Highlights of the Daily Bleed, a Radical Literary History and Anarchist Day Book

JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER DAY


1667 -- Jonathan Swift, critic, lives, Dublin, Ireland. Reads the Book of Job aloud on his birthday, perhaps because hisGulliver's Travels is the only work for which he ever receives payment: 200 pounds. 
See Kenneth Rexroth, More Classics Revisited. 
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Swift
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jswift.htm 


1835 -- American humorist & radical social critic Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) lives, Florida, Missouri (sic). Author of The War Prayer.

Rudyard Kipling, a fan, thinks "Cervantes was a relation of his"; another big fan, Bill Faulkner calls him "a hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe".

Better is Kenneth Rexroth; see, for example, Classics Revisited or Assays.

MARK TWAIN
Attributed his long life & good health to whiskey, cigars, & pocket billiards. Jubilee Calendar Saint 1999

Mark was separated at birth from his evil twin brother, Mindy, by their mother who vows, "Never the twains shall meet!"

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mtwain.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5jarRec3qo 

1900 -- Irish wit, playwright, anarchist & gay pioneer Oscar Wilde 46, dies in Paris, France. Dying in an apartment, Oscar takes one last look at the world he is leaving behind & declares,

"This wallpaper is killing me; one of us has got to go."

A witty death is as sublime as a birth.

Born in Dublin on October 16, 1854. Poet, writer, gay wit, publishes in 1890 The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which is characterized by its libertarian nonconformism. In 1895, he is condemned to two years hard labor for his homosexuality.

Wrote "De profundis" there, exalting revolutionary action & political agitation. This small book was not published in its entirety until 44 years later.

"All authority is quite degrading.
It degrades those who exercise it, & degrades those over whom it is exercised."

http://struggle.ws/ws98/ws53_wilde.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde

Wilde had been charged three times with indecency, specifically "the seduction & corruption of young men." Evidence admitted against him included testimony about the fecal stains on his sheets.

"I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art & culture of my age...The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, & philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men & the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder...I treated Art as the supreme reality, & life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth & legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, & all existence in an epigram." 1930 -- US: Rabble-rouser, labor activist Mother Jones dies, age 100, Silver Spring, Maryland. MOTHER JONES, Patron Saint 2005-2010 "I'm no lady, I'm a hell-raiser!" Labor radical, agitator. "One of the boys said I was looking well. Of course I am. There is going to be a racket & I am going to be in it!"        — Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, 1910 http://www.johnshepler.com/articles/mojo.html Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) & a militant leader of miners & other union workers, dies at the age of 100. She is buried in the Mount Olive, Illinois cemetery. Jones was an organizer or "walking delegate" for the United Mine Workers (UMW), traveling from town to town, living in the homes of miners who sometimes risked their jobs to shelter her. Stories of her bravado are legendary. When she & 3,000 women were released by a militia after being held all night in McAdoo, Pennsylvania, they marched straight to the hotel housing the soldiers & ate their breakfast. Into her 90s, Mother Jones still roamed through the hills of West Virginia, encouraging miners to organize. When a monument is dedicated to her in 1936, some 50,000 miners attend the ceremony. 1936 -- US: "Yippie" leader Abbot (Abbie) Hoffman, aka "Free," lives, Worcester, Massachusetts. Wrote the philosophicalSteal This Book, & the anarchist dance classic, Square Dancing in the Ice Age. Consummate joiner (Chicago 7, Viet Nam War protester, etc.). "Confusion is mightier than the sword."        — Abbie Hoffman Steal this Website, http://www.hayduke.com/  "Sacred cows make the best hamburger." — Abbie Hoffman Daily Bleed Saint 2003-4 Steal this Calendar! "Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit."        — Abbie Hoffman, Soon to be a Major Motion Picture 1969 -- US: 600 Native Americans occupying Alcatraz. 1994 -- Guy Debord dies, Champot, Upper Loire, France.  Member of the Situationist International, writer, filmmaker, critic of Spectacular, Too-Late Capitalism, best known for his book The Society of the Spectacle, popularized with the May Uprising of 1968. His ashes are scattered on the point of ile de la Cite, Paris. In the decor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things & their prices — graffiti, May 1968 'In a society where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." "The world at once present & absent which the spectacle makes visible is the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived. The world of the commodity is thus shown for what it is, because its movement is identical to the estrangement of men among themselves & in relation to their global product." http://www.nothingness.org/SI/debord/ T he spectacle is ideology par excellence, because it exposes & manifests in its fullness the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, servitude & negation of real life.       — Guy Debord, La société du spectacle http://www.bopsecrets.org http://members.optusnet.com.au/~rkeehan/ http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/ http://jeanzin.fr/ecorevo/politic/situs.htm http://www.mital-u.ch/Dada/index.html http://www.reocities.com/CapitolHill/6824/debord.htm We are all “undesirables” — graffiti, May 1968 Then appeared for the first time the disquieting figures of the “Situationist International.” How many are there? Where do they come from? No one knows. — Le Républicain Lorra  1999 -- US: WTO (World Trade Organization) meets in Seattle, Washington amid massive ongoing protests, cab strikes. The Emperor wears no clothes. "Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system." — Dorothy Day "The masters, whether they be priests or kings or capitalists, when they want to exploit you, the first thing they have to do is demoralize you, & they demoralize you very simply by kicking you in the nuts." — Kenneth Rexroth "There are no limits to creativity. There is no end to subversion." — Raoul Vaneigem , The Revolution of Everyday Life 2009 -- Serbia: Internationally prominent cybertextual pioneer novelist, poet, historian, & candidate for Nobel Prize in Literature, Milorad Pavic dies, Belgrade. Author of Dictionary of the Khazars.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milorad_Pavi%C4%87_%28writer%29 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/dec/17/milorad-pavic-obituary