"A young woman of the Nivalke people was going in search of water when she came upon a leafy tree, Nasuk, the guaiacum, & felt its call. She embraced its firm trunk, pressing her whole body against it, & dug her nails into its bark. The tree bled. Leaving it, she said, "How I wish, Nasuk, that you were a man!"

& the guaiacum turned into a man & ran after her. When he found her, he showed her his scratched shoulder & stretched out by her side."

       — Augusto Roa Bastos (ed.) Las culturas condenadas (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1978)

AUGUST 19

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Andalusian poet & dramatist, martyred by fascists.

FESTIVAL OF RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY.
http://www.potatoland.org/

--

NOT PEOPLE'S PARK
PEOPLE'S PLANET, CAN THEY
FENCE THAT ONE IN, BULLDOZE IT
4 A.M.?

— Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letter #38

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Park,_Berkeley

1099 -- Role-Playing Game?: Crusaders beat Saracens in Battle of Ascalon.


1391 -- France: Jehenna de Brigue & neighbor, Macette de Ruilly, are led to the Paris Pig Market & burned alive as witches.

Brigue & Ruilly were convicted in Europe's first secular witchcraft trial. Macette's husband, Jean de Ruilly, accused Brigue of witchcraft because she helped him get well while he was ill. After Brigue's conviction, her execution was delayed when she claimed she was pregnant. While being tortured, she admitted she wasn't pregnant & claimed Macette hired her to kill her husband. Macette then confessed to the charges as she was being tortured on the rack. Both women are mitered as sorcerers & executed.

1503 -- Thou shall not? ... Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) dies accidentally of poison intended for a guest.


1662 -- Blaise Pascal (Pensees) dies at the convent of Port Royal, France, at the ripe old age of 39.


1689 -- Samuel Richardson, British printer & author of Pamela, is baptized in Mackworth, near Derby.


1692 -- New World: Five people, including the town's former minister, hanged in Salem, Massachusetts for witchcraft. Inspires US TV program called "Survivors", "Big Brother", ad nauseum.


1775 -- Hear Hear!?: A rain of earwigs in Stroud, England.
Source: 'Calendar Riots'



1787 -- Herschel discovers Enceladus, moon of Saturn.

1791 -- US: Benjamin Banneker sends a copy of his just-published almanac to Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, along with an appeal on behalf of African-Americans' "humiliating condition (slavery)..."


1816 -- Microsoft/Starbuck's Ripoff?: Java again in Dutch hands.



1843 -- Edgar Allan Poe story "The Black Cat" is published.
Source: [Robert Braunwart][Hereafter attributed with symbol: ]



1855 -- YMCA World Alliance, the first international voluntary organization, founded.



1864 -- Spain: Juan (also spelled Joan) Montseny (aka Federico Urales) lives (1864-1942), Reus, Catalonia. Teacher, novelist, publisher, anarquista militant, companion of Teresa Mañé (Soledad Gustavo) & father of Federica Montseny.

[Details / context]

also spelled Joan Montseny



1867 -- US: National Labor Congress assembles at Chicago.


1871 -- US: Orville Wright aviator lives.

Generally unknown until now the Wright brothers were in a desperate race with the Wong twins of Hong Kong to be the first human to fly. Only because of Orville's excessive bicyling in his youth, did the Wrights come to understand that the airplane could be controlled like a bicycle, with balance.

Proving, once again, two Wongs don't make a Wright.

1871 -- Long after the death of his wife Elizabeth, Robert Browning writes to a family friend: "The simple truth is that she was the poet, & I the clever person by comparison."


1872 -- Canada: Pro- & anti-Cartier forces riot before elections, Montreal.



1877 -- Algeria: Pierre Jules Ruff lives (1877-1942), Algiers. Militant anarchist & antimilitarist. Arrested & perished in a Nazi concentration camp.

[Details / context]



1886 -- Joseph Conrad, Polish-born, becomes a British subject.

---

Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent … [constructs] anarchism as a form of fraudulent self-deception symptomatic of a widespread social degeneracy in British society. The...novel's ambivalent engagement with Nietzsche, showing how through a dialogue with Nietzschean intertexts anarchism is constructed as a form of religious fanaticism that is connected with the dangers of both foreign imperialism & the lower classes.

