Most Recent Additions
Elizabeth Underwood
America Meet New Orleans
We live in a time and culture that does not understand, value, or manifest personal responsibility. The general doctrine is that even if you betray the rules of your religious practice you’ll be forgiven your digressions when you die, if you ask nice.
So, what happens when you combine a deeply entrenched culture of anarchy and individual responsibility with a political system, bureaucracy, cultural climate that is currently breaking records for its utter lack of introspection or capacity to admit mistakes? New Orleans meet America.
May 6, 2015 Read the whole text...
John Clark
Letter from New Orleans
Reclusian Reflections on an Unnatural Disaster
The following letter was sent to an International Conference on Elisee Reclus, the 19th century anarchist geographer and political theorist. The conference, which was held in Milan on October 12–13, was one of several planned for 2005 to celebrate the 175th anniversary of Reclus’ birth and the 100th anniversary of his death. I was invited to do a presentation but couldn’t leave New Orleans to attend. Fortunately, our electricity, which had been out for almost six weeks, resumed shortly before the conference, and I was able to write the letter hastily and find a place to email it. It arrived in Milan the day before the conference and was read during the proceedings, and it will be translated and published in the Italian anarchist magazine Libertaria.
May 6, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
About this Issue
This issue’s theme--The Psychology of Freedom--comes to the reader without pretension or self-righteousness. We are not trying to instruct others on how they should conduct themselves in their personal or collective lives. Rather, we feel it is important to explore the anti-authoritarian ideals we often project onto society from the inside of our communities and lives.
May 2, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Contents of print edition
5 Letter from New Orleans
15 Psychic Liberation 6P the Almost Revolution
17 The War Against Imagination
20 No Borders
22 Retalin at Fifty
25 Poisoning the Poor
29 Psychology of Empire
30 Passion Fruit
27, 32–33, 37–38 Reviews
34 Both Sides Now
May 2, 2015 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Letters
I read with some surprise EB Maple’s letter (see FE 370, Fall 2005) regarding an article I wrote which was published in the Winter 2005 issue of the Fifth Estate.
Maple writes: “The standard issue primitivism of the article’s message appeals to me in many ways...” Thanks, a rather condescending way to agree with some aspects of my vision, but an acknowledgment nevertheless.
May 2, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Art in this issue
Cover: http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/visfront/index.html
Page 13: Peter Kuper, peterkuper.com
Page 21: Nik Moore, maladroitdrone.org
Page 24, 25, 32, 36: Private collection, Federico Arcos
Page 26, 34, 35: 1936: The Spanish Revolution, by The Ex
akpress.org
Page 30 & 31: Richard Warren from The Man Who Killed Durruti by Pedro De Paz, christiebooks.com
Apr 27, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Books from The Barn
Fifth Estate bookstore
Bush League Spectacles: Empire, Politics, and Culture in Bushwhacked America by Fran Shor (Factory School 2005) $13
“In the aftermath of 9/11, many of us looked to the Internet for the desperately needed analysis that was pushed out of the corporate media, and it’s there that we found writers such as Fran Shor. Combining an academic’s careful research and a political activist’s quest for justice, Shor speaks plainly and speaks with passion in these essays that analyze the political and cultural crisis of the contemporary United States.”
Apr 27, 2015 Read the whole text...
Mike of South Chicago ABC
Voices from the Inside
The two publications to the right [in the print edition] and dozens more anarchist, feminist, abolitionist and prisoner zines are available from: South Chicago ABC Zine Distro, P.O. Box 721, Homewood, IL 60430; write for a catalog.
They Will Never Get us All — Harold Thompson
They Will Never Get Us All!, Harold H. Thompson, 2006, 50 pp., order from: Friends of Harold H. Thompson, 711 E. Holly St. PMB #748, Bellingham, WA 98225, send $3–7 (sliding scale) well concealed cash
Apr 27, 2015 Read the whole text...
Rafael Uzcategui
WSF Caracas: Shroud for Venezuela’s social movements
Excerpt
FE Note: The following is taken from the El Libertario web site. See the above article on this page for their URL.
In the last four years Venezuela has undergone a polarization induced by the top players vying for power: the old “punto fijista” bureaucracy (Fedecamaras, CTV, political parties) against the new Chavez bureaucracy that has supplanted the previous one. This antagonism, false as much as real vs. pretended exercise of power, sustained and amplified by the media, has benefited those who have cast themselves as legitimate voices of the sector of Venezuelan society they claim to represent.
