 1956 to the current revolution unfolding in Oaxaca, Mexico (See Bill Weinberg’s blog for more info, or download the show here, the Wednes October 25th episode).
The library has a couple interesting looking eye witness accounts from participants in the revolutionary struggles (which I haven’t had a chance to read):
A Testament of Revolution by Bela G. Liptak and In the Name of the Working Class: The Inside Story of the Hungarian Revolution by Sandor Kopasci.
The library doesn’t have my favorite book on the topic: Hungary ’56 by Andy Anderson. Originally published by Solidarity in the UK in 1964, reprinted by Black and Red in 1976 (the edition I have). AK Press has a more recent edition. Besides being a wonderful book it has the virtue of being cheap ($5). Orgasms of History: 3000 Years of Spontaneous Insurrection by Yves Fremion (published by AK Press) also has a chapter on Hungary ’56.
Here is a link to something Raya Dunayevskaya wrote on the subject too.

New Logo!!!!

2006-10-07T13:37:00.000-07:00

Here is the wonderful new logo created here.

Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair 2006

2006-09-05T18:25:00.000-07:00

I just got back from the Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair, which was a huge success I think. Many thanks to Sean, Jeff and all the other organizers. Also, special thanks to all the cooking staff who did an amazing job. The food was great and I managed to avoid wanting to die from blood sugar issues. Eight hours tabling with little to no wholesome food is not a good idea, but with good food it was mostly fun. I got to meet Ramsay from AK Press, who I interviewed for the first issue of No Quarter. That was cool. I even got to sit in for half his workshop, which was about the struggles running AK Press and the economics of anarchist propaganda.

Despite the fact that none of these books are available at my library (Calgary Public) they may be available at yours. And if not, they are available in my personal library and I want to mention what I got:

The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin. This is the new edition published by Black Cat books in Edmonton. A very welcome, beautiful and reasonably priced edition of this perennial classic.

The Angry Brigade 1967-1984: Documents and Chronology. Elephant Editions.

A nice collection of communiqués and a chronology of the Urban Guerilla group who’s politics and actions you can support. Plus their communiqués rule! “We have started to fight back and the war will be won by the organized working class, with bombs” Communiqué 5.

The Man Who Killed Durruti by Pedro de Paz, translated by Paul Sharkey, postscript by Stuart Christie. A mystery novel about the killing of Buenaventura Durruti, one of the most prominent Spanish anarchists during the revolution. Plus a long post-script by Stuart Christie.

What’s the Use of Walking if There’s a Freight Train Going Your Way? Black Hoboes & Their Songs by Paul Garon & Gene Tomko. I guess the title of this book is pretty explanatory. Paul Garon is one of the founders of Living Blues magazine, and an active participant in the American Surrealist movement, not to mention a leading radical writer about the blues.

I also got a bunch of used books, not from the book fair though:

Freedom Challenge: African American homeschoolers – ed. Grace Llewellyn. A bunch of black homeschoolers in their own words edited by the author of Teenage Liberation Handbook.

Sounding Off! Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution – eds. Ron Sakolsky & Fred Wei-Han Ho. This book looks awesome. Radical music from all over the world. I’m sure I will review this on this site eventually.

The Forecast is Hot! Tracts & Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States 1966-1976 ed. Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont & Paul Garon. The radical fragments of the art avant garde, collided with anarchism and the I.W.W. in Chicago in the mid sixties and has been going strong ever since. A very interesting looking book.

The Oblivion Seekers – Isabelle Eberhardt, Paul Bowles translates. Writings by one of the most interesting figures in the history of history. Anarchist, journalist, sufi, possibly an agent for French imperial ambitions in North Africa. Eberhardt was born in Switzerland in 1877. She was educated by her stepfather who was a Russian nihilist and knew Baukunin. She learned many languages including Arabic, horse riding and grew up dressing in men’s clothing. She later traveled the Middle East and North Africa dressed as a man. She died in Algeria in 1904.

Arise Ye Mighty People! Gender Class and Race in Popular Struggles. Edited by Terisa E. Turner. Lots of interesting stuff in this book about Rasta, struggles in Africa, even a Seth Tobacman comic. Published by Africa World Press.

Crypto Anarchy, Cyber States, and Pirate Utopias edited by Peter Ludlow. Lots of stuff from Cypherpunks, cyber intellectuals etc discussing the liberatory possibilities of the internerd. A bit dated, as books about computers tend to get very quickly, since it was from 2001.

Death to Civilization

2006-08-19T08:15:00.000-07:00

In case you have been waiting for the two volume book to give you the final push, to reach the tipping point, so to speak, to reach that critical commitment to the destruction of civilization (and I'm not talking the destruction of Christendom, for that you might need the inspiration of Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden) then the library has come through for you. And if you are already working to contribute to the momentum of the impending planecrash that is industrial civilization then you still might like it. I'm of course talking about Endgame Vol 1&2 by Derrick Jensen.
Volume 1 is subtitled: The Problem of Civilization. This volume will convince even the most wishy washy, still clinging to their pathetic illusions that there is anything worth saving in our civilization, will come to their senses.
Volume 2 is subtitled: Resistance. Some musings and tips about how to give this ecocidal death machine a kick in the right direction. Lots of people are putting it on hold, which is a good sign. I wonder who they are. Are there secretly all these people in Calgary who are interested in anti-civ thought. Or are law inforcement types here to cheap to spring for their own copy? If you are one of the people reading it and are looking for more anti-civ stuff email me captainmissionismycopilot [at] hotmail [dot] com, because I run a distro with lots of anti-civ titles including Green Anarchy, Feral Forager, At Daggers Drawn etc.

Doctor Who and Utah Phillips

2006-08-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

The library has a bunch of Doctor Who DVDs now. I've been too busy watching them to post about this (plus I didn't want any extra competition, but I've seen all they have now). If you don't know Doctor Who, or have only seen the new series you are missing out. Every library in the City has The Key to Time stories which is an excellent place to start.

The library also has recently ordered Starlight on the Rails, the Utah Phillips songbook, which is 4 cds plus an awesome booklet, put out by AK Press. Definately check it out. Utah is perhaps the greatest radical folk musician, representing the best of the I.W.W. tradition (ie he's fairly anti-work). The library has a bunch of his other cds all worth checking out. Also while you're at it check out Don't Mourn, Organize: Songs of Labour Song Writer Joe Hill, Struggle by Woody Guthrie (or his excellent Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti, which the library doesn't have), If I Had a Hammer: Songs of Hope and Struggle by Pete Seeger, Partisans of Vilna: Songs of the World War Two Jewish Resistance etc. Or if you want to look beyond the library check out anything by Hazel Dickens, Coal Mining Women (A collection on Rounder featuring Hazel and many others), Harlan County USA: Songs of the Coal Miners Struggle (on Rounder, the soundtrack to the classic movie recently re-released on DVD), anything by Alistair Hulett especially Red Clydeside (which he did with Dave Swarbrick) etc

anarchist pirates

2006-07-23T15:57:00.000-07:00

I have a new blog for my zine projects. Here it is. There is a little duplication with this page, but what can you do?

Salt of the Earth

2006-07-23T15:39:00.000-07:00

I just watched this 1954 movie, and wow! it exceeded all my expectations. It was made by blacklisted Hollywood writers and crew and using a mainly non-professional cast of Mexican American miners and their families in New Mexico. It tells the story of a bitter strike in the local Zinc mine, which was won largely through the initiative of the wives of the miners who held the picket line several months after the miners were barred by the courts from picketing. It is an amazing piece of labor history as well as anti-racist and feminist film making. I can't recomend it enough.
Unfortunately its not available at the library here (although check out Norma Rae, another amazing feminist labour movie which is on DVD at almost every branch). It is available as a free download from archive.org here is a link.

two things I hate

2006-07-10T15:22:00.000-07:00

Stampede and Folkfest! Oh, how I hate them. But instead of being bitter I'll talk about a few cds that I've been digging in the "folk" and country side of things. All from the library of course.

Jargalan Altai: Xoomii and other music from Mongolia (Pan Records)
This is a wonderful collection of field recordings from West of Mongolia (mainly from the state of Xovd) and music from the archives of Mongol Radio. It mainly features Xoomii, which is a vocal technique that uses overtones. Acording to the liner notes xoomii is "characterized by the simultaneous production of two distinct notes: a low-pitched fundamental drone and a flutelike whistle, the latter bing used to form the melody. The sound generated by a skilled singer is truely extaordinary and many first-time listeners mistakenly believe they are listening to two seperate voices". Seriously, this cd has to be heard to be believed. Even if you have heard Inuit and other related styles of throat singing (which are similar in some ways) this will amaze and astound. Great liner notes too (as with any Pan Records release).

Inside Afghanistan - recordings by Deben Bhattacharya (Arc Music 2002)
A bunch of songs collected in the 50s and 70s by perhaps the greatest song collector that ever lived. This is a very interesting collection of musical traditions that in some cases no long exist because of the years of Soviet and American war making in the region.

Buryatia, Rites, celebrations and dances around Lake Baikal (Buda Musique, Siberie 9)
Another instalment in the wonderful Siberie series from Buda Musique.

Ruckus Juice & Chittlins - The Great Jug Bands vol 1 (Yazoo 2032)
If you don't know, Yazoo is an archival label that releases music origionally released on 78s, mainly in the 20s and 30s. Lots of Blues, Country, and music from around the world. Ruckus Juice and Chittlins features many of the great jug bands doing their thing.

Ochilbek Matchonov - Music from Central Asia - Uzbekistan on the silk road (Arc Music, 2005)
Ochilbek Matchonov is one of Uzbekistan's musical treasures. This cd rules and you should check it out, ok?

Gétatchèw Mèkurya: Negus of Ethiopean Sax (Ethiopiques 14, Buda Musique)
Ethiopiques is another great series from Buda Musique. It features various different styles of music from Ethiopia, traditional to popular and everything in between. This volume is maybe my favorite. The music is influenced by American jazz, Ethiopean music and music from the rest of Africa. Wonderful. And The Ex really like him. The whole series is worth checking out, and the library has a number of volumes.

Maybe I'll stop there. Nothing in the country vein at all actually, but that doesn't mean I can't hate the stampede. Sorry if this isn't much of an entry...

Two books I've been checking out

2006-06-25T09:46:00.000-07:00

Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity is near: When Human's Transcend Biology
So I've only had a chance to glance through this book. Partially because I've been busy and it hasn't been a high priority to read, and partially because I find it alienating and scary. Kurzweil is the author of a bunch of books - The Age of Spritual Machines: When Computers exceed Human Intelligence, and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to live forever - to name two that the library has. So basically he thinks that machines will become self aware, the amount of information in the world will keep doubling faster and faster until it reaches a point (the singularity), human beings will incorporate machine parts into their bodies (which of course has been happening for a very long time: from wooden legs to hearing aids), and people will be able to live (virtually) forever, either biologically or by putting our consiousness onto machines. If you've read SciFi writer and Mathematician Rudy Rucker's books (Especially the *ware series) he deals with these themes with humor and a critical eye. Robert Anton Wilson deals with similar themes in a very thoughtful way too. Ray Kurzweil is obviously obsessed with these themes. It is his life work and this shines through in his books. They are massive and well research and very interesting. He also comes across as a bit of a fundamentalist. His faith in the singularity and his futurist vision of the future is very strong. Its also more than a little disconcerting. Especially to someone whole doesn't share Kurzweil's technophilia. Kurzweil is sure that the only outcome of high technology is immortality and a bold future. He brings up many of the dangers of our technolgical future, but it seems from a far from thurough reading that it is mainly to head criticism off at the pass. His section where he responds to criticism does not include a single criticism that questions the desirability of increased technology with no limits. A criticism of Technophilia and questioning the desirability of the direction technolgy is taking seems to make as much sense to Kurzweil as questioning the existense of God to a Fundamentalist Christian. In any case, I don't mean that as slander. I am not suggesting that Kurzweil shares other characteristics with Christian fundamentalists. His books seem very interesting and influencial. Hopefully I'll get a chance to give The Singularity is Near a thorough reading. Preferably before the coming of the singularity, or the colapse of industrial civilization, whichever comes first.

Another book I've been looking at is Bryan D. Palmer's Culture of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression [From Medieval to Modern].

Peasants, religious heretics, witches, pirates, runaway slave, prostitutes and pornographers, frequenters of taverns and fraternal society lodge rooms, revolutionaries, blues and jazz musicians, beats and contemporay youth gangs-those who defied authority, chosing to live dangerously outside the defining cultural dominations of early insurgent and, later, dominant capitalism are what Bryan D. Palmer calls people of the night. (From the back of the book).

So anyone who knows me can see why I'd find this book very exciting! Palmer is a well respected Canadian labor historian and this is an amazing work of synthesis. At least it seems to be. I haven't even had much of a chance to look at it, but I will get around to it eventually. It looks awesome.

In case anyone is wondering what I have been reading (and not just skimming) here are some of the titles: Daughter of Elysium by Joan Sloncezwski (a wonderful anarcha-feminist scifi book which the library does have), We Should have Killed the King by J.G. Eccarius, Marcus Rediker - Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750, Dr. Ben Reitman - Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha, Tom Vague - Anarchy in the UK: The Angry Brigade, and Ron Sakolsky (ed) - Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States.

CBC book sale

2006-05-31T15:47:00.000-07:00

I just went to the CBC book sale and picked up some pretty good stuff. Highlights include:
Petr Kropotkin – Mutual Aid, Donald Dunn – Ponzi: The Incredible True Story of the King of Financial Cons (Broadway Library of Larceny), All three Vol of The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault, Stanislaw Lem – The Cyberiad, Mary Appelhof – Worms Eat my Garbage, Noam Chomsky – Hegemony or Survival (for sale soon!), Sergei Eisenstein – Essays in Film Theory, an Ezra Pound biography… some other stuff. Basically I was only overjoyed by the first two. But for $1 a book ($2 for Chomsky, because it was a hc) I was pleased.

again, internet radio

2006-05-15T06:21:00.000-07:00

Some of my favorite radio shows are available on the 'nerd now.
Anarchy Radio hosted by John Zerzan is archive at archive.org (here).
Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade (co-founded by Peter Lamborn Wilson) is archive at wbai here. Its on Wednesday mornings starting at 00:00.
Another favorite that has been archived forever is Off the Hook hosted by Emmanuel Goldstein, Bernie S. et al. Perhaps the best hacker radio show. Certainly the most anti-war and anti-authoritarian. Its here. Its sister show Off the Wall is also archived on 2600.com. Its good, but not as good as Off the Hook.
Audio Anarchy is an interesting project. It produces Audio Anarchy radio and also anarchist audio books including: Against The Logic Of Submission by Wolfi Landstreicher, The Anarchist Tension by Alfredo M. Bonanno, a collection of anti-work essays etc.
The A Info Radio Project is a good project that has a lot of interesting things archived at it. Radio Free School is very interesting. I also enjoy the Shortwave Report (a news program pulled together from various short wave broadcasts; Chinese, Cuban, Dutch and Russian state radio mostly. So all state propaganda, but all in english and still interesting), Changesurfer Radio (A Left Libertarian futurist show. All about trans-humanism, extropianism, sentient machines etc. A lot of uncritical technophilia but also some interesting stuff), lots of other shows plus lots of interviews with favorites such as Derrick Jensen, Ward Churchill, Chellis Glendinning, bell hooks, plus all the usual suspects: Chomsky, Howard Zinn, both Parenti's, Angela Davis, Vandana Shiva, Mumia Abu Jamal, most of the AK Press audio releases etc.
So, yeah. Good stuff.

