BOOKSURFER

2011-11-27T08:52:00.002Z

Revolutions in Reverse

A new book from David Graeber published by Minor Compositions: Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination. Graeber "explores a wide-ranging set of topics including political strategy, global trade, debt, imagination, violence, aesthetics, alienation, and creativity. Written in the wake of the anti-globalization movement and the rise of the war on terror, these essays survey the political landscape for signs of hope in unexpected places." Available free online or in print at $13:

http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=284

2011-10-02T19:20:00.003+01:00

The Luddites - without condescension

For anyone who (like me) was unaware of the conference on the Luddites that took place at Birkbeck College in May, the Backdoor Broadcasting Company has made podcasts of the sessions and discussions available online.

The one-day conference was held "to mark the 200th anniversary of the uprising of the handloom weavers in the dawn of the industrial revolution under the command of the mythic General Ludd. Even though the movement was sparked by skilled artisans, “luddite” has ever since been a byword for technophobes facing backwards and mindless rejection of progress. The conference will gather historians of luddism and others interested in what in 1800 was called “the machinery question”, to consider not only the historical luddites, urban and rural, but also contemporary movements of direct resistance, north and south, to capitalist modernization – for example, anti-nuclear movements, opposition to agricultural transgenics, resistance to big dams. The concluding session will address the issue of modernity itself, its model of temporality and the assumption that history is future-directed."

Contributers included Peter Linebaugh, T.J Clark,Iain Boal, Dave King, Esther Leslie and Anna Davin

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/05/the-luddites-without-condescension/

2011-08-21T08:28:00.002+01:00

Unwelcome Guests

Unwelcome Guests: 2 hours/ week of intelligent talk radio contains a fantastic themed archive of interviews, talks, audiocollages and discussions around a wide range of subjects from Digital Rights Management and Deschooling to the commercialisation of food, and the corruption of money. Somewhere to return to again and again for inspiration.

http://www.UnwelcomeGuests.Net/UNWELCOME_GUESTS

2011-07-12T11:59:00.002+01:00

Weaponizing Anthropology

A new book by David Price, Weaponizing Anthropology "documents how anthropological knowledge and ethnographic methods are harnessed by military and intelligence agencies in post-9/11 America to placate hostile foreign populations. Price's inquiry into past relationships between anthropologists and the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon provides the historical base for this expose of the current abuses of anthropology by military and intelligence agencies."

Here's a quotation from an endorsement for the book by author of Stone-Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins:

“Even before he published this masterly and comprehensive account, David Price has long been in the forefront of those warning of the adverse effects of militarizing the human sciences. Now, by matching an extraordinary command of the sources to a telling sensitivity to the political and intellectual consequences, he demonstrates in this definitive work that weaponizing anthropology is as damaging to the soul of the nation as it is to the integrity of the science. “

Published jointly by AK Press and Counterpunch - pre-publication purchase brings a 25% discount from AK Press.

2011-07-07T08:33:00.002+01:00

Crack Capitalism

John Holloway, author of Change the World Without Taking Power, is giving a series of four Leverhulme Lectures, the first of which: "Crack Capitalism" is online here.

2011-04-07T22:16:00.002+01:00

Poetry Classics and Class

An online talk with readings by poet Tony Harrison, on the theme of 'Poetry Classics and Class', recorded live at an event held at the British Academy last year. Scroll down to the foot of the page for the links to the audio files:

www.britac.ac.uk/events/2010/classicsandclass/index.cfm

2011-02-22T20:38:00.002Z

Libraries at Risk

A podcast of of a seminar by David McKitterick, Librarian at Trinity College, Cambridge given at the Institute of Historical Research, last November:

Abstract:

Several recent cases have drawn attention to the fragility of libraries as we know them - both large and small. In a world of changing attitudes to books, as well as perennial problems of cash shortage, how can library historians in particular contribute to a debate that will become even more urgent in the next few years?

http://bit.ly/flZi5K

For a complete list of podcasts on a wide range of historical topics available from the IHR:

www.history.ac.uk/digital/podcasts

2011-01-28T21:23:00.002Z

Lessons from Howard Zinn

Anthony Arnove, writes about Howard Zinn, activist and author of The Peoples' History of the United States for Yes Magazine:

"But Howard added a distinctive element to these arguments by embodying the understanding that the process of struggle, the shared experience of being part of work alongside and for others, is the most rewarding, fulfilling, and meaningful life one can live. The sense of solidarity he had with people in struggle, the sense of joy he had in life, was infectious.

Read the complete article here

http://bit.ly/dO9MyP

2011-01-28T14:13:00.002Z

Anarchist Film Archive: the first online archive and database of anarchist and libertarian cinema, film and video

Christie Books has just announced the new online Anarchist Film Archive.

The archive is free to access and contains a growing collection of nearly 1000 difficult-to-find feature films, documentaries, interviews, talks and short videos — all with anarchist or libertarian-oriented themes of education, justice, resistance — and liberation. Complementing the archive is a comprehensive and regularly updated database of anarchist/libertarian films compiled and maintained by Santiago-Juan Navarro. The archive is easy to use: you can scroll through the titles, search for a particular film in the ‘Search’ box or search by tag. You can also embed individual films in blogs, facebook pages etc.

Click here to launch The Anarchist Film Archive

http://bit.ly/fmNEZh

2011-01-22T10:15:00.002Z

Photography and Memory

Near the top of my ever-growing "to read" list is Andrea Noble's Photography and Memory in Mexico: Icons of Revolution which explores a number of the famous photographic images made during the 1910-1920 revolution. Andrea analyses a small, but carefully chosen selection of photographs which were repeatedly reproduced across a range of media in the aftermath of the conflict, to reveal some "compelling stories about cultural memory and identity in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century".

a more detailed outline of the book can be found on the Manchester University Press website

A list of Andrea's books and journal articles can be read here

2010-11-20T14:58:00.002Z

Mark Twain - autobiography storms the US best-sellers charts

One hundred years after his death, the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography has just been published and is now rapidly moving up the New York Times best-seller list - read a short review by Charles R Larson on Counterpunch

2010-11-15T08:12:00.004Z

The Re-enchantment of Place

Ken Worpole (author of the ground-breaking book Dockers and Detectives) provides a short over-view of a new book: Towards Re-enchantment: Place and Its Meanings, edited by Gareth Evans and Di Robson, (Artevents, £9.99). This collection of essays and poems about visiting places which are beyond the reach of the car provides new insights into the landscape and history of Britain:

"...in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Essex provided a home to a variety of metropolitan social reform projects employing the vocabulary of the land colony, where under strict conditions, or in a spirit of political zeal, new lives might be moulded. These included the Hadleigh Farm Colony (founded1891, Salvation Army), Mayland Colony (1896, Socialist), Purleigh Colony (1896, Tolstoyan Anarchist), Ashingdon Colony (1897, Tolstoyan Anarchist), Wickford Colony, (Tolstoyan Socialist), Laindon Farm Colony (1904, Socialist/Municipal). Even today, though, there are still a lot of idealistic initiatives in the county – religious, ecological, social – which mainstream politics ignores, and long preceded, and will long outlast, ‘the Big Society’, if not the playing fields of Eton."

Towards Re-enchantment includes essays by Jay Griffiths, Kathleen Jamie, Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, Jane Rendell, Iain Sinclair and Ken Worpole, and poems by Elizabeth Bletsoe, Lavinia Greenlaw, Alice Oswald and Robin Robertson.

Read Ken's much longer feature on the Open Democracy. website.

2010-10-21T15:59:00.003+01:00

THE HIVE OF LIBERTY

Pamphlets were always the lifeblood of radical movements, so its good to see The Hive of Liberty back in print:

THE HIVE OF LIBERTY: THE LIFE & WORK OF THOMAS SPENCE (1750-1814)

Edited by Keith Armstrong, with an introduction by Joan Beal and a new essay by Malcolm Chase

This reprint from the Thomas Spence Tryst is a celebration of that noted pioneer of people’s rights, pampleteer and poet Thomas Spence, born on Newcastle’s Quayside in turbulent times.

Spence served in his father’s netmaking trade from the age of ten but went on later to be a teacher at Haydon Bridge Free Grammar School and at St. Ann’s Church in Byker under the City Corporation. In 1775, he read his famous lecture on the right to property in land to the Newcastle Philosophical Society, who voted his expulsion at their next meeting. He claimed to have invented the phrase ‘The Rights of Man’ and chalked it in the caves at Marsden Rocks in South Shields in honour of the working-class hero ‘Blaster Jack’ who lived there.

Spence even came to blows with famed Tyneside wood-engraver Thomas Bewick over a political issue, and was thrashed with cudgels for his trouble. From 1792, having moved to London, he took part in radical agitations, particularly against the war with France. He was arrested several times for selling his own and other seditious books and was imprisoned for six months without trial in 1794, and sentenced to three years for his Restorer of Society to its Natural State in 1801. Whilst politicians such as Edmund Burke saw the mass of people as the ‘Swinish Multitude’, Spence saw creative potential in everybody and broadcast his ideas in the periodical Pigs’ Meat.

He had a stall in London’s Chancery Lane, where he sold books and saloup, and later set up a small shop called The Hive of Liberty in Holborn.

He died in poverty ‘leaving nothing to his friends but an injunction to promote his Plan and the remembrance of his inflexible integrity’.

The Thomas Spence Trust has successfully campaigned for a commemorative plaque on the Quayside in Newcastle. It was unveiled on 21st June 2010, Spence's 260th birthday, with a number of talks, displays and events coinciding with it.

PRICE £5 ISBN 1 871536 15 4

ORDERS (ADD £2 POSTAGE PER COPY) TO: THE THOMAS SPENCE TRUST,

93 WOODBURN SQUARE, WHITLEY LODGE, WHITLEY BAY, TYNE & WEAR NE26 3JD, ENGLAND. TEL 0191 2529531.

2010-09-27T23:38:00.002+01:00

Libraries in a Digital Age

Libraries in a Digital Age is a one-day conference organised by the Association of Independent Libraries which will be held in the lecture theatre at the Royal Astronomical Society on Thursday 14 October.

