[Daily Bleed] 1/25 PET LOBSTER

As a child, fresh out of the hospital
with tape covering the left side
of my face, I began to count birds.
At age fifty the sum total is precise
& astonishing, my only secret.

— Jim Harrison, "Counting Birds"


GERARD DE NERVAL

Walked his pet lobster on a blue ribbon
through the streets of Paris,

"Because it does not bark & it knows the secrets of the sea."

Visionary, great poet, suicide.

Daily Bleed web page, updated & so very full of it,
http://www.recollectionbooks.com/bleed/0125.htm

Excerpts:

1759 -- Bard of Caledonia, Scottish poet Robert Burns lives.

Burns gathered fragmentary songgs & legends &
transmuted them into something more wonderful &
more socially powerful than the originals...

The songs of partisans filtered through Burns become
battle songs of freedom, hymns to the integrity &
independence of the individual...

— Kenneth Rexroth, More Classics Revisited.


1787 -- US: Shay's Rebellion, begun in August, opposed the
imprisonment of Massachusetts farmers for debts. Daniel Shays
& 800 followers march to Springfield to seize the Federal arsenal,
but were repulsed & put down by the Massachusetts State militia.

The American Revolution is celebrated as an heroic
liberation from from colonial rule. But a major impetus
for adopting the US Constitution, a compromise
between slaveholding interests of the South & moneyed
interests of the North, was a fear of the common people
& to prevent further rebellions such as Shay's.

As Howard Zinn notes, "The Constitution was set up
for the big government. It was set up to protect the slave
owners, bankers, land prospectors & merchants. We've
been living with a big government since 1787."

http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/CS/ShaysRebellion.htm

1855 -- Gerard de Nerval, hangs himself in the streets
of Paris, France.

1874 -- William Somerset Maugham lives in bondage...

1882 -- Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) lives.

1894 -- Spain: Another brick in the wall?

A bricklayer shoots & wounds Ramon Larroca,
the civil governor of Barcelona.

1901 -- Hyppolyte Prosper Olivier Lissagaray
(1838-1901) dies.

A socialist who sided with no party, whose
sympathies lay with Blanquistes,
anticlericals, anarchists & his friend
Amilcare Cipriani.

1908 -- Andre Mournier ("The Agronomist") flees to
Switzerland. Two anti-militarist articles got him in hot
water with the government for "insulting the army".
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/MournierAndre.htm

1923 -- Argentina: Kurt Wilkens (Gustav Wilckens) assassinates
the "Killer of Patagonia" in Buenos Aires.
See on this subject Osvaldo Bayer, "Les anarchistes expropriateurs",
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/BayerOsvaldo.htm

1926 -- US: Passaic Strike -- 16,000 textile workers strike
in Passaic, N.J.

"You are the ones who can say the word Solidarity.
& call each other comrades.

The oppressor can claim nothing but his greed."


— Mother Jones

1931 -- Paavo Haavikko (1931-) lives. Prominent Finnish
poet, dramatist, & fiction writer.

I have seen quite a few things in my time.
I don't recall that a single one of them
seemed reasonable.

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/images/jk/fn002.jpg


1950 -- Austrialian anarchist "Chummy" Fleming dies, age 86.

A tattered cow-bell

'... Every Sunday until his death... he took his stand under
a tree at the Yarra Bank & summoned a few cronies with
a tattered cow-bell....'

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/0125ref.htm#25/1950

1958 -- 2nd Situationist International Conference, Paris, January
25-26: Participants: Michèle Bernstein, Guy-Ernest Debord, Asger
Jorn, Abdelhafid Khatib, Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/sources.htm#Situationists

1981 -- China: Mao's widow Jiang Qing sentenced to death.
Apparently belonged to a motorcycle gang with three others;
her sentence is later commuted to life.

1996 -- Germany: The former 'Bundeswehr' general Jorg Schonbohm
becomes Berlin's Interior Minister & declares that all squats
will be evicted.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/10ref.htm#03/1990

2001 -- Switzerland: Under massive police protection the "World
Economic Forum," bringing together heads of states & business
leaders, anti-Globalization protestors try to disrupt them & computer
pirates hack into their database of names, adresses & credit card info.

"The world is not merchandise" (José Bové).

_____________

Direct Action . . . implies that the working class
subscribes to notions of freedom & autonomy
instead of genuflecting before the principle of
authority. Now, it is thanks to this authority
principle, the pivot of the modern world —
democracy being its latest incarnation — that
the human being, tied down by a thousand
ropes, moral as well as material, is bereft of
any opportunity to display will & initiative.

— Emile Pouget, DIRECT ACTION

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

_____________


— anti-Genuflect 2009