the lark rises
over the grey dried grasses
rises & sings.
— Herbert Read, from
"The Contrary Experience,"
A World Within A War (1945)
http://recollectionbooks.com/
Full Bleed on your radar screen,
http://recollectionbooks.com/
Blips,
OCTOBER 20
ARTHUR RIMBAUD
Gay French poet, gunrunner, anarchist activist,
bad boy of Paris.
Feast Of No Excuse For A Feast.
Revolution Day ( Guatemala).
Change Your Oil Day. (Your hair will look better.)
http://recollectionbooks.com/
______________________________
1854 -- Arthur Rimbaud lives...Published his first poem
at age 16, quit writing at age 20. Precocious boy-poet
of French symbolism, wrote some of the most remarkable
poetry & prose of the 19th century before he abandoned
writing for gun-running.
"Rimbaud ... very simply tried to
take the pretensions of poetry seriously & to
re-form art so that it could alter the meaning
of relaity. He decided this was a hoax & an
activity beneath the dignity of grown
men...However, he almost succeeded, &
poetry will never be the same again."
— Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited
http://recollectionbooks.com/
http://www.levity.com/
"rimbaud. no more the daring young horseman
of high abyssinian plateau.
such ardor is petrified forever."
— Patti Smith, "rimbaud dead"
1874 -- Modernist composer Charles Ives lives
Uses `strange time.' When friends were heckling at a
dissonant performance of works by Charles Ruggles,
Ives got up & shouted,
"Hey, shut up you sissies. Why don't you use
your ears like men!"
1895 -- Gaston Leval, libertarian/writer, lives.
http://recollectionbooks.com/
1916 -- US: Appearing in court to testify on behalf of
Bolton Hall, anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman is
arrested for having distributed birth control information
...Her friend Margaret Sanger is also arrested, on the
26th, for distributing birth control information.
1923 -- Beat poet & antiauthoritarian Philip Whalen lives,
Portland, Oregon.
1924 -- The "First Colored World Series" of baseball is
held in Kansas City, Mo. The series was organized by the
famed Rube Foster.
1926 -- US: Good Ol'Days?: Labor activist, anti-militarist
& socialist Eugene Debs dies. His "radical" reforms
included an eight-hour workday, pensions, workman's
compensation, sick leave, social security ...
Ran for president from his jail cell.
[Seems to us it's the elected ones should be ensconced
in the hoosegow].
(Debs is)... a lawbreaker at large, & enemy of
the human race ... Debs should be jailed, if there
are jails in his neighborhood, & the disorder his
bad teaching has endangered must be
squelched."
— "The New York Times" editorial, 1894
1932 -- Michael McClure, beat poet, lives
Grew up in Seattle, & was fascinated by nature
& wildlife & expected to become a natural
scientist. Participated in a poetry workshop with
Robert Duncan, & was sucked into the emerging
Beat vortex of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance.
http://www.litkicks.com/
1945 -- Spain: "El Quico" & two other anarchist guerrillas,
Jaime "Abisinio" Pares Adán & Juan "Roget" Salas Millón,
at the request of Committee of Resistance of the CNT,
bust three prisoners out of jail.
http://recollectionbooks.com/
1947 -- US: HUAC opens hearings into
alleged Communist influence in Hollywood.
"Many writers continued their Hollywood careers
under pseudonyms, or "fronts," sometimes with
comic results. Alfred Levitt, for example,
screenwriter of "The Boy with Green Hair"
(1948), relates how a story conference got off on
the wrong foot when he was addressed by four
different names."
The HUAC hearings were degradation ceremonies.
Their job was not to legislate or even to discover
subversives (that had already been done by the
intelligence agencies & their informants) so much as it
was to stigmatize.
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~
1956 -- Poland: Anti-Stalinist wave. See also the 23rd.
1985 -- France: Libertarian songster Jean-Roger
Caussimon dies.
I do not want to be a poet...
I try to write songs!
Jean-Roger Caussimon est un très grand poète.
Léo Ferré a bien de la chance de l'avoir rencontré !
— Charles Trenet
I spent a lot of my time in Paris...scouring the flea markets
& used record stores for old albums, taping my friends'
collections, & trying to decipher the more
obscure, slangy lyrics.
It's a rich, fascinating world,
from nineteenth-century cabaret singers like Aristide
Bruant (the guy with red scarf and black cape pictured
on the well-known Toulouse-Lautrec poster, which was
commissioned to advertise the café where Bruant
performed his own songs), through the tragic-sordid
chansons réalistes (Fréhel, Damia, early Piaf) and upbeat
music hall artists (especially the delightfully zany Charles
Trenet) of the 1930s, to the postWorld War II renaissance
of great poet-singers: Georges Brassens (the greatest,
ranging from worldly-wise elegies to outrageous satirical
humor), Anne Sylvestre (a lovely lyricist, somewhat
reminiscent of early Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell),
Léo Ferré, Jean-Roger Caussimon, Jacques Brel,
Guy Béart, Félix Leclerc; along with many excellent
interpreters of earlier material, of whom my favorite is
Germaine Montero.
— Ken Knabb, Confessions of a Mild-Mannered
Enemy of the State
http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/
http://recollectionbooks.com/
1990 -- US: Rallies against the Gulf War in 22 cities.
"We have heard that a half million
children have died (as a result of
sanctions against Iraq). I mean, that is
more children than died in Hiroshima.
&, you know, is the price worth it?"
Albright, effervescent liberal, replied:
"I think this is a very hard
choice, but the price, we
feel that the price was worth it."
1993 -- Serbia: Women In Black attacked by paramilitaries
during weekly anti-war vigil, Belgrade.
"DO NOT SPEAK FOR US, WE WILL SPEAK FOR OURSELVES"
http://flag.blackened.net/
1994 -- Guatemala: US activist Jennifer Harbury initiates new
hunger strike at US Embassy in Guatemala City to force disclosure
of her disappeared husband's fate.
2001 -- England: London's 20th annual @ Bookfair.
Be here or be square...
http://www.anarchistbookfair.
http://recollectionbooks.com/
_________________
— anti-CopyRite 1997-3999, more or less
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