I am the joy of the desiring flesh

The days of my living

are summer days

The nights of my glory

outshine the blazing wavecaps of the heavens

at their floodtide

Mine is the confident hand shaping this world.

—

See our own Kenneth Patchen Tribute / Chronology page

JUNE 28

GASTON COUTE
French vagabond poet, cabaret anarchist, songwriter.

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FESTIVAL OF TERRIBLE POETRY.

PAUL BUNYAN DAY.

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548 -- Death of Theodora, Empress of Byzantium.


1503 -- Giovanni Della Casa lives.


1712 -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau lives, Geneva. Author of the Confessions & "father of Romanticism."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau


1770 -- New World: Anthony Benezet & other Quakers open a non-segregated school for African-American & white children in Philadelphia, Pa.


1776 -- US: Thomas Hickey, American sergeant convicted of treason, hanged.


1816 -- England: Luddite attack on Heathcoat & Boden's Mill at Loughborough.

In 1816 there was a revival of violence & machine breaking following a bad harvest & a downturn in trade.

On 28 June the Luddites attacked Heathcote & Boden's mill in Loughborough, smashing 53 frames at a cost of £6,000. Troops were used to end the riots & for their crimes, six men were executed & another three were transported. Luddism then subsided in Nottinghamshire & Leicestershire. Concurrently, 'Swing' riots erupted in the countryside as a protest against low wages, unemployment & the Game Laws.

http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/LudditeWebsites.htm
http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_Riots

"I won't slave for beggars pay.
Likewise, gold & jewels.
But I would slave to learn the way
To sink your ship of fools."

— The Grateful Dead, Ship of Fools

http://www.historyhome.co.uk/c-eight/distress/luddites.htm

1816 -- England: After several gamekeepers have been clubbed to death, five men from Mill Pond, Ely, are hanged for poaching.

The area of Littleport & Ely, Cambridgeshire were at the forefront of resistance to property accumulation, enclosure & rural proletarianization.

Soon after the hangings, the butcher who owned the gallows cart is found suffocated head first in his own cess-pit & the coffin-maker is found dead in a large water pipe.

[Source: Calendar Riots]

1820 -- The tomato is proved to be nonpoisonous. However potato remains so, as a large political football.




1850 -- M. Maguire lives. Credited as founder of Labor Day.




1867 -- Luigi Pirandello lives (1867-1936), Agrigento, Sicily. Right-wing Italian playwright, novelist, short story writer. Awarded 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. Wrote The Late Mattia Pascal & plays Right You Are — if You Think You Are; Six Characters in Search of An Author; Enrico IV.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/pirandel.htm


1885 -- Francesco Saverio Merlino is in Paris in an effort to coordinate Italian & French anarchist groups. He recommends activity within organized labor & opposes acts of individual reprisal (using the example of Pini).
Source: http://www.ephemanar.net/juin30.html#merlino


1887 -- Greenwich Village free-love radical, novelist Floyd Dell lives (1887-1969). Daily Bleed Saint July 23.
One-time companion of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Max Eastman & Floyd Dell co-edited The Masses magazine (1911-1917).

There is no human reason why a child should not admire & emulate his teacher's ability to do sums, rather than the village bum's ability to whittle sticks & smoke cigarettes. The reason why the child does not is plain enough — the bum has put himself on an equality with him & the teacher has not.

~ Floyd Dell ~

http://www.centerstagechicago.com/literature/whoswho/FloydDell.html
http://www.sappho.com/poetry/e_millay.html

1888 -- Robert Louis Stevenson leaves San Francisco on his first voyage to the South Seas.



1894 -- Labor Day declared an official US holiday by Congress amid intense labor unrest.
http://www.history.com/minisites/laborday
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Day


1905 -- (New style) Russia: The mutinous crew on the battleship "Potemkin" enter the port. Odessa taken by revolutionaries. Workers' Councils form.
http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/gombin.htm


1906 -- Japan: Shusui Denjiro Kôtoku speaks at a large public meeting in Tokyo.

Kotoku was a journalist, writer, & one of the most outstanding figures of Japanese anarchism.

[Details / context]

1909 -- Eric Ambler lives (1909-1998). English author, widely regarded, with Somerset Maugham & Graham Greene, as a pioneer of espionage & crime fiction. Used the pseudonym Eliot Reed on four novels written with Charles Rodda. 1964 Edgar-winner, later named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/eamber.htm


1911 -- Egypt: Dog killed by 18-lb meteorite, Nakhla.

1911 -- Gaston Couté, French anarchist songster, dies.

http://gastoncoute.free.fr/
http://franceweb.fr/poesie/coute3.htm
http://gastoncoute.free.fr/Sa_vie.htm
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Cout%C3%A9
http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/06/28/todays-autonomedia-jubilee-saint-gaston-coute/




1914 -- Austria's Archduke Ferdinand assassinated, by the Serbian anarchist Gavrilo Princip. The young Serbian revolutionary's two pistol shots are said to have touched off World War I. A wonderful excuse for a Great War...a governmental bloodbath had been a-brewing for many years as various nation-states jockeyed for power & wealth. The blood of the common man is cheap (5 to 10 million soldiers died).