Apr 27, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Hate Mao; Hate Maoists
Chinese State Destroys Paint Bomber
A Chinese journalist was freed in February after spending nearly 17 years in prison for splattering paint on a portrait of Mao during the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.
Yu Dongyue, now 38, and two friends, hurled eggs filled with red paint at the famous painting of Mao, which still stares at the Square from across the street. Yu and his family are expected to reunite in Hunan Province, but his younger brother said the family was deeply concerned about Yu’s mental health.
Apr 26, 2015 Read the whole text...
Peter Lamborn Wilson
Secular Antinomian Anabaptist Neo-Luddism
What can anarchists and anarcho-primitivists learn from Old Order religious groups about living beyond technology?
“By banning the telephone from the home, Old Order Amish...try to maintain the primacy of communication within the context of community.”
--D.Z. Umble
“Church splits are bad, some things are worse, and one of them is to keep on compromising with something we know is sinful.”
--Anon., Separated Unto Christ (Old Order Mennonite tract, circa 1995)
Apr 26, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Spanish Revolution Bibliography
José Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, published by The Meltzer Press (Vol. 1) and Christie Books (Vol. 2). They are essential reading.
Stuart Christie, We, The Anarchists, The Meltzer Press. A telling and thorough look at the FAI.
Much of our knowledge of the anarchist resistance to Franco comes from the work of Antonio Tellez and Miguel Garcia. All of the above publications are available from AK Press akpress.org and deserve close reading.
Apr 26, 2015 Read the whole text...
Al McKee
An American POW In America
Torture Didn’t Begin In Abu Ghraib. Try a Marine Brig 30 years ago.
US Marine Corp brig. Corpus Christi, Texas, 1964. “ON THE WALL! GET ON THE WALL, PRIDNER!” I had just been marched inside the sally port by two armed MP’s. The heavy barred gate slammed shut. My partner, Duke, was right behind me, flanked by two more MP’s.
“YOU DEAF, PRIDNER! I SAID--GET ON THE WALL!” Yellow handprints, greatly spaced, were spray-painted on the wall. Corresponding footprints, also widely-spaced, below me on the spit-shined sally port deck. I stared at the yellow prints on the deck. My face was rammed into the concrete bulkhead by one of the brig guards.
Apr 25, 2015 Read the whole text...
Anu Bonobo
‘Nothing Can Prepare You for New Orleans’
Nothing can prepare you for New Orleans. All the dramatic rhetoric, righteous anger, extravagant allegory, profligate tears, and urgent broadcasts of need have not been wasted.
If some well-intentioned money has been squandered in a vortex of government and charity bureaucracy, all the love, prayer, intention, direct action, and indignation could not be better spent than on saving this amazing spiritual and cultural homeland.
Apr 25, 2015 Read the whole text...
Julie Herrada
Paul Avrich (1931–2006)
A Passionate Chronicler of Anarchism
A beloved comrade and renowned scholar of 19th and 20th century anarchism passed away on February 17 at his home in New York City. Paul Avrich was author and editor of dozens of influential books and articles on the history of anarchism, including The Haymarket Tragedy; The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States; An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre; Anarchist Portraits; Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, and Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America.
Apr 25, 2015 Read the whole text...
H. Read
The ELF/ALF Arrests
The Issues They Present for Environmental Activists
On December 7, the sudden arrest of six individuals rocked the activist community. All were accused of arsons claimed by the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and/or Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Since then, the cases have taken many twists and turns: one of those arrested died in custody in an apparent suicide; six more activists were indicted (although three have not been apprehended); then, on January 20, a 65-count indictment against the remaining 11 arrestees blamed them for every major ELF action between 1996 and 2001, with a trial set for October 31. In February, two more activists were arrested and charged with some of the same arsons in Oregon.
Apr 25, 2015 Read the whole text...
Barry Pateman
The Spanish Revolution 70 years later
And, so we return to Spain. Nearly 70 years after the people’s response to a right-wing military uprising, those events remain a source of wonder, optimism, confusion, strife and tragedy. It was a high mark of personal and social possibility that has yet to be matched. It was a real revolution of everyday life that shattered the patterns and relationships created by the agencies that constituted a growing capitalism.
Apr 25, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Upcoming Events
Friday, 7pm-11pm, Community Church of Boston, 565 Boylston St.
