The Daily Bleed: Philip Berrigan, Zapatistas, Guy Debord, Kotanyi, Raoul Vaneigem, Alice Becker-Ho, Erich Mühsam, B. Traven, Gustav Landauer, Liberto Sarrau, MLR, Felisa de Castro, Émile Pouget: What Happened on this day, in recovered history February 21

. . . scarlet & black wounds burst upon the splendid flesh.

— Arthur Rimbaud

FEBRUARY 21
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
American novelist, essayist, infinite jester, suicide

Ancient Rome: FEAST OF PEACE & LOVE: The PARENTALIA ends with this feast at which friends & relations settle all quarrels.

China: FEAST OF THE LANTERNS CARNIVAL

1595 -- Poet Robert Southwell (St. Peter's Complaint) is hanged at Tyburn for having become a Jesuit priest against prevailing law.

1677 -- Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza dies, Netherlands.

1764 -- England: John Wilkes is thrown out of English House of Commons for his "Essay on Women." Later reinstated & becomes Lord Mayor of London. In The Vision of Judgment Byron calls him as a witness against King George III.

1803 -- Edward Despard is the last to be drawn & quartered in England.
http://voxd.blogsome.com/2007/05/15/the-commonweal-drawn-quartered/
"A nose that can see is worth two that sniff."

— Eugene Ionesco

"Two noses can see more".

— from a letter of 09.09.1847 by Sándor Petofi Sándor to his friend Arany János.
Petofi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1ndor_Pet%C5%91fi
Arany: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1nos_Arany
(courtesy of Bleedster László, 2-21-2009)

1821 -- US: Charles Scribner lives. He & his sons form one of the most important American publishing houses. Scribner's publishes, among others, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, & Wolfe.

1828 -- US: Premier issue of the Cherokee Phoenix published. The first US newspaper in a native language, it uses the Cherokee syllabary, developed by Sequoyah, who assigned symbols to 86 Cherokee syllables.
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Using his new alphabet, Sequoyah taught his daughter to read in less than a week. In 1821, a group of skeptical tribal chiefs mastered the alphabet in seven days, & gave Sequoyah permission to teach the language to the whole tribe. The Phoenix appears weekly until May 1834.

1835 -- US: Senate surprisingly accepts a treaty by which Potawatomi, Ottowa, & Chippewa cede land (including that of the town of Chicago) to the US government.

1848 -- Belgium: The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, is published in Brussels.
Marx then moved to London where he & his family lived in poverty while he continued to publish. There he composed his major work, Das Kapital, defining his theory of the capitalist system & its "inevitable" self-destruction. He died penniless & was buried at Highgate Cemetery.

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, & the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

http://www.marxists.org/

1853 -- US: As queer as a $3 dollar bill? US authorizes minting of $3 gold pieces.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060423090420/http://www.postfun.com/pfp/tracts/queer.html
http://perdurabo10.tripod.com/id1879.html

1878 -- US: First telephone directory published, 50 names, New Haven, Connecticut.

1887 -- US: Oregon becomes the first state to make Labor Day a holiday.

1893 -- Virtuoso fascist Guitar God Andrés Segovia, foremost classical guitarist of his time guy, lives in the Andalusian city of Linares, Spain.

1894 -- France: Émile Pouget's publication, Le Père Peinard — victim of government repression of anarchistes — ceases publication with its 253rd number. Many other libertarian publications also disappear under the "laws scélérates," & the hounding of the anarchists under the "Procès des trente" (Trial of the Thirty).
[Details / context]

1898 -- Spain: Felisa de Castro Sampedro lives, Madrid. Militante anarco-sindicalista, feminista. A founder, as is her sister Apolonia, of Agrupación Cultural Femenina in Cataluña, which merged with Mujeres Libres in 1936. Active as an exile with the CNT & Mujeres Libres (especially with Pepita Cárpena & Pilar Grangel), de Castro died in 1981 in Caracas, Venezuela.
References: Efemérides Ateneo Virtual, ['Ephéméride Anarchiste]
http://militants-anarchistes.info/spip.php?mot232

1903 -- Sex-writer Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) lives. Diarist, pro-sex feminist, erotic writer. Wrote a series of famous diaries, House of Incest & many other novels. Close friend of Henry Miller.
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If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, & creation.

— Anais Nin
ANAIS NIN, Daily Bleed Patron Saint, 2003-4
"Only the united beat of sex & heart together can create ecstasy."

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/anaisnin.htm

1907 -- British poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) lives, York. Auden gained fame in the 1930s as a leftist intellectual & warned of the rise of totalitarianism. Later became a religious thinker.
'Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique & impossible to get rid of as his shadow.'
http://www.sat.dundee.ac.uk/~arb/speleo/auden.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/whauden.htm

1912 -- US: Emma Goldman lectures in Indianapolis & St. Louis, February 21-29.

1915 -- Grandiose proclamations, by many states, of neutrality regards war; demonstrators for neutrality clash with interventionists who have the support of the state & their police.
Source: [Crimini e Misfatti]

1919 -- In Munich, the socialist Kurt Eisner, principal in the Bavarian revolution & president of the Republic of Councils, is assassinated by extremists. The Central Council of the Republic, composed of 11 members, including the anarchist Erich Mühsam, declare a General Strike & state of siege.