Members of "Mlada Bosna" organized the attack & in the aftermath 25 people were sent to prison (most died in custody). The 19-year-old Princip became a hero in his homeland.

Solitary, always in libraries… Always a reader & always alone, not often engaging in debates… Read much in Sarajevo… Had a nice library, because he always was buying books…. Read many anarchistic, socialistic, nationalistic pamphlets, belles letters & everything… Bought books himself… Always accustomed to read…

[Details / context]

1914 -- Brazil: Third session of the anarchist conference in São Paulo.

Five sessions were convened to select two delegates in preparation for an anarchist Congress in London. The London Congress was aborted due to the Great War That Ended All Wars. [Details / context]

1915 -- Embalming Fluency?: Henry James writes Prime Minister Asquith, asking to be made a British subject. Takes the oath of allegiance on July 28. The kindly George Bernard Shaw remarks that

"James felt buried in America; but he came here to be embalmed."

http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathaway/

1916 -- Germany: 50,000 workers stage one day protest strike against trial of Karl Leibnecht.



1919 -- WWI ends. The Treaty of Versailles — ending this war & preparing for the next "War To End All Wars" — is signed.

"Nobody wants it in particular. & then all at once, here it is. We didn't want it. The English didn't want it. & here we are fighting." Katczinsky explains how wars should really be fought: I'll tell ya how it should all be done. Whenever there's a big war comin' on, you should rope off a big field (& sell tickets). Yeah, &, &, on the big day, you should take all the kings & their cabinets & their generals, put them in the center dressed in their underpants & let 'em fight it out with clubs. The best country wins. — Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

http://www.filmsite.org/allq.html


1920 -- Author A. E. Hotchner lives.


1921 -- US: In the Sacco & Vanzetti trial, the defense began to present their case on June 22. Today Mr. Kurlansky testifies that Mrs. Andrews had told him she could not identify the defendants but a government agent was forcing her to do so. Defense expert witnesses testify that Sacco’s gun did not fire the bullet that killed Berardelli.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/SaccoVanzetti/databaseEntries.htm


1926 -- Mel Brooks lives, Brooklyn, New York.

"Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you got to flap your arms & legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. & therefore, as I see it, if you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy & colorful & lively."

1929 -- Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) dies. Sheffield propagandist, ran the Socialist Centre, wrote "England Arise" & Non-Governmental Society (1911). Homosexual & early proponent of gay rights, utopian & anarchist, poet, songwriter, pacifist. Influenced by William Morris. E.M. Forster described him as "a poet, a prose writer, a mystic, a manual labourer, an anti-vivisectionist, an art critic, etcetera."
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/TUcarpenter.htm


1931 -- France: Alexander Berkman is presented with another expulsion order, the third in 15 months; he rushes to Paris to try to get an extension of his papers.




1934 -- American novelist & poet Kenneth Patchen marries Miriam Oikemus. Moves to Greenwich Village, New York. Writes reviews for New Republic. Member of the San Francisco Libertarian Circle in the 1940s along with fellow anarchists Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, et al. Pioneered jazz poetry.

"Patchen has gone back to the world of Edward Lear & interpreted it in terms of the modern sensibility of the disengaged, the modern comic horrors of le monde concentrationnaire. It is as if, not a slick New Yorker correspondent, but the Owl & the Pussycat were writing up Hiroshima."

— Kenneth Rexroth
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/patchen.htm

His writings remain youth cult classics, from the Beats, to the hippies to today.

Written before widespread public awareness of modern threats such as nuclear war & environmental devastation, his writings portended today's concerns with clarity & gentle humor.

Among his most charming/eloquent works are "picture poems," intuitive free verse combined with his fanciful paintings.

"Not long before I worked with a poet named Patchen. He was wearing his scarlet jacket & sitting on a stool on a little stage in a theatre you walk upstairs to down on 14th street. We improvised behind him while he read his poems, which I read ahead of time "It's dark out, Jack" — Patchen's a real artist, you'd dig him, doctor. "I believe in truth" he said, "I believe that every good thought I have, all men shall have. I believe that the perfect shape of everything has been prepared.""        — Charles Mingus, From Beneath the Underdog [p.330]

1935 -- England: League of Nations Union announces result of "Peace Ballot."



1936 -- In the early hours of the day, unable to continue enduring the physical pain of a longstanding ailment, Alexander Berkman shoots himself; the bullet lodges in his spinal column, paralysing him. Emma Goldman rushes to Nice to be at his side. He sinks into a coma in the afternoon & dies at 10pm.

Daily Bleed Saint, 2003, ALEXANDER BERKMAN
Lover of Emma Goldman, failed assassin, US deportee, & a suicide following Soviet heartbreaks & aching prostrate.