Teenage Skytrain Bandits

2006-05-10T18:24:00.000-07:00

Here's a weird story about the teenage bankrobbers that is totally bizarre .
(OK, if I was thinking I would have posted the whole story, which is no longer available).

"At least one boy was doing well in school, Morrow said, 'so it's not a typical case - this one kid, at least, what I have been told - of being a schoolyard bully.'"

What is that supposed to mean? Bullies are often bank robbers? Or go on to become bank robbers. Bullies don't do well in school. They quote some criminologist who is either an idiot or they quoted him hilariously out of context. He talks about how this case is unique and then proceeds to make all sorts of generalizations about what kinds of youth get involved in this sort of serious criminal activity. I'll generalize about what kinds of thirteen year olds rob banks: Really cool ones, and not enough.

My hope is that these teens either a) just thought bank robbers and bank robbery is cool, b)were practicing a radical synthesis of illegalist anarchism and teenage liberation, c) were going to use the money to fund their nascent alf cell, d) were funding a significant collectable card game habit

Obviously I'm projecting onto these people a lot. In any case, I hope they don't get into too much trouble. Whatever their motivation, good on them. Too bad they got caught.

kids these days

2006-05-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

"Police in the Vancouver area have arrested three teens under age 15 who are suspected of a string of bank robberies in the Lower Mainland." That's from a CBC story. I know this isn't directly related to libraries, but I have been meaning to post a review of "Where the Money Was: the Memoirs of a Bank Robber" by Willie Sutton. Which is an amazing book. Then again he didn't rob a bank at thirteen. I'm guessing there is no way this could happen, but if I could somehow get a statement (or exclusive interview) from these kids for No Quarter #2... Good lord! Seriously, if these kids did what they are accused of they are so cool. I hope they don't get jail time.
On a somewhat related note, the founder of the Guardian Angels, Curtis Sliwa was in my neighbourhood at some point this weekend talking smack about how it was crime ridden and full of drug addicts and prostitutes. In case you are reading this Curtis a little message: I like drugs and prostitutes. I hate Yuppies and scumbag vigilanties. If Calgary needs to get cleaned up, clean up all the sleazy condo developers and the genocidal mining companies. If you want the Librarylove scorecard for this week it reads: Teenage bankrobbers = cool, Vigilanties = suck!!!

Here's a pamphlet I had at the Anarchist Bookfair

2006-05-02T06:27:00.000-07:00

Obviously, some of this material has been covered before on this web page. In any case, here is the text of the flyer:

The Friends of Ann Clayborne present a list of radical scifi books.

Ursula K. Leguin – The Dispossessed
An anarchist society. An ambiguous utopia. Twin planets with very different societies. Ursula K Leguin is awesome. Most of her other books are great too. The Earth Sea books (6 of them starting with A Wizard of Earthsea) in addition to being the subject of the worst tv mini series ever made, and an upcoming Studio Ghibli (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away) film, are awesome YA fantasy. The Telling, Birthday of the World, Four Ways to Forgiveness, Left Hand of Darkness- are all well worth checking out.

Octavia Butler – Kindred
A Black woman is repeatedly drawn back in time to the ante-bellum south and has to deal first hand with the trauma of slavery. This book is amazing. Her last book (Octavia Butler died recently, Feb 24, 2006), Fledgling, is about Vampires. She wrote 12 other books. All the ones I’ve read are good.

Samuel R Delaney – Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Gay interspecies public sex. The extermination of life on a planetary scale. A radical critique of “the family”. This book is amazing. He has a four book series (Tales of Nevèrÿon, Neveryóna, Flight from Nevèrÿon, The Bridge of Lost Desire) which is sword and sorcery about slave rebellions, women’s contribution to science, gay SM, AIDS, calculus etc.

Kim Stanley Robinson – Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars
When and if colonists are sent to Mars, I hope they see fit to send anarchists in the first batch. Radical ecology takes on new meanings on the red planet. These books are awesome! He also wrote Antarctica which has similar themes, and two recent books about the changing climate, feral orangutans in Washington DC, feral humans and other good stuff (40 Signs of Rain, and 50 Degrees Below). The new hard scifi at its best.

Joan Slonczewski – A Door Into Ocean
Another anarchist society on a moon threatened by profitarians from its planet/moon. Written by everyone’s favorite eco-feminist biologist Quaker.

John Brunner – The Sheep Look Up
A book much beloved by many an Earth First!er. Radical ecology meets urban guerrillas. All in an entertaining and somewhat depressing novel.

Robert Heinlein – The Moon is a harsh Mistress
An entertaining book about a libertarian revolution on the moon which does not have any evidence of Heinlein’s otherwise weird and sometimes scary politics.

Rudy Rucker – Software, Wetware, Freeware, Realware
Anarchist robots, cloning, immortality and a trans-human future. This series has it all, except for the last book which isn’t as good as the others.

Marge Piercy – Woman out of Time
A radical critique of psychiatry and mental institutions. A time travel book about an anarchist future. Both, in fact. Wonderful!

Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea – The Illuminatus Trillogy
The Illuminati want to bring about the end of the world by feeding everyone to Nyarlathotep. Meanwhile anarchists who venerate Eris, the Greek goddess of discord and strife are planning to stop them in their golden submarine. Sex, Drugs, weird religions, weirder humor. Mind blowing. Most of what Robert Anton Wilson has written is awesome, although most isn’t Science Fiction. The Schrodinger’s Cat trilogy is though.

Semiotext(e) SF
Edited by Peter Lamborn Wilson, Rudy Rucker, and Robert Anton Wilson. In addition to those authors it has work by William S Burroughs, Hakim Bey, Ivan Stang, Lewis Shiner, Phillip Jose Farmer, J. G. Ballard, Bruce Sterling and many more. And when I say magazine think 380 page oversized book. Published by Semiotext(e) and AK Press.

Judith Merril & Emily Pohl-Weary – Better to have loved: The Life of Judith Merril
Judith Merril was a pioneering scifi writer who wrote prolifically starting in the 40s. She was also a leftist, involved in anti-war activities, eventually moved to Canada and participating in the free university movement. She co-wrote this with her grand daughter Emily Pohl-Weary. Its fairly easy to find collections such as Daughters of the Earth (actually there are two different collections of her short stories by that name) at used book stores as well as a nice new anthology Homecalling and Other Stories: The Complete Solo Short SF of Judith Merril.

Saab Lofton – AD
So there is this company called III Publishing that published mainly really weird scifi, often with anarchist and otherwise radical themes. This is one of their books. It was inspired by Star Trek, The Black Panthers and Noam Chomsky. Its set in a future USA that has been divided between Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance and the Nation of Islam. The main character is a black man in Lost/Found Nation of Islam. He ends up travelling to the future and winds up in a Libertarian Socialist Democracy (LSD). Hijinx ensue. A Pretty weird book, but worth reading if you can find it.

Lewis Shiner – Slam
This guy gets out of jail for tax evasion and gets a job as a live in care taker for a bunch of cats in a big house who’s owner just died. Nearby a bunch of teenage skaters are squatting a half-built all concrete house that seems like something out of Tony Hawk Pro-skater (houses with skateboard ramps built into their roofs). A big influence on this book was The Abolition of Work by Bob Black. Not really SF at all, but some of Shiner’s other books are SF. Deserted Cities of the Heart (another of his books) is about guerrilla warfare in Mexico and time travel using psychedelics.

Cory Doctorow – Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Alan (Adam, Abel) renovates a home in Kensington market to write a story in. Instead he helps a 30 year-old punk rock hacker dumpster dive free wifi for all of Kensington Market with dreams of covering the whole city. But do the anarchists want in on this action? Adam also has to deal with his murderous dead six year old brother. Alan’s dad is a mountain and his mom is a washing machine. Maybe the solution to his problems is drinking a lot of very strong coffee. Cory Doctorow works for the Electronics Frontier Foundation (an electronic civil liberties group) and is an open source evangelist. Apparently one of his other books (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) is about a future Anarcho-syndicalist Disney World. At least that’s what one reviewer said. I haven’t read it.

Angélica Gorodischer - Kalpa Imperial
This was translated from the Spanish by Ursula K Leguin. Its sort of a fable about the ebb and flow of a vast empire. It has a lot to say about the growth of cities, community, and lots of other stuff. Gorodischer is from Argentina. Kalpa Imperial is her only novel translated so far into English.

Anarchist Bookfair

2006-05-02T06:04:00.000-07:00

I had a table at this years Calgary Anarchist Bookfair. Obstensibly to sell my zine, but also used books. I had a lot of fun, and it was a very positive experience for me. So, thanks to the Haymarket people (and especially Rachel for helping move my table) and everyone else involved. Thanks to everyone who bought my zine, or books. Feel free to email me about my zine if you see fit. And I'm not fishing for complements, mainly feedback. Big thanks to Edmonton IWW/ Black Books, Amy / twelve oh two (also from Edmonton), and Turning the Tide from Saskatoon for coming down for it.
Hopefully I can make it up for the Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair. Also, if you live in Edmonton Black Books took some copies of No Quarter, which will no doubt sell like hotcakes, but you might luck out.

New Post!!!!!!!!!!

2006-04-21T21:54:00.000-07:00

Its been a long time since my last post. I have been reading, although none of it from the library. Probably stuff I will eventually get around to reviewing. I am currently reading Someone comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow, which is very good. They do have it at the library. Expect a review soon. I watched a very good movie that I got from the library: The Legend of Bhagat Singh. Its about a Marxist guy who fought and died during the anti-colonial struggle in India.
I traded for a bunch of books today at Barb’s Book Loft in Kennsington, and did I make out like a bandit! You will be very jealous…
Here’s what I got:
George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic – The Doukhobors
Woodcock of course is a famous Canadian author. The library has this and 81 other books by him, including biographies of Kropotkin, Proudhon, William Godwin and many others. Also books on practically any subject. As for the Doukhobors, communal pacifist christians originally from Russia. I was very excited to find this book!
Max Marwick (ed) Witchcraft and Sorcery.
In the Penguin Modern Sociology Readings series. Sorcerers of Dobu, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Bechuanaland, The Bwanali-Mpulumutsi Anti-Witchcraft movement, and much much more. The library doesn’t have this one. So much the worse for you.
Father Camilo Torres – Revolutionary Writings
The dude who said “If Jesus were alive today he would be a Guerrilla” only in Spanish. He died fighting the good fight in Columbia in 1966.
William M. Mandel – Soviet but Not Russian: The ‘other’ peoples of the Soviet Union…
Some interesting Ethnography out of the U of A, which is probably why the library has it.
Marietta T. Stepaniants – Sufi Wisdom
Sufism in Russia and Central Asia, and also the study of Sufism in Russia, and also a lot of stuff about Ibn Arabi. Not at the library, although Barb had a second copy. $11 if you hurry.
Jennifer Toth – The Mole People: Life In The Tunnels Beneath NYC
Yes the library has this. It is somewhat famous. Some people have tried to discredit it. People living under grand central station in NYC, and subway tunnels.
Richard Lettis and William E. Morris – The Hungarian Revolt
Documents from the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. A revolution anarchists and other radicals should know more about. The library doesn’t have this or Hungary 1956 by Bill Lomax (on Black and Red), the best book on the subject that I know of.
Todd T. Lewis – Popular Buddhist Texts From Nepal: Narratives and Rituals of Newar Buddhism
Not to be confused with Popular Buddhist texts from Amazon.com, which features books by the Dalai Lama, Pema Chödrön, and Thich Nhat Hahn. Not at the library.
David King Dunaway – How can I Keep From Singing: Pete Seeger
Not at the library. Not to be confused with How can I keep from singing: Early American Religious music vol 1&2 on Yazoo records, both very good but also not at the library. A biography of Pete Seeger. The library does have a bunch of his cds. I suggest you pick up American Favorite Ballads vol 1 &2, American Folk, Game and Activity Songs for Children, and especially If I had a Hammer: Songs of Hope and Struggle. Oh, how I love Pete Seeger!
Hopefully more posts soon. Feel free to comment on how jealous you are of my books.

Remembering Stanisław Lem

2006-04-01T20:49:00.000-08:00

Stanisław Lem died on March 27th. He was one of the greatest Science Fiction writers of all time and like all the greats his writing seldom respected the conventional boundries of the genre. I have just been getting into his writings in the last few years. The Cyberiad and Futurological Congress are both excellent. In addition to those two the library has many of his books including Solaris, Memoirs found in a Bathtub, Fiasco, Return from the stars, and many others.

Paul Avrich 1931–2006

2006-03-12T07:52:00.000-08:00

I just ordered a couple of the AK Press reissues of Paul Avrich books. They've done an excelent job reissuing books by him. The Modern School Movement, Russian Anarchists, and Anarchist Voices, have all recently been reissued by them. On the AK Press page I read that Paul Avrich had died in February. Avrich was the formost current historian of Anarchism and one of the most important of all time. Sad news indeed.

For a while I have been considering if this site could be used to try to get the library to get certain books. I've been thinking that if many people request the same book it is more likely that the library will get it. Especially if it is current, material that they generally carry, and on a publisher that the library carries.
So perhaps we can give it a try:
The author is: Paul Avrich
The title: Anarchist Voices
You need a library card to request and if they get it they put it on hold for you, so maybe only request this if this book is actually of interest to you. It is a collection of interviews with hundreds of anarchists and is perhaps the most significant contribution to the oral history of anarchism ever. Its also not a dusty old history book. It is very easy to read, and excelent if you want to pick and chose who to read the interviews with. Their are lots of famous anarchists, and even more not famous ones.

