Daily Bleed Radical Literary History for November 4th

I suffer the dreams of a world gone mad. I like it like that & I know it. I know it well, ugly & sweet, That temper madness with an even extreme. — REM, "Leave"

NOVEMBER 4

JUDI BARI
Ecological activist, fiddler, labor radical (Wobbly organizer), Earth-First warrior.

Arcata & Oakland, California declare days in her honor.

http://www.judibari.org/

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Oklahoma: WILL ROGER'S DAY.

England, Australia, & New Zealand: MISCHIEF NIGHT.



WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS DAY.

"I raised so much money over the years, from so many different people that ... I don't owe anyone."

— Newt Gingrich

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1605 -- England: Guy Fawkes is arrested in the cellars of Parliament late tonite... & this is no ordinary wine cellar. Tomorrow is the much ballyhooed "Guy Fawkes Day."


1646 -- New World: Massachusetts Bay ayatollahs pass a law making it a capital offense to deny that the Bible is the word of God.


1771 -- James Montgomery lives, Irvine, Ayrshire. Scottish poet & newspaper editor/owner.



1780 -- Peru: The rebellion of Túpac Amaru II explodes, against the Spanish oppressors civilizers.
http://web.archive.org/...eduardo.galeano/memoria.del.fuego/17801104.htm


1796 -- US: America signs a treaty with Tripoli, which includes the statement,

"The Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

1812 -- Author Conte Aleardo Aleardi lives.


1838 -- Stendhal begins The Charterhouse of Parma; whips it out in seven weeks.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/01ref.htm#23/1783


1862 -- Hey, Kelly?: Gattling gun, first modern machine gun, patented (Richard J. Gattling).



1870 -- French proto-surrealist Comte de Lautreamont dies.

LAUTREAMONT
Isidore Ducasse, precursor of French surrealism, poet of outrage & terror. Daily BleedSaint, 1998.

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/fr/display/72



1879 -- Populist humorist Will Rogers lives, near Oolagah, Indian Territory. His epitaph reads: "I joked about every prominent man in my lifetime, but I never met one I didn't like."

Will Power?: America honors him with a nuclear submarine, the USS Will Rogers, SSBN 659, armed with 16 C-3 POSEIDON missiles having an explosive capability greater than all the bombs of World War II.

1879 -- US: Thief vs. Thief? James Ritty patents first cash register, to combat stealing by bartenders in his Dayton, Ohio saloon.


1881 -- Henry James's Portrait of a Lady first published, UK.


1889 -- France: Vittorio Pini (1860-1903) is sentenced to 20 years in prison for political banditry. Italian shoemaker & illegalist living in Paris, his expropriations supported "Intransigenti" groups & their propaganda efforts. He also supported the "Cloche de bois," an organization discreetly helping those unable to pay their landlords; "Nous, anarchistes, c'est avec l'entière conscience d'accomplir un devoir, que nous attaquons la propriété."
http://www.ephemanar.net/novembre04.html#pini


1896 -- US: In Philadelphia, Emma Goldman speaks at the Ladies' Liberal League about her "Experiences on Blackwell's Island."
[Details / context]



1897 -- Cipriano Mera lives (1897-1975). French anarcho-syndicaliste.

Militia leader & army commander in the Spanish Revolution & militant activist.

[Details / context]

1897 -- Italy: Giuseppe Ciancabilla today publically declares himself an anarchist, in Malatesta’s paper,"L’Agitazione."

In October 1897, Ciancabilla met Malatesta to do interview an for "Avanti!." This meeting & the response of the PSI (Italian Socialist Party) leadership to the discussion led Ciancabilla to leave the Socialist Party in disgust & declare himself an anarchist. Ciancabilla was one of the important Italian figures of the anarchist movement who immigrated to the US in the late 1800s.

1898 -- China: US marines begin fighting in Peking & Tientsin (-Mar. 13, 1899).


1899 -- Freud's Egyptian Dream Book published.


1903 -- Panama: US marines begin fighting (-Feb. 26, 1904).


