my first steps in society
smelling faintly of horse shit:
"Peasant!" Roberto called me
that first day of class
in the Infantile section,
& he gave me a hard shove ...
— Roque Dalton
In full, some 101 entries,
http://recollectionbooks.com/
excerpts:
MAY 10
MARCEL MAUSS
Great cultural theorist of the society of the gift.
Madrid: FEAST OF ST. ISIDORE THE PLOUGHMAN:
Music, feasting, dancing in the streets.
______________________________
105 -- Tsai Lun invents paper, China. Inspires paper airplanes.
http://recollectionbooks.com/
1837 -- Darwin?: New York banks suspend
all specie payments, initiating the Panic of 1837.
1849 -- Astor Place Riot.
So annoyed are partisans of American
actor Edwin Forrest when his competitor, William
Charles Macready, appears at NY's Astor Place
Theater that they stone the joint.
When militiamen are dispatched to the scene,
the mob stones them, too.
The soldiers open fire, & before order is
restored, 31 die & over 100 are injured.
1853 -- The pope prohibits the circulation
of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" amongst his minions
in his dominions .
1857 -- India: Beginning of the Great Mutiny
against British Imperial rule.
1872 -- French ethnologist, philosopher Marcel Mauss lives.
1872 -- Victoria Woodhull begins her US presidential
campaign, with Frederick Douglas as running mate.
On election day, Woodhull is in jail, charged with
sending obscene literature through the mail. The offensive
material is an article congratulating popular preacher Henry
Ward Beecher for his relationship with a married woman,
but chiding him for failing to openly advocate the free love
he clearly practiced.
1887 -- England: United Mine Workers
organizer Ginger Goodwin lives.
Shot by a hired private cop outside Cumberland, British
Columbia. His murder sparks Canada's first General Strike.
http://recollectionbooks.com/
1899 -- Popular dancer Fred Astaire lives.
"I just put my feet in the air & move them around."
— Fred Astaire
"I don't know why everyone makes such a fuss
about Fred Astaire's dancing.
I did all the same steps, only backwards.
& in heels!"
— Ginger Rogers
1905 -- England: Oscar Wilde play "Salome" opens privately in London
(it is banned in public in the UK until 1932).
1910 -- British government jails Tom Mann for six months for
urging soldiers not to shoot striking workers.
1911 -- Mexico: Magonista anarquistas occupy Tijuana today,
until routed by Mexican Federalists on June 22.
1920 -- England: Dock workers refuse
to load armaments for use by Allies against Russia.
1924 -- X-Files?: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader
Cross-Dresser J. Edgar Hoover appointed head of the FBI.
1933 -- Germany: Book Burning Day.
25,000 books by Jews & liberals are publicly burned
by Nazis, Berlin. Also today, Socialist parties are
prohibited.
1942 -- England: Winston Churchill broadcasts a threat
to use poison gas if Germany does.
Brutal in his treatment of striking workers, he was
vehemently opposed to woman's suffrage, was careerist
& snobbish. As foreign secretary, Churchill ordered the
use of mustard gas against Kurdish Villages. "I do not
understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I
am strongly in favour of using gases against uncivilised
tribes [to] spread a lively terror."
No terrorist he....
1967 -- Captain Howard Levy jailed three years for refusing to
train US soldiers for Vietnam.
1968 -- Paris: Latin Quarter is barricaded:
"Night of the Barricades".
Militant resistance to authority truly begins in earnest.
The week of May 6-13 in France saw the seizure
of all of France's universities & many lycées.
People all over Paris witnessed the savagery of the police
& were sickened by the system's dependence on force to
maintain order.
On May 8, after nearly a week of riots, the French public
opinion poll IFOP reported that four-fifths of the people
of Paris are sympathetic to the rebellious students.
'Tomorrow we shall have the same problem'
From the very start of the evening, 20,000 demonstrators
occupy the Latin Quarter, which takes an insurrectionary
aspect.
Students & youth built dozens & dozens of cobblestone
ramparts to defend the Latin Quarter.
Over 60 barricades — some over 10 feet high — are
built from overturned cars, sawed-down trees, lampposts,
& anything else at hand.
'Night of the barricades', Paris: The return of
the repressed, as revolution reappears in the
heart of the smug consumer democracies of
the west.
1968 -- Paris, France: During this night of the barricades, Léo
Ferré creates his now-famous song "The Anarchists". This verse
translates to a certain extent the surprise of close observers of
the rebirth of the black flag at the time of the demonstrations &
the processions of May.
1969 -- As many as 3,000 youth stage a "Zap-In" in Zap, North
Dakota; local police are not amused, & call out the National
Guard.
1975 -- El Salvador: The poet Roque Dalton ("Clandestine Poems")
assassinated by a rival faction within his party in San Salvador.
Poetry
forgive me for helping you understand
that you're not made of words alone.
1984 -- 3 Strikes you're out: World Court orders US to stop
mining of Nicaraguan harbors.
1993 -- Just child's play?: 188 die, 469 injured in fire at Kader
toy factory in Thailand, used by Hasbro & other US companies.
Deaths are blamed on doors & windows locked to keep sweatshop
workers on the job.
1994 -- Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Nelson Mandela
inaugurated as President of South Africa, ending 300 years of
white colonial rule.
"Walk gently, breathe peacefully, laugh hysterically."
— Nelson Mandela, 1994 Inaugural Speech
1999 -- Shel Silverstein dies, from a heart attack. Writer,
cartoonist, composer.
2007 -- "The New England Journal of Medicine" reports cancer risk
is almost nine times higher for people who have oral sex with more
than six partners.
'I got no time for a dozen . . .
Six of you gotta go . . . '
— The Fugs, "My Bed Is Getting Crowded"
— Auntie-Hysterical 2011, & some few or several days thereafter &
beforehand
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