You can suggest titles here:
Suggest titles here

The library currently has one Paul Avrich title:
Sacco and Vanzetti: the anarchist background

Remembering Octavia Butler

2006-03-04T09:07:00.000-08:00

Some readers may know that Octavia Butler died on Feb 24. Possibly from a stroke, or from head injuries from a fall. She was 58. I leave the biography and analysis of the importance of her work to others. I love what I have read by her. Kindred is one of the most wonderful books I have read.
The library has a number of her books:
Fledgling (2005)
Parable of the Talents (1998)
Bloodchild and other stories (1995)
Parable of the Sower (1993)
Imago (1989)
Adulthood Rites (1988)
Wildseed (1980)
Survivor (1978)
I hope that younger generations of SciFi writers (and readers) will look to Octavia Butler's example and not back away from controversy or social issues. She wasn't afraid to take Science Fiction seriously, and assumed that her readers would do so as well. She will be missed.

I'm selling stuff

2006-02-25T17:37:00.000-08:00

Cds, Vinyl, Videogames, books. Here!!!!!!!

Some Anarchist Books

2006-02-11T19:30:00.000-08:00

I have said that the library has many anarchist books, and yet I never talk about them on this blog. Now I will talk about a few:

Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939). Robert Graham ed. Black Rose.

500 pages of documents from the history of Anarchism. Lots of stuff from the big names, such as Bakunin, Proudhon, Max Stirner, Kropotkin, Malatesta, William Godwin, Voltairine De Cleyre, Emma Goldman etc. Lots of lesser known voices as well. Very interesting sections on Latin American Anarchism, Chinese Anarchism, Anarchism in Japan and Korea, a section on Anarchism and Education and much much more. Most of the writing had been broken down into easier to digest portions of 2-10 pages, which makes sense, because how many of us will ever work through longer works by many of these writers? This is definitely not the sort of book you read from cover to cover, but I certainly found much of interest in it. And a beautiful hardbound library edition!

The Anarchist Papers – Dimitrios Roussopoulos ed. Black Rose.

This one was not as interesting for me. Much more contemporary though. George Woodcock, who I’m not generally that fond of wrote an interesting article about Paul Goodman. A couple things about Emma Goldman that were interesting (Alex Wexler – Emma Goldman and Women, Marsha Hewitt – Emma Goldman: the case for Anarcha-Feminism). A bunch of other stuff I didn’t read: Murray Bookchin about libertarian municipalism, two Chomsky things, an article about the Green Party in West Germany (perhaps not as contemporary as some of the essays), something about the Black Block in Seattle. A mixed bag, but worth checking out if these topics are of interest to you.

The Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Plays: One by Dario Fo

Dario Fo is an anarchist playwrite from Italy. Accidental Death of an Anarchist is about the death of Giuseppe Penelli at the hands of police in Milan. He “fell” from the fourth floor of the police station. He was accused of a bombing which was later shown to be part of a fascist plot. Sounds like the best premise for a play ever, and I’ve been meaning to check it out forever. There is a different translation of it in Plays: One, but I just couldn’t read it. Nothing against Dario Fo, I just have a hard time reading plays. Maybe it was being forced to in school…

Radical Sports

2006-02-11T19:25:00.000-08:00

What’s My Name, Fool! Sports and Resistance in the United States by Dave Zirin (Haymarket Books).

Dave Zirin is the editor of The Prince George's Post in Maryland, and runs edge of sports, where he posts a weekly column about sports from a critical and radical perspective. You may also have seen his writing in Z Magazine or the International Socialist Review. What’s My Name, Fool! is an excelent look at the social history of sport in the US starting with the drive to de-segragate Baseball (origionally spearheaded by the Communist Party) and the significance of Joe Louis and the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fights, Muhammad Ali, radicalism at the 1968 Olympics (most famously Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ black gloved fists in the air, but there is much more to it than one incident), labour struggles in sports, resistance to war. Zirin attacks racism, sexism and homophobia so prevalent in sports and sport journalism relentlessly.

If you’ve read his columns consistantly from the beginning there will be some overlap, although most of the book is new material, including “original interviews with former heavyweight champ George Foreman, Olympian and black power saluter John Carlos, NBA basketball player and anti-death penalty activist Etan Thomas, antiwar women's college hoopster Toni Smith, Olympic Project for Human Rights leader Lee Evans and many others”. Very worthwhile, especially if you like sports, despite the bullshit that often accompanies it. I am extremely glad that the (Calgary Public) library got this book.

Two books from editors of Gnosis magazine

2006-01-28T14:36:00.000-08:00

Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions by Richard Smoley & Jay Kinney.
The Inner West: An Introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West by Jay Kinney (ed.).
Richard Smoley & Jay Kinney were editors of Gnosis magazine, which basically covered the same topics these books do. Those topics include Christian mysticism, Kabbalah, Sufism, Gnosticism, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy, G. I. Gurdjief, Alchemy, Masonry etc. The first book is a bunch of chapters by Richard Smoley & Jay Kinney, the second a bunch of essays by different authors reprinted from Gnosis that cover basically the same ground. Both are good introductions to topics that, if you are like me, you may run into in other books, and, if you are like me, you may not have approached for whatever reason. So I read Hidden Wisdom all the way through, except for some of the G. I. Gurdjief part, which I found dull, and can honestly reccomend it to anyone who needs a short introduction to any number of mystical and or magical traditions. The second, I read a couple of the essays and they were good. I just didn't have time to read it all. Also, it does cover a lot of the same ground, and my interest in many of those topics is fairly casual. Richard Smoley & Jay Kinney tend to have a fairly agnostic tone to their writing which I appreciate. They aren't dismissive of any of the traditions but also aren't enthusiastic true believers. This helps them cut through a lot of the bullshit that turns a lot of people (myself for instance) away from these subjects.

my zine is done!!!

2006-01-26T16:09:00.000-08:00

Its called No Quarter: An Anarchist Zine about Pirates.
A used book store was having a good sale. I've got some good books recently.
Where the Money was: The Memoirs of a Bank Robber by Willie Sutton
Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession by I. M. Lewis
1798 Diary by Ruan O'Donnell
The Crowd in the French Revolution by George Rude
Big Men and Cargo Cults by Glynn Cochrane
Present Moment, Wonderful Moment: Mindfulness verses for Everyday Living by Thich Nhat Hahn
Militant Suffragettes by Antonia Raeburn
The Lesbian Body by Monique Wittig
Sexwise by Susie Bright
Farmer Framed by Trinh T. Minh-Ha
Some other stuff too.
All for $2.00 or less.
P.S. I'll be posting actual book reviews soon.

Dear Loyal Reader

2006-01-22T08:45:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you thought I had given up on reading and devoted my life to contempletive tv watching. Or that I had devoted January to watching every takashi miike movie back to back. Well I actually gave up after Full Metal Yakusa. Since then I've been working very hard to finish my new zine: No Quarter: An Anarchist Zine about Pirates. So very close to being done. I hope you will think it was worth not having precious blog posts in the mean time. I have been reading too. I read Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. So amazingly good.
So there should be many post here soon.

A second look at an unfair review

2005-12-31T17:15:00.000-08:00

Noize of the world: Non-western musicians in their own words - Hank Bordowitz. Soft Skull.
I took another look at this book, after some comments from the author. I have to say my previous review was unnessesarily harsh and unfair, especially since I didn't even read the whole book. I said that the book "is full of the desire to define what is "world" music and what people should be listening to", which looking at it again is unfair. I just don't see that desire. I also didn't give the book enough credit for some very interesting interviews with a lot of artists who get very little press. I still don't like Jazziz magazine, but really that has nothing to do with this book. So a belated appology to Hank Bordowitz for an unfair review.
I left the review up more or less intact, so people can see it if they are interested.

at the risk of being cliche...

2005-12-31T16:29:00.000-08:00

A list of my 15 favorite books that I read this year (and that likely didn't come out this year) with a short note on each
In no particular order (Asterisks indicate non library books):
*Richard Parry - The Bonnot Gang
An exploration of the Bonnot gang, French anarchists who invented the motorized bank robbery get away, and the illegalist millieu that they came from.
*Jan Valtin - Out of the Night
There should be a review for this book posted soon. He was a commiterm agent in the 20s and 30s, fought the nazis etc.
Robert Anton Wilson - Schrodinger's Cat trillogy
Mind blowing weirdness. Keep a tally of the shifting genders and anarchist plots. One of my all time favorites.
Joan Slonczewski - A Door into Ocean
Anarchist society wonderfully described by everyone's favorite eco-feminist biologist quaker sci-fi writer
Octavia Butler - Kindred
Time travel and slavery. An amazing book
Rudy Rucker - The *ware series (software, wetware, freeware, but not realware which I didn't much like)(The library has Freeware only)
Anarchist robots, some intense sex, a pretty weird future
Derrick Jensen - Strangely like War: The Global Assault on Forests
Reading this book is extremely hard. Not just the effects on the environment, but also documenting ongoing genocide against indigenous people all over the world. A vital book.
Stanislaw Lem - The Futurolgical Congress
The great Polish scifi writer at his most psychadelic. I'm glad they didn't use that gas at any of the protests I've been to.
Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell
YA Fantasy with very big words and a very cool world. As good as Phillip Pullman, almost as good as Garth Nix
*Stuart Home - Red London
Gay Skinheads killing the class enemy, machine gunning a theatre full of Fellini-philes, Tabloid journalists get gutted. Oh my, not for the weak of heart, to say the least.
*Martha Ackelsberg - Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Woman
A study of the Mujeres Libres (Free Women), a group of anarchist women in the Spanish Revolution. More than an affinity group, they were a national organization that attempted to achieve a status equal to the FAI. They also did lots of awesome work. An amazing book.
* Peter Lamborn Wilson - Escape from the 19th century
Charles Fourier, Nietzche, Marx and Proudhon. Max Stirner, Andre Breton, Pierre Clastres. Why not? Weird weird weird. And good. I reviewed it here somewhere...
Christopher Hill - The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution
I review it here
Barbara Sjoholm - The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O'Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea
I review it here
*Stephen Snelders - The Devil's Anarcy
Anarchist Pirates! From the Netherlands!

Shower of Stars

2005-12-17T09:10:00.000-08:00

"Shower of Stars" Dream & Book: The Initiatic Dream in Sufism and Taoism - Peter Lamborn Wilson (Autonomedia)
It makes sense that the library doesn't have this, although I recently got a book called Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam - Hue-Tam Ho Tai, about the Hoa Hao sect, a buddhist millenarian (ie all about the end of the world and 'the millenium') anti-imperialist group, and their uneasy intersection with Vietnamese communism. Of course the latter book is on Harvard University Press and Wilson's on an anarchist publisher. Not that it really made any sense to have such an expensive and specialized book as Millenarianism and Peasant Politics at a public library either. I doubt it ever got taken out and now I have it.
So back to Shower of Stars. It's based on a paper that Wilson delivered to the Ibn Arabi Society in 1995. Its about dream in Islam, and dream interpretation, and initiatic dream. Initiatic dream refering to the tendencies in Sufism where people get initiated in dreams to a Sufi order of sorts, by various personi. Uways al-Qarani (who was a friend of Mohammad, although they never met, and only communicated in dreams), Mohammad, 'Ali (son of the prophet and founder of Sufism and Shiism), even the Hidden Imam of Shiism. Obviously this is not orthodox Sufism or Shiism Wilson is talking about. Then again, other titles published by Wilson include Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy, and Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam.
Wilson then runs the gammitof essoteric tendencies in Judaism, Christianity, Taoism, and various magical traditions. One very interesting part is a discussion of the Flying Phoenix sect, a contemporary popular sect of Taoism that practices spirit writing by planchette or "the flying phoenix", where sect members are possessed by spirits, taoist deities, even Jesus or Mohammad, and write scripture, which is then edited and published.
Thats probably more than enough info for you to figure out if you would want to read this book. As with everything with Wilson this book is highly heterodox and weird, much of the bibliography is obscure and its unlikely I will ever see much of it even if I want to (and in many cases I do). So there you have it.

Some books I didn't have time to read...

2005-12-16T19:20:00.000-08:00

Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with contemporary American Science Fiction Writers - Larry McCaffery (ed.)
Fairly long (in the neighbourhood of 20 pages each) interviews with some of my favourite scifi writers: Ursula K Le Guin, Samual R Delaney, Octavia Butler; some writers I have some interest in: William S Burroughs, Joanna Russ, William Gibson, and some others I don't know. Well worth checking out for just the first three interviews I mentioned.

Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elizabeth Nietzche - Ben Macintyre
Friedrich's sister and populizer of his works, not to mention the person who sanitized it for Nazi consumption. Also cofounder of a vegetarian (vegan?) aryan colony in Paraguay called Neuva Germania. Here is a website about it, from a racist standpoint, where you can learn if the organic fair trade Yerba Mate you buy supports white supremacy.

Women of Sufism: A Hidden Treasure - Camille Adams Helminski (ed)
A nice collection of poetry and prose by various saints and other women from the Sufi tradition. Quite extensive and very interesting.

Pataphysics: The Poetics of an imaginary Science - Christian Bok
Well, pataphysics is a term coined by Alfred Jarry, the guy who wrote Ubu Rex and Pere Ubu (which of course the band Pere Ubu and the King Ubu Orchestra are named after, which would be a nice claim to faim as it is), and was a huge influence on Dada. The library has a collection of the ubu plays, and also the super nice New Directions edition of Ubu Roi, and both of these would be worth checking out if you are interested. This book was pretty much over my head. Its all stuff I'm pretty interested in (Dada, Futurism, breaking language with a hammer) but I'd have to work pretty hard to read this book. Instead I gave it two 10 minute parusals. Its now number 6007 on the list of books to come back to when I have time.

Why doesn't the library have better pirate books? Sigh!

2005-12-10T14:55:00.000-08:00

Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger by Ulrike Klausmann &Marion Meinzerin (Black Rose).

The book opens with the occupation of the vintage steamer City of Cologne, in Cologne during the Rhineland carnival by a group called Pirate Women Against Patriarchy. An amusing anecdote that ties the subject matter of this book to the present. A creative act by radicals that caught “the authorities” of guard to such and extent that no one new what to do for six days. At that point the pirate women felt they had made their point and disappeared into the night.

