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We have this tradition on my side of the family, in which we all meet at the Anarchist Book Fair and because it happens in the month of our birthdays, sometimes my brother and I get presents. This year I got him Newton's Wake by Ken MacLeod and Singularity Sky by Charlie Stross. My stepmother got me this book -- a tome -- called Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913 by Richard Steven Street. It's huger than that. The endnotes alone are 240 pages long. The index is 27 pages long (two columns). There are six pages of abbreviations. The text is a mere 625 pages of large format and small (but readable) type. And it gets us to 1913.
It's a wonderful book. It's really well written, excellently documented, and covers everything and everything: technology, culture, internal politics of the Spanish army, church, and everything, landscape, botany, agronomy. I've read the first 46 pages which gets us to the establishment of the missions and estancias and pueblos in Alta California and discusses the relatively primitive agricultural technology used in them and why it was like that. The part I'm on now is about the structure of the work gang, the living arrangements, the ways that order was kept.
Oh, the book fair. This year I was crashing from the oral surgery and whirlwind trips all over the landscape so I was not in fit state to browse books but I did get a pamphlet by George Lakey responding to Ward Churchill's renunciation of nonviolence, an argument I didn't even know about before. I haven't been keeping up. My brother points out the George Lakey led the Friends youth group we hung out in in Philadelphia, and I can almost remember that. My stepmother pointed out Ward Churchill: he has this lantern jaw and pretentious long hair, and he looks just like the sort of macho posing college professor who would say things to scandalize and titillate, and I bet you'll never catch him trashing a cop car (by the way, I'm not wedding to nonviolence in every circumstance, but I think it's an important component of any strategy when you're facing opponents whose ability to harm you is so many more times your ability to harm them). He's the guy who got in trouble for saying that the CIA executives in the World Trade Center were evil and deserved to die -- I first heard that misquoted as "everybody in the World Trade Center was CIA and deserved to die" and I was as pissed off as anybody, because of course a huge number of people in the building were custodians and cooks and firefighters.
Jason and Emma looked exceedingly cute wheeling around the book fair. So did my father, staffing the War Resisters League table with our friend Jim Haber. I was impressed with the size of the fair this year, and the fact that they had a little carnival corner out front with booths where you could "topple the heads of state," (soda cans with portraits of world leaders on them you could throw bean bags at) "circle the A," (throw rubber rings over large letter A's made of something black) "drench the dunce," or "pin the molotov on the cop car" (it's a joke, okay, and it's not my joke anyway). My stepmother Moher kept admiring the more creative mohawks on the young folks. There were all ages -- infant, child, adolescent, young,middle, old adults. You could get baby clothes that have "Baby Brigade -- We refuse to be pacified!" on them. And other things.
I had a vegan sandwich which was really good. And then we came back to the house and Luis and I crashed and after a while we ate dinner and now I have to get ready for the other side of the family.
It's a wonderful book. It's really well written, excellently documented, and covers everything and everything: technology, culture, internal politics of the Spanish army, church, and everything, landscape, botany, agronomy. I've read the first 46 pages which gets us to the establishment of the missions and estancias and pueblos in Alta California and discusses the relatively primitive agricultural technology used in them and why it was like that. The part I'm on now is about the structure of the work gang, the living arrangements, the ways that order was kept.
Oh, the book fair. This year I was crashing from the oral surgery and whirlwind trips all over the landscape so I was not in fit state to browse books but I did get a pamphlet by George Lakey responding to Ward Churchill's renunciation of nonviolence, an argument I didn't even know about before. I haven't been keeping up. My brother points out the George Lakey led the Friends youth group we hung out in in Philadelphia, and I can almost remember that. My stepmother pointed out Ward Churchill: he has this lantern jaw and pretentious long hair, and he looks just like the sort of macho posing college professor who would say things to scandalize and titillate, and I bet you'll never catch him trashing a cop car (by the way, I'm not wedding to nonviolence in every circumstance, but I think it's an important component of any strategy when you're facing opponents whose ability to harm you is so many more times your ability to harm them). He's the guy who got in trouble for saying that the CIA executives in the World Trade Center were evil and deserved to die -- I first heard that misquoted as "everybody in the World Trade Center was CIA and deserved to die" and I was as pissed off as anybody, because of course a huge number of people in the building were custodians and cooks and firefighters.
Jason and Emma looked exceedingly cute wheeling around the book fair. So did my father, staffing the War Resisters League table with our friend Jim Haber. I was impressed with the size of the fair this year, and the fact that they had a little carnival corner out front with booths where you could "topple the heads of state," (soda cans with portraits of world leaders on them you could throw bean bags at) "circle the A," (throw rubber rings over large letter A's made of something black) "drench the dunce," or "pin the molotov on the cop car" (it's a joke, okay, and it's not my joke anyway). My stepmother Moher kept admiring the more creative mohawks on the young folks. There were all ages -- infant, child, adolescent, young,middle, old adults. You could get baby clothes that have "Baby Brigade -- We refuse to be pacified!" on them. And other things.
I had a vegan sandwich which was really good. And then we came back to the house and Luis and I crashed and after a while we ate dinner and now I have to get ready for the other side of the family.