Mitchell Verter, editor of Dreams of Freedom, on Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon and contemporary Magonism, a video and music.
The Bookfair. Saturday, 10am-7pm. Massachusetts College of Art, Pozen Center, 621 Huntington Ave. Tables from distros, radical bookstores, Info-shops, and publishers. Speakers, workshops, panel discussions, and films.
Apr 25, 2015 Read the whole text...
Larry Talbot
Who Killed Durruti?
Review
a review of
The Man Who Killed Durruti, Pedro de Paz, Translated from Spanish by Paul Sharkie, Postscript by Stuart Christie, Illustrations by Richard Warren. Christie Books (Read and Noir, PO Box 35, Hastings, East Sussex, U.K.), 2005, 135
In a book that’s both fiction and history, Pedro de Paz and Stuart Christie have combined to look once again at the question of who killed the anarchist militia leader, Buenaventura Durruti.
Apr 25, 2015 Read the whole text...
Walker Lane (Peter Werbe)
All Wars are Lies!
Iraq War Based on Lies: Liberals are Shocked!
War! Uh!
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing!
--Edwin Starr, “War”
The Motown great Edwin Starr asked and answered this question in his 1970 song that became a best-selling record and the anthem of another in a series of long, hot summers.
By then, tens of millions of people around the world had come to a similar conclusion about the U.S. empire’s brutal war in Vietnam that already had taken the lives of at least two million Indochinese and tens of thousands of those of the invaders. There was wide-spread realization that not only did America’s Asian war have nothing to do with “freedom,” but was about imperial domination of a region far from its shores.
Apr 23, 2015 Read the whole text...
Ron Sakolsky
No More Safety Valves
The Government Has Approved Low Power FM Stations, but Resistance Radio Continues
Freedom is a word with many meanings. What makes radio free from an anarchist point of view? In relation to the airwaves, the term commonly refers to a form of direct action broadcasting done without a government-approved license. It is popularly known as pirate radio.
The autonomous broadcasters of the free radio movement actively expand the everyday lived experience of freedom from state regulation by seizing the airwaves from their corporate and government masters, setting up unlicensed stations and helping others to do the same. On the other hand, the Prometheus Radio Project is a non-profit organization created by former radio pirates to facilitate the growth of a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) program known as Low Power FM (LPFM).
Apr 23, 2015 Read the whole text...
L.M. Bogad
Monumental Dialectics
Staging Haymarket Confrontation... Anarchists brawl with Teamsters, statues walk & talk, and the incident 120 years ago that gave us May Day is contested for meaning
On May 4, 1886, several hundred workers assembled in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest the shooting of their comrades on a picket line at the McCormick Reaper Works the day before. The violence happened in the context of a largely successful general strike in support of the eight-hour workday. Anarchist labor organizers and journalists played a key role in the strikes.
Apr 22, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
About This Issue
Venezuela, Spain, & Haymarket
Welcome to the first issue in our 41st year of radical publishing. This edition, no different than the preceding 371, takes up our desire for revolution, one that ends the monstrous systems of capitalism and the state. It begins with a critical look at what is billed by the Left as the Bolivarian Revolution. Michael Staudenmaier, with Anne Carlson, describing their month long visit through Venezuela and relates anarchist perspectives on Chavismo. The FE’s Walker Lane writes about the 2006 Caracas World Social Forum (WSF) he attended, and offers critiques of the gathering and the direction the country is taking.
Apr 15, 2015 Read the whole text...
Michael Staudenmaier
Anne Carlson
Venezuela
Of Chavistas and Anarquistas
Note: This is a shortened version of an essay that can be found in several locations on the Internet. Some material is likely dated at this point, given the rapidly changing situation in Venezuela. Since the essay primarily has value as a first-hand account, and since we have not returned to Venezuela since it was written, we have not attempted to update this version in any way.
Apr 15, 2015 Read the whole text...
Walker Lane (Peter Werbe)
Venezuela—An Anarchist at the World Social Forum
100,000 gather in Caracas to celebrate Chavismo. But, is it another world, or, just a different version of this one?
Barrel-assing around hair-pin turns at 6am in a crowded bus on a road with no barriers between us and a two thousand foot drop was not the manner in which I anticipated arriving in Venezuela for the Sixth World Social Forum (WSF).