This book looks with a feminist lens at women pirates. Not only Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and Grace O’Malley, with whom many readers are probably acquainted, but others as well. Like Ch’ing Yih Szaou, Lady Ch’ing, captain of the largest pirate fleet of her time (early 1800s). Or Lai Sho Sz’en, a Chinese pirate in the first part of the 20^th century who let a journalist travel with her, and who purportedly died fighting the Japanese during the Chinese-Japanese war. French Buccaneer Jacquotte Delahaye who allegedly turned down a marriage proposal stating: “I couldn’t love a man who commands me – any more than I could love one who allowed himself to be commanded by me”(p.168).

Klausmann and Meinzerin also make the argument that Bartholemew Roberts, one of the most successful and interesting pirates of the golden age, was in fact a woman. Surely this is enough reason to pick up the book. They trace the history of women and sea robbery to various places where it clearly does not fit our usual definition of piracy. A nice reminder that history is seldom as neat and clear as we would like. Klausmann and Meinzerin do an excellent job tying all these loose threads up into a cohesive and very interesting book.

two books which discuss gorrilas

2005-12-03T19:04:00.000-08:00

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
I always saw this book referred to as a sort of gateway drug to primitivism. I think this does the book a disservice, as it is a full on book length argument against civilization. Sure, its not as dense or nuanced as John Zerzan for instance. I’m guessing that’s why Future Primative isn’t the gateway drug into anything. You have to be pretty well versed in a lot of things to understand what the hell Zerzan is talking about. Ishmael is fairly low on jargon and pretty eloquently written. I could see it being a pretty powerful introduction to some wild ideas for a lot of people who would never out of the blue pick up Earth First or Green Anarchy. I had some reservations about Ishmael, but I’ll leave them for now. Any perspective reader should be aware that this book is intensely didactic (It is about a psychic gorilla teaching a human about the need to abandon the civilization project), but if you are into that then its worth checking out.

The Octopus and the Orangutan: More True Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity by Eugene Linden
Very interesting exploration of animal intelligence. Lots of anecdotes about apes using tools to escape at zoos, octopi ingenuity, elephant empathy etc, placed within the context of exploration of academic discourse about animal intelligence (mercifully this is kept to a minimum), some considerations about the ethics of zoos and animal experimentation, some travel stories and some disturbing details about environmental destruction and habitat loss for some of the species discussed in the book. But a very engaging read too.

Pirates! (but not at the library)

2005-11-30T20:58:00.000-08:00

Life Under the Death's Head: Anarchism and Piracy by Gabriel Kuhn (which is an essay in the book Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger by Ulrike Klausmann and Marion Meinzerin )
*hopefully I'll have a review for the bulk of the book soon*

I think that there is a lot to be said for audacity. We are radicals after all. And where better than the subject of pirates to set out for uncharted waters? There is a lot to admire in Gabriel Kuhn’s Life under the death’s head: Anarchism and Piracy. In less than 50 pages Kuhn attempts to use Max Stirner, Nietzche, Pierre Claestres, and Deleuze and Guattari to look at pirates. Stirner fairly briefly, Nietzche only in passing, but both Claestres and Deleuze and Guattari are used extensively. Kuhn argues that pirates are an example of Claestres’ society without a state (or against the state as it is more commonly translated). Its interesting to note that Peter Lamborn Wilson explores similar concepts in one of the essays in his Escape from the 19^th Century, reviewed elsewhere, but not in his pirate book Pirate Utopias. Kuhn argues that the pirate captain fills essentially the same role as a tribal chief, emphasising that a pirate captain’s authority was subject to recall and existed mainly in battle. Outside of battle the captain had little real power over the crew. On the contrary Kuhn argues that one of the main functions was to mediate disputes, and that the captain constantly had to maintain adequate support from all sides or have his authority rescinded. Kuhn also uses some of Claestres’ observations about primitive economies, asserting that pirates didn’t accumulate wealth like European society, but rather squandered whatever they had until they had nothing left. At which point they would ship out again.

Kuhn uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the nomadic war machine and argues that pirates as a whole constituted just that. By their nature and in order to exist pirates were at war with all states and agents of states. “Nomadic war functions molecularly: no arrangement, no uniformity, o command, no regulations, no supervision. No rigidity, not of language or of thinking, or of body and play, or of living and working together. In short: a defence of singularities, of events, of nomadic (as opposed to despotic) unity, without compromises, using all available mechanisms”(p.267).

There are some fascinating assertions in this essay. One is that pirates were Christian.

Christianity was definitely a factor with pirates. Many a captured man of religion could reckon with mercy. The preferred reading on board was the Bible. There were more than a few enthusiastic ship preachers, such as the famous Carraccioli, who extolled the justice of the pirate cause: “[Carraccioli] stepped up before the crew and explained to them that they were ‘not sea robbers, but men who consciously defended the freedoms granted to people by God. Our cause,’ Carraccioli continued, ‘is just and noble. It is a matter of freedom’”(p. 247) (Kuhn quotes Ferdinand Salentiny, Die Piraten. Wels: Welsermuhl 1978).

Kuhn goes on to argue that “pirate Christianity was thoroughly pagan. Like everything else about pirates, pagan myths, deities, and principles fit into their tribal form of life. Their absoluteness never exceeded a particular limit. Everything was subject to permanent revision, and gods and rules were regularly switched according to circumstances”(p. 248). An further that pirate Christianity was “constantly mixed together with the most divergent of other religious perspectives: African tribal rites, voodoo (influences of the escaped African slaves upon pirate communities) or so-called cosmopolitan convictions. For this reason it is probably true ‘that nomads [pirates] offer no favourable terrain for religion. A warrior is always sinning against priests or God’”(p. 248) (here Kuhn quotes Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Tausend Plateaus [A Thousand Plateaus] Berlin: Merve 1992). All very fascinating but there is no real evidence given for these claims.

In general the major weakness of this essay is that there is scant evidence provided to support most of the claims made. Clearly this is not meant to be an academic essay, and this reader at least is more than willing to give some leeway, but there is just no evidence given for many of the claims. For some reason Kuhn often makes claims as strongly as possible. Instead of saying that this essay will examine the following period or pirates or something of that nature Kuhn says “True piracy represents only a small part of the history of sea robbery. Geographically concentrated in the Caribbean (and a little bit around Madagascar and African coastal zones) and historically spanning just 30 years – the period from around 1690 to around 1720 – the “Golden Age” of piracy is in fact the only time when it ever really existed”(p. 228). An no evidence for such a controversial assertion. After reading the essay I can’t see why Kuhn even made the point. Also, Kuhn doesn’t argue that Pirate society was very similar to those societies discussed by Claestres, or that pirate society was similar to the concept of the nomadic war machine of Deleuze and Guattari, or that using this concept might help us have a new perspective on pirates. Rather Kuhn inserts the word pirate in square brackets after the word nomad in Deleuze and Guattari quotes. And then there is no indication that this is Kuhn’s insertion. Perhaps this is a fault of the translator or editor, but it is a problem none the less. Another problem is that Kuhn presents pirates (even defined in so narrow a way) as far too cohesive and uniform a group. Despite that Kuhn quotes Stirner: “for the individual is the relentless enemy of every generality, every band, meaning every binding tie” (p. 259) (from Max Stirner The Ego and Its Own). I could go on, but I don’t think I need to. Obviously there are some shortcomings here. I would also emphasize a lot of interesting and audacious ideas that deserve further exploration.

More stuff I wrote two years ago, but alas, not about hockey

2005-11-23T19:41:00.000-08:00

Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that never was by Angelica Gorodischer, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin

Angelica Gorodischer is one of Argentina’s greatest novelists. Or so I am told. Unfortunately this is the first of her 17 novels to be translated and unfortunately I don’t speak Spanish. It is unfortunate that there is so much schlock published and such a wealth of great literature that will never get translated into English. In any case our thanks to Ursula K. Le Guin for taking some time out from writing her own amazing books to do a wonderful job in translating Kalpa Imperial. I am not particularly in the know about what makes a good translation. Alas, Susan Bassnett’s Translation Studies, which I am told is a pretty good intro to the subject (and easily worth $0.50), languishes on the shelf with so many other unread books. But when friends ask me how it was and if it reads like a Le Guin book I answer wonderful and no. So I think UKL did a great job.

As for the book itself I could hardly be more enthusiastic. It takes the form of story tellers telling tales of the greatest empire in the history of the world, primarily of its emperors. Now if the story tellers were social studies textbook writers then this would be a very dull book. Luckily they are not. Instead they see themselves as tellers of truth above political considerations and consistently condemn the stupidity, cowardice, arrogance, and brutality of the various emperor’s and the ruling class in general, while commending the opposite when there was a ruler who if not just or saintly was at least temperate or prudent. It is also about cities and the women and men who live there, and how it is they who shape the cities and society, if not in the flashy or pompous way that rules shape cities (building palaces for example). More than anything the storytellers in this book have a long view of history, and with it perhaps a slight sense of fatalism, but also a knowledge of the lasting importance of any ruler (very little). Kalpa Imperial is a feminist book, full of wonderful female characters and not subject to a dreary phalocentric view of history. If I knew more about the history of Argentina or the author I have know doubt I’d have some insight about this book, to what extent its allegorical and whatnot. I can say it is a very rich book, full of ideas and a history far more compelling than any I learned in school and most that I choose to read now. I can only hope this edition does very well and we see more translations in the future, or that I learn Spanish, preferably both. I should note that Kalpa Imperial is available at the Calgary public library.

some things I wrote two years ago about hockey

2005-11-23T19:30:00.000-08:00

Edge of Sports
Dave Zirin is the News Editor of the Prince George's Post in Prince George's County Maryland. Edge of Sports is his weekly column, a radical look at sports. His column is archived here. Recent colums topics have included Eddie Mustafa Muhammad and the Joint Association of Boxing’s drive to unionize boxing, an interview with Lester 'Red' Rodney who was Sports Editor for the U.S. Communist Party's newspaper, The Daily Worker, from 1936-1958, and racism in college basketball. Zirin also writes for Z magazine . His columns tend to be insightful and very interesting and a welcome remedy to the idea that sport is apolitical or in anyway politicaly neutral.

Net Worth
Aidan Devine plays Detroit Redwings star Ted Lindsay in the 1995 CBC made movie about Lindsay’s attempt in the 1950s to form the first NHL players union. Based on Alison Griffiths and David Cruise’s book of the same name (available at the Calgary public library), the movie demystifies the NHL, not looking at the players as superhuman but rather looking at their very real needs. Lindsay for his efforts is branded a communist, threatened, and smeared in the Detroit papers to (sucessfully) undermine a certification vote their after Lindsay is traded to Chicago. Its an entertaining movie and I’ve read that it is pretty historically acurate. It was interesting to see it on Canadian Learning television in the height of hockey fever here in Calgary, although I doubt many Calgarians were watching. It may have even been on during a playoff game, although I’m not entirely sure about that.
a note in 2005: currently available on DVD for $3.98 at some Walmarts. If you can stand the irony buying it there.

Our Life With The Rocket by Roch Carrier, translated by Sheila Fischman
Carrier wrote the Hockey Sweater, one of Canada’s most beloved kids books and Fischman translated it. In fact Fichman has translated many of Carrier’s books and they are both featured in a NFB film called talking Translation, which I have on hold at the library and will hopefully watch soon. So they are a team with some history. Perhaps not as much as the Canadiens, but history.

I was born in Quebec, all 4 of my grandparents live most of there lives in Montreal, both my parents grew up there. My mother’s dad is Quebecois. Perhaps you can guess which hockey team I grew up supporting. So I grew up with tales of the Canadiens including of the Rocket who my dad saw a few times in the Rocket’s last two years. In fact Maurice Richard is perhaps the figure that looms largest in Hockey history, so when I heard about this book I was eager to read it. Luckily I heard about it two years after it came out and had no trouble getting a copy (at the libs).

Our life with the Rocket is a sort of social history of the relationship between Quebecers and the Rocket. Its also autobiography; Carriers life growing up with the Rocket as perhaps the central figure in his life. On the back in the first paragraph they mention the 1955 Richard riots which occurred when Richard got suspended in the playoffs that year by league president Clarence Campbell, one of the villans of Net Worth.

The book doesn’t disapoint. It positions the Rocket as the God of hockey as well as a family man who doesn’t like his fame, a reluctant icon for a generation and an ambiguous symbol of Quebec nationalism. Indeed, it’s a rare hockey biography that talks about the 1949 Asbestos strike and othe labor struggles. Ultimately its about the Rocket and the Canadiens and if that interests you and you aren’t a rightwing idiot or an anti-quebecois bigot you’ll like this book.

And now for something completely different: A Negative Review

2005-11-19T17:54:00.000-08:00

Muzzlers, Guzzlers, and Good Yeggs by Joe Coleman

I almost didn’t pick this up when I saw it at the library because the cover was three guys sitting around the table looking like zombies, faces all veiny, blood shot eyes, sallow, one of them with yellow skin. “All True Crime!” it proclaimed. Anything that advertises itself as True Crime! I try to avoid. Not that I have anything against crime. Just the sensationalistic exploitation of it. Also, true crime is disproportionately about serial killers. If you read true crime books you would think that prisons were full of vicious psychopathic killers, not small time drug dealers and perpetrators of property crimes. The thing that compelled me to take a look at this was the word yegg, referring to a criminal fraternity that I’ve only heard mentioned in “You Can’t Win” the autobiography of Jack Black (the first book in the Nabat series, William S Burrough’s favourite book, and generally a classic of American literature). As it turns out, the guy on the cover with the Yellow skin is a depiction of Jack Black.

I turned the book over and read the back cover. It’s a long quote from Harold Schechter, who writes about serial killer. Its quite the quote so I’ll include its entirety:

What’s so brilliant about Joe Coleman’s true-crime comics – besides their virtuosic draftsmanship and gripping narrative power – is the way he takes you inside the heads of his psychopathic subjects. Researched with a historian’s thoroughness – and rendered in meticulous, not to say obsessive, detail – the stories collected in this beautifully designed picture-book conjure up the dark ecstasy of homicidal mania in all its blazing fury.

