false 34 97 92 true 5641135 read 4 true 65533 currently-reading 1 true 65532 to-read 28 false 1577870 brain-candy 16 false 1588825 gender-and-patriarchy 13 false 1577889 enviro-justice 13 false 1764027 race-and-racism 10 false 2867547 anarchism-and-activism 10 false 4145820 place 8 false 2958756 mental-health 7 false 4604168 sex 7 false 3516373 colonialism-and-imperialism 7 false 3608101 diy-how-to 7 false 1577886 agro-ecology 4 false 3645695 poetry 4 false 4007528 globalization-and-development 3 false 4661855 philosophy-and-religion 2 false 5577824 general-social-commentary 1 false 5254415 disability-theory http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78333388 Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Paperback) by Marina Sitrin
bookshelves: anarchism-and-activism, globalization-and-development, to-read
(recalled by the library, boo) ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78696033 The Lord Of The Rings (Paperback) by J.R.R. Tolkien
bookshelves: brain-candy, currently-reading
End of semester fantasy binge continues!

[2nd read:] ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78230188 to: The Elvenbane (Halfblood Chronicles, #1) by Andre Norton
bookshelves: brain-candy
Dragons! Elves! Wizard wars! Crazy strong heroines fighting back against creepy sadistic sex slavery and uniting several different species of creature in the process! So much justice! Hoorah!

[2nd read:] ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78617846 Ciara's review of No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process
by Colin Beavan

Ciara, your reviews are always great, but this one had me sniggering the whole way through. brilliant! ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/77522051 David's review of Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods
by Sandor Ellix Katz

Yay this book! I am constantly trying to make yogurt and mostly failing. It is so fun! ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/76531482 The Complete Idiot's Guide to Statistics, 2nd Edition (Complete Idiot's Guide to) by Robert A. Donnelly Jr.
bookshelves: currently-reading, diy-how-to
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/73860704 to: Stories Care Forgot: An Anthology of New Orleans Zines (Paperback) by Ethan Clark
bookshelves: brain-candy, place
I did not expect this anthology to be this good. It's a collection of excerpts from zines that came out of New Orleans before and just after Hurricane Katrina. Like the best mixtapes, zines are whole entities. They don't always work well as singles. And sure enough, the few stories I read by randomly opening the book were good enough stories alone, but they didn't sit well together. They needed their context.

Luckily for posterity, the editor, Ethan, is a master zinester. Thank you!! Ethan manages to cut and paste a narrative flow from a mixed up collection of punk adventures, love stories, political analysis, rambling essays, and miscellanea like show flyers. All the original handwriting, formatting, and drawings are lovingly photocopied into the pages of the book. Ethan ties the pieces together with short introductions to each themed section that illustrate what makes the stories contained therein uniquely New Orleans.

Taken as a whole, Stories Care Forgot crafts its own story, a vibrant, tangible picture of a punk scene in New Orleans that is explosive, artistic, and alive. Struggle to survive is a major theme in a lot of the selections, but most temper the struggle with some kind of celebration. Shit jobs like bike delivery turn into the ultimate alleycat race. Awful living conditions in falling apart houses mean cheap rent. Everywhere there is some kind of lack, there is creation. This book made me so psyched for DIY creativity: bands and zines and puppets and bikes and gardens and banners, whatever that wild-eyed coffee-driven late-night productivity could make for anyone but a boss.

The middle section, "Neighborhoods," collects different zinesters' attempts to deal with gentrification, the role of white activists and squatters who live in New Orleans' poor, mostly African American neighborhoods (describing, it seems, the majority if not all of the zinesters contained in this book). They write about surviving the constant robberies, muggings, and fights their city is famous for. They write too about the violence of poverty and racism that the city exerts on its people, and a little (maybe too little) about resistance. Like most writings on gentrification, especially by those white people living on its leading edges, there are more questions than answers here. But the urgency of these zines out of NOLA is particular to that city. With the displacement of whole neighborhoods and the demolitions of subsidized housing that have escalated after the hurricane, the situation has only gotten more dire.

The zine scene in NOLA was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Zinesters were displaced, neighborhoods flooded and abandoned, everything, all that-- and many of the zines themselves were destroyed. Ethan, the editor, explains in his introduction that many of the stories excerpted in this book are reprints of reprints since the original zines were eaten up by flood and mold. Stories Care Forgot is a bittersweet collection, then. It saved so many gems. But it stands as a reminder of all the stories that didn't survived the storm. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/69179900 to: Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction (Paperback) by Margaret Killjoy
bookshelves: anarchism-and-activism
"Any book that doesn’t start from the fact that this culture is killing the planet and work to resolve that is unforgivable. We’d be better off with blank pages."
-Derrick Jensen

"I guess when I was 17 or 18 and I started doing Food Not Bombs and working with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in south Florida. ... I was becoming an activist outside of my brain, outside of creating art. And by being more involved in the world, I started thinking about my identity: who fucked me over, why am I the way I am, why were Green Day the only people who understood me when I was 14?"
-Christy C. Road

I am getting beside myself trying to write this review in a coherent, organized fashion. My favorite zinesters for once taken seriously as creators of culture, political theory, and radical praxis! Calls to arms for the hopelessly romantic; calls to imagination for the hopelessly political! Collective writing processes! Punks!