This anus-clenching adventure was made necessary by the fact that a key viaduct on the highway from the airport into Caracas was recently determined to be on the verge of collapse. All traffic was forced to take an old mountain road, so what was normally a 40 minute ride had turned into a gridlocked six-hour nightmare journey.
Apr 15, 2015 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Letters
Send letters to Fifth Estate, POB 201016, Ferndale Ml 48220
Congrats on changing anarchist to anti-authoritarian on your front page description. Too much baggage on the word anarchist. It’s glamorous for those with that identity; fear and mistrust for those outside the milieu.
There was that period from about 1880 to 1920 when anarchists were killing people. Like monotheists, they thought they were in touch with the higher moral values of the Universe and thus were free of morals in this world.
Apr 12, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Anarchy in Books
A sampling of the fine books we receive
Who’s Afraid of The Black Blocs?: Anarchy in Action Around the World, Francis Dupuis-Deri, 2013, PM Press pmpress.org
The Watcher, Nicholas P. Oakley, 2014, See Sharp Press, SeeSharpPress.com (Sci-fi)
The End of the World As We Know it?: Crisis, Resistance, & the Age of Austerity, edited by Deric Shannon, 2014, AK press, akpress.org
Apr 10, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Contents of print edition
Fifth Estate, #393, Spring 2015, Vol. 50, No. 1
2 Letters
4 Anarchy in Kurdistan
Bill Weinberg
7 Eric McDavid Freed!
FE Staff
8 Armed Madhouse
Bryan Tucker
9 Justice for Franco Fascists?
David Porter
11 Sam Mbah Dies
Kelly Rose Pflug-Back
12 Florida’s Burnpile Press
Matt Keene
13 An Anarchist in Berlin
Apr 10, 2015 Read the whole text...
James Koehnline
Back cover
Don’t say you can’t turn back the clock—you do it every year, dupe of daylight savings time—as if you could add or subtract one hour from light by bureaucratic fiat. The really progressive position is reversion.
—Peter Lamborn Wilson “The Alchemy of Luddism”
Graphic: James Koehnline http://www.koehnline.com/
Apr 8, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Books
Our friends at Black and Red Books--another radical publishing project from Detroit--have finally put their catalog online at http://blackandred.org. It’s now easier than ever to find titles like Society of the Spectacle; Against His-story, Against Leviathan; The Strait; The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism; Love and Politics; The Wandering of Humanity, and more.
Apr 8, 2015 Read the whole text...
Walker Lane (Peter Werbe)
Anne R. Key
Reviews
The Wedding and Other Stories and Oystercatcher #3
The Wedding and Other Stories, Cara Hoffman, Factory School Southpaw Culture, 2006, 114 pp., factoryschool.org. Available from the Barn
Cara Hoffman’s seven tautly written, alternately ominous and humorous short stories are driven by her elegant use of language. She’s a writer in the now unfashionable old school where words and the images they create shape story and characters rather than breathless action scenarios waiting to be transferred from page to film. There’s great craft here where one can almost feel the work put into each sinuous sentence; sometimes each word.
Apr 8, 2015 Read the whole text...
Walker Lane (Peter Werbe)
The State and Longing for Arcadia
Review
reviewed here:
The State, Harold Barclay, Freedom Press, London, 2003, 109 pp.
Longing for Arcadia: Memoirs of an AnarchoCynicalist Anthropologist, Harold B. Barclay, Trafford, 2005, Victoria, BC, 362 pp.
Harold Barclay’s thin volume on the political state packs into its pages everything we need to know to realize that there is nothing eternal about this inherently oppressive institution. A relatively recent phenomenon in human affairs, Barclay traces its origins to a few thousand years ago based on the desire of a few men to control others by establishing hierarchical societies in place of the egalitarian ones that preceded them.
Apr 4, 2015 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
The Amish, “Obnoxious Machinery” & Community
an exchange
In response to “Secular Antinomian Anabaptist Neo-Luddism,” FE #372, Spring, 2006]
Dear Fifth Estate,
When I saw the cover of FE which promised an article on the Amish and Anarchists, it piqued my interest. I live in Amish country, Pennsylvania. An Old Order Amish family are my next door neighbors.
Apr 4, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Anarcho-shorts
& other Tales of the Planet
A valuable anarchist history resource, The Emma Goldman Papers archive, is being defunded by University of California, Berkeley, and will have to close if alternative funding can’t be found soon. The 34-year-old archive is currently the most comprehensive, organized collection of Goldman-related materials in the world.