---

1888 -- Spain: In Seville, Ricardo Mella republishes the newspaper "Solidaridad" which is, as Max Nettlau characterizes it, one of the last ramparts of anarcho-collectivism in Spain. On January 12, 1889 it publishes his article, "La Anarquía no admite adjetivos" (Anarchy needs no adjectives).

http://www.edu.xunta.es/centros/iesricardomella/node/22
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Mella
"Acción Libertaria"
Source: [l'Ephéméride Anarchiste]

1894 -- Large anarchist gathering in New York welcomes Emma Goldman back. Among the speakers are Voltairine de Cleyre, Englishman Charles Mowbray, & the Italian Maria Roda.

... show details

Charles Mowbray (publisher of the Commonweal ) a tailor from Durham, & a member of the London Socialist League, influenced by Kropotkin's arrival in England. Kropotkin’s lectures to many Socialist League branches reinforced the anarchist tendencies among many of its members. Mowbray was one of the first to specifically call himself an anarchist communist. See
http://libcom.org/library/anarchist-communism-in-britain-1870-1991
recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/Decleyre/poetrydecleyre.htm

A young Italian woman, Maria Roda, crossed the Atlantic & settled in Paterson in 1892 after dedicating several years of activism to militant workers’ struggles in Italy, France, Portugal, Spain, & England. She arrived with her partner, the prominent Spanish anarcho-syndicalist Pedro Esteve, & immediately impressed seasoned radicals & rank-&-file workers with her ability to rouse the masses with the spoken word. While raising eight children & laboring in the silk mills, Maria & Pedro became intellectual leaders within the Paterson circolo & led efforts to organize Italian textile workers into the industrial union movement that was rapidly spreading throughout the country. A charismatic & powerful speaker, Maria regularly accompanied Pedro to Tampa & New York City to assist & support the collective struggles of Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban, Spanish, & Italian textile, cigar, & dock workers.

One of the more prolific anarchist women authors was an Italian immigrant woman who wrote under the alias "Titi" (possibly Maria Roda). In 1906 she began a series of essays with the title "Alle Donne, Emancipiamoci!" (To the Women: Let’s Emancipate Ourselves!) See Jennifer Guglielmo's article, archived at the Stan Iverson Memorial Library, Donne Sovversive: The History of Italian-American Women’s Radicalism /library/DonneSovversive.htm

1897 -- Italy: Anarchist Cesare Zaccaria lives, Genova. Died Napoli October 1961.


1902 -- Ogden Nash lives, Rye, New York.

Poets aren't very useful
Because they aren't consumeful or produceful

1909 -- Jerzy Andrzejewski lives. Polish novelist, short-story writer, & political dissident.

Portrayed in Czeslaw Milosz's Captive Mind (1953), which revealed the problems of intellectuals living under Stalinism.

In the 1950s & '60s Andrzejewski moved towards more or less open criticism of the government, starting from the novel The Inquisitors (tr. 1960). His ambiguities of style & thought eluded simplistic interpretation & several of his works went unpublished. In 1979 he helped found the workers' defence committee (KOR) to aid families of striking workers, who were jailed or dismissed from their jobs.

1909 -- First edition of The Little Red Songbook published.

(You'll get pie(d) in the sky...)

http://mitchrice.us/iww/lrs.html

1911 -- México: Huerta's troops battle the anarchist Zapatistas, El Texcal & Tetillas.

1916 -- US: Strikebreakers hired by the Everett Mills owner Neil Jamison attack & beat picketing strikers in Everett, Washington.

Local police watch & refuse to intervene, claiming that the waterfront where the incident took place was Federal land & therefore outside their jurisdiction. (When the picketers retaliated against the strikebreakers that evening, the local police intervened, claiming they had crossed the line of jurisdiction.) Three days later, 22 union men attempted to speak out at a local crossroads, but each was arrested; arrests & beatings of strikebreakers became common throughout the following months, & on October 30 vigilantes forced IWW speakers to run the gauntlet, subjecting them to whipping, tripping, kicking, & impalement against a spiked cattle guard at the end of the gauntlet. In response, the IWW called for a meeting on November 5. When the union men arrived, they were fired on; seven people were killed, 50 were wounded, & an indeterminate number wound up missing.

http://www.anarchismus.at/downloads.htm
http://mp3.com/artist/Joe%2BHill

1920 -- Russia: Start of peasant insurrection in Tambov; Bolsheviks unable to suppress the revolt until May 1921. Similar problems had arisen in 1917, when peasants seized land from the gentry, reaching the level of near insurrection in Tambov.
http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/russia/sp001861/bolintro.html
http://www.angelfire.com/nb/revhist17/




1921 -- Georges Darien (pseudonym for Georges Hippolyte Adrien) dies. French novelist & anarchiste.

