Daily Bleed Radical Literary History for July 22nd

Our Daily Bleed...

JULY 22

ERRICO MALATESTA
Italian anarcho-communist theorist, editor, prisoner, much-feared by fascists.

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SPOONERISMS DAY.
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/Spooner/

FESTIVAL OF BOREDOM & REVERIES.

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147 -- [5 BC] The day the Sun stood still according to Professor C.A. Totten's 1896 calculations.



1246 -- John of Plato Carpini arrives at Karakorum, for inauguration of Guyuk as KaKhan.


1376 -- Pied Piper of Hamelin does his legendary thing. Must have had so much fun doing it back on June 26, decided to do it again.



1515 -- Greenwich Village?: Alliance formed between the Holy Roman Empire & Bohemia.


1587 -- US: Hello, I Must Be Going?: Second "Lost Colony of Roanoke," consisting of 91 men, 17 women & 9 children, established on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina, replacing the first "Lost Colony," which disappeared without a trace. Three years later, when a third group arrived, the island is again found completely deserted.


1598 -- William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is entered on the Stationers' Register.
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/works.html


1627 -- 2 Comps & You're Out?: Execution of the Compte de Boutteville & the Compte de Rosmadec des Chapelles for the death of the Marquis de Bussy d'Amboise in a duel.


1756 -- New World: Friendly Association for Peace founded, Philadelphia. Yup.


1816 -- Percy Bysshe Shelley registers at a Mont Blanc hotel, giving his occupation (in Greek) as "Democrat, Philanthropi, Atheist" & his destination as "L'Enfer."
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/296.html


1822 -- Austria: Botanist Gregor Mendel lives. His work, beginning in 1856, crossing different varieties of garden peas, is the basis for the modern science of genetics & heredity. A monk who did most of his experiments in obscurity in his monastery garden. Died largely unknown, & it was only around the turn of the century that his papers were discovered & botanists began confirming his theories.


1860 -- Frederick Rolfe, better known as "Baron Corvo," lives (1860-1913). Wrote Hadrian the Seventh (1904), his most autobiographical novel, or rather, a fantasy autobiography in which an obscure literary Englishman is elected pope & moves forward with an ambitious & eccentric programme to remake the world in his image. Had a penchant for young gondoliers.
http://www.fact-index.com/f/fr/frederick_rolfe.html


1863 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Kit Carson begins his campaign of extermination against the Navajo indians.


1876 -- US: Workingman's Party forms, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.


1877 -- US: General Strike in St. Louis.
[Details / context]


1882 -- Brazil: José Oiticica (1882-1957) lives. Lawyer, student of medicine, teacher, & an influential figure in the Brazilian anarchist & labor movement.

Grandfather of the avantgarde artist, performance artist & anarquista, Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980).

[Details / context]

1886 -- Hella Wuolijoki lives. Estonian-born Finnish writer, prominent playwright, Marxist friend of Maxim Gorky & Bertold Brecht. Elected to parliament, successful business woman (timber & oil), director of Finnish Broadcasting Company.

Wrote 16 plays, one the basis for the Oscar-winning film The Farmer's Daughter . Used pseudonym Juhani Tervapää, partly because her play, Law & Order (1933) provoked polemic in the right-wing press for its leftist sympathies.

During Brecht's exile in Finland, she coauthored Herr Puntila und Sein Knecht Matti with him. Her Niskavuori plays remain among the most often performed in Finnish theatre.

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

1886 -- US: In San Francisco a brewery workers union formed last month among mostly socialist German workers, to resist the prevailing 16-18 hour workday. Today breweries admitted defeat & gave in to union demands for FREE BEER, the closed shop, freedom to live anywhere for brewery workers (who had, until now, typically lived in the brewery itself), a 10-hour day, six-day week, & a board of arbitration.


1892 -- US: Alexander Berkman attempts to assassinate the despised Henry Clay Frick, responsible for the deaths of nine miners killed by Pinkerton thugs on July 6, during Homestead Strike.