There will be presentations on social networking; the Oxford Google Books digitization partnership; the publishing industry; the future of public libraries; the knowledge commons and copyright. Conference participants will also be able to take part in a tour of Royal Astronomical Society Library.

Full programme details and booking form are available on the AIL website:

www.independentlibraries.co.uk/news.htm

2010-09-27T23:21:00.002+01:00

Cities Under Siege: the New Urban Militarism

Stephen Graham's new book Cities Under Siege provides a powerful exposé of how contemporary political violence now operates through the sites, spaces and infrastructures of everyday urban life. One recent example of this trend is examined by Steve, in an article for Open Democracy: "From Helmand to Merseyside: Unmanned drones and the militarisation of UK policing"

further details on Steve's book on the Verso website

His article can be read on Open Democracy

2010-09-08T07:56:00.002+01:00

Housing the Urban Poor

On the New Internationalist website, Jeremy Seabrook describes a scheme in Bangladesh which has helped garment-workers, maidservants, rickshaw drivers, construction workers, vendors and labourers transform their lives through the building of multi-storey apartments for the working poor. "In the process, the lives of the people have been transformed: they acquired new skills, their livelihoods were enhanced by co-operative working, microcredit and social education, and their savings used to acquire land, on which the first block of flats has now reached its full six storeys in Mirpur in the north of Dhaka."

"The biggest obstacle to the realization of the project has been our absence of corruption. By refusing to give bribes, we have been our own worst enemy."

Read the full article in the New Internationalist.

2010-09-03T23:03:00.002+01:00

Banned Books on tour

The London Libraries' "reader promotion Banned Books will go live in 28 Library Services across the country, including 16 in London on 25 September." in an attempt to raise awareness of censorship and the need for freedom of expression. Participating libraries will display sets of 50 books that have been banned or challenged in this country or overseas, and host discussions and author talks, around these themes and present banned music. A pre-event panel discussion on censorship in public libraries will be held on September 15 at the Free Word Centre, Farringdon Road, London. Participants include Lisa Appignanesi, author and president of English PEN; Tony Lacey, publishing director at Penguin, and Douglas Murray author of Hate on the State.

Further information on www.banned-books.org.uk

and from Index on Censorship

2010-09-03T09:24:00.002+01:00

Music is a Crime

Demetra Kotouza explores the origins and development of Rebetiko for Mute Magazine: "a kind of Greek, urban, subcultural music that developed around ports and urban centres in the end of the 19th and up to the first half of the 20th century, with the bouzouki as its main instrument. Today's rebetiko enthusiasts are fascinated not only with the way it combines oriental modes and rhythms with European harmonies, or by musicians' passion and virtuosic skill, but even more so by the defiant, hedonistic spirit of the culture it was born in."

Its a long, and times densely packed article, but fascinating because of the way it links music, not just to social issues but to the daily struggles of the poor, the exploited and the marginalised in Greek society. Footnotes for further reading, and links to websites featuring examples of Rebetiko.

Read the whole article on Meta Mute

2010-09-02T08:34:00.001+01:00

Google's All-Seeing Eye

William Gibson: "In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We’re citizens, but without rights."

Read the full text of the article "Google's Earth" at the New York Times.

2010-08-25T09:57:00.003+01:00

Media Commons

At last an alternative to the hated system of peer-review for academic journals is being developed in an experiment inititiated by Media Commons in co-operation with the Shakespeare Quarterly, which intends to use the principle of 'crowd-sourcing' rather than the existing 'double-blind' peer review.

Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education and on Media Commons.

2010-08-25T09:46:00.003+01:00

What was that Programme?

BBC researchers have started work on a project to analyse thousands of archive copies of the Radio Times as part of a plan named "BBC Genome" which is intended to provide a comprehensive and easy-to-use online catalogue of the BBC's programmes, including when and where they were first aired. In September, the project will begin the massive task of digitising more than 80 years' worth of broadcast records, including approximately 400,000 pages of Radio Times covering 3m programmes and 300m words.

Read the full story on Digital Spy

2010-08-12T23:01:00.007+01:00

The Rat Pack

A slide show of 25 "never-seen" photos of Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Junior, Frank Sinatra and others - courtesy of Life Magazine

"He wears the mask of an armchair philanderer with bottles and broads on his mind and seven kids in his swimming pool — a character with obvious appeal for both sexes. Highball glass in hand, he always looks faintly surprised to find the camera upon him, and his first bleary, self-deprecating crack establishes that neither he nor his audience can be quite sure what he will do next." —From LIFE's review of The Dean Martin Show, 5/26/1967.

[thanks to Sophie Willard for the tip]

2010-07-20T22:30:00.004+01:00

Johann Hari reviews Chomsky: Hopes and Prospects

"This is a book woven through with hope and awe at all the people who slip beyond imperial control and establish real democracy. Chomsky's strongest model – and the world's – is Bolivia's experiment with radical democracy. After 30 years of having neoliberalism forced on them by the West, including the cost of water pushed beyond their grasp, the Bolivian people elected the first indigenous leader since the European conquests. Since then, it has had the fastest fall in poverty and the most rapid growth in Latin America."

in The Independent.

2010-07-17T13:27:00.003+01:00

The works of Gerard Winstanley

Michael Braddick reviews the new two volume publication of the works of the Gerard Winstanley edited by Thomas Corns, Ann Hughes and David Lowenstein. Published by Oxford University Press, this two volume work brings together the writings of Winstanley, who during the English Civil War provided a detailed theory of a kind of Christian anarchism, and combined theory with action as one of the key players in the Digger movement, which advocated direct action by the landless poor to takeover and cultivate the wastes and commons.

"We justifie our act of digging upon that hill, to make the earth a common treasurie. First, because the earth was made by Almighty God, to be a common treasury of livelihood for whole mankind in all his branches, without respect of persons; and that not any one according to the Word of God (which is love) the pure Law of rightousnesse, ought to be Lord or landlord over another, but whole mankind was made equall and knit into one body by one spirit of love, which is Christ in you the hope of glory, even all the members of mans body, called the little world, are united into equality of love, to preserve the whole body."

Michael Braddick's articulate review is available free online on the Times Literary Supplement website.

2010-06-19T16:31:00.003+01:00

Jose Saramago dies

Nobel prize-winning Portugese novelist Jose Saramago has died at the age of 87. Always on the side of the poor and the oppressed, and black-listed after a right-wing coup in 1975, he wrote novels that "combine surrealist experimentation with a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism.

There is a full obituary in the New York Times

2010-06-14T18:23:00.002+01:00

Policing the Public Gaze

A report on the "growing restriction on citizen photography" from the Manifesto Club - for Freedom in Everyday Life - is now available as a pdf download

" In recent years photography appears to be resurfacing as a site of heated political contestation. This comes amid a flood of arbitrary and often downright bizarre interpretations of privacy, security and public order rules, by police, community safety wardens, private security guards or self appointed ‘jobsworths’. Decisions to prevent photography in public places often appear capricious and overbearing, enforced through intimidation rather than lawful authority, with official explanations after the event simply adding insult to injury. In a climate of fear and

suspicion, fuelled by alarming reports of terrorist alerts and predatory paedophiles,

uncertainties around the limits of personal freedom appear to be making room for a new and muddled form of authoritarianism."

2010-06-08T09:03:00.003+01:00

Crowd Science and the Knowledge Commons

In a recent article published in the Times Literary Supplement, "What are Universities For?" (7 May 2010) Keith Thomas defends the British university system from the threat of cuts and changes by arguing that:

"From medieval seminary to the consultancy campus, universities have served the needs of society..." and that "the humanities offer an indispensable antidote to the vices which inevitably afflict a democratic, capitalist society. They counter the dumbing down of the media by asserting the complexity of things; and they challenge the evasiveness and mendacity of politicians by placing a premium on intellectual honesty".

Like many other recent defences of Academia, Keith's argument will not sustain the universities because it fails to offer any real vision of the future role of the universities within society, other than a continuation of their current role as gatekeepers for privilege, definers and guardians of what consitutes 'knowledge', accomplices in military research, manufacturers of consent, and seedbed for profit-driven technologies.

Yet there is a real opportunity for universities to transform themselves into the beating heart of a new knowledge commons, to work with people in the whole community rather than link themselves to the privileged elites commerce, industry, media and the state. Just a hint of what might be achieved is seen in this recent article "Crowd Science Reaches New Heights", published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

2010-05-31T12:04:00.002+01:00

Libraries

As local government works out how to deal with planned (and still to be announced) cuts in expenditure, there are already indications that the slow war of attrition which saw more than 30 "service points" closed in the last year for which figures are available, is about to quicken its pace. Library authorities in Belfast have already announced plans to close 10 libraries in Belfast, while Hampshire Libraries have plans to cut 60 library jobs, according to a recent article in the Bookseller.

Yet access to books and libraries is important for both individual and communities, so it is good to know that writer Nadine Gordimer will be emphasising the important role of both in her forthcoming talk at the Hay Festival:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/30/nadime-gordimer-hay-hamelin-books

2010-05-23T14:37:00.006+01:00

Snap?

In the New York Times, Pat Ryan draws some interesting comparisons between Lisabeth Salander, the anti-heroine of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and the fiercely independent character Pippi Longstocking created by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. This is not just a casual exercise as Tattoo novelist Steig Larson told his publisher when delivering the manuscript for the first book in his Millennium trilogy:

"My point of departure was what Pippi Longstocking would be like as an adult. Would she be called a sociopath because she looked upon society in a different way and has no social competence?”

Read the complete article in the NYT

2010-05-08T11:43:00.004+01:00

Love Among the Butterflies

Peter Marren, author of the forthcoming Bugs Britannica looks at the future for British butterflies and the growth in butterfly research in a review of the recently published book The Butterflies of Britain and Ireland by Jeremy Thomas and Richard Lewington.

