Daily Bleed October 24: Alexandra David-Neel, Clement Duval, Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, Ernesto Bonomini, Fredy Perlman, Cipriano Mera, Miguel Garcia, Philip Sansom...

What happens to the dream deferred?
          Does it dry up
          like a raisin in the sun?
          Or fester like a sore—
          & then run?
          Does it stink like rotten meat?
          Or crust & sugar over—
          like a syrupy sweet?

          Maybe it just sags
          like a heavy load.
          Or does it explode?

                     — LANGSTON HUGHES

OCTOBER 24
RAFAEL AZCONA FERNÀNDEZ
Prolific Spanish surrealist, satirist, screenwriter.

FEAST OF GOOD & PLENTY.

UNITED NATIONS DAY.

1644 -- William Penn lives.

1648 -- Lack of Determination?: Thirty Years' War, another of those bloody, interminable conflicts governments are fond of, ends with the Peace of Westphalia.

1710 -- Alban Butler lives. Roman Catholic priest. Butler's great work, The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs & Other Principal Saints ("Butler's Lives"), is the result of 30 years study.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alban_Butler

1788 -- Sara Josepha Hale, author of "Mary had a little lamb," lives, Newport, New Hampshire.

1793 -- French Revolutionary Calendar. Much blood.

1811 -- Finland: G. A. Wallin lives. Finnish explorer, Orientalist, teacher, known for his journeys in Arabia in the 1850s. Conducted expeditions in Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Palestine, & Persia. First Westerner to enter the holy Islamic places, his adventures created a legend similar to T.E. Lawrence's later.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/gawallin.htm

1822 -- US: Jesse Walker conquers the Devil in St. Louis. The Daily Bleed pumped new blood into his fledgling movement. Thus 'Father Jesse,' as every one about the city called him, succeeded in taking St. Louis, which, as he expressed it, 'had been the very stronghold of devilism.' St. Louis, now a large & flourishing city, is "well supplied with churches & a churchgoing people" thanks to Jesse.

1836 -- The match is patented.
This feels just great. Two consecutive wins & a dead minotaur. What else could you ask for as a dedicated blood bowl player?

— "Life ban likely for match-fixers"

http://web.archive.org/...shakti.trincoll.edu/~awertz/oldenburg/main.html

1860 -- US: Got Email? First Pony Express service ends just 6 months after its introduction due to the completion of the first transcontinental telegraph line.

1868 -- France: Alexandra David-Neel lives, Paris.

If "heaven is the Lord's," the earth is the inheritance of man, & that consequently any honest traveller has the right to walk as he chooses, all over that globe which is his.
— Alexandra David-Neel, France, My Journey to Lhasa

ALEXANDRA DAVID-NEEL, Daily Bleed Saint 2001-2008
First woman explorer of Tibet & its mysteries. Successively & simultaneously anarchist, singer, feminist, explorer, writer, lecturer, photographer, buddhist, architect, mail artist, sanskrit grammarian & Centenarian.

At age 55, Alexandra David-Neel was the first European woman to venture into Lhasa. Disguising herself as a pilgrim, this Frenchwoman journeyed into Tibet's "forbidden city" in 1932.

"David-Neel was exceptional. Not only were independent women travelers like her unusual, but Europeans versed in Sanskrit & Buddhist philosophy, who also spoke Tibetan & could communicate with those they met, were extremely rare..."

— Dalai Lama

1870 -- Aurora borealis seen in southern England, in a rare arch shape.
Source: [Calendar Riots]

1870 -- France: Mikhail Bakunin completes the circle, sailing from Marseille to Locarno.
On September 9, 1870 Bakunin had left Locarno & arrived in Lyons September 15. Within two weeks a revolt broke out, but was suppressed. An arrest warrant was issued, & he went into hiding in Marseille until he was able to escape today.

[Sources]

1871 -- US: A mob in Los Angeles hangs 18 Chinese.

1882 -- US: Federal Grand Jury in Arizona charges civil authorities with mismanagement of Indian Affairs on San Carlos Reservation.

1886 -- France: Letter from Clément Duval, member of the anarchist group "Panther of Batignolles," justifying its activities, appears in "Revolt": "Le vol n'est que la restitution, opéré à son profit par un individu conscient des richesses produites collectivement, et indûment accaparée par quelques-uns." See also tomorrow.

1892 -- US: Strike of teamsters, salesmen & packers in New Orleans, Louisiana begins. City trade is paralyzed & within a week leads to a General Strike in support of the demand for a 10-hour work day. Includes blacks & whites working together. On 8 November 30,000 workers walk out, demanding union recognition, closed shops & hour & wage gains. Joined by non-industrial laborers, such as musicians, clothing workers, clerks, utility workers, streetcar drivers & printers. Skilled & unskilled, white & black cooperate. (See Brecher, Strike!, page 65.)

