Last Word Blog: Daily Bleed for December 21st, A Radical Anarchist Daybook

Our Daily Bleed...

Mary is seven. Homer

Is her favorite author.

. . . She says, “Aren’t those gods
Terrible? All they do is

Fight like those angels in Milton

& play tricks on the poor Greeks

& Trojans. I like Aias

& Odysseus best. They are

Lots better than those silly

Gods.”

— Kenneth Rexroth,

fishing while his daughter reads Homer

DECEMBER 21

CARL VAN VECHTEN

American avant-garde writer, photographer, journalist.

WINTER SOLSTICE (11:12 UTC).

http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_va.html?a=usxx&c=holidays&sc=yule&id=1900

http://www.knowth.com/winter-solstice.htm

First of the month of Nivose (snowy) in the French revolutionary calendar.

CHAOS DAY. Eat wontons.

England: ST. THOMAS' DAY. A Tradition of "Thomasing," begging gifts, door-to-door.

WICCAN YULE.

CHINESE FEAST OF WINTER.

BAD TO THE BONE DAY.

END OF THE MAYAN LONG CYCLE: 13 bactuns, which is 13*144000 days or 5125.26 years (roughly).

Ahhhhh, the good ol' days! We thought they'd never end....

1375 -- Giovanni Boccaccio dies at 62 in Certaldo, Italy.

1549 -- Margaret of Angoulême dies in Odos-Bigorre. Queen consort of Henry II of Navarre, a patron of humanities & religious reformers & an author. Her most important work, Heptaméron, is constructed on the lines of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, (who died on the same day), consisting of 72 tales (out of a planned 100) told by a group of travelers delayed by a flood on their return from a Pyrenean spa. The stories, illustrating the triumphs of virtue, honor, & quick-wittedness, & the frustration of vice & hypocrisy, contain a strong element of satire directed against licentious & grasping monks & clerics.

1620 -- Forefathers' day celebrates landing at Plymouth Rock.

Pilgrims first land at Plymouth Rock. It's not a very big rock, but then they weren't very big Pilgrims. The Mayflower, with a contingent of Puritan separatists from the Church of England, landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts. It had set out 15 September from Plymouth, England; its original destination was Virginia.

1790 --  US: Samuel Slater's thread-spinning factory goes into production, Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The beginning of the Industrial Revolution in America. The workers at his machines are 4 to 10 years old.

1799 -- William Wordsworth & his devoted sister, Dorothy, take possession of Dove Cottage at Grasmere, Westmorland.

1804 -- British statesman / novelist, Benjamin Disraeli lives, London. His novels are closely related to his political career which includes two stints as prime minister (1868 & 1874-80).

"Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret."

1805 -- Manuel Bocage, dies in Lisbon. Portuguese neoclassical lyric poet who dissipated his energies in a stormy life.

1845 -- India: Battle of Ferozeshah takes place, during the first Sikh War.

1858 -- Anthropologist Franz Boas lives, Minden, Germany.

1859 -- Gustave Kahn, French poet/literary theorist who claims inventing vers libre, lives in Metz.

1861 -- US: Schooner Potter arrives at Neah Bay, Washington, bringing annuity goods for the Makah — hoes, sickles, pitchforks, & Mexican spurs — much to the amazement of the fishing & whaling Makah tribe, who converted them to fish hooks, knives, & arrowheads.

1865 -- US: Illegal Executive Order (we know, it's redundant) removes lands from the Oregon Coast Indian Reservation, cutting the territory in half.

1866 --  US: Crazy Horse & Sioux Indians defeat US cavalry, Ft. Philip Kearny, Wyoming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse

1866 --

MAUD GONNE, Patron Saint 2005-06, 2009-10
Firebrand Irish hermeticist, revolutionist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maud_Gonne

1872 -- Phileas Fogg completes around world trip, & wins his wager. So says Jules Verne in a book published in 1873.

http://www.alcade.net/me/junk/e3_80days.htm

http://epguides.com/djk/JulesVerne/works.shtml

1872 -- Shaggy?: American novelist/short-story writer Payson Terhune lives, Newark, New Jersey. Known mainly for his dog stories.

1872 -- US: The Battle of Lost River, the first hostilities between the US Government & Captain Jack's band of Modoc Indians.

Today 50 Modoc Indians hold off 329 US troops in the battle of Land's Ranch. The Modoc Medicine Man, Curley Headed Doctor, places a magical rope around Captain Jack's stronghold in the Lava Beds of Northern California. Foggy conditions, green troups, fatigue & inept leadership all played a role.