Merren quotes Thomas as reading about 3,000 scientific papers on British butterflies that have been published since 1990 during the research for this boom - which leads me to ask why this important body of research should be confined to academia?

Access to knowledge is currently structured in such a way as to exclude ordinary people. We currently have a two tier library structure, where special libraries serve the academic community and bolster privilege by keeping the rest of the population - the people who pay for the research - excluded by a series of boundaries and borders. It is time to open scientific research up to everyone. Small steps might have been made towards an open scientific community since the coming of the internet - but more can and should be done to create a new 'commons' for knowledge.

Read Peter Merren's review in the Daily Telegraph.

also by Peter is a new article in The Scotsman: "Why the insect world should be celebrated - even the dreaded midge" in which he discusses some of the different names given to insects which he discovered during research for Bugs Britannica:

"We found, for example, around a dozen Scottish names for earwigs, among them clipshears, coachbell, forkie, gowlach, switchpool, and my favourite, twitch-ballock. There is an even richer batch of names for bumblebees, which I can remember were often called "bummie-bees" when I lived in north-east Scotland. I love the name "foggie-toddler" for the bee that "toddles" through the "fog" or grass to find its nest. And "sodger" or "red arsie" for the distinctive bee with a red tail."

Read the rest of Peter's article here

2010-04-24T08:18:00.004+01:00

Radio Waves

I always have mixed feelings about radio programmes, and I certainly never thought I would be writing a post about Laurence Llewlyn-Bowen, but on Sunday afternoon his 'Escape to the Country' slot on Radio 4 is about Feargus O'Connor and the Chartist Land Plan:

"Our tendency to idealise the countryside hasn't always reflected the reality of rural life. But it provides a fascinating glimpse of our dreams and fears as a society.

Out of the insurrection and radicalism of the 1840s came the idea of the countryside as a place of freedom and independence from the squalor and sweat of industrial servitude. In 1842 Feargus O'Connor, the charismatic leader of the Chartists, drew up the Land Plan, which showed how ordinary people across Britain, could plough their own furrow.For O'Connor a plot of rural land had the capacity to deliver financial independence and social dignity to the poor."

Although I am pleased to see Chartist land scheme given coverage - the intention of the Chartists was not to make the poor financially "independent and dignified" but an attempt to transform the relations of production at a time when the relentless enclosure of common land had impoverished vast numbers of people, who were being forced into wage slavery by the privitisation of land, state terror, and the transformation of the economy by industrial capitalism. It will be interesting to see the context in which the programme sets the land scheme.

Also worth catching is the Radio 3 'Words and Music' programme on Sunday(10.15 pm), which brings together a series of short readings under the heading The Rebel:

"From the Paris Commune to the American teenage rebellion of the 1950s, from home life to public life, David Bamber and Gillian Bevan explore the defiance of personal rebellion and collective uprising."

There is enough potential in this subject for a whole series of programmes, but I will be listening in particular to hear the reading of Louise Michel's poem 'L'oeillet rouge'.

The real treat of the week for me, however, is the repeat of Richard Mabey's series of five essays on the theme of "The Scientist and the Romantic" at 11.00 pm Monday to Friday on Radio 3 - flawless prose, in which Richard explores his lifelong relationship with science and nature.

2010-04-20T09:53:00.003+01:00

The Divide Between People and Nature

Peter Marren explores the social and legal forces that perpetuate and widen the gap between separation of people from nature in a perceptive article in the Independent

"Personal, direct contact with nature is being discouraged by fusspots and busybodies and control freaks who seem to want to regulate every waking moment of our lives. You can read their disapproval in the small print under the welcome sign at the entrance. Look but don't touch. You know it's illegal."

2010-04-08T22:49:00.002+01:00

Colin Ward Memorial/Celebration

Five Leaves, the publisher of many of Colin's books have just circulated first details of the celebration/ memorial for Colin:

"On Saturday July 10^th there will be a grand celebration/memorial meeting for Colin running from 2.00pm -5.00 pm at Conway Hall in London. Ken Worpole is officiating. The event is free and all are welcome."

The event will include several speakers and music. Appropriately, given it was Colin, there will be displays of his past work, first editions and the like, as well as a large bookstall. Five Leaves is also rushing through a new edition of Goodnight Campers! A history of the British holiday camp (co-written with Dennis Hardy, one of the speakers) which had been planned before Colin died.

2010-03-18T21:11:00.004Z

Election Special 2010

Bristol Radical History Group do it again with a fantastic line-up of speakers and events during the run-up to the 2010 elections, which together provide "an essential guide to how we got the vote, where representational democracy has gone wrong and possible alternatives to party democracy."

The series of public lectures, debates, history walks and other events, will take place between 5 and 25 and finish with a mock election bonfire. Speakers include Dorothy Thompson, Keith Armstrong and Ian Bone.
Full details available on the BRHG website:

www.brh.org.uk/election2010/index.html

2010-02-12T22:03:00.003Z

Colin Ward

News has just broken that the writer Colin Ward has died. Colin's contribution to anarchism has been invaluable - he founded, edited and often wrote Anarchy magazine for over ten years. In Anarchy , and a whole series of books and hundreds of articles he wrote about the practical application of anarchist ideas to social organisation. and outlined anarchism as a sociological theory. He is probably best known for Anarchy in Action, but every book he wrote provided new insights into the revolutionary potential of the way ordinary people organise and live their lives in the face of enromous odds. His books, The Child in the City and The Child in the Country demonstrate how children shape and remake their environment. He was an untiring promoter of anarchist approaches to education, in books such as Talking Schools, and Streetwork: the Exploding School, but in fact there was little about social organisation that he neglected. He made a major contribution to anarchist appraches to housing, documenting the history of squatting and self-building.

He was a softly spoken man who was generous with his time towards other people, and who had the extraordinary gift of being able to explain complex ideas in a relaxed and easy-going style.

There is a more detailed appreciation on the Five Leaves Blog.

2010-01-26T11:56:00.002Z

The Essay
One of my favourite radio programmes is the fifteen minute late night slot on Radio 3 taken by The Essay. Last week's linked essays 'Enlightenment Voices' by Kate Tunstall and Caroline Warman on French philospher and writer Diderot was spot on, introducing a comparatively neglected writer to a wider audience through his work. It also reminded me that Caroline wrote a lively piece on 'The ironic encounters of the Marquis de Sade and Jane Austen' a couple of years ago - well worth re-reading:
www.britac.ac.uk/events/2007/sade/warman.cfm

2010-01-21T23:31:00.002Z

Human Rights Watch - World Report 2010

This is the 20th annual World Report from Human Rights Watch, which covers the human rights situation in more than 90 countries. Compiled in partnership with activists in the country in question, this year's report also features a number of thematic essays which look at related issues such as the intensifying attacks on Human Rights defenders and organisations, and the way health providers are becoming increasingly complicit in torture. Read individual reports online or download the whole report as a PDF file:

www.hrw.org/world-report-2010

2009-12-20T09:51:00.002Z

Lost London

John Carey reviews Lost London 1870-1945: English Heritage by Philip Davies in the Sunday Times:
'We think of cities as solid, dependable things, fixed points, enduring landmarks. In reality, though, they are fluid, and as transient as a breath. It is usually poets or preachers who tell us truths like these...'.

Based on the English Heritage photo archive Lost London Davies, takes the reader on a 'tour of destitution, the maze of squalid streets and alleys around Drury Lane and Clare Market that Kingsway put an end to, the labyrinths of Bankside and Bermondsey, old Westminster, only a stone’s throw from parliament, but notorious for its chronic poverty until well into the 20th century, and the East End, three square miles of densely packed terraced housing, known as the City of Dreadful Night. The districts change but the essential features remain the same: soot-blackened brick walls, sunless, airless, treeless, grassless courts and yards, stone paving, kept scrupulously clean, because hunger and want allow nothing to go to waste.'

Read John Carey's perceptive review in full, on the Sunday Times website:

http://tinyurl.com/yay6ux2

[link shortened at tinyurl]

2009-12-16T17:18:00.002Z

The Art of Not Being Governed

I've not read this yet, but it is one book which is going on my new year reading list: James Scott: The Art of Not Being Governed, recently reviewed in The Boston Globe by Drake Bennett. Its about an area of Asia which has been given the name of Zomia - a 'rugged swath of Asia that for 2,000 years has remained culturally aloof from the traditional centers of power and the pull of empires. Its inhabitants, Asia’s “hill people,” have earned a reputation for egalitarianism, insurrection, and independence'.

From Drake's review:
'In Zomia’s small societies, with their simple technologies, anti-authoritarian tendencies, and oral cultures, Scott sees not a world forgotten by civilization, but one that has been deliberately constructed to keep the state at arm’s length. Zomia’s history, Scott argues, is a rejection of the mighty lowland states that are seen as defining Asia. He calls Zomia a “shatter zone,” a place where people go to escape the raw deal that complex civilization historically has been for those at the bottom: the coerced labor and conscription into military service, the taxation for wars and pharaonic building projects, the epidemic diseases that came with intensive agriculture and animal husbandry.'

Its a fascinating subject - articulately reviewed.

Read the full review here:

www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/12/06/the_mystery_of_zomia/

2009-11-12T08:35:00.003Z

The Spectator

An interesting series of articles in The Spectator (7 November issue) which dredge through the back history of the Labour Party, and the attitude of many of its key figures to the Soviet Union during the 'Cold War'. Communist Party influence inside the party is also examined. No real surprises, as most of it was common currency in the mainstream press at the time, although there is some interesting new detail. What has never really been examined, however, is the other tendency within the Labour Party during the Cold War - sometimes called 'Atlanticist' tendency, a faction which owed its greatest loyalty to US Foreign Policy and the military-industrial-political networks spawned by the US.