" . . .the grandfather catches the boy plowing, unenlightened, through the Code's articles on contracts, dowries & diving walls & demoralizes him by saying it is not what is written down in black & white which matters but the blank spaces, the margins: the unwritten laws, the loopholes."

— W.D. Redfern in Georges Darien: Robbery & Private Enterprise (p.134)
... show details

---

Between 1886 & 1890, Darien moves among the young literary generation, first appearing on the literary stage with Bas les coeurs! & Biribi, & his play Les Chapons, which is found scandalizing. He is seen as a subversive, antimilitarist & naturalistic writer.

Darien also denounces socialism because of his hatred of parliamentary government & legal political action.

After his defense of terrorism in "L'endehors" & the publishing of his review L'Escarmouche, he leaves France in July 1894. After 1898, he became more aloof from the anarchist movement, & more extremist, an individualist preferring personal & violent action rather than submission to collective action.

André Breton characterized Darien as "A heart too big & beating too well not to knock in every sense against the walls of its cage." He described his writings as "the most rigorous assault that I know against hypocrisy, imposture, stupidity, cowardice".

---

Biribi

Biribi is the name given in France to the punishment battalions in Algeria...

Scores of the most terrible facts became known lately, since Georges Darien published his book "Biribi" (Paris, 1890, Savine publisher) based on actual experience, & full of the most horrible revelations. One of my Clairvaux companions had to spend two years of military service in such a battalion — his condemnation at Lyons, as the editor of an Anarchist paper, being already a reason to be transported to Algeria.

— Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism: Its Philosophy & ldeal.

---

Louis Malle directed the film The Thief of Paris, after the novel by Darien, with Jean-Paul Belmondo as a gentleman-thief in fin-de-siècle France, impressed by the anarchist thief Canonnier, a recent escapee from Devil 's Island.

[Source: L'Ephéméride Anarchiste]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Darien
http://raforum.info/spip.php?article843
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thief_of_Paris

1929 -- "Amos n' Andy" radio show debuts.



1936 -- USSR: Purge Trials begin, "Darkness at Noon." August 19-25, Trial of the Sixteen in Moscow. Convicted of high treason in the first of the Moscow show trials, the old Bolsheviks Kamenev & Zinoviev (former pals of Stalin & Trotsky) are executed. Smirnov executed. Radek placed under arrest.
http://fbuch.com/posters.htm



1936 -- Federico García Lorca dies. Andalusian poet/dramatist/artist. Murdered by Franco's fascists. Accused of subversive activity, however evidence today suggests that it was a hate crime in response to his homosexuality. His writings remained censored until Franco died in 1975. Despite this, Lorca became one of the most widely read writers in the world.

Gacela of the Dark Death...

... show details

I want to sleep the dream of the apples,

to withdraw from the tumult of cemeteries,

I want to sleep the dream of that child

who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

 

I don't want to hear again that the dead do not lose their blood,

that the putrid mouth goes on asking for water.

I don't want to learn of the tortures of the grass,

nor of the moon with a serpent's mouth

that labors before dawn.

 

I want to sleep awhile,

awhile, a minute, a century;

but all must know that i have not died;

that there is a stable of gold in my lips;

that i am the small friend of the West wing;

that i am the intense shadow of my tears.

 

Cover me at dawn with a veil.

because dawn will throw fistfuls of ants at me.

and wet with hard water my shoes

so that the pincers of the scorpion slide.

 

For i want to sleep the dream of the apples,

to learn a lament that will cleanse me of the earth;

for i want to live with that dark child

who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

 

Cover me at dawn with a veil.

because dawn will throw fistfuls of ants at me.

and wet with hard water my shoes

so that the pincers of the scorpion slide.