The victory convinces Captain Jack's Modocs that their magic is strong enough to protect them against the white man's bullets. The two sides fought at a distance of about 50 yards in one spot. No Modocs were killed, 24 soliders were killed & at least another dozen were wounded.

Source: Thanks to daver@flag.blackened.net who typed & provided this text to the Daily Bleed

http://ceres.ca.gov/geo_area/counties/Modoc/landmarks.html

1879 -- Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Uncle Joseph Stalin, Russian dictator, lives; murdered 11,000,000.

We live, not feeling the country beneath us,
Our speech inaudible ten steps away,
But where they're up to half a conversation —
They'll speak of the Kremlin mountain man.

His thick fingers are fat like worms...

— Osip Mandelstam, We Live, Not Feeling, 1934?

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture10.html

1892 -- Author Rebecca West lives, London.

1899 --

"Take me this way: a stray guest, a bird of passage, splashing with salt-rimed wings through a brief moment of your life — a rude & blundering bird, used to large airs & great spaces, unaccustomed to the amenities of confined existence."

— Jack London to Anna Strunsky, December 21, 1899;

first published in The Masses, July 1917

http://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/walling/london.htm

http://london.sonoma.edu/Images/search.cgi?Caption=Strunsky&type=and

1902 -- Black surrealist artist, the High Sheriff of Hell, musician Peetie Wheatstraw lives, Ripley, Tennessee. See below, 1942.

1903 -- Lawrence Treat lives. Pseudonym of Lawrence Arthur Goldstone; American detective writer, frequently called the "father" of modern police procedural novel, although he refused the honor.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/treat.htm

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/eyes.html

1905 -- British novelist (12-volume series of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time) Anthony Powell lives, London.

http://www.anthonypowell.org.uk/

1907 --

Chile: Massacre of workers, women & children in Santa María, Iquique, during a strike headed by anarchists. (2000 & 3600 dead)

SANTA MARÍA SCHOOL SLAUGHTER

A strike headquarters was established at the Santa Maria School. Overall there were around 4,500 strikers & supporters in the school & another 1,500 or so camping in tents around the square.

The army was called in by the bosses, martial law declared, & at 3.45 pm the slaughter began...

[Details / context]

1909 -- Denmark: University of Copenhagen rejects Cook's claim that he was first to North Pole. It was obvious he'd cooked the books.

1911 -- France: First use of get-away-car in bank robbery, by the anarchist Bonnot Gang ("Bande à Bonnot").

Bonnot Gang, a group of anarchist bandits, pulls off the first bank robbery using an automobile, in broad daylight, in the midst of a populous Paris district.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnot_gang

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Bonnot%20gang

http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/illegalistsDougImrie.htm

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064066/

http://durru.chez.com/bonnot/bonnot.htm

http://www.mindspring.com/~acheslow/AuntMary/bonnot/bonnot.html

1913 -- US: The first crossword puzzle is published, in the New York World (with 32 clues).

1916 -- US: Emma Tenayuca lives. Labor militant, leader in the Texan pecan shellers strike.

EMMA TENAYUCA

Firebrand leader of the San Antonio pecan-shellers strike, hounded out of the state by Brave Texicans & the KKK.

Blacklisted Texan labor leader, Hispanic rights pioneer. Patron Saint, 2010

1916 -- Australia: Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) outlawed.

1917 -- Heinrich Boll lives, Cologne. German novelist/playwright, social critic, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.

Boll's works reflected his central concern with the abject failure of State, Church & Home.

... show details

1917 --  Russia: The Bolsheviks decriminalize sex between men.

1917 --  US: The Russian warship "Shilka" unexpectedly stops at Seattle, causing consternation.

Seattle Radical Timeline

1919 -- US: At dawn, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman & 247 radical aliens set sail on the S.S. Buford ("The Soviet Ark"), deported to Russia from the "Land of the Free."

Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader J. Edgar Hoover advances his cross-dressing secret police career by implementing to the fullest extent possible the government's plan to deport all foreign-born radicals.

[Details / context]

1921 -- US: Supreme Court rules labor injunctions & picketing unconstitutional.

1924 -- Germany: After five years of prison for his participation in the Republic of the Workers Councils, anarchist Erich Mühsam is amnestied. Thousands of workers turn out for his release. German anarchist poet, murdered by the Nazis at the Orianenburg concentration camp.

1925 --  Eisenstein's silent movie The Battleship Potemkin premiers, Moskva.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battleship_Potemkin

1936 -- William Butler Yeats explains why he excluded the great war poet Wilfred Owen ("Anthem for Doomed Youth") from The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: "unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper."

http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owena.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Owen

1936 -- Spain: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Uncle Joe Stalin offers advice to Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Largo Caballero.

http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/spain/sp001780/chap1.html

1937 -- Spain: First Republican soldiers are entering Teruel.