I almost didn’t open the book because I don’t care about psychopaths or homicidal fury, but still the reference to yeggs was intriguing to me, so I opened it. What I found made me scratch my head about the quote. The book is four stories: You Can’t Win, Boxcar Bertha: an autobiography, Carl Panzram #31614, and The Final Days of Paul John Knowles, each illustrated by Coleman. You Can’t Win is excerpts from the autobiography of Jack Black by the same title. The material on Boxcar bertha is presumably from Sister of The Road : The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha (which is also a Nabat title) although I haven’t read it. Again, I assume the Carl Panzram material is excerpted from his autobiography. I did a quick search and it seems like Paul John Knowles didn’t write an autobiography, but like the other sections it is written in the first person. So I’m not sure about the claim of a historian’s thoroughness, but that hardly says much about the book itself. I’m just not sure why the ridiculous quote is on the back. Moreover it kind of pisses me off that Jack Black and Boxcar Bertha are referred to as psychopathic and lumped in with two serial killers. Both were hobos and criminals. Bertha was a prostitute at times and had connections to the IWW and radical labour. Jack Black was a burglar and safe cracker, opium addict, journalist, librarian and best selling author. Both did what they needed to do to survive. Neither one glorifies their lives or portray themselves as saints, nor do they paint themselves as victims Both were highly critical of hypocritical moralists and respectable society. Both Panzram and Knowles were serial killers. I read something slightly interesting about someone who was enamoured by Nietzche who decided Panzram was justified in his action by some of Nietzche’s writing in Beyond Good and Evil, but I was only interested enough to briefly browse it.

I’m not sure what the original context of each story is. Each one was in a different issue of Coleman’s comic “Blab”, so maybe they made more sense in the original context, but the pairing of two hobos with two serial killers is at best strange. It seems to me that the focus of true crime as a genre on serial killers serves to paint all “criminals” with the same brush as serial killers. It feeds fear and the misconception that people in prison deserve to be there, that police are there to protect us, and that there are many dangerous psychopaths lurking behind every shadow. The fact that most people are in prison because of the criminalization of poverty is conveniently hidden from view. To marginalize Jack Black and Boxcar Bertha’s scathing criticism of the hypocrisy of respectable society by equating them with serial killers is pretty crappy.

Joe Coleman’s art is very detailed and at times pretty interesting. It is also as I described previously intentionally grotesque. Everyone is veiny and disfigured and crazed looking. It seems like it just plays into the stereotypes of the genre of criminals as monsters and inhuman. None of the criminals I know look like that, and all are just plain folks like you or me.

So, if you are interested in Jack Black or Boxcar Bertha, I suggest picking up the autobiographies.

Graphic Novels

2005-11-16T17:47:00.000-08:00

Hopefully people have noticed but the library has been getting amazing graphic novels for some time now and have built up quite the collection. You can now put them on hold too, although they seem to be getting a copy for each branch now so it isn’t as much of an issue. So at first they had some good ones Like the 10 volumes of the Sandman, a couple Miyazaki manga… ok not much else. A bunch of superhero stuff I’m not interested in. Anyway, here is a list of some graphic novels I’ve read with short reviews

Persepolis 1+2 by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon)
Volume one in this pair of autobiographical comics covers Satrapi’s childhood in Iran. Set to the backdrop of the revolution and Iran/Iraq war, she deftly weaves history and politics into a wonderful coming of age story. Volume two is just as good. She goes to University in Europe and struggles to keep connected to her family and Iran. I couldn’t recommend them more highly. She also has a new book out called Embroideries, where she talks with other Iranian women about their sex lives. I haven’t read it yet, but have it on hold.

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle (Drawn and Quarterly)
Day to day struggles of a French Canadian working for a French animation studio in North Korea. He tries to see as much as possible (with little success) and enjoy himself in the Hermit Kingdom. He reads Orwell and is sarcastic and anti-authoritarian without apologizing for Western governments too much. Some pretty amusing encounters with monuments to Kim Il-Sung (dead president and father of current leader).

Lovecraft by Hans Rodionoff and Keith Giffin (Vertigo)
The life of H.P. Lovecraft, perhaps the greatest horror writer the world has ever know, examined assuming that what Lovecraft wrote about was real and he was a wizard (and had a copy of the Necronomicon that he took from his crazy father [I wonder why he was crazy] when he was young). Ummm… there are shuggoths. If you are like me and like HPL an awful lot you should definitely read this. If you have no idea who he is, this might be a good place to start. It’s a rather good comic.

American Splendor: Our Movie Year by Harvey Pekar
Jazz writer/collector, retired working stiff, and movie subject Harvey Pekar writes about his experiences on the set of the movie American Splendor, traveling around to promote it, mental health issues (including him receiving ECT), under appreciated blues and jazz players, Elvis’ early years etc. He talks about mental health in a way that doesn’t make me want to vomit, which is a rare gift, and he is class conscious and generally seems like a right on guy. I really liked this. The library also has The Best of American Splendor (which Pekar has been doing since the 70s).

Drawn & Quarterly Showcase: Book Three by Genevieve Elverum (née Castrée), Sammy Harkham and Matt Broersma
I got this for the Genevieve Elverum story which is very beautiful and a fable. She is rad. Sammy Harkham’s story is about two friends and a long summer. Pretty good. Matt Broersma’s was about a ghost. I’m not sure I liked it. Didn’t hate it… And it was fairly short. Not bad.

Teenagers from Mars – Rick Spears and Rob G
Some punk kids from a small town start by trashing a “Mallmart” and leaving the tag Comicbook Liberation Army. Things escalate and they end up taking up arms against the state and going underground. Pretty similar to my story actually… There are some cliché things I didn’t like. Zombie obsessed cartoon drawing ex-mall mart employee falls in love with the punkrock violent superhero girl. Not every urban guerrilla unit needs to be founded on teenangst/love. Also the villains were all disabled. Obviously this was supposed to be a play on comic stereotypes, but come on! Eyepatch lady, false leg rent a cop, captain hook politician. Also at one point someone wears an Exploited shirt. Please pick better bands!!! Christian Death, Joy Division and Black Flag I can deal with but not “Punks not Dead”, and not just because I had the poster on my wall in highschool. On the upside there are 12 year olds who rob graves to buy comics.

Chronicles of Conan vol. 1 by Roy Thomas (Dark Horse)
Reprints the first 10 issues of the original Marvel comic. Long before it became low quality crap the first few (maybe 30 or so?) issues of this comic were actually good. So if you are like me and you like Robert E Howard (who was a correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft by the way) and Conan you might want to check this out. If my mentioning Conan makes you think of Arnold Schwarzenegger and you think I am crazy, either pick up an original Robert E Howard Conan book (ie not one of the many by people who have used the character after him), or forget I ever mentioned it.

the world turned upside down

2005-11-12T21:16:00.000-08:00

The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution by Christopher Hill

If any book could make the case that radicals today should be interested in the English revolution, a period some 350 years distant, then this is the book. Conservative historical narratives represent this period as a civil war between Cromwell and King, between royalists and parliament. Instead of a history of great men, Hill gives us a history of “the lover fifty percent”, of rank and file soldiers, of common people, and of religious and political radicals. He details groups such as the Levellers, radicals within Cromwell’s New Model Army, agitating for radical democracy within the army and in society at large, working against both the state church and the authority of the puritan divines. Hill looks at Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers who declared the world to be a common treasury for all and practiced agrarian communism on the commons. He looks at religious radicals of all stripes, Baptists, Familists, Muggletonians, Quakers and Seekers. He looks at conspiratorial groups such as the Fifth Monarchists, and perhaps the strangest and most interesting group, the Ranters. Various of these groups demanded the end of the state church, of tithes and religious courts, radical religious toleration (extending even to Muslims and Jews), court proceedings in English instead of Latin and the right to trial by jury and to represent oneself, even the abolition of lawyers, universal suffrage (extending even to servants and women), universal healthcare, free universal education and various schemes of education reform, the redistribution of land seized from royalists to the poor, an end to Imperialist aggression in Ireland. The Diggers even went so far as to advocate ‘true levelling’, that is, the abolition of private land ownership, no wage labour, no law. Many religious communities allowed for easy divorce for men or women, various liberalizations of sexual morality including allowing wife swapping and destigmatizing adultery. Ranters argued that there was no sin and proceeded to practice what they preached. They loved to smoke, drink curse, go nude, have sex with whom they chose, supposedly in public at times. Hill documents that the revolutionary period was marked by widespread opposition and resistance to Calvinism and the protestant work ethic. Cottagers (people who built homes on common land) obstinately refused to work except when absolutely necessary or when wages were unusually high. Many of the radical religious sects and the Ranters were fond of drink and would often have their religious meetings in taverns rather than churches. It was common place for radicals to attend services at conservative congregations and challenge the pastor to a debate, demand the right to address the congregation, or simply to disrupt the service. Radicals declared the right of anyone to preach, not just the educated elite. Hill argues that radical lay preachers in the New Model Army did a lot to spread the radical ideas during the civil war that made it more than just a civil war. Ranters burnt the bible on at least one occasion. Many groups claimed that the bible was not literally true and should instruct by analogy. Others doubted its divine origins, pointing out the human element in translation, not to mention choosing which books are included in the bible. Many argued that God’s light existed in all and that one’s conscience was more important than anything in the bible or any other book, that actions were more important than words ( a radical idea indeed at a time when education was restricted to a small elite). There were many wandering would be messiahs and healers. Miracles and signs were common place. Many of the sects allowed women to preach (at a time when it was illegal for a woman to sit in the same pew as her husband at church). The claim that Jesus or God was within everyone was widespread. As was the denial of the historical Jesus, or even a creator God. Ranters cursed the bible, Jesus, puritans, the rich, almost anyone. Hill provides evidence of all this and more, illustrating it with wonderful excerpts from primary sources. Censorship broke down during the revolutionary period and there is the most wonderful wealth of writings by and about the radicals. Hill’s scholarship is excellent but he never gets bogged down or boring. Despite being a well respected academic and perhaps the world’s leading authority on the English revolution (or perhaps because of it) his writing practically boils over with revolutionary enthusiasm. This book is consequently a wonderful introduction, especially for radicals to an amazingly radical period in the history of England, when common folk very nearly turned the world upside down. Hill notes: “The reader who wishes to restore his perspective might with advantage read the valuable book recently published by Professor David Underdown: Pride’s Purge (Oxford U.P., 1971). This deals with almost exactly the same period as I do, but from an entirely different angle. His is the view from the top, from Whitehall, mine the worm’s eye view. His index and mine contain entirely different lists of names.” I for one am glad I stuck with Hill.

holy shit! this book rules!!!

2005-11-06T12:12:00.000-08:00

Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology - Alan Antliff ed.
First of all Antliff is a contributing editor to Alternative Press Review, the sister publication of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, which in my book is a good thing. I've read a couple reviews of his book Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde, and it seems interesting. So I was excited when I found that the library has this book. Seemed like it might be good.
Holy shit is it good! First of all its huge! 400 pages of coffee table goodness. Secondly its not just an anarchist anthology, its an anthology of Canadian Anarchist publications. It has stuff from Open Road, Bevy of Anarcha-feminists (BOA), Demolition Derby, No Picnic, Anarchives, Demanarchie, Reality Now, Bulldozer/Prison Service News, Endless Struggle, Resistence and Kick it over. Most of which I've never heard of. Many others only in passing from writtings about Ann Hansen/Direct Action. So a fair amount detailing the history of each magazine, the mileu they came from and excerts from each. Plus lots of stuff about anarchist projects in Canada and much more. Also cool is the fact that reprints from each publication are often facimilies of the actual article or at least have some of the artwork or eliments of the origional layout. There are also excerts from zines and smaller circulation magazines, as well as sections on many of the contensious issues within anarchist circles. Very cool. As noted in some other review of this I read, there is no mention of Black Rose books or Our Generation in Only a Beginning. Who knows why? There is already an anthology of writing from Our Generation published by Black Rose (that I'm looking for actually, if anyone has a copy). But yeah, very highly recomended. And seriously $30 isn't that much for such a huge, beautiful book.

another list, in lieu of an actual review

2005-10-29T09:54:00.000-07:00

I was thinking of all the amazing books the library has thatI have read in the past. It would be very difficult for me to do any sort of review of books I’ve read some time ago but I think I’ll post a very incomplete list, occasionally with a comment or two.
Ray Raphael – People’s History of the American Revolution
An excelent history of the American Revolution told from below. It explores the experience of Native peoples, black people, women, the working class, rank and file militians and soldiers etc.
Howard Zinn – People’s history of the US
Hopefully many are familiar with this amazing book. The book all other "People's Histories" are modeled after or influenced by. The entire history (or close to it) of the USA told from below, exploring the lives and experiences of the dispossesed. Native peoples, black people, radicals, the working class, women, queers. If you haven't read this book then please do. It is amazingly captivating and accesable.
Bertolt Brecht – Days of the Commune
The great German (communist) playwrite expounds on the Paris Commune
Conor Kostick - Revolution in Ireland : popular militancy, 1917 to 1923
A wonderful remedy to sectarianism, this history of the revolutionary upsurges of the 1917-1923 period tell a much different story than narrow Republican patriotism. Strikes, inssurrection, the Limric Soviet. All put down by the the IRA in favor of the landlords and bosses (many of whom were English or were colaborators).
Ron Jacobs – The way the wind blew : a history of the Weather Underground
An interesting history of everyones favorite American Urban Guerrilla faction.
Robert Anton Wilson – Schrodinger’s Cat Trillogy
Mind blowing weirdness. Keep a tally of the shifting genders and anarchist plots. One of my all time favorites.
Dossie Easton – The Ethical Slut: a guide to infinite possibilities
A good book on polyamory.
bell hooks – Black Looks: Race and Representation
The library has many books by bell hooks (including her kids books). Take your pick. They are all solid.
Leslie Feinberg – Transgender Warriors
Trangender history told by one of the leading scholars and activists.
Kate Bornstein – My Gender Workbook
A workbook to subvert your ideas about gender, and your gender itself
Marie Fleming – Geography of freedom: the odyssey of Elisee Reclus
Excelent biography of the anarchist geographer, vegetarian, communard and contemporary of Marx.
Daniel Berrigan – To Dwell in Peace: An Autobiography
Biography of the dissident Catholic priest. Pacifist, ex-political prisoner, shit disturber, and great writer.
Daniel Berrigan & Thich Nhat Hanh – The Raft is not the Shore: conversations towards a Buddhist/Christian awareness
Conversations between leading Catholic and Buddhist antiwar thinkers during the Vietnam war. Berrigan was just out of prison for antiwar direct action and Thich Nhat Hanh was in exhile for his antiwar activities in Vietnam.
Rafi Segal & David Tartakover - A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture
An interesting book. Origionally the catalogue for a censored architectural exhibit in Israel exploring the conection between Architecture and the occupation.
Derrick Jensen – Strangely Like War: the global assault on forrests
Reading this book is extremely hard. Not just the effects on the environment, but also documenting ongoing genocide against indigenous people all over the world. A vital book.
Ursula K Leguin – The Dispossesed
Classic SciFi novel of an ambiguous anarchist utopia. All her books are amazing.
Octavia Butler – Parable of the sower
Another great book by the black feminist SciFi author.
Judith Merril & Emily Pohl-Weary - Better to have loved : the life of Judith Merril
Wonderful biography/autobiography of this pioneering femist sciFi author. HEr experiences with daughters as a medic at the 68 democratic convention in Chicago, coming to Canada to work in a free University.
James Tiptree Jr - Brightness falls from the air
Nice collection of scifi short stories by the feminist and ex-cia agent.
Kim Stanley Robinson – Mars Trillogy (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars)
Why wouldn't they want to ship anarchists and ecoradicals amongst the first Mars colonists?
Zenna Henderson – Ingathering: the complete People stories of Zenna Henderson
Nice collection by another pioneering early woman scifi writer.
Joan Slonczewski – A Door into Ocean
An anarchist society spun by this wonderful eco-feminist biologist, Quaker, and scifi author.
Rudy Rucker - Freeware
Anarchist robots, radical sex, and an extropian future. Rudy Rucker is cool.

