The Daily Bleed, 19 Dec. 2012

  "Circles & globes haunt me: oranges, Japanese billiard
   balls, Venetian lanterns, jugglers' hoops, the round ball
   of the goalkeeper who wears a jersey. I shall have to
   establish, to regulate, a whole internal astronomy."

                — Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

Daily Bleed, web page in full,
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/1219.htm

excerpts:

DECEMBER 19 --  PHIL OCHS
Emblematic American protest folksinger of the Sixties.

Alternate Saint:

ÉDITH PIAF
Iconic French chanteuse, cultural & political rebel.

Hindu FESTIVAL OF THE GODDESS SANKRAT
The Gods Wake up after six months of sleep. A day
for exchanging gifts, feasting & visiting.

______________________________


1776 -- Thomas Paine publishes his first
'American Crisis' essay.

                    "These are the times that try
                      men's souls...."

1883 --  Ruben Dario's "Oda a la Union Centroamerica" is published.

        "Poetry will exist as long as there is a problem of life & death."

1894 -- Senya Flechin lives (1894-1981), Russia.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/FlechinSenya.htm

1910 -- France: Criminal, author/playwright, Saint Genet lives.

Daily Bleed Saint 2003-4.
See Sartre's existentialist biography, Saint Genet:
Actor & Martyr.

1915 -- France: Edith Piaff lives (1915-1963). French
singer, cultural rebel, who entertained POW's while refusing
to sing for Nazis during WWII. Edith encouraged a number
of anarchist songsters like Leo Ferre & François-Henri Jolivet.

    "Édith Piaf. If her life wasn't anarchy,    
     then I misunderstand the term."

                — Bleedster Larry

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89dith_Piaf

1917 -- US: During this month libertarian feminist poet
Louise Olivereau is convicted for antiwar activities &
sent to a  Colorado prison.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/12ref.htm#19/1917

1924 -- French writer Michel Tournier lives.

           "A dead myth is called allegory.
            The writer's function is to prevent
            myths turning into allegories."

1936 --  Germany: University of Bonn withdraws
author Thomas Mann's honorary doctorate. Bad German.

1940 -- Songster Phil Ochs lives El
Paso, Texass ("Joe Hill", "War is
Over"). His music didn't sell; most
famous for songs protesting a war
everyone wants to forget. A folk singer,
a "protest" singer, a freedom rider, a
suicide. His boyish voice challenged the
history of his time, or tried to.

             Now they sing out his praises on
             every distant shore,
             But so few remember what he was
             fightin' for.
             Oh why sing the songs & forget
             about the aim,
             He wrote them for a reason, why not
             sing them for the same?

             & now he's bound for a glory all his own,
             & now he's bound for glory.

      "While the Movement died a natural death,
       the music died by hanging."

                               — John Berendt, 1976

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

1946 -- Reenactment of Boston Tea Party in Boston.
(Fashionably late?) Glorifies the destruction of
property by vandals — who inspire "Eugene anarchists"
during WTO protests in Seattle 1999.
See Jesse Walker's "The Broken Blue Line: How to start a riot",
http://reason.com/archives/2000/02/01/the-broken-blue-line
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/wto.htm

1969 -- Italy:  "Is the Reichstag Burning?", tract by Gianfranco
Sanguinetti & signed 'Friends of the International,' published.

    Sanguinetti knew —when he & other members of the Italian
    section of the SI wrote & distributed "Il Reichstag Bruccia?"
    — that the state's secret services were the real culprits for
    acts of terrorism such as the bombing of the Piazza Fontana
    (12 December), & he knew why they had been called into
    service in this fashion.

http://www.notbored.org/reichstag.html
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/chronology/chronology.html
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/sources.htm#Situationists

1982 -- US: Dwight Macdonald, social critic & combative
journalist, dies.

    Deserted Trotskyism & moved on cheerfully & with
    characteristic insouciance to pacificism & anarchism.
    In the 1950s, he was a fierce anti-Communist cold warrior
    &, later still, an even fiercer opponent of the Vietnam War
    & a great enthusiast of the student radicals of the 1960s.

1990 -- Austin Train dies in a bomb blast at his own trial.

Once the world was a wind-up toy, we watched it spin & dance
We watch it now from the other side of our last remaining chance
& the world falls down like some tired bull in a crimson Spanish ring
We've learned to love it far too late to save it from anything

       "The Sheep Look Up", Words & music: Kathy Mar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brunner_(novelist)

1994 -- Zapatista rebels in Southeastern Mexico slip
through army siege & briefly occupy 38 towns in
Chiapas state, crippling Wall Street investments in
Mexican bond market.
http://www.zapata.com/
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/zapsTactical/zaps.html

2001 -- Argentina: Government declares state of siege,
trying to stop the worst looting & riots in a decade,
sparked by austerity measures & poverty.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/12ref.htm#19/2001

2005 -- Bolivia: Evo Morales becomes the latest lefty
to win a Presidency in South America.

                       _____________

              Moe: "When the roll is called
                        up yonder I'll eat pie."

                        Curly: "Pi r²?"

                        Moe: "No, pie are round; cake
                        are square."

                        Curly: "Oh."

                        Moe: "No, O are round, also."

                http://www.bioticbakingbrigade.org/

                       _____________


—anti-RoundSquares, 1997-2012