This rather sprawling and ill-defined faction became the focus of a series of articles commissioned by the Sunday Times in 1972 as part of its series on the 'Unofficial History of the Twentieth Century'. The journalists discovered that "leading Labour politicians had been advising and deriving support from organisations subsequently shown to be set up and financed by the CIA". After the articles were written, expensive artwork was prepared and a final draft submitted to the editor for approval. Although the Sunday Times legal advisers had cleared the text for libel, the editor pulled the plug on publication, commenting "these are the people we support".

The Sunday Times self-censorship was exposed to a wider audience in 1974 with the publication of the articles including some of the prepared artwork in a report by Radical Research Services that looked like a copy of the Sunday Times Magazine. The ink had still not dried when the Sunday Times obtained an injunction to prevent distribution alleging 'breach of copyright' in respect of the art-work used. Luckily a few copies survive.

My guess is that you won't be reading about this in The Spectator, but if you take a look at the Working Class Movement Library website, you can read a more detailed account of the whole affair. Proving once again the importance of independent libraries acting as the 'memory' of the community when a large slice of what really happened is completely written out of mainstream history.

The Working Class Movement Library: www.wcml.org.uk

2009-10-31T09:08:00.004Z

New Issue of Radical Anthropology Journal

A new issue of the Radical Anthropology Journal is now available as a free pdf download. This issue is themed around the idea of 'A Willingness to Share" and includes an interview with Kate Pickett, co-author of the new book Spirit Level 'Why inequality is bad for you'; Ana Lopes asks 'Why hasn't anthropology changed the world"; Sarah Blaffer Hrdy discusses 'How mothers and others make us human'; lots of other good stuff on Scottish ballads, herbalism and so-called 'green capitalism':

www.radicalanthropologygroup.org

2009-10-17T08:28:00.002+01:00

Encyclopaedia Britannica - the hunt is on!

Publishers of the 241-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica have launched a search to find the oldest complete set in private hands. The Guardian's Alison Flood writes about the first ever edition of the Britannica, which began its life in small weekly sections, printed in the back streets of Edinburgh in July 1768:

www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/16/encyclopaedia-britannica-hunt-attics

2009-09-26T12:27:00.003+01:00

Robert Macfarlane reflects on the influence of The Monkey Wrench Gang

"Abbey spent years in grad school in New Mexico during the 1950s, flipping between the library and the landscape. His master's thesis was entitled "Anarchism and the Morality of Violence", and it compared Godwin, Proudhon and Bakunin. When he wasn't writing his thesis (which was most of the time), he was working as a fire-watcher and forest ranger in the national parks of the southwest. During those years, he thought his way through and beyond Thoreauvian civil disobedience, and into the world of direct action. He tested out his conclusions in non-fiction in the bestselling and bracingly grumpy Desert Solitaire (1968), and then fictionally in The Monkey Wrench Gang. When it was published, Jim Harrison described it approvingly in a New York Times review as "a violently revolutionary novel". So it proved to be."

Read the full article in The Guardian:

www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/26/robert-macfarlane-monkey-wrench-gang

2009-09-21T08:41:00.002+01:00

The Essay - Richard Mabey

Not to be missed is Radio 3's 'The Essay', which this week features nature writer Ricard Mabey, author of Food for Free, The Unofficial Countryside, Common Ground and Nature Cure. In a series of five programmes he '"attempts to marry a Romantic view of the natural world with a tad of scientific precision" in essays concentrating on each of our senses. Tonight and every night until Friday, at 11.00 pm - or on listen again:

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mrxqb

2009-08-21T08:35:00.002+01:00

A Soldier's Declaration: "the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it".

Cambridge University Library have launched a fund-raising campaign to aquire the archive of First world War poet Siegried Sassoon's personal papers. these include a draft of the controversial anti-war statement "A Soldier's Declaration". The archive is comprised of seven boxes of material, among which are "Sassoon's journals, pocket notebooks compiled on the Western Front, poetry books and photographs, love-letters to his wife Hester, and letters sent to Sassoon by writers and other distinguished figures".

The 'Soldier's Declaration', made in July 1917 was "an act of wilful defiance of military authority. Sent to his commanding officer, it states his refusal to return to duty and his belief that the war, which he "entered as a war of defence and liberation", had become "a war of aggression and conquest" which was being "deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it."

The declaration was subsequently read in the House of Commons on July 30, and caused a storm which only abated after fellow officer Robert Graves persuaded the authorities to send Sassoon to Craiglockhart Hospital for the treatment of shell-shock.

The power of Sassoon's statement resonates as powerfully now as when first written:
"I AM making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation."

2009-08-05T09:04:00.002+01:00

Forensic reading...

Read how new techniques can reveal the mysteries of the text in Mark Clarke's paper: "Seeking the Invisible: Forensic Science at the Parker Library"
from Medieval Academy News

2009-08-02T09:37:00.002+01:00

The real Raymond Carver

James Campbell examines the way in which the editor's razor created the work of Raymond Carver:

" The pleasure of reading Carver, who died in 1988 at the age of fifty, derives partly from his bizarre scenarios and from absurdist dialogue which yet retains the quality of overheard conversation; equally, it comes from pace and phrasing, even paragraphing and punctuation, which the author controls with what are practically musical skills. In the early stories, there is often an ambiguity in a line of speech, or a cloud over the action, which ultimately contributes to the reader’s thrill of engagement."

Read more in the Times Literary Supplement.

2009-08-01T08:26:00.002+01:00

A Passion for Mercy: Ross MacDonald

Tobias Jones offers an assement of crime writer Ross MacDonald, arguing that MacDonald eventually outstripped those writers like Hammett and Chandler he aspired to imitate, with the creation of the fictional detective Lew Archer:

"Over a series spanning 18 novels, Archer became something paradoxical: a memorable character about whom the reader knows next to nothing, the man with the punchy one-liners who is actually a good listener. Macdonald once wrote of his famous creation that he was "so narrow that when he turns sideways he almost disappears". The thinness was deliberate because Macdonald wanted his detective to be like a therapist, a man whose actions "are largely directed to putting together the stories of other people's lives and discovering their significance. He is ... a consciousness in which the meanings of other lives emerge."

Jones, like other writers who have looked at MacDonald, picks up on the psychological aspects of MacDonald's books, but like them he misses one of the things that makes MacDonald's work stand out above other writers - the way in which he locates the ultimate cause of individual and family breakdown in sociological causes - particularly war and the pursuit of power and wealth. Although these factors are always in the background it provides a missing element that makes so many other psychological thrillers lacking by comparison. One other aspect of MacDonald's work that I find exciting is the frequent backdrop of environmental disaster, threatening communities and individuals - forest fires, oil spills - which heighten the tension and provide cotnemporary relevance.
Read the whole feature in The Guardian.

2009-07-21T07:29:00.002+01:00

Time and Tide

Interesting article by Ken Worpole (with photographs by Jason Orton) on tidal pools:

"There is something mysterious and even disturbing about these pools, located on the border between land and water. There is a muscularity and even brutalism to most structures that engage directly or indirectly with the sea — not just tidal pools but also harbor walls, esplanades, piers, lighthouses, military lookouts and gun emplacements. All such constructions tend to be great works of public engineering, although they possess a distinctive architectural mass and form. For the sea is a powerful force of nature, and while the daily tides can bring pleasure and replenishment to coastal settlements, they are also agents of destruction and chaos."

Also a great quote from J G Ballard in one of the comments:
"All the most interesting things in the world take place where the sea meets the land and you're between those two states of mind. On that border zone, you're neither one nor the other, you're both. And people take their clothes off, which is always a plus"

Read the whole article in the Design Observer

2009-07-18T14:27:00.002+01:00

Benedict Seymour on Militant Urbanism

A thought-provoking essay about gentrification from Benedict Seymour in Variant (34), entitled Shoreditch and the Creative Destruction of the Inner City:

"the cosmetic renewal of a portion of the crumbling urban core coincides with continued – or intensified – infrastructural decline. Rather than an unfortunate side effect of the real estate market, gentrification is an openly pursued policy objective where 'creative entrepreneurialism’ is identified as key to reviving inner cities. Gentrification takes from the poor and gives to the rich; anything residually ‘public’ will either be reclaimed for the middle class or left to rot. The question remains, is the current crisis a reprieve or a new assault, and who will win this time?"

www.variant.randomstate.org/34texts/shoreditch34.html

2009-06-19T12:57:00.002+01:00

Franklin Rosemont 1943 - 2009

Franklin Rosemont, celebrated poet, artist, historian, publisher, street speaker, and surrealist activist, has died in Chicago aged just 65. He was active in the Sixties in the Wobblies and as part of the group around Rebel Worker. He translated Breton's writings in English (published in the UK by Pluto Press), and was the author of one of the best books on the life of Joe Hill. A tribute to Franklin by David Roediger, Paul Garon, and Kate Khatib, has been posted on InterActivist Info Exchange:

"Between the history he himself helped create and the history he helped uncover, Franklin was never without a story to tell or a book to write—about the IWW, SDS, Hobohemia in Chicago, the Rebel Worker, about the past 100 years or so of radical publishing in the US, or about the international network of Surrealists who seemed to always be passing through the Rosemonts’ Rogers Park home. As engaged with and excited by new surrealist and radical endeavors as he was with historical ones, Franklin was always at work responding to queries from a new generation of radicals and surrealists, and was a generous and rigorous interlocutor. In every new project, every revolt against misery, with which he came into contact, Franklin recognized the glimmers of the free and unfettered imagination, and lent his own boundless creativity to each and every struggle around him, inspiring, sustaining, and teaching the next generation of surrealists worldwide."

Read the full text of the tribute here:

http://info.interactivist.net/node/12524

2009-06-19T12:49:00.002+01:00

Boyd Tonkin: "Has British History lost its tongues?"

Consistently one of the best literary journalists featured in the UK daily papers, Boyd Tonkin assesses the impact of the "meltdown of language teaching in many schools and universities" on the interpretation of Continental history by British-based writers in the Independent.