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Gustav Landauer's participation as Minister of Culture along with Silvio Gesell as Minister of Economics & other anti-authoritarian & extreme libertarian socialists such as the poet/playwrights Erich Mühsam & Ernst Toller, & Ret Marut (the novelist B. Traven), gave the Soviet a distinct anarchist flavor.

— Peter Lamborn Wilson

B. Traven (The Death Ship; The Treasure of the Sierra Madres, etc):
http://skarv.se/BT/Traven.html
http://usuarios.multimania.es/jhbadbad/traven.html

Erich Mühsam:
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/MuhsamErich/erich.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_M%C3%BChsam

Gustav Landauer:
http://rekolektiv.wordpress.com/republications/v-munoz-%E2%9D%A7-a-chronology-of-gustav-landauer/
http://www.anarchismus-gustav-landauer.de/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Landauer

1923 -- China: Sun Yat-sen returns to Canton, which becomes his capital.
[Source: K.S. Karol]

1925 -- First issue of Harold Ross' magazine, The New Yorker, hits the stands, selling for 15 cents a copy. Founded & edited by Ross, who declares it is not "for the old lady in Dubuque."
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Dorothy Parker was Ross’ friend, as was James Thurber, the cartoonist. Thurber asked Parker, who later became dramatic & literary critic, to contribute some material to the magazine, which at the onset was running on a shoestring. She said,
“I came by the office to write something, but somebody was using the pencil.”

The top hatted character Eustace Tilley appeared on the cover of the first issue & every anniversary issue. In 1999 Mary F. Corey published The World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury. In 2000, Ben Yagoda authored About Town: The New Yorker & the World It Made. In 2000, Renata Adler wrote Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/the-algonquin-round-table/about-the-algonquin/527/
http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/caricatures/table.htm
http://timelines.ws/cities/NYC_B.HTML

1925 -- Film director Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs), lives, Fresno, California.

1931 -- Scott Fitzgerald’s short story "Babylon Revisited" is published in "The Saturday Evening Post." It is arguably his finest piece among his semi-autobiographical stories & is later filmed as "The Last Time I Saw Paris," with Van Johnson & Elizabeth Taylor.

1933 -- US: Nina Simone, American singer, activist, lives.

Daily Bleed Patron Saint 2005-6
Curmudgeonly expat singer, civil rights activist.

1934 -- Nicaragua: Augusto Cesar Sandino, hero of Nicaraguan independence, & his aides, assassinated in Managua by Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Somoza's National Guard.
While in exile in México during early 1920s, Sandino participates in strikes led by the IWW. Inspired by them he returns to foment revolution in Nicaragua. He adopts the IWW's black & red colors.

http://www.iww.org/en/history/chronology
http://web.archive.org/...patriagrande.net/nicaragua/augusto.c.sandino/biografia.htm
http://web.archive.org/...patriagrande.net/nicaragua/

1939 -- Richard Evans Schultes discovers, for the botanical world, the lost identity of the Mexican hallucinogenic plants teonanácatl — flesh of the gods.
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/schultes.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Evans_Schultes
http://www.erowid.org/plants/mushrooms/references/other/1971_hofmann_bulletin-narcotics.shtml
http://www.serendipity.li/dmt/cult_b.htm
http://www.wlbcenter.org/Schultes%20Publications/American%20Anthropologist....pdf

1948 --
Spain: Dissolution of Movimiento Libertario de ResistenciaLibertarian Resistance Movement (M.L.R.).

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Founded by Liberto Sarrau in 1947, intended to be the armed wing of Spanish anarco-sindicalismo, militants included Celedonio González Sanmartín, Pedro Adrover, José Facerías, García Casino, Francisco Ballester, A. Gil, Manuel Pareja, ‘Tom Mix’, etc.

The MLR finally faded away when Sarrau & Joaquina Dorado were arrested by the police.

MLR, see entry 248, Historical Encyclopaedia of Spanish Anarchism by Miguel Iñiguez
http://www.christiebooks.com/PDFs/Encyclopedia1.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlA3BU7wK_A

1952 -- England: Wartime Identity Cards become 'National Health' numbers.
Source: [Calendar Riots]

1962 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader J. Edgar Hoover wins a George Washington Award from the Freedom Foundation for "the most outstanding individual contribution to American freedom during 1961." Hoover also won the award in 1958. Don't know which dress he wore.

1962 -- Author David Foster Wallace, infinite jester, lives, Ithaca, NY. A longtime victim of severe depression, he took his life in 2008. Wrote The Broom of the System (1987), Infinite Jest (1996), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) & the anti-fatalist philosophical Fate, Time, & Language: An Essay on Free Will (2011). According to Wallace, "fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being," & he expressed a desire to write "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that could help readers "become less alone inside."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24682-fate-time-and-language-an-essay-on-free-will/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIjS4K2mQKY

1963 --

"Respectable thinkers..."

Into
the Trash
can...

