SEPTEMBER 12 JACKSON MAC LOW

American Fluxus poet, Buddhist, political activist.

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Ethiopia: NATIONAL REVOLUTIONARY DAY.

PUBLIC HOLIDAY, Guinea-Bissau: Observance of the birthday of guerrilla fighter & revolutionary thinker Amilcar Cabral. Claimed by Marxists as one of their own because of his early works, Cabral was assassinated while theorising upon class self-determination & autonomous collective forms of social organisation in the post-colonial situation. In his own words:

"Povo na manda na su cabeca" (Let people do it for themselves).

San Patricio meets Zapata on the way to the cantina & over a tequila they discuss how best to be rid of snakes.

México: SAN PATRICIOS (St. Patrick's Battalion), Irish-American Army deserters who went over to the Mexican side to fight the US invaders, are honored on this day. In 1993, the Irish began to honor them in Clifden, Galway.
http://struggle.ws/mexico/img/more_san_ps.html

Tainos, West Indies: FEAST OF ATABEI, the Goddess Mother.

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Greece: VIRGIN'S FAIR.

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1740 -- Having corresponded for several years, Voltaire & Frederick the Great finally meet.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/voltaire.htm
http://www.voltaire.net/


1838 -- Last Hawaiian monarch Luli'uokalani lives.

Daily Bleed Saint 2003        LILI'UOKALANI

"To gain the kingdom of heaven, hear what is not said." — Deposed benevolent leader of Hawaiian Islanders. http://www.kalena.com/hawaiian_culture_nyc.html

1846 -- Elizabeth Barrett, 40, & Robert Browning, 34, secretly marry at London's St. Marylebone Church. Muses William Wordsworth, "Well, I hope they understand one another — nobody else would."


1846 -- US: At Nauvoo, Illinois, the first real exchanges of gunfire & cannon fire begin between anti-Mormon "Regulators" & the Mormon "Spartan Band" (assisted by newly settled non-Mormon sympathizers, the "Kill Devils"). For the next four days there are forays & skirmishes across roadways, backyards & cornfields.


1853 -- US: Reverend Antoinette Brown Blackwell is ordained at the Congressional Church in South Butler, New York, becoming the first female minister in the United States.


1860 -- Honduras: American adventurer William Walker, who became dictator of Nicaragua before being deposed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, then attempted to invade Honduras, is executed by a firing squad after being captured by the British.


1866 -- US: During this month (exact day unknown) the first African-American trade union, the Colored Caulkers' Trade Union Society of Baltimore, is founded. Isaac Myers was the union's first president.

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African Americans played a dominant role in the caulking trade, & as early as 1835 there was a strike by black caulkers at the Washington Navy Yard. Caulking was of great importance in shipbuilding, for a ship was not fit for service unless it was caulked to prevent leaking.

http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/myers-isaac-1835-1891
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Myers

1870 -- (18)Sixties dropout Fitz Hugh Ludlow dies, the morning after his 34th birthday, Geneva, Switzerland.

Daily Bleed Saint, 2003
The Hashish Eater, an American Thomas De Quincy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitz_Hugh_Ludlow

1872 -- US: The Malheur reservation in eastern Oregon is established for several Indian bands of Northern Paiutes.

1876 -- England: Elizabeth Freeman lives. British-born suffragette, civil rights worker, militant pacifist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Freeman_(suffragist)



1880 -- H. L. Mencken, misanthrope, editor, satirist, author of The American Language, lives, Baltimore. One of the most influential American critics in the 1920s. Says of himself,

"I never listen to debates. They are dreadful things indeed. The plain truth is that I am not a fair man, & don't want to hear both sides. On all known subjects, ranging from aviation to xylophone-playing, I have fixed & invariable ideas. They have not changed since I was four or five."

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Prominent newspaperman, book reviewer, & political commentator he was a libertarian before the word came into popular usage. His prose is as clear as an azure sky, his rhetoric as deadly as a rifle shot. Enthusiastic about the writings of Twain & Conrad, the music of Brahms, Beethoven & Bach, & the victuals offered up by Chesapeake Bay.

...underneath the shells & shrapnel was the old sharpshooter, carefully picking off the enemy, one by one, with perfect accuracy.

http://web.archive.org...io.com/~gibbonsb/mencken.html
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/sf/1964.htm#H.L.%20Mencken

1891 -- Puerto Rico: Independente Pedro Albizu Campos lives, Ponce. Major figure of the Puerto Rican independence movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Albizu_Campos


1892 -- Alfred A. Knopf, dean of 20th-century American publishers, lives, New York. Of his friend H. L. Mencken: "We had the same birthday but we never were together on it because it came at the height of his hay-fever season. Anyway he disliked all such celebrations."


1896 -- Russia: Elsa Triolet lives. French writer, wife of Louis Aragon & a sister of Lili Brik. The first to translate Mayakovsky's poetry to French. Triolet & Aragon participated in French anti-fascist resistance movement.

Daily Bleed Patron Saint December 14, 1997; June 16, 2006
Russian Bohemian, Futurist, bon-vivant, French Surrealist muse.

http://www2.ac-toulouse.fr/eco-triolet-toulouse/quitait.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsa_Triolet

1897 -- US: Emma Goldman returns to Boston, where she speaks on the September 10 killings of immigrant miners striking in Hazleton, Pa. (known as the Lattimer Massacre). She travels to New Haven & New York to speak again on the Hazleton killings.