And a few books I hope to get around to:
Judith Levine – Harmful to minors: the perils of protecting children from sex
Errol Uys – Riding the Rails: teenagers on the move in the great depression
Colin Ward – Welcome: Thinner City: urban survival in the 1990s
Dario Fo – Accidental death of an anarchist
Grace Llewellyn – Real lives: eleven teenagers who don’t go to school
Eduardo Galeano – Soccer in Sun and Shadow
E. P. Thompson – The making of the English working class
Rosemary Zayigh – Palestinians: from peasants to revolutionaries; a people’s history
Mike Davis – Dead Cities
Michael Lerner – Healing Isreal / Palestine: a path to peace and reconsiliation
Ellen Messer and Kathryn May – Back Rooms: an oral history of the illegal abortion era
Pat Califia – Sex Changes: Transgender Politics (note: despite his name change to Patrick, is still listed under Pat)
George Woodcock – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Phillip Berrigan – Fighting the Lamb’s war: skirmishes with the American empire: an autobiography
Derrick Jensen – The Culture of Makebelieve
Norman Finkelstein – The Holocaust Industry: reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering
Adolfo Gilly – People’s History of the Mexican Revolution
Olivier Razac – Barbed Wire : A political history

Radical History but unfortunately Non Library

2005-10-24T18:35:00.000-07:00

Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture – Ron Sakolsky & James Koehnline (eds). Autonomedia 1993.

“The first ‘drop-outs’ from English colonization in North America left the ‘Lost Colony’ of Roanoke and went to join the natives at Croatan (also spelled Croatoan)”(p.1). What a book! Twenty five contributions, a few poems, an interview, but mainly essays. Several of the Autonomedia regulars are here: Peter Lamborn Wilson, James Koehnline, Thom Metzger, Ron Sakolsky, Jordan Zinovich; also two favourites: Markus Rediker & Peter Linebaugh, contributing an essay similar in title and content to there wonderful book seven years later, “The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century”. Even if you have read the later book, this essay is well worth the read, and if you haven’t it’s a wonderful place to start. But wow, what a wealth of writers I’ve never seen before!

Paul Z. Simons contributes a gem. “Keep Your Powder Dry: Two Insurrections in Post-Revolutionary America” explores Shays’ Rebellion, which nearly achieved its stated aim of overthrowing the Massachusetts state government in 1786-87, and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Like so many of the wonderful essays in this book, “Keep Your Powder Dry” is far from the dry history so many of us are unfortunately used to. It seethes with defiance and the revolutionary spirit of (supposed post-)revolutionary America.

Rachel Buff contributes: “Gone to Prophetstown: Rumor and History in the Story of Pan-Indian Resistance”. She explores Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, the Great Shawnee Prophet, their attempts to forge a Pan-Indian resistance to U.S. colonization. Fascinating stuff.

Sally Roesch Wagner’s “The Iroquois Influence on Women’s Rights” is great. As is Doug Sivad’s “African Seminoles”, Richard Kees’ “A New Nation In Their Hearts: The Historical Evolution of the Metis People”, Hugo P. Leaming’s “The Ben Ishmael Tribe: A Fugitive ‘Nation’ in the Old Northwest, Peter Lamborn Wilson’s “Caliban’s Masque: Spiritual Anarchy and the Wildman in Colonial America” etc. I could list every essay, it seems a shame not too, but that would hardly be a review of the book.
What I love about this book is that it addresses race in a detailed and complicated way. To deny the contradictions of the many religious and political radicals who came to America as colonizers, and sometimes slave owners, would be an offensive distortion, and to ignore the experience of Native peoples, of Africans an equally aggrievious (and too common) error. This book does neither, but rather includes many essays exploring many aspects of these questions. The other thing that I love about this book is that it is practically boiling over with enthusiasm and defiance. This is not neutral history, but rather a group of radicals digging into their own histories and the histories of their intellectual, political and spiritual ancestors. It’s a call to a collective remembering, of all the rebellions written out of history, all the stories, all the people. It’s more than anything a call to resistance and rebellion. What more could you ask from a ‘history’ book?

A Pair of Travel Books

2005-10-21T15:03:00.000-07:00

Hunting Pirate Heaven: In Search of the Lost Pirate Utopias of the Indian Ocean by Kevin Rushby

The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and other Legendary Women of the Sea by Barbara Sjoholm

Two books with some immediate similarities. Both with ‘pirate’ in the title, both more or less travel books, both have little to do with pirates.

The Pirate Queen is a fascinating tale of travel and research that starts with Sjoholm's visit to Clare Island in Ireland, site of Grace O’Malley’s castle. Throughout her travels, Sjoholm does a wonderful job weaving together interviews with locals, research and her own impressions of the places she visits, searching for women of the sea. Besides Grace O’Malley, she finds folklore about Cailleach the sea hag, a sort of Goddess of storms in Scotland. She travels north by boat into the Orkneys, where she examines the persecution of witches and the practice of selling wind to sailors and the herring lassies, who drove the Scottish fishing industry for 100 years or so. Sjoholm seems to have a gift of being able to intertwine a huge amount of historical information into her travel narrative without getting bogged down. An amazing feat, especially when you consider that she was spending a great deal of time in her room because of the torrential rain. She evokes the rugged beauty of these islands, and the life of the sea without being overly romantic. She doesn’t paint a rosy picture of the lives of women working in the herring factories, but instead places them within the historical context and examines the relative liberty they had at a time when there was very little work or freedom for women.

Sjoholm also seems to have a knack for uncovering interesting characters in her travels. As if by chance she uncovers the story Anne Robertson, a successful entrepreneur, supplier of ships, recruiter for the Hudson Bay company and whalers, in the early 1800s.

She continues by boat to the Faroe Islands, Iceland and then Norway. She encounters women sea captains, fishers, vikings, play writes and feminist scholars. As I noted before this book has little to do with pirates, but of course it never claimed to. The section on Grace O’Malley is interesting, and the rest of the book is wonderful too. Another thing to note is that despite being a travel book the bibliography is wonderful. Several books in there I’d love to hunt down.

Hunting Pirate Heaven grabbed my attention when I saw it at a used book store. Pirate Utopias! And this just a month after I had finished Peter Lamborn Wilson’s ‘Pirate Utopias’. What luck! The story behind the book is that Rushby meets someone on the docks in London who talks up pirates as heroes and mentions in passing that he knows that Captain Mission (famous founder of the colony of Libertatia ) was real. Rushby decides that he should go to Africa and try to find evidence of the existence of Libertatia and/or Mission, possibly find some descendents of pirates and generally have an adventure.

He certainly succeeds in the last part. He travels around the coast of Mozambique, over to the Comoros Islands, and down to Madagascar, often hitching rides on commercial fraters and other boats along the way. He quotes Captain Mission, Rousseau, and Gerrard Winstanley (leader of the Diggers), meets various dropouts from North America and Europe, not to mention people who own their own islands. He has quite the adventure in Anjoun (Nzwaan), one of the Comoros Islands, former French colony. After gaining independence for France in the 70s there was a coup in 1975 overthrowing a corrupt dictator in favour of Ali Soilih, who then hired a French mercenary/adventurer, Bob Denard, to capture the former dictator, after which Soilih convinced Denard reluctantly to leave. “If history books are to believed, events on the Comoros now took a turn for the worse. Ali Soilih promptly disbanded the government, burned all records, legalized marijuana and put teenagers in charge”(p.196). Rushby did a little research and the books he read basically said Soilih was basically a crazy Maoist, compared him to Pol Pot, accused him of redistributing land owned by French absentee landlords to peasants, and said that he was a drug addict and was fairly debauched. Denard came back in 1978 and assassinated Soilih and took over, reinstalling the original dictator, Ahmed Abdullah, as a puppet. Eventually Abdullah rebelled against Denard, who’s militia was brutal, and who was running guns to apartheid South Africa. Abdullah died mysteriously and Denard tried to take over, but pressure from France forced him to flee to South Africa for four years. After which he returned with twelve men and defeated the virtually non-existent Comoran army. France sent in paratroopers and arrested Denard, trying him for Abdullah’s murder. He was acquitted. The funny thing is that almost no one Rushby talked to agreed with the official history about Soilih. Some were quite fond of him. Everything was very confused. I’d like to find out more. I think you could do a lot worse than burning government records, legalizing marijuana, redistributing the land of former colonialists, and putting teenagers in charge.

But basically Rushby does fuck all when it comes to the point of the book. That is, looking for pirates or Captain Mission. He asks questions and gets some interesting answers, but unlike Sjoholm who seems to pull gold out of thin air, Rushby is a lot more interested in hooking up with a French tourist or drinking than actually following up on leads. He eventually ends up in an area of Madagascar where supposedly everyone is descended from pirates. He finds a woman who can show him a family tree. And then the book sort of ends. No real conclusions, no real evidence. Just a sort of feeling that I got ripped off and that Rushby never really cared about finding anything, he just wanted an exotic premise for another adventure travel book.

Two by Hobsbawm

2005-10-17T19:02:00.000-07:00

Behind the Times: the decline and fall of the 20th century avantgardes by E. J. Hobsbawm (1998).
He argues that avantgarde painters are behind the times because they haven't embraced mass production and are hung up on unique art objects to sell. Keep in mind this was written in 1998. After Dada, after autodestructive art, after fluxus, after mail art, neoism, performance art. Never mind asking who could possible fetishize mass production anymore, if it were ever excusable. Suffice it to say that I didn't find this book particulaily useful.

Bandits by E. J. Hobsbawm (1969).

Bandits is a vital book for anyone who wants to look at the social history of banditry. It is an amazing wealth of information on banditry all over the world. What is social banditry? Hobsbawn (p. 13) defines a social bandits as “peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case men to be admired, helped and supported”. In Bandits, Hobsbawm documents and analyses social banditry all over the world. He talks about several types of social bandits, the noble robber (like the fictional Robin Hood or the historical Diego Corrientes and Juro Janosik), avengers (known for their violence such as Rio Preto from Brazil), and haiduks (groups of free armed men somewhere between bandits and occasionally what Hobsbawm [p. 62] characterises as “primitive movements of guerrilla resistance and liberation”).

Chapter 7 is on the intersection between banditry and revolution, which would seem to be a point of much interest for many readers. Unfortunately this is where Hobsbawm Communism comes across the strongest and he betrays some of his biases.

At this point the bandit has to choose between becoming a criminal or a revolutionary.

What if he chooses revolution? As we have seen, social banditry has an affinity for revolution, being a phenomenon of social protest, if not a precusor or potential incubator of revolt. In this it differs sharply from the ordinary underworld of crime, with which we have already had occasion to contrast it. The underworld (as its name implies) is an anti-society, which exists by reversing the values of the ‘straight’ world – it is, in its own phrase, ‘bent’ – but is otherwise parasitic on it. A revolutionary world is also a ‘straight’ world, except perhaps at especially apocalyptic moments when even the anti-social criminals have their access of patriotism or revolutionary exaltation. Hence for the genuine underworld revolutions are little more than unusually good occasions for crime. There is no evidence that the flourishing underworld of Paris provided revolutionary militants or sympathisers in the French revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, though in 1871 the prostitutes were strongly Communard; but as a class they were victims of exploitation rather than criminals (p.84).

What are we to think about the choice that the bandit is given by Hobsbawm? In the eyes of the state a bandit does not cease to be a bandit the moment she takes up the banner of revolution. Far from it. In fact the charge of bandit is often a term of abuse used by states against revolutionaries and resistance fighters. The Nazi’s used the charge against partisans, Franco used it against the anarchist guerrillas after the end of the civil war, I’m sure there are numerous other examples. Throughout Bandits there are examples of people criminalized in one way or another who become bandits. I’d guess they are probably less concern with what historians and zine writers will think of them and classify them as, and more concerned with staying alive, looking after themselves, their families and communities. At the beginning of Bandits Hobsbawm makes it clear he is writing about social bandits, not freebooters (common criminals), nor bandit gentry, nor bandits in urban setting. Here he is dividing the social bandits into the ones he wants to claim, and the others. As we can see from his example of prostitutes in the Paris commune, these distinctions can seem fairly arbitrary. Why are some criminals ‘anti-social’ and others members of an exploited class? Does it real make any sense to make a distinction like that? It raises the question as to what Hobsbawm is referring to when he wrote: “especially apocalyptic moments when even the anti-social criminals have their access of patriotism or revolutionary exaltation”(p.84).

The next chapter on “the expropriators”, perhaps offers us some clues. First he ridicules “Bakuninist anarchists”(p.94), then he talks about Lenin and Stalin for a while, then he decides to explain exactly what he means by the phenomenon of expropriation. He chose the example of Francisco Sabate Llopart (El Quico), the most famous of the anarchist who waged guerrilla war against Franco after the defeat in the Spanish civil war. Why did El Quico keep fighting Franco until his death in 1960? Indeed what motivated all the other anarchist guerrillas? Hobsbawm explains: “’The idea’ of anarchism was their motive: that totally uncompromising and lunatic dream which we all share, but which few except Spaniards ever tried to act upon, at the cost of total defeat and impotence for their labour movement.” (p. 97). He proceeds to abuse Francisco Sabate Llopart, the anarchist guerrillas in general, and anarchists in the Spanish revolution for the next 11 pages. Then he writes a conclusion, 6 more pages, the end! So getting back to my somewhat disingenuous question about to which especially apocalyptic moment Hobsbawm was referring, I’m guessing it was the Spanish revolution. Can you believe the anarchists would be so bold as to open up the jails when they had the chance? And that many of the ‘criminals’ were not as anti-social as some might assume. Some even contributed to the revolution. Then again, as we learn from the biographical sketch of Sabate, the anarchists were all criminals anyway.