"Expelled again & again," Berkman once wrote.

"Must get off the earth, but am still here."

1936 -- Vicente Orobon Fernandez dies.


1938 -- US: National minimum wage enacted. Move over Bill Gates.


1940 -- X-Files?: Alien Registration (Smith) Act enacted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act
http://www.fac.org/faclibrary/case.aspx?case=Dennis_v_US


1948 -- Stalin breaks with Tito.


1951 -- One of the best-known female novelists of post-World War Japan, Fumiko Hayashi, dies in Tokyo. Among her most popular works are Daun taun (Downtown, 1948), & Ukigumo (The Drifting Clouds, 1949).

1951 --

Novelist Howard Fast writes his publisher in India (Fast was scheduled to be master of ceremonies at the Robeson concert in 1949. Peekskill, U.S.A.: A Personal Experience (1951) describes being attacked there by a mob. He led a group of 42 Negro & white men who held back a gang of fine American patriots ["Give us five minutes & we'll murder the white niggers..." "We're Hitler's boys!"] who attacked the concert, & protected the women & children from their attacks.)

43, West 94 Street, New York 25, N. Y.   People's Publishing House Ltd., Bombay 4, India Dear Sirs, I am enclosing a brief introduction for the Indian edition of PEEKSKILL: USA, which, as you see, is signed by Paul Robeson & myself. I also want to tell you how proud & happy I am that you have decided to publish this book. Our own experience with repression and fascist terror has taught us how diffi- cult it is to bring out such a book as this in these times. Yet I know that the difficulties you face far outweigh ours. Won't you please convey my warmest greet- ings & very best wishes for peace and democracy to my friends in India? Sincerely, Howard Fast June 28, 1951

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/peekskill.html
http://www.trussel.com/f_how.htm
http://www.cpsr.cs.uchicago.edu/robeson/bio.html
http://www.trussel.com/hf/alanwald.htm

The Berlin daily "Der Tagesspiegel" reported recently that the lone source of the story appears to have been a flyer from an anti-Soviet resistance group in East Germany known as NTS.

West German political leaders paid moving tributes to the mythical Soviet martyrs in Cold war speeches, especially on the sombre anniversary of June 17 — a public holiday until 1990. The story also circulated in communist East Germany.

Germany's leading weekly news magazine "Der Spiegel" concluded, based on its own research, that it was a superbly crafted Cold War myth, probably spread if not created with backing from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

https://www.cia.gov/library...v19i3a01p_0001.htm
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/7221-5.cfm

A strike begins today in Poznañ (Posen) with about 100,000 demonstrators shouting "Bread & Freedom."

State offices are taken, including prisons, while police shoot from secret police headquarters killing people. The government sends 10,000 soldiers to the city.

By tomorrow over 70 people are dead, a hundreds wounded, & 700 arrested.

[Details / context]

The fasters want to goad state officials to enact measures to guarantee sexual freedom for consenting adults. Police arrest them for "incitement to riot," a charge changed to "obstructing sidewalk traffic." Perry, released on his own recognizance, fasts & sleeps for the next 10 days on the steps of the Federal Building.

"Since the September 11 terror massacre, a Hollywood group loosely known as Hollywood 9/11 has feverishly worked with the Bush administration to support the war on terrorism by promoting happy images of American life to film audiences in Africa & the Middle East. & who better than Ali to deliver that message of ethnic & religious tolerance...

— Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet, December 31, 2001.

The press, the public, & the government's current star treatment of Ali is in stark contrast to the 1960s: during those years, Ali's greatest foes in & out of the ring were Uncle Sam (heavyweight) & J. Edgar Hoover (who targeted & wiretapped him, & ran a secret smear campaign).

One-time companion of Rirette Maitrejean. Involved in numerous papers, including Libertad's "L'Anarchie," Sébastien Faure's "Ce qu'il faut dire" & Émile's "la Mêlée."

[Further details]

Quinteros, a teacher, militant of the Federación Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU) & Partido por la Victoria del Pueblo, was orginally arrested at her home in Montevideo.

Today, four days hence, she briefly escapes from her military captors, gaining entrance to the Embassy of Venezuela. Her captors then illegally enter the embassy grounds & hauled her away. Venezuela breaks diplomatic relations with Uruguay in protest.

See Secuestro en la Embajada. El caso de la maestra Elena Quinteros, by Sara Méndez & Raúl Olivera.

Yo enterre a Elena Quinteros: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja-L6RadsOM&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_WnE7n4aQ4

. . . a group of 80 to 100 masked & uniformed men & women carrying automatic weapons presented themselves as members of the 500 strong guerrilla organization formed about a year ago.

“The climate of violence being generated by the militarization of Guerrero reflects a policy of counter insurgency – a new dirty war against dissident social organizations.”

Showcased are jazz vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater,
Têtes de Bois (Heads of Wood) & Mauro Macario.
(Ferré was an important French anarchiste militant songster.)

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine

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