2009-06-12T23:24:00.002+01:00

Facsimile Dustjackets

Hooked on the artwork for book jackets? Or got a copy of a book but the dustjacket is missing - here is a great website, with thousands of inspirational images, which can be searched or browsed. Created by Mark Terry, who will also supply facsimile copies of original dustjackets to replace missing or damaged originals. Some good links to other sites.

www.facsimiledustjackets.com

2009-06-12T08:56:00.002+01:00

The Peep Diaries

Hot of the press is a new book from City Lights - The Peep Diaries by Hal Niedzviecki, which explores the growth of a voyeuristic and informal surveillance culture. From the City Lights blurb:

"We have entered the age of "Peep culture": a tell-all, show-all, know-all digital phenomenon that is dramatically altering notions of privacy, individuality, security and even humanity. Peep culture is Reality TV, YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, surveillance technology, blogs, amateur porn, cellphone photos of your drunk friend making out with her ex-boyfriend, and more. In the age of Peep, core values and rights we once took for granted are rapidly being renegotiated, often without our even noticing.

Social critic Hal Niedzviecki dives into Peep, starting his own blog, joining every social network that will have him, monitoring the movements of his wife, hiring private detective websites to investigate his father, spying on his neighbors, and trying out for Reality TV, and drinking with a group of middle class empty nesters whose new hobby is posting their amateur porn to the 'Net. Part travelogue, part diary, part meditation and social history, The Peep Diaries explores a rapidly emerging digital phenomenon that is radically changing not just the entertainment landscape, but also the firmaments of our culture and society."

"A snapshot of a world in profound transformation. Compelling and creepy."
—Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo

www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100828760

2009-06-10T13:12:00.003+01:00

Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy

Jeff Klooger who runs the occasional Castoriadis blog has written a critical exploration of the "underpinnings and implications of Cornelius Castoriadis’ reflections on Being, society and the self. The book introduces the reader to the main concepts of Castoriadis’ work, but goes further to uncover the fundamental philosophical issues addressed by Castoriadis, and to critically examine the issues his work opens up." Published by Brill the book is available in hardback only at the astonishing price of 121 euros.

Never an easy read, but always rewarding, Castoriadis' work deserves to be better known in the UK. My introduction was by those wonderful pamphlets run off on an old duplicator by the Soldiarity group many years ago - which somehow still seem more appropriate for the subversive spirit that lays at the heart of Castioradis' writing. A pity that the audience for Jeff's book will be restricted by the price tag.

Castoriadis blog: New Book On Castoriadis Published

2009-05-29T13:10:00.002+01:00

Survival International

One year after photos of previously uncontacted Amazon Indians made headlines around the world, a new report from Survivial International reveals the five uncontacted tribes most at risk of extinction. The tribes face invasion of their lands – by loggers, ranchers, colonists and oil companies – and all are at grave risk of being decimated by diseases to which they have no immunity.

The Survival International report, is available as a pdf download or there is an html version supported with images and video clips.

2009-05-28T08:46:00.002+01:00

it - International Times archive

Now online, courtesy of the Underground Press Archive Group, the paper that gave a voice to the counter-culture is available free online, featuring original writing from William Burroughs, John Peel and even an early poem from Heathcote Williams:
www.internationaltimes.it

[via johnnyvoid]

2009-05-28T08:37:00.003+01:00

Chris Gray - Leaving the 20th Century

Co-editor of the magazine Heatwave and active member of the English situationist King Mob and editor the influential introduction to situationist ideas, Leaving the Twentieth Century, has died.
A lengthy obituary by his comrade and lifelong friend Charlie Radcliffe appears on: http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com

"Though Chris’s bourgeois background seemed superficially akin to mine our experiences were different. While I had protested with the Committee of 100 in England, he had travelled extensively. Hanging out in Tangiers and Paris’ Beat Hotel, Chris had met and knew several of the leading lights of the cultural avant-garde now burgeoning into an élite within the then new ‘counter-culture’. While my past included a veritable mishmash of ill-digested influences – largely ‘Beat’, anarchist and then surrealist – he was a cultural dissident, led into the ‘new politics’ by an initial interest in the angry young men. By now, however, he had read Antonin Artaud, had pronounced ideas on the Surrealists and Dada-ists as well as on art and anti-art. He was scathing about all avant-garde art – except Dada and to a more limited extent Surrealism. He was equally utterly contemptuous of hippie culture – “the latest slave ideology imported from America” he called it..."

2009-05-22T09:25:00.002+01:00

England's Greatest Radical? Gerard Winstanley, the Digger, 1609-1676

A lecture to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the birth of the Digger, Gerard Winstanley, given at Newcastle University by John Gurney last month, is now available online. John Gurney is the author of Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution.
(note that the lecture doesn't last as long as the time given on the website)
To listen to the lecture click here.

2009-05-15T17:43:00.004+01:00

Blackwells - Podcasts

Booksellers, Blackwells, are making some great podcasts available every couple of weeks. The most recent includes Kazuo Ishiguro, who talks about his first volume of short stories, Nocturnes - "a bittersweet collection" that owes its inspiration to his fascination with music. Nick Davies, whose book Flat Earth News last week won the first Bristol Festival of Ideas Book Prize sponsored by Blackwell, explains why he thinks journalism has been replaced by "churnalism". The third author is Mark Bostridge, whose biography of Florence Nightingale reveals that she was neither saint nor villain, but something much more interesting than the myth.

Other authors include Alain de Botton, Peter Carey and Ben Goldacre. All the podcasts to date have been archived.

Blackwells podcasts can be found here.

2009-04-24T20:15:00.002+01:00

In print....

Mary Beard examines the ancient Roman book trade and finds some surpising parallels in an essay entitled "Scrolling Down the Ages" in the New York Times Sunday Book Review:

"We usually assume that there is not much in common between the ancient Roman book trade and our own. Roman books, after all, were produced in a world that was not just pre-Internet but pre-Gutenberg. All reading material was laboriously copied out by hand. The ancient equivalent of the printing press was a battalion of slaves, whose job it was to transcribe one by one as many copies of Virgil, Horace or Ovid as the Roman market would buy."

In The Guardian, Iain Sinclair looks at the way different films have worked to construct a mythical East End in "Tales From Mean Streets":

"London cinema is a force that defies its apparent boundaries, leaking from screen into street and back again. A pre-forgotten literature of urban working lives, by such as James Curtis, Robert Westerby and Gerald Kersh, slips unmolested into cinematic adaptations. The faces of certain performers - Jack Warner, Jimmy Hanley, Alfie Bass, Sydney Tafler - are ever present, sometimes villains, sometimes regular family men."

Meanwhile, writer Ken Worpole reviews The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard as his "Book of a Lifetime" in The Independent:

"Bachelard was a phenomenologist, holding the view that there was a dynamic interplay between an active mind and its surroundings. The house was a theatre, something most people realise when travelling by train through the city at night, seeing lighted interiors. A candlelight in a window was enough to bring a street to life, he wrote."

Also in The Independent Natural History writer, Peter Marren, reviews two new books about summer migrants - the swallow and the cuckoo:

"If migrant birds could talk, what tales they could tell - though the late Miriam Rothschild insisted they would only complain about their parasites. Cuckoos and swallows are the true heralds of summer. The swallow arrives, scything through the air, belly-dipping over the grass, often during the first truly warm days of the year. The cuckoo is more of a "wandering voice", often heard, less often seen; its appearance used to be announced on The Times letters page. Both birds excite and uplift us with their promise of easy-living summer days."

2009-04-14T17:50:00.002+01:00

The Vanity of the Bonfires

Times journalist Richard Morrison examines some of the books consigned to the flames by the Nazis after their rise to power, and discusses the personal and political rivalries behind the selection of the books that were burnt :

"Astonishingly, there was virtually no opposition either from booksellers or university professors. Far from defending free expression, many academics seemed as enthusiastic about the book burning as their students. Cologne University announced that 'the Senate and Rector have decided to attend the occasion. Dress: dark suit'."

Read the full article here:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6087207.ece

2009-04-13T10:28:00.002+01:00

Stuck in the Past: Why is modern literature obsessed with history?

Novelist Amanda Craig, author of Hearts and Minds, explores the lack of contemporary relevance in British fiction, in the Independent:

"The way the world works does not change, no matter how much scientific knowledge we have acquired since Tudor times. But by failing to notice or celebrate our own age, with all its eccentricities and agonies, and by sticking our collective heads into bonnets, we fail also to understand what is special about the way we live now. This is the Victorian's legacy to us, and this, I believe, is what we have to rediscover."

2009-04-11T11:21:00.003+01:00

William Blake

Peter Marshall's short book William Blake: Visionary Anarchist is back in print. "...a lively and perceptive account of his thought, ranging from his philosophy, his critique of existing society and culture, to his vision of a free world." Available from the publishers & revamped Whitechapel bookshop Freedom books.

Also worth reading are Christine Gallant's article in the Summer 2008 issue of the Wordsworth Circle: "Blake's antislavery designs for Songs of Innocence and Experience" and the recently published Walking round Cambridge with William Blake: Auguries of Innocence illustrated by Rose Harries:

"William Blake's Auguries of Innocence is not an easy text, for despite the nursery-rhyme simplicity of couplets like

'A robin red breast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage',
the moral world he created is a difficult place to try to inhabit, even if only while reading. Like Shakespeare or Homer, though, each reading reveals new shades of meaning.

Rose Harries was a stranger to Blake's couplets until last year when she spent some time with them, then, wandering the streets of Cambridge, fitting her impressions of the poem with the modern scenes of street-life. Not surprisingly, her line drawings open the text in a new way, prompting the reader to a fresh view of a complex masterpiece."

Published in a small hand-printed edition by Incline Press:
www.inclinepress.com/index.html

2009-04-09T23:10:00.003+01:00

Anarchist Conference - London Saturday 6 & 7 June 2009

"The Anarchist Movement Conference is a chance to put our ideas on the table and rebuild ourselves. The barriers that exist need to be broken down, the experiences and ideas of those involved in anarchist politics need to be shared, discussed, critiqued and debated. The task is urgent, practical and necessary - are we as a movement mature enough to face the challenge?