... show details

1938 -- Italy: Una nuova legge sul collocamento prevede che lo stato provveda alla sistemazione dei lavoratori disoccupati. Siamo all'apogeo dello stato padre, padrone, padreterno.

Source: [Crimini e Misfatti]

1940 -- Mother of Invention, Fug, Frank Zappa lives, Baltimore, Maryland.

Zappa looks down at the audience & declares the event "a load of pompous hokum...All year long you people have manufactured this crap, now for one night you're gonna have to listen to it!"

Zappa later remarks, "We played the ugliest shit we could ... That's what they expected us to play."

http://www.zappa.com/

1940 -- Author F. Scott Fitzgerald, 44, dies of heart attack in Los Angeles.

http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/index.html

1942 -- Black surrealist artist, musician Peetie Wheatstraw, the "Devil's Son-In-Law," dies, East St. Louis, Illinois.

See The Devil's Son-In-Law: The Story of Peetie Wheatstraw & His Songs by Paul Garon.

http://www.cascadeblues.org/History/PeetieWheatstraw.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peetie_Wheatstraw

1944 -- France: The anarchiste paper Le Libertaire, originally founded in 1895 by Sébastien Faure & Louise Michel, then as the organ of the l’Union Anarchiste (1920-1939), resumes publishing once again following the defeat of the Nazis.

http://www.ephemanar.net/novembre16.html#libertaire

http://fra.anarchopedia.org/index.php/Presse_Anarchiste

1948 -- "The girls lined up for the annual relay of the Young Communist League Cup."

"Miss Krapivnitskaya, the fastest of them all, was at the tape. Just as the starter was about to fire his gun, a man on a motorcycle snatched up Miss Krapivnitskaya & sped away. He turned out to be the coach of a rival team. But Miss Krapivnitskaya refused to surrender.

She broke away, dashed toward the river, jumped into a boat, & began rowing. She reached the opposite bank & began a race against time to reach the track before the race began.

Miss Krapivnitskaya lost the race, but she & her team were promised justice."

"RELAY MISCHIEF": MOSCOW, International Herald Tribune

1952 -- World ends, according to the entity Sananda. (Well, some still claim it did...)

1953 -- US: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Atomic Development Project during WWII, told that Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Eisenhower wanted "a blank wall" placed between him & secret data, pending a security review on charges that he was a Communist symp.

1954 -- US: Dr. Sam Sheppard's wife Marilyn is murdered. He pins the crime on the "one armed man." They pin him. Inspires numerous TV shows & movies with mysterious one-armed men.

1954 --  Bertolt Brecht receives the Stalin Peace Prize in Moskva.

http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/adorno18-brecht5.html

1959 -- Spain: Antonia Maymón (b.1881) dies. Militant activist, as a rationalist teacher, naturista, libertarian, & as feminist. Maymón collaborated in numerous congresses & publications, such asGeneración Consciente, & was a founder of the FAI.

http://www.alasbarricadas.org/ateneovirtual/index.php?title=21_de_diciembre#Acontecimientos

1962 -- US: Pig in a Poke?: American interests pay Cuba $53 million worth of medicine & supplies to free 1,113 prisoners held since Bay of Pigs invasion.

1964 --  SciFi author Theodore Sturgeon's "How to Forget Baseball" (how even a good person can be corrupted by watching violence) is published in Sports Illustrated.

1964 -- American avant-garde writer, photographer, journalist Carl Van Vechten dies, NYC. Patron of the Harlem Renaissance & the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Van_Vechten

1965 -- Dec 21-Jan 6, Americans Tom Hayden, Staughton Lynd & Herbert Aptheker visit Hanoi, North Vietnam.

1965 --

& 1966: Situationist International.

DEC 21, 1965

The Class Struggles in Algeria, SI poster/leaflet distributed in Algeria; reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #10, Paris.

DEC 21, 1966

Exclusions of Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray & Donald Nicholson-Smith, English section.

"Vient de paraître" (Coming Soon), flyposter of détourned comics announcing the publication of The Society of the Spectacle &The Revolution of Everyday Life.

Resignation of Ndjangani Lungela, French section.

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/chronology/chronology.html | [Situationist Resources]

1967 -- US: The Graduate, a film directed by Mike Nichols, is released. Stars Dustin Hoffman, & with sound track by Simon & Garfunkel.

