Thursday, February 10, 2011

Daily Bleed for February 10th

Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.

— A text by Langston Hughes being analyzed by
students in the courses "Culture in the Jazz Age"
at the University of Texass

Daily Bleed in full,
http://www.recollectionbooks.com/bleed/0210.htm

Excerpts:

FEBRUARY 10 -- BERTOLT BRECHT
Great German political dramatist & poet,
inventor of modern "epic theater," the
"gest," & the "alienation effect."

Tampa, Florida: GASPARILLA DAY.
Spanish pirate defeated by US Navy in 1821.
Beginning of week long festival.
Someone playing Gasparilla is crowned
Pirate King, given keys to city, etc.

______________________________

1794 -- France: Suicide of Jacques Roux (1752-1794)
in his Paris prison cell.

French revolutionist, known as the pitiless & sometimes cruel "Red
Priest," but also a precursor of socialism & modern anarchism. He
denounced those monopolizing the revolution, the speculator, the
merchant — & also government & the whole apparatus of the
parliamentary state.

"Liberty is no more than an empty shell when one class of
men is allowed to condemn another to starvation without
any measures being taken against them. & equality is also
an empty shell when the rich, by exercising their economic
monopolies, have the power of life or death over other
members of the community."

1837 -- Black Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin, 37,
dies of wounds received in a duel.

1846 -- The first edition of Edward Lear's A Book of Nonsense
published. Buncha tosh. Lear may be considered the inventor of the
term 'snail mail' & has a jet named after him.

1863 -- P.T. Barnum stages wedding of Tom Thumb &
Mercy Lavinia Warren. The ceremony ends with their
duet of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues":

Now if you see Saint Annie
Please tell her thanks a lot
I cannot move
My fingers are all in a knot
I don't have the strength
To get up & take another shot
& my best friend, my doctor
Won't even say what it is I've got

— Bob Dylan

1888 -- Giuseppe Pasotti (1888-1951) lives. Italian anarcho-
syndicalist & member of the Italian League of Human Rights.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/PasottiGuiseppe.htm

1890 -- Boris Pasternak lives, Moscow. Librarian, translator,
novelist (Doctor Zhivago), poet.
http://www.rjgeib.com/heroes/pasternak/paster.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/pasterna.htm

1896 -- Home Colony Co-Operative (Mutual
Association) founded on Van Geldern Cove
near Seattle & Tacoma, Washington.

The Home Colony was a peculiar combination of
communism & anarchism, organized by a group who
had already been in the Glennis Co-operative
Industrial Company, a Bellamy colony...

See Brian Avery's article, in the Stan Iverson Archives,
http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/HomeColony.htm

1898 -- Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht
lives, Augsburg, Germany. Doctor, poet,
playwright, theatrical reformer. Fled
rightwing Nazis. After moving to
the US, fled from the Land of the Free
when HUAC's right wingnuts come after
him during the Cold War.

1920 -- England: Alex Comfort lives. British anarchist, poet,
& author of the ever-popular Joy of Sex. Oh, Joy!, Oh, Joy!

"You have only to speak for once — they will melt like the dust:
you have only to spit in their faces — they will go
howling like devils to swindle somebody else

but if you choose to obey, we shall not blame you
for every lesson is new. We will make room for you
in the cold hall were every cause is just.

Perhaps you'll go with us to frosty windows
putting the same choice as the years go round
or sit debating 'When will they disobey?'

wrapped in our coats against the impartial cold."
All this I think the buried me would say,
clutching their white ribs & their rusted helmets

nationless bones, under the still ground.

— Alex Comfort
excerpt from "The Soldiers"
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/ComfortAlex.htm

1931 -- US: Karl Yoneda, attends a demonstration in Los
Angeles, where the Red Squad beat him severely &
toss him into a cell.

"'Come & pick up this goddamn Jap, he's dying
anyway' he told me," Black recalled in her biography
The Red Angel.

"He was a bloody mess. The bandages
hadn't been changed on his head.
Everything was covered with blood."

As a student Yoneda read the works of Marx & the Russian
anarchist Vasily Eroshenko. Yoneda later became
an organizer for the Communist Party in Los Angeles.

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/05ref.htm#9/1999
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/EroshenkoVasily.htm

1948 -- Great Soviet filmmaker Sergei
Eisenstein dies ("Potemkin," "Ivan the
Terrible," "Ten Days That Shook the
World".)

1949 -- "Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller opens at the
Morosco Theater in NY.

1957 -- Laura Ingalls Wilder, author & the last surviving member
of the pioneering Ingalls family, dies in her Rocky Ridge home.
Laura's daughter Rose became a noted author & right-wing libertarian.

1967 -- "Tribute to J. Edgar Hoover" at
California Hall. Music by the
Jook Savages, Blue Cheer &
the Mojo Men. John H. Myers
Blues Project, Jimmy Reed &
John Lee Hooker at the
Fillmore Auditorium.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/images/BB/J_Edgar.gif

1992 -- Spain: During this month the TV film, A Matar Franco
(To Kill Franco) is made, telling in full for the first time of various,
mostly unpublicized, attempts to kill Franco by the Spanish CNT,
the Basque ETA & various international anarchists (Spanish,
Mexican, Belgian, French, Italian & British).
http://www.spunk.org/library/writers/meltzer/sp001591/app1.html

2001 -- US: Tribes of the Cass Corridor founded, Motor City, Michigan;
buncha ice skaters without skates: "Think where man's glory most begins
& ends, / & say my glory was I had such friends." — William Butler Yeats
http://corridortribe.com/

____________________________________________


"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the
occurrence of the improbable.... A man full of faith is
simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for
clear & realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is
actually ill."

— H.L. Mencken

____________________________________________

— anti-CopyRite 1997-6000, more or less

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