How and where should we organise? Who are we are speaking to? How do we relate to the wider world as anarchists? These are some of the discussions that might happen during the course of the weekend. We want this conference to be a historical turning point, a point where we manage collectively to come together to look at the problems and work towards the solutions. Anarchists from every federation, network and local group, those involved in diverse struggles from environmental direct-action to community work, trade unionism to DIY projects - we invite you and encourage you: Claim your place at the table and help make a movement!

If we truly aim to be part of making history we need to remake ourselves as an organised, pragmatic movement to become an effective part of revolutionary change. If we do not learn from the mistakes of the past we are doomed to repeat them. The anarchist ideals of mutual aid, solidarity and the desire to live as equals have been echoed throughout our history, in every country, by women and men, regardless of race or ethnicity. We have a proud history, this conference is both about recognizing where we have come from and organizing where we want to go."

further details and registration form available from

www.conference09.org.uk/index.htm

2009-03-29T22:36:00.002+01:00

The Genoa G8 trials and Their Aftermath

A short but perceptive analysis of the trials of both police and protestors and their different outcomes, by Yasha Maccanico, is one of the the main articles in the latest Statewatch News:

"The events of 19-21 July 2001 represent a wake-up call in terms of the brutality of policing and preemptive criminalisation used against a mass popular and international demonstration. It resulted in the death of protester Carlo Giuliani and in thousands of people from the European Union and beyond experiencing an array of repressive measures. These measures included temporary detention in humiliating circumstances and physical violence. The two key trials of police officers concerned events at the Bolzaneto barracks, which was turned into a make-shift prison to hold protesters for the duration of the summit, and the Diaz school. The school was used as a dormitory, where a late-night police raid, justified on the basis of fabricated evidence (a Molotov cocktail brought into the school by police officers), and spurious claims (for instance “the presence of black tops”) resulted in injuries to scores of protesters, many of whom were sleeping when they were attacked."

The full nine page article is available as a pdf download from Statewatch:

www.statewatch.org/whatsnew.htm

2009-03-16T09:09:00.003Z

Debt: the First Five Thousand Years

Anthropologist David Graeber examines the origins of money and debt and the relationship both have to violence in this essay on MetaMute:

"Commodity money, particularly in the form of gold and silver, is distinguished from credit money most of all by one spectacular feature: it can be stolen. Since an ingot of gold or silver is an object without a pedigree, throughout much of history bullion has served the same role as the contemporary drug dealer’s suitcase full of dollar bills, as an object without a history that will be accepted in exchange for other valuables just about anywhere, with no questions asked. As a result, one can see the last 5 thousand years of human history as the history of a kind of alternation. Credit systems seem to arise, and to become dominant, in periods of relative social peace, across networks of trust, whether created by states or, in most periods, transnational institutions, whilst precious metals replace them in periods characterised by widespread plunder. Predatory lending systems certainly exist at every period, but they seem to have had the most damaging effects in periods when money was most easily convertible into cash."

www.metamute.org/en/content/debt_the_first_five_thousand_years

2009-03-16T08:28:00.004Z

The Dirty Thirty: Heroes of the Miner's Strike

During the Miner's Strike of 1984-85 only 30 miners out of 2,000 from the Leicestershire coalfield went on strike against the programme of pit closures. They became known as the "Dirty Thirty" and travelled the world arguing their case, and raising money to enable the strike to continue. Five Leaves press is publishing a new book about these 30 courageous men and the women's support group that backed them in their struggle. Written by David Bell and based on interviews with most of the surviving miner's and the support, The Dirty Thirty is illustrated with photographs and ephemera from the strike.

www.fiveleaves.co.uk/index.html

2009-03-14T10:51:00.003Z

New Naturalist

Richard Mabey examines the history of the New Naturalist series in The Guardian, and recounts some of the most seductive descriptions in past volumes, before suggesting how the series might be developed in future years:

"This is not to wish the NN to be something entirely different, or to join the kind of largely autobiographical, lyrically tinged work now clunkingly known as "nature writing". It is to ask whether the series really fulfilled its high purpose of making the inquiring spirit of field biology available to a wide public."

www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/14/new-naturalist-books-richard-mabey

2009-03-13T15:08:00.002Z

Bruce Sterling

Darren Waters interviews science fiction writer Bruce Sterling on the BBC website:

"The difficulty with interviewing Bruce Sterling is knowing where to start. His interests range from literature and design culture, to futurism, political activism, micro and macro economics, technology and 11th Century writers."
***
"Sterling is not looking to produce manifestos of the future to try and corral people into making change, despite his strong activist feelings around issues such as the global economy and climate change. He says "I like ideas as abstract constructs. I don't fancy myself as political organiser.

"I am too literary and poetic to be an organiser or rabble rouser. I am an attention philanthropist, always pointing to stuff other people are doing."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7941604.stm

2009-02-27T10:18:00.002Z

John Clare and Community

If you only have time to read one thing during March - make sure it is Theresa Adams' fascinating study "Representing Rural Leisure: John Clare and the Politics of Popular Culture". In this article Theresa demonstrates how John Clare "shows the reader that leisure (including ballads, stories and customs) builds community horizontally between members of the same class, offering an escape from paternalistic surveillance, and providing what Raymond Williams calls 'a breathing-space, a fortunate distance, from the immediate and visible controls' of and unequal social systems. Customs are not merely entertainment, but an expression of laborers' customary rights, unwritten rules that limit the master's power and grant laborer's standing in the social body."

A careful analysis of some of some of Clare's key poems contrasts his writing with that of Thomson and Bloomfield to reveal the true extent of Clare's originality
Published in Studies in Romanticism, 47 (Fall 2008) 371-392

2009-02-14T22:22:00.002Z

Revolutionary Mode

Richard Porton, author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination, considers the anarchist cinema of the 21st century, on Moving Image Source:

www.movingimagesource.us/articles/revolutionary-mode-20090210

2009-02-14T22:11:00.003Z

Another Country

Claudia Roth Pierrepont writes about "James Baldwin's flight from America" in the New Yorker:

"Baldwin had been fleeing from place to place for much of his adult life. He was barely out of his teens when he left his Harlem home for Greenwich Village, in the early forties, and he had escaped altogether at twenty-four, in 1948, buying a one-way ticket to Paris, with no intention of coming back. His father was dead by then, and his mother had eight younger children whom it tortured him to be deserting; he didn’t have the courage to tell her he was going until the afternoon he left. There was, of course, no shortage of reasons for a young black man to leave the country in 1948. Devastation was all around: his contemporaries, out on Lenox Avenue, were steadily going to jail or else were on “the needle.” His father, a factory worker and a preacher—“he was righteous in the pulpit,” Baldwin said, “and a monster in the house”—had died insane, poisoned with racial bitterness."

www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/02/09/090209crbo_books_pierpont

2009-02-13T10:02:00.003Z

Arrests, death threats, and Freedom of Expression

Johann Hari writes in the Independent about the continuing attack on freedom of freedom of expression by religious fundamentalism:
"I know that the price of taking offence is that I can give it too, if that is where the facts lead me."

http://tinyurl.com/bny9ma

[long url shorterned at tinyurl]

Meanwhile in Britain the space for dissent and alternative views is shrinking further. The way news is gathered and reported is under threat again from another piece of state legislation, this time it is the Counter Terrorism Act 2008. Section 76 of the Act which gives the police new powers to to stop and search photographers and prevent them from taking pictures in public comes into force next week.. Read more in the British Journal of Photography:

www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=839141

for details of recent incidents when press photographers have already been prevented from doing their job see this article on Hold the Front Page:

www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/photo/090210newact.shtml

2009-01-24T11:09:00.002Z

The Best of W G Sebald

Robert MacFarlane argues the case for The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz by W G Sebald to be considered as among the Guardian's "1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read":

"The Rings of Saturn describes a summer walking tour down the Suffolk coast, made by a narrator figure who resembles, but is not quite, Sebald himself. Along the way, he tells apparently disconnected stories about the deforestation of Britain, the drowned town of Dunwich, the herring trade and Bergen-Belsen. Gradually, the reader realises that this almost folksy travelogue is in fact a vastly complex rumination on ruination and transience. And that the apparently crabwise motion of the narrative - its near-refusal to proceed - is in fact Sebald's way of sidling up to some of the most significant questions of modern history: trauma, the Holocaust, repression."

www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/23/1000-novels-sebald-wg

2009-01-07T10:16:00.002Z

You can't beat "El Sistema"

Richard Morrison writes about the lessons we can learn from the example of José Antonio Abreu, and his Venezualan musical project - "El Sistema": in The Times:

"The secret of the Simón Bolívar Orchestra's appeal doesn't lie in the deprived backgrounds of its members, or the Latinate exuberance of the playing. It lies in the fact that its players, and thousands of other kids back in Venezuela, voluntarily practise their instruments for 20 hours each week. And that's on top of their regular schooling."

2009-01-03T23:25:00.004Z

Gazza - News from the Israeli Resistance

You won't hear about the Israeli resistance to the Israeli War machine on the BBC despite its pretence of objectivity - but it is happening and there are daily demonstrations against the war. The only way to stop the bloodshed and bombing is to support the emerging anti-war movement inside Israel - small demonstrations will grow into larger protests as news gets around. The first step is to break the censorship that hides the protests behind a wall of silence. The best site for reports on the opposition are: Ilan Against the Wall, Anarchists Against the Wall, Israel Indymedia (which has photos and some articles in English) and Gush Shalom.

2009-01-03T11:47:00.003Z

John Clare and the Gypsies

The V & A website is currently hosting some stunning contemporary nature writing on Essex, including an essay by Ronald Blythe on John Clare and gypsies:
"Sometimes I watch a film or read a book, come-to and tell myself, 'But I was there! I heard it, I saw it.' It is a not uncommon experience. It occurs when I read John Clare on the gypsies. He both hobnobbed with them and was fastidious where they were concerned, was prejudiced and unprejudiced at the same time. He wrote many poems about them which envied their lot, their freedom, their women, and one poem which envied them nothing. "Vagabondage in a native Place: John Clare and the Gypsies".