 

For i want to sleep the dream of the apples,

to learn a lament that will cleanse me of the earth;

for i want to live with that dark child

who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

1936 -- Spain: Camillo Berneri, after organizing an Italian anarchist column within the Francisco Ascaso Column in the Pedralbes barracks (renamed "Bakunin"), with Angeloni & de Santillán (from the CNT-FAI), leaves Barcelona for the Aragonese front.

Berneri landed in Catalonia on July 25 with a cargo of rifles & ammunition. Berneri hosted a rally before 100,000 people in Plaza de los Toros in Barcelona before departing for the front. His unit engages the attacking Nationalist army on the 23rd of this month & drove them back.

Because of problems with his vision & hearing, Berneri was sent back to Barcelona. There he worked to warn people about the important implications of the imminent fascist landings in the Balearic Isles, did propaganda work, attacked the Madrid government for its politics of compromise which were damaging Catalan autonomy, & criticized the ambiguous behavior of the French & English governments. He wrote for "Guerra di Classe", & often visited the 'Amigos de Durruti ' (Friends of Durutti) before Communist agents murdered him in 1937.

http://www.municipio.re.it/manifestazioni/berneri/dopo.htm
http://www.uncwil.edu/hst/MichaelM.Seidman.html

1936 -- US: Newspaper Guild strike of the Hearst-owned "Seattle Post-Intelligencer," shuts it down for nearly four months.
http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file;_id=2495
http://web.archive.org/...brasscheck.com/seldes/lords17.html


1941 -- US: Ump Jocko Conlan ejects Pirate manager Frankie Frisch for coming out, on the baseball field, holding an umbrella in hopes of getting a rainout called.

Crusoe umbrella Claes Oldenburg

1942 -- France: Canadian & British troops suffer disastrous losses during a raid against the Germans at Dieppe. Of the 6,000 Allied troops that set out, less than half return.


1944 -- England: Death of Maurice Rowntree, Quaker pacifist.



1946 -- US: Bill Clinton, eater of cheese, lives.



1946 -- India: Rioting between Muslims & Hindus in Calcutta kills 3,000. Love yer neighbor thing.


1948 -- US: Tipper Gore lives. Won't be having any cake with Willy this year.


1951 -- US: Baseball owner Bill Veeck sends Eddie Gaedel, a 3'7" midget, to pinch-hit.



1953 -- Iran: Royalist troops overthrow liberal-leaning Premier Mohammed Mossadegh & put the pro-Western Shah Mohammed Pahlevi in power in a coup allegedly directed by Kermit Roosevelt on behalf of the CIA. One of the more brutal modern regimes, to "protect US interests."

When it is overthrown, the US supports Iraq's Saddam Hussein's war against Iran, despite (& publicly condemning) his use of chemical weapons. The Reagan administration, including the elder George Bush, provided this Axis of Evil with military intelligence, satellite photos & formulated battle plans. As one military observer put it, chemical weapons was just one more way of killing people.

"The weed of crime bears bitter fruit"


1954 -- US: Communist Control Act is passed, at the height of McCarthyism, outlaws the Communist Party.


1955 -- WINS radio announces it will not play "copy" white cover versions of (DJs must play Fats Domino's "Ain't It A Shame," not Pat Boone's) black hits.


1957 -- Canada: Violence breaks out at the Gaspé copper mines, Murdochville, Quebec.


1958 -- US: NAACP youth council begins sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters in Oklahoma.


1959 -- US: Second longest labor strike in Butte, Montana's history lasts 181 days (-February 15, 1960).
http://www.butteamerica.com/labor.htm


1960 -- In Cambridge, English poet Frances Cornford dies.


1961 -- Brazil: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Quadros awards a decoration to Che Guevara, Brasilia.


1961 -- Carlos Castaneda becomes an apprentice of don Juan.



1969 -- US: Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale is arrested in San Francisco & charged with murder.


1969 -- India: Students in Akola stone government buildings. Everybody Must Get Stoned?


1969 -- Trumpeter Miles Davis begins recording the ground-breaking jazz-fusion album "Bitches' Brew," NY.


1970 -- US: Minuteman III deployed, the first missile with multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs).


1971 -- US: H.R. Haldeman, Dick M Nixon hatchet man, orders an FBI investigation of CBS News correspondent Daniel Schor, who had analyzed a presidential speech "unfavorably."