1907 -- US: Chicago institutes the first movie censorship in the US — one of the first films banned is a production of Shakespeare's "Macbeth."



1909 -- Peru: Ciro Alegría lives. Journalist, politician, novelist who wrote about the lives of the Peruvian Indians. Twice jailed for political activity, exiled to Chile in 1934, lived in the US from 1941-48. Wrote El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941; Broad & Alien is the World).
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/calegria.htm


1913 -- England: The 'Peoples Army' — formed to resist police interference with the demonstrations of the East London Federation of Suffragettes — begin paramilitary assembly & gun drill in Victoria Park.
Source: [Calendar Riots]


1918 -- Only a week before the Armistice, Wilfred Owen ("Anthem for Doomed Youth") is killed in France at 25. He has defined his subject as "War, & the Pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." Siegfried Sassoon, poet-friend with whom he had a brief & intense affair, edits his poems following his death.

Yeats excluded Owens' "Anthem" from The Oxford Book of Modern Verse as "unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper." Owens is now considered the greatest of WWI poets.

http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/247.html

Photo above of blind soldiers leading the blind.

BleedMeisterDave corrects Yeats' egregious omission, in The Oxford Book of Daily Bleeds with a poem he recalls from his college days:

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DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!
An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out & stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes & thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.*

*"It is sweet & meet (fitting) to die for one's country."

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1918 -- 100,000 German sailors mutiny at Kiel & seize control of all ships.


1921 -- Switzerland: Victorine Brocher-Rouchy, French militant anarchist, dies (1838-1921), in Lausanne. Participant in Paris Commune, married Gustave Brocher (who wrote reminiscences published by Jean Grave).
[Details / context]



1922 -- Egypt: Curses!? British archaeologist Howard Carter & his workmen discover the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Tombs of Kings. Was there a curse? Irrefutable fact: all who "broke the sacred seal" are now dead.



1924 -- US: Nellie Rayloe Ross elected first female Governor of a US state (Wyoming).


1931 -- Luigi Galleani, Italian anarchico, dies of a heart attack, at the age of 70.

"When we talk about property, State, masters, government, laws, courts, & police, we say only that we don't want any of them."

— Luigi Galleani, The End of Anarchism?

1931 -- Jazz leader Buddy Bolden dies.



1933 -- US: Three thousand farmers demonstrate in Neilsville, Wisconsin. The action frees jailed leaders of a milk strike.

"Four legs good, Two legs bad."

— George Orwell, Animal Farm

During the Depression, desperate farmers attempt to raise ruinously low milk prices set by large dairy plants. Their preferred tactic is halting milk production. Led by the Wisconsin Milk Pool, they gather on roads leading to Wisconsin cities, & dump tons of fresh milk. They also stop trains loaded with milk bound for Chicago.

Violence erupts across the state & a striker on a road near Madison is shot to death. To break the strike, Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Governor Albert Schmedeman calls out the National Guard.

http://www.cowswithguns.com/Cowstory.html



1936 -- Spain: Four leaders of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT [Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo], the largest union in the country, bag their principles during the Spanish Revolution & join the "Popular Front" government as Cabinet Ministers, helping reduce "social revolution" to just another "civil war."

[Details / context]

1936 -- Spain: Juan Peiro Belis (1887-1942) appointed Minister of Industry in the Republican government under Caballero Largo.

With the defeat in Spain, Peiro takes refuge in France in 1939, but is turned over to Franco by Pétain's fascist government & is shot in 1942 after refusing to collaborate with the Franco government.

[Details / context]

1939 -- US: First air-conditioned car is exhibited in Chicago.


1946 -- Naked Came I? Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe lives.



1948 -- UN General Assembly rejects USSR's proposal to outlaw nuclear weapons.



1954 -- Sweden: Stig Dagerman, (1923-1954) 31, dies. Playwright, novelist, poet, anarkosyndikalistiska. Created the literary review "40-tal ," & wrote for the libertarian newspaper "Arbetaren." Wrote The Snake (1945), & Island of the Condemned. His themes were precursors to the existentialists. Deeply pessimistic & suffering writer's block, he committed suicide: "Our need for consolation is impossible to satisfy."

