"I Was a Teen-Age Reactionary"

Doug Henwood
Bad Subjects, (February 1998)

I have an embarrassing confession to make: in 1972, I cast my first ever presidential votes -- primary and general -- against Richard Nixon, because he wasn't conservative enough. The final straw was wage and price controls, a statist defilement of the market's purity.

I wasn't always a right-winger. My eighth-grade world history teacher, who was in all other respects a classic coach-style teacher, devoted a full period one day to a sympathetic lecture on Marx. When I got home, I announced to my parents that I was now a Marxist, and, supplemented by a bit of reading, thought of myself as one for the next four years.

But sometime in my senior year in high school -- in 1970, when the world was largely in rebellion -- I had a collision with one of William Buckley's collections and Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom. Subscriptions to National Review and the American Spectator soon followed. By graduation I was a raving libertarian.

Full story is at Henwood

Guinness Stout: From English to Corporate Colonialism

by Sean Dunne

EXTRACT: The effects of the Diageo ownership became clear in July, 2000, when Guinness announced plans to close the brewing and packaging plants in Dundalk, located just north of Dublin. The move came as a shock to workers and the community of Dundalk. This was the first Guinness plant closing ever to occur in Ireland. The closing eliminated over 300 jobs in a small community, as management justified the move as part of plan to remain globally competitive.

GUINNESS STOUT: FROM ENGLISH TO CORPORATE COLONIALISM

On March 17, 1737, Boston became the first city in the world to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Since that first celebration, the holiday has grown in popularity throughout the world. There are many activities and customs associated with the day, each designed to celebrate Irish culture. Parades are organized in cities all over the world, ever since New York City held what was considered the first St. Patrick’s Day parade, when Irish regiments in the British Army paraded through the streets in 1762. Irish food, such as corned beef and cabbage, is bravely eaten by people in all parts of the world. Irish dances, sports, literature, and music are also very important aspects of St. Patrick’s Day.

dr.woooo writes:

Forwarded message from "J.M. Adams"

Call For Papers: The Postanarchism Reader

"The Postanarchism Reader: Writings at the
Intersection of Anarchism and Poststructuralism"

Edited by Jason Adams

Deadline for Paper Proposals: November 2003

This callout is for a book proposal that I am putting
together for a publisher in NYC on the intersections
between poststructuralism and anarchism; the proposal
is for it to be a sort of anthology of writings by
various radical theorists who have looked at this
issue either directly in terms of articulating or
critiquing the idea of a "poststructuralist anarchism"
(Todd May, Saul Newman, Lewis Call, etc.) or by using
both poststructuralist and anarchist theorists
together in the same essay in a way that might be
thought of as a "postructuralist anarchist critique"
of some aspect of politics, history, society or
culture.

"The Examined Life: Enjoy Your Chinos!"

Joshua Glenn, 7/6/2003, Boston Globe

A few weeks ago, the trendy youth retailer Abercrombie & Fitch was slapped with a lawsuit alleging that the company discriminates against minority ''brand representatives'' (i.e., salespersons) who don't embody the brand's ''classic American'' look. Some may be surprised, then, to learn that the racy photos in the forthcoming ''Back to School 2003'' issue of the Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly are garnished with running analysis from a man who hardly embodies ''classic American'' ideas: the left-wing Slovenian philosopher, cultural critic, and theoretical omnivore Slavoj Zizek.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Only in America"

Eric Hobsbawm

Looking back on 40 years of visiting and living in the United States, I think I learned as much about the country in the first summer I spent there as in the course of the next decades. With one exception: To know New York, or even Manhattan, one has to live there. For how long? I did so for four months every year between 1984 and 1997, but even though my wife, Marlene, joined me for the whole semester only three times, it was quite enough for both of us to feel like natives rather than visitors.

This article was originally published as a web exclusive for the excellent Mute Magazine at the following url.

The Return of Proletarian Post-Modernism Part II

Luther Blissett's recent best-seller, 'Q'



by Stewart Home

Q is an intricate historical novel by four Bolognan authors deploying the name of the inglorious footballer Luther Blissett. Stewart Home, a champion of 'multiple identities' who has also published under this name, detects in Q's cultural bricolage an ascending dialectical movement between rebellious practice and theory.