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Aux poubelles de l'histoire! (Into the Trashcan of History!), tract by the Central Council of the SI demonstrating the truly shameless plagiarism of the situationist Theses on the Paris Commune (by Debord, Kotanyi & Vaneigem, 1962) undertaken by Henri Lefebvre in the final issue of the journal "Arguments".

'Stop believing in respectable thinkers, & stop believing that revolutionary theory is absent — read Internationale Situationniste for yourself.'

Also during this month, Guy Debord meets poet Alice Becker-Ho (companions until his death in 1994).

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/chronology/chronology.html | [Situationist Resources]

1965 -- US: Malcolm X assassinated Audubon Ballroom, New York City.
You don't have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being.

— Malcolm X, New York City, December 20, 1964

http://www.brothermalcolm.net/
http://www.heroism.org/class/1960/CivilUnrest.htm#Malcolm X

1965 -- US: United Auto workers (UAW) wins ratification at North American in Grand Prairie.

1971 -- Switzerland: International march in support of arrested Spanish conscientious objector (CO) Pepe Beunza leaves Geneva for Spain.

1971 -- US: Over 3,000 from US & Canada protest at Blaine (Wash.) border crossing against oil tanker traffic between Alaska & Puget Sound.

1972 -- China: Respected & Beloved Comrade Leader Nixon visits as American bombers carry out saturation bombing raids against the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam.
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The cordial welcome given Nixon by the Chinese Stalinists was a rebuke to North Vietnam & the NLF, China's supposed allies. By opening diplomatic relations with Beijing, the US hoped to isolate the NLF & pressure it into accepting a negotiated deal to end the war in Vietnam, while preserving imperialist interests in the region.

1972 -- US: Beginning of the trial of the good Christian anarchist Fr. Philip Berrigan (one of those rarities, a priest who practices what he preaches) & six other activists (The "Harrisburg Seven") for an alleged plot to kidnap Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Henry Kissinger. Proceedings later end in a mistrial.

1975 -- US: Watergate conspirators John Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman, & John D. Ehrlichman sentenced to 2½-8 year prison terms.

1984 -- Mikhail Sholokhov, Russian novelist ( Quiet Flows the Don) dies in Veshenskaya. 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, for "artistic strength & honesty when depicting a historical epoch in the life of the Russian people." The Quiet Don is controversial, allegedly plagiarized from Fyodor Kryukov, according to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, among others.

1988 -- US: Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart confesses his sins to his congregation: "I have stained against you."
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Next to disco, the game show, & the Energizer bunny, the most unforgivable American contribution to world culture has been the common televangelist (cockroachus Evangelicus everbrokus).
While this slippery creature's normal habitat includes Mercedes Benzes, exclusive vacation spots, & Republican Party fundraisers, he can at times be found in gay bathhouses, massage parlors, & cruising your local red-light district.

Created a new church, & basks in a veritable blizzard of blessings (including a fleet of Mercedes Benzes) — irrefutable evidence that God endorses legalized prostitution.

http://www.discernment.org/sick.htm

1989 -- Czechoslovakia: Vaclav Havel is jailed for anti-government demonstrations. Later becomes be president of the Czech Republic.

1994 -- México: Government officials & Zapatistas begin peace talks in Chiapas.

https://webspace.utexas.edu/hcleaver/www/Chiapas95/chiapas95.html

2003 -- US: Protests against the INS Special Registration. Today is the deadline for men — 16 years & older — from Pakistan & Saudi Arabia to show up to INS facilities for special registration, as civil liberties across the country are continuously eroded & attacked by the American government, various liberals & rightwing religious groups.

2005 -- Novelist, social critic Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1922-2005) dies, London, England, in exile. Not favored by the Batista regime or the Castro regime.
Daily Bleed Patron Saint, April 22, 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillermo_Cabrera_Infante

2006 -- US: Anti-Stalinist historian Ted Draper dies. His writings include The Roots of American Communism (1957), American Communism & Soviet Russia (1960), Castro's Revolution: Myths & Realities (1962) & A Very Thin Line, a history of the Iran-Contra Affair & a defense of the constitution against the threat of conservative coup d'etat. Became a Cold War-warrior liberal, & was severely criticized by a generation of New Left scholars.
THEODORE DRAPER
American Marxist historian, fierce anti-Stalinist critic.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/mar/10/guardianobituaries.usa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Draper
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/03/drap-m31.html

2011 -- Libya: Air Force launches airstrikes on crowds of protesters. Two Libyan Mirage jets land in Malta, the pilots refusing orders to bomb protesters.

3000 --

APOSTROPHE TO MAN

(On reflecting that the world is ready to go to war again)
Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out.
Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build
   bombing airplanes; Make speeches, unveil statues, issue bonds, parade;
Convert again into explosives the bewildered ammonia
   & the distracted cellulose;
Convert again into putrescent matter drawing flies
The hopeful bodies of the young; exhort,
Pray, pull long faces, be earnest, be all but overcome,
   be photographed,
Confer, perfect your formulae, commercialize
Bacteria harmful to human tissue,
Put death on the market;
Breed, crowd, encroach, expand, expunge yourself,
  die out,
Homo called sapiens.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

http://www.bowendesigns.com/