But I was being serious when I said that this book is a great resource. I know of no other book that covers so much ground in the social history of banditry. The first 93 pages are well worth a read, despite their somewhat Stalinist sympathies and heavy handed approach. But what can be said about the ridiculous attacks against anarchism, and more importantly the intentional misrepresentation of Francisco Sabate Llopart especially, but also all the anarchist guerrillas? To allow petty ideological concerns to attack the names of men who had the courage to fight and ultimately die in the struggle against Franco and fascism is disgusting. So until there is a book on bandits that approaches the thoroughness of Bandits, then take it for what it is. And if anyone finds a better book, please let me know.

thrift score, and used books stores

2005-10-13T15:46:00.000-07:00

So, who exactly donates Ward Churchill books to thrift stores? Someone anyways. Not that I'm complaining. Well, except about the highlighting in the first 4 pages. I'll complain a little about that. A Little Matter of Genocide. My fist Ward Churchill from a thrift store. 6 from used book stores.
Today I got several good books at used book stores.
St. Martin de Porres: The "little stories" and the semiotics of culture by Alex Garcia-Rivera (Orbis). A very interesting looking book about a semiotic reading of St. Martin de Porres a popular mulatto (mixed race) Saint from Lima, Peru in the 1600. Its also an exploration of Latin American identiy and faith, and mestizaje, cultural and racial mixture.
The Hand of Kane by Robert E. Howard.
The first book of three in a 1968 edition of Howard's stories about Solomon Kane. Not as famous as Howard's Conan (who I also love), but interesting none the less. I now have all three books in this series!!!!
New Lands by Charles Fort
Yes, the Charles Fort of the adjective Fortean, as in the magazine Fortean Times. The agnostic investigator and chronicler of rains of frogs, mysterious lights, unexplainable phenomenon, ufos etc all at the turn of the century. As nice complement to my thrift scored copy of Book of the Damned by Fort. In any case, I'm stoked.

anarchist anthropology, rocket science, and Aleister Crowley

2005-10-11T17:58:00.000-07:00

Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians by Piere Clastres
Famous work by french anarchist anthropologist and author of Society Against the State (which unfortunately the library doesn't have). About an apparently now dissapeared people in the Amazon. Seems pretty interesting.

Strange Angel: the otherworldly life of Rocket Scientist John Whitiside Parsons by George Pendle
Oh Jack Parsons! Rocket scientist, cofounder of Jet Propulsion Laboritory, father of the american space program, friend (and magickal partner) of L Ron Hubbard (until Hubbard stole some money and Parsons' girlfriend and took off), disciple of Aleister Crowley. An interesting man. The other biography of him (the library doesn't have it), Sex and Rockets: the occult world of Jack Parsons by John Carter introduction by Robert Anton Wilson, seems far less reputable and a good deal shorter. That is not to say Strange Angel is not worth a read. How many people do you know who helped found the space program and summoned deities to alter history. I bet not a one. Or at most a couple. And I bet their biography is/will be worth reading. But seriously, the Robert Anton Wilson intro just makes me wish the library had swung a little less reputable, more Robert Anton Wilson-y.

some cds I like (at the library)

2005-10-01T20:34:00.000-07:00

Here are some awesome cds that the library has. The first group is avantgarde, composed, freejazz etc. The second is folk music for lack of a better term. I didn't include any punk, indie, hiphop etc. I'm sure you can find that stuff yourself.

John Zorn – Filmworks XV protocols of Zion
John Zorn – Magick
Yamataka Eye and John Zorn – Naninani II
David Shea – Classical Works 2
Tim Sparks – At the rebbe’s table
Masada – Live at Tonic 2001
Misha Mengleberg – Who’s bridge
Derek Bailey – Harras
Anthony Braxton – 2 compositions
Iannis Xenakis – Eonta; Metastasis; Pithoprakta
Meredeth Monk – Volcano songs
Cecil Taylor – Nefretiti, the beautiful one has come
Diane Labrosse - face cachée des choses
Art Ensemble of Chicago – Coming Home Chicago
Pauline Oliveros - Deep Listening
Wendy Carlos - By Request
Pioneers of Electronic Music
Sun Ra - When Angels speak of love
Alice Coltrane - Translinear light

Ensemble Ali Kindi – Aleppian Sufi Trance
Ensemble Ali Kindi – Syria, the Aleppian music room
Wofa – Guinnee-Martinique: the encounter
Mali: songs of bambara griot
Iran : Music of South Khorassan
Qawwali: the essence of desire
Ethiopiques 14: Getatchew Mekura – Negus of Ethiopean Sax
the rest of the Ethiopiques series
Mike Seeger – True Vine
Pete Seeger – American Favorite Ballads vol 1
Mountain Music of Kentucky
Song Creators in Eastern Turkey
Drums of Defiance: Maroon music from the earliest free Black communitees of Jamaica
Central Asia in Forest Hills: music of the Bukharan Jewish Ensemble Shashmaqam
New Lost City Ramblers – the Early Years 1958-62
Tuva: voices from the center of asia
Been in the storm so long: spirituals, folktales, and children’s games from John’s Island, SC
Don’t Mourn, organise: songs of labor song writer Joe Hill
Woody Guthrie – Struggle
South Carolina: got keys to the kingdom
Caribbean Voyage: tombstone feast (and the rest of the series)
Hard times come again no more vol 1+2
Ruckus Juice and chitlins: the great jug bands vol 1+2
The secret museum of manking (entire series)
The music of Madagascar: classic traditional recordings from the 1930s

Serenity & Firefly

2005-09-30T18:33:00.000-07:00

I just went to see Serenity, the Firefly movie. Hopefully some of you have already seen it, but it is by far the most exciting movie of the year. It did not disappoint. Firefly is as good as Blakes 7, and that says a lot. Also, Firefly: the complete series DVDs is $30 at futureshop and all dvds are 10% off this weekend.

Captain Mission and Lemurs

2005-09-29T19:47:00.000-07:00

Ghost of Chance by William S. Burroughs

Here Burroughs takes the somewhat thin biographical data from Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Most Notorious Pirates (who some attribute to Daniel Defoe) on Captain Mission, (who some claim was himself fictional) founder of Libertatia, the most famous (and perhaps fictional) pirate utopia, and fleshes it out a bit. He expounds on Mission’s love of Lemurs, and positions Mission as a proto-ecologist, and his experimentation with mind altering drugs. We learn that Libertalia was repressed by conspiracy, and that the native attack that supposedly destroyed it, was provoked by false accusation that Mission was killing Lemurs, a sacred animal to locals. The first part of the book could hardly be more delightful.

After that Burrough’s muses a bit about language being humanity’s downfall and enslaving us to time (unfortunately I don’t really understand John Zerzan [read some of his writings here] enough to know how closely this resembles any of the anarcho-primintivist arguments). He then berates Jesus for healing people who didn’t deserver to be healed, arguing he should have healed those with special gifts, and also monkeys, instead. The next part of the book is about everyone dying from various plagues. Perhaps this is some kind of allusion to Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (given the theory that perhaps Defoe invented Mission). Mainly it seems like grumpy misanthropy. Which ultimately is forgivable because it is brief. In fact the whole book is only 58 pages. A bit of a mixed bag overall, but I loved the Captain Mission parts.

Some used book scores

2005-09-27T16:33:00.000-07:00

Used book shopping is one of my favorite things, as evidenced by my bookshelves. Today I picked up a couple pretty interesting seeming books.
The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprisng: a German Tragedy by Gunter Grass
This includes an introductory essay by the author delivered to the Academy of Arts and Letters, Berlin, April 23, 1964, the quartercentenary of Shakespeare's birth. It deals with one of Shakespeare's lesser known and almost never performed works Coriolanus, and Bertolt Brecht's never completed adaptation of it. The play is essentially about Coriolanus, a Roman general and nobleman, and his contempt for revolting plebians. Blah blah, he does some stuff and comes to a tragic end. It is one of the unknown Shakespeare's play because it is profoundly anti-commoner and anti-democratic. Grass claims it is also fairly dull and lacks the art of other plays by Shakespeare. So The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprisng, is about a workers uprising in East Berlin, that takes place while Brecht is rehearsing Coriolan, his version of Coriolanus. This play is based on actual events, although during the uprising Brecht was actually rehearsing Strittmatter's Zatzgraben. In any case striking workers really did come to Brecht for support and also to get him to help them draft a call for a general strike. He really was ambivalent, with his position as director of an important theatre in East Berlin and position of privalege. The book finishes with a short essay about the June 17, 1953 uprising. Short but rich in detail, about a revolt I'd never heard of. I read the two essays on the train today but haven't looked at the play. As someone interested in Brecht and revolutions this was quite the find.
The other book is Custer's Fall: The Indian Side of the Story by David Humphreys Miller. Which is collected from a series of interviews that the author did starting in 1935 with 71 natives who fought in the battle. Seems pretty interesting, especially since my parents live in North Dakota, and I've had to put up with more than my share of Custer tourism.
Another notable purchace today was Yves Bavarian and Spicy Italian Veggie Sausage, which were on a pretty good sale at Coop. Did them up on my BBQ, along with some Zuchini and potatoes. Very tastee. So much better than veggie dogs.
Last week I got 4 books at used book stores (and I did something I rarely do: paid cash instead of using credit. Well about 3/4 cash, I did have some credit). I got Realware and The Hacker and the Ant by Rudy Rucker, and Big Gurl and Shock Totem by Thom Metzger. Rucker is of course a Mathematician and Cyberpunk author. Thom Metzger is related to Autonomedia, and strangely enough has three mass market horror novels, these being two of them. I'm interested to see if they are any good. I've only read one of the four books thusfar: Realware, the forth book in a series (Software, Wetware, Freeware, and now Realware). The first three are about the evolution of selfaware anarchist robots on the moon, and are excelent. Realware was a pretty big disappointment though. I won't get into it too much detail, but it has very little to do with the moon or the robot, now mouldies, and a lot to do with love, magic wands, and a muddled understanding of economics.

Two of my favorite movies, and a few more

2005-09-20T18:08:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what I think about the library devoting such a huge amount of resources to buying feature films. It seems like so much of their stock directly replicates the worst movie stores. They have got a few good ones though, including two of my favorite movies. Afterlife and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds. Afterlife, directed by Hirokazu Koreeda, is a touching film about the center where people go when they die to chose the one memory that they are going to take with them to the afterlife. Nausicaä, directed by Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle etc), is an amazing film about a post apocalyptic world of giant insects and the trees slowly unpoisoning the air, water and land. Nausicaä, the title character is as strong a heroine as in any of Hayao Miyazaki's works. The library also has Princess Mononoke, which is excelent as well (also the manga for Nausicaä, Spirited Away, and My Neighbour Totoro). Some other good films the library has include The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (directed by Terry Gilliam), Zu: Warrios from the Magic Mountain (Tsui Hark at his craziest), the kung fu colt master.
The library has just got a huge collection of films from India and Pakistan. So hopefully I'll be able to check some of those out in the near future. Chor Machaaye Shor, a comedy about a jewel thief that was so-so, but that's it so far.

Houses and Vegetables

2005-09-17T09:25:00.000-07:00

Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter by Lloyd Kahn. Shelter Publications.
This book is the 2004 sequal to Shelter, wrotten and published by Kahn in 1973. Its an amazing oversized picture book about people who build their own homes. Geodesic domes, houses built entirely of driftwood, entirely out of uncut stone, turf houses, straw bale houses, trucks converted into (amazingly beautiful campers), trucks converted to horse drawn wagons etc. This book must be seen to be believed. Seriously.

The Heretic's Feast: A history of vegetarianism by Colin Spenser. Fourth Eastate
An interesting looking book that I didn't read much of. A lot of information about the philisophical back ground and religious aspects of vegetarianism. Lots of other info too. It's long, 360 pages. It didn't really touch on some stuff I'm interested in. Like why French Anarchists in the late 1800 were mostly vegetarian, or why US black Millenarian groups such as the Nation of Islam are vegetarian.
There is an interesting article by Alexander Cockburn here about the history of vegetarianism, that talks about the Nazis and vegetarianism, and vegetarian religious radicals in the English revolution and civil war.

Places that don't exist, and, does this make me a scab?

2005-09-16T19:31:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to not watch CBC during the current lockout, which is fairly easy not having cable (I never watch the main CBC channel [which comes in great with rabbit ear] but have watched CBC newsworld in the past). That being said, my work does have cable, and occasionally I turn on the TV and sometimes it drifts to newsworld (by mistake). The irony being that I don't like news coverage, but do like documentaries and other programing that they sometimes have on, and during the lock out it is very little news coverage (provided by BBC announcers) and lots of documentaries. But even so, I've not watched any until the other day. There was a 5 part series called Places that don't exist. In the series British freelancer Simon Reeve travels to various countries that are not recognized by most other countries. Break away countries (with the countries they broke away from for interests sake in brakets): Somaliland (Somalia), Taiwan (China), Trans-Dniester ( Moldova ), Nagorno-Karabakh (Azerbaijan), and South Ossetia (Georgia). The two episodes that I have seen were for Trans-Dniester and South Ossetia. Both episodes very interesting, although unfortunately both situations have very much to do with USA vs Russian spheres of influence. I'd love to see the others. There is an interview with Reeve here that also includes some interesting links (to the official website of Somaliland for instance) Unfortunately there was no episode about Sealand, which is near England and has existed since 1967. This relates somewhat to library books because I was trying to find a copy of How to Start Your own Country by Erwin S. Strauss. Loompanics. (details here), which the library doesn't have. They do have Uninhabited and Deserted Islands by Jon Fisher, or rather they did. When I tried to put it on hold they did a trace and then listed it as withdrawn. If anyone sees it forsale at the downtown library please buy it for me. I'll pay you back double. There is also a Straight Dope cplumn dealing with the subject here. A couple websites about such things 1, 2

another non-library book

2005-09-15T18:17:00.000-07:00

The Taqwacores – Michael Muhammad Knight. Autonomedia

There is a character in this Novel, Jehangir Tabari, a drunk punk rock sufi with a “foot-high yellow mohawk thick and bristly like the brush on an old Roman soldier’s helmet”. Near the end of this novel the narrator of the novel refers to him as the Muslim Rob Van Dam. So the image that I am most left with from this book is Jehangir on stage at the Taqwacore (ie Muslim punkrock) show he puts on, doing the whole pointing at his shoulders with his thumbs (and if you aren’t familiar with Rob Van Dam you are missing out) “… I’m Jehangir Ta-Bari, the (and here the crowd joins in) whole fucking show!” and then doing the whole, spin kick in place. Fucking sweet. Although, admittedly it never actually happened in the book. In any case, this book is about a Muslim punk house in Buffalo, NY. House residents include Yusef Ali, the narrator and engeneering student, the aformentioned Jehangir, Fasiq Abasa, Indonesian and often found on the roof smoking pot and reading the Quran, Amazing Ayyub, “the bone-thin Iranian smack-head in tight blue jeans and no shirt and a huge KARBALA tattooed in old English letters just below his collar bone”, Rabeya, a burqa-clad feminist zinester, and Umar, a straight-edge (and tattooed) Sunni. This book deals with the role of women and queers in Islam. The intersections of orthodoxy and heterodoxy (if that’s not too weak a word) are constantly explored. In a lot of ways this book reminds me of my relationship with Catholicism. All these characters are searching in their own ways to sort out what is of value in their religion (not to mention cultural back grounds), and definitely struggling at times. I can imagine that this book would make a lot of conservative Muslims very angry if they read it. Maybe even a lot of Liberal Muslims. It also reminds me how little I know about Islam, and while this didn’t really detract from my enjoyment of this book (I practically read it in one sitting), it certainly did from my understanding. Certainly a challenging and worthwhile read.