1967 -- Italy: Il generale Giorgio Manes, vice-comandante dei carabinieri, conferma, durante il suo interrogatorio al processo De Lorenzo-l'Espresso, lo svolgimento di una riunione, il 26 giugno 1964, tra il generale De Lorenzo e i comandanti delle tre divisioni Pastrengo, Podgora e Ogaden, per la messa in opera del piano Solo.

Source: [Crimini e Misfatti]

1969 -- US: 700 supporters visit jailed Vietnam War resisters, Allenwood Federal Penitentiary, Pennsylvania.

http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm

http://web.archive.org/...artgonepostal.com/viet.html

1970 -- US: Elvis Presley asks Pres. Nixon to name him a special anti-drug agent! In what becomes quite the photo-op, Elvis Presley goes to the White House to volunteer his services to Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Dick M Nixon on fighting the nation's drug problems. He gives Nixon a chrome-plated Colt .45 while Tricky Dick gives him, fittingly, a Narcotics Bureau badge.

... show details

1974 --  US: NY Times reports massive, illegal CIA domestic surveillance operations against the antiwar movement under the Nixon administration.

1976 -- "Hi Nabor Week," whose purpose is to spread good cheer to those confined in institutions, begins.

1978 -- US: Police in Des Plaines, Illinois, arrest John W. Gacy, Jr. for his clowning around.

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/notorious/gacy/gacy_1.html

1978 -- France: Roger Caillois — philosopher, anthropologist, natural scientist, renegade Surrealist — dies.

His idiosyncratic work brought together literary criticism, sociology, & philosophy by focusing on subjects as diverse as gems & the sacred. Instrumental in introducing Latin American authors to the French public (Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, et al). Spent WWII exiled in Argentina, & active in fighting the spread of Nazism in Latin America as an editor & author of anti-Nazi periodicals. With Georges Bataille & others attempted to shift the focus of Surrealism from the dream life of little old rich ladies to the social arena.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Caillois

1980 -- Marc Connelly dies in New York. American playwright, journalist, teacher, actor, director, member of the Algonquin Round Table group of writers.

1986 -- US Senator Laxalt announces Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Acting President Ronnie Reagan "is going to be in high visibility" in coming days "to demonstrate to the country that he's fully in charge."

Says a White House aide of Laxalt's statement, "When we heard it, we all cracked up."

"The White House has always attracted the mentally ill."

— Secret Service agent Vincent Charles

1987 -- US: Three white teenagers convicted in New York City of manslaughter in 1986 death of a young black man, Michael Griffith. After entering a restaurant in Howard Beach, he was chased by about a dozen whites, ran onto a highway to escape & was killed.

1988 -- Scotland: Pan Am "Flight 103" explodes over Lockerbie, killing 270.

1989 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader VP Quayle sends out 30,000 Xmas cards with word beacon spelled beakon.

Mars is essentially in the same orbit... somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, & water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.

— Vice President of the United States, Dan Quayle

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dan_Quayle

1992 -- Blues guitarist Albert King, Born Under a Bad Sign, dies of a heart attack. Master of the single-string attack....

http://www.mswritersandmusicians.com/musicians/albert-king.html

http://www.cascadeblues.org/History/AlbertKing.htm

http://www.albertking.org/

1993 --  Russia: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Boris Yeltsin abolishes the KGB (Now for the CIA & the rest of the alphabet soup).

1994 -- Liberia: Warlords sign cease-fire pact.

2001 --  US: Larry Mayes, 52, is released from an Indiana prison after serving 21 years for a rape he didn't commit; he becomes the 100th innocent American convict freed by DNA evidence. Justice is indeed blind.

2004 -- Anti-Terrorist Act? The US pressures Iceland not to grant Bobby Fischer sanctuary.

2005 -- Italy: Paolo di Nella street in Rome, named after a fascist, is re-named Viale Timur Kacharava, to the memory of a young anti-fascist murdered November 13 in St.Petersburg, Russia.

[Details / context]

2007 -- Lakota activists declare secession from US. A delegation claiming to represent the Lakota Indian Tribe, have signed a document stating that the tribe withdraws & / or cancels all treaties with the US & formally establishes independence from the country. "We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children," said activist Phyllis Young, who helped to organize a 1977 conference in Geneva on "indigenous rights."

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Lakota_activists_declare_secession_from_US

2012 -- Oh woe, oh woe! So much xmas shopping done gone to waste!

3000 --

SAPPHO 1997 PATRON SAINT

The original Lesbian poet.

3001 --

NEGRO:

Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed — not by its residents — Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.

— from The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan

3002 --

"Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle ... mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle."

       — Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid

4000 --

On this day December 21 anarchists Peter Kropotkin, Bonnot Gang, Erich Mühsam, Libertaire