Apr 3, 2015 Read the whole text...
Andrew William Smith
Live TV or Die
Primitivism on TV!
a review of
Live Free or Die. National Geographic Cable Channel
While I love the peace and challenges of backwoods camping, I admit that I don’t engage with them that often, and when I have, the thin lines between adventure and annoyance, between serenity and boredom, barely exist.
If you want to see a person with an intellectual critique of civilization get infatuated with civilization’s creature comforts, watch their most intimate reactions to home-cooked meals and hot showers after a few days or even weeks roughing it in the woods.
Apr 3, 2015 Read the whole text...
Ruhe
Riots, Revolt & the Black Bloc
Book review
a review of
I Saw Fire: Reflections on Riots, Revolt and the Black Bloc by Doug Gilbert. Institute for Experimental Freedom, 2014, $10. 204 pp. littleblackcart.com
I’ve often found myself frustrated by the lack of worthwhile media projects that accurately capture how anarchists struggle. Doug Gilbert’s I Saw Fire: Reflections on Riots, Revolt and the Black Bloc is the kind of book that you can hand to people encountering anarchist resistance for the first time.
Apr 3, 2015 Read the whole text...
Anu Bonobo
A Revolution without Enemies
Allen Ginsberg & the Poetics of Psychedelic Anarchism
An experimental rant titled “Radical Poetry, Heretical Religion, and the Psychedelic Revolution” provided the germ and genesis for this rambling, review-essay.
I delivered that sermon in my over-the-top Reverend Bonobo mode for a gathering in western North Carolina called “Croatan.” Held in late April 2006, the event featured lectures by the likes of scientist and scholar of mind-altering substances Dennis McKenna (brother of the late Terence McKenna), late nights of electronic dance music, and thunderous spring rains that sprayed us all with epic torrents.
Apr 1, 2015 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Books that changed our lives
When we put out the calls for this issue, we sought lists and commentaries on books that changed people’s lives. Apparently, many were too busy with summer reading to respond. Others may be too busy with life to read--or to write about what they might be reading if they’re reading. For me, I’ve decided to name writers more than books, and the shortlist is rather long, heavily populated by poets. Allen Ginsberg’s influence on me might always overshadow other writers, and to learn more about that, please see my article on him in a few pages. My world view has been so widely shaped by all of these visionaries that I would feel remiss not giving them their due in this issue.
Apr 1, 2015 Read the whole text...
Cara Hoffman
Here Comes Success
Fiction
Just before 1998, he started taking advice from the talking crow.
It started like you might have imagined. The crow was perched on a spindly branch near the hospital parking lot. It quietly assessed him.
He was getting his car keys out of his pocket, and the crow was drawn in by his smooth knuckles as they slid into the denim of his jeans and then slid out barely concealing something shiny.
Apr 1, 2015 Read the whole text...
Sandor Ellix Katz
The End of Sexuality and Other Apocalyptic Scenarios
From The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, Chelsea Green, 2006
Can any action avert humanity’s technological downfall? I try to remain hopeful and cast my lot with the possibility of change, but our situation and prospects both appear rather bleak. So many nightmare scenarios have been imagined for us. Science fiction anticipated genetic tinkering generations before the technology existed to actually do it. The dangers I have just briefly described are very real. Yet I find that every new revelation seems strangely familiar, as if we had been expecting it. Each sensational news report seems like it must have come from science fiction.
Apr 1, 2015 Read the whole text...
Bill Blank
A Brief Story of The Clash, Radio & the Fifth Estate
Book review
a review of
Stealing All Transmissions: The Secret History of The Clash by Randal Doane, Foreword by Barry “The Baker” Auguste, 2014, PM Press, 192 pp. $15.95 pmpress.org
In December 1979, after stumbling through my first trimester at Michigan State University, I took the allotted three weeks off in suburban Detroit. While the media began priming the struggling city as host of the upcoming Republican National Convention (and a probable Ronald Reagan presidency), a vague desperation overtook me, to search for alternatives, first on the radio and then in the press.
Mar 31, 2015 Read the whole text...
Roger Farr
Anarchist Poetics
“[The poet never] voices received opinions, or gives clear expression to the confused feelings of ‘the masses’: that is the function of the politician, the journalist, the demagogue.”
-- Herbert Read, “Art and Alienation”
“Poetry is the end(s) of politics.”
--L. Mirari, “The Politics of Refusal vs. the Refusal of Politics”
Mar 29, 2015 Read the whole text...