Michael Muhammad Knight is an American convert to Islam, a journalist who writes for Muslim wake up! and other publications.

Helen Creighton, Alan Lomax and me

2005-09-15T17:32:00.000-07:00

I was thinking of a NFB movie I saw some time ago, A sigh and a wish... Helen Creighton's Maritimes. Its an interesting documentary about one of Canada's most prolific folklorist/folk song collector. Its a good film to watch if you are at all interested in fieldrecordings and folksong collecting. It raises some of the fundamental questions, like why do Helen Creighton, Alan Lomax et al get all the credit (and own the rights) instead of the musicians they record. There is an anecdote where Helen writes to the RCMP to report visiting Pete Seeger, saying that he is a communist and a threat to Canadian security. Pete's featured in the film and is good natured enough to laugh it off and focus on Helen's prolific song collecting. At the time I'm sure it wasn't a laughing matter, especially in the context of Pete being blacklisted at the time in the United States. The film is mainly positive though, and obviously a work of admiration for Helen. In addition to this film (on VHS), there are 7 books of folksongs that she collected, a couple books of folktales and an LP. Here is an interesting online exhibit about her.
Alan Lomax is great and if you are new to the field recording world, the library has a dozen or so cds of songs he collected. They are all good and generally have wonderful liner notes. Search for him as author. Just searching for folkways as publisher will yeild loads of interesting results. Anything by Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger, Woody Guthrie is great too. I'm listening to Animal Folk songs for Children by Mike, Peggy, Barbara, and Penny Seeger, which is excelent. If you want political stuff Struggle by Woody Guthrie, is great. Unfortunately the library doesn't have Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti by Woody Guthrie, which is great. Don't mourn, organize!: songs of labor songwriter Joe Hill the library does have. And while we are talking about political music if you don't know Fela Kuti, you should. The library has 3 albums and a best of. I should probably say, never get a best of collection if you can avoid it. Always get albums. Definately don't get the best of Pete Seeger or you will think he is at best mediocre. Get anything else, especially on folkways. Also, don't be biased against music for children. Especially from any Seeger, or Woody Guthrie. I also love Yazoo records which releases collections of 78s from the 20s and 30s. Blues, country, jazz, and music from lots of other countries (Poland, Madagascar, Ukraine etc). The library has lots of their stuff.

some notes on radio

2005-09-13T16:49:00.000-07:00

I know that its not really library related but there are some awesome archives of radio and othervise audio I've found. Audio Anarchy, which is like anarchist audiobooks. So far they have Alfredo M. Bonanno, Emma Goldman, a collection of Anti-work essays, and Days of War, Nights of Love (that crimethinc book). R U Sirius radio, hosted by counterculture weirdo R U Sirius, has had interviews with the Phillip K Dick robot (and Rudy Rucker), and two interviews with Ben Blue from Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. At archive.org they have lots of cool stuff but especially shitloads of stuff from the Naropa Audio Archives with Peter Lamborn Wilson and Amiri Baraka. A site everyone should check out is A-info radio project, which has all sorts of subversive radio shows archived, including stuff with Ward Churchill, Derrick Jensen, Peter Lamborn Wilson, bell hooks, Angela Davis, John Zerzan, Howard Zinn etc..., Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, Earth First Radio, Radio Free School, and two of my favorite shows Off the wall and Off the hook, also available here and here, produced by Emmanuel Goldstein from 2600: the hacker quarterly. Also Animal Voices is often very good (and is radical, interviews with Rod Coronado, Robin Webb, UK Press Officer for the ALF, Kevin Jonas of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) USA, Freeman Wicklund of No Compromise, Mirha-Soleil Ross), CBC Unplugged, a good site about the CBC lockout with lots of podcasts by locked out CBC folk. Uh, yeah. That's it I guess.

a non-library book which i none the less loved

2005-09-11T21:11:00.000-07:00

Here is a review that I wrote for something else, about the most recent book I read. Unfortunately not available at the Calgary Public Library, but well worth tracking down, as are all his writings. Some are online here.

Escape from the 19^th century and other essays – Peter Lamborn Wilson

4 essays. The first about Charles Fourier, French utopian socialist, food theorist, scifi poet, and all around eccentric. Wilson explores the occult elements of Fourier’s work and waxes eloquent about his philosophies and their sublime weirdness; employing Nietzche and Max Stirner, and in the end Andre Breton to read Fourier. To what end? I certainly felt enthusiasm for Fourier after reading this essay, but honestly despite the energy and poetic weirdness, I’m not what to do with this essay.
The second essay is “Marx and Proudhon escape from the 19^th century”. Here Wilson borrows Marx and Proudhon to ponder the so called end of history and the triumph of capital over the social. Was the 20^th century just a repeat of the 19^th? This is the question posed, and if so how do we prevent the 21^st from being the same again. Wilson looks at Marx and Proudhon’s stormy relationship and tries to isolate the cause of their split and what became the split between marxism and anarchism. Did it have to happen? To what extent was it a clash of personalities and to what extent a clash of ideas? Can we look at Proudhon before anarchism and Marx before marxism and find a new way forward?

The third essay is “The Shamanic Trace”, which employs French anarchist anthropologist Pierre Clastres to examine the origins of the state and other nasty things. He examines Clastres’ concept of society against the state. Wilson talks about a ‘Clastrian machine’ (I think its his term not Clastres’) that exists in societies, especially hunter gatherer and other non or pre-state societies, that essentially acts against the formation of hierarchy, authority, the accumulation of wealth, and the formation of the state. Wilson talks some anthropological theory and then gets into a discussion of some work he did with the Dreamtime Avocational Archaeology Group in the driftless region of southern Wisconsin. They studied the effigy mounds built by the ancestors of the Winnebago people. Some very interesting stuff, and a bit beyond the scope of this review to get into. Further, Wilson gets into a discussion of Taoism and court shamanism in China. A fascinating essay.

The last essay is “A Nietzchean Coup D’etat”. Its an account of a strange forgotten revolution/coup d’etat at the end of the first world war in Cumantsa in Eastern Romania. It’s a strange tale involving anarchists, folklore collectors, a sufi order, smugglers, Nietzche, the German army, and stolen gold. Needless to say, a worthwhile read.

I found myself getting bogged down a couple times in this book. It at times is a little on the esoteric side of things, but for the most part this works in its favour. Mostly I found it a very captivating read, and a very interesting discussion of some important things (the origins of the state, questions of how to fight back against a supposedly triumphant capital) and an equally interesting discussion of some other things. Throughout Peter Lamborn Wilson’s enthusiasm, knowledge, and his prodigious knack for weird synthesis shines through.

Some notes about searching at the Calgary public library

2005-09-11T10:02:00.000-07:00

Since the revamp of the Calgary Public Library online catalogue, the best improvement has been the ability to search by publisher. This is great because it is easier to search for publisher than searching by topic, especially if you are like me and you have favorite publishers. Of course there are great publishers the library doesn't have books by (Autonomedia for instance, or Freedom), but they have Black Rose (Canadian Anarchist publisher, 122 titles), AK Press (4 titles), Seven Stories (60 titles), Chelsea Green (56 titles), Verso (89 titles), Seal (79 titles), Cleis (12 titles), Soft Skull (9 titles), South End (26 titles) etc.
Or search for graphic novels: fantagraphics (38 titles), drawn and quarterly (18 titles), dark horse (74 titles) etc.
Or music Yazoo (21 titles), folkways (111 titles), Rounder (44 titles, despite their mainstay of shitty singer songwriter crap, they also have some good stuff), tzadik (28 titles), traditional crossroads (11 titles), buda musique (133 titles), chant du monde (24 titles) etc.
There's lots of good stuff on random publishing houses too, so search by topic, author and title too. And browse at the library as well.

Why talk about books you haven't read?

2005-09-11T09:40:00.000-07:00

That's the question right? I should say I do read a lot. There are a lot of books I read from cover to cover, and so many other books I want to read that its overwhelming at times. So if I wait to read a book until I have time to read it from cover to cover, I would never find anything out about Libya, or Sufism, or women saints, or murals etc. Part of the point of this blog is that I want people to be aware what a tremendous resource libraries are. People often get hung up on the fact that the library may not have a specific book that the want to read. But even if doesn't have the exact book you want it probably has several books like it, and stacks of other interesting books. So I want people to get a sense of the volume of interesting books available at the Calgary Public Library, or any library. And I'm going to talk about books I've read all the way through. I promise

Libya and sufism

2005-09-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

So I had seen a documentary about Libya and Qaddafi on PBS and despite being extremely dismissive its interviews with Qaddafi were very interesting. His rhetoric was all about how Libya wasn't a state, but rather a federation of peoples councils. I'm not sure if he used that exact language, but pretty close. I wasn't suprised to later read an essay - Jihad Revisited - Hakim Bey which talked a lot about Libya and the influence of the Situationists and Council Communism on Qaddafi. So I looked at the library but their copy of the Green Book (Qaddafi's big manifesto) had been withdrawn. I later found a full text version online here. The library did have a pretty interesting book about Libya: The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization and Resistence, 1830-1932 - Ali Abdullatif Ahmida. SUNY Press. The book is dedicated "To the memory of my grandfather Ali, who fought against Italian colonialism and told me his life story when I was a child; to the memory of my grandmother Aysha, who died in exile in northern Chad before I was born; to the generations of Lybians who fought for freedom and human dignity, I dedicate this book". I must admit I only really looked at chapter 5 Reactions to colonialism: The politics of collaboration and resistance, 1911-1932, and even that, not too closely, but this is definately a book that warrents a closer examination. The other book I want to mention is Divine Flashes - Fakhruddin 'Iraqi, translation and introduction William C. Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson. This is one of the classics of Sufi literature by Persian poet Fakhruddin 'Iraqi. Some very nice poetry with an introduction much longer than the actual book. I definately didn't examine this book closely enough to do it any sort of justice. Interesting to note that Peter Lamborn Wilson is Hakim Bey. Hakim Bey is his pen name. Some people know him as an anarchist theorist, but he is also a serious scholar of Islam, and Sufism in particular. some info about Peter Lamborn Wilson.

Some stuff I've recently looked at

2005-09-10T11:49:00.000-07:00

Women Saints in World Religions - Arvind Sharma (ed) SUNY Press and Women Saints: Lives of Faith and courage - Kathleen Jones, Orbis.
Both of these books seem very interesting although I didn't have a chance to read much of either. Women Saints in World Religions covers Judaism, Christianity, Taoism, Islam, Hinduism, and Ch'an Buddhism. Women Saints: Lives of Faith and courage looks at women saints in Christianity/Catholicism. Hopefully I'll get a chance to read them both at some point.

San Fransisco Bay Area Murals: Communities create their muses 1904-1997 - Timothy W. Drescher. Pogo Press.
Very interesting book. OVersized with amazing photos of amazing murals, including maps of the bay area with murals marked.Very inspiring murals, political, cultural etc. Definately worth checking out.

Billboard: Art on the Road - Laura Steward Heon (ed)
Oversized book of artists billboards from the likes of the billboard liberation front, Guerilla Girls, Sue Coe, Leon Golub, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger etc. Lots of stuff about AIDS, anti-Columbus day, etc. Definately a cool book.

Noize of the world: Non-western musicians in their own words - Hank Bordowitz. Soft Skull.
A collection of interviews from Bordowitz' columns in Jazziz magazine. Some interesting ones: Fela Kuti, Winston Rodney (Burning Spear), Duckie Simpson (Black Uhuru), Hankus Netsky (Klesmer Conservatory band), and Frank London (Klezmatics). Some of the other interviews might have been good, but I didn't have time to read them. My problem with this book is not what was included. Its whats excluded and mainly the explanation of why its excluded. There are three entries from "Asia", Osamu Kitajima (a Japanese guitarist living in California), David Lewiston (an American living in Indonesia) and Ravi Shankar and Vijay Anand. According to Hank Bordowitz this is because: "Very little Japanese music, be it pop or traditional finds it way into the rubric of noise of the world". In case you are wondering why this might be Bordowitz uses a quote from Osamu Kitajima to further explain. "A lot of Japanese things are just no good". Now Bordowitz could have explained he didn't interview Japanese (or other Asian musicians) because of language issues, his lack of travel to Japan, lack of knowlege or interest. All of these would have been fine. But instead his book is full of the desire to define what is "world" music and what people should be listening to. Which, in his defense, is sort of what Jazziz magazine is all about. But I call bullshit, and say people should listen to what they want. If you go to the Calgary public library there is a lot of Japanese (and Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, Indian, Pakistani, Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese, etc) folk music, pop music, jazz, and classical. If you go to A&B sound or other not completely shitty record stores you can get Ruins, Boredoms, Merzbow, Meltbanana, and other Japanese noise, experimental, hardcore, punk etc.

welcome

2005-09-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

hi. This blog is about how much I love libraries, books, the people in libraries, librarians etc. I'm mainly going to talk about what I get out of the library, here in Calgary, but where ever you live, I hope there is a library and I hope you love it. It might be about other things too, like how to improve libraries in general or the Calgary public library in specific, non-library books I read, used book stores, online stuff. We'll see I guess. Feel free to comment, especially if you know me.