Mythmakers and Lawbreakers is a collection of interviews with contemporary anarchist fiction writers by a contemporary anarchist fiction writer. The Table of Contents alone is a fantastic collection of diverse ideologies, writing styles, and fame. Zinesters Jimmy T. Hand and Christy C. Road share the page with big name novelists like Ursula Le Guin and graphic novelist Alan Moore. Derrick Jensen, the author of epic anti-civilization tomes, is right alongside an "anonymous Crimethinc. agent," responsible for short and sweet semi-fictionalized, somewhat plagiarized True, capital T, political adventure narratives. There are a lot of authors featured who I had never heard of, including the no-longer-anonymous Steampunk, Professor Calamity, and punk-punk carissa van den berk clark. Anonymity reins, and most names seem fictionalized. No need to kill your heroes when they symbolically kill themselves for you! ("Just like punk rock—- never put authors on pedestals." -Jimmy T. Hand)

Editor Margaret Killjoy asks mostly the same questions of all his interviewees, but gets a vast array of answers. Still, some themes develop. Unexpected for me was the number of authors who use some sort of collective process with which to write. This ranged from the collective use of one pseudonym by many authors, like the Crimethinc Workers Collective, to Professor Calamity's Curious George Brigade who, together, "hash out the story and then huddle around the computer and take turns typing." Another major theme for anarchist authors was self-publishing. This is reflected in the number of zinesters interviewed, many of whose bodies of work may only be found in hand-stapled, folded over 8.5x11 photocopies handed out for $2 each from scummy travel backpacks. I love this shit!

A third theme to come out of these interviews wasn't so surprising: politics. Anarchist fiction writers grapple with politics all the time. The politics of writing fiction when the world is dying (see the Derrick Jensen quote, above). Creating an anarchist utopia that is more reality and less utopia. Accurately reflecting the political struggles of everyday life-- including the lives of punks, traveler kids, hackers, pagans, earth first! eco-warriors, and direct action activists. In every interview, Killjoy asks what it means to be an anarchist and a fiction writer. The responses he gets demonstrate how fiction is a political act. While most anarchist writing of our day is limited to real-life ("boring as fuck" -crimethinc.) theory and analysis, anarchist fiction writers play the important role of dreaming what could be and distilling useful stories from what is.

This is best illustrated in the large appendixes at the back of the book. Killjoy lists 20 pages worth of short bios of anarchist fiction writers through the ages, and another 6 pages of "also of notes," writers whose work was anarchist or espoused anarchist ideas, but who did not themselves identify as anarchists (a nice touch, by the way, to limit ones' list of anarchist authors only to those who self-identify as such). Fiction is a powerful tool for transmitting ideas through time and making them accessible beyond subculture. Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy, Kurt Vonnegut, Edward Abbey are some of the big-name writers whose work is well-known and well-regarded in mainstream US culture, but who Killjoy's research proves can be claimed unabashedly by the anarchist milieu. Finally, Killyjoy includes a few lists of stories to check out once your appetite it whetted, including "Stories that explore anarchist societies" and my favorite: "Stories that feature anarchists as villains."

(written in between drinkin whiskey and makin out in the back stacks of the library)
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/73860763 to: The Fire Next Time (Paperback) by James Baldwin
bookshelves: race-and-racism
This was not my time to read this book.

Though quite short, I got completely lost in Baldwin's ruminations. The Fire Next Time is a disjointed mixture of personal anecdotes about religion and broad philosophical indictments of white supremacy.

Baldwin relates a few negative experiences that he's had with Christianity and the Nation of Islam, including a very strange dinner party with Nation of Islam prophet Elijah Muhammed. If Baldwin was using these stories to make a larger point about religion and separatist ideologies being a poor route to overcome racism, I couldn't quite discern it from the hundred asides he also related about these experiences. Conversely, the most powerful passages in the essay, those that explored the overwhelming magnitude of the impact of white supremacy on African Americans and on white people, were weakened by their lack of specific context to ground the emotions in life. His words, though intense and clear, rang dull like philosophy, instead of sharp, like how they seemed to be intended.

I've had a lot of people recommend Baldwin to me recently, so I will definitely try a few more of his books. I feel like if I had read this essay piece by piece and taken the time to absorb each passage, and perhaps studied the historical context for when he wrote it, it would have meant more to me than it did with the glances-while-traveling that I was able to give it. ]]>