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1898 -- US: American artist & social critic Ben Shahn lives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shahn


1902 -- US: Today is known as "Black Friday" because of the "Yacolt Burn": Vancouver, Portland, Tacoma, & Olympia were covered in smoke. St. Helens was dark at noon.

According to a newspaper account in the area, the land of Lewis River was a "hot & silent valley of death."

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1907 -- In Belfast, Ireland, Louis MacNeice lives (-1963). Poet/playwright, a member, with W. H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis, & Stephen Spender, of a group whose low-keyed, unpoetic, socially committed, & topical verse is the "new poetry" of the 1930s.

"The move from delight to wisdom... — this move performs the work of art. MacNeice's disaffection from Ulster does not preclude an ongoing affection, & in his resolution of this doubleness he became & remains a vital figure in the history of modern Irish poetry."

— Seamus Heaney

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/755
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_MacNeice

1909 -- México: A young man, Emiliano Zapata, is elected to head the town council by villagers of Anenecuneo. (see 8 August, 10 April)

http://www.ingeb.org/songs/emiliano.html


1910 -- US: Social worker = cop? Former social worker, Mrs. Alice Stebbins Wells, becomes the LAPD's (& the world's) first policewoman.
Source: [Calendar Riots]


1912 -- Nicaragua: 2,500 US marines invade the country, to "protect US interests", remaining until 1925 — interests, which are many & seem to revolve around taking anything of value it wants.


1913 -- US: Jesse Owens lives, Oakville, Alabama. One of the greatest track & field runners in history. Achieve fame at the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, where he snags four gold medals, dispelling Hitler's notion of the superior Aryan race & the inferiority of black athletes.


1915 -- Turkey: Genocide of Armenians begins.


1918 -- First use of an army tank, in France.



1918 -- US: Eugene Debs on trial (9th-12th) under the espionage act; sentenced to 10 years on the 14th for his June "Canton Speech," against the Slaughter to End All Slaughter. (Poet Bill Witherup reads Debs' speech aloud on September 18, 2006, Cafe Allegro, Seattle.)
http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/eam/spa/spadownloads-1918.html



1919 -- US: Still in prison for opposing the war once opposed by Beloved & Respected Comrade Liberal Leader Woodrow Wilson, the anarchist Emma Goldman is served a warrant for her arrest & deportation; bond set at $15,000.



1921 -- Stanislaw Lem lives. Author best known for his satire, humor, & irreverent reflections of society.

Polish satirical/philosophical science fiction writer, & critic whose novel Solaris (1961) is among the classic science fiction novels of the 1960s; it was filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1971. Lem's books have been translated into some 30 languages.

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Also wrote The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age; The Futurological Congress among many others.

Series character: Ijon Tichy, time traveler who appeared among others in the short story collections (The Star Diaries etc.)

FURTHER READING: New Worlds for Old by David Ketterer (1974); "Stanislaw Lem" by Richard E. Ziegfeld (1985) in Science Fiction Studies, vol. 13.

http://www.metafilter.com/50409/Stanislaw-Lem-19212006
http://mmcirvin.livejournal.com/306234.html
http://web.archive.org...~mmcirvin/vitrifaxintro.html
http://dannyreviews.com/a/Stanislaw_Lem.html
http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/lem.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Lem
Links at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/abstracts/a40.htm

Hunter's writing career begins at the age of 14 with a contribution to The Pittsburgh Courier, an important black newspaper, which she writes for until her graduation from the University of Pennsylvania. Her first & best-known novel is God Bless the Child (1964), the story of three generations of women confronting choices forced upon them by their skin tones.

Unemployed workers, near starvation after county authorities cut off relief. All over the country starving people are taking direct action instead of waiting for government help.

Aunt Molly Jackson, who became active in Appalachian labor struggles, pulls a gun on her Toledo storekeeper when he objects to giving her credit. When she gets home, her seven children are so hungry they grab the raw dough out of her hands & stuff it into their mouths before she can bake it.

Molly Jackson recalls telling the shop owner:

"Martin, if you try to take this grub away from me, God knows that if they electrocute me for it tomorrow, I'll shoot you six times in a minute."

http://www.folkarchive.de/jackson.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aunt_Molly_Jackson

1,500 pickets battled state troopers in Connecticut. Other confrontations in Fall River, Ma., Lawrence & Lowell, & Lewiston, Maine. But the worst was at Woonsocket, Rhode Island, when at midnight tonight 500 let fly a barrage of bricks at the police & the crowd grew to 2,000. The National Guardsmen at the Rayon Plant fired 30 shots into the crowd, killing one & wounding others. Word spread & the angry crowd grew to 8,000.

The governor sent in two more companies of Guards to quell the crowd & put the city under martial law, & announced that "There is a Communistic uprising & not a textile strike in Rhode Island."

The strikes, centered in the NE & the South, occurred all along the eastern seaboard. In Pennsylvania, for example, 47,000 struck & in Lancaster police charged that women strikers were attacking non-strikers with "old-fashioned hat pins."

Source: Jeremy Brecher, Strike! p174