More than any other art form, even painting at the height of its ‘realist’ phase, the novel is tied to the rise of the bourgeois subject. It is for this very reason that fiction writing has tended to lag behind the other arts, and novels are nearly always ascribed to single authors. Indeed, that past master of bourgeois reaction, George Orwell, made books no longer being written by individuals one of the great horrors of his risible dystopia, 1984. In many arts, and only most obviously music and film, openly acknowledged collaboration is the norm and the ongoing weakness of the novel as a mode of cultural expression can be ascribed at least in part to its one-sided and pseudo-individualistic development. Well established writers tend to find it difficult to collaborate because they insist the stamp of their own style should be left on everything they touch, leading to disagreements and a lack of cohesion when they attempt to work in concert. When one or more collaborating writers find it either difficult or impossible to accept the revision by others of their contributions to a group project, it is each author’s weaknesses rather than their strengths that are multiplied. Innovative writers happily lacking a ready-made cultural reputation are in the fortunate position of being able to take a dispassionate view of those moribund artistic conventions rooted in the notion of style. Thus it comes as no surprise that the most successful recent example of a jointly effected anti-novel should be the work of ‘young unknowns’. The book is called Q and although it is attributed to Luther Blissett, the vigour of its anti-narrative is rooted in the fact that it emerged from the combined imaginations of four young upstarts who just happen to live in Bologna and scribble in their native Italian. The gulf between Q and most of the books currently dominating the bestseller list is the difference between masturbation and sex.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Park Fiction presents:
Unlikely Encounters in Urban Space

International Congress and Exhibition of Park Fiction's Documenta 11 Installation
Congress: June 26 - 29, 2003 Exhibition: June 19 - July 6, Reeperbahn 1, Hamburg

One year after Documenta 11, Park Fiction's installation returns to Hamburg. For the first time, the installation will be shown in its place of origin, St. Pauli, on the Reeperbahn. The exhibition will be accompanied by an international congress: Unlikely Encounters (in urban space), with groups from Delhi/India, Tijuana/Mexico, La Plata/Argentina, Milan/Italy and Berlin/Munich/Hamburg.

Following a very successful launch earlier this year, the Journal for the

Academic Study of Magic (JSM), a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed print

publication, is seeking submissions for its second annual edition, to be

published in Spring 2004. Scholarly articles of up to 8000 words, written in

English, plus shorter book reviews (up to 800 words) and the like are

welcomed. We aim to cover all areas of magic, witchcraft, paganism etc; all

geographical regions and all historical periods, and we encourage articles

from postgraduates, tenured academics and freelance writers alike, using an

academic style.



Submissions should be prepared according to the MHRA style guide (5th

edition). Please see their printed style guide (available in libraries and

bookshops) or their website http://www.mhra.org.uk/index.html, plus our own

guideline pages at http://www.sasm.co.uk/journal.html and

http://www.sasm.co.uk/chklist.html for style and content details. In light

of the breadth of submissions we received for Issue 1, we welcome early,

BRIEF correspondence with authors to discuss intended articles and their

potential suitability for our journal- the above links also give guidelines

for subject areas, including some areas that we do not cover, so please

consult these first.



Submissions should be sent electronically to Dave Evans at

socacademicstudymagic@btopenworld.com as Rich Text Format email attachments,

including your name and brief title in the file name (for example

"JSmithModernFrenchWitchcraft.rtf" rather than "essay.rtf") . If you are

unable to send by email please use regular mail to: Dave Evans, Department

of Historical Studies, University of Bristol, 13 Woodland Road, Clifton,

Bristol, UK BS8 1AD. Please enclose an SAE or IRC if you require postal

acknowledgement of receipt, and if sending by regular mail please include

one copy of your article on disk (PC formatted only, and virus-checked

please!) and one print copy, with a covering letter.



Deadline: October 31st, 2003



Issue 1 of the journal, published by Mandrake of Oxford can be ordered from

the website http://www.sasm.co.uk/journal2.html via a secure credit card

server, or from any good bookshop quoting the references ISBN 1869928 679

and ISSN 1479-0750. Academic Institutions and Libraries can send an

official purchase order to Mandrake (whose regular mail address is to be

found on the above link) to be invoiced on delivery.



Please forward this text in its entirety to anyone you think may be

interested, or to suitable email forums, bulletin boards, newsgroups etc



Thanks

Dave Evans and Alison Butler

General Editors, JSM

"Weapons for the Oppressed"

Bill Posters

Six machine guns and six hand guns cast in handmade
paper will be sent around the world to countries
including Chile, Ireland, Argentina, Italy, Indonesia,
USA, Brazil, Norway, Reunion Island Germany, England
and Holland. Each package will contain a with
compliments slip with the "facsimile weapon
without a firing-pin" referring to a statement by
Debord which refers to the appearance of radical
thought which perhaps inadvertently only supports the
dominant organisation of power.

"The Google AdWords Happening"

Christophe Bruno, April 2002

How to lose money with your art ?

At the beginning of April, a debate took place on rhizome.org mailing list, about how to earn money with net art. It suggested to me an answer to an easier problem : how to spend money with my art (if you understand everything on how to spend money, you should in principle understand also how to earn money, because of conservation laws...)

I decided to launch a happening on the web, consisting in a poetry advertisement campaign on Google AdWords . I opened an account for $5 and began to buy some keywords. For each keyword you can write a little ad and, instead of the usual ad, I decided to write little "poems", non-sensical or funny or a bit provocative.

I began with the keyword "symptom".