HERE RESTS
A SWEDISH AUTHOR
FALLEN FOR NOTHING
THE CRIME WAS INNOCENCE
FORGET HIM OFTEN

By the time he was 26 Dagerman was editor of the Syndicalist youth paper & author of four novels, four plays, a book of short stories, a travel journal & hundreds of poems & pieces of journalism.

“I believe that man’s natural enemy is the mega-organization
because it robs him of the vital necessity to feel responsible for his fellow-man,
/it/ restricts his possibilities to show solidarity & love
& instead turns him into an agent of power,
that for the moment may be directed against others,
but ultimately is directed against himself.”

From “Do we believe in man?” 1950, Stig Dagerman
Essäer och journalistik, transl. Lo Dagerman



http://hem.passagen.se/iblis/dagerman.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stig_Dagerman
http://www.fondation-besnard.org/article.php3?id_article=227
http://web.archive.org/...littlebluelight.com/lblphp/intro.php?ikey=6

1956 -- Hungarian Revolt crushed by Soviet troops in Budapest. 200,000 Russian troops attack anti-Stalinist uprising in this second invasion of Hungary. New pro-Russian government installed. Civilians set up barricades along all the major roads leading to Budapest. Soldiers & Hungarian National Guard troops participate in the resistance. Only Communist Party functionaries & security police fight along with the Russians in the name of the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

'I taught myself to embroider during the hostilities when there was nothing else to do but wait to die while the Soviet tanks fired on our apartment building.' — Eniko Farkas

http://recollectionbooks.com/anow/history/hungary.html
http://www.nyfolklore.org/pubs/voices/voisu98/border.html

The Knights

T H E Y have remained unaltered like nature,
not capable of a new inspiration,
happy to make outward renunciations
but without inward mutability.
They're in no hurry to understand,
they don't very much want to understand,
still ornamented in the idiot glitter
of old-fashioned armour, their old success.
And watching cowardice in place of courage
shoulder to shoulder in its careful ranks
I see the origin of this infection,
and trace the destiny of this obsession.
The mighty horses have worn down to tatters.
The knights are not the boys of the old days:
subject to serious infirmity,
terror of honesty, terror of battle.


— Yevtushenko

1956 --

Red Army tanks had pulled out of Hungary, as demanded by the workers' councils. It seemed as if the people had won. But today the tanks return. Having regrouped beyond the borders, 15 Russian divisions, now with 6,000 tanks, fall upon the Hungarian people. All major cities are pounded by artillery fire. In Budapest, the workers' districts bear the brunt of the assault. The people fight back as best they can, but the entire city is shelled continuously for four days & soon lays in ruin. After 10 days of terrible fighting, with thousands dead & injured, the people finally give in. Guerrilla bands fight on throughout 1957 but the last workers' councils are abolished on November 17th. Strikes & demonstrations continue until 1959.

See Peter Fryer, The Hungarian Tragedy; Andy Anderson, Hungary '56; & The Hungarian Workers' Revolution by the Syndicalist Workers' Federation.

On Workers' Councils, see
http://web.archive.org/...liberty/hungary-rev.html
http://www.notbored.org/councils.html
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/May68docs.htm

1958 -- US: B-47 carrying nuclear weapons crashes near Abilene, Texass.


1960 -- Belgium: First session of the Situationist International's Central Council in Alsemberg, near Brussels, November 4-6th. Participants: Guy Debord, Attila Kotànyi, Jørgen Nash, Helmut Sturm & Maurice Wyckaert (Asger Jorn absent).

Publication of an English language situationist journal, The Situationist Times, planned for 1961 (a project only realized by Jacqueline de Jong after her departure from the SI). No person collaborating with the journal Arguments from 1 January 1961 onwards will be considered a situationist under any circumstance at any point in the future. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/chronology/chronology.html | [Situationist Resources]

1963 -- The Beatles appear at the Royal Command Performances at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London before a glittering audience which includes the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret & Lord Snowden. John Lennon says "Will people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry."