1901 -- Philippines: US Marines land in Samar during the Philippine Insurrection. Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Brigadier General "Hell-roaring Jake" Smith issues his orders:
"I wish you to burn & kill;
the more you burn & kill,
the better it will please me."

1901 -- Bottom of the Barrel?: Anna Edson Taylor, a 43-year old widow, is first to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel & live. Her dreams of fame & fortune failed to materialize, however, & she died in poverty in 1921. (Auntie Dave co-founds Bottom of the Barrel Printing, (about 1975?) & after about two years it too disappeared in a haze of poverty.)

1904 -- Playwright Moss Hart lives, New York City. Wrote many plays with George S. Kaufman, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can't Take It With You.
http://www.pulitzer.org/awards/1937

1917 --

Corto Maltese

Hugo Pratt & Corto Maltese Tribute Site

Hugo Pratt (1927-1995), Italian artist, cartoonist, whose best-known character is the existentialist adventurer, Captain Corto Maltese.

Corto Maltese sailed into the Adriatic prior to the battle of Caporetto (24 October 1917). He spent some time in Dublin while smuggling guns for the Irish Republican Army, then headed to Stonehenge, in England, for a nap! Instead he was caught up in a faery counterplot against German sabotage in "A Mid-winter's Morning Dream."

1923 -- Poet Denise Levertov, lives, Ilford, Essex, England. Socially committed writer, moved to the US in the 40s.
Levertov's poetry displays “a kind of animal grace of the word, a pulse like the footfalls of a cat or the wingbeats of a gull. It is the intense aliveness of an alert domestic love — the wedding of form & content in poems which themselves celebrate a kind of perpetual wedding of two persons always realized as two responsible sensibilities.”

— Kenneth Rexroth, "Poets Old & New," in Assays

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1924 -- Italy: Anarchico Ernesto Bonomini sentenced to eight years hard labor (commuted to prison time) for killing, with the blow of a revolver, Nicola Bonservizi, a correspondent of Mussolini's fascist newspaper, Popolo d' Italia, & secretary of the Parisian "Faisceau."
[Further details]

1926 -- Rafael Azcona Fernández lives (d. 2008). Spanish screenwriter whose films (La Grande Bouffe, Belle époque, etc.) are characterized by the surreal & bizarre.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/apr/10/news.mainsection
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Azcona
http://www.imdb.es/name/nm0044156/

1927 --

Ernst Toller play "The Machine Wreckers" opens in Boston.

1929 -- US: Wall Street Stock market Crash, harbinger of worldwide Great Depression of the 30s.

"It is not Capital that transforms raw materials, nor Capital that produces goods. If living activity did not transform the materials, these would remain untransformed, inert, dead matter. If men were not disposed to continue selling their living activity, the impotence of Capital would be revealed; Capital would cease to exist; its last remaining potency would be the power to remind people of a bypassed form of everyday life characterized by daily universal prostitution."

— Fredy Perlman, "The Reproduction of Daily Life"
http://www.reocities.com/~johngray/reprod03.htm

1931 -- US: Mob-Connections?: George Washington bridge, connecting New York & New Jersey, opens to traffic.

1932 -- England: Adrian Mitchell lives. British poet, performer & playwright, in whom the legacies of Blake & Brecht coalesce with the zip of Little Richard & the swing of Chuck Berry. Wrote the songs & poems ("Tell Me Lies About Vietnam") famous in the anti-war movement.

1935 -- Langston Hughes's play Mulatto opens on Broadway. The longest running play there by an African-American until Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun.

1936 -- US: Boston Chronicle blasts the soon-to-be-released movie The Big Broadcast of 1937 for featuring a white pianist in the movie while Teddy Wilson actually plays the music:

"The form of racial discrimination & falsification of acts...is frequently duplicated by many whites in their daily dealings with Negroes...Negroes, from hands & laborers in other fields of industry, produce billions of dollars of wealth, but the white landowners & sweat shop operators get all the profit."

1939 -- US: Nice Gams? Nylon stockings first go on sale (or the 25th?), Wilmington, Delaware. Then, "On May 15, 1940, the first nylons were sold in stores across the United States. Crowds waited to purchase nylon stockings; All of the original four million stockings made out of nylon (the new miracle fiber) were sold in the first four days."

Also quite useful as head wear, particularly inspires bank robbers & crane operators.

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Corto Maltese
Hugo Pratt & Corto Maltese Tribute Site Hugo Pratt (1927-1995), Italian artist, cartoonist, whose best-known character is the existentialist adventurer, Captain Corto Maltese.		Corto Maltese sailed into the Adriatic prior to the battle of Caporetto (24 October 1917). He spent some time in Dublin while smuggling guns for the Irish Republican Army, then headed to Stonehenge, in England, for a nap! Instead he was caught up in a faery counterplot against German sabotage in "A Mid-winter's Morning Dream."