Rad Geek People's Daily

I was happy to see this in my mailbox this morning. From the New Orleans bookfair collective (emphasis added):

Comrades,

We are writing to let you know that the First Annual New Orleans Anarchist Book Fair will take place on October 19-20, 2013. We are now accepting vendor applications for tabling. Please visit our website for more information on the book fair in general and registration in particular.

We are also on Facebook and Twitter.

Solidarity,

The New Orleans Anarchist Book Fair Organizing Committee

N.O.A.B.
1631 Elysian Fields #282
New Orleans, LA 70117
http://www.nolaanarchistbookfair.org/

From the website:

We'd like to invite you to an exciting experiment in books, tables and Gulf Coast Anarchism, The First Annual New Orleans Anarchist Book Fair! Our collective has been hard at work securing a wonderful list of tablers and events for our book-based autonomist free-for-all on October 19th and 2013, 2013. The Book Fair will take place at the cavernous Zeitgeist Multi-disciplenary Arts Center and include events, shows and readings all around the city. For more information feel free to browse around the site or contact us directly. We are also helping to coordinate rideshares and housing for those coming into the city from out of town.

— About New Orleans Anarchist Bookfair

Their Facebook page is at facebook.com/NewOrleansAnarchistBookfair. Their website is at nolaanarchistbookfair.org. Mark your calendars! A.L.L. Distro just sent in an application for a table; more on this, hopefully, soon.

This is from Bernardo Soares’s (or Fernando Pessoa’s, as you like)^[1] Book of Disquiet, text 24. In the context of the book, the passage is contextually even more striking because it contains only the second time (after dozens of pages) that anything appears in the text that was said by another human voice besides the narrator’s. And the first that what someone else said is actually breaks through, or alters Soares’s train of thought.

Today, feeling almost physically ill because of that age-old anxiety which sometimes wells up, I ate and drank rather less than usual in the first-floor dining room of the restaurant responsible for perpetuating my existence. And as I was leaving, the waiter, having note that the bottle of wine was still half full, turned to me and said: So long, Senhor Soares, and I hope you feel better.

The trumpet blast of this simple phrase relieved my soul like a sudden wind clearing the sky of clouds. And I realized something I had never really thought about: with these café and restaurant waiters, with barbers and with the delivery boys on street corners I enjoy a natural, spontaneous rapport that I can’t say I have with those I supposedly know more intimately.

Camaraderie has its subtleties.

Some govern the world, others are the world. Between an American millionaire, a Caesar or Napoleon, or Lenin, and the Socialist leader of a small town, there’s a difference in quantity but not of quality. Below them there’s us, the unnoticed: the reckless playwright William Shakespeare, John Milton the schoolteacher, Dante Alighieri the tramp, the delivery boy who ran an errand for me yesterday, the barber who tells me jokes, and the waiter who just now demonstrated his camaraderie by wishing me well, after noticing I’d drunk only half the wine.

–Bernardo Soares, The Book of Disquiet text 24 (pp. 27-28)
New York: Penguin. trans. Richard Zenith.

1. ^[1]Pessoa wrote almost all of his mature literary work under a number of heteronyms, that is, signatures that represented not only an alternate name, but actually a complex set of interacting characters that Pessoa invented and set into the Portuguese literary scene of his day.↩

ALLies,

Are you yourself, or do you know anybody who is, an individualist anarchist, agorist, mutualist, market anarchist, or otherwise on the libertarian left, who happens to live in or nearby the Indianapolis, Indiana metropolitan area?

Are you yourself, or is the ALLy that you know, interested in meeting like-minded people and getting (more) involved in local activism and organizing? If so, please drop me a line with your or their contact information. I have some requests — from three local ALLies — who are looking for other libertarian-left folks to discuss, meet up with, and possibly start organizing a local group of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. I would love to be able to put interested ALLies in contact with each other.

Via Sheldon Richman on Facebook, comes this story about political Progressivism.

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) emerged as one of the most notable progressive defenders of the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance programs on Monday when he expressed a “high level of confidence” that the federal government’s collection of phone and Internet data has been effective in thwarting terrorism.

I can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people, Franken told Minneapolis-based CBS affiliate WCCO. The junior Minnesota senator, who’s only been in the Senate since 2009, said he was was very well aware of the surveillance programs and was not surprised by a recent slate of bombshell reports by both The Guardian and The Washington Post.

I have a high level of confidence that this is used to protect us and I know that it has been successful in preventing terrorism, Franken said.

–Tom Kludt, Al Franken Defends NSA Surveillance: It’s Not Spying, They’re Protecting Us
in TPMLiveWire (Tuesday, June 11, 2013)

Of course he has. Because he is privileged to be part of the us that is being protected, not the us that is being spied on. The reactions of many political Progressives to this scandal — including many political Progressives who had presented themselves for years as civil libertarians — are outrageous; but they should not be even a little bit surprising. They are yet another illustration of why serious social change can never come about through electoral politics; because the only mechanism that electoral politics has for change is to make a different party into the governing party. But when a party becomes the governing party, the party that they belong to has always proved to be of far less practical significance than the fact that they are, or see themselves as, governing. Their first and last loyalty will never be to a professed set of principles or a party platform, but rather to the uninterrupted continuity of government, and the successful management of the core structures of state power. The first and last loyalty of the party in power in America will always be to power, both for their party and for the American government — not to the causes or the principles or the people that they claim to speak for.

Also.

• Rad Geek People’s Daily 2010-11-02: Don’t Vote
• Rad Geek People’s Daily 2008-10-31: View images tagged Complete Falsehoods …
• Rad Geek People’s Daily: Articles tagged Change You Can Believe In
• Randolph Bourne, The State, § II ¶ 9: The President is an elected king, but the fact that he is elected has proved to be of far less significance in the course of political evolution than the fact that he is pragmatically a king. . . .

A marine photographer managed to capture hundreds of wide-eyed fish apparently posing for a picture. Californian photographer and conservationist Octavio Aburto had spent years photographing the school in Cabo Pulmo National Park, Mexico, and had been trying to capture this shot for three years.

Fish are pretty awesome. (So’s technological civilization.)