1966 -- Beginning date of Robert Hellenga novel The Sixteen Pleasures.


1966 -- Italy: Una alluvione colpisce varie regioni dell'Italia centro-settentrionale. Decenni di incuria e di pessima amministrazione del territorio lasciato nelle mani fameliche dello stato e dei suoi speculatori sono alla base del disastro. Come conseguenza di ciò gli illusi o quelli in malafede chiederanno più stato e otterranno altre alluvioni e altri disastri.
Source: [Crimini e Misfatti]


1969 -- US: Storage tank in Sewaren, New Jersey ruptured, releasing 8,400,000 gallons of oil.


1971 -- US: Chinook tribe awarded $75,000 by Indian Claims Commission for Southwest Washington lands stolen in 19th Century, but has a previous 1912 settlement deducted from the award.




1972 -- US: Communist Party headquarters firebombed, New York City.


1977 -- United Nations votes South African arms embargo.
http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?include=docs/misc/2010/umzabalazo.html


1977 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader CIA Director Helms pleads no contest to lying to the US Senate about Chile.
http://recollectionbooks.com/cs/index.htm#chile


1982 -- Maverick Canadian classical musician Glenn Gould dies, Toronto, Ontario.



1982 -- Rayford Logan dies, Washington, DC. Educator, historian, & author of numerous books on African-Americans, including the Dictionary of American Negro Biography. Recipient of 1980 NAACP Spingarn Medal.


1984 -- Nicaragua: The nation holds first free elections in 56 years; Sandinistas win 63%. US has a heart attack.


1988 -- US: Fools Rush In? At O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Acting President Ronnie Reagan signs a measure providing for US participation in an anti-genocide treaty signed by Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Buck Truman in 1948.


1988 -- US: Prisoner B.C. Kimberlin is placed in solitary confinement until after US presidential elections for claiming he sold marijuana to rightwing darling & vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle.


1989 -- Germany: 500,000 demonstrate in East Berlin.


1991 -- US: Check This Out? The Ronnie Reagan presidential library (!) opens, Simi Valley, Calif. Can't remember which cue card it holds.
http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/reagan.htm


1993 -- Send Up? Rush Limbaugh book See, I Told You So goes on sale. Pop rightwing radio talking weenie. A rather pompous hypocrite often delivering an anti-drug message. In 2003 he is exposed as a drug addict when caught in police sting.

If people are doing drugs, they ought to be accused, they ought to be convicted, they ought to sent up.

— Rush Limbaugh

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4976049414140271175&q=rush+limbaugh&hl=en

1994 -- Robert De Niro movie "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" opens, US.


1995 -- Israel: Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is fatally shot minutes after attending a peace rally held in Tel Aviv's Kings Square.



1998 -- US: Washington State voters, inspired by the fine artwork of Recollection Books & Daily Bleed's own SaintMeisterJim, pass medical marijuana initiative I-692. Pundits thought chances nil, after defeat of a similar bill in 1997, failing to comprehend the tremendous impact his fine artwork — produced for the non-existent Marijuana Liberation Front (MLF) — would have.
http://hempfest.org/


1998 -- Poet, Irish Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney leads valediction at Ted Hughes' funeral.

"You have to go back to the death of Dylan Thomas or Lorca to find a time which so expresses that moment when a poet's death is expressed as a breach in nature".

Heaney read the Dylan Thomas poem, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," & two of Hughes's finest works, "Go Fishing" & "The Day He Died."

2001 -- US: The "Los Angeles Times" reports 1,147 people have been detained in connection with the September 11 bombings, none of them charged & most still held in secret.


2001 -- "Harry Potter & the Socerer's Stone" premiers, UK.


2008 -- US: Barack Obama wins the presidential election, becoming the first African American president.

3225 --

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"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."

— Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)
http://www.philipkdick.com/

4500 --

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