Berkman's attempt fails. Emma Goldman is suspected of, but not charged with, complicity; police raid her apartment & seize her papers. Debate within the labor movement about the effectiveness of Berkman's action follows; Johann Most — once a fiery advocate of direct action, attentats, etc. — denounces Berkman & questions his motives. As public antagonism to Berkman's act mounts, Emma temporarily goes into hiding.

• Anarchist Encyclopedia entry
• Berkman, Alexander PRISON MEMOIRS OF AN ANARCHIST. (NY: Mother Earth Publishing, 1920). 2nd printing. 512p.
• Alexander Berkman, The Russian Tragedy
• Alexander Berkman, The Kronstadt Rebellion
• http://struggle.ws/ws99/ws56_berkman.html
  
  Daniel Bell recalls reading Alexander Berkman, http://www.pbs.org/arguing/nyintellectuals_bell_2.html
  http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/goldman/frick.html

1898 -- Stephen Vincent Benét lives. American poet, novelist, writer of short stories, best known for John Brown's Body, a long epic poem on the Civil War, which he wrote in France.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/sbenet.htm


1898 -- Alexander Calder lives, Lawnton, Pennsylvania. His parents & grandparents were all sculptors. Grew up liking gadgets & mechanical things, creating tiny wood & wire animal sculptures, which he fashioned into a miniature circus. Experimented with motorized versions of his sculptures, which the artist Marcel Duchamp named "mobiles." Inspires mobile phones, right?


1910 -- US: 20 blacks lynched by mob in Palestine, Texass.



1912 -- Charles Ostyn (1823-1912) dies. French communard & anarchist.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Charles+Ostyn




1913 -- Switzerland: André Bösiger lives. Member of the ligue d'action du bâtiment (L.A.B), & associated withLuigi Bertoni ("Réveil Anarchiste") & Lucien Tronchet. A founder of the CIRA (Centre International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme).

... show more

1914 -- Charles Maurin (1856-1914) dies. French painter & engraver
Friend of Toulouse-Lautrec, collaborates in "La Revue Blanche" directed by Félix Fénéon, & initiates Felix Vallotton to engraving & anarchism.

(Lithograph of Maurin by Toulouse-Lautrec)
http://www.ephemanar.net/avril01.html#maurinch

1916 -- US: Bomb explodes during a "Preparedness Day" parade in San Francisco, killing 10 & injuring 40. Tom Mooney, a labor organizer, & Warren K. Billings, a shoe worker, were framed & convicted (both pardoned by Roosevelt in 1939) by business & government interests.

San Francisco Parade the day Mooney's sentence is commuted.

Surprisingly, authorities immediately suspect anarchist involvement in the bombing.

A few days later they search & seize material at the offices of The Blast, & threaten to arrest Alexander Berkman(founder/editor) & M. Eleanor Fitzgerald. Emma Goldman proceeds today with her scheduled talk on "Preparedness, the Road to Universal Slaughter."

Later this week, Warren Billings, Israel Weinberg, Edward Nolan, Thomas Mooney, & Rena Mooney are arrested. Goldman & Berkman immediately begin organizing their defense support.

Because they are "framed" through perjured testimony & Mooney sentenced to death, even the staid AF of L joins the campaign for a new trial.

See: Frame-up by Curt Gentry & Life of an Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader, ed. Gene Fellner (NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1992)

http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=TOM_MOONEY

1917 -- Mexico: Oil industry in Tampico, shut down by successful IWW action.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070607044555/http://www.eatthestate.org/08-21/ReclaimHistory.htm


1918 -- US: Lightning kills 504 sheep in Utah's Wasatch National Park. Thousands more go on the lam.



1918 -- Peru: Manuel González Prada (1844-1918) dies. Renowned poet, polemicist & intellectual.

By 1902 Gonzalez Prada was committed to anarchist ideals & published numerous works on the social question & emancipation of the individual. Briefly head of the National Library of Peru, he resigned following a coup d'etat in 1914.

Several of his collections of poetry were published or translated during his lifetime & well after.

http://evergreen.loyola.edu/tward/www/gp/
http://www.epdlp.com/escritor.php?id=1775
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Gonz%C3%A1lez_Prada

1920 -- Chile: Police raid the Santiago IWW headquarters. In Valparaiso, police plant dynamite in the Wobbly hall & arrest most of the IWW organizers for terrorism.