William Manson
Civilization as Dis-ease
“The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for civilization, or is he past it and mastering it?”
-- Walt Whitman
Early in 1905, Leo Tolstoy wrote to a close friend in England: “Yesterday and today I have been reading Edward Carpenter’s book, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, and am enraptured by it.... Please inform me of what you know about Carpenter himself. I consider him a worthy successor to Carlyle and Ruskin.” The query as to Carpenter’s identity may well be repeated a hundred years later; his striking originality, which at one time inspired poets and anarchists alike, has since been virtually forgotten.
Mar 29, 2015 Read the whole text...
Ursula K. Le Guin
Notes from the Inner City
Daughter of itinerants,
ungrateful refusers of benefits and charity,
in terror of the all-embracing arms
I turned from the tabernacles of turkey
and progeny of toothpaste, I ran and hid
from the love that damns and pardons,
I dodged the draft from the golden doors
and let the wild west wind carry me
with torn newspapers, cigarette butts, condoms,
up against the chainlink fence at the world’s ends
in a red November evening.
Mar 28, 2015 Read the whole text...
Benjamin Carson
Planting the Seeds of Anarchy
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower
In America, the last vestiges of the liberal social contract and public safety net have been virtually erased. Under George W. Bush, the gap between the rich and poor increases at an alarming rate while privatization pushes forward. While Social Security is being slowly eviscerated and replaced by Individual Retirement Accounts, wealthy people can survive growing old while leaving those who cannot to fend for themselves. At the same time, the “richest 1% of Americans,” who, according to Peter Singer, “hold more than 38 percent of the nation’s wealth,” are forming what David Harvey calls “ghettoes of affluence (their ‘bourgeois utopias’),” which undermine “concepts of citizenship, social belonging, and mutual support,” while the poor, who are being “pushed off welfare into a stagnant labor market,” are left to make their way in what, for so many, looks like a post-apocalyptic landscape.
Mar 28, 2015 Read the whole text...
Peter Lamborn Wilson
The Alchemy of Luddism
for Diane di Prima
St. John’s Eve (Midsummer) 2006
It’s the idea
of code that’s cool not the actual
bother of decipherment: the utopia
of not having been in a state of
anticipation or regret. The Dowager Empress
took fresh honeysuckle petals in her green tea — yes even Civilization had its finer moments
Mar 28, 2015 Read the whole text...
Elliott Liu
The Radical Roots of Gary Snyder
Looking at Gary Snyder’s writing is a geological experience. Picking up a copy of The Gary Snyder Reader or checking out his shelf at a library will reveal layers of poems, journals, and essays dating from the late fifties to the turn of the millennium--all written by a would-be Wobbly turned Zen poster child of the San Francisco Renaissance. Considered foundational texts for everything from the hippies and New Left to bioregionalism and Deep Ecology, Snyder’s work reads like a countercultural cross section of the last fifty years.
Mar 28, 2015 Read the whole text...
Diane DiPrima
Writings of Diane DiPrima
archangel of fire
enwraps now melts glaciers
turf unexposed
angelic aeons trembles
naked
under a vengeful sun
--Diane DiPrima
August 3, 2002
green shack in Richmond
tag on the door sez “Merlin’s”
just that
--Diane DiPrima
March 23, 2003
Train to Sacramento
true poppies:
Mar 28, 2015 Read the whole text...
Margaret Killjoy
The Fall of Ekset City
Fiction
Ekset City was on fire. Flares and napalm and hammers and bullets and the angry minds of angry men were tearing through three hundred years of architecture and three thousand years of culture. At the center of the city, a bonfire engulfed the seven pillars of Ekset. A frightful horde of humans paraded through, warming their hands on the pyre of victory and sacrificing every trace of goblin culture to the consuming flames. Black smoke rose up so thick and high it fought against the glory of the sun.
Mar 27, 2015 Read the whole text...
Lily So-too
Under the wall
Take me to
where my heart is sunken
deep into the land
stepped on, kicked, trampled, thought
nothing of,
to the place where people don’t know that
it is even there,
supporting their weight.
Let me love them anyway.
i am not divided from myself
let me feel the ache of the person
struggling to keep alive at the hands of another person
and under a mechanized system
designed to grind her back into stardust
mine is the same body and breath
that give her
material right to be, to exist.
Mar 27, 2015 Read the whole text...