Off to campus to defend my prospectus. Next stop … dissertation! Happy Friday the 13th!

February 13th, 2009 | Category: bibliophilia, uncategorized | Comments (2)

Can anyone tell me why there are so many Bloody Sundays in history? (Wikipedia lists 16 of them.) In any event, today marks the anniversary of the most recent one. Thirty-seven years ago today, British soldiers murdered 14 unarmed civil rights protesters in Northern Ireland. Of course none of the British soldiers — nor the [...]

January 30th, 2009 | Category: bibliophilia, politics | Leave a comment

Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder-General Having been called out on a tossed-off reference to Silvia Federici’s work, I wanted to return to the subject in a little more depth, and draw out some of what I found important in Caliban and the Witch. (As that phrasing should make clear, I won’t try to give a worked-out review [...]

January 18th, 2009 | Category: bibliophilia, politics | Comments (8)

For a change, I’m not talking about the condition, but the bookstore of that name on Telegraph Ave. in Oakland. Yesterday I took Laurn to the Oakland airport for her Christmas trip home. Since I didn’t feel like driving back that hour-and-a-half ride immediately, I decided to make a tour of (some) Oakland bookstores. There [...]

December 20th, 2008 | Category: bibliophilia, politics | Leave a comment

A very happy birthday to your friend and mine, John Milton, who turns four hundred years old today. JM lived a remarkable life in remarkable times. When he was born, the United Kingdom was all of three years old; England was a minor power, one generation away from being nearly invaded and conquered by Spain. [...]

December 9th, 2008 | Category: bibliophilia, politics | Comments (3)

That dude is totally polishing their mirrors In the post the other day about Maoism, China and queer liberation, I mentioned how the Chinese word for comrade (同志 tongzhi) has come to mean “gay” in recent years. I think that’s rather beautiful actually, especially since the word literally means “equal determination” or “equal ambition”, and [...]

December 5th, 2008 | Category: China, bibliophilia, gender/queer lib., politics | Comments (1)

Back in a post before Turkey’n’Genocide Day, I mentioned Dave Fernbach’s The Spiral Path and described it as a Maoist-inspired book dealing with queer liberation. Commenting on that, Isaac wrote: So anyway, I’m curious. What’s the connection between Maoism and queer liberation? … [M]y only prior knowledge was that the maoist program promised free reeducation [...]

December 2nd, 2008 | Category: China, bibliophilia, class struggle, gender/queer lib., music, politics | Comments (3)

I would say that out of my close friends, I’m just about the most technophilic and the most constantly plugged in. But there’s one area where I can’t shake my luddism, and that’s shopping for books. Here’s why: I stumbled across this book by pure fortuity at one of our local used bookstores. What we [...]

November 20th, 2008 | Category: bibliophilia, politics | Comments (4)

Am I the only person who didn’t know about this? It seems like it must have caused some kind of stir, but I missed hearing about it at the time: a few years ago, Subcomandante Marcos co-authored a mystery novel with a famous Mexican author of detective stories (Paco Ignacio Taibo). It’s called “The Uncomfortable [...]

September 27th, 2008 | Category: bibliophilia, politics | Leave a comment