These raids were retaliatory: Through the summer of 1920 the Chilean union conducted a three month strike to prevent the export of grains from the country at a time when this export was producing famine & famine prices & profits.
[Details / context]

1922 -- US: In the Sacco & Vanzetti case, following the trial, the Goodridge motion for a new trial is made. It is based on the lack of credibility of prosecution witness Goodridge, a known felon who testified under a false name. Other motions for similar reasons have previously been filed & others follow in the next year.

See Heroes & Martyrs: Emma Goldman, Sacco & Vanzetti, & the Revolutionary Struggle, an audio CD by Howard Zinn.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/SaccoVanzetti/databaseEntries.htm



1925 -- US: Baseball's Yankees purchase infielder Leo Durocher. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1994, more for his managing than his playing career, Durocher coined the famous phrase: "Nice guys finish last."


1926 -- US: Babe Ruth proves he can catch: in a stunt at Mitchell Field in NY, Ruth, as a private in the National Guard, caught a baseball dropped from an airplane 250 feet above & traveling about 100 miles-per-hour.




1927 -- Switzerland: Albert Meister lives (d.1982), Bâle. Writer & anarchist sociologist. Under various pseudonyms he wrote many works on the problems of labor associations, workers' self-management & development in poor countries, including Coopération d'habitation et sociologie du voisinage (1957),Socialisme et autogestion, l'expérience yougoslave (1964), Participation, animation et développement(1969), La participation dans les associations (1974), L'inflation créatrice (1975), La soi-disant utopie du centre Beaubourg (1976).
http://www.ephemanar.net/janvier06.html#meister

1932 -- Italy: Errico Malatesta, center fielder
(speaking of baseball) for the "Armageddonia Anarchists," dies,
trying to hit a grand slam all his life.

Demon of all the police of Europe no more (or less).






1934 --

US: FBI think they have gunned downJohn illinger, whom they labeled "Public Enemy #1." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dillinger

1936 --

André Malraux flies to Spain, to command the Republican Escadre España. Flies 65 missions against Franco.

"The Internationale" Arise ye starvings from your slumbers, Arise ye prisoners of want, For reason in revolt know thunders, And at last ends the age of cant. So away with all your superstitions Servile masses, arise, arise, We'll change henceforth the old tradition And spurn the dust to win the prize. So comrades, come rally, And the last fight let us face The internationale unites the human race. So comrades,, come rally And the last fight let us face, The Internationale unites the human race. — L'Internationale, Poème de Eugene Pottier (Paris 1871), Musique de Pierre Degeyter (1888)

1936 -- Seattle author Tom Robbins begins looking for cowgirls with the blues, frogs in 'jammies, etc., Blowing Rock, North Carolina.
http://www.rain.org/~da5e/tom_robbins.html

1936 -- Spain: 22 July-July 26, in Barcelona, on the initiative of "Ateneu Enciclopèdic" the "Olympiades Populaires" are scheduled, to provide a fraternal counterweight to the Berlin "Olympic Games," a guaranteed grand Nazi spectacle. The Barcelona games are deferred due to revolution; foreign sportsmen present for these Olympiades discover or take part in the revolutionary combat.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympiades_populaires
http://www.google.com/#q=Olympiades+Populaires&hl...timeline...
http://actionantifasciste.fr/documents/1/barc.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9o_Lagrange


1938 -- Joe Louis defeats German boxer Max Schmeling in a rematch of their 1936 fight, retains world heavyweight crown. Because of Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe & Hitler's disdain for blacks, the fight had mythic proportions, with Louis seen by many as fighting to uphold democracy & the race. He succeeded convincingly, ending the fight in the first round.

You done stomped on my heart
you dun mashed that sucker flat.

You dun sorta
stomped on my aorta.

— Melodie Suggs

1942 -- US: Gasoline rationing begins during WW II.

"Astronomical quantities of everything & to hell with civilian needs."

— Donald Nelson, Chairman of the War Production Board

1943 -- Mystery writer Mark McGarrity lives, Holyoke, Massachusetts. Author of the McGarr series of novels, which are set in Dublin & feature the chief detective of the Irish police, Peter McGarr — written under the pseudonym of Bartholomew Gill.