Also available on site are Robert Macfarlane on "Elm", Ken Worpole on "Estuary Lines: An Essay on the Essex Coastline", "Mud Language" by Michele Roberts, and "The Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's 'Journey Out of Essex'" by Ian Sinclair.

2008-12-28T19:20:00.002Z

New Stuff...

January Magazine has a US focused round-up of "Best Books of 2008" and also two feature articles on "Best Crime Books 2008":
http://januarymagazine.com

Duke University Press have just placed eight years of back issues of the academic journal Comparative Literature online - with open access.

Robert Bly's translation of a poem by Miguel de Unamo is the seasonal posting on Wood's Lot:
"The Snowfall Is So Silent"

The New Yorker features a review by Darrel Pinckney of the recent publication of Susan Sontag's early journals: Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947-1963,. Pinckney's review is entitled: "The Book of Lists". This issue also includes an audio profile of Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine: "Voice of the Left" by Larissa MacFarquhar.

2008-12-27T22:28:00.002Z

Adrian Mitchell 1932-2008

Poet Michael Rosen pays tribute (in Socialist Worker) to his friend Adrian Mitchell, who died last week:

"As a teenager, I watched him performing his poem "To whom it may concern" from the plinth at Trafalgar Square. I was used to reading poetry to myself in my bedroom, or at best, hearing it on the radio. But here was a poetry that responded to political events of the moment and talked to a movement of hundreds and thousands."

www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=16758

[see also the post dated 21st December below for additional links on Adrian Mitchell]

2008-12-24T16:35:00.002Z

Books and Libraries in the Digital Age

A video lecture by Harvey Darnton, director of Harvard Libraries:

In conversation with David Thorburn and audience members, Darnton lays out why he finds more promise than peril in rapidly expanding digital collections. He first owns up to the tactile pleasures of archival history: the sensation of opening a box full of manuscripts, dirty hands, the smell of old paper, and literally coming “into contact with vanished humanity.”

He cherishes the drama of such research, as well as the finished, weighty products of this kind of work: the book. While the “tactile quality of books” is very important -- and Darnton describes holding up leaves of 18th century books to see bits of ground-down petticoat thread -- there are also positive dimensions to digital versions. For instance, when the British Library digitized Beowulf, it discovered several new words. But “one medium of communication doesn’t displace another,” he reassures. “They coexist.” Darnton himself is hard at work on a large-scale electronic book about books in the 18th century, comprised of layers a user can navigate, from essays on various subjects, to selections of documents in English, to the original documents in French. There might even be songs performed as they were sung in the streets of Paris 250 years ago. “We are in an era of creating new kinds of books, new kinds of reading and authorship.”

MIT Communications Forum website which hosts the lecture has also made other lectures available including "Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures" and "Copyright, Fair Use , and the Cultural Commons"

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/622

2008-12-21T22:29:00.004Z

Adrian Mitchell - Poet

My brain socialist
My heart anarchist
My eyes pacifist
My blood revolutionary

The BBC reported today on the death of poet Adrian Mitchell aged of 76. Described by Red Pepper as the "shadow laureate" Adrian was probably best known for his poems "On the Beach at Cambridge" and "To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam)" - but his writing was wide-ranging and not restricted to anti-war themes. One of his most powerful works was the anti-bullying "Back in the Playground Blues" - based on his own experience at school it widens to become an indictment of authoritarian society:

Back in the Playground Blues - Adrian Mitchell (1997)

I dreamed I was back in the playground, I was about four feet high
Yes dreamed I was back in the playground, standing about four feet high
Well the playground was three miles long and the playground was five miles wide

It was broken black tarmac with a high wire fence all around
Broken black dusty tarmac with a high wire fence running all around
And it had a special name to it, they called it The Killing Ground

Got a mother and a father, they're one thousand years away
The rulers of The Killing Ground are coming out to play
Everybody thinking: 'Who they going to play with today?'

Well you get it for being Jewish
And you get it for being black
Get it for being chicken
And you get it for fighting back
You get it for being big and fat
Get it for being small
Oh those who get it get it and get it
For any damn thing at all

Sometimes they take a beetle, tear off its six legs one by one
Beetle on its black back, rocking in the lunchtime sun
But a beetle can't beg for more, a beetle's not half the fun

I heard a deep voice talking, it had that iceberg sound
'It prepares them for Life' - but I have never found
Any place in my life worse than The Killing Ground.

More than any other poet Adrian successfully combined the rhythms of rock and roll with incisive political comment - I still have vivid recollections of his performance of his anti-boss poem "Fuck off Friday" at the Centenary celebrations for the anarchist paper Freedom in 1986. His work with children was both inspired and inspiring.

Jonathan Sale interview in the Independent.

Poetry Trust Interview with Michael Rosen and Adrian Mitchell

There is a good overview of his work on the British Council's Contemporary Writers website.

As a tribute Neil Astley has posted videos of Adrian reading three of his poems, on Vimeo, including "Especially When it Snows" an elegy for his adopted go-daughter Boty, who died of a heroin overdose. [thanks to Peony Moon]

2008-12-07T22:49:00.003Z

Seduced by the Devil's Whore?

If you have been watching Channel 4s costume Drama, the "Devil's Whore" based on the real events of the English Civil War and are interested in finding out more about the Levellers and the Diggers - what they believed in and what they did, then you will be interested in the London Socialist Historians one-day event:

1649 and the Execution of King Charles

30 January 1649 is one of the key dates in the history of British democracy but it is commemorated nowhere in Britain. It was the day when King Charles 1st was beheaded and the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell, the foundation of modern Parliamentary democracy, came into effective being. It was a revolutionary moment and it brought onto the historical stage people, ideas and movements that went well beyond anything that Cromwell and the senior leadership of the New Model Army had in mind. Brian Manning in his seminal book on 1649 notes that this was a year when popular mobilisations did not happen. There was no popular uprising to mark the Commonwealth, and no popular protest at the execution of the King. There was however an Army revolt at Burford, also celebrating its anniversary this year, which was brutally put down by Cromwell. 1649 was also the year when Cromwell landed in Dublin to initiate brutal episodes in Ireland.

This conference will look at the liberties and democratic practices ushered in by 1649 and at those who wanted to take them further.

1649 and the execution of King Charles

Saturday 7 February 2009
Venue: Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, London.

Programme

9.30 – Registration (Wolfson Room)

10.00-11.15 Welcome and Keynote addresses (Wolfson Room)
Chair: Keith Flett, LSHG
Geoffrey Robertson, author of The Tyrannicide Brief
John Rees, author of A Rebel's Guide to Milton, forthcoming

11.15-11.30 Coffee

11.30-12.30 PANEL ONE: Cromwell's coalition and its critics (Wolfson Room)
Chair: David Renton, LSHG
Martyn Everett, 'The Agitators – between Rebellion and Reaction'
Dr. Ariel Hessayon, Goldsmiths College, 'Early modern Communism: the Diggers and community of goods'

11.30-12.30 PANEL TWO: 1649 in contemporary eyes (Pollard Room)
Chair: Tobas Abse, LSHG
Claudia Guli, University of Melbourne, 'Historical Precedent in Contemporary Justifications of the Trial of Charles I'
Ángel Alloza, CSIC (Spain), '"An Outrageous Incident": the execution of Kings Charles seen from Abroad'

12.30-1.30 Lunch

1.30-2.30 PANEL THREE: The regicide, terror and Restoration (Pollard Room)
Chair: David Renton, LSHG
Jerome de Groot, University of Manchester, '"Original Villany": Foundational Terrorism'
Alan Marshall, Bath Spa University, 'The Trials of Thomas Harrison, regicide'

1.30-2.30 PANEL FOUR: The Republic and something more (Wolfson Room)
Chair: Paul Burnham, LSHG
Alejandro Doering De Rio, Queen's College Cambridge, 'James Harrington as a theorist of political of equality'
Dr John Seed, Roehampton University, 'The politics of remembering: the execution of Charles I in C18th England'

2.30-2.45 Coffee

2.45-4.00 Closing Plenary (Wolfson Room)
Chair: Keith Flett
Norah Carlin, author of The Causes of the English Civil War
Geoff Kennedy, author of Diggers, Levellers and Agrarian Capitalism

£10 waged / £5 unwaged,. Order from Keith Flett
keith1917@btinternet.com

2008-11-24T23:23:00.002Z

A Lifetime of Control

The precise impact of ID cards is still only just being made clear. Not just the sheer amount of personal data that will be collected, but the massive fines (£1,000) and extensive jail sentences (up to two years) for failing to complete application forms properly or within certain time limits, failure to turn up for questioning at a designated "interrogation" centre of the government's choosing (my three nearest centres are 30, 40 and 60 miles away - all involving a minimum of 2 hours of travel in each direction).

The No2ID website now provides a link to the government's consultation document on the secondary legislation required to make the whole scheme "work":

www.no2id.net

...meanwhile answers to recent Parliamentary questions have revealed that there are now more than a million children on the UK DNA database, including more than 100,000 aged between 10 and 12. Under 18s now comprise more than 25% of all records on the database.

full report on Publictechnology.net

2008-11-24T08:16:00.002Z

Free Digital Resources

CollegeDegree.com has put together a page of 100 University Libraries from around the world, that provide extensive digital collections "that anyone can access".

Libraries listed include Michigan State University Libraries, with digital collections on radicalism (American Indian Movement, Black Panthers, I W W, Wounded Knee, and the Sacco & Vanzetti case); Comic Art, Cookbooks, Orchids, etc.; Syracuse University Library where the digitised collections include their extensive holdings of Medieval Manuscripts; Cambridge University Library, which has digitised two of the Conrad Martens Sketchbooks (Martens accompanied Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle) and an anglo-saxon "verse life" Edward the Confessor from an early 13th century manuscript.

