*The cultural waters looks pretty warm and inviting
for utter paranoid lunatics, too:
http://thebiggestsecretpict.online.fr/nwo.htm
Your One-Stop Shop For Satanic Illuminati UFO Gibberish
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Mar 26, 2005
Anarchist Bookfair Marks Decade of Dissent
By JUSTIN M. NORTON
Associated Press Writer
Ten years after it started, the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair
has become a popular rallying point for the far left, thanks
to shared enemies like the Bush Administration and the
Patriot Act.
What originally was a few radicals getting together to talk
politics has become the focus of an entire weekend of
dissident cultural events, from punk rock concerts to soccer
games.
"The Bush era has been good for anarchist consumerism," says
Joey Cain, 50, a longtime supporter.
All 75 merchants' tables were sold out in advance of
Saturday's fair in Golden Gate Park, making the fair one of
the largest such events in North America, along with
Montreal's "Festival of Anarchy" each May. Vendors come from
as far away as Europe to sell rare anarchist and other
political books.
Enthusiasts see it as part of a tradition of dissident
literature in the San Francisco Bay area, where Jack London,
a professed socialist for much of his life, learned to write
and City Lights Books owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti faced
obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Beat-era
poem "Howl."
"There is a literary underground in the city that keeps
renewing itself," said Adam Cornford, who heads the poetics
program at the New College of California, a local
progressive liberal arts school. "There have been waves of
counterculture in the city all the way back to Jack London
and the Beats. Serious committed anarchists have been
driving force in the literary scene since the 1940s."
One of the biggest displays at the fair each year is by
Oakland-based anarchist publisher AK Press, which has seen a
10 to 20 percent annual growth in its business, including
spikes in sales during such polarizing events as the World
Trade Organization protests, the Sept. 11 terror attacks and
the leadup to the Iraq war.
"We haven't hit a wall yet," crowed Ramsey Kanaan, who works
for the publisher and volunteers at the fair. "It seems like
the number of people interested in this literature has grown
every day."
The publisher recently cracked Amazon's top 100 list with
firebrand activist Ward Churchill's book "On the Justice of
Roosting Chickens," which includes his essay about the
terror attacks. Churchill was among the many authors in town
for the fair.
Many of the works sold at the fair were little more than
self-published pamphlets, but these authors can only benefit
as the nation turns harder to the right, organizers say.
Many classics of underground literature started out as
pamphlets, said Cornford, citing San Francisco author Robert
Duncan's 1944 statement of gay liberation "The Homosexual In
Society" as an example.
"People will suddenly become famous because they get banned
or clamped down on," he said.
For Chris Carlsson, a self-employed, self-publishing San
Francisco book designer, the fair is a place where "people
with contending and antithetical views can talk, share
literature and denounce each other."
That's just the spirit organizers hoped to cultivate when
the first fair was held in 1995 by the Bound Together
Anarchist Collective, a fixture in the Haight-Ashbury
neighborhood.
After all, when civilization as they see it is falling
apart, it's time for anarchists to get together.
"They are inclined to rebel anyway," Cornford said. "They
look around and see the world is going to hell."
Bookfair: http://www.bayareaanarchistbookfair.org