1947 -- Carolivia Herron lives, Washington, D.C. Author of the novel Thereafter Johnnie (1991), & the children's book Nappy Hair.


1949 -- Belgium: Socialists protest return of King Leopold after six years in exile.


1949 -- Douglas Hyde, dies in Dublin. First president of the Republic of Ireland & distinguished Gaelic scholar & writer. A graduate & later chair of modern Irish of Trinity College, he first studied early Irish. His works include, Pleusgadh na bulgóide (The Bursting of the Bubble, 1903) & Legends of Saints & Sinners (1915).


1956 -- Seattle author David Shields lives. Best known for his 1989 comic novel Dead Languages, a story told by the young Jeremy Zorn, who stutters & is on a quest for a cure. Shields is a big basketball fan, particularly of the Sonics, & his Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season is a result.


1960 -- Brasil: Centro de Estudos José Oiticica formally established. Founded by three militants following José Oiticica's death in 1957. (The center started its activities in 1958.)

The Center was active for 12 years before forcibly closed by the military dictatorship. It founded the publishing house Editora Mundo Livre, edited five books, promoted courses on anarquismo in the Carioca Theater, sponsored libertarians from America & Europe, lead campaigns of protest & support, & sponsored over a hundred of courses & conferences.

[Details / context]

1967 -- Musical Differences? Jimi Hendrix quits as opening act of the Monkees' tour.
http://www.jimi-hendrix.com/

1969 -- US: Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin arrested for disorderly conduct after creating a disturbance (a pissing contest) in a Detroit parking lot. (Sorry, don't know who won).


1970 -- US: During the Alcatraz occupation by the Indians Of All Tribes, the first child is born on free Amerindian land in the 20th Century. He is named Wavoka after the Paiute Amerindian who originated the Ghost Dance.
Source: 'Calendar Riots'


1975 -- US: House of Reps votes to restore citizenship to Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader General Dictator of the CSA Robert E Lee. The general reaction: "I'm dead."


1978 -- US: Rebellion at Pontriac State Prison, Illinois; three guards killed.


1979 -- Little Richard, known as Reverend Richard Penniman, speaks at a revival meeting in North Richmond, California. Warns the congregation about the evils of rock & roll music & declares,

"If God can save an old homosexual like me, he can save anybody."

1987 -- High Seas: Give Me Oil, or Give Me Death!?: Three US warships escort two "reflagged" Kuwaiti oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. US ships, however, got no escorts.


1988 -- Scotland: Fast breeder nuclear reactor shut down as unnecessary & uneconomic, Dounreay.


1991 -- US: Hunger Artist?: Jeffrey Dahmer confesses to killing 17 males.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Dahmer


1992 -- Italy: Month-long hunger strike of women against the Mafia begins, Palermo, Sicily.


1995 -- Israel: Four foreign activists break padlocks & reopen the main gates to Hebron University in the West Bank, closed by Israeli security in 1987. The gates remain open after the incident.


1996 -- Parents of a teen-age murder victim sue the band Slayer, contending that the band's lyrics were "satanic" & inspired three teen-age boys to rape, torture & stab the girl to death.


1998 -- US: Annual Bohemia Club "summer camp" begins. Hundreds of the wealthiest & most powerful men in the US clandestinely plan our future in an atmosphere of "fun & games."

"The problem is, when the story gets to the top board-rooms, then it gets killed."

— A reporter's comment, common complaint from reporters who file stories on the club

http://www.4rie.com/rie%207.html

2009 -- Poland: Leszek Kolakowski dies. Outspoken Polish philosopher & one-time communist, frozen out for his trenchant views.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/22/philosophy-1968-the-year-of-revolt


2010 -- México: 51 bodies uncovered at a suspected drug-gang dumping site near Monterrey. Over 22,000 people have been killed since the government launched an offensive against drug cartels in late 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Mexican_Drug_War


3000 --

"One law for the lion & the fox
is oppression."

— William Blake

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anti-CopyRite 1997-3000, more or less
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