View the complete list of 100 Libraries:

CollegeDegree.com

2008-11-23T09:42:00.003Z

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

I wish I had met Roger Deakin before he died. His powers of observation and his humane sensibility continue to impress themselves on my mind more than two years after his death. So I was pleased to read in The Times that his random observations and research notes, compiled over a period of six years, have been edited and shaped into a new book by Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker. They have taken occasional sentences, "paragraphs and sometimes mini-essays" and presented them in journal format.

In his review Alexander Cockburn describes Deakin's "vigorous" natural descriptions, and the way in which he "communes - in the richest sense of the word - with the creatures of his old hedgerows, the living slime on the bit of Elizabethan moat in which he swam, his coppice wood, his unpoisoned pastures, the hornets in the attic, the badgers in their sett, the young hedgehog warmed back to health...."

New British nature writing at its very best.

Read Alexander Cockburn's review in full at Times Online.

2008-11-20T14:01:00.002Z

The Kindest Cut - War Surgery

A recently published book - almost banned before publication - is making news in the US.
War surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq 2003-2007 intended as a guidebook to new surgical techniques provides harrowing documentary evidence - if any is still needed - about what war does to people. Sarah Jackson Han provides an articulate review for Healthcare Today:

www.hc2d.co.uk/content.php?contentId=9297

2008-11-19T23:18:00.003Z

Hope in Common

A new essay from David Graeber on InterActivist Info Exchange:

"Those wishing to subvert the system have learned by now, from bitter experience, that we cannot place our faith in states. The last decade has instead seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid association, most of which have not even made it onto the radar of the global media. They range from tiny cooperatives and associations to vast anti-capitalist experiments, archipelagos of occupied factories in Paraguay or Argentina or of self-organized tea plantations and fisheries in India, autonomous institutes in Korea, whole insurgent communities in Chiapas or Bolivia, associations of landless peasants, urban squatters, neighborhood alliances, that spring up pretty much anywhere that where state power and global capital seem to temporarily looking the other way. They might have almost no ideological unity and many are not even aware of the other’s existence, but all are marked by a common desire to break with the logic of capital. And in many places, they are beginning to combine. “Economies of solidarity” exist on every continent, in at least eighty different countries. We are at the point where we can begin to perceive the outlines of how these can knit together on a global level, creating new forms of planetary commons to create a genuine insurgent civilization."

Read the full essay online:
http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/11569

2008-11-18T08:40:00.004Z

Mickey Mouse - 80 Today

An interesting interview on this morning's Today programme, on Radio 4, in which Brian Sibley, "the author of the Disney Studio Story and Mickey Mouse: His Life and Times, explains the enduring appeal of Walt Disney's most famous creation":

Listen again if you missed it (only available for one week after broadcast):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7734000/7734774.stm

For a different perspective here's some online extracts from Ariel Dorfman's classic How to Read Donald Duck:

www.adorfman.duke.edu/

[select "essays" from the links at the top of the page]

and if you have time on your hands to read comics, here is the full online version of The Adventures of TinTin: Breaking Free:

http://tintinrevolution.free.fr/

2008-11-14T14:11:00.004Z

"...a strong literary style bears the same relation to everyday conversation that Matisse bears to the demands of home decoration."

Andrew O'Hagan writes in the new issue of the London Review of Books, about the experience of listening to the voices of famous writers, now long dead, but newly revealed by the British Library:

www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n22/ohag01_.html

New CDs available from the British Library: The Spoken Word: British Writers and The Spoken Word: American Writers.

British Library Sound Archives
(n.b. not available between evening of 16 November and afternoon of 17 November)

2008-11-11T14:28:00.002Z

Why I Copyfight

Cory Doctorow, author of Over-Clocked; Futuristic Tales; Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town; and the recently published, Little Brother, writes about copyright issues, for Locus Magazine:

"Culture's imperative is to share information: culture is shared information. Science fiction readers know this: the guy across from you on the subway with a gaudy SF novel in his hands is part of your group. You two have almost certainly read some of the same books, you've got some shared cultural referents, some things to talk about."

www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/11/cory-doctorow-why-i-copyfight.html

2008-11-10T08:43:00.002Z

NO2ID

A blog to keep you up to date with the campaign to "stop ID cards and the database state" from the No2ID campaign:

www.no2id.net/newsblog/

2008-11-06T14:35:00.003Z

Hoyle Day

Anyone in Cambridge on Saturday (8th November) should take advantage of "Hoyle Day" to visit a one-day exhibition on the life and work of science-ficiton writer and astronomer, Fred Hoyle. His best known books were The Black Cloud, and A for Andromeda. As a bonus, St John's College, which is hosting the exhibition is also providing guided tours around the College's 17th Century Library. There will also be a talk by Dr Carolin Crawford, Institute of Astronomy, about the life and work of Fred Hoyle.

full details from The Cambridge Network.

2008-11-01T16:14:00.003Z

Studs Terkel

A pioneer in the use of oral history, Studs Terkel was one of the first historians to provide a voice for the life and experiences of ordinary working Americans.
Here's a short piece about Studs on the BBC website, which includes a short video clip made earlier this year:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7703428.stm

There is also a stimulating interview with Studs carried out when he was 91, full of rambling anecdotes, those teasing stories that give oral history its charm, on Youtube:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=QmDUwlseN4M

Some of Studs' own work - the interviews he carried out - can be found on this collection of "Conversations with America":

www.studsterkel.org

2008-10-21T23:09:00.002+01:00

Radical Bookshops

The new issue of Information for Social Change (No: 27) is now available online with a series of articles on radical bookshops:

www.libr.org/isc/toc.html

2008-10-18T09:34:00.003+01:00

Roald Dahl as Spy

Jacob Heilbrunn reviews Jennet Conant's The Irregulars in the The New York Times Sunday Book Review:

www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=3845184

2008-10-16T16:48:00.003+01:00

"of course you can say what you like in England...."

Church Street Liverpool has traditionally been a place where people can set up a stall and distribute protest literature. Recently that tradition has been subject to low level harassment and confiscation of literature by the police. In response local groups organised through "Liverpool Freedom of Expression" set up ten stalls last Saturday. The police response was to surround campaign stalls with up to six riot vans. Two people were arrested and several stalls had leaflets and literature confiscated.
After the arrests activists were joined by passing members of the public, incensed at what they had witnessed, in a spontaneous attempt to block police vans and prevent them from leaving.

Several articles explaining the background and giving details about this incident can be read on indymedia liverpool.

Liverpool people aren't prepared to tolerate this assault on their freedom of speech so this Saturday - 18th October - local people will be holding another mass stall action. If you want to take part meet outside News from Nowhere in Bold Street at 12.30 pm

2008-10-14T11:27:00.004+01:00

Albert Camus and the Libertarians

Many of the the writings of Albert Camus were framed by a dialogue with anarchism - notably The Rebel, and shorter works such as the early essay on the poet Jehan Rictus, "Jehan Rictus: the poet of poverty" and the anti-cold war statement Neither Victims Nor Executioners. He worked closely with anarchists, revolutionary syndicalists and anti-authoritarian Marxists, supporting conscientious objectors and Spanish anti-fascists. Now a long term project to publish his anarchist and libertarian writings, with the support of his daughter Catherine has reached completion with the publication in French of Albert Camus et les libertaires : écrits présentés par Lou Marin.
Marseille: Egrégores, 2008. 361 pages. € 15.
ISBN: 978-2-9523819-4-9

Égrégores Editions 7, boulevard de la Liberté, 13001 Marseille, France
egregores.editions@free.fr

2008-10-11T12:47:00.002+01:00

In Print....

A short and occasional reminder that it isn't all available on the Web:

Alastair Bellamy writes on "The Murder of John Lambe: Crowd Violence and Popular Politics in Early 17th Century England" in Past and Present, 200 (August 2008). Also in the same issue

Robert Gerwarth explores "The Central European Counter-Revolution: Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria and Hungary after the Great War." In particular he looks at how the ideology of anti-semitism helped to create a "socially homogeneous Central European subculture of paramilitary activists who were linked by a determination to suppress violently those held responsible for defeat, revolution and territorial disintegration".

The November issue of Book and Magazine Collector contains an article by David Blake on "George Bellairs: the Banker of Crime" about writer Harold Blundall, author of some 40 detective novels, while Rare Book Review (Oct/Nov 2008) has an neat article by Charlotte Luxford "A Group of Their Own" on "love and loss in Virginia Woolf's intimate circle" and as a bonus there is also a feature on Terry Pratchett - "Not the End of Discworld".

Meanwhile I was intrigued to see the revival of the argument about the "sexy hand-axe thesis" in the current issue of Antiquity. The theory that the Acheulean handaxe was a surrogate used to flaunt stoneage masculinity, and therefore played a key role in natural selection was first controversially proposed M Kohn & S Mithen, in an article "Handaxes: Products of Sexual selection?" Antiquity 73 (199) 518-526. Now Anna Jane Machin has given the pot a fresh stir with a fresh look at this theory "The Sexy Handaxe Theory" with a rejoinder by Steve Mithen.
Expect sales of Antiquity to rocket, centre-folds of Phil Harding, and the re-opening of the Norfolk flint mines at Grimes Graves as soon as the tabloids catch onto it...

2008-10-11T09:41:00.003+01:00

The Complexities of Babar

Adam Gopnik examines the different interpretations of Jean de Brunhoff's Babar books - an implicit endorsement of French colonialism or a "fable of the difficulties of a bourgeois life" as Gopnik concludes?

While I don't accept the fable argument I think it is a real step forward to see the social values embedded in literature debated in the pages of a mainstream publication like the New Yorker.

The New Yorker article:
www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/22/080922fa_fact_gopnik?currentPage=all

The Morgan Library & Museum currently host an online exhibition of original drafts and Watercolours for the first Babar book:

www.themorgan.org/collections/swf/exhibOnline.asp?id=900