1977 -- Film comedian Groucho Marx(ist) dies.

"You've got the mind of a five year old. & even he was glad to get rid of it."

1977 -- Australia: Parliament outlaws strikes by government employees.


1978 -- Iran: Muslim terrorists burn an movie theater, killing 430. God acts in mysterious ways.


1988 -- US: Report by Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, & Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci is released, concluding that "Stress, task fixation & unconscious distortion of data may have played a major role" in the accidental downing of an Iranian commercial jet liner by a US warship (see 3 July).


1989 -- South Africa: Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Desmond Tutu is among hundreds of black demonstrators who are whipped & sandblasted from helicopters as they attempt to picnic on a "whites-only" beach near Capetown.
http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?include=docs/misc/2010/umzabalazo.html


1989 -- Germans, Hungarians & Austrians cross the Hungarian-Austrian border in a demonstration.


1990 -- Australia: The world's largest lollipop is created, 1,009 kg, in Sydney.


1991 -- Russia: On the second day of the coup against Beloved Respected Comrade Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev, coup leader & Soviet Vice President Gennady Yanayev announces that Gorbachev is suffering from "serious health problems" & is unfit to govern. Meanwhile, at the Parliament Building, Boris Yeltsin presides over a huge crowd of protesters that includes defecting government troops.


1992 -- Fierce fighting between Turkish troops & Kurdish guerrillas kills 80.


1993 -- Brazil: 16 Yanomami Indians massacred by gold miners in Amazon jungle.


1996 -- Australia: ACTU labor protesters with battering rams & sledgehammers attack the Australian Parliament, Canberra.


1997 -- Argentina: Government says it will issue $3 billion in bonds to compensate survivors of victims of its "Dirty War."


1997 -- US: A court finds Dow Chemical guilty of conspiracy for withholding information about the safety of silicone breast implants.


1998 -- Canada: Ronald McDonald is now a union man: first North American McDonald's is unionized, Squamish, BC.



1999 -- US: Bleedster "Wild Bill" Koehnline, ArtMeister, out of the Chapel & Down From The Hill, blasts into Seattle. Party, party, party into the wee of the night.
http://www.oakton.edu/news/events/gallery/




2000 -- Luce Fabbri, (1908-2000) dies. A life-long activist, thinker, & writer.

Luce died of a heart attack in Montevideo, Uruguay at the age of 92. She wrote many books, including biographies of her father, the famed Italian anarchist Luigi Fabbri, Élisée Reclus, & Machiavelli. She lectured widely & produced numerous books on anarchism, as well as collections of poetry (La poesìa de Leopardi (1971)). Wrote Influenza della letteratura italiana sulla cultura rioplatense (two volumes). Her latest book was La Libertad entre la Historia y la Utopia: Tres Ensayos y Otros Textos del Siglo XX (Freedom in History & Utopia; Three Essays & Other Texts of the 20th Century [REA, 1998, 145 pages]). Her life will be documented in a forthcoming biography by Margareth Rago.

http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/f/10769524full.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Fabbri

2001 -- Seattle Hempfest 2001. HemoMeisterRick, turning over a new leaf, swears he'll never coordinate traffic again.
Sunday, August 19 10 a.m. - 8 p.m.

Myrtle Edwards Park, Downtown Seattle

Seattle Hempfest is FREE!

http://seattlehempfest.com/



2002 -- "The Daffodils" — a performance-work by Séamas Cain — performs at dawn, in the Sculpture Garden of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. The script may be found at,
http://seamascain-writernetwork.org

[Source: Charlatan Stew]

2006 -- US: Great Lakes Anarchist Gathering, Bowling Green, Ohio, (August 19-20th). Regional networking, workshops, presentations, dinner, music.


2006 -- US: Get Out Yer WeedEater? Seattle HempFest, the largest cannabis policy reform rally on the planet, lights up for a two day smoke party (August 19-20). 150,000 WeedHeads turn out (on?), making this a not-so-run-of-the-mill Garden Show. Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, an advocate for legalization of drugs, is among featured speakers, deriding America's "Drug War" as a racket.

3000 --

---

"Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; & if they could, they would still be destroyed — chased & hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much toward getting back anything like the noble primeval forests..."

— John Muir

---

anti-CopyRite 1997-3000, more or less
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